parenting Archives - Ann Hedreen, Writer Teacher Filmmaker | The Restless Nest Blog

You Who Know

Ann Hedreen2022-05-17T17:05:32-07:00Categories: arts, creative aging, family, featured posts, feminism, health & medicine, human rights, parenting, Seattle, women's rights|Tags: droit du seigneur, Justice Alito, Mother's Day, patriarchy, Putin, Roe v Wade, Saudade, Seattle Opera, The Marriage of Figaro|

Who knew that one of the central themes of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro is droit du seigneur, the feudal “lord’s right” granting the lord of a medieval European manor “sexual relations with servant brides on their wedding night?” Since I am a kindergarten-level opera fan, I am grateful to Seattle Opera General Director Christina Scheppelmann for stating it so clearly in her program notes. Because who knew I’d be watching The Marriage of Figaro—the first performance I’ve seen in Seattle’s McCaw Hall since before the pandemic—just days after the leaking of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s medieval memo detailing his lordly belief in a woman’s lack of rights over her own body? On the morning of Mother’s Day, I googled “senior rush tickets Seattle Opera.” Yes, the Opera’s rush ticket program was alive and well and yes, I now qualified! So off I went to McCaw Hall, where I bought my ticket at 12:30, which gave me plenty of time for a long walk. The sun was out at last, and the lovingly tended gardens of nearby Queen Anne Hill sparkled as they shook off the rain. By 2 p.m. I was back at McCaw, happily settled in my seat in Row P on the main floor, just off the aisle. Forty-five dollars felt like both a splurge—so self-indulgent!—and a bargain: only $45 for such a fabulous seat! And what a delightful, self-indulgent bargain of a splurge it was. To hear and see, in person, in all the immersive, sensory beauty that the word “live” [...]

April Come

Ann Hedreen2021-04-28T14:18:16-07:00Categories: creative aging, faith and doubt, family, featured posts, hiking, memoir, nature, parenting, quiet, Seattle, Uncategorized, urban life, writing|Tags: Adam Grant, April Come She Will, Braiding Sweetgrass, Languishing, New York Times, pandemic, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Simon & Garfunkel, Spring, Vaccine|

“April come!” our daughter Claire used to plead at bedtime. Her favorite lullaby was Simon & Garfunkel’s classic, “April Come She Will.” But the pleading was play-acting: she knew her father loved nothing more than to sing that song to her and her baby brother Nick. This morning, my husband teared up as he read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s poignant account in Braiding Sweetgrass of taking her daughter off to college. He and I laughed as we recalled our own last manic trip from Claire’s dorm room to Target for hangers—the only remaining little something we could think of to do before we would have to say goodbye. Three years later, we did it all again when it was Nick's turn. I read Kimmerer’s book a few months ago, and loved it, and so it made me happy that Rustin was loving it too. And remembering that long-ago college move-in day—can it really be nearly 14 years?!—was a moment of April sweetness, one of so many in this showery, sunny month, when streams are ripe and swelled with rain; this moment of the year that is bursting with newborn life every which way you look. On one morning walk in the scrap of forest that backs my urban neighborhood, I saw this. And this. And this. And yet. I am still so quick to brood (that editor hasn’t gotten back to me) and fuss (why is my stupid Zoom suddenly going choppy?!) and whine (wish I could… wish I could… wish I could…) And yet. I got [...]

Wild Isle

Ann Hedreen2019-12-09T14:04:05-08:00Categories: featured posts, hiking, memoir, midlife, nature, parenting, quiet, Seattle, Uncategorized, urban life, writing|Tags: Alaska, Audubon, Klondike, Olmsted Brothers, Schwagerl, Seattle Parks, Seward Park, Wild Isle in the City, William Seward|

