Posted by Elizabeth

The goal seemed simple enough: to watch A Christmas Story before the day was out.  The week leading up to December 25 had been a flurry of activity, filled with last-minute shopping excursions, a dinner party with new friends, a trip to the Mexican grocer for special cuts of meat to make my mother-in-law’s posole.  But now the whole day stretched before us, long and languorous.  There would be plenty of time for relaxation and leisure, for watching movies and opening gifts, for basking in the warmth of our first Christmas as a family of three.  Even the ham, ordered from a small smokehouse in Kentucky, came fully cooked.

I awoke at 1:45 am, three and a half hours earlier than normal, upon hearing Abra’s cries through the baby monitor.  Usually an efficient eater, she nursed for nearly an hour, and then I was up at six, this time for good.  Bleary-eyed, I put on the coffee and started the balloon buns, a sugary breakfast bread that my mother made every Christmas morning growing up. Before I knew it it was 10 am, and we hadn’t touched any of the small mountain of gifts that had multiplied under the tree – many for a baby that was unaware of what day it was.  Fussy and malcontented, Maikael and I took turns dandling Abra on our knee while we peeked into stockings and tore through wrapping paper.  Normally a process that we give time and attention to, our focus was fractured and diffuse.  “Why don’t we take a break?” Maikael offered, but time felt as if it was weighing heavily upon me. Abra’s mood steadily declined, and soon a “let’s just get through this” attitude took hold.   Already feeling harassed, I dashed into the kitchen to take the balloon buns from the oven, only to find the $16 marshmallows from Williams-Sonoma I had tucked into the dough now lacquered to my muffin tin, creating an oozing mess.

Determined to create the special memories I had planned, I decided it would be an ideal time to take Christmas photos.  My Aunt Nancy created a beautiful needlepoint stocking for Abra, and I was eager to capture a few shots of her in her sweet plaid Christmas dress holding the stocking that contained the one gift I had purchased for her: a grossly overpriced wooden rattle that, I was sure, would be passed down through the generations.  Abra showed zero interest in the toy, quickly dropping it in favor of a cheap, plastic ring, and tugged at the faux fur collar on her dress until she dissolved into tears.  Still in our pajamas, we propped Abra on our laps to make video calls to our parents: she slept through the call to my dad, her head lolling in the crook of Maikael’s arm, and cried through the call to my mother-in-law.

Night had fallen, and with a crying baby strapped to me I scurried around the kitchen whipping up side dishes to accompany our ham, leaving a wake of dirty pots and pans.  I congratulated myself on having made the decision earlier in the week to buy store-bought rolls.  By the time we sat down to dinner at the dining room table the china had been pushed aside in favor of our everyday dishes, paper napkins were slung across our laps, the candles sat unlit, Abra’s tights sagged around her ankles, and I popped two aspirin along with my glass of wine.

Later that evening, as I sat in the soft glow of the Christmas tree and quietly nursed Abra, I flipped through my friend’s photos of their Christmases on Facebook.  Here I saw a twirling carousel of happy memories, smiling children, clinking glasses, annual traditions, plenty of good cheery.  Reflected back at me was the Christmas I had hoped for myself, and I couldn’t help but feel overcome by sadness as I wondered where I had gone wrong.  In the weeks leading up to Christmas I had been the envy of the new mothers I know.  “How lucky you are,” they said, “to get to set your own traditions as a family of three.”  But the day had passed in an inky blur, a parade of unmet, unrealistic expectations, filled with more tears than smiles.  Rather than taking the day moment by moment – whatever those moments might have contained – I barreled through, accumulating a lump of disappointments along the way.  In the process of manifesting a predetermined experience I had squandered the very real experience that stared me squarely in the eyes.  The real sadness was not that I missed out on a picture-perfect holiday, but that I didn’t let the day unfold and simply be what it would be.

Just as becoming a family doesn’t happen overnight, neither does forming its traditions.  They don’t materialize out of thin air but gently bubble forth, flowing from one generation into the next.  I was so eager to will this Christmas into existence, to pump artificial life into its being, that I failed to let it breathe on its own.  When I think about the moments of joy that have marked this past week, they are the ones that sprung forth naturally:  a small and impromptu tamal-making party, Maikael and I both being present to watch Abra roll over for the first time, playing a goofy children’s game on Christmas Eve, watching the luminarias flicker in the darkest hour of the night.  None of these appeared on any list.

By the time I put Abra to bed on Christmas I was too tired to watch A Christmas Story, but popped it in the DVD player anyway.  I only made it half way through the movie before my eyelids became heavy.  “I’ll finish it tomorrow,” I promised myself.  But real life swept in, leaving it, like so many priorities these days, unfinished.  Maybe next year.  Or perhaps it’s time to start a new tradition.

The holidays — and life in general — are fraught with expectations.  How did you handle the expectations — unrealistic and otherwise — this season?  How might you rewrite the experience and do it differently next year?

Forget immaculate conceptions:  the real Christmas miracle is that I managed to get a tree up this year.  We had grand plans to journey deep into the Jemez Mountains to chop down our own towering pine, but in the end we never made it further than the nursery a mile from our house, a mad dash between midday feedings.  We shouldered the tree into the house while Abra watched from her carseat perched on the sidewalk, prompting a neighbor to slow down and ask if we needed any help.  Once inside, our tree trimming was constantly interrupted by a nonstop barrage of infant demands, and in the end it took two days to decorate a not-very-big tree.

