Where's My Touchstone?

Sunday, after our mani-pedis, my daughter and I were walking down Amsterdam Avenue and I saw a familiar face. "David Shack!" I said. He turned around, his eyes betraying puzzlement: he couldn't quite place me. "Linda Bernstein," I said. "Barbara's sister."

Then came his exclamation and kiss on the cheek and big hug.

He gestured to Ariel. "And this, I suppose, is your daughter?" (Well, who else would she be? But I always find this a terrific compliment.)

"Ariel," I responded, "David was your Aunt Barbara's chemistry lab partner in high school."

"I thought you were at least going to say 'Columbia,'" Ariel responded, laughing.

"Oh, that too. David went on to Columbia when Barbara went to Barnard and they stayed friends."

Then David and I had a brief conversation about what we were doing and what my sister is doing. I mentioned that she had been in New York a year ago for the 40th anniversary of the Columbia riots. (I digress for a second: How come everyone is doing 40th anniversaries? Is it that people are getting so old we're afraid we won't be around for the 50th? Or we'll just be 10 years older, thus grayer, fatter, spottier, in other words, look a lot worse?) David wasn't at all surprised when I told him my sister had reconnected with a Columbia SDS leader--someone who had been on the lam for a bit. He remembered this man hiding out in his apartment for a bit at one time and having the thought, "what am I doing?" David was never really political. He wasn't taking a risk for this man-on-the-run out of conviction; David is simply a really nice guy.

My sister was always very political in a way that I am not. I mean, I'm passionate about politics. I drive some people I know (i.e. my husband) crazy with my obsession with the news. I vote in every election, even school board. I work for candidates. Blah, blah. But no political involvement I have had is so pivotal in my life as my sister's participation in the Columbia events of 1968 is to her. She continues with reunions and gatherings where people dissect the meaning of everything that happened then and interpret the present in light of their conclusions. To my sister, occupying Hamilton Hall (then an administration building for the college) and being kicked out by the black protestors (who had a different agenda) and then occupying the university administration building, Low Library--I remember when she told me that the phrase "liberate a building" meant to take it over--is still a major event in the scheme of things. This short episode defines her.

I have no such event in my life, I think. This past spring, while involved in preparations for my college class's 35th reunion, I believed that my four years of college had defined me. And, in a way they did. I came to New York to go to college, and I am a complete New Yorker (though I do long for New England and still fantasize about living in a Brookline, MA). College introduced me to . . . well, ham and cheese sandwiches. The things people I know first encountered in college, like opera or art, I had known about before since I had parents who pushed culture. I can't say I discovered "food" in college because I was lucky when I could afford pizza from V&T's. A month after the reunion, I was already much less hepped up on the experience.

I didn't go to Woodstock. Nobody had a car that could be wisked away to what every parent who was paying attention knew would be an event rife with sex and drugs. So forget that as a life-defining experience. I also didn't get to see the Beatles in Shea Stadium, something some friends still manage to get into a conversation, especially when meeting new people. Yes, it is impressive that 40 years ago they saw something that changed the world as we knew it. (But, sour grapes?, they couldn't hear. No one could.)

If anything, having children was my life-altering event. I know that with my little ones about, I was less shy than I had been. Mothers need to be assertive, with their kids, of course, but also with the rest of the world. We run interference. Much of this ability to confront has stayed with me. But my children are adults now, and my relationship with them has changed. I'll still go out on a limb--if I'm at a party and there's a person there who could possibily help either of my kids on his or her career path, you can bet I'm chatting that person up before too long. My children's moods also have an uncanny ability to affect mine. They're flying high; I'm right in the clouds with them. When they're low, I, well, cry sometimes. But is being a mother my identity? No longer, sad to say.

Speaking of my kids, when my son was a teen, he lamented that his generation was boring and had no touchstones. He was so jealous of his dad, who had been active in the civil rights movement, and my involvement in the anti-war movement. (He still prefers the music of the Baby Boomers to that of his own Gen Y.) Then we had the last election, with Gen Y pushing the Obama revolution. Although he supported Hillary until the nomination (for once my whole family agreed on something political!), he became an avid Obama-ite, and worked really hard. His reward was spending election night in Richmond, VA, with a friend who was an actual paid Obama campaigner, and participating in a spontaneous parade of joy that erupted on the main drag of the former capital of the Confederacy.

