I was waiting at the intersection for the signal to turn green.  Suddenly, I heard sequels of laughter from the car next to me.  I turned and saw a Volvo station wagon full of girls in soccer uniforms.  They were about eleven or twelve chattering among themselves.  The mom driving was oblivious to the noise coming from the back seat of her car.

At first I was relieved it wasn’t me behind that steering wheel.  I couldn’t imagine driving one more carpool to one more soccer game.  For years I drove my two girls and their teammates to games all over the San Francisco Bay Area.  I spent many a weekend at tournaments, but one of the perks of endless hours of sitting through those games was comparing notes with the other moms about the whereabouts of our daughters. 

As our girls entered their teen years and boys and drugs circled their lives, we grew closer as a community of moms.  We began to rely on those weekend morning soccer games to review events from the night before.

I’ll never forget the first time my oldest daughter snuck out of the house.  It was a Friday night and I had come into her room around two a.m. to turn off the light.  Much to my surprise the bedroom window was wide open and pillows were stuffed under the covers on the beds where she and a girlfriend were supposed to be sleeping.  Two recycle bins were stacked on top of each other beneath the window.  They were the stairs for the “escape.”  I should have been furious but I had to laugh at the absurdity of their scheme.  I felt like I was in a “B” movie.   Fortunately, I lived in a safe, small town where I knew most of the families with school-age kids.  On this occasion she and her friend had snuck out the night before a Saturday soccer game.  My solace was in knowing I’d get the details the next morning comparing notes with the other moms.

Sure enough, it turned out that several of our daughters had snuck out and met up at a local park.  Some of the girls had said they were spending the night at a friend’s house.  Some, like my daughter, just jumped out the window.  By the time we sorted out who said what to whom, we were laughing.   

We discovered this was the best way to parent our teenage girls:  throw out a big net and make sure all the girls were safely in it.  We devised an appropriate consequence for their actions.  We made a pact: each parent would ground her daughter for the same amount of time.  No girl could then complain she had the “worst mom in the world” because as a community of moms, we had agreed on the punishment for all of them.  We later discovered the girls weren’t upset by their fates.  They were safe and they knew it.  Much to our relief we had a system for finding them when they were “lost.”

The light turned green and the Volvo with the soccer girls sped ahead.  I wished the mom good luck.  I didn’t miss the car-pooling, but I did miss the camaraderie among the moms which developed, not because our daughters were “good girls” playing soccer, but because they were bad girls testing limits to be themselves. 

By Marilee Stark

Labels: carpool, Marilee Stark, San Francisco Bay Area, sneaking out, soccer game, soccer mom, teens

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The great thing about writing is that you get to take life's challenges, and turn them into opportunities for assignments!

My article "Gluten Free Dining in the Bay Area" in June's Parents’ Press newspaper is an example of this. Having a three-year-old son who is gluten free, I've become a reluctant expert on where to dine without wheat. But I also learned a lot about Celiac disease as I researched this article, so it added to my conversation today with my son's doctor at his physical.

So now we get to decide if we want an official Celiac diagnosis, which would mean putting him back on gluten, having a blood test, and possibly an endoscopy, and if in fact he does have Celiac disease, or is just gluten intolerant, we would just end up back where we are now- avoiding gluten. I'm not sure if it's worth all that, but we'll see.

For now, I'm just grateful for all the food options we have that are gluten free.

By Kristy Lund

Labels: blood test, Celiac disease, doctors, endoscopy, gluten-free dining, Kristy Lund, life's challenges, opportunities, Parents' Press, San Francisco Bay Area, writing assignments

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My seven-years old son asked me recently, “Mom, is war ever good?” We were driving in beautiful Marin, past the emerald green hills and the sparkling blue water of San Francisco Bay.

I paused, and my thoughts raced through my head, searching for just the right words and just the right message. I thought of all the articles and books I ever read as a teacher and as a mother on explaining complicated issues to young children. My brain quickly turned up the information it retained on the warfare philosophy and latest war-related news, complete with visual images seen on TV and computer screens, as well as latest war casualties’ statistics. What could I answer to a seven-year old?

Suddenly, I recalled the familiar voice of my mother telling me stories of her growing up in Russia during and after WWII. It was her voice that made my throat tighten, my heart beating rapidly, my mind still desperately searching for words. I sensed that my answer was not instantly coming, and I said, “Let me think about it, okay?”

A few months ago, when Alex’s questions were getting increasingly complicated, I often found myself short of factual knowledge. Exactly how many miles are there from our planet to the moon? What does an artificial heart look like? For cases like these, I explained to Alex’s dismay that “sometimes Mom does not know everything, and she needs more time to look it up and think about it.”

