The Second Part of the Trip (you can read the first part here):

You were correct that I spent the day with Julie, but you’ll need to wait until the third part to hear that story because currently, my mind is back in Massachusetts.

I am not a fan of punishments, have never believed in them. We don’t punish the twins, regardless of the act. But we teach consequences. If you don’t eat your dinner, you’ll be hungry. If you take too long to get ready for bed, you’ll miss the twenty minutes of your movie. If you throw a tantrum in a store, you’ll lose my trust and I might not take you out in the future.

The consequence follows directly from the act—if we can’t connect the two events, it makes no sense. I mean, how does not eating dessert connect to not picking up your toys? It just doesn’t make sense and I think children are left focusing on the lack of connection rather than learning the lesson. So…basically, I’m a fan of consequences; not such a fan of punishments.

Except that I left Massachusetts with a desire to have consequences dolled out and if consequences didn’t neatly exist, I was absolutely fine with punishments. I wasn’t fine with the fact that the people who transgressed were unscathed and yet I had lost a great deal. In other words, I was essentially being punished–and not just by fate, but by actual people.

A few years after I left Western Massachusetts, I googled this man who had been the reason I left and discovered that while it was several years too late, consequences had finally been doled out. It still didn’t feel like enough. Doesn’t time do that? Make you feel as if the consequences or punishments should be more enormous, more elaborate if you were made to wait for them?

In googling him, I found his blog, which is now defunct, and read a story that gave me pause. When he was a boy, an accident happened and his brother died and he had witnessed the event. It was a terrible convergence of finally feeling vindicated mixed with a human impulse to understand how someone could become a monster after witnessing something so terrible so early in life.

But even knowing that, I didn’t want to forgive him.

The course of his life was changed, but so was mine.

Being up there made me wonder if it is right for us to crash into each other like this, affecting each other’s lives so deeply. On one hand, you have the connections such as the ones that arise out of the LFCA daily. We are crashing into each other’s lives in such a positive manner, affecting it for the better, that you can’t see anything wrong with stepping through social barriers to make a connection. And on the other, the darker side is that we also have the power to completely derail another person’s existence, set them on a different path, one they might not have wanted to choose.

And this is not to say that it isn’t a case of all’s well that ends well. I am quite happy with my life and I’m not sure I would have been quite so happy with the path I intended to take. By which I mean that I was on a path that I thought would make me happy, but in retrospect, probably would have made me miserable in the long run. So did he do me a favour by accident?

These are the things I thought about as we drove past the empty fields.

It feels a bit anticlimatic to go through the minute details of the trip once you have gotten the overarching sweep of the emotions that came from traveling back to Massachusetts, but I write this anyway because I need a record of the events; I need to process these thoughts. And frankly, I’m not sure if I can explain the end of the trip, which includes Julie and so, by extension, all of you, without talking about the first half of the trip.

A lot of the trip was about regaining muscle memory. I couldn’t give directions when we’d turn on the car, but we’d be driving and my arm would shoot out at last minute, point at a turn off and I’d shout, “there!” Josh spent a lot of time turning around the car.

Being there was like viewing the life not taken, like meeting an exboyfriend with your husband and kids in tow. When I was 21, I thought that after graduate school, I would get married and have children and move into a house in Leverett. I’d teach, go to shul in Northampton, volunteer on a farm. I couldn’t imagine anything better, anything different. I was exactly where I wanted to be and I was so certain of this fact, that I once went to a realtor to look at housing prices in the area. My father warned me not to buy, saying it would be too difficult to unload the property if I changed my mind after two years. And he was right, it was good advice. I wouldn’t be there two years later, it turns out.

So as we drove through Leverett on the way to the Peace Pagoda, I tried to imagine how different my life would be in a small clapboard house by the river.

The Peace Pagoda was for me, though we told the twins that it was for them. Isn’t that the hallmark of a bad mother? We started up the path, pausing to pee in the outdoor urinal behind the nuns’ house (the Wolvog was extremely impressed with the idea of peeing alfresco and said, “I just love this!”). The ChickieNob wanted to know why we weren’t going into the nuns’ house and I didn’t have an answer. Shyness. I haven’t been inside in almost ten years. It is difficult to knock on a door, barely remembering anyone’s name and say, “I’m here.”

