Helpless

R. had answered an ad on Craig’s List for a nanny and forwarded to us the response she received. 

“Remember the ad we found on Craig’s List!!!” she e-mailed us, her excitement palpable in cyberspace.

She was nearing the end of winter break, bemoaning her impoverished-student status. The minimum-wage job she’d landed before Christmas hadn’t worked out. She wanted to work with children, especially those with special needs. She knew she’d love the work–and earn more than minimum wage. Craig’s List seemed like a reasonable source for nanny jobs, and F. had helped her look. They’d spotted the ad together. But as soon as he read the response R. had received, he knew something was wrong.

The writer claimed to be a 27-year-old researcher from Australia who said she would be traveling from Spain to the U.S. in the coming week to work for the next eight months. She would be bringing her 5– and 8–year-old sons but would only need babysitting help for a total of six hours on the weekends. She said she had lost her husband to cancer in May. She offered $50 an hour and said she would send R. her first payment in advance, through an “associate.” But first, R. would have to provide some basic information, including her address, phone number, age and sex.

F. burst into the room where I was napping.

“Have you heard from R.?” he asked. “Something’s wrong.” He showed me R’s e-mail.

“If something sounds too good to be true, it is,” he said, noting the $50-an-hour offer.

My stomach clenched. It was late on a Saturday afternoon. F. had texted R. as soon as he’d received her e-mail to warn her to stop communicating with the writer. She was at brunch, she replied, and would call later. Then she stopped answering her phone.

Concerned, I texted her, in all caps: “CALL US! DO NOT ANSWER THIS WOMAN’S TEXT. STAY AWAY FROM CRAIG’S LIST!”

Like all kids, R's IPhone is glued to her palm, when it's not in her lap. But she didn’t answer. I dialed her number and got her voice mail  I kept pressing the “repeat dial” button on the phone, but continued to reach her voice mail.

Where was she? Why wasn't she answering our texts and calls? Had she gone to meet the writer of the ad? What fate had she met?

Frantic, F. and I stared at each other. We could not find our child. We had no idea where she was. If she’d become ensnared in some sinister trap, it was too late: We had no way of locating or saving her.

Every year, thousands of girls and women in the United States and around the world become victims of human trafficking, often after answering bogus ads offering too-good-to-be-true employment opportunities. They are snatched up and sold into slavery, sexual and otherwise.

I tried to tell myself that R. was simply having fun at brunch, happily ignoring her phone. But, I couldn't stop imagining that she’d been whisked off to some secret place, either in the city or, G-d forbid, across the word. I felt helpless and sick.

I started texting and calling her friends, imploring them to reach out to her, to have her call us. No one answered.

My mind raced but kept crashing into dead ends. I thought of calling the police, but what could they do? F. went on line to see if Craig’s List offered any resources to help people who have been scammed and came up empty. I was ready to drive into Manhattan, weave in and out of every street and pound on every door, screaming R's name.

Then her text came:

“What’s up?”

I answered that we were terrified something had happened to her.

“I won’t answer the ad. Calm down. I love you."

When I was newly pregnant with R., a dear friend and father of two had told me, "From now on, you will never not worry."

F. and I locked into a bear hug, our hearts pounding against each other.

Good Enough

When is good enough, enough?

When do we get to remove ourselves from under the microscope? When do we get to banish the critic in our head (or better yet: order her to Hell)?

When can we stop pretending our hair isn’t gray?  When can we stop using cover-up to blot out the circles under our eyes or the age spots on our hands?

When will we be able to stand naked in front of a mirror and stop hating our bodies for all their imperfections?

When will we stop equating imperfection of any kind with moral failure?

When will we stop apologizing for forgetting what we heard 10 seconds ago? When will we stop feeling ashamed for tripping over a stick or for just losing our balance?

When will we stop apologizing for ourselves?

We are educated. We work hard at our jobs and our marriages. We have pushed out children and dedicated our lives to raising them well, even if it meant professional sacrifice. We are loyal friends and thoughtful citizens.

