Mid-CenturyModernMoms

The Youth Vote in this Historic Election

La Petite was three weeks too young to vote in the last presidential election. She turned 18 in December of that year and registered to vote the following spring. She did her homework on the candidates and the local referendum, taking her civic responsibility very seriously. Each poll worker congratulated her on voting for the first time, and the man who handed her the "I Voted" sticker told her a brief story about a young woman he'd known who had cast her first vote at the same neighborhood polling place that we do, and a few years later ran for a local office and won.

When she went to college, she registered and voted there. She even talked her apolitical boyfriend into voting by convincing him that the people in office really did make a difference in his life. She passed on literature to him and to her roommate to make sure they made educated choices.

La Petite isn't likely to run for office, but ever since she was 13 and I took her to a Tipper Gore rally, she's been curious about the whole political picture. Now that she's a journalism major and photographer for the school paper, she's had opportunities to cover campaign rallies on and near her campus. We've had some good talks: sharing our knowledge and experiences, discussing our potential voting decisions, and agreeing that the Big Media doesn't cover everything.

Now that the Democratic candidate is (almost officially) in place, we've talked about the two fabulous Senators. I've admired Hillary Clinton for years. La Petite was excited about Obama from the day he announced his candidacy. Somehow, we've never argued about our choices. We've agreed more than we've disagreed. And on primary day, both of us had to take deep cleansing breaths before we completed our ballots.

When I won my prizes from the MOMocrats, I shared the contents (ahem) with La Petite. When she goes back to school in the fall, it's likely she'll photograph more campaign rallies in her position as staff photographer, maybe even meet Senator Obama himself.  And I'll watch with motherly pride, knowing she's watching history as it's happening, using her camera to convince her peers that yes, voting makes a difference.

Yes, I'm sending my son to Israel

By Nina

It never ceases to amaze me  -- the looks of horror I get when I tell people I'm sending my 16-year-old son to Israel for the summer.  Even from Jews. 

Well, I'm in the south now and down here people think nothing of asking you straight out, when they first meet you, "What church do y'all go to?"  And then when you tell them you're Jewish and you don't actually go to church, but you belong to Congregation Shearith Israel, three minutes later they say, "Now what was the name of that church you go to?"   OK, maybe it's hard to wrap your brain around the tangle of Hebrew that is Shearith (remnant) Israel (Israel).  This stuff doesn't even rattle me.  It's almost cute.

What I hate are the looks of grave concern when you say you're sending your child to Israel.  You'd think I was sending the kid to Baghdad.  In fact I'm sending him to his homeland, the most progressive, impressive and remarkable nation in modern history.  He will be touring with other teenagers from North America, under strict supervision in what is turning out to be one of the most robust summer tourism season in a few years.  Israel needs that badly. 

I don't want to preach here or get too political on you, but this I believe.  Israel is a brilliant democracy that sits in a very bad neighborhood.  It is surrounded by neighbors who would like it to disappear from the earth.  Egypt is digging tunnels to run guns and supplies to Hamas in Gaza.  Syria and Lebanon, it's puppet state,  have rockets aimed at the Golan Heights and Tel Aviv.  And let's face it, Iran's nukes, whether you believe they exist or not,  are intended for Israel. Only Jordan, ruled by a modern and educated King, understands the utility and potential of "making it work" with Israel.

My son will start his trip in Europe.  He'll tour Prague and visit Auschwitz and see the remnants (that Hebrew word Shearith again) of once thriving Jewish communities where his ancestors  lived, learned, taught, created and prospered.  Then he'll sail into Haifa Harbor, like the Ma'apilim (immigrants)  who survived the Holocaust and made new lives in the Jewish State. He'll see the good, the beautiful, the ugly.  He'll see the security wall and the checkpoints.  He'll see Jews and Arabs struggling to coexist in a complex shared destiny.  He'll hear Hebrew, a language resurrected from the pages of the bible, as a living, breathing modern tongue with its own unique street slang and poetry.  He'll see contradictions and complexities on every street corner. 

Israel isn't neat and tidy. It's loud and messy.  It is all at once western and eastern, orthodox and progressive, secular and religious.  It is our pride and our pain. These ads express our immense pride in what Israel has achieved amidst staggering challenges.

