Moms, Kids

Me and my mom, Venice, 1967
Gideon, Walton, NY, 1992
My mom and Gideon, New York, NY, 2005

Proud

OK, so I’ve been an iconoclast pretty much all my sentient life, everybody knows that about me. I like a little tilting at windmills, enjoy subverting the closely held and disproportionately revered paradigms where I find them.

And since armchair subversion pretty much involves making fun of stuff, I mostly like to do that. The closer to home the better. That way if I can poke a little fun at myself or my roots, I won’t come off as at least a little self-deprecating and not quite such a bitter snarky crank.

There’s plenty of good stuff to make fun of when it comes to parenting. Because it’s such a hideously intimidating prospect to begin with, people latch on to all sorts of assumptions and ideologies, which in turn have to be shot down because the rest of us are all secretly terrified that we’re doing it wrong.

If you’re Jewish, or were raised Jewish, even if your family was completely non-observant, you get to make fun of Jewish mothers – otherwise I think they’re a bit too easy of a target to really be a paradigm worth subverting. But if your family is like mine, you have all these high achievers: Professors, rabbis. And doctors! My son the doctah! Even if no one has ever actually used that phrase within earshot, it’s worth ridiculing as a state of mind. My son the doctah, he bought me a condo in Flaaaahrida! What a good boy!

But see, that’s where I’m actually kind of a jerk. All my life I’ve taken that particular cliché and distilled it down to its absolute lowest-brow common denominator, figuring it was all about status and competition and living vicariously through your offspring’s success. I never for a second bothered to think about the actual facts of it, not until this year.

My son’s not a doctah. He’s a college student, formerly a Physics major and as of this coming fall a Political Science major. But in between his sophomore and junior years he took a year off and did a Paramedic certification program at an upstate community college. He passed the last part of the exam yesterday, and he’s now a New York State Certified Paramedic. He was an EMT, riding with an ambulance company there, and now they’ll bump him up. He also has a part-time job with the county as an ambulance dispatcher, the final part of the phone chain when someone calls 911.

And you know, I finally got it. When someone says My son the doctah, sure, sometimes she means he makes a lot of money or drives a nice car or can take care of her in her old age. But there’s also this: My son saves lives. My kid, he’s not even 21 and he saves people’s lives on a regular basis. He’s doing a job that means something to him, that makes a difference in the world pretty much every time he shows up for work. And whereas sure, some folks’ sense of parental self-worth will hinge on how much money their kids make or what kind of cars they drive or how nice a nursing home he's reserved rooms in, mine is that my son saves lives.
So much for the paradigm. Every time I think about this, I am blown away. And, in case it’s not clear enough, very very very proud.

P.S. That's him when he was about 14, in his first suit. He's big now.

Gideon's First Fish

On the back it says July, 1993, which puts him a couple of months shy of his sixth birthday.

Why yes, I have spent my day doing a whole lot of nothing, which includes poking around up in the attic. Given all the events I usually try to cram into my weekends, this was a necessary and very appreciated day of total R&R.

I am not a scrapbook person, I don't have a baby book for Gideon, and none of my photos are in albums -- they are stuffed haphazardly into boxes. And while there's a kind of aleatory charm in pulling out a handful of pictures and seeing what I get, I'm sure someday when my memory is starting to go I'll really wish I had organized them better. But I don't really foresee having big chunks of free time to do this... oh, ever, honestly.

What's very touching is that I see Gideon's been through some of them and labeled the backs. I have no idea when he did it. The handwriting is on the young side -- he can't have been in his teens, I don't think. But it's sweet -- I'll have to remember to thank him.

Thankful for:

Gideon and Ivan, November 1989
Gideon and Ivan, November 2007
Ingredients: TurkeyAnd friends, and love, and food, and all that good stuff.
(I can haz turkey NOW???)
(I haz had LOTS of turkey.)

I love... burritos at four a.m.

... Parties that never end
Dogs that love cats
And twins!

Ladies and gentlemen, my fine twin sons.

Oh wait… I don’t have twins. That’s just Gideon, singular, who was down over the weekend for my birthday, playing with the Photobooth feature on my fine new iMac. Or, to be more specific, my fine new iMac with the 20” screen, which was a present from my dear, dear, lovely Jeff. I see now, in retrospect, how much it pained him to see me pounding away at my cumbersome old PC, staring at a monitor that’s nearly ten years old – oh, 17” was so BIG in those days -- covered with odd stickers and the customer support number for my old modem written in Sharpie marker and that generalized grimy look that putty-colored plastic acquires. Now that I have this beautiful gleaming white sleek machine sitting on my desk, I realize just what a blot on the general landscape my old computer was. (Now it’s my desk and attendant clutter that are blots on the landscape, but that will be addressed soon. Honest.)

Blot or no, it was a ridiculously wonderful, extravagant gift. It’s fast, it’s streamlined, it does cool tricks. And mostly it’s from someone I love. This birthday was just amazing, and I don’t mean the loot – the crazy amounts of love and good will that came pouring in my direction will stick with me for a while. Or at least I hope so. I may be highly unworthy, no matter what all these people are thinking, but I can at least aspire. I may be, in fact, fairly selfish and lazy and incapable of remembering other people’s birthdays and anniversaries and such, but everybody else seems to think I’m good, and that gives me a little bit of a head start. Just a tiny one. But that’ll do.