Some might argue that, at 51, I’ve been middle-aged for awhile. But I feel as if I’ve just arrived. Here’s how I know: About a month ago I went to the store and became engrossed with a beautiful baby. I watched as he interacted with his clearly pregnant mom. I figured her to be about 4 or 5 months along and I felt sympathetic—Wally and the Snapper are 19 months apart. When I bumped into the mom again in another aisle I asked her how old the baby was. He was 9 months. I nodded knowingly and asked when she was due. She wasn’t pregnant.
I was mortified. I fled.
I never would have asked that question when I was in my 30’s. I would have considered it an infringement of that woman’s privacy. Now here I was, a biddy nosing about her business in a store—and a craft store to boot! How much more middle-aged can you get??
Here’s how I also know I’m middle-aged: Wally and the Snapper’s dad is old enough to take Viagra. Now I’m sure you want to know how I would know such a thing about a man to whom I have not been not married for 16 years. Well, one night a week or so ago we were having dinner and the Snapper, out of the blue, started telling George and I how he’d gone looking for something in his dad’s refrigerator and had come across what he thought were vitamins but when he read the label he saw they were pills for erectile dysfunction. I started to laugh so hard I had to leave the table. He could have used those pills 25 years ago! Still, he is now old enough to really need them, which made me feel—well, not as old as him.
But here’s how I really know I’m middle-aged: Wally brought his college girlfriend home to meet the family this weekend. He and the Snapper arranged to double date with their girlfriends—and then decided to ask George and I to “triple date” with them. They drove separately from us and when George and I got into our car and he asked jokingly, “where to?” I said, “straight ahead into our future” because I know this is the shape of things to come. I looked around that restaurant table on Saturday night and thought that some time in the really-not-that-distant future, our family will include two more people, two young women like the ones seated next to my sons. Two women I don’t even know yet who will eventually know more about my sons than I do. It will no longer be just the four of us at the table, it will be the six of us. That’s an automatic 18% gratuity on the tip!
The upside is I’ll have someone to go with me to the lady’s room.
The next afternoon we had a lovely Sunday afternoon lunch in the garden with my parents and the boys and the college girlfriend. The Snapper left to drive my parents home. I packed up some leftovers for Wally, hugged him good-bye, then he got in her car and they drove off together at 3:00. I went inside where George was cleaning up and said, “I’m not sure whether I feel as if I’m in a Louis Malle film or whether I’ve become my grandmother” and he said, “well, your white hair is showing.”
I know it’s only been two weeks since I touched it up.
I went upstairs to dig out the Clairol. George followed me up. He said, “Think positive. Now that they have girlfriends they require less maintenance.” I said, “Yes, but my roots require more.”
He said, “You’re really upset, aren’t you?” I said, “I feel old. Just yesterday they were five and six.”
George said, “I don’t remember that” and I pointed out he didn’t know us then. I asked, “Who’s acting old now?”
I said, “I never think about my age. But when I find myself in a potential mother-in-law position I realize I’m not as young as I once was either. Don’t you feel as if you’re older now?”
George said, “I know I’m not.” I asked, “How’s that?” and he said, “Because I don’t have to take Viagra.”
I said, “Good point” and went off to celebrate our relative youth.
Jane Becker
]]>I promptly hid it under a pile of books so the Snapper wouldn’t see it—not because I’m a prude but because teenage boys are incredibly grossed out at the idea of women our age having sex. One time when George was kissing me in a promising way the Snapper snorted, “you guys are too old to be having sex!”
Uh-huh.
I think the Snapper’s girlfriend’s father was itching to tell him he was too young to have sex when he saw the way the Snapper was hugging and kissing his daughter at the pre-prom party. The father needn’t have worried though—I already told him that, in no uncertain terms.
Teens are always looking for private places to have sex. I know some of my sons’ friends have even done it in their houses while their parents were unknowingly in another room. Yes, I know who they are and no, I’m not telling because I never reveal my sources. But I do feel their pain. Quiet sex is quite a challenge. I know this because I live in a small house. With teenagers.
It’s not just the interior geography which poses problems—it’s the hours they keep. When they were little I could put them to be at eight or nine and be between the sheets by ten. Now, they’re still going strong at two in the morning. This dichotomy does however lend itself to teens having sex in the living room while their parents are fast asleep dreaming of it upstairs. When Wally and the Snapper started staying up, we took to scheduling sex. W
e’d try to figure out when they were going to be at football practice or out at the movies and lock the date in. Teens being who they are, they’re not always where they should be and so this didn’t always work out. We’d be on our way upstairs with a glass of wine and suddenly the door would bang open and they’d spill into the living room, home early with a group of friends. George would look at me and say, “Was it good for you?”
In my dreams, honey.
I discussed this problem with my friend Bella, an older, wiser woman and a former Madam to boot. She suggested “lunch dates”. I said I thought that was a dating service but she said no, it was sex in the middle of the day. She said, “Lunch dates are perfect because you’re both awake, and there’s less chance of being interrupted by your teens, unless they’re cutting school.” She added, “You also get to burn off calories instead of consuming them.” I asked her if she ran lunch time specials when she ran her house and she said, “what do you think those three hour lunches in the 60’s were really all about?” I wouldn’t know because I was in grade school then. But my dad did take me to lunch in a Playboy club in the mid-60’s in New York. The bunnies were awfully nice, but that’s another story.
So George and I tried lunch dates and I have to tell you, it’s fun and it feels awfully French. In French movies lovers always seem to meet in the afternoon for some passionate lovemaking before they return to their power point presentations. Maybe this is another reason why French women don’t get fat.
At any rate, none of the articles in the woman’s magazine addressed issues like lunch dates or teenagers. It’s all about failing libido and Kegel exercises and how sex after 40 is not as exciting or sexy as it used to be. I felt badly for the women who wrote these articles because frankly, I think sex is much better than it was when I was younger—I know I’m having more fun now then I did when I was 22. But reading through the articles, it sounded as if sex wasn’t very fun at all.
On second thought, maybe I’ll leave the magazine out after all.
]]>Just look at St. Jane de Chantal.
]]>Just look at St. Jane de Chantal.
St. Jane lived in 17th century France, married and bore ten children at which point she discovered her calling as a nun and—this was my mom’s favorite part—stepped over the wailing bodies of her children on her way out the door to the convent.
