Category: Happiness

How To Be a Kid Again

Recently, some of my friends with older children were lamenting that the days of trick-or-treating are over for them. But why? Does it have to end when you turn a certain age? My friend Deb doesn’t think so. Last year, she put on a wolf mask and a fake fur coat and went out on Halloween. “When you’re 5’2,” she told me, “you can trick-or-treat forever.”

I love Halloween. But my appreciation for it really has nothing to do with candy. I like the childlike invitation to dress up. I love the idea that you can throw on a wig or a beret and a mustache and Voila! You are instantly anyone or any thing you want to be. There’s the imagination phase, where you spend time wondering what you want to become, and then there’s the creation phase, the scramble to pull the pieces together and get up the courage to go out in public as, say, a BLT sandwich. I once dressed up as a BLT. Another time, I painted cardboard until I was a bagel, and then I cut foam into a misshapen circle to be a “Queen” Bolete mushroom. Those were in the category of things I liked to eat. Other years I went as Katy Perry or Grover, the blue muppet from Sesame Street. They were in the category of someones I wanted to be. Dressing up is about as creative as it gets; you make something out of nothing. Even if your costume comes in a plastic bag from Amazon.com, it’s still magical if you own the character you’ve decided to become. Take my friend’s three-year-old son Jaxson, who wasn’t just Tigger, but T-I-Double G-Errrrr.

This year, Halloween had a certain poignancy. I was not at home and I missed my kids, but I also missed all the children in the neighborhood, dressed up and believing they were animals or superheroes or superstars. Then there was the heartbreak of seeing the children at Mass General hospital. Every morning when I show up for my radiation treatments, there are always kids in the waiting room. They are doing chemotherapy and radiation at the same time, so most have lost all of their hair and are doing several energy-sucking, nausea-inducing sessions a day. I have come to know a few of them: two-year old Clayton, five-year old Aïsha, and three-year old Felicia, or Feliz (not their real names). These children go joyfully into the treatment room and come skipping back out. They don’t weigh down their experience with worry and premature grief. The other day, Aïsha found a toy xylophone, banged on its bright tin keys and belted out for all of us in the waiting room, “Everybody, yeah, eve-rrry-body is IMPORTANT!”

But it was Feliz who told me that the light around our radiation machine can change colors. I just assumed, in my grown-up way, that it was always blue. But noooo…this thing has a remote control and there are multiple shades of neon. It even has a “Disco Mode” where the blue light switches to pink to yellow to green. When I found that out, I had an idea.

On Halloween morning, Feliz came running over to me in her bright superhero costume, pulled out her pacifier, and said with a big smile, “I’m Supergirl!”

“Yes you are!” I responded and we flexed muscles for a while.

Then she asked, “What are you?”

“I’m a Disco Queen,” I said matter-of-factly, in my blonde afro wig and disco-ball earrings.

“Oh,” she said, and popped her pacifier back in her mouth before flying away. I turned to her mother and said, “Feliz is teaching me how to bring joy to my radiation treatments.” “All of us, ” she responded, “She teaches all of us so much.”

Inspired, I felt lighter going into my treatment. Maybe I could even have some fun. I seized the remote control and put the lights on “Disco Mode” then I asked the nurses to change the Pandora Radio station to ABBA and I danced. Not for very long, and not very well, but still, I was dancing in the radiation room! The nurses laughed and said, “You’re being such a kid!”

“Thank you!” I said.

And thank you Feliz, Aïsha, and Clayton for teaching me how to embrace the joy that is in every situation, no matter where I am and what I am doing.

Happy Halloween everyone!

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The Days of Awe

The Days of Awe are the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The idea is to stop, look around, and reflect. What do you want to let go of from last year? Who do you want to be in the New Year? I am not Jewish. Some of my former students call me Jew- “ish” because I like the traditions and ceremonies. As a teacher, it makes sense to me to celebrate the New Year in the fall. This year, I spend the Days of Awe outside, in nature as much as possible. I lie back in summer’s last green grasses. I watch the trees gain color and lose suppleness in their leaves. I notice that the wind smells of apples and wet soil, and that the ducks rise like mist from the pond to fly south.

I adopt the Jewish ritual called Tashlikh of dropping bread crumbs into a stream to cast away sins from last year. A young friend of mine calls this ceremony, “Kiss the Bad Thing Goodbye.” I take my lunch and sit under the giant willows by the creek. I throw the crusts of my toast in the current, kiss the bad things goodbye, and watch the swift water rush them away. I remember that what makes us human is that we are capable of making great mistakes, and yet we are also capable of great transformation. Maybe this tumor isn’t meant to set me back, but to help me transform.

I am fascinated by metamorphosis. Years ago, I wrote a children’s book, Eliza and the Dragonfly, about the process of a dragonfly nymph becoming a dragonfly. I wanted to show children the magic that exists all around them. But I also wrote it for myself, because I wanted to understand how metamorphosis happens. A dragonfly begins its life in water. When it is young, it breathes water instead of air. And it swims instead of flies. For years, it mucks about in a pond, being itself. Then it wakes up one morning with wings. It crawls out of the water, breathes air for the first time, stretches its wings in the sun, and flies away.

I wrote the children’s book because I kept wondering what I needed to do to transform into something great and become the grown-up that I wanted to be. It helped me to learn that dragonfly nymphs, like monarch caterpillars, don’t do anything to make their transformation happen. They just are. Every time I see a dragonfly, I remember to be myself. I am good enough. One day I will wake up with wings.

