Friends Talking in the Night

New PD Post - "9/11 No Longer About Fear of Flying"

2009-09-11T13:54:00.004-04:00

What to say after my L-O-N-G absence, except to say that I am back, and happy to be so! I would love it if you'd take a look at what I posted today on Politics Daily, where I'm back to blogging after a two-month hiatus following the death of my dad. This one is on the legacy of 9/11, it being that date, though a cold, dreary, rainy one in Washington, nothing like the clear skies we had eight years ago.

Lessons on War We Can't Seem to Learn

2009-05-26T10:34:00.002-04:00

On Sunday night, Julia and I went with my lifelong friend Camille to the National Memorial Day Concert held on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol, where her husband Robert McDuffie, a world-renowned solo violinist, played with the National Symphony Orchestra. The annual event was celebrating its 20th anniversary, but the last time I went was for Bobby's previous gig there, nine years ago, when he paid tribute to Schindler's List and his music and accompanying slide show moved me--embarrassingly, I have to say--to sobs.

This time, with Julia, who was wearing hand-me-down red patent leather shoes that are at least three sizes too big for her (but suitably fancy in her mind for the occasion), I kept my liquid emotions in check.

But I found the whole thing wrenching nonetheless. There we were, with a picnic spread out on the baby blankets Julia had on insisted on bringing, on a beautiful night on the Capitol grounds--the same spot where I watched Barack Obama's inauguration. The Capitol dome was lit up behind us. The top of the Washington Monument stretched above the tree line in the distance ahead. It must be where I go for doses of patriotism.

Except that what I was feeling wasn't pride in my country. It was sorrow and disappointment. I couldn't help but remember that nearly a decade ago when we were there, the concept of our country at war was neatly tucked away in the past whereas this time, we were honoring the nearly 5,000 soldiers who have died in Afghanistan and Iraq and the thousands more who are injured in wars that are ongoing as I write.

Part of the show was a tribute to the mother and sister of one such infantryman, who, when their son and brother was returned to the States with part of his head blow away, moved into Walter Reed Hospital in Bethesda, Md., giving up their jobs and homes to nurse him back to what, in his case, passes for health.

Then Colin Powell spoke, telling us that there are 10,000 adults who have given up their lives to care for their wounded adult children. And if not for them, he reminded us, they would be in Veterans' Hospitals--"or worse, homeless." Nevermind that Powell seemed an unlikely source for this information. Shouldn't our VA Hospitals be like 5-star hotels after what we've put these men and women and their families through?

Flag-waving and pool openings have long become the substance if not the soul of Memorial Day--an updated version of the men, women, and children who dressed in their finery and went out to picnic at Chancellorsville, Va, spectators to one of the early battles of the Civil War that unfolded in the fields beneath them. Not a lot has changed.

New PD Post - Washington Not Having Food Fights But Fighting Bad Food

2009-05-18T22:04:00.005-04:00

I snuck out of a forum on education featuring Education Secretary Arne Duncan today to go to a talk given by New York Times Minimalist columnist Mark Bittman and Washington-based chef Jose Andres about eating better to save not just ourselves but also the planet. It pretty much goes without saying that I wrote a PD post on the food panel ahead of anything I might write later on Duncan (who was compelling) and the allocation of resources in education. In my short life as an education reporter, I have come to understand that most of the statistics are not rosy. And if a nation moves on its belly, as Napolean said, there's no reason why a blogger shouldn't, too.

The events were put on by the Center for American Progress, and the best part was that Ralph was also working at both, so whenever I got tired of trying to focus my new progressive eyeglasses on the words, "Center for American Progress," I would watch him take pictures. Afterward, he took me to lunch at one of my favorite restaurants, Black Salt.

I'm pleased to say that after listening to Bittman urge the audience to eat less meat, I ordered a crab cake. But I realize that that's only a partial victory, because, as the head of P.R. for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) once told me when I interviewed him for U.S.News, "Fish are not swimming vegetables."

Next time, I guess it's seaweed salad for me.

Now on Politics Daily - The Last Word on Women's Ability

2009-05-15T17:24:00.002-04:00

Please take a look at my latest post on Politics Daily, about negative stereotypes for women. Thanks!

Parenting Advice from Goldie Hawn

2009-05-15T13:58:00.004-04:00

Speaking of teachable moments, I'm not one to think that Hollywood stars are the best source of parenting advice. But I told a friend who has worked with a lot of actors that I thought Goldie Hawn, whom I interviewed last week for a PD story on a mindfulness program she started in schools, was wise. She said that she kept running into smart ones--Hawn, Meg Ryan, and someone I can't remember--and marveling, until finally she realized that just because they can act doesn't mean they can't think. Point taken.

I caught up with Hawn on a particularly vulnerable parenting day in our house. After what we thought was incredibly bad behavior on Sam's part, we gave him the maximum sentence: we forbade him from playing in that day's T-ball game--a double-whammy, since (1) Ralph is his coach and (2) Sam's dedication to baseball and the Muckdogs, his team, surpasses his dedication to God and country. But that morning he had grabbed a ball away from Julia, and, when called on it, he walked away, down the hill by himself to school. When Ralph caught up with him, Sam rounded out the episode by hitting his dad.

When I asked Hawn what she'd learned as a mother, she said:

"If I have the intention to be happy as a mother, then my zest is rubbed off on the children. Being a joyful parent is actually choosing your battles. Be the best of you, and don't let them get the best of you."

She went on to say that getting angry should mean something:

"I would get angry if they weren't kind. If they lied, that was a felony. If they cursed in the house."

After that, I felt better about punishing Sam so strongly. It didn't keep him from misbehaving the next day, or the day after that, but I've come to believe that much of parenting is about conditioning your child so that small mistakes don't become nasty habits and good habits, like doing your homework and sitting down to dinner every night with your family, take root. But the process of parenting--well, that's more about educating me than him.

Cell Phones: For Talking On, Not About

2009-05-15T13:38:00.005-04:00

I have a friend who used to say that conversations about flight delays and last night's dreams were off-limits, because everyone has them, and they're not nearly as interesting to your listener as they are to you. To the list of verboten topics, I would add stories about technological glitches.

Still, I can't resist telling you that I've been in cell-phone hell for the past few days. After my well-worn iPhone fell into the toilet the other day (don't ask), I had to pull my back-up iPhone out of my drawer (don't ask) to reactivate it. This was not as simple as it sounds, because these things never are. But taking a page from the Obamas, as columnist Jill Lawrence points out on PD today, the rep at the AT & T store tried to turn the whole experience into a teachable moment. When I explained how my phone came to be water-logged, she said, "They don't swim."

And I thought they did.

Have You Read Politics Daily Today?

2009-05-12T16:31:00.003-04:00

Friends of FTITN,

I'm having a great time covering education for Politics Daily. Please take a look at it, especially my Q & A with DC School Chancellor Michelle Rhee and my most recent post on Goldie Hawn and leave a comment!

Book Club Members Need to Read the Fine Print

2009-05-12T10:34:00.012-04:00

Fact: I have never had a conversation with anyone about their book club where they've said, "I've just finished reading a fabulous book, and I can't wait to talk about it!"

Nope. It's always some variation on: "I have my book club meeting tomorrow night and I still have 1004 more pages to read of NAME OF BOOK GOES HERE. And I can't believe this is the book they chose."

Don't get me wrong. I love books so much that when an acquaintance recently said she wanted to line the entrance of her row house with bookshelves, I thought, I wonder if my hallway is wide enough to do that, too? And, Can I rearrange my radiator to make space? We used to have book wallpaper in our old house, but can you imagine how welcoming it would be to be flanked by real books as you walked into your house? It would be a lot better than being pawed at by a dog standing on her hind legs, which is what happens where I live. I've long dreamed of building bookshelves in my dining room so that I'd be surrounded by good friends on all sides. It would be like repairing to the library after dinner for brandy, cigars, and conversation, only you wouldn't have to leave the table.

Having said all of that, I feel like the bad mother--you know, the woman who wrote an essay in the New York Times about loving her husband (who turns out to be the novelist Michael Chabon) more than her kids. But here's the thing: I don't ever want to be in a book club.

For me, the joy of books comes from the freedom to choose, both what--and when-- to read. Sure it's fun to talk about books, such as recently, when it seemed like everyone I know happened to be reading The Middle Place. And I was touched when my friend Lisel brought me her copy of The Girl I Left Behind because she had read it and thought I would like it, too. (She was right.) But that's different than having to slog through The Moviegoer because someone in your book club is trying to assauge her guilt over never having read it in college. Or willing yourself to stay awake as you inch your way along in some tome about geopolitics when you'd really rather be curled up with a good mystery. The only period in my life that I didn't love reading was in grades 6 to 12, because there was never a time--summers included--that I was without an assignment. Next came the agony of having to analyze the book in class. What is a book club except English Lit. without the tests? On the rare occasions when I leave Ralph and the kids at home and get together with friends, possibly the last thing I want to discuss is the plot of a 19th century novel.

The reason this is on my mind is that the other day, my sister's friend Pat came up with a brilliant idea: a magazine club. Members would read an agreed-upon piece like the Gisele cover story in Vanity Fair or Orangette's piece on salmon in Bon Appetit, or, hell, the Organizer Doctor's solutions for arranging what's under the sink in Red Book, sift through it, and still leave plenty of time for free-ranging conversation.

Think about it. After a lively evening with friends, you could go home, climb into bed, and read. The book of your choice. Without the guilt.

Anyone want to join with me to start Magazines Only?

Life at 24,000 Feet - No Place to Run

2009-05-07T17:25:00.005-04:00

One of my sisters is a flight attendant, but for a variety of reasons, that is not a job I could ever hold down. One is that I am a spiller of drinks. Another is that I am a bad flier. I'm not neurotic about it, which is to say I've never declined a trip because I don't like to fly. Let's just say I have a reputation.

Years ago, when I was scheduled to accompany my elderly cousin on a month-long boondoggle to South Africa, the plane we were supposed to take was grounded overnight to have its engine replaced. Maybe it's because I didn't have anything else to do but worry during my unplanned stay in Chantilly, Va., near Dulles Airport--my cousin Abram, 92, had retired to his room, and I hadn't even packed dental floss in my purse to keep me busy. Still, under the best of circumstances it wouldn't sit well with me to fly for 17 hours with an impaired engine and so I calmly phoned the airline and asked why, with its puny fleet of two jets, I should trust them to fix it. Some way into our trip, my cousin told me that our guide had taken him aside and asked why the airline had a record of my being a "nervous traveler." Word had gotten out, I guess. I felt somewhat justified when, mid-trip, South African Airways went bankrupt and we had to fly another carrier home.

Even before that, when I was on a transatlantic flight in my early twenties to visit my then boyfriend in London, the ride was so rough that I grabbed the hand of the man sitting next to me and gripped it for the next four hours. I don't think I ever learned the name of the person who belonged to that hand, but I know that no amount of pleading on his part would have gotten me to release it. I remember his eyes on me when we were waiting for our luggage, but we never spoke. At least that encounter was anonymous.

Despite my history, I was trying to play it cool the other night when the plane from Atlanta, where I'd gone to visit my parents, started to bump around--a lot. I wouldn't be able to save them if thing went down, I thought, looking at Sam and Julia in their pajamas in the seats next to me. Sam was asleep, and Julia seemed oblivious to the roller coaster. Then Julia reached out and took my hand. And by the look she gave me, which made her momentarily more 30 than 3, I could tell it was for me. After all, she had announced just that day that she wants to be a smoke jumper and then a princess when she grows up. In that same conversation, as if to justify her life's ambitions, she told me that she is brave and smart.

I know people say you can learn a lot from kids, but I didn't learn a thing that night at 24,000 feet. I was just glad to have my little girl's pudgy palm in mine. And to know her name.

Announcing My New Gig on Politics Daily

2009-04-29T12:08:00.005-04:00

Dear Friends of FTITN,

Many of you have called to check in about my absence from the blog, and I'm so grateful for your concern and loyalty. Everyone in our life is as good as they can be, which, of course, means varying things depending on who we're talking about.

Partly my radio silence is due to the fact that I've been getting ready to cover education as a columnist for AOL's new venture Politics Daily. Here's how our editor in chief, Melinda Hennenberger, describes the site, which launched two days ago:

"Welcome to Politics.Daily.com, a political news magazine for the general reader updated every day, throughout the day. Instead of leading off with extravagant claims about how we're the best thing since Caller ID, what I really want to promise is that we'll work hard to distinguish ourselves the old-fashioned way, with heavily reported, well-written stories. We'll offer a straight mix of news and opinion -- and a mix of views in our reported commentary. And I can't tell you how grateful we all are that AOL (yes, Alec Baldwin, deal with it!) is willing to take this gamble, and fund a small team of old pros committed to traditional journalistic values..."

People have asked me how we're different from Politico or Slate, and the answer is, I don't know. But I can tell you from a purely personal standpoint, as the mom of one, and soon, two, kids in D.C. public school, I'm thrilled to be covering a core issue that feels to me like it's now or never in terms of making our country's public schools work. And that's what I plan to say to Michelle Rhee, our controversial chancellor, when I go interview her for PD tomorrow.

And I'm ecstatic (and a more than a little rusty) to be reporting again. So check us out. And while you're at it, please read (AND COMMENT) on my first story about how schools are gearing up to deal with swine flu. I'll also be blogging on Woman Up on the PD site.

It feels so great to be back on FTITN!

Recession: Carrot and Stick

2009-03-11T15:28:00.005-04:00

Not that it's really affected me, because I've scarfed down more Girl Scout cookies than a whole troop should be allowed to eat in one sitting. But...is it me, or are the Girl Scouts of America skimping on the size of their peanut-butter-creme Do-si-dos these days?

If so, they're not the only ones who have used the recession as an excuse for portion control. It wasn't that long ago that it seemed everywhere I went, people behind counters were trying to upsell me on more popcorn, bigger burgers, and larger fountain drinks. I'm sure that's still going on, but recently I've noticed a few restaurants and gourmet take-out shops around town where they're charging the same but quietly dishing up less--and also piling on the lettuce in place of other, more expensive ingredients. For all the warnings we've heard about obesity, maybe the real cure for the nation's collective weight is a down economy.

I'm going to start a running list on Friends Talking in the Night of good things to come out of the economic turmoil we're in, so please send in your thoughts. I only wish you could also drop in for a cookie! (I just ate another one when I went to the kitchen to check on the correct spelling of Do-si-dos.)

Economics 101: Learning in Life What I Didn't Learn in College

2009-03-04T12:41:00.008-05:00

The only reason I did well in Econ in college is that I took the courses with my friend, Bill, who had a mind for all the charts and graphs about guns and butter that I lacked, and he was generous enough to pull me along.

But even as I've tried to deny the daily damage being inflicted on my retirement account--I've been tossing the unopened statements in the trash for the past several months--the economy has risen to become THE conversation. It pops up in headlines in the daily papers and on my phone. It comes up on walks and over dinner with friends and even during Ralph's and my pillow-talk time at night. We who have Greatest Generation envy are finally to be tested, it seems, by the Great Recession.

