empty nesters

It's so quiet around here, Steve says as he wanders into the room where I am working. A couple of hours later, I poke my head into his office to say the same.  It's a strange feeling, being on our own. We have so rarely been alone in our own house, not for almost seven years.

A few days of tears in the morning turning to smiles by mid-afternoon, and we have moved from one era of our lives to the next. For him, a world of adventure has opened up, one with its own playground full of cars he can actually drive and two climbing apparatus, where everyone chatters in French or Dutch and he is surrounded by other tiny "big boys and girls" like himself all day long. In only a week, a couple of lovely maternelle teachers have finished potty training him for us, he is answering to the Francophone pronunciation of his name, and casually dropping full, useful sentences in French amid plenty of French-ish gibberish. He loves being a big boy. At drop off now he looks at us and says, "Am I going to cry today?" and swaggers into the classroom with a satirical grin on his face. And Violette's timidity at being the new kid at school last year has been replaced by the confidence of having friends to meet up with on the first day of school and knowing her way around, and being able to show her little brother the ropes. She spies on him during recreation time and reports back to us what he played and whether or not he seemed happy. Today she said that she wants to be a teacher when she grows up because she wants to teach Petite Section, just like Townsie's teachers.

For me, there are now no more mid-day snuggles or tantrums (except on Wednesdays and weekends), no more wondering how to find an unaccompanied hour for groceries or a museum, and far fewer deep knee bends a day to pick up the thousands of little items and pieces that we seem to have accumulated, and which scatter themselves through our rooms with abandon. Once again, as before I had children, it is up to me to prove that I can do something useful with all of this unfettered time. I am much more prepared now, with a few more years of life experience under my belt (literally) than I had back then. It's like I get to keep the sense of purpose that having children has given me and use it in their absence. Totally cheating. My plan is to write and write, and see how it goes, see if I can turn it into something. I am prepared to fail a lot before I succeed in the slightest. Another something that I have gained from all that giving to my children, all those parenting failures.

We had a madcap, unwieldy eight-week summer that brought us much love and travel and very, very little of the silence that now surrounds me. The start of school was always an antidote for the boredom of summer when I was a child. For my own children, the calm of their school schedule has made angels of the (not always) cute little demons who gave up all thoughts of sleep and reason to spend the last two months partying it up with friends and family.  I am still figuring out how to parse it all for this journal of mine. Memories will be trickling out post by post, I expect.

In the meantime...Peace.

a violet(te) by any other name

What's in a name? Shakespeare was very clever with words, but it is an inescapable fact of life that names imbue people, places, and things with a certain je ne sais quoi (pardon my French). He must have known so. After all, his ladies have such fabulous monikers: Portia, Ophelia, Desdemona, Hippolyta, et al. Recently, we had trial ownership of a dog over a long weekend. The dog's original owner had designated her Maddie, and while we considered keeping the dog, there was no way we were keeping the name. We know several children with variations of that name, and besides, if we were going to walk her, feed her, and care for her, we were going to name her. So, for the few days she was with us, before allergies and our children's innate disobedience sent Maddie back whence she had come, I tried out a number of potential appellations.

In doing so, I realized that each made her look like a different dog, at least in my eyes. Emily Dickenson, Edie for short, was perky and comfortable, loved long walks, and was smart but not intimidating. Dorothy Parker, on the other hand, was intriguing but a little worse for wear, as though the afternoons were a bit too long. I think I loved her best as Capucine, after the famous French fashion model best known for playing Peter Sellers's wife in The Pink Panther. Capucine the dog was elegant and mysterious; her coat seemed a little shinier, her ears more regal. And that's just a dog, an animal that is non-verbal and is unlikely ever to have a curriculum vitae to worry about. With people, the issue is so much more loaded. All this to say that I know how it sounds:  We move to Europe, and before you know it we have changed the spelling of our daughter's name from Violet to Violette. The Snobs, you must be thinking, the Carpetbaggers, the Yuppity-Ups. I don't blame you. I would probably think the same. But it's not quite as it seems. (Is it ever?)

