Occam’s Razor

Sort of Enfranchised

If my 50th birthday in February was a big deal because the number was a very big and very round then arguably my daughter’s 18th birthday tomorrow is a much bigger deal.

My turning 50 included neither new responsibilities nor privileges. Perhaps AARP membership could be construed as a new privilege. However, the AARP no longer requires you to be age 50 to join. On the other hand, when you turn 18 then like it or not you become a (mostly) official member of the tribe. Should you transgress the law, there is no juvenile court for you. At age 18, while you cannot drink you are free to do other arguably stupid but legal things like smoke with impunity.

It used to be that at age 18 or so your parents were helping you pack your bags. Often you would move from your parents’ house to the local YMCA or YWCA, which was something like a community halfway house. There you could find single room housing, people about your age with perhaps some sense of morality, some older adults to keep an eye on things and cheap weekly rents. While you established yourself in the adult world, you had some structure. I imagine there are still YCMAs that offer such a service, but I do not know of any. Our local YCMA is merely a health club. Moreover it is hardly restricted to young Christian males. Old men, women and children can hang out at our YMCA. I am not even sure you have to attest to being a Christian in order to be a member. One thing is for sure: our local YMCA has no SRO housing for young adults.

When I turned 18, while I could probably have survived on my own, it would have been a rough and angst filled transition. Today, modern life is both more complicated and more expensive. In addition, young adults have upgraded both their expectations and lifestyles. Since they are used to convenience, they expect convenience. Since they never had to pay the freight to live a convenient life, they expect that their parents will help subsidize their transition into adult life. Generally, we parents, out of parental love but also out of necessity, have bought into this new vision. Sending your young adult off to college with a couple lockers stuffed with clothes, knickknacks and a thick collegiate dictionary is no longer enough. Today’s collegiates require ATM cards, health insurance, prescription drugs, and laptop computers and maybe even a car. These may not actually be essentials, but the likelihood of their failure appears to increase if they do not have them.

If there is good news for this change of life, it is that you are finally allowed to vote. My daughter has registered to vote for our election this November. Although she accompanied me many times when I voted, she may find the actual voting process underwhelming. She may want to vote for a new president. Instead, she will have more ponder more prosaic choices, including who should be Clerk of the Court. In addition, she may discover that being one voter among millions generally means your vote does not matter too much. If you want your vote to matter, it is better to move to a swing state like Ohio and Florida. She will learn that attempts to change the course of government mostly fail. They may bitch about things, but rarely does this mean they will vote out the incumbent.

When I turned 18, I was fully enfranchised. My new privileges included the right to buy out all the booze at the local ABC store if so inclined. Since that time, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers have succeeded changing those laws. While newly liberated adults like her can vote, they cannot legally imbibe. I hope I am not the only adult to be troubled by this inconsistency. If we are going to prohibit drinking until age 21, it is far more honest to also raise the voting age to 21. In addition, some states have other asterisks next to this change in life. For example, here in Virginia while our daughter can get a driver’s license, she must get a certificate from a state approved driving school before an examiner will test her. A year from now when she turns 19 this will no longer be an issue.

Therefore, tomorrow she really becomes a qualified adult. Although she has committed no transgressions, she is an adult under probation. She has all the responsibilities of full adulthood without necessarily all its privileges.

For her parents there are some benefits to her change in life. She becomes responsible for her actions, not us. However, there are also downsides. She is harder for us to declare as a dependent. It is more difficult for us to tell her what to do, and likely counterproductive should we actually demand it. There are both legal and natural forces at work. These forces are impelling her to take full responsibility for her actions and her life, whether she is ready or not. For my wife and me these are reminders that parenting is a limited mission. Our daughter, while much loved, is really a passenger on our train. We have punched her ticket. The train is slowing. She needs to get her off the train.

As a young adult in her gap year, she now often navigates by herself to the local Books-a-Million. While she shelves books for a bit over the minimum wage, she ponders what she really wants to do with her life. Our evenings, which used to be consumed with monitoring her homework and Internet usage, are starting to become quieter. The cat, who is very bonded with our daughter, pouts because his human is spending more and more time away from her. Meanwhile, I am envisioning a much quieter and lower-key life in my near future. I am seeing a time when her bedroom morphs into a guest room or a study. Indeed, I am seeing a time when our house goes on the market and we retire to some place smaller. I am seeing my wife and me with grey hair, living in a retirement community and going to Elder Hostels. While this vision still seems quite a way away, what is new is that we can see it clearly now.

Our cat will not be happy by our daughter’s change in life but he will adopt. My wife and I will experience a mixture of feelings, but will move toward acceptance. Our lives will continue to intersect with our daughter’s, but invariably we will see less of her. There may come a day when we call her regularly just to find out what is going on with her. There may come a day when our relationship devolves into occasional Thanksgiving dinners and exchanging Christmas cards.

We have to let her go. She has to let us go. That is just the way it is. Meanwhile, we can expect measured steps by her toward self-sufficiency and many more evenings and weekends free of the distraction of supervising her life, while not entirely free about worrying about her choices.

September 27th, 2007 at 07:46pm Posted by Mark | Sociology | no comments

The transition

Some adolescents are eager to sample adult life long before they are physically and emotionally ready to do so. Others prefer to have little to do with growing up and might not grow up at all without firm parental involvement. My daughter is likely in the latter category. After she graduated in June, my wife and I set the firm expectation that she had to get a job.

Our daughter Rosie is part of an emerging trend: the gap year. A gap year is a year “off” (at least from education) between the end of high school and the start of college. My wife and I supported her decision. For a young woman for whom most life changes are a challenge, a year dealing with a regular job should help her clarify her choices. It was our hope that if nothing else this job would show her what life might be like if she did not go to college.

Rosie had managed to graduate high school without working a real job. The summary of her job experience was occasional babysitting and volunteer work. Both my wife and I held part time jobs in high school. Both of us needed the money. As one of eight children in a middle class household, I knew that if I wanted a college education, I would have to pay for most of it myself. I started working as soon as I was legally allowed. My parents chipped in a few thousand bucks toward my college education. I had saved about $7000 from working part time. Student loans and a cheap public university filled the rest of the gap.

Frankly, it irked me that Rosie had managed to get through high school without having had a real job. As I remarked in another entry an entry-level job, aside from providing a source of money was an invaluable education in life. High school has its stresses but it is surreal. Mopping floors at 10 PM or listening to surly customers bitch about their woes while maintaining a pleasant smile was real. Perhaps sensing that real life was not much fun, she seemed content to be a slacker.