Since history never repeats itself precisely, however, I find myself obsessing about what form the paradigm shifts our lives will take. About the only change I've made so far is to stop acquiring and start whittling: I've made a deal with myself that for every day I don't go to Starbucks, I transfer $5 toward my credit card balance (Last week when I was in bed with the flu and only craved tea, I "made" a whopping $35!)

This nonetheless represents a big change for me. I have lived my entire adult life by an approach that Calvin Trillin calls "Alice's Law of Compensatory Cash Flow." That's the principal by which if you think you absolutely must buy a fabulous new flat screen TV that cost $5,000 but then remember that if you do there will be no money to pay the mortgage, feed the kids, or train the dog and so you forego it, you have in effect "saved" $5,000 that you can then spend on something else.

But surely this is only the first of many adjustments, small and large. If few can afford to send their kids to college in the manner to which we upper-middle-class aspirers have planned, will the Harvards and Yales somehow become devalued, replaced by windshield stickers for Georgia State? Will we be blown back a generation, so that we raise our kids the way our parents grew up--living with multi-generations? taking in boarders? We will we start mending the clothes we buy from Target? Will we never be able to retire?

All of this is still in the realm of fantasy right now, and I hope that's where it stays. But in my imagination, what I picture from the turmoil we're in is a more communal life, with greater reliance on and interdependence among friends, family, and neighbors, less waste, and more of a focus on what we really care about because choices have to be made.

I'd love to hear how the economy has affected you, and where you think we're headed?

Public School? A Private Matter (But It Shouldn't Automatically Be Discounted, Either)

2009-03-02T13:38:00.007-05:00

As anyone who's ever read Friends Talking in the Night knows, I struggle mightily with parental guilt--that just-kicked-in-the-gut feeling that comes on unbidden each time you think you might be failing your kids, however temporarily or slightly. I'm agonizing at this particular moment over the fact that Julia is in daycare on what for many kids in Washington is a snow day, while I'm at home blogging and doing research for a speech--never mind that she was happy to be there, kicking about in her boots like the little boy in Ezra Jack Keats's The Snowy Day. So I'm totally sympathetic with a piece in yesterday's New York Times "SundayStyles" about the hard calculus many parents are currently facing over whether or not to keep their kids in private-school education in this grizzly economy.

Still, as the mother of a child in public school, I took umbrage at the writer's utter failure to question--even in a single throw-away line--the possibility that public-school education has any positives. If we hadn't made different decisions with the money we earn would Sam be in a private school? Maybe. But each morning when I hug him goodbye and give him a good luck pat on his backpack, I also feel that he's in a pretty perfect situation and that our family--and, in some tiny way, our neighborhood--benefits from being a part of the school down the hill. That sense is reinforced at pickup each afternoon by the engaged boy who hurls himself into my arms, talking without a breath about Harriet Tubman or Grandma Moses or his science teacher's voyage on an ice-cutter in Alaska.

I learned all I need to know about feeling that your child may be in the wrong place in the few weeks of kindergarten last year when Sam wailed every day, apparently over the stepped-up demands of academia: I couldn't have lived like that for long without making some changes in one direction or another. It's one thing to be unhappy yourself and altogether another to see your child in distress. It's primal. But I'm also reminded of a lesson I learned as a newlywed back in my twenties that seems so obvious now as to never have needed learning: you can't get everything you need out of one relationship--or one school.

I'm not preaching that public school is for everyone. Obviously, we don't know what, if anything, we're missing. And since we won't ever have a control group, only life will tell.

Food and the Unintended Consequences of Parenting

2009-02-27T20:30:00.002-05:00

When Sam was a toddler, someone told us that the way to cure bad behavior was to put a drop of Tabasco on his tongue. But just at the moment Ralph finally decided to reach for the small bottle with the kick-ass contents, he decided there must be a better way to teach baby Sam a lesson than to mess with his taste buds. He closed the kitchen cabinet, forever leaving Tabasco as a condiment for raw oysters rather than a form of corporal punishment.

I was thinking about that incident yesterday when I read a story in the New York Times about well-meaning parents who have passed on their obsession with health food to the detriment of their kids. Without meaning to, they have doused the equivalent of Tabasco all over what their children eat:

"We're seeing a lot of anxiety in these kids," said Cynthia Bulik, the director of the eating disorders program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "They go to birthday parties, and if it's not a granola cake they feel like they can't eat it. The culture has led both them and their parents to take the public health messages to an extreme."

The piece goes on:
"Lisa Dorfman, a registered dietician . . . says that she often sees children who are terrified of foods that are deemed 'bad' by their parents. "It's almost a fear of dying, a fear of illness, like a delusional view of foods in general," she said. "I see kids whose parents have hypnotized them. I have 5-year-olds that speak like 40-year-olds. They can't eat an Oreo cookie without being concerned about trans fats."

Like most things having to do with parenting, the lessons you teach about food are not as straightforward as you'd wish. Even though there seems to be considerable distance between obesity and eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, we're just talking about a difference of pounds in terms of the trouble they bring. One doctor has coined the name "orthorexia" for people obsessed with health-conscious eating, the Times says. What we're trying to do, of course, is lay down patterns that will serve our kids well as they grow up and make their own decisions. But how? In terms of sweets, we swing between operating a Hitler youth camp and Candy Land.

In our house, food is not just what we eat, it's what we do. In first grade this year, when he was asked to write his autobiography, "What activity does your family enjoy together," saying, "We cook." As much as it slows dinner prep down, Sam and Julia snap beans (Julia often throws away the beans and puts the snapped ends in the bowl) and cut vegetables with a dull, ivory-handled fish knife. Each time Ralph picks Sam up from school, his first question is always, "Who's coming for dinner?" (When I pick him up, he asks, "Where are we going for dinner?")

It occurred to me in thinking about all this that maybe putting food in the context of family meals rather than talking about the sugar content in a box of Puffins, say, is the way to go. The people I know who have raised successful children put great stock in the family dinner as if some alchemy happens when you sit around a table together. And certainly in my own experience growing up, the profound lessons of my childhood were delivered not from a podium but from behind a place mat. Now that my father is on a feeding tube, those kitchen table lessons seem all the more poignant to me.

Only time will tell whether the right lessons take with Sam and Julia. When I was young, my parents forbade us from going to McDonald's and listening to the Beatles (Burger King and "Winchester Cathedral" were their fast-food and music of choice.)

All of parenting seems arbitrary, fraught with unintended consequences. My parents were prescient about McDonald's (though not Burger King). As for the Beatles, well, maybe we'll learn one day that they're hazardous to your health.

The End of Journalism--and Civilization

2009-02-25T15:42:00.006-05:00

While I'm on the subject of caregivers (see yesterday's post), I'd like to rant for a moment about journalism. I didn't get to see Barack Obama's State of the Union address last night--I was too busy putting Julia to bed again and again, she having decided that she would stay up until Ralph got home at 11 p.m.

Nonetheless, I'm almost certain from reading today's papers that while the president talked about Wall Street and the Big Three in Detroit, he failed to mention the demise of journalism. We are small potatoes compared to other industries, and we will never get a bail-out. But we are dying all the same. On Monday, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News declared bankruptcy. They join the Seattle-Post Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News, which are for sale, and scores of other papers and magazines that have had lay-offs and/or involuntary furloughs. The Christian Science Monitor, of course, has already moved its operations to the Web. Ditto with U.S. News & World Report, where I used to work, which now puts out a magazine only once a month.

But it's not just a question of where we will read our news: we can all get used to reading the newspaper on a computer. It's what will be lost in the translation. I have one very good friend who's a devotee of the obituaries in the local paper, not because she's morose but because of the tidbits of humanity they reveal about the people who died.

That's exactly what I've been thinking about that New York Times piece on child caregivers that I cited yesterday. If I were reading the paper online, I would scan the headlines about the economy and Iraq and Afghanistan and probably not take the time to read anything I don't have to. And having read the caregiving story, it's not as if I--or anyone else--can do anything to change the grim circumstances it lays out. Those kids will go on giving up their lives for their parents whether it becomes public knowledge or not.

But journalism is about more than headlines; it's about more than keeping the government honest or being the whistle-blowers for big business. Its equally important role is to hold up a mirror to society; to tell us who we are. It's about the texture of our daily lives.

Few, besides my fellow journalists, seem to think that much will be lost by losing this. Journalists are reviled--lower, I'd bet, than lawyers on the food chain. Sarah Palin spoke for many Americans when she said during the campaign and afterward that we got in the way of telling the story.

But I can't help but think that what's being lost is of larger moment than a Saturn minivan, say. I think it's more a cornerstone of civilization that is crumbling.

Caregivers Are Too Young for the Job

2009-02-24T10:25:00.001-05:00

Yesterday's New York Times has a story about children taking care of their ailing parents. It's not about the sandwich generation; not about people in mid-life like me and my sisters caring for our mom and dad. It's tweens and teens who have to give up soccer practice and seeing friends and, in some cases, school, to dispense insulin and migraine meds and take their charges to doctor's appointments--people, in other words, who should still be receiving the care, not doing the heavy lifting, sometimes literally.

The newspapers are not filled with the cheeriest stories right now, it being a critical time for us both at home and abroad. But of all I've read lately, this was surely the most depressing.

I felt bad enough last week when I read about Bristol Palin's interview with Greta Van Susteren on FoxNews in which she explains that the mom thing is unexpectedly hard:

"Well it's not just the baby that's hard. It's just, like, I'm not living for myself anymore. It's, like, for another person, so it's different."

But at least her situation is the result of a hormonal romp (although based on who the father is there must be mighty slim pickin's up there in Alaska). And at least that baby will grow more independent, not less, as time passes.

That's why, even though Julia woke up whining this morning and never stopped until she walked out the door except to cry "I'm done being in a bad mood!," it is easier for me to deal with the details of motherhood than those of daughter-hood right now. At least it feels like I'm operating in the light of day.

From my experience, illness is a long, black tunnel. And even though I'm so lucky that I still have both of my parents, I have also lost them to the tunnel.

Facebook and My Bookshelves: A Shaky Comparison

2009-02-18T10:53:00.011-05:00

Yesterday I got a set of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves built in my office (actually, they're Ikea shelves nailed to the wall so they don't fall on my head) so that I can at last unpack the forty cartons of books that have been stored away from three moves ago, in 2001. This morning, as I spent a couple of hours unpacking them, I was hit with so many rushes of memory that it was like attending my own, personal reunion.

In fact, I can't help being struck by the similarities of my dusty piles of books and my new Facebook "friends," though the last time I saw my copy of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, a book I read in college and detested because of the way the professor abused the one African-American in the class, and my inscribed copy of Stefan Kanfer's The Last Empire: De Beers, Diamonds, and the World, written by someone with whom I'm no longer in touch, Facebook didn't exist.

Having carted around some books for decades that I have never read and likely never will, I'm now wondering, Do I toss Don DeLillo's Underworld in the give-away bin at the Cleveland Park Library or put it on my shelf to take up space of which I now MIRACULOUSLY have too much in order to pretend that I'm more erudite than I really am? Is the point of putting books on a bookshelf to keep the ones you've actually read and treasure, for whatever reason? (I can't part with my Kanfer book, for example, because it reads: "For Linda A lovely lady of talent, true grit, and talent from her secular rabbah," and I'm sure it's the only time my name will ever be in the same sentence with talent x two. Not to mention that when I was just getting started in journalism, I met him in a used bookstore in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, and he was incredibly generous to me.) Is it to stockpile the un-reads for the future, which, in my case means I won't need to borrow or buy another book until 3001?

My list of Facebook friends is much the same. There are the friends I talk to every day, anyway, but there's a much longer list of "friends" whom I've spoken to rarely--if ever. And may never. Don't get me wrong: I love being able to be touch with people from high school I didn't get to know back in the day. And as one "friend" of a friend who from elementary school said, we're recreating our Brownie troop on Facebook one person at a time. It's pretty incredible that these people, once lost in time, are now a click away.

Facebook makes me feel that the world is small and manageable and, as I've blogged about before, I think that there's a kind of circling of the wagons from our youth as our parents age and get sick. It means something to hear from someone who knew my mom and dad when they were in their forties. It's valuable to have the same references to the same stupid songs from 1977. Who else but those in my senior class from The Lovett School in Atlanta would know the significance of "Build Me Up Buttercup" and be able to sing it word for word?

Still, I have to wonder, as with my books, is the point of Facebook to amass sheer numbers? Is the person with 6,035 "friends" a lot cooler than the person with 7 "friends," even if they're both only really in touch with 5 of those people? And like the books I know I'll never read, what's the protocol about un-friending people, though unlike a book, they take up no room in cyber-space.

These are the questions I'm pondering as I put the Anne Tyler books from my twenties on the shelf alongside a copy of a Dorothy Parker book that belonged to my grandmother, Nick Hornsby's High Fidelity, and Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies. The lesson I'm taking from all this is that I'm used to my life being organized in neat categories. Books are arranged by the Dewey Decimal System. Friends are from college or my first marriage or Sam's daycare class. But now I realize that the old categories don't hold. My shelves are a mish-mash and now, because of Facebook, so are my friends. And I like it that way.

For Renewable Energy, Tap a Mother's Guilt

2009-02-12T13:50:00.007-05:00

I was listening to a segment on the Obama administration's plans to create renewable energy sources on The Diane Rehm Show as I was driving downtown this morning when it hit me: if you could bottle up all the mother guilt in the United States, you would never need to drill for oil again. You'd have all the renewable energy you could ever use.

The reason I was stuck in traffic, looking for a parking place near the Verizon Center, instead of (a) walking Mavis with a friend, as scheduled, and (b) getting ready for a doctor's appointment is that Julia's daycare class had a field trip to see "Disney on Ice" and suddenly I was going.

Back when I was dating, the etiquette was clear about who came first: you did not bail out on a girlfriend to make plans with a guy. Even the doctor/patient relationship leaves no gray. Cancelling an appointment at the last minute as I did means that I will have to pay for it. But child/friend etiquette has never been spelled out to me. Was it okay to leave my walking buddy in the lurch for Julia?

My guilt about not accompanying Julia on the field trip was fueled by a couple of things. If I had been in town last week, I would have signed up to chaperone and there never would have been any question about where I belonged. But as I watched Julia walk away toward the Metro holding the hand of one of her teachers, I felt horrible, not least because she wanted me to go and if we're lucky enough to win the public school lottery next month, Julia will be in real school next year. How much time I spend with her won't be my decision, it will be strictly regulated by the District of Columbia.

Also, I find that with my dad sick and every phone call to or from Atlanta one that turns up another unsettling health condition for me to process, I am walking around brimming with tears at all times. I need my mother, but the best I can get right now is the satisfaction of being present for my children. So when the teacher called from the subway platform to say that they found an extra ticket, I hesitated less than half a nano-second. Even that pause seemed too long in response to Miss La Juan's plea, "Julia really wants you to come."

