A little motherly advice

However it is that we understand Mother’s Day … whether we celebrate, mourn, or bridle at the notion of yet another day commandeered by marketers to sell us things we probably don’t need and don’t want; it is once again upon us.

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And with it, my inbox overflows with classic gift suggestions like chocolate and flowers, perfect for delivery mere hours before day’s end, if you happen to be the offspring of the last-minute variety.

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Not that I’m complaining. Were they to ask — and they have despite an experiential clairvoyance that has had them preface all fact-finding queries with “and don’t tell me … —  “that I just want my children to be happy.”

“Might as well ask for world peace,” they retort … 

Which makes me wonder, again, if a good mother would just give a suggestion, something readily attainable. Or whether they would acknowledge the uncertainty?

The media constantly reminds us how unhappy our kids might be. How unhappy we are, too, as we dwell in the discord.  But can we block it out? 

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Sandwiched in between are other ideas I probably NEVER would have considered prior:

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For instance, late in April, my spam mail asked me if I wanted to opt out of their barrage, acknowledging, no doubt out of market research, that the idea of motherhood is fraught.

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Relatedly, a few weeks later, a law firm pitched their expertise for any timely stories being written on … the legal ramifications of motherhood in the modern age, where women are embarking on their path to parenthood later in life and perhaps with more intention than ever … two things conservative America has been somewhat successful in thwarting through more onerous policy and the curtailment of certain standards of medical care.

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You know … the romantic notion that your custody battles could be intense in this “brave” new world.

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And your children will cut you off because you told them “NO” too often … or not enough, or because you were suffocating or you were stoic and unhelpful. Because you never listen or didn’t hear what they were saying. 

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Your best wasn’t enough. And it wasn’t the mistakes you made as much as it was the mistakes you wouldn’t admit or acknowledge. The things you can’t talk about without feeling hurt or defensive.

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Our actions or lack thereof may have been imminently defensible, but we never discussed them like coherent human beings. Perhaps we never even considered they were up for debate.  

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Many of us were raised to “do as you are told,” and we fully expected our kids would, too. Although many of us made good-faith attempts to be friends with our children, perhaps hoping we would be trusted confidants, always in the know.

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And while that may be the case, we were never just friends. Our job was always to give them building blocks and structure, and their job was to break those guidelines into pieces from which they could build something new. Something that is mostly their own. A life that one day, won’t include us.

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Once our parents are gone … and our children grown, mothering can feel lonely. We might feel like ghosts of past selves.

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So on this Mother’s Day, I want to urge that we give ourselves some extra careful mothering. We might just listen. We might apologize. Our memories will live on for at least a generation.

Because if we are here now, we have an onus to meet the moment. 

Hidden Gems

In the four years our daughter navigated university life in Boston and a course load I could barely pronounce, let alone wrap my head around, I had spent about a month of days trying to navigate its streets.

I spent many mornings piecing small runs through the parks that connect the city’s famed Emerald Necklace. Often getting lost, alternately confused by construction and the city’s natural complexity. 

While we visited during family weekends, we tried to be available but unobtrusive. It is natural, even if painfully so, that our very presence elicits conflicting aspects of wary and welcome. 

The first time we visited, she took advantage of the safe-haven familiarity offered in our hotel suite. This time, it was clear she was home in the world. All along, she had to push against our pull. 

A tightrope walk, for sure, but also, in truth, a feat of spectacular proportion.

We are constantly reminded of that delicate balance as we sit as guests waiting for the pomp and circumstance to begin. 

Speeches are filled with commendations about the graduates’ drive and resilience. Speakers gave generous praise to the parents who helped make it all possible. We are reminded about their fortitude in the face of struggle. How success and failure are intertwined. And how experience is at the heart of all education, which, ideally, is never-ending. 

It is our story, as parents, too.

We made small talk with the parents around us in a line that stretched around the block, past a celebrity burger joint she never tried, and the bullseye department store she mused was always cleaned out of stock by the density of college-aged consumers it triangulated. 

I got unexpectedly emotional as we shuffled slowly past. Camera in hand, but in an ocean of people … Like I had missed a silly photo opportunity to come full circle. “We should have come here … I had forgotten we were in Target when she got her acceptance letter!”

“Yesterday, we did a photo shoot at Dunkin’s,” said the lady next to me, and the line reverberated with stories of following their cap and gowned grads into their favorite bodegas and random spots on and off campus. 

We had followed our daughter through a fancy shopping center, down an escalator into an underground burrow where she had found her own hidden gem - a little closet where a cobbler offered instant shoe repair. It was a tiny moment that felt momentous.

