Rebeccalou: This Writer’s Life

Alice Neumann Lee

12.24.28 — 07.25.02 

For seven decades, she measured the goodness of the day by what she was able to accomplish. I cleaned like there was no tomorrow, she’d say. So when the cancer and the treatments and the side effects stole her energy, her productivity gradually weakened until the day it disappeared completely. In a blink, her tomorrows were numbered. The disbelief and frustration of illness gave rise to acceptance. She did not speak of what was coming, but she knew. And in her knowing, she was fearless.

This photo and prose, along with a collection of my poetry, will appear in a new book from photographer Katy Tartakoff, in collaboration with Julie Whitney, Chris Casey and Jeannine Balsamo. Entitled As Is, the book chronicles the stories of men and women who have or have had breast cancer. For more information about the project, click Breast Cancer at www.katytartakoff.com.

On another note — HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my brother, Bryan, nephew, Davis, and friend, Annie Warren.

I was raised with a conditioned distaste for the emotion that ranks among the most common on the planet. My dad yelled in anger exactly twice during my childhood, both lame attempts at expressing an emotion that made him squirm in his own skin. Mom simply announced one afternoon that there would be no anger in our home. End of story. I understand anger. I experience it from time to time, but witnessing its physical expression still feels like the rug has been pulled out from beneath my feet. It’s fair to say I come unglued from the inside out. 

So when our son started shouting obscenities at his father early one morning a few weeks ago, my fingers hardened around the cup of tea in my hands. I didn’t witness his foot blast through the wall, nor did I hear the plaster crumble. He took the stairs two at a time, glanced at his sister as he passed through the kitchen, slamming the door on his way out. I watched him cut through the wet grass as he headed toward the street, rolling onto his toes with every step. He was late for the bus. His head hung down. 

“We have another hole in the wall,” Tony announced a minute later. He looked about to explode.

Some kids practically raise themselves while others leave us going thunk in the night, perplexed, resentful, even scared. Where does his rage come from? What about the pattern of blaming others, the shouting, kicking and screaming? All from one of the sweetest males I know, tender really, with a natural propensity toward kindness. It doesn’t add up. It never has.

A few weeks ago I had a good start on a blog piece about this same boy and ultimate frisbee, the sport he has grown to love. He played for East High School this spring. He wore the white jersey and the black sweatshirt with pride and helped the team win the state championship. He was named Most Improved Player at the banquet, he and his ultimate girlfriend, Best Couple. 

Daily, from February to May, to others and to myself, I offered thanks for his participation. The sport transformed this unmotivated, disengaged teenager into a player. He came home from practice physically exhausted, hungry for dinner. His attitude was pleasant, you might even say cooperative. The grades didn’t improve but for the first time since he started high school, we had an inkling they might. He went to team dinners and played pick-up on the weekends. The mother of three teammates congratulated us on raising such “a fine young man,” the NICEST PERSON her daughters know (her caps, not mine).

He turns to me one night at dinner. “Becky, everyone dyes their hair red for state. Could we do the hair dying party here? It’s a tradition.” I swallow a mouthful of lettuce, feel my eyes expand. I picture permanent streaks of red dye on the bathroom walls, forever splotches on the hardwood floor. I imagine guys being guys—rowdy, loud, careless.

He reads my mind. “We’ll do the dying outside. I promise.”

Something inside me for which I have no explanation warms to the idea of the hair dying party. Tony is shaking his head no as I hear myself say yea, let’s do it. The boy flashes me a grin.

I set a platter of his favorite cookies and Outrageous Brownies on the table minutes before thirty athletes, mostly males, pile into our house. A mound of stinky shoes collects at the front door. It’s cold and rainy. An outdoor party is out of the question. They devour eight pizzas and the platter of sweets, wash them down with soda, then head to the pool table in the basement. Some hang on the main floor. In packs of threes and fours, with frayed bath towels draped over their shoulders, they wait for the dye to work its magic. One guy recruits Tony to give him a “professional look.” Most prefer to go it on their own. Fair-hairs turn mottled shades of red, brunettes pink, orange and peach. The next day I’m on the sidelines of the red-haired team, cheering the guys and the one gal who went eight for eight that weekend. I write a piece about pride and hope, about the value of community and being part of something bigger than yourself. I reflect on the upside of physical activity, the gift of structure, the grace of discipline.

