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Was there anything unusual about your birth?

I was born in the middle of an ice storm.

My mother was forty-three at the time and the doctors had warned her that I would almost certainly be deaf and might well have Down Syndrome. My father was recovering from kidney surgery.

Mom had arranged with a neighbor to drive her to the nearest hospital—half an hour away—and bring our car back so that my father could get his rest and join us the next day. But when the labor pains began around ten o’clock at night and my mother called Mrs. Bailey, she was too afraid to drive at night on the icy roads. My mother said that was fine, she would drive herself, if Mrs. Bailey would just come along to bring the car back after dawn. I’ve never heard any details of that drive, but they made it.

I was born about three-thirty in the morning. The call woke my father who said that for a third girl they could have waited until nine o’clock. He loved that story when I was younger, but later apologized to me, telling me that he little knew at the time just how lucky he was.
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How did you decide to get married?

I have always wanted to be married. My parents had a very strong partnership and I’ve always wanted that in my life. I was generally goal oriented in my personal life, always viewing relationships as potential lifelong commitments--in some ways that was not the best attitude to take, but it did make a good filter that mostly kept me from getting stuck in relationships that weren’t headed in that direction.

At twenty-seven I was starting to feel that time was running out. It’s funny to look back now, when twenty-seven seems so young, but at the time it felt that I had been dating for so long without finding the right match that perhaps the search was doomed to failure. I had started thinking seriously about becoming a single parent. And then I met Jason.

From the start my relationship with Jason felt comfortable and easy. We had so much in common, so many shared tastes and dreams, with just enough difference to keep things from being boring. He was smart and beautiful, funny and talented. We could talk for hours and laughed over so many shared references that we had to be careful not to shut other people out of our conversation. I was always happy to be spending time with him and being with him made me a nicer person. When we had been together only a few months, people assumed we’d been a couple for years. We certainly had our differences, but being together felt deeply right.

A couple of months after we started dating, we got into a conversation with a friend of Jason who said of the woman he was dating that she wasn’t someone he would marry. I asked if she knew that and he said no, that it would just hurt her, and I pointed out that he was treating her with a severe lack of respect. Afterward I told Jason that although we had only been together a brief time, I saw ours as a marriage track relationship--not that I was planning to marry him, but that I was assuming that if things continued to go well for a year or so, then we would probably be talking about it at that point--and that if he felt otherwise, or came to the conclusion that he could not see himself marrying me, then I expected him to let me know that.

Furthermore, I told him that if he were not ready to discuss marriage within two years, then I would probably move on. I liked him and we were good together and I was willing to do this just for the fun of it, but I had places to be. I think he was a little overwhelmed by that in the moment, but took it all in and agreed that was fair.

A month or so later, he started talking from time to time about “when we live together” and after a few instances of this, I stopped him and explained that I was not interested in living with him until we were engaged. That was not for any moral scruple, but a very practical concern. I had gone through the experience of ending relationships also disrupting my living situation and decided to avoid that if I could. While an engagement can certainly be broken, it at least requires a more serious commitment than simply signing a lease together because it’s more economical. Jason said he understood and stopped mentioning it for about six months. When he brought it up again I reminded him how I felt and he smiled and said “I remember.”

From that point on, we basically acted engaged. On my 30th birthday, when we had been together for a little over a year, we were having a deep conversation over dinner about values and plans, when I stopped him and said that we seemed to be talking like people who were planning to be married and that I was starting to trust in that. I needed to know that we were on the same page, that I wasn’t being played for a fool. He assured me that he was right there with me and saw us being married as the next step.

So I started looking at wedding venues and over the next several months we often spent weekend days visiting hotels, gardens, museums and wineries. But we still weren’t officially engaged. I kept waiting, but nothing seemed to happen. Finally I set a deadline of a planned trip to visit his parents--I wanted a ring on my finger and for him to tell them that we were planning to be married. Rather than buy a ring and present me with it, Jason felt that we should shop for the ring together. This led us as close to breaking up as we have ever come.

Jason and I have very different shopping styles. I might have gone to as many as three stores, tried on half a dozen rings, and picked the one that I liked best. Jason, however, wants to be sure that he has found the right choice, and the only way for him to be sure of that is to examine every possible option. So he dragged me to nine different shops and had me try on what seemed like hundreds of rings. I tried on rings until my fingers were sore and I was tired and hungry and didn’t even want to marry him any more if I had to try on one more ring. Fortunately, we gave up for that day.

The next day we went to a little boutique a few blocks from my apartment--I still hadn’t let him move in--and bought a simple sapphire ring with diamonds on either side. It was ready a week later, but Jason wasn’t available to pick it up that day, so I collected it from the jeweler, gave it to him on our way out to dinner that evening and he put it on my finger at the table. And the next day we flew up to Seattle and told his folks.

It was all terribly anticlimactic. I didn’t even realize at the time how disappointed I was. I could have proposed to him, but all along I was the one setting the pace and focusing on marriage. It was important to me that he do the asking, if only so he couldn’t say later that it was all my idea. For years, whenever friends would get engaged with a romantic surprise, I would have trouble not letting my grief overwhelm my joy for them, and I cried over many YouTube videos of over-the-top proposals, even though I would have been entirely happy with something much more modest. It took more than a decade for him to understand how painful it was for me not to have a good proposal story, and to apologize. It’s still a sadness for me, but now that it no longer feels like a conflict between us, it has been easier to let go.

The important thing is that we did decide to marry. We found a beautiful location at Paradise Ridge Winery in Santa Rosa, California and Jason was a real partner in all the wedding plans. September 16, 2000 was a beautiful day in every way and the twenty years since then have been better than I could ever have imagined.
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Doing meaningful work with people I love.

Competence is my favorite emotional state. It is often underestimated and ignored, but when people talk about “flow,” or “being in the zone,” a lot of what we seem to mean is that feeling of knowing what you’re doing, knowing how to do it, being able to do it easily, and being proud to be doing it. To be focused on the task, being in the moment, not wishing that you were doing something else--that is bliss.

I love to work with other people. Not any other people--probably the vast majority of people I’ve worked with have been somewhere between completely neutral and actively annoying, or frustrating. But for me part of loving someone is to love to work together. Unloading the dishwasher with my husband, reorganizing a closet with my daughter, analyzing a script with my boyfriend, designing a set with my friend, Jo--the simplest task becomes a delight with the right partner. The ability to communicate tightly, the keen awareness of each other, the ease of sharing perspectives, and the trust in each other’s capability. all of these manifest and reinforce the connections between us.

As the child of a Protestant minister in a small town, I was part of a family business. We all participated in my father’s ministry, taking leadership roles in the age-appropriate groups, helping out wherever more hands were needed, or just showing up to create a seed-kernel of participants. We sang in the choir, worked in the kitchen, organized fundraisers, staffed the nursery, participated in youth group. At home we learned how to take messages as soon as we could reach the phone and served as a dinner-table advisory board for my father’s stories of the day. We presented a public image of family harmony and achievement that reflected my father’s ability as a shepherd for his flock.

Creating meaning in daily chores is a discipline and, sometimes, an effort. It can be challenging to find real satisfaction in the laundry. It’s much easier for me when there’s an element of performance, or presentation in the delivery, an opportunity for feedback, for me to enjoy the audience’s enjoyment.

I love to cook in part because of the delight in hearing someone moan softly at the first bite, or ask for seconds...and then thirds. I rarely fail completely at cooking, but when I make something that is only adequate--something my family are content to eat, but would never ask for again-- it feels like failure.

Doing theatre weaves all of these threads together. Each person brings their own skills and talents to a different aspect of the production. Whether it’s compelling portrayals, or brilliant work with power tools, each piece is important, every person’s role is essential. Working with people I love and building community to expand that circle, makes the resulting productions not merely entertainment, but a sharing with the wider community of our audience from our vital core. But it is not in the moment of performance that my greatest satisfaction arises, but in the joy of watching a scene come together, or gasping as the lights turn on for the first time after hours of hanging them, or grinning at each other as we figure out a solution to make the set work. It is not the result, but the experience--not the product, but the act of work that I find perfect happiness.
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When I first encountered this question, I thought surely I must have done, but I couldn’t think of a story. Then came our most recent trip to Iceland.

Everyone tells you that if humans were really rational, we’d be much more worried about travelling by car than almost anything else we do. That lesson really came home to me as we drove back to Reykjavik from a lovely day on the Snaefellsnes peninsula.

We’d gone up to visit the Vatnshellir Cave, inspiration for Journey to the Center of the Earth. It’s an impressive magma tube, but the real highlight is the scenery along the way. Snow covered volcanoes on one side, pounding waves on the other, mysterious standing rocks and vast fields in between make for stunning views. We stopped along the way for a delicious lunch at the Langaholt Guest House and made it up to the cave in time for our three o’clock tour.

The day was overcast and colder than it had been in Reykjavik, with a strong wind blowing. Traversing the hundred feet from the welcome center to the cave entrance was a very chilly moment. Our guide was charming and told the obviously old jokes with the right amount of sheepishness. Standing in silence in the absolute darkness underground is always a profound experience. Jo had a little trouble with the open spiral staircase down into the depths and was very glad to be back on the surface.

