Posted by Amy Byrnes

The following is based on actual events.

This. Totally. Fucking. Happened.

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

Until now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen, sister.

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

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

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

And she weighs, like, 98 pounds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are quite the car dancers.

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

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

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

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

You’re welcome, girl.

Apr

2014

How to Cope After a Miscarriage

Posted by Amy Byrnes

Credit: John O’Neil

Someone I know had a miscarriage last week and when I called to tell her how sorry I was for her loss, she said she never expected to be so sad, and stopped to cry some more.

“Just in disbelief,” she texted later, and I totally got it.

I had three early miscarriages in my quest to have four children and while some might have seen the difficulty maintaining a pregnancy as a red flag – a sign from the universe that perhaps I shouldn’t have four kids – my uterus and I persevered.

Too bad I didn’t bring the same determination to other avenues of my life.

But I understood when she cried how truly devastating it was to lose a pregnancy, no matter how brief. As soon as that stick turns pink, the baby is real. It already has an approximated birthday, name and Ivy League school that that soon-to-be-brilliant child would some day attend.

There are so many hopes and dreams pinned to that tiny little ball of cells that when it turns out that that’s all it really is — just a ball of cells that don’t quite know what to do with themselves – it makes for a very sad revelation.

But it’s also something that nobody ever really talks about. It’s like we need to keep that sad news to ourselves because it’s going to ruin everybody’s day. Like it wasn’t a big enough deal to trouble anyone else with.

But it is to the woman who, however briefly, patted her belly thinking she was carrying a new life. A new member of her family.

And this doesn’t even take into account the moms who lose full-term babies or actual children. Like, I can’t even go there, it’s so terrible. That type of loss is in a whole other ballpark.

And then there are the women who just can’t sustain a pregnancy. Another ball of sadness wax.

But in the world of loss, suffering a miscarriage falls quietly somewhere on the spectrum of grief.

You’d have thought by now that some marketing genius would have identified this as an underserved market that’s yet to be tapped. I’m surprised Hallmark hasn’t come come up with condolence cards or that Always hasn’t created special sanitary pads marketed for the miscarriage. Maybe some K-Y product designed for after the coast is clear, when the time is once again right.

I told the kids that someone we knew had lost a pregnancy and they were super-sad. They are ready for a new baby, especially my youngest child.

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “I had three miscarriages before I had you.”

“Wait,” he said, his big blue eyes growing even bigger. “Does that mean I would have had, like, six brothers and sisters?”

“No, dummy,” his teenaged sister said. “That means you might not have been born.”

And you could tell by the look on his face that he didn’t really know what that meant.

But I did. It meant that, somehow – no matter how sad – things really do work out in the end.

Apr

2014

Postcard From Paris

Posted by Amy Byrnes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s so scary?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It scared the shit out of me.

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

Just add Nutella.

Mar

2014

How to Get a Tattoo

Posted by Amy Byrnes

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?

Mar

2014

Give Us Dirty Laundry

Posted by Amy Byrnes

I feel sorry for the Cannings.

You know who they are. They’re the New Jersey family that made international headlines last week when their teenage daughter, Rachel, took her parents to court in an effort to get them to pay her school tuition, even though she moved out of their house in October.

Rachel accuses her mom of being the source of her battle with anorexia (she says she called her “fat” and “porky”) and her dad of inappropriate acts of affection (like kissing her on the cheek in public).

Her parents claim their 18-year-old daughter constantly overstepped the boundaries they had set for her – by staying out late, drinking alcohol and dating a boy of whom they did not approve. She’d also been suspended from her Catholic high school a couple of times.

The family appeared together in court last week, although they sat at separate tables with their attorneys, and the parents at one point were photographed mopping tears from their faces with Kleenex.

It’s just so sad.

That’s all I could think when I looked at those pictures online was how sad it was that the pretty common trials and tribulations of being and raising a teenager were now public fodder for online forums.

Scrolling through the long thread of comments under just one Star Ledger article on the case, I noticed posters were quick to point the finger of blame at just about everyone involved – from Rachel, to her parents to the family who took her in after she left home.

Even the Star Ledger was taken to task for posting photos grabbed off Facebook of Rachel wearing a bikini (which I did not find lurid but instead just a cute picture of her snuggling a seal during a family vacation in the Bahamas).

And because many folks who post comments online are the trolls of the Internet, lurking under the cloak of anonymity to spread vitriol wherever possible, so much of what’s being posted is mean and downright self-righteous.

