Jet Lagged

First there was just the fact that I needed to write a blog post. After all, I had a lot to write about. It was summer in Arizona. That's always seemed to lend itself to a lot of whining.

But then, when mulling over vacation spots, I somehow convinced Husband to run wild and free and farther than he'd ever gone before. We suddenly booked four flights to Israel. With two weeks notice.

I could still have written a blog post, but then again, we only had flights booked. We had no place to stay. Can I even try to count how many nights I sat in my office instead of working, with one web browser up with a Google map of Tel Aviv, another of Jerusalem and yet another with Vacation Rentals in Israel?

There were the flights: seventeen hours there and eighteen hours back. There was the jet lag, a day on the way there and a week long after we got back. There was the crazy, mixed-up, beautiful insanity of being in Israel, of going on tours with our guide driving around hairpin turns with a Jewish Bible in one hand and the steering wheel in the other. There was my broken hair straightener, which led to me being assumed for Israeli everywhere we went, with my gigantic head of something almost resembling hair. There was the moment the four of us were crammed into a minuscule grocery store, frantically trying to buy food for the Sabbath, and staring at the all Hebrew packaging around us. We had no idea what anything was. There was standing at the Western Wall, with women all scrambling for a spot to talk to God, standing there crying, one next to another.

And just when I was figuring things out, just when the money wasn't looking like play money to me any longer and I could actually figure out what the change was in my wallet, just when the sounds around me started to sound familiar - like language - we left.

How was your summer vacation? Have you ever been on a vacation and left a piece of yourself there?

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This week Kristen over at Motherese has posted a book review of Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie and will post an interview with me tomorrow. She is also giving away a copy of the book, the winner will be drawn from those who leave comments. Please head over there!

 

Paper Jam

Here's the scene: it's my bedroom. The bed, to be exact. Nicely made, every thing looking normal, except there's a very large and disorderly pile of papers on the bed. Very, very large.

Suddenly the pile of paper moves. It breathes. It coughs. A voice can be heard from inside the pile of papers - my voice - exclaiming at the volume of paper, the quantity of paper, the sheer duplicative quantity of paper.

Of course - it's the camp paperwork and I've gotten buried beneath it.

My kids have gone to the same summer day camp almost every summer for the last six or seven years. The first year the amount of paperwork was a terrible surprise. I paid the camp fees, filled out a nice little two-sided sheet with our family information and a credit card number and, with a smile on my face, prepared to walk away. Suddenly I was handed a brick of paperwork and told to complete the forms contained in it for each child and then registration would be complete.

There's the normal stuff in there, like the contact sheet with phone numbers, and then there's stuff like the "Get to know your camper" sheet where I have to tell them about my children's psychological foibles to maybe smooth their way through their weeks there. Husband and I have had no small amount of fun over the years imagining what we'd really like to write under "Child's Three Favorite Activities" as opposed to what we actually write there. Not to mention the "Three characteristics that best describe your child." There's the challah order form, the lunch order form, the aftercare form - which needs to be filled out whether we use aftercare or not - and the friend request form. Then there's the one form I have to fill out twice: the medical/immunization form.

I've come to realize this form is created only to torture me since I must obtain my children's immunization records and then transpose those records onto the form. Each year I peer quizzically at the immunization form from the doctor's office, where they've abbreviated certain shots under one name, and tried to match them up to the form, where they've abbreviated them another.

As the years have gone by, my dread of doing this paperwork has sometimes become a deciding factor in whether my kids will go to camp, kind of like the "Sponge-worthy" Seinfeld episode. Is it paperwork-worthy? Is one week of camp worth it to fill out the paperwork? A resounding no. Two weeks? Three?

I jump back in the pile, pick up my pen with my claw-like hand, and finish the task.

Are your kids in summer camp? How voluminous are the enrollment forms? Every get overwhelmed and discouraged by paperwork?

The Second Summer of Yes

I'm anticipating a difficult summer, a repeat of last summer, which I optimistically called The Summer of Yes, though that was before I lived it. 

