Amy’s Week in Review (Oct. 14-20)

bullseyeWell, it’s been a quiet week in Lake — wait, I don’t live in Minnesota. But my own little corner of New Jersey has been calm and that’s more than alright with me.

One interesting and unexpected thing that happened this week was that my 10-year-old son called me a “perv.”

First, let me begin by saying that I actually used to be a reader of books. Literature, even. Like during the darkest days of my divorce, I read “War and Peace.” I’ve read Cheever and Updike, Franzen and Chabon. I even read the Count of goddamn Monte Cristo, not so long ago.

Now, I’m lucky if I get through the latest issue of “People.”

But one thing I never miss reading is the back page of “Entertainment Weekly,” which features a fun roundup of what’s hot in the entertainment industry each week called “The Bullseye.” Like last week’s issue featured  a picture of Jessica Lange’s new witchy “American Horror Story” character at its center and says, “To paraphrase Barbara Bush: Rhymes with bitch.”

Then there are assorted pics radiating throughout the dartboard indicating what celebs/movies/tv shows, etc. hit the target and what missed the mark, including Ed Harris (“Most welcome cameo in ‘Gravity'”) and Hank Williams Jr. (“Least welcome cameo in ‘Gravity'”).

So I was standing in the kitchen looking at this week’s issue yesterday and noticed at the bottom a blurb about Charlie Hunnam pulling out of “Fifty Shades of Grey” last minute (“Something Christian Grey would never do,” according to EW.).

“OMG you guys,” I said to my two kids sitting in the kitchen with me when I remembered this next very important bit of information. “Guess who I just heard is going to be the new Christian Grey?” (As if my 10 year old had any idea what I was talking about.)

IMPORTANT NOTE: I may having a hard time getting through “Middlemarch” right now but had no problem reading the entire 50 Shades canon over the course of one weekend.

“OMG who,” responded the 16-year-old daughter in the least-excited voice possible. She is like the Ben Stein of teenaged girls.

“Someone just texted me and said she heard it’s going to be,” I stopped, pausing for dramatic effect, imagining my audience actually cared about my news.

“Eric the Vampire!” I yelled, because I knew they at least knew that I was crazy for that insanely hot “True Blood” character. He’s really the only reason why I’ve watched that show for so long.

“I’m like taking off my clothes right now,” I told them, and that’s where I jumped the shark, as they say, as far as my audience was concerned.

“That’s disgusting,” observed the 16-year-old in a voice so flat you’d think she was one of the undead.

“Yeah, Mom,” said my son, “You’re a perv.”

“Oh come on, guys,” I said. “I’m kidding. It’s a joke.”

“It’s still pervy,” he said over his shoulder as he and his sister walked away in disgust.

And that’s the perfect segue for me to share a few of the other things that happened this week, including a post I wrote indicating that I’m apparently, according to a certain subset, pervy about another dude as well:

IMG_3113The Gos and Me

I don’t know when it started, but as with so many things these days, I’m guessing it was on Facebook.

Maybe I mentioned in a post that I had just watched “Crazy Stupid Love.” For, like, the umpteenth time.

Or it’s quite likely that I then went a bit further and described how my heart skipped a beat when he took his shirt off before the Dirty Dancing scene. (READ MORE … )

And in a rare moment of seriousness, I pondered my faith and my decision to not send my youngest to CCD unlike his three older siblings:

DSC_0037On Being Catholic: The Mystery of Faith

My 10-year-old son had a play date after school the other day and when the friend’s mom came to pick him up, she asked if we were in a rush to get my guy to CCD.

“A lot of kids seem to go on Tuesdays,” she said.

“Um, we’re taking a break from being Catholic right now,” I told her, and she laughed at my joke, but I still feel really guilty about the whole thing.

It must be the Catholic in me. (READ MORE …)

And finally, a couple of things floating around the Internet caught my eye and I shared on Facebook. (Dude, I so want to get my cat drunk and make her tell me why she is so mean to me.)

Never Drink Alone Again Because Now There’s Wine for Cats (Time)

Is Music the Key to Success? (NYTimes)

And totally finally, I wanted to remind you that you can sign up to get my newest posts emailed right to your inbox (C’est incroyable!!).
Just fill your email address in the “Subscribe to blog via email” box, which is to the right of this post if you’re on your laptop or if you scroll way to the bottom if you’re reading this on your phone. It will generate an email and you just need to confirm your subscription and you’re good.
Easy peasy.

 

Amy’s Week In Review (Oct. 6-13)

IMG_1831I get that we’re all busy.

We have deadlines to meet, children to drive and beds to make. Not to mention all the homework that needs to be checked, deli meat that has to be bought for all the school lunches that someone (preferably not me) needs to make.

Believe me, I totally get it.

