A River Runs Through It

The Boy has become a Montanan.

He has lived here for eleven months and is now a resident. 

"I don't plan on living in Seattle ever again permanently," he said. I think the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (aka CHAZ) might have been hard for him to explain to his non-Seattle friends at school. To the rest of the world, they saw CHAZ and thought "WTF?" To Seattlites, we knew this was the uber-left co-opting the Black Live Matter movement to justify taxing Amazon, not to change policing practices towards people of color.

The Boy is becoming an outdoorsman. He imagines his first car will be a pickup truck. He likes Dodge Chargers. He thinks there is nothing inherently wrong with Republicans and one day he might own a gun to hunt.

The Boy has become a Montanan.

Since the Boy can't mountain bike or hike or ski with his newly repaired knee, he has found a new sport. The Boy collects sports the way I collect books: just because I found a new book doesn't mean I don't love the ones I've already read. This sport is one that will likely never leave him: fly fishing. 

"In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing," opens Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It, a book read and re-read by the Boy. We watched the movie tonight at the Boy's request. The story takes place in Missoula, about 150 miles from the Boy's school. In Montana terms, 150 miles is considered the next town over. The scenery is breathtaking.

Norman's brother, Paul, is played by a young Brad Pitt. Paul is charming and smart and handsome and an artist when it comes to fly fishing. He also has a gambling problem and some other addictions that in the end ruin his life and break the hearts of his parents and sibling.

"Why do the people who need help the most refuse it?" Norman's girlfriend, J.C., asks. Her own brother is a very hot mess, but lacks the kindness and grace of Paul.

I was talking to a fellow boarding school mom the other day and she was moaning about the cost. Another parent a few months ago also kvetched about the cost. While I have no solid proof, my guess is that these families have some means. If they can afford this, why are they complaining? Don't they know they are lucky to be able to save their sons, cost be damned?

Why do I think this? I am the queen of investing and saving money. Shouldn't I be evaluating the cost-benefit analysis of this spending? Why am I so okay with shelling out an obscene amount of cash when people who I am guessing have way more money than me are complaining?

My brother was Paul Maclean, minus the fly fishing.

I couldn't save my brother, but perhaps I can save my son. If I lose him to Montana, I am okay with that, as long as he finds himself.

The Third Wheel

Monday morning this week I woke up and I was in a bad mood. When I am grouchy, I try to do this exercise where I ask myself:

1. What am I feeling?
2. Why am I feeling this way? Is there a cause?
3. What am I going to do about it? How will I react?

I’ve had to adopt this strategy since I started working again as it is not acceptable or sufficient to haul off and tell people they are pissing me off. But don’t think I’m all zen or whatever. I’m not.

So Monday I am grouchy.  Did I watch too much Ali “being a stay-at-home mom is like being in solitary confinement” Wong and now I am hostile at the three people who put me there?

Yeah, possibly.

This past weekend was my daughter’s prom and Mother’s Day.

First, the boutonniere debacle. Claire-Adele ordered flowers to be delivered for the prom. For Winter Ball, her boyfriend wanted to get her a corsage and she did not see the point of spending an hour of money she earned on something that she’d wear for a night then it would shrivel and die. For prom, she got the point and ordered flowers without fuss. She failed to check her voicemail until Saturday afternoon when she heard a message from earlier in the week from the florist saying they couldn’t deliver her flowers because they were slammed with Mother’s Day orders. She learned Saturday around 1:00. She was leaving for dinner at 7:00.

She was stressed. Jack drilled her with questions: Did you get a confirmation? Did you call them? Did you get your money back? The Boy said he was going to call the florist and yell at them until they brought her a flower. She became more stressed.

I looked at the Boy and Jack and said, "You guys need to go buy some bike parts" as I shooed them out the door. Claire-Adele went to her room and cried.

"What do you need me to do?" I asked. "The roses are in bloom in front of the house. We can make something."

"Leave me alone for five minutes," she said through sobs.

I thought for three minutes. I yelled up the stairs, "I can call Met Market and see if they can get you a flower."

"I am texting Robby," she said. "Okay, call Met Market."

I did. The woman at the other end of the line was as cheerful as a florist could possibly be before Mother's Day. "I can get you something by six. Does that work?"

"Sure." I told Claire-Adele.

"Robby got flowers from the Safeway where he used to work," she said. "Can you cancel yours?"

After the crisis was narrowly averted, neither Robby or I were going to cancel our flowers. Better to have two boutonnieres than none. "Robby can wear two," I said.

When he arrived and flower time came, Eleanor pinned on Robby's lapel the flower Robby brought. Of course she should. He's the boyfriend. I'm just the mom. It is my job to stand back and let her stand on her own. She should take his flower.

But still. I decided to not let a good rose go to waste, so I unwrapped the flower and put it in a vase by my kitchen sink.

