Tsunami-Bound Cruising

When my kids were away at camp last summer we couldn't call them, but there were a few other ways that we knew they were okay. There were about one hundred photos of the campers put up on the camp website each day for parents to search through who were desperate to look for their kids. I'd find them and, unfortunately, I'd usually get more alarmed from the pictures. Daughter, in her second week, was still hanging out with the only girl she knew when she left, and Bar Mitzvahzilla always seemed to be alone and flat up against a wall. There were my cheery letters to them, their desperate letters to me, and there were emails we could send, for a fee.

But when my mother and stepfather disappeared for four weeks onto a cruise ship setting off for South America, there was none of this. No contact at all. A big ship full of elderly passengers carting suitcases full of medications and not a peep.

And why, instead, shouldn't this be just like my kids' camp website? A security photo of my mother and stepfather leaving their room each day, my mother haranguing my stepfather as he locked the door of their room, would have given me plenty of assurance that they, indeed, were well. On the deck there could be live video feeds of shuffle board games, of bingo parties, of beret-wearing World War II vets all jauntily out for a stroll around the deck. Or simpler still, video of them rushing the dining room for the early dinner, day after day after day. Or of the sleepy ship come 8:00 PM.

Three weeks into her cruise, the earthquake hit Chile and tsunamis headed out over the Pacific ocean, and then I had to start worrying even more. Where was the ship exactly? Was it sitting at anchor in the middle of the Pacific, waiting for one of those tsunami waves to hit and crack it in half? Was this about to turn into the Poseiden Adventure, or the Titanic, the passengers clawing their way to air pockets, or making their way to tiny lifeboats?

Unfortunately, the cruise line website provided no help. Its only purpose was to sell cruises. You can click on entertainment, you can click on food, or you can click on accomodations, but, even if your loved ones are right now being plummetted by forty foot waves or sinking off the coast of Panama, the website would never mention this. The website is going to stay upbeat, the tone Pollyanna-ish. Nothing is ever going wrong in the their world! And anyway, didn't you see that the Day 22 shipboard activity on the itinerary is "sinking?"

It turns out you can get a message to your elderly parents on the ship but you have to be creative. You have to send them a gift, like a forty-nine dollar manicure, and as part of the gift there's a little gift card on which  you have one sentence to speak your piece. One of my sisters did just this.  Her card, instead of saying Enjoy or Have Fun, said, "CALL HOME AND TELL US IF YOU'RE OKAY! Love, Sandy."

We got the call, and eventually, we got my mother and my stepfather back. And now? They're not allowed to leave.

Am I right or just neurotic about needing some updates on my parents? Have you ever had a loved one in the middle of a disaster zone? Ever had your kids away at camp? Is there one person in your family who is just more persistent than the others, who will not take no for an answer?

Grandma Muttering Darkly

It was the evening of Daughter's preschool graduation. The children had all prepared and prepared for this big night, wearing costumes and little graduation caps and receiving scrolls that were their "diplomas." But there was something wrong. There was a weight upon my lap. Oh yes. Daughter, sitting on it, crying, and refusing to take place in the ceremony.

Why? Because she was a neurotic mess.

Me? Can't pull me away from a ceremony. Daughter? Sobbing on my lap.

Me? Participated in every piano recital I could get to, collecting miniature plastic Beethoven busts until they cast a shadow over my piano in Skokie. Daughter? Will only take lessons of any type if guaranteed ahead of time that there will be no performance.

This all would have been fine, just personally humiliating - nothing unusual for me as a parent - if I hadn't made the mistake of asking my mom to attend the graduation. I didn't always ask her to attend things, what with the leaving the house issue, and wearing enough coats and the sickness issue. But because I did, I had a double humiliation:  Daughter on my lap sobbing and my mother next to me muttering about spoiled children and how I should "make her go up there."