My daughter has found her ground in the pro-gay-marriage movement. I'm not sure how this evolved. I think it grew from her friendships with gays during high school and college, but she has a well-developed sense of fair and unfair (after all, she's been practicing making this distinction since she was about two-years-old; just ask her brother). To her, it's unfair that gays can't be legally married. It's unfair that gays can overtly serve in the military. Actually, her arguments are much more cogent than that, but I think her conviction does rest on her sense of what's right and what's wrong.

So here I am, a total Baby Boomer--and yet I seem to lack a critical piece of Generation B-Squared identity. There's nothing I immediately grab from my pocket to validate my participation in world-changing. Yes, I missed Woodstock. But I went to lots of rock concerts (Rolling Stones two times, Grateful Dead at the Filmore East four or five times). I came to Barnard too late to take over university buildings, and I was much to young to be at the Democratic party protests in Chicago when those kids getting hit on the head started chanting, "The whole world's watching." (It still sends chills up my spine.) I did participate in many protests: the big anti-war protest in Washington, D.C. in the fall of 1969, for one. It was a truly amazing experience. And it was probably part of a world-changing movement because to this day I believe that protests helped end that war. But I don't feel it altered my life so much.

So where's my touchstone? Perhaps it's just gone dark for a bit, waiting to be rediscovered as I do my bit to get a health care bill passed. Maybe I don't have one. Maybe I don't need one.

What's your experience with this? Can you point to some event (or series of events) that occurred during the seminal Baby Boomer years and say, "yes, that's it. That made me who I am today?"

Let me know. Maybe I'll tag along.

Helicopter Parent, Guilty as Charged

My baby birds have left the nest. I mean this literally. The baby bluebirds that hatched just before July 4^th weekend at our summer house are now off and on their own. On Monday I observed a bit of avian behavior that I have totally anthropomorphized. But I’m sure my interpretation is right.

My day began with my husband pointing out two juvenile bluebirds hanging out on the clothesline. Without the binoculars, they looked like fairly nondescript birds of a certain size, what a neighbor of mine calls “generic brown birds.” But through the glasses we could see what the bird books describe “telltale signs of blue in the wings and tail feathers.”

Their habits and mannerisms enabled identification, too. Just like mom and dad, the juveniles waited nonchalantly on the clothesline and then, spotting an insect, flew down, found their prey, and then resumed their clothesline stance. This continued for about a half hour. Then they flew off.

Soon after, mommy bluebird appeared with a big bug in her beak and waited on the clothesline. She looked here; she looked there; but no children appeared. Finally she dropped the insect and called—we rarely hear the bluebird call or song—but to no avail. The juveniles did not come. She spotted another insect, returned to the line, looked around, dropped it, called, and so on. This went on for fifteen, twenty minutes.

Well, I thought, the baby bluebirds are self-sufficient now, with a rush of a mother’s insight. However, mommy’s hormones are keeping her in mommy-mode. I told my husband I suspected she would keep up this behavior for at most another day until something clicked off in her birdbrain. And thus it happened.

We’ve now entered the weeks of the year when we don’t see much of the bluebirds, unless they do a second nesting. Our bluebirds' first nesting was so delayed this year—big fights with the swallows over nest boxes—that I’d wager this is a one-nest summer. Where exactly these birds go during this period has always remained a mystery. Perhaps as the weather gets warmer they fly a bit north. Or maybe they’re just hanging out in the woods, because come the end of August they’ll be back. Now, we’ve never “tagged” them, so we can’t be sure it’s the same ones year after year. But bluebirds are monogamous and tend to repeat behaviors. They’re also quite territorial, which may explain why we’ve never had two bluebird nests at the same time, although we have five nest boxes, yet our neighbors also have bluebirds. In the fall (and in the spring) we’ll see up to five or six birds, both male and female, at the same time, but by nesting time, we see only a pair.

