bucket list

Kid at the playground today: Are you a photographer or something?
Me, while snapping my 67th photo: I'm trying to learn how to be one.
Kid: Oh. Well, I know all about how to take pictures. I'm in third grade.

Sometimes 36 feels very ancient, you guys.

The first official day of summer vacation was...good? I've been looking forward to it for so long that it was inevitably a letdown, but also practically perfect in every way, as Mary Poppins might say. We finalized our summer bucket list last weekend and today decided to go for "try a park you've never been to." We almost never visit the playgrounds attached to schools in town, but we spent a happy hour pretty much all by ourselves today enjoying the perfect combination of shady and sunny, plus new to us while still old school (but not overly rundown). Monkey bars are a current fave, and this place has every combination of climbing jungle gym challenges you can dream up.

Fall was my favorite season for years, but I'm breaking up with it for the sheer romance of long, lazy summer days. Winter in our town can be such a desolate time. We chose to live here - another post on that topic has been brewing for a while - so I hate to complain, but there's so little to do. It's hard to not overdo it once summer rolls around. Some of our bucket list will mean buying tickets or paying admission fees or even a hotel stay here and there, but mostly we're sticking to the joys of cheap and free where we can get it, and if this afternoon is any indication, it doesn't take much to make for a summer filled with amazing memories. We're trying to pace ourselves here at the start of the race, but can you blame us for sprinting out of sheer exhiliration?

I'm (over)sharing our adventures on Instagram under the hashtag #HannaMcSummer - and I'm sure there will be plenty more posts here, too. Thanks for tagging along.

but you're the one for me.

After a down-and-dirty sandpie making session this afternoon, I plopped both girls into the bathtub to get squeaky clean before dinner. We were all in a silly mood, so I turned off the lights and tossed some glow sticks in the tub with them, then got out the giant bubble wand to blow at them while they scrubbed. The girls giggled together and Lorelei announced, "This is so fun. I think you're the only mom in the world who would let their kids have such a fun bath time."

I'm sure other moms living on our street have given their kids similar baths, so I'm not under any false impressions about my status as Mother of the Year. But it got me thinking about how my Facebook feed will be flooded this weekend with pictures of adult children with their mothers and captions about how each one, in turn, is the Best Mom in the World. My Instagram feed will also be filled with cellphone snaps of hilariously-answered questionnaires filled out by earnest little preschoolers and kindergartners about the wonderful qualities of their own Best Moms in the World. These pictures, too, will all be captioned in the same way - that they are precious and special and uniquely wonderful snapshots of a mother-child relationship that feels precious, special, and uniquely wonderful, too. For some people, this induces endless eyerolling. For me? I'll be trying to stay offline this weekend to be more focused on my family, but otherwise I would happily "like" and double tap every single one of those posts.

After Phoebe's birth, my aunt sent us a copy of an out-of-print book of poems by Clyde and Wendy Watson called Catch Me And Kiss Me And Say It Again. It has many charming rhymes but our favorite, and the reason (I'm sure) that it was sent, is this one:

Phoebe in a rosebush
Phoebe in a tree
There's many a Phoebe in the world
But you're the one for me.

Naming Phoebe was particularly challenging for us and, though it was a name I loved, there were some initial hurdles to it for me, most notably that I had both a former student and a former colleague with the same name. I worried that I'd always associate the name with those two women first, since I knew them first. In those early days, this poem was a well-timed reminder that this new Phoebe was, of course, My Phoebe, and that has made all the difference.

But now that My Phoebe is also the first Phoebe I think of and those particular fears have lessened, this poem has become a good reminder about the trouble we always encounter with our perception of the world: our own heavily-filtered lens. There are some things in life that are True and Immutable - this I know. There are others where it really is left to the eye of the beholder. Our children are the same, mostly, as children everywhere. They love deeply and want to please us. They stick out their tongues when they are trying very hard to learn something new. They want desperately to have authority over their daily experiences. They mix up words as they struggle to make adult language their own. They are talented and beautiful and clever in our eyes, and believing this about them helps them to become all of those things, too. There are many children in the world, but these two precious souls belong to me. And my love for them and delight in their firsts and funny moments make me hope even more so that every child has someone to cherish them in the same way.

I can't be the best mom in the world, since that title is already held by my own mother, but I'm okay with being seen through the big, beautiful eyes of my very special children, too, and knowing that I'm the one for them. Happy Mother's Day, all.

