Baby Shampoo

Today I washed my hair with baby shampoo. It's my husband's shampoo, as he has baby-fine hair, and I used it 1) to empty & recycle the bottle and 2) to smell and feel again that baby-fine feeling of washing my babies' heads. My grown-up babies have gone back to their grown-up lives after a lovely holiday visit, and I miss them. As Kim Kishbaugh puts it in her blog entry about her adult son leaving after the holiday, I am bereft.

I am also busy, working and directing a play, and that is helping me through. But today is a day of rest, in which I am doing heaps and heaps of laundry and changing the sheets on all the beds. (But not taking down the Christmas tree.)

Over the break, I read a few books, including The Awkward Age, by Francesa Segal. It's about a second relationship for two people in midlife, parents of teenage children from their first marriages. The kids are at "the awkward age" and the complications put quite a strain on the adults' relationship, not to mention making the teenagers' own lives full of, well, angst. I know I had an awkward age as a teen and plenty of angst, but, as parents, we did not encounter any trouble from our teenage children, who got through adolescence with quite a bit of grace! We all got lucky there.

Francesca Segal also wrote The Innocents, a re-telling of sorts of The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, something my book group read and I enjoyed. It made me re-read the Wharton novel and long to re-see the movie. Reading provides me with comfort when I am bereft, or anticipating my grief, as well the downtime I need as an introvert during the socializing of the holidays. This year I was reading as my family played Parcheesi. There I sat in the same room, cuddled in a blanket, watching and listening to them play as I read my novel. Parcheesi crams my math-challenged head with numbers and counting. I was probably closer to my kids and husband reading than I would have been playing, stressed out, rubbing my forehead, madly counting. It was a quiet bliss.

Happy New Year!