Mama Cat (National Geographic magazine, January 2006)

How do you stay alive in a landscape filled with stronger predators, where lions or hyenas will kill your offspring, and jackals or vultures will steal your food? You keep moving. Binti, a new mother, gently nabs one of her ten-day-old cubs by the scruff of the neck. Although mother and cub are protected from human harm in Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve, they must still combat a harsh world. Binti, whose name means “daughter” in Swahili, learned maternal skills from a peerless teacher—her mother, Amani. “Amani’s practical, cool, efficient,” says Anup Shah, who documented and named her growing family over three years.

Binti owes her survival to Amani’s faithful routine. At about six months Binti actively began learning how to hunt. So will her offspring. Cheetahs like a fresh kill and must pursue and catch their prey. Cubs are good observers, watching their mother whether she’s scouting for prey, sharpening her claws, or stalking potential dinner.

When the family needs to eat, Amani climbs atop a nearby termite mound to survey the undulating plain. A Thomson’s gazelle has strayed from its herd. Amani focuses her amber eyes. The gazelles continue to graze. Amani crouches, shoulders hunched, ears flat back, frozen. A few steps propel her into a run. Her speed builds, and within seconds she reaches full sprint. She sails across the savanna, often airborne, a symphony of speed and grace.

But the gazelle has a head start. Clocking speeds nearly as fast as the cheetah’s 60-plus miles (100 kilometers) an hour, the gazelle makes quick turns intended to throw Amani off. Despite being the world’s fastest land animal, a cheetah snags such prey only about half the time. This is one of the good times. Amani trips the gazelle with an outstretched paw. With one last bleat, the gazelle goes down. Amani goes for the throat, her bite suffocating the prize. Over the next several months the sharp-eyed cubs will try to emulate Amani’s behavior—and fail miserably, mainly because their prey notices their awkward approaches. So mother makes them practice, over and over.

“Successful mothers seem to produce really successful cubs,” says Marcella Kelly, a professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University who has tracked female cheetah lineages for up to eight generations. “They’re nervous, excitable, vigilant. In the wild they need to be jumpy. Cubs most likely pick up these traits.”

Once young cheetahs are on their own, it can take months for them to become skilled hunters. Some adolescent cheetahs start out hunting impossible prey, including buffalo. Those who learn from their mistakes survive. Among Amani’s successes is her daughter: Binti had her five cubs in the same area where Amani gave birth to her.

Continue Reading Add comment September 24, 2009 carolkaufmann

And That’s My Final Offer (Washington Post, Travel section, February 8, 2004)

We tried not to look American. We covered our legs and arms, despite the oppressive heat. We didn’t wear tennis shoes, T-shirts or baseball caps. We even had our “We’re Canadian” routine ready.

Continue Reading Add comment September 24, 2009 carolkaufmann

THE MAMA TRICK | The Well Mom

By Carol Kaufmann
Let me guess. You’ve given birth for the first time in your thirties, maybe forties, during a successful, all-consuming career. You used to consider yourself fairly together: a well-used PDA, food in the fridge, and regular plans, like dinner and yoga. Then, Precious Baby came along and that life vanished.

The initial heady period of motherhood sustained me for a good three weeks. During my two rounds in the maternity ward I spent virtually every hour holding my Precious Babies (PB), smiling down at chubby folds in skin and every exquisite gesture. The prescription drugs kept me from feeling the c-section’s incision and the realization I wouldn’t be sleeping for more than three hours straight for a very, very long time. But eventually, the well-wishers and food-bearers trickled to nothing and my husband and I were left with unwashed piles of laundry and the guilt of unordered baby announcements. Maternity clothes looked stupid and, after nine months of wear, bored me, though none of my other pants would rise past mid-thigh. I was grumpy and eating way too much dark chocolate. Worse loomed the nagging question: Would the rest of my years be a blur of washing bottles and stolen catnaps?

Can you relate? Maybe right now you’re wondering, with a sinking feeling, if you, too, will ever get back to normal.

Yes. And no.

I’m learning, slowly and painfully, how Motherhood requires a major mind shift. Obviously, prioritizing your children is paramount, but equally so is adjusting your own world view. I call this the Mama Trick.

