VIDEO: That Time I Pretended I Was a Successful Writer

Bummed you missed last week’s hot ticket?

I know, I wish I went to see Beyonce at MetLife Stadium, too. And after you finish Googling videos  of her performing “Single Ladies” and “Crazy in Love” in NJ last week, check out the show I put on in a slightly smaller Garden State venue.

Here’s my ode to being a Jersey Girl and the merits of getting a spray tan:

And here’s something a little heavier, reflecting on the stages of divorce:

 

 

 

 

 

 

5 Things I Learned From My First Reading

IMG_2002For the three of you left who haven’t heard the news, last week I got to pretend for one night that I was a successful writer.

And it was great.

Some friends had thought it would be fun to invite a bunch of people to come hear me read some of my work in hopes of maybe introducing some new readers to my blog. And plus, it was an excuse to get a bunch of women together to drink wine. Who’s not up for that?

So, they invited a bunch of their friends and about 50 women showed up at a local cheese shop for an event that was billed as “Wine & Words With Amy;” two of my favorite things, all in one room. We stood around and drank some wine and noshed on snacks and then I got up and spoke a little and read a few selections from my blog and then we drank a little bit more.

So fun.

But of course, not everything was perfect. There were a few glitches and things I’d do differently if I ever had the opportunity again to do something akin to it. Herewith, the top five things I learned at my inaugural reading:

  1. It’s all about the party hair. Of course, when a girl like me is faced with the prospect of getting up in front of a group of people to speak, she immediately worries about how she’s going to look. What to say comes second. So, before I knew exactly what I was going to read and then say in between to tie them all together, I had purchased not one but two dresses from Anthropologie and booked an appointment to have my hair blown out by my guy, who helped me channel my inner-Kelly Ripa and gave me mad party hair for the night. Unfortunately, I also probably should have thought about my failing eyesight and had the same foresight to pack a pair of reading glasses for the night so I didn’t have to hold the paper I was reading from about three inches from my face, thus blocking said party hair for much of the night. Sigh.
  2. Expect things to go wrong: Exhibit A. My two daughters were amazing helpers in the day leading up to the event. The older girl helped shlep stuff into the cheese shop and set up and helped do my eye makeup because she knows I am terrible at that. And my younger daughter helped cobble together a platform for me to perch a stool on and had tracked down a tripod to set up our camera to record the event. Yet despite her best efforts – charging the camera and digging up a memory card – once she started filming she discovered the card was full and had to quickly come up with a Plan B. So the resulting videos are kind of cobbled together – because of course her phone died and my other daughter had to pick up where she left off – and not shot from the best of angles. Like, I may have a “Basic Instinct” moment or two, somewhere along the way. Just don’t look down there.
  3. Expect things to go wrong: Exhibit B. After we unloaded all the junk – like the sound system and platform – from our car, I gave one of my girls the keys and told her to go park while we set up. And at some point, I did notice that she’d been gone for a really long time, but was too caught up in the prep and people arriving to really investigate her absence. The girls quickly packed up and left after the reading part was over, and I lingered and then went out to celebrate with some friends. So it wasn’t until the next morning that I discovered the reason for my daughter’s delay in returning from parking the car: she had sideswiped another car in the parking lot, requiring police and subsequent calls from my insurance company. “I didn’t want to ruin your night,” my girl told me, and she was totally right making that call. “I couldn’t sleep all night,” she added, “I felt so sick about it.” And I knew she felt terrible and we’ll figure out how to pay the deductible and I will ignore how ghetto my car is starting to look because, well, what are my options?
  4. I am an attention whore. I kind of already knew this about myself. I mean, I do have a blog and write about a lot of pretty personal things. And I’m a Leo, so being in the limelight is something I just enjoy. But I haven’t always loved getting up and speaking in public, so was kind of worried about that going into the reading. Right before I got up to talk, the owner of the cheese shop gave me some last-minute words of advice about successful public speaking. “Know your subject and be passionate about it,” he told me, and I was like, “Done and done.” I love to talk about myself. So in the end, it was kind of exhilarating and something I could do every night. Methinks I’ve created a monster.
  5. Surround yourself with friends. So, in theory, the event was supposed to be all about introducing new readers to my blog, it turned out to be a show of support from all my friends who already read the thing. And that felt great. So of course, it was easy getting up in front of big group of friendly and familiar faces who only want to see me succeed. Plus a lot of them enjoy all my cursing. “You say what we’re all thinking,” one woman told me after the reading, and maybe that’s why it’s so easy to do what I do. Because we’re all going through the same shit.