I drove about halfway back toward Reykjavik before we stopped for gas and Jason took over. I fell asleep in the passenger seat and was awoken by Jo and Alice simultaneously saying “Whoa!” from the back seat. When I opened my eyes I couldn’t see a think out the windshield. We were in a complete whiteout of snow gusting across the road.

As each gust enveloped us in snow, Jason would slow down as quickly as he could. The road was also slippery with snow and two or three times I could feel the tires fishtailing over the pavement. From the drive out I knew that what was on either side of the highway was usually a fairly steep drop into a ditch and then either farmed fields or vast expanses of lava rocks. Each time the car began to slip I imagined us going off the road, the car rolling over into the sharp rocks, and us all freezing to death or dying from our injuries before anyone would find us. So, I thought, this is how it ends.

But Jason kept the car on the road and as darkness fell we approached the tunnel under the Hvalfjörður. We were all looking forward to more than three miles out of the wind and snow. As we came down the hill toward the tunnel, Jason said “What is that?” and we looked across to see a line of headlights stopped all the way up the hill on the other side of the fjord, with little blue lights twinkling their way down the empty lane opposite. There was a crash in the tunnel. It was closed.

We sat at the rotary where traffic turns left down onto the tunnel approach, trying to think if there were any option. The road around the fjord would add another thirty miles to the journey. The weather showed no signs of clearing for at least a couple of hours. The sign pointing to the right said “Akranes”.

What time is it, I asked, after about ten minutes of sitting there. Six-thirty, with at least another hour to Reykjavik, even if the tunnel opened right this minute. So we drove into Akranes while Jo found a plausible restaurant online and guided us to it.

The Gamla Kaupfélagið was almost deserted on a Wednesday night in the middle of a snowstorm, but they welcomed us in and gave us a marvelous meal. We had a wonderfully earthy lobster soup and wild mushroom risotto, delicious lamb and salmon, and one of the best tenderloins of beef I’ve ever eaten. We would have been perfectly happy to find an open pub, but this was a meal almost worth the trip!

Snow was still falling as we finished dinner, but our server told us that the tunnel was open, so we set off again. I offered to drive, but Jason said he was okay to continue. We made it to the tunnel, enjoyed 5770 meters of shelter, and then continued out into the night.

For miles at a time, Jason navigated from one post to the next, through the snow. He would sight one and drive toward it, hoping that by the time he reached it, the next would be visible. If it wasn’t, he’d slow or stop until the wind revealed it, and then proceed. Sometimes there were streetlights for a stretch, which helped. When the drop-off to the side was especially steep there would be a section of guardrail, which was lovely. He kept one eye on the GPS, to know whether the road was curving or straight ahead, because there was no way to know from looking. It was tedious and terrifying.

Finally we caught up to a pickup truck and with great relief followed them. They were actually moving a little more slowly than Jason had been, but it was wonderful to let them find the path for us. About ten miles from the city, the road we’d followed south turns to the west and at that point the wind was no longer blowing across the highway and we could see clearly ahead. Before long we were navigating the tiny streets to our flat.

We kicked off our boots in the entryway and shed our coats as we moved into the living room. We didn’t die, I said to Jo. She agreed that while it had seemed unlikely a few times, Jason had done a spectacular job and gotten us home safely.

We spent the next day wandering around the city, not ready to get back in the car yet. And then the following day we went snowmobiling up on Langjokull glacier. Much safer.
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If you could go anywhere and do anything, what would your perfect Valentine’s Day be?

Valentine’s Day, in particular, isn’t that big a deal for me. We often don’t go out that evening, because—as a friend put it—it’s amateur night at all the fine dining establishments. In general my ideal for the night is to go for a walk together, have a lovely meal one way or another, and do something story-worthy.

I’ve had a few Valentine’s Days that were particularly memorable:

My worst breakup happened in January and left me feeling deeply defeated. The relationship I’d spent three years in ended very badly when I dumped him for the guy he’d pushed me to have sex with, only to be dumped in turn three weeks later when that guy decided to stay with the girlfriend who had pushed him into having sex with me, and my original boyfriend had already moved on to the woman who left her husband for him. I ended up crashing with friends for a few months and being congratulated by people who’d never liked my boyfriend for having something I’d poured myself into for three years come crashing down.

Valentine’s Day was approaching and I was feeling really low when a friend from college, also single at the time, proposed that the two of us go out to dinner together that night. We spent a marvelous evening at Helmand, an Afghani restaurant in Cambridge, eating and drinking delicious things, bitching about men as we laughed up a storm, and eventually deciding that we would look for a place to live together. After weeks of feeling defeated and broken, that night I began to really believe I could build a new life for myself.

A couple of years ago my husband and I had rehearsal on the night itself, so we celebrated a couple of days early. We went to the Tasting Counter—one of my very favorite restaurants at the moment—and had a divine multicourse tasting dinner with sublime wine pairings. When that wrapped up we checked the movie listings and decided to see Dead Pool, which was opening that night. So we spent the first part of the evening in hushed, refined sybaritism, and the latter part howling in laughter at Ryan Reynolds’ crude antics. It was a glorious night!

But the most significant Valentine’s Day was the first I spent with Jason. We had been together only a few months and after a couple of years of being mostly-single I was still pretty tender around the idea of the holiday, not wanting to make a big deal of it and not wanting to do anything canonical. I noticed that Neil Gaiman, whom both of us liked and neither of us had seen at that point, was doing a reading at the Palace of Fine Arts that night.

So after dinner at my house we drove into the city and took our places in the darkened auditorium. Neil is a marvelous reader, particularly of his own stories, which tend to have a dark, wry humor even as they are horrifying you, or wrenching at your emotions. One of the stories he read that night was “The Wedding Present,” a story that is hidden in the Introduction of a collection of his short stories called Smoke and Mirrors, as a treat for people who read introductions.

It’s about a couple who receive an envelope at their wedding that tells the story of their relationship, magically getting longer as the years pass, but a darker, twisted alternate version where everything that goes well and right in their real lives, doesn’t, and the story-versions become increasingly unhappy with each other and with themselves. I won’t give away the ending for those who’ve yet to read it, but it’s a beautiful story of some loves being worth the pain. In the car afterward we cried together and I said that I thought we might love that deeply and Jason said that he already did. We’ve seen Neil read many times since then and it’s always a lovely experience, but that one—well, that was Valentine’s Day.
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What was your fertility experience?

The previous question was originally “What was your pregnancy and birth experience?” but those are two separate questions and, in my case, skip right over the most difficult part of the process.

Memory is full of shifting layers, changing focal distances, and altered perspectives. The following was written in 2013, six years after the events I describe. And now it’s been six years since then and reading it I can see how much further I’ve come from what I hope will always have been the most difficult time in my life.

_____________________________________

When we married, in 2000, Jason very much wanted to have a couple of years of marriage before embarking on parenthood. So we moved to London and had a lovely time and didn’t start trying to get pregnant until early 2002, when I was 33.

Now, I knew that I might have difficulty getting pregnant. My sisters and I are nine years apart, after all. What I didn’t know was that my grandmother *also* had trouble getting pregnant—found that out when Alice was a few years old, from a random family story Mom told. But I wasn’t exactly shocked when it didn’t take in the first year.

At that point, both Jason and I started testing. Turned out that he had a varicocele, which had to be removed—causing a small hernia in his groin, which then had to be fixed in 2010. Fun times. In the meantime I had various tests, including the hysterosalpingogram, which I love to say—it’s a womb with a hue! Nothing seemed wrong on my end, but I didn’t get pregnant.

By this time, I was starting to get depressed. I feel lucky, in three ways: first, because my depression was situational, I could explain to people why I was depressed and they were pretty supportive and understanding and I avoided a lot of the negatives that I know can come with depression; secondly, when the situation was resolved, the depression went away, and while I definitely know that depression is a pathway my brain has learned and I will have to be wary of it for the rest of my life, it’s not an ongoing issue for me; and thirdly, now that it’s gone I feel very privileged to have had the opportunity to see what that’s really like, so that I have a better understanding of what so many of my own friends, not to mention so many people in general, are living with every day. Oh, there’s a fourth way: I’m pretty proud that I think it took me only about three weeks to realize what I had was depression and to get help, and that help was readily available and I was treated professionally and with compassion without any financial strain. So, those are the good things about being depressed for more than three years. The bad part, of course, was being depressed.

In the meantime we embarked on fertility treatment at Reproductive Science Center in Lexington. First we did several rounds of plain old sex, while taking Clomid. That didn’t work. Then we did four rounds of ICI—that’s the high tech acronymn for what is essentially the turkey-baster method, or, as I like to call it, the “poke in the cervix with a sharp stick”. They didn’t offer any medications for that procedure—I hear other places give valium, or that they would have given me valium if they’d known I was in pain (because apparently my agonized gasps, yelps and moaning failed to alert them), but I got to grit my teeth and swear a lot. After that we moved up to IVF—this is the real “test-tube baby” part, for those of you following along at home.

