Twenty Years

I haven’t eaten a bagel in over a month.  Or pizza or ice cream or even a bowl of pasta.  You see, I am on a quest to lose the last 6 pounds that will put me at the exact weight I was when I graduated high school 20 years ago this month.   When I show up for my reunion next week, it’ll be like nothing has changed.

Twenty years flew by in the blink of an eye.

To you Lost fans out this, this may actually mean something.  The first ever episode of the ground-breaking series began with a close-up of protagonist Jack Shepherd’s eye flying open after his plane crashed onto a seemingly deserted island.  After the subsequent six seasons of falling down hatches, encountering and fighting “others” on the island, surviving a smoke monster and flashing back, sideways and forwards through time, the series ends with Jack lying in the same spot where we first met him, a close-up on his eye which closes dramatically as the screen goes black.  The producers leave open the possibility that the years between when Jack landed on the island and when he dies have actually been just an instant, that time has been somewhat irrelevant.  Maybe.  

Now, I don’t profess to have fully--or even remotely--understood the true meaning of Lost, though I have spent a ridiculous amount of time talking and thinking about it.  However, a few things are clear.  One: conventional notions of time and space are rejected as the characters travel freely through past, present, and possible futures.  While these ideas seem wildly unrealistic, I can sort of relate to it as I approach my 20th reunion next week.  

My life has moved in a linear fashion since June 19, 1990.  I went off to college, moved on to grad school, lived in New York City, got married, and had a baby, in that order.  But right now, as I sit here contemplating the twenty years that has gone by, JJ Abrams' time-bending notions make some sense to me.  I don’t feel older and I don’t feel changed. If I see Steven L., I will still stammer. I will still wonder if my outfit makes me look fat.   I will still think that Jeremy P. is cute, even if he is bald, and I will smile sweetly at Sarah B., who is now my Facebook friend, though I will never like her.  

Yet, there is tangible evidence that life has changed dramatically, most notably the toddler who is yelling “Happy day day!” from his crib upstairs.  (And yes, that extra six pounds.)  But part of me actually feels that I might have jumped, capped and gowned, from that football field, to this present moment on my overstuffed couch.   When I think about the people who I will see next week, I’m imagining them as they were too. I think reunions sort of play with our own notions of time and space, or at least force us to challenge them with anti-wrinkle creams and low-fat frozen yogurt.

The penultimate scene in Lost is what really got me thinking about why I am looking forward to seeing my old high school friends.  All of the survivors (and other major characters) from the island have gathered in a church for what Jack thinks is his father, Christian’s, funeral.  However, when Jack looks in the casket, it is empty and his father appears to inform Jack that he, too, is dead.  Jack realizes that all his friends in the church are dead too, and that they were all there to help him “let go” and move on, rather than being “lost” in some supposed purgatory.  His father tells him, “The most important part of your life was the time that you spent with these people.  Nobody does it alone. You needed them and they needed you”

“For what?” Jack asks.

“To remember,” said Christian.

Hopefully, you only go through high school once.  Only once do you get that high of being asked to a dance for the first time or that low of that first hangover; the exuberance of driving your first car to pick up your friends and the heartbreak of that first torrid breakup.  The commonality of those experiences make a high school class a unique community.  Not to suggest anyone’s early demise (a la Lost), but I feel fortunate to have the opportunity to get together with the people who shared those highs and lows alongside me.  We played an important part in each other's lives. Even if we don’t keep in touch (though Facebook has certainly made it easier), it will be good to everyone, face-to-face, once again.  Until next week, class of '90....

http://newenglandreunions.com/html/reunions/2010/trumbull_90(0619).phtml

Hair Loss

I thought I had a few decades to worry about Emmet losing his hair.

Last week, Emmet turned one and half. Besides commemorating this milestone in a Facebook status update, I decided to take him for a haircut.

