What About Stockton?

I'm handing over the reins to my mom this week.  I've been going through her things and found this, written in her perfect handwriting on 80's-era computer paper my Dad would bring home from work for us to use as scratch paper. 

June 30, 1986

What does Stockton have to do with the Fourth of July?  Stockton is the Fourth of July with watermelon, baked beans, gooey chocolate cupcakes with little American flags waving on toothpicks, homemade ice cream, keg beer in need of constant pumping, the flag rippling in the wind, little kids collecting crawdads on the river bank, Norwegian freighters passing through the channel, spirited games of volleyball for all ages and sizes, splashes off the diving board with children showing what they've learned and adults what they haven't forgotten, little kids holding sparklers and big "kids" lighting firecrackers in tin cans, the firecracker display that even the sleepiest child will witness and remember, the C.P.A.s sharing incredible stories, the catching up and promising to visit before the next Fourth, the passing around of the new baby.

When my husband suggested the excitement we would experience if we were to visit New York Harbor on Liberty Weekend, our daughter asked incredulously, "But what about Stockton?"

Nancy Plath

Love

On Sunday, we baptized Patrick.  As I sat during the mass beforehand reciting all the old prayers and responses, I wondered how I would teach my sons spirituality.  In that moment, my mind was so full of the elaborate plans for the day that I couldn't think very far beyond the baptism itself.  Sure I'd thought in the past about how to field certain questions on religion and life, but as for my proactive teaching of something so hard to grasp, so fraught with minefields, so complicated by contentious history and imperfect earthly stewards - well, it wasn't very clear.

In front of me sat a mother and her late-elementary school son dressed in matching lime green Polartec shirts.  All I'd thought of when I first noticed them was how casual church had become since I was a kid in the 80's, when poofy floral dresses and thick tan-colored stockings were the uniform at mass every Sunday.  But as I looked closer, the scales fell and I saw that the boy was clearly needing his mom.  He was slumped over, and his mom was cuddling him a lot.  He leaned into her and let her pat his back - nothing like the stereotype of boys this age wiggling free of their moms' embrace.  He didn't always want to stand and kneel when it was time, and she let him be.  But as she cycled through the sit-stand-kneel routine, he always found his way back into her arms.  She sat up straight and strong, patiently holding him.  Whatever it was, she was letting him know she would be there for him no matter what.

I thought, this is love, manifested through this mother to her son.  And in that moment, that was all I needed to know about how I would teach my boys about God.

Thelma and Louise

I saw Thelma and Louise again this weekend, and with fresh eyes I realized it's a lot more socially prescient than I once realized.  It came out in 1991 - the same year William Kennedy Smith was acquitted of rape charges, the Tailhook scandal made headlines, and Anita Hill testified before the Senate at Clarence Thomas' Supreme Court confirmation hearing.

A single ugly truth drives the film: A waitress named Louise was once raped in Texas years ago.  Never acknowledged by the powers that be, the residual bile oozes out mindlessly, destructively and tragically throughout the film.  She shoots the man who had tried to rape Thelma not because he is still a threat, but because he looks at her with the same predatory eyes she saw in her original rapist.  Now a fugitive, she insists upon driving from Oklahoma City to Mexico without passing through Texas to avoid an entire state of bad memories.  Later, after she shares an intimate moment with her fiance in a coffee shop, a waitress says, "It's lucky he left when he did...we thought we were going to have to put out the fire." Louise can't give the natural conspiratorial of a giggling schoolgirl - and instead of laughing, she sits frozen and stricken in her seat.  The thrill is gone.  She is now just a soldier on a death march, not daring to avert her eyes off from the road ahead.

Louise has a number of random but revealing interactions with elderly people she encounters on the road.  They personify the path she will not, cannot travel.  She stares into the solemn, defeated eyes of elderly ladies in a dilapidated beauty shop, their hair beautifully coiffed in stark contrast to their lined, defeated faces.  Louise reflexively reaches to put on lipstick, but when she spies her reflection, she doesn't even bother.  From then on, the prim and pretty affectations we've seen up until now completely devolve along with the voided social contract.  The scarves, pearls, blue eye shadow and painted lips are gone forever.  These have become trappings of an oppression they have chosen to overthrow.