What a brilliant idea, after all! A summer in which my kids would have to say "Yes" to all my goofball ideas of great activities! Let's go to Taliesin West, kids! Let's go to the Jewish Museum! Let's go to the library, let's go to Arcosanti, let's go antiquing and to romantic comedies with mom! Yes, yes and yes!

This is not exactly what happened. Daughter was onboard if ice skating and Peter Piper Pizza were included. Bar Mitzvahzilla? Apparently he thought it was the Summer of No.

He told me he only wanted to play on his PlayStation. All summer, nonstop. As in, "Mom, can you just drop me off at home?" And then, "Can I go on the PlayStation when we get there?" Well, from time to time we could run out to the gaming store and buy another game for sixty dollars. Wow, that was nice of him, to let us spend time together.

About three years ago, I decided to override my husband's wise counsel and bought Bar Mitzvahzilla a PlayStation 2 game system. He was already twelve and was apparently the last child anywhere in the Western Hemisphere who didn't have a gaming system. He was already a social outcast - there were legions of boys who weren't interested in coming over to our house to hang out because there wasn't anything to do there - despite our basketball hoop and air hockey table. One time a boy came over and expressed astonishment that we had a nice house; the kids at school had all assumed that we were poor because Bar Mitzvahzilla didn't have a gaming system.

So I gave in, buckled. I said yes. I told Husband that we could keep this thing under control. It'd be used when friends were over only. And anyway, seeing my son stick out like such a sore thumb reminded me of myself as a kid, when friends came over with their perfect Barbies with store-bought Barbie clothes, and then I'd pull out what passed for a Barbie in our house: a Barbie body with a freckled Skipper head and one leg. And it was naked. I felt my boy's misery.

After two years had passed, I had to shovel past criss-crossed mounds of wires just to find my son somewhere tangled in the middle, the computer addict needing more, more, more. And just like they say happens with drugs, the purchases didn't stop with the Playstation. Soon there it was yes to the Wii, yes to the XBox, and yes to the iTouch, which I actually thought he'd use for music. Little did I know he could download games.

Sometimes things I don't want to look at closely kind of dance around the edges of my brain and then, when I finally notice them, my brain kicks back on and I can act swiftly. So when Bar Mitzvahzilla tried to opt out of every activity last summer in favor of staying home with his favorite friend in the world, the PlayStation,  well, that was it. It became the "Summer of No" all right, but with me saying No.

So I took it all away. He put up a good fight, asking me hundreds of times after the ban if he could use it anyway, waiting to tire me out, insisting he had nothing to do. And of course he had nothing to do. He had become the most boring child in the world, with no interests except gaming. With it all gone, we just had to wait and find out who existed under there.

But by the middle of the first week he was playing basketball in the driveway and then he put on his Rollerblades and zoomed around the neighborhood. By that Friday he became aware of the existence of other people in the world again, and actually had a conversation with his sister.

Who would have thought that it took saying "no" to get my kid to say "yes?"

Have any gaming troubles in your household? Budding addicts like mine? Have you ever taken it all away? Planning any amazing outings for your kids this summer? Doing any Mommy Day Camp like me? 

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Yesterday was the release day for Aidan Donnelley Rowley's book, Life After Yes. Aidan blogs over at Ivy League Insecurities and has written her debut novel which is getting great reviews! Go to Amazon and buy it now and after you're done reading it participate in the book club discussion on Motherese about it!

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Falling Cactus

My mother has returned from spending the summer in Northern Arizona. After calling me all summer and making fun of Phoenix for being too hot all summer - which was her way of inviting me up to visit - it finally got too cold up there and she returned home.

Because I live the closest to her of her seven daughters, my mother calls upon me for general house maintenance and run of the mill slavery while she's in Flagstaff. There's the dead and dying arboretum in her front yard that she calls landscaping and which must be tended to. I don't take care of it, I just call to tell her when, finally, her last living cactus has keeled over and whether it's hit the house. Also, for some reason, my mother and stepfather don't fully understand the idea of stopping the paper when they leave for three months, so I have to swing by, pick up the papers that have accumulated on the driveway, and throw them behind her front pillar. After a long, hot summer, the shade behind the pillar and her leaky hose, it turns out I've pretty much started a mulch pile.

