Those Awful Teen Years

IMG_2770I was not a nice teenager.

In fact, it could probably be said that I was a wee bit scary.

On top of the usual teenage stuff – like, rebelling against my parents and experimenting with drugs and alcohol and boys – I also had an extra-special helping of anger woven into my teen spirit.

I was pissed at my parents for divorcing; my mom for remarrying; and at the world in general when I was plucked out of the comfortable bubble that had been my life for 13 years and plopped into a whole new universe. My new home may have been only an hour south from where I’d grown up but it seemed light years away from everything that I had known up until then.

I seethed. I skulked. I acted out.

The only things that I’m thankful for about that period in my life are that A. I survived and B. There was no Facebook back then to document it all.

(There truly is an upside to growing up in the Eighties besides knowing all the words to the “Like a Virgin” album.)

I’d really rather forget the heavy eye makeup, questionable clothing choices and terrible attitude I sported in the early-to-mid-80s. Really, I cringe just thinking about the Flashdance-inspired ensembles and my big, Jersey Girl hair; my defiant cigarette smoking and sneaking my high school boyfriend in through my bedroom window late at night.

But the Universe has managed to have the last laugh because, as the mother of four kids, I’ve now had the opportunity to be on the other side of teen angst.

It’s scary, y’all.

At one point, three of my kids were teenagers simultaneously and it was probably one of the most harrowing periods of my life since it happened to coincide with the end of my marriage. That provided more drama than a month’s worth of  “General Hospital” episodes. Luke and Laura had nothing on us, yo.

Recently, the oldest daughter of a guy I’ve been dating turned 13 and while on the outside I was all, “Mazel tov, that’s great,” all I could think in my head was, “You poor motherfucker.” Really, the only thing more brutal than a 13-year-old girl would be twin 13-year-old girls. The government should figure out a way to harness all that angst and eye rolling to use as a weapon of mass destruction or some shit. That could really do some damage.

Pretty much the only time teenagers are amusing is when they’re not your own, which is why I got a kick out of Sasha and Malia Obama’s recent appearance at the annual turkey pardon headed up by their dorky dad. Their bored postures, crossed arms and the stony looks on their faces were pure teen evil genius. They were barely putting up with the whole charade – their dad laughing at his own corny jokes – and practically ran out of the room when it was over.

Credit: White House / Via youtube.com

Credit: White House / Via youtube.com

I mean, who has not been in a public situation with her own child and not wanted to reach over and throttle both the kid and the kid’s shitty attitude? And this is not counting all the times that you’ve wanted to commit a teen-directed homicide in the privacy of your own kitchen.

So I was surprised when I heard that a GOP staffer, one Elizabeth Lauten, took a swipe at the Obama girls’ turkey pardon performance, suggesting on Facebook they show “a little class” and perhaps “Dress like (they) deserve respect, not a spot at a bar.” Ouch.

I mean, wow, she went there. It’s like Lauten, the communication director for a southern Republican congressman, had forgotten for a moment what it was like to be a teenager. What it was like to behave in a way that might be regretted years later. What it’s like to, say, get caught shoplifting when you were not much older than Malia, which according to Smoking Gun, is what happened when Lauten was 17.

It’s probably safe to say that a lot of us would rather forget some of the things that happened during our teen years. And man, I’m glad I’m not president because I don’t even know what people like Lauten would make of some of the outfits my daughters have come downstairs wearing or the withering looks my older son has cast in my direction. She would not be impressed.

It’s hard enough to be a teen much less have to grow up under the 24/7 news microscope. The Obama girls should be left alone to work through wearing skirts that are way too short the way the Bush girls dabbled in underage drinking. It’s all a part of growing up.

I did it. My kids did it. We all did it.

I’m just glad my shenanigans never turned up on anybody’s news feed.

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Boy on Fire

See more from my favorite photographer: https://www.flickr.com/photos/maggiealice/

See more from my favorite photographer: https://www.flickr.com/photos/maggiealice/

I should have seen it coming.

Or maybe I should have smelled it.

Earlier in the evening I’d detected the unmistakable odor of teen spirit wafting up from the basement, where my youngest son has been hanging out more and more lately. I mean, who could blame him? Not only is there a sitting area with a TV and XBOX system, but his older brother’s bedroom and bathroom down there – currently unoccupied as the 22-year-old’s away at school – make it like a cozy Petri dish for raging hormones.

