What I Told My Children, 10 and 8, About The Boston Bombing Suspects

They found the second man suspected of planting the bombs that went off at the Boston Marathon today.  He is nineteen years old, just barely old enough to be considered an adult, and his name is Dzhokhar, or in English, Jahar.  People who knew him well are absolutely shocked that Jahar is suspected of helping to create and plant the bombs.  Some of his friends have described him as kind, talented, and thoughtful.  Jahar’s big brother, Tamarlan, was twenty-six; Tamarlan died while police were chasing him and his brother.

If Jahar did what he is suspected of doing, he is responsible, with his brother, for the death of one eight-year old boy and three adults.  It is his fault, and his brother’s fault, that some of the victims of the blasts have lost their legs and will need to learn to walk, and hopefully someday to run, on artificial legs.  It is Jahar’s fault, and his brother’s fault, that other people who were running the Marathon were wounded physically, and that many of the people who ran, and the people who were watching, were wounded mentally.  An act of violence like this does not just hurt the people that die and the people whose bodies are hurt.  It also leaves invisible scars on the people who helped, the people who were there but didn’t get killed or injured, and all of the families and friends of all of those people.  Violence like this spreads out in ripples and hurts everyone that the ripples touch.

We don’t know yet, and we may never know, exactly why Jahar and Tamarlan committed this crime, but there are some very important lessons that I want you to learn from what happened in Boston.

From what we can tell so far, it seems likely that Jahar went along with his big brother’s plan.  Jahar and Tamarlan moved to Boston from Dagestan, which is close to Chechnya, a country that has been torn apart by war and fighting, when they were children.  By the time Jahar had started university in the U.S., Jahar and Tamarlan’s mother and father had moved back to Russia, so they lived very far away from the boys.  Jahar probably looked up to his big brother, and listened to him.  It may be that when his big brother involved him in the plot to kill people at the Marathon, Jahar did not say no.

You run into problems that are a tiny bit like this, but not nearly as dangerous, every week at school; you need to practice saying no.  If you know someone is doing something mean, you need to stand up for what you know is right.  Tell the person who is being unkind what you think of what they are doing.  If that doesn’t get the person to stop, then tell an adult.  If the adult does nothing—and that does happen sometimes—then tell another adult.  Don’t stop telling people until you are sure that someone has heard you.  Be willing to understand that the child that you think is being mean may have another side of the story to tell.  Listen to what that child’s side of the story is, and think about it.  Be willing to consider that you might be part of the problem.  Think about your own involvement, and if you see that maybe you have been partly responsible, apologize to the people that you have hurt.  Do not just go along with what other people are doing.  You have the right to make your own decisions.

Jahar and Tamarlan, in some way, were trying to solve a problem that they had.  They were not happy, and they got the idea somehow that hurting other people would be the answer to their problem.  But hurting other people is never a good answer; it is a very bad solution to any problem.  Jahar and Tamarlan needed to find other solutions, but they did not know how, or maybe they turned to the wrong people.  Sometimes people choose to talk to others that don’t help them, people who offer them bad solutions.  It is possible that Tamarlan, the big brother, may have been talking to people who were angry and hateful.

If you ever begin to feel very unhappy, the best way to solve that problem is to talk to real, live, loving people.  It is not enough to just think about your sadness, or write about it, or talk to people online about it.  Those may be good things to do, but talking to someone that you trust in person is even better.  There are always people who will be willing to listen, and there will be people who will do what they can to show you ways to feel better.  If the people you’ve decided to speak with can’t help you as well as they would like, they may be able to tell you about other people who would be even better at solving your problem and getting you to a happier place.

It seems likely that both brothers, Tamarlan and Jahar, were religious.  Religion can be a good thing: following a religion can bring meaning, hope, comfort, and community to your life.  But sometimes people get carried away by religion and it becomes a bad thing.  Any time belief in a religion inspires feelings of hate towards other people, then the religious belief is not healthy.  This applies also to other beliefs—some people are very against religion, but it is important that these people also recognize that if their opposition becomes hate, it has gone too far.  Hate can only do damage, and it has no place in a caring community, religious or not.  If you choose to follow a religious path, it is very important to continually question whether your religious beliefs are inspiring thoughts of anger and hate or thoughts of tolerance and peace.  Your religious leader— your rabbi, priest, imam, vicar, or other religious leader– should encourage questioning and should accept doubts.  If she or he does not, or if they support unkind thoughts or acts towards any groups of people, you should find another place of worship, or another leader.  Jimmy Carter, who was once President of the United States, left the church he had been a member of for sixty years because he did not like the church’s attitudes towards women.  Jimmy Carter is still religious, and still goes to church, but he belongs to a different church now.  If you choose not to believe in a religion, it is still important that you always look at your beliefs, and if you discover that you feel hateful towards any particular group of people— people with a certain skin colour, a certain body type, a certain political belief—you need to figure out why you are feeling so strongly about those people, and you need to try to remember that those people are humans too, just like you are.

Finally, and this is what I consider most important, I want you to understand that the line between good and bad is very, very thin.  A lot of people were cheering and celebrating when the police caught Jahar.  I am very glad that Jahar was caught before he could hurt anybody else.  But think of Jahar’s friends— they never thought Jahar would plant bombs at the Marathon, and now they are saddened that their friend has done something so awful.  Last week, Jahar was a university student; today, he is a suspect in a horrible act of terrorism.  It is easier than you think for people to make bad choices, and sometimes people make very bad choices, choices that they will regret for the rest of their lives.  Every choice matters.

You are not powerless.  You can learn about different nations and religions so that you will get a better sense of what you have in common with people from everywhere.  Better yet, you can get to know people from many places, who follow different religions, or who don’t follow any.  You can try to help people who may be feeling sad, including yourself.  You can speak up when you see cruelty or unfairness.  You can look at every choice that you make, and ask yourself, “Is this a loving choice?  Is this a good choice?”  Sometimes the loving thing to do in certain situations may hurt someone’s feelings, but a loving, good choice will never, ever hurt someone’s body (unless you are a medical doctor and you need to operate on someone to help them heal).

A lot of people in Boston made brave and loving choices as the bombs exploded and afterwards.  Many people ran to help the victims in any way they could.  Lots of people offered food and shelter to the runners that had come from far away.  The police and other officials worked very hard to keep people safe and to find and arrest the suspects, Jahar and Tamarlan.  I hope I would be like all of the people in Boston that have shown courage in acts small and large, and I hope that you would be like them too, should you ever find yourself in a situation like that (although I pray that will never come to pass).

My thoughts are with the families and friends of the people who were killed and hurt at the Marathon on Monday, and with the police officer who was killed, and the transit officer who was wounded while the police were trying to catch Tamarlan and Jahar.  Martin Richard, the eight year old boy who died because of one of the bombs, once made a poster at school that said, “No more hurting people.  Peace.”  I hope that you will do your part to work towards a world that will honour Martin Richard’s idea.

Note: This post is unlike the other posts in this blog as it is directed at children, and it was written quickly, unlike the last several posts.

My Written Voice

“And when my voice is silenced in death,

My song will speak in your living heart.”  From “My Song,” by Tagore.

For my seventh birthday, my first stepfather, Myron, gave me a large, hard-backed journal with blank pages.  The covers were dark brown and patterned to resemble walnut wood, and the pages were white, empty, and waiting.  I accepted the book solemnly, understanding even then that receiving such a gift was not without obligation—the pages would need to be filled, and it would fall to me to populate them.

Myron didn’t just give me the tools without providing some instructions.  When it suited him, Myron wove long, detailed yarns for me about mythical creatures, enchanted forests, and of course, princesses; my favourite character of Myron’s creation was Princess Luleela, a tomboyish young heroine who rode a flying horse with angel-like wings.  Myron had a wide social circle, and it was through Myron that I met Iris, my very first best friend.  Together Iris and I spent innumerable hours toiling over the creation of our own mythological encyclopaedia; each entry called for a thorough description of the goddess or god in question, accompanied by an illustration.  Our finished reference work—written by two seven-year olds– contained at least forty pages, and left few well-known deities unmentioned.

During my third grade year, when I was eight, my family lived in a rambling white farmhouse on a steep hill.  To get to school, I needed to catch the big yellow school bus that came lumbering down the dirt road early in the morning.  I disliked school, preferring to spend the days up the tree outside our kitchen with a notebook, scribbling away, or with a book, immersed in another reality.  I was ten when my writing was published in ink for the first time.  By that time, Myron had left for greyer pastures—he had driven his VW camper van right out of Vermont and into Brooklyn—and my mom, single again, had moved us into the village, to a teeny house that bordered one of the town cemeteries.  The summer before I entered fifth grade, I indulged my powerful crush on Harrison Ford by seeing “Star Wars” several times during its long tenure at the town movie theatre over the school holidays.  When my fifth grade teacher announced that the local newspaper was holding a writing competition for schoolchildren, and that the best entry of a sequel to “Star Wars” would be published, I set earnestly to work.  My sequel won.  The editor of the newspaper, bless him, cut nothing; my story spanned several columns on one page, and was continued on another page.  To add glory to honour, I received a prize cheque for five dollars.

The year following, I briefly pursued journalism by setting up a newspaper office at home.  The distribution centre—where the finished “newspaper” was placed– was at the foot of the fully-finished staircase that led, paradoxically, to the trap door to the attic.  I assigned features to my brother and sister, and we held several planning meetings on the staircase.  After two or three issues, the staff’s motivation fizzled out, and we returned to playing “War” in the living room.

I started taking flute lessons at twelve, and throughout junior high and high school, music was my primary creative outlet.  Either my flute teacher or my band director must have told me at some point to practice for thirty minutes a day, because I kept to that regime at least three times a week for six years, becoming habituated to a measure of self-discipline.  I continued to write, but mostly for school.  Although I attended a regional state school in a small town in Vermont, many of my teachers were not content with acceptable work and pushed me towards excellence.  One English teacher in particular set the bar, it seemed at the time, ridiculously high; she required that each student read over two hundred pages of non-fiction per week, and she demanded well-written summaries of every book finished.  I grumbled—we all did– but her high standards helped to hone my critical reading and writing skills.

My letter-writing years began at eighteen, the year after my graduation from high school, when I followed my true love to Sweden, but to the wrong side of the country.  My beloved had returned to his home on the west side of Sweden, and I was placed as an exchange student in Stockholm, on the east side.  A mixture of homesickness and lovesickness clobbered me like a piano falling from a third-story window; furious penning of missives to my family and my sweetheart was one of the few pursuits that eased the pain, and it had clear advantages over crying in phone booths.  I wrote to my boyfriend, to my best friend, to my family, to a friend I had made at the two-week Swedish language course that marked the beginning of my year abroad; I didn’t even wait for a response before starting a new letter.  I wrote by hand—imagine—and some of my letters were many pages long.

I enrolled in university, with no firm idea of what I wanted to study, upon my return to the States.  A small New York state college had offered me a place in their music education course, but after deliberation, I declined; I loved music, and I enjoyed teaching, but “music teacher” felt too confining for me.  During my first semester as an “undeclared” liberal arts major at a university in the Finger Lakes region of New York, I took a required introductory-level English course titled “Personal Essay,” taught by a slight, soft-spoken  professor with gold wire-rimmed glasses who introduced himself as “David” rather than “Professor Homes.”

“Don’t be afraid to choose something that you’re not even sure you can write about,” David encouraged us.  “Maybe you feel it’s too raw—it’s not.  It’s the events that inspire the most emotion that can also lead to the best writing.  You won’t be reading any of your work aloud.  Only I will read it, and I am a poet—we deal in emotion all the time.”

David’s comments on my first essay—a tentative warm-up piece—served as proof of his trustworthiness:  “Good work…  can you delve deeper next time?  I want you to make it all come alive for the reader.”  My second essay was less cautious, and David’s response was again encouraging.  Three papers in, I found my groove.  I chose a memory that still churned, and I wrote my way in to the centre.  I put myself so wholly in the memory that the present fell away, yet when I finished, not only did I return to the present, I came back to a better now, because I had journeyed not merely to the eye of the hurricane, but out the other side.  I discovered what all memoirists must know—once it is written, you can let it go.

I transferred, after only one term in New York, to the University of Vermont (UVM), where I narrowed my major down to English or French.  The English department at UVM emphasized reading over writing, but I did take one high-level English course called “Writing the New Yorker.”  The aim of the course—a seminar for fifteen students—was to produce a piece of writing that mimicked every style represented in that venerable publication: from a short humorous column to an essay, from a piece of poetry to a review.  My best work for the course was a “Talk of the Town”-style column describing my visit to an exhibition of animated dinosaurs that had briefly visited the Burlington Square Mall.  Of all the courses I took to fulfil the English major I finally settled on, only two engaged me so fully that I remember them now, more than twenty years later: “Writing the New Yorker” and “Introduction to Irish Literature.”

I left UVM with a BA in English and a French minor, a degree that qualified me for nothing in particular except graduate studies.  Rather than embark immediately on further education, I moved with my husband to Sweden and took a job as a telex operator with a company that imported shoes.  When my patience for sending faxes to China wore thin, I followed a good friend’s advice, and began teaching English to small groups of adults.  When my husband graduated with a degree in Civil Engineering, we resolved to return to the States.  By this time I was in my mid-twenties, and I felt I should be “making something” of my life, but I wasn’t sure what that something should be or how I should go about making it.  Writing brought me more satisfaction than music, but I knew that very few writers ever made a living writing, and that many more were never published at all.  I concluded that the only way to become a successful writer was to enrol in a graduate program for writers.  In one of the most notable examples of shooting myself in the foot of my adult life, I further reasoned that if my writing was not good enough for me to be accepted into one of the five best schools for writing in the country, then it wasn’t good enough for me to even remotely entertain writing as a future vocation.  That settled, I sent out applications to said five schools, and then waited anxiously.  One by one, the rejection letters arrived; after a few weeks, I had five.  That was it— writing could be a hobby, but it would never pay my bills.  I would need to choose a sensible profession, one that would guarantee me a job with a steady income.

After more deliberation, and a bit of research, I sent out several more graduate school applications, this time to universities offering Master’s degrees in Speech Therapy.  In contrast to the previous batch, the letters that arrived this time were all acceptance letters.  I accepted a place at a university in Boston, and assumed that my future as a professional speech therapist was secured.

While at graduate school, I carried on writing letters, but less and less frequently, as the internet was gradually making hand-written letters obsolete.  A good friend from the course solved the problem of my idle hand by presenting me with a compact black cardboard box, striped with gold, filled with eight striped blank books of handmade paper, for my birthday.  I had stopped keeping a diary long ago, as it seemed far too dangerous a pursuit, but the pages of these books demanded to be filled, just like the journal Myron had given me so long ago.  I puzzled out a method—I would write my diary entries in Swedish.  The foreign language, combined with my unique (and occasionally illegible) handwriting, would serve to deter any prospective readers should my diary be lost or untended.  And I set myself a goal—I would maintain a journal until all the pages in all eight books contained an entry.  I called on the discipline I had become accustomed to during my years playing the flute, and began to write again, penning an entry nearly every day, even if the entry was no more than a sentence.  Each book was small enough to carry with me, and I took to writing whenever I found myself with time and motivation: while waiting for public transportation or while eating lunch at a cafe, as well as the usual, in bed just before turning out the lights.  Even with frequent writing, the pages filled slowly, but after several months I was able to return the first book to the black and gold box and commence writing in the second book.

By the time I had reached the third book, my diary writing habit was firmly established, and days without entries felt incomplete.  Gradually I wrote my way through seven of the eight little books—the rose book with fuchsia stripes, the apple-green book with grass-green stripes, the sky-blue book with midnight-blue stripes, and so on—until, several years after I had received the box, I finally opened the last diminutive volume to its first blank page.  Only then did I start to wonder what would happen when I came to the last page of this last book.  Would I pat myself on the back for reaching my goal, and then wash my hands of journaling?  No; I recognized that the seed had taken root, but I worried that the size and beauty of my tiny journals may be essential to the growth of my identity as a diarist.  How would I find a suitable replacement for my now-beloved stripy books?

I needn’t have worried.  For Christmas, my sister in Brooklyn gave me a worthy successor, from the Chinese department store she occasionally visited: a small hardcover book, wrapped in beige silk fabric printed with images of women in kimonos, with detailing in maroon leather.  On each delicate page a spray of cherry blossoms whispered in the corner.  When the day came for me to put my eighth little diary in the black and gold box, I felt a fine sense of accomplishment, but there was no longer any question of abandoning the practice.

When our first child was born, in Sweden, my circle of readers expanded.  Today, a would-be blogger is spoilt for choice by free blogging sites, but at the time, blogs were still called web logs, and my husband spent hours building one for me so that I could easily share pictures and diary entries with my family and friends in the States.  The more public platform did not noticeably improve my writing (the first two years of online diary entries are monotonous at best, tedious at worst), but it served to accustom me to writing for a wider audience, rather than writing only for myself, as in my hand-written journals, or for one chosen reader, as in letters.  After our daughter was born, the kids’ blog developed more of a voice and became more readable, but it remained clearly a diary, rather than a crafted work.

Enter Facebook.  I joined the social networking site in 2007, and before long, I had connected, or re-connected, with scores of friends.  Facebook suited me.  I have often wondered if I would place somewhere on the autistic spectrum, were I to be tested; my lack of social graces indicates that the answer may well be yes.  Online socialization appealed to me as it both flattened and slowed down interaction; I could, and did, spend the length of my morning shower composing exactly the status update I wished to share.  A live conversation would fail miserably if the conversants insisted on twenty-minute pauses to crystallize their thoughts into words.  Facebook offered me the sensation of connection, but in a controlled environment.  I soon noted that what I wanted to say sometimes exceeded the status update character limit, and I started to write longer “notes”.  Friends read my miniature essays, and commented, and their encouragement spurred me to write more.  Slowly, my essays lengthened, until even the “note” format seemed confining.

I created a writing blog for myself, outside of Facebook, in 2009.  A few months later, I met my friend Brenda for coffee.  I knew Brenda wrote—I had read, and been moved by, several of her pieces.  Although Brenda was not a full-time author, writing was an integral element of her profession; when Brenda asked me, halfway through her latte, “So, Beth, what’s up with the writing?”  I blushed, and nearly choked on my tea.

“Oh… you mean my blog?  Well, um, I’m not really sure…” I stammered.

“Have you written in the past?”  Brenda continued.  “Is this what you want to do?”

“I… yes, I’ve written a bit, but not, you know, not seriously.  I mean, I’d like to write more, but I don’t think I would ever make any money doing it.”

“Are you sending any of your work out?”

The flush rose higher and intensified.  “Oh, no, no, I’m just writing for myself.  I don’t think my writing would really be published in print anywhere.”

“You could self-publish.  Some people do that.  I’ve been considering self-publishing… There are sites online; you can actually have a batch of twenty to thirty good-quality books bound for not too much money.”

“Really?  I’ve never heard of that…  Maybe, I don’t know, maybe when I have a more robust body of work.  But what about you,” I said, attempting to steer the conversation back to safer waters, “Were you thinking about pulling together some of your essays into a book?”

My discomfort subsided as we chatted about the book Brenda hoped to collaborate on with her brother, a keen photographer.  But after we said goodbye, Brenda’s questions—questions that I had been studiously avoiding asking myself— simmered in my mind.  Well before they reached the boiling point and demanded answers, however, I slammed the lid down, turned the heat off, and declared to myself, “What matters is not why I am writing, what matters is that I am writing at all.”

Several months and a few blog posts later, I was talking to my friend Joanna about a phone call I had made to another friend to iron out a disagreement.

“You actually called her?” Joanna said incredulously.  “I would not have called.”

“Well, I just couldn’t leave it like that.  I felt it was the best thing for me to say my piece, and for her to have a chance to tell her side of the story,” I explained.

“That was very brave.”

“Thank you, but I don’t think so… It was better than not calling, because now we know where we stand, and I prefer it that way.”

“I can see that.  As a writer, you probably needed a sense of closure,” Joanna mused.

As a writer.  Joanna, a well-read, intelligent, professional woman, had referred to me as “a writer.”  I was so taken aback, and so elated, that the rest of the conversation blurred.  If someone that I respected could label me a writer, then maybe writing was more than a lark for me; maybe writing had legs.

Joanna’s casual comment led me to ask myself how I could possibly transform writing from a well-loved hobby to a vocation.  My daughter had begged for, and received, a boxed set of fifteen books by a well-known children’s author for her birthday; her appetite for books far outpaced our supply.  Many of the books my daughter brought home from school were formulaic and simplistic.  I had a friend who had just finished a degree in illustration; she had produced a children’s picture book as her final project.  Eureka—I would write a children’s book, and my friend could illustrate it.

I picked dogs as my topic, and set about writing, blending personal anecdote with folklore and fact.  While the mix sounds good on paper, the writing was dry, and the factual bits hovered precariously close to plagiarism.  After a couple of months, I reached the word count recommended for books aimed at my chosen age group, nine to eleven year olds.  With trepidation, I sent the finished first draft to my mom.  My mom, who had spent most of her working life as an English teacher, had been reading my blog regularly, and she was my most vocal and consistent supporter.  But my mom calls a spade a spade, and when I asked for her opinion of my children’s book attempt, her hesitation gave the game away before she had even spoken.

“To be honest,” she started, and I smiled from the other side of the ocean, thinking that I had never harboured any suspicion that she would be anything but, “I don’t like it as much as I like your other essays.”

My “children’s books” soap bubble of hope popped instantly, and vanished as if it had never existed, leaving not even a shimmery film behind.  But I knew Mom was right, and one little sliver of me was glad that she had told me she didn’t like the dog book, because that meant that her belief in the quality of some of my other work was genuine.

“I mean, some of it was engaging, mostly the stories, but Beth, I don’t think that’s the kind of writing you’re meant to be doing.  Why did you write it again?”

“I wanted to write something that could maybe be published,” I said forlornly.  “And I know an illustrator, so I thought with pictures, it might stand a chance…”

“That’s right, you mentioned the artist, I remember now.  But you haven’t even tried to send out any other pieces from your blog…  Some of them would be much better candidates for publication.  You’ll never know until you try.”

“I don’t really have the time to try,” I said.

“So how were you going to send out the children’s book?” Mom asked.

“I was going to leave that to my friend, the illustrator.”

“Ah.  I haven’t read many children’s books lately… maybe there’s a market for this sort of work… but I think you should go back to what you’re best at.”

“You may have a point,” I conceded.

I called my friend Ellie, also an aspiring writer, the next day to share my dejection.

“My mom thought the dog piece was not up to snuff,” I confided.

“Oh, Beth, I’m sure it’s good,” Ellie countered.

“No, Mom didn’t think so, and she’s right.  It’s not.  I was just so desperate to figure out a way to make writing profitable.”

“Now, now, you can’t throw up your hands just because your mom doesn’t like it.  You have to get a second opinion!  Send it to me, I’ll read it, or better yet, because it’s a kids’ book, I’ll let Juliette read it.  She’s about the age you were targeting, yes?”

“Ellie, that’s so kind of you, but I really don’t think Juliette would want to take the time…  it’s rather long…”

“I insist.  I’ll be looking for it in my inbox.”

True to her word, Ellie gave the nascent book to her daughter, and Juliette sent me a lovely message, saying the writing was “great,” but suggesting I cut it down a bit and build on the fictional elements.  I thanked Juliette– and Ellie– warmly, but I knew, despite their kind efforts to buoy me, that the dog book was a sinking ship.

After brooding for a week or two on my failure to show promise as a children’s author, the drive to write overpowered the desire to sulk.  When the children had been kissed good night, I poured myself a cup of tea, took my place at the writing chair, and waited for words to present themselves to me, exactly as I had done countless nights before.  It didn’t matter that I was not suited to bring forth work to rival the Rainbow Fairies, or that my readership consisted almost exclusively of dear friends and family.  I would persevere regardless, jaws clamped shut like a terrier’s to the belief that if practicing the flute for thirty minutes a day for a few years meant that I could play Mozart passably, then writing for thirty minutes a day for several years must mean that I would eventually write something that would be worth reading, even by strangers.

One infrequent reader once commented that writing must be therapeutic for me.  I huffed around the house in righteous irritation for some days afterwards, wondering if the reader in question was insinuating that I would be better served paying someone to listen to the inner workings of my mind rather than exposing the process for all to see.  What made matters worse was that the reader was correct—writing is restorative, sometimes verging on cathartic, for me.  My reliance on the regular practice of capturing thoughts and emotion with written words is most noticeable during the Christmas season, when the demands of December impose a month-long writing hiatus.  The online comparative shopping, the Christmas cards to prepare, the extra evenings out—they all conspire to eat into that precious hour or two at the end of my day that I try to ring-fence for my habit.  My restiveness has increased with each passing year as my evening writing ritual has become more established, reaching nearly intolerable levels this past Christmas; denied my daily hour of introspection, I turned to the obsessive pursuit of perfect stocking fillers for the children, and became more short-tempered with each passing day of December.  The stocking fillers, painstakingly chosen, took less than five minutes to open and were forgotten by Boxing Day, but it took me a few weeks to deflate from December, rid myself of my annual materialist hangover, and return to my alleviative craft.

Memoir is among the heavyweights of writing as therapy, and constitutes much of what I write, but I dabble, picking out certain events rather than attempting to write a proper, chronological memoir that spans several years.  Two seemingly insurmountable obstacles stand in the way of writing a cohesive and continuous memoir; the first is pain, and the second is time.  I know, from experience, that it hurts to spend too much time among the ghosts of times past, and were I to write about the most vivid ghosts, I would not only be walking headlong into sorrow myself, I would also be dragging loved ones along, likely without their full consent.

Even if I were to determine that the cost is worth the reward, at my current level of output, it would take me at least four years to write 70,000 words, the word count of a typical book.  I read an article titled “The Art of Being Still” (New York Times, December 1^st, 2012) just as the Christmas season was commencing.  The author, Silas House, opens with this paragraph:  “Many of the aspiring writers I know talk about writing more than they actually write. Instead of setting free the novel or short story or essay that is sizzling at the ends of their fingers, desperate to set fire to the world, they fret about writer’s block or about never having the time to write.”  Well, I can credit Mr. House with leading me, that evening, into the very trap he warns about.  Upon finishing the article, I leapt out of my chair and stormed off to find my husband, who was in the kitchen hanging laundry.

