Hand Over Heart

Several thousand of us thundered to our feet for the national anthem at a recent college graduation. Predictably, these types of events are choked with the emotion of life’s passages.  I had been observing parents on the bleachers hugging family members and wincing back tears.  The graduates on the field, roasting in dark caps and gowns, excitedly waved cell phones as they located their families, while others fought sleep and hangovers.

 

Yet the instant the band struck up the anthem, the entire crowd stood and morphed into a stadium of reluctant zombies.  Operating on autopilot I began to sing.  Keep in mind that me – singing -  is not a pretty sound.  God didn’t grant me a set of pipes.  This was made more obvious by the fact that I was seated in a box with strangers, none of whom knew one another well, so it was … um…. really quiet except for me.  My voice tapered off as I panned around the room observing the group.  We looked sheepish, uncomfortable, as if it were uncool to be enthusiastic or patriotic at this moment.  In short order I ended up mouthing the words like everyone else.  I had succumbed to peer pressure.  Why had I suddenly felt foolish? 

 

What happened to the swollen sense of national pride that burst forth like a seed pod after that first Sept 11th?  Flags decorated lawns and overpasses, car bumpers and hats.  Hands were placed firmly over hearts, red white and blue everything sprouted like hives.  More than ten years later, we are tentative patriots.  We gauge our neighbors’ politics, we stick a finger in the air to test the atmosphere before we consider declaring that we love our country, despite its warts and fault lines.

 

Who remembers the needle hitting the record over the classroom loudspeaker in elementary school?  “Oh say can you see…” standing straight, one sock up and one down, chest out, facing the flag hanging from a pine pole in the corner.  It was an accomplishment to have memorized the national anthem and the pledge of allegiance.  Saying the rote words gave me a sense of belonging to a greater whole, a pride in our country and all that it stood for.

 

 

In the 1960s of my single digit years there was much to take pride in.  We had put men on the moon and discovered cures for diseases.  America was a land of  bountiful agriculture and continuous invention.  We produced “things” you could touch and products that took up space and streamlined living.  Detroit churned out shiny cars and bustling cities defined themselves as towns of steel and textiles, paper and shoes, television sets and refrigerators.  We dominated whole business sectors, conjured up Hollywood and all of this while welcoming a labor force to our shores that comprised the muscle and backbone of our manufacturing might.  We were a stew pot of ingenuity and moxie with a meteoric trajectory.  Our forefathers had shed blood in a revolution to gain independence.  That pledge of allegiance and national anthem were sacred stuff back then, they represented hard won freedom.

 

Things got upended in the 70’s.  It was a decade of turmoil, intent on throwing off the shackles of convention and complacency.  Authority figures became “the man,” cops become “pigs” and when the boy next door’s draft number was up, brothers and sons and boyfriends marched off to Vietnam and some of them didn’t come back.  And those that did, forever altered by the act of war, were shown our country’s collective back.  They were challenged, spit on, their sacrifice questioned.  They learned to hide their service like a jagged scar.

 

And as the decades ticked on, wars and conflicts came and went, and civilization progressed in some ways and devolved in others.  We lost a healthy respect for many things: our elders, appropriate discipline, boundaries and manners, sharing, saving, re-using, home-made, hand-me-downs and parenting with consequences, not just blind indulgence.  We downgraded the value of military service, the contribution of teachers and the virtue of stay at home mothers.  Celebrities with sex tapes became our aspirational heroes and we coveted anything bigger and newer: houses, cars, wardrobes and helpings.  Economize became supersize.  Our country settled into a disjointed, somewhat cagey relationship with national pride.   Today, we pull it out when it suits, as convenient as the windshield Police Benefit Association sticker that can help wriggle out of a speeding ticket.  

 

It’s not that we aren’t grateful for living here.  It’s more that we tend to forget just what we have to be thankful for.   Political schisms and the inability to compromise in Washington, the economic flat line, the drain of the wars, we have reasons to feel lackluster about the United States.  There are always things to criticize, that’s the cheap shot.  Thank God we live in a society where we can.  But somehow we’ve arrived at a place where national pride feels shameful, like joining a cult or participating in a skinhead rally.

 

 

Citizens today will tell you they are appreciative of our all-volunteer military.  Most of us will answer that we know war is hell and we understand there is a brutal cost for being free in the land of the brave. We welcome troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan at airports, stuff backpacks and donate dollars and then we head to the mall to pick up the summer swimsuit or buy the hot dogs for the July 4th BBQ. Because that’s simply the business of living.   

