Uncategorized

Because of the pandemic, like a lot of people, we have been shut in here since mid-March. I wonder what people are doing all day? People who have children, how do they cope? I try to not look at the big picture too much. What I mean is that in the beginning I kept thinking (and saying) We are dying, our country is bleeding to death with no leadership, how long will this thing go on–giving myself a huge attack of esophageal reflux…my body’s cry for help. However: since last October I’ve been practicing Transcendental Meditation which I’ve come rely on. My stomach is OK now. But I have to be careful, what I choose to do and think about. Today we got all wrapped up in masks and gloves and went to the hardware store in Bloomsburg, PA. Peter needed a rake and it was fun to go out in our van. Now Peter is out in his workshop in the barn, inspecting a new piece of equipment he bought. What a joyous mood he’s in!!!!! In the photo I included  father and son–our son Michael–with the barn in the background.

At the end of our road one of our neighbors keeps a dairy farm.

When we moved here, my husband Peter said that he had never seen cleaner cows. I had no reference point for this. I had never been close to a cow to notice.

In 2002 I was working for large mental health facility in a town called Nanticoke. I was a resident counselor in a group home for adults, working on the overnight shift. In the mornings I’d drive home using the back roads, seeing along the way some farms so filthy that they seemed swallowed up in mud. And, of course, the cows were standing in mud half way up their legs. Impossible to think that they gave clean milk!

This neighbor of ours who keeps the dairy farm is magnificent. She is the strongest woman I’ve ever seen, very serious, and runs her farm immaculately. I love to watch her driving her tractor around the house and barn; the muscles in her arms bulge with strength. I think that at the end of each day, she brings in her cows and gives them each a bath.

Dedicated to Michael Cook. Get well soon Mike!! I have always admired your early and intense interest in Pittsburgh’s transportation system.

My favorite Pittsburgh bus? The 61B. After school, if I didn’t want to go straight home, I’d take the 61B from Squirrel Hill to Swissvale, after hanging out with my cousin Maxine Cohen Marcus, my boyfriend Sam, and other friends.

A Family Business/1

From the age of 2 to 5 Michael was in full time day care and I had a full time job. Peter had been laid off from the Franklin Mint and with his very generous severance package, decided to start his own sculptural and mold-making business. There was an old garage on our property that he turned into a work studio.

At 2 Michael was read for day care. He craved movement and stimulation. I still didn’t know how brilliant he was and how he needed to go out into the world. I hated the whole arrangement.

So there were these three years where I was sure that Michael would be scarred for life.   He seemed OK; it was I that was in a terrible state. The famous T. Berry Brazelton’s book helped me through this. He said that very young children tolerate day care but is was the young parents who suffered.

The year that Michael turned five and was headed for kindergarten, the pressures on me loosened, and life became fun again.

“I’m Glad You’re Not One Of Those Silly Mothers.”

I had a model for being a mother; one of my mother’s sisters, my aunt, raised her two children in a realistic, no-nonsense way. She didn’t fuss over dumb stuff; however she was very much “there,” in their corners. She was tough but tender when it counted.

When I learned I was pregnant, Peter and I went for a walk in a nature preserve. It was on that walk that I told him how I wanted to be as a parent. I wanted to be somewhat like my aunt Maxine.

As early as three weeks old, Michael let me know who he was going to be. He never really slept well until he was in a crib in a room with the door closed. Not for us, all that clinging and the whole family in one bed. The other women I knew used to brag about those lovely times with their new babies. So of course I thought Michael would grow up to be a psychopath with no feelings. But something else stirred within. Wasn’t I like that, needing privacy,  and wasn’t Peter?

This is hard to describe. Of course I held him, cuddled him. But sometimes when he’d be laying on his back in his crib, I placed my hand, gently but firmly, on his stomach. I knew that he liked that quiet touch.

When did Michael say those words to me, about not being a silly mother? When it was “picture day” at school and all the parents fussed over their children’s appearance. Usually I forgot it was picture day and in a photo from grade school Michael’s hair is sticking up and he’s wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt.

However, if I thought that Michael was being treated unfairly in school, I was in the principal’s or the school counselor’s office, demanding to be seen. I think, that when Michael graduated from high school, everybody in the Rose Tree Media school district breathed a sigh of relief. They didn’t have to deal with Mrs. Mastroianni any more!!!

 

Michael, Agnes of God, and The Miracle Worker/3

When Michael was a senior in high school the director of Barnstormers decided to stage The Miracle Worker, the story of Helen Keller. And for the first time, Michael was going to be on stage. He had the part of James Keller, Helen’s older brother.

This is going to be a short entry. Michael’s part was not big but he did appear in several emotional scenes; in one he had a comical line and he delivered it perfectly. It was, as usual, overwhelming for us.

After the play was over the director came to me and looked at me in this starry-eyed way, saying “Wasn’t he wonderful?!” We just stared at each other.

Anybody who is reading these stories could maybe feel–“Isn’t this all a bit much?” Yes, it probably is but as Michael’s pediatrician told me…”You’ve got a tiger by the tail.”

Michael, Agnes of God, and The Miracle Worker/2

I want to start this memoir by saying that I always had incredibly high standards for myself as a mother. I knew very well the kind of mother I wanted to be and–thank God–I got my chance with Michael.

Barnstormers was putting on the play, Agnes of God, which was turned into a movie. As usual, Michael was not on stage but had taken over all of the lighting of this production.

The drive to Barnstormers was awkward and long; once you got there you had to either drive all the way home again after a brief amount of time and then go back, or hang around the theater, trying to find something to do while Michael rehearsed. There was no shopping mall, library, bookstore in the whole area. Nevertheless, one night I decided to stay in the area of Barnstormers and wait.