There is no lack of entry-level jobs in our area of Northern Virginia. Yet many of them were simply unacceptable to our daughter. With threats of pain and suffering, we could have forced her to apply at a McDonalds or a Target. That tack seemed counterproductive. Since she would have to navigate her own way through real life, we felt it better to work with her than against her. My wife and I became her coaches. Still there was a big gap between our expectations and hers. Ours were that as soon as graduation was over she would be pounding the pavement. Hers was that a couple of times a week, and only if we nagged her and drove her around, she would apply at places where she wanted to work. After applying at a few places, she preferred to wait to see if they would call her. They did not.

To make a long story short she mostly managed to slack off all summer, sleeping in past noon and staying up nearly until dawn. She applied with lackluster enthusiasm at places like the local drug store, but really wanted to work in a bookstore. An interview with a Barnes & Noble though never resulted in a call back. She was this close to being forced to apply for a job at Target when, after a second interview the local Books-a-Million finally offered her a job. If she was relieved, it was hard to tell. My wife and I felt like popping the champagne. It had been an aggravating summer.

We are still nervous. For a young woman who spent most of her summer in a comfy chair with her laptop computer, a real job was going to be a big change. Could our daughter go from slacker to productive retail drone overnight? The answer appears to be yes. She has only finished four days on the job but we are amazed by the transition. While we wait to pick her up in the parking lot after her shift, we can watch her through the large open windows, scurrying from place to place. Her legs hurt, she says. This is not surprising, since they were little used all summer. Already she navigates around the store as if it were a second home, working with intensity and energy that astounds us. She often finds the working at the store interesting. She likes her coworkers, finds many of her chores boring but is too busy running from one task to another to care too much.

I guess underneath that slacker young woman was a woman ready to engage life, but scared by the transition. Now much of that fear is behind her. She has learned to apply for jobs and to interview. She did not like it, but she has acquired a life skill all of us but Paris Hilton must learn. Our job was to encourage first then coax and cajole when necessary. While the process took longer than we expected it is gratifying to see the fruit of her efforts at last. From navigating the buses, (they run only during rush hours) to vacuuming the store after it closes, she has moved from inertia into full engagement. She is learning to leave work at 12:15 in the morning and be back at 10 the same morning for another eight-hour shift. Moreover, she is doing so with both grace and a pragmatic attitude.

While I am still wondering if the other shoe will drop, I am beginning to relax. I know there is much more to this parenting business but I am also seeing that it does eventually end. Flush with her own money (she still must pay us $200 a month in rent, since she is not going to school) she is beginning to make her own choices in the real world. At the end of the month, she turns eighteen. Our joint account will become her own private account. Her checks have arrived. Her check card is already in use.

She still has some catching up to do with her peers. She has expressed little interest in getting her driver’s license. The State of Virginia requires anyone under 19 to go to a driving school, even though my wife and I have taught her how to drive. She will decide if she wants to accelerate the process or wait until she is 19 to take her driving test. The hassle of taking the bus to work (when it runs) or depending on her parents to drop her off and pick her up (when they are not running) may force her to rethink her lackadaisical attitude.

Over the next year, her hazy plans for becoming an English teacher may well change. She understands that public school teachers do not make much money. Working for modest wages may put this choice into context for her. I would not be surprised if her career plans take a new and unexpected path over the next year. For now, she keeps her goal modest: she wants to save up enough money to buy a Vespa. Unlike my wife and me, she will probably not have to worry about how she will afford college. We can give that one gift. She can graduate college and likely start debt free.

This coaching business is challenging for me. I certainly know what I would do if I were in her shoes. Yet I will never be in her shoes. She has treaded a different path in life than mine. My job is to express confidence, provide unconditional love, give an unvarnished picture of the road ahead and, if she asks, help her think through some tough choices. I am sure that she will have some stumbles along life’s path. Perhaps her cautious attitude is now something of an asset. Modern life is incredibly complicated, so caution is warranted, provided it does not amount to dysfunction. Yet life cannot be avoided forever. At some point, it must be engaged. It is heartening to see her engage it at last with a surprising spirit of determination and vigor.

September 14th, 2007 at 08:27pm Posted by Mark | Life 2007 | no comments

Review: Dazed and Confused (1993)

American Graffiti (1973) celebrated the teenage years of the first set of baby boomers. Arguably, for those of us born in the middle to late end of the baby boom generation, Dazed and Confused (1993) is our American Graffiti. While not nearly as good as American Graffiti, for those of us born in the late 1950s and early 1960s Dazed and Confused will doubtlessly resurrect some adolescent feelings. If you are like me, the memories will be more painful than nostalgic. If you laugh more than cringe, maybe part of you never quite grew up.

There is no question that the 1970s were a weird decade. Dazed and Confused chronicles a set of rising seniors on the last day of school in 1976. The nation’s bicentennial was a month away. The Vietnam War had recently come to an inglorious end. We were on the tail end of the hippie generation. By the mid 1970s, society had thrown up its hands in surrender. Drug use was common among my generation, although smoking marijuana tended to be as far as we would go. In most states, you could buy beer at age eighteen, but even if you were not quite eighteen, there were no Mothers Against Drunk Drivers to worry about. It was not that difficult for a minor to purchase either beer or cigarettes. Even sex was not that hard to acquire. If a pregnancy occurred, abortions were readily obtainable, although you might have had to cross state lines. AIDS did not yet exist, so any social disease with the exception of genital herpes, which was relatively rare, could be cured with antibiotics. By default, we emulated our older siblings. As a class, we were inclined to fool around, take chances and be reckless. We were also a lost generation. The hippie movement was dying out. Ronald Reagan had yet to capture our imagination. Gerald Ford was our president. Our hair tended to be long, washed infrequently and uncut. Our clothes tended to be made of polyester and not to match. With utter authenticity, Dazed and Confused chronicles us at this time.

Director and Writer Richard Linklater was one of the few of us taking detailed notes during this time. The result was this 1993 movie. Watching Dazed and Confused is a bit like looking at pornography. That is not to say that Dazed and Confused is pornographic, although it has an R rating. (There is no nudity in the movie.) Just as pornography does not hide the warts and pimples on its models, neither does Dazed and Confused bother to present a false impression of our high school years. That is why it is difficult not to both cringe and laugh at the same time. You may find yourself a bit like me, wanting to watch it between the cracks in your fingers, desperately hoping it was not quite as bad as it was in this movie, but also knowing that yeah, it was that bad.

My high school was Seabreeze Senior High School in Daytona Beach, Florida. Unlike the students in this unnamed city, my classmates were generally too high on something to be cruel. These rising seniors though are downright cruel. On the last day of school, the guys hang out in front of the local middle school, ready to harass the rising freshmen when school lets out. They literally capture them as they exit the school and spank their hinnies with large wooden paddles. The women were not much better. They cover the rising freshmen girls with ketchup, mustard and kitty litter and force them to say humiliating things to the seniors. Why do they do it? It is a tradition. They suffered the same humiliation four years earlier, so of course they have to mete it out.

