Are Mommies Drinking More?

photo-20Here’s a conversation I had with my 11-year-old son yesterday morning:

Fade in: Early morning in my kitchen. The high school kid has already left for the day and my fifth grader is sitting at the island busily sawing through his syrupy waffle while watching the “Today Show.” Maria Shriver is onscreen, reporting in earnest that there’s a growing trend of mommies hitting the bottle a little too hard. The segment is called “Mother’s Little Helper.” She reports that in a Today.com survey, nearly 40 percent of moms said they drank to cope with the stress of raising children.

Son (looking up from waffle): Well, good thing you don’t have a drinking problem, Mom.

Me (relieved): Really? How would you know if I did?

Son (in earnest): First of all, you don’t beat me.

Me (suppressing hysterical laughter): Okay, that’s an interesting way to know I’m not drinking too much. Anything else?

Son (thinking): Yeah, and you don’t act like a total byatch to me.

Me (still trying not to laugh): Well, good buddy. I’m glad you don’t think my wine drinking is an issue.

Son (giving me a knowing look): I know you love your wine, Mom.

So, that’s pretty much what a person with a drinking problem looks like to an 11-year old. Or at least my 11-year-old. Beatings and acting like a bitch to children are the obvious, telltale signs of alcoholism for him.

But we all have those guidelines. You know, like, the signs we’ve seen on TV and in movies that would clearly pinpoint whether someone had drinking issues. Things like having a drink first thing in the morning, hiding bottles, losing a job due to alcohol or living on Skid Row and being a bum. Stuff like that.

The truth is, people with drinking problems look like any one of us (as Shriver’s piece illustrates by featuring a normal-looking mom, just like us, who came to terms with her own alcoholism). And while “Today” tried to make the issue seem new with the slant that more mommies are having wine during Friday playdates (like that’s some new phenomenon), I think the problem is far more quiet and pervasive. I think a lot of moms are at home at the end of the day pouring themselves just one more glass of wine to take the edge off the drudgery of it all. Or the stress of it all. It just makes everything a little happier.

God knows it does for me. But I don’t think it’s anything new.

Drinking is a slippery slope. Sometimes things are in check — I can have one glass of a nice Chardonnay with my dinner — and other times I wake up with a headache thinking, “Maybe I didn’t really need that third glass.”

Because it’s one thing to have a glass of wine with dinner and it’s another when you can’t seem to find your “Off” button on a Monday night in January.

The Center for Disease Control says that one-in-five women ages 25-34 report frequent binge drinking or four or more drinks, according to the Today Show segment.

I don’t even want to know the statistics for old people like me with teenagers. Yikes.

One good deterrent to drinking for me was reading the novel The Good House last year. If you’re struggling with booze, I suggest you read it because the main character, Hildy Goode, and her drinking will scare the shit out of you. You will definitely rethink that third glass of wine. And the author, Ann Leary, not only seems super-cool and somebody I want to hang out with, she is also very open about her own struggles with alcohol.

Here’s the good news for me: My saving grace just may be my fat ass. Seriously. Because I’m finding that one of the things standing in the way of losing weight — in the face of a slowing metabolism and exciting hormone surges — is the calories I ingest from wine.

Perhaps my ego really will save the day after all.

So I’ve really not bought any wine in a while and am finding that I am finally, finally starting to shed a few pounds. I’ve decided I need to get down to my fighting weight before the full onslaught of menopause sets in because things are challenging enough in the perimenopausal stage. I mean if I need to lose weight five years from now, I guess I’ll be relegated to just looking at pictures of food and licking stamps.

The best advice my therapist ever gave me when I was going through my divorce a few years ago was not to numb myself to the process. “Get rid of all the crutches,” she said, encouraging me to step back from the nightly glasses of wine.

And I think we’d all be better off if we stopped trying to avoid the full impact of our lives. Trying to soften the blow of  children and spouses and jobs with a big glass of Pinot Grigio at the end of the day. When we meet the challenges head on, we grow. I know I did.

It’s just that sometimes I forget.

But maybe now the problem is that — in our hyper-connected, Skinnygirl,  Sex and the City kind of world — mommy drinking is a little more acceptable. It’s more out in the open. Cosmos for everyone. Another round, please.

But Carrie Bradshaw never had to worry about waking up the next day to pack lunches for school.

 

 

 

Is It Cold or Allergies?

photo-18The worst part of feeling so lousy these last two weeks was not the hacking cough that actually caused me to vomit (I know, I’m sorry but it really happened) or the 90-minute wait for the five-minute exam with the nice, young doctor who quickly told me I had an upper respiratory infection and prescribed a Z-PAK.

No, the very worst part of this sore throat, headachy, cough thing that just refused to subside was when the nurse at the walk-in clinic this morning asked me to follow her outside the exam room to be weighed.

“What?” I croaked. “I would have gone on a diet before coming if I knew you were going to weigh me.”

I would have done a one-day cleanse, at the very least.

I also would have stripped down to my bra and underwear but instead, she coaxed me onto the scale wearing clothes and my black riding boots, which I am assuming added an additional 10-12 pounds to the final result.

