Essays

Thoughts on Happiness

2011-09-15T08:15:00.000-07:00

Short essay I wrote recently...

2010-10-21T15:41:00.000-07:00

...about my mother, my daughter, my younger self and my current self. Bet you can relate.

Reading about Meg

2010-08-23T17:50:00.000-07:00

I recently read at the Tory Burch store in SF and my pal Rick videotaped it. For all the Megs out there, big love.

To all the moms: here's the Mother's Day note you deserve

2010-05-02T09:46:00.000-07:00

Tell me something

2010-04-14T15:37:00.001-07:00

Couple announcements and a request:

1. I'll be on The Today Show on Thurs Apr 29 if you want to tune in and see if I've gained any weight or grown any new moles since last you saw me live. No idea what time my segment is. (Sorry)

2. If you want to give LIFT to someone for Mother's Day (May 9) and you'd like a signed bookplate to stick in the jacket, I am happy to send you one. Just reply with your address and I'll pop it in the mail.

3. I just finished a beautiful book I wanted to recommend: An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken. Short, intelligent, powerful.

4. If you live in the Bay Area and are free on Thursday, May 6, I'd love to see you at Notes & Words, a cool new event that mixes readings with live music.

Okay, now the request:

I am writing something about Mother's Day and was wondering what, specifically, you'd like to be thanked for. What thing or things do you do that no one seems to notice or appreciate?

Alright, that's it for me today. Sending out good wishes to you all from my hotel in Houston.

I dare you.

2010-03-09T09:53:00.000-08:00

What are we doing to our girls?

2010-03-09T09:34:00.000-08:00

This image stopped me short today while I was walking in Chicago. There's something so plainly starved about this girl, and then she's so young, in her underwear, almost like child pornography. Do we really want to go this far? Do I have to walk my kids past this?

Couldn't we insist, en masse, that all models (the term itself admits to their influence) stay within a healthy weight range? Not obese and not maudlin sticks. Couldn't we all demand that stores we patronize lead rather than follow?

On the road again

2010-02-26T11:43:00.001-08:00

I'm headed out of town on Monday to read from the new book, Lift, which is available online now for pre-orders and next Tuesday (3/2) in stores. I'm set for a 20 stop tour (NYC, CT, Boston, NH, Chicago, Detroit, St Louis, Philly, DC, Baltimore, Annapolis, Houston, Dallas, Denver and Phoenix, to name a few). Would love to see you or your friends in the audience. Full tour schedule here.

You can also read a short excerpt of Lift on my site. The book is quite short, a single-sitting read, and is written as a letter to my girls about what it has been to be their mother so far and in particular, three things that happened in the early days of parenting that, to varying degrees, pre-occupy me still. The book means a lot to me; I hope you like it.

In Honor of John Updike's Passing

2009-01-27T13:20:00.000-08:00

Perfection Wasted

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market --
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories
packed in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That's it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren't the same.

John Updike

Daring Girl

2009-01-25T16:39:00.000-08:00

From the January 2009 issue of O, The Oprah Winfrey Magazine.

“This is it!” I’d call to Edward. “Get the video camera!” Georgia was a year old. “Come on, baby! Take a step.” She’d been teasing us for weeks, slowly lifting herself up and then freezing—studying the terrain, considering the consequences. “You can do it! One little baby step!” It'd be another six weeks before Georgia summoned the nerve to lift one foot off the ground and set it down in front of the other. It happened when we weren’t looking, perhaps even because we weren’t looking.

Right around this time, I found an old Pentax in our storage space and started taking pictures. A few weeks later, I told Edward I might quit my job designing educational software. “I want to be a photographer,” I announced, handing him a set of black and whites. “Candid portraits.” He responded with his signature squint, a look of derision, skepticism, and superiority, all rolled into one. (Edward is a person who dares not begin anything that might not end with excellence, whereas I’ve been known to swing by the art supply store on the way home from the museum because “how hard can it be?”)

I landed one photography client, then another. A nice man at the camera shop walked me through my contact sheets, showing me which frames to print. After my first big assignment, I ran back to the lab waving my check. “She couldn’t believe this was my first job!” I reported. “I can’t, either,” said the nice man, beaming. That was all the confirmation I needed to say goodbye to education software.

A year or two later, though, expectations had reset. Customers started asking if I did my own printing, if I would bring lighting, if I could shoot in medium format. Nope, not me. If there are ten steps to mastering photography, medium format is probably around step eight. It’s advanced. You are no longer taking long easy strides, but rather inching ahead so slowly you wonder if you’ve moved forward at all. Too much work for too little gain, if you ask me.

By this time, Georgia was in preschool, distinguishing herself as the girl who drew flowers. Not hearts, or stick people, or big firecracker suns—just flowers. And really just one flower: a daisy-ish blossom that she honed and refined over the course of a year, like Monet and his water lilies. “Want me to show you how to draw a house?” I would ask. “I’m not finished with my flower!” she’d answer. Really? It looked good enough to me.

If I were Georgia, I’d have moved on months ago. I like the huge payoff of the steep learning curve. One day you’re stumbling around and the next, you’re doing it (drawing a tree, skiing down the bunny slope, playing chopsticks on the piano). I like impressing people (“Wow, you’ve never done this before?!”) And I love always having a fresh answer to my favorite question, What’s new?

Clearly, my daughter felt differently.

Eventually, I put down my camera and picked up a pen. I had read enough poorly written newspaper columns to believe that I could beat the average. I sent in a sample essay (about teaching kids to approach new things with optimism); one month later, my name and photo were on the front page of The Piedmonter, my town’s weekly paper. Just like that, I was a “columnist,” $50 per column, two columns a month, 100,000 readers. People at cocktail parties seemed impressed. Edward stopped squinting. When I walked Georgia to school, she ran from driveway to driveway looking for my face on the morning’s paper.

In second grade, having finally taken her flower as far as she could, Georgia dedicated herself to the cartwheel. Weeks became months. “You’ve got it!” I’d tell her. “Not yet,” she’d reply. She wanted to start and end on an imaginary balance beam, like her friend Amelia did. I’d say, “Try a headstand.” But she wasn’t looking for a quick win. She was working on something small and specific, something well beyond basic proficiency. “No,” she’d say, tossing her legs over her body again.

Meanwhile, after a year of writing my newspaper column, it was getting harder and harder to produce 800 original and meaningful words about family life. That’s when I came up with my coolest party trick yet. I wrote a book—a memoir about growing up called The Middle Place. Each week, I’d bang out a new chapter, which I’d oblige Edward to read the minute he walked in the door on Friday nights. Eventually, my story had a beginning, middle and end. My sister-in-law found me an agent, the agent found me an editor, the book was published. And to everyone’s astonishment, for one splendid week, it was tied for 15th place on the New York Times bestseller list. The book did okay with reviewers, too. All in all, pretty good for my first time. But in every chapter, there’s a phrase or a paragraph or a whole page that I wish I’d worked harder on.

It’s been a year since The Middle Place came out, and naturally my agent wants to know how the second book is coming. “I’m thinking about it,” I say, as I flip through my rough outline for Fields and Fences (so much easier to name a book than write one). I look at the document almost every day—sometimes touching up sentences, more often just tweaking the formatting. I want to write it, I do. The subject matter—deciding what faith to teach our children—feels important and provocative and worthwhile. But when I get inside a chapter, I can’t get any momentum going.

So, rather than suffer through the hopeless periods that every decent writer has, rather than delete and rewrite, outline and restructure, rather than advance by those tiny increments my daughter seems to relish, I’ve started something new: Saving Fairyland, an original screenplay!

Step one: Buy special software. Check.
Step two: Bang out a draft. Voila!
Step three: Drag my friend Betsy into the project. Done.

Right this minute, we have 89 index cards on my dining room table, one for each scene; by the time you read this, the fifth draft will be complete. That’s right, finished! If this were Fields and Fences, I’d still be suffering through the first chapter. I’ve started talking about the screenplay to friends. “You’re too much!” my friends say. “What next—an opera?”

Of course, as I’m busy reinventing myself, Georgia is still working on her cartwheel. The same damn thing, over and over again. Except, as Edward points out, her cartwheel has actually changed—a lot. She can do it anywhere now: on a grassy hill, in a crowded living room, on a painted line on concrete. Where it was once mostly momentum, it’s now controlled and exact. And watching her one day, it dawns on me that what appeared to be fruitless repetition has turned out to be…mastery. “That’s some cartwheel honey,” I say. And I mean it.

For 15 years Edward and I have been going to a San Francisco lecture series that features writers talking about their life’s work. I often think back on the night Charles Frazier said it took him six or seven years to write Cold Mountain. He spent the first three in the Blue Ridge Mountains, cataloging Appalachian plants, tracking down headstones on forgotten hillsides, reading old letters and journals from 19th Century farmers. Without an agent, Frazier quit his teaching job and spent years researching a novel that, for all he knew, might never have been published. On the way home that night, Edward and I agree that Frazier's gift is not only genius but will. Writers like Charles Frazier haven’t been on the steep part of the learning curve in years. They’re not susceptible to the look at me! lure of having something new to announce. They wouldn’t abandon their craft any sooner than they would their children. They’re moving slowly, even imperceptibly, toward some hard-to-come-by, maybe even impossible, goal that they refuse to forsake. How rich their satisfaction must be.

After one thousand cartwheels, Georgia knows something of that satisfaction. And watching her, I finally see that although I’ve always prided myself on fearlessly jumping into one new project after another, I’m the one who’s been doing the same thing over and over: finding a way to be a beginner. I keep starting at zero and making it to six or seven, but never going any further, never knowing the gratification of levels eight, nine, and ten, never reaching the place where the cartwheel becomes elegant.

When I think about writing another book (it couldn’t possibly go as well; I’ve told all the best stories already), what worries me is that I may have already done my personal best—and that whatever worked about The Middle Place was nothing more than beginner’s luck. And for the first time, I’m wondering if all the commotion that goes with continually—and “fearlessly”—reinventing myself might just be an elaborate smoke screen, a way to distract myself from my greatest fear: failure. I’d like to sit down for however many years it takes and write one true and beautiful thing, one book worthy of a world that already has too many books in it. The real truth is, I’m just not sure I can.

Georgia is too young to have found her life’s work, but when I watch her study the terrain and consider the consequences, it’s clear that if she felt like she had something big to say, she’d slip off quietly and while no one was looking, she’d summon the nerve to lift one foot off the ground and set it down in front of the other.

So here I go, opening the Fields and Fences file again. One sentence at a time. If I can get myself through this, it will be the most truly daring thing I’ve ever done. And while I think and stare and occasionally type, Georgia sits at the kitchen table, directing her considerable focus on cursive. The stylish capital G. The Laverne and Shirley L. Over and over again, she writes her name, Georgia Corrigan Lichty, until it perfectly reflects the indomitable, inspiring girl she is.

Looking Back

2008-11-01T09:50:00.000-07:00

[This one was published in last month's O Magazine and is reprinted here for the Young Survivors I met last week at the Gilda's Club event.]

It’s clear to you immediately that you can have anything you want when you have cancer.

Your doctor called at 1pm and since that moment, your husband has met your every need, even anticipating needs (proving that he had been capable of such all along).

Word spreads and your doorstep shows it -- a cheery bunch of Gerber daisies, a little tin of peanut butter cookies, a calla lily. The phone calls are endless. You think to yourself that your diagnosis is probably generating as much curiosity and awkwardness as winning the lottery would.

Everyone treats you like you are a saint, an elderly disabled saint.

Except two people who still want you to find their bunny -- not that one! -- and fill their sippy cups and read them a book. They never say please and they always interrupt and they lean into you even when you are so hot already. And their ignorant self-centeredness is proof that you are still managing to put your children first even when you are in the crisis of your life.

Claire comes towards you with her bulging diaper and her hair is stuck to her forehead with the musty sweat that builds up during her morning nap. She knocks over your tall pilsner glass of iced peppermint tea, the one that Edward made for you in a moment as romantic as the one in which he proposed. Claire doesn’t say she’s sorry, she just cries because her t-shirt is wet on the bottom part and she loves her Elmo and Rosita t-shirt. Georgia also cries, because the tea went onto her paper where she is scribbling. She is so close to three. Her party is in five days. You’ve been talking about it for months -- when you push her in the swing, when you put her to bed, when you cut up her apple.

“Guess what’s happening in two weeks from today?” you say.

Then, between calls to medical centers, long sessions on breastcancer.org, and emails to work colleagues, Edward says, “We’re not gonna do the party, right? It’s too much.” But you say “No! She has to have it!” because you are feeling dramatic and magnanimous and like you can’t possibly let cancer have it’s way with your daughter’s first real birthday party. He says, “She’ll never even remember it.”

“I will,” you say.

On Wednesday, you swing into the Mammography center to pick up your films to take them over to the national expert you will wait three hours to see, making lists and pretending to sleep and reading old People magazines about Jen and Brad and that Angelina Jolie. On the way home, even though you’ve just been told you will do chemo for 5 months and then probably have a mastectomy after that, even though it’s dinnertime, you pass Michael’s craft store and you tell Edward to pull in -- “real quick” -- so you can get some decorations and order the helium balloons and he looks at you like you’ve just cut your own hair with a kitchen knife.

But then you’re in there, at Michael's, and it’s so exciting to be in line with the other people whose great concerns are finding three matching green photo mats and some extra wide gross grain ribbon for their fall door wreath. You’re up and the tired cashier says, “How are you tonight?” and you say, “Good!” and it’s the biggest lie you ever told as well as the God’s honest truth and you don’t really know what you’re doing but someone’s gonna have a great birthday on Saturday and it’ll all be because of you and you aren’t irrelevant yet, even if you are defective and are messing everything up for your family.

You are perky coming out of the store, even holding the door for the woman behind you, who is having a bad day, you can tell. Edward is slumped over the steering wheel like he’s been shot from behind, which he kinda has. He sits up when he feels you coming towards the car. He is “fine, just tired.”

Your kids are asleep when you get home and Sophie, the babysitter who breaks out every time she has a pop quiz, looks at you tragically but you divert her by saying, “Look! Look at these great party hats -- they go with the plates -- see?” You sound like Mrs. Dalloway. Edward hands Sophie a wad of twenties and says, “Thanks Soph.”

You unpack your shopping bag from Michael’s and show Edward the candy decorations for the cake you haven’t made but will and he says “Good” and you can’t bear to ask him how he is again because it might come out this time for real and so you just turn on the stereo and as he heads to the answering machine, you say, “Let’s do that tomorrow” because the machine says 14 people called and every one of them wants to tell you that you are in their prayers and that God doesn’t give you anything you can’t handle and what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger but Edward is responsible and level-headed and says, “It could be about your bone scan.” You realize you forgot something in the car, maybe, so you say “OK, I gotta go get something in the trunk anyway” and when you come back he says, “The scan is on Friday. I’ll call Sophie.”

The party is scheduled for Saturday afternoon and when you send out the email about it -- yes, it’s happening, please no cancer talk -- you realize you will have to have a conversation with your children before all these people come over. You google talking to children about cancer and you start to worry that some kid will say “My grandma died of cancer” and then you realize your daughters don’t know what death is. Because why should they?

Then you find this line: “Cancer is like weeds in a garden.” That’s really good. You think you should send a thank you card to the person who came up with that phrase. See how important words are, you think.

The bone scan makes you cry. “Stay still please,” says the technician, who has an Irish accent and looks like a guy who loves his pub. It’s so big, the machine, it’s so Willy Wonka/Mike TV and you can tell it is extremely expensive and you know very little but still enough to know that if they find it in your bones, you’ll probably die before you turn 40. And that’s why you cry and that’s why the technician asks you again to “stay very still” but when he comes to your side to help you up off the table, he has tears in his eyes and you know that he does this every day so why would he cry?

Friday is a two-Ambien night. Sleep is deep and black and divine.

Saturday! The party. Georgia is at your feet in no time. “Mommy! I’m three! I’m three years old!”

“You are, do you feel any different?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“No, I don’t feel anything. Everything feels exactly the same.” She looks concerned, like maybe if she can’t feel it, it didn’t happen.

“Well, even if you can’t feel it, it’s real,” you say, newly expert in the matter.

Edward comes in and lifts Georgia up and she is so happy and the party will be great.

Everyone will come with a bigger gift that they had planned -- at the last minute they will tape something extra on the top; a recorder, a pony tail holder, a My Pretty Pony. Claire will also get a pile of gifts. In an hour, Georgia will blow out her candles and there will be wrapping paper everywhere and the goodie bags that compliment the paper plates will be torn through and it’ll all be on film and towards the end, after about half the people have left and the afternoon is drifting towards five o clock, you will open a bottle of chardonnay and the remaining mothers will gather around and fill little polka dot paper cups and you will all stand in the sun and look at each other and your children and shake your heads and make that little sound you do when you don’t know what else to say, the little sound that says didn’t see this coming and you will lean into one of them and feel that tiny contraction in your throat that means you’re going to cry and you will decide to let it come, it’s really okay now, because Georgia is running in circles on the back deck with her new butterfly wings on and a hot pink helium balloon tied to each wrist and needs absolutely not one more thing from you.

For now.

