As most of you are aware, Jason and I moved to London shortly after our wedding. In that time we visited most of Western Europe and Egypt, as well as touring around the UK. When we were at home in London, we had many guests, saw many shows, visited most of the museums and tourist attractions, ate at many restaurants, and had lots of other adventures. Although I wasn't on LJ at the time, I was writing up regular reports and sending them to friends & family throughout our stay. Over the past year I've been transferring these reports to LJ and have finally finished that process. If you're interested you can go back and read them, starting with our arrival. If you're looking for specific recommendations on things to do in various spots, comment here and I'm always happy to dig up the details.

Enjoy!

In this journal I share a lot of the recipes I find online or develop myself. Since people often ask me for pointers to those, here's an index, dated to stay at the top of the page:

( Click for Links to Recipe EntriesCollapse )

When I first encountered this question, I thought surely I must have done, but I couldn’t think of a story. Then came our most recent trip to Iceland.

Everyone tells you that if humans were really rational, we’d be much more worried about travelling by car than almost anything else we do. That lesson really came home to me as we drove back to Reykjavik from a lovely day on the Snaefellsnes peninsula.

We’d gone up to visit the Vatnshellir Cave, inspiration for Journey to the Center of the Earth. It’s an impressive magma tube, but the real highlight is the scenery along the way. Snow covered volcanoes on one side, pounding waves on the other, mysterious standing rocks and vast fields in between make for stunning views. We stopped along the way for a delicious lunch at the Langaholt Guest House and made it up to the cave in time for our three o’clock tour.

The day was overcast and colder than it had been in Reykjavik, with a strong wind blowing. Traversing the hundred feet from the welcome center to the cave entrance was a very chilly moment. Our guide was charming and told the obviously old jokes with the right amount of sheepishness. Standing in silence in the absolute darkness underground is always a profound experience. Jo had a little trouble with the open spiral staircase down into the depths and was very glad to be back on the surface.

I drove about halfway back toward Reykjavik before we stopped for gas and Jason took over. I fell asleep in the passenger seat and was awoken by Jo and Alice simultaneously saying “Whoa!” from the back seat. When I opened my eyes I couldn’t see a think out the windshield. We were in a complete whiteout of snow gusting across the road.

As each gust enveloped us in snow, Jason would slow down as quickly as he could. The road was also slippery with snow and two or three times I could feel the tires fishtailing over the pavement. From the drive out I knew that what was on either side of the highway was usually a fairly steep drop into a ditch and then either farmed fields or vast expanses of lava rocks. Each time the car began to slip I imagined us going off the road, the car rolling over into the sharp rocks, and us all freezing to death or dying from our injuries before anyone would find us. So, I thought, this is how it ends.

But Jason kept the car on the road and as darkness fell we approached the tunnel under the Hvalfjörður. We were all looking forward to more than three miles out of the wind and snow. As we came down the hill toward the tunnel, Jason said “What is that?” and we looked across to see a line of headlights stopped all the way up the hill on the other side of the fjord, with little blue lights twinkling their way down the empty lane opposite. There was a crash in the tunnel. It was closed.

We sat at the rotary where traffic turns left down onto the tunnel approach, trying to think if there were any option. The road around the fjord would add another thirty miles to the journey. The weather showed no signs of clearing for at least a couple of hours. The sign pointing to the right said “Akranes”.

What time is it, I asked, after about ten minutes of sitting there. Six-thirty, with at least another hour to Reykjavik, even if the tunnel opened right this minute. So we drove into Akranes while Jo found a plausible restaurant online and guided us to it.

The Gamla Kaupfélagið was almost deserted on a Wednesday night in the middle of a snowstorm, but they welcomed us in and gave us a marvelous meal. We had a wonderfully earthy lobster soup and wild mushroom risotto, delicious lamb and salmon, and one of the best tenderloins of beef I’ve ever eaten. We would have been perfectly happy to find an open pub, but this was a meal almost worth the trip!

Snow was still falling as we finished dinner, but our server told us that the tunnel was open, so we set off again. I offered to drive, but Jason said he was okay to continue. We made it to the tunnel, enjoyed 5770 meters of shelter, and then continued out into the night.

For miles at a time, Jason navigated from one post to the next, through the snow. He would sight one and drive toward it, hoping that by the time he reached it, the next would be visible. If it wasn’t, he’d slow or stop until the wind revealed it, and then proceed. Sometimes there were streetlights for a stretch, which helped. When the drop-off to the side was especially steep there would be a section of guardrail, which was lovely. He kept one eye on the GPS, to know whether the road was curving or straight ahead, because there was no way to know from looking. It was tedious and terrifying.

Finally we caught up to a pickup truck and with great relief followed them. They were actually moving a little more slowly than Jason had been, but it was wonderful to let them find the path for us. About ten miles from the city, the road we’d followed south turns to the west and at that point the wind was no longer blowing across the highway and we could see clearly ahead. Before long we were navigating the tiny streets to our flat.

We kicked off our boots in the entryway and shed our coats as we moved into the living room. We didn’t die, I said to Jo. She agreed that while it had seemed unlikely a few times, Jason had done a spectacular job and gotten us home safely.

We spent the next day wandering around the city, not ready to get back in the car yet. And then the following day we went snowmobiling up on Langjokull glacier. Much safer.

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Are you an extrovert or an introvert?

While I don’t think those categories are as rigid, or as useful, as most people seem to think, I’m pretty obviously extroverted. I enjoy social events, can easily make conversation with strangers, make friends comparatively quickly, and don’t find other people’s company exhausting in reasonable doses.

It has been funny to me that most people who identify as introverts feel that they are disadvantaged in the world and often shamed for how they prefer to interact with it. I spent a lot of my life being shamed for talking too much and feeling bad that I often make myself the center of attention in gatherings. I think that my mother’s idea of what it means to be a “lady” didn’t include calling attention to oneself and that idea is embedded pretty deeply. In the last twenty years I’ve worked at being more in control of my talking—not to talk less, necessarily, but to not do it reflexively—and to acknowledge the positives of being extroverted and own those as a valuable part of myself.

At the same time, whenever I see the “Introvert Bingo” memes and lists, I recognize a lot of myself there. I love to read. I spend most of my days alone. I hate meetings. I often feel awkward among strangers. I do most of my shopping online. Many of my friends are people I’ve never met, or rarely see in person. I nap daily. At parties I often need breaks and when I’ve had a lot of social time, I need time alone to recharge.

As with most ways of categorizing people, I don’t fit neatly into either box.

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What do you admire most about your mother?

My mother strove all her life to be of service to others. She was raised on a tobacco farm in rural North Carolina during the Great Depression, but thanks to her father’s value for the education he never got she went to college and became a teacher. As the wife of a smalltown minister, she was his professional partner, working alongside him to care for their congregations. She taught Sunday School, ran the women’s groups, served church suppers, hosted events, and listened to everyone’s problems with a patient smile.

She was an amazing housekeeper, eking nutritious meals out of a meagre budget and keeping us all clothed in handmade clothes and hand-me-downs. She saved everything that might be of use and knew how to clean anything and how to fix and reuse everything.

Beyond the scope of home and church, she volunteered as a member of the Women’s Club, serving as local, district, and state president. In 1978 she became the first woman on our School Board and served for eight years. After Dad retired and they moved to Clifton Park, my parents spent a decade working as an interim ministry team, finally recognizing the joint nature of their ministry and even putting her in the pulpit occasionally. When my father’s health had them sticking closer to home she joined the Friends of the Library where she ran their enormous, semi-annual book sales and was instrumental in their campaign to build a new library.

She suffered fools with remarkable grace, often adopting as her special friends the people that no one else could stand. She had high standards of behavior and could give a set down with admirable firmness, but was never rude, or cruel—to strangers, at least. She was a very political animal, remembering names and key facts to make others feel recognized, remembered and known. She wanted to be respected and admired and cared deeply about the impression she made and the reputation she built.

Mom really wore herself out downsizing and moving to Arlington. But even in her last community she became an integral part of yet another church, working on their rummage sales and showing up regularly to the weekly women’s coffee group. She adored Alice and loved to have her come to spend the day with her, or stay overnight, especially after my father passed away. One of the hardest things for her about aging was accepting others’ service and not feeling bad about herself for needing their help.

In January of 1990 she wrote me a letter and opened by saying that it seemed so strange to write the new year, like something out of science fiction. It seems like there ought to be a whole new way to be, she wrote, but I don’t know any way to be except pouring myself into service to others, which is its own kind of selfishness. May we all be so selfish.

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Have you ever sleep walked or sleep talked?

Oh, yes! I’ve never sleepwalked, that I know of, but I talk in my sleep all the time. Roommates and bedmates remark on it from time to time. Beckie swears I used to play basketball in my sleep when I was in middle school.

Two of my favorites happened the same week, shortly after we moved to London. Jason was actually going into the office while we waited for our net connection to be set up and would wake me up before he left. One morning he sat down on the bed next to me and I said “You look beautiful!” He was amused, since my back was turned toward him and my eyes were closed. He made me roll over and look at him and I said “Oh! You’re not wearing the double-breasted navy blue pinstriped suit!” I have no image of what I thought he looked like in my dream, but it sounds very fine!

The other one went like this:

Him: Time to wake up, sweetie.

Me: Who are you going to tell?

Him: Tell what?

Me: Aren’t you going to tell them?

Him: Tell who? What?

Me (actually waking up): Oh! You’re probably not going to tell anyone that you’re secretly the King of Armenia.

We agreed that was probably best kept to ourselves.

I’d love to remember more of the stories people have told me over the years of my sleep talk, but those are the ones that I can recall at the moment.

