Easy as Riding a Bike
Mary Boyle, Bethesda
I couldn’t get the hang of teaching my son how to ride a bicycle. “Just do it, just pedal, you’ll get it,” I insisted over and over as I held onto him, running by his side, trying to remove my grasp without his noticing. Every time I did, we both became gripped by nerves. He’d wobble and inevitably collapse in a heap: crying, frustrated and occasionally scraped. “You’ll get it,” I tried to console him. “It takes practice,” I said as much to myself as to him. He felt the sting of failure, but so did I. Why couldn’t I figure out how to make this easy? You know the expression: It’s as easy as riding a bike. Well, not for us. Out of frustration, I eventually asked my brother to help out. On the first try, he propelled my son forward and he was off. Just like that. I was holding on too tight it seems.
Nowadays, the two-wheeler has given way to a four-wheeler—a car. My son is learning to drive, but the lessons, for him and for me, remain the same. He knows it takes practice and I know I have to let go. So far, I haven’t had to call my brother.
A Mother’s Journal
Maria Leonard Olsen, Chevy Chase
People frequently rib me about my need to write everything down. Perhaps it comes from watching Alzheimer’s ravage my grandmother’s mind, or my parents’ losing my baby book in the shuffle of their divorce. In any event, I’ve written in my treasured mother’s journal since first giving birth 13 years ago. Here are several of the entries:
Dec.1, 1997—I was in my last month of pregnancy and had added 40-plus pounds to my 4’11” frame. “Look, Mommy,” my 2-year-old Caroline said. “I can waddle just like you!”
May 23, 2002—Christopher at age 4 is often very loud. One time when I asked him to be quiet, he came close to me, looked me in the eye, threw his fists skyward and yelled, “Rock and roll!” Is this a precursor of things to come?
Jan. 22, 2004—Christopher aspires to be a movie star. He said recently, “Mommy, when I am rich and famous, I am going to buy you a facelift! I want you to look really good when you walk the red carpet with me!”
Jan. 15, 2006—Christopher burst out of the shower to try to catch his favorite television show. “Phew,” he exclaimed. “I even used soap this time!” I said, “What?” Christopher responded, “Oh, I had to confess to the priest that I don’t always use soap.”
Nov. 3, 2008—I admitted to Caroline that I have been sneaking candy from her Halloween bag. The next time I approached Caroline’s candy bag, I saw a large, handwritten sign tucked inside: "Stealing is a sin!"
Dancing in a Circle
Virginia D. Myers, Takoma Park
It was one of those sunny autumn days that make me want the season to last. My daughter and I had just emerged from the dark theater, where we’d watched the Suzanne Farrell Ballet, part of the Kennedy Center’s open house arts festival. The performance was free, and we’d waited in a long line of chattering art-lovers snaking through the red-carpeted hallway to get in. It was quintessential ballet—heavily influenced by Farrell’s years as Balanchine’s muse, and exactly the sort of tutu-filled, dreamy ballet my then 12-year-old daughter loved. And it was especially fun to watch with her, as she’d just started studying seriously at Maryland Youth Ballet, then in Bethesda.
Clara has always danced. When she was a toddler, I would come home from African dance class, push aside the living room furniture and teach her pieces of “kuku,” a Guinean dance; she learned a little modern dance that way, too. When she was 4 years old, we enrolled in a mother-daughter class at the Dance Exchange in Takoma Park, and performed in a little grove of trees as part of a community show. The next year, Jane Franklin, of Jane Franklin Dance, created a piece for us with two other mother-daughter pairs, incorporating movements we helped choreograph, depicting some of our favorite shared activities—popping corn and reading books. Jane tweaked and polished it and we performed it at the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage.
Now we were back at the Kennedy Center, inspired by the ballet we’d just seen. Out in the sunlight, on the balcony looking over the Potomac River, Clara began to show me what she’d been learning in ballet class, counting out, one-two-THREE-four, one-two-three- FOUR, a difficult rhythm as her feet hit each beat. A tiny piece of Swan Lake.
I remember concentrating on her feet as she taught me the steps, insisting we do it slowly and then dissolving in laughter when my feet got tangled. Clara continued to bob along, willowy-quick, a nod here, a quick pause there, steadfast in the smooth rhythm of the swans, and I would catch up, all the while our arms linked and our hands holding tight as if letting go would unravel it all.
I never really learned Swan Lake that day, though I certainly recognize it in a more visceral way than I would ever have done before. But I did learn that the lessons we teach our children will inevitably come back around.
Garden State
Brian Friel, Chevy Chase
I’m originally from New Jersey, so I’m naturally one of those people who has a chip on his shoulder from all of the Jersey jokes from friends, colleagues and neighbors here in the Washington area, and even from my wife, who grew up in St. Louis. Of course, outsiders don’t give full recognition to those things that make New Jersey beautiful—the Jersey beaches (the “Shore”), the many beautiful historic towns and villages, the rolling hills and mountains of central and north Jersey, and of course, Bruce Springsteen and fantastic pizza by the slice. In short, New Jersey is a beautiful state. For whatever reason, outsiders have to keep reminding us of that terrible stretch of industrial blight that runs alongside the New Jersey Turnpike from Exit 11 to the George Washington Bridge.
