@theterrace

I found out that Kamala Harris lost and Trump would be our next president at about 1 o’clock in the morning, when Tatum woke me up, crying. She fell asleep with me, inconsolable. I knew how she felt.

While more than half the country clearly appreciates Trump’s vision for our future, I find it destructive. I see dismantling of basic checks and balances in our trifold system, stripping away of women’s rights not only to make decisions about our health and bodies but also about our very lives—since having a child only gets started at delivery (see last post); destabilizing our economy since I don’t believe that this administration cares very much about the working or middle class, in spite of their sales pitch; ignoring the planet’s health; and decreasing our sense of safety with each other and in the world.

It makes me sad, more than anything because I love the country we have built up over the last few hundred years. It takes so long to build and it’s so easy to kick structures down. To reflect on this, I took the children to see the Constitution and Bills of Rights the week of the election. It was moving.

My hope is the incoming administration will bring honor to those men who constructed our cool system of democracy. I hope they will restore more dignity and respect to people who feel left out or disrespected. I hope they will bring better budgets at the household level and the country level, and feelings of hope, trust and pride in all that the United States represent. Will they do the good works that my conservative grandfather would be proud to be associated with?

Will they honor the vision of George Washington, who represented the best in bestowed and elected power by modeling how to carry power lightly and peacefully, handing it over graciously when one’s turn is up?

My hope is that sadness is transformed into pride. Sometimes we lose our lives to find them when the broken pieces reassemble into something even better. Let’s see what each of us can do individually, collectively to reassemble into the better.

Hugh’s friends in Poland were baffled when he explained that the rest of his family lived in California, DC, Nashville and Copenhagen…simultaneously. “Do you not like each other?” they asked. We do, very much. And this is why having my mother live across the country from me, or vice versa, still kind of stinks. In the season of thankfulness, I’m thankful for planes. They brought Mom and Doug to us once again, for a fall visit.

Whereas the hills of Montclair, California, offer unbeatable views of city lights over the Bay, our little neck of the woods offers unbeatable…woods. I am so proud of our Cabin John Creek trails. Doug walked them with me and probably appreciated my company just fine, but would have better liked the company of his fishing rod.

One fun part of the visit was attending one of Finn’s competitions, where they got to see Finn’s freestyle, currently in development for international competition trials. Look at those screenagers.

One of the things I admire most about Mom is her gift for and investment in friendships, and this visit was no exception. Anna Borg, Jimmy and Rose, our neighbors Lisa and Norman, and Dad and Auntie Blitz came over to watch the elections, and it was indeed good to have company. Tatum, Aiden, Finn and Clara were gleefully startled by the irreverence of the so-called grown ups lounging around drinking, smoking, cussing and pontificating.

Marley pried herself away from hardcore senior year studies to come for Mom’s birthday, and we went out for Middle Eastern foods at Ala in Bethesda. Mom, naturally, ordered a lavender martini.

My kids have only celebrated Mom’s birthday in person with her a handful of times, so we made the most of it. Clara made dinner with me and Tatum made mini lemon custard and meringue cakes for dessert. Finn was on the low key end of participation, as Tatum, unimpressed, points out in his “card.”

Our celebration circle extended beyond the usual activities to include some handyman love. There’s nothing like rotting wood and funky electrical wires to bond men. It was great having Doug and Dad conspire to get my house back in shape. They brought out the ladder, the electric drill, hammer and nails, light bulbs, the whole toolbox, and repaired our steps, put up porch lights, replaced flickering lights with calm ones and generally made our house more respectable again.

This was nice because it gave Mom and me the chance to shop for my gala jump suit—more on that in a moment. Activities aside, it’s just the best having my mother by my side to talk and talk and cook and read and talk. It’s funny that the older I get, the more I need my parents.