If I sound hovering and over-involved with a bird species here, let me quickly assure you that I hover pretty intensely over my own young adult children, and I have in fact been intently involved at every stage of their lives. Although the pejorative term “helicopter parent” is fairly recent, Baby Boomers certainly exhibited the same traits twenty years ago that today’s authors describe, and, in fact, the term was first thrown at Baby Boomers. We had fewer options than today’s young parents when it came to classes and afterschool activities in the early years (Gymboree was only beginning, “Mommy and Me” classes only offered at a few forward-thinking Ys), but moms of today’s 16- and 17-year-olds are no less intense than I and the other parents in my cohort. We signed our kids up for SAT prep courses, read through the huge college books, drove (and flew!) to tens of colleges (even when the supposed prospective student was having a tantrum and wouldn’t get out of the car).

Many experts are making a decent living dressing down the over-involved parent. Just google “helicopter parent” and to view an impressive list of the CNN segments featuring talking heads from high schools and colleges bemoaning parent over-involvement. On the other hand, Lisa Belkin who writes the “Motherlode” blog for The New York Times, jumped to their defense (or at least defending the non-extreme version) a few months ago. (See http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/in-defense-of-helicopter-parents/), although, being a good journalist she also mentioned the arguments of social psychologist Susan Newman, the author of Nobody’s Baby Now: Reinventing Your Adult Relationship With Your Mother and Father, who believes involved parents are doing their children a disservice. (But let me digress a moment and make a distinction: Lisa Belkin is a top tier journalist, Susan Newman is about a fourth tier expert.)

Yes, writing your child’s college essays is a no-no (though reading them and making suggestions, if your child asks is a yes-yes, in my book). I also think that many parents are too pushy about making sure their child is exposed to things that are supposed to make them smarter or more self-assured.

But I will defend any parent who shows interest in his or her child’s activities and feelings. I am a big believer in “family dinner.” “We have to have family dinner so you won’t do drugs,” I anxiously told my children for many years. It was supposed to be a quasi-joke, but I had done research and written on the topic and firmly believed that important parent/child bonds are cemented over the evening meal. (Although it’s the time together that’s crucial, I continue to wonder if the ritual of “breaking bread” also solidifies some kind of primordial family-making imprint in our genes.)

My children have matured into pretty independent souls and are quite responsible—most of the time. But I’m still their mother. I may be in the middle of a meeting when I’ll get a text that reads, “I just threw up. Should I call in sick?” My reaction? The meeting stops. I’ve always made it clear that within reason I will take a phone call or message from my family no matter what’s going on at work. The converse side is that now that my children (and husband) are rational adults, I tell them when I would prefer not to be interrupted and will ignore a phone call, IM or text unless they signal it’s urgent.

Still, in a lot of ways I’m still like that mommy bluebird with the insect in her mouth, waiting to cater to the needs of her children. Today my son called—did we have an extra microwave. Yes, in fact we do, having just replaced a counter-top model with an over-the-stove one, and he can certainly have it. And, speaking of food, my two young grown-ups still go grocery shopping in my refrigerator and cabinets, something I aid and abet by buying special items I know they like before they visit.

Sometimes, when I’m annoyed, I’ll grouse that they’re spoiled; ergo I spoiled them. But, as I firmly believe, you can’t spoil a child with love, even when that child is an adult. So, again, I will argue that involving oneself in a child’s life—even an adult child—has great benefits. You have to find the right balance, of course. For instance, it’s OK for a young adult to call his or her parents freaking out over something. It’s even OK for that parent to offer to come rescue the child because in my experience, and the experience of others who parent like I do, most of the time they just need you to know that they’re having a hard time, and then they can end up handling things. “Don’t you want to know why I’m never going to play the violin again,” my friend’s professional musician daughter exploded from 3,000 miles away when my friend begged off the call because she had company. My friend did indeed call her back a few hours later, listened to about an hour’s worth of rants and raves. But three years later, Emily is still a violinist. So let them vent.

But adult children sometimes need actual parental hands-on help, and expecting the kid to “tough it out” would be nonsensical or cruel. A friend of mine, for instance, recently took a day off from work to spend time with her daughter, who lives in another city about a two-hour train ride away, because the almost-fiancé had just dumped the girl. Over email. The poor young woman was a wreck—we all know how heartbreak goes, and sometimes a mother’s physical shoulder can be healing. Another friend similarly took a few days off to be with her son who needed minor surgery. Sure, one of his competent (medical student, even) friends could have helped him get back from the hospital and made sure he followed the doctor’s orders and cooked him meals and so forth—but what’s a mother for anyway?

