Always Be My Baby

Eleven-year-old showing off his handiwork.

Eleven-year-old showing off his handiwork.

One morning last week, my 21-year-old son came into the kitchen and asked if I’d help him make a cup of coffee.

Now, if any of you own one of those newfangled Keurig machines, like the one I have, you know that it’s fairly simple to operate. You open the doohickey and stick the plastic K-cup filled with the coffee into the chamber, select the size cup you’d like and press “Brew.”

That’s about it.

But he’s my first baby. He’s the one who benefitted from having a super-young and enthusiastic mommy who was more than happy to lay out his clothes each night for the next day, trim his sandwich crusts and peel his thinly-sliced apples.

Nowadays, I am hard pressed to even buy an apple, much less peel it.

So I suppressed my urge to laugh when he asked for help with the coffee, but when he proceeded to sit down and start to look at his iPhone, I realized he didn’t really want help trying to figure out how to make coffee. He just wanted me to make it for him.

“Okay,” I told him, “you need to walk over to the machine and open it up.”

I walked him through the whole process and, like magic, he was enjoying a hot cup of joe in no time.

A little while later, his 11-year-old brother came into the kitchen and made himself an omelette.

He got out the pan and heated it over a low flame, cracked an egg into a bowl and added a little extra egg whites from a container in the frig, sprayed the pan with Pam and cooked up his breakfast. He doused the entire thing in Frank’s Hot Sauce and sat and watched Drake and Josh and enjoyed his eggs with some hot chocolate he made in the Keurig.

The differences between the first and fourth child never gets old to me. It always amazes me to see how much the younger child has benefitted from neglect. And how much all my hovering stymied my oldest kid’s ability to WANT to do things for himself, which is very different than being actually able to do things for himself. He’s more than capable.

In fact, he showed me that today when I dropped him off to catch the bus that would take him an hour north to start a summer internship. It’s the kind of gig that requires business-casual attire and behaving like a grown up and when he came into the kitchen for breakfast before we left for the bus, it took my breath away to see an adult standing there at the counter pouring a bowl of Reese’s Puffs.

This is not to say that there wasn’t a fair amount of hand holding going on in the week leading up to his first day at work. We went out and bought some big boy clothes, bought his monthly bus pass and did a test run to check out a big commuter lot where he could park all day for free. Reading the bus schedule also proved to be slightly challenging but then again, what does he know? He’s never had to do anything like this before. The younger kids have benefitted their whole lives from their oldest brother’s firsts — from learning to play an instrument to getting into college — he’s paved the way and showed them how things are done.

So it was weird watching him get out of my car this morning and make his way over to the throng of people waiting to board the commuter bus. A part of me wanted to get out and make sure he was getting on the right one, but I resisted the urge and drove away, watching the back of his new jacket slowly recede in my rearview mirror.

He texted me later to tell me he was on the bus and on his way (thumbs-up emoji). “Thank u for ride and everything else mom (lovey and heart emojis),” he wrote. And I knew he really meant that. The two of us may often bump heads but he knows at the end of the day, I’ve got his back.

I know there’s a fine line between being a helicopter parent and simply helping a brother out. I hope I’m doing the latter. And I know that by the time the little guy heads off into the real world 10 years from now, there will probably be less hand holding involved because he’ll have watched his three older siblings go through that rite of passage.

But I’m getting ahead of myself because after this morning, I’m glad I still am the proud owner of a little boy. Someone who will still just wrap his arms around my waist and squeeze for no reason, sing Maroon 5 at the top of his lungs in the shower and occasionally forgets to use shampoo.

Because it goes fast, people. In the blink of an eye you go from handing your kid a Gatorade to a commuter mug and I know people say that kind of stuff all the time and when you’re in the thick of carpooling and chicken nuggets it just seems like it’s never going to end and then some of it does start to wind down and you’re like, “What the fuck?”

You can’t win.

All I know is that I’m looking forward to picking him up from the bus later and hearing about his day over the dinner I’ll make tonight to celebrate his big day. Because he may have graduated from skater duds to khakis and a dress shirt, but he’s still my baby.

An Overall Bad Look

320px-Bib-braceI am super sorry to report that for a good portion of the 1990s, I could be found sporting a pair of overalls. I would like to have said I was actually “rocking” them if, in fact, overalls could indeed be rocked.

Hard to say.

I wore them to the playground. I wore them to take the kids to preschool. I wore them to the grocery store. I wore them to cook Hamburger Helper for dinner (with ground turkey, I’ll have you know). I wore them to snuggle in bed with little bodies to read Tikki Tikki Tembo and Courduroy. And I wore them to sit on our back deck after I’d tucked everyone in at night, sipping a glass of Chardonnay and listening to a bullfrog croak in a nearby pond, and wonder if being a mom would ever get any easier.

LOL.

And apparently, as I discovered while sifting through old photos this morning, I liked overalls so much, I even wore them to  visit other people’s babies …

Circa 1999, holding, I believe, my niece Emily.

Circa 1999, holding, I believe, my niece Emily.

to family gatherings …

Circa 1994 holding my very own Annie Banannie.

