On Tuesday, I took the subway uptown and spent the afternoon with my father. It is something that I don’t do often enough. Typically, my sister and I go together, but this week she and her husband are overseas, so I made the journey alone. With her, the journey back home is easier: forced laughter as we look back on life and rally one another as we come from a day that is both heartfelt and dutiful, wrenching and satisfying, and often melancholy in the absence of irretrievable touchstones. It is a new episode in our lives: Neither of us ever “lunched” with either of our parents, and are not “ladies who lunch” altogether.
Before the lunch, I struggled with what to wear. My wardrobe is limited primarily workout clothes, two pairs of jeans, and then funky, bohemian clothes that I will wear for a night out. My style has not matured since the 1970s. But I found a black cashmere dress that came demurely to the knee, unearthed a half slip (eliminating the possibility of static cling), and high-heeled boots which made the hike up and down the subway stairs difficult: I am accustomed to my Ugg knock-off’s with which my stride is faster and firmer.
My father is nearly 90, and doesn’t look like an old man. True, his gait shuffles a bit these days, something he blames on old shoes. His vision and hearing are not what they used to be. He tends to repeat himself, something we all do even in our middle age, but if I were to be perfectly honest, his repetition is more pronounced than ours. He’s a retired physician, so we lunched in the faculty club at the medical center where younger physicians and academicians greeted him with a respect endemic to cultures where the elderly are venerated and considered wise rather than forgotten. Although in my 50s, I felt like a child as he introduced me. It brought me back to the days when I was a little girl visiting my beloved grandparents in Hollywood Beach, Florida. My grandfather always strolled me through the lobby of their apartment building after an early supper, introducing me to friends, and even going so far as to befriend a stranger so that he could then introduce me as well.
It is a strange feeling to be a woman, wife, and mother and still, after all these years, feel memories exhumed from childhood.
Conversations with my father typically rest safest upon the past. Memories make him smile and laugh. But on Tuesday, there was his confession about my mother. My father is innocently guilty (how’s that for an oxymoron?) of not acknowledging my loss of my mother in her mental absentia. He focuses only upon the loss of his wife. It is something I have come to forgive and understand, recognizing that this woman was his best friend, companion, and yes, lover, for 65 years. I have let go of the expectations that he will ever say, “I know you miss her, too.”
And so his confession: “I come home at night and kiss your mother,” he said. “I tell her that I love her and she ignores me. It’s as though she doesn’t give a damn. She makes a face at me. What the hell is that about?”
Understand my father: a conundrum of sentimental and crusty, the latter being an understatement.
I reminded him of whom my mother was, a woman who lacked confidence despite her beauty and brains. A woman who never felt deserving of a compliment and often made a silly face to deflect it, rather than saying thank you. A woman who was uncomfortable in the company of women, and who, in retrospect, probably felt threatened. And then there was the piece about her marriage to my dashing father who loved women… all women… from elegant society types to bawdier types who walked the aisles of nightclubs selling cigars.
This is keeping with whom she was. Do you ever think she makes a face because she wonders somewhere in the recesses of her mind how you could love her in the state she’s in? I asked, trying to keep my eyes from spilling over as I defended this woman who I’m trying to objectively understand over the last five years. Sometimes I wonder whether I am understanding her or myself — another one who can’t take a compliment. Do you think perhaps as she sits motionless and speechless in a wheelchair that she feels embarrassed? Unworthy?
My father cocked his head, and said he had never thought of it that way.
And then mustering up all the courage I had, at the risk of eliciting his anger, I said, “You know, perhaps it’s not about you, but simply about her. How might you feel if the tables were turned? If you were the one who was compromised? Would you still feel worthy of being loved in an altered state?”
“Your’e pretty smart for a little girl,” he said.
Do I think the epiphany will endure? Probably not. I seize the moments, though.
As I search my wardrobe for something appropriate to wear for lunch with my father, as I morph from his child to his companion, from his daughter to his confidante, I think about what remains (sigh) I, still the little girl in his eyes.
There is a strange beauty as I see my parents through a different lens: With their filters diminishing, I see them as a man and a woman rather than parents.
Or maybe I am just a storyteller at heart, telling the tale the way I want it to be told.
