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Socially Distanced

5/25/2020

It was raining and dank when we scheduled Zoom cocktails with a friend for Saturday at 6. But then came the weekend weather report and, with it, an email: “It’s supposed to be beautiful,” it read. “Would you consider coming over to my backyard to have socially-distanced cocktails?”

After a momentary consultation with my husband, Paul, I declined. “We’re just not ready,” I wrote. But while the decision was quick, its aftereffects have lingered.

When our self-isolation began, followed days later by the official lockdown, part of me was excited. Part of me loved that suddenly everything was called off. No longer did I have to arrange activities, buy tickets, make reservations, schedule appointments or head to the gym. I went into my calendar and gleefully hit delete, delete, delete – no excuses needed.

Of course, before long, my calendar filled with Zoom this and Zoom that, and I have been grateful for every single one of those classes and visits and lunches and cocktails. They have been my connection – to my work, to my friends, to my family, to the world beyond my house.

And yes, I complain: too much screen time, not enough human contact. I miss being in the room with people, observing the subtleties and depths that can only be sensed in person.

The reason I said no to backyard cocktails wasn’t only my now-ingrained pandemic caution. It was a reluctance to give up some of what comes with an enforced lockdown. And acknowledging this reluctance has been fraught.

Here are a few of my conflicts:

• Maybe I won’t ever go back to the gym. I’ve been exercising daily, and, truth is, going swimming is a big production.

• When I teach on Zoom, it doesn’t matter what the weather is. It doesn’t matter what I’m wearing from the waist down. And all of my students show up, and show up on time.

• I like not having to drive anywhere. And I like knowing that if I did, there’d be no traffic.

• I relish the challenge of rationing food and supplies. You can’t argue with it economically and ecologically. And it suits my compulsive tendencies.

• And there’s something about those Zoom cocktails – the no-fuss, BYOB, no clean-up, hour-is-just-about-all-anyone-can-take – that I loathe to give up.

Epilogue: We had our cocktails, and at the end, our friend said, “I hope that next time, we can do this in person.”

“I hope so, too,” I said.

But do I?

~ Susan Hodara

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Two Perspectives on Goodbye

7/15/2019

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To Kiss or Not To Kiss

“Bye. See you next week.”

“Yup, bye bye.”

My friend Joan and I are parting after an hour-and-a-half long lunch in a local sushi restaurant. We’ve had many such lunches over the years, our conversations running from what to watch on Netflix, to the angst of family crises.

Joan and I know a lot about each other’s lives – and not just from our lunches. We met nearly two decades ago when I signed up for a weekly memoir workshop she was teaching at a nearby arts center. It was the first writing class I’d taken since high school creative writing.

Joan was petite, her straight white hair cut short, with the front falling gracefully across her forehead. She often wore Oxford shirts and cardigans with jeans and delicate earrings. In class, each student read their writing aloud and the rest of us offered feedback. Joan’s suggestions always impressed me, and I wondered how she knew so intuitively just what each student’s piece needed.

The stories of my life poured easily from me, and I re-enrolled for the workshop again and again. I wrote about my childhood, my old boyfriends, my daughters, my husband, Paul – my persistent goal to find the precise phrases that captured the truths of my experiences. I never thought about what I was revealing of myself. I never felt judged.

I don’t remember when Joan and I began chatting after class, or when I learned that she lived in the same town as I, or when we first met for lunch. I do remember Paul and I bumping into Joan at the opening of a Mexican restaurant and realizing, when she met him, that she knew far more about him than he knew about her.

After a few years I stopped taking Joan’s class. Then she stopped teaching it, and I had the privilege of becoming her replacement. Meanwhile, she and I formed a weekly writing group with Lori and Vicki, who’d been in the workshop, and before long, the four of us decided to collaborate on a book about our mothers.

