In Praise of Step Moms, on Mother's Day

Stepmothers get bad press, even from those of us in a collective rush to pat ourselves on the back for our modern family outlook.  Yesterday at Target, I looked for a stepmom card in the Mother's Day section, and had to revert to the blank card section.  Hard to believe Hallmark hasn't caught up.

The stepmom in my life is not my own, but that of my children. We're not friends, as she is married to a man I once was. That would be, I think we'd both agree, weird. We don't even know each other that well. Yet I am grateful every single day for her presence in my kids' lives.

My own mom had a stepmother who didn't do much to disabuse the stereotype.  Their uneasy relationship marked her own with me and with that of my former husband and the children we had together.  A couple of Christmases ago, we ran into my former husband and his wife in the parking lot at the local grocery store.  I was buying last-minute items and when I came out all the hellos had been said and we headed off.  Later, my mother told me, tears in her eyes, that stepmom had jumped out of the car and embraced the children, to their mutual delight.  "If She had ever done that with me, my life would have been so different," my mother said, shaking her head with simultaneous disbelief and happiness.

This past October I went to China for a work trip.  As luck would have it, two days before I was to leave my son had an asthma flareup for the first time in three years. Back when the kids were small and I travelled rarely, I used to say that someone always started throwing up when I drove through the gates of DFW airport.  It seemed their dad spent all of my few trips away at the pediatrician's office.  With that burden of guilt as I headed into this voyage, I ran through the San Francisco airport towards the international terminal and called to see how The Boy was doing.  He was with stepmom at the office of that same pediatrician.  They'd gotten some steroids and when I talked to him, he had that cough that instantly makes me feel I'd bargain with devil to take it away.

This wasn't an optional trip.  I said it sounded silly but if I'd been somewhere in the US, I wouldn't feel so helpless.  But I was going to be half a world away.  "I know it's hard, but I'll take good care of him," she said. "I know." I did. I hung up before she heard me burst into tears. I was heartbroken to leave but recognized how extraordinarily blessed I am for this kind, loving woman who had voluntarily taken my children into her life and her heart.

I am an only child and don't share with ease.  In the early days of co-parenting, we would hand off on Sundays, which meant I could wrap up my weekend and get off to a fresh start to work.  After a legal wrangle a couple of years ago, we switched against my wishes to Monday mornings.  I wake at the start of every other week with a wooden heart; after I drive away from the carpool line, I inevitably shed tears at leaving the two dearest souls on earth to me.

Last Mother's Day, the kids arrived with a beautifully wrapped package for me.  It was a flower vase  I would have picked out on my own.  It came from a store I know we don't have in Fort Worth, so it was clear that stepmom had to spend some time ahead picking it out.  I sent her a text to thank her, and she wrote back, "I'm glad you like it.  The kids thought you would. Happy Mother's Day."  Yesterday, my daughter and I went to pick out a little something for her.  The kids love her and I hope she is reminded of that.

Stepmothers (and stepfathers, lest I forget) often haul a good share of the water in child-rearing, but get little credit in our society. So to all the people with the stickers on their cars with the Perfect Family--the Dad, the Mom, the three kids, all holding hands--I have a message.  Not all of us get the life we had planned. We can sit around pointing fingers at society or each other or blaming ourselves.  Or we can open heart our hearts to what grace we receive and take every opportunity to raise our children with consistent love.  And that's pretty good. 

What Does it Mean to be Alone?

To relieve, they might tell you, the bleak depths of mid-February, the Hallmark card company chose to manufacture a holiday. This sadistic ritual is designed to make all but the newly-besotted want to retreat under the bedcovers and forget about it. 

Men in relationships navigate it the best they can and envy those who aren't paired up and who can go out to sports bars and ramp up for March madness, beer in hand. Women, even cerebral, sensible types, feel slighted when the event is mismanaged or ignored altogether. A friend of mine whose teenaged son told her a few years ago that his new girlfriend had said she thought V-Day was silly and she didn't need him to get her anything, grabbed him by the shoulders, looked him in the eyes and said, "She's lying. Let's go to the store. Now."  Anyone who thinks being a man is easy in this age knows not of what she speaks.

