Tag Archives: family

Sunday was a great day

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Sunday was my free day before my new job.

POB (partner of blogger) excused me from the otherwise obligatory lunch with her father and a children’s Hebrew music concert at our synagogue.  POB is TOO good to me.  I don’t deserve her but let’s keep that quiet (she hardly ever reads my blog often so I am not giving the secret away).

So, I watched cartoons with our son, went to the gym for a long, long time (I am still hurting Monday night), got a manicure, bought food for dinner with the extended family (my side) and started preparing it.  POB — G-d bless her — likes having my extended family over, even when I have slacked off ALL day. And they love her (what’s not to love?)

As an aside, it is a little bit of heaven to go to the gym without the stresses of having only 45 minutes to sweat, stretch, and be grossed out by those in the locker room.

The family came over and we started to reminisce about seminal moments of our clan gatherings at our aunt’s and uncle’s house in New Rochelle. And how we all thought we should have been consulted when they sold that house. That house was special because of the wonderful memories created there when the older generation was young and tall (and, yep, alive). Younger than their children are now.  It was a great fun to remember and laugh.

After everyone left, we cleaned up and my son was all ready for bed, he said, “Good luck tomorrow, E-Mom, I hope you make new friends and have someone to eat lunch with.”

I didn’t have time to get nervous about going to a new job the next day (ok, I didn’t get nervous until it was time to go to bed). 

It was a great day.

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Toxins aren’t only in labs

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A great philosopher and life coach (and a college friend) once offered up a simple, yet mind-blowing concept:  situations and relationships can be toxic.  Now, this great philosopher and life coach may reveal herself in a comment but I do try (as best I can) to exercise some discretion in naming names.

Think about that: not just WMDs and not just science experiments gone wrong, but the relationships can be, well, combustible. Or more often, a slow carbon monoxide leak.   And this is true in business relationship as well as love relationships as well as family relationships.

 

It is possible to overstate the point.  My child’s periodic tantrums and exhortations of “I never get to do ANYthing” are annoying but they are not toxic.  And they are more than balanced by the sheer joy I get from spending time with my partner and our son.  My partner and I may argue, but we are soul mates.

Even relationships that ostensibly start out fine can turn toxic.  They get toxic when one feels bad and unloved and exploited.  But we must remember that relationships are not balanced all the time, every day.  For example, recently I have been leaning more on my partner for emotional support than usual (and I am so lucky to have her).  So, technically, there is an imbalance.   And I may never be as supportive of her as she is of me now, but as long as she feels loved and respected and appreciated, that can also balance the cosmic equation.  Toxicity comes in when the power in a relationship is taken or (let’s admit it) ceded to one person.  Usually that happens out of fear but sometimes it happens because that is the only relationship model one knows.

Over some months, I realized a dangerously high toxin level in one relationship.  Still, I was desperate to keep it in part for economic reasons, but mostly because I was looking for vindication, acceptance and a great epiphany that I imagine I deserved.

I keep reminding myself that if I knew I was being poisoned by carbon monoxide, I’d run, like the wind.

Still, breaking up stinks even if it is for the best.

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Fantasy Football Undone

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Remember the intro to “ABC’s Wide World of Sports”?  The announcer gravely intoned, “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.”

Fast-forward 30 years, as I sit with my young son after an awesome first half of the Jets-Colts game.  Awesome because the Jets were ahead and it was his team!!  He does like Peyton Manning, the Colts QB, but my son IS a New Yorker, after all.

Then came the frustrating second half in which the Colts players showed themselves to be too much for our Jets.  Aggravation, disappointment and helplessness in a sports game generally means that older boys (as in 20s and up) drink away their sorrows.  Not so for a 7.5 year-old.  He has to have a tantrum the old fashion way — whining, being obstreperous, fresh and generally miserable company.  At some point, he pushed enough of my buttons — some I didn’t know I had.  I maxed out on the tantrum and matched his yelling with my yelling.  At this point, POB (partner of blogger)  — G-d bless her — ushered our son out of the room and said, “I have to separate you, two.”

So, there it was.  POB actually has two children but only one is really able to use age as an excuse (hint: not me).  Ok, so my homework is to figure out how to help my son channel his agony of defeat in a way that works better for him (and me) and how to stand tough when my son can’t.

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Fantasy Football and Real Life

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My son’s best friend is wild about football.  So, my son is now, too.  This is an awesome event because my son has had trouble connecting to peers in the past.