Through it all, Joan and I continued to get together and keep each other apprised of our lives – from weddings and separations, to illnesses and injuries, to lots of petty gossip. Many things changed over the long course of our friendship, including the restaurants we favored. But our lunches remained constant, and as I stared across whatever table we shared, so did Joan’s face, with its attentive eyes, wry smile and blush of lipstick, seemingly untouched by time.

I have friends whose cheeks I peck when we say hello or goodbye, but not Joan’s. We don’t kiss. We don’t hug. “Hi,” we say, and “Bye, see you soon.” Then we go our separate ways.

But today is different. In the instant of our parting, my feet already swiveling to go, is a tiny melee of overlapping instincts. A kiss goodbye? No, we don’t kiss. But why not?

“Wait,” I say, and swivel back toward her as she turns around. I think I say, “Let me give you a kiss goodbye.” And then I lean forward and touch my lips to her soft cheek.

There is a tinge of awkwardness, of embarrassment, but they dissolve as we both smile and head into the rest of our days.

~ Susan Hodara

* * *

Hugs or Kisses

People are hugging more and more lately. Really long, tight hugs, with sometimes a cheek kiss or two. I see this in movies and on television. But not in my real life.

There are a few demonstrative women friends who give me a quick hug when they run into me on the street or in the grocery store, but that doesn’t happen often. I used to sometimes encounter a man who engulfed me in creepily lengthy hugs while proclaiming, “You’re the best.” Another man I’ve known for years likes to greet me with a wet kiss; when I see him coming I’m careful to quickly turn my head so his smooch lands on my cheek.

Among my four grown children, two are huggers and two are not. The two seldom-huggers, a son and a daughter, seem to like me well enough and will sometimes grant me a quick kiss. The other daughter is a warm hugger and kisser. The second son is also physically affectionate, but he’s six-foot-six and I’m five-two, and our hugs, although I love them, can be awkward.

Three of my closest women friends are fellow writers. We’ve known one another for twenty years and meet every two weeks to read aloud and comment on our writings, much of which are memoir. Over the years we’ve shared many experiences – illnesses, both physical and mental; deaths – human and animal.

We truly care about one another, we listen carefully and offer words of support, but we’ve never enfolded the others in those weepy, consoling hugs I see on my television screen. When we meet, we smile and say, “Hi.” When departing, we say, “Bye, see you later, enjoy the weekend.” No touching.

Just recently, I met one of our group, Susan, for sushi at a local restaurant. We always have plenty to talk about – our kids’ problems, our health, and, of course, books and writing. We finished lunch, paid our check, and stood to leave. Susan was going out the front door and I had parked in back.

There was a moment before saying goodbye when we didn’t seem to know what to do with our hands. We leaned slightly forward in a possible lead-in to a hug or cheek kiss. Then we pulled away, laughed, and headed in our separate directions.

Why did this happen? What does it portend? What should I do next time we meet? I’m hoping we can forget about it and return to the good old days of a smile and a wave and “So long, see you next week.”

~ Joan Potter

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Kraft American Singles

5/13/2018

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We are watching Ed Sullivan, as we always do on Sunday nights. We are in the den, a narrow space off the living room. A couch lines the long wall beneath a couple of windows whose venetian blinds are shut; a few feet away, an upholstered chair sits in front of the desk where my father comes to pay bills. Now he’s in the chair: dark hair parted and combed to his left, button-down plaid shirt, khaki pants, each foot on the floor. The rest of us – my mother, my two younger brothers and I – perch side by side on the couch, twisting slightly to our right to face the television set.

During the commercials, we can get snacks. Eating while watching television – it’s the perfect pairing. My father likes to have an apple; my mother takes a little bowl of black licorice nubs. I don’t remember what my brothers have. I head for the kitchen, open the refrigerator and peer into its illuminated insides. I consider carefully until I know what I want: cheese.

Kraft American slices – the orange ones, each individually wrapped. I get one in my lunchbox sometimes. Tonight I slip one out of the package where a stack of them looks like shiny corduroy. I bring the piece back to the den intact, and as the program resumes, I start in.