Archive for February, 2009
Last Tuesday, my husband and I took a mid-week break and flew to Florida for a visit with his parents. While we were away, our youngest took off for his Spring Break to the Bahamas, our middle one flew off to her Spring Break in Puerto Rico, and our oldest turned 23, and bemoaned the fact that while his family vacationed in the tropics, his “Spring Break” was spent on a business trip to sub-zero Syracuse, N.Y. Welcome to the real world, I said, laughing.
How, I asked myself, was all this possible – that our entire family was airborne, nearly simultaneously, and flying in all different directions? I, who once was such a fearful flyer, have become not quite cavalier, but resigned to air travel as the only means of going anywhere substantial, not to mention, to seek warmth in winter. Not to mention that I, who once tracked my children as though I was a radar controller at NASA, was able to let them fly without letting angst get in their ways or mine.
It was exactly one year ago, March 19th, that my mother suffered her stroke which has left her both paralyzed and brain-damaged. It has, unquestionably, changed HER life. Of course, what she doesn’t know, and what I say with a modicum of guilt, is that it changed my life as well. As a matter of fact, the last two years have changed my life, or perhaps I should say my outlook on life, as I have, for all intents and purposes, lost my mother, sent my “baby” off to college, and endured a marital separation that ultimately resulted in a reunion of strength and affirmation of what I always believed was, as corny as it sounds, a true and eternal love.
I have come to question whether it’s that certain things are out of our control or whether it’s just a question of playing the cards that Fate deals. I don’t believe there are any winners and losers… that it all boils down to playing the hand and staying in the game.
But with these cards I hold, there are no more nine a.m. phone calls to my mother knowing that both of our husbands have left for their offices. No more chit chat and laughter as we start our days. Oh, don’t get me wrong…we argued. We downright fought sometimes, and what I wouldn’t give for just one more mother/daughter battle with her. I believe that I have come to realize many things about her that I never knew before and wish I had known. As my father is bare without her shield, I am beginning to fill in what were once blanks about my mother as a woman, wife, and mother. Perhaps it’s all just wishful thinking…who knows? I have come to understand myself without her shield, and conclude that much of what I do is in opposition to how she did things when it comes to marriage and children. And then there are the things I have taken with me and embraced. I only hope that I have taken what I should and renounced what I should. Her absence is a strange mix of both loss and liberation for me, and I’ll never know if I would I have come into my middle age as confidently as I have if she were “here.” That’s one question where the blank will remain.
There isn’t a day when I don’t feel surges of anger about my mother… wondering why she “left” me. My anger is amorphous, not directed at her, but rage is often easier to capitulate than grief. She asks every day where I live, and although I tell her, she retains none of it. The notion that she is not “here” to see that we have kept her mother’s chairs and reupholstered them to fit the Art Deco style of our new Manhattan apartment makes me sad. As I said, anger is easier.
As for marriage, it is, once again what it was meant to be in the beginning: the union of two people who chose to spend a life together because a life apart seemed incomplete. You learn to change your expectations of both yourself and your mate. I have come to realize that we are all such flawed individuals, and no one can be perfect or attempt to be – most of all ourselves. I was brought up to believe that anything in myself shy of perfection was unacceptable. I was brought up to be more resilient than I felt I could be. I suppose that in the last two years I have learned, more than anything else, that saying “I can’t” is more rewarding that saying “I can,” although I will always try. I have discovered that admitting to hurt gives greater relief than carrying around a false stoicism. And again, I wonder if my husband and I would have come to these conclusions about marriage and ourselves had we not been apart. More unanswered questions as to why certain things have to happen the way they do.
As for my children, letting go is imperative – because as their wings spread, no human mother could possibly chase them in flight. I used to read to them at bedtime when they were small, in particular, a book called The Runaway Bunny about a mother rabbit who promised she would find her children and cling to them tenaciously no matter how they tried to elude her grasp, regardless of how great a wind came along that threatened to send them sailing, she would retrieve them. And with that, my children would slumber, assured of my presence. For older rabbits, and older rabbit mothers, the chase is too exhausting. This isn’t to say I am not there still to field the myriad questions, do their errands, give the guidance…but the wind carries them now, and it gets pretty gusty out there.
So, these days, I often picture myself hang gliding, navigating the currents, sailing the calm breezes when they come around. Trying not to ask too many questions which probably have no answers, or have answers I don’t care to hear. Basically, just trying to wing it.
When I was a child, a well-heeled woman cradled a doll as she roamed our New York City neighborhood. She fed her from an empty bottle, burped her, comforted her.
“What’s wrong with her?” I asked my mother.
