Child-free Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving approaches and I am depressed. Also relieved. But mostly depressed.

For the first time in 21 years, I face a Thanksgiving without at least one son. Son #1 is staying in Oregon to focus on his senior thesis. (This is not my fault; I did not give him this work ethic.) Son #2 is in, of all places, Sri Lanka.  (Can I just say, this is not normal; we are not the sort of family who holiday in Sri Lanka; I, for one, have never been to Sri Lanka or anywhere in the vicinity of Sri Lanka.)

So I face this child-free Thanksgiving and I am depressed. I'm astonished how depressed I am.

And here's where the relief comes in. I've wondered-- fairly frequently in the last few years-- if I lack some essential Mom Gene, if I'm deficient in fundamental maternal, uh, stuff. Because many of my friends and acquaintances have kids about the same age as mine, which means many of my friends and acquaintances are sending off their youngest child to college or university, which means many of my friends and acquaintances have been slogging around in various stages of grief as they confront the absence of young Taylor or Tyler or Madison or Morgan. And I nod, and hold hands, and say, "Oh, I know," --but I don't. I don't. Hugh went off to boarding school last year, and with Owen off in Oregon, that left us with an empty nest, and well, frankly, in our childless house, Keith and I look at each other and go, "Cool!"

Except now it's Thanksgiving, almost, and my boys aren't here and damn. Damndamndamndamn. I am sad. I miss my guys. And suddenly I realize this is it, they won't be here much any more, hardly ever really, and the ache in my gut and heart really really hurts. Which is kind of a relief. It's good to know I'm not some sort of deficient Un-Mom.

Except it hurts. It really really hurts.

Damn. I need someone to nod and hold my hand and say, "Oh, I know."

Shit. I need my boys.

Upgrade

Hell hath no fury like a 17-year-old deprived of his cell phone upgrade by his older brother.

No doubt about it, it was Hugh's upgrade. And he'd been counting, actually counting, the days til the release of the iPhone 5. And no doubt about it, Owen should not have grabbed the upgrade without checking with us. Us, as in We the Parents Who Pay.

And now we're paying big-time as we deal with Hugh, who is incandescent with fury, almost in tears with utter, absolute rage, shaking with thwarted iPhone desire. I get it. Phones don't matter to me, but I know what it is to enjoy something and to want something and to expect something--and to have those expectations suddenly shattered, and to stand there, impotent and angry, knowing that I did not make this happen and that this was not fair.

Safely out of reach in Oregon, Owen is apologetic but cool, "Hey, man, sorry." He went swimming and forgot the phone in his back pocket. His phone was soaked and ruined; he needed a new phone; his cheapest option was to take the family's available upgrade. It must have all seemed so clear under the Hugh-free skies of Portland. And yet, since this is only Owen's second phone in eight years and since Hugh has grabbed approximately 75 percent of the collective upgrades due to the four of us, I can see my older son's point.

"Fuck him!"

They launch their weapons at each other but somehow always hit me instead.

You Can't Go Home Again

Of course you can go home again. It's just that it will make you feel like shit.

Just back from Chicago and a family wedding. Took Owen on the Chicago Architectural Society Boat Tour--as fabulous, with views as breath-taking and guide as witty and knowledgeable as I remembered--except that most of the buildings that dominate the river tour rose up long after I left the city. Damn. Nothing like a couple of spectacular skyscrapers to make you feel your age.

Then we were on the El. And as soon as we boarded, a young woman popped up and gestured to her seat. Poor child. Raised well, she was just doing as she'd been taught, offering up her seat to elderly passengers. Except that said elderly--Keith and I-- were horrified.

The trauma of Lutz's brought the message home. I was first introduced to Lutz's by my beloved Gram V. It was quite a trek from the suburbs, driving in on the tollway and down crowded Montrose Avenue, but well worth it: this little slice of Vienna, transported to the Midwest. A plush dining area that evoked the parlor of the early 20th-century bourgoisie, cakes so rich and ornate that you felt they'd have satisfied even Mozart, coffee served in fancy little pots with real whipped cream on the side, buxom waitresses with their hair in buns and pronounced German accents, and--an essential part of every visit--the most elaborate women's restroom I have ever encountered. When I grew up enough to live in Chicago, my roommate and I would regularly set aside several hours for a trip to Lutz's: a walk to the bus stop, a long bus ride, a walk to another bus stop, another long bus ride. . . but all worth it. One memorable day, we stayed in the Lutz's patio garden for several hours, consuming several slices of cake and plates of cookies and quaffing countless pots of whipped-cream-laced coffee in the process. Amazing we didn't launch ourselves into a diabetic coma then and there.

So when Keith and I married in my mother's backyard in the western suburbs of Chicago, of course Lutz's cakes bedecked the festivities. And of course I dragged Keith and Owen to Lutz's this trip. Except all was changed. Shrunken. Literally shrunken--the dining area halved, stripped of its plushness, just a set of utilitarian diner chairs and tables on linoleum; the wait staff now a couple of adolescent girls; and, horrors, no women's restrooms, just a single unisex toilet. And the cakes? Fine, but not fabulous. "It's ok," shrugged Owen. OK. A part of me died inside. Lutz's was never "ok."

So, yes, you can go home again. But maybe you shouldn't.

Laundry; or, Things Happen

I'm not proud of much in my parenting career, but I do feel quite chuffed about one achievement: I taught both boys, once they reached middle school, to do their own laundry. Lights versus darks, hot versus cold, gentle versus permanent press versus heavy duty. . . we covered the lot. There were a few blips along the way, like the time Owen ran out to stop me before I backed out of the driveway to ask if it was ok to put a shirt with buttons in the wash. (God, he was so adorable.) But, blips and all, I released them, to discover the woes of shrinkage and the mysteries of lost socks and the horror of dye seepage all on their own.

