My Jenn-eration

Recently, I watched a fascinating documentary about a tiny town in Pennsylvania known as Roseto. Founded in the 1800s by a group of Italian immigrants, the town quickly began to flourish as more and more people from their original village emigrated from Italy. At first blush, it seemed like a rather non-descript little place. Except for one strange detail that came to light in the 1950s. The Rosetans were seemingly in perfect health with a near zero mortality rate from heart attack or heart disease. The statistics were almost too staggering to be true.   Stewart Wolf, a doctor from Oklahoma, flew to Roseto to study its people and investigate this phenomenon in the late 1950s and 1960s. Wolf studied whether genetics could be a variable, but in fact the local Rosetans proved healthier and far stronger than those that had emigrated from the same Italian village, but lived elsewhere in the United States. He studied their diet and exercise habits. But many Rosetans drank and smo...

Tonight felt different. As always, I went in to Dylan’s room to tuck him in and kiss him goodnight. On this, the eve of his preschool graduation, I leaned over and whispered to him with tears glistening in my eyes, “I’m proud of the boy that you are becoming.” He looked up at me, smiled, and farted. In some ways, I appreciated his not so gentle reminder to not take myself and this moment quite so seriously. After all, he is five and he’s graduating pre-school, not law school. As a parent, there is much more work to be done. But I can already feel my role with him shifting not so subtly, away from the emphasis on basic needs. Increasingly my role at least with Dylan is not to do so much as to step back and try to let him figure it out for himself; that is, to promote the struggle a bit. That in this it is good for him to struggle with the words on the page or the kids on the playground; to learn to use his own internal cues to navigate. It feels so different. It isn’t babywash a...

There is trouble brewing in the land over at Fox News where Lou Dobbs led an all-male panel discussion on May 29 th focused on a recent study by the Pew Research Center on the increased role of women as the “breadwinners” for their family. [1] In it, the study outlined a number of fascinating statistics including the following: ·          4 out of 10 households with children under the age of 18 include women who are the primary (or sole) breadwinners for their families ·          Approximately 74% of surveyed adults said that working women make it harder to raise their children; and ·          Approximately 50% of surveyed adults said that working women make it harder for their marriage to succeed. As you can imagine, the all male panel on Fox went to town with this study, linking specifically women’s increasing dominance and earnings power in the workplace...

It’s almost Father’s Day. I shouldn’t need a Hallmark holiday to remind me of a reason to think about my dad and about my relationship with him. Yet it does.   My dad is a complicated man. My relationship with him, as I expect is true for many folks, is equally complicated. He is 70. I am 35. For exactly ½ of his life, I have been a part of it. But I wonder what happened in that first part – the first 35. The years of his life that were about a man I didn’t know. That I’ll probably never know because having me and my sisters and marrying my mother didn’t erase that guy, but probably fundamentally changed him to the point where he isn’t sure he remembers that guy. I get that. I get how family can do that. But still I wonder about that part of him I never knew that laid the groundwork for the husband, and father, and grandfather that he would and is still evolving into. And I wonder a lot about all the stuff he doesn’t talk about: the good stuff and hard stuff and messy stu...

Ruby’s dance recital is rapidly approaching and I am in full panic mode. Not because I think she will freeze or cry on stage. Diva that she is I think she’ll love working that Jewish Center audience. The real source of my anxiety is over her hair. Ruby has extremely curly hair. If I fail to apply the twelve step multi product process that we go through nearly every day to tame it, her hair turns into dreadlocks. Legitimately. It’s like a party trick. We should actually charge to have people come and watch it occur. Now let me be clear: I love Ruby’s hair. I adore it. Her curls remind of my mother’s when she was a little girl. They are an amazing color and are literally exquisite. I just have no idea what to do with them. It’s totally not her fault. Part of the issue is my own post-traumatic stress over the boy hair I sported growing up. My mother had a thing about keeping my hair extremely short. Until I rebelled in my early 20s (clearly I was a very wild child) and finally decided ...

There is a favorite picture I have of me and my mother. In it, I am probably around two years old. I have curls that look strikingly like Ruby’s and I am sitting on a large pink toilet, my tiny two year old feet dangling far above. I am looking with rapture at a story my mother is reading to me as she sits beside me on the pink tub that anchored our bathroom. She is barefoot and lost in the story. I love the way she looks nice but a little worn. One of her pant legs are rolled up, the other down. Her hair is done but her long sleeves are rumpled and pushed up as she rests on her elbows to read the book. The moment is captured by my father through a crack in the doorway. I’m potty training and we are both totally absorbed in the decidedly un-instagram-worthy scene. I love noticing the lovely white curtains that framed our bathroom window, the perfectly vacuumed bathroom rug, the toy boat on the back of the toilet. I love looking at us as mother and child, totally lost and caught ...

The other night I was sweeping the kitchen floor, carefully pushing piles of dirt and Pringles and play dough around Ruby who was naturally playing on the dirtiest part of the floor directly under my feet, when I suddenly stopped and looked at her. And I caught her watching me, studying me. I felt anxious wondering if the image I was creating in her mind was somehow a glimpse of what her own future might look like. I think what she sees in the most simplistic terms is a woman serving her family, by sweeping and cooking and washing and doing all of these very sort of old school traditional woman-ly things. And that I do more of them and Phil does less of them is just more of a function of who is here more to do them and where our family is at right now. There are many things about this that trouble me. I feel anxious that she thinks we’ve prioritized Phil’s work over mine, even though Phil and I made a conscious choice to divide up the labor this way both for financial reasons and be...