Season's Greetings

Don't send holiday cards. Seriously. Don't.

Unless there is
money in that envelope, or a heartfelt and handwritten message in that
card, don't bother sending it. Nobody is fooled when you mail a
preprinted card that wishes "All the best," to someone who hasn't heard
from you in a year. 

Instead of "Season's greetings," the card
might as well read, "I hope you haven't moved since last year" because
everyone knows that mailing holiday cards is less about whom you
cherish and more about who's in your address book.

"We got a holiday card from the Satterfields," I told Hubby. 

"Who are the Satterfields?" he asked.

"I don't know. They live in Alabama. Who do we know in Alabama?" 

"No one."

"Oh, wait," I said, searching my contact list. "They're your cousins. Did you know they moved to Alabama?" 

"Which cousins?"

This is why we stopped sending holiday cards.

We
used to relish making and sending holiday cards as a form of creative
expression. Usually, we'd make cards featuring photos of Monkey, our
stuffed animal gorilla, posing at various historic landmarks. One year,
we downloaded a picture of a random ugly family and used that as our
greetings. After Zev was born, everyone naturally expected he'd become
the star of our new holiday stationery line.

Not so.
 

I
think the thing that sent me over the bah-humbug edge was that
metastasizing trend of sending personal essays inside of greeting
cards. You know what I'm talking about: Those two- or three-page
(single-spaced) letters crisply folded inside a blank, bland greeting
card that tell you (and probably 100 other people the writer hasn't
thought about in a year) what he or she has been doing for the past 365
days. Some are funny. Some are spoofs on the form. But all of them are
unsettling in how impersonal they are.

Last year, I learned
that someone I used to have brunch with every week spent several months
recovering from a back injury. I had no idea. I felt like a jerk for
being so out of touch that a major trauma could come and go without me
knowing about it. After reading that, I thought, "Are we even
acquaintances anymore?"
 

I tried making that argument to Yvette
last week. Yvette has had a momentous year, culminating in brain
surgery. She figured not everyone was up to speed on her life, and
writing it all down was a good way to get the word out.

"But if
they're someone you really wanted to tell this to, wouldn't you have
told them, like, before they cut into your skull and removed a chunk of
your brain?"
 

"Well, a lot of people are busy," Yvette said,
citing a friend of hers who was finishing up a PhD while having
relationship issues and, if I'm remembering this correctly, going to
clown school or something like that.

There is busy, and then
there is too-busy-to-be-in-your-life busy. Can an annual essay really
maintain bonds that are so obviously fraying?
 

And then there is
the weirdness of getting one of those letters from someone you see all
the time. You feel like calling them and saying, "Hi. Yeah, it's me. I
just got a letter detailing everything you've done in the last year,
and – having been party to most of it – I have to say, it wasn't as
boring as you made it out to be."

So, how about saving the
postage and picking up the phone instead? It's, like, 143 times better
to hear someone's voice than to read his words. For one, you can be
sure the words shared will be unique to the two of you. Unless you're a
freak and you write out a script before you call people. In that case,
I can't help you.
 

Otherwise, stop typing and start dialing.
After all, there is no reason to wish a "Happy New Year" to someone you
didn't talk to during the old one.

Oops! She Did It Again

The passage of time is supposed to do it. Having children is
supposed to do it. Changing party affiliations, finding a homey hobby,
discovering religion. These are all things that are supposed to do it.
Britney Spears is not supposed to do it.

And yet, she did it: Britney Spears has turned me into my mother.

"Oh, Britney!" I found myself saying out loud, into my newspaper. "Why Paris?"
 

I
was lamenting the fact that Ms. Spears, a woman I have never met, has
started hanging out with Paris Hilton. She finally sheds that dead
weight of a "husband" of hers, and she rushes into the arms of a woman
who ascended to fame with a night-vision sex video? How stupid of her.
What a waste. How … wait, what am I saying?

Mom was always
concerned about who our friends were. She is of the opinion that you
can judge a person by the company they keep. I never subscribed to that
point of view, but since I naturally gravitated toward the straight-A
types, it wasn't much of a problem. Sis, with her Florence
Nightingale-like love of all things injured and stupid, vexed Mom much
more with her choice of friends.
 

It used to bug me how much
importance Mom placed on who Sis' friends were. As long as Sis was
happy and staying out of trouble what difference did it make if her
friends were never going to win the Fulbright?

"It's important," she would snap back, without elaborating.
 

No, I thought to myself, it's not.