Your home, personal calendar, car, yard, Blackberry, office files, gym locker, refrigerator, whatever space used to feel like your own is never going to be up to the par that once worked for you. Par is history. But it’s ok. It’s OOOOOOO KAAAAAYAYYYYY. Each day, if you and your children’s basic needs are met, you win. The rest is gravy – even that daily shower where you use soap, shampoo, AND conditioner. You’ve taken on the most important responsibility in the world: the care and nurturing of another human. If you succeed at that, what else is there?

I know, I know. You still don’t feel like it’s enough, do you, Superwoman? Me either.

So if the race to the end-of-day finish line is simply not satisfying in that deep, soul-fulfilling way, try this. Give yourself one task. ONE. You could choose to file your nails. Reorganize your panty (still a size or two above your norm, right?) drawer. Rush over to the Banana Republic sale (with or without the coupon you intended to use). But times have changed. And Mommyhood has changed your time. What you choose to fill your day (hour, half-hour, five minutes) with is now, by process of elimination, more precious. So make your daily do-for-me thing count. Download your photos of your child’s first three months. Journal a few sentences. Call the friend who makes you laugh harder than anyone else rather than watching TiVoed Grey’s Anatomy episodes. Haven’t you seen them all, anyway?

When my Life With Kids gets truly hectic, I slip into what I call “Organization Fantasy Mode.” Just last week I found myself daydreaming about eliminating all the clutter in my house. My brain went wild. If my mind couldn’t ooze tranquility, my four walls could. So in my overactive head, I reorganized the family room, eliminated some major (heavy) pieces of furniture that contained family heirlooms, turned our dining room into a playroom (would we ever be using the family silver now?), and converted our bedroom into a bastion of peace. The problem with all this is that while streamlining looks good in my mind’s eye, the reality requires lots of hefty lifting, moving furniture that may or may not fit past absurdly small doorways, a complete purging of the attic, painting a few tables and walls that will no longer be covered by previously mentioned furniture, and relocating most of our electronic equipment – which I don’t know how to reconnect.

Even without small kids (and a job and cats), such a project would take the better part of a week. With small kids? A six month minimum. But since tranquility in some part of life is now crucial to me, I settled on initial task: Discarding old shoe boxes. It doesn’t sound like a lot, true. But this tiny job, accomplished in about fifteen minutes, made room in our attic hell for the aforementioned family heirlooms. I’m on my way. And given everything else that life hands you in the early days of motherhood, that fifteen minutes made me proud – and even a little more balanced.

Think about it. In your former childless, perhaps even self-obsessed, life, did discarding shoeboxes ever take on such meaning? Did it ever positively exhilarate you? Try it now: One Mama Trick. And notice how you feel like Wonder Woman wrestling baddies to the ground with her lasso.

And while you’re catapulting your own proverbial shoe boxes from your cramped attic, consider your new identity. You, this new gal with the disorganized abode, never-ending laundry piles, and little people who constantly need need need, you’ve YOU’VE become something better, someone more important, than you’ve ever been.

You’re someone’s mother.


Carol Kaufmann will regularly share her Mama Tricks with The Well Mom. Her work has appeared in Reader’s Digest, National Geographic, The Washington Post, and in the anthology A Woman’s Europe. She lives in Alexandria,
Virginia, with her husband, toddler, newborn, and two obese rescue cats.

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Add comment September 22, 2009 carolkaufmann

A River’s Gifts

Published: January 2007, National Geographic Magazine
A River’s Gifts
Why did Romans, Celts, and even prehistoric settlers submerge their personal belongings, from swords to dishes, in a shallow river in Slovenia?
By Carol Kaufmann

Archaeologist Andrej Gaspari is haunted by pieces of the past. His hometown river, the Ljubljanica, has yielded thousands of them—Celtic coins, Roman luxuries, medieval swords—all from a shallow 12-mile stretch. Those who lived near and traveled along the stream that winds through Slovenia’s capital of Ljubljana considered it sacred, Gaspari believes. That would explain why generations of Celts, Romans, and earlier inhabitants offered treasures—far too many to be accidental—to the river during rites of passage, in mourning, or as thanksgiving for battles won.

But Gaspari may never be able to explain for certain why the Ljubljanica holds one of Europe’s richest stores of river treasures, many of them remarkably preserved by the soft sediments and gentle waters. Too many pieces of the puzzle have already disappeared.