For this the Catholic Church elevated her to sainthood.
I used to think that living in a convent was a fate worse than death. Now that I have children of my own—and have read up about those medieval convents—I kind of get it. There were libraries and herb gardens in convents, servants who cooked and cleaned. Often the nuns were women who, like St. Jane, had left their marriages behind. The convents tended to be conveniently situated near monasteries and this being France there was a fair amount of, shall we say, social intercourse.
Nowadays Jane would be thrown in jail—just look at the mother who let her children out of the car and drove off without them. She went home and was arrested. She probably just should have headed for a convent.
It’s ironic that in the 21st century, when we have a full range of options and lifestyles open to us, we have reverted back to biblical times in terms of how we view motherhood. Mothers are Mary again. That would be the Virgin Mary, the Mother of Christ and the Whore Mary, Mary Magdalene. But this iconization of motherhood has nothing to do with sex (does it ever, except maybe in Europe?) and everything to do with the pursuit of perfectionism.
Good Mary’s feed their children organic strawberries, worry about their child’s carbon footprint, go to online confessionals and mea culpa for having served their 5 year old juice in his toddler brother’s sippy cup. Seriously—someone wrote about this. Even better, it was published in a book. I will not be buying this book because I don’t want my sons to know that children can develop self-esteem issues around cups and glasses. It would interfere with my quest to get them to wash the dishes.
Anyway, not only do Virgin Mary’s beat their breasts, they beat up the Mary Magdalene’s of the world—that would be anyone whom they think is not a good mother. Troll any parenting or women’s site and I guarantee you will find some variation of this headline: “Mothers We Hate.” These mothers usually include the Octo-Mom, Angelina Jolie and Sarah Palin. Virgin Mary’s do not discriminate on the basis of party affiliation or job status—their only target is mothers whom they perceive to be not perfect.
Now these women know that they themselves are not perfect. They blog about the fact endlessly. But they are like reformed sinners—the confession of their imperfection makes them somewhat perfect. All I can say is, it feels a bit like the Spanish Inquisition to me. And not the one with the soft, fluffy pillows, either.
I’m not sure how we got here. I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s and I know my mother and her friends weren’t that interested in pursuing perfectionism. One of my favorite childhood photos is of the first four (of six) of my siblings eating dinner in the backyard, in the middle of summer. It is a black and white photo, but you can see the dirt on us. We look as if we just spent hours crawling around in the yard—especially my sister, who is blissfully eating food off the high chair tray with her dirty fingers.
My sister ended up writing her doctoral dissertation on nuns.
Another image in my mental scrapbook is of my mother and a group of about five of her friends on the beach. They are sitting in a wide circle in their faded bathing suits, talking, knitting and laughing. There must have been 30 kids among them, but they seemed unconcerned about where we were or what we were doing. If we needed a snack, they pointed to the picnic baskets. If someone was crying further down the sand, they sent an older child to investigate. I remember standing outside that circle and watching them, thinking, it must be pretty fun to be a mom. And for me, it has been and it still is.
To be fair, a lot of these Inquisitors are the mothers of young children. They still think they have total control of their children and who their children will become. Mothers of teenagers know differently—that you can be the most sainted of mothers and still end up raising an axe murderer, or at least someone who returns the car with the gas tank on empty. Because kids aren’t perfect either. They will not always listen to you or foreswear corn fructose syrup or eat a balanced dinner or keep their dirty feet off the sofa.
They’re not Saints. But I’m not either. I have more of a Mary Magdalene streak running through me. I forgot to pick up Wally from kindergarten one day and he had to sit in his cubby til I got there. I once set my chair up at a little league game and watched for four innings before I realized that none of the kids on the field were my kids. They didn’t know how to read when they entered first grade. I missed their birthdays because I was on business trips and I still can’t remember what their favorite vegetables are and how they like them (but George does).
I’m not a good sinner. I don’t feel badly about myself as a mother because I did these things. My sons survived them as I did. We did other things too—like reading endlessly on the porch on lazy afternoons and building snow forts and going on puddle walks around the block and catching fireflies in jars on summer evenings and once, when there was a full moon on the winter solstice, dancing in the moonlight in the snow.
We no longer read on the porch in the summer, but we sometimes hang out on the porch and smoke a cigar. We no longer chase fireflies but we do watch disgusting movies on the Horror Channel and bad reality shows on VH1 and sometimes we go on long bike rides where they end up leaving me behind in the dust. We enjoy each other’s company.
I like the adults they’ve become—they are happy, healthy, funny and relaxed. And I hope that they carry the same philosophy of parenting forward when they have their own families—that saints belong in convents and Mary Magdalene is a lot more fun to have around.
]]>
Last night we got to talking about the column in the New York Times by Dr. Perri Klass. It was about discussing sex with boys.
Uh-huh. I’ve addressed this issue.
When Wally was in the 3rd grade he mentioned, over dinner, the fact that one of the girls in his class was growing under-arm hair.
I took advantage of the teachable moment to discuss puberty and hormones and menstruation and sex. I finished off my chat by looking the boys in the eyes and saying, “So basically, every time you have sex you can get a girl pregnant.”
I know that’s not biologically factual, but I have been known to deconstruct “The Cat in the Hat” to suit my needs, so I had no compunction about creating a fact to reinforce my teachable message which was, always use birth control. The Snapper, who was then in 1st grade, reflected on this little lesson and then said to me seriously, “Mom, I’m just not gonna have sex til I’m 30.”
I reminded him of this last week when he went off to visit Wally at college.
Our next constructive sex discussion occurred when Wally was in 7th grade. It was the night before he was to attend his first Bar Mitzvah. A mother of an 8th grader had informed me that some girls were giving out blow jobs as presents. I admired the cost-effective approach to gifting but it occurred to me that in all of our open discussions about sex we’d never discussed oral sex. So I went to George before dinner and asked if he’d like to handle this part of the educational experience.
He fled the room.
So I brought Wally into the kitchen as I was making pasta and said, we never discussed oral sex, but let me tell you, contrary to Bill Clinton’s statements, it is sex. I said, she can’t get pregnant but you could both still get diseases. I asked if he had any questions, but he said no and fled after George.