So now they're both home for the summer. And they continue to do their own laundry. And, to my horror, they do not Separate. Completely ignoring all  my carefully inculcated lessons, they just throw all their whites and darks, towels and cotton shirts, jeans and undies, all together in one big undifferentiated mass. "What's the point?" they ask. "It all goes on cold--regular," they point out. "It's fine," they insist.

And it is fine. They're not walking around in pink undershirts or weirdly bleached jeans or horribly shrunk tee-shirts.

Except it's not fine. One cannot not Separate laundry. There are Rules. Whites do not float promiscuously with Darks; undies do not spin with dress shirts; sheets must not fraternize with khaki shorts. Consequences will ensue. Catastrophe looms. You start mixing socks with delicates and, well, Things Will Happen.

The thing is, my boys aren't afraid of Things Happening.

So much to learn. And, with my 52nd birthday lurking just ahead, so little time. I'm going to start tomorrow morning by throwing in my white blouse with my blue jeans. And so it begins. Laundry and a life where Things Happen.

Ick

Marple the Kitty has tapeworms, Cleaning Sarah informed me when I got home today.
"They were all over the chair, you know, the rocking chair that he sits in."
I'm confused. "But, how in the world, I mean, I thought tapeworms showed up in poop."
Cleaning Sarah is embarrassed. She doesn't like discussing bodily functions. Too much cleaning of other folks' toilets, I imagine. "Well, yeah, but you know, they crawl out of, well, you know, down there. . ."

Oh good lord.

Ick.

So in less than one week we've got Kitty Wimsey crapping in our bed, Ol' Dog Rowan vomiting twelve times one morning before I left for work and another five times after, and now feline tapeworms.

I'm thinking maybe a goldfish.

Maybe not. I remember goldfishes. We had a series of them, plus beta fish, when the boys were little. You start with all that enthusiasm, a fresh bowl, a little filter, a couple of plastic plants and a castle, plus the fish. You end up with lots of slime, a horrible odor, and a dead fish. Which was the whole point of it all, from Hugh's perspective. He loved our fish funerals. He never actually actively killed a fish, but he certainly thought they were far more interesting dead than alive. Of course, he had a point.

So maybe hamsters. We had a successful run of hamsters when we lived in England. Cute, containable, fairly cheap. You put the little guy in a ball and watch him run around--a couple of glasses of wine and hey, it's like you're at the Olympics. But you have to remember to put him back in his cage, or you'll find one really traumatized hamster and a plastic ball filled with hamster pee and little hamster feces, stuck behind the sofa late one Saturday afternoon.

So maybe not hamsters. Can't remember basic things these days, let alone hamster balls.

Maybe menopausal women and pets are a bad combo. Like menopausal women and teenaged sons. And menopausal women and husbands. And menopausal women and work colleagues. And menopausal women and neighbors. And menopausal women and telephone survey takers. And menopausal women and pizza delivery guys. And menopausal women and supermarket checkout clerks. . . .

Maybe the isolation ward. I hear the drugs are really good.

Prom Night

So Hugh went to prom last night.

What a disappointment.

You know, I try very hard not to live through my children (it helps immensely that they're both boys--most of the time, quite frankly, there's a certain "ick" factor, which I'm sure is sexist but hey, teenaged boys are icky much of the time). The point is, I do try to establish boundaries, to make clear to them and me and everyone else that I have my life and they have theirs. . . .

Still. Prom.

I didn't go to prom. We didn't have prom. In my Dutch immigrant Calvinist corner of the world, drinking in moderation was fine and smoking was practically required for adult males, but dancing, card-playing, and movie-going belonged to the traditional trifecta of forbidden, sinful activities. (Actually, there was a fourth Sin: Freemasonry, but since no one in the Midwest knew what that was, it didn't impinge on our lives.) Now, by the 1970s, when I was in high school, both the movie-going and card-playing prohibitions had largely lapsed; my grandmother, in her 60s, discovered Shirley Temple movies on the local tv station's Saturday morning programming and again and again, she said plaintively, "I just don't understand; why were we told these were so Bad?" I imagine it was television that made the ban on movie-going utterly nonsensical. I don't know what happened to the card-playing; I just know by the time I came around, my parents played pinochle every week with several couples from church. Not poker, mind you, but cards nonetheless.

That left Dancing on the Forbidden list. We were allowed the occasional square-dance, but that was it. Certainly no Prom. Insread,we had the Junior-Senior Banquet and the Awards Banquet and Senior Night. "What did you do at all these banquets?" asked a puzzled Hugh. "Umm. We ate. They gave out awards. Like I got the Freshman Latin Award and the Sophomore American Lit. Award. And people sang. Sometimes there was a play." He stares at me. "Mom. That's pathetic."

Really? Maybe. I dunno. Hugh tells me that after the dances at his school, used condoms litter the floor; I think of those poor girls pressured into having sex in public and I am grateful that all I ever had to do was sit at a table and clap for the Senior Quartet.  Still. Prom. I alwas felt like I'd missed something, some quintessential American teenager experience. I mean, we banquet-going Calvinists hoped for dates, and we got nice dresses, and the guys brought corsages. But it wasn't Prom and we knew it. Not like in the movies and on tv. Not Like In Normal America.

So, yeah, pitiful as it is, as the boys got older,  I did think, "Prom! Cool!" Owen, however, refused to stay on script. I hinted, wheedled, and cajoled. I offered bribes. I tried guilting him into it. But no. Owen and his buddy Angela went to the Salvation Army surplus store together and bought Anti-Prom clothes for the dance and then decided WTF? and went to the movies instead.