At the show, Julia sat on my lap and we shared a big box of popcorn and there was no question for me about where I should be. But when it ended and I had to go find my car, I again had to leave her. This time, she was bound up in Miss La Juan's arms, crying.

A few days ago when I was about to go to the airport and I was telling my mother goodbye, she hugged me hard and said, "I love you more than you can know."

"I'm a mother, too," I said, "and so I do have some idea."

In preparation for Valentine's Day, each child in Julia's class was asked to say how much they love their mothers (maybe the dads get the cards??). Borrowing from one of our favorite picture books, Guess How Much I Love You, Julia answered, "I love my mama to the moon."

I'm not sure why a mother's love is tinged with guilt, but I know that I've got enough of both to get Julia and me to the moon--and back.

Intensivist Care

2009-02-11T13:17:00.000-05:00

In the intermediate intensive care unit of the hospital in Atlanta where my dad is, there's a doctor on call 24/7 known as an intensivist. But I've decided that whether we deal with sick people or not, we're all intensivists. Think about it: when's the last time you went at a project in a relaxed way? Did anything at a leisurely pace? Took something lightly?

When I landed in Washington after an emotional week spent at my dad's bedside, I was, for the briefest time, Sam and Julia's fantasy mom. They were happy to see me and clung to me in baggage claim, full of news about what they'd been doing in my absence: a birthday party at a real fire house, a dinner date with their friend Benjamin and his parents, ballet class that ended with Julia's getting bear stamps on her hands (still visible), breakfast with Ralph, including hot chocolate with extra whipped cream. Time slowed while I took in the sight and substance of my beautiful, healthy family.

It didn't take more than about 1 1/2 hours, though, before I was back in intensivist mode, which is to say back in the trenches of mom-dom. Sam hadn't done his homework while I was away and wasn't in the mood to hear that he still had to, late or not. A skirmish ensued. But the truth is, life has moved on, because there's this week's homework to attend to. Last week is over.

The intensity at which we live is not just about parenting. A friend who is writing a book and trying to finish said she worked so hard yesterday that she didn't have time to eat until she looked up from her computer and it was dinner-time. Why do I do this to myself, she opined. Why do I wait until the last minute?

But we all do. The way our full lives are organized--or disorganized--we can't help but do things on deadline. As one of my sisters said recently, our lives are so based on a 24/7 time clock, we don't ask what day something is due anymore, we ask what time. She was referring to her son, who punched the send button on a college application related something at 11:59 p.m. before it had to be in at midnight.

And even though I bought Valentine's Day cards at the CVS across the street from the hospital days ago in an effort to relieve the tedium of the waiting room, it's not like I also mailed them in advance. No, I will scramble to do that today so that they'll arrive on Feb. 14, if the postal service cooperates. It's not the first instance I've been late. I have solved my latent tardiness before by spending $48 at FedEx on a $2.49 father's day card.

All this rushing makes it hard to stop and put things in context. To enjoy. It wasn't until I was looking at photos of Sam and Julia at my mom and dad's house last week and saw one of Julia at 1, standing diaper-less and defiant in her patent-leather party shoes in the front yard, that I realized I don't even remember that moment--don't remember Julia at 1--which was just 2 years ago. It had the effect of slamming on my interior brakes, just briefly, to luxuriate in the fact that I have a still-small child--in fact, two--to swaddle myself in. And then I had to turn my attention elsewhere.

I'm not sure there's a solution. I'm just musing--intensively.

Getting By With a Lot of Help From Our Friends

2009-02-04T16:01:00.007-05:00

Ralph and I (and Sam and Julia) are incredibly fortunate to have such great friends. On Monday when I had to fly to Atlanta unexpectedly and without telling S and J, and Ralph had to work, our next-of-kin, Katy Kelly, subbed for us. Here's a report that made me laugh. Maybe it will amuse you, too. (Pop is my dad, who probably hasn't eaten a Dunkin Donut in 38 years--if ever.)

"Sam and Julia were excellento. I picked up Sam about 5:15. We got Julia. Drove home. Walked to Arucola for supper. Came back. Took a bath. Julia got a princess hairdo. Made Valentines. Julia made one for Pop. There are many letters on it. Mostly Ps and Bs and Os. She says it says Dunkin Donuts. Perhaps it is a coupon. She says he likes them. Ralph came. Helped Steve re-hang the Fap Anis picture (LR got painted today). Lost socks. Meltdown. Found socks. Home."

Love, Linda

2009-02-04T12:07:00.006-05:00

I hadn't planned to be in Atlanta this week, but here I am, having gotten a phone call on Monday that my dad, already in the hospital after his second leg amputation, was having trouble breathing. Now he is on a ventilator in ICU and my mom and two sisters and I are going in two-by-two every few minutes to squeeze his hand. It's like Noah's Ark, but we are not going to save our species--or anyone, for that matter.

The prognosis is that he will likely be on a feeding tube when he comes home, which the doctor and his ICU nurse are very high on because it will eliminate the pesky step of trying to stuff him with nutrients, which he needs badly in order to heal, via food.

This is hard stuff, which I have generally avoided blogging about, but now it has filled so much space in my mind that I find I can no longer side-step it. One promise I made to myself when I started Friends Talking in the Night is that I wouldn't necessarily have to say everything, but that everything I do say must be 100 percent honest.

So back to my dad. I am trying to come to terms with his diminishing state. We are not talking here about the abstract problems of diabetes or a Parkinson's-like tremor or our aging population. This is my once 6' 1" father, who, until just a few years ago when his illness got markedly worse, was my very best pal. Before I got married the first time, we sat together in a restaurant and cried. And when that marriage was coming apart, he's the one who came to me and said that he knew something wasn't right and that he would love me no matter what.

We share a sense of humor and a love of history, not to mention a great appreciation for Southern biscuits. Our bond formed when I was in high school--we went to breakfast together every Saturday at a diner called Melvin's. And when I lived in New York, he made sure that I always had at least a dozen Melvin's (by then called Maria's) biscuits in my freezer. Thomas Wolfe was wrong: you can go home again when your favorite childhood foods are involved.

Now I see that what I am really writing is a love letter to my father. Because squeezing his hand and saying I love you covers a lot of territory but not all that is in my breaking heart.

Tainted Peanut Butter An Extreme of Corporate Greed

2009-02-03T10:15:00.000-05:00

Just before she finally gave into sleep a few nights ago, Julia and I had a lengthy recap of her day, which included a circle-time conversation at school about what to do if a stranger approaches you. I was quizzing her on various situations: if someone you don't know says he/she has candy in the car, what do you do? Puppies? Kittens? Trained by her powerhouse teacher Miss Brenda Julia dutifully answered no to each question, though I suspect she would waver if chocolate, a fistful of sugar, or a stick of butter--her three favorite food groups--was the lure.

As a mom, sometimes I feel that these early lessons--how to look before crossing a street and what red, yellow, and green mean--are among the most important I can impart to my kids. Certainly there are more nuanced values about lying, for instance, to pass on as well as other things down the road about drugs and sex (they'll have to teach me about rock 'n' roll). But these first conversations--all bright lines--are like an old-fashioned orange life-preserver: you can't get in the boat without them.

I know that even as a diligent parent I can't protect my kids from everything. When Sam had just turned 1, we were in a car accident caused when a woman too old to be driving ran a red light (she had perhaps forgotten that red means STOP!) and broad-sided me. The car was totaled, but Sam, our family friend/babysitter, Marguerite, and I emerged unbruised. Sam thought the crash was great fun. It was hard to accept that bad things could happen on my watch, but it did make me slightly more forgiving when bad things happened on other people's watch. (Bad is a relative term here, because I'm not talking about anything more major than rug burn or a cut over an eye, thank goodness.)

But even knowing that my ability to shield my kids from danger is limited, I am enraged by the Peanut Corp. of America's behavior. It has been a bad few weeks for Corporate America.

John Thain's $1.2 million redecorating job came to light as did Wall Street bonuses and news that Citibank, the recipient of federal bailout dollars, is buying a new jet. All of that is inexcusable, but it's not as irresponsible as the peanut people, who knowingly distributed salmonella-laden products, killing at least eight people and sickening 550. That puts them down on a par with kidnappers and pedophiles. Worse, really, because I can't drill my kids on a threat we can't see.

I had been thinking last week when Barack Obama rapped Wall Street's knuckles that if his plate weren't so full, he should also do the same to the peanut folks, and yesterday on the Today show, he did, suggesting that the Food and Drug Administration needs to do a better job:

"That's what Sasha eats for lunch probably three times a week. And you know, I don't want to have to worry about whether she's going to get sick as a consequence to having her lunch."

I have no illusions that the President wakes up and makes the sandwiches every morning, despite the Obamas' exertions to normalize the White House with Pottery Barn furniture and J. Crew clothing, according to the cover of this week's US Weekly. Nonetheless, I am glad to have a dad (a mom would be okay, too!) running the country. Perhaps our everyday concerns might get a little more attention. And though neither I nor anyone else I know personally will ever have the President's secret Blackberry address, it does make me feel that we and the Obamas are having pretty much the same conversations, if not also the same food, come dinner time.

Republicans Against Stimulus Package Take Note

2009-01-29T10:56:00.003-05:00

Yesterday the House of Representatives passed Barack Obama's $819 billion stimulus package without the support of a single Republican, who worried that once states got used to a temporary infusion of federal money into education and Medicaid, it would be difficult to pull back.

I don't know enough about the bill on its merits to say one way or the other whether it's good, although on the surface it makes sense to me to put money into the economy where it's needed most, and certainly education and health care are two top candidates for that. And I certainly feel better about my tax dollars going toward Pell Grants and rebuilding decrepit schools than to John Thain (formerly of Merrill Lynch and Bank of America), say, who saw fit to use $1.2 million of our money to redesign his office (including a $1,405 waste basket). Or to Wall Street, more generally, which used it to pay out bonuses many multiples larger than my annual earnings.

On the point of an addiction to federal funds, I can say this: there's a really simple and effective tool against making the federal government's temporary expansion permanent. As a parent, I use the same tool all the time. It's the word "no." And I know all about addiction. Over the winter break when we were visiting my family in Atlanta, Sam experienced a similar expansion of TV-watching hours, and it's been a bear of a habit to break since, at home, we're stricter than the 18-hour maximum he enjoys in the face of an ailing relative at his grandparents' house (no TV on school nights and 2 hours each on Saturdays and Sundays). Sometimes we have to spell out "N-O!." Sometimes we have to resort to "No, no, no!" (The glitch in my argument, I realize, is that at home we enjoy a benevolent dictatorship, not a democracy, and our two parental votes carry more weight than the Republicans' votes in Congress these days.)

Still, it goes without saying that if the country had said no sooner and more often, we wouldn't be in quite this deep of a predicament.

John Updike and Me

2009-01-28T13:56:00.004-05:00

Much has been written about John Updike since his death yesterday, but I'm prompted to write still more to tell about an interaction I had with him when I was a New Yorker fact checker 15 years ago. As part of the magazine's special issue devoted to the movies in 1994, Updike penned a piece on dancer/actor Gene Kelly. It was my job to watch all the movies he mentioned and make sure that nothing was out of place.

But something was. In his discussion of the 1949 movie On the Town, about three sailors on 24-hour shore-leave in New York, Updike followed Kelly (plus Frank Sinatra, Jules Munchin, and their gal pals) around the city, driving past, among other notable spots, the literary lions on the front steps of the New York Public Library. With Updike a literary lion more imposing than any statue, who was I to contradict him. But, having watched the movie a dozen times, re-winding and re-winding the scenes where they go around town in a taxi the size of your couch and had another fact checker double-check me, I finally, reluctantly, concluded that Updike had erred. Or else I was about to be made to feel really stupid.

I mustered my courage which, in those days, was pretty much lacking, called him up and said in my most polite, fact checkery voice that I hadn't been able to find the New York Public Library in the movie and that maybe he could point me toward it.

"Oh, I'm sure you're right," Updike said, the wave of his hand almost visible over the phone. "I haven't watched that movie in years. I was just relying on memory."

Only later did I find out that on the rare occasion a fact checker did have a quibble with the master, they were never to call him directly but were to go through his editor.

I had the honor of writing about Updike a couple of years ago when we were featuring his 2007 reading of Terrorist on NPR's Book Tour, but I never spoke with him again. And I'd say it's a sure bet I've never again watched a movie as many times as I sat down with On the Town.

Obama's Day 4 and How I'm Feeling

2009-01-23T13:31:00.008-05:00

Tuesday's inaugural events were just as uplifting as they promised to be. Never mind that I snagged a ticket for an honest-to-God SEAT, of all things, at 2 the morning of, what I loved best was looking not ahead of me (Obama was 2 inches tall from my vantage point) but looking behind at the shimmering sea (and I really do mean a sea) of people standing in the sunlight with flags that stretched as far as the eye would allow, from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. I also loved that it was a day without cynicism. Beautiful people with really white teeth from L.A., (including Sheryl Crowe, whom I met but failed to alert that Julia wants to adopt her) were asking to have their pictures snapped with cell phones alongside overweight men from Greece and Upper Eastsiders wearing "W New York" baseball caps.

It was also a day without irony. When Obama mentioned patriotism as one of our country's bedrock values in his inaugural speech, it's the first time I'd heard the word in seven years without some internal eye-rolling. How luxurious, I thought, to be able to feel patriotic without all the fear and ideology that has loaded it down for so long.

On Day 4 of his presidency, Obama is busy being tough with terrorists and tough-minded about the economy. On Day 4, I am busy too, but, as you might expect, my sights are set closer to home. What to do, I wondered, upon coming downstairs to fix breakfast and finding that Mavis had pooped all over the rug pad (the rug was already removed due to same last Friday)? What to do about my own economics (no money in checking account) and my own weighty issues (ate too much on inauguration day and realized today why the pedi-cab driver was peddling so slow). In short, I'm feeling overweight and overdrawn.

It's bad when in answer to your six-year-old son's begging to go out for a fancy sushi dinner you say that it's too expensive and he offers to chip in the $20 his grandparents gave him for Christmas.

(Sam has, incidentally, hypothetically spent that $20 four times already: once on the game Apples to Apples Jr.; once on taking his mother to the movie Hotel for Dogs (with popcorn); once on a portion of a video game for him and his little sister that he vows they won't play until they're both 20; and once in the form of a donation to help prevent polar bears from becoming extinct).

It's a hard lesson to learn that you can only spend the money once.

Friends Talking in the Night Welcomes New Friends

2009-01-13T13:31:00.005-05:00

Friends Talking in the Night has recently gotten comments from new readers. Welcome! Blogger isn't set up for me to respond to you individually, but I'm so glad you've joined the conversation! If you ever do want a personal response, please include your email address in your comment. Thanks--and keep reading. Suggestions are appreciated, too.