“I just read an article that says most wannabe writers don’t actually spend enough time writing,” I announced.

My husband was nonplussed.  “Mm-hmm,” he murmured, turning a collar right-side out.

“I mean, I try so hard to write every day, but some days I just can’t manage it, like now, when we have to decide what Wii game to get the kids for Christmas,” I moaned.

“I don’t think it really matters which Wii game you get, just pick one,” my husband said, attempting to be helpful.

“That’s not the point,” I quickly retorted.  “Even if I simplified the Christmas shopping, there are still nights that I don’t have time to write, like if I have to do menu planning, or if I need to order school uniform for the kids.  Not to mention that I should plan regular writing breaks so that we can watch TV together…  I think Mr House must have a lot of extra help,” I concluded.

“Maybe he does,” my husband said.  “Or maybe he never goes on Facebook.”

Touché.  I could not deny my social media habit—it ate a good thirty minutes each evening– but I justified time spent scanning the news feed and responding to comments as social activity.  Beyond that tenuous social engagement, more concrete forms of interaction also clambered for a share of the treasured evening hours: emails, instant messages, or phone calls to family and friends.  My husband, bless him, never complained, but I knew that too many evenings spent in separate rooms, looking at our own screens, could not be beneficial to our marital contentment.  Even if I were to completely shun the siren call of procrastination, and ignore the itch to communicate online or by phone, my active duty day job doesn’t end until just before nine o’clock at night when both kids have been tucked in.  By the time my reserve duty– tidying the kitchen and preparing for the following day– has been fulfilled, I have less than an hour of unbroken time before eleven, that magical bedtime that can make the difference between waking up as a human and waking up as an automaton.

Lack of time has not dissuaded me from writing.  What discourages me is methodical self-doubt, which starts at the top, with form, and works its way all the way down to the word level.  Take form: while some memoirists publish best-sellers, and some essayists write for large audiences, I remain convinced that the only true writers are writers of fictional novels (short story writers need not apply).  I consider it a personal failure that my writing is based on my approximation of reality, yet the mere idea of attempting to fabricate fills me with trepidation.  I am not skilled enough to create a story wholly alien to my background, but the thought of taking any factual element and using it as a springboard to invention seems like a very slippery slope.  Not to mention the prospect of living two parallel lives— my “real” life and the life of my characters.  My grip on sanity is feeble already; if I began to inhabit an alternate fictional world of my creation, how would I not succumb to madness?  Better to stick with memoir and essay, but then I disparage my work before it has even begun, as it is not proper writing (a fictional novel) at all.

At the sentence level, I repeatedly come up against my poor knowledge of grammar.  My ten-year old son, who has been studying grammar at school and has developed a particular interest in the subject, has started to correct my spoken grammar; if I were to let him loose on one of my blog pieces, I am sure he would find many grammatical errors requiring remediation.  He would not stop at that—he would undoubtedly suggest improvements to my vocabulary as well.  Yes, even at the word level, insecurity strikes.  Last year I read an essay collection, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (Penguin, 2000), by the wonderfully talented writer Anne Fadiman, and I was gobsmacked by the breadth and depth of her working vocabulary.  I would never be able to use the verb “balkanized” casually and appropriately, as Fadiman does a mere four pages into the book (“Marrying Libraries”).

Most debilitating of all, though, is the niggling feeling that my writing is a fluke.  My deepest anxiety is that I will run out of things to say, or that I will crash headlong into writer’s block and never recover.  Cheerleading helps; my audience has declined as my word counts have risen, but I still have a handful of devoted readers, and the certainty that they will read what I post, regardless of my assessment of the quality of the writing, incites me to keep working.  But praise, while it warms the cockles of my heart, is not what compels me to return to my writing chair.  What leads me to my laptop, night after night, is the powerful, bittersweet desire to speak with my written voice.

The year I met my husband, I often heard him speaking Swedish to a fellow Swedish exchange student.  I understood nothing of what they said to each other, but I observed subtle changes in my beloved when he spoke to his friend: his speech flowed more smoothly, and he laughed more readily.  When I later moved to Sweden and became proficient enough to follow conversations, the facets of my husband’s personality that had been hinted at the year prior became more visible.  As I gained fluency, I too developed a Swedish self, in addition to my American self.  But unlike my husband, who feels almost equally comfortable speaking English or Swedish, I could never lose my hesitancy when speaking Swedish; as a result, my Swedish persona always remained a shadow of my American persona.  I recall the sense of liberation I felt when some of my husband’s family came to the United States for our wedding and first heard me unapologetically speaking English; the subtext to every effortless sentence I uttered was, “This is me!  This is what I sound like when I really talk!  I am not that girl that stumbles over simple vocabulary; no, I am usually articulate!”

Greater facility with a spoken language made it possible for me to convey my personality more accurately in English than in Swedish, and similarly, skill using written language can allow an author to reveal more of herself in print than in conversation.  A dear, long-standing friend of mine, Brittany, delved into blogging a few months ago.  When she told me she had posted her first entry, I made the appropriate noises, but I didn’t jump straight on the computer.  After a few days, I remembered that I needed to see what Brittany had to say.  Her post had me in stitches after the first paragraph.  I was taken aback; I had been friends with Brittany for well over ten years, and while I know her to be a well-spoken woman who relishes a good laugh, still I would not have guessed that her writing would be so instantly engaging and wryly witty.  When I receive notifications of new posts on Brittany’s blog now, I hasten to the site, and with each entry I read, my mental picture of my friend gains further resolution.

I prefer writing to speaking.  Conversations move too quickly for me, and I often miss words, or even sentences, particularly if there is competing sound.  I learned at school to limit my vocabulary or risk unwelcome attention; even now, twenty years later, if I toss in a low-frequency word I endure a minor panic attack as I worry that my conversational partner may feel uncomfortable, or worse yet, that I may have mispronounced the word due to lack of exposure.  Writing gives me the time I crave to craft my chosen medium, words, into the most accurate description possible of the thoughts, or emotions, that are asking for release.  It has taken me years to trust my written voice, and now that I do (most of the time), I do not want it silenced.

The satisfaction of accomplished self-expression wavers, but what remains constant is my wish to produce work that my children can read in years to come.  I had my children late, at thirty-five and thirty-eight.  When I am in a deal-making mood, I pray to be granted enough life to see my youngest celebrate her eighteenth birthday.  That prayer seems likely to be heard, but I am well aware that the odds of meeting my grandchildren are not nearly as favourable for me as they were for my mother, who gave birth to my little sister at twenty-five.  I will leave traces—the kids will have memories, and photos, and mementoes—but traces are not enough.  I want my children to be able to hear my voice, speaking to them from across time through the page, when I am no longer present to speak to them in person.  I want them to know me in the way that I have only been able to know my parents as an adult.  Each post I publish will give them more to chew on, for better or worse, than any photo could offer.

So I continue, steadily, but oh-so-slowly.  I console myself that perhaps I write like I jog; most runners are warmed up after one kilometre, but it takes me about four kilometres to get the kinks out and begin to run naturally.  It may take many more years for me to hit my stride as a writer, but I want to maintain a base level of creative fitness so that I will be ready for the big race when the time comes.  I’ve averaged seven posts a year; I pat myself on the back if I write one hundred words in a day, and I am overjoyed if I clear two hundred.  Doubt threatens continuously to force me to fold, but I play on.  It seems possible that even successful authors can’t hide from the gnawing fear that what they have written is not worthy to be read, or the terror that even if their work is solid, their muse may take the first flight out without saying goodbye, so I attempt to accept the doubt rather than fight it.  I would be grateful for a map of where my writing is taking me, but, like a driver in heavy traffic in parts unknown, even if a map was offered, I’m not sure I would be able to read it without risking collision.  While I can’t predict the sights and detours that will pepper the road my work takes, I am well aware of the ultimate destination: a future my children will see, but I will not.  Certainty of the point that is surely programmed into my personal satellite navigation system suffices to keep me travelling along the route I am prompted to follow, writing faithfully, until at some point—hopefully later rather than sooner—the chequered flags will appear, and I will arrive at home.

Blackbirds

“Blackbird singing in the dead of night,

Take those broken wings, and learn to fly.”

The Beatles, “Blackbird.”

I know that I am not without prejudice.  Although I would like to consider every human as equal to every other human, I recognize that I both consciously and subconsciously ascribe to stereotypes about people of certain sexes, races, ages, classes, professions, appearances, and so forth.  Most of the time, these preconceived notions do not jump out at me, and I can lull myself into thinking that I am doing a decent job of keeping my -isms at bay.  Today, however, one of those prejudices punched me in the stomach and knocked the wind right out of me.

I met a man today who had been burned extensively over his entire body.  The skin of his face was pulled so tightly that his light blue eyes were permanently red-rimmed, and his skin colour was unnaturally white.  He had almost no hair on his head, or on his face; one of his legs was made of metal below the knee.  I had seen this man, and noted his burns, from a distance a couple of times previously– once at a playground, and once in a cafe– but I had never been close enough to see him clearly.  When he walked through the door at work today, he was perhaps two meters from me, and I was in a position where to avoid him would have been exceedingly rude.  I forced myself to look at him, in a way that I hoped very much was similar to the way I would look at anyone I had just met, and I said hello to him and to his daughter.

It is possible that on the surface my face seemed open, but given the aversion that lay just below, I am doubtful that my expression was as neutral as I would have hoped.  The man, who had likely seen similar reactions countless times, carried on chatting amiably with the woman standing next to me, giving me time to regain my composure.  By the end of the morning, I had glanced at the man often enough to become familiar with his appearance; my goodbye was better than my hello, but was still tentative.

During the morning, the question that bubbled up repeatedly in my head was, “What happened?”  How had this man been burned to within an inch of his life?  What terrible accident had taken place, and how long had this man fought for his survival afterwards?  Had the man’s daughter been born before or after her father’s near-death event, and how did the daughter feel about what her dad looked like?  The answers to these questions, I knew, were absolutely none of my business, but my mind refused to stop asking for them.  When the man left, I had to bite my tongue not to ask my friend, who had greeted the man and his daughter warmly by name, if she knew his back story.

*

We all have invisible scars.  I do not know a single human who has not been damaged by life.  Just being born is itself a traumatic experience.  As adults, some of these unseen scars are just minor scratches, caused perhaps by the relative who made an insulting comment about your child, the dentist that banned you for missing too many appointments, or the wife who forgot Valentine’s Day three years ago.  But some psychological wounds go far deeper, cutting into the muscle, or even taking limbs.  I have watched one friend, Kevin, who suffered extreme abuse as a child, battle to remain functional.  Usually he stays upright, but sometimes the pain is too much for him, and Kevin falls, figuratively, and even literally.  My father had a friend,  Ray, who engaged in a battle similar to Kevin’s for a very long time; Ray’s wife found Ray hanging just above a chair, a silk tie around his neck, several years ago.

To expose the right scars, at the right time, to the right people, seems to be an advanced social skill.  During my first year at graduate school, I worked part-time in the office of a workshop for adults with developmental disabilities.  The case workers sometimes came to the front office, the only space in the building where the windows were low enough to see outside, to chat and have a change of scenery.  After several break-time conversations, I became friendly enough with one of the case workers, Mindy, to suggest meeting for coffee.  I had no car at that point, but Mindy did, and she offered to pick me up.  During that very first ride, while Mindy drove easily through the notorious traffic of Boston, Mindy mentioned that she was a recovered heroin and alcohol addict, and she added nonchalantly that she had participated in several robberies during her junkie years to acquire money for drugs.  Burglars had figured high on my list of childhood baddies, and when Mindy told me of her breaking and entering adventures, my mind reeled as I struggled to quickly reconcile my innate fear of felons with my fondness for my friend.  After a brief conversational hiatus on my part, which Mindy allowed me, my heart won and I accepted that I now had a friend with a significant criminal record.  Mindy was a natural talker, and driving seemed to elicit an additional openness; as a passenger in Mindy’s small, blue American car, I sometimes revisited that initial feeling of soaring, when my intellect needed a time-out to come to grips with stories from Mindy’s past of experiences so painful that I would not wish them on anyone.

It is possible that Mindy revealed more to me than what would be considered healthy.  But by telling me her history so freely, Mindy gave me hope that I could rise above my own background and aspire to the kind of life Mindy was living.  Despite her intermittently horrific past, Mindy had a full-time job, a steady girlfriend, a cosy home, and a car; she was, by all measures, a successful adult.  If someone much further to the left on the bell curve of invisible damage could achieve such respectability, it stood to reason that I could too.

Some people, like my dad, hold their cards much closer to their chest than Mindy.  I learned early on that my father had spent the first year of my life as an Air Force officer in the Vietnam War.  As soon as I had a vague idea of what war entailed, I understood that my father’s service in Vietnam had cut deeply into his psyche.  My parents divorced when I was five, and I saw my dad every four to six weeks.  I remember two serious talks my dad had with me and my siblings; the first was about puberty and included the unwrapping of a tampon, much to my embarrassment as the oldest daughter and the only daughter that would need such a thing, and the second, held when I was maybe fifteen, was about Vietnam.  Dad set up a screen, turned on the slide projector, and quietly described twenty or thirty slides.  I remember seeing pictures of barbed wire, planes, and buildings; I remember listening to my dad’s voice crack, falter, and then fall silent while the projector displayed an image of one particular young man in uniform.  The man, a friend of my father’s, had lost his life during his service in Vietnam.  While my father paused at his picture, my siblings and I sat, hushed and uncharacteristically still, like interns observing an open-heart surgery for the first time.  I never saw those slides again, but once sufficed to help me see more clearly the contours of the scar my father carried from his service in the war.

My dad let us in once, but I have known people who, whether consciously or subconsciously, never open the gates to their own gardens of Gethsemane.  I had a friend, Joanna, many years ago, who had a secret.  Joanna sometimes referred to the pain the secret had caused her, and it was clear to me that her wounds had been deep.  While I sometimes thought Joanna was trying to give me clues about what lay in her past, she never told me outright what had hurt her so profoundly.  In the absence of knowledge, my imagination provided possibilities:  perhaps Joanna had recovered from gambling, childhood abuse, or eating disorders.  Maybe she had been raped, or even kidnapped.  Sometimes, in conversations, I wondered if I had touched a sore spot, but I never knew for sure, and the uncertainty left me uneasy.

On the spectrum of self-disclosure, I fall somewhere closer to Mindy than to my father or Joanna.  I prefer, in theory, to share, but I am also aware of the vulnerability that comes from exposure.  One salient fact about my current existence is that my husband, Håkan, was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) three years ago.  He has been comparatively lucky so far— the MS has not obviously affected his movement, at least not more than a slight increase in clumsiness.  It has, however, caused considerable, and sometimes insurmountable, fatigue, and the disease has also necessitated drug regimes that have noticeable, and occasionally unpleasant, side effects.  While I don’t announce to people upon introduction that my husband has MS, I also don’t keep the diagnosis to myself.  I do, though, loosely keep track of who knows and who doesn’t.  Those who do know can be roughly divided into empathetic askers, non-askers, and informational askers.

Of these, the most straightforward for me to deal with are the informational askers—the people who ask very matter-of-factly how Håkan is doing and seem satisfied with whatever answer I provide.  The informational askers tend to be either people I know extremely well, like my sister, or people I don’t know well at all.  The non-askers, surprisingly, pose more problems than the informational askers.  My suspicion is that the non-askers, who are often people I know reasonably well, feel that it would be intrusive to inquire about such a sensitive topic; they would prefer to let me volunteer whatever I feel comfortable sharing.  However, because they don’t ask, I sometimes wonder if they would rather not know.  When I do talk about difficult aspects of living with MS with non-askers, I sometimes feel a twinge of panic, akin to the sensation the emperor likely felt in the fable, that I have bared more than I should have while the non-askers remain fully dressed.

Yet most challenging of all are the empathetic askers.  This group can be further subdivided into empathetic, yet dutiful, and straight-up empathetic.  Members of the first set do honestly care, but they also feel that they should ask, regardless of whether they are in the mood to truly listen or not.  While I appreciate their concern, and I am grateful for the chance to describe my husband’s issues with, for example, daily versus weekly injections, the tone of these questioners sometimes raises my hackles, particularly if it teeters precariously on the verge of pity.  The second set, the purely empathetic, are often people who have just learned of Håkan’s diagnosis after having known me for some time.  They are often caught off-guard, and it is their sympathy that I find hardest to take; their surprise, and their genuine concern, pulls off the disguise of familiarity and routine and reminds me that MS is an armed robber of a disease that I am powerless to apprehend.  I sometimes have to pause, when answering this group’s well-meaning questions, to maintain a semblance of composure.

I choose who, and how much, to tell about Håkan’s illness.  There is little about my appearance that would lead a casual acquaintance to wonder what damage I have lived through, or am living with.  This is not the case for people like the burn survivor that I met; only people who have not seen him in person could be unaware that he has suffered great trauma.  Last summer, my family was fortunate enough to attend two sessions of the London Paralympic Games.  During the athletics session, we were seated within shouting distance of the women’s long jump event for women who had lost some or all of one or both legs.  As I watched these extremely fit women leap across the starting line, my mind ran through lists of ways they may have lost their legs: car crash, birth defect, boating accident.  How did they feel about taking part in the Paralympics; did they wonder about whether or not they would have qualified for the Olympics had their bodies been typical?  As woman after woman soared through the air, my eyes welled up with tears of admiration for the physical and mental strength of these athletes.  Through choice and ability, they had triumphed spectacularly over their additional physical challenges.  By doing so, they had also put themselves in a position where they would be asked, over and over, about how and why their bodies were different.

My dear friend Vera told me about a blog she had started to follow written by Stephanie Nielson (“NieNie”), a woman who had survived a plane crash but been badly burnt over most of her body.

“She’s very into her religion…  I can’t always go there with her…  and her lifestyle is completely unlike mine, but she is so inspirational.  It’s amazing that she was able to recover from her accident.  Her appearance changed completely, but she is still so positive,” Vera explained.

“I’ll check it out,” I promised.

I visited the blog (http://nieniedialogues.blogspot.co.uk), and I saw exactly what Vera meant.  I soon found an entry that included photos of NieNie from both before and after her accident (see post from 12/12/12).  To share those photos with her large audience required bravery, as did writing, in that same post, about her post-accident visit to a store she had frequented regularly prior to the crash.  While she recognized members of the staff, they had no idea who she was, and it hurt.  Despite her struggles, NieNie refused, in post after post, to succumb to self-pity, and instead stayed steadfastly focussed on gratitude.

As someone whose own hurt is largely hidden, I find the openness of the Paralympians and NieNie in exposing their physical scars courageous.  What would happen if I allowed more of my own damage to show—would I encourage others to let light into their dark rooms as well?  How would I feel about making myself more vulnerable?  Because that is the catch—vulnerability.  While I have enormous respect for the athletes and swimmers I saw at the Paralympics, I would be lying if I said that respect did not sometimes cross the line into pity, and similarly, alongside my admiration of NieNie the blogger, I am ashamed to admit to a pang of shock at her appearance.  Listening to Mindy, my friend who shared more of her hidden wounds with me than anyone before or since, I sometimes found myself thinking, “Poor Mindy.”  Still worse, occasionally I had the nerve to judge Mindy, and to issue the verdict, albeit fleeting, that I was morally superior.  I would prefer not to be pitied, and I would be insulted should someone deem herself intrinsically better than me; the less others know, the less either of those responses are likely to occur.  But at the same time, the less others know about me, the further I feel from them.

A couple weeks ago, I happened upon a couple friends at the local cafe.  I’ve known both women for several years, and whenever I’ve had the chance to sit down with them, the conversation has flowed freely and been punctuated by laughter.  I know neither of the women well enough to call for a chat, and I haven’t ever been round to either of their homes, nor has either of them been home to mine, but I am always happy to see them both.  That morning at the cafe, the two women brought up a topic that is particularly sensitive for me.  Often, when this particular subject is on the table, I skirt it completely, or if cornered, opt for an easy out.  But that morning I was feeling courageous, and rather than skittishly moving the conversation to safer ground, I told my friends a bit of truth.  The women were surprised, but they recovered quickly; after a few minutes of kindly question-and-answer, they added my stance on that topic to their picture of me, and we moved on.  No ill came of my honesty.  On the contrary, both women, when I’ve bumped into them since that morning, have greeted me even more warmly than before.

*

I will see the man who survived the burns again, and when I do, this is what I want to remember: we are all broken.  Some of us are more broken on the inside, some on the outside, some are broken all over.  There are people, like my friend Joanna and my father, who will keep their invisible pain mostly to themselves.  Others, like me, will tread the line between concealing and revealing hidden scars, while the Mindys of the world will not hesitate to tell their full story.  All of us will reckon with the consequences of whichever choice we make.  Those with visible damage may be less able to opt out of exposing past or current pain, but they too have alternatives.  A talkative cashier at the supermarket, one morning when there were few shoppers, happened to tell me about her son, who had an artificial leg below the knee.

“He used to keep it covered up all the time, you know, put on regular trousers and shoes over it.  When he did that, he looked just like any other bloke.  But as he got older, he got fed up with keeping it under wraps.  When we went on holiday last year, we were on the beach, and someone was just staring at him, and wouldn’t stop staring, you know?”

“Oh, that must have been annoying,” I said, while bagging my groceries.

“Well, William thought he’d show the lad what for, so he took his metal leg right off, and started polishing it.”  The cashier chortled.  “Ah, you should have seen the look on the lad’s face, his jaw just dropped, and William said to him, ‘Maybe you should think twice about staring next time.’  I felt a bit sorry for the lad, but my William had a point, you know, and I’m guessing that lad changed his ways after that.”

“I’m sure he did,” I agreed.

Very few will rise, phoenix-like, and transform pain into accomplishment before a wide audience, as the Paralympians and NieNie the blogger have done.  But those who do provide an example for the rest of us, who are merely attempting to transcend physical or mental hurt in our personal spheres.  Stephanie Nielson—NieNie—has written a book about her accident and the aftermath, and customer review after customer review includes the words “beautiful,” “blessing,” and, most frequent by a large margin, “inspiring.”

The man that came to my workplace seemed to lean neither towards anger, like the cashier’s son, nor towards publicity, like NieNie.  The day I met him, and the times I had seen him previously, he was going about the routines of daily life in this part of London: spending the morning at the playground with his wife and daughter, enjoying a cup of coffee with friends, bringing his daughter to a playgroup.  Like any other person, regardless of sex, colour, or appearance, when he came through the door, he deserved eye contact, a smile, and a warm “good morning.”  I could not give him that greeting the first time I met him properly.  Next time, I hope that I can.

Leave to Remain

“If I go there will be trouble, and if I stay it will be double.”

The Clash, “Should I Stay or Should I Go.”

I recently learned that two good friends will be moving abroad before the end of the school year.  One friend shared the news via email; one friend told me in person.  Both received the same shocked response from me:  “What?  You’re leaving?  You can’t leave!”

How could these friends be skipping town and not me?  That was just wrong!  I should not be the one left behind; I should be the one forging bravely off to a new city, or a new country.  But no, this time I was staying put, and my friends were preparing to pack their bags and ride off into the sunset.

By my ninth birthday, I had lived in four different states, in eleven different towns, in twelve different houses.  At seventeen, I left the town I had lived in for eight years straight– a personal best– and moved to Sweden.  For the next twenty-two years, until I was thirty-nine, I followed an unwritten personal rule to stay in one place for no longer than three years at a time.  As we approached three years in any city, state, or country, I began to make my husband’s life miserable by insisting to him, over and over, that I could only attain any semblance of happiness if we moved right away to the place I was sure would be my Forever Home.  Towards the end of those twenty-two years, my husband began to dread my internal alarm clock.  A typical geographic conversation after two and a half years in, say, Boston, sounded something like this:

Me: “I just think that Sweden is so much more peaceful.  It’s much better for rock climbing, and the health care is far more reliable than the health care here, where if you don’t have insurance, breaking your arm can put you in debt for years.”

Håkan: “We’ve already lived in Sweden, and you didn’t like it, don’t you remember?  You felt you couldn’t communicate adequately, even though you’re fluent.  You made me promise you wouldn’t talk me into moving back.”

Me: “But I’m sure it wouldn’t be like that now.  I’ve grown up in these last two and a half years, and now I really think that Sweden is the best place for us.”

Håkan: “Beth, we can’t keep doing this.  Moving is hard work, and it’s expensive.  When are you going to finally settle down?”

Although I rhapsodized about staying in one location for good, just hearing the words “settle down” activated the fight-or-flight reflex that, in my case, had morphed into a well-tuned flight-or-flight reflex.  The thought that wherever we were living could be my final port of call was anathema to me.  There were a few cities, during those twenty-two years, which we called home more than once, but there were reasons for all of them to be crossed off of our short list:  Burlington was too small, Boston was too far from good rock climbing, and Stockholm was too Swedish.

Also, there were benefits to the three-year schedule.  I confess to enjoying the attention that came my way at leaving parties that we held.  Conversely, when we first moved to a new city, or when we returned to one of our standbys years later when our friends had often moved away themselves, I relished the anonymity.  I felt like a successful explorer in a brave new world when I discovered a wonderful cafe or the best place to buy tomatoes.  Friendships take at least a year to develop, and then comes a honeymoon period, but often, around the three-year mark, even a solid friendship will sail into hazardous waters.  However, if one friend announces her imminent departure just after the honeymoon period, the rocky section can be avoided.  Any disagreements that could lead to conflict can instead be glossed over, as both friends know that their time together will soon end.  Granted, learning the lay of the land in a new place and developing new friendships was always hard work, but it seemed preferable to me than staying somewhere that had come to seem unsuitable, or perhaps had become too well-known.

We had our first child, our son Sam, when I was nearly thirty-five.  Sam’s first year, not surprisingly given our geographic history, was unsettled; we moved three times within Stockholm.  When Sam was one and a half, Håkan and I packed our belongings for overseas shipping yet again and relocated to Cambridge, England, where our daughter, Nina, was born.  The sitting room of our cottage terrace in Cambridge measured a mere 12’X15’, and we shared walls with the pub next door, so one evening a month the sound of bells alerted us to impending Morris dancing, and every Saturday evening we heard Diamond Dave serenading the pub’s regulars.  We managed two years in Cambridge before Håkan, desperate for more living space, accepted an offer of a better job in southwest London.