As we file into the storied stadium and sit in seats we’d envy during a ballgame, the bigness of all hits me in a way that it hadn’t during two other ceremonies we’d already attended in as many days.

We all experience moments like this, and we interpret them in different ways. Sometimes we marvel, and sometimes we take for granted. We often experience excitement with anxiety. We even filter out the shine and focus on the little spots of tarnish. 

We may even look back and see something we missed the first time. Hidden in plain sight. Hope.

Family business

 “Hey … can you check to see if the artwork in my room is covered?”

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I’m not sure why the thought crossed her mind at that moment – ten minutes to noon on a Wednesday, three days before the first of three commencement ceremonies she would walk in to culminate her bachelor’s degree – but as I was on my way to the home office to make a sandwich anyway, I concluded popping my head into her room for a condition check wasn’t an imposition.

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Of course, I knew that the “artwork” in question was a gift her father and I had given to her for her birthday, a favorite print that we’d had framed. It was just waiting, leaning against a bookcase in her childhood bedroom, temporary storage for when she has a house of her own … not just a dorm that only allows featherweight posters to be hung with the non-marring properties of a sticky putty.

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What I didn’t know was what she was really after through the seemingly random ask.

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“What do you mean covered?”

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I could have assumed that she wanted to ensure the piece was enclosed in some protective packaging, something to keep it off the dust and the unwanted attention of a cat intent on sharpening her claws. But she could also have meant some kind of indemnification, where the work would have been protected should there be a cataclysm in these increasingly uncertain times.

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It was the former, although my confusion gave her pause to consider the latter, if only momentarily.

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I smiled as I imagined her thought process.

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A tree could give up, or a storm could make it give in; either way, the roof could be next in line for destruction. That she worried about the things in her room that she coveted most was the framed art poster – not even a print – that wouldn’t break the bank to replace.

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Was she really worried about the sun bleaching the paperboard through the tiny, eyebrow windows, or was it a safe-enough worry to distract her from all the other worries that fire at us randomly whenever we mark a transition?

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Not that she’ll be going anywhere just yet. She’ll stay on the same campus - maybe in another suite with different roommates and similar pristine walls - for one more year while she adds another degree.

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When I get to the top of the stairs and open the door to her room, I see what I expected. The frame is leaning against the bookcase. It is exposed, and the print is facing the windows. It was fine. The colors were still intense. There were no imperfections. In the room, the light seemed to naturally filter elsewhere. It occurred to me that the glass is likely the kind that protects from UV damage. I just hope the protection is the product of manufacturing science and not a combination of marketing and wishful thinking.

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I’m not worried. But i don’t want her to worry either.

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I turn the frame’s face toward the windowless wall and wrap it in a clean sheet from the linen closet. I take a photo of its protected state and send it off with my condition report.

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She sends me a smiley face emoji wearing sunglasses.

Al not Ai

 The mission, should I choose to accept it, was to find out where The Boss purchased the expensive tool - now a heap of junk sitting unceremoniously on top of my desk –  and return it.

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Preferably for a full refund. Or an exchange for a factory-tested working model. Basically, your holy grail of customer service … followed all the way back to the manufacturer. Maybe there’s hope.

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The additional pieces of information that he didn’t know included when he bought the item and whether he had ever filled out the small card that validated the so-called warranty.

I know I didn’t.

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So, in effect, the task ahead of me was looking for a minor miracle.

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Which, after a few minutes of scrounging around through credit card statements and the drawer where our library of operating manuals is filed in no apparent order, I am on the verge of giving up.

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Another expensive piece of equipment bites the dust.

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I understand this mission, which I’ve embarked on so many times before, is a performative circling of the wagons in hopes of finding that the answer is as easy as finding a pocket of the known universe where costs aren’t relative and durable goods are still durable. A pocket time hasn’t changed.

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I was ruminating on these intrusive thoughts as I began to search the interwebs for a reasonable replacement.

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Surprisingly, I couldn’t find one.

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Typing in the trademarked name didn’t help. All the hits looked similar, but, upon closer inspection, it was clear the options were only look-alikes with rhyming names, devoid of important letters.

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And under other circumstances, I may not have noticed the switcheroo..

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Honestly, my fingers drummed away on the keyboard, and I found myself in a vaguely familiar place, looking incredulously at an item description that was almost exactly what I needed.

If not a little confusing.

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The company would exchange my defective item with a factory-authorized refurbished tool for only a small fee and the cost of shipping. All I had to do was submit an inquiry form, complete with the number of tools I would be sending them and a return address.