"This is supposed to be fun." | Jazz Fest 2016

In general, Jason and I are a good balance for each other - we have opposite personalities in so many ways, and so the combination tends to fall somewhere in the middle. But we can both be pretty tightly wound in certain situations, especially when it comes to Big Events Where Something Might Go Wrong. Our kids, since they're not able to fully process and understand emotional turbulence, act out accordingly: Lorelei gets very worried and neurotic at the first sign of us snapping at each other, and Phoebe looks for all the ways she can get everyone's attention by being as naughty as possible.

We had been planning for months to go to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival on "local Thursday" to see some great Louisiana music as well as Lorelei's favorite singer, Elvis Costello. As the date crept closer, the logistics of parking and port-a-potties, not to mention the threat of thunderstorms, made our plans seem impossible. We seriously debated not going, a tense conversation which made Lorelei weepy. Was it worth all this effort to spend a few hours covered in mud with whiny kids and the not-insignificant risk of food poisoning?

On Thursday morning, I went to Target to buy cheap Elvis Costello glasses for the girls and we devised a family mantra: "This is supposed to be fun." Whatever happened, we were in it together, and the whole point was to do something as a family. Come what may, we'd have great stories to tell later.

We'll have enough stories to last us for a long, long time.

ghost ships.

When Phoebe turned 18 months old - the age Lorelei was when I got pregnant again - I had a vivid dream that we were pregnant with a third child. Another sweet baby girl, named Maeve. For a week or so, I thought a lot about that maybe-baby, dreaming of what it would be like to have her in our hearts and arms and home. And then I said goodbye.

I've said it lots of times, here and out loud to anyone who wants to listen, but I am not a baby person. I am not overcome with longing when I see little hands and feet peeking out of blankets in a stroller and I almost never ask to hold anyone's newborn (except as an offer of assistance so they can eat, or nap, or just be off duty for five whole minutes). I loved both our daughters intensely when they were babies, but I don't yearn for those early, sleepless moments. Jason and I felt confident and happy with our choice to have two, and only two, children. I boxed up and shipped off my maternity clothes within days of giving birth for the second, and last, time. The older they get, the more I enjoy being a mom to two girls.

And yet I clung, even for a brief time, to the idea of a third baby. Maybe it would be different this time, a little voice said in the back of my head. Maybe you'd love it - and what if you missed that chance? I've been watching with interest as Elise Cripe (of Elise Joy fame) has embraced the baby stage so wholeheartedly with her second daughter - after a very difficult birth and postpartum period the first time around - and I feel in awe, and a little jealous, of how much she loves it. I wanted to love it, too, and I just couldn't.

Reading Joanna Goddard's recent(ish) post, however, made bells go off in my head (it helps, too, that she has struggled just as much, if not more so, during the baby phase with both of her children, even though she desperately loves being a mother). There's an allure to thinking of yourself in the group of "young mothers" as opposed to "done having kids": one feels youthful, the other as if a page has been turned and there's no going back to the previous chapter. And her other explanation for the romantic notion of another baby - the desire to stop time with your already-existing children - rings true for me, too: I found myself teary-eyed last week after browsing back through my board of "to-make" projects (ha ha) on Pinterest and discovering several patterns for sweet rompers I never got around to sewing for either girl.

I mentioned those rompers - with slightly teary eyes again - to Jason on a very rare date night last week, and he responded, "I guess I don't feel that way because I don't really make projects." Womp womp. But then he went on to say that he has been feeling similarly. For him, it's been a realization that, over the past 13-15 years, he's made all of the significant choices he can probably ever hope to make in his life: which career to pursue, whom to marry, where to live, whether or not to have a family, when that family is complete. And though there is comfort and ease in having those choices made, there's also a poignancy in knowing that, barring great misfortune or tragedy or major life upheaval, from here, the path is an increasingly narrow one.

In her role as advice columnist for The Rumpus, Cheryl Strayed (aka Dear Sugar) wrote a beautiful response to a man questioning whether he should become a father in a column titled "The Ghost Ship That Doesn't Carry Us." It's a wonderful read, but here's a nice summary of it from Cheryl Strayed herself, later, on her podcast also titled Dear Sugar: "One of the beautiful things about life is loving the things that you've had to let go...It's about waving to this ship that you're not aboard, and acknowledging that there's beauty on it, and you're not there for it, but because you're not there for it, you're there for another kind of beauty."