But
here I am, pouring over Web pages of Britney and Paris sharing fishnet
stockings, and thinking Brit could do better. Should do better. It's
important.
 

Have I mentioned that I don't know Britney Spears?

When
Madonna's "Sex" book came out, I was in high school and Madonna was, by
my estimation, infallible. My mother thought the book was vulgar. I
thought it was genius – albeit in a pervy kind of way. Here was Madonna
laughing at the face of convention. Living up to the expectations of
prurient audacity a Puritan public placed on her – all while daring
that public not to like it.
 

And yet, when Britney flashes her
naughty bits (post babies!) for the paparazzi, I'm as aghast as a
librarian. As uppity as a book-burner. As disgusted as … as my mother.

Oops! Britney did it again.
 

"Do
they not make underwear on Planet Moron?" I shouted. "When she's
sticking her naked butt up against a plate glass window, is she
thinking, 'I sure hope my sons see these photos someday?' "

I
shake my head, wondering what is wrong with people, and I feel that
head growing a little harder, a little more judgmental, a little more
Mom-like. It freaks me out.
 

Time was, I saw a diverse friend
base as a sign of a truly loving person, a big-tent heart that had as
much room for the friend with the cabin in Big Bear as for the guy
who'd track you down at that cabin to ask you to post bail.

I
don't know how it happened, this transformation. I don't know how I
went from thinking about people as individuals to thinking about them
as the sum total of their friends. But it's happened. And I fear it's
taking over me: I mean, what was Lane Garrison doing in a car with
teenagers, anyway? He's 26!
 

I don't know if I'll ever shake
this choose-your-friends-wisely mentality. But one thing is clear: I
shouldn't spend any more time thinking about Britney Spears. She's bad
news.

At least, that's what my mom would say.

Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want

They say 'tis better to give than to receive. That's not true, of
course. Unless what's being given is a TB blanket or a venereal
disease, 'tis always better to get as much as your stubby little arms
can carry. Especially this time of year, when all your relatives and
friends are socially obligated to buy you things.

But there is
an upside to giving that getting can't match: the esteem you receive
from imparting a well-purchased present. Getting somebody something
that they really wanted shows that you understand that person. That you
care about what's going on in his heart and mind. That you pick up the
buried cues in her most casual conversation. Trouble is, getting the
right gift means you have to actually understand, care and listen to
the people around you. 

Who has time for that?

That's
why this Hanukkah, I propose that all my friends update their
Amazon.com wish lists. (Brill, sweetie, you're going to have to start
one. A little bird told me you want a soldering iron, but I am not
about to get you an implement of destruction unless I have proof that
that bird isn't putting me on.)

An Amazon.com wish list tells
your friends exactly what you want and how much you want it. And it
lends specificity to the vague concepts of you that your friends have.
I know, for instance, that Jean loves to knit. But I don't know the
first thing about choosing a knitting book. Now, thanks to her Amazon
wish list, I don't need to take time out of my schedule of being
fabulous to find out.

And what's more, I know without a doubt
that Jean is going to love her present. Why wouldn't she? She picked it
out. And all the love she has for her present will, naturally, spill
over to me – making me look and feel absolutely glorious in her eyes
(and the eyes of anyone else in the room when she opens her present).
 

Some
old-fashioned types out there will tell you that buying stuff off of
registries and wish lists is impersonal. That searching for and finding
the perfect trinket – the gift your recipient hadn't already thought of
– shows you really care. These are the same people who tell children,
"The best presents are the ones you make yourselves." Ever get a
macaroni necklace and think, "That's just the accessory I needed to
spruce up my wardrobe"? I didn't think so. Don't listen to those
people. They're delusional. They're archaic. They're Lisa Bee's
relatives.

"Every year I tell my family, 'Buy me stuff from my
Amazon wish list, and I'll rejoice.' And every year I get, like, 'Top
Gun,' " Lisa Bee IM'd me.
 

I took a look at her wish list. She
has 193 items. It goes on for eight pages. I nearly called her mother.
No one, ever, has the right to say Lisa Bee is hard to shop for. Ever.

The
wish list is not just a collection of things people want, it's a view
inside their psyches and their ever-expanding interests. Lisa Bee, for
instance, added some books about the Middle East to her list shortly
after a group of us got into a big discussion about the Iraq war and
the state of affairs in Israel. (Guess what you're getting this year,
Lisa Bee.)
 

And if you take a look at my wish list you'll find …
oh. Wait. My Amazon wish list contains two items, one of which is my
husband's novel. Hmm. Not a very helpful road map for potential
gift-givers, is it? I've been so busy thinking of others – well, how
others will perceive me once I present them with the perfect present –
that I've completely neglected to update my own requests.

