Another Day for Mom

By: Tanya Ward Goodman

I woke up on Mother’s Day to find a note on my pillow. It read “Have fun!” and told me to go to my son’s room to find the next clue. I followed directions and found another note that advised “the love is ithin you. Find the missing letter.” I headed to my daughter’s room for the final clue. As soon as I popped my head through the door, she sat up in bed and shouted, “Get out!” I backed away quickly, but not before I heard the sound of paper being shredded. The last clue was no more. Today, love was going to say “ithin.”

While my husband tried to stage manage this current drama, I went downstairs where my son was engrossed in Minecraft on the Xbox. I’m pretty sure he gave a grunt that could be construed as a Mother’s Day greeting.

I have to admit to feeling a bit let down, but this lasted about three seconds and then I thought about how I could take advantage of the hysteria upstairs and the screen-related zombification downstairs and actually enjoy my morning. I poured myself a cup of coffee and opened the newspaper. After nearly ten years, I think I might actually be getting the hang of this parenting thing.

In what was a nearly unprecedented bout of alone time, I got through the entire New York Times Magazine, the Style section and most of the Week in Review before everyone turned up in a slightly better mood. My daughter brought down a box of cards and letters and signs and drawings that she’d been working on for the better part of a month. On every page were hearts and flowers and sweet words. My son put down his controller long enough to give me a potted plant and a great, big hug and then he came down with a fever and went back to bed.

This year, Mother’s Day for me included a lot of mothering. I mothered my feverish son and my daughter who was angry and loving in turns. But I also went to a yoga class and returned to a wonderful brunch cooked by my loving husband. I looked after my family and felt them return the favor. The love was not “ithin,” it was all around.

Adventure Everywhere

By: Tanya Ward Goodman

Today, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, old jeans, and a headlamp, I scaled a cement wall, shimmied under a heating duct, and crawled across rubble. Up until the very moment I did this thing, the thought of doing it made my heart beat a little faster, but once I was under my house, making my way toward the damp spot waaaaay under the far wall, I just felt calm.

Most of my really terrible dreams include some moment when I am trying to inch through a low, enclosed space. In the really scary ones, I usually have to squirm through a tunnel, crawl under a fence, and squeeze through some kind of dark pipe to get where I need to be. In the dream, just beyond the tunnel, my kids are in trouble or my husband is in trouble and I am desperately needed. I hate these dreams. I hate feeling so scared and powerless.

The first time I told my husband I was going under the house to check on the musty smell, he sighed. He thought he should probably do it. A couple of days later, I said it again. I wasn’t trying to be passive aggressive. I was ready to do it. I think I had to psych myself up a bit, though. My husband sighed again.

“It needs to get done,” I said. I was channeling the women of my youth, the kind of moms who could bake a loaf of bread, grow a garden of greens, build an addition on the house, and kill a rattlesnake without batting an eye. In Los Angeles, there is no snow to shovel, no wood to chop and feed to the iron stove and some days I feel antsy.

Under the house, I noticed everything and nothing. I noticed the crinkle-crunch of the silver wrapped heating duct, the cracked clay earth deprived of sunlight for nearly eighty years. I noticed a little green rubber figure of Gumby lying forlorn in the dust. There was rat poop and a clump of greyish fur that might have rubbed off a raccoon. I crawled toward the damp spot on the far wall. I held that spot in the glow of my flashlight and shut out all the dark corners around me. Sure enough the wood was damp to my touch, the pipe calcified from a steady seep of water.

“Yep,” I shouted over my shoulder to my husband. “There’s a leak, all right.”

I backed out, away from the wall and guided by my husband’s voice I ducked my head, carefully squeaked under a pipe and reached my toes down the wall toward the safety of the ladder.

“I wasn’t scared under there,” I said. “Normally, I might have had a panic attack. But I didn’t.”

“Well, I’m glad I didn’t stand in the way of your personal growth,” my husband said.

As I travel through my forties, my path seems to bend toward the uncomfortable, the unfamiliar, and the adventurous. I feel more willing to take on the unknown. Crawling under my house wasn’t quite as thrilling as learning to ski or taking a big horse for a fast spin around an arena, but it wasn’t bad for a slow day.