I begin by lifting the cellophane and pulling it back to expose about a third of the slice of cheese, which I fold onto the rest of the slice and watch as it breaks off in a straight line, its edge jagged. I continue folding that third horizontally until I end up with three plastic-y squares. I put one on my tongue and let it sit; the cheese doesn’t dissolve, but it gets warmer, and creamier, and I mash it against the roof of my mouth. Flavor emanates – impossible to describe – a sweet saltiness that is somehow orange itself. Satisfying. It doesn’t take long before I’ve swallowed it, but its taste lingers within the cavern of my mouth.

I do this with the other two squares I’ve already broken off. Then I peel away more cellophane, fold another third and repeat the process until I’m left with the clear, weightless wrapper. Ed Sullivan continues; my father sucks the juice from his apple core. At the next commercial, I get up and toss the paper into the little brown wastebasket under my father’s desk.

~ Susan Hodara

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Journaling

12/16/2016

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I could no longer ignore my messy house. I began in the bedroom I share with my husband, with my shelf of journals and the tiresome chore of dusting. As I have been keeping a journal for over forty years now, this one shelf can take quite some time to dust.

The notebooks I’ve used vary in size, design, and color. The common marble school notebooks; small sketchbooks or more expensive handmade journals; loose sheets of paper that I bind together myself. Some of the older ones have yellowing pages that have become dry and brittle.

In these books I have recorded daily events while also wondering, questioning, and venting. I sometimes tease out ideas for short stories or poems I want to write. When working on a memoir piece I turn to my journals to help me remember. There are pages of doodles and drawings when words have escaped me.

I pulled out four notebooks, at random, and sat on the floor. I flipped through the pages, reacquainting myself with a past self, a younger self, a different self.

July 26, 1982: Jones Beach today. Billy dragged me into the water and I was glad because it felt good.

Billy. My husband, seven years before he became my husband, grabbing me by both hands, walking backwards into the waves, telling me it will be fun. I hesitate, plant my feet firmly, but he does not give up. “Come on! I’ll hold on to you!” he says. His light brown hair is wet and slicked back. His nose is sunburned. His smile is big. I know I trust him. I move toward him, he wraps his arm around my waist, and we are bobbing up and down with the waves. The water cools me, and I am happy. I call him Bill now; Billy is our older son.

November 1, 1993: I should give them to her. My sweet babies, my sons. She is so much better with them than I could ever be. Where does her patience come from? I cannot remember my mother being like that with me, although I imagine she must have been. When I was a baby. Before I became this selfish, miserable person. I feel I am damaging my children.

I am sitting on the blue and white plaid sofa in my mother’s living room. She is rolling around on the floor, my toddler playfully wrestling with her, my two-month-old lying on a blanket nearby. Billy is laughing. Steven is trying to turn towards the commotion, trying to focus and see what is happening beside him. My mother tickles Billy’s belly, kisses his cheeks. Then she tells him, “Let’s check on your baby brother,” and they look over to Steven. I am tired. I am hungry. I am wondering if I will ever be able to relax, if I will ever be what my sons need and deserve.

Mother’s Day, May 11, 1997: At times I feel I’ve left my mother. I’ve pulled back, a bit too far; it’s as if I decided she is already gone. I think it is because I just don’t want to be unhappy. I am useless.

She is not gone, not yet. One more month. But she is already so sick, weak, tired all the time. And I remember the look in her eyes; unfocused, and so frightened. I don’t know how to help her. I still feel like I need her to help me. I promised her, when she first found out about the cancer, that I would find a way to make her well. A promise I could never keep.

March 28, 1999: We missed Mass this morning. The second graders were to attend at 9am, to be part of a procession for Palm Sunday.

My mother has been gone almost two years. It is the phase of my half-hearted effort to be like her, to please her still, by holding on to her religion, by passing it on to my sons. I fail terribly. It makes me realize how much I failed her.

Four entries, and so many stories they can tell.

