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The blade of the knife should face the plate. This is something my grandmother, my Emily Post, told me many times as we set the table for a Thanksgiving meal.

For all the years of my childhood and most of my young adulthood, setting the table has been our mutual Thanksgiving job. Thanksgiving is the one meal of the year for which we take out the good silver, my great-grandmother’s silver, from its hiding place under the spare bed. My grandmother used to polish that silver until she could see her face in the soup spoons (although we did not actually use the soup spoons), and then we would set the table together, 10 places or 12.  My grandmother would follow after me and straighten the occasional wayward utensil.

This year, I do the straightening.  My grandmother’s hands aren’t as steady as they used to be.  When I find a knife with the blade facing out, I know my grandmother has finally gotten old.

This isn’t really news. Her short-term memory has been fading gradually for years; at a few months shy of 93, it now seems pretty much shot to hell. She repeats the same questions three times in the span of a five-minute conversation; where I live (London), when she saw me last (August), what my mother is doing upstairs (peeing, I think)—we go round and round. My grandmother, reader of mystery novels and doer of crosswords, purveyor of family history, can no longer follow a dinner conversation without getting a muddled look on her face.

Her long-term memory has fared better. Just when I think she doesn’t remember anything, this, in conversation with my aunt and uncle, who are vacationing in Rome:

“When are you coming home?” Gram asks.

“December 7.”

“Ohhh.”  She turns to me with a pinched face.  “I don’t like that at all.”

“Why?”  I wrack my mental history bank.  “Pearl Harbor?” I ask.

Grandma nods solemnly.

We say goodbye to my aunt and uncle, and then, for the fifth time in 20 minutes: “Where’s your mother?”

My grandmother doesn’t have Alzheimer’s, nor any other kind of dementia that we know of. She’s just old. She’s never had cancer or heart disease or a stroke; she’s got what she describes as her “bum knee,” high blood pressure, and a sensitive stomach.  Not bad for 92 and three-quarters.

She also still insists on living by herself, to our perpetual frustration and worry. As much as I wish she would give in just a little, I suspect this lifelong independence (and stubbornness) has allowed her to get to this age in such relatively good condition.  My grandmother raised three children on her own after my grandfather left her and never dated again. My mother once commented that she hoped Gram had a decent vibrator in her hey-day. She might have: My grandmother worked for Planned Parenthood and fought quietly for women’s reproductive rights long before they were fashionable or legal; she’s never been prudish about sexuality.

But now that she sometimes forgets her pills and is shaky on solid ground, let alone the icy sidewalks of winter in Rochester, we’ve all been pressing her to move to closer to her children. If only she lived just around the corner, rather than seven hours down the turnpike—we’d all feel a bit more secure.

We would, but perhaps not Grandma. She may not remember the conversation of the past five minutes, but that her children and grandchildren continually nudge her to move from her apartment of the last 50-odd years, an apartment overrun with old pictures, with a desk still bearing my mother’s elementary school pencil holder: This she remembers.  And she’s not giving an inch.

One day, my father sensed an opening. She commented how helpful he was as he got something out of the fridge, or went downstairs to iron the tablecloth. He mentioned that maybe she’d like to be down the street, so she could reap the benefits of his helpfulness more often. She conceded that yes, that would be nice.

The next day, my father brought up this conversation.

“What?” Gram said, an incredulous look on her face.  “I never said that.”

It feels to me, on the plane over from Heathrow, that I am really coming home to set the table with Grandma. As much as I love my mother’s turkey, I will be with my family again in three weeks for Christmas, and the flight from London is neither very short nor very cheap.

But my grandmother doesn’t spend Christmas with us. It’s too much traveling, she says, after Thanksgiving—and anyway, she’s a Jew. She prefers to spend the day in her robe, eating the candy we send. So if I miss Thanksgiving, I miss Grandma; I miss setting the table with her.  For a decade she’s been warning us that she might not be around next year. At some point, she’ll be right.

It would put us, her family, all at ease if she would spend the last years of her life closer to us. We think she’d be happier in Massachusetts, with more to do, more people to talk to.

But of course, the woman isn’t senile. She’s almost 93; she struggles to remember what she’s doing with the onion she’s in the middle of chopping for the stuffing, but she remembers the important things, and she knows what she wants.  I suppose—though it pains me to admit it, should her safety be compromised—that having gotten this far, she probably deserves to live the rest of her life exactly how and where she wants.

She plunks the silver down on the table, slightly askew, and I adjust it when she looks away. Turning back, my grandmother admires our handiwork and reminds me that the blade should face the plate.

Photograph of family by Comstock/Getty Images.

Tags: Christmas, holidays, silver

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Milan Kundera wrote that happiness is the longing for repetition, and there’s nothing more repetitive that brings more happiness than holiday traditions. For me, each year my parents would take both me and my sister to a small farm in upstate New York where Dad would somehow expertly wield a handsaw and chop down our tree. We would decorate it with colored lights and bright gold garlands because Mom (who loved Christmas more than anyone) appreciated the childhood whimsy it provoked. On Christmas Eve, we would dress up in our holiday best to attend church, and then come home to prepare the sugar cookies we’d made (slightly burnt and smothered with red and green sprinkles) for Santa’s highly anticipated arrival.

However, what I remember most of all is that every Christmas Eve the four of us would sit on the couch in our pajamas by the light of our multicolored tree and watch the 1983 recording of the Boston Pops holiday concert.