“Poor thing,” my mother said. “Maybe she lost a child or couldn’t have one.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She thinks the doll is real.”
“But why?”
“Just stay away from her,” my mother said. “She’s not right.”
This imagery of delusion returned yesterday with Travis the Chimp who mauled Charla Nash, was ultimately shot and killed by the police, and first stabbed by Sandra Herold, his owner, in an attempt to save her friend. Herold is now under scrutiny, and why she has agreed to appear in the media baffles me, although perhaps she needs the forum as public defense, explanation, and even catharsis. I don’t think it’s the irresistible 15 minutes of fame.
With this incident, I recalled the strange woman who looked so “normal” except for the solace of the doll which wasn’t in the realm of acceptable behavior. I didn’t heed my mother’s warnings: I stared, a voyeur in her world of fantasy. The depths of the woman’s delusion didn’t resonate back then: how the doll kept her strangely sane and somehow sated. She was grossly fascinating and pitiful.
Most disturbing and now redolent of the “doll lady” is the notion that Herold describes Travis as her “son.” Never mind that Travis’s talent clearly provided an income for the widowed Herold: What went deeper? Of course, there are animal rights issues surrounding the humanity, if you will, of keeping a wild creature in a human environment, in front of a computer, a television, drinking wine, using a Water Pik, dressing and grooming himself, and using the toilet as a human would.
Yes, there are animal rights issues, but what about the issue of Sandra Herold? What about her psyche and emotional state went unnoticed and unexamined? Is it true or false that Lyme disease had somehow compromised Travis neurologically, and caused his sudden outburst of violence? Did Herold’s administering Xanax as a panacea for Travis’s anxiety become the trigger? (Did he also have a glass of wine as we humans have cocktails to calm our nerves?) But more, what about Herold’s propensity for treating Travis as a human? Dog owners know that human analgesics should not be given to our PETS for pain relief.
What was Herold’s “disconnect?”
Chimps have DNA eerily similar to that of humans, but their brains are half the size of ours, and they are known to attack one another, territorial creatures that they are. I don’t blame Herold or Travis: I feel for both in the same way that my eight-year-old heart and soul pitied the woman with the doll – although the doll was plastic and harmless. Travis, strapping at 200 pounds, was potentially dangerous. And I ask how much of a danger was Herold to herself in what I perceive as a deeper delusion? Was Travis’s presence in Herold’s life her only answer to quell a need that was otherwise unfulfilled? And in the end, she lost not only her “child,” but her dear friend Charla Nash was mauled beyond recognition.
How is Herold managing these two significant losses? And then there is the piece where Travis, wounded and bloodied, returned as animals do to his living quarters – a comfortable, safe, and familiar place — to die.
Walter, our dog, is eerily connected to me. If I am sad, he is mournful. When I am sick, he takes to his bed (or mine). If someone threatens me, he postures his 14 pounds between me and the offender, puffing out his chest. As I box up belongings for our impending move, he appears nervous and puzzled. I love Walter. But the boundaries are firm: Walter is my dog, my pet – not my child. Walter’s instincts are powerful, but they are instincts, not thought processes. Perhaps Travis’s instincts were powerful as well….stemmed wine glasses and toilets notwithstanding. Poor Travis: he acted appropriately as a chimp.
We (and animal activists) reproach those who take in wild animals as pets. Exploitation: Point well taken and agreed. I, for one, never liked zoos where we gawk at animals who should be living their lives as Nature intended, and not for human amusement.
But what about the humans who raise nondomestic animals as though they have a magical power to tame the wild? What about those who raise animals as children? People in my neighborhood wheel small dogs in strollers, dressing them in coats that many children would love to have while they shiver in the cold. A woman chastised me on a cold day last week, “You don’t have a coat for that dog?” I wanted to say that Walter’s natural coat acclimates quite well to the seasons. Instead, I walked away.
While we take up the causes of animals who should be neither house pets nor children, perhaps we should address the fragile psyches of the owners. Where are the activists for human mental health – an arena that still remains anachronistically taboo?
The homeless man outside my building wields beer bottles and shouts invectives as he tosses the money-back treasures into a rickety grocery cart. The man wears a T-shirt when the temperature is freezing, and dons a plastic bag when it rains. The police say he’s harmless until he attacks someone. And then he’ll become a criminal rather than someone who needed help a long time ago and fell through the cracks of The System. Like Travis, he could even be shot as intervention. Unlike Travis, I bet he will have no familiar place to go when it’s time to die.
