Parenting

Eat Your Veggies, Skip the Magic Mushrooms – and More Advice for Sending Your Kid to College

August 28, 2014 By Thelma 1 Comment

Buster Keaton Goes to ‘College’

A week ago Thursday, we drove our son to college six hundred miles south where they serve grits for breakfast in the dining hall. Worried much? As a 55-year-old film critic, I’m not as desperate as the mother of a freshman leaving the nest in the current hit Boyhood, who laments that all she has ahead of her is her own death. While you don’t need to be that fatalistic, if you make the transition correctly, it should be harder on you than it will be on your kid.

Here’s how to ease your separation anxiety:

1. Surrender Your Sex Police Badge: Sure, you can slow down in the CVS condom aisle, but be cool. That ship has probably sailed during high school. If your child has watched Game of Thrones like my son, he knows more about fornication than you did after your honeymoon.

2. Become a Social Network Stalker: Is he dating? Has he grown sideburns, or joined a cult like the cheer squad? Refrain from commenting: It’s not stalking if they don’t see you hovering.

3. Eat your Veggies, Skip the Magic Mushrooms: We all did our share of drinking and toking and tripping in college – at least I did. I’d like my son to do as I say, not as I did – but he already knows what I did. While ‘just say no’ may be too much to expect – replace it with ‘just don’t get caught.’ If you must, experiment with trusted friends, in safe environments.

4. Chuck the Emotional Baggage: This is their leap into the unknown – not yours. I remember pushing my mother out of my Berkeley dorm the second we’d dumped my stuff. That may have been the one time in my entire college career that I refused a free meal. I turned out well and even brought her two grandkids to kvell from.

5. Avoid Wail Watching: Be prepared for tears. Your own. Do not expect to cry it out together. Remember when you left your kid at day care for the first time and wept all the way from the jungle gym to your Brooklyn stoop? Cry on the way home.

6. Disconnect: Don’t expect that daily phone call or text. Let them go. Just like you took your hands off their bicycle years ago and watched them wobble toward the horizon and achieve balance. You can reach out regularly but let them set the pace of their responses – the goal is to build their confidence, not undermine it.

7. Unplug the Pressure Cooker: Don’t start discussing grades before the first day of school. Yes, by their sophomore year you will be nagging your astrophysicist about their report card but now navigating new friends, purchasing razors at the drugstore and surviving a smelly roommate obsessed with techno-pop is enough to keep them busy.

8. Listen, Don’t Preach: If your son or daughter calls home depressed and doubting and overwhelmed, let the kid vent. That’s why he is calling you – and that’s a good thing. Afterwards, he will probably feel comforted. You will be up all night. Shoot a quick “feeling better?” text the next day just to confirm the cloud has passed, then pop a Xanax.

9. Consider the Nest Half Full Not Half Empty: Don’t freak out! Remember you really do like your spouse. That’s why you married him.

10. Catch the Boomerang Babies: Remember that they are not leaving home forever. Given the economy, not only will your offspring be bunking in their old room, but their spouse and kids might one day, too.

Independence Day 2012

July 4, 2014 By Thelma Leave a Comment

: Independence Day with sparklers, 2012

Just two years ago we lit sparklers on my father-in-law Randy’s lawn in Alexandria, Virginia. Lizzie and I had bought them earlier in the day at the roadside superstore that sold everything from smelly glow worms to weapons of mass destruction. We went old school: sparklers. We gathered in the trim front yard that was already igniting with fireflies, the air smelling charred. The sounds of bigger, grander bombs bursting in air at bigger parties and somewhere, in the distance and over the Key Bridge, on the mall.

Inside the split-level ranch, Randy, the retired Air Force General, was spending his last summer. The family patriarch was probably watching TV, the fireworks from the Capitol, although he was even less interested in the tube than he had been. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand what was going on because of dementia, it was that he was getting so much closer to being gone. Another July 4th, a movie’s plot, who did it and why? It did not matter.

I love these pictures because they capture the three people I love most in the world, grainy, summer. It’s as if the photos imprint the humidity and how beautiful a warm Southern night can be, how they feel infinite. I love the way the sparklers register on Lizzie’s iPhone. Even my husband, Ranald, allowed us to take a snapshot of him, and that put him in the picture. I have always loved sparklers, the fire and crackle and the way they bring people together — lighting them, watching them, the little disappointment as they sizzle out. Get another one. And another. Until the box is empty.

A few days later, in the Subaru on the long drive to Upstate New York, I must have told the kids that Grandpa wasn’t going to last long. They did not like hearing this. I was such a downer. Why should they? I thought I was preparing them for the inevitable, but what can prepare them for that loss? We all loved him so much.