I've been waving at a lot of ghost ships lately: one where I have a third baby girl named Maeve and love her intensely, one where I have no children at all but a magnificent career doing Meaningful and Important Things, even one where I have only one child and life is a little slower, and little less chaotic, a little simpler. But I've also sewed three skirts for the girls in the past two days and just downloaded another pattern to try, because I'd better sail this ship before I'm waving at it, too.

sharing the spotlight (mamalode)

I'm so thrilled to share with you that an essay of mine is featured over on Mamalode today! It's appropriate timing, too: this week, Phoebe is exactly the age Lorelei was when she became a big sister, and my essay is all about becoming a family of four and worrying about raising two girls. Hope you'll click over and give it a read!

up in the air I go flying again

Last week, we headed to City Park on an afternoon New Orleanians call autumn but which would easily have been, to borrow a phrase from Raffi, a hot, hot day in July back in DeKalb. I don't like the playground in the afternoon. I love park mornings, when the air is still cool and dewy and we often have no one to play with but ourselves, or just a few other parents with stroller and preschooler in tow. Park mornings are slow, relaxed, gentle. In the afternoon, kids are everywhere, adultless, with their bikes and backpacks strewn across the grass, their uniforms untucked, their pent-up energy from the school day bubbling out everywhere. They throw fistfuls of pebbles onto the bottom of the slide as their friends race down. They push chubby-legged new walkers aside in their eagerness to claim the best swing for themselves. The few moms and occasional dads there are tired from a day spent saying no and are tacitly saying yes to the Lord of the Flies savagery from behind their iPhone shields.  Afternoons at the park are uncivilized. I don't cope well unless there's a posted placard of at least 10 very specific rules to follow. And I'm not just talking about the playground.

My girls, naturally, love afternoons at the park. I had finally caved under the sheer weight of the whining. I could tell as soon as we arrived that getting a turn on the swings, their favorite, was going to be a challenge - they were filled already, with kids standing around waiting for a turn - so I tried to steer them towards the rest of the equipment. Fiiiiiiiiine, they said, eyes glued to the promised land just over my shoulder. And then they were running, four pink rubber shoes flying over the sandy earth, pell mell tumble bumble, till they came to the green poles and two coveted open spots.

Somewhere in the last six months, Lorelei learned to pump on the swings. I'm not sure if it was a skill born of necessity, since I'm inevitably distracted by Phoebe's penchant for climbing something just outside her ability and my comfort zone, or born of determination to be a Big Kid as soon as possible, but besides a quick boost up at parks where the woodchips have been scooped away by ungainly puppy paws hidden inside scuffed, light-up sneaks, she's suddenly, surprisingly, self-sufficient.

She's not, however, ready for complete independence. "Look at me, Mom!" she calls, in the time-honored playground tradition of every kid who came before her and every kid after, her feet stretching as hard as they can towards the branches above. "Look at me!" as she lifts off the seat at the apex of her arc, laughing as she slams back down into the saddle on her journey backwards. "Look at me, Mom! Look!"

I don't recall playing favorites with playground equipment as a kid. I was never the monkey that my brother was - my mom loves to tell of looking out a bedroom window to discover him, at two and a half, perched on top of our backyard swingset - though I loved to be a pirate princess scampering up the ship's rope ladder, bravely facing the fiery danger of the precarious metal slide baking in the summer sun, and hiding in the secret nooks of the wooden castle away from the wicked stepmother or the evil witch. But I did love the swings. Our park's were self-contained within a metal dome, bars curving overhead, so that the best and bravest swingers, if their legs were long enough and their might strong enough, could just barely touch the center with a satisfying ping. The swings were where you could make real all the best childhood make-believe. The swings were where you could fly.

Middle schoolers, mouths filled with pubescent attempts at profanity, might drape themselves on the tops of tornado slides or dangle apathetically from monkey bars to prove their coolness, but swinging is never babyish. Parents, arms weary from hoisting toddlers up and down the fireman's pole and hair staticky from rubbing through the covered plastic tubes, breathe a sigh of relief when they can steal a moment or two on an open swing, chains creaking in complaint. Contrary to the overused adage, I learned that you can, in fact, forget how to ride a bike. But your legs and arms always remember that magic formula of pumping and pulling to climb ever higher and higher.

