The Great Decline: One Mom’s Halloween Timeline

You should have seen me 20 years ago. The magic I could pull off with a cardboard box and some construction paper was not to be believed. And on top of that, I had unwitting subjects to work with. I could do anything I wanted to do to them.

I drew goatees on baby girls. I dressed my son up in a Barney costume one of our friends had given us as a kind of joke.

Sorry, kids.

Sorry, kids.

I spent hours spray painting boxes and working with stencils to make this circus train with the big brother engineer and the baby lion in the caboose.

Back when people did what I told them to do.

Back when people did what I told them to do.

Even later, when they wanted to be more conventional characters for Halloween, I put costumes together out of our ever-growing dress-up box (Please notice the artful way I worked turtlenecks into princess costumes for both warmth and modesty. No whore-y princess outfits for my girls. They are still pissed about that)).

My princesses.

Pretty, pretty princesses.

Even as my kids got older, I still tried to stay creative with their costumes, as evidenced by this very-amazing Wayne from Wayne’s World (Garth was pretty awesome, too).

Schwing!

Schwing!

I even made an adorable cape for a Little Red Riding Hood costume using felt and a glue gun but since it was for one of my younger kids, there is no picture to use as evidence.

But, maybe due to the invention of the Internet and Facebook in particular, I’ve kind of dropped the ball on Halloween costumes with my younger guy. Lame Wolverine.

Ho-hum.

Boring.

Ho-hum Harry Potter.

P1000611

The year everyone was the Boy Wizard.

The only creativity coming out of this house nowadays is when my Baby Girl got involved, like the time a few years ago she used YouTube videos to teach herself how to sew the backpack for Finn from AdventureTime (a cartoon I am convinced is geared towards stoned college kids and not 11-year-olds).

But this year, my 22nd Halloween as a mom, kind of tops them all. I neither worked with a glue gun nor visited one of those pop-up Halloween stores to buy a costume. We picked pumpkins out of a big box in front of our grocery store and not a field. And I didn’t even bother getting the tombstones out of the garage to set up on the lawn or have one of the kids string cobwebs along the shrubs in front of the house.

My little guy, who’s in the sixth grade, said initially he was going to be one of the guys from “Men in Black” (presumably Tommy Lee Jones),  but later modified that, keeping the suit and calling himself a “businessman” instead. Interesting. It’s the one day of the year you can be anything you want to be and he wants to dress like he just got off the boat from Wall Street.

He had a hand-me-down blazer in his closet and got his sister to tie his tie (what can’t she teach herself how to do on YouTube?). He came down this morning with his hair all gelled and squeezed into his black band concert khakis from the spring and I had to laugh. All he needed was an American flag pin on his lapel and he could tell people he was either a CEO or a Young Republican.

My very own baby CEO.

My very own baby CEO.

My neighbor came over to exercise this morning and I showed her the picture of my baby Master of the Universe and we laughed and then she scrolled through her photos to show me what her 15-year-old-son pulled together about 15 minutes before his bus came this morning.

I got a rock.

***I got a rock.

And how we get from spray painting boxes to cutting a couple of holes in a sheet, I’ll never know. I just know that I kind of miss drawing scars on their faces, the Halloween parade at the elementary school and reminding little ones a thousand times as they raced from house to house to say “Trick or treat” and “Thank you.”

Tonight my little guy will go off with his posse to fill their pillowcases with as much candy as humanly possible as I drink red wine with all the moms back at home. He’s at his dad’s this weekend so I’ll miss seeing his loot poured out and categorized on the floor and swiping all of the candy he deems gross (come to me, Almond Joy bars).

I’m going to meet up later with another single mom and mother to older children and maybe we’ll reminisce about the good old days — the costumes and endless trick-or-treating. How much we miss it.

Or maybe we’ll just drink a cocktail and dance like moms who have done their time in the pumpkin patch.

