Category Archives: The Domestic Front

Gearing Up for Camping

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Camping gear

My husband, Jonathan, and I are about to embark for a week in the eastern Sierra. The first three nights involve camping with a group of fanatical hikers who think nothing of day after day of 13+ mile hikes with 3,000+ foot elevation gains. But despite our aging knees, it’s not the hiking that gives me pause. It’s the camping.

I loved backpacking in my youth, but I was never that keen on camping. With backpacking you know you’ve abandoned all comfort at the trailhead, so you quickly stop dreaming about high thread count sheets. With camping, though, it’s always in the back of your mind that you could just jump in the car and drive to a motel for a good night’s sleep.  We had a lot of fun when our kids were younger camping with the Girl Scouts. But that’s because we stood around “watching the kids” while our friends did all the work. Basically, I’m like my friend Roberta, whose idea of acceptable camping is a hotel without room service.

But it seemed like a good idea at the time when Jonathan asked if I’d like to try camping again. Now that we’re going, we’re getting our gear ready. Trouble has set in even before we’ve gotten to where the oxygen is thin.

Like in our living room, as we try to remember how to set up our tent. As the scent of mildew permeates the house and we nearly knock over the lamp with the fully extended aluminum poles, we argue about whether or not we’ll need the fly.

“It might be cold,” I point out, as Jonathan frowns.

Then it’s time to see if the air mattress has a slow leak. At least we are persuaded it doesn’t have a fast leak, so we are happy. Until I propose getting a sheet to cover it.

“We don’t need a sheet,” Jonathan says. “I am not bringing a bunch of blankets and sheets. You’ll be in a sleeping bag.”

Did I mention how much I HATE being confined in a sleeping bag, and like to spread one out under me, one on top, my legs akimbo in a sensible sprawl?

“This is not lightweight backpacking,” I counter. “Can’t we go for comfort?”

Apparently not. Meanwhile, Jonathan starts to talk about how nice it would be just to slip into his bivvy sack and sleep under the stars. He looks longingly at his one-person tent.

Our last decision involves water shoes. You can guess who is pro and who is con, and who is welcome to bring them as long as she is willing to carry them.

Luckily, the last three nights of our trip will involve sleeping inside on mattresses, so I think our marriage will survive.

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Camping trials and joys? How compatible are you and your sweetie’s vacation and/or packing preferences?

Cleaning Up Our Act

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SolesIt’s time. Past time, actually. Emma is 26 and has been living in Brooklyn for the last 18 months. She’s graduated not just from college, but to full independent living, not counting the occasional Trader Joe’s gift cards I send her. I do this when I become too anxious that trying to make it on $12 an hour in the Big Apple may force Emma into dumpster diving. (Possibly it is not the threat of starvation that might drive her to this, as you will see.) Also, Emma’s still on our Verizon family plan. I am convinced that when the stages of human development are revised for the current era, getting your own phone account will replace marriage, mortgages, and having children as the signposts of adulthood.  Still, aside from these minor caveats, Emma’s grown up. Gone.

Her stuff isn’t gone, though. True, she did a major purge to mark her graduation from college. But I might have been a tad too optimistic when I chronicled the demise of Emma’s hoarding days. She really just scratched the surface. One thing unearthed during that earlier excavation was that I am a hoarder by proxy, and I didn’t demand that Emma dig deeper. I believe that closets and basements were invented for hanging onto things until we are ready to let go.

Apparently, I haven’t been ready. Although I’ve professed a desire for a guestroom for years, Emma’s partially denuded bedroom has retained its status as part shrine, part dumping ground. The one thing we did get rid of after she left is her loft bed, so now even nimble guests (or returning daughters) have no place to sleep.

My husband and I finally got a new mattress, which provided the impetus to move the old one into Emma’s room and turn fantasy into reality. It is not quite the guestroom of my dreams. In fact, it bears a striking resemblance to a dumping ground with a bed in the middle of it, surrounded by junk. Emma’s junk.

