My older son, Sam, and I were up early, waiting until it was late enough to decorate for his little brother’s fourth birthday. On that morning of remembering babies and births, it was a nice surprise to come across a photo of Sam’s three-week-old sunlit toes on Millennium’s home page. I am a new contributor to Millennium Images, a stock agency of contemporary photography based in London. You can see their website here or on Facebook, and my pictures with them are here.
When she was ten, my great-grandmother picked watermelons so she could buy shoes. Her education ended in sixth grade.
She married at age sixteen, and moved with her husband, and eventually their three children, to a series of mining towns. She started washing the miners’ laundry to help bring in money. Over the next several decades, she transformed the laundry business into a chain of department stores, pulling her family up the socioeconomic ladder.
My grandfather ran the flagship store. When my grandmother wisely realized that my mom got in trouble at school because she was bored, they moved to a nicer neighborhood with a better school.
A generation later, I came home from kindergarten and cried because my class did so little work. My mom disagreed when the principal told her, “Your daughter will have to learn frustration.” She and my dad didn’t want to take a loan from her parents, but they did, so they could move across town to a new house and a better school.
This past summer, when my older son turned six, my husband and I repeated the pattern. We left our beloved 1940s house near the park and moved a mile west, so that our sons could have a bigger backyard, and attend a public school with smaller classes and better test scores. Our new house has a front that only a mass-market 1960s builder could love. My paternal grandparents’ strong saving ethic, and my father’s generosity in passing on his inheritance, helped make the change possible.
The move continued my pattern of making career and lifestyle decisions that previously I would have disdained. Five years ago, when I dropped my older son off at a babysitter’s house, I wondered who would ever want to live in her neighborhood. Now I know the answer: us.
Raising two boys feels like living with big dogs. They need frequent exercise. It is hard to imagine life without our new backyard. The boys can run around independently and safely. We are no longer on the corner of a busy street.
My sons took the former owners’ birdhouses apart, and now use the wooden poles to climb the big tree. A six-year-old girl lived here previously, and they use her abandoned jump ropes and swing as rappelling gear. I see the alarm in other parents’ eyes when they watch our boys. One mom commented that she hoped we had a really good insurance policy.
Part of me is selfishly glad to see them occupied, and part of me believes in the value of their independent projects. I now understand why my mom was happy to let my brother spend hours digging a hole in the backyard so that he could make a swimming pool with a shower curtain. He also made a teepee out of scrap lumber and a clubhouse out of yard signs from my mom’s failed school board race. I didn’t come up with the ideas, but as the older sister I stepped in to boss.
I tease my husband about how he and his seven siblings were given make-work jobs like churning butter. One of the reasons we recently started composting was that it gave us an excuse to have the kids roll a garbage can around the yard. (Another reason was the mechanized apple at a children’s museum that told me, “I wish I was in a compost pile instead of this landfill!”)
Several galleries on my website have new photos (see links below), including images from both houses. When I look at the pictures I don’t feel the fatigue, irritation, full bladder, thirst, hunger, cold, humidity, mosquitoes or distraction that I did during the actual moment.
I have a dozen more years of education than my great-grandmother, and I won’t ever have an elementary school named after me like she does. But when I look at my pictures, I think of Clarence the Angel telling Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey, “See, George, you’ve really had a wonderful life.”
More information about my great-grandmother, Bertha B. Ronzone.
A major milestone: my older son, Sam, age six, can now read stories to his younger brother, Eli, age three. When Eli was a baby, it was hard to imagine just getting through a story with both of them, let alone one brother reading to another. It never occurred to me that one day they could interact without my guidance.
As a parent, I know all too well that a sweet Hallmark moment can suddenly turn into a prison riot. The 25 minutes that Sam read to Eli were an unexpected reward for running the parenting obstacle course.
It was wonderful. And seeing it happen meant that I didn’t go downstairs to make lunch until it was time to eat. By then the boys were hungry, tired and didn’t have the wherewithal to pick up their costumes without arguing. I yelled ineffective instructions from the kitchen.
The next picture on my camera, taken the following day, was a lighting test of me. I was setting up to make a portrait of the boys for their grandfather’s birthday. This should have been easy or at least doable. It was not. As I released the shutter, I took an inadvertent self-portrait of me hearing an entire container of Tinker Toys cascading down our wooden stairs, a harbinger of the no-nap bad behavior yet to come. My overtired younger son delightedly tried to wipe boogers on his brother the entire portrait session.
Sam often handles his little brother’s insufficient naps better than I do. Another afternoon, as Eli burst into tears, Sam said, in his best calm and cheerful parent voice, “Eli, I have a special job for you.” Eli’s round face lit up through his tears and he said “Sam has a special job for me!” He trotted over and carefully carried upstairs the domino box Sam handed him.
The pride I felt at that moment was as great as the sadness I felt a few days later at the park. We were there for a playdate to say goodbye to a family moving overseas. After attending to our friends and watching Eli, I had a feeling I should check on Sam. I found him just in time to see him running with a group of boys and throwing a plastic bottle at a boy with a disfigured face. The boy’s grandmother got to Sam before I did. I would rather have been in her shoes, acting calm and understanding, than in mine, feeling horrified and ashamed and having to ask for forgiveness.
After later interrogations, it appeared that the chasing and throwing game probably started out as legitimate. Some “Lord of the Flies” instinct took over, and the boys focused their throwing on a child with a bone disease.
The whole incident and its ugly truth revealed sin. My son’s, and mine. In my case it was the sin of pride. I wasn’t surprised by the other boys’ bad and mean behavior, but I was by my son’s. I somehow thought I had done a better job than other parents, that I, and he, had escaped the inevitable weight of being human.