“Why does it reek of Axe?” I yelled down the stairs, trying to be heard over The Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror” marathon blaring on the television.

The unmistakable scent gave me pause. Too many times in the past I’d smelled that smelly smell – a mixture of musky armpit and aggression – climbing out of the basement as my older son worked through his teen years. And while at first I just thought he was being really fastidious about his personal grooming, later I would realize that he was using his enormous collection of stinky Axe products to mask activities other than showering going down in his lair.

So I had a PTSD moment, standing at the top of the stairs and recognizing that unmistakable odor, but then laughed it off. I assumed the almost 12-year-old had just been experimenting with the numerous cans of body spray – with names like “Dark Temptation” and “Anarchy for Him” – left behind when his older brother took off for college in August.

When will I ever learn to connect the goddamn dots?

I finished cleaning up after dinner and settled onto the couch to watch this week’s episode of Homeland when the fire detectors on all three levels of our house began to shriek.

“Is Axe really that powerful?” I thought as I ran to the basement to investigate. I was really still thinking that body spray, however stinky, could set off smoke detectors.

And then I really smelled it.

Fire.

Or, more precisely, I detected something that had been recently set on fire and put out.

It’s smoky when I get to the bottom of the stairs to find my little guy standing there wide-eyed, teary and seemingly confused.

“What the hell is going on down here?” I shouted, noticing the scorched area of rug by his feet and big, grey specks of ash scattered about.

“I don’t know,” he stuttered, and I ran into the bathroom to find more pieces of ash on the floor and toilet seat and noticed that the toilet had also recently been flushed.

“What were you burning?” I yelled, not waiting for him to come to Jesus.

Jesus was fucking coming to him.

“I don’t know,” he said, continuing with his disoriented act and then I give him my scariest look. “Paper,” he finally blurted out.

“With what?” I asked, imaging some book of matches he had stolen from one of his brother’s drawers, and then he got down on his knees to retrieve the lighter he’d had the wherewithal to shove under a nearby desk when he realized the jig was fucking up.

“Are you insane?” I screamed, “Why would you do that?”

“I don’t know,” he cried, visibly shaken. “I just did.”

Here’s the good thing about the men in my family when they admit to having fucked up, which isn’t often. They finally do what I fucking tell them to do and don’t make a stink about it.

So my little man marched up the stairs and got immediately into the shower. He didn’t dawdle like he usually does and get distracted by some YouTube video, or lie down on his bed and think about the new soccer ball he desperately wants for his birthday.

He took a shower. He brushed his teeth. He told me he even used mouthwash. He read his book for 20 minutes and then he turned out the light to go to sleep.

Right around then his 17-year-old sister got home from her babysitting gig and I told her to go smell the basement.

“It smells like fiery boy down there,” she came back to report, and I laughed and told her about what had happened.

“What an idiot,” she said.

And of course, I agreed. But I also wondered how much of it was, in a way, my fault.

I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m not in any way taking the blame for the kid’s budding pyromania. But  I tend to give my little guy, as the youngest of four, a lot more leeway than his siblings. He uses words like “atrocious” and tells me my upcoming trip to the Hamptons sounds “fabulous.” He just seems more mature than the other kids did in middle school. Like he has his wits about him.

I know. I am a terrible judge of character.

But lately, he’s always asking to light the candle I like to burn on the kitchen counter and I even showed him how to work the same lighter he would use to almost burn down the house a few weeks later. I’ve noticed he’s lit the candle a time or two when I wasn’t around, and I probably should have been a lot more stern about that. And concerned probably, too.

But when half of your kids are in their 20s, you get to the point where you start to think that maybe certain acts of bullshit are behind you. You assume the younger children have learned from their older siblings’ mistakes and will spare you the ensuing drama.

You think certain people are smart enough not to set shit on fire in your basement on a Monday night.

And lots of things have gotten lit up down there in the past. Pipes. Libidos. Dreams.

At least now I know exactly what it smells like.

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The Light at the End of the Tunnel

IMG_4398Five years ago, I sat on my therapist’s couch and told her I felt like I was drowning.

“I feel like I’m treading water as fast as I can and I still can’t keep my head above water,” I told her.

At that point I had four children in four different schools, which meant four back-to-school nights, four sets of teacher conferences, four pick up and drop off times and locations and I had just started working full-time from home.

Oh, and I was going through a very stressful and acrimonious divorce. 

