Style & Serenity

Once or Twice a Year

September 23rd, 2026

My uncle has been gone for years. We drove out to California from Las Vegas to see his wife, his two kids, grown and married now, and their kids. Losing him never meant losing them.

One evening we went up into the canyon above Malibu and stopped at an overlook. There’s a bench up there and a tree the wind has pushed sideways. Purple sage was blooming along the edge of the pavement. The ocean was flat and hazy all the way out, and the sun was going down behind the ridge.

The Pacific seen from a hillside above Malibu, dry brush in the foreground and houses tucked along the coast below.

I paint water. I do it alone, usually from a photo, and I can spend a long time on one color. Standing up there was different. I was between my father’s sister and my father’s brother, looking at the same thing they were looking at. The ocean wasn’t better than the water at home. I just wasn’t by myself.

That’s most of what this trip was.

My uncle lives in Las Vegas, my aunt came from Virginia, I came from New York. The plan was to be in the same house.

My cousins and I grew up scattered. We were refugees, so the family landed in different countries, not different towns. Our parents got everyone into one house once or twice a year for a few days, sometimes a week, and that was how we knew each other. It doesn’t sound like enough. It was.

A purple sage bush in full bloom beside a path, mountains and open sky behind it.

We’re still close. My cousins’ wives are lovely and welcoming. The kids didn’t hold back either. They were curious about everything, affectionate, wanting to be in the middle of whatever the adults were doing, and by the third day I had something of my own going with each one of them.

I want that for Sophia. I want her to know her cousins’ kids and her nieces and nephews well enough to recognize them anywhere. It doesn’t happen by itself. Most of us spend our time off somewhere new, a country we haven’t seen yet, and I do that too. But making the family the trip, on purpose, is what keeps everybody in each other’s lives. Nothing else holds. You book the flight, you cook for everyone, you put up with the noise, the way our parents did.

I want her to have the annoying part too. It’s easy to love family you see once a year for an afternoon. I want her to have the ones who get on her nerves and she goes back to anyway.

The sun dropping behind a dark ridgeline above Malibu, yellow light spread across the clouds.

The first half of this trip, the week in Las Vegas, is Million Dollar Views.

Million Dollar Views

September 15th, 2026

My uncle’s kitchen in Las Vegas holds four people and about six conversations. My aunt is telling me something about my father. My uncle interrupts to correct the year it happened. She keeps going without acknowledging him. Someone sets a plate of cut fruit in front of me that I didn’t ask for and don’t need, and I eat all of it.

This is the closest I get to my parents now.

Not because I don’t see these people. I always have. But nobody visits the way they used to. People call instead, or they mean to. A house full of everyone at once, for no reason except that it’s Tuesday, is something my parents’ generation did and mine mostly doesn’t.

Here is the arithmetic that brought me here. My father is gone. So is one of his brothers, and so is his sister Halima. On my mother’s side there is no one left at all, my mother included. What remains of my father’s generation is one sister and three brothers.

So I booked the trip. Not a stop on the way to somewhere else, not a weekend that happened to work out. I asked for the days and I came. Next week we drive to California to see my aunt and my cousins, their wives, their children, all of it.

My cousin lives here too, with his parents. He’s here every day, part of the noise. I didn’t know how much I’d been missing that until I was sitting in it.

They are feeding me constantly. They ask what I need before I’ve worked out that I need it. There’s no version of me here that has to be competent or interesting.

And they tell the stories I already know.

I heard every one of them from my mother and father, most more than once, a few so often I could tell them myself. But these are those stories from inside a different body. My aunt was in the room when it happened. Her version carries a detail my father always left out. Or it loses one he always included. Or the blame lands on someone else entirely, and nobody at this table finds that worth arguing about. They just keep going. I’m listening to a story I’ve heard forty times because this is the forty-first, and there won’t be an unlimited supply.

I understand now that I was never hearing the story. I was hearing my father’s telling of it, which is a different object, and there were only ever a few people alive who had their own.