While Cooks Illustrated promised me that baking three batches of Christmas cookies would take no more than two hours, mine stretched into an all-day affair, each round punctuated by a nursing session.  Abra wailed while Ol’ Blue Eyes crooned White Christmas in the background, and I couldn’t pick her up because I was too busy ferrying sizzling cookie sheets from an oven chugging on overdrive.

My Christmas decorations largely consist of boughs of holly hastily selected while waiting in the check-out line at Trader Joe’s.

Nearly all of my gifts were bought online or during frantic five-minute dashes into stores, and any vision of sugarplum fairies is blocked by Abra’s activity gym, an albatross that ruins any picture-perfect view of Christmas cheer.

My Christmas cards were designed piecemeal over two weeks, in snatches of time during brief naps or bouncing a fussy baby on one knee while navigating Tiny Prints’ website with one hand.

In short, I don’t feel like I’ve “done” the holidays very well this year.  Nor have I been very attentive to my daughter.  These two competing forces have demanded much of my time and energy this December, and as a result both have suffered.  Every plan has been executed with half-baked precision, which has left me feeling frazzled and incompetent on all fronts.  But I was reminded that good enough is often good enough when I brought those three batches of cookies to my nursing mother’s support group yesterday afternoon.  As soon as I snapped open the cheery tins the women flocked to the cookies like vultures on carrion, giving thanks between crispy bites, expressing wonder that I’d had time to even make cookies.

So rather than berate myself for all that I never got around to this holiday season, or the fact that so much was accomplished in haste, I will remind myself that it truly is a miracle that I accomplished as much as I did.  My heart was in the right place.  My daughter is still alive and smiling (most of the time).  There are more things I could do, but I’ve decided enough is enough.  I’ve thrown away the to-do list and instead spent the past few days creating a “Fun List,” whose items I will gleefully check off while Maikael is off the next two weeks.  There is a boatload of Oscar-buzzing films to see (if we can wrangle a babysitter).  I plan on cozying up to watch two of my favorite Christmas movies at some point before the 25th.  Maikael and I have a dinner out to a swanky restaurant planned, as well as a long-anticipated lunch at a divey, but delicious, taqueria. I plan on holing up one day for a Breaking Bad marathon over Venezia pizza (does it get more perfect than having a Breaking Bad marathon in Albuquerque?).

In between it all we will spend a low-key Christmas at home, just being together and starting our own traditions as a family of three.  And that really is a miracle.

Posted by Elizabeth

“Deep within my body, the past is still alive.  Everything that has ever happened keeps happening.” Devotion by Dani Shapiro

In order to rewrite our lives, we have to possess a deep understanding of how they were written in the first place.  Inspired by this post at A Design So Vast, which was adapted from this writing exercise, I bring to you my version of “Where I’m From.”

I am from the seafoam house stuffed to the gills with stuff, from towering stacks of aging National Geographic magazines and a junk drawer whose crusty bottom never saw the light of day.

I am from the place with an impossibly steep staircase lined with fuzzy gold shag, and chipped linoleum in the kitchen perfect for an indoor roller rink.

I am from the fuchsia rhododendrons peeking over the front window, delicate trilliums on the backyard “nature trail” that dad carved out one year.

I am from Friday Night Party Night, crouched in front of a tiny black and white screen, gobbling Hershey’s Miniatures and watching Sha-Na-Na.

I am from a long line of women – strong, risk-taking, and independent – each a mirror image of the other, from our squinty eyes to the crinkly bridge of our nose to our laugh with reckless abandon.

I am from thrift and practicality:  always buy a white car!

From “be careful what you wish for” and “follow your bliss.”

I am from faith without churches, spirit without God, an eclectic smorgasbord of beliefs from all around the globe.

I’m from the deep, cool shade of evergreen forests, from warm tartans and a feathery headdress, from dessert after every meal and silver shrimp forks.

From watery camping trips on the shores of Puget Sound with floating tents, and aquatic creatures who spent even the chilliest of Pacific Northwest summers caked with sand and salt.

I am from a musty warehouse sheltering decaying boxes of fading photographs.  There is no family home, no communal gathering place.  But the memories I treasure most I carry with me, right where they belong, making my home wherever I go.

Where are you from?

Posted by Anne

Before August, 2007, I’d never tasted a coconut macaroon.  Or if I had, it was a puny effort—a light and airy breed of macaroon no bigger than an inch or two in diameter.  Pathetic.  In 2007, I discovered a real macaroon.  That was the year I moved to Durham, North Carolina to complete the final year of my graduate degree in psychology…easily one of the most enriching and tough years of my life.

The work I was doing that year was rewarding, important, and challenging.  But it also made me anxious as hell.  Was I actually helping people?  Was I irritating my supervisors with my endless questions and consultation?  Added to my daily dose of anxiety was the fact that I seriously missed my brand new fiancé, our family suffered a crushing loss, and I had the travel budget of a pauper.  

As I loved living in North Carolina, it didn’t take long for me to feel homesick.  I began combing my temporary city for a place where I could surround myself with people—where I could feel at home without knowing a soul.  Yes, long before this blog, I was looking for a way to feel settled amidst a life that felt endlessly ambiguous and ever-so-slightly scary. 

Enter:  The Coconut Macaroon

The coconut macaroon gave me solace in that lonely, ambiguous year.  It can be found at Foster’s Market in Durham, North Carolina, and if you’ve never been there, I’m sorry.  You really should go.  Like…now.  Foster’s Market is a café/deli/specialty food store/coffee shop/old-time candy counter.  Take the Barefoot Contessa, strip it of the Hamptons accoutrements, add enamel dishes, throw in some (tastefully) funky mismatched furniture and top it off with ancient picnic tables and a cozy front porch.  You have Foster’s Market.

