I’ve consumed scads of biographies over the years, but I could always manage to put them down long enough to grab a snack.  The Jobs book has me bound in a headlock, and until this morning I was puzzled by my attraction to this particular life. My list of favorite topics includes the American and French revolutions, but certainly not the technological one. No geek am I.  Yet something is compelling me to rifle through this book in search of something elusive. Meaning? A moral? A warning?  This morning, after a phone call from my son during which I bombarded him with Jobs anecdotes, the epiphany came. I am not reading the Jobs biography from the point of view of an interested observer of human nature, or a curious wannabe, or a jealous competitor, or simply a voracious reader.  For some reason, I am reading this book from the vantage point of motherhood.

Perhaps because my sons are all of an age when they are seeking their professional niches in the world, I am particularly attuned to the story of one man’s journey to the top of the heap.  The more I read the more questions arise…questions I fear no biographer will tackle.

Walter Isaacson, Jobs’ biographer, asserts that he was asked by Jobs to write the book because the man at Apple’s core wanted his children to see into his.  Jobs took no issue with Isaacson’s warning that in the interest of full disclosure he would have to paint an unflattering portrait of his subject as friend, colleague, employer, and father.  As I wade deeper into this man’s life, I become more surprised by this. Most of us want to shield our children from the evil inclinations that lurk within us.  It seems Jobs almost dares his kids to enter his dark side.

When Jobs’ mothers, both biological and adoptive, read the book, will they be proud?   The man’s genius is legendary, but so are his narcissism and aloofness.  Can a parent burst with pride over a son’s monumental accomplishments while simultaneously being ashamed of him for putting miles of emotional distance between himself and others, including his own children?  Does one overwhelming emotion cancel out the other?

If building an empire demands total self-absorption, do we rob our children of their fiefdom by teaching them to care about others?If we push our children to excel academically and then professionally, do we sacrifice time they could have spent learning to be empathetic?

Of course, the answer is balance. Good parents try to establish a healthy self-esteem in their children without giving them the false impression that they are the center of the universe.  At the same time, we encourage our progeny to set goals, work hard, and ignore the naysayers who tell them they can’t succeed.

Balance is key for most people, but Steve Jobs was not like most people. The question remains, could Jobs have created Apple and changed the world if he hadn’t demanded perfection (often to the point of boorishness) from the mere mortals who served him?  Could he have found the time to be an emperor if he had accepted responsibility for the child he fathered at 23?

By all reports including his own, Jobs’ adoptive parents were lovely and loving people. If ever a subject was fodder for the nature/nurture debate, Steve Jobs is it.  Like his father, he was a perfectionist.  Like his graduate student biological parents, he was extremely intelligent. But the bare feet, the failure to bathe regularly, the freedom with which he insulted people and their work, the rude behavior in restaurants?  He may have brought all that to the table himself.

I’d love my children to be visionaries.  It would be wonderful to have a child who changed the world. But if my child had to be Steve Jobs to be Steve Jobs, I think I’d say never mind.

What a day!  I went to the protest at Old Main directly after the board of trustees announcement in hopes that it would turn into something productive. It became clear fairly quickly that that wasn’t going to happen. We followed the crowd to Beaver Canyon and I was holding out some hope that integrity or respect or something like that would lead to cooler heads prevailing, but it wasn’t to be. I was okay with the WE ARE – PENN STATE chants, but I had to stay silent for the ones about Paterno or the Trustees – I just don’t know what side I’m on anymore. I guess I’m just on my school’s side, rather than some individual or group of individuals. We left as soon as the first light post went down – I felt absolutely sick seeing the news vans parked up the street and knowing how this was going to make my school look in the media today.
I’ve always known there were a lot of stupid assholes at this school. I see them every day at the gym or at the HUB and I wonder for a second how they got in here, and then I move on with my life. Unfortunately, our reputation as a school is judged on the actions of the worst of us, not the best of us, and that’s just a harsh reality. There were at least 15,000 kids out there and I would say 90% of them were either trying to be productive or just trying to watch, but that isn’t what gets played on the news reels.