A few days before the story is ready to publish, the season ends. He comes home to empty hours after school. No routine. Another transition that isn’t going well. Determined to be in charge, he rejects our suggestions about how to spend his time. Without exercise, the grumpy mood returns. He slumps in his chair at dinner, has little to say. He grows surly and one morning kicks his foot through the wall. There is no apology, no offer to compensate for damages. He feels entitled to his anger, his outbursts justified. The printer wouldn’t print his Spanish final. He was running late. His grade was on the line. It was his father’s fault. 

“Boys are just different.” Wise counsel from a friend, a mother of three sons and a daughter. “They don’t process the way girls do. They react—loud and physical.” 

I suppose there are lots of reasons why this boy does what he does. But I’m a mom who goes to the mother-child connection for explanation, not out of egocentricity so much as a hunch. I’ve been watching and living with him since he was eleven. I reckon I figure into the hole in the wall by default. He’s fond of me, respects me, maybe even loves me, but I’m second string, a replacement not of his choosing, a stand-in for the real thing. And even though he despises the choices the real mom has made, abhors the ruin of her life, the little boy under all that anger wishes things had been different. He’s starting to figure out that he’s powerless to change any of it. Even though Mom was nowhere near that wall a few weeks ago, the incident was triggered by a lack of control that inevitably points to her. Hence, the rage. And the swearing, and too much fear to admit his own vulnerability.

Listening to the birds at four in the morning, I’m caught in a dream of drunk adults, young boys, and chaos. An hour later Tony rolls over. 

“I don’t want our family to be about holes in the wall,” I tell him. “This unresolved anger makes me nuts. The boy is fighting demons the rest of us can’t even see, let alone destroy.” I admit exasperation. “None of what we do matters, not the trying and the loving, the caring, the patience, the tolerance, the humor. Things set him off and we’re back to square one, looking for new tactics and new strategies. It’s crazy making.” 

I’m angry.

“I know it’s hard,” says his father. He’s traveled this road before, with the mom. “I don’t know what to think.”  

That makes two of us. 

If you’ve seen The Soloist, you’ve watched a well-meaning journalist attempt to change the life of a homeless, schizophrenic musician, only to question his motives as his frustration deepens. Is he in it for the guy or for himself. Twenty years ago I honestly believed effective intervention could compensate for my daughter’s compromised brain. I knew she had cerebral palsy but I didn’t believe it, not for a long, long time. I thought I could—and needed—to fix her.

In the days that follow the hole in the wall, I search inside and sure enough, there I am: trying too hard, wanting to do right by the people I love, to make a difference, to excel, to prove I can be the mom he wanted but never had. I nod at the old friend, run my fingers through her hair, weep during a yoga class. The tears come in gratitude for all the ways she has served me, and in acknowledgement of this latest reminder that the time has come to surrender, and let her go.

It took me a good week to look into the eyes of the boy I call my son, and forgive him. I imagine him at four and at seven, imagine his confusion, his child-like angst as the world spins wildly out of control. My heart softens. I dig through the papers on my desk and find the list for the handyman. Under basement handrail I write plaster repair.

This past March and into April, I worked on a piece about two of our kids, and their mother. I’d skimmed the surface of this story a half dozen times, wading up to my ankles in muck but never honestly taking it on. And then something happens and I find myself diving into a tale of addiction, abandonment and pain. This time I bite. I taste, chew and swallow. When the whole thing feels more heavy and deep than I want to go, I write anyway.

Weeks of work unfold and one day I’m ready for Tony to read my account of a story more his than mine: alcoholic spouse drives drunk with their 10-month-old daughter in the car. Nothing happens, but Tony’s image of what might have been snaps the frail marriage in two. The what if drives the last bit of fear out of him and sets him free, in a twisted kind of way, to make his move. A ten-year string of incidents, one more shameful and surreal than the next, and he’d had enough. Loyal by nature, protective to the core, he stops believing that life with a drug-addicted alcoholic would ever be anything other than the anxiety-ridden nightmare it had become. He takes the kids and leaves. Tess is a year old, barely, Pierce almost four. 

But facts are just the beginning. 

How does a mother’s physical and emotional abandonment smell? 

How does it taste in the mouth of a son? 

What shape does it acquire in a daughter? 

Does abandonment pound into eternity at the walls of the heart or simply leave a scar? 

How thick is the scab? 

What if there is no scab and the wound, a dozen years later, is still open and bleeding? 

Then what?

