Notes of a not-quite-crazy mom

I have been friends with Ben Baron for more than thirty years. We met at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut and we’ve been hanging—give or take–ever since. There were several years at school when we would gather in Ben’s room on Thursday nights and watch Hill St. Blues. It was Ben, Chuck Welsh, Jim Kachadoorian, Joe Gamache and me. I liked the odds. Four incredibly sweet football players and me. It was the only club I belonged to in college and I haven’t joined one since. We all went our separate ways and for some reason, unknown to all of us, or maybe known to all of us but NEVER acknowledged, Ben was accepted to Harvard Business School. Fast forward thirty years, a very successful career at Kaplan Test Prep and now Ben lives less than an hour away from me in Colorado. He owns and runs driving schools and college prep test centers. We meet for lunch every couple of months to catch up, discuss sports, politics, books and our children. He always peruses the menu and ends up ordering a cheeseburger and fries. I always peruse the menu and end up ordering some kind of salad. He constantly makes me laugh.

Last week he made me laugh harder than usual. He told me that he had been thinking a lot about life and that for him, after much experience and pondering, it had come down to two basic rules:Don’t Be An Idiot and Don’t Be An Asshole. I loved the simple truth of it. And then I said, “Ben, I think you’re right, but I also think it’s amazing how many people have a hard time with just those two.”

In the 51 years I’ve been on this planet, I’d say that I’ve been good on Ben’s rules for about 49.5 of them. There was a short period in my forties when I pretty much botched them both and consequently went through a very difficult time. I am happy to report that I’m back to being impeccable when it comes to Ben’s criteria. In the week since we had our lunch, I find his rules a useful self-check as well as a reasonable standard to hold others by. It offers both levity (always a good thing when people are behaving badly) and clarity. Case in point: A prospective architect wrote me a snarky email when I requested a second viewing of a house she had designed. Instead of getting angry or firing off a nasty reply, I simply considered Ben’s rules. Which made me a) laugh at the idiocy of such a note and b) come to the decision that she could not be hired. After all, it was only the courting process and she had already broken BOTH Ben’s rules. I also offer up Ben’s theory as a useful life tool for my teenage daughters who are figuring out their place in the world and the people they choose as friends and boyfriends and I just kind of suggest that if those in the running can’t pass this test, they should be voted OFF the island.

Of course we all—like me— have had our moments, but history will show where people consistently fall in relation to Ben’s Rules. It’s not necessarily a high bar, but it’s a beautiful indicator.

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My second daughter, Emmy Lou, was Bat MItzvahed on June 25th of this year. I wrote the following tribute to her and wanted to share it this month as a celebration of her 14th birthday.

Emmy Lou Strongwater was born ready. At 4:30 I felt a contraction, at 6:30, we had a baby. The doctor’s words, and I quote, were this: “ I was lucky to catch her. “ And as Coach Oscar and Ernie and Brett and her teammates can attest, people have been trying hard to do just that ever since. Emmy’s middle name “Lou” is in memory of my father, Louis “Doc” Meyers, who she would have melted like butter and whose grounded wisdom she possesses. But Emmy brought many amazing qualities of her own to the dance, and the one most abundant from arrival was EXUBERANCE. Em is so full of joy and energy for life that often she has trouble staying upright. We like to think of her as vertically challenged. We laughed when going through many of her early pictures because as often as we could, Lee and I had her in a helmet. When Mr. McCarthy her fourth grade teacher called to inform me that Emmy had been to the nurses office 19 times due to falling-related episodes I know he thought I was a bad mother when I laughed and said: “That’s just Emmy.”

And while I remember waiting for Annie to say her first words, I honestly don’t remember when Emmy DIDN’T talk. I feel like she was born chatting and almost everything she said was smart or funny, even if she didn’t get the words quite right. If I ever dared to interrupt one of her monologues she would give me this exasperated look and say. “Mom you’re ERUPTING me! Stop ERUPTING me!” In grade school when Em would get frustrated with the boys she liked and their teasing and age-appropriate boy behavior she’d say, “Mom, I’m exponentially more mature…” And trust me, that’s the word she used.

Beyond the exponential maturity. Emmy has a unique in-your-face directness that has been both amazing and hilarious to watch. She was about four when we were dressing in the Louisville Rec Center locker room after a swim and she observed her first pair of thong underwear. In her raspy, no-volume control voice she announced to all within earshot: “Mom—her butt’s sticking out of her underwear!”

Beyond the shocked woman in the locker room, no one has been spared her acute, to-the-point observations. When she first met Scott she looked him up and down and said two things. “Are you mom’s boyfriend?” And when he said yes, she replied, “You look like Elvis Costello.” She was seven. Three or four years later I heard her arguing with her dad and mid-tirade she scolded, “Dad, you’re off topic. Stay on topic!”

