Why It's Important To Have Younger Friends

So many women I know (and women I don’t know – Hollywood stars mainly) are obsessed with looking younger. How can you blame them? Our society is youth-obsessed. The media bombards us with sexy images of slinky, young women with gorgeous bodies that I promise you have never had an 11 ½ lb. baby pass through (that was my son’s birth weight – honest to God truth – delivered by c-section after a 30 hour labor).

It’s this mindset, this pressure to remain forever young that engenders women to go to great lengths to erase any outward signs of aging, lest God forbid, someone know their real age.

Usually, this subject has me up in arms. What’s wrong with aging? People pay exorbitant amounts of money for wine that is aged because older vines make better wines. 

But recently, I met a young woman that has me jumping on the, younger is better bandwagon.

Through my volunteer work with the Somaly Mam Foundation – http://www.somaly.org/ – a 501(c)3 nonprofit public charity committed to ending slavery, founded by the world renowned Cambodian activist and former sex slave, Somaly Mam – I’ve had the good fortune to meet an extremely bright and inspiring young woman – I say young because she’s 22.

I say young, because I’m not 22.

She’s a graduate of UCLA and currently works as a research associate at the UCLA Developmental Neuroscience Lab. This girl has oodles of boundless energy. Drives a scooter everywhere and recently texted me to say she was running an hour early for our meeting.

I have to confess I was dragging my sorry ass out of bed when she called – having stayed up much too late writing. She arrived minutes later (I, of course, told her it was fine to come by), looking vibrant holding two lattes from Starbucks and her kicky motorcycle helmet. I was curious to see that she was wearing flip-flops. I can’t even drive in a pair of flip-flops let alone imagine myself zipping through traffic on a two-wheeled motorized vehicle.

She apologized if she seemed kind of out of it, explaining she was only working on 1 hour of sleep. I’d had maybe 4 hours and can assure you I looked like it. Thank God, she brought coffee. Why was it, that she seemed so fresh and alert, while I was cranky and tired? Because there are some things you can do at 22 that you can’t get away with when you’re older – and sleep deprivation is definitely at the top of that list.

I never would have known she had pulled an all-nighter. Her glowing eyes sparkled with enthusiasm. She has such passion for Somaly’s cause. She traveled to Cambodia last year where she met Somaly and visited the recovery centers. It was a life-changing event for her.  As we riffed on our fundraising ideas, she took notes. I marveled as her fingers flew over the keys with the alacrity of a court reporter that had had at least 22 cups of coffee… if not more.

Being around her is a delight. Her eagerness and zeal for life reminds me of someone I used to know…

Me.

Not that I’m uninspired by any stretch, nor am I dispassionate or void of excitement. Au contraire. This is one of the most fulfilling times in my life. We finally have our baby girl. Our son is mostly thriving in school (he hates homework, well, all school work in general, even so he’s doing great) and I’m being extremely prolific with my work – enjoying pushing the boundaries of my writing – exploring new areas.

It’s all good.

Still, why is it every time she beams her wide grin at me, I feel a certain nostalgia? Like I’m watching an old video of myself.  Because, there was a time when I was absolutely that same bright-eyed, exuberant girl. When everything I experienced was new. And that’s the difference between us…

Experience.

It’s not like I want to turn back the clock and relive my life. Believe me, there is a lot of stuff that happened in my 20s that I’d just as soon forget.

But I’ll be honest. I love the way I feel when I’m around this girl’s energy. It’s infectious. It kicks me up a notch or 10. Seriously, after she left I had the most productive day, despite the 4 hours of sleep.

So how can I capture this feeling and use it to up my productivity, because I am all about eking out as much efficiency out of my day as possible.

To sum up (and I’m no authority) what this has made me realize, is that if I want to feel 22 again, I need to keep hanging out with my new 22 year-old friend.

Because clearly being around her has had a very positive effect on me.

