The Inside Press

Magazines serving the communities of Northern Westchester

memories

For Mother’s Day: Family Memories Shared by our Sponsors too!

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A Family who Golfs Together Stays Together!

Miyuki Shirakura, Business Administrator of Dr. Aki Shirakura and Associates Dental Practice in Armonk, with her beautiful children Douglas (14) and Maya (12).

“Golfing with my kids is something wonderful we all share a love for and enjoy doing together. I hope they will keep golfing throughout their lives and with their kids someday.” –Miuki Shirakura

What it’s All About

“It’s not always about burping, feeding and diaper changes Sometimes it’s about having fun. Thanks mom for hanging out and playing with me at World
Cup Gymnastics Romperee Class!”

Chappaqua Grandmothers

“Mom Jean (Jean Bueti) and and Mom Marge (Marge Cullen) as she is ready to make a wish…They both live close by, a hop and a skip through the Greeley woods and over the stream.”

–Sandy Bueti and Teresa Cullen Bueti, Bueti Brothers Builders, Inc.

Celebration Time

Daughter and granddaughter, Gail Marie and Daniella Victoria Delbalzo, enjoyed time together celebrating with Mildred Rose Politi on Mildred’s 104th Birthday.

Gail Marie Brow Studio & More

Chaotic is the New Happy

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Jodi Baretz and her sometimes happy family.
Jodi Baretz and her sometimes happy family.

By Jodi Baretz

When Grace asked me to write an essay on “Happy Homes,” I chuckled a bit to myself! I’m not sure what goes on in your house, but in mine, it is certainly not always happy. I would describe my home as a loving, accepting, nurturing environment, but a bit chaotic and tense at times. Overall, we are a “happy” family but from the look on my teenager’s face, you may not think so.

I have a little problem with always striving for happiness. Happiness is a fleeting feeling, not a state that we should expect all the time. Families are messy. Life is messy. Kids are messy. Instead of happy home, let’s aim for a full adventure recognizing our full range of feelings; things may not always be perfect, but embrace the good, bad and ugly because they are there anyway. By being more aware that there will always be set backs, bad grades, tons of drama and spilled milk, we can certainly tolerate challenging times a bit more.

Having expectations of what activities we want our children to be involved in can create stress in a home. We may want our son to play baseball, but they want to take an art class. My son is a wrestler. I never would have picked it for him (and was shell shocked at the first meet), but it turned out to be one of his greatest experiences that had a huge (positive) impact on his life. Guess what? We don’t always know what is best for our kids. A common fear among my clients is that their child doesn’t have many friends or found an activity they enjoy. We can encourage, but not force this. We can expose them to activities, but ultimately, they have to be on board. They will find interests and friends in their own time. They are not always on our timeline. Accepting and making our child feel comfortable with who they are is the true key to a happy home and happy child.

“Instead of happy home, let’s aim for a full adventure recognizing our full range of feelings.”

On Facebook, it might look like everyone has a “happy home,” and we tend to feel “less than” if ours does not measure up. Most of you realize things are not always as they seem, but seeing those happy families on social media can have an impact. If you are struggling with issues in your house, chances are other families are too. They just don’t post it. Alternatively, we may want to be mindful about over posting. We all love and are proud of our children, and it’s great to share special moments, but if you are chronically posting familial bliss, it’s wise to stop and think about why so many of us have the need to do this, and how it affects others.

Instead of a permanently “happy home,” how do we create happy moments or create wonderful memories with our families? My biggest fear is one day my kids are going to look up from their phones and ask, “What happened to my childhood?” Kids don’t remember their best day of television. Creating memories has become increasingly difficult. We are rarely all disconnected from our devices at the same time and long enough to connect as a family. Thank goodness for dinner time, family vacations and carpools.

As my kids get older, these are the times I value and the only times I can get them to engage with me.

Creating memories does not have to be forced. One way to make them is by making the ordinary moments extraordinary. Meet every moment with your child as a new exciting adventure. Take a step back and appreciate them for who they are and how lucky you are to have them, without trying to change them. Gratitude goes a long way. The feeling is what you will remember. Life goes so fast and before you know it, the kids are gone. One memory from last month that stuck with me is my son getting out of the car, walking into a friends house and I sat back, watched, savored the moment and realized how very lucky I am. I hope

I always remember that!

Jodi Baretz, LCSW, CHHC is a psychotherapist and holistic health coach at The Center for Health and Healing in Mt. Kisco. She is a speaker on mindfulness topics and runs a Mindful is the New Skinny bootcamp to help women ease stress and get lighter inside and out. Jodi is a Chappaqua mom of two teenage boys. Visit jodibaretz.com.

Slipping Out from Under

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(L-R) Authors Lori Toppel, Susan Hodara, Vicki Addesso, & Joan Potter. Photo by Margaret Fox
(L-R) Authors Lori Toppel, Susan Hodara, Vicki Addesso, & Joan Potter.
Photo by Margaret Fox

By Susan Hodara

“My left thumb is identical to my right thumb except for a small pink callus below its joint, permanently hardened by the regular pressure of my lower teeth. I am in my  50s–writer, teacher, wife, and mother of two grown daughters– and I still suck my thumb. The left one, never the right; an ingrained response, I know, from my earliest days.

When my first baby was born, my mother revealed that she had to stop nursing me after just three weeks because of an infection in her left nipple. My parents had come to stay in our Brooklyn Heights apartment to meet their new granddaughter. My mother and I were sitting on opposite corners of the sofa when she told me. Sofie lay across my lap and pulled greedily at my right breast; my mother perched upright on the edge of the seat cushion, knees together.

I remember her words, innocent, almost chatty, her eyes averted across the living room as she spoke. Of course I have no memory of my own first weeks, but I can imagine: the very best thing in my new life–my sustenance, my comfort, my reconnection with my mother’s body –suddenly gone. The discovery of my thumb set a lasting pattern: get the need filled, find another way. Though I don’t think about it often, I know my left thumb holds something of my mother for me.

In my childhood memories of her, she is often standing on the sidelines as my father proclaimed, announced, questioned, yelled. She is silent and passive, removed. In the memoir class, after I’d finish reading my work, Joan’s response was often the same: “But what about your mother? Where was she?”

BookCoverPhotoThe fall that our writing group started meeting, my father was declining into the morass of Alzheimer’s disease. Over five years our family had watched him slowly disappear. I talked to my mother on the telephone almost every day, and traveled regularly to Washington, D.C., to visit. Sometimes she cried, from exhaustion or despair.

But the more lost my father became, the more my mother emerged. As I wrote about her and shared my stories in our group, and as I learned about the others’ mothers through the stories they wrote, my understanding started to shift. For the first time in my life, I began to glimpse who my mother was.

I am the only member of our writing group whose mother is still alive, who can still ask her mother questions, compare memories from the past. When I think of the others’ stories– the heartbreaking last days of Vicki and Lori’s mothers, the spreading of Joan’s mother’s ashes–I sense the fragility of the time I have left with my own mother. I have just begun to discover her. It awakens a hunger I can hardly bear to feel.”

Excerpted from Still Here Thinking of You: A Second Chance with Our Mothers (Big Table Publishing, March 2013), a collaborative memoir by Susan Hodara, Joan Potter, Vicki Addesso, and Lori Toppel. Hodara, a longtime Chappaqua resident, is a memoirist whose work appears in numerous anthologies and literary journals, and a journalist who covers the arts for the New York Times and other publications. She and her co-authors formed a writing group in 2006; Still Here Thinking of You presents their stories of their relationships with their mothers, from their early childhoods to their mothers’ later years. Available at Amazon.com and stillHereThinkingOfYou.com.