Since my mother is elderly, there's no imposition that she won't foist upon me to make her life easier and my life harder. The newest one, just invented this summer, is that now, when she's driving down from Flagstaff, she wants me to pop over to her house and turn on her air conditioning so it will be cool for them when they get there. I need to do this at exactly 9:00 in the morning. They've timed this exactly. They'll be there at 11, which will give the house two hours to cool off from a summer with the air conditioning off. So she wants to know - is there a problem? Can't the kids go to school at a different time? And what do I mean, I need to be at exercise at 9:15?

The next thing I knew, she was back in town but there was dead silence, unusual for someone who usually announces her presence with, "What, you can't come over to see me? You're so busy?" Both her home phone and cell phone were malfunctioning. I left a message on the cell even though I know she's never figured out how to retrieve them.

By the time I got to her house, another sister was already there. She greeted me with cries of, "Oy, Linda! You're so skinny! A size four?" This is actually her standard greeting or farewell comment. When we were leaving she said the same thing as a goodbye to my sister. "Oy, Eileen! You're so skinny! A size four?"

She's back home. Her ringer's back on. Her house is cooled off. The TV's turned on to something that keeps her up at night, like a Holocaust special. Things are back to normal.

Long, Dry Summer

When I was in high school I spent a month each summer with extended family in Chicago. Each summer I would reappear in my old Skokie life like an apparition, and to strangers I was a very rare thing indeed: the Arizona cousin. "There are Jews in Arizona?," people would say, like I was the Loch Ness monster and maybe they should take a picture. Then I'd suffer through an examination from head to toe while they assessed whether I was really this thing I claimed to be, this Arizona Jew. After a few times, I knew what was coming next, the question: "If you're from Arizona, why don't you have a tan?"

Since I've lived in Arizona since 1973, I'm going to claim a little bit of expertise on this topic, though I'll readily recognize that there were people here before me, like the Neanderthals. Let's put it this way, when I moved to Arizona, kids in my eighth grade class rode horses to school. That was a little too country for me. The big event in Skokie before I moved had been getting a Star of David necklace for Hanukkah; the big thing in Scottsdale in 1973 was going to a weekend tent revival.

So here's the big secret that people in the rest of the country might not understand: people in Arizona don't have tans because when you live in Arizona, you actually don't go out in the sun at all, at least from May through September. You are positively paranoid about the sun. You wear SPF 1000 inside your house in case some sunlight gets through the window, on which you have a sunshade anyway. When you go driving anywhere, like even to the corner market, you carry a jug of water, because if your car breaks down you could die of dehydration before help arrives. Your children wear Transition lenses on their eyeglasses because you're afraid of them getting cataracts before their time, like when they're teenagers.

It's very dry here. So dry that when I moved here, I didn't understand why bottles of lotion were constantly being passed around among women who would swoon at the sight of them, reaching for them with their hands shaking in ecstasy. Now I understand. Each morning I take my shower and then I slather on lotion from head to toe. If I didn't do this, my whole body would actually crack into a million tiny pieces and fall to the bathroom floor. Then comes sunscreen for my whole body, secret anti-aging wrinkle creams, more lotions, more sunscreens. I end up so greased up that when I get in my car I actually slip right out again.

Soon I'll be heading to California where people actually leave their homes and have outside lives. It seems unbelievable, but I'm going to feel a breeze on my face. And when I meet Californians they'll look at me and get a quizzical look in their eyes; they'll look me up and down, and then they'll say, "If you're from Arizona, why don't you have a tan?"

Carrying Baggage

Since neither my husband nor I ever went to overnight camp as kids, we kind of botched up a few things as we sent our kids off last Thursday.

First of all we sent the kids with real luggage, like the rolling king of luggage you would take on an airplane. We got to the the synagogue rendezvous point and, trust me, there was no baggage like this besides our kids'. Their bags stood there - green, bulky and square, with roller wheels on the bottom - while every other bag was a soft-side duffel. When they head off on their camping trips into the forest, my children will need a valet.