Publish Post

My Inaugural "Ball" is Already Famous

2009-01-09T15:02:00.007-05:00

Here's an update to the post I wrote a few days ago about our little inaugural party. Our so-called Blue Ball might be Pluto in the Washington solar system, but we still made Politico! We're already having fun, and the open bar's not even open yet!

Notes from the Field of Momdom

2009-01-09T14:45:00.005-05:00

This morning I was driving Julia to daycare and, as usual, we were listening to The Very Best of Sheryl Crow cranked way up.

"Mom," Julia asked, looking sheepish: "Does Sheryl Crow have any kids?"

"Yes," I said, "she has a baby girl," astonished that I've read enough issues of People to know. I figured J. would be pleased since she loves babies, especially of the female variety. But no. J. just wanted to establish Sheryl's bona fides because next she said:

"I want her to be my mom." Pause. "But Sam likes you."

Where does that leave me, I wondered. Still, I had to know what's so special about Sheryl.

Julia: "She can sing."

All I have to say is: my life ain't no disco.

Princess for a Decade; Queen for Life?

2009-01-08T12:11:00.008-05:00

Anyone who's ever spent more than nine seconds with a three-year-old girl will know that I speak the truth when I say that in her world, everything is coming up princesses. Let's use Julia as Exhibit A. She wants to grow her hair "as long as Cinderella's." She can reel off the names of all the Disney princesses with the same facility (and sometimes more accurately) than Sam can spout Bo-Sox stats. Her movie choices run the gamut from Princess Diaries I to Princess Dairies II. For Christmas, she got a Cinderella plastic paper doll set, a Playmobil Cinderella set, a rhinestone-studded princess jewelry box, a set of tiny princess story board books, a princess dress, sparkly silver princess shoes and, since everyone knows that ballerinas are princesses in training, a leotard, tights, and ballet slippers. Mainly, she plainly states that her goal is to marry a prince (by which it is assumed she means a wealthy, handsome one).

As I write this, I think, What are her parents thinking that they would allow this toddler's values to lurch so dangerously off track? Instead of the dance class that she's starting this weekend, maybe we should hustle her off to auto mechanics class.

Thus far, her sensibility has led us the other way. Because of Julia's predilection for pink (and purple, but I can't go there), I find myself gravitating toward all things rosy hued. It was a small but, to me, noticeable act when, instead of buying black (always my default color) gloves on sale at J. Crew a few weeks ago, I went for fuschia. It reminds me of a story my friend Katy once told me about an off-the-charts sparkly pair of shoes that she once bought herself and wore relentlessly simply because they delighted her small daughter so. She says she still thinks it's one of the best investments she ever made.

I understand. Perhaps I would have settled for a sensible heel yesterday when I purchased my inaugural ball shoes. Instead, I went for a pair of towering sandles that, when I brought them home, Julia could walk in far better than I. If having a son has dredged up my love of baseball and kindled a passing interest in Star Wars, it's as if having a daughter has given me permission to unleash my feminine side. It turns out it's ferocious.

I'm confident that Julia's pink period will pass just as it did for Sam (who, when we moved into our house three years ago when he was three, was disappointed that his new baby sister got the pink room and not him). But here's the but (every blog post has one, right?) After writing about Sam as a husband in training, or H.I.T., the other day, I have to set the record straight on Julia, too: I don't want to raise a princess any more than I do a prince. And I'm wondering if the ultimate expression of the sensitive man is being able to bring home the tampons for the woman in his life, what is the equivalent for raising a strong woman? Because while it's totally fun to indulge in the princess fantasy now, it would be wrong to send a daughter who still believes off to college.

Let me know what you think makes for strong, independent daughters. I'd love to hear from you.

Tuesday Night Fever

2009-01-07T23:15:00.011-05:00

Washington, as anyone over the age of 16 minutes can sense, is suffering from a collective anxiety these days. You'd think that our nervousness might be over the deficit that's 12 zeroes long or the full-out war in the Gaza Strip, and of course good people are fretting over both. But neither the debate over the economic stimulus nor the need for a cease fire in the Middle East is the No. 1 preoccupation in town.

At the moment Washington is not about politics with a capital P but rather a form of office politics, the central question being how far away your personal planet is from the center of the solar system--a.k.a. the president. This distance determines not just your career but also your social life, where your kids go to school, and soon, I'm sure, which rescue league your dog comes from.

All this is to say that whether you're a Bush person or an Obama person, what you're most likely thinking about right now is how best to position yourself. After all, what Republican wants to be the one to turn out the lights as the Bushes decamp for Texas? And what Democrat wants to be left behind at the non-profit that's been a holding tank for the past eight years when there's an actual country to run instead of merely to theorize about? The anxiety is so high among some of these government wannabees that they need a stunt double* to perform the extreme and, in a few cases, extremely embarrassing, maneuvers they're trying to secure a job in the new administration. There's also a secondary mania over snagging a ticket (or two, because who really wants to go alone?) to the inauguration itself.

Our family is so outside the outer loop of the Beltway that we're just thinking about the same things we always dwell on: what garbage bag, doll's head, potpourri pouch, Star Wars Lego has Mavis chewed up and has she peed and/or pooped in Sam or Julia's room or simply thrown up?

Still, we're all excited about January 20th, when we may get to see the 44th president sworn-in on a Jumbo-tron somewhere down on the Mall--or, more likely, on a little TV in the warmth of the Five Guys Burgers and Fries at DuPont Circle if walking to the Mall turns out to be more Sissyphean than pleasurable. (The we here means my sister, Betsy, not Ralph, who's working.)

But come Inauguration Night, hey, we're (Betsy and me again) grabbing the sequined ring and going to a ball! It's being thrown by a friend of ours, and we're dressing up to go spend an evening in high heels with our closest buddies. It might not be celebrity-studded, but it will definitely be fun.

"It's a lesser ball," I've told those who're interested. "Truthfully," I say, "it's probably your least ball." At least that's what I thought until I was set straight today by a friend, who explained that a ball is an official event, meaning that's it's being hosted by Barack Obama or Joe Biden, while a gala is an unofficial one.

"In that case, I guess that makes my event a gala," I said. "

"Your event is nothing," she answered.

I'm not sure, but I think what she was saying was that if I were a planet, I'd be Pluto. And yes, I think she knows that Pluto has been demoted.

*My niece recently told Sam and Julia that actors use stunt doubles for kissing in movies because, you know, they might otherwise get germs--or they might already be married.

Revenge--Even Hypothetical--Is the Best Medicine

2009-01-06T15:48:00.005-05:00

Even though the bra-burning part of the 1960s turns out to be a myth, suffice it to say that the modern women's movement happened a long time ago, long enough, it seemed to me yesterday, that I was surprised to be treated like a woman who didn't know a nut from a bolt when I dropped off my car at the VW dealership for its 30,000-mile check-up. I shouldn't have been particularly surprised because ours is still a sexist society, starting with the way journalists sometimes wrote about Hillary Clinton during her campaign to become the Democratic presidential nominee. I mean would Mr. Hillary Clinton ever have been described in newspapers as "shrill"?

The car experience was still galling me today when I went to the doctor for my 30,000-mile check-up. Why I told my GP that in Ralph's absence Sam carried my purse onto the plane when we flew to Atlanta for the holidays to free up my arms for Julia and two carry-ons, I'm not sure. But he easily topped my story by revealing that he was 1 of 20 kids in his family and that his 5' 3" mother, who was just as formidable as she was short, called each of her 13 boys "HITs," or husbands in training. She insisted that each one learn to cook, iron, and sew. On top of that, his seven older sisters trained their baby bro to buy their tampons, right down to the embarrassing price check screamed from the back of the store to the front. It made me realize that I have a lot of fundamentals to teach Sam before he gets sucked into some kind of macho force field. (After all, at six, he still kisses his mama goodbye in public.)

But more than that, my doc inadvertently gave me just the right salve for my anger. I can take the car somewhere else for repairs, of course, but it won't ever satisfy me as much as imagining my Martens' VW man standing in line at the CVS with an armload of tampons, waiting for a price check.

Ring in the Old

2009-01-05T10:32:00.005-05:00

As usual, the start of the new year was accompanied by a look back, including an entertaining interview with the Bush twins in People, on Malia and Sasha Obama. But one wrap-up that utterly baffled me was the In/Out List published last week by the Washington Post. It's not only that I hadn't heard of most of the things on the "in" list, I was also clueless about most of the "out" list, proving that I'm not just out, I'm out in the standing room section of the upper bleachers. I mean "LOLcats"? "Competitive cup-stacking"? "Gourmet Toast"? "Emphasizing. Things. With. Periods."? Please. The bafflement goes on. And on.

Just when I thought I hadn't been invited to the party at all, along came the ultra-hip SundayStyles section of the New York Times, which made me feel at least somewhat vindicated. For while the Post had declared absinthe--that sickly green liquid that made everyone in Toulouse-Lautrec's day feel so sickly green--soooo last year, the Times had a front-page story on its current popularity:

There are a number of bars in New York City these days that make cocktails with absinthe, mixing it with rum or tequila or gin to, um, complement the taste. A significant portion of them are on the Lower East Side and are the kind of bars that don't have a sign or a listed phone number...

I am declaring a moratorium on in/out lists. It's not just because of my incredible investigative work revealing a Styles war. It's because I'm fatigued by the idea that everything is disposable. It's definitely a lesson that Ralph and I are trying to un-teach Sam and Julia, who, up to now, have had the same toys bought and re-bought for them. And I think we're not alone. Most people I know aren't just thinking three times before spending money, they're also thinking a time or two before throwing anything away that could possibly prove to be useful later on. This includes good ideas. And it extends to the loaf of bread on the top of the fridge, gourmet or not. (Check out the food Web site Loulies, which recently had a post on not wasting food.)

Recycling extends to fashion, too. The same SundayStyles section, in fact, had a photo feature on pulling one's vintage designer wear out of mothballs. While I don't have a Balenciaga coat hanging in the back of my closet or anything else designer save Isaac Mizrahi for Target, I did rummage through to find a J.Crew cardigan I bought 10 years ago. (Okay, not everything weathers well.)

Along with in/out lists, I'm also putting new year's resolutions on ice. While I'm all for striving to be better, I've come to think that most resolutions aren't so new as they are another example of recycling from last year--or last decade. Lose weight. Check. Get more exercise. Check. Spend more time with the kids. Check. It's just a compilation of all the things that make us feel less than good about ourselves--or even downright guilty.

Last night when I was flipping through the January issue of Real Simple, I came across a resolution that I could actually buy into. It's "controlling the controllables." And, while they didn't come out and say it, I will: Try not to worry--or feel guilty--about the rest.

Is Happiness the Same as Success or Do We Have to Choose?

2008-12-11T06:59:00.018-05:00

I'm in the all-too-typical position of reading two books at once now (three, if count War and Peace, which is frozen on page 364 where I left off at the end of the summer). The first book is Ned Hallowell's CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap; the second is Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success. Neither is what I'd call a great read, but I'm slogging through.

But it didn't occur to me until last night (hair slathered in Cetaphil and covered with a plastic shower cap to "suffocate" those g-d lice is how my friend Sarah put it) how much the books are in opposition to one another. Or are they?

In CrazyBusy, Hallowell, a former Harvard psychiatrist and ADD expert who Ralph and I recently heard speak, suggests dialing life back a notch or three. In his view, being out-of-control busy has supplanted designer handbags as the new status symbol and the yearning to get organized is just as ubiquitous as the nearly universal desire to shed a few pounds. All it will take, the chronic clutterers among us believe, is the equivalent of the next new diet to clean off our desks and clear out our kids' toy boxes, and come January or June or September, by God, it's going to happen!

Hallowell's lecture was about the childhood roots of happiness (after his book by the same name), but his theme was much the same as CrazyBusy: don't lose sight of what's important. He stressed to a state-of-the-art private school auditorium full of stressed-out parents that dragging your child from horseback riding to ballet to baseball to math tutoring is not nearly as important as allowing him to find a passion and then letting all the connections that ripple out from that passion grow. I felt calm when I left. Sam loves baseball, and, as I've blogged about before, that obsession has been his window on the world since he was 19 months old. And Julia, I was sure that night, would eventually find something besides dressing up that makes her world spin properly on its axis.

But Gladwell upset my zen moment. While our national narrative on success is all about pluck and how sturdy one's boot straps are, Gladwell says that success is more a function of luck

--when you're born (January babies are more likely to excel at hockey) and to whom. He describes a study by sociologist Annette Lareau, who found not only that parenting styles were "divided almost perfectly along class lines" but that the overachiever parent tends to produce the most successful kids:

The wealthier parents were heavily involved in their children's free time, shuttling them from one activity to the next, quizzing them about their teachers and coaches and teammates. One of the well-off children Lareau followed played on a baseball team, two soccer teams, a swim team, and a basketball team in the summer, as well as playing in an orchestra and taking piano lessons.

Reading that was enough to make me want to pull off my Cetaphil-laced shower cap. That's not crazybusy, I thought. That's insane.

Lareau calls what I think of as Xtreme parenting "concerted cultivation" and believes that the ability to "customize" your environment is one of the big keys to success.

And so I was left wondering all over again if trips for Sam to play baseball in the Virginia and Pennsylvania suburbs will one day be necessary for his success, not as a ball player necessarily, but as a person. Should he already be taking saxophone lessons? And what about karate? And am I behind by not already signing Julia up for ballet lessons, even though, at this point for her, it's all about the leotard and the pink slippers? Should we be fanning her interest in music not by playing CDs in the car but by attending music appreciation classes? Is our mellow approach stunting our children's growth before they even get started?

I personally don't know a single parent who says, "I just want my child to be successful." Like Ralph and me, they say, "I just want to be my child to be happy." But do we really believe that our children will be happy as cashiers or waiters or construction workers? Don't we secretly have some floor that we think they should attain in order to be happy, say waiter/struggling artist? Can you be happy without also being successful? Where do those two intertwined notions of success and happiness go their separate ways? Or do they?

I need a little wisdom here. And a cure for head lice.

Phoning Home--and Elsewhere

2008-12-08T14:09:00.000-05:00

I've always thought the expression "phoning it in" was too glib; too coldly technological, but in the past few weeks I've come to see the advantages of telephone as proxy.

That's because I've recently had the opportunity to play the roles of mother, daughter, wife, worker bee, in-law, and aunt both in person and via cell. The morning I arrived in Atlanta a week before Thanksgiving to spend a few days with my parents without the distraction of kids and siblings, my mom had contracted a stomach flu so severe she was lying in the emergency room of the local hospital on a glucose drip. Out went our plans for ladies' lunches and holiday shopping designed to get my mom, my dad's 24/7 caregiver, out of the house. Instead, while she sipped chicken broth or slept, I took over her nursing duties (albeit far less proficiently than she handles them). My dad, who can do little for himself and requires constant care, is nonetheless the essence of courtesy and consideration. His middle-of-the-night requests for a blanket or cough syrup were invariably blanketed in apologies. And despite the circumstances, I loved spending time with him. But as I was trying to get back to sleep after one of those wee-hour wake up calls, I thought, Being a daughter is the hardest job I have right now.