So I write the story to try to figure things out. I’d like to make sense of behavior that, on the surface, makes no sense. I look for openings, in myself and in them, and conversely, for the places I shut down and they the same. I tell stories. I reveal things. I describe the way their mother looked and behaved when they saw her in March after fifteen months of not so much as a phone call. I share what they tell me about her. I write of pain and hurt, of anger, resentment and longing, and yes, of love. None of it is easy. All of it counts. 

On a Thursday night I go to Tess’s school to work concessions for a theatre production. A friend and I talk about our kids. She says she’d like to meet my other two. “I kind of feel like I know them already,” she says, “from reading your blog.”

Bingo. I leave the school with a rumbling in my gut, fueled by fear. Once home, I walk the stairs to my study and print the piece, hand it to Tony. A bowl of popcorn sits on the bed between us. 

“I can’t publish this.” 

“What?! You’ve been working on it for a month.” 

“It’s too revealing. There’s stuff in here that could hurt the kids.”

I believed the piece had value, that it told the story fairly and tenderly, without judgment. I believed it contained information that could be healing for others. Together we read it again, this time thinking about classmates hearing the details, about well-intentioned parents saying something to their kids. In the re-telling I imagine the story growing legs and sprouting the head of a monster. All compassion is lost and one day someone in the mood to hurt says something and with it comes the sting of shame, of privacy betrayed, honor destroyed. And I have played a part in it? No way. 

There are moments in the life of a stepparent when you realize—more like caught by surprise—that these kids who walked through the door and rearranged your life have claimed your heart. Indeed, Tess and Pierce have settled in, not just in the house or in the rhythm of my days but in me, in the fiber and sinew, the grit and muscle of who I am. I watch myself protect them with the intensity I mistakenly thought I had reserved solely for the child I’d raised since infancy. Along with their father, they have become mine to look after, to nurture, to usher into adulthood, despite the debris left in the emotional wake of their earliest years and with all the joy and excitement that comes in watching young people grow into themselves.

There is one catch. I really wanted to publish that piece. The story had a pulse. I felt like its time had come. Love changed my mind, love and that gnawing sensation that taking their life public could harm two innocents who have been through enough. 

I am going to share one paragraph—the ending. It’s the happiest part of the story:

On a Sunday in March, Tony and I take the kids to the tubing hill at Winter Park. The day is glorious, not a wisp of cloud in that big blue sky. After a handful of runs, we decide to go down as a group, four on the belly. We position the tubes in a circle, sides touching, each of us front body down, legs extended, a hand wrapped through the handle of the tube next to our own. Our faces are inches apart. With the toes of our boots digging into the snow, we push ourselves over the edge and take off down the slope, hair flying, faces smacked by the wind, screaming, laughing, spinning in wide circles all the way down to the base of the hill. The terrain flattens and we cruise to a standstill in the open, snow-packed field. The four of us took another fifteen runs that day, shedding coats and gloves as the sun arced high above the peaks. In pairs, individually, sitting or supine, no run was as gratifying—or as fun—as four on the belly. No one jumped off early, no one let go, determined to stay connected, no matter what.

Decades ago and years younger, my father loved to imitate Tim Conway from the Carol Burnett Show. Do your Tim Conway, we’d say when we were all home for Christmas. Dad would curl his body into the stooped form of an old man and with arms pumping ever so slightly, shuffle from his favorite wing-backed chair to the dinner table. The imitation was impeccable. We laughed ourselves off the sofa. Dad turned eighty the summer Mom died, with the blood pressure and pulse of a man half his age. A few years of lonely and he was old. His back melted into a curve and froze. His skin went pale and dry. He stopped trying to hear. The last time he stepped on the scale he weighed one hundred twenty four pounds, fully clothed, wearing shoes and a jacket. I followed in slow motion as he shuffled down the corridor to the doctor’s office, weak and infinitely tired, white-knuckling the bar of the walker, his head pushed forward to point the way. Is this what happens? Do we finally become the character we once pretended to be?

“I don’t know how to start.” That’s Tess talking, slumped on a stool at the kitchen counter. She’s doodling in the corner of a blank piece of paper, stuck on a writing assignment. Those green eyes are willing me to say something, anything, to get the ball rolling. I ask about the topic. I ask for her ideas. I empathize. 

“It’s the same for me.” She is not consoled. A writer whose name I can’t remember comes to mind: sit for a morning and if nothing comes, slash your wrists and get it over with. I do not share this with Tess.