Everyone here at Penn State is pissed off, and part of that is because we can barely keep track of what we’re supposed to be pissed off about anymore. I heard a few things yesterday that confirmed that this is going to get MUCH MUCH worse before it gets better. Thinking that only five people knew about this and covered it up was fairly naive-it looks like many more knew or at least suspected and failed to act.

I’m praying (why not, tried everything else) that this new rumor about Ssandusky running some kind of pedophile ring is false. The media has jumped on every rumor and speculation so far and turned it into their version of the truth, and it’s been a sickening process to watch unfold.  All they’ve done is sensationalize everything having to do with Paterno and the administration while ignoring the real villain (Sandusky) and the real victims (the kids, who seem like a tragic footnote at this point).  I cannot ever see myself working in journalism after this.

Please forward this to anyone wondering what it feels like at State at the moment, or wondering why the media is showing a bunch of assholes in PSU sweatshirts flipping a news van. Those kids are not Penn State, and hopefully sometime soon we will be able to separate the 90% of students who acted with integrity from the 10% who ruined it for everyone else. No one I know went to Old Main just to protest about Joe Paterno. It’s much more complicated than that.

We went to protest the handling of the situation by the administration, the gutless way Graham Spanier tried to save his job by throwing a local icon under the bus, the way the media has put the victims in the back seat to sell ad time, and the fact that something this monstrous could happen right under our noses and no one lifted a finger to stop it.

For years I have wondered what it is that will ignite the next generation of college students. Our country has been engaged in two wars for more than a decade.  Eighteen-year-old children have been killed or scarred for life both physically and emotionally while our fortunate coeds play beer pong.  Granted, there is no draft to call them to action, but still…

Then there’s the economy. There are conflicting reports about how Occupy Wall Street began. The Canadian anti-capitalist magazine, Adbusters, credits itself with sparking the idea, but according to Mother Jones Magazine, the protest against the 1% began when a group of artists, activists, writers and organizers gathered on the fourth floor of 16 Beaver Street, an artist’s space near Wall Street, to talk about changing the world.  In either case, the impetus for the massive protest did not begin in a college or university setting.

But this week, we finally learned what college kids deem significant enough to riot about.  Football.  The riots on Penn State’s campus in support of Joe Paturno were a disgrace. Thousands of students displayed outrage that “JoePa” would not be allowed to coach one more game on his way to a record.  Are our hearts supposed to bleed for those poor coachless babies?  Are you kidding me?  We’re talking about rape and sodomy here.

Paul Howard, a 24-year-old student told The New York Times, “Of course we’re going to riot. What do they expect when they tell us at 10 pm that they fired our football coach?”

I’m sure he didn’t mean me when he asked what “they” would expect, because I would expect Penn State students to feel disappointed that a man trusted to work with young people failed to alert authorities when very young people were victimized by his assistant. I would expect them to feel shame that their school was stained by the horrific reports coming from Jerry Sandusky’s victims, and by the fact that their head coach could have made a courageous and morally appropriate move and chose not to.

You have to wonder what would have happened if a Dean had been fired for not reporting that one of the English teachers had sexually abused children.  I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by suggesting the whole ordeal would have been inconsequential to the students at worst, and at best the outrage would have been directed at the Dean and not at the administration that released him from his duties. But this is football.

Tonight the students have decided to hold a candlelight vigil to show solidarity with the victims and their families.  It’s a nice gesture, though a tardy one.  After all the unfavorable press coverage the students’ received, it’s no wonder they decided to do the right thing.

My son is in college. I sent him there for academics, but also to mature as a person by taking the code of morality we tried to teach him at home, and applying it in real life situations. I would have been appalled had he been one of the rioters that night.

An argument can be made that there are 44,000 students at Penn State so obviously most of them did not riot.  But that fact doesn’t cancel out the fact that thousands, not hundreds, but thousands of students did.  I hope they someday lasso that energy and direct it in support of something good.

