Rebeccalou: This Writer’s Life

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.

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?”