Behind the Curtain

We wandered off the side of the road in the cul-de-sac while walking the pooch. Bug was all too eager to climb on top of a stump, declare himself king of the hill, and brandish his twig-scepter over all in his dominion. "I command the trees," he declared. "Grow!"

We scrabbled down in the dirt, found branches blown down from the storm, and shoved them into the mud at the base of the gnarled tree. "It worked," I said. "See? It's bigger. It grew."

Bored, Bug followed the dog through the brambles as she sniffed down a cowering rodent. Together, they nosed their way into the hollow base of a towering maple. They took turns shoving their heads into the mossy crevice. "Come out, little mouse," Bug called, menace in his voice. A piece of weather-crisped paper clung to the weeds nearby. "Mommy, look!" Bug charged after it, unfurled it and wiped off the mud. "A map! Do you think it's a treasure map?"

"Let's see. It has arrows on it." We bent in and assessed. "Let's see. M-A-P-Q-U-E-S-T. Well, looky there. I think you have found a treasure map!"

"Let's go find the treasure!" My boy charged down the cul-de-sac. "What does it say to do?"

A glance at the paper provided a good stall for considering options. Would it take us into the backyard? To the nearby school with its acre of play equipment? Eagerness and fatigue fought it out in me. It would be so easy just to hide a box of pennies in the sandbox as we have done for the past few weeks. But I have longed for my son to have his wild places. If I do not guide him there, who will?

"This arrow says to go left."

Over a decade ago, I moved into this neighborhood the first time. My folks reluctantly allowed me to occupy the guest room as I geared up for grad school. I stayed on for four years, walking these same loops and lollipops when I needed a fix of breath and sky. Now, back at home, after living in every other time zone in this great nation, the familiarity is both a comfort and a tender wound. Each home in this rareified corner of Northern Virginia is out-of-reach even while I inhabit an address here. I've walked my way right back around to where I was. What comes next? Is there any answer other than "I don't know?" The future is uncertain to the point of skipping over terrifying and crashing down on the other side. Call it an adventure. Saddle up the cyclone. Adjust the prism just so, and a crumbling path becomes the Yellow Brick Road.

Because my figuartive path disappears into the unknown whenever I try to get a fix on it, putting my feet on a real blacktop is the best way to keep the faith. Such small rituals keep me coloring inside the lines. I walk the dog the same two miles every night. Unfurl the ribbons of blacktop I have covered in thits patchwork neighborhood, and it would stretch halfway across the continent. I know these streets.

More importantly, I know the way in to the small swaths of undeveloped land whispering behind the McMansions. I call out to Bug. "It says to find the second green post and turn left. It will take us to a secret trail."

Bug gasped in delight. "There it is! The green post! The second one!" We veered over and he scooted down the side of someone's driveway. "Here? It says here?" Even he was not so sure.

"Yep. It's a secret trail."

Down into the roots and mud we traipsed, finding a small woodland where trees stretch their shoulders and the can breathe. Bug found the bridges the map told him to find. Then he discovered the bank of the stream where the map said we were to land.

"Where is the treasure?"

Oh. Right. Treasure. Think quick, mama. "It's buried. In the water. Let's look."

We bent down, dragging sticks through the trickle of the creek. Then a flash of light. "There!" He gasped. Sun glinted off a stone.

"It's a crystal!" We dragged it from the water, this square-ish hunk of rock. We washed it, marveled at its milky tone. On down the creek-bed we wandered. The erosion in the Difficult Run watershed is unstoppable. Exposed roots grasp at ever-crumbling banks. Mud sucks at bridge footings and athletic shoes. Pebbles and detritus churn in the living soil. Thousands upon thousands of tiny stones comprise the very ground. Adjust the prism just so, and riches are at your fingertips.

"Look! Coins!" Another rock sheared into thin, malachite-toned discs in our damp fingers. Oblong, glowing. Dubloons, no doubt. We gathered tiny bits. Rose quartz, gold, and a finger of silver. Bug washed his gemstones in the water. He tucked each precious thing carefully away in a box he had brought just for this purpose.

We discovered a post leaning on the fulcrum of an infested log. Bug climbed aboard, balanced at the center against both the vertical and horizontal wobbles, and announced, "This is my treasure! You cannot get it!" The lever became a see-saw, a ship, a throne, a cannon. We blasted through outer space, each tree a planet on our solar system tour to hide and then find the ever-elusive gemstones. Bug slid joyously down a mud-slick bank. "I don't need to hold your hand," he hollered back at me. He clung to roots to scale the other side.

Down into gulleys. Up along hills. My boy led the way with smug fierceness, commanding me to stay put so he could scramble down a log alone and slip momentarily out of sight. On our weary way back out into daylight, Bug ducked under a tangle of thorns and tore himself loose, declaring, "This is one messy adventure."