Circa 1994, holding my very own Annie Banannie.

and to celebrate Christmas one year.

Circa whenever-it-was-okay-to-wear-overalls-on-Christmas.

Circa whenever-it-was-okay-to-wear-overalls-on-Christmas.

Yikes.

But I guess back then, fashion was the least of my concerns. I’d had three babies in five years by 1997 and with all the other things I needed to think about — like how many times a day it was okay to watch “Toy Story”  and whether my daughter would be doomed to a life of crime after swiping a Beanie Baby from a local card store — I needed to eliminate as much decision making as possible.

Overalls made an excellent uniform for a mommy. They accommodated both turtlenecks and tshirts and could even be repurposed for warmer weather dressing should a hole appear in one knee.

As we all know by now, I fancy one-piece clothing. If you were to stop by, you’d find a couple of jumpsuits hanging in my closet (an affinity for all-things 80s) and the fleece onesie I wore all winter to keep my crumb-filled tummy warm still hanging from a hook on the back of my bathroom door. So overalls are a natural fit, pun intended.

I’d like to blame my many years in Catholic school for my daily struggle with dressing and ensuing affinity for the one-size-fits-all approach to it. Growing up wearing a uniform every day for almost 12 years made it tricky for me to get dressed in civilian clothing post high school. It was, like, an overwhelming task having so much to choose from.

And overalls are easy, which suits my lazy nature. They were not only good for handling errant spit up and Banana Burst Go-Gurt, they also were good for hiding a bevy of postpartum symptoms, like lactating breasts or that last five pounds. Cover it up in denim, I say (especially since there was no spray tanning back then).

Which leads me to a write up I saw in the Times Style Section today about the comeback of overalls this spring, which is both exhilarating and alarming news.

Be still my heart.

Be still my heart.

“Comfort is a good look,” notes the article, but at prices starting at $300, these new overalls are completely out of my shopping ballpark.

I’m sorry my daughters weren’t old enough, way back when, to tell me to hang up my coveralls. I might have needed them around to tell me enough was enough already. Nowadays, in moments of fashion fatigue and just looking for comfort, I have been trying to get away with wearing the jeans/sneakers combo, a look that horrifies my two girls.

“Mom!” one would shriek after spying me in my comfiest Old Navy jeans and sensible New Balance sneaks. “Take them off right now! You look ridiculous!”

And every time we’re in a store where I can try on a straw fedora, one will inevitably look over at me and say, “You look terrible.”

In all likelihood, they’d have similar reactions if I brought home a new pair of overalls. I’d never make it past my bedroom door. Apparently, I’m too old for many of these trends and while I’d still like to find a cute straw beach hat, I’m willing to bet no one wants to see some old broad like me dressed like a farmer.

So they can keep their fancy $300 overalls. I won’t be needing them this spring. I’m very happy sitting around in my pajamas all day, thank you very much.

I totally rock them.

 

Emoji Love

So, I was texting with a gentleman about our upcoming second date (I know), when the following conversation occurred with my 17-year-old daughter:

Me (looking down at iPhone): “Dude, do you think it’s too soon?”

Teenager: “Mom, are you crazy? It totally is.”

Me: “I know, you’re probably right. I just really want to.”

Teenager: “He’s gonna think you’re a total weirdo. Do you want that?”

Me: “But he’ll never even begin to know who I am if he doesn’t know how much I love it.”

Teenager: “You really are a weirdo.”

And she’s right, I suppose. Some things – like sex, farting and second dates – really do need to be eased into. It’s common sense. But I was surprised to learn that I had to hold the phone on my liberal use of emojis when texting potential suitors as well. Apparently, it signals weirdness. A definite no-no in the dating world, according to my daughter. The expert.

But I love them, those little cartoon-y images you can insert into your text using an iPad and iPhone. They are, like, magic.

Emojis say it all.

Emojis say it all.

I didn’t know what they were at first. The first time I saw one was in a text from my oldest son a few years ago. He had run into a McDonald’s somewhere in Maryland to use the restroom on our drive down to his college and he sent me a text from inside containing a smiling little pile of poo. Simultaneously cute and disgusting but talk about a picture being worth a thousand words. “Say no more,” I responded.

 

Seriously.

Seriously.

Then, I started getting texts from all my kids that included happy cartoon-y faces with heart eyes or hands clasped in prayer. Finally, one of my girls hooked me up with emojis of my own and my life hasn’t been the same since.

First of all, why go to the effort to type in “Ok” or “LOL” when you can just tap in a picture of a thumbs up or happy face? And it’s way easier than the couple of keys needed to create those more old-fashioned emoticons. 🙂 It suits my lazy nature but it’s also pretty efficient.

When I was a kid, I loved the book “Cheaper By The Dozen” and checked it out all the time from the tiny library in my Catholic school. Unlike the movie starring Steve Martin as the father to a brood of 12 children, the book focused on how the parents used time management strategies to juggle the chaos of all those kids, like teaching everyone Morse code. Emojis are like the Morse code of texting.