Awesome.

So I was probably looking a little jittery sitting there on her loveseat in my yoga pants, clutching one of her throw pillows to my chest and pouring out my troubles. And then, in the same calm, soothing voice she uses to quote Goethe and Rumi and say things like, “And how did that make you feel?,” my therapist suggested I make a chart of how things would change over the next five years.

“You need to see that your life will get immeasurably easier,” she cooed.

And because I do just about everything she tells me to, I went home and did just that and saw on paper that over the course of five years I would soon have one child leave for college followed by another the following year. My third child would enter high school and my little guy would finally move to the middle school, which was within walking distance of our house. By the end of those five years, I’d have three kids with driver’s licenses and my little guy would be almost 12.

It did look a lot easier. And really far away, too.

But that’s where I am right now and guess what? My life is so easy it’s almost too easy.

I didn’t even have to make dinner last night.

My daughter is now a senior in high school and usually off at one of her many jobs or out with her friends and my little guy spends a few days a week involved in some sporty endeavor so it’s pretty much just me a lot of the time at home. And my cat.

Five years ago I wouldn’t have believed how drastically things would change. Back then I was working 60-hour weeks and juggling college applications and well visits, food shopping and laundry, and trying to stabilize one of my sadder kids.

Now, I’m, like, drinking wine and watching Scandal.

But here’s the scary thing: It’s only going to get worse. According to my calculations, in five years the only creature requiring my assistance will be the cat, if she’s still around. I will have three college graduates (God willing) and my little guy will be a junior in high school and driving. And, even crazier, my oldest child will be turning 27. That is nuts.

And unlike five years ago, when my projections for the future brought me relief, now, seeing how grown up everyone will be just makes me sad. I want to go back in time. I mean, I don’t necessarily ever need to relive that period in my life when I had three teenagers living under my roof. That was kind of scary.

But for the longest time, it all seemed so endless. It seemed like I’d always have kids up my ass. It felt like I’d be wiping faces and fannies and driving people all over creation forever. And now, just like that, I don’t.

It’s all so trite. So totally cliché. But it goes super fast. One minute you’re scattering Cheerios on a high chair tray and cooking up a box of mac-and-cheese and the next, you’re watching Scandal instead of making dinner.

So, all you little mommies reading this right now, I get that your kids are assholes. I really do. All that whining about having to go to bed and telling you you’re the WORST MOM EVER. You just want them to grow up and move out already.

But the thing is, someday you are going to miss those assholes and wish they’d ask you to take them to Toys R Us or Game Stop. You’ll wish they were home so you could spend two hours making them a dinner they will tell you is disgusting or hide half-chewed pieces in their napkin. You’ll wish someone would complain about having to DO EVERYTHING. You really will.

Like me.

 

 

Forty-Eight

photo-35I knew that my 48th birthday yesterday was a something when it even seemed to give my father pause.

I called him the day before to thank him for the gift he sent, and he mentioned my age and how the calendar on his computer had told him it was “Amy Byrnes’s 48th birthday” and then he says, “Huh” and literally paused.

My father is a man of few words so I could tell that for him to bring it up, he thought my age was a something, too. I think it even made him feel old.

And honestly, I usually don’t really get caught up in my age. I still feel like the same, albeit much smarter, woman who I was 20 years ago. I feel healthy and strong and know that I can still turn heads if I really put my mind to it and wear, like, mascara and stuff.

It’s just that I’m starting to feel, as I near the end of my 40s, that there’s an expiration date on all of this. Things are starting to feel a little less infinite.

For one thing, as much as I didn’t really worry too much about a man’s age initially as I re-entered the dating scene, I’m starting to think that a cap needs to be put in place. I need to draw the line on just how young of a man I am willing to spend time with, which is really going to limit the already pretty limited dating pool I’m forced to deal with.

It’s like that really great line from the movie “The Other Woman,” which I watched last night with my daughters, in which the Lesley Mann character — who is struggling with whether to leave her philandering husband — expresses her horror at the idea of dating in her 40s.

“The last time I was single I was 24 and the dating pool was everyone,” she cries to the Cameron Diaz, not-very-sympathetic, character. “And now it’s like a shallow puddle of age appropriate men who are old and gross.”

Ha.

I’m also starting to feel that I need to get going on all of those things I was going to do “some day” – like write a book or be a famous blogger –because “some day” is, like, right now.