Posters call Rachel “troubled,” the family “dysfunctional” and the father of the friend Rachel is staying with – who happens to be an attorney who’s fronting her legal bills – “creepy.”

One poster wonders about the Cannings, “If they were such a wonderful family how did they end up with such a self-absorbed entitled daughter who didn’t want to respect her parents?”

Another commenter posted, “The parents should have done a better job at raising this child, they were definitely a dysfunctional family.”

Ouch.

Have none of these holier-than-thou commenters ever lived with, raised or spent time as a teenager?

If they had done any one of those things, they would know that it is NOT easy. Who are any of us to judge?

I don’t know about you, but I would not want the intimate details of my family life – my struggles raising my teenagers in particular – splashed all over the Internet.

I mean, okay, I do my fair share of writing about personal stuff on this blog but I promise you, you don’t know the half of what goes on around here. And that’s how it should be.

Believe me, I know just what it’s like to try to live with someone who’s under the impression that the number of candles on a birthday cake gives him or her the right to do whatever s/he pleases, house rules be damned.

I think the Cannings just wanted the best for Rachel and her sisters and thought they, in turn, were doing their best for them. Just like the rest of us.

I think that some kids are just more difficult than others and Rachel might be one of those. I have some experience with that.

I had separate discussions with both of my daughters recently about the Cannings and thought it was interesting that neither jumped to Rachel’s defense. They were both kind of like, “What?”

“Every kid’s got, like, rules they have to live with,” observed my 20-year-old. “Nobody likes it, but that’s just the way it is.”

My younger daughter, who’s 16 and still at a stage where the less syllables she has to use in a conversation with me the better, just said of Rachel’s plight, “That’s stupid.”

And I agree, the Cannings’ disagreements with their daughter – ones I bet a lot of us have had with our own kids – just got out of control.

I hope they can figure out a way to work things out and that Rachel moves home because that’s where she belongs.

And if one of my kids tries to run away and live with a friend, to those parents I say: Please, don’t do my child any favors.

Mar

2014

The Secret to a Perfect SAT Score

Posted by Amy Byrnes

“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.

Mar

2014

The ‘Shizzness’ of Being a Mom

Posted by Amy Byrnes

It happened at the stroke of midnight, just a few hours ago, the vanishing of one of my two remaining teenagers. In the blink of an eye and the tick of a minute hand, my oldest daughter turned 20 while I slept.

She joined her brother, now 21, in what I guess could be categorized as young adulthood (with the caveat that both are very much still on their folks’ dime), leaving one teen in my life.

It wasn’t that long ago that I lived in a house bulging with three teenagers, the walls barely containing all the hormones and angst radiating off of my children, like the ever-present stinky waves that surrounded Pigpen.

Teenage angst emanates off my kids like the stinky waves surrounding Pigpen.

And I have to say, I am surprised to find myself the mother of two kids that are in their 20s.

In a way, I defined myself as being the mom of so many teenagers. Their assorted issues dominated my thoughts and much of my time in therapy as I struggled to navigate the choppy waters of growing up. Again.

Worrying about how late to let them stay up on school nights and whether they were getting enough fiber quickly morphed into weekend midnight curfews and battling underage drinking.

All the stuff that clogs the highways that get you from the Point A of childhood to the Point B that is adulthood, the things I thought I’d said good-bye and good luck to many moons ago, became a part of my everyday landscape: broken hearts, driving tests, SATs, pimples, high school sports, college essays, prom dresses, boutonnieres, after school jobs, queen bees, lunch tables, eyeliner and AP Calculus.

Just when I never thought any of it would end, we seem to have rounded a corner. The end, of this chapter anyway, is in sight. And that’s what has me feeling slightly melancholy on this 20th anniversary of the birth of my second child.

Three years ago, when I had a junior and senior in high school, and an eighth and second grader, it seemed like I’d never get through it all. There were days I thought I would drown underneath everything that needed to happen (see the long list above) and all the FEELINGS in my house.

And now here we are. Two kids away in college and another is well on her way. Pretty soon things like resumes, internships, roommates and first apartments will become an integral part of our vernacular.

Just when I was starting to get a handle on all the other stuff.

And honestly, it’s making me feel kind of old. Having half of my kids now in their 20s is actually making me slightly nostalgic for teenagers.

I know, crazy, right?