I have no philosophical or ideological objection to the celebration of Halloween.  I simply hate it because I am artistically challenged and Halloween is mother of all the arts and crafts oriented holidays.  Every year my children marched in the school Halloween parade looking like…my children. Being easily recognizable is a wonderful thing when you seek out your progeny in the graduation procession, but on Halloween they’re supposed to look like someone or something else. I simply could not help them pull that off.

Fine arts incompetence runs in my family.  Mine was invariably the most pathetic Halloween costume in the neighborhood.  Year in and year out my mother would tie my hair into pigtails, paint red circles on my cheeks and send me out as a little girl.  Her creativity was astounding.

Playing the gene card didn’t work with my kids.  It didn’t work when I told them Jews don’t play sports and it didn’t work when I told them to dress like little boys for Halloween. They wanted to wear cool costumes like Donny down the street whose mother once turned him into a cheese sandwich. Right. Like that was going to happen!

One year, in a rare Martha Stewart moment, I asked a neighborhood mom for costume advice. She told me I could make just about anything if I had a hot glue gun. Harold said he would no more trust me to work with a hot glue gun than he would trust Jeffrey Dahmer to babysit. He had a point.  In a period of a few months I had sliced a chunk off a finger using a mandoline, burned my forehead to a crisp with a curling iron, and whacked the rearview mirror off the car banging into the garbage can. Without a glue gun, the boys would have to be ghosts for the third year in a row.  I could be trusted with a pillowcase and a scissors.

And I could be trusted with a wallet, which is what I used in subsequent years to buy cheap costumes I recently learned are flammable.

The pressure to be crafty is even worse today than it was while my children were growing up. Art projects are ubiquitous. You can’t escape them! Half the channels on television are house and home related. I quickly surfed through the morning shows today and virtually drowned in Halloween bric-a-brac. I learned how to make bat-o-lanterns out of miniature pumpkins and foam, drape my windows in spider webs, create scary eyeballs out of ping-pong balls and battery-powered tea lights, and carve ghost lanterns out of gallon milk jugs.  And I didn’t even get to Martha Stewart’s show!

When I was young, our neighborhood was never decked out for Halloween.  Parents had all they could do to put the Christmas lights up. Now, every porch in town except mine is dripping in gauze.

I always gave my kids the option of making their own Halloween costumes if mine embarrassed them beyond their ability to cope.  They never bothered.  And now they are grown.

My oldest, Dan, and his wife, Kristen, will be dressing my granddaughter as a mermaid on her first Halloween. They bought the costume in a store. Andrew, the middle son won’t figure out that Halloween is here until his doorbell rings and he has no candy.  Zack, my college boy, will be attending a costume party Monday night.  When I asked about his costume he replied, “I’m going as Craig.”

“Who’s Craig?” I asked, assuming that I am once again ignorant of the latest pop culture icon.

“Some kid I know named Craig,” Zack said. “He used to work at a gas station and he still has his old shirt with his name on it.”

Genes.

Roommate trouble is not big news on college campuses.  By the fourth week of school, housing offices traditionally see their fair share of disgruntled freshman requesting, sometimes demanding roommate switches. Often these switches are made with little ado. But the university housing office had little sympathy for Beth.  Beth and Bryce had chosen to room with each other in very much the same way singles choose to meet through match.com or eharmony or jdate.

Many colleges now allow incoming students to select their own roommates by filling out extensive online questionnaires.  In advance of living with someone, freshmen can now learn prospective roommates’ tastes in music, film, and television. They can find out about religious practices, study habits, politics, fashion preferences, allergies, eating habits and more. When I went to school I was able to choose a nonsmoker.

I’m all for the convenience of the Internet, but really?   Why bother leaving home to go to college if you’re going to live with someone who is exactly the same as the kids from your own neighborhood?   Save the money and commute to a nearby school.

This is what I told my youngest son when I insisted he allow his school to randomly select a roommate for him.  He could have roomed with any one of his seven high school friends who had been admitted to the school.  But I explained that the value of a college education is not simply to be found nestled in the pages of a textbook or spewed from the lips of an esteemed professor.  It is also to be gained by living among a diverse group of thinkers and people with lifestyles quite different from your own.  An anatomy teacher can show you where the tibia is, and this information will help you get along in a medical environment. But a bad roommate can teach you patience, negotiation skills, and communication tactics that will help you immeasurably in the big, diverse world that awaits you outside the protective walls of academia.