We are aging, but we keep up. We go to work. We struggle with technology. We stretch our brains. We stand by our partners, our children, our friends. We volunteer. We exercise, when we can, to stay healthy and fit.

We have earned our stripes.

And yet, our flaws loom large. Our eyes zero-in on them like laser beams:  the gray hairs, the love handles, the brain freezes, the clumsiness, the technological ineptitude.

A friend of mine is 85, a wisp of a woman who eats like a sparrow. A writer, a teacher, published poet, happily married for 58 years and mother of three. She denigrates herself for not having achieved enough in her life. And for eating too much. A swimmer who is 65 years old, recovering from cancer surgery and still swimming a mile at a good clip, chastises herself for the extra flesh on her waist. Another woman and regular swimmer, tears up with shame for being the oldest student in a graduate class of 20-something-year-olds.

I could go on, but I will stop, because enough is enough.

And being good enough is enough too. 

For your sake and for mine, it has to be.

Gratitude

As well-seasoned partners, we are supposed to know when and how to give each other space.

But what happens when our kids need one of us just at the moment when we’d rather be buried deep in a book or a blanket or a pile of sand, far away from family or friends or anyone’s demands?

I say, the kids win.

The kids need to know we’re here, no matter how bad our day was, no matter how muddled or conflicted we feel about our lives, no matter how much we want to smash something.

The kids need us. That's all they know.

They’re too young to know about being middle-aged and feeling like half of life is over. They’re too young to know what it feels like when everyone younger seems to be getting ahead further and faster. They can’t relate to the pain of arthritis, or worries about retirement or how much equity is in the house.

They need us when they need us.

And it’s a blessing that they do.

Tonight, E., still finding his way back from the terror of last week's car crash, tried to engage his dad in conversation by asking him about his day. But F., after a sleepless night and a bad day, rebuffed E's attempts. He didn't mean to hurt his son; he just couldn't rally enough energy to get out of his own way.

An opportunity lost. A blessing, missed.

Never overlook the desire of your kid, your teenager, to connect with you.

Be there at the very moment they need you.

Be grateful that the moment exists.

Weight

Little competes with the jolt of seeing the reflection of one’s naked self in a dressing room mirror.

Alone in a dressing room, I eagerly strip from the waist up to try on a slinky, sparkly blouse, something to cheer me up. I know what I expect to find in the mirror, but I am not prepared for what I see: hips whose extra flesh slightly overhangs my jeans and a belly that hangs like a small sack.

The last time I saw myself fully exposed was during the summer, while I was still suffering through the job that had my stomach tied up in knots. Eating had become impossible. My hip bones jutted out and the indentations between my breast bones were well-defined; my cheekbones were pronounced, my belly and my ass, flat. F. had started calling me skinny; friends were expressing concern. I may have been miserable at work, but I loved the way I looked.

Now that the awful stress of that job is gone, now that I am no longer subsisting on adrenalin and coffee, my metabolism has returned to normal. I am still a petite woman, but I have regained some of the padding that I’d lost: padding that is normal for my body. The problem is that normal isn’t how I like to look; that being as thin as I like requires me to eat barely anything. It triggers my inner anorexic.

At this stage in life, aren’t we entitled to surrender to our fleshier hips and grab-able tummies? Shouldn’t I accept my Hungarian-Jewish heritage, my ethnic predisposition to thighs that rub together when I walk and a belly that rolls over a little?  So, why can’t I do it?

Like many midlife women who came of age during the 60s in the days of Twiggy, I acquired my obsession—and my body self-hatred—from watching my mother. She was always on a diet, always castigating herself for having pounds to lose. She was a little chunky, always. No matter what she wore, she would squeeze herself into a girdle, desperate to compress her fleshiness, sounding like a washboard when she walked.

