Big Love

My own heffalump has been love, big love. I'm not sure what it looks like or sounds like; I'm sure it's a bit scary and I'm hoping I'll see it before it sees me.

I have loved and I have been loved. But of Big Love, I have been afraid. I have been so afraid, that I have left some loves because I was not ready. My parents, they had a Big Love. It began as an old-fashioned love affair. They met in Stockholm in the 1960s. He was a handsome, American diplomat, thirteen years her senior with three small children. She was a young, Swedish, green-eyed, fiery secretary working at the American Embassy. He was the son of a Southern belle and a Major General. She was the daughter of a prominent businessman and blonde beauty. It was a time of men in suits and hats, of cocktail parties, of elegance, of manners. They married in the city's cathedral, the surrounding grounds covered in February’s snow. To me, it always seemed a magical love.

When I was fifteen, I woke up late one night to the sound of crying. Crouching at the top of the steps, I peered down into the lit kitchen where my parents sat, dinner plates pushed back on the table, glasses of wine half full, my mother smoking, talking, crying. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but their voices were gentle. It was my first memory of what real love looks like.

Back then, I wasn’t afraid of love. I wasn’t afraid of love until my early twenties when my father died. My mother did not want to be without him; it took ten years, but at age 58, she literally gave up living. I have been afraid. I have been afraid to love so much that I will want to give up living if, when, I lose my big love.

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. I am not a mother, nor do I have a mother anymore. But over the years, I have been mothered. I was read to, sung to, nursed back to health when my face swelled with mumps and when my body scabbed and itched with pox. I sat at the kitchen table after my first heart-break, comforted with tea poured from an earthen pot and words of empathy. When I wore the very wrong outfit, an - ugh!- dress, to a school dance, my mother – though quite annoyed – showed up in the rainy, dark evening with jeans, a blouse and sneakers, so that I could change. For many years after she died, I had a clear image of my mother flying below my plane, her red hair frizzy in the wind, her pointer finger gently holding my plane safely in the air. From my mother, I learned love.

The other day, I talked to my mother in the car. I explained that I wanted her beside me, but I needed to figure this love thing out on my own. I imagined she was sitting in the passenger seat, listening while gazing out at the passing sugar cane fields. I'm pretty sure the corners of her lips were turned up in a small, satisfied smile.

On Mother's Day

During the years that my family lived in Belgium, we lived in a Flemish area of Brussels. I was barely aware of the country’s deep, cultural and political ‘Flanders vs. Wallonia’ rift. In fact, the only way it touched my life was that street signs were posted in two languages. My mother, on the other hand, ran up against the problem at least once, when she called our local police station after an attempted burglary at our home. Our local police station, as it happened, was also in the Flemish district. My mother did not speak Flemish. The police officer refused to speak French. Then, in English, with no room for misunderstanding, she pointedly told him that she could speak English, French, Swedish, German, Spanish or Italian. In which language was he going to help her?
He assisted my mother in French. Miraculously, the police officer’s command of a language he claimed not to know was quite strong.

If my mother had a motto, it would be: Get it done. As she often reminded us, a job half-done was a job not done at all. The reciting of this maxim was especially annoying when the job at hand involved polishing silver or the annual chore of pulling up weeds from between the stone slats of our terrace (a task that invariably left little callouses to form on the side of the forefinger).

On second thought, perhaps it would be: Suffer no fools. No one wanted to be on the receiving end of one of her steely gazes, especially not when accompanied by a swift tongue-lashing. She could - and would - cut hubris with a single comment. She had a knack for turn of phrase. When my sister was born, the doctor saw her resemblance to our dad and said, “Well, there’s no question who the father is!” to which my mother responded, “There never was.”

When I was 15, I held a party on a weekend my parents were out of town. The following Monday, my mother surprised me by picking me up from school. Immediately, my guilty conscience told me I’d been found out, but instead she chatted pleasantly with me about her day and I breathed a sigh of relief. As we pulled into our driveway, she remarked casually that she had run into our neighbor earlier.
“Phil said he was sorry he wasn’t invited to my party. It looked like quite a success.”
My stomach flipped.
“I had to tell him I didn’t know what he was referring to.”
I had trouble hearing for the pounding in my ears.
“And that I was away for the weekend.”
The jig was up.
And it was then, and only then, that she turned to look at me. There was no reason to speak. The look on my face said it all.
My mother, the tactician.

