The nurse takes the blood pressure cuff off my arm and turns to input the reading as she tells me the results.

I resist the urge to ask, but the override is not in me.

“Wait, before you push reset, can I take a picture of the display?”

She smiles and gives me a quizzical look.

“It’s a long story, but those are competitive numbers.”

It all started years ago when the doctor prescribed my husband a blood pressure cuff to monitor his numbers at home. He never used it once. But for the rest of us, it sparked a persistent competition for the lowest reading.

Heart rate was also in play.

Things veered from normal the day I accompanied my daughter to the doctor and we asked the nurse to take both our blood pressures.

By the second round, the nurse was taking sides and providing tips and redo excuses for the underdog, me.

As the kids got older, they feigned disinterest. However, I still get an occasional text from one of them with a screenshot of a blood pressure monitor. Even my husband, who does not have contending numbers, recently sent me a decent reading from the dentist’s office.

So I was surprised when I glanced down at my phone to see the photo.

98/70, pulse 62

It was an unexpected, stealth winning entry from the least likely of our four kids.

In the very best way, she has been the outlier in our family from day one. Always elegant and calm amid our loud and dramatic alpha antics.

She was last born and is the last to leave. Next week I will drive her to college, yet the house is already too quiet.

With her typical reserve, she methodically prepares.

She is already gone, as it should be.

She has won.

Ahmaud Arbery was born on Mother’s Day in 1994. This past Friday – May 8th, 2020 – he would have turned twenty-six, the same age as my oldest son.

I do not worry that my sons will be hunted and killed while on a jog through the neighborhood.

That is an unearned advantage.

Wanda Cooper-Jones does not have the same privilege.

“What do I have that I didn’t earn?”

That is the question that Peggy McIntosh, former associate director of the Wellesley Centers for Women, and founder of the National SEED Project, asked herself in 1988.

Her answer became the basis for her groundbreaking, still relevant article, White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, which contains forty-six examples of her white privilege.

Written thirty-two years ago, numbers 14 and 15 on her list are still not privileges for ALL mothers in this country.

14. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them.

15. I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection.

Talking about privilege is complex. Rage, Shame, Fear, and Indifference often shout the loudest in the discourse.

I have been advantaged and disadvantaged by the circumstances of my birth. My choices have been shaped by a matrix of evolving societal and cultural systems.

What do I have that I didn’t earn?

It is not a complicated question.

It is a quiet, deeply personal, honest place to start. 

More importantly, what will I do with my answer?

End note: I took the photograph in 2008 in Austin, Texas.

Elephant seals can dive to a depth of more than a mile, and stay below for an hour or longer, on a single breath. The seals roll over on their backs and spiral towards the bottom of the sea in a slow descent known as a drift dive.

Our guide described the motion as resembling the fluttering of a leaf falling to the ground.

As they descend, the elephant seal’s lungs collapse. The oxygen is transferred to their spleen and then routed to the animal’s muscles, digestive tract, heart, and brain as needed.

Scientists believe the seals use the long dive to rest and process their food. Their gentle decent makes them less noticeable to predators.

That bright February morning at Ano Nuevo State Park was a lifetime ago.

I had tacked on the visit to see the seals during their breeding season on the recommendation of the ranger at Big Basin National Park, where I had hiked the day before.

There was one other person on the tour, a woman from New York City visiting her daughter at Santa Cruz. We spent three hours together, talking and observing the clamorous colonies of elephant seals.

Our guide explained that outside of the breeding season, both the male and female seals are solitary creatures. Alone, they spend between 250 and 300 days a year at sea.

On the walk back to the parking lot, the woman told me that she and her daughter had a troubled relationship. She confessed that when she arrived at the dorm, her daughter did not want to see her after all.

She came to visit the elephant seals instead.

In the six weeks since I returned from California, the entire world has gone into a free fall.

I wonder if the woman, like me, takes comfort in the indelible image of the elephant seals drifting, leaf-like, toward the bottom of the sea.

Resting. Processing.

Alone.

When I was in college, my grandmother would send me twenty-five dollar checks along with newspaper clippings. There was always a handwritten note with the unarticulated, but deafeningly loud suggestion, that the included articles, if read and followed, would keep me safe and change the direction of my life for the better.

