The Critical Mom and the Aged P

 I wish taking care of my Aged P were as easy and pleasant as Dickens makes it sound in Great Expectations.  The father of John Wemmick, a bill collector, the old man sits by the fire in the castle home with which his son has furnished him, enjoying the small drawbridge, flag post, and the daily firing of the cannon, an event that always nearly blows the old man out of his chair.
Dickens' Aged P is easy to get along with.  His son Wemmick says to Pip, the main character, "Nod away at him Mr Pip; that's what he likes. Nod away at him, if you please, like winking!"  The old man is happy, and it is soothing to spend time with him. 
 My 93-year-old mother--with whom it is never soothing to spend time--lives alone in her own place, does her own shopping (in the fridge sit open cans of green beans topped by Mom's Au Bon Pain breakfast corn muffin, from which she's taken a bite or two, and which she's decided to "save.") Also two meals worth of leftover Chinese food and the many cans of Vanilla Ensure I sent her via Amazon.  
"You could let the social workers do the laundry," I say with the most casual tones I can summon, as I strip the bed I slept on the night before.
She bristles.  "I'm not helpless!"
Dust coats bookcases, surfaces.  The kitchen is not one I'd be happy cooking in without a morning's work with Clorox. The elegant wrought-iron cage elevator door--as well as the front door to her non-doorman building--are heavy for me, but she scowls when I open them for her. 
"Don't hurt yourself!" she growls.
When I let her struggle with the front door, as she wishes, she mutters, "Guess I'll have to get stronger."  She broke her hip some months ago, and still favors one side, going up the steps by placing her right foot on the step, leaning heavily on the bannister, and hauling herself up.  By the time she gets home, she's ready for a nap, and so am I, but we don't take naps.  We walk to the bookstore and she buys me four books, one for me and several for my children.  The glare she bestows on me when I mention the assisted living facility in which even she admitted enjoying "my three squares," when she was recovering from her broken hip, is potent.  
"I don't want to be around all those old people!" she tells me.  When I write to the social workers who look in on her, they are legally required--or feel morally obligated--or both--to inform her that "your daughter is worried about you."  This nets me an enraged look and a not inconsiderable concern about my inheritance.  She promised to wear a device  on her wrist that would let her push a button and call for help if she happened to fall again and be unable to reach her phone.  The time she fell and broke her hip, she tripped over her phone cord, "So it was right there!" she said brightly.  "They came in four minutes."  I've reminded her about getting that device ("Yes I know! Glare, glare) as have her social workers, but Mom has yet to acquire one. 
"You could get those three squares without the assisted living place," I say.
"How?" She looks interested.  I have hopes.
"Meals on wheels! They deliver three square meals a day."
She shakes her head.  "Oh, I don't eat that much."
Like most modern children of Aged Ps, I live in another city--in fact I live in another country.  I patch together a group of friends and neighbors to look in on her, but these young people, all of whom love and admire her, are always off living their own lives.  One got a job in another city, and one went home to Japan to visit her own Aged P.
"We had such fun times together, the three of us," Mom laments.
I waved goodbye through the back of my taxi.  She's determined to live to 120.  Knowing her, she will.

"It's Spring," and the Critical Mom

---and the bird is on the wing.  Went right past me, a gray blur smaller than a pigeon but disconcertingly close as I exited my front door.  
"Whoa!" Two of my kids and I were rushing to catch the tram, they to go to school and I to teach an early morning class, and I wondered why a little gray bird would dive bomb my navel.   It left no calling cards, but the incident thrust me into an unpleasant recollection of a time when I'd been waiting for a train in Paddington Station, London, and a pigeon had dropped a load right on my head.  You should have seen the way five or six genteel British ladies whipped out hankies and Kleenexes and dabbed ineffectively at my head.  I'd been on my way to the British library to do some research, and my first stop there was the ladies room, where I washed my hair in their institutional hand soap, before leaving to take my coat to a dry cleaners.  
Our little gray bird turned out to be living inside our newspaper mailbox, which was fortunately free of newspapers.  By the time it rushed at me, the bird had already built a nest of brown leaves, and laid a bunch of eggs.  So we are all waiting to see them hatch, and hope that they'll dine on the wasps and hornets who like to set up housekeeping under our eaves about this time of year.

The "Microsoft" Guy and the Critical Mom

It happens all too often--at least once a week.  The phone rings, a heavily-Indian accented voice says my name, and announces that he's calling from the London office of "Microsoft computers," only sometimes he pronounces it "Mick-rosoft."  There's a problem with my computer, he tries to tell me, a virus . . . .or even, "We are receiving signals from your computer!"   . . .  But nothing I say seems to dissuade the gentleman. 
"How's the weather in Mumbai?" I asked last time.
"I do not know what you are speaking, Ma'am!"  
He did a good job of sounding indignant.
"I am calling you from Lon-don!  I am an engineer with Microsoft computers!"
"If you're an engineer with Microsoft computers, I'm the Queen of England," I said, and slammed down the phone.
A good friend took one of these callers seriously when he told her that her computer was infecting other computers.  She gave him a lot of information and nearly ruined her computer, which needed hours of service. 
"Mom," said the sixteen-year-old, who knows everything, "You're doing it wrong."  He instructed me to tell the next Microsoft impersonator that my computer was fine, but that I would like to help him with his computer.  That I had experienced vibes strongly intimating a problem with his computer, and that I would do everything in my power to help him dispel the virus that was damaging his computer.
But this ingenious idea didn't work either.  The wilder my soliloquy ("Ah, but I've had visions!  Visions of a virus swirling through your computer!  Let me help you dear sir!") the more insistently he declaimed that he was "a Microsoft engineer, Ma'am, and your computer . . . . "
Having run out of energy, I inquired once more about the weather in Mumbai, and hung up.  
"Well, Mom, they're just poor people in India or Pakistan trying to make enough to live," intoned the sixteen-year-old, making me feel almost that I should let the callers make more money by talking to me longer.  My husband says I should try asking what time it is in London the next time our persistent imposter calls, or whether the snowstorm inconvenienced him.  But I don't think that'll stop him.  Snopes.com has reported on this, but there's a sucker born every minute, and I must have done something--visited some website or something--to get the attention I'm getting from these folks.
And I don't even own a Microsoft computer.  I'm typing this on my Mac. 