My body is no stranger to any of the symptoms it’s been hosting over the last 10 days and if I was better at seeing patterns and reading signs, I’d have gotten to the bottom of it all by now. But the start of each fall and spring brings acute awareness to my sinus cavities and I’m still struggling with whether it’s a cold or allergies and if I should be taking Mucinex or Claritin. So I just take everything, as the picture above can attest.

The good news is that I’m not alone. A quick trip to the grocery store yesterday morning after spin class (because feeling fat trumps feeling sick all day long) found me having not one but like three conversations with various people I ran into about illness. One of those conversations was just me complaining to someone on the deli line about how crappy I felt, but then I met two other women who were just coming off the same kind of stuff I had.

And naturally, I polled everyone about whether they thought I should go to the walk-in clinic to see a doctor. I love polling people. It makes my decision making even more difficult.

In the end, I drove over yesterday afternoon to the clinic to find like a dozen people reading magazines and texting while they waited to see the one doctor working.

No thanks. I went home to suffer.

This morning I woke up with a cough that continued to wrack my chest and a headache to rival any 50th birthday party. So once the kids left for school, I hightailed it back and found only about five people sitting in the waiting area ahead of me.

When the doctor finally entered my exam room, I probably spent more time detailing my symptoms and their duration than she did looking in my ears and throat and concluding I had an upper respiratory infection.

Initially I had been afraid that a doctor was just going to throw antibiotics at me but at that point, I was happy just knowing the tide was about to turn.

And you know what? Three hours after my first dose I already feel about a million times better.

So my advice to any of you on the fence about whether to seek medical advice or just ride the bad symptoms out, I say, “Get thee to a doctor.”

Because I am all about waiting for things to get better, like hacking coughs and unhappy marriages, but sometimes you’ve got to know when enough is enough.

Do you rush to the doctor at the first signs of an illness or do you try to wait it out? What’s your advice?

 

 

That’s What She Said

photo-17So, lately I’ve drawn much of my inspiration for this blog from things going on in the news, mostly because there’s absolutely nothing going on in my life. Absolutely. Nothing.

It’s so bad that in the five-year memory book I try to write in at the end of every day, just a quick recap of what transpired in the previous 24 hours, I actually noted: Picked Nick up from karate.

Actually, the entire post read: Still sick. Still fat. Spin Class. Whole Foods. Drove Nick to karate.

I mean, what the fuck? I used to have a life. I used to really do somewhat important-ish things. Now I am relegated to karate carpooling and steaming turnips.

But while there’s currently not much going on in my life, there does seem to be a bunch of things going on in the rest of the world. So much, in fact, that I really can’t get to writing about everything that’s caught my eye of late.

So I thought I’d share some links to interesting articles I’ve stumbled upon in the paper or trolling Facebook (which I now spend an inordinate amount of time on).

Herewith, some rabbit holes to jump down:

– Like, a day after I write about turning 50 (some day), I discover I’m not the only one wringing my hands about it. 

– And if you missed the reference to crying about a future big birthday, here’s a refresher.

– As if turning 50’s not bad enough, a doctor will try to stick something where?

– Just when you thought Snapchat was the most worrisome app on your middle schooler’s iPhone, now there’s this.

– Although some media people can build a whole career out of that kind of stuff.

–  Will you go ape shit if you read one more contradictory piece on parenting? You’re not alone.

“Conscious Uncoupling” gets a blast of fresh air.

If you’re still looking for something to do, why don’t you subscribe to the blog via email to get new posts delivered straight to your inbox? Just look for the box here that encourages you to do just that. Easy. Peasy. 

The ‘Conscious Uncoupling’ of Gwyneth & Chris

photo-15It can’t be easy being Gwyneth.

What with all the kale she’s got to juice, arms she needs to spin in circles with her friend Tracy the fitness guru and $350 Veronica Beard shorts she must ferret out for us to buy on her website, I don’t know where she finds the time to yell at her kids and watch TV like me.

And on top of that, there’s that rock star husband that needs to be kept happy.

So I wasn’t super surprised when Gwyneth Paltrow and her husband Chris Martin announced their split Tuesday on her much-maligned blog, Goop. 

“It is with hearts full of sadness that we have decided to separate,” the two announced in a statement that fell under the blog post heading “Conscious Uncoupling.”

The end of the Oscar-winning, kale-eating actress and British rock star’s 11-year marriage set off a flurry of snarky tweets on Twitter:

“Gwyneth Paltrow and her husband “consciously uncouple.” She even gets a divorce in a pretentious way.”

Gwyneth Paltrow says,”Yes, this is my divorce attorney” *points to kale smoothie*

Even Gwyneth Paltrow‘s divorce is going to be perfect.

Guys, Gwyneth Paltrow is going to have the most amazing organic & sustainable  divorce. 

And I get it, Gwyneth and her perfectly pretentious life can be really annoying. Her suggestions that we substitute Vegenaise for mayo on our turkey sandwiches and roll our own dumpling wrappers don’t always seem doable for the single mother of four living in the New Jersey suburbs.