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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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In Defense of Renee Zellweger

I don’t know about you, but I’d almost forgotten about Renee Zellweger, she of Bridget Jones and Chicago fame. But that probably should come as no surprise since I consume a steady diet of Hollywood’s newest and hottest starlets fed to me through my dedicated reading of People and Entertainment Weekly magazines and watching schlocky Extra and Access Hollywood on TV most nights (Mario Lopez and Billy Bush are like the Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite for the celebrity set). There’s always somebody newer, hotter and fresher to admire and scrutinize.

So Zellweger’s name caught my eye yesterday as I was scrolling through Facebook but the picture I was looking at didn’t quite match up to the actress I remembered. The woman didn’t even look like she could be a sister, much less a cousin, once-removed of the Oscar-winning actress.

Not 24 hours later and Zellweger, 45, is everywhere: the aforementioned Extra and Access Hollywood breathlessly reporting how her appearance at an awards ceremony set off a firestorm of speculation about the extent of work she has had done to her face. The story is all over the Internet and the Today Show (ack, what happened to the Today Show?) could not get enough of this very important issue. Matt Lauer even had Bill O’Reilly – there to discuss his new book on Patton – give his two cents on the issue (probably the only time I’ve ever agreed with the old gasbag).

“They’re not reporting on the issue,” noted my very smart friend, “they’re creating the issue.”

I wonder what the great newsman Ben Bradlee, longtime editor of the Washington Post who died yesterday, had to say in the end about what is considered news nowadays. Scroll through the home page of Today.com and you can read all you want about “Best Baby Bump Style” and “4 Moves to a Great Butt” (I shit you not), but find not one word about Hong Kong or ISIS.

But I digress.

Women in their 40s are fucked and we don’t even talk about anyone in their 50s so I guess we just slink off somewhere to pluck our chin hairs and wait to shrivel up and die.

And you don’t have to be a movie star to feel the pressure to hang onto youth and beauty for as long as possible. Even unemployed mothers of four living in suburban New Jersey succumb to a multitude of treatments to stay fresh. To look the way I do requires gel manicures, pedicures, haircuts/color/straightening, waxing of brows/lip/bikini area. Then there’s the monthly facial, the guy who comes to work out with me at my house twice a week and my face may have seen a needle a time or two.

That’s not even counting all of the lotions and potions sitting in a basket on my bathroom counter that I smear and splatter all over myself  to encourage my skin to retain whatever elasticity it has left.

And I make jokes that I have to keep myself together since I’m single and have so many kids. That I have to have one thing – other than thin ankles – going for me.

I said as much to my girlfriend this morning as we discussed Zellweger while squatting with 20-pound weights (the irony). “Yeah, but I do all that stuff too,” said my pal, “and I’m married.”

Even the great Anna Quindlen – my long-time professional and personal hero, who famously wrote, “The life span of women in our society is divided into three stages: pre-Babe, Babe and post-Babe” – has admitted to using Botox (like it’s a narcotic or something).

Another pal and I were talking not long ago about Botox and how she was told by a friend that she better start including the procedure in her maintenance schedule or she was going to look like shit compared to everyone else.

“Why can’t we all just agree not to go there?” she moaned.

But, as Zellweger has proven, things are going in the opposite direction. Botox is just the gateway procedure leading to the harder treatments like lasers, fillers, eye and neck lifts.

Why can’t we all just channel Meryl Streep, who called our push for actresses to stay young “Victoria’s Secret Syndrome” in a 2008 Good Housekeeping article?

“I just don’t get it. You have to embrace getting older,” said the now-65-year-old actress. “Life is precious, and when you’ve lost a lot of people, you realize each day is a gift.”

Society tells us that we’re nothing if we’re not babes and I can tell you, at 48 and wallowing in the final days of my own babedom (or maybe the beginning of the decay), it’s fucking scary. It’s not only how we’re defined but, for many of us, how we define ourselves.

So I get why Renee Zellweger felt the need to do whatever it was she did to herself. I like to think that I’ll let my looks go softly into the night, but who knows? Maybe I’ll be led astray and succumb to the shiny promises of Juvaderm and blepharoplasty.

At least I won’t have Mario Lopez talking about me on TV if I do.

 

 

 

Insulting Things Said to Me Over Dinner

IMG_2661“Hey Mom, quick question,” said my 11-year old son last night as we were sitting down to a late dinner, “but, can you still have babies?”

