A Word From the Weiss

        Not to make you feel guilty – although what would a Jewish blog be without guilt? – but writing this entry is among the last things I feel like doing this week, yet I have a strong sense of obligation to do it anyway, strictly for the sake of you, my readers… even though, for the most part, I have almost no idea who you may be.
        Yes, there is the numerical counting device on my site that tells me I have had close to 6,500 “hits” on these pages since debuting on the Web a little over a year ago. I also can tell that most of my readers are in the U.S., although last month I also had two each in China, France, Estonia and Kazakhstan. (Borat, is that you?) Beyond that, there is nothing that helps identify any of you by gender, religion, or geographical origin, let alone by name.
        Sure, there was the unquestionably twisted individual who made his presence known last week by entering a comment on my guestbook suggesting in rather graphic terms that I might enjoy some pro-creational activity with well-endowed males of another race… and who, as soon as I managed to remove this helpful suggestion, hastened to add two even more explicit comments offering to aid me in that pursuit.
        There was also the time recently that my daughter asked me not to mention the engagement of her longtime ex-boyfriend to another young woman on my blog, since his mother reads it regularly, and I didn’t believe her and did it anyway… only to run into his mom at the store the very next day and learn instantly that my daughter was right.
        But otherwise I have almost no clue who is reading my blog, and I generally assume that almost no one I know is, since almost no one I know ever mentions it to me anymore. The only way I ever find out to the contrary is when I write about people whom I assumed were not reading it, and they proceed to tell me in no uncertain terms that they did, indeed, read it and didn’t particularly appreciate what I had to say about them.
        Of course, I never write anything here to deliberately offend anyone. Ever. I am, after all, not just a Jewish mother, but by definition a nice one. However it may seem, I am simply trying to reflect on my life by writing about events that befall me each week, especially ones that I believe are universal experiences and especially challenging ones at that – like having a heated quarrel with one of your children, being asked to attend a fundraiser honoring a friend at an organization you don’t support, or having an extended holiday visit with relatives who have very different temperaments and habits from yours.
        In the last of those three cases, in retrospect, as absurdly lengthy as my most recent entry ended up being, I probably should have spent much more time dwelling on the extent to which those relatives went to great lengths to make sure that my family and I felt welcome – serving lavish meals, paying for our ferry tickets, and most of all being warm, affectionate, and deeply appreciative of everything that we brought, and then taking the time to phone afterwards to say how much they’d enjoyed being together.
        No, in retrospect, what I should have done is written about something else entirely, or just printed my reaction to our rabbi’s sermon (very nice), or offered holiday recipes.
        But I’m a complete and utter asshole – excuse my language, but that seems apt – and I didn’t do that, largely because that wasn’t my point at all. My point was that no matter how much relatives may want you to feel welcome, and you may want to be with them, family get-togethers can still be excruciatingly difficult because you are often fundamentally different people, and no matter how much you may try to get along, you know that just being yourself is guaranteed to rub them the wrong way. But there’s no point in apologizing here, or going on about it now, because those people evidently were reading this (although they hadn't mentioned it in a long time), and they evidently no longer will be.
        And although it may be totally obtuse of me not to have realized how offensive what I wrote was (because I would never write something offensive about someone just because I thought they would never read it), the strange thing is that it’s often hard to predict what will insult people and what won’t. You may find that hard to believe -- and as someone who is hypersensitive to criticism myself, I feel a bit ridiculous saying it. But it’s true. It’s also easy to offend people by just being honest. Yet the thing that ends up bothering them is often not something you were aware of or even thinking about at all.
        For example, a few weeks ago I wrote about attending a bar mitzvah held by some of my husband's relatives who live in New Jersey. I wrote about sitting beside the bar mitzvah boy’s uncle, Jamie, a relative whom I like enormously, largely because he’s so open and candid about personal details of his life. Still, I worried that he might be offended by my mentioning here that his eldest son suffers from Angelman Syndrome, a rare affliction, and how difficult this often proved for his family.
