Category Archives: RITUALS & PASSAGES

April 3, 2009

SPRING PASSAGES

By JL

March winds blow in the season of April proms and May graduations. Being an empty-nester, I am so done with all of that.

Proms are a fun and exciting time, especially for the mother of three daughters who each attended three proms. Do the math – I could be driving around in a cherry, classic Mustang convertible for the price. Add in the grad portraits and I could have some impressive custom wheel covers.

I am eternally grateful that we snuck by on the cheap with the first two girls – that’s the middle daughter (in the middle) wearing my early 80’s disco diva dress. You can see by the expression on her face that the girl has attitude. With the third daughter, we managed to keep a firm, though somewhat weakening hold on the budget – from her first prom (less than $200 total expenditure) to her last prom, in which she went all out.

Being the baby in my own family, I remember my mother’s excuse for everything I got away with (according to my older siblings). “I’m old. I’m tired,” she said summarily dismissing the ranks. Oh, how true. It becomes so easy to choose your battles when you are road-weary from traveling that path before.

I am enjoying a window of respite from this season of high emotion and high priced necessities before my first born grandchild is ready for her first prom. I admit, I’m a little (okay a lot) excited about dress shopping when the bill is on her father.

Of course, this grandma might be tempted to fork over the extra dollars for that dress she just has to have or she knows she’ll die. Ah, the payback is rich! For now, I am thankful to sit back and observe this season of young adult passages.

Like all grandma’s who sit in their rockers thinking their thoughts, I can’t help but wonder at how things have changed.

Several years ago in the autumn of the year, a college administrator sent a memo to his staff reminding them of the things the incoming freshman had never experienced. The list became somewhat famous, and now current versions can be easily found on the internet. Here’s my spring passages version ~

The young folks shopping for proms and graduations this year have never known a world without malls and chain stores. It’s unthinkable that they might wear their sister’s or cousin’s prom dress from two years ago. And they can’t believe that dress shops never“registered” your dress so that no other girl at your school would show up in the same one.

They have no idea what polyester is or what leisure suits were and have never danced with a man in stacked heels as high as their own (thank the goddess for small favors!).

They can’t imagine being restricted to going to prom as couples only or arriving in their parent’s four door sedan. They wonder if we didn’t have limos in our days.

Their feet never danced across the floor of a crepe paper festooned gymnasium. They rent ballrooms and receptions halls and drink punch (we can only hope it is only punch) in engraved stemware.

They’re dumbfounded by the suggestion that one or two poses are enough for graduation portraits. What about the sports pose, the sexy pose and the outdoor pose? What about touch-ups to remove glare from glasses, pimples on noses and flyaway hair? What about the Photoshop special effects – black and white drama with pseudo hand tinted accents?

They expect full scale receptions for graduation parties, complete with music and dancing. If they were given a suitcase (the classic gift from my day with the hint that it was time to move on being apparent) they would expect it to be the “gift box” containing their tickets for a graduation trip to Cancun.

Greek philosopher Heraclitus said “The only constant in life is change.” Bob dylan expounded on this theory in his song The Times They Are A-Changin’. As Dylan so aptly sates, we parents and grandparents can either keep up or get out of the way:

“Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
and don’t criticize what you can’t understand.
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.
Your old road is rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand,
for the times they are a-changin’.”

. . . . . . mid
GET A ^ LIFE at MAD Goddess

4 Comments | posted in Beauty and Image, RITUALS & PASSAGES

June 3, 2008

COMING OF AGE

By JL

Being a MA’d Goddess woman isn’t necessarily about age (as in middle aged). It’s about a stage that all women come to – some sooner, some later.

This past weekend, I went to the chick-flick premier with my daughter. It (our evening, not the movie) was all about a girl’s night out and started with a potential group of about half a dozen. One by one, our entourage dwindled until it was just the two of us.

First to drop was my daughter’s girlfriend, whose not-exactly-boyfriend (translate, when he’s interested he’s her boyfriend), suffered serious injury through his own stupidity. Now, I’m not so callous as to deny succor to the stupid – after all they generally don’t know (or maybe can’t help) that they are the dullest crayon. But in this case, the crisis was past and his prognosis was good. Still, she couldn’t possibly go out and have a good time with her gal pals while he just lay there in agony – and the care of round-the-clock nurses seeing to his every need. Her time would be better spent, at home, babysitting somebody’s kids. The whole thing sounded like doing penance to me but I’m not sure if it was for the sin of contemplating having a good time with her girlfriends, or for not being in the accident with the guy who’s not exactly her boyfriend.

Next to drop us like a dirty shirt downt he laundry shoot was the girlfriend whose husband decided this was (finally) the perfect time to install the floor tiles in their kitchen. She couldn’t leave him there to do it all alone after she’d been bugging him for so long and kept promising she would help if he could just find the time. Suddenly finding the time when she had other plans is a classic man tactic. The diversion saved him trouble of telling the truth, which is, “I don’t want you getting dressed up, looking hot and traveling with a pack of other dressed up hotties. You’ll draw the attention of men . . . who I know are pigs . . . because I’m a man.”

Oh, how truly clueless some males are about the ritual of girl’s night out when you’re a MA’d Goddess woman. Sure, we dress fine and we like to turn heads, but if we’re out looking for anything it’s a break from PMS – putting up with men’s shit. The last thing we want to hear is some line of bull from a horny animal.

So, with all the no-shows it was just my daughter and I. We had a perfectly lovely evening, starting at an A-list restaurant my husband suggested (even though he’d wanted to take me there first). Dinner was on her husband, who knows how to treat his mother-in-law right. Drinks at the coolest martini bar in three counties were on my husband, who knows that no man shall part a MA’d Goddess and her martinis – and a wise man will keep them coming.

And then, in a darkened theater, the screen lit up on a New York skyline and a familiar, simple tune gave rise to a cheer of Ma’d Goddess women heard round the world – or at least in our time zone. And whether they were 20-something or 50-something, they shared a bond of wisdom, a knowledge not born of a certain age, but of reaching a stage of certainty. Of finally figuring out that we don’t need anybody to complete us, just to meet us halfway.

And on that silver screen, four women confirmed that life is never perfect, that loving somebody is the hardest thing you’ll ever do, that your heart will be broken, but it can be fixed (one way or another), that when you stumble you have to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and get back up on those high-heels (literally or metaphorically), and if you keep doing that, eventually, you’ll come to know yourself and what you want. And lastly, that once you figure it out, who gives a shit what anybody else thinks.

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1 Comment | posted in RITUALS & PASSAGES