Females who are, God forbid, unpaired, feel the full brunt of our couple-oriented culture.  Mercifully, I am a couple of decades past the remorseless June wedding seasons of the early post-college years.  Of course I was a smug married at 23 and no doubt made more than a few thoughtless comments to my-then single friends, who later made good marriages. Divorced at forty, I've got proof on this count that karma really is a bitch. 

I really do think the whole thing is silly.  Until I read articles like the one in yesterday's Washington Post. It's titled, "Some people never find the love of their lives. And live to tell about it." and so billed as a thoughtful take on the whole romantic myth.  But it ends up being a sad story about a woman who, despite her many qualities, hasn't found love and is in her fifties.  Reading it put me in a foul temper that lasted until cocktail hour, when a bunch of friends came over for wine and spirited discussion before we all went off to a school fundraiser.

Not finding love, as far as mainstream American culture goes, means not being married, or living alone.  For my own part, I have found living alone is much less lonely than living in an unhappy union.  In Eric Klinenberg's book, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, the sociologist looks at what 31 million real adult Americans are doing: living alone because they can afford it and they want to. They are not, by and large, recluses or misfits but people who have good jobs and are engaged in their communities, with wide circles of friends.

Last month, Dominique Browning wrote a piece (click here to read) about her independent existence. She noted that women don't worry much about living solo and in fact enjoy its freedom: "Single women love not having to get permission to spend our own money on a 10th pair of black boots or a painting or a wood stove."  I'll cop to loving that.  Once, not long after my divorce was final, I heard a smartly-dressed young woman, sporting a large diamond, in a store looking at a dress she clearly wanted. "Oh, I can't," she sighed to her friend. "I'd get in trouble."  I was thrilled at the sudden thought that my money was now mine alone to save or squander.

The subtitle of Browning's article was "Why Men Can't Live Alone," which no doubt garnered the Times many readers but also sent her plenty of criticism.  Although I know many men, including my former husband, who could simply not stand to be without continuous company, I've had the pleasure of knowing a number who are happily building their own independent lives. I happen to be dating one of them.

We live nearly 1,500 miles apart.  Every day we talk or text or write to one another, and in the past four months we've seen one another every few weeks.  It's fun because we carve out time from both of our admittedly crazy schedules and find time to just be together.  So it's not what traditionally-married people would call "real." So far, though, we've been through me being sick, forgetting where we parked the car, and a pretty significant disagreement.  All okay.  A month ago I went to work for a few days at my firm's San Francisco office, and he dropped me off in the mornings and called to see when I was wrapping up work in the evening. I'd walk out of the office building and he'd be there. We'd go back to his loft, where he poured us a glass of wine and we talked of our respective days, then went out for dinner.  He spent a weekend at my house recently, and we did pretty much what I always do: sleep in, walk the dog, go to my favorite market, cook a good dinner, and read.  It was a couple of days of deep, quiet contentment for both of us.

That alone made me very, very happy.  We both are veterans of long marriages, his much longer than mine, so we know how to do this.  And yet I wonder if I could do it every day.  Of course I live with the kids at least half the time, and we work it out.  And SF man is, like me, a person who likes order and is very tidy. No wet towels to pick up with him, no beer cans lying about that I must put in the bin with gritted teeth.  We are kind to one another and content in conversation and comfortable silence.

We'll see where it goes, but we've talked about it and neither of us is in a hurry to head back to marriage or even cohabitation.  We're still getting to know each, and are both happy that each has an independent life. 

This evening I sit in my house where I've chosen and placed the furniture and hung the the pictures myself, where I damn well wanted them. The dinner I hankered for earlier in the day to is simmering.  Tonight the television stays off  and I will get back into the novel I was reading this afternoon, before I took an impromptu nap. I'll enjoy the next twelve hours before the dog must be walked and work beckons and the children land home with all that demands.  And just because, I've just sent SF man an Amazon order of my favorite memoir, and he says there is something coming to my house via FedEx.  Not that we believe in manufactured holidays.

The Proust Smackdown--Questions to Ponder

This month's Vanity Fair is a particularly good issue, with articles about an artist who fathered 14 children, died at the age of 88, is the grandson of Sigmund Freud, and whose last lover entered his life near the end and was a half-century his junior. It also publishes, with both pride and sadness, the last of Christopher Hitchens' columns for the magazine.

