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Parent Category: Life and Style

Category: Living in USA

Created: 08 November 2013

Last Updated: 05 January 2016

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Letter from America.  

O'Donnell Irish EyesWho hasn’t had a day when nothing went right?  You know what kind of day I mean.  You wake up and brush your teeth with 2% hydrocortisone cream instead of toothpaste.  Oh, you’ve never done that?  Well, I have.  The aftertaste in my mouth was most unpleasant, but I can honestly say that my pearly whites haven’t itched for so much as a single minute since that unintended application.

Read more: Calamity Cara.

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Written by Administrator

Parent Category: Life and Style

Category: Living in USA

Created: 05 April 2013

Last Updated: 05 January 2016

User Rating: 5 / 5

Letter from America  

By Cara Sheridan O’Donnell  

O'Donnell Irish EyesI will have to give myself a timeout when I next hear some young woman (her joy almost palpable) say to me, “We’re pregnant!”  Yup, I’ll have to go sit in a corner of a quiet room to compose myself; otherwise, I know I will blurt out something I will later regret.  Having been pregnant more than a few times, I can say with absolute certainty that, with the exception of baby ‘n’ me, there is no “we” in pregnancy.  Oh, I can understand the intent--or is it hope?--behind the expression “we are pregnant.”  It is the belief--or is it hope?--of the woman who employs the first-person-plural pronoun in the announcement of her impending arrival that the father of her baby is and will continue to be fully invested, not to mention wholeheartedly and enthusiastically involved, in what is, after all, the product of a joint effort.  If she was lucky, it was a thoroughly enjoyable and memorable joint effort.  Yes, that “we” is completely understandable.  Understandable, but patently ridiculous.

What kind of investment are we talking about here?  Who is likely to suffer an occasional, more frequent, or—ugh!--continuous wave of nausea for a month (or nine)?  Who will have the final say-so regarding the desired birthing plan?  Hospital, at home, with a doctor in attendance, or a midwife?  My own wish for a birth experience was merely that my first child would not be assisted into this world by the same United Parcel Service delivery guy who helped my mom’s friend in the rushed delivery of her seventh or eighth baby a few years prior.  Once reassured that that particular scenario was unlikely to be repeated any time soon, I did consider all the options.  

I sought the advice of some older friends and chose Frank Hardart, M.D., as my obstetrician.  The son of the founder of the celebrated (now-defunct) Horn & Hardart restaurant/cafeteria chain, Dr. Hardart was himself the father of six children. He had a warmly professional bedside manner; most important, in my view, was that he was the OB most respected by the nurses at (the also now-defunct) St. Vincent’s Hospital in the heart of New York City’s Greenwich Village.  If he was good enough for them, he was good enough for me.  The fact that he was the direct descendant of the man who invented a unique and efficient method of delivering food to hungry hordes of thrifty people crossed my mind as well.  I envisioned my future self on the afternoon of my exact due date:  I would be attractively attired in an immaculate, crisply ironed hospital gown, glowing and rosy cheeked, with nary a hair out of place.  With a twinkle in his eye and after only a minimal and effortless wait, a scrub-suited Frank Hardart would place a prettily-packaged bundle in my arms.  (Don’t laugh.  What did I know? No amount of book smarts prepares the expectant woman for reality.)

Nowadays, pregnant women have more options than I had back in the 1970s.  A woman today might believe that giving birth in a kiddie pool set up for that purpose in the living room of her apartment is a good idea.  Then again, maybe not:  She might, after a particularly searing contraction, want to kick that pool clear across the room, through the sliding doors, and out onto the balcony, where it will teeter, then drop, contents and all, on the heads of passersby below.  Note the operative word in that last sentence:  SHE.  The father—i.e., the other individual in the “we-are-pregnant” duo—would never entertain such an idea.  Why would he? Is it his belly that will forever bear remnants of stretch marks arranged in a pattern resembling a street map of Tokyo?  For that matter, did his belly balloon to the size of the Astrodome in a matter of weeks?  Did he have to push a 17-pound bowling ball through an itty-bitty bodily orifice?

“We are expecting,” a friend’s daughter gushed to me recently. I was as overjoyed to hear her good news as I was happy to hear the words she used to deliver it.  After all, a couple can be expectant, even eagerly expectant.  Back in the 1950s, when readers of newspapers (remember them?) rarely, if ever, saw the word “pregnant” in print, some gossip columnist coined the coy euphemism, “infanticipating.”  You would probably agree with me, though, that “we are infanticipating” sounds just a tad too cute to a generation so accustomed and inured to hearing “preggers” and “knocked up,” doesn’t it?