If you are seventeen going on eighteen in 1976 the world is your sandbox. Drugs and beer are easy to acquire. The parents for the most part look the other way. The girls are mostly easy lays. You do stupid and reckless things; you are quick to anger. You knock over mailboxes for fun. Yet underneath all this reckless behavior is a teen wanting to sober up but not sure how to keep the hormones in check.

Richard Linklater captures this world excruciatingly well. His movie is not really art, so much as a dispassionate look at twenty-four hours in the life of teenagers in late May 1976. From someone who grew up in this environment I can say that Dazed and Confused feels entirely authentic. There is not a false note in the whole movie. These were our teenage years with all their warts and pimples. That is why it is hard not to cringe. It is also okay, if you can muster it, to chuckle along from time to time.

With two exceptions, the cast is mostly a bunch of no names. Ben Afflack plays Fred O’Bannion, one of the more obnoxious teenagers. Matthew McConaughey plays David Wooderson, a young man who graduated some years earlier but cannot seem to escape the allure of his high school youth. I identified with a trio of nerds who for some reason choose to hang out with this bunch. Anthony Rapp, who starred in Rent both on Broadway and on film, plays Tony Olson, one of the few with his head together.

There is virtually nothing in the way of plot in this movie. It is just a tiny slice of time from May 1976, obviously heavily drawn from Linklater’s real life experiences and flawlessly rendered in all its garishness. Those of you my age who feel twinges of nostalgia for your high school years might want to see this movie, just so you remember what it was really like. Your current life in your extremely late 40s and early 50s should look quite a bit better than the mess you likely were back then.

I will leave this movie unrated. It is not high art but it is a faithful restatement of our lives and times back then.

Thank goodness, those days are gone.

September 2nd, 2007 at 11:15am Posted by Mark | The Arts | no comments

The Graduate

Time sneaks up on you when you are a parent. One day you are changing your daughter’s diaper and the next she is on a stage being handed a diploma. You stand there applauding, tears streaming down your face and hoarsely shouting her name to ten thousand attendees. The principle shakes her hand with his right hand while giving her her diploma with his left hand.

It is strange and surreal. You would feel like singing “Sunrise, Sunset” from Fiddler on the Roof except you are too choked up to sing. Also, there is the constant drone of Sir Edward Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” from the school orchestra. Still, you would sing it if you could, for you are filled with a powerful and bittersweet feeling. Your heart just aches for the love you feel for your child, now a woman.

Is this the little girl I carried?
Is this the little boy at play?
I don’t remember growing older
When did they?
When did she get to be a beauty?
When did he get to be so tall?
Wasn’t it yesterday
When they were small?

Your heart also aches in sorrow, for the bridges of dependency you know you must slowly burn as your daughter to transitions into an adult. You want her to stay at home forever, playing video games, attending sleepovers and going to Girl Scout meetings. Instead, you realize that part of the parenting experience is behind you. You now express your love by letting her go. Now comes a time when love will look a little sterner and at times a little heartless. Every bird reaches an age when the parent unceremoniously kicks the hatchling out of the nest. So too do you realize that it is your solemn parental duty to do the same, perhaps not by suddenly changing the locks, but by sending your daughter out to get a real job, and to learn to do things like paying rent. Since she has elected to take a year off before going to college, she has to get a job to stay at home. After she turns eighteen, our daughter will start paying us rent, $200 a month to start.

When not overcome by emotion you sit there in the George Mason University Patriot Center, one of ten thousand attendees and are a bit mesmerized by the size of the crowd and the enormous Class of 2007. For our daughter Rosie is a graduate of Westfield High School in Chantilly, Virginia. To say she is one of many is to put it mildly. There are over seven hundred students in her graduating class. It will take a full hour for all the graduates to get their diplomas. Principle Tim Thomas’ arms will be sore for a week.

The number of graduates may be huge, but I am feeling wistful anyhow. This is the sort of high school graduation that I wanted but I never received. Instead of a huge auditorium, my class graduated at the Daytona Beach Kennel Club. Unlike my graduation, where a thunderstorm took out the lights for ninety minutes, this graduation proceeded like clockwork. And unlike my graduation where a fair number of graduating seniors smoked reefers in the darkness while they waited for the lights to come back on, at this graduation the mere failure of the men to wear black pants or the girls to wear a black dress and heels was sufficient grounds to be thrown out of the ceremony.

Yes, it may be corny, but an orchestra has to play “Pomp and Circumstance”. Of course, there has to be brief speeches by the principle, the class historian, the class president and the class valedictorian, none of which really inspires anyone, particularly the graduates. They are more focused on the all night party at the school that will follow graduation. Still, these things are necessary. It is how the reality of graduation sinks in. Anything less and the ceremony is stripped of its meaning and dignity. Still, these graduates are not without a sense of humor. Despite stern admonitions and a pat down of students before graduation, two inflatable beach balls were tossed among the graduates while diplomas were handed out. In addition, despite stern warnings not to do so, a few yahoos in the audience used their air horns anyhow. No graduation is complete without it turning into something of a popularity contest; you can judge a graduate’s popularity by the volume of cheers he or she gets when their name is announced.

Nonetheless, my daughter’s graduation was still deeply satisfying for this parent. I found myself crying at strange times, like when the orchestra struck up a tune from West Side Story but the graduates had not yet filed in. Perhaps it was the jet lag (I had arrived home from Denver, at 1 AM, and was up at 6:30 AM). Perhaps it was the wedding I attended the day before. (I was crying through that too.) On the other hand, perhaps through my daughter’s graduation I was vicariously experiencing the graduation I wanted, but was denied.

It was likely all these things, but mostly I was feeling obnoxious pride at my daughter’s accomplishment. She may not have been class valedictorian, but that was an unattainable goal among 700 plus students anyhow. For now, her proud father was simply awed that she had survived high school and eked out a better than B average. That is no small accomplishment in the 21st century and in a high school ranked 128th in the country. Despite her inexperience, my daughter adroitly dodged all the teenage minefields in front of her. She could have become drug addicted, hooked on tobacco, pregnant, in a car wrapped around a telephone poll or acquired some social disease. She rebelled by truly being different, even among her peers. Not many freshmen would join the Gay-Straight Alliance, or go on to be its vice president. While mostly she navigated below the radar of the preppy and popular, when she stood up, she did so for things she believed in: like civil rights for those whose lifestyle offended the majority of Virginians. How could I not feel pride in a young woman whose values are that well grounded?