It snowed yesterday, which was a cue that fall is about to slip into winter, and I haven’t shared fall updates in awhile. Highlights include Halloween and a visit from Grandoug Einstein and Mama Zombie; college applications dropped in the metaphorical mail box; I became a professional photographer; Kyiven signing the largest Bank loan ever; Clara and a dozen red roses; Finnittowinit and the Spot for Space; and reaching the extraordinary milestone of ten years of Roshan. Lowlights included the closing the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv and the election of Donald Trump as our next president.

Halloween was a spectacular orange and green spectacle, and I that’s all the Charleston Chew I can bite off for this first update. I love our block. We are chock a…block full of young families, which makes it fun for children of all ages, especially my parents. Check out Grandoug’s new Einstein look. Poppy showed up predictably unpredictable: He wore a green beret, spoke in something between an Irish and Indian accent, and sported a tight, bright yellow polo with a Redskins logo. When Clara pointed out that was perhaps not kosher, Poppy replied, “Yes, isn’t it wonderful?” In some kind of bad accent.

Finn declined to dress up but didn’t fully decline to knock on at least one door, the Donnellan’s, with his buddies—two of whom made a full-on effort to embrace the costume, Eli as an alien and Carter as a turkey. They scared the dog but I think the little kids mostly laughed at them.

Clara didn’t dress up, and Tatum went with Aiden as part of a video game couple but I couldn’t tell they were in costume. I know it was a priority, however, because college applications briefly took a backseat to the front seat drives (multiple) to the thrift store. Clara didn’t embrace a character but Mary was impressive as the lead druggie/chemist in Breaking Bad.

Even Kevin got into the spirit, as it were, with his colleagues in Kyiv. He said they decided to celebrate this uniquely American holiday because any distraction helps.

They were enthralled by Georgetown in all its glory afterwards, thanks to Sheila driving while I kept the candy machine going at home. Clara was a bit shocked by Palestine protestors seeming to drip blood, but loved seeing the world get wacky.

How they’ve grown.

And they’re off! Like circus cats in a clown car, the tiny green Mini rolled down the street with Tatum behind the wheel, Clara beside her, likely fiddling with the radio, and Finn, now the tallest among them, stuffed in the back like a folding chair holding a fat backpack. It’s a miracle they can all get in the car—but I’m not worried, Tatum takes full advantage of the convertible aspect of the car to provide mental and physical space. There’s nothing like a happy teenager with hair flying to remember the real reason for a car, which is obviously joie de vivre.

There is going to much to unpack about my joie de vivre shimmering with all three pigs in one schoolhouse for one blessed year. However, there is still so much to unpack about the summer that I didn’t get to share yet. We can start with the fantastic karma that accompanies hard work and unparalleled motivation. Let’s call it “carma,” because look at the smiles on these two new drivers, who are absolutely glowing in the light of their new licenses. Go Tatum and Bridget! Tatum celebrated with brunch at Tastee Diner.

Tatum had a highly accomplished summer, because in addition to getting her license, she completed a year’s worth of French III online, got a certification, job and employee of the week award as a lifeguard at Palisades, and completed about 80 percent of her college application and list of schools of interest. Moreover, she has her first publication coming out in the fall, a chapter in a book about the desert, edited by none other than Joanna Biggar. Tatum’s time in wilderness, metaphorical and literal, has produced jewels.

Yet Kevin and I consider this Clara’s Epic Summer. At 15, Clara travelled solo to South Africa to participate for more than three weeks in a wildlife conservation program. Given Tatum’s immense growth during her time in the great outdoors, we thought Clara might love it as well. Outward Bound and similar programs didn’t align with our schedule, but Hugh told us about Global Leadership Adventures, “peace corps for teens,” and that captured our imaginations. Clara said yes before we even finished the invitational question.

She unfortunately didn’t write us letters or take her own photos, but I got some intel from a program blog and she told us more about it once home. It sounded, well, epic. I would say an experience of a lifetime, but I hope she’ll have many more. She learned how to track poachers, saw every imaginable animal on game drives, and made new friends.