Then next day was Mother's Day. Jack and I decided to go for a bike ride, and I was delighted the Boy decided to join us. It was a warm, sunny day, prefect for a ride across the 520 bridge. When we got to the park on the Eastside, we admired the view for a bit and then I was ready to go back home.

"I'm hungry," said the Boy. Which means his hunger has slowly been building for a while and now he was ravenous. 

"Why don't we go back and got to lunch in Ballard?" Ballard is full of fun places to go for lunch on a Saturday. That suggestion was met with ridicule from Jack and the Boy.

"It is only three more miles to Bellevue," Jack said, not looking at the elevation gain. As we left, we rode down a giant hill. Which meant on the way back I'd have to ride up a giant hill. Fuck. And then there was the mile uphill climb. The ride to Ballard is along the water and is as flat as a any ride you can find in Seattle.

Jack and the Boy were consistently twenty yards ahead of me. Once in a while, Jack would turn around and yell "You can do it!" Just because I could do it, doesn't mean I wanted to. And this was Mother's Day. It was supposed to be my ride and it was turning into theirs. I was getting pissed and I was the weak link, holding them back. Plus, I was carrying the Boy's water.

Literally.

We were the sweatiest people Bellevue Square has ever seen. Truckloads of people were dressed up and at the mall on the nicest weekend day of spring so far this year. It was weird. I didn't bring my saddle bags, so I couldn't shop--for much! I did manage to get a little "treat yourself" Mother's Day goodies in my fanny pack from Lego and Lush. The boy got Jamba Juice.

I was in need of some powerful feminine energy after riding with the Boys. And lip gloss.

The ride from Bellevue Square back to the 520 bridge wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. When I got to the bottom of the steep part, I found a mantra--In two months, I'll be in London. London is flat. There are no hills in London. Magically, the hill I was terrified about wasn't nearly as killer as I thought it would be. Evan, my physical therapist, would have been proud.

At the end of the day, I had fun slogging to Bellevue Square, even though I was swearing under my breath for the second half of the ride. I had 16 miles to add to my "Bike Everywhere" log for May.

So why was I so grumpy on Monday? Did I watch too much Ali Wong over the weekend and I was deeply pondering the inequity women face in the world?

Perhaps it is the realization that for so long, my world revolved around them, and that there never will be a day where their world revolves around me--not that it should. Still--I'd like a weekend where I am not the third wheel in my family events.

Ma Famille

A few months ago, I spit into a vial and mailed it off to Ancestry.com where I would await information about my ethnic heritage and be linked up with others who shared my genes. For many people, the results would be predictable, but for me, not entirely. My mom was adopted at birth in 1944. My father's side showed up on my family tree, but my mom's side was empty.

Until a few weeks ago.

I hadn't been to the ancestry website in ages, but I thought I'd check in. I had gotten an inner-ancestry message from another member. Ancestry had sent me an email a few months ago telling me I had a message, but I didn't open it thinking it was a sales pitch to upgrade my membership. The message was from a possible third or fourth cousin asking if I knew so-and-so, her delict grandfather who impregnated her grandmother and left. She wanted to find out about the scoundrel before she died. I had no recollection of hearing stories about a distant relative who scoundrel, but I replied anyway, even though I had no idea how we were connected.

Then, I saw I had a new "close" relative, someone who popped up between my aunt and my cousin. I called my dad to see if this woman was on his tree. She wasn't, which meant she was on my mom's side of the family.

I had been a little skeptical about spitting into the cup in the first place. What if there were people out there who didn't know that their grandma had a child out of wedlock or whatever seventy plus years ago, and now an entire family may have a bunch of skeletons uncovered. My mom's bio-mother was named Emily Corona and when Emily had a baby in 1944, she never could have imaged that in 2017 people would be able to track all of this down via technology that wasn't even imaged at the time. Would I want to ruin a bunch of people's lives that I didn't know?

I called my dad and asked what he thought. He thought it was cool. This was the fruit he had been wanting this tree to bear. He asked if he could be a custodian (or something) of my account so he could contact possible relatives of my mother. Since my mother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's a few years ago, he has amped up his search for her family since she couldn't do it herself. She couldn't even spit into a cup to enter her own DNA into Ancestry.com, so my father needed me to be the conduit.

My Aunt Lorraine came to visit Seattle with my cousin at the time I found about this new possible relative. This was the first time I had seen my aunt in eight years. My family and I were busy with their visit, so I put Ancestry.com on the back burner. Two weeks later, my dad came to town--the first time he has had a break or vacation in five years. Even though my mom is in a nursing home, he had been afraid to leave town in case something bad might happen to her while he was gone. We didn't think about the Ancestry.com stuff, either.

The day my father flew back to Ohio, I got a message from Marissa, the possible relative.

"Do you know Emily Corona?" That was all it said. I wanted to talk to my dad before I replied, but he was on a plane. Before I contacted Marissa, I wanted to know if he had contacted her first. When we talked Thursday, he told me he hadn't talked to her.

