On Turning Ten

My daughter spends the last days of her single-digit-years kayaking among dreamy domes of vibrant lime green mountain moss in Vermont. Small citrus shades of tufts cling to rock and weathered wooden bridges, activating happy sensory circuits as our bare feet brush against their softness. Down by the pond, my daughter wades into its bank, mud squishing to form a fleeting footstep. She spends hours scouting for the tiniest toads and crawfish with her dad and brother. 

I find a reading nook between the pond and a delicious babbling brook. I enjoy how the color schemes of my stack of books blend so beautifully with those limelight green and earthy browns. Solitude gives me a moment to notice how the pond reflects pine trees and the enormous, cumulus clouds so vividly that it almost tips my reality upside-down. Sun sparkles dance on the floor of this magical space as an afternoon breeze settles in. 

I wish I could stir all these happy ingredients into a lotion that I can reapply daily for the rest of my life. Or package this particular color wheel into a tube of paint so I can spread it across a canvas when hard days arrive. Instead, I absorb this moment through all my senses and tenderly tuck it deep into my brain matter as the precious tiny gift that it is. Just as I have been doing these past ten years with my daughter, whose hair used to turn translucent in the sunlight.

People love to tell new mothers that childhood goes by in a blink of an eye. I always nod, knowingly. Growing up, my parents called me "Little Busia". Little Grandma. I have always been keenly aware of the bittersweet passing of time. The only remedy I know is to find occasional moments to slow down and soak in life's moments as best as I am able. I appreciated Albert Lee’s words of wisdom that he shared with Ben after the birth of our daughter. “Each stage is so unique and you think you will be devastated when she grows out of it until you realize the next stage is pretty awesome too.” 

We arrive the next day in Boston and, after a rather competitive game of family Uno in the public garden, my daughter turns ten. Standing in Brittany’s apartment in the South End neighborhood, she confesses she feels sad to say goodbye to nine. Brittany, who is just as close in age to my daughter as she is to mine, nods empathetically. “Nine is a great prime number.” My daughter sighs and they share a moment of sadness together. There are sheets of rain pouring onto the streets of Boston when my husband invites our daughter to walk to the nearest coffee and donut shop for a mini birthday date. I remember how vulnerable my heart felt when I first held this baby girl. I thought I had endured big heartbreak before but never had I experienced the sheer amount of power that one little human being could command on whether or not my heart stayed unified or not. For the rest of my life. If there is any comfort in loving someone so deeply, it is knowing that someone else in this world loves her just as much. 

We head to the ocean with Brittany when the date is done- Sandwich, Barnstable, Provincetown. The words “Hey Brittany!” become the anthem of the weekend as our five-year-old son begs for her attention. There are late-night walk-up ice cream counters and carryout dinners sitting beside a tumultuous Atlantic ocean. On a calmer day, Brittany, my daughter, and I spend hours wading through entire seaside ecosystems and tidepools. My son experiences the ocean tides for the first time, jumping, leaping, getting mouthfuls of salt water, sputtering, and spitting. 

I have been dreaming of getting in our car and driving to the ocean since April 2020. It is only fitting that Brittany is here. Brittany, who spent so many years in our living room watching my daughter learn to speak, read, and wonder aloud. Brittany, who bought my daughter women in science t-shirts featuring Madame Curie and Mae Jemison. Who gifted kids books on Quantum Physics, folktales from around the world, and (my favorite) roadkill science. Brittany who ate her dinners of noodles while we met weekly if not multiple times weekly on Zoom throughout March-April-May 2020. When summer 2020 came it was Brittany laying down her blanket in our backyard, on the beach, Garden Park, Wicker Park and joining us for socially distanced dinners where I shared my strong desire to drive to the ocean. Brittany who supplied the families in our bible study with no less than 150 free Covid test kits. Brittany who loves our family so faithfully.