I worry, which I never did before, that I’m getting too old for some things, like going to certain bars on Sunday nights to dance and wearing the cat necklace my 11-year-old gave me for my birthday out in public. I’m concerned about what other people might think about me and whether I can pull certain things off because even though I feel young, my looks are beginning to betray just how old I really am.

And that light I’d been looking for at the end of my parenting tunnel — that time in my life I fantasized about when I still had to wash three little heads under the tub faucet each night and sweep piles of discarded Cheerios and bits of American cheese off my kitchen floor – when they’d actually grow up, is kind of here, too. In no time I’ll watch my oldest turn 22 and graduate from college and send my third kid off to school and things around here are really going to start to change. Even my days as the mom of an elementary school student are starting to wind down, which you’d think – as I’ve had a child in grammar school since 1999 – wouldn’t come as such a big shock, but it’s hard to believe that those days of art shows, band concerts and middle school dances might actually come to an end.

The good news is that I am ridiculously optimistic, like, as hopeful as a golden retriever just waiting for you to drop something off your fork onto the floor, so I know it’s all going to work out. I’m just going to move to new stages of my life while my neck continues its downward spiral as it tries to merge into my décolletage but it’s all going to be okay.

Because what are my options? I have a girlfriend right now who is facing the challenge of breast cancer, so I’m certainly not going to start crying about my sagging boobs. I’m lucky their collective droop is the worst issue I have to deal with in that department.

And even though this was the fifth birthday I’ve celebrated as a single person, I appreciate how it’s forced my kids to take responsibility for making it a special day for me. They bought me great gifts, took me out to dinner and even paid for parking. They also took care of some pesky chores around the house – like putting chemicals in the pool and organizing shelves in the garage – without a peep of resistance. Someone even emptied the dishwasher.

So, am I thrilled about turning 48? Um, not so much. But am I grateful for all of the things I am blessed with here, in the middle of my pretty wonderful life?

You betcha.

Happy birthday to me.

Happy birthday to me.

 

 

 

Listen to Your Mother. Thank You.

keep-calm-and-listen-to-your-mother-1

http://www.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk

This is what I am fucking sick of: People with opinions.

Not you. You can have all the opinions you want. I mean, I’d prefer it if you kept them to yourself — especially if you watch a lot of Fox News — but I am open to people having beliefs other than my own, as long as I don’t have to agree and pretend you are not crazy.

No, it’s really the people that I gave birth to whose thoughts, feelings and beliefs I am not really interested in hearing about, especially when they are in direct contrast to what I am trying to accomplish around here.

I just want them to shut up and do what I say. Toe the fucking line. Like the good old days.

In the good old days — back before they were teenagers — when one of the kids would start to act up and resist what I wanted her to do, I would just start counting to three and she’d quickly relent and come around to my way of thinking.

“Fine,” the would-be offender would say, and skulk away in defeat.

That method remained effective for years. It wasn’t perfect – sure, we had our share of little ones shoplifting Beanie Babies I wouldn’t buy for them and soap in the mouth of an 8-year-old for saying an offensive word – but overall, counting to three really worked for me.

It still worked when my oldest child was in his early teens and I couldn’t get him out of the ocean to go home one sunny summer day. You know that trick, when the kid pretends he’s having so much fun bobbing up and down in the water that he doesn’t notice his mother screaming and waving her arms from the shoreline about 10 feet away? Anyway, that was what was happening that day, but then we suddenly made eye contact and I held up my pointer finger and mouthed, “One!” and he quickly started to make his way out of the water.

“I don’t even know why I’m doing this,” he said as he passed by me to get a towel. “Like, what are you going to do when you get to three?”

That’s a good question.

But then, with the introduction of temptations more powerful than the ocean in our lives – like beer and Internet porn – I needed to find more effective parenting methods than just counting to three. Like suspending Verizon Wireless accounts and confiscating laptops became my weapons of mass parenting destruction.

So even while the oldest three kids started to drift from my family action plan – coming home on time, saying “No” to drugs and getting straight-As – I could always count on my little guy to toe the line. He was young enough that he still happily drank my Mommy Kool Aid.

But lately, as he starts to inch closer to 12 than 11 and prepares to enter the sixth grade, the kid is starting to get a little sassy. And unlike with his three older siblings, I no longer tell myself that it’s a passing phase. It’s a sign of things to come, and frankly, I don’t really have the energy to try to break one more person’s spirit.