Of course, now I need to call the plumber.

Twenty Years

By: Tanya Ward Goodman

On the day the riots broke out in Los Angeles, I was eating lunch at a Thai restaurant on Larchmont Boulevard just down the street from the television production company where I worked. We didn’t usually all eat together. Mindful of my tiny paycheck, I usually scrounged left over bagels in the company kitchen or grabbed a handful of Cheez-Its from the big box my boss kept in his office, but this day was different. We’d gathered together because we’d heard that following the verdict in the Rodney King case, there had been sporadic violence. The air was filled with sirens and helicopters. We thought we’d have lunch and then see what happened. We weren’t sure if we should go home or stay at work. It was the streaks of smoke in the air that made up our minds. From the patio of the Thai restaurant, we could see the smudgy proof of the news reports. Fires were burning. Big fires.

The drive from the office to my new single apartment in Silver Lake took, on average, twenty minutes. On this day the drive took two hours. I was afraid, but saw nothing that justified this fear, only other people, like me, trying to get home.

From my window, I could see clouds of smoke downtown, helicopters hovering above it all like the lazy flies in my apartment lobby. I listened to the radio and then, overwhelmed by what I was hearing, turned on some music and set to the project of tiling my kitchen floor. I laid down black and white tile in a checkerboard pattern over the stained linoleum. It was comforting to create a clean, orderly space.

Just before dark, my downstairs neighbor knocked on my door. He wondered if I wanted to watch his television. He wanted to make sure I was okay. I remember going down into his apartment where his big, orange cat rubbed against my legs and the screen of his television was bright with the color of flames.

The next morning, I talked to my dad and stepmother. They said I could leave Los Angeles if I needed to. They would buy me a plane ticket if I wanted one. But I told them I felt safe. They promised to wire money so that I could buy a television of my own.

When their money arrived, I picked out a tiny TV at The Good Guys on La Cienega Boulevard because by that time, the Circuit City in my own neighborhood had been looted. The salesman jokingly told me I was the only person actually paying for a television.

I joined the line in front of the ATM and withdrew as much money as I was allowed in one day. I waited in another line to fill my tank with gas. I stocked up on food from nearly empty shelves at the grocery store. I ate English muffins slathered in butter and drank a few bottles of beer. Except for one strange night when I ignored the curfew to date a cute boy on the west side, I stayed inside my apartment for the rest of the week. I finished tiling my floor and played with an angry kitten I’d adopted from the community of neighborhood strays. I watched the news of the riots on my new television and I talked to my parents every day.

On one of these phone calls, my stepmother said, “you are living history.”

I thought of that comment this morning when my son looked at the newspaper and asked, “What’s a riot?” I started to explain what happened here in this city twenty years ago. I told him about the fires and the curfews and the anger and the sorrow. I tried to do a good job telling him, but he was about to leave for school and he was only kind of listening. Like anything that is complicated or sad or “grown-up,” we will talk about this again and again. We will take it layer by layer. It is strange to him that news once came from the radio and the television. I didn’t have an iPhone, I couldn’t update my status on Facebook, or get minute by minute coverage of the violence on my computer. There was no Internet and few cell phones. Most of my news came from looking up at the sky, listening out my window. Smoke and sirens and the deep growl of fire engines.

The newspaper on my breakfast table tells me that my son lives in a more peaceful city than I did twenty years ago. I hope so. I hope that this history does not bear repeating.

Hungry For Books

By: Tanya Ward Goodman

I have just started to read “The Hunger Games.” I’m curious to see what the hullabaloo is about.

My nine-year-old son wants to read the book, but after a lot of thought, I’ve decided against it.

I think he’s too young. I thought a lot about my decision. I did some research. I asked around. I talked to the librarian and to the woman who works in the children’s department at the bookstore. I Googled “Hunger Games age appropriate.” I read all the articles in the newspaper and I watched the trailer for the movie. And then I decided that my boy was too young to read this book.