Mass Murder and the Critical Mom

A few days before Andreas Lubitz deliberately reprogrammed Germanwings Flight 9525 in order to lower the plane's altitude from 38,000 feet to 100 feet, ignoring the pleas of Captain Patrick Sonderheimer, a group from my children's school took the same flight--possibly with the same pilots.  German children often go on exchange programs, and my older son has been on several trips to China with international groups of students.   The children on the Germanwings flight lived in a small village slightly north of Düsseldorf, a city to which I frequently go, half an hour from our local Hauptbahnhof.  The sister of a colleague was booked on the fatal flight, but changed her plans at the last minute. A friend who works for Lufthansa loaded the plane with meals, glasses, cutlery.
When we first heard the terrible news, when speculations about the age of the aircraft and the dangers of birds or foreign objects being sucked into the plane dominated the news, I felt that this crash couldn't have been caused by mechanical failure, since most crashes happen during take-off and landing, even those that have occurred with pilots impaired by alcohol or severe psychological problems.  It is still very hard to imagine someone studying the Airbus system carefully enough to set the plane's course in such a way that the system could not override the pilot's intentions.   It is hard to imagine a man wanting to die by sending a plane into slow descent so that it crashes into an alp, killing babies, schoolchildren, opera singers, vacationers.  Even if we try to get into the mind of Andreas Lubitz--another colleague suggests that he wants people to be thinking and talking about him right now--it is difficult to imagine any result other than the kind of feelings experienced by the actor Ralph Fiennes when he prepared for the role of the sadistic nazi, Amon Goeth.  In a February, 1994 New York Times interview in which he reflected that "Evil may well be nearer the surface than we like to admit," Fiennes confessed, 

"It's not a rational thing, but it's an instinctive thing," he explained. "If you are playing a role, you are immersing yourself in thinking about that character -- how he moves, how he thinks. In the end he becomes an extension of your own self. You like him."

When the Times reporter asked Fiennes whether there was "an emotional residue from the experience of playing a character he nonetheless views as obscene and sick," Fiennes answered, "I think there was a price to pay for this one. When you're investigating behavior that is that negative so intensely for three months, then you feel sort of peculiar because you might have at moments enjoyed it and at the same time you feel slightly soiled by it. It just throws up all kinds of question marks -- about acting, about human behavior, about how all of that is probably a lot closer to the surface than we like to think."  For the chilling scene in which Goeth shoots at random, and for kicks, at concentration camp inmates, Fiennes combined memories of "that boyish thrill with an air rifle when you aim at cans on a wall . . . satisfaction when you hit a target--it gives you a kick" with "a desperate and psychotic personality with an unnatural void at the core."  This "desperate and psychotic void" reminds me of St. Augustine's definition of evil as "the absence of good."  In a way, it is what an actor must do--destroy the good parts of him or herself in order to let in--temporarily--the mind of, say, Hannibal Lecter.  The necessary process of actors--or writers--erasing their own personalities in order to inhabit the role of characters they play or create must be accompanied by some form of identification, and identification with another person is normally sympathetic.  The cost of even beginning to understand a mind like that of Andreas Lubitz is this kind of imaginative sympathy:  What if it thrilled me to known that I was going to die in a few minutes, and what if the screams of my passengers were music to my ears?  What if the sound of Andreas Lubitz's breathing was heavy breathing, evidence that he was sexually excited by the knowledge that he would die and kill many innocent people?  What if--alternatively--he had forgotten all about the passengers, lost as he was in the feeling of relief that his life would end?  What if nothing meant anything to him--either his own life or that of the passengers and the captain?  What if he felt things were so awful that he just could not even wait until he got home to kill himself?  If we could imagine feeling any of this, would we be closer to understanding or preventing tragedies like that of Flight 9525?  Or can we only thank our lucky stars that people like Andreas Lubitz are relatively few in this world? 

The Partially Eclipsed Critical Mom

I was expecting the sky to be dark, dark, dark amidst the blaze of 9:30 a.m. but when it was still a regular old cloudy-wintry sky by 10:00, I harrumphed around my office, walked down the hall to ask my colleagues if they had a better view out their window, but no one did.  Meanwhile, hysteria reigned--"You're not allowed to look when you're outside, Mommy," said the ten-year-old, who had almost convinced herself that she had to make her way to the tram stop with her eyes shut.  We were able to convince her that this would prove far more dangerous than staring directly at the sun.  But a friend in a neighboring city told me that the blinds were drawn in every window and that guards were posted at the doors to make sure no child emerged during any recess period.  Parents and pupils alike got hysterical. At my child's school no blinds were drawn, everyone was allowed out during the 9:30 recess, but for some inexplicable reason everyone had to stay in during the afternoon recess, that is, when the show was over.  And there hadn't even been a show in our part of Germany.  Oh, but eclipses can be so thrilling!  When I was in second grade we had a total eclipse and one girl in my class, instead of staring through the pinhole at the piece of white paper, looked right at the sun.  Her mother rushed her off to the ophthalmologist and the everyone wrung their hands.  P.S. She now has the same kind of vision I have--meaning that she, too, wears non-prescription reading glasses.  To find real romance in an eclipse, you'll have to turn to novels.  Wikipedia has an entry on solar eclipses in fiction.  The plot, for example, of King Solomon's Mines takes a nifty twist when the Englishmen just happen to have an almanac, and tell the African natives that they will put out the sun and not give it back UNLESS!!!! So that's how they get to go to the diamond mines, saving a damsel in distress along the way, but getting rich, I'll just spoil the plot for you, doesn't do any of them any good.  But who knows how many real life plots turned on eclipses before we had those almanacs?  Even so, nobody seems any less hysterical than they were before the advent of what is ambitiously and optimistically termed "modern science." 

