Because I Said So

Sometimes parents are so worried about their kids going away that they are unprepared to have them come storming back. Erin and Meagan are rising seniors at Big Ten schools. At 21-years-old, they can order a cocktail, travel by themselves and negotiate all manner of tight corners that life puts before them.

While they were at school, our lives had shrunk. As a triumvirate, Jill, Maddie and I all have our separate preoccupations and our time together is quiet and measured. But when the twins came home from school, our house was suddenly alive again, with friends, phone calls, and lots of rumbling around deep into the night. There were some, ah, issues of adjustment, but in general I would say that we have all managed to accommodate each other.

Part of what takes getting used to is sharing space with adults. When they want to be in the kitchen, they are not children under foot, they are housemates doing their thing. They do, after all, live here, at least for the summer. I adore having them close – I still take a big whiff of their heads when I hug them as I have since they were tiny – but it’s not like they can fit in my lap. But what had seemed like a huge house has shrunk and all of the resources are now shared. There is one kitchen, one car, and at least in the family room, only one remote control.

Erin and Meagan are, by and large, extremely well mannered. We had a party in New York for the paperback version of the book I wrote and the twins co-hosted. I stopped counting the number of people who commented on their grace and comportment. And after some negotiation, we have all found a place to stand in our newly re-assembled household.

Each of the twins has their blind spots. Meagan lives in terror of having to drive on the highway and Erin lives in terror of having to actually clean up after herself in the kitchen, but in general, they are breathtakingly capable. This past weekend, each of them took off in very different modes of transportation – Meagan took a train to see a friend and Erin hopped in her pal’s beat-up car to go up to the Adirondacks. And they still managed to make it home in one piece, on time, and ready to work for the weekend.

But they are still my kids. They care what I think, perhaps more than they did a few years ago. And these are far more complicated times than the ones I moved through. Each of them have held jobs, both at home and at school, since they were 14-years-old – we are workers if nothing else – but this summer, they ran smack dab into the economy that has hard-pressed adults taking many of the summer jobs they would normally slip right into.

They posted looking-for-work notices on the web, papered the town we live in, negotiated nanny positions that seemed to involve a kind of modern indentured servitude and eventually came up with not much. Jill and I were talking about the dark trend one night and a light went off that the company she works for was going to have a need for summer help at a café in Central Park that serves the summer Shakespeare in the Park Series. Whew. They completed their training, bought their uniforms and like their parents, will be commuting into the city every day to be part of the scrum.

Even with the assist from Jill, something about this makes me very proud. Jill works for an outfit that has incredibly high standards in hospitality and the fact that she was able to recommend them without reservation speaks to the fact that at their relatively tender age, they have held many jobs and been a credit to each of them. It is no small bonus that Maddie, at the impressionable age of 12, is watching her sisters navigate difficult circumstance.

And there is also something remarkable about these two girls, who did not have the easiest start in life, that they are able to march into a city that has laid many of us low and take an honest living from it.

They are, especially as adults, two very different people in spite of their shared birth. Meagan is not a natural New Yorker – “I’m just happy to have a job, Dad,” she said when I was extolling the virtues of Central Park, one of the premier public space on earth. Erin, on the other hand, has an internship to look after as well, along with a busy schedule of music and hijinks in the city – she is all about New York and has been since she first laid eyes on it.

It’s not all roses. It’s expensive to get back and forth every day and the job requires a commitment that probably means that the weekends of familial idyll in past summers are a thing of the past. And I shudder when I think of them walking into the Port Authority bus terminal after a 10 p.m. shift.

But at a time when so many families, including friends of ours, are struggling to find ways to make ends meet, we have gotten lucky. Again. Everyone has their health, they wake up with a purpose to each day and will end the week with a paycheck. These are not small things, they are everything.

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