Nostalgia

(To give you fair warning I'm feeling quite introspective and self-indulgent today. If you have a low tolerance for crap you're probably better off skipping this one.)

It's so trite as to be almost embarrassing. It's one thing to let a song take you back, but to be totally blown away by the radio's latest must-play hit? That's never been me. I'm not a top-40 kind of girl. I'm all about classic rock, folk music, the Grateful Dead, music with history, a sense of place and time. But there I was, minding my own business, listening to my car radio (thank god Maya is finally outgrowing her insistence on children's music All! The! Time!) and Kid Rock's (Kid Rock's. Good lord.) All Summer Long came on.

I sat there in the car listening to the words, and they just blew me away. Not because they were so meaningful, or lyrical, or poetic. They're really not. But they were singing my own past back to me. The details are a bit different, I grew up far from Northern Michigan and its lake, I've never even seen a walleye, let alone caught one, and the song was more likely to be Stairway to Heaven than Sweet Home Alabama, but it was my life. My history.

I started laughing when I heard the chorus, remembering how we too spent our days, and our nights, doing the same things, with the long-haired guys and the girls in skimpy bikinis (oh to be that thin again) drinking that Jack Daniels straight out of the bottle that my best friend used to hide in the back of her closet. And all the rest. Yeah, that too. We weren't hard-core delinquents, at least not most of us, but we did know how to teeter right on the edge of the line, sometimes falling one way and sometimes the other. We had the world by the tail. We were so arrogant. We were so clueless. We may not have been half of what we thought we were, or known half of what we thought we did, but damn, we did have a good time. It was a hell of a ride.

Nostalgia is a powerful force. It dulls the edges. Wipes out the hard times. The tears. The fear. Of course it wasn't all good, but that's the thing about time. It softens things. Hides things. Makes you forget. You lose touch with people you once cared deeply about and persuade yourself that it doesn't matter.

It does matter though. It isn't life or death, but it is an anchor. An anchor to who you used to be. I haven't been that rebellious teenage girl in a very long time, such an incredibly long time, but she's still in there somewhere, still a part of me. The shit she pulled, the trouble she got in (or avoided - I was pretty good at the avoidance part), they all combined to form one of the basic building blocks of Robin. Of who I am today, far removed though it seems from the Robin that was.

As I sat there listening, and remembering, I began to think about M, my best friend all through junior high and high school. The one I'd swap bras with (before she got boobs and I didn't, and yes, it does seem gross now, but we were 13 and didn't always remember to wear one when we were going out), the one I'd double-date with, and sneak out of the house at 2am with (M, if you're out there, remember Officer Cole's hat?). The one who was right there with me as I was "tryin' different things" and who was still there to pick up the broken pieces of the ones that didn't work. The one who didn't stop me as I left to go on a date in my slippers - because she too was walking out right next to me in hers! The Be Fri to my st ends. (See, I told you this was going to be a lot of self-indulgent and overly sugary crap. Can't say I didn't warn you.)

M and I went different ways many years ago, and as tends to happen we lost touch. I'd think about her sometimes and wonder where she was, but her mother had moved away and M was living off the grid somewhere in Vermont, ungoogleable except for an outdated reference to Semester at Sea (her, not me). Still, I'd try on occasion as the years went by, but I never found her, and the few other friends I'd kept in loose touch with had no news either.

As I sat there the other day listening to Kid Rock (oh god, there he is again, I sound like a starstruck 14 year old) sing about the good old days I started thinking about her again, about everyone from back then, and decided it was time for my biannual attempt at googling. Except this time, I got a hit. Her name was right there in black and white. She had a Facebook account. I promptly shoved my principles back onto a high shelf (I'd deleted my Facebook account when they'd forbid pictures of nursing mothers - see the Great Virtual Breast Fest button in my sidebar) and signed up for an account, and two minutes later there she was. We've just gotten back in touch now, and haven't really had a chance to talk yet, but we will, and it's good to be back. It feels good to be back.

You can't go home again, but sometimes it's awfully nice to visit.

Thirty-Nine

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That's how many birthdays I have had.

Some were more memorable than others - the pool party at age 4, the year the dog ate the rollerskate birthday cake my mother spent hours making (and that was only the start of what went wrong that year), the surprise party at age thirty that found me gaping slack-jawed at a restaurant table full of friends in utter confusion (I always was a bit slow on the uptake). A lot of birthdays. Thirty-nine. Far fewer than some but more than many, with many more hopefully to come.

