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Mothers and Daughters

Mothers and Daughters

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I’ve been missing Mom more than usual lately, not just because it’s Mother’s Day but also because of what I’m reading and thinking, because there is so much to tell her, and most of all because not just one but two of my daughters are soon to be mothers.

It’s a joy and a privilege to watch your child become a parent. It’s role-bending and life-affirming. It’s an excellent counterbalance to a worldwide pandemic. And it’s the sort of experience that makes me wish my parents were still here to share it with (putting aside for the moment that I would be worried sick about them if they were).

So today I will just have to share it virtually, as we do so much these days; share it by saying here how thankful I am to be not just a mother, but a mother of daughters — and of daughters becoming mothers.

“OK, Boomer “

“OK, Boomer “

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Sometimes a phrase hits the zeitgeist so squarely that it becomes the mantra of a generation. For mine, it was “don’t trust anyone over 30.” For the Millennials, it seems to be “OK, Boomer.”

Twice within the last two days I’ve heard or read about “OK, boomer,” the dismissive reply young people make to “olds” who don’t get (fill in the blank) climate change, student debt or how to rotate a PDF.  The phrase lit up the Twitterverse, the editorial pages and will be featured on a radio show I occasionally listen to. There are retorts and retorts of retorts.

Here’s how millennial Morgan Sung ends a Mashable essay on the topic: “Saying ‘OK, Boomer’ now is even funnier because of how pressed the Boomers get. And you know what we say to that? OK, Boomer.”

If I’m aware of something like this, I figure it’s probably on the way out. But just in case it isn’t, I will refrain from generational preaching. Because that would just be playing into their hands, you know.

Small Fry

Small Fry

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I tore through Lisa Brennan-Jobs’ memoir Small Fry in a few days. It’s honest and it’s titillating, since Lisa’s father is Steve Jobs, and his paternal behavior is quite strange, to put it mildly.

Steve has little to do with Lisa and her mother (who he never married) in the beginning, and only acknowledges paternity under duress. Eventually, he has a relationship with Lisa, albeit an unusual one. They skate together, have dinner together and in high school Lisa even lives with Steve and his wife and son. But it’s a relationship fraught with uncertainty and even meanness. Steve won’t admit he named his Lisa computer after his daughter. He belittles Lisa and refuses to pay for her last year of college. Lisa has the final word, though, in the way of all memorable memoirists.

What I liked best about Lisa’s writing was when she described the California of her youth, the sights and smells of the land she came alive to: “Here the soil was black and wet and fragrant; beneath rocks I discovered small red bugs, pink- and ash-colored worms, thin centipedes, and slate-colored woodlice that curled into armored spheres when I bothered them. The air smelled of eucalyptus and sunshine-warmed dirt, moisture, cut grass.”

It reminds me of George Eliot’s line: “We would never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.”

Last Day, Redux

Last Day, Redux

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To be the parent of young adults means getting used to the filling and emptying of the house that gave them birth. The house didn’t really give them birth, of course — I did. But sometimes it feels like it did, the rooms have so absorbed the people who grew up in them.

This old house has gotten pretty good at it by now. People move out, then in … then out again. The house accommodates it all — I just hang on for the ride.

Today is the last day of school in Fairfax County, a day my kids once celebrated with shaving cream fights at the bus stop, a celebratory fast-food lunch and the ceremonial viewing of one of our fave family movies, “The Music Man.” I hear the buses already, revving up for early dismissal. Soon they’ll be disgorging young’uns into an endless summer.

It doesn’t seem so long ago that I was meeting my own girls down at the corner. Now Celia (front row, left) is about to move in with her friend Jessy (standing right next to her), who lives … on the other side of the country.

It’s a grand adventure for all of us, the ones just starting out and the ones who’ve lived long enough to marvel at it all.

Whistle Them Home

Whistle Them Home

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It was after 6:00 p.m. yesterday and the children — two boys, one  girl — were angling for some park time.  “You can play outside for a while, but you have to come in when I whistle for you,” said the mother. Maybe she was in the middle of cooking dinner, or had just changed from her work clothes. Or maybe she works at home, as I did when the girls were young.

But the whistling, that was unique. No texting, no agreed-upon time to be home. Just wait for the whistle. A bit canine,  to be sure. But deliciously old-fashioned.

Where I grew up in Lexington, only one family had a dinner bell. Other parents just cupped their hands around their mouths and yelled for their kids to come home in the evening. “Johnnnnny! Sallllly!” (Children had primary reader names back in those days.) These ersatz bullhorns are the original communication device, are they not?