And then as if by luck, my 11-year-old son came into my room bright and early this morning to announce he was having a hard time breathing and let me return to a place I know best: being the mother of a child.

So for the umpteenth time, I ushered a kid into my small bathroom and turned the shower knob to its hottest setting and let the steamy mist fill the room. I slipped out to get him a pillow and blanket so he could get cozy on the tile floor, and we sat and waited for his breathing to ease up.

Later, after I set him up in my bed to watch Cartoon Network with some ice water and Motrin and called the school and the doctor, I told him I thought he had the croup again and suggested we try the nebulizer before heading out to see the pediatrician.

“Why aren’t you a doctor?” my son asked. “You seem like you know all this shizzness.”

And in many ways he’s right. Four kids and 20 years later, I am an expert on changing the most explosive of diapers, could diagnosis a croupy cough coming from three rooms away and have been known to breastfeed a baby while browning ground turkey for tacos.

I was that good.

And now, where has it gotten me?

Because just when you get the lay of the land, know exactly what needs to be done in a variety of situations, it’s time to get in your boat and set sail again.

Pretty soon I’ll be shoving off for parts unknown and will need to develop a whole new set of skills to survive all that waits somewhere just around the bend.

But until then, I need to go pick up all the Legos my little guy left scattered around the den before I made him go upstairs to take a good, long nap.

I’m keeping one foot firmly planted in childhood for as long as I can.

Feb

2014

20 Days Unemployed

Posted by Amy Byrnes

Greetings from Day 20 of my unemployment!

I am here to report to those of you still working that aside from the paycheck and insurance benefits, having a job gives one a sense of purpose each day. Being employed generally keeps one showering regularly and a reason to get out of bed in the morning besides coffee.

Sure, I wore a lot of Lycra while I worked full time from home, but since I was laid off nearly four weeks ago, even the leggings are starting to seem kind of fancy compared to the grey Gap sweats I tend to gravitate towards when dressing most days. Yoga pants seem like a good in between.

There has also been a complete reversal of too much and too little in my life. For instance, there were never enough hours in the day to squeeze in all the things I wanted to do – like writing, yoga and meditation – vs. the things I needed to do – like my job, folding laundry and food shopping.

Now, I have so much time I don’t even know what to do with myself, leaving me unfocused and unproductive. It’s just like freshman year of college, when all that unstructured time and lack of accountability left me sitting in my dorm room most days smoking cigarettes and watching General Hospital.

While I was working, my inbox would be flooded with about 100 emails each day – press releases, BNN reports and annoying spam from Zappos – but now that I’m unemployed and using a new email (and one that few people know) I get about five emails a day. Legit.

My calendar is also looking a lot different than it did a year ago. Back then, my days were filled with calls for work, meetings to cover as a reporter and basketball practices for my son. The only event still on my calendar for today is a game for my 11-year-old’s rec team tonight at the middle school in town.

At least a reason to shower.

Initially, being out of a job was kind of nice after three years of crazy, non-stop work. It was like a giant weight had been lifted from my shoulders.

I started working full time when I still had four kids living at home and had to juggle the usual mom stuff with all the joys of raising teenagers – driving lessons, car accidents, alcohol, underage drunkards, college visits, college applications and wild and unpredictable mood swings.

Oh, and I had just gotten a divorce.

I had never worked harder in my life than in the first 18 months of the job other than when the kids were small and my days were more physically than mentally grueling. And it was great.

Then just as fast, I only had two kids living at home, with the other half away at college, and it bears repeating that those of you with two kids are geniuses. It’s much more doable than four.

But now I have two kids and zero jobs and it’s kind of boring.

I have had some minor victories: I did put together a resume and updated my LinkedIn profile; I’ve already paid all my bills for the month and yesterday I finally figured out how to sync all of my Apple devices and cloud with my updated Apple ID.

Today I might investigate the iTunes Home Sharing to sync my music library. I mean, what the hell?

So what have I learned about myself in these last four weeks? Pretty much that I am really good at making excuses. Whereas before there wasn’t enough time to write a book/lose weight/find a boyfriend/clean out my crawl space/make healthy meals/finish knitting that sweater, now I realize that it’s just a matter of doing it.

“The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too,” Goethe wrote. “Begin it now.”

Or you’ll be stuck wearing sweats in your kitchen with kind of dirty hair.

