Rebeccalou: This Writer’s Life

A friend said to me a few weeks ago, “Imagine if every person in the world had access to fresh water, even just one gallon a day. What a difference that would make.”

She’s right… what a difference.

In the spirit of hoping to make a difference, Pierce and I are headed to Asia in December to help install what’s referred to in developing countries as a MUS—multiple use (water) system. Our destination is the remote village of Majuwa Badahare in the Pokhara region of central Nepal. We’re traveling with a group from Denver, organized by the folks from Montview Presbyterian Church, who have been sending volunteers to Nepal since 2000. Eleven of us will be working under the direction of a team from International Development Enterprises (www.ideorg.org). They’re providing the expertise, we the physical labor. We’ll be digging trenches, mixing concrete and building cisterns. I’ll be leaning heavily on my Lake Wobegon where-the-women-are-strong childhood, and swallowing ibuprofen by the handfuls.

According to National Geographic (April 2010), women in developing countries walk an average of 3.7 miles for water. Nepal is no exception. The people in Majuwa Badahare walk miles for water or use what collects in puddles, jeopardizing their health and the health of their families. The MUS will draw from a natural spring and send water by hose or pipe to the village for cooking, drinking and cleaning… carried of course, but for yards instead of miles. The run-off will be used to water the crops of small-plot farmers in the village, potentially moving them out of subsistence farming into the cash economy. We’ll be working alongside Nepalese people, camping in the village, eating local food and using local facilities, if you get my drift.

This is a service trip. Pierce and I are fundraising our expenses. We just passed the $5,000 mark on our way toward the $7,000 required to cover our airfare plus in-country food, transport, and mandatory evacuation insurance. Many thanks to all of you who have sent donations! If you haven’t yet received a personal note, you will. Your generosity is remarkable. I’m deeply touched… awed is more like it.

I’m making the trip because I feel called to go, although I tried for a month this last winter to talk myself out of it. I’d be away over the holidays, leaving Tony with the family during his busiest season. Asia is a long haul. I have a hard time sitting still — how could I possibly do 21 hours on a plane. There’ll be other opportunities, I told myself. I’m healthy. But my sixtieth birthday loomed, with more years behind me than ahead. I couldn’t get comfortable saying no to a voice that never wavered. Two months go by. The deadline for applications passes. I call the group leader on a Wednesday in January.

“What’s the drop-dead sign-up date for Nepal?”

“The committee is meeting at six o-clock to review the applications. There’s more interest than we anticipated. Anyone who comes in after tonight goes on a waiting list.”

I pick up Pierce after school, invite him to come with me to Nepal on the ride home, complete the forms in an hour and hand deliver the packet at ten minutes to six.

So the two of us are busy preparing to share an adventure on the other side of the globe in a culture that will forever change how we see the world and our place in it. No dad or sister with him, just the mom he acquired at the start of fifth grade, one year before Adolescence grabbed him by the collar and hung on tight for a good, long run. He’s come out on the other side, his sweet, kind nature intact, re-connecting with parts of his self that went into hiding at the first sign of facial hair. Granted, the grades aren’t recoverable but hey, friends who have walked this road tell us there’s a college for everyone. “A journey without challenge,” writes Phil Cousineau in The Art of Pilgrimage, “is a journey without meaning; one without purpose has no soul.” I suspect Nepal will give Pierce meaningful and soulful gifts he cannot name — not at eighteen, perhaps not for many years, but no matter. The groundwork will be laid, the seeds planted.

Our culture of excess will be brought into sharp relief (and disbelief) against the ways and habits of a country ranked the 12^th poorest in the world. I started to write that I’m prepared for the experience, but who am I kidding. Clueless is closer to the truth, for how does one prepare to be laid open, and left raw and unsettled. A friend that has traveled the world, including a dozen trips to Nepal, has shared with me how groundless she feels in that country.

“So why do you keep returning?” I wanted to know. We were parked at a stoplight in Boulder, on our way to a Nepalese restaurant.

“I’m my best self in Nepal, the person I’d like to be all the time. Something happens back here… things get in the way.” Her husband smiled. The light turned green. She’s going back this fall—both of them are—to uncover that best self yet again, and bring her home for another try.

If you feel called to support the work of bringing clean water to the families in Majuwa Badahare, we would so appreciate your support. Your donation is tax deductible. Every dollar brings us that much closer. All funding goes directly to Montview Presbyterian Church, where they’re keeping an account in our names. You can donate online (www.montview.org/montivew-in-the-world/global-mission/nepal-worktrip-2010) or by check, made payable to Montview Church, and sent to:

Montview Presbyterian Church

1980 Dahlia Street

Denver, CO 80220

Be sure to enclose a note, identifying the travelers your sponsorship supports (Pierce Westenhaver and Rebecca Lee). For tax purposes, do not write our names on the check. Any money raised beyond the $7,000 will go into a Hand-Up fund for disbursement to specific projects once we’re in Nepal.

I’ve been reading Rumi on the front porch this summer, showered in early morning light, a cup of hot tea on the flat arm of the Adirondack chair. Rumi is a sufi poet, a spiritual master for whom “everything has to do with loving and not loving.” He writes of the inner life, but with words and stories rooted in the physical world. The lines I read this morning brought Nepal to mind, and the journey that awaits us this December.

Someone who goes with half a loaf of bread

to a small place that fits like a nest around him,

someone who wants no more, who’s not himself

longed for by anyone else,

He is a letter to everyone. You open it.

It says, LIVE.

Thanks for your support, prayers and blessings. We depart on December 18th, returning with stories to tell on the second of January. Until then, I’ll be torturing myself with P90X, building biceps suitable for digging trenches.

Today I turn sixty. It snowed on the 2nd of May in 1950, and stayed cool that entire summer, according to my dad. I arrived two weeks overdue, weighing nearly ten pounds, jaundiced and both lungs filled with fluid. My mother said I looked like a 6-month-old stuffed in that incubator. My head was bruised and dented from the forceps delivery. Apparently I wasn’t much interested in entering the world. My grandmother looked at her first grandchild and pronounced me the most beautiful baby she’d ever seen. “I don’t know what she saw,” my mother told me years later. “You were a mess. We both were.” Her brother Howard, 15 at the time, came to the hospital to donate blood but the nurse sent him home. He was too young. “Don’t dwell on the numbers,” Howard wrote in an email this morning. “You being 60 seems no more possible than me being 75.”