You said it, kid. We ain't in Kansas anymore.

Make Believe

"Happy six months with SPP! So happy to have you with us!" - Best Boss Ever

You wake up every morning
don the cape
flex the muscles
grit your teeth
grin.

You wake up one morning
to find the costume
has become your very own
skin.

Wild or Nest

If getting our kids out into nature is a search for perfection, or is one more chore, then the belief in perfection and the chore defeats the joy. It's a good thing to learn more about nature in order to share this knowledge with children; it's even better if the adult and child learn about nature together. And it's a lot more fun.
- Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods

On the shore of Lake George at the foothills of the Adirondacks, a canopy of trees sheltered our home. I could walk out the front door of our house following a wooded trail up to the top of Buck Mountain without ever crossing a road. Bug grew up in that place, and in two other places like it in two other time zones. Logs made from trees felled by storms became the makeshift jungle-gym. A swing, a hammock, and several bird-feeders dangled from the trees surrounding our cabin. Despite this abundant temptation, Bug never did discover the heady allure of climbing trees.

By moving to the outer reaches of the DC metro area, Bug has inadvertently traded slopping through beaver dams for metro rides and trips to Costco with Gramma. Shaggy mixed deciduous forest skirting the edges of jagged peaks has given way to manicured ornamentals dotting evenly edged lawns. Sometimes I cannot bear this re-ordering of my little boy's relationship with the natural world.

Worry cannot gain a foothold, thought. I will not let it. The kid is four and full of adventure. He plays as rough on the blacktop driveway as he ever did in a mud bog. It is also wise to remember that our little corner of  wilderness had neither museums nor decent kid's theater -- two things Bug has decided to love. Ultimately, this accounting is the burden of being a grownup. My little boy does not seem to measure the worth of one form of play over another. Here in the suburbs, he laughs with his whole body just like he always has.

I have to admit, I was delighted when Bug went slamming out of the house one day last autumn without asking permission. Despite his lack of a chaperone, I was secretly ecstatic to find him already three branches up the white pine in the front yard. Without warning or fanfare, my son had become a tree climber.

Throughout the fall and into the first chill of winter, Bug did his level best to master that tree. He could hoist himself about ten feet up without help. My son possesses that magical four-year-old cocktail of tenacity, flexibility, and foolishness. He figured out how to use his belly, limbs, and balance to get both up and down, only falling once. Bug had me clamber up ahead of him a time or two to provide the motivation for greater height when he someday acheives the same.

Two simple rules have governed the tree climbing: 1) an adult has to be watching, and 2) the kid has to get both up and down on his own. For a few sweet months, this tree was our one sliver of the wild woods, one glinting souvenir from our previous life.

In the recent snowstorm that brought the DMV to its knees, power lines and patience levels were not the only casualties. Branches all over the region buckled under the weight of accumulation. Our tree was hit harder than any other on the property. Bug was momentarily awed by the destruction before he tromped off to pound footprints in the drifts.

A few days after the storm, my folks called in a couple of guys with an impressive array of power tools and an extension ladder. The duo worked in tandem to shear the trunk clean of all branches twenty feet straight up. They went even higher in places, amputating limbs that had sustained injury and lay limp in the crown. When they drove off in their pickup truck, I looked at the tree and felt fate sucker-punch me once again. They had left not one knot big enough for my boy to hoist himself up.

This tree had been the last on our postage-stamp property with branches inviting ascent. Now, naked and groomed like so much of this neighborhood, it cannot provide risk and adventure as it had before. Another loss my boy has to sustain. Another positive spin this mama has to manufacture. "There are other trees," my own mother pointed out. Angry and sad, I grumbled back, "No there aren't. There aren't any other trees."

Of course, I do not believe such dire declarations. Even if I do, even if for one second, I will not speak them out loud. Maybe this yard, this patch of land is not the place where we will become our feral selves. But we will find our next thicket. We pass through here as we have so many places before. We grab hold of the rough edges, we hoist ourselves into the cradle of the moment and treasure it for its brief grip. My son may find another tree. He may not. But he will watch me to learn how to inhabit his own wild, mammalian body. Together, we will seek another manner of ascent. And then another.



Arrival

Then one day you see
you are just as beautiful
as they say you are.

Unplugged

As much by laziness as by design, my family had no television when I was a kid. Sometime while I was in diapers, the tube broke down and the folks never replaced it. Along with mountains of toys, open access to woods and the playmates with whom to wreak havoc, we had record players in the house and a library of LPs containing everything from Chopin to Meatloaf. Despite this abundace, I had a sneaking suspicion I was missing chunks of critical experience. I registered the absence of the television by way of comparison. Friends sang cartoon theme songs at school and I diligently absorbed them. Whenever we could, my sister and I would hole up in friends' houses to gobble down episoses of Kidd Video and Speed Racer.