Feb

2014

Mrs. X

Posted by Amy Byrnes

Credit: Eviatar Bach

When I was in the end stages of my divorce a few years ago and struggling with whether I should reclaim my maiden name, my college roommate advised against it.

“What are your kids’ friends going to call you?” she asked, and went on to explain how her high school boyfriend’s mom was always Mrs. Whatever, even though she and her husband had been divorced for ages.

“You’ll always be Mrs. X,” she said.

In the end, I decided that that demographic of the population – the friends of my four children – would have to adjust just like everyone else. And for the most part, that’s what happened. In a little over a year, people came to know and refer to me using my maiden name. Everything from my credit card statements to the nameplate that sat in front of me during monthly board of education meetings was adjusted to reflect the change.

And when I sent an email to one of the officials in my town for business and inadvertently used an old email address that had my married name, and the wife of said official told him to look for that name in his inbox, he asked, “Who’s that?”

Mission accomplished.

But three years after the name change, the people who have no idea what to call me remain the kids’ friends and frankly, I don’t know what to tell them. Or their parents.

Nothing sounds right.

For my older kids and their friends, it didn’t really seem too weird to tell them to just keep calling me Mrs. X. That’s how they had known me for most of their lives and it just seemed easier and frankly, do they really care whether or not I am married or actually use that name any more? No.

And while initially, that strategy worked just fine, the further away I get from ever having been Mrs. X, the weirder it’s starting to sound.

I went out to dinner with a slew of parents and children Sunday night – literally, there were like 15 kids sitting down at the far end of the table, my 11-year-old son happily eating his French fries among them.

So needless to say, it was loud, and I was busy chitchatting with the moms at the opposite end of the table, so wasn’t especially tuned in to what the kids were doing.

But then I heard a voice rise above the din and my son, apparently trying to get my attention because he needed my iPhone, was telling the boys around him to call for Mrs. X.

“Interesting,” I thought, that the person who knew me for the least amount of time when I used my married name would still think to refer to me as that.

And I don’t know why it is that calling me Ms. Y seems so weird, too. I’ve seen a lot of parents try to get their kids to refer to me as such. “Say ‘thank you’ to Ms. Y,” they’ll coax their kid after a day playing in my basement. Or, more interestingly, I’ll be referred to as Mrs. Y. Sometimes I’m “Miss Amy.” That’s weird, too, making me sound like some old spinster with cats crawling around my legs.

My decision to change my name was so not a political, feminist or angry statement. In the end, it just felt more authentic to go back to the name I was born with.

So maybe the answer, even though I was always a stickler for having my kids call all grownups “Mr.” or “Mrs.,” is for their friends to just call me “Amy.”

One of my older guy’s friends tried that out at a holiday party I had right before Christmas. Everyone had had a few cocktails and the boys were heading out and my son’s friend was saying good-bye but didn’t quite know how to address me.

“Yeah, Mom,” said my son. “My friends never know what to call you.”

“Just call me ‘Amy,’” I told them.

“Really?” my son’s friend asked. “Well, okay. Good-bye, Amy,” he said before the two of them walked out the door.

I saw that friend maybe a week after that and thought it was interesting that he greeted me with, “Hi, Mrs. X.”

So, I guess it’s going to take more than a few cans of Keystone Light to make that change stick.

Feb

2014

That Time My Tooth Fell Out

Posted by Amy Byrnes

I tend to have recurring dreams, with many of the same themes cycling through my brain, night after night.

There’s the one where I’m packing a suitcase or boarding an airplane. I always seem to be taking off and never landing.

There’s another one where I’m driving to a city — along loopy highways — or taking a subway or walking along city streets and sometimes going into a building and getting on an elevator. You always know there’s going to be trouble when you step into an elevator in one of my dreams.

And sometimes I’m back in college, and more specifically, about to take a test I forgot to study for.

Often, I’ve had dreams about losing a tooth or two. A few weeks ago I dreamt I was in my bathroom rinsing my mouth out and felt something rattling around inside. I opened my mouth and my teeth fell into my cupped palm, crumbled bits and pieces that were almost sparkly, like diamonds. And I clearly remember the panic I felt having just had teeth literally pour out of my mouth and could actually feel the smoothness of the gum along my jawbone from which they slipped.

It was one of those dreams where I had to remind myself it was just a dream. I even remember becoming conscious enough to poke around inside my mouth with my tongue to ensure all my teeth were still there. And I remember the relief I felt to find them all intact.

