Summer Bribes

When I joined my DNA with my husband's, there were many unanswered questions. Would my recessive blonde genes triumph over his green eyes and dark hair?  Would our kids inherit his more mathematical and logical mind?  Would his laid back attitude trump my more tightly wired list-making one?  No matter. Those were all things we had little or no control over.

But I did feel certain of one thing:  our kids would be avid readers.

When I think back to my childhood, and the one my husband describes, we both loved to disappear into a world of books.  Reading took us to new places, requiring only imagination to color in the lines or draw the landscape.  

I fell just a little bit more in love with Bob when he first described his boyhood self to me as a kid “buried in a book.”  That’s when I knew, among other things, that he was the man for me.  Naturally, we would create a little cache of eager beaver readers.  Forget nature—that part was all about nurture, right?

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Oh, hang on a tick, no one in my household is illiterate, no one is using rope for a belt or wears cardboard shoes.  All four of my kids have a decent grasp on current events.  But much to my great sorrow, they don’t read for pleasure.  So if you are one of the lucky people whose progeny devour books like Halloween fun-size candy bars, you can stop reading now.   We need not feel the sting of your smugness.

I got through July and I put my foot down. Summer was half over! The tide had to turn.  I announced to my 13 year olds that they would read or lose their allowance.  Read beyond their summer reading assignments and, well, there would be a new article of clothing in it for them.

Admitting this two-pronged “punitive plus bribery” approach to making my kids read, feels a little like standing up in an AA meeting and announcing that I’m an alcoholic.

But I figure, if I out myself, maybe some of the rest of you won’t be so hard on yourselves.  You’ll abandon the unproductive search for where you failed, after years of modeling solid recreational reading habits, countless bedtime stories and dedicated visits to your public library. It’s a jungle out there in the world of modern childhood— the concept of reading for fun today feels more like being the Victorian bathing costume in the Miss America Bikini Contest--- its just not as sexy as its technologically entertaining competitors.

Bribing kids to read?  Horrors, say the ghosts of child librarians past.  I wasn’t beneath using Skittles as a reward for potty training.  Is this really any different?  Isn’t regular reading as essential as proper pooping if you’re going to thrive in this world? 

As an author I have the pleasure of knowing and working with some wonderful people in the book business. So I canvassed a few industry folks and came up with a stack of current YA books.  I’m no dummy.  I’m not going to try to force-feed Jane Austen right now.  I chose the Harry Potter-style lane. Every crack addict knows you need to begin with a gateway drug.

“All Our Pretty Songs” by Sarah McCarry was first up, a new YA summer entry that got great reviews.  My girls looked over the cover, their summer freckles furrowing as they read the flap; Cool Hand Lukes, those two, careful not to display too much overt enthusiasm.  An eyebrow raised in interest.  The lure and hook snagged in the fish’s mouth.  Success, I thought to myself, displaying my poker face.

I gathered titles like “Social Code,” “Fan Girl” and “Prep School Confidential.”  These books also had wonderful cover art to sweeten the offering, a short skirt here, a mysterious kissy face there.  Hah! Take that you addictive TV series, you seductively shot  “Gossip Girl” and fake blood strewn “Vampire Diaries” episodes! Yes, yes, shame on me.  I do permit them to watch these shows, but I’m what you call an “almost-everything-in-moderation” kind of mother.  Current pop culture has its own important place in adolescence. 

 

The books arrived.  And so they read.

Here we are now, in the early days of August.  Just before lights out, the three of us tuck in, we open our books, stretch out our legs on the bed, the moths beat against the screens in the hushed dark outside. There’s a bullfrog or two, singing baritone with all this recent rain.  OK, OK, so I over-dramatized the scene a little, it does feel sorta triumphant.  And it’s blissfully quiet inside, no vampire victims are screaming on TV, no Park Avenue prepsters are tossing their highlighted manes and huffing away on their Tory Burches.

There is only the flickering of the theater of our minds.  Only the sound of we three drawing breath.  We are reading.  Pure happiness.

Perhaps we will work our way to iconic titles like “The Wind in the Willows,” (although that window has probably passed) “Little Women,”  “The Hobbit” or any of the endless classics that could enrich their sponge-like minds.  Or not.  Is it important that my girls have read Thackeray or can recite sonnets of William Wordsworth or stanzas from William Shakespeare?  Or do we march on now, in the full glare of the information age, with a morphing view of what it means to be well read and well educated?  Quotes and poems and answers lie but a keystroke or two away now on Google.  Do studying Latin and Greek make one especially erudite?  Or obsolete?  What is the future of the “great books” and how will that definition change through the generations?  Who is writing the great books of our time?