I wish I were the kind of mother who could just start tossing, confident that the appropriation of kids’ former space no longer induces trauma once they are old enough to fall off your health insurance under Obamacare. But I can’t. I’m an enabler.

It would probably be better, I think as I riffle through high school term papers and ugly glass figurines, to adopt a version of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Don’t tell Emma about that mysteriously disappeared fake hand we got for Halloween one year, and she won’t ask. Or care. Or even know! But perhaps I have never gotten over the box of stuffed animals my mother tossed. More pragmatically, I regret that the baseball Jackie Robinson autographed for my husband when he was a boy did not survive a major move by his unsentimental (and financially unsavvy) parents.

I don’t want to make such mistakes, or make Emma’s decisions for her.So I hit upon the brilliant idea of taking iPhone pictures of stuff, then sending them to her so she can decide. Plus, if I succeed in the time-honored trick of substituting photos of stuff for the stuff itself, we’ll already have the photos! Cyberspace is such a vast new wasteland to clutter up, our humble collection will barely make a dent.

Hopeful, I arrange scarves, trinkets, purses on the bed, and send off my first batch with the subject line “Keep or Give Away?” I am careful to avoid the word “discard,” which sounds so dismissive and final. Maybe “give away”  might stimulate some deeply buried philanthropic urge.

“Save!” Emma emails in response, the act of hoarding itself apparently a rescue operation. This is not working. But then, a different response to one of the four pictures arrives: I am allowed to get rid of—sorry, give away–two hats.

So I send another photo, this one containing a pair of shoes and a pair of cowboy boots with holes that the Marlboro Man could ride his horse through. I’ve appended a message: “HUGE holes! Be brave!”

Emma writes back, “I really like the strange compositions of these photos you have been taking! But unfortunately I will have to ask you to retain this pile (it took me so long to find cowboy boots—I will get them resoled).”

And I will need to get re-souled into a different kind of mother, if I ever hope to have a guestroom.

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Where are you on the spectrum from minimalist to hoarder? How do you deal with your grown kids’ stuff? How did your parents deal with yours?

Steady Hands

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Stomach injectionFor the past week and a half, since my husband Jonathan had eye surgery to correct strabismus, I’ve been applying a thin line of ointment to his inner eyelids each night. It’s been something of a slapdash operation–the ointment sometimes sticks to his eyelashes, sometimes runs down his cheeks. It makes me wonder how on earth I ever got drops into our daughters for pink eye when they were little—Jonathan, unlike them, has not even screamed or squirmed. Eventually we figured out that if he rolled his eyeballs back into his head, the ointment got within spitting distance of the target area. Still, it’s a lucky thing I never aspired to become a brain surgeon.

All of which sparked my memories of a year ago, in the days following my last chemotherapy infusion, when Jonathan gave me my final Neupogen shot. (Neupogen stimulates white blood cell production.) For five nights of each chemo cycle, I’d lain on the couch while Jonathan swabbed my exposed belly with alcohol before carefully plunging a syringe into the fatty tissue. The first cycle we’d nervously joked about the movie Memento, in which an injection gone awry leads to amnesia and an excellent film. But nary a drop of blood did he draw the whole time. I can’t imagine entrusting myself to anyone else.

There were many steady hands holding me throughout six months of treatment–my doctors and the always cheerful Kaiser staff, my therapist, my yoga class, Michael at Pine Street Clinic, my daughters (who in honor of my remaining wisps of hair dubbed me Gollem), and, of course my many wonderful friends and family members who cheered me with delicious food, walks, emails, flowers, CDs, presents, visits, and funny YouTube links. I wouldn’t have made it through without everyone.

Yet the steadiest was Jonathan, who was there from the first terrifying news of diagnosis through it all: hours of surgery not knowing how far the cancer had spread; uncooperative catheters; private sadnesses and fears; doctors’ visits; a wife with no appetite who didn’t put dinner on the table but who still obsessed about her weight; hair loss; and all the usual demands like taxes and college tuition. On top of it all Jonathan worked 10-hour days to keep the paychecks and medical insurance in place, and he did it all without complaint. He even endured my most incessant question: “How do you really feel?”

