Essays

In mid-December of last year, I hopped on a plane to my hometown in the Southwest and was hit by a striking realization. For the first time in my 64 years, I had no living parent to welcome me.

I’m old to consider myself an orphan, I know, but still it was a shock.

My mother, twice widowed, died the previous month after nine decades of living an impressively authentic and adventurous life. But far from a quick end, she languished for more than a year, so I lost her in chapters.

First, the diminishment of her robust physicality. My mother, who effortlessly zipped from a business breakfast to a Rotary luncheon to an evening symphony, needed an hour to move from her bed to her car to the hairdresser (I drove). Then even that ended. Bed-ridden, with her memory fading, her innate edges softened. My visits became less challenging but also less familiar. And then there were no words at all. I could get a smile out of her, but the quiet stretches grew longer and longer until, really, all I could offer by way of comfort was holding her hand.

All of it, the seemingly endless months of it, forced upon me a growing uneasiness I couldn’t pinpoint.

“You’re in a liminal space,” my cousin told me during a text exchange as I shared my angst. I’d never heard the word, but grasping for something to explain my malaise, I dug in.

Ah, liminality. From the Latin, limen. Occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold. Also: Relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process.

In other words, one monster of a holding pattern.

I laughed when I came across one quote by a therapist opining that humans don’t like liminality; we don’t like existing in a space of unpredictability. Ya think?

But at least there was an end to it, right? We traverse that epic thoroughfare and are rewarded for our herculean efforts with closure on the other side.

Hmmm.

It was on that trip in December to my childhood home when I realized the fatal flaw in the concept.

Leaving the Twin Cities, I sat down in the aisle seat next to a chatty fellow on his way to a guys’ ski weekend out West. We talked for more than 20 minutes – about jobs and kids – before he told me, cautiously, that he almost didn’t get on the plane, but his wife – in surgery for cancer at the very moment we were chatting and eating our granola bars – insisted that he go.

On my flight back to Minneapolis, my delightful 80-year-old seat mate, returning from celebrating his milestone birthday with family, broke down telling me his 40-something son died several months earlier from an accidental drug overdose.

I would never flatter myself by suggesting I’m a magnet for stories of human challenges and tragedies such as these. But 40-plus years in journalism has made it easy for me to read a room (or an airplane cabin) and ask questions borne of genuine curiosity.

And that’s when it occurred to me. Every one of us propelled forward at 500 mph inside that plane, or riding moving walkways in antiseptic airports, or zipping home on freeways in Ubers, or unpacking from bedroom to bathroom, is fooling ourselves in the belief that we know where the boundaries begin and end. Or that they end at all.

Yes, my mother is gone. But the unpredictability of life isn’t going anywhere. There will be the next and the next. Living means embracing continuous liminality.

So, what do we do? We don’t like this unpredictability, remember?

Honestly, I don’t know. But here’s what I’m going to try to do now, with no parent left to guide me. I’m going to try to be more realistic and more courageous and more flexible.

Mostly, I’m going to try to be more empathetic to strangers in limen, in the rare moments when it isn’t my turn.

**The essay can also be read in the Minnesota Good Age

In the end, the finest appliance I ever owned made a quiet exit from our Minneapolis house, loaded into the back of a large delivery truck and carted off to be unceremoniously picked apart, or worse.

I can say with certainty that no one else under my roof felt anything close to the sadness I experienced at its removal. A resounding chant of “Good riddance!” was more like it.

Our basement Maytag washing machine was nearly 25 years old (a quarter century!) when we bought our funky city house a decade ago. It was the first thing we planned to replace. But we never got around to it with more urgent issues to address (ice dams, aging pipes, uncooperative toilets, a houseful of blended teenagers demanding their space).

So, quietly and with the dignity best exemplified by the aged, it just kept doing its job, sucking ground-in dirt from soccer jerseys, gently freshening delicates, and reserving judgment on lighters catapulted out of pockets in the final powerful spin. Yep, kids. I found them. And all those dollar bills and coins you forgot to remove? They went to charity. Thanks so very much!