The other day, in an attempt to jump-start a new piece, I go to the bookshelf in search of Anna Quindlen. In the mid-late 80’s, Quindlen wrote a weekly column in The New York Times called Life in the 30’s, hailed for its wit, honesty and insight. She and I and another several million women who came of age in the sixties believed we could have it all: love, family, rewarding career. Anna brought us tales from the trenches, poking fun, engaging her brain and her heart around the possibilities and the pitfalls. She bravely revealed insecurities and prejudices, the issues she wrestled with, what made her happy and the things that hurt. She felt like a friend. Some weeks she was me, another eldest child, in her words “a leader, a doer, a convincing veneer of personality and confidence atop a bottomless pit of insecurity and need,” and other times an icon I bowed to. She had her finger on the pulse of a generation of overachievers, pen at hand. She held up the mirror and there we were, en masse, wagging our tails, begging for more. 

I met Anna exactly once, in the fall of 1988. She was on tour for Living Out Loud, the published collection of her Life in the 30’s columns. I was home as a full-time mom after years of business lunches and expensive clothes, moving through my day in a tee-shirt and a pair of Levi’s. Ali was a year old. We had a diagnosis but really knew nothing about how this neurological impairment called cerebral palsy would play out over time. Our baby was alert and engaging, smiled often, obviously understood what we said to her, but wasn’t rolling over, wasn’t sitting without support, wasn’t making the kind of sounds that turn into words. I turned to writing. The notebooks were a place to put what I couldn’t say out loud. To the world, to Ali, to my family and all but my closest friends, I maintained the convincing veneer we firstborns master in childhood, the one Anna had nailed on the head.

I ran several miles a week, wrote while Ali napped, tried not to be afraid. 

The midwestern roots and natural instincts of a woman accustomed to success kicked in. If we worked hard, if I took her to experts in Chicago, Milwaukee and San Francisco, if I repeated the exercises at home and fed her healthy foods and played Louise Hay tapes in the background, my baby would literally crawl out of this place of fisted hands and floppy torso and be on her way. I visualized the two of us returning in a year to the white-coated specialists who had delivered the diagnosis. I wanted more than anything to prove them wrong. My money was on the long shot: heaps of intervention and piles of love would somehow re-route the pathways in Ali’s brain. I didn’t want a special needs child. I wanted a ballerina, an athlete, a little girl who played the piano. I wanted a star, which is what I have, but in the beginning I was looking for the usual suspects in all the wrong places. 

So on a warmish October afternoon I go to hear Anna Quindlen, one of my heros. She talks and reads for thirty minutes and then the women-only crowd forms a line for book signing. Anna sits at a blond library table in front of a stack of fiction, brown hair to her shoulders, belly extended, well into her pregnancy with their third child, a girl they would name Maria. 

As the line snakes among the racks, I think about what to say to this woman whose work I adore, idolize and try to emulate. I want to sound less like a fan and more like a kindred spirit. I know, she’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist syndicated in newspapers throughout the country and I’m filling journals I share with no one, but still, you never know. 

And then the woman ahead of me steps aside and I’m standing at the table, eager as a five-year-old on her first day of school, a little anxious, very curious. The writer says hi and reaches for the book I’m holding. She’s gracious but I’d bet a hundred dollars she’d rather be home with her feet up and her boys in bed. She sets my book on the table, opens the inside cover, asks my name. This is happening all too quickly. I want coffee, a glass of wine, time to chat. I want to connect.

“I’d love to be a writer.” There, I’ve said it out loud.

She lets out a soft groan and raises her eyebrows. “You might want to think twice about that.” Sarcasm with a smile or an Irish Catholic’s confession? Her eyes look tired. “If I knew how to do anything else, I would.” A shallow sigh, followed by the tiniest chuckle. She’s dead serious. 

Anna writes quickly, gives me the book and smiles again. Time’s up. I thank her and step into the sunshine. I don’t look until I’m sitting in the car.

For Rebecca — Enjoy!    Anna Quindlen

Change the name, and the inscription was most likely what she wrote in the books of the other fifty women in line that day. No Good luck, no Go for it. Nothing so corny as Follow your dream (thank god). A simple Enjoy. And I do. Every time I pick up anything she’s written. Quindlen, the queen of making it look easy. 

But we all know better, including a 13-year-old with a homework assignment.

“So Becky, do you, like, think this is okay?” Tess hands me two pages filled with thick scratches, squiggles in the margins, rows of small cursive followed by large loopy letters—telltale signs of struggle. “I’m not sure about the ending,” she adds.

I read the piece out loud beginning with the hardest line of all, that precious first sentence, and work my way to the second hardest, the last.

“How does it sound to you?” I ask.

“I think it needs some work but could we, like, have a snack first?”