I’m not sure how he really felt. But I feel incredibly lucky to have him: steady hands, steady heart, mind, and soul.

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Who’s your steady?

 

Mom Rules

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My mother gave me some impossible advice: “Don’t be like me.” (My essay of the same title was just published in skirt! Click here for a funky link to the issue’s pdf and find page 31). I don’t know many women who don’t fear discovering—and then finding–aspects of their mothers in themselves, do you?

Another of Mom’s gems was, “Don’t grow old.” This puzzled me as a child. Was I supposed to look forward to an early death? As a person who was diagnosed with cancer a year and a half ago, I can tell you that there is nothing I look forward to more than growing old.

I have tried to take a more pragmatic approach with my daughters. Here are my top tips to them:

  1. Pay off your credit cards in full on time, every time.
  2. Try to have a job where you don’t have to wear pantyhose everyday (I dispensed this tidbit before it was acceptable for people to leave the house in their pajamas).
  3. If you want to have children, try to have a career that allows you to work part-time.
  4. If you want to save money, don’t buy alcohol at a restaurant or bar.

When my eldest daughter, Emma, was experiencing a difficult time in college, I recommended that she figure out one small thing she could do each day NO MATTER WHAT—brush her teeth, put on lipstick, do the dishes, get dressed. “For me, it’s making the bed,” I added. Emma now makes her bed religiously, and says this is the most helpful thing I’ve ever said. I only wish I had thought to say it before she left home for college, leaving behind her a bedroom that looked like it had crossed paths with Hurricane Katrina.

Who knows what bits of mother wisdom and folly will lodge in kids’ brains?

Actually, my mother gave me some very valuable advice on top of the impossible:

  1. If you want to read good writing, read The New Yorker.
  2. If a man hits you, even once, walk away and never look back (I passed this one on to my girls).

Here’s what I really hope I’ve passed on to my girls from my mother. She didn’t write it–I came across the well-worn clipping in her drawer. It wasn’t even published until 1972, when I was almost out of the house. But my mother could have been the author–it was the air I breathed growing up. Take it and pass it on; you could do a lot worse:

Children Learn What They Live

By Dorothy Law Nolte, Ph.D.

If children live with criticism, they learn to condemn.

If children live with hostility, they learn to fight.

If children live with fear, they learn to be apprehensive.

If children live with pity, they learn to feel sorry for themselves.

If children live with ridicule, they learn to feel shy.

If children live with jealousy, they learn to feel envy.

If children live with shame, they learn to feel guilty.

If children live with encouragement, they learn confidence.

If children live with tolerance, they learn patience.

If children live with praise, they learn appreciation.

If children live with acceptance, they learn to love.

If children live with approval, they learn to like themselves.

If children live with recognition, they learn it is good to have a goal.

If children live with sharing, they learn generosity.

If children live with honesty, they learn truthfulness.

If children live with fairness, they learn justice.

If children live with kindness and consideration, they learn respect.

If children live with security, they learn to have faith in themselves and in those about them.

If children live with friendliness, they learn the world is a nice place in which to live.

Copyright © 1972 by Dorothy Law Nolte

Thanks, Mom. You rule.

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What was the best and worst advice you got from your mother? How about the best and worst advice you’ve given your kids?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Friend Me

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facebook.com

I never thought this day would come. But there it was on my timeline:

“Hi, Mommy. Let’s be facebook friends finally.”

The last time I had been privy to Ally’s social media life was when she was 12 and let me look at her MySpace page for a dollar. Reading about her Harry Potter crush was no different from hearing about it face to face for free. I wondered why I had wasted my money, and quickly lost all interest in cyber-sleuthing. My children were born and mostly raised before technology made childrearing a living hell, so this is not as negligent as it sounds.