But it’s  a funny coincidence that she should be all over the headlines this week because her face and name have been all over my kitchen lately.

My neighbor Susan brought over the copy of Gwyneth’s newest cookbook, “It’s All Good,” for me to take a look at after I expressed some interest it. But I was really interested in more of a “What is that crazy bitch up to now?” kind of way rather than a “I’d really like to make some of those recipes” kind of way.

I had been on the Goop website a few times and could not relate to all the talk of kimchi and $570 charm bracelets.

I was dubious, at best.

But another girlfriend who’d borrowed the book reported that she had found a number of good recipes to incorporate into her family dinner plan, and even though I think this friend has actually made her own sriracha sauce – something I never, ever aspire to do since I can buy it at Wegman’s – I thought, “What the hell?”

And a few days later I actually ordered my own copy on Amazon.

Here’s the deal: I have really tried to clean up not only my own eating habits, but those of my children, no matter how much they cry about it. I’m really trying to eliminate as much processed, sugary crap as I can.

It’s been over-reported on this blog that I’ve tried to shed some of my recent mid-life weight gain by breaking up with old friends like Mr. Cheez-Its and Senor Tostitos, which is not easy because they were beautiful, beautiful companions. They never suggested I go brush my teeth or take the scrunchie out of my hair.

And, because a certain someone I work out with is all about protein – don’t even get him going about protein – I’ve tried to incorporate more of that stuff into most of my meals. So my diet has slowly shifted from sandwiches, toasted bagels and Honey Bunches of Oats (sigh) to Greek yogurt, smoothies and quinoa.

I’ve even started eating a lot of kale.

The kids and I have been enjoying a bunch of Gwyneth’s recipes for dinner over the last few weeks. We loved the Teriyaki Chicken and the Chicken Francaise. We wolfed down the Spicy Brussels Sprouts. And last night I made the Super-Crispy Roast Chicken, which we devoured, but nobody wanted any part of the White Bean Puree With Turnip + Roasted Garlic that I made to go along with it. The kids have their limits.

Of course, all of those recipes were pretty labor-intensive and probably wouldn’t have happened – especially on such a regular basis – if I was still working full time. But in my semi-retirement, I’m trying to spend time doing all the things I didn’t have time for a year ago, like making recipes with more than three ingredients and getting my little guy to read every night.

Plus it breaks up the monotony of my usual chicken recipes.

While paging through the cookbook, I try to ignore – or at least not get annoyed by – all of the accompanying photos of Gwyneth and her two children, walking through a meadow or sitting cross legged on the beach waiting for their paella to simmer. It’s all a little too perfect, but who am I to judge?

Who are any of us to judge?

Listen, I’m the first one to admit that it isn’t easy being married. It’s hard fucking work. And I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like trying to do that in the public eye, much less having to announce when it came to an end.

But so far, at least according to their joint statement, Gwyneth and Chris seem to be heading in the right direction, stressing that they are “parents first and foremost” and that they “will always be a family.”

Good start.

Following the announcement on the blog, Gwyneth brings in some expert advice in a post to describe what an “unconscious uncoupling” was, which could be viewed as another pretentious Gwyneth idea, or a very sane and compassionate way to end a marriage. If you ask me it’s like everything you need to know about marriage and divorce, in about 1,000 words (compliments of Dr. Habib Sadeghi and Dr. Sherry Sami):

“If we can recognize that our partners in our intimate relationships are our teachers, helping us evolve our internal, spiritual support structure, we can avoid the drama of divorce and experience what we call a conscious uncoupling. A conscious uncoupling is the ability to understand that every irritation and argument was a signal to look inside ourselves and identify a negative internal object that needed healing.”

Boom. That’s it. It makes it all about self-awareness and understanding rather than anger and resentment.

I hope Gwyneth is able to find time to figure that all out in between her sage charring and detoxing.  It’s taken me a good six years of therapy to start to see things this way. And I hope she finds peace, as I have, in focusing on all the good things about her marriage and the beautiful children that came out of it.

It’s like kale for the soul.

 

 

 

 

 

This Is What 47 Looks Like

Credit: Randjelovic.zzz

Credit: Randjelovic.zzz

“Why is everyone turning 50 this week?” my 11-year-old son asked yesterday and I have to say, it certainly felt that way this weekend.

I spent most of Sunday recovering from back-to-back 50th birthday parties the day before. On Saturday afternoon the kids and I helped our neighbor celebrate his milestone with a small group of friends and family and lots of pictures from various stages of his life. Later that evening I attended a surprise dinner at a local restaurant for a high school friend hitting the big five-oh with a mix of his old and new friends plus lots of red wine.

My joke of the weekend was that I liked playing the part of the young ingénue by hanging around old people, but who am I kidding? In less than 30 months there will be 50 candles on my cake, too.

Fuck.

In the meantime, I really felt all of my 47 years yesterday while I tried to recover from what happened after the birthday dinner. I was driving home with old friends – and I mean “old” not because they were two grades ahead of me in high school (I’m still thinking in terms of high school) but “old” like they knew me when I was a brunette – and we decided what the night really needed was some more gasoline sprayed all over our steadily-burning fires.