Case in point: Yesterday I was driving my youngest child and his two friends – our neighbors who are leaving for Hong Kong in two days – to the beach. I wanted to stop at the ATM and get some cash so he could go buy himself, like, a $3 Coke or $5 fries at the snack bar to live it up during his friends’ final days in New Jersey.

“Do we have to come in?” he asked and I told them they could sit in the car and listen to Z100 while I ran into the bank. Unfortunately, I failed to mention not to touch anything while I was gone since I have issued that disclaimer so many times in the past, I did not see that it would be necessary in this instance.

I run in and find myself behind a young woman who did not wish to avail herself of one of the tellers sitting around and chatting to make her deposit, but rather go through the lengthy process at the ATM and causing the rest of us to stand and watch her slowly press whatever needed to be pressed and feed envelopes into the machine to complete the transaction. My turn finally came and I am so good at taking cash out lately that I zipped through the process and was stuffing the cash into my wallet as I walked down the sidewalk to my car when I heard the sound of a key turning in the ignition and realized it was my own vehicle being started.

Now, unlike my older children – who didn’t even touch the car keys until they started to learn to drive — my 11-year-old is well versed in how to turn the car on and off and I’ve even let him steer down our street and into the driveway on occasion. Since his older siblings have gotten into so many accidents already in their driving lives, my new strategy is to get this little one as comfortable behind the wheel as early as possible to hopefully avoid similar situations and $500 deductibles.

My son was returning to the passenger seat as I opened the door and I asked him what he was thinking about, knowing perfectly well that he was just being bossy and trying to show off his car-starting skills to his friends.

Did I mention it was August in New Jersey?

Then I looked in the backseat and saw the two friends looking a little more moist than when I had left them five minutes earlier, their hair damp and sweat building under their eyes, and I kind of freaked out.

“What?” my son responded, and I could tell by the tone in his voice, he was not remotely sorry as he kept telling me to calm down.

“Do you know how much trouble I could get into?” I yelled. “I mean, the police station is literally in the same parking lot!”

It literally is.

Sticking to his guns, he said, “Mom, what’s the big deal?”

And because he probably hasn’t been reading in the newspaper lately about all the moms getting into big trouble for leaving kids in cars to run into 7Eleven and stuff, he had no idea the ramifications of someone walking by and seeing three middle school-aged boys sitting in a hot car with the windows rolled up and Iggy Azalea blaring within on a hot, sunny day in August.

And all I wanted to scream, as he continued to talk back to me and argue his point, was, “Just do what I fucking say.” If I say, “Don’t turn the engine off and sit in a hot car in August,” I don’t want to fucking argue and debate whether or not that’s a good idea. If I said it, it’s pure genius.

I guess the point of this rant is that I can see it coming, that shift from agreeable child to contrary teenager. The days of my fourth child doing something wrong and remorsefully saying he was sorry are just about behind us. I am no longer delusional and under the impression that it won’t happen to my kid, that my kid won’t go down that path of angst. They mostly all do.

I was complaining about his newfound freshness to his sisters and they immediately pointed the finger of blame at yours truly.

“You’re a terrible power figure,” said Daughter #2, insisting her brother listened to her because she was much scarier than his own mother.

“You literally raised him with no concept of ‘No’,” said the oldest daughter, probably still smarting from having to return that Beanie Baby to the store after I found it stuffed at the bottom of her sister’s stroller as we piled back into the car all those years ago.

But I know better than that. I’ve been the bad cop and I’ve been the good cop and in the end, don’t think it really matters. The change is as inevitable as underarm hair and zits.

I guess I’m just not in the mood.

 

 

‘How Ugly is This Guy?’: Things My Kids Ask About My Dates

images “Okay, Mom,” said my 17-year-old daughter, totally out of the blue not long ago. “How ugly is this guy?”

We had been lying around our den one afternoon – along with her older sister and best friend from across the street – laughing and chatting about nothing in particular, when she asked her question.

I had just started dating someone and although it was the first real relationship I had had since I split from their dad five years earlier, the girls really didn’t want any details. In fact, the entire subject of this new guy made their faces twist in disgust and brought an abrupt halt to the conversation.

So I was surprised she would ask me anything about him, especially what he looked like.

“I don’t know,” I told her. “I think he’s kind of cute.”