Many thanks to all of you who came out and to the many people who told me they wished they could have come. Perhaps we’ll do it again some day because we always need a reason to get out and drink wine.

In the meantime, check out some videos from the night.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You Can’t Always Get What You Want

The Black Lagoon redux.

The Black Lagoon redux.

When I am dead, I would like the following engraved on my headstone: “She got what she wanted.”

And while you might think that that is a really awesome thing, getting what one wants, I’ve learned over the last 40-blah-blah years that actually getting what you want is not all it’s cracked up to be.

I read a quote recently about women never really wanting what they actually need — and that might be a giant blanket statement — but it seems to be one of the major themes of my life.

Witness the swimming pool in my backyard.

When we bought the house about a dozen years ago, it was everything I ever wanted: a traditional colonial in a nice neighborhood with four bedrooms and pool out back.

Who wouldn’t be happy in that set up?

But it turns out, having all the trappings of a happy life does not guarantee actual happiness. No, no it does not. That my friends has to come from within, which took me a couple of years and like, 800 hours of therapy, to figure out.

In the meantime, I still have this pain in the ass pool to deal with. For some reason, the monster has always been my problem. Over the years, I’ve had to figure out the complexities of vacuuming, maintaining chemical levels and scooping the inevitable bunny or mole that finds its way into the water but, alas, not its way out each summer.

And, because the pool was already about 20 years old when we moved in, there’s always something that needs to be replaced each season and it always costs $1,500. It’s weird.

There’s so much else that still needs to be done to keep it up, like fixing the concrete deck that’s steadily sinking near the deep end and replacing the robotic cleaner that meanders listlessly along the bottom of the pool like some drunken sailor, pushing the debris around with its tail. The money and energy required to keep the thing going can be overwhelming.

When I called a few weeks ago to schedule this year’s opening with my current pool service – and I’m convinced that they are all thieves — the woman on the other end was like, “Well, we’re pretty booked up so you won’t have it open for Memorial Day,” all condescending like she was simultaneously crushing my dreams and kind of happy about it.

She didn’t know whom she was dealing with. “Fine by me,” I told her happily. “Perfect, in fact.”

I was in no hurry to unleash the monster.

The best day of the year for me – well, aside from my birthday in August and the day after Christmas – is the day my pool is closed for the season. It’s just one less thing to clean and take care of. In fact, the pool is often the one thing that tends to slip through the cracks each summer. But unlike neglecting, say, a child, no one’s going to start making regular visits to make sure I’m taking care of my pool. No one’s going to arrest me if my pool walls turn green.

I finally had the pool opened last weekend and much to my surprise, it didn’t look half bad. Historically, the pool dudes pull aside the green cover and the water underneath seriously looks like it just got back from a stint at the Black Lagoon. You really expect to see some scaly dude with gills pulling himself up from its murky depths. But this year, the water was pretty clear although the bottom covered in some mysterious type of silt that just seems to absorb its way through the pool’s cover each winter.

That was on Saturday and as of this writing – some five days later – that crap is still clinging to the bottom of the pool. It’s hard to motivate to get out there and go through the whole rigmarole necessary to vacuum, but I don’t know how many more days I can stand the disappointment on my 11-year-old’s face when he bursts through the door from school asking if he could go for a swim.

I mean, what’s the point of having a pool?

I’ll admit, when it finally comes together, the pool has proven to be quite fun. The girls and I have spent hours over the years soaking in the steamy water of the spa at night, surrounded by candles and watching the bats swoop low over the pool’s dark water. And the kids have gone through hundreds of plastic bottle caps playing “dibble” (in which they pitch it into the pool and then have to find it) and seeing who can make it across the pool the fastest in one breath.

I know I sound like a brat — boo hoo me and my pool – but I’ve just figured out that more/bigger/better isn’t what makes for a happy life. Just a more complicated one. 

In the future, I’m going to focus on nabbing the things I need instead of the stuff I want, or think I want. I mean, the idea is certainly not revolutionary — Mick Jagger figured it out about 100 years ago. But still. Some of us are just a little slower than others to figure out what’s really good for them.