Things Women Do

2008-09-22T10:33:00.001-07:00

A couple weeks ago, I was the "Guest of Honor" at one of the country's largest breast cancer walks. It was goofy, like Mardi Gras, but sober, like a church square dance. People wore boas and cowboy hats and put their Boston Terriers in pink TuTus. Women like this one:

And these two:

And these W.I.T.'s (Women In Training):

When they release doves into the air to start the walk, I stood next to "the Pats" -- two old friends who started this particular race. 15 years ago, over coffee, Pat 1 and Pat 2 decided Little Rock needed to participate in the Komen movement and that they might as well be the ones to do it.

This year, 46,000 women walked.

I left proud to be a woman and wondering if there will every be anything that I start that is as utterly good as what The Pats have done down in Arkansas.

Field Trip

2008-08-11T10:11:00.000-07:00

I made a list this morning of places I might take my kids today if I was a better mom -- the Exploratorium, Zeum, Fairyland. But then, I drifted into my office (there's a bad undertow near that door) and started pushing through a hundred emails that need attention. The next thing I knew, thanks to one of those email blasts certain friends send every so often, I was on National Geographic's site and calling out "Girls! Come here! Look!"

Here's one of the shots that blew us away.

"What are those?" Claire asked.

"Eggs," I said, almost in a whisper.

"Will they all become babies?" Georgia asked.

Before a discussion could develop, Claire said "Click the octopus!" 15 minutes later, we were still clicking. A sea anemone. A peacock. A thorny devil lizard in Australia.

Then we got to this one. Which was sort of how I was feeling after walking through all those images with my kids leaning into my shoulders, like it's big world and I'd like to carry them through it for a while and co-exist in that place of wonder where there is no age and nothing has been disturbed and language is not only insufficient but also unnecessary.

And for the rest of the day, and maybe the rest of my life, I will be wondering if all that beauty is God or nature, and if it really matters anyway.

Doubt Inside My Doubt

2008-05-12T13:17:00.000-07:00

This essay is reprinted here from O, The Oprah Winfrey Magazine, where it appeared in May 2008.

My mother is fond of telling me I’m over-thinking it, “it” being anything from organic mulch for my flowerbeds to booster seats for my daughters so you can imagine how she feels about my religious ambivalence. While it’s not quite true to say she was 30 with three kids before she met someone who wasn’t Catholic, it’s close enough. Perhaps as a consequence, she is not a woman who has frittered away her days critiquing her religion. Instead, she prays, mostly for her children, who she so hoped would inherit her bulletproof faith but who are more likely to drive away with her navy blue Buick and a leftover case of Chardonnay she bought at a discount over the state line in Delaware. Both my parents shudder over our discerning, noncommittal generation that has something to say about everything but nowhere to go on Sunday mornings.

I envy my parents’ orientation. Supplication, I’ve often thought, must be easier on the body than TUMS and Ambien. How contenting it must be to believe that someday everyone you love will be in one place and will stay there forever. Who wouldn’t want that? But for all of its obvious appeal, I rarely go to church and have only read a few chapters of the Bible. (I got stuck five chapters into Genesis when Adam was said to have lived for five hundred and thirty years.) But even as roll my eyes, I’m not ready to toss out both bath water and baby. There is doubt in my doubt. And from my earliest days as a mother, I have known that someday, say when the girls start elementary school, I’d be expected to take questions from the audience, so to speak.

Then, in the fall of 2004, well before either of my daughters asked me about God, both my father and I were diagnosed with late-stage cancer. I was 36, and the seven-centimeter tumor behind my nipple was technically my second cancer. (In my mid-twenties, I’d had a melanoma as big as a pencil eraser removed from my calf, leaving a little divot and a long scar that remind me to use sun block and stay in the shade at midday.) My dad was 74, and the scattered tumors around his bladder marked round three for him. And as alarming and unsettling as this was, I did not fall to my knees and petition the God of my childhood.

The day my doctor called with the diagnosis, I hung up the phone, looked over the heads of my kids and mouthed to my husband, “It’s cancer.” Then, after a long hug, a cold Corona, and a cigarette (I had squirreled away a half-smoked pack after a party the year before and for reasons I can’t explain, I couldn’t wait to suck up a Merit Ultra Light that afternoon), we went to the computer and starting searching for information on “invasive ductal carcinoma.” My father got his diagnosis in person; after thanking the doctor and scheduling a slew of tests, he and my mother slid into the Buick and drove down to St. Coleman’s, their favorite little church, for noon mass. They gave it to God; we gave it to Google.

Over the course of a year, my dad and I both got better and, especially in his case, people said it was miraculous. At the very least, it was unexpected. Perhaps even unexplainable, though not to Mom, who summed it up in a word: prayer. “People around the world were praying for your father,” she explained (“around the world” referring primarily to a high school friend of mine who lived in Moscow and had always been particularly fond of my dad).)

I had both always prayed and never prayed, which is to say that I often found myself in bed at the end of a day saying to no one in particular, “Thank you for this good man beside me and those girls in the other room.” But had I beseeched God to make me well? Had I begged God for my father’s life? I had not. Among other things, I didn’t want to be—to borrow from sixth-grade parlance—a user, a phony who thought she could get what she wanted by conveniently nuzzling up to someone she usually snubbed.

After my dad recovered, I talked to an old friend about my parents’ confidence in prayer and their belief that God had intervened. Rather than praise the inexplicable glory of God, my friend thought we should acknowledge and exalt the devotion and ingenuity of man. Or, as she put it: It just bugs me how people want to give all the credit away, as if we were all just useless sinners who didn’t know how to take care of ourselves or each other. In other words, maybe it wasn’t prayer that made my dad better—maybe it was the scope with tiny scissors that removed nine moldy tumors from my dad’s bladder without his even having to check in to the OR. Or all that chemo. Or the meticulous doctor who managed his case with such vigil. I liked my friend’s take on things: up with people and their hard work and cool inventions.

But I kept going thinking back to my father’s initial prognosis. The urologist to whom I attributed my dad’s stunning recovery had told us to "brace for the worst." Ten months later, when he declared my father a healthy man, that same doctor said he couldn’t explain “how on earth” my dad was disease-free. So could I really give all the credit to a doctor who shrugged his shoulders and said it was "anybody’s guess" how my dad survived?

Part of growing up is living with the disturbing and complicating fact that people—even the very smartest people—are sometimes wrong. It was only a generation ago when new mothers smoked cigarettes on the maternity ward while nurses fed the infants nice big bottles of formula, to say nothing of wee Pluto, once required learning for all students of a certain age. Every day, things get grayer and grayer where they used to be neatly partitioned into black and white. Notions that are considered dubious now will, in a just decade or two, become widely accepted. Or vice versa: what is standard practice now will be eschewed, like how no one puts plastic in the microwave anymore. So might we eventually say, “Can you believe that people used to doubt the power of prayer?”

In fact, the federal government has underwritten elaborate and expensive studies asking this very question. Online, I read through a pile of 2002 research that showed a measurable, therapeutic benefit to prayer. People who prayed and were prayed for had higher recovery rates. Sure, the link can be explained away: prayer, like any type of quiet meditation, is relaxing, and relaxation has proven physiological benefits. But a click away from those reports is collated surveys of surgeons and oncologists—a huge majority of whom pray for their patients. Scientists praying. So it’s not just my unguarded, gullible parents. If doctors can get to belief, might I?

If there is a God, he knows how much I want there to be more to human existence than a series of discrete physical experiences that start with birth and end with death. I want all of us—and all of our lives—to be meaningful. But small. I’d be elated to learn that this go-round is only part one of something that has a thousand parts. I’d love to laugh at this life from a distance. As it is, I relish the fact that I am one of six billion people the way my mother revels in Pavarotti’s recording of the Ave Maria. Being one in six billion means my life can’t possibly matter to anyone but me and my little flock and that means almost everything on my mind, all my mistakes and failures and anxieties, is utterly inconsequential. When I forget my place, things begin to matter too much and I find it hard to get a good, deep breath. When that happens, I close my eyes and imagine flying over houses, lifting off the roofs and seeing all the people whose lives are happening concurrently with mine—arguing, dying, cooking, begging, hugging, losing, building, stealing, suffering and laughing, people learning that their adult son shows signs of schizophrenia or their mother is bankrupt, brothers playing air hockey in the basement after a fight, couples listening to music on the sofa, holding each others feet. Each of us a little bitty fish in an inconceivably large pond, swimming in circles, nothing to do but enjoy the water.

But maybe that’s a foolishly incomplete picture. Maybe there’s something between and around and inside of all six billion of us and maybe that something knows every hair on each of our heads. Maybe we are not anonymous. Wouldn’t that be outrageous? And beautiful?

Enter faith, the tallest order, the tightest nut, the humbling of yourself before purposes you don’t—and cannot ever—comprehend. Let’s face it; believing that there is a God who might get involved in your life—your tiny little life—defies all reason. In fact, it’s beyond anti-intellectual. It’s downright foolish. But then there’s the confounding, cuts-both-ways quote from Voltaire, the great French thinker who criticized the church while still seeing evidence for a supreme, eternal being everywhere he looked: who said, “Doubt is not a pleasant condition but certainty is absurd.”

So, I let my parents share their faith with our children. When we visit Philadelphia where my parents live, I let them take our daughters to church. At night, my mom gets the girls on their knees and shows them how to cross themselves and position their hands and bow their heads. It is a lovely sight, and I would never discourage it. But when we get back to California where we live, the girls are loaded with new ideas and the kinds of questions I always knew were coming.

Claire, who is a senior in preschool recently asked what lights are made of. After I gave her my best answer, something sketchy about filaments and electricity and Thomas Edison, she said, “In church, they said Jesus is a light.” Georgia, a first-grader, reprimanded me for saying ‘Oh my God.’ “God is a bad word,” she said. To which I heard myself say, “Oh no, honey. God is not a bad word. God is a very good word.” Both girls have asked if they could be the Holy Ghost for Halloween.

Regardless of where I am on the spectrum from atheism to theism, I’d rather my girls be grounded in something, even something that seems too good (or too damn crazy) to be true. So when the girls ask me about God, I say that people believe all kinds of things and no one really knows, including me, but that I hope for God. Then I tell them what my husband recently told me with tears in his eyes. I say being with them is the most spiritual experience of my life—the highest high, the deepest yes, the most staggering gift—and that gift must have come from somewhere.

And what to say about all the little gifts, the everyday stuff like a good cantaloupe or the rebate check coming just in time or a great public school teacher? For that, I’ve taken to saying grace with the girls. We all hold hands while I talk about our friends, our family, our health. Then my husband, generally prompted by my raised eyebrow, says a prayer for the people we know who are having trouble. The girls mostly tolerate it (sometimes adding a thank you for a popsicle or a playdate) and look forward to saying Amen, after which we do the family wave, as if the home team just scored. It feels good, saying grace. Not only because gratitude is a pleasant emotion but also because it is a step in the direction of my childhood, where grace was offered regularly (if quickly) and faith was less ambiguous.

For now, that’s as far as I’ve gotten. I’m just another person pulsing with thankfulness, wondering what will happen next. Someday—despite all medications and all prayers—people in our lives will get sick and will not get better. They will die. Georgia and Claire will ask me where they went and I’ll probably be wondering the same thing. Have they gone to a paradise, a separate plane of existence where God holds them in palm of his hand? Are they internalized in the people who are left behind? Do they become part of the earth and therefore, an endless part of the cycle of life?

If you asked my dad, he’d assure you that heaven exists and boy are you gonna love it. Just like if you asked him why I got better, he’d say something about how God wants me to be here. I tell him I got better because there was an antidote, namely four chemotherapies, each an impressive creation of man. But that just makes him laugh, shake his head and flash his big knowing smile. “Aw Lovey,” he says, “don’t you see? What do you think makes a man spend his days trying to cure cancer?”

Virtual Reality

2008-04-29T08:29:00.000-07:00

If you can't get to a reading, you might enjoy this video taken at a recent Berkeley event by my old pal, Ricky Friedman. If it seems like I keep looking at someone, my husband, Edward, was in the front row.

About Faith

2008-04-11T20:42:00.001-07:00

I worked long and hard with a very smart editor at O Magazine named Deborah Way to figure out just how to articulate where I am with faith these days. The back and forth, draft after draft, was the closest thing to therapy that I've had in years. Although there is much left to resolve, I was able to come up with a couple thousand words about it and you can read them in the May issue, which has just hit the newsstands. Since this was written, I've dug into the Bible (a children's version, in particular), some C.S. Lewis, a refresher course on Greek and Roman mythology and a collection of poetry called In Praise of Mortality, by Rilke. Oh, and the 2004 novel, Gilead. Hard to say yet where it's all leading but it definitely feels worthwhile.

The photo that runs with the essay was taken in New York, in January, the same week The Middle Place came out. My dad was with me as the original idea for the photo was to get him walking into the Cathedral and me hesitating out front. [St. Patrick's Cathedral has a noon mass that my dad used to frequent before he retired and stopped commuting to New York.] But in the end, the shot they went to print with was one of the very last they took, while my dad was around the corner getting us coffees. Greenie, you were robbed.

I am very interested to hear from you about your faith (in God, yoga, nature, retail therapy, service--whatever you believe in) so if you have thoughts after you read the essay, please post them.

So Close Eddy

2008-04-01T11:22:00.000-07:00

The Midnight Cough

2008-03-27T12:45:00.000-07:00

You hear it. First, from a distance. Then it breaks through. You are dumped out of the island hammock that is REM sleep. You do not open your eyes but you roll them. Cough, cough. You pull the pillow over your head. You count. Five, six, seven— Cough, cough. She had it last night too. It never stopped. Not until she stood up. It’s postnasal drip, you can tell. Cough, cough. Nine seconds that time. Maybe it’s slowing. Cough, cough. You should get up. You might as well. It’s not going to stop. Would your husband get up if he were here? Not in a— Cough, cough. Will she wake up her sister? Why do they sleep in the same room? It was your husband’s idea. You could shoot him. If she wakes her up— Cough, cough. Get up. You gotta get up. Where are you slippers? It’s so cold. What time is it? Don’t look, you shout to yourself without speaking. Don’t ever look at the clock in the night. That insomnia article said— Cough, cough. Get up. Get up right now. Put an end to it.

You are up. A little lightheaded. You move towards the hall. Were you always this stiff? Is this why they say parenthood is for the young? Cough, cough. There is no cup in the bathroom. How could there be no cup in the bathroom? The cleaners. Why do the cleaners always take the cup—it’s like they hide it, along with your face lotion and your kitchen sponge— Cough, cough. You are down the stairs, in the cabinet, at the fridge. You press the cup against the door. The light—don’t look at the light. You’ll never get back to sleep if you look— Cough, cough. You are upstairs again. In the bathroom again. You have to turn on the light over the sink. You keep it low. Where is the Tylenol Cough? What’s this…Robitussin…from 2004. Is that expired? I’ve gotta throw some of this shit out. Cough, cough. Why do we have so much Motrin? Oh yeah, Costco. God, I haven’t been to Costco in years. Well, here’s some Tylenol Flu. Bad idea? Cough, cough. It’s all you’ve got. The little measuring cup—where is the little cup? Goddammit. How many little cups have we gone through? Don’t get mad, you say gently to yourself, it’ll wake you up. Cough, cough. You take the open bottle to your kid, oh and here’s a lozzie. That’ll help. You're at her bedside now. She’s hot and red. “Claire, honey, take a sip…”

CRY (as if dropped-the-ice-cream) “Okay, have a little water. Sit up. Two hands, there you go. Now,” you say as you bring the Tylenol Fl to her lips, “just a sip of—“ CRY (as if car-running-over-toes) “Claire, honey, you have to just take a quick sip so you can sleep—“ CRY (as if lion-charging–her-full-on) “Okay, forget it.” You put down the Tylenol Flu dramatically. “Have this lozzie.” Whimper. “It’s the lozzie or the medicine,” you say to her in the dark. “It’s too spicy,” she half-whispers. You tell her this is the minty kind. She succumbs. “Okay good. Okay lie down now.” Stroke, kiss.

You walk quietly back to your room and slip back into your bed. Still warm. You are so happy to be there. Silence. You imagine her sucking her lozzie on her side and then her back. Silence. Is she okay? Is she choking on her lozzie? You want to check. The coughing wasn’t that bad. You should get up. You are crazy. She is five. She knows how to suck a lozzie. Silence. She could swallow it whole. She could die. Tonight. Just so you could sleep. More silence. Did you put the cap back on the Tylenol Flu? What if she drinks it? All of it. Silence. You know what’s coming. You looked into the light. You know what time it is.

Essay from April Issue of Glamour

2008-03-17T13:06:00.000-07:00

Glamour's April issue has a great collection of essays on friendship by writers like Jennifer Weiner, Julie Klam and, um, me. I have always felt slightly unworthy of my friendships, like I couldn't possibly have done enough to deserve them. So I was glad to have the chance to spill some ink on a few pals. I hope it gives a little honor to the many women who accompanied me through cancer, including Missy (in the photo at right). Whatever your crisis is--infertility, unemployment, divorce--I'm sure you can agree that when it's over, you're left with a tremendous sense of awe and gratitude for the people who showed up. Here's to you guys, a model for us all.