In her column Dr. Klass waxes philosophically about the differences in discussing sex with adolescent boys vs. adolescent girls. With boys she recommends discussing respect, date violence and manners.
She is much more circumspect than I am.
When each of the boys hit high school, I instructed them, “First, no means no, it never means yes. Second, never attempt to have sex with a girl who is drunk. Third, condoms are only 85% effective—when used properly. And finally, there is no such thing as spontaneous sex, so always be prepared.”
At dinner one night, one of them once challenged me on the “myth” of spontaneous sex. I said if sex was truly spontaneous, then there would be no need for Victoria’s Secret. I turned to George for support. I said, “Seriously, how many women end up in bed with a guy while wearing Hanes undies? If a woman thinks she’s going to have sex, she goes to Victoria’s and gets ready for it, right?” He turned pale and left the table.
But I know it’s true. I’ve been to Victoria’s Secret myself.
Dr. Klass’ column is a good read, but I don’t think it goes far enough. If she wants to do a follow-up, I’d be happy to invite her to my place.
We could discuss it over dinner.
http://thedamedomain.blogspot.com
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There was a long pause on her end of the line. Then Annie sighed and said, “Okay, go ahead.”
I said, “I’m reading this article about how Biden is so tightly controlled at the White House that Obama even orders his entrée for him at their weekly lunch meeting.” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/us/politics/29biden.html?pagewanted=1&adxnnl=1&ref=politics&adxnnlx=1238445775-tklw2UVsgLPRw7DUchC5%20w
Annie said, “Well I know you’ve never liked it when a date tried to order for you” and I said that was just me safeguarding my food, a habit ingrained in me by growing up with three brothers.
But I said, “That’s not the point. The point is that Joe Biden has more experience than Barack Obama—he spent 30 plus years in the Senate. And he came up with the all time best slogan from the campaign when he said about Giuliani that all of his sentences consisted of a noun, a verb and the word 9-11. But now he’s trailing around after a much younger boss who has him reading off cue cards. They even use kitchen terminology to describe his role—the article says he’s good at stirring the pot. How sexist is that?” and Annie said, “Jane, no one would ever describe you using kitchen terminology.”
I said, “It’s true, but I feel for Joe Biden. He’s the older woman working for a younger and less experienced man—someone, in fact, who should be working for him. I’ve been there.” She said, “You’re still not over that agency gig, are you?”
No, I’m not.
I was called in 3 times to interview for an assignment. Each time I met with a young’un who was probably in utero when I began my career. He asked me to do a writing sample for the client and even though I hadn’t done one in years, I agreed. He called me to tell me that I had turned in the best writing sample and was the most qualified writer for the account. Then he called me back to tell me he was hiring the other candidate—a 30 year old guy who was also probably just a gleam in his mother’s eye when I started out.
But I’m smarter than they are—I snaked the client. Hey, I’d already passed the writing test.
This is not the first time I’ve bumped into this situation and I know I’m not the only one. I have a 50 something friend whose job was recently eliminated. The (male) higher-ups called her department into a meeting and put a power point slide up on the screen with everyone’s job titles. Anyone who had a circle around their job title lost their job. Despite being a top producer for ten years, my friend was circled. It was amazing how many 20-something young men were left up on the power point.
I have another friend who worked for months for free on a start-up company. She created her position and helped secure funding. The entrepreneur, a man in his 30’s, told her she was indispensable. After he received capital he hired a male assistant in his mid-20’s—who moved rapidly up the ladder and took the position my friend had created. When she complained the entrepreneur told her she was welcome to stay—and work for the younger man.
You have to wonder, if experience is a core value in the business world, then why are more experienced women consistently being passed over for younger men with only a few years under their belts? Annie said, “Because of what else is under their belts.”
I said I thought that when women began making inroads in the 80’s and 90’s the penis argument went out the window and Annie said, “Only if you were Lorena Bobbit.”
Annie said, “I’ve a great quote for you: ‘There’s no such thing as a glass ceiling for women. It’s just a thick layer of men’ .”
I said, “Maybe. But who’d have thought they would be men whose diapers you could have changed when you were a babysitter?”
Older Women Who Reached The Top
Julia Child published her first cookbook at 49 and launched her first television series at 50.
Hillary Clinton became a Senator at 53.
Clara Barton started the American Red Cross when she was 60.
Golda Meir became Prime Minister of Israel at 71. Millicent Fenwick was elected to Congress at the age of 64.
Eleanor of Aquitaine was 52 when she launched a war against her husband, the king of England.
Helen Thomas still sits in the front row of the White House Press Corps. She’s 79.
Jane Becker http://thedamedomain.blogspot.com
]]>I know I didn’t take that many tests in high school, though George seems to think that he did. I said maybe my high school wasn’t geared that way and he suggested that maybe I had just cut those classes.
Probably.
So when Wally called and asked me to take a personality test I tried to squirm out of it. He insisted. He said , “Come on, it will take 5 minutes and it’s fun” , which I believe is the same logic I employed on him in elementary school.
He said, “It’s called Myers-Briggs and it tells you cool stuff about yourself.” I said, “I think I took something like that in high school and it recommended that I become a beautician.” Wally pointed out that I did like to give everyone a manicure, so maybe it wasn’t so far off.
It’s true—I also mix my one nail colors. Sometimes I think I’ve missed my calling.
I logged on to take the test, http://www.humanmetrics.com:80/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp, which despite being 75 questions did not actually take a lot of time. I came back as an INTJ, which is Introverted, Intuitive (somehow I knew that), Thinking, Judging.
I clicked through to careers and found I’d been upgraded to scientist. I called Wally back and said, “Okay, I took the test but I still don’t think I’m a scientist” and he urged me to click over to the Keirsey site, which breaks down the results into four profiles: Guardians, Idealists, Artisans and Rationals (http://keirsey.com/handler.aspx?s=keirsey&f=fourtemps&tab=1&c=overview ) .
I was profiled as a Rational. When I dug down further I saw that my profile was actually MASTERMIND. I was thrilled! It sounded like something out of a Tom Wolfe novel!
The profile says that Masterminds comprise about 1% of the population and “their aim is maximum efficiency…They are head and shoulders above all the rest in contingency planning...Masterminds never set off on their current project without a Plan A firmly in mind, but they are always prepared to switch to Plan B or C or D if need be.”