And I’m not alone in my love for sprinkling cartoons into my communiques. Recently, even CBS Sunday Morning’s Mo Rocca profiled the origins of the emoticon and featured one 20-something woman who uses emojis constantly but admitted that her dad’s enthusiastic embrace of them is just “weird.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FB9eDKPk7pw

I also think a lot gets lost in translation when you’re texting with someone, and so I use emojis to soften the message. Like, “pls clean ur room” sent to a child is always accompanied by a smiling emoji to convey how happy this Herculean task will make her mom. Or, I plug in a big red heart into a text reminding my son to drive safely home from school, reminding him how much his mother loves him and hopefully sending the subliminal message that if anything bad happened, my big, red heart would surely break.

The only person this approach doesn’t seem to work on is my ex-husband. I used to send him the thumbs up all the time as an affirmative to texts he sent, but he began to take umbrage, thinking I was sending him the middle finger instead.

“Dude,” I said to him later, “I’m obsessed with emojis and am just giving you the okay sign.”

“I can’t really see anything without my glasses,” he confessed, making me wonder why he would just assume the worst in the first place. Sigh.

Anyway, I’ll continue to ease this new guy into my love for emojis. So far, I’m just keeping it to the smiley face. It’s way too soon for cats and crazy eyes.

Am partial to the cats.

Am partial to the cats.

We were texting again last night and I used a few and he told me he didn’t have emojis.

I texted back, “That’s sad. I’ll hook u up. Will make ur life way better.”

And it will. There’s something very pleasing about finding just the right image to communicate an emotion, like a hypodermic needle for something painful — like having to drive a long distance — or a long row of wine glasses for a group chat with your lady friends. He’ll figure it out.

I’ll have his texts looking like a 12-year-old-girl’s in no time. 😉

That Time I Became a Werewolf

1024px-Superkuu0372So, I’ve been busy lately with the college kids home and their assorted needs and stitches that came back to New Jersey with them.

Yes, stitches. Don’t ask.

I just feel out of sorts now with folks home during the day and just can’t focus. And coming up with things to blog about has been at the bottom of my to-do list. I’m back to restocking quickly dwindling larders and moving laundry along. I don’t know how I ever held down a full-time job around here.

Anyway, I thought of something funny I had wanted to write about last week but then when the time came to produce, I could not for the life of me remember what that was.

And then I was in Target this weekend (this is also where I’ve been spending too much time and money lately), standing in the bathroom accessories aisle trying to pick just the right basket to corral all the girls’ lotions and potions on the counter in their bathroom, when I totally remembered.

At first, I thought maybe it was just a little warmer in that part of the store and then I realized that the heat was coming from inside me. Hot fucking flash. I looked around at my fellow shoppers — the boyfriend and girlfriend, maybe, about three feet away examining shower curtains — and started to nonchalantly take off as much clothing as possible without seeming like a weirdo.

And it totally reminded me of what I wanted to write about. I had just happened to catch one of my all-time favorite movies, circa 1982, on cable the night before and made this startling revelation; “Holy shit,” I thought, “going through menopause in like becoming a werewolf, with, like, a little less hair.”

Ladies of a certain age, please tell me this hasn’t happened to you at one point in your not-so-distant life:

Tell me you haven’t found yourself sitting there quietly reading a book, or perhaps shopping for containers at Target, minding your own business when out of the blue, you start screaming that you’re burning up and then sweating like you just ran a marathon through the Mojave Desert and need to take off all your clothes. Pronto.

Even my kids can recognize those moments when they see them. I was making breakfast not long ago and felt a flash coming on and quickly pulled off my sweatshirt and started to fan myself with a Reeses Puff cereal box.

“What’s wrong, Mom?” asked my 11-year-old, quietly moving to the other side of the kitchen island. “Hot flash?”

He is going to make a great husband some day.

The only comfort I get in all this sweating is that it’s leading to something better. I’m looking forward to life on the other side of swinging hormones and managing my monthly visit from Aunt Blood. She is rarely a welcome visitor.

I am going to cling to something I read in The New York Times Style Section this weekend that Sandra Tsing Loh, who wrote the new book, “The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones,” says about menopause. 

She says that women finally stabilize hormonally after the insanity of our baby-making years.

“It’s like you lived on earth, and then you went to the moon, and lived there for a while,” Loh says in the Times article. “Now you’re back where you started” — the hormone levels of a preadolescent — “and it’s, like, ‘Welcome home.’ ”

It sounds like the silver bullet to crazy. With a lot less hair.

 

Who Would Play Your Mom In The Movie Version Of Your Life?

I am a world-class procrastinator. Really, don’t even try to compete with me. You won’t stand a chance.

I’m awesome at rationalizing why I should fold the laundry and make my bed and wipe the kitchen counters before sitting down to write. And chronic indecisiveness often results in a stack of papers collecting in a giant bowl on my kitchen counter and fences still crushed in my backyard 18 months after Hurricane Sandy blew through here.

And my inability to focus on certain tasks at hand has me wondering lately if I suffer from an undiagnosed case of ADD. Except in this case, my squirrel is Facebook. 