What I Learned From Dance

Today I was sitting in our home on a rainy, rainy, cold, grey Sunday feeding our daughter a bottle of breast milk procured from a FT working, single mom who is in our Mommy & Me class. This lovely woman, whom I barely know, was kind enough to drive over a shopping bag filled with 5 oz. frozen bags of milk in the pouring rain because Frances is sick and she wanted to help. And this from a woman who has a very stressful, high-powered job.

Talk about kindness.

Last night the baby had us up all night with her 101.5 fever, completely stopped up nose, wet, sputtering, cough and howling, pitiful cries. At one point she projectile vomited all over my husband. Anyone who is a parent knows what that moment feels like – time stands still and all of your needs go out the window.

You are reduced to being at the mercy of the helpless babe in front of you.

I happen to have a nasty cold myself (thought it was allergies, but nope it's a cold) and my husband had barely 4 hrs of sleep the night before because he was up and down with Frances (which must have been a precursor to this new virus – she catches everything this little one).

But all of that took a backseat to our sweet, 11 month-old, blue-eyed beauty who could do nothing in that moment to comfort herself and relieve her distress.

She needed us and there we were by here side to do whatever we could, which wasn’t much.

She slept in fits and starts and thankfully the fever broke around 5 a.m.

Long night.

She is still sick today, but it’s uphill from here – now that I have mommy antibiotic milk to give her.

Back in our living room on this dreary Sunday, holding her chubby, little, nascent body and listening to the gorgeous Adagietto from Mahler’s 5^th Symphony No. 5 in C Sharp Minor I was transported back to my dancing days when I was a teenager and a modern dance major at the North Carolina School of the Arts (an arts school that trains both high school and college students) I performed in a faculty piece (quite an honor) to the Adagietto. It was perhaps the hardest dance I ever performed and taught me more about myself as a dancer than any experience outside of a workshop with the Lar Lubovitch Company the summer of that same year. The piece was achingly slow, tremendously lyrical, and required intense strength and total ensemble focus.

I am not someone who generally looks back. I rarely sit and relive my life experiences. But listening to this particular piece of music brought this memory flooding back to me in great detail.

The piece started with a group of dancers on an almost pitch black stage lying flat on our backs. Were there 10 of us? 8? The details on that part are fuzzy. We began with the floating up of a single arm. Deliberately. Slowly. With an intense, yet delicate precision. None of us could see one another – we had to sense our timing. Each other. This requires stilling all thoughts in your brain until you are nothing but living, breathing in that moment. Hearing the breath of others. Sensing with every pore of your body all that is happening around you. It was excruciating. Interminable. Our movements progressed at a snail’s pace until we were all standing on one leg in an arabesque (for non-dancers this means one leg stretched behind you completely straight in what should be a beautiful line ending in an equally beautiful pointed foot). Our backs were completely flat, parallel facing the floor, which means our heads were facing the floor too, which means our eyes were focused not on one another but on the floor! To execute this as an ensemble in the dark without the benefit of even peripheral vision is nothing short of impossible.

To do it as a teenager is a life changing experience.

From the moment we stood up, it never got easier, because we spent a good chunk of the piece dancing on that same one leg on that same darkened stage. For anyone who has ever done danced adagio movement on one leg, then you know the balance required… intense focus… the zen of being nowhere else but in the moment. One slight shift and you wobble or worse…

…you fall.

The dread I felt about performing this piece was paralyzing. I had to dig inside myself to find the strength to get through rehearsals let alone contemplate performing it on stage. Because when you are dancing in an ensemble piece the greatest fear you have is that you will let the others in the group down. You’re creating something together. Each individual’s contribution is as important as the next. You cannot, not, not fail the group. The audience.

Yourself.

On opening night I can remember warming up in my dorm room. As I was stretching and going through the piece in my head, terror struck and I completely lost it. 