My fellow Masterminds include Isaac Asimov, Dwight Eisenhower, Frederick Nietzsche, Lisa Meitner and Ulysses S. Grant. I know could have fun with this group, even though I doubt anyone of them would be interested in a manicure. Maybe Lisa—who says physicists can’t enjoy Revlon Red?
I pinged George to let him know I was a Mastermind. I added, “Now I understand why I was so addicted to ‘The A Team’ in the 80’s. They might have been the A Team but it was always Plan B that carried them through.” He said, “That’s a pretty creative excuse for enjoying bad TV” and I said that’s why I was a Mastermind.
I spent a couple of days feeling pretty good about my Mastermind status. When friends called and asked how I was doing, I said, “I’m a Mastermind.” It imbued me with a sense of satisfaction that called to mind the “Designing Women” episode where Annie Potts’ character puts on a pair of fake boobs and goes out to a bar, where men fall all over her and she says to the other women, “These are power!”
I called Rebecca and said I’d found something better than my baby blue converse sneakers. “Being a Mastermind just may make up for having to shop in the junior lingerie department,” I said and she suggested maybe I could use my master intellect to find a way out of the junior department.
Plan A and Cup B, here I come.
The Dame Domain, http://thedamedomain.blogspot.com
]]>Take, The Cat in the Hat. At the end of the book the narrator says something like this: “Then our mother came home and she said to us two, did you have fun? Well what did you do? And my sister and I did not know what to say. Should we tell her the things that went on here today? Should we tell her about it? What should we do? Well, what would you do if your mother asked you?”
Here I would pause to look maternally into their rapt eyes and I would say, “Well, of course you tell the mom. You tell the mom everything, right?” And they would nod faithfully. Sometimes I think the Snapper took that lesson too completely to heart because there are times I have to stop his narration of an event and say, “I really don’t need to know everything!!”
The Cat in the Hat , despite my twisted deconstruction of it, is essentially a story about kid anarchy. About kids getting away with it, which they need to do, unless it involves drinking and my car. But wreaking havoc in the house with Thing One and Thing Two—these are things kids need to do and get away with, especially if they learn how to tape up the cracks in the window, which Wally and the Snapper did.
Theodore Geisel snuck a lot of lessons into his books—not the kinds of lessons that turn a book into a Calvinistic primer—but the kind that he knew all kids intuitively understood, even if they forgot them when they got older. Like this one, from Red Fish, Blue Fish: “It is good to have fun—but you have to know how.”
Which, now that I think about it, goes hand-in-hand with the lesson at the end of Cat in the Hat. You have to know how to have fun—and when not to say anything about it.
Maybe it’s a good thing the boys have stopped reading Seuss, after all:))
Jane Becker
]]>This philosophy extends to never reading manuals associated with any form of technology, even my landline phone. I believe everything is plug n’ play (and why not, I wrote a lot of the copy that said it was).
Technology was pretty straightforward in the 80’s, but in the 1990’s things like streaming video came along. I triumphed over that technology by getting a company to pay me to launch a website that streamed short films, without actually owning a computer that would let me see the films.
Eventually I upgraded—and my troubles began. There was a lot more to plug before I could play. I could have read the manual, of course, but I find them pretty boring. So instead I gave them to Wally and the Snapper, who were by then 7 and 8 and old enough to learn about bits and bytes, if not the birds and the bees.
It was such a successful strategy that I never again even took the shrink wrap off the manuals. I would just give the technology to my sons and said, “Hey, let’s play, ‘take your son to work day’.” Wally is now majoring in physics and I like to believe I had a hand in his interest in science and technology.
I have stayed ahead of the curve, philosophically speaking. I got into Skype several years ago, video conferencing several years ago and Twitter last year. Just last week the Snapper and I were out to dinner and the TV in the bar had a story on about Twitter. The Snapper asked, “What is that?” and I was able to discourse at length. Hey, I can’t throw a football but my sons know who to come to for the latest in technological trends.
Last week I finally upgraded to a new cell phone. My first instinct was to put it aside for when I had time to take it to the cell phone store, where they could do it all for me. But the Snapper was pestering me because he wanted my old phone (his is currently held together by duct tape—don’t ask).
After several days of moving the instructions from the kitchen counter to the dining room table and back again, I finally read them and learned I could program my phone myself and move all the contacts by going online. I did it! I didn’t even get bored and terminate the application before it had fully downloaded. I transferred all my photos and my contact list. When the Snapper came home yesterday, I displayed my updated and function
al new phone, which, let’s be honest, I bought because it has a screen large enough for me to see without my glasses. But I didn’t say this to him. Instead I said, “Look! I downloaded all the data myself! Doesn’t it look great?”
He casually picked up the phone and scrolled through the pictures. Then he said, “Mom, you should have just bought the Jitterbug phone for old-heads” and left the room.
Meaning, no matter how ahead of the curve I think I am, I will always be pre Y2k for my sons!
Jane Becker
]]>I put my 80-something parents on the plane to somewhere in Florida yesterday. I admit, I’m not big on Florida geography. I know Rebecca lives there, it’s warm and sunny in February and it’s where everyone went in the 1960’s morality tale, “Where the Boys Are”. If you have a cell phone number, what more do you need to know about a place?
I tucked my parents into their wheelchairs at the US Air gate and the attendants assured me they would escort my p’s all the way to their seats. They wouldn’t even have to get out and take their shoes off for security, which is worth being 80 something for, if you ask me. I kissed them good-bye and the last thing I said was, “Call me when you get there.”
That was 10 a.m.
At 5 p.m. my younger brother phoned me to ask if they’d actually gotten on the flight. I said they had. He sounded worried. He said, “Do you think they made it okay?” I assured him. I said, “They’re probably still alive because if they were dead, we’d have heard by now.” He understood that logic and, having registered the fact that they were safe, proceeded to get really mad at my parents. “Don’t you think they should have called to let us know?” This is how we Irish deal with concern—we get pissed off. I said, “I’m thinking this is payback for the years they spent parenting six adolescents.”
At what point did our parents turn into our teenagers??
They’re much older than Dennis Hopper so I know they’re not being influenced by that retirement ad he’s doing—the one he’s sitting in the middle of a highway on a red chair and you’re compelled to keep scrutinizing the image to figure out if he’s stoned or not. At least, that’s what my sister and I did.