Thirty-nine.

I'm supposed to feel panicked at the impending demise of even the last few fleeting illusions of youth (most of which have already fled for parts unknown along with my girlish figure).

I don't feel panicked. Actually, I feel pretty good. Thirty-eight had its ups and downs, just as every other year has - some of the lows stomach-plungingly low but ultimately balanced out by highs which made my heart soar in joy.

I feel more balanced as I embark on this journey that will be thirty-nine. More aware that a number is just that - a number. It isn't a state of mind or a burden if I don't let it become one. I find that I am becoming more comfortable in my own skin with the passing years. Less enthralled with the outer packaging perhaps, but more able to recognize that for the wrapping paper that it is while the real me continues to grow and thrive. Confident in my likes and dislikes, in my abilities and strengths, and knowledgeable and accepting of my faults, for without them I would not be me. Proud of the woman I have become.

The kind of woman who is confident enough in her choices to stand up and say "yes, I went to see Air Supply in concert last Saturday night and I LOVED it." (And apparently so did thousands of other people too - the venue was PACKED with smiling people singing along to all their old favorites, the way you would slip on a favorite old sweater on a cold winter's night. I felt so vindicated.) The kind of woman who can admit that she used to own Air Supply's Lost in Love album, long before she discovered the Grateful Dead (and followed them up and down the East Coast) but long after discovering the Doors and Meat Loaf and Peter Paul and Mary. Yes, that's me. I paved my own path even back then. Hey, it could have been worse. It could have been the Bee Gees.

It's all good. And it will be even better tonight when I'm surrounded by gifts and cake the love of my family as we welcome thirty-nine together.

Bring it on thirty-nine. I'm ready.
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Find the connection

What do Mrs. Brown, an English monarch, milk (or lack thereof), a tailor, Suzie Q and Mary-Ann all have in common?

Any idea?

Still nothing?

Not yet?

Come on, the oldsters among you have a better chance with this one. Think hard, you can get it.

Well, first we heard this and this, and then later this and this (but with them), and then saw this who did this, but we never did hear this*.

For those of you whose musical tastes are not older than dirt and who are now completely bewildered, I went tonight to go see Herman's Hermits and The Animals in concert, and they ROCKED! I hadn't seen Herman's Hermits since 1987 (and that was a reunion tour back then!) and had never seen the Animals. They were only playing ONE date in Israel in a city quite far away but I managed to find a few friends to go with and off we went to spend the night cheering, singing along, and hooting like schoolkids. It was a fabulous trip down memory lane to the days of my misspent youth.

And now, since it's 2:39 in the morning, I'm off to bed. I'm not nearly as young as I was the last time I saw these guys and morning is going to come much too soon.

*I suspect it was being saved for a final group encore but since it was already 1am and we had an hour+ drive home the woman driving decided to leave during the final set. What idiots put the weakest band (The Marmalade) on last anyway? At least that way we didn't feel like we missed anything (other than the encore and this fab song) by leaving a few minutes early.

Do as I say, not as I did/didn't/would never/umm...

There was a big article in yesterday's Washington Post talking about a subject I've given a great deal of thought to over the years - how much of your past do you, or don't you, share with your children? I'm sure we've all thought about this to some extent, but I suspect the issue is a bit tougher for those of us with more, how shall I put this, colorful pasts. Yes, colorful. There you go. A nice euphemism for "boy was she a screwup, god I'm glad she wasn't my kid".

It's inevitable. Someday my children are going to grow up and discover that there are all sorts of temptations out there, some a bit of harmless fun, others much more sinister. I hope that when that time comes we will have the type of relationship where they will feel close enough to me to talk to me before the moment of decision arrives. And when they do I don't have the faintest idea what I'm going to tell them. Sometime between now and that future I suspect will all too rapidly arrive I have to figure out how to walk a very fine line between being "relevant" and sharing some of the lessons I learned and being a piss-poor example of reasonable teenage behavior.

For now, we've still been able to teach values without getting into such sticky questions as our personal histories - yes, cigarettes are disgusting, no, no one should smoke. Yes, some people do smoke. Why? Because when they started they didn't know yet how very dangerous it is and how hard it would be to stop, but today since we know that already it doesn't make any sense at all to start. Besides, it's completely disgusting, remember? See how I managed to sidestep the fact that I myself smoked a pack a day for seventeen years, stopping only when I began trying to get pregnant with Itai?