The three men on the cover--George Clooney, Matt Damon, and Daniel Craig--were, I won't lie, what made me pick it up. And the interview to which each submits seemed like a good idea for me, and maybe for you. So here are my answers to what is evidently a standard set of questions from Marcel Proust, whose work I've never read so apologies to those who have:

What is your idea of perfect happiness? Warmth, fine conversation, good food and wine. All after a day of pleasant exertions. What is your greatest fear? Wasting my time on earth.
Who is the living person you admire most? My daughter.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? I interrupt people while they are still speaking.
What is the trait you most deplore in others? The certainty they have everyone else's life figured out on the basis of their own experience.
What is the most overrated virtue? Modesty.
Which words and phrases do you most overuse? "Apparently." "Really?" "Shit."
Which talent would you most like to have? I'd be an actress. A good one.
What is your greatest extravagance? Skincare.
If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? I'd stop worrying I don't measure up and just get on with it.
If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be? We'd understand one another better.
What do you consider your greatest achievement? My ability to adapt in foreign circumstances. If you could choose what to come back as, what would it be? An heiress with disinterested parents.
What is your most treasured possession? A photograph of my children when my youngest was four days old.
What is your favorite journey? The flight west across America at sunset.  The daylight is perpetually fading but never disappears.
When/where were you happiest? The first time I heard my children laugh together.
What quality do you admire most in a man? Curiousity.
What quality do you admire most in a woman? A complete disregard for the opinions of others.
What do you most value in your friends? The things they teach me.
Where would you most like to live? A place where I finally don't feel like an outsider. Though that might take a lot of fun out of my day.
Who are your favorite writers? Joan Didion, Julia Reed, Amy Bloom. Who is your favorite hero of fiction? Inez Victor, from Didion's Democracy.
Who are your heroes in real life? Anyone who deals with the stuff the rest of us wish to avoid.  Cops, nurses, hospice workers, funeral directors, people who dive in searches for bodies.
What is it that you most dislike? People who are angry but haven't considered their real reasons for being so. How would you like to die? In a way that causes the people I love the least amount of pain.
What is your motto? To quote the Dixie Chicks, "I'm takin' the long way around."

If you are game, post your own answers in the comments section. 

Home for the Holidays

Cultural differences are powerful, as my trip to China taught me. Watching people hock giant loogies on the street isn't something we in the West often do, and we find it pretty uncouth. But after a week living in the dreadful air quality of Beijing, I kind of got it. 

Maybe I've just noticed it more since my recent trip, but air quality in Beijing seems to have been in the news a great deal lately. NPR's Morning Edition recently ran a story today about how keeping one's air clean is a luxury in this city of 23 million. Click here for the link. Another story, aired on Marketplace, cited a study showing a 60 percent increase in lung cancer in China over the past decade, at a cost of $100 billion a year, nearly 6 percent of the GDP. Try to imagine the understandable outrage if this were to happen in the United States.

The lack of protests of any sort was striking to me, and it felt very, very different. Yet my experience there with the Chinese as well as with tourists and expats I met and watched at many times amused me greatly, as it showed me that some things are universal:

Cab drivers. There are those who want you to be their best friend and more who act as though by taking you on as a fare they are letting you through past the velvet rope at the newest club in town. Still can't decide which is more annoying.

Annoying radio. Despite my complete lack of proficiency in any Chinese dialect, I know a car dealership ad when I hear one, especially on a Saturday morning. Why do they have to be so loud? Guess it works.

Come....on!!! Is the universal expression of frustration in traffic, or at least something that sounds like it.  This noise, naturally, is accompanied by a throwing up of hands and followed by a string of single-syllable words.

Teenagers.  A family from a European country (unclear to me which one, my limitation) is visiting the Great Wall of China on the same day I am there. Kids and mom come through the gate built around the 8th Century looking irritated/bored to tears. Dad stands at the top of gate and bellows something funny and good natured about how cool it is to be there. Mom sighs. Younger girls look embarassed but send him cute grins.  Oldest daughter, aged 15, rolls eyes and stomps on.  If you don't live with it, you've done it.