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Do you believe in a higher power?

Not really, no. At best I believe in a greater power, some kind of collective consciousness, or sustained zeitgeist. Mostly I’m deeply agnostic. I think that we do not have the perspective to understand existence as a whole. And I think that we are pattern-creating beings, so any pattern that we claim to perceive without hard data is suspect. We see pictures in the stars and clouds and can enjoy them and find meaning in them, but that meaning is intrinsic to ourselves, not an external reality.

That said, I have deep respect for the religious faith that sustains and nurtures many people. I tend to understand it as a metaphor for an underlying reality that we do not have the tools to comprehend directly. It makes sense to me that many people find the metaphors they were taught as children to be powerful and meaningful. I haven’t found one that gives me any sense of certainty, or that can be sustained on a universal scale.

The story I like best is The Egg, by Andrew Weir. In it a person discovers that they are every human being that has ever existed and that our world is a process of becoming. When we truly grasp that there is no “other,” that all human beings are ourselves, then we will attain a different level of awareness and transcend to a different level of existence. I don’t really believe that, but I see no downside to trying to behave as if it were true.

In the meantime, I don’t see that it really matters. Watson was shocked to discover that Sherlock Holmes doesn’t know that the Earth orbits the Sun and Holmes points out that he has probably known it at some point, but discarded it as information that makes no difference to his life. I do not think I would live my life differently if I believed in a divine spirit and since I don’t think we can ever truly know, I don’t spend a great deal of time focusing on it.

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What are your favorite movies?

The whole idea of favorites is a tricky one for me. When I answer this question, it’s often simply a matter of what movies I happen to think of at the moment. I’ve learned that’s fine in conversation—what people are asking is simply for an insight into what kinds of things you like, what they might talk about with you. But to really discern my favorites, I try to take a long view, to think about what movies have really stuck with me. It helps that a few years ago I went through a big tome listing all the movies released in the US and made a record of all the ones I can remember having seen. Looking back through the list, here are the ones that stand out—today, at least:

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai
Aliens
Antonia and Jane
Bend It Like Beckham
Better Off Dead
The Big Chill
Clueless
The Commitments
Dark City
Delicatessen
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Four Weddings and a Funeral
Galaxy Quest
The Game
Harold and Maude
Impromptu
Jupiter Ascending
The Matrix
Memento
O Brother, Where Art Thou
Ocean’s Eleven
Raiders of the Lost Ark
A Room with a View
sex, lies and videotape
Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back
The Station Agent
Truly, Madly, Deeply
Wayne’s World
What Dreams May Come
Where the Wild Things Are
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

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The best class I ever took was Oceanography, my last term at Wellesley. The combination of biology and physics and the glimpse into an almost entirely hidden world fascinated me. I often distracted my roommates by reading excerpts from my textbook—which I still have. I remember the explanation of centripetal force using the example of throwing snowballs at yourself on a merry-go-round, ending with the confession that the author had tried this themselves, “when younger, and more naive.” There were marvelous descriptions of the deep sea vent communities, the only ones on earth not dependent on the sun’s energy. I took that course to fulfill a requirement and sometimes think that if I’d taken it my first year, I would have ended up following that as a career.

The best class in my major was a comparative politics class on Race & Ethnicity, taught by Cynthia Enloe, who was visiting from Clark University that term. I remember being unenthusiastic about the subject matter when I signed up, but it was an exciting and eye-opening class that impacts my understanding of the world to this day. The central thesis of the class was that unless you ask the question “How do race and ethnicity operate in this situation?” you have not fully examined whatever you’re studying. We read books about the Ulstermen of Northern Ireland, the cannery workers of California, the cocaine industry in South America, and sugar farming in Florida. Enloe’s work was largely about women in the military—her book, Does Khaki Become You? is a great read—and she had spent time in the Phillippines helping sex workers cope with the closing of the US Navy base at Subic Bay, and supporting negotiations for improved working conditions for the people who make Levi’s jeans. Over the past six years, as my awareness of the racial injustice in our country has increased dramatically, I often find myself thinking about our discussions in Prof. Enloe’s class thirty years ago and wishing I could go back to them with new understanding.

But when I think “college,” the class that immediately comes to mind is Lit Hum. Literature Humanities has been part of the Core Curriculum at Columbia for over a hundred years and the list of books studied has changed only slightly. It’s a year-long course that meets two or three times a week. We all take it in sections of 15-20 students with graduate student advisors. Mine was a woman from Union Theological Seminary who was doing her thesis on the uses of water in the Bible and she took a very different approach to the classics, encouraging us to consider the metaphors and symbolism in each work. Robin really helped me to love the works of Homer and Virgil, especially, as well as turning me on to Toni Morrison. Our section met at 8am, so I often missed it, and at Christmas Robin gave me one of those coffee makers with a timer, in hopes of encouraging me to be part of the discussion more often, one of the most meaningful gifts I’ve ever received.

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What traits do you share with your father?

Physically, I'm built very much like my father, with his long arms and legs and heavy middle. My face is much more like my mother's, something that wasn't apparent to me until I reached my forties. I did seem to inherit his sinuses, however--we both can sneeze down the house and need a tissue frequently, while I can't remember ever seeing my mother blow her nose, even when she was sick. Our digestive systems seem very similar as well--we'd rather throw up and have it done with, while my mother would prefer to die first.

Intellectually I think we're very similar, loving a good book, or an interesting new idea, wanting to share it with those around us and to discuss what we find in it. I don't know whether my storytelling is inherited, or learned, but people have often remarked that I tell stories like a preacher, though I think I'm much better than he was at coming to the point, or delivering a punchline. Conversation is a central part of both our lives and key to how we experience the world is how we will tell the story of our experiences and observations. We're both natural leaders, with whatever charisma or authority it is that make other people think our ideas are worth following, but I think he was a better teacher than I've ever been, with much more patience for people who don't get our points.

Emotionally I'm very much like him--easily moved to tears and affection, willing to have an argument rather than let issues fester, but generally fairly positive and happy most of the time. I think that if I had known him as a peer I would have liked him very much. I miss talking with him, having his perspective and unconditional love in my life. He and I were a really good match and I feel incredibly lucky to have had him as a father.

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Who have been your closest friends throughout the years?

My friends are the crowning glory of my life and I've been lucky to develop deep, long-lasting relationships with many of them. This may take me a while!

My first best friend was Rhonda. Her parents were members of our church and her mother was one of my mom's closest friends. Rhonda was born eight months before me and she has been a fact of my life since I was born. We came all the way through school, Girl Scouts, and Sunday School together and although we haven't spent a great deal of time together since we each went off to college, we keep in touch and see each other every couple of years. She's wonderfully crafty and sends us marvelous Christmas presents every year. We've been there to support each other through life's highs and lows and there is an enduring closeness that connects us like family.

Rhonda was actually a year ahead of me until I skipped in 2nd grade. Until then my closest friends were the other kids from church, particularly Lori, Evelyn, Paul, and Mark. Lori and I spent hours playing with our Fisher-Price people--she had the airport--and Evelyn and I would roam the marshes out behind her house in Coeymans Hollow and read the same books. I remember tobogganing on the hill beside Mark's house and the Christmas gathering his parents hosted, and spending hours playing in our back yards with Paul. I'm barely in touch with them now, though I had the chance to really reconnect with Mark earlier this year, to my great delight, but when I think of my early years they were a constant presence as we learned how to be people together.

My other best friend in elementary school was Tricia. We were classmates all but one year, I think, from 2nd through 12th grade and when I went to Columbia, she came to Barnard and spent a summer living with me in Boston. In high school we got to know Holly through drama club and there were two new kids in town that year, Lynmarie and Keith, all of whom became close friends of mine in different ways. I also spent a bunch of time with Karen--we wrote fanfic together and watched MTV when her family were one of the very first in town to get cable. There were various fallings out and losing touch, but I'm loosely in touch with all but one of them and enjoy seeing them online and catching up when we have a chance.

I have a lot of treasured friends from my college years, but only one with whom I actually attended the same school. Susan and I were the same year at Columbia, took a couple of classes together, and had many late nights and adventures. We stayed in vague touch through our twenties and she was one of my bridesmaids. We've actually become closer over time and these days touch base at least once a week online and talk often--we spent over an hour on the phone last night catching up. While we never spend as much time together as we'd like, we do manage to see each other at least three or four times a year. She is an amazing person--I've never introduced her to anyone who didn't find her charming and want to know her better--gives incredible hugs and makes me feel very loved whenever we talk, which is a marvelous gift.

The other lasting friend from my Columbia days is Sumati--she was a Barnard student I met through Tricia. She came to Boston for grad school and my sisters both adored her. I would say that we stayed very close until we both got married, one week apart. She moved to California at that point, while I left California for London, but we catch up a couple of times a year on the phone and see each other whenever we're in the same town. She is incredibly intelligent and insightful, with a very different perspective on life that I've always found both invigorating and grounding.

