Well, it happened again. Twice now, in less than one month, I cried at the end of a book. The last time it was reading Amos Oz’ moving memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness.

This time, it was reading Peter Pan, which I just finished with my five year old.

I don’t usually go in for children’s literature all that much. I’m too much of a sucker for dark realism – Where the Wild Things Are – but for adults.

But I must say that Peter Pan won me over. Maybe it was because I identified so much with Wendy – the designated “adult” amongst the kids at Neverland. Wendy is always so responsible – putting the boys to bed, making sure they’re fed. It isn’t until she’s grown up and with a child of her own and Peter makes that last visit that she realizes that she can no longer fly – literally or figuratively. Her childhood is long gone and with it, her imagination and even her ability to comfort Peter when he sobs because she’s no longer part of his world.

I look at my kids sometimes – both of whom still play imaginary games with some regularity – and I wonder when the day will come that they’ll give them up. Of course, when I said this to my daughter – whose list of imaginary friends runs the gamut from the more mundane Maya and Annie to the more exotic Cherard and Zoma – she cheerfully said that she’d always be friends with them and that I shouldn’t worry. But I can see with my eight year old that the older he gets, the games become fewer and fewer.

So for those of you who are willing to engage in the occasional bout of nostalgia, I heartily recommend that you dip back into Peter Pan when you next have the chance. It won’t be long until, like Wendy watching her daughter fly off to spring clean with Peter Pan, your own kids will be the ones reading it to their children.

I’m feeling old today. And I know why.

It all began when my husband and I watched a movie we rented over the weekend entitled, In Search of a Midnight Kiss. Let’s start with the premise of said film, which is basically a boy meets girl kinda thing with two sad, lonely protagonists desperate not to spend New Year’s Eve alone, who meet through an ad in Craigs List and spend the afternoon and evening together. That’s pretty much it. But it’s been so long that I spent New Year’s Eve alone – or worried about kissing someone other than my spouse (and I don’t really worry about that too much) – that it was like taking a trip back in time even to get myself a place where I could remotely identify with the protagonists.

Or maybe I could have, if the protagonists had been cynical middle-aged divorces, recently separated and gamely looking for a night out on the town (there was one character like this in the film – in a scene that lasted maybe 15 seconds – but he was really there as fodder for our laughter and derision, and other than him, there was no one over thirty in the movie except the main character’s mother, herself getting a boob job to feel younger).

I have no problem with any of this. The movie was made by someone who’s probably barely 30 himself and I’m sure the whole thing resonates with his target audience. In fact, I actually liked the film (I’m a sucker for sad endings…or at least wistful ones). But with its indiscriminate drug and alcohol use, random hook ups and fleeting moments of intimacy, it did make me feel, well…old. Anthony Lane, in an improbably long review of this film for The New Yorker, argues that the movie is a poster child for the “Indie” romance wherein “all the inhabitants of the indie universe…are like children, playing at adult life.”

Amen, brother.

It’s kind of like how I feel when I read the “Gen Y” portions of Penelope Trunk’s insightful and entertaining blog, Brazen Careerist. I’m sure these posts connect with their intended readership, but I’m so firmly ensconced in Gen X that I no longer even bother skimming them.

Which brings us to the end of the weekend, when one of my husband’s new colleagues and his fiance stopped by our house to say hi with three friends in tow. It was around 6 p.m. on a Sunday night and they’d all just come from Paris where they’d spent the weekend – en masse – and were about to go out and “catch some dinner” before heading back to their collective crash pad. As it happened, I was making beef stew when they showed up. I was also in my pajamas since I’d taken a late afternoon run and couldn’t be bothered to get dressed for the evening: picture a sort of Target-esque red and black tartan pajama bottom with…it must be said..a black dog on the pajama top. Now to be fair, I’m not normally a beef stew/doggie pajama kinda gal. But that’s exactly what I looked like when they showed up with tales of the Rodin Museum and strolling through the Left Bank.

And, as I was saying, I just felt really old.

So tonight I’m thinking of rassling up some fajitas and buying some tequila and maybe I’ll even wear that new teal camisole I bought…What’s that you say? Oh, right. It’s book club. With my forty something friends. To talk about Amos Oz’ memoir. Guess not…

A friend of mine in London just passed me a link to the following essay in The Guardian, which is written by her 83 year old mother and came out today. It’s an essay about how much this woman misses her husband of 60 plus years and how she’s learned to cope over the past year. She just won the Mary Stott Prize at the Guardian, an annual prize honoring women in journalism.