So what do you do with a kid like that? Listen mostly, and try and stay out of the way. And that’s what we’ve done. We’ve marveled at her on the soccer field, the track, the basketball court, and the classroom. We’ve witnessed her hustle, her diligence, her kindness, her humor and most especially her tremendous heart. My favorite soccer moment—and it’s a very telling one— happened a few years ago when Jamie Turcotte made an unbelievably beautiful pass that allowed Emmy to score. Jamie got hammered on the play and she was still on the ground crying a little bit when I saw Em go up to her, hug her and whisper something in her ear. After the game I asked Emmy what she said to Jaime and she said she told her it was HER goal. Last month, a middle school mom came over during a track meet to tell me that she heard the girls in her car talking about how Emmy was nice to everyone and how she was the kid who would stick up for whoever was being teased. I was proud, but not surprised. Emmy knows how to make everyone feel good, including her parents. When I am having a down day, she will pat my back or start imitating Kristen Wiig from Saturday Night Live or suddenly there will be a note on my desk telling me I’m doing a good job.

So all I can think of to say at this point is: WHAT A KID…..

I look around this room and feel so lucky and so grateful that Emmy has such wonderful people in her life and I thank all of you for being here and sharing your love with Emmy. You are the village that it takes. In the meantime, as Emmy makes this leap into adulthood I would like to say: I love you, I am so proud of you and my hope and my wish is that you keep rocking the free world and that you PLEASE, PLEASE, try and stay upright while doing it.

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I didn’t cry when I read that Clarence Clemons had died. Instead, I watched a video clip sent via email from my friend Alan with the headline: “Best Rosalita Ever?” It was an old bootleg of Bruce and Clarence doing their thing in black and white. I shared it with my daughter Annie. I also read part of a eulogy Bruce had written, and there was a phrase in it that hit me: “Too Big To Die.” But it wasn’t until yesterday, more than a month after the fact that the tears came.

The emotion was prompted when my friend George Lange, someone who I’ve shared a love for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band with for 37 years (I was 14 the first time I saw Bruce in concert), showed me a video of Bruce and Clarence in Buffalo for what turned out to be their last performance together. In the clip Bruce told yet another highly dramatic version of the magical, night-I-met-the-Big-Man story (scary, dark, Asbury Park) that all Springsteen fans have come to know and love. They reenacted the Born to Run cover pose and then went on into the music.

I was watching while sitting on an old couch my late father had built in a house at the Jersey Shore my parents bought when I was twelve. This is the place where I listened to Springsteen non-stop throughout my teenage summers. I’d lay on an old mattress next to the speakers hooked up in our garage and before or after I worked scooping ice cream or waitressing, or on rainy days or any time I needed company, I’d take in the music. It comforted me. It gave voice to my angst and fueled my dreams. So it seemed fitting this would be the place where it hit me that Clarence was really gone. This was also the place that my dad told me, the summer before he died of cancer, “You reach points in your life when you realize the time to do that thing in your life is over.”

I haven’t seen Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band in a while though I’ve attended about 25 of their concerts over the last four decades. So with the loss of Clarence, I realized with a very tangible sense of finality, that a certain time in my life was over. The end of the POSSIBILITY of that experience and all that came with it, truly hit me. It was more than great music they shared with anyone lucky enough to see them on stage. They shared a love story—with each other and with all of us watching— and it will be shared in the same way no longer.

There are people who think it’s funny that I refer to Bruce Springsteen as Bruce and to Clarence Clemons as Clarence. I get that in the real world they are not my friends, but what they gave me makes them so. And in saying so long to this icon with a saxophone I know I am closing a chapter in my life I was lucky to have. And in a way, I think Bruce was right about Clarence being too big to die. He made himself big to me through the music and the performances and I will carry them with me in memory.

Tonight I am hoping to ride my one speed up the island to have a beer with my friend Joe. We met when he was a line cook and I was a waitress at the Mooring restaurant in Beach Haven, N.J. in 1978 and we’ve been friends ever since. When I was in college, Joe kept in touch by sending “Greetings from Asbury Park” postcards. I am planning to propose a toast to the Big Man and to giving it your all until the time to do that in your life is over.

(written July 2011)

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I was doing some research on relationships recently and I picked up a copy of he’s just not that into you.I know I’m very late on this purchase, but time did not affect the ongoing glee I experienced as I read it cover to cover, laughing all the way. If you hated the movie or liked the movie, it matters not. This is a true work of genius that every young woman should be gifted upon her high school graduation. After reading it I looked up and announced to my girls: “I wish this book existed 30 years ago, it would have saved a lot of time, energy and heartache in my life.”

