After several years of attending chorus and band concerts, talent shows, award ceremonies, and other school assemblies, I have become, in short, familiar with your work. You are the woman who leaps up before each and every song start or critical moment, flips on your video cam, and starts to preserve those wonderful childhood memories we all wish to remember as we move along that strangely short continuum known as life. I’m very glad that you are careful to gather each and every note your child has warbled. I envision a home library filled with videos, each carefully categorized for future generations’ use.
You may not realize this, but thanks to your fastidious attention to capturing those moments, you have also become a part of our family’s memories. At first, I would attempt a paltry photograph here or there, only to capture your back, shoulders, or butt (the latter of which has gotten larger over the years, which I can glean from my photographic evidence.) I would try to sit elsewhere in the auditorium, and yet, like two toddlers hellbent on getting the one toy in the room, our worlds would collide again and again. Over time, I gave up hope at actually watching my child in any performance; I would simply hope that my being there was enough for her. She’ll never know that I spent my time, teeth gritted, trying to see around your standing, ample frame, hearing less her voice and more of the whirr of your taping.
I should learn to live with the fact that your child must be more important than mine or anyone else’s here at school. However, now that the final year at elementary school is coming to a close, I have been asked to share any photographs I have of my child at school activities for one final montage at the graduation program. Instead, as I gather together my collection of pictures, I notice a preponderance of shots of you. While your family may never show much interest in watching your thousands of hours of video, my kids will have to content themselves with multiple shots of your posterior.
I’m picking out the finest samples for the entire 5th grade to enjoy.
an indictment of the world of high school that could be considered the great grandma of mean girls, janis ian’s at seventeen must have hit a chord with a lot of others as well, as it was a huge hit that year. it’s a commentary on the importance of popularity, cliques, and being judged on your appearance: your clothes, your face, basically everything about “ugly duckling girls.” at 10, i knew i’d never be a cheerleader, a beauty queen, or one of those girls who seemed to walk out of a shampoo commercial. for starters, my hair was brown (and we all knew back then that blondes had more fun.) all the girls in my class were thin as sticks; i somehow was curvy, which wasn’t too cool when you’re in 5th grade. (and that continued on into high school, when finally most of the girls caught up.) and worst of all, i was a smart girl.
i knew it would be a long time, if ever, that anyone would want to date a smart girl like me. at 10, i was reading mother jones and newsweek and all sorts of classic books; i adored joining my folks as they watched PBS shows on history and politics. most of my peers at the time were not there; many still aren’t. and yet, i also loved it when my friend jeanne and i would borrow her older sister’s seventeen magazine. somehow, my entire existence was supposed to be centered on finding the right lip gloss and taking quizzes that would surely determine the path of my life going forward. it was all so confusing to me; it was like i was supposed to be several different people, all without actually turning into sybil.
and then janis ian cleared it all up for me. don’t worry kid, she seemed to be saying. the really pretty and popular ones were going to lead boring, traditional lives. but you, my friend, are an ugly ducking girl like me.
and what i took from that? well, you know what eventually happened to the ugly duckling, right?
today is the anniversary of the assassination of the reverend martin luther king, jr, MLK. i prefer to reflect on his life rather than his sad demise; but thanks to this classic u2 song, i will never, ever forget what happened early morning, april 4.
like any human being, MLK had his flaws, but i wonder why our society fixated on his misdeeds. when you think of all the good MLK did in his brief life, who really cares whether he had affairs? i’m beginning to think that so many people in power think that to be an option; i don’t agree, obviously. i think we expect our heroes to be made of something out of a storybook: but these leaders are, inevitably, flesh and blood. i suspect that if any of us were judged under a microscope, we would all be found wanting in some way.
the bigger question i think people ought to ask themselves, though, is what have i done for the world? i struggle with this question daily. one day, i was actually upset about my answer. people like MLK inspired me as a child to do something important for humanity. MLK helped african-americans and other people of color make important gains toward achieving their proper, equal place in american society. i do not believe i have ever done anything as critical.
some people just try to make it through the day. others are looking toward the weekend, the future, the promised time when they can achieve a measure of happiness. me, i want to do something good for the world. and i just wasn’t seeing how i was getting there as a stay-at-home mom. BC came up to me as i sat, slumped. what’s wrong, mom? she asked. i no longer hide my moods from my daughter; she knows me as a whole person as well as her mom.
well honey, i replied, when i was your age, i thought i was going to do something important to help people in the world. and i just don’t see how i’m accomplishing that at all right now.