No
matter. If someone really cares, they won't need an Amazon wish list to
tell them what to get me. But the rest of you, get typing. I don't have
the time necessary to put into buying thoughtful gifts unless you help
me look like I've taken the time to be particularly thoughtful. So get to it!

Your
sense of my generosity and consideration depends on it.

Breakable Tradition

Last week many of you grabbed your flashlights, braved the cobwebs
and eased out the wedding china from its hiding place, box by pristine
box, to adorn your Thanksgiving tables. Some of you probably held your
breath each time someone slurped from a precious coffee cup or clinked
a fork down a little too hard on a salad plate.

You might have
counted the minutes until you could wash and dry the whole mess (by
hand, of course) and then return each setting to its proper box –
cardboard dividers and all. Your guests measured the success of your
holiday meal by the quality of the food. You, secretly, used the number
of chipped dishes as your metric: No matter how delicious your
marshmallow yams were, if that cow-shaped creamer broke, the evening
was ruined. 

When we were getting married, Hubby tried to
dissuade me from registering for fine china. He anticipated that people
would shell out a lot of money for a delicate albatross that would lurk
silently in our house, emerging only on the rarest occasions to drive
me completely batty.

Don't touch that! I'll wash that! Don't stack the soup bowls with the spoons still in them; they'll chip! 

He
told me we would likely never use fine china. As it happens, we've used
our pretty calla lily-embossed settings very nearly eight times. Or
maybe it was five.

"Why do we need china?" he asked me back then. 

"Because," was my answer.

In
truth, I had no idea why we needed china, but Mom and the woman at
Macy's told me we did, and I was too young to argue. At the time, they
equated china with the little black dress: You always want to have one
in your closet. But the difference is, I get actual use out of my
little black dress – and it doesn't take up nearly as much room in the
closet.

My girlfriends who waited until after puberty to get
married were a little wiser. They now keep food in their pantries
instead of punch bowls and cake plates. I'm slightly envious of people
who managed to get a marriage license without a gravy boat. These are
people who don't own a single silver napkin ring – and have had no
occasion to learn that I have 12.

Each time we've moved, I've
been the one to pack the kitchen – never wanting Hubby to get a good
inventory of the insane amount of underused stuff we keep hidden away.
 

I know what he'd say after packing his 17th box of fondue sets and caviar spoons: "Why did we register for this again?"

My answer would be the same as it was back then: "Because."
 

Because,
like serving turkey on Thanksgiving, collecting useless table
adornments is a tradition. We load up married couples with plenty to
prepare them for special occasions and precious little to prepare them
for life. Collectively, we perpetuate the myth that expensive stemware
is an heirloom in the making, rather than a thing couples fight about
every time a glass breaks. We all do it. And we will all keep doing it
until civilization comes crashing down in a giant crescendo of broken
pumpkin-shaped soup tureens.

If we didn't keep doing it, if we
gave newlyweds presents they'd actually use – like toilet paper or
groceries or retainer fees for a divorce attorney – then when we went
over to their homes for dinner once every two years, we'd have to pile
food onto everyday plates, covering it with ladled gravy and eating it
with mismatched flatware. Chaos.
 

And worse, the unencumbered
couple would have gotten off scot-free. Babies don't wear handmade
booties, but that won't stop people from knitting them. We will keep
heaping unwanted treasures onto newlyweds because we had this stuff
foisted onto us.

So for those out there who hosted Thanksgiving
dinner this year and hazarded your finest china in the hands of Auntie
Neanderthal and her ADHD-afflicted brood, I raise my glass to you.
And set it back down. Very, very carefully.

Peek-A-Boo! I Can't See You!

I dread The Question.

I dread The Question almost as much as
I dread that puff of air they always shoot into your eyes to test for
glaucoma. Nearly every visit to the eye doctor involves someone asking,
"Have you considered laser eye surgery?" And I just dread it. 

I usually cast a dilated eye downward and mutter something like, "Yeah. I don't think it's for me."

Some docs push it harder than others, but pretty much all of them do a hard sell. Imagine never needing to fuss with contacts and glasses again! Imagine waking up and being able to see! 

And when I resist they almost always think it's because I'm some Luddite coward. The technology has improved dramatically and the results are fabulous!

Truth
is, I'm not afraid of lasers in my eye (though I think hirsute lil' me
would be better served if the lasers were pointed more southward). I
just don't want to give up my bad vision.

I know that sounds ridiculous. That's why I dread the question.