The first time I walked in, I sighed.  It was so ME—manifested in everything from the décor to the menu to the dishes.  And make no mistake—that place is strategically homey.  It’s not accidental…but it worked.  For the next 12 months, I went to Foster’s Market almost once a week.  On my measly budget, I could feed my body and my sad little emotional state with a bowl of soup, crackers, a cup of coffee, and…the best coconut macaroon on the planet.

These macaroons defy description.  First off, they’re chewy.  Not light…chewy.  Coconut-y.  Gooey.  And they taste like they should have about a pound of butter in them…except they don’t. 

After that first surprising bite, I couldn’t stop.  It became a sort of obsession—come Friday afternoon, I’d swoop into the market and blissfully carry away that macaroon in a brown paper bag like it was a fifth of vodka.  I’m telling you…that cookie had healing properties.

After 11 coconut-filled months, I was able to say I survived and graduated, leaving the macaroons behind.  Strangely, I’ve had the recipe for 2 years, and never made them.  I have no idea why.  Maybe because I thought they’d never be the same.  I’m no longer lonely, and I’ve been known to screw up a batch of cookies.  They needed to stay preserved in my culinary memory—I didn’t want them reinvented. 

But after 2 years of macaroon withdrawal, I gave in.  This week, I hauled out the forgotten cookbook, stared at the recipe, and told myself: “You know, even if they stink, it’s okay.  You don’t need this macaroon for emotional healing anymore.  Just the sugar.”

I made them.  And they rocked.  They took me back to that long year in the South, to my talented fellow interns with their encouraging hugs, to my patient supervisors, and my simple little apartment.  Those chewy, gooey concoctions remind me that I made it through a year of ambiguity, and I can always make it through another. 

What treat helps you through rough patches?

My finished product...

Posted by Elizabeth

Growing up, Sundays were special.  It wasn’t because we went to church, because we didn’t, but my family observed the Sabbath in our own way.  Sunday was the only day of the week that my mother didn’t work, so, desperate for a rest, the activity of the seventh day usually orbited around home and hearth.  Although it didn’t happen like clockwork, more times than not my mother made a special dinner, whipping up a dish that required the kind of tending that only hours at home could provide.   Pot roast would cozy us next to rustic apple crisp, steaming up the kitchen windows on a cold winter’s day.  Cool slices of banana cream pie – my dad’s favorite – would be dished up in the warm summer months.  These were not fancy, complicated meals served on our best, chipped china; rather, they were an everyday centerpiece to our small family of three being in one place, at one time, one day of the week.

As my thoughts turn towards my own soon-to-be family of three, I’ve become interested in resurrecting this particular version of the Sabbath; one that has not religious meaning but a personally spiritual one.  And it seems as if I’m not the only one concerned with rewriting what it means to take a day of rest.  Over the last year, I’ve noticed the publication of books like Judith Shulevitz’s The Sabbath World and Dani Shapiro’s spiritual memoir Devotion. I’ve dipped in and out of the blog A Year (or More) of Shabbats, tracing one family’s journey to share Friday night Shabbat dinners with friends.  Just last week, The New York Times featured an article (also by Shulevitz), Creating Sabbath Peace Amid the Noise, which highlights the different ways in which people are adapting ancient Sabbath rituals for modern times, from eating a special meal to forgoing shopping and disconnecting from technology.  Taken as a whole, I can’t help but think that, as a culture, we are itching to bring more quiet, more meaning, and more connection into our everyday lives.

Sometimes I let my mind run wild with visions of the small Sabbath feasts that I will make tradition in my expanding family.  Home-cooked meals will be served on the delicate Noritake china that my mother-in-law gifted me.  We will toast to the clink of the Waterford crystal goblets that were passed down from my parents.  We will sit around the stately cherry dining room table that was my grandparents’, swallowed whole by candlelight.  And this will happen every Sunday, without fail.  But just as soon as I create this gauzy vision it is withered by reality.  Once again, my imagination has set me up to fail, and I’ve missed the point completely.  As I think about rewriting my relationship to Sunday, I’d be smart to pay attention to two pieces of wisdom from Shulevitz’s article:
1.  “Sometimes doing things halfway is exactly what we need to do.”
2.  “The second you write down the rules, it doesn’t work.”

In other words, like living Life in Pencil itself, we’d be wise to create our own version of the Sabbath in a way that works for us, and to keep rewriting it as our lives change.  Traditions are wonderful, but we’re more likely to maintain them if we take a flexible approach.  As I reflect on the Sabbaths of my childhood, the shards of memories that glimmer from the corners of my mind are those of good food, quiet, and togetherness; you don’t need any elaborate ritual to do that.

Are you as enamored as I am with this idea of the modern day Sabbath? Do you have a Sabbath day ritual, secular or non-secular?  What ideas do you have for creating or maintaining a day of rest?  I encourage you to read Shulevitz’s New York Times article; it is short, but instructive.