BC, thoughtful 40-year-old-in-a-12-year-old-suit, breathed in for a second. then, she replied: you’re raising julian and me to be good people. isn’t that enough? i smiled and hugged her hard. perhaps it is, i mused to myself.
so i now have a dream. maybe it isn’t as lofty as MLK’s. maybe it will be far-reaching, maybe not. it is certainly inspired by the man.
and hopefully, it will be fulfilled through my children.
today was the big day in second grade. parents were invited in to see the two-part museums the children had created for american studies and science. part one involved native american tribes. each class contributed two docents to discuss their particular exhibit. i was thrilled to witness jools and his little girlfriend rose perform as docents, discussing all sorts of native american things. (not as thrilled as jools was. he often isn’t selected for these sorts of things, and as he was this time, he was jumping out of his skin. he couldn’t wait to do his bit. which, i would add, he did knowledgeably and marvelously, unbiased mom that i am.) we all moved around to each class’s native american exhibit, listening to their classes’ docents discuss all things powhatan. it was really a creative and well-done idea, and i send many kudos to the teachers and kids who worked very hard to put it all together. a lot of learning clearly took place!
part two of the exhibits involved their biome unit. (i don’t remember anything about biomes when i was a kid. we just talked about nature.) the kids learned about three different biomes: the desert, the deciduous forest, and the grassland. each child was to make a diorama depicting an animal from one of those three selected biomes. they also needed to write about the animal, it’s interdependent relationships, and interesting facts. there were quite a few bison, many cheetahs, lots of slithering snakes, all probably selected from the big list o’ animals distributed at the start of the project. did we pick one of those aforementioned animals?
of course not.
when we sat down to discuss the selection of the animal, we went to a website recommended by the teacher as a great resource on animals. from there, i’m not sure where we went, but we stumbled on an animal which, the minute i read its name, i knew would be the one the boy would select. ohmygawd how COOL, the boy exclaimed when i showed him a picture of this little, nonpredatory, ant-eating aussie lizard. it was settled. our animal would be: the thorny devil.
now i could tell you loads and loads about this adorable little dude, but a picture (or video) is probably way less verbose and far more informative than i’ll ever be.
anyway, we read together in books and on the web about this little creature. as he has a tough time writing neatly, the boy typed a sentence a day about this lumpy lizard until we had critical mass. we also discussed how to make the diorama. i reminded mr. man that i passed the second grade; so while i’d be glad to talk about the project and help him get what he needed, for the most part, he was on his own. he painted the inside of a girl scouts thin mint box blue and pasted cotton balls for clouds. we put down a mass quantity of glue on the bottom and poured sand (from our old sandbox sand bag) on it. he made a shrub out of green tissue paper from an old gift. the husband bought the boy some clay, and he fashioned a lizard as best as he could out of several colors. and then, he stuck toothpicks all over the lizard to show it’s spikes.
so today in class, after the native american museum part of the program, we entered the kids’ classrooms, whereupon everyone stood up and talked about their animal. the boy did a fine job mentioning that the devil gets water by both absorbing it through it’s tummy as well as by drinking the rain gathered in the little valleys created by the spiky skin on his back. well done, little man. he was so very, very proud.
and i was, too.
so then, we all walked around the classroom, admiring everyone’s work. i noticed plenty of ready-made plastic animals stuck into boxes. some dioramas were really quite realistic — one boy put actual cacti into his to show it was the desert. (i’m too much of a slacker to have gone there. bully for him.) and i stopped for a moment, standing by the boy’s diorama, when i overheard two boys talking as they peered into jools’ work. look, one boy said, laughing as he looked at jools’ interpretation of the thorny devil. he stuck TOOTHPICKS into his lizard. that looks dumb.
and i couldn’t help myself. i know i’m supposed to behave. i know i’m supposed to be an adult. and i know i would say something sharp to my son if i heard him making fun of someone else’s hard work. and, as part of the global village which it takes to raise children, i spoke up.
you know, i said, giving my sternest parental look, it’s really hard to make those spikes. you shouldn’t make fun of something if you haven’t tried it.
the boys looked at me, surprised, then sheepish. and fled.
i remember when elton john’s captain fantastic and the brown dirt cowboy album came out. i was 10 years old, and i was completely enthralled by this pudgy, bespectacled spectacle. BTD had bought this one (apparently, a lot of people did — it debuted at number one on the billboard pop albums chart, the first album ever to do that.), along with a few others, and i somehow glommed onto this one. the album cover seemed to me to be as complex as sgt pepper‘s; and there were not one, but two inserts, one with lyrics and the other with all sorts of photos and pictures and minutae. i must have looked at those things for hours, as if i would somehow find some clues to the missing holy grail.
