dear answer lady

1. freaking thanksgiving

One of my day jobs during this happy-go-lucky dating period was writing a monthly advice column for a national women’s magazine. Obviously, I had a voluminous store of past mistakes I could draw on for instructional purposes. Furthermore, my position as a national moral resource was helping to bolster my growing determination not to run around town acting like an alcoholic, manic-depressive slut. An advice columnist needs to keep up appearances. Particularly, say, during the holidays, though I was well aware that they are the hardest time of year to pretend one is coping at all.

Let’s take another look at that first Baltimore Thanksgiving of mine. Unsurprisingly, I had felt a little puny about it: I was an orphan, I was single, my thing with J.J. was pretty dubious, and I’d agreed to let Crispin take Jane to his mother’s for Thanksgiving dinner. Hayes and Vince would be home, but given their terrifying and indiscriminate hunger, their passion for Chick-fil-A, Chipotle, and cheese steaks, my usual frenzy of gourmet preparations looked like a bad bet. How would I prove that I was a good mother and a decent human being?

Once, I had firmly believed these things were measured in ergs. The amount you loved your family could be rated week by week, or day by day, a kind of Standard & Poor’s index of parenting value.

Number of family members (miles driven + missing items located)2

Total hours spent in kitchen and laundry room

By the time poor Jane was born, I had let things slip a bit. I was less inclined to volunteer as a chaperone for school field trips, to enforce household rules that entailed climbing a flight of stairs, or God forbid, to throw a Frisbee.

And now, freaking Thanksgiving. Was there some way out of cooking for three days and cleaning up for another two, with a twenty-minute break between for the ravening stampede? Or should I hide my tears in my dead mother’s favorite creamed pearl onions and carry on bravely? Tell me, Answer Lady, what to do.

Signed, Burnt Out in Baltimore.

Dear Burnt,

While there is an argument for the comfort of ritual in the face of chaos and crisis, this argument is usually made by those not responsible for producing these rituals. Often, the bereaved, the abandoned, the ill, and the otherwise beleaguered are tired. Very tired. Too tired to spell the word ritual, much less enact one. Also, you’d be amazed at how strongly you feel people’s absence when their actual chairs are empty. But there is good news. They serve Thanksgiving dinner in restaurants. Get on the Internet and make a reservation, for God’s sake.

2. chicken soup for dina lohan

Until you end up with a helpless infant on your hands, the seriousness of first-time parents looks ridiculous. Once there, you instantly grasp the problem: Your child could be hurt in any one of 2.3 million ways, 1.9 million of which would be your fault. It could even die—an unlikely prospect that will occur to you more than once a day. On the other hand, you could die and it could live. If you think you have little control now, wait ’til you’re dead.

Should both of you survive, the seeds you plant with your early parenting will shape its entire future psyche, so if it turns out to be a criminal, a tyrant, a public disgrace, or just a miserable person, you will be Dina Lohan, a woman widely believed not only to have caused her daughter Lindsay’s problems with drugs, alcohol, and the law, but to have capitalized on them.

Indeed, there are grounds for concern. The question is how to translate that anxiety into action.

I became a mother in my late twenties, which was in the late ’80s. I lived in Austin, Texas, where I had fallen in with an enclave of New Age earth-mother vigilantes. We labored without drugs, breastfed for eighteen months minimum, used only cotton diapers, and made baby food from scratch. My older son Hayes had no sugar until after his first birthday, and was never left with a babysitter until then. If babies were not allowed at an event, I didn’t go either. Sorry, baby-haters. Your loss.

Hayes’s room, his toys, his stroller, his car seat—everything was chosen with consideration. Every decision, from immunizations to nap schedule to toddler disciplinary style, was the result of research and discussion. Television—NO! Black-and-white geometric mobiles—YES! Weaning and toilet training were studied like epistemology and calculus. And take it from me, you’ll never run out of conversation with friends and strangers alike if your child uses a pacifier, as Hayes did. This is something people really, really want to put in their two cents on, whether they see it as a moral failing, a developmental problem, or a gateway addiction. As a writer, I had a whole cottage industry going with pacifier-related articles and radio broadcasts.

When Vince was born two years after his brother—at home on tie-dyed sheets, with a midwife who took the placenta away in a yogurt container—I raised him approximately the same way. By this time, however, I had furtively acknowledged the usefulness of Pampers, TV, and even baby formula in certain situations. As time went on, privileges long awaited by his older brother came early to Vince, starting with late bedtimes and PG-13 movies (PG-9, it turns out), and continuing through cell phones and unsupervised girlfriend visits. (Put a box of condoms in the bathroom and get an unlimited text-messaging plan.)

