Rose Horowitz 1915-2006

I got a call today that Rose died peacefully this morning at 9:20.

We will miss her.

Things Not To Do

Do not start a new job and leave your daughter for the first time with a new nanny who for all you know could be an axe-murderer in the same week when your husband is away on a business trip and on Thursday you’ll already need to take a day off and be all packed and get yourself and your baby onto a 6AM flight to go to a family wedding.

Do not get your period the morning of your first day of work and have miserable cramps. And don’t forget to take Advil before you leave the house and spend the whole day hoping that you’ll magically find some in your office in the 30 second breaks between your back-to-back getting-to-know-you need-to-make-a-good-first-impression meetings.

Do not wear a pink dress shirt under a black dress on your first day of work, thinking it looks cute until you arrive at the office and realize you look like an overgrown girl in a Catholic school uniform.

Do not take on management of a community event when you are starting a new job and your husband is away on a business trip.

Do not freak out that the nanny that you hired is possibly terrible and that your daughter no longer loves you after one day left with a total stranger who you hope she will come to like someday, but not too much.

Do not get lost on your first drive home from your first day of work and ultimately sit in extra traffic and have to call the nanny and tell her you’ll be late and can she possible stay longer–establishing yourself in her mind as irresponsible (and as having a bad sense of direction).

Do not cry on the phone to your husband after feeding and bathing a crying overtired baby who didn’t take an afternoon nap, making him feel terrible about being away on a business trip.

Do not spend an hour updating a spreadsheet for your community event planning (which you have foisted off on your benevolent friend) when all you want to do is space out and watch TV, then have your computer crash and lose all your work.

Do not underestimate the many emails and calls you got from friends asking how your first day of work was, sending heaps of encouragement, and making you feel somewhat validated that this is indeed a big transition and worthy of stress, exhaustion, and anxiety but given time could turn out to be just fine and maybe even very rewarding.

Do not give into the temptation to ask your husband to come home from his business trip early just because you miss him madly and feel bad that he feels bad that you feel bad. Do go to sleep grateful to have him and looking forward to how happy you will be to see him in the Houston airport on Thursday.

Silly Crazy Love

Last Saturday we went to our friend Barb’s 40th birthday party. Barb was my old roommate Maureen’s friend from college. So, essentially the first flat I moved into in SF–the requisite Victorian flat that you move into with people you don’t know because you’re young and idealistic and have just pulled up your East Coast roots to live in sunny California–that flat used to be occupied by three friends who all went to UC Santa Barbara. So Barb was one of the apartment’s occupants before I was.

By the time I’d made it to Vicksburg Street, Barb was off gallivanting in Australia with her then BF, now hubbie. And one of the other three gals, Laurie, was off in Africa doing relief nursing work and meeting the man she’d eventually marry. Which left Maureen to look for two total strangers to shack up with. Those strangers turned out to be Shelley and me.

Anyway, those UCSB gals are a tight crew. Not unlike any group of best girlfriends really, though they have seen each other through particularly thick and thin times. And, God bless ‘em, they always make a great showing at parties. So, unbeknownst to the birthday girl, Maureen flew in from Boston and Laurie from Canada to take part in the festivities.

A considerable amount has changed in our lives since Maureen and I shared a phone. She ended up marrying a fine lad from Rhode Island who I never knew from growing up, but who I met in SF and introduced her to. And now she has four–yes 4–kids with said Rhode Islanduh [sic], and lives in domestic bliss in The Land of the Bad Accent.

So we were talking about being parents and Maureen beat me to the comment that I most often make about the revelation of parenthood, which was “Having kids makes you realize just how much your parents love you.” Word to that, sister.

My father is in the Professional Proud Parents Hall of Fame, and he certainly isn’t totally bereft of things to be proud of, but in many cases he’s just crazed with delusional paternal satisfaction. My old college roommate used to love it about Fred. “Aw Kris,” she’d say, imitating his deep voice. “You brushed your teeth this morning! I’m so damn proud of you!” (And I wonder why I need Mark to praise me when I clean the bathroom…)

But now, having Kate, I totally get it. The girl hits her hand in the bath water to splash and I act as if she’s won the Nobel Peace Prize. I too have foolish over-inflated pride. And don’t even dare to tell me it’s for no good reason.

The thing that Maureen said that totally cracked me up was, “All those times growing up when your parents told you how beautiful you were–they really thought it!” Hilarious.

