Love in the time of corona

It seemed far away until it didn't.

A novel coronavirus, Wuhan. I listened to The Daily and read the Washington Post until I hit the paywall. I updated the safety and health section of the website at work.

But it's just a bad flu. But it's only deadly if you're really old. But all the old people in China are smokers anyway. But. But. But.

It was far away until it wasn't.

Eat ginger and drink hot liquids. Stay home if you are old or immune-suppressed.

But being over 50 is a risk factor. But young people can transmit the virus asymptomatically. One day a health reporter on The Daily advised me not to ride the subway...while I was riding the subway. Suddenly I was a bullet filled with COVID-19 in an unfired gun, a sword smeared with virus on the tip of the blade.

This is how "Station Eleven" started.

I washed my hands for 20 seconds and opened doors with my sleeve. I brought a container of anti-viral wipes to a staff training session. I tried not to breathe too deeply on the subway, but the virus was suffocating.

I've never lived through a pandemic. When I think about the catastrophes I've lived through — 9/11, Trump's election — nothing about my day-to-day life really changed. Now everything is about to change.

We took a socially distant walk in the woods.

Flatten the curve. Socially distance yourself. Cancel everything. Your ancestors were asked to save the nation by going to war and you're just being asked to stay home. Have courage.

But after every catastrophe I've lived through, the message is the same: Keep moving forward. Fight on. Persist. Never before, except maybe during snowstorms and hurricanes, have we as a nation been told: Stay where you are. Touch nothing. Be still.

I keep thinking about the high school I visited on Friday, just before the world stopped turning, where students had prepared for months for a videoconference with Jessica Meir, an astronaut aboard the International Space Station. A student asked her, "What are some interesting things you have seen, felt or learned in space that you wish everyone on Earth knew about, and would it change the way we think about certain things?"

This is what she said: “The view we have up here is extraordinary, and when you see that with your own eyes, and you’re looking down at this fragile blue ball beneath you — everywhere you’ve ever been, every experience you’ve ever had, all the people I’ve ever known in my life — you see it from this unique perspective. You don’t see any borders. It makes you really understand and feel that we truly are in this all together.”

Everywhere I've ever been. Every experience I've ever had. All the people I've ever known. I have to believe that we're all in this together.

Mischief managed

On Thanksgiving Day, as the smells of turkey and sweet potatoes wafted through our apartment, I snuggled up with my 7-year-old to read with him.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t calibrated our position in the book with our holiday meal. As the sky darkened and my husband and his mother brought our Thanksgiving meal to the table, Eli and I reached the end of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” which — no spoilers! — chillingly details one of the most upsetting climaxes in modern American literature, young adult or otherwise. 

When Eli came to the table, he was dripping tears into his turkey. Every few moments, he let out a fresh wail. When I said, consolingly, that the long weekend would give us time to watch the accompanying film, he shook his head.

“Then I’ll have to live through it twice,” he sniffled.

Did I feel guilty that I had ruined Thanksgiving? Yes. Was it nevertheless one of the highlights of my parenting life to date? Also yes.

He had become so absorbed in the story, so devoted to a fictional character that he felt compelled to grieve for him, and I couldn’t have been prouder.

I’ve been a Harry Potter fan since I was 17 and my friends and I persuaded our participatory democracy teacher Mr. Moskowitz to let us read an excerpt to the class from “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” for...reasons I can’t recall. It’s no exaggeration to say I’ve been waiting Eli’s whole life to read the books with him.

But for a long time, he was resistant and I was hesitant — first, because he was too young, and then, because I was nervous that he wouldn’t love them the way I did and I would be disappointed. 

Because I love the Harry Potter books — I mean, I really, really love them. I’ve read the entire series, at minimum, a dozen times. (That’s a conservative estimate.) Every time, there’s something new and magical in the experience.

Before Eli and I read the series together, I had never read the books aloud before. I worked on perfecting my character voices (Snape was the easiest; just do a full-on imitation of Alan Rickman and draw...out...every...syllable) and pronouncing tongue-twisting spells. Every time Gryffindor won a Quidditch match, Eli would pump his fist. When a Death Eater smashed Neville’s nose during the battle in the Department of Mysteries at the end of the fifth book, Eli was so upset he shouted his first legitimate swear word. When he took the Sorting Quiz on Pottermore and was Sorted into Hufflepuff, he embraced his Hufflepuff pride with aplomb. On Halloween, if we passed anyone wearing a Hogwarts costume, he’d shout out, “Hey Gryffindor! I’m a Hufflepuff!”

When we started the series, we were following a standard one-chapter-per-day schedule. But Eli soon demanded what felt like round-the-clock readings of Harry Potter; in the morning, he would follow me to the kitchen and insist that I keep reading as I made my coffee, and during the ending of a particularly memorable chapter I had to read to him as we walked to school.