I’d been married over 25 years by then. My feelings had altered from the awe and a little fear when Randy first picked Ranald and me up at Union Station before we were engaged, to love and need and a peacefulness together I wouldn’t have thought possible when we first met.

I came of age among lefty Jews during the Vietnam War. My parents taught me everything military was bad at the same time they told me to finish my milk. It took a long while for that conditioning to dissipate. In the end, if anybody would ever have my back, the General would. If there was a blackout, or an invasion, or a zombie apocalypse, or a night with a bottle of Macallan on the table, I wanted him there.

Looking at these pictures, you see a happy family, a boy, a girl, a husband, a wife somewhere not wanting to be in the picture, but having purchased the artillery and marched us outside and away from the television. I see them, too. But I also see the lights in the windows, the house by the Potomac that I returned to for over a quarter of a century, from a young naiver-than-I-knew woman overly attached to her parents, to a wife and mother of a son and daughter with a strong marriage built brick by brick in joy and tragedy.

I see the last Independence Day we spent at that house in what was nearly an annual event. We went South again at Christmas and Randy was already in the hospital. We saw him once more: we waited outside his room on Christmas Day while he argued with the nurse. She came out, a little Filipino, flustered but still in charge, and we apologized for him, then filed in.

Randy was wearing those awful hospital gowns that defy dignity — that last uniform he would ever wear while alive. His eyes were unfocused without his glasses, his hearing iffy without his aids. But he was still commanding for a little man, still tied us together. We stood in a row at the foot of his bed like the Von Trapps. The little grandchildren now grown into adolescence. Randy was lucid but this was one ridiculous battle he just didn’t want to fight anymore. He died before the New Year.

And while we are all still in mourning, the beauty of having had him as part of my life is how much he came to mean to me, despite my upbringing, and to those around him. He was a man in full, not a guy in flip flops and cargo shorts. I still see Randy in my husband’s smile, in his square head, in the way Ranald is so firmly rooted in reality.

Randy exemplified the best in the American military man, the fighter pilot, the West Point grad, that had fought for our independence. He missed WWII but flew missions in Korea and Vietnam.

Tonight, when it’s dark and bursts of fireworks flash above the tops of the trees, I will raise my shot glass to the sky, and remember our fun times on the Fourth, with you Randy, when we were a little lit, like sparklers.

Q&A: Mads Mikkelsen confronts child abuse in ‘The Hunt’

July 15, 2013 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Sexy Danish star Mads Mikkelson, 47, bit into international fame this year: he had the title role in NBC TV’s hit “Hannibal,” and literally lost his head in the Oscar-nominated historical romance “A Royal Affair.”

Mikkelsen saved the best for last with Thomas Vinterberg’s “The Hunt” (opening Friday), a devastating Danish drama for which he won best actor honors at Cannes in 2012. He plays a divorced schoolteacher who becomes a pariah in his small town when his best friend’s kindergartner accuses him of abuse.

Audiences exit the theater embroiled in debates about child abuse and society and divided in their reactions to what they saw on the screen: but no one is divided on Mikkelsen’s understated performance. He is a major star.

Did this trifecta of successes on big and small screen surprise you?

I never planned a career. I’ve tried to avoid it. I’ve just been meeting these fantastic directors who’ve offered me a variation of different parts and different films. And now it’s landed here.

In “The Hunt,” you play an ordinary man changed by extraordinary circumstances and local hysteria.

Lucas is a traditional average of a Scandinavian man, what Vinterberg called a “castrated man.” The man that believes in society will take care of the problems and that we are civilized people and we will behave civilized through any problems we might face.

And then Lucas finds himself accused of the unthinkable – and his social position crumbles.

Yes. In this crisis, it turns out to be so much more complicated than he thought it would be. He’s divorced. He used to work at a school and the school closed. Now he’s working in a kindergarten and he’s trying to get his feet back on the ground. And he has a teenage son. And he’s doing pretty well. He’s climbed up the ladder again.

And then there is that kiss in the kindergarten, where his best friend’s daughter plants her lips on his.