But now it's Hugh's year. While Owen has always swum in the undercurrent, Hugh floats in the mainstream. He's definitely a Prom rather than an Anti-Prom kind of guy. And off he went, boutanniere in his lapel and corsage in hand. To my confusion and consternation, however, somewhere along the last three decades Prom has ceased to mean, well, PROM. Prom, for example, no longer requires that the the guys rent tuxes. No pink ruffled shirts. Not even a bow tie, let alone one of those adorable little vests. Proms no longer have Themes. No Underwater Enchantments. No Oriental Evenings. No Rockin' Back to the Fifties. Not even a Rod Stewart's Tonight's the Night. Parents do not gather to take pictures of the glamorous duo. Bashful couples do not sit together at a fancy restaurant before the dance, nor is there a post-prom lakeside party. Nope, once the dance was over, Hugh and his buddies drove to the 24-hour Coffee Call, while the girls wandered off to Waffle House.

Beware living on or through one's children. That road leads, inexorably, to the Waffle House. . . tho' I have to admit, I'm rather partial to their Pigs-In-A -Blanket breakfast plate. And those chocolate chip waffles with the whipped cream. They do a pretty good cinnamon roll too. . . . Come to think of it, maybe those girls were on to something, a crucial life lesson, the Moral to the Story, even: Dance with the guys and then dump them for grits and bacon and pancakes. One must make one's own Romance. And it's best when covered in whipped cream.

Sunburn

The last evening at the beach. No sunburn. Of course not. We have a beach umbrella. We retreat to the condo for lunch and reading and naps during peak sun hours. We use #50 sunscreen on our faces and #30 on the rest. Sunburn?? That is soooo Not Done. My one undisputed success as a parent is that blonde, blue-eyed, pale-skinned Owen did not experience sunburn until he was 17 and went to the beach with friends. Of course, he also assumed it was totally normal to swim clad in swimming trunks that went down to his mid-calves and a long-sleeved shirt and a pith-helmet-like cap that covered not only his head but his neck. Still, the point, the victory, is that he was 17-friggin' years old when he came home, pointed in horror to his deep red, just-about-to-blister shoulders, and said, "Mom, this really hurts. What is this?"

Such a contrast with my own upbringing, when it was simply expected that every summer I went to the beach, I got horribly burned, my temperature spiked, I was miserable, my skin erupted in blisters, I "peeled"--meaning I shedded vast swathes of skin that I could hold and drape along the furniture and wad into a ball--and then I emerged with "a tan," which we all assumed was a Good Thing.

My mom tells this heartbreaking story of my dad, taking his four older sons, all between age 2 and 7, to Florida for a week in the spring, to give my mom, home with baby #5 (not me--I was #6), a bit of a break. And after the first day at the beach, Dad shepherded his four little guys through the parking lot--and they were all sobbing. A gentle man, my dad, but come on, he'd driven the little rugrats all the way down from Chicago, all on  his own in the station wagon, and given him this splendid day on this magnificent beach and now they were all whimpering and moaning. . . WTF, man!. . . so he basically beat them into the car, oblivious to the fact that his sons, in fact, needed hospitalization, that the hot Florida sun had fried and crisped the white-as-white-can-be skins of his phalanx of little blonde Dutch boys.

God, I hate that story.

But Dad had no idea. No one had any idea. When the first #6 sunscreen lotion came onto the market in my early college years, I used it --much to the amusement and incomprehension of family and friends, who just couldn't understand why any rational person would employ such a radical sunblock and so ensure that she would remain such an incredibly unattractive shade of pale. I didn't want to be unattractive. I just hated the pain of sunburn enough to choose "ugly" over "in-need-of-medical-care."

And now I await my first skin cancer diagnosis. The fact that I've spent all of my adult life looking wan and washed out, eschewing the sun, this will count for nothing. I know this. I resent this. But I know this. I know skin cancer waits, lurking, bound to happen, the assured results of all those annual bad burns. The intervening years of copious suntan lotion and rigorous hat-wearing and assiduous shade-seeking will count for nothing. The fact that I've spent my adult years not at the seashore or beach but rather in libraries and offices and archives; the fact that I wear the same swimsuit for years, years and years, on end, til the elastic wears out, for pete's sake, because why spend money on something that one only uses for a few days each decade; the fact that I've never been Brown and Beautiful, the tanned Beloved One of high school dreams. . . none of this will count. I am doomed by biology, by genes and generation, by my blonde hair and blue eyes and alabaster skin (ok, sounds egocentric but one boyfriend long long ago called my skin "alabaster"; he turned out to be narcissistic and gay [not that I have a problem with gay, except when it's a guy who's promising to marry me. . .] but still, I stick by and totally claim the "alabaster"). My comfort: Owen does not, cannot face the same future.

Of course there's a certain irony at work here. Enormous colorful tattoos now cover most of Owen's beautiful skin, which I oh-so-carefully and consciously protected againt the sun's damaging rays. "I only go to reputable places," he tells  me. "Mom, it's organic ink. Totally safe. No problem." Really? No problem? Vast quantities of ink injected into his skin and "no problem"?

Dunno. What if I'd plucked off that long-sleeved tee-shirt, eschewed the #50 sunscreen, let him get totally burned as a boy? Would he regard his skin differently? Would he see it as more vulnerable? Limited? In need of care and protection?

I imagine not. Hell. I did my job. I protected what I was supposed to protect when I was supposed to protect it. The rest is up to him. Me? I gotta go check for moles.

Pausing in Time

So, I'm watching Doc Martin and want another glass of wine. Cool beans! I click "Pause" and off I go for a refill. Pause. PAUSE! I've paused Live TV!

God. I love living in the 21st century.

I had no idea one could pause "Live TV," as in "TV being broadcast right now." But the weekend before last, Hugh had some friends staying over. While he was passed out upstairs (ok, yes, another story), his buddies were watching tv and I came in and we started chatting and something came up so that they pulled out the remote and said, "Look, Miss Facing-50, see, just press this button with the two lines and  you can pause your show." I was stunned. "Wait. Are you serious? TV? It's not a dvd? You're pausing a TELEVISION PROGRAM?" "Yeah, sure," they said, all nonchalant, but also rather gentle, like they were talking to an inquisitive toddler or maybe an Indigenous Person in a loincloth who somehow got catapulted from the jungle into our living room. "And see, just press this button with the arrow and you can fast-forward."