It is not that he couldn’t read it. He’s an advanced reader and willing to lose himself in a good book for hours at a time. He could easily follow the story. But I’m not sure he will really get it. I’m not sure he’s ready to read about kids killing other kids. (Truthfully, I’m not sure I’m ready to read about it.)

When I was in second grade, I read “The Hobbit.” I was very impressed with myself and carried this fat tome around with a certain degree of pride. Later, in seventh grade, (at my father’s recommendation,) I read “The Magus” by John Fowles. I have very little memory of either book. I don’t think I really absorbed them or understood them and so some might argue that reading these books did me no harm. It might be said that simply carrying them around boosted my self-confidence and gave me the will to read other challenging books.

But what if I missed an opportunity to really connect my life to the ideas in these books? What if I’d read the Hobbit at twelve or thirteen? What if I’d waited to plumb the erotic, violent, obsessive weirdness of “The Magus” until I was in high school or college or at the very least until I’d gone through puberty?

When my son was four going on five, we showed him what I consider the “first three” Star Wars movies. He and all his friends in pre-school played at being Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. He got an X-wing Fighter for his birthday and a light saber for Christmas. Star Wars was all the rage until around first or second grade when it was suddenly “for babies.” Now that he’s nine going on ten, this well-told story of a boy torn between good and evil would come in really handy. Sadly, I let the excellent metaphor of the Force versus The Dark Side go to waste at a time when they didn’t really resonate with my boy.

I am not saying that our children shouldn’t read these books (or see these movies). I am simply saying, why rush it?

My boy is young for such a little bit of time; I want to let him be young. He’s reading Harry Potter, but he’s also cuddling up to me and asking to hear “Winnie the Pooh.” He is a pre-teen and a post-toddler all rolled up into one silly, weepy, petulant, nose-picking, joke-making ball. I’m taking it slow while we can. Because between now and the day he asks for the keys to my car, he has plenty of time to read “The Hunger Games.”

Fun or Not

By: Tanya Ward Goodman

“He said something that really, really hurt my feelings,” my daughter said.

“Tell me,” I offered.

“I can’t repeat it,” she said through tears.

“Okay,” I said. “I don’t need to know.”

But she kept dropping hints and asking me to guess. “It wasn’t a bad word,” she said. “It was the worst thing you can say to someone without using a bad word.”

“I don’t really want to guess,” I said. And I really didn’t. Why throw a whole bunch of negative things into the air and take the chance that they are ten times worse than the actual thing that was said?

“It begins with the word what,” she said.
“What…” I began.
“You’re not guessing. I’m upset that you’re not guessing.”

She was crying hard now and crouched down on the floor in the corner like a little rabbit. I didn’t need to see her face to wonder if she needed a tissue. She nodded and without lifting her face accepted the tissue and blew her nose. When she sat up, her eyes were red, her cheeks streaked, her hair a flyaway bird’s nest. And she was still beautiful.

“Let me whisper it to you,” she said.
She leaned her snuffling self toward my ear and managed to get out “What happened…” before collapsing into tears again. “My feelings are really hurt,” she explained.

I didn’t want her to tell me. I just wanted to sit beside her and try to give some support where I could tell it was needed. I made some sympathetic noises.

After a few minutes, she looked up and me, her cloudy eyes filled with determination.

“What happened to the fun Sadie?” she said. “That’s what he said.” Her lip trembled and a couple of big fat tears oozed out. “And that really, really hurt my feelings.”

I was stung. Her father had said something similar to me a few hours earlier. He’d reminisced about the “fun” Tanya.

It is not pleasant to be reminded that there might be another, better, you around someplace. It is terrible to hear this kind of sentimental longing for your old “fun” self especially when you are (for whatever reason) not feeling particularly “fun.”

I think that both my daughter and I excel at being “fun.” The thing is, it’s hard to keep it up full time. But when we are fun, we are so fun that any sort of un-fun concern about sharing toys, grocery lists, or a small complaint about the neighbor’s smoky outdoor fire pit are thrown into relief against a background of circus colors and confetti.