At the next stop, Louise sits down next to an old man at a truck stop, unemotionally removes all her jewelry and places it into his hands.  Stricken, he takes it.  This man seems to embody his entire gender, and we are to imagine that's he's spent a lifetime racking up institutional advantages - home-cooked meals, jobs, no-strings sex - and here he takes from Louise once again.  Louise is so resigned that she has resolved to render unto him what is his.  Or perhaps what was never truly hers.

If one type of man doesn't get them, another will.  While Louise fends off the advances of her sincere ex-fiance, Thelma exposes not only Louise's life savings, but their travel plans.  While Thelma is smart enough to know that her misogynistic ex-husband's phone is bugged because of his saccharine tone, Louise then gets on the phone with Harvey Keitel's "sensitive" cop, who turns out to be the bigger threat despite his good intentions: It is he who facilitates the relentless, mechanical march of the authorities to bring them to justice.  And while he sweet-talks her, his cold-blooded cohort is tracing her call and speeding their journey toward its end.  That he could say empathetically, "I know what happened to you in Texas," keeps her on the phone long enough for the men in suits to pinpoint the fugitives' location.  The moment that Louise finally gets validation from a man in power that she was raped is the same moment that the noose closes around her neck for the last time.  The crime is finally unearthed, but it is she who pays the price.  Again.

For Thelma and Louise, there's no way for them to live in the world on their terms.  Louise's rapist, it turns out, was also her murderer.  As an impersonal, disembodied voice crackles on the radio listing their crimes, the men who wronged them weep, the men who chase them close in, and Thelma and Louise come to grips with the reality of their endgame.  They dance precariously along the edges of the Grand Canyon, evoking the American wild west and all the danger that goes with it.  

The persistent imagery of Americana is there to remind us that these are just the girls next door, struggling to survive the circumstances into which they were born.  The Chrysler convertible, the open road, endless blue skies, the American flag hat - even the lewd truck driver wears an American flag, and when they blow up his big rig, it's as though the last clause of their social contract has been nullified in a cacophony of Fourth of July fireworks.  But they are all-American girls to the very end, taking the romanticized open road to the next level and plunging ahead into the Grand Canyon.  In their last moments, we see images of their mother's pearls, ammo, friendship bracelets, photos of happier times and a stetson boot on the gas pedal.  

As they take their last breaths, a man finally does something good for them: The sensitive cop blocks the snipers' shot as he runs after them, trying in vain to stop their fatal plunge.  In the end, they enjoy their moment of feminist glory only because a man makes it possible.

* * *

It's easy for us to look at Thelma's deadbeat husband or the degenerate truck driver and identify them as misogynists.  After all, they are mere caricatures.  But surely the flesh-and-blood women who abide characters like these can't consciously identify them as such.  We can only identify prejudice from afar, which is probably why the well-documented sexism against Hillary Clinton was only acknowledged by many after she ended her bid.  Salon's Rebecca Traister wrote thoughtfully about it here and here, methodically laying out the evidence of bias directed toward the candidate, sparking hundreds of angry letters resurrecting the poison.  I'm not a huge fan of Hillary's; I'm especially unhappy about her minions' heavy-handed latest attempt to wrest much-needed funds from Obama's coffers to line Mark Penn's pockets.  But the fact remains that a disproportionate amount of vitriol was hurled in Senator Clinton's direction, more than was ever directed toward a man stumping for the highest office in a blue suit and innocuous tie.  

Today, Clarence Thomas sits on the bench of the highest court in the land, but for many, his name remains inextricably linked to that of Anita Hill.  William Kennedy Smith is a free man today, but in 2005 he settled out of court over another sexual assault allegation.  And while sexual harassment laws have made most thinking men extremely careful about what they say at work, just about every woman I know has a story about a skeevy colleague who made life at work uncomfortable.  We've also been overrun by frivolous celebutantes like Paris Hilton who have found playing dumb to be extremely lucrative.  Much to the chagrin of mothers everywhere, little girls are still labeled "bossy" when they exhibit leadership behaviors we celebrate in boys.  And of course, the feminist movement never made it past our front doors; the plight of today's overworked mother is extremely well-documented.  And this is to say nothing of What. Still. Goes. On. Around. The. World.  