On a warm and sunny Saturday morning in early February, two friends and I load the back end of the car with snowshoes, poles, boots and backpacks and head south on C-470, veering right at the sign for Fairplay, winding our way through canyons of red rock and pine until the urban sprawl filling the rearview mirror disappears completely. The radio is off. Bright sun beats through the glass. The creeks are open and running hard. The gray and brown earth of winter lies exposed during these weeks of mild weather. We wind our way through the foothills, slowing down for Conifer, Bailey and Grant, then climb the last four miles to Kenosha Pass. At the summit the Colorado Trail crosses the highway, with arrows pointing in both directions. The trailhead to our right is filled with two rows of vehicles. We turn left onto gravel. The car scrapes across a twenty-foot patch of snow. We avoid the ruts for another hundred yards and pull into the parking lot, the fourth car to arrive.

The air is colder at 10,000 feet. We add more layers, strap on foot gear and head up through a stand of aspen on a snow-packed trail imprinted with the soles of boots and the wide, oversized mark of a snowshoe. Parallel tracks left by a cross-country skier run alongside the trail a short distance before veering off into the meadow. I unwrap the chain at the gate and swing it open just far enough to allow passage into the forest. 

At the first clearing, Kathy interrupts Patricia’s story of how she came to own the hat she’s wearing, and we all stop. Off to the right are thousands of aspen in the meadow below us, tall and silver-gray in their nakedness, intermingled with ponderosa pine. Across the distant highway, hills sit like children at the knees of the massive peaks, snow-covered and majestic, tall enough to reach into the swirl of white cloud brushed through winter’s sky. At the curve of the highway, the hills give way to the expansive South Park valley, and miles beyond, at the southern edge of our view, the Collegiate Peaks rise to the heavens, promising adventure from afar, triggering memories of summer climbs, nights in a tent at tree line, my first pelting by corn snow on the summit of Mount Harvard seventeen years ago, its landscape barren as the moon. 

I love to hike. I love that my feet are on the ground. I have no desire to float through air or explore the deep waters of an ocean but I will climb anything the body will tolerate. I respond to the palpable thinness of air at altitude, the crisp bite on the face, the effort in the muscles of thigh and calf, the fifty-something whine in my left knee. I find it impossible to remain stuck in the angst and nagging turmoil of ego when I look at the world from the side or the top of a mountain, caught in the quirky blend of humility and empowerment, our insignificance twinned with all that’s possible. Without fail, the big picture reveals itself in direct proportion to the diminishment of self. Despite the thinner air, I breathe more fully.

We continue up-trail. The body grows warm with exertion. Without leaves to interrupt their fall, the sun’s rays stroke our heads, shoulders and chests before reflecting off the snow on the forest floor. We stop for water in a small clearing. I plant poles in the shallow snowbank at the side of the trail, remove my pack, unclip the snowshoes and take off the outer layer. I stuff the clothes into the pack, eat a handful of almonds, drink more water and step back into the snowshoes. Before grabbing the poles, I unzip the fleece at my neck, feel the sweat on my skin, followed by a clammy chill when a breeze kicks up.

Another hour passes on the trail. We stop for lunch at a spot overlooking South Park. A fallen aspen provides the perfect bench. We unload our gear and spread the contents of our packs at our feet: wedges of cheese, leftover chicken cutlets, one peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a container of olives, slices of pear, a banana, a bag of raw almonds. Kathy opens the Beaulieu Vineyard Merlot and fills three cups. The sun, full-out when we sat, is soon covered by a band of clouds. Hats and gloves go back on. We take turns snapping photos of the other two, all sunglasses and smiles. We consume every morsel, washing down the home-baked chocolate chip cookie with a final sip of wine before strapping on the gear and starting back down.

The descent offers another perspective on the same view. The clouds move on, exposing afternoon sunlight against bold peaks that sparkle in their whiteness. I spot the basket that had disengaged from my pole on the way up, abandoned atop a small patch of crusted snow. We talk of families and books, a meditation service, husbands and parents, the writing process, a website for a client, what it feels like to return to square one in this economy, in our fifties. 

I bring up the Pema Chodron series I’m listening to, a collection of teachings called Noble Heart. The three of us have stopped for water. I unscrew the blue cap on the Nalgene bottle, stare at the forest around us and think about the big sky concept of equanimity. The word is a favorite of mine, although descriptive of a state I don’t come close to touching on home turf. But up here, away from the distractions and messiness of daily life, equanimity seems almost plausible; maybe it is possible to move beyond the dualistic principles of pleasure and pain, good and bad, praise and blame, into the vast mind that embraces all of it. Like the arrows at the top of the pass, equanimity points to the great way, to the open mind-open heart goodness of our true nature.

