Author: Susan Knoppow

I Was Suzy Weiss

~ Susan Knoppow ~ 2 Comments

This entry first appeared on the Wow Writing Workshop website.

Last month, high school senior Suzy Weiss penned an op ed piece about getting rejected from the college of her dreams for the Wall Street Journal. The piece attracted national attention and landed her an interview on the Today Show. Wow Writing Workshop CEO Susan Knoppow understood what Ms. Weiss was going through; she wrote this blog.

Dear Suzy,

I feel your pain. In 1985, Brown University told me no.

To be honest, I blamed Amy Carter.

So what if she was the former president’s daughter? I was certain Amy had snagged my spot. She could have gone to college anywhere. I belonged at Brown. I didn’t get into Yale either, but I wasn’t mad at Paul Giamatti or Mira Sorvino; I hadn’t heard of them yet.

I was destined for Rhode Island. I had no doubts. How could Brown say no to me?

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Doberge Cake

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The first cousin I met was Stephen, who scooped a crawfish out of a giant warming tray and held it up to show me: “Just snap off the head,” he said, demonstrating as he spoke. “Peel back the shell, and pop the meat in your mouth.”

I tried one. Then another. Easy.

It was my first visit to New Orleans, my first encounter with my boyfriend’s Southern family, and, at age 26, the first time I really felt like a foreigner. Continue reading →

Drum Solo

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Last night at Cliff Bell’s in Detroit, I listened to a watercolor emerge on canvas, an oil painting, a collage of color and texture.

gayelynn cliff bells 1-5The drum solo moved forward for minutes … thundering loud then soft as a whisper. It was denim and suede, sandpaper, a still lake at dusk. Pine scent and snow, a dented hubcap, diesel fumes, hands entwined, a woman alone.

I’ve heard this band before – Straight Ahead – but it’s been many years. The drummer, Gayelynn McKinney, is my son’s teacher, a coincidence of time and place, of stumbling into The Lesson Rooms looking for an instructor at an opportune moment.

Two years later, five years after starting to play, he is becoming a musician. I remember that realization as a young adolescent – the emerging awareness that the weekly lesson was a check-in point. It wasn’t the “thing.” The thing was practice, mastery, repeating the pattern over and over until it lived in my breath and fingers. It was line, arc, motion, stillness and surprise.

J, S, M after recitalMy children live in music. They sing and drum and play piano. My daughter dreams of mastering my old guitar – the one I never really learned to play. They know there is a clarinet in the basement and that the piano in the living room came from my second grade teacher. They wear concert t-shirts and memorize lyrics. They sit still, and usually they like what they hear.

Last night I watched a woman live in her music. The room fell away for a moment, and everyone listened.

The Real Life Baby Book, Part 2

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I dropped the kids at the movies last Thursday night.  Monsters, Inc. in 3-D at the Star Southfield. 7:20 show.

No big deal, right?

But it felt like a big deal.

Because it was dark.

And because the youngest is eight.

And because sometimes the boys can’t help themselves, and fight in the most inappropriate places over the oddest annoyances.

But mostly because I’m an inveterate worrier.

Fortunately, the loveliness of my three children finding something they could enjoy together won out. So I told the monkey brain to shut up, handed them tickets and candy money, and left for the grocery store. Where I shopped … V…  E…  R…  Y…     S…  L…  O…  W…  L…  Y… Continue reading →

Lipstick

~ Susan Knoppow ~ 1 Comment

While the earth breaks the soft horizon
eastward, we study how to deserve
what has already been given us.

William Stafford, “Love in the Country,” from Stories that Could Be True

Sugared Maple was, without question, the right shade of lipstick.  The Clinique lady in her white lab coat shook her head at Twilight Nude, the color Amy had been wearing for years.  “I would never recommend that for you,” she said with a frown bordering on disdain.

Amy wears very little makeup. But we had time to fill before the memorial service, and she needed a new lipstick. I was in Chicago for the day. She was there for three, to pay her respects and begin to mourn Irene, her second mother, the beloved nanny who had raised her from the age of six months.

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Fourteen: Beginning to Leave

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The book title made me laugh: I’m Not Mad, I Just Hate You! by Roni Cohen-Sandler and Michelle Silver, “A New Understanding of Mother-Daughter Conflict.”