This is what brings me to my family and how they came to appreciate New Jersey. From 2002 to 2003 my wife and I and our kids lived in the beautiful town of Mendham, N.J., just west of Morristown. One day, we received the dreaded invitation from Long Island, N.Y., relatives to join them for a summer family get-together. One thought came to mind: traffic. We headed out of our driveway for our two- to seven-hour drive to Long Island. No surprise, we stopped dead on Route 80 about five miles from the GW Bridge. Both the temperature outside and the tension inside the minivan were rising by the minute. We had stopped right next to a factory alongside the highway which was emitting loads of pollution-filled puffs of industrial smoke. “Ah,” I thought, “that other part of New Jersey.” My daughter, then age 5, pointed to the factory and yelled, “Hey, look, everyone, a cloud factory.” My two boys (ages 3 and 1) started clapping and smiling. At that moment, I knew that I had three more converts to the Garden State!
Falling in Love With Lulu
Laurel Tierney, Silver Spring
A few weeks after my daughter Lulu was born, my mother was pronounced terminally ill. Mute with despair, I strapped my children in the backseat and drove six hours to care for her. Lulu was a gorgeous child, but in my mother’s not-so-large house, she screamed 12 hours a day. A local doctor, with wild hair and a thick Southern drawl, told me that she had colic. He said I could try this stuff called “happy water” that homeopaths sell, but that eventually Lulu would cry less as she gained control of her body. Colicky babies, he said, while gesticulating vigorously, become energetic adults. They are proactive types. The payoff would be big, he was trying to tell me, if only I could wait it out. “Sometimes mothers of colicky babies have trouble bonding with their infants,” he added thoughtfully.
The timing could not have been worse. As I learned how to be a nursemaid, my little Lulu screamed. She yelled through the doctor’s detailed instructions about the chemo my mother would be receiving, some of which I would administer. She fussed incessantly while I stood at the kitchen counter taking my mother’s instructions on how to peel a peach without cutting away the whole of it. She howled as I searched increasingly messy rooms for the blue fuzzy hat which would cover my mother’s rapidly balding head. “HUSH, Lulu!” I would scream after she had cried for hours. I needed to listen. I needed to hear my mother die.
Whom do I hold onto? A dear mother and de facto best friend who has just months to live? A helpless infant who needs my constant care? “Mom, can we press the pause button on that disease racing through your frame?” I would say to myself. “Lulu, can you just stand by, honey, while I say goodbye to someone I have loved a lifetime? Then, my darling, I am yours. But will I damage you in the process?” I fearfully asked her (to myself), “Will you grow up to love me?”
Piano, piano—slowly, slowly, as they say in Italian, I prepared my mother and myself for her departure. And piano, piano, I fell in love with Lulu.
The writer’s mother died of colon cancer in 2005. Lulu is a happy and energetic 4-year-old.
I Think I Hear a Roar
Jill Stewart Brigati, Rockville
“You can go to the party, but you will call me when you get there,” I say to my 16-year-old daughter in that maternal tone that is at once a blessing and a threat. The tone that means “There’ll be hell to pay if you can’t get it together enough to give me the consideration of one phone call when I let you do exactly what you want to do.”
“Call me, OK?” I coo sweetly, as she gets into the boyfriend’s car. I still sound slightly charming, given that the boy is there. I despair, in a hyperventilating sort of way, that I have not received her “I’m alive” phone call even though young Mario Andretti has barely careened out of the driveway.
Calling home seems like such a simple parental request, now that I am a parent. Back in my day, we didn’t have cell phones to get the job done. Besides, it was too loud to use the pay phones in the discos we snuck into. Back in my day, my mom didn’t get hit with Dateline’s To Catch a Predator before I left the house on a Friday night. If I went to a friend’s party, my mother was usually upstairs with all the other kids’ parents, discussing I’m OK, You’re OK, or some such literature of the time. We all knew who was who…and everyone really did seem OK.
Now my baby girl—the one I had to cajole into joining pre-school circle time by sitting cross-legged next to her for a month of “Two-Day Two’s,” the one who I personally escorted on and off the big yellow bus for five years, the one who in middle school was still telling me that she’d live with me “forever”—that same little kitten has been released into the wilds of the city. I think I hear a roar.
My Saint Came Watching In
Ann Cochran, Bethesda
After two years away from home on a Mormon mission in Italy, Harry, my handsome 22-year-old son, recently burst through closed doors and into my open arms at Dulles. The sun is shining brighter over Bethesda now, but this experience for me began with dark clouds.
At the Missionary Training Center, I felt the spirit but nothing could dull the pain of separation in September of 2006. Finger by finger, I slowly released my son’s hands and watched him walk into a new life with 2,000 other missionaries.
