Browsed by
Category: children

Haunted House

Haunted House

Comments 0 Comment

The stairs creak, the floor groans — night sounds of the empty nest.

When the house was full of children I used to joke that we didn’t need those fake cobwebs, we had the real thing. Our house was messy because we were too busy to clean it.

The house is tidier now, but trick-or-treaters will be the only kids I see. No one to carve the pumpkin (though Celia helped with that last week when she was here for fall break). No one to watch “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and laugh at Bram Bones. No one to borrow my eyeliner for drawing a fake mustache.

Luckily, the house is haunted. Not with evil spirits, but with good ones. All the years, tears, giggles — all the drama — it’s here somewhere; I’m convinced of it. And on this day of spirits, it doesn’t take much imagination to find it. 

Marathon Girl

Marathon Girl

Comments 1 comment

Her first achievement was signing up, a marathon of its own, requiring hours online and the drive to submit her name ahead of tens of thousands of others.

And then there was the training, which began in March and involved a byzantine schedule of long runs and short runs building up to yesterday’s 26.2 miles (excuse me, 26.6 miles, according to her Garmin).

For some reason, she decided that the training should also include a triathlon, a swim-bike-run event that left her with a sprained ankle less than two months before the big race. But she pushed through that, too, with an air boot and lots of determination.

And finally, yesterday, all the hard work and determination paid off.  Not much more than a year and a half since she started running, Claire successfully completed the Marine Corps Marathon.

There were many moments I’ll remember, ones I didn’t photograph because I was too busy hugging her, but this is one that will stick with me.

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Five

Comments 0 Comment

I’m up early, but her birthday has already been underway for nine hours. Her 25th birthday. It’s happening in Greenwich Mean Time in the northern reaches of a tall, skinny country in West Africa, and in many ways I’m feeling very far away from Suzanne today.

But in other ways I’m not. I heard her voice less than 48 hours ago and, God willing (a phrase she’s begun to use with alarming frequency), I will again later today. I’ve had two emails recently and, within the past month, a rare and precious letter.

These, for now, will have to do. And I’m left where many parents of 25-year-olds are — to my own devices. Suzanne, after all, is her own person. They all are. And I am mine. Or at least I’m beginning to be again.

So what I think about today is not just that she is a quarter-century old, but that I’m 25 years a parent. Long enough to get the hang of it, you’d think. Not really, though.

(Photo: Katie Esselburn)

Frying Pan Park

Frying Pan Park

Comments 1 comment

As soon as I pulled into the gravel parking lot, I knew it was a mistake. I hadn’t been to this farm park since the girls were young. I was missing them enough as it was. What was I thinking of?

Some sort of therapy, I suppose, the kind where anxious folks expose themselves to ever-increasing doses of what they fear. So I hopped out of the car and started my “treatment.”

There was the big barn where we’d admire the baby pigs and the field where we’d watch the young goats rut and run. There was the chicken coop, the old tractor, the field where the pardoned Thanksgiving turkeys (given to several American presidents, who chose not to slaughter them) now run free.

Mostly there were the shadows of my three daughters. One running ahead, a second clambering on a fence and the third holding her nose because “this place really stinks, Mom.” For a moment the memories overcame me and I had to stop and compose myself.

As I stared at the light on the early fall fields, a young father raced ahead of me, his two children pulling on his arms. He looked harried and hassled — and seeing him helped me remember the high drama of those days, the endlessness of them. My trips to this park were often out of desperation.

But I also recalled the way it felt to pull in the driveway after one of our outings, secure in our togetherness, feeling, as I rushed to start dinner, that everything was exactly as it should be.

Shopping Alone

Shopping Alone

Comments 0 Comment

It had been two weeks since I’d shopped for groceries. Two weeks of eating the ultimate leftovers, what’s left in the freezer after the kids have gone. But having exhausted most staples, I headed for the store.