My freshman roommate was a mercurial theater major. I had declared a major in speech pathology. I needed a quiet place to memorize the anatomy of the vocal tract. She needed a place to emote. Somehow we managed to accommodate each other.

I was raised in a suburban Jewish neighborhood in upstate New York.  On paper, I have absolutely nothing in common with my dear friend Sylvia, a Lithuanian Lutheran from Valparaiso, Indiana, except for a mutual love of deep- dish pizza.  Nevertheless, we have loved each other since the day we met in college more than three decades ago.

During sorority rush, my soon-to-be best friend Leslie, who had been raised in Kansas, asked me if I had ever seen a cow.  I responded by asking her why she wasn’t in braids and gingham, and whether or not a house had ever fallen on anyone she knew. We enjoyed a good laugh, and have been laughing and crying together for 38 years.

My son listened to my stories, and was assigned three roommates whose interests were widely divergent from his.  The three young men were able to create a living environment based on mutual respect, and Zack has thanked me for helping him broaden his horizons.

On its website, eCampustours.com lists the seven most important qualities to look for when choosing a college roommate. They are: trustworthiness, respectfulness, willingness to cooperate, friendliness, patience, compatibility, and communication skills.  Do people actually reply “no” when asked if they are trustworthy?  Do they admit to being unfriendly or impatient?  I’m willing to bet the lying cheating Bryce didn’t reveal her dark side on her roommate questionnaire.

Chemistry between humans is not the science it is between elements and mixtures.  If it were, there would be no serial match.com daters.  We would all get it right the first time.  Kids who seek out those most like themselves are denying themselves the beauty and surprise of a friendship forged through mutual experience rather than mutual upbringing or interests.

Far more important is the impact this will have on society at large. Aren’t we, as a nation, divisive enough?   Turn on any news station and you see an assortment of cantankerous middle-aged louts pontificating to people just like them.  This is not going to change for the better if college freshman are randomly assigned roommates as used to be the case.  But, if our young people in great numbers seek to “live with same,” if they are not encouraged to meet and get along with a diverse student population, I’m afraid things could get frighteningly worse.

According to the Oxford English dictionary, a slut is a “dirty, slatternly, or immoral woman.” A generation ago this was not a label a girl aspired to, despite the fact that millions of us protested for the right to be as dirty, slatternly, and immoral as our male counterparts.

Thanks to the determination and grit of their mothers and grandmothers, young women today have equal access to higher education and to positions of power in all sectors of public and private enterprise.  But what happens in the social world of the college campus and then trickles down to high school and even middle school is maddeningly regressive to me.

In a thought-provking New York Times article last week that can be read here, Lisa Belkin tackled the issue of gender equality on college campuses. She did not paint a rosy picture.  In college parties across the country, the slut is alive and well and socially under the thumb of her male classmates.

Belkin quotes a Halloween party invitation sent by a Duke University fraternity to 300 female students. (The ungrammatical substitution of “your” for “you’re” was the fraternity’s error, not mine or Belkin’s.) “Hey Ladies. Whether your dressing up as a slutty nurse, a slutty doctor, a slutty schoolgirl, or just a total slut, we invite you…”

Some took umbrage with the sleaze factor.  Fliers were distributed around campus asking, “Is this why you came to Duke?”   But the sad fact remains that hundreds of women attended the party and most dressed as requested.

Last spring, Princeton University hosted a weeklong “She Roars” conference to celebrate progress. Before an invited audience of 1300 alumnae including Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Meg Whitman, former chief executive of eBay, Wendy Kopp, chief executive and founder of Teach for America, two female members of Congress and several best selling authors, an all-male Princeton a-capella group mimed unzipping their pants and thrusting their pelvises as they crooned at a female student pretending to have mistakenly wandered onto the stage. I am outraged by this behavior, and so were many other people who witnessed it.  But, for every indignant response, there were several from college students who saw it as “no big deal.”

