{Review} Recipes for a Beautiful Life: A Memoir in Stories

Once upon a time, Henry and I decided to make a go of it in Western Massachusetts. Alice was just a baby then, maybe 18 months old, and I was seven months pregnant. Henry found a job in Greenfield, twenty minutes north of Northampton, and I left it up to him find an apartment. He found a newly renovated one bedroom on Bank Row, a few doors down from Main Street, facing the town green and around the corner from our favorite restaurant, Hope and Olive.

On a blustery January day, I loaded Alice and my extremely pregnant self into our little green Mazda protege, the trunk and backseat bulging with stuff that was too small to go into the moving truck, and off we went to Greenfield, where we met Henry and my mother outside our new apartment.

That was the beginning of the longest, most amazing year of my life. I look back and can hardly believe it was only a year. It feels like a lifetime. Reading Rebecca Barry's memoir, Recipes for a Beautiful Life,  that year comes rushing back. The move from big city to small city, surrounded by farmland, being poor in money but rich in friendship and love, and the natural phenomenons of the world that make you eternally grateful to be alive. Each story in Barry's memoir is redeemed by the kind of self-discovery that only comes when nothing's easy.

Be grateful. 

Hold space. 

Open your heart. 

Think small. 

Think big. 

This is hard, Barry realizes, but this is good.

Her husband tells her the book she plans to write, the book she did write, sounds like a lot of complaining. He's not wrong but for every complaint, every whine, every "woe is me," there is redemption. There is also much humor because one does not survive motherhood in the early years without a sense of humor and humility.

This is not a parenting book, but those who are in the thick of early motherhood will appreciate this book, this Not-A-How-To-How-To collection of stories that expose the sordid details of marriage and parenthood, the ones that lie behind the scenes of a life that seems romantic and wonderful and magical to everyone else. And the stories are funny because they are true. I know Rebecca Barry. I am Rebecca Barry. I know dozens of Rebecca Barrys. We Rebecca Barrys dream a world of farm shares, starlit summer skies, neighborhood coffeeshops, family nearby, friends at the ready with wine and cheese and bread and company.

Our dream ended after a year and we slunk back to New York, slightly depressed but also slightly relieved to be not-poor again. Despite our own failed attempt, I cheered Rebecca Barry on and willed her to stick it out, see it through, if only so I could live vicariously through her for as long as the book lasted.

Recipes for a Beautiful Life: A Memoir in Stories by Rebecca Barry is out from Simon & Schuster in April 2015. 

{I received an Advanced Reader's Copy of this book for review purposes. This post contains affiliate links.}

Finding Community.

Since Alice was born, we have lived in three different communities, each one distinctly different from the rest. She was born in New York City, and we lived in Riverdale, a heavily Jewish but still diverse section of the Bronx, along the Hudson River. When I first moved to Riverdale, I was dating my future husband and we had no children. My sister lived in the neighborhood and she was pretty much my only friend, since Riverdale is a family 'hood thanks to the good schools and affordable housing prices. When Alice was six months old,  I finally ventured out to a library story time and it was there that I made my first "mom friend." Alana was a great mom friend to have because she was a go-getter that made things happen. Through her, I joined a playgroup that she started in her playroom (It's where I met Justine of Full Belly Sisters and Caitlin of The Joy of Caitlin!) and suddenly, I had a whole group of moms with kids the same age as Alice, a whole group of women accompanying each other on this journey of early motherhood. Besides these awesome women, I also had great neighbors (Hi, Wittes, Lapins and Rocco!) As a first-time mom who suddenly found herself spending long stretches of time with no other adult in site, this group of mothers and neighbors was a lifesaver.

The Riverdale Gang

When I was seven months pregnant with Stella, and Alice was a few months shy of her second birthday, we up and moved to Greenfield, Mass. This was a big change for me. Greenfield is a small city but it is nothing like the Bronx. Thought Henry had friends there, none of them had kids. It was by chance that I fell in with a group of parents, thanks to a chance run-in with Henry's college acquaintance when we were out for Sunday brunch. Again, I allowed myself to be swept up into a group of amazing parents who welcomed me with open arms and library time schedules. It was my first time living in a place with no family nearby and being taken in by these amazing folks was incredible, especially when Stella was born. Though I barely knew these families, they were delivering food and company to us for weeks after Stella's birth. It was spiritually uplifting and to this day, the memory makes me well up in appreciation.

Happy Valley Friends

Alas, we found ourselves back in the Bronx a year after we left. My friends were still around and I made some new ones, before we up and left again for Connecticut. Here, I have found my community  at the preschool, aptly named Community Nursery School. Again, my sister lives here and she was my only friend in the beginning. Living in this semi-rural area means that it can be easy to feel isolated. I look forward to preschool drop-off, where I can count on having at least one good conversation and maybe a cup of coffee with the other moms before we rush off to get errands done before pick-up. Moving here was another big change for us, and I think making friends as adults is hard--having kids makes it much easier but there's no guarantee of a connection.
These three parenting communities were different in personality and style but they have the most important thing in common--we could count on each other for help, to look out for each other's kids and to support each other in this season of early parenting. It may be a cliche but it still holds true:

It takes a village. 