Despite never actually attending MIT--the only course I took for credit there was aerobics--most of my college-era friends went there, or at least hung out there. The two big groupings of people were the theatre gang and the Fenway House folk. For a while Larry, Rachel, steve, and I were so close that we joked about changing our last names to symbolize our family-like connection--Larry favored "Roosevelt," because Eleanor didn't have to change her name. Rachel and I shared an apartment for a term, as well as working the same job, dating the same men, and doing the same shows. Fenway House was like a fraternity in the good ways--closeness among the residents varied and shifted, but sharing a home and maintaining our house together created the basis for some of my longest-lasting, deepest friendships. The two that have stayed the closest are steve and Dave.

steve and I started talking on the phone regularly while I was still at Columbia. When we graduated and each had jobs with a lot of repetitive tasks and minimal supervision, we would spend hours chatting while we worked. I took an apartment in the same building where he lived with Tom for my last year before moving to California, which made it even more convenient to spend hours talking. A three-hour time difference turned out to be perfect for our respective schedules, so while I lived on the West Coast we talked almost every night. We used to each subscribe to TIME Magazine and would especially call each other to talk through the news of each issue. When I moved to London the time difference was trickier, but we found that if I got up at 7am I could catch him as he was getting home from the clubs and chat while I was waking up and he was winding down. These days we only manage to connect about once a week and see each other once a month, or so, but he's still probably the person with the most accurate model of me, the person who knows the most about what and how I think and feel about the world.

Dave and I were good friends while we were at Fenway and lived together, for a year--or two, depending on how you look at it--after I graduated. That was a particularly difficult time in his life and my focus was elsewhere, leaving us with a bunch of issues to resolve. We did stay in touch and during my years in California developed an extended email conversation that healed and deepened our friendship. After moving back to Boston and founding Theatre@First I was delighted that he came out to work with us for more than a decade. We still talk online and hang out regularly. Our conversation has ebbed and flowed over time, but continues to be one of the richest of my life.

We found Jo in London. Her second cousin introduced us and we quickly became close friends. She decided to move back to Boston--where we'd overlapped briefly, but never met--shortly after Jason and I did. She became one of the founding members of Theatre@First, developed a godmother relationship with Alice when she came along, and joined First Parish not long after we did. I'm not always the friend she wishes I could be, and she's had a lot of big changes in her life over the past few years that have impacted our closeness, but talking and working with her is always a joy and I try to appreciate that and celebrate her, always.

There are so many other people that I could talk about. Gilly, who gave me this project as a gift, who has taught me so much about design and courage and faith, and who makes the effort to reach out and make plans on a regular basis. Jeanne, one of my friends from the science-fiction convention world, who has kept in touch and popped back up and lets me edit her wonderful stories and connects different pieces of my world and shared the sadness of dealing with aging parents and their aftermath at exactly the right time. Drea, who is one of the most creative, intelligent, brave, and loving people I've ever been close to. Leon, who is always a breath of fresh air in my life and has the knack of going deep despite long absences. Glen, who drove cross-country with me and is just the best person for turning bad experiences into adventures and always smiles in a way that makes me feel special when he sees me walk in a room. Regis, who is an absolute rock and yet one of the most tender people I've ever known. Lindasusan, who has grown and elaborated her phenomenal self in so many breathtaking ways over the years, and her amazing wife, Emily. Linda Marie, who takes me way too seriously, but doesn''t hesitate to call me on my crap. The several ex-partners who've transmuted into friends and are treasured for finding a relationship with me that was possible to continue through the years after our romances withered. The many wonderful women of Theatre@First that I've had the chance to become closer with and am afraid to name for fear of leaving out someone important and obvious. The astonishing people of First Parish, many of whom I feel very close with, despite not having spent enough time together yet to justify that. And all the friends I'm forgetting at the moment, but whose memory makes me smile when I remember times of being close to one another.

Friendship is the pillar of my life and I am endlessly grateful for all of them.

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How is life different today compared to when you were a child?

There's always a temptation to compare one's own childhood and adulthood and to see the world of our youth as simpler and larger than the world we face today. I think the biggest difference between Alice's childhood and mine is that she is almost never bored.

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to do when I was a kid. School was pretty tedious, but after school and in the summers it felt like there just wasn't a lot to do. I watched a bunch of tv--there were four channels: ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS. There was relatively little tv made for kids (though more than just a decade earlier) and I could only watch what was being broadcast at the moment. I read every book in the children's section of our relatively small library, supplemented by books that my eldest sister bought me on trips to Boston, and completely inappropriate books from the shelves of my middle sister and even my father. I played with my toys, I had what we now call playdates, I hung around with the kids up the block--my mom kind of hated that, as they were not "our sort". Most of my friends didn't live right in the center of town, and I could only talk to them if one of my parents wasn't on the single landline. I played in our backyard or went over to the playground at school, or later went to the village pool and playground on my own. I explored the woods down behind the bank across the street from our house. I wrote stories and plays. I had ballet once a week. Sometimes I helped my mom with whatever housework she was doing, but she tended to be impatient with my efforts and find it easier to do it herself. I helped my dad if he had mailings to fold, or bulletins to copy on the mimeograph machine. It feels as though I spent a lot of time at loose ends.

Alice puts in long days. During the school year she has after school activities most days (chorus, piano, kung fu, dance) and if she has a free day she often has a friend over. She has more homework than I remember doing at her age. But when she has free time she has the entire world at her fingertips. She has had lots of toys and art supplies, costumes, and kits, but these days barely touches those. She has a gazillion books, both hardcopy and on her Kindle. She can watch any of the dozens of made-for-her-age tv shows whenever she wants (another big change is that she has watched almost nothing made for adults, whereas I watched whatever my sisters and parents watched). She has YouTube and video games and all the rest of the internet at her fingertips. She can text or talk with her friends any time.

I'm interested to see what difference that makes for her as she matures. When I talk about this, many people respond with regret, feeling that the boredom was motivating and forced us all to invent our own toys and games and projects. But I don't see Alice as any less inventive than I was at her age, just with more resources. I love all the opportunities that she gets to have, because of the ways that things have changed, as well as the contrast between my upbringing in a tiny, rural town and hers here in Somerville. As she builds her own life, I am excited to see how she absorbs all these inputs and experiences and what she makes of it all.

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A friend posted an image to Facebook with the following text:

Nine Types of Rest

1. time away
2. permission to not be helpful
3. something "unproductive"
4. connection to art and nature
5. solitude to recharge
6. a break from responsibility
7. stillness to decompress
8. safe space
9. alone time at home

It was from a group called Trauma-Informed Practice, but I don't know if the content originated there. I re-posted it and it seemed to resonate with other people--one friend used it for her weekly self-care post and another asked if she could share it with her writing group. I've been coming back to it and finding new thoughts each time.

1. time away
This turns out to be enormously important for me. I need to get away and stay away for long enough to really let go of whatever's going on at home. A few years ago there was a whole year when I never made it out of town for longer than a weekend and that turned out to be crazy-making. On the other hand, I spent two months away last year and that was awesome, but when I came home I got super depressed, even though I love my life here. I'm much better now, but still talking about this in therapy.

2. permission to not be helpful
I've gotten a lot better at this over the past decade, but it can still be hard for me not to try to solve other people's problems. It feels so good to be useful to others, but as my mother once wisely told me, that can be its own form of selfishness. I've learned a lot about letting other people also be helpful and about listening without jumping in to fix things. It's a work in progress, but it's definitely good when I can give myself this permission.

3. something "unproductive"
On the one hand, I do spend a fair amount of non-productive time. On the other hand, I rarely give myself permission to be unproductive. There are days when I struggle to do two or three things that count to me and I will sometimes tell Jason "I did a thing! Not useless!" There is also a double-bind operating in my life: it's essential to me that my work be recognized and validated by others, but more importantly by myself. So I have asserted that all of the following are part of my work: laundry, cooking, errands, family scheduling, travel planning, parenting logistics, relationship maintenance, church committee meetings and tasks, activism efforts, theatre meetings/administration/outreach, the work I do to direct shows, the time I spend strengthening and maintaining my communities, and throwing parties. That leaves very little in my life that doesn't count as "work," and so my life/work balance feels out of whack, which is kind of ironic for someone who hasn't held a fulltime paying job in nearly twenty years.

4. connection to art and nature
I don't prioritize this as much as might be healthy for me. I love art of all kinds and spending time immersed in other people's thoughts and images is important. I don't really get a lot out of nature. Don't get me wrong--I love a good sunset, a walk in the woods is a nice break, a pretty view can be breathtaking. But many of my friends and co-religionists seem to find deep spiritual connection there that eludes me. On the other hand, a good play can break my heart right open and I can happily spend hours wandering an art museum, absorbing meaning and memory from the works there. But I almost never get to a museum or gallery unless I'm travelling and I miss half the shows I might enjoy seeing, because other things fill up my time.

5. solitude to recharge
Most people experience me as extremely extroverted, probably because they only see me when I'm out and about. I'm very comfortable with other people and I need conversation and physical contact regularly. But I think most people would be surprised by how much time I spend alone each day. When my schedule has me out and about more than home and alone I get exhausted pretty quickly. Jason and I share office space and we do chat occasionally through the day--and if he has his door open and I'm not engaged in a project, I'm more likely than he is to initiate conversation--but I do need quality time by myself regularly.

6. a break from responsibility
This one is huge. If I've got a magic power it's the ability to say "Let's do this thing!" and have people follow me. I have leadership roles at the theatre and at First Parish and much of the management load of our family has fallen on me. The best thing for me is when someone else makes the plan and is in charge of seeing it through. That's a pretty rare thing in my life, though I've worked to increase it over the past decade. It's actually easiest to let go of responsibility while travelling, when the plans are relatively simple and easy to hand off, which may be part of why time away feels so vitally important.

7. stillness to decompress
My need for this seems to be satisfied by regular, small doses. I get it mostly during shared silence in worship and in srivasana, the resting pose at the end of most yoga classes. It feels very good to me, but I don't seek out greater opportunities to rest in stillness.

8. safe space
This is the one that I know least about. I'm not sure how I would define it. I know a couple of places in my life that feel unsafe, but I am not called upon to spend much time in those. Of course, these days my country feels pretty unsafe and traumatic, and there are definitely spaces where I rest from that barrage of ugliness and offensiveness. This feels like an area for me to explore more fully.

