Worry equals love

My daughter is proposing to drive to Tennessee and spend 4 days camping out at a music festival. I'm pretty sure she's going to be OK at the music festival even though she's a princess who has never slept in a tent. It's the 10 hour drive, at night, after a full day's work that worries me. She routinely shorts herself on sleep.  Although I think I've kept my worries to myself I'm  sure she knows I would rather she didn't go. So I wish her well and tell myself that worry is negative energy like crossing the bridge twice, once before you actually get there.

Except, I have this private belief, developed in childhood that what you worry about doesn't happen. The bad things that happen, that take you by surprise are because you failed to anticipate and worry about them.  This could be called productive worry. Productive worry is what made me study for tests so that I would pass. Neurotic worry is what made me study so much that I almost always aced the test. Productive worry has me check the weather forecast, the oil and the fluids in the car before I embark on a long car journey in the deep of winter. Neurotic worry stops me travelling.  Productive worry has me lay out my interview outfit, check the traffic report and plan in detail how I'm going to get to the job interview. Neurotic worry has me lie awake all night rehearsing answers to every possible and impossible question that might be asked of me. 

Then there is the really insidious belief that worry equals love. I know this because my mother told me so frequently. "I only worry about you because I love you so much"  which was only a short hop, skip and a jump from " if you loved me you wouldn't do   fill - in - the - blank because I will worry about you."  So as a child I stayed at home -  a lot. Stayed at home bored and resentful and got on my mother's nerves -  a lot. I finally broke free at 15 when I had the opportunity to go away to college. I could go to the one 2 towns over, a good school ve-ery close to home or the big, exciting ivy league school at the opposite end of the state. I asked for my mother's opinion to help me choose between these two alternatives. She made a huge mistake in citing the neighbor's opinion of her as the critical factor in making a decision. As in " what would the neighbors think of me if I let my 15 year old daughter go away to college."  In retrospect it was the kindest thing she could have said.  My decision was instantly clear. If it was the neighbors opinion of her that was her biggest concern I was free to go. I cut those traces and left. It wasn't that clean of course. I had to cut those cords again and again and again. They re-grew of their own volition. Then I became a mother and  found myself attaching the silken threads to my daughter. 

She went to the music festival. She texted me to let me know she'd gotten there alive. Her exact words. She didn't communicate over the next few days and I restrained myself to the occasional "how are you" text. I have to admit I breathed a huge sigh of relief (had I really been holding my breath for 4 days?) when she rolled up at my door late Sunday night dirty, exhausted, happy and indubitably alive.

Mother's day

"When I was a child, I spake as a child and now it is time to put away childish things." Or is it? Perhaps life is a bell curve and I'm over the hump and on the way back down to old age when I can become child-like again shedding responsibilities like daisy petals.
"he loves me, he loves me not"
He loves me but do I love him?
How many people can we love in a lifetime?
I have a son. " He loves me, he loves me not."
He loves me, he needs me not. Yet I need him.
I miss him - that little  boy who told me stories of Batman and Calvin and Hobbes and begged me not to go to work - and now he comes home and doesn't stay and doesn't speak.  A good conversation  for him is teasing. It has its own kind of intimacy but it has barriers too.
And yet he lives - he grew up -  they don't all - some are missing.
As long as he lives there is hope for re-acquaintance - for an adult conversation for connection.
Old age is a privilege. We don't all get to grow old. My father taught me that. Every day over 70 years was a gift for him. He died well my Dad, not so my mother . She lives on and knows not why. Every day a burden, a woe is me, a glass not full day.
I wrote her a mother's day card this morning. "you are in my heart and in my mind." A lovely sentiment it would seem. It is true she is in my heart and mind but often not in a good way.
I am a mother and I have a mother and I should feel blessed   and usually I do.
I have a son and a daughter and both have reached their 20's. My college friend who wanted a child so badly she adopted one lost her son when he was barely 20 years old. My son's roommate died in his sleep in their dorm room in April. Mother's day will be sad and  poignant for their mothers.
But we have our children for as long as we have them and to have them at all is a gift. 

Thanksgivings past and present

I don't remember the first Thanksgiving I celebrated but it had to be the year I turned 13. We left England on November 5, Guy Fawkes night, sailed across the Atlantic in a big storm on the Queen Mary and arrived 5 days later and disembarked in NY. We stayed with my father's brother, Gunther, who had a house in Ozone Park, NY. It was a strange, tense time. No-one could sleep because the bed rooms were too hot. We didn't have central heating in the UK so our bedrooms were un-heated. The food was strange, the television was on a lot more than we were used to, we felt awkward and out-of-place  and my mother cried  every day. She resented everything about her German sister-in-law. The more Irene tried to help my mother the more insulted Iris felt. It was horrible. Undoubtedly it was Irene who cooked that first Thanksgiving turkey although I remember nothing about the day itself. By Christmas we were living in half of a  rented duplex in South Ozone park. My mother roasted the Christmas bird which is when I learned that the bird Irene cooked was "dry".  The tension between the two families was if anything even higher.