So, in the interest of my busy readers, who tell me that they aren’t always able to get to all my posts (one friend told me it would be so much better if the blog was printed on paper so she could take it into the tub where she goes to escape her family nightly), I’ve put together a recap of all that’s happened around here this week.

But don’t think my intentions are purely altruistic, because as Don Miguel Ruiz warns us in The Four Agreements, Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves.” (I learned this yesterday while traipsing through the woods listening to the audio version of this book that, dudes, I think just might change my life.)

I like being able to pull the posts out of the blogger bag just one more time and admire them before they’re released into the great Milky Way of data that is the Internet. It’s kind of like how I like to just stare at my kids sometimes and admire my handiwork.

Forthwith, my week in review:

liebsteraward_3lilapplesBlogger Love:  10 Liebster Award Questions

So, here’s the really cool thing about this blog: Just when I thought the only people following it were all the moms living in my small town and my ex-husband, it turns out that at least one other blogger has started reading along. She’s Connie over at “I Suck as a Parent” and she has even gone so far as to nominate me for a Liebster Award, which she likens to the Grammys for bloggers, minus the red carpet. More …

 

IMG_2385Care Package Goodies: Easy Peanut Butter Cup Cookies

On the occasion of my son’s birthday this weekend, I put together my first care packages of the school year. I’m generally terrible at this type of thoughtfulness but figured I’d also send something to his sister since I was already going to the post office with one box. More …

 

 

photo (3)What I’ve Learned in My 21 Years as a Mom

Twenty-one years ago today, I bought a car. Or at least, I started the day buying a car and ending it having a baby. It all happened so fast. More …

 

 

I also posted links to a couple of articles on Facebook this week I loved:

Are You Raising a Douchebag? (Details)

33 Untold Truths That Writers Know Too Well (BuzzFeed)

“You’re a stay-at-home mom? What do you DO all day?” (The Matt Walsh Blog)

 

 

 

 

What I’ve Learned in My 21 Years as a Mom

I wrote this essay last year in honor of my oldest child’s 20th birthday but aside from the additional year, all of the sentiments remain the same. 

0511-1010-0812-3638_Compass_Rose_Boating_Navigation_Equipment_clipart_imageTwenty-one years ago today, I bought a car. Or at least, I started the day buying a car and ending it having a baby. It all happened so fast.

My husband at the time and I, babies ourselves, were about to have one and having just moved to the suburbs, were in the market for a second car. I had already started my maternity leave – unable to cope with the long train ride in and out of the city each day – and he was off for the Columbus Day holiday.

And so, much like Columbus whose journey brought him to an unexpected destination, we set sail in search of an extra set of wheels and ended up with me barfing up a giant meal in the hospital before giving birth.

Here’s what I discovered on that day all those years ago: Being a mom is hard.

For months, I had envisioned all sorts of happy scenarios as I rubbed my growing belly and religiously devoured “What to Expect,” but none of it prepared me for the reality of actually having the baby. I had been so focused on the actual birth that I was not prepared for the day-to-day slog of parenting.

And so I had my truly excellent natural childbirth, bringing my 7-pound son easily into the world, and then everything went off script. He couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t expel the pesky placenta. We both labored until he was whisked off to the neonatal unit and I was wheeled into the operating room.

I ended up on the sad-mommy floor, the section of the maternity ward that shielded moms whose pregnancies had gone awry from all the happy families cooing over their newborns with rooms overflowing with balloons and doting grandparents. It was like being in the Land of Misfit Toys, where for one reason or another, our square-wheeled babies couldn’t come join us for a snuggle in our hospital beds.

The baby’s health was so unstable that the hospital had a nun come and perform an emergency baptism on Day 2. Talk about grim.

For many years afterwards – long before I had to end my marriage or had a child slip into the darkness of depression – the hardest thing I ever had to do was leave that hospital five days later without my baby. I had to leave him there, alone in an incubator with tubes running down his throat and wires attached to a shaved patch on his tiny head, and that, my friends, sucked.

I remember standing on the curb in front of the hospital with my mom and my mother-in-law waiting for my husband to come pull the car around and trying not to totally lose it, when the mother-in-law, probably trying to help take my mind off the dire situation, asked me how much weight I needed to lose.

Seriously.

And of course, the rest happened so fast. The baby quickly recovered and in less than a week, he was home and crying all the time, making me wonder what the hurry was getting him out of the hospital in the first place. While he was there, I had been religiously pumping breast milk at home so that when he could finally be fed, I would be more than ready to accommodate his little thirst. We immediately began passing thrush back and forth to each other, which for him meant a little yeasty white patches inside his pink mouth and for me it meant searing pain across my left breast. Like it was on fire.

So, here’s what I learned 21 years, three more kids and one less husband later: I was reading the wrong manual all those years ago. “What to Expect When You’re Expecting”? That’s completely misleading. Moms-to-be should read something like, “You’ll Never Know What to Expect Parenting” or “Never-Say-Never as a Mom.”