APRIL GLAMOUR: 7 Friends Every Woman Needs

The friends who show up

You never know until you know, you know? You hope your friends are what you think they are—loyal, deep, fast—but you don’t find out for sure until, say, a big lump in your breast turns out to be a bad tumor. Shannon called from vacation in tears when she heard my news. Mellie hired me a house cleaner. Carolann knitted me a warm, kicky beret that I wore for months until it began to fall apart and my husband said I looked like a 40-year-old pothead. One by one, in choreographed succession, Phoebe, Tracy and Missy packed bags and came from points east to California, because they “had to be with me.” They didn’t know what they were doing—my cancer was a first for all of us—but they came anyway. They brought things— art supplies for my two kids, books for my husband, slippers and sleeping caps for me.

And all this came as quite a surprise to me. Had I earned this much support?

I had lived most of my life in the company of men. When I was growing up, my older brothers dominated our house, as much with their giant bags of sweaty ice hockey equipment that filled the laundry room as with their epic tales of triumph at the boy-girl dance. I lived in the space that was left over, sometimes boldly (if ineffectively) inserting myself into the action, but mostly saving my voice for a later day. I’ve often pretended that I preferred hanging out with men. After all, I had learned how to cuss like a sea hand and tell a joke like a bartender and, damn it, I wasn’t going to rein myself in for a bunch of lily-livered “ladies” who bored me with their small talk about wrap dresses and Pilates and sisal rugs.

But it was the ladies who saved me, physically and emotionally. My surgeon was a woman, as were my ob-gyn, my chemo nurse, my radiation oncologist, my genetic counselor and the psychologist who gave us the words “cancer is like weeds in a garden,” a phrase my husband and I used over and over again with our small children (who are, incidentally, both girls). When my fertility was sacrificed to the cause, I found the empathy I so needed in the arms of Mary Hope and then Meg and then my mother, all of whom knew to listen for a long time (days) before reminding me that the two girls I already had were double-good, and would surely fill me up if I let them. Maybe it was the central role my breasts were suddenly playing in things, but looking back, it was a distinctly feminine time and one that left me wiser than it found me.

Since then, since I’ve become a regular person again instead of a cancer patient, I’ve kept a soft spot in my heart for guy friends, but I woo girlfriends. I cultivate and collect them because I know. Believe me, I know.

—Kelly Corrigan, author of the New York Times best-seller The Middle Place.

Revisiting Group Exercise

2008-02-03T10:43:00.000-08:00

Kelly's column appears here with permission from The Bay Area News Group.

It’d been a good ten years since someone told me to “grapevine left.” In fact, the last time I was barked at to do a Triple Knee Repeater or a ‘Round The World, the only woman in America who had a headset mic was Madonna. I don’t exercise often and when I do, I try not to sweat too much, so last weekend at the Y, when I saw on the Group Fitness Schedule that Tina’s Basic Step class was “suitable for all levels,” I peaked in. Just about everyone in there was 10-20 pounds overweight. There were no fancy racer back tanks or chafe-free lycra pants. While I was sizing it all up, Tina herself waved me in and so, the next thing I knew, I was over at the equipment wall deciding how many risers to put under my step.

There is, as any honest person will admit, a hierarchy to women’s exercise. The truly fit (and centered) do yoga, Chi Gung, pilates or the Dailey Method. These women are lean and muscular and flexible, and I have always suspected that they were born this way. They like green tea, which they seep in reusable metal strainers, and can confidently pronounce their teachers names: Tuam, Karuna, Shotoa. Many of them are extremely attractive and consider a touch of Burt’s Bees on their lips to be fully made up. They know not the cottage cheese dimple.

Next are the spinners. Atop their stationery cycles, they are slightly less feminine and generally talk and walk louder and faster than the wispy, barefoot yoga-types. The spin class girls are competitive and bring lots of towels to class. They can tell you their heart rate at any moment. They read magazines about fitness, Women’s Health or something, while guzzling Gatorade and doing Kegels. If they’re running late and all the bikes are spoken for, they’ll slip into the back of a Body Sculpt class. They always do the advanced moves and the extra sets. When the instructor offers a low impact option, they just laugh, adrenaline flooding their system.

At my gym, in Berkeley, there is yet a third class of exercisers: the mind/body folks. Think Feldenkrais, Aikido, Karate. These people will probably save the world and at the very least, never yell at their kids, and for these reasons, are beyond my reproach.

Then, there are the people, often middle aged, who just love to move. I have a soft spot for this merry bunch. They do Merengue on Mondays, World Hip Hop on Tuesdays, Belly Dance Basics on Wednesdays, Salsa Fusion on Thursdays and then wind up the week with some TransDance, which integrates tribal motion, freestyle jamming and moving meditation. A woman named Tranquilla teaches this class. People hug on the way out.

Later, after time marches all over your back and drips cement in your joints, there is low impact senior aerobics (using metal folding chairs) and water aerobics with aqua barbells and something “New!” called The Noodle Workout. Perry Como is big in these classes, as is Liza Minelli. Afterwards, participants peel off their webbed gloves, dry off their hands and head over to an afternoon of oversized origami.

Then there’s me, in Tina’s Basic Step class, secretly laughing at my classmates—their funny pumpkin butts, their awkward clapping, their outdated scrunchies. I was yawning through the warm up, Basic Right, Basic Left, and held my own during the steroid version of Justin Timberlake’s Sexy Back, but three songs into things, I started to feel dizzy. Nauseous. By the time we got to “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” my vision was blurred. Pumpkin Butt next to me was fine, even thriving—this was her song! Silver Scrunchie was also high on endorphins—she seemed to love the Charleston/T-Step/Hamstring Curl combo we were doing. Was I going to have to stop? Take out my risers? I drank some water, eliminated any extraneous motion and, after twenty humiliating minutes, I heard the sweet tones of Enya. It was over.

So that’s where I fit into the hierarchy, right there at the very bottom—eating low-cal humble pie and passing out towels to my new role models in Basic Step and wondering if I could ever reach the great heights of TriYoga Flow III.

*******

Hey, if you're still with me, and if you know anyone in NYC, could I ask you help me get the word out about an upcoming event? On Monday February 18 (which is President's Day), I am doing a double bill with an old friend of my husband's who is a killer musician--a cross between Jack Johnson and Stevie Wonder (if you can get your head around that). It is a dream come true for me to "perform" with him and I think will be a very special night.

Just Another Citizen of Oz

2008-01-04T10:51:00.000-08:00

I had read the descriptions the “rock star candidate,” “the tantalizing, highflying senator.” And I had seen him speak at the ’04 Democratic Convention, when he famously referred to himself as “a skinny guy with a funny name.” But the comparisons to Kennedy, that perfectly-maintained legend we barely knew, put me over the top. See, my dad, a Republican, told me that he met Jack Kennedy when he was running for President and that it was “magic.”

Ooh, magic. What I wouldn’t do for magic.

And so, when the invitation to a fundraising lunch for the one and only Barack Obama landed in my mailbox, I instantly coughed up more money than I spent on my wedding dress and booked a sitter.

The day finally came and just as I was finishing off my third bread stick, there he was.

He spoke for about 15 minutes and answered questions for another 15. I did not get the chills. I did not break into a sweat. I did not shout out in agreement. Barack Obama, it turns out, it just a man, a little older and a whole lot smarter than me, a man who values practicable solutions and incremental change. He has the self-possession of an elder statesman, a moniker generally reserved for retired or dead politicians. He is measured and astute and cerebral. He is (and this is not what I expected from a politician of any stripe) serene.

For days afterwards, I was, well, let down. I had wanted to be whipped up, swept away, lit on fire.

Nursing my disappointment, I found myself listening to the soundtrack from “Wicked,” a musical my daughters love about all their favorite characters from The Wizard of Oz. The CD was on Song 10: Wonderful, the moment in the show when the Wonderful Wizard of Oz is outted as a mere mortal, a nice and good man who had some skills and some potential but was not, alas, magic. He says: “Suddenly I'm here, respected, worshipped, even. Just because the folks in Oz needed someone to believe in. Wonderful! They called me Wonderful! so I said Wonderful, if you insist.”

Oh, but we do insist! Oh, how we need someone to believe in! Give us charisma! Genius! Virtue! But nobody too polished, or too inaccessible, or too formal. Why I do believe we’re just the sort of people to see a man come out of the clear blue sky and expect him to answer all our questions and solve all our problems.

And I think I know why. Not only does it make us feel safer, to have a superhuman on the premises, but it also allows us to go home. Personally, I want to go back to my kids, my husband and my novel--back to my regularly scheduled programming. I’d be delighted just to pay my taxes and have it all done for me: a Four Seasons government.

I know, I know. Democracy depends on active participation from the public. It starts, most obviously, with voting. I often feel, however, that I don’t know enough to vote. Even for president but definitely in local and state elections. I guess never forgot this quote from Churchill: “The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.” Consequently, I don’t always go to the polls. I can only admit this publicly because I know that I am in the majority.

I might vote more if someone told me who and what to support -- which bond measures and propositions and congressmen. It’s not a matter of apathy; it’s honesty. What do I know about how to resolve Iraq? Health care? Farm Subsidies? For that matter, what I do know about local issues, where it is said all politics truly reside, like seismic retrofitting, etc. As Kennedy himself said, “the ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.”

So if you’re someone who wants to elect someone you can trust, someone who is exponentially smarter than yourself, someone who is level-headed and methodical and absolutely devoted to the sane and rational course, I think I met your guy. If you want to swoon or faint, I recommend old Cary Grant movies. And if we are so fortunate to call Barack Obama "Mr. President," still, we’ll all have to show up to make the change everyone’s shouting about actually happen.

Best of Breed

2007-12-24T07:27:00.000-08:00

I usually contribute to the holiday chaos with a regifting party, where my friends trade odd gifts we’ve received over the year—-a spooky Christmas angel that stutters in Japanese, a pair of panties made with candy necklaces, a Bedazzler kit. But this year, the season snuck up on me and so the best I can do is offer up a column commemorating the truly memorable gift.

At the top of my list: A can of tennis balls. You probably can’t imagine being talked into giving someone a can of tennis balls in the class gift exchange. You’d object. You’d refuse to go to school that day. You’d show up with nothing before you’d hand a girl three Wilson Pros in front of the whole 7th grade. Not me. I fell for the sell-job: “They’re brand new!” “She loves tennis!” “Look how the bow sits so perfectly on top!”

When I asked my husband what gift he’ll always remember, he too found himself back in adolescence, when his cousin from Kentucky gave him Jovan Soap-on-a-rope. This excellent product hung conveniently around the shower knobs and so was never subject to the softening and deterioration that could happen to untethered soap. So handy. And Masculine with a capital M. Here I quote from perfumebay.com: “Jovan Musk. The sexy smell of warm skin. Stroke it on, and it becomes a scent like no one else's. Because it works with your body's natural chemistry. (And later, with hers.) Jovan Musk lasts all day. Since a man like you can make things happen at any hour.”

Then there are the special offerings that make you snap your fingers and wish you’d thought of. I once watched my brother bring my mother to tears on a Christmas morning. It seemed he had been to a bookstore, because my mother loved to read, and not ten feet in the door, he was struck by a certain title, “Home.” “This is perfect for Mom! She sells residential real estate!” My mom smiled at her son as she slid her thumbnail under the invisible scotch tape and opened the paper to show a paperback novel. Oh my God, I thought to myself, it’s fiction. It could be about a mental institution, or an underground bomb shelter cum heroin lab, or a perverted mortgage broker. My mom loved it.

Later that morning, that same brother would give me a pack of Goody barrettes in a folded drugstore bag and maybe a deck of cards. It went on this way for years—-a bag of BRACH’s red hots (“since you love them!”), a Captain & Tenille 45, a pack of lined notebook paper. Life was good.

So this year, when someone hands you a homemade ham and nut pie or a tree garland made of printer cartridges, remind yourself that this gem…this choice doodad…this undervalued treasure will be the only gift you’ll remember in five years. And you and I both know that a good laugh and a story you can tell for the rest of your life beats an italian cashmere crewneck any day.

Have I driven you to the liquor cabinet yet?

2007-11-26T15:22:00.000-08:00

I just wanted to apologize for the 6 or 7 emails you've gotten from Feedblitz lately. As you can tell, I have been updating the site to include all the relevant info about The Middle Place, which hits bookstores on January 8. In anticipation, I thought I'd share the backstory about the cover.

At first, it was set to look like this (that's my actual school picture from kindergarten):

But some people thought I looked a little alarmed in that photo, or like I had just been whacked in the ass with a paddle but was trying to remain stoic. So then it changed to this:

But then a few other memoirs that are coming out around mine seemed to have similar covers so the next thing I knew, they sent over this:

At which point, I was headed to the liquor cabinet for some self-soothing. Rather than crawl into a nice fat bottle of Pinor Noir, I opened up Photoshop and came up with my own little idea, which, it turns out, is being "a bad customer" and so I backed off and that's how the book jacket came to be this:

Which we are all very happy with.

At any rate, while all this has been unfolding, you've been peppered with emails about my site and I'm sure there's a simple way for me to control for that but the truth is, I'm no tech support and my husband is tiring of the role.

So, anyway, thanks for hanging in there. (6 people unsubscribed and mother didn't like that one lousy bit.)

And hey, if you want an advance copy of The Middle Place and you're one of those people who loves to evangelize about your favorite new book or movie or song, send me your mailing address. I only have 5 so "act now!"

Inviting Failure

2007-11-11T14:59:00.001-08:00

Kelly's column is reprinted here with permission from The Bay Area News Group.

This column is part of an ongoing discussion series with Christine Carter, PhD, Director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. For more on increasing children’s tolerance for failure and the value of challenging children, go to www.greatergoodparents.org.

My daughter’s not big on trying new things. It’s particularly noticeable with her artwork. She’s currently in what will later be recalled as her great flora stage. Even the faint footsteps of failure in the distance will cause her to flip over the page and go back to her old standby: daisies. Not trees, not bushes, not even tulips. Daisies. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, defines failure as "the state or condition of not meeting a desirable or intended objective." That’s all, just a mark missed. Nothing so awful. Nothing to be ashamed of or chronically avoided.

I myself am on friendlier terms with failure, as we’ve known each other for so long now. I met her way before I shook hands with success. In fact, failure introduced me to success. Some of my standout failures were all eight years of French, which left me with as much fluency as any six-year-old walking out of “Ratatouille,” high school field hockey, where I never could stop loosing giant divots from the field, and all cooking beyond pasta. Oh, and I bombed my SATs.

After a lifetime of making mistakes so often it feels like my resting state, I’ve come to feel utterly undeterred by the prospect of failing. This freeing condition was facilitated by my parents, who were able to communicate a thousand ways that they didn’t care a whip about whether I made the team or got into a big name college. Their expectations were around things like respect—for teachers and coaches as well as teammates and myself—and what they called The Eleventh Commandment—Thou Shalt Laugh At Thyself. The most pitiable person in our house was not the poor student or the third-string athlete but the one who couldn’t tell a joke or the truly besotted who couldn’t even get a joke.

Another upside to befriending failure early is that you develop a certain knack for the postmortem, a medical term used here to mean a time of examination and reflection. Failure analysis, as they call it in product development circles, is the process of collecting and analyzing all available data to find the cause of a failure and figure out how to prevent it from happening again. Is there a more useful skill, or a more capacitating one? Failure analysis, by its very nature, says failure is an event, not an identity and that future outcomes can and will be affected by our choices.

So, if failure’s so good for us, why aren’t we treating our children to more of it? Christine Carter, PhD, of The Greater Good Science Center, saw in her own research that kids who reported facing more challenges in their lives were far happier than the kids who reported fewer (or no) challenges. That means not only is failure critical to success but it’s also a cornerstone of happiness.

Challenge, in the elementary school context, could be anything from peeling that stubborn little sticker off an apple to fixing a princess crown to packing lunch. When I zip up my daughter’s sweatshirt or manage relations during her playdates or run her forgotten homework down to school, I am essentially covering her bet. She should lose sometimes, if only so she experiences for herself how sharp the initial sting is and then how quickly it subsides. An oddly carved pumpkin, illegible homework, a misapplied band-aid, I owe her these. Intervening—making things easier and more perfect—may inadvertently send the message that I think she needs my help, either because she is incapable in some way or because failing would be too traumatic.

As Christine said, "the thing we need to protect our kids from is not failure but a life void of failure."

Oh Honey! You’re so—uh—well—

2007-10-30T12:13:00.000-07:00

This column is a part of an ongoing discussion series between Kelly Corrigan and Dr. Christine Carter of the Greater Good Science Center.

KC: Now that I'm seeing everything though this fixed mindset/growth mindset prism, I feel a little tongue-tied around my kids. I’ve been in a terrible habit of saying things like “You’re such a good artist” and “You have a beautiful singing voice.”

CC: I do it, too. I'm training myself to keep pointing out that practice pays off.

KC: It’s Interpersonal Communications 101: always separate the action from the actor. “You are being mean” rather than “You are mean.” We have to stop generalizing and talk instead about specific actions.

CC: “You connected with the ball much better this time” carries a completely different message than “You are a fantastic baseball player.”

KC: The trick is when I’m trying to build up my kids’ confidence. For instance, when I see Claire struggle or hesitate, I want to say, “You can do this, honey. You’re a smart girl.”