So we headed to the kind of bar in the town next door that charges a cover just to go upstairs and drink overpriced vodka drinks and try to scream over the thumping music. The place was packed but it soon became clear that we were probably the oldest group there by about a dozen years. We tried, unsuccessfully, to scope out some prospective gentlemen for me and eventually gave up and went home.

I awoke on Sunday feeling way too old to be out clubbing after midnight and wondering if I’d be making more grown up decisions at 50.

Yesterday also marked my ex-husband’s 50th birthday and that was really weird and a little sad for me but probably not for him, because he’s away in some sunny spot with his live-in girlfriend celebrating the occasion.

But it’s weird to think that the cute boy whose locker was next to my best friend’s locker all those years ago was now older than my parents were at the time that I fell for him. I came across a picture of the two of us sitting on the beach together, circa 1982, and couldn’t get over what babies we were. I even have babies now that are older than the two knuckleheads sitting in the sand that day.

And it was sad that we’re both so annoyed with each other right now that I couldn’t even send him a “happy birthday” text. Because even though we’re not married, I still care about the lug – he was an important part of my life for a long time.

My daughter and I watched Wes Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaum’s” yesterday afternoon and I thought about how you never stop caring about someone when Gene Hackman’s character, Royal Tenenbaum, tells his ex-wife, played by the amazing Angelica Houston, that he is dying (which turns out to be a lie) and her reaction.

The milestone even gave my mom pause when I told her a few weeks ago that he would turn 50 this month. “Oh my god,” she said.

I guess his big birthday is just another reminder that none of us is getting any younger.

It was kind of a relief when I read yesterday that even Gloria Steinem struggled with the half-century mark. “Fifty was a shock, because it was the end of the center period of life,” she says in a piece in the Sunday Review section of The New York Times. “But once I got over that, 60 was great.”

Steinem, who turns 80 this week, goes on to say, “I seriously loved aging.”

And I’m inspired by that sentiment. I want to get out and explore and spend time with the people that I love and move towards the end with grace. I admire that Steinem says she only colors her hair and has left the rest alone and hope I can stay the course and not do too much fiddling with myself as things really start to go downhill. It won’t be easy as I already stand in front of my supersonic bathroom magnifying mirror and gently pull up my brows and cheekbones to see the girl I once was.

But I guess I’ll just sit back and appreciate that I still have another about another 870 days to come to terms with my own 50th birthday.

I mean, what’s the alternative?

How to Get a Tattoo

Credit: Magnus Manske

Credit: Magnus Manske

I have a tattoo.

And if you have gotten any sense from this blog of the boring, pretty traditional kind of person that I am, then you understand that it is truly the weirdest thing about me.

I never even really wanted one.

The night I got it about a dozen years ago, I was just kind of along for the ride to watch my then-husband and sister-in-law get inked and then go out to dinner. I was in it for the food and drinks, basically.

My sister-in-law had gotten a bee in her bonnet about getting a tattoo – doing all sorts of research on, like, the cleanest place to get one locally and the best artist to do it – and it just enabled my husband’s long-held desire for skin art. So her husband and I accompanied them to their destiny with a needle.

But when we got to the tattoo parlor and were faced with the pages of samples of potential body stamps – cartoon characters, Chinese symbols, flowers – my husband started to think it would be a good idea if I got one, too. A REALLY good idea, he said.

I have never been very good at saying “No.” When handed a cigarette as a youngster I gladly puffed away, and when my BFF in high school suggested we take her dad’s BMW out for a spin, even though we were still a year shy of having drivers licenses, I got in and fastened my seatbelt. I made an excellent accomplice.

So, maybe lifelong issues have stemmed from poor decision making.

Anyway, the husband started some slight pressuring and before I knew it, I was hunched over in a chair with some guy sitting behind me and dragging a needle through my lower back.

I wasn’t even drunk.

And let me tell you, I have given birth to two children with absolutely no medication. Zilch. Zippo. Nothing.

And while the process of getting a baby out of you really hurts, I found natural childbirth fairly manageable. You just need to keep your wits about you.

You should have seen me then, carrying on in the tattoo parlor, sweating and feeling weak with my wits scattered all over the linoleum floor. I was in so much pain that someone had to run next door to the Cumberland Farms to buy some orange juice to keep me from fainting.

Later, one of the other tattoo artists came in to the little curtained-off area to survey the two-inch butterfly sitting on my lower right hip and said, “That’s what all the fuss was about?”

This was a man thoroughly covered in ink, with artwork creeping out of his shirt and all the way up his neck.

The four of us ended up getting tattoos in various shapes and sizes on different parts of our bodies, and then headed off to dinner at a local seafood place. We sat outside on a deck overlooking the river in the soft summer air, pulling steamers from their shells and marveling over what we had just done, feeling just a little bit giddy about our bandaged tats.

