The Senior Crying Season and the Wishbone

Claire-Adele applied Early Decision to one college and Early Action to another this fall. Applications were due Nov. 1. She will hear from the Early Decision college on Dec. 15. For those who are unfamiliar with the process, Early Decision applications are binding. If she gets accepted, that is where she will go. She will withdraw all other college applications. This early decision school is her first choice, her dream school. The odds are slightly more in her favor of getting in early decision than in the regular application pool, though the odds of getting into this particular school are very, very low. On the other hand, they have to let someone in. Her odds of getting in would be zero if she didn't apply at all.

We have now entered the Senior Crying Season. The applications are in, and everything is beyond her control. All she can do is wait.

I didn't realize how stressful this waiting time is for Claire-Adele until a few days ago. In the past two weeks, she has thrown two tantrums and had one stressed out crying fit, which is out of character for her. I am not talking about being a usual snitty teenager who makes rude and insensitive comments. I am talking about toddler level meltdowns at a grocery store two hours past nap time and mom said no to buying a box of cookies. That kind of uncontrolled and irrational meltdown.

In addition to the stress of knowing her fate lies in the hands of strangers, she is also having to prepare a second round of applications for regular college application decision in case she doesn't get into her first choice school. She is stressed, and I feel for her. I, too, hope she gets into her favorite school.

I wish she could understand that whether or not these schools pick her, she will still be the same interesting, curious, hard working person she was before. She doesn't beleive me when I tell her that. She is a teenager, and needs validation from someone other than her mom. I get it, but I wish she could get it from someplace else in addition to a college application review board. Today, she went to work and after work she staying downtown to go the YMCA Youth Leadership Program that she was a part of for the past two years. As an alum and camp intern this summer, she is welcome to crash the party. I am glad she is seeking self-care by surrounding herself with people who love her as she is who aren't in her immediate family.

This Thanksgiving, Claire-Adele and I broke the wishbone. She begged to do it. I knew what her wish was without her telling me.

And I wished for the same thing.

Stitch in the Ditch

Note: The internet nearly ruined this perfectly good blog idea. I won't spoil it for you until the end.

Last weekend, I cleaned off the Boy's desk in the dining room that was covered with quadcopters and other flying devices, old homework, and random magazines. It was the place where Claire-Adele dumped the junk mail after clearing it from the dining room table so she could set it for dinner. I bought this desk a few years ago to give the Boy a quiet and clean spot to do his homework. Since this desk had been covered in crap since 2012, he did his homework on the couch or in his bed.

I decided to claim this table for my sewing, which is logical because it is a sewing table that I tried to pass off on the Boy for his own, knowing very well that I wanted this desk, but really couldn't justify buying myself a third desk in addition to the one off the kitchen and the one in the shed. This desk is a really nice piece of furniture--spalted maple with an antique Singer sewing table legs. Before I would sew on the dining room table, which was a huge pain because I had to move everything on and off the table before and after we ate. I don't have a before picture of the desk, but I have an after.

Some of the Boy's flying devices are still under the desk.

This weekend I've bee working on a quilt I started last winter. It is the quilt I would have wanted when I was ten years old. It has bright rainbow-y colors, treehouses and bicycles. It is awesome. I am kind of sad Claire-Adele doesn't want it, but oh well. She is seventeen and has lost her interest in things whimsical.

For the top quilting, I am trying something new: Stitch in the ditch. This is where the lines are sewn inside the seams of the patchwork. 

This is nearly impossible to do right. The truly bizarre thing is that when it is done perfectly, you can't tell that it has been done at all. So why do quilters try to do something so impossible that you can't see? Why? It doesn't make any sense. There is something zen about trying to do the impossible that can't even be seen when done properly. How do you learn how to do this? You start when you are fourteen and by time you are sixty-five you can be mildly competent?

Here are my good and bad examples. You can see I nail it about 15% of the time. Where did I get it right? You can't see it. Crazy, eh?

As I sat down to write this, I googled "Stitch in the ditch" to make sure I had the term right and I discovered there is a sewing foot especially designed to do the stitch in the ditch that could have made it all easier. 

Take it easy...

Last Friday, Jack and I took the Boy to see the latest Warren Miller advertisement ski documentary at the Seattle Center. We ate dinner at the Center House and walked over to the McCaw Hall where they were going to show the movie. Through the window, the Boy saw the crowd.

"Flannel and beards," he said. "It looks like Alpental. These are my people."