CC: That’s a mixed message. The fixed-mindset part—telling her she’s smart—is tempting but that’s exactly the kind of praise is that causes problems. (By the way, I’m constantly having to stop myself from saying to my kids “You’re brilliant!”) We need make the message constructive by saying something like “I know you can do it if you put your mind to it.”

KC: Praise is a powerful drug for a kid. Once they’ve tasted it, they’ll do anything to get it again.

CC: Kids feel people evaluating and judging them. And certain praise reinforces feelings of being valued for their achievements alone. Carol Dweck says, based on her studies of thousands of kids, “Maybe the ability they proved yesterday is not up to today's task. Maybe they were smart enough for algebra but not calculus. So they're racing to prove themselves over and over…amassing countless affirmations, but not necessarily ending up where they want to be.”

KC: That's heartbreaking.

CC: Dweck’s team did an experiment where they give kids a short test and then one line of praise. They either said: “You did really well; you must be very smart,” (fixed mindset) OR they said, “You did really well; you must have worked really hard” (growth mindset).
After the first puzzle, the researchers offered the kids either a harder puzzle that they could learn from or one that was easier than the one they completed successfully. The majority of the kids praised for their intelligence wanted the easier puzzle—they weren’t going to risk making a mistake and loosing their status as “smart.” On the other hand, more than 90% of growth-mindset encouraged kids chose a harder puzzle. Why? Dweck explains: “when we praise children for the effort and hard work that leads to achievement, they want to keep engaging in that process. They are not diverted from the task of learning by a concern with how smart they might—or might not—look.”

KC: It makes sense to me. Attributing success to innate gifts is a recipe for anxiety and joyless achievement.

CC: Joyless is the key word. In Dweck’s study, during the first puzzle, pretty much everyone had fun. But when the ability-praised kids were given a harder puzzle, they said it wasn’t fun anymore.

KC: Because it’s no fun when your special talent is in jeopardy.

CC: In another study, praising kids’ “smarts” actually lowered their IQ scores! Besides making them insecure and crushing the fun of learning something new, telling kids that how smart they are actually hinders performance.

KC: So we can praise our kids all day long, as long we focus on effort, commitment, resourcefulness, and tenacity.

CC: Right. Because those are the things that truly help them grow and succeed.

What Christine Told Me, Part I

2007-10-13T10:34:00.000-07:00

Kelly's column is reprinted here with permission from the Bay Area News Group.

Last fall, when Georgia was in kindergarten, she tried soccer. I could go into it—making dandelion necklaces, lying down on the field, wearing a skirt to practice—but let’s just say it didn’t take. It was an interesting mix of disinterest and inability and I wasn’t sure which was feeding which. When she got frustrated, I was quick to take off the pressure by saying something like, “It’s no big deal, honey. Not everybody’s good at soccer. Some people have it in their bones and some people don’t.” Because I was feeling her pain and had been trained to communicate that I didn’t care a whip about her achievements, I’d go on. “I was never much good at sports myself. And it was funny because people always thought I should’ve been better, since I came from such an athletic family,” I’d ramble. “My brothers—your uncles—they had the magic touch but not me.”

Why?” she wanted to know.

“Well, I wasn’t that fast and I didn’t know where to be on the field and I couldn’t really kick that far. There was a guy on my team—he was really gifted—who could just wind up and send that ball halfway down the field. Not me, though. I was more the creative type.”

We talked for a while like this, about how different people have different talents. We talked about Daddy, who is musical and good with numbers. We talked about a third-grade girl named Tess who is such a natural athlete, I’ve watched grown men one-up each other with Tess stories—the time she whipped every 5th grade boy in wall ball, the time she stole second, the time she threw a football 30 yards, a perfect spiral. Then there’s Sophie, our babysitter who sings opera with this voice that’s as powerful and beautiful as a waterfall.

Then my husband came home and while the kids ran laps around us, he recounted an interesting conversation he’d had with his co-workers that day about what kind of people make the best CEOs. One guy was sure you couldn’t be a CEO unless you were born with something he called the killer instinct. We inventoried my husband’s traits—he was strategic, level headed, good in a crisis. But was he a born killer? Maybe it was like me and soccer—maybe it wasn’t in his bones.

As often happens, the next day I got talking with my friend Christine, who, in true PhD style, referred me to a huge body of research on mindsets, completed mostly by a woman named Carol Dweck, who’s done the rounds at Harvard and Columbia and is now down in sunny Palo Alto at Stanford. There were basically two mindsets, Christine explained, two ways of thinking about yourself and your abilities. Fixed and growth.

Apparently, talking about gifts and natural talents had made me an unwitting evangelist for the fixed mindset, which could be summarized as: you are what you are because you got what you got and once the plaster dries, there’s not much wiggle room.

Whatever I may have said, I don’t believe traits and skills are fixed. No, ma’am. I believe you reap (if only after much back-breaking tending) what you sow and that you can sow whatever you want. Personally, I plant new things all the time. Which brings me to the growth mindset, which gives all the credit to time on task. In other words, people are good at things they work at. My brothers broke scoring records in lacrosse because they started backing up the goal for my dad’s club games when they were in kindergarten. As teenagers, when other kids were hanging around the 7-11, they were playing Fall Ball and in the summer, while the other kids were playing ping-pong and doing cannonballs at the local pool, my brothers were sweating it out in Baltimore, at lacrosse camps. During the actual season, in the spring, they came home from a two-hour practice and went straight to our backyard to play catch until my mom called them in or it started raining. They were really good because they worked really hard. The same is true of Tess, who’s had a ball in her hands 80% of her waking hours since the day she was born. And Sophie, who spends several hours every day developing the muscle that is her voice, a routine she began when she was eleven. And so it is that Georgia will never be any good at soccer until she stands up, drops the dandelions and does the drills.

Now it’s a matter of consistently communicating that and not slipping into the limited (and limiting) thinking that credits born instincts and magic touches over the real enablers—study, training, rehearsal, revision and growth.

For more on this topic, click the play button below or head on over to Greater Good Science Center. The video download may take a minute or so. If you prefer to view on YouTube.com, which will be instant, click YouTube.com/blogversations.

Had to share these lines

2007-10-05T16:33:00.002-07:00

...from p 52 page of Gilead, the 2004 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Marilynne Robinson. If you haven't read it, it's just beautiful, as beautiful as anything on paper can be. The narrator is an old pastor at the end of his life and he's talking to his young son.

"I am writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you have done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God's grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to have been no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you."

As someone who wrote a whole book about what it means to be someone's child while also being someone's parent, I bow down to this.

"Hey...just calling to check in..."

2007-10-01T06:51:00.000-07:00

Kelly's column is reprinted here with permission from The Bay Area News Group.

I know that on Mondays at 10am, my husband meets with his boss. Those meetings last about ninety minutes and often there is about fifteen minutes of pressing work on either end. I also know that the first Friday of every month, the board of his small start-up meets and those meetings require about two hours of uninterrupted prep time and at least twenty minutes of chatting afterwards. I know his train schedule and that it takes him about ten minutes to settle into his commute and feel ready to kick back and chat. I know these things because I have been living with him for eight years and I have picked up on his basic routine. These effortless observations help me decide when to call and when to hold off for an hour, or even just five minutes.

Now. My husband is more “spontaneous.” He might call at 8:05am, to ask me to remind him (when he gets home in twelve hours) to find that parking receipt from last week’s trip to LA for his expense report. Or, he might call at 6:00pm for no reason at all, just a sweet, lazy hello, as he stares out the window at the traffic jam on 880 North. I have tried to point out that the kids’ dinnertime is not when I am at my conversational best. I have tried to explain that I only pick up at this time in case of emergency or to get the vigil ante thrill of barking at a telemarketer. And yet.

Last summer, during one such call, he called with a tidbit.

“Hi,” I said. “Bad time. Can we talk when you get home?”

“Sure yeah, just lemme tell you one quick thing—” he insisted.

“Um, ok,” I responded, phone wedged between my ear and my shoulder, hip blocking my daughter from the frying pan, fingers poking at a softball of frozen peas.

“Guess what?” he said, sounding titillated, like you might if you won a new Bentley.

“No idea honey.”

“Selma Hayek skipped a grade.”

“What?”

“She skipped a grade. She graduated from high school when she was sixteen.”

Let’s just say that no mother would call another mother at 6:00pm unless, perhaps, she opened her fridge to discover there was only a drop or two of chardonnay to carry her through the day’s last grueling hours.

So for the men out there, loving husbands all, here is a list of approved reasons for an ill-timed call:

Your car has broken down and AAA is not answering.
You got a raise. A big one.
You’re at the jewelry store buying diamonds and you need to confirm her ring size.

You’ll note that although surprising and impressive, Selma Hayek’s high school transcript does not make the list. That’s something to tuck away for Day Six of a week vacation where you have exhausted meatier topics like whether to replace your mattress this year and if the kids are listening to High School Musical 2 too much.

That said, I’d rather be doing an Andy Rooney routine over inconvenient calls than no calls at all, so if it’s an either/or, go ahead and keep em coming.

Did I Say Intractable?

2007-09-13T10:12:00.000-07:00

This just in from the United Nations:

"Child mortality rate tumbles to record low."

Have you heard better news in that last month? Year?

Apparently, thanks to promoting exclusive breastfeeding** and campaigns against malaria and measles, the number of deaths of young children has dropped to below 10 million a year for the first time since such record-keeping began in 1960.

This means that outreach and education and fundraising actually add up. This means that big, messy, multi-layered problems that seem unwinnable aren't. This means, in a nutshell, that hope is not unreasonable.

If you feel a little giddy about this, and your VISA number is handy, follow me here to give a little something to UNICEF.

**Correction thanks to Cynthia, a careful reader. [Thanks Cynthia.]

"Oh, I know that kid..."

2007-06-06T18:53:00.000-07:00

Kelly's column is reprinted here with permission from The Hills Newspaper Group.

Everyone does it. Everyone talks about other people’s kids. Mostly, it’s good-natured jokes about bad hair cuts and pot bellies and crooked teeth. But, all of us have to admit, sometimes it’s more. “She’s a tough one” or “He’s a wildcard” or “We steer clear of so-and-so.” Some kids trigger our protective instincts and in the company of a like-minded mother, a small objection to a specific behavior can become a broader critique of character.

This will never stop, even between friends. The most honest feedback you can hope for is a factual account of an eye-witnessed event, for instance, “Today after school, I saw your kid smack my kid.” And I know plenty of cases when even this seemingly essential information is withheld.

It’s understandable. Nobody wants to tell a parent that their child has been mean, or rude, or bossy since today’s victim is tomorrow’s bully just as today’s mortal enemy is tomorrow’s best buddy. Anyway, who wants to sound like an uptight tattletale? It’s not just kids who want to seem cool and laidback. And most of the time, it’s hearsay. Are you really going to risk seeming holier-than-thou based on the half-baked report of a seven year-old?

The thing is, if you choose to bite your tongue and give an incomplete report of the playdate—“It was great!” when the truth was “Your kid whacked my kid on the head with a Barbie doll”—then you can’t turn around and tell someone else. If you choose to stay silent, you have to actually stay silent. If you find you just can’t keep it in, the only person you should really talk to is the Barbie Swinger’s mom. Even if you’re afraid of how she’ll react. Even if you’re afraid that she’ll, oh I dunno, write a column about it.

Giving a parent negative feedback about their child is a small act of courage. Just ask my friend Christine, who shared some things about my daughter’s behavior that turned me inside-out for 48 hours (during which she was witness to several of my own “areas needing improvement”).

Why is it so painful to come face to face with our children’s flaws?

In my case, the pain came from two different places. One, it’s unsettling to think that other people can see something that you can’t. Our effectiveness hinges on our ability to see our kids’ clearly. I tried to dismiss Christine’s reports, believe me, but they were quickly corroborated by two other parents, convincing me that I have been asleep at the wheel, a wheel I thought I had been white-knuckling. After all, just like everyone reading this right now, my children are my raison d’etre, my self esteem, my everything.

Which brings me to the second cause of my pain: my big fat ego. While my children happily work their way through Erik Erikson’s developmental stages of autonomy, identity and separation, I cling. I realized this last weekend when my wise friend Susan said, “We are not our children.” Was there ever such a simple and obvious statement with such sweeping implications? Susan went on to say, as I was sharing my theory that my daughter is bossy because I am bossy, “Kelly, we influence them, we do not make them.”

If everything that is said about your child is essentially something said about you--your parenting, your nature--you and your child will be operating at a considerable disadvantage. Attaching your ego to your child--their reputation, their behavior, their happiness--is the exact opposite of lifting them up. It’s putting rocks in their backpack, making everything they do weightier than it needs to be. Beyond that, it’s impossible to see them clearly if they are obscured by a giant mirror showing your reflection.

In my life as a mother, this was a growth spurt. This was the week that I let some blood back into my knuckles, which were white from gripping too tight. This was the week I decided to stop talking about other people’s kids with anyone but their parents. And this is the week I learned to hear feedback and push past all the rotten self-doubt and defensiveness and just see it for what it is: a little gift. Thanks Christine.

Waking Up As Clarissa

2007-04-24T18:24:00.000-07:00

Kelly's column is reprinted with permission from The Hills Newspaper Group.

A long time ago [read: before cell phones], I read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway in an undergrad Lit class. I don’t remember the story all that well but I believe it’s set in London just after the first World War and everything happens in a single day. I’m pretty sure it’s springtime. There’s this Mrs. Dalloway who’s planning a party and there’s a disturbed war veteran struggling to reassimilate and these two plots unfold simultaneously. In one chapter, Mrs. Dalloway carefully selects flowers for her centerpieces and in the next, a wife broach the topic of an asylum to her husband, the vet who’s being haunted by battlefield images.

I recall that in our class discussion, swimming in our shapeless Benetton sweaters, we gals felt mighty superior to Clarissa Dalloway and her pitiful commitment to the hostess arts. “She’s so disconnected…isolated…shallow.”

It’s easy to think you’ll be different when it’s your turn to be a forty year-old suburban woman. But once you get here—to the leafy small town, to middle age—it is an act of will to continually balance a life of comfort and privilege with a life of engagement and compassion. This is particularly apropos now, when the war in Iraq goes on and on for about 140,000 American families while all other families go untouched. Not only have most of us not sacrificed in any measurable way but, at least in my home, when we talk about Iraq, it’s all politics and the ‘08 presidential election and the mounting costs. I can hardly think of a time when we discussed the soldiers and their families.

Rather then berate myself in print, I'll just tell you what corrective measures we've taken around here.

In addition to saying a prayer each night for the men and women sleeping uneasily in their makeshift barracks so far from home [which involves visualizing the soldiers and imagining what they eat, the sounds they hear, the letters under their pillows], I wanted to share a website I’ve found that will send a soldier in Iraq a care package for about $20 all in. Boxes go out in large shipments once a month and include; cereal bars, packets of Gatorade, AA batteries, phone cards, sunflower seeds, tube socks, beef jerky and playing cards. Beyond these “treats,” the organization also packs up what seem like essentials; dental floss, sun block, bug repellant, tube socks and chap stick. Maybe best of all are letters from school children that say, “We think about you. We are proud of you. We can’t wait until you come home.”

So this weekend, before you slide into your party shoes, please visit www.forgottensoldiers.org. I’m betting it’ll make the party that much better. It did for us.

In Defense of the Long Answer

2007-04-09T17:28:00.000-07:00

Kelly's columns appear with permission from The Hills Newspaper Group.

My husband, Edward, recently told me, in the kindest possible way, that he thinks I “go on” a bit. For instance, when people (by people, I mean people we socialize with, a.k.a. friends) ask me how my book is coming, he thinks they’re looking for something simple, like “good.” When I say, “Well, I handed in a rewrite last week and the editors were happy with it so next week, it goes to copyediting and I’ll get it back in about a month for one more round of changes,” he suspects that may be more than they wanted.

When I pressed him (“But they asked!”), he said it was probably different for everyone but that if he were me, he’d err on the side of too little information (TLI), not too much (TMI). But if we all err on the side of TLI--if everyone’s answer to everything is “good”--it’s gonna be a pretty dull garden party. On the flip side, the possibility that I am verbally overstaying my welcome makes me cringe.

For the record, unless I’m running to the bathroom or standing in the rain, there isn’t anything I’d rather do that hear about the new client you just signed or how your mother-in-law offended you by organizing your daughter’s closet or the NPR story about faith and science that kept you up last night. I’m hoping you’ll give me a paragraph or two, not a word.

Beyond the facts of your life, I’d also like to know what you believe in--who you voted for, if you go to church, where you stand on gay marriage. Oh, and I’d like to know the last time you yelled so loud it hurt your throat. I’m not judging, by the way. I’m calibrating. I know enough to draw the line at money and sex. [However, thanks to a few confidantes, I have a couple key data points on both topics that have served me well over the years.]

I’ve always felt self-conscious about my curiosity, perhaps because my mother and her generation esteem privacy so. (When my mom saw the movie “The Queen,” she called on the way home from the theater to say, “That’s precisely how I feel about things. Some things aren’t meant to be discussed.”)