She then proceeded to make gagging noises and pretended to vomit over the arm of the leather chair she was draped in. But the neighbor was all over it; leaning forward to get every detail she could about my new dating life.

“Maggie is, like, obsessed with this,” my daughter sniped and she told her friend to cut it out. She made it clear that my dating life was totally disgusting and not cool.

I always thought that by the time I got around to dating, once we were able to brush all the ashes and soot of the nuclear fallout of my divorce off and get on with our lives, my kids would be happy to see me happy.

I am so naïve.

The truth of it is that children, for the most part, are not really that interested in their parents’ happiness; especially when it puts their own happiness at risk.

No, it turns out my kids would rather see me alone, surrounded by cats and stacks of newspapers and back issues of The New Yorker, than with a significant other.

And for a long time, that seemed to be my trajectory. I was really busy with a demanding full-time job and managing the fallout of the divorce – all of the emotional ups and downs – to even think about dating. I had a pissed off ex-husband and three ornery teenagers so I didn’t really feel the need to develop any new relationships. I had enough personalities on my plate to manage, thank you.

But five years after everything imploded, even my therapist was like, “Start dating, already.” And I tried. I signed up for online services and never said “no” to anyone trying to fix me up with someone. I even gave a checkout guy my number, for gods sakes.

But my heart wasn’t really in it.

So, unlike all the glasses of wine and cups of coffee I shared with a litany of fix ups before, I went on a date not long ago with not only an open mind, but an open heart and kind of liked the guy enough to go out again the next night.

And I’ve got to admit, the whole thing came out of the blue. One minute I’m going to meet yet another guy at a bar for a drink and the next, we’ve gone out together seven times in two weeks.

So the kids were annoyed that this new relationship briefly took me away from being on call 24/7 for sandwich making duties and counter wiping. They like the idea of me standing in our kitchen at the ready as they go about their lives. They like to know that I’m around on the off chance that they might need me.

And they’ve been jealous of things that have taken my attention away from them in the past – like my girlfriends and my former job – but nothing compared to the disdain they employed when discussing my love life.

One night, as I rushed around the kitchen putting out taco fixings for dinner before I got picked up to go out on a date, two of the kids were complaining that I was going out with this guy again and I threw up my hands and asked, “You guys, don’t you want me to be happy?”

And the two of them looked at me and said, unequivocally, “No.” They barely blinked before they said it.

My 20-year-old daughter told me she had come home from a summer class the night before and was feeling cranky about the course and when she saw her older brother sitting on the couch watching TV, she asked him where I was.

“Out on a date,” he said.

“AAARRRGGGHH!” was, I think, the response she said she gave him and he immediately snapped back, “Cut it out. Mom deserves to date.”

So, at least a quarter of my progeny can see past themselves and support my love life.

I tried to talk to each kid about it privately. I tried to assure them that I wasn’t going to marry the guy. We were just dating and that if it wasn’t him, at some point it was going to be somebody else.

I told this to my little guy, and he just said, “Face.”

“Face?” I asked. “What do you mean face?”

“I want to see his face,” he told me. “Take a selfie so I can see what he looks like.”

But it never came to that. The relationship lasted the duration of two gel manicures — for whatever reason — but it taught me a lot about myself and what I want. And I think it was a really good experience for the kids. It helped brace them for when I am in a relationship that lasts longer than a month.

No matter what he looks like.

 

 

 

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.

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?

Full Nest Syndrome

matthew-diffee-you-may-be-suffering-from-what-s-known-as-full-nest-syndrome-new-yorker-cartoon

My all-time favorite New Yorker cartoon says it all.

Lately, I’ve taken to sitting at the head of the big pine table in my kitchen to write, my black-and-white slipcovered chair backed into the bay window that bumps out that back corner of the room. Outside the window over my left shoulder, there’s a tremendous amount of chattering these days coming from the finches who have claimed the white birdhouse that towers above the middle of the garden behind my house.

They’re awfully busy, the little birds, as they flit in and out of their new abode, perched high atop a PVC pipe onto which the vine of a clematis I planted at its base years ago climbs and wraps its tendrils. Soon, my new neighbors will be surrounded by the vine’s big purple flowers, whose tightly closed buds seem be looking up at the birdhouse, their noses pointed in the air, searching for the source of all that chattering.