Let's go back to The Night It All Began, in that hospital delivery room perched high above FDR Drive.  In the minute of new parent enchantment between the torture of delivery and the terror of all that went wrong afterward, Steve, his eyes wet as he gazed upon that magnificent, moon-faced, howling purple infant, said, "Maybe we should call her Violet(te)." 

Then some other stuff happened that I won't go into just now. My sister took the baby, the room filled up with doctors, and I was wheeled into an operating room. All that night alone in recovery, and the next morning as I waited for my husband to be released from the psych ward and my baby to be cleared by the neonatal ICU, the thought running 'round and 'round in my mind was, "I need to see my little Violet(te)."  By the time we were finally together as a family, sometime around noon, she had a name.

But did her name have a spelling?  Well. The great-grandmother who was partial originator of the name, as far as our baby name list was concerned, was Violet. I, being an amateur Francophone, while respecting the traditional British spelling, couldn't easily get past the fact that in French, violet is the masculine form of the word, and violette, the feminine. Violette just looked prettier to me, and could be pronounced either way. Ah, but we had both spent our entire lives spelling our own names for strangers, we said, pen hovering over the blank line on the birth certificate. Did we want to curse our daughter with the same fate? Everyone, most English-speakers, anyway, would know how to spell Violet by sound. Violette would require constant verbal correction of schoolteachers and receptionists, and the ladies at the DMV. Pragmatism got the better of us, and we quickly wrote V-I-O-L-E-T on the page, handing it to a nurse before we could change our minds.

Over the next few years, I had moments of doubt, but none serious. Actually, most of my doubts had more to do with our not having given her my last name in addition to Steve's, again done out of pragmatism. I spoke French with Violet at home quite a lot, and when I did she was always Violette, but the spelling didn't seem to matter either way. When she learned to write her name, she learned it both ways, because she asked to. Two years later, school application time arrived--which in New York is something akin to writing and defending a doctoral thesis (or so I have heard from friends who have done both)--and for various reasons, Violet was enrolled at a French school. There she officially became Violette. She loved school, made friends, and started to get comfortable with the bilingual program, but we noticed with concern that she began to differentiate between when she was as Violet, and when Violette.

Then we moved to Holland. A transfer into another French school was easy--the curriculum is consistent throughout the French system--but a move is always a bit emotional, and a new school in a new country, neither of which speaks the family's native language, is a lot of change. Violet(te) transitioned remarkably well for an almost-six-year-old, but the name differentiation became worse, and we worried that we were creating a situation in which she might believe she is a different person "out there" than she is "in here". We made a decision, undertook an experiment. Her name would be spelled Violette all the time, regardless of the pronunciation. No paperwork has been filed or changed, no official pronouncement made to family and friends. She is six, so her personal correspondents are few, mostly grandmothers, and she is rarely saddled with the task of completing legal forms. We figure we have a little time to test our hypothesis. In the long term, this change could be brilliant...or meaningless, or possibly misguided. That is parenthood. Things could also be back to the way they were before you read this post. That, too, is parenthood.

She is quite a Violet(te), though, no matter the spelling of her name, and she just lost her first tooth! (She added the exclamation point as she copy-edited my original draft.) Adolescence is just around the corner.

nous sommes tous 70 (we are all 70)

We look out at the beaches from the cliffs and grasp that it was reality, that hundreds of thousands of mostly young men just like us, with fathers and mothers, friends, wives and children, chose to wade from boats or parachute from planes, here.  Many had never set foot in Continental Europe, had no loved ones here to fight for, and still, they got off of the boats.  They jumped out of the planes. They died before they reached the shore, or as they scaled the cliffs, or hitting the ground too fast in the dark. Each was willing to be one of the lives given in a battle strategy that depended on having more Allied men than German bullets.