And suddenly, there was This Moment. Just a second or two, I guess. But in that one or two seconds, I had this vision, this totally Doctor Who moment, the possibility of time collapsing, of fast forwarding into the future, wrinkles in time, wormholes in space. No Tardis and no David Tennant, sadly, not even Matt Smith, but still, TIME, right at my fingers via my remote control.

Until Hugh's buddies stammered, "Oh no, umm, no, Miss Facing-50, we didn't mean you could, like, you know, fast-forward in real time. Just if you pause a program, later you can, you know, fast-forward it. But you know, like, you can't like really mess with time. Not really."

They had That Look on their faces--that "Oh my God, we're dealing with an insane old person" look. And, even though Hugh was unconscious upstairs and Owen was doing whatever he does in Oregon, I could hear both of them howling, "MOM! Oh God, Mom! Really?! Are you kidding me???"

Time and space collapsing.

Right. Of course. I know you can't use your tv remote to fast-forward through time. Kind of. Except, you know, like, I've seen a hell of a lot of technological change in my time. Geez louise. We had a black and white tv, you know? A transistor radio. A friggin' hi-fi. And now, I click on my remote and I pause my tv program. I speak into my phone and it tells me where to go, then I plug it into a little box and somewhere somehow someone plays hours of music that I like, songs I've never even heard before, but yes, I like them, and somehow someone somewhere knew I would like them because I like Bruce Springsteen and the Beatles and the Clash. So, fast-forwarding through time. . . .for a second there, it seemed, well, utterly real, totally sensible, completely possible.

Just for a moment. A second. An eternity.

Bad Neighbor

Well, dang. A "For Sale" sign, right there in Carole's front yard. Life will be so much less interesting without her.

Carole hates me. I have no idea why, but I've enjoyed it immensely for years.

It all started when Owen was a pre-schooler, and desperate for friends in the neighborhood. We were in our house on Cherokee, and Carole and her husband and two little boys lived just around the corner. We had met at a couple of neighborhood functions. I'll admit there was no immediate attraction. Carole is the kind of person for whom the word "coiffed" was coined. And her house sported "window treatments" rather than shades and drapes. Still, several of my best friends have window treatments and a number of them could even be described as coiffed. I'm a tolerant soul. Plus, my kid needed some nearby playmates. And there they were, Carole's Edward and Charles. They suited our needs:
1) They were kids.
2) They lived close by.
3) They seemed normal despite their Little Lord Fauntleroy playsuits and their royal names. (And I can say with a certain degree of pride in my self-control that I never ever gave in to the very strong temptation to call these kids Teddy and Charlie, and certainly not Ed and Chuck. But, can I just note that eventually Edward and Charles had two sisters named Isabella and Eugenia? 'Nuff said.)

To continue: Determined to get Owen some neighborhood buddies, I pursued Carole whenever I saw her on the sidewalk, trying to engage her in conversation, asking about the boys, talking about this and that. And she'd smile her perfectly modulated smile and nod in a kind of "oh, mmm, yes" way. I then pinned her down by issuing an outright invitation, complete with date and times, for her boys to come over and play. She agreed, but insisted that Owen come to their house instead. "Great!" said I. "And then I'll have your guys over next week." Wow. Her facial expression taught me what "brittle smile" really meant. The Play Date arrived, I dropped Owen off (God, he was so excited) and an hour later--an hour earlier than agreed--Carole brought Owen back. "We all had such a good time," she said politely, "Bye bye."

Now look. Owen was (and is--you've just got to embrace the tattoos) a perfectly normal, friendly, fun boy. He behaved himself at other people's houses. He wasn't mean or squirrelly or inappropriate or obnoxious. Even at age 4, he went out of his way to please the other kids, to do what they wanted to do, to play their way. In other words, no way in God's green earth this child caused any trouble in an hour. Yet Carole communicated, clearly and absolutely, that the first playdate was the last.

I understood. I got it. I immediately abandoned all hopes of Edward and Charles as preschool pals. (I am not as clueless as I appear.) But, you know, I'm a mom. And there was no excuse to do that to my boy. So, well, umm, ok, fact is, I decided to drive Carole nuts by pretending to be that clueless, by continuing to call and drop by and accost her on the sidewalk, by greeting her enthusiastically whenever our paths crossed at neighborhood parties, by acting as if I didn't notice that my very presence caused her pain. Her face, ah, her face, our first Halloween back after four years out of the neighborhood, when she and her kids (all four of them by this time) showed up at our door--different house, she had no idea--and I greeted her like an old and dearly beloved friend.

I shouldn't have done it, I'm sure. My mother raised me better. And yet, really, did I do any harm? And more to the point, boy howdy, it was fun.

Bye, bye Carole. I'm gonna miss you, darlin'.

Skill Set

A follow-up to my post of January 8:

Owen has a skin rash and so took himself off to the doctor and got a prescription for a medicated ointment. When he got home, however, he couldn't get the ointment tube open so he handed it to Keith. "Dad, what's up with this? I can't get this foil thing off." Keith then showed him how you have to flip the cap over and use the pointy end to break a hole in the foil seal. And then he called over to me, "See, hon? We still have important skills to pass on to the next generation."

A New TV

Today we bought a new tv. A Google tv. We can access the Internet and stream Netflix in Hi Def.

Good lord.

Me: "You should know how to do this. Why don't you know how to do this? You're a teenager. Teenagers know how to do this stuff."
Owen: "Way to stereotype, Mom. You gonna start telling racist jokes now?"

I'm traumatized. We're all traumatized. Owen, upset by all the drama, has mounted his bike and disappeared into the gloaming. Over on the sofa, Hugh is glowering and muttering, sure if we'd only left it to him, all would be well. Keith is on the phone, trying not to cuss out some poor minimum-waged peon at the Best Buy Help Desk. And me, well, I'm blogging to y'all.