They loved the incarnations of the Buddha (though out of habit, I told them that the Buddha was sleeping when we came to the gold encrusted depiction of his death and then couldn’t gracefully retract that statement and mention that they were seeing his death) and we went through the story of his life.

They climbed on the stones by the pond and talked to the fish in the water. When we walked back down the path, I kept thinking to myself, “this could be your last time doing this. You may never come back here.” And then I’d catch myself saying, “you never know when anything is a last time. I mean, that could have been my last bagel this morning. You just don’t know.”

And that’s how I put things in perspective. You know, berating myself.

We went to the Book Mill, my favourite book store in New England. They have a bumper sticker that says: “books you don’t need in a place you can’t find.” I think anyone who loves books should make this a vacation destination. Seriously. I’m not sure you can get better than a used book store next to rapids in a river, with a café and restaurant on the property. It is not only a full day excursion, but a multi-day excursion. Plus, the rest of the area is so lovely.

We had some time before dinner so we swung by the campus, knowing it would be difficult to park the next day once classes were in session. The campus was quiet, we only encountered a few students walking towards the library and campus union, a few town people exiting the theater.

The ChickieNob wanted to see my office and I told her that I wanted to take the stairs. The reason was simple. Before I left, I had stopped taking the main stairs and only took the elevator to avoid running into certain professors. We climbed the four flights to the top floor.

And then the ChickieNob saw that I was crying.

And she wanted to know why.

She seemed appeased with simply knowing that I was so unhappy in this space. We paused in front of each office and classroom and she asked me questions. Was this person nice? Well, no, they weren’t. They were only helpful once they stood to get in trouble for not being helpful. Was this person nice? Yes, she gave me some of the most important advice I received while I was there. Where did I sit when I was in this room? I couldn’t even say the words. I just pointed to the red chair where I sat for workshop and the brown one where I sat for Shakespeare. It was the same room for both classes.

She wanted to write on the board and she took the chalk and just wrote the word “sad.” I’m not really sure why but it seemed like the right thing to do so I didn’t erase it.

Josh asked me what it was like being there and honestly, it felt like entering your bed again after a nightmare. It felt like even though I knew nothing bad could happen to me, the people who hurt me were long gone, it felt like I shouldn’t be there, that I was stepping into a dangerous space. And that was silly. Just because you had one nightmare doesn’t mean you’ll have another if you return to bed. And being there, it was just a building. But I felt the same way as we drove down certain streets. I would twist my neck to watch a house now void of its former occupants, my heart pounding as if I expected to see him out of his lawn even though I knew he was miles away. It just felt risky.

On our last night, we discovered that the museum we wanted to see would be closed the next day so we researched maple farms in the area. In the morning, we woke up to the rain and decided to go regardless after I spoke to the kind farm owner on the telephone and she told me to bring the family over, she’d “get one of the boys to explain the whole thing even though they took down the buckets that morning.” We swung by the local burrito place to eat one last time before we got on the road.

I took the ChickieNob to the bathroom, reading the new graffiti that had appeared since the last time I ate at the restaurant, long before the twins were born. It’s a college town–I obviously couldn’t read any of it to her, but I explained that it was a series of proclamations. After I walked her back to the table, I returned to the bathroom and took out my pen. And wrote the obvious. Knowing full well that while it wasn’t clever and it wasn’t going to even be noticed amid some of the brasher statements, that it was the truest thing I could say in the moment and an important point to leave behind as we drove up I-91 and into Vermont.

Have you ever returned to the place which was the source of a tremendous amount of emotional pain–returned to the same clinic, returned to an area, returned to high school? How did returning affect you? Did you feel as if you had taken back the space or approached it differently the second time?

