LOVED This Book!

Here is a book for anyone experiencing that challenging life passage called parenthood, especially for those who are overparenting, overhovering, overpressuring, overscheduling, overwhelming your kids - yes, you know who you are.

This sometimes cranky political journalist and pundit has written a touching personal book about his relationship with his son Tyler, diagnosed at age 12 with Asperger's syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism.  It is honest, loving and contains some poignant lessons for all parents, not just those with kids with unique challenges.  Some of the best:  parent for today, not the future; make being different cool, and most of all, love the child you have; let go of the perfect fantasy child you imagined when he was born.  As Ron says, "Tyler isn't my idealized son, he is my ideal one."

I, too, have come to the same conclusion, having raised two children with challenges -- one with learning disabilities and mental illness, and the other with anxiety driven addictions.  I have written about my experience in my upcoming book, Swimming Lessons:  a mother's tale of navigating the mental illness tide.  An excerpt from my book on this issue of accepting and loving the gift that is your child:

Like any parent of any child, I take on each situation as best I can.  With a child who has special needs like this, I have to bear in mind that there are good times in between the hits.  I try, only sometimes successfully, to remember what a wise friend told me:  don’t miss the wonder and enjoyment of the child you have, while wishing for a child that doesn’t exist.

AGING:  does it have to be depressing?
The following short story was a hit at my writers group last night:

TIME, REMEMBERED AND FORGOTTEN

Abel Arnett celebrated his 82^nd birthday alone.  He wanted it that way. He made a wish before blowing out the single candle on the chocolate cupcake he’d bought at the Stop N Shop.  His wish was to die, and die soon, so he could be with his now-dead wife Sarah. He simply couldn’t stand to go on, deteriorating in body and mind in the house they had shared for more than fifty years.  It had been seven months, yet he could still feel her, still smell her perfume.  He hadn’t changed a thing in the house, but everything had changed. 

He missed so much about her. He missed the evenings when they would walk through the neighborhood holding hands.  He missed how she would sing Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” while folding laundry or washing the dishes. He missed talking about politics with her; Sarah would listen to him rant about Nixon even long after the disgraced president had died.  Sarah was kind and patient. Abel needed that.

They never had kids.  Something in the plumbing didn’t work, but they never looked into it.  They never discussed it.  They just lived their life. When he retired from the insurance company, she talked about taking a trip to China.  He didn’t want to go to China, but he let her talk. She talked about moving to Florida.  He let her talk. 

She died suddenly.  Abel found her on the kitchen floor.  In shock, he fell and hit his head on the counter and didn’t notice the gash until the blood flooded his eyes.  He dialed 911 and the EMTs bandaged up his head and took him to the hospital for evaluation.  The kindly woman doctor who treated him in the ER approached the topic of assisted living but Abel wouldn’t hear of it. He did his best to assure her he was well enough to return home.  The doctor told him he was going to need help, and he promised he would get someone.

As soon as the doorbell rang on the day he expected his first visit from a caregiver, he almost didn’t answer it.  Standing on the front porch was a woman who smiled brightly and told him “I’m Helen, your visiting angel!”

Abel said, “I’ve changed my mind.  Don’t need you.” As he tried to close the door in her face, but Helen stopped that with one determined orthopedic shoe.  “Please, Mr. Arnett, just let me in for a moment and give me a chance to tell you how I can help.”

“Can you bring Sarah back?” he growled, looking at her as though he really expected her to answer.

Helen winked at him.  “I can try.”

Over the next months, Helen came four days a week to help Abel with household duties, medications, and preparing meals.  Abel accepted her help, but rarely spoke to her beyond monosyllabic grunts.  Most of the time he ignored her as she would prattle on and on about her life, how she grew up locally, went away to nursing school, then returned to New York and married, divorced and remarried.  Abel didn’t listen. If he had, he would have known something that even Helen hadn’t yet realized, a connection between them that would change his life.

His birthday was a day when Helen was supposed to come, but she cancelled the day before for a vague reason.  It was six p.m. when he finished his dinner and his cupcake and just as he was about to sit down to watch the Yankees game, the doorbell rang.  Annoyed, Abel trudged to the door.

Helen stood there holding a bouquet of colorful balloons.  Next to her was a short  elderly lady.  “Happy birthday!” they said together, then sang the song off key.  Abel noted that the white-haired lady had a big smile and still had all her teeth.

 “Abel, this is my mom, Millie.” said Helen, pushing Millie into the house.  “I think you’ve met before!”  She tied the balloons to a chair.

Millie gently touched Abel’s hand.  “Abel Arnett!  Abel! It’s been years!”

Abel stared at her, then he remembered.  “Millie?  Coney Island Millie? Is it you?”

She giggled.  “It’s me.”

The fog of so many years fell away.  Abel now clearly remembered a girl with freckles and dimples and soft hands.  The smell of popcorn and the sound of calliope music and the roar and shrieks from the roller coaster.  A sunny day at Coney Island.  The sea breeze messing her auburn hair. It was only a first date, but he envisioned a future with this beautiful girl.

But the gods did not cooperate.  He had been drafted and was to be shipped off to Europe.  He expected to die in the war.  It would not be permissible or acceptable for him to propose or even kiss her.  And so, he went away and Millie disappeared from his life.  

He was one of the lucky ones.  He never saw combat.  He was still in training in Dover when the war ended.  He was off duty reveling with the crowd of Brits in Trafalgar Square in London.   Like everyone that day, he was overcome with joy and relief, and when he noticed an attractive girl in a plaid coat standing next to him holding a faded British Union Jack, he impulsively kissed her.  They laughed, kissed again, and jumped in the fountain with others gone wild.  It was that kind of day.

He returned to the states with his war bride, Sarah.  