When I was a kid, reading was my thing, my identity. I prided myself on checking out the maximum number of books allowed from the library (at the time it was 25) and packing an extra vacation bag especially for books. (Pre-Kindle!) I bragged that my father was a librarian and would cancel all my late fees. (Thanks, Dad.) No one had a smartphone (no one even had a dumbphone, for that matter). No one was a YouTube star. Reading was what I had.

In early December, just as we were embarking on our final reckoning with “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” we got an invitation to attend the “Star Student” awards at Eli’s school. In kindergarten and in first grade, Eli’s award was for “effort,” which I always assumed was code for “tries hard at being a pain.” But this year, he was recognized as an...Avid Reader!

Eli is such a firecracker of a kid. Much of the time, I’m wondering how he and I can possibly be related, let alone how on earth I could have spawned him. But that night, the evidence spoke for itself. I had successfully produced a fellow Avid Reader!

On the first Friday night of winter vacation, I told Eli we were going to stay up late and read the three most pivotal chapters in the climax of “Deathly Hallows”: The Prince’s Tale, The Forest Again and King’s Cross. We turned off the lights in the living room and he lay on his gigantic puppy pillow so he could bury his face in it when tears came. When we came to I open at the close...I didn’t so much read the words as weep them.

Just as Dumbledore tells Snape that Harry's deepest nature is more like his mother's, I've always felt that Eli's deepest nature is more like his father's. They've bonded over various shared interests: Legos, video games, fencing, terrible 99-cent pizza. This is, perhaps, the first time I've loved something so deeply and convinced Eli to love it too.

Last night, Eli said to me, "Mom, we need a new series." I was so tickled. A new series, a new adventure for us to embark on together as Avid Readers.

What marathons have taught me

Great South Bay, 2019: Look how happy running makes me when it's going well.

Cape Cod, 2004

Fifteen years ago, I decided to become a marathon runner.

I had never before participated willingly in athletics of any kind, unless you count Chinese jump rope in sixth grade in the yard outside PS 101. (Which you should. Because I could jump waist-high.)

I didn’t have a Garmin, or even Google Maps. I measured my training routes by the distance it took me in my car to drive from Brandeis to the Watertown Target.

On the morning of the marathon, I reasoned that because I had always eaten one PowerBar before a long training run, and this was the day of the race, I should eat two PowerBars. I promptly threw up.

When I crossed the finish line of the Cape Cod Marathon in 5:01:49, it felt like all my dreams —
dreams I hadn’t even dreamed I could have — had come true.

My first marathon taught me that I could be a marathon runner.

It isn't really a marathon until you cry at the finish line.

New York City, 2008

But I didn’t feel the urge to run another one right away. I finished college, then graduate school, then moved back to New York. I became a teacher. I got engaged! I ran nine New York Road Runner races in a year (in those days there was no +1 volunteer requirement!) so that I would qualify for the New York City Marathon.

Whereas in my first marathon I had trained using a book called “The Non-Runner’s Guide to Marathon Training,” I was now running six days a week to help me run faster. I had an ambitious goal: to run 4:30.

Phil accompanied me to the Staten Island ferry and kissed me goodbye. He would be waiting for me in the Bronx, he said, just about the time I would be facing “the Wall.”

There were tens of thousands more runners in New York City than there had been in Cape Cod. I sped through Brooklyn feeling light and strong. Just as I reached the “Wall of Sound” on 1st Avenue, I felt sharp cramps in my side.

I had never had cramps while running before. I didn’t know what to do. I slowed to a walk, gulping back tears. I kept telling myself to get to the Bronx, to make it to Phil. Then I crossed the Willis Avenue Bridge, and I didn’t see him.

I finished in 4:34:48, which remains my PR to this day.

My second marathon taught me that the marathon will humble you.

New York City, 2009

The next year, Phil and I decided it would be fun to run the marathon together for the first time, just two weeks after we got married.

We trained, but not hardcore — we were planning a wedding, after all. We decided we’d use the “Galloway method,” five minutes of running followed by one minute of walking, then repeat. By then I had a Garmin, and I programmed it to beep to signal us when it was time to start doing one or the other.

We got married on a rainy, windy Sunday in a restaurant downtown. We danced our hearts out. Exactly two weeks later, I used black marker to inscribe “JUST MARRIED” on the back of our marathon shirts.

Other runners congratulated us as they streamed past. Some of them joked that we had chosen a hell of a honeymoon.

We ran-walked the 2009 New York City Marathon in 5:27:20. It was nearly an hour slower than my time the previous year, but it was infinitely more enjoyable.

My third marathon taught me that there’s something special about running through life with someone you love.