How could I think otherwise when, during my five days in Atlanta, all I heard from home were cheery phone messages in which Ralph would say, "We love you," followed by a tiny and distant-sounding echo of "We love you" and then an even tinier and more distant voice, "We love you," like so many stair steps. Separated by hundreds of miles and connected only by speaker phone, even Mavis, our not-quite-housebroken hound with a nose for a crumb, began to seem like a contender for best-behaved dog. As a friend of Ralph's and mine whose job keeps him on the road about 250 days a year, says, "The longer I'm away from home, the less my wife and I have to talk about." It's true for us, too. At least I don't recall Ralph's mentioning any suspicions about Sam and head lice over the phone.

Arriving back in Washington, it was a different story. I returned to D.C. sick with the same bug as my mom, but, as bad luck would have it, had to steer Sam into the school nurse's office for a lice check the very next morning, a trip that, as you know from my last post, resulted in a frenzy of washing--hair, clothes, and, just to be safe, Mavis. Meanwhile, the phone was ringing with grateful--and sympathetic--calls from my parents over what I'd just left behind in Atlanta and what had just greeted me here. Feverish, chilled, and wiped out from all those lice, I found myself thinking, Motherhood is the hardest job I have.

You see where I'm going with this. But it's not because I believe that absence makes the heart grow fonder. In fact I think true love is tucking your daughter into her toddler bed, stroking her soft cheek, and whispering into your sleepy girl's ear how much you love her just as she drifts off--all the while wondering if lice lurk in her halo of hair.

No. We women with aging parents and children who are just getting started, with a job to hold down and a household to run and a husband to stay connected to can't be in two or four places at once--even though I'd like to. The phone just helps you forget momentarily that you're not.

The 10 Plagues - A Modern-Day Interpretation

2008-12-05T13:22:00.006-05:00

Okay, so I haven't had frogs, rivers of blood, hail, boils, or locusts to contend with, but I'm still feeling that I've suffered my share of pestilence, disease, and plain bad Juju. There was that stomach bug that kept me out of the Thanksgiving cooking rotation, the head lice that led to 18 Mt. Everest's worth of wash in hot water (and the accompanying drying, folding, and putting away) without so much as a sherpa to help, a nasty head cold, and scuffles with my first-born child over his cavalier attitude toward coloring. And that was just in one week.

I probably haven't said this since the period in early adulthood when I would write notations on my calendar like "Wed., 10 P.M. - Brewskies with W at The Pub! YAY!" but here goes:

T.G.I.F.

Middle-Aged Mom Means Well

2008-11-17T14:08:00.003-05:00

The friend in my life I've known the longest (since kindergarten), Cary Campbell Umhau, has a wonderful piece in today's Washington Post on being the mother of socially conscious kids. I loved it so much, I thought you should see it, too.

Here's one of my favorite parts:

"One of my children presented me with a handy Pocket Seafood Selector from Oceans Alive that would help me determine which eco-friendly fish I should buy in restaurants or at the grocery store. I truly want to buy fish that are not farmed, that are not caught by methods that kill seabirds, and that are not endangered -- all while being sure to get enough omega-3's. Yet I would need a PhD to decipher the chart on sustainability, and without my reading glasses, I can't handle the fine print."

There are others...

Entering the New Age of Reason

2008-11-14T10:27:00.007-05:00

It's not for nothing that Anne Enright won Britain's most prestigious literary prize last year for her novel The Gathering. Although it's about an Irish family and the reverberations in one sibling's life from the molestation, alcoholism, and, ultimately, suicide of one of her brothers, like all good books, its words extend far beyond their slim 5-inch by 9-inch frame. One line, though I can't find it now despite giving up a entire morning to do so, basically says that money doesn't change people; it just allows them to be who they really are. But I've been wondering in the midst of what is politely called our "economic downturn" if the opposite isn't true. Each time we have to make a decision on how to spend our limited resources, we are making a tiny declaration about what matters most to us. If you can afford to go skiing in Aspen one weekend and to St. Bart's the next, you never have to come down squarely in any camp.

There's one scene in particular that makes the point about the limitations of spending power. Veronica Hegarty, the protagonist, goes into a Dublin department store and realizes that because money is no object, every object holds the same value for her:

"There is nothing here that I can not buy. I can buy bedlinen, or I can buy a bed. I can buy posh jeans for the girls or a Miu Miu jacket for myself if it doesn't look too boxy. I can buy the plastic Branbantia storage jars that I am now staring at on the third floor..."

Nothing means anything because the one thing she can't buy, of course, is her brother's return.

I'm not talking in this post about people who have to make untenable choices between buying their blood-pressure pills, say, or buying breakfast. Nor does this observation include those who have lost their jobs or their savings, have nothing to tide them over, and no real prospects for recovery. And this is not a time to be smug, because it feels like that could happen to any of us at any time.

But for most of us, the daily calculus over how to spend our money--whether to get a babysitter for this Wednesday in order to attend a lecture or to save the babysitter up for a weekend night out for a dinner with close friends--is bracingly clarifying. For most of us, these either/or decisions aren't new; they've just come into sharper focus with the economic news of the past few months. The difference is that we no longer have to apologize for denying our kids a Wii or a Princess Barbie. We don't have to apologize for telling our friends that we can go out for a burger but not for a steak. It's as though we have suddenly entering a new Age of Reasonableness, personified by the calm demeanor of our president-elect. Suddenly, values are in vogue.

Even the very rich who really are different from you and me are trying to act somewhat like the rest of us. A piece in yesterday's New York Times's "SundayStyles" talks about how even for people not particularly affected by the plummeting stock market and the shrinking job market, being in the market for anything conspicuous, be it watches, cars, or fancy vacations, is in bad taste these days.

"It's now chic to cut back," [says Alexandra Lebenthal, president of a wealth management firm]. "If you ask people if they are going away for the holidays, they say, 'No, we're just spending a very quiet holiday with family'--instead of 'We're going to Anguilla for Thanksgiving.' "

The thing is, spending time with the people we love is what has mattered all along. Everything else is just a distraction.

HuffPost Publishes My Three-Mornings-After Election Day Post

2008-11-10T15:50:00.004-05:00

HuffPost published my post on the similarities between a second marriage and the election of Barack Obama in his first few days as president-elect called "Obama's Election is the 'Triumph of Hope.'" Please take a look, and let me know what you think. You can comment either here or there.

Thanks so much for being a reader! And thanks to the people at Huffington Post.

The New Yorker Spotlights Friends Talking in the Night Blog

2008-11-05T14:33:00.006-05:00

Following Obama's announcement last night that his daughters, Malia and Sasha, will get to take a puppy with them to the White House, The New Yorker quoted me today in my capacity as White House pet historian. Take a look. And if you have any thoughts about what to name the new first pup, feel free to leave a comment here.

Thank you so much, New Yorker!

My HuffPost Election Day Post

2008-11-04T13:07:00.004-05:00

HuffPost published my post on my bizarre immersion in all things George W. Bush just as we're about to get a new president. Please take a look. And please leave a comment either there or here.

BE SURE TO VOTE TODAY!

Thinking Inside the Bun

2008-11-03T11:09:00.010-05:00

"The real source of all growth is human ingenuity..."

I don't usually go around quoting Forbes (nor do I usually read it). But when a recent issue was brought to my attention, I had to take note of the above quotation, because suddenly, as if this economically down time has called for people to reassess, I'm seeing/hearing the same idea everywhere about how creativity is THE ingredient that makes someone successful. It's a little different from the well-worn statement "Think Outside the Box"--or Taco Bell's twist, "Think Outside the Bun"--because it's not so much an exhortation as an explanation of what works.

All these thoughts came together on my dinner plate a few weeks ago, when Ralph took the family to Ray's Hell-Burger in Arlington, Va., for dinner. Just when I thought I had reached the apotheosis of hamburger-dom with the foothold gained by Five Guys in our part of the country, along came Ray (his real name is Michael Landrum), who doesn't have a line down the sidewalk outside his burger establishment at both lunch and dinner because he's thinking outside the bun, it's because he's thinking inside of it--only better. Comparing what he's done to the humble hamburger is like comparing a Bugatti to a VW Bug. They're both cars, but that's where the similarity stops. His freshly ground, hand-trimmed beef on a brioche roll topped with a choice of artisan cheeses, among other primo condiments, was a revelation to me, because I've been having the "everything under the sun has already been done" debate with Ralph for more than a decade vis a vis writing. Ralph's argument: just do it your way and people will come.

As if to prove that Hell-Burger, and therefore, Ralph's rationale, was not a fluke, along came Surfside, another new eatery, this one in Washington's Glover Park neighborhood. What the chef, David Scribner, has opened is not so much a restaurant as a commissary. You mark down your order on a sheet of paper, find your own table, and pick up your meal when the electronic gizmo they hand you lights up. But what you bite into is not cafeteria fare at all. It's fresh Tex-Mex meets Tahiti, with guacamole that arrives in huge chunks and just the right side of spicy. I didn't actually taste the seafood, but I take the Washington Post's food critic, Tom Sietsema's word that it's great. (Only Sam, who wants to start his own food blog, had a complaint, which is that the chips were too salty.) The taller among us were thrilled with the inexpensive prices, the availability of margaritas, the quality, and the fact that we were in by 5:30, out by 6:15, and on to Max's Best Ice Cream for dessert, which though it's been around for awhile, follows the same concept of doing it the same but better: you won't confuse what's in your cone with a scoop of Ede's.

I hate it when Ralph is right! But as long as he is, I'm wondering if you've come across any examples of the same-old thing turned out-of-this-world?

HuffPost's Halloween Treat

2008-11-03T10:53:00.003-05:00

Thought you should know that Huffington Post picked up my Halloween post called "Halloween and Celebration Inflation" on Friday. Please take a look and leave a comment, either there--or here.

Thanks so much, HuffPost! It was better than candy (not that I stinted on that, either).

Family Bed: Taking It Too Far

2008-10-30T09:32:00.008-04:00

Here's a update to an earlier post about what sleep--or lack thereof--is like around our house.

When Mavis jumped up on our bed and settled herself as close as she could get into the crook of Ralph's knees at 4:48 this morning I got the brilliant idea that what we need is not a king-size set up like we have, but an accordion mattress--one that expands as the need arises--much like a dining table to which you add more leaves for company.

That's because when I went to sleep around midnight, it was just Ralph and me, taking up a concentrated amount of space in the middle of the bed--about the size of a double. When Julia joined us around 3:00 a.m., splayed out in the middle, we expanded to a queen. By the time Mavis came along, I was hanging off the edge like Cary Grant clinging precariously to some president's nose on Mt. Rushmore in the great Alfred Hitchcock movie North by Northwest. Maybe we needed a California king at that point.

Like dreams, most ideas you have in the wee hours don't really hold up when daylight comes. But I'm sticking with my accordion bed invention. Anyone up for investing?

Media: Old and New Are in It Together

2008-10-29T12:02:00.005-04:00

I'm getting more and more used to reading if not entire newspapers online then at least a handful of key stories every day and surfing around to see what's new with Sarah Palin, so, strictly as a reader, yesterday's announcement that the Christian Science Monitor is shutting down its print publication and going online didn't particularly bother me. As a journalist, of course, it seems like a big deal, especially coupled with the news that Gannett is laying off thousands of people. But David Carr, the New York Times media columnist, explains why it was a bad day for anyone who cares about the news in a way I hadn't previously understood:

The answer is that paper is not just how news is delivered; it is how it is paid for.

More than 90 percent of the newspaper industry's revenue still derives from the print product, a legacy technology that attracts fewer consumers and advertisers every single day. A single newspaper ad might cost many thousands of dollars while an online ad might only bring in $20 for each 1,000 customers who see it.

The difference between print dollars and digital dimes -- or sometimes pennies -- is being taken out of the newsrooms that supply both. And while it is indeed tough all over in this economy, consider the consequences.

New Jersey, a petri dish of corruption, will have to make do with 40 percent fewer reporters at The Star-Ledger, one of the few remaining cops on the beat. The Los Angeles Times, which toils under Hollywood's nose, has one movie reviewer left on staff. And dozens of communities served by Gannett will have fewer reporters and editors overseeing the deeds and misdeeds of local government and businesses.

I'm curious to know where you get your news. And if you'd like to throw in the name of your favorite blog, I'd like to know that, too, since that seems to be the way journalism is heading.

Sarah Palin and the "Post-Palate Era"

2008-10-27T11:45:00.009-04:00

With Ralph and the kids out canvassing for Obama, this past Saturday marked the first time since Sam was born in 2002 that I was in the house, alone, without a deadline looming. And since I married a man who not only loves to cook but is also a forceful presence in the kitchen (this is my diplomatic way of saying he's a kitchen fascist), it was one of the few times since Ralph and I met that I was in charge of cooking for a dinner party.

Is food like music, I wonder. Do we go back to the recipes we relied on when we were starting out on our own in the same way that most of us never really progress past the music we liked in high school and college? My anthem: Earth Wind and Fire's "September." My dish: Chicken Marbella.

For anyone who doesn't know, Chicken Marbella, distinguished by the colors and flavors of prunes, green olives, and capers, comes from The Silver Palate Cookbook. One of the people who didn't know about the book was our 20-something dinner guest, who was, after all, two or three when it came out in 1982.

But when I was in my 20s, it was THE go-to cookbook--a bridge between the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook of my mother's heyday and epicurious.com and foodchannel.com now. And for me, it was also a highly personal book, because my first apartment in New York, a furnished one-bedroom on the top floor of a five-story-walkup on West 73rd Street, was kitty-corner across Columbus Ave. from the Silver Palate, a snail's shell-size storefront that sold the same gourmet food as the cookbook set forth. Although there was nothing especially revolutionary about either the store or the book, both were emblematic of America's burgeoning food culture

--and culture, in general--in the '80s. As the authors, Sheila Lukins and Julee Rosso write in the intro:

The Silver Palate was born of two women's personal desperation. Our lives had become increasingly active and it was getting more and more difficult to juggle it all. There were school schedules, business appointments, political activities, art projects, sculpting classes, movie going, exercising, theater, chamber music concerts, tennis, squash, weekends in the country or at the beach, friends, family, fund raisers, books to read, shopping that couldn't be avoided, and, last, but not least, trying to prepare creative, well-balanced meals daily and an occasional dinner party at home. It was much too much. The wonder women we thought and were being told we were, had to acknowledge we might not be.

