Home

Forehead pressed against the cold window, I waited impatiently for the plane to descend through thick clouds.  My breath held and released only when Turnagain Arm welcomed me “home” with a ripple of its silky waters.

The jagged gray mountain peaks that I loved were already coated with termination dust, hinting at my favorite time of the year.  As the wheels touched ground, I sighed, the kind you release when you’re coming home after a long business trip, even though I was now a visitor with only ten days to teach a class for 49 Writers, wrap up loose ends with various jobs, and put our house in Eagle River on the market.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, home is “a refuge, a sanctuary a place or region to which one naturally belongs or where one feels at ease; a place where something flourishes.”

A few moments with my feet on Alaskan soil and I felt as if I was wrapped in the softest robe, sipping a cup of tea.  Physically, I am extremely comfortable.  My metabolism is such that in places like D.C., even in an air-conditioned environment, Thomas catches me climbing into refrigerators or freezers.  Cold temperatures calm me down so that I am more willing to let things be.  Emotionally, I flourish in nature.  A placid body of water, so still that it reflects the drifting clouds in the sky, inspires poetry, while manicured lawns, office buildings, and traffic jams put me on edge.  Shrink-wrapped in pantyhose, high heels, and a tight suit, I’m not only uncomfortable but I feel judged.

Escaping the rat race of job titles, houses, and cars, is one of the main reasons why my friends swear they will never leave Alaska.  Here, we can smoke salmon in our pajamas on our front lawn.  Or wear Bogs and Carhartts to work. Or crash into a friend’s truck and simply be forgiven with the words, “Don’t worry about it.  I’ve done worse things to this piece of shit.”  For many of us, it’s hard to find another place in the world that makes you feel so much at ease.

For all of these reasons, Alaska will always be my “home,” which is why it was difficult for me to accept that eventually I would have to write a “last post” for KTD.

The Oxford English Dictionary also defines “home” as “the family or social unit occupying a house.”   No matter how much I might savor a long soak in a hot tub beneath skies lit by the Northern Lights and a full moon, my mind lingered in Vienna, Virginia, worrying about whether Thomas remembered to brush the kids’ teeth or whether anyone made him breakfast.

My phone conversations with my family went like this:

“Hi, it’s Kyra Oh.  Mommee, I didn’t miss the bus today.  Mommee, I love you.  I miss you.  When you come home, I have a surprise for you,” Kyra speaks so fast that I can’t get a word in. “Come home soon, okay? Here, Ethan talk to Mommee.”

“Wait!” I say, but now I can hear my son walking around with Thomas’ iPhone.  “Mommee?  Mommee? Mommee?” his voice reminds me of the pitiful cry of a hungry baby bird waiting for his mom to feed him.

“Ethan?  I love you!” I say, but my iPhone goes silent.  The connection is still running.

“Hello? Ethan?  Thomas? I think Ethan hit the mute button.”  I pace back and forth in frustration.

Finally, a child’s voice comes through, “Are you in Alaska?”  Now, I understand why my relatives can never tell the difference between Kyra and Ethan on the phone.  Their voices are virtually indistinguishable, but as the mother, shouldn’t I be able to tell?

So I try to be quiet and just listen.  Once the words “I’m mad” and “Spiderman” and “Batman” surface, I sigh with relief.  It’s Ethan.

Finally, I decipher a full sentence. “Mommee, why are you not home?” Ethan demands.  Then the connection drops, probably because he hit the “end” button.

The longer I stayed in Alaska, my refuge and sanctuary, without my family, the more I felt uneasy.  Soon, I heard myself saying that I couldn’t wait to go “home.” I scrolled through photos of my kids on my iPhone and counted down the hours to lying in bed with a kid tucked under each arm and a book propped on my belly.

When I did reunite with my family in the D.C. area, I filled their tummies with smoked salmon and blueberry jam made by my Alaskan friends.  The kids insisted that I read Kiska and Kobuk every night as they snuggled with their Kiska and Kobuk huskies.   At the center of our dining table, I filled a vase with dry reed grass I picked from a hike on Glen Alps, where I dozed to their gentle rustle in the wind.

I have a feeling that part of me will always be curled up like my son  in front of Alaska’s door, waiting patient and loyal, cheeks squished, butt propped high and proud.