9. alone time at home
Unlike most moms I know, this is one that I do get pretty regularly. With Jason and I both working at home, it's not a daily occurrence, but Jason and Alice travel together (or, like now, separately at the same time) at least two or three times a year. I have to be mindful not to fill that time with other things, but it is a real treat whenever I get it.

If you have thoughts to share about where you find rest and what kinds of rest you need, I'd love to hear them!

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What would you save if your house was on fire?

I thought this would be harder for me. I don’t tend to fret about possible disasters, so it’s not something I’d really considered. We have a lot of things and yet I don’t care that much about any of them—in general the things that matter to me do so because they carry memories, or fit their purpose beautifully.

I am assuming, by the way, that Sadie and any people in the house have been safely evacuated before I’m called on to make this decision. Obviously they are the truly important considerations. I’m also assuming that this question doesn’t cover the jewelry that I always wear, or my phone, which I would reflexively grab. That last could be replaced, of course, and I don’t especially care about the thing itself, but having that gone would be an annoying start to the recovery process.

I’m also struck by how much this answer is changed by modern technology. Pictures of my family: copies are in the cloud. Important financial and legal documents: copies are in the cloud. Books, music, and other media: in the cloud. So there are a lot of potential answers that just don’t matter as much any more.

Our beautiful house would be a terrible loss in itself, of course, but I’d also be excited to rebuild and make a new home. I’d probably cry over losing all the family memorabilia that is stored in my basement, but there’s no way I could haul all of that out in time, or choose between any of it, and the most important bits have all been scanned. There are many pieces of art and souvenirs of our travels that I would mourn, but too many to choose from if our lives were in danger.

The one thing that I could think of is the Hirshfeld print.



It’s a drawing of Jason’s uncle, J.D. Cannon, being directed as Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing in Central Park by Joe Papp. We received it as a gift from Uncle Jack’s wife, Alice, shown knitting in the foreground, for whom our daughter is named. It has a lot of meaning to us on a number of different levels, and is absolutely irreplaceable. It wouldn’t be worth rushing back into a burning building to save, but if I were running out the door, that’s the one thing I would grab.

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If you could go anywhere and do anything, what would your perfect Valentine’s Day be?

Valentine’s Day, in particular, isn’t that big a deal for me. We often don’t go out that evening, because—as a friend put it—it’s amateur night at all the fine dining establishments. In general my ideal for the night is to go for a walk together, have a lovely meal one way or another, and do something story-worthy.

I’ve had a few Valentine’s Days that were particularly memorable:

My worst breakup happened in January and left me feeling deeply defeated. The relationship I’d spent three years in ended very badly when I dumped him for the guy he’d pushed me to have sex with, only to be dumped in turn three weeks later when that guy decided to stay with the girlfriend who had pushed him into having sex with me, and my original boyfriend had already moved on to the woman who left her husband for him. I ended up crashing with friends for a few months and being congratulated by people who’d never liked my boyfriend for having something I’d poured myself into for three years come crashing down.

Valentine’s Day was approaching and I was feeling really low when a friend from college, also single at the time, proposed that the two of us go out to dinner together that night. We spent a marvelous evening at Helmand, an Afghani restaurant in Cambridge, eating and drinking delicious things, bitching about men as we laughed up a storm, and eventually deciding that we would look for a place to live together. After weeks of feeling defeated and broken, that night I began to really believe I could build a new life for myself.

A couple of years ago my husband and I had rehearsal on the night itself, so we celebrated a couple of days early. We went to the Tasting Counter—one of my very favorite restaurants at the moment—and had a divine multicourse tasting dinner with sublime wine pairings. When that wrapped up we checked the movie listings and decided to see Dead Pool, which was opening that night. So we spent the first part of the evening in hushed, refined sybaritism, and the latter part howling in laughter at Ryan Reynolds’ crude antics. It was a glorious night!

But the most significant Valentine’s Day was the first I spent with Jason. We had been together only a few months and after a couple of years of being mostly-single I was still pretty tender around the idea of the holiday, not wanting to make a big deal of it and not wanting to do anything canonical. I noticed that Neil Gaiman, whom both of us liked and neither of us had seen at that point, was doing a reading at the Palace of Fine Arts that night.

So after dinner at my house we drove into the city and took our places in the darkened auditorium. Neil is a marvelous reader, particularly of his own stories, which tend to have a dark, wry humor even as they are horrifying you, or wrenching at your emotions. One of the stories he read that night was “The Wedding Present,” a story that is hidden in the Introduction of a collection of his short stories called Smoke and Mirrors, as a treat for people who read introductions.

It’s about a couple who receive an envelope at their wedding that tells the story of their relationship, magically getting longer as the years pass, but a darker, twisted alternate version where everything that goes well and right in their real lives, doesn’t, and the story-versions become increasingly unhappy with each other and with themselves. I won’t give away the ending for those who’ve yet to read it, but it’s a beautiful story of some loves being worth the pain. In the car afterward we cried together and I said that I thought we might love that deeply and Jason said that he already did. We’ve seen Neil read many times since then and it’s always a lovely experience, but that one—well, that was Valentine’s Day.

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Have you ever won anything?

I've won games from time to time, a couple of raffle prizes at benefit events, and I actually won a trivia game at Theatre@First’s recent Shakespeare Slam, so it is not true that I never win anything. But I don’t get picked out of the audience to participate, I don’t win at sweepstakes, or slot machines. If there’s skill involved I do a little better—like the trivia game, or card games, and I do pretty well at board games that don’t require a great deal of strategy. But in general, I don’t think of myself as a winner in those contexts.

I used to resent that. There was the feeling of futility raising my hand, filling out the ticket, sharing to win. The sadness of hopes dashed and dreams unrealized. The suspicion that the universe is chuckling at my expense. It wasn’t something I spent much time on, just a little zing at every loss.

Then I realized that I am a huge winner on so many more important fronts. I was incredibly lucky in my birth family, who bestowed on me some extraordinary privileges, while instilling in me a sense of love and confidence in myself that astonishes my therapists. I was lucky enough to find my people relatively early and to have an amazing community. Despite some pretty risky choices along the way, I’ve been very lucky not to have suffered many consequences of my stupidity. I won the grand prize with my husband and together we’ve been lucky in so many ways. Despite the bad hand I was dealt in fertility, I had the resources to have the child I had always wanted and then gotten lucky in her, as well. I won my dream house and my days are filled with meaningful work (albeit unpaid, but I’m lucky enough for that not to be a deal-breaker). I have won my dream vacation, many times over, without having to listen to timeshare spiels. I could go on and on about how lucky I have been, how much I have, and how grateful I am for it.

I definitely feel like a winner.

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What was your fertility experience?

The previous question was originally “What was your pregnancy and birth experience?” but those are two separate questions and, in my case, skip right over the most difficult part of the process.

Memory is full of shifting layers, changing focal distances, and altered perspectives. The following was written in 2013, six years after the events I describe. And now it’s been six years since then and reading it I can see how much further I’ve come from what I hope will always have been the most difficult time in my life.
_____________________________________

When we married, in 2000, Jason very much wanted to have a couple of years of marriage before embarking on parenthood. So we moved to London and had a lovely time and didn’t start trying to get pregnant until early 2002, when I was 33.

Now, I knew that I might have difficulty getting pregnant. My sisters and I are nine years apart, after all. What I didn’t know was that my grandmother *also* had trouble getting pregnant—found that out when Alice was a few years old, from a random family story Mom told. But I wasn’t exactly shocked when it didn’t take in the first year.

At that point, both Jason and I started testing. Turned out that he had a varicocele, which had to be removed—causing a small hernia in his groin, which then had to be fixed in 2010. Fun times. In the meantime I had various tests, including the hysterosalpingogram, which I love to say—it’s a womb with a hue! Nothing seemed wrong on my end, but I didn’t get pregnant.

By this time, I was starting to get depressed. I feel lucky, in three ways: first, because my depression was situational, I could explain to people why I was depressed and they were pretty supportive and understanding and I avoided a lot of the negatives that I know can come with depression; secondly, when the situation was resolved, the depression went away, and while I definitely know that depression is a pathway my brain has learned and I will have to be wary of it for the rest of my life, it’s not an ongoing issue for me; and thirdly, now that it’s gone I feel very privileged to have had the opportunity to see what that’s really like, so that I have a better understanding of what so many of my own friends, not to mention so many people in general, are living with every day. Oh, there’s a fourth way: I’m pretty proud that I think it took me only about three weeks to realize what I had was depression and to get help, and that help was readily available and I was treated professionally and with compassion without any financial strain. So, those are the good things about being depressed for more than three years. The bad part, of course, was being depressed.

In the meantime we embarked on fertility treatment at Reproductive Science Center in Lexington. First we did several rounds of plain old sex, while taking Clomid. That didn’t work. Then we did four rounds of ICI—that’s the high tech acronymn for what is essentially the turkey-baster method, or, as I like to call it, the “poke in the cervix with a sharp stick”. They didn’t offer any medications for that procedure—I hear other places give valium, or that they would have given me valium if they’d known I was in pain (because apparently my agonized gasps, yelps and moaning failed to alert them), but I got to grit my teeth and swear a lot. After that we moved up to IVF—this is the real “test-tube baby” part, for those of you following along at home.

During the first round, despite excellent follicle production and retrieval, none of the embryos survived to be implanted. The second round resulted in a chemical pregnancy—that’s where the hormone numbers go up and then…come back down to baseline within a couple of weeks. By this time we had maxed out what was then the $5000 lifetime cap on insurance for fertility treatments, so we were paying about $10K per round on our own. I had learned to give myself shots (as I said at the time, I’d always drawn the line at poking holes in myself to get high, yet here I was huddled in my basement every night with the needles laid out before me) and come to hate the dildo-cam, especially since it turns out I’m sensitive to the gel they use.

