The Art of Becoming

One day while walking the kids to school, Sean was telling me how his brand new tennis shoes allowed him to run really fast. I smiled, agreed with him, and continued schlepping Audrey's violin on my shoulder while holding the leashed dog in one hand and a dog-poop-bag in another. Sean: You know, Mama. I bet if you put on your tennis shoes and tied them really tight, you might actually be able to run. I scoffed. me: I can run! Sean: You can? me: Of course I can! You just don't see me run very much because I have all this stuff weighing me down. Sean: Oh. Yeah, (almost to himself)  I just never see you run... me: I am able  to run. I just choose to walk. His belief that maybe I could run if I just tried was endearing, but I suddenly felt very alien to my own child. I dropped the kids at school and as I walked home by myself, a half block from our duplex, I began to jog. I started to pick up speed, sprinting, and our dog happily raced alongside me. The air whipped...

I’ve often wondered what kind of a parent I am. I’ve heard the labels of “helicopter parents” or the more lackadaisical among us who raise “free range kids.” I can see aspects of my personality present in each of the labels, and yet I’ve not been able to determine which one pertains to me. There are pros and cons to each label, and neither one really captures the kind of parent I want to be. A recent experience forced me to think about these two labels again. I was enjoying a pleasant morning with two other moms. I brought scones over to my sister-in-law's house, she had coffee for all of us, and we each had a toddler. The toddlers played in the living room and we sat at the dining room table in the adjacent room. Moments arose where two of the toddlers would begin to wrestle and fight over a toy, and the moms would break the conversation long enough to glance over our shoulders.   The moms paused to watch the aggravated faces of our toddlers as they duked it out with Nean...

My grandmother, Anna Leah Agniel, passed away on August 11, 2016. She was three weeks shy of her 94th birthday. I was honored to speak at her funeral. {walking up to pulpit, adjusting microphone, pulling out lipstick, applying lipstick without a mirror blotting lipstick on back of hand} ...and then she would gesture with it {taking lipstick and pointing out to the crowd} "now, we just need to move that table over here." Or if she was cooking and had a carrot in her hand, she would gesture with that, "please bring that platter into the kitchen."  I have so, so many great memories of Grannie. And yet when I started to put thoughts together for her eulogy, the memory that kept coming to mind was from down at the cabin in Shadow Valley. Often we would be down swimming in the lake when Pup and Gran would arrive. Their arrival came with great fanfare, honking of the car horn, and their voices, hellos, echoing across the lake. Though we were down in the water and the...

The children are obsessed with Star Wars. For that matter: the husband is obsessed with Star Wars. He and I saw #7  in the theaters and this started a tidal wave of hunting down the original three (4, 5, 6) and resurrecting the second trilogy (1, 2, 3). My chronological training in Star Wars is complete. Our three children make multiple light sabers a day. Frankie calls them "light savers." Star Wars character roles are divvied out: Audrey is Leia, Sean is Luke, and Frankie is Yoda. Which makes sense, right? Frankie is short, so she is assigned the seat of wisdom. Hers is the character that molds and culls the force in others. Frankie calls herself "Yoga" and when I try to correct her, she never capitulates. me: His name is Yoda. Frankie: No. YOga. One day the force was so powerful that they combined all their legos into one Jedi fleet. Sean brought out every lego set he has and Audrey enlisted the help of her girl-branded legos. They created worlds upon worl...

I love surprises. I love surprise gifts, surprise parties, and surprising moments. As I was telling this to a friend recently, he responded with, "so I should jump out and scare you sometime and you'll like it?" No. Definitely not. I have never enjoyed being scared: not by my brother in a werewolf mask, not by scary movies, and never by haunted houses. Never. This got me thinking: why do I love surprises but not scary movies? Surprises tend to connote something good. Whereas scary movies often lead to something bad happening.  Being scared fuels fear, paranoia, and doubts about the goodness of the world. Yet whether I'm talking about surprises or something scary, they both involve the unexpected. Unexpected situations in my life rest on a spectrum. On one end of this spectrum, we have good surprises. One morning, Seancito got up with his alarm clock at 6:30am, got dressed, and came downstairs to see me dragging the recycling out into -9 degree weather (real tempe...

The Thanksgiving break took its toll on all of us. We cooked all day on Thursday, it snowed, the kids played outside, the house was warm and smelled good. It couldn't have been more picturesque. That is until they all came inside. Then they fought with each other. Or Sean was busy tackling his sisters to the ground. The tackling isn't so much the problem, it's more the tackling on a hard wood floor. Or the tackling on the couch, while the 2 year old responds full force and then lands on the floor crying. Or tackling a sister in the middle of a well-traveled walkway for everyone else in the family. It was THAT. I spent so much of the evening quietly correcting, then swiftly and loudly reprimanding Sean, that by the time we were brushing teeth and getting ready for bed, he broke down into tears. me: (tired, exasperated) Why are you crying? Sean: I didn't have a fun night! me: Why is that? Sean: I'm sad... (sob, sob)...because you wouldn't let me do... anyth...

“What most of us must be involved in--whether we teach or write, make films, write films, direct films, play music, act, whatever we do--has to not only make people feel good and inspired and at one with other people around them, but also has to educate a new generation to do this very modest thing: change the world.” ― Howard Zinn, Artists in Times of War and Other Essays  When I was in college, a friend's parents told me and my closest friends that idealism belonged to the young. They applauded our desire to better understand the war in Iraq and rail against it, but they seemed unwavering in their belief that we would abandon our idealism the older we got. In the wake of the attacks in Paris last Friday, I've been trying to channel my emotions into something good. My mom's response to Friday's attacks was prayer. She believes that's the only response possible in the face of such atrocity. I don't disagree. Another fr...