And also, I have been teased. (Yes, reader, teased!) And we all know that teasing is just a clever, sometimes graceful way to reset the conversation. So when people say, “Kelly, TMI!” I know to pull back and start talking about season six of American Idol.

But then, about once a month I get the housewives’ equivalent of a Kindergarten “All About ME” session--a set of questions in an email that I am supposed to answer and then “Forward to 10 great women!!!!” The questions range from the banal “What is your favorite cereal?” to the traumatizing “How do you know that you are turning into your mother?” What is clear from all of them is that needs are going unmet. Those emails are begging for more sharing!

If that wasn’t enough, Barnes and Noble dedicates considerable retail space to books of questions and games like Scruples or Table Topics, which is a box of cards that have questions on each side. My friend Beth keeps the deck on her kitchen table. Last week, over turkey burgers and beans, I pulled: What is your greatest regret? Each person answered and I left that night feeling connected in new ways to a friend I’ve had for a couple years now. (Mine was a broad-shouldered Lambda Chi back in ‘87, if you must know.)

By definition, sharing is the joint use of a resource and the resource I want more of is life experience. My limits are more clear to me than ever. Your trip to Africa, your front row seats to James Taylor, your meeting with the head of the NBA may be the closest I ever come to any of those things. So please, go on a bit.

My PhD-friend, Christine, refers to sharing as “reciprocal disclosure” and can prove to you through social science that it is the stuff friendships are made of. Moreover, Christine says that 50 years of studies confirm that happiness comes from “meaningful social connections.” So, if you’re looking for those, if you’re looking for happiness, it’s time to say more than “good.”

There you have it: an air-tight defense of the long answer. Sorry, Edward.

Getting a little greener every day

2007-04-04T10:10:00.000-07:00

On the heels of my last column about bystanders and activists, I got a tip from a reader about keeping your tires full. Turns out--and this may be old news to many of you--driving around on underinflated tires uses excess gas. So save yourself a few bucks (it cost me $56 to fill my tank yesterday) and top off your tires monthly. In the process, you can pat yourself on the back for making things a little bit greener.

*Note from stopgloablwarming.org: Look for the recommended tire pressure on a sticker on the doorjamb of the driver-side door. Buy a tire-pressure gauge and check your tires monthly, adding air as necessary.

Backwards Designing Meg

2007-03-11T09:12:00.000-07:00

My friend Meg is the most community-minded person I know. Without ever seeming boorish or superior, Meg moves mountains. It started back in the late 80s, after college graduation. While I was sussing out the best happy hour in Baltimore, she was in Niger speaking Hausa, digging ditches and midwifing birth and death, both of which happened in a field outside her village. Nowadays, she runs Yahoo’s community service arm and, in the last couple years, she has helped make a single national database for Katrina survivors to find relatives and organized a voter registration drive that brought one million new people to the polls.

Meg is the exact opposite of a bystander, defined as “a person who present at an event or incident but does not take part.”

The question of why some people respond to the call (of global warming, or natural disasters, of poverty) and some don’t is worth considering. The first bystander experience most of us have is watching a sister or brother bump their head or struggle to tie a shoe or look in vain for a prized toy. From there, we go to school, where we watch as a friend rips a page in a library book, or cheats on a quiz, or bullies a classmate. As parents, these incidents are our chance to intervene and maybe just create a generation of Megs. Like everything else, it starts with modeling, as I learned last week when I took my girls down to Jack London Square for their first Ferry ride into San Francisco. Unfortunately, the ferry wasn’t running on President’s Day. As we were leaving the pier, several people were headed down to the waiting area and my daughter said, “Mommy, aren’t you going to tell them there’s no ferry today?”

I wasn’t going to. It crossed my mind but a moment later, I started thinking about where to take my girls to make up for my poor planning. For my five-year-old, I jogged up behind the people on the pier and told them the news. “Oh thanks! We would have waited here for an hour!” they said.

Beyond modeling, we can talk to our kids. My brother is a high school lacrosse coach, a job he takes seriously (The McDonogh School has been and will be again ranked number one in the nation). His refrain throughout the season is Be The Guy, as in “Be the guy who dives for the ball. Be the guy who gets open. Be the guy who wins the face off.” He puts even more time into guiding his team’s behavior off the field. So graduates of his program also know to “be the guy” who stops the fight, tutors a classmate, and takes the car keys from someone who’s been drinking.

By role modeling, by message, by repetition, we have to convince our children to “be the guy.” And it all starts with little things – running to get a friend a Band Aid, helping mommy find her cell phone, picking up a candy wrapper.

Knowing Meg’s mother, I can imagine that’s how it began for her. I bet her family pulled over for broken down cars and stayed after to clean up after the school play and cooked an extra Thanksgiving dinner for the local church. Whatever it was, it has lead to her latest act: 18seconds.org, which is a site to encourage everyone in the US to change their light bulbs to CFLs. CFLs are sold in any hardware store and last ten times as long as the bulbs you’ve probably got now. But the real reason Meg cares is because if everyone in the US swapped out just ONE bulb for a CFL, which takes about 18 seconds, it would be like taking 2 million cars off the road. And that’s just changing ONE bulb.

So here’s our chance to practice. Go get some CFL bulbs. Take your kids along. It’s small, but if you explain to your kids what you’re doing and why, it could be big. It could be the beginning of a lifetime habit.

Mad, Sad, Glad Meets The Sunday Times

2007-02-12T12:50:00.000-08:00

Thanks to a kitchen remodel, our family dinner last night was Zone Bars served on paper plates. I told the girls it was like being an astronaut. Presumably to elevate the pitiful experience, my 3 year-old suggested a round of Mad, Sad, Glad, a variation on Daily Highs and Lows, which is itself a variation on “How was your day?” which is a proven conversational dead end with all people under 25. Turns out my girls are glad about ice cream, sad about taking Motrin and mad about Time Outs.

This morning, I spent a few precious minutes with an old New York Times from Sunday, January 28. Still seeing through Mad, Sad, Glad paradigm, here’s where I came out on current events:

Mad
1. Congress has an idea to rein in executive pay, which is good. Executive compensation is the number one contributor to the portentous gap between the super rich and the gigantic middle class. But the bill has been tinkered with, as bills always are, and now it looks like the real pinch will be for people making under $100,000 and although the big guys will also pay, their companies will “top them off” so they won’t actually have to contribute to the expenses of the very country that has made them so rich.

2. Worldwide volume of spamming has doubled over the past year, and anti-spam programmers are having a hard time innovating at a greater rate than their nemesis’s (don’t you wish it were spelled nemesi?). So you’ll still be given many opportunities every day to grow your penis, whether you have one or not.

Sad
1. Costco’s business is booming, close to $60 billion last year, making unnecessary consumption as easy as 1-2-3. Environmentally and morally, trash matters, and at least in my house, Costco generates waste, from the massive amount of packaging to the leftovers that eventually get tossed. (Thinking that I had finally found a set of markers big enough to match my daughters’ capacity for creation, I saw firsthand the inverse relationship between volume and value. It shames me to think about what it took to manufacture, package, ship and shelve those 75 pens, a dozen of which were dried up, lost or tossed by the end of the first week. )

2. Many of Iraq’s moderate families, businesses and political leaders have fled or been killed; these were the very people we were counting on to stabilize and rebuild the country.

Glad
1. Bill Gates is becoming a full time philanthropist. What if every great mind from the Fortune 500 spent their retirement doing non-profit work? Can you even imagine?

2. Speaking of Microsoft, CEO Steve Ballmer lives with his wife and 3 kids in the same 2-bedroom house he bought before he was married. I don’t know precisely why this makes me glad but it’s related to the Costco entry about over-consumption and is right up there with another “Glad,” namely: Warren Buffett has opted to leave his children “a couple hundred thousand dollars” each. So instead of making a handful of Buffetts super-rich, he is giving his outrageous fortune to non-profits working to decrease disease, hunger and poverty.

3. Ben Stein, who writes a column called SOAP BOX, is a lawyer, writer, actor and economist. Doesn’t that make you so happy? That one person can do so many things?

Not sure
1. Consumer Reports released a report in early January that said 8 of 10 car seats tested were unsafe. This made me feel hopeless, like even my best efforts weren’t going to matter in an accident, which led me to think about all the studies we internalize only to have them debunked later—about which position babies should sleep in, whether toddlers should have binkies, if kids should or should not participate in after-school activities. Cynicism was afoot. But it turns out the car seats in question were mistakenly tested at 70 mph, not 38 mph, and so they were safe after all. Great news, but boy, I hate to think we can’t trust Consumer Reports.

2. A German company is now selling a duvet cover that you can tie around your neck. This is for those occasions when you’ve been brought breakfast in bed and are loathe to eat your buttered toast for fear of crumbs. It costs $169 and comes with a matching pillowcase.

And finally, for a subsection about coincidences that I’ll call “Well I’ll Be Damned” Ford Motors lost $12.7 billion last year, which is exactly the current value of Steve Ballmer’s stake in Microsoft.

Answering to my Teenage Self

2007-01-30T16:23:00.000-08:00

Kelly Corrigan, writer, wife, mother of two, recently sat down for an interview with her eighteen year-old self to discuss values, ambition and dating versus mating. Here’s an excerpt from what appears to be an ongoing conversation.

KC (18): OK, um, for starters, why do you put on sun block every morning? It’s not like you’re going to the beach or something, and you could use some sun on your cheeks.

KC (39): Well, besides skin cancer, there’s the wrinkles. Look at my forehead. See?

KC (18): What-ever. Why don’t you go to a tanning place if you’re so down on real rays? I know one on Shattuck Avenue that’s awesome and they have a 10-pack thing so it’s totally cheap.

KC (39): It’s not a money thing; it’s the time. We’ve been out of ketchup for three days and don’t have a piece of bread in the house. Do you realize how challenging it is to feed children without ketchup? Anyway, I don’t care that much.

KC (18): I can tell.

KC (39): Oh, really?

KC (18): Well, I mean, yeah. You’re totally awesome and everything but seriously, CK jeans from Costco? T-shirts from Land’s End? And what’s this Miracle Suit thing? At least go to Old Navy. Or H&M. If I were you—okay, I am you, eew, weird—I’d spend more time shopping for clothes and less time shopping for ottomans and window treatments. And what’s with the gardening kick? You’ve been back and forth to the nursery like ten times in the last week.

KC (39): Is gardening so bad? My flowerbeds are finally working. Look at the snapdragons, the zinnias. That hydrangea is burning up but that corner’s always given me problems—

KC (18): Um, OK, senior citizens garden. That’s how they throw their backs out and break their hips. It’s the last thing they do before they move into [finger quotes] continuous care. By the by, Claire’s preschool called and you forgot to hand in the permission slip for the field trip to the [more finger quotes] retirement community. I thought you’d—ugh, I’d—be more together by now.

KC (39): Nope. Still hitting the snooze button, still missing deadlines and still ten pounds overweight.

KC (18): And still borrowing clothes.

KC (39): Oh come on, that was one time. I found out that wedding was black tie the day before we left.

KC (18): I just thought by the time we were 40—

KC (39): We’re not 40. We’re 39.

KC (18): Yeah, okay but anyway, I thought we’d have a couple nice dresses in the closet. I thought we’d throw nice dinner parties and get front row tickets at the best concerts and stop wearing those Levi’s.

KC (39): I love those Levi’s. Who’s looking at me, anyway?

KC (18): (head shake. hopelessness sets in around the eyes.)

KC (39): Did you see I quit smoking? Like, 10 years ago? My lungs are probably as pink as a baby’s bottom. And I got a Masters. Like we always planned.

KC (18): Oh really? I have it right here in my Monkees journal— P H D.

KC (39): Yeah, that was before we researched student loans and the job market for Comparative Lit Professors. Before we went to college and realized that the kids we’d be lucky discuss Wallace Stevens and Toni Morrision with just want to get into the right fraternity, try some psychedelics and maul each other.

KC (18): Whoa. Freak out. Little cynical there?

KC (39): Not cynical. I can’t be cynical. I have children. Just realistic.

KC (18): That’s what they all say. So, is this mommy thing what we’re gonna do for the rest of our life?

KC (39): We’re not gonna do anything for the rest of our life. We’ll keep changing. That’s one of the things we figured out.

KC (18): Sounds kinda unstable to me. Doesn’t it drive you crazy?

KC (39): No, it’s liberating—making small decisions, taking the drama out of things, knowing that I can change course. The only thing that needs to be consistent and stable is my marriage.

KC (18): Interesting. I like him, by the way, even though he was in a singing group in college. And he’s not as tall as I thought he’d be. But I like him.

KC (39): Tall? Get a grip, kid. You know how hard it is to find the right guy? Trust me, it’s all coming together just fine.

KC (18): What a relief. All that worry—the stress breakouts and bitten nails—for nothing. Hard to believe how normal it all seems. (pause) I still think you could you spruce it up a bit.

Public Service Announcement

2007-01-17T15:11:00.000-08:00

You’ve probably already given up on your new year’s resolution. And why not? I mean honestly, how nutritious are brussel sprouts? And whose even gonna notice a missing five pounds? Everybody knows that resolutions are just a gimmick cooked up by the diet and exercise industry.

Or maybe I’m selling you short. Maybe Shakespeare’s tragedies are piled up on your nightstand right now, or you’re flossing while doing sit ups while calling your sick grandmother. Maybe you’re recycling more, relying on Tylenol PM less, and finally addressing the mold issue in your basement. My congratulations.

If however, you are in the vast majority who don’t bother with resolutions at all, to you I say: it’s not too late. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that people who make their resolutions after January 1 are more likely to keep them. We are a contemplative lot, and contemplation leads to resolve. So, get on board.

For your encouragement, here’s the process I used to narrow my list:
Start by listing all the resolutions you could possibly make and then categorize them. For example, in my PERSONAL GROOMING column, which was the longest by far, I wrote: dress better, take care of my skin, and shower more.

But then I stopped myself. I remembered what I learned once in an All Hands Professional Development session held, incidentally, in a field. (The terminally upbeat facilitator explained to us that nature was supposed to help us think “out of the box,” which she said with a wink and some finger quotes to indicate that the box we were supposed be thinking outside of was the office building itself. Mind blowing.) Anyway, the facilitator explained that all goals should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely.

So I went back to the Grooming list to revise:
1. Never again wear the t-shirt I slept in to drop the girls at school.
2. Shower every day, except those days when my hair looks extra good.
3. Replace Jergen’s with proper moisturizer and remember to use it at night.

My husband applauded this list, as he has always been a fan of small but achievable resolutions. His best one—he wanted me to pass on to you—was “Wash hands three times a day.” He swore this protected him from catching colds. [Now he has given that job to Airborne, which takes after being within ten feet of a smothered cough or a blown nose.]

The next category, which my husband also encouraged, was WIFELY DUTIES. He suggested cooking dinner more and by that, I took it to mean that Cornmeal Pizza from Whole Foods, while delicious and pricey, does not qualify as a home-cooked, square meal. He also pondered that I could be greatly improved if only I would put away the laundry immediately, instead of dressing out of the baskets, as is my wont. I took this one under advisement, struggling as I do with all clothing matters.

On to the next category, the most substantive: INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT. With New Yorkers going unread week after week and the Sunday New York Times also proving to be more than I can digest, I knew I had to stay small here. So the resolution was to find my own answers to all the questions I usually ask my husband when he gets home from work, burning questions like Did Olga Korbet ever compete against Nadia Commenchi? Where did Auld Lang Syne [not Old Ang’s Sign by the way] come from? And, How do you spell nauseous?

This I was able to act on immediately. On the web, I learned all kinds of tidbits, one leading to another, in a seemingly endless chain. For instance, Auld Lang Syne, which means Old Long Ago, uses the same exact tune as The Unviersity of Virginia’s fight. Then, I found a list of people born on January 1. Siddig El Nigoumi, the ceramicist (that’s all it said; maybe my husband knows more) and Holling Gustav Vapor (the character on “Northern Exposure” who was married to the young cute ditsy girl). I pushed away thoughts about the uselessness of this information and instead, reveled in my new supply of cocktail party trivia. I covered so much ground in one sitting, I think I may have knocked off this resolution for the year.

Interestingly, while I was developing my intellect, I noticed an ad that said: Achieve your new year’s resolutions with cosmetic surgery. So while I’m hold with the nurse, let me suggest that the best resolution may just be to love your life just as it is and never get caught taking things too seriously.

Searching for that Fairy Godmother Feeling

2006-12-17T16:05:00.000-08:00

Kelly's column is reprinted here with permission from The Hills Newspapers.

You know how sometimes it’s really hard to feel integrated with the larger world? How you want to make a meaningful contribution but the little things, like bagging up canned food for the local drive, don’t seem to add up to much? Or how, when you’re writing checks to charities, you get that little high looking at the pictures in the brochure but twenty minutes later the high is gone and you wonder if there isn’t a way to get more connection for your philanthropic investment?

I found a way.

At least, it’s working for me. It’s called Donors Choose and it’s one of those brilliant applications of the web that leave you wondering how we ever survived without it.

Teachers--that underpaid, overtaxed lot to which we assign our most important work--write up three or four paragraphs about something they need to make magic happen in their classroom, or even just give their students a fighting chance to learn anything. It’s all there—from basics like textbooks and staplers to elective supplies, like recorders and basketballs. And it’s searchable by subject, by location, by grade.

