Prologue

 

"There are only two ways to live your life:

one as if nothing is a miracle and one as if everything is a miracle."​

                                                                                                                                             — Albert Einstein

 

          One night when I was 23, I slipped and fell on a ski slope outside of Boulder, Colorado, bouncing all the way down the mountain on a sheet of ice, breaking my back. I thought I was a goner. It took Mom two days to get to my bedside and it seemed like an eternity. I just needed her there - it was such a scary, uncertain time. I would need to be bathed and fed and humored for nearly three months…  a second infancy really. Who else but a mother would do that twice?

 

          I remember the first question she asked my doctor when she finally stormed into my hospital room - “Will she be able to have children?!” I was mortified. How many times had I told her I was never going to get married let alone have babies?!!

 

          My mother has been gone more than 40 years now, and I am way older than she ever gotto be. I can still hear her voice rattling around in my head as if it was yesterday. She died suddenly, of a massive heart attack, while moving my baby brother into his college dorm, leaving me with the strong impression that motherhood is actually deadly, and I clearly should avoid it like the plague. I am one of those people who passionately believes everything that I think. But dead people can be so intense and smart and persistent. It seemed my mom was everywhere once she was no longer confined to a physical body. I am absolutely haunted by her. How else can I explain my complete change of heart?

​

          Bravely soldiering on, it was becoming increasingly obvious that the only thing that would heal the nagging, clinging, lonely void of grief would be to have a family of my own. I had been living with my sister and we were both changing jobs every 6-9 months, just faking it, in that great confused fog that comes with sudden loss. We were both restless and spacey and most certainly undatable. Then this really great, funny, creative, kind guy moved in next door. He was exactly the kind of man my mom would have hand-picked, tied up with a bow and given my phone number without asking me. My sister and I both loved him immediately. Fortunately, she got a job as a flight attendant and was traveling all the time, therefore not geographically desirable enough to really compete with me for his affection.

 

          Alas, Roger didn’t get the memo on the great romantic plans I had in store for him. He had the audacity to invite me over to see his new digs and gesture grandly: “See all this, Liz? This is a shrine to my independence.” As luck would have it, he had been squandering all his romantic notions on the wrong gal for the past three years and when they finally broke up, he naively thought he could catch his breath and be a bachelor for a while. I remember fixating on the antique elk head he had hanging over his fireplace and thinking, “Wow: my initials are ELK! Maybe it’s a sign.” So, there I was - in love all by myself. Our courtship was nothing like my hopeless romantic heart had pictured. But I will always be proud of the deep knowing that I somehow had, that this was my one true love, and that gave me all the confidence I needed to be a total fool for love and risk everything to go get it. I would invite him out to the theater with friends, and he would think that I was a terrific neighbor. Sure, it was awkward, going home to the same front door, but awkward is my middle name.

 

         After months of persistence, and many contrived moments that today might be considered stalking, he finally was able to glean the factoid that I wanted to be MORE than his extra-friendly next-door neighbor, and it was ON… almost as if it was really meant to be.

 

          I loved his family right away. He was one of four hilarious brothers who were really close, and his parents were still hot for each other after 35-plus years of wedded bliss. For unknown reasons, his mom liked me right away, and for those of you who understand the dynamics of reverse psychology, this caused Roger to regard me with extreme caution. After a couple of years of dating, his mother invited me out to the garden after dinner one night. Like a lamb to the slaughter, I followed her, and suddenly she turned and said with great dramatic flourish, “I want to apologize for that crappy son of mine. I do NOT know why he hasn’t proposed yet! You know, dear, there is only one thing to do. You simply must cut him off in the boudoir!”

 

          Now, I am sure this was well-intentioned advice, but it was not the 1950s anymore, and I am pretty private about the olde boudoir and did not relish the thought of talking about such things with a man’s mother. Before going back inside, she grabbed my arm and conspiratorially whispered, “Let’s keep this conversation our little secret, dear.”

 

          I do not know what I said or how I got back in the house, but apparently most of the blood had drained out of my face. My true love took one look at my deathly pallor then hopped up and said, “Well, I guess we better get going…” He gathered me into the car and then asked, “What happened to you out there?” Keeping secrets is not one of the strengths of my so-called character, so I said  robotically, “Your mom thinks I need to cut you off in the boudoir.”

 

          We overcame that little speed bump and were engaged a few months later, ushering in the rollercoaster ride of family life. I began to experience what I call “motherhood-induced Alzheimer’s” setting in that first year following the birth of our adorable son Roger III, so I started writing things down to help me make sense of all the chaos and try to preserve some of the perfect little wacky moments.

 

          Our incompetence as parents was legendary. Slippery toddler Roger seemed to know just how to evade me whenever the phone rang or my head was turned, and he was picked up by the police twice by the time he was 3… not for any felonies per se, but because I had been encouraging him in potty-training by telling him what a big boy he was and he figured that hehad been emancipated. Since we were such successful parents, we were soon blessed with darling daughter Lucy and I was outnumbered, sleep deprived, and under water for the next 15 or so years.

 

          One Easter Sunday, we went with the kids to visit the cemetery and bring flowers to where Mom was buried. Four-year-old Lucy talked freely to her, and she and her brother decorated her headstone with a few jellybeans from their Easter baskets. I had such an ache to have Mom back to spend a little bit of life with her amazing grandchildren. Lucy gets extraordinarily charming and animated when it’s bedtime, and that night as I was trying to talk her down and get her to sleep, she grabbed my hand and said “I’m sorry your Mommy died. But she’s in heaven and you miss her and soon we will go get her and take the lid off her house and clean the dirt off her and I will say ‘Grandma, I love you. Do you have any candy?’ I really love you, Mom. Your hair is dirt-colored. My hair is not dirt-colored. And when I grow up, I will be your mom and take care of you! I love that story.” Goodnight Lucy-moon.

 

          If you had asked me long ago about breaking my back, I would have said it was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. Now, with the 20-20 vision of hindsight, I count that accident as one of God’s most tender gifts to me. It gave me three months of my mom’s undivided attention in the last months of her precious life. And she got the last laugh, as I ate my words that I was never going to get married or have children. I never did find that world-changing career that I dreamed of. I am fond of torturing myself wondering what my purpose in this life was supposed to be, what is the actual meaning of life? Becoming a wife and mother, however unnatural it was for me, was ultimately the best medicine and such a sure-fire recipe for learning those all-important lessons in love, which I am pretty sure IS the entire meaning of life. Love is the only thing that lasts or matters on our deathbeds. Ideally, we can wake up to that little wisdom nugget well before we find ourselves on said deathbeds, and we can dare ourselves to press on to a master’s degree and then maybe even a PhD in the art and science of love. And then rededicate ourselves to that goal fiercely, relentlessly every single day.

 

*****

 

          I have always written down my miraculous moments so that I could sleep at night, because they pestered me until I did. These pages represent a lifetime of moments that still take my breath away. May they resonate for you and encourage you to laugh at yourself . . .  or maybe just at me!