A New London Christmas

For 17 years I have been making the same trip, same time, same general routine.

I leave from Dulles the Sunday of Thanksgiving, arrive in London Monday morning, go to the office in time for my morning meeting (10:15 back home, 3:15 London time).  

Regular visits to this coffee shop or that bookstore, depending on where I'm staying.  Beers with MRDC'ers, a lunch or dinner with the team, maybe meet a friend.  It never never dulls.

Whether a drink at the Jamaica Wine Bar, pasta at Guiseppe's, a walk amid the Christmas lights on Oxford Street, I never tire of this city, listening to these people, watching.

In the shadow of the Paris attacks there is an unease that has replaced the usual holiday joy.  

Maybe it's no different back home, but riding the Tube here you can sense everyone looking more closely at each other, the bags they are carrying, wondering.  

Someone in our office, apropos of nothing, mentions how his morning train gets backed up at the same point each day, three trains lined up in the same tunnel and they all think the same thing, easy target.

Piccadilly Circus is filled with tourists, lovers surround the Eros Statue which is shrouded in construction materials.  A group of Muslim men walk the area with pamphlets that read, "I am Muslim and I love Christ."  Police stand by, waiting for trouble.

My plane taxis away from the gate, Thanksgiving behind me, another ritual on the horizon.  I exhale, take my Melatonin with a glass of red wine and am asleep before we are in the air.  I am awakened by the woman sitting next to me as she leans in too close, bumping my shoulder and asking why we are flying so low.  The Captain announces we are returning to Washington.

Everyone thinks the same thing.

We land, surrounded by firetrucks, the lights are stark through my rain splattered window on the cold dark night.  It turns out we've hit a bird.  Even in the bleariness of my Melatonin coma I know we are not leaving any time soon.  The rush to the Virgin desk, the luggage, home in time to put the girls to bed and back at the airport at 7 the following morning.

We all want to believe that we are keeping calm and carrying on, but we know it's coming.  Just like the shooting that occurs in California while I'm there, is it Middle East terrorism or just more gun violence?  Either way we are not surprised.  

It has penetrated our thinking.  The 20 minute Tube ride, the 10 minute walk through the train station, the 8 hour flight home, it is there.  They have won this battle.

"So now we're bombing them," the cab driver says to me, referring to the Parliament vote from the previous day.  He is driving me back to Paddington Station early on my last morning.  The Prime Minister said Britain is safer now that the bombing has begun. "What good does it do bombing Syria," he asks, "if they're living next door."

Changing Rooms

We don’t see gradual.

I looked up one day from our intense preparation for his college departure and realized, he was already gone.

Our parent's generation doesn't seem to understand.  Somehow my departure from the stage wasn't such a cataclysmic event.

When they say "What's the big deal, no one died" I want to shake them and say "you don't understand, I'm just gonna miss him, his presence, the pleasure of his company."

I am trying not to be overly dramatic about the first one leaving the nest, but even the most hard-bitten friends have talked about the emptiness that comes when they do.

“It’s like they cut a hole in your heart,” according to friend I would call, unemotional.

Nothing ages you like your children's passages.  When you send them off to college and realize the clock really is ticking, not on them, but on you.  It forces us to think about all we are in the midst of: Jobs, marriages, friendships, life.

In a much passed-around article, columnist Michael Gerson compared dropping his child off at college with the ending of the universe.  He notes that Cosmologists, who I thought gave facials, “assure us, our sun and all suns will consume their fuel, violently explode and then become cold and dark. Matter itself will evaporate into the void and the universe will become desolate for the rest of time.”

Okay, that’s dramatic, but only a little.

We started preparing early, at the start of senior year, a time everyone told us would be a disaster.  But it wasn’t.  The college application process, the waiting, the pull and push of a teenager trying to escape childhood and parents trying to keep order.

Everything flew generally on time and according to plan.    

And then one night a few weeks ago I headed upstairs to drop the new copy of Sports Illustrated on his bed and found myself in the center of his empty room.  There were lots of days like this, with work, friends, and his own angst changing the household routine, I would leave before he was up and he was out when I went to bed.  His job as an 18-year old waiter conflicted with my schedule as a human.  I could go days without seeing his face. 

