Bowl o’ Cherriesbowl o’ cherries

Tomorrow, May 1, is D-Day for high school seniors.  All those who have been put through brutal application and acceptance processes, these kids who have a new appreciation for the concept of a “wait list,” will have to make up their minds.  By tomorrow, they’ve got to fill out paperwork and mail deposits into the colleges of their choice.  This is it.

I’m hearing from family and friends how hard it is to balance feelings of pride and delight against the sadness of upcoming loss as their kids make these sometimes tough decisions. I spoke on the phone last night with my sister-in-law who lives in Virginia. Her daughter — my niece — has decided to start school next September in California.  A beloved friend in San Diego is coming to terms with her son’s decision to head to Boston. The silver lining is that we’ll have more opportunities to visit, but that doesn’t ease her heartache at having her son leave home in such a definitive way. And I am struggling with the implications of one of my kids’ decision to attend boarding school in New Hampshire in the fall.  Distance.  Life as we know it is about the change dramatically.

My sister-in-law, my friend, I — we are all members of the tail end of the Baby Boom.  We have all made choices to curtail professional ambitions so that we’ve been able to have more time with our growing children. Sociologists and gender analysts in a few decades will surely have a field day when they pick apart our lives.  I shudder to think what they will conclude.  Here on the ground, in the moment, what I see is a desire for deep connection with family.  A friend has told me since her kids were born that her greatest accomplishment will be if her kids want to come home for Thanksgiving when they are grown.  I think she speaks for an entire generation.

I don’t know if our desire for proximity and reciprocity among our growing children is good or bad.  Don’t know if it’s mostly about us or our kids.  Do we want something for them that we didn’t have? Is this deep-seated desire yet another manifestation of the narcissism of our generation?

NBC has tapped into these complicated feelings with its new drama Parenthood. The show airs Tuesdays at 10 PM Eastern Time.  It chronicles the ins and outs of the Braverman clan — two aging Early Boomer parents, their four mid-life Late Boomer kids, and their six growing grandchildren.  Each episode is studded with scenes in which adult children gather to celebrate even the smallest extended family happenings. The camera lovingly films the extended clan gathered at a local park to cheer on one of the kid’s baseball games.  It shows the entire family in a public pool as the youngest member successfully swims for the first time.   The Bravermans all grapple with demons.  None is perfect.  But none suffers alone. They share their imperfections, seeking each others’ advice in person and on the phone.  They take comfort in their ability to drop by each others’ homes and offices. Their lives are tightly braided together, and the show’s writers demonstrate again and again that this mostly brings the characters deep satisfaction.

I have come to think of Parenthood as family porn.  We Late Boomers who feed our children slow food at family suppers want more time with the people we have raised to adulthood.  And just as they are heading off to have their own adventures like so many tufts on a dandelion, we crave stories about families who choose to live in proximity.  The cameras filming Parenthood linger over the faces of siblings who choose to babysit each others’ children and attend their birthday parties.  We grew up watching Dynasty and Dallas, night time soap operas about the evil machinations of family members hell-bent on destroying each others’ lives.  Now we are hungry for shows that allow us to fantasize about the essential goodness of kin and connection. If we can’t have our own family suppers, at least we can watch the Bravermans enjoying theirs.

I’ve been blogging this summer — but not here, on Bowl o’ Cherries.  I’m keeping a blog for WCAI, the NPR affiliate for Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket.  The blog’s called “The Outer Space,” because I’m spending the summer covering stories on the Outer Cape (roughly Orleans to Provincetown).  Come find me, and leave me a comment:

http://wcaioutercape.wordpress.com/

WCAI is a great radio station.  It relies on a small staff to produce features and investigative spots.  Because it’s based in Wood’s Hole, home of the famous oceanographic institute, the station features a wide array of science and marine stories.  WCAI is also home to Mindy Todd’s “The Point,” a daily 1/2-hour live call-in show.  Mindy does the show without a producer — amazing to me after spending the spring at WBUR’s On Point, which has a staff of 10+.

I’m so excited to be working as a radio reporter.  No ambivalence whatsoever.  And the timing couldn’t be better.  Just as I’m learning to push the buttons on digital recorders and editing software, the kids are learning to push buttons on their own alarm clocks and test their independence.  They are all doing interesting things this summer, each taking emotional, intellectual, and physical risks.  I’m getting a chance to do a bit of that myself.  Lucky, lucky me.