Ali hates that she has disability. She wants to meet someone who makes her feel special, wanted, loved. We can give our kids a lot of things but sometimes, where it counts the most, we’re as helpless as newborns. “I’ve walked and talked for 60 years,” I tell Ali a month ago. “If I could, I’d give you my legs and my voice, and I’d use the wheelchair and the talker for the time I have left.” Her face opens to the possibility. The next afternoon she calls from campus. “Remember what you said yesterday?” she types, cooing into the phone. “I want to trade places.” I stare out the window. The neighbor boys are kicking a ball in the backyard. The younger one trips and stumbles. If trading places were really possible, would I be so magnanimous?

The contract was my yoga teacher’s idea. “I write a new one every 28 days,” she tells me, “on the new moon.” I stop at Meininger’s on the way home and buy a notebook with a smooth red cover and narrow-lined pages. I buy a sand-colored rock the size of my fist, stamped with the word Courage. The rock and the notebook sit on my desk, untouched, for a week. The notebook goes in the bag to Cabo. On the sixth morning, while Tony is in the gym, I sit with a cup of tea on our third floor balcony, stare at the Sea of Cortez, and write a contract with myself. I will give our children—all three of them—the space to have their own lives and take the space required to have mine. Instead of worrying that I might be disappointing others, I will ask if I am disappointing myself. Before saying yes to any request, from anyone, I will check in with myself: is this something I want to do. I fill three pages.

After dinner Tess offers to play the song she’s singing at the school Cabaret. She sits in the brown leather chair, wearing gym shorts and an Under Armour top, one bare leg tucked under the other. Her shoulder length hair is pulled into a pony tail. Loose strands frame her face. She sings like a bird. “We are so fragile. Breakable, breakable, breakable girls and boys.” Her voice blends with the strum of the ukulele as she watches her fingers find their way across the strings. We do more than listen. We bear witness.

I open the envelope from my brother and read the Satchel Paige quote on the front of the card. How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are? I pull out the letter. Dear Becky, Don’t even think about it. Happy birthday. Time passes, we get wiser, life is good, it is what it is. Equanimity is a goal we should strive for, although with a teenager in the house, equanimity is difficult to understand, much less achieve.

I cleaned winter’s debris from the gardens in late March. I’ve loved watching the tulips come into bloom, the tiny white flowers of the sweet woodruff appear, the first blossom on the purple cranesbill pop along the front walk. For thirty years I’ve pictured myself gardening well into old age, nurturing, pruning, weeding, tending. Until now. If the gardens are calling, I do not hear them. I trekked the trails of the Andes last summer, and discovered that light-spirited, funny, freedom-loving soul I thought I’d lost. Turns out she was right where I’d left her, buried beneath an over-functioning personality who’s been stepping up, saying yes, and tending to for decades.

Next December Pierce and I are traveling to the Pokhara region of Nepal. We’re helping to install a water system in a remote village that has no access to fresh water. Locals walk for miles to fetch water, or drink polluted surface water. “I want to go,” I tell Pierce one day last January, “and I want you to come with me.” We’re in the car. He turns to look at me, then breaks into a smile. OK is all he says, but that smile tells me everything.

“People think yoga is this magical, meditative state of oneness, but it’s not. Yoga is dirty and gritty and messy—like life.” The lesson has started. “Yoga teaches us where we’re holding on, where we’re stuck. If we let it, the practice informs us.” I plant my hands at the top of the mat, spread wide the fingers and toes, raise my hips to the sky and press down on my heels. I inhale and lift the hips higher, drop the heels another inch, lower the heart, allow the shoulder blades to roll onto the back. I slowly uncurl into plank, lower to the floor, rise into cobra and back to downward-facing dog, taking the body into crescent lunge with the next in-breath. “Lower your ribs,” she says, and pulls them into my chest, pushes them down. “These are the tell-tale sign of a woman who gives too much.” I will myself not to cry.

“There could be some retardation, possibly developmental problems. It’s too early to tell. We’ll know more in six months.” Doc Kinkade and my dad stare at the fat, bruised baby in the incubator. “Don’t tell Alice. She’d only worry.” Maybe that was why my father was always so proud of me, told me I was beautiful and smart every chance he had. For months he’d waited in silence to see if his firstborn would sit, crawl, walk, talk. I didn’t take a step until I was 14 months old, then walked across the room. Dad came home in the middle of the day to see for himself. I know how it feels to wonder if anything will be different in six months, in six years. My father was spared. I was not.

“Maybe this is about forgiving yourself,” the yoga teacher says. Almost as an afterthought, she tells me she was diagnosed with lupus last week. “My body is attacking itself. How bizarre is that?” In an instant, I love her. This woman who can do postures I’ll never do, who possesses the physical strength of an ox and a body suitable for the cover of Yoga Journal, is human after all. In each human being there is a meeting with the divine. That intersection is the heart. So says Coleman Barks. I also love him.

My husband takes the two of us to Cabo in celebration of me turning sixty. On the morning of my birthday, back in Denver, we eat omelets in a favorite neighborhood cafe. He prepares a gorgeous fillet of salmon for dinner, with crab and spinach-stuffed mushrooms, a medley of grilled peppers and zucchini, a salad dressed in Dijon vinaigrette, a wedge of carrot cake. A vase of lilies and alstroemeria sits on the piano. For the first time in seven years, he does not give me a card. I am mystified.

The house lights go down as sixteen women walk onto the stage and stand below a panoramic masterpiece of the Grand Canyon. One by one, a harp, Native American flute and deep drum fill the silence. An African-American woman dances slowly onto the stage, moving to the beat of the a cappella chanting. My friend and I take our place among the living, counting ourselves lucky to be here…on this day, at this moment.

On my sixtieth birthday I am grateful for a strong body, good health, a loving husband and family, great friends, children who are finding their way, a family business that pays the bills, a return to writing. My youngest nephew calls to wish me happy birthday. I do most of the talking. After we’ve covered baseball and the afternoon’s game, I offer an admission: your Aunt Becky is kinda old. From this quiet-mannered, tall, lean, athletic 14-year-old comes exactly what I need to hear. “It’s OK.”

“I can’t do this by myself anymore.”

We’re in a family meeting, called by Tony on a Saturday night.

“When we opened three years ago, I saw Tonto as a family business, but it really isn’t. It’s me, I’m doing it all. I feel good about providing a place for people to earn a living. The salon is beautiful and it’s doing really well but the business is not sustainable, not the way it is.

“I need your help.”

Tony’s mother claims her fourth child came out of the womb self-sufficient. If the last six years are any indication, I’d have to agree. It’s probably one reason this marriage is working. If the man had arrived needy AND with kids in tow, I’d have been hauled away by the men in white coats before our first anniversary.