This is where my high standards came into play. Once my son was inside the theater I waited in my car, then very quietly crept into the theater, hid myself in a shadowed area, and watched and listened. I normally would never do this…spying on Michael. But I had this one chance which probably wouldn’t come again…what parent wouldn’t to see what went on with her son?

What I saw made me spellbound and to this day I can’t really describe it. Agnes of God is a serious play with many emotional tones and moods; the lighting has to reflect that. Michael couldn’t see me–he was high up in a gallery–so I could watch him making subtle changes in his lighting throughout the rehearsal. He had some instruction from somebody but in Agnes of God he was on his own, creating his own mood-changing light patterns and colors. It was so beautiful, so adult and professional that I couldn’t breathe. I still get choked with emotion about that night.

And when we went to see the production of the play I just cried and cried. P understood how I felt, thank God. He was overwhelmed, too.

 

Theater,  Agnes of God, and The Miracle Worker/1

When Michael entered ninth grade, his first year of high school, he fell in love with the theater. He joined the student theater group and from ninth grade on, we attended every play he was involved in. It’s interesting to note that he was never on the stage during this time; he was the prop man, arranger of lighting, prompter in case somebody forgot his lines. Life got kind of hectic around our house when Michael was helping to produce a play; lots of late nights, having to get homework done, driving him back and forth to rehearsals. But P and I cooperated all we could and never complained. P and I are both involved in the arts–we were then, too–and we wanted to nurture any of Michael’s dreams.

School involvement in the theater led to his participation in local theater as well. There’s a community theater near where we lived called Barnstormers;  lovers of acting and plays performed there for no money, just for the love of doing it. When Michael began going there he was the only young person involved ; all others were adults. Very heady stuff for a 16-year-old, to be accepted into the group of adults–there were even later nights of rehearsals and Michael didn’t get his drivers’ license until he turned 18 so we drove him, again, back and forth. The time he spent with the Barnstormers people and their inclusion of him became part of his coming into manhood. I sensed this; I was somewhat troubled about what could happen; but I had to let go and trust that he would be OK and emerge a more talented and mature young man.

With his  good looks, supple and strong body, phenomenal memory, bubbling personality, ability to lay his hands on any prop that was needed, his throwing himself into the whole gestalt of the theater–of course the adult actors and directors adored him. I was used to Michael and I wasn’t surprised.

End of Part 1

A Functional Family/This is Us

During Michael’s early childhood he was quiet, playing by himself a lot, creating a “town” called “Stewartville” in the basement out of Legos and little bits of other toys. He spent hours like this. Of course, I worried–that he had no playmates, didn’t play baseball out on the street, etc. My childhood had been so happy, plenty of fun, people who liked me. Michael was probably miserable, right?

In my graduate school years I had a psychology class and we talked about coming of age. I learned that boys, between the ages of 9 – 14, show beginning signs of adolescent behaviors, become more curious about the world around them. I always tell people who ask me about my wonderful, accomplished son that on the exact date that Michael turned 9, he was a young adult or at least a teenager. He volunteered to work for the Democrats in Media, PA…with his father’s encouragement. In other major ways, he was evolving.

This was the start of what I call the “ten years.” Ten isn’t exactly correct, it was more like nine, that we began to have one of the most joyous times in our lives. I’m going to brag now. Most families can look back on a period of time–a vacation, etc.–when all was well and everybody had fun and got along well. Our lives were like that only they stayed that way for  almost a decade. Our weekends were hilarious, full of fun and lots of movies and junk food but most important–we began to watch the movies we loved and take out certain words and phrases. We ended up with a “lexicon” of at least fifty secret words and phrases that we dropped into the conversation, causing us to laugh long and sometimes almost hysterically. It was obvious at this point that Michael was brilliant with an IQ of at least 180; I realized, in retrospect, that his first-class mind was the reason for his quiet childhood. He was bored and waiting to grow up.

Were we intellectual snobs? Yeah, in a way, because if anybody visited us we couldn’t hold back from dropping one or two of “our secret words” into the conversation. We were Shakespeare-lovers, had watched Kenneth Branagh’s film versions of Much Ado About Nothing and Henry V and took some of our phrases from them. In restaurants we used to laugh so hard that people noticed us but for once I didn’t care.

So everything was fun for ten years. When I took Michael shopping for school clothes I stayed on the perimeter of the boys’ sections and let him pick out his own clothes.

Finally, we used to call ourselves a “functional family.” We loved being together; if one of us needed solitude and quiet, the two others would respect that and go away and have some fun doing something else.

A Hungry Woman Gets Fed

For better or worse I have the ability to push the past behind me and throw myself into a new form of existence. When Mark, my first husband, and I read all about astrology, he told me I fitted the description of Aries, my sun sign. Headstrong. But I don’t believe in that.

Peter was very funny and jolly, Italian. Since I don’t want to write long blogs–it’s a good challenge for a writer to keep things concise–I’ll say a few words about food.

This is strictly my opinion. However, I’ll write it and hope that nobody’s offended. I always knew that Jewish people loved good food, loved going out to fine restaurants and being served quickly and skillfully. But Italians in general–AT LEAST THE ITALIANS I’VE KNOWN–adore food, worship it, express love with it. My mother-in-law hated eating in restaurants and thought her food was better than anything you could get outside her kitchen. She was both extremely graceful and humble about food. Peter learned to cook from her.

My mother-in-law made such delicious fruitcake at Christmas. During one Christmas season (not all in one day) I ate a whole one, all by myself.

The first thing I learned from Peter–eating is FUN. It was liberation, exhilaration, relaxation.

After all, it all started at a brunch.