During the first round, despite excellent follicle production and retrieval, none of the embryos survived to be implanted. The second round resulted in a chemical pregnancy—that’s where the hormone numbers go up and then…come back down to baseline within a couple of weeks. By this time we had maxed out what was then the $5000 lifetime cap on insurance for fertility treatments, so we were paying about $10K per round on our own. I had learned to give myself shots (as I said at the time, I’d always drawn the line at poking holes in myself to get high, yet here I was huddled in my basement every night with the needles laid out before me) and come to hate the dildo-cam, especially since it turns out I’m sensitive to the gel they use.

The hardest part is the hope. While you’re going through a cycle, you have to believe it will work—you have to, or why on earth would you be doing these ridiculous things to yourself? So you believe and you think positively and you visualize and when the news comes back negative, it is crushing. Because not only did it not work, but you were a fool, a fool to ever believe that this dream could come true, that you deserve to be a mother, that you are not an utter failure as a biological creature. And then they want you to do it again. At the fertility clinic that’s all they care about—that you do it again, exactly as they tell you, that you have no other focus in your life, that you bend everything else around that schedule, that you become nothing but a walking womb.

At this time I got some difficult news and the depression was swallowing me whole. Fortunately, I correctly interpreted serious suicidal ideation as a bad symptom, rather than a factual statement about the world and my life, and got on anti-depressants for a few months. Turns out I’m hella sensitive to SSRIs, what a surprise (not actually—next time you really want to hear about my bad trip). But they got me stabilized and eventually I was able to continue. Third round, another chemical pregnancy.

Fourth round—and now for something completely different. After three rounds of failure, the RSC team decided to try a different protocol, part of which involved giant horse needles full of progesterone in my butt every night. Not only did this result in the most erotic dreams of my entire life, but it also ushered in a new era for several friends who were called on for injection duty when Jason had to be out of town. Apparently there is a protein deficiency of the uterine lining that is impossible to detect without a biopsy that no insurance company will pay for, but in theory there’s nothing wrong with treating someone as if they had that deficiency, so that’s what we were trying. Of course, if it worked, we still wouldn’t know—that might just be the round that happened to catch—but it was a new approach and I was definitely ready for that.

I was starting to say that this would be my last round and sending off for applications for graduate programs in theatre. Jason was hoping to talk me into continuing through the rest of the year and we’ll never know who would have won that argument, because at last, I got pregnant. And it stuck. And forty weeks later, just after my 38th birthday, I had an incredible child who has been a joy every day since. And it was all worth it.
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This was written a couple of weeks after Alice’s birth. Reading through it the most surprising thing is how little I remember of any of it…

On Sunday afternoon Jason was working with our friend, Jo, to get the last bits of painting done in the bathroom, while I was busy making a huge batch of chicken pot pie as part of my project to fill our new freezer. Leah had arrived from Northampton to spend a couple of days with us and Jack had come by to talk about set design issues for Arms & The Man, but had left shortly before.



Jo had just helped me to take the pot pie out of the oven at 8:30pm, when I realized I needed to pee—this was a frequent occurrence—so I ran upstairs and barely made it before there was a small gush of liquid. It was odd, but I just thought it was a new variation on having to pee all the time. I went back downstairs and felt a cramp, but it passed quickly and I thought I must be hungrier than I had thought. I had started dishing up the pot pie, when I felt myself leaking again, so I went into the downstairs bathroom, where Jason was working and, again, there was an odd gush. The dots connected and I told Jason that I thought my water was breaking, but it seemed to be happening gradually and we’d just see how it went.

We dished up the pot pie and took it to the table, when I felt things letting go again, so I ran for the john once more and this time there was a much larger gush, followed by another cramp. Back at the table, I explained to Jo and Leah what was going on. I finished my dinner and then Jason put in a call to the OB’s office, while Jo and Leah helped me finish packing up my hospital bag and I called my sisters and parents and Jason let his mom know that things were starting to happen. There was no return call from the OB after half an hour, so Jason called again and it turned out the first page had gone out with the wrong number entered. This time a nurse practitioner called back within about ten minutes.

The NP questioned me and recommended that I head in to Mt. Auburn for fetal monitoring. We finished packing up and finally got out the door about quarter to eleven. The contractions had continued to come about every ten to twelve minutes and I’d had some more leaking and another big gush. Fortunately, I had bought some Depends pads and that was mostly catching the fluid. I decided that I preferred to drive—I tend to feel the bumps less when I’m the one driving—and we made it to the hospital just before eleven. I went in through the emergency entrance, while Jason went to park the car, but the main admissions desk was still open, so they sent me upstairs to fill out the paperwork there and Jason met me at the desk.

We got our paperwork and bracelet and headed up to the Birthing Place on the fifth floor. I went to the bathroom again and then went into an exam room. The nurse on duty—Pam, who led our childbirth prep classes—got me hooked up to the monitors and then the OB on call, Dr. Sylvia Fine, examined me externally and guessed the baby’s weight at a little under seven pounds. They had some trouble getting a good recording of the heartbeat and contractions, but everything seemed to be going fine. Then I started throwing up and they moved me over to Birthing Room 1, where I was able to shower off and get better recordings. Pam had me try the birthing ball, but I found the vibration of it exacerbated my nausea and gave up on that pretty quickly.

At that point they wanted me to stay, but I was eager to go home, so after an initial IV of fluid and antibiotics, they let us leave about 2am. The contractions were coming about every five minutes, but I wasn’t actually feeling about half of them, so I still had about ten minutes of feeling fine in between them. On the way home, the nausea was hitting more strongly and the contractions coming harder and faster. We had hoped to watch Battlestar Galactica and get a few hours of sleep in our own bed, but I was unable to focus on the TV and I started heaving pretty continuously.

After about ninety minutes of this—poor Leah, having to listen to my distress—I decided I’d been wrong to think I wanted to be at home and we headed back, with Jason driving this time. During the time at home, I had started asking him to count while the contractions lasted and I found that really helped me, especially as we bounced along the bumpy Cambridge streets.

Pam, the nurse, teased me a little for coming back so quickly, but I just said that now I knew that I wanted to be there, which was good to know and would make things easier for me and she shut right up. She is an older woman—thirty-six years as an obstetric nurse—with a no-nonsense manner, but very compassionate when needed. While I was throwing up, she held my head and patted my back and made me feel about as comforted as possible. Very quickly I requested anti-nausea drugs and waited until the Zofran took effect before deciding that even without the nausea, I still wasn’t dealing well with the pain of the contractions and wanted an epidural.

I was amused to read the Entertainment Weekly’s Shaw Report (their version of “Hot or Not”) this week and find that silent births are “out,” hiring a midwife is “five minutes ago,” and what’s “in”? Yup—epidurals. I feel so trendy now, but at least I was ahead of the curve!

The insertion of the epidural catheter into the fluid sac around my spinal cord wasn’t painful, although it did feel quite odd, and it was definitely a relief. From all accounts—and the staff’s feedback—my epidural was particularly good, in that I never lost control of my lower body. It felt numb and I couldn’t feel the contractions at all, but I could still sit up and roll over more than the staff seemed to expect. I think that if some emergency had required me to get up and walk, I could have done it with some concentration, but was just as happy not to have to. Having the urinary catheter in was a relief, as well—after weeks of having to pee constantly, I could just relax and forget about that particular function. I got a little too relaxed when the epidural was first kicking in—my diastolic dropped down to 24—so they gave me some ephedrin via IV and when that didn’t have much effect, the anesthesiologist hit me with a syringe of the stuff and that picked things right up.

That was all done by about 6am on Monday morning and then came several hours of lying in bed, watching the sunrise over Boston and the rush hour traffic building and ebbing. Because I have moderate sleep apnea, any time I began to really drift off to sleep, my oxygen level would dip and a beeping alarm would start up and if I didn’t grab the mask and take some deep breaths, the nurse would pop her head in and remind me. But when I was awake, it was fine. So I would take off the mask to talk to someone, or have some ice chips, and then drift off and the alarm would go and… That made it difficult to get much solid sleep.



The shift changed at 8am and the team that would actually deliver the baby came on. The OB on call was Dr. Amy McGaraghan. She was being shadowed by a Harvard Med student named Katie, who not only attended all of the doctor’s time with me, but came by to interview us about our experiences with pregnancy, which passed the time very pleasantly. My nurse was a pleasant, younger woman named Chris, who grew up in New Hampshire, had lived for several years in San Diego, and recently returned to New England, so we had a pleasant time chatting about the differences between the coasts.

There was a little excitement on the ward, accompanied by much screaming, as two women both came in around the same time, both 10cm dilated on arrival—too late for pain meds. Chris and Katie both rushed to assure me that I shouldn’t let the screaming scare me, as it wasn’t going to be like that for me. I was too relaxed to worry much, but it added to the difficulty of sleeping. Jason slept through most of the morning, waking up occasionally to check on me and read to me, but I encouraged him to get sleep while he could. He ordered a breakfast sandwich from the cafeteria and pronounced it very tasty.

We were able to use our cell phones in the birthing suite, which was a nice surprise, so I talked to my sister, Beckie, a couple of times to keep her updated and we agreed that she would come over at lunchtime and see how things were going.

The various external monitors continued to not provide as clear readings as the staff wanted, so we agreed to switch to internal monitoring—one inserted alongside the baby’s head to record my contractions and the other attached to the baby’s scalp to watch her vital signs. I began to be very amused by all the tubes and wires trailing out of my lower half and to be just as glad I didn’t have to see or feel them.

