Soar, Little Bird

I return to the theme of watching my now adult children flying on their own, triggered to write by the crazy success my daughter is currently experiencing.
In case you have not heard me shouting from the rooftops, my daughter, Zana Bayne , is getting a great deal of attention for her leather designs currently being worn (again and again!) by Lady Gaga and her dancers - on tour, on television, in the New York Times, and now on Gaga's latest video released this week!

With her success, I am asked repeatedly how she did it and how I did it, and the answers are pretty simple. She, Zana, did it by working her tail off, by having an idea and pursuing it, by treating her ideas and her work and her career as if they were important and persisting in being herself unabashedly. (This is, after all, the same person who at age 8 put a yellow post-it on our home mirror saying "be yourself".)

What did I do as a parent? I gave her the room to be herself, encouraged her creativity, answered her questions when asked, gave her a role model of a working woman confident in her own roles as professional and mom. I never pushed her toward a particular calling, but watched and nurtured what she wanted.

I believe strongly that our job as parents is to not screw up our precious little progeny. Watching Zana soar right now only strengthens that belief. The world of leather and Gaga is foreign to me; it is Zana's world, not mine, with styles I can admire without them being mine, representatives of a younger generation and our future.

Mental Illness Comes out of the Closet

Is it me, or is there more conversation going on about mental illness right now than we often see in the news and in blogs? As the child of a mentally ill parent, I find my attention is always drawn to the subject. But several high profile/high readership sources seem to be raising awareness of not only mental illness, but the stigmas surrounding it, and for that I am most supportive and grateful

The New York Times is taking the bold step of publishing a series called "Lives Restored", specifically about people coping with life and mental illness. When I read this piece in the New York Times about Marsha Linehan, a therapist and innovator in the treatment of extremely suicidal patients , she herself a sufferer of bi-polar illness, it gave me hope that mental illness might be beginning to come out of the closet.

When a friend called late at night with the horrifying news about her husband's mental illness and the nightmarish course their lives are now taking, I wished for her sake that stigma did not have to be one of the burdens she was now facing. It is hard enough to watch someone you know turn into someone you don't even recognize. Not to be able to talk openly about it through feelings of embarrassment and shame only makes it harder, more isolating and frightening.

A short TED talk highlighting the difficulties of suicide survivors - yes, those who attempt suicide and remain living - shed more light on the isolation of the severely ill. Imagine the triple whammy of being so tortured that you attempt suicide, a mixture of elation/despair/embarrassment that you failed, and then the awkwardness caused by no one knowing what to do with you, say to you.

Why write about this? Why today? Because it needs to be said, because closeting of who any of us are can only do harm, because those of us with the ability to think rationally often try to apply that same rationality to mental illness, and fail those in need the most.

Playing Games

Often we use the phrase "playing games" about psychological games, subtle manipulation through unspoken messages we send to others. As I am trying to shed game-playing as a form of communication in relationships, I am struck by the very different and important role games have played in my life.

My dad was an avid crossword puzzler, conquering the Sunday New York Times puzzle weekly until Alzheimer's stole his brain. I watched him, envied his ability and vocabulary, and inherited his love of lazing away hours on a Sunday to do nothing but engage his brain and his loved ones with the challenge of a good puzzle. One of his favorite crossword puzzle stories was about the word "yatagan", a word which is apparently used frequently and which most of us have little use for in daily conversation.

My ex-husband, too, had a huge vocabulary and a strong facility for crossword puzzles. After his traumatic brain injury, it was sobering to watch as we spent long hours playing Boggle, watching him try to form words of more than two letters and attempt - and fail - to do even the Monday puzzles.

Since living alone, I have been drawn to online Scrabble and Lexulous with friends on Facebook. While I lose more than I win, I enjoy the challenge and, frankly, the contact with others. I began to know and ultimately date one of my opponents. I have learned more about one opponent than I ever imagined, and have been able to re-connect with an old friend through the game. I have learned that there is a community of players who are "assisted" using online tools, and a community who would never consider that. When people criticize the reality of community on FB, I have to counter with the attention of my Scrabble and Lex friends, some of whom pick up the phone in concern if they have not "heard" from me in a game for a few days.

And then came today, when I was handed the letters needed to form "yatagan", my dad's favorite word. Though it did not get me as many points as another combination of letters would have, I had to play the word - for Dad and for that connection.

Kalmanize My World

There's a show at San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum of the work of Maira Kalman. As a huge fan of Kalman's, particularly after her amazing blog in the New York Times in 2009 called "And The Pursuit of Happiness", I knew that seeing this show was one of the first things on my list of things to do once I arrived in SF this past weekend. Kalman has never had a museum show before, and I was eager to see her paintings, mostly created for the purposes of book or magazine illustrations (notably for The New Yorker), en masse and in person.

The appeal of Kalman's work has a lot to do with her joie de vivre, her free associations, and her childlike observations and wonder. She is an observer of life's details and ironies, taking what she sees and putting a unique spin on her documentation of it. You get the sense that you can watch her mind at work, as she spins an idea, weaves together linked thoughts and images, and comes out on the other side with a unique world perspective. Seeing a large body of her work all together gave me a sense of a "Kalmanized" world, a world I would most definitely like to live in, and in fact do live in, if only I observe more carefully.


When asked about her work, Maira Kalman says it is what it is, that the viewer should not look for hidden meaning. An eggbeater is an eggbeater; a rubber band is a rubber band. She saw it, it caught her eye, she painted it. That's all. It's a refreshing approach, especially for people like me who tend to want to find subtexts and hidden messages where perhaps there are none. With her book, "What Pete Ate A-Z", Kalman takes a most ordinary subject, the alphabet, and turns it into a charming tale full of giggles and smiles, a story that any adult will delight in reading over and over again to an equally delighted child. I had to buy copies of this book, one for me and one for a friend who is delighting in being a grandfather, so that we could enjoy a taste of a Kalmanized world whenever necessary.

In My Next Life, Perhaps I'll be French

I was immediately attracted to this article in the Times this morning "Aging Gracefully, The French Way" http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/fashion/15French.html?ref=fashion as it speaks to a subject dear to my heart - women's attitudes toward aging, cultural norms, self-care and self-image.

On a business trip to France, I was introduced to a particular line of French skin-care products. They seemed prohibitively expensive and self-indulgent, but I had recently turned 30, had just survived melanoma, and knew that my skin could be my enemy both in terms of my health and my image. So I took the plunge, and have never looked back. Those products couldn't prevent the cancer from returning, and I have no idea if their early introduction in my life contributed to my relative lack of wrinkles, but what they did do is introduce a ritual which became a part of me, not self-indulgence but rather, self CARE.

On a lighter note and even earlier in my career, my ex-husband and I took a trip to St. Tropez to observe fashion. Prior to the trip, my worldly husband declared that the expected display of topless women in France was no big deal, after all, he had seen many breasts already in his life. Then we got to St.Tropez, and he encountered all these beautiful French women and re-thought his earlier position! Viva la France!