Wild Isle: what a beautiful pair of words. But where, on earth, might there be a wild isle in a city? Right in my back yard, as it turns out. One hundred and just about nine years ago, the voters of Seattle gave themselves a gift they decided to call Seward Park: an island of wild old-growth forest that juts into Lake Washington from its southwest shore, barely connected to the mainland via a then-slim isthmus. It seemed only right to name this green jewel box after William Seward, best known for negotiating the 1867 purchase of Alaska, a territory that Seattleites were very fond of, back in 1911, because of the money that had poured into the city as gold prospectors from all over the world stopped to gear up before sailing from Seattle to the Klondike by way of Alaska. On their way home, the miners stopped through again, and spent more money. At last, Seattle could afford the wild isle at the southern end of the stunning chain of parks and boulevards laid out by the famed Olmsted brothers of New York. And now our Wild Isle has its own beautiful book. Published by the Friends of Seward Park under the painstaking direction of writer/editor Paul Talbert and photo editor/designer Karen O’Brien, Wild Isle in the City is full of “tales from Seward Park’s First 100 years,” as the subtitle promises. But it goes back much, much further, all the way back to the Ice Age geology that shaped our city; the abundance [...]

My Mother Was Here

therestlessnest2019-11-07T15:30:19-08:00Categories: family, memoir, midlife, parenting, politics, Uncategorized|

This post is really about my mother-in-law, who died January 12 at the age of 86. She was sweeter and more selfless than I'll ever be. You might say she was the kind of person our new president pretends to understand, but does not and never will, because his heart is several sizes too small. But I'm going to let her son, my husband Rustin, take it from here: My mom, Donna Thompson, never thought of herself first. Even in the last month of her life while in the hospital, she’d offer her lunch to me or my wife (or her grandkids, Nick and Claire, pictured with her here) before taking a bite. Sometimes her unselfishness was exasperating. “Mom, it’s okay to take care of yourself,” I’d implore, but she was too stubborn to take my advice. Mom would be the first to tell you she was just an ordinary person. She’d say she never did anything special or remarkable her whole life. She never flew on an airplane, never traveled farther than Disneyland to the south or Mt. Rushmore to the east. She drove the same car the last 35 years of her life, lived on nothing more than a pension and social security since she was 65, and she never owned a credit card. She worked hard for every penny she ever had. Mom drove a Franklin Pierce district school bus for 28 years, working overtime at sporting events, and she picked raspberries and drove the berry-picking bus in the summers. In [...]

The Journals Project

therestlessnest2019-11-07T15:34:34-08:00Categories: faith and doubt, family, feminism, parenting, politics, women's rights, work|Tags: Democratic Convention, Hillary Clinton, journal writing, memoir, Obama|

This may look like July 2016 to you, what with the political conventions, heat waves and all. But if you ask me where I am on any given afternoon, I might say 1994. Or 1992. Or, not too many weeks ago, 1978. It is the summer of the Journals Project: the season I re-read my hand-scrawled life, transcribing not all of it—that would be WAY too brutal a task—but some important scraps. Morsels. I began keeping a journal when I was 13, so I have a lot of years to get through. The good news is that I did not (and do not) write every day. Sometimes I’ve skipped whole months, or more. But it’s taking me a while, because—sort of like eating Thanksgiving dinner—I can do it for no more than an hour or two at a time. There are only so many rich, nostalgia-laden bites a girl can take in one sitting. My self-imposed assignment is to look for anything having to do with God, faith, loss of faith, doubt, mortality and/or the meaning of life. It’s research for my next book, known for now as The Observant Doubter. Me being me, there’s a generous sprinkling of all of the above. In my very first volume, I wrote by candlelight, and used a fountain pen: a smudgy, spill-prone choice for left-handed me. But I can still remember the clink of the pen in the bottle, the scratchy sound of the nib, the smell of the ink. In the beginning, I wrote a LOT about [...]

To the Nines

therestlessnest2019-11-07T15:37:34-08:00Categories: family, memoir, midlife, parenting, travel|Tags: Ballet Folklorico, Mexico City|