Our east coast travels conclude in the Hudson Valley. On a Sunday evening, we wave goodbye to Brittany as her ferry departs from Provincetown for Boston. On a Monday we are in the Catskills, meeting our niece Mayerli in front of her dorm room. Resourceful, spirited, beautiful, twenty years young- she immediately wraps her arms around her cousins. She arrived early to school for cross-country practice and in this mostly empty building we share our opinions on her dorm furniture and choosing the best dorm room according to capacity for sunlight. She is vibrant in this new home and we laugh as she explains the multiple colorful band-aids patched over her knees. Apparently, her dorm keycard isn’t working and she has to crawl through her dorm window every time she wishes to enter the building. I take a video of her setting up a chair she has hidden in the bushes and then of her hoisting herself up through the lead glass windows. I send it to her mother who will also laugh and groan.

In this moment I gain brief clarity about what I can dream for my daughter over the next ten years. These are the years to build stamina, grit, creative problem-solving, and faithfulness. To continue encouraging wonder and exploration. To provide more invitations to walk to a coffee shop in the rain in new cities, spend more time wading through mud and tidepools in the name of curiousity, read more fairytales, advocate for what you need (maybe it is sunlight!), board ferries that pull us away from the familiar, and teach how to climb in through windows when the door isn’t an option (metaphorically and literally). We wave goodbye to Mayerli the same way we waved to Brittany: knowing that she is thriving in the process of growing.

** Fun Resource: Storybook House on Wright Mountain, Vermont

Where my feet are

I left my dream job seven years ago. It still sits on my heart like a former love that I have shelved for another season. Last spring, I took a continuing education course and found myself in a room with several occupational therapists that had been colleagues and mentors from seventeen years ago when I was a new graduate practicing at the now Shirley Ryan Rehabilitation facility. Many of these women were still practicing adult neuro rehabilitation, creating businesses and podcasts of their own. Listening to their professional paths made my heart sing a little. The class itself also showcased many videos from stroke and brain injury rehabilitation. I found my own brain firing hundreds of circuit connections built on the eleven years I was fortunate enough to spend practicing in that field. There it was: all that knowledge and passion had not entirely left my body when I transitioned to a job that provided an amazing life-work balance benefiting our family needs.

I have worked in the public school system for the past seven years. I am thankful for a district that took a chance on me- willing to see how much and how fast I could learn as it was quite a career change. The change happened swiftly. Ben and I had already planned a trip to Maine before I actually interviewed and took the job so I had this little life intermission to mentally transition. I spent much of those eight days in Maine grieving what I was leaving behind and preparing for the steepest learning curve I could climb. That autumn my then three-year-old daughter would fall asleep to the glow of child development blogs I studied each night.

While I sincerely miss the cognitive, motor, and visual rehabilitation I got to do in the hospitals, I do adore my current job working with 3-13-year-old humans. Much of my current job entails harnessing 5-6-7-8-9-year-old boy energy into something fun, productive, and creative while also practicing fine motor and executive function skills. This is why my most used therapeutic tools these days are bean bags that look like weird vegetables, skeleton arm tongs, and spontaneous movement breaks that mimic potatoes, mashed potatoes, and angry cats. 

On this particular day, I am assessing how to get the most handwriting and executive functioning practice out of my two sweet, energetic boys when I decide to recreate the environment. We typically sit at a table that is actually two rhomboid tables pushed together to make a large hexagon. After a brief moment of thought, I pull apart the two tables so I can sit directly across from both boys and within arm’s length. One of the boys bounds into the room but stops cold just before reaching me. He runs back into the hall and I hear him shout to his classmates: “You guys! YOU GUYS!! Ms C just SPLIT the big table and it is now TWO tables! You have to come see this!” I wonder if this is at all on par with the genuine awe and excitement Moses encountered after parting the Red Sea because I don’t think another level of excitement can be found in a human being than what I witnessed there. 