I met a young man who held on to me. We married and had two sons. In the way my mother did for me, I tried to care for them. When my mother got sick, I wanted to save her, but I could not. I could not keep her safe from all that can go wrong. I will never be able to keep my children safe. For everyone, everything, grows older, can be broken, can be lost.

I placed the notebooks back on the shelf, marveling at how much dust they collect. Perhaps some is the dust of their own decay, their slow decomposition. One day, years from now, all of it — the words, stories, images — will be blown about by the wind, millions of tiny particles floating in a sunbeam.

~ Vicki Addesso

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Annoyed

9/19/2016

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When you’re hovering between a nervous breakdown and suicide, being forced to chat with a bubbly woman can push you over the edge. I’m in my eye doctor’s waiting room for my yearly checkup. I didn’t sleep well last night and today I’m so depressed that I’d rather be here than in my apartment full of chores to be done and a grouchy husband to tend to.

I sit down and open my book. “Mrs. Potter, it’s so good to see you again,” chirps the receptionist, who seems unduly excited by my presence. “It’s been a while.” She takes a breath. “What are you reading?”

My head is pounding. “It’s just a book,” I say.

Her voice lowers a pitch. “Oh, I see.”

I had a choice. I could have said, “I’m reading Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen.”

Then she would have squealed, “Oh, a comma queen. That sounds so interesting. What’s
it about?”

A response was something I couldn’t handle. I lowered my eyes to my book, feeling a twinge of guilt that quickly dissipated.

~ Joan Potter

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Dancing in the New Year

3/29/2016

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For the first time in a long time, my mother danced. It was on New Year’s Eve, at an annual celebration hosted by the senior residential facility in Bethesda, Maryland, where she has lived for a year and a half. They hold the event in what they call the ballroom, complete with live music, portable dance floor, instructors to assist the revelers, and, of course, champagne.

My mother attended the party last year, but was afraid to dance, worried she wasn’t steady enough and would fall. She was disappointed, she told me the next day. “Next year,” she said, a promise to herself.

Over the past 12 months, my mother has continued to exercise, but just shy of 89, she has come to rely more on her walker than her cane. Nevertheless, she kept her promise. She announced her victory first thing on New Year’s Day, when I called her from New York. “You’ll be happy to know that I danced last night,” she said. “I’m very proud of myself.”

I fired some questions at her as I tried to conjure the scene.

What did she wear? Her black pants, her embroidered red jacket, and her pearls, she told me. “What I always wear on special occasions,” she said. I knew the outfit; she had probably worn well-blotted red lipstick, too.

Whom did she dance with? First, one of the instructors. “I explained my situation and he said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll hold onto you.’” Then she danced with one of the residents, someone she’d shared meals with in the dining hall along with his wife.

What music did they play? Jazz standards, old familiars. “I danced to ‘It Had to be You,’” she said, the song I’d heard her sing in the kitchen of the house she’d lived in with my father, and where she remained alone for seven years after he died.

There are two versions of that night that I picture in my mind. In one, my mother clutches the instructor’s arms as she moves her feet in tiny, tentative increments. She is small, a little stooped, and her skin is pallid against her short gray hair. She is concentrating, willing herself to stay upright, barely hearing the song.

In the other, she is gliding, her satiny pants flowing around her ankles, her pearls glistening in the light from a chandelier. Her lips form a rosy smile and her cheeks are blushing as she sings along with the music: “It had to be you, it had to be you…” She has forgotten her age, as have I.

~ Susan Hodara

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When Pinto Got Paroled

1/15/2016

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The last of the barred doors clanged shut behind me and soon I was standing in front of Sing Sing’s huge stone administration building, the prison’s main entrance. I was carrying a cardboard carton that held Pinto – a half-grown black-and-white cat – and his cellmate, Missy, an all-black little male named by prisoners confused about his gender.

As I turned to head for my car, I heard the voices of prisoners behind the bars on an upper level. “Goodbye, Pinto,” they called.