Posted by Elizabeth

My grandfather, Gordon Wood Grant, died over Memorial Day weekend at the ripe age of 92.  Following the small but dignified service that he was entitled to as a Veteran of Foreign Wars, I had a chance last Friday to share my memories of Grandpa Gordon amongst my little circle of family.  I hope you enjoy the words I spoke to them, about rewriting a relationship, and how death rewrites life itself:

Gordon Grant didn’t like talking on the phone, and neither did I.  Most of our phone conversations were exceedingly brief, punctuated by short jags of small talk and ragged bits of silence, reaching its awkward crescendo just minutes later.  Perhaps it was because of our shared preference for outmoded forms of communication, as well as the distance between us – both in age and geography – that we struck up an old-fashioned correspondence.  I don’t remember how or why it started, but the earliest letter, part of a modest stack that I keep carefully bound by a thick band of white satin ribbon in a box in my closet, dates December 21, 2004, a year after I had moved to the middle-of-nowhere Missouri to complete my graduate studies.  It was the first time that I had lived so far from home and wouldn’t be in Seattle for Christmas, so he sent a letter in response to a Christmas card I had mailed his way a few weeks earlier:

Thanks for your nice card and voluminous update on your activities et cetera.  A veritable tome.  You’ve been a busy young lady, worthy of commendation.  I hereby comply.  Your Mom would be proud as punch; I hope you know we all are.

And so it began.  Like most of the letters that followed over the next four years, there was no earth-shattering news to report.  Instead, the pages – not fancy stationery but simple lined notebook paper – were filled with the details of his life, which he penned in graceful, yet straightforward, prose that seemed borne of an earlier time.  The letters were always rife with apologies for not having more to report and amazement at my own busy life (“limited horizons, limited content,” he said), but I always looked forward to tearing open the envelope and reading about his accounts of an extraordinarily ordinary life.

A perennially favorite topic was his garden, a modest plot that he scratched out of the hard earth on the hillside behind his home.  It was a far cry from the spread he maintained at his longtime residence in Burien, Washington, sprawling with proud stands of fruit trees, tangles of Concord grapevines, and flowers so big their heads lolled to one side in the afternoon sun.  But judging from the way he wrote about it, you’d guess he lived squarely in the Garden of Eden.

Mother Nature is usually kind.  The plants keep producing every year, the posies favor us with their elegance, the early bloomers are giving way after a good show.

What mattered most was that he had a place where he would dig his hands into the ground and nurture new life, one of the things he loved most.

He wrote often of his penchant for PBS; a “real treat” for him was settling down in the evening to listen to Andre Rien and his Dublin Orchestra.  In the beginning there were reports of afternoon jaunts to the bowling alley and morning computer classes (“a lost cause,” in his words).  He marveled at technology, maintaining a tenuous love/hate relationship with progress.  He was glad for the digital photographs of my world travels that my dad would share with him, but once included a list of “You Know You Are Living in 2005 When…” jokes, of which modern technology was the eternal butt.

I know email and cellphones keep you quite well comprised of things here and about; still, I’d like to add my 25 cents worth.

And I was grateful that he did, because nobody wrote more eloquently about the simple pleasures of life than he.

Chris and I made a trip to ‘Pill Hill’ this AM…Now we’re home, looking at the last rays of sun, bathing our hillside of Scotch broom and evergreens, that are looking up at an azure blue sky.  How’s that for a January weather report?

These are the moments – the thousands of sunrises and sunsets of our life – that pass most of us by.  These are not details fit for the fast-paced age of digital communication; he knew that there were some things that only the slow act of letter writing could capture.  Each letter always included an atmospheric update, not, I think, in an effort to make idle chit chat, but to connect me in the most tactile way to the world I was missing in Seattle, to paint a picture of the one he still inhabited.

Years ago, relatives seemed more important.  With news from all over, and transportation convenient, I ‘spose we’re normally attracted to the ‘rainbow.’  C’est la vie.

Only now, with retrospect on my side, can I see that he might have been saying, in his own way, “Come visit more often.  Why do your travels always have to take you so far from home?”

Without his letters, I never would have known how much he enjoyed a good meal.  He would often spend half the letter discussing how and what he was eating, the success of a day hinging on what sustenance had been provided.

Today, Dave and Nancy came from Gig Harbor.  We picked up Edell and went to Shari’s (Dave’s treat).  He asked Edell what she’d like best, and can you believe, she said, ‘A good breakfast!’  So the five of us, in one car, headed to the restaurant.  Each of us had something different.  Edell had pancakes with strawberries and cream on the side – coffee, too.  It was a treat to see how she enjoyed her meal.

It was clear that he savored these small acts of kindness, which fed not just his body, but his soul.  He especially delighted in home-cooked fare, and forever looked forward to family gatherings in which handmade meals were served.  The details of fleshy Easter hams and smoky Fourth of July barbecue danced across the page.  Living halfway across the country, the best I could manage was sending a jar of gooseberry jam and homemade oatmeal cookies – amongst his favorite foods – along with a letter, every now and then.

A lifelong penny-pincher, he was notorious for sending letters in unused return envelopes.  One letter arrived in the remittance envelope for Farmer’s Insurance, the “Have you moved lately?” box scratched out and, in its place, a note about the week’s average temperature (85 degrees).  And yet, he would often enclose a check or a crisp $20 bill, encouraging me to buy “a plant, or whatever.”  The real gifts, though, were the kernels of wisdom nestled in his words:

Do what you think is right, and you’ll probably be not far wrong.

We usually do a good job at something we enjoy.

Stay healthy.

‘A change is as good as a rest.’

He was quick to make keen observations about my temperament (“like your mom, you seem to thrive on excess”), and I think he worried that life might pass me by without me having taken it all in, for every letter closed with some version of the following phrase:  “Keep doing good and try to enjoy it.”  He knew as well as anyone the impermanence of life.  As the years ticked by, his reports of the computer classes and bowling league were slowly replaced by a never-ending parade of doctor’s appointments, tests, x-rays, procedures, and surgeries, a dizzying carousel ride that seemed unlikely to stop spinning anytime soon.