We have to believe our children are like those “juvenile” bluebirds, able to support themselves and catch their own worms. So when an adult child tells you to bug off—the same is true for an adolescent—you bug off (unless you really feel your child is in danger. Then the rules change, but that’s another blog for another day). Bugging off isn’t easy. I probably am more upset than my daughter that her boyfriend’s new apartment is six subway stops, instead of six blocks, away. She told me to quit worrying, that everything is OK. So I have to believe her, and I’m lucky to have a blog where I can obsess about this. (Who will walk her home from the subway now at night? I could go on.)

I’ll probably helicopter away for a long time. I could shrug my shoulders and say my “birdbrain” hasn’t gotten the message. Except I really think I’m doing what’s best for my adult children—and what’s best for me.

Identity Crisis? No, We’re In This Together

The 40th anniversary of the moon landing on July 20th brought the whole thing home to me once again: The “Baby Boomer demographic” (Generation B-Squared) includes people born from 1946 to 1964; it covers includes people born 18 years apart. So why is it considered a “generation” with defining characteristics? First of all, the cohort is a product of the United States Census Bureau, which deals in numbers. When you look at birth rates, you’ll see that post WWII, as soldiers came home from war and the nation celebrated an unprecedented prosperity, lots of couples made lots of babies—76 million of them. Then, suddenly, people stopped having sex or something, and number of births dropped precipitously (call that Gen X), until about 1980, when the Baby Boomers began having babies. (Call these Gen Y.) If while my daughter was in college she couldn’t understand how she could belong to the same generation as her very different, but only three years older, brother, then how can we expect someone born in 1946 to be lumped together with a youngster born in 1964?

Well, let’s begin our query with The United States Census Bureau. They say they aren’t interested in the cultural implications of collapsing into one entity this huge cohort. Nevertheless, in 2006, when the first Baby Boomers started turning 60, they released a “fact sheet.” (See http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/006105.html.)

Yes, it’s “just the facts, ma’am,” as a famous TV detective once said. But there’s a lot of cultural information in this “fact sheet.”

For a long time is was my opinion that if a real Baby Boomer would know exactly the TV character to whom I’m referring. And if you didn’t know—well you either recently emerged from the fallout shelter your family retreated to during the Cuban missile crisis or you were born after 1958.

Not that I have anything against people born after 1958. I’d say that considering my niece and nephews, great niece and nephew, my own kids (for heaven’s sake), their friends, and a whole bunch of people I’ve worked with or met through various places were born after 1958, I do not feel at all estranged from people born after 1958. Some of best friends were born after 1958.

Nor do I have any problem with including the 1958-1965’ers in the Baby Boomer cohort. It all has to do with numbers.

However, there’s a strong argument that those Boomers born after 1958 aren’t quite the same as those of use born in the preceding twelve years. Almost none of them were at Woodstock (unless they were small children, and there were many small children there)—another event whose 40th anniversary we’re fast upon. Not that I was at Woodstock. I was still in high school and didn’t have a car or friends adventurous enough to defy their parents and go after being forbidden. (Because our parents knew! They knew what we were getting ourselves up to!) Or perhaps I simply didn’t have enough money for enough gas to get my friends and me to not-Woodstock; as it turned out Bethel, NY. (Again, I didn’t have my own car!) But my sister was there, and in the movie there are many shots of people I knew. After all, to quote Joanie Mitchell, by the time they got to Woodstock, they were half-a-million strong. So that means that 1/38th of my Baby Boomer cohort of 76 million attended, or something like that, which raises the possibility that I would know attendees pretty high.

