Motherhood – The ReelFan

Gloomy

It’s a gloomy day in Los Angeles, which turns out to be a good thing, because we need rain and El Niño is letting us down. Northern California and the Sierras have gotten lots of rain this winter, but down here some sort of high pressure system has kept the storms away.

This is disappointing. I like the rain in Southern California. It’s very dramatic – the sky opens up and dumps sheets of water on unprepared Angelenos. Little kids pull on their rain boots and send paper boats sailing down curbside streams. The roof – surprised to suddenly have work to do – reveals holes that have gone unnoticed for years.

The last time El Niño passed through I woke up to the sound of water dripping, and discovered a happy little stream flowing from the light fixture in my children’s bedroom. By the time I grabbed a pot to catch the leak, new ones had sprung through, six or seven across the pink ceiling. My sleepy children were delighted. They ran off to get more pots, the youngest lustily singing “Seems it never rains in Southern California…”

I have no idea how she knew that song.

It’s gloomy today in Los Angeles, and it’s been raining off and on, and the powers that be tell us that the drought is not over but the lovely rain is falling, and my grass is dark green.

G is for gloomy, day seven of the A-Z challenge. How’s the weather where you are?

FBI

Except for J. Edgar Hoover, and the incredibly dull film that Leo DiCaprio made about his life, I have mostly positive feelings about the FBI. There was that TV show in the sixties, with Efrem Zimbalist Jr. that I wasn’t allowed to watch, but my sisters would sometimes let me sneak down to see when our parents weren’t home. And The X-Files, of course, we all loved Scully and Mulder around here, although I think the show gave our daughter nightmares. She’s a sensitive type.

Recently a young woman I know was accepted into the FBI training program. I met her when she was a baby; I remember when all she wanted for Christmas was a Little Mermaid doll in a wedding dress. Now I keep imagining her rushing into a building with her weapon drawn, like Clarice Starling.

I guess she wants more.

This young woman is a great believer in justice and she needs to take action – step right into the fight. None of this studying the issue or lobbying for it, she wants to get out there and make the right thing happen. This is all very admirable and I think she’ll make a great agent, but I’m uneasy. FBI work is risky. Scully and Mulder got into all kinds of tricky situations.

But there’s not much you can do when an independent young person makes up their mind. They’ll do what they do; it’ll work out or it won’t. I know a few twenty somethings who are on the verge of making big changes in their lives, all of them looking to shake things up, none of them opting for a traditionally safe path. All you can do is pull for them, kind of like Scully is always there for Mulder, no matter how wacky his plan.

F is for FBI – A-Z Blogging Challenge day 6.

(Anyone have thoughts or experience in the FBI? Any tips to share? Any wacky young people in your life who are doing their thing in a surprising way? Let me know in the comments.)

Daughters

D is for daughters – I have two of them. They grew up and moved away, but now they are coming back. It’s a Millennial thing.

The youngest has spent that last two years in New York City. She turned an internship into a job that paid enough to make her self sustaining, but she didn’t like it. There was the whole thing about going to work, and then staying there all day.

“Office work isn’t healthy,” she often said. “You’re inside all the time.”

I would point out to my Southern California child that when it’s 20 degrees outside, most people seek out central heating, but that logic didn’t impress her. She went to NYC because her friends were there, and she has had a busy social time, hitting clubs and restaurants and taking late night Ubers around town. But now many of her pals are moving on, as twenty-somethings will do, and she’s bored with her job, so she’s taking her considerable savings and coming home.

Her big sister, three years older, is in a PhD program in Durham, North Carolina, but all her classes are done, and she says it doesn’t matter anymore where she lives. This is cheerful news because Durham, for all its NCAA charms, doesn’t appeal to her at all. She likes the big city – Los Angeles, and also London, where her fiance lives. But, it turns out that he wants to move to Los Angeles too, so it seems we sent two children off, but three are coming back.

It’s one heck of a boomerang.

I have no idea what will happen next, but then, that’s been true since they were born.