While it's tempting to think we vanquished the quaint caricatures of Thelma and Louise, sexism has adapted and evolved.  The path ahead is murky.  We have no clear plan.  Unfortunately, that's a strategy that turned out rather poorly for Thelma and Louise.  

Disenchanted

DeAnna Pappas started out as the perfect, empowered Disney-ABC princess. She has thick, gorgeous hair like Rapunzel, an unlikeable antagonist spun to be every bit as nefarious as any Evil Stepmother, and in the pattern of nearly all fairytale princesses, her mother is absent.  At 26, she believes in love, the Bachelor/Bachelorette franchise's vaunted "process," and the dream that she'll have 3 kids before she's 30.

But in the end, she is just another marginalized reality princess overthrown at the editing desk, ending her fifteen minutes as just another hardened yuppie tooling around L.A. in a Maserati while her fairytale dreams slowly slip away.  

Enchanted's perfect princess begins with a dream, too.  She sings about her would-be prince's perfect lips, sitting on a pillow surrounded by a bevy of wild animals and relentless hyperbole.  When she's thrust onto the "so real" streets of New York City by a palace cabal, she's a world away from the soft treatment showered upon her by her pliant furry friends.  Hapless to contend with an unhelpful transient she blusters, "You...are not a very nice old man!"

Our reality princess, too, awakens in a strange place, but immediately begins to put her homey touches on the experience.  She claims to have awoken early one of her first mornings of taping to make pancakes for the men staying in her house, every bit the Disney princess making a house a home, overseeing a massive cleanup by the local wildlife.  The men aren't so lucky, forced to take up residence in an outhouse.  Our Enchanted prince, played by the wonderful James Marsden moving seamlessly between his identical roles here and in 27 Dresses, sums up the men's incredulity when he asks, "What is this terrible place?"

Yet when they make the most of it, make it their home and invite DeAnna to a BBQ, she is vexed by the lack of deferential treatment she receives, flummoxed that they are more interested in hanging out with each other than winning her heart.  She later lamented that women in the same situation were "goo-goo, gah-gah" over their hotly contested prize.  That the men forego ripping each other to shreds and instead turn their outhouse into a fraternity house.

"Oh my, it's a little twist on our story, it's the princess coming to rescue the prince.  I guess that makes you the damsel in distress."  Emboldened as the planner and the pruner, DeAnna weilds all the power to save each bachelor from the jaws of the humiliating limo confessional.  But just how empowered was she?  Questions began to arise when DeAnna kept taking credit for the elaborately planned dates with her would-be suitors.  Like a Disney princess' conscripted army of hardworking critters, the ABC production crew does the true heavy lifting.

"DeAnna values words over actions," was a frequent criticism by the jilted suitors.  Tongue-tied bachelors were quickly dismissed, one even in a storybook horse-drawn carriage.  She reasoned that if she couldn't feel a spark outside ABC headquarters in a carriage shaped like a pumpkin making its way down a closed-off street in downtown Los Angeles under klieg lights and a three-camera crew, she never would.  Watching at home with my baby monitor and cookie dough ice cream, I think this is when I began to worry whether she would make a good decision in the end.

Then there's the bachelor loathed for always cutting in on other contestants.  Like Gisele's Prince Edward, Jeremy is handsome, orphaned and promises to be a good provider, but alas he's "too perfect," according to DeAnna.  Like Gisele, she insists on spending time together on a date in the real world (a.k.a. the Bahamas in reality land), which proves to be their undoing as a couple.  Aren't they glad they didn't rush into that hasty, high-profile Disney-ABC wedding?  At least she is.

Too many times at the Men Tell All special, she passed up opportunities to be gracious, instead quibbling with her third runner-up and appearing to coldly dismiss her brokenhearted Prince Edward.  It was uncomfortable to watch - and in the end, disappointing.  Trying not to be cryptically vague like Brad, she overcorrected and reopened the wounds.

