She has a tan, small face and tiny features like a mouse or a squirrel. There is a smattering of freckles across her nose like someone has been flinging wild oats out to the horses.

Like her mama, she needs her quiet time. If she gets overwhelmed, she might really let you have it, yelling and screaming at one moment, then taking a moment alone to recollect herself and then reemerging moments later like some kind of beautiful, kind, sweet thing. A thing transformed.

“Oh, hello. I love you,” she will say when she comes back to herself, even if she never left but has been standing in front of you the entire time.

Despite what I have just told you, everyone would say that she has charisma and a calm soul. Even when she was first born, she would look not at you, but through you. She isn’t afraid to hold a person’s gaze. “Wow,” my friends would say to her when they held her as a baby, “Whatever do you see in there? In the deepest darkest depths of my soul?”

She still isn’t afraid of looking into people. She never backs down and she never looks away. She can look at you, swallow you up, understand what you are really all about, your fears, your darkness, all the bad things that you could do and then she loves you anyway.

From the moment I held her as a newborn, I thought to myself – and this is a strange thing for a mom to think about the baby she had birthed moments before – I’m not sure this baby needs me. She’ll just humor me for awhile.

We joke (not to her face) that she is a cat in a family of dogs. She doesn’t feel the need to slobber on you or kiss your ass, like the rest of us do. She rarely even feels the need to answer you when she is called. She would just as soon lie in the sun and scratch herself. She will answer you when she is good and ready. She moves through life, catlike and stretchy. Lithe and animalistic.

She is an amazing piece of work. She is a pure and happy thing. When she walks, she skips. Sometimes she locks her elbows and swings her fists, little pendulums that propel her down the street. It is her way.

And when she is on her bike and going really fast, she can’t stop herself from giggling. Great peals of laughter rip out of her.

I love her. She loves me. And that’s how it will be forever and ever. Amen.

So we’re sitting at the table mowing down this bag of grapefruit and my kids are extolling its virtues. They squeeze the fruit into their bowls and then slurp it up.

My husband says, “It’s great fruit, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s really fantastic,” I say.

My son says, “I love it, but the name is weird. I mean, it’s nothing like a grape. And a grape is already a fruit.”

“It’s one of life’s great mysteries,” I say.

“Wait a second,” my husband says, “Is it grapefruit – or greatfruit?”

“Are you pulling my leg?” I laugh, but, alas, he is earnest.

The expression on his face is quizzical. “Well, which is it?”

My 12 year old daughter looks down at her bowl of juice and shakes her head. “Oh, dad.”

I take out the sack from the fridge because he’s likely to not believe me without proof. “5 pounds of Texas Sweet ruby red grapefruit.” I brandish the label.

“Huh. Well, would you look at that.”

“In all your 38 years, did this never come up?”

“I kind of remember someone laughing at me and correcting me, once. In my teens,” he reflects. “But it truly IS great. And I like that name for it more. So I think I forgot that it was really grapefruit. To me, it will always be greatfruit. It should be greatfruit.”

Reality be damned. It really should be.

The thing is, I honestly can’t tell if he’s kidding. Did he know it was ‘grapefruit’ all along? My husband is rather a visionary. He has a brain that is so sharp and so creative – and also so focused – that ordinary things – such as which side of the envelope the stamp goes on – completely escape his notice.

He has a friend like this as well. His name is Steve and, years ago, he came to spend a few days with us. On his last day, he insisted on making us dinner. He went to the market and brought back a number of ingredients, including a do-it-yourself pizza dough in which you add water, press to the pan, add toppings and serve.

Steve banged around for a bit in our galley kitchen and soon had the pizza in the oven. After 20 minutes, he checked the pizza, but the crust “wasn’t quite there,” he said. Twenty more minutes. Nope, that crust still needed more time.

After an hour, I went to take a look. I opened the oven door to a mass of pasty goo topped with watery cheese and oozy sauce dripping off the pan, down the rack, and into the oven below. There was also smoke and a funny smell.

“Huh,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like that.”