I remember tvs. You bought 'em. You plugged 'em in. You watched 'em. Life was Good. Or at least ok. We didn't know any better. Life was at least simple.

Our old tv is 10 years old. Huge, in terms of space consumed, small in terms of screen, pretty basic in terms of sound. Seemed ok to me. Except lately I found myself asking, "Gosh, why are they filming in such muted colors? Why do directors want everything to look so drained?" And it took College Son, home for the holidays, to point out that, no, no, Mom You Moron, directors aren't filming that way, it's your horrible tv.

We've talked and talked about getting a new tv but the whole process always seemed so overwhelming. And the tv prices so high. But then the holidays came and both the boys showed up at home, moaning about our rotten tv. Nothing too new there, but then my mother-in-law, my friggin' mother-in-law, queen of Never Spending Anything, arrived for a visit and actually commented on how bad the tv was. Geez. But of course the clincher, the thing that made it all happen, is that the Saints have a Big Game tonight and the LSU Tigers have A Really Really Big Game on Monday. So  now we have a new tv.

Sort of.

The new tv sits on the antique chest-with-drawers that has served as our tv stand since Keith cut out the back of the cabinet for all the tv and vcr wires way back before we married.. He always meant to sand and refinish said chest, and of course he never has. So now there perches upon this lovely, battered wooden chest a totally up-to-date 42" flat screen. You can tell the new tv is wondering how and why it ended up in such a downmarket environment. Well, fine. Be snooty, ye wretched rectangle. "Just plug it in and follow the instructions on screen," said the cute Best Buy salesguy. Right. The 15-minutes set-up has now consumed ten hours and counting, several phone calls to the Best Buy Geek Squad (they've hung up on us no less than four times this afternoon), two phone calls to the Direct TV Satellite people, one quick trip to Radio Shack to buy a cord with blue-green-red thingies to replace the cord with yellow-white-red thingies, the conscription of Owen's somewhat technically inclined buddy Conrad, and several rather volume-intensive discussions between and among the various inhabitants of this household. These included a number of helpful exchanges along the lines of the following:

Hugh: "Here, let me try something. Hand me the controller."
Me: "It's not a controller. It's a keypad."
Hugh (rolling his eyes): "It's a controller. It controls the tv remotely. That means it's a remote control. A COOONNNNTROOOLLLLEEEEEERRRRR."
Me (by this time determined to show my obnoxiously condescending offspring that I do in fact possess useful and up-to-date knowledge): "No, no, no, if you say "controller" to the Best Buy Guys they'll think you're talking about this (I brandish the remote control that goes with our satellite tv box) but the problem is the KEYPAD ( I hold up the Star Trekky groovy device that's come with the new tv and that looks like we now have the capability of initiating nuclear war) . It's a KEYPAD."
Hugh: "MOM. It's a controller."
Me: "No, honestly, it's an important difference I think. It's a keypad."
Hugh: "Why are you acting like you know anything about any of this? It's ridiculous. And it's a controller."
. . . .
I'm embarrassed to admit how long we continued. So I won't.

Keith is now maniacally chopping vegetables in the kitchen--never a good sign. I'm not sure our marriage will survive this purchase. Should've gotten a new bathroom sink instead. At least then we wouldn't have discovered we'd need to spend $10 more every month for high definition reception (we had no idea we were even buying a "Hi Def" tv). Water comes without definition. And I know how to turn the faucet on and off and I understand the difference between hot and cold.

I don't remember there being such a huge technological gap between me and my parents. Certainly they didn't like the music I listened to--but they didn't have to ask me for help in operating the radio and record-player. My mom didn't know the difference between "The Waltons" and "Little House on the Prairie"--but she could work the tv. They got mad about how much time we kids spent on the phone and once to my mother's horror I ran up an enormoous monthly long-distance bill talking to my boyfriend in Kalamazoo--but she knew which buttons to press to make a call. And when it came to home movies--there my mom was completely in charge, the only one in the entire extended family who knew how to use the movie camera, how to splice the little reels of film to make the big ones, how to run the projector. It does seem, in fact, that not only childhood but early adulthood followed the same pattern:  my mom showed me how to do things, how to make things, how to fix things, how to run things, how to operate things, from the hi-fi to the stickshift, from the lawn mower to the Christmas lights, from checking the oil to cleaning out the dryer lint.

I don't think--oh for pete's sake I know--that my sons don't have the same sense of me as a competent person. I need help with the remote and I can't figure out my smart phone and I have to ask Hugh to take pictures because I can't seem to make the camera work and I'm a little unclear on the whole Hulu thing.

Maybe this greater equality in parent-child relations is a good thing. Maybe the fact that my kids have no doubts about my limits and utter faillibility makes it easier for them to head in new directions. Maybe. But I dunno. The sense that your parent knows all the important stuff--that's a rather powerful protective shield to wield as you face the dragons of daily adolescent life. Still, I imagine there's an app for that.

Vibrators et. al.

I like to think, despite having hit the Big 50, that I'm not totally out of it. But maybe I'm deluded. I subscribe to fab.com: daily email alerts to specials on groovy independent design items. Mostly funky kitchen stuff, tee shirts, jewelry, furnishings. But yesterday's selection included a firm specializing in beautiful vibrators. Okey dokey. No problem. Except there was this vibrator that I just did not get. Meaning, no, I didn't buy it, but also, I just didn't understand it. It was shaped like the profile of a hand flashing the peace sign. So, umm, two fingers. . . I dunno. . . I"m so confused.

Vibrators in general confuse me. Does that make me a Bad Person? A Failed Sexual Being? Uptight? Clueless? See, a mechanical thing is, well, mechanical. Uniform. Constant. These qualities do not seem to me to be the best suited for physical pleasure. Maybe I'm weird, but the thing is. . . . I vary. Sometimes a slow gentle touch, sometimes a vigorous  approach .  . . the days change, the moods change, the needs change. So . . . a responsive human finger seems much more efficient.