So, football.  Ok, two women raising a boy and he wants to watch football.  My son, who learns through reading — books, websites, whatever — said to me, “E-Mom, we need to fire up the iPod with serious football apps!!”  Ok, how did he know there were football apps?  So now we have THREE football apps on two iPods but because they are not iPhones we cannot play together.  Uh-oh.  I am feeling an upgrade on the horizon.

When kids want the next new gadget (or at least the gadget they’ve recently discovered) and are feeling extra deprived (as only spoiled children can feel), they no longer make references to the Stone Age or pre-WWII Europe, like we did or our parents did.  My parents would quote their parents, as in, “when we were starving in Europe, we only asked for food and water” to which I remember responding, “gee, sorry, can I get Frye boots anyway?”

No, our kids say things like, “we’re being raised like the Aaaa-mishhhhh!!”  As I remember, Kelly McGillis was very hot in that movie with Harrison Ford, “Witness,” about an Amish boy who witnessed a murder in Port Authority or Penn Station.  Ok, so I am missing the point of the intended scathing analysis of our child-rearing techniques.  Never mind.

It is important to listen to kids because they are experts in being children and being childish.  If they are happy all of the time, then you are a push-over, the moral equivalent of a chump, and, ultimately, a bad parent.  I hear tell of a magical zone where good parenting meets the right level of whining for proper childhood development.  This may be a myth (actually, I know it is because I just made it up). But there are books written about errogenous zones that exist only on runway models and elixirs of youth, so maybe I have found my way out of the daily grind by discovery a new theory.  Hmmm. 

What does this have to do with fantasy football?  Work with me here.  My son is into football and I have a fantasy that he and I will both survive his childhood and adolescence as high-functioning individuals in environs more luxurious than Amish.   Also, part of my fantasy involves my brother-in-law watching the football games with my son.  Here the reason why it is a fantasy: he is an artist and in touch with his animus and anima (I think these are Jungian terms) — that is to say, he is too evolved for football and in touch with his feminine side as well as his masculine side.  Bottom line — he is not a chest beater or head-butter.   Which makes him wonderful in general but useless at football.  Maybe he is a closet alpha male.  (Don’t tell SOB — sister of blogger — because she will un-alpha him in a NY minute.  She IS tough but gentle and uses her powers for good.)

I am rambling because my mind goes to crazy places on Friday nights as the work week winds downs and cartoons cometh in the morning.  I feel a good kind of tired — the kind that comes from playing with my son — tackle football, of course, and “keep away” and monkey-in-the-middle with POB.  Then as we wind down to bed time, we have pretend adventures — because my son has an incredible imagination — I am a British tourist to Oregon (who would not set foot in the former colonies) and only goes to place that revolted against the French, Spanish and Dutch and my son is my uncle George.  Then I am a Kenyan who travels to Jamaica in hurricane season (because the airfare was cheap).  Where does he get this stuff?.  Soon to be followed in a slightly altered Fred Flintstone voice as I reprise my “Big Tuna” role in an undersea world where I have a talk show and he is my little ramora whom POB, as Secret Agent Swordfish (don’t ask), saved on her nose as he fell off a whale.   I am exhausted to my core.

Now, my son who is my joy is in his jammies and reading an encyclopedia of something.  Because that is the way he is.  And I love him because he is kooky and loving and kind and imaginative.  And I can take no credit — I am genetically irrelevant to him.  He is like the most fabulous gift that keeps changing and challenging the recipient.  Sometimes, like tonight, I max out from his intensity.  But no worries, he will come charging at full volume into my bedroom tomorrow to wake me up.  Thank G-d POB is following with hot coffee.

I love my family.  I am blessed.  I am tired.

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The greatest generation

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I know, I know. I write about death and destruction a lot. But life is like that. And movies and TV depict death and destruction with a certain enthusiasm that seems, well, ooky.

Today, I went to a friend’s father’s funeral. I didn’t know my friend’s father but I knew about his life.  I heard him speak once.  And his is a life story worth telling again and again, over and over.

He was born in Turkey and raised — before World War II — in France. He was a Jew and fled to the forests in unoccupied France.  There he met his wife and together, with others they met in hiding, fought with the Resistance.

I remember his saying at a talk at our synagogue that he never really thought of himself as a survivor in the same way that those who survived the concentration camps were survivors.

At the funeral, the rabbi asked those who hid with him to stand and three very old people slowly, and with assistance, stood, two of them very stooped over.  These old people did heroic things in a world gone haywire and they survived in a jungle of sorts where other humans were hunters and they were the game.

This man did the exact opposite of what was done to him. He loved, he gave generously of his time and his resources, he was grateful for life‘s gifts and, as someone at the funeral said, he didn’t blink when adversity hit.