It certainly sounds tough! I can't imagine trying to fit squash and a sculpting class into the same day, either. Or the same month, for that matter. What does resonate is the part about being "wonder women," because I remember so well thinking then, as most of my friends did, "I'm going to have it all." I even remember writing an essay about it to get into graduate school, and whether or not it was based on the weakness of my argument, I was turned down. As time passed, but still before I had children, the phrase shifted to being, "You can't have it all at once, but you can still have it," and I thought that made a lot more sense.

But life has proved both ideals wrong for me and everyone I know--I suspect even for Sarah Palin, who has revived, and become the poster mom for, the debate. In the first case, if you have a fulfilling career, a wonderful husband, well-adjusted, well-groomed children, and Chicken Marbella on the table when you come home at night, chances are great that you are weighed down by the guilt of feeling that you're not spending enough time with your kids, who, it turns out, grow up fast and do not become well-adjusted and well-groomed on their own. In the second case, if you step out of your career or slow it down to raise your children in a more hands-on fashion, you have the nagging dread that (a) you're missing out on important work and (b) you'll never get back on track. I'm not saying anything new here, I'm just saying the dilemma has never been satisfactorily resolved.

When I told my friend Sarah (the other Sarah, that is) on Sunday that our dinner guest had never heard of The Silver Palate, she joked, "I guess it's not the post-racial era we're living in, it's the post-Palate era."

So here's my question for the women in what I'm calling the epicurious generation--women who haven't had to make decisions yet about balancing work and family. It doesn't matter if you've never heard of The Silver Palate, but does "having it all" mean anything to you? Is there another paradigm?

Unscrambling the Eggs

2008-10-27T10:34:00.003-04:00

I've previously confessed my downhill slide from perfectionism but this is how far toward degradation I've gone.

Yesterday, Sam had a friend over, and once they had finished the light saber fight that's in the play date rule book for 6-to-8-year-old-boys, their rising boredom threatened to thwart the afternoon. "What if we make brownies?" I asked brightly.

"I'd rather just skip right to eating them," Sam's friend replied.

With that, I jumped on my laptop, googled "easy brownies," and was soon melting butter and cocoa powder in a pot on the stove. The kids took turns measuring out the sugar and vanilla and beating the eggs. We were all into it, PLUS, we were going to be rewarded for our labors--handsomely, I thought. I poured the eggs into the pot . . . and realized that I had made a mistake. A big one, unless you happen to be a fan of chocolate scrambled eggs, which I am not.

The old me would have thrown out the curdled-looking molten chocolate and started over. But the old me did not have three young children watching expectantly. And the me standing over the stove had just used up the last grain of sugar and the only two eggs in the house.

The new me shoved the pan away from the heat, stirred vigorously, and poured the lumpen mixture into the 9 x 9 pan. After all, Julia Child once exhorted her TV audience: "Remember, you are alone in the kitchen and nobody can see you." Well, at least the kids were too short to see what had happened.

Thirty-five minutes later, I pulled the not-quite-cooked brownies out of the oven, cut them while they were still hot, put them on plates, and served with a glass of milk and a smile. And you know, even I didn't really notice the eggy bits.

But it made me wonder, not for the first time: is the key to motherhood--and life, generally--faking it? Is this what Hemingway meant by "grace under pressure?"

HuffPost Said "Yes" to My Post on Saying No

2008-10-24T15:49:00.004-04:00

My new post "Notes From a Yes Girl" just went up on HuffPost. Please take a look and please leave a comment--I'd love to know what you think. Thanks to you--and thanks to HuffPost!

Why You Shouldn't Make a Llama Nervous

2008-10-22T11:50:00.003-04:00

So Ralph just read my previous post on spitting. He says that ballplayers spit because they get nervous. "If you watch them," he said, "they start to pace. It's very animalistic."

"Dogs don't spit," I said, looking at Mavis.

"Yeah," he said, "but llamas do."

You May Find Portions of This Offensive

2008-10-22T10:01:00.006-04:00

You know how when you're thinking about buying a new car and suddenly start to notice the make of every car that's parked on the street? Or how when you're hoping to get pregnant and all you see are babies everywhere?

This is not that.

The other night, when I stayed up late with Sam to watch one of the playoff games between the Red Sox and the Tampa Bay Rays, every time the camera panned to another player or coach, he was spitting. It was like a contagion. Except it was behavior as usual. Just in case you don't get the full picture of what I'm talking about, Terry Francona, the manager of the Sox, took a sip of something from a cup--Gatorade, Sam said--and then he spit it out.

"Why'd he do that?" I asked Sam.

Sam: "He's rinsing his mouth out."

Me (to myself): Isn't that what the bathroom sink of for?

I chew gum, drink drinks, play catch, but do I ever spit? NO! And it's not just ballplayers who do it--it's men! I can honestly say that unless a woman is trying to expel an errant insect that flew into her mouth, I have never seen the fairer sex spit.

Maybe dads take their sons aside and tell them that spitting is a good idea, but then why does the mom message, Don't do it!, hold no sway?

So here's my question: WHY DO MEN THINK SPITTING IS A MUST?

I'm Not Company; I Live Here

2008-10-21T09:39:00.009-04:00

Last night, I was reading The Trumpet of the Swan (about a swan who, like another famous trumpeter, is named Louis) to Sam and Julia, and it said that with so much stuff hanging around his neck--a trumpet, a chalk board and chalk pencil, a bag for his money, and a Lifesaving medal--Louis felt like a hippie. In the same chapter, a little boy commented, "That's groovy" (all this is from memory because the book has gone off to school for the day). I thought, How do I explain "hippie" and "groovy" to a six- and three-year-old who have never heard "Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In," let alone have a context for it. Fortunately, it was late, they didn't ask, and I was spared. Besides, I thought, That pile of necklaces seems more Coco Chanel than Jerry Garcia to me.

But the idea of hippies popped into my head again this morning when I read a recent post on the blog Woulda Coulda Shoulda about a visit from the grandparents:

If you'd asked me before they got here what my favorite part of these visits is, I would've responded without hesitation that it's watching my parents interact with my kids . . . This morning, though, I realized that there's another thing I absolutely love on these trips: Having coffee and grown-up chat in the morning.

Woulda Coulda is written by a mom of two named Mir, and I believe she's right on both counts. Wearing a pink cashmere sweater from J. Crew today, I also look far more Coco than Jerry, too. But I firmly believe that apart from Haight-Ashbury and a few other pockets of hippiedom in the 1960s, communes were a brilliant idea that never got off the ground as they should have. When my sister Betsy was making a transition away from Atlanta to live in this part of the country a couple of years ago, she stayed with us for nearly two years; before that, we spent six weeks with our friends Katy and Steve while I was pregnant and our house was being sanded and painted.

As with everything, there's a downside to communal living: you have to be highly strategic about when you walk around in your underwear or less. But overall, those experiences taught me that a woman should always have another woman in the house to take pressure off the marriage. Imagine how sparing your husband the question, "Honey, do these shoes look OK with this skirt?" would lift the relationship. (I hasten to add that having recently seen the movie The Duchess, in which Georgiana Spencer, the Duchess of Devonshire and ancestor to Diana, was forced to dine at the same table each day with her husband and his mistress and to hear their love-making, I'm talking here about a strictly platonic arrangement.) Betsy and I have put on our makeup side-by-side in front of a mirror since she was 17 and I was 14, she telling me I look better and vice versa. Who among us can't use that kind of boost in the morning, before the run to Starbucks?

Besides allowing for mutual admiration, the set up provides for instant community, including a wider audience for our children's moment-to-moment triumphs and tribulations. It's amazing to watch Betsy with Sam and Julia knowing that her love for them is only infinitesimally less intense than Ralph's and mine--if it's different at all.

No matter what your age, everybody needs the kind of safety net that a long-ago acquaintance described as a "take-me-to-the-hospital-if-I'm-sick-in-the-middle-of-the-night-and-feed-me-

J-ello" kind of friend. Besides the need for food, shelter, and the money to pay for both, feeling that you're not alone in this big world is perhaps our most elemental need. And perhaps that's why Sam asks every day, "Who else is coming for dinner?"

If I remember correctly, even though Louis the Swan gained fame as a trumpet player and stayed in a fancy room at the Ritz in Boston, what he craved most was to be in the company of his family and the other swans back on Upper Red Rock Lake in Montana.

There's Always This Year

2008-10-20T09:37:00.003-04:00

There was never a Curse of the Bambino for Sam. He fell in love with baseball one hot afternoon at Camden Yard when he was 19 months old, and even though we live in Washington, Sam and the Red Sox were a natural fit. We listened to games on the radio up on Cape Cod that summer. We joked with Sox fans standing in line at Moby Dick's for lobster. Sam had long, golden-brown curls back then. Johnny Damon had long brown locks back then. (Unlike Damon, Sam did not--and promises he never will--cut his toenails on national TV.) By the time Sam had been a fan for four months, the Red Sox captured their first World Series title in 86 years.

Sam comes from baseball stock. His dad is a Yankees fan. I ardently followed the Atlanta Braves in the years when Hank Aaron was chasing Babe Ruth's home run record. But Sam came to the game on his own, and even when he was tiny, it was his portal on the world. He picked up geography by reciting the city where each team played; he learned his colors (at least red, white, and blue) based on the uniforms; he was introduced to math by the daily box scores in the newspaper. Still, for him, those gray months between November and March, when baseball is just a memory, were dreary. Shuffling and re-shuffling through stacks of baseball cards (most of which were mine from the 1970s), Sam reminded me of a gardener gazing at pictures in a seed catalog. At least when you're older, you know that spring will come again.

Baseball, of course, did return, and with each new season, Sam drew the rest of the family in a little more. The Nationals came to D.C. and we bought tickets. We started going to the Cape a little earlier so we could take in Cape League baseball.

This past summer, on the Cape, we went to a whole, new level. Ralph, the hardened Yankee fan, who used to go to games with his father, began to cheer on the Sox. We drove into Boston to see an As-Sox game at Fenway. We turned over a portion of each evening to the Sox on TV. Mornings brought a re-broadcast of the highlights, which, naturally, Sam watched. We played games in the yard and catch on the beach.

One morning, not long after daybreak, when Sam and I took our puppy to the beach to play, we ran into a fellow dog owner and Red Sox fan who began quizzing Sam on the previous night's game. I stood by as they chatted about who got picked off on first (what's a pick off, I wondered) and discussed the merits of the new pitcher from Cleveland. That's when I realized that although I have 42 years on Sam, he has a deeper knowledge of baseball than I'll ever have and an ability to see the whole field at once, which I can't do. It must come from playing, watching, or dreaming about baseball all the time.

You'd think that his single-mindedness where the Red Sox are concerned would make Sam despondent over their loss last night to the Rays. But strangely he's not. Maybe as baseball is his conduit to the world the Red Sox are merely his conduit to the game. Maybe it's because we've Tivoed enough Sox games to see Sam through the winter. Or maybe it's because a good season is good enough. And in Sam's experience, there really is a future tense where the Red Sox are concerned.

The Stuff of Life

2008-10-20T09:31:00.003-04:00

Please read what Washington-area food stylist and writer Lisa Cherkasky has to say about family on her excellent blog, Lunch Encounter, about sandwiches and life. Thanks for the shout out, Lisa!

My Advice for John McCain Picked Up by HuffPost

2008-10-17T11:50:00.002-04:00

HuffPost picked up my latest submission on John McCain's condescending language. The gist is that he should avoid phrases like "I'm proud of her" when referring to Sarah Palin and to stop calling us "my friends!"

Please take a look, and please leave a comment. It will help me as I try to make a go of life as a blogger.

Thanks so much, HuffPost!

A Change in the World as We Know It

2008-10-16T13:18:00.008-04:00

I'm always fascinated by signs of the times, so it was with great interest that I read a piece in yesterday's New York Times reporting that a growing number of Americans are turning to the tap for their drinking water. This back-to-the-future move, a result of consumers' efforts to cut costs and become better environmental stewards, has so affected PepsiCo's profits, that the company announced thousands of lay-offs. Is this what's meant by trickle-down economics now that we live in the post bailout world? The same day the Environmental Working Group issued a report citing contaminants in 10 brands of bottled water. So much for paying for quality.

Even this morning, as Sam and I talked over what snacks to take his class when it's our turn next week, he reminded me: "No juice, Mom. We drink water from the fountain."

I'm not a huge fan of what flows out of Washington's taps--it has too much of a chlorine aftertaste for me. And at our last house, the lead level in the water was so high that it caught Sam's pediatrician's notice well before revelations surfaced about lead pipes in several of the District's neighborhoods, including ours.

Nonetheless I can happily imagine an evening when Ralph and I go out to dinner and our waiter assumes that we'd like regular water rather than offering us a range of slickly bottled choices in reverential tones usually reserved for the most expensive wines.

Maybe I crave this simplicity because I grew up in Atlanta, where Coca-Cola was also born. In my world, Coke was the generic term for soda just as Kleenex stands for tissue and Xerox for photocopying. The polite host would invariably offer you a "Coke" if you dropped by, by which he or she meant anything non-alcoholic to drink, including, I believe, water. You could answer something like, "That'd be great! I'd love some ginger-ale."

At the World of Coca-Cola, yet another marketing tool for the company's soft drinks, this one slightly disguised as a museum, a number of the exhibits suggest that Coke was at least partly responsible for many of the gains our society has made in the past century, including such landmarks as civil rights. At the end of your "tour," you have the opportunity to hold out a cup into which the bubbly soda sprays from a fountain. I didn't know whether to be disgusted or delighted, but I put my cynicism aside and drank the hypothetical Kool-aid.

The only other time I've seen anything like that was when Ralph and I went to the Kentucky Derby in Louisville, Ken., several years ago. After the horses ran and we had the requisite experience of losing at the betting window, we went to a party thrown at the home of a local whiskey scion. On the wide back lawn they had set up a white-cloth-draped table on top of which sat a sterling-silver fountain of cascading mint juleps. I don't know for sure, but I'd bet people would use fewer plastic water bottles if that's what came out of their kitchen tap.

Mom Wars Need a Cease Fire

2008-10-15T16:58:00.001-04:00

Each time I hear the morning traffic report, I thank the real-estate gods that I wound up living in the middle of Washington, D.C., and don't have to navigate what's known locally as the Mixing Bowl, one of the country's most heavily congested crossroads and a gantlet required of thousands who commute into town each day from the surrounding suburbs. What's especially baffling to me are those people who have chosen to own a mega-square-foot, high-ceilinged McMansion but then, because they're so far away from EVERYTHING, wind up living in their car. It might be a really nice, luxury SUV, but it's still a car. They eat there. They email there. They raise their kids there. And last week Sam noticed a driver shaving, a spectacle that he, at 6, pronounced "pathetic." But even living a few walkable blocks from the Metro, I could relate to this post on Burbia.com called "Mommy Wars Redux: How Simone De Beauvior Rescued Me in the Suburbs," by a friend of a friend named Delia Lloyd.

Lloyd, who lives in London, writes that the dichotomy is not so much between women who work and those who don't but rather between those two types she dubs "Prissy mom" and "earthy-crunchy mom."