The magnitude of finally being at the point where I would actually be performing this piece live before a paying audience hit me – hard. We had only done technical lighting rehearsals up to this point and not even a complete dress rehearsal – run-through – for an invited audience of our peers. Adding to my stress was that the choreographer, our beloved teacher and mentor, the God we all worshipped, had stormed out in a rage after a lighting run-through a few days earlier, telling us he was through. That we all basically sucked and we were now on our OWN with this piece. This means we had to finish rehearsing an 11 some odd minute piece for this asshole for his faculty concert with no help from anyone but ourselves. Remember, we were in high school. To top it off we were to be reviewed by the local press. As an adult looking back on this event, the reality of what this teacher did to us seems truly Machiavellian and yet he had a master plan. He knew that by abandoning us we would come together.


And we did. We finished our scheduled rehearsals – prepared ourselves for the upcoming performance. Bonding together in a completely democratic way that I have rarely experienced since. No egos. Just working for the good of the whole. Trying to get that Goddamn piece off the ground, despite the brewng hatred we had for man we all considered an asshole.


Back in my dorm room, I broke down and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed until my diaphragm was in spasms – until there were no more tears left in me. It was all too much. I couldn't handle the pressure.

I was completely convinced I couldn’t do it. 


How I got myself to the theater that night I’ll never know. But somehow I pulled it together – never telling any of the other dancers what I'd just been through and how petrified I was. I'm sure I was not the only one.

In the dressing room, I quietly put on my kabuki make-up. We called it that because the stage was so dark we had to devise a way to lighten our faces in order for our features to be seen.

As I prepared myself, I was shaky, exhausted from my breakdown and unsure whether I even had the strength to get through the piece. Yet, when I put on my costume something hit me.

So what? 

If I fell off my leg, I fell. If I made a fool of myself, so be it. What was the worst that could happen? I'd already experienced such gut wrenching emotions... At some point all that fear burned into fuel and I faced my demons head on, realizing that I could only be as good a dancer as I was in that moment and that would just have to do.

Talk about life lessons.

When I got out on stage and took my place and the music started, I was so focused (worn out and fatigued I had no other choice but to let go and be in the moment), I simply listened to the music and allowed it to take me through the piece and in doing so trusted myself in a way I hadn't fully done before. I trusted that I knew the piece well enough that my body, mind and spirit would not, could not fail me, or the other dancers.

And it didn’t.

I gave the best performance I had ever done of the piece. WE the ensemble gave the best performance we had ever done. We had bonded during the process (ordeal) to the point that we were one living, breathing entity.

I know (and knew then) I wasn’t the best dancer in the piece. I was really, very good, don’t get me wrong, but I was not the best. And yet, somehow I triumphed over what only hours before had seemed like an insurmountable odd.

Today, as I held our daughter, staring into her wonder filled face – her sickly glazed eyes and runny nose, I was filled with such intense emotion for the teenage girl I once was. How could I know then the woman I would become? All the obstacles that still lay ahead? Heartaches and triumphs.

I still don’t know what life has in store for me. But that performance was my first real life hurdle and despite the ensemble nature of dancer's life, I felt utterly alone.  (Btw, I don’t believe I’ve ever shared this story with anyone in my family – not even my friends.)

Daubing milk from tiny, pink cheeks all I could think was, what trials will Frances face? What roads will her life take her down? How will she handle herself? And will she share her fears and failings with me or will she keep them buried all to herself, just as I did these many years?

More important than any of that, is how can I help her be self-sufficient and strong? This goes for Henry too. How do I teach my children to face difficulties and have the wherewithal to persevere?

Yesterday, in Mommy & Me class http://www.pumpstation.com/pumpstation/dept.asp?s_id=0&dept_id=3497 we discussed the Po Bronson New York Magazine article: How Not To Talk To Your Kids – The inverse power of praise. http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/  It’s interesting and speaks directly to this subject. It created quite a stimulating discussion that obviously has me still thinking about it.

As hard as that performance experience was, I did manage to get myself through it. 


My parents did something right.

Somehow they raised me to persist... 

I know I can’t protect my children from everything, but I can help them develop coping skills.