It’s not a grownup love. But it’s the girl’s fascination with this person, her father’s friend, her teacher. After she kisses him, he does the right thing. She should know that she shouldn’t kiss him on the mouth. But she didn’t. I mean we’re living in Scandinavia. [Read more…]

Julie Delpy spends ‘2 Days in New York’…

May 18, 2012 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Delpy casts Rock as her live-in love (photo by Magnolia Pictures)

People tend to remember Delpy as that French chick Celine opposite Ethan Hawke’s Jesse in “Before Sunset” and “Before Sunrise,” the funky Franco-American romantic bookends directed by Richard Linklater. But the Paris-born, L.A.-based, NYU-educated mother of a toddler also contributed to those screenplays. Then she went on to write and direct a parallel comedy, “2 Days in Paris,” in which she brings her American boyfriend (Adam Goldberg) to meet her crazy French family. In “2 Days in New York,” writer, director, and star Delpy continues the unsentimental journey, gaining maturity as a character and as an artist. She plays a French photographer named Marion, whose father (her real-life dad, Albert Delpy) and sister (Alexia Landeau) visit the Manhattan love nest she’s set up with Mingus (Chris Rock) and their kids from previous marriages. It’s one of those dysfunctional-family comedies where everything unfolds in two short days, and the preconceptions of Americans and the French, men and women, a father and a daughter, all get tossed in a cultural Cuisinart.

Thelma Adams: How are you like Marion — and how do you differ?

Julie Delpy: My screen character is a bit more out of control than me. I’m more grounded and less crazy. I have my neuroses, but she’s more confused, and more self-centered. I’m a very pragmatic person basically. It’s fun to have this kind of alter ego. I did that a bit when I wrote “Before Sunset,” a different part of me that isn’t just like me. I’m fascinated by crazy people because I’m so not crazy: I know what’s reality, what’s me, and what’s not me.

TA: How much of this movie was improvised?

JD: The film is actually very scripted. All my films are. Sometimes, I let people, like Adam Goldberg in “Two Days in Paris,” improvise, like when he ordered that burger. Or when Chris is doing this conversation with a cardboard cutout of Obama — it’s 80 percent written, and 20 percent improvised. But the best acting is when you feel like people are not acting.

TA: When the acting is transparent, and the writing seems natural?

JD: Yes. I just presented a film “Le Skylab,” that film could not be more scripted. It’s an affectation to seem like you just turn on the camera. I love feeling that if people watch my movie, they have the feeling that they are part of the scene, to give people the sense that they actually spent one hour and a half with these people. My goal is to make it feel like people are improvising and not acting. I love to feel like it’s hyper real, like the camera just turned on.

TA: What directors influenced your style?

JD: Robert Altman had this naturalistic thing, and John Cassavetes, and Woody Allen in a more comedic way like “Husbands and Wives.”

TA: Don’t you find Allen misogynistic?

JD: I think Allen is more Pygmalion-obsessed than misogynistic. His body of work is just amazing. If I could get to a tenth of his career! When I think of people like Altman, there is a certain freedom to his movies. He was underrated at his time. His films are so naturalistic. People love to give prizes where you see the acting, the directing, the makeup — what movies are really about, for me, is capturing moments as well as entertainment.

TA: You capture quite a few moments that are relatively rare. Like the opening scene when your character Marion is doing Kegel exercises for incontinence while talking a mile a minute to her newsroom coworker Mingus, played by Chris Rock. Marion has a baby at home, and she talks about squeezing and pumping, and Mingus is both charmed and, OK, a little grossed out. It’s so TMI.

JD: It’s a women’s point-of-view. It’s funny to include it in the film. The kind of intimacy, friendship to a guy, who she would date later, unaware, she’s not premeditating the move to date. She’s not trying to seduce the guy. She’s not a nasty bimbo that wants to get laid. She’s literally sharing the stress of not knowing with a friend, who ends up in a relationship with her, which is endearing for both of them. Neither is superficial. It’s a small moment to set up what kind of a relationship they have. Those characters don’t meet cute; they meet down and dirty. It’s not the obvious thing.

TA: I’ve known women like Marion. After being pregnant twice while working in a newsroom, I may even have been a woman like Marion in more ways than most. But it’s rare to see her on the screen.

JD: I hate the idea of objectifying the woman. She’s not flirting with Mingus with miniskirts. Do you want to be playing sexy bimbo at 40 when you meet someone? The truth is, down the road they’re going to know who you are. You can’t hide. You don’t want to be a bimbo all your life. The reality is that people are imperfect. First, I’m not attracted to beauty or cuteness in men. In the long run for men, it’s not their thing either. I have so many men who’ve dated really beautiful women. It lasts two months. For me, beautiful men, it lasts two weeks. It actually becomes annoying after a while. If they’re good people, then you love them; if they’re bad people, it doesn’t matter if they’re beautiful.

TA: In this movie, Chris Rock comes across as beautiful from the inside out — not the first thing we’d normally say about Rock.

JD: He’s real. He has a lot of funny moments but it’s not boom boom boom ta da.

