Swimming Against the Tide

Do a mitzvah. Adopt a barnacle.

Earlier this month, a barnacle covered fishing boat set adrift by the tsunami in Japan washed ashore in California. A little more than a week ago, a young man laden with a back pack full of yen coins in small denominations and a few pairs of socks and underwear washed ashore in Chicago. This morning, that same young man wings his way back to the shores of Japan, while the barnacle covered fishing boat remains on this side of the planet. No fair.

Like the boat, the young man left in his wake a bit of rubble. As I stood amid the tossed articles of clothing and the half empty (half full?) Starbucks cups and soda cans in his room this morning, looking at the sheets that seemed to have been lifted and tossed and twisted and dropped again by some mysterious storm that left the rest of the house relatively intact, I decided the clean up could wait. I am not ready to set the debris adrift, to restore the room to a tranquility that erases all evidence of my son's brief and messy visit.

A friend sent me a video the other day, a tongue in cheek promotional ad seeking young men willing to adopt a Jewish mother, to spend a day here and there with a woman who has devoted her life to micromanaging her own son only to see him drift away and neglect her. "Hmm, what are you implying?" I asked my friend. Could I possibly be the woman caricatured in the video, the controlling desperate housewife who demands that girlfriends take a back seat to her, whose favorite pastime is reading about colleges and determining which ones might be worthy of educating her number one son?
My friend denied intending any such implication, claiming he simply thought I would find the spoof amusing. Liar.

I have to admit it was amusing, and really, I am so not like that. Pretending girlfriends don't exist is certainly not the same thing as demanding they take a back seat. I never picked out colleges for him -- mostly because, at the time he was applying, I was just happy he had decided to go. And the Jewish mothers in the video would never tolerate the whole Japan thing, even despite the bragging rights. No amount of telling people how fabulously brilliant and unique your son is because he is teaching English in Japan can substitute for the satisfaction a true Jewish mother gets when her grown son shows up for dinner on a regular basis and allows her to shove matzoh balls down his throat while she offers up suggestions about what he should wear and where he should work and why he should have gone to medical school, no matter how much he hates science.

A true Jewish mother would cover herself in barnacles and somehow make herself buoyant and figure out a way to drift against the tide and end up on the shores of Japan and whisk her son home. I would never do such a thing. The thought has never even crossed my mind.

By the way, does anyone know where you can buy some barnacles?