Right now, I am trying to help an 11 month-old cope with constipation and feeling really crappy.

And for today that’s enough.

He Wasn’t Bad Just Unwell

The other night I was heading out to make a quick library run. I needed to pick up some books for research and, of course, once Henry heard where I was going he clambered to come along to get a few Star Wars books. Even though it was 7:30pm and he hadn’t had dinner yet, how could I refuse? As a working mom I’ve missed out on so much of his young life. Dinner could wait tonight.

The excursion began on a sweet note. H is really into American presidential history right now, which made for wonderful car conversation. FDR, JFK, Jimmy Carter, Lincoln, Jefferson, Barack are all his new heroes. I love how fast my son’s brain works. How much he can absorb. Everyday brings an amazing wealth of new information.

First complication.

I asked if we could make a quick stop by the dumpster, because yes I’m still rescuing plants and I wanted to hit it before dark. I’ve tried to make a point of not going at night anymore because my poor mother worries about my safety and has made me promise to never go after dark. And even though I’m an adult and live across country and she has no idea what I do or when I do it, I still value her wise opinion and do what she says, which I know makes her happy from afar.

Good daughter.

Plus, I had a child in the car who was grumbling about my planned detour but agreed to let me go, because he would rather help rescue dying plants than think about them languishing in a landfill.

He is my son after all…

So off we went. The pickings were slim. Even so, in the waning light, I was able to retrieve 3 delicate indoor ferns. It took all of 4 minutes to grab them and throw them in the back of the car and we were on our way again.

More talk of presidential history on the ride down Wilshire Boulevard. This time about Garfield and the fact that the gunshot wound didn’t actually kill him, the infection did.

We hung a fast left on 6^th street. But time was ticking away, so I took a short cut and made a wrong turn down a one-way entry into the library parking lot rather than drive around the block to enter it properly. Henry was not happy about this and made me promise to never EVER do it again. I promised I would not.

I seem to be making a lot of promises these days.

Nevertheless, we made it to the library in the nick of time, however the parking meeting was busted so we couldn’t pay. Another thing that bothered H.

He is not a rule breaker my son.

Quick, quick, quick we ran to the library entrance. And as H struggled to open the big, heavy, glass, door for me – something he loves to do to prove his 8 year-old prowess – our paths crossed a gnarly, young homeless man who was exiting the building. The guy was typical. Nothing about him set off any red flags for me, his sunglasses maybe (it was dark by now) but the truth is, I barely registered his presence. Having lived in NYC most of my adult life I’ve sadly become inured to the homeless – the smells, raggedy hair, large pants cinched in by the obligatory cracked leather belt, the low, incessant mutterings. None of this guy’s stuff fazed me, until I realized the bespectacled boy by my side was frozen stiff with fear.

His taut, little fingers slipped tightly into mine. He gripped my hand and asked: Is he a bad guy? I bent down and whispered no, honey, he’s just a homeless man –

But no sooner had the words left my lips, than the low mutterings turned into loud, angry ranting. We had lingered just a bit too long I guess, because the man was engaged now. I hurried to pull my boy inside but it was too late. The angry man’s vitriolic words fell on my child’s chaste ears: You know what they do to little children?! They cut them up and eat them and then they—

Swift yank and we were safely inside on the other side of the glass door, hurrying away from the rest of that sentence.

But the damage was done. H had heard it all and was processing. He gripped my hand even harder and said: He is a bad guy. I saw my first real bad guy.

I said he’s not bad he’s just unwell.

H turned back briefly to stare at the now wildly gesticulating man pacing outside – an image I hope he can someday erase from his super absorbent sponge-like brain – What’s wrong with him he asked perplexed?

His brain doesn’t work right.

Why not?

Because some people get sick and this is what happens to them.

Why?

I don’t know…

Come on; let’s get out of here H said. And he pulled me inside the 2^nd set of glass doors into the library.