I went on a job interview.

OK, so not a paying job.  An internship.  Two days a week.  And I couldn’t have been more delighted when I learned I’d gotten the spot.  

After five and a half years of — now, how shall I say this? — Unemployment?  Staying at home with the kids? — I stick my toe into a formal work environment again.

I notice three things about my hesitation as I waffle over how to describe the last five and a half years.  One starts with a negative.  (UN.  As in UNhappy.  UNfulfilled.  UNpaid.)  The other sounds like a positive decision but comes off as if it were a really fun fakey vacation to a theme park.  (You know.  You’ve just gotten off the Whizzmatron and are standing by a large metal trash can, holding your hair back — and also the hair of several small children who have just drunk blue Slurpees — as everyone retches from the effects of Zero G, and someone asks to ride again,  and you think, “Why not?”) The last is a simple declarative sentence. (I stick.  Manly, no?)  The truth is in there.  Somewhere.

Even as I walked into the interview, I had these grammatical and internal complexities on my mind.  I’ve been mulling them over since second grade (I’ll save that one for another posting).  I got more serious in graduate school, when, pregnant with triplets, I prepared for an oral exam on the history of American women and work.  I found it difficult to maintain a stance of scholarly disinterest as I checked articles and books off my long list.  I’d be wrapping my head around the cultural and political factors that had shaped American women’s lives over the centuries when one fetus or another would deliver a swift kick.  The most important lessons I took away from this reading were: 1) When America goes to war and most men join in the fight, women work and get paid to do anything and everything that theretofore had been considered unladylike and off-limits,  2) When the economy shrinks, men — traditionally white men — get the pickins’, and 3) drink gallons of water when carrying higher order multiples — it reduces the blood concentration of the hormone that causes contractions. 

I gave birth and began raising children in a period of extraordinary economic expansion. Though I watched CNN reporters live from Iraq as I gestated, for me, my family, and those I knew, we were not “at war.”  Jobs were plentiful.  Money was plentiful.  And in my life, children were plentiful.  I left gainful employ for what I believed - and still believe — good reasons.  I had absolutely no idea when or how I would make my way back to a place where I would be going on a job interview.

Some of what I’ve needed to do in the last five and a half years has been downright head-bangingly impossible.  Much has been plain old fun.  Never have I needed reminding that it’s been a privilege or that it is because I am privileged that I’ve been “at home.”  

When I read Lisa Belkin’s farewell column in an October Style section of The New York Times and found her declaring ownership of the phrase “opting out” and the “revolution” it inspired, I had a grammatical hiccup akin to the one I experienced writing the beginning of this post. I remembered the article  Belkin wrote for the Times Magazine called “The Opt Out Revolution.” In it, she described women very much like me: married mothers with advanced degrees and promising careers who “opted out” of the job market to “stay at home with the kids.”  Her descriptions weren’t always flattering. Women used to running organizations and managing large staffs were putting their PDAs and Filofaxes to work overscheduling and micromanaging their children.  They channeled their ambitions into their offspring, morphing from accomplished fast-trackers into aggressive stage mothers.  Belkin’s use of “opting out” bugged me.  To “opt out” put a premium on the work place.  It cast women’s decisions in terms of a negative — what we/they weren’t doing, rather than what we/they were.

The verb “opt” comes from “option.”  An option is a choice.  Choices often come only to those who have possibilities.  I wish there were a word, a grammatical phrase, that could simultaneously honor and complicate “opting in.”   I don’t imagine anyone putting a lot of energy into this phrase-mongering any time soon.  I come back to those oral exams.  We’re in a time of economic contraction. Options are evaporating.  I worry that even with advances in discrimination law, we will fall back into sexist habits.  Will women have fewer choices as employers hire young male college grads to fill empty positions?   Will women be “staying home with the kids” because they have to — there won’t be jobs, and they won’t have day care?

In January, as I zip myself into business casual two days a week, I’ll still be thinking about what it means “to opt.”  And I’ll be hoping that you will help coin a new phrase, something better than “opting out.”  Send me ideas via “comments,” please.