I actually did ask Mark one night if he thought that maybe Kate wasn’t cute but we were so blind with love that we thought so. Unsurprisingly he said he thought she really was cute. I guess it’s something we’ll never know. (Don’t crazy people never think they’re crazy, which is the first symptom of insanity?) Whatever the case, I think Mark and I are destined to live out our days going with our hunch that Kate is sweet, brilliant, and beautiful. It’s annoying I know, but we try our best to keep it under wraps.

So, last year on this day I was clutching the side of a hot tub (more like a tepid tub) moaning my way through contractions. I was about 11 1/2 hours into active labor (but who’s counting?) and was at a particularly “active” juncture. I remember from the strange planet I was on that I saw Yeshi, my midwife, who was reading something or filling out some forms. And Sarah, my doula, who I also saw as if through a gauzy veil, was mopping my brow and reminding me to breathe. And Mark, of course, was right there with me and earnest and excited and supportive and kept telling me what a great job I was doing and how I was amazing and strong and beautiful.

About a half-hour from now was when, after an internal exam, I was told that I hadn’t progressed really at all. That all those intense contractions crashing in on me less than a minute apart had really gotten me nowhere closer to having that baby in my arms. And so I decided to toss my drug-free birthing plans out the window and get an epidural. If after 12 hours I was in the same place, how long would it take and how hard would it be to actually get somewhere?

Suffice it to say that by this time tomorrow, a year ago, Mark and I had taken up temporary residence in a hospital room with a baby we had no idea how very much we would come to crazy over-the-top love love love and be proud of in ways that no doubt seem foolish to anyone else (but really they just don’t get it).

So Kate, I tell you this on the eve of your first birthday. I know your father and I must seem out of our minds at times, but we really do think you’re beautiful. We really do think you are better than him. We really do think a family vacation would be a fun way for us all to spend some time. Someday you may experience all this yourself, and then you might not think we’re so crazy after all.

Less Confident Now

Okay so I just opened the pattern for Kate’s Halloween costume and am totally overwhelmed. What the hell was I thinking?

There are two huge sheets of onion paper with all these letters and numbers and lines on them–and to make the costume number and size variants even more complex, it’s all written in several languages. This costume would be a great team-building activity for a UN off-site.

Under a cheery headline entitled “Simply the Best Sewing Techniques for Fur Fabrics” it says that in order to get the seams to lie flat with “heavier fur fabrics” you may need to “shear away” some of the pile and “pound with a heavy object to keep seams and edges flat.” Pound the fabric? I can’t help but think that instruction is there for us rookies to see if we actually take the bait and do something as ridiculous as that. I mean, how does Suzy Homemaker sew a costume while her kid is napping if pounding is required?

Anyway, I might not even need to pound. Is the fur I got considered heavier? What is the baseline one uses to determine where their fur fits on the heaviness scale?

And as if it’s totally easy to figure out what part of the pattern you need and what you don’t and then how to cut it and pin it to the fabric and cut that and sew it all together then actually have it fit your kid, the only instructional illustration they have in the whole pattern is a little line drawing of a woman’s hand and a mallet pounding a furry seam. Of everything required here I think I could figure out how to pound the fur, thank you very much. Now that I’m looking at it again, maybe the pounder in the drawing is a judge and she’s repurposed her gavel for fur-flattening purposes. (One never gets to use the word gavel often enough.)

Speaking of words, what the hell are selvages?

Oy. I fear that I might have gotten myself into a bit of a pickle. Ah well, I only spent $35 on all this. Probably twice what it would have cost to buy a costume that’s ready to wear.

She’s Crafty

In my waning days of stay-at-home-momdom, it appears I’m trying to overachieve and/or just prove my mettle. Give me a soccer mom of the highest rank and I will go toe to toe with her!

So, a couple days ago I went to a fabric store and put myself at the mercy of a nice gay man who worked there. “I’m a total rookie. I have no idea how to do this. Can you please help me?”

I’d picked out a pattern to make a Halloween costume for Kate. As in sew a costume. And for starters I needed help even figuring out what fabric to get, where it was in the store, how much I needed—the basics.

I could claim never to have sewn anything in my life, and I think my skill level pretty much puts me there, but I did make a red corduroy skirt once. I took a brief sewing class as an elective in Middle School and the result was a simple A-line skirt.