My friends and I look at strong, healthy trees, at fallen dead trees, young saplings, trees still upright but showing signs of disease, others hearty and straight in their stretch toward sunlight. Broken branches poke out of the snow. Exposed clumps of black, gnarly roots resemble prehistoric art forms. Slender stalks not three feet tall appear alongside trees with trunks thick as the muscled thigh of a seasoned climber. Nothing moves. There are no leaves to flitter in the breeze, no animals afoot. Decay sits alongside healthy, tall alongside tiny, old next to young, without judgment, without labels, equanimous in their beauty.

We pass through the gate and head to the parking lot, savoring the last leg of the hike in silence. The drone of cars on the highway drowns out the crunch of boots and snowshoes on packed snow. The mind fills with plans for the evening, weekend commitments, the full, busy nature of life. We load gear and backpacks into the trunk, shedding hats, gloves and jackets, and head back to the city. 

The next afternoon, on our way out of the restaurant, a friend touches my arm. “When are we going to see some more writing? Anything in the works?”

I nod my head. Soon. I’m thinking you’ll see something soon.

I’ve been working on this piece for a month. The writing has felt like hugging jello—impossible to contain, with goo oozing in every direction. The topic is blended families. Not exactly my field of expertise, although I do have a few observations to make on the subject, like maybe a book’s worth.

Our blended family just passed the five-year mark. In the annals of family dynamics, I’m told that five years is a benchmark; it typically takes at least that long before a blended family starts to feel and function like a whole. What started me thinking about them—about us—is the photo at the top of the page, taken in November 2003. On the day before Thanksgiving, Katy captured our imperfect lives at a time when they had turned perfect. A man raising his two children, resigned to life without a partner, falls in love with a woman who figures she and her daughter are a bigger package than most men want. Tony and I were neither young nor foolish. We knew life would change, just not how or to what degree. We chalked up any oh-my-god-how-will-this-work trepidation to the excitement of a new adventure, and rode into the future atop a thirty-foot wave of happiness, lighthearted and beaming. 

We’re in Santa Fe for our wedding. Tony has walked to the plaza to replace the shirts he left in Denver. Pierce is the first to ask when Dad will be back. 

“Soon,” I say. “He’s already been gone an hour. He’ll be home soon.”

Twenty minutes later I hear Tess drag a chair through the kitchen, headed toward the back door. I watch her lift the semi-sheer curtain away from the glass and carefully position the chair to face the door. When she has it where she wants it, she sits. From across the room I feel her willing her dad to return. She says nothing but hums a kind of mantra. She wants him home. Outside, clumps of daffodil are blooming in the garden. Light rain taps at the window. As dusk settles, the child looks smaller and somehow fragile in the shadow of the curtain. She shifts in the chair, lifts her feet off the crossbar and folds her legs Indian style, resting her chin in her right hand. 

At last she speaks. “Becky, when will Daddy be home?” 

“Soon, honey, I think soon. He’s fine. Come over here. Let’s play 21.”

I shuffle the cards, hoping for distraction. She considers my proposal; leaving her post might delay his arrival. I pat my thigh as if beckoning a puppy. She hops down and joins me. With one arm around her and the other on the table, I shuffle the deck one last time. Midway through the second game, she hears the door open.

“Daddy!”

Exchanging marital vows or sitting for a portrait is an act to signify a shift in status but the real work takes its own sweet time. The process of making two families feel like one is largely an ongoing act of faith, kinda like commandeering the little engine that could, chanting I think I can, I think I can. Essential to the mix are grit and muscle, bone, blood and heart, good humor and luck. Trust is an issue. So is sharing. Possessions that once were yours, as well as parents, time and space, take on a communal quality. Like all things worth having, you need to want it—even when you don’t. 

I’m up against deadlines for three clients. Ali’s attendant arrives thirty minutes late on a Tuesday to announce that she’s quitting. Pierce turns 12 and a switch is flipped; words are exchanged for grunts and his straight A’s turn into the rainbow coalition. Every letter is represented. Tess is equipped with radar; she appears as if on cue to foil every attempt at private conversation between husband and wife. Ali is choosing to spend more and more time in her room behind a closed door. The cleaning lady quits via voicemail the morning she’s scheduled to turn this place around and Max, our cocker spaniel, has taken to lifting his leg in the house now that Tony has usurped him as top dog. I’m in over my head.