        On the contrary, he didn’t mind at all. “I am pretty hard to offend, since I just look for the humor in pretty much everything,” he later wrote. Still, one unfortunate word that I used without thinking clearly stuck in his craw. “I don’t think Colin is a ‘victim,’ so much as a genetic loser in the game of evolution,” he wrote. And I realized that this loaded term was, indeed, a thoughtless and very offensive one.
        More than once, I also have documented an argument I had with someone and stated how relieved I was to have settled it, only to have that person call up outraged to have read my account, and suddenly we were battling all over again. (I thought they’d agree that it was great we’d made up. But I’m not going to get any more specific than that, at the risk of offending any of them again and opening up those wounds yet a third time.)
        Then there was last month’s entry about a mother-daughter weekend I spent with my daughter Allegra, her good friend Samara, and Samara’s mother Laurel. I worried that Laurel, who is one of my closest friends, might take offense at a relatively personal reference I made (which I won’t repeat here at the risk of offending her again).
        On the contrary, she never even mentioned it. What troubled her, she said – although she was fairly gentle about it – was that I’d posted a wide range of photographs taken that weekend. She had wanted to relax on the trip and not wear makeup, she said, and she didn’t exactly welcome having pictures of her unvarnished self broadcast online.
        I thought she looked wonderful in those photos (and would like to think that women all look wonderful without makeup, especially when they are having a wonderful time). But I deeply regret making her uncomfortable and apologized profusely for having done so (and I am only putting one of those photos on here again, at the risk of offending her once more, because I think she is wearing makeup in it, and no matter what she says I still think that she looks great).
        Yet I am not going to write about having visited her in the hospital or at home in the past few days after her husband underwent surgery, as much as this was a major event in my week, because she was understandably not wearing any makeup at these times. Also because those visits were not things I did for the purposes of writing about them. They were something I did strictly because we are friends, and that’s what friends do.
        Nor am I going to write about the great evening I spent visiting my niece at college last Friday night. All I will say is that I was there from 5 to 11 p.m. and it occurred to me afterwards that since she was born 21 years ago I had never spent a single hour alone with her, let alone six of them. Too often that happens with relatives because there are always other family members around. There’s no good substitute for alone time, though. This was a great bonding experience, and if you haven’t ever done it with your own nieces and nephews, or perhaps even your own children lately, I heartily recommend it.
        I also feel a little bad because I put a photo of my niece on here last week, even though I wasn’t sure she’d like that. She had seemed reluctant every time I tried to snap her the previous weekend, then relented on condition that the pictures not appear on my blog. I wanted to show her even so because I was writing about her, and because she’s a beautiful girl, so I simply chose to use the photo she’d selected as her profile picture on Facebook, thinking that this was one she liked and was already showing to the world.
        I still worry that she might have since seen the photo on that blog, or will see this one, and feel that it was an invasion of her privacy. I certainly hope not.
        As for all this taking of photos, I must admit that I’m becoming an incredible nuisance to my own family because I whip out the camera almost constantly now, in an effort to document almost everything we do on film, just in case I later choose to write about it.
        No, I am not trying to imitate the Kardashians, whose reality show Keeping Up With the Kardashians I have never seen and with whom I have no desire to keep up. Rather, I do it for the purposes of having something with which to illustrate what I later will write. Although, given my camera skills, many of my pictures are worth only about, say, 10 or 15 words give or take, I do think you, my readers (whomever you may be) want to see what I’m talking about.
        In part, my newfound shutterbug habit is also a subtle way of reminding everyone periodically that I’m not just some run-of-the-mill (or run-of-the-mall) nice Jewish mom. I’m also a weekly blogger, and anything they do or say within earshot of me may later turn up online and incriminate them (or at the very least prove mildly embarrassing).
        I both fear and occasionally fantasize that people eventually will start behaving so impeccably around me that I’ll have nothing to report about them other than that they’re nice. Then again, no one I know really wants me documenting their every move in print. This is not a reality show, it’s real life -- theirs.