I love the fact that, at 83, this woman still has it in her to produce such a moving and reflective piece of writing. She’s a model for us all. But she’s not alone. A few years back, Joan Didion wrote a best-selling memoir of the year she tragically lost both her husband and daughter, entitled The Year of Magical Thinking (Haven’t read it? It’s a must). What Didion does brilliantly in this book is get you ready for the process of grieving – not so much the emotional side but the psychological side – narrating with a reporter’s precision the different stages one goes through.

There’s no doubt that one of the defining events of adulthood is losing a parent. And even if you’re not a writer by trade – Cynthia Walton isn’t – what both these women do is show you how writing can be a tool in letting you process that grief. In short, they are both fine examples of writing as therapy.

I also just finished Amos Oz’ wonderful (and L-O-N-G) memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness. In addition to being a captivating history of Jerusalem from the 1940s on, this is also a very personal account about how the author’s mother’s suicide when he was 13 fundamentally shaped him as a person, and more importantly, as a writer. Oz is such a talented writer that though he hints at the centrality of his mother’s death throughout the book, it isn’t until the very last page that you fully grasp the enormity of the event in shaping who he is and the writer he becomes. I cried when I read it, which is something I rarely do with a book.

But Walton’s article also made me think about the website I linked to the other day entitled Old Jews Telling Jokes. Because like these men, what Cynthia Walton is doing in writing this article is finding a hobby for herself at the ripe old age of 83 that is both fulfilling and enjoyable. We should all be so lucky.

You go girl!

I’ve been thinking a lot about helicopter parenting lately.

It started when a friend of mine with two school age children ages 8 and 11 told me that she’s begun letting them walk home alone without the babysitter. My first reaction was to suppress a gasp. Mind you, when my brother and I were roughly their ages we regularly walked to and from school on our own and our house was at least ten minutes further away from school than theirs is. There was even a period when my mother went back to school and we had to come home and – gasp – make our own lunch! (The thought of this now with my own kids, ages 8 and 5, makes me tumble over with laughter…) But I still had trouble believing that this friend would let her kids do this at such a tender age.

Then a close friend of mine, whom my husband and I both agree is a model where parenting is concerned, confessed that he and his wife may encourage their 17 year-old son to attend the state university in their home town next year when he goes to college. They’d like to help him navigate course selection and the like.

Again, I suppressed a gasp, but this time for the opposite reason: Really? Isn’t finding your own way what college is all about?

But then I read this post on the Motherlode blog. Turns out experts are actually divided on how much independence you wish to foster in children and at what age. (If you haven’t already, it’s also well worth spending some time over at Free Range Kids, a blog devoted to the idea that we smother our children with our over-protectiveness.)

As someone who still struggles with the appropriate degree of independence/dependence in my own life, I must confess that I’m not sure where I fall on this one. On the one hand, I hate the idea of my kids ever getting hurt because of some stupid lack of oversight on my part. On the other hand, I feel like I practically raised myself as a child, and that independence has proved invaluable to me as an adult, giving me the confidence to take chances and experiment in life.

But maybe it’s a moot point. Maybe kids figure out for themselves how soon they’ll make their own choices, and whether and when we decide as parents to cut the proverbial chord isn’t really the deciding factor. See below….

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I thought I’d share a recent conversation with my five year-old daughter, who sprung the following on me at roughly 6:58 a.m. this morning:

DAUGHTER: I’ve decided that I’m going to marry another lady when I grow up and she can have my children.
ME (still half asleep): Ok, honey. Why do you want to marry a lady?
DAUGHTER: Because having babies hurts.
ME (Unable to articulate a sufficiently sound counter-argument): Good point.

I talked in Monday’s post about the importance of choosing a career that you both enjoy and are good at. But it’s also important, as we grow older, to have a good time outside of work.

Here’s a link to a website of people doing just that. It’s called Old Jews Telling Jokes and it’s just that.

What a fantastic way to spend one’s leisure time!

(Tip: Scroll down and listen to Bert Busch on “healthcare.” Warning: adults only!!)

Among the many purchases we just made during our whirlwind trip back to the United States was a new rice cooker (here it is, if you’d like to take a peek…)

If you look closely, you’ll see that said cooker forms part of the “fuzzy logic” line of rice cooker/steamers/slow cookers by Sanyo. Call me crazy, but am I the only person who feels somewhat uncomfortable encountering fuzzy logic outside of the confines of a philosophy seminar?