As a stay-at-home mom with three kids, it felt so edgy and naughty to say I had a tattoo. This was back before it became de rigeur for all professional athletes and everyone under 30 to be inked up and probably a cultural turning point for tattoos in general when mothers of three from New Jersey were getting body art. If you charted the history of tattoos on a timeline, that summer probably marked the moment when having a tattoo went from being cool to so last year — like Facebook and Uggs.

For the most part, I’ve never really regretted getting it. It’s fun to pull out as a party trick after a few drinks and I liked that my husband thought it was sexy. Now that he’s not around, I still don’t hate it. I’ve never thought of having it removed and since it’s on my back and out of sight, I often forget the bluish butterfly is even there.

But none of this is to say that I would ever support any of my children marring their bodies permanently with ink. One of the upsides of having a tattoo is that I always assumed it would act as a deterrent to our children from getting inked. I mean, who would want to do anything that dorky?

So I thought it was funny when I heard that President Obama was using the same rationale with his daughters. He has said that if Sasha or Malia got a tattoo, he and Michelle would get inked as well.

“Michelle and I will be right there and we’ll post it so that everybody will be able to see it and we’ll say we all got matching tattoos,” he told Ellen DeGeneres this week.

But I have one daughter who keeps talking about getting a tattoo. It would be meaningful though, she tells me. Not some stupid butterfly.

I’ve already come to terms with the increasing number of holes running along the perimeter of her ears. Every time I see her, it seems like there’s another one (thank god no freaky gages, though). But I cannot stand the thought of her ruining a perfectly good ankle or shoulder – covered in all that beautiful skin I spent years patting dry after a bath and slathering sunscreen on for a day at the beach – by some stranger with an electric needle. It really bothers me.

And even though I’ve never had an urge to get another tattoo, when my daughter brings up wanting to get one, I pretend to get all excited about us doing it together. I suggest we get the same beef-and-broccoli sign on the inside of our wrists or whatever.

She just stares and gives me the same withering look she reserves for when I suggest she gets a job at school or takes her car in to get the oil changed.

It’s quite scary, actually.

Before she turned 18, my daughter needed my permission to get a tattoo but now that she’s 20, she can walk in and get the side of her face tattooed Mike Tyson-style if she wanted.

It’s hard as a parent to sit back and watch your kids mess with the things you worked so hard to nurture and protect when they were young — like brain cells, lungs and flesh.

I’d like to ask my mom what she thought about four of her eight children having something permanently inked on their bodies, but I don’t think any of us have had the nerve to tell her yet about our tattoos.

Do you have a tattoo? Do you regret it and have you told your mother?

Suburban Women in Crisis

IMG_3972A couple of years ago I went away for a long weekend to Miami’s South Beach with an old college friend while my kids went away with their dad for Spring Break.

She’s the same friend who, if you recall, suggested on a recent girls’ weekend that my dark, red lipstick was not doing me any favors, and smudged it off of my lips with her thumb. She also observed during another ladycation with our sorority sisters in Hilton Head that I if I wanted to be successful with the fellas, I really needed to work on my small talk. Apparently, it’s not great.

And while some people might be offended by these personal observations, I know that she just has my best interest at heart and was offering the advice with love. She’s a Greek and after spending a week with her people last summer, I understand her so much better. I now know from where her very strong opinions and forceful nature stem. It’s the same cultural impulse that compels a taxi driver to shout out the window at everyone he passes and the frustrated woman behind the hotel desk in Samos — who was trying to help me connect my iPhone to their wireless — to bark, “Give to me,” and pluck the phone from my hands.

They are inherently a bossy people.

So, from time to time during our trip to Miami, where we stayed in a swanky little boutique hotel and sunned ourselves on the beach alongside topless South American beauties, my pal would lean over to me and say, “S-S.”

That was her code for “stop staring.”

Apparently, it’s something I do quite a lot. And now that it’s been brought to my attention, I catch myself staring at people from time to time, like one of my kids sitting on the couch reading or when I see that really beautiful woman in town who I think looks exactly like Elle MacPherson.

I guess I just get caught up in all the admiring and forget that I am not invisible and it could be perceived as creepy (it freaks my kids out at any rate; I don’t know if the lady in town has noticed me yet).

This past weekend I found myself wishing that the same Greek girlfriend was around to help keep my staring in check.

I went away with a couple of friends from town to Vermont to stay in one of the girls’ condo for a weekend of winter fun at her members-only ski resort.

Yes, something like that really exists.

We snowmobiled through the snowy woods along a winding trail — at one point passing a herd (flock?) of turkeys standing in a clearing along the side — and raced across a hilly golf course, opening our throttles as our hands gripped the heated handles. We skied the wide-open and empty trails on snow groomed to resemble corduroy, skiing right back onto the chair lift and up the mountain. And on Sunday we strapped on our snowshoes and marched around the well-marked cross-country ski and snowshoe trails in the woods alongside the condo.

We were quite adventurous.

And when we weren’t outside playing in the snow, we spent quite a bit of time in the old country inn at the base of the mountain that serves as an uber quaint and fancy ski lodge while a much larger facility is being built for members nearby.

