I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(56)

“Anything is fine, really,” I try to tell my mother-in-law. I tell my own mom, “They like everything. Maybe clothes?”

“That doesn’t help me,” my mom says.

That’s when I realize she and I are experiencing variations of the same feeling: Help me. Make this easier, please. Tell me what to do.



* * *



At the end of the school day, my daughter climbs into the car. Thanks to her brother’s sports schedule, she has done her homework on bleachers and in backseats for three of the past four nights. “What’s for dinner?” she asks.

“I’m not sure yet,” I say. “What are you in the mood for?”

“Whatever,” she says. “You pick.”

She wants me to decide. I want someone else to decide. My mother wants me to decide. We don’t grow out of this either, apparently. It’s funny how the same conversation happens every year, with the same undertones: You make all the decisions. No, you make all the decisions. I guess this means there is no age when we stop wishing to be taken care of. Good to know.

I make a decision: No events tonight. Not one, not two, not three, not four. I make the calls and beg off. “I’m sorry. I wish I could come.” And it’s true; I wish I could be many places at once. But I can’t.

We go to the soccer game. We come home. I make spaghetti. John and our son hang out after homework and talk about whether the deer in our yard have enough to eat when it turns cold. My daughter and I share a blanket on the sofa. She’s braiding the fringe when I ask, “If Mimi”—her grandmother, my mother—“wanted to give you something you really liked for Christmas, do you have any ideas for her?” She looks up and ponders for a moment, then says, “Maybe a few yards of fabric? I want to make a cape.” I reach for paper and pen, start making a list. That wasn’t so hard. “What else?” I ask.

So I make the list this year. I will do it every year, after I resist for a little while and then give up resisting, after I remember that I have been that daughter, I will be that grandmother.





The Unaccountable Weight of Accountability


I stood in the middle of a forest and silent-screamed every profane word I know, which is a lot of bad words.

For the second time in one morning, I was on a wooded park trail. The first time, I’d decided to cram in a mini-hike before doing an hour of writing and then heading to a meeting for work. Then I got home, checked my pockets, and found that my driver’s license had gone missing. So back I went, hiking the same route a second time, eyes scanning the ground for my lost card. An hour later, there I was under the trees, still no license, my precious hour of writing time gone. This is what I get for trying to exercise, I thought. Later, I ate a packet of gummy fruit snacks in my car on the way to my meeting.

I reported this episode to my various accountability groups—sets of friends who’d decided to check in on a daily or weekly basis to hold each other’s feet to the fire of various goals. There’s the fitness group; I’m supposed to check in with them weekly about how many days I’ve worked out. There’s the healthy-eating group, in which we keep a text thread circulating to log accomplishments such as, “Drank green juice instead of Diet Coke.” Then there’s the writing group, five nonfiction writers who also have day jobs. We meet weekly before work and use a private Facebook page to hold each other to our pledge not to let our creative endeavors get pushed aside by workaday tasks.

In Dani Shapiro’s memoir Hourglass, she quotes something the writer Grace Paley once said: The years between ages fifty and eighty go by so fast they feel less like minutes, more like seconds. I suspect Paley and Shapiro are right, although I’m not there yet, so I can’t say for sure. What I can say is that my early forties are ticking by at an alarming rate. The idea of making my days count makes me feel like I’m not wasting them.

Accountability is all the rage, and not just in our own lives. Whenever something bad happens, people insist on finding someone to hold accountable—as if that will undo anything. It’s a buzzword in the business and political worlds, code for “responsibility” and “the buck stops here.” Being accountable means you reply promptly to emails at work, you finish what you start, and you spend money wisely. It means every move you make counts toward something. The higher up the ranks you go, the greater accountability you have on your shoulders.

Personally, I’m glad I’m not an elected official or a CEO, because I can’t take any more accountability. The more people and forces I have to answer to, the more “held accountable” starts to feel like “held underwater.” Some days, I want to spend an afternoon online looking at pictures of dogs with eyebrows, and I don’t want to have to report it to anyone. Some nights, I want to spend $9.99 to buy a movie on-demand even though I could wait a week and rent it for $2.99, and I want to revel in that foolish splurge by myself.

As it is, I find I can only clear the bar for one accountability group at a time. As an approval-seeking person, I always want a gold star. But to achieve one thing generally means letting go of another. I can write, but only—as they say—by putting my butt in the chair. If my butt is in the chair, my butt is not outside walking. I skip checking in with my hiking buddies on those days, but not because I want to hide from them. It’s just that I’m already a little downtrodden from having to report to my healthy-eating group: “Unwrapped seven slices of American cheese for lunch.”