New York City, 2011

After back-to-back marathons, it felt good to take a year off. Phil and I got a dog to be our running buddy. I transferred to a new school. We moved across Queens Boulevard to a new apartment, a bigger apartment because we were hoping we’d need more space for a baby.

2011 was my PR year. I ran my fastest 4-miler in April, then my fastest 10K in May, then my fastest 5K in June, then my fastest mile in September. As the marathon drew closer, I kept wishfully thinking, “Well, I’ll probably get pregnant and then I won’t run the marathon.”

I didn’t get pregnant. November seemed very cold and dark.

I don’t remember what our expectations were for the 2011 marathon. But I do remember that we absolutely crushed them. In the final few miles, we found ourselves darting around other runners in Central Park as we whizzed toward the finish line, elated by how strong and fast we felt.

We finished in 4:45:05, and my fastest mile was mile 26.

My fourth marathon taught me that finishing a marathon fast isn’t always as important as finishing it strong.

New York City, 2014

A month after the 2011 marathon, I finally got pregnant.

When Eli was a year old, he and I went to cheer on Phil in Long Island City as he ran the 2013 marathon. He finished in 4:37:30 and I remember feeling vaguely insulted that he had run it faster without me.

In 2014 I nervously returned to the starting line. I had broken my pinky toe in early July stubbing it against a rock while carrying Eli at the beach, bringing my first post-birth marathon training to a crashing halt before it had even begun. I was seeded into one of the last corrals of Wave 3, but I decided to start in Wave 4 so I could run over the Verrazano Bridge and not underneath it; besides, I wasn’t in a rush. It was my longest gap in between marathons since the one from my first to my second, when I’d been younger and thinner and hadn’t yet given birth.

It was also the wildest weather I’d ever experienced in a marathon, the year when they wouldn’t let the wheelchair racers cross the Verrazano Bridge because it was dangerously windy. As we ran up the bridge at the start and runners began shedding the extra layers they’d been reluctant to take off, I saw jackets and sweatshirts whipping through the air and sailing across the lanes.

All 26.2 miles through the streets of New York felt like a blessing. It was the first time I had ever negative split a marathon (that means to run the second half faster than the first), and substantially — my first 5K was 37:02, my last 5K split (from miles 21 to 24) was 32:42.

I finished in 4:48:49 and it felt like a tremendous achievement.

My fifth marathon taught me that I could finish strong all on my own.

New York City, 2015 

Phil and I had come to a parenting agreement that we would take turns running the marathon, so 2015 should have been his year — but buoyed by my accomplishment at the 2014 marathon, I decided I would join him.

I hadn’t done back-to-back marathons in a long time, and I had forgotten how grueling it could be — planning every weekend around long training runs, working through nerves you’d have thought I had long since conquered. One night Phil and I dropped Eli off at my parents’ house for a sleepover, but it wasn’t so we could have a date night; it was so we could get up really early for a 20-mile training run the next day.

By the time we reached the starting line on the Verrazano Bridge, I was already over it without really even knowing why. I had never run with headphones in a marathon — I preferred to soak in all the cheering and excitement from the crowd — but that year I missed having my own music to motivate me. Just a few miles into the race, while we were still in Brooklyn, the tape I’d used to emblazon my name on my chest blew off and I distinctly remember thinking, “Well, that was an omen, and today isn’t going to be my day.”

It was a warm day — for runners, anyway — and we probably went out too fast. By the time we reached the Bronx, I was done for.

Phil and I had an unspoken agreement, and we parted ways so he could continue ahead; I hadn’t expected or even wanted him to stay with me and watch me struggle, but I had never felt more alone in a race. Tavern on the Green felt very, very, very far away. Remember my amazing 5K splits from the 2014 marathon? In 2015, my first 5K split was 34:30. My 35–40K split? 44:10.

I finished in 5:14:26 feeling small and defeated, like I had tried to treat the marathon too casually and it had vanquished me. The next morning at work, some of my co-workers presented me with overly large printouts of the photo proofs of me miserably struggling toward the finish line. I had never felt more ashamed to look at a race photo.

It wasn’t my time that bothered me — it wasn’t my slowest marathon. It was my attitude.

My sixth marathon taught me that mental fitness for the marathon is just as important as physical fitness.

Philadelphia, 2019

After 2015 I knew I would take a long break from marathon running. I wanted to enjoy a season of not training for a marathon.

But in 2016 I injured my foot; I limped for two months, right at the heart of marathon season running, and three different podiatrists never quite figured out why. It was the first time I had ever been injured by running, and it made me feel terribly vulnerable. From then on, every time I felt a twinge in that foot I’d freeze, worrying I was about to ruin my running all over again.

Years passed. I went on enjoying the freedom of not marathon training. In 2018, after having finished 30 half marathons in my life, I didn’t run any — it was the first year in as long as I could remember that I hadn’t done a half.