This is my legacy. I grew up, also a little chunky, hating my body and at war with it. As R. was growing up, I made a point of never discussing weight or calories–mine or anybody’s–so as not to infect her with the cultural pressure to be skinny that has completely distorted my physical self-perception. Still, I continue to watch every morsel I eat and force myself to exercise mercilessly; to burn up every calorie I consume, every single day. Although I am slender and fit, not a day goes by when I don’t take a personal, physical inventory. Sometimes I don’t even recognize that I’m doing it. It is second nature.

Along with the aches and pain and extra pounds of middle age, I hope to discover the capacity for self-acceptance, self-love even. What a concept.

Crash

The call came late Sunday afternoon, and as soon as E. said, “Mom, I’m fine,” I knew he wasn’t. 

There had been an accident. His friend was driving. He’d hit a wet slick on the road. They’d skidded and spun, hit an oncoming car, took another hit from behind, then crashed into a pole. They'd crawled out through the driver’s side window. That they survived is nothing short of miraculous.

The tremble in E’s voice was palpable.

“I’m coming home,” I said.

“We spun out,” he said, trailing off. “I’m so scared.”

I hadn’t heard my boy cry in years.

I raced home, dropped my bags on the floor and wrapped my arms around him. I had to stand on my toes to kiss him. He was shaking. My muscle-bound athlete, my tough guy, the kid I’ve been butting heads with for the past 18 months—now tender, terrified, vulnerable; afraid to drive in a car, or walk down the street.

It took hours of rubbing his back, hugging him and staying close, to help him get to sleep, and more of the same all the next day.

Confession: I relish the closeness, his need for me. I assure him he is safe, over and over. He can’t seem to hear it enough. This has always been my job: To love him as much as is humanly possible and to let him know how much he is cherished. It is even more critical now that I can no longer physically protect him.

He keeps reliving the crash, drifting in and out of disbelief and detachment, his world and ours, forever changed.

Loss

In an essay on aging, Anne Lamott writes that growing older inevitably brings with it the loss of someone without whom you cannot live.

For me, this loss came nearly nine years ago, when my brother Steven died. Every year around this time, I relive his dying. It is an automatic setting on my emotional clock: from December, when he entered the hospital for the last time, to January, when he moved into the nursing home, to February 25th, the day he died. Those long, dark, frigid days and the anguish of missing him are locked in my muscle memory.

Steven was 15 years older than I. He and my slightly older half-brother, Roy, lost their dad when they were 5 and 7, leaving my mother widowed (at age 29). My mother remarried 10 years later and had me, but left my father when I was an infant, after discovering that he was not only an alcoholic and a batterer, but that he liked boys more than he liked girls.

I never regarded my brothers as half-siblings. Actually, they were my heroes. Roy, who joined the Navy and left home when I was five, tried to step in as a father figure, which didn't work out too well. But Steven was my protector, my mentor, my sidekick and my best friend.

Steven taught me about survival. He did all he could to get me out of the house and away from my mother, who'd started throwing back vodka shots first thing in the morning and washing Valium down with gin and tonics.

Steven taught me about courage. When I was six, he took me to Coney Island where he held me tight as we rode the Dragon Coaster. He taught me about whimsy: When I was 11, he packed up his green, 1969 VW bug and took me on a spur-of-the-moment camping trip to Quebec, where we shared a pup tent, played his out-of-tune guitar and ate hot dogs three times a day, for three days in a row. He taught me about defying convention (and breaking the law), letting me hang out at age 12 in his Bronx apartment where he and his friends smoked pot and brewed beer in giant plastic trash cans. He introduced me to Joni Mitchell and Neil Young and Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen and made up a story to accompany Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.

He edited (and made me re-write and re-write) my college essays. He met me at 4 a.m. for a cup of coffee in the St. Louis airport where I was changing planes while en-route to Boston and my first year of college. He was the sounding board for my sieges of self-doubt, my reality check and my comic relief. Now and then he'd call me at work to brighten my day with a dirty joke.

Steven was serious, irreverent and the most honorable person I knew. He taught me to live with integrity, to always be honest, to stand up for myself and to carve my own path. He encouraged me to take risks, make mistakes and keep pushing on. He said there was no other way to live.