Just ask the guy whom I work out with who was constantly baffled that a woman of fairly reasonable intelligence could not figure out that eating a box of Wheat Thins in bed each night was not the path to weight loss and good health.

I’ve finally cut all that extracurricular nibbling out of my diet — as he had been suggesting — and lost some weight recently and he was all, “It’s about time.”

“What can I tell you?” I said to him. “I’m a late bloomer.”

Maybe it’s not too late to start making smarter choices — from what I eat to whom I love — in my life so I’ll be able to edit that tombstone to read: “She got what she needed.”

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m almost died,” she answered.

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

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

You’re welcome.

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

Prince Swears Off Cursing. You Won’t Believe What Happened Next.

210px-No_gesture.svgI remember the first time I heard my mother curse.

I was about 10, eating breakfast at the big, round table that took up much of our small kitchen and she was opening a box of Devil Dogs – presumably to put in our school lunches and not to serve for breakfast, but this was the 70s – when all of a sudden I heard her bark, “Shit!”

Of course, back then, you didn’t try to engage with an angry parent and ask what was wrong, so I just assumed she cut herself opening the box, and went back to my Cocoa Puffs. But inside I was thinking, “Wow. Mom just used a really bad curse word.”

That never happened.

Other than getting my hands on a George Carlin comedy album around 1976 and listening over and over to his infamous “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” I don’t remember hearing anyone around me using controversial language on a daily basis. It was a G-rated world.

So when something PG-13 was uttered, I took note. Once, my dad told a story and its punch line, in which he told one of his employees at a Burger King in Yonkers to get his “Puerto Rican ass off the counter and get back to work,” was so hilarious, I decided to retell it while having dinner at my friend Katy Leary’s house. And while that punch line received uncontrollable laughter at my grandparents’ house one Saturday night when my father told the story over a table littered with Budweiser cans and ashtrays, it garnered icy silence and nervous stares from my friend’s family and a follow-up phone call to my parents from Mrs. Leary.

Probably around the same time – I guess you could call this my profanity awakening – I heard some older boys, maybe 7th or 8th graders, at my tiny Catholic school using the F-word and couldn’t believe my ears.

“How could they say that about a woman’s body?” I thought, because at that point, I was under the impression that all forbidden words had something to do with the female reproductive system.

I remember standing on the quiet street in front of my suburban New Jersey house with other kids in my neighborhood, trying to work out just where the “shit” and “fuck” were located.

Almost 40 years later, I’d bet that my 11-year-old son has a better understanding of what a lot of those naughty words mean. Today, we are surrounded by expletives. They jump out at us at every corner. They’re all over the radio and on TV. In fact, last night on The New Girl one of the characters compared a folded napkin to a vagina, which isn’t one of those dirty words (although used in this case improperly) but the visual just seemed to cross a line. I was like, “Wow.”

And Jimmy Kimmel hosted his first annual Celebrity Curse Off the other night between Julia Roberts and Sally Field and you should’ve heard the mouth on Gidget. After Sally unloaded a big fat “motherfucker,” poor Julia looked at the audience and said, “Why am I in a curse-off with the Flying Nun?”

Not that I am any language prude. In fact, I have a tendency to sprinkle much of my day-to-day conversation with salty talk. It worked back in college, when my freshman roommate – a cute little blonde debutante from Baltimore – cursed like a sailor. We got along great, swearing and filling up a two-foot ashtray with Marlboro cigarette butts.

Over the years, I’ve developed enough sense to know when I needed to clean up my act, like at work and around my little children. Back in the day, “stupid” and “dummy” were on the list of words you weren’t allowed to say around our house and I think I might have washed a little mouth or two out for employing such offensive language.

But now that they’re bigger, well most of them, I seem to have lightened up my restrictions on cursing around the kids. I have confessed to yelling, “Fuck you” into a phone at my 21-year-old and was cursing to high heaven during a drive to Virginia two weeks ago. Just ask my daughter, who was sitting next to me in the car when I learned, via a text sent by my girlfriend, that I had not only missed my fifth grader’s Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) graduation but that his essay had been selected as the best in his class and he got to read it out loud at the assembly.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I shouted, thinking of all the DARE graduations I’d attended not only for my other children but covering as a local reporter. “Do you mean to fucking tell me after all these fucking years, one of my kids finally fucking wins and I’m not fucking there?”

