Today my “baby” turns 21.
Dylan arrived home from college yesterday, top down on his Mustang after two days of driving. We went to see the new Spiderman movie last night. This morning we went out and played pickleball. We got his favorite Habit burgers for lunch, along with milkshakes for those who wanted them.
As I write, he is playing the piano. Dylan has been playing the piano since it was a 12-inch toy with eight keys. He’s a singer, without a doubt, but he loves the piano. We got this piano from my sister, who got it from my aunt. Dylan hasn’t stopped playing it since.
We tried to give Dylan piano lessons, and he went to a couple. But sitting and playing scales wasn’t for him. He’s never learned to read music, which has cost him a spot in all of the college’s a cappella groups. He didn’t practice piano until we gave up and took him out of lessons. Then he started to play.
He just sat down and started to play. He thought of a song he liked, and he sat down and learned how to play it. He plays with two hands, not one finger (like I do), and he plays chords and notes and mixes them beautifully. In fact, he can play – quite literally – any song he wants to play.
He was originally playing Don’t Stop Believin’ by Journey. He started a few minutes ago and played it until he figured it out. Over and over and over. And it’s loud. It’s the kind of loud that, if it weren’t so beautiful, you would want to cover your ears and scream. Over and over and over and over and over … and then, voila! He figured it out.
So then, in the blink of an eye, he switched to the theme from Halloween, the horror movie. He’s been playing that one for about ten minutes now. Every now and then, he’ll stop playing long enough to respond to messages on his phone.
If it were up to Dylan, he would play piano – figuring out songs one at a time – all day, every day.
Dylan doesn’t know what he’s going to do “for a living,” but he’ll never stop playing music unless something physically forces him to do so.
Bill’s coworkers are excited that Dylan is turning 21. “You can finally buy him his first beer!” they say, laughing because it’s so unlikely that Dylan hasn’t already had several hundred illegal alcoholic drinks.
But Dylan doesn’t drink; he’s never wanted that life. Dylan won’t be going out tonight and drinking alcohol. And with much of his non-drunk time, he’ll be playing the piano.
He’s finished with Halloween now – and moved on to learning the music from The Nightmare Before Christmas. In my head I’m singing along: “This is Halloween; this is Halloween.” But it’s a week before Christmas. If Dylan stops playing piano now, I’ll be stuck with this song in my head until he plays something new.
Maybe this isn’t the typical 21st birthday celebration.
I drank so much on my 21st birthday that I passed out on the sidewalk outside my dorm. I woke in the morning with no clothes, sheets or blankets because I’d vomited all night long. My roommate spent her night doing my laundry. And she also saved my life: I could have easily choked to death on all that vomit.
To say that I am grateful for Dylan’s decisions would be the understatement of a lifetime.
Happiest of birthdays, Son.
I have now been gluten-free for a year, and off-and-on gluten-free for five. This is not something I enjoy, with the exception of feeling substantially better and not being sick all the time.
While I am technically choosing to eat foods without gluten so that I will no longer be sick, I just want to complain about the entire experience. Stop reading now if you don’t want to hear it.
First, everything contains gluten. In America, our diets revolve around bread. We have bagels and biscuits for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, and there’s always bread on the table for dinners. I have never much cared for bread, which is good, but the convenience of having, say, a cheeseburger on a bun has always meant a lot to me.
I can no longer get a cheeseburger on a bun. I can get it wrapped in lettuce, which is disastrous to eat, or sitting on a plate which is just dull. Who wants a cheeseburger on a plate? On rare occasions, I have a choice of a gluten-free bun. These taste a little like sand, and they often crumble like sand, too. They are not a suitable substitute for a hearty, glutenous bun.
But – and this is the real kicker – gluten-free buns cost more. I pay an extra $3-10 every single time we eat out, simply because the entire food arena – from grocery stores to restaurants – charges more to provide sub-par substitutes just for the pleasure of eating with my own family. Occasionally I will have the chance to eat gluten-free pizza. Gluten-free pizza crusts often come in only one size, which is – to put it mildly – very small. I can only get one 10″ pizza, which is a little like saying I can have pizza, but most of it is crust.