 

I know that patriotism isn’t just about standing at attention in front of a flag.  Real national pride is about standing up and acting.  What differentiates a good country from a GREAT country is its ability and desire to take care of its own.  This means not just the less than 1% of our population who volunteered to walk into the crucible in Iraq and Afghanistan multiple times, but the millions who fought in Vietnam, Korea and WW11.  When America needed them they answered the call.

 

While we are busy as a country, a community or as families honoring our veterans this July 4th, there is one thing we can all do.   When you hear the national anthem, or the flag marches past you, take a moment to reflect on all of the things that are right and good about America.  

 

Because I think we’ve lost something by not raising our collective voices at a ball park, a public dinner, a ceremony, wherever we are asked to sing the anthem.  I think that’s precisely the kind of thing that connects us, Black, White, Hispanic, Muslim, Buddhist, Catholic, Jewish, Atheist, whatever -- when we gather together with one unified voice.  Focusing for a moment on national pride allows our crazy quilt of a country to lay down our arms, set aside our anger and reflect how the whole is so much greater and more powerful than the sum of its parts.

 

 

This fourth of July, when I spot Old Glory in our loveable rag tag mountain town parade, I’m going to stand up straight, hand over my heart, no matter how silly that might look to my kids, or how much I may embarrass them.  I’m proud of our country.  And the only way we will go from good to great again is if we all begin to try to feel it too.

FACETIME

I’ve been a little slumpy lately.  Nothing major, just kind of in a middle-o’-life blah.  I can’t seem to motivate to work out the way I used to, the get up and go is less “go” and more “harder to get up.”  I eat healthy for a while and then suddenly purchase a giant box of Dots or a tub of chocolate covered raisins and consume the whole thing almost without tasting.  It’s not that I feel lousy; I just don’t feel like the old me.

 

That was the initial thrust behind the timing of a mother/daughter spa trip.  I’ve been thinking about doing this ever since my baby girl was born, 18 years ago.  And now she is home from her first year in college.  All in all she’s had a pretty good experience, with the expected ups and downs of leaving the nest for the first time.  She’s worked hard and made friends, all while trying to live up to the decidedly unhelpful “these are the best years of your life” advice that we parents have parroted to them for the last decade.  That’s a lot of pressure to put on someone as they tie the bandana on the stick and head out the door to live with four strangers in a room the size of a handicapped bathroom stall. 

 

Photo by CATHRINE WHITE 

The last two years of high school she was a partial stranger to us, distant, most of her in shadow.  I understood she was hard at work uncoupling from me, sawing off the umbilical cord, sometimes with a dull, Swiss Army knife.  Mother nature has programmed our children during this period to be as judgmental, sullen and eye rolling as possible, presumably to make it hurt less when they finally blow the pop stand.   We were all ready for her to go, mostly her.   And I honestly don’t think my daughter would have wanted to spend a stretch of time with me anywhere back then. I had nothing to offer beyond my cooking, cleaning, step n’ fetch-it skills and my vague resemblance to a punching bag.  So the thought of going to a spa with her in those years would have felt like a Club Med trip with Stockholm syndrome and no alcohol. 

But a year away had made a world of difference.  And when a work trip with her father fell through, impulsively I called a spa within driving distance to check out their advertised deals.  Maybe we could both jump-start our health and well-being, our mind-body energy and our mother-daughter mojo with a little downward dog and green juice?  This was high on my bucket list. 

Each of us has ways in which we have terminally crimpled our children’s wiring through our own life experiences, shortcomings, fears or phobias.  Let’s just say that growing up with parents scarred by a depression-era mentality, my sisters and I inherited what we’ll call a Scotch-Yankee, tight-fisted approach to spending.  Admittedly, we are cheapskates, some of us sisters more than others.   (Ahem, OK, me.) 

And as the daughter of skinflints, I still proudly cling to some of the pioneer-settler tenants of my childhood:  you want the extras?  Work for it.  Go bag a few groceries, rake some lawns and babysit a few snot-nosed kids up the street.   In short, I’m not the kind of Mom who regularly throws mani-pedis around.  I’m not stuffing bills at my kids like sorority sisters at a bachelorette party.  Believe me, no one is suffering in my household.  No one has rickets or scurvy, no one is digging through the Salvation Army bins to accessorize at the gas station.  No one has holey underwear.  My children have what they need and much more, and the truth is they don’t continually ask me for a lot.  By now you are getting the correct impression that it wasn’t characteristic or typical of me to bestow my largesse on this grand of a scale.  