“Motherfucker!” I howled.

My daughter pretty much kept quiet during the expletive-riddled outburst but later that night at dinner, she reported my bad behavior to the rest of our family. “You should have heard Mom,” she told them over a giant tower of onion rings. “She had, like, a total temper tantrum driving down here.”

“What a diva,” they all concurred, as I sat picking at a salad while they plowed their way through the spire of fried rings.

But sometimes, nothing gets the point across quite like a well-placed expletive. I do tend to employ curse words probably more than the average person in my everyday conversations — which I consider a part of my charm — and that carries over into the blog. And let’s face it; the blog is just like one giant conversation in which I get to do all of the talking.

When I first started posting, I used foul language pretty liberally but now I try to save the really big ones for where they’re going to have an impact on the story. I’m trying to keep it classy over here in the blogosphere. But I can’t tell you how many people have commented to me about how I described my ex-husband’s shoveling skills. Not to brag, but it’s goddamn poetry.

But after a weekend of driving almost 18 hours and contending with the terrible drivers south of the Mason-Dixon line, I pulled as many expletives that I could think of out of the bad-word arsenal when I wrote about the experience for the blog. 

And that post prompted a very nice e-mail from one of my Internet boyfriends – which is what I like to call my guy friends who follow my blog mostly because, even though they’re all married and there’s nothing romantic or unseemly involved whatsoever, I think it sounds really funny – suggesting that all the cursing detracted from my writing.

At first I thought, “Fuck him.”

But then I saw on the Today Show that Prince – and if you really know me, you know I loved that weirdo so much I had a poster of him hanging in my freshman dorm – had sworn off cursing. The Purple One recently told Essence magazine that he quit all the cussing out of respect to others. “Would you curse in front of your kids? To your mother?” he asked.

This from the man who sang “Let’s Pretend We’re Married” and “Sexy M.F.”?

[Here is where I spent countless minutes trying to find a YouTube video of either of these songs, which apparently do not exist in this country. Trust me, they’re racy.]

And so, out of deference to my own mom and the few of my children who read the blog, along with a handful of local officials, colleagues and other folks I’ve known on a professional level who’ve found my blog and read along, I think I might have to follow suit.

Don’t get me wrong: Some drivers will always have to be called out for their douchy ways and some guys will always shovel like, well, you know how they do it.

But I’m going to make an effort to keep things a little cleaner. I mean, they are just words, upon which we’ve decided arbitrarily to attach negative connotations, making them a threat to society. But there is something appealing about trying to preserve a sense of civility. I mean, it’s either that or we chuck it all out the window and start wearing jeans to church and chewing with our mouths open. Licking of fingers would not be far behind followed by sweatpants at the office.

I will be one small blogger trying to maintain some level of dignity in an increasingly undignified world.

And really, if I can give up pizza and bagels, cursing should be no fu… um, no problem. No problem at all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How to Get a Spray Tan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m kind of sorry I know these things.

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

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

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

Really, I consider it a public service.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clearly, she must not be from New Jersey.

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

 

That’s What She Said

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

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

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

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

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

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

Herewith, some rabbit holes to jump down:

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Conscious Uncoupling” gets a blast of fresh air.

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

The ‘Shizzness’ of Being a Mom

P1000060It 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.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

S’no Joke

IMG_3773Get out your onsies, kids, because it sounds like those of us living in and around New Jersey are about to get socked in once again by snow.

I don’t even care. I’m, like, waving the white flag and telling Mother Nature, “I give up.”

I mean, what’s the point? Especially now that I’m not working.

When I was, my job was to cover the news and newspeople — not necessarily me, mind you — get hard-ons for snow storms. We’d have higher ups urging us to post articles about when it’s coming, how much is coming, whether the local police and DPW crews were prepared. We’d cover it as it started to come down and then the aftermath, with our own photos and tried to get readers to post photos of their own — which usually meant pictures of patio furniture covered in snow. That always seems to be people’s go-to for illustrating the amount of snow that has fallen.

But now I can just sit in my house, in my onesie, all day long and play Walking Dead Monopoly while watching the snow fall outside my TV room window.

Now, if only this weather pattern would shift to take place during the midweek, when everyone’s already done all their food shopping because sadly, I’m still on a weekend hunting and gathering schedule. Which put me in my local Costco Saturday at about 2 p.m., which also happened to be the exact center of Hell on Earth.

