Category: Insight

Posted in Adult Offspring, College, Fragile Life, Insight, Milestone Moments, Mother to Crone, Nuts & Bolts, Takes a Village, Twenty-something, What's Next? (18 & beyond)

No Guarantees

Posted on by Kelly Salasin


There’s something about a college graduation.

I can’t put my finger on it.

Last weekend, at the farmers market, I came across another college graduate and she told me about her plans to return west to start her career, and I walked away weeping.

I’m grateful for sunny days. For sunglasses.

I think it’s time. Maybe it’s time. Time passing.

Teens becoming grownups. Everything changing, reshaping.

I had come to the Farmer’s Market from yoga so maybe I was especially tender. I feel awfully proud of my son’s graduation, but I’m not sure why. What did I have to do with it?

I actually felt called out when the commencement speaker said: “Thank your parents,” especially as I looked around at all the richer parents or harder working ones or more sacrificing ones–those who put their kids through school while ours did it on his own.

And then I remembered all the trips I made to be close by when he was going through something that I couldn’t quite figure and then all the times I helped him navigate through alternate routes and detours and segues. I remembered all the encouragement and returns and goodbyes and trips to the airport. The fights. The pillow talk. The persistence. So much persistence.

Maybe I feel used up.

Maybe that’s just right.

I gave it my all, I did.

He seemed so happy on his graduation day and that made me happy. It still does. He was so full of himself in the way that every one of us should be at such a moment. Inflated. Buoyant. Light. The whole point of me was to be ballast. Weight. Homecoming. Backboard. Less and less relevant.

I always feel better when I write into something that I don’t quite understand even if I don’t understand it much better afterward.

Just showing up for myself is something.

Like I showed up for him.

Like we’ve been showing up for this nation.
For women.
For immigrants.
For Muslims and Jews and POC.
For the underpaid. The uninsured.

No guarantees.

Posted in Insight, Mother to Crone

Mothers, SIT Down!

Posted on by Kelly Salasin
Me & my boys many moons ago

Now that I’m no longer doing it with little kids or teenagers (or even with my husband), I have come to the realization that this every-day, taken-for-granted necessity is as complex and demanding as many top-dollar responsibilities.

Mood, energy level and hunger aside, the thought processes required to fulfill this obligation are exceedingly complex.

Preference, season, local, organic, sustainability, dietary, budgetary, bulk, sale, recipe, occasion, guests… What have I forgotten?

At 55, I cannot believe that anyone is expected to make multi-faceted decisions affecting family health, wellbeing & financial stability while simultaneously caring for children. Women must refuse to do so any longer. It is simply too taxing and motherhood is tax enough. (Men, however, should grocery shop with children as much as possible. For the next thousand years.)

I rarely shop on a Sunday and it was disheartening to see the aisles absent of men this morning, and instead populated by frantic mothers tending to the needs of children while carefully filling a cart.

If ever you ever come across a young mother grocery shopping without children in tow, she looks as if she is on vacation, so freed is her mind to focus or daydream; while men shopping alone often look perplexed or entirely ambivalent.

I always thought I loved grocery shopping. I used to cry when my mother left me behind. Once I could drive, I did the shopping for her. With several younger siblings, I may have simply been hungry. 8 gallons of milk is all I can remember. I can still see the white jugs lining the bottom of my cart with a signed check in my pocket.

When I was lucky enough to accompany my mother as a girl, she would coach me and my younger siblings before heading inside. “Previewing,” is what the educators call it now. Though uneducated, my mother was a brilliant developmentalist. As the eldest of 8 and the mother of 8 (with an absentee husband), this may have been a matter of survival. She often apologized, explaining that as her first, I had been her practice child.

When I went into teaching, she expressed alarm. “All those children,” she’d say, “How will you manage?” But I liked the order and routine of the classroom much better than the chaos and ambiguity of the home, as if those were my choices, which were much better than hers.

It turns out, I was anxious in the classroom too, just as I was in the home and in the grocery store, even alone.

What is this internal pressure?

I wasn’t born with it.

I suppose it was inherited through the generations of women asked to do so much at once with so little recognition of what it is they faced and considered and decided every hour of every day.

Mothers, AMAZE me.
WOMEN amaze me.

SIT DOWN, Women!
Put up your feet.
You deserve it.
YOU ARE ENOUGH.
You are MORE than enough.

TAKE A BOW!

Posted in College, Insight, Teens, What's Next? (18 & beyond), Wisdom of Youth

Parenting bites…

Posted on by Kelly Salasin

With the nest almost empty now, my parenting insights come in shorter bits which I suppose is just about right as I turn more & more toward other things…

And yet, I’m learning that this role is the role of a lifetime…

~

Payback Theater

That rare night when he goes to bed before us. A dramatized rendition of what we endure night after night. Door latches. Stairs. Lights. A sudden desire to share scientific discoveries, insights, intimacies.

~

IN A FAMILY WAY

It’s such a comfort, this being a family. A buffer. An ease. A certainty. Sweet. Exhausting. Consuming. Distracting.

The silence, after, is deafening. Resurrecting. The original. Sin. Of separation. Abandonment. Mortality.

There is this larger family. This shared dwelling. This belonging.

There is this whole.

Past. Present. Future.

One.

~

OUR TURN

My state is proposing a 24-hour waiting period to buy a handgun.

Here’s an idea. Until this country figures out its shit when it comes to guns, men are unable to purchase them, and women are in charge of any firearms in the home. Furthermore, public funds are provided to women for firearm training and to provide the necessary equipment for safekeeping. Additionally, all new hires in positions that require firearms will be women until such time that a 50/50 gender balance is achieved in police departments, security teams, military personnel, etc. Public funding will also post armed women at every school, church, and each of the other venues that the men of our country frequent to kill people begrudgingly and at random.

You’ve had our vote, our money, our bodies. We’ll have your guns.

~

FROM THE MOUTH OF BABES

”It’s like the release of a new iPhone. Is it going to be good, and are we gonna like it, or is it just gonna be the same thing without a headphone jack?”

Our youngest, on the Mueller Report

~

APOCALYPSE

You know how if your kids are plugged in–at home or in the car–you gain some well-deserved solace, but it’s bittersweet because they’re checked out, like that rambunctious kid in your classroom on Ritalin, or the outlying boroughs of NYC, silenced by the seduction of indoor screens, or the neighborhood of my childhood on the base at West Point, the roads in front of the homes now three times as full with oversized SUVs obscurring the view of the Hudson, while the sidewalks and the playgrounds and the woods, once sprinkled with kids, are barren, even on a perfect July day, like the ghost town we visited when we lived in the Rockies, or the Apocalypse we inhabit now–quieted, distracted, consumed.