When I asked the priest to pray for Beth's mother and he said, "What's her name?" I answered, "Mrs. O'Connor."
Her first name, Mary, didn't come to me until hours later because, it's "my mother" that Beth always calls her.
"My mother's on the other line. Can I call you back?"
"My mother and father are here. My mother's staying a few days. "
"The twins are with my mother."
Read MoreEvery afternoon she races in from school, raids the refrigerator, then heads for the piano.
"So how was your day?" I shout over Jimmy crack corn and I don't care.
"Fine," she answers, distracted, immediately lost in the notes of a song she has been drumming on her desk and rehearsing in her head throughout the day.
Read MoreShe moved out the way she was born, in the midst of a crisis that overshadowed her. So her leaving was hardly noticed. She left home amid, "What's the prognosis on Gram?" and phone calls and tears.
She slipped into the world pretty much the same way. Then it was her other grandmother who was fighting for her life. She was born quickly, as if she knew there were other things to be done. We have pictures of her older brother and younger sister at their births. But there is not a single photograph of her.
Read MoreWhen my kids were little, I used to notice these things: The way the sky in winter looks as if you could skate on it; the way the evergreens, laden with snow, look like they belong next to a gingerbread house; the way the world looks when the snow stops and the sun comes out and everything seems fresh and newborn…
Read MoreThere were two of them, one about 9, the other 11 or 12. Brothers seeing a baseball game. They sat in front of us, beside their parents in a front row. They were nasty kids, poking at each other, spilling their drinks, yelling insults at the players, throwing their candy, getting ice cream all over the place.
When they got their Cokes, they put them on the wall in front of them. An usher came along and told them food wasn't allowed there. The 9-year-old put his Coke right back where he had it seconds after the usher walked away. His parents looked and said nothing. When the usher returned and told the kid once again to move his Coke, his mother just rolled her eyes.
Read MoreIt was a small ad that ran in the theater section of the New York Times last Thursday. The graphics were simple; nothing clever stood out. Even the words were old, the promotion a cliche: "Cyrano. The Musical. The Greatest Love Of All." And yet it has stuck with me, nagged at me. “The Greatest Love of All?” Most everyone knows the story of Cyrano de Bergerac, a love-struck young man who pens eloquent, romantic letters to the woman he loves, only in another man's name. Because he is ugly, Cyrano fears rejection. Because he doesn't trust in the power of love, Cyrano hides his identity. And so he writes love letters for a handsome man who uses his words and emotions to woe Roxanne.
Read MoreNEW YORK - I still call her "my baby," and she puts up with this and with me, with an understanding that goes beyond her 16 1/2 years. She allows me this indulgence, this solitary pretense, though we both know she isn't a baby anymore.
The knowledge for her is old. But for me, it's new. I have seen her through such myopic eyes. Even dressed up for a formal dance, she has seemed to me just a little girl pretending. All of the outward signs - her learning to drive, her staunch independence, the bedroom door closed while she talks on the phone for hours, the calls from boys, the flowers, the whispers, the cogent arguments about right and wrong, good and bad, the talks about college, about careers, about the rest of her life - should have alerted me to the truth.
Read MoreYou don't have to come to New York to see "Blood Brothers," the hit London musical about twins separated at birth, one raised with money, one raised without. The story's an old, familiar one. It has been playing for centuries in cities and towns all over the world. The chasm between the haves and the have nots has always been the Great Divide.
And the chasm is getting wider.
Read MoreThe 21-year-old keeps appearing at my office door in clothes I know I threw away two decades ago.
"What do you think, Mom? Don't you just love this outfit?"
This "outfit," the one she's modeling now, is the worst of the lot. It's a black-and-white polka-dot-one-piece, who-knows-what-to-call it.
"It's three different fashions in one," she explains. "It's a bell-bottom jumpsuit with an empire waist and a halter-top front. Remember those halter tops you used to wear?"
Read MoreIt is an idea born of frustration, holding parents criminally accountable for their children's violent actions. But Mayor Ray Flynn, fed up with violence, as are we all, is advocating just that: punishing parents who fail to keep guns out of their children's hands.