So I’m paying attention. I study the husband sitting across from me, hardly a stranger but revealing a new side, one I wasn’t sure existed. His eyelids droop. He’s pale from no exercise and too little rest. He stares at his hands, folded on the table, fingers moving while he talks. He allows the back of the chair to support his weight. I notice his left shoulder rises higher than the right.

Sometimes life can’t be more clear.

“The kids and I will hatch a plan,” I hear myself say. He looks up now, those blue-green eyes wanting something he has no words to describe, other than to say things need to change.

He stands, pushes in his chair and starts to leave the table.

“I’ll take Pierce to Adam’s,” I offer. “He’s spending the night.”

In the car, I’m the one to bring it up.

“What about what your dad said?”

“I dunno. I guess he needs our help. I’m already cleaning on Sundays.”

“How about you add Wednesdays. There’s no Ultimate practice. You could put in a few hours after school. What do you say?”

“What’s Tess going to do?”

Ah yes, the concern about what will be asked of the sibling, this relentless desire on both their parts to ensure that things are even, that life is fair, that one doesn’t do more, get more, be loved more than the other. There was a time the competition drove me crazy. Now, not so much.

“I’m thinking she goes in on Saturdays. So what do you say…can we make Wednesdays work?”

“Sure.”

I find Tess sprawled on her bed, watching an episode of Lost on her laptop.

“How about spending part of your Saturday at Tonto.”

“What if I have homework? Or play practice?”

“You’re right. School comes first, but you have Sundays for homework and hardly ever rehearse on a weekend. I’m thinking 4 or 5 hours?”

“OK. Dad looks really tired.”

At dinner the following night, we lay out the family plan. Pierce on Wednesdays and Sundays, Tess on Saturdays. Ali agrees to go with the flow and not give me a hard time about being less available. “As for me,” I say, “I’ll come in 3 or 4 days a week to help at the front desk. I don’t really know what else I’ll do but we’ll figure it out. We’ll make it work.”

He doesn’t cry but looks like he could. I clear the table and wonder what I’ve just agreed to.

For the last decade I’ve sought quiet places to write. On the contrary, a busy salon is like a popular bar without the drinks. I’m on my feet most of the day, and I’m talking…a lot. Some of the people I know. Others I’ve met once or twice. Some are complete strangers but I’ve heard their story. So I stand there, saying hello, trying to remember if this is the woman whose hair caught on fire the night she intended to give her husband an anniversary gift he wouldn’t soon forget but instead relaxes into the flame of a candle sitting on the edge of the bathtub. Her husband enters the steamy room, lets out a screech to wake the dead and shoves her under water. So much for romance.

Keeping the stories straight isn’t the only challenge. The phones are techy and I’m no geek. The retail software runs on a PC—I’m an Apple gal—and the amount of time each hairdresser allots for particular services varies. The acronyms are consistent—HCT, PC, FS, BT, BD, TU—but not everyone works every day, or charges the same prices. Thankfully, they’re all patient and kind and grateful for whatever help I can give.

It’s fair to say my first week belonged to the ego. I felt under utilized. What was I doing, answering the phone and hanging up coats and folding small towels into tidy rolls? I hold three college degrees for god’s sake. I’ve written books and given presentations in large auditoriums and run my own business. Once upon a time, I worked for six figures at a fancy magazine on Michigan Avenue. And another thing, what I’m doing here feels a lot like home… I’m taking care of people. Again. Still.

I give myself pep talks: Change takes time. You’ll find your way—you always do. Already Tony is lighter in spirit, happier, not so tired. And you, the independent one, is behaving like a partner; this is good for you. Week One turns into Two and Three. I hang on to my anchors—morning pages, yoga, sitting practice—as if my well-being depended upon them because of course it does. I play around with schedules. I develop a feel for what works. A client asks Tony what I’m doing there. “She’s our new manager,” he says, and shoots me a smile.

The other afternoon 80-year-old Joann leans over the desk and confesses from a mouth outlined in cherry red, “I never had children.” Her voice is low and raspy, testimony to decades of smoking. “Tony’s like a son to me. I’ve known him since before the kids came, before he was even married to that crazy Holly.”

I hear a lot of this. Genuine affection for a man his clients have known for ten, fifteen, twenty years. He’s a fixture in their lives, the keeper of their secrets. No one makes them laugh like Tony, they tell me. “He’s a good man, a really special human being,” they say.

Yes, he is.

He also does this weird puffy thing with his mouth as he’s falling asleep that makes my falling asleep impossible. He has the memory of a gnat, and wrestles the lifeblood out of a decision before landing on one side or the other. Next time a client pulls me aside to wax eloquently about the man I married, I’m tempted to ask if she’d like to take him for the weekend and try her luck at keeping him awake past nine.

On Saturday afternoon, after the receptionist leaves, I park at the front desk, feeling the fullness of the day relax into quiet. A peacefulness settles over the place as the light shifts to make room for dusk. I unwrap the new issues of Vogue and Self—magazines I worked for in the 80’s—book a few appointments, sell a bottle of Moroccan oil to a man named Tim, and think about Elizabeth.

She’s old now but has been coming to one of our hairdressers for years. I didn’t know Elizabeth in her prime, but I imagine beautiful and petite, with bright blue eyes, a woman of class and sophistication. No longer able to stand fully upright, Elizabeth walks with a cane and wears sensible shoes to stabilize her tired, old bones. She can’t weigh more than 90 pounds. She doesn’t hear well, and speaks in a whisper. Putting herself into a chair resembles a fall more than an intention to sit. Getting out requires her to rock repeatedly until she gains the momentum to shift her weight onto the cane and slowly rise as if for the first time.

Elizabeth approaches the desk with newly permed and coiffed white hair. I take her coat from the closet and guide the stiff, frail arm into the lined sleeve. She says something. “Pardon me?” I ask, and bend down to align my ear with her mouth.

“Could you call a cab please? I don’t drive anymore. 777-7777.”

Standing slightly taller than the desk, Elizabeth hands me her credit card, tells me her address. I watch her lips move yet hear nothing. I step around the desk, hold my ear to her face, and repeat back to her the street address she has now told me three times. We both smile.

Satisfied that a car is on its way, Elizabeth inches her way to the chair closest to the front door, drops her tiny self onto the leather, and waits. Ten minutes go by. She turns to get my attention.

“Does it usually take this long?” I ask. Her lips move. I walk to her.