True, I can't see my
own face in the mirror unless I'm so close to the glass that my breath
steams over my reflection. And true, my handicap forever prevents me
from being a pilot in the Air Force or a viable contestant on
"Survivor." But I can live with these limitations.

What I don't think I could live with is a completely altered identity.
 

I've
always been the "blind girl." I was the blind girl when I was 6, and I
had to squint at all the puppets and overhead projections and
chalk-drawn alphabet letters that the rest of my first-grade class
seemed to have no problem seeing. I was the blind girl in the second
grade, when an astute teacher finally figured out what was going on and
mentioned to my parents that I might need glasses. I was still the
blind girl in the third grade, when an overly indulgent teacher let me
stand by the chalkboard during her lessons like some kind of magician's
assistant.

And I was the blind girl in the fourth grade, when I
finally convinced my stubborn father to pretty please let me get some
glasses so I could go to school and, you know, learn stuff.
 

Dad
didn't much like the idea of his pretty daughter covering up her face
with homely glasses, so he built up a cataract of denial around my
deteriorating vision.

"I don't need glasses. Your mom doesn't need glasses. You don't need glasses," he'd say.
 

"OK," I'd answer, before bumping into a wall.

When
he finally did concede -- after a teacher's intervention -- I had to
agree to only wear my specs in the classroom. If I was going to be
ugly, I'd have to do it on my own time.
 

I interpreted his
admonition to mean that I couldn't wear my glasses on the playground,
either. And it was there that my strained vision gave me two things I
love more than anything else: attention and an excuse not to exercise.

Can't
play dodge ball if you can't see what you're dodging. So, instead, I'd
sit on the sidelines and mock the boys until they cracked little smiles
at my jokes or gave up their games altogether to talk to me.
 

Dad
and I reached a détente when contact lenses became more popular and
readily available. He never understood why my vision (and then later my
sister's vision) was bad, but he finally admitted it was and shelled
out the money for my first pair of contacts.

Since then, my
blindness has been less of an attention-getter than an escape. Other
people with bad eyes might disagree with me, but there is something
almost soothing about taking out your contacts and not being able to
see anything. A kind of visual shush that absolves you of the
responsibility of sight. I don't meditate, but a few minutes of blurry
vision every day comes close.
 

So I was relieved the other day
when my new eye doc didn't ask The Question. We talked about changing the
type of contact lenses I wear. We talked about getting new frames for
my glasses. And then, without any mention of lasers, she sent me to the
receptionist to place my order.

"Wow," the receptionist said, noting the prescription.
 

"Yeah," I answered brightly. "I'm pretty blind."

Broken Bed

I thought I was adjusting well to this new lifestyle. This
one-income, live-in-an-apartment, limit-our-travel lifestyle. Then the
bed broke, and I snapped.

Zev, Hubby and I were all piled on
the bed, and Hubby started jumping up and down, to the delight of our
toddler. I was less thrilled. 

When I first married Hubby, I remember telling a friend that I felt as though we'd gotten away with a spectacular prank.

My exact words were: "Don't they know we're just kids? Don't they know we eat chocolate cake for breakfast and jump on the bed?" 

That
bed wasn't even a bed. It was a box spring and a mattress on the floor.
To compensate for the lack of actual furniture, I hung two rings from
the wall where a headboard would have been and draped a piece of pale
green fabric between them. We called it "the swoosh." It was all the
furniture we could afford, and it was all the furniture we needed.

To
complete the adolescent look, we kept stuffed animals on the bed along
with a pile of seven extraneous pillows that I thought added a
deceptive height to the whole mess. 

Even after we bought a real
bed, after we bought a house and replaced every bit of Ikea furniture
in our home with big-boy-and-girl pieces, we still kept the stuffed
animals where they were. I thought it was triumph of youthful hearts
over encroaching age. But it turns out stuffed monkeys don't a carefree
girl make.

When the bed broke, I grabbed Zev and huffed out of
the room. Hubby lingered in the bedroom for a minute and then met me in
the kitchen. There was a split in the wood. That was his postmortem
assessment. A split in the wood that was probably going to go at any
time.

But it didn't go at any time. It went now. And now, I
feel as though we're back where we were 10 years ago: living in an
apartment and sleeping on the floor. But we're no longer those
wide-eyed kids awestruck by our good fortune. We don't eat chocolate
cake for breakfast. And, clearly, we're too old to jump on the bed.
 

The
dam that had been holding back my insecurities collapsed right along
with that bed frame. What are we doing? Where are we going? Why did I
quit my job? How is any of this possibly in Zev's best interest?

