Daughter vs. the Wall

Lately Daughter's been on a cleaning spree. Not of our kitchen island, on which she has scattered arts and crafts supplies and anything and everything she could dump on there. Not of our family room where she has snuck plates, wrappers, cups, and cans, treating "her chair" in the middle of the room like it's her private garbage can, while not having anything actually make it into a garbage can.

Instead, she's suddenly started cleaning out her room. First she had an idea, which she presented to me and Husband in compelling detail: her room is too small and we need to take the wall down between it and the room next door. She had some drawings handy for how this would be accomplished, had chosen paint colors, and had a white board showing the eventual placement of her futon (she doesn't actually have a futon) and her walk-in closet (ditto). Every morning during my recent illness, the first thing I saw when I cracked my eyes open was Daughter standing at the foot of my bed with her white board and easel, ready to provide me with a detailed presentation on the subject. And, by any chance, do I happen to have the blueprints for our house laying about? 

Husband expressed some doubt that she could actually keep a space twice as large clean. "Let's see you clean up the room you've got and then we'll talk about it," he said.

His statement, I'm sure, is what triggered the cleaning frenzy.

This is how our lives were before: once a year or so, Daughter would lure me into her room on some pretense, I'm not sure what, and I'd find myself still sitting there about two days later sorting through junk, Daughter by my side and two gigantic bags nearby - one for giveaway and one for garbage. We'd slowly move through the room until it was clean, or at least vacuumable.

But Daughter, in her present cleaning frenzy, is handling things differently. She is slowly divesting herself of everything in the room, till now it resembles a prison cell or nun's chamber. Basically, there's a bed in there.  She's emptied out her dresser, one whole side of her closet, packed away some chairs she once loved, and has told me she doesn't need her bookshelves anymore. Or books.

I'm unsure of what's exactly going on here. Is she moving out? Because she's only eleven. I'm all for the kids moving out but I had kind of thought they'd wait till they got through middle school.

Husband thinks he can hold her off, keep setting new and more miserable cleaning tasks for her, trying to avoid the home renovation issue, the big daughter/small room issue. But I know what's going to happen. With Daughter's indomitable will, once she's done with her emptying, she'll take down that wall herself.

Do you ever recognize a will stronger than your own in your child or children? Messy kids? Determined kids?

Essential Yiddish: Part II

 

                                                    "Yiddish" in Yiddish 

I've been meaning to write a follow up to my post, Essential Yiddish: Part I, for quite some time. Not that I'm some kind of Yiddish expert. It's just that, having grown up with Yiddish swirling around my suburban Skokie house, listening to my mother give colorful commentary on everyone who walked in and out of our lives, I can't imagine life without it. Yiddish, to use a Yiddish word, is poonkt - a Yiddish word for getting something just right, perfectly, even if we're talking about my house, which is never actually just right or perfect.

                                                   The Yiddish Hoarder

The other day I was watching "Hoarders: Buried Alive." When the show was over I suddenly noticed that I hadn't seen my master bathtub in quite a while because of all the chazerai [haz-er-eye] (junk) I had piled in it. This was because I had taken that chazerai out of my closet and needed somewhere to put it. It's a constantly shifting pile of drek (see Post #1) around here, basically.

Since I was watching Hoarders with Daughter, a true nudnik [nood-nick] (precocious child), she noticed the resemblance between the house on the TV set and my bathroom. She said, "Mom, you're a hoarder!"

I took a deep breath. Instead of shraying [shrie-ing] (yelling) about it, moaning about it, wailing about it, I looked around and I thought, I need all that chazerai like a loch in kopp (hole in my head). But I wasn't sure I'd have the coyach [koy-ach] (energy) to do all the cleaning myself. So I asked the kleina [klayna] (little one) nudnik to help and Bar Mitzvahzilla, who, with all his football training, has become quite the shtarker (heavy lifter, tough guy).

And soon, though I was farmisht (exhausted); though I thought I might plotz (collapse) - the tub? Gornisht [gor-neesh-ed] (nothing). Empty.

Do you have things laying around that you need like a hole in your head? Do you find yourself using one of your kids for heavy lifting and that they have to help you now instead of vice versa? Do you have a secondary language that adds some color to your speech?

Dream House

I've lived in my house for almost seventeen years. We built this house as newlyweds and I've been stuck here ever since. I need to just face the fact that I'm never getting out of this house.

I should have known when I met Husband that he wasn't the kind of guy who moved around a lot. He was pretty settled in his own nice little house back then. The fact that it was in a neighborhood that was crumbling around him, with dangerous youth gangs roaming the streets, never fazed him. He wasn't the kind of guy who just up and moved. He had to think about it first for a few decades. Also, he came from a family who didn't like change either, like they'd nail a picture up on the wall in 1946 and that's where it would stay for the next sixty years.