But then of course I started to miss it — that feeling of running long. Standing in a hot shower on legs that have just run 10 miles in the cold air. Arriving at a destination hours and miles away from where I started. That runner’s high.

And I knew I didn’t want the 2015 New York City marathon to have been my last marathon — that shameful, sad feeling of defeat, of having not tried my best and paid the price for it.

I also wanted to run a different race than NYC, for a change, so, almost exactly one year ago, I signed up for the Philadelphia Marathon.

It started out as my lucky #7. I ran while listening to podcasts for the first time (specifically "Binge Mode: Harry Potter"), which quite possibly had not existed the last time I had trained for a marathon. I ran to work a few times, slipping upstairs to grab my backpack so I could head back out to the gym to shower, carrying the knowledge that I had done a long run in the morning throughout the work day like a secret talisman. I ran a few 5Ks where I placed in my age group. I experimented with all the new kinds of gels and electrolytes on the market that had barely existed the last time I trained for a marathon.

I bought new wireless headphones, and new sports bras, and boxes of Honey Stinger waffles and gummies. I put Nuun tablets in my water. I was diligent about stretching and about sunscreen. I felt like I was doing everything right.

I dared to hope that this marathon would be the one — the last one, where I would leave marathons feeling strong and fast. I ordered some pace bracelets online, and a bib with my name on it, and T-shirts with running puns on them. I was ready.

Then three weeks before the marathon, days before my final 20-mile run, my foot started to hurt.
It was just a little sore. I thought I might be imagining it. I iced it and stretched it. I foam rolled. I thought I’d better not do 20 miles, so I stopped at 10. I had never, ever before stopped short of a long run.

My foot didn’t hurt, exactly. But...it didn’t not hurt.

Dr. Google told me I had sesamoiditis, or pain in the ball of the foot under the big toe. (Dr. Quinn, an actual podiatrist and not a medicine woman, told me the same thing.) Dr. Google’s prognosis for sesamoiditis is very, very grim. I stopped consulting Dr. Google.

For the past three weeks, I cycled through a crushing tide of emotions and changed my mind every hour about whether or not I would run. I imagined myself crossing the finish line in triumph and also imagined myself limping off the course in defeat.

I recognize there’s something a bit warped in the runner’s psyche: Imagine being devastated at not having to run 26.2 miles. Especially because I know that it isn't as if I have nothing to show for it: This year I feel like I truly rediscovered the joy of running.

In January I ran with a friend in her first 10-miler (and then we drank beer after). In February I ran a 5K in the most frigid, bone-chilling wind I'd ever run in, and it turned out to be the fastest 5K I'd run in three years. In March I ran to the Bronx Zoo and met my family there, a long run I'd always wanted to try. In April I ran in the rain on a Rockefeller trail in the Hudson Valley and remembered that running has always been my favorite way to explore new places. In May I flew to Cincinnati to run the Flying Pig half marathon with a friend, the most fun I'd had in a half in years. In June I placed first in my age group in a 5K, finished my 16th Mini 10K as an official "Crazylegs" runner and conquered my jet lag in Copenhagen with a run. In July my running routes in Amsterdam were some of the most scenic I've ever done. In August I ran 15 miles to the beach with friends and noted that it had been my longest run in four years. In September, another age-group win. In October, I cried as I took the last few steps of my 20-mile run along the Bronx River Pathway — not because I felt drained, but because I felt so euphoric. And in November, right around the time I was losing faith in the marathon, Phil and Eli and I signed up to do a family turkey trot on Thanksgiving.

But oh, it stings. I realized that what I'm feeling is a kind of grief, and maybe what I'm grieving is not missing out on the race but the loss of the runner I used to be, the runner who was carefree and never stretched and never got injured and recovered rapidly. Maybe what I'm grieving is that freshness and naivete that comes from not knowing any better, from running without fear.

I ran my first marathon because I had something to prove: that despite my average physique, lack of any athletic ability or talent and inexperience, I could run a marathon.

Maybe what my seventh not-marathon has taught is that I don't have to run marathons to prove anything anymore. Maybe what it's taught me is that the marathon is a distance just like any other race and that there's no shame in not running one.

Or maybe what it’s taught me is that there’s been something worthwhile in the journey to get here. That I want to be a runner for life, not just for one race I didn't get to run. That I didn't make it to the finish line because there is no finish line.

"You tried your best and that's good enough!" Eli said firmly to me at what was supposed to be my pre-marathon carbo-loading dinner, where I was shedding tears into my plate of tasteless pasta as my seesawing decision came to its final reckoning. Maybe what my seventh marathon has taught me is that the journey has to be enough.