Magic in the Moonlight and the Young Girl

In Magic in the Moonlight, Woody Allen is at his subtle best--bittersweet, romantic, filled with unfulfillable longing that is then fulfilled at the last moment, I won't tell you exactly how.  But I saw as I watched--admiring the music, the costumes, the wind-blown pastoral scenes, the elegant Firth and the wide-eyed Stone--a strong indictment of himself as a pedophile.  The girlishly slim Stone, made to look considerably younger than her twenty-six years, falls in love with the fatherly, distinguished fifty-four year old Colin Firth.  She's made to look flat-chested, 1920s-style; he's pedantic and repressed, but hoping to be rescued.  It's Lolita-ish, and he's looking for the kind of salvation Oscar Wilde depicts in The Canterville Ghost, in which a spirit is doomed, like Hamlet's father, to pace around like the Wandering Jew or the Flying Dutchman or any number of guilty types until, in this case, a "golden girl" makes a mysterious sacrifice, freeing the ghost from Purgatory.  That does seem to be the sort of tale we're getting here from Allen.  A sensible man, lonely in life but successful as a magician, investigates a supposed case of spiritualism, and teeters on the brink of religious belief, actually sitting down to pray when his beloved aunt is being operated on after a car accident.  In the middle of his effort to pray he has an epiphany--that religion is nonsense, and that somehow that spiritualist--remember, she's the Emma Stone character--is fooling him.  And he figures out how she's doing it, and whom to blame, and then he feels much better, only needing the Emma Stone character--with her air of the twelve-year-old, right down to eating three course meals chased by muffins--to scoop him up and love him.  Fade out.  Everyone who didn't believe Dylan Farrow ought to perceive the confession in this film.  Woody Allen is our modern day Lewis Carroll, and like Carroll, he's apparently gotten away with it.

The Critical Mom Grades Final Exams

Did you know that Salome's beloved was named "Jonathan?"  They're probably out having sushi together right now.  Or that she had him "decapitulated?" And yes, that's a coinage that covers the process of screaming, "Back, daughter of Sodom!" and then having your head served up on a silver platter and your unwilling lips kissed by the frustrated teenager.  After grading a huge stack of first year English essays one year, I was rewarded by the following: "Although my opinion is based on the way I feel, that is what I think!"  Now that, in my considered opinion, is what twelve years of being educated by North Jersey nuns can do to a kid's mind.  I took for granted the Socratic approach when I was in a nun-free grade school.  Teachers were always bothering me:  "What do YOU think?"  I always told them.  And it never occurred to me at the time that many of my compatriots were growing up with "Memorize what I tell you to think or you'll be kneeling on a window pole for the next hour!"  (An acquaintance taught by "clerics" who endured said punishment became an orthopedic surgeon).  A friend told me that in her parochial school, down the block from where we played, the nuns liked to line up three girls, so they could slap them all across the face at the same time.  Nobody asked her to "think"--and she didn't know what they meant when they did--until she got to college.  And that's the kind of student whose exams so frequently come my way.  Another example:   passionately inveighing against animal abuse, one of my First Year English students wrote: "Animals are people, too!"  But my all-time favorite misunderstanding, when I was teaching Othello, occurred after I asked students to read the following passage:

And say besides that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, I took by the throat the circumcisèd dog, And smote him, thus.

 Now, this was in the bad old days before "No Fear Shakespeare" or any Internet, and I had  explained in gory detail that Othello's telling them how he grabbed a Turkish soldier with whom he was fighting and slashed him across the throat--just as he's doing same to self.  I'd also explained that in the seventeenth century an awful lot of English people were Christian and thought of anyone who wasn't--the Turkish soldier is Muslim--as "infidels," a word I defined, along with "circumcision."   I wanted my students to be able to show that they understood the passage because my class was being observed on that day.  And I had them all prepped, had even given them lines, and so when I asked, "Well, Bob, can you tell us what these lines mean?" I had a sinking feeling as his face went blank.  He was sitting next to his also-prepped-by-me pal, to whom I turned in despair.  And the two of them looked at each other, clearly struggling to remember the right answer, the one I had given them in the previous class, and muttering and whispering together, they came up with: "Iago and Othello are circumcising a dog!"

The Critical Mom and The Measles Outbreak

An 18-month old child died of measles in Berlin, and plenty of children here have it.  Many conscientious parents believe that they are saving their childrens' immune systems--or protecting them from autism--or leading a life "close to nature" that is therefore healthier--when they refuse to vaccinate.  There's Nature dancing-with-the-daffodils and there's Nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw.  You don't get the one without the other.  I've listened to my doctor at the Traditional Chinese Medicine Center, the one whose potions and brews and acupuncture got me through menopause in a healthy way, when my gynecologist wanted to pump me full of hormones or take a knife to my uterus (yes, there are still a few doctors around here who wonder why you need that thing if you're too old to have children).  I've seen the MAD MEN episode with the kid running on crutches because he came down with polio a year before the Salk vaccine was available.  I've read Eula Biss:  On Immunity: An Inoculation (http://www.eulabiss.net/) and please--take your kids to get their shots.  After an earful from my very trusted practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine ("It's unnecessary!  It's big business!  Children die!") I went to the equally trusted pediatrician, who sighed, took off her glasses and shuffled thoughts in her head in that visibly thorough German way before saying with all her heart, "You know, I have seen a child die of chicken pox.  And I never forgot it."  My daughter got her shot that day. Yesterday I phoned the pediatrician to make sure all three kids were up to date on their immunizations. 
Germany promotes, and supports, many excellent sources of alternative medicine, exactly the kinds of things that I always thought of as the lunatic fringe when I lived in New York.  But when acupuncture works, it really works.  When chiropractery works, it really works.  When potions and herbs work, they really work.  And the folks who practice these forms of medicine belong to a cult that never lets in a grain of sugar or a morsel of meat or a dab of butter or a single fiber of polyester.  But they are nice people and they really do heal you.  They just think their way is the only way . . . some of the time.  I know practitioners of hair-raisingly non-traditional medicine who have kept wards of AIDS patients alive long after anyone thought they could, and using none of the drugs that Establishment Medicine claims are absolutely necessary.  That doesn't prove that either side is right.  It proves that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than can be dreamt of in your philosophy.  And it proves that you, as a patient, have to listen to both sides, weigh the situation, and make up your own mind.  But if you don't get your kids their shots, you expose both them and other, often immune-compromised children, to pain, illness, and death.  