So it’s pretty remarkable that I’ve been able to resist all of those stupid quizzes I see on Facebook all the time. You know, the ones that are going to help me determine which state I should live in or what color in the rainbow I’d be or some shit. I think I did one once, like which Arrested Development character I’d be, and swore off those time sucks after that.

Apparently, my oldest daughter is open to these time wasters, as evidenced by our exchange last night.

My phone, lying on the nightstand next to my head, dinged with a text coming in as I was falling asleep and I saw it was from her and I picked it up to read her message.

“Just wanted to let you know that Oprah will be playing you in a movie about my life,” she wrote, and I read the accompanying photo of the quiz results snapped on her laptop screen.

Apparently, Oprah will play me in the movie version of my daughter's life.

Apparently, Oprah will play me in the movie version of my daughter’s life.

I started laughing like crazy and wrote back, “Probably the funniest thing ever.”

“I’m almost died,” she answered.

But actually, it’s perfect because not long ago, my other daughter told me she’d like Beyonce to play her in the movie version of my life, so Oprah’s presence will make that casting decision much more plausible.

But don’t think I don’t love learning that all my cursing and wine drinking serves as an inspiration for the girl or that it’s making the world a better place.

You’re welcome.

Who would play your mom in the movie about your life?

The Day I Went South

400px-Keep_Calm_and_Carry_On_Poster.svgThe following is based on actual events. 

This. Totally. Fucking. Happened. 

Let me begin by issuing a disclaimer: I have never purported here to be particularly smart. And while I often seem to by trying to prove quite the opposite in the stories I share on my blog, hopefully I come off – at the very least – as someone who knows her left from her right. Her up from her down. Her north from her south.

Until now.

Okay, coming on the heels of my Jamaican getaway, followed by my brush with poisoning last week, I had to make the long drive south to the very southwestern, middle-of-nowhere part of Virginia to visit my college kids for parents weekend.

I hate that fucking drive. I’ve now officially done the eight-hour, one-way leg 22 times in four years and most of the driving. One time my son pitched in. One time my daughter pitched in. And one time my ex-husband actually did a majority of the drive. Other than that, I have driven the five-state journey myself and I’d say about 75 percent of the time it’s through a torrential downpour and always seems to include one giant traffic snarl that narrows the highway down to one lane for miles.

The return trip yesterday for me and my 16-year-old daughter started on a promising note, under clear blue skies and with our tummies full of Cracker Barrel biscuits and gravy. We filled up our gas tank and headed north on I-81 a little after 11 a.m. towards New Jersey.

A few hours into the drive and finally breaking free of the stop-and-go traffic that clogged up the Virginia portion of the trip, we stopped to refill the tank and use the restroom shortly after crossing the border into West Virginia .

And here’s where things get fucked up, fast.

The first person I’d like to blame for events taking a turn for the worse is Kelly Ripa. In all this time blogging, I have failed to mention my obsession with the Live host, which started with her hairdo and then spread to just about everything about her. Sure, she’s kinda skinny but she says things like this:

Amen, sister.

Amen, sister.

And she also told Cher that she grew up watching the Sonny & Cher show and wanting to be a part of their family (I TOTALLY wanted to be Chastity Bono), so we’re, like, practically the same person. Sadly, the closest I’ve come to being Kelly is finding a great stylist to mimic her hair. I’ve yet to lose the 40 extra pounds.

Anyway, I follow the show on Instagram (which is pathetic since it’s one of, like, 10 people or whatever I follow and Lena Dunham and Oprah are two of the others), and there was a video around Easter of Kelly with a giant basket of Goldfish products. Apparently Pepperidge Farm sent her the array of fish in anticipation of the end of Lent and her 40-day abstinence from the snack she told Shape magazine she was “addicted to.” And it planted the seed.

So, I left the teenager outside filling the gas tank and ran inside to use the restroom and passed a beautiful display of Goldfish products. Seriously, every flavor. And it reminded me of Kelly and even though I am not really eating carbohydrate-y snacks anymore, I reasoned, “Well, Kelly does.”

And she weighs, like, 98 pounds.

I ran back outside to tell my daughter and grab my wallet, and she asked, “Do they have Original?” (her total favorite) and I nodded and she pulled the keys out of the ignition, unsnapped her seat belt and announced, “I’m coming in.”

We giddily made our purchase, got back in the car and back on the highway where we ripped open the bag and ate handfuls of the saltine-like crackers. I could imagine the pounds just starting to fall off me with every handful I shoved into my mouth, letting the salty sides melt on my tongue a bit and trying to split them in half with my teeth. We restarted the audiobook we’d been listening to during the ride down and were probably seven hours into the story at that point.

And now we’ve come to the second person I’d like to blame for the bad decision-making that occurred in my car yesterday afternoon: the novelist Rainbow Rowell.

Let me give you some background: my daughter and I listened to Rainbow’s young adult novel, Eleanor & Park, during one of our college visits a few months ago. I’d already read the book but figured it was the one audiobook I could get my hard fast non-reader (“I hate books.”) to listen to with me and I was more than happy to reconnect with Rainbow’s teenage characters whom she breathes this incredible life into and creates the most lovely romantic moments over mix tapes and comic books.