And OMG that gluten-free crust is bad. Unless someone knows how to cook it – which simply doesn’t happen very often – gluten-free crust comes out mushy and gross. Gluten-free pizza needs to be well-done and crispy or it doesn’t taste like pizza crust at all. And for the pleasure of eating the mush, I get to pay an extra $3-10!
I don’t know who decides that gluten-free stuff should cost more; I really don’t. It’s mostly made out of cheap rice flour – so why are we paying more for rice? Isn’t rice competitively priced with wheat? I read somewhere that we are paying for the gluten-free symbol, that it takes a lot of paperwork and hoo-hah to get that symbol on a package.
Still. Whoever they are…
Do they believe that we should pay more – for a symbol, for rice, for mushy/sandy tasting food? It just doesn’t seem fair. It’s bad enough that cookies, cake, donuts, bread, cereal, fried foods, most soups and even soy sauce are off limits if I want to stay well.
Paying more for less just doesn’t seem right.
I am just crawling out of bed, two days after my COVID booster shot…
Will be back to write another day.
Usually when Thanksgiving is over, I start writing my annual Christmas letter. I started when the children were young. I had too many leftover photo prints from their latest visit to Picture People, so I decided to shove a few into Christmas letters.
At first, I bought cards, too. I wrote letters and folded them carefully to fit inside. I agonized over which cards went where, and who got Jesus stickers on their envelopes, and who got Santa stickers.
One summer, one of my cousins told me that she looked forward to my Christmas letter every year. “I read every word,” she said.
And I thought, wow – who knew? Someone actually appreciated what I was writing, so I kept writing – and forgot about the cards.
I wrote about my kids, and life with them. I talked about our vacations and our challenges with ADHD and vision processing. I talked about God and sobriety and how much I appreciate the little things in life – and life itself. I poured out my heart and soul, and then scattered photos among the words and wrapped the entire creation in a holiday-themed banner. I always tried to keep it to one page, but I don’t remember if I did.
As my kids grew, it became harder to talk about what we were doing. I started working and the kids started closing themselves in their rooms, as teenagers often do. Our vacations became the highlights of the letter, because that’s when I spent the most time with my kids. My letters started to look more like “typical” Christmas letters than unique ones. And I felt bad about that.
I started a blog along the way, and wrote about my life several times every week. This went on for years. I mentioned my blog in my Christmas letter, hoping those who cared would want to read more. Later I realized: my blog is really just for me.
Then politics upended everything. Friends and family disagreed – vehemently and about everything – for the first time in my life. I’d always believed everyone in my family thought exactly like me. But I learned with a jolt that many of the people I loved most in the world didn’t think like me. And while that was hard to realize, it was also hard not to take it personally.
Friends and family members unfriended me on Facebook because our views didn’t align. People I admired all my life became … just people. My heroes became human. Some of the people I loved most in the world generalized my personal views using hateful, horrible language. And while many of my favorite people remained quiet, I recognized for the first time in my life that I might not be as deeply loved as I once believed.
And then: COVID. Politics and COVID nearly tore apart the world.
So I wrote one last Christmas letter – in July 2020. I wrote about my family and my feelings and tried to offer joy and solace during a miserable time. But for the first time ever, I reeled in my heart and soul. I was desperately afraid that I would hurt someone’s feelings.
And then I mailed out that letter to all the people on my list, even those who had unfriended me. Dylan was in college, Shane was finishing high school, and I was feeling more alone than ever. But I decided that July 2020 letter would be my last one.
Now, 18 months later, my heart is a little broken. My family is a little broken. Some of my dear friends are gone from my life forever. And the holidays are here, but they’re a bit broken, too.
So I am sad to be not writing a Christmas letter this year. But maybe, if I get super-motivated, I’ll send out a couple of cards.
I am not cool.
But admitting that is nothing in comparison to this confession: I love Donny Osmond.
Let me back up to say: this is not a leftover crush from my childhood years. In fact, when the rest of the world was swooning over Donny, I preferred his little brother, Jimmy, who had freckles and bangs. Also, I reasoned at the ripe old age of 8, I was much more likely to marry Jimmy Osmond because he was closer to my own age. (He was 9.)
I sang along to every Donny Osmond song released between 1972 and 1976. I learned every lyric while staring at his puppy-dog eyes and trying to get my hair to whisk across my forehead like his.