Years ago, I drove a 1964 Nash Metropolitan. It was a cartoon of a car and so cheerful with its red and white paint job and jaunty rear-mounted spare tire that people smiled and waved when I drove by. Complete strangers held ten-minute conversations with me in parking lots. It was lovely, though at times, exhausting. I felt constant pressure to be in a good mood. I traded in the Nash for a grey Honda Civic and never felt guilty for my occasional darkness again.

I don’t want Sadie to be stuck in a Nash anymore than I want that for myself.

“I can see why that hurt your feelings,” I said.

I hugged her and gave her more tissue and made more sympathetic noises.

I sometimes long for the “fun Sadie.” The nearly-eight-year-old is a ball of stress and anxiety and hysteria. But then, so is the nearly 44-year-old. And we are both going to be just fine.

Kentucky Whirlwind, Part 3

By: Tanya Ward Goodman

 

 

“Midway is halfway between Lexington and Frankfort, that’s why it’s called Midway.  You know, mid-way.”  The hotel clerk gives me directions for the scenic route.  “You’ll see some things – keep a look out for the rock fences.”

It’s my last day in Kentucky and I am driving to Midway to meet a long time friend for brunch.  He’s told me to drive on the street and he’ll find me.  It’s a town that small.

I’ve known Greg for much of my life.  He was my father’s friend first, a real Hollywood screenwriter with the voice of a midnight disc jockey.  He’d been married and divorced and lived with a woman he called Paige, though her real name was Leslie.  He had daughters my age, but they seemed years ahead in their city clothes and painted nails.

I remember visiting Greg in Los Angeles and staying with him in his apartment in West Hollywood.  I remember poinsettias outside his window.  These plants were sold only at Christmas in New Mexico and came in foil-covered plastic pots that got tossed out with the wrapping paper.  In sunny So-Cal, they grew twelve feet out of the ground and bloomed all year.

I drive for a long time, through rolling hills and board fences that run for miles.  The dark bodies of horses dot the hillsides.  The famed grass is neither blue nor green at this time of year, but straw colored in the wan winter light.  A few snowflakes flicker down from the sky.  The last time I saw Greg he was visiting my childhood home and I could tell that everywhere he looked, he saw my dad.  We both missed him and that missing seemed to take up the years between us; to make us evenly “adult,” no matter our ages.

In Midway, I pulled into the first spot and looked to my right to see Greg waving from inside a blue Volkswagen bug.  He took me to a favorite brunch spot and made sure to hold the door and point out all the original art inside.  He walked with a cane and his hair had turned gray.  He told me the medicine had changed his face and made him forgetful, but his voice was the same and he still embodied the elegant and graceful soul I remember visiting as a child.

After our meal, he offered a driving tour of the surrounding towns.  We passed gigantic estates owned by the very wealthy and fields where prizewinning racehorses grew strong on a diet of Kentucky Blue Grass.  The trees were bare of leaves and he wished I could see the country when it was blanketed by green.  I come from the land of green, now.  The winter landscape rests my eyes.   We talked and talked and his company was so easy, so attentive, I wished that we’d had so much more time.

He drove me back to my little red car and we parted quickly, the truth of his illness heavy between us.  I am awkward with good-byes.  I hate to really say them for good so I said, “I hope I see you again.” And he said, “yes.”  And that is how we left it.   I drove off to the airport and thought of the rock fences we had seen.  Miles and miles of these dry stacked, stone walls were built at first by the Irish and then by slaves and now are maintained by conservation societies.  The walls are made of the gray limestone that lies beneath much of Kentucky providing minerals to feed all that grass and filtering the water used to make bourbon.  This stone is what makes the grass and the horses and the whiskey great.

If I were to imagine my life as a kind of topographical map, I might imagine Greg as fieldstone. A solid, though, often unseen influence, one who has in some way helped me be great.

Kentucky Whirlwind, Part Two

By: Tanya Ward Goodman

 

 

Under a grey sky, I drove from Louisville to Frankfort, Kentucky. Dry grass rolled out across the hills on both sides of my small, red car. I stopped at a white clapboard house and bought bourbon balls and fudge for my husband and children.