TA: There’s no obvious laugh track.

JD: Which I would hate. He wanted to do the part because it wasn’t written like a typical comedy gag. When I started writing the screenplay, he was the first person that came to mind. I blindly called his agent and said, “I did this film ‘Two Days in Paris.’ Does Chris know my work?” And then he said “yes.”

TA: I think it’s Rock’s best scripted work.

JD: I love the look on Chris’s face at moments with my dad…

TA: …played by your real dad, the actor Albert Delpy…

JD: …Yes, where Chris has no clue about my dad, and it’s beyond acting. He doesn’t know what my father will do, and he’s totally in the moment, where my dad’s talking about me being like Peter Fonda in “Easy Rider,” the confusion, the look on Chris’s face in that moment! Obviously some is very acted and very well done and some is an angst beyond the acting…

TA: Like the scene in which Marion’s sister is alone in the apartment with Mingus, and she’s walking around naked, and they’ve only met in the last hour.

JD: Yes. Mingus is terrified: What the hell is she doing naked in my apartment? I’m alone with a naked woman. There’s this uncomfortable moment. What if Marion comes in, and her sister’s naked, and he’s thinking of the consequences. It’s beyond his understanding.

TA: Like Woody Allen, with gentiles and Jews, men and women, you’re playing with our expectations of black and whites, male and female, American and French…

JD: Mingus stumbles into this French family…

TA: Really, they invade the loft he shares with Marion…

JD: …And Americans think that the French are classy.

TA: You mean they’re not?

JD: I showed this film at this festival, and Americans got shocked by the French family. This is the real France. Twenty percent voted for the right, fascist, racist, and anti-Semitic. What do they think the French are — “La Vie en Rose”? That they’re all singing Edith Piaf on the streets of Paris? Edith was a prostitute when she started out. It’s a total myth. France can be really rough.

TA: And yet the father, who tries to smuggle sausages into the U.S. as a gift and arrives smelling of meat, is hugely endearing.

JD: The father is kind of friendly. My father is very free-spirited, more of a 1968, sexual revolution type. Actually my dad’s generation is much freer than the current generation.

TA: What’s it like working with your father — and being the director in charge?

JD: It was a lot of fun because I know what he’s capable of. Also I have to push him. It’s not easy as a daughter to push my dad. Sometimes he rebels. He would also doubt me. When I looked at the rushes with the editor, we laughed at the moments between me and my dad arguing after the take when the cameras were still rolling. I’d say: “Dad, you want to kill me? Is that it?” Ninety percent of the time it worked; 10 percent WTF — What am I doing directing my dad who’s driving me crazy? He’s my dad, and he would say, “I worked with great directors that didn’t bug me as much as you do.” I’d say, “OK, fine, call them. Go work with them.” Overall, we had a wonderful time.

TA: What’s next?

JD: “Le Skylab” is coming out in Europe. It’s about the real French people, but Americans want the French with baguettes and berets.

TA: So it’s not opening in America?

JD: It’s coming out all over the world everywhere. The film is too true to France for Americans to accept what France really is. The way French people handle sexuality is too controversial for American audiences. Children play doctor. I stopped walking around topless with my three-year-old, Leo, because his eyes light up. He does a double take, and he’s super excited to see my breasts. The minute there’s a pretty girl, Leo gets super-excited.

TA: I don’t think I’ve seen a movie like that yet in the United States — that’s a bigger taboo than showing a woman doing her Kegel exercises while talking to a male coworker. Americans have a puritanical streak — and, as a group, we’re unsettled by the potential of sexual predators and inappropriate behavior.

JD: Obviously there are huge problems, and you need to address pedophilia, but when kids are interested in sex between each other, when it’s innocent and no one’s getting hurt, that’s healthy. I feel like it’s very normal. The only danger is when adults involved. As a kid, I grew up playing doctor with all my cousins. It was never weird. Nowadays people can click on something on the net and be exposed on the net pornography and that’s more dangerous. Sexuality is only bad because society has said it is bad. That’s why we’re here because it’s not that bad. There’s the whole animal kingdom, so how bad can it be?