What remains with me, almost four decades later, is a low-grade uneasiness when I’m in a flat-roofed building during a storm.

Sheltering-in-place with three of our children, and more frequent phone conversation with our oldest in California, has awakened my clipping gene.

Clearly, I have arrived at the precise genetic algorithm of age, nature, and nurture.

It’s undeniable; I have a biological urge to share valuable information about positive life skills with my children. I can convince myself that sheltering-in-place is the natural time for these helpful discussions.

With each passing day of confinement, it becomes more difficult to thwart my salmon-up-stream desire to share fun facts, graphs, and gentle suggestions. This urge is most potent when our kids at home are staring into screens while surrounded by mountains of laundry and bio-hazard dirty dishes.

But the real trigger is my twenty-year-old son, home from college with his newly adopted puppy. I rationally understand that he is an adult, and I have no business giving him unsolicited advice. I genuinely want to honor that boundary.

But I can’t help myself.

Just seeing him stand outside, waiting for his Uber Eats delivery, makes me want to find my scissors for the article I read in Science magazine on the post-teen frontal cortex.

The clipping part of my brain is old school and sees no value in emailing or texting. Real knowledge must be in a tangible form, something that can be held and put in an envelope.

I’m thankful for our printer.

Sheltering-in-place makes the clipping process much more immediate, leap-frogging the postal service completely.

I’m thinking of placing a corkboard in a shared space, like the downstairs bathroom. I will start with innocuous inspiring quotes, pictures of the family, and a listicle or two.

Who doesn’t want to read a fascinating, life-altering article while sheltering-in-place?

I can count on one hand the times when I have bolted upright in bed in a state of clarity that allows me to receive and preserve a dream’s message.

Last night’s dream came through my gut as I sat, alert, in the darkness.

Gravity. That was the message. It makes perfect sense.

Over the past year, I prepared for 2020 as if readying myself for a mission. I have mythologized the new year and decade with individual and collective narratives of hope and optimism.

Today, in the last hours of 2019, I am a racehorse at the gate and confidently ready.

I cannot be distracted with the usual New Year’s lists for self-improvement that get lost in the margins of the calendar’s first months.

Gravity, in all its meanings, is my resolution.

The new year pulls me to the ground with its weighty balance of solemnity and promise. As I prepare for an empty nest, I am calling back the parts of me that I let scatter, flotsam-like, within the decades of parenting and too much doing. There is a lean muscularity and precision in the new configuration. It has density.

I am returning to the things that are real – family, friends, community, and the earth.

I want to live in full embodiment – to feel my feet on the ground, see the faces of the people I love, work shoulder to shoulder for a common purpose, and be guided by my head, heart, and senses.

It is serious work. It takes sacrifice and discipline.

I feel the gravity.

“The trouble is, you think you have time.” Buddha

Endnote: The picture is of my husband’s Christmas dinner fortune cookie message.

A Micro-Memoir

Twenty-two years compressed into three short chapters

Chapter 1: The Victory Lap

I was looking forward to Back to School Night. The first door to close in our twin daughters’ senior year, like an advent calendar in reverse.

It was to be the final and twenty-second consecutive Back to School Night of my parenting career. If I counted the years when our kids were divided between two, sometimes three, school campuses, the total would increase by a half a dozen or so. For efficiency sake, my internal tally was of just the singular annual benchmark event.

My grand finale Back to School Night was to be the completion of the circle, similarly to how I like to start and stop my runs at the same spot, touching the smooth gray pole to honor the finish.

In my mind’s eye, I saw myself taking a victory lap around the halls where each of our four children went to high school. In the shuffle of parents, I would recognize a few of the same faces from the elementary and middle school years. We would give each other a kindred nod from across the bobbing heads. A grateful, somewhat resigned, acknowledgment of our random good fortune to have arrived at this point that once seemed light-years away.

Chapter 2: The Trajectory

My younger parent-self attended those first Back to School Nights, notebook in hand, with a nieve surefootedness. I attentively listened, read all the handouts, and signed up for the PTA and every committee with a fierce belief that I could get it all right. The possibility of perfect parenting seemed rational and learnable, like a recipe or math equation.