Now Ally is about to turn 23–independent enough to no longer need to prove her independence.  And so she’s accepted my Friend Request, sent so long ago I’d forgotten I’d ever committed the faux-pas of asking in the first place.

“Mom,” both daughters had protested when I first got on Facebook and naively proposed that we become friends. “Are you out of your mind?” I think they may have phrased it more diplomatically, but I am skilled at discerning the subtext behind polite demurrals.

What is the subtext behind this sudden confirmation of my Friend Request? (And when will my daughter Emma follow her sister’s lead?) Ah, I get it . . . Ally, an aspiring writer, is trying to build platform. As an aspiring writer myself, I know that’s what I should be doing, too, inviting everyone in the world to be my friend and “Like” my page (which I have yet to create). Somehow, though, I can’t get past thinking of platforms as 70s shoes to be avoided, and the time in college someone stole my wallet on the platform at the Philadelphia train station. Perhaps I could have chased the thief down had I not been wearing those damn shoes.

Now I can communicate with my new friend about how to set up my writer’s page. After all, what are friends for? Not much, I’m afraid, at least not the eye-rolling daughterly kind. My preliminary request for help resulted in Ally’s telling me I could figure it out in five minutes if only I would google it.

At any rate, I’m not sure how I feel about being Facebook friends. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was terrible policy for the military, but it turns out to be pretty serviceable as parenting advice for those with older teenagers or young adult children. So far I’ve been relieved to find that Ally’s Facebook life is about as racy as her MySpace page. Do corporations really pay people to troll through prospective employee’s pages looking for embarrassing and illegal revelations of youthful folly? If so, they are not paying them enough.

The real problem is that now I have to think about my posts and whether or not I want Ally to see them. Since all I post are political petitions and my writing, I’m not too worried. Except that Ally is the child who said, when I asked if she minded what I wrote, “I don’t care what you write about me as long as I get a cut of any money you make.”

What price, friendship?

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Are you friends with your kids on social media? Pros and cons?

 

Love, Actually

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Green for sustainability

Green for sustainability, a little scuffed for reality

“Our lives are so boring,” my husband remarked recently. “Pretty much the same thing from one day to the next.”

“That’s why the girls have a horror of becoming us,” I replied. “And also why it’s so hard to write the holiday newsletter year after year.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” Jonathan continued. “I’m really happy with our lives.”

Me too.

Perhaps it’s just self-delusion, but I’ve long thought that the secret to a happy marriage is a high tolerance for boredom. Jonathan thinks the secret is watching DVDs of long-running TV shows, like Friday Night Lights. Our Friday nights consist of pizza and Netflix. Our latest addiction is The Good Wife, which has the advantage of 6 seasons with 23 episodes each. Not to mention the salutary impact of the title’s subliminal message!

Still, even Jonathan and I have our limits. So the other night we decided to shake things up a little by going to see a live one-man show at our local community theater. As soon as the lights went down and the performer appeared onstage, Jonathan’s eyes closed. I would have elbowed him awake, except my eyes closed soon after. We made our escape at intermission, and settled in for the next episode of The Good Wife.

Perhaps the natural arc of long-term love moves from rutting to rut. Couples dubbed by “Modern Love” editor Daniel Jones as “appreciatively resigned” fare best with this trajectory.

We can come to appreciate some pretty strange things.

The other night, for example, I was laboring over a clogged toilet that looked as if it might defeat even Roto-Rooter. Jonathan came in and asked if he could help. I remembered a midnight years ago, same toilet, same linoleum floor, my exhausted husband cleaning up from the latest round of our daughters’ stomach flu. Back then I was inexplicably turned on watching him mop, flush, and mop again. “Is this what it’s come to?” I’d thought in despair. I couldn’t imagine anything more depressing than reviving muted passion over an overflowing toilet. How low we had sunk from the days of mutual fascination! But a wise friend saw it differently: “There’s nothing more intimate than seeing someone take such tender care of those you love.”