McCaw Hall is where I have season tickets to the Pacific Northwest Ballet. The ballet crowd is decidedly different. I would have let this event be a father-son bonding experience, except Jack was on call and he might have needed to bail; therefore, I needed to be there in order to drive the Boy home in case Jack needed to go into the hospital. I had a long week at work, and needed a break. I wanted to do something more relaxing than watch an adrenaline junkie movie.

I've watched another skiing movie with the Boy, something that takes place in Norway and has English subtitles through half of it, but the plot was really easy to understand.

1. Crazy and talented young men seek adventure.
2. Crazy and talented young men ski down some super steep and dangerous shit.
3. Crazy and talented young men survive.

Earlier in the week, I made plans to take the Boy and a friend skiing on Saturday at Crystal. This was early season snow, and the Boy was ready to hit the pow. This movie only amped him up, while it made me more more terrified to get back on the slopes...until the middle.

A snowboarder who jumps off cliffs recalled a story from his grandfather.

"Take it easy," said the snowboarder, "but always take it." In watching two hours of testosterone fueled insanity, I found a golden nugget.

When I said I was going to drive to Crystal, I had every expectation that I might not ski. The next morning, the Boy packed up my skis along with his. In my bag, I packed my helmet, gloves and a book to read in case I bailed and decided not to ski.

While the boys took off on the blue and black runs, I went on the beginner hill. After ten runs, I thought of the what the snowboarder's grandfather had told him. Take it easy, but take it.

I did a few more runs on the beginner hill, but I was getting more and more afraid of the beginner skiers and snowboarders. One woman fell off the lift after it got four feet off the ground. A father with his kindergarten age son didn't get off this lift and the top and had to jump off as it went around the loop. I rode the lift once with a (water) skier from Australia. This was his third run ever on a snowboard. I feared getting off the lift with this guy.

I'm not going to get any better on the bunny hill, I thought. I could only progress so much on flat terrtain. I decided to get on the real mountain around lunchtime. Most people headed into the lodge so the lines were very short. I got to the top, looked around for the easiest way down, and went. I was terrified and exhilarated at the same time, much like young men and women in the movie from the night before. My threshold for what would be considered terrifying was much less than theirs, but it was still terror nonetheless.

I did a few runs, and went in for lunch. After lunch, I did another run. The snow was soft earier in the day, and now there were bumps from where everyone had skied. My legs were tired, and I went back to the bunny hill. It was time for me to take it easy. I realized I was spending too much energy turning to get down the hill, and in return I'd get tired much faster. Before I tore my ACL, I could ski all day for days in a row. Now I was afraid the burn in my thighs might mean I might get hurt.

As I was taking my last run at 3:55 p.m., minutes before the lifts closed, I got a text from the Boy. We are at the lodge, ready to go. They were tired before me, a first. The problem I had been wrestling with at work seemed to fade into the background as my struggle to ski came to the front. As my friend Christina told me, I was using my body and giving my brain a break. I felt at peace, more than I had felt in a long time. I was happy to have taken it, to have gotten back on the snow.

Steely Eyes

The other night, Jack was working and the kids and I went to dinner. The kids speak more freely when their father isn't there, taking advantage of the "one parent versus two kids" shift in the power dynamic. 

Claire-Adele said she needed a picture of herself for her Facebook profile, and she asked to look at my phone to see if I had any pictures of her that she could use. My new smart phone came with a new operating system that organizes my photos by faces, which is both creepy and useful. The kids then started looking at pictures of me on my phone, most of which are crappy selfies. I don't know how to take a selfie--I always look at the wrong spot or I am squinting, usually both.

"Look at this one," said Claire-Adele handing the phone to her brother. I saw the picture as my phone changed hands.

Tofino, B.C., August 2014

"You have the best steely eyes in this one," said Claire-Adele. Steely eyes? I thought. Here is how the dictionary on my computer defines the word:

steely |ˈstēlē| adjective (steelier, steeliest) 1 resembling steel in color, brightness, or strength: a steely blue.2 coldly determined; hard: there was a steely edge to his questions.
Claire-Adele was refering to the second definition.

"You look like you are not going to take any shit," said the Boy.

"You look like you are female British Minister in wartime," said Claire-Adele. "Like Winston Churchill, but meaner."

Meaner than Winston Churchill? Seriously? And this was meant to be a compliment.

"Dad is smiling and I am in hiding in the background," said the Boy. "While you look like you are going to kick some ass." They both thought this was cool. Or they were making fun of me. Probably both.