For the first time in my adult life, I resisted the idea of leaving town.  Sam had been diagnosed with autism just after he turned three, and he was being monitored by the autism unit at the well-respected Addenbrooke’s Hospital.  I had become friends with a woman from California, Mimi, whose son had similar special needs; she lived two blocks away and acted as a comprehensive resource for Cambridge and its environs.  What would the provision for Sam be like in London?  How long would it take to meet a woman like Mimi, who would be sensitive to our circumstances yet able to lead us to the best London had to offer?

Håkan assured me that I would soon find a friend like Mimi and that Sam would have access to equal or better care in London.  Then Håkan informed me that, while he was very pleased that I suddenly seemed keen to settle down, the minuteness of our home in Cambridge was about to drive him over the edge and only by going to London would we be able to improve our prospects.  Thus advised, I said goodbye, regretfully, to Mimi, to the team at Addenbrooke’s, and to the particular locations in Cambridge that mattered to me: the nearby purveyor of vegetarian nut roasts, the playground in an enormous field beside the river Cam, the graveyard I had walked through four times a day on my way to and from Sam’s preschool.

As it turned out, Håkan was right about the friend, but not so right about care for Sam.  Ellie, a tall Australian with three children, took me under her wing within a few months of my arrival in London.  Ellie, like Mimi, was a connoisseur of the twenty-mile concentric circle with her home at the centre.  Two of Ellie’s three children were on the autistic spectrum, and Ellie was well-acquainted with local services for children with special needs; she let me know promptly (and, as I later discovered, accurately) that the doctor in charge of autism in the borough had no personality and was minimally competent.  Thankfully, there were a few independent charities that were more engaged; I had first met Ellie at a family event offered by one such charity, and we had chatted while watching our children jump, over and over, into the ball pit in the occupational therapy room.

Sam entered the reception year of a highly-regarded school close to our home, but after less than a month, it became clear that the school was not right for him.  A long battle to get Sam a statement of special needs, which would guarantee him one-to-one help and allow us to choose a new school for him, ensued.  With a statement in hand, we hand-picked a new primary school for Sam towards the end of his reception year; he started Year One at the new school, with many hours of mandated support, the following September.

Sam has just entered his sixth year at the same school.  But that doesn’t mean that we have lived in the same home for six years.  No, we did manage to move house in April of Sam’s second year at the school, as we wanted to stop driving and start walking to school.  That relocation was nothing like previous ones, however, as our new home was a mere two miles from our former home.  Håkan’s job, Sam’s school, and Nina’s preschool all remained the same, and while I needed to find new stores for top-up shopping, we still did our weekly shop at the same familiar Sainsbury’s.

So here we are, in southwest London, in the semi-detached house with the blue door that has been our home for the past three years and five months.  We rent, which is good because it satisfies my need for a quick escape route, but we fully expect to sign on for another two years come April, which will mean that by the end of our next lease period, we will have doubled our record for time spent in one home as adults.

The heaviest load to carry on the path from peripatetic to settled has been the baggage of interpersonal history.  A few months after I began taking the kids to the local Anglican church, I struck up a conversation with a friendly woman from New Zealand, Aimee, following a service.  She was a clinical psychologist, and she had some connections in London that I thought may be useful for my friend Ellie, also a psychologist by training.  I asked Aimee for her contact details; she wrote them neatly on the back page of my handbag notebook.  “Clinical psychologist,” I wrote underneath, to remind myself.

Several weeks later, Nina began talking frequently about Si, a boy she knew from both preschool and church.  I caught Si’s mum at preschool pickup one day and asked if she would be interested in sending Si round for a play date.  She said that Si had also been mentioning Nina at home, and agreed that a play date would be fun for the kids.  The preschool had no contact list for parents, so I asked Si’s mum if she could write her mobile number down, and I offered her the same page of my notebook that I had presented to Aimee.  Only after I had placed the page in front of Si’s mum did I notice my note about Aimee: “Clinical psychologist.”

Like many Americans, I am all in favour of therapy, but I had by that time lived in England long enough to understand that while friends in New York talked openly about counsellors they had seen, friends in London would only do so in hushed tones after several months of acquaintance.  I wished desperately that I had offered Si’s mum a blank page.

“Oh—that note about the clinical psychologist—that’s actually Aimee, from church, do you know her?”  I asked Si’s mum, flustered.

“Hmm, I don’t think I do,” Si’s mum said.

“Oh, well, she’s a psychologist, and I have this other friend that’s a psychologist, so that’s why I wrote it down, because I thought Aimee may be able to give my friend some tips about finding work in London,” I babbled, hoping to make it clear that I hadn’t written down Aimee’s profession for personal use.  Even as I offered my explanation I realized that I was just digging myself a deeper hole.

Si’s mum looked at me curiously, then wrote down her name and mobile number, to my mortification, just under “Clinical Psychologist”.  “Can you read that?” she asked.

I read her number back to her, aware that I was now at least two shades redder than I had been moments earlier, and told Si’s mum I would text her a couple of dates that would work for play dates.

I felt slightly queasy every time I saw Si’s mum after that.  Even now, four years later, when I sometimes bump into Si’s mum at church, the “Clinical Psychologist” incident springs to mind and I wonder again just how mad she thinks I am.

Although relocation offers a clean slate, to move to a new town, or especially to a new country, takes a great deal of energy.  So much of daily life needs to be re-established: where will I buy my bread?  Who can I befriend?  What are these people talking about when they say ‘zebra crossing’?  I began keeping a blog in earnest only after I had already lived in southwest London for three years, when the framework of my daily life had reached some semblance of stability.  To be fair, the timing may also have been thanks to our children becoming less demanding— on the date of my first blog entry, our son was seven and our daughter was four—but I am sure that becoming more established locally freed up mental space that could then be filled by creativity.

As far as incidental relationships, the rewards of staying put are perhaps best illustrated by the example of Mail Delivery Substation Man, or Mr Parcel for short.  Upon moving to our current house, the procedure for collecting packages too big to fit through our letterbox changed.  Rather than drive to the next town over, we needed to visit the mail delivery substation.  The substation is close to, but not in, the town centre, past the central post office parking lot, which is always crowded with post vehicles, cycles, and hand trucks, at the end of an exceedingly narrow passageway.  The office is actually just a counter, and there is room for only three people to wait in line inside.  Any other customers must stand outside in the passageway, thus necessitating much apologetic mumbling on the way out past the queue if one has the bad fortune of not getting to the office until just before noon closing time on a Saturday (on weekdays the counter is generously open until 1PM).

The counter, nearly always, is staffed by Mr Parcel, an extremely tall man with fine, longish salt and pepper hair and a matching, but better-maintained, salt and pepper full moustache and beard.  Mr Parcel wears silver-rimmed glasses, keeps a World’s Best Dad coffee mug the size of a small saucepan next to the window, and has affixed a small poster about the importance of keeping the Thames safe for fishing on the second counter window, which is permanently closed.  I can imagine Mr Parcel playing Santa, but he would be the sort of Santa that would point out to a child asking for a Ferrari toy car that Porsches are superior, or to a child asking for fairy wings, that wings may cause the child to fly away inadvertently.  The children would be confounded, and would wonder whether Santa was really on their side or not.  When working at the substation, Mr Parcel, whether by requirement or by personal choice, was a stickler for photographic ID.

The first couple of times I made my way to his counter, Mr Parcel scrutinized my license, then stared at me for a moment, comparing my appearance to the image on the card.  He seemed to only grudgingly admit that the license belonged to me.  The third time, he spoke up.

“The address on the slip doesn’t match the address on your license,” he said, disapprovingly.

“You’re right.  I need to get that changed.  It’s been on my to-do list, I just haven’t gotten around to it.”

“If you get stopped on the road and you don’t have your current address on your license, you can be fined,” Mr Parcel said seriously, peering down at me over the top of his glasses.  “I think the fine is several hundred pounds.”

I reddened, but thought I would try humour.  “I guess I better drive safely.”

Mr Parcel reluctantly handed me my padded brown envelope.  “You should move changing your address on your license to the top of your list.”

Thus scolded, when I returned home, I began rummaging through my piles of documents, looking for the paper counterpart to my plastic driving license; to change my address, I was expected to send in the slip at the bottom of the paper license.  After a twenty minute search, I gave up.  I called the Department of Motor Vehicles and confessed to losing my paper license.  Two days later, a form arrived; for £25, a new paper license could be mine.  I placed the form in the burgeoning “action required” pile in our kitchen, and promptly put it out of my mind.

I had no reason to see Mr Parcel for several weeks, but eventually I placed an order with Amazon that contained too many books for home delivery, and I found myself back at the substation.

I anticipated Mr Parcel’s comment, and announced pre-emptively, “I still haven’t fixed my license, but it’s because I’ve lost the paper counterpart.  I have a form though, so I can apply for a new one soon.”

“Ah ha.  Lost the paper counterpart.  I’m nearly certain you can be fined for that as well,” Mr Parcel commented dryly.

“That may be,” I agreed, thinking to myself, just please give me my books.

It pained me to spend £25 when I was sure my paper license was not really lost, just temporarily misplaced, and I continued to procrastinate.  Mr Parcel carried on admonishing me, but still turned over my intermittent packages.  One morning, when I knew the parcel contained cricket books for Sam, I brought Sam along.

“So is this for you, young sir?” Mr Parcel asked Sam as he prepared to hand the package through.

“Yes.  It’s books about cricket,” Sam answered.

“Cricket!  Are you a cricketer?”  Mr Parcel was taken aback.  He was quite aware that I was American, and he knew Americans generally think of an insect rather than a sport when they hear the word ‘cricket’.

“Yes, I am,” Sam said, matter-of-factly.

“Are you watching the Indian Premier League on telly then?” Mr Parcel asked, with a tone that implied he was pulling Sam’s leg.

“Yes.  I support the Mumbai Indians, but my little sister supports the Royal Challengers Bengalore.”

“I see,” said Mr Parcel, with visible respect.  “Hope you like your new books.”

Following the cricket revelation, Mr Parcel stopped glaring at me, and contented himself with stern looks when I, every so often, paid the mail delivery substation a visit.

One afternoon, while looking feverishly for some other important piece of paper that had been sucked into the black hole of documents in our home, I came across an envelope from the Department of Motor Vehicles.  I held my breath as I took out the papers inside.  Could it be?  Yes!  It was my long-lost paper counterpart license, complete with the “address change” form at the bottom.

“I can’t believe it!” I exclaimed to the empty room.  “I can finally change my address without paying £25!”

I posted the form twenty minutes later, and within three days, my new license arrived.  A few weeks later, when another book delivery necessitated a trip to the mail delivery substation, there was a bounce in my step and a big grin on my face as I approached the counter.  I had chosen a quiet time, and there was no one else in the tiny room when I presented my parcel slip and, with a flourish, my new license.

“Ta-da!”

“What’s this then?  Did you finally get it sorted?” Mr Parcel said, with mock incredulity.  He took the license and held it up to the light.  “Well, my, my, your address actually matches the address on the slip!  Fancy that!”

“Turns out I had the paper counterpart all along.”

“Did you now,” Mr Parcel said, clearly not surprised.  “Congratulations!  Now you can be stopped by the police without any worries!”

“I’m still hoping to avoid that.”

Mr Parcel grinned at me, and handed me my package.  “What in the world is in this, it seems like a book, but it’s unbelievably heavy, what, is it made of solid wood or something?”

“It’s an encyclopaedia of cat breeds.  We like encyclopaedias at our house.”

“I bet you do.”

I smiled graciously and left the counter, book in hand.

There is a type of closer friendship, the shared history friendship, which only develops after about three years in one location.  I first met Daisy through my friend Ellie—their sons had attended the same preschool.  Daisy’s sons entered the same reception class as Nina.  I liked Daisy instantly, and I was always pleased to see her.  We only occasionally made specific plans to meet, but we saw each other often at coffee mornings and at evenings out with groups of mums.

I didn’t realize just how well Daisy knew me until school began again this autumn.  After dropping our children off on the first day of school, many of us met at a cafe to catch up after the summer holidays.  After a long chat, the time came to settle the bill.  As often happens with big tables, the money came up short.  Worried the waitress wouldn’t be left a respectable tip, I added some money to the pot.

Daisy intervened.  “What are you doing, Beth?  You already left your share.”

“I know, but we don’t have quite enough, and I want to be sure the waitress has her tip.”

“Just wait until everyone is back from the loo, it may work itself out then,” Daisy said.

When the mums had all returned to the table, Daisy and another mum rechecked the bill, and the shortfall was accounted for and redressed.  Daisy scooped up the amount I had overpaid and handed it to me.

“I told you that was too much,” she said, smiling.

A few weeks later, an even larger clutch of mums went out for dinner.  When the bill arrived, after several hours, two mums spent about ten minutes scrutinizing it, calculators in hand, before announcing a cost per head.  Ten more minutes of cash collection and change-making ensued, and then the waitress began to make the rounds with the card machine.  The two mums who had taken charge re-totalled, only to find that this bill had also come up short, by a more substantial amount than the bill at the coffee shop.

I took out a note to add to the silver platter, but Daisy, seated across from me, stopped me.

“Put that back in your purse, Beth.  Didn’t you learn anything from last time?”

“But this time there’s even more money missing, and the table was in my name, so I feel responsible,” I protested.

“The problem is, you’re too nice, and it gets you into trouble,” Daisy said patiently.  “Just wait a bit longer, I’m guessing someone hasn’t paid yet.”

Daisy was right.  One card had been missed out.  With that mum’s payment, the bill was covered, and the tip was appropriate.

I’ve never spoken to Daisy on the phone, but she was looking out for me.  It may be an illusion, but I see a net of friends like Daisy, or even like Mr Parcel (in a pinch), ready to catch me should I risk a serious fall here in London.  If our family moved to Chicago tomorrow—we know not a soul in Chicago– we would be completely without that net.  I haven’t tested if the net I have in London would hold me, and I hope I won’t ever need to try its strength, but it is comforting to think that the net might at least prevent a ground fall.

Overshadowing all other reasons to avoid relocation is my firm, yet largely intuitive, conviction that spending their childhood in one town will somehow benefit our children.  Of course, by having chosen London as that one city, our kids are missing out on lots of other aspects of childhood that may be equally or more important than geographic stability.  On paper, London is not a good fit for our family.  Just for starters, my husband is Swedish, I am American, but London is in England.  To visit any family, we need to cross the North Sea to the east or, more daunting, the Atlantic to the west.  During the first few years of our marriage, my husband and I habitually climbed thousand-metre mountains, and until Sam was born, we spent hours at outdoor climbing areas.  In London, we are two hundred miles from the nearest mountain over five hundred metres, and one hundred miles from good outdoor climbing.  As an American, I find it harder to read and follow the social norms of England than of Sweden.  I can’t even say I fully speak the language. Nina, in particular, speaks such British English that I occasionally misunderstand her; it took considerable exposure before I understood that when she said “bowl,” she meant something to throw, not something to hold food.

And yet, London suits me and Håkan.  The bustle of the city appeals to our restless natures, and we live in a suburb that encompasses a vast park.  Because neither of us is native, Håkan and I are on a more equal footing than we would be should we live in either Sweden or America.  We both have strong personalities, so having a more level playing field is a benefit.  Paradoxically, my status as a permanent outsider in England, a status revealed whenever I speak, comforts me.  I am less accustomed to belonging than to being an outsider, and as long as I live in London, I will never fully belong; I will always be “American.”  Our children consider London home; they speak British English, and they are happy at their school.  I have finally learned to consistently use the word ‘trousers.’

Still, after so many years of refusing to put down roots, the thought that we may remain here for many years to come does not always sit easily.  A friend from university in the States recently wrote to me.  She is hoping to make London the starting point of a trip she and her husband are planning to celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, two years from now.

“Will you still be in London in 2014?” she asked.

It is now 2012, and when I read my friend’s innocent question, I panicked.  We couldn’t possibly still live in London in two years, could we?  Shouldn’t we have left several years ago?  I thought of my two friends in London who will be leaving town before long; it still felt all wrong for me to be saying goodbye to them, rather than vice versa.  But while I envied my friends their fresh starts, I knew that for the foreseeable future, I would only move away from London if under duress.

“We will still be in London in 2014,” I wrote back to my friend.  “I’ll look forward to seeing you then.”

The Sand Doesn’t Leave The Hourglass

When my eagerly-awaited daughter was less than a month old, she arranged her face into an expression I had seen before.

“Look at her,” I said to my husband.  “She is the spitting image of your mother.”

“That’s almost spooky,” he agreed.  “How could she duplicate that so exactly?”

We both laughed.  Over the next several months, Nina’s occasional resemblance to her paternal grandmother continued to astound us.  It was a peculiar sensation to gaze at my daughter and see my mother-in-law, rather than any of my own features, but I just added that to the list of surprises Nina had already brought my way.

***

Many wives intentionally keep their mother-in-laws at a safe distance, but I met Märta when I moved from the U.S. to Sweden at the tender age of eighteen, and I spent considerable amounts of time in her home both before and after marrying my husband, Håkan.  With an ocean between myself and my moms and dads, I was suffering from a lack of parenting; after successfully raising six children, Märta provided extra mothering instinctually.  Our needs and talents matched.

During the first several years of my membership in the family, Märta did not let a coffee break pass without offering at least two sorts of homemade biscuit, often presented with accompanying homemade cinnamon buns.  On days when Märta wanted to make a simple lunch, she made omelettes with cream sauces based on wild mushrooms.  A no-fuss dinner at my in-laws’ could be comprised of boiled potatoes, moose medallions, and a salad with iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, and partially-defrosted frozen green peas and sweet corn.  The difficulty of Märta’s meals went up from that baseline, culminating in the feasts that she produced for holidays.  Märta even coordinated the table service with the meal.  If fish was on the menu, she chose the plates illustrated with various types of seafood and the accompanying dainty green wine glasses.  Lunch was generally served on speckled grey plates rimmed with orange and brown circles.

When she wasn’t cooking or baking, Märta shopped, hung laundry, sang in the church choir, took part in Save the Children events, and chatted on the phone or on the street to family and friends.  She sat down in the afternoon only at coffee breaks, for the occasional game of canasta, or if there was a significant sporting event on television, such as any sport involving skis at any level, or balls at the national level.

At breakfast, and just after the afternoon coffee, Märta and Sven, Håkan’s dad, listened to the radio.  Märta had very clear likes and dislikes, and sometimes held forth in favour of or in opposition to the people or events mentioned by the newsreaders.  Just after the news, the state radio station often played a popular song.  When my husband was in his early twenties, he was enamoured of a Swedish singer whose voice was distinctive but often slightly off-key.  Märta could not bear this singer, and huffed in disgust whenever his song was chosen to start the post-news set.

Märta’s opinions extended even to animals.  My father-in-law had spent most of his working life in the service of Sweden’s largest foresting company.  For many years he had been based at a large country home, Bosjön, that the company owned.  While living there, one of Sven’s tasks was to ensure the yearly moose hunting quota was met.  This meant that, beyond and above the moose he wanted to shoot to feed his own family, Sven needed to do his bit to shoot whatever moose were leftover from the regional quota.  Moose hunting relies heavily on moose dogs, so the family owned several of these.  Sven also hunted deer, rabbits, and birds, all requiring different dogs.  Many of my husband’s childhood pictures feature various hunting dogs.

By the time I met them, my parents-in-law were both retired, and the country house they had lived in was two houses in the past, but Sven still kept one moose dog, a dignified black and white huntress called Bricka.  Märta was fond of Bricka, but still kept the memory of a beagle the family had owned, Bess, closest to her heart.  Cats, however, held no appeal whatsoever for Märta, not even as mousers—that’s what terriers were for.

When we went to visit, I sometimes accompanied Märta on her trips into town.  My in-laws had re-settled in the town they grew up in, a small village of several thousand on the west side of Sweden.  Each visit to the high street with Märta was punctuated by friendly hellos to her fellow villagers and animated conversations with shopkeepers.  Märta liked to introduce me as her American daughter-in-law, after which her conversant and I would exchange smiles.  Sometimes Märta told me more about the people we had just run into when we had walked away: “Oh, that’s Mary; she’s having terrible trouble with her husband at the moment.  He had an operation, for his heart, but he’s not recovering well…  Isn’t that shopkeeper lovely?  I’m so glad he opened up his shop.  He gets the best fruit and vegetables, and he and his wife are so hard-working.”

A few years after my husband and I married, Sven suffered a major stroke that left him significantly disabled.  As time passed and it became clear that Sven would never regain his previous level of health, Märta, whom I had always known as optimistic and outgoing, began to have spells of worry and sadness, and, by necessity as Sven’s primary carer, she became more housebound.

It was a family joke, even before Sven’s stroke, that Märta could not keep her sons straight.  She had four, two of whom were identical twins, so it was not surprising that some confusion would develop.  The twins’ names were muddled with some regularity, my husband was called by his oldest brother’s name on occasion, and even my name, Beth, had sometimes been mixed with Bess, the name of the gone-but-not-forgotten beagle.  Not long after Sven’s stroke, Märta began taking selenium tablets.

“I’m taking these little pills now,” she would say at breakfast when my husband and I were visiting, which happened less often since Sven’s stroke, because guests, even very familiar, helpful guests, placed an additional strain on Märta.  “They’re meant to improve my memory.  The problem is, I keep forgetting to take them.”

We would all smile, and my husband, who is the youngest (by a distance) of Märta’s four sons, would say, “So that’s why I end up being called every other brother’s name before you get to mine.  You have to remember your pills more often, Mamma.”

After a few years, the physical strain of caring for Sven became too much for Märta.  Sven moved to a care home, and after some years there, he passed away.  Märta moved to an apartment overlooking the village square, and became rapidly more forgetful.  My husband’s older brothers and sisters took turns visiting Märta, and slowly took over her affairs—her banking, her doctor’s appointments, and when it became clear that Märta could no longer cook safely for herself, her meals.

We had moved to London not long before Sven’s passing.  My husband was able to justify occasional trips to Sweden through his work, but the kids and I were only able to see Märta once a year.  Three years ago, Märta made a request: she wanted to have a meal with all of her grown children.  Her children were happy to oblige; a fine restaurant close to Märta’s home was chosen, and Märta, all the siblings and their partners, and our two children spent a sunny afternoon partaking of lovingly prepared Swedish food and relishing each other’s company.  Two years ago, the same restaurant served as the gathering place, but Märta was running a fever; while the afternoon was pleasant, an undercurrent of concern ran through it.

Last year the siblings booked the lunch at another restaurant in Märta’s village.  Our party was seated in the conservatory.  One side of the table, the side Märta happened to be seated at, had to contend with a bit of glare from the sunshine coming through the glass roof.  We could chalk some of Märta’s increased confusion up to the altered visual circumstances—it is harder to recognize people with the sun in your eyes—but all of us knew that wasn’t really the problem.  Not only did Märta often seem unsure of who she was talking to, she also did not recall what she had talked about.  When she asked our children for the third time if they had been swimming outside yet that year, my husband and I exchanged glances.  Our kids grew up in England, and their Swedish is yet to be truly fluent, so they were unfazed by the redundancy as they struggled to both understand and answer each time the question was posed.  I was grateful that the kids were both not skilled enough and not brazen enough to tell Farmor that she was repeating herself.

This year the siblings planned whole-group get-togethers that did not include Märta; it was tacitly agreed that a meal with such a large group would cost her more than she would gain from it. We scheduled our annual family trip to include a lunch with all of my husband’s brothers and one of his two sisters a few hours north of Märta’s home, in the part of Sweden where four of the six siblings own houses, and booked our usual two nights in the self-service apartments in Märta’s village. During the car journey south, I asked the children, now ten and seven, to turn off their screens for a moment.

“Listen kids, this is important,” I commenced. “We’re about to visit Farmor. Farmor is quite old now, nearly ninety, and she has become very forgetful. She probably won’t remember your names, and even if you tell her, she may not be sure who you are. She may say the same thing over and over. This isn’t her fault; it just ends up that way for some people when they get to be that age. So you still need to be polite, OK? It’s important to respect our elders.”

“Yes, Mum,” Nina said seriously. Sam, our son, nodded his head gravely.

“So even if Farmor asks what your name is four times, each time you need to answer as if she hasn’t asked you before.  Don’t say ‘You already asked me that,’” my husband, who consistently speaks Swedish to the children, added in English. Both children sat up straight, listening with particular attention to what must be critical information to have necessitated presentation in English.

“Got it,” Sam said. This time Nina nodded, wide-eyed.

We called two hours before arriving at Märta’s flat, but when we appeared in her doorway, she was nonetheless surprised to see us.

“Are you here!” she exclaimed, smiling. “I had no idea you were coming!”

Anyone who has ever offered advice knows that it is far easier to give than to follow. “We called you from the road, Mamma,” my husband said. “And I know it’s written on your calendar.”

“Oh, I didn’t remember that you had called. How good to see you! And what are these children’s names?”

“I’m Sam,” Sam replied.

“And I’m Nina. Nina Louise Elvira. You’re Elvira too,” Nina said helpfully.

“That’s right, Märta Elvira, after my mother, her first name was Elvira.  She died when I was only your age,” Märta added wistfully. “Tuberculosis.”

After a faraway moment, Märta returned, and saw that Nina was still standing in front of her. “Aren’t you pretty,” Märta said, placing her hands on Nina’s shoulders.

Nina grinned bashfully.

“We thought we would go out for dinner,” Håkan said.  “To the Thai restaurant just around the corner.”

“Thai? Is there a Thai restaurant here now?”

“Yes, around the corner, you went there with one of the twins.  There used to be a pizzeria there.”

“Oh, the pizzeria.  Is there a Thai restaurant there now?  I didn’t realize.”

Märta put on her tweed jacket and Håkan took her arm.  The stairs leading down from Märta’s apartment are made of black marble, with slight dips in the middle from many generations of footfalls, and the staircase turns; at its most narrow, even Nina could not fit her entire foot on a stair.  For the past few years, each time we have taken Märta up or down those stairs, I have held my breath.  We completed the staircase descent without incident, and started walking slowly towards the restaurant.

