fierce attachments

a mother-daughter blog about the fierce attachments in our lives… title inspired by Vivian Gornick's wonderful memoir

Category: family

December 10, 2011

the end of gift giving (as we once knew it)

by nikki meredith

Juleaften The Royal Library, Denmark

According to the New York Times, the recipients of gifts are no longer content with leaving it up to you to decide, they want what they want and they want you to get it for them. We the givers, writes Penelope Green, are being treated like “catalogs or department stores, brandishing lengthy wish lists, demanding gift cards or boldly asking for cash.” Social scientists who study this phenomenon have various explanations (according to one theory: what matters is having the exact right stuff — the clothes we wear, the object d’art we display, the lamps we light — because of what our stuff says about our style and identity) but Judith Martin, aka Miss Manners, calls it is “blatant greed” and, in the article, labels it our number one etiquette problem.

You’d think I’d welcome this specificity. On November 20, 2011 I wrote about how difficult it is for me and my husband to get the gift-giving thing right, even after 36 years of marriage. But the mercenary approach horrifies me. I first noticed it when a relative got married a few years ago and along with the invitation came a request that guests contribute to the car she and her future spouse wanted to buy. I figured this was just my crazy family but then the daughter of a friend got married a year later and this kid wanted us to contribute to the purchase of a condominium. Read the rest of this entry »

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December 4, 2011

how to beat the holiday blues: be nimble

by nikki meredith

via Terry Vine/CORBIS

There is a saying in Italian: Natale con i tuoi, Pasqua con qui vuoi . Which means: Christmas with your family, but Easter with whomever you want! My parents weren’t Italian but they subscribed to this notion. The one and only time I dared to spend Christmas away from them was my honeymoon and they never quite forgave me for it. As a result, I vowed that, with my kids, I would never make spending any holiday with me compulsory.  In the beginning it was because I didn’t want to burden them. Later it was because I didn’t want to be so wedded to one way of celebrating the holidays that I’d be crushed if it didn’t work out. I do have a tradition, however, and it’s to be forever nimble on holidays. And I think it’s a tradition that might work for others.

I have a friend who was depressed for most of the weeks leading up to Christmas last year because her adult son and his wife decided to take their kids and join some friends of theirs in Hawaii for Christmas. Taking Grandma and Grandpa apparently wasn’t an option – either because they wanted a break from the old folks or because no one could afford the extra plane tickets. My friend and her husband are on a fixed income; their son’s wife is currently unemployed so the only way they could manage the trip was to cobble together a package of frequent flier miles and to trade their home in Marin County for a condo in Oahu.   “Christmas has always been at our house,” my friend said, “that’s our family tradition.” I felt sad for her but that always is a problem. There is no always in this life. People move, they divorce, they die, they decide they prefer palm trees to redwood trees on Christmas. Read the rest of this entry »

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November 20, 2011

advice for giving a gift to your husband or wife: DON’T

by nikki meredith

IMG_3160

The heart of the giver makes the gift dear and precious. ~ Martin Luther

I once had a fiction writing teacher who said, “It’s hard to say anything definitive about adultery.” I thought that was the wisest thing anyone ever said about anything. (Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe in adultery but where would fiction be without it?)   But this isn’t about adultery. This is about gifts and I want to say, “It’s hard to say anything definitive about gift-giving.”

Let me start with the person in my life for whom it should be the easiest to buy gifts: my husband. Read the rest of this entry »

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November 7, 2011

mother-daughter relationships: then and now

by nikki meredith

Image via Couture Allure

Easter Sunday. I’m 10 years old.  While other families are attending Easter sunrise services at the Hollywood Bowl, my family is in my father’s Buick heading to Rand’s Roundup in Hollywood – a restaurant billed as an urban chuck wagon.    I’m clutching my Easter basket – my brother is 14 and too old for Easter baskets — but we are each holding a cellophane bag of foil-covered Sees chocolate eggs that my mother’s Jewish friend Rose gives us every Easter to celebrate our secular L.A. urban holiday.

My mother and I are wearing Easter bonnets —  plain straw hats to which she has attached fresh gardenias — and matching dresses. I love the dresses — delicate Swiss cotton in pale yellow with tiny pearl buttons down the front. I like being twins with my mother. I like my mother. That will change but I don’t know it yet. Read the rest of this entry »

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October 27, 2011

fierce attachments: difficult mothers and the daughters who love them

by nikki meredith

A few years ago I was at an all women dinner party and we started talking about our mothers. Because it’s Marin County — an area saturated with shrinks of all stripes —  there was a lot of shrinkish  vocabulary circulating the room.  At one point when I talked about my mother and my complicated relationship with her, one of the women said,  “She must have been a narcissist.” No, I said, she was not a narcissist and I tried to back up my claim with examples of her non-narcissistic behavior. Another woman opined that my mother must have had boundary issues. Yet another, diagnosed her as borderline. I changed the subject. These terms, as applied to someone I cared about, were not only off the mark, they were offensive.  Where, I thought, is a novelist when you need one?

