Working from home has equally great advantages and disadvantages. I don’t have to race into the shower, wash and blow dry my hair, and figure out what outfit to wear. Rather, I can slip into the black cotton one-piece overall I just bought from an online discount dance wear store and hit the desk. It can also get lonely. Sometimes I miss contact: the pulse of the newsroom, the “story” conferences, the chaos, getting dressed up.
I’ve devised a guilty pleasure when I need a break from coaching, writing, research and generally over-cranking brain: I watch a half-hour of television. What with the invention of DVR, I can watch what would typically be a one-hour show in thirty minutes, and get my fix of fantasy – and pseudo human contact.
Typically, I watch NCIS, Criminal Minds, The Mentalist, or one of the many CSIs. The other day while riding the subway, I realized that I’ve been watching far too many forensic and behavioral analysis shows: Everyone on the train looked suspicious. I was profiling the high school kid playing games on his PDA to the women with Bloomingdale’s Big Brown Bags. Even the cops looked suspect to me.
And so, on Sunday when my husband hit the links, I decided to finally watch the movie version of Sex and the City rather than work at the computer. Another disadvantage of working from home – if you’re not careful, you’re always “at the office.” My 24-year-old daughter, my girlfriends and even some guy friends said “it’s actually a pretty good movie.” Even some critics were pleasantly surprised. There were those who panned it, of course, including my sister (not a critic, but an avid moviegoer). She “hated it” – except for the clothes, shoes, and Kim Cattrall all of which and whom she reviewed as “divine.”
For me, it was the perfect movie for a lazy Sunday afternoon. Now, I only watched the last season of the show and an occasional re-run here and there. I knew that Carrie Bradshaw and Mr. Big had a stormy and passionate relationship, and I knew the storylines behind Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte.
It took me three days to watch that movie, not merely because it was two and a half hours long, and even with the fast forward through dull scenes that’s kind of lengthy, but because it made me nervous. I couldn’t take the Sturm and Drang of the relationships.
So, what’s the reason I’m suddenly more at ease with shows depicting a corpse on a slab in the medical examiner’s office rather than two people who are in love and have a break-up, an argument or misunderstanding? What’s happened to the “me” who always loved a good cry and a love story – An Affair to Remember, Pretty Woman, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg – I’ve watched them over and over (yes, my tastes are eclectic – classics to chick-flicks. Feel free to write letters of condemnation).
So, why did I have such an anxiety attack with a movie as seemingly benign as Sex and the City?
Why? Because the movie wasn’t about sex and the city. It was an urban fairytale about love and relationships. Despite all the distractions of haute couture, jewel-toned Manolos and unrealistically lavish pre-war New York City apartments, I was stuck on the angst of Carrie and Big, and Miranda and Steve, and even felt sorry for Samantha when she lay naked covered with home-made sushi awaiting hunky Smith on Valentine’s Day who showed up late with a pathetic box of candy.
That’s why.
And I’m a life coach? Well, self-awareness is half the battle to life changes…
I was tempted to fast forward my DVR to the end of the movie. Watch it backwards. Make sure there was a happy ending. Then I could weather the ups and downs of the relationships.
For the last couple of days I have wrestled with my reaction during the three-day viewing and I’ve concluded that despite my newfound propensity for forensic and criminal behavior shows, I have clearly become faint of heart.
Last Saturday was our wedding anniversary. It hasn’t always been an easy path for the last 28 years, but then again, after 28 years, who can truly say it’s been all bliss? For awhile, it was downright painful, and every so often wounds re-open, and I’m the first to admit that except for scrapes and bruises, I don’t heal well or easily. With stuff of the superficial variety, I don’t scar. I’d probably be a perfect candidate for a facelift. Emotionally, I’m a keloid former.
There was a time that I wanted to fast forward my life…find out where the path was taking me, if it was merely a detour or were my husband and I headed in totally different directions. I had to plod along, see what happened when I came to a clearing in the forest, see if I’d know where I was and if I wanted to be there. Even now, as my husband and I toasted one another last Saturday night, I did so with trepidation. To make matters worse, as a writer of fiction, I keep anticipating future chapters – wondering how they’ll be written, how they’ll play out…really just wanting “happy” in the now without the ending.
In the movie, if Steve and Miranda meet on the Brooklyn Bridge (way over the top symbolism, but it still made me weepy) on a designated day, at a designated time (all under the advice of their therapist) when they will put the past behind them, never to visit it again, and move forward. For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, I won’t tell you what happens although I am probably the only person on earth who didn’t know what would happen.