Last week he ordered Boston Police Commissioner Mickey Roache to convene a task force to draft legislation that would penalize parents whose children carry guns. Should the plan win final approval, it would affect only those living within city limits.
Read MoreShe is upstairs cleaning her room, the 21-year-old. The new college graduate is out, out, damn spotting childhood and adolescence to make way for the working woman she has become.
Necessity has forced her to do this. She can't fit what she brought home, what she has collected in the past four years, in a room that is a storehouse for her first 17.
Read MoreAh, for the days of arranged marriages.
That's what a friend of mine wished for about 10 years ago. He was dead serious. His parents had a great marriage, and it had been arranged. His aunts and uncles had been married 40, 50, even 60 years, and all their marriages had been arranged.
Read MoreI am sitting in the car, in the passenger seat. My daughter, the 16-year-old, is behind the wheel. She is learning to drive, and I am teaching her, telling her when to speed up, to slow down, to move a little to the left, to be careful of the ice on the road.
I hardly breathe while she drives. I keep my foot poised on an invisible brake. I see a child next to me, a little girl far too young to be driving a car.
My hands are fists as we travel down Dedham Street.
Read MoreIt's the first capitulation. Totally understandable. Maybe even warranted. But it's a surrender, nonetheless, of ideals and perhaps even goals.
President-elect Bill Clinton has decided to send his only child, Chelsea, to private school. Who can blame him? Who, in his position, wouldn't do the same? He is the president. She is his daughter. Why shouldn't she have the best?
Read MoreI phoned her the other day to ask how her pregnancy is coming along. "I'll be glad when it's over," she said in a weary voice. "I'm a nervous wreck…
Read MoreAh, yes, the good old days. Dad worked 10, 12, 14 hours, came home, sat down, read the paper, ate dinner, took out the rubbish, shoveled snow in the winter, cut the grass in the summer, and gave the final word in all important decisions.
Your father will be home in 10 minutes. I want you to put your books away, now.
You better watch your step, young man. Don't let your father catch you talking like that.
How different things are now. The monarchy is dead. Democracy rules. Father is no longer a figurehead. Fathers father.
Read More"All we do is argue," the woman tells me over a cup of coffee. Her 16-year-old daughter has just stormed out the front door ("I'm going for a walk.") because her mother suggested in front of "company" that she might want to shut off the TV and go upstairs and clean her room.
"I didn't yell at her," the mother says. "I was simply making a suggestion.
"My daughter and I are like oil and water these days. I tell myself to be calm and patient and understanding. I try to remember how I felt when I was her age. I know I was a slob, too. But it isn't just her room we fight about. It's everything. She looks at me like I'm a fly on her dinner plate. She sighs every time I try to talk to her. She shuts herself in her room and talks on the phone for hours, and I can hear her up there laughing and giggling and having a great time. Then she hangs up and comes downstairs and thumps around here like she's in prison and I'm the guard.
Read MoreThere's this little girl, just 13 months old. Her birthday was Valentine's Day, her father tells the woman next to him. She is toddling around the doctor's waiting room totally unconcerned that everyone else is sitting. She races to the TV, stares at it for a minute, then turns away. She picks up a book she finds on a chair, looks at it, then puts it down. She approaches a stranger, meets the stranger's eyes, grins, then runs back to her father who hasn't for a second taken his eyes off her.
She is a tiny thing, a baby, still bald, the blond fuzz on her head barely visible. She wears pink pants and a teal green sweater and a grin that shows off her teeth. Her mother is in the doctor's office because within weeks she will be having another baby. But it's clear the father is totally enthralled with this one.
Read MoreI embarrassed her the other evening. I didn't mean to. The problem with me is that I look at her and see a child, a little girl, although she is 15 now and hardly a little girl at all.
I walk into a restaurant and there she is, somewhere I don't expect her to be and I give her the third-degree. I say she should have phoned and told me where she was going. I say I don't want her in a car with a driver I don't know. I overreact. I behave like my mother.
Read MoreShe is 17 and beautiful, not just on the outside, with her dark hair and Snow White complexion and her perfect teeth, which never needed braces; but on the inside where it counts.
She has always been beautiful: interested in other people, careful about their feelings, warm, considerate, a smiling, sweet, loving, gentle, wonderful girl.
Read More
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