The book is mostly written from the point of view a guy, Greg Behrendt. He’s caring, insighful and hilarious and he totally gets women—how we behave, how we act and the ridiculous excuses we go out of our way to concoct when men are either a) not interested or b) behaving like jag offs.

It’s a very simple, go-to bible for gals. If you have a question about a guy you know and maybe like or wonder if he maybe likes you, just read this book and you will know what’s what and with great clarity forever more. Sometimes the brutal truth, as it says in the Old Testament sets you free. Of course it doesn’t say this in the Old Testament—heaven forbid there would be something directly applicable in there that didn’t involve sheep. The truth will still hurt, but it will hurt a lot less if you cut your losses early and have someone else’s wise perspective to dust you off.

Anyway, as I look back at my history which contains …well lets’ s see, a drunk, two gay men —my brother Muzz was so right, by the way, when he told me I was a slow learner—and a serial cheater. (These things alone are covered in the following chapters: “He’s Just Not That Into You If He Only Wants To See You When He’s Drunk”; “He’s Just Not That Into You If He’s Not Sleeping With You”; “He’s Just Not That Into You If He’s Having Sex With Someone Else.”) Even more pathetic about that summation is that for me, those men were at one time the A-list.

My inability (until the fortuitous purchase of this book) to really get it when it comes to men is tremendously surprising because I grew up in a home filled with them. I have three brothers and we spent our formative years in a house with a lighted outdoor basketball court. My brothers and many of their friends were all ways around, bouncing the round ball when it was warm enough, playing backyard street hockey during the colder months, and occasionally throwing the football at intervals in between. The toilet seat was always up.

The result was that I grew up in a locker room. I could hang with guys, I could talk sports with the guys, I could have fun with the guys and I could hold my own on a basketball court, but it’s clear now that I was clueless to their true inner workings. I think I walked around for almost the entirety of my dating life with a “DUH” sign over my head.

There are many clear and sad-but-true messages in this book. Peppered throughout are “incredibly unscientific polls,” that I’m sure offer the same information that incredibly scientific ones would. This one stood out: “We polled 20 of our male friends (ranging in ages from 26-45) who are in serious long-term relationships. Not one of their relationships started with the woman asking them out first.” Times have so NOT changed. Of course, this lack of change is not easy to swallow if you’re a gal who likes to take the law into your own hands—if you’re strong, assertive, otherwise intelligent and well, sometimes feel like you need only push fate a tad in your direction. But alas, we cannot overcome biology. We need to read the writing on the scoreboard. We women are like the field of dreams, if they want us, they will show.

Sometimes you will be thrilled at what shows up, sometimes not. Sometimes you will be saved from a train wreck you didn’t see coming. The point is if they’re into you, they will make it clear. No need for interpretations, excuses, or phone machine message playbacks. If they’re not, go dancing with your girlfriends, watch an episode of Friday Night Lights or Modern Family or take a walk in the sun and crank up the Nicki Minaj. If you really pay attention to this book you will accept the signs fast enough NOT to be crushed. Not everyone is smart enough or wonderful enough or DESERVING enough to get the amazing person you are. And if they aren’t, you don’t want them in the first place. Life is not to be spent waiting. My friend Kate Ross and I often quote from the movie version of Neil Simon’s “Chapter Two,” (okay I’m embarrassed that we quote from this because it dates us, but never mind): A Girl Who Sits Waiting By The Phone Sits Waiting By The Phone.

If they want us they will work for it and we need to let them. I knew all this on some level, but until I read this book and felt like someone was holding——with great compassion, humor and no bull shit— a mirror to womanhood, I didn’t get it. We women explain and analyze and rationalize and oh honey, it’s all for naught.

A few years ago, I was out with a friend whose daughter was in her late teens and who, my friend suspected, was beginning to have sex. We talked about at what age we really thought we were ready to have sex. I said, “46.” The sad thing is, I meant it. Physically I was ready in my late teens, but emotionally— 46. Did I mention: SLOW LEARNER? I’m glad I didn’t wait until 46, though I should have held out longer than I did. I will say that growing up in that locker room of boys made me curious to know what the fuss was all about. Unfortunately, while I saw myself as one of the boys and could curse with the best of them, I also thought I was tough like one of the boys and that sex meant the same thing to me as it did to them. It didn’t. I’m also so glad I didn’t wait until 46 to actually have sex because I have two amazing daughters who—thank god—are so much smarter than their mother. My gift to them very, very soon will be this priceless book.