When Belkin’s journalism students were sent across the country to interview their fellow coeds, the responses they amassed were varied, but often disheartening.  Several women claimed that men have power over women on campus because they are generally the hosts of the parties. These men attend their parties in casual clothing they may have worn to class that day, or even slept in, while expectations are that their female guests will wear cocktail dresses, makeup and heels. The women happily comply.

“You feel privileged when the host pays attention to you,” a University of Utah junior explained.  When questioned, most of the responders had no problem with the “he chases, she submits” paradigm and more than one laughed off sexist antics by saying “boys will be boys.”  Sigh.

Every interviewee eventually arrived at the topic of generational differences. Parents are too uptight, the students agreed.  Parents don’t understand that some girls just like to have sex. They’re wrong.  I do understand. I was there for the sexual revolution and I have no problem with girls having sex. My problem is with them being treated as sex objects. My problem is with their willingness to be treated as sex objects.  I fought off too many unwanted advances to be comfortable with the boys-will-be-boys cop-out.

It has been many years since I’ve had to grapple with issues of this nature.  As the mother of three sons, I pounded respect for women into their skulls from the earliest age. I pounced on any perceived condescension or disrespect, and I believe I have raised respectful, egalitarian men. But now I have a granddaughter and the issue of sexism raises its ugly head once again.  I want her to grow up believing in her equality in the classroom, in the business world, and in the social milieu.  I do not want her to bow to pressure from men or women to be anything other than her authentic self.

I suppose, as a feminist, I must tell her she has the right to dress any way she likes. She even has the right to dress like a slut if she so desires, but not because some boy expects or demands it of her.  And then I’ll tell her I’ll kill her if she goes that route because I have options too.

The jury found Kristine Cushing not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. Her lawyers blamed the heinous crime on a bad reaction to the antidepressant Prozac, combined with a debilitating heart condition and the fact that the Cushing’s marriage was on the verge of breakup.

Kristine Cushing spent four years in a mental institution, followed by ten years of psychiatric monitoring. In 2005 she received an unconditional release and the plot thickened. Kristine and John Cushing have remarried and for the past several years have been living on Vashon Island, Seattle.  Since her divorce, Trisha Conlon has shared custody of Stephen and Sam with her ex-husband.  Stephen, the 14 year old, lives with Trisha during the school year while Sam resides with his father. On vacations and holidays the boys stay together and split their time between Conlon’s home in Oregon and the Cushings’ residence on Vashon Island. It has only recently come to Conlon’s attention that Kristine has been living in the same house as the boys, and Conlon is none too happy about it. She has been battling for full custody since hearing the news of the Cushings’ living arrangement, claiming she fears for her boys’ safety.

“I am not willing to risk my kids’ lives on speculation,” she told The Today Show’s Matt Lauer. “When a person is capable, they’re capable.”

The court denied Conlon’s request for sole custody, stating that Kristine Cushing poses no threat to Stephen and Sam. So, last Sunday, Conlon delivered her sons into the hands of John and Kristine Cushing for the summer.  It is a summer, I suspect, during which she will get little sleep.

“It was gut-wrenching,” she said. “I don’t even have the words to describe it.”

Conlon claims she has been grilling mental health professionals for answers as to why her ex-husband is willing, even happy to have their sons share a home with a woman who murdered her own daughters.  She said, “The words ‘guilt’ and ‘denial’ always come up. To believe that she’s okay, to believe that it was the fault of Prozac and the fault of medical events coming together, I’m sure helps him deal with it.”

Conlon learned of the Cushings’ remarriage and cohabitation in 2007 from a Washington State Child Protective Services worker who had been informed by Kristine’s therapist that Kristine was living with children again. The fact that Kristine’s psychiatrist felt there was a need to report this situation fueled Conlon’s anger and anxiety. When confronted by Conlon, John Cushing claimed that he and Kristine were divorcing and Kristine was moving out.  With that reassurance, Conlon changed her mind about suing for sole custody.