Sigh.  All these questions!  I just don’t know.  What I do know is that my girls are reading.  They are marinating in the pure pleasure of delving into a real, live, paper paged book.  And yes, they will redeem their promised reward.  Fair is fair.  A deal is a deal.  They’ll pick a cute top or a skirt at Target as we head out of the mountains after Labor Day and begin to brace for the return of school, chauffeuring and schedules.

 

But here is the thing that gives me hope.  It’s the reminder that all of that foundation laying, all of that work we did as parents in the reading department, lurks somewhere inside like the herpes virus, just waiting to flare up.

 

My 19 year old asked me for book recommendations this summer—she actually asked ME!  And please do NOT tell her I’m writing this.  Aware that I could scare her off by lending her my more literary faves, I quickly pulled down choices like Tina Fey’s “Bossypants” and “Gone Girl.”  I slipped in “The Light Between Oceans,” and that clever Sloan Crosleys “I Was Told There’d Be Cake.”  Finally, I thought I’d dazzle her with Mindy Kaling’s “Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?” just to prove my cool factor is intact.  I must have smiled all the way to bed that night.

 

So take hope ye mother’s of children connected to their cell phones and computers.  Don’t despair you parents of instagrammers and Facebook friends.  I share this as a tale of courage that somewhere, around the bend, you might just witness the payback, all those years after the initial investment.

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IN PRAISE OF THE UNCOOL MOM

I always wanted one of those chatty, gabby mothers, the ones who set out the warm cookies and milk after school, eagerly hovering on both elbows to hear all about the day’s crushes, heartbreak and gossip.  I coveted the moms who begged to do their daughters make-up, twisted tresses into French braids and got excited about the latest elephant bell hip hugger jeans and platform shoes.

 

My mother was the exact opposite.  Our after school snacks were carrot sticks and celery.  Cranberry juice stood in for soda and there were no weekends spent trolling the mall for the latest shade of frosted pink lipstick.  My mom’s idea of a good time, her reward for a day of chores and household maintenance, was to curl up every afternoon with a book.

 

My mother is a smarty-pants.  An intellectual.  Her idea of a challenge was reading Will and Ariel Durant’s classic “A Story of Civilization.”  All eleven volumes.  I kid you not.  I proudly told friends in our upstate New York suburb that she had a master’s degree.  Take that, all you girls who’s Moms got the Mary Tyler Moore flip curl and culottes!  Her currency was never the latest hairstyle, although she did get a cropped “Beatles “ cut before I was born.  She wasn’t the interior decorating type, a serious cook or gardener. She was bookish. And she reinforced the importance of that by example, taking us to the library from a very early age.


When we were old enough to ride our bikes alone, I loved the grown up feeling of consulting with the librarians, having my own library card (so COOL!) and then placing the books in my bike basket for transport home.  I can’t quite articulate the feeling I still get walking into a library or a bookstore today. It’s a sense of endless possibilities and want.  Entering a fashion boutique on Rodeo Drive or Fifth Avenue will never carry the same thrill.   Books are a different form of acquisition, more lasting and fulfilling.  My mother taught me that.


I picture my mother now, absorbed in her book; feet propped to rest her “throbbing veins,” (GROSS! we’d mouth to each other) as the late afternoon sunlight knifed through the living room window onto the mustard colored rug (yes, it was the 70’s.)  The table was set for dinner; the roast was roasting, the vacuuming and dusting completed for the day.

 

Only now do I understand how reading buttressed her sense of individualism during the years when tending to our repetitive needs must have strip-mined her intellectual life.  Books nurtured her own flame, especially as she navigated through three daughters’ teen years (oy vey), bubbling with hormones, churlishness and delayed gratification.  It is in hindsight that I see how reading legitimized her presence among us.  Books were her “cover” as she stationed herself in the living room chair, her antennae alert without meddling; such an under-rated attribute in today’s world of micro-managed parenting and helicopter hovering.

 

I don’t ever recall her telling me what to wear, criticizing a friend or offering up opinions about the boys who cycled in and out of our hearts (especially the one with the red Camaro who reeked of Marlboros.) Adolescence is a desert landscape of shifting sands and petty hurts.  She was smart enough to recognize that the girl who excluded you from her birthday party one day is back as your bestie the next.  My mother taught me how to be the bobber on the fishing line, not the hook with the bait.