Dad, always the man to videotape just about everything, had randomly recorded the broadcast on WGBH from the year of my birth. Ever since, we watched the recording with John Williams as he led the Pops through the typical holiday favorites. At one point the audience (and we) would join in on a sing-a-long and Lorne Greene would read 'Twas the Night Before Christmas. At the end, Santa Claus (who my sister and I always insisted was the real Santa) would come through the back doors of Symphony Hall and give out candy canes on his way up to the podium, before brandishing at Maestro Williams a miniature E.T. (the film had just come out) in black tie holding a conductors baton.

Every year it was the same. The same performance with audience members whose clothes and hairstyles began to look more and more dated as the years progressed.

This was our repetition. This was our happiness.

As fate would have it, I ended up going to college at Northeastern, right down the street from Symphony Hall. When each season’s concert schedule was announced my parents would suggest we get tickets to see the real thing. But every year we didn’t get around to it, always saying, “We’ll do it next year.”

By the time I graduated in 2005, my sister and I began to feel too old to be bothered with sitting on the couch through yet another predictable performance. We muttered that singing along was lame, while busy texting friends. We watched distractedly for only a few minutes until our frustrated parents gave up and turned it off.

The following year, when we yet again went to put in the tape, we realized with horror that it had somehow been accidently taped over. All that was left now was a blank screen staring back at us. That would be our last Christmas together as a whole family, for a few months later Mom died in a car accident.

Just like that, everything was gone.

As the next holiday season approached, we dreaded what the day would bring without her. I couldn’t help but think about all the chances we’d had to go to the performance live, something I know would have made her happy. Why had we waited so long? And, more importantly, why had it stopped meaning something to me?

Feeling overwhelmed by everything I’d lost, I felt compelled to try to reclaim something. I searched online, made calls, and e-mailed the site contact at Symphony Hall detailing my situation. Finally, just five days before Christmas, a woman in the offices on Massachusetts Avenue wrote me back.

She apologized for the delay and told me they had several strict musician union rules preventing them from sharing archival copies of their performances. However, my letter touched all of the people involved, and everyone there wanted me to have a copy of the concert. They were so touched that the Holiday Pops meant as much to others as it did to them that all I had to do was sign a letter of agreement and she would overnight me the tape.

It arrived just in time. On Christmas Eve, in the quiet sadness of our living room (there would be no tree, there would be no cookies), I told my dad and sister that I had a surprise. I watched as their confused faces turned to shock, and then came great heaves of tears as the familiar sounds and images on the television showed us the one thing we had taken for granted the most—time.

Every year it’s the same. Every year we buy presents and spend too much money and lose our minds while losing sight of what really matters. We grow up and grow bitter and let ourselves forget that at the end of the day we’re all packing and traveling and gift-giving because of the people in our lives that we love. We’re driven by the hopeful idea that something small, like an old recording of a concert, can bring a family together. We say “as soon as,” and “next time,” and “maybe next year,” when we know we shouldn’t be wasting another minute. We stop believing—in people and the innocence of youth—and become accustomed to coming home to certain things that once are gone leave holes in our hearts nothing can ever repair.

They say you can’t go home again, but we all keep going home every year to a place that constantly changes, a place that means different things to each of us in different parts of our lives. There is a lot we can’t control, but it is those repetitive things that we cling to that mean so much more than we oftentimes allow ourselves to admit.

The holidays and my life will never be the same without my mother. However, now that I can’t have her here in the present I can at least have the tape as a reminder of her and the way things once were. That way, during this season of expectation and hope I can believe, for a little while anyway, that not everything has to become lost.

Photograph of family by Ryan McVay/Photodisc/Getty Images.

Tags: Christmas, milan kundera

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Anyone who is figuring out which New Year's resolution to adopt should take heart from today's piece by Dr. Maria Johnson. If you yearn to do something more ambitious than losing 10 pounds or stop biting your nails, how about taking up a musical instrument? Dr. Johnson recently swapped the mysteries of God for the mystery of guitar chords and found it enriching, rewarding—even uplifting.

I have told myself for years that, come my next sabbatical from teaching college theology, I was going to learn guitar. I don’t know why I would tell myself something so patently untrue; I didn’t even pretend to believe myself. I had plinked my way miserably through a lonely decade of youthful piano lessons without stumbling across the merest sliver of musical talent and besides, guitars are for cool young people, and I’m neither. The entire idea was absurd and nobody is more surprised than I that now, less than halfway through the sabbatical, I own a guitar, know 12 chords, and can play more than 20 songs, a couple of them almost decently.

It began with Robby and Paul, who met among the group of students that meets at our house on Thursday nights to watch movies. They discovered they shared a taste for folk music. For reasons I don’t fully understand, they decided to take up residence here; they started appearing on the doorstep several night a week with their instruments. Other musicians soon congregated around them, and before our eyes, our rather staid movie group mutated into a gang of rough-edged chain-smoking hipsters with guitars and banjos and harmonicas and even a washboard, who would hold late-night backyard bonfire jam sessions three or four nights a week.

This was fine with us—our general policy is to keep the doors open and welcome whatever shows up. But for me, the turning point came when Robby and Paul appeared one evening  and announced, “We’ve bought you a guitar—what’s with not having a guitar?” It instantly became one of my favorite things. It is not a high-end instrument: It is banged up and has a patch of duct-tape on it, and cost $25 in a pawn shop. This suits me perfectly: I’m not very good about taking care of objects, and am much happier around those that don’t demand tender solicitude. My guitar has been around the block a few times, and isn’t going to balk or whimper at being left on the porch or experimented on by my children. We deserve each other.

