There were six people in the room with the neurosurgeon yesterday when we met to discuss Mom’s biopsy results, if you don’t count my brother and sister-in-law who were FaceTiming from Sarah’s office in Wisconsin. Our family does love a party. My mom’s surgeon feels like a godsend. She is patient, and quiet, and takes time to answer questions and doesn’t once look at us askance when somebody inevitably says something ridiculous (I’ll save the examples to protect the guilty…er, me). She is knowledgeable and experienced and we already trusted her once, so when she came into that room and sat down and immediately told us some relatively positive news, we (after extensive ridiculous questioning) walked out of that meeting weirdly, pleasantly, buoyed. Let me back up a little bit: You know the Arnold Swarzenegger line in “Kindergarten Cop” where he says he has a headache, and one of the children tells him that it might be a tumor, and then he’s all, “It’s not a toomah! It’s not a toomah!” That line has…
I’ve realized recently that I don’t write about my mom very often, and when I do, it’s always sort of about her as a part of something else–my dad’s life, or my children’s. I’m not proud of this–mom is an integral part of my life, after all, and of our life as a family. Why don’t I discuss her? Why don’t I talk about her? I mean, we’ve gotten pretty tight, especially in these past ten years, and our relationship is–outside of a bumpy decade or so I’ll just call adolescence–for the most part, easy. So maybe that’s it: maybe the easy is why she hasn’t appeared on these pages so often. See, Mom is my constant. She’s as much a part of the framework of my life that to write about her sometimes feels like writing about what it’s like to breathe, or eat yogurt for breakfast, or put in a load of laundry for Clean Sheets Day. Mom is my constant: she…
The kids were off school this past Friday for their spring break, and David took off work so that we could do something as a family. I don’t know what it’s like in your world, but in ours there are times where all the red flags start flying and we realize that we need a “reset” day: just some time together to do something a bit different, something that means we get to hang out together, experiencing something new–and something that, hopefully, will require lots and lots of walking so as to tire the kids out so they sleep in the next day. (It’s all for the kids, I tell you.) So, this past Friday we decided on a road trip to Washington, D.C., with the idea of seeing some dinosaur bones. We drove a couple hours into Maryland from our house in Pennsylvania, then surprised our suburban children with their first Metro ride (those initial moments of the train ride were the most exciting 30 seconds of their day…until they realized that they were going to look at nothing but dark tunnel walls for the next…