When I was nine years old, I put on my first pair of glasses—light blue, cat-eyed—and looked out my bedroom window at the huge, old Japanese maple tree that shaded our entire postage-stamp backyard. For the first time, from that once-great distance of about 20 feet, I saw not just its spring-green canopy of foliage, but the etched outlines of individual leaves. It felt—magic is too weak a word. Religious might be right, or ecstatic. I wanted to cry, or shout. Not because I was experiencing my own personal miracle—I was blind, but now I see!—but because the world itself had changed. It had become rich in detail, startling in clarity. It was a place I wanted to know, in the way that grownups knew things. No more gauzy, child’s-eye views for me. In that instant, staring at the leaves of a tree I had loved since the day we moved into that Seven Dwarves' cottage of a house, I believed that for me, vision would forever trump vanity: I would wear these glasses. Most of the time. When I was nineteen years old, I got my first passport, and got it stamped for the first time at Heathrow Airport, where I began a year of study and travel that opened my eager eyes to the world. I wore contact lenses by then, the old hard lenses that could pop out of your eye and down the drain of a Roman pensione in a millisecond, leaving you with your slightly blurry backup glasses for the next [...]

Restless Night

therestlessnest2019-11-07T15:40:26-08:00Categories: arts, film, memoir, midlife, parenting, Seattle, urban life|Tags: Bertha, Big Magic, Columbia City, creativity, documentary films, Elizabeth Gilbert, Halloween, Kickstarter, memoir writing, Peru|

There was a solemn three-year-old firefighter and a fierce four-year-old Batman. There were many princesses, one wearing a football helmet. There were moms dressed as witches and one dad in a hardhat carrying a cardboard model of Bertha, Seattle’s doomed supersized tunnel driller. There were some very sweet baby bumblebees. It was Halloween night in Columbia City, and my husband and I were there for the show. We left a basket of candy on our front porch with a sign: “Happy Halloween! Take a few and leave some for your neighbors.” We’ll never know whether the trick or treaters did that, or whether one or a few them could not resist the temptation to empty the entire basket into their bags. What we did know is that we were too restless, this year, to sit home and wait for the doorbell to ring. So there we were, a dozen blocks away in our neighborhood’s hopping, decked-out business district, watching what has become a wildly popular south Seattle ritual: trick or treating at the bars, restaurants, galleries and stores in rustic, red-brick Columbia City. We ordered beers at Lottie’s and stood outside, protected from the rain by the awning. We complimented the trick or treaters on their costumes and chatted with their parents. Rus took a few photos to send our children, currently living far away in Colorado and New York and busy at that hour dressing up for their respective Halloween parties. After dinner at Tutta Bella, we raced up to Taproot Theatre in Greenwood to [...]

Letter to New Orleans

therestlessnest2019-11-07T15:43:00-08:00Categories: faith and doubt, film, human rights, midlife, parenting|Tags: Katrina, New Orleans|

Dear New Orleans: you took me in. At a time when you were still so bruised, splintered, fractured, frayed, and I showed up with nothing to offer except my eyes, ears, a pen and a notebook—you pretended you could use me. Don’t hurry away, you said. Stay awhile. I couldn’t stay a while; I had teenagers back home. But I could and did return six times. My husband had something more to offer: his camera. What I did was to try to help him tell, not the story, but A story, a small story we happened to stumble across, about what happened to New Orleans, ten years ago this week. Our small story was about the post-Hurricane Katrina rebuilding of a church that is home to both New Orleans’ deaf Catholics and a Spanish-speaking congregation in a neighborhood layered with immigrant history. Creole, German and Italian-American carpenters, plumbers and skilled volunteers of every description showed up to help. Many of them had grown up down the block. Many had lost their own homes to Katrina. Volunteers from out of town, including a Seattle crew, were there too. Our small story became a documentary film called The Church on Dauphine Street. One of the first places it aired was on the New Orleans PBS station, WYES, whose studios had been badly damaged by Katrina. When we asked if the station wanted to air it again in honor of the tenth anniversary of the hurricane, they declined, saying people in New Orleans are trying hard to look forward [...]