Here are other new photographs in the Domestic Life gallery.
“He takes more breaks than a union supervisor,” said Ted, exasperated with three-year-old Eli’s frequent sit-downs in the middle of a scooter practice session in Washington Park in Springfield, Ill. A heat advisory doesn’t take away the boys’ exhausting flow of energy, which must be harnessed into positive outlets.
Ted pushes the boys harder than I would, waiting longer to acquiesce to water breaks or requests to be carried. He is much better at using humor or fun to distract them from their own complaints. I think they have a better time on outings with him than with me.
Some parenting differences are funny. I don’t let the boys use the dog drinking fountain, but after I saw this happen, I had to concede that it probably wasn’t harmful. Here is the ongoing project: Father to Son gallery
It is rewarding to photograph people I am proud to share with the world.
In the last several weeks I’ve photographed three women confronting serious illness in themselves or in loved ones. Their reactions are all very different, but each woman is using her gifts to help better treat or prevent disease in others.
In Peoria, Claudia Garrido-Revilla is a Fox Trial Finder Ambassador. She educates people about participating in clinical trials studying Parkinson’s. Revilla has Parkinson’s herself, and keeps a stack of informational materials in her kitchen so that she can always take some with her when she leaves the house. She also leads Team Fox, which raises money for Parkinson’s research, at Peoria Academy. Medication keeps Revilla’s symptoms under control, but she wants to be part of the effort to find a cure.
On May 3, I photographed at the Illinois State Capitol for the University of Chicago Medical Center as two moms, Laura Lutarewych (black suit) and Sheila Quirke (red sweater), and Dr. John Cunningham testified before the Illinois House Revenue and Finance Committee about the need for greater children’s cancer research funding. If passed, House Bill 4211 would allow taxpayers to donate money to The Childhood Cancer Research Fund through a charitable deduction check-off box on their state tax form. Lutarewych spearheaded HB4211. She and her four-year-old daughter Atia are both cancer survivors. Lutarewych testified, “Currently, childhood cancer receives about 4% of the national cancer research budget.” She pointed out that when life spans are taken into consideration, under the current allotment to pediatric cancer research, a child’s life is valued at $940 a year, and an adult’s life is valued at over $10,000 per year.
Quirke’s daughter, Donna, died from a brain tumor at age four. Quirke testified: “Every single treatment decision that was made was a shot in the dark, an educated guess, a hope, and a wish. The thing that failed Donna was the science. Her cancer was simply better equipped than her doctors.”
After their presentation, the group met Governor Pat Quinn and toured his office, and was interviewed for the local television news.
Happy Mother’s Day, ladies. Keep up the good work.
It takes courage to begin a book with “Is a pen a metaphorical penis?” as Susan Gubar did in 1979 in The Madwoman in the Attic, her widely acclaimed and groundbreaking book with writing partner Sandra Gilbert. It takes even more courage to write about your own serious illness and its debilitating treatment. I photographed Professor Gubar in her Bloomington, Ind., home for an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about her new book, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer.
My grandmother never would have called herself a feminist, but I thought about her a lot as I took these pictures. My grandmother’s deadly cancer symptoms went untreated and unrecognized for over a year. Her doctor told her she was just depressed.
I talked to my dad the night before the portrait session, and was surprised to hear that he thought my grandmother died from ovarian cancer. He wasn’t sure. I thought it was liver cancer. The ignorance and silence about what happened inside my grandmother’s body is an example of why an outspoken book like Gubar’s is necessary.
As a parent trying to make good education decisions for my own children, I respect the parents, some who don’t speak English, who trek to the Illinois State Capitol with The Ounce of Prevention Fund to ask state legislators to preserve early childhood programs. Teachers and early childhood professionals also gathered to advocate at the Capitol in Springfield on April 17, 2012. The Ounce strives to narrow the academic achievement gap and promotes programs that help the development of vulnerable young children.
You can vote in a residential garage and get home-baked treats along with your ballot outside Springfield, Ill. You can purchase the latest community cookbook when you choose your candidate in Dawson, Ill. You can get a warm greeting from poll volunteers, even though they know you’re not local by looking at your car, in Buffalo, Ill. Covering the state primary for the New York Times was a fun way to meet my central Illinois neighbors.
The Domestic Life Archive is now expanded, with more pictures and text and easier search capability. Some photos will be accompanied by essays, like the one below.
Stubborn
Toddler parenting: if you’re yelling, you’ve lost. If you’re asking for sympathy, you’ve lost. If you’re posing a command as a suggestion, it won’t happen. And if you’re trying to use logic, you’re crazy.
Eli, age two and a half, asked for a glass of water as he was sitting on the toilet and we were preparing to take his older brother to school. Wanting to move him forward, I told him he could have a drink as soon as he was done going to the bathroom. At the time, my answer seemed natural and logical.
After several minutes of hysterical screaming, it was clear Eli disagreed.
He continued screaming as I carried him downstairs and unsuccessfully tried to give him a glass of water, unsuccessfully tried to get him dressed, and unsuccessfully encouraged him to dress himself. Still screaming and sobbing and naked from the waist down, Eli grabbed his cup of water, ran back upstairs, scrambled onto the toilet and drank, satisfied at last. He was still upset, but calm enough to pull on his underwear, putting both legs through one hole and wearing it like a belt. He put his pants on backwards. He was in no mood for help, and I was done pointing out the obvious. This is how we went to school, half an hour late, and how he brushed his teeth when we returned home.
Initially I marveled at the toddler who clung so tenaciously to such a silly demand. Later I wondered at the mother who did the same.