What is somewhat surprising to me is that today’s tabloid readers will still find no shortage of coy euphemisms.  “Baby bump” is one of them.  No magazine is considered complete without a photograph of some female celeb with an arrow superimposed on the photo and pointed directly at her abdominal region.  “Baby bump?” reads the caption, encouraging fans of the woman to speculate wildly about her status.  Baby bump!  I never noticed the juxtaposition of those two words prior to the late 1990s. The ubiquitous “baby bump” is now such a cliché that we are due for something new to replace it.  That will not happen, though, until thousands (if not millions) more pregnant Facebook members have posted photos of their own baby bumps, taken at monthly intervals between the announcements of their pregnancies and the actual births of their babies.  Take a look at a couple of them.  You will probably notice that they all feature a profile view of a pregnant woman at various stages of baby bumpiness. She might be wearing a fitted shirt, stretched taut against her skin; you might even catch a glimpse at her discreetly bared bump. What you will not notice is a corresponding picture of the woman’s “babydaddy” (with or without his own shirt).  Baby bumps don’t lie:  If anyone needs proof that the expression “we are pregnant” is long overdue for delivery to the deepest recesses of our memories, these photos serve the purpose.

Now, I happen to believe that the enceinte female body is beautiful.  I am glad that gone are the days when women had to hide their pregnant tummies in public.  No longer does “confinement” mean exactly that:  A pregnant woman was confined to her own home, lest she offend the refined sensibilities of her neighbors! I am delighted that the presence of dads in the delivery room is no longer the exotic novelty it once was and that pregnancy is no longer a taboo topic of conversation in mixed company.  As open as we are in talking about pregnancy, however, we have failed to emphasize one aspect of it:  Neither carrying nor siring a baby makes a woman out of a girl or a man out of a boy.  Furthermore, just as parking herself in a garage for nine months will not turn a woman into a Chevrolet, neither does a pregnancy automatically render her a mother. To be sure, pregnancy gives a woman some time to get used to the idea of mothering, but transformation from pregnant woman to true mommy occurs after a baby is born.  Same with her partner:  His involvement during a pregnancy and birth is appreciated, but relatively uncomplicated.  As Dr. Hardart, while tapping me on the tummy with his fetoscope, used to remind this impatient patient in the last weeks of my first pregnancy, “That baby is a lot easier to take care of inside than outside!”

A baby will emerge in its own good time, with or without the assistance of a doctor, midwife, husband, partner, or UPS delivery man.    Whether a baby goes home from the birthing center or hospital in the arms of its birth mother and father or goes home with adoptive parents, it is then that the journey of motherhood and fatherhood begins. Only after a few sleepless nights and the changing of a dozen dirty diapers should a couple use the first-person plural in sharing their brand-new status with others:  “WE are parents!”

May God bless each and every one of them!

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Written by Administrator

Parent Category: Life and Style

Category: Living in USA

Created: 29 March 2013

Last Updated: 05 January 2016

User Rating: 5 / 5

Letter From America  

By Cara Sheridan O’Donnell  

O'Donnell Irish EyesIf I live to be 103, nobody will ever convince me that God does not thoroughly understand women, right down to knowing not only exactly what they need as they age but also what they most desire.  For example, as we all know, a woman’s visual acuity decreases at about the same time that her hair starts to gray.  In His infinite wisdom and mercy, I believe that God allows this diminution in eyesight to occur so that when a woman of a certain age looks into a mirror, she doesn’t scare the stuffing right out of herself. 

The upside of this, at least in my case, is that I fail to notice the latest wrinkle or spot on my face.  The downside is that, following the application of makeup, I often bear a striking resemblance to Bette Davis in her role of the elderly vaudeville performer in the movie What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962).  I noticed the transformation of my ordinary middle-aged self into Baby Jane recently after peering closely at photographic evidence.  Wondering how I could have allowed this to happen, I retraced my steps, so to speak, by thoroughly examining my own typical “beautification” regimen, performed, of necessity, without the aid of corrective lenses.