I’m starting another round of doctor’s visits.  Never knew how lucky I’ve been, wouldn’t mind some more of it.  We’ll take ‘er as she comes, and hope to tell you all about it.

He candidly apprised me of both the successes and the failures with his treatments, and told me bluntly in one letter, “Everything wears out.”

It was with great sadness that I watched his handwriting deteriorate alongside his body.  After a terrible fall that left him with equilibrium problems, letters would often take days to compose, which frustrated him to no end.  “Getting dingy in the head is one thing; realizing it is demoralizing.”  Although the letters stopped when he was no longer able to easily wield a pen, I kept writing.  He was forever apologizing for not returning the favor in kind – the first rule of a successful correspondence – but I certainly wasn’t keeping tabs.  I wrote letters because I wanted to.  I wrote letters because I knew that, halfway across the country, someone was excited to see an Albuquerque postmark.  Someone studied the carefully chosen stamp and saved the envelope.  Someone was reading my words with care.

I may have given you the impression that our correspondence filled volumes.  The truth is, the letters didn’t come very often, and they weren’t very long.  In flipping through the thin stack, I was surprised to discover that they only total half a dozen, because although our letter writing campaign was waged during the waning years of his life, I came to know my grandpa through those six letters more completely than the previous 26 years combined.  It was here that he revealed his thoughts and feelings about the things that mattered most to him:  his beloved garden; his pleasure with a good meal; his wife, Edell, who he doted on; the family members who cared for him, each in their own way, in body, mind and spirit.  In one of his final letters, as he realized that his broken-down body was getting the best of him, he said, “Cry me no tears.  For 89 years – almost to the day – I was one lucky dog, in more ways than one.”  That we should all be fortunate enough to feel the same way at the end of our lives.

The last time I talked to my grandpa was shortly after New Year’s, when he called to thank me for a batch of oatmeal cookies – and a letter – that I had sent his way.  I was surprised to hear his voice on the other end of the line; most of our conversations were a result of my dad passing him the phone at the end of one of our talks, but he had called of his own accord.  Unable to write, he expressed his appreciation by describing in great detail the attributes of a perfect oatmeal cookie:  thick, chewy, and filled with ample raisins.  Mine, he said, fit the bill, and he happily reported that he’d already eaten two of them.  We talked for a few minutes, and then said goodbye.  There wasn’t anything awkward about it.

We will feature our next Life in Pencil Moments of the Week next Friday, July 2.  For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, we’re compiling our readers’ contributions of moments, both big and small, in which you find yourself living life “in pencil.”  Please email Anne or Elizabeth your submissions by Thursday, July 1.

Posted by Elizabeth

Last week, I received a giant care package from my friend, Holly, who lives in Oregon.  I muscled the box into the house, excitedly tearing away the brown paper casing to reveal a treasure trove of hand-me-down baby items.  Nestled amongst the soft-worn onesies and a rainbow of bibs were special gifts bound carefully by cheerful ribbons.  Time for Bed and I Love You, Goodnight, two of her son’s favorite books, were included, as was a green knitted cap sprouting a pea pod atop.  I immediately set to work organizing my wares, meticulously folding and placing the clothing in the baby’s dresser, finding a perfect place for the books, moving a stuffed animal to different locations around the room at least three times.

By all accounts I appear to be “nesting,” that ubiquitous, gossamer curtain that all women seem consigned to pass through at some stage of their pregnancy.  Far transcending the organization of baby clothes, my life maintains a steady orbit around home these days, the radius of activity growing smaller, the scope bound by a strong undercurrent of nesting instincts.  The upheaval of our bathroom remodel project, while finally drawing to a close, can’t come soon enough.  I am an anxious mama bird, nervously fluttering around the entrance to the bathroom, pecking at boxes of tile, feathering dusty countertops, winging at tools – knowing full well that the delicate order I’ve created will be disrupted in a matter of moments.    “When will it be done?” I chirp, my constant birdsong.  “Soon,” Maikael assures me.

Unable to rest or focus as the work lingers on, I force myself out into the jagged world, but find the magnetic pull of home difficult to resist.  I set about tasks that will soothe my tattered nerves.  Cooking, a long-time passion, leaves me weary and irritable.  Instead, I find myself churning out golden banana bread, buttery cookies, and plump blueberry muffins at the (alarming) rate of a professional bakery.  I pore over my well-thumbed copy of Baking Illustrated, literally salivating, knowing where my seven pounds of weight gain last month came from.  While the day-to-day routine of cooking feeds the body, baking nourishes the soul:  right now, this is the sustenance I need most.

According to my birth class instructor, nesting is a real thing, a set biological function.  Holly, who attempted a full kitchen remodel in the midst of her own pregnancy, commiserated with my situation by relating how distressing it was to have the heart and hearth of her home exposed and gutted during this fragile time.  She sought refuge in the other areas of her house, continuing to build her nest by conducting a major spring cleaning while the work carried on.  She confirmed what my instructor emphasized:  “Husbands definitely don’t get it.”