Lost & Found Mom

therestlessnest2019-11-07T15:47:21-08:00Categories: brain, faith and doubt, family, memoir, midlife, parenting|Tags: love, moms, Mother's Day|

When I saw that dirt-colored linoleum, I knew I had to act. Fast. Thanks to my mom, I knew how. Yellow pages: rugs. Phone. Directions. “Vicky,” I said to my brand-new college roommate, “will you go in with me on a rug? It’ll cost us 40 dollars.” She said yes. And so off I went, via bus and subway, into a Boston neighborhood not normally frequented by Wellesley College freshmen from faraway states. I bought the rug: short nap, sky blue. I truly can’t remember how I got it back to the dorm. What caught me by surprise was how impressed my roommate and hallmates were. To me, this was a logical reaction to a crisis of ugliness. To them, it was all about me being a plucky Western girl, an Annie Oakley who got stuff done. But I knew the truth, which was that I had simply channeled my inner Arlene: my mom, that is, and the example she had always set of moving right past hand-wringing and right into making things better. I always wince when I use the words “lost” and “mom” in the same sentence. Because she’s not lost. She’s right here, inside me. I am sure my brother and sisters feel the same way. She was and is far too powerful a beacon to be “lost.” Gone, yes, and too young: Alzheimer’s started stealing bits of her when she was my age and kept at it for quite a long time. She died in 2006, at 74, after many years during [...]

The West: A Love Story

therestlessnest2019-11-07T16:00:34-08:00Categories: family, hiking, memoir, midlife, nature, parenting, travel|Tags: National Parks, Wilderness Act|

“A mountain lion sounds like a screaming woman,” said the ranger at Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado. This bothered me. Until I was standing outside a locked door in Castle Valley, Utah, listening to what sounded like a chorus of screaming women. “Mountain lions,” I thought, as mournful coyotes sang harmony. My husband and I are on a road trip around the West. We have stayed with relatives, camped, enjoyed a few budget motels and a sweet suite at a hostel. The graciously lent Utah home of a friend, outside of which we were now standing and listening to wildlife, was by far the most luxurious stop on our trip. For the first time in two weeks, we cooked: pasta with veggies from the Salida, Colorado Farmer’s Market; a bottle of red wine. Aahh. After dinner we stepped out on the patio to admire the stars and the moon over the red rock castles of this storied valley. Rustin was in socks. I was in slippers. The door closed and locked behind us. What followed was one of the longest half hours of our lives. For a few minutes, we swore and moaned along with the coyotes and lions. Then Rus began systematically checking windows. I tried jimmying the lock with my tiny cross necklace, succeeding only in twisting the cross—a metaphor I may use in a future Restless Nest, but not this one. Then I racked my brain: what else could I find and use, without a flashlight? My bicycle key and the [...]

The Restless Report, Part Two

therestlessnest2019-11-07T16:01:38-08:00Categories: brain, family, memoir, midlife, parenting, travel|Tags: brain health, Her Beautiful Brain, Laurence Steinberg|

artist: Kim Goff-Harrington When our children were younger, my husband and I used to joke about our great fear that they might “rebel” against the creative, financially precarious example we have set by becoming stockbrokers or bankers. Didn’t happen! And so far, it doesn’t like it’s going to. This is good news, regarding all of us having a lot in common and plenty to talk about around the dinner table. Not so good, re our collective financial futures. But once you make the decision—or, more accurately, once you realize you’ve made the decision without noticing you made it—to value your time on the planet more than your money, it’s hard to go back. Three years ago, I wrote a Restless Nest about this called, “Oops, I forgot to get rich.” It cheered me up to write it in the midst of the recession, as we and our nonprofit clients struggled to stay afloat while the big bankers got their big bailout. But the central tenet of that piece—that time is worth so much more than money—holds up. Back to the kids, who aren’t kids anymore: they’re 22 and 25, and as I reported last week, they’re currently in Eastern Europe and Colorado, doing their own restless adventuring. Neither of them is sure what will come next. My own experience and my instincts about them tell me they’re doing exactly what they should be doing. But it’s also in my job description, as a mom, to worry. Just a tiny bit. Imagine my relief when [...]

