fast-forward 25 years

A link to this 25-years-from-now video time capsule just landed in my inbox, and I went over to the “In 25 Years” web site and looked at some of the sample videos.  As I did so, I actually had a mental math shutdown. I was unable to subtract 1953 from 2035, which is when the time capsule will be opened, and just as unable to add 25 to 57.  Both of those numbers would tell me the age I will be 25 years from now. But I’ve managed to face the truth, the answer is 82, and I have to wonder not only what shape this poor sweet world will be in by then, but whether I’ll still be alive to see it.

The time capsule project was thought up by a bunch of young people: a young Californian named Pearl Wible and, from the looks of the web site, a couple of her young Californian friends.  The most ambitious part of their plan is that after they’ve “sealed off” the video time capsule (which will live somewhere in the internet cloud, as near as I can tell), they will try to gather together all the contributors they can find in 2035 for a huge middle-aged reunion.

I love how some of the people talking into their webcams say things like, “Hello future me.”  Such confidence.  Such sincerity. But there’s some black humor there, too, like the young guy who says, “If you’re seeing this now, it means I didn’t drink myself to death.”

If I made a video and were talking to my 82-year-old self, I would no doubt say something different than these 25-year-olds are saying as they talk to themselves at 50.  I’m not sure what it would be, though.  Would I tell my 82-year-old self that I should have realized that my 50s were my best years?  Would I tell her that I expect she’ll have found out that things kept getting better the older I got, as I watched daily tribulations fade away and leave me with concerns only about what really mattered?   Or would I be using the time-capsule video to talk not really to my future self at all — since there’s a pretty good chance that I’ll have died by then — but to my future middle-aged daughters, to tell them how central they were to my life?  Who knows.  Maybe I would just use it, once there’s nothing left to lose, to tell all the annoying people in my 2010 life to fuck off.

In a way, we all want to know how the story of our lives will turn out.  But in a bigger way, I think, we don’t.  I love the idea of the video time capsule, to be opened in 25 years, but it’s more than I can bear to try to picture my 82-year-old self clearly enough to have a conversation with her.

playing favorites

Nutmeg and I have started a book club, and last night we had our third meeting to discuss Room by Emma Donaghue.  (I think Nutmeg and I loved it a little more than the others did, but we had a rousing conversation even with those who were a little less in awe of the book, which I still heartily recommend.)  In the course of our book talk, we ended up talking about The Bridges of Madison County, a book Nutmeg picked up the summer before she went to college, read without knowing anything about it, wept, and proudly announced that when she went off to college she would have a ready answer to the inevitable question, “What’s your favorite book?”  Easy, Nutmeg said; her new favorite book was The Bridges of Madison County.  To which Meta promptly replied, “That book is crap.”

It was a funny story, and it was germane to our discussion about whether Room is a gimmicky book like The Bridges of Madison County or some Stephen King books, or whether it’s something better.  But I took it another way.  As we laughed at Nutmeg’s story, she said something that made me a little sad.  “Yeah, she knew it was a dumb book.  That’s because Meta was the smart one, and I was the stupid one.”

That’s not exactly true, but it’s truer than I want to believe.  Meta was always super-smart, almost dysfunctionally so, and she was a tough act to follow, even for Nutmeg, who was really smart, too.  Meta always was reading, inhaling Shakespeare and Victor Hugo from a very young age, and Nutmeg liked books but had other things she preferred doing.  I tried to deny that we had typecast the girls quite so blatantly, but Nutmeg was insistent.  “Remember that card Dad made when Meta graduated from college and I graduated from high school?” she said.  “That was the running joke — she was smart and I was sporty.”  She smiled as she said that, and it looked like an  authentic smile — but this morning I’m not so sure.

I was especially sensitive to this whole idea of typecasting and favoritism at the book club meeting because I had, just hours before, had a long phone interview with a sociologist who’s spent the past 20-plus years studying the effects of parental favoritism, both on the parent and on the child.  She told me that almost every mother she interviewed (who were generally in their late 60s to early 80s) was willing to admit that she preferred one child over another along at least a couple of dimensions.  They were responding to questions like “Who do you feel closest to?” and “Who would you call in an emergency?” and “If you need caregiving, who would you most like to provide it?”   Just recently she started asking another question, an especially fiery one: “Which child has most disappointed you?”

And here’s the thing: the preferences are normal, and inevitable.  But the “kids” (who in this study were generally in their 40s and 50s) suffered as a result.  In families in which the favoritism was most extreme, the researchers found, kids were most likely to have psychological problems like depression.  And this was true whether or not the kid in question was the most favored one.  In other words, in families where it’s clear that Mother prefers one kid over another, it’s just as oppressive to be the chosen child as it is to be the unchosen one.

All of which makes me wonder: when we joke around with our kids about which one’s smart and which one’s sporty, when we make the suggestion to one of them that the other one’s driving us crazy, when we babysit more for one son’s kids than for another son’s or give one daughter a necklace that the other one wanted, are we doing more damage than we know?  In that same hand-made graduation card that Nutmeg referred to last night, iDaddy and I had included the line, “and they loved them very very much, and exactly equally.”  Because we did — we do — love them equally.  But is that enough?

try, try again

Nearly three months have passed since my last post, in which I mused about whether my daughters really minded having me write about them, even on a barely-noticed, anonymous blog.  A couple of Momma Loshen’s few readers wrote to ask whether I had decided to stop the blog altogether.  In a way, I had.  If it came down to a choice between my daughters and my little blog, or even my career as a writer, there was no contest, the girls would win.

But is that really what it comes down to?  Have Meta and Nutmeg even noticed that I’m not writing here anymore?  For that matter, had they noticed that I was writing here in the first place?  Meta had, I think, since she postsed comments occasionally, but Nutmeg seemed basically uninterested in the whole enterprise.  Now, however, Nutmeg and I are thinking of entering into a joint book-writing project (Meta wanted no part of it, though I would have loved to have her help).   If the stars align — if the publishing gods come through with a decent advance — Nutmeg and I are going to have to figure out how to mix personal revelations with plain old-fashioned journalism.  So maybe I should go back to practicing some of that here.

I’ve also wondered, on and off over these past three months, whether my ideas about privacy and decorum are positively archaic.  Has the notion of self-scrutiny and confessional totally changed in the Wide World of Web 2.0.?  When I see what people, including Meta and Nutmeg, are willing to reveal about themselves online, I realize how outmoded my thinking seems to be.   Maybe I don’t really want to be left out of all the chatter — I had been having a good time nurturing this blog, and I’ve missed it.

I realize that, in some ways, blogging is so last-year, almost as out of date as the legacy-media magazines I ordinarily write for.  If I want to really understand how people are using the Web, what I have to figure out isn’t blogging, it’s microblogging.  Eh.  Maybe later; at the moment Twitter is beyond me. But I’m going to take another stab at Momma Loshen.  In doing so, I hope I can stake out a balance between being honest about myself and my relationship with my grown daughters, and being sensitive to my daughters’ right to their own stories, without my intrusive filter.  I’m going to walk this tightrope one more time, because it was kind of fun while it lasted, and we three are all adults now.  We should be able to figure out how to make this work.

am I hurting my kids by writing about them?

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here — I look at my blog stats and see that I had only one post in June, and before that only one post in May.  Part of this is because I’ve been working on a long magazine article that was due in mid-July, and that I’m still working on because there are (as there always are) editors’ revisions to address.  But part of this, I think, is because I’ve been a little uncertain about this whole project.   I worry that my original plan to write about mothering grown-ups, first in blog form and maybe eventually in book form, might be something that endangers my relationship with my daughters, and that I refuse to do, even for — especially for? — the sake of my career.  So that’s tempered my enthusiasm somewhat about posting on Momma Loshen.

I always knew that Meta didn’t want me to write about her anymore.  I got her permission to write this blog, not using my real name and giving her a pseudonym, before I began.  And when I thought that maybe a book about this topic would include some personal memoir-type stuff about mothering adults (and that time it WOULD be using my real name), she said only “I don’t love that.”  (“Said” is a relative term here — this conversation took place, as many of ours do, on g-chat.)  But I didn’t recognize the true feelings behind “I don’t love that” — didn’t recognize, maybe, because it was convenient for me not to — as that old bad feeling Meta used to get whenever I wrote about her, even in what I thought to be a loving way, that had led to her original prohibition.  That old bad feeling was still there.  “Don’t love” was her mature version of “hate.”  It took an in-person conversation with Nutmeg, in which I asked her directly how Meta felt about me writing a parenting book that mentioned her, to realize how angry she is at me for even considering it, after she had repeatedly made her preferences very very clear.

Nutmeg, too, it turns out, isn’t so wild about me writing about her — so there goes my Plan B, which had been to write in the preface of whatever  book I might end up writing, “I have two daughters, but the older one has prohibited me from writing about her, so in this book I’m only going to write about the younger one.”  The younger one doesn’t really like that idea, either.  And if there’s to be a memoir-ish element to a book about parenting grown-ups, I can’t fail to write about at least one of them!

I just spent a long beautiful summer morning sitting on the back deck of our house (yes, iDaddy and I just bought a second home in a sweet little beach town in Delaware) erasing traceable evidence on this blog of Nutmeg’s true identity.   I had originally chosen a different pseudonym for Nutmeg, a nickname she used to use — but I recently realized that she’s using that nickname now on her Twitter account, and her ID could easily be traced back to this blog for anyone who cared.  (Meta had pointed this out to me when I first chose the pseudonym, but Nutmeg said she didn’t care — and the original pseudonym was a better name for her than Nutmeg is.  Nutmeg is the name of her pet hamster when she was 8 years old.)  When I suggested to Nutmeg that I’d try to expunge all use of that first pseudonym on this blog, since she’s using it for Twitter, she said that would be good.  She didn’t ask me to do it directly, but I did anyway.  It took two fucking hours, but I consider it two hours well spent if it protects her from whatever scary internet privacy invasion she might have suffered because of something I’d done.

All this is a long way around today’s topic — writing about our children.

A couple of months ago, the wonderful monologuist Julia Sweeney — who’s made a career telling touching and hilarious tales about her mother, brother, daughter, priest, and anyone else in her orbit — said she wasn’t going to talk about her daughter Mulan anymore.  Mulan is now 10 years old, old enough to read or hear her mother’s stuff and to be embarrassed by it.  Sweeney figures there will only be more of that ahead, so she’s calling it quits, at least that part of her storytelling.  As she put it in her blog, “I plan to hang up my mouth.”  (I was alerted to Julia Sweeney’s blog by another wonderful blogger, Melinda Blau, a writer who, for all I know, is thinking about writing a book exactly like the one I’d like to write.  Melinda’s blog, MotherU, is a collaboration with her grown-up daughter Jennifer.  More on MotherU in another post.)

Here’s what Julia Sweeney wrote in her farewell post (it was posted in March, but I just discovered it today) that hammered it home for me:

I began to look at the darker side of telling stories about my personal life.  The guilt, the anguish, the desire to emphasize this over that, the slant, the small or large exaggeration, the worry that someone I’m talking about will see or hear me.   Then I suppose you could say the tipping point was Mulan.

Also, she expressed a concern quite apart from hurting people’s feelings, and this I found interesting, too (though less discomfiting) –  a concern about sapping your energies by writing about or pursuing the wrong things.  As Sweeney put it:

Sometimes I feel that my creativity, (and not just mine, but everyone’s creativity) is like the snow on a mountaintop melting a little at a time.  All my various outlets – performing and writing in all its manifestations — create little rivers through which the snow can melt.  I always liked having so many things going at once.  I always felt that in show business, you had to have five pots on the stove just to get one of them to boil.  I benefited from being so multi-able.  I could do voice over and then perform at a club, I could write a monologue and then write a pilot for a TV show.

But lately it feels that I have fragmented my focus with this policy.  I want the snow to melt into a couple of larger rivers, not into several smaller streams.

The idea that by blogging and journal-writing and whatever else I do, either to make a living or to procrastinate, I’m diverting my creativity that should be going to whatever the hell else it is that’s my real goal — well, that gives me pause.

Does this mean that I’m giving up ever writing again about Meta and Nutmeg, except anonymously?  I don’t know.  Does it mean I’m even giving up on writing about them anonymously, as in this little, nearly-invisible blog?  I don’t know that, either, but I don’t think so.  But like Sweeney, I’m mulling.  I’m spending the next month at our new house at the beach, here with iDaddy and occasionally with family and a couple of dear friends, and I’m mulling.

generation who?

Articles that make sweeping claims for an entire generation make me crabby, and the essay in last weekend’s New York Times Magazine was no exception.  It was by Judith Warner, who isn’t usually prone to over-generalizing, and her point (I think; it wasn’t a great essay) was that we Baby Boomers have ruined our Gen Y children, raising them with an eye on boosting their self-esteem rather than teaching them skills and humility, creating a generation of young people who are entitled, narcisstic, unwilling to work hard, and have that annoying interrogative way of talking.  OK, the interrogative thing is just my own pet peeve — all the others are stereotypes that come straight from Judith Warner.

She defines this cohort — who have also been called, variously, millennials, echo boomers, Generation Me — as people born between 1982 and 2002.  Really?  That includes Nutmeg, who’s 26 — but it also includes my 18-year-old niece and my cousin’s 10-year-old daughter.  These people could not possibly all be in the same generation.

That’s the first objection, then.  The second is that there are so many exceptions to Warner’s observation that her whole point strikes me as meaningless.  Yes, my exceptions are anecdotes — but so are her generalizations.  Warner herself admits that she bases her opinion on interviews with nine young people.  Nine.  Based on that, and on a couple of interviews with a couple of psychologists, she concludes that kids today feel entitled to jobs that are rewarding, creative, and worthy of them; they turn down job offers as though there’s a whole string of alternatives waiting in the wings; they don’t know how to make compromises; they wear flip-flops to work.  What emerges based on her nine interviews, she writes, is

a picture of emerging adults with a striking ability to keep self-doubt — and deep discouragement — at bay. Many were jobless, others were dissatisfied with their work or graduate-school choices, yet they didn’t blame themselves if life failed to meet their expectations. They didn’t call into question their choices or competencies. It was as if all the cries of “Good job!” they heard as children armed them against the repeated blows of frustration and rejection now coming their way.

To her credit, Warner defends these kids — they’re resilient, she writes, and maybe the fact that they were raised in an atmosphere of “unremitting ambient anxiety” from 9/11, Columbine, and blah blah, has given them a higher tolerance for the kinds of stress they’re facing now as they try to figure out how to make a living in a tough economy.  But I’m sorry –  even positive generalizations make me twitchy.  My own two daughters never acted especially entitled — there might have been times when Meta felt insulted by the demands made at her entry-level jobs, but she reacted to that the way any mature employed person is supposed to, by doing her job while looking for a better one.  Both of them always seemed willing to work long hours if that’s what it took to do their work.  (Warner writes that employers complain about kids who expect to work 40 hours a week and no extra.)  And since I know a bunch of their friends, especially Nutmeg’s friends, I can say that most of the young people I know are serious, hard-working, willing to put up with an employer’s crap if they have to.  They might grumble about it — often on Twitter and Facebook, which does make me nervous — but they do the work.  They are not the Generation Me kids that Warner describes.