I totally suspect my parents are having as much fun as my own teenagers. Like Wally, they’re living in a lovely community, surrounded by people their own age. They never have to turn the thermostat down, so they can heat the whole outdoors if they want to (I know my father has waited his whole life to be able to do this), and they’re served three squares a day. I actually got confused when I went to visit this retirement center about a month after Wally went to college, and ended up asking the housing director what the meal plan was like.
Like the Snapper, my parents have the tendency to socialize constantly and not check in with me concerning their whereabouts. I get text messages from the Snapper when he’s driving home, five minutes before his Cinderella license kicks in, the way I get phone calls from my parents when they need a ride to the airport. I only know where they all are when they’re in transit, unless they get sick.
For instance, today the Snapper is home sick in bed. Ironically with the same flu that grounded my parents last weekend (temporarily). It started last night, right before “24”. He knew enough not to interrupt me during my fix, so he let me know, at 8:50 p.m., that he wasn’t feeling well.
I told him to lie down.
A, I didn’t want to miss my show and B, I didn’t want him getting sick because, frankly, I’ve been up half the past 2 nights with menopausal hot flashes that were do fiery I could have easily left the front door open and heated the whole outdoors. So my plan was to actually sleep last night.
Uh-huh.
The Snapper thoughtfully waited until 10:01 before he began throwing up. He has good aim, so there wasn’t a mess. I made sure he got into bed and solicitously put extra blankets on him, thanking god this had happened early enough in the evening.
At 11 I went to bed. At 11:15 he threw up again, this time all over his blankets and in such a way that I wondered, briefly, how I had survived single parenting two pre-schoolers.
I cleaned up, put him back to bed, threw in a load of laundry and went back to bed. He was sick again at 1 a.m. He left the towel on the bathroom floor. At 4 he was up moaning. I turned off my alarm and checked on him. He wasn’t sick—he just wanted to be, the way we all did at 4 a.m. after some party in college (perhaps this is why F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “It is always 4.m. in the darkness of the soul.” I believe he drank a lot, too).
At 6 a.m. I woke to the sound of pounding something. I groggily lifted my head from the pillow and listened as the Snapper ran up and down the stairs, they way he used to for wrestling. I called out, “What the hell are you doing?” and he explained that he was running up and down the stairs to try and make himself throw up again. I don’t recall reading about this technique in any of Fitzgerald’s books, but I could check in with my mother whenever I hear from her, because she too is a big fan of F.Scott. I told the Snapper to go back to bed.
My mother called at 8:30 in the morning. I said crossly, “Thanks a hell of a lot for checking in. No one has any idea where you are, I’ve had hot flashes so intense they could heat up the state of Florida, the Snapper’s been up all night throwing up, I have 2 deadlines today and I’m so deliriously tired that all I can think about is F. Scott Fitzgerald.”
She said, “The Snapper got sick? We don’t get sick in our family. Are you sending him to school today?”
I said, “Where are you?!” I could hear her asking my father where in Florida they were.
She said, “Somewhere.”
And I said, “I’m keeping the Snapper home—at least I’ll know where he is.”
Jane Becker
]]>George said, “Hey, at least you have hair!”
I said, “George, didn’t you read ‘The Man Book’ that Wally gave the Snapper for Christmas?”
He said, “Some of it, yeah. Why?”
I said, “Go back and look at the section on things not to say to a woman about her hair. Your response was right up there.”
George snapped his fingers. He said, “I’ve got an idea—why don’t you just leave your roots white and dye the rest of it a color that complements it?! You know, go with what you have instead of fighting it?”
I said ominously, “Like your black and white color scheme?” George has salt and pepper hair. I think it looks good but he thinks it makes him look old.
I called Ellie and asked how often she had to dye her roots. She said, “Every 4 to 6 weeks” and I said, “In my next life, I’m coming back blonde.”
I am brunette. Or at least I used to be.
I have been going white since I was in my early 30’s. My first streak came in when I was pregnant with the Snapper. I died it (not for me the concerns about hair color and pregnancy!).
As my hair grew, so did my white streak. It looked bold and artistic. I considered ditching my gold earrings and going with all silver and turquoise. Rebecca, who had already seen me through my Audrey Hepburn hair phase, advised me to hold off. She said, “White hair and silver earrings! Next thing you know you’ll stop shaving your legs!”
Good point.
I stuck with the gold, but continued to grow my streak out. It was in the front and dropped down the side of my face in true Veronica Lake style. It grew wider and more prominent and one day when I was at a parent-teacher conference, Wally’s 3rd grade teacher said to me, “That is a distinctive look!” and Wally said, “She looks like Cruella De Ville.” The one played by Glenn Close.
I started dyeing it again.
For some reason my bold streak eventually went away, but my roots turned white, as did the highly resistant hair at my temples. I increased my visits to the hair colorist. I have a lot of hair so the price kept creeping up. When it hit $165, I hit the roof and went out and bought off-the-shelf-hair color. I was a recessionista before it was fashionable.
I became pretty expert. I mixed colors together, used multiple colors to achieve a certain look, went darker in the winter and experimented a very nearly blonde in the summer. George said to me, “I like that look” and I said, “I thought you preferred brunettes” and he shrugged and said, “And blondes, too.” This is true of George. He may prefer brunettes but that never stopped him from admiring a woman with, say, red or chestnut colored hair. He’s equal opportunity that way.
As good as I got, I never attempted dyeing hair on any other parts of my body, no matter how white it turned. Then, shortly before Christmas, I found this beauty product online: http://www.bettybeauty.com . It’s called Betty Beauty, For Hair Down There. The site offered a whole range of colors and for Christmas they offered holly stencils for sale! In red and green! I was euphoric! I said to George, “What do you think???” and he looked shocked. I said, “You have no imagination” and he said, “I have imagination but it doesn’t stretch to include green pubic hair.”
I went out for drinks with Athena and Babe and told them about the site. They were equally enthusiastic and Athena said her sister had actually used the product. I asked hopefully, “Did she try the holly stencils?” and Athena said no, she was Jewish. I told her they also offered blue (Malibu Betty! Like Malibu Barbie!) but we didn’t see any menorah stencils.