Ellie was home over the weekend with her boyfriend. In about a month, the two of them are taking a place together on the North Shore of Massachusetts, a good five-hour drive from where we live, and a distance that I make a conscious effort not to think about. Of our three children, she is the only girl, the one who still allows me to wrap her in my arms and kiss the side of her head. Sometimes I pass the back of my hand along the curve of her chin, and the smoothness of her skin feels no different from it did when she was a “little one.” She is the middle child, the rose between the thorns, as someone aptly said, and still my baby girl.
Her room at home is slowly being emptied of clothing. Discarded T-shirts and juvenile flannel pajamas, party dresses left over from high school, and chunky boots and shoes that she wore as a teenager years ago remain. My husband recently hung a bunch of trousers in her closet, winter items that merely clutter his own closet in the heat of the summer. He tells me to do the same, and yet I am not ready to use the space in there. For me, it’s too final a reality that Ellie doesn’t live here anymore.
This is not exactly how I pictured things would go. I thought that Ellie would move back home (at least for the summer) with her wardrobe, books, and CDs, photo albums, and general clutter. She would find a job, and then take an apartment in the city with a girlfriend. I anticipated an adjustment period as she learned to live again with her parents and younger brother on a daily basis, and even anticipated some door slamming and under-the-breath mutters with mea culpas on all sides just moments later as though nothing happened. Then again, I worried that she would be lost in the city, concerned about her navigating the subways, and being pretty much by herself since at this time in life, friends are in a diaspora as the recent graduates try to find their place in life. She’ll be 22 at the end of September, so I know that she’d be living on her own around this time of life anyway…still, the distance is tough to rationalize. She’s not, as her older brother is, a cab ride away where we could meet for lunch or coffee on the spur of the moment, meet at Bloomingdale’s, and just spend a few hours browsing the racks and ending up with a new compact or lipstick, just to say we shopped. She’s not, as her younger brother is, still in college and home for summers and in between. Her brothers call her the “enigma” now, a sobriquet she hates. What I realize, and she doesn’t, or perhaps doesn’t want to face, is that they miss her. We all miss her. For me, I’ll miss the early evening talks we always had before her father would come home at night.
Probably the best thing we can do as mothers is to let go. We have to define that thin line between mothering and smothering as our children get older. It’s like when they finally take their first steps, and we move all the obstacles out of their path, cushion the corners of furniture, and stand a few feet away as they stagger like drunkards into our waiting arms. I suppose I look at this move of hers in a similar way, except for my ability to remove obstacles from her path. Sure, if she falls, I’m still here. Her father and I are her “safety net” as I’ve told her a million times in the last few months. Of course, should she come back home, there would be the challenge of dealing with either a broken heart or the guilt about breaking someone else’s, and rounds of analysis as to what went “wrong.” I suppose at the most primal level, this is the same dynamic as the learning-to-walk: you take a lot of tumbles until you’ve gotten the hang of it.
I have to admit, I have pretty calm about all this. I suppose that part of my calm is because I trust my daughter. I trust her choices, her calculated risks, her intentions. I believe that we have to chase our dreams, and find things out for ourselves one way or the other. I remember when she left for college, and I was nearly heartbroken. I didn’t feel she was ready, and I was correct: she was so homesick it didn’t give me time to shed a tear after the drive home. Who would have thought that four years later, this child who could barely stay up at school for two weekends straight, would be moving so far away?
And so Ellie has grown up enough to give her heart, and take in someone else’s. I remind myself all the time: this is her life, not mine, and yet she is such a huge part of me that I have to steal myself from feeling her every bump in the road, not to mention wanting to somehow steer her around them. All of this falls under the aegis of not meddling. And I watch her navigate from a distance, knowing it is someone else right now who strokes the side of her face and wraps her in his arms. Letting go with all my might and hoping she still feels my arms around her.
Yesterday was quite the red letter day. It was Walter’s birthday. Walter is our now seven-year -old cockapoo. Ellie got him in 2001, brought him home, and said that he would be my companion as she prepared to leave for college. How right she was. Walter and I are joined at the hip, much like Ellie and I were when she was a baby, a child, a teen and even now as a young woman.
Walter was groomed yesterday, had his check-up and vaccinations the day before, and last night we celebrated with him at The Tribeca Grand Hotel, one of the few New York City restaurant/hotels that welcomes dogs since they’re owned by Hartz Mountain. Walter was duly feted with biscuits, and offered table scraps which he ate with delicacy and not his usual fervor. I think that somehow he knew that this was an occasion.
