The Fabulous Geezersisters’ Weblog

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When a president-elect is putting together his new cabinet, I always think of Zoe Baird.  She was Bill Clinton’s nominee for attorney general in 1993, one of those unfortunates who went down because of hiring illegal aliens and not paying their social security taxes.  After that, a number of other nominees for other positions — most of them women — bit the political dust for similar reasons.  Naturally, it was called Nannygate.

I don’t want to defend people who hire illegal aliens and cheat on their taxes, but I do think the whole brouhaha ignored the reality of working couples’ lives.  If you and your spouse both work, as my husband and I did, you spend much of your lives patching together makeshift plans for your kids’ care.  We were fortunate enough to have excellent daycare for our two children — but that didn’t address what happens when they go to school and need after-school care.  Or the holidays that seemed to pop up constantly on school schedules but not on our work schedules.  Or the long, hot summers.

We used neighborhood babysitters.  Babysitters found through agencies.  We advertised, we interviewed, we went quietly and desperately nuts.  With this kind of hysteria going on, it wouldn’t be surprising if you ended up with an occasional illegal person.  As long as the babysitter wasn’t a serial killer or a drug dealer, who cared about smaller legal niceties, especially when you were panting to get out the door, already late for your job?  (Why was it that most of my supervisors didn’t have kids and hadn’t the slightest comprehension for how hard it was to keep body and soul together?  Or that women of my era were loath to ever mention how precarious this kind of juggling was?  You kept your home life and your office life separate.  Kvetching about kids was the surest track to being marginalized at work.)

And occasionally getting out on the weekends — it was a nightmare.  I can still remember our desire to go somewhere one night, calling everybody we knew or were willing to meet on short notice.  My husband ended up talking to a answering machine owned by a graduate student, trying to force her to pick up the phone.  “I know you’re there, Rhonda!” he screamed.  “Answer!”  Desperation yields bad behavior like that.  

It all turned out well for us — and I know we were lucky.  These days, when I walk down the street, I realize something else: Half the world is populated by our former babysitters.  We run into them all the time, hear from them by email.  “Remember me?  I was your daughter’s nanny,” a young woman told my husband a couple of years ago.  Since we never called anybody a nanny, that was kind of startling, but I’m sure she was right.  We vaguely remembered her from one of those summers in the 80s, but her hair color had changed in the meantime.

With this kind of slipshod past, no wonder no one’s been in touch with my husband or me about assuming an important position in the Obama administration.  I couldn’t pick out half our old babysitters in a police lineup — much less tell you their citizenship status.  I bet that kind of non-answer would go over like gangbusters these days.  If they call, I plan to just say no.

(Copyright 2009 by Ruth Pennebaker)

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Tags: babysitters, working parents, zoe baird

“You know what?  I’ve never been beaten at Monopoly,” my boyfriend told me.

That was years ago, of course.  My boyfriend’s now my husband and soon after he bragged about his Monopoly winning streak, I ended it.  (He’s still whining about it, but tough.  Cream rises to the top, you know.  It’s a law of nature.)

Anyway, so we’re both a little cutthroat when it comes to competition.  Even when being competitive was socially unacceptable (the I’m OK, You’re OK Seventies, which I, personally, always thought was a crock), we were still keeping score.  We were just quiet about it.

All of which is why we were determined to thrash the young woman and young man we played Trivial Pursuit with the other night.  My husband and I got a blue wedge (geography!).  A pink wedge (entertainment!).  A green one (science!).  Yellow (history!).  Hee, hee, hee, hee.  We were stomping them.  We exchanged triumphant glances across the table.

Then we got stuck on orange (sports! — a stupid topic).   We rolled the die over and over and got creamed again and again.  Who cares which city lost two NFL franchises in a single year?  I mean, big deal.  Ask me something important, for a change.

The young man and young woman, in the meantime, were catching their stride.  We exchanged taunts with them as they added wedge after wedge.  “You take too long!”  “Don’t you know that?”  “Wake me when you finally figure out the answer.”  You know, good-natured ribbing.

The game went on.  The young man and young woman got lucky.  They added a third wedge, then a fourth.  It was midnight and we were tied and tired.  A few more insults about cheating and moronic lack of knowledge were batted about.  Then we all agreed to quit.

A tie with two people who were far younger.  How mortifying.  How demoralizing.

Except.  “You know what?” I said to my husband as we went to bed.  “If we have to tie with anyone, I’d rather be tied with our kids.”

“Did you notice how smart they are?” he asked.  “They’re incredible.”