Young people. I loved seeing the twenty-somethings who work in the big city.  When I sat in a Starbucks across a courtyard from my hotel, I was near a subway station and enjoyed watching all of them head off to work in their cute boots and coats.  They dress much like members of their cohort in New York or Chicago, and they laughed and flirted with one another as they walked by. But in the meeting setting where they were working for me on behalf of the hotel, they were incredibly polite and respectful, looking to me as an elder for direction in a way American twenty-somethings typically do not. They seemed so very young. I found it very touching and wished I could tell them in their native tongue how much I appreciated their work.

Later I learned more. I knew that many had come from the countryside to help support their families, but heard anecdotally from a number of expats that most of them only get home once every twelve months, if at all, for Chinese New Year. It's estimated over 2 billion Chinese migrate during this holiday. The young people I saw were trying so very hard to do a good job, but it wasn't clear to me if there was real opportunity for them. 

I don't remember well how I felt in my twenties, but my own children are close to it and I can't imagine them being so far away, for so long, at such a tender age. I looked at these sweet kids, many who are no doubt living in the outer rings of the city and in meager circumstances, and thought about how surely lonely they must be, so far from those they love and all that is familiar. For at least some of us, youth and not knowing about how hard the world can be gives us the courage, even if false, to go forward.  China's brutal history does not offer much in the way of of support for this, but I hope the future rewards this generation's hope. 

Traveling Like a Queen

After filling up four days off for Thanksgiving--the kids were with their father and second mom--with seeing friends and distracting myself with a lot of walking and magazines, I spent my Sunday evening watching a wonderous French film, Queen of Play.

It's about chess, but of course it's a metaphor.  The story is familiar, with a working class woman for whom suddenly the world cracks open and she can't turn back, even though she knows she should.  She's no sweet young thing but a woman with a long marriage and a teenaged daughter, making it more Bridges of Madison County than Pretty Woman.  But it's a French movie so, happily, the viewer doesn't need to be whacked over the head, and the relationship between Helene (Sandrine Bonnaire) and Dr. Kroeger (Kevin Kline), who speaks in French through the whole thing, is more about delicious flirtation than getting down to it.  Bonnaire's character discovers her game through an encounter with a guest at the hotel where she changes beds, and she sees a path she must walk down, the village gossips be damned.

We're all held in by our internal expectations of behaving well.  My recent trip to Asia was sanctioned given work commitments, but I tacked on a couple of days in San Francisco for my own benefit.  There were friends I asked to come along, but they have kids and men and work, and I wondered for a brief moment if I should just do the proper thing and come straight home.  "All by yourself?" my little good girl voice asked.  This was the moment when I realized it is possible to wait forever to find a person to do things with, but if I want to do something it was time to do it myself.  I haven't the patience to get on a tour bus, so solo it was.

After a week in a smoggy Beijing and thirteen hours in coach, I landed at SFO.  It was Chamber of Commerce weather, with such perfect sunshine off the Bay I practically wept.  After a hot shower I hit the Slanted Door in the Ferry Building and ordered lunch and a fine glass. I was so tired and turned upside down it wasn't weird to be there by myself.  The couple who sat beside me struck up a conversation and told me to hit Chaya for sushi later that night.   I hadn't really liked the woman of the team when she came in and started talking, but suddenly I realized being approachable might not be a bad thing and decided to take her advice. 

Chaya's bar was upscale and also fun, even at an early hour.  It was amazing to me how people, men and women, just started chatting me up.  I met a writer, a cool woman from Kansas who'd been educated in the UK, and a couple of crazy chicks.  A man with the warmest voice I've ever heard bought me a glass of wine from the other end of the bar, and when I thanked him and shook his hand, I felt like I'd met someone I'd known forever and had a strong desire to throw my arms around him.  He took a friend to the airport and came back to spend two hours talking to me. The next night we spent several more talking at my birthday dinner. (I'd booked a spot at Frances, where I'd decided I could be on my own, which would have been lovely in any case.  Being with him, however, was much better.) 

A couple of weeks later, I'd head back to the city for a longer visit.  Now we've eaten well several times and have checked out Napa together.  We shall see what follows, but it's been a very nice time indeed, and I am grateful be in a personal place and to live in a time when that's all I must consider.  The only downside is that it gave my Thanksgiving weekend a very hard act to follow.

