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October 11, 2002/Cheshvan 5 5763, Vol. 55, No. 7
Searching for Adam's rib
VICKI CABOT
Contributing Editor
"Any new partners?"
The words trailed the nurse practitioner as she breezed into the examining room for my annual gynecological check-up.
I didn't know if I should be flattered or insulted.
"I've been married for more than 30 years," I managed to reply, eschewing the hip "partner" for the more conventional term "husband."
New partners, indeed.
My view from the examining table was decidedly myopic. I met my husband, Howard, as a college sophomore. We were engaged as juniors, married just months after graduation. Two children were born when he was still in law school. Two more followed. By the time we turned 30, we were a family of six.
Fast forward 33 years. Only one of our four children is married; none have children; all have fulfilling professional and personal lives. Ask them about partners, I was wont to reply, though as a parent of adult children I subscribe to Bill Clinton's wisdom when it comes to relationships. "Don't ask, don't tell." It's the parental mantra of the 21st century.
Still, we have met a number of suitors, heard of even more. There are the socially challenged and the emotionally constipated, the ill mannered and the self absorbed, the bad dressers and the sorry conversationalists. There are those with too little self-confidence and those with too much. Those who are too nice and those who are not nice enough.
We worry that singledom defines the romantic reality for our children and that they view being single as easy - and pleasing - as being married, with or without children.
Yet, I hesitate to mention that the biological time clock is ticking even as I revel in their independence and accomplishments. I am proud of their self-assurance even as I secretly want to see them married, and as my parents called it, settled.
It is unsettling.
I cringe at the college sex columnists who hold forth on subjects from sexual arousal to sexual etiquette. I find HBO's "Sex and the City" discomforting. I blush at glossy magazines that extol sex outside of marriage with titillating headlines aimed at our 20- and 30-somethings. I recoil just as I did at the inference of the nurse practitioner's question.
So maybe I am old-fashioned. I still appreciate the comfort of more than three decades of marriage, the security of having the same someone to come home to at night. And that's what I want for my kids.
So I still cry at weddings. The tears well up when I see a bride and groom under the chupah. I sniffle as I watch them sip from the same cup of wine, circle each other, intertwine their paths as they intertwine their lives. I pull out the Kleenex when their parents toast the new union with loving words, welcoming a new son, a new daughter into the family.
The words of Genesis, of man and woman as bone of one bone, flesh of one flesh, still resonate, still bode of the inexorable pull toward marriage and family, still point to the profound divine observation that man and woman were not meant to be alone.
Contact the writer at vicki_cabot@jewishaz.com.
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