Meanwhile, in my family, my mother spent the sixties repainting, recarpeting, refurbishing. If she ran out of money, she just picked up our furniture and threw it down, like dice, into a new decorating configuration. She could never leave anything alone, except permanent fixtures, like light switches and staircases.

I'm not saying my house isn't great, on the inside. Somehow, in 1993 when we bought it, before we even had kids, we ended up with a house with enough space. Nowadays we use a lot more of that space, but still, we're not squished.

But this great house is plopped on a postage stamp piece of property, and the house takes up most of it. If I reach an arm out the window, I can almost touch my neighbor's house. Our front yards are gravel, like the alleys were back in Chicago. In Arizona this is called "landscaping." Since grass doesn't grow naturally here, our backyard has a combination of dirt and weeds that we like to call a lawn.

So I stalk houses with land. I stalk houses with big kids' bedrooms. I stalk houses with views. I stalk houses in neighborhoods that don't have HOAs. I stalk houses with gigantic laundryrooms that don't have doors to the garage at one end of them. I could settle for a house that had a laundryroom that could actually fit a laundry basket in it.

For right now, I think I'll go rearrange some furniture.

Do you always feel like everything would be perfect if you lived in a different place? Do you live in different circumstances than those you grew up in?

Desert Ruins

My mom's been burrowed up inside her house for about a week, since it got cold in Arizona. This would be fine except that, based on how it's built, it's probably colder in there than it is outside.  Her house, built in 1973 with construction methods that can only be called a little primitive, was built to keep cold in and heat out, not really helpful in the winter.  There's basically the wall of cinder blocks, then there's the sheet rock, and then there's my mom, shivering inside and wearing a coat.

When we moved to Arizona, we had quite a job finding a house.  There were seven girls - six unmarried - and my parents, so we needed like ten thousand bedrooms.  In Skokie we had somehow gotten by with three bedrooms, which made for a very intense home life.  There were the Parents in one bedroom, and then there were the seven daughters split into the two remaining bedrooms: two sets of clawing, fighting sisters battling it out for every inch of space.

The whole move of ours turned out to be quite a shock anyway.  Going from four seasons to two seasons, from snowstorms to duststorms, from trees to cactus, was all quite a shock. And going from a home that had some substance, like a basement and a second story and bricks, to a house that looked like a flat domino that had been thrown across the surface of the desert, that took some getting used to.

My parents searched and searched.  The house had to be just right:  not too close to the Jewish community, not too far.  Kind of more in a Jewish expatriot community.  One day, after we overheard our own real estate agent use an anti-semitic term to refer to negotiating, my dad stormed out of the house we were looking at.  There, across the street, was a billboard for the neighborhood in which we ended up:  Rich Rosen's Hacienda Del Sol.  Perfect.  A street of sixteen houses, all filled with Jews.

We just needed some basic information.  How many bedrooms?  Five.  Was there a pool?  Yes.  That was it.  Who needed to ask about construction methods?  It was Arizona, not the Antarctic!  We drove back to Skokie, loaded up the car and moved.

Add thirty-six years to that and there my mother sits still.  The billboard gone.  The expatriot Jews back to their homelands, my mother's house, built like a refrigerator, a crumbling ruin around her ears. 

Spooked

Last night was the end of us trick or treating in our neighborhood.

We've lived here a long, long time. As a matter of fact, when Husband and I moved in, childless, in October 1993 there were four occupied houses out of 89 in our subdivision. Of course, there were also about twenty under construction with dirt and nails everywhere, poured foundations, walls rising up built out of two by fours, and debris. It was like living in post-World War II Dresden. So that first year we thought, Only four people live here. Certainly it's safe not to buy candy. No one will come. Of course, the doorbell rang. The mean neighbors across the street showed up uttering the only words I ever heard them say to us in the fourteen years they lived there, "Trick or treat."

Even though I'm the child of two Holocaust Survivors and you'd think that pitch black nights and scary figures banging on doors with sudden demands would bring back bad memories for my parents, causing them to ban Halloween, it didn't. Not to mention the whole death thing. My parents made every decision based on "What are the Americans doing?" So, if the Americans were dressing their children up as ghouls and sending them out begging, that's what we did. Also, it didn't cost any money. To get a costume I was basically sent into my older sisters' room to find one - which meant every year I was a hippy. Also, we came home with this free food as a result of this bewildering panhandling, a definite bonus in Mom's eyes.