Helene's journey is also uncertain, and like me a few years ago, she has more to lose and the fear of hurting those she loves. All she knows is that she must forge ahead, and luckily she's got some support, though she is out of her depth and is old enough to know it. Like all wise adventurers, she is thrilled but scared to death.  As she leaves idyllic Corsica by ship in a final scene, the one she loves grows smaller and smaller, and she waves in a futile gesture.  She's on her own now.

Hailing a Cab in Beijing

Coming off the adrenaline high that is my firm's annual meeting, I had a few extra hours on a Saturday morning in Beijing and decided to jump in a cab at my hotel and run up to T Square, as it's known among the well-traveled in Asia.  "Tiananmen Square," the cabbie sang, mocking my American accent, as we drove up the freeway to the infamous spot, across from the Forbidden City and smack in the middle of Beijing, a metropolis with a population of 23 million souls and almost 5 million cars.

I noticed him regarding me in his rearview mirror, seemingly interested in a woman, or at least a Western woman, in a taxi by herself. "Square, no stop," he said knowingly.  In fact the Forbidden City, which is immediately across the boulevard and almost eight million square feet in size, means that there are no cross streets for at least twenty blocks, so I ended up jumping out once we hit gridlock in front of the iconic portrait Mao had installed when he became the boss of everybody. 

People were out in droves, shopping and enjoying the weekend morning.  I'd been in the area the night before, after a group dinner, where I'd ended up with a few others led by a worldly colleague in a little bar owned by a German expat.  It had been dark and quiet and gated off for the most part, but now in daylight it was loud and filled with the smell of cigarettes and the frequent whiff of sewage, though the streets were quite clean.  I walked past the landmarks and into my previously unexplored territory. 

Even though I am a small person with straight dark hair, I still got plenty of stares.  People were buying roasted chestnuts and some sort of pastry.  Justin Bieber sang in a tinny voice over the din of the crowd and the hawkers of cheap silk scarves.  I felt completely, utterly foreign.  It wasn't like being in Paris or New York, where I'd felt a hick but had toyed, even on my first visits, with the idea of living there.  Not for a moment in China did I feel like I might belong.

The air quality in Beijing is appalling.  At one point shortly after my exit from the cab, I felt breathless and didn't know why, until I considered that the sun never really seemed to be properly out.  As I'd spend at least three hours walking that day--though I didn't know it yet--I wonder now what damage is done to the local citizens. 

I headed to the Forbidden City and was amazed at the quiet and the birdsong.  It was enormous, beautiful, and had the faded beauty of a national treasure built in 1420, not that I'd seen many of them. The spitting hoards (the Chinese do this almost constantly, perhaps because of the air quality or lack thereof) congregate near the main buildings, and the enormous pond and beautiful landscaping do not appear to be of interest to most.  I loved it and would have stayed all afternoon and looked at the beautiful gates and sat in the quiet, but had to get back to the meeting.

So back I headed to the Square, figuring I'd have the same ten-minute, 20-Yuan trip back.  I walked for about six blocks and found a bunch of cabs congregated on a side street.  I walked over to one, who looked at my taxi card with my hotel name on it, and typed 80 on his mobile screen.  How do you say go to hell in Chinese? I thought.  I've been around and refuse to get ripped off.

A good 45 minutes later I was on a side-street of questionable repute (to me) and asking a very young man in a valet uniform to hail me a car.  I'd waved at a number of drivers on a major throughfare and those few without occupants just shook their heads at me and I realized I wouldn't get anywhere on my own.  But this fellow flagged one down in less than two minutes.  With relief I got in the car and showed the cabbie my taxicard.  He looked at me helplessly and threw up his hands.  No idea.

We had not a word in common. I was in the middle of a city I knew not at all, and he was stuck with an idiot passenger who didn't know how to dial the hotel from her US phone. In silence, we sat for a minute, then he pointed at the hotel number again. Susan, I admonished my middle-aged self, you're not in Manhattan, sister.  And you may finally have bitten off more than you can chew.  I looked down at my ring with my children's names engraved on it and wondered what they'd make of my predicament. Luckily midday traffic had kicked in, so I had some time before he threw me back out on the street.