Needless to say, I won’t be watching Sex and the City 2 unless someone can lace my popcorn with a sedative. Back to the Behavioral Analysis Unit for me.
Archive for September, 2009
The kitchen in our old house was a large room with planked wooden floors and a wood-burning stove. It was hardly state-of-the-art. The regular stove was basic – four burners and one oven. The sink was stainless and shallow. The dishwasher was old, and often needed coaxing. The counters were spare except for a large center peninsula that again, was not modern – not stone and filled with drawers and cubbies – but simply a deep green Formica with an overhang that accommodated as many as seven “bar stools.” The kitchen was the hub of the house – a conference room for conversation, the place where kids sometimes did homework, where I could watch the kids play in the backyard as I cooked, where on the all too many nights when we lost power in winter storms, the wood stove threw off enough heat to keep us warm with flashlights standing upright on the counter. There was an alcove for a basic oval oak table that comfortably sat six, although rarely used except for Sunday night dinners. Typically, we opted for the peninsula.
Our children were never “picky eaters” – presumably an outgrowth of pureeing whatever Mark and I were having for dinner (before they had the ability to chew). I used a coffee bean grinder and did this not because it was chic and I was concerned about preservatives (that wasn’t endemic to the 1980’s), but simply because it made sense. To think, had I realized then that I was “ahead of my time,” I could have written some sort of hip kids’ cookbook a la Jessica Seinfeld. My kids and I still laugh recalling that they were the only ones of their friends who “begged” for frozen dinners packaged in cartoonish boxes and things like hot dogs, chicken fingers and Tater Tots.
Looking back, I realize I was the product of my upbringing. My mother was a good and basic cook. Except for the occasional use of a canned vegetable and Campbell’s Soup, every meal was “from scratch.” I have memories of her shelling peas, breaking the tips off green beans, peeling carrots, and mashing potatoes. Unlike other families who had sodas with dinner, we had ice water. Ginger ale was pretty much the only carbonated beverage we had – and that typically when we had upset stomachs, or as a treat. Eggs, butter, and fatty foods were off-limits for the most part – especially when my father was around. A cardiologist, he was obsessed with our coronary arteries: Nothing to be consumed that had a hint of cholesterol and only a scant amount of salt lest we suffer hypertension – medical words that were common in my childhood vocabulary. Ironically, with all my father’s edicts, my mother ultimately died from untreated hypertension and atherosclerosis.
What with the austerity of my diet as a kid, I longed for invitations to dinner at my friend Janie’s house. Janie’s parents were Brits whose Sunday night dinner was roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. The meal dripped in fat and gravy…thick slices of butter in a bowl on the table…something sugary, drowned with whipped cream for dessert. Eating there felt nearly illicit.
Once I got to college and had a meal plan for breakfast and dinner, I was truly liberated: fried eggs, bacon and rye toast smeared with butter and jam was my morning staple, a greasy cheeseburger at night with French fries – and pie a la mode. Forget LSD – no interest. I was all about HFD (high fat diet). Sweet rebellion.
My mother and I had our treats when my father was either sleeping or out of town. Two of the favorites were bananas and sour cream liberally sprinkled with sugar, and cucumber and tomato sandwiches on white bread with a thick layer of mayonnaise and salt. And then there were the occasional lunches we had at Chock Full O’ Nuts – the cake-like date nut bread sandwich with cream cheese, pizza from the stand near the subway, and the Papaya King hot dog heaped with salty sauerkraut. Shared vices.
I’ve always cooked, but lately I am cooking only for my husband and myself – and experimenting. The other night I made scallops with bacon, leeks and butter in a curry sauce. It once would have been deemed a culinary sin.
When our children lived at home, I cooked much like my mother – nutritious, basic comfort foods, and like her (despite my wild food days during college), I separated yolks from whites when I baked, substituted margarine for butter, used corn oil. Over the years, I struck a balance – slipping in a yolk now and then, reading that butter and olive oil were, in fact, healthier. Even my mother, as she got older and perhaps bolder – either defying or ignoring my father, created a dish of pasta tossed with olive oil, stewed tomatoes, and shredded cheddar cheese topped with sprinkled Parmesan: a departure for her. It became a favorite dish for my kids when she made lunch at her country house on Sundays. Coined Mommy-Mommy Pasta (they called her Mommy Mommy, an off-shoot of Mommy’s Mommy as opposed to Grandma which never pleased her), it remains part of her legacy – the kids’ friends still recalling the dish by that name since I often made vats of that pasta when my kids showed up with their friends in tow, and everyone was hungry.