At some point late morning, the doctor checked me and I was 8cm dilated and she recommended a dose of pitocin to pick up the pace of my contractions. That worked like a charm and we called Beckie to say that she should plan to stay once she got there. She arrived about one and the contractions were starting to be much stronger. As the epidural ebbed, I began to be able to feel them more and more. The doctor was in the OR doing a c-section and sent word that I should not start pushing. Katie and Chris had me do a little “practice” pushing to see if I could get the hang of it and that went well enough that we didn’t do it for long.

Beckie arrived and settled in and eventually the doctor came in and the real work began. We tried various positions and I found that I was most comfortable on all fours—basically in child pose—and that being on my side felt really awkward and ineffective. Being on my back was also fine, but not as effective at that point as they wanted. I moved around, pushing with the contractions, for what I guess was about two hours. Eventually I ended up on my back again, with Jason holding one leg, Katie the other, and Beckie holding my hand.

The last twenty minutes hurt. A lot. The room was pretty crowded at that point, with Jason, Beckie, Dr. McGaraghan, Katie, Janet (the nurse who replaced Chris at the afternoon shift change), the pediatrician and the pediatric nurse all standing around and saying encouraging things. The one time I swore during the process was when it felt as though everyone were jabbering at me to the point that it was making it hard to focus and follow the doctor’s instructions, so I told them all to shut up. At another point, I suddenly started crying, and everyone but Jason said “what’s wrong?!” and he said “it hurts!” It’s good to have someone who understands me!

For a while we were making good progress, but we kept getting the crown of her head just poking out and then slipping back between contractions—I just couldn’t hold it long enough to pop. So the doctor asked if we’d be ok with her using the vacuum suction thingy and we said sure. She attached it and used it to hold the baby’s head in place between two contractions and on the third, out came Alice at 4:24pm.

The last push, to get her body out, was easy and then the pediatric folk set to work on cleaning her off—they got Jason to cut the cord, which he hadn’t been planning to do, but was glad to have been involved in the process—while the doctor got the placenta out. That thing was enormous! After that there was apparently some bleeding that they were concerned about for a few minutes, but it let up and seems to have been ok. I was pretty exhausted by this time, so it was all a little blurry. The doctor checked for tears, but found only abrasions, three of which were bleeding enough for her to tack up with a stitch. All the tubes and wires were removed, except for my IV tap, which they left in just in case I were to have more bleeding and need fluids or drugs.



They brought Alice to me after the weights and measures routine and the three of us took a good look at each other and I was able to get her to latch on and nurse for a few minutes right away. Then Jason went off to the nursery with her for her first bath and testing, while Beckie stayed with me. Janet had me up on my feet pretty quickly and seemed surprised that I was able to walk. It took a bit of concentration getting to the bathroom, but by the time I came back, it felt much more normal. Beckie packed up all our junk and Janet popped me in a wheelchair for the trip down to my recovery room, on the other end of the floor.







Jason came back with the baby and we began to settle in. We ordered some food to be brought up for all of us—chicken soup and a grilled cheese sandwich were very tasty after twenty-four hours of fasting—and before we could finish, the rest of the aunts & uncles arrived, singing “venite adoremus”. OK, not really, but that was the theme of the evening. By about 8pm we said goodnight to everyone and settled in for our first night as a family of three.

lillibet: (Default)
Did you have a favorite planet as a child?



My elder sister is eighteen years older than I am. She went off to college the year I was born--in fact, my baptism was postponed until the day after Anne's graduation, because the grandparents were already planning to travel to us that weekend. So throughout my childhood she was an intermittent presence, coming home on the weekends and holidays with a suitcase full of laundry and marvelous stories to share.

That was also the period when she was establishing her independence from my parents, the tail end of the 1960s and into the 1970s, a very different time from the Great Depression, in which my parents' values were forged. There were a lot of conflicts. Anne would say something provocative--sometimes deliberately, but mostly not--and Mom would say something dismissive and Anne would snap at her and Dad would defend her and attempt, in his booming bass, to explain why she was wrong. It was awful.

Not that I was immune from this--our father was very loving, but also a passionate man, with a big voice, and not the world's largest supply of tact. It was easy to feel that he was yelling at us when he got the least bit heated in his delivery. Beckie tended to duck and cover when Dad got going, but Anne and I never mastered that trick.

When Anne saw that her exchanges with Dad, or his lectures and criticisms of either of us, were upsetting me, she took me aside and told me to think about Jupiter. "It's beautiful," she said, showing me pictures of the Great Red Spot in National Geographic, "and it has thirteen moons. Learn their names."

When I was about eight, I decided that I wanted to learn to play bridge. Beckie happily gave up the spot at the table she'd never wanted and I got to play whenever Anne hadn't brought along a friend or lover who, while being otherwise generally unacceptable to my parents, would always be welcome if they could make a fourth.



Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto...

My dad always wanted to be a teacher and loved lecturing, but was not a great instructor. His explanations tended to be far too complicated, with too much information thrown in all at once. And when his pupil became confused, or forgot a key point, he would become frustrated and critical.



Amalthea, Himalia, Elara...

I was a terrible bridge player. I've never had a head for strategy and despite an excellent memory I've never been able to keep track of what cards are played. Bidding made little sense to me, even at its most basic level, and if my father--with whom I was almost always paired--tried any of the more complicated codes he tried to teach me, I could never grasp how I was supposed to respond. I struggled through each hand, veering between utter confusion and abject boredom, neither of which made for good play.



Pasiphae, Sinope, Lysithea, Carme, Ananke, Leda...

Of course, Anne was no joy to play with, either. Stressed out by my parents' critical attitude, she would chainsmoke and snap through the hands. One of the worst moments came when it was my turn to be the "dummy" (the partner of the winning bidder, who turns their cards face up and lets the winner play both hands against the other pair) and Anne said, in something much like her Wicked Witch of the West voice (a staple terror of my childhood) "You're the dummy, dummy!" I burst into tears, ran from the table and hid. She was terribly sorry, it was all a joke, but I just couldn't see the humor in it then.



Themisto, Metis, Adrastea, Thebe...

There were thirteen moons when I started playing. By 1979 there were seventeen. That was something that always startled me, the idea that our schoolbooks could be wrong, that new information was always arriving. When my mother studied chemistry in the 1940s she had to learn the nine amino acids by heart, but by the time I reached ninth grade biology there were twenty-three and no one expected us to know them all. Today we've identified seventy-nine moons. That would have lasted through several rubbers, at least.

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What qualities do you most value in your partner?

I think the single most important quality for me is happiness. Many people seem wired to find the negative in every situation, to worry about what might happen around the corner and down the road, and to rehearse every grievance until it's wrung of every drop of anger and indignation. I can't live with that--when I try, I spend way too much energy trying to cheer the person up, find the bright side, make their life easy in hopes of their finding happiness with me, which many people just aren't going to do. Realizing this was a major breakthrough in my relationship history and made me value Jason's essential good humor enormously.



A deep sense of commitment is also key for me. I was raised by parents who were married for life and being able to make and live that kind of partnership was something that I was always looking for. Jason sometimes says that for him the best thing about being married was letting go of the decision--it was made and he no longer has to wonder whether or not to marry, because he did. This plays out not only in just not separating, but in showing up every day to make our lives together good, in being willing to work on our communication and find ways to enhance our connection and our mutual ease and happiness.



Being openly loving is also very important. We sometimes call it "The Love Game," taking joy in finding ways to say and show that we love each other every day, finding new games to play together, new inside jokes that reinforce our connection. I see other couples who seem to revel in something different, in teasing each other with dislike, and while I get that joking about it might release steam, or disarm the negative potential of the relationship, that's not a comfortable way of interacting for me. Physical affection is an important part of this--we touch each other often, we hug many times throughout the day, and the best part of every day is holding each other as we fall asleep.



I don't think I could be partnered with someone who didn't share a basic curiosity about the world, an eagerness to try new things, travel to other parts of the world, try new foods, or share cool articles about science and interesting insights about the human condition. We can spend hours together talking about everything and nothing, because each of us is interested in how the other sees the world and in sharing what we see with each other.



A willingness to be a full partner is another essential quality. Jason and I have different strengths, but we are working together toward the same goals. We communicate freely about our priorities. We share values. We are here for each other, whether that's maintaining a balance in chores, or figuring out how to parent equitably. We're not using each other to get what we each want, we're cooperating to get what both of us want, and each other's happiness is vitally important. We love working together and are able to spend the bulk of our time in the same space. I've heard it said that in all relationships there is one who loves more, but our love is intense on both sides and very well balanced. I feel incredibly privileged to have found a partner like this.

Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, it matters enormously to me that we enable each other to be our best selves and give each other the freedom to do that. Given what interdependent lives we lead, I think it would be impossible without the counterweight of respect and independence that suffuses our relationship.



In swimming lessons, we always had to have a buddy. It was your responsibility to know where your buddy was, to stick together, and when the whistle blew, to find each other and keep each other safe. That's one of the things that marriage is--a hand to grab in the deep water when the whistle blows. It's good to have a buddy.
lillibet: (Default)
What were your favorite toys as a child?

My favorite toys were my Fisher-Price Little People.