(lest the pinball fan in me forget that there also was the captain fantastic pinball machine:)
but the best part for me, of course, was the album itself. my favorite elton john album, of course, remains tumbleweed connection; but captain fantastic follows, a close second. it’s the last time you hear the original elton john band together (playing at their peak) until the too low for zero album in 1983. the album is a sort of untintentional concept piece: an early history of the struggle of john and taupin to find their way into music business success. they struggle with love, loss, hunger, and the choices they must make to be successful. they even struggle with writing and rejection, something i always have found endearing. someone saved my life tonight, the story of john’s escape from near-marriage in 1969, was the only single and is, unquestionably, the jewel in the crown of the work.
but i have always adored the first track. i’d listen to captain fantastic and the brown dirt cowboy, imagining the young john and taupin, like two guys in a western, as they start to forge a path toward fame and fortune. while recognizing that they’re both wet behind the ears, they are excited by the promise of their future. they are anxious about the troubles ahead. should they stay where they are? should they pursue their heartfelt destiny? it’s a tough call, and it won’t be easy: from here on, sonny sonny sonny, it’s a long, lonely climb.
knowing the path the john’s career and life have taken makes this song, 35 years later, that much more poignant. and yet now, many years on, with the realization that john made it through so much adversity, this song becomes ever sweeter, as we know all the angst of these two young lads pays off ultimately in a sweet, happy, and creative life.
middle school. the loveliest time of life, methinks.
i’m very fortunate to have a relationship with my daughter where she still deigns to speak to me. at the ripe old age of 12+, girlfriend is supposedly at the point of life where parents are beyond embarrassing. i remember trips to the mall where i tried to walk several paces away from my mom (not always, of course — just when kids from school were sighted) and pretended to have been apparently spawned from thin air. don’t get me wrong — i have always, always adored my parents. but it was a tricky phase at times, balancing the person i was with the person i knew i should be.
girlfriend doesn’t seem to be bothered by that sort of nonsense. she’s clearly more mature at this age than i was. (arguably, she is still more mature than i am, but that’s fodder for a different day.) she walks with me. sometimes, she’s even willing to still hold my hand. (not when her friends are around, of course, but that’s to be expected.) and best of all, she continues to tell me all about the magical time she is having as a young middle schooler.
middle school, in her view at the moment, is full of dudes experimenting with their respective swaggers. i hear tales of boys using extremely profane language (one was talking directly to BC for a time. i called his mom, as i knew that if it were my kid, i would want someone to call ME. bless that mom’s heart; she heard me, understood me, and together, we worked to change that situation around. i am very grateful to her.) i hear of boys putting irish spring soap in their pants, mushing it around, then taking it out and giving it back to other boys, an act which seems unbearably odd. and of course, on her school bus, there is the issue of the traveling tampon. it is apparently the height of comedy to throw a tampon around the bus, although the other day, girlfriend was extra-mortified by this activity, as the aforementioned feminine protection product had what appeared to be some blood on it.
ew.
most of her girlfriends appear to be relatively sane at the moment, but of course there is talk about the girls who are rude, petty, and mean. there are the girls who are dressed up, date, and go grinding with the boys at a monthly local church dance. some things never change, i guess.
i asked the girl once about whether kids were dating in the 6th grade. her response?
well, yeah, if you call dating sitting together in the cafeteria, hanging outside during lunchtime, and then, if you’re really, really crazy, walking up the street afterschool to the harris-teeter to go get a free sugar cookie.
i have been informed that this sort of activity is not for her at the present time. i am, in short, relieved.