All of our children cook. Our sons are more basic cooks, but capable – the younger son perhaps more inventive than the older one. Our daughter is an amazing cook – perhaps my muse when it comes to experimenting lately. I’d never used leeks before the other night, and had to call and ask her what to do with the thick-leafed vegetable.
It dawned on me last night as Mark and I had dinner that family dinners, whether for five of us, or now the two of us, are heirlooms. Despite the fact that it is simply the two of us now for the last few weeks since our youngest took his own apartment, the dinner hour remains nearly sacred. I set the table as I would for “company” (something I always did – another legacy from my mother): cloth napkins in jeweled rings, crystal wine glasses, colorful plates, and place mats. The meal is not merely about food. It is, and always has been, a combination of ingredients that nourish far more than the body. It is sustenance for the heart and soul; conversation that catches us up on one another’s days – sharing the good and the bad, the frustrating and rewarding…a letting- go of the negative…an embrace of the positive. And so it was last night, that I remembered my mother’s pasta, and the late nights when she and I furtively ate bananas heaped with sour cream together in the dim light of the kitchen. I got misty eyed.
“It’s a trade-off,” my husband explained, comforting me. “The pain of missing your mother so much is the price you pay for having so many sweet memories of her.”
Of course, the problem is that I want both: To make that phone call and say, “Hey, Ma, remember when we ate all that sour cream? And by the way, I cooked with butter last night.”
My younger son recently gave me a book called Science in the Kitchen and The Art of Eating Well. It was originally published in 1891. It is not merely a cookbook – it is a cultural and sociological journey (with recipes). The first few lines of the Preface read, “Cooking is a troublesome sprite. Often it may drive you to despair. Yet it is also very rewarding, for when you do succeed, or overcome a difficulty in doing so, you feel the satisfaction of a great triumph.”
It captures my culinary reflections as I look back on nights of sour cream sweetened with sugar… memories filled at once with passion and despair…a troublesome sprite indeed.
My grandfather died in 1986. I remember him as a strong and strapping man. I believe that he was brilliant and passionate, and yet others have told me that he had a tendency towards arrogance: That was a side of him I never saw – or didn’t notice. Maybe it was the mere presence of my mother that allowed the image of my maternal grandfather to remain. Despite my grandfather’s stay in a nursing home until he died of pneumonia after years of Alzheimer’s…despite his declining mental state and increasing physical frailty, I managed to see through and past his deterioration. Until now, I wondered why my mother didn’t visit him with the frequency that I did – going to his nursing home every Sunday with my two older children (the third was born after he died), bringing treats and offering company, letting him play the silly games with me that we played when I was small. Poke me on the belly so I would look down and then chuck me under the chin. I pretended to fall for it every time. Often, my mother sent me with food she’d cooked, and later jars of baby food when his capacity to chew became more difficult. It is only now that I realize it wasn’t that she wouldn’t go with the frequency that I did, but rather the pain of seeing him that way was too great for her. I had that generational degree of separation, coupled with the innocence and ignorance of youth that allowed for easier visits. He was the grandparent. He was supposed to be “old.” For my mother, she was the generation who was losing the shield of her parents (her mother died in 1979) – becoming the “old” one as he declined, and the oldest generation once he was gone.
I have come to realize we are not new as a “sandwich” generation. We just talk about it more.
Sometimes it feels as though I am being handed clues to a riddle. Solve this one, something taunts me. Or maybe I am just a storyteller at heart, trying to create a tale – one that provides explanations to so many unasked questions. Perhaps both elements are valid.
Several months ago, before she died, I found a picture of my mother and myself: She was 50 and I was 20. If you ask my siblings, they will tell you she was 52: I choose to believe she was the age she claimed to be. Why rob her of that small secret now? The picture was taken at a dinner party in my parents’ home. She was always photogenic. I was, and am, not. But in this picture, the camera loved us both. If I take a piece of paper (which I did) and cover parts of our faces, I see that I have her mouth (something I always knew and saw) – lately, something I recognize in more ways than one. I see the similarity in our musculature, and the way we carry ourselves. Most importantly, we both just look so happy. She, in particular, is beaming; I am shyer. I had the photo blown up to an 8 X 10, and it sits prominently now on the shelf in our living room. It is painful and comforting at once. All I know is that, for sure, it erases the last five years of her life when she barely resembled herself. In the photo, my mother remains.