All of which has gotten me to thinking about masturbation. Would I be a different person had my mother not assured me that masturbation was sinful and that God frowned on it? If I hadn't sat in church and when Rev. Witte said that on Judgment Day all our secret sins would exposed--like a movie running in front of the world--I just died inside, thinking of me and my pillow, on this giant global screen?

I was determined not to do that to my kids. When Owen was little, he liked to wear these colored long underwear sets that I got from some organic kids catalog (when you called to place an order, there'd be all these babies crying and half the time the woman taking the info--yes, yes, this was Way Back Then Before Online Shopping--would say, "oh wait a sec, have to switch to the other breast;" it was a Very organic baby catalog company). Owen liked these sets because they were soft and comfy, no itchy seams or tags, and he could pull them on himself and, best of all, he could be Robin Hood in green, the Red Power Ranger in red, a Ninja in black, etc etc etc.

All of which was fine and fairly cheap and Owen was adorable; the only problem was that the long underwear did allow him very easy access to Down There. And goodness, he enjoyed getting to know Down There. So I developed this mantra: "That is a Bed and Bathroom Activity." See? No judgment, but also doing my job to socialize my kid: Look, baby, you can't be doing this in public.

And on the whole, it worked. Owen's all grown up and he does not pleasure himself in public. But there was this one day . . . my then 16-year-old niece Anne was living with us for the summer and serving as our summertime nanny. She had taken Owen to the video store (remember those? before Netflix? you'd wander around and around and around, and there's be all these movies, and you couldn't find anything you hadn't seen or he hadn't seen or that you both wanted to see?). There they were, little Owen, teenaged Anne,  in line. Anne looks up and the two guys about Anne's age at the cash register are giggling and snorting. Nothing too unusual in that, but then one of the boys looks right at Owen and say, "Go for it, man!" Anne looks down and there's Owen with his hands in his pants. Without missing a beat, she says in a loud, firm, loving voice, "Owen, that is a Bed and Bathroom Activity!" At which point the boys behind the counter practically pass out with laughter and Anne turns brilliant red and wonders how many different ways she can make me suffer.

Into the Gap

I just realized that today is Nov. 6, which means yesterday was Nov. 5. (See, I may be in menopause, but I'm still as sharp as ever.)

The Fifth of November--how could I have forgotten? I feel like I've betrayed a fundamental part of my family's history. Not "my family" as in "my lineage." We're all Dutch, nothing to do with Guy Fawkes Day or the Gunpowder Plot, nothing interesting or important in my family lineup, just a bunch of impoverished Calvinist mud farmers from Drenthe. No, by "my family," I mean my real family: Keith and Owen and Hugh. And by "history," I mean our history, our past, our life in England.

Our first Guy Fawkes Day, or "Bonfire Night" as most people in Manchester called it, was quite a revelation. I had lived in London in November and so expected something along London lines--a few firecrackers, some film clips of bonfires in vacant lots on the evening news. But Bonfire Night in our working-class neighborhood turned out to be something more akin to a night in Baghdad during the U.S. invasion. The explosions began early and just did not stop. At one point, a cascade of bottle rockets came whizzing into our back garden (aka back yard) and slammed into the kitchen door, but that was small beer compared to the bombs detonating all around us. To my utter amazement, this society--which did not allow anyone to purchase a 12-capsule pack of ibuprofen without first listening to a lengthy lecture about the proper use of painkillers, which had banned lice-killing shampoo because of the damage it could do if overused, which did not have Jungle Gyms in its school playgrounds because of the potential danger--this society allowed the purchase and recreational use of major explosives without any apparent control or limit.

By sunset, when we were supposed to show up in a neighbor's back garden for a genuine bonfire and BBQ, four-year-old Hugh was as close to catatonic as one can be without being thrown into a hospital bed. At this point in his young life, he was acutely frightened of loud, sudden noises (so strange, given his own capacity for noise-making). If a balloon popped in Hugh's vicinity, he would go silent and freeze, his body rigid, his big dark eyes staring fixedly ahead. Even the possibility of such a noise reduced him to rigidity: the mere sight of a balloon or a party popper was enough to transmogrify all his liveliness and curiosity and endless chatter into something closer to severe autism.

Owen so desperately wanted to attend the bonfire. On the whole, life in England was just one long misery for him, so desperately, stupidly, I tried.
--Where was Keith? Usually, at this point in our lives, at some church meeting or service or event, given his position as pastor of four Methodist congregations in Manchester, but surely not on Bonfire Night? No, definitely not, and yet. . . he's not there. In these memories, he's not there. Maybe I'm transferring all those times in Manchester that he wasn't there to this particular night. I honestly can't say. But in my memory, Keith is nowhere to be found.--
All on my own, then, I jollied poor Hugh along. There must have been a hiatus in the bombing, because he did walk over to the neighbor's, and Owen was so thrilled, so enchanted with the darkness and the sense of rules being broken and the utter edginess of the night. But almost immediately the whistles and bangs began again and Hugh couldn't cope. Our accommodating, if puzzled, hosts had no problem with keeping Owen but he pleaded with me to stay; only eight, he still wanted/needed/flourished in my company. When I headed out the gate with Hugh in my arms, Owen just stared at the ground and refused to say goodbye.

And then came one of the most surreal walks of my entire life. Down this dark lane (was it dark? surely the streetlamps were on? yet I remember it as so dark) I carried my eerily silent Hugh, his body stiff, his eyes glassy, while all around us things zoomed and shrieked and zzzzed and banged and boomed.

Such a strange night. The next two Bonfire Nights were much the same: Owen eager to join the anarchy, Hugh driven deep within himself, while I sought somehow to encourage the one and comfort the other, and felt myself falling, slipping, tumbling down the gap between the two.