And they did the job.  The kids came running home.

(These tunnels — I call them “snake eyes” — are near the park where the kids were playing.) 

Life Preserver

Life Preserver

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If all birthdays should hold within them some memento mori, some reflections on our own mortality, then my recent one was complete even in that way, with the funeral of an acquaintance, a woman my age (too young to die!) held Saturday in a local cemetery.

Attending this funeral brought many thoughts to mind: Sadness for the family, especially the two twenty-something children who now must make their way without their mom; gratitude for my own health and family, for everything I have; and relief that I’ve escaped a trap that suburban living makes women especially prone to.

It isn’t always easy to schlep to the office, but the suburbs have a way of sucking women in and making everything about the kids. While I made sure I was home with the girls as much as possible when they were young, and I look back on those years as some of the most precious and happiest of my life, I tried always to have a separate self, a career (writing) self — an Anne that is not also Mom.

Now I tell my girls to do this, to keep themselves alive. The childrearing years only seem like they’ll last forever. In truth, they’re over in a flash.  When they are, you want a self to go back to.

Toys Aren’t Us

Toys Aren’t Us

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I was sad to learn that Toys R Us will be closing its stores. Not that I liked them much in their heyday. Then I was sad about the smaller closings, the independents and the Zany Brainys. But still, this marks the end of an era. Not just of toy stores but of the sort of children who frequented them.

My kids grew up with real, tangible playthings — blocks and puzzles and Legos — and of course the boxes they came in. Electronic toys were beginning to enter the market, but barely. Now they dominate the market, and, I’m afraid, childhood itself.

What becomes of children who touch screens instead of play dough, who swipe instead of stack? I guess they become the people suited for a digital universe. All I know is, I’m glad I raised my kids when there were Barbies and Bratz and My Pretty Ponies — and the big warehouse store that sold them.

Self and Silliness

Self and Silliness

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Halloween has snuck up on me this year. Being out of town for a few days, being busy … But here we are on the day, little ghosts and goblins getting geared up for their big nights on the town.

I’m thinking about some of the girls’ best childhood costumes, which were made by their grandmother: a colorful clown, cuddly lion, tusked elephant and a seal made out of some sort of naugahyde fabric that I can’t even imagine cutting, let alone sewing.

Then came the in-between years, when make-up replaced masks. One year Suzanne went as some sort of a sprite or spirit with greenish skin and lots of eye shadow.

On Halloween we can pretend to be something we are not. But that was often the case when raising young children. I might be called on to cackle like a witch or moo like a cow at any time. The line between self and silliness was thin to nonexistent.

Now I’m myself all the time. As the girls would say … borrrrring.

Power of Love

Power of Love

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A few weeks ago Celia finally convinced me to give the Harry Potter series a try. Last night I started Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the third book. This morning I learned that the first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, was published 20 years ago today.

By now we know the story, how Rowling, a single mother down on her luck, was sitting on a delayed train from Manchester to London when she imagined a young wizard with a scar on his forehead. The scar, he was told, was from a car accident, the same one that killed his parents.

By the end of Book One Harry has learned that the scar isn’t from a car accident. It’s from a encounter with Lord Voldemort, “he who must not be named,” the darkest of dark wizards whose evil ways were no match for the one magic power all of us have at our disposal:

If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. He didn’t realize that love as powerful as your mother’s for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign … to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever. It is in your very skin.

Three books in, here’s what I take from the series so far: the power of imagination, the power of love.

Young Inside

Young Inside

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I remember a conversation I had with Dad in the hospital when he was recovering from one of his surgeries. He was getting better every day, so it was not a bad hospitalization that time, and we were having a good visit.

We talked, as we often did, about his time in England during World War II. He was 21 years old then, seeing the world for the first time. “You know something?” he said. “I still feel that age inside.” Dad was lying in a hospital room with wires that measured his respiration and heart rate. He had an IV and catheter.  It was difficult to imagine how he felt young inside.

More than a decade later, I understand what he meant. In part it’s the mind’s way of dealing with dizzying change. In part, it’s because we often keep the image we form of ourselves in young adulthood.

Last night, as the older girls left our Father’s Day celebration in a car stuffed with a bike and a puppy and a boyfriend, I was reminded of Dad’s comment. My kids are not only young inside; they’re young outside, too. Their lives are ahead of them. But someday they will be telling their children how the young selves they wear so lightly now are still there inside of them.