Oh, behave

On the second day of second grade, my 7-year-old reported that he had landed on “Warning” on the class behavior chart. It was the first thing he told me about his day, and I listened with a growing sense of foreboding: Everyone else in the class had ended the day on “Ready to Learn,” or “Great Choices” or even “Superstar Student” — the pinnacle achievement. He had gotten a warning, he said, for repeatedly pulling his shirt over his knees; he was wearing shorts, and his legs were chilly.

When I was a 2nd-grade teacher, I had my own behavior chart hanging in my classroom. Mine was a pocket chart with four colored cards for each student: green, blue, yellow and red. A traffic light with an extra level of warning.

“Go move your card,” I’d say to a student who was behaving inappropriately — more often than not the same few students over and over, trekking back and forth from their desks to the behavior chart.
In an effort to reduce public shaming, I labeled my students’ cards not with their names but with numbers I had assigned them. In retrospect, my error was twofold: Everyone still knew who those same offenders were, and I had reduced them to numbers.

When I was my son’s age, I idolized my teachers: Mrs. Rosen, Mrs. Grossman, Mrs. Steinberg. Displeasing them would have been devastating for me. And the way I demonstrated my great devotion — my elementary school love language, if you will — was by following their instructions. When they said to sit, I sat. What they told me to copy, I copied. I shunned anyone who didn’t display the same fervent dedication to the rule of classroom law, as if their disobedience might be catching.

I suspect a lot of people — mostly girls — who felt the same way about their elementary school teachers and grow up to become teachers themselves learn the same grueling truth that I did: that we were beloved as students because we knew how to “play school” in the traditional way. We knew how to sit, how to listen, how to raise our hands eagerly with the right answers. We knew how to do what we were told.

Eli knows how to sit and listen, too. He just isn’t sold on why he should. Why should he keep his body still like a statue when it could be bouncing to its own rhythm? Why should he raise his hand and wait patiently for permission to answer a question when he could exuberantly shout it out?

I know acutely how his teachers feel. When I was a teacher, I had a checklist of teaching points for every subject for every day of the month. I had 10 minutes during a mini lesson to address that teaching point, during which time I was supposed to somehow check off the level of understanding of each of my 27 students. I had no time for shenanigans. I had no time for the whims of kids like Eli.

On the second day of the second week of second grade, Eli declared as we walked to school that he didn’t care about moving up to “Great Choices” or “Superstar Student.”

“All you get is tickets, and the prizes in the prize bin aren’t that good,” he said.

At this I felt a small surge of panic. As a former elementary school overachiever, I felt certain I would have landed on “Superstar Student” every day. My desk would have been full of tickets. The prize bin would have been my oyster.

Eli shrugged. “I’d rather be myself,” he said.

On the third day of the second week of second grade, Eli announced that he wasn’t going to school. “School is miserable,” he said morosely. “My class would be better off without me. They would earn more marbles, because I’m the only one who can’t behave.”

There was my child in the kitchen, all soft cheeks and gapped teeth, who chuckles out loud to himself at the funny parts in the Big Nate books and makes goofy faces in the cafeteria potentially when he isn’t supposed to, who so far in second grade has learned only that he’s the only one who can’t behave.

If I ever needed proof that karma was a real phenomenon, here it was: My own child was every kid who had haunted me in my classroom 10 years ago. All of those kids knew they were That Kid, too. All of those kids probably felt the same shame.

“I can’t just sit plain,” Eli explained. “I always have to be moving, or doing something with my hands. Because if I don’t do that, I would just be sitting there plain, and then I wouldn’t be the same Eli that I am now.”

In all the times we had talked about how teachers expect him to behave, I had never thought of it like that before, like school and its restrictions were somehow stripping him of his essential Eli-ness. I pictured him like a firefly trapped in a jar, his wings buzzing furiously and his light dimming out.

But even fireflies need to learn to turn their lights off sometimes, and part of what we learn and teach in school is how to sit still and be quiet: how to walk with quiet feet and wait our turn to speak, how to regulate our bodies and modulate our voices.

That day I gave Eli a stress ball and told him to ask his teacher if she would let him hold onto it during class. When I asked him that evening how the day had gone, he ducked his head and grinned. 

“Great Choices,” he said. “And we earned three marbles!” He seemed super pumped.

I asked him about the stress ball.

“That’s pretty much how I got to Great Choices,” he said.

I still have my reservations about the class behavior chart: Did he know he had a good day in school only because the class behavior chart deemed it, or did he feel it himself? What will happen when he plummets to the dreaded “Teacher’s Choice” block (“I know I’m going to get a phone call home this year”)? And is his teacher really threatening to send him to the principal’s office for making goofy faces in the lunchroom? (As a former teacher, I maintain a healthy skepticism about tales my child tells me, but that anecdote stretches my patience and I haven’t met her yet.)