“I think I must have done something wrong,” Steve explains. “The crust recipe said to add a cup of water, but it didn’t say what size cup.” He fishes a 64 ounce tumbler out of the sink.

Judging by the bubbling crud all over the inside of my oven, he really had added 8 times the amount of water he was supposed to.

To this day, a decade later, my husband swears it was a joke. He swears that Steve had known all along and had done all this to mess with me. We shall never know.

But I know that my husband knew the word was grapefruit.

Didn’t he?

More than one of us mothers at my table notice this, but we live in a resort town, where young men such as these tend to drink Tequila or Wild Turkey or Jim Beam all night, stopping only when dawn signals that it is time for some grub. It is not all that unusual to see a guy passed out at the breakfast table. And who are we to judge?

A moment later, I look up to see this guy sliding against his friend and then sliding right out of his chair onto the floor. Limp as a spaghetti noodle, but altogether more pale and pasty-looking. His forehead and lips are covered with white goo and there’s thick red fluid under his nose and dripping down his neck. Is he dead? I ask.

We’re not sure, but, certainly, he is down. On the floor. And yet his friends keep eating. They’re still chewing away on their breakfast. One of them registers a mild sort of alarm, more of a calm attention, really, as he stands up to get a closer look at the guy who had, until moments before, been seated at the table in front of him.

Meanwhile, the ladies at my table, none of whom has any medical background whatsoever, launch themselves nimbly to his side. One lady completely clears away the tables and chairs near the poor boy. Another is grilling his friends about his health history: allergies and his history of seizures and the like. Another is instructing the waitress to call 911. Another is rolling up her sweatshirt to put behind the head of this young man, who keeps looking up and then slamming his head back into the floor in confusion. My other friend is wiping his face with her napkin (and it is she who discovers that what we are looking at is not blood and foam but ketchup and white sauce from his biscuits and gravy.) My other friend is rubbing his head gently with her cool touch and speaking in her softest angelic mama voice as his eyes flutter open and closed. I think he, too, is wondering if he were dead.

His friends are still sitting in their chairs, spreading jam on toast. I get the sense that we are in a parallel universe – one in which their friend is dying but they are only watching it on television.

We get up from his side when the paramedics arrive. He is sucking on oxygen for a good 15 minutes before the greenish gray pallor cedes from his face and he can sit again.

My Texan friend says, “If this ever happens to me and you all keep eating your breakfast, then we are not friends anymore.” I believe her.

As they are leaving, the young men who are left standing stop by our table and they say, “Thank you all so much for helping us there. We didn’t know what to do. Are you all a bunch of nurses or something?”

“No,” we say, all at once. “We are Mamas.”

Photo by Vinni123, on Flickr

When the economy took a dive, quite a few people in my town went looking for new digs. It’s a mass exodus, really. The other day, I came across an old Girl Scout roster from two years ago and saw that, in that time, more than half of our sweet Brownie troop has moved away.

One family went to Florida, where they somehow ride roller coasters just about every day. One went to go and live at grandma and grandpa’s beach home. One family is setting off this week for ports unknown, though I’m told it’s most likely to be Cambodia, where they figure their feet will be warm and they’ll be able to really stretch their few remaining dollars.

I told my husband the other day that if I didn’t have three kids and two dogs, this might be the time when I would want to move on. Uproot myself and start over. Ride some roller coasters or some rickshaws.

It would make me feel younger, certainly. It would make me worry less about whether I unplugged the iron or whether my son is getting enough vitamin c or whether my kids are brushing their teeth enough or if their world will be forever marred because I lose track of how long it has been between their baths. If we were in Cambodia, I’d have new things to worry about.

When I was young, I dreamed of living my entire life as a vagabond. A life in which I could travel and meet new people and write down their stories, and I wouldn’t have to do any of those things I saw my mother doing. Fretting over the tomato stains in the Tupperware. Inviting the neighbors over for coffee and pastries while exchanging techniques for properly plumping the raisins in the cinnamon rolls. Getting left behind in the kitchen after dinner with a mess.

That life was not for me, I had decided as a girl. I dreamed to be relaxed and capricious. Wayward and rootless.