It’s like the setting for a snowy Nancy Meyers movie and is where all the staring comes in.

So, I am not living hand-to-mouth here in a fairly affluent part of central New Jersey where many of my 11-year-old’s friends own iPhones, there are a lot of Louis Vuitton bags standing on line at the gourmet deli counter and Audi SUVs waiting out in the parking lot.

There are pockets of great wealth, where the Wall Street crowd lives in fabulous homes with pools and docks along the river, and then, well, there are the rest of us living landlocked in Cape Cods and split-levels. I am kind of exaggerating but you get the picture: there’s a little bit of everything. 

The crowd gathered at this particular Vermont inn last weekend definitely fell into the former category — there seemed to be a lot of hedge fund managers — but it was just in such high concentration, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I stared at the Patagonia and Prada (!) ski jackets, the well-heeled ladies scattered around the dining room at dinner enjoying miso glazed Brussels sprouts and seared scallops in a beet puree and the woman sitting alongside us at the bar with the fabulous blow out (my friends couldn’t stop talking about her hair).

My one always-elegant friend leaned over as we stood enjoying our glasses of cabernet at the wine-and-cheese gathering for members Saturday night among the casually clad après ski crowd swathed in all their cashmere, and whispered, “It’s very Connecticut.”

None of this however, prepared me for all the staring I would try not to do on Sunday when we were whisked up to the top of the mountain in a heated Snowcat (nicknamed the CATillac) with CNN’s Chris Cuomo, who was with his wife and two young children. And us.

I know.

Two things: First, Chris Cuomo is a pretty handsome dude in real life but the one I couldn’t stop staring at was the wife. Even after pulling off her helmet and one of those Balaclavas from a morning of skiing, she was absolutely beautiful – very dark and exotic, which some Googling later uncovered might be due to her Brazilian roots. The second important thing about this encounter was that the Cuomos were not remotely interested in our lady gang from Jersey. We really did not interact with them at all, even though we sat around a communal table in a charmingly rustic cabin at the top of the mountain and ate lunch together (where the spread included bagels and lox and vegetable-hummus wraps).

“Did you see her eyes glaze over when she heard we were from New Jersey?” laughed one of my ladies later after the Cuomos skied off with their kids and we took the Snowcat back down the mountain ourselves.

We had a lot of time for research during out four-hour drive back home and learned that they lived in Manhattan and Mrs. Cuomo worked full-time as magazine editor, has been called “”one of the most fabulous mommies in New York” and is BFFs with Tory Burch.  And she graduated from Cornell. Oh, and we think she was wearing a Prada ski outfit. Oh, oh and their South Hampton home had been featured in a spread in Elle Decor.

I was in a weird piecemeal snow outfit pulled out of our winter bins that hold my daughters’ old ski wear and the pants were so tight I could barely breathe.

We did have a brief conversation with Mrs. Cuomo, and I shouted to her at the other end of the long wooden table about how the four of us had been planning a winter getaway for months and had originally thought we’d go much farther north, to Jay Peak to stay at a friend’s bed and breakfast. When that didn’t pan out, I told her, our girlfriend offered her place and mentioned there was a nice mountain where we could ski. Totally downplaying the greatness.

Then we started “oohing” and “ahhing” over how fabulous we all thought it was and in retrospect, the Cuomos were probably a little more used to that kind of lifestyle. They probably didn’t think twice about people just handing them vegetable hummus wraps and Chardonnay and icy cold water tapped from some nearby private water source. And it was all gratis.

But the four of us did. We discussed in detail all of the lovely little things we had noticed over the course of our fancy weekend and thanked our generous and insanely low-key girlfriend for sharing her getaway with us.

“I feel like a celebrity,” joked one of our gang as we packed the car to return home. “My kids are going to ask me for my autograph.”

And while I wasn’t hoping my kids would ask for my autograph, I was so excited about my weekend that I was hoping they would be somewhat interested in hearing my stories and looking at the pictures on my iPhone.

“Why do you keep bragging about it?” asked my fifth grader when I tried to show him a picture of the Snowcat, and that’s when I realized that they couldn’t just be happy for me. They felt jealous and left out.

So, I guess that’s why I’m telling you. Please don’t feel jealous, I would have taken you, too, but there’s only so much room in a Snowcat.

The very famous Snowcat.

The very famous Snowcat.

 

 

Free to Be You and Me at 40

39521_free-2-b-u-and-meWhen I became a mom about a hundred years ago, there were a lot of things that came as a surprise, like how much babies cried, how challenging it could be to breastfeed and the power and force of a tiny colon.  Who knew poop could fly like that out of something so small?

But there were also a lot of things that I knew for sure: like, that my kids would love to read, never watch television and listen to everything that I said.

And if you’re an ‘A’ My Name is Amy reader, or one of my children, you know how that all worked out.

I also was determined to bring  a very “Free to be You and Me” approach to my parenting. You know, like we are all equals, be who you are, accept others’ differences, kumbaya.

I even had the Free to Be CD playing on heavy rotation in our minivan, along with our Shel Silverstein and Roald Dahl collections and the soundtracks from Oklahoma! and The Music Man.