I can't help it that I was raised like a wolf. My mother's idea of summer camp in Skokie was to shoo me and my six sisters out of the house into the garage to play all day. We'd wait for the milkman; then we'd wait for the pop man. Or maybe some boys would ride by from the other school district and we would chase them - that one activity could occupy us until school started in September. That was a typical summer.

Since my parents were Holocaust Survivors, they didn't quite understand the concept of summer camp. First of all, the word "camp?" Not good. Concentration Camp, Displaced Persons Camp, Labor Camp - those were camps. After all, they had both come out of the DP camps after the war. Were they expected to send their own children there on purpose? Of course not. Also, it cost money. My parents only spent money on food and shelter. If there was any money left over, my dad bought a new station wagon.

My parents also couldn't understand why we'd be interested in the deprivations of camp. Why would I want to give up living in the lap of luxury in Skokie in a three-bedroom house with nine people, sharing a bedroom with four sisters and sharing the bathroom with seven? How could I give up the authentic immigrant feistiness of my family - the fistfights over a salami, murder over a matzo ball - to go live among American strangers?

But on camp drop-off day, my kids are oblivious. Even paranoid Bar Mitzvahzilla, who will micromanage his underwear, doesn't care about having baggage that clearly shows not only is he a novice at this, but his parents? Novices too.

Their bags get on the bus, they get on the bus, and they're gone.

Perfect Day for the Public Pool

Yes, I promised the kids that we'd go swimming at the public pool today, the one with a high-dive, a low-dive, a fountain, and a waterslide, thousands of kids and parents.

Yes, it's probably the hottest day of the year so far. My car - which is pretty smart - says it's 107.

Yes, I'll admit it, I was a little excited when I left for my exercise class this morning and it was drizzling, thinking, Don't they close pools when it rains? Because then I thought I wouldn't have to go and I'd get to do my favorite Mom camp activity - go see a movie.

But yes, because we live in Arizona, the clouds didn't last long and the sun came out again, a sweltering, suffocating, kind of sun today.

Yes, it's true, I won't swim. This isn't because I hate my body. I've talked about this before, but let's just say that, except for my daily shower, I find the process of being wet excruciating.

Yes, I'm going to try to have an out-of-body experience while I'm sitting there melting on my folding lawn chair, maybe pretending I'm on the beach somewhere with a cool breeze on my face.

Yes, I'll probably faint and have to be revived by paramedics. This has happened before in much cooler places.

Yes, I'm bringing a book to read, my writer's notebook, and a bunch of magazines, but I'll probably just get on my phone and waste all my time yakking to a bunch of people and get nothing done.

Yes, my kids will ask for money for the vending machines which only accept dollars and which will malfunction right after they put their money in. Right then all the pool employees will have suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. If I find someone, they'll look at me blankly and say, "I'm sorry, Ma'am, but you have to call the number on the machines to get a refund of your dollar."

Yes, though I've planned this very carefully, going late to coincide with sundown since the pool stays open late, it won't work out like I've planned. The pool will be dirty from being open all day, the day will stay hot, a breeze will never stir, the kids will never want to get out, and the sun will never set.

And Yes, they'll want to do it again.

All Wet

My kids have started up their yearly clamor to get a pool, but they've run into an unyielding object standing in the way of their desire: their Dad. There'd be no problem with me getting a pool - I actually will spend money on anything. Just the idea of buying a pool gets the shopper in me kind of worked up: the process of picking one, choosing waterfall features, accent tiles, watching the yard get dug up, filling up the pool for days with a garden hose. You can always get a compulsive shopper to shop, after all.

But the immovable ox that I'm married to has a a lot of objections. Even his objections have objections.

Since he considers himself some type of Olympic swimmer - the Jewish, 54-year-old, three time a week-type of Olympic swimmer anyway - he could never get in his weekly swimming in a backyard pool. No, he must have swimming lanes and bobbing buoys; he's got to fight silently and mentally with the other swimmers who are trying to encroach on his space and, especially, with any swim team that shows up to practice, even if they're children. And there are his other reasons: the money, the money, and the money.

Then he throws the whole question on me: "Ask Mom if she'd swim in it." And the kids both look at me expectantly.