While doing some research recently, I came across a reference to the name “Generation Jones” to refer the section of the Generation B-Squared born between 1954 and 1965. Evidently, about three people have used this term, and none (including the man who coined it) can pin down whether it refers to “having a jones” for something , “keeping up with the Joneses” or stems from all the times the name “Jones” appeared in 1970’s pop music. (See http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-6452129_ITM for a pretty good article from the Denver Post. Apparently some guy thinks he can garner attention by inventing meaningless terminology. This seems to be a rampant flaw of sociologists and “cultural critics.”) Yes, that moniker makes no sense; the demographic numbers don’t indicate a big shift between 1953 and 1954. But one major factor points up why this is not a good division of the generation anyway:

People born in 1954 can answer the question, “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” They were in their fourth-grade classrooms and have a good memory of the exactly what they were doing. So they were there for seminal incident of the time, something that completely defines the Baby Boomer mentality.

For a while that seemed to me to be the real Generation B-Squared characteristic. And that left out people born after 1958, because only some people who were five years old that day in November 1963 have true memories of being sent home from school or watching the funeral on television and seeing John-John salute his father’s coffin.

However, the more I thought about it, I felt I had more in common with those then-five-year-olds than I didn’t. Newsweek writer Jonathan Alter, born in 1957, argues that the second half of the Baby Boom was influenced by the culture of the 1970’s, not the culture of the 1960’s. (See “Twilight of the Baby Boom,” http://www.newsweek.com/id/107583.) What Alter forgets is that the supposedly defining aspects of the 1960’s happened at the end of the decade, like Woodstock, and that the supposed sexual revolution didn’t really get underway until the 1970’s. (I began college in 1970, and the first couple weeks of school, boys weren’t allowed above the lobby of my dorm.) The critical aspects of the 1970’s grew out of the 1960’s. Nothing much changed—until the 1980’s, when we ran into AIDS and “greed is good.”

True, the later Baby Boomers are a whole bunch younger than I am, like half a generation. But they are beginning to face some of the same issues. Look at Barack Obama, whom Baby Boomers can claim as one of our own, according to the demographic definition of the cohort. He’s going grey. So is Hillary Clinton, born 1947 (though she has a fantastic hair stylist). She worries about an aging parent; so does Obama (his wife’s mother, his own parents being dead). In my book it’s no coincidence that Obama is trying to pick up on health care where Clinton finally threw up her hands over a decade ago. The older the younger Boomers get, the more we have in common.

Back to the moon landing, though: I was listening to the radio on the July 20th anniversary, and the program host, before playing some moon-themed song or another, said, “do you remember where you were that day? Considering it was a summer evening, I must have been home on my couch in front of the TV.” Evidently, she’s a little bit younger than I am, because I was at a friend’s house, with a bunch of rising high school seniors (plus some younger sibs), watching—and having a generally hilarious time until THE moment. My memory is so clear: a man in a space-suit walking slowly (sort of bouncing) and speaking some barely intelligible words about a big step for mankind, Walter Cronkite saying, “wow,” two guys trying to raise the American flag in moon dust. We hung on every movement, every word, so well aware that we were watching history that we stopped having fun for several minutes. (The next morning I left with my parents for Nova Scotia on our last “family vacation.” I spent I week trying to avoid them in very close quarters, terribly embarrassed that anyone would think me their child.)

So does that mean there is a clear division? The last of the Baby Boom babies would have been five or not quite on July 20, 1969. I just said that five-year-olds don’t have reliable memories. For the sake of argument, to bolster my contention that Boomers are indeed a definable whole, do I now take that statement back?

I think maybe I shall. I think that what all of us born between 1946 and 1964 share is ultimately more important than whether one was actually born before the day Kennedy was shot.

Of course, this will make the section of the book I’m writing on Baby Boomers that covers what we’re supposed to know just because we’re baby boomers much more difficult to write. Not only did I miss a lot of that “generation-defining” stuff that was going on right under my nose—my parents were anti-Disney, for good reason, so I didn’t see the original The Parent Trap with Haley Mills until I was much too old to enjoy it—there’s a lot that people ten years younger than I really relate to that I can’t—like School House Rock.

But why, people have asked me, do I even care? Is it just because I want to get a book out of this? Yeah, sure. That’s part of it. This book—and stay tuned as it gets written and published so you can buy it and help its Amazon numbers go sky high—is a lot of fun to research and write, and it will be a lot of fun to read. But the other part is that I’m unwilling to let go of a huge section of a huge cohort that shares a lot of ideals and, because of its size, can have terrific political clout. In other words, whether a member of Generation B-Squared is 45 or 52 or 63, there are a lot of values we hold in common. So let’s use our terrific power to get health care passed, to see gay marriage become legal, to shore up social security (some of us are almost there!), to save our environment, and on and on.