The hardest part is the hope. While you’re going through a cycle, you have to believe it will work—you have to, or why on earth would you be doing these ridiculous things to yourself? So you believe and you think positively and you visualize and when the news comes back negative, it is crushing. Because not only did it not work, but you were a fool, a fool to ever believe that this dream could come true, that you deserve to be a mother, that you are not an utter failure as a biological creature. And then they want you to do it again. At the fertility clinic that’s all they care about—that you do it again, exactly as they tell you, that you have no other focus in your life, that you bend everything else around that schedule, that you become nothing but a walking womb.

At this time I got some difficult news and the depression was swallowing me whole. Fortunately, I correctly interpreted serious suicidal ideation as a bad symptom, rather than a factual statement about the world and my life, and got on anti-depressants for a few months. Turns out I’m hella sensitive to SSRIs, what a surprise (not actually—next time you really want to hear about my bad trip). But they got me stabilized and eventually I was able to continue. Third round, another chemical pregnancy.

Fourth round—and now for something completely different. After three rounds of failure, the RSC team decided to try a different protocol, part of which involved giant horse needles full of progesterone in my butt every night. Not only did this result in the most erotic dreams of my entire life, but it also ushered in a new era for several friends who were called on for injection duty when Jason had to be out of town. Apparently there is a protein deficiency of the uterine lining that is impossible to detect without a biopsy that no insurance company will pay for, but in theory there’s nothing wrong with treating someone as if they had that deficiency, so that’s what we were trying. Of course, if it worked, we still wouldn’t know—that might just be the round that happened to catch—but it was a new approach and I was definitely ready for that.

I was starting to say that this would be my last round and sending off for applications for graduate programs in theatre. Jason was hoping to talk me into continuing through the rest of the year and we’ll never know who would have won that argument, because at last, I got pregnant. And it stuck. And forty weeks later, just after my 38th birthday, I had an incredible child who has been a joy every day since. And it was all worth it.

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This was written a couple of weeks after Alice’s birth. Reading through it the most surprising thing is how little I remember of any of it…

On Sunday afternoon Jason was working with our friend, Jo, to get the last bits of painting done in the bathroom, while I was busy making a huge batch of chicken pot pie as part of my project to fill our new freezer. Leah had arrived from Northampton to spend a couple of days with us and Jack had come by to talk about set design issues for Arms & The Man, but had left shortly before.



Jo had just helped me to take the pot pie out of the oven at 8:30pm, when I realized I needed to pee—this was a frequent occurrence—so I ran upstairs and barely made it before there was a small gush of liquid. It was odd, but I just thought it was a new variation on having to pee all the time. I went back downstairs and felt a cramp, but it passed quickly and I thought I must be hungrier than I had thought. I had started dishing up the pot pie, when I felt myself leaking again, so I went into the downstairs bathroom, where Jason was working and, again, there was an odd gush. The dots connected and I told Jason that I thought my water was breaking, but it seemed to be happening gradually and we’d just see how it went.

We dished up the pot pie and took it to the table, when I felt things letting go again, so I ran for the john once more and this time there was a much larger gush, followed by another cramp. Back at the table, I explained to Jo and Leah what was going on. I finished my dinner and then Jason put in a call to the OB’s office, while Jo and Leah helped me finish packing up my hospital bag and I called my sisters and parents and Jason let his mom know that things were starting to happen. There was no return call from the OB after half an hour, so Jason called again and it turned out the first page had gone out with the wrong number entered. This time a nurse practitioner called back within about ten minutes.

The NP questioned me and recommended that I head in to Mt. Auburn for fetal monitoring. We finished packing up and finally got out the door about quarter to eleven. The contractions had continued to come about every ten to twelve minutes and I’d had some more leaking and another big gush. Fortunately, I had bought some Depends pads and that was mostly catching the fluid. I decided that I preferred to drive—I tend to feel the bumps less when I’m the one driving—and we made it to the hospital just before eleven. I went in through the emergency entrance, while Jason went to park the car, but the main admissions desk was still open, so they sent me upstairs to fill out the paperwork there and Jason met me at the desk.

We got our paperwork and bracelet and headed up to the Birthing Place on the fifth floor. I went to the bathroom again and then went into an exam room. The nurse on duty—Pam, who led our childbirth prep classes—got me hooked up to the monitors and then the OB on call, Dr. Sylvia Fine, examined me externally and guessed the baby’s weight at a little under seven pounds. They had some trouble getting a good recording of the heartbeat and contractions, but everything seemed to be going fine. Then I started throwing up and they moved me over to Birthing Room 1, where I was able to shower off and get better recordings. Pam had me try the birthing ball, but I found the vibration of it exacerbated my nausea and gave up on that pretty quickly.

At that point they wanted me to stay, but I was eager to go home, so after an initial IV of fluid and antibiotics, they let us leave about 2am. The contractions were coming about every five minutes, but I wasn’t actually feeling about half of them, so I still had about ten minutes of feeling fine in between them. On the way home, the nausea was hitting more strongly and the contractions coming harder and faster. We had hoped to watch Battlestar Galactica and get a few hours of sleep in our own bed, but I was unable to focus on the TV and I started heaving pretty continuously.

After about ninety minutes of this—poor Leah, having to listen to my distress—I decided I’d been wrong to think I wanted to be at home and we headed back, with Jason driving this time. During the time at home, I had started asking him to count while the contractions lasted and I found that really helped me, especially as we bounced along the bumpy Cambridge streets.

Pam, the nurse, teased me a little for coming back so quickly, but I just said that now I knew that I wanted to be there, which was good to know and would make things easier for me and she shut right up. She is an older woman—thirty-six years as an obstetric nurse—with a no-nonsense manner, but very compassionate when needed. While I was throwing up, she held my head and patted my back and made me feel about as comforted as possible. Very quickly I requested anti-nausea drugs and waited until the Zofran took effect before deciding that even without the nausea, I still wasn’t dealing well with the pain of the contractions and wanted an epidural.

I was amused to read the Entertainment Weekly’s Shaw Report (their version of “Hot or Not”) this week and find that silent births are “out,” hiring a midwife is “five minutes ago,” and what’s “in”? Yup—epidurals. I feel so trendy now, but at least I was ahead of the curve!

The insertion of the epidural catheter into the fluid sac around my spinal cord wasn’t painful, although it did feel quite odd, and it was definitely a relief. From all accounts—and the staff’s feedback—my epidural was particularly good, in that I never lost control of my lower body. It felt numb and I couldn’t feel the contractions at all, but I could still sit up and roll over more than the staff seemed to expect. I think that if some emergency had required me to get up and walk, I could have done it with some concentration, but was just as happy not to have to. Having the urinary catheter in was a relief, as well—after weeks of having to pee constantly, I could just relax and forget about that particular function. I got a little too relaxed when the epidural was first kicking in—my diastolic dropped down to 24—so they gave me some ephedrin via IV and when that didn’t have much effect, the anesthesiologist hit me with a syringe of the stuff and that picked things right up.

That was all done by about 6am on Monday morning and then came several hours of lying in bed, watching the sunrise over Boston and the rush hour traffic building and ebbing. Because I have moderate sleep apnea, any time I began to really drift off to sleep, my oxygen level would dip and a beeping alarm would start up and if I didn’t grab the mask and take some deep breaths, the nurse would pop her head in and remind me. But when I was awake, it was fine. So I would take off the mask to talk to someone, or have some ice chips, and then drift off and the alarm would go and… That made it difficult to get much solid sleep.



The shift changed at 8am and the team that would actually deliver the baby came on. The OB on call was Dr. Amy McGaraghan. She was being shadowed by a Harvard Med student named Katie, who not only attended all of the doctor’s time with me, but came by to interview us about our experiences with pregnancy, which passed the time very pleasantly. My nurse was a pleasant, younger woman named Chris, who grew up in New Hampshire, had lived for several years in San Diego, and recently returned to New England, so we had a pleasant time chatting about the differences between the coasts.

There was a little excitement on the ward, accompanied by much screaming, as two women both came in around the same time, both 10cm dilated on arrival—too late for pain meds. Chris and Katie both rushed to assure me that I shouldn’t let the screaming scare me, as it wasn’t going to be like that for me. I was too relaxed to worry much, but it added to the difficulty of sleeping. Jason slept through most of the morning, waking up occasionally to check on me and read to me, but I encouraged him to get sleep while he could. He ordered a breakfast sandwich from the cafeteria and pronounced it very tasty.

We were able to use our cell phones in the birthing suite, which was a nice surprise, so I talked to my sister, Beckie, a couple of times to keep her updated and we agreed that she would come over at lunchtime and see how things were going.

The various external monitors continued to not provide as clear readings as the staff wanted, so we agreed to switch to internal monitoring—one inserted alongside the baby’s head to record my contractions and the other attached to the baby’s scalp to watch her vital signs. I began to be very amused by all the tubes and wires trailing out of my lower half and to be just as glad I didn’t have to see or feel them.

At some point late morning, the doctor checked me and I was 8cm dilated and she recommended a dose of pitocin to pick up the pace of my contractions. That worked like a charm and we called Beckie to say that she should plan to stay once she got there. She arrived about one and the contractions were starting to be much stronger. As the epidural ebbed, I began to be able to feel them more and more. The doctor was in the OR doing a c-section and sent word that I should not start pushing. Katie and Chris had me do a little “practice” pushing to see if I could get the hang of it and that went well enough that we didn’t do it for long.