I'm not exactly what you'd call a natural athlete. As a child, if a ball was thrown towards me I'd duck rather than catch it. I spent long hours swinging like Tarzan from the knot at the end of the rope in our gym class in Skokie wondering why the teacher was yelling at me to climb. I had climbed. I had climbed up there, hadn't I?

Same thing with swimming. I never even dunked my head till I was eleven. My mother finally signed me up for a swim class where we were grouped by skill level not age level, so I was with the five-year-olds. One day, the instructor told us to abandon our nose plugs and open our eyes under water. I abandoned the class instead. To this day, to get a really good swim, I need a snorkel and mask. And a wetsuit.

And now there are grown-up reasons not to swim.

For example, when I take my shower each day, the stuff on my head that is supposed to be human hair dries on its own into an interesting, Jewish-type of fur ball. You know when people have naturally curly hair and other people love it and talk them into wearing it naturally? No one's ever said that to me. They call 911. It takes at least ten specialty products to make my hair resemble something that is supposed to grow out of a human being's head as opposed to something that's supposed to grow on a lawn.

There's the bathing suit problem: the fact that there are parts of my body that are not meant for daytime, sunlit viewing. There are parts of me that I can't even stand to look at, and it's my body. And when I get into the water, some of that unviewable stuff becomes flotation devices. My thighs levitate and, if I walk through the water, the fat part of me either stays behind or zooms on ahead. This doesn't actually happen to me on dry land, which leads me to the conclusion that I'm meants to be on dry land.

When we were leaving Chicago for Arizona in 1973 and my father didn't want to tell people all the myriad reasons why we were moving - from the asthmatic child to his own heart attack - all he had to say was that we had bought a house with a swimming pool in the backyard. Boiled down to its essential essence, it became this: we were moving to Arizona to get a swimming pool.

After five years passed, things had changed. There was, unfortunately, no more father; he had died of a second heart attack. And that pool, that wondrous mirage in the desert? It had become a swamp in our backyard, greenish brown, with some type of hissing and bubbling primordial ooze growing in it. Let's put it this way, no one was swimming in it.

So, sorry kids, we can't get a pool. Maybe next year.

A Day in the Life

Just in case anyone cares, just in case anyone is even reading this, or even if this is just for me, I just want to point out that it's 108 degrees here in Phoenix every day. Last week, when we had just returned from the sweaty, rainy Puerto Vallarta, I kind of liked the "dry" heat, but no more.
Today, since somehow my kids' school starts later than every other child's in Arizona, we all got to hang together for errands.

As usual, they were stuck with me for my morning Jazzercise class. Yes, I would leave my now-thirteen-year-old son home alone and certainly he could watch the eight-year-old, but neither will stay home without me. So he skulks along, walking in the babysitting room filled with two-year-old boys who are eager to get to know him. He hides in the corner with a Star Wars book.

Then on to my sister's chocolate store to approve the centerpieces which were, wow, ongepotchke and ongeblozen and onge-everything. They are about 3 feet tall and silver and blue and have Jewish symbols coming out of the bottom made out of chocolate. Then she showed me the candlelighting thing she put together for me. Bar Mitzvazilla's name is in letters about 10 inches high - a little too big for my liking but I guess everyone at the Bar Mitzvah party should know it's DANIEL's Bar Mitzvah, just in case they forgot. Maybe the glitter will remind them. Or the long white tapers. Or the glittery Jewish stars on the sides. Maybe all of that.

Then we went to a party store to find helium and a huge bag of candy. Came away empty handed. Then we went to another store to find a backpack for the daughter. Came away empty handed. Since it was next to a pet store, we had to stop in there an stare mournfully at the cats for adoption and try to catch the eye of another female Beta, just in case another one could ever be as special as our last fish who died six months ago. No chance. Then onto the library where, once again, I had to turn myself into the library authorities to pay fines for my kids' late fees and hand over replacement books for the books my daughter has lost.

Lunch. Grocery store. Cantor tutoring. Hot, hot, hot. Car off, car on. A/C blasting, then hot again as we re-enter the vehicle.

Phone calls to best friend with cancer, my neighbor, my sister. Collapse. But I can't collapse.
It's only 5:45 pm.