And that's the way I want it.  I cannot protect Grumble from everything.  In truth, I think life in Israel is safer than life in America. People are connected there in ways that can barely be expressed.  When you ride the bus and someone thinks your baby might be under-dressed and chilly, 5 surrogate mothers will step in and offer their sweater as an extra blanket.  Once in a restaurant where my 5 year old wailed for pizza, the proprietor sent a waiter across the street and got my kid a slice.  When Israeli soldiers were camped out in a field near Efrat during the 2nd Intifada, my friends cooked for them as if they were their own sons and daughters.  That's the kind of place I want my son to experience. 

There will be an armed guard on Grumble's bus.  He will not travel outside the so-called "Green Line" and security reports will determine when and where his group travels.  But there will also be songs and sights and stories I cannot give him in America. For 5 weeks he'll be in a danger zone.  I wouldn't have it any other way.

It's all political. And I mean ALL political.

When I opened the package Monday, I knew it was my new clutch bag, a prize from the  MOMocrats' drawing last week. The bag is as sweet as can be, letting me show off my political preferences with class -- at least until the Democratic convention, and perhaps longer.

The cute little clutch was full of miscellaneous swag, too. A MOMocrats magnet and bumper sticker, a tiny hand sanitizer (you know, to use after shaking hands ad nauseum at a rally), and the piece that made me laugh, honestly, out loud.

Of course, the saga continued. Husband asked, "Are those what I think they are?" La Petite -- well, she's 21, and our "chat" went something like this.

La Petite: "OMG THATS HILARIOUS! Can i pin them onto my bulletin board? since you clearly can not properly display them anywhere at your work or home, but me on the other hand, well its almost so cliche i have to do it..."

Me (the serious mother): "Now, my gifted and talented and intelligent offspring (yes, I really did address her in that manner), you realize that if you put a pin through them they become unusable."

La Petite: "Yes, thank you Mrs. Teacher Mom. I realize they forced you to teach sex ed last year, but don't worry, you don't have to anymore."

She's right. I don't have to teach sex ed any more! W00T!! And just because I can, I'm going to mail a package of, shall we say, "unique campaign material" to her campus apartment's mailbox.

Why is the World Round, and Other Imponderables by Jenny Gardiner

Me and my teen mom homies, we've been dealing with it all, and then some, lately. We're almost cliched, in fact, pondering as we are how much easier it was back in the days when we merely had to drag a tantrum-hurling 2 year-old from the grocery store, versus tackling the many heady issues parents of modern teens face as their offspring teeter on the precipice of adulthood. It's enough to make a girl go gray, stress-eat the ever-so-divine limited offer Indiana Jones Mint Crisp M&Ms, and cuss a blue streak to no one and everyone in particular. Not that I would be susceptible to the latter two...

I think in the world of raising children, barring unforeseen circumstances, you start out with the cake course. Parenting 101. You know, the diaper changing, the calming of an irrationally petulant child. The easy stuff (that at the time seems insufferably impossible to navigate). By the time the kids are teens, parents have unwittingly entered into the post-graduate phase of things. Everything becomes so much more involved, so much more complex. Black and white blurs into gray, with no necessary right or wrong, but rather a "hope I don't screw this up too badly" mode. At this point, I find visualizing into the future, to a point at which your kids are through with college, in the work world, happily dating, or maybe even married, is a vital coping tool. Because only then might we be secure in the knowledge that we were able to transcend the stressful makes-your-head-hurt stuff that is the domain of the teen parent.

Consider a few recently teen quandaries my homies and I have encountered lately:

*The high school senior, the one who can't yet seem to keep track of a permission slip let alone a passport, who wants to travel alone through Europe this summer. That same one will be off on his own by summer's end, so perhaps allowing this risk-taking venture is a way to encourage some necessary maturation before he cuts loose altogether? Or perhaps that un-street-savvy kid will end up mugged and left for dead in a gutter, passport, cellphone and wallet lifted, unable to contact his parents for help. Of course approving this venture for the boy then means his younger sister must also have this opportunity, and hey, like it or not, there is a double standard when it comes to females traveling alone abroad, especially at that young age.

*The high school sophomore who met a boy last year one week before he moved six states away. They've remained in cellphone/IM contact throughout the school year. Now he wants to come visit, staying at the girls house over a holiday weekend. Having this complete stranger under one's roof can be one of two things---a positive chance to spend plenty of time with him, to get to know him and trust his intentions. Or it can mean ready-made opportunities for him to hook-up in the middle of the night with the daughter while the mom sleeps (the dad will be out of town at a soccer tournament with one of the kids). To deny this certainly offers up a large platter of forbidden fruit, and we all know how much tastier that type is...