Two weeks into the trip, Clara got Kevin and me on the phone at the same time—not an easy feat spanning three continents—and asked if she could go to a new school this year (hence the clown car, see above). Then she had the chance to talk it all over with Kevin when she hit the streets and plastic sheets of Costa Rica for a child care service project, followed by surfing and ATV driving on our vacation. See? An epic summer for Clara.

Of course, her favorite week may still have been the traditional summer trip to Deep Creek Lake in August. Tatum said the Fourth of July week at DCL was her summer highlight as well. Poppy and Grams have given us a magical gift with the family gathering at the dock each year.

Stones on the path of the week have to include fireworks and possibly swimming under the stars on the Fourth itself; cousin time; Blitz’s and Sean’s trivia night preceded by Patrick’s homemade pesto and followed by birthday cake for Blitz; a visit or six to The Creamery; an actual cinema showing of the latest good movie; dinners on the porch at the cottage and the big house; boggle and cam jam, books and tanning time at the dock; tubing and boat rides; coffee in bed with the aunties; and many games of telephone tag (“What? I can’t hear you. What judge is pickled in potatoes?” “No, I said don’t judge my salad, it should have triple the amount of tomatoes”).

There are so many moments over the summer that I want to etch into to my mind, but I can’t say I wasn’t counting the days til school started. There is a certain amount of crankiness that sets in when schedules are too fluid for too long. So school arrived just in time, and for once, I only have to keep track of one of them. But I’m guessing it will still keep me on my toes, and it will definitely have my heart as I watch the clown car roll slowly down Tomlinson Terrace.

“It’s really surreal. One minute I’m meeting with my team in the shelter and then I’m eating a $7 ribeye at this little European bistro on the sidewalk with some colleagues, and it’s beautiful,” Kevin said over the phone on his first night in Kyiv.

What’s also surreal was hearing the missile alerts speak to us decisively on his phone when he first returned to DC and forgot to silence them. They commanded us to go to shelter, repeatedly and, dare I say, alarmingly. However, when the alert was over, an hour later, they kindly blessed us to return to our lives with a cheerful, “May the force by with you.”

Kevin’s reports include the following. The 11-hour overnight train ride from or to the border of Poland allows for privacy but only a bench and not a bed per se. It was kind of cool being introduced at a meeting by the Prime Minister of Ukraine. Cyrillic is hard to get his mind around. And he loves the people in Ukraine, whom he says are unwaveringly committed to victory, open to nothing less. His team is close and they like to be at the office, now located in a big hotel with a safe bunker and back-up generator, because it feels like a reprieve from the intense pressure of everything else in some ways.

It doesn’t fully protect mentally, however. Kevin’s hardest day in his brief three weeks on the job came the day of a terrible missile attack that landed on a children’s hospital (only 10 minutes from his apartment, I might add). Being a day-time attack, the team was at the hotel-office at the time. Kevin had to refuse to let his colleagues leave work to collect their children, which he said was very hard, but one can’t be out during a raid. The mothers were beside themselves, as I could completely imagine. (Most of his Ukrainian colleagues are women because men are less available.) They came together for lunch and wine in the office the next day, just to decompress and collect themselves as a community.

In addition to the extremely disruptive power outages, which are frequent and make communication and working difficult at best, a big concern is disrupted sleep. Missile alerts happen almost nightly it sounds like, and there are limited sleeping spaces in the shelters. First come, first serve is the system. People shelter in subway stations and basements, as anyplace underground is best.

Unless you’re Kevin and have decided that sleeping in your bathroom is just fine. “Yeah, it’s fine. It’s pretty safe. I’m inside double walls. I don’t worry about my safety,” he told me. What does “pretty safe” mean—shouldn’t that be a yes or no situation? He has not yet gone to find his designated actual shelter in the building next door. (That shelter is under a kindergarten, which I can hardly think about.)