“That’s the real Kentucky,” the tiny, white haired woman behind the counter told me. “That’s just what people get.”

The air inside was heavy with the scent of caramel. It was with great self-control that I put the candy, unopened, into my suitcase. I looked at the tiny blue numbers of my car clock and hit the road. I didn’t want to be late for the wedding.

A few months before, Mayra had called to share the news.
“My boy,” she said. “He’s engaged.”
I honestly couldn’t believe it. “But he’s a baby,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “But he’s in love.”
She asked if I would come to the wedding and before she’d finished asking, I’d said, “yes.”

I love weddings. I love them because they not only celebrate the love of two happy people, but they also provide a wonderful way to gather all the disparate folks in your life in one place to share in joy. A wedding is a union of two people, but also a union of family and friends. When I am able, I always say, “yes” to a wedding.

Frankfort is a small town and my hotel was only a few blocks from the First Baptist Church where the ceremony would take place, but I still managed to get lost. I was out of breath when I rushed into the church lobby. An usher asked me which side I was on and I told him the groom’s and then I saw Mayra. Her eyes were bright with emotion and we hugged for a long time. I pulled back to admire her red gown and her carefully curled hair. I was so glad to be there.

While she prepared to walk the aisle with her son, I was taken to the front pew and seated with her two daughters. We hugged and laughed and talked. We peered into the tiny screen of my phone at photos of my kids. They complimented my jacket, I expressed my amazement at their ability to walk in their extremely tall, sparkly shoes. They were as beautiful and kind and generous with their love as Mayra.

I left my camera in my pocketbook for most of the wedding, but I don’t need photos to remember what it felt like to watch my friend walk down the aisle on the arm of her son. I was nervous for her and happy for her. I felt her sorrow and joy all mixed together. I could almost see the love she felt for her boy and the hope she held for his happiness floating around them, bright as stars.

When Mayra took her place next to me, I held her hand and made sure she had a tissue. I watched the bride in her Cinderella dress float down the aisle on the arm of her daddy and watched while these two lovely, young (so young) people promised to love and cherish each other.

I was the only guest to make the trip to Kentucky and so I looked after Mayra’s coat and met the parents of the bride. I made small talk with the nice woman who organized weddings for the church. I made sure my friend had a glass of tea. I danced with Mayra’s husband and watched tearfully as she danced with her son the tall, handsome Marine.

“Your dress is perfect,” I told her. “It looks great with Brian’s uniform.”

“That’s why I picked it,” she said. “I wanted us to match.”

After we ate tacos and drank more sweet tea, we tossed birdseed as the happy couple headed off to meet their new life. The music started to wind down and the bride’s family began to stack the chairs. I went into a photo booth with Mayra and her husband and we made silly faces as the camera flashed again and again.

We stood for a while in the parking lot of the church, shifting back and forth on our feet in the cold. They would drive their big truck back to Houston in the morning and I would take my little red car off to Lexington and then to the Louisville airport.

I thought about the odds of us meeting here. In her life Mayra had travelled from Guatemala to Los Angeles to Houston. Her son had traded Texas for Hawaii where he met and fell for a girl from Kentucky. I’d come to Los Angeles from San Francisco with friends I’d met in Chicago, though I’d grown up in New Mexico. I thought about all the paths my life had already taken and all those paths, as yet unknown, where my children might lead me. I felt lucky and loved and loving.

The girls skittered off to the truck on their high heels, legs long as fawns, and Mayra and I shared one last hug. She thanked me for coming and I thanked her for having me, but I realized that sometimes there really aren’t enough words.

Kentucky Whirlwind – Part 1

By: Tanya Ward Goodman

I touched down in Kentucky in the midst of a tornado. The man in the seat behind me was watching the Weather Channel on Direct TV and he couldn’t help but describe the dark clouds, the high wind and sheets of rain. I could have seen those things if I’d looked out my window, but I chose to keep my hands flat on my knees and stare straight ahead. I memorized the pattern of the blue and tan upholstery and focused on the joy my daughter finds in turbulence. I imagined how she would take the jolting and dropping and jerking of our airplane. She would hold her hands up in the air, the way you would on a roller coaster. She would laugh. She would gleefully shout, “That was awesome!”