One of my favorite parts is this:

"I'm not nearly put together enough for the Women's Club set (my tennis game could easily qualify me for Special Needs). Nor do I fit in with the wholesome crowd (when asked to draw my ideal birth scene in my La Maze class, I drew an epidural)."

She could be describing me. But actually, I see the mom kingdom (queendom?) divided slightly differently into those who pack a napkin in their child's lunch, those who forget the napkin, and those who forget everything and rely on the stuff that passes for food in the school cafeteria (i.e., hyper-organized, moderately organized, and a mess). Needless to say, I fall into the latter category, and I can add that I also forget to pay for the school lunches most of thetime.

But however you categorize us, we can be pretty nasty to each other--and equally hard on ourselves, like my friend in Atlanta who says she feels constant pressure to participate more in her kids' school activities but between three children and a sick father, she's maxed out. Last year when I was Sam's room parent, I could see the guilt and relief on the other parents' faces that someone else was making the royal icing for gingerbread houses, collecting money for teacher gifts, or arranging chaperones for a field trip. I recognized the look from how I felt the year before.

Who hasn't had an eyebrow raised about her deadbeat behavior by a fellow mom or raised her own harried brow? But I say that we should stop comparing ourselves to the overachievers; in fact, let's stop comparing ourselves altogether. "What's important,"says Lloyd, "is to engage with the world in ways that matter to you, regardless of what the others are saying or doing." Mothering, after all, is not meant to be a blood sport.

"Taking the Long Way": Take 2

2008-10-14T22:52:00.008-04:00

When I told my father a couple of weeks ago that I was planning to go to my 30th high school reunion, he asked me why. Always a succinct and insightful man, he had put his pinky on the right question. And though he's also kind enough to say, "That makes sense" when I answered, "I think I'll have a horrible time, but I'll regret it if I don't go," my response did not persuade even me that this was a good idea. At the least I thought an appearance, however brief, would yield rich anecdotes, much like a bad blind date--the difference being that this promised to be a bad date in a hall of mirrors.

Here's the back story: When I transferred to The Lovett School in eighth grade where many of my classmates had gone since kindergarten, I was a social misfit. My above-the-collar haircut was short enough to be regulation--for the boys. I was petrified of the opposite sex. The school I had gone to before was so poor academically that I was two years behind in almost every subject. Hell, I even said the Lord's Prayer with the wrong ending given that I had come from the Christ the King, a Catholic school where I was the only Jew, before I went Episcopalian. And while I caught up academically, that only widened the gap in my popularity. I spent Saturday nights writing English papers with my grandmother. I hoped that underneath my nerdly exterior there was a normal person, and I couldn't wait to get out of that suffocating environment to find out. The last time I was on the Lovett campus, Jimmy Carter was president and the No. 1 hit single was "Shadow Dancing" by Andy Gibb (the Bee Gees' "Night Fever" was No. 2).

To say that Lovett did not "light up my life" (that year's No. 3 hit by Debby Boone) is a tremendous understatement. When I thought about the upcoming reunion, my mind kept replaying that Dixie Chicks' song "The Long Way Around" about bucking the system while everyone else stays in the same zip code where their parents live. I haven't lived in Atlanta since I went off to college. But 30 years is a long time. So having had a conversation with myself that I would just find the people who had been my friends back in the day and not bother with the others, I went . . . and had the best time! One of my favorite conversations was with the class of '78's football star, a guy--now a man--with whom I had never before exchanged a vowel. Never mind that as one of my friends emailed me today, XX "used to have PROMINENT hair" and now he is bald. What stood out for me was his kindness. There was my friend Clare, who I also haven't seen in three decades. She was wearing the same wry expression and the same Oxford cloth shirt that I left her in. And there was the woman who said I seemed really comfortable with myself. To my surprise, there are some moments when I think she might be right.

There are a lot of downsides to aging, but, depending on where you start out, I think you either gain confidence (me) or humility (nearly everyone else in my class). Miraculously it seems that the see-saw balances.

Just in the past couple of years I've wondered how one can arrive in middle-age and still make the same mistakes. My mistake this time was to assume the worst when, in reality, we were just a tiny band of well-wishers that gathered in a lush backyard a block from my parents' house, listened to Earth, Wind and Fire, leafed through the high-school yearbook, and went home at 11:00 p.m.

A Little Pick-Me-Up from HuffPost: Town Hall Debate

2008-10-14T22:27:00.006-04:00

The Huffington Post picked up my second submission last week. Check it out:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-kulman/one-man-will-win-the-pres_b_132938.html

Please tell your friends. Just don't tell my mother!

After the Greed Is Gone

2008-10-06T15:12:00.014-04:00

My friend David R. Anderson, the rector of St. Luke's Parish in Darien, Conn., was quoted in a New York Times piece yesterday about how recent events on Wall Street are affecting "the community said to have the nation's highest percentage of residents working in financial industries." David said:

"We're all greedy. If you can acknowledge that in yourself, you can make some progress. If you want to find someone else to blame, you're probably not going to make much progress yourself."

David's eloquence aside, most of us measure progress not in how accepting we are of our sins but in terms of the money we make and how many houses, cars, private school educations, etc. we can pay for along the way. We've aimed for nobility a few times. Remember after 9/11 when we were ready to sacrifice for our country and in a move that was more Zsa Zsa Gabor than Greatest Generation, the president instead implored us to shop?

Over the past several years it hasn't just been Congress and the White House that have encouraged us to spend. Somewhere along the way Wall Street allowed crucial social compacts to be broken and truisms like you can't get something for nothing and if something seems too good to be true, it probably is to be ignored. It used to be that if after due diligence, mortgage lenders thought a prospective borrower wasn’t up to a loan, they said no. They didn't say, We’ll look the other way while you take on more debt than you could possibly repay. Some of these borrowers should have known better. But who could blame them--us--for trying when housing seemed to be a foolproof investment, providing us with even more of those things we were hell-bent on acquiring?

Over the past few weeks and months, we've moved from greed to something else though what, exactly, it's too soon to say. One clue is that the president went on national TV recently and instead of addressing us as consumers he spoke to us as "taxpayers," asking Americans to spare some of our "hard-earned money" for Wall Street. In my small way at home (which we bought in 2005, just before the market crested), I'm on a new kick to make do with what we have. We have too much. It was a telling moment when I threw away three contractor bags full of puzzles and games missing too many pieces to salvage and my children didn't notice that a single toy was gone. Yesterday Sam went to a fellow 6-year-old's birthday party not with the customary Star Wars Lego set but a gift certificate for a Kiva micro-loan so that a farmer in Nicaragua can buy a pig. Sam and Julia will probably have a lot to say about how weird their mom and dad are when they get a little older. And the pig farmer is just the start.

Please Stop Distracting Me, I'm Trying to Read

2008-10-02T10:30:00.011-04:00

Back in the pre-convention calm of August, I sat on the beach on Cape Cod, my head buried not just in sand but in a suitcase-size volume* of War and Peace. Since Labor Day Tolstoy's fictional account of 19th-century Russia, though a soap opera the likes of which HBO has never approximated, has not captivated me nearly as much as the daily--and sometimes, hourly--news. Between the presidential race and what's happening on Wall Street and Capitol Hill there's no doubt that we live in an eye-popping time. And whether or not there really is an ancient Chinese proverb to that effect, it feels like we're under a curse.

So cursed, in fact, that watching the presidential debate last week--you know, the pedantic one that felt like we were back in Al Gore's graduate class, An Inconvenient Truth--I couldn't help but wonder why anyone would want to be president right now. Between the country's money troubles, the energy crisis, our involvement in two wars, and whether or not we should talk to Iran with or without preconditions--we've made a mess of things. God bless McCain and Obama--those candidates with egos the size of California and Texas put together--is all I have to say. Someone has to have K-P duty.

In a month this race that will have lasted 658 days will be over (unless we again find ourselves wrangling over hanging chads) and perhaps the national sport of watching Sarah Palin being interviewed by Katie Couric or otherwise proving Tina Fey to be the more prepared candidate will be over (and perhaps not). I will turn away from the 2008 version of the femme fatale that has so obsessed my friends and me (one even declared herself a member of the wholly fictitious Palin Anonymous just so she could stop watching YouTube and get on with her work) and go back to reading about Tolstoy's femme fatale, Natasha Rostov.

But I think I won't be as wholly absorbed in my novel as before. I can't recall a single president who's had a calamity-free term so maybe we'll come out of the fix we're in just fine. I can't help but believe, though, that it's going to take all of us this time. If we'd just been paying more attention when promises like "shock and awe" and "Wall Street can regulate itself" were made, we wouldn't find ourselves living in times that are quite so riveting.

*Additional baggage charges may apply

My Debut as a Pundit!

2008-09-29T23:22:00.006-04:00

My Sarah Palin post was picked up by the Huffington Post on Sept. 26!!! Please check it out at:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-kulman/my-gal-pal-sarah-and-me_b_129512.html

Thanks HuffPost!

My Gal Pal Sarah and Me

2008-09-22T11:19:00.011-04:00

You might be surprised to find out how much Alaska's Gov. Sarah Palin and I have in common.

She's in her 40s and I'm in my 40s.

She's a hockey mom and I'm a mom who's been to a hockey game.

Asked by ABC's Charlie Gibson whether she agrees with the Bush Doctrine, she answered without blinking, "In what respect, Charlie?" Asked by my 11th-grade American history teacher (also named Charlie) to explain the Monroe Doctrine, I wrote on my test, "Why do I need to know this? It's not like I'm trying to run for vice president or anything."

But like Palin I held elective office. During my junior year in college I was sitting in an auditorium filled with university bigwigs and parents (including my own) not paying much attention to the induction ceremony at hand when I heard my friend Bill nominating me to be the secretary of that academic honorary society Phi Beta Kappa that's a lot older than Alaska. I then had to leave the building and sit on a car bumper in the parking lot outside with my opponent (the editor of the school paper) while the yeas and nays were counted. It was so embarrassing, but I won! Yay! And so the whole next year I got to carry out my awesome responsibility of signing my name on the certificates for new inductees on a line above the word "Secretary," and most of the time I spelled my name right but occasionally I got confused and did not.

Until recently, Palin got her hair color done at a salon in Wasilla called the Beehive. I get my hair colored, too. Only I get mine done at a Washington salon called Roche, which, if you say it with sort of a French accent, can sound almost like Roach. And for the record, I did have a bee hive outside my office recently, except that I thought it was a hornets' nest. As those stinkers were swarming around my desk (no screen on the window), I used all the artillery at my disposal and killed them with my Synonym Finder (OK, so I'm not the head of the Alaska National Guard). Only later, when my husband came home and said, "Honey, why did you kill those bees? They are our friends, not our foes," did I realize what I had done.

Mrs. Palin can practically see Russia from her house and, in an amazing coincidence, I can practically see the Swiss Embassy from mine.

She says things like "the economy needs fixin'," as though there were no g on the end of the word. (Maybe Palin is really short for PalinG.) I say things to my husband like, "Honey, dinner needs fixin'."

But despite these many similarities, I think that the governor and I will never be friends. That's because, as a working mom, I try to understand what she was thinking when she struck the house chef from her government payroll, but I cannot. What I want to know is, How does she get dinner on the table every night for that big family of hers after workin' all day, especially those weeks when Todd's away? Has she convinced her children, as I have, that breakfast for dinner is a huge treat? Or does she just pull a moose pot pie out of the freezer and nuke it for six minutes before serving?

Here's another thing I wonder. Does she ever worry that she's short-changin' her constituents by spendin' too much time in the kitchen preparin' dinner or that she's short-changin' her kids by spendin' too much time workin'? The reason I ask is that in my circle of friends, I don't know a single woman who does not constantly do the calculus in her head about balancing family and work. If they don't work, they feel that they're missing out. If, like me, they do, every day feels like a robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul situation--Peter, in this case, is standing in for the kids.

It goes without saying that Gov. Palin had to appointment her old school friends to help her out runnin' Alaska and that she includes Todd in so many of her meetin's. How else would she ever get to see her "guy" and gal pals?

Inconsistency 2.0

2008-09-19T09:43:00.008-04:00

A few more thoughts to my last post on routine--or lack thereof.

Years ago, when I was in my formative 20s and living in New York, I was an acolyte to Anna Quindlen's column in the New York Times called "Life in the 30s." I was surprised today when I just found out that Quindlen wrote it for only two years ('86 to '88), because it had such a huge influence on me. And even though I've passed by my 30s altogether, it still does. For instance: I remember her column admitting that once when she was unable to find a pair of stockings for a luncheon, she resorted to wearing her husband's socks inside her boots. No one was the wiser, of course, and that was the point.

But at 26 or 27, I was somewhat taken aback by Quindlen's small act of defiance. In Atlanta where I grew up--and particularly in my parents' house--propriety was one of the core values. We were drilled on how to make a bed (hospital corners and tucked in tightly enough that you could bounce a quarter off the mattress à la Air Force in which my dad was a colonel); we were schooled in setting a proper table (only put the forks on top of the napkin if you're at a picnic and the napkin would otherwise blow away); we were expected to thank-you notes in writing for birthday wishes merely delivered over the phone.

Somehow I carried those lessons intact through my first marriage, (gasp) my divorce (the neighbors weren't happy), and on to Washington, where, as a divorceé I moved in with my boyfriend to my parents' utter horror (again, there were the neighbors to consider). That boyfriend, Ralph, is the one who really challenged these age-old notions. When I said I couldn't, wouldn't put pots on the table at a dinner party, he reminded me that the point was to gather friends around the table, not what the table looked like. And once those properly scrubbed Calphalon pans made their debut in the dining room, the rest of the edifice began to crumble, too.

Things really fell apart when we had children. Mismatched socks (not hidden by boots) are routine in our house. We're lucky if we can find matching shoes--or any shoes at all (sometimes we have to resort to mismatched flip-flops).

All this improvisation bothers me a bit--I wonder if my children will ever know how to make a bed or if Julia will think that a flowered shirt and plaid pants actually match instead of being the only two clean pieces of clothing available. I did make Sam write thank-you notes for his presents--at least to his grandparents.

Mainly though, I've come to think the means justify the ends in this case: get out the door and get on with living. My take-away point from Quindlen two decades ago was that even the perfect life is imperfect.

Back to Back to Back to Back to School

2008-09-18T13:00:00.006-04:00

Sam's school hosted its Back to School Night a few evenings ago--that annual event where your name suddenly becomes YOUR CHILD's NAME HERE's Mom and you have to squeeze into tiny chairs at really low tables while focusing on the teachers' every word. Displaying their dizzying energy, Sam's two teachers led us through the morning meeting--songs, date, weather, colors, shapes--all in Spanish, before turning to their power point presentation highlighting things like the importance of good nutrition and the perils of flip flops in school.

