Awhile back, a well-meaning (and very successful) friend said to me, “I just wish we could buy you a house in Bethesda so you wouldn’t have to live so far away from here.”

We had been talking about our families and children, and in particular, I’d been narrating the details of my epic, every-Saturday-morning drive across the city to my daughter’s ballet class (which I wrote about for Good Letters here.)

Yep, every Saturday morning, Scott Simon on the radio, I buckled her, pink tights and braided hair, into the car seat and drove off my leafy hill, down New York Avenue, past no-tell motels and abandoned warehouses, past the lobbying shops and monuments of downtown D.C., then back up the hills of embassies and leafy trees, to the bright-pink ballet studio where second-marriage fifty-something dads consoled tutu-wearing daughters having meltdowns worthy of Maria Callas.

“What exactly are you trying to prove?” asked another friend. “There are ballet studios that are closer, and just as good.” [Read more...]

For Johnny, of course

My mother has been dead a year now, and it has taken me this whole time to begin to find value in her faults as much as her virtues.

For much of my adult life, I’ve been in flight from just such a consideration: There’s a book called The Spiritual Advantages of an Unhappy Childhood, but I didn’t want to read it.

The short version of the story—as anyone who’s read my posts on Good Letters knows—is that my father died and then my mother fell apart, friends left behind and relationships squandered.

Her life shrunk to the dried husk cast off by a locust. She even began to speak in the past tense. My siblings were grown and gone, and I was with her in the house alone. [Read more...]

Last Friday night, a freak microburst descended on our neighborhood with eighty mile an hour winds scattering tree limbs like matchsticks and knocking out the power on a steamy summer evening. My husband decamped to sleep at the office (he had to work on Saturday), and I spent an exhausted night on the living room sofa huddled next to my two sweaty children.

Twenty-four hours later, power still off, we checked into a Fairfield Inn two miles from our house, cranked on the air conditioner, ordered a large pizza, and sat in our slick cool hotel beds watching the Washington Nationals play the Baltimore Orioles.

For it has been the season of baseball in our house. Way back in March, my eight-year-old son signed up for a machine pitch team coached by a friend’s father, among others. [Read more...]