My fiercely loyal, silly, loving, beautiful mother passed on to me the importance of the Golden Rule, being a good friend, choosing a mate I could laugh with, making time for myself, and finding a doctor I liked. I'm proud to say she also passed on to me her withering gaze.

Not Exactly Eat, Pray, Love

The very same year that Elizabeth Gilbert ate and prayed and loved her way through three countries, I high-tailed it to Maui to do the same. Gilbert’s journey from divorced and depressed to finding love, as anyone who has read Eat, Pray, Love knows, took about a year by way of spaghetti a la carbonara in Italy, yoga and meditation in India, and the temples and blossoms of Bali. By the time she left Bali, she'd found true love. My version of Eat, Pray, Love could be titled Eat and Drink While Loving the Wrong People, Pray Meditate Manifest, On Line Date, Confuse Love with a Slew of Other Issues, Crash and Rebuild Slowly. It has taken me eights years and counting. Allow me to backtrack.

New Year’s Eve, 2001, I lay in the porcelain tub of my Manhattan pre-war apartment. Candles were lit, Ella Fitzgerald was playing, and a glass of Sherry was within arm's reach. As my skin warmed and softened against the icy wind that blew outside, I knew that this was it; it was time to leave my marriage. I was young still, thirty-one. But I’d married much younger, before I’d grown into myself and out of this particular life. I did not know what I wanted exactly, but I couldn’t escape the feeling that there was more out there for me, more of life. My husband and I separated in the early weeks of January.

I did not know then that my mother would be dead in less than three months. I did not know then that my still-husband would drive to Rhode Island and play Amazing Grace on his trumpet at her memorial service. I did not know then that H and I would laugh at stupid things at the post-memorial reception in my mother's living room. We laughed at how many of H’s prom dates and ex-boyfriends were in attendance. At “friends” of our mother’s who cornered us in the supermarket aisles to offer condolences peppered with comments like, “So sudden. So sad that she died without having any grandchildren.” At how much Hawaiian Punch we’d bought for the reception even though we didn’t know anyone who liked it, and no one drank it.

That frigid, final eve of December, I did not know that eighteen months later I would have put everything in storage, found a rental on craigslist on the north shore of Maui, and flown to an island I knew little about to live on my own for six months.

The first time I came to Maui, it was to escape. This is where I began to heal, gasping at the clean, sweet air through the heavy exhaustion that enveloped me. I extended my ticket and stayed even longer. I, a northern European/ East Coast girl, slipped into a sweet existence of guava scented hikes, nights lit bright by the full moon, breezes scented by plumeria blossoms. I lived in the space of not being known, other than what I was willing to share. I danced at parties dressed in angel wings or beaded hats or whatever the theme of the night required. I drank too much and woke up hazy in the early morning hours, dipping myself in the cool ocean to wake up and refresh. I flitted. I flirted. I feigned nonchalance. I fell hard. I learned to surf baby waves, but was most content sitting in the ocean on my board looking back at the emerald green mountains. Instead of teaching, I picked protea on a small flower farm Upcountry for Auntie Ruth, a seventy-year-old Portuguese lady who'd be born in the house next door, the one with the red tin roof. Auntie Ruth swore a blue streak.

The first time I lived in Maui, I created a new life for myself far from home. It wasn't necessarily a life I recognized, but that was what I wanted. Ironically, I had moved from a city of 8 million people to a small island of 150,000 for the sake of anonymity.

Only later did I begin to connect the dots: my grandparents had lived on Oahu - one island over - in the early 1930's when my father was a toddler, my grandfather flying planes from Pearl Harbor. And my half- brother, my father’s son, had backpacked around much of the world after college, passing through this island. He’d camped on these very same beaches, sitting in the sand and playing guitar, watching the Kona storms blow in. I'd flown 10,000 miles to an island in the middle of the Pacific to get as far away from what I knew as I could manage, only to realize that part of me had belonged here all along.

In the past eight years, I've moved to Maui, moved back to New York, and then again to Maui. The second time I moved to Maui, I wasn't escaping. I was returning. Eight years, and I’m still eating, praying and loving. That's just the way my story has unfolded.