The Restless Report

therestlessnest2019-11-07T16:02:14-08:00Categories: brain, memoir, midlife, parenting, women's rights, writing|Tags: Empty Nest, Her Beautiful Brain, Liza Mundy, memoir writing, New York Times|

Four years ago, a word came to me: restless. That’s me, I thought. That’s what I am: restless. And then I saw how well it went with the word “nest.” Restless Nest. Suddenly, I had a retort, a comeback, to the tiresome questions about how I was coping with our newly empty nest. “It’s not empty,” I would say. “It’s restless.” I liked saying it, because it instantly defused a whole Molotov-cocktail shaker full of flammable issues behind the words “empty nest.” There was the implied sexism—“I’m sure your husband’s fine but you must be a mess!”—and ageism: “wow, life’s pretty bleak and empty at your age, isn’t it?” And then there were my own incendiary issues: I hated the thought of my college-age children judging me and thinking my life was now empty and dull. I resented the mixed messages from well-meaning friends, which I somehow heard as: if you’re a good and loving mother, of course you are going to feel bereft when your children leave. On the other hand, if you do feel bereft, that must mean you defined yourself through your children, and didn’t we all vow thirty years ago we wouldn’t do that? Four years later, thinking about what I was thinking then makes my head spin. Because here’s one thing I’ve learned: I am not the only restless one in this nest, and I’m not just talking about my husband. Although he’s a good place to start. “Read this,” he said on Sunday, pointing to a New York Times Opinion [...]

Alchemy

therestlessnest2019-11-14T12:02:23-08:00Categories: faith and doubt, family, midlife, parenting|Tags: alchemy, graduation, memoir, Rumi|

High on the list of words that make me twitch due to overuse is the word “alchemy.” Early this morning, there it was on the page, ready to pounce on my nerves. But this time, I found myself—not twitching, perhaps because it appeared in the last line of a poem by Rumi. It is hard to accuse a writer dead for more than seven centuries of tedious trendiness. Rumi’s cryptic phrase was this: “The alchemy of a changing life is the only truth.” It’s the end of a poem of flirtation, of courtship. In the poem, Rumi playfully assumes the voice of King Solomon speaking to messengers sent by Queen Sheba. Solomon tells the messengers to scold Sheba for sending him expensive gifts. He suggests that the wealth of her throne “keeps her from passing through the doorway that leads to a true majesty.” He concludes by reminding her of the story of Joseph, who sat at the bottom of a well until he “reached to take the rope that rose/to a new understanding. The alchemy/of a changing life is the only truth.” I had to refresh myself on the story of Joseph. Most important point: Joseph got thrown into that well by his ever-jealous brothers. They only tossed him a rope when it occurred to them that they could sell him as a slave to some passing merchants, pocket the money, and still go home and tell their doting father that his favorite son was dead. Being sold to those traveling salesmen changed young Joseph’s [...]

Happy Mother’s Day

therestlessnest2019-11-13T16:18:03-08:00Categories: dementia, family, memoir, midlife, parenting, urban life|Tags: Frederick & Nelson, Seattle, Williamsburg Court Apartments|

Once upon a time in Seattle, a little girl went downtown with her mother and baby sister and had a grand adventure. They may have shopped at Frederick & Nelson. They could have sipped milkshakes in the Paul Bunyan Room. But the excitement meter started spinning like crazy when the car broke down. I was that little girl. What I remember is this: the pale green Pontiac thudded to a halt. Mom twisted the keys and the steering wheel. The car wheezed weakly—and then went silent. Mom sighed, got out, opened the back door, scooped up baby Lisa from her car bed and motioned for me to slide across the vast back seat. “What are we doing?” I asked, as I scrambled down to the sidewalk. “Are we going to visit this castle?” We were standing in front of a brick building with a grassy courtyard and white columns flanking the oversized front door. Mom laughed. “That’s not a castle, honey. That’s an apartment building. And look—here’s a bus stop right in front of it! Are you ready for your very first bus ride?” Was I ever. This was a trip downtown I would never forget! And I didn’t. As I wrote in my memoir, Her Beautiful Brain, “In my three-year-old mind, it was the ideal moment: the complete safety of Mom; the thrilling adventure of the bus. Our mother was the opposite of fear, the opposite of worry, the handler of everything.” It’s that castle-like apartment building that kept this scrap of memory alive for me. [...]