I created dances for Yo Yo and Down By the Lazy River, and wailed internally through Sweet and Innocent and Go Away Little Girl. I believed Donny was actually the Last of the Red Hot Lovers, even though I had no idea what that meant.
These songs still wake up my psyche, even after 45 years.
I watched Donny & Marie on TV but got to middle school and mostly forgot about Donny. In 1989, long after he’d disappeared from my life, I heard a song called Soldier of Love on the radio – and was dumbfounded when the DJ said Donny was singing.
I recognized Donny’s voice instantly in Disney’s Mulan. I heard he did some musicals, but never saw any.
When, finally, I did see Donny live, and Donny and Marie live twice, I claimed that these concerts were a “gift” for my mentally challenged sister-in-law. She has no idea that the world has moved on since Donny & Marie was the hottest show on TV. She lives in TV Land.
But I got a glimmer of the true Osmond talent at those concerts.
I started to pay attention to Donny’s career, realizing that he suddenly seemed to be everywhere. His face was all over Las Vegas when we vacationed there. He appeared in College Road Trip, the funniest character in the movie. He made fun of himself – something he does beautifully – in Weird Al’s White and Nerdy. He won first place on Dancing With The Stars. He came in second on The Masked Singer (where I also recognized his voice). His talent is tenacious.
This year, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, Donny released Who, a pop song that I’ve only heard while watching the official video. He sings his own backup and harmony vocals. The old Osmond dance style is as strong as ever. But I can’t just listen; I have to watch.
Donny – the consummate Mormon, at the age of 63 – is oozing sex appeal. He is the hottest I have ever seen him, 100% on fire. I cannot understand how there hasn’t been a sudden and forceful uprising of old women, rushing out of their retirement homes to scream and cry under Donny’s window sill. After watching this video, it is irrelevant that he has twelve grandchildren.
I watch this man – the same one whose eyes I adored 50 years ago while planning to marry his little brother – and I can only think: WOW.
So it’s time for me to read his book – something that will likely contradict every Tiger Beat interview I ever read. The last book I read about Donny was purchased through my school’s Scholastic book fair, so I think it’s time I read another one.
I will never, ever, ever be cool.
Dear Tree Guy,
I want you to know what you took from me.
We bought our first house with a toddler and an infant – had it built in Pennsylvania and driven into Maryland on trucks. It was the cheapest way we could find to buy a house we liked. We put the whole thing together with cranes like a giant jigsaw puzzle.
Our yard was a mud pit. There were no trees to climb and, as a youth, I’d spent a considerable amount of time climbing the beautiful Sycamore near my home. I’d sit in the tree and read books. So when we decided to plant a tree for our kids, we chose a Sycamore, a real Sycamore that had to be special-ordered. At a mere 7’ tall, it was planted right outside a window where I could watch it grow. We watered it meticulously for two years to produce deep, sturdy roots, so that tree would be strong enough to withstand anything.
Our kids grew and the Sycamore grew, and they were both bigger than we could have imagined after a very fast decade. The tree grew taller than our house. It had substantial, gorgeous branches that the kids could climb – and they did. The tree blocked the view of our neighbor’s house, and gave a gorgeous, natural feel to a once barren yard.
We used the tree as a feeding station to heal a group of foxes with mange. Squirrels buried their nuts under it. Migrating birds stopped by – even tiny hummingbirds. I hung a beautiful handmade hummingbird swing from a low branch. I watched the hummingbirds fly from the feeder back into that tree, marveling at their tiny size and supersonic wings.
My oldest son is in college now. Last time he came home, he climbed nearly to the top of that tree. My youngest son is now heading for college, and he’s spent time in that tree as well.
My son and I were looking at colleges when your guys came to my house to decimate my backyard. I knew you were coming. The tree in the backyard couldn’t grow sideways forever – so I knew it would be cut down, but I didn’t want to be in town when it fell. It broke my heart.
But nothing could have prepared me for what you did to the Sycamore in the front yard. One low-hanging branch of the Sycamore brushed over our cars as we pulled into our driveway – just a tiny piece of the tree, really.
But you didn’t cut one tiny piece.
You massacred my beloved Sycamore. In minutes, without asking us, you chopped off twelve feet of enormous, beautiful, low branches. You sawed off limb after limb – seven branches, at least – before my husband saw what you were doing.