And this brings me to Vivian Gornick and her book, Fierce Attachments, a memoir structured around her walks with her aged mother in New York City and after which we named this web site. Gornick is not a novelist and it is not a work of fiction – I’ll get to that issue in a minute — but if you’ve read it, try to imagine someone affixing Gornick’s mother – an exasperating woman who could be petty and narrow-minded but who was also smart, courageous, and funny – with a label from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.  Imagine how much of the power and the intensity would be lost. Read the rest of this entry »

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October 18, 2011

did not disconnect: the permanence of an ex-spouse

by nikki meredith

Uncle Danny

I had an uncle Danny that I never met. He died before I was born but I saw photos of him in his Navy uniform. He was boyish and handsome and, to the extent that a child can mourn someone she never met, I mourned him. Or, to be precise, I mourned the idea of an uncle Danny. I decided that if I ever had a boy I would name him Danny.

Fast-forward 15 years: I’m pregnant and my then-husband and I are making lists of names for boys and girls. Actually, I didn’t have a list. I had only one name on my boy list. But my then-husband said he hated the name Daniel. Hated it.  Even if it’s after your dead uncle, you can’t lobby to saddle a boy with a name his father hates. Mildly objects to, maybe, but not hate.  I gave birth to a wonderful little boy and in the spirit of compromise that would augur a more promising marital future than we, in fact, had, we came up with a name we both liked. Read the rest of this entry »

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October 7, 2011

it’s true, all men are bastards: when your dog falls in love with a fickle partner

by nikki meredith

Alice is in love. The object of her affection is Jasper, a hefty Labradoodle who looks more like a bear than a dog. They are both shaggy but otherwise they are a picture of contrasts. She’s a creamy 25 pounder; he’s chocolate and weighs 75 pounds. Every day when we pass Jasper’s house on our walk, if he isn’t home or if I don’t have time to stop, I have a mutiny on my hands. Alice emits a doleful cry and like a stubborn donkey in a cartoon, she puts the brakes on and no amount of cajoling will get her to move. Since I don’t want to drag her little butt along the sidewalk, the only way to keep going is to pick her up and carry her far enough away that she loses his scent. According to Jasper’s owner, Fran, when we have a scheduled play date and she announces it to Jasper, he posts himself at their front window and waits. As soon as he sees her, he literally jumps for joy and the two of them fall into each other’s forelegs.

They jump, they run, they twirl. They lick each other, they play tug-of-war, but even with all the rough and tumble, the boy is gentle with her and has been since she was a tiny puppy. It’s like watching Gérard Depardieu make chaste love to little Gidget. Read the rest of this entry »

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October 4, 2011

a douche, a baseball bat and judge judy: renting my house to a delinquent tenant

by caitlin meredith

In April of 2008 I quit my job at the local health department in Austin and flew to Nigeria to help track and treat a meningitis epidemic with my on again, off again employer Doctors Without Borders. It all happened so quickly that I was barely able to pack my bag for the summer, much less rent out my house. Fortunately I had a couple of pro bono property managers willing to take the case: my parents. From their home in Northern California, they tried to allure a summer tenant through Craigslist. After several flakes and false alarms, they finally found a renter that seemed perfect.

Penny needed a place for her and her college-aged son to stay for the summer while the house she had just bought got work done. She happily agreed to pay the rent, the security deposit and the utilities. Over the course of the summer she and my mom exchanged countless e-mails all with some small business purpose but that more often than not drifted into more personal terrain. She sent a photo when a large branch fell off of one of the pecan trees and broke part of the fence and told of the condo they had found for her son where he would live during his third year at college in Flagstaff. My mom asked her about the rent deposit and sent her detailed instructions about how to retrieve your voicemail when you don’t have your cell phone with you after Penny told her she lost hers. Reading through them you see two empty-nesters sharing tips and observations about this chapter in their lives. There’s a real warmth there – both expressed the desire to meet in person one day. Something about this relationship confirmed all of our best feelings about Austin, reminding us of the kind of kind hippies that used to live in Marin. When it got closer to my return from Africa, Penny even offered to pick me up from the airport. That’s good people.

A few weeks after my return, however, the touchy feelies turned to touch and go. Read the rest of this entry »

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