        In terms of the embarrassment factor, I probably err wildly on the side of candor. This is in part because I don’t think it’s worth writing about almost anything if you’re not going to be honest, and also because I don’t feel great embarrassment about most of the things I reveal, since I sense that you and I are total strangers who will never meet. (Or are you people whom I know well, but who will never mention reading this to me?)
        It’s also because as a former newspaper reporter, I long ago came to the firm conclusion that we all are subject to the most embarrassing experiences in life, from bouts of gastric distress to saying unspeakably horrid things to the people we love most. And barring that you commit any grave crimes or unethical acts, like murder or adultery, it would be hard to truly shock almost anyone by divulging most human behavior.
        There is also some real value, I believe, in talking about troubling things that we all undergo, and letting other people out there who probably also have experienced those things know they are not abnormal, are not alone, and have nothing to be ashamed of.
        But I also realize that I have no real right to write about the people around me -- whether they be my family members or people I briefly encounter at an event -- let alone to publish photographs of them. (Newspapers and other media have regulations about this and tend to require written releases from people before exhibiting them in print. To my knowledge, blogs are unregulated and, as unethical as it may seem, a free-for-all.)
        If I were truly nice, I would never use photos of anyone without prior approval, even so. Also, maybe, if I were really that nice I would play it safe from now on and not say anything here about anyone else I know beyond the fact that they are very nice. (Although then, of course, I would know exactly who my readers were: no one.)
        I asked my son, Aidan, today if he considered the people I know fair game for my blog.
        “No, I don’t,” he replied flatly. He didn’t think I should write about any of them (although he’s given me almost blanket permission to write about him however I see fit). “It’s inappropriate,” he said, particularly if I have anything remotely unpleasant to say.
        Then he went on to elaborate. “It’s my stance as a journalist that I would never write anything negative about anyone unless I was on staff at a publication, and it was my job to do it.” If he were a critic of some kind, for example, then he might be obliged to be harsh sometimes. And even then, he’d want to explain to the person he was writing about that it was his job and not everything he had to say would necessarily be positive.
        “I’m also from the school of thought that ‘if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all,’ ” he observed.
        That was something that my late mother, who was very nice, often used to say to me, so I guess I’m from that school, too.
        Despite having occasional moments of angst or crabbiness, I think Aidan sincerely embraces that concept, which is one reason that, although he writes weekly about jazz, he has little desire to actually become a music critic.
        I also think he’s feeling that way now in part because someone he knows said something very unpleasant to him the other night -- that this fellow and a mutual acquaintance often talk about Aidan, which sounded kind of ominous, not nice. We then talked about how awful it is for someone to say that, and how paranoid it can make you feel, and that the only thing along those lines that it’s socially acceptable to say to someone is, “We were just talking about you,” since the implication is that they were saying something reasonably nice.
        And I hope my repeating that here wasn’t a gross invasion of my son’s privacy.
        So, let’s see. I’ve been writing for most of the day now, other than for a few brief breaks I took to chat with my son, berate my husband, check my email, and chat with my good friend Stacey about our friend Catherine’s upcoming sixtieth birthday party. (Do you mind that I mentioned you, Stacey? How intrusive is it that I included the photo of us at right? And Catherine, you don’t look a day over 45. Do you mind that I mentioned your age?)
        I’m not mocking anyone. I simply have gotten to the point where I’m afraid to write about anyone for fear of antagonizing them. The problem is that this is a personal blog – I don’t address world issues, like the swap of long-imprisoned Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners; I write about my own life. And there is nothing interesting to say if I don’t weave in accounts of my interactions with others, although those people may not welcome having anything at all about their lives revealed online.
        I don’t want to risk alienating everyone I know in the interests of having fodder for my weekly ramblings. Nor am I convinced it’s OK to write about people I don’t know well (other than celebrities like Hugh Jackman, whom I amazingly haven’t mentioned yet) just because I assume they’ll never know because they’ll probably never read it.
        Take, for example, the group of women I met last weekend at a private elementary school reunion of my husband’s that he dragged, er, invited  me to. Are they fair game?