Be that as it may, and perhaps because I’m a convenience freak, I think of a rice cooker as a staple of any kitchen (though, admittedly, I wouldn’t have necessarily chosen to dump close to 180 dollars on this particular model, as we just did…make that my husband just did…but then again, he’s a gadget freak – don’t get me started on the “texture” button…he’s all over that).

But back to adulthood. I’m always fascinated by what people consider to be “necessary” vs. “luxury” expenditures (for a quick economics primer on these terms, see here). An old friend of ours who was just visiting, for example, confessed that his wife – a one-time caterer and still a superb cook – had only recently purchase a rice cooker, deeming this to be a somewhat frivolous kitchen expenditure when you could just, you know, boil the stuff. But she is also the one who endlessly harasses her husband to drop “one to two hundred grand” to overhaul their current kitchen – a figure they can’t even come close to matching so it’s really a moot point, but, hey, why dismiss a potential source of marital conflict over a technicality?

Similarly, my husband – the one who prefers his rice textured just so – recently declined my generous offer to a 30% off coupon at our local Gap, protesting, “But I already have one pair of everyday pants. I don’t need anymore than that…” Hey, I grew up in a house where we used a fork tyne to remove the top of one of our sauce pans for thirty years before questioning whether it might not be time to get a new one, so I’m hardly what you’d call a spendthrift. But it strikes me that one pair of “everyday pants” is pretty few indeed.

We are currently living through an era of proposed Treasury Department regulations restricting luxury expenditures and culturally pregnant movies about Shopaholics (for a great explanation of why this movie is so pertinent right now, read this article in Slate.) So I think it’s well worth asking: When the going gets rough, what do you really need and what can you do without?

I know that in our household, there’s a lot that’s up for debate. My husband will want to hang onto the organic home-delivered groceries; I’ll want to hang onto The New Yorker. But because we’re both grown ups (and want to keep our marriage going) we’ll inevitably have to make trade-offs and compromises.

How about you? Where do you draw this line?

I just got back from yet another trip to the United States and as I trolled through my ever-burgeoning pile of unread RSS feeds, I came across the following post about ghostwriting on the blog Lisa Romeo Writes.

I regularly subscribe to a bunch of different blogs about freelance writing and I’ve probably seen at least twenty if not hundreds of job listings for ghost writers over the past twelve months alone. But until today, I never thought much about ghost writing as a possible supplemental source of income for myself.

The main reason – as Romeo notes in her introduction to the post with respect to her own experience – is that I’ve always been so preoccupied with finding and expanding my own voice that I never wanted to deviate any of that energy into someone else’s work. Perhaps because I’m feeling just a tiny bit more confident about my own voice lately or maybe it’s just the pinch of these credit-crunched times, but when I read this post I suddenly thought: Hey! I can do that! (Sorry, but you must indulge my less-than-closeted love of Broadway musicals while I quickly link to famous A Chorus Line number of same title…ah, to spend the afternoon singing lyrics from A Chorus Line…but I digress.)

Why do I mention this here?

Because when I read this writer’s account of how she got started ghost writing and why she enjoys it – i.e. finding a way to tell someone else’s story in a way that respects their unique voice- I realized that I’d not only be very good at this kind of thing, I’d actually enjoy it. I strongly believe that the two keys to a successful career are a. finding things that you like and b. finding things you are good at and then identifying where these two intersect (much harder than it sounds). And so, it suddenly occurred to me that I ought to give ghost writing a second chance.

Which I’ve been doing…all day long.

And it’s something we all should be doing – i.e., thinking about our talents and interests and where these intersect. It seems like every day now, I get another email from a friend whose company has just folded or who’s been let go or who’s just had a baby and is going to try and make it on her own, and a lot of them ask me for advice about how to get started on a new career path. And while I have loads to say on this topic, the main thing I always tell people is: figure out what you like and what you’re good at and that’s where you need to begin.

Because if this economy is going to continue on its current trajectory, we’re all going to need to be a heckuva lot more creative in thinking about our skill sets and the many possible directions in which we can take them while still being true to who we are. Myself included.

So if you’ve got that burning life story you’re just itching to tell and don’t trust yourself to tell it, drop me a line…I’m listening.