The freeway through the middle of Beijing, China

Once I remembered to breathe, it occurred to me I wasn't working without a net.  In a controlled state of panic, I pulled up my Blackberry and sent a colleague an email, to which she responded: "Don't freak out.  Standing next to someone who works with us and is Chinese." A call, with what felt like an endless ping across satellites from my Dallas number to her Chicago phone, finally hooked everyone up.  After the discussion, I looked at the man who held my immediate fate in his hands and asked if things were OK. He shrugged and nodded, then laughed with great relish at my obvious relief.  At some point during what turned out to be a 40-minute drive and 60 Yuan, he turned off the ignition in the midst of a complete and apparently common stop, and hurled a great spitball out the window. 

The world, as I have often commented, is not Disneyland. Maybe I wasn't in any real peril--the driver's laugh suggested hey, we would have found it eventually--but this experience gave me a jolt. In the middle of my fifth decade with not a little bit of travel behind me, I foolishly assumed I knew what I was doing, and might have found myself in a predicament had I not had someone to call. A little scary, to be sure.  But the worst trips make the best stories. Can't wait to get to Paris again.

Five Expensive Things Worth the Money

Ask me about my outfit, and I'll tell you what a deal I got.  My hot dress? Target. My premium denim habit (see below) is now supported by a resale shop near the TCU campus.  There are some things that I've found worth the money, however.

Dyson vaccum cleaner.  A couple of years ago I attended the wedding of dear friends in a raspberry satin dress from Banana Republic that cost me a cool $34.99 and made me look like a million bucks. It was rendered much less attractive by about fifty flea bites on my legs. That evening I arrived home and found the infestation had continued unabated, despite bombing and using my useless vaccum endlessly. I fretted all night and showed up at Target when it opened on Sunday morning.  Bought the floor model of the DC24 Multifloor for $350 and vaccumed three times a day for about 36 hours. Done. It's bagless, so you can see into the chamber and know what nasty business has come out of your carpets. Loved pitching those fleas into the bin, and it eats up dog hair. Excellent for neat/control freaks, not that I am either.  http://www.dyson.com/

My Infiniti G35.  Bought this in December of 2009, when car salesmen wondered if they would eat again. My baby had 24,000 miles on her, and between the economic squeeze and the salesman being hopped up on Percoset for upcoming back surgery, I got a great deal. The car has run like a dream and when I found a great and honest mechanic, hasn't been expensive to maintain. It's a safe car to drive my kids around in and for my commute. And it goes like stink. It's a great used car I couldn't have afforded new, and I will drive it until the wheels fall off.

A Wusthof 1.6 cm knife.  As close to all-purpose as a capable cook can find.  I paid full retail for it at Williams Sonoma, but I use it every day for damn near everything I cut up.  Keep it sharp and out of the dishwasher and it will never let you down.
http://www.williams-sonoma.com/shop/cutlery/knives-wusthof/

Clarisonic. If you are a woman of a certain age, this is a not-so-secret weapon.  Makes your skin so clean and gorgeous you'll weep,and it helps get rid of  at least some of the damage life has done. People will tell you how great you look and you can take a break on facials. If you're in your twenties, plunk down the $150 and use it every single night, no matter how late you've been out and how many dollars drafts you've downed. Do this and wear your sunscreen, and your forty year-old self will thank me. http://clarisonic.com/

Citizens of Humanity Jeans. I was newly single five years ago and back to my fighting weight--the much-touted divorce weight loss worked the other way for me until my freedom was secure--and my friend Tammy and I hit a very expensive place catering to rich sorority girls.  She kept pulling out pairs and said not to look at the size or the price or the length but to consider only how my ass looked.  I complied and when I pulled on one pair, it was like coming home.  Incredibly soft and comfortable. Also, when I turned around and saw how my backside looked, I figured I'd give those sorority girls total hell.  These are Not Your Mom's Jeans, my friends. My Citizens cost a hundred and eight-five bucks and another twenty to hem, but I still wear them all the time. To wine bars, to work and to church.  Beat that with a stick. http://citizensofhumanity.com/

Next post: Cheap things that work really, really well.