But now that my kids are the age that I was then, I find that I love quite a few of my ways and even one or more of my roots.

Still, I tell myself, the time is coming in the not-so-distant future when my kids will be needing me less, and that’s when I’ll pull up some of those roots. Change my ways.

Those will be my vagabond days. And I will have so deserved each and every one.

Photo by muha…,T on Flickr

Sometimes we look for earth-shattering, far-reaching, stunning and tremendous ways to change the world. Friends are reaching out to Rwandan refugees, but I do not. Friends are running races to raise awareness for the plight of women in the Congo. But I do not. While I admire them and their ways of reaching out and spreading their love and caring and kindness into the world, this is not my way. At least not today. At least not this moment. At least not during this season of my life.

For me, today, I write my small words and I raise my small kids, and I do many small things that I write about here. Things that no one (besides you, dear readers) will ever know that I do.

To take an example, here is one small thing that I am about to do: It is a small daily task that I am convinced is one of the easiest ways to infuse more love and joy and happiness into the world, and that is to reach for the leashes that hang on the nail by the wall. My Jack Russell gets so excited that she springs 4 feet in the air to give me kisses. Then she hangs from the collar of my Labrador like a warm, fuzzy pendant. So happy is she to be out in the world with me.

For now, this will have to be enough. And it is.

A few of my favorite wintry things:

The swoosh of my cross country skis as they sail along on heaps of powder; the towering Engelman spruce with their lofty snowy hats and puffy snowy sleeves that bestow water for my kids, who occasionally drag their tongues along them as we ski by; my terrier, Harriet, in her prissy pink sweater, tearing ferociously after ground squirrels and chipmunks.

Lest you think it’s all about skiing, it’s also the way my foot slides into a boot that fits just so; it’s friends with woodstoves and crackling logs; it’s the crunch and squeak of snow under my new, miraculous Finnish snowtires. It’s bustling, cheery, hollering holiday crowds; it’s avoiding bustling, cheery, hollering holiday crowds. It’s a fleece blanket. It’s vanilla spice. It’s making tea bread studded with whole, fresh cranberries.

It’s the white etched on the blue.

Which brings me back to skiing: the way my sharp exhalations shape my hair into spidery ice webs; when it’s so cold the air cracks and gives my body a new energy to move. The energy that comes only when it’s this cold; it gets me the same as the sizzle on my skin in the summertime. It is aliveness and power.

We have a Thanksgiving tradition in my family that I’m not so very thankful for.

It’s called the Gratitude Circle, and I’m not grateful for it because it is this tradition that makes it so my parents and brother don’t share Thanskgiving Dinner with me and my husband and my kids and my in-laws’ bold band of merrymakers. No, they would rather dine alone than share intimate thoughts with a crowd of people they see only once a year.

As you might imagine, in the Gratitude Circle, we gather just before dinner and we all hold hands – all 34 of us – and we go around the circle, taking turns making little speeches about what we’re thankful for. This can take 30 or so minutes, and as you also might imagine, in the meantime, turkey gets cold. Gravy congeals. Rolls harden. The pre-dinner beer buzz wears off.

One guest dims the light and cues music when it’s her turn. Her children are always weeping, also right on cue.. “I…”sniff, sniff, “am thankful for my family…” sniff, sniff. Other people prepare notecards with quotes from Meister Eckhart and Maya Angelou.

I’ve long suspected that my own shy kids would prefer to run for the hills like my parents and my brother, but they don’t know any different. The Gratitude Circle is every bit a part of their Thanksgiving as cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. There has never been a time in their lives when we didn’t do it, because we have always had dinner with my mother-in-law and she eats up this kind of thing. The more melodrama, the better. Everyone is trying to dramatize and outdo.

Now that my kids are getting older, they are beginning to show that maybe they are taking after my side of the family. My 11-year-old daughter says, “I’m grateful and all, but why do we all have to cry about it?”

My 9-year old daughter says, “Can I just say I’m grateful for Chicken Noodle Soup?”