The man behind me said, “I can’t believe they are taking us in.” He said, “I don’t know what they’re thinking.” He said, “Just look at that front – just a wall of blackness…”

We landed and everyone burst into applause. I turned to look at my seatmate and she nodded her head to the guy behind us and rolled her eyes. “Not much help there,” she said.

On the ground, I got a text from my friend, J.J, “Just came out of the basement…”

“Heading over,” I wrote back. “Brought rain boots, but no ruby slippers.”

When I arrived at her house, I heard, “Is my friend here? Is that my friend?”

Her son, a teenager, shrugged and swung open the screen door and then slunk off down the front steps, not wanting to witness the grown ups and all their hugging and jumping around. It had been his whole lifetime since we’d last seen each other, but it seemed like no time at all.

I spent Friday afternoon and Friday night and most of Saturday morning sitting in a wooden chair at a small table in J.J’s kitchen. She (just as she had in college and after college and in our early twenties) danced around. She’d land for a moment and then she was back up to grab a glass of wine or a jar of the most wonderful pickled beans. She’d be up to rumple her son’s hair, check the temperature of the oven or lean out the back door to take a look at the clearing sky. It was wonderful to be in her presence. It was so familiar and yet, this time, I had company – her husband and children – all of us swimming a little more slowly, but appreciating her speed, her lightness, her energy.

The screen door slammed again and again, opening and closing to admit a neighborhood kid or the sweet dog, Lola, who leaned her wide soft body against me and looked up with the most trusting eyes. The kids asked for money and taquitos and drinks. They ate jelly beans out of a mason jar. There were mussels for dinner and lots of bread to sop up the juice. There was good music and the promise of an all night bourbon-fed conversation and then we suddenly realized that we were no longer twenty and it wasn’t even eleven o’clock, but it was time for bed.

In the morning there were waffles and visiting friends. We ate lots of bacon and drank so much coffee my hands shook as much as my plane on landing. We realized we had chosen the same wedding china, we’d read a lot of the same books and our parenting style – kind and funny and fast and loose – was the same. We became friends when we were still kind of kids and although we didn’t travel all the way to adulthood together, we have shared many of the same paths.

It was with real regret that I got in the car and drove away from her house. I needed more time. With more time, we could organize a walk, where we could talk and move simultaneously, we could cook a meal together. We could pull up a stool at that little bar down the street. I wanted more time with her kind and funny husband. I wanted him to meet my own kind and funny husband. I wanted her kids to meet my kids. And one day I think it will happen. Her teenager, a little less aloof than when I’d arrived, offered his hand when I said good-bye and I took it and promised we would meet again.

I drove off down the narrow streets of J.J.’s hometown. She lives just a few blocks from the friends of her youth. Their kids play with her kids and their stories are one long, continuous strand. I was so grateful to be able to weave myself into her world for a moment; so happy to pick up the thread of our friendship and find it still so strong.

Dear Mayra

By: Tanya Ward Goodman

When you came to interview, you were wearing a perfume that almost kept me from hiring you. I have a thing about scents. For me, an awful lot of things wind up in the “smells bad” column -even things that might hit the “smells good” column for someone else. You smelled floral like my grandmother’s bathroom cabinet. Plus, you seemed shy. And I’m shy. And if we were both shy, how, I wondered, would we ever communicate?

It was important that we communicate because you would be helping me to care for my children. The woman who helped us before you was a super communicator. (Maybe she even over did it from time to time.) She was a big gust of wind and you seemed just a breeze. I thought I would like that, but me, with two kids still in diapers, me with milk leaking out of my breasts, me with the messy kitchen counters and the bare refrigerator, what did I even know?

I hired you because I’m a firm believer in fate. I met your mother-in-law in the Nordstrom shoe department and she seemed nice. She mentioned that she was a nanny and from the way she talked to my daughter, plump and happy in her stroller, I could tell she was a good one. Truthfully, I wanted to hire your mother-in-law, but she was unavailable. So she recommended you and your perfume and timidity were far outweighed by my need for a nap, so we hired you.