One of their topics was consistency, an idea that has been creeping into my consciousness lately. Routine, as you may have heard, is GOOD for children, who need the same breakfast at the same time of day, the same well lighted desk to do their homework at the same time, and the same drill that moves them from the dinner table (you guessed it--served at the same time each night) to bed.

Our house is full of affection, encouragement--even nutritious food. But as a seat-of-the-pants operation, we're desperately low on routine of any kind. It's always been thus for me: when I worked in New York and was supposed to take the 6:06 train (or whatever) to Greenwich, Conn., each night, I failed utterly at living by a train schedule, not to mention the marriage that accompanied it. Eventually, I moved back to Manhattan--alone. Ralph, who might be roped into habitual behavior more easily than I nonetheless works odd hours--days, nights, and weekends-- the schedule of which is rarely the same twice. So it might be me pouring the Puffins or scrambling the eggs and taking the kids to school or it might not be. Ditto with pickup and dinner. And I like it that way. One of the reasons I married Ralph is that I knew he would never be home for dinner every night and that I could therefore eat Golden Grahams standing over the kitchen sink. The one routine I truly embrace!

I think it was Woody Allen who said that 90 percent of life is just showing up, as though showing up were the easy part. I am here to point out the folly of that idea. For example: getting Sam to school the first day was full of excitement; this morning (day 18), we were all a bit more disheveled and not quite as prompt. God knows what we'll be like by the time June rolls around, but if last year is any indication, it won't be pretty.

Sam, who is something of a child hypochondriac, told my friend Katy a few days ago that he had "atendonitis" in his leg. I heard it as "attend-initis." And I thought, Are you kidding? It must run in the family!

Baby, Come Back!

2008-09-16T15:57:00.009-04:00

I share a hair colorist with Jennifer Aniston. That's right. Once a month, Michael Canale treks to D.C. from Beverly Hills with his special formulas in tow to treat the otherwise deprived women of the nation's capital, 99.99 percent of whom prefer to be blond. But far from feeling that I was pampering myself amidst all the iced skinny lattes and salon chit-chat when I was there last week, I was thinking, I can't f------ believe that I am using up 4 1/2 precious hours and not a little money to cover the gray hairs on my head, which, lately, seem as plentiful as the mosquitoes in our backyard. It's no surprise that we live in a youth culture, although you'd think that all the baby boomers might put up a fuss about having to keep up with the Joneses' grandchildren. That night, when I mentioned to my mom that I might have to rethink the whole hide-the-gray concept in order to put my time and money to better use, she, who went salt-and-pepper when she was 39 and has stayed that way since, said, "You'll change your mind."

I was thinking about all this today when I came across Clever Girl Goes Blog by a 27-year-old hairdresser named Tia, who writes that "the idea of turning twenty-seven very nearly caused me to hyperventilate on a daily basis." Clever Girl is referring to her first sighting of middle age--for her a speck on the horizon viewed from a distant, distant shore.

But as someone who has beached her craft there, I can say that Clever Girl is onto something. Aging isn't about one big thing--it's a thousand tiny injustices like waking up to find that your eyelids have drooped or that the mild salsa at the local Mexican joint is too HOT! For Clever Girl, it's how "it's Tuesday!" is no longer enough motivation to party.

In the land I now inhabit, party is a noun, not a verb, and it's usually associated with sticky children and goody bags containing little sponges that don't open up into pirates the way they're supposed to when they're put in water.

But Clever Girl is onto something, because just this morning I realized that the desire to be young does not just strike the nearly old. That's when Sam, who turned six last week, said he wished he could be one again and still in the first grade. If he could have articulated it, I think he was trying to say something about dialing back the clock but keeping the hard-won wisdom of his years.

Do You Know Your "Disaster Personality?"

2008-09-15T12:28:00.004-04:00

Among the many reasons I married my husband, one of the least talked about is his uncommon ability to take the measure of a situation. Back in the late 90s, he insisted that either we jump into the escalating Washington real-estate market IMMEDIATELY!!! or we would be cast out--far out--to the suburbs. The condo he chose to avert our impending doom, though a bargain, wasn't one I wanted to live in, and I often scoffed that he treated our flimsily constructed four walls and a roof garden in a hip (read seedy) part of town as if it were the last chopper out of Saigon. But it quickly became evident that he'd been right. Within a staggeringly short time entry-level prices went from the $300s to the $800s and if you weren't already in, you were out of luck.

As a Jew--and a person who follows the rules--I long ago decided that I would have ignored the danger signs in prewar Germany that would have sent Ralph packing to safety. And on 9/11/01 I knew that I would have heeded the announcements to stay put in one of the towers where he would have headed for the stairs--and taken five coworkers with him. So I listened with interest to a rebroadcast of The Diane Rehm Show yesterday, where Time reporter Amanda Ripley discussed her book The Unthinkable, which came out this past July.

It turns out that having the confidence to handle whatever comes your way could spell the difference in your success. More than a stockpile of water and duct tape in the basement is mental preparation, i.e., do you know where the exit is on your plane? In your Cineplex 22? I'm not confident yet, but listening to Ripley, I was optimistic for the first time that I could not only "get to know" my disaster personality--how you react in freefall--but to build a better one.

As for the real-estate market, well...if only Merrill Lynch had listened to Ralph.

Per Chance to Dream

2008-09-11T22:27:00.008-04:00

If sleep is the new sex, then an uninterrupted night's sleep has got to be the equivalent of great sex. And in my house, at least, the former seems harder to come by than the latter. For the past three years, despite all the arguments against the family bed, we've had one--and, often, two--children sandwiched between us. Besides the problem of overcrowding, our children spin in their sleep, meaning that I'd often wake to a random foot poking me in the eye. Sometimes we'd sneak off to one of the empty beds on the unoccupied third floor. But we never went a full night without being caught AWOL.

So when we were on vacation last month in a Cape Cod cottage the size of a fried clam platter, we sent the children packing to their own room. Never mind that we could lay in our bed and practically reach them across the hall, the separation was still a gargantuan step. After years of conditioning, I didn't sleep spread-eagle, but I did occasionally brush against my husband in the middle of the night.

Still, weaning the kids from our bed hasn't resolved the bigger problem of sleep deprivation. I'm generally such a sound sleeper that an ice-cream truck could park on my mattress and I might not turn over. Years ago, when one of my roommates got locked out of our apartment, she tried for hours to penetrate my personal sound barrier, banging on the door and calling, and I never did wake up. So why are those same deaf ears attuned to the tiniest tot sigh? Several times a night, I respond to the siren call of a scared 37-inch-tall girl in a flowered nightgown, who appears at the top of the stairs needing to be led to bed and patted back to sleep. When I was three and similarly frightened, I would go stand over my mother, saying nothing but simply willing her to wake up--and she always did.

And my daughter's cries aren't the only noise I'm sensitive to. Since Mavis the dog came into our life six weeks ago, her whining at odd moments like 2:32 a.m. or 3:33--to pee, to play, or because she wants company--gets me up again. You see where all this is going: Mavis has ended up occupying the prime real estate abandoned by our children. I'm thinking/hoping that this nocturnal commotion can't last forever. But by the time everyone settles down, will I think of sex as the new sleep? Who knows? It's late, and I'm being summoned.

It's Not My Party

2008-09-08T21:29:00.008-04:00

Forgive my rant, but I have to say I don't understand what motivates voters who describe themselves as independents, including some people whom I dearly love. As a journalist, I avoid campaign contributions, marches, petitions, bumper stickers, and waving (and especially wearing) the flag--anything that could compromise my ability to report a story fairly. But what of the millions of adults who say they vote for the person, not the party, as though theirs is somehow the nobler approach? When did the cult of personality get to be the moral high ground? To me, choosing a candidate based on how much you like him or her is not that different than obsessing about Brad and Angelina or Tom and Katie. We can gush over their family photos in Vanity Fair, People, and US, but what we actually know about them is only PhotoShop deep. It's the same, really, with John and Barack, Sarah and Joe. Must the fate of the country come down to a preference for Michelle's pared-down shifts over Cindy's ruffles or vice versa?

If we focus on what the candidates do instead of just what they say, then the party they've chosen is a pretty big hint as to how they think about the future makeup of the Supreme Court or how proactive the Environmental Protection Agency should be. The lines between Republicans and Democrats, so blurred in the 1990s, have become neon bright in the past few years. And for all the talk about being a maverick or an agent of change, the presidential candidates are only going to drive so far outside their proscribed lane. This is not NASCAR people, this is politics.

Tell Me a Story

2008-09-05T14:30:00.005-04:00

With two jobs, two kids, one marriage, and a teething puppy, life is hectic enough in our own family to have to worry about the jobs, marriage, and kids of another--particularly someone I'm unlikely ever to meet. But like many people I know, I've become obsessed with all things Sarah Palin. Partly, my impulse is the same that Southern writer Walker Percy described when he said we watch airplanes land just in case they crash. So I'm attuned to YouTube, the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, etc. etc. to learn the latest on Bristol's pregnancy, Sarah's rumored extramarital affair with Todd's ex-business partner, Troopergate--even Levi's makeover from grunge hockey player to Greenwich prepster--in case any of these makes Palin crash and burn, whisking her off the national stage that she was so recently air-dropped onto.

Deliciously scandalous possibilities aside, we're still susceptible to people's stories, real or not. It's how we categorize people and file them away; it becomes shorthand for how we think. So Palin is reduced to the hockey mom who married her high-school "guy;" McCain, the ex-POW who spent five years in a box; Obama, the candidate raised by a single mom striving to give her son the tools to get ahead in life; and Biden, just a regular Joe.

The stories that captivate aren't all political, of course. Consider my previously mentioned puppy. During the weeks this summer that I spent searching petfinder.com and other sites online for a pup, the only thing worse for me than a dog with a stupid name like Chewey and a boring story was a dog with no name and no story at all. Our pet's tale involves a dramatic West Virginia rescue, a doting mom, a dead-beat dad, hearty mixed-breed stock, and a litter of dumpling-like, playful, curious, innocents "who know only good in the world."

Once we got her home, we changed her name from Biscuit to Mavis to reflect her country-girl roots. It turns out, though, that while Mavis is extremely sweet, she's probably not too different from the dozens of other puppies I bypassed. I'll bet they like to contemplate a butterfly just as Mavis was billed to do.

Let Mavis's story be a cautionary one. In politics, as with house pets, the winning candidate should not be the one whose story tugs at the heartstrings. It should be based on the issues. Which presidential candidate do you think would learn to be house-trained first?

This One's for You

2008-09-03T00:10:00.008-04:00

I owe a lot to my late friend Philip Hamburger, who encouraged me to become a journalist and who inspired this blog, which comes directly from the title of his 1998 book of essays by the same name. It's ironic, because had blogging been more prevalent before Phil died in 2004, he might have been the anti-blogger. A New Yorker writer for sixty-five years, he was 89 before he toyed with getting a computer and, in the end, he stuck with his typewriter. Like his contemporary Joseph Mitchell (Up in the Old Hotel), Phil used simple language that belied the depth and nuance of his words. And no matter what the subject, the subtext was his great belief in humanity. I hope for some shred of the same.

His mode of writing aside, Phil was determinedly current. One did not show up to the dining table--whether at the cozy Upper East Side apartment that he shared with his wife, Anna, or their gnome of a house in Wellfleet, Mass.--without having read the New York Times from back to front. An evening at the Hamburgers' began around the TV for the 6:30 news (they preferred CBS) before dinner, where the conversation moved fast and always far outlasted dessert.

It was at their table on Cape Cod that Phil gave me a valued piece of advice. "I'd be happy to have lunch with you some time and talk about writing," Phil said, "but I can tell you everything I know right now: ass on chair." It was his version of Nike's "Just do it."

Phil and Anna always stood in the doorway under a cheery yellow lamp, which had the effect, even as they waved good-bye, of beckoning guests to return. I hope my blog captures something of the same currency and warmth that those dinners did. And Phil, I'm taking your advice--with love.

Doing Family Time

2008-08-27T22:10:00.003-04:00

This first week of school reminds me how insular families can be. When I was single in the mid-1990s and new to Washington, I remember when a mom barked at me to move away from a monument where I was trying to read the inscription. Her family, I was told, needed a photo, but the subtext was that the mere fact of being a family trumped any experience I could possibly have. Standing to the side of that monument waiting for the shutter to click, I promised myself that if I ever had a family of my own, I would be inclusive.

But it turns out that that insularity happens all on its own. Once your kids are in school--sooner if you actually try to keep your tots on a schedule--week nights find you and your family, at home, alone. There in the familial bosom, there are few dinners out, even fewer friends invited in, and nary a phone call answered or returned during the witching hours from 6:00 to 9:00 when baths must be given, books read, and bedtime enforced. Certainly when you're falling in love with your future mate no one tells you that raising kids, especially that forced march from food prep to night lights on, is the marital equivalent of driving through Kansas, where, as my father says, there's nothing to see but miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles. Anyone can be enraptured at the sight of the Grand Canyon. Now I know that the real trick is to enjoy the cornfields.

Head First

2008-08-25T16:47:00.008-04:00

I woke up at 6:42 this morning to my son, Sam, shouting, "I'm a first-grader!" Then he got dressed and ate breakfast so fast, it was one of those rare mornings--in fact it's never happened at our house before--that we were ready for the day so early we didn't know what to do with ourselves. But I admit that while I shared some of Sam's exuberance over the first day of first grade, there's that other side of me that's not quite ready for it to happen. And for a long time, while I was trying to get pregnant with the baby who would become Sam--and then throughout his earlier milestones--the first time he ate an olive (6 mos.); the first time he erased one of my stories on the computer (20 mos.); the first time he cheered for the Red Sox (21 mos.)--the idea of his ever reaching first grade seemed as far-fetched as digging to China. But here we are.

So why is this moment so bittersweet? I know that starting first grade is not in the same league as, say, buying your first heavy-metal CD or bringing your first girlfriend home to spend the night, but it comes with those intimations. If first grade got here so quickly, can Sam's first apartment, laden with Red Sox paraphernalia, be far away?

And there is something truly grown up about first grade. Unlike kindergarten, with naps and a pretend kitchen in the housekeeping corner, this is the formal start of that 15-year progression through what my friend Jay has dubbed the education-industrial complex, whereby life is ordered around the school year. Memory doesn't kick in in first grade, but it's close. While you might have the odd recollection from when you were four, you tend to catalog what happens by whether you were in first grade or fourth or twelfth. Maybe that's why I have such a snapshot in my mind of my own first day of school--spindly legs sticking out from a too-short dress with a ladybug applique and, on top, a too-short Pixie haircut.

Time moves too damn fast. It outpaces consciousness in much the same way that light outpaces sound. Arriving home from vacation last night to a yard of dead plants, stacks of mail, and suitcases filled with dirty clothes, there were a few seconds when I forgot that I was 48 and living in my own townhouse with a husband, two kids, and a dog. In that short span, I felt relieved that my mom would take care of the mess. That's when I remembered, Oh, I'm the mom.