This I'd Like to Forget

So, the thing is, I lied in my last post.  Not "lying" as in "actively making stuff up"--everything I wrote was true; we did go to a tiny Greek island  and we did have an amazing experience--but "lying" as in "consciously omitting big chunks of that experience."

The truth, the whole truth. . . the whole truth is hard.

Like that friend that Owen made? The one who made him feel ok once again? What I didn't write was that when we returned home to Manchester Owen wrote and tried to phone this boy several times. He never responded. Owen was devastated.

And Hugh's jaunts out and about the village? The whole truth demands that these jaunts be set against our previous 48 hours in Rhodes. An entirely unexpected stay (a storm prevented us from taking the boat to Halki as planned), it caught us without any preparation. We ALWAYS prepared before going anywhere with Hugh, who could have been the poster child for ADHD at that point in his young life. So as we wandered about  Rhodes, trying to fill the time, Hugh kept running away from us. Keith was of the mindset that, well, he'll be fine, let's not worry about it.Right. A five year old. In a friggin' foreign city. A friggin' foreign city filled with insane Greek teenage boys on mopeds.  Fiinally, frustrated and furious, I lost it and began screaming at Hugh while I smacked him on his bottom--right on a busy sidewalk. A cluster of Greek women, witnesses to my breakdown, clucked in horror and shook their heads. I hated them with an intensity I am still ashamed to admit to.

And the entire Greek idyll needs to be reframed in the awareness of the the fact that we never ever worked as a family. I know all siblings fight: I have six of my own. But, as anyone who has spent any time with Hugh and Owen together will testify, "sibling rivalry" in no way adequately describes my sons' relationship. They have rarely interacted like brothers, rarely played together, rarely enjoyed each other, rarely hung out--and never ever looked to the other for comfort or companionship, never even bonded together in an alliance against us. A constant strain, a source of deep grief, the antipathy between the two of them of course simply intensified on family holidays as they had to endure each other for hours and days on end. I remember a good family friend spending some time with us on one such vacation and then turning to me and saying, "Why do you do this? This isn't good for any of you. Just stop it. There's no law that says you all have to vacation together." It took me a long time to give up, to stop it, as she advised. I did, eventually. The four of us have not traveled together since 2002. But that was after Greece.

And then there's the constant fact, the thread that weaves through my adult life: I didn't sleep for the entire trip. And I had a headache every single damned day. So that hilltop abandoned monastery that Owen climbed to? He wanted me to come along. He begged me to come along. But I didn't. I was too fucking tired.

The whole truth.

But surely it's better to forget it, isn't it? Owen is a beautiful man and Hugh is on his way to becoming one. They still loathe each other, but I guess that just as there's no law requiring family vacations, there's also no law requiring brothers to like each other.

This all started with olives. And if every time I eat an olive I want to remember the four of us, eating and laughing together, on a Greek island, rather than all the rest, that's ok, isn't it? All those surveys showing that people become so much happier omce they hit their 50s--I'll bet forgetting plays an essential, probably the central, role there.

This I believe: that one is better off forgetting the whole truth.

This I Believe

National Public Radio runs this periodic bit called "This I Believe," where ordinary and sometimes not-so-ordinary folks talk about what they believe--not always, or in fact, not usually, in the religious or dogmatic sense, but rather, in day-to-day life. Fill in the blank I believe in __________.

Everytime I hear one of these segments I think, "I believe in. . . olives."

This concerns me. What sort of person believes in olives? What does that mean?

So,tonight, fueled by a couple of glasses of wine, I intend to find out. Here goes.

I believe in olives.

I believe in the memories they conjure, of a tiny Greek village on the tiny island of Halki close to the Turkish coast, and of a magical week spent there when the boys were little. Once sustained by diving for sponges, Halki's population turned to honey cultivation after an epidemic wiped out the sponges. Then the honey bees died, and now --or then; this was 11 years ago--Halki survives solely on the tourist revenue generated by a small English company specializing in "unknown Greece."

Our time there was magical--a villa on the harbor, with our own steep descent into the water, and this little village containing nothing but the bakery where we bought our breakfast pastries, a beautiful church, an ice cream parlor, an assortment of tiny houses and five other tourist villas, one souvenir shop, one minscule grocery store, two beaches (one with a donkey and one without), and four harborside cafes. Every day, two decisions to make: where do we eat lunch? and where do we eat dinner? Not that it mattered; each of the cafes offered the same stunning view, the same just-off-the-boat seafood, the same heavenly feta cheese, the same to-die-for tomato and olive salads.

In Halki we sent 5-year-old Hugh off every morning to collect the bread and pastries for breakfast. He was so proud, so pleased to be off on his own, trusted with money, able to wind his way through the stone streets and across the church courtyard to the bakery. The villagers loved him, with his dark brown skin and curly brown-black hair and big brown eyes. In just one week, he chrmed them all, the quiet priest, the cranky young cashier in the souvenir shop, the old lady at the bakery, the fishermen in their boats. 

In Halki ten-year-old Owen, lonely and beaten down after a year being bullied in English state schools, met a friend, a fellow Harry Potter fan. They climbed up to an abandoned monastery and talked about Hogwarts and Owen remembered what it was to be ok.

I eat olives and in the salty tang and the soft yet firm texture, I taste sunny days and spiced lamb and a friendly donkey and a fresh breeze across the harbor and my boys. Happy. Thriving. Laughing.

This I believe. In olives. And my sons.

Empty Nesting

One week to the day of our new life in the Empty Nest. Or so folks keep saying when they hear that not only has Owen returned to college in Oregon (a normal, expected development) but that Hugh is now in boarding school in Mississippi (a really weird, say what? kind of thing). But I'm uncertain. Is it really Empty Nestdom, given that Hugh can come home every weekend? Shoot, it takes me three days to clean up the chaos he leaves behind, and then it's just a brief breath and here he is again, in all his six-foot, 200-pound, chaotic adolescent glory. Not really an Empty Nest as much as a temporarily-vacated-but- soon-to-be-reclaimed-and-reconquered-and-laid-waste nest.