He is truly the epitome of our greatest generation.  He saw the worst, endured the worst and gave his best back.

I didn’t know him but I stand on his shoulders and those like him — my own parents and grandparents — and therefore I need to pay my respects to a man who made possible the opportunities in my life.  For the debt I cannot repay to those who so willingly gave to me, I promise to pay it forward to the next generation, all the while telling the heroic stories of those who came before me.

Monsieur Henri, your memory is a blessing to all who know you and your family.

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The hardest part about having kids? Living through their childhoods.

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So this weekend, we went to the birthday party of our son’s betrothed (she turned 8, he is 7.5).  He asked her to marry him at summer camp and she said, “sure!”  We adore her and her parents so life is good so far. And both children attend the same school (but different classes, thank G-d).

Her parents (machertunim in Yiddish) and we went out recently and, among the stories, there was one in which the husband, a gentle giant (did I mention giant?) went — in his own words — ape-shit on someone.  He was justified in his reaction but, still, I thought, I am not sure that I want to tell him about an “oops” that could occur in adolescence if our children are still betrothed.  So, I am thinking about a chastity belt for boys.  All this going through my mind as we listen to jazz at a club and eat great food and wine.  I then start thinking about body armor for my son AND me.

My son is a gentlemen and a hyper-heterosexual young man.  Oxymoronic in the truest sense.  I guess being raised by lesbians will do that.  I am afraid, like any sane parent, about adolescence and what kids can watch on TV and then do in the instant that a parent is not watching.  Case in point: we are watching the Jets game on Sunday and a Viagara commercial comes on.  Try to explain erectile dysfunction to your 7.5 year-old to whom, at age 3, we had to plead “point it down” (so the pee would go in the overnight diaper) after “exploring”.

SO, back to the party.  The birthday girl’s mother says that the leader of their play group, an experienced child expert in something (vays nischt, as they say in Yiddish), thinks they are like brother-sister and not boyfriend-girlfriend.  I am relieved only to the extent that I don’t have to worry about plastic surgery after the gentle giant is finished with me if, G-d forbid, I had to explain about crazy adolescence and hormones (think, military school).  The grandmother overhears this and says, “the way they touch each other and interact, it is DEFINITELY boyfriend/girlfriend”.  Mothers know these things and I am scared once again and thinking about multi-generational living as a consequence of my son’s future indiscretion.  Until POB (partner of blogger) tells me that I am over-reacting.  Then I remember that she thought that the “bad girls” in hebrew school (yes, we’ve known each other since age 10) were still virgins.  I sink into despair.  I check my investments.  I move money to a separate account for contingencies.  I rest easy while searching the internet for his and her matching chastity belts.

This parent thing could kill a person.  I KNOW I was easier on my parents.  Or maybe they were not as crazy as I am.  Maybe they should have been because I did some crazy things.  Ok, I am stopping this loop because only bad things can come of it.

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I’ve lost that blogging feelin’

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I need help.  There are not too many bloggable moments as of late that are not work-related (or family-related with an unappealing message about those still alive and able to read my blog).   In fact, life has gotten, in some ways happily, ordinary.  Even mundane.

I had to be Mommy in the middle of the day — something I secretly enjoy but is still anathema to corporate America.  I picked up my son and his “bethrothed” — the young lady, soon to be 8 years old — to whom he pledged his love and undying loyalty at summer camp — and took them to a play group.  They talked about life when grown up and in the “hereafter” so much so that I suggested that they had long lives ahead of them and the “hereafter” could wait.  They held hands on the walk to the street corner and made sure each other was buckled in for the cab ride to the play group.  As the adult/guardian/interloper, I felt it was my duty to let them converse as they wanted.  They surprised me at the good habits they learned from their respective parents.  Old beyond their years.  Which means wild days are to come.  Be afraid.  Very afraid.  Apparently my son’s betrothed wants a marriage proposal for her birthday.  I was relieved that a ring wasn’t requested.  Knowing what I know about my son’s feelings for this little girl, it would be a BIG ring.  The kind you mortgage your house for.  Luckily, a solid birthday present and a marriage proposal are all that are warrranted.   I have time to save up for the wedding, because by that time, the groom’s family will be paying for the wedding.

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First Family Sunday Brunch of 2010

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So, last week, as I mentioned in my blog, as part of our family tradition, we gather together on the Sunday after Christmas for brunch to kvetch while our mouths are full of food.