And meanwhile, I’ll have to catch up with The Brady Bunch on YouTube.

Gen Y Boomerangs Home

My husband and I were having a conversation about the daughter of friends of ours, a really nice girl who just graduated college, and is temporarily living in her parents’ New York City apartment. In a few days she’s moving to their London apartment while she does a summer internship. She’s also planning to spend a bit of time in their Rome apartment.

Nice digs if you can get them.

This brought back memories of the months our son lived at home with us after college before he got a job and saved enough money to rent an apartment with some friends (in Brooklyn, of course).

So it really hit home when I came upon the lastet “Your Money” column in The New York Times: “When the Fledglings Return to the Nest” (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/your-money/household-budgeting/11money.html?hp). Some of the questions raised in the article we never even considered. Like there was no question that my son (and next his then-girlfriend) could live with us until they got on their feet—and we have only a two-bedroom apartment. (For the few weeks my daughter was home at the same time, well, let me say I’m glad they’re both alive.) The next question, should they pay rent—for us that was also a non-issue. Like why? On the other hand, my perfectly normal cousin, who lives outside of Chicago, charged her daughter some kind of token rent, and this girl is now self sufficient and perfectly well adjusted and loving and kind and beautiful and living in London. I can see no ill effects. But for us, part of the point was that our son save money so he could get out. (At this point, I will also confess that although he has been “self-sufficient” for three years, I still pay his cell phone bill. We have a “family” plan, and I guess that’s one of my “family values.”)

Naturally, while he was home, he ate food from our refrigerator. We didn’t charge him for that either. But without us even asking, he cooked at least one night a week, cleaned up the kitchen, and helped with household chores. To this day he goes shopping in our refrigerator when he comes home for dinner—usually leftovers. However, here’s another confession. I’m an enabler. I frequently make sure that I have a Zabar’s rye or other delicacy he can’t get in Brooklyn. (Can’t get in Brooklyn? He’s not likely to admit the possibility, though he is grateful for the rye bread.)

I do recommend this article. I have also perused the books Ron Lieber mentions because they resonate with the Generation BSquared crowd—and they’re pretty sensible reads. And yes, Generation Y boomeranging home can be a serious concern. The college tuition may have been paid, but parents are bound to be spending money on an adult child that they may have thought they’d be spending on something else.

My son moved out after about three or four months, but moved back in again when he was between apartments a year later, this time for only two months. Then I waited for my daughter to show up after college, bags in hand. Except, her stint was only two months long because she went right to Law School and right into their housing. I was proud, a little relieved too. But also disappointed. Last weekend she was babysitting late for people in our building (summer law internships don’t pay especially well), and she slept over! What a treat. We thought about watching a movie, but we were tired, so we just talked.

The room she stayed in, what had been my son’s and daughter’s room, has been redone into my study. There’s a full-size bed and a pull-out full-size couch. We say we did this so that if they don’t settle in New York City, when they come visit with their families (yes, we’re looking through that telescope), there will be plenty of room.

But meanwhile, we refer to it as her room. The closets are full of her junk. And if she should actually need to live there—and I really hope she doesn’t because she doesn’t want to—well, it’s there. New sheets. Fresh paint. Bose Radio. Flat-screen TV.

A nice enough space for an adult child.

57 Friends for 57 Years? or I Love Facebook

I had a great idea. On my 57th birthday, I would have 57 friends on Facebook.

Let me start again, I had a stupid idea. Most people I know don’t really want to have conversations about Facebook.

My kids can’t understand why Facebook interests me so much. My son contends that it was never meant for people my age and baby boomers don’t know how to use it correctly, or rather, we just shouldn’t be using it. He has a point. It was invented for college kids to network. He’s also blocked me from his wall, and I don’t really mind. I don’t use Facebook to spy on my kids.

