Bush

All my favorite political pundits are notorious for pointing fingers at the trailer trash set as the ones who think Bush is a great president, a good man, a man of "faith" and all that useless drivel that doesn't qualify a person to be the leader of the free world.

The scary truth is that the people who put him in office & who kept him there, are not sleeping with their sisters. They are graduates of well known universities, they sold you your house, they're not sitting in their pickup listening to bad country music. (OK, maybe they listen to country.)

That is what confounds me, what makes me want to bang my head against the wall, scream in frustration. When will Americans understand the truth about politics?

They want to be blind. I'm convinced of it.
They don't want to really think about the truth because it's too much damn work. And it hurts.

How can you start a revolution when there is soccer practice & water parks to go to? Who really cares when it's not your son coming home in a body bag? For what- does anyone really believe in their hearts that violence will beget peace?
We have become a mob mentality (or maybe we have always been)& just because everyone is jumping on the Bush- sucks bandwagon now doesn't mean they wouldn't jump on the let's-start-a-new-war one in a few years hence when things have calmed down a bit.

It seems Americans have the most pathetic short term memory.

Mothering

I had always thought IF I ever had kids, naturally I'd have boys.
I had nephews & had only babysat for boys. They were fun & uncomplicated. Except when they'd ride their Big Wheels in front of speeding cars or tried to swallow bleach while I was in the bathroom.

Of course I had girls & now what I was always hoping to avoid has begun. The whole mess of replaying the mother/daughter drama is so painfully present.

It's terrifying. I hate it. It's a daily struggle to be anything but her. And yet sometimes I find myself screaming in her voice at my precious little daughters & I have to run into my bathroom & cower with fear as I calm down. Am I turning into her? Is there any way to avoid this?

Maybe I shouldn't have had children. When I calm down, I hug them & we giggle together & I sigh with relief (just a little). I am not her but I must be constantly vigilant. The tides could turn at any moment.

Becoming Our Parents

To my shock & mostly horror, many of the group that I hung with in the late eighties, early nineties, became observant Jews again as married adults.

Ironically, I had grown up more religious than all of them put together & was mystified & a little disgusted as to the why behind the decision.

Were their lives so misguided & meaningless that they had to cling to the life raft that our parents did? I still can't quite wrap my brain around these friends & boyfriends who took me to rock & reggae concerts, smoked endless joints ,loved sushi & Asian girls & suddenly felt the compulsion to go to shul? Goodbye bacon. Hello matzoh ball soup!
What the *&*$!

Can we not raise our kids to be good human beings without keeping Kosher? Can't we know in our hearts the difference between what is intrinsically good or evil?

Maybe it is like the preschooler who does well in Montessori while the other child needs a more structured program to thrive.

It's makes me angry. That they didn't trust themselves to be in the world & still know who they are. Kind of like returning to the ghetto, voluntarily. Like climbing back into the womb.
Yeah, it's safe but are you really living?

Osmosis

They say people tell you who they are when you first meet them. That you need to listen to them when they are saying, This is who I am.

I didn't trust my instincts when I was a young woman & was quite the idiot when it came to judging people's character. Are you a pathological liar? How fascinating! Let's be best friends!

And that especially pertains to men. I dated a guy for 5 years who told me on our first date what a commitment phobe he was & how frustrated he was professionally. I ignored him & paid the price. When I finally left him & moved halfway around the world to do it, I met my soul mate & guess who suddenly proposed marriage? What an idiot. That's me, I'm talking about. My ex was just being who he was.

What kept me from leaving my ex all those years? I wanted to steal his life. Well, more like his childhood. I wanted to absorb it by osmosis. Guilt by association?

Before his father tragically died of cancer a few years older than I am now, & their whole life went to shit, my ex lead the life of a young prince on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

His parents were both artists & they lived in a 16 room apartment on Central Park West.
They traveled the world & spent holidays in Spain & Africa for months at a time. They went to exclusive private schools & famous actors & artists lived in their building.

Even though this was way over by the time we met, after all, he was an adult living in Connecticut. But he still reeked of his marvelous upbringing & so did his childhood friends.

My upbringing was quite different. I grew up in poverty, the youngest child of a Jewish immigrant who narrowly escaped the concentration camps. My mother was a single parent & had a volatile temperament( to put it kindly) & was also an orthodox Jew.
My education was a miracle of scholarships to private schools & my summer holidays were scholarships to summer camp in the Adirondacks. I got away as quickly as I could.

Attempting to write

I write like I gossip, scared shitless someone is listening, whispering when the person in question is a 1000 miles away, on another continent.
My husband thinks it's an adorable if neurotic quirk, but I know better. It's called, having no balls.

I hear Erica Jong in my head, saying "Creativity demands nothing less than all you have. It means revealing murderous rage, the marksman behind the writing desk, the inner demons that confound us all." (-from her novel, Fear of Fifty)

My Jewish mother is looking. And the bible thumping army wives are all around me, trying to get me to go to Bible Study.
I am surrounded by real & imaginary critics. And the imaginary ones are the worst.

But clever little me has found an anonyomous creative outlet because I am a coward.
I still care what people think & that is such an unflattering characteristic in a potential writer.

I should be dead( or God has a sense of humor)

On a bitterly cold night, I was working n New Jersey and had missed the last train back to the city. I was longing to be home in my warm bed with a book & some Haagen Dazs.
I met this guy & got on the back of his Harley & rode the 40 minutes, freezing my ass off, staring at his red bandana. I asked him to let me off by Penn Station & took a cab home, my fingers & toes still numb.
Not for a second did it occur to me that he could have murdered me & left me in a dumpster in some shitty town in central Jersey. Did I have a Guardian Angel? I took many other chances like that, throughout my twenties & escaped unscathed.
Now I have two daughters & wonder how much I will shelter them, hoping they would never attempt such stupidity, but would living so carefully make them boring? Or just sane.

NYC

My children are growing up in the south & my concern is that they are not going to experience the best city in the world, the way that I did, when I was a kid in New York City.

Central Park, The Museum of Natural History, The MET, the subway,the freaks, plays, walking everywhere.

What do they know? Spongebob, riding their bikes, chain restaurants.................it's a good life, but what perspective can they have growing up in suburbia and now on a military base?

Oy vey, as my Jewish mother would say, & wring her hands and frown/smile, who knew with her crazy temperament.

I am taking my eldest daughter to The Lion King this weekend, the play that I was going to take her to when I was hoping to go home to the city years ago. It's not Kafka, but it will do.