But I also know this: Some kids love the class behavior chart. They get to see themselves climbing the ladder to good behavior every day, and they get to feel proud of that, and they deserve that, too. Somewhere in a Facebook group right now, there is probably some parent complaining about a kid like mine who is ruining their kid’s day at school because he won’t stop talking during the mini lesson.

The school year is still young. It could go a lot of different ways. But if a genie could grant me three parenting wishes for Eli...well, I wouldn’t even need three. I would just need the one cornball phrase I use whenever we’re discussing his behavior, or his academics, or his social skills, or really anything: Be the best Eli you can be.

Motherhood is the biggest gamble in the world

Motherhood is the biggest gamble in the world. It's huge and scary — an act of infinite optimism. —Gilda Radner

Last week, Phil showed us a picture of his co-worker's baby, all round-bellied and chubby-fisted with a pacifier in his mouth. "Awwwww," I cooed to Eli, "you used to have a pacifier like that. You loooooved your pacifier."

It was bedtime, and the next thing I knew Eli was shouting instructions: "Don't come in my room, Mom! OK, come in my room!"

There was Eli in his lofted bed with his hair still wet from his shower, exactly in the spot where his crib used to be, and he was all snuggled up in blankets pretending to be asleep with a pacifier in his mouth (because, yes, there is still a pacifier in our house because I couldn't bear to get rid of it, and his accomplice Phil washed it before they carried out this scheme).

I wanted to laugh, but suddenly I couldn't see him anymore because my eyes were so blurry with tears. He kept on laying there (he really does a marvelous job pretending to be asleep), and I literally saw time unspool backwards, saw his features get softer and rounder and his hair wispier, saw his Target pajamas replaced by a zip-up feetie onesie, saw the IKEA bed swapped for a crib emptied of all its blankets, stuffed animals, books and various toy detritus in accordance with AAP safe sleeping standards.

When Eli finally cracked open an eye, I was standing there weeping.

"Are you crying because I'm so cute?" he asked a tad smugly as I hastily wiped tears from my cheeks.

"I'm not just crying because you're so cute," I said. "I'm crying because it seems like it's gone so fast; you used to be a little baby in this same spot with your pacifier and now you're such a big kid. And I'm crying because I'm thinking about how when you were a baby, you and I didn't really know each other that well, and now I know you and you're so great and I'm so proud of you."

I've spoken before about how so many people take the love between a parent and child for granted, how I've always been envious of parents who were able to post proudly on Facebook that they loved their babies the instant they laid eyes on them in the delivery room. But I will say honestly that I didn't love Eli until I knew Eli, and that took me some time.

He chewed contemplatively on the pacifier. "You know what's funny?" he said, thoughtfully patting my face. "If I wasn't your kid, I wouldn't love you, because I wouldn't know your face, and your tone of voice, and other stuff...like, I don't love Jocelyn's mom the way I love you, because I don't know her quite as well."

It was like he was realizing how we come to know the people that we love and how we come to love them. It was like he was realizing what makes a family.

He reached up and nuzzled his head against me and murmured, "You're the best mom in the world," and I sniffled and said thank you and "You're the best kid in the world," and we smiled at each other in the dark.

(Then probably we had some kind of altercation about how he should stop chewing on the pacifier and not pick his nose while I was reading "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" but honestly I've blocked that part out because the preceding moments were so much sweeter.)

Whenever Mother's Day comes around I think a lot about what it means to be a mother: how fraught it is with all kinds of guilt and responsibility and burden, how if it's Phil who gets to be the super fun parent than what I am stuck being; how my own mother (thanks, Mom) picked me up from school every day at 3 p.m. and how I do that for Eli exactly once a year, on Halloween. I think about mothers who homeschool their children and mothers who bake cakes and crafty mothers and mothers with chore charts and mothers who volunteer more with the PA. I think about how if motherhood were like "The Good Place," it would be virtually impossible to earn any points.

Then I take a deep breath and remind myself that I'm not here to earn points, I'm just out here being The Best Mom in the World. At least until tomorrow or teenagerhood when I may be The Worst Mom in the World. But for now, being the best mom in the world is enough.

Happy Mother's Day to all the other best moms in the world out there.

It's easier to leave than to be left behind

If I ever leave Queens, it will be because of that goddamn manhole cover.

On Queens Boulevard, five floors below my apartment, there is a loose manhole cover that rattles loudly every time a car passes over it. You know the sound: clung-clung. Clung-clung.

Aside from four dorm rooms in Waltham and two houses in Medford and Somerville, I've lived on Queens Boulevard for my entire life. I am no country mouse appalled by the cacophony of fire engines, Hatzolah ambulances and that one guy who used to wade into the traffic to scream every Saturday night; I'm accustomed to New York City noise. But there is something about that manhole cover, that goddamn clung-clunging manhole cover, that's slowly breaking me.