But the Cushings never finalized their divorce, Kristine never moved out, and for three years Conlon was kept in the dark. She claims Cushing deliberately concealed the fact of Kristine’s presence by telling the boys to refer to their stepmother as “Mrs. M.”  So Conlon reopened her case.

In June, Commissioner Leonid Ponomarchuk ruled against her, saying that since the boys had been spending time with Cushing since 2008 with no problem, there was no evidence that would warrant a new parenting plan. He dismissed the case, saying it had no merit. There is another hearing set for August 25th.

As a compassionate and reasonably intelligent person, this is my response. Give the poor woman a break. Over the past twenty years researchers have learned a great deal about the possible horrific side effects of Prozac. We were blissfully unaware of these side effects during the drug’s infancy. No doubt Prozac did contribute, if not cause, Kristine’s snap from sanity. And what about rehabilitation?  It wouldn’t exist if we didn’t believe it could work. Why pour billions of dollars into healing people if we don’t believe they can be healed?  Kristine Cushing spent fourteen years under medical surveillance and has been deemed capable of living in civilized society with children. It is logical to give her the chance to reclaim her life and prove herself as a good citizen and nurturing stepmother.

As a mother of three children, this is my response. Since when does motherhood have anything to do with logic?  If mothers thought logically, they would let their children walk to school because it really is safe and it’s good exercise. Instead more children ride the bus to school than ever before because today’s mothers are afraid of the rare pedophile lurking in the shadows. Logic dictates that most of the time children bounce back easily from playground injuries. I broke my arm falling off the monkey bars in second grade and recovered perfectly. Yet playgrounds are becoming excruciatingly boring because all the really fun equipment is being deemed too dangerous for children. And so it goes in the case of Kristine Cushing. Motherhood trumps common sense.  I’m a little more liberal than some. Would I let my young child play on the monkey bars?  Yes. But, would I want my children living with a woman who killed hers?  I’m mad at myself for thinking this, but I think not.

What do you think?

From what I have heard and read, the best part of being a grandparent is that you get to engage with your grandchildren on your own terms. Relieved of the day-to-day maintenance, logistics and aggravations of parenthood, you are granted the well-earned gratification of making room in your life for your grandchildren as you see fit.  Almost any grandparent you approach is happy to recite the same tired old line, “I get to spoil the kids rotten and show them a wonderful time, and then I get to hand them back to their parents. It’s a perfect set-up.”

Well, goody goody for them. Those of us with children whose careers or lifestyles or soulmates have taken them hundreds of miles from the home in which they were raised, are denied the pleasure of grandparenting on our own terms. We are subject to the terms and conditions of numerous forces beyond our control.

We are at the mercy of our bank accounts.  My husband and I forked over a hefty sum for our recent jaunt which involved airfare, a hotel room, a rental car, on-site parking, and meals. We’ve been invited to stay at the kids’ small condo, but I am too old and my back is too weak to sleep on a pull-out bed in my son’s office.

We are at the mercy of the airlines. Cross-country fares are expensive, and fares to places less traveled than LA are exorbitant. I ache for parents who have to fly from, let’s say, Akron to Albuquerque. And then there’s the issue of cancelled and delayed flights, and the fact that you can’t even pack a decent bottle of moisturizer if you don’t want to check a bag.

We are at the mercy of our employers. Because retirement is pretty much a luxury of past generations, especially when one needs to save for frequent trips to see the grandchildren (see budgetary issues above), many grandparents today continue to hold down jobs. There is a finite amount of time an employer will allow for vacation travel. You can argue that a visit with one’s grandchildren is a necessity of life, like air, but most employers view such excursions as vacation time.

So we must resign ourselves to being strobe-light grandparents. We get flashes of the physical and cognitive changes that occur so rapidly in young children your head could spin. Each time the light flashes we see a new child up to new tricks. What we don’t witness is the process, the delight of learning a new word or tasting a new food, those gone-in-a-twinkling moments so spontaneous they can’t be caught on film or contained on a computer screen.