I am thankful that one of my favorite teachers, Ms. D, is able to enjoy this moment with me (it is her classroom, after all). I am also grateful that I get to spend the next five minutes building trunk strength by striking our own silly, made up poses of different vegetables. “Be where your feet are” is a little mantra I’ve started implementing since listening to a podcast called “Barb Knows Best”. If you know me, my thoughts are rarely in the present but way back in time or thinking about the future. I have big dreams and desires for future years. I have big regrets and desires to change the past. But my feet are presently between two bouncy boys begging to strike the “strawberry pose”. Boys who think I split a large wooden table in half with my bare hands. I will absolutely join them here in this moment.

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* Picture: One of my favorite parts of my job is creating unique art using fine motor and visual motor skills. This particular student is always abundant with his crafts and the outcome is always striking.

** Fun resource: My Fine Motor Crafts Pinterest Board

Allagash White

I remember her barefoot with the squishiest legs 

Dangling over the pier

Toes barely touching the water

My smallest love, sitting there in the quiet of a sleepy town in September 

Middle of Maine

Middle of the week 

Lakeside, mountainside

In a video I capture her production of language- all cheeks & cadence-

She is noticing the pier that moves

Up and Down on the gentle laps of water

“It's like the people,” she says

And begins to sing

The people on the bus go up and down

She turns to look at me

Light pink glasses framing a devoted gaze

Two square chiclet front teeth 

Freshly three years old

I revisit this video over and over

The way her voice sounds when she says “people” 

I tell every new mother to take all the videos

Catch that tiny voice

The way each word is so intentionally strung together

Syllables pronounced with definition

Sentence structure concrete and singular 

like every word is sliding a counter on a abacus

I sometimes live in these Maine moments

Morning Kayaks 

Mist on the water, feet splashing

Collecting fallen birch bark on the steep trail 

leading us from the house to the pier

Miss Rumphius by the fireplace

Allagash White in the evenings 

The darkness of night when we tried to convince her to gaze upward

Searching out for stars 

Grasping for glory

She refused

Because she was three

Years later there is June

Two-year-old daughter of a friend

Her voice is all cheeks & cadence 

Every word so articulate and intentionally expressed 

I hold her on my hip and I watch her 

cheeks inflate as she narrates

The actions of her older sister, my daughter, 

And a miniature horse named Miss Mouse

There is no lake but just a stream of sudsy hose water

That trickles past my feet as I snuggle 

Happy that I can live 

in my memory of the middle of Maine right here

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* Picture Hancock, Maine September 2016 

** Actual pier sat in Rangely, Maine

*** Fun resource: Allagash is a Maine brewery and Allagash White continues to be one of my favorite drinks because of this very week 

Better than Sesame Street

Sense of place is often my favorite part of a story. I love it when the setting of a story becomes its own character. For example, I don’t remember much about the movie Mulholland Drive but I do remember loving the city lights of Los Angeles and how the city became a strange, breathing, living thing that kept me unsettled but also transfixed.  Or the book Heaven’s Coast by poet Mark Doty which highlights Boston and Provincetown as major characters both in heartbreak and healing. Or anytime Jhumpa Lahiri places a short story in Boston or the bible refers to "the wilderness". And what would Gilmore Girls be without the main star, Stars Hollow?

In my own life, I think of my middle school connection with a forest preserve where our cross-country team would practice in autumn. I can still feel the clickiness of my Walkman as I started my mixtape and the way the machine popped in my hand when the tape ended abruptly. I still find comfort when I recall sitting in my dear friend’s papasan chair in her first apartment located in Lincoln Park and the way she loved to cook something from the recipe book of Dr Andrew Weil while I read the trilogy of Griffin and Sabine from her library. I can visualize the layout of so many people’s homes, the direction of light that came from different lamps and windows, the smells, the way I feel the barometric pressure either drop or rise when I enter, the texture of their rugs or furniture. The kitchen chairs that were covered in fabric at my childhood friend’s home- the ones that spun around so fast and we would sit with Hostess cupcakes and spin and spin. 