I paused shoveling the forkful of quinoa-stuffed pepper into my mouth, looked at him and said, “Uh, yes.”

“WHAT?????!!!!!” he responded, apparently amazed that such a miracle could occur to someone so old, causing his 17-year-old sister to convulse in laughter and bang the table.

She even repeated the whole conversation over breakfast this morning while Joe and Mika debated the whole Ray Rice/NFL thing for the millionth time. The insult was way more entertaining to her.

So I think it’s interesting that, from a youngster’s point of view, the idea of me getting pregnant — and I will point out to anyone who wasn’t paying attention the first five times I’ve mentioned this fun fact here but I am but one day older than Halle Berry, who just had her own baby — is a shocking/nauseating revelation.

While the only thing I think Halle Berry and I have in common are ovaries, I like to think that my body could still muster the energy if necessary to make a baby. Maybe one with three arms, but still.

And I might not be good at a lot of things, but I was amazing at getting pregnant. Like, a real pro.

It’s funny I’d even be offended by this exchange, given my baby factory’s been shut down for years due to the economic downturn. I was supplying more than was in demand. And really, I don’t even want a houseplant much less another person around here to deal with. Especially if it’s going to grow up to start insulting me over dinner.

Obviously, the only logical next step was to make that creep of a kid pay for his insulting behavior.

“Do you have any of those ultra-sized tampons in your bathroom?” I casually asked his sister later in the meal.

“DO YOU MIND?” my son yelled. “THAT’S DISGUSTING.”

Hehehe.

5 Things I Feel Kind of Sorry About (In No Particular Order)

Seriously.

I try not to live a life of regret. I try to frame the maybe-not-so-positive events that go down in my world as life lessons. This way of thinking makes my therapist very happy and I’m a pleaser so there you go.

However, sometimes I do find myself second guessing decisions I’ve made. Wondering what the fuck I was thinking about in certain instances.

And because it’s the end of August and absolutely nothing is happening in my life – at least that I can write about – I thought I’d share the Top 5 things I’m fretting about right now.

I know, you’re welcome.

  1. Sex With Strangers

I was paying my AmEx bill last Friday afternoon and noticed a charge for theater tickets and was like, “What the hell?” A quick search in my inbox turned up an email confirming tickets my girlfriend and I had bought a few weeks ago, kind of spur-of-the-moment, for an Off-Broadway play that got a great review in The New York Times called “Sex With Strangers.” The two-person show stars Anna Gunn – Skyler White from “Breaking Bad” – and some super-hot, sexy young dude named Billy Magnussen and the review said it explored real vs. social media personas and the struggle for writers to find commercial success while staying true to their artistic sensibilities. So up my alley. “HOLY FUCK,” I texted my gal pal, “We have tickets to see that show tonight!” Usually, if I need to get into the city from New Jersey, I need a game plan because it can be a real pain, especially on a Friday afternoon. But we got our acts together and took a ferry into Manhattan and even had time to spare for a glass of wine and big bowl of mussels at a restaurant bar before the show. And here’s where the trouble started. Here’s where, maybe because of the wine or the pretty sexy show, I got a bee in my bonnet about an itch that I needed to scratch. It had been brewing for a while but the show kind of set the wheels in motion for something that happened later in the weekend. And whether it’s a relief to have scratched at that itch or, like poison ivy, I should have just left it alone, remains to be seen. Well, everything is copy, as a certain hero of mine has said. But the show is at the Second Stage until the end of the month and as long as you don’t harbor a secret hankering for a much-younger man, I highly suggest you get tickets and see it. Maybe just leave your cell phone at home.

  1. Hermit Crabs

Haven’t I made myself clear? Haven’t I told my kids, time and again, I was not interested in bringing anything else into this house that needs to be kept alive? Like, I don’t even own a houseplant. But my third child gets teary-eyed when she thinks of all the pets I’ve allowed her older sister to own/kill over the years. The frog. The mice. The poor guinea pig that slowly fossilized in our basement. It pisses the younger sister off that she never had the same opportunity to torture small creatures. So, now I see – via some videos she’s sent me on Snapchat – that she has righted those childhood wrongs and bought herself two hermit crabs while spending the week away with friends down the shore. I’ve already watched them skitter across the floor of the beach house where she’s staying. I am not thrilled and wonder how long it will take for those things to shrivel up inside their shells the way the hermit crabs we had, like, 15 years ago for the two older kids did. I give them two weeks and they better not fucking smell while they’re at it.