I’ve noticed that one of the birds is almost defiant as it cranes its upper body out one of the birdhouse holes, chirping aggressively at some unknown predator. He quickly swoops off his ledge and darts back into the yard, only to return with yet another thin twig or piece of debris clutched in its beak to furnish the inside of the birdhouse and prepare for the arrival of its newest family members.

DSC_0002

The view from where I sit.

After the long, cold winter sitting in my kitchen surrounded by the quiet of closed windows and school days, May has brought with it a lot of noise and activity, wafting with the warm air through my window screen.

According to my calculations – already a dangerous proposition considering my math skills – I have about 60 hours left of general peace and quiet inside my own house until mid-August. On Wednesday, some time in the early evening, my two college kids will arrive home for summer vacation and the house will be filled once again with debris, defiant chirping and the unpredictable dives and swoops of so many personalities living under one roof.

Prior to their arrival, I’ll be flitting in and out of grocery stores and Costco to make sure our nest is ready for them and stocked with the organic milk and cold cuts I know they like. It makes my little birdies so happy to return home to a Tostito-laden pantry.

Okay, I know, I’ve written about this phenomenon before at some length, my struggle with school breaks. And I also know it pisses my two adult-ish children off, this suggestion that having them home is a bummer or burdensome in some way.

I mean, it is and it isn’t.

What they fail to understand is that it’s not necessarily them, per se, that’s got me so agitated. On the one hand, it’s the addition of extra people who need to be fed, whose laundry needs to be washed and whose personalities need to be managed. And on the other hand, my two oldest children also happen to be the more challenging half of my brood, especially my son. But luckily, their individual Instagram posts to me yesterday for Mother’s Day indicated that they both might know that.

My 20-year-old daughter posted a picture of the two of us mugging for the camera selfie-fish-lips-style at a football game at her school in the fall and wrote, “Thanks for putting up with my crap for 20 years. Love ya ma.”

Plus, she added an emoticon at the end and if you and I have ever texted, you know I’m crazy for emojis. I sprinkle my communication with hearts and the thumbs up signs like a 14 year old.

Her older brother posted a picture of me taken last summer before a “Heroes and Villains” costume party I attended dressed as the less-than-warm-and-fuzzy mother from Arrested Development (black St. John’s knit suit, pearls and my hair in a perfect ladies-who-lunch helmet).

I       I don't understand the question, and I won't respond to it.

Lucille Bluth: I don’t understand the question, and I won’t respond to it.

“Happy Mother’s Day to my very own Lucille Bluth. Putting up with me is a handful but you’ve managed to do it for 21 whole years. God bless. Love you Ma,” he wrote and added to his post the cat with the heart eyes emoji that’s one of my favorites.

Clearly they have the self-awareness to acknowledge that I’ve been “putting up with” a lot of challenges for over the last 20 years.

On the flip side, I missed having those two divas around yesterday to help celebrate Mother’s Day. When the kids were young and I was still married to their dad, Mother’s Day was filled with family. Often, we’d go to church, where other moms would admire my new macaroni necklace or glittery pin, and then to brunch at our beach club, the boys in crisp new chinos and the girls in bright cotton cardigans.

Other years, I’d host a brunch at our house and the kids would run around outside on the thick spring lawn with their cousins while the grown ups milled around the kitchen sipping mimosas.

One year, after my husband had moved out of our house, I flew to Ohio over Mother’s Day weekend to spend time with a good friend while I struggled with whether to end the marriage, and returned home on Sunday for a dinner out at a local pizza place, the six of us crammed in a booth eating garlic knots.

So it was odd to be just me and the two kids still living at home full-time yesterday for Mother’s Day. We went out and hiked for an hour in the woods, which they could not complain about, and then picked up some salads and sandwiches (compliments of my teenager) at our favorite shop nearby and ate sitting around our kitchen island. The kids went outside to play with neighbors and I sat on my bed and read for hours. We showered and went out to an early dinner where we sat by the window overlooking the river and talked about how it was our last weekend of quiet before their siblings returned.

The waiter delivered our drinks and I toasted the end of another peaceful year and we watched a jet ski cut through the river as we raised our glasses to drink.

Here’s the good news: Unlike the summers of long ago, when I would cart the four of them to the beach early each day — our cooler packed with crustless sandwiches and juice boxes — the three older kids will be pretty busy this summer. There are internships, babysitting jobs, classes and the gym to keep them all pretty busy and out of my hair.