I have no idea why, but I decided, or was told, that their last name was "Smith" and so they became my "Smiffies." Looking at the picture now, I remember thinking that the mother was so beautiful.

When I was three or four, I decided that I wanted to be part of the Christmas gift-giving tradition, and so I carefully wrapped one of my Smiffies for each member of my family. The rest of them all found opportunities to slip their Smiffy back into my collection, but Mom kept the little orange boy on her dresser. After a while I asked if I could have it back and she explained no, it was a gift, and having given it away it didn't belong to me any more.



I spent hours playing with my Smiffies, both alone and with my friends, especially Lori. I had the house, but she had the airport, which was the coolest thing in the world. Later I would move on to Barbies and my sister's much-coveted Dawn Dolls, but I never loved them as deeply as the Smiffies.



One day I decided that I was going to walk over to Miss Norma's--she was the older lady in the church who served as our babysitter and adopted grandmother. I put my Smiffies in a bag--unfortunately, a paper one, and set off on the four block walk, a bold move of independence for me at five or six. Sadly, it was raining and as I crossed Main Street my bag broke, scattering my Smiffies across the road. The lady at the corner store saw me, frantically trying to rescue them, and came out to keep me from running into traffic in the gloomy late-afternoon darkness. When she understood my panic, she brought out a plastic bag and helped me to find as many as we could. Some were broken, others embedded with gravel. It's probably not true that I never played with them again after that, but something about that day broke my heart, made me realize that they were only pieces of wood, and the magic of the Smiffies was never quite the same again.
lillibet: (Default)
What was your Dad like when you were a child?

Dad was 47 years old when I was born, so in some ways he always seemed old to me. He and my mother had been married for almost twenty years at that point, and in the same job and home for ten years, so they were very settled in their lives. I was a complete surprise and threw a wrench into things in many ways, but he always let me know that he was delighted with me and wouldn’t have changed a thing.

My father was 6‘4” and seemed tall enough to touch the moon. When I was just six weeks old he fell on the ice and broke his arm—thankfully on the trip after he had carried me in from the car—so some of my earliest memories of him are “The Elephant Game,” which I only understood much later were the physical therapy exercises he did to restore strength and flexibility to that arm.

Dad was the minister and in our church, Sunday School came before church and once I was too old for the nursery I was expected to sit through the adult service next to my mother. I grew up listening to stories about myself from the pulpit and having him say “God Bless You,” in his beautiful bass voice when I sneezed in church.

He was very affectionate and much more emotionally open than my mother was. He would openly weep at romantic movies and loved for me to sit on his lap and snuggle with him. He could also get very angry at times—until I was an adolescent that was more directed at my sister than at me, but his loud voice made it seem that he was yelling even when he had no intention of doing so.

Like many families of the era, Dad was the “fun” parent, the one who took us for ice cream, or to McDonald’s, or out for a late movie on Thanksgiving night, while Mom set the chores and kept the rules and made us stop playing for dinner, or bedtime. I’m told that in earlier days he was perfectly able to cook for himself and Anne, but by the time I came along there was some combination of more money and learned helplessness, but he still took charge of the grill for backyard London Broil in the summertime.

Since we lived in the parsonage, just across the driveway from the church, he was around much more than many fathers. He worked in the mornings at his office in the church, came home for lunch, then spent the afternoon calling on parishioners who were sick, or going through other crises. When I was little he would take me along when calling on families with children, and by the time I was in junior high I would often go along with him once a week when he went up to the hospitals in Albany. On Sunday afternoons we would drive down to see my grandmother in the nursing home. Many of my best memories of him are of conversations we had in the car together.

He was never athletic and not much of a sports fan, though he always enjoyed watching the baseball game. He was a Rockefeller Republican, voting for Democrats in the presidential elections and trying to keep his more liberal leanings confined to the Christian life he lived largely for others. If he hadn’t felt a call to the ministry he would have been a history teacher and was a scholar of the Protestant Reformation and a big fan of historical fiction. He loved to read and happily encouraged me to read any book in his library that caught my eye. He tried hard to teach me the habit of reading a daily newspaper and though that never caught, he did make me see current events on a national and international scale as relevant to our lives and worthy of my attention.

Although I think I’m actually better than he was at telling stories, I learned it from him, the art of observing the world for the purpose of distilling its meaning and finding its lessons. He had a hard time letting go of the details and sticking to the point, and so I also learned from him the joy of digressions, of conversations that start on one topic and drift over the course of hours into far different regions. I still find myself wanting to tell him things and to hear how he would incorporate them into his Sunday sermon.
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What were your grandparents like?

I didn’t get to have a long relationship with any of my grandparents—the first died when I was three and the last when I was twelve. What I know of them is largely from stories told by my parents and sisters and, more recently, from going through the family memorabilia and finding photos, letters, and other artifacts that flesh out their stories.

These were my mother’s parents: Murphy and Mitt. He was a carpenter who always resented being made to leave school at fourteen, a resentment that manifested in his proudly and whole-heartedly supporting my mother in her education. He was a very quiet man, loving and gentle. Mitt was more feisty, with a temper that made her relationship with my mother problematic, but also many fears and anxieties—she was so terrified of thunder that she would hide under the bed when a storm blew up. They worked hard all their lives, keeping their farm going and the family fed through the Great Depression. Mom was always proud of the Sunday dinners, where up to twenty folks would come around after church to eat with them, because “there was always food at Miss Mitt’s”.

A lot of what I remember of them isn’t about them, specifically, but about the farm in North Carolina. I don’t remember them ever visiting, though they did when I was very little. It was always us, driving south and south forever, until finally arriving at their place. I remember the smell of the sandy dirt after the rain, the strangely pleasant, rotting smell of the cold house where the freezer was, and the warm, dry smell of the old tobacco barns in the sunshine. I remember drinking cold Mountain Dew from a bottle, back when you couldn’t get it up north and it was the taste of summer. I remember picking corn and beans out of the fields and playing at the feet of the women shucking and shelling the vegetables for dinner. There was always work to do.

On the morning of her 50th anniversary, my grandmother had a major stroke. There was nothing to be done in those days—they got her dressed and put her in a chair at the reception while friends and family trooped by to pay their respects and she had no idea who any of them were. That was a horrifying time for my mother, but I remember Granny as one of the best playmates—we would play “pretend” and make believe that she didn’t know my name, or that she was a little girl like me, or that she didn’t know her way around the house she’d lived in for decades, and she was utterly convincing. She would give me slices of white bread with cold butter as a snack. In the morning, I would slip out of the bed I shared with my mother in the front room, sneak as quietly through my grandfather’s dark, shaded room as a three year old could, and out onto the back porch, where my grandmother slept in a tiny storeroom, almost filled by her big bed. I would open the door and shout “Boo, Granny!” and she would holler “Boo, ‘Lizbeth!” and I would jump on her bed and we would play while the rest of the household got up and ready for the day. One morning I shouted, but she didn’t respond, and my mother remembered being woken by my screams over Granny’s body.

I only have a few vivid memories of my grandfather, despite his having outlived my grandmother by two years. They may even all have been from the same trip, when I was five. Beckie was fourteen that year and somehow Dad got the idea of teaching her to drive on the dirt roads around the farm. She managed to put the car in one of the drainage ditches—she didn’t have much beginner’s luck. Dad tried various strategies to get the car back on the road and as he worked, shouting occasionally for Beckie to hit the gas, I kept jumping up and down and saying “Should I go get Poppo? Can I go get Poppo now?” Dad said “You sound like you don’t believe we can do this,” and I responded very seriously, “I don’t.” They both laughed and Beckie said “At least she’s honest!” Finally, finally Dad said “OK, Elizabeth, go!” I raced down the track to the barn where my grandfather was working and he fired up the tractor and let me ride along, holding onto the strap of his overalls as we chugged back to haul out the car.

On the long summer evenings the family would gather on the porch of the house that Poppo built, watching the occasional traffic pass by on the road. I was tearing around, probably being a pest, and Poppo told me to run around the house and he would time me. I ran and I ran and every time I came back to the big, broad steps, he would tell me my time and then say “Do it again. Run faster now,” and I’d be off again. When we drove away, I twisted around in the back seat to watch him wave to us as we pulled out of the drive and onto the highway for the long drive back to New York. A few hours after we arrived home, Uncle MG called to say that Poppo had died.


My father’s parents were very different. Raised in Kansas and Michigan, they married and moved to New York in 1919. My grandfather tried to establish himself in the financial world, but after the man from the next office jumped out the window in 1929, Grandfather decided it was time to get out of the business by a safer route. He spent the Depression taking an array of jobs—setting up distilleries in Canada, working on the Chicago World’s Fair—many of which kept him away from home for long stretches, leaving my grandmother to raise Dad alone, or with the company of her father, who lived with them for several years. She desperately wanted a girl, but miscarried many times after Dad was born—we now know that she was Rh negative, but in those days it was just a tragic mystery. She thought the moon rose and set on my father and would hear no criticism of him. They wrote to each other every week for more than twenty years—I have reams of her letters to him, filled with the details of her life, that reveal a surprisingly funny, money-fixated woman devoted to her husband and her church, but delighted to travel and find adventure.