During the past two decades, sport divers have made the river their playground, removing most of some 10,000 to 13,000 objects found so far. Even though removing artifacts from the Ljubljanica has long been illegal, professional archaeologists have been forced to compete with private collectors. Some divers sold their loot to museums; others to the highest bidder. Some kept their treasures private. Many artifacts have left the country, untraceable. Gaspari’s greatest torment comes from the knowledge that few maverick collectors know—or care—where exactly their prizes were found. For an archaeologist, an object’s meaning comes as much from its context—location, association with other objects—as from the prize itself. Without context, there is no story.

Mladen Mück is one of Gaspari’s tormentors. Now in his 40s, the Bosnian-born architectbegan diving in the river in 1985 and has brought up about a thousand pieces. In his kitchen in Ljubljana, a plastic box contains prehistoric tools. Upstairs, dusty cases hold other rare artifacts, including deer antler axes. Mück says he has no intention of selling what he has found. Like many collectors, he babies his goods and claims they are better off with him than with the authorities.

“More people see these artifacts in my house than if I gave them to a museum,” he says with a dismissive wave. “There they would sit in a basement.”

Gaspari disagrees. A team at the National Museum of Slovenia is preparing an exhibit of the river’s treasures that will tour Europe in 2008, he says. Still, he hopes that someday Mück will hand over his items. “My heart is strong,” quips the 33-year-old archaeologist. If Mück is obstinate, “I will outlive him.”

As for artifacts still in the Ljubljanica, Gaspari believes they should be left untouched until they can be properly conserved. He searches for new objects only when he believes they are threatened—as is the case on one blistering July afternoon. Struggling into a wet suit on the riverbank, Gaspari gets ready for a dive. Water visibility is unusually good, he says, though you might not think so looking at all the algae and bits of trash.

He and his team have been hired by the town of Vrhnika to search for artifacts that could be lost when a sewage plant is built on the river. The need for a treatment plant is obvious from the stench of sulfur, and worse.

Gaspari doesn’t expect to find much here, perhaps some medieval potsherds, not rare in an Old World river. But less than an hour after the divers begin their survey, one member of his team, Miran Erič-Pac, surfaces and hands him an ax made from deer antlers more than 5,000 years ago.

“We’ve never found an artifact so old this far upstream,” Gaspari says. “It’s probably from a nearby prehistoric settlement.”

Then from the murk comes a 16th-century water pitcher painted with an aqua bird and yellow flowers that resembles a thousand replicas in local souvenir shops. Another diver hands him a chunk of stone with a decorative edge—a fragment of an ancient plate. Gaspari strokes its flat side, as familiar with its shape as with his morning coffee cup. “It’s early Roman,” he says, “around 10 b.c.”

Throughout the day, more pieces of Slovenia’s early story are found. Like other objects from the riverbed, they hint at a mysterious connection between distant generations and waters they revered. Somewhere, perhaps in the trove of artifacts in private hands—or perhaps in the river’s murky depths—is the clue that could unlock the mystery.
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On Assignment:

Writer Carol Kaufmann’s approach to covering a story about ancient artifacts is to “find the living person who’s passionate about them,” which wasn’t hard to do in Slovenia. “People are absolutely crazy about what comes out of the Ljubljanica River,” she says. “The treasures excavated from that little river could make curators of many American museums cry.”

What was your best experience during this assignment?

The water was exceptionally clear the day I dived into the Ljubljanica River. While the archaeology team surveyed part of the riverbed, photographer and dive master Arne Hodalič showed me around the river he’s been photographing for the past three years. We could see sherds from medieval pots and bits of Roman glass popping out of the mud. Rivers in the United States may have their share of Coke cans and hubcaps, but rarely anything older than, say, 1986. So I was like a kid in a chocolate factory, all wide-eyed and impressed. But the glimpses of riches that stunned this American gal were no big deal to the Old World Slovenians. Medieval? To them, that’s so yesterday.

What was your worst experience during this assignment?

I’d had a baby ten months before the Slovenia trip, so I haven’t quite returned to the former me and, uh, severely underestimated my wet suit size. When we arrived on the river around noon on that blistering July day, I tried to stuff myself into the hot, miserable neoprene by jumping up and down. But the skintight material never budged past my knees. In the end, I couldn’t dress myself. The photographer held the sides of the suit together, and the archaeologist inched the zipper upward as I sucked in. Horrific. Thank God it was hot! Sweat helped.