I wasn’t sure whether to cry or sigh in relief after reading the first few paragraphs, an all too familiar story about moms and daughters, about what stands between us and draws us together.

I have a magnificent daughter – beautiful and funny; smart, sensitive and quick. The kind of babysitter who makes musical instruments with the children and leaves notes in their shoes while they’re sleeping. The kind of friend who spends hours crafting birthday card collages of buttons and magazine clippings sealed with Mod Podge.  The kind of sister who invents silly stories and sends them home in letters from camp.

Regardless, teenhood is a foreign country to a mother. It doesn’t matter that I once lived there; I have a tin ear for the dialect. It sometimes feels as though a delightful young girl from a remote Scottish island has taken up residence in our home. She speaks our language, but the subtleties of accent and idiom are lost on me.

I am reminded of watching her learn to walk. One day she couldn’t, then the next she was cruising down the hall. But that came after weeks and months of standing up and falling down, scooting along the furniture, crawling again, then picking herself back up. Until one day she was running down the sidewalk, oblivious to oncoming bicycles and cars backing down driveways, with me running behind shouting warnings and scooping her up when she fell.

Yes, it’s something like that. And it’s nothing like that. I want her to run far away from me, but I also want her to come back, to make safe choices and responsible friends.

With that on my mind, I randomly opened a book by poet Ruth Stone and found this:

Marcia

This distance between us
which stretches and shrinks,
as the breathing trees,
exhaling their oxygen,
lift and sigh with the weight of the world,
clasped by the molten center.

How in this braided pattern
we dance in and out
of our bodies which dance in and out
themselves, never one thing or the other.

What is this that we are
so like the mist that changes to water;
this rocking tide that we remember
imperfectly in our separate skins.

Burdened with ourselves,
as we love one another,
how to escape the unyielding law of the universe,
the self and the Other;
imperfect love.

That the self, sometimes
in sleep, admits the loss, the grief, and accepts
the burden of loneliness; embracing
what we will not admit we long for;
this separation of mother and daughter.

****

Ruth Stone has won more literary prizes than I ever will, but she was a mother long before I was born. My girl will turn 14 this week. I wish both of us a happy birthday.

My Tray Runneth Over

~ Susan Knoppow ~ 1 Comment

By guest blogger, Ellen Shanna Knoppow

H-A-R-O-S-E-T. I used my blank as an S, a 50-point bonus for a 7-letter word. Aren’t I clever? However, I couldn’t make it fit anywhere on the board. Such is life.

November 26, 2011
Last night up north and Dad’s 71st birthday. Susan and David dining in Traverse City, thankful for a night out alone. Papa Jerry and the boys on a pilgrimage to the diner, to rate chocolate malteds. That left Mom, me and my niece. (Name: Miriam. Age: 13. Claim to fame: Our novelist and fearless reader. “To Kill a Mockingbird”? That’s so 2007.)

Grandma Sharon had the idea to play an open-tray, no-score Scrabble game to teach Miriam strategy. Conserve your S’s! Save your blanks! Don’t leave the triple-letter score open! And, I told her, sometimes you just want to use a cool word, even if it’s not worth many points. I taught her “laity” and Mom taught her “civet.” We shared “ak” and “ka,” two two-letter words whose meanings escaped both of us. No matter: “’Ka…’ mused our young friend, “isn’t that, like, an ancient Egyptian spiritual entity?”

The day before, after a post-Black-Friday nap (saving money can be exhausting), I found a game already in progress. I volunteered my services as a consultant (giving back to the community is a tradition in my family). No takers. My older nephew faced a trayful of vowels: “aeiweeo!!!” He exploded. In laughter. Peals and peals of it, unable to stop. He rolled on the floor, with an inhibitionlessness that I envied. Weeks later, I’m glad it’s still in my ear. (Name: Sammy. Age: 11. Claim to fame: Would not stoop to using a calculator.)

His big sister, in her Scrabble debut, was clogged with consonants. She was very serious, and seriously upset. “What’s so funny?” she whined. And as you know, it’s not the content of the whine but the tone and pitch that are its essence.