My husband’s parents own a three-flat that I call Sesame Street. At a very special time, two sets of our friends rented out two of their flats. There was an evening that Ben and I dropped by with our three-year-old daughter to visit. We found his parents hanging out on the front porch steps and we began chatting there. Suddenly, a window from the second story was tossed open and Brady joined in the conversation, his upper body hanging out the window for a better view. The couple in the garden apartment opened their front door letting their three-year-old daughter dash out to join mine on a tiny patch of grass. Bailey & Kevin leaned against the brick exterior and we all chatted in these casual spaces until the cicadas started to sing. It was a moment that I knew made my soul so joyful but was not going to last forever. My job was simply to savor. The theatrical positioning of our bodies reminded me of a 1980s Sesame Street scene. Hence, the name Sesame Street continued. 

There was also a fun season in Ben and my life where we hosted a small group for our church every Monday evening. I worked a ten-hour shift on Mondays in that same season and would often arrive home to greet my husband and two-year-old daughter along with twenty to thirty people who were already settling into my living room. This sounds exhausting when I write it out now but we loved providing a space to congregate for Northwestern students, young couples and families, and anyone willing to join the chaos. I enjoyed coming home and hearing the distinct voices of people I cherished. Our six years of hosting ended quite suddenly with the pandemic but one evening, over Zoom, our friend Josh confessed that he missed our kitchen and could vividly imagine the overhead lighting and how it made him feel so cozy in our home. This made my heart sing: someone else carried the sense of place that our home provided.

As with all things in life, nothing stays the same. Half the battle in life is recognizing that a place of comfort or beauty or the people within those spaces can be fleeting. It is only then that you can take a moment to be thankful for and savor it. In an instant, places can be torn away, burned down, left behind, overtaken, lost, vacated, or taken from us. Lake Michigan water levels rose significantly in the spring and summer of 2020. Ben and I were taking a drive as we often did during the early pandemic and we saw our favorite beaches were completely covered in water. It was as if they never existed. We can carry treasured places in our memories and hearts if we allow them the space. What a privilege having a home or welcome space can be, especially when there are so many displaced people and unsafe spaces. When your town, city, or country itself is in turmoil. My brain is wired to constantly be aware that this happens every day and could happen to anyone, anywhere. But this is also when I lean on the belief that what lies here on earth is not my final home. I appreciated a quote from Author Jen Pollock who writes, “In the beginning of time, God made a home for his people and at the end of time God will make a home for us.” She goes on to point out that our first home was in a garden, and our last home will be in a city. Better than Sesame Street.

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* Postcards by Bob Eckstein found from The Wasteshed

** Fun resource: YOU! I would love to hear what your favorite space is :)

Life is an 86 Year Old Cabaret

She demanded that we assemble in the waiting room at 3 o'clock so she could perform a song as a way to thank us for our services over the last three months. Tiny, Jewish, and eighty-six-year-old Sally* couldn't wait for her moment to shine. Boisterous and lovely, she loved to tell us the story of a date she once had with a rabbi. "The date happened just before I met my husband (sixty-some years ago). This rabbi had the hots for me and he asked me out. I was a looker. We went to dinner and guess what I ordered? I ordered ribs!" she said, emphasizing her rebellious choice of pork with large eyes, raised eyebrows and voice, and a jab with her elbow to my side. We assembled in the waiting room like she had requested. She sat in a chair next to her devoted ninety-two-year-old husband who was her full-time oxygen tank holder. "Is everyone here?" she asked before literally leaping to her feet to perform. Ninety-five pounds of our dear Sally* began her song: a full Liza Minella rendition of "Life is a Cabaret". She danced into the audience, she twirled therapists and our MD, she growled like Liza, and she wouldn't stop singing even after we had applauded twice. Meanwhile, her husband chased her around with the oxygen tank so she wouldn't unplug the oxygen tube that was nestled in her nose.

After the performance and a Friday rush to finish up documentation, our doctor came into the office. "Doesn't that make it worth it?" she asked us, leaning her own tiny frame against the door in her miniskirt and heels. This doctor didn't dress down even though her job required inspecting feet for gout often. We had to agree: our job was worth it.