I was a freelancer for the New York Times, and also a volunteer in a Sing Sing writing workshop. The Times had assigned me an article about how inmates at two Westchester County prisons not far from my home – women at Bedford Hills and men at Sing Sing – were able to humanize their lives within the confines of a maximum security prison.

It was 1977, six years after the Attica rebellion, when prisons started opening their doors to reporters and volunteers. Restrictions had been loosened, and the media became more interested in what was happening inside the walls. The Bedford Hills women told me about how they altered their drab green uniforms to make them more stylish, how they rubbed Vaseline on red and blue magazine photographs and spread the colors on their lips and eyelids.

Some men at Sing Sing said they made paintings, kept fish tanks in their cells, and had pet cats. The cats had found their way into the prison yard through holes in the old stone walls, and eventually into the cell blocks, where prisoners lured them to their cells by offering tidbits of food. One prisoner mentioned he begged gefilte fish from the Jewish chaplain.

After I finished the article, the paper sent a photographer to Sing Sing, and when my story appeared it was accompanied by a picture of a young prisoner standing in front of the bars of his cell holding a small black-and-white cat. Coincidentally, this prisoner – the owner of two cats – was also in the writing workshop.

A few days later I received a letter from him saying he’d heard on the grapevine that a cat purge was in the works. “They say they will give the cats to the SPCA,” he wrote, “but we know they’ll put them in burlap bags and toss them into the Hudson.”

I got on the phone to the warden. “Are you getting rid of the cats because of my article?” I asked. He said no, the article had nothing to do with it. Cats had begun to overrun the cellblocks, creating a nuisance and unsanitary conditions. They had to go.

After more back-and-forth with the warden over the next few days, he finally said that I could take the prisoner’s two cats out of the prison after the next writing workshop.

Toward the end of the session, as the inmates and I sat in a circle of folding chairs discussing that week’s readings, the cat-owning prisoner left the room and came back carrying a medium-sized cardboard carton with the top closed. When the workshop ended he placed the box in my arms. The inmates filed down the corridor, back to their cells. I walked the other way, escorted by a guard. When we reached the locked bars at the end of the hallway the guard shouted, “On the gate, two cats, out on parole,” and the lock clicked open. One more gate and I was in the lobby and out the door.

I settled the box in my car’s passenger seat and drove the twenty minutes to my house, where I tipped the cats out of the carton and led them to their food, water, and litter box. Pinto was wearing a brown leather collar embossed with his name, which must have been created by his owner in the prison crafts shop. I went to bed, and in the morning the cats were nowhere to be seen. After my teenage sons had left for school and my husband went to work, I searched the house, and finally found the two crouched together behind the television set in the living room.

They gradually relaxed and we began letting them outdoors during the day. But a few months later, when my sons were returning from school, they discovered Missy’s body on the street in front of our house. He’d been hit by a car. From then on, when Pinto went outside he seemed more cautious; he spent his time relaxing under a rhododendron bush in front of the house, and we kept a close eye on him.

He grew into a solid, beautiful cat, loving, intelligent, and sweet-natured. But whenever a visiting man with a heavy tread walked into the house, Pinto cowered in fear, no doubt recalling the prison guards who had stomped around the cellblocks.

When Pinto was fifteen, my husband, Roy, and I retired from our jobs, sold our suburban home, and moved to a log cabin in the Adirondacks. We worried about letting our cat outdoors, fearing he would wander into the woods and disappear – captured by a coyote or becoming hopelessly lost as he tried to make his way back.

But he figured things out and seemed content with his rural existence. In summer, he sat under the pine trees and among the wildflowers, watching chipmunks and red squirrels speed past. On cold winter days he sprawled on the tile hearth in front of the woodstove. He was making a better adjustment than I was.

I often felt lonely and isolated, especially when summer ended and our downstate family and friends stopped visiting. I felt out of place in our small town, where the residents had lived for generations. Sometimes I cried with frustration, railing at my husband about our ill-conceived move.