So when I called my daughter, jubilant and bursting with excitement over my spontaneous spa generosity, her first question, uttered with prison guard level suspicion, was “Why?”

“Well, I just want to spend some time with you,” I stammered defensively.  “I thought this would be fun.”

Silence.  “Sure.  Sounds good.”

My sister called me later that night, the one who lives near my college student in Boston.

“I thought you should know that your daughter called to ask me if anything was wrong,” she reported and my eyebrows shot up.  “Wrong?” I answered panicked.

“She told me you had invited her to a spa and she wondered if you’d gotten some kind of major medical diagnosis or if there was anything bad happening with you and Bob that she didn’t know.”  It took me a minute to process that and then I didn’t know whether to laugh out loud or be crushed. 

 

True, we are raising children in a somewhat scary time.  They are growing up surrounded by the low level muzak of September 11, war, economic uncertainty and divorce exploding around us like carpet bombs. OK, it’s not so different from eras of the past.  My childhood was punctuated by elementary school duck and cover drills, the Cold War, Kent State, and the polarizing horror of Vietnam.  There’s always some sword of Damocles hanging over our heads, isn’t there?  But I honestly don’t remember being so anxious. Perhaps I was. And while I’d tried to do my best to shield my children from life’s harsher glare, they had experienced the uncertainty of outcomes, the fear of infirmity and the grief of death up close. 

Still, did it have to take an act of God for me to invite my own offspring for a little loofa get-away with an enzyme facial?  Times were tough, all right.  But her reaction caused me to second guess my mothering. Had I actually been more “communist block mother” than nurturing and cozy?   I imagined myself to be a rule enforcing but sporadically indulgent parent.  And what about those hours of glue gunning I’d undertaken with them?  The homemade Halloween costumes, the bunny head cake at Easter and the Jell-O American flag on July 4th?  Had my puritanical approach been so extreme that my child’s first response to a fun trip was to cock her head suspiciously and look for a chemo IV?

As I went to bed that night, still reflecting on my daughter’s reaction to my proposition, I remembered hearing Maria Shriver speak at her California Woman’s Conference.  She had described coming to a life juncture where she needed to define herself, to figure out what was next.  Up to that point she had always been someone’s daughter, wife or mother.  An award-winning journalist, Maria had stepped back to raise a growing family but as her children became more self-sufficient, she was ready to re-evaluate a new direction.

As part of her vision quest she decided to sojourn to a desert spa for reflection.  This solitary repose was so uncharacteristic, that when she told her kids where she was headed, her daughter’s first response had been to ask if she had cancer. 

I felt slightly better remembering the Maria story.  I felt in good company at least.   Maria was a smart cookie, a good Mom and a Kennedy to boot.  Her girls hadn’t been deprived and warped by a cold Mother Scrooge.  I’ll be they’d owned every American Girl doll accessory and unlike mine, probably never wore hand-me-downs.  In short, they’d had a life of privilege and still her daughter had leapt to the same awful conclusions as mine.  I felt better.

When I called my daughter the next day I relaxed as I listened to her growing excitement about our trip. She had already visited the website, reviewed the activities we could do together and determined what classes and hikes we would take.  And me?  I can hardly wait for our weekend.  I’ve been daydreaming and picturing it since she was a wee lass.  I’m already imagining what it will feel like to have her to myself, the essence of that old “little girl” who is making her way back to me, as she peers out of the body of a beautiful young woman.

 

DO JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER

Writing a book is a major achievement.  Ask anyone who has ever kissed their manuscript as they mailed it to their editor, or fist pumped right before they pressed “send.”

 

But the writing is just the beginning. With the traditional publishing industry undergoing liposuction in every way, the marketing, the talking it up, the endorsing, and the window dressing are even more critical.  That makes the cover (always an important factor in selecting your next read) of critical importance. 

 

Choosing a cover feels a bit like deciding what outfit to be buried in.  It’s an eternal, fairly final choice. Unless of course you write “The Help “ and you get a do-over on the paperback cover, swapping out the mysteriously ambiguous ravens for a picture of the movie stars.

 

So when choosing the cover do you go bold?  Or do you stick with the little black dress?  Do you tantalize or reveal?  If your book touches on a serious subject do you make the cover more…airy?  Do you merely hint at a suggestion of real life sadness?  Flap copy is designed to preview the contents of the book, but let’s be honest, don’t we all judge a book by its cover?  Aren’t we quick to flick our eyes over what appeals and then pick it up for closer inspection?