Over the years, Mark — our knowledgeable and supremely optimistic Maytag repair man – arrived periodically to keep our Maytag washing machine chugging. An adjustment here, a new part there – crushing the hopes of family members wishing the old thing would finally die and we’d get something shiny and new.

A month ago, even I knew it was time.

Our sleep was abruptly interrupted by a smoke alarm. We rushed downstairs and examined every likely suspect: Old lightbulbs hanging precariously above us? The dryer? Extension cords?

But the smell led us to a surprising place: Nooooo! Not you!

Yes.

A burned-out motor, most likely due to wiring eroding with age, took down my best appliance friend.

Mark arrived as soon as he could and gently confirmed what I suspected. There just was no way to fix it now that wouldn’t be prohibitively expensive — if he could even find the replacement part for a nearly 35-year-old washing machine.

A week later, my husband and I found ourselves in a bright appliance store with a friendly young saleswoman returning every few minutes to sing the praises of this one — Pet Pro System! — and that one – 10-Year Limited Warranty!

Ten years. The average lifespan of the washing machine today. Most other appliances aren’t much better, maybe hitting their teen years before breaking down.

I admit to an unusual attachment to old stuff. I’ve got clothes and jewelry so old they’re back in style. Photos on the fridge of babies now in grad school.

I donated my cherished 2003 green Rav 4 to the Wheels for Women Program at Newgate School — in 2019. To this day I miss it – and its user-friendly radio dials. Our new car’s dashboard belongs in an airplane cockpit. Yes, I do know how I sound.

And, yes, we wouldn’t have to mine too deeply the connection between my distress with throw-away culture and the steady stream of Medicare brochures arriving in my mailbox daily. But I digress.

We bought a new washing machine.

It’s got a huge basin to accommodate even the largest bedding. It sings to us when we push start.

It wants me to love it so I’m really going to try. I’ll get there. It just won’t be a clean break.

**This essay can also be read in Minnesota Good Age.

High school graduation season began a couple of weeks ago for our family, with a lovely evening celebration under the stars for a nephew in Tucson. So much felt familiar to this mom, who's been through quite a few of these with a blended clan of six young adults:

The high school band played an enthusiastic, if slightly off-key, "Pomp and Circumstance." There was that overly zealous family whooping it up and shrieking when their kid reached the stage. And many parents and grandparents teared up at the ritual shift of tassel from right to left.

But these are COVID Kids — just catching their breath after a painful, lonely three-year slog of separations from their cherished peers, virtual learning challenges, cancellations of traditional rites of passage and "school avoidance" becoming a mental health term.

Maybe that's why my heart leapt at something I've never seen in a printed grad ceremony program — a bold statement and a smart one given the times we're in.

Listed in the same type size as the state universities, private colleges, military academies and overseas art schools to which commitments had been made were two other fine institutions of learning and growth, chosen by more than a few members of the Class of 2023:

Gap Year

and

Employment

I've been a believer in the wisdom of gap years for far longer than our recent pandemic. Study-abroad programs, a year of travel with a backpack, even a job with DoorDash, offer young people a chance to figure out who they are and what they want before they get saddled with college debt — now hovering around $30,000 on average for Minnesota students.

I'm a huge fan of two-year colleges and trade schools for the same reasons, their training leading many into immediate jobs as plumbers, mechanics and essential health care workers with livable wages and benefits.

But despite everything that has transpired over the past few years, these sensible options remain a hard sell — not just for parents with huge hopes for their kids — but also for kids caught up in the excitement of and competition for four-year colleges, who believe they have no way out.

A profound reminder of this narrow thinking is a young woman I mentored this year. Jessica is one of the most poised, mature and focused communications students I've had the pleasure of working with. Maybe that's because she's 25.