It’s not that we’re not grateful for life and for a large loving family and for the beauty that surrounds us each and every day. It’s that we feel more comfortable sharing those personal, private gratitudes with a small circle indeed. So to get into the spirit of the holiday, we each give ourselves three minutes to jot down some gratitudes, for our very own eyes only, and none of which we shared with the multitudes on Thanksgiving Day.

Here are a few of mine:

redhots on sugar cookies

grandma’s caramel corn

cinnamon

snickerdoodles with soft buttery centers

the way my son looks at me like I’m WonderWoman

pomegranates so ripe they drip down your hands

warm gloves

used bookstores

my daughter Joy’s musical giggle

blowing steam from the top of my coffee

the way snow captures the light in a thousand different ways and winks it back to you – the same way the ocean does when the sun shines just right and makes you believe in magic

the smell of vanilla

warm mugs

puppies with their warm little bellies and sweet warm puppy breath

the skittery sound of snow hitting my windowpanes when my kids and husband are home safe and warm and we have no particular place to go

alone time

lemons

patches on sunshine on my carpet

bicycles

my glorious bed

fleece

honesty

kindness

belly laughs

a pint shared with friends

the way my face tingles after a good hard backcountry ski.

And chicken noodle soup.

I’m at the recycling center, dumping crushed Lego boxes and the rest of the flotsam and wreckage from my son’s birthday celebration. I have to dump this stuff right away, while he’s at school, or he’ll decide he wants to make a cardboard drum set or bunk beds for his Webkinz – and I’ll never get it out of his room.

My neighbor comes up behind me, and as I turn and spot her, I greet her with an exuberance I don’t feel.

I’m exhausted. I’ve been up working since 3 am. I have somehow just spent an hour and a half in Wal-Mart just to buy dog food, air freshener, and tube socks. I’ve got three more errands to run before I can get back to work, and Thanksgiving is coming, and I have so much to do and I feel like I’m running down a hallway that just keeps gets longer and longer and longer.

My neighbor is so sweet and I am feeling tremendously guilty for not wanting to make the time for her right now. She reaches up for a hug, which always makes me feel like a clod because I’m almost 6 feet tall, and I have to bend way down, like a clunky schoolmarm.

Just then I remember an invitation we have just received for her son’s birthday party. Hooray! I can buy  some time by giving my RSVP now, saving myself the 10-minute chit chatty RSVP phone call.

“Jake can come to your son’s party!” I announce. “Thanks so much for inviting him!” And then I take a second to really look at her and I see that she has been agonizing over something and she hasn’t wanted to tell me. It’s in her eyes and in the creases on her forehead.

Something’s going on. Think, Susanna, think. She’s waiting for an apology for something.

“So,” she paints on a smile, “Did you have a good time at your son’s birthday party?”

Oh dear.

“Well, it wasn’t really a party,” I stammer. “It was really more of a family celebration where he was able to invite a few of his closest friends.” Her son wasn’t even in the same grade as my son, and they spent zero time together on the weekends, but we do live a few doors down, and their birthdays are one year and one day apart.

She still looks hurt. Wounded.

“I hope there’s no hard feelings?” Too often as a mom, I find myself apologizing for something I don’t feel bad for, something I didn’t even know I did.

“Well, I guess it’s okay,” she says, “But my son did cry for two nights about not being invited.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry his feelings were hurt,” I gush. “I had no idea. My son told me he was careful not to mention it to anyone at school because he couldn’t invite many kids.”

“One of your other guests told him.” Her voice softens. “Now I know this is a lesson my son must learn, but my husband was very upset. He said we should just not invite your son to our party. But my son wanted to show you that he’s the bigger person. So he insisted on inviting him after all.”

Suddenly, I want to rescind my RSVP, just for spite. I feel violent in that girly well-now-I-want-my-lipgloss-back kind of way. And though it would probably be emotionally healthier to let her know how I feel, calmly and rationally and honestly and firmly, I find myself babbling and making up excuses for myself.

My neighbor interrupts me to repeat everything she has just said, verbatim. Usually that means she wants a different response from me. She is granting me a do-over. But I don’t have another response, so I keep right on blathering.