My belief in fate was again rewarded because you turned out to be funny and kind and a really good cook. One day you mentioned that you had an aversion to weird smells and I admitted my hesitancy to hire you because of the perfume. You laughed. The perfume had been a gift and you’d worn it only that day before tossing it out.

You were able to get my daughter to take a nap by laying her across your lap and patting her back. My son took to you right away and brought you piles of books to read aloud.

The day that I chopped down the overgrown bushes in our front yard, you said, “Your eyes are so sad. They are like a child’s.” I explained that I was missing my father. That his death, even after more than two years, left a hole. You said that the intensity of my emotions might mean that my father’s spirit was still hanging around. You said he might be missing me, too. You suggested that I leave him a glass of milk. This is what your grandmother believed would comfort the spirits. I thought my dad might find more comfort in a beer, but I took comfort in your kindness.

Your children were beautiful and smart and very, very kind. Your daughters accompanied you when you worked on a rare evening and they showered my children with love. The three of you were so lovely and serene and so filled with love for each other. You brought my kids to your home and cooked them soup, you asked if they could accompany you to the school orchestra concert where your daughter played violin. You and I huddled together, teary eyed, when your oldest girl graduated from eighth grade.

When you told me you would be moving away, I was thrilled for you. Your new house was lovely, the kids would be able to walk to school. But Houston was very far away and that night after you’d gone home, I cried and cried. My husband tried to comfort me. “You’re losing a friend,” he said. And it was true.

Motherhood is lonely and you were great, great company. In those early years, I was uncertain and you had the answers. All the parenting books talk about “modeling” meaning that kids will learn by watching their parents. But who do parents model? You. We should all model you.

When I was sick with bronchitis you brewed this incredibly strong tea composed of honey and lemon and pepper and you told me to drink it while it was still hot. I did as you said and I was flooded with warmth and well-being. I get that same feeling now as I write.

Adapted from a piece on my blog “Dearest You” www.youdearestyou.blogspot.com

Oscar Night

By: Tanya Ward Goodman

This year’s award for most enduring bad mood goes to my daughter. She seems determined to sweep the categories for deepest scowl without the employment of a makeup crew, loudest door slam without the assistance of a Foley artist, and most dramatic performance of the phrase, “You are the worst mother ever.”

Oscar night found us with more Sturm und Drang in our house than on the screen all year long.

I’m not sure why it is this way. I’m not sure how to change it. I am feeling a bit defeated and powerless and, above all that, tired to the bone.

It started out fine. (Just as everything was fine when that poor family moved to Amityville.) We worked on a themed menu for dinner: pigs in a blanket in honor of “Moneyball,” brie, pate and baguette in tribute to “The Artist” and “Hugo” (though with all the Brits in Scorsese’s Paris, perhaps we should have gone with tea and scones). We had deviled eggs and pie for those belabored gals in “The Help.” My daughter selected artichokes and made a salad of spinach and strawberries. It was fun. For a minute.

Then it wasn’t.

We didn’t eat the salad fast enough or apparently with the desired amount of excitement. (Though it was very good. Perhaps we need an acting coach to work on our line readings for this very particular director.)

Though we repeated over and over that the ballots were only for fun, feelings were hurt when my kids guessed wrong. (How could they be right all the time when they’d only seen one of the films in the contest? Considering their answer in every category was “Hugo,” they still did pretty well.)

To complicate things, my daughter was awake one minute and the next asleep. It was a lovely and quiet interlude. She looked adorable wrapped in a blanket on the sofa. Her face, relaxed from its perpetual furrowed fury, was angelic.

And then she woke up.

“This is the worst day of my life,” she said. “You kept going without me.”

We did keep going. We had to. We were as determined as Billy Crystal to keep this evening on schedule. Bedtime was at nine and the Academy helped us by ending the glittery doings just a few minutes before the witching hour.

My daughter, like perhaps a starlet or two, slept last night in her clothes. She woke this morning with bleary eyes and turned immediately to the paper. “Who won?” she asked. “What happened?”

I was not exactly sure how to answer.

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