This should have been no big deal. Emmet had already had three haircuts, all without incident. Unlike my gravity-defying hair, Emmet’s hair grows straight and quickly, flopping over his eyebrows and creeping stealthily over his ears, giving him the appearance of an unkempt elf. And while I think it is adorable, I live in fear of the “mess patrol” (my mother) who believes that a person’s well-being is reflected by the state of his or her hair. (Case in point, my mother kept me in a horribly short haircut until the one time I left the beauty parlor screaming, “I look like a fucking boy!”) I’m sure she washed my eleven-year old mouth out with soap, but she never made me get a short haircut again.

So in my pursuit of being a good mother, I brought Emmet to a salon in Greenwich. I figured the $30 price tag would buy a few smooth snips and Emmet would toddle out looking mightily cared-for.

The place was charming. The walls were painted gumdrop purple, and there was a play area filled with toys, books and puzzles. Instead of chairs, the toddlers sat in brightly colored little cars, with large steering wheels and gear shifts. Each “station” had a small flat-screen television with a DVD player to distract the tiny customers. Colorful balloons hung from the ceiling, parting gifts for the newly shorn child.

When Emmet and I walked in, we were directed to Toni’s station: the pink racecar. As I buckled him into his “chair,” I talked to Toni about what I wanted.
“I just want it to be a little neater looking. I kind of like how it flops around, so I don’t want it to be too short, yet I want it to be shorter than it is now because it’s looking sort of messy. You know?”

Toni paraphrased: “OK, so you want a trim?”

“Well, no, I want it short, just not too short. We have a wedding next weekend in Albany and I want him to look cute and neat,” I explained.

She looked at me dubiously, realizing then what I didn’t grasp until much later: I wasn’t going to be happy with anything she did because I really didn’t want Emmet to have a haircut. Or, more to the point, I didn’t want Emmet to change at all.

So I stood, okay hovered, over poor Toni as she attempted to cut Emmet’s hair. With every snip, I felt my stomach tense up into knots. Watching large chunks of my baby’s hair fall to the ground, I couldn’t hold back my comments:

“No! I like when a little hair hangs over his ears.”

“Oooo….you’re cutting his bangs like that?”

“Wait, I think that might be a little too much off the top...”

After some furtive glances to the receptionist that said “another one of those moms,” Toni finally finished with Emmet, brushed him off, and handed him back to me. I was so grateful that this harrowing experience was over, that I barely even looked at Emmet. I paid for the haircut as Emmet waddled around the salon, dumping a large container of Legos on the floor. I scooped him up, grabbing a yellow balloon on our way out. No one seemed sorry to see us go.

When I got him home, I finally took a good long look at my sweet little boy: his haircut was awful. His bangs were cut straight across, which would have been fetching had it been 1977. The hair around his ears was choppy, since I had halted the trimming in that region. And the top was just plain poofey.
I was hoping that this was a situation in which the problem was worse in my mind than in actuality. I waited for Jeff to come home to allay my fear that my son looked like a dandelion.

“What happened to your little head?” Jeff asked Emmet as he walked through the door, holding his arms out. Emmet ran right into them as they grinned at each other, their faces one and the same. Very different hair.

The fact that Jeff even noticed that Emmet had gotten a haircut was bad news. He agreed with me that Emmet could be a ringer for Jim Carrey’s character in Dumb and Dumber.

“Why didn’t you tell them you wanted it shorter?” Jeff asked me, reasonably.

“I’m not telling a professional hair cutter how to cut hair!” I replied hotly, the guilt of my bald-faced lie (no pun intended) spreading through me.

“Well, make sure when you take him back that they cut it shorter.”

Take him back? How much anxiety did I need in one weekend?

But the next morning, I called the salon and they agreed to “take a look” at Emmet’s hair. I was relieved to hear that Toni had the day off. The Saturday stylist, Traci, took one look at Emmet, whisked him away from me, and planted him back in the pink racecar.

“No charge,” she said to me, apologetically. It was really that awful.

Before I could begin to tell her what to do, she began chopping away--the Edward Scissorhands of kids’ hairdressers. I opened my mouth to speak, but stopped, resigned to her unspoken authority. As Emmet’s sandy hair fell, my anxiety grew. I swear his face changed: it looked thinner and longer. For the first time, it became clear what he would look like as a five, six, seven year old. And I wasn’t ready for it. But I swallowed my protests and let Traci finish.