Oddly the skirt as unmemorable as it was, does bring up a strong memory of my mother’s mom. I’d cut out the fabric for the skirt and had the pattern pinned onto it (like you do). It was on the kitchen table one morning, ready for me to bring to school. My grandmother was visiting and she mistakenly spilled a glass of orange juice on it. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but I remember my mother being really upset with how I reacted.

It’s one of those memories that still triggers a strong emotion in me. After I said or did whatever it was I said or did I felt terrible. I’d managed to make my poor sweet Bopchi feel even worse about what was obviously an accident, and ultimately didn’t harm the fabric or pattern at all. God, the woman is long dead and thinking about that still gets me! I’m sorry, Bopchi! I know you didn’t mean to!

Anyway, I’m not sure exactly how expertly the skirt was eventually assembled but I remember I wore it a few times—so at the very least it did manifest into an actual wearable garment.

So, how hard can it be to make a Halloween costume? People sew all the time, right? The nice gay man showed me to the “craft fur” section in the store and I selected some that didn’t have a scratchy back. I got some no-roll elastic for the cuffs, and even some cotton to line one part of it. Once I was in the groove of picking everything out, it felt like I actually started the project and I was buoyed by a false sense of early accomplishment.

But by yesterday I was telling friends that at 4PM on Halloween day I’d likely be sending Mark off to Target with urgent instructions to buy a costume–any costume they have!–just so she’ll have something to wear. Of course, I was telling friends that, but it was mostly false modestly. I was secretly thinking, how hard can this be? The pattern is made by Simplicity, after all.

On Sunday, Sheryl is bringing her sewing machine over for me to borrow. Hopefully I’ll have the fabric cut out by then and she can show me a move or two and get me going. Project Runway, here I come!

I’ll have to remember to warn Mark to steer clear of my workspace with his OJ.

Sunday

Got a “not good news” call yesterday from my friend Amelia who I’ve known since we crawled around on blankets in each other’s backyards as our mothers looked fabulous in cat’s eye glasses and clam-diggers. Turns out her mother has cancer. It’s something that was just discovered in the past week, and they don’t yet know what course of action the doctors will recommend. I’m so incredibly sick of hearing about people getting cancer. What the hell is out there that’s poisoning us? And can’t it skip over the people I love?

What’s weird is that our neighbor who is pregnant just lost her father to a heart attack. And here is Amelia, eight weeks until her due date, and dealing with this horrible diagnosis that leaves her stressed out and emotional and checking on airline policies to see when and if she can fly, instead of nesting like a maniac like she should be.

At least there’s no terrible conclusive word on her condition. So I’m summoning all my powers of cancer-ridding thoughts and sending them across the country to beloved Mrs. D. Damn it.

After getting off the phone Mark and I were off to do some errands and I said I really should visit Rose first. She’s been in her final days for about a week now, and even though someone is supposed to call me from the nursing home if her “status changes,” I still wasn’t sure whether she’d be there when we arrived. I was already so sad about Mrs. D, but since geography prevented me from being with her (another adoptive granny to Kate), I’d try my luck at seeing Rose.

When we arrived, Marie, an administrator at the nursing home who loves Rose like a Mama, told us Rose was out in the garden. I had to admit that for a second I thought, “Alive in the garden?” Marie said they were able to move her into a kind of wheelchair bed and roll her out there. She was getting a manicure actually, from her son’s girlfriend. They were all out there–Rose’ twin sons and the girlfriend. Walk to the yard and turn all the way around to the left, she said, and we’d see them. “I’m sure they’d love to have you join them.”

Mark and I looked at each other as we headed for the back door. Huh. We’d been geared up to brace for news that she’d died, so it was odd shifting gears to the fact that she was getting a manicure outside. Odd but good, mind you.

Sure enough there they were. The garden was in bloom and sun was peeking in from the shade of the trees, and there was Rose in a hot pink fleece robe and black and white patterned scarf. He sons stood up when we approached (she raised ‘em right) and I introduced Mark, and we met Stephanie, Martin’s girlfriend, who was sweetly holding Rose’s hand.

Rose was more lucid than she’d been in days. She still dozed off often, but when she did open her eyes she smiled and laughed to see Kate. She even scolded us for not dressing her warmly enough. “That baby needs socks!” she said to Mark. Her sons shook their heads and chuckled. (Those twins tend to move in unison that way.)