Falling off the map

therestlessnest2014-03-04T13:50:56-08:00Categories: family, memoir, midlife, parenting, travel|Tags: Esther Helfgott, Megabus, unplugging|

Once upon a time, it was easy to fall off the map. You saved your money. You bought a ticket. You told your parents you’d be checking in, gave them a hug, and off you went. A few weeks later, you scribbled a postcard if you remembered. If you were feeling verbose, you bought a tissue-thin aerogram and wrote a letter in your tiniest handwriting. If weeks turned into months, you went to an underlit, Dickensian place full of grimy booths called a telephone center and sat down for a brief, expensive, shouted phone call to the folks back home. But at no point did you feel compelled or obliged to let anyone know where you were all the time, or even most of the time. I started writing this piece on a cross-country flight a few weeks ago. We are still generally unreachable when in mid-air, although 1) this may change and/or is already changing and 2) your nearest and dearest tend to know where you are when you’re on that plane, even if you can’t text, email or actually call one another. I wrote a bit more when I was on a Megabus trip from New York City to Syracuse. The wi-fi worked pretty well, with the occasional slow patch as we skirted the Catskills. Most of the other passengers appeared to be college students, heading back upstate after a weekend in the city. Most of them wore ear buds connected to smartphones; tethered even as they slept to music, to friends, to news. [...]

Swimming

therestlessnest2014-02-06T10:06:56-08:00Categories: human rights, memoir, parenting, urban life|Tags: Rainier Beach Pool, Rainier Valley, Seahawks, Seattle, Superbowl, Swimming|

I swam and swam, longer and further than I thought I would, turning my face to the sun each time I flipped over for some backstroke. Then I sat in a hot tub and worked the jets over my tight calves, shoulders, back, feet. From there I repaired to the sauna, lay back and went from pleasantly warm to luxuriously hot. It was the tail end of January. Noon on a Friday. I wasn’t on vacation. I was at the sparkling new Rainier Beach pool in the middle of southeast Seattle. For five dollars and 25 cents, I swam, soaked and sweated away my cares and woes, along with a rainbow coalition of fellow south Seattleites. When I arrived, the locker room was swarming with toddlers and moms who had just finishing swim lessons. When I left, the seniors were on their way in, slow and graceful, like tortoises who’ve lived for decades on a beach the rest of us just discovered. “You just turned 68? You’re a baby. I’m 87!” one of them said to another. “87?” said the 68-year-old. “That’s a blessing, to be 87. That’s a blessing!” “It sure is,” said the 87-year-old, as she moved, one step at a time, behind her walker. “It sure is.” I had not been to the Rainier Beach Pool for many years, not since long before it was torn down and rebuilt. I remember one summer, taking my children there for swimming lessons; walking in was like entering a steamy, mildewed concrete bunker. What a transformation! [...]

Holiday Family School

therestlessnest2013-12-24T10:03:52-08:00Categories: faith and doubt, family, midlife, parenting|Tags: Christmas, Christmas story|

We figured out a long time ago that buying presents for every single family member was not going to work out very well in the long-term. Not when you start with six siblings and add spouses and then kids, more and more, year after year. So in my extended family, we draw names. And every Christmas, I’m grateful we figured that part out. Because there’s always so much else going on. When a big family gets together for Thanksgiving or Christmas or Hanukah or any other annual occasion, it is never the same group of people it was the year before. There’s a new boyfriend, or spouse, or baby. There are friends or neighbors who need a place to go. There are a few nuclear families who might be missing this year because, shockingly, they’re with that other family known as their in-laws. Or they’ve dared to break with protocol and go on a trip. But there’s another reason it’s never the same group of people: everyone in the room is a year older. So what? You might say. Maybe so what for us grown-ups, but for the kids? Wow. What a difference a year makes, when you go from squalling newborn to toddling, smiling one-year-old. Or silent young teen to suddenly-able-to-speak-again older teen. Or high school senior to college freshman. The niece or nephew I thought I knew? Gone, replaced by a young adult who wants to talk to quaint, church-going me about whether God exists and if so, why. Every year for 32 years, [...]