On the occasional weekend, my dad would bring an old black-and-white about the size of a shoebox home from his office. We clamored around this ersatz Prometheus to ogle in slack-jawed amazement until he snuck the thing away again.

When I was ten years old, Gramma bought us a real, honest-to-God boob tube. Color and everything. So began my dysfunctional love affair with visual media.

Like many kids with working parents, TV was my companion in the recovery hours between the emotional mosh-pit of middle school and the domestic familiarity of family dinnertime. For all the reasons people watch, I watched. To escape, to be entertained, to take a load off, to fill up the house with noise. I watched too much -- even as a bull-headed teenager, I was aware it was too much -- and had to rely on my parents to set the limits I could not.

When I left home at 17, I moved into an apartment firmly put my foot down: no TV. For the next ten years, I lived without one, except for the occasional, surreal summer home when I slipped into that washed-out vortex of over-consumption. Back then, my folks lived on seven acres of land abutting a forested mountainside in Vermont. Their closest neighbors were blackberry bushes, two babbling brooks, and perhaps a community of wood fairies. What did I do with my down time? Holed up on the couch with a pint of Ben and Jerry's watching game shows.

I knew better, of course. I had read Marie Winn's The Plug-In Drug. I understood that while television itself is simply a medium, and while it can be the conduit of edifying content, it has an addictive (narcotic?) effect which makes it hard to use responsibly. I desperately wanted to be A Person Who Does Not Watch Television. As a result, when I came anywhere near one, I developed whole lists of negotiations with myself about how much I would allow, and under what circumstances, and as a reward for what sort of behavior.

It has all been very exhausting.

In the eight years Tee and I have been together, TV has been a battle. Tee doesn't seem to think watching for hours on end is much of a problem. I have wanted to concede this point -- it's his life, after all -- but I hate having the thing in the house. It becomes too central. So many activities are available to us in this big, fat world. We can sing a song, make out on the couch, go identify a tree, paint a wall, host a dance party. We can just sit around and gaze at the sky. If visual media took its proper place in the scheme of things, we would watch about as often as we engage in so many other things. Once or twice a month, perhaps? In my experience, as soon as the television is introduced into the vocabulary of domestic life, it becomes a primary language. Other tongues grow rusty with disuse.

Add this to one more cause for panic about having to move back in with the folks.

The parental units have very comfortable viewing digs. A high-def flat screen in the living room offers up a thousand channels of dizzying possibility. Another box in the basement provides a nonviolent resolution to conflicting tastes. How in the world was I going to move my life in a better direction with so many opportunities for distraction? Their spare rooms have been a port in the storm (one generously offered), so I tensed my jaw in preparation for an inner battle with my own pull towards the idiot box.

Without noticing it unfolding, a curious change has taken place. Eight months have passed since we moved in. And I have watched maybe six hours during that time. Six hours total. The pull is simply gone.

What I didn't realize is that during two decades of relentless slef-flagellation and negotiation, I was still engaging with the television. Even when it was off, even when it was not it my house, I was attending to it. Like an ex-lover turned stalker hanging back in the shadows, its uncomfortably compelling presence kept me on high alert. By proclaiming, "I am not the kind of person who watches TV!" I was only re-establishing the intensity of the allure.

Reading Kenneth Gergen a lifetime ago, I began to consider that naming a problem or a diagnosis actually cements that diagnosis as reality. Each of us is in the process of framing and building our sense of what is real and who we are through our thoughts, language, and behaviors. Conceive of oneself as a productive or lazy, balanced or crazy, and watch the structure snap into place.

In the radical act of choosing a different life than the one I was living, I have inadvertently climbed up out of the deep grooves of patterned behavior. Not in every way, mind you. I still overeat when I am fretting and far too often, I speak before my censors have a chance to shut me up. But I walk every day in this new, exposed skin, and sometimes the intensity of lived experience is more than I can bear. Gazing at my fellow metro commuters, as tired as they seem, satisfies my hunger for color and story. A patch of ice, a lunchtime walk, a brief conversation. I lift my eyes, and while I may be gazing at the same street in the same neighborhood day after day, it is still a rare and precious place. This moment, without equal. Connection? Rest? A giggle? A narrative? Sure, television can offer all these things. But life itself does it so much better.

Okay, so yes, I am gushing. But you know what? Somehow, that specter back there in the buzzing, bluish light of the alleyway is no longer a concern to me. He seems a pitiful and dull companion. I guess by taking on the task of crafting my own joy, I stopped being secretly in love with him. I sigh and smile at myself. What did I ever see in that guy?