To Nina’s delight, she was seated across from Märta at dinner, with me to her right and Sam on my other side.  My husband sat on Märta’s left.  Märta had left her glasses at home, and was flummoxed by the menu, so we selected a mild chicken curry for her.  Nina, who likes to be “food twins” with people, picked the same dish.

“We eat same, chicken!” Nina told Märta, in broken Swedish, with great animation.

Märta regarded Nina, bemused. “Have you started school yet?”

Nina wiggled in her seat with pleasure at being asked a question. “Yes, I am Year Two… Well, Pappa, how do you say ‘I am about to start Year Three’?”

My husband provided her with the Swedish translation, which Nina replicated to the best of her ability. “Sam Year Six,” she added, puffing up with pride that her brother was about to start his last year at primary school.

“Do you like school?” Märta asked.

“Yes.  Pappa, how do you say ‘I like literacy the best’?”

My husband again filled his role as translator, and Nina repeated him.

“Year Three first year Key Stage Two,” Nina elaborated, combining Swedish and English.

Märta smiled at Nina, but turned to Håkan. “I can’t understand what she’s saying,” Märta admitted.

“She’s mixing Swedish and English, so that doesn’t make it easier, but basically she’s telling you about school.”

“She’s very enthusiastic,” Märta said.

“That she is,” my husband concurred.

“And the boy, what’s his name again?”

“Samuel. Sam.”

Sam leaned forward and waved.

“He’s lovely,” Märta said approvingly.

“Thank you, we think so too. They’re good kids,” I said.

The rest of the evening continued in the same vein. Nina did her utmost to communicate with Märta, asking for frequent translation assistance. My husband and I ran interference on Nina’s efforts at conversation and made small talk. Sam focussed on eating as much of his Thai yellow curry with grapes and pineapple as he could manage. Märta listened to Nina indulgently, asked several more times what years the children were in at school and what their names were, and brought up a few of her familiar themes.

For the past three years, Märta had perseverated on certain topics, returning to some several times an hour, and to others less frequently. Dogs were low-repetition, but the theme was one of the more challenging because of the great discrepancy between desire and possibility.

“I would like to have a dog.  It gets very lonely, being by myself all the time. There are those people that come,” Märta said, referring to the care workers that came briefly twice a day, “but a dog would be good company.”

My husband and I looked at each other, thinking of how completely impossible it would be for Märta to care for even the smallest dog given her limitations.

“A moose dog, they are wonderful dogs,” Märta said dreamily.

My husband laughed. “Mamma, you can’t have a moose dog, it would pull you of your feet in a second.”

Again Märta snapped back to the present. “I know I can’t have a moose dog. But do you remember all the dogs we’ve had over the years? There was Puck, and then there was Bess, the beagle…”

“Puck was a great dog,” my husband said. “Do you remember when he ran the moose into the lake?”

Märta laughed. “Yes, that didn’t end well for the moose. At Bosjön there were always puppies, do you remember?”

Bosjön was the country house Märta and Sven had lived in when Sven was working for the forestry company. The house had served as a venue for dinners with important guests, as the childhood home for most of my husband’s siblings, and even, on rare occasions, as a holding space for the village dead. The family had eaten fish from the nearby lake, moose and deer from the forest, and mushrooms and berries from the land.

“I was three when we left Bosjön, Mamma. I don’t remember very much from there.”

“Were you so little? Oh, Bosjön was special. I was always so busy, but it was exciting.”

“We had dog, Enzo, ten days,” Nina volunteered in clear, although grammatically broken, Swedish.

“Do you have a dog?” Märta asked, surprised.

“No, we were watching a friend’s dog for a couple of weeks,” my husband clarified. “A terrier.”

“That’s nice,” Märta said to Nina.  Nina beamed.

After the meal, we walked Märta home, then retired to our lodging.

“You did such a great job talking to Farmor,” I said to Nina. “I have never seen you speak that much Swedish.”

“I like Farmor. She’s cute.”

“Cute?”

“Yeah, she’s just so short, and she’s got so many wrinkles, and she’s just, well, she’s cute!” Nina explained.

I thought of all I knew about Märta’s life, and I remembered the woman she had been before Sven’s stroke. To think of that vibrant, opinionated, energetic woman, who had endured considerable hardship, worked tirelessly, yet loved nothing more than laughing at a good story, as “cute” seemed to diminish Märta to nearly unrecognizable. “Cute,” furthermore, struck me as verging on disrespectful. But I tried to consider Nina’s perspective. I recalled my own great-grandmothers, who had been about the same age as Märta was now when I was Nina’s age. When I knew them, I had never seen past their silver hair, slow movements, and thick glasses to the women they had been, just as Nina only saw Märta as she was now, rather than as she had been. I would not have called my great-grandmothers “cute” though, as I did not spend enough time with them to feel the closeness that “cute” requires. Although it rubbed me the wrong way, “cute” was actually a good thing.

“Hmm, cute, OK,” I said. “Sleep tight now, sweetie.”

“Will we see Farmor tomorrow?”

“Yes, we’re going to cook dinner at her place tomorrow.”

“Yay!” Nina exclaimed.

The following afternoon, after a trip to the supermarket, we walked up to Märta’s flat. Märta opened the door with the same amazed expression as on the previous day.

“Is it you! I didn’t know you were coming!”

“Hello Mamma. We left you a note, didn’t you see it, saying we would be here and we would fix dinner,” my husband reminded Märta gently.

“How good to see you!”

Märta took each child’s face in her hands in turn. After they were greeted, the kids went to watch TV in the sitting room. Håkan set to work in the kitchen, and I sat at the kitchen table with Märta.

“Look at him,” Märta said, gazing with wonder at Håkan, who was hard at work chopping vegetables. “Does he make dinner at home too?”

“He does, on weekends. He’s a good cook. He’s not the only son of yours that knows his way around the kitchen- Hans is quite a chef as well.”

“Is he? Well, they certainly didn’t inherit that from their father. Sven, he couldn’t cook at all.”

“I remember. But he was good at other things.”

“That’s him there,” Märta said, pointing to a black and white photo in a simple frame next to the kitchen table. I recognized Sven instantly, although in the picture, Sven was far younger than he had been when I first met him: his hair still dark, his face unweathered, his features handsome and determined.  It struck me that Märta, although she “knew” me enough to feel warmly towards me, could not place me in her family history. I had already accepted that my name was no longer accessible, but to be disassociated in her memory from my father-in-law, whom I had known and loved, plucked the string of loss sharply.

“I talk to him during the day,” Märta continued. “I tell him what’s happening in the village square. I think about our lives sometimes, and I think how lucky we were that Sven was able to do what he loved for work. When we were at Bosjön, he made his living doing what came naturally to him- hunting, looking after the forest. I’m so glad it turned out like that.”

I nodded, and we both fell backwards in time, thinking of Sven in our separate ways, until my husband brought us back to the present by asking where Märta kept her salad bowls. I rose to lay the dining table, then returned to my seat opposite Märta in the kitchen.

“He’s still cooking,” Märta said, newly impressed by Håkan’s efforts.

“Nearly done now, Mamma.”

“I’m not sure what he’s making. Fish, I think.”

“Salmon with sweet chilli sauce,” Håkan repeated patiently.

“Have you seen my begonias?” Märta asked me, gesturing towards the flowering plants adorning the kitchen windowsill beside the picture of Sven.

I knew what story the begonia comment led to, and I readied myself to listen to it again.

“They’re lovely,” I said, honestly.  Märta had kept begonias for all the years I had known her; cheerful, colourful small plants with white, pink and red flowers.

“A woman came up to me in the square and took me by the arm one day.  ‘Are those your begonias in the window?’ she asked me, almost whispering.  I didn’t know the woman, I hadn’t seen her before, but she must have really liked my flowers to ask me.  ‘Yes,’ I told her, ‘Those are mine.’  ‘They’re beautiful!’ the woman said, holding my arm. ‘What are they called?’ ‘They’re begonias,’ I told her.  She thanked me, and went away.”

So far, the story matched previous tellings.  “She must have really liked your begonias,” I commented.  “Maybe she wanted to buy some herself, so it’s good that you told her what they were called.”

I assumed the thread would end there, as it had many times before, but I was wrong.

“I wish I had thought to tell the woman to come up for some cuttings,” Märta said.  “I could have easily given her cuttings.  But I didn’t know who she was, and I didn’t see her again.  I’ve thought about her many times since that day, how she took my arm and asked about my flowers.”

This new ending made the anecdote still more poignant.  In the original recounting, the emphasis seemed to be on the pride Märta took in tending the begonias well, but now the weight was on the missed connection.  It mattered that Märta had not known the woman, and that the woman had made a particular effort to approach Märta, but what gnawed at Märta the most was that she had not helped the woman as much as she could have.  I thought of Märta’s prodigious talents in the kitchen, and how, one afternoon before Sven’s stroke, Märta had spent several hours patiently demonstrating to me how best to bake the moist, delicious cinnamon buns that were a staple of the family coffee breaks.  For Märta, the pleasure derived from  sharing her skills was nearly as great, and perhaps even greater, than the pleasure gained from putting them to use for her own benefit.

“Dinner is served,” Håkan announced, and the kids tore themselves away from the TV and joined the adults at the table.  I spent the meal worrying about how Märta would find the children’s table manners; at restaurants the kids normally exhibited self-control, but at home they sometimes ignored my requests to consistently use cutlery.  To my relief, Märta let their occasional minor infractions pass unnoticed, and dinner was completed without major table manner violations.

After dinner, my husband left to run a couple of short errands for Märta.  The kids resumed watching TV, and I began washing up.  After resting for a few moments at the kitchen table, Märta rose stiffly and fetched a dish towel.

“I may as well dry, that way it will be all finished,” she said.

“No, no, you can just sit down, your knee could surely use the rest,” I protested.

“I like to be helpful.  That’s what I like the most about the senior center; they give us work to do.  We actually help in the kitchen, we don’t just sit around.”

I relented.  Märta stood beside me, picking the rinsed dishes out of the dish rack.

“Have you been swimming yet this year?” Märta asked, revisiting the topic she preferred above all others.

“No, I haven’t, it hasn’t really been warm enough this year.”

“I remember when I was young; it used to be a competition, to see who could go in the water first.  It was so cold!  I can’t imagine getting into such cold water now.”

“Did you like swimming as a child?” I asked.

“I loved it.  My father taught me.  My mother, she died when I was very young,” Märta said.

I was hit again by the feeling of disconnect that occurred whenever Märta told me something I had known for many years as though I were a stranger.  “Yes,” I said, nodding.

“But my father felt it was important for all of us to learn how to swim.  And it is very important for children, if they should ever be in a situation where they need to swim; they need to feel they can.  If they can’t swim, they may panic, and that’s the worst thing you can do in the water.”

“That’s true.  I’m glad my kids feel comfortable in the water.  Did you like swimming more than your brothers and sisters?”

“Well, my father, he would hold us up in the water.  I remember how it felt, his arms under my middle, when I was first learning.  Barbro, she was so independent, she didn’t really take to swimming.  She never did learn properly.  I don’t see Barbro often enough,” Märta mused.

I held my tongue.  Of Märta’s four siblings, I was certain that at least three had passed away, and it seemed entirely possible that Märta was the only living sibling.

“I would like to meet her again.  I would like to see Barbro.  I would ask her if she finally learned to swim.”  Märta smiled, envisaging the conversation in her mind.

“That was good of your dad to teach all of you,” I said, steering the conversation back towards more solid ground.  “Where was that?”

“It was right there in Lilla Le,” Märta said, referring to the lake visible from her small balcony.  “I went swimming there, perhaps last summer, but it wasn’t like I thought it would be.”

“No?”

“No.  It was too cold.  I couldn’t relax in the water.  I didn’t really swim.”

“That’s too bad.  Maybe you could try swimming indoors somewhere?” I asked, regretting the suggestion even before I had finished the sentence.  Where would Märta swim?  There was no suitable indoor swimming pool in her little village.  Even if the logistics could be managed, I suspected that what Märta truly wanted was to not to swim in the present, but to swim in the past, as she had when she was a girl, when her father had held her up, when she had been one of the first kids in town to brave the icy lake water in the early Swedish spring.  The contrast between Märta’s nearly 90-year old body, aching and unsteady, and the body of her youth, floating easily through the water, was stark.

The apartment door opened and closed.  Håkan entered the kitchen.  “Mamma, what are you doing standing up?” he asked, solicitously.  “Sit down and rest.  Let us take care of this.”

Märta made no effort to protest, and returned to her seat at the kitchen table beside the picture of Sven.

Back at our lodgings, when the kids had finally succumbed to sleep, I settled myself on the couch with a cup of tea.  I asked Håkan, “Is Märta’s sister Barbro still alive?”

Håkan answered without looking, while watching the sports on TV.  “Yes, I believe she is.  It’s just her and Mamma left now.  Why?”

“Märta was talking about her this evening.  She said she would like to see Barbro again.”

Håkan raised his eyebrows.  “Really?”

“She said that while you were out.  Which one is Barbro, is she the slightly odd one that lived in the forest?”

“No, that’s Gun.  I don’t think you ever met Barbro.”

“The only one I met was Kalle.”

“Ah.  How did you end up talking about Barbro?”

“We were talking about swimming again.  But this time Märta told me that her dad had taught all of them to swim, all except Barbro, who was too independent.”

Håkan laughed.  “That sounds about right.”

“Do you think it would be possible to get Märta to the hydrotherapy pool your dad went to sometimes after his stroke?  What town was that in?”

“That was in Nal, but I don’t think it’s operational now.”

“There probably isn’t another one anywhere close by?”

“No, the nearest would be Uddevalla, and that would be a schlep.”

“She just seems to miss swimming so much.”

Håkan turned away from the sports, and looked straight at me.  “Beth, it’s hard to tell if she really misses swimming, or if it’s just the way her mind works now.  It’s like a broken record.”

“Her mental needle does seem stuck on the ‘first one in the water’ track, that’s true.”

Håkan nodded and resumed watching TV.  I sipped my tea and wondered why Märta’s swirling sense of time was so disconcerting.  Sven’s path through his last years had been so different; even after his stroke rendered speaking enormously difficult for him, his mind had remained sharp.  Sven knew exactly who I was, and who his grandchildren were, the last time I saw him.  Märta, however, could no longer retrieve that information, and that inability, more than all the other changes that had come with senility, caused me to mourn her loss, although she was still present.  It seemed petty and selfish to care about being known, but a relationship is built, to a great extent, on a foundation of shared memories; without them, two people may be friendly with each other, but not close.  I no longer figured in any cohesive memory for Märta.  Her strongest recall was for events that had happened during the first few decades of her life, well before my husband had been born.  I could still learn more about Märta, and my children would form memories of this visit, but the opposite did not hold true, and that was not easy to sit with.

The following morning we packed our suitcases and left our self-catering apartment.  We drove the short distance to the village square, and the four of us trundled up the worn marble stairs to say goodbye to Märta.  Although we had left another note in the kitchen, our arrival was again an unexpected pleasure.  Håkan and I had agreed beforehand that we would stay only briefly, as we had the long drive to the airport ahead of us, so when Märta, who had been resting in her room before we showed up, asked if we wanted coffee, Håkan declined.  Relieved of that task, Märta made her way slowly to the chair closest to the TV and settled herself in it carefully.  We chatted for a few minutes, then the community nurse called out from the doorway.

“Hello Märta!  It’s Marcus!”

“Oh hello!” Märta replied, then turned to us and said sotto voce, “This is the young man who comes sometimes, he is just wonderful, so kind and cheerful.”

Marcus entered the sitting room.  “Hi there,” he said to us. “Märta didn’t say that you would be here this morning, I could have left her medicines for you to give to her.”

“We wrote it down on the notebook in the kitchen, but don’t worry, we’re just stopping by on our way out of town,” my husband said.

Marcus introduced himself to the children, then went to Märta and took her hand.  “How lovely to have visitors! Now Märta, have you had your breakfast this morning?”

Märta looked at Marcus while her mind searched for the answer.  “No, I don’t think I have,” she finally replied.

“Shall I fix something?  Maybe your favourite prawn cocktail sandwich?”

“Yes,” Märta said, visibly relieved, “Yes, I would like that.”

“And perhaps a cup of coffee to go with it?”

“Yes, that sounds good.”

A tidal wave of guilt washed over me.  It was after 10 o’clock, we had been at Märta’s for ten minutes, and we had not checked to see if she had eaten.  Our refusal of coffee, and our failure to start some brewing and offer something to accompany it, suddenly felt almost criminally negligent.

“I can fix the coffee,” Håkan volunteered.

Markus brushed off Håkan’s offer breezily.  “Oh, you carry on talking; I’ll have it done in a tick.  But before I do that, I have some pills for you, Märta.”

“Oh, my pills.  I like to joke with him, I ask him if he can’t find some that are tastier,” Märta said in our direction.

Markus smiled at her fondly.  “She has a good sense of humour, your mamma,” he said to Håkan.

Märta took the medicine, and Markus repaired to the kitchen, as did Håkan, despite Markus’s dismissal of Håkan’s offer to help.

Märta turned the small white pills over in her hand.  “I don’t really know what these are for,” she confided to me.  “Since my fall a couple of years ago, my head hasn’t been quite right.  They may be for that.”

I wasn’t sure what the medicine was for either, but it tugged at my heart to hear Märta hope aloud that it may be medicine that would restore order in her mind.

Håkan and Markus presented Märta with coffee and a sandwich respectively.  Markus wished us safe travels, took leave of Märta, and quietly let himself out of the flat.

“That is such a nice young man.  It’s not always him that comes, but I’m happy when it is,” Märta said, nibbling at her sandwich half-heartedly.

When we had finished our coffee and quickly washed the dishes, the time came to set off for the airport.

“Well, Mamma,”  Håkan said, standing by Märta and resting his hand on her shoulder.  She laid a hand over his.

“Yes.  How wonderful it has been to see you, and the children.  What are their names again?”

“Sam,” Sam declared.

“And Nina,” Nina added, pronouncing her name with extra emphasis on the second syllable, in a continued effort to assimilate.

“Come here,” Märta said to Nina.  Nina obliged, and stood before Märta, pleased to be singled out.  “You are so adorable,”  Märta said.  Nina smiled from ear to ear, and shrugged her shoulders with the false modesty of a seven-year old.

As departure loomed, the possible finality of the goodbyes struck me with still more force than it had the previous year, and I asked Håkan to take a picture of me with Märta and the children.  Märta and I took the back row, with Märta holding Nina’s shoulders, and me holding Sam’s.  Nina, for once, posed without sticking out her tongue or pulling a silly face.  After a couple shots with my camera, Håkan and I switched places, and I took a few shots of the four of them.  Then it was time for hugs.  Sam was first in line; he said goodbye matter-of-factly, returned Märta’s hug, then walked out to the landing, ready for the next stage of our journey.   Nina, although two years younger, understood the emotional aspect of farewell more deeply, and one embrace was not sufficient for her.

“Goodbye Farmor,” Nina said, in her best Swedish, after giving Märta a second squeeze.

“Goodbye little friend,” Märta said, with the slight lisp she reserved for those she loved best.  “Come back and see me again soon, will you?”

“I will…”  Nina said hesitantly.  She turned to me, and asked in English, “When, Mum?  When will we be back?  Christmas? Next summer?”

“Probably not before next summer, sweetie,” I answered apologetically.

“How do you say ‘next summer’ in Swedish?”

Håkan translated.  Nina repeated the words to Märta, then went to join Sam just outside the open door.  I was next.  Märta clasped my hands in hers and looked me in the eye.  “So good to see you,” she said.

“And so good to see you.  Take care of yourself, Märta.  See you next summer.”  We hugged, and it dawned on me that, while the details of who I was and where I fit in historically were fuzzy at best,  Märta’s affection for me was clear and intact, as was my affection for her.  I joined the children on the landing, then led them slowly down the winding stairs, leaving Håkan to say farewell in private.

We settled ourselves into the rental car and left Märta’s village, passing the ancient white stone church and its cemetery, where Sven had been laid to rest, on our way out of town.

***

Since gaining the ability to express her own ideas, around the age of five, Nina has maintained steadfastly that she will neither marry nor bear children.  I’ve wondered, vaguely, what it is about marriage and motherhood that makes her so adamantly opposed to both of these states.  Perhaps because of my reluctance to hear her defend her position, stemming from my (hopefully) misguided fear that her case rests on my inadequacies as a wife and mother, I have never pressed the point.  I point out, when she states that she will remain single and childless, that were it not for her parents’ love for each other, she would not exist, and I mention that she and her brother have brought joy beyond measure into my life, but I tell her that I respect her right to her own destiny, and if that destiny does not include a husband or children, then so be it.

When we were about halfway to the airport, Nina piped up from the backseat.

“I like Farmor,” she said.

“That’s good, sweetie.  Farmor is lovely, and she likes you too,” I said.

“I know she does.  Would you like to have grandchildren some day?”

Despite wanting to seem impartial, I felt I should answer Nina as truthfully as possible.  “I want you to follow your own path, but if that path included children, I would be over the moon to be a grandmother someday.”

“I want you to have the chance to be a grandma.  I want to have two children, a girl and a boy,” Nina said firmly.

I said a quick and silent prayer that I would live long enough to hold those future grandchildren, should they materialize, once in my arms.

“That sounds wonderful, Nina.  I would love to see your children.”

Nina smiled, satisfied, then started an animated conversation with her brother.  I smiled too, gazing at my little girl, and catching a glimpse of her grandmother in the set of her chin.

It’s A Wide Open Road

I recently took my seven-year old daughter to the cinema.  We arrived early enough to see the pre-film advertisements, including one for the Ford Focus Titanium, a car with multiple safety features to assist the driver, including blind spot alerts and self-braking when the car is travelling at less than twenty miles per hour and senses a stationary car ahead.

“Oh my gosh,” I exclaimed, practically jumping out of my seat, “I need that car.”

“What is it, Mum?  What are you so excited about?” Nina asked.

“The Ford Focus Titanium…  I really want that car!”  I told her.

“Maybe you can ask for one for Christmas?” Nina suggested helpfully.

I grinned.  “That’s a good idea, honey.  But really I think we’ll stick with the car we have for a few more years.  When our car stops running, maybe we could get one.”

***

My memories of car travel date from when I was perhaps seven years old, the same age my daughter is now.  My mother used to take me and my younger brother and sister from Vermont, where we lived, to visit her parents in Pennsylvania at least a couple times a year by car.  Mom worked hard to make these six-hour car rides as fun as possible, leading us in song and suggesting inventive games for us to play.  While Mom succeeded to the degree that I remember the seemingly interminable car journeys fondly, there would invariably come a time on each trip when  Mom would utter the threat: “If you don’t stop that right now, I am pulling over to the side of the road, and I will not start driving again until you’re sitting nicely.”  In those days, long before mandated child seats, we three children would rotate our seating arrangements, with the lucky one sitting in the front passenger seat, and the two losers of the draw sitting in the back seat. The antecedent to the “pulling over” threat was often excessive tickling or roughhousing occurring in the back seat.  Sometimes just the thought of stopping was enough to whip us back into shape, but sometimes it wasn’t.  If we continued to create chaos, Mom would make good on her word and pull over, regardless of whether we were on a side road or a major highway.  My siblings and I would watch our mom stare stonily ahead while other cars zoomed past our windows, and eventually we would settle down.  When I was in the back seat, I both dreaded and anticipated the pulling-over manoeuvre; I knew it meant we were in big trouble, but I looked forward to either observing my mom’s silent resignation or listening to her voice her frustration, which usually went something like this: “I can not concentrate with you making such a racket in the back seat!  How can I drive safely when you’re shouting at each other back there?  I’m the only driver here, and the longer you act like that, the longer it will take us to get to Pennsylvania!”

I could giggle during Mom’s car tirades because I knew that within five minutes we would be back on the road, slowly closing the distance between ourselves and Pennsylvania.  My mom is a skilled driver, and it was apparent, despite our interruptions, that she relished the feeling of freedom that comes from cruising along highways at seventy miles per hour.

***

I got my own Vermont driver’s license at the tender age of seventeen.  My mom had assumed that, with her wealth of driving experience, she would be able to teach me to drive herself.  Sadly, from the very beginning I had an unhelpful awareness of cars as rolling implements of destruction, possibly due to having mourned several cats that were lost to road accidents.  In one particularly gruesome case, I was actually in the car when a young cat of ours that had been sleeping in the wheel well died.  I was nine at the time, and I remember running down the street afterwards in tears, swearing to never ride in a car again.  Some of our pets survived being hit by cars but were permanently injured, like our grey cat, Phineas, who limped for the rest of his life after a collision.  By sixteen, I knew I needed to drive- there was no public transportation for anyone under 65 in my hometown, and the nearest cinema was in a town over twenty miles away- but cars terrified me.

My mom saw cars as a means to an end, and could not comprehend why I insisted on driving under ten miles an hour on the deserted dirt road she chose as a beginner’s slope.  It became a vicious circle; my mom would get more and more frustrated by my slow speed and my hesitancy, then I would drive even less confidently, leading to more parental frustration, and still more timidity.  While Mom had a healthy perspective on cars, she suffered from an occasionally debilitating fear of heights, so when I finally graduated to speeds above twenty and was ready to drive on paved rather than dirt roads, she became noticeably anxious whenever there was a height drop on the passenger side of the car.  I grew up in Vermont, the Green Mountain state, so this happened often.  After one particularly harrowing journey during which I had driven so cautiously that I had become a hazard, then so close to the edge of the road that Mom had become terror-stricken, I pulled over to the side of the road halfway down the small mountain that led to our village and stormed out of the car.  My younger brother and sister looked on from the back seat as I shouted, in a typically dramatic teenaged manner, “That’s it, I am not driving ever again.”

“Beth, get back in the car,” my mom had ordered, through the rolled-down window.

“No, I am walking the rest of the way,” I replied defiantly.

My mom had quickly switched to the driver’s seat and started driving at a snail’s pace along beside me.  “Get back in the car this minute,” she commanded.