“He’s driving around the parking lot,” she whispers, and points to the door.

I catch sight of the back end of the yellow cab and step outside to flag him down, something I haven’t done since my days on Michigan Avenue. I take Elizabeth’s elbow and together we walk baby steps to the taxi. I confirm the address with the driver and guide his passenger into the back seat, tucking the coat against her child-size body. I touch her bony shoulder, think of my dad, and say goodbye. She smiles.

Inside I pick up the wrappers thrown on the floor by the four-year-old who helped himself to the the candy bowl a few hundred times while his mother had her hair cut. Earlier that morning, a wedding party was here for up-do’s before the two o’clock ceremony. The mother of the bride has been Tony’s client since before her daughter was born. A businessman and a psychiatrist came in for haircuts. A proud dad ran the video camera while his teenager’s hair was cut and gathered for Locks of Love. A lawyer, mother of two, relaxed in the shampoo chair as a pair of strong hands slowly massaged her workweek into oblivion. And Elizabeth had a perm and a blow dry she won’t touch for a week.

We’re not saving people’s lives or investing their money or educating their children. No breakthrough discoveries happen in our midst. Perhaps life-changing insights occasionally occur in our chairs, but we can’t be certain. We perform services and nurture people in small ways throughout the day. We laugh, listen, connect. We hear their stories and share our own. Our clients leave with great-looking hair, softer hands, painted nails and radiant complexions, feeling prettier, younger, cared for. I like to think we help to keep them grounded—a claim I could never make about that job on Michigan Avenue.

December 6 — On Saturday morning a truck backs into the driveway of the house next door. I go upstairs and look out the window. A heavy-set man wearing a stocking cap and parka pulls a red wagon with wooden side protectors up the ramp, through thick snowfall, into the van from Cowboy Moving & Storage. The wagon belongs to Isabella, a 3-year-old whose parents aren’t sure they belong together. I lower the shade, wipe the tears from my face.

Isabella loves to feed the fish who spend summers in the ceramic pot in our front garden. A few weeks ago, while her mother and I talk, the child rearranges the smooth stones in the wooden bowl on our table. I was the first neighbor on the block to hold her after she was born. She and her parents and baby sister are still in Denver, just not next door. Things change but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

December 12 — “I want to adopt the kids.” Tony and I have finished a bowl of popcorn and gone to bed. He runs his fingers through my hair. “Tess and Pierce will be in my life forever. They have no relationship with Holly. I’m the mother they know, and they have become my children. I’d like to formalize things, to tighten the strings.”

“That’s very sweet.” There’s a pause. “Have you talked to them about the idea?”

No, I hadn’t, and ask him to talk to them first. If adoption is not what they want, I imagine them struggling through the conversation, afraid of disappointing, not knowing how to say no.

“Becky would like to adopt both of you.” The three of them are in the car, approaching home. Tony has them captive. He parks in the driveway. Pierce listens. Tess talks.

“But won’t Mommy’s feelings be hurt?” She’s crying. “I know we don’t have a relationship with her but what if, some day, what if she’s better and she wants to have a relationship with us? She won’t be able to because Becky will be our mother.”

She’s sobbing now. “Only I know she’ll never get better.” Her voice trails off. The car, with four locked doors, holds her grief. Father and brother sit with the pain, hers and theirs. A full minute passes.

“What about you?” Tony looks at Pierce. “How are you with the idea?”

The more wounded one meets his father’s eyes, shrugs his shoulders. “It’s not like we have a relationship with her now,” he says, then drops his gaze. Tony turns to Tess.

“How do you think Becky will feel if you say no?” He needs to close the circle.

“I know Becky loves me enough to forgive me. I don’t know if Mommy does.”

December 24 — I cook ribs and sauerkraut, a Christmas Eve tradition my mother started years ago. We attend a candlelight service at a presbyterian church, and come home to a fondue pot filled with melted dark, mint-flavored Ghirardelli chocolate. We poke carry-out chopsticks through marshmellows, fresh raspberries, strawberries and chunks of banana. One stick crosses another and sends a raspberry ricochetting across the room, splattering the red lamp shade with dripping chocolate. We each open one gift, then another, and finally see no point in waiting until morning. We open all of them.

Gourmet’s new cookbook, a cutting board from Williams-Sonoma, and a red Le Creuset pot tell the story: the family supports me as their cook. Tony hands me a little black box. When I’ve opened the earrings, he hands me another, slightly larger box containing the necklace.

“You’re the glue that holds this family together. Thanks for making Christmas special.”

I smile, wondering if he can read my mind. Sometimes I don’t want to be the glue. Sometimes I want nothing to stick—not one responsibility, not one expectation, from them or the tapes in my head or the society we live in. Some days I want to fly.

December 25 — I call my brother in Chicago. He tells me he just spent an hour on the phone with Peter Kinkade. Peter’s father, Doc Kinkade, delivered my brothers and me. He made house calls, stitched cut lips, nursed us through the measles and poison oak and mysterious viral infections. The Kinkade family lived next door. My brothers and I grew up with the five kids. Every year, on December 25th, Mary, the mother, would walk over with a loaf of her Christmas bread, dripping in icing, fresh from the oven.

“Peter’s wife, Annie, died last Saturday. Fifty-seven. From colon cancer.” This burst of sudden, unexpected loss slowly sinks in and connects with the death of our parents, the tragic death of Peter’s younger brother—Bryan’s best friend—almost 40 years ago, and the fragile Dr. Kinkade and his wife, now well into their 80’s.

This morning I read about impermanence. We all know we’re going to die. We know things are constantly changing but mostly we live like they aren’t. We detest uncertainty. We try our best to make life secure and safe. We prefer sleep-walking to the unpredictable state of groundlessness, afraid of what it may bring.

December 27 — Forty years ago, a sophomore in college, I am married in Grace Lutheran Church. Two 30-foot Christmas trees, covered in lights, and a few dozen poinsettias fill the sanctuary. I wear white velvet, with red roses woven through my long, straight, summer-blonde hair. At 19, I have no idea who I am, what I want or where I’m headed. I know myself only through the eyes of others. My parents are enthusiastic about the marriage. They regard him a super star. I only know how to make them happy. No one encourages us to wait. No one suggests we are too young, maybe not ready.

Who walks away from a natural leader, an athlete, a kind, great-looking, responsible eagle scout? Eleven years later, I break the perfect man’s heart and make my father cry. My brothers are confused and angry. My mother sees it coming. It is time to figure out who I am. About to turn 30, I intuit that there is work to be done. Things are changing and more change is on the way—the transformative kind I’m not brave enough to ask for—but sturdy wings have sprouted, wings more powerful than the guilt that lasts for years.