Flash back to Skokie, 1971. It was a big year for me. I had become a big time Skokie pianist, famous in my own mind. My amazing talent had catapulted me past all the other little Jewish girls marching reticently over to our piano teacher's apartment building each week and had managed to get me the hard version of every song the entire fifth grade was playing - from Sunrise Sunset to If I Were A Rich Man. This earned me two distinct accolades: a spot in the elementary school orchestra playing Kumbalalaika, and a spot playing Love Story in front of the entire auditorium for my fifth grade graduation.

My piano teacher was there. My friend's trampy mafia-hooker mother was there, a ring of empty seats around her. My teachers were there. Guess who wasn't there for either performance? My mom. In 1971 she was busy all year readying herself for my oldest sister's wedding. In 1978, the year I graduated high school, she was busy all year readying herself for the third sister's wedding. This year I'm turning 50. She'll be away on a cruise. Coincidence?

Yet she sat there fuming at my sweet, nutty Daughter, like she herself was an expert at graduation ceremonies. Little did she know, later that evening that little nut of mine reenacted the entire ceremony for us from start to finish. She sang all the songs, danced all the dances, and had me call out her name with her play microphone so she could come up to our pretend podium in our family room and get her diploma.

No sobbing, no sitting on my lap. No muttering grandma looking on.

Are you the kind of parent who goes to everything or just the necessary things? Did your parents attend every function when you were a kid? Do your kids relish time in the spotlight or shy away from it?

A big thank you to Kristen at Motherese, for reminding me about the topic of neurotic children!

In the Help Haiti Blog Challenge, from Jan. 15th to Jan. 20th this blog received 48 comments, for which I am donating $2 each to the Red Cross, or $96.00, and adding an additional contribution of $54.00 to equal $150. Thank you for helping me help Haiti.

A Dunce of a Mom

Daughter is in her fifth day of being sick and today had her second doctor appointment, at which I finally convinced the doctor to put Daughter on an antibiotic. Then I told my mom about it.

My mom loves nothing better than to search and search out a problem and find a solution. The solution to the problem of Daughter being sick was simple: it was because of my shoddy parenting. Everything can always be blamed on me.

She says, "You probably didn't dress her warm enough. That's how she got sick in the first place."

Thanks, mom.

Or, "You didn't feed her enough. She's too skinny. She wouldn't get sick if she weighed more." Okay, that's number two. But since she's starting to rile me up, I'm wondering if it's time to get off the phone yet. Have we talked long enough?

Then I get, "You never should have taken her to the football game yesterday."

Look, if it was up to me, you can bet I would have chosen a day at home with Sick Daughter to a day with eighty thousand screaming and yelling fans at a football stadium, but my mom knows Cheap Husband pretty well by now. There's no way he would willingly say goodbye to $200 on Daughter's unused seat at the game. This is actually outside the realm of possibility.

I'm not saying I'm not a complete dunce of a mother. There are some things that I'm so stupid about that it's scary. I can't put a meal together to save my life. I'm too lenient, constantly wanting to give my kids the childhood I never had by buying it for them. But I know my medical. With nearly lifelong asthma and eighteen years working for a Gigantic Insurance Company, I know my medical. I can diagnose, I can treat. I just can't prescribe or I would've had Daughter on an antibiotic already.

Now that I've been insulted enough, I'm ready to get off the phone, but my mom's not. Before our call ends, she squeezes one more in. One to ruin my week and give me guilt. She says, "You can't send her to school tomorrow. You better keep her home all week."

Thanks, mom. Glad I called.

My Mother's Merry Chrismukkah

Here's proof that somehow my mother and I have switched roles and I've become her mother:  I'm the big Jew in the family and she's rejected all of our traditions.  Now she's constantly on the defensive with me, trying to justify her lack of adherence.

Two days ago Bar Mitzvahzilla, Daughter and I went over there - that would be on December 23rd. I knew from other Decembers that it would be a shock walking in, but still.  My Holocaust Survivor mother's house, filled with Christmas tchochkes.  And she's so proud of them, trying to take the kids on a tour of Christmas in her family room.  Did they notice the Santa with the full sleigh of Christmas cards from all her old real estate clients she never told she was Jewish?  Did they notice the tinsel, the little Christmas tree, the garlands, the lights, the reindeer, the candles?