My heart went out to that poor man outside, even though I was pissed at him for scaring the shit out of my son. Whether he was schizophrenic, psychopathic or just plain high as a kite, what a miserable existence. Wandering around with no place to call home. Synapses misfiring. Incoming information being misinterpreted. But none of that mattered in that moment. The only thing I cared about was consoling my still frightened son.

As we made our way deeper into the safety of the library, the questions kept circling. Why did he say he wanted to eat children, mommy? Because he doesn’t know what he’s saying. Why? Because he’s sick. Why? Because some people’s brains get sick. Why? I don’t know, honey, they just do. I kept it simple and repetitive.

H was worried the man was going to come after us and hurt him.

I told him he was safe and that I would always protect him. He didn’t seem too impressed by my offer. I wish dad were here, he said. I want dad. I know, honey, but Mommy’s here. You’re safe. I hugged him tight. And for a moment I thought the incident would pass. But then he looked for a security guard. He wanted to tell him about the bad guy, but there wasn’t one to be found. He toyed with the idea of telling a librarian, but the checkout lines were too long and anyways, he decided the security guard was the person who really needed to be told about this.

We discussed ditching the library and going home, but H pointed out that if we left now we might have to walk by the crazy man again. Good point I told him. We agreed to grab my books first and then get his and by the time we wanted to leave the guy would probably be gone. Tiny fingers once again gripped my hand as we walked upstairs to find my books.

H was unusually silent. Gone was his playful, chattering self. He was serious. All business. On the alert for more bad guys.

Suddenly the library, his library, a place that has always been full of wonder and magic for him was freaking him out. Every person we passed made him shudder. Is that a bad man? No, honey, no. How do you know? Because not everyone is bad. How do you know? Because I can tell. Is she bad? No. How do you know? I just get a sense about people. You can tell when they're tricky.I learned about tricky people at school, he said.

It broke my heart hearing my baby trying to process all of this.

Walking through the stacks, his hand firmly clenched in mine, I told him again that he was safe with me. That I would never let anyone hurt him, even though deep down I knew I could never really keep that promise. How could I make a promise like that knowing that 6 years ago a stranger had murdered my best friend in an unprovoked attack? Henry knows what happened, even though he was only just turning 3 at the time. He has memories of something. Witnessing our intense sadness. He knows a bad man killed Adrienne.

But this was his first encounter with that kind of energy up close and personal.

I quickly found my books and then, hand still gripped in mine, we made our way downstairs to the children’s section. The whole time H was still obsessed with the man outside. Obsessed that everyone around us now had the potential to hurt him. He made a plan. He would look for a security guard on the way out and ask him to walk us to our car. That way, he said, we’d be safe. I told him that was a good plan, although I reassured him the guy was probably long gone, but if he wanted an escort, we would do it. His book found, we checked out and asked the librarian for a security guard to walk us to our car.

The homeless guy had, as I suspected, moved on. Nevertheless, the security guard, who couldn’t have been nicer, walked us the car and made sure Henry was buckled safely in his car seat. He told Henry that he had done the right thing. That anytime he needed assistance, just ask.

Henry was relieved he didn’t have to see the man again, but he did say he never wanted to come to the library again.

I told him I was sure we would never see that man again, but we could go to the little library on Montana Avenue if he wanted. It’s small and where he used to do story book time as a toddler. That seemed to calm him.

Home, we relayed the harrowing tale to daddy, who said he would’ve have punched the guy in the nose if he laid a hand on us. No wonder Henry prefers dad’s protection to mine.

Dinner followed by a warm bath. Jammies. Daddy read to H as he snuggled warmly under the layered covers of our family bed.

We were home.

Safe.

As I stroked his hair H asked sleepily:

Why don’t people have homes?

Because they probably don’t have a job to pay their rent.

Why?

Because maybe they’re not well enough to work.

Why?

Because the world isn’t always fair and bad things happen to good people.

Why, mommy?

I kissed his head and stroked his back.

That question I’ll have to answer another day.