She was a wonderful grandmother when my eldest sister was little. She would arrive by train with her suitcases stuffed with presents for her namesake and spend a week or more before Christmas baking cookies that filled the entire dining room table. She was a snappy dresser, with a certain elegance, and everyone was shocked when she threw herself down on the sled with Anne and played in the Michigan snow. She thought Anne was the most perfect child in the world and sent her cards and letters and treats throughout the year and begged in her letters for news of Anne’s health and latest accomplishments.

A year before I was born, Grandmother had her first major stroke. Throughout my childhood she spent stretches in the nursing home, returning to sit awkwardly in a green power lift chair. Her face was partially paralyzed by strokes and her gaze was glassy and unfocused. My parents would set me on her lap, where she would pluck at my clothing with long fingers, or they would tell me to hug her. She smelled medicinal and unsettling and her ability to talk changed as her brain tried to rearrange itself after each stroke. By the time I was five, she needed constant care and was placed in a nursing home about half an hour south of our home upstate. My grandfather couldn’t bear to see his “brown eyed Peg” so debilitated and never visited her there, but my father drove down every Sunday afternoon, despite the fact that she often had no idea who he was and would sob for her “Dickie boy,” and wonder why he didn’t come instead of this balding, middle-aged man she didn’t recognize. Visiting her was about equal parts scary and boring, but I always enjoyed the drive there and back with my dad. She passed away when I was eight.

My grandfather always seemed like a very stern, somewhat distant figure. He and my grandmother lived in a two bedroom apartment in Mount Vernon and when we visited my mother would make up the couch cushions on the living room floor as a bed for me. After his many jobs in the 30s he landed as the Executive Secretary of the International Merchant Tailors’ Association, where the main part of his duties was to organize their annual conferences in exotic locations like Miami or Chicago. He would also entertain visiting members from other countries and their breakfront—the same one that stands in my dining room today, was filled with gifts from around the world. The less-breakable ones were kept in the righthand door of that cabinet and I was allowed to pull out the sake cups and figurines and create elaborate games and fantasies around them.

If we were there on a weekday he would take me into the office on the train and I would spend the morning being given busy work—I remember using the porcelain stamp licker and drawing on scrap letterhead. His long-time secretary, Irma, was a very fashionable woman and she would take me out at lunch to Saks Fifth Avenue or Macy’s and buy me “a good dress,” just about the only clothing bought for me in those years of handmades and hand-me-downs. We would have sandwiches at one of the local lunch counters and bring one back to my grandfather and then my Dad and Beckie, usually, would pick me up and we’d go on an afternoon adventure somewhere in the city. On Saturdays my grandfather would swap his suit jacket for a cardigan, but I can’t picture him without a tie, even after he retired at eighty. It was shocking to find photos of him working the farms as a teen in Abilene, wearing nothing but overalls and a straw hat.

He could be a real curmudgeon—I think he never really knew how to interact with children except by teasing. The only time I’ve been stung by a bee was when he told me it was bothering a flower and I should squeeze it out of there. Another time, when I was five and we were out to an Italian restaurant, he was horrified to see me pick up the shrimp from my scampi by the tails to eat it and was loudly critical of my mother for failing to teach me to peel shrimp with a knife and fork. He never understood my father’s calling to the ministry and often criticized what he saw as an incomprehensible failure by my father to prioritize money in his life. When he died, at eighty-six, he left us much better off, financially, than we had been. At his funeral the minister kept referring to what a Brooklyn accent rendered as “Mistah Huntah,” so my last memory of my grandfather is of struggling not to giggle in a pew full of black-clad family.

And then I turned twelve and all my grandparents were gone.
lillibet: (Default)
Has your relationship with your siblings changed over the years?

In some ways my relationship with my sisters has changed profoundly, but in other ways not at all.

The three of us are all nine years apart. That is, Beckie was born when Anne was almost nine and I was born when Beckie was almost ten. Anne left for college the year I was born—my baptism was scheduled for the day after her graduation, since the grandparents would all be in town for that. Beckie left home when I was nine.

When I was little Anne was more like an aunt, in some ways—an exciting occasional presence in my life. She came home for summers when I was very little, and for holidays. When we were out alone together people automatically assumed that she was my mother. She bought me books and fed me strange things and took me exploring. Whatever interest or hobby she developed, she shared with me—I fondly remember the grave-rubbing phase and the hiking phase. She taught me to cook, mostly by telling me to make it up and assume it would be fine. In the summer Anne & George would take me along with them to Block Island and we would climb the bluffs and body surf in the waves.

My parents made a real effort to promote a relationship between us, sending me to stay with her for a week at a time, starting while she was still living in the dorms at Wellesley and I would have been no more than three. By the time I was eight they would put me on the Peter Pan bus and let me make the journey to Boston on my own, where she thought nothing of handing me T tokens and telling me where to meet her after work. She introduced me to science fiction and gave me Our Bodies, Our Selves, and taught me to be a feminist. I adored her and thought she was the coolest person in the world.

Beckie and I were much closer on a day-to-day basis while we were both at home. In most of my baby pictures it is Beckie who is holding me. My first word was “baby,” but my second was “Becca.” When she came to bed I would pound on the wall until she came to get me to snuggle with her—while my mother accused her of “never leaving that child alone!” Finally they put an extra bed in my room and Beckie slept there—the only way to keep me in my own bed. My mother still made most of our clothes in those days and Beckie had to endure my being dressed in scaled down copies of her clothes. We would watch tv together every afternoon when she got home from school—One Life to Live and General Hospital, followed by Sesame Street, Mister Rogers, and The Electric Company, before Dad got home and switched to the news.

When I was little and our grandparents were still alive, we drove to North Carolina and back at least twice each year—with me sprawled out and napping on Beckie in the days before carseats for toddlers. She got dragged along on the family vacation to Disneyworld, while I tagged along on trips to visit the colleges she was checking out. She had to endure my painfully honest comments chiming in at the most awkward times throughout her adolescence.

Anne’s relationship with our parents was always turbulent. The values that she embraced as a young woman in the 70s were very different from their Depression Era morality. My mother was always ready with a judgmental or dismissive comment and my father was very emotionally open and willing to go toe to toe with her in arguments that shook the house. Anne always wanted me to be on her team, to recognize our parents’ shortcomings and join her in criticizing and rebelling against them. I think that by the time I hit puberty, alone in the house with them, that—along with everything else—made me feel awkward with Anne and we grew more distant. And with Beckie also out of the house, I had somewhere else to go.

I spent much of Beckie’s college years hanging out with her at Smith. As a tall, precocious kid, I was generally assumed to be one of the more baby-faced freshmen and spent many long weekends and breaks roaming the campus while Beckie worked, or studied, and tagging along with her and her friends to movies, concerts, and lectures. When I wasn’t there I ran up huge long distance bills calling her almost every afternoon.

After Beckie graduated she moved to Boston. The plan was for her to stay with Anne and her partner, George, for a few months while she found a job and an apartment, but Beckie ended up living with them for nine years. During that time I visited often, so I was spending more time with Anne again.

There are lots of fun stories of the Hunter Sisters from those days. One time George made the mistake of referring to the musical “1776” as “forgettable,” so we sang the entire score from top to bottom, it having been a favorite to sing on car trips. Or there was the time that TV Guide said that record companies mistrusted MTV’s promises to play their videos at certain rates, but since there was “no way for them to tell,” they were having to take MTV’s word on it. “There’s no way to tell” entered our family language for easily-verifiable information.

While the gravitational pull of Boston was strong, I attempted to elude my fate by going to college in New York, but after two years there I bowed to the inevitable, moved to Boston—living partly with my sisters that first summer—and transferred to Wellesley.

While I was there, first Beckie and then Anne & George, bought condos and moved apart. Anne & George went into a big Indian cooking phase, at the time that my IBS was making Indian food really difficult for me to eat, so I spent less time with them. Beckie was living alone for the first time and especially once I had graduated we spent a lot of time hanging out together.

It's funny, because the big age difference between us always seemed so important when we were younger--in many ways it was defining of our relationship. But by the time I was about twenty-five, it really didn't matter any more. We were all working women, living in apartments, managing our relationships...shocking as it seems, we'd grown up. Though I do have to remind Anne from time to time not to tell stories about how awful I could be when I was little!

In the mid-90s, Beckie got married and I moved to California to try my luck on the West Coast, so we necessarily spent less time together. Then I met Jason and we married and moved to London, where both my sisters visited, and I had a cheap calling plan, so we spoke often. When we decided to move back to Boston, Beckie did us the enormous favor of finding a house and dealing with the purchase. Not long after our move back, we founded Theatre@First with Beckie and worked together closely on that.

When our daughter, Alice, turned three, Anne announced that she was exercising her big-sister right to have her come stay at least one weekend a month. Alice loves staying with Anne & George—much as I did when I was younger. It’s sometimes funny to hear about their adventures together, because they are similar in many ways to my time with them. Every summer they take her along for a week on Block Island, just as they did when I was a kid.

During my parents' decline, we all had to pull together to help care for them and make decisions. It was such a relief that we were all on the same page about the big issues. My therapist, listening to me talk about dealing with my mother's medical care--because I'm the one without a day job that could easily take her to appointments, that part fell to me--asked once if I felt like my sisters were doing enough and I said "We each do all that we possibly can, and most days that's enough. And if it isn't enough, it's still all that we can." Having that kind of mutual support made that awful time bearable.