But I don’t think the nesting instinct is confined to pregnancy.  We all nest in our own way during times of transition, whenever great change looms heavy on the horizon.  I recall periods of my own life when one stage was drawing to a close before another yawned opened – the end of school, jobs, relationships, and even seasons – when all I could muster energy for was painting walls, clearing out closets, and color-coding my library of books.  This is not frivolous activity:  our nests are a vitally important touchstone, a defined, tranquil space when the winds of change beat against the door.  It’s times like these that we work hard to bring order and structure to a situation that feels perilously out of our control.

And it doesn’t just apply to the physical realm.  Nesting involves gathering our resources, counting our reserves, and taking stock of our psychological storehouses.  We intimately acquaint ourselves with what we have before reaching out into the world to acquire more.  I find myself deepening old friendships rather than cultivating new ones.  I write long, rambling letters to dear friends, linger on the phone for hours with my most trusted confidantes, send cards just because, and stoke the fires of dwindling relationships over long lunches.  I sift through old photos and drench myself in sepia memories.  I fall back on the recipes I know by heart.  I wear the clothes I know best.  I trust the time-honored and the true, and hold the familiar close because who knows what’s coming next?

Before we can pass through the veil that shrouds our period of change and back into the bright, naked world, we owe it to ourselves to give due time and attention to building our nests.  We need a location that feels secure and out of harm’s way, where all we hold dear will be protected and kept close at hand.  I love the film Away We Go, wherein a young couple, expecting their first child, embarks on a transcontinental trip to find a place to make their home before their child is born.  From the blistered Arizona desert to the cosmopolitan pulse of Quebec, nothing fits the bill until they arrive at the sagging Florida house of the woman’s childhood.  Although dilapidated and long-abandoned, the house – perched on the side of a lazy river and nestled in mature citrus groves – is the first place that feels like home.  It’s the choice that makes no sense and perfect sense.  Wherever we build our nests, by necessity or choice, it’s our job to work around constraints to make it feel like home, weaving a cocoon of shelter, warmth, and security, sometimes in the most unlikely of places.

Nests are not feathered by reaching a long arm out into the world, but by drawing deep from what’s within arm’s reach.  A bird spins her nest from the scraps of life that are close at hand:  rough twigs and downy feathers, lacy ribbons of thread, shiny bits of candy bar wrappers.  Nesting is as much about the reorganization of our existing worlds as it is about painting the world anew.  While the veil is still pulled tight around me in these waning months of pregnancy, I remind myself that I can build a cozy refuge while the whine of saws whirls around me, and indulge in activities that feel restorative and soul-full.  My nest will be what I make it, because I already have everything I need.

In what ways do you nest?  How does nesting help you cope with the process of change?

Our next Life in Pencil Moment of the Week will be featured on Friday, June 11.  Email Anne or me with your submissions by Thursday, June 10.

Posted by Elizabeth

“The cases in which friends disappoint are the easy ones: either you discuss, forgive and forget, or you strike a line through the relationship. The calculus–when to let go, when to work through it–is complicated and fraught.” – Dominique Browning, Slow Love Life

My best friend, Heidi, and I have never ascribed to traditional rules of gift-giving.  In keeping with our personalities, my gifts usually come too early, and Heidi’s tend to arrive late.  I’ve received a birthday gift at the height of summer, or a Christmas package, wrapped in pastel paper, as the first flowers of spring shouldered their way out of the crusty earth.  I recently sent Heidi a psychedelic llama fashioned from baked marzipan, a souvenir from Ecuador that I’d been hanging onto for just the right occasion (which never came).  But more often than not we don’t hold onto gifts until the time is right, setting it free as soon as it’s in our clutches.

Our uneven style of gift giving has remained one of the only constants throughout a 16-year friendship that has been defined by transformation, marked by periods of intense togetherness, long periods of separation, and finally, today, balanced connection.  Heidi and I met each other the first week of school, both transfer students thrown into a pulsing student body midway through our high school career.  After auditioning for the student play, we lingered by our battered cars parked alongside the tennis courts, getting to know each other as the crisp autumn evening settled in around us.

Within weeks we were inseparable, “kindred spirits” a la Anne Shirley and Diana Barry.  We starred in grainy home videos together, dressed in thrift store finds from our regular scavenger hunts, and made pilgrimages to local ice cream parlors (Heidi has always been an ice cream fiend).  We holed up in our bedrooms and talked long into the night on the telephone; on more than one occasion I picked up the phone to call Heidi, only to find her on the other end of the line, calling me before the phone had a chance to ring.  Our friendship was sealed when she defended my honor in the face of a couple of Mean Girls, pledging her fidelity before she even had a chance to know if I was worth the risk.

After high school, our life paths rocketed in different directions.  I made my way to college and Heidi married quickly and young.  Within a year she lost both her marriage and the baby girl, Mary, she gave birth to ten months after her wedding.  We drifted apart for a number of years, two small boats bobbing uneasily on the choppy seas of friendship.  As a 20 year-old college student whose greatest concern was acing her final exams, the dual losses Heidi experienced made me intensely uncomfortable, and I naively –and selfishly – hoped that things could simply go back to the way they were.  Visits and phone calls grew farther apart until they vanished altogether, a sad disappearing act.  We were specters in each other’s lives, the ghosts of friendship past.

Four years after Mary’s death, wondering where in the world Heidi was, I sent a stinging email in response to a message she had sent me months earlier, like jabbing a sharp stick at a papery hornet’s nest.  I was surprise when I opened my inbox a few days later to reveal an impassioned message from Heidi, detailing the struggles she had faced in the intervening years.  I was done, I told her, but she wanted to talk.