I hadn’t been in his room in weeks.  It used to be a regular hang out.  At first to tuck him in, read a book, make sure he was asleep, then make sure he was home.  It was a place where serious talks took place and stories were told in the confidence of darkness.  

And now I stood in a foreign zone, duffle bags splayed open like patients on an operating table, packages of t-shirts and socks, various dorm room requirements, fresh toiletries still in their packaging.  Along the perimeter was his past.  An outer ring of memorabilia that tracked his childhood: 

A baseball glove, a collage of pictures with kids from another neighborhood, stacks of books from various years, Narnia, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Road. Some are dog eared, some un-cracked.  Old bobble heads, long-forgotten ticket stubs, a sea shell, baseball caps of all sizes, a faded art project, a piggy bank stuffed with pennies, a replica of the Forum, an empty Coke bottle from Israel, a deconstructed science project.

A friend of mine calls this a “memory minefield.”  These places that shake us with their history, of a time that no longer exists.  

I look for them in every room, every block of our neighborhood, every memento.  The school, the restaurants, a dent on the couch, things from a different era, when the house had a different rhythm. Gerson said that parenthood is a lesson in humility: “The very best thing about your life is a short stage in someone else’s story.”

Hunting around these corners, preparing myself for these moments, I realized that while I was still on stage, he was already gone.  Off on his new adventure, while I am here with the memories, a minefield for me, a past for him.

In a Foreign Land: These Four Walls

In a Foreign Land: These Four Walls: The most common narrative in literature is the hero returning home.   But not all homes are equal.  We get more from that first house th...

These Four Walls

The most common narrative in literature is the hero returning home.  

But not all homes are equal.  We get more from that first house than anywhere else.  The memory of that first bedroom, the curve of the living room couch, the light behind a certain fixture.

 

Singer/songwriter/hero Bruce Springsteen said all his songs come out of that place.  "My deepest motivation comes out of the house that I grew up in and the circumstance that were set up there."  He said it's a place "you carry with you forever, no matter where you go or what you become." 

In a new book Michelle Obama said "Everything that I think about and do, is shaped around the life that I lived in that little apartment.” 

So what will our children remember?

The impact of these four walls scrapes at me as they run off, realizing the walls that we built are those that will define them.  Our house, the place we designed with the photos we picked, the drapes she chose, the books we stacked, are the ones of their childhood memories.  

Springsteen and Mrs. Obama describe the memory fragments: the smell of the kitchen, the light at the end of a father's cigarette, the sound of a sibling on the other side of a thin wall.

Parenting expert Wendy Mogel tries to assure parents not to mistake "a snapshot taken today with the epic movie of your child's life."  But how do we know what will stick and what will fade?  Will they remember the time I got up and made breakfast or the time I slept in?  Will they recall the time I yelled when I was right or the time I was just having a bad day?

A few weeks ago on Spring Break in a darkened and hip restaurant in South Beach my middle child started to cry without provocation.  It was just the three of us, me, the college-bound eldest and the middle.

She explained the burst of emotion came from the knowledge that with travel, summer, camp and jobs, it was coming to an end.

"This is the last week we'll be in the house together," she said.  "As brother and sister."

And then the day came, their last breakfast around that kitchen island, the scene of so many morning comments, passed forks in silence, shared muffins, stolen last pieces of French toast.  The only fireworks were in my heart as he gnawed at a bagel and she measured out gluten-free granola into her yogurt. On their first day of school there were pictures and new backpacks, sharpened pencils and juice boxes.  Today there was no fanfare, just two adults looking for their car keys, going in separate directions to different schools. 

It will never be like this again I thought, and she articulated.  So much of what has occupied our minds in that home over the past 18 years has been about what they are seeing. No longer are they learning this lesson or that, those days are past, either they saw it or they didn't.  They remembered it or not.  There is still much to learn, but it's too late to change the arc.