Sausage Rolls: Seriously

therestlessnest2013-12-17T15:55:01-08:00Categories: family, midlife, parenting|Tags: biscuits, Columbia City, holiday food, sausage, sausage rolls|

If you had asked me, thirty years ago, what sort of holiday magic I hoped to someday impart to my grateful family, I never would have predicted that it would be all about pork products. But such is my fate. I am the official maker of the sausage rolls. That is my one unchanging task, year in, year out, Thanksgiving and Christmas. It’s no small job. I’m one of six siblings, who all married and have two or more children. My oldest nephew is now married and has a baby of his own. Looks like our gatherings, which average 20 or 25 people, are just going to keep getting bigger.For each holiday, I purchase four pounds of pan sausage from Bob’s Quality Meats on Rainier Avenue in Columbia City. In recent years, I’ve also bought a package of fake sausage for the vegetarians in the family. Then I mix up a quadruple batch of buttermilk biscuit dough. I roll out a quarter of the dough at a time, cover it with sausage, and roll it up together into four and a half long cylinders, which I wrap and put in the freezer. When the big day comes, I slice, bake and serve the sausage rolls piping hot. I must do this. It is written. Except, of course, that it’s not written at all. It just sort of happened, a long time ago, that sausage rolls became mandatory. And I went along with it, because—well, maybe because I like having one unchanging holiday task, one that I [...]

Restless Breeze

therestlessnest2013-08-29T14:50:43-07:00Categories: arts, hiking, nature, parenting, Uncategorized, women's rights|Tags: Cliff Mass, Hedgebrook, She Writes Press, Washington Trails Association, writing|

I’m restless, I’m humid, I’m one big inhale. I’m a late-August breeze in the shape of a woman. Labor Day is SO next week. Vacation’s over. There’s work to do. But give me any excuse and I’m jumping on my bike. And/or into the lake. I’m stalking blackberry bushes with a plastic bag. I’m looking at the Washington Trails Association website, studying the Hike of the Week, reading articles about what to do if you encounter a bear. I think the entire Northwest population is unanimous about how wonderful the weather has been this summer, even with these recent splatters of rain. It’s such a big deal for us: we don’t always have summers like this one, with tomatoes ripening in early August and day after day glittering like a glacial stream. But it also makes it very hard to say goodbye. Word from the weather watchers is that we don’t have to quite yet, thank God: the September forecast is for more, more, more. But therein lies the challenge: how do we shift gears, get busy, get going, when our restless bodies and minds shout Summer? I am hoping that resuming my reports from the Restless Nest will help. Breaks are good, but I’ve missed this, which is so different from anything else I do or write. And the Nest is authentically Restless right now. Our children—who don’t live under our roof but do live nearby—are off adventuring. Claire’s in the mountains of Colorado with the Southwest Conservation Corps, out of cellphone reach for ten [...]

Hiatus

therestlessnest2013-05-29T11:22:33-07:00Categories: midlife, parenting, quiet|Tags: Empty Nest, KBCS|

We were going to camp, but the weather was terrible. Instead, we rented a tiny cottage on the Washington coast. It has a wood stove and a big window, so we can watch the storm pound the beach in comfort. There is room, in this cabin, for exactly two people: my husband and me. About fifteen years ago, we rented a pair of houses up the beach a ways. There were eight of us—my sister and her family and me and mine. Four adults, four kids. Beach fires, forts, expeditions, charades, a new puppy—it was a hectic, joyful blast of a trip. It was a different time of life. A wonderful time. I feel lucky to have had such a wonderful time. We still feel lucky. We have two young adult children who actually want to hang out with us reasonably often, and we treasure our time together. But we also have this: the flexibility to sneak off to the beach and rent a place the size of a dollhouse, where we can read, write, walk, eat and sleep when we want. The Washington coast is a good place to ponder the passage of time. Little changes here, and yet everything does. The wind and waves push the sand without ceasing: every day, the beach is brand new. Two years ago, when I began writing these commentaries for KBCS radio, I thought I would reflect frequently on the passage of time and this big life transition from a full nest to a “restless” one. More often, [...]

