Happy New Year

There are all sorts of parties and gatherings happening tonight. We're not at any of them. Instead, the four of us — my wife and daughters and I — are in the kitchen making appetizers and other silly foods. The dog eagerly awaits any drops. Our youngest girl is rolling sushi, something she taught herself while school has been out. The older girl is eating bacon-wrapped scallops, something she learned at a very young age. My wife and I are floating in and out of different food prep, dish washing, and occasional kisses and smiles at how lovely this all is.

In school I often have kids write about wants versus needs. This evening fits both of those requirements. I easily get lost in things I want and forget simpler pleasures. I'm not saying that I have to focus on family and love every second, but here at the end of 2018 I am content, happy, thrilled to be spending the evening as a family, just the four of us (and the dog and cats). I'm ending the year in love.

There have been times when I've really forgotten how important my family is. I'm not proud of that but I'm not too ashamed either. Forgetting allowed me to come back. I'm looking around this kitchen at one daughter who will soon go away to college, another daughter full-grown but naive and childlike in the ways I love, and my wife who is cancer-free and healthy, totally in love with her girls, and still somehow the same woman I fell in love with so long ago on the Oswego shore of Lake Ontario.

Mine is a good life. 2018 was a pretty good year. I remember tough times but they were far outweighed by good times, love, and warmth. 2019, for whatever reasons, already feels like a great year before it has begun. It probably has to do with the company I'm keeping on the eve of 2019's beginning.

Happy New Year to all of us. To mess with John Lennon's lyric, let's make it a good one without any fear.

So Much For The Wide Open Spaces

My daughter asked why I moved my shampoo to the shower stall floor off of the shelves in there. I lied: it's easier for me to grab down there. It's really that there's no room left on the shelves between my daughters' and wife's bath products. This would be tough for me if I had hair, but I shave it off once a week and can make do bar of soap across my skull. I only use the shampoo my older daughter decided she doesn't like for herself. She asked if I wanted to use it up and now I smell just like a flower, which has long been my dream. 

It was nice of her to ask about the shampoo bottle.

There's a bathroom cupboard in which I keep extra soap, baby powder, and a stick of deodorant. It is one third of one shelf, and I guard it as though against a horde of invaders. I keep finding cotton balls, face cleaning rounds, maxi-pads, and cotton swabs in my space and pushing them back or moving them to other shelves. Can I just have one section of shelf? I plead. The girls are willing to accommodate me. It's just that they need a bit more room. 

Years ago this happened in the basement, our house's main entry point. I put up a coat rack for my sweatshirt, heavy coat, and rain coat. Soon there were snowpants and children's coats hanging from that rack as well as dozens of shoes littered below. I installed another rack, but was out of that within the month. I put a rack inside the door of my basement office, a space forbidden to them for anything beyond a visit. I've hung onto that space. It's good to have a home in which to hang a coat if not a hat. 

I sound like I'm complaining. Mostly, it makes me smile. Sharing the house is a wonder I know I will miss too much when my daughters move out for college and adult life. I'll hurt with missing them. I will have all the room in the basement that I could ever want and wish I had none. I'll have shelves in the bathroom with nothing to put there. 

I can see all that empty space and I'm in no rush to have it. 

This wasn't the case ten years ago. Then I failed to understand that sharing space is better than inhabiting it. I felt pushed and shoved aside when in fact I was becoming more important and loved. Things like this I'm slow to realize. 

Both girls have gone to their rooms to bed. The older one has the dog, the younger leaves her door cracked open for the cat. My wife lies beside me playing a game on her phone. Outside, the rain falls in the most meditative of sounds and Pat Metheny plays solo guitar softly on the speaker. I just heard one girl come out to use the bathroom. 

I so hope she will come crawl into bed between us, pushing me over so I'm precariously balanced on the edge only able to stay in bed by holding on tight to her with all my love. 

Waking My Girl

Last night she asked, can you make sure I'm sitting up when you get me up tomorrow? I smiled. My youngest sets an alarm for 6:30 but has been in the high school musical this weekend and hell week before that. She has been going flat out for three weeks and is tired. On an easy day, she gets herself up, dresses, comes down, packs lunch, makes  breakfast, and sits on the love seat under a blanket to eat. After the musical, she was pretty sure it wouldn't be so easy. 

I said, I'll make sure. 

I'm up before five to make coffee and then write in my basement nook. I go to the couch around six to read and write an email note for my wife to read over her breakfast. When I hear my girl's 6:30 alarm, I creep upstairs to make sure she's up, then pack lunch and get ready to go. 