As one of the speakers said, graduation is really the end of the beginning, as in the end of childhood. Now our daughter begins a strange and much different chapter of her life, where she navigates regularly to a job, does things she does not want to do for eight hours at a time, smiles when she does not want to, pays rent and learns to live within her means. Perhaps she will learn some other lessons, like what it feels like to be fired, laid off or to make a catastrophically bad choice that eluded her in high school. She will have that right in September when she turns 18. She tells me that one of the first things she plans do when she turns 18 will be to register to vote.

That is how we all learn, of course: by making choices and observing their results in the often nebulous minefield called reality. She is bound to stumble and she will have to learn how to recover by herself. Perhaps this year off from education will be the best education she will ever get. For the one course they cannot teach you in high school is how to navigate real life. Some things cannot be taught; they can only be experienced.

I expressed my confidence that she will make these choices wisely. I too must learn some new skills. I must learn to keep my lips buttoned and to give advice only when asked, and maybe not even then. Our daughter remains leery and cautious about engaging life, but she is not dysfunctional. She remains a nerdy, eclectic but sweet young woman, much like her parents. Her sense of caution will serve her well. She will sort it out in her own way. Her choices may surprise us and occasionally disagree with us. However, those choices will be authentically her own.

We have released the tether and she is unmoored. She is trying out the oars of her life tentatively. Ever so slowly, she will recede from our view.

June 19th, 2007 at 10:42pm Posted by Mark | Life 2007 | no comments

Ready or not, here life comes

I am beginning to understand that the first eighteen years of parenting are the easiest.

Those first eighteen years amount to parental spadework. Parents provide the soil, the sunlight, and the seeds that help a child grow and mature. When it comes to our children, most of us are reasonably myopic. How could we not be? We had to be there for our children 24/7 for eighteen long years. When they were infants bawling at 2 AM, we had to sort through their issue of the moment. When they took their first tentative steps, we had to be there to make sure they did not hurt themselves. We had to sort through innumerable child rearing issues from their schooling, their religious education (or lack thereof) and their friendships. Then at some point, we have to cut the cord and try not to grimace as our darling children struggle to navigate the complexities of real life.

There are times when I think that my daughter, who graduates high school and turns eighteen this year, should have engaged life more. Like her parents, she has turned quite introverted. She is fine with her small coterie of oddball friends. She seems fine that most of them have already started executing their career plans while she has yet to engage. While naturally intelligent, she often lacks motivation. What she really wants to do is write fiction (and she is a gifted writer) and watch CSI: Miami reruns. Unfortunately, writing fiction, while a laudable goal, is unlikely to provide the income she will need to survive. Moreover, there are only so many episodes of CSI: Miami. When she thinks about her looming adulthood at all, she is trying to figure out whether she wants to go to a community college or spend a year in the real world and then maybe go to college. Rather than decide, she seems content to just see what life serves up on her doorstep. Her attitude is understandable. The real world can be a bizarre, cold and brutal place.

While concerned, I realize that any teenager moving into adulthood will go through stages like this. She is like a chrysalis. She may prefer to stay in her shell, but it is opening anyhow. Life is propelling her toward maturity, whether she is ready or not.

Her “go real slow” approach is not necessarily a bad strategy. Her innate sense of caution, perhaps learned by observing some dysfunctional friends, has had some positive effects. She does not smoke and is not taking drugs. She has not run off with a biker named Thor. I do not worry that she has caught a sexually transmitted disease or that she will have a child out of wedlock.

In addition, she does appear unlikely to emulate her somewhat older cousin. Over the last week or so, I have become privy to an example of a disastrously bad choice that a young adult can make. My niece is a skinny, intelligent, well-mannered and attractive girl. Excellent parents raised her in a warm and nurturing environment. Her parents, as best I can tell, have done everything right. Doctor Spock would use them as examples. My niece has excelled scholastically, grabbed a scholarship, managed a part time while attending university, and learned the art of sharing an apartment with a friend. Her parents have followed the usual best practices: giving educational carrots and additional freedoms commensurate with grades and demonstrating sound values.

So just why has their 20-year-old daughter run away with a very handsome but very troubled young man? It is not as if she did not have any warning about his dysfunctional nature. Nor is there a lack of earnest young men with sound values who would like to be romantically involved with her. Instead, she chooses to focus on her bad boy boyfriend. He smokes, has gotten in trouble with the law, totaled some cars and continually relies on others to bail him out. Now my niece has stopped going to classes. She has moved to Atlanta to be with her boyfriend and his dysfunctional mother .

Her parents, of course, are tearing their hair out. They spend much of their time crying, worrying and not getting much sleep. They are also taking painful steps: repossessing her car, cutting off her cell phone and cleaning up the detritus she left behind. These included two beloved cats that she abandoned. I think I can confidently say that my daughter will never do anything quite this rash. Caution seems to be hardwired into her brain.

As she turns eighteen, my wife and I are negotiating a set of transition rules for our daughter. Just agreeing on a set of rules is a big challenge for us. Both of us come from different backgrounds. Consequently, we have sometimes-divergent ideas of what strings and carrots are appropriate for a young adult. It seems unlikely that on the day she turns 18 that our daughter will move into an apartment of her own. Having spurned a part time job, she does not have the money for such an endeavor, and we will not give it to her. With the high cost of living in Northern Virginia, she would need plenty of roommates to make ends meet. Given her tendency toward inertia, we will likely have to prod her to find a job. Nonetheless, the outlines of what we are prepared to do are now clear.

We have a pile of money set aside for her college education. We will spend it on her educational expenses only. If she goes to school full time and needs a car we may provide a car but we will not give her the title. If she wants to wait a while before going to college, then she can stay with us but will have to pay us rent. Right now, my wife and I are negotiating these details. I am thinking $200 a month or 25 percent of her gross income for rent, whichever is less, with amounts going up every year. If she chooses not to go to school, we will expect her to work at least 32 hours a week. She will be responsible for getting to and from work. Our bus service around here is problematical, so it will be a logistical challenge for her. It will be one of many challenges she will have to manage, but they will help prepare her for much bigger challenges ahead.

Our daughter has the outline of our thinking, but we have not presented the details. We plan to implement it as a contract where we all sign on the dotted line. If she does not like it, she is free to move out. I cannot see her doing that, since inertia may just as well be her middle name. In addition, the true cost of living would be a real shock. I doubt she has the right set of skills to manage the complexity of jobs, roommates and living within her means at this stage of her life.

The reality is we all found this time of life challenging. College, as hard as it was, provided me with something of a buffer. Student (and later off campus) housing was straightforward and not too complex. It was not until I graduated and found myself in the midst of a bad job market that I was forced to fully engage adult life with all its uncertainty and stresses. I struggled. My wife went through similar struggles.