How could it be that my kids could see me in such a way that I didn't or don't see myself? When I look at that picture, I think "I was so much skinnier before I tore my ACL" while they are comparing me to military generals. Where did they both get that idea, an idea that they agree on together, when I have such a different view of myself? Or maybe they don't see me much like this, and when they did, they found it remarkable.

This made me wonder if I should take the kids out to dinner alone anymore, especially when they are going to dissect me into bits. Or perhaps this is the reason I should take them out to dinner, to give them a chance to make me--their mother--an open topic for conversation.

The Line and #MeToo

I've been thinking about Harvey Weinstein and all of the men who have recently been declared deviants and creeps at best, and sexual predators, rapists, molesters and criminals at worst. Do these guys think they are bad when they harass women, or are they even thinking at all? Do these guys have a misaligned vision of themselves compared to what the world really thinks of them? I am trying to figure this out. Did Harvey Weinstein in his mind imagine himself to be Romeo, because he's not. Where is the line between nice and disgusting? Here is a graph--

What do the guys in blue have in common that the guys in gray don't, aside from the fact the blue guys are fictional characters, two of which were created by women? I could write about why the cretins are cretins, but instead I'll focus on what makes a nice guy...

• Consent. When Elizabeth Bennett told Darcy to back off, he did. Instead of secretly stalking her, he used his power to help her troubled sister without seeking credit. After he did a bunch of nice stuff, he gently asked her again if she would reconsider and if she said no, he'd never bother her again. There is a reason this guy had been the leading romantic character for the past two hundred years.
• Genuine affection for the other party. Romeo. Brings meaning to the phrase "I'd die for you." Mr. Darcy gets points here, too. He loves Elizabeth for her strength and intelligence. 
• Caring, kindness and respect for fellow humans. Atticus Finch was a widower, but he was also one of the most decent humans ever created in the mind of a novelist, at least in To Kill a Mockingbird. I haven't read Go Set a Watchman.

Sexual harassment and discrimination is everywhere, and it is sometimes so subtle we don't even notice it. I tried to ignore the #MeToo campaign, not because I think a vast majority of women have never been harassed, but because the harassment and discrimination I experienced was so much less than the women victimized by Harvey Weinstein. Those women deserve their moments where the world listens quietly and empathetically without me chiming in. Yet, everyone chiming in gave those women more power. 

So here is my #MeToo story, but it was a potential crisis averted thanks to help from a co-worker.  When I was twenty-six or so, I was scheduled to go to (pre-Katrina) New Orleans on a business trip with a senior manager at the firm where I worked. The senior manager was fifteen to twenty years older than I was at the time.

He smirked and leered and said, "We are going to have a lot of fun on this trip." New Orleans is a great city, but I imagined going to dinner with this guy, him drinking too much and meeting me trying to pry him off of me. 

I left this D---'s office and walked into Mike's office and shut the door. Mike was another one of my managers. (In this firm, I worked for several managers, partners and senior managers.) "I don't feel comfortable going to New Orleans with D---," I said. One sentence. That was it. I didn't need to explain or cry or wring my hands.

He looked at me and said, "I have a giant project I need you to work on so you need to cancel your trip."

"Thanks," I said and I left his office. And that was it. I told D--- I had other work to do and canceled my plane ticket. 

I wasn't smarter or braver than other women, but I was luckier--lucky to have had a colleague I could talk to and who had my back.

The World Traveler and The Water Bottle

Claire-Adele is quite the traveler. At the age of seventeen, she has been to every continent except South America and Antarctica. Image our surprise when we were at SeaTac last Thursday morning at 4:00 a.m. for our 5:50 flight to New York and she got tagged in security with a not empty water bottle.

"It had less than three ounces of water," she said. "You are allowed three ounces."

Not in a liter sized bottle.

"They let me bring water on a plane in Dubai," she said.

The airport in Dubai isn't run by TSA.

This was Claire-Adele's special water bottle. I had found it on the sidelines of one of the Boy's soccer games when I was the team mom in charge of picking up their lost and leftover crap. No one claimed the blue Nalgene bottle so it sat in our cabinet next to the rest of our tall, skinny, bicycle water bottles, lonely and unloved until one Claire-Adele adopted it.

"Where did you get this bottle?" she asked. "I love it. Everyone at camp has a Nalgene."

Shortly thereafter, this bottle was covered in camp stickers and she carried it with her everywhere. It had traveled with her to New York for Spring Break, and to camp for a month this summer where she was a summer intern.

Her backpack had made it through the x-ray, but it was stopped because they thought one of her books was a laptop. When the twenty-something (maybe even nineteen-something) TSA guy, fresh on the four a.m. shift, saw the backpack, he pulled Claire-Adele in her lululemon tights and jacket over to the side to dig through her bag. The book was fine. The water bottle was not.