Those kids are gone now, leaving none of their messes to clean up. Intimacy is the glue that keeps us together. Not the intimacy of candlelit dinners and sexy lingerie, but enduring intimacy, which requires a continual process of mutual forgiveness for not remaining as exciting as when we first fell in love. We stay together precisely because we know each other’s messes, and mop up after them patiently and lovingly time and time again. Not because we have to, but because we want to take care of those we love.

And because we always look forward to the next episode.

 

Dismantling Christmas

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Christmas ornaments in boxes

The holidays are over. How do you feel about that?

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When the doorbell rings for our tree-trimming party every year, we turn up the volume on Handel’s Messiah, ladle out hot mulled cider, and put our guests to work hanging the ornaments.

I’m the only one invited to the untrimming party. Soon Joni Mitchell’s Blue is blasting from the speakers as I bring up boxes from the garage and get to work dismantling Christmas.

But I’m not blue at all. I love taking apart the wooden train set and stowing away the brightly painted nutcrackers. I scrape melted wax from the mantel and toss withered cedar boughs into the fireplace. Scummy vases once overflowing with holly and white orchids get a good scrubbing.

Then I untrim the tree, from hand-blown glass balls to hand-crafted macaroni angels. It’s like unearthing a time capsule. Here is the rocking horse era, followed by the rise of the snowmen. Family pets are honored by an abundance of dog and cat angels. Crazily misshapen Santas record the preschool years, while “Baby’s First Christmas” ornaments round out the collection.

My favorite part is tossing the denuded tree off the balcony. Such a satisfying crash! Pine needles blanket the asphalt below, but I don’t sweep them up; the wind and rain will take care of the mess. Discarded Christmas TreeThis act of purposeful sloth thrills me as much as tearing out spent petunias from the garden at the end of the summer. Annuals and Christmas trees are supposed to wither and die, then get tossed. Unlike the perpetual nurturing demanded by children, pets,and perennials, limited care for ephemeral glory is the only requirement.

After all, it’s the dismantling that brings about the restored order and hope of the new year.

 

Santa-less

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Santa

We had a lovely Christmas, but it’s just not the same without little kids. How about you? Here’s one from the archives.

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No separate wrapping paper and tags. Not having to disguise one’s penmanship or remember whether Santa’s cursive slants left or right every year. Not having to remember that the girls can’t yet read cursive.

I guess there are a few benefits to Christmas with nonbelievers. But mostly it makes me sad that we no longer need to dispose of scummed-over cocoa and apples for the reindeer after the kids have finally gone to bed on Christmas Eve. (My brother trained his kids to leave beer for Santa.)

It wasn’t so bad when our eldest daughter grew suspicious about Santa’s largesse. In fact, she seemed more impressed that her notoriously cheap parents were the ones springing for all that loot than by the idea of a fat guy squeezing down millions of chimneys in the space of a few hours.

Plus, she was a good sport about keeping the charade going for the sake of her little sister—and parents. I remember spending Christmas a long time ago with the same brother who so cleverly customized Santa’s repast. His kids tumbled into the living room where I was trying to sleep, unable to contain their excitement a minute past four a.m. They spied the riot of plastic tunnels and the squeaky rotating wheel under the tree.

“A hamster!! Oh, thank you, Santa, thank you!!” they gushed into the darkness. Nobody had to prompt them into politeness. Theirs was a spontaneous outpouring of reverence.

Now politeness is about all we can expect. The girls are teenagers with exacting and expensive taste. They write out detailed wish lists while making it clear that my judgment is not to be trusted, that I shouldn’t venture off-list.

Then they are disappointed to get everything they want except the element of surprise. But their manners are impeccable as they dutifully thank us.

I miss Santa.

Ornaments

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When my brothers and I were toddlers, at Christmastime my mother set out a fake table-top tree with unbreakable ornaments we could put on and take off to our hearts’ content. I’ve been imprinted on tree-trimming ever since, and have continued this tradition with my own children. Every year the day after Thanksgiving, we haul a little artificial tree and box of soft ornaments from the garage and set it up in the living room. My girls are in their 20s now, and can be trusted with fragile glass angels, but woven pandas and plush whales from Marine World still dangle from the table-top tree.