I found this quote from Eleanor & Park on pureimaginationblog.com.

I found this quote from Eleanor & Park on pureimaginationblog.com.

She references Star Wars, Twilight and the Gilmour Girls and uses the F-word. She really makes me want to write.

So for this trip, I got the go ahead from my daughter to download another one of Rainbow’s novels, Fangirl, and as the audio version began on the way down and the narrator said the author’s name, I got excited.

I turned to my daughter and said, “Promise me you’ll name one of your daughters Rainbow.”

“We talked about this, Amy,” she barked. She tends to call me by my first name when she’s annoyed with me. Apparently, I’d already tried to get her to promise the same thing during that earlier trip. But I forget everything. “I already told you I’m not naming any of my kids Rainbow,” she finished.

Whatev. Luckily I have three more kids to work on.

We drove on and since the traffic had let up significantly, started to make really good time, flying along the interstate and thoroughly engrossed in the story and our Goldfish.

“Let’s guess how much time we have left,” I said, and my daughter paused the book and we both estimated our ETA. I guessed four hours and she said three hours, 15 minutes. She checked the map app on her iPhone and looked up, confused.

“It says five hours and 25 minutes,” she said. “I think I need to refresh the app.”

And here is the third person I’d like to blame for the no-good, very bad thing that happened: My daughter, who, obviously forgetting whom she was dealing with, went along with me when I told her she could turn off the annoying guidance hours earlier. “I know where I’m going,” I told her.

We continued to hurtle down the highway with my cruise control set at 79, listening to our story, our hands digging deeper into the Goldfish bag, until I noticed one of those green signs along the side of the highway that lets you know how far away the next few major cities were, and saw that “Roanoke” was one of the spots listed.

“HOLY SHIT, WE’RE GOING THE WRONG WAY!” I screamed, my whole body breaking out in hot sweat. It was like my seat heater had been jacked up to full blast.

“WHAT???” my daughter shrieked, and we started screaming and cackling and banging our fists on the dashboard. We both needed to be slapped.

“That’s why our drive time to get home kept getting longer!” I yelled at her, searching for the next exit to turn ourselves around. “Why didn’t you notice that on your phone?”

“No way, Amy,” she spit. “Don’t you put that on me.”

And she’s right, I guess. It wasn’t her or Kelly Ripa or Rainbow Rowell who stupidly drove our vehicle onto I-81 south instead of north an hour back in West Virginia. It was totally me.

“I wondered why we were back in Virginia,” my daughter said later (um, red flag number 8?).

Needless to say, we had plenty of time to finish listening to Fangirl (adorable) and spent the rest of the almost 10-hour drive listening to the Frozen soundtrack (twice and with very dramatic interpretations of “Let it Go”) and dancing our hearts out to “Single Ladies” and Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas.”

We are quite the car dancers.

Every once in a while during our race home under darkening skies, one of us would just start laughing hysterically about what had happened and the other would whoop or hit something. Overall, if I had to make that mistake with anyone, I’m glad it was my 16-year-old. We finish each other’s sandwiches (Frozen/Arrested Development reference).

“Please don’t tell anyone about this,” I begged when we first discovered we’d been driving in the wrong direction for an hour and she instinctively picked up her phone to start texting all her friends.

“You better write about this, Amy,” she said smiling, putting down the phone. “It would be your one blog post I’d actually read.”

And so, I figured, it was the least I could do.

You’re welcome, girl.

 

 

 

 

 

Postcard From Paris

Spring time in Paris, courtesy of my 16-year-old.

Springtime in Paris, courtesy of my 16-year-old daughter.

I didn’t leave the United States until I was 23 and out of college. Up until then, the extent of my air travel consisted of a handful of trips to Florida and a visit to St. Louis to stay with my aunt and her family the summer my parents separated when I turned 12.

As the oldest of six kids, before two more would join us after my mom got remarried, vacations didn’t really happen much for me as a kid. We did drive from New Jersey to Orlando one year – my parents, five siblings, a grandfather and me, and I was tasked with sitting in the way back of our station wagon with an 18-month-old struggling with diarrhea (sister, you know who you are). And for about five summers I joined my mom’s parents on their annual journey to western Maine, with the occasional pit stop on Cape Cod to stay with a great uncle.

But when I finally travelled to Europe with a girlfriend for two weeks in the spring of 1990 — a super-low-budget affair funded using my VISA card and cash advances — I got bit by the travel bug. We rode the train from Paris to Rome to Florence to Nice and back to Paris and frankly didn’t know what the hell we were doing. We did, however, stuff in as much as we could – including the Louvre, St. Peter’s, a day-trip to Cannes and a makeout session with some Italian guys – before heading home.

Unbeknownst to me then, I’d be married six months later and a mom less than two years after that. International travel was pushed to the back burner while I learned to navigate the foreign soil of breastfeeding, night terrors and potty training for another dozen years.