Impatience

therestlessnest2013-04-03T08:00:31-07:00Categories: arts, economics, education, midlife, parenting, Seattle, women's rights, work, writing|Tags: Ada Williams Prince, GeekGirlCon, Jennifer Stuller, Kristin Rowe Finkbeiner, Lean In, Lori Pfingst, MomsRising, OneAmerica, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, Seattle Art Museum, Sheryl Sandberg, Town Hall Seattle, Washington State Budget & Policy Center, Women's Funding Alliance|

“Patience is a virtue.” Who first said that, and why? A quick Internet search points to a few “medieval poets.” Let’s leave it there—in the dark ages—and move on: to why patience is on my mind, and not in a virtuous, well-behaved way. I just spent an evening at Seattle’s Town Hall listening to five dynamic women speak at an event, sponsored by the Women’s Funding Alliance, called “Fresh Perspective: Women Lead a Changing World.” Good title; wish it were true. The speakers had some good news to share—the dramatic increase in the numbers of women obtaining bachelors, masters and PhD degrees; the previously unheard of opportunities for women in government, science, technology, sports. But “Women Lead a Changing World?” No. Not very many of us are leading. Not by a long shot. And the world may be changing, but it sure is taking its time. And we’ve been far too patient. It is time we made a virtue of impatience. When eight of every ten corporations in Washington state have fewer than three women on their boards, it is time to be impatient. When women in Washington* earn 75 cents for every dollar men earn—73 cents, if you have kids; 60 cents if you’re a single mom—it’s time to be impatient. When Washington slips from first to eighth in the nation for female political representation, it’s time to be impatient. When 415 thousand women and girls in our state have no health insurance, when reproductive rights are under assault, when one out of four children [...]

Borders

therestlessnest2013-03-25T15:43:00-07:00Categories: arts, midlife, parenting|Tags: creativity, Mad Men, Robert Frost, work, work from home, work-life balance, writing|

I grew up in a world of well-marked borders between work and the rest of life. Work was something my father did in an office downtown, not ever at home. I knew he was an “insurance agent” but I didn’t know, or really care, what that meant. Work was what he did to earn money. That’s all work meant. When my parents divorced, the Mad Men lifestyle they had modeled for us ended, at least at our house, for good. My mother went back to college and became a teacher, daily demonstrating to her six children how thoroughly work and the rest of life could and did mix when necessary. Her evenings were filled with making dinner, grading papers, paying bills, grading more papers. But still I thought of work as what you did to earn money. These days, I’m not sure what to think. I do plenty of work that is important to me for which I don’t get paid. I write these radio commentaries. I create independent documentary films with my husband, Rustin Thompson. This unpaid work gets all mixed in, every day, with our paying work. The borders are porous and the benefits flow both ways. We bring more creative energy to the work we do for our clients—nearly all of them hard-working nonprofits in the Puget Sound area—who in turn inspire us to be creative. Meanwhile, there’s cooking, housework, family time, all going into the daily mix. Believe me, ours is not a great business model, if you define business in terms [...]

Preschool

therestlessnest2013-02-26T10:02:43-08:00Categories: education, parenting, politics|Tags: Obama, Obama's preschool plan, preschool|

“Just imagine they’re all four years old.” Someone once told me to try that when I was nervous about speaking in front of a group. Maybe you’ve heard it too: Look out at the audience and imagine them all as… preschoolers. Clearly, whoever coined that little quip had not spent a lot of time around young children. One of the reasons I am excited about Obama’s proposed preschool-for-all initiative is that it is going to be so educational for parents. Preschool is not just valuable for children’s development, it’s valuable for parents’ development. Think about it: is there any job for which we show up so utterly unprepared, uneducated and unqualified? As a young mom, I naively assumed guidance would spring up along the way, like traffic lights and road signs do when you’re driving. But more often, early parenthood resembles the confusion that ensues at a major intersection when the power’s out. No one knows what to do until the traffic cops arrive in their orange vests and jump out into the chaos and start signaling. Good preschool teachers are like those gutsy traffic cops. New parents show up, tired and edgy from all the inching along they’ve done in the clueless dark, and suddenly there is someone on the road who can show them the way. If you’re lucky enough to have access to and are able to afford good-quality preschool—your child’s teachers will be—unlike you—prepared by years of experience. They will have actual degrees in early childhood education. Whatever your worry might be about [...]