What I do use it for—well, I’m just able to keep up with people. I’m pretty new to it, and most of my friends aren’t on it yet. They claim it’s too time consuming and it has no purpose, blah, blah. But the resistance is eroding. In the past two weeks I’ve heard from several high school friends that I haven’t seen for years, people I really care about and was close to. (This is in direct contrast the Facebook list of people from my high school graduating class whom I can’t place or remember and I’m sure I never knew. Either I wasn’t as popular as I remember, or dementia is setting in. Help! The high school neurons in my brain are dying!) I also think he’s right that people my age are not using Facebook to its fullest. Basically, for many people I know it’s like another form of email.

But I like the nearly daily wacky communications I have with a neighbor. I could go down the block and knock on her door. I do that some times, actually. But via Facebook we send each other links and photos of our plants. Yes, boring, but not very different from people whose status updates are conversations about who is being mean to whom in the office and who take quiz after quiz after quiz and post the results. (OK, I take quizzes too. I did very well on the “How Massachusetts Are You?” one.)

I’m also enjoying pictures of the vintage hats that a friend has taken to posting. I love my friend’s 13-year-old daughter’s posts: She’s taken a quiz that shows she’s “totally dateable,” another that indicates she has the maturity of a 20-year-old (“not true,” she comments. “No, really, true,” I think), and she took the Disney Princess quiz and came out as “Cinderella.” (I did too. We’ve all taken the Disney Princess quiz.) I liked when my cousin’s son did a post-college three week tour of Europe, 14 countries in 21 days or something, because I got to say each day to my husband or friends, “Can you believe Dan spent just one day in Brussels?” Or Rome or Naples or wherever. I had great conversation fodder for three weeks because the idea of traveling like that boggled my mind. My kids thought my fixation on this was strange.

Today via Facebook I found out that it is raining in Boston and that a friend’s cat is sick. The weather has been great in Israel and very warm in LA. The East Coast weather is awful, everyone is complaining, but I don’t need Facebook to know that.

I love Facebook. I think it’s one of the greatest things ever invented and I don’t care if it was meant for 18-year-olds originally. It’s so completely perfect for Baby Boomers, too, all of us in Generation B-Squared who are trying to stay connected or reconnect, for those of use who are trying to figure out what friendship means at this stage of our lives, for those of us learning to navigate being parents of adults.

So 57 friends for 57 years? Not that important. I already blocked some people because they use Twitter for their jobs, which feeds into their Facebook accounts, which means I got continual email notifications about medical conferences or books to read—information which doesn’t interest me. I am interested in them and their jobs, so I wish there were a way to remedy this. I have even contacted Facebook. No answer. (I’m told that if I Tweet this, I’m likely to get Facebook to notice. Nice irony.) So on the one hand, right now I have more information than I can handle. Yet I want more information, too. I want everyone I know to be on Facebook sharing.

I wonder about people with 647 or 2,289 friends on Facebook. I’m still at a point where I can look at my friend list and I know all the people and speak to them in person. I also can say, “I’m not a Facebook friend with her (or him).” I mean, I know my Facebook friends. They aren’t people I’ve met in bars or friends of friends of friends who did a friend request. People with lots of Facebook friends must either use the “hide” tool a lot, learn to do very quick update readings, or not really read anything beyond their own wall.

I’d love to figure this all out. Maybe I should aim for 5800 friends for my 58th birthday.

Almost a Grandparent

My nearly five-year-old great-nephew answers the phone. “I miss you already,” I say. He replies, “I miss you too. I had a really good time at your house.”

Now he’s telling the truth. (He has always acquired phone manners that would put many adults to shame.) Over the weekend, Ben managed to convince his doting older cousin (my daughter), great aunt and great uncle to let him stay up until 9:30 p.m. so he could see fireflies. Coincidentally, it was also the Fourth of July, and he got to see fireworks from about fifteen locales, some as far as 20 miles away, from our house in the Berkshires. “See” is a relative term in this instance. We can view colorful pops above the horizon, but it’s not a “real” fireworks experience. However, this year the ones from Red Rock were actually close enough and visible enough through the trees that Ben sang “ooh and ah” for fifteen minutes as he ran from window to window. He kept on enumerating the colors, utterly amazed. The third rate show was spectacular. The fireflies finally came out! This was one of my favorite July Fourths ever!