Now, when conversations about shows and movies swirl around me, I don't have much to add. No one seems to care. The fact that I don't watch much television is about as peripheral a part of my makeup as the fact that I don't play guitar or tinker with engines. On rare occasions, I might skirt the edges of these activities. I have no strong feelings about them one way or the other, and it is strange to notice television does not hook my attention anymore. I am much more compelled by the things I am doing than the things I am not. By beginning to construct a life resonant with the woman I really am, the protracted battles resolve themselves.

I guess all that wrangling with an unwelcome compulsion was missing one simple trick: if you simply turn yourself in the direction you want to move, the plug just falls out on its own.

Tax Season

My new friend Smee has directed me to do one gentle thing for myself every day for two weeks. This is an interesting assignment. Self-care I can do, but it usually takes the form of a hard run up five flights of stairs. Gentle? What is that? Play, a light touch, bouyacy? Last night, I belted out a lengthy repertoir of show-tunes in bed with the Bug. We were in bliss. Close enough.

Tonight, I am alone. Tee has taken Bug to a hockey game. I've already walked the dog, eaten the dinner, done the laundry, and packed the gym bag for tomorrow. What is left but Smee's homework? Ah, well. Dangerous question.

Bleepin' taxes.

I take a detour from my friend's assignment. Time to download the TurboTax CD. I begin, still folding clothes and feeling pretty dang good about how much time remains in this big, quiet night. Then the CD freezes. I re-boot, fiddle with settings. The computer grumbles through my nudges before finally staging a strike. The CPU withstands a round of verbal abuse but still refuses to budge. Pressure squeezes my temples, chest, jaw.

Once upon a time, a vibrant and independent girl leapt at her taxes at the start of every year. It sounds a little crazy, I know. But the math was a puzzle, and comparing deductions a compelling game. I liked the tables, finding my way. I did the taxes every year. Even for Tee. Even when we were dating. When we morphed into a unit with a single last name, the taxes were still a form of play.

Then we began moving. Then moving some more. Only three out of the past eight years have we lived in a single state during a tax year. Relocation expenses, car registrations, investment laws changing across time zones. Because Tee out earning the cash and I was home with the babe, I managed the increasingly burdensome finances. Year after year. State after state. During every first quarter, I diligently compiled documents and forced a smile, tight as it had become.

Now Tee is at the hockey game with our son. Here I sit in front of my internet download of TurboTax (couldn't ever get the dang CD to work). Every piece of data I enter into the system reminds me of the grim reality of our circumstances. Copious amounts of money disappeared selling off our already meager investments before and during the move. More cash drained away as we divided up our anemic bank accounts and our households. This is the first move in which we did not receive any reimbursments for our relocation expenses, so this girl has yet to summon the nerve to glance at those receipts.

My buddy Ben Franklin was right about death and taxes. At this moment, the former is looking more appealing. But what's the use of letting irritation eat me up? Every financial advisor counsels tough love. You've got to look hard and straight at what you spend, what you owe, and where you can go from here. My skin may have been thick before, but this new life seems is wrapping me in rhinocerous hide. Tackling the taxes may require copious amounts of cursing under my breath, but this gal has it in her to do whatever needs doing.

Still, I can't help but wonder what comes after this. No windfalls await me. The resources for easing our way -- my son's and mine -- seem impossibly out of reach. Managing the money is no longer a game. The stakes are far too high. Perhaps this is the biggest heartbreak of all.

But then I think of Smee.She and her husband had their own plan this weekend. As they plowed through their annual finances, they decided to stop at regular intervals during the torture to make a little whoopie. "Tax and Shag Sunday." That is the way to approach these things if one happens to have a mate in the vicinity who is primed for action.

As for me? I must stop entirely for the moment and get my bearings. Is it possible to approach this task with the deftness my friend suggests? I may not be playing with Monopoly money, but taking account of finances may simply be another way of gazing in dumb wonder at the life unfolding in my hands. I can attempt to give it shape, sure. But my touch must be delicate, because every gesture has the power to shape me in return.

For now, I am closing downTurboTax. I have to take a walk under the misted moon, smooth almond oil into my skin, and take a dozen deep breaths. When I am kind to myself, I rest. And when I rest, my mind has a way of revealing paths I could not conceive with all my thinking and agitated work. Sometimes, in my calmest moments, I even forget to worry about the future. As I let the pressure ease, the thought occurs to me that the resources my son and I need might already be right here, in my grasp, in this moment. It's a strange and delicious possibility.

Being gentle is a kind of currency whose worth does not appear in the normal calculations. I will make my own small deposit in this secret account and trust in the magic of compounding interest.