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Another human (and I wouldn’t blame them) would see this as just another chapter in the book of Too Good To Be True. Best just to skip it.

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The more I searched for the normal solution, the more I realized that the trophy I sought might have been discontinued. I was embarking on a journey to find a holy grail.

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Since I couldn’t find the interactive form the website alluded to, I called the phone number at the bottom of the page and waited for someone to answer as the cinematic scope of this idea filled my head.

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“Hold on … you need to talk with Al.”

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And after a few missed connections from hold (thanks to a new phone system), Al called back.

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And, to my complete amazement, Al was a real person, with one small part of his job being the repair and replacement of a particular make of tool. It was also his job to make the company website function efficiently, which he was dismayed to find it wasn’t smooth enough for a rube like me. (He plans on rectifying that, too.)

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Honestly, it was a breath of fresh air to talk to a real person who had an easy answer to my problem that still felt so old-world impossible.

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I mailed the package that day, and two business days later, he mailed it back.

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All fixed. With a little sack of hard candy and a note thanking me for my business.

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Who needs AI … When there’s AL.

Freedumb rings

 I felt unsettled as I opened “the paper” and saw the expressionless face of a young girl standing behind a tall man reaching into what I presumed was her backpack.

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The photo illustrated a news item that heralded a new security system and accompanying procedures at Cohoes High School.

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Metal detectors and bag searches are now a hand-in-glove partner with education. In 2022, the most recent year data was published by the National Center for Educational Statistics, only about two percent of schools employed daily use of metal detectors.

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This was merely a photo op documenting the depressing reality of our circumstances: Danger lurks where we least expect it, so we need to prepare ourselves for the intrusion of inspection. All shoes are off. And no matter how sweet and diminutive that child looks, we have accepted that they could be one failing grade and one firing pin away from causing mayhem.

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All the people interviewed for the story seemed resigned, if not happy, about the development. The expense, in the fifties of thousands, is to be written off as the price of our “better-safe-than-sorry,” insistence.

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I understand that doing “something” feels important. And I understand that the “somethings” we can do are not failsafe. They are plastic bandages, and humps of cement, and fortifications. They are all our fears re-packaged as limited protections.

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We all kind of know the limitations: The screenings create a bottleneck at school entrances, which often results in significant delay; the machines also have a high rate of detecting things that are not harmful, such as binder rings and calculators. And all of this aids in the creation of a prison-like atmosphere, where students bear the brunt of scrutiny and suspicion.

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And perhaps worst of all, according to numerous reports, as well as an inflated sense of peril, the reliance on such technology in schools leads to a false sense of security. It provides a quick fix to a problem that needs something more comprehensive than mere mortals like us can comprehend.

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This will become painfully clear the moment a newspaper like this one finds itself reporting the aftermath of a school shooting where the suspect printed a series of 3-D gun parts inside of shop class and assembled the weapon at study hall. Allegedly.

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We have accepted that life in America is dangerous. Yet we are never going to give up guns. We are never going back to a time when fear isn’t foisted upon us. We are going to grin and bear it.

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We can get used to weapons of war, militarized police, and a president who blurts out descriptions of war crimes that he emboldens our country’s leaders to commit. And we are willing to give up our privacy and the presumption of innocence if it might mean one fewer crime is committed.

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When I say this is not the right move, I’ll hear vehement disagreement coming from inside my own house. I have raised people who trust the technology, even as it requires them to take off their shoes, throw out their filled water bottles, and jettison the 6-ounce tube of toothpaste some scanner detected as contraband at the airport.

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“This is how it works now,” they will tell me. The old woman tilting at windmills. “Hope for the best and plan for the worst. We can buy another tube of toothpaste at a drugstore.”

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“We should be planning for better and expecting the best.”

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Don’t our children deserve that effort?

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“Sure. That’s why you’ll be buying fat, felt-tipped markers and posterboards when we get there.”

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We grow up, but we don't stop learning

 The headline grabbed my attention: How do you teach kids to be responsible?​

Oh, here we go.

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My hackles raised as I read through the vertical text from the anonymous writer who was complaining about their adolescent son’s repetitive forgetfulness in packing necessary sports equipment ahead of time, requiring (at least in the teen’s estimation) an abrupt delivery of gear as an emergency. With each unexpected delivery, however, it seemed apparent that the pair’s tolerance of each other’s patience grew increasingly tense.