Cream rises to the top.  It’s a law of nature.  So is secretly rooting for your own adult children.  Win, lose or draw — you get to give yourself a lot of credit.  They’re just like us, we told ourselves before we went to sleep, almost as happy as we would have been if we’d won ourselves.

(Copyright 2009 by Ruth Pennnebaker)

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Tags: competition, family, marriage, trivial pursuit

When you sit in the waiting room at an oncologist’s office, you always have an invisible companion with you.  It’s never acknowledged, but it’s always there.  You try to ignore it.  You notice, though, it always has its way with you: You talk more loudly than usual.  Laugh too much.  Or freeze into silence.  Or seethe with irritation and frustration, ready to pick a fight with anybody unlucky enough to be around you.

“I was talking to one of my patients about it,” my oncologist said this week.  “How she gets so scared when she has tests — mammograms, breast mri’s.  She doesn’t know what to do with the fear.”

Oh, yes.  Fear.  That’s the invisible companion whose name never gets mentioned.  We’re all ashamed of it.  We live, after all, in a society that manufactures No Fear T-shirts and sentiments.  The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.  Never let them see you sweat.

You know how it is.  There’s nothing more ignominious than being scared to death.

“How are you feeling?”  That’s what you’re always asked at the oncologist’s office.   They’re talking about suspicious symptoms, of course — a recurring cough, a mysterious ache, ankles that swell.  So, how are you feeling?  You never say the obvious, the omnipresent, the great unmentionable: Hey, glad you asked.  I’m a nervous wreck.  Can I vomit now, please?

No, forget it.  That would be in very poor taste.  Being afraid is in very bad taste, in the first place, and you need to learn to keep it to yourself, like your bathroom habits, your nose-picking, your time of the month.  Too much information!  Shut up, already!  Whistle a happy tune and everybody’s a little relieved, everybody gets to call you brave, even though you know you’re not.

Someday, I want to think, this will be a thing of the past — similar to the way that cancer as an unmentionable, shameful secret is also a relic of another time.  Someday, maybe, you’ll step into a waiting room and punch a Fear-O-Meter that indicates your level of anxiety from just-measurable to inches-away-from-a-total-screaming-meltdown.  Then, your name will be called and you’ll enter the little office and jump into one of those unattractive little gowns and the first thing you and your oncologist will discuss is how scared you are and how difficult it is to live with that fear and pretend to be normal.

But that’s not happening yet.  Today, I’m just happy to know another patient is talking to our wonderful, concerned oncologist about her sheer terror, that she isn’t so ashamed of it that she pastes on a smooth face or screeches with inappropriate laughter the way I always did.

So, let’s talk about it — that nebulous, smothering beast.  Let’s name the fear and drag it out of the shadows where it thrives and haunts us.

“You’re so brave!”  God, I always hated hearing that, even though it was said with the best of intentions.  Sometimes, I’d say no, I wasn’t, I was just doing what I had to do.

But I always lacked the guts to say, “No, I’m not.  You want to know the real truth?  I’m scared to death.”

(Copyright 2009 by Ruth Pennebaker)

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Tags: breast cancer, cancer, fear, health, oncologist

If you dread the New Year’s crush at your gym, please check out my radio commentary on the January people:

http://kut.org/items/show/15242

In the meantime, Happy New Year!

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Tags: exercise, gym, health, new year's resolutions

I wrote this last year for my husband’s and my 35th anniversary.  I still like it:

“You want me to tell you the secret of a good marriage?” the minister asked us.

He smiled across the desk at us.  I can only imagine how we must have looked to him: Two would-be hippies dressed in clothes from Goodwill that scandalized our parents.  My hair was a little longer than my husband’s-to-be, but not by much.  We were young, naïve, partially formed.

No, we didn’t really want to hear his advice.  After all, he was part of the Establishment we so strenuously objected to: Hadn’t he and his kind already ruined the world with Vietnam and Richard Nixon?  What kind of wisdom could you possibly get from somebody as old as he was (probably in his thirties, we estimated)?

But we were also middle-class and polite.  So yes, we nodded our heads.

The minister brightened at this encouragement.  “I’ll tell you what my wife and I do,” he said.  “Every year, we sit down and make a list of what we like about each other.  Then, year after year, we compare those lists and see how much we’ve grown.”

My boyfriend and I barely made it out of his office before we collapsed in laughter.  We would never, we swore to ourselves, ever make annual lists about our marriage.  Wasn’t that the most ridiculous thing we’d ever heard of?  We died laughing again.