Part Two fini; the final part coming soon…

Show and Tell is wasted on elementary schoolers. Join several dozen bloggers weekly to show off an item, tell a story, and get the attention of the class. In other words, this is Show and Tell 2.0. Everyone is welcome to join, even if you have never posted before and just found out about Show and Tell for the first time today. So yank out a photo of the worst bridesmaid’s dress you ever wore and tell us the story; show off the homemade soup you cooked last night; or tell us all about the scarf you made for your first knitting project. Details on how to participate are located at the bottom of this post.

Let’s begin. Children are seen in this post in case you want to skip down to Mr. Linky and add your own without reading mine.

I have another guessing game. I spent the day with a fellow blogger. You get to guess who it is and then I will tell you the story. While I haven’t seen many pictures of her on her blog, the baby has been featured. So that is your best clue if you don’t recognize her. Here are your other clues: she is brilliant, she is funny, and she is a baker extraordinaire–and I’m not sure which fact makes me admire her the most.

And just to be completely immodest, several pictures of myself.

These three pictures were taken at three different points on the same day of the trip: at the Peace Pagoda, the Book Mill, and outside my old university building. They correspond to the places I showed last week, with the exception of Shelburne Falls. When we arrived, the entire area was closed off and under water. It seems fitting that I post instead a picture taken outside my university building, a place where I often figuratively felt underwater.

Laughing at the Peace Pagoda

Outside the Bookmill

On the wall outside my university building

What are you showing today?

Click here or scroll down to the bottom of this post if this is your first time joining along (hint: link to the permalink for the post, not the main url for your blog and use your blog’s name, not your name). The list is open from now until late Tuesday night and a new one is posted every week.

This is a story in three parts.

Part One:

Before we left for the trip, I heard this wonderful quote: “The end is built into the beginning.” At it’s most basic level, it is an obvious statement about the fact that once we are conceived, we are all dying. Some may be closer to their death than others, but it has always been such a strange statement when you’re told that someone is dying. What does that actually mean when death will happen to all of us?

I didn’t mean this to be a downer of a post.

I’ll start over.

I was fixated on another meaning in the statement (which comes, by the way, from Synecdoche, New York): that the way the event or relationship or situation ends is built into the beginning. You can predict how it will go. I think back to my first days at graduate school and it makes perfect sense. The tumultuous end was due to the tumultuous beginning. I should have known how it would go based on those first days and perhaps, had I been smarter, I would have cut my losses when I saw how the beginning went and not allow the natural end to play out at all.

The word synecdoche means to use part of something to describe the whole (it can also mean the inverse). For instance, Pinocchio is entirely defined by his nose. This one trait–the fact that his nose grows when he lies–is the defining characteristic used to describe the whole character (if you saw a cartoon where a bird told his mother a lie and his beak grew, what is the first thing you’d think of? Pinocchio, right?).

With infertility, we often have this limitation of our body define the whole. I am an infertile woman, it is the trait you know me by best. And it is a strange concept, this separation of the whole. I am a firm believer in holistic approaches–holistic teaching or holistic medicine–and yet, I not only allow this element of myself to serve as a synecdoche, but I encourage it. I have a blog where I discuss it, make it the focus even in the title. Perhaps it is just our desire to make ourselves smaller, more manageable. Our whole selves are too messy, too unordered. Taking out these small elements are like making a meal of tapas.

Human experience tapas.

So I am an infertile woman.

I am a Jewish woman.

I am a baker.

My experience in Western Massachusetts was also more varied than I give it credit when I describe it with a single word. When I think of the entire space, I think of it as two sided, black-and-white. On the sunnier side are these memories of tashlich by the Bookmill, cleaning the Kosher K, the stacked rocks on the way up to the Peace Pagoda, riding my bicycle around the top floor of my co-op, the smell of the Haymarket, swimming in Shelburne Falls, tea with Norton Juster. All pleasant, happy things that made me think that I wanted to go back to reclaim the space.

But truly, it’s the darker side that I allow to define the place. I really struggled here.

I already told you the story of the end. It was the first ending. This week, we had four days between two events and Josh and I decided to create a different ending. I was excited during the drive, looking forward to seeing family, eating at my favourite burrito place, buying used books. If I was going to create a synecdoche of the place, I might as well choose one of its sunnier traits. You have heard, of course, of Take Back the Night. Well, this was my version of Take Back the Place.