Yesterday was also my mother’s birthday. Her age is questionable. I was under the impression that she turned 87 yesterday, although my sister says that rumor has it that it was her 90th . Somehow it mattered to me – the not really knowing. Under different circumstances, her age wouldn’t have mattered to me as much as it did yesterday – but it was just another mystery that surrounds this woman who is my mother and who I view more like a woman these days than a mother since she’s been absent in all ways but a physical presence for nearly the last four years.
But more, yesterday was the first time in my life as an aware person that I did not either send my mother flowers or candies, buy her the lacy handkerchiefs she loved, or worse – wish her happy birthday. She and my father are in Florida now and whereas last year the phone was an option as she answered the phone with a wavering and uncertain ‘hello,’ this year that line of communication was fruitless. Instead, I asked the care giver and my father to please tell her that I called and kiss her for me. And despite the gala we held for Walter last night, I cried because the birthdays yesterday were all too poignant for me.
How prescient was Ellie when she presented that little puppy to me as my companion. I remember calling my mother from my cell the day that Ellie held him in her arms at the pet shop (and please, no letters from those telling me we should have gotten a rescue dog…I know. But in fact, he was rescued from that dreadful playpen in the pet shop). We already had four other dogs at home, and getting Walter was near insanity.
“He shares your birthday,” I said to my mother, seeking her approval and sanction.
“Well, then by all means just get him,” she said.
I am a firm believer that when someone dies, we need to celebrate the person’s life. Yesterday, it dawned on me that I could not celebrate my mother’s life on her birthday because she is still living it, although not in the way that should be. It is this limbo, this abeyance, as she hangs between what was and what will ultimately be. It riddles me with guilt as I wish for both her sake and mine that she would be truly gone so that I can not only grieve with finality, but celebrate in my grief with memories – memories that are realistic, good and bad, sweet and bittersweet. And yet, although there was a time right after her stroke that I whispered to people that it would be better if she would just have died, now I remain uncertain and question how I will deal with that finality when the time comes. There is also my nearly morbid fascination with the machinations of the brain, both damaged and intact, that make me question whether or not the absence of my call or gift yesterday was felt on some level in her psyche. My obsession with truth drives me crazy. And yet I have to make peace with the notion that some truths simply remain mysteries, and the lack of an answer in the domain of what we embrace as reality has to be sufficient.
So this one is for my mother – whether you’re 87 or 90: I toasted you with a Cosmopolitan last night. You probably would have tasted it and liked it, and then said that you get drunk if you simply smell a cork, and pushed it aside. You would have said that the skirt I wore was too short for “someone my age.” You might have chastised me for having that glass of wine after the Cosmo, and made the remark ” you’d better take it easy.” You would have complained that the music was too loud in the restaurant, and that the couple engaging in a very public display of affection at the table next too us were rather crude. You probably would have said that the waitress was dressed too scantily, and that eating at what was a coffee table in the hotel lobby (the only area where the dogs can be) was a bit uncomfortable. But you would have had a good time. It would have been different – not the tony places you’re accustomed to, and secretly I think you would have liked to have been in a place that was a different slice of life than that which you know. I have come to embrace those idiosyncracies about you. They used to make me really angry. Now they make me smile and shake my head. So, there’s one truth I can put to rest.
It never occurred to me that I would have a daughter since my first-born was a son. It seemed preposterous when people patted my pregnant belly and said, ”I hope you get your girl now.” When Ellie was born, I was thrilled to have a healthy baby who happened to be my daughter.
Pink boxes arrived swathed in lacy bows holding bonnets and dresses with pinafores. Welcoming cards depicted girls dressed in outfits resembling Little Bo Peep with seraph wings and halos. Stereotypes were evident even at birth: Cards for David (and then Ben, the third child) were decorated with ballplayers and railroad engineers in striped overalls. Their gifts, firefighter hats and footballs, were wrapped in paper with sport motifs and rockets. Ellie got ballet slippers and pocketbooks wrapped in floral foils.
Perhaps even more daunting were the warnings about the inevitability of the tempestuous mother/daughter relationship that would ensue as Ellie grew older. She’ll leave you when she’s around 12, the soothsayers said, but she’ll return years later when her estrogen storm calms down and your levels are waning. And don’t forget how competitive it will be, they warned. Exert damage control: One day she could write a bestseller akin to Mommy Dearest.