That was before the twelve-year storm of non-stop and over-lapping adolescence.

For each of our kids, senior year is when the gale-force winds die down a bit. But the calm comes with a new distance, as it should, that they guard like a demilitarized zone. By senior year, I awaken to the fact that they live most of their lives behind the checkpoint.

On the afternoon of my final Back to School Night, my girls texted me separately that none of their friends’ parents were going. It would be weird if I went, Twin A added.

I was undeterred by their thinly veiled embarrassing-parent-prevention strategy, although my husband gladly took them up on their suggestion.

I had a circle to close.

Chapter 3: The Grackles

It went against my nature to find myself standing alone in the small gym where I work and not at my daughters’ school. I watched the minute hand tick across the start time of what would have been my twenty-second Back to School Night.

I was not going.

I felt defiant, yet there was a lightness to my choice as if I was flying up above my life, without a bit of heaviness, regret, or disappointment.

When I closed my eyes, I saw the grackles that sit on the telephone wires at the major intersection near our house. Often, as I wait for the red light to turn green, I watch the flock take flight from their perch and spill across the sky, separating and merging, to form mesmerizing fluid swaths of expanding and contrasting patterns.

I marvel at how they intuitively burst into the air, in unison, and then just as spontaneously, land. The birds make the time in-between look like it matters most.

Moving to the floor, I set up for a final round of pushups, the end of a workout I had planned to miss.

Lower down. Press up. Breathe.

The time in-between matters most.

It didn’t cross my mind, not even for one millisecond, that I shouldn’t eat the exquisitely wrapped chocolates at the base of Buddha’s lotus-positioned feet. The small rectangles, packaged in a rainbow of bright colors, looked exactly like the legos I had been playing with all morning.

Having never seen a home alter before, I didn’t know that the chocolates were off limits.

The summer after my freshman year of college, I worked in New York City as a nanny for the sweetest toddler named Paul. His blonde ringlets and predictable, almost constant, cherubesque demeanor were in stark contrast to his kind but wrung-dry looking parents.

Paul was an only child, although there were grown unseen step-siblings, of an older psychiatrist and his second wife, younger of course. She carried herself wearily, without the confidence that I felt around the other young-ish mothers that I met through the service. The other mothers beamed with the good fortune of what appeared to me, a directionless college student, as having it all.

I applied for the job because of the Park Avenue address. It jumped out at me when I was reading the listings in the cumbersome black binder at the Barnard College Alumnae Babysitting Service. I envisioned a penthouse with a wing for me and my toddler charge.

Instead, it was the smallest living space I had ever seen. Adding to the cramped and restrictive situation, was the fact that Paul’s father ran his practice out of the apartment in the living room off the dark and tapestried main entrance.

My domain included a closet-sized kitchen with one window looking out a second-floor air shaft, a narrow hall where I could reach out and touch both walls at the same time, a nursery that fit just a crib, and the master bedroom where a stone carved Buddha took up half the space. The remainder of the multi-use master bedroom included a small futon, all of Paul’s toys and stroller, stacks of books, and a clothesline for cloth diapers.

The items placed around and on the Buddha were a continuation of the explosion of flotsam in the room.

Paul’s mother was decades ahead of her time with discovering threatening food allergies and fearful eating. I spent hours squished in the tiny kitchen, my back pressed into the wall as I sat in front of Paul’s high chair spooning foods I had never heard of in his mouth.

I did not speak with Paul’s dad. He smiled and nodded at me when he walked into his office as I hurried down the narrow hall. Paul’s mother asked me to stay in the playroom, which we pretended was not her bedroom, while her husband saw patients in the morning.

Instead, I would pass the patient time at the playground in Central Park. I ran after Paul and listened to the au pairs complain about their host families and speak to one another in their home languages.

It rained the morning that I carelessly ate the sweets left at Buddha’s feet. Paul and I could not make it to the park. The hours stuck in the apartment were excruciating. Paul’s joyfulness usually softened my boredom and claustrophobia, but that morning, he was cranky. As I read to him, he fell asleep.