My kids and I stood there like triplet biblical Moses', our mouths hanging open.  We were appalled. She realized the kids didn't want a tour of the winter wonderland, and then she looked at me and said, "What?"

"Ma, look at your house! What kind of role model are you for the kids?  You're their Jewish bubbe! And you're a Holocaust Survivor! You're supposed to be my backup here."

She said, "I have something for Hanukah." And she pointed to a thin, scraggly piece of dreidel garland, covered with dust, nearly obscured by the blinking Christmas lights nearby.

This is how I know that my life has descended into irony, that I've crossed the final line, and that I'm raising my mother, and badly.  I can't make her a Jew.  I don't even know how I made myself a Jew.

One time when I was a kid in Skokie we found a tiny, white, plug-in Christmas tree in the alley behind our house and we snuck it inside our laundry room.  I remember the hemming and hawing, trying to figure out the best way to ask mom if we could keep it - like it was a load of heroin we had stashed in the basement. Finally we told her and she came for an inspection.  It was a cheerful little thing, blinking on and off like a migraine headache.  She said, "You can keep it if you hide it down here.  Just don't let your grandmother see it."

And we sat there, for a couple weeks at least, mom sewing, the little tree blinking, me playing Barbies.  Ar least until the day my dad burst in and found it, snapped it half, and hid it in a non-Jewish neighbor's garbage can. Even our garbage had to be Jewish.

My mother now has a blinking tree.  My dad - long dead - gets me.

The Germ Factory

I had planned my mom's visit to my house for my Chanukah party very carefully.  She'd been sick for a while, with the kind of cough that sprays you through the phone, so I thought, surely she'd understand a touch of germ paranoia now!  Especially in this season of the miserable H1N1, when everyone knows the danger of spreading germs.  Surely even my mother will be on board now with my requests not to pick at the food. 

She always makes fun of Husband and me for this exact issue.  Her version of science, pre-1940, indicates
that she only gets sick from cold not from germs.  Of course, she spent World War II living in the Polish forest without a coat, so maybe that's understandable.  But basically, if she can't see it, it doesn't exist.  Meanwhile, she's sick all the time.  My family - I blame Husband - goes with modern scientific theory: cover your mouth when sneezing, don't share germs on purpose.

My mother doesn't believe in any of this.  Loudly.  Her standard answer, perfected over the forty-nine years of my life to an ear-splitting shriek is, "You think you're so smart, Linda!  Well, I raised all seven of you and managed not to kill anyone!"

So she comes over for the Chanukah party and there are a lot of seating options.  She can sit at the long, long kitchen table, far away from the food serving area.  She can sit on one of the couches, also far, far away from the food serving area.  But no.  She sits on a bar stool, right on top of the food serving area, the better so that she can pick at the food. With her fingers.

In my larger family, the family with the seven sisters, for some reason hands are serving utencils.  There's some connection here with dieting that I haven't quite figured out yet, like if they pick, pick, pick at the food with their fingers - no plate - the calories don't count. Because if someone says, "Did you have a piece of cake?" The answer can legitimately be "No." No piece of cake was obtained.  The cake was just picked at until crumbs remained on the platter, but no legitimate slice of cake was placed on a plate and consumed, like a real human being.  So, no calories. 

In my family, platters of meat disappear this way, containers of potato salad are demolished, and, yes, cakes vanish into thin air.

So my mother sat there, sick, picking at all the food, glaring at me if I glared at her, refusing my offer of a plate or for me to make her a sandwich, seat her at the table, a choice chair perhaps - anywhere!  Then I noticed everyone at the party was picking except my little family of germophobes. 

And I thought, okay, obviously I'm the lunatic here.  What did it matter anyway?  Since we knew this was going to happen, husband and I, Bar Mitzvahzilla and Daughter made sure and isolated ourselves from those germs:  we ate before the party.

Latke Come Lately

My mom was in charge of making the latkes - potato pancakes - for the family Channukah party at my house last night. Would the latkes make it to the party? 