Last night our neighborhood was a ghost town, and I don't mean a fun, Halloween ghost town. So we ditched it for a different neighborhood nearby, becoming Halloween crashers. There we found the motherlode: roving bands of kids, dressed up adults, parties in the driveways, hay-filled wagons set up to take kids from one block to another, decorated houses, even cauldrons boiling over with dry ice "smoke." A firetruck came by with all of its lights on and the firefighters came out and passed out candy.

Bar Mitzvahzilla and his friend, on their last Halloween before high school, found a house that was giving out whole candy bars and couldn't help themselves, they had to go there over and over again until the homeowner sent them away. Inbred chutzpah. Daughter, who has a short fuse for just about anything, had finished earlier, but once she saw that whole candy bar, that was it for her. She walked up to the door of the house in a trance, cupped her hand for the candy - she was so sure she was done she hadn't even brought a bag along - and came running back, clutching the candy bar like gold.

And then it was done and the lights went out one by one, the legend of the whole chocolate bar living on forever.

Threadbare

My mother calls me up. Because her TV's on so loud, she yells into the phone, "Do you have any old towels? Bob and I are going up to the cabin tomorrow and we need new towels."

Now, if anyone else asked me for old towels I'd think maybe it's for a project or for cleaning a car, or maybe drop cloths are needed for some reason. But not with my mom. Just like she said: my old towels are her new towels. She's trolling for my cast offs.

I tell her I have to think about it and I do. I have to examine my towels to see if it's time to give them away.

One time I was over at her house and I made the mistake of opening her linen closet. This is the house we bought in the wilds of North Scottsdale when our whole family moved here in 1973 from Skokie, but from looking at the collection of towels in her linen closet it didn't look like my mother had cleaned it out since the day we moved in. It also didn't look like she had left anything behind in Chicago. It was like being transported back in time. All the towels we had in the 1960s were in there. It was like a time capsule. Does my mother ever throw anything out?

I'm pretty sure my mother's never bought a towel in her lifetime. Since we owned a laundry in Chicago, maybe she got her first towels from the ones that simply showed up at the laundry loose or got separated from a customer's wash, instantly becoming part of our motley household towel collection. And here they are still: in 2009 Scottsdale, threadbare - vintage maybe.

One time, when I was first meeting my husband's family and we were staying with my sister-in-law, I was about to take a shower so I asked her for a towel. She handed me a pile of rags. I looked down at it, actually not comprehending why she had handed me these schmattas. Maybe she needed me to do the dishes before I got in the shower? Scrub the windows? The toilet? But she said, "It's your towel." I held it up and I could see through it, it was so threadbare. Both my husband and sister-in-law then looked at me completely straight-faced and said, "Towels only get soft when they're threadbare."

So, since it's obviously genetic, this predisposition to using things until they disintegrate in my hands, I guard against it by making sure I buy new towels once every two years. How do I know when it's time to get them? Easy. It's like clockwork - exactly when my mother calls asking for the old ones.

Mr. Fixit

My mom's phone broke the other day. This can cause some real havoc around Phoenix, with all seven of us calling her, not getting through, calling her cell phone (which she apparently turns off when she's not using it), then calling each other to see where mom was - is she okay? who spoke to her last? when? - yet trying to seem cool about it, like we actually don't call her every day.

Finally, something changed. The phone, instead of ringing and ringing, kept getting answered by some kind of phantom fax machine. As I held my phone to my ear, there was the ear-splitting sound of a fax going off. Of course, I did that about three times before I remembered not to do it.

Finally, she called me.

She said, "Why haven't you called me?"

I said, "Ma! I've been calling! There's a fax picking up the line."

"No..."

"What then?"

"Something's broken. I hear something screaming in there. Bob's going to fix it."

Oh, well, this inspires confidence in me. Stepfather is going to fix her Princess phone from 1980.

Stepfather loves a project. Nothing inspires him more than a good challenge - propping up a 200 pound cactus with a flimsy piece of rope, fixing the roof with some duct tape. This one's the kind of problem he loves to tackle. He takes the broken telephone with him as he travels from one end of the valley to the other, looking for a good deal on a princess phone. He comes home frustrated. The salesman tried to talk him into a phone with no cord! What does he think, that Stepfather was born yesterday?

When I called my mother last night, she answered.

I said, "Your phone's working!"

She said, "Yeah, it's fixed."

"Bob bought a new one?"

"No. It fixed itself."

I'm kind of quiet for a minute thinking about this, when she says, "You know, it just needed to be unplugged for awhile. Rested."

I'm about to tell her that phones don't just fix themselves, when I think, what am I, nuts? In the world my mom lives in, things do fix themselves.