I stood up and considered the Buddha. For a month I had shared my workspace with the statue, and surprisingly, not given it much attention.

When Paul’s mother opened the door, I was unwrapping my third rectangle of chocolate. She looked more wrung-dry than usual as her eyes went from Buddha to my hands. I kept chewing and swallowed as fast as possible.

I gave my notice and stayed for a few more weeks while looking for a waitressing job. We parted amicably. I still have the picture of Paul that his mother gave me the day I left. He is climbing on a monster truck tire next to the pond at their country house, smiling of course.

For the first time in twenty-six years, I am not driving somebody somewhere. A rough total milage calculation from all the cars that we owned while raising our four children places me just over five-hundred thousand miles.

That’s twenty times around the circumference of the earth.

I own my acute odometer shame and cringe when I think of my carbon footprint. It’s not the parenting badge that I want to shine a light on and do so only to illustrate what a colossal deal it is for me to be out of the family Uber business.

When I found out I was pregnant with our first child, I followed the hubris of every couple and made the mental list of things that I would never do as a parent. I balked at the thought of ever driving a minivan. It was right up there with never saying a snarky word to my child and the promise that parenthood would not change our marriage.

We went through several ill-fated car purchases including our neighbor’s hail-pocked Tercel, a top-coat shedding Taurus station wagon with chronic heating and cooling issues, and a red Brocho that we discovered later had two bullet hole through the roof.

Several months before the twins were born, we made our last questionable car decision. We were lured into buying a second-hand Suburban because it was so tricked out. We could only hear the bells and whistles and the roar of the impending doubling of our family while letting the accident and mechanical history slip by like white noise.

The Suburban was ok, but just delayed our inevitable car drama correction: Minivan ownership.

As I drove the first of our minivans off the lot, I accepted my life as a transporter of children and understood how people joined cults.

Our two minivans, the second of which we still own, steadfastly saw me through the constant rhythm of activities, sports, play dates, school drop-offs and pick-ups, and general family maintenance. With one push of a button, the sliding door opened and closed as children, mine and others, piled in and out for fifteen years.

The van was part living room, garden shed, dressing area, study hall, storage unit, and kitchen. It became an extension of our family life, and much of our togetherness took place during hours driving up and down MoPac. None of those five-hundred thousand miles were glamorous.

I barely noticed when Leo left the minivan and began driving himself. I have no recollection of the process. What I do remember is standing in our front yard, bragging to the lady next door about what a good driver he was, when at that exact moment, Leo came screeching around the cul-de-sac, jumped the curb with two wheels, and drove through our neighbor’s garden. He parked the car in front of the house and walked by us as if nothing happened. To this day, Leo claims that I taught him how to drive.

Eli and his friends were all gamers and spent way too much time inside darkened rooms. We were eager to get him behind the wheel, out of the house and into the light. We signed him up for a formal driving course, but when he rebelled against completing his road hours with the instructor, Matthew took over, or at least I thought he did. According to Eli, I also taught him how to drive for which he continues to blame me for each of his accidents and tickets, plural.

It was clear that I was pegged as the driving teacher in our family lore. I figured I needed to be more serious about the title with the twins.

Georgia was the most eager to drive. I stretched out the learning process much longer than she wanted, making sure that we completed every item on the parent-taught checklist provided by the Department of Public Safety. Georgia credits me for her being a good driver but quickly adds that it was a hellish process of my constant wincing, commenting on the nearness of objects on the right side of the car, usually in a loud panicky voice, and the dramatic foot smashing of my imaginary passenger-side brake.

Then there was Q. With three kids driving on their own, I downsized to a Forrester and passed the minivan to Matthew. I nicknamed our Forrester the therapy box, as we took our teacher and student positions in the car. We would begin each session with an agreed upon truce, but it rarely lasted around the block. Take Georgia’s description, double the suffering, and add more obscenities.

It has been three weeks since Q and I sat patiently in the hard blue chairs at the licensing office. Her turn was called and I watched as one practiced smile for the camera set us both free. I was officially relieved of my duty, and just like that, almost half my life spent driving somebody somewhere was over.