I begin in the dairy aisle. No gallon of skim, just a pint of whole milk for my tea.

I skip the cold cuts, the Lunchables, the Fruit Rollups.

No candy or cookies or crackers. No goldfish! Kid cereal successfully bypassed, too; I go for the granola instead.

Meat, eh! Fish, double eh! I even pass on pasta. I settle on salad and one of those rotisserie chickens, the kind someone else cooks for you.

Before I leave I move through the produce aisle. The pears, I always bought them for Celia. The apples, those were for
Suzanne. Claire has always loved melon.

So I buy all three — pears and apples and
melon — just for the memories, you understand.

(Photo: 123RF)

Back to School

Back to School

Comments 0 Comment

They have new tennis shoes and big smiles. Their adventure is about to begin. But “they” aren’t mine.

It’s the first day of school in Fairfax County. But for the first time in 20 years it doesn’t matter. No kid of mine is boarding one of those big yellow buses. Or getting a ride or driving herself to school, either.

And this is fine.

I miss the little people my children once were. But I love the young adults they have become.

As for nostalgia, I’m channeling Alice Cooper:

School’s out for summer

School’s out forever!

(Celia on her first day of kindergarten in 2000.)

Empty and Full

Empty and Full

Comments 0 Comment

Yesterday we drove Celia, the youngest, a few hours up the road to college. For the first time since we bought this house in 1989, I awoke to no children living in it.

Until this morning the adrenalin carried me along. The list-making and packing, trying to make her transition as smooth as possible. But now the adrenalin is gone. The children are, too.

All the years of other-oriented living, of pushing my own needs aside for theirs, they haven’t come to a complete halt, of course, but they have come to a new phase.

I think of those amusement park rides that begin with a slow boat float through a cool tunnel only to shoot riders down a channel of water with a stomach-churning drop and a plume of spray.

What I thought would be easy turned out to be hard. Very hard. And at the end of the ride (the end of one phase of the ride, I should say), I’m exhausted, curious, wistful.

I’m empty — but I’m also full.

The van on the return trip. Those bags are empty — but the car is full.

Two for the Road, One at Home

Two for the Road, One at Home

Comments 0 Comment

Yesterday I haunted the Air France website, checking first to see that Celia’s flight to Paris had arrived, then to see if her flight to Africa had taken off and, finally, to be sure that it had landed.

It did! She arrived in Cotonou, Benin, on Beninese Independence Day. Her big sister was waiting for her. What seemed preposterous two years ago — that I would have even one daughter in Africa — is now even more so. I have two!

Two girls on an adventure, two girls buzzing around on the backs of motorcycles (trying not to think about that part), two (girls) for the road.

Luckily, I also have a daughter who travels more conservatively, who even as a toddler would ask, “How we get home, Mama?” when we were on vacation.

We need both types: the micro and the macro. The ones on the road and the ones waiting for them back at home.

Scentscape

Scentscape

Comments 0 Comment

Walking through a field of clover the other day, I caught a whiff of childhood. The sweetness of the  purple flower mixed with the aroma of cut grass, loamy earth and hot sun. The scents were radiating from below, up past my knees and into my nose.

But there was a time when those smells didn’t have as far to travel. A time when I was closer to the ground. We all were.

No wonder, then, that the world was full of fragrance. That we were storing up a lifetime of olfactory memories and triggers, a scentscape.

It was the world, and we were just coming alive to it. And it can be there for us again. Just take a deep breath.

Last Day of School

Last Day of School

Comments 1 comment

Graduation is behind us, so why do I care?

Because it’s a ritual, I guess. Because this is the last day the big yellow bus will come to our corner for two and a half months.

Because Fairfax County Public Schools close for the summer today and when they reopen in September it will be the first time since 1994 that one of my children isn’t enrolled.

This is a good thing, of course, what is supposed to be. But today, just a brief backward look, not of longing or of regret, but of fullness, significance. A nod to time passing. A nod to change.