In an essay published this month in the Rochester Community College Echo, Jessica wrote of finding herself at 18 simply going through the motions of applying to colleges. Not surprisingly, she was accepted by a prestigious private liberal arts college with a nearly full-ride scholarship.

But Jessica met the news with a panic attack "and a whole day spent locked in my bathroom out of fear of seeing the disappointment on my parents' faces."

Her mental health plummeted; she worked odd jobs for five years, fearing she was destined to never get back up. When she was 23, her brother pulled up the website of RCTC — a two-year college of 5,000 students near their home — and its Mass Communications Transfer Pathway program. She applied that night. Jessica is soaring now.

I'm guessing that all of us, as we attend grad parties in the weeks to come, will meet many Jessicas. So while we, of course, celebrate the hardworking grads off to sleep in dorms and chase dreams, I hope we can also celebrate the kids who just don't know — yet.

Let's do our best to engage them in supportive conversation, too: "So, what are you thinking about for the next year or two?" "What interests you right now?" When they tell you, think about colleagues or friends who might be willing to mentor them on a volunteer basis to test out their passions.

Let's be honest about ourselves. At 18, who among us had a clue about what we wanted to do with our lives? How many of us are still doing what we thought we'd be doing at 18?

Let's be honest about financial realities, too. It's obscene to drown in college debt, from which they may never recover.

Let's tell the kids who don't know that we admire their courage to carve out a different path. And that in their not knowing, they might just be the most knowing of all.

This essay can also be read in The Star Tribune

William waits for me in front of Room 210, hands holding something behind his back, head tilted away as I approach. “I don't feel like reading today,” he announces, avoiding eye contact. He is almost ten, handsome and polite, with dark brown eyes as big as pennies. And he's on to me. As the year moves along, he's figured out that I'm a pushover.“How about one book?” I suggest, “in our favorite spot? Then we can play your game.” Negotiations complete, he pulls the board game front and center, and we walk down five steps to a white window seat to begin reading Frog and Toad Together. Suddenly, he stops.“Too many pages,” he says. “I can't read that many pages.” “How about if you read one, then I read one. I'll start.”“No,” Williams says. “I'll start.”And so it goes. Once a week for one hour, going on three years, William and I meet with the assigned task of improving his literacy. Mostly we goof around. On his high-energy days, we whip throughEasy Readers. I celebrate every new word he masters with cheerleader-like frenzy. “Wonderful! Great! You are a reader, William!” He fires back with enthusiasm of his own: “How many books can we read today? Ten? Twelve? Let's read eighteen!”Sometimes we just play games – Trouble or Mancala. He plays to win, and does. Sometimes, we sneak into the school cafeteria, scouring it for a Popsicle or bag of salty chips. Other days are a chore. He's distracted, annoyed even, watching his buddies swat each other's heads at they march down the hall to the Media Center while he's stuck with me. “William,” I tease, “where are you?” On those days, I feel defeated. But I'm never sorry I come.Once William arrived at school with a family crisis embedded in his face. As we sat together on the white bench, he shed his bravado and tucked wet eyes into my shoulder and I would have held him there forever. But he is, after all, nine years old. The storm passed quickly. He sat up, wiped his eyes and asked, “Can we play Trouble?”A teacher I know stopped me in the hall one day to ask if I'd be returning in the fall. Of course, I told her. “Well, good,” she said. “William needs you.” I wanted to correct her. Actually, I need William.I am forty-three years old, with a full-time newspaper job I like and three neat kids who, so far, still like me. But sometimes I catch myself letting work problems distract me from them at home, when I open the mail instead of focusing on a detail of their day, or rush through their bedtime rituals so I can crawl into bed with a book.Sixteen years into marriage, I'm a decent spouse. But the most romantic getaway we have these days is to the wholesale club to buy in bulk. At work, where I manage nine creative people, most days go well. But last week I missed a deadline and screwed up an administrative detail and got some facts wrong in a meeting and wondered why they ever hired me.I have friends I adore who complete my world. But we can never seem to find time for lunch anymore; one is battling depression and my words, meant to comfort, come out trite and patronizing. “Hang in there,” I tell her. “It will get better.” Dear God.My world is safe and solid and good—except when the wheels come off unexpectedly and I find myself drowning in self-doubt. Or when I say something stupid, or feel envy, or bark at my kids because I'm tired, or forget to call my mother, or got to work with graham crackers ground into my shoulder and my sweater buttoned wrong.But I have one hour.One hour a week when I have no self-doubt. When I walk down a noisy elementary school hallway covered with children's art and my respite awaits me.“When will you come back?” William asks.“Next Thursday, silly. I always come on Thursday.”“I wish you could come on Mondays instead,” he says. “Then I wouldn't have to wait so long for you.”One hour a week I am granted the greatest reward possible. The comfort of knowing that I am absolutely in the right place, doing the right thing. My life will catch up with me soon enough. But for the moment, it will just have to wait.