Our daughter knows that advanced education and a professional work attitude will make these challenges less stressful. However, knowing is not the same motivator that feeling them provides. We suspect that when she experiences these things first hand she might find additional motivation to do hard things, like make the commitment to strive hard in college. A year between high school and college working a low wage job might provide a needed dose of reality. Her lack of a plan may be the career perfect medicine.

Still, it is no wonder that she prefers to stay in denial. She has absorbed at least this much correctly: real life can be damned scary. It was scary for me and it will be scary for her. Given that society is far more complex for her than it was for me at her age, it could well be scarier for her. Yet like all of us, by confronting real life she will gain self-assurance. It remains to be seen how well she will do and whether our strategies will help or hinder her in this process. The only thing we can say for sure is that there is turbulence ahead. I hope that for a girl who likes roller coasters she will find a way to enjoy the topsy-turvy years ahead.

February 9th, 2007 at 01:33pm Posted by Mark | Life 2007 | 2 comments

A daughter grows up

I am always a bit leery to write about my family members. I am afraid that I will say something in my blog that will inadvertently hurt them. Therefore, when I do write about my family I am circumspect. Still, they are my family so they cannot help but loom large in my thoughts. So occasionally, I will invite the reader to get some insight into my family. Today, I give you a picture of my daughter on the cusp of adulthood.

In fact, on occasion, I have said things in my blog about my daughter Rosie, but little of it was meaningful. I described her as a polysexual (a word I think that I coined) a couple years back. She was just fourteen when she announced to my wife and I in a matter of fact tone that she was attracted to both genders. I also once pondered mistakes I made parenting her. Other than these instances, I have written little in my blog that gives you a sense of the wonderful young woman that is my daughter.

Now Rosie is sixteen and a junior in high school. She is taller than her mother. Prior to adolescence, she struck her two introverted parents as inexplicably popular. Her many girlfriends were a constant presence in our lives. It seemed like almost every other weekend she was at a sleepover at some girl’s house. She rarely needed or bothered to call up her friends. They sought her out. She was not popular in the traditional sense of the word. There are no yearbooks in grade school, but if there were, I doubt her class would have been voted her most popular. Rosie is the antithesis of perky. For whatever reason though, she effortlessly attracted a devoted group of followers. Without intending to be the leader, she became one to her friends. She carried with her both imagination and an intangible energy. Girls who wanted more of these traits in themselves were drawn to her like moths to a flame.

Adolescence found Rosie getting in touch with her introvert. She still has good friends, but they are a smaller and more eclectic set. They meet mostly online now. Her friends include a few really unusual, somewhat bizarre, quite skewed (but not dysfunctional) harmless young men. You might say they are the out crowd at school. She still claims to be a bisexual, but seems to be in no hurry to try sex, drugs, cigarettes or, for that matter, heavy romantic relationships. She is comfortable with whom she is, and who she is does not resemble many of her peers.

I still think she attracts a certain kind of person who is also turned off by peer pressure, but not as comfortable in openly expressing it. When they see her, they see something of a model on how they would like to be: a genuine and unapologetic non-conformanist. She has her own tastes in clothes and music and they rarely intersect with those of her peers. She likes some popular music, but her favorite music tends to be rather obscure stuff she found on the Internet. She is comfortable with less trendy forms of music, including musicals, folk, jazz and classical music.

There are times I think she might be a Goth, since she is usually dressed in black. However, she is not the type to dye her hair jet black. She wears no makeup. She makes sporadic efforts to clear up her acne, but usually she is indifferent to it. Adolescence is usually a time of pulling a way. Yet at this stage in her life, she seems comfortable emulating her geeky parents. For both my wife and I are comfortable in our own non-conformanist skins. For her a pleasant day is spent in the sanctuary of her bedroom. Half of the time, she is chatting online with friends. The other half of the time, she is writing. For like her mother and I, she seems to have the gift of words. For now, she writes mostly fan fiction. She even has her own web site full of fan fiction that she has written. Her friends are some of her more enthusiastic readers. They participate by providing artwork for her web site, and hang on her latest chapters.

For most of her life, academics have been her biggest challenge. It was not that she was stupid. At every conference we had with her teachers she was singled out as one of the smartest and most interesting children in the class. Rather, her challenges were organization and being able to focus. We tried every approach we could think of and nothing worked. For a while there I had regular nightmares of her spending her adult years placing smiley face stickers on customers entering the local Wal-Mart.

Now, at long last, she is cruising academically. We are not entirely sure what did the trick. It could be that she finally realized that independent living was right around the corner. We do know that things started improving shortly after we found Peggy, her life coach. Perhaps parental guidance can be counterproductive at a certain age. Her coach works as a partner, rather than as an authority. Just last week we reached a welcome milestone. Her latest report card arrived with all A’s and B’s on it. I used to dread the arrival of her report card. Now it is almost a happy experience.

At sixteen, it is too much to expect her to figure out what she wants to do with her adult life. She is definitely thinking about it though. For now, her goal is to study overseas. Since she is one of the top French students in her school, she would prefer to study in France. To help her discover if this is something she really wants to do, we are planning to take a trip to Paris this summer. One thing is for sure: she is not terribly enamored with her own country. She talks about giving up her American citizenship for French citizenship. I have to remind her that things are not that wonderful in France. Young adults have been rioting in the streets. Youth unemployment hovers around 20%. Then there are the sectarian problems with Muslims and other immigrants who live what amounts to permanent second-class citizenship. Nor, if truth were told, would I be that happy to have her across the pond permanently. She is after all our only child. We know she has to leave home sometime. We are hoping if she must go to college in a foreign country that she will pick Canada. Quebec might be a more pragmatic (and less expensive) place for her to get a degree.

She has a hazy idea of a career in translation. She wants to see the world, and being multilingual might provide the opportunities she wants. Her choice strikes me as reasonable. Moreover, it is likely to pay much better than being a Wal-Mart greeter. Still, I wonder. I suspect that her real calling will be in the arts. Someone who can write so beautifully at age sixteen is likely to want to continue it as a passion into adulthood too. She has done her share of Community Theater, and has sung in a few chorales. For much of her life, I heard more singing from her than I heard from most birds. It is hard to imagine that side of her will disappear in adulthood.

I expect that she will experience some significant potholes as she transitions to adulthood. Her remaining time with us is now rather short. There is still so much to teach her. She needs many more driving lessons. I need to teach her money management skills, so she does not spend her adulthood in debt like so many these days. She needs a job beyond babysitting to see how the world of employment actually works. In addition, she needs to have some understanding of how expensive it is to live in our modern world. Perhaps this will encourage her to pick a profession that pays more than a bare living wage.