So, I had the guitar that I would never have got around to buying for myself. The next thing that I wouldn’t have got around to was learning to play. Again, Robby and Paul took the problem out of my hands; “Right, you need three chords to get started. This is G, and this is C—no, look, this way—and this is D. That’ll do you for most things.” This, apparently, is how it works for guitar. If you want to learn viola or bassoon you find a teacher and book lessons. If you want to learn guitar, the rule is that you find a teenager and ask him to teach you a chord—a rule that seemingly applies even to theologians in their 40s.

Initially it was baffling and downright painful—you have to push metal wires up against bars, hard, with fingers accustomed to computer keyboards. And you have to bend your fingers into odd configurations, and then into others, really quickly, while meanwhile, your right hand is doing something totally different that looks easier but actually isn’t; all in all, it’s a quite a lot for a middle-aged brain to take in at once. I’m no good at all, and never expect to be. But my fingers have callouses, and my middle-aged brain, tired of puttering around the same tiny patch of scholarship for years, has been surprisingly cooperative about trying something new. After four decades of gloomy acceptance that I am utterly unmusical, discovering that I could actually get through a whole song was slightly less surprising and exhilarating than suddenly discovering that I could fly.

The best moment of the summer was when I inserted myself into the group around the bonfire. Even five years ago I would probably have been deterred by the inherent foolishness of my dorky, soccer-mom self flailing helplessly half a measure behind a gang of hipsters half my age, singing songs about young love and hitchhiking and cocaine; I was delighted to discover I care not a whit.

I have even been an inspiration to others. The impressively nerdy Pat started out watching us from the shadows. Then one day he requested his favorite song, then eventually joined in, and finally astonished the assembled company by singing it, all by himself, all the way through, in front of all the real musicians. It was pretty bad, but he did it. Emboldened, he bought himself a guitar, I passed on the mysteries of G, C, and D, and we spent many a happy hour ploughing our tuneless way through "Hey Mr Tambourine Man."

All good things come to an end. The weather turned cold and wet, Robby and Paul acquired girlfriends, Pat moved away to grad school, and the Thursday night movie group morphed back into a group that meets on Thursday nights to watch movies. I haven’t abandoned my guitar (current project, "It Ain’t Me Babe") but it’s less fun by myself, and anyway, one doesn’t get sabbaticals for learning to butcher Joan Baez and Leonard Cohen.

But they can’t take my 12 chords from me. Nor can they take the discovery that there is infinite, innocent fun to be had when one no longer cares whether one looks like a big dork. I’ve hustled my way shamelessly into an onstage role as a parent in my daughters’ ballet school’s Nutcracker, and have been spending Sunday afternoons at the studio, dahling, surrounded by lithe 12-year-olds in leotards, happily miming cocktail conversation with a cluster of air-kissy grown-ups. I think I’m having even more fun than my kids. In a couple of weeks I’ll don a outlandish dress to do it all in front of an audience in a real theater. Robby and Paul, benignly curious about the monster they have helped to create, are coming to watch.

Dr. Maria Poggi Johnson is the Director of the Graduate Program in Theology at the University of Scranton.

Photograph of woman with guitar by Digital Vision/Getty Images

Tags: guitar, Hey Mr Tambourine Man, It Ain’t Me Babe, Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen

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The first of our pieces about marriage counseling comes from J., who sent in the following about why she and her husband went to seek help.

It was 1986. We'd been married seven years (yeah yeah, what a cliché—the Seven Year Itch) and had two small children. My husband is a professional musician and has always traveled for a living. Back then he was playing lead alto for Frank Sinatra, flying first class all over the world, staying in fabulous hotels, rubbing shoulders with celebrities, living the high life. Meanwhile, I was home, alone with our daughter and son, 1,000 miles away from my own family. We lived close to my in-laws, but they had a very active social/work life, and didn't have time for much baby-sitting. I had grown increasingly resentful, disenchanted with my marriage. Mike came home from weeks on the road, exhausted, ready to catch up on his sleep, have home-cooked meals. I longed to have him step in and share child-rearing responsibilities and take me out to dinner. No such luck. The watershed moment I remember is when, in the middle of us having words, I said, “Listen, pal, when you come home, you're HOME. This isn't your celebrity life—the limos, hotels, fancy dinners. You carry out the garbage, help with the kids, be a partner to me—this is your REAL life.” And Mike said, “How do you know? Maybe that other life—the limos and glamour and celebrity—maybe THAT'S my real life.”

He couldn't understand that his being happy and successful wasn't enough for me, that I had desires and dreams of my own, a career of my own, which had been put on hold so that he could have the life he wanted while I assumed all responsibility for our home and family.

I was devastated, and my feelings of aloneness and my anger were overwhelming. I ignited a relationship with someone who was a friend to both me and my husband. It was an intensely emotional affair—he was a sweet, available, quiet, and domestic man. He wanted me to leave my husband and marry him. He was ready to take on my children, too.

When my husband found out, he was completely freaked out. After years of me asking him to go to counseling and him saying, “What for? I'm perfectly happy with things the way they are,” things changed. He begged me to go to counseling with him, even went so far as to find a therapist and make an appointment. And we went.

He, of course, felt that he had the upper hand—the moral high ground—because I'd betrayed the marriage by having an affair. I really didn't know what to expect from our therapy; frankly, I didn't care. I was already emotionally checking out of the relationship. The going rate for therapy back then was $70 an hour, about half what it is now. At our first session, when Margaret asked us to talk about our issues, my husband immediately talked about how I'd betrayed him and our marriage, while he'd been out on the road, always faithful, focused only on his career. And then she asked me how I perceived our marriage. Out poured all my heartache and loneliness, my terrible unhappiness. I talked about my deferred dreams, what it was like to be alone, how angry I'd been for so long.