Unresolved

For several years now, two friends and I have shared our New Year resolutions with each other. The tradition includes somewhat regular updates to keep ourselves on track. I was deemed overly vigilant one year when I initiated quarterly check-ins, but somehow the practice stuck, and last week was Check-In Time. I couldn’t remember what my resolutions were. This was a bad sign.
I dug through my email to find the original January exchange and quickly realized why I had blocked mine out.
Resolution #1: Do not let my wedding take over my life.
Status: Fail.

Small talk serves as a constant reminder that I have a wedding to plan.

I had no idea how many veritable strangers would take such interest in the details of “My Big Day.” Then again, I wouldn’t have guessed that dozens of co-workers love wedding-based reality TV shows. Have you heard of “Say Yes to the Dress?” “Bridezillas?” How about “My Fair Wedding?” I have now.

Prior to my wearing an engagement ring, occasional pleasantries would be limited to the weather and vague discussions of weekend plans. Now, all bets are off.

I frequently get asked a question about the wedding to which my answer is usually “I don’t know”, “I haven’t gotten that far yet” or “I’m not sure.” Watching their reaction to my lack of clarity is like that part in a job interview when I know I flubbed the clincher.

I attended a Wedding Expo recently thanks to a friend who works in events. If anyone has ever ventured into IKEA without a game plan, they know how I felt walking into this place. I started to panic a little. I headed for the bar. Fortified with a glass of wine, I started making my way through the giant room. I cannot tell you how many times I heard a bride-to-be tell a vendor that her wedding was in 2012. 2012! How much advance planning did one need? How behind was I??
A photographer told me this is the most “joy-full” time of my life.
I headed back to the bar.

Theknot.com sent me an email telling me it was time to order my invitations. But I have almost six more months to go – how long can it take to ship paper? Theknot.com will now be telling my junk mail folder that I’m behind schedule for everything; I don’t want to hear it.

I dreamed my wedding was happening the next morning and I didn’t have a dress and I had forgotten to count my RSVPs and had no idea how many people were showing up.

If my resolution is any indication, a part of me must have known there was potential for turning into a stress ball. But that’s the point of these check-ins: to assess and re-resolve.

I’m amending my resolution.

New New Years Resolution #1: Accept that the wedding will take over my life and stop fighting it.

After all, as theknot.com so thoughtfully pointed out today, I only have 175 more days to go.

Moving.

I’m moving.

I abhor moving. More specifically, I abhor packing. Actually, when I come right down to it, what I really cannot bear is the act of disassembling my home.

Home. Where the heart is. Where you hang your hat. And so on. All of my life, and to this very day, the most disconcerting question posed to me by strangers or new friends is, "Where are you from?" or "Where's home?" I never know quite how to answer and that fact, in and of itself, feels unsettling. I, the daughter of a Swedish mother and American father, grew up in Copenhagen, Rome and Brussels. Though I didn't know it at the time, there is a term for people like me. I'm a Third Culture Kid. According to the government's website, a TCK has spent some or most of their childhood growing up in foreign countries. The first time I lived in the United States (or 'America' as I used to call it in awe), I was 16 and just about to begin my senior year of high school. Until then, my time had been limited to a few weeks every other summer. East Coast humidity, the stale smell of air-conditioning, and Bubble Yum made lasting impressions.

I'm not complaining. Having had the chance to grow up in various countries, to be exposed to different languages, customs and ways of life is not something I would easily trade. Still, growing up, I never lived in a country where the street signs, billboards, or t.v. shows were in my native tongue. I negotiated public transportation, grocery stores, and the like in a foreign language. And let's be clear: my ability to understand what They were saying was always better than my ability to express myself.

Add to this the amalgam of cultures in my family: Swedish, French and American. The only person fluent in all languages was my mother. When we came together for the holidays, all of us (except my mother) butchered grammar – no language was spared, used hand gestures and overly dramatic facial expressions in order to make our points, and by the end of the holiday no one could muster a word in any language, including their own.The feeling that clung to me for years was that I belonged everywhere at once, yet nowhere. I felt European in the States, and American in Europe. And honestly, I felt neither truly European nor American.