Dear Susan,
It’s 1982. I know this because we are wearing Fair Isle sweaters. The wool is itchy, but that’s the price of conformity. We are playing our game, just you and me. I am winning. You do not like this. As the point spread grows, so too grows your pout, seasoned with whine. I am pleased with myself, but I feel guilty about making you unhappy. I employ my proven strategy, for my favorite audience: “What? Of course ‘imple’ is a word. You know, when an imp gets a pimple.” I can see your forehead relax. A half laugh…then…no dice. You get up and you leave me.

And today? There are no bitter verbs between us.

November 27, 2011
Early Sunday morning and my younger nephew is staring at the closed refrigerator door, his post-breakfast ritual. I don’t want to disturb him. “moon mango man says smile,” reads his magnetic creation. (Name: Josh. Age: 7. Claim to fame: Has had remarkable success teaching the dog piano.) We are preparing to leave; we know the drill: Pack, launder, round up the toys.  The scrabble tiles have been corralled and returned to their box, then placed in the overflowing wooden toy chest/coffee table where they reside with jenga and the rest.

Find your iPad, fill the water bottles, empty the wastebasket. And a plea from our host, “Will someone please take home the leftover cranberry sauce?” Before saying goodbye and thanking my gracious parents, I reflect on the past five days with the people I love the most, and ask myself this question: If I take an English muffin to eat in the car, should I toast it first?

The Mug

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My daughter set the mug on the counter and reached for the kettle. The mug is wide and sturdy and glazed a drippy brownish-green, the kind of cup that makes you want to hold your coffee in two hands.

“Sorry, Sweetie, I’m using that,” I said, before she could pour the water for her tea.

In truth, I was on my way out for an early meeting. I planned to take my coffee in a travel mug with a lid, not the hippie/handmade one from the Purple Fiddle cafe.

There is very little a mother keeps for herself. The mug is a souvenir from a week in West Virginia’s Caanan Valley with dear family friends. I’ve never said so outright, but I don’t share it.

If I were a child, it would be the action figure I keep by my bedside, my favorite strawberry lipgloss worn to a nub, the best pencil for math homework.

That night at the Purple Fiddle, we ate ice cream and drank beer while our children played board games and snapped photos outside on the sidewalk. A blues duo sang for the regulars and visitors to this tiny mountain town. Or maybe the kids played cards and the music was bluegrass. I can’t be sure, but the details are beside the point.

My friend Amy has a shirt from the same evening. We talk hands-free on the way to pick up our children from school – Amy in New Jersey and me in Michigan. We have until 3:30, when we scramble to wrap up our conversation and emerge from our vans, moms on active duty.

Sometimes I’m careless and put the mug in the dishwasher. One day it might chip. Someday I might even share it.

But not yet.

Late Night Surgery

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I just completed stealth emergency surgery on my son’s stuffed cocker spaniel. The eye is a little off kilter, and the stitches show more than I would like, but the stuffing has been returned to the little brown head. If I’m lucky, my boy will have no idea of what really happened to his puppy.

“Guess what!” I’ll say at breakfast, cheerful as can be. “Onyx was chewing on Fiddler. Can you believe that silly dog?” Then I’ll show off my clumsy needle work and go back to pouring cereal.

For a moment, I was horrified when I walked into the bedroom. Onyx, the real life black lab, likes to sleep on Josh’s bed, which is usually no problem. He also likes to chew stuffed animals and shoes, but that’s generally only when he wants attention. The bed is a sea of stuffed animals. I should have known that one day I would find a half-deflated puppy between the dog’s paws and a pile of polyester stuffing on the floor.

They are not a predictable bunch, dogs and children. We love the dog, except when he grabs a friend’s eyeglasses from the table or mangles the housekeeper’s cell phone. We love the children too, regardless of tantrums, misplaced soccer cleats and the general confusion of adolescence.

Often, I’m winging it, glossing over stuffed animal disasters, acting like I know how to mend a bruised ego or make mushroom soup without a recipe. Most of my improvisation proves both convincing and effective. That’s motherhood for you.

The house is noisy and often messy. The kitchen smells like roasted peppers and lasagna. Everyone is sleeping now. I will return the stuffed dog to his owner’s bed, and all will be well … at least until tomorrow.