Beckie arrived and settled in and eventually the doctor came in and the real work began. We tried various positions and I found that I was most comfortable on all fours—basically in child pose—and that being on my side felt really awkward and ineffective. Being on my back was also fine, but not as effective at that point as they wanted. I moved around, pushing with the contractions, for what I guess was about two hours. Eventually I ended up on my back again, with Jason holding one leg, Katie the other, and Beckie holding my hand.

The last twenty minutes hurt. A lot. The room was pretty crowded at that point, with Jason, Beckie, Dr. McGaraghan, Katie, Janet (the nurse who replaced Chris at the afternoon shift change), the pediatrician and the pediatric nurse all standing around and saying encouraging things. The one time I swore during the process was when it felt as though everyone were jabbering at me to the point that it was making it hard to focus and follow the doctor’s instructions, so I told them all to shut up. At another point, I suddenly started crying, and everyone but Jason said “what’s wrong?!” and he said “it hurts!” It’s good to have someone who understands me!

For a while we were making good progress, but we kept getting the crown of her head just poking out and then slipping back between contractions—I just couldn’t hold it long enough to pop. So the doctor asked if we’d be ok with her using the vacuum suction thingy and we said sure. She attached it and used it to hold the baby’s head in place between two contractions and on the third, out came Alice at 4:24pm.

The last push, to get her body out, was easy and then the pediatric folk set to work on cleaning her off—they got Jason to cut the cord, which he hadn’t been planning to do, but was glad to have been involved in the process—while the doctor got the placenta out. That thing was enormous! After that there was apparently some bleeding that they were concerned about for a few minutes, but it let up and seems to have been ok. I was pretty exhausted by this time, so it was all a little blurry. The doctor checked for tears, but found only abrasions, three of which were bleeding enough for her to tack up with a stitch. All the tubes and wires were removed, except for my IV tap, which they left in just in case I were to have more bleeding and need fluids or drugs.



They brought Alice to me after the weights and measures routine and the three of us took a good look at each other and I was able to get her to latch on and nurse for a few minutes right away. Then Jason went off to the nursery with her for her first bath and testing, while Beckie stayed with me. Janet had me up on my feet pretty quickly and seemed surprised that I was able to walk. It took a bit of concentration getting to the bathroom, but by the time I came back, it felt much more normal. Beckie packed up all our junk and Janet popped me in a wheelchair for the trip down to my recovery room, on the other end of the floor.







Jason came back with the baby and we began to settle in. We ordered some food to be brought up for all of us—chicken soup and a grilled cheese sandwich were very tasty after twenty-four hours of fasting—and before we could finish, the rest of the aunts & uncles arrived, singing “venite adoremus”. OK, not really, but that was the theme of the evening. By about 8pm we said goodnight to everyone and settled in for our first night as a family of three.



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Did you have a favorite planet as a child?



My elder sister is eighteen years older than I am. She went off to college the year I was born--in fact, my baptism was postponed until the day after Anne's graduation, because the grandparents were already planning to travel to us that weekend. So throughout my childhood she was an intermittent presence, coming home on the weekends and holidays with a suitcase full of laundry and marvelous stories to share.

That was also the period when she was establishing her independence from my parents, the tail end of the 1960s and into the 1970s, a very different time from the Great Depression, in which my parents' values were forged. There were a lot of conflicts. Anne would say something provocative--sometimes deliberately, but mostly not--and Mom would say something dismissive and Anne would snap at her and Dad would defend her and attempt, in his booming bass, to explain why she was wrong. It was awful.

Not that I was immune from this--our father was very loving, but also a passionate man, with a big voice, and not the world's largest supply of tact. It was easy to feel that he was yelling at us when he got the least bit heated in his delivery. Beckie tended to duck and cover when Dad got going, but Anne and I never mastered that trick.

When Anne saw that her exchanges with Dad, or his lectures and criticisms of either of us, were upsetting me, she took me aside and told me to think about Jupiter. "It's beautiful," she said, showing me pictures of the Great Red Spot in National Geographic, "and it has thirteen moons. Learn their names."

When I was about eight, I decided that I wanted to learn to play bridge. Beckie happily gave up the spot at the table she'd never wanted and I got to play whenever Anne hadn't brought along a friend or lover who, while being otherwise generally unacceptable to my parents, would always be welcome if they could make a fourth.



Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto...

My dad always wanted to be a teacher and loved lecturing, but was not a great instructor. His explanations tended to be far too complicated, with too much information thrown in all at once. And when his pupil became confused, or forgot a key point, he would become frustrated and critical.



Amalthea, Himalia, Elara...

I was a terrible bridge player. I've never had a head for strategy and despite an excellent memory I've never been able to keep track of what cards are played. Bidding made little sense to me, even at its most basic level, and if my father--with whom I was almost always paired--tried any of the more complicated codes he tried to teach me, I could never grasp how I was supposed to respond. I struggled through each hand, veering between utter confusion and abject boredom, neither of which made for good play.



Pasiphae, Sinope, Lysithea, Carme, Ananke, Leda...

Of course, Anne was no joy to play with, either. Stressed out by my parents' critical attitude, she would chainsmoke and snap through the hands. One of the worst moments came when it was my turn to be the "dummy" (the partner of the winning bidder, who turns their cards face up and lets the winner play both hands against the other pair) and Anne said, in something much like her Wicked Witch of the West voice (a staple terror of my childhood) "You're the dummy, dummy!" I burst into tears, ran from the table and hid. She was terribly sorry, it was all a joke, but I just couldn't see the humor in it then.



Themisto, Metis, Adrastea, Thebe...

There were thirteen moons when I started playing. By 1979 there were seventeen. That was something that always startled me, the idea that our schoolbooks could be wrong, that new information was always arriving. When my mother studied chemistry in the 1940s she had to learn the nine amino acids by heart, but by the time I reached ninth grade biology there were twenty-three and no one expected us to know them all. Today we've identified seventy-nine moons. That would have lasted through several rubbers, at least.



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What qualities do you most value in your partner?

I think the single most important quality for me is happiness. Many people seem wired to find the negative in every situation, to worry about what might happen around the corner and down the road, and to rehearse every grievance until it's wrung of every drop of anger and indignation. I can't live with that--when I try, I spend way too much energy trying to cheer the person up, find the bright side, make their life easy in hopes of their finding happiness with me, which many people just aren't going to do. Realizing this was a major breakthrough in my relationship history and made me value Jason's essential good humor enormously.



A deep sense of commitment is also key for me. I was raised by parents who were married for life and being able to make and live that kind of partnership was something that I was always looking for. Jason sometimes says that for him the best thing about being married was letting go of the decision--it was made and he no longer has to wonder whether or not to marry, because he did. This plays out not only in just not separating, but in showing up every day to make our lives together good, in being willing to work on our communication and find ways to enhance our connection and our mutual ease and happiness.



Being openly loving is also very important. We sometimes call it "The Love Game," taking joy in finding ways to say and show that we love each other every day, finding new games to play together, new inside jokes that reinforce our connection. I see other couples who seem to revel in something different, in teasing each other with dislike, and while I get that joking about it might release steam, or disarm the negative potential of the relationship, that's not a comfortable way of interacting for me. Physical affection is an important part of this--we touch each other often, we hug many times throughout the day, and the best part of every day is holding each other as we fall asleep.



I don't think I could be partnered with someone who didn't share a basic curiosity about the world, an eagerness to try new things, travel to other parts of the world, try new foods, or share cool articles about science and interesting insights about the human condition. We can spend hours together talking about everything and nothing, because each of us is interested in how the other sees the world and in sharing what we see with each other.



A willingness to be a full partner is another essential quality. Jason and I have different strengths, but we are working together toward the same goals. We communicate freely about our priorities. We share values. We are here for each other, whether that's maintaining a balance in chores, or figuring out how to parent equitably. We're not using each other to get what we each want, we're cooperating to get what both of us want, and each other's happiness is vitally important. We love working together and are able to spend the bulk of our time in the same space. I've heard it said that in all relationships there is one who loves more, but our love is intense on both sides and very well balanced. I feel incredibly privileged to have found a partner like this.

Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, it matters enormously to me that we enable each other to be our best selves and give each other the freedom to do that. Given what interdependent lives we lead, I think it would be impossible without the counterweight of respect and independence that suffuses our relationship.



In swimming lessons, we always had to have a buddy. It was your responsibility to know where your buddy was, to stick together, and when the whistle blew, to find each other and keep each other safe. That's one of the things that marriage is--a hand to grab in the deep water when the whistle blows. It's good to have a buddy.

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What were your favorite toys as a child?

My favorite toys were my Fisher-Price Little People.



I have no idea why, but I decided, or was told, that their last name was "Smith" and so they became my "Smiffies." Looking at the picture now, I remember thinking that the mother was so beautiful.

When I was three or four, I decided that I wanted to be part of the Christmas gift-giving tradition, and so I carefully wrapped one of my Smiffies for each member of my family. The rest of them all found opportunities to slip their Smiffy back into my collection, but Mom kept the little orange boy on her dresser. After a while I asked if I could have it back and she explained no, it was a gift, and having given it away it didn't belong to me any more.



I spent hours playing with my Smiffies, both alone and with my friends, especially Lori. I had the house, but she had the airport, which was the coolest thing in the world. Later I would move on to Barbies and my sister's much-coveted Dawn Dolls, but I never loved them as deeply as the Smiffies.