“Beth, come on, get back in,” my brother chimed in.  My sister sat stock still, looking uncomfortable.

After about fifty feet of this, with me striding purposefully along the grassy verge and my mom driving slowly behind me in the breakdown lane, I realized that it was actually quite a long walk home, and my self-righteousness faded enough for me to succumb and climb into the passenger seat.

Mom proposed driving lessons with the high school driver’s education instructor shortly after that incident.  Mr Mason was a soft-spoken man of perhaps thirty, with dark, fine hair and a moustache.  He taught both industrial arts and driver’s ed.  He was a masterful melodic whistler.  The more stressful the driving instructing experience became, the more intently Mr Mason would whistle, and I figured out that if the tune increased to a certain volume, the emergency instructor’s brake was likely to soon be utilized.  To brake firmly when driving oneself is jarring, but to come to a sudden stop as a pseudo-passenger is even more unpleasant, and I learned to read Mr Mason’s whistling cues to try to avoid emergency brake situations.

As part of the driver’s education theory classes, we were required to watch a movie whose name I can’t remember exactly, but that sounded like “Death Machine.”  The other students in the class were beside themselves with excitement when Mr Mason announced that the next class meeting would include the film screening.  Everyone knew that “Death Machine” was something of a low-budget horror movie about the disastrous effects of drinking and driving; the plot centred on two high-school lovebirds who go out to a dance and an after-party, they drink too much, and the driver crashes the car, with fatal results for all involved.

I raised my hand.

“Yes, Beth?”

“Um, Mr Mason, I really don’t want to watch the movie,” I said.  Some of my classmates snickered.

“Well, you need to show me that you understand the consequences of drinking and driving,” Mr Mason said, thoughtfully.  “How about you write a short report about that topic?”

“That’s fine,” I agreed.  I spent the first half of the following class sitting on a bench close to the school office while “Death Machine” was screened.  When I was called back, some of my classmates were vaguely green, while others were whispering to each other enthusiastically.

“Did you see how the train just plowed into them?” I heard one boy say. “And the blood splattered all over the windshield?”

“Can you shut up and stop talking about it?” a friend of mine hissed.

I had made a very wise decision to spend that half hour on the bench.

The remaining lectures, on topics like driving in the snow and appropriate use of headlights, were far less popular than the “Death Machine” screening with most of the class.  After sitting through them, and enduring several more driving sessions with Mr Mason, all I had to do was wait until August, when I would be eligible for my full license.  My seventeenth birthday came and went, and shortly afterwards I appeared as summoned for my theory and practical exams at the town music hall, a grand turn-of-the-century building wholly incongruous with a licensing test.  I was given a sheet with ten multiple-choice theory questions.  I needed to get six right to pass.  I answered seven correctly, then moved on to the practical exam.  Because I grew up in a small town, I knew the examiner, Mr Swift.  He was older than Mr Mason, with white wavy hair and deep wrinkles.  Mr Swift walked me outside to the test car.  I panicked inwardly during the hill stop and revved the engine a bit but didn’t roll backwards.  Mr Swift directed me back to the music hall, I parked acceptably, shut off the car, and less than an hour after the exam had begun, I was declared a licensed driver.

After several years of detente with automobiles, during which I tolerated them and they served my needs, I moved to Gothenburg, Sweden with my husband.  Gothenburg had excellent public transportation, and Håkan and I had neither reason nor funds to buy a car.  I took up cycling again, having cycled both by necessity and for pleasure during my childhood, and I became the sort of cycle commuter who owns and uses rain gear rather than leaving the bike at home.  When we moved back to the U.S., after three years abroad,  I carried on cycling.

Cycling is fine for local travel, but Håkan wanted a car.  We had both taken up rock climbing, and a car would make it possible for us to get to the cliffs.  The first time I drove the car we had purchased, Håkan feared for his life.  I was accustomed to cycle speeds, and I steadfastly refused to drive faster than twenty miles per hour.

“Beth, you’ve got to speed up.  This is Boston,” Håkan pleaded.

“I’m going over twenty!” I retorted, feeling like a Formula One driver.

“The speed limit here is thirty.  To drive this slowly is actually dangerous,” Håkan pointed out.  He knew me well; appealing to my sense of safety was a wise tactic.

“I guess you’re right… I’ll try to speed up,” I said, increasing my velocity to a breakneck twenty-five miles per hour.

Håkan sighed.  “Why don’t I drive for a few weeks, until you get the idea that cars are not bikes.”

That would have been a good solution, except that I was studying not only neuroanatomy but also the effects of traumatic brain injury as part of my graduate degree when Håkan made the suggestion.  On a scale of driving styles, with zero being extremely over-cautious and ten being prone to serious road rage, I would place at perhaps a three, while Håkan would fall somewhere between six and seven.  It may be that six to seven is a sensible and safe range, but for someone at my end of the spectrum, riding with someone who falls there can make the passenger seat feel like the kind of fairground ride that would have a long warning sign at the entrance.  The combination of my newfound knowledge of the effects of brain damage and our divergent driving styles led me to conclude that I would be best served wearing a cycle helmet and sitting directly behind Håkan while in the car.

The next time we planned to travel by car, Håkan set his jaw sternly as I retrieved my helmet from the closet, and he rolled his eyes dramatically when I climbed into the back seat behind him.  When I placed the helmet on my head and he heard the click of the buckle, Håkan snapped.

“Beth, I know cars are exceedingly frightening, and I suppose I can live with chauffeuring you around, but I am going nowhere if you insist on wearing that helmet,” Håkan stated unequivocally.

“But the effects of a car accident can last a lifetime.  I don’t want to end up with frontal lobe damage.  You don’t even have to be driving very fast for a crash to have a serious impact on your cognitive function,” I replied, leaving the helmet firmly on my head.

“Your cognitive function can also be markedly impaired by hunger, and we are not going for pizza until you take that thing off,” Håkan announced with finality.

After a few moments of us sitting in the stationary vehicle, my desire for pizza overcame my fear of traumatic brain injury.  “I’ll take the helmet off, but I’m not moving to the front, and you need to drive as carefully as possible,” I demanded.

Håkan emitted a long-suffering sigh.  “Of course I’m going to drive as carefully as possible.  Do you think I want to crash the car?  I don’t want to get hurt any more than you do, and I don’t want to have to pay for damage to this car or any other car.”

“Well, it doesn’t only depend on you, there are other drivers out there who may make poor choices,” I retorted, putting the helmet on the seat beside me.

“That is true, and I will do my best to be on the lookout for them.  I’m about to start the car, hopefully we’ll arrive in one piece at the pizzeria,” Håkan jested.

I smiled despite myself.  I recognized that my behaviour was eccentric at best, crazy at worst, but my trepidation was so great that I had to jump mental hurdles to consent to travelling by car at all.  Håkan knew that, and I was grateful that he loved me enough to tread lightly.

I only brought the helmet along that once.  I persisted in riding in the back seat for a few weeks, until I gradually re-acclimated myself to the speed of motorized vehicles.  After several months, I became confident enough driving to brave Storrow Drive, one of the most notorious roads in a city with a reputation for traffic madness.  My driving odometer clicked on steadily for a few years until Håkan and I again moved abroad, this time to London.

As an American in England, I was allowed to drive using my American license for one year.  I practiced seldom, content to let me husband drive whenever driving was necessary.  Even after our son, Sam, was born, I managed to get where I needed to go without a car.  I became adept at biking with Sam in the child seat, and even purchased a special cycle child seat that allowed him to recline should he fall asleep.

It wasn’t until Sam was five years old that my desire for an English driving license became overpowering.  We had transferred Sam to a school that was further from our home, and while we were very pleased about the move, we were less pleased about the logistics of transporting him to the new school.  I experimented with various solutions.  Sam was fascinated by wheels and had started riding a balance bike at three.  By five, he was comfortable on his two-wheeler, but biking to school took a solid twenty minutes and required cycling up a long, steep hill and navigating safely on the crowded footpath as school drew nearer.  My husband was able to change his work schedule so that he could cycle to school with Sam most mornings, but I still needed to collect Sam from school in the afternoon.  Sam’s little sister, Nina, was three years old at the time, and cycling with her in the child’s bike seat, particularly both up and down the precipitous hill, was taking its toll on my calves.  If the weather was adverse, we could take the bus, but the bus stopped a fair distance from the school, at the base of the aforementioned long, steep hill, and Sam was even less pleased about walking up that hill than he was about cycling up it.  It took less than a week of the new commute for me to understand that if I wanted to maintain any semblance of sanity, I would absolutely have to be able to drive.

I did some research into driving schools, looking for an acceptable combination of price and track record, and settled on a lesser-known but still reputable outfit.

When I opened the door for the instructor on the day of my first lesson, I knew instantly that I had not made the best choice.  The instructor was significantly overweight, had a B-movie moustache, and talked like a phone marketer.  As I drove along the less-crowded streets he had selected, I began to have flashbacks to high school and Mr Mason.

I cancelled the lesson I had booked for the following week with that driving school, and asked an acquaintance whose husband was also trying to get his U.K. license for advice.

“You should go with the English School of Motoring,” my acquaintance recommended.  “They are very good.  My husband still hasn’t passed, but that’s because he’s from India, and the driving there is not the same.”

“I’ve heard that,” I said.  I had once proofread a thesis about traffic in India, and had sworn afterwards to never even think of driving in that country, as it was clearly no place for the timid.  “How many times has your husband taken the practical test?”

“Four.”

“Oh dear…” I commiserated, hoping that I would not meet a similar fate.

“He still thinks the ESM instructors are excellent, he just can’t learn to drive the way the English do,” my acquaintance said.

I called ESM later that day, and set up a lesson with Dominic Delozier.

Dominic knocked on our door a couple minutes ahead of our scheduled lesson time.  I said a quick goodbye to the kids and opened the door, saying a silent prayer that this instructor would be better than the last one.  Dominic was about my height and had the build of someone who had played rugby.  His hair was greying, and his brow was becoming furrowed, but Dominic had bright blue eyes and remained handsome.

“You Beth?” Dominic asked, gruffly.

“Yes, that’s me,” I confirmed.

“The car’s just here.  So you’ve driven before?”

“Yes,” I said, as we walked the short distance to Dominic’s parking space.  The ESM logo on the car itself and the triangular ESM sign on the car roof made it instantly clear which car we were headed towards.  “I drove for years in the States.  I got my license at 17.”

“OK, so why don’t you sit right down in the driver’s seat,” Dominic suggested.

The car smelled faintly of cologne and cigarette smoke.  I adjusted the seat and the mirrors carefully, checking that I was completely happy.  I fastened my seat belt.

“Well, Beth, nice work with the mirrors, but next time put on your seat belt right after fixing your seat, before the mirrors.  That’s what they’ll expect the day of the test,” Dominic instructed.

I reddened.  “Right, sorry, I’ll remember that next time.”

“I’m sure you will,” Dominic said, with the slightest hint of a smile.

The weather was chilly, so I took it upon myself to roll up the passenger’s and driver’s side windows.

“If you don’t mind, Beth, I’d like the windows open just a crack,” Dominic said.

“Isn’t it a bit cold?”

“Well, I think it helps keep the air healthy in the car.  I’m in the car for hours on end, you know.”

“I guess you are,” I conceded, opening the windows half an inch each.

“So have you passed your theory test yet?”

“Um, no, not yet,” I confessed.

Dominic gave me the look a teacher gives a student who has just offered a lame excuse about why her homework is late, with his eyebrows raised and an expression of consternation.  “You best get on that, then,” he said.

“I just want to make sure I’m going to pass before I spend the money,” I replied, somewhat petulantly.

“Don’t wait until you know all the rules off by heart.  Just read The Highway Code a couple times, then make your appointment.  Tell you what, why don’t we switch places, and I’ll drive us over to Surbiton, where the roads are really wide.  I think you’ll like it over there, it has an American feel,” Dominic said.

Dominic was right; Surbiton suited me well.  The roads were very quiet and I didn’t have the feeling of playing an advanced game of chicken that I often had on English town streets.  I performed some basic manoeuvres, then it was time for Dominic to drive us home.

“So I’ll see you next Wednesday at 8,” Dominic said, as he stopped the car just outside our house.  “Book your theory test.”

“Will do,” I said.  “See you then.”

I made an appointment to take the theory test in three weeks, and I increased the pace of my studies, using my historically tried and proven method of writing down salient points.  I learned assorted rules about horses in traffic, and took to heart recommendations about how to best cross fords.  My fear of driving through tunnels grew, based on the many cautions regarding the tunnel environment.  Sam enthusiastically helped quiz me on the sign section of The Highway Code, the part of the book he found most fascinating.  I memorized the appearances of the “Priority Over Oncoming Vehicles” and “Speed Humps” road signs, among others.

The portion of the test that worried me most was hazard perception.  This segment entailed watching several short video clips filmed from the top of a vehicle.  Each clip contained from one to several particularly hazardous driving conditions, and the test taker was expected to identify each instance within seconds by clicking with the computer mouse in any area of the screen.  I can count on one hand the number of times I have voluntarily played video games, and Håkan has often marvelled at the slowness of my computer navigation, so I was far from a natural at hazard perception.  I practiced using the twenty clips on the test practice CD-rom I had purchased, but I knew hazard perception was my weak spot.

As it turned out, it was not just my weak spot, it was my Achilles heel.  I scored 48 out of 50 on the multiple choice section of the theory test and finished well in advance of the time limit, but I failed overall because of my miserable performance on hazard perception.

When Dominic arrived, early as usual, for my next lesson, he asked me how the test had gone.

“I didn’t pass,” I admitted, looking down.

“You surprise me, Beth; you’re a smart girl, didn’t you study enough?”

“It wasn’t the theory part, it was hazard perception.  I don’t play video games.”

“Ah, hazard perception.  Yes, that’s easier for the younger generation, they grew up using computers,” Dominic said, nodding.

“I first saw a computer when I was 18.”

“Right.  Well, it’s back to the drawing board for you then, and you’ll have to practice more.  You know they have a CD-rom with just hazard perception?  Like two hours of it.  Why don’t you get that?”

“Wow, that’s just what I need, two hours of hazard perception,” I said sarcastically.

“Hey, you’re the one that wants a license,” Dominic said, throwing his hands up in a “what do you want from me” gesture.  “So are you ready for the Kingston one-way system yet?”

“Um, I don’t know, I’m feeling a bit low from failing the theory test, that might not help.”

“Oh come on, it’ll boost your confidence,” Dominic cajoled.

I received the hazard perception CD-rom, containing over four hundred practice clips, a couple of days later.  I was a good student while at school, and I set about to master hazard perception methodically.  The clips themselves were filmed mostly in western England or Wales.  Many contained the Welsh word “araf” written in giant capital letters, sometimes alongside the English translation, “slow.”  The sequences were filmed by a camera mounted atop a Department of Motor Vehicles car, giving an oddly high perspective on the traffic, and the clips ran the gamut of driving conditions, from a sunny day in city traffic to a rainy evening on a one-car-wide country lane.  It was apparent from my scores that I preferred the country lanes.  I was quick to identify horses in the distance, or a single set of approaching headlights, but I was flummoxed by vehicles behaving badly in city roundabouts or on motorways, just as in real life.  The program picked up on this weakness after perhaps fifty clips and recommended that I concentrate on town and city driving sequences.

My dad and stepmom came to visit when I had about one hundred practice clips under my belt.

“So how’s the, what’s it called again, hazard practice going?” Dad asked.

“Hazard perception.  I’m getting better.  You’ve got to try it, it’s crazy,” I said, starting the CD-rom.  I gave my dad, who has degrees in both engineering and law, a quick tutorial and let him loose on the first practice test.  My stepmom stood on my dad’s left, her right hand resting on the back of his chair.

“The ball!  The boy might run after the ball that rolled into the road!” my stepmom exclaimed.

“Got it,” Dad said calmly, post-click.  “What language are those signs in?  Gaelic?”

“No, that’s Welsh,” I answered.

“You have to learn Welsh to take this?  Seriously?” Dad asked, clicking away intermittently.

“Well, Wales is part of the United Kingdom,” I replied, “So you have to know what ‘araf’ means, at least.”

“That’s what I’m going to say to you next time you’re speeding on the interstate,” my stepmom joshed my dad, “Araf!”

My dad’s results appeared on the screen.  “Thirteen out of twenty; keep practicing,” he read, incredulous.  “Better you than me, that’s all I have to say, Beth.”

“Right?  The problem is I never played video games!”

“You’re just old, like us.”  Dad smiled.  “I’m sure you’ll ace it next time.  When is next time?”

“Maybe in a few weeks,” I said.

To take lessons with ESM, I had to book blocks of five lessons at a time, and each block took a substantial toll on our bank account.  I was fond of Dominic; I had learned that he played in a rockabilly band, that he liked to ride motorcycles, and that his girlfriend refused to drive on any route that included a large roundabout.  But I was also keenly aware of the impact the driving lessons were having on our family’s economy.  I saw an ad for a special offer on three lessons with the biggest competitor to ESM, and I jumped at the possibility of saving some money.

The AAE instructor, Gary, bore a strong resemblance to Colonel Mustard in the board game Clue, right down to the well-tended moustache with curled ends.  Dominic didn’t really want to be a driving instructor—he had worked as a mechanic until car repair became too computerized—but he enjoyed meeting the spectrum of students that the job brought his way, as evidenced by his frequent retelling of stories other students had shared with him.  Gary, however, was all business.  He quizzed me on my skills; I said that my biggest difficulty was parallel parking, so he got right to work, directing me to parallel park repeatedly on the little-trafficked road that ran along the Thames close to our house.  It wasn’t a relaxing lesson, but it was useful practice, and while I missed Dominic’s friendly manner, it seemed I had chosen well by opting to switch to the AAE.

Until the second lesson.  Gary seemed to figure that if I had perfected parallel parking on a quiet road, it was sensible to try to transfer my skills to a busier road, so he led us into Isleworth, to the kind of residential street that is not unusual in London, where the cars are parked tightly on both sides and it is impossible for two cars to pass each other in the middle.  Driving on such roads is like playing a long game of “Chicken.”  Each driver has to anticipate what will happen should an oncoming vehicle appear, and there is an unwritten flowchart: if there is room for one vehicle to pull in somewhere, the other vehicle can drive on, hoping that the first vehicle will give way.  If there is nowhere nearby for either vehicle to slot into, one of the cars will have to reverse.  This can, in extreme cases, mean reversing all the way to the nearest junction (I don’t believe it is even legal to drive that far in reverse in the United States).  On top of the excitement of wondering what will happen with oncoming traffic, a driver also needs to be on the lookout for car doors that may be opening and people who may be walking into the road to enter their cars.

For me, driving on this sort of road, particularly when I was still not fully acclimated to sitting on the right-hand side of the car while driving on the left-hand side of the street, was like finding myself in one of Dante’s inner circles of Hell.  My shoulders rose two inches, my chest became tight, and my fingers began to cramp from the vise-like grip I was maintaining on the steering wheel.

When I saw another car coming towards me, I asked Gary breathlessly, “What should I do?  I don’t know if I can pull in to that spot?  Do I have to reverse?”

“He flashed his lights at you,” Gary answered matter-of-factly.  “That means he wants you to go forward.”

I tried to mentally judge the route forward.  “But I don’t think I can fit through there!”

“You can.”

“I really don’t think so,” I maintained, creeping forward at less than five miles per hour.  The driver of the oncoming vehicle flashed his lights again.  I was close enough to see his face now, and saw his expression of impatience and frustration.

“Just take it slow, there’s plenty of room for you to pass,” Gary said reassuringly.  As we slid past the other car, Gary waved to the driver and nodded his head, gestures I had also seen Dominic make to many other drivers.  The man returned Gary’s nod grudgingly.

As if that near-death experience had not been enough, Gary then suggested I practice parallel parking on the same street.  I survived two acceptable parallel parking manoeuvres, but came home with shaking legs and tattered nerves.  After a much-needed cup of tea, I called the AAE and cancelled the third lesson with Gary, then dialled ESM and booked another block of lessons with Dominic.

Dominic parked outside our house a good ten minutes before my lesson was due to start, as usual.  At two minutes before eight, he knocked quietly on the door.

As we walked to the car, Dominic asked, “So where you been, Beth?  I haven’t seen you in several weeks, everything OK?”

I glanced at my feet.  “Well, I gave the AAE a try,” I muttered.

“What?” Dominic gasped in mock horror.  “Beth, you’ve been two-timing me!  I can’t believe it!  Here I was, thinking we were getting on just fine, and you go and take some lessons with our biggest competitor!”

I grinned; he was taking the news well.  “You’re a great teacher Dominic, but the AAE had a special bargain, and I was trying to think about the bottom line.  But I learned my lesson—he made me drive on one of those horrible English streets.  I was sure I was going to die then and there.”

It was Dominic’s turn to smile.  “You prefer Surbiton, don’t you, more like home.”

“You got that right.”

“Well, let’s head over there then,” Dominic said cheerfully.  “If you stick with me, Beth, that’s where you’ll take your practical exam.  I know some of the examiners over there, they’re good guys.”

“I won’t stray again,” I joked.

“I hope not.  Today we’re going to focus on reversing around a corner,” Dominic informed me.

“Oh goody.”

Dominic looked at me sideways.  “You’re in quite a mood today, aren’t you?”

“I just want to get this all over with,” I complained.  “I’ve had my license since I was seventeen.  I want to drive my son to school.  Cycling is an absolute nightmare.”

“You will get your license.  You just have to relax a little.  Have you rescheduled your theory test?”  Dominic asked.

“No.  But I feel that I could drive safely in Wales.”

“The clips are all from out there, aren’t they?  Well, book your test.  You can’t do the practical until you’ve passed the theory, you know, so you want to get that under your belt.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, like a cross teenager who has been given a piece of good advice by their parent.  “I’ll check the calendar.”

On my way to my second attempt at the theory test, I pondered what I would do if I failed the hazard perception portion again.  I didn’t limit myself to one worry; I also thought that it was possible I would fail the theory multiple choice as well.  That particular anxiety proved unfounded; I sailed through the theory multiple choice questions in no time.  I did my best on the hazard perception, and when I went to collect the credit card that had served as my ID, I held my breath, awaiting the verdict.

“Can I see your second ID?” the man working behind the desk at the test centre requested.

“Of course, here you are,” I said, handing over my passport.

“Let me see…  oh, you did very well on the theory.  And you’ve passed the hazard perception section too, by the skin of your teeth.”

“I passed?” I asked incredulously.

“Congratulations,” the man said, sounding bored.

I became so euphoric that I practically floated out of the test centre.  Kingston suddenly looked like a quaint and welcoming market town, rather than a gritty budget shopping hub.

“I could drive here on my own soon,” I thought to myself gleefully.  “Well, I could at least drive to the parking lot outside of the city centre, so I don’t have to get through the one-way system,” I corrected myself, quickly making my aspirations more reasonable.

When I next saw Dominic, he asked about the results of the theory test.

I puffed up with pride.  “Passed,” I said.

“Good girl.  We just need to do some more work on roundabouts and the motorway, and you’ll be ready to try the practical,” Dominic said.

Dominic began taking me to busier roads, including streets that required the wave, the gesture of thanks drivers gave each other when they were allowed to pass.  On one of those streets, I decided to show Dominic that I had seen and internalized that particular aspect of driving in England.  When an oncoming vehicle slowed, granting me priority, I raised my right hand just far enough off the steering wheel to offer a wave.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Dominic demanded.

“Um, waving?  You wave all the time?” I said.

“Yes, I wave, but that doesn’t mean you can!” Dominic blurted out.  “You have to keep both hands on the steering wheel at all times, or you’re guaranteed to fail the practical,” Dominic explained, more gently.

I nodded, chastised.  “I just thought, since you do it so often, it was almost like a necessary hand signal,” I said, trying to justify my action.

“Is it in The Highway Code?” Dominic quizzed me.

“Um…  no, I don’t think I’ve seen anything about the wave there…” I stammered.

“Nothing about flashing lights either, right?”

“I guess not,” I agreed.  “But I didn’t flash my lights.”

“Good.  Don’t.  Leave the waving and the flashing to me.  You just keep both hands on that wheel and don’t even think about flashing the lights until you’ve gotten rid of your L plates,” Dominic said, referring to the large green “L” stickers new drivers often displayed to alert other motorists to their lack of experience.  “Now how are you feeling about the motorway?”

Several lessons later, Dominic said the magic words.  “Beth,” he began, “I think you’ve gotten your confidence back.  You were shaken by driving on the left, but you’re accustomed to it now.  You’re doing very well on all your manoeuvres, you seem comfortable in traffic…  I think it’s time for you to take your practical test.”

I had an immediate sensation of panic; my hands went cold and it felt as if the blood had fallen out of my head.  “Do you really think I’m ready?” I asked, my voice quavering.

Dominic nodded.  “I’m not saying you will definitely pass—you may seize up on the day—but even if you don’t pass first time, the sooner the first time is, the sooner you can try again.  You have to wait a certain amount of time after your first practical before you can retake it.”

That changed matters.  “Ah, so this would be like a practice run,” I said.

“You might pass, but a lot of people don’t pass the first time,” Dominic confirmed.

“Let’s book it.”

“’Atta girl.”

Dominic booked me a test slot in two weeks’ time.  Our next lessons focussed on what to expect during the exam.  I needed to be able to identify certain parts of the vehicle under the hood.  As a teenager, I had spent one summer working at a full-service petrol station, where my duties had included topping up the oil and checking the water levels, so this part of the test did not worry me.  (When I was off-duty at the petrol station, I was allowed to sit behind the counter and read as much as I wanted, making full-service petrol station attendant my favourite job to date.)  Dominic reminded me several times that if I began to adjust my mirrors before fastening my seat belt, that would be a serious strike against me.  I nodded; yes, yes, seat belt first.

Dominic was a stickler for punctuality, so we arrived well before the exam was scheduled to begin.  I was asked to fill in a form, and then I sat and waited for my examiner to be ready.  When my turn came, the examiner walked in and shook my hand, and I followed him out to the front of the building where Dominic’s ESM car, the car I had been driving for several months, was parked.  I was thinking about my seat belt so intensely that I forgot to think about what country I was in.  I walked directly to the American driver’s side, the English passenger’s side, and opened the door.  Only when I went to sit down did I realize my mistake.  I jumped back from the car in alarm.

