Roots and Wings

The day after our final child—our oldest son—moved out last November, we went on a short road trip to IKEA and a cemetery. I hoped to replace an accidentally broken glass canister but then I spotted a green floral William-Morris-like coverlet and I remembered something I’d read that flipped the idea of the empty nest, suggesting when the kids did move out, it was an opportunity for refeathering the nest. So the bedspread came to the checkout with us.

I wanted to visit the cemetery because one of my ancestors was buried there. My mother had long said that when I reached A Certain Age, I too would develop an interest in genealogy. It turned out she was both right and wrong. In me—a novelist—the interest has turned quite specific and it has turned to this ancestor who died prematurely exactly a hundred years ago, and his father whose profound grief shaped generations of my family. I read Carl Jung who said his work was to do the work left undone by his ancestors. That is how it feels as I write a novel based on their lives.

In the book I’m writing, I play with the facts but not with the truth. But the day after our own oldest son moved out, I wanted to visit this cemetery.

Three days post-partum with that son, as my milk came in, I cried and said a line I would later bequeath to a character in another novel: someday he’s going to grow up and leave us. At the very start, that grief, that homesickness, was baked in. It took more than a quarter-century for the day to come—an unseasonably warm November day with thin sunlight and strong winds—but it had come.,

Those strong winds found us on the top of a hilly cemetery, with a harbor visible on one side of us and a bay on the other. I knew the bay well: when I was a child, my family was evacuated to this city after a dangerous train derailment in our own city, the largest peacetime evacuation in North America before Hurricane Katrina. The anxiety of this evacuation was compounded by the fact that my mother was fully pregnant with my brother, and that a few years before, my healthy sister had been stillborn after complications during delivery. We walked that bay the November we were evacuated, while my mother made regular visits to the hospital to check in. My brother would be safely delivered a day or two after we returned home.

My mother had once visited this grave with her father. She recalled a gravestone of a small lamb and lettering worn down over the years. The Internet told us the section of the cemetery in which he was buried. And so under the strong winds and thin sunlight, my husband and I searched every lamb, looking for the one that had gone astray. We looked again, including parting branches of a bush that had grown around one such grave. I realized I wasn’t leaving until we found it. My husband fortunately broadened his search to grave markers that weren’t lambs, calling me over when he found the grave: a marble cube with an open book on top, and the words beloved son inscribed below his name. My husband slipped away, then, to the car, allowing me time alone. I took pictures and took in the facts of the grave, the location and the views, but it wasn’t like visiting the grave of someone I’ve loved, and my book and my work isn’t about the son but the father. In my book, the son is a kind of cipher. As I’ve written it the story of Abraham and the near-sacrifice of Isaac keeps coming to mind. Because how does a parent let his beloved son go into the will of God? Because it is not a lamb provided instead when Abraham’s hand is stayed, but a ram.

So my son going off into the world, having forgotten to be vaccinated against diseases endemic to the place he would be visiting, not polio but other diseases that shouldn’t but could end up with a grave marker and a grieving parent.

There’s an old proverb that a parent gives a child two things: roots and wings. I read that before I had kids and I believed it to be deeply true. I still believe it. I believe we have given that to our own kids. I also believe it’s what I was instinctively reaching for myself that windy day: the pilgrimage to the cemetery and the visit to IKEA. The walking and bending and feeling the wind provided a knowing in my body of where my people came from and were rooted, and the trip to IKEA, the refeathering the nest, was not as frivolous as it might seem. It was the wings. It was the ram in the thicket. It was the looking forward with hope to a future beyond one where children lived at home, to one where flowers climbed across our bed at night and perhaps even into our dreams of new life blossoming in November.

Sea Change

Many of us have heard the term sea change in business conversations—words used to describe a real transformation—intriguingly the expression doesn’t originally come from sailors or the sea, but from Shakespeare, who wrote in The Tempest, “Full fathom five thy father lies/Of his bones are coral made:/Those are pearls that were his eyes:/Nothing of him that doth fade/But doth suffer a sea-change/Into something rich and strange.”

Last week I visited the ocean on a whirlwind trip to Boston. There was no time for a long visit but I wasn’t going to get that close without putting my feet in the water. The problem was that the beach we visited was littered with broken glass.

I don’t mean the sea glass my family used to collect at the cottage we visited when the kids were small. It sat alongside a beach that was tidal, salt water filled and emptied the beach twice a day. Someone told us that summer residents there would save their wine bottles all summer and dash them against the rocks as they left in the early autumn, knowing that by the time they returned the sharp edges of glass would have been softened. We collected handfuls of that glass that had experienced a sea change (unlike the glass on the Boston shoreline).

A sea-change “into something rich and strange” certainly describes the real transformation that happens at the start of parenthood. There, a person’s identity is cracked open and at first the edges are often jagged as the nights of unbroken sleep, the bodily changes, and the incessant demands of small people.

