Intergenerational Wisdom

As my sons become adults, I still can’t help offering advice to them, invited or not. I sidle up to them and thrust it out like a slightly wilted bouquet, the remnant of a relationship that has changed forever.
Some of it is well-received, other suggestions are dropped into the dustbin without a second glance.
My older son tends to prickle when I offer up my wisdom. Somehow, it clamors in his ears like criticism. I don’t mean it to be.
My younger son receives advice graciously. Doesn’t mean he’s going to use it, but he smiles and nods as if he’s filing it away.
Recently, he began an internship at his dream employer, a video game design firm. “Do you have the right clothes?” I asked him. “Do we need to go shopping? You want to make a good impression.”
“It’s casual dress,” he said. “That’s what they said.”
“Don’t go in there in shorts and flip-flops on your first day,” I said. “Wear khakis and a collared shirt until you see what everybody else is wearing.”
He rolled his eyes but left the flip-flops at home. That first night, I called him to see how it went. “What were they wearing?” I asked.
“Normal clothes, Mom,” he said patiently.
“What do you mean by normal?” I asked.
“Shorts and flip-flops.”
My sons will likely never wear collared shirts. And maybe that’s fine.
I remember the summer I was married. I’d been living in an apartment with my sister for a year, but moved home with my parents just prior to the ceremony. There I was, lodged in my old room for a month, living out of a suitcase.
I think my father saw it as his last opportunity to prune and shape me in the direction he wanted me to grow. I remember him framed in the doorway of my room , telling me to clean it up.
“You’d better not keep house like this once you’re married,” he warned, shaking his finger at me. “Your husband won’t put up with it.”
This advice was not well received. It was out of date. It did not reflect what I saw as my new peer relationship with my father. It had nothing to do with how my soon-to-be husband and I planned to live our lives.
Looking back, I think it was offered out of love, and his own experience, and the pain of separation. It was all he knew how to give me at the time.

In the Bleak Midwinter or Christmas Guilt

In the Bleak Mid-Winter

This time of year, I always feel like my emotions have been sandpapered to an exquisite tenderness. Joy and sorrow reverberate off each other and memories boil up, stirred by the scent of pine or the weight of an ornament in my hand or the sound of bells. That’s how I know it’s time for the annual Christmas guilt.

When my sons were younger, it was all about working full time and not being available to choreograph the day-care holiday pageant or help them craft original holiday art to be featured in our family Christmas cards. Not that I can draw my way out of a paper bag (nor, apparently, come up with an appropriate metaphor). There was the one stellar year when my older son and I made wrapping paper by block-printing butcher paper with cookie cutters. Or was it carved potatoes? I disremember. Maybe I just made that up.

I do bake homemade cookies, rich with butter and sugar and nuts, but these days you never know whether to feel proud or guilty about that.

My Christmas cards have computer-generated address labels affixed (my calligraphy pen is out of ink, you see.) They do not include a Christmas letter. In rare cases there is a hand-written two-line update (We have two sons now and they’ve both already graduated from high school. Time flies.)

I’m not the designated Christmas shopper. At holiday parties (which I don’t host, by the way) I end up sequestered in groups of women who gripe about having to do all the shopping—for themselves, for the kids, and for their husbands’ relatives. I just keep quiet. Because, in fact, my husband is Father Christmas (but sexier). He really gets into Christmas, and he will do hours of research in order to find just the right present, and he prides himself on finding things that aren’t on your Christmas list, but that are just perfect. Gift cards are not allowed. He knows all the games and books my sons own, and he knows what the new releases are, and he gets online and sends away for obscure T shirts and classic sci-fi and horror movies and buys the All Clad cookwear I’ve been dreaming about.

And I let him. Knowing my presents for him will be lame, lame, lame.