Purple Unicorn

Here’s today’s paradox: trying to accept who and where I am, while fretting that I’m not somewhere—or someone—else.

Like two cats in a bag, both impulses are strong and fighting.

I have created a nice freelance nest, with just enough work, income and spare time to write creatively. But when I peruse online job boards, I realize that I couldn't leave this nest if I wanted to.

In his column in yesterday’s New York Times, Tom Friedman wrote that today's employers are not interested in where prospective hires went to school or what they studied. They’re interested in the value they bring to a company, their entrepreneurial spirit, their ability to continuously reinvent themselves.

“Employers have unrealistic expectations,” according to Eleonora Sharef, 27, co-founder of HireArt, a company that screens job hunters for big companies. “They don’t want to train you, and they expect you to be overqualified. They are all looking for purple unicorns: the perfect match.”

It’s no longer enough to be a veteran and much-published writer/editor. I have to have a gazillion other skills, including technology and social media. I have to think in Twitter tweets. And I have to be 30 years younger.

A friend and former colleague recently said that the jobs we would easily have landed five or ten years ago are now going to people who have more of today’s skill set, are smarter, younger and willing to work for less.

On days when work grinds to a halt, when I can’t manage to put two words together or when our bank account dips into overdraft, it’s easy to let stories of whiz kids who have made it big lure me into a cauldron of self-loathing.

I have to remind myself that 30 years ago, my professional goal was not to be a whiz kid or a millionaire or a purple unicorn. It was to be a freelance writer. And, with the exception of a few detours along the way, I have stuck to my plan. That in itself is an achievement.

A Delicate Balance

As infants, they seemed so impossibly fragile: Support their heads. Protect the soft spot. Don’t let them sleep on their backs (or their stomachs?). Watch what they put into their mouths. Don’t leave them unattended on a bed, lest they roll off.

The vigilance was constant.

But it’s now, I realize, when they’re really vulnerable. Out of sight, at all hours, driving with newly-licensed friends, experimenting. Far from my watch.

My nervousness when they were babies was soothe-able: I would pick them up and cradle them close. Feel them breathe.

But as they grow into themselves, my worry runs rampant.

I can’t hold onto them anymore, I can’t be omniscient. I have to give them room or else they will take more than they need. Because they can.

And  I will lose.

They don’t want my absence, and I don’t want their dependence. 

It will forever be a delicate balance. 

Haunted

No parent is not haunted by last week's murder of a college junior in her house at Hofstra University. We don’t have to have known her or her family. Our hearts break for them. And any sense of ease we may have had about our kids being away at school has shattered. This could have happened to any one of us.

As inconceivable as birth, so is such sudden, violent loss, from which there can be no recovery.

R. is home for the summer, and I am newly terrified. 

Last night, hot and thick with humidity, I locked all the windows. And I woke up every hour, checking to see if she—a legal adult who has been living independently in the city for the better part of a year—was home yet.

Just like old times.

It’s going to be a challenge: trying to relax while she is out with friends until morning. I realize this is what she has done all year at school, but she was far enough away for me to be able to shut my eyes to it.

Now, there is no ignoring the porch light that burns until she gets home. 

Flirting

At first, I wasn’t sure if he was flirting with me. 

After 20 years of marriage and a social life that mainly involves other married people, my radar’s a little rusty. Plus, with a still-fresh hip scar and slightly swollen leg, I haven’t been feeling at the peak of attractiveness. Frankly, at 55, I no longer consider myself flirt-worthy. I guess my self-esteem has been on the down slope.

He’s about my age; divorced with grown kids. Pleasant looking. Both of us in above-average physical shape. Neither of us, stunners.

The first time I thought he was just inquiring about my healing hip. It felt thoughtful and good. The second time was brazen.

“Look at that smile!" he said, loud enough for by-standers to hear. "Do you smile like that for everyone or just when you see me?”

I should have been embarrassed, even put off. But my heart beat faster. My smile took up half my face.

I am a feminist: hard wired to reject any suggestion that my capabilities and rights are not equal to that of a man. I detest and will rebuff any demeaning, tasteless or otherwise disrespectful gesture. I’d also like to believe that, as a happily married heterosexual woman, I don’t care about the attraction of other men. 

Maybe it's because I am in a secure, satisfying marriage, where the balance of power is even, that I can enjoy the hokey attention of a man other than my husband who finds me attractive. After all—and as corny as this may sound—I don’t dream of attention from anyone other than F.  

But when it comes along, my ego does a jig. And that’s not politically incorrect. It’s human. 

Growing Old

After a few tender Mothers’ Day texts, E’s mood plummeted.