P.S.  See Roald Dahl's heartbreaking account of his daughter's death from measles--and just when they thought she was recovering.

The Critical Mom's Crock pot

Or slow cooker, if you're British or Australian.  I was wary of mine, since the first few times I cooked a meat-and-vegetable dish the carrots stayed hard--as did the potatoes--while the meat was overdone.  I've learned to avoid all those beautifully illustrated recipes on the net that show somebody throwing a bunch of whole carrots into a crock pot, topped by potatoes, topped by hunks of meat, and glorified with five-star ratings.  Nope, it ain't quite that easy.  But here's what really does work, and really is pretty fast:

(1) Boil some water in your electric water kettle and pour into a big pot on the stove.  Keep heating that as you boil another kettle.  Add some sea salt.

(2) Meanwhile, wash, scrape and slice carrots into smallish pieces, also wash and cut into slices potatoes, and throw in pot.  Let cook around fifteen minutes.

(3)  While the potatoes and carrots are cooking, slice and toss into your crock pot peppers (around two big ones), zucchini, onions, and maybe peas.  And/or sliced celery.

(4) When you can easily push a knife into the potatoes and carrots--but they shouldn't be totally soft-- drain them and add them to the vegetables in the crock pot.  

(5) Take your chicken breasts (with bones is better--the bones add flavor) or your stew meat--and brown them in vegetable oil or olive oil.  The former is currently believed to be the heart-healthy choice, but the latter has more flavor, and if you read as many online health pages as I do you know how frequently ideas about what is really heart-or-total-body healthy change.  Do trust your instincts.  I'm assuming your instincts don't run to prepared foods and sugar shock, because if they did, you wouldn't be reading this recipe, would you?

(6) Back to the water cooker.  Pour boiled water into a large coffee cup in which you've put a tablespoon of dry chicken broth and another of dry soup greens.  Stir and let dissolve, pour over vegetables.  Add more water until the vegetables are nearly covered.  Add a bay leaf or three.  Pour in a little dry white wine (around 3/4 cup) if you're cooking chicken.  Use dry red wine if you're cooking chunks of pork.

(7) Put the browned chicken or stew meat on top.  Add garlic salt and freshly ground pepper.  Cover with lid and set the crock pot to high.

Your meal should be ready in four hours.  Enjoy!

P.S. Another pleasant addition is a Hokkaido pumpkin.  You don't need to peel it.  Just wash, cut, throw away the seeds (they're no good cooked--only regular pumpkin seeds taste good baked with olive oil and garlic salt).  Sauté with a little garlic, add water or chicken broth, let cook a bit, then add to the pot.

The Critical Mom's Fifty Shades of Gray

Well, mine is actually on my very crammed bookshelf and I'm embarrassed to say that I haven't actually read it yet but it is on my list . . .  oh, is it ever.  I've been around long enough to see an amusing video of David Sedaris reading aloud from it in front of a packed crowd and stumbling over the word, "clitoris."  And to see a very charming young woman who ran several videos of herself singing (What a voice!  And so pretty, too!) a song whose lyrics belied the tune, which she had borrowed from one of my favorite singers:  "GIRLS JUST WANNA BE NUNS!"  I thought she was really hip until one day she related an anecdote about a friend saying she was thinking of reading Fifty Shades of Gray.  The singer advised us that she'd said "yeah, go for it!" but then dipped into the volume herself.  Her face changed.  She seemed outraged.  But she didn't say it was bad or evil or disgusting: she said it was "addictive!"  Well, so is life.  Food.  Sex.  I wonder about that word, "addictive" and what she really meant.  I can't ask her because she's in a Carmelite nunnery somewhere not, in my view, living her life with the fullness that nature intends.  I might diagnose her as being addicted to asceticism or to guilt or to her mother's ideas about the nunhood being a good place for a young girl.  There's really no accounting for taste, and that's the truth exposed by audience reactions to Fifty Shades of Gray.  I came across a rather brilliant feminist argument in the Atlantic saying that what's worrisome about the book is the portrayal of women agreeing to sex that they're not happy with or comfortable about.  Is anyone really suggesting that the book advocates that they have this sort of sex?  I think that instead, Fifty Shades of Gray is geared to those who find exactly this portrayal its main selling point, and exactly because it's all in a book, not in real life.  Today I was in Kaiser Foods gathering carrots and parsnips and creamed mushroom soup in to make a crock pot meal, and what should appear, like the big bad wolf waltzing up to Little Red Riding Hood, but a massive display case of the book strategically placed near wine and sweets.  My ten-year-old daughter wandered up the aisle in search of chapstick, so I didn't pick up a copy and flip through it to see if the German translation is just as dirty, but I did think wow, porn's mainstream!  And what, the nun might ask, if my child had asked about the book?  I would have said, as I have now said to her about a number of books, "you might like it, but probably when you're over twenty-five."