So when I had the opportunity to join my then-husband for his annual trip to London around 2006, I jumped at the chance even though farming out four kids and their assorted schedules – basketball games and birthday parties – for a long weekend was akin to brokering a Mid-East peace deal.

But it was worth it. We had tons of fun – we were always good at having fun together – and got to hang out with an assortment of people he worked with in shipping from all over the world, and I returned with him two more times before we split up.

In the perfect world, we would have introduced our kids to international travel as they got older but, alas, the marriage went the way of the pound and with two college tuitions coupled with an addiction to Amazon Prime, I couldn’t exactly swing taking four kids to Europe on my own.

Which is why I encourage them — constantly – to to jump on any opportunity that comes their way to get out of the United States and see the world themselves.

My oldest daughter went with her high school to Italy over spring break of her junior year. She traveled to Rome and Florence and came home with an appreciation for wine and Nutella and artsy photos she took of the Coliseum.

I’ve been trying to push her to spend a semester abroad now that she’s in college, but she just drags her feet and her older brother says he doesn’t want to miss anything going on at school – a rocking tailgate or fraternity party – and that Europe could wait.

What they are both failing to understand is that if they don’t go somewhere now, they’ll never again have the opportunity to be immersed in another culture for an extended period of time and able to travel from there, on their parents’ dime.

They’ll be stuck jacking up their credit card balances to cram as much as they can in 14 days and staying in sketchy pensiones, unable to afford anything but like the cattle car on the overnight Eurorail from Paris to Rome. Believe me, I know.

My 16-year-old daughter took off for Paris Saturday afternoon for a 10-day trip with her high school. I literally scraped together the money – which I really didn’t have any business spending – for her to join many of her good friends tour the City of Light and discover that there’s a whole world outside the good ol’ US of A.

We really spent a lot of time getting her ready for the trip — making sure she had appropriate rain gear, walking shoes and a fashionable Old Navy ensemble – unlike when her sister flew to Europe three years ago. Back then, I don’t think I was involved in the clothes she packed and couldn’t tell you if she even had an umbrella, and I think that it’s a sign of how much things have changed around here since then.

Three years ago I still had four kids living at home and had started working full-time and I don’t think I could even see straight, much less worry about how many pairs of jeans my daughter had packed for 10 days in Italy.

I didn’t even know what time to pick her back up from the high school the day they returned . I actually had to call another family whose son was on the trip, people I didn’t really know well, to find out and you should have heard the tone in the dad’s voice when I had to lay my clueless cards on the table. He was surprised, at best. He had obviously never spent any time trying to operate as a disorganized, working, single mother.

But to my older daughter’s credit, she didn’t really need me. Later, I learned that some of the kids had called their families while in Italy, but my girl left her iPhone at home and never really felt the need to check in. I probably don’t blame her.

Flash forward three years, one job and two fewer kids later, and I had a lot of time to focus on my younger daughter’s trip. And, unlike her sister, she brought her phone along and I’ve already gotten filled in on the adventure so far through iMessages and Snapchat. There’s Wi-Fi in her hotel, so I’ve gotten a picture of the view from the rooftop and one of her pretending to lick the Eiffel Tower in the distance.

I asked her to sum up the experience so far in three words and she wrote back: “Foreign. Fabulous. Frightening.”

“What’s so scary?” I asked.

“It’s just so different here,” she texted. “And I can already tell they hate Americans.”

I reminded her to keep smiling and to try to use the little French she knew – lots of pleases and thank yous – as much as possible and she’d be okay.

“I’m trying, it’s just hard,” she wrote. “But I’m loving it.”

As the kids started to board the bus yesterday that would take them to the airport, I grabbed my daughter and pulled her aside for one last hug. I looked into her big blue eyes and tried to impart important final pieces of wisdom: Don’t talk to strangers. Sleep on the plane. Take notes on everything interesting you see and hear. Be careful because the alcohol there is a lot stronger than it is here. We laughed and she gave me one more big squeeze and I could feel my throat tighten and the tears start to sting my eyes.

“Stop,” she said and gave me a kiss and got on the bus with a wave.

As the bus pulled out of the high school parking lot, past the group of moms and dads gathered to wave the kids off, I had to wipe the tears leaking past my sunglasses.

Because as thrilled that I was that she was on the cusp of this great and possibly life-changing adventure, I hated to see her go.

It scared the shit out of me.

But, like figuring out how to navigate the Paris Metro or an overnight layover in the Milan train station – or, hey, even a divorce – these challenges have made for a richer, fuller life.

Just add Nutella.

 

 

Here’s the Story

IMG_3118 2Okay, now I get it.

For the longest time, I’ve been trying to figure out where they were, the guys my age. At least the ones who weren’t married and were straight.

As many of you may remember, I’ve spent a little time dabbling on Match.com. I say “dabble” because I’ve gone ahead and created a profile, uploaded photos and exchanged a few emails with dudes and ultimately went on exactly one date. And it was totally meh.

But of all the emails, favorites and winks I’ve received on the dating web site, none of them are from men in their 40s. I’m plenty popular with the young guys in their 30s and the older dudes in their 50s and 60s, but men born around the same time as me are scarce.