I didn’t see him for most of the day: When he wasn't with friends, he was cloistered inside his room. I chalked it up to hormones, or disappointment about losing the last lacrosse game of the season.

When I asked him what was up, he said he was tired. I pressed, and it didn't take much for him to remind me that this marked the third year—to the day—since his closest friend had died. The boy’s mother had hosted a memorial brunch for all his friends, which, achingly, fell on Mothers’ Day. E. spent half the morning there.

Digesting death is difficult at any age. At 13--E's age when he lost his buddy--it is incomprehensible.

“It gets easier,” he said, yelling over the music that his headphones were pumping into his ears.

So young and, so old.

Mothers' Day

R. and I spend the afternoon strolling downtown, window shopping, dipping into stores, trying things on. I talk about my creative drought. She talks about studying for finals. We lock arms, hold hands. Like old friends.  

This never happened between my mother and me.

“I’m not your friend. I’m your mother,” my mother would proclaim during our hateful fights, when she was drunk, and I was as nasty and disrespectful as a teenager can be; before she finally lost her temper and smacked me across the face. She never apologized, never considered that she may have been wrong. She just issued this slogan. It was her warning shot: Remember who I am and watch your step.

By the time I was 14, letting my mother touch me was out of the question. We’d be shopping or crossing a street and she’d surreptitiously inch her hand across my back and try to curl her arm around my waist to pull me close. This may have been her plea for forgiveness; her demonstration of love. But the minute I felt her fingers on my waist I’d stiffen and withdraw; widen the space between us and keep walking, rejecting her and reigniting her anger.

I wanted to love her, as every child loves its parent. But she channeled enough pain and bitterness into rage toward me, that whatever love I once felt became a phantom limb; a shard of fossilized bone.

Only now, 20 years after her death, do I think of my mother with compassion, probably because she’s not here.

I’m sorry she didn’t live to see me marry and have children. I’m sorry she didn’t get to know R. and E. or see the bond we have. I’m sorry she didn’t get to know me, the mom, who always apologizes to my kids when I am wrong. I’m sorry, but I don’t miss her.

A fierce clap of thunder splits the downtown sky and the ensuring downpour gives R. and me a delicious excuse to keep shopping. School ends next week and she moves back home for a few months. Our boundaries will shift then, and we’ll needle each other, no doubt. Until then, I bask in her love and the love of my family; a love I'd never imagined.

On the corner, near her dorm, R. wraps her arms around me and says, “You’re the best mom ever.”

Dry Spell

Every writer has dry spells.

It’s hard to know how to weather them. Do I turn my attention elsewhere and take the pressure off? Do I hunker down and push through?

My well has felt empty for weeks. The words come but they get stuck in my mouth. They don’t seem important, or relevant, or impressive. Why should anybody care?

I sit down at this computer first thing in the morning, and I have nothing to say. I pull up my long-stalled memoir, and I feel stuck. I inhibit myself. I can’t get out of my own way. So I am silent.

I fear I am tapped out.

In fact, my mind is jumbled with worry: the fear of never finding (or wanting to find) a real job; the encroaching anxiety over E’s beginning college hunt.

If I were a more disciplined writer, I could remove myself from these real life worries and produce work. Alas, I need a fallow mind. I need to be surrounded by little more than air and trees, sea and sound, for creative energy to emerge.

Yesterday, sitting in the warm spring sun with a cup of steaming lemon tea, I could feel some words come, like a thin trickle of water moistening the parched well bottom. I sat. I watched the birds. I stroked the dog. I didn’t force myself to put them down.

They kept coming. Faster. Rushing.

I grabbed a pen and paper. I wrote a page. Got them all down. Quenched a thirst.

This morning, they stare at me from the page. 

Where We Are

I coulda’ been a contender. I coulda’ been somebody. Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy, “On the Waterfront.”

F. and I pull out these lines when we feel lost and overlooked, like we missed our shot at becoming the stars we’d imagined we’d be; when we realize we’re missing the bigger, more important picture.

Last week, it was my turn. I confess: Not getting the job threw me. I wasn’t sure I wanted it, but I thought I’d have the opportunity to decide. It kept me from brooding about this long stretch of open road that has become my new normal.

“If I had only made different choices,“ I told F. over coffee one morning when I was feeling particularly sorry for myself. “If only I’d gone to a different college, had someone to mentor me…"

“Then what?” he challenged.

“I coulda’ been a contender,” I started chuckling, hearing myself. “I coulda’ been somebody.”

“And you wouldn’t have R. or E or me,” he said, knowing me as no one can, bringing me back to where we are.