Thirty-five years later, from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush, Vietnam to Iraq, partially formed to about as fully formed as we’ll ever get – I still wonder about that question.  What’s the secret of a good marriage?

I can’t ask our minister, that sweet, earnest, curly-haired guy with the thick West Texas accent.  A few years after he married us, he was convicted of embezzling church funds to support a girlfriend in the congregation.

Even Tolstoy, who was married forever, falls short for once.  I’ve never agreed with his judgment that every happy family is alike.  To me, happy families are as variable, unpredictable and mysterious as their less-fortunate counterparts.

“I don’t understand long marriages,” a frequently married friend once said to me.  Well, neither do I.  I can’t explain my own marriage, except to say we’ve been lucky, we’ve been stubborn, we’ve laughed a lot, we’ve persevered and we’ve almost killed each other on a couple of occasions.  (That’s my one ironclad view of marriage: If you haven’t wanted to strangle each other a few times, you haven’t really been married.)

More than anything, I don’t think there’s anything seamless about a long marriage or a long relationship.  We’ve had our starter-marriage era, with no money and no kids.  Our years with children, our years of frantic career-building, when we went for months without being able to complete a sentence, much less a conversation.  Years with a potentially fatal disease and its aftermath.  Years of a slowly emptying nest.

And now this – an age I can’t quite define.  No longer young, not quite old, occasionally creaky.  But it’s a time in life and in our relationship that has great contentment and pleasure and peace.  So we fall asleep on the couch at an embarrassingly early hour and our parties fold when they used to be catching a second wind?  So we have some days when it takes the two of us – working together – to complete a coherent thought with matching subject and verb?  So we’re currently tied in our race to resemble a shar pei?

Two weeks ago, I watched an elderly couple across the aisle from me on an airline flight.  They worked a crossword puzzle together, pausing occasionally to exchange a kiss.  He hovered over her as he stood up to stretch.  She looked up at him, smiling; she had dyed hair and a too-enthusiastically madeup face and when she moved, waves of Fendi wafted through the air.  He sat down again and they continued their crossword puzzle, peering through their reading glasses, chuckling and whispering.

It’s so funny the things, like this scene, you come to wish for and value as the years pass.  The long-haired would-be hippie girl would never have understood.  She was too busy planning a future, too blinded with fresh love and the easy certainty of youth.  Maybe she even thought there was a secret to marriage she would learn over the years – instead of the continuing mystery it turned out to be.

Lists never did anything for me.  But a good mystery keeps me turning the pages, wondering what comes next.

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Tags: anniversary, marriage

Save the Tatas.  It was on a bumper sticker with a jaunty little pink ribbon, pasted on the bumper of a pickup truck.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t carrying my sledgehammer with me.  My purse is already heavy enough.

So I came home and Googled the cute little saying.  As it turns out, it’s a website enterprise with lots of bannered T-shirts and perky young things smiling at the camera.  It’s all about eradicating breast cancer – but with a smile and a sly wink.  With humor, you know.  Get it?  No, I don’t.

Or maybe I do, but I don’t like it.  Sure, maybe some of the proceeds from the sales of STTT clothing and bumper stickers go to support breast cancer research.   Everybody gets to wear tight T-shirts that show they still — fortunately! — have their tatas and their sense of play.  Everybody grins and wins, you know.

Good lord.  Where to start?

For me, of course, it’s already too late.  Like many of my friends, I’ve lost both breasts (excuse me if I don’t call them tatas) to surgery.  And you know what?  That was the least of my problems.  Cancer in your breasts doesn’t kill you; it’s simply where cancer can start.  You stop worrying about your breasts really quickly — and start worrying about sites where the breast cancer can metastasize.  Places like your liver, lungs, bones and brain that are a bit more vital than your cleavage.  Places where the cancer will kill you.

But Save the Lungs wouldn’t look funny on a T-shirt or bumper sticker.  Instead, let’s grab the reassuring little pink ribbon and the cutesy names for breasts and forget all about mortality tables and metastases and wink like Sarah Palin, since nothing’s really that serious that you can’t joke about it, including national security and global warming and terrorist cells of the individual and malignant variety.  And, if you don’t get the joke, too bad for you and all your gloom-and-doom pronouncements.  C’mon, smile!

Save the Tatas!  You only worry about your breasts when there’s not something greater at stake.  Like your life, say.

I get the joke.  The trouble is, it isn’t funny.  I’ll be carrying my sledgehammer after this.