One day I decided that I was going to walk over to Miss Norma's--she was the older lady in the church who served as our babysitter and adopted grandmother. I put my Smiffies in a bag--unfortunately, a paper one, and set off on the four block walk, a bold move of independence for me at five or six. Sadly, it was raining and as I crossed Main Street my bag broke, scattering my Smiffies across the road. The lady at the corner store saw me, frantically trying to rescue them, and came out to keep me from running into traffic in the gloomy late-afternoon darkness. When she understood my panic, she brought out a plastic bag and helped me to find as many as we could. Some were broken, others embedded with gravel. It's probably not true that I never played with them again after that, but something about that day broke my heart, made me realize that they were only pieces of wood, and the magic of the Smiffies was never quite the same again.

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What was your Dad like when you were a child?

Dad was 47 years old when I was born, so in some ways he always seemed old to me. He and my mother had been married for almost twenty years at that point, and in the same job and home for ten years, so they were very settled in their lives. I was a complete surprise and threw a wrench into things in many ways, but he always let me know that he was delighted with me and wouldn’t have changed a thing.

My father was 6‘4” and seemed tall enough to touch the moon. When I was just six weeks old he fell on the ice and broke his arm—thankfully on the trip after he had carried me in from the car—so some of my earliest memories of him are “The Elephant Game,” which I only understood much later were the physical therapy exercises he did to restore strength and flexibility to that arm.

Dad was the minister and in our church, Sunday School came before church and once I was too old for the nursery I was expected to sit through the adult service next to my mother. I grew up listening to stories about myself from the pulpit and having him say “God Bless You,” in his beautiful bass voice when I sneezed in church.

He was very affectionate and much more emotionally open than my mother was. He would openly weep at romantic movies and loved for me to sit on his lap and snuggle with him. He could also get very angry at times—until I was an adolescent that was more directed at my sister than at me, but his loud voice made it seem that he was yelling even when he had no intention of doing so.

Like many families of the era, Dad was the “fun” parent, the one who took us for ice cream, or to McDonald’s, or out for a late movie on Thanksgiving night, while Mom set the chores and kept the rules and made us stop playing for dinner, or bedtime. I’m told that in earlier days he was perfectly able to cook for himself and Anne, but by the time I came along there was some combination of more money and learned helplessness, but he still took charge of the grill for backyard London Broil in the summertime.

Since we lived in the parsonage, just across the driveway from the church, he was around much more than many fathers. He worked in the mornings at his office in the church, came home for lunch, then spent the afternoon calling on parishioners who were sick, or going through other crises. When I was little he would take me along when calling on families with children, and by the time I was in junior high I would often go along with him once a week when he went up to the hospitals in Albany. On Sunday afternoons we would drive down to see my grandmother in the nursing home. Many of my best memories of him are of conversations we had in the car together.

He was never athletic and not much of a sports fan, though he always enjoyed watching the baseball game. He was a Rockefeller Republican, voting for Democrats in the presidential elections and trying to keep his more liberal leanings confined to the Christian life he lived largely for others. If he hadn’t felt a call to the ministry he would have been a history teacher and was a scholar of the Protestant Reformation and a big fan of historical fiction. He loved to read and happily encouraged me to read any book in his library that caught my eye. He tried hard to teach me the habit of reading a daily newspaper and though that never caught, he did make me see current events on a national and international scale as relevant to our lives and worthy of my attention.

Although I think I’m actually better than he was at telling stories, I learned it from him, the art of observing the world for the purpose of distilling its meaning and finding its lessons. He had a hard time letting go of the details and sticking to the point, and so I also learned from him the joy of digressions, of conversations that start on one topic and drift over the course of hours into far different regions. I still find myself wanting to tell him things and to hear how he would incorporate them into his Sunday sermon.

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What were your grandparents like?

I didn’t get to have a long relationship with any of my grandparents—the first died when I was three and the last when I was twelve. What I know of them is largely from stories told by my parents and sisters and, more recently, from going through the family memorabilia and finding photos, letters, and other artifacts that flesh out their stories.

These were my mother’s parents: Murphy and Mitt. He was a carpenter who always resented being made to leave school at fourteen, a resentment that manifested in his proudly and whole-heartedly supporting my mother in her education. He was a very quiet man, loving and gentle. Mitt was more feisty, with a temper that made her relationship with my mother problematic, but also many fears and anxieties—she was so terrified of thunder that she would hide under the bed when a storm blew up. They worked hard all their lives, keeping their farm going and the family fed through the Great Depression. Mom was always proud of the Sunday dinners, where up to twenty folks would come around after church to eat with them, because “there was always food at Miss Mitt’s”.

A lot of what I remember of them isn’t about them, specifically, but about the farm in North Carolina. I don’t remember them ever visiting, though they did when I was very little. It was always us, driving south and south forever, until finally arriving at their place. I remember the smell of the sandy dirt after the rain, the strangely pleasant, rotting smell of the cold house where the freezer was, and the warm, dry smell of the old tobacco barns in the sunshine. I remember drinking cold Mountain Dew from a bottle, back when you couldn’t get it up north and it was the taste of summer. I remember picking corn and beans out of the fields and playing at the feet of the women shucking and shelling the vegetables for dinner. There was always work to do.

On the morning of her 50th anniversary, my grandmother had a major stroke. There was nothing to be done in those days—they got her dressed and put her in a chair at the reception while friends and family trooped by to pay their respects and she had no idea who any of them were. That was a horrifying time for my mother, but I remember Granny as one of the best playmates—we would play “pretend” and make believe that she didn’t know my name, or that she was a little girl like me, or that she didn’t know her way around the house she’d lived in for decades, and she was utterly convincing. She would give me slices of white bread with cold butter as a snack. In the morning, I would slip out of the bed I shared with my mother in the front room, sneak as quietly through my grandfather’s dark, shaded room as a three year old could, and out onto the back porch, where my grandmother slept in a tiny storeroom, almost filled by her big bed. I would open the door and shout “Boo, Granny!” and she would holler “Boo, ‘Lizbeth!” and I would jump on her bed and we would play while the rest of the household got up and ready for the day. One morning I shouted, but she didn’t respond, and my mother remembered being woken by my screams over Granny’s body.

I only have a few vivid memories of my grandfather, despite his having outlived my grandmother by two years. They may even all have been from the same trip, when I was five. Beckie was fourteen that year and somehow Dad got the idea of teaching her to drive on the dirt roads around the farm. She managed to put the car in one of the drainage ditches—she didn’t have much beginner’s luck. Dad tried various strategies to get the car back on the road and as he worked, shouting occasionally for Beckie to hit the gas, I kept jumping up and down and saying “Should I go get Poppo? Can I go get Poppo now?” Dad said “You sound like you don’t believe we can do this,” and I responded very seriously, “I don’t.” They both laughed and Beckie said “At least she’s honest!” Finally, finally Dad said “OK, Elizabeth, go!” I raced down the track to the barn where my grandfather was working and he fired up the tractor and let me ride along, holding onto the strap of his overalls as we chugged back to haul out the car.

On the long summer evenings the family would gather on the porch of the house that Poppo built, watching the occasional traffic pass by on the road. I was tearing around, probably being a pest, and Poppo told me to run around the house and he would time me. I ran and I ran and every time I came back to the big, broad steps, he would tell me my time and then say “Do it again. Run faster now,” and I’d be off again. When we drove away, I twisted around in the back seat to watch him wave to us as we pulled out of the drive and onto the highway for the long drive back to New York. A few hours after we arrived home, Uncle MG called to say that Poppo had died.


My father’s parents were very different. Raised in Kansas and Michigan, they married and moved to New York in 1919. My grandfather tried to establish himself in the financial world, but after the man from the next office jumped out the window in 1929, Grandfather decided it was time to get out of the business by a safer route. He spent the Depression taking an array of jobs—setting up distilleries in Canada, working on the Chicago World’s Fair—many of which kept him away from home for long stretches, leaving my grandmother to raise Dad alone, or with the company of her father, who lived with them for several years. She desperately wanted a girl, but miscarried many times after Dad was born—we now know that she was Rh negative, but in those days it was just a tragic mystery. She thought the moon rose and set on my father and would hear no criticism of him. They wrote to each other every week for more than twenty years—I have reams of her letters to him, filled with the details of her life, that reveal a surprisingly funny, money-fixated woman devoted to her husband and her church, but delighted to travel and find adventure.

She was a wonderful grandmother when my eldest sister was little. She would arrive by train with her suitcases stuffed with presents for her namesake and spend a week or more before Christmas baking cookies that filled the entire dining room table. She was a snappy dresser, with a certain elegance, and everyone was shocked when she threw herself down on the sled with Anne and played in the Michigan snow. She thought Anne was the most perfect child in the world and sent her cards and letters and treats throughout the year and begged in her letters for news of Anne’s health and latest accomplishments.

A year before I was born, Grandmother had her first major stroke. Throughout my childhood she spent stretches in the nursing home, returning to sit awkwardly in a green power lift chair. Her face was partially paralyzed by strokes and her gaze was glassy and unfocused. My parents would set me on her lap, where she would pluck at my clothing with long fingers, or they would tell me to hug her. She smelled medicinal and unsettling and her ability to talk changed as her brain tried to rearrange itself after each stroke. By the time I was five, she needed constant care and was placed in a nursing home about half an hour south of our home upstate. My grandfather couldn’t bear to see his “brown eyed Peg” so debilitated and never visited her there, but my father drove down every Sunday afternoon, despite the fact that she often had no idea who he was and would sob for her “Dickie boy,” and wonder why he didn’t come instead of this balding, middle-aged man she didn’t recognize. Visiting her was about equal parts scary and boring, but I always enjoyed the drive there and back with my dad. She passed away when I was eight.