I sorted first by Art & Music Projects, where I quickly stumbled upon Mrs. Dien, an elementary school teacher down in LA. She’s leading a field trip to see Dan Zanes perform in April. Dan Zanes is a storyteller and musician and my girls love him, especially his Polly Wolly Doodle duet with Sheryl Crow. Now, no one could say a Dan Zanes show is something students need to succeed in life. But as I read the second paragraph, I learned that the entire student body is going, except the special needs kids. For them to go, the school would need to rent a bus with a lift, which costs $382.53 a day, including gas, insurance and the driver’s pay. So I picked up the tab. Come April 2007, those special needs kids will be humming alongside their luckier schoolmates.

The next week, I got this note:

Dear Kelly and Edward,

Thank you very much for funding the bus for our students to see Dan Zanes at UCLA Performing Arts Center. My special students have a difficult time learning academic subjects, but one area that they all enjoy and can relate to is music and story telling. Thank you for making this possible. We will be sending our thank you letters and pictures of our trip after we attend the performance in April 2007.

Thank you,
Michelle Dien

It was better than finding the perfect sweater to go with the brown skirt I bought last year and never wear because, well, I don’t have the perfect sweater to go with it.

High on the Michelle Dien letter, I went back to Donors Choose. This time, I found a high school in Chicago where 92% of the students are on free lunch. A Geometry teacher there was asking for $322.81 to buy a manipulatives kit that he is sure will help his students finally understand geometry. One click, and I had solved the problem.

It’s a little problem, I know, and there’s another problem right behind it. And sure, it’s just one set of tools for one set of kids. But before I went too far in that direction, I got another letter:

Dear Kelly and Edward,

My students and I cannot thank you enough for your generous donation to our classroom. When I informed my students of your generous gift, they were all incredibly ecstatic and astounded that someone from outside their community truly cared about their education. They were also very eager to start using the materials to help them learn geometry in new and innovative ways. Once again, thank you very much.

Regards,

Vinay Mullick
Paul Robeson High School

With $322, I made some kids in Chicago “ecstatic.” I “astounded” them. I showed them that people they don’t know care about what happens to them. And Vinay gave me his email, so I can check in any time. Now that’s the connection I was hoping for.

Donors Choose is online at www.donorschoose.org.

The Noey Effect

2006-12-05T13:35:00.000-08:00

Kelly’s column is represented here with permission from The Hills Newspapers.

My seventeen year-old babysitter, Noey, doesn’t know how to work our TiVo, nor does she want to know.

Noey is an industrious first-generation American with her eyes on Stanford. She studies all the time. Doesn’t care what time we get home since by her calculations, she’s getting paid to prep for the SATs and finish her AP Chemistry homework. Every time she comes, she asks if it’s okay to use my computer. “Just checking,” she says when I say “Of course, Noey.” “Thanks a lot,” she adds, in a tone so genuine it makes me wonder if my kids have ever sincerely thanked me for anything.

Noey, I should mention, is fit for the cover of a magazine. She has the kind of face that makes some girls stop trying and just coast along on the perks that come with show-stopping beauty. I keep telling her she could make money a whole lot faster than $12 an hour if she was willing to send a couple photos off to the nearest modeling agency.

But that’s not her style. She wants to be a doctor.

Noey’s parents are Nicaraguan immigrants who work as Custodial Managers at UC Berkeley. They found a high school for her in Albany, even though it’s five towns north of their home, because it’s the kind of high school that sends its graduates to college. When Noey matriculates, she will be the first in her family to walk the halls of a freshman dorm looking for her name on a door, or comb through a university bookstore filling a basket with $400 worth of textbooks, or harbor a secret crush on the guy in Chem Lab.

But that’s where Noey is headed.

When I ask her why college is so important, she says, “That’s why my parents came here. That’s why they left everything behind.”

When I was seventeen, I could be found in front of the mirror, wondering if my hair looked better in French braids or a bun and rolling my eyes at my mother who was always calling up to me to “Get downstairs now!” When I was finally satisfied with my locks, I’d slip on my Mia flats, noting the scuffs on the toes and wishing for a fresh pair. I rarely said thank you spontaneously and was quick to remind my mom, in our regular showdowns, that at least I wasn’t pregnant or on drugs. It wasn’t pretty.

And my girls – they are the luckiest kids in America. Piles of books in every room. So many clothes that when they’re all clean, they don’t fit in the dresser. Soccer, choir, summer camp. Trips to the circus, the beach, the Big Apple. And perhaps the ultimate luxury: a well-rested, at-home mom, not to mention a father who can’t wait to get home to them.

But there are things Noey has that I can’t give my children. There are advantages to “disadvantage.” Noey appreciates a Coke. She saves the last bit of cream cheese because if you really scrape around the sides, there’s enough for another bagel. She found an SAT course that is half the cost as Kaplan, but just as good. She’s more resourceful and self-sufficient than some forty year-olds I know.

But she has one more thing I wish for my kids—the thing that makes the world her oyster. Noey has the pride and the insight of the entrepreneur, the person who takes an idea about what could be and makes it real. She came by her daring and will honestly, through her parents.

As Powerful As Brylcreem

2006-11-20T14:47:00.000-08:00

Kelly's column is reprinted with permission from The Hills Newspapers.

I THOUGHT I knew all about empathy. I’ve written about it, given speeches about it, made a web site about it (www.circusofcancer.org) and generally evangelized about its terrific healing powers on every street corner since 2004. In that year, I was the recipient of so much empathy (thanks to a run-in with late-stage breast cancer), I thought I could write the book on it.

Silly girl.

Empathy isn’t just the thing you pack in your bag on the way to see a friend in crisis. Rather, as I was shown last week, empathy is your primary tool for every interaction. But that’s putting the punchline before the joke, so to speak. Let me back up a bit.

Last Wednesday, I had coffee with Tracy, an old friend whose parenting style leans towards…um…well, let’s just say she is kinder with her children than I am with mine. In my dark days, pre-enlightenment, I may have even described her mothering as indulgent. She starts every interaction trying to make sure her children know she understands how they feel while I start every interaction trying to make sure my children know who’s boss.

Tracy and I had a long time to talk; we were AWOL mothers in New York City, many states between us and our children--and their overripe diapers, unbuckled shoes and running noses. Buzzing with caffeine, trapped in a café by sheets of rain, we talked about what she’s learning in her parenting classes, which she gets for the cost of tuition at her children’s private school.

Oh boy, have I been blowing it around here.

Children, Tracy reported, want to feel that they have been felt. (Children are clearly just like people in this way.) Hmm. In my interactions with my children, I am operating as my husband sometimes does with me. No time for empathy! Let’s get to the good part, the satisfying part: problem solving! But satisfying for whom? Like me, my kids may not need a solution as much as they need someone to hear them out, a little emotional camaraderie. “It is hard to zip up stiff, new boots.” “Amoxicillin chewable tablets do taste like Ajax.” “I like it when Toto pulls the curtain back on the Wizard too!”

But here’s the finer point, and the place where I oversimplified. While empathy is big enough to reshape any interaction and consequently any relationship, in most cases, the empathetic act is, by comparison, microscopic. A nod is the quintessential show of empathy. Eye contact is also high on the list. Mirroring expressions – a frown for a frown, a furrowed brow for a furrowed brow – ranks right up there with actually mirroring their words. “You really want to have a playdate.” “You’re so hungry you could eat a horse.” "That homework assignment is pretty tough." I find after addressing the urgent need [to be heard and acknowledged], it’s easier to explain that dinner isn’t ready, we can set up a playdate for tomorrow, and homework is homework, everybody’s gotta do it.

Mirroring and eye contact and nodding may sound like a lotta touchy-feely garbage but the thing is if your children (or, for that matter, your spouse) can’t tell from your behavior that you’re really listening, you might as well not be. So though the temptation may be strong, you cannot hope to empathize while reading the paper or checking the score of the game or finishing a column. The good news is you don’t have to. Empathizing is so powerful that, as the old Brylcreem ad went, a little dab’ll do ya.

Sandbagging

2006-11-10T08:38:00.000-08:00

Kelly's column about Sandbagging originally appeared in The Hills Newspapers and is represented here with their permission.

I’m married to a good man who works hard, between between tracking his fantasy football players and picking wines online and finding the occasional sportcoat deal on jcrew.com… and I’m a good woman , an at-home mom who works hard, between writing columns and coffeeing with friends and catching a spin on the elliptical trainer down at the Y). Between us, we’ve got nothing to hide.

Still, I’ve noticed this trend in our daily check in calls. He seems to want me to go first so he gets right out there with "how's your day?" and that’s when it happens. That’s the moment I feel myself hedging, wishing I knew which way his day was going before I rattle off a list of small but mission-critical achievements, like picking up dry cleaning and getting his prescription filled OR focus instead on the hour that the girls played quietly while I flipped through old Pottery Barn catalogs and yakked on the phone to my friend down the street. I mean, it's unwise (right?) to let your husband think it's too cruisy back at home. Stories of heroism always involve great obstacles and unforeseen challenges, right? What credit will I get at the end if I make motherhood out to be one long afternoon of crayons, cupcakes, and Curious George? Best to report the tantrums and timeouts. Best to cast the corporate world as a haven, predictable, logic- based, preferable on all counts.

Guilt seeps in.

But then I notice that he sandbags me too. Calling from a first-class trip to Tokyo, he hesitates to describe his hotel room, or his dinner, or his schedule the next day. He plays the hold-back game. Which means that somewhere along the line, I've communicated that I don’t want to hear about the $100 bottle of wine he had with his brainy, interesting boss while exquisite women scurried to and fro in silk kimonos bringing course after course of award-winning food.

More guilt. I mean what kind of bitter killjoy doesn’t want her hard working husband to enjoy the occasional boondoggle?

So I say to him one night, after a particularly effective glass of red wine, when he is wearing a shirt I like and the girls have gone to bed in that charming way that kids do sometimes, I say, "Edward, sometimes I kinda lie to you, or just kinda omit things." I go on to explain that if I sat in a hot tub after working out on a Monday morning while he was in that weekly staff meeting that he just hates, I usually don't mention the hot tub. And he says, in this weirdly convincing way, that he wants me to be happy. And I, of course, recall a similar desire for him. And so we agree, after chewing on it for a while, that sandbagging is more silly than sensitive and that we should, from now on, revel openly in a good day.

This column served as fodder for a a recent Today Show segment. To see it, go to: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12065856/ and scroll down to THURSDAY's VIDEOS and select TRUTH IN MARRIAGE: Stop Sandbagging. And if you want to see more columns like this on Today, please email today@nbc.com and let them know.

It’s Going Around Town

2006-11-04T17:23:00.000-08:00

Kelly's column is reprinted with permission from The Hills Newspapers.

My popularity at home is at an all-time low since my daughter started elementary school in August. Every day, she manages to work into conversation that Fiona has a dog, Sadie has a princess backpack with pearl trim and Olivia has cowboy boots. We don’t have a dog, Georgia’s backpack is cute but plain and the coolest shoes she has can’t touch Olivia’s pink boots. It’s not peer pressure. It’s not groupthink. I guess I’d call it instinctive conformity. If only I could channel it to her advantage. Instead of “But Becky gets Pop Tarts for breakfast!” it could be “Why can’t I have broccoli and tofu dogs like Jane?”

It takes me back. As a girl, my impossible dream was pierced ears (which, it was explained to me repeatedly, God would have put there Himself if He’d wanted me to have them). By the time I bellied up to the Piercing Pagoda at the mall, the Beckys and Janes in my class all had jewelry boxes bursting with posts, hoops and dangles. I survived, and took the message to heart: Everyone else is doing it is not sufficient grounds for action.

Conformity doesn’t end in childhood, of course. I often hear myself saying to my husband that I need an eyebrow wax, I must replace my lumpy sofa, I should really get a nice dress for the holidays. I’m not sure those were my ideas. In fact, I think I could be parroting my friends, just as my daughter parrots hers. But these are benign desires.

I get good ideas from my pals too. My friend Susan started an exercise studio when she turned 40. She opened up a beautiful place on Piedmont Avenue called The Dailey Method and every day, she’s in there taking women to their physical limit in the name of improved health and a good tush. When the sign went up out front everyone I know wondered if they didn’t have a small business bubbling inside them. Other friends are volunteering, designing handbags, teaching Sunday School. What would we be if we weren’t open to the new idea blowing around town like wind? Personally, I’m keeping my door wide open.

But it’s not just inspiration and optimism that shake the leaves. I heard a story recently about L., a married woman who has reconnected with an old flame from high school and spent the summer emailing him, the fall calling him, and if she gets on the flight next week, the winter visiting him.

I mentioned it to my mom and she said, “My friends just didn’t do that.” My parents ran in a crowd where no one got divorced, even if maybe they should have. It just wasn’t done. And I don’t think it was a coincidence. Sometimes it’s subtle, but I believe peers can influence us in every conceivable way; everything is contagious. Wearing seatbelts, eating organic, joining clubs, flirting with infidelity.

It has something to do with that old adage: you pick your advice when you pick your advisor. Meaning, if a woman like L. told my mom she was talking to her old boyfriend, my mom would probably furrow her brow and shake her head before saying something blunt and unmistakable, like “That’s awful.” But if L. confided in a friend who’d strayed from her own marriage, L.’s friend might say, “What are you going to wear?” which is, for all practical purposes, saying, “Go for it. And tell me all about it when you get home.”

There’s a rule in advertising that says it takes six impressions before a customer will make a purchase. The impressions can be miniscule and fleeting—a logo here, a banner there—but they combine to create a feeling of inevitability. Eventually, you say, “Of course, we’re going to get Yahoo DSL!” So maybe if we surround ourselves and our children with principled, gutsy people, we’ll be bombarded with impressions that will have the net effect of reinforcing what we know is right. We’ll be programmed to pick a designated driver before the night begins, withdraw from the behavior that leads to family ruin, explore new career options, and every now and then, splurge on a pair of pink cowboy boots just like Olivia’s.

Striking Out

2006-10-23T11:32:00.000-07:00

Kelly's column is reprinted with permission from The Hills Newspapers.

My friend Deryl came over the other day with his Gibson acoustic and humored me on another one of my “projects”: a children’s song about Homonyms. (My kindergartener and I have been tripping over homonyms for months, ever since that fateful morning when she got twisted up in “two,” “too” and “to.”) You can’t believe how often homonyms pop up. Bare, Bear. Aunt, Ant. Wring, Ring. Anyway, I really thought there was a song there. Possibly even a song and dance that could become a video that would go around the world on YouTube or find it’s way onto Sesame Street. (I’m overrun with daydreams—can’t stop the images from coming.)

So Deryl and I spent an hour on my deck playing various types of music, looking for something to build a melody on. Country, then bluegrass, then Jack Black-ish hard rock. From there, we started to work through the lyrics. The opening line was a cinch:

“When my friend Phil said ‘Fill it to the brim,”
I said ‘Whoa! Is that a homonym?’”

For that one minute, it looked like writing a kids song was as easy as it sometimes seemed. We joked that guys like Dan Zanes and Elizabeth Mitchell were robbing the bank with their albums. (We even used finger quotes when we said “albums.”)

On to the next verse! Nose and knows. It took a little longer than Phil and fill but eventually, I suggested something like:

“Every pirate knows that a ticklin’ nose
means ‘Look out boys! Thar she blows!’”

I could tell by Deryl’s guffaw that he didn’t think that one was even worth transcribing. Concerned about losing our momentum, we quickly scraped the nose-knows pairing and tried to come up with a verse using blue and blew. Surely there was something there, something about blue skies and wind that blew, but we couldn’t find it, and by then, it was time for Deryl to get back to his real job as a software developer.

So the afternoon didn't yield much and another day went by that I didn’t return the plastic ponys and flip flops that my children brought home from playdates last week. I guess The Homonym Song was a stupid idea.

All I can say for myself is that it was fun and refreshing and humbling, like falling in the snow. Being a beginner, being lost, making things up, that made me feel young. Plus, my short-lived foray into songwriting made me love a good song all the more, just as the experience of making a bench made me appreciate the tidiness of a properly mitered edge, and the experience of painting a laughably misshapen portrait of my daughter made me recognize how layered and clever even the simplest paintings are. And lastly, it can’t hurt for my kids to see me try to do something I’ve never done and fail so happily. Especially when their lives are a near-endless string of new things they are forced to try—tying a shoe, dribbling a ball, inverting a fraction.

So I say: Take a swing at it. Whatever it might be. And make sure your children are around to see it. A handful of afternoons watching you venture and stumble and maybe even come up short will save you a lot of long lectures about trial and error, gumption, and the joy of shrugging your shoulders and saying “What the hell? I’ll give it a whirl.”

Why We Do It

2006-09-26T17:17:00.000-07:00

Kelly's column is reprinted with permission from The Hills Newspapers.

I met my old friend, Andy, at Chrissy Field this weekend. He had his family and I had mine. Plus, we had a Frisbee, four bottles of water, a slowly deflating football and two sand buckets. Not ten minutes into it, we started to make up a game. This is Andy’s specialty. In fact, as he outlined the rules, I could see the faded outlines of a hundred previous games. A speed round where you run with a bucket upside down on your head, bonus points for making a catch with a toddler on your hip, negative points for whining—all the makings of a game that could entertain us all for an hour. And it did, even as we appealed to Andy for clarification on one rule or another. Suffice it to say, Sunday was one of those completely satisfying days where you feel like things really couldn’t be any better.