Like the firstborn who tells her parents it’s time to bring the new baby back to the hospital, the immensity of what we have undertaken is slowly revealed. Reality settles in, one load of laundry, one jealous outburst at a time. While friends are sending kids off to college, escaping to the mountains, awaiting the arrival of a first grandchild or even taking up traveling as a new career—not that I think about or even notice these things—I welcome two youngsters into my fold, round the clock, 24/7. One day the house is quiet; the next it isn’t, and won’t be for a long time. Peacefulness is trumped by talking, squealing, running, arguing and giggling. I find candy wrappers buried under pillows, trip over backpacks and legos, and share my airspace with a boy and girl who vie for their father’s attention with renewed vigor, for now there are three competitors: the sibling, the woman their father has married and the daughter who requires extra help and attention. We witness sibling rivalry on steroids. Daily.

In my dream I carry a baby girl on my shoulders, a toddler with blond hair and eyes the color of my own. She is light as a feather. My hands wrap around her tiny fists to balance the bouncing body. We’re both laughing. I look up and see that the child is Tess at an age when I didn’t even know she was in the world. I imagine writing a book. I call it The Missing Years.

My adopted child arrived from Korea two days shy of five months, not exactly the beginning but close. I acquired my other two through marriage. At eight and eleven, habits were formed. Routines were in place. Their way of being in the world had taken hold. Like the child on the chair between the curtain and the glass, I watched and waited, unprepared to make a move without a working knowledge of where they had been. I had no memory of first tooth, first word, first day of school. I did not know the color or scent of their favorite blanket or stuffed animal. They had not hidden behind my pant leg in a room full of strangers or climbed to the top of the refrigerator in my kitchen. I was not imprinted with their baby scent or the sound of their giggle. Memories provide context. They’re a framework to lean on when a fist goes through a wall or a squeal reaches ear-splitting decibels. Without the foundation of the early years, what follows can feel groundless, like falling in love or stepping into quicksand. You feel left out of some irreplaceable magic that happened while you were away. You build your new house starting with the third story. You pray that the support beams are strong enough to sustain the structure until you’ve filled in the lower levels with materials not indigenous to the original house. In a reflective moment, you wonder how things would have played had you started where most people start: at the beginning. 

We sit around the table on Christmas Eve, guessing about the presents under the tree. “I wonder if I’ll get Barefoot’s new cookbook” I say. The kids shoot fast glances at one another. Ali turns the sound off on her talker and types something only Tony, sitting next to her, can read. 

Two days later Pierce opens the car door and sets a present on my lap. I take off the paper and there it is, the latest Back to Basics cookbook from Barefoot Contessa. “Merry Christmas,” he says from the back seat. “I bought it with the Barnes and Noble gift card Dad’s client gave me.”

What am I to my husband’s children? It’s a fair question from the woman who parents but isn’t the Parent, who is mom but not Mother. For three years I asked the question of Tony on a regular basis. I was looking for some kind of validation, some assurance that this drastic shift in my life had a payoff. Without an answer that satisfied or one I was ready to believe, I kept on doing what mothers do: pick them up from school, take them to voice lessons, to Blockbuster, to the homes of their friends, remind them that elbows belong off the table and all four chair legs on the floor, cook dinner, take them shopping, ask about school, go on bike rides, write checks, bake peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, attend their performances, give them money, tell them I love them. To my relief, the question no longer matters. I let it go; it’s theirs to answer, not mine. I know I am not the Mother. I also know I am the woman they see every day, the woman they have learned they can count on, a steady albeit too often tired presence in their lives. To them I am Becky, unless they’re on the phone with a friend. “Hang on,” I hear them say. “I need to ask my mom,” and they turn to me. 

I sit in front of the fire with the Sunday New York Times. Ali is on the laptop in her room. Tony and the kids have gone to dinner with friends. Halfway through the Book Review, I hear the key in the front door. The dogs start barking. Squealing and roughhousing follow. The silence is broken. I hear Tony talking about the afternoon but my attention is on the once pervasive quality of Quiet that has all but vanished from this home, and the new sounds that have taken its place. 