But as we exited the highway, I started to feel ill. I didn’t want to be up here at all. I always describe this feeling as my nervous system being inflamed. I could not calm down and I didn’t want to be in my skin and I felt like I should burrow in somewhere dark and deep and not intake any more stimuli for a bit.

But we were already up here. With two kids in tow.

Driving through town, it was interesting to see the places that caused me such anxiety were gone. They had changed. They had gone from a bar to a bank, a burrito shop to a coffeehouse. I had been trying to remember the name of a bar all afternoon, asked my cousin when I saw her before I left. Josh drove up the street and my heart was pounding, waiting to see the sign, confirm my thought. But the bar was gone. Vanished. There was a restaurant in its place.

It made me feel a little sick to see it gone. It made me feel a little relieved.

The Montague Book Mill circa 1998 and today

It was like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Someone had changed my history. Knocked down a sign, put another in its place. A walk down a staircase that replays in my head all the time is now becoming fainter, the staircase entirely gone, the store gutted and repainted and refurbished.

And like that film, I couldn’t decide if the erasing of memories were a good thing. On one hand, it felt like I was trying to grab at air when the store was so clearly changed. I couldn’t picture it suddenly, this scene I always imagined, because I was staring at a wall where the staircase should be. I bought my coffee and left, feeling like I couldn’t take back the space because it was taken back for me. It was like liposuction instead of dieting. The work had been done by someone else.

But does it matter if you like the end result?

And on the other hand, did I want my memories erased? Aren’t they part of what makes me who I am now? If those memories are suddenly gone, will the empathy, patience, and self-assertion I gained by the experiences also be gone, making me a different person, perhaps not instantaneously as the removal of a sign signaling a new store, but a slow-fade into a new Melissa, one who does not remember why she wanted to figuratively install anti-virus software on herself in the first place? And without remembering, will it make me simply feel defensive rather than self-assertive? Aloof rather than protective?

On the first night, after we came back from visiting my cousin and her husband, I crawled into bed with my daughter and started to cry as I watched her sleep. I don’t even know why I was crying—was it because I was scared of the world we were releasing her into? We are raising her only to release her and we need to trust that the world will treat her well. Or was it because if she had been around back then, I would have had a harbour to return to at the end of the day. There was a woman in my program who had a child and I always thought that no matter how terrible her day went, she could go home to that harbour.

But really, wasn’t the ChickieNob the reclaimed ending more than the trip? Weren’t the three of them—Josh, the ChickieNob, and the Wolvog—the replacement of the past? And when we get down to the blood and bones, weren’t they with me the entire time—ideals I carried with me for Josh, literal cells for the twins. Hal
f of their DNA was inside me from the moment I was born. They were tucked away inside an organ, and I didn’t even know they were there. If I had, it all may have gone differently.

I went to the bathroom to write this thought down on a post-it note because I didn’t want to forget it. Actually, I wanted to remind my children this in the future when they are in one of life’s maelstroms. That everyone they will love as a harbour in the future is already inside them and with them—either in their cells or in their ideals or in their longings. Those from us and to us.

And then I went back into bed and fell asleep.

Part One Fini; two more to go…

children mentioned and seen…

A few weeks ago, the ChickieNob* asked me if girls were allowed to work. After sputtering around for a minute, I said, “of course!” And she gave a sigh of relief and said, “oh, good, I just wanted to make sure I could get the job of president.”

I said, “I have a job; I work. So, of course, women can work.”

She couldn’t name what I do. To be fair, she couldn’t really name what Josh did either. And it dawned on me that she has never observed me work, though she has visited Josh many times at his office. Her sole understanding of what I did consisted of cleaning, cooking, making candy that she wanted to eat but that I give away to others like the bitch I am, and reading Oliver and Amanda stories. She has only seen me in this one role.

While we still have a lot of time to introduce her to female empowerment, I thought it was detrimental that she never saw me in action. And, then again, do I really want her standing all Children-of-the-Corn, inches from my elbow, while I type up articles? Even the ones that do not involve reproductive organs?