As we drove home from Normandy we stopped in Brussels for chocolate and a bit of shopping. Nearing the antique shop, I saw mounds of flowers and two barrel-chested men in uniforms standing guard, powerful weapons at the ready.  On the corner, a pair of ten-year-old boys whispered to each other with somber faces. My shop was next door to--shared a wall with--the Jewish Museum, where only a week earlier a jihadist had walked in and gunned down the visitors, killing four people.

The conflicts of Normandy aren't over.  They have just shape-shifted.

Still, we and the German friends that we were traveling with, grandchildren of sympathizers on both sides, stood on the cliffs of Pointe-du-Hoc and watched our children climbing in and out of bomb craters--now covered in brilliant green grass--together. Surely there is an answer in there somewhere?

See:  The Longest Day
Read:  The Origins of the Second World War, by A.J.P Taylor; The Atlantic, "How Many Tons of WWII Munitions are Found in Germany Each Year?"
Listen: The Romantic Hero, Vittorio Grigolo, Manon, Act II

(Header photo by Chief Photographer's Mate Robert F. Sargent, available from the National Archives and Records Administration. Thanks to Anne and Jörg for the article, use of their photos, and for the good company.)

prague

Before Utah, there was Prague; drizzly, confectionery Prague. It had been there, beckoning, since I was a teenager and first fell in love with anything and everything Art Nouveau (although absinthe and I have never been, nor will we ever be, acquainted). In my mind, it was a city of shops selling the work of Czech artisans housed in gorgeous, finely-wrought old buildings. And it was, kind of. My friend Jen warned me shortly before we left that it was more like Disneyland, really, existing only for tourists. The preparation did me good. I could enjoy the architectural eye candy and ignore the tourist traps at street level, having known what was coming. We walked right by the obvious restaurants and shops and instead found little gems--Michelin quality at American chain prices--and looked a bit harder for the authentic local experiences. I think we found them.

The moment that will stay with me from Prague was during an architectural tour that Violette and I took of the Municipal House, an incredible collaboration of local artists and architects created to affirm the Czech right to independence while part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is a stunning building, one of the most beautiful in the world, and there my daughter stood, in the Alphonse Mucha room, first sketching and then photographing the details that caught her imagination, while our fellow tourists watched her in fascination. Magic. If you asked my children, however, they would tell you that in Prague they saw rock candy being made, and that may be all. True, too.

What we will hopefully forget is that Violette most likely had had a fever for a day or two before we realized that we had been dragging a sick child around a foreign city. We will also try to forget that the rest of us had similar fevers by the flight home. If we were going to get sick, at least we had beautiful, long-lasting impressions of Prague to keep us company.

 

my sister, the bride

A few days before her wedding, my sister, an art major, made a pair of life-sized papier mâché figures for her senior exhibition thesis, using another sister, Angela, as her model. By the time my children and I arrived for the wedding festivities, the figures had served their purpose and were to be found lurking about my parents' house--one torso and one standing figure--sitting atop the washer as I breezed in from the garage, for instance, or leaning against the wall behind a chair in the family room. Seen through the periphery of the eye, even when I knew what they were, it felt as though there were a family member in the room. There was invariably a sense of disappointment when I turned to look and there was no one there. And then there were the times when I would speak a few words to them before realizing.

Our entire visit was a play on our perceptions. The night before we left to fly home to The Hague, Steve and I stood close together in the dark of the cabin, pressing foreheads and cheeks together in a rare moment alone, our sleeping children on the other side of the door we were about to enter. Steve whispered, "It has been a strange visit, but I'm glad that we came."

I knew exactly what he meant. There had been a generational shift, somehow, one that had been gradually evolving for years but had never seemed absolute until this visit. We had become the adults, no longer the children. With our own family now complete--most likely the last of the grandchildren on Steve's side, though definitely not my own--we now felt keenly the passage of time and all that it entails. We could no longer pretend we were kids just starting out, just starting a family. It's now our children's turn to make childhood memories, and ours to help them.