  1. My Raging Narcissism

There was a time when I really knew what was going on in the world. When I’d wake up early each day and read the paper cover-to-cover. But lately, I get up and grab a cup of coffee and immediately start writing about myself in my journal – documenting my weight and daily alcohol intake – while tragedies unfold in St. Louis and Iraq and I still can’t tell you the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite, much less what ISIS stands for. I can, however, report that I’ve lost almost 10 oz. since yesterday.

  1. The Fantasy of the Only Child 

Don’t tell my three older kids, but for some time now I’ve fantasized about what it will be like when they’re all off in college or starting their grown up lives and it’s just me and their little brother left at home. I’d imagine how clean our kitchen would be and all the cool things my little guys and I would be able to do together in the older kids’ wake. But, just like the reality of how things like being a grown up or marriage never quite stack up to how we imagined they’d be, having an only child is far from perfect. In fact, it’s kind of boring. Sure, my house is a little cleaner and he’s happy eating taquitos night after night, but I kind of miss the chaos of all those other personalities. Turns out, I really like having them around.

  1. The Summer of Amy

You’ve heard it here before, how my 10 Days of Fun somehow stretched into my Summer of Amy. How a lot has transpired over the course of the last three months. I have danced and I have kissed and pretty much made up for all those nights home, cooking for kids and working, over the last five years. And although I normally can’t wait for summer to come to an end, am almost pushing my kids out the door for the first day of school, this year is somehow different. I’ve loved having time off from work to screw around on my blog, sit on the beach with my kids and focus on my love life (such as it is). And I know in no time, I’ll be back at work and rushing to make dinners and go grocery shopping and it will all be a distant – fabulous – memory. So, who in the world would ever think they’d hear me say this: I am really sorry to see the summer end.

What, pray, are you sorry about, nowadays? I’m an equal-opportunity venter and would love to hear what’s bringing you down. Misery does love company, you know. 

Who’s a Scary Mommy?

The other night, I clicked on the Scary Mommy website and was greeted with this:

Look who's at the top of Scary Mommy.

Look who’s at the top of Scary Mommy.

Yup, that weeping woman clinging to her child is yours truly.

If you’re not in-the-know, Scary Mommy is an insanely popular mom blog that’s become a community for parents to celebrate imperfect parenting. So obviously, as my parenting over the last 21 years has been sketchy at best — I mean, I have been known to do ice luge shots with my older children — I totally belonged there.

So there I was at the top of this site that gets 10-15 million unique pageviews a month (according to Scary Mommy) with my mug in full-on ugly cry mode as I said good-bye to my oldest child when we left him at college for his freshman year three years ago. Luckily, I have no qualms with any of you seeing me not looking my best, as evidenced here (cheetah suit alert).

It was actually the second piece I had appear on Scary Mommy in less than a week. I had submitted one essay last month and got the good news that it was going to be featured on the site, but not until four weeks later. “Wow,” I thought, “who knew all that scariness was being planned so far in advance?”

So I sat and patiently waited until I got the good news that the post was live and was amazed at the kind of traffic it generated and was like, “Holy crow, I need to do that again, stat.”

So I rattled my brain to come up with something good and submitted a piece I had written about my son going off to college and, due to its timeliness, it was posted on Scary Mommy the next day.

Anyway, if you are a parent, do I even need to tell you that the timing could not have been worse as the piece went live in the midst of an emotional crisis going downright next to me on our big red couch. I was like, “I hear you’re really sad,” while watching out of the corner of my eye as a big teardrop rolled down the child’s face, “but do you mind if I just jump on Facebook for a minute?”

Like, can you just hold that thought while I promote myself on social media?