The tree we planted with love and care, the one that grew up with our children, the only tree I have loved since my childhood Sycamore, was destroyed. You chopped and chopped, WITHOUT OUR PERMISSION, and then just said, “Oops.”
My kids can’t climb the tree now; you have taken away all of the lowest branches. The handmade hummingbird swing is gone; no one even noticed its glimmering beauty as it fell with the branches you sheared. The yard next door – an eyesore at best – is now clearly visible, since the tree is only half there. I just sit at the window and cry.
You took something that cannot be replaced: you took a symbol of my children’s lives, a version of my own childhood. You destroyed and obliterated the tree we used to measure the growth of our family. Just as my last child is leaving for college, you ruined my tree, just as the tree was becoming the only thing I had left to watch grow.
YOU did that. And then you destroyed our backyard. Then you left.
You can’t make this right. You can’t bring back what you stole from me and my family. You can’t make the tree climbable again – it will never, ever be climbable again. You can’t apologize to a tree, or regrow its gorgeous, beautiful limbs. You can’t, in fact, do anything to save our beloved tree.
But you could pay for us to plant a new tree.
It wouldn’t have to be a huge tree, and it won’t grow along with my children because they will be gone. It won’t give back anything to MY family. But it is something you can do to give back to Nature.
I am not the kind of person to threaten you with court or lawsuits; I am the kind of person who thinks love is always the answer. And maybe you are not that kind of person; maybe you don’t think what you did was not a big deal. But I have lost something dear, and you have been merrily going about your days, doing nothing to make amends.
So: what kind of person are you? Are you willing to help us have another tree planted? Or are you the kind of person who is all about the money and will ignore this letter?
I will wait to find out. I will just sit here, looking out my window – for the rest of my life, looking out this window – seeing what you did, and waiting.
I am swamped with college tours. My head is spinning with organizing the trips, preparing statistical paperwork, reading college books and prepping Shane for every possible collegiate option.
I love it. In fact, next to planning a Disney vacation, this is the most fun I’ve ever had.
I am a member of several online college admissions groups. When I can’t find anyone to talk to about colleges, I read. Currently I’m re-reading Colleges That Change Lives and Princeton Review’s 387 Best Colleges. Given that I devoured these books when Dylan was searching, and that some of Shane’s top choices are featured in both books, I’m actually on my third time through.
Over the summer, I devoured two phenomenal books written about the admissions process: Who Gets In and Why and Valedictorians at the Gate. I’ve requested another book through the interlibrary loan because my library doesn’t have it. It’s called The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College.
I have no interest – nor does Shane – in Ivy League colleges. It’s not his style.
But it’s not about his style. I’ve recently read books about college essays and financial aid secrets. I’ve enjoyed autobiographies by people who got through grad school debt-free, cheated their way into Harvard, and quit the admissions grind for greener pastures. I’m still debating whether or not I want to read about the celebrity admissions scandal. Some things, I may not want to know.
I spend hours preparing stat sheets for Shane for each college we visit. He likes to look at the numbers, and I like to compile them. His interests focus primarily on whether or not the average GPA of a college is too low – or too high – for his liking, and what percentage of students graduate in four years. These are important to him so I print them in a brief document as a reminder before he steps onto a campus.
I pull together student reviews for him, too, from online sites. These reviews are amazingly helpful in letting him know what life is really like at any given university. They give him clues about what to look for, and what questions to ask during his visit.
Shane has applied to 12 of his 14 chosen colleges already. He doesn’t need any of this. The visits are sufficient, maybe overkill. He’s done a zillion Zooms with all of these schools. He knows what he likes, what he doesn’t – what he wants, what he doesn’t. Shane is going to make his own choice, and he certainly hasn’t read any of the admissions books that I’ve been reading.
I’m reading them just for fun. I am obscenely fascinated by college admissions. I’m fascinated in exactly the same way I was fascinated by baby deliveries before I gave birth for the first time, when I watched a thousand episodes of A Baby Story on TLC.
Reading, studying, preparing… it makes me feel like I have control over what happens next. I don’t, of course; I’ve had no control the entire time. Shane has all the control – Shane, and God.
After a thousand episodes of A Baby Story, my own brutal, two-day delivery ended with a traumatized newborn and an emergency C-Section. My second delivery was worse. Watching that show now makes me nauseous.