When my kids were very young, I grabbed at moments of solitude. I cultivated opportunities to draw inward, to be centred and quiet and still  because, as Anne Morrow Lindbergh says in her book Gift from the Sea, my life was one of zerrissenheit, a German word which can be translated as torn-to-pieces-hood.

Lindbergh writes: “With a new awareness, both painful and humorous, I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has to do primarily with distractions. The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children; the running of a house with its thousand details; human relationships with their myriad pulls–woman’s normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life. The problem is … how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life; how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal forces tend to pull one off center; how to remain strong, no matter what shocks come in at the periphery and tend to crack the hub of the wheel.” 

I lived a lot of years in torn-to-pieceshood and while I loved much of it, I also worked hard to have regular respite from that world.

But there was another sea change ahead. In a later edition of Gift from the Sea, Lindbergh describes it:

“The oyster bed as the tide of life ebbed…was left high and dry. A most uncomfortable stage followed, not sufficiently anticipated and barely hinted at in my book. In bleak honesty, it can only be called ‘the abandoned shell.’ Plenty of solitude and a sudden panic with how to fill it characterized this period. With me, it was not simply a question of filling up the space or the time. I had many activities and even a well-established vocation to pursue. But when a mother is left, the lone hub of a wheel, with no other lives revolving about her,  she faces a total re-orientation. It takes time to re-find the center of gravity.”

This is precisely the challenge facing many parents this month of the year. It comes into my play in my book, Renaissance. This stage can feel like the Boston beach with its shards of broken glass, its unexpected stabs of pain.

As my kids began to leave home, I read a book about the empty nest that broke down the percentage of parental reactions. It said something like half of all parents have mixed feelings that mostly get absorbed into daily life pretty quickly, a new normal. Another 35% are elated: they’ve put plans on hold or their kids have cramped their style and now they are ready to get going. And then there were the small percentage that experienced the leaving as loss, as grief.

That was me when my kids started to leave. I was in good company, though.

Lindbergh counsels: “One has to come to terms with oneself not only in a new stage of life but in a new role. Life without children, living for oneself – the words at first ring with a hollow sound.” She writes, “We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity…”

Again, this played into my writing of Renaissance. My main character, Liz, is a new empty nester and she didn’t have the same experience of grief that I did, but she still had to figure out what next as we all do after any sea change. That’s why it isn’t just a midlife book but a book for anyone whose life feels jagged and who needs the transformation of a sea change, who needs a re-naissance.

In my next post I’ll tell the story of the very day I became a full-fledged empty nester but for now let me let Lindbergh’s words wash over you like a wave of salt water: “Perhaps this is the most important thing for me to take back from beach-living: simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of a relationship is valid.” 

Nun Cake

Most of the meals Liz eats at the convent in Italy are ones I made up, but her first meal was our first meal, and her experience was mine:

 “I wrongly assumed that the third course—the pasta—was the main course but it was followed by platters of pan-fried whitefish and bowls of green beans and potatoes, and then a cheese course and fruit. It was served by a nun with a face like a wizened apple who urged us to “Mangia! Mangia!” I had been hungry beforehand, but by the time I finished the fish and potatoes, I couldn’t find space for a single bite of cheese, though I looked longingly at the great wedges. I didn’t know what the nun was saying, but I could tell from her tone and face that she was chastising my lack of intestinal fortitude.”

I still feel disappointed that I didn’t have the capacity to eat chunks of fresh Parmigiano Reggiano because never again in our stay were we offered the cheese again. (We had to go to Parma to get samples!)

But one of the dishes I most enjoyed served by our nuns was never served by Liz’s nuns, and yet it’s one I want to share with you now. Because after we came back, I found a recipe that approximated it. Sometimes I wonder whether, if I were to return to the convent (impossible since it got sold to become a luxury hotel), I might prefer my own version of this cake that we always call Nun Cake.

Nun Cake is similar to a pound cake – so called, apparently, because it contains a pound each of sugar, eggs, flour and butter – but it’s simpler and has less butter and is hard to mess up.

(I guess if it’s a nun cake, I should say it gives you grace.)

In any event, here’s the recipe:

Mix together by hand (but don’t overmix): ½ c. softened butter, ¾ c sugar (or slightly more), 2 eggs, 1 tsp vanilla,1 tsp salt, ½ c. buttermilk (milk + 1 tsp lemon juice), 1-1/2 c flour, and 2 tsp baking powder.

Put in a buttered cake pan of any size and shape and bake at 375 degrees F for about 40 minutes or until golden. I often make mine in a round 9” pan but you could make this in a loaf pan too.

It’s a really simple cake, but it is delicious and is lovely served with fresh, unsweetened fruit.

Mangia! Mangia!