At the advanced age of forty-two, I ended up back in the ugly white bra with Velcro-closing cups, thanks to that baby-freak Crispin, who didn’t think his two and my two were enough.

Nursing was about the only way Jane’s babyhood resembled that of her older brothers. Breast pump; no way. Cloth diapers; ha. I’m not exactly certain when she started solid food, as her siblings were giving her french fries even as they taught her to play Grand Theft Auto on the PlayStation. She designed her own nap schedule; I left weaning and toilet training to her as well.

Then what happened? Oh, you know—the usual idyllic childhood, including substance abuse, delinquency, and felony charges among the family members (cemetery desecration, car chases, ski trips gone bad), followed by marital war and divorce. Not quite as cataclysmic as her brothers’ dead-father script, but not what you wish on your five-year-old.

Without a doubt Jane has a Leftover Mom—lazy, lax, full of excuses, and in her mid-fifties, for God’s sake. But with exhaustion has come a certain wisdom. I have observed children born of super-strict parents, helicopter parents, soccer moms, potheads, churchgoers, and people who have staff members perform 75 percent of their parental duties. I have seen enough mental effort to solve the serious troubles of the human race poured into minor child-rearing decisions. And for those who decide differently: jihad!

I do not deny that there are certain minimum requirements for safety, nutrition, and hygiene. But very few styles of parenting actually blow it in this respect. The bigger problem is that there are too many unhappy, stressed-out, exhausted parents who get little pleasure from parenting and are, in fact, about to snap. This snapping can go in many different directions, and none of them is good.

The thing that gets undervalued in the quest to do everything right is the need to take off some of the pressure. No matter how hard you try, you’re going to have bad days—you’ll make mistakes—and the best thing you can do is forgive yourself and move on. The reason anyone gets through a day that starts with whining, backtalk, shouting, curses, something wrong with these eggs, go live with your father, worst mother in the world, don’t touch me, don’t talk to me, cracked juice glass, awful radio station, enslavement to utter bitch, slammed door, silence, and welcome to Tuesday! is because they let it go.

Jane and I usually rely on a simple hand on the knee to say it all.

Your inner peace and strength are your child’s greatest resource. This is not bullshit. When you’re okay, they’re okay. All the parenting micromanagement in the world doesn’t change the thing that has the biggest effect on your kids: who you really are, in your heart and soul. That is the sky. Everything else is just the weather, the passing clouds.

3. mr. turkey

My parents had a long history of dining out for Thanksgiving. My mother was a golfing, blackjack-playing, martini-drinking sort who had little to do with cooking, sewing, or other domestic arts. Throughout my childhood, we ate Thanksgiving dinner at the Hollywood Golf Club in Deal, New Jersey; this club was essentially my parents’ place of worship. Both my sister and I were eventually married there, and we scattered my mother’s ashes on the ninth hole. The best thing about Thanksgiving at the club—other than the fact that it saved my mother from having to contemplate the creaming of pearl onions (or even the defrosting of the Birds Eye version)—was the magnificent centerpieces they assembled: towering cornucopias of nuts, fruit, chocolates, and candles in the shape of Pilgrim children that made my sister and me twitch with acquisitive longing.

Once I left home, I did things rather differently. I cooked myself silly every Thanksgiving, even during my early vegetarian years, and on through the ages of brining and turducken and pumpkin pie made from actual shaved pumpkin, according to Gourmet magazine (a multiday disaster; Answer Lady says stick to the canned). This particular rebellion of mine was just fine with my mother. She would come clear across the country if necessary, always bringing her signature contribution: the centerpiece, a creation known as Mr. Turkey.

Mr. Turkey consisted of a simplistic red felt turkey head, a black bead eye on either side, that could be attached to the butt end of a pineapple with straight pins. You laid the fruit on its side so the leaves took the place of tail feathers and . . . ta da!

Even though the S-shaped seams of the neck were glued together and it could have been a preschool art project, I am quite sure my mother did not make the turkey head herself. Perhaps it was a gift from one of the ladies at the bridge table. When the eye fell off, we drew one on with a Sharpie. It had a certain outsider-art-meets-Lillian-Vernon charm, and it was at the center of my table every year, always surrounded by a flock of hand-carved apple swans I learned how to make from a chef friend in my early twenties. 
But this year, acts of daughterly one-upmanship had no audience, and peeling turnips, mashing potatoes, and rubbing butter into cold, pimply bird skin held little appeal. I looked on the Internet and, by God, dozens of restaurants in Baltimore were vying to get my business. I was nervous when I called a hotel dining room near my house and may have given the poor reservation clerk a little more backstory than was required. “I didn’t ask why, hon,” she said finally. “Just what time.”