And so I look at home movies and photographs, read letters from my mother, remember vignettes from the past, phrases she used, battles and conversations we had, and I realize that so many of the memories are from what were my mother’s own middle years – the place where I am now. I ask myself if I am projecting as I come up with answers to the riddles, or is it that suddenly I am my mother’s peer as she is frozen in time in that photograph. I like to think that I have come to know her in a different – and more sympathetic – way.
Did my mother feel the way I do in her fifties? Where does she leave off and where do I begin in this quest for truth about her and myself as women? How strange it has been to witness my father/her husband in the last five years without her there to “run interference.” Perhaps the duality of the situation rests in both my mother’s absence and my father’s overwhelming solo presence: It’s been odd to see him more prominently as a man and less like a father as I deal with him without her cautions, her advice on how to “handle” him with her as my ally. Illuminating? Hardly. I could forego the perspective. Rather, it feels voyeuristic – a nearly forbidden glimpse into what life with this man was like for my mother as I often walk in some of her shoes. Although the terrain is not entirely unfamiliar, it is unsettling and odd as I see the woman/my mother roughly the same age as myself now in the photograph.
How much of all this is subject to my own interpretation as her daughter? My husband’s wife? My children’s mother? Myself? What did my mother think/feel/want/eschew as my father’s wife? A woman? Sometimes it feels like she and I bleed into one another, challenging the most competent forensic scientist – or perhaps forensic psychologist – to differentiate the two personae.
And then there are my own twenty-something children. Once, I was the woman – the mother – who nurtured them and the neighborhood. Ours was the house with the overstocked refrigerator, everything in place, extras of pillows, toothbrushes, and bed linens. The woman/mother who knew the answer to “where’s that shirt I wore last Thursday?” The one who had a cabinet filled with school supplies, a Halloween costume basket, a menagerie of dogs, hamsters, ducks, frogs and rabbits and still said it was fine if the “team” came for dinner.
Yesterday, my oldest son went for a run and ended up at our apartment in the middle of the day. He has a key. I was in the kitchen when I heard the door open. I was caught off guard. Didn’t have my “face” on. Hadn’t showered yet or made the bed. He stayed for a bit, and we talked. I gave him some left-overs – hardly on the grand scale of years before. A part of me was self-conscious. Did he pause to think that I wasn’t that woman I used to be – the one who could care for the neighborhood? Did he see me as “old” or simply as a woman with grown children who now lives alone with her husband? I wasn’t sure.
Last night I dreamed my mother came to me and kept murmuring the word “solipsism.” Is this because for me she finally exists both as a woman and a mother with the “woman” part becoming more of what I embrace? Or is this because finally, upon her death and in the photograph, she exists in ways she couldn’t when once upon a time she was a wife and a mother and her world was not entirely her own? I have searched her name on websites and credit reports, and except for her obituary, she didn’t “exist.” Is that why she came to me in a dream and whispered solipsism?
She and I are suspended in time in the photograph. We are a continuum, ageless and connected with a touch of innocence. I look back at what neither of us knew then – before she lost her parents, before I lost her. I make up a story as our arms touch one another, as she beams and I look shyly at the camera. It occurred to me this morning that I now own the dress she wore in that photo. She gave it to me about 20 years ago, deciding it was “too young” for her.
Even in my dream, I neglected to ask about her reality. And yet if I had, even as we sleep, how much would a mother reveal to her daughter? Do dreams come true only in dreams? Van Gogh said, “I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.” Perhaps, in some ways, I am trying to do the same.
I remember the days when my children were small and my greatest fear was losing them.
We’ve all had those moments as we stand on the supermarket checkout line with our child beside us, admonishing them distractedly as they pull down candies from the shelves. We turn around, prepared to take the child’s hand and leave, and our child isn’t there. The panic ripples through our bodies, lips parch, hearts pound, we grow weak with fear. We scream our child’s name in a voice so primal, it isn’t our own. When my daughter was three, I drove to pick her up at nursery school only to be told by an assistant teacher that they couldn’t find her. Once the school bus driver neglected to drop off six-year-old Ben who was sleeping in the back of the bus. At four, David played hide-and-seek so well that one afternoon we combed the neighborhood. Ten minutes for Ellie, over an hour for Ben and David: It didn’t matter. When they were gone, every moment was an eternity. And then there were the nights when they got older – when curfews were missed and cell phones unanswered, until finally the teen showed up – and I didn’t know whether to scold or embrace them. Looking back, the feelings of panic are still palpable.