So imagine my dismay last night when, after settling in to watching a movie with my daughter and biting into a piece of frozen chocolate, I felt something rattling around inside my mouth and spit a molar into my hand.

And if you think I was in a panic to find myself holding my own tooth, you should have seen the look on my 16 year old’s face when it registered what had just happened on the couch next to her.

“I feel like I should do something,” she shouted after I turned towards her with one hand covering my mouth and the other holding the molar on my outstretched palm. “Are you bleeding? Do you need a towel?”

“Tell me if it looks bad,” I said and then lowered my hand and smiled.

“WHAT???!!!” she shrieked, and fell backwards onto the couch, laughing hysterically at the gap in my smile. “Your legit tooth fell out,” she blurted, her big blue eyes bulging at the sight of her mother’s jack-o-lantern grin.

The joke here is that I had put the chocolate – usually chewy morsels of caramel covered in dark chocolate and sprinkled with bits of sea salt given to me by my daughter for Valentine’s Day – in the freezer in an effort to slow down its consumption. My strategy was that it would take so long to gnaw through one piece – and I’d enjoy it so thoroughly – that a second would not be required.

Proving once again my complete lack of self awareness

My daughter, who’s been sick the last few days, and I had gotten takeout for dinner and were just settling in to spend the snowy Saturday night on our couch watching the totally adorable “About Time” with Rachel McAdams and her time traveling British love, which was possibly even sweeter than the dangerous chocolates I pulled out of the freezer. We each ate one and then I fetched two more and set one down next to each of us. I gave mine exactly 30 seconds to thaw and then gnawed some of the chocolate off the edge with the left side of my mouth.

And it was almost if those magical little bits of sea salt had made their way under a molar and popped the crown off its little nub base and sent it swirling into the abyss of my mouth, like Sandra Bullock spinning out of control in “Gravity,” except (SPOILER ALERT) without the happy ending.

After we got over the horror of what had just happened, my daughter and I proceeded to take pictures of me cackling and the gap in my smile, which we Snapchatted and texted to her siblings.

She even drew a big red circle around the gap and wrote, “Her tooth fell out … ,” which was really funny and I considered sharing the photo here until I realized that I actually do have boundaries when it comes to making myself look bad. This is, after all, the Internet and while I long for one of my blog posts to go viral, wouldn’t it be just my luck that it would be of a photo of me with a missing tooth?

(Cheetah-covered onesies are one thing but looking like I just blew in from my shack in the Ozarks is quite another.)

So I’m planning on lying low until my dentist gets around to calling me back to tell me when he can glue the thing back in. I’m supposed to take my son to a basketball game at a local university with other folks from town but don’t know if my ego will let me go through with it.

I definitely know my ego won’t let me go on the date I’m supposed to go on Monday night. All the personality in the world couldn’t cover up a potential love interest’s missing tooth.

I got into a bit of an online argument with my older daughter yesterday when she got annoyed with the pep talk I was giving her.

“You hold the key to everything,” I wrote in our increasingly snippy Facebook conversation. “It’s all about your attitude.”

“Shhhhh,” she wrote back.

When I Googled “losing tooth dream,” I found this interpretation: “This teeth dream theme is closely related to the idea of things falling apart, both literally and symbolically.”

Dreaming about the loss of teeth mostly symbolizes the loss of some type of control — over people or aging, all that kind of stuff. I think that’s spot on because as much as we try, we just can’t control most things in our lives. Things will break and fall apart – marriages, jobs, cars — and it’s how we respond that really forms the basis for how we live our lives. It’s really all about attitude.

In the meantime, I tried to leverage my tooth loss as a means for getting my daughter to make me breakfast this morning. We were lying on my bed together laughing about the whole tooth thing and I asked if she would go downstairs and make me something to eat.

“You and your ratchet ass missing tooth can go downstairs and make your own breakfast,” she said, trying to feel the gap in my mouth through my cheek with her finger.

And out of all the things in my life, I should know by now that teenagers were the most impossible to control.

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Amy Byrnes

life in fits and starts

Category Archives: t is for teenagers

The Day I Went South

How to Cope After a Miscarriage

Postcard From Paris

How to Get a Tattoo

Give Us Dirty Laundry

The Secret to a Perfect SAT Score

The ‘Shizzness’ of Being a Mom

20 Days Unemployed

Mrs. X

That Time My Tooth Fell Out