 

The Ablation of Grief – Part III

Before the day heats up, Ethan and I slip on our Bogs, still caked with mud from the mouth of the Kenai.  We inch our way down the steep incline behind our house.  Ethan marches confidently ahead of me.  His raspy voice bounces between the trunks of oak trees, “Where did the Mommee deer go?”

Thomas had left hours ago for his first day of work.  On our way back to the house from Kyra’s bus stop, a white-tailed deer froze in the middle of the street studying our every move.  Ethan and I stared at our first animal sighting in Virginia.  Then, the deer flicked her head and two fawns appeared out of the woods. The three of them ran into our backyard with their tails raised, white underside flickering.

Still in our pajamas, we follow the deer into our backyard and check out the areas that had been underwater just a few days ago.  We are outside for no more than five minutes when Ethan screams “Spider” and hides behind my back.

Nearly every tree is linked by fine strands of spider silk.  Some hang elaborate orb webs, glistening with dew.  Others are so fine; you can only see the fat body of a spider twisting in the wind.

Putting on a brave face for my son, I use my camera bag and fling it ahead of me in hopes of taking down some of these webs to create a path for us.  The hike is not fun.  We’re brushing whispers of webs across our faces.  Our feet trip over roots and mushrooms.  At one point, I turn around to check on Ethan and the boy has one tiny mosquito on his forehead and another one on his neck.

With arms folded across his chest and his lower lip sticking out and a red bite swelling to the size of a nickel on his head, Ethan says, “Mommee, let’s not EVER do this again.”

Back in the house, Ethan deals with our setback by slipping on his Batman suit.  While I’m scratching irritably at three new bites on my back and arms, he sits down and starts his daily routine.

I wish adults could adapt that easily, too.  My mentor, Elaine Abraham, Naa Tláa (clan mother) of the Yéil Naa (Raven Moiety), K’ineix Ḵwáan (people of the Copper River Clan) from the Tsisk’w Hít (Owl House), encouraged me to “feel the earth.  If you go into the woods and just sit there and rub your hands up and down on a tree or put your hand on the soil, there’s warmth. The spirit of the land is warm. You can make connections with the earth anywhere anytime because today we are travelling people.  Now, we can adapt.  You have to have a real strong spirit to adapt.”

Looking out my ceiling to floor windows at the maze of webbed trees, I can now appreciate the strong spirits of my military friends, who had to leave Alaska.  Keilah Frickson, who moved to Eagle River, Wisconsin, last year, says she misses “the smell of the mist on the mountains on cool, rainy days, the texture of the landscape, the road trips through breathtaking vistas, and the constantly changing moods of the mountains.”

Alaska taught her to slow down and take breaths regularly.  “I tried things I never thought I would do, and I loved it!  The broad, ruddy foundation of the Chugach range still grounds me. The fierce winds whipping off of the ocean and through my hair still remind me that I can weather any challenge in life. The cool mountain air still helps me stay calm under pressure. The muddy bottoms of every shoe and sandal I wore in Alaska still remind me that ‘it’s just dirt and it won’t hurt anything.’”

The Conaboys, who left in 2007 for Japan and currently reside in Massachusetts, still fill their bellies with Alaska Amber, salmon, and halibut.  Jed has managed to return to Alaska every summer on business trips and charter a boat with his squadron.

The Registers, who left in 2008 for Florida and currently reside in Texas, say that Alaska is their “measuring stick” for every place they travel.  “Plus, our first child was born there. We will always have a connection to Alaska, especially through her.”

I know that eventually I must adapt too.  After all, I have survived the death of my mother, brother, both sets of grandparents, and my father-in-law.  And I will always have to chase down my Alaskan babies, who ablate grief in seconds.

But for now, change is not my friend.

A loud THUMP-thud-thud-thud skips across our roof and lands on our deck.

“What’s that?” Batman asks.

“It’s an acorn,” I tell him about every hour, when this disturbing sound echoes through the house and makes my heart skip.

“You want me to stop it?” Batman throws two punches into the air.

“I wish you could,” I answer. “I wish you could.”

The Ablation of Grief – Part II

Two weeks after moving to Vienna, Virginia, Tropical Storm Lee kills at least seven and forces tens of thousands of people to evacuate their homes.   A fifteen minute drive home turns into several hours of bumper-to-bumper traffic, something I’ve never had to deal with in Alaska.