It is astonishing how Jaycee Dugard’s mother, Terry, survived the nearly two decades spent missing her child. Perhaps “survive” is the operative word – far different from “living.” How did she manage to cling to hope after 11-year-old Jaycee was abducted while walking to the school bus in South Lake Tahoe, California? To think, Jaycee was a three-hour drive away from home.
Google Antioch, California, the town in which Jaycee Dugard spent 18 years as Philip Garrido’s captive, and you will see that there are roughly 100,000 people living there – none of whom noticed anything strange about Philip Garrido’s backyard.
According to Antioch’s website – which depicts a vista of rolling hills under shimmering sunlight, there are many town committees: economic development, capital improvements, environmental agencies overseeing conservation of water, pollution, programs for a “healthy home,” “green living,” and one for household “Haz Waste.” There are planning, engineering and building divisions, a neighborhood watch, the presence of Megan’s Law Website so that sex offenders have to be registered, a tip line for unsolved crimes, and a crime prevention commission that holds 7 p.m. meetings on the third Monday of every month.
Maybe it’s me, but I keep wondering why the neighbors, police department, planning and zoning board, and the department of health didn’t find something the tiniest bit odd, let alone downright suspicious, given the living conditions at the Garrido house – the back yard covered with tarpaulins. Some of the kids called him “Creepy Phil,” but that was the extent of it.
Yes, Garrido is guilty of an unfathomable crime, but in what appears to be a nearly idyllic California town, who else is guilty – by omission?
I keep thinking about the 1964 murder of 28-year-old Kitty Genovese near her home in Queens, N.Y. The fatal attack lasted nearly a half hour: Neighbors heard her screams and cries for help, but no one called the police until it was too late. People said they thought her screams might be those from a “lovers quarrel” or a “drunken brawl.” Well, since when do we assume that lovers quarrels and drunken brawls are unworthy of intervention? Reports said that nearly a dozen people witnessed her attack either audibly or visually: Kitty died in the ambulance on her way to the hospital after someone finally called the police. And so the phrase “bystander effect” was coined – a phenomenon where the greater number of people present, witness to an incident or crime, the less likely people are to get involved. There is, as the definition says, a “diffusion of responsibility.”
Is this what happened in the town of Antioch? People are now saying that when Jaycee and her “sisters” attended birthday parties for their children, they seemed like “sweet and happy girls.” They mention now that their clothing was “different” from that of the typical teen – they were more “conservative.” Of course, the latter is merely a superficial glance. The point is, people were not unaware of the existence of Jaycee and her “sisters” ( who are, in fact, her daughters, Angel and Starlet, fathered by Garrido). No, they had never been to a doctor or dentist, and yes, they were home-schooled, but they were visible.
This visibility leads to my next question: Did people choose to look the other way? Did the local police department not do the math when it came to Garrido, a registered sex offender who did a stint at Leavenworth for rape and kidnapping? Garrido was not just your run-of-the-mill neighborhood pervert. Didn’t anyone think that something or someone might be hiding or hidden under one of those tarps or in the shed that sat in the Garrido’s littered backyard? What’s the point of having a registered sex offender program in place (and Garrido re-registered annually on his birthday – he did not slip through the cracks) if the sex offender is just a name on a list?
So, what’s the reason that no one saw a red flag and law enforcement didn’t have enough probable cause for a detailed look/see under the guise of something as benign as sanitary conditions?
In the end, it took a mother’s instinct – a mother who happens to be a police officer – to feel something beyond unsettling about Philip Garrido. Lisa Campbell, a police officer at the University of California (Berkeley) encountered Garrido with Angel and Starlet last Monday when he stopped in to propose a religious event called God’s Desire. Campbell, who felt the two girls were “robotic” and “smiled too much,” instinctively called upon Ally Jacobs, another police officer, who ran a records check and discovered Garrido’s criminal history. Garrido’s parole officer was called, and the rest is history.
Of course, hindsight is always 20/20, and it’s always simpler to be an armchair quarterback than the player on the field – but what if someone had just been courageous or curious enough to have a closer look at Garrido’s property given his background and the apparent living conditions?
What if we are all brave enough to go with our guts and cultivate our instincts as Lisa Campbell did? The worst that can happen is that we might be wrong.
Right: Last week I said I wouldn’t blog about “news items” in this forum. Well, Jaycee Dugard is far more than a news item. She is, at her essence, every missing and endangered child out there. She was “news” 18 years ago and then disappeared (literally and figuratively) into the landscape. She is “news” again because her recovery is a miracle.
The next time you’re surfing the web, check out www.missingkids.com. That’s the website for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Please look carefully: One of those children could be right next door.
We need more miracles.