Huh?
I often protest when distinctions are drawn between boys and girls/sons and daughters, though I also concede that there are differences. Boys don’t keep lotions and potions and perfumes on their dressers, and their bathrooms smell like gyms after a big game. Ellie’s bathroom smells like a spa. Boys bound down the stairs like herds of elephants and use their shirts as handkerchiefs. Ellie moves with hesitant grace, and carries small packets of tissues. My sons will ask me to dance in the kitchen, and my daughter will tell me that the necklace and earrings I’m wearing are “too much.” But really, other than these olfactory differences and physical and verbal displays of what is true affection, their differences are based more upon personality than gender.
As a little girl, I always wanted a pink and white canopy bed. I ordered dolls from the backs of cereal boxes. Ellie never wanted a canopy bed, and has an aversion to pink in general. I liked nightgowns trimmed in lace and Ellie prefers flannel pajamas worn with her brothers T-shirts.
When David was little, he took Ellie’s doll which she had tossed unceremoniously in a corner of the play room and gently placed it in its cradle, though he made me swear not to tell his friends. Ben is a clothes horse who spends a good 30 minutes styling his hair in the morning. David loves to babysit, and Ellie has little tolerance for toddlers. Ben wants to have two daughters and wants his wife to look like Pamela Lee. There’s no gender rhyme or reason to any of my three kids.
At 12, when I first needed a bra, my mother gave me $5.00 and sent me alone to the Five and Dime on the corner and said,”Go get one.” I was mortified and terrified. I loitered in the “lingerie department” until the rest of the shoppers cleared out, and started to poke through the cardboard boxes marked “youth bras.” If not for the blue-haired lady in the red apron who worked in the department, I would have been lost. She took me into a corner, eyed me up and down, and handed me the right box pictured with the demure brassiere clad girl. I waited on line to pay, the box hidden under my coat, my face flushing as the cashier placed it in a brown paper bag.
When Ellie’s time came for a bra, I was determined to undo the pitiful experience of my youth. I made it an event. We drove to the lingerie boutique on Main Street where I summoned a silver-haired saleswoman with a cloth measuring tape hanging around her neck: MY daughter would be properly fit with what was best in the confines of the velvet-draped dressing room. Ah, I thought, Ellie will have such a fond memory of this momentous day! The bonding, the closeness, that special mother/daughter memory all wrapped up in a Playtex encumbrance! I was all choked up. And then Ellie turned to me and said, “Mom, please leave. This is not a big deal. This is just a normal stage in development and you’re really embarrassing me. What is WRONG with you?”
Except for the dolls in my youth, things stereotypically girlie were absent like canopy beds, cosmetics and scents. My mother scoffed at my requests for seasonal wardrobes, and forbade me to paint my nails or wear make-up until I was 18. Until recently, it didn’t occur to me that maybe my mother in an awkward attempt was trying to steer me away from the stereotypes. After all, when my boys needed athletic supporters, I didn’t make it a Big Event or suggest that their father take them shopping. Looking back, I realize that my father bought me gaudy floral headbands but also taught me plumbing and building skills. My mother rarely (ever?) took me shopping and although she taught me how to cook, she urged me not to marry too young. It was my mother-in-law who insisted I have a bridal shower and insisted upon taking me shopping for wedding china and it drove my mother crazy. “Why should you have a bridal shower where you get pots and pans?” my mother asked angrily. And when my mother attended my shower (clearly against her wishes), I was shocked as I opened her gift to me: Three peignoir ensembles that could have come from Frederick’s of Hollywood. I guess it was the anti-Farberware statement.
Is this why I married a man who openly cried at the end of Titanic and makes sure that he introduces me with my last name and not his?
Perhaps when my mother sent me to the Five and Dime she knew that Little Bo Peep, canopy beds, and cosmetics were not the only ingredients in the recipe for mother/daughter bonds and womanhood. Although I wish she’d come with me to buy the bra.
This morning’s news was filled with caution for us baby boomers. Watch our blood pressure and triglycerides, exercise, moisturize, sexualize. Mark and I stood still in front of The Today Show this morning as we dressed for the day and then looked at each other in horror, Mark pointing an imaginary gun to his head.