(Copyright 2008 by Ruth Pennebaker)

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Tags: breast cancer, cancer, save the tatas

Maybe it was the second dessert of ice cream, a brownie and Irish cream.  Or that pick-me-up White Russian.  Or the fact I spent almost all of yesterday either reclining on a couch watching movies and TV or sleeping, while the house continued to look like a post-Christmas dumping site.  Whatever.

The point is — and it kills me to admit it, since I harbor the desperately pathetic notion that I’m a lot of fun sometimes – a little sloth and self-indulgence go a long way with me.  Just too many dour-faced Scots-Irish in my lineage.  People who sat on hard, splintery benches for hours in drafty churches while furious ministers ranted and shouted and told them they were going to burn in hell — well, anyway, that’s what they did for enjoyment and enlightenment when they weren’t working double-digit hours every weekday, performing dreary, meaningless, backbreaking work that they hated.

If you sport a background like that, along with a family history of scolding children with, “Shame on you!  For shame!”, you may think you’ve escaped the austere, frigid churches and joyless hymns of your childhood just because you haven’t been dragged to a church since you were 21 and you’re free at last, thank God almighty.  But that kind of punishing background has a remarkable resilience.  Those harsh voices begin to whisper to you about the time the shadows have gathered and you realize you haven’t accomplished a thing all day.

It’s why, I’m inclined to think, I’m one of the few people I know who doesn’t like spas.  It just seems wrong to lie around and pay other people to wait on you and wax your legs and polish your toes.  Wrong!  Practically sinful!  In any event, not enjoyable.

So, as the holidays pass, I begin to get restless.  Too much free, unstructured time, too much food, way too much drink, too many people around.  I begin to long to get back to my real life with the schedule, the expectations, the work — my own loosely defined idea of salvation in this world.  My thin-lipped ancestors wouldn’t have approved of the fact that the work I do is often enjoyable and fulfilling (although, they’d be happy to notice, it doesn’t pay well.  It’s one of those touche moments life serves you).

Who knows?  Maybe my forebears are looking down on me, disapproving the lack of religion, the occasional hedonism, the rejection of rigid standards (”We came across that icy ocean so she could sleep late on Sundays?”).  But they’ve got to feel a little sense of satisfaction that too much sloth makes me feel guilty and that, the truth is, I’ll be happy to get back to work.  “See how guilty she looks?” they ask one another, nodding their heads approvingly.  “She’s still one of us, after all.”

(Copyright 2008 by Ruth Pennebaker)

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Tags: guilt, holidays, scots irish, slothfulness

If there’s anything I hate, it’s a winner who gloats.

Which is one reason I haven’t written much about Obama’s victory last month.  That — and the knowledge that he’ll have his failures and we’ll be disappointed by him eventually to some extent or another.  I’m 59, I’m an adult, I’ve mostly given up childish things like great and unrealistic expectations.

But, still.  In the meantime, every day I get up and hear some news about his administration-in-waiting and I feel comforted and relieved.

He speaks in complete sentences!  His subjects and verbs agree.

He seems to believe in science, as opposed to extremist ideology and fairy tales.

He evidently sees the world as the great and complicated place it is, as not easily understood.  (Hey, people in other countries have different cultures.  They’re different from us.  Imagine that.)

He knows we’ll probably never be welcomed as liberators anywhere.  Hopefully, he’ll never insult our intelligence by claiming otherwise.

He appears to be appointing people who don’t always agree with him and won’t try to protect him from the truth.

When he has the opportunity to nominate someone to the Supreme Court, it won’t be a right-wing lunatic like Scalia or Thomas.

He’ll close Guantanimo.

He thinks torture is anti-American.  (You see how low the bar has been set?  I am thrilled by this knowledge.)

He’s thoughtful.  He’s a writer.  He respects the English language.  (God, I’m a sucker for a smart man with intellectual curiosity.)

I know it’s early, it’s too soon.  Hell, he’s not even president yet.  But already I feel so much better.

I can watch and listen to the dazzling wordplay of the Current Occupant of the White House (”We’re fighting Al Quaeda in Iraq,” he recently told a newscaster, who answered, “But they weren’t there before we invaded the country.”  As Bush put it in his usual thoughtful and introspective way: “Yeah.  So what?”) and comfort myself that his days are dwindling.  Hasta la vista, vaquero.

But still, as the Current Occupant cautions us with a straight face, history will be the judge of his legacy.  Why, look at Harry Truman and his dismal approval ratings when he left office.

Harry Truman, the self-made man who bristled with honesty.  Harry Truman, who said, “The buck stops here.”  Harry Truman, who’s now widely considered to be one of our greatest presidents.