This morning, her phone's alarm was flashing silently. I sat on her bed and hugged her leg with my hands. Honey, it's time. I said it softly knowing she didn't want to get up. I didn't want her to get up either. She looked so peaceful, so cherubic. I wanted to stay and pass the day with her.

"I'm going to stay in bed today," she said. I smiled. "I'll go to school some other day." Hmm, I said. "I'm so tired," she said, drawing out "so" like a yawn. Yeah, I know, I said, almost whispering and I could feel the words coming from my smile. I hugged her leg some more and waited. She pulled the covers up high. I said, "a girl last night told me to make sure she was sitting up." She sat up and rubbed her eyes. I said, I'll see you downstairs, my love. 

There's not much better in than seeing my girl each morning. I wake her gently because that's what she prefers. Who doesn't? I remember being jerked awake by my alarm clock's terrible click and buzzer or, when I overslept, my mother's shouting, singing, and clapping. It made me angry. I want the opposite for my girl. 

There's a selfish aspect as well. 

I want her to remember me waking her. Not the specifics of today, but that feeling of me talking quietly, hugging her leg. I want her to feel loved without thinking about it and as sure of that love as she is of the sun in the sky. No question, no doubt about it. This small ritual of checking if she's awake and waking her gently is me trying to insure all that. 

I want it for her, but I want it just as much for me. Having her feel loved helps her love me and I'm greedy for more of that. 

Some say I'm lucky she gets up so well and goes to school. Most of the kids I teach come to school only under threat. My girl, unless she's feverish or it's a Jewish holiday, goes to school, mostly willingly because my wife and I have been waking them this way their whole lives. We have engineered this. We seem to have realized early enough that we have our children only for so long. Childhood really is over too quickly. 

When she goes out on her own, I hope she will wake some mornings remembering my soft knock at her door and the shadow of me sitting on her bed. She might almost feel my hand hug her leg and hear me say, "it's morning, honey. I'll see her downstairs." If she does, there's every chance she will begin her day feeling loved and radiating it out into her world. That's about all this world needs is more of her kind of love. 

Correct Usage of Awesome

This was originally written on February 14, 2012. I've revised it feeling that the words were good but not good enough. I feel the love even stronger than I did back then, something I wouldn't have believed possible. 

Stephanie and her first girl, about a year after what I've described here.

Sometimes I need a return to comforts. Tonight it's Steely Dan. I've heard this album a thousand times dating back to tapes played on my Walkman as I walked to Chris's house. Once there, we probably threw a football and then went down to his basement and put on more music, most of it familiar and thoroughly analyzed by us. It was soothing, familiar, something I knew how to feel about. It was a comfort than and remains one now. 

I find myself returning to many things. I've written of my daughters, the things they teach me, the things I'm trying to learn in order to be their father. I haven't written much about Stephanie, their mother, my wife, and it's time to return to thinking that helps me feel warm and happy, serene and excited, content and expectant. It's time to return to thoughts of Stephanie. 

Her story is hers to tell, but ours is one she trusts me to write. Telling all of our story is too much, so no Valentine's Day I want to concentrate on just one small story that for me epitomizes who Stephanie is and has been. 

Years ago, our older daughter's appendix ruptured. She was four, her little sister was two. I left her and Stephanie at the hospital to go help my brother tuck our younger girl into bed. When I returned, Stephanie was with the doctor looking at a scan. 

Stephanie has a history of passing out in waiting rooms. Looking at the scan of her daughter's ruptured appendix, all those toxins swimming inside her tiny body, she looked up at me shaken but still there. She was relieved to see me, to hand off some of the burden, but she had had it all in hand without me. 

Soon after, the doctor's sedated our girl and inserted a picc line from her tiny arm down to her beating heart. I waited with Stephanie who glowed with a fierce, frightening love for her child. I felt it like heat coming off a sunburn. She cried, paced, sat and all the while burned with that love. It astounded me. I've always loved our girls, but this was beyond. 

They wheeled our girl out and as the anesthesia wore off she cried and whimpered. Stephanie nearly climbed into the rolling gurney and rode with her girl to the recovery room. Stephanie held her and spoke with her, much more than their bodies connected as they moved from recovery to the room where they would stay together for days. Our daughter woke to find Stephanie there, slept feeling Stephanie's presence, and knew she would be forever warmed by Stephanie's love.

I'm not a guy to say my wife is awesome. It sounds trite. It is trite. Instead, I say that twelve years after the fact, I'm miles from Stephanie and still feel the burning power of her love from all those years ago. I feel it for our younger daughter. I feel it even for me, I'm so blessed. Truth to tell, it scares me a little to know someone can love so much and so completely. And that, I can tell you, is truly awesome. 

Happy Valentine's Day, Stephanie.