The Critical Mom's Emergency Room

Sometimes, it pays to live in a small city. 
How well I remember the time I stepped on broken glass, cutting my foot badly, on the afternoon of the day I was going to fly home to Germany from Paradise, aka New York.  The wonderful au pair scooped up the two-year-old, said, "I'll finish your packing!  Find a doctor!  Go!"  so I limped out of the house, thinking "at all costs I will avoid the St. Luke's emergency room down the block."  I stopped at the office of an ophthalmologist whom I'd known since I was six.  Could he possibly just stitch up my foot or give me a tetanus shot?  The secretary wouldn't even let me say hello to him.  I'd been out of the country too long to realize how much things had changed.  So I sat in the St. Luke's emergency room among the teenaged members of the oldest profession and the very old alcoholic men with gruesomely infected feet and what sounded like tuberculosis . . . they were coughing their lungs out in my lap.  A fist fight broke out among the girls . . .  "YOU da @#$%^Y&UI ho!" "No, YOU da #$%^Y&UIOP{!!! ho!"  I moved out of the way, not before hearing cuss words that even I, a  woman of forty-something at the time, had never dreamed existed, but the security guards intervened.  Suddenly I did a horribly middle class thing.  I got up, went to the secretary, pulled out my credit card, and said, "Please let me see a doctor.  I'll pay right now."  And they glued my foot together.  And I paid.  And I hated myself, but I made the plane.  The whole thing took around five hours.

Fast forward to today.  The two year old is now a strapping sixteen, and I was getting a quick dinner ready for him, his brother, and his sister, and their friend.  Guilty about the frozen pizza, I thought I should at least slice some cucumbers before zipping out to a concert with my husband, and even though we had exactly four minutes before I had to be out the door, I grabbed a knife and inserted it in the plastic wrap covering the cucumber, as I have done on numerous occasions.    Only this time my hand slipped and so did the knife, and blood spurted from a spot between my thumb and forefinger.  I closed the wound with a bandaid.

"Mommy, forget the concert!" said my sensible kids.  "Just go to the emergency room!"  I knew they were right but my voice teacher was giving the concert, and I really wanted to hear it.  So I went.  With my husband.  Who didn't really have time to go, since he had to drive the kid's friend to the airport . . . but it was great, and on the way home to drive the kid he dropped me at the emergency room.  

"Augenblick!" (Just a moment!") said the nurse as she pointed me toward the waiting room.  She was sympathetic, too.  And only about forty Augenblicks later (I was expecting at least four thousand Augenblicks) they treated my hand.  And here I am, typing with it.  But it still hurts, so I'll stop now.  But it's got a big bandage on it, oceans of disinfectant and everything!

The Critical Mom's Rejection Letter

 . . .  For a memoir from a rather well known and respected literary journal, (circulation 2,500) once deemed "the most valuable journal in the U.S. today" : 

It was a fascinating read; it just was not for us.

So who is it for?  If it's so fascinating, why aren't you publishing it?  These are not the questions that rejection letters answer, of course.  Usually I get the form letter instead: "not right for us at this time."  Actually, I think I'd prefer that, since what I did get sounds like at least one of the following:

(1) It's good, but we don't do scandal, and shame on you.

(2) You made spelling mistakes, but we'd like for you to feel good. 
(3) This is weird and disgusting and makes us squirm when we read it.

What they wrote praises with faint damns. But if interpretation (3) is correct, I think I'm on the right track.  I just printed the thing out and re-read it and feel not inclined to change One Damn Thing.  So I'll just Google around until I find a magazine with a circulation of more than eight (yes, 8) readers.  Since my last memoir appeared in such a publication, I think I have a right to move up to one with a circulation of at least twenty-five, if not 2,500. 

P.S.  Last night when I was asking my very sleepy husband what the SAM HILL "a fascinating read . . . not for us" could mean, and he was saying "I don't knowwwww"  we both feel asleep.  And he dreamed a dream, a very odd dream, he reported in the morning, that we were living in The White House, and although Obama was still president, he was living in some little guest house on the grounds, and sitting around in his pajamas answering a call from one of us about not publishing Adrienne Rich because she might offend guess who?  MOI.  I love his sympathetic dreams.  When I was pregnant with our first child, he dreamed his mother would have the baby for me, so that I would not experience labor pains.

Well, in the wake of all this, I changed three words and removed one, and I'm going to ship the thing off again.   Now is the time to chant mantras like, "The Iowa writers workshop rejected Gary Shteyngart!  And they didn't think Sandra Cisneros had any talent!" 

P.S.  Then I looked the thing over.  Trimmed a word here, a paragraph there.  Oh, that paragraph really doesn't belong there.  It belongs here.  Or out.  Or no, half of it stays in and the rest out.  

This is why it is much harder to write something that is 4,000 words instead of 11,000.