Jack, the Boy and I didn't hear the conversation between Claire-Adele and the TSA guy, but we saw him grab her bottle. Ugh, I thought as he walked away with her bottle. She loved that bottle. Oh well. I thought of the many water bottle graveyards I had seen at entry ways to x-ray scanners at airports. Large plastic tubs, filled with dead water bottles. I remember seeing families chug water or gatorade in line, just to keep their bottles. We did once at an airport, passed the bottle around until it was empty so it wouldn't float away in the TSA liquid-filled water bottle garbage pile.

The three of us waited for Claire-Adele to move it along, but she stayed at the TSA table with her backpack open.

"Let's go," Jack said.

"I am waiting for my water bottle," she said.

What? No, no, no. Honey, he is going to dump it in the trash.

"No, he is going to empty my water and bring me my bottle back," she said.

What?! The three of us stared at her in disbelief. She didn't cry or nash her teeth or anything at this guy. She acted it like it was perfectly normal for a TSA agent to take her bottle back to the front of the line, dump the water, send it back through the x-ray machine and bring it back to her.

Is life unfair? Yes it is, but sometimes it is unfair in our favor. It pays to be young and hot.

Wait for it, wait for it. I'm willing to wait for it..

The wait ended Friday night.

We finally got to see Hamilton. Yay! I think to myself as I read the Seattle Times article about how some fans were not able to get tickets to see it here. I could have waited until it came to Seattle, but then I might not have been able to get tickets.

The day of the show, I was jittery. We went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I got to see one of my favorite paintings, Van Gogh's Wheat Field with Cypresses. On a normal trip, that might have been the highlight. It is much more impressive in real life because the colors are so vibrant. I understood the nature of art when I saw this picture sixteen years ago when it came to St. Louis. The artist picks a topic. For a writer, words and sentences are colors and brush strokes.

We took the subway back to the hotel from the museum because Jack was running the marathon the next day and didn't want to tire his legs out after the three mile walk. I would have been happy to walk. As we got on the train around 4:00, I had a small panic. What if the train gets stuck in the tunnel and we are stuck here for five hours and I miss the show? What will happen to my mental health if I miss the show after waiting for a year? All through the week, I kept the tickets buried in a pocket in my backpack. Every time I got back to the hotel, I made sure they were there. I made Jack bring a second copy of the tickets to New York in case my copy got lost.

Those tickets were a symbol of so many things. Sometimes there are problems in life that can't be fixed, or not without struggle or tremendous effort. Our family was facing about three or four of those things last November. Hamilton was our balm. The tickets said I'm sorry, I love you and We have your back, kiddo, when words were alone were not sufficient or believed. Hamilton tickets were the grand gesture that said things that couldn't be said.

Why do I love to travel? I love to be transported to a new place to experience new foods, new sites, new sounds. Some people travel with their families and use the time to bond. Others travel alone and meet new people. We travel to be transformed, to be in inspired. The reason people love to read and see movies and plays is to be transported to a different time or place, inside of someone else's mind and story.

So it goes with Hamilton, and why not just me but thousands of others are willing to pay more for a ticket to see a show than the cost of the airfare to get to New York to see it. To be transported is why we bought the tickets almost a year ago and were willing to wait.

We went to dinner before the show, with plenty of time to spare. Restaurants in New York are pleasantly efficient without rushing. We stopped at the Hamilton gift shop before the show, but I didn't buy anything because I was in a hurry to get in line. Jack and the Boy jaywalked across the street to get to the Richard Rodgers theater. I feared getting arrested for jaywalking and missing the show. I didn't want to be like the little girl living on Venus in Ray Bradbury's short story "All Summer in a Day" who got locked in a closet during the only hour the sun shone on Venus in seven years. Would I have flipped? Yes. Yes, I would have.

We got to the line around 7:20. I asked the woman in line ahead of me if she had tickets to the show or if she was waiting in line for something else.

"I hope we have tickets," she said as her teenage daughters took selfies. "My husband has them. We better have tickets."

"I have the tickets," he said pulling them out and showing her.

"Why don't you make sure we are in the right place?" she asked her husband. This woman was more neurotic than I was.

He did as he was told. He came back moments later and said, "The doors open at 7:30." Everyone was happy to be there early. I was the most laid back and intense crowd I have ever been in. This family had come from Dallas to seem Hamilton. In the theater, we ran into other friends from Seattle.