My parents never sat me down and explained that this was the point. They just lived as though it were. My father was a diplomat, which meant he and my mother and their children were safe when the war came. The rest of the family wasn’t. They went from prominent and comfortable to refugees, and they landed where they could land, Germany, and several different states here. We watched all of it happen. My parents treated the scattering as a logistics problem rather than an ending. Our house was the hub. People came from wherever they’d ended up and stayed for weeks. Every bedroom taken, then mattresses on the living room floor, then the hallway, then the kitchen. You stepped over people to get to the bathroom. Nobody delivered a lesson about family and I absorbed the whole thing anyway, the way you absorb a language before you know it has grammar.

I’m in the third chapter of my life now. What that mostly means is that I’ve stopped assuming I’ll get around to things.

Four people left who remember my father as a boy. That number has only ever moved one direction.

I’m not going to be the generation this stops with. That’s the whole of my ambition here. What happens after me isn’t mine to decide, and I’ve made my peace with that, but whether there’s anything left to carry is decided now, by whether I keep showing up while everyone is still in the room.

Sitting in that house I feel overwhelmed and completely safe at the same time, which I didn’t know were compatible.

Sophia is twenty. She’s seen some of this, the full houses, the fuss, the cooking for more than showed up. I don’t know if it took. Nobody finds that out for years.

Tell me about the house you grew up in. Was it the hub, or was it quiet? I want to know.

We made the drive to California the following week. That part is Once or Twice a Year.

What You Allow

September 8th, 2026

Silhouette of a woman looking out at the ocean horizon

You already know if you’re in one of these. Not the kind of knowing you’d say out loud to a friend, but the quiet kind, felt in your stomach a half second before you talk yourself out of it. The relationship that doesn’t make you happy. The one where you’re smaller at the end of most days than you were at the start.

I’m not a therapist and I don’t have a method. I have twenty years of watching women I love, myself included, stay somewhere bad and call it something else. A rough patch. He’s stressed. She doesn’t mean it like that. I’ve come to believe most of us were taught long ago that love and diminishment can come from the same person, in the same sentence. A parent who criticized you as devotion. A partner who cuts you down and calls it honesty. Learn that pairing early enough, and unkindness stops registering as unkindness. It registers as familiar, and your body mistakes familiar for safe.

That’s why smart, capable women stay in relationships that would horrify them if a friend described the same one back to them. I’ve watched women who run companies and speak to full rooms without shaking go home and shrink in front of one person. Confidence doesn’t touch this. It runs on a different track.

Some do leave. File the divorce, pack the car, move to another city so there’s nothing left to walk past. A few years later they’re sitting across from someone new who turns out, once you know him, to be the same person with a different last name. Leaving him doesn’t leave the pattern. It isn’t attached to any one man. It’s attached to her, waiting for the next familiar shape to climb into.

It rarely starts with the woman living it now. This moves down a line, mother to daughter to granddaughter, each one certain she’ll be the one to end it, each one arriving there anyway, because nobody handed the next woman what actually stops it: the knowledge that this is a pattern and not a personal failing, the confidence to name it while it’s happening instead of years later, and one other person willing to say so plainly instead of looking away.

I don’t think the way out starts with an ultimatum, and I’ve never seen a five-step plan hold up against a real relationship. The shift I’ve actually watched work is smaller than that. It happens at the table, in the second after the comment lands, when something in her flinches, and then, almost instantly, she starts building the excuse: he’s stressed, I’m too sensitive. That flinch is the truest thing that happens all day. Everything after it is the story she writes to keep living where she’s living.

The women who’ve changed didn’t get harder or colder. They caught themselves mid-excuse, once, and said the true sentence instead: that wasn’t okay, and I’m not going to pretend it was. Even silently. Even if it took months to say out loud to the person who’d earned it. It looked like standing up straighter than they were used to, not like relief. Doing it once made it easier to do again, and easier to spot the next man for what he actually was.

What happens after isn’t the same for everyone. Some relationships bend around a woman who’s stopped apologizing for existing. Others don’t, because they were never built on anything except her absorbing it. I don’t know which one is coming for you, and I don’t think anyone does in advance. But the women who get somewhere better are the ones who stopped being available to people who needed them smaller, and had one person in their corner who could name the pattern and still see her clearly underneath it.

