Tag: Kids

Empty-Nesting IRL

by jcafesin, posted in Uncategorized

I’m no longer, and will never again be my kids’ demigod…

I wanted kids for as long as I can remember. Have 2. Adopt 1. I was absolutely sure I could raise them better than my mom [and dad].

I’d give them ground instead of ripping it away with critical judgments. I’d show my love unconditionally, not doled out with achievements or ‘acceptable’ behavior. I’d be the best friend they ever had, there for them when they needed me, even when they didn’t know they did but just needed to be heard. And I’ve been all this for my kids for the most part. By their measure, I am their closest confidant, even now.

Now 26 and 24, though both are back home for the moment, we almost never eat meals together and seldom interact beyond quick exchanges. My kids are moving beyond family with boyfriends, girlfriends, media becoming their greater influence. While they both still share with me intimate details of their lives, it’s different now. We truly are friends. Not mom to kid, but adult to adult. And while this is good, and right, it hurts, in almost the abstract, like I shouldn’t be feeling sad they are launching.

I am no longer and will never again be their demigod. As adults, their trust in what I say wavers, knowing my propensity to infuse parables into storytelling. They see me now, know my history, watched much of it unfold. They understand my frailties, and love me anyway, but they [rightfully] no longer believe that mine is the final word.

I was into the arts from the beginning too — drawing, sculpting, building, writing. I was obsessed with creating as far back as I can recall, so my desire to produce children wasn’t lack of other interests or just to do better than my mother. I wanted to put people into this world who would be kind, compassionate, lead with their head and their heart. I figured if each gen raised their kids to embody these traits, in some number of generations forward humans could reach our amazing potential for boundless creation, innovation, intimacy, love. My kids are kind, empathetic people and I am proud to know them, but I get I made it hard on them, pushing them to care beyond themselves in a world that generally does not.

I had kids late, in my early 40s after 6 pregnancy losses before our son, and another before having our daughter. I married late too, at 37, pursuing my career while searching for Mr. Right to father the family I wanted so badly. Together we chose to have children. And together we agreed not to raise latchkey kids as our parents had done. One of us would be home for them, at least through most of puberty.

My husband became the main income provider as a male software developer in Silicon Valley, making much more than me as a female marketing consultant and full-time parent. I focused on being there for my kids — taking them to school and picking them up daily, planning activities, groups to join, sports to play, shopping, preparing meals…etc. And talking, endless talking, being available to help them define and navigate their world. I also helped launch and market startups, taught entrepreneurship at top unis, authored 3 novels, 2 short story collections, 2 business marketing books, and an edtech course.

I’ve been busy, for sure, but now I’m tired. I don’t have a ‘second life’ like most women who had kids in their late 20s or early 30s. I’m old, or feel old.

I hate having more memories than time to make them.

When I was little, I would fantasize about my life forward. I’d marry my BFF by mid to late 20s. We’d have kids in our early 30s. I’d be home for my kids, and a successful author too. (I was clearly naive about the time and head space required to really ‘be there’ for your kids.)

Imagining this stage of my life as a kid, I assumed my children would have launched by now (and likely would have if I’d had them earlier). I’d be well into my second act, engaged in writing fiction, and traveling to beautiful and bizarre places with my beloved husband. We wouldn’t be worried about making money anymore. We could spend freely, like never before. I wouldn’t be grieving the loss of my revered position as a mother because I’d be a selling author, and hanging with my BFF.

The kids are moving on, aging out as a mompreneur, and I still have no cachet as a writer, still relatively unknown. I’m back to being what feels like… nothing. And now there’s an additional twist. Younger, there was always time to make the future what I wanted it to be. But I’ve learned that hope, like time, is fleeting.

The life I pictured is so far from the reality I live it’s verging on surreal. I don’t feel like I’m in my body so much of the time lately, just sort of watching from the outside. I am truly lost, consumed in mourning the loss of my past, and the end of my future. No longer atop any hierarchy, like I was in my kids’ eyes when they were growing up, or my entrepreneurial students. I’m back to being nobody with hardly any time or energy left to create the future I wanted to be living by now.