Several years ago, after having filed at least a half-dozen 311 reports about the manhole cover, I reached out to NY1 for help via their "NY1 for You" segment. I sent them some video clips of my manhole cover and a reporter met me on Queens Boulevard before work to interview me. Within days, my manhole cover was fixed and the reporter drove back to film new footage of me gazing blissfully at the manhole cover refusing to clung — a peaceful, silent oasis amid the honking horns and sirens.

Months passed. Life on Queens Boulevard spooled on. Then one afternoon I heard it again: the dreaded clung-clung. 311 is useless. Someone at Councilwoman Karen Koslowitz's claimed he had visited the corner and could hear no clung-clunging; I sent him a video clip and he ghosted me. And NY1's "NY1 for You" segment is no more.

My manhole cover has become more than a nuisance, more than one of the many indignities we put up with when we live in a New York City apartment. It's become an obsession. It's become a representation of every fantasy I've ever had about living somewhere else. If we left the city, the thinking goes, there would be no loud drunken arguments on the sidewalk at 4 a.m., no yappy-dog neighbor circling the block at regular intervals every morning and evening, and definitely no clung-clunging manhole cover.

Last week, a giant rat squeezed his fat ass out of a crack in the sidewalk directly in front of me and scampered off. Last month, a raving man on the subway yelled at Eli and Phil, frightening Eli and throwing an orange at Phil. (Obviously there are worse ways to be attacked on the subway than by produce, but still.)

I think it always feels this way at the end of a New York City winter: Any snow that's left on the sidewalks is grimy and soiled, the air feels raw outside but stale on the subway, and there comes a moment for every New Yorker who comes upon a suspicious crosswalk slush puddle where we ask ourselves, What are we doing this for?

So today, on a whim, we went house hunting in Glen Ridge, NJ. The houses were really lovely. They had driveways, so you wouldn't have to circle the block to find a parking space or drive the car when you don't need to go anywhere because of street cleaning regulations or decide not to drive the car when you do need to go somewhere because you don't want to lose your parking spot, which is the probably the dumbest thing about owning a car in New York City. They had yards and porches, so you could just step outside and...be outside. They had washers and dryers, so you could do the laundry without having to put on a bra, load money onto the laundry card and beat out your neighbors for control of the machines. They had multiple bathrooms, so you could take a shower without a child barging in to poop (or presumably, vice versa). They had stainless steel appliances and Elfa storage system components and original tin ceilings. They had features I'd only ever heard about on "House Hunters," like "breakfast nooks" and "powder rooms" and "shoe closets." When we got to the upstairs of one house and opened a door to discover another bathroom, Eli shouted, "IT'S LIKE A BATHROOM WORLD!" (Someone asked me if he had been planted to hype up the house by exclaiming over how much space there was.)

But as we toured these houses, instead of feeling tantalized by the possibility of owning one or even envious of the people who already did, I began to feel somehow stunted, as if I was defective because I had been deprived of some crucial phase of adulthood. I, like the homeowners, was a fully grown human with a job and a child and a dog, but I did not have a pantry or a mudroom area or a Bosch dishwasher. At one of the houses, the agent confided in us as we walked in, "This house hasn't been staged. This is just how they live. Can you believe it?"

I looked around at the immaculate living room, at the Smith & Noble light filtering shade and the Nest thermostat and the Miele dishwasher. I could not believe it.

Because of course, part of the fantasy of leaving New York City is that I'll somehow get to leave other things behind as well, like self-doubt and laziness and the dishes that pile up in the sink. I'll leave behind all the parts of myself I don't like, and in my new home I'll be neater, kinder and a better cook. (Or is not true that the Wolf range doesn't actually do the cooking for you? The brochure was unclear.) 

Because I'm almost certain that my fantasy of leaving New York City is just that — a fantasy. I could tell you it's because we can't really afford a house or because I honestly can't stand for my commute to get one minute longer or even because we love so many things about our neighborhood — and we do! I know that for many people, moving to the suburbs after you have children is an obvious next step, a natural progression to give your children space and sunlight. I've even been resentful in the past of people who have treated our neighborhood like a stopover on the way to somewhere else when I have such deep roots here that I honestly just don't know if I know how to live anywhere else, or if I have the energy and inclination to figure out how.

I know, I know the saying goes "home is where the heart is," and I disagree. My home is deep inside my bones, a pair of comfortable pajamas it's taken decades to break in. A manhole cover that's been worn down by thousands of cars.

The fantasy wherein I ask, "Who would I be if I were somewhere different?" has its flip side: Who would I be if I were somewhere different? I'd have a finished basement, but not Eddie's Sweet Shop. I'd have a porch on which to sip my morning coffee, but a longer walk to the train.

