What's My Age Again?

(My birthday is on Saturday, I expect presents, or at least like a quarter.)

My father's side of my family has always seemed to me more grown up than my mother's. Perhaps that's because his parents were doctors, professionals with advanced degrees, while mom's parents were scraping by with high school diplomas and gumption. Perhaps its because one of my dad's sisters lives in Colorado and the other wasn't married till I was like 8 (thus making her appear to be a sophisticated 20-or-30-something like I always wished I was), while my mom's sister lives four blocks from us and still acts like a twelve year old to my mom's sophisticated seventeen-year-old college freshman. Or perhaps it's because my paternal grandfather died when I was young, while my maternal relations continued on as pseudo-sick, complaining, elderly yiddish caricatures.

Whatever the reason, it's been quite reversed lately. Visits to my mom's childhood home are depressing and emotionally draining; my grandmother's Parkinson's has taken away all but her smallest movements or sounds, and so we crowd around her bed and talk at her in strained, almost condescending sing-song, retelling her stories she told us and glossing over the details of our lives. My grandfather, meanwhile, is in better physical shape (his recently-repaired broken ribs and ongoing heart difficulties nonwithstanding), but Grandma's illness is really getting to him. Late in June he celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary, though they'd known each other for much longer. Mom told me that he spent almost all day trying to get her to remember, but she was pretty unresponsive. And thus, he is acting out. He's always basically been like a jolly Jewish Santa Claus figure--when they used to babysit us, Grandma was the one nagging us about safety and worrying about nonsense in the kitchen while Grandpa played games and told jokes with us in the living room. Mom once told me she'd never seen him really angry. And now, he's become... cranky. He yells at everyone (except us). He's fired every geriatric aide we've hired to help carry Grandma around and stuff. He calls Mom a billion times a day to complain about the TV, the aides, the nurses, his medications, what have you. In sum, my mom's side basically consists of a bed-ridden silent sickster and a grumpy olod man.

My dad's side, however, is now overrun with little children. His mother, though not in perfect health, seems fairly vibrant and fine. My cousins are 14, 7, 7, and 3. Both my dad's sisters married blondish goyim men who like golf and fishing and hiking and outdoorsy stuff, in stark contrast to my father (or, indeed, his father, who, I realized, I refer to primarily as "dead grandpa"), who spends perfectly good mountain-climbing weather days indoors watching movies or visiting museums.

I could never go on a vacation with my mom's family, not even her sister's husband and kid (Holly, now... 15? I'm never sure, is severely allergic to milk, and that built on the inherent overprotective nervous nebbish in my aunt and uncle to make them a very anxious bunch even to dine with. Also, Holly, like me, had a bout of elective mutism in her youth, and enjoys writing and the theater, and was born a day after me [years later, obvi], and thus, with all that in common, I can never think of anything to talk to her about).

However, I just returned from a vacation with my dad's. MIreya, the 3-year-old, is angelic and unobtrusive and utterly cooperative. Every time she saw me she shouted "Laura!" with pure joy, except the one time she slipped and called me "Aunt Laura," because to her I more resemble the grown-ups than anyone in her generation. Her brother Kyle, the 15-day-older 7 year old, is brash and obnoxious and "difficult." He doesn't really like sports, and asked me a bunch of questions after he learned I was going to take astronomy ("How many moons are there, in total, in the universe?"). His parents are quick to judge and blame him for everything. Meanwhile, the younger 7 year old, Aidan, is another of those blond angelic kids. He has big eyes and plays baseball and tennis and weighs like ten pounds. His sister, Paige, the 14-year-old, is a champion gymnast and thus a bit physically stunted. She enjoys the Disney Channel, Grey's Anatomy, and sulking whenever her mom speaks. In sum, they are kids. They are young. They are they world. They are physically draining and emotionally inspiring and I wish I could be them again. I wish Grandma (maternal) could be like that again. I wish we all could be 3, splashing around in a Sesame-Street floatie, explaining "the box says Beauty and the Beast but Beauty is in Sleeping Beauty so the movie is called Belle and the Beast" to a spell-bound and indulgent crowd of one elder, six grown ups, and 2-5 other children.