I'm not fooling myself though. As they get older the questions will get tougher, they'll probe deeper. The issues will be even bigger. The drug question is in many ways harder, but also a bit easier - maybe I'll take the tack of "in my day (back in the old days, since mom is of course older than dirt) they didn't have such dangerous drugs like ecstasy and meth. Those are SO dangerous, look at what could happen!" Maybe I'll get lucky and by then things like mushrooms will have gone so far out of fashion that it won't even come up (she says foolishly). More likely I'll dwell on the dangers out there, WHY they're dangerous, and then focus on tactics - what to do if you're confronted with something you're not comfortable with, the fact that you can ALWAYS call us to come and get you, no questions asked, that sort of thing.

Sex? I can't imagine children actually wanting to know what their parents got up to. Not really. That one can hopefully stay on the hypothetical plane.

The truth is, I don't think I'll have any idea how I'll actually handle this until it comes up, and then I'll have to make a judgment call based on the actual conversation, the age and maturity level of the kid in question, and my own gut. I don't want to lie outright, but I also don't feel that my past has to be an open book. On the other hand, I don't want them to be so afraid of a misstep in front of some kind of mythical perfect and completely out of touch parent that they are afraid to come to me. I'll be looking for a balance which allows me to share enough to create a bond of trust, without sharing too much and creating an unacceptable example of acceptable behavior. (An unacceptable example of acceptable behavior? Oh god, I'm so overthinking this that I've turned into a Gilbert and Sullivan musical. Shoot me now.)

I'm thinking prevarication and a lot of redirection are going to be involved.

So what have I accomplished here? I've waffled around for an entire post and said nothing more substantial than "I'll have to wait and see". Yup, sounds about right.

At least the experts in the article didn't have anything better than that either.

The Kindness of Strangers

I'm going to kill two birds with one virtual stone today - I'm going to write something on fellow travelers, this week's Sunday Scribblings prompt, and at the same time I'm going to write about Tel Aviv for the Carnival of Cities which is being hosted this month by Grace of Sandier Pastures.

The winter of 1990-1991 I was finishing my last year of university back in the States. I'd spent the previous year at Tel Aviv University in Israel, and at the end of this final year I was planning on getting married and returning to Israel for good. While I was back in New Jersey, my fiance (now husband of 16 years) was serving in the Israeli army. If you are wondering why that winter rings a bell in your mind, it was the date of the first Gulf War. Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait in August, and Bush (the first one) had announced that if he didn't withdraw by January 16, 1991, that he would suffer the consequences. (It's a very strange feeling to have a start date for a war hanging over your head like that. It's hard to explain if you haven't lived through it.) Everyone knew that the moment the war began, Iraq would begin attacking Israel (and Saudi Arabia) to provoke the Israelis into retaliating, in the hopes that this would split the Arab nations away from the anti-Iraq coalition. Israel did in fact come very close to retaliating (and wouldn't you if another country suddenly declared war on you and began lobbing missiles at your civilian population centers?), but held back due to Bush's pledge to protect Israeli cities from the scuds. (As a result of this promise, U.S. Patriot missile batteries were deployed in Israel in a valiant but ultimately ineffectual attempt to shoot down the scuds.)

In the midst of all this and with a typical sense of the invincibility of youth, I decided to spend the end of December and most of January in Israel. I'd been separated for my fiance long enough and didn't want to miss this opportunity to be with him, despite the increasingly worrying political climate. I'm not going to go into war stories right now, suffice it to say that sitting there with a gas mask on during those first nights of scuds, when everyone still thought he might be crazy enough to use chemical warfare, were the most frightening of my life. The whole country shut down, hoping the next scud wouldn't fall on their bedroom roof. I was lucky, I was on kibbutz up north where I was relatively safe. In Tel Aviv and the central region the fears were much more real.

After a few weeks of this surreal existence, trying to get on with our lives while carrying gas masks around the kibbutz, a few things slowly returned to something approaching normal, and as part of this the airport finally reopened, just in time for my flight out. I knew that if I did not get on that flight out I could be stuck for weeks more and end up having to cancel my final semester of university. I had no choice, it was time to go home. This was more complicated than it would have been in peacetime though, since public transportation was still not running and there was nearly no civilian traffic on the roads. Luckily, someone from the kibbutz had to drive down to Tel Aviv very early that morning. I accepted his offer of a lift with gratitude, and that is how I found myself sitting outside a closed bakery in North Tel Aviv at 6am, with no place to go, no way to get there anyway, and a flight that wasn't leaving until midnight.