Back at home, Jeff thought Emmet’s new do looked great. “Just like a big boy!” Emmet threw his head back and laughed. I sulked. I was nostalgic about Emmet’s childhood before he even turned two.

That night in bed, as I turned my lamp off without reading, Jeff asked, “What is wrong with you today?”
“I’m just upset about Emmet’s haircut! It’s too short!” I burst into tears.

“Sweetie, I don’t think it’s his haircut; I think you’re upset because your little baby isn’t such a baby anymore.” The truth of this just made me cry harder.

The next day, I pulled myself together and my family had a lovely day: we played in the park and Emmet climbed up the slide by himself for the first time; we shopped at the grocery store, Emmet yelling out “apple” and “ ‘nana” as we walked through the produce section; as we read his books that night, he made the “fff” sound when we showed him a fish.

Later that night, as I sat at my computer doing some work and Emmet was drinking his milk, I felt a little tug at my sweatpants. There was Emmet looking up at me with his big blue eyes, bottom lip protruding, his tiny hand searching to grasp my fingers. With purpose, he pulled me to my feet and led me to his toys. “Ball!” he proclaimed breathlessly, rolling his neon-light- up ball towards me.

His haircut was already growing on me.

(Anti) Social Network

Over the fifteen years I have been teaching, one thing I have learned is that parents really don’t want to hear anything bad about their offspring. So I have become skilled at spinning negative comments into positive ones.  For example, “Your son is such an active boy!” really means “your Tasmanian devil is tearing up my classroom.”

 So when I refer to myself as an “enthusiastic Facebooker,” I am glazing over the disturbing fact that my enthusiasm might be better labeled “obsession.”  

It started out innocently enough. About two years ago, I joined Facebook at the urging of a friend who was using it to promote a conference.   At first, I went to the Facebook website every week or so, just to see if any new friends had joined. But as the site added features like status updates and photo tags, my visits were more frequent.  Pretty soon, I was updating my status almost every day, sharing the mundane details of my life (“Lisa Manheim is making chicken soup for dinner”) to bigger news (“Lisa Manheim is going to be eating matzah this Passover…..for two!”)  

While I was pregnant, I would come home exhausted from a day of teaching, often retiring to the couch in our New Jersey apartment only 15 minutes from Manhattan, though it felt a world away from my old life.  Checking Facebook became a matter of routine, as if it were my bank account or stock portfolio.  People from my past were joining at a rapid rate, and I was eager to get a look-see at how their lives had unfurled.  Many evenings, minutes became hours that were siphoned away in what I began to think of as the "Facebook vortex."

When Emmet was born ("Lisa Manheim is…a mommy!") I figured that my obsession would diminish as I cared for my newborn son.  For a few weeks it did, as I learned how to swaddle, change diapers, and rock my sweet little boy to sleep.  But I had taken the school year off to be with Emmet and I found myself feeling somewhat disconnected from the world.  Facebook allowed me to feel as if I was still a part of the human race.

 I had so many plans for what I would do during my year off from teaching: watch the AFI top 100 movies; read the books on the New York Times bestseller list; keep a diary of my first year being a mom.  But I found myself, far too often, glued to my laptop which was beginning to feel more like a lifeline than a machine I’d bought at Circuit City the previous summer.  

 I didn’t realize how bad my preoccupation had become until my family was celebrating Passover this year.   Jeff and I, along with one-year old Emmet, had joined my sister and her family at my parents’ apartment in New York City.  As tradition dictates, we were sitting at the large dining room table discussing the story of how the Jews escaped from slavery in Egypt.  My father posed a question to make us connect the ancient story to our own modern lives:

“Although we are free, in the traditional sense of the word, to what might you consider yourself a slave?” he asked everyone at the table.

 As I settled back in my chair to give the question some thought, my husband blurted out, “Lisa, that’s an easy one for you:  Facebook!”  Everyone at the table laughed, as my faced burned with the uneasy truth of Jeff’s proclamation. 