We had visited the hospital that day to see Steve's dad post-surgery. The surgery was a good thing and by no means his first, but seeing his father in a hospital bed after having done so many rounds in hospitals with him as the brilliant surgeon was emotional for my husband, so rarely an emotional man. His hero was mortal after all. The night before, Steve had given his father a beautiful priesthood blessing, telling him that throughout his life he has been a healer by profession, and now it is his turn to be the one healed. Less profoundly, my face was still puffy from enough dental work to convince me that I was no longer an adolescent. 

We had been alone at the cabin, really for the first time without Steve's parents at least partially in residence, and that, too, was a strange sensation. We kept looking around us as though expecting to see them going about their previously usual business. We felt their absence much more than we had expected to, but worse than that was the sense of future absence. It was the realization of how much we will miss the relationships that we have always been blessed to take for granted, even if separation is only temporary.

Looking at my beautiful baby sister, Danielle, standing outside the temple in which I was married ten years ago, wearing the dress in which I was married (with her own characteristic addition of tulip sleeves), a cocktail of images past and present swam before my eyes. My entire life I have collected notebooks and photographs, haunted by the notion that if I cannot remember the people and events of my own life it will be as though they never happened. Experiences, even profound ones, disappear so quickly into the deep, gone forever, it seems. And then comes a day--a wedding, a funeral, or something less obvious, a specific place or scent--and memories float back up to the surface, making me laugh or love or cry all over again. They were there all the time. On this day, I saw glinting grey almond-shaped eyes and strawberry bobbed hair, a two-year-old who was hilarious but hated to be laughed at. She would circle, moving closer and closer, a disingenuous smile on her adorable little face, until she pounced, teeth and claws out, protesting her audience's approbation. I saw my thirteen-year-old self, all untested potential and insecurity, cuddling with that little sister, the calico and lace coverlet of my daybed wrapped around us. To me she was a living doll. My mother said that with my sister she thought she had finally had a baby who slept through the night, until she discovered that it was I who had been getting up with her, sneaking in to hold her at the first cry. One of my neighborhood friends had a sister the same age, and she and I would take the babies out with us so often that we soon had a reputation as teenage mothers. It is no wonder that I now call my sister by my daughter's name, and Violette by my sister's.

Watching her with her new husband, scenes from my early marriage also returned to me, having lost nothing of their force in the ten years' lapse: Random comments, an early morning outside of a b&b in Edinburgh, tempestuous fights in our tiny kitchen on Second Avenue and Seventy-Third Street, the guitar string he gave me for Valentine's Day while we were dating. Things had mellowed significantly by our third anniversary, but I could feel those early moments still.  Comforting to know that these memories and lessons are retained in their perfect form, somewhere in the mind and in the soul. With perspective, I hope, and without bitterness.

As I write, we are slowly, slowly beginning to emerge from six weeks of JET. LAG. Okay, so maybe only two of the weeks were technically jet lag, but we arrived home to find sunset significantly later, and having it as bright as midday at bedtime has done nothing for our melatonin levels. And to top it off, on our first night back TTO discovered that he could get out of his crib, so there have been bunk beds and a shared room to adjust to. We haven't been this sleep-deprived since TTO's first year, something that, having now moved on from the baby thing, we thought we would never have to relive. I keep telling myself that it resolved itself then and it can this time, but we are starting to lose hope that we will sleep a full night before the shortened days of winter come along again to rescue us. We are not ourselves at the moment.

p.s. As I was typing that, Townsend ran into the room and spit a mouthful of water all over me and laughed. He was not wearing a diaper. His father is now escorting him out to the garden. It is really the only option, since we cannot keep clothing on him and our furniture and rugs are not safe with him around. Luckily, this is Europe, so all the neighbors who are out on their terraces enjoying this lovely Sunday will simply applaud our healthy nudist approach to parenting. Snapshot of our life as we now find it. Oh, and we are thinking of getting a dog.