All day I was subjected to a barrage of phone calls advising me about the latkes' progress.  First it was the sheer volume of the potatos - how many pounds - twenty, thirty, a truckload? Then the misery of the peeling.  The agony of the chopping and the woe of the grinding.  I was happy to hear that she wasn't using a hand grinder anymore but still, she was out of date, using a no name blender that she bought with S&H green stamps in the 60s.  It broke in the middle of grinding.  Could I bring her mine?  Sure mom, I'm just getting the house ready for the fifty people who are coming over tonight. No problem. 


While over there I saw the latke factory she'd set up:  her ancient, black, ten-thousand pound skillets sitting on her uneven electric coils.  The cooking spray she had pulled out of a cabinet to convince me it'd be safe to eat her latkes even though the pans were coated deep with oil. The latkes, after fried, sleeping smashed and smushed on top of each other in casserole dishes in her oven melding into one huge, square latke, the super duper latke of my dreams, coming to my house in three hours. 

But would they make it?  My mother had been sick and holed up in her house for two weeks.  She'd been avoiding all fresh air since she was certain that air was the cause of all her problems.  How would she manage to get to my house without breathing the outside air?

She drives over, the latkes steaming in her car, the serving dishes wrapped in towels - some secret old country method of heat-preservation - and then she gets trapped at the gate into my neighborhood.  It's not like I'd actually expect her to be able to enter a gate code.  I don't.  I know she and Stepfather could never in their lives figure out what a pound key is.  Something about the key pad and telephone hanging there just don't compute with them; apparently, they expect an operator to get on the line.  To avoid this, I gave them their own gate opener, which they still can't manage to operate.  Pretty soon there are people backing up behind them all the way onto the main street.

So she calls me from her cell to tell me she's trapped.  Can I leave the party and lope out there with my gate clicker to open it for her?  Can I send Bar Mitzvahzilla out there on a latke rescue mission, looking for Mom and Stepfather in her souped up Toyota Matrix and let them in?

Suddenly she says, "Oh, never mind, Linda.  The gate is opening!  It worked!" And she hangs up on me, the Toyota - latke express - creeping along on its way till she pulls up.

The House that Technology Forgot

On Wednesday I stopped by my mother's house, just for a moment, I swore.  My mom's sick and I was bringing her some magazines, a little care package of sorts, and checking on her just to see how badly she's bungling up her medical treatment.

I promised myself I would not get roped into fixing her whole world at once, as I noticed the cacti in her front yard falling or dead but still propped up with huge slings and stakes, the ham radio antennae strung in the palm trees, and the broken locks on her front door.  No, I would stick to the tasks at hand.  Magazine delivery, medical monitoring.

My mission was accomplished, I was ready to leave.  Suddenly, Stepfather came into view.  A nice man, he's been my Stepfather now for nearly twenty years now.  The secret to their marital longevity?  Mom yells, he's deaf.

He said, "Linda, could you take a look at my computer for a second?"

A seemingly innocuous question from anyone else.  But I'm not that dumb:  this is a trap.  If eighty-four-year-old Stepfather asked me to look at his computer for a second, I might just never leave their house.   Stepfather can touch the wrong key on his computer and the power grids in three states go out.  Maybe I'm remembering this wrong, but I believe he once fixed the light switch in my mother's bathroom so that each time we turned it on, the toilet flushed. 

I gave him a weak smile, "What do you need help with?"

"Just a password."

So I went into Stepfather's lair, which is kind of his computer room and kind of my mom's sewing room at the same time.  The printer was loaded with different colored paper from every flyer that had ever been dropped off at their house.  He reuses everything.  He was reducing his carbon footprint before it even became fashionable.

The computer was not as bad as I imagined.  It was set up to make everything as hard as possible for him to find.  Kind of like if you thought books were your main reference tool and the computer was a backup for the books instead of the other way around.  I fixed the password and, I couldn't resist, I gave him a few shortcuts, and then, I was gone.

Past the broken lock, past the ham radio wires, past the falling cactus.