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I have to write about my mother on Mother’s Day. This is the second year she hasn’t been around for the event. Last year I wrote an appreciation of her in Cooking Light magazine and I got a lot of wonderful comments on the piece. But there are parts of my mother that just wouldn’t fly in a national magazine. For instance, I couldn’t have said what her oft-repeated quote about this Hallmark holiday was, and it went like this: “ I hate fucking Mother’s Day. And P.S. don’t buy me anything. I don’t want any more stuff!” Really, seriously, that was my mom verbatim.

Natalie Roth Meyers was not a women of tepid opinion. She screamed at the television set often. When people spoke grammatically incorrectly she was personally offended. If a sports announcer said something stupid she went into a tirade that would have made David Mamet swoon. In college some preppy guy commented on my propensity to use four letter words and said : “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” And to this I replied: “Where do you think I learned it, asshole?”

So my mother’s virulent anti-Mother’s Day stance frees me from the sentimentality that I’m sure a lot of people who have lost their mothers would feel on such a day. I still think about my mom on Mother’s Day and every other day. I’m thankful that she was a woman of huge heart and brilliant mind, but the missing doesn’t go away. The tears that come also have joy. There is joy that my mom was funny and fiery and did not suffer fools. As a kid I was sometimes embarrassed by her directness, her in-your-face willingness to call things as she saw them. I see now as an adult that by doing this, she gave me permission to do the same. To stand up, to say my piece, to ask for what I needed and if a bit of colorful language here and there served to strengthen a point, well then my all means.

If I had one more day with my mom it would be spent holding and loving and laughing, listening to great music and having something yummy brought in —probably Mineo’s pizza and Diet Coke with lots of ice— so we wouldn’t have to spend time cooking or cleaning up. There might be some poetry included and if luck was with us a Steelers game would be on. My brother Muzz tells me she’s here with me and in many ways I know that to be true. I hear her voice in my head. I know when she’d approve and not approve. I know she’d laugh at me losing my patience at the exact same things she had lost her patience over. Take shopping. I used to walk into a store with my mother and within seconds want to join the Witness Protection Program. It would always begin the same way. We’d enter and some sweet sales girl would walk up to us all cheery and chirpy and ask if she could help us with anything and my mother would immediately answer in a direct attack.” If you want me to spend my money in this store you are going to have to turn the music down,” she’d say. As if tasered, the young employee would back away mumbling. I feel my mom’s anger every time I make the mistake of walking my girls into the dimly-lit, music-blaring Hollister in our nearby mall. I don’t attack, though, I usually just turn around, and tell the girls I’ll wait outside, praying that they won’t need me to come in and pay for something.

My oldest daughter, Annie, has her learner’s permit this year. After one particularly fraught ride into town she told me the thing that makes her most nervous when she drives is how I hold onto the car handle above my right shoulder for dear life. I laughed hard when she offered that up because my mother did the exact same thing. I don’t know if my mom was ever was comfortable with my driving and I’m afraid that my daughter and I may share the same fate. I realize now that it had little to do with my road skills and everything to do with the powerlessness you feel over your children in the world and how acutely that hits you when they are behind the wheel of a large automobile.

Last week I had a bit of a crying time thinking about my mom and a friend stopped by mid-cry. She is a very sweet, very well-meaning friend who was very serious about explaining to me that she communicated with people who are no longer living. (You have to remember, I live in Boulder, Co.) So on this day my friend who speaks to the dead mentioned that my mother was talking to her and started telling me what my mother was “saying.” I know my friend was trying to cheer me up and I didn’t get mad at her when she proceeded to say all these sweet things that a mother would say.

Secretly though, I couldn’t wait to call my fiancée and tell him what I didn’t have the heart to tell my friend, and that is that my mother would NEVER have said those things. She didn’t talk that way. She was not a person to speak in vapid pleasantries or spew out stuff that you’d see in needlepoint somewhere. My mother found subtlety difficult and though she was often incredibly kind and loving to me, there was no syrup to it. So I’m thinking that what my mother would have said was this: “If I can communicate with the living , why the FUCK would I be talking to YOU when I could just speak with my daughter directly?!”

And yes, my mother would have told me she loved me and she was proud of me and she also would have insisted that I stop being sad and just go and enjoy my life. She would have used the line she always used when I needed a kick in the ass: “Enough of your self pity, Max.” I dreaded that line because it was always true. Nobody wants to hear words like that, which is why mothers have to say them. As the mom of two teenagers, I now know how hard that is to do, and I love her even more for it.

So today, in my mom’s honor, there will be no tears and no self-pity, Max. I’m thinking a good dose of Nina Simone, a glass of red, some meatloaf, a glob of mashed potatoes and a few choice words: “Happy Fucking Mother’s Day.”

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