I am grateful for the life I have, for my spectacular kids, my marriage, and the home we’ve built and share. But I still want more. Don’t you, (whatever your age!)? I want everyone who reads me to share my work with their fam and friends. I wanta be at my kids’ weddings, and play with my grandkids, teach them, listen to them, learn from them. I want to stay close to my kids, as integral a part of their lives as always, but now see that I won’t be as they move on.

Common advice is ‘live in the moment,’ but lately I don’t know how to shake off the suffocating weight of aging. My body reminds me often with injuries taking so much longer to heal. Society tells me I’ve become valueless. I can’t fall back asleep at 4:00am when I get up to pee for the 5th time. Back in bed I start looping on the reality I’m losing the family life I lived. And loved. Sleeping now seems… wasteful since the bulk of my life is over. I can’t get off the bullet of time, out of the tunnel I’m in railing towards the light that I know is the freight train comin’ at me.

While it’s true no one knows when they’re gonna die, let me tell ya, death begins looming — the proverbial ax over your head the older you get. Every illness I wonder if this one will take me out. Past a certain age, you don’t keep getting over it.

In 20 to 30 yrs I will likely cease to exist. My body will return to organic matter. No heaven. No hell. No afterlife awaits any of us. Like my biological clock to bear children, my life clock is running out. I can feel it coming, the light at the end of the tunnel brighter than ever now. Aging is a bitch, but I suppose it’s better than not. Love to end this blog on a cheerful note, since we all love happy endings. Thing about being alive is our ending is always the same.

4 Steps to Better Relationships

by jcafesin, posted in relationships

How to build better relationships with partners, kids, friends and colleagues…

The first year of my marriage didn’t go according to plan. The creative, smart, capable man I thought I married appeared to be a jobless, lazy, self-absorbed brat.

I’d waited 37 years to marry, ten years behind almost everyone I knew. I’d waited to find a best friend to share life with. I had this idea of the man I wanted to be with since childhood. He’d be smart. Very smart. Massively creative, anything less would bore me. Financially stable, and able to help support a family with his skill set. And fun, of course, loved exploring new places. Cute was a must. I had to be physically attracted.

My husband had all these things and more, even after we married. And similar goals of having a family remained intact, but something had changed between us. The best friend I wanted became the burden I carried the poorer we got. He refused to take on consulting, and I couldn’t support us both on my salary alone. Ten months into our marriage we’d gone through most of my life savings.

He came into our union with no savings, and no paying job. He was working at developing a tech startup when we met and continued to do so after we married. He spent his days and most nights creating software. My dear husband’s response to going broke was to make his already complex software even more complex. Marketing his startup was a mystery to him and easily avoided by immersing himself in coding. He seemed more intimate with his computer than with me. Many a night I had to please myself while he was downstairs making it with his 64-bit Alpha.

There were many good days, long drives, and hikes along the Pacific coastline, filled with conversation that flowed from one topic to another in a smooth, endless dialog. Those days bonded us, reminded me why we married, and how much I enjoyed his mind, his perspectives, his passion. But things got harsher and more contentious. Eleven and a half months into marital bliss I lost our first baby in utero eight weeks into the pregnancy. And my husband engaged with his muse while I mourned our loss alone.

Time and again that first year of our marriage, I’m sure I wasn’t the only one that considered divorce. A chasm was growing between us. I’m sure he felt it too. He was just better at ignoring it, and me, which I found infuriating. I was so very lonely, and when prodded, my husband admitted he was too. We were stuck in a downward spiral which I couldn’t live with, in a relationship I didn’t want to abandon. Ultimately, fear of missing my childbearing years, and having to start from square one dating again, compelled me to stick with my marriage.

I narrowed the root of our discord down to three possible scenarios:

  • He fed off other people’s pain, which would make him a psychopath.
  • He was indifferent to anyone’s needs but his own.
  • He didn’t know any better.

It was improbable I’d married a psychopath. My husband was guilty of distance, but never violence. Indifference was impossible to work with. Trying to motivate people to care — that don’t — is a fool’s play. So I went with the third possibility. He didn’t know what was wrong between us, or how to fix it, so he froze, paralyzed by uncertainty.

