A few years ago, when we dispersed my mother-in-law’s possessions after her death at 96, I accidentally ended up with one of her nightgowns. Pearl’s long, floaty, pink gown was not quite new and not my style. And yet, on what seemed like a whim at the moment, I tried it on and found I […]
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Grandmother Surveilled
// Elizabeth Marcus // Decoding Our Parents, Essays
Suddenly finding myself the full-time nanny of my two-year-old grandson Aiden was an experience in swinging from the horrifying to the hilarious by the moment. What landed me in the job was a family emergency—my daughter was hospitalized with frightening symptoms—and here was a way I could help. On the one hand, I got to be […]
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Know Thyself: Through Photos
// Elizabeth Marcus // All, Decoding Our Parents, Essays
It is generally held that the road to mastering internal conflict winds through our past and back to the conflict’s source. As children, we do our best to make sense of what feels wrong, with whatever limited understanding we have at that moment. And so we often come to false conclusions–most commonly that we were […]
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Roz to the Rescue
// Elizabeth Marcus // Decoding Our Parents, Essays, Memoir Writing
It’s not surprising that when you have spent your life worrying that your words will be pounced on and held up for scrutiny by nitpicking judges, writing what you want can take more courage than you have. Particularly if it is the nitpicking judges that you want to write about. You will need a mentor […]
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Early Trauma That Won’t Let Go
// Elizabeth Marcus // All, Decoding Our Parents, Essays
We tend to take our strong aversions as a given, but behind them there surely lies an explanation and a story full of feeling. Recently, I had reason to recall my having once been so allergic to French as to have become entirely deaf-mute in the language, a condition I’d never questioned. So, when I […]
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you’re not like your parents? really?
// Elizabeth Marcus // All, Blog, Decoding Our Parents
Psychologists would say that we naturally identify with our parents, either modeling ourselves on them or establishing independent identities by choosing the opposite path. The perfect example of conscious rejection is the 1980’s TV series, Family Ties, starring Michael J. Fox as the hyper-conservative son who mocks the liberal values of his baby boomer […]
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bellicose bambini
// dsaw_admin // All, Decoding Our Parents, Essays, Travel Lessons
The history of Italy is a gory tale of non-stop internecine fighting. If Disney had animated it, the tongue would be trying to devour the toe, the grommet to strangle the lace. To walk the otherwise charming old streets is to tread on centuries of dried blood, fratricidal blood. Other travelers may focus on […]
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the bugs and us
// Elizabeth Marcus // All, Decoding Our Parents, Essays, Travel Lessons
My parents, like the Monarch butterflies, wintered in Central Mexico. Fleeing icy Manhattan to join their friends in Palm Beach or Palm Springs would have been too easy. Instead, after my father retired from dentistry at 80, they set up house in Ajijic, a small lake-side village outside Guadalajara with a big ex-pat community […]
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Edna’s list
// dsaw_admin // All, Decoding Our Parents, Essays, Travel Lessons
After my mother’s death at 83, I was surprised to find among her personal papers a frayed and folded magazine clipping entitled Wonders of the world. It consisted of two lists: one proclaiming the world’s ten greatest sights and the other hedging with another 25 runner-ups. The clipping was tucked into her pocket date […]
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travel wars: us v. them
// Elizabeth Marcus // All, Decoding Our Parents, Essays, Travel Lessons
To most, the sixties “generation gap” was a vague, pop-culture generality. To us—my parents on one side, my husband Michael and I on the other—it was my family’s defining motif. We were deeply, truly, madly split on every subject. Police brutality. Dean Martin. Grey Poupon versus French’s. It was all equally significant. Where you […]