It came down to a choice between the 31-year-old father beloved by her family and most of the audience, and a 26-year-old snowboarder with a penchant for terrorist fist jabs and the word "rad."  Jason is courtly and kind but not a player, unromantically asking permission to kiss her for the first time.  Playing hard to get, Jesse put greater stock in the power of true love's first kiss, holding back even until the day she meets his parents, taking the lead of other successful contenders who had evidently read The Rules.  

It worked.  She picked the snowboarder who pounded fists with her dad to cap off the conversation in which he grudgingly bestowed his paternal blessing.  Unfortunately, many in the audience fell in love with the other prince and his young child more than they did his would-be Disney princess.  In the end, it seemed very wrong to drag a child through the ups and downs of a romantic comedy, strung along to the very end.  As the primary caregiver for his son, Jason spent precious weeks away from him in fruitless pursuit of his princess; it's not the kind of heartwarming Disney ending for which we had hoped.

Instead of putting her trust in the man most likely to give her the family she desires, the man who wore a peach tie to his own rejection in honor of her home state, she takes her sister-in-law's advice not to grow up too fast, to stay in the world of DINKY, carefree twentysomethings a little while longer.  For Princess Gisele, like fledgling second-wave feminists everywhere, New York City becomes a refuge, a destination and a new home signifying adventure and emancipation.  And like millions of city slickers before her, it's really, really hard for her to move back to the suburbs.  In the end, the specter of three kids in four years pales in comparison to the prospect of prolonging her moment in the sun a little while longer.  

And so she falls for the unlikely, terrestrial man she's not supposed to love.

"Just one bite, my love, and all of this will go away - and all of the people that you met.  You won't remember anything.  Just sweet dreams, and happy endings," the disguised evil queen exhorts Gisele.  Like the producers hoping that a short commercial break will take the sting out of the scenes of heartbreak, DeAnna forges ahead.  Under time pressure to take her bite of the apple before the clock strikes midnight or the producers' contracts expire, our princess, too, hastily makes the wrong decision.

There was much speculation over at Fans of Reality TV that the screencaps showed DeAnna kissing Jason with her eyes closed, but Jesse with her eyes open.  In Enchanted, it's the earnest suitor that opens Gisele's eyes for all to see.  Sadly, the reality version doesn't yield such perfect results.

And in the end, even New York City yields to the contours of the pop-up book.  For DeAnna's sake, I'd love to say the same thing for Newnan, Georgia, but word is already leaking out on the Fans of Reality TV boards that an Engagement Party special scheduled for July 14 was canceled for a "Where Are They Now?" rehash.  Now Jason has revealed that he actually made a full proposal before she stopped him.  Our princess' aura is fading fast.  

In the last moments of the finale, DeAnna proclaimed, "I cannot believe I'm going to marry the guy with the pink shoelaces!"  Sadly, neither can we.

Ode to the Id

As I careened down I-5 heading south to celebrate my thirtieth birthday last week, I grappled with different interpretations of the milestone.  Would it be like that moment in The Truman Show when the unwitting reality TV star celebrates this big birthday by stepping off his sabotaged, spotlit sailboat, asserting his place in the unseen driver's seat of his new life?  Would I fall asleep one night and gain Danteesque insight on the trajectory of my life from a somber midgame report by a placid, unswerving Virgil?  Or would it be the dawn of my own personal Enlightenment, filling Diderot's pages with my own music, art, science and literature?

Alas, none of these things came to pass, but I did go see the new Sex and the City movie.  