Pinto was my comfort. When I sat at the kitchen table with my morning coffee, he hopped onto my lap and stayed there until it was time for me to start my day. In the evening, as I lay on the couch reading or watching TV, he curled up on my stomach. In bed, he stretched his warm body next to mine and purred me to sleep.

Two years after our move, Pinto developed a malignant tumor on his side. His vets, Diane and David, removed it and he recovered, but before long another tumor appeared, this time inoperable. He gradually became thinner and weaker. When we let him outdoors, he seemed bewildered. One day he wandered in the wrong direction, and I discovered him crouched on a fallen tree.

From then on when I let him out I followed him as he moved slowly across the grass, stopping now and then to rest in a sunny spot. Then I’d pick him up and carry him back into the house. In the evening I’d carry him to the couch, sit down, and gently lower him onto a soft blanket I’d folded on my lap. Soon even that made him uncomfortable; he chose to spend his days lying on a towel behind the open bathroom door.

Roy and I could see that he was suffering, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to choose to end his life. Some mornings as we watched him trudge into the kitchen for a few bites of breakfast, one of us would say, “He seems to look better today,” and the other would agree. But of course we were fooling ourselves.

The vets would only lay out our options, leaving us with the final decision. But one day David said,” Pinto has been kind and loving to you for eighteen years. Now you can do something kind for him.”

The next day, David and Diane helped Pinto die. Afterward, I wrapped his body in a soft cloth, placed it in a box, and buried it at the top of a small rise that overlooked the cabin. I collected smooth, grey stones from the woods and built a cairn to mark the grave. When our young granddaughters came to visit, they painted bright flowers on the stones, and on the biggest one they printed in brilliant red letters: PINTO.

A few years later we sold our log cabin and moved back to the suburbs. We left behind the chipmunks that ate sunflower seeds from our hands and the hummingbirds that darted past our faces on the way to their feeders. And we left Pinto’s decorated grave.
On trips to the Adirondacks to visit friends, I could never bring myself to return to our cabin to see if the new owners had preserved the grave or had dismantled the colorful stones and tossed them into the woods.

~Joan Potter
Memoir reprinted from Celebrating Animal Rescue,
  Splattered Ink Press, available on Amazon

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Good Book

11/20/2015

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I read the review; the book sounds good. It is a memoir in which a young woman contemplates years’ worth of her diaries. The reviewer says it captures the impossibility of recording one’s life. As someone who also writes memoir, I would like to read it.

There is a world in which I will. There is another world in which I would have written it, and a world in which I will write a similar book. For now, though, the fact of the book’s existence, that the author wrote it and that the reviewer commended it, is enough.

That someone in a different world took the matter of her experience and transformed it into words that draw me.

That I believe will draw me.

That will mirror myself back to me.

The awareness of others who seem to perceive emotions similar to mine, to notice what I notice, who I imagine might respond not too differently from the way I would, is a great comfort to me. Some of them are my friends or will become my friends. Others create the work — the writing, the imagery, the music — that I lose myself in and long for. That affirms me.

So whether I read the young woman’s memoir or not, I am happy knowing that the book has been written. For now, it is all I need.

~ Susan Hodara

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Walker Connection

7/11/2015

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I'm halfway through the recovery period for a hip replacement. Normally that period would be two or three weeks, but because of a tiny fracture in my femur that happened during my surgery, I have to use a walker for six weeks. I have become adept at many daily tasks that in my first days home from the hospital seemed daunting.

Overall I feel like my regular self tackling a new set of challenges. It’s me taking a shower, only now I am sitting down. It’s me making my morning coffee, only now if I fill the mug as full as I used to, it will slosh all over my walker tray as I maneuver to the table. I’m developing calluses on the corners of my palms from the repeated pressure of my hands on the walker.

But sometimes it strikes me: I am here because of time. I have reached the point in my life where my bones deteriorated enough that I needed surgery. For decades I bounced around, jogged, danced, walked for miles without a second thought. The years have, undeniably, left their mark. It is the passage of time, the aging of my body, that has brought me to this place.