As I watched the segment, I thought, “once upon a time I was a wild girl.” Not wild in the sense of my generation’s stereotype of drug use and promiscuity, but just so fearless. I learned most things by trial and error: I told a boyfriend that I was an experienced skier although I’d never been on skis, and rode the lift with him to the top of the mountain only to break out sobbing as I gazed down the slope, and admitted that I’d never skied before. It was same with horseback riding: I went with a group of friends, seasoned riders, who rode bareback. I asked for a saddle, watched my friends post, and figured out how to ride. And with sailing as well, my lack of experience (I’d never been on a sailboat before) was evident when someone yelled, “Come about.” I stood up and was knocked in the head by the boom. Even with water skiing, I liked to ski barefoot. With roller skating, I took the steepest downhill in Central Park.
My parents never knew that reckless aspect of me. I kept it well-hidden. I am the middle child. I was the “easy” one, the family’s court jester, the rock of Gibralter, and sort of lost in the shuffle as the child who was obedient and cautious.
But when my first child was born, I changed – not wanting him to be as reckless and brazen as I was. And then with each child who became mobile, I became more protective, sitting on the edge of my seat as they climbed trees, sledded icy runs that wove in and out of trees, learned to ride a two-wheeler, roller bladed, skate boarded , ice skated. Don’t be like me, I thought. Be like your father who believes in lessons and whose main sports are golf and basketball – safer sports. Yet when Mark took our oldest out on the golf course when he was two, I insisted that he wear a batting helmet in case an errant golf ball came the way of his baby’s head.
I just re-read (the last time was in college) Fitzgerald’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I have not seen the movie. When we re-read the classics as we get older, we have such a different perspective. I have this “thing” about seeing movies before I’ve read the original version. Always an avid reader (one of the things for which I DID get in trouble as a kid was reading behind my Math book in elementary school , and reading with a flashlight under the tented sheets long after I was to be sleeping), I read Gone With the Wind about a dozen times. When I saw the movie, I was sorely disappointed. For me, where books take us in our imagination simply can’t be translated to the screen no matter how great the film. So that’s why I re-read Benjamin Button.
Fitzgerald was about 36 when he wrote the story – an age in those days concomitant with middle age today in terms of longevity. At its essence, the story questions life’s conventions, employing the parable of being born out of time, living life in reverse. What happens to our lives when they are somehow “out of order?” And of course, it was an homage to all of the young men who never got to grow old as the First World War robbed them not only of their youth, but their old age. The short story is timeless. Human nature, history and eras past, notwithstanding, remains the same.
Reading this story has hit me hard in today’s youth-oriented culture, this chaotic world…as People Magazine’s year-end issue listed all of those who’ve thus far lost their lives in Iraq – a list not unlike the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. except that People gives their ages…How many times did I see “19″ next to the name of a soldier?
So, as we listen to talk shows advising us of the ways to maintain our youth in middle age, as we remain emotionally present for our adult children (and even financially responsible and certainly giving), and as so many of us care for aging parents, we truly are muddling through the middle. Where once upon a time I protected my children from harm, I now protect my parents from those out there who might exploit the elderly, who could make them victims albeit in a life lived in natural order.
How do we combine the dreams and the abandon of our youth as we are expected to stay within the parameters of convention, mete our responsibilities, remain dutiful?
I carefully navigate the icy sidewalks in my sensible rubber-soled boots. This is the first winter that I have ever worn a waterproof coat with a hood. I am growing weary of caution, duties, responsibilities. Sometimes, I just want to water-ski barefoot again. Skate down a steep hill. Be a wild thing.
My high school graduating class consisted of 15 girls in plaid skirts, white blouses, and crested navy blazers. “Old” Miss Bradley greeted us in the vestibule each morning. Her watery, bloodshot eyes encased in jowly puffy cheeks scowled. Her chin lifted aristocratically, and with the scrutiny of a judge, she inspected us for both demeanor and attitude. Unlucky girls whose skirts seemed a little too short were asked to kneel, making certain that the hem hit the floor. Knee-length was the rule: an inch too short and you got a demerit. Three demerits and you were sent to The Office to meet with Miss Comfort, an odd name for the stern headmistress. Our fingernails were inspected for signs of polish. Our lips were wiped with tissues if there appeared to be a trace of lipstick. Our throats were checked with a flashlight by the school nurse. And if we passed inspection, we shook Miss Bradley’s hand, curtsied (yes, you heard me right), and ascended the spiral staircase, holding our shoulders straight and tall. A slump would land a book on the head while we walked a room to ensure better posture. In fact, the school even had a “Posture Award.” We had to be virtuous, well-mannered, and germ-free before submerged into the rigors of academia.