And at the same time, how much responsibility do parents have to mirror the plethora of choices in the world? Being a mother is a job; she has seen me doing this role of caregiver. I certainly can’t be every profession in the world simultaneously, so regardless of what I show her, she can always assume limitations in what she doesn’t see. Or, not notice those limitations at all.

Perhaps I’m just worried because she asked if girls were allowed to work. Is it commentary on her lack of exposure to women in the workplace or simply a question that is on her mind because she is a girl and regardless of what she has observed, perhaps she simply wants confirmation that she will be able to get a job too if she wants one. She has a tendency to ask questions where she clearly knows the answer.

But, regardless, it is a wake-up call to how much they absorb–the things we say and do, but also, what they perceive written between the lines. I have thought long and hard about how I present ideas on beauty and body image, but I haven’t really thought about things like drawing self-esteem from work.

It gives me pause; how much what she observes is shaping her–even more than what I say. I can tell her that she can be anything she wants to be, but if she only sees me bleaching and scrubbing, what is the subtext that she is taking from that conversation? Will she be able to comprehend that it was a choice to stay home and fit my job around their schedule–a choice with side effects that I must own as well, but a choice that works best for me and the family? That it could have been otherwise; that until I was faced with the prospect of not having a family, I would have possibly made a different choice. Who knows because you can only speak to the path taken.

I work this strange job that fits in the folds and bends around their day. I feel like I slip my job into tight crevices, taking minutes here and there. I hit every deadline; I rarely need to ask for an extension. But because my job is so malleable, it sometimes feels like it doesn’t exist. I have done such a good job spreading it into time that no one else needs, that it has become almost hidden. It is blending in with the walls.

You know, to the point that my own daughter doesn’t know that I work.

I showed her the book and some articles and explained that I write. That it’s my job, as strange as it sounds. But that not everything I write is for work. I write blog posts and letters that are not part of my job. “How do you know what is for work?” she asked. I just do. I just know when the words are going to be compensated with money and when they’re going to be compensated with love or friendship or community.

And I showed her some of Josh’s stuff and I explained that he writes. That her parents both write stuff. And people pay us to do so. But we also write and don’t get paid. Because it is what we love to do. That she should find a job she loves.

Before we get up in arms and insist that being a stay-at-home mum is a job and yank out that popular email forward stating what a SAHM would be paid if she worked outside the home, I want to disarm. I am on your side. I’ve already stated above that being a mother is a job. It is certainly my career and I care about it more than I do my paid work (um…people who pay me, don’t take that the wrong way). My greatest sense of accomplishment this month–the moment where I was most proud of myself–came as I packed my final mishloach manot box and stacked it next to the wall to be taken to the post office. At the end of my life, I have a feeling that I will care more about what I’ve accomplished in my home, family, marriage than what I have accomplished outside the home. That is just me.

But when the ChickieNob asks about work, she asks about it in the most simplistic sense of the word–an exchange of goods for services. And I don’t do this job in the home to be paid. I do it because I love it. And when you love something, you are willing to do it regardless of whether you get paid. I would still write even if all the freelance work dries up. It is something I love too. And I do write–in this space–without being paid.

If I didn’t work at all, I would have no strange feelings about my daughter only seeing me cleaning and cooking. What strikes me is that I do work, but I have tucked it so far out of sight that they had no clue the job even existed. I guess that is the crux of this: why have I hidden the fact that I work from my kids and not shared it with them? And yet, I am trying to teach my child balance just as my mother taught me balance–between home and work and volunteering and friendships. That it is all a high wire act and no one should be tipping too far in any direction lest they fall off.

*The Wolvog doesn’t really have these deep considerations about his future. He has informed me that he will be the CEO of Apple, and only the CEO of Apple. He will own an iPhone and a Mac. He will also have a Dell; a very tall, thin house with a kitchen on the top floor; and will build said house next to our house so I can come over and make all of his food because he doesn’t
know how to use a stove. He doesn’t need to consider other options when he has already come up with the ultimate plan. Must be nice to have that much confidence and direction at age four.