Dalai Mama Dishes

by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

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Posted October 23, 2007
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Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.

The question on the table is: What is your worst fear? Ben has plucked this from our family's Question Jar: a dinnertime conversation-provoker modeled after a game we played at his grandparents' house. Ben has decorated an old pickle jar, and we've filled it with questions, each written out neatly on a slip of pretty paper. "You should totally pitch this to the magazine!" Ben said when we were done making it -- which cracked me up. That he knows the expression "pitch," for instance. Or that he sees our lives, as I so often do, in terms of how we might mine them for saleable ideas. Probably this shouldn't make me smile, his budding spirit of exploitation, but it does. "You're right," I said. And then a little later: "Actually, I think I already pitched this." And a moment after that: "No, actually I think the magazine already ran it. I think I got this idea from them!" "Pitch it back," Ben teased, my son who knows this as a publishing joke rather than a sproingy baseball gizmo.

But, whether or not the idea has already run in FamilyFun, it's a fantastic one. Sure, there are some dud questions: Ben's What is your favorite color? for example, turns out to be more like a bucket of cold water than a fan when it comes to the flames of conversation. Or Birdy's Which is your favorite at-home tea set? "I like that tiny small one for dolly tea parties?" she explains. "But the different-colors one for really, like, slurping a big cup of tea or, like, having a sandwich kind of tea party or something. The tiny one? It's like: Hello, still thirsty afterwards." After so eloquent a summation of the at-home tea set merits, who can really say anything more?

Some of the questions are fun (What are you most looking forward to?) and some are profound (Is there anything you wish you'd done differently?), and I watch Michael and me struggle to strike the right balance between honesty and, well, deception. No -- not deception. Delicacy. Which is why I don't blurt out now, about my worst fear: That you or Birdy would die. Ben buys me a little more time by offering up his own first: "That I'd be way out in the middle of a wavy-deep and wavy ocean? And I wouldn't be in a boat or anything. I'd only have my life vest on." Michael and I try not to catch each other's eye. I like a person who leaves a little room in their worst-fear scenario for a safety apparatus.

Michael says "Snakes," which I think is kind of a cop-out, just between you and me. And Birdy says, "Going into a dark room," which I am glad to know about. "You know what?" I say. "Nobody really likes going into a dark room." And she smiles and nods. "The dark is good for sleeping," she explains, "because then you don't have to close your eyes. And I never do -- I never close my eyes." "Well, you do when you're sleeping," Ben says, and Birdy says, calmly, "No. I actually don't." I picture her wide-eyed in the dark, the goldfish wide-eyed in their bowl nearby, and it makes me smile. But Ben is suddenly a hundred years old, a 100-year-old with a 4-year-old sister, and he sighs accordingly. Then he turns to me.

"I guess it's that someone I love will die," I say, and Ben nods quietly. "But Mama," he says. "Is that really a fear? Or just something you really don't like?" What a great question, right? I feel like I'm being called on my weird coping mechanism -- the way I treat the inevitable grief in my life as if it's completely hypothetical, as likely as, say, finding yourself in the middle of the Atlantic with only a life preserver. "That's a great question," I say. "I think it's both."

Ben has seen me checking the Website of a young man who was in a skateboarding accident when we were in Wellfleet in July. Caleb Potter. We had been stuck in traffic for hours and hours one evening, and it was devastating the next day to realize that while we'd been complaining abstractedly in the car, needing vaguely to pee, entire lives were changing course, a family's comfortable everydayness was dissolving into the rainy night.

I log on daily to read the blog his mother keeps about his recovery and the recovery of his injuried brain, and I don't need to tell you how wrapped up I have become in the lives of these people I never met, whose exhalations of grief and fear I had breathed in unknowingly as we skimmed the edge of their town. I don't need to explain the odd circumstance of my falling in love with them. Parenting inspiration comes from unlikely sources, and this is one of them for me: this mother's utter fearlessness, even as the future sits as fragile and precarious as a butterfly on her fingertip. She doesn't look back; she doesn't clench up; she doesn't wish eternal safety for her sons. She wants only their living, in their lives, as they are; she is grateful, even now:

"I have felt gifts every minute of the day - miracles all around me as I go through this with Caleb ... Now all of you have to do something for me this week - Caleb would not like to have an unhappy air about town so whoop it up this week - go extra crazy over this - do something out of the ordinary - stretch your limits! Give the cops something to worry about! This is how Caleb lives everyday - so smile - smile - smile!"

I am afraid -- but I am smiling.

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About Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman is the author of the memoir, Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family, available online and in bookstores nationwide.

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