I look at Harry Truman.  Then, I think, Yeah.  So what?

(Copyright 2008 by Ruth Pennebaker)

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Tags: bush, obama, politics

I could hear the moaning from the second floor.

“I think you should know,” my husband said above the yowls, “the cat is suffering from PTSD.”

Oh, dear.  Some kind of damage always occurs when we have our annual holiday party.  Years ago, houseplants used to die when some drunken friend or another dumped vodka or cigarette ashes into their dirt.  (I always told myself: at least the plants died happily.)  Floors were ruined, stereos were upended, glasses were smashed.

The years went on and the physical damage was curtailed.  Our parties attracted damage of the more emotional variety.  One year, a poet tried to dismember my husband for a study he’d published about suicidal poets; she’s no longer on our guest list, but we presume she isn’t suicidal about it.  Another year, a guest came flouncing up to me, complaining about another guest who wouldn’t introduce her to his new wife.  “I guess I was good enough to fuck, but not good enough to be introduced,” she huffed.  I nodded in what I hoped was in a neutral, yet supportive, manner.  The duties of a modern-day hostess are many and varied.

In years past, too, my husband and I used to regale each other with scandalous, gossipy stories after every party.  These days, the gossip and scandal are mercifully in shorter supply.  The stories we tell each other are warmer, even bittersweet.  We take great pleasure in having our grown children and their friends at our gatherings and watch their collective progress in life.  Our annual parties no longer seem like single events.  They’re part of a greater continuum of our lives through the years.

Since we’re not a religious family, I worry that we lack meaningful rituals, especially this time of year.  Last week, driving home, I heard a version of “O Holy Night” that made me think of my sister, my parents, my childhood.  I don’t necessarily miss the beliefs we shared, but I do miss the music, the ritual, the deeper meaning to the holiday season that I once possessed.

The cat calms down and, slowly, we’re getting the house back to normal.  This annual party, it occurs to me, is our family’s ritual and tradition.  Every year, it reminds me how fortunate we are to be a part of a wonderful community of friends.

(Copyright 2008 by Ruth Pennebaker)

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Tags: family, friendship, holidays, parties, traditions

I tip especially well when a haircut is bad.  That’s because I hate to hurt the cosmetologist’s feelings.  Who cares about my shitty haircut and the fact I should really be wearing a paper bag over my head?  Not me.

Similarly, when I’m served a terrible meal, it makes me feel awful.  If I can’t eat it, I’m capable of shifting it around on the plate so it looks half-eaten or cutting it into small pieces or trying to foist it off on somebody else’s plate so its inedibility will be less obvious.  Oh, and then I tip big, of course.  What did you expect?

All of which is why I was both thrilled and horrified to be having lunch with some of my friends the other day.  Out came the entrees.

Before Pat even dipped a spoon into her soup, she already didn’t like the color.  “This tastes terrible,” she announced in a loud voice.

Karen had gotten something else.  An enchilada, maybe?  I don’t know.  I was mostly watching her face, which wrinkled up like she’d just stepped into a latrine.  “I hate this,” she said.

I tasted my entree, a couple of mediocre tacos.  Who cared?  I’ve had worse.

A few minutes later, the waiter hovered.  “And how is everything?” he wanted to know.

“Fine,” I said, in a loud voice.

“This is terrible,” Pat said, pushing the soup away from her.  “I can’t eat this.”

“This is bad, too,” Karen said.

By that time, I was even beginning to question my tacos.  Were they really mediocre — or were they just bad?  Nothing spoils my appetite like conflict.  Especially restaurant conflict.

“Can I get you something else?” the waiter asked.

Yes, he could.  Karen and Pat ordered something else.  “Will you take this bowl away?” Pat sniffed, pointing at her soup.  The soup and enchiladas disappeared with murmured apologies.  Two new entrees reappeared.

“It was amazing watching the two of you send back your food the other day,” I told Pat and Karen a few days later.  “You’re now my role models.”

They stopped short and exchanged glances.  “I’ve never done anything like that before,” Pat said.  “That’s not like me at all.”

“Neither have I,” Karen said.  “I don’t know what got into me.”

They went on, protesting vehemently about what big wimps they really are.  “Shut up,” I told them.  “You’re going to be my restaurant customer role models, like it or not.  You can’t take it back.”

“You know those nachos I got to replace that awful soup?” Pat said.  “Well, they weren’t any better than the soup.  I should have sent them back, too.”

There.  That’s more like it.

(Copyright 2008 by Ruth Pennebaker)

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Tags: assertiveness, bad food, restaurant