My point is this: wherever I end up these days, I like to feel settled. I like to walk in the door and know that this is where I belong. I don't have tons of stuff but what I do have comforts me. The painted water pitcher that my parents bought when we lived in Italy. My grandmother's diary from 1927, the year she dated my grandfather and the year he proposed. My father's bookcase, and on it, the copy of Winnie-the-Pooh from which he used to read to me at night. Some may call it stuff, but to me it is home.

Which is why I've been procrastinating and have yet to pack a box. Because the moment I take that first painting off the wall and those books off the shelf, this home will no longer feel like mine and I will, again, be neither here nor there for a little while.

But packing also means moving forward, and this I love. Soon enough, I will be in my new home, a lovely one right beside the sea. I'll place the painted pitcher on the kitchen counter and Winnie-the-Pooh back on its shelf. And if someone asks, "Where's home?" I'll be ready to respond. Right here.

On Enlightenment, Sister Mary and Cosmos

"The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines."

— Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies

It hasn’t the been easiest start to a year ever. (It hasn’t been the hardest either. Still…) In the past weeks, each time I arrived at a fork in the path of life, instead of the way widening and becoming clearly lit as I hoped, it seemed I was faced with a multitude of signs that declared STOP or SLOW or You'd Better U-Turn Here. Were I French, I’m sure I would have run into my favorite, ubiquitous French street sign seen at roundabouts: Vous n’avez pas la priorite. You do not have priority here!

A dear friend of mine turns to meditation and prayer in times of extreme stress. This would be a Maui friend. My Maui friends turn to the heavens and shamans and prayer and angel cards more often than my New York friends -they turn more to cosmos and The New Yorker. I go back and forth.

I believe meditation can be helpful and I mean to do it first thing in the morning, but I’m always halfway through that first cup of coffee and New York Times website before I remember. By that point, the caffeine has shot the potential benefit of mediation straight to hell – sorry – so I think, “Tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll start.” The truth is I have trouble sitting still, and I have yet to get comfortable with prayer. My religious upbringing was almost nonexistent and only relatively recently have I begun to figure out how I fit into the whole Believing thing.

When I was 6, my family moved to Italy and I began 2nd grade at the St. Francis International School of Rome. My teacher was the thin, stern Sister Mary. As family lore goes, I took quite keenly to the strict Catholic teachings. My religious frenzy peaked one morning over breakfast as I stood beside my father and sang a hymn about “eating his body” and “drinking his blood." I then pontificated on how the rest of my family was headed straight to hell. My father yelled out to my mother something to the effect of FIX THIS! She promptly called the Swedish Lutheran Church of Rome and a nice pastor drove to the outskirts of the city to go many rounds with me on the topic of religion, or rather, Catholicism. He apparently left in a sweat, but victorious nonetheless. I remember none of this.

The rest of my youthful years contained virtually no religious or spiritual guidance. As a family, we only went to church on Christmas Eve and the rare Easter. My mother claimed claustrophobia in churches, and once a year was the best she could do. At age thirteen, I was sent to confirmation camp in Sweden because my mother had gone. Tradition. Mostly, I remember making friends, biking to the mini-golf, and eating soft pear ice-cream. On our confirmation day, everyone handed out the religious version of business cards - little, white cards with our names and Biblical pictures. Kind of like Pokeman cards, only with small doves and Bibles. When my family moved to Rhode Island, we lived in a lovely house on Elm Street encircled by churches. Sitting on our deck eating Sunday breakfasts, we could see the churchgoers arrive. My father would yell out, “Give my regards to God!” and then settle in with his coffee and pancakes. Watching my parents die did nothing for my spiritual growth. If anything, it sent me reeling in the opposite direction.

At age 32, I moved to Maui for a short respite from life. I fell into an almost dream-like state and before the plumeria blossoms could flutter to the ground, I was at new moon gatherings, soaking paper in the full moon glow, and sitting in circles as powerful entities were channeled. I experienced shamans and intuitive readings and swam with wild dolphins - a spiritual experience if I've ever had one.

Back in New York, I continued the exploration, even visiting a shaman in a post-war apartment building; his den was full of nature, crystals and magic, and his eyes were the color of clouds. One particularly odd night, I found myself sitting on a metal folding chair in a West Side townhouse, chanting sanskrit while the image of a yogi was projected onto a screen.