The Critical Mom Turns Fifty-Eight

My husband makes the best marble cake I've ever had--sweet, flavorful, dry but not too dry. Perfect with whipped cream.  Breakfast with birthday cake and everybody giving me favorite things--dried papaya (which is delicious with a little goat cheese and that sweet, but not too strong Macedonian  König Arthur red wine from Aldi.)
My tastes in wine are close to those of Elaine May.  In A New Leaf, the most brilliant screwball comedy ever written by a woman--easily rivaling Woody Allen--she plays a character whose boyfriend is trying to impress her by wondering whether the 1955 vintage he has just ordered is better than the 1953.  She takes a sip and shrugs.  It's "nice," she concedes, but "have you ever tasted Mogen-David extra heavy malaga wine with soda water and lime juice?"  she asks, expounding on the delights of the Mogen-David wine cooler even as he reflects on how he spent his very last dime on the expensive heliotrope that sits all but untasted in her glass.  Yum.  I know just what she's talking about.  Sweets are still one of my favorite things.  Which is why I weigh six kilos more than I did when I was young, and why part of every New Year's resolution is to lose them.  But now, lose 'em or not, I'm going to get strong:  ballet Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.  The gym Tuesdays and Saturdays.  Belly dance Thursday evenings.  Tap on Fridays.  No osteoporosis for me!
Although I'm in a pretty good mood for me, I'm still wishing I were as wonderful a writer as Gary Shteyngart, as I gulp down his latest, a memoir called Little Failure.  The title resonates, since I often think of myself as a big failure.  With each passing birthday, I daydream about getting to re-do my life, rectifying all mistakes.  I imagine otherworldly post-life scenarios, in one of which I die, only to wake up as some tiny toadlike creature in a basket in a market somewhere, and remember immediately how I got there.  I got there by having purchased the life that I just lived, and "it was a bargain."  I learn that I paid to have "some" happiness, because I couldn't afford to be happy all the time.  That's for rich little toad creatures, who purchase, at ten times the sum I offered, lives that stay charmed from start to finish, including deaths that are painless.  I, on the other hand, have purchased the deal that starts with the rotten childhood, makes its way through the rottoner adolescence and the miserable mid-twenties and thirties to the life beginning at forty phase, when things really start to get better.  My imagination hasn't yet produced an answer to the question of how the little toad creature (some sort of a soul) acquires the currency needed to purchase a life, but I do daydream about the possibility of re-living the very same life and improving it (when I was eight I would have done this . . .when I was fourteen I would not have done that . . . had I known more about babies when my firstborn emerged I would have . . . .) as opposed to moving on to an entirely new life and forgetting the old, even moving on to an entirely new language, solar system, or gender.  But each beloved person in this life reappears in a new identity in the next . . . a child might be a father, a mother a sister or daughter.  Then I start to play with the idea of karma:  you store up points for whatever the fates decide is doing good, or you lose them for causing harm.  I think of the end of C.S.Lewis's The Last Battle, a judgement-day scenario in which Aslan glances into the faces of all creatures passing him as they leave life, sending those who have followed his rules to some glorious heaven containing everything they want, and the others off into oblivion.  Or maybe you'd be reincarnated as a toad.  And then a prince would kiss you.  Or vice versa.  These are the thought of someone determined to publish her novels and writings, perform in a few more tap dances, and generally live it up before hitting that most sobering of birthdays--sixty.  I should be so lucky.

The Critical Mom Crusades for Socks

As any mother knows, doing the laundry involves crouching on the floor in bathrooms and bedrooms where the dirty laundry piles up in corners, and pulling the inside-out underwear off the inside-out blue jeans before dumping both in the hamper you're taking downstairs to the laundry room.  But before you get to cart all that stuff down to the laundry room, there's hauling the bunched-up socks from inside the knee area of the jeans, where they've burrowed down for the winter after the kid stepped out of his clothes.  Or sometimes they fall out while you're picking up the jeans and skitter across the floor as if they had legs, landing right underneath the used dental floss that is somehow dangling from the wastebasket and clinging to it for dear life.
So, memories of helpful hints from Heloise and others dancing through my head, I picked up some of those small mesh bags with zippers at Tchibo, intended for laundering delicates--or a load of socks.  Each child--and each has frequently complained I DON'T HAVE ANY SOCKS, MOM!  WHERE ARE MY SOCKS???--received two of these, plus instructions on how to place their dirty socks in them.  I even laundered a whole set of my older son's new socks in one of them, returning said socks to him clean, in the bag, and he was very happy indeed.  All three children have received two or three reminders from me about using those bags, which they seem most pleased to possess, and have even hung on their doorknobs.  But yesterday, today, and the day before, the socks have taken control again . . . .they're back in the knees of the blue jeans.  They're barricading themselves behind doors.  They're mobilizing themselves for an all-out attack again.   But still, I've always had a whole bunch of them cleaned and folded and piled up in a laundry basket in the guest room, although finding a pair that actually fits anyone in our family involves a major excavation.  
Socks of the world unite.  You have nothing to lose except your owners.

The Critical Mom Goes Belly Dancing

I've always wanted to try it.  But up to now, since my options for dance classes were limited, and since I had to choose between ballet, which really does keep you in shape, and belly dancing, I took the ballet, which I could only do twice a week anyway 'cause that's all the local dance school offered.  But then my life changed.  First, I encountered a dancer in the local Lidl.  He was standing on line ahead of me and I almost changed lines, thinking "here's a lunatic."  He seemed to be jogging in place but his face suggested that he might be on drugs, so I'm-in-another-world were the eyes and the slack-jawed concentration.  Then he did a plié to the side and it hit me like the proverbial bolt of lightning:  "The young man is rehearsing a dance he's going to perform while he's waiting to buy his cream cheese and potatoes!"  I've been seeking--for a very long time--a decent dance school--the kind that offers ballet classes lasting an hour and a half at the least, and follows the traditional exercises, including grands pliés.  Now or never!  I thought to myself.  And I asked the young man, in my terribly accented German, if he were a professional dancer.  He answered in another accent--clearly not German, and we got talking, and it developed that I could probably attend the school he's attending which is technically closed to outsiders.  Thanks to him I can go there, and take the best ballet classes I've found anywhere in this godforsaken region.  And yes, he was rehearsing a dance but no I did not get to see it, since my daughter had a performance that day too.    But now that I get to go to these very good ballet classes I'm not stuck with the ones at the other place, where they make you spend ten minutes doing aerobics before starting the barrework and don't do grand pliés.  
So now was the time to try belly dancing, which also fit with my New Year's Resolution of doing core-strengthening exercises in order to regain the abdominal strength that I lost after three C-sections.  And I'm doing the core strength exercises at the University gym, and NOW I'm doing belly dancing.  Which is a lot more than strengthening your core muscles.  I always knew it would be fun--and that I'd get to wear colorful scarves and sequin-covered outfits and shimmy around the dance floor.  But I somehow hadn't grasped (not having seen enough YouTube videos) how very sensual, indeed just plain sexy, it is.  Wow.  But what gives?  How is it that Egypt, a country that practices female genital mutilation on more than 97% of its women--the Unicef statistics from the summer of 2014 say the practice is "nearly universal"--at the same time creates a culture in which women dance in a style that, if you've still got your clitoris and also have really good technique, which I can see takes years to develop, must be orgasmic?  Where do Egyptian styles of "purity" (the most frequently offered rationale for the cutting)  coincide with belly dancing?  Is my teacher, who is in her fifties like me and who was raised in Egypt, among the women who were cut?  Another question I can't ask, like most of the questions I want answered.  Are belly dancers women who are shimmying toward a lost sexuality?  Trying to gyrate into something that's been cut out?  And looking very beautiful while they do so, too.  Well, belly dancing is a technique-- I had not realized how much it is really a technique, as demanding as ballet--and one I sure can't wait to develop.