My husband is a mathematician. His brain shuts out chaos. He craves order, creates it daily in tidy mathematical models with strict parameters. Feelings were messy, but exploring them was downright unnerving for him.

My dad once told me the difference between men and women lies in our nature. Men are self-oriented, internal. Women are maternal. Producing life grounds us outside ourselves. Therefore, it is the woman’s role to coax the man outside himself, bring him to her, even his children.

It was my job to figure out a method, a series of clearly defined, linear steps we were both beholden to take that would make our marriage work. I felt certain once a path was apparent my husband would gladly take it with me, if for no other reason than to end the perpetual arguing. And though it took me several months, I eventually came up with an equation and presented it on our vacation, because timing is everything.

We were climbing on the gigantic slabs of granite rocks and exploring the spectacular rugged shoreline of Acadia National Park in Maine. Humbled by the grandeur all around us, we connected in that shared moment. That’s when I unveiled the set of steps I’d conjured that were likely to improve our marriage. I spoke slowly, calmly, lovingly as I laid out the logistics.

  1. We are a TEAM.
  2. What does my partner need/want?
  3. What do I need/want?
  4. Compromise.

Four simple (or not so simple) steps, in this exact order.

Step #1 defines the goal, I explained to my husband. Any relationship — whether husband, lover, friend, or child and parent, must be a TEAM to effectively communicate, and manage discord. We first must acknowledge we are not competing. We’re on the same side trying to work together to solve the issue at hand.

Steps #2 and #3, I continued explaining, are about building trust — the foundation of all productive relationships. If I know you’ll consider my needs and desires before your own (#2), and you know I’m looking out for you before myself (#3), we’ll be able to establish trust knowing we’ll be there for each other before ourselves alone.

Step #4: Compromise, I told my husband, is the functional workings of any healthy relationship. With everything given, something (not necessarily the same thing) is owed. At the very least, each of us must feel heard, and understanding must be achieved before archiving any conflict. Letting issues fester is destructive, and divisive in the extreme. At best, we both get something we want, even if that something is yielding our position to support our team. And as a sidebar — ‘giving in’ doesn’t mean ‘losing.’ Concessions are more easily given by referring to Step #1.

My husband paced me across the granite slabs as we climbed the rocky shoreline. His slender form moved with grace and ease across the rocks. He scrambled ahead to help me with a vertical climb, then reached down to give me a hand. A moment later we stood on cliff’s edge overlooking the Atlantic.

“Other than I think you’re hot, I married you because I knew you were brilliant. Anything less would have bored me.” He smiled at me, then stared out at the ocean, big waves striking the shoreline sending plumes of mist around us.

We walked and talked and climbed for the next five hours, breaking down each of the four steps with specific case scenarios. After analyzing and massaging the data the rest of the weekend, and each step passing QA of course, it was agreed upon to give them a go.

For our summer vacation a decade ago we took our teen children to Acadia to share with them the park’s pristine beauty. My husband spoke of our earlier adventures there and told the kids about our long talk. He quoted the four steps, in order, and explained why each was important, then pointed out how applying them to most interactions strengthens communication and can improve almost any relationship. A big wave sprayed us all. The mist twinkling around us, I spied my husband staring out at the sea and flashed on our moment there so long ago. I held his face in my hands and kissed him.

We’ll be celebrating our 30th anniversary this coming spring. It isn’t always bliss, or easy to compromise, but continually affiriming we are a team, and adhering to the four steps has made our relationship richer, more intimate and rewarding for both of us.

LOVE Defined

by jcafesin, posted in Uncategorized

My sister is dead, I told the bank manager.

She isn’t dead. She lives in Washington with her husband, having recently moved from L.A., where we were both born and raised.

The bank manager expressed his condolences. He accepted the paperwork from our lawyer to remove my sister’s name from our Trust as the potential guardian of our children should my husband and I die before they’re of legal age to care for themselves.

I told him she was dead to delete her from my psyche, distance myself from loving her. Five years ago, she told my husband she didn’t want any contact with him, me, or our kids, her then 7 and 9 yr old niece and nephew, in a response to an email my husband sent her.