I'm not sure yet where all this has led me, nor can I clearly define my belief system. I do believe that sometimes yelling, "What the fuck!" feels really, really good. I also believe that if something feels good, be it a shamanic session, playing pool in a dark, dank bar, downward dog or, yes, a Cosmo, then I'll do it. I believe in gathering, reading, listening and learning, and taking in any and all snippets that inspire and have meaning for me. I believe in my friends. I believe in the power of waterfalls, laughing until my stomach aches, a good red-faced-nose-dripping-blubbering-cry (even in an unfortunately public place) and, of course, snacks. And I know that nothing stays one way forever; somewhere around the corner is the street sign that reads This Way, For Sure, or Nothing but Smooth Roads Ahead.

On whether to have children – or why

As a child, I had everything handed to me on a silver platter. I traveled through Europe and the United States. I was exposed to languages, arts, culture. I received a top-notch education. I took lessons in piano and ballet. I ran track in high school. I took home awards and scholarships. I was always encouraged and supported by my family and teachers, adults who were confident that I could do or be whatever I wanted.

I feel like I let everyone down. For all intents and purposes, I should be excelling at something right now. I should be a diplomat, or working at the United Nations, or be a published writer, or, at the very least, be accomplished in my field of choice.

I wanted to be an actor ever since Mrs. Campbell’s fourth grade play about the Romans invading Britain in something like 55 BC. It began with a troop of soldiers marching on stage, chanting “Sinister, Dexter, Sinister, Dexter…” (Latin for “Left, Right, Left, Right.”) I played Delirius, a bad poet. I made the audience laugh.

From that point on, I was in love with the stage. I loved the rehearsal process of bringing a script to life, of being back stage, of listening to an audience respond to the play. Most of all, I was in love with what I still feel is the noble art of bringing to an audience the chance to live vicariously through the actor.

An audience member can experience an event through an actor that they may never live through first hand. If a role I played resonated with even a single audience member, then that one person might walk away from the theater thinking a little differently about the world around them. And maybe, just maybe, one day they might behave a little differently as a result. Perhaps they would be a little more empathetic, or sympathetic, or open-minded in a way they weren’t before. The power of that potential ripple effect was how I felt I could make a difference in this world.

When I was in the throes of pursuing my career, my priorities revolved – theoretically –around acting. What if I missed a crucial audition because I was on vacation? How could I take a summer job waiting tables when it added nothing to my acting resume? Most importantly, how could I possibly get married and have children? What if I had to be away for a job for three months? Or six? I couldn’t risk that kind of commitment and sacrifice. In truth, I never succeeded to the level where that last issue was real, but I did aspire to be in that league, and so I felt I had to adopt those concerns.

Years of failing to earn a living as a professional actor took its toll on me. I found myself bitter, cynical and unhappy. Out of self-preservation, I finally quit.

Now that I’m no longer acting, I don’t have a career that calls for commitment or sacrifice. Now I’m afraid that I want children not only because I met the man whose children I want to have, but also because I don’t have something else to pour my heart into.

I mother my loved ones inasmuch as I hound them to wear sunscreen and be careful driving, but being a mother was never much of a draw for me. Babies have lots of body fluids oozing from every orifice; it kind of grosses me out. They cost a lot of money, they take up so much time. And it’s forever.

And yet. The desire to be a mother surfaced when my own mother died. I suddenly felt a strong yearning to bring a child into the world so that they, too, would know the feeling of being loved unconditionally.

That urge has tempered a fair amount since then, but there remains this fear that I will not have left this planet a better place for my having been on it. I don’t know if having children will rectify this, but I find myself with a mindset not unlike immigrants from a struggling nation, thinking, I can teach my child all I have learned, and they can have a better life than I did.

But this is a false statement. I have a good life. I have a rich, varied, interesting, entertaining life. Would I be so badly off if I didn’t have a child? Would my life be lonelier without children? Would my life as I know it today seem empty without having someone to pass it on to?

I have a little time left to answer these questions before I must make a decision. No, that’s not quite accurate; I have a few years remaining before I can no longer have a child - I have a lifetime to answer these questions. I just might not reach a conclusion before I lose the chance to be a mother.