Now I know why.

As I was trolling Facebook yesterday, something I am wont to do in my semi-retirement and looking for things to keep me busy, I saw the following tidbit posted by the Today Show:

All the young boys love Florence.

All the young boys love Florence.

 

The guys my age are trying to date 80-year-old Florence fucking Henderson.

That explains everything.

That explains why I not only don’t get any emails, winks, nods, pokes or whatever from 40-year-old men on Match, but when I actually send messages to men my age who don’t look like they want to keep me in a cage in their basement in Queens, I get no response.

Like, crickets.

And of course there is the possibility that the notes I’m sending are perceived as weird, my profile boring (one man did observe that it seemed I really liked to watch TV), my pictures are ugly or I have too many kids.

I get that.

But today, I am going with the notion that they’re just too busy trying to get it on with Carol Brady.

That’s the better story.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How to Get a Spray Tan

IMG_2945Because I am a woman of a certain age living in New Jersey, there might be certain assumptions you’ve made about me.

Perhaps you think I tawk a certain way, embrace big hair and have had my breasts surgically augmented up to here (hand at throat). But while I’ll admit to being a fairly aggressive driver and knowing all the words to most Bruce Springsteen songs, I don’t really fit that “Real Housewives of New Jersey” profile. I like to wear my hair short and flat to my head, my boobs look like the kind of boobs you’d find on a 47-year-old woman who’d nursed four kids and a woman I interviewed with once years ago in Manhattan for a PR job with Gucci couldn’t get over how I spoke.

“You don’t sound like you’re from New Jersey,” this Italian woman marveled repeatedly after I told her I grew up in the Garden State.

But there is one thing about me that kind of fits the “Jersey Shore” profile and that is my penchant for tanning. It just makes everything better: Middle-aged belly fat, wobbly arms and a face left pale by cold and snowy Jersey winters.

Dudes, I am a firm believer that if you can’t tone it, you need to tan it.

I’ve embraced this notion since I was a teenager, when I returned home from a two-week stay at my parents’ condo in Boca (so Jersey) and garnered attention not only for my deep tan but my overall attractiveness level. It had gone way up. It turns out I’m one of those girls who just looks a lot better with a little color.

After that revelation, I dedicated myself to tanning. I spent hours sitting on the beach with my high school BFF, slathered in Bain de Soleil, sipping Diet Cokes and puffing away on our Merit cigarettes (the picture of health, circa 1983).

When tanning beds came into vogue, you can bet I’d scrape money together to go and bake on those glass beds, my eyes shielded by those little rubber goggles like someone participating in some weird science experiment.

But then, like the delicious Diet Cokes and cigarettes, we found out that all those rays — whether real or blasted out of a tanning bed — were not so good for you.

So when a spray tan place opened in town 10 years ago,  I was an early adapter. I quickly adjusted to standing in just a paper thong and a hair net in front of another woman, while she instructed me to turn my leg this way and that, and then turn around and bend over a little to avoid that dreaded ass wrinkle.

I’m kind of sorry I know these things.

Now, you don’t have to go au natural — you can wear a bra and underwear or a bathing suit — but I mean if I’m getting tan, I am going to get a tan.

And I’ve learned over the years that being as brown as a berry was cute when I was 8 — when my siblings and I would pile into the dentist’s office for a check up after a long summer playing under the sun sans sunscreen and the receptionist would say, “Look at all you brown little berries” — but not so attractive on a grown woman. Witness the poor “Tan Mom.” A little glow is really all you need.

I visited the nice ladies at the spray tan place in anticipation of my Florida Ladycation last weekend because you could be sure I didn’t want to hit the beach fresh off this brutal winter weather. I really needed something to tone down those big, blue veins on the backs of my legs.

Really, I consider it a public service.

Here’s the difference between getting sprayed now at 47 than a decade ago: The technician needs to employ one of those sponge brushes to gently prop the skin that sags towards my knees up to get inside those wrinkles. It’s come to that.

I became concerned when the woman who sprayed me didn’t have me kind of bend over to spray my front, thus preventing my boobs from shading half my torso, and told her as much. She then came over and, one at a time, kind of lifted up my boobs with her fingers to get under there.

“Wow,” I told her. “That’s the most action I’ve gotten in a while.”

I mean, what else are you going to say in that situation? I treated it as if she was a doctor or a mammogram technician.

Before entering one of the back rooms to get sprayed, I was chatting with the owner and a mom waiting as her teenage daughter got sprayed for a prom. I had mentioned that I was preparing to go on a trip and the mom said it never occurred to her to get a spray tan before going on a sunny vacation. It never occurred to her? I even make a beeline to the spray tan place to spruce up for a big party.

The owner tried to encourage the mom to try a quick spray on her face to see what it’s like in case she wanted to come back before going on vacation the following week, but the mom demurred, saying she’d think about it.

Clearly, she must not be from New Jersey.

Are you a Jersey Girl who enjoys a little tanning? Just click here to share it!

 

Great Expectations

photo-21This is a story about expectations and the benefits of keeping them low.