Paris, the City of Haters, and the Critical Mom

I'm with the folks saying, "Je suis Charlie" ("I am Charlie.)  The Americans are saying they're "not afraid," but that's whistling in the dark.  We're all afraid, and we all want our voices heard.  We want to tell the truth, and we want to live to say we told it.  We are these twelve brave people who dared to speak the truth even though they'd already lived through an attack and even though, maybe, they knew their days were numbered.  The words of the courageous Malala--"they can only shoot a body.  They cannot shoot my dreams," come to mind.  I wonder what she'd say about all this?  Charlie Hebdo didn't target Islam any more than it targeted Christians and Jews.  Charlie Hebdo just didn't go for religion in general.  I get this!  Oh, do I ever get it!  But the problem goes way beyond saying Judaism is dreck and Christianity is dreck and oh, Islam, too.  The problem is usually much more personal.  It starts in families.  It starts with being the one who utters the family secret out loud.  Maxine Hong Kingston's bestselling autobiography, The Woman Warrior, begins with "You must not tell anyone . . . ." and it's her mother speaking and she's warning and threatening her daughter with the tale of an aunt who got pregnant out of wedlock and ended up drowning herself and her newborn child in the family well.  The villagers had violently shown their scorn, destroying the family's possessions, animals, and much of their food.  The aunt died of shame.  We all die of shame when we don't tell the truth.  Bernadette Devlin, Britain's youngest MP at 21, in 1969, remarked that "to gain that which is worth having it may be necessary to lose everything else."  I don't go for extremes and I don't go for violence and I wouldn't have gone on a hunger strike to prove a point--this quotation is often taken to be a reference to Irish Revolutionary hunger strikers--but I do go for telling the truth, at the very least to myself, and lately, far more openly.  What if my family goes online and comes across the stuff they said that I invented?  Well, the farthest I'll go, to save myself agony or lawyers or both, is to call some of my memoir "fiction."  (after all, the family's been calling real events "fiction" for years, and went into a real rage when I remarked on some undiscovered realities about my grandfather and my father and my uncle.)   If telling the truth means giving up my original family, well, it wasn't much of a family to begin with, but it was everything for the longest time.  And I would never have the strength to tell the truth if it weren't for the family I chose--my husband and children, as opposed to the one into which I was born.   I don't expect to be shot, but I suppose I'll be ostracized.  Ostracism is something with which we can all live.  But murder, cold-blooded murder of those who reject or ridicule your god, your saints, your folks, or your beliefs, kills you, not those who laughed at what you cherish.  That is the truth that I wish the Paris killers could absorb.  Longue vérité en direct! (Long live truth.)  It's always mutating.  It's never stable. It's a living, breathing thing.  A bullet kills us--not it.

The Critical Mom and The Champagne

So far, I'm only anticipating it.  While we were watching Dinner For One, Germany's traditional New Year's Eve ten-minute tribute to Carpe Diem, we had sherry, because Miss Sophie, in the film, has sherry with her mulligatawny soup.  Then we had a little red wine with the appetizers and the baked nachos (my husband makes them with grated Gouda, chopped scallions, and salsa).  A few people are shooting off firecrackers already (yes, you can just buy them at your local Aldi's here . . .) but we're waiting until midnight.  And it's only 9:52 as I write, and two children have said, "Wake me up before midnight, Mom," and my husband is snoozing on the couch.  We did watch The Lord of the Rings and a little CNN, but now I'm just answering e-mail and reading one of my favorite blogs, "Little Earthling."  And I'm remaining upright, although I may just take a little nap.  Our eldest is in China, and sent a Whats App of himself and the other members of the choir singing "Clementine" in Chinese and wishing us Happy New Year.  It's already 2015 in China!  I'll top off the evening with a return to my blog as soon as I've had my champagne.  But now I've got to get the laundry out of the machine.  Oops, didn't manage that--we were watching 2012, apocalyptic enough for the end of the year.  
And now midnight has just come and gone.  I've had my share of champagne, oh bubbly!  Bubbly!  It goes superbly with the fireworks, some of which, thrown enthusiastically by my twelve-year-old, landed not in the road but the neighbor's garden.
"Not in the neighbor's garden!" we yelled.  But that's where the next one went, too.  The neighbor came out on his balcony.  Good thing he wasn't in the yard.
Now, one more sip of champagne, and then I'll toddle off to bed.  Happy New Year!