        For some reason, he seemed eager to have me accompany him to this event, although I still contend that reunions are meant strictly for the alumni of the school in question and are likely to be torture for all significant others, especially if they are less than gregarious, like me. I also must admit that, as a product and huge proponent of public schools, I had personal reservations about mingling with former students from what I considered to be a rather elitist institution, even 55 years after they’d graduated.
        But along with being reluctant to go, I was also reluctant to disappoint my husband. Besides, the reunion was right in our town and he assured me it would only be for lunch.
        Only five people from his class, all women, showed up for what was not exactly a major milestone, their 55th anniversary of finishing sixth grade. As I expected, all five appeared to be well-heeled WASPs. All were also 11 years my senior, like my husband. And I felt a little uncomfortable about that because I’m convinced that most women harbor some resentment toward much younger women who marry their contemporaries. (Not that the decade-plus between us exactly makes me the Jewish Anna Nicole Smith.)
        On some level, it’s a little like the question a non-Jewish friend asked me over the weekend: Do Jewish women resent Gentile women who marry Jewish men, much in the same way that black women may be inclined to resent white women who marry black men? Yes, I said, because it’s hard not to take it as something of a personal affront.  (“Why does he prefer one of them? And isn’t that, on some level, a rejection of me?”)
        One of the women at the reunion made an actual overt (albeit subtle) comment about my age. Yet all were accomplished in some way and exceedingly cordial to me, and I began to feel enormous guilt for having been so oppositional… until the slide show after lunch began, and I had to sit for nearly two hours viewing hundreds of decades-old childhood photos of school plays and class activities shot before I was born, featuring people I didn’t know. (My husband appeared in only three toward the very end, and by that point I was wavering between boiling over and falling asleep sitting up.)
        By the time it was over it was late afternoon, the sun was all but gone, and I was livid at my husband for having pressured me into coming, even though I knew it wasn’t his fault that it had lasted so long, and I sensed that I’d managed to put a major damper on his enjoyment, since he’d continually turned around throughout the presentation to see if I was exasperated, which I clearly was.
        So, never mind whether it’s fair for me to make my husband out to be a dolt (considering that his only real crimes here were being a little obtuse and wanting my company). Is it fair game for me to post pictures of those women, both at age 11 and age 67, since they are not likely to ever view my blog, which has little to offer them? (Then again, that nut job who sullied my guestbook last week was neither female nor Jewish, I can only hope, yet that did nothing to discourage him from logging on.)
        Probably not. Then again, my husband persuaded me to join him there mostly by arguing that he needed me to take photographs. (That’s the reason I don’t appear in any of them, along with the fact that I didn’t belong in any of them or at the event at all!) And they are the only photos I shot all week. So, like it or not, ladies, there you are!
        I’m hoping that I’ve blabbered on enough by now to stop soon. I’m also hoping that I’ve managed to write this entire blog without offending anyone. And I am not being sarcastic, as much as anyone might think I am. I don’t want to insult anyone. That’s why I was reluctant to write this week, and why I’m wondering if I should continue writing this blog at all.
        Then again, I just stopped briefly to watchThe NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams. And the final story on it reminded me why I think it’s worthwhile to do this sort of thing, and to candidly divulge some of the not-so-nice experiences that befall me, even at the risk of compromising the feelings of others and my relationships with them.
        The story was about a 10-year-old girl named Brooke in Minnesota who’d been feeling ashamed about a terrible secret she harbored. Then one day her teacher read a book to her class about a family living in their car, and suddenly she got up the courage to tell the teacher and her friends that her own family had been living in a tent in a field.
        “I thought I was the only one who had to go through this, but then I learned there’s other people, too,” she explained to the reporter.
        And when her friends accepted her despite it all, this girl learned another lesson. “It doesn’t matter where you live or what you do or what you wear or what you look like. It’s always [what’s] on the inside that matters."
        I don’t live in a car. I don’t live in a tent. But I know what it is to feel shame. Ashamed of myself, that is.
        Maybe if I keep writing this, I’ll learn how to put things that simply and eloquently.
        Or maybe, at the very least, I’ll eventually learn how to write about my life and my complex relationships with others without offending anyone. Now wouldn’t that be nice?