And Margaret looked at my husband and said, “What an ass. Of course she had an affair. She had to get something from someone. She should have left your sorry ass.”

My husband's jaw dropped. He expected to hear that I was the bad guy, and that's not what our therapist saw or told him.

Long story short, this woman kept our marriage together, helped us to remember how we'd adored each other as newlyweds. She made us recognize that we had a good foundation for marriage—physical attraction, two children, a basic appreciation of each other. My husband made huge changes, his eyes opened up to what it was like to be the one left behind while the other flew. It didn't change the nature of his job, but he came home a different man.

We've now been married for 30 years, solidly, happily. We have, in our own estimation, a very successful, close relationship. I believe our therapy made all the difference in the world. We both got words of real empathy and wisdom when we needed it. So when people say that affairs saved their marriages—it's not as ridiculous as it sounds. Sometimes a big catalyst is necessary to move a relationship forward.

J. is a writer and musician in Chicago

Photograph of couple by Stockbyte/Getty Images.

Tags: marriage counseling, marriage therapy

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As Hanna has already pointed out, this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine deals with the issue of marriage counseling (and marriage in general). The author, Elizabeth Weil, decided that although her marriage was fine, it could be better. She thought she and her husband should pay their marriage the same kind of attention they paid their careers, their kids, their health, and their friendships. “I decided to apply myself to my marriage," Weil writes, "to work at improving ours now, while it felt strong.”

The way she did this, she tells us, was by working her way through the books and the assessment tests into the therapist’s office. Off the couple went to a “reed-thin psychoanalyst” who was given to pronouncements like, “On the first count, you find Dan unavailable because he’s not relating to you. He’s just using you as a sounding board. But on the other hand he feels he can’t reach you either. He wants you to accept his affection and praise, but those attentions make you feel smothered, and that makes him feel alone.”

It’s hard to tell at the end of the piece what Weil and her husband gained from their efforts. It’s impossible to know what goes on inside anyone else’s marriage at any time or why two people choose to marry in the first place. Yet while her story isn’t as riveting as some of the better episodes of In Treatment or Tell Me You Love Me, it piqued my interest because I’d like to know how many of you have tried marriage or couples counseling in any form. Did you go—like Weil—to strengthen an already strong union? Or did a crisis force you to seek help? How did you agree on this course of action? What form did your sessions take? How much did they cost? And the most important question of all, what did you gain from going?

Send me your stories at emma@thecomebackbook.com and I’ll run them.

Photograph of unhappy couple by Getty Creative Images.

Tags: elizabeth weil, In Treatment, new york times, Tell Me You Love Me

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One thing I wish I could bring home from Italy but cannot: the gonging of church bells. Here in Perugia, they mark the quarter hour with a primeval sound intended long ago for people who couldn’t read, people who had no access to clocks, serfs who needed to get up in the morning and pray. Now the bells serve a different purpose: I do need to get up and make breakfast for recalcitrant schoolchildren, go to work, return home, check e-mail, make dinner. I don’t need these bells to tell me the hour—I have a BlackBerry, a cellphone, and watch—but they clang out a larger, deeper measure of time, the mortal one.

We are culturally Christian, atheist Americans in Italy. We celebrate Christmas with a tree. The most church time our children had before Italy was once when I had the quaint fantasy of exposing my toddler son to a country church in upstate New York, pushed his stroller through the wooden doors only to spy stacks of anti-abortion leaflets, and backed quietly out. We all went together one Sunday to St. John the Divine in Manhattan, on the day when they bless the animals and dogs and camels walk down the aisle. They were too bored to sit through the sermon, so we went outside and petted the reindeer.

Since we’ve been in Italy, though, we’ve entered dozens of beautiful churches together, from Rome to Bari. Besides the endless walls of Renaissance art, the virgins suckling babes, the hanging statues of bleeding Christ, we’ve seen the macabre stacked skulls of Otranto, the shriveled but well-dressed 11th century corpse of St. Ubaldo in his glass coffin in Gubbio, the reliquary of St. Nicholas (yes, that’s Santa Claus to us) in Bari. We’ve watched men, women, and children enter, make the sign of the cross, and kneel, while we, atheist tourists and never more outsider than when in these places of worship, wander around the margins of their sacred ceremony, agog at the paintings, at the mind-boggling beauty of the jewel-box ceilings.

The quotidian bells are but one way in which religion—in the material form of churches—has regulated life in Italy for so many centuries. For us these churches are museums; for the Italians, something else entirely. And the harder I try to understand what that something else is, the more baffled I am.

Does the church, for example, exert some kind of moral sway? Not really.

At school, the Italian fifth graders say “Oh mio dio” and “Madonna!” as mild oaths. They have all been confirmed in the Catholic Church but they also swear and fight a lot, so all that regular churching hasn’t made them any less like our kids in that sense.

In the hours between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m., all the shops shut down. People go home for lunch, and, I am reliably told, many of them are using that free time to have sex with their lovers. Their “nooners" last for hours. Italy is home of the slow-sex movement.

Furthermore, the nation’s very Catholic leaders are lascivious old men, openly consorting with boobalicious babes not their wives, even prostitutes (Berlusconi), and acknowledging relationships with transvestites (Google the governor of the province of Rome). No one seems to mind.

Does the church provide comfort to the aged, to those who have lost loved ones?