But other than those issues, Kyiv is a garden of roses. Literally. There are gardens everywhere, and summering in Europe is delightful. Kevin raves about the architecture, the cobblestone streets, the sidewalk restaurants, murals and street musicians. It sounds amazing, once you get over those pesky missile alerts.

Now that his two-week summer vacation is over, he’s off again, currently in the Frankfurt airport en route to Krakow en route to the border en route to the overnight train en route to Kyiv. (That sounds like the beginning of a bad children’s story.) He would love for me to come visit and see his stylish apartment with its balcony in the trees on one side and overlooking a charming market on the other. As much as I would love to eat pastries under fairy lights at some artful bistro, that doesn’t seem quite wise at the moment. In fact, that might be a little surreal.

It’s hard to capture Clara smiling in a family photo this year—and her school photos could wither a spider (no offense)—but this girl in the middle of some little kids and she’s lit up like a hot tamale. They banded around this beautiful child of mine like fans to a rock star, which she is. The photos are the proof of what she’s too modest to say, which is that people feel her care, her sense of fun and kindness and her spark.

International Volunteers Headquarters (IVHQ) assigned Clara to work in a child care program in gritty San José, Costa Rica. IVHQ is a program my friend recommended, and Clara initially asked to work on a 2-week turtle conservation project on the coast, in line with her love of beaches and the environment and Bali. That plan got upended by Kevin’s move to Kyiv because Clara wanted him to join the trip and he could no longer take 3 weeks of vacation.

Instead, they slept on plastic sheets in a narrow room in a home stay in San José for one week, and then Tatum, Finn and I joined them for a week of vacation in Montezuma for a week. While Clara’s slightly older peers in the program, those not joined by a parent, were possibly checking out dance clubs and local pubs, Clara and Kyiven were drinking tea, chatting with Vera in a flowery house dress and watching cat videos before falling asleep at 8.30 pm.

But look how worth it that was: Clara was amazing with the kiddos and loved the experience. They loved her, it’s plain from the adoring hugs, and she is super organized and responsible, which teachers need in a classroom. Whitman High School prepared her well, with a Child Development class and hands-on practica experience developing curricula and leading activities with pre schoolers—although in this case, Clara and Kev worked with slightly older kids.

Poppy prepared her well too, and she was ready to go with the hand games, no language skills needed.

Clara

Riding ATVs, the butterfly garden, swimming in the surf with Dad and Tatum, and playing Old Maid in The pavilion. Especially swimming with Tay.

Tay

Riding ATVs, swimming in the ocean with Clara, taking a nap in the hammock, playing Old Maid last night, and Finn’s competition.

Finn

Eating food with the family, walking in the jungle, ATVing.

Kevin

Breakfast every morning with Mamasita, the ginger kick smoothie, and yoga.

Heather

Finn’s family game, playing Marco Polo in the tropical pool, playing cards and scattegories at the ferry building, moonlight streaming over on the ocean, yoga with an ocean view and breezes every morning with Kev and Finn and once Clara, the massive evening thunderstorm, seeing my first pizote, bananagrams with Clara, the jungle hike, seeing my kids laugh with each other, mint tea with milk, and everywhere views of banana leaves, sea-green and cobalt ocean colors, fat, neon green iguanas, and deep raspberry-colored flowers. And Finn telling the server a joke in Spanish, getting the set up wrong, about snow. Snow balls in particular. Has Daniel the server ever seen snow? Regardless, Daniel laughed for five minutes straight and did that Latin snap with his fingers that expresses true appreciation.

Kids from the Indy Air Bears, Proform Airborne, The Comet Skippers, Raincity Ropes, and Kangaroo Kids, among other teams, shouted “You got this!” or “Yeah!” or “Push it!” Parents clapped and hollered from the bleachers—and may or may not have played a lot of bananagrams. Judges nursed thumbs sore from clicking clickers for hours.