At 7 the owners came to open the store. I quickly went inside and ordered a coffee and a pastry, glad for the chance to at least warm up for a while. After I'd sat there for about 45 minutes (the only customer who came and actually stayed), the wife asked me what on earth I was doing there, in this outlying neighborhood in the middle of a war, surrounded by luggage and reading a book. When I told her, she went in the back and spoke with her husband. Five minutes later I found myself being driven to their apartment, coffee and a big bag of baked goods in hand. They had to work that day, but I was more than welcome to stay in their home until it was time to leave for the airport that evening. Her only request was not to go out on the balcony, since the scuds had blown out the windows and there was broken glass everywhere.

These people hadn't even known my name when they opened their home to me and then left me there on my own all day. Seventeen years later I am still speechless with gratitude at their generosity. Israelis can be abrasive at times, occasionally even downright rude, but when push comes to shove they pull out this inner reserve of strength and compassion that has no equal. The whole country temporarily forgets its many differences and pulls together for the common good. Israelis have known their share of crises, but if I had to pick who to have sitting next to me during the next one there is no one in the world I'd rather have with me.

Recapturing my lost youth

In an effort to stick my head in the sand and pretend that the last, say, 20 years never happened, Jay and I are going here to see these guys tonight. At 60 (!!!) he's been rockin' for a long time by now, but hopefully he's still got a little bit of the old magic going on. And hey, the tickets were cheap, and the venue is certainly worth the trip. (And as a former player of that same instrument he made famous, this will bring back a lot of memories of my misspent youth - cutting band class to hang out behind the school playing my kind of music with my friends.)

But, because the last 20 years DID in fact happen and I'm now the mom of two small children, we'll be spending the afternoon at the pool first. All the better to tire the kiddos out with my dear. Gotta have some sympathy for the babysitter after all. It's going to be a long evening for her.

Dear Diary...

Dear Diary,

Wow. It's been decades since I looked at you. 25 years at least. You're looking a bit worse for wear, and the little gold key that stood guard over your secrets has long since disappeared. Nevermind, those locks are even flimsier than the ones on the old travel locks. I just stuck a bobby pin in and it popped right open.

How strange to read about things that seemed so important back then and are so completely meaningless now. Those two girls down the street that made it their life's work to torment you at the bus stop each morning? One didn't get a date until she was nearly 17. The other's parents got divorced and she had to move away. Neither of them were ever even that popular. Maybe that's why they were such bullies.

Oh, and the youth group I wrote about, wondering whether I should join? (I should? You should? How does one write to one's younger self, anyway?) I did join, and I became very active in it, gaining lots of friends, a very active social life, my first trip to Israel (and we all know where that led, much to my parents' dismay), and the complete decaying corruption of my teenage moral fiber (you'd be surprised what some of those kids got up to on some of those retreats). Come to think of it, I wonder how many children are corrupted in the very places that are supposed to be teaching them values...

And that brings me to another thing, self. You're almost at the age, if you're not there already, where you're going to take a temporary leave of your sanity and decide that it would be an adventurous thing to do to try smoking the discarded cigarette butts in the ashtray of Lisa W.'s father's van. For god's sake girl, THINK about it! That is freaking DISGUSTING! Don't do it! And how a revolting experience like that one could end up in 17 years of heavy smoking I'll never understand. You'd think it would have sent you (me?) running as fast as you (I?) could in the other direction. Take it from me, young and inexperienced self. Quitting smoking is HARD. Unbelievably hard. Probably the hardest thing you've ever done. Save yourself a whole lot of anguish and don't bother starting in the first place. Seriously. It's not worth it.

And one more thing before I run away screaming from these annals of preteen angst. (Don't take it personally, there's only so much I can take from the viewpoint of a 38 year old.) This one's important though. It's hang in there, and believe in yourself. Your road is going to have a lot of ups and downs. Growing up, at least the way I did it, is not for the faint of heart. Just be true to yourself, keep a good head on your shoulders, and know that you're going to turn out just fine. Better than fine. So buckle your seat belt, you're in for the ride of your life, kid.

The writing prompt for this week's Sunday Scribblings was "Dear Diary".

No Market For Used Teenagers

I had a pretty idyllic childhood - a loving family, long summers at camp, fondly remembered holiday gatherings, family vacations, ski trips, parents who put their all into raising two kids they could be proud of. I got good grades, minded my teachers, listened to my parents, didn't fight (much) with my sister... Exactly what you'd hope for in a child.