“Oh my!  That’s the wrong side!  I was just so eager to put on my seat belt!” I exclaimed.

The examiner looked at me tiredly, and I knew that I had failed the test before even demonstrating my excellent seat belt protocol.  I walked around to the correct side, fastened my seat belt, fixed my mirrors, then soldiered on through the hated parallel parking and around several roundabouts. When I shut off the engine and the examiner broke the news that I would need to retake the practical test, it was only confirmation of what I had already surmised.

Dominic met me in the waiting room.  I noticed the scent of coffee and smoke as he sat down next to me.

“No luck this time, eh?” he said, in hushed tones.

“’Fraid not,” I replied.  “It didn’t help that I temporarily forgot I was in England.”

“Yeah, I saw that.  Oops.”  Dominic chuckled.  “Guess you were nervous.  You won’t be so nervous next time.  I’ll drive you home.”

“Shouldn’t I drive, for the extra practice?”

“We actually don’t let students drive home after they’ve failed the practical.  You may not be thinking as clearly as you should be.”

I smiled ruefully as I opened the passenger door of the ESM car.  To think, after all this time, I had forgotten what side was the driver’s side.

“Do you think we could listen to some music?  Just to take my mind off blowing the test?” I wondered.

“Yeah, sure, that’s a good idea.  You like bluegrass, right?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I think you’ll really like this, then,” Dominic said, turning on the stereo at a volume I wouldn’t have expected to be possible in an ESM vehicle.

I know it doesn’t suit everyone, but I find bluegrass soothing for the soul, so I immersed myself in the music rather than asking Dominic what my strategy should be for passing the next time I took the practical exam.   Dominic, as might be expected for a driving instructor, was an exceptionally good driver.  Slumped in the passenger seat, listening to music that spoke to me, I truly relaxed for the first time while in a car in England.  It was the most valuable driving lesson Dominic could have given me at that moment.  I was even able to let go, for a short time, of the niggling conviction that driving on the left side of the road, while sitting on the right side of the car, was just plain wrong.

I spent the next several driving lessons practicing the manoeuvres that I had lost points on during the first practical exam.  I complained bitterly to Dominic about the impossibility of roundabouts.

“You’re not the only one that feels that way,” Dominic conceded, “But there’s no reason to be frightened of roundabouts.  You just have to learn how they work.  It’s very straightforward, once you’ve learned the rules.”

“Mmm…” I mumbled.  “Right.  Very straightforward.”

“You’re much better at them than you were when we started.”

“That’s not saying much.”

“You know, Beth, that’s your biggest problem.  You need to change your attitude.  You know how to drive.  I can tell that you used to drive regularly in the States.  You failed the first practical mostly because you lacked confidence.  You need to say to yourself, ‘I can drive.  I can do this.’  Because it’s true, you can, I know you can, and you know you can too.  You just have to relax.”

I stole a sideways glance at Dominic.  He had my number, in more ways than he could imagine.

“I see what you’re saying,” I said.

“I’m not trying to be harsh.  I want you to have your driving license, is all, and bigging yourself up is the way you’re going to get it,” Dominic continued.

“You know, I should do that with more than just driving.”

“That may be, but my remit is driving,” Dominic said, smiling.

“Let’s do this thing.  What’s next for today, the motorway?  The Kingston one-way system?  Bring it on,” I said, with bravado.

“Now you’re talking.”

During my lesson following Dominic’s self-confidence pep talk, I was driving on a busy road that ran alongside the Thames.  A cyclist was in the left lane.  I followed the cyclist for some time, cognizant that the drivers behind me were becoming frustrated by my slow speed.  When there was a brief break in oncoming traffic, I made my move.  I pushed the accelerator pedal and swerved around the cyclist, pulling back into my lane just before the oncoming vehicle’s driver would have had to leave her lane to avoid a collision.

“What was that?” Dominic questioned me.  “Why are you driving like a yob?”

“I didn’t want to hold up the cars behind us any longer,” I said.  “I wanted to exhibit self-confidence.”

“There’s self-confidence, and there’s foolhardiness.  Yobs are foolhardy.  That kind of move would result in a certain fail during the practical.”

“But most drivers wouldn’t stay behind a cyclist for longer than necessary.”

“You’re not most drivers right now.  You’re a learner, in a driving school vehicle, with big old signs announcing it to the world.  Other drivers will expect you to drive slowly, and you were cutting it pretty close even for an experienced driver.  Until you’ve passed your exam, no more foolhardiness, OK?”

Chastened yet again, I nodded my head.

“When you’ve passed your test, you can drive aggressively.  But for now, you need to just drive sensibly—not timidly, not recklessly, just sensibly.  Can you do that?”

“I can try.”

“Good.  Now listen, there’s a chance you may get a friend of mine, Greg, as an examiner when you next take the practical.  In case you do, let me give you some inside information; Greg is a Buddy Holly fan.”

“I like Buddy Holly.  I have his Greatest Hits CD.”

“I figured as much.”

“So am I supposed to say, ‘Hey, I hear you like Buddy Holly, how about passing me?’”

“Maybe not quite like that.  But you could slip Buddy Holly into the conversation after you’ve done your manoeuvres.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

It was perfect English spring weather on the day of my second attempt to pass the practical driving exam; sunny, except for when the slight breeze pushed a fluffy white cloud in front of the sun, and warm, but by no means hot.  We had so much time to spare when we arrived at the test centre that Dominic casually suggested grabbing a cup of coffee.

“Sounds great!” I said.  “May help me take my mind off my nerves.”

“Jeff, another instructor, is going to come along too,” Dominic told me.

“That’s fine.”

“And good news, it’s my friend the Buddy Holly fan who will be sitting in the car with you today,” Dominic added.

We met Jeff, a spare man who had at least a foot on Dominic and nearly two feet on me, outside the test centre, and the three of us walked to a cosy diner in the village high street.

“This isn’t Starbucks or anything,” Dominic said apologetically.  “It’s a real greasy spoon.  But you can get a coffee for under a pound.”

“That works for me,” I said.

I asked for tea, while Dominic and Jeff ordered coffee.  Jeff excused himself to smoke a quick cigarette just outside the diner door.

“How are you feeling about the exam today?” Dominic asked me.

I considered.  “Better than last time.”

“Good.”  Dominic turned to Jeff, who had rejoined us at the table.  “So, Jeff, did you hear about the new leasing regulations?”

“Yes, it’s so annoying, they just want to make it more difficult for us, don’t they?”  Jeff leaned forward, and I wondered off-handedly what it would be like to be so tall that sitting on a chair in a restaurant would require a careful arranging of limbs.

Jeff and Dominic engaged in a critical discussion of their employer, the driving school, while I sipped my tea and pondered how to mention Buddy Holly to my examiner without seeming contrived.

On the walk back to the test centre, Dominic reminded me to make sure I got into the car on the correct side this time.  Jeff guffawed when he heard the story of my mistake, and the two of them began to brainstorm other ways my American driving background could negatively affect my exam.

“Don’t reach for the gear shift where the door handle is!” Jeff warned me.

I went straight for the right side of the car when my exam commenced.  Dominic’s friend, Greg, was a thin, soft-spoken man.  He ran me through several manoeuvres, then led me to a road I hadn’t visited before, a country lane that began with a tight barrier requiring precision steering to avoid nicking the side-view mirror.  I passed through easily, and something about Greg’s exhalation indicated to me that although the test was not over, I had passed.

“This is the kind of driving that I’m used to,” I told Greg, “Having grown up in Vermont.  It’s just a small state, and there are lots of back roads.”

“What part of the States is Vermont in?  After the junction, take your first right.”

“It’s close to New York,” I replied, signalling for the turn.

“Continue straight ahead through the mini-roundabout.  Have you travelled much within the States?”

“Not as much as I would have liked.  My husband and I went on a cross-country road trip many years ago; we drove to Utah, then back through parts of the South.”  I saw my opportunity to mention rock and roll, and added, “We went through Tennessee on the way home, and we visited Sun Studios and Graceland.”

“Graceland, that’s brilliant!  Are you an Elvis fan then?” the examiner asked, with animation.

“Elvis was a talented guy.”

A wistful look appeared on Greg’s face.  “I like Elvis, but I prefer Buddy Holly.”

“I have Buddy Holly’s Greatest Hits collection,” I remarked, as casually as possible, while inwardly celebrating that I had been able to mention the great man in conversation.

“We’re going to do the reverse around a corner manoeuvre here, so you can pull into that road on the left.  Which is your favourite Buddy Holly song then?”

“That would have to be ‘Runaway,’” I said, while slowing down and signalling left.

The examiner seemed satisfied with my choice.  He talked me through the manoeuvre, and we made our way back to the test centre.  When I had parked the car appropriately, he told me the good news.

“You’ve passed your practical test, Beth.  You are now qualified to drive in the United Kingdom.”

“Oh, thank you so much.  This will make a huge difference to my life,” I gushed.

“I can tell you know how to drive.  Just remember to stay relaxed on the road.  Best of luck to you.”  Greg offered me his hand to shake.

Thrilled, I went in to the test centre to find Dominic.  “I passed,” I said, beaming.

“High five,” Dominic said, grinning, holding up his hand for me to slap.

“So do I get to drive home this time?”

“Still no.  School policy is I drive home after exams, pass or fail.”

“They probably figure too much excitement is just as dangerous as too much disappointment.”

“They’re probably right,” Dominic opined.

As Dominic drove home, I realized that I had not quite worked out that passing my practical would mean no longer spending an hour with Dominic every week.  I had lived in England for many years by the time I began taking driving lessons, but before Dominic, strangely, I had never really spent much time with anyone English.  My best friends had been American and Australian.  Dominic had not only taught me how to drive in England, he had also given me my best glimpse yet into the English character through the many stories he had told me.

“Thank you for teaching me how to drive in England,” I said, before I left the little black car with the big triangular ESM sign on top for the last time.  “Let me know if your band ever has a gig, I’d love to come.  You’ve got my mobile number.”

“It’s been a pleasure, Beth.  I’m sure I’ll see you around.  Enjoy your license, yeah?”

“Yeah, I will.  Thank you again.”

“No worries.  Off you go.”

That same day I affixed a green “L” to the rear windscreen.  The next day, feeling like the queen of the road, I proudly drove my son to school.  I welcomed the liberation of not needing to choose between my usual suboptimal transport options, cycling or taking the bus.  Granted, cycling was good for fitness and fresh air, and I had perfected my bus entertainment strategy by consistently bringing small packages of gummy bears that I would ration out slowly, over the course of the twenty-minute journey, to the children.  But cycling came with the stress of assuring that my son’s six-year old perspective on traffic safety caused no injury to himself or others, and taking the bus meant jollying both children through a long walk both up and down the hill to Sam’s school.  Driving entailed parking, but if I left enough time, I could usually find a space that would not place undue strain on my parking skills.  If the day was fine, I could choose to drive to school but cycle home, or vice versa.

I felt reasonably confident driving to school.  I was intimately familiar with the route, and at no point was the speed limit greater than thirty miles per hour.  I was very reluctant, however, to drive anywhere other than to the school and back.  I feared that my poor sense of direction, combined with the challenge of driving in England, would lead to disaster.  Perhaps a year after getting my license, my children were invited to a birthday party in an unfamiliar part of town on a day that my husband was away on business.  The party was being hosted by a friend of mine from Australia, Ellie, who claimed to find English driving intimidating, like me, but who was actually brave enough to drive into central London on her own.

“Oh, the party venue is easy to get to,” Ellie assured me over the phone.  “You just go out the A316, then drive through all the roundabouts until you see the stadium, pass the stadium, and at the next roundabout you want to turn right.  You’ll see the little library, and the venue is just after that.  Easy peasy.”

I should have remembered, when Ellie said it would be simple, that although Ellie routinely parked on the top floor of the town’s multi-storey parking garage where she could have a double space if necessary, she was nonetheless intrepid enough to drive to Heathrow and Legoland with her three children in tow.

“The roundabouts aren’t easy,” I argued.

“Most of them are light-controlled.  It’s just a question of making sure you’re in the correct lane at the roundabout when you want to turn off, otherwise you’ll end up on the A316 in the wrong direction, and it may be difficult to turn back around.”

“Hmm…”  I said.  “Maybe I should see if there’s a bus?”

“Oh, Beth, give it a try, you can do it, I’m sure you can.  If I can drive there, I’m sure you won’t have any trouble either.”

On the day of the party, I left the house with time to spare.  I cleared the first roundabout, then the second and third.  Finally I passed the stadium and prepared for turning off when I next had the chance.  But when we reached the critical junction, I found myself in the wrong lane, and had no choice but to continue straight ahead.

“I missed it,” I muttered to myself.  “I can’t believe I missed it.”

What happened next is a blur to me, but I somehow ended up on a small road close to a train station, where I pulled over to consult the A-Z.

“Are we at the party?” Nina asked.

“No, honey, I’m afraid we’re not.  Mommy is just a little bit lost.”

“Oh, Mum,” Sam groaned.  “I don’t want to be late to the party!”

“We won’t be very late.  We’ve still got some time.  It’s merely a question of going back the way we came,” I said, hoping to prevent a meltdown.  “I’m going to make a quick phone call.”

I dialled my husband’s mobile number.  “I need a bit of help,” I told him, glad he wasn’t in a meeting.

“Where are you?” he asked.

I described my location.  “We need to head back, it will actually be easier to take the turn from this direction,” I said, looking at the bright side.

“You’re also very lucky, because if you had kept going, you would have ended up on the motorway,” my husband informed me.

“Good thing I didn’t,” I agreed.  Håkan ran me through the route I needed to follow and wished me luck.

“A sat nav would help even more than luck,” I tossed out.  Håkan grunted.

Our lack of a satellite navigational system was a sore point.  I had started asking for one as soon as I received my English license, but we needed to count our pennies, and good sat navs were not cheap.  Håkan also had an intrinsic dislike of the sat nav concept; he felt that by consulting a map beforehand and having a map to refer to while en route, I should be able to find my way.  I drove to unfamiliar places so seldom that I had to admit a sat nav was more of a luxury than a necessity.  So on the day of the party, parked close to the railway station, I found myself poring once again over the map prior to making a new attempt to reach our destination.

“You’re very lost, aren’t you,” Sam said accusingly.

“Only a little.  But now I know what to do.”

Nina piped up.  “How late are we going to be, Mum?  What if we’re the last ones there?  What if we miss the party tea?”  Nina scrunched up her face and prepared to cry.

“We will definitely not miss the party tea.  I bet we won’t even be the last ones there.  Now you both can actually help me, when we get through the roundabout, you can look for the library,” I said, using the time-honoured mothering technique of distracting children by giving them a task to perform.  The ploy worked.  Nina’s lip stopped trembling, and Sam looked slightly less angry.

We were, in fact, the last guests to arrive at the party, twenty minutes after the party had started, but to Nina’s relief, we had not missed the party tea.  Ellie greeted me, looking concerned.  “What happened, Beth?”

“Oh, I missed the roundabout, and we ended up by a little train station.  I’m sorry we’re so late,” I added.

“Don’t worry about that, but how distressing for you!  I know that train station, I’ve ended up there myself.  If you hadn’t turned in there, you would have found yourself on the motorway,” Ellie said ominously.

I nodded gravely.  “Håkan told me.  That would have been bad.”

“Well, I did that once too, and the thing is, there’s no exit for something like twenty miles, so I was very late getting where I was going that day.”  Ellie smiled.  “Let me get you a cup of tea, I think you could use one after the trauma of getting here.”

“Thank you, that sounds like just what the doctor ordered.”

After the birthday party debacle, my hesitancy to drive to new places on my own increased.  There were some destinations that were so useful, or so desirable, that I did learn how to find them, but I could count them on my fingers, and none of them were more than a fifteen minutes’ drive away.  I made do with my limited range for well over a year.  But there was one establishment I was desperate to be able to drive to on my own that was well outside of my comfort zone: Ikea.

Because I had lived for many years in Sweden, home of Ikea, a trip to the store, with its gigantic sign in the colours of the Swedish flag, eased my homesickness for the country.  Customers walking through the store’s front entrance are met by Ikea employees wearing yellow and blue that distribute the store’s distinctive bright blue and yellow carrier bags .  All the products in the store have Swedish names, often including one or more of the three extra letters in the Swedish alphabet, the food served in the cafeteria is Swedish food, and on the way out, there is a large poster of the Stockholm skyline that includes a view of one of the apartment complexes my husband and I lived in while there.  Nostalgia, combined with the chance to purchase packs of one hundred white dinner napkins at £1.99 each, made Ikea an irresistible magnet.

The first time Håkan tried to drive our family to Ikea, we got lost.  We ended up in a residential neighbourhood in North London that we would not have visited otherwise.  After trying to find our way out for maybe ten minutes, I insisted that we accost passers-by for directions.  While my first request for help was unsuccessful, my second request fell on fertile ground.  The man I called out to (“Excuse me!  Sir!  Sir!”) took a few steps closer, then explained to Håkan, through my rolled-down window, how Håkan could best drive to Ikea.  The second time we went as a family, we managed to choose a day that a major football match was taking place at Wembley Stadium; the return trip, that normally takes less than half an hour, lasted well over an hour.  After our second trip, Håkan had both dialled in the route and learned to unfailingly check the Wembley schedule of events prior to planning an Ikea visit.  But the damage was done; I had personally observed how onerous the journey was, and I doubted wholeheartedly that I would be able to pull it off.  It didn’t help that Håkan had told me repeatedly that the Hanger Lane roundabout (a roundabout so large that it is officially named a gyratory system) had once been named the scariest roundabout in England.

In time, my longing for lingonberry jam and cheerful fake flowers became stronger than my fear of the route I would have to travel.  I asked Håkan if I could drive the next time we ran out of dinner napkins and had a sound reason to head north.  He agreed, and patiently explained, using a diagram, how to best handle the Hanger Lane roundabout.  Armed with his tips, and with Håkan sitting beside me, I exceeded my expectations and completed the journey both to and from Ikea without incident.  After two more test runs, I felt I was ready to tackle the drive solo. One Wednesday, after the kids’ bedtime, I asked Håkan to wish me luck and set off.  I adhered strictly to my instructions at Hanger Lane, and exhaled when I emerged from the roundabout on the proper.  As soon as I had parked the car in the massive Ikea parking lot, I texted Håkan the good news.  He congratulated me, and I walked into the store feeling like I had just won a medal.

A few months later, a friend of mine who doesn’t drive asked me if I would be going to Ikea anytime soon.

“Probably, but I don’t know if I’m secure enough driving to have a passenger,” I said.

“I was hoping to get some Christmas decorations there,” Maria said.  “I promise not to be a back-seat driver.”

I reconsidered.  “Well, I guess you could come along, but only if you swear to be absolutely silent during the Chiswick and Hanger Lane roundabouts.”

“I can do that,” my friend agreed, grinning.  “I could sit quietly the whole way, if that’s what would suit you best.  I just want cheap Christmas tree ornaments.”

“No, we can talk most of the time, just not during those roundabouts,” I said.

“It’s a deal.”

On the appointed day, I picked Maria up at a bus stop close to our house.

“Hello,” I greeted her.

“Hello,” Maria said.  “Are you sure this is OK?”

“Yes, it’s good practice for me, and it will be nice to have company for lunch,” I assured her.

As I drove, we chatted about our daughters and their school.  When we drew near to the Chiswick roundabout, I reminded Maria that I would need to concentrate.

“Go for it,” she said.  “We’ll talk again in a few minutes.”

I made my way through the roundabout in silence.  When we had safely accessed the road we needed, I broke the quiet.  “That’s one done, one to go,” I tallied aloud.

“That one went smoothly,” Maria said, with the hint of a smile.

We observed the same protocol for the remaining roundabouts of the round-trip journey, and Maria thanked me sincerely when I dropped her outside her flat, laden down with a sizeable bright blue plastic carrier bag full of Ikea goodies.

A few months after Christmas, when another friend, Lily, expressed interest in picking up some Ikea products, Maria, Lily, and I agreed that a joint outing would be fun.

“Who should drive?” Lily asked.  “I’m not sure I know the way.”

“I could drive,” I said, reluctantly, “but you and Maria would have to promise not to talk at the roundabouts.  That’s the arrangement Maria and I made last time.”

“You did not,” Lily said, incredulously.

“We did,” Maria confirmed.

“I’m a bit of an anxious driver, especially in England,” I confessed.

“Shall we take my car, then?” Lily offered.

“That sounds great,” I said.

I was speaking to Lily on the phone some time after I had come out of the nervous driver closet.

“Sam has a cricket game that I would love to take him too on Saturday, but it’s far away, and I don’t think I could find my way,” I told her.  “But I wish I could, because I’d like to see him play, and it would be good for Håkan to spend more time with Nina.”

“Why don’t you take him then?  I’m sure Nina would be thrilled to have her dad to herself on a Saturday,” Lily suggested.

“I would get lost,” I argued.  “I’m the one that doesn’t let people talk in roundabouts, remember?”

“I don’t see why.  It’s only driving.  The best way to get better is to drive more,” Lily counseled.  “You should just get in the car and drive everywhere.    Don’t you like to drive?”

“I was better at driving in the States, but no, I don’t really like to drive.”

“I love driving,” Lily said.  “It makes my husband crazy, but if there’s traffic, I will take a different route, because I know eventually I’ll find my way.  It’s a wonderful feeling of freedom,” Lily rhapsodized.

“Maybe if we had a sat nav, I would feel more confident,” I said.

Lily thought about this.  “To tell you the truth, my TomTom irritates me.  I would rather use Google maps.  I look at the map before I leave, and that usually gets me where I’m going.  And if it doesn’t, I work it out on the fly.”

“That’s so funny, that’s exactly what Håkan does,” I remarked.  “That must be the Way of the Secure Driver.”

“You could be a secure driver too, Beth, it’s just a question of practice.  Mind over matter,” Lily said, encouragingly.

I didn’t drive Sam to his cricket match that weekend, but I took Lily’s words to heart.  When we decided to go on a family camping break for a couple nights in Devon, I volunteered to drive most of the way.  I lasted for a good three hours before turning the wheel over to Håkan.  During those three hours, instead of thinking to myself, “Oh my gosh, I’m driving in a foreign country, other drivers may behave in ways I don’t expect and I don’t know the roads,” I thought, “I’ve lived here for ten years, these are my roads too, and actually, I’m a reasonably safe driver.”

The day after we arrived in Devon, Håkan had scheduled a well-deserved four-hour surfing lesson for himself.  My task was to entertain the kids, in weather that alternated between light drizzle and heavy shower, until the kids’ surfing lesson in the late afternoon.  About ten miles before the campsite, I had spotted a tenpin bowling alley, and I knew there was an aquarium in the town just past the bowling alley.  I reviewed the route back to the town with the aquarium with Håkan, then dropped him at the beach and set off.  The kids were playing happily on their respective Nintendos.  I managed the one turn that was necessary to take me to my destination, and was pleased to see the bowling alley appear on my right.  But bowling was my backup option; my top pick was the aquarium, so I drove on, hoping that there would be tourist attraction signs for the aquarium as I approached the town.  There were no signs.  I made a number of quick choices, and ended up on a residential road clearly not close to any sort of aquarium that people would pay to visit.  I slotted myself into a parallel parking space, and because crying seemed likely to upset the children, I chuckled to myself.

“Where is the aquarium, Mum?”  Nina asked.  “And why are you laughing?”

“I’m not really sure where it is, honey,” I admitted, “And I’m laughing, well, just because.”

“Oh, Mum,” Nina said.  “Can’t we just go back to the bowling alley?”

“It may come to that.  Let me see if I can find the way to the aquarium with my phone,” I said, fiddling with my hand-me-down smart phone.

“Your phone is too slow,” Sam said matter-of-factly.  “That won’t work.”

I watched the gear symbol on the phone spinning around and around as the phone endeavoured to take me to the site I had requested.

“You’re right, Sam.  It’s not going to work.  Let’s go bowling.”

“Yay!” both kids shouted in unison.

I drove successfully back out of the town and parked in the bowling alley lot.  The kids thoroughly enjoyed themselves bowling, particularly Nina, who won the game (it should be noted that I was the only one playing without bumpers).

I may not have made it to the more cultural aquarium, but I had been able to drive myself and the kids to a fun place, in the rain, in unfamiliar territory, without becoming unreasonably agitated, and without getting hopelessly lost.  Lily, like Dominic several years ago, had put her finger on it; I didn’t need to learn any more about driving, I just needed to change my attitude.

***

I still struggle with various facets of driving.  Parking, for example, will never come easily.  My daughter’s swimming lessons take place at a leisure centre where the parking is limited and tight.  Before a recent lesson, it took me several attempts to back into the one available space.  Both kids peered through their windows and shouted warnings and guidance in true back-seat driver fashion.  When I was finally within the lines, I shut off the engine, but I paused before exiting the car.

“Just think if we had a Ford Focus Titanium,” I mused.  “Parking would be so much easier.  The car would beep, and it might even do the parking for me, I’m not sure.”

“Can’t you get one?” Nina asked.  Nina found my driving tribulations more stressful than Sam, who tended to remain unfazed.

“That wouldn’t make sense, not when we have a car that works perfectly well.”

“I could save my pocket money,” Nina suggested.

Love for my daughter, combined with anxiety about the effects of my inadequacies on her psyche, spilled over the sides of the container of my emotions.

“That is so sweet of you, Nina, but don’t worry, this car is just fine.  You know kids,” I said, in that I-have-something-to-impart tone of voice, “when you grow up, I hope that both of you will become really good drivers.  I know that I don’t always set the best example, but I am sure you both will be very capable, and I want you to enjoy driving.  A lot of people think driving is fun, and I hope you will feel that way, although I also hope you will drive in a safe and responsible manner.  Do you think you’ll be able to do that?”

Nina and Sam looked straight at me.  “Yes, Mum,” they said together.

It was obvious they knew the answer I expected of them, but hearing them agree to enjoy driving cheered me up regardless.  “Good,” I said.  “Now let’s get out of the car.”