That turned out to be a tall order.

Despite my best efforts, we have conformed to traditional gender stereotypes around here – the boys take out the trash, the girls help clear the table – with narrow views (Boston University was deemed “weird” when my son saw a girl with purple hair on her way to class).

But how could I have really thought I would get different results when I wasn’t really being “me”? I spent much of my life trying to compress that girl. To get her to stop being so bossy, so loud, so weird. To stop arguing with everybody’s husbands about their bad politics (a blow job is worse than a baseless war?) and penchant for go-go bars (seriously?).

I wish I could have stayed the same girl I was when Free to Be first aired on television, which happened 40 years ago this week. In 1974, sitting in the small yellow room that served as our TV room and watching that program, I knew that it was alright to cry, that boys could be afraid of mice and that ladies shouldn’t always go first.

I also believed that I could do anything. I used to sit in my room and practice being on the Merv Griffin show – yukking it up with ZsaZsa Gabor – so I’d be prepared when greatness came my way.

But I drifted far away from that 8-year-old girl over the following 20 years. I became less sure of myself. More uncertain about the way the world works.

It took a lot of work to turn that around but now I do feel free to be me and I hope my kids are taking notes. I still think that all of the Free to Be ideas and values remain relevant as well as challenging today as they were 40 years ago.

And maybe you can absorb them all when you’re a kid or maybe you need to live life a little to figure out who you really are.

Kumbaya.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_26FOHoaC78

The Secret to a Perfect SAT Score

photo-13“That is so not fair,” observed my 16-year-old daughter as she drove us around yesterday afternoon to do some chores while we listened to “All Things Considered” on the radio.

She had just heard about the changes coming to the SATs and, as she prepares to take the college entrance exam for the second time this Saturday, was agitated.

As things don’t always go so well for us when she’s behind the wheel of our car, I decided not to try to downplay the cruel twist this news presented, coming on the heels of about five months of classes she’s taken to prepare for the exams.

It sucks.

Starting in 2016, the test will revert to the 1600 score format and make the writing portion optional. The vocabulary section will focus more on words that crop up in every day school and work environments – like synthesis vs. sagacity – and test takers will no longer be penalized for incorrect answers.

The College Board has determined that the current iteration of the SATs doesn’t focus on academic skills – the things kids are learning in the classroom – and puts low-income students at a disadvantage.

Amen to that.

I’d estimate that over the course of three children I have spent around $3,000 to prepare them to take the SATs.

The older two kids went and sat with a local woman – you know, the SAT prep expert you HAD to use, was IMPOSSIBLE to get in touch with and was THOROUGHLY booked months in advance. She charged $90 an hour – although the weekly practice test kids took as a group was free – and met privately with each student at her office.

This time around, we decided to try an outfit about 20 minutes away that does group classes – at $80 a pop – and kids can pick and choose what they’d like to focus on. I don’t know if it’s the environment or my daughter, but she seems more focused on studying for the SATs and is already talking about taking it a third time in May if her scores don’t go up to where she’d like them to be.

As usual, I struggle with making any type of commentary about SAT scores, not only because I know that ultimately it’s their lives and I can only push so much (or can I?), but also because the little darlings go on the attack and ask how I did on my SATs.

“Yeah, Mom,” one would hiss. “I’d like to see you take it.”

Because the general consensus around here is that I am a complete screw up. (I might have mentioned to them that my one attempt at the test looked like this: I was completely unprepared, had gone out the night before and was slightly hungover and got a speeding ticket rushing to get to the school where I needed to take it at the appointed early morning hour. This was not a recipe for success.)

I’d like to prove my children wrong. In fact, there’s a part of me that would like to prove to myself that I could have performed a lot better on the test, had I just been a little bit more prepared. And not hungover.

Sometimes I’ll do one of those SAT practice questions on the College Board web site (the reading ones, not the math, silly), and I usually kill it. The vocab words aren’t that hard either if you ask me.

But the math section would obliterate any of my reading and writing success.

This is why I got such a kick out an article I recently read in The New Yorker about another mom who had the same urge but actually went ahead and took the SATs. And not just once but multiple times, which she writes about in her book “The Perfect Score Project: Uncovering the Secrets of the SAT.” 

Debbie Stier, the author of the book — a divorced mother of two and successful book publicist — discovers somewhere between her fourth and fifth SAT rounds that she has tested on the third grade level for math. So while she goes on to score a perfect 800 during one try on the writing section and 740 in reading, her math never gets over 560 despite devoting herself full-time to the endeavor and availing herself of numerous test prep operations.

“Taking the SAT is not something to do lightly,” points out Elizabeth Kolbert, the author of The New Yorker article “When Mom Takes the SATs.”

She, too, decides to take the exam and towards the end becomes confused by her answer sheet, inadvertently filling in bubbles in the wrong section and unsure which to erase.

“In the confusion, I felt my chances of getting into the college of my choice slip away which, considering the circumstances, says a lot about the power of the SATs,” Kolbert writes.