As I meticulously smooth a creamy foundation on my face with a tool I picked up on sale at The Home Depot, I count the layers carefully, allowing each to “set” before again dipping my trowel into the gallon container of goop.  Upon application of Layer #4 (at which point a younger woman would undoubtedly say to herself, “Enough’s enough!”), the reflection in my lighted mirror informs me in no uncertain terms that I have only one more layer to go before I am ready to proceed to the blusher/bronzer step in the process.
                                                                   

Bette DavisThus, a blush brush about the size of a cotton ball sufficed.  This itty-bitty brush nestled neatly in the storage compartment of a petite plastic compact.  The compact also contained both a Pepto-Bismol-pink pressed powder—yes, so inexperienced were we that we all used the same shade of blush, no matter what our natural skin tones happened to be—and a built-in mirror, used for discreet makeup repairs at any time and wherever we were. 

Naturally, and despite the fact that we really needed no blush at all, we whipped out our compacts to “freshen” our rosy cheeks approximately every nine minutes. In a similar fashion, Jackie gave lessons in mascara and eyeliner application.  With our compact mirrors ever at the ready for blush reapplication, we girls multi-tasked, tending to our cheeks and eyelashes more often during a typical school day than most women do in a month.  As you might imagine, by the end of each school day, many of my classmates and I looked like a herd of parochial-school-uniformed Kewpie dolls, but we viewed ourselves as the most glamorous gals on Planet Earth.

Back to my current makeup routine: 
Forty-eight years after mastering the Mitchell Method, in order to achieve that same all-over glow, I need a blush brush the size of a Swiffer® duster. While I don’t refresh my blush and mascara every time I blink nowadays, I slap on coats of the war paint until I can see evidence of it in the mirror.  In 10 minutes, I can achieve the same Kewpie-doll look that required an entire school day to achieve back in 1964.   You might say that, at age 14, I sometimes overdid the makeup because I didn’t know what I was doing; I guess I occasionally overdo it now because I can’t see what I am doing.

altThat, however, will not be the case for much longer. 
You see, I went to my eye doctor just last week because my left eye was giving me some trouble.  In his office, I discovered that, over the past month or so, my vision had become increasingly blurred not because my eyesight had deteriorated but rather because my near-sightedness had improved! The contact lenses I had been wearing were “over correcting” my myopia.  In other words, my lens prescriptions were too strong.  The doctor told me that many near-sighted individuals become far-sighted as they age.  Conversely, far-sighted folks are inclined to become more near-sighted.  Does this mean, I asked the doctor hopefully, that when I am 103 years old I will have 20/20 vision?  Unfortunately, his answer was no.

Wearing a nice new pair of contact lenses, I returned home from my appointment, pleased that I could read every single street sign so clearly along the way.  The clouds in the sky were so distinctly delineated to my “new” eyes that I imagined them to be giant mounds of spun-sugar candy laid out on an expanse of blue.  I was able to identify several species of birds that were perched on the branches of a winter-naked bush outside my front door.  Still dreamily contemplating the beauty of God’s creations, I opened the front door. 

Then, upon entering the house, I happened to glance in the hall mirror.  Big mistake.  I could see myself more clearly than I had seen myself in a couple of years.  Baby Jane was back in the house!  Yes, God surely does know what He is doing.  Maybe I should have skipped that eye doctor appointment altogether.  On second thought, I have a better idea.  Now equipped again with the eyes of my 14-year-old self, I think I’ll call Jackie in the next week or so.  We have been meaning to get together for coffee anyway.  Surely she will have some new and improved makeup tricks to share with me.

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Written by Administrator

Parent Category: Life and Style

Category: Living in USA

Created: 15 March 2013

Last Updated: 05 January 2016

User Rating: 5 / 5

Letter 

from

America.

By Cara Sheridan O’Donnell.

O'Donnell Irish EyesHigh school reunions in the United States are a big deal, events to anticipate with equal parts equanimity and trepidation.  Even the most self-confident of men in every class worries:  Could his classmates have grown so fat and bald that they will fail to recognize him?  At least one gal in every class, having shed the avoirdupois, remolded the crooked nose, and repaired the mousy-brown flyaway hair that had plagued her throughout her teenage years, suffers her own brand of pre-reunion jitters:  She prays that no classmates will see right through her elegant new persona and squeal gleefully upon recognizing the plain-Jane chubster disguise she once wore.