This is where Thomas parks to take the bus to work. Photo credit: Washingtonpost.com

My windshield wipers cannot keep up with the rain pouring at a rate of four inches per hour from the skies.  Every detour that GPS offers routes me back to the same closed road leading to my neighborhood.  Meanwhile, Thomas, Kyra, and Ethan, dry inside our rental home, call me on my cell to report that our neighbors and their horses are being evacuated.

Stuck only a mile away from my family, I have a lot of time to ponder the wisdom of resisting change.

Kyra and Ethan ride change like champions.  On our last day in our Eagle River log cabin, Kyra woke us up in the morning with, “Come on guys.  It’s time to go to D.C.”

Whenever I look down, Ethan asks, “Are you sad Mommee?  Is it Alaska? Do you need kiss?”

Starting first grade was rough for me, but not Kyra.  The school encourages all kids to ride a bus to school.  Since Kyra has never ridden a bus before, I begged her to let me take her to school on the first day.  I was worried about her transition from a tiny school with one classroom of kids in her grade to one with five classrooms of first graders.  The school is so large that the four of us got lost during open house.

Kyra said to me, “Mommee, I’m not scared.  If you don’t let me take the bus, I’ll be mad.”

I ask Kyra, “Tell me everything that happened on your first day of school.” Kyra answers, “Nothing happened.”

The kids ask me from time-to-time when we are going back to Alaska.  They will even say that they miss our house, but I can tell they have moved on, something I’m not very good at.

To be honest, I’m still at Patricia (“Trish”) Opheen Redmond’s Celebration of Life, the eve before we depart Alaska, grieving about my loss of Alaska and Trish, a colleague of Thomas’ who always made me feel loved.

With the rain beating down all around me and the shrill of passing ambulances with boats strapped to their roof, I remember that Trish’s best friend of 40 years, Carolyn Bettes, encouraged all of us to “move forward” in her remembrance speech.  She offered a list of moving forward ideas, things that Trish used to do: prepare an amazing meal and share it with friends, send a postcard to a best friend about your day, walk a dog, be a mentor, volunteer, live up to your own potential, live out loud.

Mike Redmond, Trish’s husband, defined Trish’s attitude towards life as a woman who could never cook the same thing twice, “no matter how strongly I pleaded, because there were so many other recipes to try.”  If it was a sunny day, she would cancel whatever they had planned for the day.  “Even if we had planned something for weeks, nope, she would change the plan so we could be together outdoors: hiking, biking, backcountry sledding.”

Trish enjoys a sunny day with Harry above her cabin in Resurrection Bay.

Adapting, letting the waters of life sweep you off your feet, moving on.  I grip the steering wheel and force myself to move.  Approaching the cop car that blocked my road, I roll down my window and plead with him.  I tell him I need to get to my family, that I am driving our only form of transportation.

The cop says, “Well, you can go around us, but do so at your own risk.  Your street might be underwater.”

With images of Trish coasting down mountains lit by moonlight with the engine turned off or sipping a glass of wine to the sunset on the landing of their Resurrection Bay cabin, I maneuver around the cop and make my way slowly down the slick street.  I’m the only one on the road and I can see a lake where the road disappears around the bend.

Fortunately, the entrance to our rental is still above water.  I drive into a forest of trees, where my friends joke that I managed to find the only Alaskan cabin located in Northern Virginia.  Thomas is waiting anxiously at the front door.

“This is not good,” he escorts me into the house and points out our glass sliding doors facing the backyard.  Through the dense trees, what used to be roads and homes is now a lake as far as our eyes can see.

Our backyard turns into a lake.

“Let’s go to my sister’s house.  Pack your bags,” Thomas announces.

Kyra and Ethan erupt into excitement at the prospect of playing with their cousins.  “Yeah, I’m Superman!” Kyra yells, then starts to run in circles around me.

Ethan chases her and says, “I’m Batman!”

My heart is pounding and my knees feel weak from “moving on” and I can do nothing at the moment but lie down on the carpet where I stood.

The Ablation of Grief – Part I

I never thought that one day, I would be sitting in front of my wood burning stove with the heat warming my back against an emptied house, not just any house, but the first I ever owned.  A log cabin my husband and I chinked every summer.   Maple hardwood floors carved by my kids learning how to walk. A weathered porch where I surrendered the things I couldn’t control in life to the roar of Southfork Eagle River.

It’s my last night in Alaska and I am weighed down with grief.  Tomorrow, we will board a flight to Washington, D.C., where Thomas grew up, where his extended family and college buddies still reside, where we first met and married.