Sigh.

And I needed stuff you can’t get around, like kitty litter and toilet paper.

I would have tended to all this earlier in the week but my high school girl and I decided fairly last minute to haul ass to the center of Pennsylvania on Thursday to check out Penn State as a potential college choice. And while it’s known to many as “Happy Valley,” as it’s the “happiest place on Earth,” on Thursday at around 2 p.m. it might also have qualified as the “coldest place on Earth.”

The college kids leading the tour, bravely walking backwards across icy paths through the sprawling campus, lacked the good sense to bring us into buildings rather than just standing in front and talking while the bitter wind whipped and snow obscured our vision while we stared longingly at the warmth of the library before us.

Anyway, that’s about as exciting as my life has been this week: Costco and college road trips. No accidents and all my teeth remain in my head (although I did have another dream this week about all of them just falling out, which I thought was a fairly common dream but have yet to find someone else whose had one).

In between, I squeezed in some of this stuff, in case you missed it:

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IMG_0496 220 Days Unemployed

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. (READ MORE … )

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Screen Shot 2014-02-26 at 9.25.41 AMBounce Your Muffintop

My friend Tara, who lives in Connecticut, and I have shared many of the same life experiences.

We both fell in love with boys at a certain military academy and the four of us found we had lots of fun, perhaps too much fun, together.

We attended each other’s weddings not long after college and then the babies started to come. (READ MORE … ) 

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

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

Bikinis After 40: Good or Gross?

To wear or not to wear?

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

Twenty years ago, wearing a two-​​piece wasn’t even an issue. In fact, it was 20 years ago this year that I put one on over Memorial Day weekend after having my second child that March. But back then I guess my body was a lot more elastic than the thing I’m working with today. (READ MORE … )

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While the kids are out playing in the snow, don’t forget to like me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter @AMyNameisAMy, subscribe to my blog (look over to your right) and hand me a glass of wine — not necessarily in that order.

Bounce Your Muffintop

Here we are in the fall of 1993 thinking we could take on at least five more kids each. #ignoranceisbliss

Here we are in the fall of 1993 holding each other’s baby and thinking we could take on at least five more kids apiece. #ignoranceisbliss

My friend Tara, who lives in Connecticut, and I have shared many of the same life experiences.

We both fell in love with boys at a certain military academy and the four of us found we had lots of fun, perhaps too much fun, together.

We attended each other’s weddings not long after college and then the babies started to come.

We had our first babies within months of each other and got together when those babies were old enough that at least I was already pregnant again with my second child.

We strolled the babies down to a nearby playground and pushed them on swings and talked about our plans for the future.

“I’d like to have at least four,” she said of the body count she had in mind for her family, and then reconsidered. “Maybe six.”

I nodded my head and said I’d been thinking I’d like to have that many children, too.

Clearly, we were so delusional we thought that having six children would be as easy as having a single one-year-old. Taking care of a one-year-old is like having a three-year-old dog except with the diapers.

Like, you just have to keep it alive.

How were we supposed to know then the challenges that would come with having multiple children, like the endlessness of two kids in diapers, temper tantrums in stereo and everyone crying and drooling because of Coxsackie sores?

I can’t even get started on the joys of owning multiple teenagers which makes a strong case for tubal ligation.

In the end, cooler heads (and husbands) prevailed and we both held steady at four kids apiece and are now both down to just two living at home with the other off at college.

In the early days, our husbands worked for the same Russian shipping operation in Manhattan and we’d see each other annually at the company Christmas party at which it always seemed one of us was either pregnant or breastfeeding and way too sober for the crazy antics going on around us.

Russians are nuts.

A dozen years later, it seems that Tara and I both are going through another one of life’s obstacles together: The Midlife Muffintop.

She emailed me this video yesterday (which she needs you to know is NOT of her) and I laughed at the mom’s rap about her struggle with her bulging middle and took comfort when I saw hers that at least mine might be categorized as a mini-muffin.

It’s a fascinating mid-life phenomenon, this slowing down of the metabolism and carb bloating, and one of those things people fail to mention so that you can anticipate, like the trauma of pooping after you have a baby.

Anyway, I take comfort that I’m not alone on my journey through love, babies and muffin tops.

Enjoy the show. And bounce carbohydrate, bounce.