“Jake didn’t really have a choice in how many kids to invite [uh, not really true] and we gave him a very strict budget [not at all true], and we had so much family coming that this was really our focus and there was only room in our car for Jake to bring 4 friends…”

God, why am I lying? I am so bad at this sometimes…relating to other mothers. And birthday parties, I’ve discovered are surprisingly complicated. We stopped having parties at our house altogether because there were some hard feelings when we didn’t invite the school bully who lives next door and who is 5 years older than my kid. We felt bad when he kept peering in our windows, so we invited him in for pizza and cake along with his older sisters, but he still threw rocks at our house for weeks. Really. He did.

It pains me that I can try and be everything to everyone. I can try to be as nice as I can possibly be to the point of acting like a total phony, and yet I’m still inflicting hurt on my neighbor and on her entire family, unknowingly, in the simple act of trying to do something nice for my own kid.

I remember just then an interview with Mary J. Blige in O Magazine. She said something important: “I grew up in an environment where people were constantly ‘frowned up,’ and I assumed they were upset because of something I’d done. But the most beautiful thing has happened to me: I’m unlearning self-blame. Now I can say, ‘No. That’s not about me. That’s their burden. Their bump in the road.’”

We all have our neuroses, I suppose. God knows I do. Missed invitations, apparently, represents one of hers. But it’s hers and not mine, and so I don’t need to spend any more time thinking about that. I have plenty of my own insecurities to keep me busy, thank you very much.

My neighbor and I end up talking about this for another 25 minutes, in circles. She repeats herself. I repeat myself. We both do it again. And again. And again. Then I get in my car, thankful that I get to spend the rest of the day getting things done. Working on my own burdens and bumps, quiet and alone and without frowns of any kind – up or down.

As she drives away, I wish her well and send her thoughts of strength for her own burdens and bumps. It helps sometimes to know that that these private battles that we are each fighting aren’t so very different from one another – though they might seem as though they are. Knowing this helps me to soften and to be patient, both with my neighbor and with myself.

“Remember when I was little?”

My nine-year-old daughter asked me that today and then proceeded to describe something that happened last week.

“Remember when I was little and Harriet was little, too, and she would crawl on my lap no matter where I was and sleep on me? Even if I sat down to put on my boots, she would nestle on my lap and I couldn’t move? Remember that…when I was little?”

Harriet is our 10-month old puppy, and this all happened last Thursday. It will probably happen again this Thursday.

“That was when you were little?” I asked.

“Yes. I’m growing every day, mom. And so is Harriet.”

It’s true.

Hearing her say that brings me back to the day, nearly 12 years ago, when my husband was marveling at our first daughter. She was a newborn and lying between us on the bed in the middle of the afternoon. She was snatching bits of something (sunlight, spirit?) out of the air in the way that newborns do — batting at something unknown with her tight, tiny fists and squishing her head into her neck and back long again and stretching her tiny mouth with its tiny, tiny lips.

We could have lazed there all day, staring at her, being as she was the most magnificent, marvelous, astonishing miracle we had ever witnessed. And my husband took one of her newborn hands in his and he looked at me with his eyes all brimming and he said, “Remember when she was little?”

She was 8 days old. The stump of her umbilical cord was still attached, but I knew just what he meant.

“Yeah, remember that?” I said.

Here’s a true confession of motherhood:

Birthday parties freak me out.

Not the kind with just my kid and some of his friends, but the ones where I have to host a whole bunch of my relatives and mommy friends, many of whom don’t get along for some reason.

I try to avoid throwing these big birthday parties at all costs because, in addition to costing a fortune, they inevitably take my attention away from the birthday boy or girl. I’m so busy filling odd, arbitrary social obligations that I miss my own kid blowing out the birthday candles.

Still, every now and then, the planets are aligned just so and my husband gets a wild hair and invites everyone under the sun.

Saturday was one of those days. Aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, grandmas and grandpas are all going to gather with my son and four of his best friends at the bowling alley, because my son wanted to bowl.