* Name and some details changed
** Photo: Chicago Botanic Garden September 2023
** Fun Resource: The Man Who Mist His Wife for a Hat - Oliver Sacks ... A perfect illustration of how wondrous the brain can be. I had the pleasure of working as a neurological focused occupational therapist for 12 years and it remains my favorite.

I'll Write You a Letter Tomorrow

Little Denise sits on the window ledge above my kitchen sink. She takes form in a wide-mouthed mason jar among tiny green propagation clippings. Her composition consists of 50 grams water, 50 grams flour, and 100 grams sourdough starter that Big Denise dropped off on a Sunday afternoon. I barely make bread with Little Denise.

Instead, I love to watch her breath- bubbles climbing the sides of the mason jar and then settling back down by evening. I love her remnants that stick like lace to the jar’s interior, evidence that she grew until she couldn’t anymore. I love her constancy, like tides rising and falling. I marvel at her breathwork like I marvel at the plastic gallon of milk which pumps like a heart, its sides expanding and contracting rhythmically when I pour its spoiled contents down my sink drain. Apparently, I create and measure body vitals in the form of food containers these days. Breath. Heartbeat. Hunger. I feed Little Denise daily. She is like a new pet and I feel stupidly anxious that I will fail her and she will stop rising to the top of the jar. Stop breathing. I confess my new anxiety to a small group of women on a Monday evening.

“Sourdough in 2022? That was so 2020,” Danielle jokes. And we laugh because it’s true. Because it is still so tender to think about that season. Because I might start sobbing if we don’t laugh. Or that I won't cry at all. The latter has become my norm since double masking while moving around masses of tiny, sweet bodies that I continued to work with in person while much of our community was still isolated. Singing, dancing, playing, practicing handwriting, and trying to smile extra big with my eyes since no one saw the lower half of my face for a year and it's hard to build rapport with smalls when they can't see you are smiling. 

But even before that. The day before our state asked us to stay in our homes for two weeks, my daughter joined her kindergarten friends at Lia’s home for a birthday party. My two-year-old son sat on the window sill with Lia’s sweet older brothers and we watched these little six-year-old girls giggle and hug with their freshly painted faces. They were small tigers and butterflies moving around the house with so much joy. And if you knew my daughter’s shyness leading up to that year, you would know how beautiful it was to see her moving so confidently and linking arms with her classmates. Our family stayed late, joined Lia’s family for dinner, and then walked home with my son sitting up on Ben’s shoulders under a bright moon. I remember looking up at him and seeing the moon atop his head like a crown. “See you in two weeks,” were probably our parting words with Lia’s family as we exited through the garage. I still feel the breath knocked out of me when I recall this day and all the things we knew and did not know at that moment.

It is now autumn of 2023. Little Denise died of starvation a year ago. As did Little Cathy, her replacement. Perhaps I shouldn’t name my sourdough starters after friends anymore. It only adds guilt to the smell of spoiled starter. I am restless in this season and sense the signs of misalignment when I cannot stop running. The cool, dark Tuesday evening covers me and I am obsessed with a song I don’t remember listening to very often in the 90s but is now my nostalgic poster song for those high school years that are suddenly under review after a dream I had in August. I listen to this song all four miles of this particular run, pondering and working through all the things I could have done differently, better, and kinder at the turn of the century. The tension of life seems to involve making decisions in individual moments where we both know and don’t know things. We try to do the best we can with what we know. Sometimes we make choices that are painful to recall. We just didn't know then what we know now. “Can’t Hardly Wait” seems to be a portal for these ruminations but what I most appreciate as I listen to this song on repeat, is when the horns quit for a beat and there is absolute silence. The only thing I hear in that perfect pause is the exhale of breath. Mine.

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“I remember me and all the little things that make up a memory

Like she said she loved to watch me sleep

Like she said

"It's the breathing, it's the breathing in and out and in and..." 

- Have You Seen Me Lately, The Counting Crows

A band I once loved and never listened to again

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*Photo: Little Denise outgrowing her mason jar

** Fun resource: My end of my Century Playlist