middle school is like a cauldron of sturm und drang. i continue to share with her my tales of my time in hell, where the boys ran around and snapped your bra straps without anyone screaming sexual harassment and where having glasses and/or braces was pretty much a sentence into your own private gulag for a few years. mercifully, the latter seems to not be in play anymore, but it is still a rocky, rocky time. her tales sometimes are so cringeworthy; they remind me of times i didn’t particularly enjoy. and yet, i hope i continue to hear her tales, no matter how graphic, gory, or gross.
for as she crosses the street toward adulthood, it’s sometimes a good idea to continue to hold hands while in the middle of the road. at least, for now.
because you just never know where your inspiration will come from…
so yesterday was purim. purim, to me, is the very best jewish holiday going. chanukah gets more press because here in america, it has ended up in a tit-for-tat with christmas. american jews run to the shops to buy altogether too many things for their offspring, because G-d forbid jeremy or sarah feels left out of the gift-giving frenzy. oy veis mer.
but purim? hands down, it rocks.
i sometimes call purim the jewish mardi gras. (well, only in my little bear brain, of course: obviously, it has nothing at all to do with the tale behind mardi gras, but it’s almost as much fun.) sure, you have to sit through the reading of the book of esther (the megillah, as in the whole megillah fame. not to be confused with the gorilla of a similar sounding name.) but every time the evil haman is named in the story, you are encouraged to make boatloads of noise (vuvuzelas, anybody?) to blot out the sound of he who should not be named, one of the bigger villains who wanted to kill all the jews. (sadly, this appears to be a recurrent theme in our cultural history.) it’s literally the only time i let my kids yell boo in public (though in all fairness, i haven’t yet taken them to a yankees game.)
A person is obligated to drink on Purim until he does not know the difference between “cursed be Haman” and “blessed be Mordechai”
honestly, as a mom and as a person of a certain age, i don’t really ever get to do this. and i still didn’t get to do this. but it’s nice to know in the back of my mind that i’m supposed to do this on this one-time-only basis each year.
i did, however, eat my weight in hamentashen this year, the three-sided cookie that we red sea pedestrians eat as a traditional holiday treat. old skool ashkenazi jews like to eat them with poppy, prune, or apricot filling. bleh. over the years, though, i have enjoyed more and more delightful fillings, like cherry, chocolate, and basically anything not poppy or prune oriented. i mean, imagine if you did get drunk AND you had eaten a lot of prune-filled delights? i shudder to think.
so what the hell does this have to do with a psychedelic hit, you might ask? (well, besides the being wasted part of things.)
many synagogues put together a purim carnival for the children. ours was no exception — lots of games and a moonbounce for the kiddies to enjoy. BC missed the entire thing because of a prior girl scout commitment (and BOY, was she mad.) but jools? he had the time of his life. he played all sorts of carnival games, winning tickets to earn small prizes. that being said, his eye was on a particular prize — candy. he loaded up on a lot of hershey kisses and miniatures.
but then, he went up to a friend of mine, who was running the prize area, and he was counting his tickets. how many do you have? she asked him. he continued to count.
i’m trying to see whether i have enough tickets. i want to get a peppermint patty for my sister. she loves them. i want to get one for my dad, too.
bless my friend’s heart. thinking of your sister and your dad is a mitzvah. you can have one for each of them, no tickets required.
i am always incredibly grateful when a child does the right thing and an adult reinforces the message. it really does take a village to raise a a child, and moments like these, i’m so glad to find like-minded people in my little village of sorts. it’s magical, it’s meaningful.
years ago when i was working for the world’s then-largest online service, i had the privilege of working in the international division. our company had joint ventures in several nations (and launched still others while i was on staff.) i had been restructured from my other position in the company, and i was exceptionally grateful for the opportunity to continue contributing toward the company in this young division. somewhere along the line, i believe i was told that my job was essentially paid for by our joint venture with japan, which of course made me especially grateful and sensitive to those folks out in a wildly-different time zone.
and it really wasn’t easy working as a product manager in this realm, to be sure. our US counterparts regularly ignored our requests for products and actually belittled us to our faces. they were the 1000-pound gorilla to our small but feisty group. to fight the gorilla, we often had to resort to guerilla product marketing/management tactics in order to serve our clients. hell, my then-boss (and beloved BFF) and i did not have a computer on which to load the japanese software — you needed to have a japanese operating system in order to use the japanese software. so we did what any two enterprising girls would do — we somehow located a forgotten computer through our snooping, er, research methods, liberated it stealthily, and brought it into my office, where we loaded the software. it seems silly now — we needed that machine in order to test our products and see how things worked. but as the rodney dangerfields of the company, we just didn’t get any respect.