So I’ll be glad when it’s my daughter getting out of the car early Saturday morning with her #2 pencils to take the SATs and not me.

I’ve got to get to spin class.

 

 

Bikinis After 40: Good or Gross?

This photo of a model, presumably well under 40, is sadly taped to my frig for inspiration/agitation.

This photo of a model, presumably well under 40, from the Athleta catalog is sadly taped to my frig for inspiration/agitation.

To wear or not to wear?

That, my friends, is the question I struggle with lately at the start of each new swimsuit season.

Twenty years ago, wearing a two-piece wasn’t even an issue. In fact, it was 20 years ago this year that I put one on over Memorial Day weekend after having my second child that March. But back then I guess my body was a lot more elastic than the thing I’m working with today. I mean, I was 27 for godssakes and six weeks of running and laying off bagels was all I needed to bounce back into a bikini. I don’t think I even did sit ups.

I was too busy trying to keep two little babies alive to eat, probably.

Since then, I’ve managed to get it together every year to wear a two-piece to the beach or pool – although some years are definitely better than others. I even wore a Gap maternity bikini the summer I was about five months pregnant with my fourth child because I just couldn’t bear the feel of the hot, one-piece fabric on my middle. Made me sweaty.

As I approach some bathing suit-wearing this April, I am once again hopeful that I can pull off a two piece on the cusp of my 48th birthday (okay, it’s not until August but I can already feel it staring at me like my cat).

My main concern is not if it’s appropriate but whether or not I look good enough to pull it off. Like, I need to get that Shar Pei of a belly under control. STAT.

But yesterday, I read a blog post by Heidi over at Still a Dancing Queen about how, at 40, she worries more about looking inappropriate in her bikini as a mother of a certain age.

From the sounds of it, Heidi looks pretty good in her two-piece – she’s just finished training for a half-marathon and is, after all, just 40. I met her in real life last summer at Blogher and can vouch for her bikini-ready figure.

But when she pulled out her old purple two piece for an upcoming family trip, she questioned the “appropriateness” of it.  “My conservative halter top with its full-coverage bottoms is a far cry from the string bikini thongs worn on Caribbean beaches, and yet I worry it is too revealing for the kiddie pool,” Heidi writes.

And I immediately thought of my trip to Greece last summer and … wait, did you just hear that? “My trip to Greece last summer”? Sigh.

Anyway, the only person I saw wearing a one-piece bathing suit during my week in Greece last year was me, when I put on my black, strapless J. Crew number to sit around the hotel pool in Athens on my last day. I thought it appropriately glamorous for the setting and besides, I needed to cover my middle that had bloated over the week after eating countless “chips” (for us Americans, those would be French fries, like the thick “steak fry” variety that Ore Ida sells) that seem to accompany every meal served on tiny Grecian islands. Drinking a few Mythos beers every day probably didn’t help the situation.

Every woman, even the grandmas, wears a two-piece on holiday in Greece. All the Turks and Italians and whoever else seemed to be sunning themselves on the Aegean in August, where it is very hot, is wearing very little. In fact, some women even opted out of tops. Everyone seemed quite comfortable and, I’d like to add, I also don’t remember seeing any particularly overweight women either.

I am glad that in the end Heidi decided to pack her purple bikini.  “I’ve earned the right to wear that swimsuit—and I’m going to try to wear it proudly without concern about judgment,” she writes. “After all, it’s only a matter of time before gravity wins and I won’t want to wear that swimsuit.”

As someone a few steps ahead, I say, “Right on, sister.” After all, Halle Berry is a day younger than me (don’t think that didn’t blow my f’ing mind when I discovered that tidbit).

We have crazy body issues in the United States. On the one hand, a lot of us could stand to lose a few pounds and on the other, those who are thin and fit fret that they’re not perfect. They struggle with the images they see in things like Sports Illustrated and that bullshit Victoria’s Secret catalog.

Mandy at Words By the Glass wrote a hilarious blog post this week about the swim suit styles being hawked this season by VS, which she called “The 2014 VS Swim Catalog: A Mom’s Buying Guide”: “I start looking through this magazine and I just keep wondering why I get this in the mail.  I can’t wear this shit.  I don’t even know anyone who can wear this shit…or WOULD wear this shit even if they had an ass like that.  If you are showing your ass crack at the beach, what’s the point in wearing a t-shirt?”

Credit: Victoria's Secret

Assuming this ass hasn’t seen its 40th birthday, either. Credit: Victoria’s Secret

For me, that’s the definition of inappropriate swim attire.

At this stage of the game, I don’t care about being perfect. I’ve never eaten more healthfully — tons more vegetables and protein than the Doritos and pizza that used to be my nutritional staples – and exercise a few days a week.

I want to feel good about all those things when I put on my new sporty Athleta two-piece in April, even though I’m well past my 40th birthday. And hopefully I can get there in six weeks – barring car accidents, job or tooth loss, which tend to make me want to be bad and snuggle up with salty good-for-nothings.

But if all else fails, I’ll just get a spray tan. Because as an old friend once so wisely observed, “If you can’t tone it, tan it.”

Boom.