Ten Secrets of Stay-at-Home Dads

April 10, 2012 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Lance,Belle,Playdate,novel,Parade Magazine,Oprah pick,NY Times rave,Home Depot,difficult discussions,birds and bees

Stay-at-home-dads do it in the mini-van

With all the changes in contemporary parenting, perhaps the biggest remains relatively unsung. As more women succeed in the workplace, and general unemployment continues, a new class of parents have emerged: the stay-at-home dad (SAHD). Whether working from home between drop-off and pick-up, or shouldering the load of childcare (don’t call them babysitters!), this current generation of fathers eat quiche, do diapers and still pop a Bud at the end of the day. Interviews with SAHD’s reveal that past job experience is a help herding toddlers (particularly if you were a rock musician); bicep curls with the heir can substitute for going to the gym, and ‘a look but don’t touch’ policy prevails when hanging with mommies at the playground. Here. the real stay-at-home dads across the country reveal ten secrets of the guys behind the apron:

Even Dads get cranky – and one of the first things they say is “I have a college degree, too.” Shannon, Kansas City, MO.

Previous job experience can help, especially if you were a rock musician. “The biggest and most pleasant surprise, the aspect of my parenting experience no one predicted, was this: time spent with the proud misfits, the actors, the rockers, the misbehaved, the difficult drunks, the brazen cross dressers, the gender-fuzzy, the socially awkward - all those years provided the perfect training ground for stay-at-home-dadhood.” Robert aka “Uncle Rock,” Phoenicia, NY

There’s safety in numbers. “Dad’s don’t like to ask for directions or read the manual. You don’t need to go it alone. Go out and connect with other people in the same situation to find parenting more meaningful and engaging and social. There’s a Dad-ternity, a fraternity of dads.” Lance, New York, NY

Dads don’t experience a latency period. “A secret that most dads have is that they are thinking about the other moms more than the moms realize…. I check out the nannies, however, I check out the stay at home moms more. I desperately try not to give away what I am thinking because the deck is already stacked against me. Most already assume that I am a deadbeat for not bringing home enough money to keep my wife at home with my child. So why further the cliche by wanting to sleep with the Swedish nanny who comes to the playground promptly at 9 am, coffee in hand, wearing something my wife wouldn’t dream of wearing out in public? The other moms I hang out with hate the Swedish nanny because they see their husbands staring… but not me, I’m too busy making conversation about potty training and weighing in on the pros and cons of crying it out…. They won’t see me staring at the swedish nanny and they will never know that I would rather sleep with each of them. one at a time, or all at once, I’m flexible like that,” Carlos, NJ

Weight-training is a side benefit. “When the baby is born, begin using him or her as a dumbbell. That’s right, SAHD’s need exercise. As the kid grows, so will your muscles. When you’re standing at your 17 year old’s high school graduation, you’ll be more ripped than any of those dads that work in an office. You’ve been doing 160lb curls and shoulder presses five days a week. When the kids are off to college, you can finally follow your dreams…become a pro wrestler!” Tommy, Los Angeles, CA

Cocktails at five, but not beer before breakfast. “”Your kid will wake up in the middle of the “Downton Abbey” finale, your every meal will get cold before you eat it, any conversation you have with an adult will be interrupted as soon as the gossip gets juicy. You have to accept this. If for some reason you have difficulty accepting this, I recommend a Rittenhouse Manhattan at five o’clock.” Greg, New Paltz, NY

They have bad days, too. “The first rule of having a bad day is to admit that you are having a bad day and hope that the God of Toilets will let you out of his swirling bowl of [poo].” Shannon, Kansas City, MO

TV is a necessary evil babysitter. “M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E. Sure, we’ve all heard that kids shouldn’t watch TV… But, a half hour of cartoons can’t hurt so Daddy can submit the March Madness brackets which will pay for April’s grocery bills!” Tommy, Los Angeles, CA

Timing is every thing. “Anything and everything that is going to come out of your child, is going to do so at the wrong time, in the wrong place and will likely cover all of the wrong things. Puke, pee, poop and nose ooze will at some point become a catastrophe for you…. I have carried my soiled son out of a theme park pants-less after begging strangers for extra diapers and wipes. I have washed my children in an ocean when no other options were available and have dried my own suit with a bathroom hand drier when a shoulder ride turned into an unexpected deluge of urine. I don’t know how they recognize those rare instances when I haven’t prepared, but they do and they make me pay for it each and every time.” Patrick, San Juan Capistrano, CA

As a working mother, why did Stay-at-Home Dads obsess me? It began as research for my novel “Playdate,” a cross between “Shampoo” and “Mr. Mom,” about a Southern California father and his breadwinner wife. I didn’t know anything about the SAHD movement when I began, but having raised two kids while working full-time, I had a lot of personal experience to process. My hope was that, somehow, if a man, even a man in short pants carrying Girl Scout cookies, said the things that obsessed us mothers at the playground, it might have more weight. And I discovered, from taking this fictional voyage and talking to this canny crew, that we have a lot in common, and a lot to teach each other.

[this blog originally appeared on Yahoo! Shine]