Both of them are getting ready to retire and it will be interesting to see what changes that brings to their lives and our relationships. I talk to each of my sisters at least a couple of times a week and see them once a month, or more. We still celebrate holidays together--usually at my house.

In some ways nothing has changed--Anne is still the rebellious older daughter, Beckie is still the peacemaker, and I'm probably still the brat. In other ways, it's all changed--we're none of us young any more, even if they forget sometimes. But in the most important ways it's just what it always was--we're sisters, we grew up in the same family even if our parents were pretty different over time, we share a common history and language and connection that is different from anything I share with anyone else in the world.
lillibet: (Default)
What stories have you been told about yourself as a baby?

I think that it’s because my sisters were old enough to remember things that happened while I was a baby and to be part of they “hey, remember when E…” conversations, my babyhood comes up in conversation pretty frequently.

I’m planning to leave this post open and add to it as I remember different stories I have been told. Maybe Beckie or Anne will chime in with additions.


- holding up my head and focusing much earlier than expected

- first word “baby,” second word “Becca,” my sister

- calling myself Ebus, much to Mom’s puzzlement

- baby words: cugar, oo-oops, i-kippies

- calling Leo “Leelow”

- freaking people out by talking so early

- kicking on the wall to make Beckie take me into bed with her

- eating bologna wrapped around gherkins and the cat nibbling the bologna out of my fingers
lillibet: (Default)
What is the best meal you've ever had?

I have had a lot of wonderful meals and several spectacular ones and have cooked a few showstoppers, though I have the advantage of being able to make food exactly to my own taste. I’m not sure anything will ever equal the taste of my mother’s fried chicken with rice and gravy and there are few things as perfect in this world as a really good grilled cheese sandwich and there are times that I would pay any money for Mary’s suan la chow show or the duck with winter greens from Y Ming. I love to eat and to dine—different things, both beautiful—and it’s really all about the moment.

But one of the most special meals I’ve enjoyed was at Guy Savoy Paris, on Jason’s 29th birthday. Here’s how I described it at the time:

Located on a side street north of the Arc de Triomphe (though it has since moved) Guy Savoy is an easy place to miss, with its sliding door looking like a wall of wood and glass. Inside is a secluded, modern dining room with lots of wood and metal. While lovely, it felt somewhat sterile to me, like the executive dining room of a very high end law firm.

The meal that followed was just incredible, characterized by bold combinations of flavors used to create remarkably subtle overall effects. We began with a glass of champagne. First we were handed an amuse bouche of a small crostini with a slice of duck liver pate. That was followed by a bite of a watermelon and radish confection. Then we were brought a plate with one bite each of a lovely marinated and grilled tuna, a skewer of tomato and squid, and a tiny bowl of carrot soup with star anise. Neither of us generally enjoy anise, but the flavors combined so perfectly that we were both quite impressed.

Somewhere amid all this showing off by the chef, we got to order. We declined the E170 tasting menu and went a la carte instead. Jason ordered the grilled mussels with morel mushrooms in a light butter sauce and I asked for the house specialty of cream of artichoke soup with shaved black truffles and parmesan cheese with a mushroom-stuffed brioche with truffle butter on the side. We were therefore surprised when our waiter brought two portions of the mussels. I explained the mistake and he apologized, left the mussels with us and brought us each a half portion of the soup as our next course.

With our first courses, we were enjoying the sommelier’s recommendation of a half bottle of Meursault, a white varietal unfamiliar to us, but destined to become quite a favorite. With our mains, we split another half bottle, this one of Bordeaux. I was starting to write down the names when the sommelier offered us the labels, which he brought us in a Guy Savoy souvenir folder that we will add to our memorabilia to remind us of a fabulous gustatory experience.

For mains, Jason had a lovely roast lamb, carved tableside, over greens with tiny hunks of bacon, with a cheesy spinach and mushroom side dish. Mine was pigeon, poached to keep in the juices and then grilled to crisp the skin, served with pureed peas and spinach and drizzled with a sherry vinaigrette. On the side I was brought the pigeon gizzards in a napoleon (layers) of beet chips.

After those were cleared away and we declined the cheese course, they brought us a plate of petit fours, including a sliver of chocolate with a square of gelatin topped with currant, a berry meringue filled with berry mousse, a vanilla pastry shell filled with something creamy, and a candied fruit (one of those things that looks like a tomatillo, but is sweet—or so other people tell me; I find them so sour they send shivers down my spine, although that reaction was mitigated by the caramelized sugar coating this one), each one bite-sized. They also handed us a small caramel crisp encrusted with macadamia nuts and pink praline. For dessert (no, that wasn’t dessert, apparently) we split a millefeuille, layers of puff pastry filled with a vanilla cream, with just a few strawberries, currants and raspberries on the side. We declined coffee, protested that we were really quite finished and asked for the check. Before we could have that, they brought us two more small bites (which our waiter very sternly told us would help our digestion), one of Earl Grey sorbet (which was a revelation to Jason—he was close to tears) and a tiny sliver of apple tart. Whether it was those, or just the impeccable balance of the meal, we were both surprised to find ourselves only pleasantly full, not bloated at all.
________________

It is funny and a little humbling to me now how very little we understood about this level of dining, the gauche mistakes we made, and the opportunities lost. But the staff were very kind to us and we have learned so much since then, but that meal still stands out. A few years ago we were excited to try Guy Savoy’s new establishment in Las Vegas and terribly disappointed by the experience. Perhaps we will return to Paris one of these days…
lillibet: (Default)
What is the most awkward date you've been on?

Back in the dark ages of the Internet, I hung out a bunch on USENET. I'm not sure where I ran into The Captain, but we had a pleasant conversation and agreed that we would meet in Downtown Boston and hang out for a couple of hours. So I'm standing on a corner, looking around for someone who fits the description this guy gave me, when a tan Trans Am convertible pulls up next to me with a deeply unattractive guy at the wheel who says "Elizabeth?" It's him.

I've forgotten what his real name was, because one of the first things he said when I got in the car, back in those more innocent days when that seemed like a reasonable thing to do, was that all his friends call him "The Captain," like Captain Kirk. He's a big Star Trek fan--this is fine, I like Star Trek myself. No, no, I don't understand, he's a BIG Star Trek fan. He's been thinking about moving out of his mother's basement, but most of his disposable income goes to expanding his collection of Star Trek memorabilia, which has been appraised at over $1500. Besides, if he moved, he'd be concerned about things getting broken and security for his valued figurines, some of which are worth more than $50 each.

He asks what I'd like to do and after rejecting a couple of suggestions--he doesn't like art, can't really go for a walk thanks to his knee injury, doesn't drink coffee, and isn't hungry right now--decides that he's going to give me a tour of "his Boston". We drive around Allston, where he grew up, and see the Catholic elementary school he attended, and the house where his mother raised him. The kitchen window looked out over the school playground, so when his mom caught him beating up on smaller kids, she'd come sailing out with a wooden spoon and whup his ass.

No, he didn't go to college. He's got a data entry job that he can do via a remote terminal. It pays really well, and he can just have a couple of machines at his mom's. The main office was in Cambridge, but they're talking about moving to California. I mention that I'm thinking about moving to California and he says maybe he'll drive out there one of these days and visit me. He doesn't like to fly, well, he wouldn't know as he's never actually flown, but he really loves to drive long distances. What do I say to driving out along the beach? I try to say that this is getting longer than I was really expecting and he says nah, it'll be quick, and drives me out to the coast.

So, he asks, what do I think of the car? I say that it's very nice. He explains that it's not why he has it, not to impress "the chicks". He doesn't really care what other people think, although most chicks do seem to have a thing for Trans Ams. That's why he was late to meet me, he explains, he was having it waxed and there were a couple of chicks at the carwash who were really into the car. They wanted a ride in it, he could tell, and he hated to disappoint them, but he told them he had a date to get to. They said he should bail on his date and take them for a ride instead, but The Captain is a man of his word. Anyway, all that conversation about the car slowed him down and that's why he was a few minutes late. Just so I know, he isn't usually late.

We drive along--it was a gorgeous day and the views were really lovely. He told me all about his Star Trek gaming group and what he's looking for in a girlfriend. I ask if he's ever been to one of the local science-fiction fan conventions and he says no, that he went to a Star Trek convention once, got something signed by George Takei--do I know who that is? But he just wasn't interested in all those people, everyone posing, trying to prove what a big Star Trek fan they are. The Captain doesn't care if you have only a small collection, or if you focus on autographs, or if you just like to watch the show, although he's not sure that anyone who just watches Star Trek on TV could really be considered a fan, y'know? But who is he to judge?

As we pull up in front of my house, The Captain tells me that this is the greatest date he's ever been on. He feels like he can really talk to me, like a guy, y'know? That's it, I'm not like other women, I can have a real conversation. I'm just too cool. He's got to see me again, because I am just too cool. Maybe he'll call me and I could come over and see some of his collection. He doesn't usually let chicks around his collection, but he can tell I'm really different. I'm just too cool.