I
was mad. At Hubby. At me. At first I was so mad, I refused to speak.
Then I said a few cruel things that I immediately regretted. In terms
of "in good times and in bad," this doesn't even come close to the
worst we've seen. It's fixable. A not-very-expensive fix at that.
 

The
old me would have found the whole thing funny, really. For one, the
timing was impeccable. Hadn't I just been warning Hubby not to teach
Zev to jump on the bed "because, you know, it could…?"

But I
didn't laugh. It's startling to snap/crack/boom onto a pile of
splintered wood. It's more startling, still, to find out you're no
longer the old you.
 

Eventually I apologized to Hubby and helped
him carry the bed frame into the garage. He said he'd look for a
furniture maker to replace the broken beam, and I'd ask some of my
interior designer friends for advice.

That night, as we were falling asleep, he said, "It's kinda fun. Sleeping like this."
 

I
smiled in the dark at his attitude. He doubts our decisions and worries
about our future as much as I do. But he's able to laugh about it. I
resolved to do the same.

"Fun? I don't know about that," I said. "But at least now we can jump on the bed all we want."

Never Better Late

My belly is flabby. My memory is shot. I'm tired all the time, and
I've been known to slip into baby talk with friends and colleagues.

But motherhood has endowed me with a superpower. A talent the likes of which I never expected I could possess: punctuality. 

I
used to be pathologically late. My husband once asked me if I ate time,
because he had trouble figuring out what else I could have done with
it. I was the person you lied to about movie start times. I showed up
late to Lorene's wedding and gave her a great big hug, only to be told,
"Um, Mayrav, it's nice to see you, but the reason all those people are
looking at me right now is that I'm about to walk down the aisle. So
could you please find a seat?"

Now? Now, I'm not only on time,
I'm the kind of on-time that takes into account parking and slow
elevators. The best thing about my new superpower, though, is that it
has given me the ability to predict exactly how late other people are
going to be.

Mom's hair appointment was at noon in the Valley. She said she was going to come over right after.

"So I'll see you at 5?" I said.
 

"What 5?" she said "My appointment is at noon. I'll be there at 2."

"OK."
 

In the meantime, Keren called to see if I'd be free for a late lunch, "sometime around 3."

I thought about it for about a half-second.
 

"Yeah. I'll be able to make it."

Later, when my mom showed up, I looked at the clock. 4:50 p.m.
 

When
Lisa said she wanted to stop by for coffee in the afternoon, I took
steaks out of the freezer. I figured afternoon on Planet Lisa meant 6
p.m. Earth time, but then figuring for traffic, she could easily be
here as late as 7. And she'd be hungry. Her arrival time? 8 p.m. We had
a delightful dinner.

Former late arrivers are the opposite of
former smokers: We're totally mellow about it. But late arrivers are a
jittery lot, all apologies and overcompensation. In Lisa's case, she
usually buys the first two rounds if she's late meeting a friend at a
bar. (Note to self: Invite Lisa to more bars.)
 

"I want you to know, I'm trying to reform myself," Lisa said, when I called her later. "I've gotten much better."

"Yeah? What are you doing differently?"
 

"I'm trying not to take on too many things."

Lisa,
it should be noted, was talking to me from the self-checkout kiosk of
the grocery store where she was buying a few last-minute items that
she'd forgotten for the pasta sauce that she'd left cooking on the
stove at home.
 

"How's that going for you?"

Lisa
said lateness comes from a desire to please – you don't want to say no
to anything, so you end up taking on too much and showing up late to
all of it. "I don't want to come off looking bad, but I always do."
 

She didn't need to explain. I'm the same way. Or at least I was.

I'd
like to say that Zev has inspired a greater focus in my life. Or that
my desire to spend quality time with him forces me to work faster, more
efficiently and manage my time better. I'd like to say a lot of things
that people always say after they have kids. The truth is, I think I
was zapped with a gamma ray. I'm simply not the same human being I used
to be.
 

But while Lisa was busy analyzing the root cause of her
tardiness ("I always underestimate how long it takes to do anything"),
I was trying hard not to think too much about my new superpower, for
fear I'd lose it. If Lisa wants to reform her ways, I want to help out
– offer some advice from my own life experience. But "have a kid"
sounds as ridiculous as "get bitten by a radioactive spider."

Luckily
I got out of it the same way I got into it: Zev. It was nearing his
bedtime and I had pajamas to put on, books to read and snuggling to do.
So I got off the phone.
 

I didn't want to be late.