I Would Have Been a Bird

September 1st, 2026

Sophia wanted to be a mermaid before she wanted almost anything else. Not a swimmer, not a girl who liked to float. A mermaid. She watched The Little Mermaid so many times I could recite the songs from another room without ever meaning to learn them.

She swam competitively for years, face in the water, breathing on a count. Now she rows for her university. Hours on the water most days, out before the rest of the city is up. She spent all those years moving under the surface. Now she moves across the top of it.

Then Aria arrived, my brother’s daughter, eleven years behind her, wanting the same thing. Nine now. She goes into the water like she’s been invited, straight in, no testing the temperature with one foot first. Dives, comes up laughing, goes back down. Whatever is happening under there is better than whatever is happening up here and she wants all of it.

I painted Aria when she was smaller. Bent over the surface with her hair pulled up and loose strands falling forward, looking down at something I didn’t paint in. I gave her a tail the color of oceans I’ve actually stood in front of, not cartoon teal, blue going green going blue again, the color of water that’s actually cold. I didn’t give her a face. I couldn’t get it right, and then I understood why. She wasn’t supposed to be looking back at me.

It took me a while to see that the girl in the painting could have been either of them.

The tail is only the equipment. What they want is what the water does to you: no weight, no edges, every direction available at once. Nobody actually wants to be a fish. They want to move the way a fish moves.

Mine was always a bird. Not the feathers. The flight.

I’ve been drawing and painting as long as I can remember, mostly on paper, long before either of them existed. When Sophia was five or six I signed her up for an art class with Katayoon, and it turned out Katayoon taught adults too. I was home with her every day and I wanted to keep making things. So I took it. Fifteen years later I still go.

That’s where I get what they get in the water. It’s the only thing that gets me out of my own head. Nothing holding me down, no right direction, nothing waiting on the other side of it. I can put a color down and be wrong and go somewhere else with it. It’s why there’s a painting of a girl with a tail at all. I wasn’t only painting her. I was doing the same thing she was.

Nobody arranged it. Both of them went for the water before anybody taught them to swim.

Tell me what does it for you. Water, a canvas, a road, a kitchen at six in the morning. I want to know what yours is.

My teacher is Katayoon Moghaddam-Soroush, @katayoonarts, who taught my daughter before she taught me and who has become one of my dearest friends. She runs classes, workshops, and camps on Long Island for all ages. If you’ve ever wanted to pick up a brush, find her.

I Don’t Think She Misses Us the Way We Miss Her

August 25th, 2026

Her mattress never made it to her room. The mailroom turned it away, and FedEx took it back to the warehouse. The bed frame they accepted, in a box too big for her cubby, so the front desk propped it sideways against the wall behind them. She told us this on the phone, half laughing, half not knowing what to do about it.

We hadn’t seen her in six weeks. She’d been abroad all summer, home for two of them, then straight to Boston for her internship. The mattress was still sitting at the warehouse. She said she’d get it in an Uber, that people do it all the time. So we drove down. We’d have driven down for less.

Her dad carried it up and spent Saturday afternoon on her floor with an Allen wrench, working the frame together bolt by bolt.

We took her to dinner that night, brunch again the next day. She told us stories about people we’d never met like we already knew them. About her job. About the next co-op she’s already applying for, though she hasn’t finished this one. For those two days it felt almost like she’d never left.

Then we drove home, and the house was quiet the way it’s been quiet since she left, except now it was quiet with the specific shape of her missing from it.

I don’t think she misses us the way we miss her. It’s what’s supposed to happen. She has three roommates she loves, a schedule, a city that’s hers now, a life that doesn’t run through checking in with her mother every day. It shouldn’t. But I miss her in the ordinary hours. Cooking for two instead of three. Passing her room and seeing the door open onto nothing.

My husband says her new bed is too soft but that’s the way she likes it, roomy and cozy.

An unmade bed with cream bedding and a fur throw, beside a window looking onto trees in a college dorm room

I think about that bed more than I probably should. That it’s holding her up at night in a city we don’t live in, in a room we only saw for two days, put together by the same hands that used to build blanket forts for her in the living room.

Once or Twice a Year

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Million Dollar Views

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What You Allow

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I Would Have Been a Bird

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I Don’t Think She Misses Us the Way We Miss Her

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