Tag: parents

Home and Heartache

House_front_8Yeah, we’re home – and as usual it’s like walking into an electric fan.  We landed, unpacked, did laundry, slept (until 3AM) then Rick went back to the airport for a fund-raising trip to California.  I’m working on several major projects and wanting to organize for when the boys come home for the holidays.  Grocery lists and activity planning in addition to many hours of business obligations.

Lots on my mind.  Today a friend told me about the last conversation she had with her father and I was ambushed by a deluge of memories.  It’s tough to come to terms with the loss of a parent.  Both of mine have been gone for years and there isn’t a day I don’t think of them — and, often, wish I could ask them something – or tell them something — or just feel their love again.  I haven’t felt this way in a long time and it surprised me.  I just wasn’t expecting the intensity.

I once sent my dad the lyrics to a Judy Collins song about her father.  It’s a wonderful evocation of the love between fathers and daughters and the bitter-sweet realization that one’s life will exceed that of a beloved parent.  It’s what they’d wish for us but it’s complicated.  Anyway there wasn’t a moment of my life when I doubted the love for and faith in me felt by both my parents. 

There were also circumstances in my life that led me, in my memory at least, to be less attentive than I wanted to be.  I think it will haunt me forever- times when finances or my own parental responsibilities kept me from visits; times when I let my dad tell me not to come because he didn’t want us to "see him like this."  — all those things we all wish we’d done differently.  I am beginning to think that this is a real issue for me and one I’ve got to get some clarity about. 

This is the second time in the space of the 90 days or so I’ve had this blog that my dad has come up and he’s been gone since 1991.  Somehow though I’m more at peace with the loss of him.  I can summon memories that make me smile and I know that he had a profound and lovely effect on my sons, which adds to  my own fond remembrances of him.

My mother, who died in 1998, haunts me though.  I know things in her life frustrated her – and that she would have liked to do more in the world outside the house.  My husband told both her and me that I was guilty that my arrival had pulled her out of a promising career but she insisted that that was HER choice and I should get over it.  That she loved raising the three of us.  I don’t doubt that she loved raising her daughters but I also think she needed more than she was able to get in life as a suburban mom.  I don’t know – all I know is that I feel a need to be particularly helpful to elderly women on the street, or the bus, or the synagogue steps.  As if I can do for her by doing for them.  Agh. I don’t know.  I’m going to bed to see if I can beat the last of the jet lag.  This is too sad.

I DON’T WANT TO BE A TURKEY ON THANKSGIVING

We’re going to Seattle for Thanksgiving to see our older son’s new apartment and be with both boys and assorted others.  I always get a little nervous when I haven’t seen them in a while; you know how it is — you just love them so much and sometimes if it’s too obvious it becomes a burden.  They are wonderful sons and wonderful people and they tolerate my enthusiasm for them pretty well.  Like any family, we’ve been through a lot together – good and bad — and understand one another pretty well I think.  But I do worry about what I do when I’m uneasy – I get way too verbal and my big effort is going to be to keep my mouth shut except when it makes sense to open it!

Emerson1_1 One thing I learned from my father (that’s him on the left) is to try like hell not to tangle your kids up any more than necessary.  He used to tell us that we should live our own lives and NEVER feel obligated to him; that the gift of us was all we owed him. 

His own father was a classic immigrant tyrant and so he, of course, went the other way.  I’ll tell you, I honestly believe that his attitude made us MORE likely to call, show up and fuss over him.  The only grief of it, aside from losing him, is that my mom kept telling us not to come home in his final illness, that he "would not want you to see him like this."  I finally decided to go to him – fed up with being put off and horribly guilty about not doing it sooner – and he died as I was on my way there.  I don’t think I’ve completely dealt with it in the 15 years since he died — too painful and nothing to do about it anyway — but I don’t want my kids to have that sort of experience either. 

For that reason, I forced myself to call them when I was in the hospital instead of, like my own parents, waiting until I was out and OK to let them know.  I really do think of them as grown men now and try to treat them with the respect I would treat other impressive men – but sometimes I slip and go "all mom" on them.   They accept it with good humor but I just would love to have the discipline to give them the respect they deserve instead of indulging my own over-expressive self.  I’m practicing all weekend.  Can’t talk anymore… shhhhh! 

OF COURSE IT COULDN’T LAST – RANDOM THOUGHTS ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE WEB

I just spent an hour listening to NYT reporter Kurt Eichenwald on a talk show describing the current state of Internet child pornography.  It’s just so sad. 

I remember as far back as 1998, when I helped launch an Internet safety campaign called America Links Up. We organized teach-ins, a TV program, a family website and a lot of other material to help parents keep their kids safe on line.  I, stupidly, thought people were a little overwrought about the whole thing.  If you were honest with kids, they could be trusted.  [ASIDE: I am, I often observe, a walking demographic… here for the George Lakoff nurturing parent.]  How could we deprive them when the Internet was, as John Perry Barlow said, "the most important discovery since fire?"

I was so besotted that I was incorrigible.  My boss at iVillage, whom I represented at American Links Up, used to call me a Web rat.  But it’s a sign of my eternal naivete that I never thought it would get as bad as it (apparently) is. AND that so many kids would log on when parents weren’t looking and participate. ( If the stories are true, it’s not just toddlers and preteens being exploited, it is also older teens getting sucked in and abused as well. )

We raised our kids in a style very similar to that described by long-time Wired writer Jon Katz, writing as Wired’s Netizen.  In 1996 he wrote a kids’ bill of rights on line – linking web rights to responsibilities met.  I wonder how that would play just ten years later.

In addition, I still don’t understand – when there are so many Law and Order SVU and a dozens of other programs portraying the dangers of these people – why young people would engage in this stuff to begin with.  Either too many kids are too lonely to care or we just aren’t paying enough attention.  Parents have to work and if they want decent housing they often have long commutes.  They need help.

So what do you think?  Is the Web as scary as Eichenwald portrays it?  Is some of it hype?  How do we keep kids safe and still help them to savor the Internet in all its wonders and opportunities?  Holler out some ideas….