Naturally, the advisor assumed the parent was the mother and that the teen was a boy-child, and as such spent some dozen or so words explaining how it would not be fair to the teen’s future wife if he expected her to be his sherpa.

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The writer then spent a few hundred more words describing all the snarky ways a response would teach the kid a lesson, such as charging a fee for the delivery that would be refunded if the kid could figure out a solution that didn’t require parental involvement.

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The writer also helpfully imagined the person’s selfish child yelling, crying, and screaming over the phone and hanging up.

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I don’t know why I tend to bristle at such advice.

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I recall, at the dawn of the cell phone age, before I became a parent, I passed a similar judgment. I was shopping in a department store when the purse of a woman across the rack from me started ringing. There was a momentary silence after she picked up the phone until she blurted out a complete story of parenthood immemorial in one simple question: “How am I supposed to know where your soccer cleats are in that mess you call a room?”

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Back then, I wasn’t judging her or her parenting.

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I wasn’t judging the kid, whose voice I hadn’t heard and whose gender I did not guess.

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I just wondered: “For this, we need to be reachable at all times? This is progress?”

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Today, my phone rang.

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It was a child who hadn’t “needed me” to do, or bring, or help with anything in a long time.

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This child just wanted to say hello. Hear my voice. Check in.

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I should say this is an adult. … Because this adult was once a child who forgot things. This was a child who requested last-minute interventions that I was sure would continue needing my attention forever, and the forgetfulness would persist despite my stern face and evident displeasure as I dutifully delivered whenever humanly possible.

The calls stopped coming.

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It didn’t happen overnight, but it certainly seems like it now.

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How fast time flies may be a cliché, but it is also an incontrovertible truth.

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A part of me thinks my “teachings” were my kids simply figuring out how to deal with their parents, or their friends, or all the other people and things in their lives they couldn’t entirely control.

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We tilt at windmills, and cell phones, and adolescent brains. and our mid-life malaise. It doesn’t always work out the way we hoped, but it happens.

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Our children grow up.

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Time keeps changing us, too.

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Experience is the actual teacher. And we are never too old to learn.

The stories of our demise are greatly dimished

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“I could have lived forever …”  my mother used to say. It would be her standard response whenever I had divulged some morsel of information that, to her, seemed over the top: Something excessive, extravagant, outside of norms … or something entirely too personal.

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Not that she was squeamish. She was keen to see all skinned knees, infected cuts, or random swelling that seemed to come out of nowhere.

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But gossip, or taking some unnecessary risk, as she thought of it – especially if it was delivered in the form of news and information – she felt better off just not knowing.

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I knew her better, though.

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Her mind thirsted for information she could parse.

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Her mind could sift truth from fiction as efficiently as she could discern her daughter’s true intentions from her insistence I had none.

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I think of the sparkle in her eye and her mischievous half-grin whenever I open my computer to the news of the day.

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My inbox is filled with stories about health and wellness; each one extolling the virtues of what I try to assume, when forwarded by friends and loved ones, these are well-meant suggestions sealed with love and, often, care-animated emojis.

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Sometimes they include links to lengthy articles written in a scholarly style that purport some recent finding extrapolated from science and translated into easily digestible prose.  

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Often their messages conflict.

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Why, just this week, I gleaned through missives that trumpeted THE key to longevity as not only being busy and feeling useful as we age, but also remaining optimistic, or more pointedly, resilient.

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Of course, it sounds good. It sounds like something we should know intuitively. Like common sense, or the proverbial sense God gave goats, but just a few clicks away into the archives of “like-minded articles,” I am confronted with the polar opposite.

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Here are the stories that warn against my desire to drink coffee, or confirm my bias against red wine. Here are the stories that make the case for doing nothing at all. Here are the choice parts of studies that tell not to do what today’s studies are tentatively debunking … in mice.

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My mother always hated these stories the most.

In her mind, these harmless little stories that asked a centenarian to provide the key to their longevity and hearing that it was knocking back a whiskey once a day, or never going to bed angry, or exercising obsessively, or not at all … after all how many studies show how many people visit emergency rooms each year as a result of an accident when they were exercising?!!

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The only thing we know for sure is that we humans don’t live forever. We can do all the right things, and we still might not get to live long enough.

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I knew she was right … but I also knew that keeping busy helped settle anxieties. The occasional glass of wine gave her pleasure, of course, but not nearly as much pleasure as she gleaned from debunking the myths “experts” kept trying to pass off as incontrovertible truth.

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I half-smile as I close the newspaper story, knowing I will not live forever, but I will probably live to see today’s revelations debunked.