Not Going to Apologize

I’m tired of apologizing for things this summer. I’m tired of explaining I haven’t gotten to email, I can’t get to my Facebook. I’ve had the same chipped toenail polish on my feet for maybe a month now. And I’m not going to apologize for that either. It just isn’t important enough.

My goal for these two short months of summer was to spend this block of time absolutely putting my kids first. As a part-time working Mom (everyone tells me its full time but I fake it by working at home) I never quite feel as if I’m completely turning my high beams on my kids. There is always something I have to do, groceries, work, dinner, simmering in the back of my mind.

That’s why I did something that is not in my nature; something that would connect me more tightly to my kids, slow my pace, make me still. I ordered an old-fashioned wooden jigsaw puzzle online from Liberty Puzzle in Boulder Colorado. I had seen these puzzles at a girlfriend weekend in Montana and been captivated by the intricate wooden puzzle pieces; shapes of people, buffalos, shooting stars and so many more. They were works of art.

Not being a puzzle person, or even much of a game/card enthusiast, I found myself surprisingly excited at the choices on the website. So many pictures, how many pieces? I wanted something that would be a long-term project, that we could go back and forth with and spend minutes and even hours lost in the search for building and creating. I wanted to feel the triumph of teamwork and to give us all that sense of accomplishment that comes with finishing a section. We chose a Currier and Ives print of a train, mostly because it had the largest number of pieces we could find.

When the puzzle arrived and I dumped out all the intricate pieces I felt dismayed for a moment. What was a novice doing setting the bar so high? My girls looked up at me expectantly. How would we ever begin? My first inclination, being a type A person, was to organize all the sky blue pieces and then the border pieces and then the smoke stack gray pieces and the grass on the landscape.

“No,” my girls said in a chorus. “We want to do it our way.” And they began with a little section, building it out and plucking the pieces from the giant pile. I would have to learn to do it their way. Wasn’t that the point after all? not to rush through this, but to pick our way, to follow their lead.

This past spring was a flurry of speaking engagements and a book tour whirlwind, of leaving my kids for nights at a time. I missed the very last day of third grade of the very last kids I’ll ever have. I came home to their artwork already unpacked on the table, the backpacks, empty and limp.

On the way home from a book reading I picked up a copy of Ann Hood’s “Comfort.” We had met one another at a book event and had made a connection. I hesitated before opening the slim white cover, knowing it was a book about the unexpected loss of her daughter. In beautiful and painful prose she weaves the agony of what I consider to be the thing from which you never recover.

In the book, she describes how she and her daughter have what they call the “puzzle room” where they work on puzzles together after school, after homework, where they find the rhythm of mother and daughter banter.

It was reading this on the plane that made me decide I needed my own puzzle experience with my family. I didn’t want to lose them, to have them grow up and not be able to say “we used to do puzzles together.” Just once, I wanted us to be puzzle people.

The puzzle is still all over the dining room table. We find bits of time to do it. We laugh, we get mad at each other and I break up twin-type altercations, but mostly it feels like summer to me. The crickets buzz at night, the geese honk out on the lake, and wispy clouds sit low on the mountains on many of the misty mornings. I can hear a whipoorwill call and the scamper of chipmunks around my flower beds. As I walk by the dining room table before anyone else is awake and look at all those uncoupled pieces I don’t feel the sense of what is undone. Instead, I feel a satisfaction in what we will do together, on our own timetable.

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Getting Back on the Horse

I've received so many wonderful emails and notes from folks who have read on the news that my husband Bob is back in Iraq and Afghanistan three years after his injury in Balad from a roadside bomb.  So many people have been so supportive of his desire to go back in honor of those who have served, are serving and who have returned from the wars injured or different. Many people have asked me "how could you let him go?  Or " aren't you nervous?"  When Bob stepped back out into the world after months of healing privately the first question it seemed many wanted to know was "would he go back?"  As I answered questions about whether or not I'd "let" him go back to Iraq, there was a tiny voice inside my head countering my own words. As Bob dutifully answered no, I knew that somewhere, somehow, knowing Bob, it would be important for him to do so.  The question was when and how.  It was clear he would never again be in a combat situation.  I would never be comfortable with him going back to a warzone.  The danger of even being near a blast could undo some of the amazing healing that his brain has undergone. All of the years he had spent covering conflicts or wars, putting his life on the line at times to cover a story, those days were over.  And although a part of him still yearns to do that kind of journalism.  I, for one, am very relieved that he will not. Bob got into his field the back way.  He didn't set out to be a journalist.  He was and is captivated by history, by current events,other cultures and world conflicts.  Traveling to far-flung places and telling the stories of what is happening there is simply an extension of his love of travel and backpacking into third world places or climbing high peaks. I knew well who I had married 20 years ago.  And after his injuries, I am so happy and relieved to say that very little of the Bob I married has changed.  Especially that part. It would be easy to imagine that Bob wants to return to Iraq to prove it "didn't best him" or to say that the insurgents didn't win.  The Bob I know wants to return to Iraq for many different reasons because it too, has gotten in his blood.  Certainly the fact that he almost lost his life there, that people battled and fought valiantly to save his life on that soil and that there are thousands of Americans there at this very moment putting their lives on the line, makes it an incredibly important story to tell.  No matter how weary Americans seem to have grown of hearing about the war, what your political bent is or how overshadowed the war is by the current economic events, what is happening in Iraq does matter. I understand Bob's need to return.  I understand the need to go back to a place where you almost perished and to see it with new eyes.  I understand his desire to get "back on the horse that threw him," to get the story and to update us on what is happening there from his unique position.  He is further privileged by traveling with Admiral Mullen, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It's a big story and a worthy one. Each night, many spouses in America tuck in their kids, lay their head on the pillow and pray this is not going to be the night the phone rings with news of their loved one in Iraq.   I know that feeling, from the times he was embedded or placed somewhere in a danger zone.  But I didn't have to live with a year's worth of these nights-- or longer. I think that to live that way, to go to bed waiting for a phone to ring, to hope against hope that it won't, is to live a life circumscribed by fear. I won't live my life worrying that lightning will strike twice.  I've already been reminded just how precious it is.  As Bob says often to meif I worry about safety or danger, "You could step off the curb in Manhattan and get hit by a bus. " And he is right.  Life is unpredictable.  It's impossible to script.  In fact it's perfectly imperfect. In some ways Bob is most alive when he is in the field covering stories.  And this is the story that almost got the best of him.  I am sure he is feeling a mixture of many emotions while he is there.  And he will feel some very strong ones   when he touches back down on American soil. I've subconsciously waited for this trip to come for almost 2 years now, once I realized he would recover enough to go back to the work he loves. And I'm comfortable with it.  I understand it.  But I'll also be very, very glad when he is back home with us.

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I Need Your Advice

I'd love to hear your stories, advice, thoughts on sending a child off to college.  This will be my first time and I'm going to do a segment on Good Morning America in August.  It's going to be a piece on good advice from other Moms-- so please write me if you have some tips on what you bought that was useful, how you handled yourself when you dropped him or her off...... all of it!!!  The good , the bad, the emotional and the ugly.

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