The Critical Mom's Post-Christmas Moods

It's lovely, the tongues of light on the windowsill from our tree--the electric candles flickering away, and on the table a forgotten glass of white wine, from which, yesterday, someone sipped.  I take a nap, and when I wake up, two of my son's friends, ages eleven and thirteen, have shown up hungry.   They're on a court-mandated weekend visit with their dad, who lives up the hill and who forgot to buy food or didn't bother, and is on his second or third volubly cantankerous relationship with a mail-order bride from a desperately poor country somewhere in Asia.  His first wife, the boys' mother, is in another city with her very wealthy new spouse ("my husband is well-situated," she said timidly, translating from German into English.  In German, that sounds normal but in translation it sounds like a line from a mid-Victorian penny dreadful).  I wonder often how she ever ended up with the boys' father, that ex-football professional whose charming smile is a dead giveaway.  But maybe it wasn't so obvious to a naïve and very Catholic sixteen-year-old who got knocked up.  This is how I imagine things.   But I can't ask and she'd never tell.
We gave the boys pumpkin soup, Bratwurst, and rice and they seemed very cheerful and stuck around to play computer games.   Their new stepfather, whom they hate, provides a lavishly luxurious separate apartment for them and their mother, and spirits her away to romantic getaways while the boys are visiting their father.  When I asked my husband whether we should tell the mother that the dad hadn't been feeding them he thought no.  She may know, but she'd resent it if we did, and the boys don't look underfed.  Back when the mother and the estranged dad were still living in the same building, the dad used to drop them off here and forget to pick them up   Then I wouldn't be able to reach either parent. 
We've got it good.  Our Christmas proved remarkably peaceful.  Long ago in a galaxy far away I belonged to an internet forum that provided humor to anyone who knew they had to invite a certain relative for Christmas or pay big.  You'd pay big anyway, but you'd pay bigger or sooner if you didn't invite her.  I've been over the river and through many dark woods seeking a substitute forum, but nothing else is quite to my taste. 
A Hallowe'en card in which said party joked about haunting us put me on edge:  she's in her nineties (but will probably outlive me, especially if I spend too much time with her) and I'd like for the kids to inherit something.  So we invited her.  Never mind that during the last visit she started squeezing my then five-year-old daughter's thigh in some trancelike return to her own abuse as a child.  Never mind that my eldest, in a rare moment away from her during that exhausting visit said, "Mom, you grew up with that?  You know, I kind of admire you."  Never mind that the minute I invited her I came down with bronchitis.  I've been planning dinner parties for when she's here--her visits are always easier when I pad the room with plenty of other people.  
But there's been a stay of execution:  she can't come, because of an ailment I decline to disclose.  Isn't that awful?  Isn't it the worst thing in the world?  Where's the champagne? 
 P.S.  Happy New Year, Danu Morrigan

The Critical Mom and the Ketchup

I wasn't around for the show--I was in the ladies room--but by the time we were in the car, I was learning that "if they did find your cell phone, the mess was such that they would probably throw it away," and "now, Mom, just let me tell you my side of the story," accompanied by the twelve-year-old's hysterical giggles.  It was worth the giggles, but I guess we'll never dare set foot in that restaurant again.  Apparently, during those few moments when I was answering a call of nature, the twelve-year-old squeezed on the plastic ketchup bottle, "not because I wanted any on my Schnitzel, mom, but I just thought it was like only half full and I was bored."
Hee, hee, hee.  Hee, hee, hee.  He has to stop talking because he's laughing so hard he can't breathe. 
"And then what happened?"
"Well, then I really just squeezed as hard as I could!  I mean, I REALLY thought it was empty!"
"And then the fireworks happened?" asks my husband.
"Did you see it?" I asked, ready to inquire why he hadn't stopped our little force of nature.
"No, but I saw the results.  Quite impressive.  The white tablecloth.  The wineglasses."  An entry might have been made in the Guinness Book of World Records on ketchup-squirting.  But we are all safe and sound, and it's almost Christmas, and there are good detergents out there among the Bavarian housewives, "and REALLY, Mom, IT WAS AN ACCIDENT!"

The Critical Mom's Seasonal Bronchitis

At least I hope that's all it is.  Six years ago I went through pneumonia and occasionally I have a touch of asthma.  Besides, I have already consumed more than my fair share of antibiotics this year . . . what with the revenge of Atahualpa in Peru, the trips to the local botica where they handed out Cipro like candy the moment they saw that I was 
(a) a non-native speaker and 
(b) writhing with embarrassment as well as the need to use body language to tell them what was the matter with me.  
Then I got over that bout, but at the end of the trip there was all that campylobacteria that I apparently consumed in the local cilantro . . .or the ice cubes . . . or something; anyway Cipro down the hatch again.
So I'd like to avoid a third round of antibiotics now, especially since the Internet tells me that even if you're coughing up yellow goo, it's probably viral rather than bacterial, so probably won't be chased off by the Clarithromycin that I do have some of, but haven't yet ingested.  (I read all the possible side effects . . . oh, is that ever a sign of middle age, and they are scary.)  Maybe the onion poultice I tried will work.  (All ya gotta do is chop an onion or two, simmer them in water until they're soft, lift them onto a clean kitchen towel or cloth, fold them in securely as if you were wrapping a tortilla around a gooey mess of chicken and vegetables, and slap it on your chest for as long as you can stand).  I did that twice today.  I'm going to add fresh ginger next time.  I'm taking Sinupret and Umckaloabo.  My chest is marginally clearer; I hope I don't have to go for the hard stuff, but it is nice to know it's there.  I'll try a little red wine, too.  Any reader know of any other home remedies?  

Day 2:  (Actually, I've been sick for five days, but at first it was "just a cold.") I caved in and took the Clarithromycin.  But before I did, I tried  yet another onion-and-fresh-ginger hot poultice.  And it did have some, minor, effect.  As did the gallons of fruit tea with honey, hunk-of-ginger-in-boiling water, coffee (strong) and breathing exercises.   Yes, I did give the natural way the old college try . . .  meanwhile, two hours after 500 milligrams of the magic bullet, my chest already feels clearer.  Well, what would one expect of somebody who grew up practically teething on antibiotics?  That was just the way New Yorkers did things back in the sixties when I was growing up.  Every cold was accompanied by a bottle of syrupy, green Chlorotrimeton, an antihistamene, plus Penicillin.   (I remember those Pen-Vee tablets.) Strep throats, ear infections . . . as our jovial pediatrician said, "Ear infections pay the pediatricians rent."   I had a childhood of asthma and generally poor health, which may have had something to do with all that green syrup and antibiotics, but my immune system, pampered, or weakened, seems to need the stuff now.  Go figure.  Now that I'm feeling better it seems so very unfair that I'll have to relinquish my evening glass of sweet red wine for the duration of the antibiotic regimen!  But okay, yes indeedy, of course I'll do it . . . especially since I ought to be well by Christmas, when I plan to indulge in cookies, too.