And here I am in the nest, amidst piles of extra tee-shirts and mismatched socks and unnecessary jackets and too-tight khakis as well as bikes and stuffed animals and torn posters and old sports medals and other boy leavings, and I'm online checking Hugh's grades and calling him to remind him to wear his retainer and worrying that he's going to have headaches because he left his contact lens behind and I'm writing myself notes to fill and mail Owen's prescritptions and to check airfares so Owen can come to a family wedding in October and I'm wondering if he has a toaster and a crockpot in the house he's now sharing and should I ship those and is he remembering to irrigate the holes left by his wisdom teeth surgery and I'm reminding Keith that we need to check on the revisions to Owen's financial aid package and did he write the second check for Hugh's youth group trip next summer and and and-- good lord, for an empty nest, it's pretty cluttered in here.

Conversations

A younger Facebook Friend of mine reported the following conversation with her 4-year-old:

K., while holding the iron token from Monopoly: Mom, who is Iron Man?
Friend: I'm not sure. Maybe a superhero? You should ask Daddy.
K.: I think he's a guy who irons any stuff that's in his way.

The commercial potential here is huge. Ironing Man could team up with Dyson Dude (sucks up wrongdoing while turning on a ball) and the bewitching, bikini-clad Mop Maid.

But this conversation also reminded me of Owen, about age 11. I was backing up the car; he was shooting baskets in the driveway. He walked over, motioned for me to roll down the window, and said, "You know that metal thing, that thing you heat up and rub it back and forth on clothes to get the wrinkles out of them, what's that thing called?"
"Um, you mean the iron?"
"Iron. . . Are you sure it's called an iron?"

We don't do much ironing in our house. Obviously.

Binary Parenting

Son #1.

Owen came home from college with a suitcase full of unwashed clothes. It’s not that he expected me to do his laundry—my one Absolutely Right Parenting Act was to teach (and require) my boys to wash their own clothes once they entered middle school.

So anyway, Owen came home with a bunch of dirty clothes because he’d run out of money for the washing machines in the dorm. Pleased to have him home, I scoop up a heap of utterly rank jeans and corduroys and say, “I’ll start these in the wash for you.” Owen leaps up. “Noooo! Not those jeans!” I pause.

“They have holes in the crotch,” he explains. “Washing makes the holes bigger. So I never wash them.”

“Owen,” say I. “It's time to buy new pants.”

“Why?” he asks, utterly perplexed.

Son #2.

I find a pile of clothes that Hugh plans to try to sell to Plato's Closet, a teen clothing resale shop. In the pile, right on top, sits a brand new flannel shirt, tags still on, that I'd given him for Christmas--that, in fact, he'd picked out for Christmas. I demand to know what he's thinking.

"Well, it's about to be summer so I'm not going to wear a flannel shirt," he says in one of those "like totally, duh" tones of voice.

"Hugh. We have closets. Save it for next year," I reply.

He stares at me, horrified. "Like I'm going to wear last season's clothes!"

Supernanny

regret (verb) : 1)to feel sorrow or remorse for; 2) to think of with a sense of loss.

I'm watching Supernanny. I love Jo the Supernanny. Tonight she's dealing with a poor, lost, clueless young Houston widower and his three out-of-control little boys. (All with shaven heads; they look like concentration camp kids.) One hour. Total transformation; complete healing. Screaming, biting, hitting, kicking, emotionally autistic, junk-food addicted, horrid hellions transfigured into banana-bread-baking, mom-remembering, veggie-adoring, well-disciplined little troopers.

OK. A bit unrealistic. Yet, watching Jo, she does make sense. You can see the hows and whys and what ifs.

Damn. If I'd only had had a supernanny. I didn't feel the need, actually, with Owen. I could read and he conformed to the baby books. You stuck Owen in timeout; he jumped out; you put him back; he got it: "Oh,right, here I stay." You gave him a reward chart with stickers; he thought, 'ooh stickers! nifty-keen!'; he performed accordingly. But then came Hugh. You stuck Hugh in timeout; he jumped out; you put him back; he jumped out; you put him back; he jumped out; you put him back; he jumped out; you put him back; he jumped out; you put him back; and on and on and on until you're screaming and you realize you're about to throw Hugh out the window. You gave Hugh a reward chart with stickers; he thought, 'who gives a shit about stickers?' and careened on to his next act of destruction. So, given the data at hand, I concluded, umm, ok, timeouts and reward charts don't work with this kid. Umm, now what?

And then, years later, I watched Jo the supernanny cheer a mom on through four hours--four hours--of firmly but gently placing a toddler back in timeout. If only I'd had someone like Supernanny saying yes, yes, you're doing it right, it's ok, you can do this, yep, this is it, this is what moms do. I watched that episode with Hugh, Hugh, who kept saying, "Gosh, a kid like that would drive me nuts."

I could do it better now. Really. I'd be really good at it now.

Progeny

We're no longer sleeping on the floor. Our bed finally arrived and, astoundingly, we actually learned from our mistakes and paid the delivery guys to set it up. Massive, solid, wooden, it now bestrides our bedroom, a furnishings colossus. It is, very clearly, a bed for spawning progeny. Sadly, our spawning days behind us, Keith and I will have to bequeath it to one of the boys and let them produce the progeny.

Owen, however, is not quite on board the progeny-producing project, as he "can't really see the point of babies." Our hopes rest with Hugh. He surprised me the other day when he declared that he and his future wife would adopt. Thinking that his plans constituted a heart-warming affirmation of his own adoption, I was delighted. . . until he added that his wife of course will be incredibly hot and he doesn't want her figure wrecked by pregnancy. Before I could bellow my response, he went on, "And we're only having one child because I'm going to buy it the best of everything, you know, designer clothes and stuff."

Maybe we shouldn't get our hopes up.