Perhaps. Whenever we enter one of them, we see the occasional older man or woman, sitting alone, or on knees, head down in prayer. But they never seem crowded.

Religion exerts an undeniable pull, though.

Our children are fascinated by the votive candle tables. They always beg us for a euro to drop in and light one, after which they, too, have acquired the habit of kneeling at the bar and putting their hands up, praying to a divine being whose existence we have never acknowledged in our household.

At the basilica of St. Francis in Assisi, they watched other children and parents lining up to be blessed by an actual priest in a brown wooden box, and they wanted to do that. I gave them two euro coins and they joined the line, only to be sent away with a mere nod, rather then having their hands actually held. A small sign at the window indicated the blessing required a $10 euro donation.

We went to Mass on a Sunday morning at San Pietro Church here in Perugia, a stunning, gloomily lit antique with black marble pillars, walls are decorated with dark Renaissance paintings depicting Biblical scenes we will never understand without a guidebook. I made the children sit quietly through the entire service, from the hymns to the Italian sermon. When the worshippers lined up to receive the eucharist at the end, my son Felix wanted to see what they were doing. I told him to get in line.

We lost sight of his low head in the line of adults moving toward the altar. After an unusually long time, I began to panic. I got up and crept to the side, from where I saw him behind one of the great pillars, being talked to by a man in black. I waved, and the officiant relinquished our chastened child, who returned to report that something he had done—probably taking the host and then taking it out of his mouth—had caused alarm. “He asked me if it was my first time, and I said yes, and he told me not to tell anyone,” he said.

I left the Mass in a state of mortal embarrassment rather than grace. By letting Felix enter the line uninstructed, I had displayed the heedlessness many Italians associate with Americans. I have since come to understand that since our son never made a First Communion, we may be technically guilty of host desecration, a charge commonly hurled at Jews and witches in the Middle Ages. I assume that since he is a child, he is forgiven.

I, on the other hand, am another story.

We have since returned to San Pietro’s grounds, because the Benedictine monks operate a medieval garden behind it, but Felix gives the actual church door a wide berth. He is always worried that he will run into “that man in the cassock.”

Thus, perhaps the first and greatest religious mystery of all, fear of the man in the black cassock, has been revealed to us.

Photograph of the Duomo in Milan, Italy by Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images.

Tags: Bari, Italy. Perugia, Otranto, Renaissance art, Rome, San Pietro Church, the basilica of St. Francis in Assissi

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I’ll confess. This is the week that I force the kids and the dog into their Santa hats and take our annual Christmas card photo. Over the years the picture has gone out on everything from the cheapest stick–it-on-yourself to the most expensive hand-engraved cards. Last year, in the interest of saving time, money, paper, and the planet, I finally succumbed to attaching the photo to an e-card and found it highly satisfactory. Like so much to do with family, our annual tradition has become at once a chore and a delight. Should I give up on the card altogether? Probably not until the chore part outweighs the delight.

Today it seems that Jane Roper might have reached this point. She describes her reasons below.

Every year around this time, I ask my husband the same question: Are we doing holiday cards? And every year his answer is the same: an emphatic no. In the past, I’ve responded by calling him a crank, a curmudgeon, and a Scrooge with no sense of tradition, and sent out cards (from both of us, of course) on my own.

But over the years, I’ve grown increasingly ambivalent about the whole thing. And I think 2009 may be the year I finally end up in the Grinch-y no-cards camp with my husband. Here’s why:

1. So over the politics. If someone sends us a card, are we obligated to send them one, too? Can we drop people from our list if we fall out of touch, or do we have to keep sending to more and more people every year? If someone drops us from their list, does it mean they’re mad at us? It’s like trying to put together your wedding invitation list every year. Ugh.

2. Children. We have two of them, twin girls who are almost three. I try not to play the working-mom-with-young-kids card too much, but in this case, I think I may be justified. My free time is so limited, so precious; do I really want to spend it buying cards, chasing down my friends’ current addresses, trying and inevitably failing to print labels from my computer, adding the all-important “personal note,” to each card, and stuffing envelopes? As opposed to, say, reading a book or going to the gym? Call me selfish if you want. I can’t hear you over my daughters’ outside voices.

3. Facebook, e-mail, Twitter, cell phones, etc. The tradition of holiday cards dates back to a time when people weren’t constantly, obsessively in touch with each other. Is it really necessary to reach out to my friends and acquaintances in this manner when we can go online and read about what the other had for breakfast on any given day? Why send one another pictures of our kids when we can just post jpegs?

4. Money. We have a lot of friends and relatives. Decent cards start at $.50 each. Stamps are $.44. Can I just donate what we would have spent on holiday cards to a worthy charity? I can be lazy, cheap, and sanctimonious!

5. The environment. This is a biggie. In the age of virtual everything, it’s nice to get a real-live card in the mail—creamy hardstock, glitter and all. I like it, too. And I know that e-cards just aren’t the same. But I also know that I feel a tree-sized pang of guilt a few weeks after Christmas when I dump a six-inch stack of cards into the recycling bin. Consider the millions of holiday card recipients around the globe doing the same thing, the factories that manufacture and ink the cards, the mail trucks and planes that deliver them, and you’re talking one big, jolly carbon footprint.

6. Other forms of holiday cheer. Buying gifts, putting up decorations, making cookies and other holiday fare, going to parties and other festivities, spending time with friends and family. These things are time-consuming in and of themselves, and to me they’re a lot more fun and meaningful than sending and receiving small, folded pieces of paper. A girl’s gotta have priorities.