Although I protested, I know he is right.  I have always been a slave to technologies that connect me to others.  In college, I used to call my answering machine at least 30 times a day to check for messages; since 1997, I’ve never gone longer than 3 hours without a cell phone; and on my honeymoon a few years ago, I racked up a $700 bill reading emails on my Iphone from Italy. Yes, I have always felt the need to connect.

Yet, I understand the irony that a social networking website actually promotes anti-social behavior.  While I am busy connecting with my 800+ "friends" on Facebook,  what other connections am I actually missing out on? As this realization is slowly sinking in, I continue to click my way through profiles, news feeds, and photo albums. Hey, even if I can’t attend the pre-marathon pasta party at Carmine’s with my athletic friends, at least I can see the mobile photos of them diving into piles of linguini.   

On the other hand, I’ve got some great pictures of Emmet and Jeff planting a tree in our front yard. 

Manolo-What?

I didn’t watch TV for thirteen years.

I’m not against watching television.  I love television. As a kid, I watched plenty, and can still hum the jingles from even the most obscure TV sitcoms. (Love, Sidney anyone?)  My nights revolved around which shows I’d watch.  TV was so central in my life that banishing it from me was the harsh punishment that my parents doled out when I misbehaved.  Back then, I took "Must See TV" very literally.

But for the thirteen years that I lived in New York City, from 1994 to 2007, I was not committed to one single show that would require me, in the pre-DVR era, to actually stay home to watch it, a fact I find embarrassingly unimaginable right now.  

I’m not saying that I never flipped on the tube to check out Jon Stewart, or watch Seinfeld reruns while getting ready for bed.  I even recall a flu-ey weekend when I was glued to 24 hours of Lifetime movies, which morphed into one giant afterschool special which might have been named My Baby’s Father Made Me an Anorexic Killer, starring Meredith Baxter Birney or Tracey Gold. Often, I simply had the television on as background noise to my single life.

And it’s not that there weren’t some quality programs on during those years: water cooler talk at work ranged from Tony Soprano’s psychotrauma (a gangster with feelings?) or Carrie’s outrageous styles on Sex and the City (a Manolo-what?), but I found that I was proudly, maybe even a bit smugly, oblivious to these characters’ latest foibles.

The only thing I was committed to was finding someone.  In my mind, this required me to be out every single night.  After all “Mr. Right was not just going to swoop into my apartment,” as my mother liked to remind me.

I treated going out like it was my job, and like any job, it took its toll. Television began to represent all that I desired for my life: companionship, comfort, and security.  I wanted the luxury of being able to sit at home and watch TV without the anxiety that I wasn’t out  doing all that I could to find my mate.

So I went out.  To bar crawls and dance clubs and movie screenings, in my twenties; to dinners with friends at swanky restaurants, fundraisers with catchy names like “Purim Palooza,” and wine tastings, in my thirties. I joined the boards of several philanthropic organizations and attended meetings several times a month.   I took a watercolor painting class, went to Spain to partake in a creativity workshop, and attended lectures at the 92nd Street Y.  I signed up for trips with other singles to Israel, Budapest, and Prague.  I was too busy cursing my singledom to realize how rich my life had become. 

Now, three years later, I have a husband who is kind and caring, and a one-year old son who has transformed me into one of those gushing, annoying moms who think their kids are geniuses (though really, he is brilliant).  We just bought a lovely house on a cul de sac so that when Emmet is older, he can ride his bike in the street.  I’ve made some really cool girlfriends out here.  I feel blessed in so many ways.  

And once we put Emmet to bed, we watch a lot of television.  Just like I always wanted.  To be fair, I consider most of what we watch to be creative television with good writing: Lost, 24, 30 Rock, The Office.  (OK, I am mildly obsessed with The Bachelor too). I have found commitment in my life: to my husband, my son, my three stepchildren, and about eight television shows.  But I wonder: shouldn’t I be out taking classes or attending lectures? Volunteering on committees?   Don’t I want to set an example for my son of how to lead a rich and stimulating life?  

Thank goodness for DVR.