January 10th, 2010
Every year, I put off taking down the holiday decorations. Packing up the ornaments and hauling the bare tree out to the curb gives me an acute sense of time passing. How many more Christmas mornings will my five-year-old daughter, Emi, race to the living room to see if Santa ate his cookies? When will the details of holidays with my kids start to run together, just as my childhood Christmas memories now do? Some of the highlights are clear—the year I got my first two-wheel bike with the yellow banana seat or the Christmas Eve my brother and I wore matching red-and-white-striped pajamas and bounced through the house, too excited to go to bed. But the details are murky.
On New Year’s Day, we visited my husband’s grandmother in the group home where she lives with six other elderly women. Hiroyo, or “G.G.” as Emi calls her, will be 102 in March. When we arrived with the kids, you would have though the Obamas had walked through the front door. “A baby!” the ladies exclaimed, crowding around my 14-month-old son and trying to coax a smile out of him. “Look at how pretty you are!” they called to my daughter. Emi hung back, shy, for a few moments, but then obliged them with a twirl of her purple velvet dress.
G.G. was in her room. It’s a small space, but bright, with French doors that open onto a patio where she likes to sit when the weather is warmer. What’s it like to ring in a New Year knowing you’ve outlived a husband, most of your friends, a daughter-in-law, and a son? Is she sad that so many celebrations are forever behind her? But like the ladies out front, G.G. was in a jolly mood. She gave my son her walker to push and laughed with delight when he zoomed out of the room with it. She pulled my daughter close, pressing her wrinkled cheek against Emi’s soft one and telling her how much she loved Emi’s pretty dress. The contented expression on G.G.’s face told me she enjoyed the moment.
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August 11th, 2009
When I was in high school, I spent many a weekend night holed up in my bedroom, listening to cassettes and brooding over all that I was missing out on by not being invited to the “good” lunch table.
This of course was where the popular crowd sat ― the ones that got elected to student government and homecoming court and traveled in packs at the mall and had parties to go to every Saturday ― parties that I was sure were wildly exciting events taking place at impressively furnished houses, with people crowding the kitchen, spilling out onto patios and jumping into swimming pools in their underwear.
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February 26th, 2009
I’ve been on maternity leave for the past four months with my second child, and if I happen to be lucky enough to have a conversation with an adult, all I want to talk about are the cops, drug dealers and heroin addicts of West Baltimore. And I have never actually been to West Baltimore.
With no Presidential election to follow, the news too depressing to watch and nothing else happening in my life outside of breastfeeding, diaper changing and about a thousand loads of laundry, I find myself living vicariously through a bunch of people who don’t technically exist. When my daughter was an infant, it was Tony, Carmela, Chrissy and Ade. Now it’s McNulty, Bunk, Omar, and Snoop. The economy being what it is, my husband and I are not that motivated to drop fifty bucks or more on babysitting, only to spend another fifty on dinner and a movie that’s going to come out on Netflix in a couple months anyway. Instead (thanks to Netflix) we spend our evenings burning through DVD episodes of the HBO series The Wire.
The result is that we have become so immersed in the lives of the characters on the show, we discuss them as if they are family: How is Omar going to unload the package he stole from Prop Joe? Will Bubbles ever get caught snitching? Who’ll survive the turf war between the Barksdale and Stanfield crews? Aside from what is needed on our next Costco run, these are the topics that dominate our conversations. Sometimes I even manage to combine the two, giving our Costco exchanges a Wire-esque spin: “Yo - don’t get none of them off brand diapers. Those bitches leak. A-ight?”
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January 9th, 2009
What on earth did I do with my time before my daughter was born? Did I suffer from narcolepsy or some sort of chronic fatigue disorder or something? Because I’m wondering how it is possible that I lived in my house two years prior to her birth and still did not manage to paint the dining room, organize my office, or finish putting my wedding photos into an album.
Because I had hours, I had days, I had whole weekends where changing diapers, cleaning up the high chair, washing boo boos, picking up toys and constantly spotting a very small and very reckless climber (she likes to stack things up and see how high she can get) were not mandatory activities.
Even if I take into account all those Saturday mornings when my husband and I slept in till the decadent hour of nine (or even ten!) a.m., or the Sundays wiled away sipping coffee on the back patio reading The New York Times, that still left a lot of space to get things accomplished. What was I thinking? I’ll bet I could have written a novel, found an agent and got it published.
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