Obviously, no one in the room witnessing the meltdown thought that that was good parenting. I think someone might have even mentioned my insensitivity was slightly scary. “Typical, Mom,” she said.

Ultimately, disaster was averted — thanks to clear thinking and perhaps a little wine — and I did get to enjoy, virtually, the magic of being featured on a big site that garnered me over 150 new Facebook likes, 15.8K Facebook shares, 457 Tweets, a great traffic day for my site while discovering cool new bloggers (if you guys like me, you’ll love The Happy Hausfrau).

So, for all of you sending your babies off to college for the first time — and for the many it seems with 5-year-olds who are already freaking out about that moment — this one’s for you.

Oh, and there’s nothing scary about it.

The Under-Estimator

Credit: behappy.me

Credit: behappy.me

This morning, I told the guy that I work out with twice a week that one of my main issues – okay, other than my penchant for wine and hankering for unavailable men – was that I am an under-estimator.

“Calories, drinks, kids,” I told him, “I always just assume I have less of something than I really do.”

(This can also be applied to my weight, the amount of time I spend on Facebook and my monthly AmEx bill.)

Interestingly enough, I employ the opposite thinking with the amount of money I have in the bank. I always operate as if I have more than I really do.

But I digress.

We were discussing the Fitbit that my friend, who also exercises with the man I like the call the Girl Whisperer, just bought and we were kind of teasing her about it.

She’s rail thin, quite fabulous for a girl in her late 40s – or late 30s, for that matter – and she bought the navy  bracelet to help her keep track of how many steps she takes each day and ultimately lose six pounds. Not five. Not seven. Six.

She also synced the device to her computer to input what she eats to help her determine how many calories + how many steps she needs to achieve her weight loss goal.

I was saying that it would be a waste of money for me to get a Fitbit because I’m terrible at keeping track of things and always just assume I’m better than I really am. So like, I’d be good about inputting the salad I ordered at dinner last night but would forget to add the dozen or so French fries I ate off my son’s plate. Like, that shit doesn’t really count, does it? The same thinking applies to food eaten while standing up or intoxicated. Those calories are like the unicorns of eating: magical and nonexistent.

But truth be told, I actually did buy a Fitbit a few years ago when they first came out. I had been steadily gaining weight and blamed it on all the sitting I did working on my computer and at meetings a few nights a week for my all-consuming job. I was still running and working out but assumed that I was just moving around a lot less during my day than I did before I worked full time and just needed to get off my butt a little more.

Enter the Fitbit. I dutifully typed my vital statistics into the computer and starting wearing it around clipped to my bra as I went about my day.

What I neglected to take into account were all those boxes of CheezIts and bags of Doritos I was plowing through late at night watching the Daily Show whilst the FitBit rested on my brassiere and was showered in orange dust.

But then I legit popped a zipper on a pair of jeans – a really cute pair of, like, AG ones from Anthropologie —  that I was trying to squeeze into for a night out and I sucked in my tummy and pulled up the zipper, exhaled and POP! went my pants. Rock fucking bottom. Luckily, my vanity would not put up with this downward spiral and I got serious about paying attention to every single fry and M&M I put in my mouth and just wore those – now repaired – jeans the other night and the zipper went right up and they looked cute. Case closed.

So anyway, now you know. And it wasn’t a matter of walking 10,000 steps a day or counting calories. I just stopped eating shit and got back to my regular self.

It probably all comes down to paying attention, something I’m not always so good at. There’s probably a will power element involved here too, since I tend to go for the immediate gratification and not worry about consequences. But whatever.

I’m still a work in progress, regardless of how many calories, drinks or kids I have. And I’m always looking for unicorns.

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Gains and Losses

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Credit: Susan Buchenberger

In theory, you would have thought I’d be happy they were leaving.

I mean, I scored a lot of swag over the last few weeks as my next-door neighbors frantically cleaned out their house so they could pull up stakes and move to Hong Kong this past weekend. They needed to clear out for another family in town who are renting their house while they’re gone.