Last week the middle child needed to go to the National Archives for a school project.  We drove through rush hour to get in line with the Spring Breakers and when they all ran to see the Declaration of Independence, we viewed some obscure document, took notes and finished.

With time still left in our morning I grabbed her hand as we ran across Constitution Avenue to the National Gallery of Art.  Somewhere below the gallery, between the section that houses the old masters and the moderns is a gift shop, a waterfall and a little cafe.

I hadn't been there in years and so a few wrong turns around a series of 15th century European sculptures until we emerged at the gleaming underground.  There wasn't much food yet and so she got water and I got coffee and we sat for just a moment.  There were mostly old people eating sandwiches out of brown bags, others who worked at the gift shop setting up their stalls.  And next to us a man and women dressed for work drinking coffee and eating Tootsie Pops?

We listened to the conversation, the clack of shoes on the floor, the workers making lunch for the tourists.  And I told her that she won't remember this day, but I hope she will one day know the complete pleasure of having 15 minutes with your daughter and sharing an espresso.

"I always remember this stuff," she assured me. "I have a good memory for this kind of thing."

The Symmetry of Birthdays

I’ve always liked the symmetry of our birthdays.

As if we planned it.  This year my dad turns 78, I turn 48 and my son 18.

Every year something rises to the fore, the growing child, the aging parent, the next stage.

Forty eight it turns out, is not the year I inch closer to AARP, it’s the year he leaves home.  Everything takes on the tinge of this event that is still several months away, but still there.

It reminds me of the scene in When Harry Met Sally as she weeps about turning 40.

“And I’m gonna be 40” she says, amid hysterics.

“When?” Harry asks.

“Someday.”

“In eight years,” he deadpans.

“But it’s there.  It’s just sitting there.  Like this big dead end.”

I don’t yet know what I am feeling about this next phase, but I keep watching for it, around the corners of our daily life.  A recent New York Times piece gave me the green light to feel something.  The article about empty nest dads articulates some of what is coming as our first born speeds down the runway toward college.

“The empty-nest transition is harder on fathers than conventional wisdom might have us believe. Men’s experience of this life passage has changed dramatically from what they might have felt — or admitted feeling — 40 years ago.”

I agree with the sentiment, but why was this article written by a woman?  Is no man capable of explaining why a child leaving home is deadening?  Terrifying?  Sad.

According to her there is a happy reason for all this unhappiness:  

“Fathers occupy a more central place in family life than they once did: Since the 1960s, fathers have more than doubled the number of hours they spend on housework and now do about a third of household chores, according to the Pew Research Center.”

So that’s it, the extra run of laundry, the additional sock repaired brought us closer to our children?  I think not.  Dads are parents too.  Actually, dads are people too.  It’s less about the chores that we complete and more about the hole that exists in our days and the redefinition of a role we acquired the day these children scream into our lives.

It’s all about the clock.

I have heard more men talk with sadness about how their weeks have been defined by their child’s soccer schedule, a joint commute to school/work or the shared sporting event.  The first big hit comes when they get their driver’s license, a couple years before they leave and our time with them is carved into even smaller pieces.  If we are not their driver, their coach, their ticket purveyor, who are we?

“Men’s identity is now invested in a more intimate, hands-on fatherhood; fathers see themselves not just as breadwinners but as caregivers and confidants, and feel deeply attached to kids they have changed and bathed and driven.”

A driver’s license is a license to stay away. They no longer rely on us to pick them up from school, the haircut, tennis practice is now something to be shared with friends. The household rhythm is off, the empty seat at the table, the un-dented couch cushion.  But what will be a year from now?  A therapist might call this anticipatory anxiety.  No shit.  

As we age our birthdays become less about us and more about things outside ourselves, the age of a parent, the number of candles on our child’s cake, the lines on a face, the distance between visits.  This birthday is not about who I am today, but of what’s next.  

Until now there was a crude road map for what to expect when you’re expecting, schooling, skinned knees, grit, grade school, high school. 

But not now. 

What is life like on the other side of that door?  The door they’re about to walk out of?