My house guests are calling me a freak. They're laughing as they say it and I'm laughing, too, because I knew it was coming and, frankly, I've been called worse. I just told them about my evening's dinner plans and they can't get their heads around why I'd want to spend Friday night at the home of a happily married man and his three kids, whose wife, by the way, is out of town. “I love his cooking?” I say, hoping the statement, if posed as a question, might encourage empathy on their part, or at least an end to the ribbing.For years, I've been getting grief from relatives and friends about this guy. He and I talk on the phone several times a week, meet for coffee on occasion (we go Dutch), email and text regularly. He knows and likes my boyfriend; even gave a bicycle to my boyfriend's son. His wife and I buy each other gifts.I can't tell you exactly when our relationship evolved into the mature and thoroughly enjoyable union it is, only that I dreamed for years of this very thing with this very man. This man whose kids are my kids. Whose house was once my house, too. This man I was married to for 21 years.I can tell you, from my professional life writing about relationships, and my personal life living in the middle of many, that we aren't the only exes navigating this peculiarly pleasant state, once released from the bonds of holy matrimony.I can tell you, too, that while I have never bought Ritalin from the neighbor boy, (or propositioned him for sex) I might as well have from the reactions I get when sharing the unseemly news that my ex and I get along well, that we live six blocks apart and celebrate holidays and our kids' birthdays together.That is so weird! Your kids must be so confused! You must secretly want to get back together!No. No. And really no. What we wanted, actually, was to get on with the tasks of daily living with our imperfect selves, and more important, our precious children's selves, in as few shards as possible. Early on, when our grief was big and ugly and unshakable, we had no idea how to get to this place. Didn't, in fact, know that it existed in the world.Now that we're here, we're like those obnoxious couples who just returned from a 10-day Alaskan cruise: You HAVE to experience it for yourselves!I can hear you out there screaming. You will NEVER EVER !! give that bastard the satisfaction. And I am here to push back. I am here to tell you that it may take months -- or years -- and many co-pays to a baseball team of therapists. But, if you can get to the other side, you will breathe more deeply than you have in years. You will be able to focus on what matters, what you really want, always wanted, from your life going forward. Your children will be far better off. Your whites will be whiter, too.***A story: I'm standing in front of my open refrigerator, studying the possibilities. I am now living in an arrangement known as “bird-nesting.” This is when a married couple, too frightened and confused to fully pull the plug, decides to separate, but still has one ounce of wherewithal left to keep the kids' needs front and center. Instead of moving them from hysterical house to hysterical house, the parents move in and out of the family home and, in our case, a one-bedroom condo a few blocks away.We've been at this for months, experimenting with not being a union. Tonight, though, I know it's over. I know it's over because of the plump piece of salmon, seasoned with rosemary and olive oil, wrapped in plastic on one of the nifty glass plates we purchased in a hurry from IKEA to set up this second home. In theory, our deal is that we move in and out of this condo like members of the Cat in the Hat team. You'd never know either of us had been here. In practice, he forgot to clean up. Hence, the salmon. My ex has a lot of fine qualities, in addition to the ones that tempted me to kill him, but the one I miss most is his ability to cook like Bobby Flay. Apparently, he's cooking for someone else now.The million-dollar question is: Am I going to be a Big Girl and eat it anyway? I promise to answer that, but first, a brief history of how we got here.