She enters her adulthood in a vastly more complex world than the one I knew at her age. There are so many more choices and as a consequence, many more potential pitfalls. If she has floundered in some ways until recently, it was probably simply because it is so tough to master all the necessary skills to succeed. She is now making sound choices. Now she carries a pervasive sense of inner confidence. Moreover, she seems to be a genuinely happy young woman. Rather than being rebellious, she is sweet and affectionate. She may be happy holed up in her room, but when she is out of it, she talks to us freely about her life. She remains as affectionate as a young woman as she was as a child. We can still hug each other freely. She radiates honesty and projects a sense of inner harmony.

She will still need some guidance, and she still is a bit nervous holding the tiller of her own life. She is nearing the edge of the harbor where she has spent her life. She has navigated in the shoals long enough. She is almost ready to handle the breakers.

April 18th, 2006 at 09:53pm Posted by Mark | Life 2006 | no comments

My Daughter the Vampire

It is 4 a.m. Do you know where your teenager is? Thankfully I do. My fifteen-year-old daughter is at home where she should be. However, that does not necessarily mean that she is asleep. During summer vacation, she can become a vampire. Therefore, at 4 a.m. she could still very well be awake, quietly in her room doing stuff. I do not know exactly what stuff she is doing. I have a feeling I probably do not want to know. She is likely on line, along with many of her friends, with a half dozen chat windows going. This seems to be her main use of her computer when she is awake, so most likely she is doing the same thing after hours.

Maybe this is a modern form of peer pressure. There must be some new requirement that during summer vacation and on weekends trendy teenagers must stay up past midnight, preferably until at least three a.m. I am betting that they are on line sending instant messages to each other specifically to encourage each other to stay awake. After all, dawn is only a few hours away.

I know I should not let it bother me. Since we are on the third summer of this peculiar behavior for the most part it does not bother me. Yet I still find it weird. It seems unnatural. When it is dark outside my melatonin levels naturally rise. It is unusual for me to stay awake past midnight. Generally, I am in bed by ten o’clock on weeknights, and eleven o’clock on weekends. Similarly, when it is light outside I tend to be awake. I find that sleeping in past eight a.m. is difficult. Because I sometimes need more sleep than I get, I compensate by wearing blinders in the morning. While it helps, I still sense the daylight. Invariably I am the first one to bed and the first one awake.

My wife has night owl tendencies. Since she is no longer tethered to a 9 to 5 job she is often to bed between midnight and 1 a.m. By this time, I have been asleep for hours. I usually do not even register her coming to bed. For my daughter, midnight can be more like the dinner hour. In fact, she will sometimes tip toe downstairs for a midnight snack. I find her evidence in the morning.

Last summer I was the parent on call to get my daughter to the doctor for a 3 p.m. appointment. I, the good dutiful father, left her a note on our kitchen table reminding her that I would be home around 2:30 p.m. so please be ready. I arrived at home to find the house deathly quiet. Where was my daughter? I called for her several times and got no answer. I figured she had gone to a friend’s house and did not bother to tell us, a serious offense. I started to look up the phone numbers of her favorite friends in the neighborhood. Then I noticed that her door was closed. I knocked on her door. The blinds were drawn. She was still deeply asleep.

I understand that this kind of behavior with teens is not unusual. My wife does not give it a second’s thought. “She’s a teenager,” she says, as if that is the answer to all questions about my daughter. Teenagers are supposed to do things that weird their parents out, and this was a minor thing. She could be smoking dope or having premarital sex. Conclusion: I should count my blessings.

Yeah, yeah, maybe so. I realize that she is fifteen. I realize at her age micromanagement is counterproductive. I realize we need to set flexible boundaries. However, isn’t there a reasonable limit? Can we not insist that even during summer vacations there is a bedtime? Isn’t midnight a reasonable bedtime during the summer? Can I not demand that ten a.m. is late enough for anyone her to sleep in? To me her behavior not only seems unnatural, it seems bizarre.

I also realize that it is dangerous to project my habits on other people. Some people are naturally night owls. My daughter may be one of these creatures. However, it was not always this way. For much of her childhood she happily went to bed on time. Things changed subtly during her middle school years. By the time high school arrived, her body had morphed. When opportunity arose, she became a vampire.

In June, it reached the absurd stage. She said she had insomnia; she had tried to go to sleep but could not. I tried to shuffle her off to school anyhow. “But I didn’t get any sleep,” she whined. “If I go to school I will just sleep at my desk.” She informed me that she could not function at school. Since there was less than two weeks of school left, I cut her some slack. Nevertheless, I suspected that if she had not been up until 2 or 3 a.m. the night before she would not have had insomnia in the first place.

In a way, I am happy that she has elected to go to summer school. As a consequence she must be up around 6 a.m. For a while, it is impossible for her to maintain her weird summer sleep schedule. Now during the week she is more likely to be asleep between 11 p.m. and midnight. Alas, summer school does not last forever. It is only four weeks long. So I can anticipate more weeks of vampire mode ahead.

July 23rd, 2005 at 09:31pm Posted by Mark | Life 2005 | one comment

Twin Sons of Different Mothers

When we parted in 1973 I was sixteen. Since fourth grade we had been best friends. But in 1972 my family moved to Florida. So we were reduced to sending each other occasional letters. In truth it was a bit traumatic for me to leave Tom and my life in upstate New York behind. But it was also a pleasure to get Tom down to Florida for a week or so in the summer of 1973 and let him check out my new subtropical digs. As I sent him back home on the Greyhound bus for a long journey back to the Triple Cities I wondered if I would ever see him again. He was my one remaining tenuous thread to that part of my past.

My fear was well founded. In those pre-Internet days it was easy for friends to lose touch. We were both rapidly turning into adults and being catapulted into a dubious future. I sent him a couple letters when he was in college but then he disappeared. After college I moved to the Washington area (where I still reside) and I effectively disappeared. But always in the back of my mind was the question “Where’s Tom?” Where was the guy who filled my youth with such creativity, enthusiasm and adventure? Would I ever see him again? The prospects looked bleak. On occasion I searched for him. When I went on business trips I looked for his name in the phone books. Once I spent a couple hours in the Martin Luther King Library in Washington D.C. going through their stacks of phone books from various cities looking for his name. No luck.

The situation finally changed in the mid 1990s when the World Wide Web emerged. Through the web I found online telephone listings. To my surprise I found his name in our home city of Binghamton, New York. The name turned out to be his father. Fortunately his father forwarded my letter to him.

We traded emails warily and sporadically. It was clear that the adult Tom was not quite the same teen I once knew. Nor was I quite the same person either. While we had a great youthful friendship, there were some unhealed and tender spots in our relationship. There were issues to be worked out between us. We groped our way through them, sometimes opening old wounds. Fortunately we did not lose touch with each other altogether. Over the course of many years and many emails we reconnected and worked through our issues. Despite the years we still appeared to have a lot in common.