I was nervous about replying. What if Emily were her mother or aunt, and she never knew one of her family members had another kid?

It turns out Marissa was adopted, too, and her bio-mother was Emily Corona. I figured that Marissa was my mom's half-sister since in the DNA stack-up she was not as close as my Aunt Lorraine but closer than my cousin. I emailed Marissa and told her my dad would likely be in touch. My dad called me yesterday afternoon saying he had talked to Marissa on the phone for an hour.

"What do think of all of this?" asked Jack. "It is not like you know her. She is a stranger. All you have in common is DNA. You have more in common with our neighbors, with Kate and Christy."

I was thinking about this. Now that we live in the hinterlands of the Pacific Northwest, we don't see our families very often. This spring, we saw Jack's sister when we went to Philadelphia. It was the first time we had seen her eight years. My aunt just visited, as did my dad. My son didn't know that my Aunt Lorraine was my dad's sister. He missed the memo, but why would he otherwise know? He met my aunt once when he was seven and my dad wasn't there. When I was a kid, all of my extended family except for my Uncle Bob all lived in the Chicago area. I'd see them for Christmas, Easter, Fourth of July, birthdays, graduations, and ballet recitals, plus major events like weddings and funerals. Even after my parents moved to Ohio, we'd trek to Chicago several times and year. I moved there for college and stayed for years.

My kids didn't grow up with family in town. They have to get on a plane to see relatives--long-drawn out, expensive flights with multiple time zones changes. It is not simple to pop into Ohio for the weekend as it takes a day to get there and a day to get back.

So what do I think of this? As far as my kids are concerned, they have never met my Uncle Bob or many of Jack's aunts and uncles. Jack has family in Thailand that he met once and my kids have never met. We still consider them family, but I wonder what my kids will think of family when they are older. Our family is pretty much just the four of us.

So where does Marissa fall into this?

I think of her perhaps as a new fourth or fifth or sixth branch of my family. I have my dad's side and my mom's adopted side who I knew growing up. I am part of Jack's family--I know both his mother's and father's sides. I have my kids with Jack. My Grandma Conti will always be my grandma -- the one who always bought Eggo blueberry waffles when my brother and I came to visit. My Grandpa Conti made braciole for Christmas dinner. When my Grandpa Conti died in 1997, my mom gave me some money from his estate. When I told her I was going to use the money to take a trip to Thailand and buy a ticket for Jack's mom who hadn't seen her own mother in twenty-seven years, my mom said it was a good investment. She had never been to Sicily with her father, and she wished she had. She thought it was important that I should meet the family that my future children would be a part of, to understand the culture from which Jack's mother came.

Families grow and families contract. Marissa is a new branch, like a new shoot popping off a rose bush or orchid. She doesn't take anything away from my current family, just as I don't take anything away from hers. She is new to me, but so was Jack at one point, and Claire-Adele and the Boy.

Ancestry, Part 2

Yesterday was a big day. I collected my saliva sample for my Ancestry.com DNA test to figure out where I am from. After lunch, I brushed my teeth and set a timer for thirty minutes during which I would not eat, drink or chew gum, which is hard for me to do after lunch. I usually sip on a cup of tea after lunch and chew gum. I didn't want my results to come back "German, Swedish, Jewish, Italian, and Peppermint."

I mailed my sample off today. Now I wait for six to eight weeks.

I had a friend whose father was into genealogy. She warned me I might discover things I'd rather not know, and I can see that. "I could have lived my whole life not knowing I was related to an advisor to a fascist."

There was an interesting clause when I went online to register my spit. They asked if I wanted to be part of their research study. They didn't say what they were studying, just that they would be looking at DNA and historical trends. I decided to say no. They could have legitimate areas of research, but I didn't know if they were trying to prove some crazy nonsense about ethnicity or race, like "Everyone who descended from King George III is a genius. Everyone who didn't isn't and should be purged."

Ancestry

My mother was adopted as an infant. About twenty years ago, my mother started looking for her birth parents. I didn't know she was looking for them. She told my brother, and he told me.

Fast forward twenty years, there are now companies like ancestry.com where you can mail them a saliva sample, and they will run a test on your DNA to find where you are from and connect you with long-lost relatives.

This is fine for people who know who they are related to, but it is kind of scary when half of my family tree will be populated people I don't know. Since the day I was born, my maternal grandfather was Joseph Conti, and my maternal grandmother was Anne Liberti Conti. I have cousins and aunts who I have known forever who will not appear on this genetic and electronic family tree.

I am not sure I am ready for this, but my dad wants to do this for my mom before she dies of Alzheimer's. She doesn't have the capability to spit into a cup now. Her adoptive parents are dead, so there is no fear of offending them.

But what does this new service do to people who might not have known they were adopted, or for women who perhaps gave up a child for adoption years ago and now have another family? I suppose they could choose not to spit in the cup, but their sister or daughter might, and those connections might appear.

Will I want to meet these new members of my family tree? Would they want to meet me?