The idea of leaving New York City for a house in the suburbs does sometimes seem like an enticing adventure. But the thing about embarking on an adventure by moving somewhere different is that pretty soon it ceases to be an adventure and starts to be your everyday life. After that it comes down to all your basic pros and cons: Would I be happier spending more time on a train if it meant I had room for a treadmill in my basement? Could I revel in the quietude of my non-clunging street if it meant I would have to shovel my own driveway? It's an ouroboros of questions.

There's that study that says planning a vacation makes you happier than actually taking it. So if you need me, I'll be here watching "House Hunters" and perusing Trulia listings. And wincing every time my goddamn manhole cover clungs. Because you know what they say, it's the little things that make it feel like home.

It's easier to leave than to be left behind
Leaving was never my proud
Leaving New York never easy
I saw the light fading out
-REM 

My 6-year-old, myself

I ran my first marathon in my senior year of college, and when my parents came to campus for commencement, it was a frequent topic of conversation. I remember my mother hastening to tell my friends, "She didn't get it from us!"

At the time I felt vaguely offended by her eagerness to disassociate from me. But now that I'm a parent, I understand that instinct: Believe me, it seems to say to the people around you, I find my child as baffling as you do. 

My co-worker, with whom I share all my best Eli stories, has lately been insisting that Eli is more like me than I think. Last week, I told her that when Eli was home with the flu, at one point he called me in my office and, when I answered, just started chanting his own name over the phone. "It's Eli! Eli! Eli!"

She and I sat next to each other during a training session during which we practiced creating demo content for our website. I gave mine a headline: "Rachel rules." Then I created a card grid: "Here are the reasons Rachel is so awesome."

She looked over at my screen and raised her eyebrows. "Eli! Eli! Eli!" she mouthed.

I still maintain that Eli's personality is unique. But lately I've beginning to see that we're similar in ways that manifest differently.

This weekend, we went to a "silent disco party" for kids (they give you headphones to wear that you can tune to one of three different channels to hear music). There were a lot of kids in a small space and just a few party props, like emoji balls, which naturally led to a lot of play battles.

Eli made it his mission to collect both the emoji balls. After running himself ragged all over the room, he emerged raising both balls in triumph only to catch the eye of a small toddler gaping at him with an unmistakable desire for his prize. After a moment's hesitation, Eli passed one ball to the boy, only to have a bigger kid dart through them, grab the ball and take off.

The little boy burst into tears. Eli did a double take: from the crying boy to the one ball left in his hand and then back again. Then, as if in slow motion, he presented him with the ball. He walked heavily back over to me and sighed the deep sigh of a little kid who's just acted like a mature one.

"I didn't want the baby to be sad," he said.

It was a shining triumph of motherhood for me, and I almost welled up with pride: My baby was growing up to be kind and empathetic and generous, all the things I'd always wanted him to be.

But then, as I watched, Eli decided he had a new mission: Protect the baby and his ball. Justice for the baby! He threw his arms out to form a protective barrier around the baby. He dedicated himself to chasing down any kid in the room who wasn't sharing appropriately and got in their faces, explaining at top volume how they should be playing.

We both would have felt sad for the baby. We both would have handed over our balls to the baby. We might have both even done a little yelling over the issue. But only Eli would have turned it into a conflict and a personal crusade.

"You have a strong sense of justice," I told him. "You want everyone to do what you think is right. But sometimes you don't get to be the one that decides how everyone else behaves."

Yesterday morning, Eli asked if we could take him to get a haircut because he had one longer tuft of hair in the front that was bothering him (and he's recently become obsessed with "styling" his hair so it looks "handsome"). I said I could trim that hair for him. Then I went to get to the garbage and when I returned, Eli had vanished and the hallway was silent.

Because Eli was in the bathroom, on a stool, looking in the mirror and trimming his own hair with scissors.

(Side note: When I said, "WE DO NOT CUT OUR OWN HAIR!" he replied, "Well, now I wish I had a time machine so I could go back and tell past Eli that," which, in retrospect, is pretty funny.)

"You're like me," I told him after I finished my lecture. "When you have a problem, you want to fix it right away. You don't want to wait. And you want to do it yourself."

It's like there's some of me in there, but supersized: what I would act like if I were 6 years old and brimming with life. (Alternatively, what I might act like if I were 6 years old and gave no fucks.)

It's comforting to recognize these reflections of my own personality in Eli, because it gives me hope that some of the values I try to instill in him might be making a subconscious impression after all.

Every day, when I drop Eli off at school, I say hopefully, "Have a great day! Be kind to your friends and make good choices!" while he rockets off toward the door. Last week, when I dropped him off, he motioned for me to bend down, gave me a kiss on the cheek and beamed up at me.

"I'll be nice and kind and I'll make good choices," he said.

May that go for both of us in the new year.