A Word From the Weiss

        With the Jewish New Year upon us, I’ve been thinking a whole lot lately, not just about life’s little dilemmas --  like whether it would be better to serve brisket or chicken to my holiday guests -- but big ones, like how I could lead a better, more satisfying life.
       

So I was more than a little interested when one of my favorite TV shows, CBS’s Sunday Morning, led off two weekends ago with a segment on the subject of pleasure.
       

It went on to quote Gregory Berns, an Emory University neuroeconomist (whatever that might be), who noted that in surveys he had conducted, participants’ chief sources of pleasure focused on the three basic human needs – sleep, food and sex (yes, in roughly that order).
       

I was not at all surprised when he specified that these participants consisted entirely of college undergraduates, because I knew that they couldn’t be grown women. For one thing, once you become a mother, sleep becomes more of a daily struggle than a source of delight. For another, he neglected to include any of the three top pleasures that mature women know in life: shopping (for anything other than what you can find in a supermarket); having a great new piece of gossip to share (however sincerely during the High Holy Days you may swear off the sin of spreading it); and discovering that you were right in some way, and your spouse, mother or similar significant other was wrong.
       

Of course, being a mother, I know of an even higher level of potential satisfaction, which involves giving some sort of pleasure to others. (This may relate to food, but it has nothing to do with sleep or sex, because by “others” I mostly mean my children.)
        

My son was unavailable, but my daughter Allegra and her boyfriend Stevo were eager to join us. As I have reported, Stevo, a talented musician and aspiring audio engineer, recently landed a fabulous job at a recording studio in L.A., and he was leaving last Wednesday. Allegra, who has been seeing him for about two years, was dreading his departure, but making the most of his continued presence in NYC and eager for a special night out.
       

You might wonder why they’d want to share even a second of their limited time left together with us. The fact is, they knew we’d take them somewhere nice. Besides, they had already enjoyed their own special night out together only a few days earlier, when they had gone to see Relatively Speaking, a new production featuring one-act plays by Ethan Coen, Elaine May, and Woody Allen, which had just begun previews on Broadway.
       

I wanted three seats because I felt a little guilty taking Allegra out for a special evening and excluding my son Aidan. Moreover, Aidan is an aspiring screenwriter and playwright, not to mention a lifelong, dyed-in-the-wool Woody Allen devotee. So if any one of us should have been getting to see a new play he’d written, it was probably him.
       

It was several hours before he responded. “I don’t think I can make it,” he wrote, explaining that he had to meet with someone on Sunday. My heart plummeted. But then he thought better of it and offered to rearrange his schedule. “I’ll work it out,” he said.
       

To my distress, I realized that his joining us would end up being less of a pleasure for him than just an added pressure. I felt like the mother of a beleaguered beast of burden, and sensed that I had just purchased that proverbial straw destined to break the camel’s back. “Liz would love the ticket,” I repeated, regretfully. But he remained determined to come.
       

Pleasure takes many forms, and we all have our personal sources of satisfaction, from horror movies and hot peppers (deemed a form of “benign masochism” by another professor on that CBS show) to chocolate (arguably also classifiable as a human need).
       

Then there are the people who are obsessed with celebrities and their personal lives (although, according to yet another expert on that show, people would pay less for a sweater that had once belonged to George Clooney if they were told that they could never resell it or brag about it, and even less if they were told that it had been washed thoroughly, since, as the expert’s wife put it, “you’ve washed away the Clooney cooties”).
       