I forgot about Betty for awhile, but after I found more of the increasingly forceful white hairs yesterday, I went back to the site. There was an advertisement for Valentine’s colors, along with the slogan “Lingerie is so last year.”
I texted George and said I’d decided to take his advice and dye my hair a color that would complement the white. I didn’t say which hair. He wrote back, “What color?” I texted, “Red.” He texted, “I love redheads!”
Wait til he sees the Valentine’s stencils.
]]>Now she tells me.
I asked if she had any New Year’s Resolutions and she said, yes. “I’ve decided to sleep with the married man who’s been propositioning me for several months.” I said, “Well, you’ve already gotten the bikini wax, so why waste it?”
Before I was married and divorced, I thought women who had affairs with married men were borrowing trouble. Now I know they’re looking for a way to avoid it. Or as Athena said to me, “I’m 55, I don’t need a father for my children or a husband for myself. I just want to have sex with an adult whom I know.”
Susan was not amused, but then again her marriage ended when her former husband slept with her (former) best friend. She said, “How could Athena do that to the wife?? She’s been married—she should know better.” I suggested to Susan that her own experience colored her opinion of Athena’s actions and she said, “Damn straight. If you’re married, you shouldn’t be screwing around on the side.”
I said, “Rules of marriage, eh? How about this one: marriage is only between a man and a woman. Should Rebecca be denied access just because she’s gay? Or, marriage is forever so you should stay no matter what your—even if your spouse hits you or screws around on you. Would you want to still be harnessed to Steve?”
I already knew the answer to that one.
When I was younger I used to think there were many ways of being single, but only one way of being married. Now I know there are many ways of being married, too.
Marriage is, after all, a relationship that is unique to the two people in it. What works for your neighbor or Hillary Clinton may not work for you. But they may not want your marriage, either.
Athena’s potential bedmate has been married for 30 years. For 25 of those years he and his wife have run a business together. For 15 of those years, they’ve lived in separate bedrooms. He tells Athena they can’t afford to disassemble the business, so remain married while living separate lives. I have another friend whose 80 year old father married his girlfriend of ten years in the Catholic Church (they’re both widowed) and then got divorced several months later. This way they were married in the eyes of the Church but their assets were not commingled, a plus when they have 9 adult children between them. Despite the divorce, they still consider themselves married.
Relationships like these fly in the face of the billion dollar wedding industry—an industry that survives despite the fact that almost half of all marriages end in divorce. Any other business that had an ROI like that and still flourished would be investigated for fraud.
Marriage has historically been a business arrangement, a socio-economic contract between two families in exchange for assets ranging from cows to countries. Romantic love made an appearance in the 12th and 13th centuries in the form of Courtly Love. But Courtly Love was really just a codified system of socially acceptable adultery because it usually occurred between a married woman and a single man.
Even fairy tales end at the altar as if to acknowledge the harsh reality that love may have gotten you this far, but the walk back down the aisle and into married life is no fantasy.
Susan said, “Jane, that’s no justification for having an affair.” I said, “Sometimes an affair can help keep a marriage going. For example, I know this woman—let’s call her Cathy—who told me she was divorcing her husband of 20 years because he wouldn’t have oral sex with her.”
Susan interrupted. She said, “This came up how?”
And I said, “Over coffee. I barely knew her. Anyway, Cathy had 3 teenagers at home. She found a new lover and he also had 2 teenagers. They each left their spouses and uprooted the lives of five adolescents. Now, don’t you think that everyone—the two other spouses and the five adolescents—would have been much happier if Cathy and her oral sex loving boyfriend had just climbed into bed with each other once a week? She would have stopped being resentful of her husband and gone back to keeping the marriage together until all the teens were out of the house. It also would have given the kids a fighting chance.”
Susan said, “I gather this is the advice you gave her.” I said yes, actually, it was.
Susan said, “Sometimes I wonder if this next generation is even going to bother with marriage. They certainly don’t date, they just hook-up or send naked texts to each other.” She works at a university, so she’s up on all the latest trends.
I said, “Naked texting?” and she said, “Don’t ask. Just be thankful you don’t have daughters.”
I said, “Maybe it’s time to redefine marriage and maybe this economy will do it. Marriage could become a civil union with economic benefits. Then anyone who wants to plot eternal fidelity and love to each other could do so in a Church of their choosing.”
“So you could do one or the other, or both”, said Susan and I said yes, sort of an a la carte, build your own, approach to marriage.
Susan said, “I guess Athena is dessert oriented. Others prefer a diet. Me, I’m a meat and potatoes girl. How about you?” I said, “I like Tapas.”
What’s on your menu?
]]>Looking back it’s amazing that I held on as long as I did, especially considering that the Christmas Eve I was six I awoke around midnight to a lot of loud, un-Santa-like laughter and shouts. My parents had gotten my sister and I a playhouse that year, a sizable one into which several kids could climb. It was made of cardboard and came with the kinds of flaps and inserts that have since made IKEA synonymous with multi-lingual swearing.
Several of the neighbors on our block had ended up in my parents living room late that night and had been enlisted to help build the house. The enticement was apparently a pitcher of manhattans. The bourbon cleared their heads enough to get them past the “insert flap A into point M” –but not enough to clarify where they should stand when inserting the flaps and the result was that Mr. S. and Mr. G. ended up inside the playhouse. The door was not big enough to let them crawl out. I believe it took another pitcher to get them out.
I thought of them the year George and I remembered at midnight that we had left the big present, a new television, at his apartment and we had to go out into the freezing cold to retrieve it. This was after hosting a lengthy Christmas Eve dinner party with a lot of champagne. The damn TV was so big that it wouldn’t fit in the car. We drove over to my parents and broke into their station wagon, only to discover that it was out of gas. We ended up wrestling the TV out of the box in front of the apartment building and trying to shove it in the back seat. I said to George, “I feel as if we’re ripping off an appliance store”.
We finally got it home and inside the living room at which point George had had enough and went up to bed. It was 1:30 in the morning by then, so I pulled a blanket off the couch, threw it over the TV, put a bow on top and followed him upstairs. In the morning Wally and the Snapper said, “Nice wrapping job”.
So the following Christmas when we bought them a huge set of free weights, George wrestled it to the front porch and left it with a note saying that union rules wouldn’t permit Santa to carry it in—let alone wrap it.
