Declaring bankrupcy

At first I was pretty good about staying on top of things.

Then they just kept coming, faster than I could keep up.

Then came the shameful day when I decided to ignore them entirely. Ignorance is bliss, right?

There was no going back after that. Did they stop? No. The debts kept piling up while my head was planted firmly in the sand.

But now I owe too much! It's hopeless!

Today I declare phone message bankruptcy and wipe the board clean. I hereby absolve myself of any owed messages on my voicemail but, in exchange for the clean slate, I promise to return calls from now on. Ahhhhh....It feels so liberating to come out from under the weight of owed phone calls and ignored callers. Free at last! The shackles have fallen from my...wherever shackles are placed!
I really must apologize to any of you who ever left a message on our answering machine in the last nine months or so. It's very misleading, that message that says "...we'll call you back as soon as we can." Not entirely true. I should have said "...we'll call you back if we ever listen to this message. But it's highly unlikely. Frankly the chances are zero."

It's not you, callers, it's me.

First, I'm not a big phone talker. Love to chat in person, I'll even join in on a good text conversation, but I'm not so great on the phone. I can't hang up fast enough. [I can't count how many times I've told G "...okay...yeah...well, let's talk about this tonight when you get home."]

So when we moved into this house last summer, I noticed that the message indicator on the phone didn't work anymore. I used to come in, glance at the phone, dial in to voicemail and listen. But with no indicator, I could go days without listening to messages and then when I finally checked there would be an insane number: "You have...1498 messages." If you think I proceeded to listen to each and every message, you are sadly wrong. Better people would have done that. Me? I just hung up.

At some point, somebody told one of the kids that our voicemail was full. I was so happy! Now when people called, they wouldn't be able to leave a message and would call back instead. People wouldn't be roaming the country believing that I was spitefully ignoring them! [Quite often I would tell people our phone message system was "broken" and to use my cell phone if they needed to reach me but unfortunately I'm sure there are some people who thought I was giving them the cold shoulder. My shoulders are warm, I promise!]

You might ask why didn't I just cancel our voicemail system? That's a good point. Well, that would involve making a phone call to the phone company, wouldn't it? And, even worse, waiting on the phone for hours! So on and on it went.

Until.

We bought a new phone this last weekend with a built-in answering machine, an old-school solution of listening to the taped messages out loud. It works! It really really works. I listen while I put away the groceries or putter around the kitchen and it's almost like the caller's right there in the room. Sometimes I even talk back. But--so far, fingers crossed, wood knocking--I've returned every single one.

And that's why I had a chocolate banana shake for lunch today. It was Phone Message Bankruptcy celebration day. Feel free to raise a glass in my direction today and join me!

Always go to the funeral

Greg's grandmother passed away yesterday, the lovely matriarch of a large family. She lived a wonderful and long life and had been ill recently but you're never really prepared for that phone call, are you?

Our kids were very teary last night as we broke the news to them and told stories remembering Grandma Lee and the great memories of our visits over the years. Immediately the kids started asking, "Can we go to her funeral? Please? We have to go." We definitely feel So Far Away from the rest of our family at these times--we're the distant east coast outpost of the family and the funeral is in Idaho--and what we want most is to be with everyone else.

But it was never really a question. We're going. We've always thought it was important but a couple of years ago Greg and I heard a moving This I Believe essay on NPR and decided, right there, that we would always do everything we could to show up at times like these.

Thought I'd share it here. It's kind of long but worth it, I think. Thanks, Deirdre Sullivan, whoever you are, for articulating this in a way that has stayed with us and crystallized our priorities. I especially love this line: "In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn't been good versus evil. It's hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing."

Always Go to the Funeral

I believe in always going to the funeral. My father taught me that.

The first time he said it directly to me, I was 16 and trying to get out of going to calling hours for Miss Emerson, my old fifth grade math teacher. I did not want to go. My father was unequivocal. ''Dee,'' he said, ''you're going. Always go to the funeral. Do it for the family.''

So my dad waited outside while I went in. It was worse than I thought it would be: I was the only kid there. When the condolence line deposited me in front of Miss Emerson's shell-shocked parents, I stammered out, ''Sorry about all this,'' and stalked away. But, for that deeply weird expression of sympathy delivered 20 years ago, Miss Emerson's mother still remembers my name and always says hello with tearing eyes.