We are returning to a place that once made us happy and yet, all I could think about was the calving of events that started last year when Thomas’ dad was suddenly killed in a metro accident.

Many Alaskans return to the Lower 48 due to a death in the family.  I have certainly uprooted myself in the past due to MaMa and Jon-Jon’s death.  And yet, this time, I resisted.

I think I wanted death to take pity on us, just this once.

A week before the movers arrived at my house, I attended a potlatch, a gift-giving ceremony to honor a clan member who died and a naming ceremony, in Yakutat.  I told Thomas I had to accept this invitation even though the timing was terrible.  At the potlatch, I heard a translation of something Tlingit Elder Jessie Dalton had once said:

Does death take pity on us too?
It does not take pity on us either,
This thing that has happened.

Death does not take pity on anyone.  I let those words sink in during the 20 hour long potlatch.  I let them sink in as Yakutat soaked me down to the bones the few hours I had before returning to Anchorage to face my remaining two weeks in my beloved Alaska.

I walked and collected some Yakutat flowers for Kyra and sat on the earth until the anger and resentment I had towards all the forces working to uproot me seeped away.  I had not expected to come to any peace about this move in Yakutat.  I thought it would make me miss Alaska more.  Instead, I realized that I learned a great deal about balance.

In the potlatch, every action was thoroughly discussed and planned out years in advance.  Each sad song balanced by a happy one.  Each sad story balanced with a happy one.  Each person’s contributions no matter how big or small remembered and repaid.

I learned that everything has its turn.   That  things never happen when I want them to.  That I can be stronger than I think.

And I was strong for the most part, until the movers drove away with all our possessions.  Faced with an empty house, all these words of wisdom floated beyond my reach.  I knew what I needed to do when I was ready.  But now, I simply wanted to mourn.

Leaving Alaska was equivalent to a loss, a death to the good life we had here, where my kids could strap on crampons and hike glaciers, where we could scoop salmon out of the ocean.

A time to say how grateful we are to the people who have become our family these past seven years.  We form these tight bonds with adventurous adaptable souls.   We give and give, even though we know that like the plucking that occurs in glaciers, we might lose this family at any time.

Shehla threw a farewell party for us even though she was just as upset as I was about the move.  She lent us air mattresses, pillows, and sleeping bags.  She took my calls no matter what time of the night and told me to look for the positive aspects of the move.

Erica brought me meals and held my hand in the park while my kids played and told me everything happens for a reason.  She promised to keep my fridge stocked with salmon.

My neighbor, Lian, whom I met only a year ago, snuck into my house after the movers left and cleaned my nasty fridge. She lent us a car when ours were shipped out and babysat up my kids so that I could focus on the move.

Even Thomas’ colleague, Patricia (“Trish”) Opheen Redmond, who died unexpectantly a few days ago, inspired  everyone to live life to its fullest at her Celebration of Life, which we attended today.  When the pastor urged us to examine our reflection and see that Trish still lives in us, I wondered whether Alaska will always live in me too.

 

To Freak or Not to Freak

You would think that growing up in Southern California, I would be a seasoned disaster preparedness mom.  Earthquake drills were a constant affair at school.  We stocked cans of food and bottles of water in our garage.  In my college dorm, a 6.7 earthquake threw me across the room when my bunk bed toppled over.  My roommates and I nicked our bare feet on picture frames that had shattered on the floor.

But I also had a mother that completely freaked out at the slightest ground movement.  She would scream hysterically (even if it was just a massive truck driving by), shove my brother and me under our thick oak kitchen table, then throw her trembling body over us.  My father would just laugh and laugh.  I would watch his round belly jiggling under his red robe and worry that the house was going to crush him.

In some of the worst earthquakes we lived through, my mom booked us a room on the Queen Mary because she thought that being on a boat would be the safest way to survive the aftershocks.  Huddled with our friends and family on the deck, I peered through binoculars at the land mass worrying that at any time the earth would swallow up the rest of the world.

Shortly after Kyra was born, I felt a tremble ripple through my log cabin walls.  The hair on my body stiffened.  I fought every nerve in my body to calmly ride this earthquake through.  I was not going to frighten my kids like my mother did.  Besides, it had taken me hours to get Kyra to sleep and as you know we don’t wake a sleeping baby unless it’s an emergency.  I gripped the edge of my desk and listened to the creaking of the wood and the clinking of my china and that thunder in my ear that seems to crescendo until I’m no longer sure if it’s the earthquake or a manifestation of all my fears from my childhood.