For out-of-town grandparents, visits become special events. “Grandma and Grandpa are coming to stay. Break out the party dress.”  We stay for several days or a week and we are in everyone’s face for hours on end.  I wasn’t particularly good at being with my own children for hours on end.  I want to have the kids and grandkids over for dinner on a random Tuesday evening and then send them home, gifted and fed. I don’t like feeling that I am getting on my children’s nerves or overstaying my welcome, even though they would never admit to that being the case.

There are certain facts of life our children cannot grasp until they become parents. The day my son became a father, I watched him watching his daughter sleep. Every molecule of air in the room was bloated with the profundity of his love for her. I seized the moment and whispered in his ear, “Now you finally understand how much I love you.”

And there are certain facts of life that we, our parents’ children, are unable to grasp until we become grandparents. I’ve lived away from my birth home for thirty-eight years. They’ve been a fulfilling three plus decades, replete with kids and friends and work and all the accoutrements of a well-lived suburban family life. It wasn’t until the plane ride home from visiting my granddaughter that I finally understood how much my mother has missed me and her grandsons, and how very much she has missed.

I have accepted the fact that the situation is not going to change. So I have a choice. I can look toward the future and envision nothing but an endless string of good-byes. Or I can grow up, buck up, and look forward to the hellos. What I am able to do is anyone’s guess, but as a start, I have memorized the mantra of the Out-of-Town Grandparent Club…“At least we have Skype.”  It’s more than Mom had.

Okay, go ahead and think I’m biased. See if I care. I know the truth. No grandparent before or since Kyla’s birth a week ago has ever seen the likes of her resplendence. She’s a Gerber baby, a cherub on the Sistine Chapel…as Cole Porter wrote, she’s “a Shakespeare sonnet, a Bendel bonnet, she’s Mickey Mouse.”  Get the picture?

Even though my older friends who paved the way have been telling me that I am going to love being a grandma, for the longest time I wasn’t so sure. Being a grandparent means you are old and I’m not ready to be old. Beatlemaniacs don’t get old. Seeing the Rolling Stones live onstage in 1971 exempts you from growing old, doesn’t it?  Also the timing was bad. My youngest child is a college sophomore. I haven’t put the finishing touches on him yet. It’s not time to be a grandmother when you still have an unfinished dependent under your wing.  Plus, my son and daughter-in-law live in Los Angeles. I wanted to wait until they came to their senses and moved back to the East Coast before I became a grandmother.

You know what they say about how to make God laugh…tell him your plans.  There are only two living Beatles now. Mick Jagger is 68.  The college tuition bills aren’t going away any time soon, my son is very happy and settled on the West Coast thank you very much, and I’ve got crow’s feet and love handles. Like it or not, I am a grandmother, and surprisingly, I really, really like it.

I am not yet clearheaded enough to synthesize all of the feelings I am experiencing about this new life passage because it has only been one week, but I’m sure as time goes by I will have plenty to say.

For now, I am astounded at how quickly becoming a grandparent throws you into the macrocosm.  Parents, and especially new parents, by necessity dwell in the microcosm. Their newfangled lives revolve around feedings and diaper-changes and trying to grab some shut-eye between all the feedings and diaper-changes. The questions they ask are, “Is it okay to vacuum the rugs while she’s sleeping?” and “How are we ever going to afford preschool?”

But grandparents have the luxury, or is it the misfortune, to ponder the really BIG questions. “Will there be enough water for our grandchildren?  How will they live when we run out of oil which is bound to happen?”  When my son moved to the West Coast I began to worry about earthquakes. But now I see there is no place he could take his family to be free from Mother Nature’s wrath. Floods, tornadoes, dust storms, droughts, fires, and hurricanes have ravaged much of the country.

My friend, Sean, recently informed me that the first person to live to 150 has just been born. This person could be Kyla. Many of the people I know are unable to retire until they drop dead on the job. How will people in Kyla’s generation support themselves to the age of 150?  What will health care look like?  If we keep going to war in foreign lands what will the lay of our land look like?

I was an activist once. Kyla has made me want to dust off the old love beads, shake off my complacency, and get to work. She is too sweet and beautiful to live in the world we are handing to her.  All of our grandchildren are. Would someone please tell that to the grandparents in Congress, of which there are many?  Can we all just get along and resolve to get something done for the children?  Our kids are too busy to do all the work that needs to be done. Kyla’s quality of life and that of her peers rests on our shoulders. I pray we don’t blow it.