Most of this is beside the point, though. I’m just bragging. Well, that is sort of the point. I think I talk about my great niece and nephew the way people talk about their grandchildren. This morning my trainer at the gym knew all about the picture Ben drew of the “purple house” where my daughter lived for her last two years of college—the significance being that this house was a five minute drive from his. He is sad that she is no longer so close by, we assume. Even better, the house that he drew had a smiling girl at every window—much the same way my daughter remembers her life at the end of college. She has posted the picture on her Facebook page.

So this is a good thing. I get the bragging rights. I even do some of the grandparent responsibility things, like drive up to the Boston area to babysit for a weekend. But I don’t have the “real” responsibilities of grandparenting. Translate: my niece does not get to complain if I don’t step up to the plate. It’s all gravy for her.

And for me. I love nearly everything those kids do. I get the hugs and the cuddling. When Ben says, “I miss you,” he means it, at least at that moment.

So the question: Do I get to judge my niece’s parenting? Do I get to make suggestions? Do I get to think she should be firmer, or less firm? Do I get to yell at her husband, “You f---ing let Harper stand on a desk chair with wheels?” as the child cries when she falls off.

Here’s my conclusion. What I think about what they do with their children is something I should keep mostly to myself. I think that clause is written into the “great aunt” by-laws. I think I’m only supposed to give love. If asked, I can suggest. But what matters is that my love remains unconditional. The bonus is that my niece and I never argue, as I assume I shall do with my own children once they marry and have kids. When I am an actual grandparent—and it’s not something I’m looking for right now—I’ll have more at stake. Then I’ll fight with them because I’ll be fighting for my grandchildren, the way I always fought for my own children. I’ll have ideas about the way things should be done. I’ll want my children to listen to me.

But right now, all I need is love.

We Like Her! We Really Like Her!

Lately my 26-year-old son has taken to criticizing me a lot--nice and friendly criticism that in no way interferes with his weekly evenings in front of our TV. (He does not have TV. He does not believe in TV. Except when he's at our house, and the shows he downloads onto his computer via Hula.) My worst trespasses, it seems, have to do with my interactions with his girlfriend.

Now, I like this girl. A lot. In fact, I like her better than any girl he has dated since he was in seventh grade. I like her so much (and so does my husband) that when she comes to dinner, I don't use any animal products. (She's an ethical vegetarian.) I like her so much that for her birthday, I bought her a pair of plastic-frame RayBan sunglasses. I admit that I spent $100.

Thus the incident began. The store was supposed to remove the price tag. They remembered to put the gift receipt in the box, but they left on the price tag. My son discovered this--which led to two critcisms. First, I had left the price tag on. Bad manners. (He's right there. I should have checked.) Secondly, I spent $100 on her. When he was dressing me down, he said that her family is quite frugal and give each other frugal gifts. Spending $100 on her was somehow gauche.

Now, I would have thought he'd be pleased that we spent such a sum--it's evidence of our affection for her. But no.

A few days later she comes to visit wearing the sunglasses. They're bright yellow, adorable. But she's a little concerned that they're a bit too much for her summer legal internship. I agree. So she returns them for something slightly more conservative--white frame with wire bottom, but the same style. When I see her the next week, she's wearing them, and extra happy. They're the first pair of sunglasses with actual glass she's owned, and they block the glare, etc. She loves them. (They're also the pair I would have picked for her in the store, but when I called my son for advice, he suggested the yellow frames.)

So here's the thing: If she used the gift receipt, she knows how much I spent on her. And she seems happy, grateful.

So do I bring this up with my son? No I shall not. Because now the issue is that by including her in family celebrations, etc., we're assuming too much and putting pressure on them. Meanwhile, he attended her younger sister's high school graduation. He's in some of their family photos. (I saw them on FaceBook, but he told me about it as well.) I think maybe it's her family that's giving subtle messages that he's interpreting as pressure. But I tend to think they were just being welcoming. They are lovely, normal people. They also give normal gifts, I've found out.

Does my son really think I made a faux pas with the gift? I doubt it. Does he really think we're pressuring them? About what, I want to ask.

I think I have to chalk this up to one more incident of Life-With-Adult-Kids.

And as my grandmother used to say, "a mother's place is in the wrong." I have to remember that one. Frequently.