We had a lovely visit. The weather was warm and comfortable, our sprits were high, and the garden was so peaceful and intimate that you’d never know looking down at our little party we were sitting outside a nursing home. Rose’s sons joked that according to their mother, none of us would ever be dressed warmly enough. We even took some great pictures.

It seemed, if only for a little while, Rose was back.

Two Things

I was just making the bed and felt something crinkly below the sheet. I pulled it back and there was a five-dollar bill! Just sitting there between the fitted sheet and the mattress pad. Woo hoo! There’s money stuffed in our mattress! I’d always thought that was just some expression.

And totally unrelated yet delightful (at least to me):
The other day our issue of Outside magazine came in the mail. One of the stories is a travel feature about Mexico’s Yucatan coast. The headline is “The Pleasure’s All Mayan.” How good is that?

Grandma Rose, We Love You

Our neighbor’s father died suddenly after a heart attack a few weeks ago, and as someone who has lost a parent myself, I wish I had special powers to offer her some consolation. But it doesn’t really work that way. She’s now a member of a club that no one wants to be part of.

As I’ve been thinking about what she’s going through I keep coming back to this idea that when you lose a parent it’s like one of the anchors in your world goes away. Or, at least that’s what it was like for me. Over time you manage to rebalance the load, so the weight that one anchor used to shoulder gets redistributed between the others. In my case, Mark, who was a fiance when my mother died and a husband soon thereafter, took the lion’s share of the load. Still, you always sense the loss of that anchor.

So the last time I saw Rose was Saturday. We went by to bring her a collage of photos of her and Kate, taken at our various visits with her.

She had her dentures out, and with the oxygen tubes in her nose and her thin frail body curled up in bed, she barely resembled the spunky Rose we’d come to know. She slept mostly but opened her eyes a couple times and seemed to express a spark of excitement at the sight of Kate. She even managed to sputter out something about Kate’s ears, which she’s always cooed over.

I handed her the collage and couldn’t help but wonder what sense she had of what was happening. Her dark eyes stood out so strongly against her pale skin and looked so sad and beseeching. Even though she wasn’t really speaking it was like she was trying to connect with me somehow. And I hoped the collage didn’t come off to her as some sort of inappropriate parting gift. More than anything I just wanted her to be able to look at pictures of Kate when we weren’t there, in case they could bring her any small amount of happiness at this stage. And I wrote, “Grandma Rose, We Love You” on it—something we’d never told her.

Tomorrow we’re going back. I have no idea whether she’ll still be there or not. I’ve felt guilty about not visiting for the past few days, but my heart has been so heavy I didn’t know if I could bear it. Selfish, I know.

Just last week I got an email from the Chaparral House volunteer coordinator about an upcoming event, and I emailed him back to let him know that I was starting a new job soon and I didn’t know how often Kate and I would be able to visit. As someone who tends to over-commit myself, it seemed like the responsible thing to do, much as I hated to do it. When I’m not working, my first commitment needs to be to my family. But after sending the email I felt terrible. Like I was betraying Rose.

And then, with two weeks left until my job starts, we visit Rose on Friday and see that she’ll likely be gone before I even set foot in my new office. It’s wrenching to think of how that timing has worked out. Not that I feel like I had some cosmic hand in Rose’s decline, but it just feels like another loss, another change, in the midst of my struggle over leaving Kate to return to work. Why does so much need to happen at once?

Kate and I met Rose on March 1st of this year. A short time really, though it represents the majority of Kate’s life. And in our weekly visits, it’s been clear that my role has been as the conduit. I’m really just the person who brings Kate to see Rose. I’ve often asked Rose about her life and her family, but she’s never really indulged in those conversations. They represented a tiny amount of the time we spent together. Invariably Rose would give me a quick answer and then change the subject to point out something Kate was doing, or to start singing a song in Polish to her. I was always happy to follow her lead.

When I think about all that I know about Rose, it’s really quite little. And with her sketchy memory and occasional bouts of confusion, I was never certain that what she was saying was ever exactly correct. Despite that I realized that somewhere along the way Rose has become one of my anchors. And it breaks my heart to have to let go of another one.

Our Rose

What do you do when the grandmother you’ve found for your daughter, in an attempt to fill the hole where her dead grandmother would be, is also dying?

Friday Kate and I went to Chaparral House to see Rose. She was sleeping and had on oxygen, but she’s had that intermittently in the past, so I didn’t think much of it. They tell the volunteers to gently wake up the folks you’re visiting if they’re asleep–since the sleep is pretty much due to boredom, or the grogginess they feel from their meds. But when I tried to rouse Rose over the course of a few minutes she just softy muttered and shook her head and wouldn’t open her eyes.