I’ve been psyching myself up for this since the Tuesday before last. It’s not the thought of my child’s friends running wild and out of control, hopped up on soda and cake, without the disciplinary help of their parents. It’s the cousins and other little friends who are running wild and out of control, hopped up on soda and cake, in full view of their parents, who are sucking down pitchers of Coors Light and grinning while watching their kids doing things like vandalizing soda machines and running into waitresses at full speed. It puts the host (me) in a precarious position – one that this terribly non-confrontational mother wants to run from.

The bowling alley is about a 40 minute drive, which takes us over a majestic but occasionally icy Rocky Mountain pass, so I am offering my son’s friends door-to-door service for this party. I’ll fill my minivan with my son’s friends and drop them off again when we are done. Our other family friends and relatives will meet us at the bowling alley.

As I drive to the first guest’s home, my eye drifts to the clock and I calculate how many hours will have passed before this party is finished, and I can come home again; before I can once more drive down this street, drop off the last guest, collapse on my couch with my daughters and my dogs, and sip a jumbo glass of merlot while my son puts together the Star Wars lego kit he’s about to get.

And then I see our first guest on the sidewalk in front of his house. He is clutching a bright blue be-ribboned box, and he is boogying. It is quite a show, and he is giggling his brains out. He wiggles to the left and then to the right. He does some John Travolta, “Stayin’ Alive,” finger-pointing moves. He does a little mambo. He does a little cha cha.

Watching him, I decide right then that this is what this day will be about. My son and his friends. That’s it. The cousins and aunts and uncles can take care of themselves. I mean, I’ll feed them and all, but my focus is on the birthday boy.

The little boys my son has invited spend quite a lot of time at my house. We know each other, we respect each other. I would even say we love each other.  When my van is full and it starts to get a little noisy, one little boy says “Ssh, you should all be quiet so Susanna can drive. We don’t want her to get in an ACK-si-dent.”

Another says, “Yeah. Let’s play the quiet game.”

But that was too good to be true, because pretty soon another boy pipes up: “I’ll be the distracter. The first person to talk or laugh loses.”

It’s quiet for a minute, but then “the distracter” starts in, and it doesn’t take long to tease out his strategy. It is this: Append the word “butt” or “poop” to every single thing he sees. “Telephone wire butt.  Waterfall butt. Waterfall poop. Waterfall poop from the waterfall butt. Rock butt. Butt rock. Rock poop. Poop rocks.”

Of course, I am the first to laugh. I lose, and a new distracter is chosen. The second boy has a similar strategy, but he adds “pee” to the mix, just to keep us guessing.

All of these boys are 8 except for one 5-year-old, whom we invited because he is the little brother of my son’s best friend. Also because he is particularly cute and particularly sweet, and I love him, in particular. Today he is wearing a plaid shirt with a starched collar and wide wale corduroy pants. His eyes are wide and baby blue and innocent, almost wistful. He is sitting just behind me in the van because it was the easiest place for me to install his booster seat.

He likes to say my name, as many little kids do. He holds the “s” until it hisses. Susssssana.  “Guess what, Sussssssssanna.” And “Do you know what, Sussssssana?”

“Tell me.”

“I like it when we make the turns in the roads,” he says as we go around a tight switchback.

“Lots of people call this part of the road the switchbacks,” I tell him. “But I like to call them the ‘twisty bits’ because I like the way those words sound together.”

Evidently, he likes it, too. He says it over and over. “Twisty bits. Twisty bits. I like the twissssssty bits, Missss Susssssana.”

Little boys’ thoughts are so linear. One follows the next in methodical fashion. It’s nice.

For this moment, I am delighting in being a part of their afternoon, just driving them to a party all together in the car, getting to eavesdrop on their guileless games and their frank, undemanding conversation.

I discover that I am driving to this party pretty slowly. Is it because I have such precious cargo in my van or because I know this might be the best part of the entire event?

It did, in fact, turn out to be the highlight of the day. The cousins did try to break open the coin changer and unplug the arcade games and pour soda on the carpet, but I heard about it only later, from my daughters and my husband, who stopped them. I was too busy bowling with my boys.