Here are just some of the bigger items that I am the new – and in some cases — temporary, owner of:

  • Sauna
  • Trampoline
  • 2 paddle boards
  • Potted boxwoods
  • Multiple bags of quinoa
  • Not one but three iPhone 5 chargers
  • Trader Joe’s Frozen Mahi Mahi steaks

This is not to mention the two shopping bags full of frozen and refrigerated items, about 10 bottles of assorted alcohol and one final bag yesterday containing everything from Trader Joe’s popcorn to a new bottle of Nivea lotion and Band Aids that I brought home.

I could have also had a cat, dog, bunny and various houseplants, but I drew the line at anything that required being kept alive. I can commit to quinoa but not animals, nowadays.

Initially, when my neighbor Susan started to offer various pantry items to me as she began clearing out her kitchen to prepare to move to Hong Kong for a couple of years for her husband’s job, I demurred. I was okay in the herbal teas and balsamic vinegar department and felt bad taking hers.

But then she told me how she tried to get another friend to take items from her pantry, and that friend also politely declined, and Susan said to me, “All I could think was: For fucks sake, please just take it!”

She needed us to help take stuff off her hands. It made her life easier.

So I stopped saying, “No,” every time she offered me something, which turned out to be a lot since I lived right next door, making it relatively easy to unload giant things like trampolines and saunas. I stopped feeling embarrassed or guilty for taking their stuff and saw it as something that made the giant move to the other side of the world with her husband and three young boys a tiny bit easier.

But of course, all the Kahlua and frozen Mahi Mahi steaks in the world could not make up for how much I was really losing. I told Susan that as we hugged good-bye in her garage Sunday morning as the giant black van waited to take her and her family and their 17 bags to JFK to fly to Hong Kong.

“You’ve been such a good friend,” I cried as we stood their hugging each other and she hugged me a little tighter and I thought about what an understatement that was. How critical her friendship has been to the quality of my life.

She was a major part of the safety net that kept me from falling to the ground during and after my divorce. She always included my youngest child – who’s 11 and around the same age as her boys – in whatever they were doing.

“Does he want to come over to watch a movie?”

“Does he was to stay and eat pizza?”

“Does he need a ride to lacrosse?”

“Does he want to stay at the beach with us?”

“Does he want to go to the movies with us?”

“Does he want to sleep over?”

It was always so easy and made the transition from stay-at-home mom to single working mom a lot easier.

She never said, “No,” when I asked her for a favor, never even hesitated or made me feel bad. She often asked if I needed anything if she was running to Costco or Trader Joe’s, and gave my family more free cupcakes from the cupcake business she ran on the side, than we could ever dream possible.

And she looped me into her group of friends — who have kids around my youngest child’s age — which helped me not only meet a great group of people but let me find a niche after my divorce and needed to find a place to set up my beach chair in the summer. She gladly welcomed me into her circle and had a spicy margarita waiting when I got there.

Her husband, Michael, was just as good. He was the boys’ lacrosse coach and helped us with the complicated equipment and always made sure my son was on his team, which came in handy this past spring when I forgot to pick my guy up from practice and Mike just scooped him up with his own kids to bring home.

“I literally forgot him,” I texted Michael back in May. “WTH is gonna happen when u guys r gone?”

WTH is right.

When I first told my 17-year-old daughter that our neighbors, whose boys she has been babysitting since they moved next door seven years ago, were definitely moving to Hong Kong, she started to cry. “Not my babies,” she sniffled.

But we knew that the move was hard enough on Susan and the boys without us being all weepy in front of them, so we put on a good face. We talked about how exciting it was, this new adventure, and how they’ll be back in New Jersey with lots of stories to tell in a few years.

In the meantime, for the rest of us, it’s kind of like a temporary death. I’ll miss the day-to-day interactions, the ease of having someone just a few yards away who I can ask to borrow an egg or sesame oil or drive me to the hospital if I’m feeling especially crazy. I’ll miss being able to tell my son to go outside and see what the boys are doing and watching them all play soccer on her front lawn for hours on end. I’ll even miss all the pieces of crap they set up in my driveway as they practiced for their future jobs as professional skateboarders and BMX riders.

So when I walked around Costco and Wegman’s yesterday crying after they pulled out of the neighborhood, it wasn’t really for Susan’s family that I was weeping. They were going to be great. I mean, they already have a trip planned to Thailand in October.