Still 32 years is a very long time. When life finally took me to Portland, Oregon where he lived I knew that we could at last reconnect. But for me it was still an open question whether after so many years we could renew a friendship that was so rich during our youth. We are both middle aged now, with families, burdens and aging parents. I approached our reunion with both excitement and nervousness.

Tom’s flaming red hair is now white. My hair is peppered with gray. We are both not quite the skinny things we were in our teens. Life had scarred us and challenged us. Our youthful faces now have middle aged cares and concerns. I did not even recognize his voice on the phone. Who was this person? When we met in the lobby of my hotel I did a bit of a double take. I suspect he did the same thing with me. We both wear glasses now. Our hair is now shorter. But his infectious laugh and the lines around his eyes - those were instantly familiar.

The changes age had wreaked on us turned out to be superficial. Like two tuning forks struck at the same time we had spent 32 years apart on our own life adventures yet we were still remarkably similar people. Life challenged us in different ways. Yet here we were 32 years later with amazingly congruent interests, opinions and philosophies. One would expect that someone who spent his career living in the challenging and unforgiving advertising domain might naturally be a Republican. But Tom is not. Like me he is a flaming liberal. When we weren’t talking about times and people past, we were dallying in the present political situation. Once more I felt the harmony. We were still synchronized.

And we are both married with children. My daughter is older than his boys. (The older informed me over and over again he was “six and three quarters.”) His house in the burbs is comparable to mine. He drives a Toyota Prius. I drive a Honda Civic Hybrid. He expresses his creativity in art. I express mine in writing. We compared family histories. His family had their significant challenges as had mine. Our passion for the space program though remains undiminished. Even our taste in music is similar.

But most remarkable of all is that we connected on a new emotional level too. My wife sometimes remarks that I have few male friends. I say that is because so few of them are people of any depth. I have little patience for men whose conversation revolves largely around booze, broads and sports. Tom is a man deeply in touch with his feelings and who, like me, has learned to deeply care about other people. He knows how to express genuine empathy and warmth. Perhaps this is because we have so much history together or had shared some of our painful stories via email. But we know each other on a very deep level and could connect on that level too. It is a wonderful intimacy.

When tempted to generalize, which I do often, I see three general tracks in life for people. People either overcome adversity, are overcome by it, or float through life in a steady state, arguably alive but not growing in any meaningful direction, except possibly from side to side. Arguably both Tom and I had a lot of adversity to overcome, although I suspect Tom had more of it to deal with than I did. He has seen members of his own family unable to surmount (so far anyhow) their life challenges, as I have mine. To me it is quite remarkable when someone is dealt a tough hand in life yet manages to excel anyhow. Unquestionably though Tom has succeeded. As the pieces of Tom’s unique story fell into place I was filled with a sense of awe that he surmounted it all. And now here he is at midlife, incredibly busy and challenged but living a purpose driven life. The wonderful zoo of his life includes a lovely wife and two boys under age seven. Where many would have fallen into a lifelong depression or have given up, he managed to move through life’s landmines. Occasionally he stepped on them yet he survived his minefield scarred but ultimately triumphant. The result is a man who is a joy to know as an adult: full of complexity, richness, ideas, creativity, passion and eloquence. He is a privilege to know as an adult.

It still strikes me as odd that though thirty years and three thousand miles separate us we are still so alike. We truly are two tuning forks putting out nearly identical pitches after all these years. We both feel better for reconnecting. I think we both look forward to renewing a rich friendship that will hopefully carry us through the rest of our lives.

May 20th, 2005 at 12:42am Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Life 2005 | no comments

Is too much freedom unhealthy?

Perhaps it is the recent death of Pope John Paul and his firm, never varying approach to morality that has me thinking. Or perhaps it is that our daughter, failing in a number of classes in school, is now getting the service of a life coach to try to get her life organized in a way so she can actually succeed. But I’m beginning to wonder if too much freedom for an adolescent is a bad thing.

That’s not to suggest that our 15-year-old daughter can do whatever she wants. We have rules and she largely abides by them. It is true that we often get a load of snarkiness in return. But she is definitely not doing drugs, tobacco, alcohol or sex. She is not in trouble with the law. Like me she is wary of pretty much anything that might cause her to lose control of herself. At the moment her only crucial problem is her schoolwork. Bringing home consistent D’s and F’s in subjects she doesn’t care about (currently Algebra, Chemistry and World History) — and largely because she can’t/won’t remember to either do/turn-in her homework — is her problem. It is one that we’ve been trying to solve since at least fourth grade. I won’t get into all the details of how we’ve tried and failed over and over again. (And yes, she’s been tested for ADD.) Let’s just say that busy public school teachers often don’t help in solving the problem. Our daughter is one of many they manage. They don’t usually have time to work with us week to week while we try to track assignments. It’s like trying to pin the tail on a donkey when you are in the other room. Now in high school her teachers are more inclined to laugh at us as we try to hold her accountable for their assignments than anything else. She was supposed to master that phase in Junior High. And yes we acknowledge our share of fault. We’ve tried lots of different strategies with little success but after all we are her parents.

So our daughter often says she has done her homework when in fact she hasn’t and it is often impossible to know for sure. What I do know is that she can find plenty of far more interesting things to do than homework and studying. Principally, like many teens, her social life is now online. Most of her online friends are also people she knows from school. IMing and downloading music seem to be favorite activities.

Things were simpler when I was growing up. I know instinctively that if a tool like the Internet had been available to me I probably would have been lured by it in deference to doing boring things like studying for an upcoming exam. Particularly if I found things on the Internet I really liked my grades would have suffered.

Even back in the 1960s though my parents had some pretty old-fashioned ideas. These are ideas that now in hindsight seem pretty smart. For example, they limited our TV watching to one hour a night if we had school the next day. Oh, how we hollered! But on the other hand with our list of choices tightly constrained it was a lot easier to spend our free time reading books than watching Star Trek.

But there was a downside to all that discipline. We felt very much under their thumbs and chafed at it. Probably most teenagers would do the same regardless of the degree of discipline imposed. But it seemed pretty heavy handed to us at the time because naturally all our friends got to watch all the TV they wanted. We were considered freaks and our parents just didn’t care!

On the other hand, our family really succeeded. I didn’t do a scientific study of where all our friends are today. But I will note in a family with eight children we have three with PhDs and three with Masters degrees.

But we are told that freedom is a virtue. George W. Bush unilaterally invaded a foreign country to liberate people. If freedom is good then by implication choice is good too. And how can people know what they want in life if they don’t have the freedom to try various things and see what fits?