Stephanie Zacharek of Salon has written very sympathetically of the supporting actresses on SATC in the past, and her review of the movie especially extols the merits of Kim Cattrall's performance.  I agree with her: Samantha ran away with the show, emerging as the most thoughtful and self-aware of the foursome.  Carrie always called her female friends her mirrors: Miranda is her brain, Charlotte her heart, and Samantha - well, some people say she's her libido, but I think she's her id.  She brooks no doubts, shows no false emotion, and quickly identifies what needs to be done and does it.  When Big's doubts about taking his third trip down the aisle are personified by his sniping business partner, Samantha shuts him down humorously but resolutely.  Her reaction to Carrie's engagement isn't the baited-breath, knee-jerk reaction of the other two falling mindlessly into society's cliched script for such a scene.  She's taken aback at first, takes a quick interlude to uncheck the never-going-to-marry box for Carrie, then calls back to genuinely embrace the news.  The look on her face after Carrie gets the news that Big is MIA on the big day is one of genuine devastation, but it never morphs into pity, even when she spoonfeeds the listless Carrie her first meal in days.  Far from the emotionally challenged, romance-resistant sex addict portrayed in the original series, here she is a fully fleshed-out woman, well led by her instincts.

She swiftly takes care of the logistics of booking extra tickets for the honeymoon and moving Carrie's things out of Heaven on Fifth, runs Smith's empire and scores front row seats at Fashion Week - all while looking fabulous.  Samantha's prodigious success was never explicitly connected to the essence of her character in the series, but here it makes a lot of sense that id-driven Samantha would thrive in a business culture that rewards action, not constipated analysis.  

If Samantha is Carrie's id, Miranda is her superego.  The "brain" in this movie is also the most wrong, the most heartbreaking, the most destructive.  Her critical analysis leads her nowhere good, and the only wisdom to her character's storyline can be found when she abandons her feminist absolutism.  She can only find happiness by eschewing her overrational methodology.  It's only when she looks in the mirror and sees cappuccino foam on her lip, evoking a tender moment with Steve, that she realizes she must throw away her overwrought pro/con list and go with her gut.  She analyzes, draws lines in the sand and condemns, never training her Harvard-honed mind on the bigger picture.  The woman who has the most classically feminist career trajectory and all the best lines is the one who's the least happy.  She's alone on New Year's Eve issuing thinly veiled pleas her friend - whose happiness she was instrumental in dismantling - to walk through the snow to visit her.

Parts of the script could have been written by Phyllis Schlafly.  It reads like a postfeminist manifesto on how we've become too successful, analytical and cerebral for our own good.  Pretty Charlotte never gives up on love, easily gives up her career, and is rewarded with a domestic bliss that she proclaims makes her happy every day.  Miranda is dragged kicking and screaming to the suburbs, never really loses her attitude about it, and is punished by infidelity.  And is anyone really able to suspend disbelief that Carrie is making a meaningful contribution as she submits from her apartment to the fund for Heaven on Fifth?  Certainly not Big: "I know.  I bought it."  As Owen Glieberman writes in Entertainment Weekly, "the glory of Sex and the City is that it turned the cosmopolitan high life of girls who just want to have fun into a new feminine mystique."

Except for Samantha.  She calls all of her own shots with very little consternation.  True, she falls into a relationship rut, but jets off to New York enough to score equal screen time with Charlotte and Miranda, evacuates Mexico on the spur of the moment, and still manages have her name on the wall at work.  And when even this life becomes too constricting, she extricates herself from it with class, grace and dignity.  She even lets Smith save face.  Samantha is really the only character who escapes this antifeminist ethos that independence will make you miserable.  "Three of the four outcomes would not have been shockers in Eisenhower-era sitcoms," observes to Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal.  Samantha is a feminist, but somehow she never really pays the price.  

There's a lot of cognitive dissonance going on in the film, and in the minds of most modern women for that matter: We want to be independent and fabulous, but our collective attention lingers lovingly with the camera on Harry as a "big bundle of love" on the day his second daughter is born, Lily's bedroom in all its pink splendor, and little Brady plaintively yearning to see his parents kiss on New Year's.  Samantha is the only one who isn't afflicted with the confusion most women feel about our wants and needs.  She's the only one who transcends the rules that have us living in an egalitarian utopia academically, socially and athletically all the way up to college graduation - then abruptly returning us to the world our mothers and grandmothers inhabited.  Somewhere along the way, Samantha somehow escapes that new feminine mystique.

For me, the evolution of the other three characters was honest and satisfying.  They all end up happy, two of them with children they adore.  After all the frustrations and heartbreak along the way, they've made it to the other side without completely losing themselves.  At thirty, I have too.  But just the same, I'll be taking a few pages out of Samantha's book.  We all need to trust our gut, speak the truth, and let our id run wild every now and then.