My knuckles turned white.  I could see my heart pounding through my chest.  And still the earthquake wasn’t passing. I couldn’t take it anymore.  I ran down the hall, swooped up Kyra, and curled up beneath her bedroom doorframe.  Pressed tightly against my chest, her heartbeat calmed me down and soon I realized that the birds twittered outside again, maybe even laughed at me the way my father used to tease my mom.

Fortunately, Kyra had no clue that her Mommee freaked out.

With tomorrow’s show in mind, I wondered what kind of disaster preparedness mom I was going to be as my children got wiser.  Over dinner, I decided to talk to Kyra and Ethan about earthquakes.  I asked Kyra if she had any earthquake drills at school.

“Nope.  Mommee, tell me what an earthquake is.”

“Well, it’s when the earth suddenly releases energy that causes the ground to shake and our house to shake too.”

Kyra licked the spaghetti sauce off her lips and said, “I like earthquakes.”

Ethan said, “Me too.”

“Sometimes though earthquakes can hurt people.  Buildings can fall down.  Do you remember that scary 8.0 earthquake in China?  Lots of kids were in school at the time.  Some were kindergarteners just like you and their school fell on them.”

“Did they die?”  Kyra asked.

“Some of them did.  Many many people died in that earthquake.”

Kyra thought about all of this for a moment.  I started to get nervous.  Then she smiled and said, “That’s okay Mommee.  I like dead.”

“You do?”

“Yes, dead makes me happy,” Kyra said as she twisted her fork with noodles.

Ethan said, “Me too.”

Either my kids did not understand what “dead” meant or I had done such a good job in explaining death to them that they weren’t scared of it.  Kyra leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.  Her eyes spun with such delight and she danced in her seat.  Ethan tickled her and the two of them collapsed into laughter.

An hour later, I tried again, “Kyra, do you know what an earthquake is?”

She squeezed her eyes shut as if she was thinking very hard, then said, “It’s when people die.”

“Well, earthquakes don’t always cause people to die.  Just sometimes…”  Oh god, was I making this worse?  I picked up Kyra and held her in my arms.  “Uh, are you scared of earthquakes now?”

“No!”  Kyra said firmly.

Ethan ran towards us and pointed at his chest which displayed an enormous red “S” and and said, “I’m Super Man!”

Clearly, I wasn’t very good at explaining the big bad world to my children.   But at least, they weren’t scared of it.  And somehow, I didn’t want to mess with that.  Do you think that’s okay?

The Computer is Dead

Kyra ran into the kitchen and said, “Mommee, he spilled juice on the computer.”  Grabbing a towel, I raced Kyra into their playroom and caught Ethan finger painting  juice on the case of the desktop (the same brand-new computer that only survived two months in our home and was featured in Raising Techno Addicts and Screen Time Fight Play-by-Play.)

Thomas scolded Ethan while I cleaned off the computer and perched it high out of our kids’ reach.  It didn’t appear as if juice had seeped into the case, but we let it “dry.”

A week later, we held our breath and turned it on; about ten minutes later, Kyra pronounced, “The computer is dead.”

She didn’t cry or get upset at Ethan.  She simply accepted that these things happen.  I wished I could grieve in this way about all the losses in my life both big and small.

It’s been a tough year beginning with the passing of Thomas’ father in January from a railway accident and ending with my grandmother dying in her sleep just a few days before we were flying to California to see her.

I remember when I told Kyra about her grandpa.  She jumped into my lap, grabbed my face and said, “I am not sad, I’m happy.  Kyra die and then Kyra see Grandpa and Jesus.”

Death was not a new subject for her because my mother’s photos are on her wall.  Before bedtime, we often talk about how Grandma Auxilia, whose looks and personality Kyra inherited, would protect her from monsters.

Nonetheless, my relatives told me that Kyra was too young to understand death.  So, after Thomas’ dad died, I read her a book called Tell Me More About Eternity by Joel Anderson.  The Children’s Ministry Leader at our church had recommended to me.  Anderson starts with “It was a very special day for two people.  One person was very young.  The other was very old.  Somehow they both knew this day was to be one of the most important days of their lives.”

For months, this book was Kyra’s favorite.  She made me read it every night before bed and through two story lines one about a baby being born and an old man entering heaven, Kyra asked me many questions.