We’re down to our last three college visits for the fall. In the past six weeks, we’ve toured eight schools in six states. We’ll be visiting three additional states for the last three schools. And then …
Who knows? The results are entirely out of my control.
So I am hanging onto the process with the death grip of someone who is about to lose everything.
Shane and I were having a great time on a college road trip last weekend. We were talking casually about his breakfast when Shane said “Mom” with a look of horror in his eyes.
I looked up and realized that our car had careened off the highway.
With the speed set at 75 mph, we’d been cruising in the left lane, all good. A split second later we had veered completely off the road – not a little, but all four wheels heading in an unwanted direction.
We were gliding sharply downhill at an alarmingly high rate of speed.
Grass, I thought. There shouldn’t be grass.
Then I thought only this: get the car back onto the highway.
I turned off the cruise control but never once hit the brake.
Still flying down the hill, bumping over whatever lies in a median strip on a highway, I kept a death-grip on the steering wheel. Get the car back onto the highway.
We couldn’t go uphill until we stopped going downhill. I turned the wheel slowly to the right, still bumping along at a high rate of speed, trying to position us sideways on the bank.
I remember no sound. Just: grass.
The car was completely out of control, like steering on ice. Too fast, too fast, too fast – but no brake. I needed the momentum to carry us back up the hill.
No gas, either: I didn’t want to get stuck in mud.
Get the car back onto the highway.
The car swerved – sideways – downhill – grass – like ice – uphill – grass – sideways – it felt like we were spinning…. Get the car back onto the highway. We’d been on the hill for 10 minutes, 10 hours maybe, 10 seconds – who knew? – with me pulling at the steering wheel, aiming to get back onto the black – seeing only green – time demolished by the feeling of being utterly out of control.
We were facing diagonally uphill, the back wheels still skidding, trying to grab hold, when I saw it: the highway was within reach.
I couldn’t see what was at the top of the hill, but I saw something that wasn’t grass. My goal was in sight.
And that’s when I realized with horror: we are pulling onto an active highway.
If I could get us out of this grass – and it seemed suddenly like I might – we’d be in even more danger. With the car barely able to climb the lip of the asphalt, I didn’t have even an instant to turn my head and check for traffic. I was pulling the car directly into the path of whatever was up there.
And my baby was sitting helplessly in the passenger seat.
Please God, I thought, without any time to finish my prayer.
The car clonked up onto the asphalt, out of the grass – one wheel, two, then four.
Nothing hit us.
I checked my speed: 38 mph. We’d slowed down considerably, and now we needed to speed up to avoid getting hit by oncoming cars. Tentatively, I pushed on the gas pedal.
“Are you okay?” I breathed at Shane.
“Okay?” he asked, incredulous.
“Are you okay?” I asked again, begging.
“Physically, I guess.”
Just after we reemerged on the highway, while I was still shaking, a sign announced an upcoming rest area. Five miles later, we pulled off to check the car’s status.
It wasn’t clean. We lost a small piece of trim from one door and there was a dent that I found hours later. The wheels and the undercarriage were caked in sod. We rescued a lone grasshopper who sat baffled next to one tire. With the exception of a four-inch chunk of wood stuck between one tire and its hubcap, everything was copacetic.
Thanking God at this point seems necessary – but entirely insufficient. It was a miracle.
Yesterday morning, I woke up and got ready for softball.
I heard a fan making its soft whooshing sound down the hall, which was unusual. Bill has a fan in his bedroom, but that fan is usually off by 8 a.m. (We sleep in separate rooms so as not to kill one another.)
In fact, usually by the time I’m ready for softball, Shane is at school and Bill is at work. So I figured the fan was left on accidentally – until I saw the darkness in Bill’s room.
And the fan was still on. What the … ?
It was way too late for Bill to be sleeping. He never missed work. Bill is rarely sick, and even when he is, he goes to work. If he’d had some kind of appointment, he’d surely have told me.
So why is his room still dark?
In our dating days, Bill often forgot to open the curtains. Tentatively, I looked inside. I expected him to be gone. I peered into the darkness, aiming my gaze at his bed.
Lumps.
I saw lumps in his bed – pillows, blankets, maybe a human form. Yes, definitely a human form. This could mean only one thing.