Even before our daughters were born, my husband and I started laying things away for them—not money for college or a home of their own, but Christmas tree ornaments. When I was pregnant with the baby we called Tadpole before she emerged as Emma, we hung a tiny red-and-green striped stocking on our spindly tree with enormous hope and excitement.

For Emma’s first Christmas extra utero, we chose a bristlecone-pine bear in a cradle. Ally’s arrival three years later brought a baby on a rocking horse to keep the bear company. Along with setting up the table-top tree every year right after Thanksgiving, our family goes ornament shopping. It’s our favorite tradition, and each girl is allowed to pick one special ornament. There have been some doozies along the way, like the pink-flocked hippopotamus, purple-glitter octopus, and plastic day-glo peace sign.

Since the girls have gone to college and beyond, some years they haven’t made it home, and I’ve substituted my better and more tasteful judgment. The year Emma was in St. Petersburg, and hard pressed to find her favorite food in Russia, we hung a glass-blown sushi roll in her honor. Ally’s junior year abroad was marked by a miniature French baguette dangling from the tree while she downed the real thing during Christmas travels to Paris.

This year Ally’s back in Europe, teaching English in Bilbao, where it rains 24/7. Since the rain in Spain falls mainly on my daughter, we found the perfect ornament for her in absentia—polka dot rain boots. And Emma, who moved to Brooklyn in February but is home for the holidays, picked out a pink-frosted glass doughnut to commemorate the first job she landed in New York at an upscale doughnut store.

As soon as Emma and Ally have Christmas trees of their own, I’ll present them with the numerous snowmen, Santas, dogs, cats, and pink-flocked hippopotami that have graced our trees through the years. It will be a good start as they set out to create their own homes, families, traditions. My husband’s and my tree will be a little sparser, but that’s OK. I’m going to keep Tadpole’s tiny red and green striped stocking for remembrance of Christmases past.

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What’s your favorite ornament or holiday tradition and the story behind it?

 

Health Care for the Holidays

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Covered California home page

A version of this piece recently aired on KQED’s Perspectives.

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With the holidays here, I know just what I’m going to ask my daughter for this year. Emma’s almost 26, and like a lot of young adults, she’s piecing together a couple of part-time jobs while figuring out what comes next. I don’t want her to spend her hard-earned cash on stuff I don’t need. Instead, I’m asking Emma to make sure she signs up for something she needs: health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

It’s true that the rollout has been riddled with problems, but the Affordable Care Act’s tremendous benefits remain. Besides, Californians are lucky to have Covered California, the state’s fully functional and easy-to-navigate healthcare exchange. Those who enroll by December 23 will be covered when the law goes into effect January 1. What better way to start the New Year?

Our family has already benefited greatly from the Affordable Care Act–it’s allowed us to keep our daughters on our plan until they turn 26. Soon, though, Emma will need her own health insurance. Before, she never could have afforded it. It’s hard to find jobs these days that offer coverage. Emma, like millions of Americans, might have been forced to rely on costly ER visits or the “Cross my fingers and hope I don’t need it!” plan. Now, under the Affordable Care Act, she and the many Californians like her who’ve risked disaster due to unattainable insurance will be eligible for expanded Medicaid, federal subsidies, or tax credits.

As parents, we make sure our kids are safe: teaching them to buckle up, wear bike helmets, and drive defensively. Grown-up children may think of themselves as Young Invincibles who don’t need insurance, but accidents and serious illness happen, putting health and family finances at risk. Here’s our chance to further guide our kids into responsible and secure adulthood, continuing to protect them by making sure they’re covered.

That’s why I’m asking Emma for the best present of all: good and affordable healthcare for her, peace of mind for me.

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Covered California: www.coveredca.com or 800-300-1506

Other states: check your local resources or www.healthcare.gov or 800-318-2596

Open enrollment period ends March 31, 2014