What was the oddest experience that you encountered during this assignment?

Photographer Arne Hodalič and I were invited to the home of a collector who’d been diving into the treasure-laden Ljubljanica River for about 20 years. He’d been down to the bottom of the river maybe 200 times, more than any archaeologist, and had become quite skilled at finding and recognizing artifacts. His home was a museum, minus the good lighting and fancy displays. Up in a dusty attic-like room crowded with magazines, religious symbols, portraits, scuba equipment, and yoga mats were boxes of priceless archaeological artifacts. A crate full of deer-antler axes looked old—about 6,000 years to be precise. He pulled out his laptop and showed us similar objects for sale on an auction house’s website. Each ax was worth 500 euros ($650) apiece. Bronze swords, the pride of his collection, would net a cool 3,000 euros ($3,950), at least.

Add comment September 22, 2009 carolkaufmann

Iron Mom

Iron Mom

By Carol Kaufmann, for the “Mama Tricks” column on www.thewellmom.com

I stood in front of an upright ironing board, glaring at the basket load of button-downs, clean but wrinkled. Mother of toddlers, working professional, schooled and world-traveled, a credit card holder, a second-time homeowner. And I am… ironing my husband’s shirts?

This is not who I am.

Like many 30-somethings who entered the work world during the age of excess, I formed a certain ideal of what life would be like once my career was on a roll. I saw examples of the good life flourishing in the D.C. metro area: Manicured lawns done by gardeners, regular help cleaning the house, spiky, animal-skinned shoes, lunches on white tablecloths, black-tie charity events, and vacations at places with names like Guanacaste and Essaouira. I heard the stories. Sometimes I even had a taste of them myself.

But last fall as the national depression sank in and sparked our fears, my American dream spiraled down the potty along with the country’s economic outlook. Now, I’m happy to have a job, given the front-page Post stories of massive layoffs, spiking unemployment and two-parent households with not a job between them.

I know my job and my husband’s are guaranteed only by the thinnest wisp of commitment from our companies. These days, we’re very replaceable—at least that’s how our employers think. The reality is if our jobs go, we’re a few missed mortgage payments away from financial Armaggedon. Every month, our bank account creeps dangerously close to negative numbers, thanks to a preschool deposit, a sink that backs up on a Sunday, a spot on my arm that needed removing or any variety of home/child/health crises.

Yes, when it comes to money, control seemed just beyond my grasp—except what lurks within the four walls around me. And within this lair, I find opportunities to save bucks everywhere and battened down our hatches.

Hubby, who’s up first, makes bag lunches so we don’t waste cash at our favorite sandwich haunts. We’ve weaned our addiction to lattes. I learned to like natural-colored nails instead of manicured ones, eliminated most dinners out, and now think of vacation not as a trip to the beach but as absence of work. I even enjoyed my frugality, now in full force. Doing more with less has become a game, an exercise in creativity to find the best deal, amass the most effective combination of coupons.

But ironing?

Shall I also don an apron while I assume the classic position of a 50s housewife? Watching the hyper-inflated suffocating predicaments of every female character on the 1960s-based drama Mad Men is enough to drive me screaming down the block. Now, I felt like one of them, a slave to the times. (Only not as nattily dressed.)

It’s not as if I’m a spoiled, holier-than-thou princess (OK, maybe a little) who doesn’t know how to roll up her sleeves and do the hard work. But my work, I thought, was to use my brain to create content and read Beginner’s Dr. Seuss, not pushing metal to and fro over seemingly permanent wrinkles.

I remember so well watching my mother, a child of parents who saved pieces of aluminum foil and reused jars during the Depression, diligently pulling out the ironing board, creaking the lever into an upright X, and tackling the laundry basket of Dad’s work shirts. Even before age 10, I realized Mom was enduring a necessary evil.

As I grew, Mom continued to iron. She’d drive right on by the fairly convenient dry cleaner, even though she was as busy as all get-out raising kids, teaching school, volunteering for this and that, taking covered dishes to new neighbors and shut-ins. I’d ask why she didn’t just drop off the laundry and save herself a little time? “Because I can do it myself,” she’d tell me. “Why waste the money?”