We had found Mr. Turkey up in the closet next to the wrapping paper after my mother died, his edges rotting from years of seeping pineapple juice. Nonetheless, I took him to the restaurant with us and stuck him on the bottle of Nouveau Beaujolais that was sitting on our table when we arrived. From there, all I had to do was eat, drink, converse with my sons, and give my credit card to the waiter. There was a huge buffet of food, and the boys piled their plates with salmon and roast beef and ham, claiming they had never liked turkey. Really? Well, thank God I hadn’t spent half a day cooking the damn thing.

4. trivial pursuits

What with my weird, low-energy Thanksgiving Day having been such a success, I was developing a new appreciation for the wisdom of my own parents’ credit-card-based approach to child rearing. Christmas was on the way, and suddenly I saw a detour around the shopping, cooking, decorating, cleaning, and socializing that so filled me with dread. I got right back on that Internet and booked two nights in a double room in a hotel on the beach in Fort Lauderdale for Hayes, Vince, Jane, and me.

We got up Christmas morning, flew to Florida, spent three un-fun hours waiting in line to rent a car in the airport, then picked up our Christmas dinner from the only restaurant open at 9:00 p.m., a Subway we passed on the way to the hotel. But as soon as we were ensconced at the Beachcomber, we unwrapped our sandwiches, then opened our gift: Trivial Pursuit Family. We played it until the sun rose over the Atlantic, which we couldn’t actually see from our discount room overlooking the parking lot, but no one seemed to mind.

New Year’s Eve I went down to D.C. and saw those heart-surgery-having / gourmet-food-eating friends of mine, who assembled each year for an over-the-top feast: 7 hours, 14 courses, 200 plates, glasses, and utensils, 8,000 bottles of wine, and a truly infinite number of calories. I may never get over the drinkable part of the dessert course: a chocolate shot layered with lavender-infused milk.

And that isn’t the only thing I could not get over, apparently. A couple of days after I got home, I received an e-mail from long-lost Brett, unheard from for several months, who wondered in a single sentence if I was going to watch the Ravens in the NFL play-offs. It took me a while to comprehend that he was asking if he could come to my house to watch the game.

My house? Are you kidding? Did I have the only TV in the state of Maryland? Why would he do this? I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now. All I could think of was this Hollywood joke I heard years ago. After a difficult day, a struggling actor returns to his neighborhood and is shocked to find a horde of police cars and fire trucks surrounding the smoldering remains of his house.

“This is a crime scene, sir; you’re going to have to move on,” one of the officers orders him.

“But I live here!”

“You mean this is your house?” the officer asks in a more sympathetic tone.

“Yes! What happened?”

“Well,” the cop says, “it seems that your agent came by earlier today, and while he was here he attacked your wife, assaulted your children, beat your dog, and burned the place to the ground.”

The actor’s jaw drops in disbelief. “My agent came to my house?”

There is a chance to spare myself some humiliation here. I don’t have to tell you that I made a Ravens-theme supper consisting of purple coleslaw (the team color) and crab cakes (Baltimore’s favorite food) and lemon rice. I could omit the Dark and Stormies (of course he didn’t remember this is what we drank on our first date), or the fact that I got my toenails painted purple as well. I could just answer the questions you are most interested in. Did we have sex? No. Did we get past first base? No, although at his boyish suggestion, we made out every time the Ravens scored. There were three touchdowns and a field goal in the first quarter alone. At a certain point, the frustration began to outweigh the thrill.

Him: Why do you put up with me? This can’t be fun for you.

Me: I just have an intuition about us, I guess.

Him: Is your intuition ever wrong?

Just a couple e-mails were required to wrap up this phase—he said he just wasn’t ready, and I said, you know, I’m starting to believe you. A month later, on Valentine’s Day, my intuition told me to look on Craigslist. Yes, his original post was up again. “The perfect guy? Or another wacky CL poster. You decide.” This caused another short round of e-mails. I never saw the ol’ dreamboat again, but it was not until October that communication ended completely.

After months of silence, a final volley of messages resulted in a plan for a one-year-anniversary meeting on the famous bench in Annapolis. Several days before the rendezvous, his messages included mention of a bothersome sore throat. My intuition told me this sore throat would worsen, and the date would be canceled.

My intuition was getting better all the time.