Then came Monday. Bad day, Monday. A children’s book I have been tinkering with (well, okay, more like laboring over) for oh, six months or so was slapped down by an agent at ICM in New York. Then, an article I pitched to a magazine that no one I know reads (no sour grapes here) was rejected as unoriginal. This, from a magazine that has an article on flattening your abs each and every month. (Again, no sour grapes.) Oh, and the pedal on my daughter’s new bike fell off and she’s been asking me to fix it every day for a week now. Suffice it to say, Monday was an ugly mix of frustrated and overwhelmed.

Then I talked to my husband—stick with me here—who had just finished a long meeting about the new product his company is developing. The feature list is apparently growing as each engineer thinks up a new bell or whistle that will make the product irresistible to the market. Just when the work seemed like it was about to cross over from challenging to grueling, someone laughed and said, “Why do we do this to ourselves?” My husband quoted his old boss at TiVo, Mike Ramsay, the guy who thought up that most wonderful of all gadgets. When asked the same question by his team, Mike said “Smart people will make tasks complex enough to make them interesting.”

Oh, so that’s what we’re all doing. That’s why my friend Beth breads and fries chicken for her kids instead of grabbing a big bag of frozen nuggets at Safeway and why Amie makes Halloween costumes fit for the cover of Martha Stewart Kids. That’s why Christine signed up to be a room parent while she’s writing her PhD dissertation and why John volunteered to coach soccer while he’s remodeling almost every room in his house. Besides wanting to do right by our kids, we all crave a certain level of complexity. Complexity keeps things interesting.

So now, when I find myself adding projects to my To Do list, when I see my hand go up for the fundraising committee, when I decide to keep pushing my children’s book up the hill, I just shrug my shoulders and think, “You did this to yourself, Kelly. Admit it, you like it. You could kick back, fixing broken toys and keeping the fridge stocked but you’d miss the speed rounds and bonus points.” And so would everyone you know, whether they are opening a small business or planting an herb garden. That’s what makes them compelling, evolving people—they know how to make up a good game.

Unclenching

2006-08-28T19:58:00.000-07:00

Twice lately, I've been shoved into a state of teeth-grinding anger, the kind of anger you just know they’re talking about when they refer to “unhealthy stress”.

First, there was Earl, the taxi guy.

My husband found Earl in the phone book and booked him several days in advance to take us all to the Oakland Airport at 7am. [I had suggested a different guy, a guy named Ala that my totally-on-top-of-it friend, Michele, recommended.] Earl was 15 minutes late, which is not late enough to cause any real problems but just late enough to make you pace, panic, reconsider, and bicker.

A 101 Psych student could have decoded my sudden coffee brewing as a nonverbal cue that I had lost faith in Earl. Finally, he pulled up. I must mention, though it doesn’t forward my thesis, that Earl drove a white stretch limo, the kind you may have rented with ten friends on prom night, the kind with fake, often mauve flowers and dusty liquor decanters clinking around in the “bar” area. My husband posited that Ala probably didn’t have nice place for our morning whiskey.

Anyway, as the girls marveled at Earl’s luxurious chariot, I passively aggressively coached them to "Get your seat belts on now or we're going to miss our flight." To which Earl said casually, "Plenty of time, plenty of time." I was really hoping for something more like "I'm sorry I'm late." It was then that I knew I'd be writing about Earl some day.

Next, the snit at the doctor's office.

S., as we’ll call her, is the manager of all the admins at the medical center I use. She became the manager, I presume, because she is extra good at following the rules. When I signed in at the front desk, S. informed me, over the shoulder of her tongue-tied subordinate, that I did not have the necessary authorization and would not be able to receive service until such authorization was in hand.

Did I mention that in order to be there begging S. for "service," I got a babysitter, drove through the rain and found the last parking space in a five-story underground garage. And did I mention that—as is often the case when people go to the doctor—I wasn’t in there for something optional like Botox or a new pair of perky breasts.

Anyway, twenty minutes after I promised her that my HMO didn't require an authorization for this procedure, S. was informed by her now-vocal subordinate that she had reached my HMO and apparently, I didn't need an authorization for this procedure. But by then, S. had sent the only qualified medical technician on duty off to lunch. He'd be back in about thirty minutes. Here's where an "I’m sorry" would have really loosened my jaw. S. just said, “Please be seated. It won’t be long now.”

I know the feelings that make apologizing so hard—a little shame, a dash of defensiveness, even a smidge of self-loathing. I know because I have to apologize a couple times a week, mostly for choosing to indulge myself in some way instead of doing something I’m suppose to. Like today, I wrote this essay instead of finding the eyeglasses my mom left in my car last weekend, the ones she’s called about twice so far. I'll have to apologize for that. And although it was on my calendar, I forgot my sister-in-law’s birthday, again. [She never forgets my birthday. Unfortunately.] And I borrowed my friend’s galvanized tub for a cocktail party I had a few weeks ago and as I type, it sits on my deck with the last few Sierra Nevadas on their side, sun bathing in an inch or two of water. So I’ll have to apologize for that.

But I will. I will "own it" as my therapy-lovin' friend always says. And as that same friend taught me, while I’m owning it, I will neither complain nor explain. In other words, I will not smother the apology in so many excuses that it is unrecognizable as an apology. I will just put it out there bare: “I’m sorry I didn’t call you back sooner.”

Thanks to people like Earl and S., a timely, unadorned apology is still an impressive act of interpersonal bravery. And like most acts of bravery, it will be rewarded. The payoff for saying those two little words is forgiveness, which is, as the old saw goes, divine.

But what to do with my anger? How to spare myself the buzz of self righteousness that may be doing permanent damage to my jaw? Well, there’s always breathing, sure. A mantra perhaps. An imaginary trip to my happy place? Maybe for you.

For me, I’ve decided the only way is to smile. Like a first grader in front of a camera. Big and dumb. Because it makes me laugh. Because it makes me remember that almost everything is silly and who really cares and it happens to everyone. All of us. All six billion of us. Every day. So really, next time life rubs up against you and leaves you chafed, refuse to give in. Force a smile, even a phoney one will do. Trust me. You’ll see.

The Way of the Peaceful Sherpa

2006-08-21T15:21:00.000-07:00

You shouldn’t try to teach a pig to sing. It can't be done and it makes the pig angry.

Or so goes one of my favorite quotes. I used to share it with co-workers who found our mutual employer to be impressively stubborn and unyielding. It soothed us all, partially because it reminded us to stop spitting into the wind and partially because it cast our boss as the pig, which is almost always fun.

Now, I share it with girlfriends who husbands never seem to change for long. I've learned. See, my beloved almost always walks up and down the stairs empty handed, sometimes stepping over or around little piles of shoes or stuffed animals in the process. In his special “off duty” goggles, he can’t see these items.

For me, going up and down the stairs is nearly always an opportunity to "get something done," like carrying the laundry up from the basement, or taking empty glasses from our nightstands to the sink. It's simple but it's a worldview too.

If your worldview is, "everything in the house that needs doing will be done by me sooner or later," then you might as well grab those old magazines from the bedroom and drop them in the recycling bin out front now, because you're gonna have to do it eventually anyway. See, I live in my workplace and my to do items are neatly organized on a list beside my online calendar. No, they are sitting everywhere I look, on every surface, on every floor, of every room. And unless I have a documented fever of 102 or higher, I am always on duty.

If however, your worldview is, "everything in the house that needs doing will get done by magic," or perhaps better said, "by witchcraft," you'll find that it's much more pleasant to go up and down unfettered by shoes, newspapers and bath towels. If you have left work and shaken off your work mood, your home is a haven, a place to put your feet up, a place to rest before the next day begins.

And so, in what I consider to be record time -- only six years of marriage -- I have stopped trying to teach my sweet pig to sing. I have accepted my role as household sherpa and my husband’s role as American Tourist. Lovable, oblivious, a good tipper.

Heat, as an entrée to bigger ideas

2006-08-01T10:44:00.000-07:00

Kelly Corrigan's column is printed here with permission from The Hills Newspapers.

IT'S GOTTA PASS.

This is what I keep saying to myself as pour another glass of ice water and wipe my daughter’s hair off her sticky forehead. This is what I say as I toss out the three red candles that were too close to the window, the candles that folded over on themselves like playdoh.

But what if it doesn’t? What if this punishing heat is what environmental scientists, and their celebrity-sponsor, Al Gore, have been waving their arms about all these years? Is this what global warming feels like? Does this qualify as “climate change”?

It’s an obvious question. Like a couple million other people, I saw An Inconvenient Truth this summer. Besides being wowed by what Power Point can do these days and wondering if Apple paid to be Gore’s leading lady, I left the theater (the dark, cool theater) as motivated as I have ever been to make changes in our family’s wasteful ways. So far, we’re investigating three things: replacing old windows with double paned, energy efficient versions, putting solar panels on the backside of our roof—the side we never see, the side that bakes in summer sun for eight hours a day—and buying a hybrid.

These three changes have a few things in common; they cost money initially and save money over the long haul, they are visible to others, which helps nudge the country closer to what Malcom Gladwell calls “the tipping point,” and they help us talk to our kids about more than today’s swim lesson and tomorrow’s birthday party. It’s this last thing that really gets me out of bed in the morning.

Our kids are young, just starting school this fall, so we keep it simple. For now, it’s about sharing. Just like at preschool, where there are only so many glue sticks, and so many orange popsicles, we’re all sharing a single set of supplies—water, gas, electricity. So, I explain, when you refuse to use both sides of a piece of paper, or you turn the volume down on your CD player instead of turning the whole thing off, or when you stuff all your clean clothes in the laundry basket after playing dress ups with your friend, we’re using more than we need. At some point, that means that someone else, like some baby trying to nap in Modesto where it’s 113 degrees, might not be able to use her oscillating fan [which means that baby will cry for her hot, over taxed mother and I think we all know that hell hath no fury like a hot, over taxed mother.]

This conversation has the immediate benefit of keeping my bills lower and my conscious cleaner. But better than that by a mile is that this conversation implies that there is a giant world out there, a world that doesn’t go to The Piedmont Pool or to birthday parties at Kids In Motion gymnastics, a world that I so hope my girls become more and more mindful of. Because they can’t make it better if they don’t know it exists.

Call to Action from the Retirement Home

2006-07-20T14:01:00.000-07:00

Kelly Corrigan's column appears with permission from The Hills Newspaper Group.

I HAVE a friend who’s turning 85 soon. Her family calls her Grandma Bea and, feeling as I do about her, that’s what I call her too. We sat together last weekend, talking about the comings and goings of her retirement home, a veritable Melrose Place for Bay Area widows and widowers. She said the women do well; they play bridge, they cook for each other, they meet at the pool and laugh about their sagging bodies. The men, she said, aren’t as communal. “They seem a little lost” was how she put it.

I nodded. This seemed predictable. Men, in my broad estimation, have a tenth the innate social aptitude of women. Or maybe it’s a tenth the interest. Or a tenth the time. Whatever it is, men don’t fall into connections the way women do. We counsel each other, we confess to each other, we track each other. How many men do you know that keep the social calendar for their household? As far as I can tell, they all defer to their wives, using the standard line: “Sounds great, but I better check with the boss.”

No, men work. And when they’re not working, they’re working out, usually alone. Then they head home, to kiss the boss.

So, Grandma Bea notes, when the boss dies, men find their social muscles have atrophied, leaving them with the same choice corporations face when they find a hole in their product line: buy or build? It’s a crass comparison but stick with me. “Buying,” in the case of the widower, is to find a nice widow who will pick up where the first wife left off. “Building,” always the more daunting option, demands that the widower relearn social skills and establish his own circle of friends.

Which brings me to golf. And mountain biking, tennis, and sports bars. It’s long been accepted that women bond by talking and men bond by doing. Consequently, much male bonding requires special shoes, which tend to be expensive mud-magnets that never quite find a suitable home, but I digress.

Golf and it’s counterparts (henceforth to be collectively referred to as “golf”) are often pooh-poohed as thinly veiled attempts to shirk family responsibilities, mainly because sometimes that’s exactly what they are. Just like the tenth grade field trip that was cancelled because a couple of hooligans tried to sneak a flask of Jack Daniels on the bus, a few self-indulgent men have ruined “golf” for everyone. But for most of the guys out there, “golf” is actually a path to fellowship, the very fellowship that will keep them emotionally alive and connected. So, at the risk of losing some girlfriends, I say here that “golf” is an essential component of a man’s emotional health.

Unfortunately, “golf” keeps fathers from children and husbands from wives for hours and hours on end. “Golf” essentially makes a Saturday just a sixth weekday for women. And, thinking about it from the man’s perspective, “golf” is short-term thinking. See, many of the activities I’m calling “golf” prefer the young. When age walks off smugly with a man’s youth, that man better have a Plan B for staying connecting.
So, here’s my big idea, 533 words into it. How about men start bonding over play dates, as we women have learned to do. I ask, would it be so laughable to imagine men organizing a weekend coffee? I mean, at the very least, they’d gorge shamelessly on the pastries instead of nibbling regretfully, one 15-calorie bite after another, as we women do. The conversation can still cover Barry Bonds, IPOs, Swimsuit Models; it just has to be clean enough to be overheard by minors.

The man play date corrects two flaws in the current arrangement: men practice connecting through conversation, sparing themselves the 11th hour Build or Buy conundrum, and women actually get a proper weekend, sparing them that low level resentment that builds up over decades of “golf.”

Huh? Whaddaya think?

Nothing To Do But Laugh

2006-07-06T14:22:00.000-07:00

Kelly Corrigan’s column is reprinted here with permission from The Hills Newspapers.

So, it’s almost 10pm. My column was due today and I just opened a new document. I’m 700 words from bed. I had something going earlier today, but then I went to a t-ball game and realized that my column was all wrong.

See, I’d been stewing on this idea about kids and sports. I thought I wanted to write about the drawback of downplaying the differences between ringers and scrubs. As cold-hearted as this may seem, I thought I wanted to question the overt, “everybody’s-a-winner” message of t-ball. The truth is I find it suspect that every player gets a trophy and no one keeps score. The absence of ranking and competition is bound to ring false, even to a bunch of nose-picking five year-olds. Pretending that everyone is the same is a. impossible, b. unnecessary and c. confusing. I mean, just in the last month, my daughter has watched a World Cup soccer game, waited while Dad finished his tennis match, and overheard twenty-some conversations about winning and losing. And then there’s her natural inclination to make a competition out of everything from getting up the stairs to finishing her popsicle.

So basically, what I was gonna say was that kids know when we’re snowing them with Pollyanna lines like “Good try!” Say it ‘til you’re blue in the face but if they just saw the sea of painted faces on the sidelines of Brazil v. Ghana, the know that there’s something big about the ball going in the net. Even at t-ball, they notice that all the adults stop chatting with each other and tune back into the game when a kid hits a ball over the pitchers’ head and they hear us chuckle when a kid makes the ball dribble off the tee by whacking the plastic stand like a frustrated log splitter.

But I just got home from a t-ball game and tossed my draft about all that in the trash. While we may be giving them mixed signals, and that may be hurting our credibility and overemphasizing success in sports in the process, it’d be a sin to overlook the pure joy of t-ball. Honestly, tonight, watching the Indians take turns at bat with the Dodgers, well, I haven’t felt that pure in six months. It was exactly what I hoped parenthood would be when I was a dreamy college girl whose biggest ambition was having my own family.

Sure, a player I’ll refer to as “Number Two” was a natural slugger whose swing made my daughter look like she’d just had a body cast removed. Yes, all the adults scattered around the perimeter of the field sat up when he was at bat, and, yeah, the other kids probably picked up on that energy.

But the most palpable feeling there was joie de vive (and you know I must be serious if I’m resorting to French).

I sat next one of the dads, whose wife happens to be in oral chemotherapy. We couldn’t finish a sentence about doctors, new drugs and MRIs without pausing to laugh at something on the field. During the first “inning,” a kid ran from home plate to second base, diagonally, since the boy on first seemed like he was pretty settled in there and didn’t intend on moving. Then, a batter fielded his own six-foot hit, diving for the ball before the other team piled on. Eventually, the coaches had to intervene. The confused young batter kept saying, “But it’s mine!” My daughter, after her second at bat, did this little booty dance when she got to third base. “I have three!” she called over to me.

There’s time to question how we communicate to our kids about the spectrum of abilities, about winning and losing, about making the All Star team or getting cut from the Varsity, but for tonight, I wouldn’t dare cloud the t-ball experience by over-analyzing it. It was a Technicolor Keystone Cops movie and I’ll go to bed happy, with that old time piano music from Black and White movies bouncing around in my head.

The Thing About Acclimating

2006-06-20T13:09:00.000-07:00

Kelly Corrigan's column, GRAIN OF SALT, appears with permission from The Hills Newspapers.