So that is sort of the philosophy that we brought to our own parenting experience. Admittedly I am more inclined toward limiting freedom with my daughter than is my wife. Her experience growing up was a lot different. Her mother was a hands off mother. My wife was naturally intelligent. She never worked very hard at her studies but she consistently brought home A’s. So over time we groped toward a spot in the middle of our philosophies. It became something like this: if our daughter’s homework was done then she was free to spend as much time as she wanted pursuing her interests, providing they were neither dangerous nor illegal.

I would like to think that our mixed experience was one of a kind. But talking with fellow parents who are using similar tactics I find that their experiences are quite similar. Of course there are some children who naturally embrace learning. But there are also lots of children like my daughter who are intensely interested in those subjects they like, but cannot find the wherewithal to pay attention and excel in those subjects they don’t care about.

In my spare time I teach a course in Web Page Design at a local community college. Maybe it is just community college students, or maybe it is a pervasive trend, but my younger students in general just don’t seem willing to invest the time and energy it takes to succeed in the class either. The odds improve for those who are foreign born. Orientals and Indians in particular seem to have the educational ethic. But about a third of the class will withdraw or switch to audit when they discover the class requires real study. Others will skip lots of classes. Like my daughter they will be scattershot about turning in homework, even though they get credit for turning it in. When it comes time for exams, it is clear that about half the class never bothered to study. Since I always review for exams you would think they would at least take notes during the review. But mostly they sit there without taking notes. Some of them zone me out.

It takes discipline to focus on that which doesn’t particularly interest you. I am afraid we’ve filled up the lives of our children with too many potential distractions. The aggregate seems to be a sort of addiction. From their perspective instant gratification online is a powerful allure. Things can always be put off until tomorrow.

And yet we also live in a frighteningly more complex world. Some of the skills that children learn today, such as multitasking, may be very valuable in the 21st century workforce. But these skills are only as good as their ability to maintain focus on a task. I don’t see a lot of that happening in today’s youth. I think my daughter is a case in point.

Perhaps that’s why I shudder when I imagine my daughter in the real world. To her life is a la carte.

I wonder if I should have sent her to parochial school. Maybe she would have gotten a heaping portion of Catholic guilt like I got. But likely she would be better prepared to survive in the real world than she is now. There is still time to learn these lessons before the real world delivers them unwelcome on her doorstep. Will she, like so many of my students, just get by? Or will she find the right stuff within her at last to compete effectively in the world?

Right now I don’t want to know the answer.

April 4th, 2005 at 10:01pm Posted by Mark | Philosophy | no comments

The Stranger in the Mirror and the Unexpected Adult on the Stretcher

The times they are a changing.

A couple weeks back I got one of these really unwanted calls from school that you know you will get once or twice in a lifetime. There is a rule that they cannot arrive until you are frantically busy with a deadline. Our 14-year-old daughter Rosie was injured during gym class at school. Some jock hit her not once, but twice with a basketball. The first blow landed on the back of her spine. She apparently didn’t think it was enough to bother moving off her bench. The second hit the back of her head. This one made her feel dizzy and nauseous. Since these were signs of a concussion the school clinic called 911 and us. I frantically dialed my wife who was resting at home in her easy chair recovering from abdominal surgery the week before. We made plans to rush to her high school. But before we could a subsequent call said Rosie was in an ambulance on her way to Fair Oaks Hospital. Despite her condition Terri managed to drive the van and pick me up at work (I had taken the bike) and we hurried to the hospital. We ended up beating her there by a couple minutes.

I hate hospitals and I particularly hate emergency rooms. I hate the gnawing feeling in my gut when someone I love is in danger. Fortunately when we saw her on the stretcher we breathed a sigh of relief. She looked fine. In case she had a spinal or head injury she was wholly immobilized. She had to be checked out by the ER doctor who ordered multiple X-rays. We knew that she was going to be fine. But it was an odd feeling to see her there on a stretcher in her gym clothes. She was uncomfortable because she was strapped in very tightly on a very hard immobilizer board. She wanted out immediately but we couldn’t let her off.

Perhaps most striking in the couple hours she lay there was to see the adult woman I apparently had raised. This couldn’t be. This was my daughter, the same girl I had bottle fed, read to, potty trained and played endless tedious games of Barbie with. But except for the acne she looked very much like a woman. She is already taller than her mother. She is likely to add a few more inches before she stops growing. I held her hand when she would let me but that stage seemed very much over. I offered empathy and found her a snack from a vending machine in the lobby. That’s about all the nurturing we dads are allowed to do for fourteen-year-old daughters. Our role at this age is pretty cut and dry. We show up when they appear in plays or recitals. We give lectures about grades and completing homework. We ferry them from party to party and sleepover to sleepover. We try not to give too much offense and give them plenty of personal space.

Still it took my breath away to think that in so short a time, a mere fourteen years or so she had gone from a fertilized egg to someone nearly as large as I am and on the cusp of independent living. As Tevye laments in Fiddler on the Roof: “When did she get to be a beauty? When did he grow to be so tall? I don’t remember growing older. When did they?” After several hours she was released. We retrieved her stuff from school. At home she made herself an overdue PBJ. She seemed back to her old self, but I she was no longer the child in my mind’s eye. She was an adult. And I felt very much like I was in a time warp.

It was a week later at a hotel in North Carolina. I woke up alone and staggered toward the sink for a glass of water. I needed it to drown out the acrid taste of dead bacteria in my mouth. I happened to look into the mirror and I was shocked. My father was staring back at me. But it couldn’t have been him … that person somehow must be me! Overnight I had arrived at middle age. And I was looking so much like my father, sans the gray hair perhaps. But mostly I saw him, right down to the long bony English nose. I was depressed for the rest of the day. Eventually after a long day at my conference, a long run, a hair wash and a fresh set of clothes I gingerly approached the mirror again to see if my father was still there. And he was still there. But I was also there too.

I don’t remember becoming middle aged. Someone threw the switch overnight. I realized I was different too, at least to myself. I no longer saw myself as youthful or virile. Unless I became Bill Clinton interns wouldn’t be chasing after my body. It was time to throw out those occasional foolish fantasies that dared to cross my mind. The reality was that someone other than my wife would never give me a second glance. I was yet another invisible middle-aged male.

Yet I rebelled but didn’t know what to do. Eventually I said no to a high caloric fern bar dinner. I bought a large Chicken Caesar Salad at a Schlotzsky’s Deli. I ate it quietly in my room and tried to accept my new reality. I don’t know if it will ever fully sink in. I suspect when I am in my eighties, just like my mother, that I will still ask just who is that stranger in the mirror.

June 23rd, 2004 at 08:21pm Posted by Mark | Life 2004 | no comments