Here’s a poem I wrote in gratitude for this time of year and to celebrate how far I’ve come, how far we’ve all come.

The Days of Awe

These are the days of awe.

Lie back in summer’s last green grasses.

Listen.

Each cricket’s song is slower now,

the wind smells of ripe apples,

the soil devours rain

and coughs up stones.

Mallards rise like mist off the pond

and fly south.

Trees gain color and restraint overnight,

act like old ladies who

snap their purses shut.

Remember

The sun isn’t traveling

East to West.

We are

spinning — West to East,

setting to rising,

beginnings growing out of endings,

not the other way around.

Lie back in the wet grass.

Wait for the sky to grow dark.

Breathe in the moon

like a question

you’re not quite ready to ask.

Be like the river

Who moves toward the unknown,

who doesn’t turn around

and ask the mountain for directions.

Listen to the grace of insects,

then drop, swell, and release

like bread in cool, swirling waters.

–SCR

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by Susie Rinehart

The mother I wanted; the mother I got

When I was younger, I wanted a mother who was sweet and nurturing, who baked cookies, and who welcomed my friends with cheerful holiday decorations. What I got was a mother who raised us well, but without softness, and who baked so rarely that she kept a heavy chair in front of our oven door. On Halloween, she turned off the lights and left a bowl of toothbrushes on the front step. At Christmas, she hung a tangled strand of lights on a house plant and called it a day.

My favorite picture book was “Are You My Mother?” It’s about a bird who falls out of the nest and goes looking for its mother, asking the cow, the hen, even a bulldozer if they are her mother. Growing up, the book was an inside joke between my mom and me, because I always felt so different from her, and she knew it. I was a little hippie girl and she was more like a Spice Girl. I lay on the floor and listened to Bob Dylan while she moonwalked to Michael Jackson. She was messy and I organized everything. She seemed to be care free. I worried constantly. She had clear boundaries, I ran ragged trying to keep everyone happy. When I read that the legendary folk singer, Joni Mitchell, had given up a daughter about my age for adoption, I fantasized that she was my real mother. I imagined the warm embrace when we finally met, and the cover story in the newspaper. There would be a picture; Joni with her guitar, Susie with her ukulele, and we’d be sitting under a tree, smiling. The headline, “Mother and Child Reunion.” Basically, I just wanted my mother to be different than she was. Doesn’t everybody?

Now that I am a wife and a mother myself, I appreciate that my mother was never conventional and always 100% herself. One of my mom’s best friend’s described her as, “often wrong, never in doubt.” And my mom laughed. That is the thing about my mother: she can laugh at herself easily, joyfully. Just last week we were trying to carry a suitcase down a flight of stairs and when we realized that we only had 1 good arm and 3 good legs between us, she started to laugh, and then I laughed, until the two of us were laughing so hard that I peed—just a little—right there on Boston’s South Station steps.

The first time she came to see me post-surgery in Boston, I wanted her to help me prepare meals, do laundry, clean up. When she arrived, she set down her hot pink bag and declared, “I don’t cook. I don’t do dishes. Never have. Never will.” Instead, she made me swallow monster gummy multivitamins, get my hair styled, and do exercises that she had seen the Olympic rugby teams do on TV. I was frustrated; I kept wanting her to be better at this nurse stuff, and know exactly what to say and do. I wanted her to be different.

It was the same as when I was a teenager in the house. While I raged at her shouting, “Why can’t you be more like other moms?” I missed what she was demonstrating to me every single day: how to be authentic and real. Be yourself! Her actions screamed. And I missed and missed and missed the memo. When my parents divorced, I was just a baby. I never knew what it was like to have two parents under one roof. Somehow, I blamed my mother for the divorce. If she had only been a little more like the other moms, I reasoned, he would still be around. I vowed to be different when I grew up. And by different, I meant the same as others. I reasoned that if I acted a little less myself and more like other women, my prince wouldn’t leave. But the consequence was that I gave up my uniqueness in order to fit in and not rock the boat. Even when I realized that I was holding my mom to impossible standards, I didn’t realize it enough to stop holding myself to those same impossible standards. I worked to maintain my status as the good daughter, the good wife, the good spouse, the good mother. I managed others’ needs and feelings to the detriment of my own to the point where when my husband asked me what I needed one day, I had nothing to say. I had no idea.

When my mom came to visit me last week during my radiation treatments, we had wonderful days together. This time, instead of just wishing she were different, I spoke up and asked her directly for what I needed. She listened and responded. When I wanted privacy, she took my phone and guarded my door. When I wanted to go for a walk, she strapped on her squeaky running shoes and led the way. When I was hungry for breakfast, but too tired to get out of bed, she made me porridge. And this time, she only destroyed my host’s stovetop once. All week, I was relaxed and able to appreciate my mother for who she is, bold and brave. I was also able to appreciate myself for who I am, curious and courageous. We are more similar than I thought. This helped me to finally accept that Joni Mitchell is taken; the tabloids say she is reunited with her daughter in a California suburb. That’s OK. I hate suburbs. Plus, I think I am the lucky one. My mom may never be a great nurse or maid, but she can lift me out of my negative cycle of thoughts with her undying sense of adventure. And she can always make me laugh.

Love,

Susie

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