I wandered into the hall trying to decide if I’d drop in on someone else there for a visit, but truthfully, aside from quick hallway chats with Dorothy, there isn’t anyone aside from Rose with whom we have a strong connection there. I passed one of the nurses, a sassy African-American woman who always wears loud smocks and who I know is close with Rose too. She pulled me aside.

“Rose is in a, well, in a new place. It’s her heart. But I know she’d love a visit from you guys, even if you just sit by her bed.”

This wasn’t good news, I knew. But the mind has a way of interpreting things as it wants to sometimes, and I decided not to delve deeper into what she meant by “a new place.” Maybe this was just a passing episode. Rose had nodded off a couple times during a recent visit from us, which was unusual, but in general she’s seemed so vital and healthy. I mean, at least compared to the other folks there. Rose snubbed her nose at the food and often rolled her eyes at the other residents. I always took that as a good sign. She was stronger, smarter, more with-it than the others–enough so to look down on them, and at times the whole nursing home scene.

Kate and I went back in and eventually Rose opened her eyes for a couple short spells. She smiled to see Kate, but there was something different about her. She talked much less than usual and was clearly weaker, maybe even thinner. She was in a new place. But I still didn’t want to think about just where that was, or worse, where it was taking her.

After a while Kate was getting squirmy and Rose was clearly needing rest, so we headed out. All volunteers are required to write into log books about their visits with residents. You’re supposed to say a bit about how they were doing (cheerful, complained about pain, incoherent, confused). The comments are compiled and sent out as part of monthly reports that go out to the family of (or whoever pays the bills for) the resident.

When I opened the page for Rose I happened to read the comment written by a volunteer who’d visited with her the day before. “Sat with Rose and said my goodbyes. Very sad.” It was one time when the volunteer wrote how they were doing, instead of the resident.

And it spelled out for me the thought I was trying to push away and deny.

As I walked out to the car and started strapping Kate into her car seat, something about how unaware she was of what was happening–her excited reaction to finding a toy on her seat, when my heart was so heavy–struck me, turning the wetness in my eyes to sobs.

Kate looked up at me and registered concern for a moment, but then looked back down at her lion, and smiled, finding a good place to gnaw on. She seemed so innocent and naive, it killed me. The poor girl had no idea that she was about to lose one of her biggest fans.

Living with the Queen

Kate has known how to wave for a while now. Like her crawling, she started backwards–she said “bye-bye” first and would use it for greeting people and for departing their company. And she used to just clench and unclench her fist to wave, which was probably my fault. In teaching her how to wave I think I over-dramatized the motion because I somehow thought it would make her “get it” easier (like speaking loudly to those who don’t understand your language).

Thankfully, despite my poor training, Kate’s waves have gotten much lighter and airier. She daintily moves her limp hand at the wrist with a bit of a regal air.

And there just aren’t enough people out there for Kate to satisfy her need for waving, so recently she’s taken up waving at things. She’ll wake up from a nap, crawl to the edge of her crib and wave at the books on her bookshelf. Or I’ll be changing her and tell her she can get down and play with her toys in a minute, and she’ll look over at the box of toys on the floor and wave at them. It’s her way of saying, “Don’t y’all worry! I’ll be right there!” Today she waved at the heating duct grate on the dining room floor, and at the Infant Tylenol. She’s unstoppable.

In a recent nanny interview Kate was being about as coy and sweet and charming as a baby could be. She was “dancing”–sitting up with her shoulders hunched and bouncing–while smiling at the Perspective Nanny. Then she decided to crawl off somewhere, and when she passed my desk she stopped, looked through the legs of the chair at us and gave her regal wave, then turned around and continued crawling off. I couldn’t have stage-managed a cuter set of moves. (Needless to say, a Kate-Love spell was effectively cast upon the Perspective Nanny.)

Friday we drove over to visit Ellen in the late afternoon on a wild hair (hare?). Kate was occupying herself in the living room as Ellen made tea and I tore through her pantry looking for something sweet and fattening. I looked in on Kate at one point and she let go of the stuffed frog she was playing with and took off to find another toy, then I imagine her internal dialogue to be something like, “Where are my manners?” So she stopped and looked back at the frog and gave it a little wave. Such a polite gal we have.