Anyway, despite surviving the playhouse and Sister Grace Miriam in 3rd grade, I eventually learned the truth, and that Christmas Eve rolled around where I found myself outside the magic for the first time. The rule in my parents’ house was that when you stopped believing in Santa, you could stay up and be a Santa’s helper on Christmas Eve. So I was up helping my parents lay out the many piles of gifts and after awhile I wandered into the kitchen, where my grandmother was starting in on Christmas Day dinner for the 30 or so usual suspects. My grandmother was a Hallmark classic, white hair and a soft Irish accent and always cooking in the kitchen.
I stood there without saying anything until she finally asked me what was wrong. I said, “It’s just not the same anymore since I don’t believe in Santa.” And she turned away from the stove and said to me, “I still believe.” And then she went back to the turkey.
Just like that. No explanations. No deconstructions of the myth.
Just, “I still believe”.
In that moment she gave all the magic of Christmas back to me.
I think of her every Christmas Eve when I’m caught up in dinner and wrapping and finding enough triple A batteries at eleven at night. I look around at the dishes and the presents and wrapping paper and the lights on the tree and the stockings on the mantel and think, “I still believe.”
And I do.
Merry Christmas.
]]>We were sitting down at the table when my phone rang. It was Max’s mom and she was so mad the steam blew through the receiver when I picked up. “Is he there?” I said yes, he was. She said, “I’ll be there in 5 minutes” and hung up.
I went back to the table as if nothing had happened. I am good at this. So good that if the CIA ever runs short of recruits, they should talk to me. I excel at compressing my mouth into a tight, silent line and I’m adept at torturing young men. Plus, I got really high marks when I took their entrance exam 25 years ago. I’m even better now.
Technology will do that for you.
After Max’s mom had carted him off in handcuffs I asked the Snapper what had just gone down. He said, “Uh, Max was texting some girl at 3 a.m. and then he snuck out of his house to meet her, so now he’s grounded”. George said ominously, “Then what was he doing here?” and the Snapper clammed up.
The Snapper said, “I can’t comment on an on-going investigation.” As I said, I’m good at torture. I went and got the car keys and dangled them in front of him. I said, “What did you know and when did you know it?”
The Snapper flinched. He said, “I had no contact with Max or the girl, so I was not aware of what was happening.” I said, “Who do you think I am that I’d believe that—MSNBC?”
I asked again when he had become aware of Max’s situation and he said he’d found out when Max showed up for dinner but he had been too focused on his homework to pay much attention. George said, “Now I know you’re covering up! The only time you’re so focused that you miss a conversation is when the weekly BCS results come in.” The Snapper said, “The Florida-Okalahoma match-up is a disgrace!” and George got enthusiastically off track.
I said to George later, “All he has to do is bring up football and you’re willing to digress.” He said, “Oh, and you’re David Frost?” I said, no, a former CIA recruit and an Irish mother with a highly developed sense of skepticism.
Me, I totally get why Patrick Fitzgerald was tracking Blagojevich. A, he’s from Illinois. B, he’s a politician. C, he knows a lot of important people from the South Side of Chicago. Add those facts up and you can see why the Feds were proactively wire tapping the governor’s office—and probably a number of other offices, too.
I take the same approach to parenting teens because A, they’re teens and B, they’re boys. I don’t need a “C” to convince me to log onto to my wireless account and monitor whether or not text messages are being sent at 3 a.m. or in the middle of Trig, and to whom.
George said, “You know who he’s texting?” I said, “Yes. I took his phone one morning while he was sleeping and checked the contact list against the numbers on the log.” He said, “And?” I said, “Let’s just say there are more than five candidates with whom he texts on a regular basis.”
George said, “Do you think he realizes you’re monitoring his records?” I said, “Did Blagojevich realize Fitzgerald was monitoring his phone calls?” The answer is, probably. And he did it anyway, because he thought he could get away with it. Just like teenage boys.
Or, as I like to say to the men in my house, “You’re all 12!”
The Snapper came back downstairs, for a post-dinner snack. I asked him whether he thought Max really thought he could really get away with sneaking out at 3 a.m. on a school night. He said, darkly, “Not everyone is as good with technology as you are.” I said, “Me and Jack Bauer, honey.”
The Snapper said, “You know, Max will be back out on the street in less than 24 hours. His mom isn’t that strict.” I said maybe Max wasn’t the focus of the investigation. The Snapper was incredulous. “You can’t be talking about me! I didn’t do anything!”
I said, “Sometimes my Irish grandmother would smack us as we were walking past and we’d say, ‘I didn’t do anything!’” And she’d say, “Well, you’re either coming from or going to, trouble.’ Kind of like the whole Obama-Blagojevich thing.
Eventually the company you keep will catch up with you.”
]]>It’s good to have a clear sense of priorities.
Redistricting is the process whereby the local school board tries to decide which of the two new multi-million dollar high schools the students will attend. One of them is three and a half miles away from the other one!! You can understand why this topic drew hundreds of people out on a cold winter night, to protest.
Most of them drove, undercutting their argument that their kids should go to the school where the meeting was being held because it is within a walkable distance from their homes.
But I digress.
The turn-out was amazing. I said to a “cohort”, “If we passed out yellow T-shirts we would be in solidarity with the Thai airport protestors.” She shot me a dirty look so I moved to the back of the room, to sit with a former grade school teacher of Wally’s. She herself has five children, the youngest of whom is 21.
Another elementary school mom friend was there and she had brought her knitting, just like Madame Defarge. After listening to some of the parents speak I only wished their heads would roll.
Many parents were there to protest the redistricting of their children from this closer-in school, to which they had driven, to the “distant” high school, some three miles away. All of them were parents of elementary school children. Three grown women wept and one father thunderously informed the audience that if children were sent to the distant school three miles away, they would never be able to participate in extra-curricular activities!
He said, “Think of our students returning from some away game at 10 at night and we have to then drive them home from there!” Wally’s former teacher looked at me and rolled her eyes. We’d both been in that parking lot at 10pm, waiting for the bus to return and happy we at least knew where our kids were. I said, “They’re clueless, aren’t they?” and she said, “They have no idea.”
In elementary school you like your kids to be able to walk home.
In high school, you pray they can walk a straight line if they’re pulled over.