Because at that brunch we didn’t kvetch enough or talk enough about our petty grievances against the humanity, the world and the next door neighbor, we re-convened at my house this Sunday.  We hoped the snarky energy that I emit in my home would provide a better venue for the spirit of our gathering.

Unfortunately, my sister couldn’t come because she had to cover for a sick colleague (“Doctor, heal thyself,” I say).  Besides the patients are so used to rounds, they could round themselves.  Still, my sister is a professional and went to the aid of her patients.  So, already, good karma started to push out my snarky energy.  AND IN MY OWN HOME.  How galling.

My brother-in-law came and he is really too sweet to have to carry the banner of acerbic, sarcastic humor.  He also has high blood pressure and a teensy cholesterol problem.  So, I ratted him out in the middle of brunch when he ate chocolate cake by sending the following pictures by email to my hard-working sister:

Needless to say, my brother-in-law is now on a diet of lentils, rice, and anti-oxidants.

Also, our dear cousin for whom my sister broke ground by cooking scrambled eggs, came this Sunday.  If my sister can cook eggs, well, I can, too.

SO THERE!!!

We are NOT competitive.  Really.  Nooooo, sireeeee.

Anyway, another cousin came over, too.  He is really a wonderful kid and it was actually hard to be snarky.  It was an odd feeling to want to be nice and gentle.  Wow, age does mellow a person.

But, let’s re-evaluate tomorrow.

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The Clan

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On Sunday we gathered at my sister’s house for the traditional Jewish post-Christmas brunch, to go over the number of tourists who got in our way and the number of merry people who infected the usual ennui and bad humor that are so quintessentially New York.  Because we are open-hearted, if narrow-minded, my sister’s Catholic husband was welcomed to join. We sat down to a traditional meal — high in salt smoked fish oils and low nutrition and low in any nutritive value.  Not a vitamin in sight.

But something different happened this Sunday, and I have yet to process the event fully.  I saw — or else I would not believe this — my sister cook something.  Our cousin can no longer eat the usual fare that is our cultural comfort foods.  My sister, who had never before used her stove, made our cousin freshly scrambled eggs.

Last year, she got married to a wonderful man who is kind and always in a good mood.

This year she is cooking nourishing food.  I can see a trend, but I can’t yet see the trajectory.

For background, my mother and I had suggested to my sister, when she bought her apartment in 1999, that she just convert the kitchen to a den.  All she needed were a phone, a stack of take-out menus and a mini-bar fridge for diet coke. But she insisted that an apartment needed a kitchen.  So we suggested that she get the fiberglass demo version of a stove to save some money.  A few years after she moved in, my partner finally took out the plastic envelope with the care instructions and warranties and turned on a burner.  (I was horrified that she diminished the resale value for no apparent reason.)

I was nervous seeing my sister at the stove, thinking she might hurt herself.  Our cousin was so touched at my sister’s domestic effort once he realized that she never cooked anything for anyone, even her husband.  Also, our cousin is a life-long bachelor (save for a short-lived marriage a long time ago) living in a tiny studio with a mini-bar fridge, and therefore unaccustomed to home-cooking.  He could not stop complimenting my sister on the eggs.

We forgot to kvetch about the tourists or the merriment that interfered with our hardened and mean personalities.  Instead, at this brunch, we just all talked and were glad to be together.

Next year, we may be singing folk songs and a bonus round of kumbaya or maybe my sister will have knitted each of us something in seasonal colors.  I think I’ll read up on Ebenezer Scrooge, so I know my part and can be the standard bearer against the march of time and humility.  I hope Scrooge doesn’t get nice.  I don’t “do” nice.

You see why I am worried.

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No Holiday For Us

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My son refused the time-honored Jewish tradition of going to the movies on Christmas.  It is a variation on the theme of sitting in the dark until the holiday passes.  In the movies, you sit in the dark, too, but are possibly diverted for 2 or so hours.

We took a walk along Broadway.  It is a gray day and the lingering snow is in that only-in-New-York-could-snow-be-so-gross state.  Everything is closed, even the eatery I called which had a recorded message naming the soup of the day.  In the back of my mind I had a feeling that that recording was for the soup d’autre jour.  Thursday, for example.  Our son didn’t want to go on this walk to — as it turned out — nowhere, and the fact that there was no “there” there justified further whining.

Now we are home, watching educational movies (because we are those creepy kind of parents who have very few videos just for fun).  Now that I have watched the biography of Abraham Lincoln for the third time in six weeks, I am so creeped out by my own parenting that I may have to buy the entire video library of SpongeBob.

Maybe my partner will talk me off the ledge.

The good news is tomorrow is NOT Christmas.

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