Bill is dead.
I walked into the room, unsure what to do. He had to be breathing. He simply had to be breathing. He wasn’t even sick last night.
His heart. Bill has a small arrhythmia.
I stared down at the lump that was a human form, waiting for my eyes to adjust.
Bill was lying on his side, the top of his head barely visible above the covers.
He wasn’t snoring. He wasn’t even moving. I expected his body to slowly lift and fall, but there was no movement, and no sound.
I stared and listened for a long time.
Nothing.
Finally I put my hand just below his shoulder on his back, where I thought I might be able to detect lung action. I expected him to leap up at my touch if he was alive, but … still nothing.
I left my hand there. I waited. I felt no movement, no breath. I started to panic.
What should I do? He’s really not breathing. What do I do if he’s dead?
I considered calling someone. I watched enough TV to know that you’re supposed to call someone.
Who? I thought. Who am I supposed to call? An ambulance? A mortuary? A priest?
I couldn’t remember.
I just stood there in the dark, my hand resting on his back, still waiting for breath.
That’s when Bill casually rolled over and said “what’s up?” without a hint of concern for his own life.
“You’re not dead,” I said. I wanted to cry with joy! Instead, I suddenly realized – with all the force of a Mack truck – that it was a federal holiday. I’d just awakened Bill on the one day he could have slept in.
I removed my hand and stepped away from the bed. “I forgot that it was a holiday!” I called as I left. “Go back to sleep!”
I shuffled out way faster than I came in, relieved but sorry that I’d woken him, trying not to think about a day when I might actually find him there not breathing.
For the first time since I’d walked into his room, I realized I could breathe, too.
I love him so much.
Ten hours later, having forgotten all about Bill’s brush with death, I griped endlessly that he hadn’t correctly cooked my gluten-free tuna casserole.
You’d think a scare like that would last a little longer.
Sometimes I still think about my former “best friend.” Nearly a decade ago, and without provocation, she slammed me on Facebook and deleted me from her life.
I didn’t realize, in college, that she was a narcissist. I thought she was cool. Looking back, I see (now) that she had no ability to care about other people. But at the time, I was totally enraptured by her taste in music.
For a long time after the Facebook incident, I had a hard time listening to songs that reminded me of Bonnie. I would feel hurt and sad and eject the jukebox record or change the channel. But over the years I realized: what I liked best about Bonnie was, in actuality, the music we shared. My love was for the music, not the person.
I am incredibly sensitive to the lure of music because it helps me connect to people.
But I also love learning all about the songs I like: who sings it? what’s the official title? is it on the charts – and what number? what are the lyrics? who wrote it? who’s in the band? how old are they? what do they look like? is there a video? did the song win any awards?
This started when I was very young, and I liked a lot of songs. So I have a ridiculous amount of useless musical knowledge in my head. (I store it in the place where other people store their useful knowledge.)
So when Bonnie came along, and she introduced me to whole albums and bands that weren’t on the radio, I was awestruck. The music was called “new wave.” Now, the wave is old and tired. But at the time, it was glorious.
Bonnie would pull out album after album, playing song after song: Yaz, The Smiths, Talking Heads, The Cure, U2. We discovered Howard Jones, XTC, Depeche Mode, Prefab Sprout and INXS. So many bands were new when I was young! We drank – a lot – and we listened to music.
Music took on a whole new meaning for me. I listened harder after she pointed out a song’s nuances. But Bonnie was reckless – dancing madly on her bed, tossing albums like frisbees across her room. I was always a little bothered by the broken albums. I sincerely treasured the music.
And emotionally, I attached Bonnie to the music. This connection survived well past its expiration. I couldn’t think about certain songs without thinking about her. I’d spent years believing I loved a person just because I loved the music. But Bonnie isn’t a music guru, and she doesn’t own the songs we enjoyed together.
So now I turn on my jukebox filled with my favorite songs, and I play whatever I want. My musical tastes have expanded over the years, so I can play the old bands but new genres, new experiences, and new music has broadened my horizons. I have new emotional attachments, new favorite bands, and a new soundtrack to my life.
It makes me happy to think of this: the soundtrack of my life. It’s mine and mine alone, and I can love it every moment of every day. It’s an absolutely beautiful thing.