Back in my days of regular flights on the swings, I was pretty sure I was going to be a writer when I grew up. Either that or an Egyptologist. But probably both. Somewhere between fourth grade and the fiction writing course I was forced to take in college for my teaching certification, I realized I just didn't have what it took to write anything worth reading. "I'm just better at being critical of other people's stuff," I'd answer when anyone asked if I did any writing of my own. When my high school AP composition teacher told me how surprised she was to learn I was left-handed, I knew just what she meant. No one would mistake me for being a creative spirit. I'm a feet-on-the-ground kind of a girl.

My parents signed me up for a creative writing workshop one year where we wrote and published our own books from start to finish, complete with a book signing party at the end. The story I wrote a rudimentary mash-up of Betsy and Tacy and Meet Samantha, my major literary influences at the time. I remember someone - was it the workshop coordinator or some overzealous parent visiting my "Meet The Author!" table? - pointed out how ludicrous it was to have my derivative little main character, a proper Victorian, looking out her window at a sundial to get to school on time. I was mortified. That same hot-cheeked, tight-chested feeling came rushing back the day I had to share my short story in my college creative writing class. A deafening chorus of voices rang out, in unison, to declare how much my pitiful attempt at originality reminded them of a much-anthologized story I must have read but somehow forgot about. Since then, I've taught and graded countless creative writing assignments, sponsored a fiction writing club, and coached a handful of students (and one teacher) through a month-long challenge to write a draft of a novel. As for me? I have a few journal pages here and there, but I could never quite find that magic formula again.

That afternoon, I watched Lorelei, pumping her feet, pulling the chains, hair whooshing back, as I pushed Phoebe. She seemed so confident as she flew, higher and higher, toes pointed hard at the low-hanging branches. "Hi Mommy!" she called. One hand came off the chain, briefly, to wave at us. Then back on again, gripping hard. Phoebe and I waved from below. Up in the air I go flying again, I heard in my head. Up in the air and down.

The gang of slouching, surly teens had gathered slowly enough that it escaped my notice at first. Then they were everywhere: raucous, swaggering. I had moved Phoebe over to a swing nearer Lorelei, but their insistent glares made me feel 34 going on 9. "Let's go back to the baby swing and give someone else a chance," I said loudly. One of the girls, sass painted in broad strokes on her face, stood with a hand on her hip. "Are those both yours?" she said pointedly, gesturing at Lorelei. "Yes," I said, clutching Phoebe, my cheeks surprisingly hot. "They're mine."

Lorelei pumped harder and waved again. She looked as if she might really touch the tree this time. Ping. When did she get to be so brave? And when did I cease to be? I pushed Phoebe in silence, watching them as they watched her, keeping up with biggest of the boys who had muscled their way onto the open swings ahead of their friends. Two more minutes, I told myself. Two minutes, and I'll make her get off. Was it my job to police the playground? Would anyone else have made room for my girl, had she been standing there? Was I unnecessarily inflating this into some sort of park morality play when, really, it was nothing at all?

I glanced over at two moms, not watching from a bench, and turned again to Phoebe. I felt a warmth next to my hip. "Mom, I'm done now," Lorelei said, looking up with magic in her eyes. "That was fun. Did you see me flying?" She gave her sister's swing a happy little push.

this is two.

A couple of moms I know have been gushing about their toddler daughters lately and how much they love this stage of having a two-year-old. For me, it's an adventure, to put it mildly. Turns out that two was a glorious age for Lorelei - I remember once telling someone that Jason and I couldn't help but laugh whenever she threw a tantrum because they were just so funny to witness. My sincerest apologies to that parent, and to any of the rest of you rolling your eyes at that. I deserve it, and more.