That is when I think of my mother. I remember the first time she fell and broke her knee. My husband and I drove her back to her house when she was discharged from rehab. We hovered nearby, arms at the ready, as she hobbled up the walk pushing her walker and then, pausing to recall the instructions she’d been taught, cautiously climbed the two steps to her front door. We prepared food and brought it to her. We helped her upstairs at bedtime and back downstairs in the morning. As she struggled with an extended shoehorn contraption to slide her still-swollen foot into a slipper, I got down on my knees, lifted her toes to direct them into the shoe, then jiggled her heel so it would fit.

That was just a few years ago, I was the middle-aged daughter and she was my elderly, incapacitated mother. Now there are moments when I get confused. As I slip out of the passenger side of the car into a too-narrow area and have to navigate an uneven curb to get onto the sidewalk; as the door of a restaurant bathroom slams onto my back behind me; as I realize with despair that I’ve left my bowl on one side of the kitchen and my spoon on the other, I sometimes feel like I have become my mother. I envision the two of us shuffling around together through the extra wide corridors of the stair-less independent living community where she recently moved.

Then I remember: I am still only middle-aged. When I am healed, I will feel better than I did pre-surgery. I will travel, hike, stroll jauntily around town. I will be back on my way.

~Susan Hodara

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What I Miss

4/25/2015

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There are moments when I miss being my mother’s child.

All grown up with children of my own, and still those feelings come upon me like a shock. I want somebody to run to, someone to hold me, to tell me it’s going to be okay.

My childhood wasn’t perfect. But certain memories of my past can flood me with longing. Those occasions when my parents’ reassuring words were a truth I could believe. A time when simple gestures of comfort and protection were enough to wipe away the fear and pain.

What I yearn for is to be little, small enough that the arms of my mother could wrap around me completely. To rest my head against her chest and hear her heartbeat, listen to its insistent, unrelenting rhythm, and know that I am safe. She would say, “Don’t worry. I am here. Nothing can hurt you now.”

I’m sure my mother believed what she told me. She knew, in those moments, that somehow she would make everything all right. I know she felt this way because it’s how I felt when my own children needed reassurance from me. When it was my turn to wrap my arms around a small human being and be his protector, I did so confidently. My instincts as a parent grew solid and infinite. No harm would come to my children, not as long as I held them close.

I have a husband whose arms are powerful and caring. Many occasions have found me cocooned within his embrace, hoping for that same reassurance. There are times when my arms try to enfold him, when he rests his head on my shoulder and I tell him, “It’s okay.” But we know. We know that isn’t always true. Yet the strong arms, the shoulder upon which to rest the head, the bodies melding, this physical expression of need and the desire to meet that need - all of it softens harsh reality.

My sons are older now, in their early twenties, and they are taller and stronger than I. I get to hug them on their birthdays and holidays, and once in a while I will ask for and receive an impromptu, loving though hesitant embrace. They are still my children, but they are no longer children, and we both know that parents are not omnipotent, and that sometimes it is not going to be okay.

In our book I wrote about learning that my mother’s cancer was terminal. I was sitting on her hospital bed, and she was lying there staring off into space. She looked terrified. Even though the doctors had just said, “No hope. There is nothing we can do,” in that moment I knew they were wrong. I leaned over, wrapped my arms around her and lifted her up into my embrace. I told her it would be okay. “I will find a way to make you well,” I said. I like to think that for a few seconds she, like I, believed my words.

You grow up and you learn that sometimes things work out and sometimes they don’t. When I was a child, my mother’s touch and her words kept the peril at bay. I guess what I miss, really, is being able to believe that somehow everything, in the end, will always be all right.

~ Vicki Addesso

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Socially Distanced

Two Perspectives on Goodbye

Kraft American Singles

Journaling

Annoyed

Dancing in the New Year

When Pinto Got Paroled

Good Book

Walker Connection

What I Miss

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