And still, spite of all of these arguments against them, I’ll admit it: I’m not entirely convinced that I won’t give in and send cards this year. There’s an old-fashioned part of me that loves the tradition, the personal connection. And some of our friends do send pretty kickass cards; I’d hate to fall off their lists.

So maybe we’ll split the difference and just send to the friends and relatives we never see, either in the flesh or online. I’ll use recycled cards with vegetable-based ink. And make the twins lick the envelopes.

Jane Roper is a Boston-based writer. She blogs at Baby Squared.

Tags: Facebook, holiday cards, twitter

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• 8

Before I became a journalist, I taught. My first job in New York was as a high school English Literature teacher. Back then, I was only six or seven years older than my students, which to me seemed like a lifetime and to them felt like 10 minutes. I lived in a different part of the city, so rarely encountered my students outside school. I can only remember one occasion when seeing them flustered me. I was at a bar in SoHo when two or three walked in. As we caught sight of each other my face fell, while their faces lit up.

"Hey Miss Gilbey," they sang out. "Seeing as we're all in a bar, can we call you Emma?"

"No," I replied briskly. "You may not."

Jessica Rosevear reminded me of all of this when she sent in today's piece about being a teacher in a small town. She never gets to escape from her students. She has my sympathy.

I laughed in recognition at Emma Pillsbury, the young, goody-two-shoes educator on Fox’s new smash-hit show Glee. Five days out of the week, as a public high school English teacher in New Jersey, I was exactly her, right down to the red hair and overwhelming sincerity. It wasn’t because I wanted to be, but because to be a role model and win the respect of my students and colleagues, I had to be. The only problem was that unlike most teachers who go home to their real lives and take off the stiff sweater sets at the end of the school day, I lived in the 4.4-square-mile town where I teach. As a single 26-year-old, this makes things tricky.

It started out as cute. I’d see students in the produce aisle at Stop & Shop, give a friendly wave, and turn back to the task of selecting a head of iceberg lettuce. I didn’t realize how much of a problem it would be until one day, while buying a bottle of wine at the liquor store, I spotted a senior trying to pick up a case of beer. Throwing my money at the cashier and rushing out of the store, I felt more like I was the one committing a felony, not him. The tired human being craving a peaceful evening at home with a book and a glass of white suddenly became the wayward teacher, buying booze that she would drink alone in her yoga pants.

It snowballed from there. On a jog after school one day, I was mortified when the entire cross-country team passed by me on the sidewalk during their practice. I’ve been spotted on dinner dates with my boyfriend. When I got pulled over for talking on my cell phone while driving, I was more upset at the thought of being seen by students from whom I’d confiscate cell phones regularly than the thought of receiving a ticket. Last year, after realizing that two families from the school lived in my apartment building, I began covering the pajamas and thongs in my laundry basket with a big towel every time I went downstairs to the laundry room. I stopped ordering takeout for fear that one of my students might take an after-school delivery job.

“Be careful,” my colleagues warned me. “People talk in a small town.”

Paranoid, I envisioned the board of education discussing my tenure at a public meeting. “Her skimpy workout clothes, her traffic tickets, her boyfriend—she is a depraved, promiscuous young woman,” the board members would say, looking at each other and shaking their heads. Mothers fan themselves; fathers purse their lips. “How can we, in good conscience, keep this young woman working in our public schools?”

On the flip side, some kids enjoyed these run-ins that I found nightmarish. After running into one of my pupils several times between trips to CVS and Starbucks, I finally confessed my residential status. “I might move, though, so I don’t run into students as much,” I told her.

She looked chagrined. “But I love running into you!”

“You don’t need to see me buying US Weekly and cookie dough at Stop & Shop.”

“But it’s nice to know that you’re a real person,” she said.

Yes, teachers are real people who engage in real-life activities. And sometimes, being a townie helps me to connect in ways I never expected. Last year I frequently ran into one student’s mom in the mornings at the local bakery. At the end of the year, she told me how much her son enjoyed my class as we stirred our coffees at the milk counter during that last week of school. “He said he hopes his little sister gets you next year when she starts her freshman year,” she added.

I drove the rest of the way to school on a cloud that day. There are few compliments better than a student saying he hopes you go on to teach his little sister. Sometimes those moments happen more easily while ordering lattes than when erasing the blackboard. Maybe it’s good to get a little personal, not just be a talking head at the front of the classroom.

But I’m still picking another jogging route ... at least until I turn 30.

Jessica Rosevear teaches at the former high school of Glee star Lea Michele, writes for Instructor magazine, and blogs at www.jessicarosevear.com.

Photograph of teacher by Comstock Images/Getty Images.

 

Tags: Emma Pillsbury. New Jersey, Glee, kids, teaching

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• 33

Some girls start making lists of their children's names when they're still kids themselves. And some girls don't. Some of us graduate from college and spend our 20s and 30s living life to the full with no interest in babies. For some, that lack of interest lasts a lifetime. Because some women just don't want to be mothers. And that's OK. But often that choice is judged negatively, as if not being a mother means you are not a real woman. If the reaction isn't negative it can be patronising, as if it hasn't been a real choice and you'll change your mind. Why can't we be more respectful of this decision? Hillary Fields tackles the subject in today's piece.

It begins when, during my annual exam, I tell my GP that I’ve just gotten married. “Oh," she says, “You’d better start having your babies now. You only have two or three years.”

A-whah?