Phoebe hasn't had her two-year check-up yet, because we've been waiting on record transfers from home and other red tape, but she's big in all the ways that matter: she towers over other children her age and she has the personality to match. She is the girl of a thousand faces that I haven't even begun to capture on film, try as I might. She talks a mile a minute, runs like lightning, kisses you as if you're going on a long and perilous sea voyage, and works a crowd like she's the funniest stand-up comic you've ever paid good money to see. She asks to wear a dress almost every day and then spins around the room, breathlessly announcing, "this is so, so bootiful." She is fiercely determined to do everything by herself, no matter how long it takes and how many exasperated sighs she gets in response. She goes from zero to a hundred in two seconds flat and her horror movie screaming skills are unparalleled. She has sparkling blue eyes that are usually hidden behind sunglasses, a gap between her two front teeth, and the best dimples you've ever seen. Her favorite letters are W and Q, she could hear you read The Gruffalo at least twenty times more than you think you need to read it, and she likes to hide in the closet whenever you want to leave the house. She could eat her weight in chocolate ice cream, can drink anyone under the table (water, that is), and loves her sister more than I thought anybody could love anybody. She is brave and goofy and smart and affectionate and stubborn and we are so lucky to have her, at this stage and any stage.

while you were sleeping

Today felt like a do-over kind of a day. I want to sneak in to watch the girls as they sleep, because it makes them seem so angelic and glazes over everything that happened earlier, when they were awake and not angelic and neither was I, with a hazy, happy amnesia. But they are light sleepers and then I'd end up spending the night on the floor next to Phoebe's crib, so instead I'm gazing on some recent photos that I haven't shared anywhere but can't help loving. Both have that same heavy-eyelash-on-cheek thing going on, so it's like granting my wish to tiptoe in and kiss their dreaming foreheads...almost.

Sleep well, sweet sisters, and let's all dream of a beautiful tomorrow.

tradition, tradition

Last night at sundown we welcomed the start of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and the beginning of the High Holy Days. It's a beautiful time of year, and I look forward to it every fall that I've gotten to celebrate it, which is somewhere close to fifteen at this point. But it still doesn't feel like my own tradition.

Jason and I made the decision to raise any future children as Jews back when we joined an interfaith couples' support group before we got married. It's a choice that we're both still confident in, but it comes with inherent challenges. The challenges are perhaps more obvious for me as the daughter of a UCC minister, but the differences are actually not as significant as you might think when we hold shared beliefs in the importance of faith practices in our daily lives, the need for prayer, the importance of membership and contribution to one's community (and community of faith), the sacredness of the natural world, and the value in a life of charity, humility, kindness, justice, service, and truth.

What's hard, though, is that so many of the traditions of Judaism are practices that occur within the home, and I have no model to follow. Our small Jewish community in our hometown is loving and kind, but there are only five or six children in the congregation including our own, so there isn't a religious school I can count on to help to teach our daughters the ebb and flow of the religious year. Jason also grew up far away from extended family and mostly in towns and cities without a large Jewish population, and in a household that, though definitely Jewish, was mostly secular in its day-to-day life, so he has little to fall back on when it comes to tradition and religious family practices.

Some of my strongest connections to my religious identity come from my memories of traditions from childhood: setting up the creche piece by piece as we opened our Advent calendars, hymns that we always sang at certain times of the year, the simple supper before the somber Maundy Thursday service. Sometimes, the need to do this right or risk my daughters growing up without a sense of their religious identity feels like I'm standing on one foot, holding my other above a wineglass, like Jason did in our wedding ceremony, but I have to balance ever so carefully to keep it intact.

But this family is an interfaith one, and I know that's something to celebrate rather than tiptoe around. When Phoebe was blessed at my lovely little church, just like Lorelei was when she was a baby, my minister spoke about how lucky she would be to grow up in a family rich in tradition on both sides and with the benefit of two parents lovingly navigating a path towards faithfulness together. It sounded much more eloquent than it feels to live it, but we try to embrace it as a blessing and an opportunity. So we muddle through together and try to teach them what we can with the tools we have. And every year on Rosh Hashanah, we perform tashlich together, cast the worries and fears and wrongs from last year out into the water, and let the hope for better things to come wash over us anew.

Bedtime for Frances

The other night, while we were catching up on Netflix and laundry folding, a little someone came tiptoeing out looking for a late-night snack. It made us think of a favorite book series of ours - sometimes, I think we should have named our daughters Frances and Gloria - though we certainly weren't going to threaten spanking despite how long past her bedtime she had been playing in her room. Instead, we all sat down together at the table and, over some warm milk, and Lorelei told us all about how, when she grows up, she'll have a house with a big yard - "in Europe" - and she'll have a white dog named Woofy and a white-and-black cat named Snowy and we can all come and stay with her "but I'll have allergy medicine for Mommy so she doesn't get sick."

She was really tired the next day. I wonder if she'll treasure the memory that nighttime chat as much as we will.