As a child I didn't enjoy Thanksgiving. It was all about eating which I found pretty boring, because it involved too much time and work for  preparation, and created too many dirty dishes  that I was expected to stick around to help clean up, and way, way too much tension for too little pay off; an over-full stomach. Tension, walking on egg shells, tip-toeing around waiting for someone to explode and start haranguing. Usually, no always, Mom. At least at Christmas, there were gifts, and decorations as well as tension.

When I had my own household and it was my turn to host Thanksgiving I realized I could diffuse some of that tension by inviting strangers to the table. My mother could usually be counted on to behave in front of strangers. So Thanksgiving found me actively seeking lonely widows, lost foreign students, visiting scientists, or people just too far from home to get there. I'd been in that situation myself and had been grateful to be rescued from dinner alone.  It was a two-for-one,  I kept my mother at bay and I got to feel noble about having real Thanksgiving spirit. We were the natives and it was necessary to find a few pilgrims.

Later still, I came to feel like Thanksgiving was truly *my* holiday. The Pilgrims, after all, were the original immigrants. They were celebrating having enough food to make it through the winter. And as immigrants we had much to be grateful for. We had not only survived that first bleak winter we had flourished and put down roots.

As the years added up I came to a further realization; it isn't even necessary to have turkey for Thanksgiving.  It's big, it's heavy, it's hot and greasy and slippery and often it doesn't taste all that good. What the people want is everything else! All the yummy stuff, (starting with stuffing of course) that goes with the turkey.  One year I made a turkey dinner according to Julia Child, with all the potatoes drenched in butter  and a wine based gravy. My father didn't like it. He wanted my mother's giblet  gravy.  The year my parents went to my sister's house and it was just me, 2 kids and my spouse it occurred to me to ask. Hey what would you really like to eat?  Macaroni cheese said my children. My husband's idea of food from home is idli samber, ( he's a South Indian from Madras). So that's what I made.

 I've learned to be careful about  expectations I create for myself of what I should do. If I'm not paying attention I end up as angry as my mother.   So I pay attention, I ask questions, I try not to assume anything. And I often fail.
We are back to family tension time again. Only this time the source is my sister. She feels put upon and unappreciated. She kept her feelings to herself, just like Mom taught her to do, until she could stand it no more and exploded in the modern way. By e mail. The kind that scorch the in-box. I have my orders to take care of Mom for Thanksgiving.  Mom doesn't travel and to be honest why would I bring a source of angst and misery into my home so we go to Mom and take her out for Thanksgiving dinner in a restaurant.  I never thought I would be a restaurant dinner on a holiday kind of person. I've spent too long in service jobs to want to make others work on a holiday.  But hey, you never know, maybe they need an excuse to get away from their family too!

"I don't do windows"

I washed windows today. Is washed the right word? I sprayed them with window cleaner and then wiped with an old tee shirt. It's a bigger job than it sounds.  We have combination windows; 2 storm windows and a screen in metal tracks and then a pair of sash windows that are about 50 years old. So the screen has to be pulled out. Then the storm windows have to removed  and  cleaned on both sides. Then the sash windows  which are divided into 6 lights have to be cleaned on both sides. This is tricky on the second floor. I end up manipulating sash  windows up and down,  leaning out and under and contorting myself to get to the outside surfaces. At some point I have to track down a step stool. Then a brush and a tool to pry the spiders and dead stink bugs out of the tracks and a bar of soap to rub on the tracks so the windows will slide up and down as everything sticks.  I usually end up with broken nails and wrenched muscles. Then  the whole deal  has to be reassembled, at  which point the bits I missed  become very obvious. Window cleaning is time consuming, tedious and physically demanding.
My parents didn't employ anyone to mow the lawn, clean the  house, wallpaper, paint, fix plumbing or electricity or do any kind of renovations. My Dad did it all. My mother cooked a meal every day of her life. We never ate out.  Yet we had a weekly window washer.  He arrived weekly with a bucket, a ladder and a chamois leather all carried on a bicycle.
 This was England in the 1950's when people still burned coal and smog was a frequent occurence. The air was dirty. So a window washer was necessary and affordable.