When I’m finished doing my double take, I am able to focus in on the tiny, earnest woman who is still talking at me. “Now that you’re married, you can start to have children. But since you’re 32, you should start now. Women over 35 have a much harder time conceiving and carrying healthy babies.”

I haven’t been living under a rock for the past three decades, so this is not news to me. “I hate to break it to you, doc,” I say, “but I was capable of bearing children before I wed. And you didn’t bring up the subject then.”

She smiles as though this is a very funny joke, and then gets serious again. “No, really. Start thinking about your family right away, or you will regret it.”

“Dr. ___,"I say, “I’m really not sure I want to have kids.”

This does not appear to be information of great import to my physician. “Even so, you should do it now. You don’t want to wait until it’s too late, and you find out you haven’t any eggs left.”

Demurring as politely as I can under duress, I reply, “I’m not going to have children just in case I might someday want them. That doesn’t sound like a smart idea.” I figure this will be the end of the subject, and we can turn to more important things, like my ludicrously high cholesterol or the mole on my back I’m not sure I’ve always had.

But no.

“I’m serious,” she stresses with the air of a woman who wants to be 100 percent diligent about discharging her duty. “You should know that if you delay now, you may regret it later. I’m just giving you the facts.”

This is a bit pushy, even for me as a native New Yorker used to dealing with pushy people.

“I get it, Dr. ____. I’m just not in a position to bring a child into my life at this juncture. Financially, we’re not set up for it. We’d have to string the kid from a hammock on our studio apartment’s ceiling to make room for it.” Time for a new topic now, surely.

Nope.

“People have children all the time when they’re not secure financially,” she presses.

“Do those kids go to college?” I shoot back.

Finally the exam (or cross-exam) is over and I’m back on the street. I find myself fuming mad, but also ... ashamed.

Because the truth is, I’m not sure I’ll ever want kids, and apparently, this is unnatural.

What’s wrong with me? I’ve got oodles of awwws for puppies and kittens. I melt over baby pandas and bunnies and such. But human offspring? Not only do they all resemble Winston Churchill to me, they elicit no such admiration as did the great man. They drool, they squawk, they poop all over themselves—when they’re not vomiting, sneezing, or coughing up a tiny, itty-bitty lung.

Oh, I’ve heard the reassurances. “It’s different when they’re your own.” This pap doesn’t reassure me, however. What if it’s not different? And, hey, what if I simply don’t have a maternal bone in my body?

I’m not sure what makes me more uncomfortable. Seeming unfeeling—and unfeminine—to society at large, or wondering if, later in life, I will regret it if I don’t have children. Will my life seem empty? Will I wrestle daily with what-ifs? Do people like my doctor know something about life I don’t know?

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve sworn up and down I’d never have children of my own. Unless I were visited by the Ghost of Kiddies Future, begging me to bear them, I’ve always felt it’s ... I don’t know ... presumptuous to bring a life into the world without permission. Perhaps this is because, until I was in my late 20s, I myself wasn’t particularly glad to be on the planet. I suffered from major depression (among other things) and had a difficult childhood raised by parents who, it was clear, would have been better off not being parents. I was always loved, but love was an odd thing sometimes. And my mother was no great model of maternal mushiness. She was (and is) a great woman, but she simply didn’t do Donna Reed.

But wait ... what about hubby? I married a man as emotionally connected as I am detached, a fella who coos “boojie boojie boo” at every tot who happens to occupy a high chair at a nearby restaurant table, a man so sweet, so full of love that I just know he’d be the best papa ever in the world. Does he secretly long for a little girl or boy? A little. But he knew the drill when he married me. I told him I might never get to a place where I wanted rug-rats.

Still, wouldn’t it be a great gift to give the man I love the children that might make his life more complete? Don’t I love him enough to rearrange my world and my expectations and my comforts, change the course of my future so that his will be fulfilled?

Honestly, I don’t know. Two-and-a-half years after that uncomfortable doctor’s appointment, trembling on the verge of statistical ovarian decrepitude, nothing has changed. I’m still child-free, still not feeling a crater of emptiness in my womb or any place else. But will that still be the case in five years, or 10, when it’s just too damn late?

I want some sort of sign to help me decide what to do. And here’s where I curse my sluggish biology. My hormones simply haven’t kicked up a ruckus to help sway me toward being a mother. They aren’t weighing in, making emotional demands, the way I hear they’re supposed to. Legend speaks volumes about the fabled biological clock that starts ticking for women, a haunting toll that begins following you around like Poe’s telltale heart, growing louder and more urgent the longer you wait. For my mom, it was one of the deciding factors in having me and my brother. One day, she says, she started looking at kids in strollers and thinking they were cute, when she had never noticed them before.

Well, they’re still not cute to me. Not yet. I wonder if someone’s smothered my particular alarm clock with a pillow, or unplugged it, or what. Because, if my doctor is to be believed, I’m counting the final seconds off on my fertility countdown, and if I don’t act soon, the option will be off the table.

Perhaps the silence is, in itself, the answer for which I’ve been waiting. Maybe it’s not meant to be, not for me.

I just wish I knew for sure.

Hillary Fields is a New York-based writer, editor, and web producer.

Tags: choice, Hillary Fields, kids, motherhood, women

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• 13

All I can say about the following piece by Emily Piacenza is that if it doesn't make you want to race out and get fitted for a bra, I don't know what will. Have a great weekend, everyone.