I HATE to hear a pregnant woman complain. I mean, think about it; it smacks of thanklessness. Sure, thousands of women get pregnant every day, but others never do. And those others, what they would give for morning sickness, back pain, stretch marks…In the same way, I make a mental note when rich people grouse about their gardener or their roof guy or their painters. A lot of people still paint their own walls, after all, and a garden, in the Bay Area, is a luxury.

I get similarly annoyed when I watch rock stars or overpaid actors or published writers find a way to upend their velvety lives. I wonder what they really have to be upset about, or what they would do under the strain of an actual problem, like disease or poverty. Rush Limbaugh, Russell Crowe, Kobe Bryant – have you forgotten that you are being paid millions of dollars to do what you love?

So, now that you know about my awful, judgmental side, get this:

Last week, I, Kelly Corrigan, a rich person who has a gardener, a painter, and a roof guy, a lucky writer whose first book has been bought by Hyperion for publication, a mother of two merry, untroubled girls, bellyached for a good twenty minutes to my husband about our whining three-year-old and our stalled deck project, the combination of which threw off my writing schedule by two whole days!

There’s more.

After I hung up with Edward, I roared so loudly at Claire (my “vocal” three-year-old) that my throat hurt all morning. That’s right, I said morning. I cracked early. It wasn’t at the end of a long hard day of button-pushing and limit-testing. I was screaming “Stop crying!” at my three-year-old by 9am, after sleeping for eight uninterrupted hours.

The shame.

It is a childish, black and white worldview where riches equal happiness, pregnancy equals bliss, and fame equals satisfaction. I should know better than to demand such, from anyone, including myself. Life is complicated. Many poor people fighting disease are infinitely more blessed than their wealthy, healthy counterparts. But, as a healthy and wealthy woman, may I never stop hounding myself to be more grateful.

The enemy of appreciation is acclimation. Acclimation is a good idea for hikers and mountain climbers, who couldn’t think straight without pausing on the way up to adjust to the ever-thinning air. It’s acclimate or bust for new parents too, who need to survive on less sleep, fewer cogent thoughts, and less carnal interaction.

But often times, we acclimate to things we needn't, like settling into a bad movie or adjusting to five new pounds by wearing jeans less and sweats more. (Inertia and acclimation are good friends, often working in partnership.) But making room for five extra pounds is no tragedy.

Forgetting your fortunes is. Every day, some mundane irritant, some nagging chore, some inconsolable child will jump right in front of us, waving frantically for our attention, and blocking the view to the larger picture. And I guess our job is just to step a little to the right so we can keep our eyes on the spectacular mural.

Learning to Riff

2006-05-08T15:56:00.000-07:00

Kelly Corrigan’s column, GRAIN OF SALT, appears with permission from The Hills Newspapers and was first published on May 5, 2006.

One of my nearest and dearest friends adopted a baby girl late last year. Her name is Eliza and by all measures, she is perfect. My friend is in heaven watching Eliza unfold. “I don’t know who this girl is, but so far, all I can tell you is that she knows how to get what she wants,” my friend said, referring to the unmistakable communication Eliza has come up with to indicate that her binky has fallen out. (Eliza uses a certain screech that I believe many of us know.) But there was something about the way she said, “I don’t know who this girl is” that struck me as downright respectful, like she wouldn’t dream of rushing to judgment on this girl, like a mother’s job was to sit back and watch her child reveal her nature, lest a mother deconstruct and define her child prematurely (and inaccurately).

I think this wait, watch and listen thing may be a real advantage for adopted kids.

My daughter wasn’t finished her first day before we started ascribing her features and behaviors to various family members. In the maternity ward, the declarations about her having her mother’s eyes and her father’s long toes were a predictable and innocent part of the euphoria, even if they drew the conversation away from the eight-pound mystery before us. We were laying claim to this person we made. We were owning her. She was ours, and every bit of her was a possible reference to someone in our tribe, as if letting her remain a mystery for one more minute was to endure a state of intolerable suspense.

But when my friend held Eliza in her arms, she said something like, “Hi there. It’s an honor to meet you. I’m going to take care of you now.” Unlike women who become mothers over the course of nine months, my friend had not rubbed her belly a thousand times, imagining, anticipating and foreseeing her child. Instead, my friend got a call one Sunday afternoon and 90 minutes later she was alone in the maternity ward, dripping tears onto a day-old baby girl, shaking her head in disbelief and wonder and the very same gratitude any mother feels when she holds her baby against her chest for the first time.

On the long ride home from Eliza’s house, I was thinking about Eliza’s good fortune and listening to an interview on NPR with Bela Fleck, of Bela Fleck and The Flecktones. Bela Fleck, if you aren’t an indie music kinda person, is an inventive musician who is currently experimenting with the electric banjo. Bela Fleck is one of those people that defies definition. The interviewer struggled to label him—jazz? pop? bluegrass? Then it got to the part of the interview where callers join the conversation. The first call was from an upbeat guy named Joe, a big fan of the Flecktones, a jazz musician himself, and a new dad. Joe had a 13 month-old named Miles who was “already banging away at the piano!” Miles’ apparent interest in his father’s vocation was “a dream come true” for his dad, who was actually calling to ask how best to encourage his son’s interest. I got the feeling, from Bela’s response, that he thought Joe might be over interpreting his son’s banging.

My own reaction was empathetic recognition. I know how easy and comforting it is to see yourself--your interests, your talents, your hang ups--in your child. It makes things so tidy. It makes the family match. Diversity might have worked for the Village People and the Spice Girls, but when it comes to families, well, you’ve seen golfers at the driving range with their five year-olds and you can bet I am saving every little story my girls pen as proof that writing “runs in the family.”

Beyond just habits and hobbies, there is the giant matter of heredity. Genetic destiny is a persuasive idea that has made headlines and bestseller lists for years. It is the thing that makes women put off mammograms, because breast cancer is not in their families. It is the thing that undermines dieters who quietly assume that if their parents are chronically overweight, their body-fate is sealed. It is the thing that subverts ambition in kids of blue collar workers and keeps cycles of all types in tact. But lately, I’ve noticed that some researchers think that the idea of genetic destiny is about as reliable as a horoscope, which is liberating news for all of us.

The NPR interview ended with a long discussion of Bela Fleck’s tendency towards improvisational jams. He said rather than sticking to a planned structure, he much prefers to rif off his band mates, just kind of spontaneously respond to who they are at that moment, and what they're doing with their instruments that day. He said he thought playing a carefully rehearsed and pre-defined set of songs they laid out long ago would be a lot less fun.

Play on, Eliza.

Idea Du Jour

2006-04-28T16:41:00.000-07:00

The more attention you give them, the less they'll demand.

They = your children, your parents, your co-workers, your plants, your gutters, your car, your body, your spouse.

If you consciously dole out attention, on your time and your schedule, you may be less vulnerable to break downs, emergency meetings, and crisis interventions of all types.

The more attention you give them, the less they'll demand.

This one is really working for me these days.

Slipping Into Complacency

2006-03-28T19:13:00.000-08:00

About a month ago, I had this idea to get all the local school kids to sell Mardi Gras beads door to door, to raise money for the unrelenting frustrations of Katrina survivors. I imagined color-coded giving levels -- red beads cost $10, blue beads cost $50, gold beads cost $100. I found a place online to buy 1,000 beads for $112. I pictured those beads hanging around every neck in town on February 28. I thought it’d be so gratifying for all those kids to look outward together, beyond their Girl Scout troop, beyond their class fund, to make something big and satisfying happen. But I failed to convert the good intention into action. I mentioned it to a few people and then let just enough days pass so that I could say to myself, “You know, to do this right, you’d really need more lead time.” So, you can imagine, when Katie Couric and Jim Lehrer sent their crews back to New Orleans last week, I felt a little disappointed in myself.

As it happened, the day after Mardi Gras, I spent thirty minutes organizing all the cancelled checks, W2s and receipts from 2005 for our tax return. In so doing, I was forced to consider the sum total of our charitable giving, which worked out to be a little more than 1% of our income. We could have given more, I admitted to myself, as I dug my toes deeper into my new Pottery Barn rug, sitting on my new Evolution sofa, tallying up purchases I could see around me and wondering what percentage of our income they amounted to. Maybe, I thought, our annual contributions should equal the total cost of our most indulgent purchases, like the giant TV for the family room and the high-end gas grill for the deck.

Curious about how we compared to others, I read over the first-ever IRS based report on charitable giving. Over a quarter of a million individual tax returns were analyzed and guess what, I was right, we were below average (which, for the Middle and Upper Middle class, was over 1.5% for people age 36-50 and jumped to close to 2% for those over 50.)

Not long after I had put a rubber band around the Tax 05 file and vowed to double our donations in 2006, a woman rang the doorbell. When I saw her clipboard, I rolled my eyes indignantly. In fact, if the girls hadn’t screamed straight for the door, I might have pretended we weren’t home. After all, this was precisely the kind of unwelcome nagging that stopped me from the Mardi Gras bead sale.

Her name was Jesse and as she articulated her cause, I found myself hoping she was making an impression on my girls, who are not exposed to enough Jesses. She explained that her group was lobbying congress to pass a bill that would force carmakers to increase fuel efficiency. After I wrote her a check and wished her luck with the bill, I closed the door. The girls didn’t quite understand the interaction until I explained, “Jesse is a person whose found a problem she wants to fix.” “But Mom, it’s raining,” Georgia noted. “Yeah, but it’s a pretty bad problem and she really wants to fix it.”

It was the perfect storm – Mardi Gras, tax returns, Jesse. And like a good storm, it had a clarifying effect. I want my family to be above average, philanthropically speaking. I want us to live up to my cocktail party bluster. I want to be a family that makes things better. Even if it means ringing doorbells. So darken the front stoop. We're coming.

In The Words of Willy Wonka...

2006-03-08T10:33:00.000-08:00

Once a week, the girls are allowed to watch a movie, a whole movie. This is a highly anticipated event, possibly more by me than by them, since it buys me two uninterrupted hours, if I can excuse myself for exposing a two year-old to the Wicked Witch of the West's flying monkeys and risk teaching my four year-old Veruca Salt's tricks of the brat trade . Which brings me to their favorite movie -- Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, the one from the 70s with Gene Wilder.

If you can get past the 20 second boat-in-the-tunnel scene where a centipede crawls across a man's face and a chicken is beheaded, and forgive the directors for including it, it's a helluva movie. Not only is it dripping with entertainment value, it also offers a lexicon for parenting that kids instantly understand.

Here's what I mean:

1. All sentences that start with "I want..." are forbodden in our house. All I need say is "Hey, how did Veruca get in here...?"

2. Augustis Galooping, a new verb I am officially putting into circulation, is a reminder to adults and children alike to "save some room for later." When said with a German accent, this is the lightest possible way to communicate that someone is behaving piggishly.

3. Wonka's mysterious reminders have taken on a mythic feeling for me -- the kind of feeling you don't second guess or talk back to. My favorite, just edging out "You should never ever doubt what no one is sure about," is "A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men." I find these bring out the bouncy teenage babysitter in me when I've slipped into Military Mom.

Am I alone in wondering...

2006-02-05T10:11:00.000-08:00

where the term toe-head comes from?

I can imagine how it came to be that people wanted to pick each other's brains and get each other's goats. And although I can't say exactly why people dress to the nines and go to hell in a hand-basket, it does not vex me. But toe-head has always weighed on me.

Until today, all I've known is that a toe-head is a blonde -- the really white-haired variety -- little kid. [I'm not 100% on this but I'm fairly sure you'd never call an adult a toe-head.]

Well, let the pasta boil over and the kids cut each other's hair! I've finally unearthed the derivation.

For starters, it's TOW, not TOE. This is a crucial revelation, since it shuts down all the foot-related theories I've heard proffered over the years.

And tow, back in the 14th century, was this flaxen, hemp-like material that textile types spun into yarn. So a tow-head is a kid whose head of tousled, white hair looks like tow.

It's not much, I admit, but it's my little gift for today. Tune in next week when I deconstruct cut the mustard.

Super Foods

2006-01-24T15:58:00.000-08:00

As a girl who used to be a card-carrying schlub when it came to diet and exercise, I feel like I am turning my back on my roots by posting this but hey, cancer changes a girl. (I am all better now but the last year and a half has included surgery, baldness and much cell-zapping.)

I just spent an hour reviewing some things I already knew about food and its relationship to health when my pal Marge called. [She goes by Meg generally, but I like to call her Marge since there just aren't enough Marge's anymore.] I accidentally monopolized the conversation by bombarding her with facts about the Super Foods and their combined power to keep me and my family cancer-free when she stopped me and said, nicely, "So are you gonna send an email to all the people you love and tell them this?"

I was starting to do just that and I thought I could go one better. Here, for the people I love and the people I don't even know, is the Cliffs Notes on Super Foods:

1. The big winner is BROCCOLI, and Broccoli's cousins, Cabbage and Cauliflower.

2. Coming in right behind the Cruciferous stuff is BEANS (including soy). Beans rule in my house so this was good news.

3. Closing out the B run is BERRIES. Berries are fun for all, although kinda expensive, and these should definitely be organic. Those crap pesticides soak right into berries.

4. ONIONS and garlic and chives come next. Apparently, it is NOT necessary to go oranic here. Garlic seems like an easy thing to work into a recipe a day.

5. COLORFUL STUFF, like carrots, melons, spinach, tomatoes. Think rainbow produce.

6. FISH. It seems our friends from the sea come packed with Omega-3s and O3s are, as Beck says, "where it's at".

7. NUTS and SEEDS. So now you have en excuse to toss back a handful on your next trip to the country club.

8. GREEN TEA, and tea in general. We've been making a pitcher a day around here and drinking it over ice with a little Splenda. I've come to love it but I'm a sucker for stuff that's gonna keep the IV out of my arm.

My source is The Cancer Lifeline Cookbook and there's a hundred pages more to tell but for now, this seems like more than enough. xoxo, Kelly

A Little Love for This Very Blog

2006-01-24T15:55:00.000-08:00

Parents Press, a montly newspaper for parents all over the San Francisco Bay Area, just picked this blog as the BEST NEW BLOG for MOMS, or something like that. I'd like to thank the academy, my agent, my mom back in Philly...

I was counting on you, PBS.

2005-12-05T12:11:00.000-08:00

Over Thanksgiving, my well-intentioned dad took Claire [2 and ½] to the local library. They came home with a bag of books and, here's where the train went off the rails, a Teletubbies video. When I sighed upon seeing it, he said, "It's from PBS. They won't steer you wrong, Lovey."

I love PBS. I love NPR. I use and support both every day. But Teletubbies? I mean really.

Now, I try not to be a stooge when my girls are at their grandparents, mostly because I want them to feel like they are on a fantastic vacation instead of squatting at a house where the heat is never high enough, the pack-n-play is 7 years old and every meal starts by opening the freezer. So, against my instincts, my girls and I got in my parents bed together one raining night, turned on the electric blanket and watched Teletubbies.

They all talk baby talk! Baby talk, from the mouth of anyone other than a baby, makes me cringe, which in turn makes my four year-old crank up the baby talk. Baby talk can't be helpful to hear, can it? It can't teach anything useful, can it?

And the Teletubbies, they have TVs on their bellies! I realize I am stating the obvious here, but it is in service of making the larger point: is television watching to be celebrated? Is it now a legitimate pastime for pre-verbal toddlers?

So I did a little research and here's what the co-creators have to say, as best as I can paraphrase it: babies and small children watch TV anyway, so why not give them something they can follow instead of Sesame Street et al, which just goes over their heads. PBS acknowledges that Teletubbies is primarily entertainment but points to endorsements by academics who say the show's use of technology (referring, I suppose, to Noo-Noo, the vacuum cleaner, that runs the operations inside their submarine-ish hovel) helps to prepare young minds for our increasingly technical world.

I'm not buying it, so we don't watch it.

But I am irritated that programming is being created specifically for the pre-verbal set. Just like I’m irritated by chocolate milk. But then I think, Oh God, this puts me in the same camp as the stubborn, irrelevant women who refuse to give teens contraceptive choices since they "shouldn't be having sex at their age anyway!"

The Giving Tree v. Stick Kid

2005-11-10T15:01:00.000-08:00

I have a masters in literature, so I am prone to deconstructing texts, as they say. ("They" being a handful of devoted but marginalized academics.) Since becoming a mother, however, it is a rare moment when I close a novel, turn to Edward and say, "Another good read, honey." Because I don't pick up novels anymore, much less finish them. I read one or two good articles from The New Yorker and the Sunday New York Times Magazine a month and flip through endless "womens" magazines while churning away on cardio equipment at the Berkeley Y. I did read Jonathon Franzen's impressive (almost obnoxiously so) Corrections a year or two back. And I always read David Sedaris' books when they come out.

But in the four years since Georgia made me a mother, I've really specialized in children's literature. 100 books later, I've found something special. Stick Kid, by Peter Holwitz. It is this generation's The Giving Tree, minus the rotten, self-centered child who never, not even as an old man, acknowledges that marytr of a tree for it's selflessness.

Stick Kid captures the feelings of parenthood, from the amazement of the first act to the nostalgia and pride of the final act. It is a love story, a healthy one, and although I still can't read The Giving Tree without getting choked up, I am relieved to have Stick Kid in the daily line up around here.

2005-11-09T18:52:00.000-08:00

Kelly and her girls, Claire and Georgia, July 2005