When Tony runs an errand, the children no longer wait at the window for his return. On occasion Pierce still asks when his dad will be home, but now the question is code for When Will Dinner Be Ready. The five of us have found a rhythm, set down roots. We’re building a collective memory and quietly preserving the years before we knew one another. Daily we bear witness to one another’s lives. We have survived a home remodel, middle school, buying a business, a house burglary. We’ve been together, for better and, trust me, for worse, in restaurants and in bowling alleys, on scooters and bicycles, at movies, plays and performances, on beaches, mountains and hiking trails, in cars and buses, on trains, boats and airplanes. We’ve said goodbye to one another hundreds of times—and learned that we always come back. I’ll give a nod to the experts. Five years later, we’ve rounded a bend.

When I asked for a leaner schedule during our burning bowl ceremony on New Year’s Day, illness wasn’t what I had in mind. Apparently the universe felt otherwise. If this is what it takes to wipe my calendar clean, so be it, although I am feeling puny and more than a little remiss. Hope to post a new entry in a few weeks. In the meantime, I’ll take my liberties with the practice of snail blogging.

When I went looking for the wedding picture of my parents a month ago, I found this snapshot among a stack I had collected when we moved Dad to Johnson Village. I was a freshman in college, 1968, back for the weekend to help with the leaves. My parents lived on a piece of property that was home to roughly a hundred oak trees. The gathering and burning of the leaves was an annual ritual that signaled the imminent return of the Minnesota winter. 

Raised on a farm, Dad owned every piece of equipment required for proper leaf removal: a signature yellow International Harvester lawn tractor, three sweepers, a variety of rakes, two large heavy-duty tarps and two John Deere power mowers. Obsessive by nature and compulsive in habit, Dad kept the place immaculate every season of the year.

My father was a tax accountant and an abstractor who wore a tie and went to an office five days a week for close to fifty years. But the dad I connected with was a man who loved nothing more than putting on a cap, grabbing a pair of sturdy gloves and working outside, especially when he had a partner. “I’d hate to be doing this alone,” he would say every time we filled another tarp. “I sure am glad you came home to help.”

Harvesting the leaves satisfied our shared propensity for orderliness, something we understood about one another. For those hours or possibly few days before the wind, so common to that part of the country, kicked up more leaves, we took great satisfaction in the uncluttered lawn we left in our wake. We loved being outside, in nature, doing work that brought immediate results: rake the leaves away from the base of the trees, collect them with sweepers, dump the contents of the bins onto a thick canvas tarp, haul each load to the front of the property and roll the dusty heap into the ditch, forming pile after pile alongside the road. 

At dusk—provided the adjacent woods and the house were downwind—we’d light the piles on fire. Acorns popped in the flames. Leaves of assorted size and color succumbed to the heat. In a dry year, you could hear the crunch and crumble of disintegration. We stood silent and stared at the fire, prodding it along, poking at the embers, hair and clothes smelling of smoke, bodies tired to the bone, spirits content.

My parents sold their home and property in 1994, and moved to Denver. Some years ago, serious flooding throughout the Red River Valley scared the new owners into transporting the home to higher ground a few miles away. Abandoned and untended, the acreage has grown wild and disheveled, looking nothing like it did under Dad’s care. “I’m glad your dad didn’t have to see that happen,” Uncle Howard wrote in an email this fall. “It would have really been hard on him.”

My father died at Porter Hospice on December 4, 2006, in the same room Mom had occupied four years earlier. The day prior, I sat with my husband and our children at Dad’s bedside and talked about doing the leaves together, about camping on South Pike Bay, about limping into his office one June morning after tripping on the railroad tracks and sliding hands-first through a patch of gravel. I talked about him being with Mom again, and I told him what a great dad he had been. His eyes were closed. He hadn’t spoken for two days. With every story, he squeezed my hand tighter. When it came time to leave, he would not let go. The kids were hungry. Darkness had settled outside the window with the bird feeder at its ledge. I promised to return in a few hours, and did, but in that short interim Dad had moved that much closer to the other side. I don’t believe he knew I was in the room. His breathing had become more shallow. He didn’t move, not so much as a twitch. A nurse called just before noon the following morning to tell me he had passed.

This fall I stepped into our tiny backyard, the grass covered in aspen and locust leaves, and remembered the October weekend forty years ago. I raked rhythmically, wearing gloves and a cap, taking meticulous care to gather every leaf, twig and pod. I had no need for a riding tractor, a sweeper or a tarp. There was no fire. The dry, dusty piles went into a compost bin for their subsequent return to the earth next spring. 

During our family’s exchange of gratitude that evening, I shared that I was thankful for my dad, for the kind of man he was and for all the things I had learned from him. The kids looked up from their plates, afraid they might see tears, and nodded.