Much to my sister’s chagrin, we’ve raised our kids without religion. Cleaning out her Agoura Hills McMansion before moving to her custom built estate in Washington, she sent our kids Hanukkah ‘gifts’ of broken toys that used to belong to her children. She missed acknowledging our daughter’s birthday, again. Three months later, she sent her a present with the one she sent for our son’s birthday, and spelled her name wrong on the card. She’d disappointed our kids time and again, ignoring their birthdays and special events, rarely calling, and talking about her life, not theirs, when she did. Many times after jacking them up that she was coming to visit, on the day she was supposed to arrive, she left it to me to tell our kids she wasn’t coming.

Her sins were many, and mounted with the years without apology. My husband got tired of her hurting our kids, emailed her five sentences politely informing her the correct spelling of our daughter’s name, and requested if she was going to send them birthday cards or gifts to please do so on or around their respective birthdays.

My sister decided he was asking too much and emailed back that “though I am deeply in love with your kids, and it breaks my heart to do so,” she was withdrawing from their lives entirely. She stopped calling every few months. For a couple of years she sent the kids birthday cards when it struck her fancy—weeks late to our daughter, if at all, but managed to get cards to our son within days of his, professing her deep affection and love for him. It took all my will not to shed the cards in a million tiny pieces. Her sentiments to him were totally self-serving, for her ego, her ‘loving’ words meaningless, meant to pump up her self-image alone.

“Love is an ACTION, what we do, not some abstract in our heads,” my husband and I teach our kids. “Don’t profess love in words without taking actions to show it,” we preach. “And don’t accept words of love as truth without seeing the actions that actualize their sentiment.”

Over the years my sister had been so disrespectful to our youngest that our daughter never really formed a bond, but her choice to terminate her relationship with our kids deeply hurt our son. She was important to him because the few extended family members we have left, namely my brother and father, didn’t call or acknowledge our children in any way.

My mom died when our daughter was just 2, and our son only 4 yrs old, so she never really got to know our kids. She did love them though. Deeply. Profoundly. And they got that. How did they know?

  • She came to visit often.
  • She called them on the phone every couple of days.
  • She mailed them presents on time, and called to sing Happy Birthday on their special days.
  • She spelled their names right.
  • She stayed abreast of their lives through me, my husband, and through the kids, consistently showed interest in their interests and feelings, and shared her world with them.

My mother often extolled how much she loved our kids, to me, to them, to anyone who’d listen, but she also showed it, so my children knew it was real.

The day my dad called to tell me of my mom’s cancer diagnosis, after I hung up the phone I said to my husband, “Well, that’s the end of my family.” She was the conduit that kept us together, in contact, a feature in each other’s lives. She fervently believed people come and go, but family is forever, the folks with which your love and loyalty should reside. Within a year of my mother’s passing, my sister and father checked out of my life, and the lives of our kids, too busy with their own to bother with me or mine.

My father, like my sister, practices love in the abstract. He never talks to his grandkids, never calls [even me], never asks to talk to them when I call him, and rarely even asks about them. He doesn’t acknowledge their birthdays anymore. I got tired of reminding him with multiple calls and emails weekly the month before their special days, then daily reminders the week before. The rare occasions I call my dad, he always professes how much he loves my kids, how important they are to him, though he does nothing to actually show them this. He never did, I just didn’t notice, as my mother’s effusive love overshadowed his self-love. When I mention his grandkids, he reminds me to tell them that grandpa loves them, and misses them. But I don’t. I tell them, “Popi says hi.” I don’t want our children to ever get the impression it’s acceptable to say you love someone when you take virtually no action to show it.

Her body ravaged by cancer and near death, my mother insisted my father take her to Toys R Us. She bought each of our kids their next birthday gift, and made him swear to mail them on time. She was hoping to establish a tradition (an action) for my father to adopt for his grandchildren after she was gone. He delivered her dying gifts to our kids two years later, on his way to visit my sister in Washington.

In a thousand lifetimes I cannot repay my mom for her precious gift of LOVE I now model to our children. But I cannot buy into her belief [and society’s rhetoric] that family and love are synonymous anymore.

LOVE, like potential, is meaningless unless put into ACTION.