I’ve heard that grief is a teacher.  It’s been seventeen years since my brother died of cancer, and sixteen years since my mother died of the same disease.  And only now am I starting to comprehend that death is the same journey as birth.

By the time I told her about my grandma, I was pretty sure that Kyra understood what “dead” meant.  “Great Grandma died?” she asked me, blinking with her big eyes.

“Yes, Mommy is sad.”

She smiled, then closed her eyes and pursed her lips at me.  I leaned in and she kissed me on the nose.  Then she asked, “Mommee, can you show me a picture of great grandmother so I can remember her?”

As we clicked through photos of the first time Kyra or Ethan met their great grandmother, I gazed at the excited bright eyes of my children and wondered whether sometimes they were our teachers, too.

How have you explained death to your children?

Holiday Cuing

“Grrrr.  I’m a dragon,” Kyra scrapped her fingernails along my kitchen cabinets as she flapped her Night Fury pajama wings.

We heard Thomas and Ethan stumble down the hall to our master bedroom and dive under the covers.

“I’m going to get you!” Kyra threatened.

Ethan screamed.

Kyra giggled hysterically and ran as fast as she could toward her victims.

I sat down at our dining table cuing my family’s idea of holiday fun with MaMa’s.

In three days, we would be flying to California to stay at my dad’s house through the New Year.   Thomas, the kids, and my half-brother would help me set up a Christmas tree that MaMa bought before I was born and decorate it with ornaments that dazzled me as a child.   Parties would fill dad’s house with MaMa’s best crystal and his secret family Chinese recipes.  The night before Christmas, we might attend midnight mass.  Before tucking the kids to bed, we would set out milk and cookies for Santa Claus.  On Christmas morning, there would be presents spilling a few feet in diameter from the tree, with at least ten presents for each person to open so that it would be well past lunch before we finished tearing off all the wrapping.  At the stroke of midnight on New Year’s, we would light candles in remembrance of all those who passed.

After MaMa died, I inherited these responsibilities.  I had always thought these traditions had to be sustained, no matter what, otherwise the backbone of the family connecting ancestors to descendants would shatter.  Besides, I did want my kids and my half-brother to grow up, like me, believing in Santa Claus and miracles at Christmas.  And maybe, I hoped some things from my childhood could remain constant between my dad and me.

But now that I am a mother, I simply don’t know how MaMa had the energy to keep these traditions going even after I entered college.  Up through high school, I wrote a letter to Santa and received a reply once a year.  When we vacationed, MaMa still managed to ensure that Santa Claus could find us.

My track record wasn’t too good.  Last week, Kyra dug around in my Explorer cargo space and found some Christmas presents that I hadn’t had a chance to wrap and hide.  This year, I can only afford three presents for each kid glistening beneath the tree.  Sometimes, Thomas has to entertain the kids on Christmas morning while I finish wrapping.  And my body almost always collapses the week after the holidays.

Last Christmas, my dad decided to take his family to Disneyworld and while I was appalled that he broke tradition, I had my first taste of a quiet Alaskan Christmas.  We still decorated a tree, but this one was alive and filled our lungs with the energizing effects of pine.  Kyra and Ethan set out their favorite snacks for Santa and stealthily snacked on it until only crumbs were left on the plate after they went to bed.  On Christmas morning, they fought over the replenished snacks that Santa nibbled and ignored his presents.  Most days, the four of us slept in and lounged in front of our wood burning stove playing games.

At the dining table, I looked out the window at a tranquil world coated in soft white powder. I couldn’t help feeling some regret that we weren’t staying home for the holidays.

In heavy pursuit, Ethan clamored into my lap, yelling, “Help!  Dragon!”

He buried his face in my chest and growled.  Kyra arrived on Thomas’ shoulders pretending to breathe fire, then sprang onto my head and tackled me to the floor.  We all laughed until our stomachs hurt.

When I could breathe again, I realized that it was important for the four of us to create own traditions too.

Ice ornaments, for example, was one that I really wanted to try ever since Jessica Cochran posted “Five Winter Crafts to Do with your Kids.”

Earlier that day, the kids had gathered a pile of rocks, twigs, and toys on the dining table.  I pointed to them and asked, “Are you ready to make ornaments?”

“Yeah!” they both jumped up and down.