In elementary school, you like to spend your downtime with your kids.
In high school you encourage them to sign up for week long field trips.
In elementary school, you like to tuck your kids in at night. I
n high school, you’d just like them in their beds when you wake up in the morning.
In elementary school, you blog about their every waking moment so you can remember all the cute things they did.
In high school, you drink heavily to forget.
This is called evolution.
I said to the knitter, “It’s interesting how few of the parents here actually have high school students” and she said, “They’re at church praying their kids don’t get moved closer to home.”
Letting go is the hardest thing we learn to do as parents, though high school helps speed the teachable moment. When we took Wally to college he suggested we make ourselves scarce while he set up his room. George and I happily took ourselves off to a coffee shop, congratulating ourselves on Wally’s independence—until he texted us to say he’d left his pillows at home and could we go buy some?
We pulled ourselves away from the caffeine and went to the local IKEA—where he texted us again, wanting to know when we were coming back. I said to George, “This is what they’re like when they’re two: go away, come back! Go away, come back!” When we got back to Wally’s room, his roommate had arrived and the mother was making his bed and organizing the pens on his desk. We went out to lunch and snickered about it.
About a week or so before Thanksgiving I said to Ellie, “I’m glad Wally’s doing so well on his own but I’ll be happy to have him home again for the summer.” That night he called, thrilled and happy, to say he’d been hired for a job on campus. For the summer. I choked out, “Congratulations!” and then hung up and cried, almost as hard as I did when I drove away from campus last August.
When I could finally draw breath I thought to myself, “Isn’t this what I raised him for? To be independent and self-sufficient? If so, shouldn’t I be proud of myself for having accomplished it?” I cried again and decided, yes, this is how I wanted him to be.
Just not yet.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have done such a good job.
I do have some sympathy for these parents who are desperate to keep their children closer to home. Their kids are only 7 and 8, but they’re projecting ten years ahead, instinctively trying to keep them as close as possible, as long as possible.
But what these younger parents have yet to learn is that it’s our job to draw larger and larger circumferences on the map, expanding the safe areas in which our kids roam, until finally the circles fall off the map and our kids walk toward their own horizons.
And no amount of redistricting will keep them home when it’s time to go.
]]>I don’t come from a family that prizes culinary talent. Awhile back I read an article about the emergence of Irish cuisine and I thought, there’s an oxymoron for you.
My fondest memory of Christmas dinners when I was growing up are the cut glass dishes filled with olives, peanuts and smoked oysters. Often that’s all we had, as the adults were usually knee-deep in Manhattans in the living room. I shared this story with George before I introduced him to my family’s holiday traditions a few years ago. He was shocked. He is Italian. He is from New Orleans. For him olives are an anti-pasta, not a main course.
He asked, “Didn’t they serve dinner?” and I said, trust me, the olives were a step-up. He asked if we weren’t all starving and I said no, my dad usually made stacks of pancakes on Thanksgiving morning to sustain us.
George and I were together for several years before he actually participated in one of our family dinners. I felt I should prepare him. I said, “This may be a bit of a transition for you. We don’t - uh – do things the way your family does”. He said, “How bad can it be? I know you’re no longer feasting on olives.”
I lost my nerve. I lied.
I said, “We , for one, we all share the cooking at these events.” George was down with that as he wanted to participate. He rifled through cookbooks, planning exotic, piquant dishes he could bring. I stopped him before he could get his hopes up and said “My aunt will be handing out the cooking assignments.” He was a little disgruntled but I pointed out that with 25 to 30 people at the table there needed to be some coordination and he conceded the point.
We scored the string bean casserole. Yup, the Betty Crocker Classic, mushroom soup and dried onion rings. Naturally, George would have none of this. He used Portobello mushrooms sautéed in white wine and deep fried some onions (in home made batter) for the garnish. I was worried.
When we arrived at my aunt’s George proceeded to charm the pants off everyone. The he said the fateful words, “I’ll go check on things in the kitchen.” I tried to head him off. I said, “George you don’t need to own the process tonight. Have a drink - try the hors d’oeuvres, they’re a family tradition.” These hors d’oeuvres have been passed down from my Aunt Peg who was a glamorous career gal in California and Mexico. They consist of Ritz crackers spread with peanut butter, a dash of ketchup and a soupcon of horseradish. They’re delicious, I swear. George looked horrified and left the room.
I hit the bar.
George came out of the kitchen a minute later; he was apoplectic. He said, “they dumped my string beans into someone else’s mushroom soup-frozen string bean thing! It’s all mixed together!” I said, “You should have had a Ritz hors d’oeuvre.” Undeterred, he went back into the kitchen.
I followed him, just in time to hear him ask my aunt if he could help with the turkey. She ate that accent up with a spoon and said yes. George pulled the turkey out of the oven and frowned. He said to my aunt, “this bird is rawer than a baby’s ass with diaper rash!” Perhaps an exaggeration but certainly colorful.
My formidable godmother did not appreciate the simile. She said, “No. It isn’t.” You need to understand my aunt: she can alter reality just by her perception of it, but George didn’t know that. He said, “I’m telling you, this turkey could be up peckin’ around your backyard.” There was silence in the kitchen. I cleared my throat and said, “George, can I speak with you a moment?” and dragged him out of there by his collar.
I sat him down on a chair in the hall to deliver the news. I said, “I have to level with you. I’ve never eaten a completely cooked turkey at a family dinner – they’re always slightly raw!” And George, perplexed, asked, “how does anyone eat it?” and I said, “We don’t. We eat olives and Ritz crackers with horseradish and ketchup. They go well with the string bean casserole and a lot of wine.”
He looked pained. We stopped at Popeye’s Chicken on the way home.
The following Thanksgiving George let me handle the string bean casserole. The year after that he made a huge stack of pancakes for Wally and the Snapper for breakfast. Last year he cooked a turkey before we went to my aunt’s so the boys would actually be able to participate in the American tradition of eating turkey on Thanksgiving. I was proud of the way he acclimated.
So the other night my aunt called with this year’s assignments, just as George was walking in the door. I said, “Guess what? We scored appetizers” and George turned and walked back out.
I followed him to the car and said, “Where are you going?” and he said, “To get the Manhattans.”
I think his transition is complete.
Jane Becker
http://thedamedomain.blogspot.com
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