In Marie-Helene Bertino's novel, 2 A.M. at The Cat's Pajamas, the protagonist, 9-year-old Madeleine is shored up by the people in her life after the death of her mother and her father's subsequent depression. This small community of people proves to be her saving grace.

This post was inspired by 2 A.M. At The Cat’s Pajamas by Marie-Helene Bertino, a novel about hope, love, and music in the snow-covered streets of Philadelphia. Join From Left to Write on August 28 as we discuss 2 A.M. At The Cat’s Pajamas. As a member, I received a copy of the book for review purposes.

Marie-Helen Bertino is on Twitter and Facebook. Give her a shout-out!

The (Kindergarten) Graduate

Oh, man, you guys. My heart yesterday broke into a million, squamillion, gajillion pieces. It was the second to last day of Kindergarten for my baby girl, and so she came off the bus with a paper bag full of her journey through her first year in school. In the space of ten months, she became a reader, a mathematician, a writer. She went from this:

to this: 

As I poured through the papers she brought home, the books she had made, the stories she wrote, the pictures she drew, her first year unfolded before my eyes. She grew so much as a person this year, with me and without me. I let her out of my sight for 8 hours a day,  five days a week and entrusted her to the care of people who did not hold her when she was born. As I placed everything neatly back into the folders that Alice had unceremoniously dumped out onto the living room floor, all I could think was, "How amazing her teachers are. I must thank them." Who stapled and laminated all these books? Who organized all these folders? Who made her Kindergarten yearbook with the plastic spiral-bound?  The teachers in her classroom nurtured and encouraged this little big girl of mine, and we are so very lucky to be in this amazing school, with such amazing people. 

{I thought about how, had we stayed in the Bronx, there was probably no way I would have this amazing cache of artifacts documenting Alice's first year of school. In the city school that we were zoned for, Alice would've been in a class of 25 kindergartners and one overwhelmed teacher. Here, she was in a class of sixteen kids and her teachers-plural! teachers!- got to know her very well. Don't tell me class size doesn't matter. It matters.}

I don't really remember being five. I remember my classroom, I kind of remember my teacher and I remember some of my friends. I remember Hurricane Gloria. I remember being in a bus accident. But I don't remember being five. I don't remember learning to read or learning to write. I don't remember what it felt like to be five. But I look at Alice. Her ups and her downs, her struggle to figure things out, to understand who she is in the world. I look at her and  I understand. I get her in a way that no one else can or will because I see myself. I look at the emotions on her face and I know what she is feeling because I have felt them, too. Watching Alice navigate five has filled in the gaps in my own memory.

But don't get me wrong. Alice is distinctively Alice. The world she is moving through is very different from the one I experienced. Her family life is so very different. When I was this age,  five going on six, my parents were divorcing, my mother had come out as a lesbian, my father had moved out of the house, and my mother's future wife was moving into our house with her two kids. I was transitioning from special ed into a mainstream classroom.  I was oblivious to the world around me, in part because of my deafness.  Alice, on the other hand, is all ears and tuned into the world. Her life is all song, all the time. She has close girlfriends and a boy-friend. She's so much more sophisticated than I ever was, sometimes to my mortification, but mostly in a precocious way. Her family life is simple-- the oldest of three, a set of married parents, and her cousins across town to play with.

As of today, my kindergartner is a first grader. I am the mother of a first grader. She will move out of the Kindergarten wing. She will eat lunch in a cafeteria. She will read chapter books on her own and learn how to multiply. She will become more of herself, more Alice.

I hope she will write more things like this:

My mom likes pink cupcakes. My mom is Jewish. My mom loves me. 

Micah is my brother. Micah likes milk. Micah like sleeping.

Stella is my sister. She loves the playground. My sister likes to go to school. Stella is 3. 

I have a cat. My cat loves balls of string. My cat likes birds. My cat once ate a bluebird. 

My dad loves work. My dad snores. My dad loves computers. 

Slice of Life #5

                                                          

Don't worry, I'm not copping out on SOL with a bunch of photos. I just thought it'd be helpful to provide a visual for my slice as of late. See, snow. A lot of it. More coming. It's hard to pick one moment in the day as a slice because the whole day feels like one big slice...themes are recurring and are woven throughout the day, like subplots in a TV episode.  I have days where it all blurs together and time falls into this weird vortex where I open my eyes at 6am, then all of a sudden it's 12:30, and then it's 3pm and then it's 6:30 and then it's 10 (if I'm lucky) and I'm closing my eyes again, not really sure where the day went or what exactly I did. My cousin's wife told me once that we have this thing called motor memory, where we do things without thinking about it. This was after I told her that sometimes I get home and I have no memory of driving home. That's what my life is like sometimes--I have no memory of how I got through the day. I just get through it, even when it's not the same old stuff I always do, it feels like it.

I think I'm tired.