Jump roping is an amazing sport. I’m totally a convert, willing to proselytize: you can do it alone in your garage or with a team of ten in front of a full stadium at halftime. You can do it for $5 a year, the cost of a rope. You can do at age 5 or 75. You can do it as a fat, frumpy granny or an elite world-champion athlete. You can do it to meditate in a zone or as a complicated dance routine with cowboy hats and riding pants.

This is not to say that I personally do it. I can’t jump for 30-seconds straight. But these athletes are incredible! And Finn is the best!

Okay, that’s totally a lie. He’s the best in our family and that’s the truth; but more than that, he’s one of four members of the second-best team in the country for Single Rope Speed Relay and Double Dutch Pairs Freestyle. That’s by official ranking in the 2024 National championships in Salt Lake City. That’s pretty cool.

Finn’s favorite moments of the past week included three highlights. One was seeing his friend and team member Alex overtake more established athletes to claim the gold medal for triple unders (the rope does three rotations each time the feet leave the floor); I think he did 204 triple jumps without stopping. The second was the team dinner over Olive Garden pasta and breadsticks in the lobby of the Fairfield Inn-Herriman. After dinner, everyone received a paper-plate award with artistically designed marker drawings for a specific strength: most likely to write this up in a Snapchat story, most likely to have a sugar high, most likely to live off of endorsements and sponsorships, and so forth. Finn received a plate reading, most likely to learn a trick after seeing it just once. I think he will treasure it more even than the many medals and two plaques he earned. And the social, a Hawaiian-themed party on the football field next to the inside venue for all the athletes, was a huge hit. Riley was seen running across the field on his toothpick legs carrying Finn in a fireman’s carry across the shoulders; and Finn particularly loved getting dunked. Boys are weird.

He had decided that being on the team is too much to do during the school year because getting to practice each of three days a week entails a full one-hour drive in rush hour traffic on the beltway and 270. He doesn’t get home until 7.30 pm, just in time for dinner, chores and bed, but not homework. In addition, he misses out on track and cross country with friends and Coach Smythe and possibly making the basketball team again.

But we will have to see if he reconsiders this decision after this glowing week. His teammates and coaches would be thrilled.

My favorite moments from the week were seeing Finn’s individual freestyle go so well that the national champion, Conner of the bleached hair and sleeveless shirts, gave Finn a high-five; and seeing Finn fully own the camouflage swim trunks, flowered Hawaiian shirt and funky blue beach hat, gift of Uncle Brooks, which he tipped onto his head with a flourish. A signature move to complement his jump combos.

Of course, there was also the handstand. Mason, 19, son of Coach Nicole and a super athlete, had flipped over and walked a couple steps on his hands. Coach Nicole saw Finn watching and said, “Finn, try it.” Never one too shy away from a request, flipped himself onto a perfectly balanced handstand and proceeded to dip into a push up and back up again. It took a lot of balance and strength. Coach Nicole laughed and told her son he just got showed up.

Just for the record, Finn got up before breakfast to swim laps in the pool. I sat on the side with coffee and a sunrise view, not to be mistaken as an athlete. One other memorable aspect of the trip was the pick-up truck. The rental car rep apparently took one look at me and said, “This lady needs to drive a monster truck.” So that was fun.

It’s not often a girl turns 21. Once to be precise! Plans to go to Rocklands Farm Winery were rightly superseded by friends whisking Marley out for a surprise picnic and bar hop, so we settled on alfresco dining with a sunset view over Bethesda and beyond from Blitz’s ritzy rooftop terrace.

Marley is creative and disciplined, drawing within the lines of her field and her life but still the beautiful 6-week-old and fanciful 6-year-old in my mind’s eye.

Her selected menu was decidedly unfanciful: burgers, green beans, corn and key lime pie. That’s my grounded, down-home goddaughter; she keeps things simple yet sprinkles in the magic.