January 3 — If you believe Mary Oliver in her book Blue Pastures, I am not an artist. My writing does not come above all else. If it did, I imagine our children starving, the house imploding, and me, alone in a trailer court. A few weeks ago, in a private lesson, my yoga teacher asks me to name my top five values. Cooking does not make the list, nor do laundry or grocery shopping or chauffeuring teenagers. But connection is there—to spouse, children, family, friends—and right after connection—or was it before—comes freedom, followed by creativity. Is there room for all of them on the same list, in the same life?

On the third afternoon of the new year, I sit in a coffee shop at 12th and Clayton—one of my favorite places to write—and drink sweet, foamy chai from a fat cup. Thirty minutes and nothing but dribble. I resist the urge to pack up and leave. I make myself sit, willing fingers to move across keys…surely something deeper is just ahead. When the wave finally surfaces, I ride it till the end, knowing it won’t last, knowing it can’t. Two hours later I ride it home and up the stairs to my study. Tony makes dinner. I come down to eat and go back up, hanging on to the last ripple as the words find their way onto the shore.

Inscribed on a piece of folk art hanging in my study is a quote from Brian Andreas: Most people don’t know there are angels whose only job is to make sure you don’t get too comfortable, she said. They know how easy it is to fall asleep and miss your life.

May the New Year bring you many blessings, and find you awake to life.

Even though I live with two of the furry creatures, I wouldn’t call myself a dog person. My husband makes over dogs the way love-sick males hang on beautiful women in a bar, but I’m more selective. I loved Rosie, our yellow lab, but god, that shedding. Sticky hair everywhere, including the bottom drawer of the refrigerator. The affection I harbored for our over-protective Rottweiler vanished the day he wouldn’t let my brother and one-year-old nephew into the living room, but I adore beyond all reasonable measure that same brother’s West Highland Terrier—one of the most entitled, spoiled and altogether delightful creatures I’ve ever known. So go figure.

On a Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago, a couple in their early 70’s pulled up in a black Escalade. They had come to meet Max, our cocker spaniel. We had decided Max needed a new home. One of Tony’s clients had given our phone number to the couple. I could tell these were dog people. The woman stood in the doorway, holding out her hand for Max to sniff. She laughed when the little dear made a bee-line for the wilting clematis at the end of the fence. “Ah, the male thing,” she said.

I sighed. Max could teach you a thing or two about the male thing, I thought, but kept my mouth shut. This was a sales call. Max probably ran out the front door because he felt unusually free and unencumbered at the moment, what with his wrap-around diaper off and out of sight. Diaper?

It hasn’t always been like this.

We acquired Max as a puppy eight years ago, Ali’s birthday present the summer she turned 14. I had had it up to here with the me-me-me attitude and thought a dog might move her a few degrees left of center of the universe. Max was a cute puppy, adorable really, a buff-colored cuddle-ball with a spiked tuft of hair at the crown. His favorite thing was to find an aluminum can on a walk and strut through the neighborhood, an empty Bud Light clenched between his teeth.

Things were fine until Tony and the kids moved in. “I’m not sleeping with a dog,” Tony announced, and relegated the two-year-old to nights in his crate. To complicate things, we brought a new puppy into our blended fold, a lovable black poodle with silver-tipped paws and muzzle. In a few short months, Max plummeted from top dog to underdog. His mistress was devoted to another man. The entire family loved the puppy and Max, try as he might, couldn’t garner the attention he knew he deserved.

So he bit Tess. She had been cuddling with him and apparently rubbed him wrong or touched him in a sensitive place or maybe he’d just had enough… It’s hard to know with Max. He snarled and bit, catching her lower lip. She quickly took responsibility, apologizing like a well-seasoned co-dependent, claiming she must have done something wrong, Max loved her too much to bite her.

“That’s it,” I said. “Max needs to go.”

I emailed the ex-boyfriend whose decision it had been to get a cocker spaniel in the first place, and who had reassured me that the suspicious-looking puppy farm was really an okay place to buy a dog. When we parted ways, he had vowed he would do anything, anytime, for Ali and me. All I had to do was ask.

“I need you to take Max,” I wrote. To think that a man who couldn’t commit to Friday night plans on a Thursday afternoon would agree to the responsibilities of a dog now sounds preposterous, but I was desperate. Yes, he’d like to help, he really would, but he didn’t lead the kind of life that would be good for a dog. Spare me.

The lip healed. Without a handy option short of dropping Max off at a shelter, we put the incident behind us and set about learning to tolerate the dog’s less than endearing ways—snatching food that isn’t his, barking at the air in the backyard, insisting on being underfoot in the kitchen, dashing out the front door in search of a trash can without its lid. We knew he wanted more from us, most especially from me, but I was maxed out. A daughter with special needs, a new husband, two more children, clients, and a puppy. Max knew he’d landed at the bottom of the heap. We all knew it. Sometimes we felt badly but mostly we—okay, I—wished he’d go away.

A male dog who feels threatened or ignored or simply unhappy has a weapon guaranteed to capture the attention of human beings who do not want to live like animals. When things didn’t go his way, Max walked over to the basket in the living room, or the blue chair, or the floor lamp, and lifted his leg. I guess it makes sense to a dog—pissing to show he’s pissed—but I was livid.

“Have you thought about a trainer?” suggested a friend. “Maybe one who’d come to the house?”

I hear things like that and think another phone call to make, another appointment to arrange, another person to interact with, somewhere else to spend money. Besides, I had my doubts. I had tried every technique known to the common pet owner. I rubbed Max’s nose in the urine. I flipped him on his back, stared into those brown eyes and made sure he looked away first. I lifted him by his collar and dragged his sorry ass outside. I yelled and screamed. In calmer moments, I reassured him that he didn’t need to pee in the house, that we loved him.

Apparently he detects insincerity. The marking didn’t subside. In fact, it heightened until the day I announced a second time, “I’ve had enough. Max has to go. I’m serious.”

The nail tech at Tony’s salon gave me a short list of people she thought could help. Linda loves her three dogs. She loves all dogs. She will do anything to ensure a dog’s well-being, short of taking Max off our hands. I explained the situation to the first woman on the list. “You need to train him,” she said, and jumped on her soapbox: there-are-no-bad-dogs-only-bad-dog-owners. I interrupted her tirade mid-sentence, thanked her, and hung up. I never did reach lady number two but the third one was helpful. She gave me the number for cocker rescue.