And now, Millie stood before him. Without knowing it, the widowed mother Helen had been prattling about for months was his Millie from 1945.  Now he saw that Helen had her mother’s dimples.

For the next several weeks, Helen would bring her mother every time she came to do her Angel duties.  Millie and Abel would sit on the porch or in the TV room.  Millie didn’t talk much, but she listened.  She hated Nixon too.  It seemed they could actually recapture the magic of Coney Island so long ago. 

As long as they didn’t look in any mirrors. 

After a few months, Abel asked her to marry him, but Millie didn’t want to get married, saying ,”I’ve done that already.”  It didn’t seem right to Abel to live together in sin, but it was what she wanted and he wanted her to be happy.  So he sold the house he’d shared with Sarah, and they rented a nice apartment together.

He still missed Sarah every day, but he no longer wished to die.  He felt lucky to have found love twice in his life.  He was amazed that he and Millie found ways to be intimate with their old bodies that was energizing and joyful.   He was convinced it was right and meant to be one day while they were in their sitting room.   He was reading the newspaper and she was knitting a hat for a friend who was going through chemo.

  He looked up and watched her pale fingers moving her needles.  He smiled with comfort and contentment.  And then he realized that she was absentmindedly humming a  familiar song.  Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.”

“Mean Girls” and Memories

A recent conversation with my grown daughter about the ways in which she and other young women often battle each other verbally online in social media made 

me say to her, “this is like high school.  Aren’t you past this?” She didn’t really understand why I found it so astounding.  The physical distance and anonymity of the internet make it possible to be a mean girl long after high school is over.

When “Queen Bees and Wannabees” was published in 2002 by Rosalind Wiseman, and then satirized in the comedy “Mean Girls” in 2004 by Tina Fey, I was fascinated by a public discussion of what I had not realized was a widespread phenomenon.  I thought I was alone and neurotic about my own traumatic memory of the queen bees in my seventh grade class. Not so.  I attended an appearance by Ms. Wiseman to an audience of moms and daughters in which she opened with the following:

“How many of you moms in this room remember the name or names of the queen bees who mistreated you in middle school?”

Nearly every woman in that packed auditorium raised her hand, including me.  So now it was permissible to discuss this openly.

In the summer of 1966, a girl from my sixth grade class moved across town into my neighborhood.  She wasn’t new to school, just new to my neighborhood  Her name was Jean, and she and I became BFFs over the summer, spending every day together in her rec room or mine, dancing and lip-synching to records like the Beach Boys “Good Vibrations” and talking endlessly about girl stuff like boys and clothes and how to do our hair in a flip.  We both pined for the cute boy up the street named Barney. By August, she told me they had taken a walk together and he held her hand.  “Do You Believe in Magic” was their song. I was jealous. Barney was my first loss to Jean.

I was especially excited to return to school that year, with a new outfit Jean helped me pick out and knowing that Jean was friends with the popular girls at school.  Surely I would be able to join this group now that Jean had put her stamp of approval on me.  How I wanted to be a part of the Diana-Christine-DeeDee-Jean group.  They were pretty and had beautiful penmanship.  They wore pastel colored poor-boy ribbed sweaters and golden circle pins over their training bras; and nylon stockings with their linen flowered skirts.  I was a year younger and a nerd; my mom still sent me to school wearing undershirts and ankle socks.  But I knew that Jean would help them not to notice that. Each day I would follow Jean out to the school yard at recess and join the circle.  They never spoke to me, but I would stand with them, feeling special.

 A week or so into the school year, they dropped the hammer on me.

Dee Dee asked me to step out of the circle while the group did a football huddle for a minute, after which she stepped my way, and smiled, “We just voted.  You’re out of our group.”  Jean didn’t look at me.  In fact, she and I never spoke again.

Of course I was shocked, hurt and immediately shrugged and walked away, crying.

Another girl, Nancy, saw me crying and came over to me. 

“What happened?” she asked, her hand on my shoulder. 

“They kicked me out.” I sobbed. 

 “Those girls are mean.” She said, “Everyone knows that.  You can be with me.  I’ll be your friend.”

Thanks goodness for that moment.  Nancy and I became good friends over the next year; Soon after, I moved away, my father’s job taking us to the West Coast. Several years later, we returned when I was in tenth grade.  I was more grown up now; with a stronger sense of self, yet back in this school system I was afraid to make friends.  In that large high school I would easily get lost in the crowd, which helped me avoid those same girls who were still the popular ones; cheerleaders and class office holders and homecoming candidates.  They didn’t see me or recognize me. For them I was a forgotten memory, but I hadn’t forgotten them, and feared the possibility of them humiliating me again every day. It never happened.  Midway through that year I changed schools and my life changed; I made new friends.  I became a cheerleader and an office holder and a homecoming candidate. 

Finally, I let the seventh grade hurt go, or so I thought.

Years later, when I was a senior at the state university I spotted Dee Dee in the student union.  It had been over ten years, a lifetime in a child’s life, yet that awful moment was suddenly new.  I quickly turned and walked in the opposite direction, hoping she didn’t see me.  I know now that she couldn’t, because she had forgotten me the moment she slammed me in the school yard.   

In retrospect, school meanness in 1966 looks tame compared to the high-tech bullying and meanness that happens today.  What hasn’t changed is the early teen years are still a sensitive time, and there is little adults can do to soften the blows. Only a peer friendship can make a difference, as Nancy did for me.  And if my daughter is typical, this applies to late teens and early twenties as well.  The good news is, often there are messages onscreen of hope and caring, a version of Nancy for the internet age.

I understand now that the reason “Mean Girls” was such a success was because it offered some much-needed comic relief to the many of us who harbor bad memories that never go away.  Perhaps Rosalind Wiseman performed a great service by drawing attention to that, and Tina Fey helped us by making it possible to laugh about it.