Closing the Door

Where does neighborly compassion end and self-preservation begin?

This afternoon, a middle-aged lady dressed in a plaid knit cardigan knocked on my door.  Thinking it was the wife of a dad I'd just met at the pool (he was playing playdate matchmaker), I opened the door with my son on my hip.  Clutching a phone book, she explained that she needed to call a taxi for a ride home.  She explained that she was in one of life's unpredictable situations and had brought along the telephone book because she knew she'd need to get home.  I asked whether she lived in the neighborhood - no, she lived in a neighboring city.  I asked whether I could give her a ride, but she said she didn't want to trouble me.  Thinking of my son needing his dinner, I didn't insist.  

Instead, I offered her the use of my cell phone.  I excused myself, closed and locked my door, and retrieved the phone.  When I re-emerged, she seemed surprised to see me.  I walked a few steps outside my door, which somehow made me feel safer, and she showed me the page in the phone book for the taxi.  I dialed the number and handed her the phone to set up the ride.  When she hung up, she said it would be fifteen minutes until it arrived.

At that point, I had a dilemma: Should I invite her in for a warm cup of tea or let her wait outside?  It was 4:30p.m. on one of those perfect California days, about 75 degrees with a light wind rustling our leafy surroundings.  I pointed her to a sunny patch of lawn outside our neighbor's home and explained that I often sit out there at this time of day with my son, and it's nice.  Remembering the cabs who had ventured to the other side of the freeway or never shown up, causing us to nearly miss more than a few flights, I told her that if the cab didn't come, to let me know and we'd try again.  She looked downcast, thanked me, and walked away.  

Fifteen minutes later, my cell phone rang off the hook while I was changing my son's diaper. I finally I got to it, saw that "Private" caller had left several voice messages and looked outside to see a taxi cab waiting for its occupant.  I went outside to talk to the sixtysomething driver who had driven all the way from Burlingame - 10+ miles away - and turned down two calls in the process.  The woman was nowhere to be found.  With my son in my arms, I searched for her, but I knew she was gone.

So, did I weaken the social fabric by not showing more neighborly hospitality to this stranded woman, or did I place myself and my son in danger by opening my door in the first place? 

I find myself clinging to the fantasy that if I ever find myself in trouble, I'll be able to extricate myself, but stories like this tell me that moms just like me meet terrible ends more often than I can bear to imagine.  Whenever I hear a horror story on the nightly news of a beating or a sexual assault or a murder, I try to extract a detail that differentiates me from the victim - anything to think it can't happen to me.  Did she know her attacker?  Was it a case of mistaken identity?  Did she open her door to a stranger?   In fact, I could just as easily fit these descriptions: How well do I really know that nice grocery clerk at Nob Hill who always stops to talk to my son and me after he walks us to our car?  With my mom uniform of a messy pony tail, wrinkled shorts and a T-shirt, I look like millions of other women and could easily be mistaken for someone else in a grainy photograph.  And it turns out that despite a hundred vigorous public safety campaigns launched in the hysterical early 80's, I do open my door to strangers in my maternal quest to make our disconnected community a little smaller.  Aspiring to Dr. King's dream of the Beloved Community, I feel that part of my job as a mom is to help create a cocoon of community around my son.  But today, I didn't do it mindfully, and the consequences could have been tragic.

With a sad heart, I realize I must now err more on the side of safety than hospitality.  Of course I'm haunted by the idea that an irate ex-boyfriend abducted my stranded visitor, or an angry would-be employer attacked her as she was waiting.  Or that she could have used a listening ear.  Or that she grew cold as she waited.  But in reality, I know that it was a warm day, she had a beautiful place to wait with lots of cars driving by, and a safe ride was on its way.