For two and a half decades I chauffeured three sons to soccer games. On misty, muddy days their cleats left gritty polka-dots on the back of my seats, and clumps of dirt on the floor. In late November, my car became a refuge from the brisk gusts of autumn wind.  I would leave the heat on and dash to its warm embrace between quarters. After the games, chilled to our bones, our family would huddle in the car, sip hot chocolate I had brought in a thermos, and offer up commentary on the teams’ performance.

There were nights when my car became a diner.  Scholarly studies reveal that the happiest families are those who eat dinner together nightly.  I wish I could say we sat down to nutritious dinners together every night like the Cleavers, but we didn’t. Wally and “The Beav” didn’t attend religious school two nights a week and tennis on a third.  Wally and “The Beav” did stupid stuff like playing outside instead of important stuff like art lessons or karate. Truthfully, I never believed in over-programming my kids, but when you have three kids, and they are each allotted one self-selected activity in addition to religious school and the orthodontist, you wind up driving to nine activities. Nine activities squeezed into a five day work week means sometimes you have to eat cheesesteaks and fries in the car. My kids love cheesesteaks and fries and love me for allowing them to chow down in the car. Put that in your study!

On seven-hour treks to visit grandparents, the car became Las Vegas. We would bet on what time we’d arrive, how often the youngest would have to stop for the bathroom, whether or not the turnpike stop would have Peanut M&Ms, how many desserts Grandma made for Thanksgiving dinner. When all bets had been tallied, it was showtime. We listened to tapes of Disney movies and sang along.  I recall begging for mercy on one jaunt, when my two oldest boys croaked out the Robin Williams song from Aladdin for three hours nonstop.  Prince Aliiiiiiiiiii…..Over the years we’ve taken down and passed around approximately four million bottles of beer on the wall.

My car periodically moonlighted as a reading room. I learned to love Don DeLillo while waiting for my youngest to emerge from his hour long saxophone and guitar lessons. I read the collected works of Philip Roth to the music of Big Bad Voodoo Daddies, and Jimi Hendrix provided a somewhat inappropriate soundtrack to The Lovely Bones.

My cars have been ambulances, speeding through red lights when I thought my oldest inadvertently drank record cleaning fluid, when the baby had his first several asthma attacks and when the middle son sprouted a kidney stone.  Each car has proven itself a trustworthy partner in parenting.

A mother’s car is a counseling office on wheels, particularly when she is the mother of sons. In my experience,  young sons don’t talk much, especially about feelings. They’re always “okay” or  “it’s no big deal, they can handle it” or they’re “too busy right now.”  But most mothers learn that once their boys are captive in the car, they will talk. My mothering skills were honed in my car.  Behind the wheel I didn’t have to play second fiddle to the television set. I came to know my boys best there, stuck in traffic on the way to the tennis lesson or waiting for a brother to return from a pit stop. I learned how fragile boys are despite their heroic efforts to hide from that reality.  I learned about their hurts and their insecurities and their crushes and I always kept my eyes on the road.  They rarely had to see the tears they brought to my eyes.

In later years, our car was a moving van.  We stuffed it to the brim twice this year when we drove the youngest to college and when we moved the middle son to a new city to begin a new job.  I am a totally emancipated woman now, and happy to be starting life as such with new horizons beckoning me and a car that is finally just a car.

Really?  My firstborn lives on the opposite coast. He has become a successful businessman with a wife and a home and a baby on the way.  The time change is a killer and our schedules rarely intersect, so we don’t connect as often as I’d like.  When he calls me, he calls me from his car. He always calls from his car, often when I am in mine.  I hated it at first. I’m still not too crazy about it. The connection is fuzzy and my hearing isn’t what it used to be.  But there is a feeling of geometry about it.  Something about it rings true. When he is captive in the car, he will talk.  And I will listen from my clean, fresh-smelling Prius that once again is more than just a car.