We tried both the cookie cutter method and the bowls of water.  Kyra poured out a can of magnetic letters and dropped the letters of her name and Ethan’s into bowls of water.  Ethan studied the impact of yanking his Lightning McQueen keychain in and out of a bowl.  While I cooked, Thomas carefully carried each ornament outside to freeze on our patio.

The kids made a huge mess.  Their clothes were soaked.  Water had seeped beneath the glass top and ruined the cherry wood dining table.  Food coloring stained all of our hands and magnetic letters turned our living area into a mine field. It looked like a tornado struck our home, but this was how we rolled.

What traditions are hard for you to let go during the holidays?

Doting Grandparents Wanted (won AK Professional Communicator’s Award)

After listening to Tuesday’s show, I considered placing an ad for a grandparent willing to make breakfast for my kids every morning or read them stories several times a week over video chat.

On a whim, I typed into Google “Grandparents wanted” and was surprised to discover I’m not the first one to joke about this.

Kristen, a reader of the New York Times Motherlode posted in “Absent Grandparents” that after her parents died she thought about placing this kind of ad in Craigslist.

She says, “Love is an incredible gift and an asset. I wish I could surround my son with more of it. No matter how imperfect, I wish we had others on our team, backing up our plays, pinch hitting for us when needed and most importantly, rooting us on in that special way that only family can.”

Living far away from relatives, I envy my friends who have grandparents backing up their plays.   Janis, my best friend in Washington, D.C., tells me that every day her husband’s parents pick her up from the metro after work.   In the backseat, her son was already fed and bathed from school.  In the summers, my bridesmaid Esther who lives in Washington State, flies her son to Los Angeles to bond with her parents and learn Korean.

Wow.  My mother died before my kids were born and Thomas’ dad died this January.  Their only chance to bond with Grandma Teresa on Thomas’ side and Grandpa John on mine occurs once a year at noisy restaurant dinners splintered by holiday chaos and jet lag.

My kids can’t speak Korean, the language that Grandma Teresa is most comfortable with.  She skyped with us twice, when Thomas’ siblings set it up, but only smiled shyly from the distance.  And Grandpa John, well, he’s probably pissed that I’m even calling him “Grandpa.”   Unfortunately, we have never been able to agree on a better name.  He thinks the Chinese word for Grandpa sounds even worse:  Wai Goon or Lou Goon Goon.  Wai means external.  Lou means Old.  Goon just adds further insult I suppose.  Once while bouncing newborn Kyra on his lap, he asked me, “How about if she just calls me John?”

Honestly, I haven’t tried very hard to find an alternative name for my dad because I’m still angry about these three awkward conversations:

LESLIE: So, I have some good news.  I’m pregnant again.

DAD: (Let’s out a sigh like a balloon losing air.)

LESLIE: You don’t have anything to say about another grandchild?

DAD:  Nothing to be excited about.  I’m getting older.  Life goes on.

LESLIE: So, I was thinking about visiting this Christmas, since it will be the first time everyone’s meeting Ethan.

DAD: That’s okay.  Save money.  Just send pictures or video.

LESLIE:  When we’re visiting, I need a babysitter for Kyra and Ethan for a few hours after we put them to bed.

DAD:  Did you ask your godparents?

LESLIE:  I did and they can’t commit right now.

DAD: What are you going to do?

I rub these exchanges like worry stones, until I’m no longer sure of their original form. It’s taken me a long time to understand that it’s not because he doesn’t love Kyra and Ethan.  According to Lisa Belkin of Motherlode’s  “Just Don’t Call me ‘Grandma’”  post, it’s a baby boomer thing.  Dad just doesn’t want to feel old.

What he doesn’t understand is that I worry that my kids are growing up untethered. Perhaps one day, they might wonder what place or culture or ancestors they belong to.

You see, Kyra and Ethan probably have more grandparents than most kids.  I’ve made sure of that, collecting over a dozen surrogate grandparents in addition to Grandma Teresa and Grandpa John, but they are all spread across the Lower 48.

And while my kids do receive tons of love from surrogate grandparents, I can’t help feeling a bit jealous when I hear their own grandchildren laughing in the background nearly every time I call.

The chances that these grandparents could read to them or tell them stories are rare.  Sadly, I fear that they will only be connected with slivers of materialistic associations, such as “This grandma sent you the ribbon dress.  That grandma gave you your favorite Lightning McQueen sleeping bag.”

Do you worry about your kids growing up untethered?  And if so, how do you weave a more durable thread between your kids and their grandparents?