 

You absorb things as a kid—even when you are trying not to.  You tell yourself that when it’s your turn you will be a slightly different parent.  You will edit, accept and reject. You will change things from the way you were raised, do it your own way.  And sometimes you do.  But I understand now what she was up to, each afternoon as we walked in the door from school.  She was hanging back, holding her counsel and her tongue, being my parent, not my BFF.  She was mothering—not smothering—and she gave me the space to learn for myself, to make my own decisions, choices and mistakes. 

Now that I am a parent, working to instill a sense of well being and independence in frustrated by her occasional maternal indifference, I see that her approach required far more restraint than the dishy, tell-me-all tact.   Those afternoons she spent at home, quietly reading, were a gift.  They were an act of love equally as important as the love of reading.

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Digging in the Dirt

Most young children compete with their siblings for their parent’s affection. My sisters’ and my rivals, however, were my father’s plants.  He adored lush ferns and bright colors, lipstick red summer geraniums and the bold purple of miniature lobelia.  Our lawn was golf-course green and weed-free (and he was not above employing a few chemicals to keep it that way).  Watering, fertilizing, clipping and weeding were his sports arena, his temple and his escape.

When I ultimately had my own home, yard and children, I discovered that growing things, digging around in the soil, was a balm for me, too. 

 

The plants and trees I nurtured existed in a separate sphere from the sometimes routinized and often chaotic world of mothering four children, now ranging in age from 21 to 13.

 

I am drawn to my summer garden in the dawn, before anyone stirs inside. In springtime, I prepare the beds and start my dahlia bulbs and herbs in pots of kitchen compost soil.  By August, the flowers are a tangle of bright colors.  But in October, as I cut back my dahlia stalks, dig out the tubers and turn over the earth, I am reminded how the seasons of a garden mirror those of our lives. 

 

And so it was natural, 18 years ago, when I lost a baby at 14 weeks that I turned to the land to make sense of my grief.  The pain of losing that child was sharp, unlike anything I had experienced.  I had pictured my baby, imagined him in our family’s silhouette.  There were mornings I didn’t want to lift my head off the pillow, days I forced myself to simply get through, and tend to the needs of my two living children.

 

Grief craves ritual, and that summer, I was determined to plant a tree to memorialize our son, to root him in our land and fix his place.  I felt a primal need to make something thrive after something so precious had perished.

 

Feeling barren and broken, I chose a small but sturdy Japanese maple with deep burgundy pointed leaves. We were a transient family in those days, moving from town to town every few years for my
husband’s job as a journalist.

The place we call our “constant home” is on a lake in  the Adirondacks to which my family has returned for five generations each summer.  It was there, in a simple ceremony of poems and prayers, that we planted the tree under the spread of a giant fir.  As I covered the roots with loamy soil, I felt the barest flicker, a hope that my battered heart might begin to heal.

 

Throughout each summer, passing the tree in my walk between beach and house, it’s impossible not to wonder what our family would have looked like with a different configuration.  We were thrilled with the birth of our twin girls in 2000, but a loss doesn’t get erased by joy, only diluted. That sorrow is buried within now, marked in our trunks like the inner rings of a tree. The maple reminds me that life is indomitable.  We may never get over losing those we love, but we can navigate through it.

 

In 2003, the war in Iraq claimed the life of a friend in a very sudden way.  It was our first close brush with the death of someone my age and it hobbled us.  In the autumn after his funeral, a group of friends planted hundreds of white tulips on the grassy bank near his house for his widow and daughters.  The activity connected us all and joined our grief in one supportive web.  That spring, the riot of color that bloomed filled up some space, it lessened the ache.

 

My children are older now, and I’ve come to that place in life where I’m parenting my parents.  The seesaw has tipped for my sisters and me as we head toward the inescapable fact that we will lose them both.  Yet I cannot quite grasp what it will feel like once they are gone.  When I am unable to hear my mother’s voice on the phone, or loop my arm through my father’s on a walk, I imagine it will throb like a phantom limb.

 

I’ve not yet decided how I will honor my mother, but I know what I will do to memorialize the man who loved to put his hands in the dirt.  I will plant a White Birch, the lavender pink bark etched with whorled black lines in the shape of God’s eyes. We will place it near the shores of the lake he loves, by the dock where he spent his afternoons.  And when I cover the roots of the tree with earth, I will know that a little piece of my father will live on there too. 

This blog was published in Martha Stewart Living Magazine, April 2013, pg. 170

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