Reset

The most difficult thing about marriage is the occasional, inexplicable disconnect; the distance that moves in from nowhere, like a dense, cold fog.

We sail side by side, riding the same wave. But in a blink the affection and humor and empathy and cooperation we shared moments ago disappear. We chafe and clash. We irritate then criticize then hurt then anger each other.

Qualities we’d once admired become nails scraping the paint off a car: his slow and thoughtful conversation sounds muddled and plodding; my valued emotional radar turns him into a hunted duck; his good-natured teasing feels malicious; my need for constant closeness, a strip of toilet paper stuck to his heel.

Traits we rarely notice in each other become flaws we can’t forgive:  his chewing and snoring, my anxiety and insomnia; his insistence on dressing an entire salad, mine on counting calories; his need to read half a New Yorker during each trip to the bathroom, mine on saving money by keeping the house dim and cool; the whisker trimmings he leaves in the sink, the sweaty work-out clothes I leave in the hamper.

We should retreat to our corners, but we can’t disentangle; we’re inextricably entwined but we’re estranged. And we can’t right it. We grow impatient and disappointed and distraught.

So we watch a movie. Focus on something outside ourselves. No demands. No expectations. No talking. Just breathing. Separate and together. Recalibrating.

It doesn't vanish, the love. But sometimes it gets caught in the lint trap. It's taken 20 years to know this. Knowing this is what gets us through.

Gradually, our feet touch, then our elbows. In time, one asks the other for a piece of blanket, and we warm, together.

Growing

“Adult Children.” What an oxymoron.

R. turned 18 last fall. She is mature for her age, poised and wiser than her years in many ways. Still, she calls to me from the kitchen, where she swings on the open refrigerator door like a little monkey, asking, “What should I eat?”

Really?

She has been living, shopping, cooking and eating on her own since starting college five months ago. Like most college students, she subsists on pasta. When I suggest that increasing her protein intake might help alleviate the dizziness she complains about, she looks at me as if I belong in a home. When I suggest that sleeping for four hours after partying all night might explain why she keeps getting sick, she dismisses me with contempt. A week later she calls crying for a remedy for her raw throat and fever.

She joined a bus full of strangers on a trip to Virginia to do volunteer work at 14, traveled in Israel for a month by herself at 16, and has landed dozens of acting auditions and job interviews. But when she needs to figure out which subway will take her across town, she calls me for directions.

Growth isn’t linear.

It also isn’t commensurate with age.

After all, when F's parents call to see how he's doing, he doesn’t even try to hide his annoyance. An adult child.The more they probe, the more remote he becomes, just the way E., our 16-year-old, responds when I ask him how he is: speaking softly enough, with just enough disdain, to make me want to leave the country.

Perhaps I need thicker skin.Or a better sense of humor.Or just to let things go.

Now that would be real growth.

The Up Side

I’m glad the holidays are over. I’m ready for life to come off “hold” and to stop having an excuse to sleep past 6 a.m.  My “to do” list for 2013 is already long, and I’m eager to get started. I’m anxious for people to start returning e-mails and phone calls. I’m ready to plunge into the next phase of my life.

Remember when I said there was an up side to aging? Well, here it is: It’s being able to trudge through an emotional swamp and emerge on the other side, renewed; assembling the pieces of a past and using the picture to inform a future; deciding to take new a risk without caring what anyone thinks; allowing for the possibility of failure and then, of starting over again.

It’s realizing that all we have is time.

Time is going to pass us by (and we're going to keep getting older), no matter what we do.

If I don’t chase my dream, if I give up on myself or stay stuck or live in the past, aging will have been a fruitless exercise. A waste.

So, this is my charge for 2013: To view midlife as a goldmine; to benefit from what I know and to use the time ahead to learn; to allow myself tentative steps or soaring leaps, as long as I keep moving.

About the memoir: I launched this morning, but I’ve decided to keep it separate from this blog, which keeps me connected to you--albeit virtually--and gives me the immediate sense of accomplishment I need to stay out of my own way.

Happy New Year.