In 2002, our friendship was nothing but a shred of string dangling precariously between two wounded souls.  Where I was ready to clip the ragged thread and move forward with my life, Heidi saw something that could be rewoven.  Dominique Browning says, “Some friendships evolve as your life changes; others hit the wall. It is a painful rupture, not entered into lightly. It doesn’t mean the friendship was wrong to begin with–it means it has reached an impasse, or died.”  If it had been up to me, Heidi would be just another friend on the discard pile, but where I saw dead, she saw merely stuck.  She knitted her way back into my life through small but sure motions.  Although we were living in different states by now, making reconnection all the more challenging, she called regularly when she promised she would, even when our first conversations were smattered with awkward small talk and long pauses, not unlike a chat with a distant relative.  But we pushed through our mutual wariness, and when things got difficult we fell back into soft, easy memories, swimming in the details of better days.

By the time my mom died suddenly a few months later, we had reestablished enough of a connection that she was the first person I called, in a calm state of shock, on that rain-streaked Thanksgiving night.  I understood why she had come back into my life when she had:  she was intimately acquainted with loss and grief in a way that most 26 year-olds could never know.  Although I had vilified her unreliability over the years, I suddenly understood that, in the wake of her own losses, I had been the absent one, unable to provide the kind of support she would come to give me.

Even though our external lives have continued on different trajectories – Heidi is remarried with three more blue-eyed beauties — our souls have continued to grow and flourish right alongside one another over the past eight years.  We have successfully hit the “reset” button on our friendship and created new memories on the backs of the old ones, but not without constant nurturing and care on each of our parts.  We send emails daily, talk on the phone weekly, and visit one another yearly.  Through our friendship I have learned that the most important things in life require our small, but sustained, devotion.  But even that is not a talisman against things falling apart from time to time.  It is only through the concerted effort of both parties, and a willingness to slog through the muck and not skim the silky surface, that something new is reborn from the smoldering ashes.   How fitting it was, then, when Heidi and I sought spiritual guidance during our annual “retreat” in Sedona last May from a woman named Phoenix.  Nothing worthwhile can be rebuilt overnight, but everything worthwhile must be rewritten.

On Monday I smiled when I received a belated birthday package from Heidi.  Stuffed inside was a treasure trove of maternity clothes, hand-scribbled pictures from her children, and a cream-colored teddy bear with doleful eyes and a pink bowtie.  Inside the birthday card – appropriately inscribed with the words “Wing It!” – was the explanation for the gift:

I agonized a little over what to give you.  In the end I want to give you this little bear.  When I found out I was pregnant with Mary this was the first baby item I bought.  It is a special bear to me and I have pictures with each of my kids with it. All my feelings as a mother are summed up in this bear – and now, you are a mother, too.

With tears sliding down my face I placed the bear in the rocking chair in what is slowly developing into a nursery.  Over the years I have benefited from the fact that Heidi’s always been a step ahead of me in life.  She guided me through the tidal wave of grief that crashed over my life following my mother’s untimely death.  She ferried me through my wedding day, recognizing the complicated constellation of joy and sadness that accompanied this important life passage.  She’s been with me through every step of my pregnancy, and will be there when my baby takes her first shrill cries.  Heidi’s gifts may be belated, but the real gifts she’s bestowed upon me – those of unconditional love, support, and wisdom – have always arrived right on time, when I needed them most.

We are changing our format!  With a desire to bring you more substantive pieces, we will only be posting three days a week.  Elizabeth will be featured on Mondays, Anne will contribute on Wednesdays, and Fridays will bring a rotating series of topics, including reader contributions, media reviews, tips, and other Life in Pencil-related topics.  (For example, this Friday will feature a Q&A with New York Times best-selling author Allison Winn Scotch!)  Each day will continue to revolve around our central theme of “rewriting life one day at a time,” and we hope this change will bring deeper thought and reflection to the everyday moments that help us to better live our lives in pencil.

Posted by Elizabeth

There are two types of people in this world:  those who love their birthdays and those who’d prefer to hide under a rock when their special day rolls around.  I happily belong to the former group, a diehard birthday-holic who tries to milk the occasion for all its worth.  Over the years my birthday has morphed from a single day of celebration to a month-long affair.  Tomorrow I am turning 32, and I’m proud to say that, this year, the festivities kicked off in early April, when I declared a particularly spectacular dinner in Bologna, Italy, “my birthday dinner.”  “We can go out on your birthday,” Maikael said.  “No,” I responded, “I’d like to remember this as my ‘birthday dinner.’”

Although 32 isn’t a particularly momentous year, I have a fun weekend of celebration planned, from high tea and a pedicure with a dear friend to a last-minute lunch invitation, from a twilight picnic at the symphony with my honey to a low-key barbecue.  It’s a fitting reflection of where I’m at in my life right now, an eclectic patchwork of interests and friends rolled up into a three-day period that hits all the right notes.

Birthdays are important to me not just because of the revelry and celebration, but because they are a way to mark the passage of time.  Birthdays are wrapped in tradition and ritual, of which there’s little left in this world.  They are a time of reflection, when I think about where I’ve been on my life’s journey the past 365 days, and where the next 365 will take me.  As the blog approaches its first birthday, a big part of my journey this past year has been learning to live “in pencil.” Although 31 wasn’t a year I’m likely to remember for any particular reason, there are so many moments that comprised that year that I’ll never forget.  And as I look forward to a year filled with birth and new life, sleepless nights and first steps, constant change and boring hours, family and friends, writing and more writing, transition and change, I know the one thing I can count on is the fact that my life will be rewritten on a daily basis.