The show started. The first few lines of music are jarring, and the words would be considered by most people in polite society to be offensive: "How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman..." The crowd cheered and cheered and cheered.

The only thing the crowd didn't do was cry at the right spots, myself included. One person behind me was sobbing, and thought to myself Newbie... There are at least four songs that had a devastating emotional impact on me the first time I heard the entire soundtrack in one sitting. I was sobbing during "Dear Theodosia," "Burn," "It's Quiet Uptown," and the finale.

When I got to the show, I had heard these songs dozens of times, so much so that I had nearly memorized all of the lyrics. I was slightly jealous of the newbie, hearing it fresh on Broadway, able to feel those emotions live and fresh while the actors were on stage. I wondered about the first performances for the original cast who likely had to listen to an entire audience crying their eyes out night after night.

And I wondered as I sat in the room where it happened. Isn't that what so much of us want, too, to be in the room where it happens?

Halloween and College

Instead of trick-or-treating or going to a Halloween party Tuesday night, Claire-Adele submitted online applications to two colleges while the Boy was at a movie with a bunch of friends. I am glad he wasn't home. The applications were due November 1, but she decided to submit the applications a day early just to get it over with. The websites were having problems on Monday, and there was major freak out in our home. There is enough drama with the applications that I didn't need to add a failing website to the pile and angst and anguish. She is freaked out enough by the whole competitiveness of the process, that I didn't need a late application due to technical errors contribute to her already insanely high level of stress.

Tuesday after dinner and homework, Claire-Adele hunkered down with her laptop at my desk. I cleared out so she could command the space. Jack sat next to her and read the final draft of her answers to the questions. This was the first time either of us saw her application aside from the part we had to fill out with all of our information.

"Maybe we should break out the champagne!" I said. The night before, Jack and Claire-Adele were screaming at each other. I thought I might need to be totally tanked to get through the night.

"I am not having any alcohol until after the marathon," said Jack.

Party pooper, I thought. I looked at Claire-Adele and raised my eyebrows. "Do you want some champagne?" I said. She smiled, "Are you serious?" Yes, I thought. Maybe a half a glass will cut the edge off.

"No," said Jack.

Ugh. I thought. I am not a big drinker but man I didn't want to go through this sober.

I needed a distraction, so I put on my wireless headphones and cranked up Macklemore's "And We Danced."

And we danced
And we cried
And we laughed and had a really really really good time.
Take my hand
Let's have a blast 
A remember this moment for the rest of our lives...

The night before, Claire-Adele was complaining how unfair the college admissions process is, and Jack was arguing against her.

"Some kids needs a leg up," he said. "They don't have as many opportunities as you have." Yes, that it true, but not what a stressed out seventeen year old needs to hear two days before her college applications are due.

"Why do these schools need so many athletes?" she said. "They have such an advantage just getting in." She is right, too, but again, this was not the time to debate the finer points of the college admissions process.

Just as my Macklemore song finished, Jack called me over to read one of Claire-Adele's answers. She wrote that she was inspired to studied politics because of my run for School Board two years ago.

"It's is different than watching an election on television," she wrote. "I remember the mail-biting drama of election night..."

I started to get a little teary. "Maybe you want to save that to a Word file," I said.

Two minutes later, there was hyperventilating from my office.

"The answer is gone," she said. "I meant to do a control-c and I did a control-v and now my perfect answer is gone!"

Jack came to her computer, hit a few "undo's" and the answer was back. Crisis averted. At the point, I decided to walk the dog. When I got back, I volunteered to pick up the Boy from a friend's house. I let Jack hold the bag here.

When I got back, Claire-Adele hit the send button. We were done for now.

The next morning, the New York Times had an article with a subtitle: Yes, college admissions are unfair. If I recall correctly, one-third of students at Harvard are legacies. Colleges consider the wealth of parents to determines who gets in. And colleges still need "an oboe and a goalie."

Which makes me thinks about the Boy. He plays bassoon and he is reasonably athletic. Jack and I went to a fancy college, so the Boy could possibly get legacy status there. Heck, he could phone in the rest of high school and still get in. I am joking, but not by much. On the other hand, why should all of these kids across the country have to kill themselves with stress and effort to get into what is perceived to be a "good" school?

A lottery might be a better choice to determine who gets into college. Kids would still have to apply, but they could get a notice that said "Congrats! You made the lottery. You have a better chance if you are a goalie or play an obscure musical instrument, but you are worthy! And if your parents have money, all the better!" It might not be more fair, but at least it would be transparent.