On Sunday, I went to a ladies’ lunch with women I’d worked with at my newspaper back in the day. Two were still at the newspaper. Two had moved on to the NY Post. One is now teaching at a local college and I am not doing much of anything except helping my number three son get into college and working phlegmatically on some fiction pieces.
These are women I’ve known since my 24-year-old son Mike was an infant. Women whose pregnancies I remember. And now a couple of them are empty-nesters. We are at the stage where, as my friend K has just done, we help our young adult children move into their apartments, arrange the furniture, maybe even paint the walls.
As we ate eggs and fruit and coffee at the Governeur Morris Inn in Morristown, we provided, in Facebook parlance, “status updates.”
Actually, we talked about Facebook. Some of us were on it. Some of us weren’t. (B talked about how she was a “Luddite” about the new online world. Nice word choice..she was always a good writer.) O said she had seen horrible, vile things on one of her sons’ Facebook “wall” (nothing he had written, but an interchange between two of his friends) and so she insisted that he “friend” her so she could see what was going on. My teen-age children refuse to “friend” me.
We talked about how we shudder at the insipid sweetness of some of the messages. (“Love you, honey.” "You are the best!") We are all journalists, so we think of ourselves as kind of hard-edged. We also talked about how, as the Baby Boomers have come to Facebook in the past couple of years, the younger generation has migrated off, to a certain extent.
I was asked, as the only mother with a married child, how to behave as “mother of the groom.” J was upset with her own mother-in-law, who had recently failed to host the rehearsal dinner for J’s 42-year-old brother-in-law.
“Well, that is the one thing you’re supposed to do,” I said. “As parents of the groom, we hosted the rehearsal dinner and the post-wedding brunch. And we contributed some money. My son and daughter-in-law made all the decisions, which was how it should be. They even helped us pick the rehearsal dinner site.”
I noted that one of my friends whose daughter is marrying in May said that the new wedding contribution formula is not 99 percent the bride’s family, but now one-third bride’s family, one-third groom’s family, and one-third the couple.
This was a group where sons predominate, and they clucked a little at that formula.
We talked about the apparent rootlessness of some of our children who’ve graduated from college. It is a stage of life where there is no clear path to move on, and the poor economy and high jobless rate only muddy the waters further. Some of my friends said they told their children they would pay for college, but not for graduate school.
O said that her oldest son –in the middle of college—had decided to go to boot camp and join the California Highway Patrol. She displayed a photo of him, handsome and sober-looking in his uniform. He assists disabled cars, deals with drunks, and escorts lost pets off the highways. He makes a very good salary. She said he’s been interested in firefighting and law enforcement and community service since he was 3. It warmed the heart of every mother around the table to hear about a young man who’s pursued his dream and found his place.
I asked about B’s husband. An investigative reporter on our newspaper, he was the older man entranced by a younger woman when they married some 20 years ago. He always had great energy and enthusiasm. At age 73, he still teachers aerobics classes.
B said she had recently interviewed Jane Fonda, also 73, who talked about how good the sex is with her new partner. We didn’t have much to say about that.
We had talked about my bio-siblings (children of my birth-mother) who came to my son’s wedding. S told me about a story she had done on New York lawyer Seymour Fenichel who ran a baby-selling adoption business starting in the ‘70s and whose now-grown adoptees are searching out their roots through a Facebook forum. “I read that story,” I told her. “It came through an adoption listserv I’m part of.” You can tell S lives her stories.
We talked about the state of local journalism. My friends said the precipitous decline of newspapers seems to have eased somewhat. My old newspaper is even hiring to replace reporters who have left. Rupert Murdoch’s New Corps iPad app online newspaper is hiring.
But the atmosphere at work is different, they said. There used to be a great sense of camaraderie, of fun, of constant conversation. Now the new reporter hires may be “mo-jos”—mobile journalists, who work out of their cars. My old newspaper moved out of the building it owned, decommissioned the newsroom.
“It’s like working in the insurance industry now, everyone in his own cubicle,” said one of my friends.
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