In my own defense I would like to clarify that I am not obsessed with boobs. My younger brothers are. Many of my friends are too. My students talk about them constantly, and I laugh at their ever-evolving mammary euphemisms: tits, totes, chesticles, gazongas, fun bubbles. I actually detest the word "breasts," always tripping over it clumsily or unintentionally emphasizing it. But I am not obsessed with boobs. I am interested in well-supported lady lumps, though, and the way that women become happier when theirs are comfortably secure. I am interested in feeling strong and sexy, and having my friends feel that way, too—all of which, I guess, is to say that I am actually obsessed with bras.

When I was 10 or 11, I wished very sincerely not to have breasts. They seemed inconvenient and unfair. My well-endowed soccer teammates looked ridiculous when theirs bounced painfully down the field. I watched mine grow against my will, charting their progress in the bathroom mirror, and hoped that maybe they would stay small and get in my way as little as possible. I was angry that one was larger than the other: At the very least, if they were out to ruin me, they could do so symmetrically. The idea of wearing a bra filled me with dread, and when I finally did graduate all the way up to underwire support, I cursed the daily discomfort, the slipping straps, and the permanent red marks left on my ribs. My mother and sister could never really relate, tiny-titted as they are. (“You clearly get those from your father,” my mother even once observed, to my great confusion.) I knew I should appreciate my icons of womanhood, but I did not love them. Eventually I learned to overlook the itching, sticking, and digging because I realized that my breasts looked better supported than they did just hanging free on their own, and though I felt restricted, I knew I appeared more attractive and more professional when harnessed in—and suffering.

But two years ago, a friend changed my life by telling me that she had been fitted in a fancy store in New York City and that her bras never rode up or down or anywhere that they weren't supposed to be. I didn’t really believe her. She said people had started telling her, "You look great!" as soon as she bought her new bras. "Eighty-five percent of women are wearing the wrong size bra," she told me. So it came to pass that, skeptical but vaguely hopeful, I headed to Madison Avenue on a Saturday afternoon, figuring brassieres certainly couldn't get worse and hoping to at least acquire something sexy in the process.

Inside the store, I was seated briefly in a tight corner, surrounded by lingerie and hosiery, and there I filled out a questionnaire about my goals. I was interested in comfortable, everyday bras, not "special occasion" lingerie. Yes, I often found that my straps slid down and that underwire left marks. I did not have a problem with bras being too tight. I wasn't sure if they were too loose. No, I did not need a lot of padding. Yes, my breasts were two subtly different sizes. In the space marked "other concerns," I wrote, "I am a schoolteacher and cannot have my nipples visible at any time. Thank you." A small bespectacled woman eventually approached me through the screens of silk and lace, collected my paper, and glanced over it quickly. "OK, Emily, please follow me into the dressing room," she said, not really smiling, and back we went.

In a small, curtained cubicle she asked me to take off my top and bra, and I stood uncomfortably aware of my boobs as she looked at them quickly and quizzically and then left. Alone, I gazed at myself in the full-length mirror, but before I could do a thorough analysis, she was back, armed with twenty bras. She chose a plain black one with lacy straps, held it up in front of me, and then with one swift movement hooked it around me. I couldn't remember the last time anyone had actually helped me put on my underwear, and so distracted was I with that thought that I didn't even really notice that she was tugging at the bra and adjusting the straps, the band, and my breasts. She stepped away to give me a glance into the mirror. I stared.

My gazongas looked gorgeous. The bra felt a little bit tight but my new mentor explained that the band should be bearing almost all of the responsibility for supporting the bust. Most women, she said, relied heavily on the straps for support, and they shortened them when the bra felt loose. The tightening in turn caused the back of the bra band to ride up, which tipped the breasts forward and thus actually helped them droop. She showed me that the bra should be worn down lower than I thought, across the smallest part of my back. "You're a 32D," she told me. "And here you’ve been wearing a 36C all these years." Fascinated (a D?!) I tried on the rest of her selections for an hour, ultimately choosing just three practical bras and one fancy one. Choosing was difficult. The ones I bought were expensive. I didn’t care.

The next day I wore a new bra to school and two colleagues asked if I had been working out more lately. At first I thought they were joking. When I took my new acquisition off that night, I had no red marks on my body where the bra had just been. I felt sexier. I was converted.

Some people didn't believe me. ("Your boobs are way too small to be a D!" they said, and "A bra? That changed your life? What about your education? Please.") I guess it seemed too easy. But women wear bras every day, and bras should not, therefore, be an afterthought, picked up off the floor and donned in haste. They should be as comfortable and as attractive as possible. We don't settle for terrible haircuts, and we wear those every day, too. Why should we settle for ugly, poorly cut underthings?

These days, my friends call me the Bravangelist and roll their eyes when I start talking about underwear. One has accused me of having a breast fixation and has even bought me an erotic magazine as a joke. But several of them have been fitted and have discovered that their daily comfort and quality of life has been improved with this one simple change. My cousins have purchased new bras. My roommates have purchased new bras. Some of my colleagues have sought their true size, at my urging, and not one person regrets the experience. ("I’m so ashamed that I can’t even clean my bedroom!" one friend wailed recently. "My floor is just strewn with ill-fitting bras!") Now I walk straighter, feel happier, and love myself more. I like my fun bubbles buoyant, thank you very much. And recently when a creepy male friend of a friend approached me at a bar and drunkenly said, "Hey, you. Listen, I have a special gift. I can guess cup size from just a quick breast squeeze ... let me try yours and show you!" I was able to tell him thanks but no thanks. 32D. And yeah, I'm sure of it.

Emily Piacenza is a writer and teacher living in Connecticut.

Photograph courtesy of Emily Piacenza.

Tags: boobs, bras, breasts, lingerie