***We met on a blind date and married on the late side (I was nearly 27, he was 31), ready to commit, eager to start a family. We were good people from good families with similar religious upbringings. But looking back, I realize that the noise between us began even before marriage, a low rumble we ignored effectively. I needed lots of space. He felt abandoned. I was an extrovert who thrived on friends and social engagements. He thrived on ideas, preferring to stay home to create, fix, think. I couldn't balance my checkbook and, recklessly, didn't care. He had an advanced degree in finance and cared very much.We carried on. Kids keep couples busy. Jobs keep couples busy. Societal and familial pressures keep couples busy, and married, too.As our three children grew older, the rumble grew to a roar. We were fighting all the time, exhausting each other. But we refused to say the D word. Instead, we began a painstaking journey to save our marriage because we were going to save our marriage. Maybe we just suffered from lousy communication. We'd get better! For a year, we carved out two hours every Sunday to practice the art of talking to one another without feeling small and bad, filling notebooks with Harville Hendrix-y dialogues and 'I' phrases. “When I hear XXX, I feel YYY.” Every time we spoke those words, though, the tensions between us grew closer to snapping.Still, we hung tight, shifted to another strategy. We'd stop expecting so much. All marriages experience libido shifts, job and money stresses, boredom, fantasies about other people...Right?Eventually, though, even people who knew us best and loved us most were starting to believe that our struggles weren't acute, but chronic. As one of our most perceptive marriage therapists asked us, "Has the milk been out too long?" In other words, how many years can two good people run on emotional empty before somebody tries to fill up elsewhere?The questions roared inside our heads, accompanied by a constant drum beat: Our kids. Our kids. What about our kids? Ultimately, we decided that staying was riskier than leaving. We needed to end the power struggle and free each other. We knew it, and yet, we cried all the time.People often tell me that we can have this enviable (and odd) post-marital relationship because each of us wanted to divorce. I respond with a challenge: Imagine a patient who is chronically ill. The patient is, in fact, dying and you know it. But you love this patient with all your heart and for years you do everything you can to keep this patient alive. You seek out the finest experts, no matter the cost. You read every handbook. You try experimental therapies. On the patient's good days, and there are many good days, you celebrate and tell yourselves, “See! It's going to be all right!” Then the patient relapses and you are forced, ultimately, to face the truth.When the patient dies, I assure you that the grief is no less wrenching, the blame no gentler. On brave days, when I look back at my voluminous journal entries from those dark days, I cannot believe that despondent person was me.“...instead of my usual “you-fucker” phone call, I just left and cried in my car...”“...had every anxiety dream in the book last night. Planes crashing. Wounded people...”“I feel myself getting more and more crazy inside...”I'm going to bust your other big belief, too: “You can do this because there was no affair.” But I do know people, not lots of people, admittedly, but people who do get to this place despite heart-breaking infidelity. It's because they finally understand that the “other person” is rarely the reason. The reason is you and you, who did not know how to love the other in the way he or she longed to be loved.The marriage of my friend, Max, imploded after his wife confessed to an affair with a co-worker she believed was her soul mate. In the early days, I called him long-distance twice a day to make sure he was getting out of bed. I reminded him to eat but he didn't listen, dropping 25 pounds in three weeks. His grief was so thick he could barely breathe through it. “I never wanted to see her again,” he said, “but we had this child together.”Slowly, they worked their way back to a civil co-parenting relationship. They moved five blocks apart, threw birthday parties together, even shopped for groceries together on occasion. And over the years what had been merely civil began to seem genuinely pleasant. Today, both are in better-fitting relationships, and they interact like old friends, free of the passion, yes, but of any hint of anger, too. Their son is a well-adjusted, focused teenager keen on, and non-judgmental about, the complexities of human