Cooties or not, my husband would much prefer to have a sweater once owned by Olivia Wilde (at left) or Kyra Sedgwick. But over the summer, he had discovered a very different source of pleasure that had nothing to do with sleep, sex or celebrities. He had developed a passion for Pinkberry.
       

We didn’t want to spoil our dinner out at Bar Boulud, the restaurant I’d reserved near Lincoln Center, though. So we resolved to go there for dessert later that night.
       

When we arrived at dinner, we discovered that Allegra and Stevo were bristling with excitement about our evening out. They’d been looking forward to it all week, she said, and both had dressed up accordingly. Although the restaurant proved to be a bit pricier than I had anticipated, our last dinner with Stevo was a major occasion, however bittersweet, and we went all out, sharing a bottle of wine, along with escargots and pâté.
       

Unfortunately, the entrées proved to be so modest in size (despite the exorbitant prices) that we decided to also spring for three of the gorgeous, decadent desserts that had been passing us by, including one called Tanin (an intense dark chocolate tart with cocoa mousse and vanilla ice cream), a Royal Coupe Glacée (lemon verbena-white chocolate Chantilly with red currant compote and chartreuse peaches en gelée) and a caramel and chocolate-covered apricot tart with apricot-hazelnut ice cream.
       

Then we made our way to the concert, held in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater, where the air was charged with anticipation. There’s something invigorating, I must say, about opening-night performances, as well as events featuring a multicultural crowd, rather than the ho-hum, homogeneous gatherings we tend to frequent back home in Connecticut.
       

Then there are the issues of coolness and comportment. When we go to a concert, we might be motivated to tap our toes energetically, or even keep the beat discreetly with our fingertips on our knees. But the stylish woman sitting next to me, sporting a mane of heavily beaded cornrows, saw fit to cry out after every single solo, erupting with a loud, “Sing it, brother!” or simply, “Yeah!”
       

It reminded me of what happened when our temple used to have an annual exchange with an African Methodist Episcopal church in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. Members of the church kept up a loud running commentary throughout services, constantly reacting to the minister’s utterances with ardent cries of “Uh-huh!” “Amen!” and “Praise Jesus!” And when they came to visit, they brought their vociferous worship habits with them. How stodgy we felt by comparison, sitting in inhibited silence. After all, the only time we dare show the slightest enthusiasm during temple services is when we dare to break into applause during the High Holy Days to acknowledge a shofar blower’s particularly heroic efforts.
       

The thing that moved me most, however, was something that took place on the stage itself. Jazz at Lincoln Center aims not only to generate a wider audience for jazz music, but also to preserve its endangered traditions. With that in mind, the headliners that night consisted of two esteemed elder statesmen of the jazz world, saxophonist Jimmy Heath, who turns 85 this month, and singer and lyricist Jon Hendricks, a co-founder of the group Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, who was introduced as “the James Joyce of jive!”
       

Joining him were stellar recording artist Dianne Reeves, the closest thing to Ella Fitzgerald alive today, the incomparably inventive Bobby McFerrin, and rising jazz star Sachal Vasandani, “a young man who’s relatively new on the scene – which ain’t me!” Hendricks howled. But he was also accompanied by his abundantly talented daughters Aria and Michele, two of his seven offspring. (“We have children like other people have mice,” Hendricks quipped. “We have children to rent!”)
       

And at the close of the first act, after an electrifying grand finale, Aria ran to the front of the stage, turned her back to the audience and dropped to the floor, kowtowing to her father in devoted reverence. What parent isn’t secretly dying to experience something like that?
        It was an image that would soon come back to haunt me.
       

Of course she was happy for him. And we were thrilled for his folks. But coinciding with Stevo’s imminent departure, the timing was, let’s just say, less than ideal. And if you don’t understand why it was painful for her to hear, then let’s just say it’s a girl thing.
       