Soon Alex grew to like that answer, because it often meant that we’d look stuff up together online or in the library. I also learned that it meant that I will definitely be reminded to account for my “thinking time.” As I invoked my “let me think about it” answer deferment, I knew that a few hours later I will be asked that very same question again.

My mother’s voice came to me from my childhood, when my bedtime stories were not about Goldilocks or dinosaurs, like the ones my son hears from me these days. They were my mother’s childhood memories, told in a quiet half-whisper in the darkness of my room in our apartment in the center of Moscow.

She told me of being called the “German bastard” by other children, because her birthday fell on the first day of war for Russia. She also told me about her family living in the church basement for several cold winter months, while their village in the outskirts of Moscow was bombed flat. Speaking slowly and calmly, she’d tell me, “Everyone bombed us, both our planes and the Germans. Bombs and bullets are too stupid to know who to kill and who to spare, they do not pick sides. Everyone who was out of the basement was dead.”

My mom also told me that the reason we didn’t have any family jewelry was because my grandmother exchanged all of her gold rings and earrings for two loafs of crudely baked brown bread to feed her five children, including my then four-year old mom. Even with that, her two seven-years old siblings died of starvation, their emaciated bodies forever etched in my mother’s memories. They were my uncle and aunt I never got to meet.

She told me about my grandfather coming back from war triumphant, angry, addicted to alcohol, and missing a leg. My mother’s stories left me sleeping fitfully, dreaming of black smoke of my mother’s burning village, of planes dropping bombs on women and children, and of the scarred stump of my grandpa’s leg.

Growing up during the Cold War, I was plagued with the anxiety of a seemingly imminent war threat from the United States. After learning of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in school, I grilled my much older brother with questions: “What exactly happens when a nuclear bomb explodes? Why do Americans want to start a nuclear war with us? How long will it take me to die if the bomb hits my school?”

An aspiring young scientist, he was all too happy to provide me with gruesome details. For my third grade art contest, I drew a picture of a big, black bomb with two thick red lines crossing it off and a white dove with an olive branch flying in the background. I did not win any prize.

As I got older, things gradually changed. The Cold War ended when I was a teenager, and America became our far away capitalist model to emulate. I moved to California to go to college, and my son was born here, in a comfortable hospital room overlooking the mountains of Marin County. In the beauty of emerald green hills and in our peaceful if hectic everyday life, my mother’s bedtime stories, my nightmares and my brother’s graphic modern warfare explanations began to slowly fade away. Only occasional glimpses of TV news about the war in Iraq kept them from completely disappearing from the back of my mind. My son’s question brought it all flooding back.

Sometimes, your mind does strange things, and it does not recall memories in the exact way it recorded them. A mother now, I suddenly see my son in the black smoke of a burning village. I see him in the dying, starving child in the basement and in burned bodies of nuclear bomb survivors. I imagine his face in place of a uniformed picture of a fallen American soldier in Iraq.

Is war ever good? It was such a short question. I could have given him a long, complicated, well-researched answer complete with statistics and examples. As a teacher, I could have possibly found the way to word it in a child-appropriate way. Instead, when we got home that day and he surely remembered to ask me again, I quietly sat him on my lap, hugged him tight, and simply said, “No.”

By Svetlana Nikitina

Labels: fighting war, Grandma, Marin, Moscow, Olive Branch, Russia, San Francisco Bay Area, Svetlana Nikitina, war casualties, WW11

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My favorite authors are those that invite you into their lives to become one of their family members, friends, or loved ones for the duration of the book. For me, Kelly Corrigan is one of these authors. I had the pleasure of hearing her speak at Book Passage, an iconic independent bookstore in the San Francisco Bay Area, recently. She is even funnier, smarter, and wittier in person, with her book The Middle Place having already set a very high standard.

Because her book magically weaves tales of cancer, being a parent while also having parents, and lots of humor, she had us all crying and laughing. The majority female audience continued to grow as she spoke. At one point I counted ninety people or so, but more kept arriving (and staying).

She asked those who have had or currently have cancer to stand so we could support them, and at least fifteen people stood. One was a woman, thirty years old or so, sitting in front of me with a knit black hat covering her bare head. All I had to do was see her wiping tears, and then I was done for.

When Kelly read, she kept interrupting herself to tell us back stories, or follow-ups, which were just as hilarious or touching as the material she was reading. It was like getting the director’s commentary on a movie.

But overall, from hearing her talk and reading her book, what I came away with is the optimism that she shares with her father. It’s contagious, and you come away wanting to be a better person.

“I’m so lucky,” she says, and you can’t help but believe her.

See what I mean by watching her touching video that has gone viral. Just click here.

By Kristy Lund

Labels: Book Passage, breast cancer, Kelly Corrigan, Kristy Lund, optimism, San Francisco Bay Area, The Middle Place, viral video

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