relationships. If I hadn't observed them – seen what they could do – I would never have believed it possible.The key to getting there is what we tell our kids: Practice, practice, practice. Show up at the soccer game or the wedding of mutual friends (but get a fabulous facial first, if it helps). Keep your distance. Smile. Then, bolt, have a drink. Next time, sit closer, maybe a row back, smile. Say hello. Then go home and scream into your pillow. I swear to you it does get easier.The first time we all had Thanksgiving together at the home that was once mine and was now shared by my ex'es fiance, I smiled, ate nearly all the sweet potatoes, drank too much and couldn't get out of there fast enough. I still laugh at this journal entry: “For a few days, I wanted to end all the kumbaya shit.”It was no easier for her, certain as she was that he and I were going to fall back into each other's arms at any minute (never happened). The first time she saw me pulling up in my car at the house to pick up the kids, she took off running. (She laughs about that now).Today, I honestly look forward to our extended family gatherings. And that's what we've become. An extended family. It's still awkward at times, and we know that there are boundaries we must never cross. When they announced their engagement, many friends asked me if I would attend the wedding. In fact, my ex asked me if he was supposed to invite me. We could have pulled it off, but why? It was her day. Instead, I hosted family members at my house and listened to my 10-year-old daughter share Every Single Detail, responding with great big oohs! And ahhs!. But when my ex'es new step-daughter married eight months later, I was among the small number of honored guests. I had a blast, drinking, dancing, sharing their joy. Nothing quite like a family wedding where you don't have to plan or pay for a thing.We do Thanksgiving and Hanukkah together with everybody's kids. But when I turned 50, I threw myself a big bash with a swing band and fabulous Greek food and told him I wasn't inviting him. Boundaries. He laughed and bought me an expensive bottle of wine.Sometimes, I still hurt. I wonder why he never drank coffee with me (“Hot, brown water,” he called it) but he now owns a fancy coffee maker for their forays with big mugs onto their backyard patio. I wonder when his bad knees that prevented him from running with me turned strong enough to run several times a week with her. Mostly, though, I feel grateful for the bigger stuff, like a son who thanked us at a family holiday dinner because “none of my friends has what I have.”Here's what I think: I think that life is too short to be pissed off forever. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be pissed off at all. I'm all for it. I think you should be so pissed off, or so despondent, that your ribs rattle, you lose sleep, lose your voice from screaming, hate him, long for him, then hate him some more. I think it's fine to have airplane crash fantasies.But then you need to pick the date when you're going to stop all that. When you stop losing yourself. When you start again to remember who you are and what you want. Now. Because holding that grudge forever is “rather like eating rat poison and thinking the rat will die.” That's from Pema Chodron's book, “The Places That Scare You,” and it's my favorite quote these days.The place that scares me most is the sad and lonely place I left inside my soul. I don't plan to return. Yes, I gave up the family home and bought myself a far smaller condo. Yes, I have to be more careful with my money these days, but who doesn't?The biggest reward is that when I finally was at my best, when I finally knew what kind of love I wanted, I walked into a bar one day to meet a man I'd been fixed up with by that modern matchmaker, Yahoo Personals. We've been together, happily, for four years. Therapists like to say that marriage has three truths -- his, hers and the one in between. As the years pass, the fog is lifting around that last truth. But there is only clarity about how my ex and I are moving forward. I can still count on the man I spent half my life with. So, about that salmon. Yes, I ate it. Mostly. I pulled it out of the fridge, placed it on the counter and chopped it into little pieces. Then I added it to a salad. It was delicious.I didn't throw it all away. I took the best parts of it and made it mine.