I need to be a lot more concerned about the fact that she - or an unseen cohort - could have strong-armed their way into my house and done something terrible to my son or to me.  But I'm stuck in the idea that I should have done more for her.  It makes me so sad that a desperate woman may have passed through my life today and I couldn't do as much for her as I wished.  A few years ago while I was pregnant, I locked myself out of my house on a cold November day.  A neighbor came by, let me use his phone to call a locksmith, and offered for me to wait inside.  While I turned him down for safety reasons, his kindness always made me feel more welcome in our neighborhood.  But 1) he was male and about twice as big as me, 2) my open garage demonstrated that I was clearly his neighbor, and 3) it was freezing outside.  I know in my heart that I can't be so open-hearted given my gender, stature, and especially my total and complete responsibility for my child.  

I know this.  But right now, as I sit on my cozy couch with my cell phone charging and my son sleeping soundly in his crib, I hate not knowing what happened to my surprise visitor after I closed my door.

Falling Down

I've always had doubts about my maternal instincts.  I've always wondered whether I would do the right thing if faced with a sudden threat to my son.  Would I throw my body over him if a car came careening toward us?  Would I whisk him to the safety of the nearest doorway in the event of the impending California earthquake?  Would I protect him from a would-be kidnapper with my life if necessary?   

Last Tuesday, I returned from a sunny walk around the neighborhood with Andrew in my arms, trying to find a silver lining on a sad day.  We were two steps away from home when my flip flop caught on an unforeseen gap just before our driveway, and I toppled helplessly toward the cement.  Surprising myself a little, I passed the mommy test: I channeled the brunt of the fall from my son to my elbow, and despite being suddenly horizontal, Andrew didn't even realize anything was wrong until he noticed my labored breathing.  With the wind knocked out of me, I struggled to regain my composure.  Scared but unscathed, Andrew cried as I mustered the strength to get up again and take the last few steps of our journey home.  

It was May 6, the twelfth anniversary of my mother's early death from Lou Gehrig's disease, a month before my high school graduation, robbing her of that rite-of-passage milestone by just a few inches.  Just short of legal adulthood, a child's graduation is the closest our society comes to connoting a sense of completion to the task of parenthood.  After losing my coach so close to the finish line, it took me a long time to find my way home.  Wandering through the woods on an endless journey better described by the Indigo Girls here, I tried fruitlessly to get back to being "fine."  

I was at the mall the day before my 24th birthday when I ran into my future husband, who I hadn't seen since physics cram sessions my senior year of high school.  I saw him from across the room and a soft, certain voice from deep within told me my life would change if I chose to walk over to him.  I chose him, and a few seconds later he saw me, walked over and started a conversation.  My future sister and mother-in-law blended into a tall pile of sweaters and let us have our moment, and said later that our reconnection was nothing short of electric.  A few minutes later, they came over and we all chatted.  I don't recall what we discussed, but throughout the conversation I had a strong feeling that I was coming home.  I tried to talk myself out of it, but I couldn't help but feel that I was walking around on a cloud for the rest of the day.  

My life did change.  Eight months later, we were engaged, and before I knew it we were married.  My husband didn't change me, I've just always felt most like myself when I'm around him.  Caring for him, and later for our son too, helped me take those last steps across the finish line, even without my mother guiding me in person.  

I don't think I'll ever "get over" my mom's death, but I've finally come home - to a houseful of people who need me.  The only thing that's ever salved the pain of missing my mom has been to do things for other people.  So today, my sister, my mother-in-law and I threw a Mothers' Day tea for fifteen wonderful mothers who have come into my life this year.  We delighted in the planning, and my mom's favorite flower - roses - were everywhere.  My mother was always doing things for other people, and "paying forward" my mother's spirit of generosity seemed to be the best way to honor her memory.  

Spending time with my wonderful fellow mothers was the best Mothers' Day gift I could have received.  They filled my home with the spirit of friendship and kindness.  The conversations were authentic, a few tears were shed as people let down their guards, and I even think a few brand new friendships were formed.  In that sense, the day was exactly what I'd hoped for - except for the still-raw gash on my elbow.  It was a reminder to always pick myself up when I fall, and that caring for others is the best way to do that.  Next time I'm missing my mom, I'll try to remember to pick myself up, take those last few steps home, and take good care of the people inside.  

Happy Mothers' Day to all the wonderful mothers out there, wherever they may be.