I bet “old” Miss Bradley was only around 50.
The walk home from school was land mines of adolescent sexuality as uniformed (and uninformed) boys from the other city private schools waited eagerly for our dismissal. The moment we stepped a safe distance from our hallowed halls, we hiked up our skirts to a fashionable mini length, loosened our waist-length hair from the tight barrettes, and dug the pink lip gloss and mascara from the depths of our school bags. With an air of aloofness (recently, my old friend Tim referred to my demeanor back then as ‘gravitas’), we sashayed past the boys – hoping that one would say something provocative enough to trigger a response. We’d toss back a clever line, and strike up a conversation. It was all a game – a wonderfully safe and titillating game. Rebellion and innocence all rolled in one.
I bet Miss Bradley knew all about it. As I look back, now I think there was a twinkle in those rheumy eyes.
Weekend dances at St. Bart’s Church were never as wholesome as we told our parents. There were the boys who stole bottles of scotch from their parents’ liquor cabinets and poured them into bottles of Coca-Cola. And kids who smoked pot and cigarettes in the basement coat closet of the church. And steamy couples who found the back stairs to the boiler room that became an ersatz Days Inn. Chaperones appeared oblivious, more concerned about the decibel level coming from the band than the contraband. They’d sniff the air, puzzled by the sweet scents. “Incense,” someone would offer as explanation, and then they’d nod knowingly, but not knowingly at all, fingers in their ears. Or maybe they knew and didn’t really care.
My oldest, David, is 14. High school started this fall, spawning an independence that I am not quite prepared to handle. When David tells me that he’ll be going out with friends on Friday night, I shudder. I fear my new title is Mother the Impasse. I am what stands between David and a good time. Despite my vain attempts at open communication (”It seems like yesterday that I was your age….”), he thinks I have “no clue.”
I am a fossil.
As a teenager, I was one of the lucky ones. A wimp who knew how to say no and how to duck when peer pressure got too intimidating when it came to the ubiquitous drugs in my generation. I also had a highly developed conscience. I learned to fake things like taking a swig of the scotch-laden Coca-Cola, or hold the paper cup into which it was poured and then dump it in the nearest philodendron or trash can at St. Bart’s. And yet there was still a thrill to being there in the melee, and outsmarting my parents. My only vice was a penchant for boyfriends…and yet I was still innocent – all too often called a “tease.”
So, with fingers crossed, I allowed David to go to a “field party” – a new term for me who grew up in the city, but it’s just what it sounds like: A gathering in a school field or suburban park. I warned David with a litany of cautions: There will be beer, pot, cigarettes. Don’t drink. Don’t smoke. Don’t drink a soda that’s already been opened. Don’t eat anything that isn’t factory wrapped. Stay with your crowd. Don’t wander off. Call me. Take a cab home if you can’t reach me. His eyes rolled as he answered me with dutiful, “Yes, Mom’s.” I rattled on in desperation, my voice becoming a drone even to me. White noise. But I remembered those dances at St. Bart’s. Yet how could I deny him the rites of passage? And how could I still keep him “safe?”
About an hour after David got to the field party, the phone rang. “Mom, can you come get me?” he asked. “I’m at a pay phone at the train station.”
When I pulled my van down Main Street, the kids were all there, hanging on corners, bottles of “soda,” the air thick with smoke, girls scantily dressed on the cool Autumn night – all just the way I remembered. I parked in line behind Mom vans and station wagons sporting bumper stickers that said “Kids on Board” or boasting of honor students. We Moms tooted our horns gently, looking straight ahead past the older kids who pointed at us and giggled: The Moms – weary, impatient, anxious women who never had a life. And yet for the kids, the night was young.
David conceded that the party was all I said it would be – a crowd of kids doing a lot of things they shouldn’t be doing. He said it was actually pretty boring until the police cars arrived and flashed their lights and whooped up their sirens and everyone scattered.
I am not supposed to be “cool” or even understanding. I must not praise him too much for knowing when to walk away. I can’t tell him – not yet – about St. Bart’s. He still needs me to be his scapegoat, the voice behind the angry excuse, “My Mom won’t let me.” He won’t talk to me about what he calls “his” music and certainly not about girls.
In short, I think he needs me to be Miss Bradley. Of course, in retrospect, she was no fool.