So I say, "Great!" and we talk till suddenly the line goes dead. And the fax machine comes back on.

Wired

I'm on my way home one night and since my mother lives only a mile from me - about as far as the umbilical cord will stretch - I call her to see if I can swing by with some magazines.

I stay on the phone with her till I'm standing in her driveway. Then I hang up and start walking towards the door, when something catches my eye. I look up. Really far up - like up to the top of her 30 foot skinny palm tree, and I see a long orange wire hanging down from the top to the ground, where the excess is coiled on the ground, like a lasso. Then I look back up to the top of the tree and I see that the orange cord is strung from the other side of the palm tree to the house. There I see a much more troubling sight: huge antennas mounted on top of my mother's house and strung up in the air over and around it. My Stepfather's ham radio antennas. Nothing like bringing down the neighborhood.

As I approach the door, my mother starts unlocking the inside locks while I start on the outside locks. There are a lot of locks. To make sure it's me, she turns on the flashing motion detector. Finally we're face to face. I say, "Ma, look what's in your tree!"

She cranes her head around the door. She doesn't like leaving the house. In the summer it's too hot and in the winter too cold. Any opening of the door and exiting from the house is seen with much skepticism - is it absolutely necessary? Does it require a coat?

She sees the cord hanging, then she looks up, up, up, and sees the other side strung to the house. She's not surprised. She says, "That's Bob's antenna."

"How'd he get it up there?"

"He has an arrow that he shoots out."

I try to get a mental image of this for a second: my 84-year-old stepfather, who looks a little like the farmer in American Gothic, sitting in the backyard surrounded by his World War II-era ham radio equipment, suddenly leaping up with a bow and arrow and shooting a line out with pure aim, his shot true, straight through the heart of the palm fronds. Then he gets back to the ham radio and marvels as a call comes in from Russia. Imagine that! Speaking to a person on the other side of the world! What will they think of next?

I give my mom the magazines. I leave before lightning strikes and burns the place down.

My Hurricane

I used to have a really organized house.

When Bar Mitzvahzilla was little, we had him firmly under control. We had a bunch of plastic buckets of various sizes and each one was designated for a certain type of toy. There were buckets for cars, for blocks, for Legos, and one for action figures. There were a lot of buckets.

He had an amazing memory for the minute. If I picked up the tiniest Lego connector piece and said, "Where does this belong?" I could watch as his brain would go click click click and, like a computer, he'd figure it out. He'd say, "That goes with my Star Wars Death Star Lego set." And if I asked him where that was, he'd go to his room, pick up a Darth Vader helmet, 5 light sabers, 3 swords and 5 Bionicals, and find it.

Then the hurricane came into our lives. Our daughter was born.

She looked like a normal baby. 6 pounds, 9 ounces. Not a preemie like her brother. She slept a lot the first year. Little did I know that she was just storing up energy to bring the house down around our ears.

She was the nicest baby. A sweet, charming baby. Chubby with big red cheeks. Everyone who saw her - or at least anyone who was Jewish who happened to see her - said, "Oy, such a Yiddishe Punim!" Which meant that she had a beautiful little Jewish face - yes, chubby with big, red cheeks.

And then she turned one.

We were at a restaurant one day with her in a high chair and everything was pretty normal. She was putting all the olives on her fingers like fake fingernails, but nothing too odd. Suddenly, she stood up in the high chair. Apparently she had decided to leave. Alone. While walking into mid-air. That was the end of our halcyon days. I'm not sure she's ever sat down or stopped screaming yet.

My mother doesn't understand my leniency. She tells me, "Don't let her play! Tell her to stay in her room! Did you ever have toys all over the house in Skokie?"

Well, no Mom, as a matter of fact, I didn't. My mother ran a tight ship in Skokie. Despite having seven girls, there was never any evidence of us around. We were only allowed to play on the hard linoleum tile of our laundry room, but even there - in a room with a furnace, a laundry chute, and sponge-painted walls - everything had to be put away at bedtime. She wasn't raising kids, she was raising a house.

My house shows the effect of the hurricane to whom I gave birth nearly ten years ago. All spots at the table are neat and tidy except hers, which has a pile of crumbs on the floor beneath it. Nine forks have been thrown out with paper plates. Not one of her toys has ever made it into that neurotic toy bin system we once had. Her bed nearly rises from the ground with all she has hidden beneath it. Sometimes she surprises me by showing up out of her room dressed in a lab coat with a feather boa, a stethoscope, and a Magnadoodle briefcase, then setting up an office in our dining room. An office I don't disturb.