 

This is the era of Facebook and Match.com.   We can go right to the visual and decide if we want to fondle the goods or click on by.  The cover of a book is the eye candy for the IQ inside.  It’s the hooked worm on the bobber.

 

And the cover is where the author (unless they wield major New York Times Book Review list-rattling power) is merely one voice in a chorus of marketing experts. 

 

With my first two books, “In an Instant” and “Perfectly Imperfect,” this process was largely out of my hands.  My photograph appears on each of the covers, something that still makes me slightly uncomfortable.  It’s like the wealthy WASP homes I visited as a child where the ubiquitous oil portrait of “mother” in white dress and garden background lurked over the mantle.  You will never find a picture of me over my fireplace.  Not even if I was the Queen of England.  I’m not judging here, I’m just…inwardly cringing at the thought.

I framed a black and white photo of myself that was taken with one of the last giant portrait Polaroid cameras left in the world.  It was shot by iconic photographer Mary Ellen Mark and I am most proud of this picture because it was an award I got for being a mother first and an advocate second.  You can bet your sweet bippy that professional make up artists and stylists helped curate the illusion of a better me. But I will tell you that this picture hangs in my closet.  I’m frankly about the only person who gets to see it besides my husband.

In that photograph I’m fierce and strong, a warrior mother, my arms are on my hips like Linda Carter and I’m ready to Wonder Woman a lobbed spear right back at the bad guys.  But on the cover of my first book I’m in a bowel movement brown sweater looking… terribly sad.

“In an Instant” was an honest book about our family’s journey and recovery after my husband’s injury in Iraq.  It’s also a love story of sorts. So the cover had to say—“hey, remember the anchor guy on TV who got hit by a bomb, along with his devoted and egregiously sad wife?  The story lies within these pages… come get the poop.”  And then the color of the sweater kind of underscored the poop part for folks if they managed to mistake my winsome expression. 

My second book, “Perfectly Imperfect,” is a book of essays about life, some funny while others are more poignant.  I had hoped to have one lone, single inanimate object on the cover, like the jar of cream on Nora Ephron’s “I Feel Bad About My Neck.”   I loved that cover.  My husband gave me a hideous turquoise ring once and I wrote about it in one of the chapters. I fancied that ring in its heart shaped fuzzy red box on the cover of the book like a whimsical smirk.  But since I am NOT Nora Ephron and people DON’T instantly recognize my name, it was decided that I myself would appear on the cover, (marketing calls this branding) bright colors and plaid sneakers and all.  

The “Perfectly Imperfect” cover showed readers that I’d regained my sense of humor, cheered up and had bought more fashionable clothing than that of my previous fecal-brown V-neck sweater-wearing phase. The carefree yet scrunched expression on my face, a kind of “what the hey” look, was meant to invite readers to sit a spell.  Looking at myself, forever preserved on the cover like a fly in amber, I am reminded of the need for more roughage in my diet, or perhaps a Metamucil colonic.

For “Those We Love Most,” a work of fiction, the sky was the limit in terms of cover choice.  Smarter marketing minds at my publisher Hyperion Voice would need to put their heads together. 

“It can’t look sad” was what I heard.  And the first cover concept was an Adirondack chair on a porch with flowers and sunlight.  It looked mystical, hopeful and partially spiritual, like someone was going to slide down Jacob’s ladder from heaven and show back up at the dinner table.  But it just didn’t feel right. Not to mention there wasn’t actually one porch in the book. 

What about a mere suggestion that something is amiss?  I asked.  But the rougher stuff, the loss had to be nuanced a bit—you don’t want to scare anyone off.  We are just throttling out of an economic recession and people want to escape into bondage, Hermes scarves, S & M and futuristic worlds.  If you believe the research, that is. 

Another version of the present cover had pink flowers that seemed to originate in Hawaii, despite the fact that the book takes place in the Midwest.   It reminded me of some of the 70’s feminine hygiene boxes—before they invented the wing technology and got all graphic and real-world on the outside.   But this newer book cover had legs.  We were refining and changing.

In the end we got a cover that feels inviting and homey, like I hope my house feels.  In fact the eerie thing is that without ever having seen my home, the artist captured my mudroom almost exactly.  I figured that was some kind of sign.

So here it is.  The cover.  I hope it speaks to you too.  I hope that when you and others are walking through a book store or airport or scrolling through a website or blog you hear a little… “You hooooo… over here” from my book.  And I hope you will be compelled to pick it up.