(no respect, i should add, save for one US product manager, who to this day is my friend and who actually worked to help us, probably to his occupational detriment. imagine that — we all worked for the same company, and he took it to heart to mean that we should work together. what a revolutionary idea!)
i ascertained so many nuanced things from my interactions with my japanese counterparts. it wasn’t always easy being on conference calls either very early in the morning or late at night; (i’m sure it wasn’t easy for them, either!) i learned, for example, that just because someone there says yes to you does not necessarily mean that he or she is agreeing with you; rather, it just means that you’ve been heard. i’ve since learned to truly pay attention to people when i’m interacting with them; there’s more going on there than one might expect.
anyway, i loved working with all the folks overseas; i hope they realize that we really tried our very best for them against some absurd conditions. i continue to be pals with some of my UK, canadian, and japanese counterparts. and i’m worry about my friends in japan. sure, they’re mostly in tokyo — but the tales of the city closed up, with no food on the shelves and aftershocks and radiation makes me want to go and airlift everyone out of all of the affected areas. we’ve already given money, but the helplessness i feel all of the way around the world makes me cry daily. i want to do more. i want to help more. i want to somehow make the world safer for them and for everyone.
and i want them to know how amazed i am by what i see, how astounded all of us in america are. i see a nation of very courageous people who are just doing the best they can under horrific circumstances. there are super-heroics going on at the nuclear plants, where people are risking their very lives in order to save their countrymen and the world. i am awe-struck. would people be like that here under such conditions? i don’t know, but i hope so.
but i hope people in japan know that people in america are with them. for the people of japan are surely in our hearts.
is it just me, or does it seem like america has become even more openly hostile to women these days? between all the anti-choice legislative nightmares brewing and even oddly-misogynistic attitudes in journalistic pieces, it’s apparently becoming more acceptable to knock down women. (and gays. and jews. and minorities. and basically anyone out there who isn’t one of the wildly-oppressed, white male species. oh, boo effing hoo, boys. ) methinks for that years, people were shamed into trying to be less racist, and unfortunately, shaming doesn’t work. (of course, with some of these folks, i wonder whether education will work, either.)
so it is with some trepidation that i ponder our current state of affairs. i fear that neither diversity of population or of thought is appreciated in the policy circles of the current powers that be. the damage that may occur in our society as a result is stunning. for somehow, it is becoming more acceptable to force a woman to complete an unplanned pregnancy. and when that baby is born, will these same people be there to raise it, shelter it, pay for it? of course not. somehow, pregnancy has become a punishment of sorts — and it doesn’t matter whether the woman became pregnant simply because she was sexually active or because she was raped. her life is worth less than the burgeoning life inside of her. the policy decisions surrounding abortion rights are being made by people who not only do not care about the rights of women, but who feel that society must use certain tools to punish them, even in cases when the pregnancy is not the woman’s fault.
and where the hell are the men in these situations? women do not conceive immaculately.
roe versus wade is the law. and now that plenty of states, including my own, are making it absurdly difficult to provide safe, legal abortions to those who choose to have them, i fear for a lot of female citizens, women who may die because of someone else’s misogynistic belief system. hey — don’t want an abortion? don’t have one!
so i’m hoping a lot of people out there — men and women alike — see the writing on the wall… i’m hoping they get involved in policy discussions. i’m hoping they get active in the issues.
today is my birthday. i’m a wee bit older than i was a few minutes ago, but still not old.
luckily for me, i have an older brother, middlebro, who kindly shared a little bit of video of me as a toddler. (thanks, middlebro! gah.) see, back in the olden days, when they were building the house in which i grew up, my front lawn was a mountain! well, not really a mountain. a molehill, probably, especially after i saw it last summer for the first time in years. i swear it was a mountain once upon a time. and i, intrepid young thang, was going to climb it!
for the record, i’d like to blame my mother for overdressing me. if i hadn’t had 50 pounds of clothing plus a sherpa on my back, i might have made it up to the front door that day.
ah, so wonderful to evidence my grace and skill at such a tender age. some things never change.