And for the first time in a few years, I don’t have to cobble together sports camps and babysitters to farm my youngest guy out while I worked from home during the summer. With no job on the horizon, I get to spend my summer on the beach with him, letting him surf and swim with all his friends in town while I try to get through the tower of books on my nightstand.

I figure that over time, with some of the kids graduating and moving back to the nest after college and others just leaving, all four of the kids will at some point have the opportunity to discover the joy of living in a reduced family. They’ll experience the dinner table set for just two or three people, never having to wait their turn to do laundry and having a quart of milk last longer than one day.

But maybe those birds out back know something I don’t because they really don’t seem to stick around once their nest empties out. One day they’re carrying on, squawking and pooping all over the place, and the next day they’re gone. It’s like they just pull up stakes over night.

I think it’s just going to take a while for me to find out whether they are onto something.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Letting It Go

2364When my oldest was a junior in high school, I couldn’t wait to start looking at colleges. He and I drove north over his spring break that year to stay with friends just outside Boston to visit a couple of schools, and you would have thought I was going to Disney World.

Libraries! Dining halls! Dorms! I don’t think Space Mountain could have rivaled the excitement I felt as I walked around those campuses.

And I really love Space Mountain.

My son, on the other hand, was mostly annoyed with the entire process and refused to sit through any of the schools’ information sessions. He did consent to removing his ubiquitous headphones for the actual tours but would then quickly pop the buds into his ears when we got back into the car.

I would spend hours – like a nut – paging through the big college guides we had bought at Barnes & Noble and trolling the Internet, plugging in his SAT and GPA to determine whether he had a chance of getting into this school or that. I often joke that he was lucky I was also going through a really messy divorce at the same time, which prevented me from getting totally weird about the whole thing.

In the end, we probably visited seven or eight schools before he applied to about 10 the December of his senior year for regular admission.

And when the letters started to trickle in that spring, there was really no rhyme or reason to where he was accepted, rejected or wait listed. He ended up going to a school we didn’t visit until after he was accepted, to which he had applied more as an afterthought because some of his friends had visited and liked it. It seemed like a good fit because he wanted to major in engineering (or maybe that was me) and the school was known for its engineering program and then, of course, he ended up switching out of engineering by the end of his freshman year and all reasoning went out the door.

Kid #2 the following year was pretty easy in that she was all about applying early to her brother’s school and by mid-December we had the whole thing wrapped up and she was looking for a roommate on Facebook.

In retrospect, she should probably be at some small, liberal arts college closer to home, but at the time I was happy not to have to go through the whole rigmarole two years in a row.

So now, this third time around the college merry go round with my high school junior, I am trying to keep things in perspective. But it’s totally not easy and I fluctuate between being really into it and totally over it.

We went to visit a couple of schools at the end of last week, bringing our total number of colleges visited to four, and I can tell you one thing: I’ve got Chronic College Tour Fatigue (CCTF). I don’t want to walk through one more student union or hear one more anecdote about a bench or chiming bells.

And please don’t make me shout something about who we are. I’m not fun like that.

I found myself back home this weekend going through the Fiske Guide to Colleges 2010 and plugging in my daughter’s data on Cappex, and after about an hour of studying various schools’ acceptance and retention rates, I was like, “What am I doing?”

I don’t want to get caught up in a lot of hand wringing about finding the perfect school for her and whether or not she can get into it. Because now that I have a sophomore and junior in college, my concern has shifted to what they’re doing AFTER college. The thought of anyone I just spent, like, 50 grand to educate sitting in my basement unemployed playing XBOX or watching Breaking Bad really makes me agitated.

There’s no science to any of this. Getting into the perfect school is some great American myth, brought to you by the same folks that came up with the legend of the white picket fence and the fantasy of the Victoria’s Secret swimsuit catalog.

There is just no such thing.

So, I think I just need to take a deep breath and put it all in my daughter’s hands. She’ll figure out where she wants to go and how to get in if that’s where she really sees herself. I will inevitably relapse and get crazy about something — SAT subject tests or a pending deadline — but hopefully I’ll have the wherewithal to calm down fast.

I will need to, in the immortal words of Princess Elsa, let it go.

But I take comfort in the fact that I won’t have to traipse around one more quad or tell one more kid walking backwards that she’s about to slam into a light pole for another six years when it’s my little guy’s turn to look at schools.

Hopefully, my CCFS will be in remission by then. Or maybe, like learning to tie his own shoes or riding a bike, my youngest will just take care of it himself.