I thank him for the ride, make a noncommittal remark about being pretty busy in the next few weeks, and dive for the shelter of my building, thinking that he's absolutely right. I am, indeed, too cool to spend another minute of my life with The Captain.
lillibet: (Default)
Did you ever get lost as a child?

I can't recall that I ever got lost, in the sense of not knowing where I was, but my parents frequently lost me. At the mall they would sit me down in the children's section of the bookstore while they did their other errands and I would read happily until they came back. At least once that was after getting in the car to head home and realizing they'd forgotten something! We would get separated in crowds and they'd panic at not being able to find me, but I usually had just gotten distracted and was back along their path. My dad used to say that since he was generally the tallest person in a crowd, I should easily be able to see him and keep up with him, but it also meant he had the longest legs!

One of my favorite times of being "lost" was at the Washington Monument. We'd had a long day of touristing and then spent far longer than I had the attention span for touring the exhibit at the top. It was time for our group to descend, so we all got into the elevator and I scooted to the back and sat down on the floor. Mom got on, saw Beckie and said "Do you have Elizabeth?" I said "I'm here," but no one heard me. Beckie said no, so Mom asked Dad. I said "I'm here." Dad said no, and asked Beckie, who said no, and I hollered "I"m here! I'm at the back!" The doors closed and the attendant asked if anyone had any questions. One smart alec said "Only one! Who's Elizabeth?" and everyone laughed.
lillibet: (Default)
It's hard to decide which trip qualifies as "my first big trip," because travelling was something my family just did. The year before I was born my parents had taken my sisters to Europe on a six-week sabbatical trip, so that was the Big Trip often discussed throughout my childhood and I grew up eager to know when my turn for Europe would come. We lived in Upstate New York with grandparents just outside New York City and my mom's side of the family in North Carolina, so thousand-mile roadtrips south were something we did at least two or three times a year. I know that my first flight on an airplane was at six weeks, when my mother took me down to see my grandparents. My father led bustrips for church groups each year and I visited Montreal, Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington, DC that way, without remembering which city was which year. When I was in 3rd grade my mother was elected to the School Board and went each year to the national convention, taking my father and me along to Miami, Los Angeles, and San Francisco when the dates lined up with my school breaks. There were a lot of trips.

The one I'm going to pick is the trip to Florida when I was six. We drove down to North Carolina, as usual, and spent at least a few days visiting family there, but then continued on "South of the Border". Finally I got to visit that tourist mecca, familiar to anyone who's driven I-95 past the Mason-Dixon line. We visited a few more family members in South Carolina--my Aunt Myrl, who was really a first cousin of my mother's, and her sister, Margaret, as well as one of my mother's bridesmaids who had married a pediatrician and settled in Columbia. We drove down to Savannah and had a magical dinner at the Pirate's House. We continued driving and spent a day and night in Jacksonville, where my strongest memory is an exhibit at the Children's Museum where I could climb through a model of the human digestive tract and slide out the end, and my mother left one of her favorite dresses in a drawer at the hotel, so we had to turn around and drive back more than an hour down the road. We also spent a night in St. Augustine and went to the nighttime presentation of the history of that oldest settlement, of which I mainly remember flaming torches. We visited Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center and visited the Edwards, family friends with a daughter just my age. And then we went to Orlando! We spent two or three days at DisneyWorld--this was before even EPCOT was built. My memories of that visit to the park are mostly of standing in long lines, but the stories my family tell include me disappearing and coming back with the life story of everyone behind us in line, and me falling asleep in the Hall of Presidents and napping all the way through the American Revolution and the Civil War. I have clearer memories of the water-skiers at Cypress Gardens, and I'm sure we stopped at at least a couple of other attractions that have faded from memory.

Now that I try to pull up memories, it's interesting how much has faded and what still stands out. Somewhere I convinced my parents to pay for a drawing done by a sidewalk artist, who made my shirt blue instead of the white it really was, and that portrait hung in my parents' bedroom for many years afterward. We ate at Morrison's Roast Beef almost every day--an all-you-can-eat cafeteria-style chain where I fell in love with the hot open roast beef sandwiches. I tried Key Lime pie for the first time and still don't care for it. It was incredibly hot for much of the trip, especially while we were in Orlando--there are pictures of six-year old me with sweat standing out on my brow, and I think that trip is what convinced my Dad to start getting air conditioning in our future cars. I remember the orange briefcase, handed down from my father, that held my books, toys, and drawing materials. I remember singing show tunes and Scottish airs and rounds along the highway. I remember sleeping on Beckie, who was incredibly patient for a fifteen year old dragged along on a six-year-old's dream trip.

As I think about it, that's why I'm picking that trip: it was the first time that a trip focused on what I would enjoy, not on visiting family, or attending a meeting, or entertaining a church group, or--as would soon become the case--visiting colleges. My parents wanted me to love travelling as much as they did and I can see now the effort and expense they went to in order to teach me the joy of it. That was a good trip.
lillibet: (Default)
What was your dream car?

My oldest sister's first car was a green VW bug, rumored to have been previously owned by Tina Louise, who played Ginger on Gilligan's Island. It had no air conditioning and spotty heat, but I loved climbing in the back of that thing and heading off on adventures with Anne and her partner, George. We would go spelunking at Dungeon Rock in the Lynn Woods, or off to Block Island for a week in the summer. There was a whole phase where they were into grave rubbing and we'd spend afternoons picnicking in graveyards, taking rubbings of the more interesting gravestones on rice paper with hard wax crayons.

So perhaps it's not surprising that for many years my dream car was a VW bug. And not just any bug, but the convertible yellow one with leopard-print interiors that I occasionally saw tootling around Cambridge over the years. I don't remember anything about the driver, but I thought that car was the coolest thing I'd ever seen.

I spent a lot more time in the back of bugs while I lived in Mexico. All the taxis were VW bugs painted black with yellow roofs. There were no meters--before you got in the car you negotiated the fare to your destination with the driver. Taxis were very cheap by my standards, so I ended up taking them a lot. I got into a conversation with one driver who said he wished he could speak English, because so many American tourists came to town and asked him questions about sites along their route that he couldn't answer. We worked out a deal where he made me a cassette tape of what words and phrases he needed and I dubbed in between the English translations. Apparently this was more helpful than I had thought, because for a while any time I got in a cab they asked me for a tape and I not only sold at least a couple dozen of them, but could generally count on free cab rides whenever I needed them.

I never have owned a bug, but I came close with my last car. The new MINI rolled out while Jason and I lived in London. We loved the "MINI Adventure" commercials, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH5MQLgpY7Y

They weren't for sale in the US when we moved back, but as soon as they were we got a gold one with a black roof. I loved driving that car--not only was it fun to drive and ridiculously easy to park, but I enjoyed how often people would roll down their windows at stoplights to tell me how much they liked it and ask questions about it. We drove it for twelve years, until our daughter's legs got so long that she had to sit cross-legged in her car seat to fit behind Jason.

Now I drive an Audi A3 e-tron, the hybrid electric. It drives well and is pretty cool from an environmental perspective, but on the outside it looks like yet another blue hatchback. I find I miss driving a car with personality and hope that by the time Alice goes off to college, MINI will be making electric cars once again.

Or maybe I'll finally get myself a vintage convertible yellow VW bug.
lillibet: (Default)
Did you have any serious accidents as a child?

The parsonage that I grew up in had a concrete porch with cast iron railings all around it. From pictures I know that it was all wooden when my parents and sisters moved into it, several years before I was born, but somewhere along the line my dad must have convinced the church to replace it with a more modern solution.

For my third birthday I received a beautiful purple tricycle with a white seat and white handles with plastic fringe hanging from them that would flap around in the breeze of my cycling. I loved that tricycle and would ride it for hours. Unless someone was around to supervise me (and carry the tricycle back up the steps) I was only allowed to ride it on the porch. The way my mother phrased this rule was "Never ride your tricycle off the porch," which I interpreted to mean "Do not ride your tricycle down the steps," and since she said it so often, I decided that it must be a fun thing to do.

So one sunny day I got as much of a racing start as I could in six feet of porch and launched myself down the steps. I can't actually remember the sensation of tumbling, or landing, and the pain has long faded from memory as well. What I remember was my mother standing over me, looking down in horror.

With the resilience of childhood I had avoided breaking any bones, but I had scraped all the skin off the right side of my face, bitten my tongue so hard that the skin sloughed off, and knocked both of my front teeth out. Well, not quite out--they were dangling by the roots.

My mother grew up on a tobacco farm in rural North Carolina during the Great Depression. Going for the doctor was an hours long drive and I'm not sure where the nearest hospital was back then. So despite having medical care much closer to home, she still tended to take care of anything she felt she knew how to handle.

She pushed my teeth back up into the gums, picked the gravel out of my face, washed and bandaged me up, and put me to bed. Miraculously, the teeth returned happily to their beds, and my face healed eventually.

But before it did I decided, in the way of small children, to take control of my appearance. One evening while I was lying under the marble-topped coffee table in the center of the living room, where I could play without being underfoot, I took my safety scissors and hacked away several inches of my hair all over the top of my head.

Mom said that going to the grocery store after that was a real treat. People would look at me, my face banged up, my teeth at odd angles, my hair sticking up at every angle and look askance at my mother, who could only shrug and say "She did it herself!"

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