The next day turned out to be unseasonably warm, so we decided to ditch our plans to visit a museum and meet Allegra and Stevo at a street fair instead. En route, walking through midtown’s wholesale district, my husband stopped into a schlocky shop to buy a T-shirt. While he disappeared upstairs with the owner, I noticed that the place stocked men’s underwear and socks so cheap that, as they say, they were practically giving it away. Hadn’t Aidan complained that he would have no time to do his laundry? Perhaps I could make up for having diverted him from this task by buying him some staples. So I picked up a three-pack of boxer shorts and a 12-pack of socks, all for a mere 10 bucks. Surely he’d appreciate this when he woke up to clean undergarments instead of having to wear dirty ones in the morning.
       

After our outing, the kids walked us back to our hotel to collect our luggage before we went to the play. That’s when we realized it was our last chance for that Pinkberry. All four of us ordered cups brimming with our flavors and toppings of choice, which were so delicious that I remarked to the salesgirl that I wished I could bring some home with us. She volunteered that they had free ice packs for this purpose. That’s when I got an idea.
       

I explained as best I could, while panting and foraging in my purse for the tickets. I told him about meeting his sister, stopping for Pinkberry and getting stuck in gridlock.
       

“No,” he said sternly, seizing the cup. “I’ll just eat it.”
       

“You’ve known me my whole life,” he said. “Haven’t you figured out by now that I don’t like surprises?” What he liked even less, he said, was having to feign gratitude for nice things people did for him that he hadn’t wanted in the first place.
       

“What else have you got there?” he asked suspiciously.
       

 out a long sigh that sounded like a kettle reaching the boiling point. "Mom?" he seethed.
       

        
        I’m happy to report that the plays – at least the third one, which Woody Allen wrote – were so uproariously funny that we eventually found ourselves howling with laughter, despite the family drama that had just unfolded.
        I’m even happier to report that Aidan called soon after that day to apologize profusely.
        “I'm so sorry," he said sincerely. "I’ve really been beating myself up about it. I was just stressed out, and you didn’t deserve it.”
        I was quick to apologize, too. Although I’d meant well in each of my actions, as you can tell from this sorry tale, he clearly felt that I was not respecting his boundaries. Or treating him like the adult that he is. And that is obviously not a good thing.
        Still, I admitted that I’d been extremely disappointed about the day and deeply hurt.
        The fact is that I’d been heartbroken about his behavior, but mostly because it wasn’t like him at all. I’m so proud of him. He’s a great young man. He’s a great son. We rarely fight, and ordinarily he'd never do anything to deliberately hurt me.
        So for him to have reached the point where he lashed out at the one person on earth who loved him most, however annoying and excessively helpful she might be – for, honestly, who will ever love us as much as our own mothers? – meant that he was in serious pain, or at least definitely doing much too much.
        He explained that when I do these things that are meant to help him, he feels like I'm intimating that he can’t take care of himself (which is clearly not what I intended to do and clearly not the case). He told me that he was feeling much better, though, and that he had just been stretched to the breaking point and incredibly overtired that day.
        I was relieved to hear this, although it was even more gratifying to hear something else.
        “You’ve been the most supportive mother,” he said. Which was not quite having him kowtow publically onstage (not that I’d actually ever really want that), but was still music to my motherly ears.
        Being a nice Jewish mom, all I want is for my children to be happy. That’s what would give me more pleasure than anything else there is. But as I keep learning each week, just as money can’t buy happiness, mothers can’t buy it, either.
        I'm not quite ready to give up, but I’m thinking of starting my own support group: Mothers Who Do Too Much for Their Children and the Children Who Love Them Anyway (But Would Rather Buy Their Own Underwear).
        Meanwhile, from now on I’ll consult my kids before buying them tickets, ice cream, or almost anything else. Also, next time I'm going to cut my losses and go for Hugh Jackman instead of jazz. Or maybe I'll just try to buy one of his old sweaters on eBay. I must confess that I'd just about die to have almost anything of Hugh's in any hue. But please, please, whatever you do, don’t wash the cooties off.