Now, of course, this idea is nothing new. Every year there’s some article written about how Denmark is considered the happiest country in the world and it’s in part because the Danes keep their expectations low.

They are just content with their lot in life and don’t expect much more.

I’ve mentioned this idea to my kids, the notion of keeping their own expectations low, which is usually met with groans and eye rolls. Okay, it might be a bit of a bummer – having your mom tell you not to expect too much out of life – but it is a surefire path to happiness. Don’t get your hopes up for, say, a hamster for your birthday when you know your mom is not willing to clean more poop.

I like the slant the novelist Jodi Picoult gives to achieving happiness in her book, “Nineteen Minutes”: “A mathematical formula for happiness: Reality divided by expectations,” she writes. “There were two ways to be happy: Improve your reality or lower your expectations.”

Maybe this idea is a little more hopeful, a little more in line with what my friend Lisa was trying to get at during a recent conversation we had about expectations. “Shouldn’t we all expect certain things from ourselves?” she asked, and I agreed. We should have a certain set of boundaries about our own and others’ behavior and if those our not being met — our expectations — then something needs to change.

But we both agreed that low expectations for our Ladycation to Florida this past weekend was probably the key to a memorable getaway. Like, we had off-the-charts fun.

In the days leading up to our departure, people would ask me where I was going in Florida and I would have to tell them, “I have no idea.”

I mean, I knew I was flying into West Palm Airport and that we were staying at our friend’s place somewhere around there and that the three of us would be joined by the homeowner’s college roommate the following day.

That’s about it.

I had no idea what we were going to be doing, if I needed to pack some dressier stuff for dinners and if bringing sneakers was way too ambitious. And I figured the college friend would be nice enough, but didn’t really give her too much thought.

I just figured it would all be fine and nice to get away from cold New Jersey for a long weekend with nice women.

When my girlfriend who lives across the street – the kind of friend who, when I am packing for a trip, lends me all her chic Joie tops and Anthropologie necklaces – learned that I was not going to South Beach, as she first thought, but West Palm, she said, “Oh, so it’s just going to be a nice, quiet girls weekend,” and started putting her fancier items back in her closet.

I nodded my head and picked up the stack of colorful Lily cashmere sweaters she was lending me to take along and I packed for days lying out in the sun and casual dinners with the girls at night.

It turns out, that the weekend was anything but quiet. In fact, I’d say it took on the feel of one of those Vegas commercials because some of the things that happened are really better left in the West Palm-area and definitely not on my blog which is read by my kids, their friends and my mom.

We got a little crazy.

Perhaps the tone of the trip was set when that second round of drinks at the Newark Airport wine bar caused us to almost miss the flight out Thursday night (it turns out a 7:30 departure means they shut the door to the plane at 7:20, according to the flight attendant who lectured us while checking us in at, like, 7:10 and then punished us by making us check our carefully-packed, carry-on bags.) There was my Beyoncé moment when the singer in the band at the bar we went to after dinner Saturday night came down off the stage to dance with me to “Walk This Way” and one of my moves was crooking my pointer finger to get him to, well you know, walk my way. (My girlfriend Lisa said the next day, “I know the type of shenanigans I can get into, but didn’t know you had that in you.”) And the tail end of the trip found me in the airport bar, again, drinking Scotch out of a straw being held by some hot guy whose sunglasses, at 8 p.m., indicated he had had a rough weekend, too.

Here’s that mathematical formula: Low expectations + High alcohol =  Mucho fun.

We had joked all weekend that Lisa was a “connector.” She loves to chat with the workers at her local Dunkin Donuts she visits daily and tried to high-five one of the flight attendants on our flight to Florida. But it is pretty safe to say that Florida Amy was also quite the connector.

As for the college roommate, it turns out that we were separated at birth. We hit it off immediately when she arrived early Friday morning, totally admiring each other’s outfits, and the four of us were really well suited for traveling together. There was a high-level of bossiness that was balanced by others’ (me in particular) willingness to just get in the back seat and go along for the ride. I am an amazing Indian.

And my friend who owns the house, unbeknownst to me, had planned our weekend with lots of fun things to do on an almost hourly basis, like at 3 p.m. Saturday we needed to leave the beach for cocktails, 4 p.m. was ice cream at her favorite ice cream place followed by shopping and then home to be ready for our 7:00 pick up to go out to dinner. I woke up Sunday morning to find a pink bag filled with assorted resort wear pieces lying on the floor of my room and carried it into the kitchen and said to the girls standing there, “What the hell? I don’t even have a job.” 

Therein lies the danger of shopping with girlfriends after drinking a goblet full of Hendricks gin on a sunny deck in Florida. Rational thinking goes for a swim in the ocean.

Anyway, lest you start to get worried about me, I’ll assure you that Florida Amy has been packed away since my return late Sunday night. She was a lot of fun but doesn’t really fit into my daily grind of laundry folding and driving duties. She wasn’t the most solid of citizens.

Take heart, though. I leave for Jamaica next week.

God only knows what Jamaica Amy is like.