I know I’ll be better at living my life “in pencil” on the cusp of 33 than I am at 32.

How do you feel about your own birthday?  Love it or loathe it?  Is it a time of reflection or a time of hiding out?

Today is the final day of Momalom’s “Five for Ten Challenge,” and the theme is Yes!

Posted by Elizabeth

I arrived home from a workout at the gym early Monday afternoon and made my way to the mailbox, where a slim envelope from the Social Security Administration was waiting for me.  My new Social Security card!  I held it in my hands and stared at the name typed in official block letters.  My new name.

Elizabeth Marie Thomas

Except this wasn’t my new name.  The name I had carefully penned on my application, after five years of hemming and hawing, was Elizabeth Grant Thomas, my maiden name nestled between the old and the new.  I immediately went into panic mode and began making frantic calls to the national and local offices of the Social Security Administration.  After being placed on interminable hold, I called Maikael at work, who suggested I go to the local branch first thing the next morning and straighten everything out.  “I can’t wait until tomorrow,” I shrieked.  “I’m having an identity crisis!”

When I got married five Julys ago, I didn’t feel strongly about keeping or changing my name.  I couldn’t settle on any of the myriad possibilities for a new name, so I decided to wait it out and see what emerged naturally.  But nothing – even my own maiden name – ever felt quite right.  I remained deeply ambivalent about what I should call myself, and, depending on my mood, alternated between different permutations of “Grant” and “Thomas” when introducing myself.  It was often confusing, both for myself and others, but because I felt such deep-seated ambivalence I chose the path of non-action.

Then we found out we were having a baby, and I felt a creeping desire to unite our growing family through a shared surname.  In a flurry of dialogue about choosing our baby’s names, Maikael and I had many conversations about this proposed name change, and in the end I settled on Elizabeth Grant Thomas because it was the name that had stuck the most over the past five years.  If nothing else, it was the name printed on the top of my stationary.

Names are an important piece of our identity.  They signal where we’ve been and who we are, and the decision to change or keep one’s name is a deeply personal decision.  Why I have felt such uncertainty about my own name is unclear to me.  The counselor in me sees all sorts of subconscious underpinnings here:  Am I uncomfortable in my own skin?  Does my identity not feel solidified?  Am I in a constant state of metamorphosis?  In a world where people tend to quickly change their names after they get married, or don’t at all, I feel like a name-changing pariah.

Once I arrived at the Social Security Office, I was briskly informed that, although my name had been entered into the system incorrectly, my surname was now Thomas, and without additional identification to prove my identity, nothing further could be done.  The logic seemed suspiciously circular – weren’t they the ones who had changed my name in the first place? – but what I was instructed to do was to get a new license that stated my name as Elizabeth M. Thomas, go back to Social Security with the license and change my name to Elizabeth Grant Thomas, and then return once again to the licensing bureau to have a new license issued in new new name.

The other option was to keep the name that the Social Security Administration had given me.

I slinked back home defeated, feeling more entrenched than ever in my mounting identity crisis, literally caught between two selves.  If I felt strongly about being a Grant Thomas rather than a Marie Thomas, Maikael said, I should go through the extra two steps to get the name I wanted.  He advised me to sleep on it and approach it fresh in the morning, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

How did I feel about Elizabeth Marie Thomas?

The truth of the matter is, it’s a version of my name that five years of deliberation had never generated.   Had fate intervened on my behalf?  Did an outside force push me out of my ambivalence?  How important are middle names?  Does my family name of Grant carry any more weight or importance than Marie, a name my parents chose for me?  Wasn’t Oprah’s iconic name the result of a similar clerical error?  Perhaps I should just leave well enough alone?  After spending the evening in deep contemplation, I realized that it wasn’t that I didn’t like the name; I simply didn’t know how I felt about it.  And maybe I never would, because I felt just as ambivalent about it as I always had about any of the other names I had considered for myself.  Once I got over the initial shock of seeing a name I hadn’t chosen for myself in black and white, I realized that I didn’t feel any greater affinity to “Grant” than “Marie.”

My objective had been to share a surname with my family, and ultimately, “Thomas” — whether prefaced with “Marie” or “Grant” — was going to take some getting used to.  Identities don’t change overnight, and neither do we.

Rather than fighting it, I’ve made the decision to keep the unexpected name that the Social Security Administration bequeathed upon me.  I know it’s not the decision that everyone would make, and there are undoubtedly some readers out there who are thinking, “Are you kidding? You waited five years to change your name to just the right thing, and you’re going to lie down and accept the name that someone decided you should have?”  And maybe you’re right.  Maybe I’ll live to regret this decision.  But I’m also not sure what the “right thing” is – and I’m not sure I’ll know anytime soon.

In saying “yes” to this unforeseen circumstance, I can’t help but feel that I’m symbolically stepping into a new world of surprises and unbridled possibilities.  I am approaching this name change as I am the next stage of my life, with eyes wide shut.  Perhaps that’s what saying “yes” to life really means:  taking a leap of faith into the unknown, even when it doesn’t seem to make a whole heck of a lot of rational sense, and trusting that you’ll land on your feet.

My name is changing right along with my life.

Realizing I am opening a can of worms here – and understanding that it’s a profoundly personal decision – how do you feel about the act of keeping or changing one’s name?  What do names signal about our identity?  Can we “rewrite” our identities by changing our names?  What do you think of Elizabeth Marie Thomas versus Elizabeth Grant Thomas (be honest)?  Am I crazy to let a behemoth governmental organization choose my name?