The more I learn to discern the fragile moment between a perfect crease and an iron imprint, the more I understand her question. Why spend the money, indeed, when times call for using it for more important purchases—quality fruits and veggies, college accounts, credit-card debt reduction—and in these days especially, a few bucks for someone who could really use it.

And why do all important lessons seem to come from our mothers?

As it turns out, I like seeing a line of freshly pressed shirts hanging along our furniture, a visible, tangible reminded of a job I can do. My husband, who takes his turns at the board, is tickled—even thinks it’s hot, for some odd reason—when I press the shirts and pants he’ll wear that week.

I had grown too big for my britches, as Mom would say. I had forgotten a basic tenet of good living that my hubby and I swore in our wedding vows we wouldn’t lose sight of—that it’s the simple things, after all, that provide a quick jolt of peace. So I iron because I can.

Hard times purify. They force those of us who think we’re above little details, to get over ourselves and put some muscle back into work. They remind us that being able to take care of ourselves because we’re capable of doing so is a gift.

Copyright 2009 Carol Kaufmann

Add comment September 22, 2009 carolkaufmann

Writing Clips

Find stories I’ve written for Reader’s Digest, National Geographic and other fine publications.

Continue Reading Add comment October 25, 2008 carolkaufmann

The Road Taken

In the middle of this global economic meltdown and political uncertainty, my brother and his wife of three years came up with a genius idea: They would buy a white Chevy van, make it a home with some “minor” alterations, quit their jobs with benefits, sell their house, and go out on the road. For an indefinite amount of time.

As you might imagine, this plan met with considerable opposition. My “keep the homefires burning” mother was so flummoxed she couldn’t speak. When she did, she could only utter “health insurance!” Friends were skeptical. Reactions ranged from “Are you nuts?”, “Where will you shower?” to my favorite “Does this involve a Great Dane and solving mysteries?” (Non Gen-Xers go here for the reference.) Me? With a full-time job, two toddlers, and a pair of obese rescue cats to tend to, I’m their biggest fan.

With no children or pets and little else to tie them to bucolic Lexington, Kentucky—their both natives of the Bluegrass State and had pretty much lived there since birth—Steven and Jill had an insatiable curiosity to see more. An unscratchable itch. Perhaps, they thought, there’s another place for us to be now. With more fulfilling jobs. More things to learn. And we’re never going to know unless we Just Plain Go.

“Are we living the American dream?” Bro wondered aloud this past weekend. “Because if we are, if we found it, there’s not much to it.”

Now these are not fly-by-night folks. They toyed with the idea for well over a year, making financial plans, paring down their earthly possessions (again, so jealous), and researching campground and desireable communities all around the country. They alerted their friends they might be parked in their driveways. They developed mental lists of places they could settle in for a few months of seasonal work, like ski communities, for earning extra cash along the way. They popped in “The Van CD,” a modern mix tape made by my musician husband for the trip. No strangers to the tent-and-outhouse crowd, these marathon-running, rock-climbing semi-pros are used to the Great Outdoors and community showers. Maybe not for months on end, but there has to be some unknown in any adventure.

They set out last week. First stop: Our house in the DC area, mainly because of the aforementioned toddlers. Not a day after they had been here, they caught the miserable viral plague we had all had. And though we do have running water and a working air conditioning system, they opted to sleep—at least most nights—in the van. I know they’ll be just fine.

I think about that restlessness many of us felt after high school or college, the traditional time for geographical exploration. It’s even becoming commonplace for high-school grads to take a year or two off before college to “find their way,” or in the day of hyper-competitve college admissions, pad the application. But why should extended travel be limited to those seminal periods? The road is always there and despite sprawl, this country still boasts wide open spaces where you can hear your thoughts and the whispers of fluttering wings. I’m proud to know real examples of those who buck tradition and plunge right on in.

We’ve all read the classic Robert Frost poem “The Road Not Taken” back in English lit in 9th grade and again on plaques at Hallmark, but pause for a moment, if you will, and give it another look.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Very seldom in life are we faced with the prospect of no choices. The not-so-logical road may be the best—at least the most interesting—path to take.

P.S. If you’re entertaining serious thoughts of taking it on the road, you can see exactly how a white Chevy van can be livable right here. Just click “Van Construction.”

Add comment October 20, 2008 carolkaufmann

Planet Campfire

Introduction

Add comment October 20, 2008 carolkaufmann

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