A man named Scott answered the phone. I took the psychological approach and shared Max’s story: poor dog demoted by new husband is irritated by rowdy children and threatened by new, very cute puppy. A chorus of dogs barked in the background. Scott was sympathetic. We talked for twenty minutes… I thought I had him. He asked me to email him the whole story and he’d see what he could do. So I spent another thirty minutes re-telling what I’d already told him, sent the missive, and waited.

A week later he replied, asking me to complete the attached form and return it to him. Once he received it, he’d call to arrange a home visit. Home visit? I roll my eyes and download the form… eight pages, double-sided. After 22 years of filling out paperwork for schools, government agencies and healthcare providers in order to obtain services for Ali, I detest paperwork. It makes me emotionally distraught. The quintessential over-achiever, I procrastinate with one lame excuse after another. So when I look at the stack this stranger has requested for a DOG, I know there’s no way, and toss the papers in the recycle bin. Besides, I was having issues. A few sets of fingerprints and a physical and the process would eerily resemble what I had gone through years before to adopt a child, only in reverse. Instead of inviting in, I was sending out. I couldn’t do it. The paperwork was a convenient cover.

A year passes. Max goes in and out of favor. “He’s like a bad boyfriend,” I tell Tony one night after another now-forgotten dog disaster. “Things go well for awhile, he’s all happy and content, and then one day you don’t give him what he thinks he deserves at that particular moment and he goes around the corner and lifts his leg. I’ve known guys like that.” Ask any woman. We all have.

So one morning Max walks in from the backyard, passes me in the kitchen and heads for the living room. Something clicks. “Max!” I yell, and follow him around the corner to find a fresh puddle by the leg of the blue chair. There is no screaming, kicking or hauling him outside. I simply stare in pity and disbelief. “You’ve just lost your last friend,” I tell him, and vow to remember the incident as long as it takes to re-home the blonde monster.

“Let me handle this,” Tony says that evening.

He breaks the news at dinner. “We’re going to find a new home for Max.”

“But he’s been good.” Pierce to the rescue, always the first to defend and excuse errant behavior. During his middle school years we reckon Pierce bonded with this defiant, equally lovable male who can’t seem to get his act together. Tony tells the kids about the blue chair—and reminds them of the stains on the maple floor, the snarling and biting, the food obsession, the barking over nothing.

“Max is stressing out our household. We all love him but he’s not a good pet. He’s driving us crazy.” The royal we. Nice try, Tony. Max is driving the adults crazy and everyone at the table knows it.

The kids listen in silence, their eyes fixated on empty plates until Tess pushes hers aside, folds her arms on the table, buries her head and starts to cry. She and her brother were long ago traded for booze and drugs by a mother too sick, too wounded and too foolish to know better. They’ve lived through the big hurt. They wear abandonment well until something or someone tugs a little too hard at the scar and the old, still fresh blood is free to flow.

“I’ll agree to one last thing,” I say. Tony shoots me a look. He can’t believe it. “The three of you go out right now and buy a diaper. We’ll try it for a week and then we’ll talk.” I wonder if I sound as heartbroken as I feel.

The kids breathe for the first time in ten minutes, push back their chairs and head for the car. Tony turns on his way out. “Why did you do that?”

“I can’t stand it when she cries.”

The three of them come home twenty minutes later with a faded blue denim wrap-around diaper, secured with velcro at the top of the dog’s back, a contraption I have come to call the Maxi-pad. There have been accidents, most of them the result of someone leaving the inside back door open and Max running out the pet door to pee, returning five minutes later, soaked and dripping. I’ve grown so accustomed to seeing that wide strip of denim around his midsection that yesterday, while I had the dogs on a walk, Max was watering the lamp post before I realized I hadn’t removed the pad.

“They’re not going to take Max,” I said to Tony after the couple left that afternoon.

“Why do you say that?”

“I watched the woman watch the kids, Max going back and forth as they took turns loving on him. I saw the look in her eyes. She’s going to think she’d be taking away the dog they adore and she won’t do it. She’s a mother.”

The woman’s name is Ellen. She left a voicemail that night. She would have taken the “sweet boy” home that afternoon but her husband has his mind on a bigger dog, probably another springer like the one that died. They’re meeting a few more dogs before making their decision. “Besides,” she said, “I think those kids of yours are going to have a hard time letting Max go. There’s a lot of love there. But we’ll be sure to call if we decide he’s the one.”

Nearly three weeks have passed without a word more from Ellen. The couple would have been perfect: older, calm, no children, plenty of time to make all over Max like dog people do. But instead, we have another opportunity to render the ego helpless, to practice gratitude, and let go. This time we’re letting go of stains and a dog underfoot with an insatiable appetite. Wish me luck with the diaper. Max appears to be ours for the long haul… Unless someone is interested in a very cute cocker spaniel?

Thanks to the Great Recession, my days are looking eerily like my mother’s did when I was a kid. While 14-year-old Tess spent her Saturday at a friend’s house watching back-to-back episodes of Gossip Girl, I cleaned her room in a fashion that would have made my mother proud. The vacuum cleaner and I unearthed a few hundred bobby pins, a couple of CD covers, two discarded paperbacks from last year’s reading list, and the odd sock. I cleared the closet floor of flip flops, character shoes, jazz shoes, ballet slippers, our daughter’s first pair of sexy heels, Birkenstocks, assorted flats, hiking boots, cowboy boots, and Uggs, and wrote “shoe bags” on a shopping list for The Container Store. I sorted clothes under the categories of keep, giveaway, and toss. I filled two trash bags with things you don’t even want to know about and scrubbed the stains on the carpet like a woman gone mad. The day was a labor of love and an exercise in spiritual practice: Stay present and pass no judgment.

Let’s talk laundry. We are a family of active adults and teenagers who begin the day in clean clothes, who practice yoga, take walks, ride bikes, play sports and, I’m happy to report (in reference to the adolescent male in the house), shower daily—all good things in my book. My mother used to say I changed clothes more often than most people change their minds, so maybe this is payback. When the kids and Tony were newcomers in our home, I got the occasional kick out of counting the number of loads I did on any given day. The intrigue wore thin a few thousand towels ago. Now, if I don’t hear the washer or dryer running, I figure something has gone haywire, like maybe the refrigerator has stopped working and the food is slowly rotting—that is if there’s anything left from the grocery run I did three days ago.