The goal set by the planners of my last “big” reunion—my 40^th, to be exact—was that attendees would have the time of their lives. Beginning about one year before the gala, an informal planning committee was established. Its first order of business was to locate every member of our two graduating classes.  You see, during our years at St. Mary’s High School, which is now a fully coeducational private college-preparatory school in Manhasset, New York, we boys and girls were educated in two separate buildings, each with its own administration, faculty, and staff.  While extracurricular romances could potentially blossom in this environment, our single-sex educational arrangement neither encouraged nor facilitated such shenanigans in any way.  In fact, despite the relatively small size of our combined class of about 300, very few girls knew more than two dozen (“separately but equally” educated) classmates from the boys’ school, and vice versa. 

Forty years after our graduation, with the exception of a few high-school sweethearts who did later marry, our class remained divided along gender lines.  We were still largely unfamiliar with about half of the members of our class.  However, in planning our 40^th reunion, that changed.  Once located, classmates were invited to join a couple of social-networking sites, through which (and along with the help of many group e-mails) we got to know one another as new acquaintances or to renew old friendships.  By the time our reunion rolled around, most of us were up to date on events in the lives of one another.  As a result, we were well equipped to carry out the real business of a reunion:  To pare away four decades’ worth of the laugh- and wisdom lines, post-pregnancy jelly rolls, shiny pates, and well-earned gray hairs we had acquired (oh-so-gradually) over the years, thus revealing our inner adolescence and all of its madcap, devil-may-care components.  To say that a good time was had by all at that reunion is an understatement.  The evening might not have been the time of their lives for some revelers, but I challenge anyone who was there to say that it was a flop!

Since that momentous party, quite a few of my girls’-school classmates and I have met every couple of months for lunch or brunch, extending invitations (well in advance of each event) through our web-site  connections, telephone calls to the technologically challenged, and other channels.  If one of us learns that someone who has long since moved out of state will be on Long Island for a brief visit, we make every effort to schedule a lunch date during her stay here.  We meet in groups of as few as three or four and up to 20 or so.

There is a beauty to these gatherings which is difficult to describe to anyone who has not experienced anything like them.  Although several of us enjoyed close friendships during our high school years, most of us separated when we went off to college and then quietly, inexorably drifted apart, sometimes geographically but most often as the result of our respective careers and/or new family responsibilities. But by the time our regular “mini-reunions” began (now almost five years ago), most of us had both the time and inclination needed to rediscover and reexamine the ties that first bound us.

We delight in a common history which encompasses far more than memories of eccentric and/or brilliant teachers and high-school hijinks. Oh, sure, we do groan when reminiscing about having to wear pleated, gray, wool uniform skirts and navy-blue blazers in classrooms without air conditioning.  Our utilitarian polyester gym uniforms, guaranteed to accentuate the flaws of every single body type known to mankind, are the stuff of legend.  Whoever designed those bloomers and shirtwaists will no doubt spend eternity in a special hell guarded by a similarly (and deliciously) condemned branch of the parochial school fashion police.  We discuss (and, finally, fully appreciate) the sacrifices our parents made to educate us and wonder if our lives might have taken different directions had our parents not made those sacrifices.  We rejoice with the person who reveals a triumph and cry genuine tears of sympathy for the woman who shares a personal tragedy.  We care.

What else do we discuss?  In the hours we spend at a single gathering, our conversations might revolve around our joint replacements, diabetic complications, special diets, marital-status changes, the appearance of errant but supremely pluckable chin hairs, retirement parties, plans for downsizing, various cancers conquered, children, grandchildren, tattoos, LASIK surgery, the priestly ordination of women, dogs, cats, *Peaches & Herb, in-laws, parents’ health problems, deaths, births, travels, hair styles we love and loathe, lactose intolerance, music, pap smears, liverwurst (yes, liverwurst!), an upcoming art exhibition by a classmate, what to order for lunch, and myriad other topics of universal interest.  So far-reaching are our lunchtime topics of conversation that the better question would be, “What topics do we not discuss?”  Our conversations often lead to questions and, while we don’t claim to have all the answers to any of them (nor do we agree at all times when debating the fine points of a controversial issue), we are comfortable enough with one another to express our opinions freely and/or confident enough about our friendship to agree to disagree.  We are as mixed a bag now as we were back in the 1960s.

Through our tears and laughter (and sometimes tears of laughter), we are unanimous in our agreement about one thing above all others, though:  Just as we were God’s works in progress back in the mid-1960s, so we are to this day.

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