At night I go in to check on her and kiss her, if I can find her beneath the pile of stuffed animals. She lays there, her Yiddishe punim cheeks glowing, the hurricane gathering strength during the night to wreak havoc again in the morning.

Home Sweet Home

This is our neighborhood: we're trapped in a subdivision of three streets and we live on the middle one. The houses, though not completely identical, are pretty much identical. You'd have to live here to be able to tell the minute differences between one exterior elevation and another. Let's just say that there's a lot of stucco and mission tile roofs, Mesquite trees and gravel front yards.

One of the reasons why the houses look the same is because we have an approved color palette for our exteriors and we aren't allowed to change anything without submitting it to the architectural board. Even, like, if we wanted to switch from grass to gravel. I know I'm supposed to be very reassured by this firm control - after all, no one can suddenly come along and paint their house flamingo pink. But we can't even have a garage door different from the others, and they're starting to look dated, like we're a time capsule from 1993. I'm all for historical accuracy, I'm just not sure about anachronism.

Since we live in Arizona, I have neighbors I've never met. For some reason - the heat maybe? - people don't leave their houses here, they hide inside, or they open their garage, hop in their car and drive away. Kids don't play outside because of those gravel front yards and because every one of them goes to a different school and they don't know each other. Anyway, with lots as small as ours, a good neighbor is always a quiet neighbor, and a good neighbor driver is the one who doesn't try to run over my kids if they do wander outside.

Our neighborhood is also gated, which means that everytime I try to get in here the gate malfunctions in some way and starts slamming shut on my car. Sometimes the gates break on both ends - the in and the out - and I'm trapped in here like a jail cell. The gates weren't original to our neighborhood, rather they were voted in and not by us, because we're Democrats and don't believe in such exclusionary nonsense. Cars get stuck trying to get in or out of the gates or they just lurk around a while and get in following someone else. After all, these are not security gates; they're just for show. And they're only supposed to show the world that we're richer than everyone outside the gates.

But the neighborhood looks good - it's very neat. It has to be. About once a week a tiny white pickup truck from the Homeowner's Police drives through here with a guy inside holding a clip board. He stops in front of each house, carefully examining our home for any infractions of our HOA rules, like leaves left in our gravel front yards or garbage cans left out on non-garbage days. Within a few days we'll have a letter titled "Friendly Reminder," which is not friendly nor is it a reminder, it's a violation notice. I head outside to rake, I haul in errant garbage cans.

It's Arizona, it's our house, and we've been living here for 16 years.

A Tour of the Thirteen-Year-Old's Bedroom

Here's a brief tour of my son's room at age 13 1/2:

He sleeps on the top bunk of a bunk bed but, since he can't get his sheet on by himself and my husband and I aren't agile enough to get up there, he's just kind of laid it out on there with its springy, fitted edges snapping back, and sleeps in the little puddle of sheet in the middle.

He considers the bottom bunk of the bunk bed to be a storage area for the top bunk. He just throws things down there when he's marooned up above.

There is a desk on which, when he was five, he scratched the words, "I hate my mom and dad."

There are about 200 books all stuffed into bookshelves backwards and upside down.

There are little white cloth balls mysteriously rolling around on the floor of his room. When these are examined closely, they turn out to be socks that were thrown at the laundry basket but didn't make it.

Under the bed are a few rolling plastic bins, one containing swords and other weapons, another containing light sabers, and the last containing Bionicals that had been put together and then cast into this jumbled heap, since their play value only, apparently, lasts till they're built.

So, when finally, nearly six months after the Bar Mitzvah, I'm looking for a place to put away all the paperwork from the event, I immediately have to rule out Bar Mitzvahzilla's room. It's tempting to just sneak down the hall and throw it in there - how would he ever notice something in that mess?- but I can't.

Before this time this stuff - a folder containing receipts, guest lists, and contracts, and the extra invitations, all the response cards (do I have to save these forever? Will Bar Mitzvahzilla ever want them?), and all the extra envelopes - migrated around my room. And you know I'm going to use beige vellum envelopes with black lining to pay bills, especially when I pay all my bills online, right?

First everything was on the top left of my dresser. Then it was on the top right of my dresser. Then the pile got too high and I moved it under my dresser. Then it got kicked around and toppled over on the floor. One dust-filled month at each location. So I naturally had to ask myself, where should this stuff go? It never occurred to me to actually throw anything away, no more than I threw out the nearly identical folder I had for my wedding to Bar Mitzvahzilla's Dad 16 years ago. And that's when I know where it could go - right next to that one in our office. And that one did end up coming in handy, come to think of it, sixteen years later, when I had to look up addresses for this one.