To be honest, I was really crying for me.

Because I might have gained a sauna and lots of quinoa, but for now, I’ve lost some wonderful friends.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Listen to Your Mother. Thank You.

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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.

 

 

10 Days of Fun

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This meme pretty much sums up my last 10 days.

Here is the downside of going out nine times in ten days: you don’t really get a lot of stuff done. And while I’ve amassed about a book’s-worth of stories – oh my god, do I have some good stories – I can’t really write about most of them. I mean, you can call me up and I’d share a few of them with you, but I totally can’t put it all out there on my blog. I have a reputation to maintain, you know.

So I haven’t really known what to write about in the meantime. Even the guy I work out with, who was away on vacation last week, laughed when I told him some of my stories this morning and was like, “You haven’t written anything in so long, I knew something was going on.”

My “10 Days of Fun,” as I have taken to calling this party-thon, was a convergence of pre-planned activities that were coincidentally strung together over many consecutive days – including a dinner to celebrate some Leo ladies’ birthdays, a going away party for neighbors and good friends and my 30th high school reunion.

I know.

And there has been dancing, people, lots and lots of dancing and teetering around in high heels and as a result, walking has become a bit of an issue. I woke up Sunday morning and the first thing I said to my high school BFF, who came up from Virginia for the reunion and was lying next to me in bed, was, “My fucking bunions are killing me.”

Sexier words have never been spoken between two people lying in bed together.

But I’ve had a bee in my bonnet lately about going out and having fun. It’s like I’m going through that phase that most divorced people go through when they first taste the freedom of being single, except I’m on a five-year delay. When my marriage collapsed, instead of rushing out to party and console myself in the arms of someone else, I kind of went into hiding. I spent my time drinking wine in the homes of close friends and acting like Greta Garbo. I just hated the idea of people talking about me and didn’t want to add to things already being said. I kept my nose clean and focused on my kids and my new, all-consuming job.

And I think it’s safe to say that that was a good move. I figured out how to be happy by myself and with myself and maintain my dignity during a difficult period. I had fun, but it was more of the go-out-to-dinner or go-to-the-movies kind of fun.

Oh, how things have changed.

I had more fun in the month of July than all of 2011. I have danced to “Rosalita” on a packed dance floor on a hot Sunday night. I stood and ate cheese fries around midnight with high school friends and laughed about how much and how little had changed in 30 years. I squatted with my face pressed next to my oldest daughter’s at the bottom of an ice luge as shots of vodka raced down the chutes and into our mouths. And I kissed a guy in a bar on a dare by a girlfriend and was reminded of just how good chemistry between two people can be.

That kind of fun.

I spent my final night of fun back out with a group of friends from town to celebrate/mourn the pending departure of one of the families to Hong Kong and also trying to recapture all the fun we had at this particular bar the week before. We brought the husbands this time, too, and ate sliders and peeled shrimp on the back porch before heading downstairs to dance and drink mixed drinks out of Dixie cups. Even the guys got in on the act of being my Wingmen and interviewed my potential dance partners over beers. One poor guy had to go through so many rounds of interviews before he could dance with me that by the time he was finished, I had snuck off and found someone else to dance with.

I think some of this non-stop fun is due, in part, to my upcoming 48th birthday but can attribute a lot of my recent shenanigans to just being more open to dudes. I now realize that for a long time, I just wasn’t into the idea of guys and dating. For some reason, it freaked me out. I just couldn’t deal. But then I dated someone I kind of liked and, boom, wanted to do it again.

But I’ve always been a late bloomer. I mean, I started drinking and smoking when I was, like, 12, but some of the bigger things – like developing self-awareness and healthy boundaries – came a lot later to me than normal people.

So, you all will be happy to know that tonight, I will not be putting on eye shadow and telling my kids to make themselves pizza bagels. Instead, I plan on getting into bed early and watching a movie or starting a new book. I might not even drink.

I need to rest up, since I’m out every night for the rest of this week. There are four more weeks until Labor Day, you know.

Maybe we should call this my “Summer of Fun.”