X-Ray Vision and Interior Decorating

After years of living with two mismatched but well-loved cushions on our sofa, I decided it was time to take a small step towards improved interior decorating and purchase matching cushions.  I chose two large pillows with identical covers—a beige background with embroidery in muted earth tones and a maroon elephant in the centre.  I was well-pleased with my purchase and marvelled at just how much of a difference coordinated cushion covers could make.  That feeling of inner harmony upon seeing the elephants lasted for a couple of years, but then I began to notice that the embroidery was showing signs of wear.  Each time our young son was ill, which he often was until having he had his tonsils removed, he would lie for hours on the cushions watching TV.  This proximity to the pillows, combined with the boredom of illness, led to him pulling at the stitching.  Little snags developed in the threads.  One of the cushions became so worn that it changed colour, becoming darker than the other one.  Finally I admitted that the cushion covers had served their time, and I ordered new covers, in nubby beige chenille.

When the new covers arrived, I debated whether it was best to pull the new covers over the elephant covers or to remove the old covers and replace them with the new ones.  Because leaving the elephants on underneath meant that when the new covers required washing, the cushions would not be bare, I left the old covers on.  I briefly admired the positive effect on the appearance of the room, but I observed that although the new covers were pleasing to the eye, I was unable to see them without calling up an image of the rather tattered elephant cushion covers underneath.  I assumed that this x-ray vision effect would disappear quickly, but it has persisted.

***

It can sometimes be a blessing to know what came before.  A significant number of my Facebook friends are from the town I spent most of my childhood in, a picturesque village of about four thousand in rural Vermont.  Some of these Facebook friends were close friends during my childhood, some were teachers, some were casual friends.  Before Facebook, I kept in touch with only one friend from my hometown, and for a great many years, that suited me just fine.  When I re-established contact with some of my childhood friends, I understood that many of them had been closer friends than I had realized at the time, and I relished the renewed connections. 

One of the most wonderful aspects of communicating with friends from my childhood is that they know my history.  When forming friendships as an adult, I hold several salient facts about my background like a poker player holds cards.  I wait, sometimes for years, carefully considering the timing, before laying a card down.  After exposing a card, I pause, hoping my developing friend will lay a card of her own, wondering if the next card I play will be the one that will cause my partner to fold and walk away.  With friends from my childhood, many of these cards are already on the table.  Even casual friends from my hometown, because of the way information is stored in a town so small, know more about me than casual friends I have made as an adult.  Beyond my personal history, these friends also share the history of the town itself.  Last fall a Facebook group called “You Know You Are From ___” appeared; it gained members at a breathtaking pace.  Recently posts about mud season, maple sugaring, and long-ago grade school teachers all received multiple comments.  I feel a warm glow reading many of the posts on the group wall; shared memory is a powerfully unifying phenomenon.

Yet there are other times when the ability to start fresh is invaluable.  When our son, Sam, was three and a half, he was diagnosed with autism.  Just before Sam’s reception year at primary school, we moved home, relocating from Cambridge, England, to southwest London.  We were thrilled when Sam was given a place at the well-respected local primary school, but we knew that proper school would be challenging for Sam as he did not yet have a statement of special needs.  While I am sure the school Sam first enrolled in is a wonderful learning environment for the overwhelming majority of its students, it did not fit Sam at all.  So many incidents occurred on the playground that I went in repeatedly to plead with the powers-that-be to allow me to supervise Sam personally during all of his playtimes.  His behaviour in class was disruptive; he once threw a chair at a learning support assistant.  When the other reception children moved from half-days to whole days, we met with those in charge and agreed that Sam would remain at half-days.  Looking back I am stunned that I went along with, and even begged for, a solution like that, but I was desperate for Sam to be happy at school, and I knew that full days would be debilitating for him, and therefore for us. 

During that awful year I was working diligently, aided by a few skilled and selfless volunteers, to get Sam a statement of special needs; a document that would entitle him to individual help at school.  Towards the end of the school year, the statement became a likelihood, and we were told we had the option of choosing a new school for Sam, if we wanted to do that.  We wanted very much to do that, so we scheduled tours and meetings with the head teachers at two other primary schools in the borough.  After a great deal of consideration, we settled on the primary school that emphasized music and had a large international population.  That school was further from our home at the time, but felt more likely to be the right school for Sam.

Sam had started two different preschools and one primary school before starting at the school we handpicked.  The anxiety of those first days was negligible when compared to the anxiety of this first day.  This school felt like Sam’s last chance.  If he wasn’t happy at this new school, I was determined to pull him out of the school system altogether and pursue home-schooling, although the idea did not appeal to me.  I don’t remember the drop-offs those first days, but I remember home time.  I arrived early each day and stood nervously outside the classroom door, wondering what terrible things may have happened:  would Sam have been bullied, would he have been violent towards other children or adults, would he have taken unkindly to some element of the school day and flipped out entirely?  Each afternoon when Sam came out, seemingly content, I crept up to the teacher, and in hushed tones, asked her how the day had gone. 

“Fine,” she answered each afternoon.  “Sam seems to be settling in quite well.” 

Hugely relieved, I would practically dance home, but the same gnawing stress would return the following afternoon.  How could it be that our child, who had rarely been happy and had often been shockingly unhappy at school, could be doing so well?

During Sam’s second week at the new school, when I went up to the teacher at the end of the day, she said to me gently, “You really don’t need to check in with me every day.  Sam is a lovely boy and he’s adjusting brilliantly.  You have nothing to worry about.”

“I’m sorry to keep asking how he’s doing,” I responded, “But you have to understand, this is such an enormous change from how Sam was at his previous school.”

The teacher looked curious.  “How was he there?” she asked.

“He was miserable, and aggressive,” I said.  “It was very difficult.”

“That’s hard to believe, based on what I’ve seen of him,” the teacher said thoughtfully.  “But I can tell it must have been hard at the other school.  He has support now though; that may be helping a lot.” 

“It must be,” I said, “Because the change is remarkable.”

“Well, I just don’t want you to feel you need to ask every day.  If there’s a problem, I will let you know, you can rest assured.”

I left school that day bewildered.  The weight of Sam’s unhappiness at school had been lifted in just a few days, and I only saw in hindsight what a heavy weight it had been.  It took nearly two months for me to begin to trust what Sam’s teacher kept telling me—Sam was happy, and he was doing well.  There was one incident, perhaps three weeks after school started, of Sam kicking another boy in line.  My adrenaline rushed back to previous school levels.  Would this be the start of the decline?  The teacher told me that she had informed Sam that such behaviour was not tolerated at this school, and she felt certain that she and Sam had come to an agreement that he would abide by the school rules in the future. 

She was right.  For the rest of that year, Sam was tractable and obedient.  Although Sam’s teacher had no doubt read Sam’s file from his previous school, she had been able to see him as a clean slate.  The teacher’s willingness to not prejudge Sam based on his history was certainly vital to his success at settling in the new school.

The ability to acknowledge change and to start fresh given new parameters does not come easily to everyone.  About a year ago a good friend slowly but surely talked me into joining her on an inexpensive beginner’s jogging course run by the borough.  I was not especially fit as a child; I preferred playing music to playing sports, and for several years I was, as a parent would say, “plump.”  (Stopping religiously at the Village Bakery for an enormous glazed doughnut every day as I walked home from school didn’t help.)  Every year in high school when the time came for the “President’s Physical Fitness” event, I would dread the day of the 800 meter run/walk.  I would watch in awe as many of my classmates leapt away at the starting gun, and then I would walk, slowly, around the perimeter of the huge playing field.  When I had gotten about a quarter of the way, I could see the runners approaching the finish line on the opposite side of the field.

I was eighteen before I ever really tried to jog.  I went out with my future husband, Håkan, in the early evening, and jogged for maybe seven minutes before exclaiming in agony that I could go no further.  Håkan looked at me quizzically. 

“Are you serious?” he asked.  “You honestly can’t do more than that?”

“No,” I said, panting. “I honestly can not.” 

“OK,” he said. “We’ve got a long ways to go to get you fit.”

After that seven-minute session, I could not walk down stairs facing forward for an entire week.  My calf muscles felt like rubber bands, about to snap at any moment.  I was able to increase my jogging time to about twenty minutes, but I loathed the actual jogging, and only forced myself to do it because I knew I would feel good afterwards.  That initial jogging phase lasted perhaps three months, and then I gave it up and went back to walking.  During the next twenty years, I repeated that pattern four or five times, taking up jogging with great intentions of carrying on forever, then giving up a few months later when I again realized that I resented every step.

But the beginner’s course I did with my friend was different.  We had a leader, Frank, who encouraged us, we had each other, and we had a few other women along who were at roughly the same level of jogging fitness.  The goal of the course was to jog 5K without stopping, and to my amazement, when the final session took place, I completed the 5K without walking once.  Even more astounding, a couple times during that session, I actually enjoyed the act of jogging itself.  Finishing the course meant I automatically became a member of the jogging club that Frank helped lead, and I have continued jogging with Frank and a rotating cast of club members for many months now.  During good weeks I also go out once on my own, and while jogging is still sometimes a struggle, it is now often meditative.  It helps that my route is consistently breathtaking; I jog in a Royal Park renowned in London for its beauty.  But even given the stunning surroundings, I could choose each time to walk instead, but I haven’t.

One recent Sunday at the gymnastics centre, while waiting for my daughter to finish her gym session, I began chatting with a mum I know mostly through mutual friends.  I once met this mum, Ella, while jogging in the park; she was running with her good friend, Hannah, who is the mum of a boy in my daughter’s class.

“So,” Ella asked in the gymnastics waiting room, “Has Hannah signed you up for the half marathon?”

An expression of shock surely appeared on my face.  “Heavens no, I wouldn’t be able to do that.”

“Really?  I know Hannah has gotten a whole crew together from your school, she didn’t rope you in?” Ella prodded amiably.

“I’m not that sort of runner,” I said, off-handedly.  “Are you doing it?”

“I am.  Hannah wouldn’t take no for an answer,” Ella said with a mock sigh.

“I can imagine that,” I said, smiling.  “I hope it goes well.”

“Thanks,” Ella replied.

My husband was in the kitchen when my daughter and I returned from gymnastics.

“You’ll never believe it, but that mum Ella, the one who knows Hannah, she asked if I was going to run the half marathon!” I exclaimed.

“And?” he asked.

“Are you kidding?  I can’t run a half marathon!  I can barely run 5K reliably!”

“You could run a half marathon if you wanted to.  You’d just have to train a little more seriously.”

“No way,” I maintained.  “I am not a real runner.”

My husband, ever practical, inquired, “Did you want me to get the chicken ready to roast?”

I thought about Ella asking me about the half marathon several times over the next couple of days.  I was in complete disbelief that anyone could think I was fit enough to entertain running that sort of distance.  In my mind, I was still the girl who had struggled to run for seven minutes.  But the seven minutes had increased to thirty minutes, and it was entirely possible that the thirty minutes could increase to sixty, or maybe even to the hundred and twenty it would likely take to finish a half marathon.  Looking at the evidence, I had to acknowledge that I had become a bona fide runner.  To persist in viewing myself as a non-runner would be doing myself a disservice.

***

I have left my sofa cushions as they are, with the old covers underneath the now not-so-new covers, although I still can not look at the cushions rather than through them.  The effect reminds me, every time I sit on the couch, that history matters, but the present matters more.      

        

Kirsty, Rachel, and the quest for equality

Nina, my seven-year-old daughter, received a boxed set of seven Rainbow Magic fairy books when she was five. She had been begging for Rainbow Magic books for some time, and when I saw a special offer on the Sporty Fairies set, I reasoned that if she had to have Rainbow Magic books, she could at least have a set where the fairies were ostensibly interested in something beyond jewels and parties. The Sporty Fairies include Francesca the Football Fairy and Alice the Tennis Fairy, both sports my daughter plays, and as I had not actually read a Rainbow Magic book before ordering the set, I entertained hopes that perhaps Francesca and Alice would be good role models.

 If you have not been in contact with a five- to eight-year-old girl in the U.K. recently, you may be blissfully unaware of the Rainbow Magic fairy phenomenon. The series contains over one hundred books, mostly in sets of seven books each, with themes such as “The Dance Fairies” or “The Pet Keeper Fairies.” Each seventy-page book is divided into chapters of ten-fifteen pages each, with simple pen and ink drawings scattered throughout. The covers are all remarkably similar, with the Rainbow Magic logo in the upper left-hand corner, the fairy in question surrounded by stars in the centre above the title in the distinctive Rainbow Magic cover font, and a small rainbow in the bottom right-hand corner. They are written by “Daisy Meadows,” and illustrated by Georgie Ripper.

For the first several months of ownership, Nina was content to just take the Sporty Fairies books out of their box and admire them. She would spread them all out on the floor, gaze at them lovingly, then put them back into the box and replace the box in her bookcase. But in the end, just looking wasn’t enough, and Nina asked to read Zoe the Skating Fairy at bedtime.

Every Rainbow Magic book I have been exposed to has had the same basic premise. Two girls, Kirsty and Rachel, who seem to be somewhere between ten and sixteen years old, need to help the titular fairy by finding an object that the fairy has lost. Only when the girls have found all seven objects is their mission accomplished; in the Sporty Fairy set, reaching that goal means that the Fairy Olympics are able to take place. In each book, it is Jack Frost and his band of nasty male goblins that has taken the special object. The goblins all look the same: bald heads, big pointy ears, extremely long noses. They are smaller than Kirsty and Rachel, sometimes just by a bit, sometimes significantly (although there are tense moments in some of the books when Kirsty and Rachel temporarily shrink to fairy size and the goblins tower over them). The fairies themselves are diminuitive and are always fashionably dressed. Each fairy’s outfit and appearance is described when the fairy first steps into the scene to ask Kirsty and Rachel for help, which the girls are always willing to provide. The friends encounter goblin mischief (which is never threatening enough to keep a seven-year old up at night), but by the end of each book, Rachel and Kirsty outwit the goblins and return the stolen object to its rightful fairy owner.

What bothers me most about the Rainbow Magic books is not the fairies’ silvery voices or their sparkly outfits, although those attributes do give me pause. I have no objection to the quality of the writing, as I do with some other children’s books Nina has brought home. No, what I find most troublesome is that in most of the Sporty Fairy books, and in all the other Rainbow Magic books Nina borrowed excitedly from her school library, the only prominent male characters are goblins. King Oberon, king of all the fairies, makes a brief appearance with Queen Titania in Helena the Horseriding Fairy to set the girls on their quest for the sporty objects, and he and the Queen reappear in Gemma the Gymnastics Fairy to congratulate Rachel and Kirsty on a job well done. Rachel’s dad, Mr Walker, has a very small role in Samantha the Swimming Fairy, but features more prominently in Francesca the Football Fairy, as does a male football official. However, in four of the seven books in the Sporty Fairies series, goblins are the only men mentioned.

The Beast Quest books, a series of sixty books aimed primarily at five- to eight-year old boys (but read more often by girls than Rainbow Magic books are read by boys), are more even-handed regarding gender roles. Tom, a boy of about twelve, is the hero of Beast Quest, but in each story, he is accompanied by Elenna, his tomboyish best friend. Elenna is a worthy role model—capable, loyal, and eager for adventure— but she is still very much Tom’s sidekick. The spotlight always shines most brightly on Tom.

My son preferred the Astrosaurs series, a set of over twenty books about a group of herbivorous dinosaurs that belong to the Dinosaur Space Service (DSS). These books, written by Steve Cole, focus on the efforts of the crew of the DSS Sauropod to keep space safe from the many evil plans of the carnivorous dinosaurs. The captain, first officer, and chief engineer of the DSS Sauropod are all male, but the communications officer, Gypsy Saurine, is a female corythosaurus. Gypsy offers able assistance on each Astrosaurs mission, and in contrast to Elenna in the Beast Quest books, Gypsy even carries out the mission herself in one book, albeit aided by the male first officer.

These two book series for boys have chosen to include girls in significant supporting roles on the side of good, but in most of the Rainbow Magic books, the only boys are despicable goblins. Why?

***

Let’s start answering that question by looking at India. “4 million to 12 million selective abortions of girls have occurred in India in the past three decades,” according to a study published in The Lancet and reported on by Jim Yardley in the New York Times(“As Wealth and Literacy Rise in India, Report Says, So Do Sex-Selective Abortions,” May 24, 2011). The number of Indian women choosing to end pregnancies when carrying girls, particularly among the better-educated and more well-to-do, has increased in tandem with access to ultrasound technology and safe abortions. Mr Yardley further writes, “The 2011 census found about 7.1 million fewer girls than boys under the age of 6, compared with a gap of roughly 6 million girls a decade earlier.” An article in The Hindustan Times, one of the most widely-circulated newspapers in India, goes so far as to label the abortion of girls “India’s Silent Genocide” (Samar Halarnkar, January 26, 2011).

Selective abortion based on sex is morally murky because of continued ambiguity about the personhood of foetuses. However, “bride burning,” colloquial for murdering a bride when her family is unable to provide the dowry demanded by the groom and his family, is unequivocally immoral. Nilanjana S. Roy, in “A Campaign Against Girls in India,” writes that “National Crime Bureau figures indicate that reported dowry deaths have risen, with 8,172 in 2008, up from an estimated 5,800 a decade earlier” (The New York Times, April 12, 2011). Many of these deaths are caused by immolation.

A dear friend of mine is currently spending time in India. She posted recently on Facebook: “On being female in Delhi: so far, I have been groped, propositioned, condescended to, belittled, demeaned, severely scolded for an egregious instance of not doing as I was told and asking too many questions, invited to engage in adultery, and generally treated like my gender somehow ran away with my cognitive faculties, ethics, sense, good taste, and last pair of panties.”

In a society where women are treated as inferior, it would make sense that a book series portraying men as goblins would become popular. But the Rainbow Magic books are set in the United Kingdom, not in India. Surely girls and boys, and women and men, are on a more equal footing in this country, where dowries have not been common since the end of the nineteenth century and bride burning is considered barbaric? Are there reasons, in the United Kingdom, for girls to identify with an imaginary world where men are almost exclusively villains?

In the Global Gender Gap Report issued by the World Economic Forum in 2011, the United Kingdom had fallen from fifteenth to sixteenth place among the twenty countries with the greatest equality between men and women. The United States rose two places in 2011, to position seventeen, while India came 113th out of 134 countries. These results indicate that the U.K. and the U.S. are indeed achieving greater equality for men and women than India and many other countries, but the findings also point out that there is plenty of room for improvement. Particularly concerning for the United Kingdom is the drop from ninth to fifteenth place, although this is in keeping with an overall trend towards widening gaps in equality between women and men worldwide.

How do these chart positions play out in daily life? Jonathan Owen, writing for The Independent, reports that “Almost two-thirds of UK boys think that a woman’s most important role is to take care of her home and cook for the family – something less than half of girls agree with.” (“Why Equality Is A Distant Dream”, 9 October 2011). Mr Owen mentions that women have on average £9100 worth of retirement savings at the end of their working years while men average £52,800, and he points out that women are underrepresented in positions of power in the U.K.; there are fewer female politicians, judges, head teachers of secondary schools, and directors of large companies. Indeed, although India places much further down in the chart of gender equality, Mr Owen writes that “Only 49 per cent of boys in the UK, 52 per cent in Rwanda and 61 per cent of boys in India agreed: “It would be good to have the same number of men and women leading top companies.””

On a more personal level, in her TEDxWomen talk from 2011, Jennifer Siebel Newsom tells the poignant story of the gifts her daughter and son received at birth. Montana, the first-born daughter, was given “lots of pink” and many compliments on her appearance. Hunter, Siebel Newsom’s second child, was presented with several items bearing the White House insignia. The President of the United States and the Vice President each sent Hunter a letter welcoming him to the world. A tee shirt that Hunter was given had “Future President” emblazoned on the front in large letters. Ms Siebel Newsom fights back tears when she points out that “Montana, our eldest, but also our girl, didn’t even receive the suggestion that she, too, could be President… that her opportunities in life were limitless.”

Ms Siebel Newsom was not willing to stand by quietly and merely observe this dichotomy; she directed a feature-length documentary film, Miss Representation, to challenge the images and expectations of women created by the media and to call for greater empowerment of girls and women. She also created a campaign by the same name, with an online presence and an education department, to further the film’s message.

My own most powerful recent reminder of the distance women have left to travel before attaining parity with men came in the woods last summer. I took up jogging last spring, and when we went on holiday to visit family in Sweden, I was keen to keep up the habit. We stayed at my brother-in-law’s house, deep in the forests of Värmland, where wolves have made a resurgence and the wolf population is now estimated at 100. My sister-in-law, who lives in the same area, was able to get close enough to a full-grown wolf standing in the snow to take a picture that my husband now uses as his computer wallpaper. There was no snow on the sunny morning in late May when I set out for my jog. It was a peculiar feeling to run in wolf country; I imagined eyes watching me from behind the trees, and I wondered what I would do should a wolf suddenly appear close by. But my low-level anxiety about meeting canis lupus did not compare to my stronger worry about meeting the wrong sort of homo sapiens. When I jogged past a seemingly empty house in need of some repair, my concern about what sort of man could possibly live or stay in a house like that was serious enough to make me increase my pace substantially. I met neither man nor wolf, and returned safely, albeit out of breath, to my brother-in-law’s house.

Later in the summer we flew to the United States to visit my side of the family. Our base during that visit was a remote summer house, halfway up a mountain, on a dirt road in Vermont. During a morning walk with our kids we met a cheerful man with an exposed handgun in a halter around his waist. The man was in outdoorsy clothes, not in any sort of uniform, and he greeted us with a friendly “Lovely day for a walk!” as he passed.

I have spent most of my adult life in countries where it would be illegal to leave the house with a visible pistol. In England, even the policemen are generally unarmed, although there are special Armed Response Vehicles that may be called in if officers feel firearms are needed. I was shocked that a man could be armed as casually as if he were carrying a water bottle. There have been many times—walking home alone at night, locking my bicycle in the cellar of a block of flats, riding by myself in taxis—that I have vaguely considered the possibility that I could be raped. According to rapecrisis.org.uk, having this occasional fear places me alongside the majority of women. The fear is not at all unfounded; 23% of adult women in the U.K. will be sexually assaulted and 5% will be raped. When that anxiety starts to simmer, I attempt to calm it by assuring myself, probably falsely, that I would at least stand a chance against an assailant as I am physically strong and I am not afraid of making lots of noise. However, I am not naive enough to suppose that my strength and voice would do me any good at all against a rapist who was armed with a pistol.

When I went out jogging the next day, the man we had seen out walking and his weapon were never far from the front of my mind. I enjoyed running past the brook and through the dappled sunlight, but I was again glad to complete my jog without incident. Several days later, when I was ready to run again, my sister, who had joined us with her family at the summer house for a few nights, suggested that she look after our two children so that my husband could jog with me. My husband and I had not run together since my very earliest efforts to become a jogger, maybe twenty years earlier. I snapped up my sister’s kind offer, and my husband and I loped off down the dirt road. It was another glorious Vermont morning, and I was not only accompanied, but accompanied by a six-foot tall man. I felt no niggling anxiety about who we might meet, only a delicious sense of freedom to enjoy the run.

“Do you ever worry about being attacked when you’re out jogging?” I asked my husband between footfalls.

“No,” my husband replied, instantly. “Maybe I should sometimes, but I never do.”

“Must be nice,” I said.

“It is. Where did you turn around last time?” he asked, bringing the conversation back to more immediate concerns.

***

The Rainbow Magic books were the first books Nina pleaded with me to purchase for her. By the time she asked for them, she had already attended over a year of preschool and had entered her first year of primary school. Once acquired, the Sporty Fairy books were the first chapter books that Nina read independently. Children are savvy; by the age of five, regardless of the ideas we hoped to instil at home, Nina had doubtless begun to understand that boys and men have a societal advantage over girls and women. Behind the sparkly book covers, behind the descriptions of outfits and hairstyles, behind the fairy wings, the Rainbow Magic books are about female empowerment, albeit at the expense of males. Every time Kirsty and Rachel, as part of the all-girl good side, put the goblins in their place, inequality is redressed vicariously for the girl readers. Boys, who surely recognise that the balance of power is in their favour, can tolerate the presence of girl sidekicks in their popular book series.

Shortly after turning seven, Nina declared that she officially hated the colour pink. Not long after that announcement, she brought home a reading book featuring Secret Agent Jack Stalwart.

“You didn’t choose a Rainbow Magic book this time?” I asked, surprised.

“No, those books are too girly for me now,” Nina answered.

I then found myself in the peculiar position of defending Kirsty and Rachel. “I don’t think they’re too girly,” I said. “I think some of them are pretty exciting.”

“Oh Mum…” Nina sighed. “They’re like all pink, and sparkly, and fairies…”

“Well, I like that the girls are the heroines,” I persisted.

Nina looked at me, incredulous. “You actually like Rainbow Magic.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Jack Stalwart is far more cool,” Nina pointed out helpfully.

“That may be, but I still like the Rainbow Fairies,” I maintained.

By the time Nina has children (if she opts to follow that path) I fervently hope that the gender gap will be smaller than it is today. I want my grandchildren to read books that reflect an ameliorated balance of power. I envisage a Rainbow Magic equivalent for my granddaughters that will feature boys as helpers in the quest for magical objects and will portray both male and female goblins. If Nina’s sons read a series like Beast Quest, I’d like the books to include a girl heroine who often saves the day while wearing smashing dresses.

For now, I will look for books with strong female characters for Nina to read, I’ll send her to both ballet and karate lessons, and I’ll champion, as best I can, the idea that girls and boys are created equal.

Don’t Assume

When I was in the eighth grade, in a small town in Vermont, I had an algebra teacher named Mr. Jeffries.  Mr. Jeffries was not a tall man, but he had clearly been good-looking in the past.  He had the sort of world-weary air one would expect from a character in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, except that far from being a man-about-town, Mr. Jeffries was a native Vermonter.  His face was lined with deep wrinkles that had developed partly from countless hours spent outside in Vermont’s extreme weather (hot and humid in the summer, bitter cold and snowy in the winter), and partly from his serious cigarette habit.  At least once a week, leaning back in his chair or standing beside the chalkboard, Mr. Jeffries would announce to the assembled thirteen-year olds in his raspy voice, “Remember, kids… don’t assume.  It makes an ass out of you and me.”

