So this blog isn’t just about the humorous and the mundane, it is also about the disappointments.
Most people my age have younger parents. My parents were in their late 30s and early 40s when they had us. They were visionaries because, one generation later, most of my friends and I were that old when we had our own kids. My parents were born in the 1920s to immigrant, semi-literate parents. My parents lived through the depression, the wars and made the galactic leap beyond the Lower East Side and Pelham Parkway (in the Bronx) to settle down in midtown Manhattan where they sent us to private school, camp and schlepped us up to a weekend house. Now, it wasn’t exactly to the manor born because we lived in a tiny apartment (what did my parents know about personal space since they lived two to a bed and five to a room growing up?) and a rambling, ugly country house where there were no other weekenders. But we had all of the advantages and none of the handicaps of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations. My grandfather would shake his head — anything is possible in America.
My whole generation (one my father’s side) had a choice — doctor or lawyer. You could be any type of doctor you wanted or any kind of lawyer you wanted (except medical malpractice). So, choose already because the elders had to talk to the next cousin and make sure that no two cousins picked the same field. Redundancies do not make for a robust web of intra-family professional courtesies. There was a method to this madness.
We were raised to expect to work hard and succeed. Success was the inevitable end of hard work. You could miss Mother’s Day or a family celebration — even great uncle Lou’s retirement party — if you were working. (But you couldn’t miss a funeral or a shiva because even if you didn’t like the person alive, G-d forbid you wouldn’t pay your respects after the end.) But I digress.
Success was measured by your ability to give more to your children and community than your parents did. A Nobel Prize was not required but not off the table either, so to speak.
So, here I am, a formerly successful lawyer. In 2006 and even into 2007, I was feeling entitled and self-satisfied and as if I were paying it forward more than my parents did when, all kind of a sudden, the financial backbone of the world gave way. Like a retaining wall giving way and taking the building and neighboring buildings with it. I am one of the neighbors in the building next door. I had everything given to me and then it was all taken away. The difference is that what I was given was given with love, optimism and a significant amount of expectation and what was taken was taken by systemic hubris and greed.
My parents had the “suck it up” view of life — no matter what, we are responsible for our lives and fear of homelessness is good. Fear is a motivator. Ok, I am fearful but I can’t come up with an exit strategy. Hopelessness is the enemy and must be repelled ast all costs. I try to imagine that I am the protagonist in a Robert Ludlum novel about an anemic looking, gray-haired, 40-something desk jockey — ok, work with me — who fights against the great evil of NO HOPE.
So call me Joan Bourne. Because I want my family to live in comfort and I want this world to be a better place for my having been born into it. But I am still digging out of the mud from the destruction of the retaining wall. Speaking of retaining, my ankles are retaining water and I didn’t give birth to my child. And I can’t sneeze with any sense of security (pause, for the women readers to understand). So, let’s face it — not having given birth didn’t save me from any of this and I didn’t get the larger breasts.
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile
