Getting Ready For College

People have been asking how’s our college search going.  Specifically, they ask: What are you doing?

I’m sorry to report, not much.

I am armed with books and websites that I don’t look at because they’re too overwhelming, or because The Teenager has no idea what kind of school he wants to go to.  He vacillates between Ivy League and County College, depending on how onerous his workload is that week. 

I’ve tried to do the questionnaires on websites like College Board, an activity that’s supposed to narrow your search down to a manageable number of schools that you can then research further.  I’ve done this particular questionnaire three times, each time pretending I’m The Teenager and answering questions as I think he would (or should).  Each time, when I reach the end of the questionnaire, there are no suggestions.  Zero.  Apparently, there’s not one single college that fits my criteria.

I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong.

In between my bouts of inertia, I’ve been dismantling all our old Lego sets so I can sell the pieces by the bag.  There’s a local consignment shop that I give quart-sized Zip-Locks filled with hundreds of dollars worth of colorful plastic and the proprietor says there’s a waiting list for them.  I sit in the basement pulling apart Harry Potter sets and Star Wars sets that result in the same back aching stiffness as when I sat for hours with my kids putting them together in the first place.

I have five huge shopping bags of Legos in my trunk right now. 

Lately, The Teenager has been broaching the subject of California.  As in, Would you consider letting me go to school out there?

I’ve said no to this in the past.  It’s a long ways away and, you know, they have earthquakes out there.  But in some ways, California would really suit him and I’m now trying to pry open my stubborn mind and at least try to consider his applying.

I’m not a big fan of earthquakes (or most any destructive act of God, really), but the main reason I don’t want him to go to school in California is because I’m afraid he’ll want to stay there forever.  Should I live my life in sunny California, or should I move back to New Jersey?  Duh.

He says things like, “I like such and such school, but they don’t offer a Latin minor,” and I say, “For God’s Sake, do not pick a school based on whether they offer Latin,” even though I know that if he spends a lot of time studying Latin in school, there’s a really good chance he’ll end up close to home after college; maybe even back in his old bedroom, which would address at least one of my concerns: deep down I don’t really want him to leave.

Many of the Lego sets I’m pulling apart are structures that The Teenager and I worked long and tireless hours on.  The instructions have no words and you simply do the best you can to interpret what the diagrams are asking of you.  There’s something about the pictograms that level the playing field for parent and child.  You teach each other how to build together.

I’ve never been a Sporty Mom or a Video Game Mom or (perish the thought) an Action Figure Mom, so Legos became one of the few things I could spend time doing with my boys where we’re both really engaged – where I wanted to be doing just that. 

So, not to get all goopy, but breaking down the Legos feels a little like taking apart a childhood.

There will be mothers at the consignment shop who will happily plunk down five bucks to score a bag of random Lego pieces.  Mothers who have never thought about Subject SATs or how they might manage to nag their child effectively across several time zones, and are only trying to find something to occupy their kids for a time – to engage their creativity and delight them with something new.

I try to make each bag unique by distributing the cool Lego accoutrements evenly.  One gets a little yellow life boat.  Another gets some teeny gold Lego coins.  Lego snakes in one.  Lego-copter in another. 

I want their new pint-sized owner to stick his smooth, perfect hand deep into the bag of plastic parts and pull something out that makes his eyes go wide.  Something that he holds out to his mother and says, “Look what I got!” and it becomes another little thing that the two of them have together – that they can cherish and marvel how lucky they were to pick a bag that held such a special little secret, just for them. 

I want the mother to treasure the look on his face – the look that says, You got me this…You did this for me!  I want her to burn that look into her heart so she always knows where to find it, long after she herself has packed the Legos away.

I don’t think it’s getting me very far, but that's what I've been doing to get ready for college.

To Poo and Back Again

A few days ago, I started writing a blog post about why I haven’t written any blog posts for a while, and now I can’t find it.  It’s taken a lot of resolve to stop looking for it and start again.

It began with me explaining how, every so often, I decide that I need a Real Job and I kick around the idea of getting my Realtor’s license.  And then some kind of divine intervention occurs and I end up with a writing gig or in a writing workshop or basically doing something that has everything to do words and ideas and nothing to do with houses and closing costs.  As if the universe is trying to tell me something.

I would actually make a good Realtor in some ways, because I really like showing people around and telling them nifty little things they might not know.  About a house, or a neighborhood, or a town.  It would also give me the opportunity to wear some of the cute outfits my Dresser put together for me last year when I broke down last year and paid someone to help me figure out what to wear.

But instead, I’m in ratty jeans, sitting in front of a computer screen that I’m absolutely certain is the cause of my failing eyesight.   This is because I’m six weeks into a writing class.

I come to writing classes in perhaps the most arrogant way.  I must need to conjure up a certain amount of egotistical overconfidence just to get myself to sign up.  Because, writing workshops are kind of scary.  At least they are for me.  You’re basically paying someone a chunk of money to allow you to sit in a circle and have 10 people tell you why your essays don’t work.

So, all puffed up and full of myself, I walk into a room of other writers, fairly certain that I will be the most competent of the group.  I soon discover, quickly and incontrovertibly, that I suck. 

Ok, maybe that’s too harsh. Let’s just say, it dawns on me that not only am I not the best in the room, I may possibly be the worst. 

As you might expect, this is not an ideal mindset for churning out blog posts.

This exact process has transpired so many times in precisely the same way that I feel like I should know by now to just walk in humble in the first place.  But my brain is a rat bastard sometimes and it won’t let me just decide to be humble. It requires experiential proof.

I’m not sure if it’s like this for everyone, but I find Being Humbled very liberating, but absolutely exhausting. And not for just an hour or two; I’m kind of wrung out for a long time. 

It also makes me really hungry.

So between spending the last many weeks writing, reading other people’s submissions, commenting on those submissions, overeating and generally feeling like poo, you can see how blogging might get shelved for a little while.

I think I’m back now, though.  Thanks for being patient. 

Sublimation vs. Sublime

My partner and I were at a big disadvantage today, just based on who our opponents were.  One of them has an insanely powerful serve and groundstroke, the other can get almost anything at the net.  My partner and I are both recovering from injuries that kept us away from Friday Tennis for a lot of the fall and then, after that, left us fumphering around the court, trying to compensate for our shortcomings, an activity at which I’m all too well-practiced.

She and I shouldn’t even play together, but we do.

We lost the first two games quickly and embarrassingly.  We swung at balls and missed them entirely.  Repeatedly hit shots into the net.  Not here and there, but over and over.  By the third game, we were high-fiving that we had simply scored a single point.

The subject of sex came up (as it often does in Friday Tennis) and after a short discussion (the details of which are better left unshared), my partner and I started playing the littlest bit better.  We took a game.  Then lost a game.  Then took two games in a row and we were tied 4-4. 

The reason this is important to mention is because there are different ways to lose a set.  There’s the humiliating way (6-0 or 6-1), and then there’s the way that we did, 6-4, with our heads held high.

We started a new set and my partner and I made the mistake of switching sides, something you should certainly try if you’re getting creamed (6-0), but not if you’re playing decently with lots of close games, as was our situation.  This was because we convinced ourselves that our short sex conversation had been the key to our success.  That we had found ourselves in some sort of Bull Durham Reverse Universe where the transmutation of sexual energy was enhancing our strokes (so to speak), a phenomenon Freud may have considered a type of “sublimation.”  If we just continued thinking about sex while we were playing tennis, we reasoned, we would be unstoppable.

This conviction proved very, very wrong.

I’m not sure what was responsible for our inexplicable underdog comeback in the first set, but whatever it was, it was gone once we switched sides and no amount of lascivious thought or innuendo seemed capable of getting it back. 

My partner and I went from being Roadrunners back to being Coyotes, with shot after shot leaving us tail-singed and gape-jawed.  I looked around for some Acme dynamite and in doing so, managed to miss yet another ball.

I think we ran out of time before we could finish the second set, but we played about five games and my partner and I only won one of them.  I think that one was a fluke.  I had stopped thinking about sex head on and instead began trying to remember the name of the Bull Durham movie, not actively, exactly, but like Muzak in the background – using just enough brain power to wrest my mind away from berating myself for our bad judgment and occupy it enough to let me go about hitting a proper backhand, which is likely the precise function our sex talk served to begin with.

By the end of the game, I still didn’t have the movie title.   All I could conjure was Susan Sarandon writhing around while Kevin Costner is painting her toenails, a scene I remembered as itself sexy and unexpected and, in the world of movie scenes, perhaps even sublime.

Ok. I'm Still Doing It.

During my time with Therapist Number 2 (Number 3 if you count my short stint with The Woman Who Only Wore Purple), I felt like I had some really big fish to fry – namely, I wanted to quit smoking cigarettes, leave my job and lose weight, three things that were unlikely to ever happen together.

I would lay on her leather couch with her Dachshund on my belly and bemoan my inability to become waiflike despite how meagerly I ate or how ferociously I exercised. 

“We don’t exercise to be thin,” she told me one day, her long, reedy legs crossed at the knee in her massive leather shrink chair.

“We don’t?”

“No, we exercise to have a relationship with our body.”

That was one of those statements that, depending on my mood, could strike me as either totally asinine or absolutely profound.  On that day, it was profound.

Everything I understood about exercise suddenly shifted.  It no longer became a means to an end, but an end unto itself.  I stopped caring about results.  It stopped being about my self-esteem. I stopped doing things simply to suffer through them and made a commitment to stoke that relationship that she talked about in a good way, every day. 

I just had a similar revelation at a writing workshop I attended last week. 

Surrounded by a dozen women, writing from prompts, reading aloud, sharing reactions, reading some more, I began to remember why we write. As Natalie Goldberg says, “We write to study mind.” 

Maybe she didn’t say exactly that, but that’s her general gist: writing helps us understand how the mind works.  The writer’s job is mostly just to show up and write. 

This is a perfect revelation for today, because today is our third birthday.  I started this blog February 1, 2009 with this post.  I wrote then, “I’m not entirely sure this is a good idea…” and in retrospect, I can say it was a very good idea.  It did, in fact, keep me out of trouble.  It landed me a bit of work.  It keeps me connected to a lot of folks. 

But mostly, it helps me understand how mind works. That delicate mystery machine that I delude myself into thinking I have control over. It is here that I learn what’s important to me, when I sit down to write one thing and come up with quite another.  I’ve posted things that crack me up and that scare the shit out of me, and doing so has created that relationship that Therapist Number 2 was talking about: no ends, just flexing and stretching and trying to engage my heart.

Thanks for being here with me for our birthday.  Sorry, no cake.

Boyz 2 Men

The world is feeling out of whack to me.

In the last few weeks, I’ve learned about the conditions of several local boys – teenagers who are going through the kinds of trying health situations I’d expect to hear about my mother’s friends.  Not about my son’s.

A heart surgery.  A gall bladder operation.  A mysterious loss of vision.  Circumstances that would make a parent pine for something as mundane as a concussion or a broken foot.

Hearing about these incidents reminded me of my husband’s story, a story that I tell with the authority of someone who actually witnessed the events, even though they took place before I ever knew him.

My husband lost his vision when he was in his twenties.  It happened gradually but efficiently, over the course of a few months.  Initially, his vision became blurry.  As if he were driving in a car whose windshield was very dirty, is how he describes it.  As time went on, he was barely able to see things directly and was left with only a peripheral vision.  And colorblindness.

It took a while for a diagnosis.  He went to ophthalmologists and neurologists, submitted to scans and spinal taps, and ultimately it was decreed that his condition was Leber’s Optic Atrophy – a rare affliction that involves the degeneration of the optic nerve.  It’s genetic.  It’s not correctable by glasses.  It’s neurological and untreatable and has left him with either 20/200 or 20/2000 vision (I can’t remember which).  In either case, legally blind.

My husband was a PA when he lost his vision.  That is, he was a Production Assistant at The Movie Channel, an entry-level job that require he screen a lot of movies and write snappy 30-second promo spots to run on the network.  I think it was his first “real job” out of college, and he had moved from his home in Boston to New York to start his career in television.

Once he received his diagnosis (and prognosis – which was, basically, this is your lot in life), he went to his boss to resign.  He said that his vision problems were uncorrectable and he planned on moving back with his parents and figuring out how to go on with his life from there.

His boss said to him, “Look, you have a lot of problems. You’re unorganized and your workspace is a mess.  Why don’t you go back to your desk and work on those problems and I’ll figure out what to do about your vision issues.”

My husband’s boss then went to bat for him.  Somehow, they found machines and contraptions that would enlarge text and video sufficiently for my husband to do his work.  His boss got the company to buy it all for him.  The idea that an organization would make that kind of investment in a Production Assistant was outlandish. 

Yet, they did.

My husband remained at The Movie Channel for a while, and then moved on to become an On-Air Producer elsewhere.  After a year he took the same job at Nickelodeon and remained there for 16 years, where he became a Senior Producer, Department Director, VP, Senior VP and ultimately Executive VP Creative Director of Nickelodeon Worldwide, which was an insanely highfalutin title for someone who remained as messy and disorganized as he was as a PA. 

Disorganization was not the only characteristic that remained a constant for him.  Another was his Vision.  Not his eyesight, but his ability to see and create things that don’t yet exist in the world.  Losing his eyesight didn’t affect his Vision at all.  Perhaps it even enhanced it.

What I’m saying is, he went on to become an award-winning producer of visual entertainment and groomed a staff that went on to run divisions and networks of their own – a prospect that no one could have seen or predicted through that dirty car windshield.

I am heartbroken when I imagine what these young men are going through with their medical hurdles.  I can’t even fathom how scary it must feel.  And for their parents – the anxiety of what’s to come, what kind of lives their children will now be able to lead.

I don’t know anything about medicine and even less about having to endure that kind of struggle in a life, but I see it proven time and again that our essence, our magic – our superpower – exists in a place beyond our physical circumstances.  I want to believe that these boys, like my husband, will discover a power within themselves that will transform them.   That they will find their own greatness not in spite of their hardship, but perhaps because of it.

What if they learn early and with certainty that our perfection has little to do with flawlessness and everything to do with loving the parts of us that are broken?

Zen And The Art Of Auto Body Maintenance

It’s no secret that my Friday Tennis Game sometimes takes on the qualities of a sacred confessional.  Last Friday did not disappoint.  I ran quickly through the details of The Teenager’s first vehicular mishap, explaining how he backed out of a driveway into a car that was parked opposite that driveway, a maneuver that I myself have managed to execute on three separate occasions in the 11 years we’ve lived in suburbia.  I told them how the car he hit belonged to his friend and how the driver’s door needs to be replaced, how the friend took it for two estimates, and how each estimate came in at $4,000.  I had given the friend the name of a particular auto body shop that I thought might be more reasonable, but the boy neglected to take it there.

“So, I took it myself,” I told them, with a self-satisfied smile.  It was obvious from my demeanor that the estimate I acquired was much, much lower.

“Did you cry?” asked Shelley.

I was startled by this, because that was going to be my big confession.  Not that I did cry, but that I announced to the owner as soon as I met him, that I might cry.

“I hope you cried,” said Eileen.  She told me that she uses a certain brand of gum as an aid for just such interactions.  “If you put it in your mouth and just let it sit there – don’t chew – it’s so strong it will make your eyes tear.”  She keeps some in her purse all the time.

When I was 27, I worked with a guy who accused me one day of using my feminine wiles to get what I wanted in the workplace.  He wasn’t even talking about promotions – just getting my projects moved up to the top of the roster so I could meet my clients’ deadlines.  I remember being so affronted when he said this to me that we had a big falling out and didn’t speak to each other for days.  I also remember being mortified that my tactics were so transparent.

Now, I’m barely even sheepish. 

It’s no secret that a woman reaches a point in her life where she doesn’t have many feminine wiles left.  I’m thinking I may have two or three at most; I may as well use them.

As I’ve matured, I’ve found the Threat of Crying to be more effective than Actual Crying.  You can still come across as pathetic, but you don’t get all pink and puffy.  For me, it allows oxygen a continued clear passage through my nasal cavity.  Also, there’s no awkward moment when someone has to decide whether it’s appropriate to put their arm around you.

The auto body shop owner was a man, but I’ve used my few remaining wiles with women as well.  “Are you really nice?” I asked the woman at the insurance company when I called to find out that The Teenager’s insurance rates would increase almost 100% if we filed a claim for the damage.  “Because I might cry during this call and I need to be talking to someone really nice.”

“I can be,” she said.

“Would you?” I pressed.

These conversations didn’t need any gum or onion-chopping or any pinching myself hard on the underside of my arm.  Because I really am on the verge of tears over this incident, even though I got a much lower estimate from my auto body shop and even though no one got hurt and no one is even angry about what happened.  But from the moment I got The Call from The Teenager, a truth solidified for me, one that I had been entertaining as hypothetical, but been able to push safely away, which is that my baby boy has gained a level of independence and taken on an amount of responsibility that I have no control over.  And things are going to get broken, despite how much I try to will them otherwise.

There is a Buddhist saying that goes, “The teacup is already broken.”  I usually take that to mean, don’t get too attached to the way things are – they’re going to change; impermanence is the nature of the world.  This has been a notion I’ve found solace in over and over when I find myself too worried about things I can’t control. 

But it’s a concept that’s harder to embrace when your child is getting behind the wheel of a car every day. 

For now, a better maxim might be, “Don’t send a teenager to an auto body shop to do the work of a distraught and zealously frugal middle-aged woman,” which may not be as elegant a metaphor, but is a notion I think every one of us can get behind.

Happy New Year

Many, many years ago, I spent New Year’s morning walking through Hoboken with my boyfriend. We’d decided that morning (or maybe the night before) that we needed to break up. We’d been together for several years – longer than I’d been with anyone at that point in my life – but the writing was on the wall and we both knew it.

I think I was 29.

It was snowing that morning, which made our walk all the more wistful. Because we really liked each other, and we loved walking through Hoboken together, and also because Hoboken is especially beautiful during an early winter snow. It made the whole sad thing all the more sad.

Somewhere along our walk (I remember it being around 14th Street), one of us had an uncharacteristic moment of profound maturity and suggested something that, even as I write it, seems so outlandish I can’t believe the other even entertained it. One of us suggested we go see a therapist to break up. Because we were both in our twenties and each of us understood that we had gotten to “that place” we all get to in a relationship where we start doing our stupid, self-destructive things and that it would just be a matter of time before this union crashed and burned as had the others that came before it.

If we saw a therapist together and hashed it all out, we thought maybe we could do it differently with the next person. Maybe we could walk away from each other feeling not like victims, but empowered to stop playing out our same silly games in every subsequent love affair we had for the rest of our lives.

The logic was: If we broke up mindfully, we could perhaps each go off and find happiness in the world.

Therapy took a good, long time – much longer than the two or three sessions either of us had envisioned. After we were done, we bought a house together. And then we went on a 10-day trip to Hawaii, a trip that, after we got married, we referred to as our honeymoon, even though it took place before we had exchanged vows.

I just received this message today from an old friend: “On this first day of 2012 let go of the past. Don't waste a good minute worrying about a bad one. Know that everything is perfect exactly as it is. Trust that there is a reason, even when you can't see it.”

I don’t really believe in New Year’s Resolutions, but I’m making an exception this year and resolving to try and remind myself of my friend’s wise words every single day. And maybe to also try and eat more kale.

Happy New Year!! Thanks so much for spending time here with me.