My grandfather always seemed like a very stern, somewhat distant figure. He and my grandmother lived in a two bedroom apartment in Mount Vernon and when we visited my mother would make up the couch cushions on the living room floor as a bed for me. After his many jobs in the 30s he landed as the Executive Secretary of the International Merchant Tailors’ Association, where the main part of his duties was to organize their annual conferences in exotic locations like Miami or Chicago. He would also entertain visiting members from other countries and their breakfront—the same one that stands in my dining room today, was filled with gifts from around the world. The less-breakable ones were kept in the righthand door of that cabinet and I was allowed to pull out the sake cups and figurines and create elaborate games and fantasies around them.

If we were there on a weekday he would take me into the office on the train and I would spend the morning being given busy work—I remember using the porcelain stamp licker and drawing on scrap letterhead. His long-time secretary, Irma, was a very fashionable woman and she would take me out at lunch to Saks Fifth Avenue or Macy’s and buy me “a good dress,” just about the only clothing bought for me in those years of handmades and hand-me-downs. We would have sandwiches at one of the local lunch counters and bring one back to my grandfather and then my Dad and Beckie, usually, would pick me up and we’d go on an afternoon adventure somewhere in the city. On Saturdays my grandfather would swap his suit jacket for a cardigan, but I can’t picture him without a tie, even after he retired at eighty. It was shocking to find photos of him working the farms as a teen in Abilene, wearing nothing but overalls and a straw hat.

He could be a real curmudgeon—I think he never really knew how to interact with children except by teasing. The only time I’ve been stung by a bee was when he told me it was bothering a flower and I should squeeze it out of there. Another time, when I was five and we were out to an Italian restaurant, he was horrified to see me pick up the shrimp from my scampi by the tails to eat it and was loudly critical of my mother for failing to teach me to peel shrimp with a knife and fork. He never understood my father’s calling to the ministry and often criticized what he saw as an incomprehensible failure by my father to prioritize money in his life. When he died, at eighty-six, he left us much better off, financially, than we had been. At his funeral the minister kept referring to what a Brooklyn accent rendered as “Mistah Huntah,” so my last memory of my grandfather is of struggling not to giggle in a pew full of black-clad family.

And then I turned twelve and all my grandparents were gone.

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Has your relationship with your siblings changed over the years?

In some ways my relationship with my sisters has changed profoundly, but in other ways not at all.

The three of us are all nine years apart. That is, Beckie was born when Anne was almost nine and I was born when Beckie was almost ten. Anne left for college the year I was born—my baptism was scheduled for the day after her graduation, since the grandparents would all be in town for that. Beckie left home when I was nine.

When I was little Anne was more like an aunt, in some ways—an exciting occasional presence in my life. She came home for summers when I was very little, and for holidays. When we were out alone together people automatically assumed that she was my mother. She bought me books and fed me strange things and took me exploring. Whatever interest or hobby she developed, she shared with me—I fondly remember the grave-rubbing phase and the hiking phase. She taught me to cook, mostly by telling me to make it up and assume it would be fine. In the summer Anne & George would take me along with them to Block Island and we would climb the bluffs and body surf in the waves.

My parents made a real effort to promote a relationship between us, sending me to stay with her for a week at a time, starting while she was still living in the dorms at Wellesley and I would have been no more than three. By the time I was eight they would put me on the Peter Pan bus and let me make the journey to Boston on my own, where she thought nothing of handing me T tokens and telling me where to meet her after work. She introduced me to science fiction and gave me Our Bodies, Our Selves, and taught me to be a feminist. I adored her and thought she was the coolest person in the world.

Beckie and I were much closer on a day-to-day basis while we were both at home. In most of my baby pictures it is Beckie who is holding me. My first word was “baby,” but my second was “Becca.” When she came to bed I would pound on the wall until she came to get me to snuggle with her—while my mother accused her of “never leaving that child alone!” Finally they put an extra bed in my room and Beckie slept there—the only way to keep me in my own bed. My mother still made most of our clothes in those days and Beckie had to endure my being dressed in scaled down copies of her clothes. We would watch tv together every afternoon when she got home from school—One Life to Live and General Hospital, followed by Sesame Street, Mister Rogers, and The Electric Company, before Dad got home and switched to the news.

When I was little and our grandparents were still alive, we drove to North Carolina and back at least twice each year—with me sprawled out and napping on Beckie in the days before carseats for toddlers. She got dragged along on the family vacation to Disneyworld, while I tagged along on trips to visit the colleges she was checking out. She had to endure my painfully honest comments chiming in at the most awkward times throughout her adolescence.

Anne’s relationship with our parents was always turbulent. The values that she embraced as a young woman in the 70s were very different from their Depression Era morality. My mother was always ready with a judgmental or dismissive comment and my father was very emotionally open and willing to go toe to toe with her in arguments that shook the house. Anne always wanted me to be on her team, to recognize our parents’ shortcomings and join her in criticizing and rebelling against them. I think that by the time I hit puberty, alone in the house with them, that—along with everything else—made me feel awkward with Anne and we grew more distant. And with Beckie also out of the house, I had somewhere else to go.

I spent much of Beckie’s college years hanging out with her at Smith. As a tall, precocious kid, I was generally assumed to be one of the more baby-faced freshmen and spent many long weekends and breaks roaming the campus while Beckie worked, or studied, and tagging along with her and her friends to movies, concerts, and lectures. When I wasn’t there I ran up huge long distance bills calling her almost every afternoon.

After Beckie graduated she moved to Boston. The plan was for her to stay with Anne and her partner, George, for a few months while she found a job and an apartment, but Beckie ended up living with them for nine years. During that time I visited often, so I was spending more time with Anne again.

There are lots of fun stories of the Hunter Sisters from those days. One time George made the mistake of referring to the musical “1776” as “forgettable,” so we sang the entire score from top to bottom, it having been a favorite to sing on car trips. Or there was the time that TV Guide said that record companies mistrusted MTV’s promises to play their videos at certain rates, but since there was “no way for them to tell,” they were having to take MTV’s word on it. “There’s no way to tell” entered our family language for easily-verifiable information.

While the gravitational pull of Boston was strong, I attempted to elude my fate by going to college in New York, but after two years there I bowed to the inevitable, moved to Boston—living partly with my sisters that first summer—and transferred to Wellesley.

While I was there, first Beckie and then Anne & George, bought condos and moved apart. Anne & George went into a big Indian cooking phase, at the time that my IBS was making Indian food really difficult for me to eat, so I spent less time with them. Beckie was living alone for the first time and especially once I had graduated we spent a lot of time hanging out together.

It's funny, because the big age difference between us always seemed so important when we were younger--in many ways it was defining of our relationship. But by the time I was about twenty-five, it really didn't matter any more. We were all working women, living in apartments, managing our relationships...shocking as it seems, we'd grown up. Though I do have to remind Anne from time to time not to tell stories about how awful I could be when I was little!

In the mid-90s, Beckie got married and I moved to California to try my luck on the West Coast, so we necessarily spent less time together. Then I met Jason and we married and moved to London, where both my sisters visited, and I had a cheap calling plan, so we spoke often. When we decided to move back to Boston, Beckie did us the enormous favor of finding a house and dealing with the purchase. Not long after our move back, we founded Theatre@First with Beckie and worked together closely on that.

When our daughter, Alice, turned three, Anne announced that she was exercising her big-sister right to have her come stay at least one weekend a month. Alice loves staying with Anne & George—much as I did when I was younger. It’s sometimes funny to hear about their adventures together, because they are similar in many ways to my time with them. Every summer they take her along for a week on Block Island, just as they did when I was a kid.

During my parents' decline, we all had to pull together to help care for them and make decisions. It was such a relief that we were all on the same page about the big issues. My therapist, listening to me talk about dealing with my mother's medical care--because I'm the one without a day job that could easily take her to appointments, that part fell to me--asked once if I felt like my sisters were doing enough and I said "We each do all that we possibly can, and most days that's enough. And if it isn't enough, it's still all that we can." Having that kind of mutual support made that awful time bearable.

Both of them are getting ready to retire and it will be interesting to see what changes that brings to their lives and our relationships. I talk to each of my sisters at least a couple of times a week and see them once a month, or more. We still celebrate holidays together--usually at my house.

In some ways nothing has changed--Anne is still the rebellious older daughter, Beckie is still the peacemaker, and I'm probably still the brat. In other ways, it's all changed--we're none of us young any more, even if they forget sometimes. But in the most important ways it's just what it always was--we're sisters, we grew up in the same family even if our parents were pretty different over time, we share a common history and language and connection that is different from anything I share with anyone else in the world.

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This afternoon, shortly after we returned from a lovely time at the beach and pool here at our resort on Kauai, Alice asked where her glasses were. They had been part of the bundle of towels and hats and shoes that Jason had been diligently moving from spot to spot over the past couple of hours, without being aware that it contained her glasses. Controlled panic ensued.

After brief discussion Jason headed back to our first spot, in hope that they would have been dropped there. There wasn't much for Alice and I to do in the meantime, except keep her from freaking out. We only have one more day here and while she chose not to bring her backup glasses, she does have a pair at home and we were planning to order new glasses when we got home anyway, following her eye appointment last week.

Jason returned without having found the glasses and we asked if Alice were absolutely sure she had brought them to the beach at all. She thought so, but on another check they were found in the counter in the bathroom. Whew!

The remarkable thing here is that at no point in any of this did Jason get angry. He went through the significant emotional states of panic, guilt, frustration, relief, etc. and never converted those into anger. I think that's pretty amazing for a modern American man and I wanted to share that moment if amazement. He's a really good dad and a truly lovely human being. I feel so grateful to have him as a partner and co-parent.

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