And anyway, what would be so unusual about that if they were?  Wasn’t the Me Decade the term Tom Wolfe invented to apply to MY generation, those of us who were young when he wrote his classic New York magazine cover story in 1976?  Maybe a little self-focus and high self-regard is part of what it means to be in your twenties, no matter what generation you’re in.  Maybe that’s what it takes to figure out your rightful place in the world.

casting a long shadow

Stories about adult children following in their parents’ footsteps have taken on special meaning for me, now that I realize that both my daughters have, in a way, gone into our own family business, too, of journalism and writing.    So I was especially intrigued by the article in today’s New York Times about Andrew Cuomo, the attorney general of New York, and his career in politics, the family business begun by his father Mario, New York’s former governor.  “Political Test May Loom for the Cuomos’ Bond,” reads the headline.  Imagine that — competition and jealousy rearing their un-pretty heads in a father-son relationship lived out in the spotlight.

Times reporters Michael Powell and Raymond Hernandez had to cobble their story together from secondary sources, since both father and son declined to be interviewed.  (Mario had at first agreed, but when Andrew refused to talk, Mario backed out.)  But they managed to find people who would talk, mostly anonymously, about the fierce, intense, loving, competitive relationship that Andrew, aged 52, has with his 78-year-old father.  And it was the father, someone I’ve long admired for his oratory skills, who summed up the relationship perfectly.

As to their changing relationship, father and son express frustration with the endless literary allusions and amateur psychoanalysis. To the elder Cuomo, the Shakespeare this and the Freudian that is silliness. Yes, he is a strong-willed and loving father, and, yes, he has a strong-willed and loving son.

“People say, ‘Oh, they have such a complicated relationship,’ ” Mario Cuomo said. “Do you know any father who doesn’t have a complicated relationship with his son?”

He paused, and added, “Incidentally, it doesn’t get less complicated as it goes on.”

Oh my goodness, it doesn’t?  Ur-Momma had always uttered the refrain “it never ends” whenever I expressed any worry about Nutmeg or Meta as they were growing up.  But I’d always hoped that she was wrong, that the worry DOES in fact end, or at least changes significantly, when the kids become adults and are living their own exuberant, rocky lives.  And now here’s Mario — erudite, thoughtful Mario — telling me that not only does it never ends, it only gets more complicated.  Maybe Ur-Momma was smarter than I realized.

the ancient matrix of the wilderness

I read a lovely account this morning in the April Conde Nast Traveler of a father (aged 56) on a four-day trek in Joshua Tree National Park with his daughter (aged 19).  It’s called “Eliza Grace, the Mojave, and Me.”  As I read the details of the experience, I was confirmed in my city-girl belief that a backcountry camping trip is pretty much my personal vision of Hell.  But it ended with the kind of epiphany that really speaks to someone who’s been thinking about what it means to be the parent of adult children.  Here’s how the author, Guy Martin, describes his feelings at the end of the trip, when his daughter Eliza tells him she’d like to do it again next year.

It seems to me then that our trek wasn’t really about Eliza encountering the backcountry. We did a few good hard things. We moved some bad luggage over a lot of really rough ground. We lived in the wind, we lived with some squirrels and rats and snakes, we met the horned toad. We slept with the coyote and with the mourning dove.

But in fact the deeper education was mine. As we age, it’s too easy to live with our children as we think they are, and much harder to embrace—in the shifting present—the adults they’ve become. This may be a function of velocity; their lives speed up as inexorably and as radically as ours slow down.

But. In the ancient matrix of the wilderness from which we have just stepped, nature knows better than to apply the possessive to the offspring for long. Eliza Grace is of me but not mine. The girl belongs to herself.

So, from Eliza’s gracious invitation to join her in the Mojave, I take the lesson that I will never match the velocity of her being and becoming. In fact, she’s telling me that that’s not my job. Rather, my job is to be the father of a constant surprise.

That’s our job, isn’t it, as parents of adult children.  Not to keep up with them, not to “match the velocity,” but just to witness, share, and enjoy the “constant surprise.”  When we’re lucky, as Guy Martin is, as I am, our children take us along for the amazing ride.