That was the first time I went un-chaperoned, but my parents had been taking us kids to funerals and calling hours as a matter of course for years. By the time I was 16, I had been to five or six funerals. I remember two things from the funeral circuit: bottomless dishes of free mints and my father saying on the ride home, ''You can't come in without going out, kids. Always go to the funeral.''

Sounds simple -- when someone dies, get in your car and go to calling hours or the funeral. That, I can do. But I think a personal philosophy of going to funerals means more than that.

''Always go to the funeral'' means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don't feel like it. I have to remind myself of it when I could make some small gesture, but I don't really have to and I definitely don't want to. I'm talking about those things that represent only inconvenience to me, but the world to the other guy. You know, the painfully under-attended birthday party. The hospital visit during happy hour. The Shiva call for one of my ex's uncles. In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn't been good versus evil. It's hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing.

In going to funerals, I've come to believe that while I wait to make a grand heroic gesture, I should just stick to the small inconveniences that let me share in life's inevitable, occasional calamity.

On a cold April night three years ago, my father died a quiet death from cancer. His funeral was on a Wednesday, middle of the workweek. I had been numb for days when, for some reason, during the funeral, I turned and looked back at the folks in the church. The memory of it still takes my breath away. The most human, powerful and humbling thing I've ever seen was a church at 3:00 on a Wednesday full of inconvenienced people who believe in going to the funeral.

Deirdre Sullivan grew up in Syracuse, and traveled the world working odd jobs before attending law school at Northwestern University. She’s now a freelance attorney living in Brooklyn. Sullivan says her father’s greatest gift to her and her family was how he ushered them through the process of his death.

In praise of late bloomers

I love late bloomers, all varieties. My grandpa took up painting just a couple of years ago and sends us watercolor treasures, scenes from Italy and France and Utah. I linger over articles about authors late to the publishing world, taking small shards of hope from their against-all-odds optimism.

My kids didn't get teeth until they were 9 months old and that was perfectly fine with me. Sam's now almost nine years (next month) and he's only lost a couple of teeth, the two almost invisible ones in the bottom center. {Poor boy, he's going to be in 4th grade with the gappy front tooth smile, up to 5 years later than some of his friends.} And Maddy still cherishes her doll Emily with the fidelity of a mother, long after dolls have lost their cool for most of her friends. Everything in its time, I think to myself, privately happy to extend the moments of childhood and allow them their own timetables.

With that in mind, please do not be shocked when I tell you something.

Sam just mastered riding a bike.

Are you still reading this? Are you not shocked with the depths of neglect this boy has had to suffer at the hands of his parents? Truthfully, we've tried. For the past several summers we've taken him out. But, used to the ease that some things have come to him, he didn't like it, dug in his heels and refused. You know that saying about horses and water and drinking? Try young boys and bicycles and riding. Then, we had waited too long and Sam didn't want to be seen learning how to ride a bike, he wanted to do it without the pain of trial, mistakes, and potential embarrassment.

Hmmm. I recognized this trait. And it worried me. I recognized it from my own life, from times when I stayed in the boat rather than learn how to water ski in front of people, countless other times when fear of other's opinions trumped fun and experience and trial and error and joy, for crying out loud.

But I also recognized it from my own reading. In my research work* I have been drawn to interesting findings by Carol Dweck on the developmental importance of failure and persistence in the face of barriers. She's found that, more important than believing that you're smart is believing you're hard working or able to work to become better. She's also looked at the effects of different kinds of praise (from parents and teachers), discovering that praise about traits (being smart, beautiful, naturally athletic) means less (and is in fact at times counter-productive) than praise about effort. In short, the difference is whether you think that your abilities are inborn or developed because it influences your philosophy about whether effort is worth it.

This lack of bike-riding was a splinter in Sam's view of himself. He stayed home from the scout bike rodeo and avoided playing with bike-happy friends. For a while, Sam seemed to think people either could bike or they couldn't and there wasn't much point in trying. But this week, with the aid of a positive and patient dad and much negotiation, he agreed to work at it for ten tries. And then, mid-week, he started rolling his bike out to the front of the house on the sly, doggedly working solo on that tricky starting moment where you lift both feet to the pedals and push. Today he's zipping around the neighborhood, all glee and I-did-it-ness.

Yeah, I love those inspiring, audacious, late-bloomers--octogenarian novice painters, middle-age debut authors, and especially nine-year-old bike riders.

*just if you're curious: my proposed work is focusing on early interaction patterns between infants/toddlers and parents that influence these self views and subsequent motivations/curiosity/persistence/resilience.