Which brings me to food. My family loves regular meals. I love regular meals. It’s just that supplying them on a daily basis gets old and tiresome and tedious. First there’s figuring out what to eat, then shopping, hauling bags, unloading bags, cooking, and cleaning up. I’m lucky in one regard: this group will eat whatever I set before them. When I opted for a scooter date with Tony instead of another trip to the grocery store last Sunday afternoon, the kids were thrilled with what I billed as a novelty…grilled cheese and roasted vegetables.

So what does all this domestic activity have to do with the Great Recession and my mother? In my family of origin—another family of five—I was one of the lucky benefactors of Mom’s cooking, cleaning and care taking. I took for granted the dinners served promptly at six, the home-baked cakes, cookies and banana bread, the washed and pressed clothes that magically appeared in my closet, and an orderly, lemon-scented, impeccably clean home. I also knew I didn’t want her life. No offense Mom, but mine was the generation of females who would have it all, starting with career. I had earned three college degrees by the time I turned 26, and never looked back. Okay, rarely looked back…until my mid-thirties when the baby urge hit in full force and the stresses of corporate life started to feel somehow not worth it. In the course of trying to figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up, I reinvented my professional self a half dozen times. And in the attempt to hold things together as a working mom, I sampled pretty much every support system that exists for employed women in modern America, from live-in nannies and carry-out dinners to standing Friday-night babysitters, summer camps and cleaning ladies. Until now.

In prolonged economic downturns like the one we’re in, the demand for copy writing dwindles to a slow drip. So I’m picking up the slack around the house. I’ve turned the home front into a bustling scene of getting to what I’ve put off, delegated to the spouse, assigned to the children, or ignored. This was not an intentional move. I have long held that men and women need to share domestic responsibilities, knowing that “sharing” often entails convincing the man to do something more than put his dirty underwear in the laundry basket. I scored big with Tony. A working single dad for seven years before we got together, he knows what it takes to keep the ship afloat. And during his 25 years of cutting and coloring the heads of females, he’s heard his share of lazy-husband and disengaged-father stories. So he gets it. Does he parent with the same intensity that I do, or obsessively wipe the kitchen counters until they gleam like stars in the night sky?

No.

But he parents effectively and loads the dishwasher without being asked. What really counts is that, with me working less, he has stepped it up and is working more. The kids and I see less of him, but the bills are paid.

Which makes him about perfect, although he directed a comment my way the other day that still has me questioning just who he thinks I am, and I quote, “You’re the most sensible person I know.” What happened to adventurous, or courageous? What about witty, clever and irresistible? Even smart would do, but SENSIBLE? My mother used the word to describe footwear. From choice of shoes, she inferred character—and meant it as a compliment. For the first thirty-seven years of my life, i.e. before Ali came along, I didn’t want anything to do with the word or the concept. Any psychologist worth her salt would have a heyday upon learning that during my years at Conde Nast, the woman who was raised under a canopy of “sensible” spent thousands of dollars on designer shoes, along with clothes, handbags and Donna Karan shimmering sheers in matching shades. A friend in Denver still teases me about the day I walked into the ad agency dressed in olive green from head to suede toe…but I digress. Fast forward twenty years and the man I sleep with has called me sensible. Apparently he’s forgotten I ride a scooter in city traffic and climb mountains in South America.

Does professional woman turned cook, cleaning lady and laundress make good sense? In this economy, probably. Thank god for the blog, and for you who read it. The writing makes me feel like I still have a real job, even though the pay is lousy. Would I rather be creating headlines than folding laundry? Most days, yes, although it’s harder to believe our planet is on the verge of imploding with warm cotton in my hands. And knowing my husband stands on his feet with his arms in the air for 12 hours, even I’m hard-pressed to insist it’s his turn to cook when he walks in the door. We have a system that happened all by itself: I cook, he loads the dishwasher, and I come around later to wipe the counters one last time.

By the way, I learned there’s a chance I’ll be working on a website for a client I haven’t heard from in a year. Maybe this Great Recession is finally receding. I better clean another closet while I still have the time, but first I’ll whip up a meat loaf.

He wears thick-soled, heavy-duty hiking boots and a yellow University of Pittsburgh baseball cap. A miniature gnome dangles from the center pocket of his backpack. Most days he’s in long sleeves and shorts, a Makalu trekking pole in each hand.

“Give me a color from the Crayola deck of 64,” he says. “The big box.”

We’re sitting outdoors in the Sacred Valley of Peru, a large umbrella overhead to shade the noonday sun. Someone comments on the hedge of fuchsia bougainvillea. “If the color’s not in that box, I don’t know it.”

This is the heart of Inca land, where stone, stucco and mud-brick houses line narrow cobblestone streets. Small, meticulously tilled fields of potato, beans and cabbage grow alongside the road. We stop at the Inca ruins in the village of Ollantaytambo, and walk through a crowded market lined with Quechua tribal hats and baby alpaca shawls, bags and scarves. The guide leads us to an ancient stone structure designed to transport water. She talks with pride about the ingenious Inca irrigation systems. To demonstrate, she passes her hand across the trough, causing the flowing water to stop. She swipes the channel a second time, and the water begins to run. The guide turns to Dan, takes his hand, tells him about the barrier that’s strung knee-high across the grass, and ushers him to the trough. She places his hand in the cool water then slides his fingers across the stone at the mouth of the channel.

“Whoa, no water. That’s cool.” The guide swipes his hand a second time. He feels the water flow.

“Very cool.”

A tumor cost Dan the sight in one eye when he was three. The cancer relapsed and, at the age of seven, he lost his other eye. The man has climbed the 19,340-foot Mount Kilimanjaro—the highest peak on the African continent—and trekked to Everest base camp in Nepal. He has jumped out of an airplane more than 300 times. To prove he is not without fear, he tells the story of once trekking along a narrow ridge when someone in his group starts talking about the drop-offs.

“Sometimes not being able to see where you are is a good thing,” Dan explains from the back of the van. We’re driving through the high plateau on our way back to Cusco. “You don’t realize the danger you’re in. Once I heard the guy describe just how narrow the ridge was, and how steep the drop-offs were, I was scared shitless.” There are sighs and nods from the group, but no one has a story to top his. We’ve all been on ridges at elevation and we’ve all been scared. We can’t imagine being there blind.

The following morning, twelve of us step out of the van outside the village of Mollepata and begin the six-day, roughly 35-mile trek to Machu Picchu. We are in the Andes on the Salkantay Trail, a route foraged centuries ago by villagers and their horses and mules. The trail opened to the public in September 2008.