*The teen girl who insists upon booking her first Brasilian waxing. (clearly this girl has no clue what she's getting herself into, pain-wise!). Truth is, we all know why anyone chooses a Brasilian wax job. And it ain't comfort. So that in and of itself suggests there's reason behind this (trust me, it has nothing to do with swim suit season being upon us). So now that that mom knows what her 16 year old is up to, what's a mom to do?

*The high school prom, for which an alternate, unsanctioned prom sprung up after school administrators decided that grinding was far too scandalous and issued a 10-inch rule (get your mind out of the gutter, not that type of 10-inches!): a mandatory 10 inches of air must be sustained between a dancing couple. Is grinding mighty sexually suggestive? Sure. Is this much different than adults banning Elvis and the Twist? Not really.

*Then there's the high school senior who questions what it's all about---after all, why bother with any of it when ultimately we're all gonna die. Um, how do you truly answer that question? Anyone deep enough to ponder such things is not going to be satisfied with a pat answer. And who actually has a legitimate answer to this question?

Okay, some of these issues are far bigger than my head can wrap around. The we-are-merely-a-speck-of-dust-on-the-pinhead-of-some-larger-entity is far more than I can/will/choose to ponder with any success. It makes me too dizzy and slightly depressed. But at least I'll tackle the prom thing, and by extension, perhaps address my feelings and worries about the state of teen-hood today.

The pat advice to all parents is this: pick your battles. On the issue of dirty dancing, I do feel as if this is a battle best left alone. After all, teens nowadays have their wings clipped to the point of no longer being birds of flight. In our home we have a parrot, and when she was younger, we regularly clipped her wings (a practice akin to trimming fingernails). The idea was to keep her from flying around the house. But the reality was it caused her to fall off her perch and drop like a lead weight to the floor---her wings sans flight feathers sort of led to her fall from grace.

After our parrot fell enough times so hard that her breast bone punctured through her skin, our vet decided it was a good idea to let her flight wings grow out. And you know what? She doesn't fly around the house. Sure she still spreads her wings, flaps them vigorously on occasion. But if she falls, the amount of feathers she's got enables her to enough loft to land without such a violent thud.

I think society has gone way overboard in clipping back the flight feathers of our teens, particularly at a point at which they need to be spreading their wings and learning to fly, even if it means they fall hard and fast to the ground. The simplest of bad judgment errors for teens nowadays can result in a loss of all academic honors, membership to sports teams, hell, even college admissions. We don't allow teenagers the chance to make mistakes and learn from them. They're expected to learn vicariously from others' errors, I suspect, when in reality that doesn't quite work the same way. We have raised a generation of future adults with probably far less life experiences than we ever had, because most were never allowed to take risks, were clamped so tightly in their car seats and then strapped down with onerous activities and then just when biology started mandating that they stretch away from the weight of our protective shield, we further reduced their ability to take those important strides toward adulthood, errors or not.

I remember once reading about Eunice Kennedy, mother of umteen children, and she spoke of how she let her children fail, even when it meant they suffered for it. We parents---armed in this dreadful age of information with the myriad fearful possibilities of what could go wrong---cherish our children so greatly that we are afraid to allow failure to happen. We don't want them to be hurt, or even worse, killed. We don't want them to fall flat on their faces, to suffer the pain and/or humiliation of trying and faltering.

But have we really served them best in this regard? I know so many of my contemporaries look each other in the eyes when discussing our own jaded youth with that knowing wide-eyed gaze of "Damn, how the hell did we live to tell about it?" The sad reality of it is there were those of our peers who didn't live to tell about it. That's the sucky thing of it. For this, we are all so fearful that our kids will be amongst that unfortunate group. Thus we keep our birds caged, wings clipped, hoping they can get to adulthood injury-free. Yet truly, probably, sorely untested, and lacking some important life experiences that they need to become complete adults.

All of these ponderings lead to me to wonder what is the answer to these teen parent dilemmas. Of course I no sooner have these answers than do you. I'm just muddling through it the best I can, trying not to eat too many of those Mint Crisp M&Ms. After all, they are a limited edition, and when they're gone, they gone.

THE WIMPY BURGER FACTOR

by Jenny Gardiner

I know you all know about the Wimpy Burger. Because we are all old enough to remember Popeye, right? Back when we were kids, there was nothing else on television but that lame-o cartoon several time a week (and of course Leave it To Beaver, but that's a story for another day). So for lack of anything better to do, we kicked back in front of the TV console (remember those consoles?!) and watched Popeye pouring on the spinach, Brutus forcing himself on Olive Oyl (talk about a wife-beater type), and Wimpy always in search of the elusive burger, for which he had no cash.