Algebra marked the beginning of the end of my days as a math student, and most of what Mr. Jeffries said about finding xwent in one ear and out the other, but I have had lots of reasons to remember Mr. Jeffries’ favourite saying.

As an undergraduate, I became good friends with a woman named Sheila.  Sheila, in turn, introduced me to one of her friends, Jennifer.  The three of us were enrolled in the same French course.  Jennifer, a recent transplant to Vermont from South Africa, had very long, very dark hair that she always wore in a strict ponytail.  She had a petite, heart-shaped face, freckles, and blue eyes.  Sheila, Jennifer, and I would often visit the small cafe in the lower ground floor of the college hall for banana bread and coffee after class.  We would sit on chairs with wrought-iron backs around small marble-topped tables and talk. 

I took an instant dislike to Jennifer.  I blamed it partly on her ponytail.  How could she wear her hair the same way, pulled so tightly back from her face that it stretched the skin at her temples, every single day?  Looking back, I am stunned that I would have even entertained hairstyle as a reason to dismiss a potential friend.  But I clearly remember telling my husband, “It’s her ponytail.  I can’t get past the ponytail.”

Sheila, however, was fond of Jennifer, and always included her in our after-class plans.  As the term wore on, my feelings about Jennifer began to shift.  I had known next to nothing about the situation in South Africa before I met Jennifer, but over weekly hazelnut coffees, I learned that her life there had been challenging.  Jennifer spoke about her home country with a combination of longing and bitterness that  I now recognize this as the tone of the exile, even the self-chosen exile.  I imagine that I sometimes use a less intense variant of this same tone about the United States, as I have now lived in England for over ten years.  As I got to know Jennifer better, my attitude toward her hairstyle also changed.  The permanent ponytail was no longer a reason to condemn Jennifer, although it remained curiously irritating to me. 

Jennifer, Sheila, and I all signed up for the continuation of the introductory French course, and we all added a French literature course as well.  By the end of our second term as classmates, I had become friends with Jennifer, and had come to accept her ponytail as an unfortunate but surmountable quirk.  After that second term together, the three of us had all chosen to either major or minor in French, so we were frequently in the same classes.  One fine spring day a few weeks before we graduated, when the windows were open and a fresh breeze was cooling the classroom, Jennifer walked in to our medieval French literature class with a pixie cut.  She had cut off her entire foot-long ponytail– now there were just little wisps of black hair framing her face.  The improvement in Jennifer’s appearance was considerable, and she was clearly pleased as well.  I was mightily impressed that she had possessed the nerve to cut off all those inches of hair, but at the same time, I could finally see that it didn’t matter.  Jennifer was still Jennifer, whether she had a ponytail or a pixie cut.  Not long after cutting her hair, Jennifer, who- like me- was a bit older than most undergraduates, invited Sheila and me to her wedding.  She had fallen in love, somewhat clandestinely, with a teaching assistant, and they were very happy together.  The wedding took place just after graduation, outdoors, on the banks of Lake Champlain, an enormous lake with views over the Adirondack mountains in New York.  It was a small wedding, with no more than forty guests, and Jennifer was radiant with joy during the ceremony.  I was honoured to be in attendance.  I laughed later with my husband about how I had nearly foregone what had come to be a valued friendship based on an assumption about Jennifer’s personality that I had made on the basis of something as hugely superficial as a ponytail. 

I laughed, but I didn’t learn.  Many, many years later, in the suburb of London where my husband and I now live, I began attending the local church with our two children.  My church enlists a volunteer or two each week to stand by the door, greeting people as they enter.  Every few weeks, one of the welcomers would be Gillian, a tall woman with blue eyes and short blonde hair.  I rather dreaded the weeks that Gillian was standing by the door, because I had pegged Gillian as a woman with a possible drinking problem.  Whenever I met Gillian, her speech seemed slurred, and she moved in the unsteady way that people do when they’ve had a few too many.  She would greet me and my kids enthusiastically, and I would cringe inwardly.  During my second Christmas season at church, Gillian was one of the members of the congregation chosen to read a passage during the carol service.  I watched curiously as she approached the front of the church, and when she again seemed under the influence, I made my final judgement:  definitely drunk.  When I came home from the carol service, I informed my husband of my verdict.  He nodded, unfazed, and quite lacking any sort of moral indignation.     

A few months after Christmas, a social evening for women from church was held at a local pub.  I went along, and I was chatting with Trina, one of the women I knew casually from church who also had a child at the same preschool as my daughter, when Gillian arrived.  The table was crowded, but Gillian found a seat quite close to me.  When Trina stood up to order another drink, I realized I would need to speak with Gillian or risk seeming dreadfully impolite. 

“I’ve seen you at church, but I’ve never really introduced myself,” I said.  “I’m Beth.”

“Nice to meet you Beth, yes, I’ve seen you, you have those two adorable children,” Gillian said, already slurring slightly.

I smiled.  “Thanks.”

“So you’re from America…  I’ve been to Arizona,” Gillian said cheerfully.

“Oh really?”

“Yes, that was after the accident.”

“The accident?” I repeated, and even as I said it, I felt a sinking sensation as I rapidly understood that I had labelled Gillian incorrectly.

“Yes, I don’t know if you’d heard, but I was in a horrible accident several years ago.  My car was hit by a lorry.  It was awful.  I was in a coma for awhile.  I had to learn how to speak and how to walk all over again.  That’s why I come to church, to thank God for helping me recover.”

“Wow,” I said, humbled.  “I had no idea.  I’m so sorry to hear about the accident, but how amazing that you were able to fight your way back as you have.”

We chatted some more, about Gillian’s recovery, about America, about kids.  When I got home, I confessed to my husband that I had been terribly unfair to Gillian.  I recounted the story of the accident and of Gillian’s recovery. 

“So she isn’t a drunk,” my husband said.  “She’s a survivor.”

“She certainly is,” I agreed, and I scolded myself for having jumped to conclusions yet again.  I assured myself that I would be more careful about being open-minded in the future.

But old habits die hard.  This past weekend, I was feather-dusting upstairs in the late afternoon when I heard a peculiar noise through the wall.  It was a repetitive, rhythmic, high-pitched sound, very faint, as though it were emanating from a TV or a computer.  I walked downstairs quietly and found my husband. 

“Come upstairs for a minute,” I said.

“Why?”

“There’s something I want you to hear.”

“OK.”

We went back upstairs together and I took him to the spot where I had heard the noise.  The sound was still audible. 

“He’s watching porn, isn’t he?”  I whispered.

“Sure sounds like it to me,” he said. 

“Can you believe that?  They have that huge vegetable garden!  How could he be watching porn?” I demanded.  Even there, I had made an assumption: people who tend substantial vegetable gardens couldn’t possibly be porn consumers. 

My husband shrugged.  “We don’t know what their lives are like,” he said calmly. 

I admit there was a part of me that relished the idea that our neighbours’ lives were not perfect.  I have only spoken briefly with the neighbours on that side, but I know they own their half of the house, as well as a Jaguar and an Audi.  We rent our half of the house, and we drive a Peugeot with a substantial dent on one side, the unfortunate result of a close call I had with a concealed brick wall.  I felt a certain schadenfreude at the thought of a chink in the neighbours’ seemingly superior existence.

My husband was upstairs sending email a few days after the porn incident when he called me softly from the top of the stairs. 

“Beth,” he said, “I want you to hear something up here.”

I joined him in the same location where we had heard the porn.  The sound was coming through the wall again, but it was different this time.  It was stronger, less regular, but very familiar.  It was the sound of a baby crying. 

“It’s a baby,” I said, stunned at my mistake. 

“So much for their secret life,” my husband said, with only the slightest hint of “I told you so.” 

I blushed, embarrassed by having suspected the sound of being illicit when it was in actuality the sound of something completely innocent.  I was ashamed of having gloated even the littlest bit.

*

I have a slight idea of what it feels like to be on the receiving end of preconceived notions.  Most of my adult life has been spent abroad.  The first country I lived in outside America was Sweden.  I understood quickly that to be American in Sweden meant that I had a bit of cachet.  When I moved to Sweden, the TV soap opera “Dallas” was at the height of its popularity.  Several Swedes I met asked me if Americans really wore high heels in the kitchen and drank cocktails continuously.  I grew up in Vermont, where people wear sensible shoes or hiking boots and drink kegs of beer at outdoor parties, so whenever I was asked that question I would grin and answer that no, not all Americans resembled Pamela and Bobby Ewing. 

In England, where I’ve lived for the last ten years, to be American is often more of a liability than a benefit.  Just last week someone visibly recoiled when they heard my accent.  That sort of strong reaction to my nationality is thankfully very rare, but it is far from uncommon that English nationals are politely standoffish upon first meeting me.  I have read “Watching the English,” by Kate Fox, so I know that politely standoffish may describe English people meeting other English people for the first time as well, yet all the Americans in England that I have spoken to agree that they have sometimes experienced anti-American sentiment.

Children are often far more forthcoming with their thoughts than adults.  Last year one of our daughter’s six-year old friends came to play.  After glancing at me suspiciously several times during the play date, she finally looked me square in the eye and posed the question that had likely been on her mind for some time. 

“Did you know there are lots of books written about bad Americans?” she asked.

A small grin tugged at the corners of my mouth.  “That is definitely true, but do you know what?  There are lots of books written about bad English people as well,” I responded. 

She considered this for a moment.  “Maybe, but I think there are more about bad Americans.”

As the hostess, I felt it was best not to rock my daughter’s friend’s boat more than necessary.  “That may be,” I conceded.  “It’s hard to tell.”

Another little friend of our daughter’s was clearly on the fence about me when I first met her.  This particular girl is a huge fan of a certain American singer.  I attempted to influence her opinion of me by pointing out that I was American, just like the singer she adores, but that didn’t sway her.  She remained undecided about me for over a year.  Then one day, at a birthday party for one of the children in the class, she walked right up to me, smiling broadly.

“Did you know Tom and Jerry are American?” she asked me excitedly.

“Yes, I did know that.  Do you like that show?”

“It’s my favourite.  They talk just like you!”  She laughed.

I had never actually watched Tom and Jerry, but if they had made Americans acceptable to this little girl, then I was a fan. 

“How funny!  Are you enjoying the party?” I inquired.

“Yes.  I’m going to go get a fairy cake,” she informed me.

“Good choice.”

It seems safe to surmise that childrens’ reactions to my nationality mirror adult reactions.  Granted, I have met a number of English people who have been favourably predisposed towards Americans.  They are usually people who have worked or travelled in America, or who have become friends with other Americans previously.  With most English folks, it feels as if I undergo a probationary period; it’s like being American is my ponytail, and they need time to come to terms with my nationality, just as it took me months to see past Jennifer’s ponytail.  I am a patient person, and I don’t mind waiting, but I do relish the instances when my accent is warmly welcomed.              

I recognize that anti-American sentiment is completely trivial when compared with racism, homophobia, or discrimination based on religious beliefs.  I do not suppose for a moment that I have any idea of what it is like to encounter that level of hostility.  Yet the distancing effect of my nationality has had consequences.  Even after ten years in England, most of my close friends are not from here. 

I make assumptions about people every day.  I assume, for example, that the people I meet will follow the broad social norms for human behaviour and will be generally well-meaning.  I take for granted that people are doing the best they can as professionals: that the family doctors will attempt to diagnose and treat any illnesses, that my children’s teachers have my children’s best interests at heart.  I rest assured that my close friends and family are on my side.  In addition to making these generalizations, I also categorize people.  If I learn that someone is married, I put them in the “married” box.  When I discover that someone is from another country, I pull out whatever knowledge I have of that country and its nationals and use that information as a guide for speaking with the person.  So far, all is well.  It is only when my preconceptions include some element of negative judgement that I get into trouble.  Similarly, only when being an American is considered less than ideal do I mind being categorized by nationality by others.  The giveaway that I have misstepped is even the slightest bit of scornfulness.  I felt better than Jennifer because I didn’t always wear my hair in a ponytail (as a woman who now wears jeans every single day, I am dumbfounded by this, and I can only wonder what I would have thought had I met my future self at that time).  I figured Gillian as a person with a drinking problem, when in truth she is a brave and determined survivor.  I jumped at a possible reason to feel more morally upstanding than our neighbours, only to find that they have embarked upon the morally demanding journey of parenthood.

My son, who is nearly ten, is in the midst of an all-consuming love affair with mathematics.  He talks about math throughout the day and reads books about math at night.  As a result, all the math teachers I encountered as a student have been parading through my memory.  Most of the concepts they valiantly attempted to teach me have been washed away by time, much like pictures drawn in the sand are erased when the sea washes over them.  But the next time I feel that creeping sense of superiority as I judge another person, I aim to call to mind the most important thing that Mr. Jeffries taught me sooner rather than later.  I will envisage him standing by the chalkboard, with his James Dean haircut and his furrowed brow, saying laconically, “Remember, don’t assume…  it makes an ass out of you and me.”




(Note: some names and minor details have been changed.)

‘Tis the Season

As a child, I adored Christmas.  Not just the day itself, but the entire season, held me in its thrall.  As soon as Thanksgiving had passed, I would start asking my mom to play Christmas carols on the piano so I could sing along.  One Christmas when I was maybe nine, I talked my younger brother and sister into caroling for my mom, who was inside, from outside.  Our boots crunched in the snow as we walked around our small house.  My brother and sister got cold after a few songs and went back in, but I carried on, singing a new carol at each window.  Every year Mom would string our motley selection of lights around the Christmas tree.  They were the sort of lights with sockets the size of a fingertip, and we had them in every colour, both matte and clear, blinking and steady.  My favourite was the clear blue flashing light, closely followed by the red matte bulb.  In the evenings, Mom liked to turn off the everyday lights in the living room and sit quietly, almost reverentially, with the tree.  On Christmas Eve, we sometimes went to the evening service at church.  This meant venturing out into the starlit, cold Vermont night well after my usual bedtime.  I would arrive at the candlelit church sanctuary sleepy, but excited to hear the familiar Christmas story, with its themes of miracles, of promises kept, and of gifts given.

Every Christmas morning as a child I woke up long before sunrise.  Mom had impressed upon me the need to wait until a reasonable hour, I believe it was six o’clock, before waking the rest of the household on Christmas Day.  When the clock finally struck six, I would rouse my tired family, then rush downstairs while they slowly woke up.  In December, in Vermont, the sun doesn’t rise until after seven.  Mom always left the tree lights on overnight on Christmas Eve, so the tree would sparkle magically in the dark.  The stockings, empty the night before, would be bulging, sometimes with box corners making jagged points in the knitting.  Many more presents would have taken their place under the tree, all with either “Santa” or “SC” in the “From” box on the gift tag.  Only when I was a teenager did I realize that Santa Claus and my mom shared the same initials.

When my brother, sister, mom and stepdad joined me in the living room, we would open the presents in our stockings.  I had a bright green stocking with a white heel and toe, handknit by one of my great-grandmothers.  It had a picture of Santa Claus’s face knit into the side, and best of all, Santa’s beard was actually fuzzy.  After the stockings, we would have Moravian coffee cake and grapefruit, and when breakfast was eaten, under-the-tree presents were opened, one by one.  I don’t remember ever feeling disappointed with my presents, although I must have at some point.  To me, the ritual of presents was so thrilling in and of itself- the wrapping, the ribbon, the mystery- that I was happy even when the gift was something useful, like clothes.

After presents, there would be a lull while Mom finished cooking.  Some of the dinner preparation was done in advance.  Several days before Christmas, for example, we would “help” Mom by turning the crank on the ancient silver grinder to prepare the fresh cranberries for the cranberry-orange relish.  On Christmas Day Mom preferred to have the kitchen to herself, and the kids’ only contribution to the meal was to set the table, with the good silverware, one of two possible inherited porcelain patterns, and glasses that all matched.  I would sit down to a table laden with traditional Christmas dishes—turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, brussel sprouts—and I would bask in the warm glow of contentment.  We were celebrating a child’s birthday, and I was about to eat a delicious meal, together with people I loved beyond measure, after which I would return to listening to Christmas carols while playing with new toys.  What was not to like?

*

My embrace of the Christmas season continued unabated until a few years ago.  When the children were very small, they were easily enchanted, and the holiday continued to feel magical.  But the older they got, the more challenging the season became, and Christmas slowly began to be tinged with guilt and regret.

Take Christmas cards.  Four years ago, before my daughter had joined her brother at full-time school, was the last year that I sent out proper family Christmas cards, with pictures of the children, that arrived at their destinations before Christmas.  The following year, I again sent out pictures of the kids, but the cards were sent several weeks after Christmas Day.  Last year, I did not put a single card in the mail.  As the cards others had sent began to trickle in, each light thud as an envelope landed on the doormat engendered an echo of guilt within me.

Eleven years ago, as my husband and I prepared to move to England from New England, my mom called me up.

“I’m really going to miss you,” she said.  “I probably won’t see you more than every couple of years.”

“Of course you will, we’ll be back every summer!” I assured her.

“You think that now, but just wait, when you have kids, you’ll find it isn’t so easy to travel anymore.”

“I’m not sure we will ever have kids, and if we do, we’ll still come over at least once a year,” I said confidently.

As it happens, my mom was right.  The Internet bubble burst, we had two children, and we now average a visit to the U.S. every other year.  For the last couple of years, homesickness has kicked in around Thanksgiving, and it hasn’t let up until after Christmas.  Moving back to the States is not a realistic option for us at the moment, nor is moving to Sweden, where my husband’s entire family lives.  A few years ago, my brother came to visit  during the Christmas break, but other than that, we haven’t seen relatives during the holiday season for the past eleven years.  Some of the seasonal advertisements, and many of the Christmas songs, make it clear that Christmas should be celebrated at home with family.  We have our little family, and we have a home, and for most of the year, that suffices.  But from November through January, it is harder to ignore the distance between both of us and our extended families. 

*

Last year I thought maybe I could regain my Christmas spirit if I went “back to the basics” of Christmas.  As someone who attends church regularly, I assumed that meant that I should emphasize the religious aspects of the holiday season.  Accordingly, I downplayed Santa.  I didn’t come right out and say that Santa isn’t real, but I didn’t tell many stories of Santa.  A friend’s husband played Santa at the school Christmas Fair, and when the children, who have big ears, asked me if it had really been Santa in the grotto or if it had been Tessa’s daddy, I admitted that maybe Tessa’s daddy had been helping Santa out by standing in for him at the Fair.  I took the kids to all the Christmas services at church, and I tried to recapture the magic I had felt at hearing the Biblical Christmas story as a child.  It didn’t work.  I couldn’t turn myself over to the promise of a miracle as I had before. 

Two years ago, in the fall, my husband, Håkan, was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (MS).  The diagnosis followed several extremely difficult years during which Håkan fell ill repeatedly and spent many weekends in bed.  We were shocked, as anyone would have been, to hear the news.  MS is a progressive degenerative disease for which there is currently no cure.  After being diagnosed, Håkan began taking medication to relieve his symptoms.  The medication was an enormous blessing.  Håkan’s asthma disappeared—it had never been asthma, it had been MS.  During the steroid courses, especially the first one, I had the peculiar feeling that someone who had long been absent had returned.  But even with medication, Hakan still suffers from relapses, that manifest themselves primarily as enormous fatigue and a tendency towards gloominess.  This past fall, Hakan was told that it was time for him to start self-injecting.  Since September, I have woken up in the morning to the sounds of this treatment: the slapping of the skin to prepare the site for injection, the click of the needle, the moment where Hakan holds his breath as the medicine enters his body, the sigh, and the clink of the needle being thrown on top of all the other needles in the bright yellow bucket with the big red sharps symbol on it.  The oral drug that could have perhaps offered Hakan a bit of improvement, rather than just prevention of rapid deterioration, was not approved by the agency that controls medications in the U.K., so Hakan, who had been hoping to switch to that oral drug after his next appointment with his consultant, will have to continue self-injecting.

Christmas is about belief.  Devout Christians believe in the Biblical story of Christ’s birth as it is written.  More doubtful Christians, where I usually place, may see the Christmas story is a reminder of the wonder and power of hope.  Children may believe whole-heartedly in Santa.  There are many who choose to see Christmas as a time to celebrate their belief in the promise of Earth’s slow journey towards spring, as the equinox passes, and the days slowly start to become lighter.  I have been a believer—not a traditional believer, but a believer nonetheless— my entire life.  My husband’s illness has shaken that belief more violently than anything I have yet experienced.  Before the results of his brain scan, I could still believe that all his weekends in bed, although there had been years of them, were just an anomaly.  I could hope that one day, something would change, and he would return to his “normal” self.  The medication Hakan takes has helped, but I know full well that the prognosis is not good, and every time he drops the salt shaker or needs to lie down during the day, I need to work hard to rein in the galloping panic that threatens to trample any semblance of composure that I have. How could I give myself fully to Christmas, a holiday that holds out a promise of hope, when despair was tugging at me?

But humans need to believe.  When my daughter, Nina, was about five years old, she went through her first “death phase.”  She seemed abnormally concerned about the possibility of death.  During that time, Nina struggled to postpone my inevitable departure from her room in the evening.

“Wait,” she would say, after I had given her a goodnight hug and kiss, “I have something to tell you.”

I would pause at the door, then return to her bedside.  “What is it, sweetie?”

“I’m scared that you might die tonight,” she would say, frowning, and holding out her arms for an extra hug.

“Chances are I probably won’t, and most likely I’ll see you in the morning,” I would say. 

Nina would then hug me very tightly and make another attempt to keep me in the room.  “I have a secret to tell you.”

“What is it, Nina?” I would say, and I would start to feel the first tickles of frustration.

Nina would then recount a long, drawn-out, somewhat cohesive story about an event, real or imaginary.  I would do my best to listen sympathetically, then say “good night” again.  The pattern would repeat.  After a few more stories from Nina and “good nights” from me, I would usually give in to irritation and announce that it was time to sleep in a rather more stern voice than I would have wished.

I guessed that I was probably not helping Nina get to sleep by sidestepping the question of my continued presence in the morning, but I had moral misgivings about telling her I would without a doubt be there to welcome her awakening in the new day.  The fact was, to tell her that would be lying.  There was no guarantee that either of us would open our eyes in the morning. 

At coffee one morning with some friends, I recounted our sleep issues.  I mentioned my hesitancy to answer Nina’s continual question about whether or not I would die in the night with a definite no.  One friend in particular was adamant that I must change my approach. 

“You have to tell her you’ll be there in the morning, Beth,” my friend said.  “It’s not lying.  It’s your best guess, and even if it were lying, she needs to hear it.  She’s only five!  No wonder she’s not going to sleep, I wouldn’t either if I were in her shoes!”

When my friend put it that way, something clicked, and I saw that my desire to be truthful was doing more harm than good.  I started telling Nina, when she asked, that I was absolutely, positively going to live through the night, and that there was no question whatsoever that I would see her in the morning. 

After about a month of this new strategy, a month that also included a visit to Westminster Abbey to see the many graves and memorials there, Nina began to move past her “death phase.”  The bedtime routine slowly became easier.  Nina is six now, and she lets me leave her room in the evening without a second thought.

*

I missed Santa last year.  It felt like a treasured guest was missing from the Christmas celebration.  But this year Santa is back, even though my daughter has insisted on several occasions that Santa is not real.  We spread glitter over the back lawn to make it more attractive to the reindeer; we offered them a reindeer cake that Nina had made at school.  Our kids composed a letter to Santa that we left for him with a midnight snack.  Our son even placed his Santa hat in the Christmas tree, with a note reading: “Dear Santa, if you lose your hat, feel free to borrow mine.”  Santa has returned because this year I am offering them every opportunity to believe.  Whether they believe in Jesus, Santa, or the promise of spring is up to them.

My children will need to be believe.  They are growing up in a country that neither of their parents calls home, and  while we have good friends here, we have no family.  Their father’s illness has already affected them, and will undoubtedly give them reason to lose hope as the years go by.  I want my children to have a bedrock of faith so that when there is an earthquake in their lives, there may be cracks, but the bedrock will not be shaken.

The celebration of Christmas is about building that faith.  It is indicative of my state of mind at the time that last year I reached my lowest point regarding Christmas cards.  After several years of sliding downhill,  last year I felt that Christmas cards were at best frivolous, and at worst, an opportunity for one-upmanship.  What was the point of sending cards?  If I saw the potential card recipient frequently, why not just say “Merry Christmas”?  If I didn’t see them frequently, why bother?  This year, as the cards began to arrive, I confessed to myself that I actually liked receiving them.  Yes, they may sometimes be sent out of a sense of obligation rather than a sense of generosity, but it struck me the week before Christmas, as I looked fondly at our collection, that the Christmas cards contribute to the hopefulness of the season.  By Christmas Day our mantelpiece is crowded with cards: cards to our children from their friends, cards from neighbours, cards from organizations, cards from friends near and far, and cards from family.  Every card is like a little candle, lit by the one who wrote it, sent to brighten the Christmas season just that little bit more.  I felt a bit like the Grinch at the climax of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” by Dr. Seuss, when the Grinch realizes that the Whos will still hold hands and celebrate the coming of Christmas morning although he has stolen all their Christmas trappings.  My heart grew three sizes, and I sat right down and started my Christmas cards.  When I took them to the post office, the Tuesday before Christmas, the clerk there looked at me like a teacher would look at a student handing in late homework.

“You really left these until the last minute,” he said, peering over his reading glasses at me.

“I know,” I said.  But like anyone whose heart has just grown three sizes, I wanted to look at the positive.  “At least they’ll be postmarked before Christmas,” I said, smiling. 

The clerk’s countenance softened.  “Very true,” he concurred.

I am more at peace with Christmas this year.  Our situation has not changed—if anything it is more precarious than it was last year—but I am convinced that without faith, it would be even worse.  And Christmas, as I understand it today, is God’s way of saying to people, or people’s way of saying to each other, or maybe a little bit of both, something very similar to the message I learned that I needed to give Nina every night:  “There is darkness, but even in that darkness, there is hope, and one way or another, morning will come, and when it does, that morning will be good.”