Dan’s wife, Teresa, is expecting the couple’s first child, a daughter, in November. She has her physician’s clearance to 12,000 feet, which means she’ll hike with us the first day and again at the end of the trek. On Day 1, a jingling wristband of sleigh bells hangs from Teresa’s backpack. Dan follows the sound and listens for her verbal cues. He responds with the agility of a trained athlete.

“Rock left. Switchback right. Steep down.”

Like hearing lyrics from a song none of us knows, we watch the synchronicity of a well-rehearsed high-mountain dance. For most of us, the experience of hiking with Dan, or anyone like him, is a first. I close both eyes, take a step, then another, trying to imagine his world. The eyelids fly open before I’ve counted to five, so strong is the urge to see where I am going, so entrenched the desire for control.

After dinner we throw on another layer of fleece and step outside into a cool night. “You can only see this when there’s no moon,” explains Jose. “This is our one chance all week.” We look to the sky and there, to the left of the Southern Cross, wedged between Scorpion and the Milky Way, is the sleeping llama, another icon in the lore of the Incas. The animal is tucked into the blackness of a sky splattered in stars, his head folded into a curled front leg.

“Anyone want to borrow these?” Phoebe holds up her binoculars.

“I’d love to have a look,” says Dan, his mischievous grin nearly as bright as the sky overhead. The group erupts in laughter.

For three days we climb steadily toward the namesake of the trail—the Salkantay—the mountain most revered by the Incas, the second highest in Peru. With Teresa waiting for us in a lodge down trail, we take turns guiding Dan, carrying the bells, giving the cues. Where we go, he goes—across crude, narrow bridges, through rocky switchbacks, down muddy slopes. To watch him negotiate loose rock, up AND down, is to abandon all excuses…for sore ankles and throbbing knees, for tired lungs and blisters on the feet. Instead of excuses we feel gratitude, and lots of it.

It turns out this trip was about getting my self back—the wise, lighter self who lives below the angst of ego and responsibility, the self who knew I needed to forget about the rotten economy, trust that my family would manage without me, and go. What I didn’t know about before I left was the man who would open my heart another notch, who would expand my mind and give me that rare gift of humility and self-empowerment. If he can do this blind, well, here we go.

We cross the pass at 15,237 feet on Day 3, celebrating with hugs and photos, piling rocks atop the cairns already there, with blessings for our children and loved ones. With his finger in the air, our guide traces the routes of five international expeditions that have attempted summits of Salkantay, the successful and the tragic. He checks the clouds overhead, promises lunch in an hour, and turns to lead the descent.

The mountain that has held our eye for three days is suddenly to our backs. Loose rock is harder to handle going down, balance trickier as the body redistributes its weight through the pelvis and torso. The lungs find freedom but the joints are stressed and cranky. To a blind man, the descent is a series of steps—thousands of them—into nothingness. Add mud, or wet, slippery rock from snowmelt, and the experience must be terrifying. Dan’s technique is to bend both legs at the knees, his poles out in front like the forelegs of a horse, his trunk upright. The jaw, cheekbones and forehead lock in acute awareness of every step. There is no letting up for the Crouching Tiger, not once. To lose concentration could mean disaster of the worst possible kind.

Three more days of down, and up, and down again, and we walk at sunset into the town of Aguas Calientes. Overhead, in misty cloud-cover, looms the magical Lost City of the Incas, Machu Picchu.

“Was the trip at all spiritual?” asks a friend a month after I return home. We’re sitting outside at a Starbucks on a late August afternoon. No longer under a summer sky, the sun has shifted to cast bright amber light through a hanging basket of petunias. I wonder if the color fuchsia was in his box of 64.

“There was a lot about that trip I found spiritual,” I say, and tell her first about Dan.

Two self-proclaimed technophobe friends of mine are starting blogs, and asked for my help. Like the cobbler’s daughter without shoes, I have no problem finding time to help them with the very thing I haven’t found time to get to myself. The other day, while the three of us talked about layouts, I pulled up my site as a frame of reference. Last entry? July 3rd. August has nearly come and gone. What happened to posting every other week, preferably on a Friday?

All I can say is, it’s like not running for a month to rest your ankle or taking a summer off from the piano. We forget how to do it…sort of. What we lose is not so much the skill as the routine, the discipline of just doing it, no matter what. And the longer we put it off, well, you know what happens. The bump in the road becomes a hill that one day feels like a mountain.

Several summers ago I heard Ron Carlson, a novelist and short story writer, give a talk at the Aspen Writers Workshop. He titled it “Staying in the Room.” Carlson is an affable, funny guy and, not surprisingly, a good story teller. He shared a few anecdotes about himself and his career, none of which I remember, but I recall like yesterday what he said about staying in the room.

“I’m most likely no better a writer than anyone here,” he said, humbled and suddenly serious. “But I’ve figured out something that a lot of you probably haven’t. I’ve learned how to stay in the room. I know how to ignore the chatter in the mind: this would be easier if you had a fresh cup of coffee, the sprinkler needs to be moved to the back yard, the dog could use a walk, I could use a walk, and on and on and on.”

By now everyone in the audience is either laughing to mask their dis-ease, nodding in agreement, or sitting there thinking, that rat, he’s onto me. “It’s the only writing secret I know,” he said. “You’ve got to sit there and write.”

Or draw or paint or practice the cello. Pick your passion. The advice is the same.

I’ve had an amazing, if not THE best summer of my life. I spent five days in silent retreat in June, meditating 6-7 hours a day under the direction of an incredible teacher from California, a man named John Travis. In July I flew with two friends to Peru and trekked through the Andes on the rugged Salkantay Trail, from Cusco to Machu Picchu, a place I’ve wanted to visit since the fourth grade. And in August I attended Virtuoso Travel Mart in unashamed, excessive Las Vegas, a city as far removed from meditative silence and snow-capped adventure as a city could possibly be.

I have stories to tell.

But for two months I had myself convinced that I couldn’t stay in the room. I was either getting ready for Peru, caught up in work, or stuck in the angst and sluggishness of a re-entry that has felt endless. The excuses worked for awhile, and then the other day a friend was talking about herself when she said, “It just wasn’t a priority. We always make time for our priorities.” Bingo.

So I had a talk with myself. For the hundredth, okay, five hundredth time, I’ve renewed my pact not to abandon the part of me that lives below the chatter, the one who knows deeply and wholly what it means to stay in the room. Besides, I have photos I’m fairly certain will knock your socks off. All they need is a story.

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 weakened and faltered until the day it disappeared completely. In a blink, her tomorrows were numbered. 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.