And then I became a teenager, and it all went to hell.

To say that I was testing my boundaries would be a gross understatement. It would be a lot more correct to say that I chose, yes chose, to fall in with a bad crowd because they were more "interesting". I wasn't interested in the goody-two-shoes smart kids, I didn't want the reputation that went (in my snobby high school anyway) with being in the marching band, I didn't have enough money to keep up with the in-crowd, and didn't really want to anyway. I wanted, or perhaps needed, to rebel, but the truth is I had a great life with great parents. I had nothing to rebel against.

That didn't stop me from doing it anyway.

I made a conscious decision to become a burnout, with everything that went along with that. I looked around, decided they were the most appealing group, and cultivated the habits I'd need to be included. (God I was stupid, and arrogant, and foolish, and careless, and did I mention stupid? So completely, unbelievably stupid. And so very lucky to have survived fairly unscathed.)

There is no reason to detail all of my misspent youth, suffice it to say that the one-quarter of it that my parents found out enough was more than enough to ground me for life. The part they didn't know? Well that would have gotten me grounded until long after I was dead.

I pulled stunts that put my parents through hell, and even today I cringe in shame at the mere memory of some of them.

As I carried out my senseless rebellion my parents never wavered. No matter what I pulled, I always knew they loved me unconditionally. Even when they were unspeakably, and justifiably, angry, I always knew that they loved me and that I had a home and that that home was a moral touchstone.

This wasn't true for many of the others I knew. There was B*, who was always getting thrown out of the house by his mother's new husband. Seems this cop didn't like getting a screwup burnout for a step-son. We'd all leave our cars unlocked every night in case B needed a place to crash. Then there was I*, whose parents didn't even bother showing up to his high school graduation, leaving him stranded and alone when it was over. (I drove him home, while he talked about cutting up lines of cocaine in the kitchen while his father watched, afraid to say anything.) Or A*, whose mother was so helpless that she didn't even try to exert any control over what went on in her home. Or T*, who'd share bong hits with his parents. Or J*, whose single mom was so busy working 3 jobs that she was never home long enough to know what he, what we all, got up to in her living room when we should have been in school. I could go on and on... There were of course others like my parents, who were probably just as devastated as they were at what their beautiful, formerly sweet and innocent children were getting up too, but for every loving family there was at least one more that was equally disfunctional.

It took years, four of them away at college, before I was able to grow up enough to move past all of this and back towards my family. Looking at us today, 20 years later, you'd never dream of all the strife and discord that ran rampant through the house for a few years. My parents are two of my closest friends. Instead of choosing to run away, we choose to run away together - on joint vacations. On purpose. Without being forced or bribed, just because we enjoy being together. Our biggest obstacle these days is that in a fit of college-age idealism I picked up and moved halfway across the world, leaving all of my family behind. We need to work even harder to stay close emotionally since we live 6,000 miles apart physically.

During one of these early joint vacations I asked my mother why she never threw my sorry ass out of the house. Her answer has stuck with me all these years. She said:

"I'm your mother, and I love you, and I would NEVER EVER throw you out of my home, no matter what. I did however try to sell you to the gypsies once, but there was no market for used teenagers."

She then added that had the technology been available she would have happily locked me in a deep freeze for about 6 years, not letting me out until I hit 22, but that she would have kept that freezer safe at home.

I'm not in touch with many people I knew from high school anymore, but from the few that I do speak to occasionally I've seen something. We were all headed together down the wrong path in those days. The difference lay in who stayed on the path, and who managed to get themselves together and return to being happy, well-adjusted human beings.

The answer? Those with loving, supportive families. It's a terrible cliche, but true nonetheless. The ones who came from very difficult places had a much harder time clawing their way out, and often didn't, while those that came from good strong families were more able to return to their roots. I look around today at my innermost circle of high school friends, the ones from families like mine, and see that we have become doctors, and lawyers (at least 3), real estate tycoons, corporate hacks turned lactation consultants (that would be me), stay at home moms... Whatever and wherever our passions led us. And you know what? We could never have done it without our families.

So for all that you did Mom, by raising me right, by loving me unconditionally even when I probably didn't deserve it, and by welcoming me back with open arms and forgiving all my sins, I say "Thanks, Mom. (And Dad.)"

I could never have done it without you. I love you Mom. (And Dad.)

This essay was written for MamaBlogga's July Group Writing Project, on the theme "Thanks, Mom".