Wimpy's famous line, of course, was "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today."

I have come to recite this line with regularity, sotto voce, around my teenaged son, who loves to "rob Peter to pay Paul" in order to borrow time. In other words, he's a Grand Master Procrastinator, and it's making me nuts.

You know the cliched line about Little Kids, Little Problems, Big Kids, Big Problems? Well, it's true. To a certain extent. Granted, your very small child can indeed get into all sorts of vexing, and even deadly trouble. Like swallowing something out of those bottles with the Mr. Yuk stickers would constitute Big Problem for Little Kids.

But generally speaking, once they get bigger, you can be assured of mental stresses that will add fat to your ass and gray to your head faster than you can say "My kid didn't do that!"

That is, of course, if you are a stress-eater (which I am), and inclined to sprout gray hairs under duress with the rapidity of a tender bean pod unfurling on a time-lapse video (ditto). [By the way, if something happens to my hairdresser, I sure as hell hope they can unearth his wonderful recipe for my bogus blond hair color or I'm screwed.]

Okay, so I'm beating around the bush. But here's my Big Kid issue. And really, it started out as a Little Kid issue, but we failed, failed, failed to quash it in its infancy, and so it has become a problem that has grown and spread like that bright yellow fungus that shows up magically in your mulch after a heavy rain.

It's all about teen boys and procrastination. Oy, vey.

Now, I know that there must be those boys who are punctual and get their homework done on time and go to bed before 1 a.m. and when they're supposed to be home at 11:30 they're home at 11:30 and not 12:10 with every legitimate-sounding excuse in the book as to why they're not there on time. But I haven't ever experienced that myself. And it makes me CRAZY.

I think the thing of it is that my son is such a fabulous kid in every way (except the procrastination, which, admittedly, bleeds into every aspect of our lives) that I have excused away this bad habit to the point that it's now a firmly-entrenched personality trait that constantly comes back to bite not only him in the butt, but us as well. I have been his procrastination enabler, feeding the addiction instead of stopping it early and often.

And I wonder often: is the procrastination of a 17-year old a trait that will never recede? Much like a 15-year old nail biter, really unlikely to ever cease that obsessive habit. Or, say, a 45-year old stress-eater who blithely pops peanut M&Ms when anxiety hits the flash point.

This all came to a head this week when college admissions letters came out. And to our great dismay, our intellectually curious teenaged son, with a passion for learning and smarts to spare and who truly deserved admission into most of the colleges to which he applied found himself wait-listed for his top choices (this of course hastened by the fact that this of all years is officially the hardest year to get into college, thanks to the Type-A overachieving Baby Boomer parents, whose children have all reached matriculation peak this year). And these wait-lists? A direct result of years of Wimpy Burger behavior that sadly cancelled out SO many of the hugely important and relevant things he's done over the years, because when it came time to crunch for that AP Calculus exam, he was too engrossed in debating other political buffs on some website where you create and sustain your own nation-state to bother with integers or whatever it is you learn in Calculus. A really well-meaning kid whose track record was exemplary in so many areas, but who just couldn't help but reaching for that Wimpy Burger time and again when he should've been focusing on those irrelevant classes that ultimately mean nothing down the road, because really, who actually uses Calculus anyhow?

On one level my heart aches for him that he couldn't squelch the Wimpy Burger in himself, couldn't see far enough down the road to realize that even if he would rather spend hours on the computer debating world events, the fact is you have to play the high school game if you want to get past it and ultimately into the area in which you have a passion. You can't keep blowing off the have-to's to deal with the want-to's, even if the want-to's really matter. The have-to's are sort of the tolls on the highway toward your dreams, and you can't jump the tollbooth---eventually it catches up with you.

Our philosophy all along has been that our kids need to learn to sink or swim on their own. We refuse to be helicopter parents, hand-holding and hovering and ensuring every step they take is the right step. And so it's been agonizing for us to watch this unfold, to watch his dreams now have to re-shape to fit this new reality, a reality that exists because of those damned Wimpy Burgers. You can be sure I am left to question whether we should have, could have, done something to stop the Wimpy Burger behavior from getting beyond him. And to hope that perhaps this time the lesson will take hold (but most likely won't)...

)

The irony has not escaped me that a wait list for college admission is almost a Wimpy Burger sort of thing in and of itself. "I'll gladly accept you Tuesday, that is, unless I can't find an opening for you, er, um..."

Am I the only mom with a perpetually procrastinating boy? Or is this the rule, rather than the exception?