Because we all set sail into unchartered waters when we become parents. We think we are clever, with our course clearly mapped and plugged into the GPS of our lives. But kids are tricky and bring with them lots of variables, their insecurities and emotions are the winds and tides that can blow you off course in a heartbeat. So we often end up standing on the shores of some strange land, not where we expected to be, much like Columbus ending up in the Bahamas rather than Asia.

But here’s the thing: as much as I was sure 21 years ago that my life would follow a certain trajectory, I’ve discovered that it’s better in the Bahamas.

photo (3)

You Can’t Go Home Again

383327_10151151342727173_531539335_nFor 16 years, I had a child at home with me for at least a portion of the school day.

That is a long time to be restricted to scheduling dentist appointments, grocery shopping and personal grooming in between preschool pickup and drop off and nap times.

Those are a lot of years of organizing trips to the playground and MyGym classes and playdates to fill our long days. Many hours spent negotiating television watching, minutes left playing in the McDonald’s play area and drinking a glass of milk at lunch.

And when the day starts at 6 a.m., that’s a good 13 hours of crust cutting and potty mouth patrol. After about a decade or so, I was done.

At one point, I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. Could start to taste what it would be like to have all three of my kids in school for a full day, none of that two-and-a-half hour nursery school and kindergarten nonsense.

But then I accidentally got pregnant when my third child entered kindergarten and what would have been my home stretch became my freedom swan song.

Because when he arrived, this new fella even wanted to hang out in the middle of the night with me. For months. There was no escaping him.

I don’t know, maybe I wasn’t the ideal candidate to have four kids in the first place, but that ship seems to have sailed a long time ago.

Maybe I should have chosen a different route and gone back to work after my first child was born. But I’ve never been that ambitious. Except when it came to having kids.

And honestly, I also loved those early years home with little ones. I loved mornings spent at Gymboree playing with their cousins and then sitting down at the bagel shop for an early lunch before I took them home and put them down for afternoon naps. Maybe we’d head to the playground when they woke up and then back home for chicken nuggets and a soak in the tub and a story or two before bed.

It was easy and we were happy. Or at least, that’s how I remember it now.

And maybe that’s what I wanted to go back to the fourth time around: happier times. I joke that the kid was a booboo but that was hardly the case. I had tried for a few years to get knocked up with him and when things just didn’t seem to be going in that direction, I threw my hands up in surrender.

And immediately got pregnant.

But, as they say, you can’t go home again. There were too many things pulling me in too many different directions at that point – the three older kids, an increasingly-challenging marriage and my desire to get back to writing.

It just wasn’t the same.

So by the time that little guy was 5 and about to start his THIRD year of preschool (Pre-K since he’s a December birthday and missed the October cutoff for kindergarten), I made a last-minute decision to send him to a school that not only had a full-day program, they even provided busing.

I felt a huge weight lift off my shoulder after I signed him up and then went to an end-of-summer party and filled two women friends in on the recent development.

And was surprised by their reaction.

“Won’t you miss him?” asked one woman who had three kids, the oldest around third grade at the time.

“I’m not sending him to the Army,” I told her. “He’s just going to school.”

The vibe both these moms gave off was that not wanting to spend all my time with my kids made me a bad mom. Or at least that was the message I took away that night.

But what they failed to understand was that stretching four kids out over 10 years had dampened my enthusiasm.

I super-love my kids, but I do not want to be with them 24/7. I don’t always want to be on call – to explain why I don’t want a lizard or pour a glass of milk or drive to the skate park or hear about how there’s no food in the house.

And after a good four months this summer of having at least one of the four kids hanging around eating Tostito chips or watching Netflix, the start of the school year yesterday nearly brought tears to my eyes. With the older two back at school for a few weeks, it was the last piece of the get-out-of-my-hair puzzle.

The youngest is starting fifth grade and his first year at the middle school in town and the teen-daughter is a junior in the public high school. I made them a big breakfast and complimented their straightened and slicked-back hairdos and we made sure to take lots of pictures before they left.

And when they were gone, I congratulated myself for once again having avoided committing any homicidal acts during the summer break — go self-control! — and poured myself another cup of coffee.

Then I got dressed and went about my workday and before I knew it, they were walking back through the door.

And it was great. I loved hearing all about their time out in the trenches. I wanted to get the scoop on all of their teachers, who was in their classes, what friends they sat with at lunch.

“It was so great, mom,” my little guy reported. “All the teachers knew who I was.”

And you could tell he loved that. Loved knowing that, because of his three older siblings, there was brand recognition.

And so he’ll follow in their footsteps for a while, and it will be fun to see what stays the same and how much of it will change.

And maybe five years, 10 years from now, I’ll look back on these years and remember them as easy and wish I could return to this very moment. And I’ll remember that we were happy, too. Because in the end, who’s to say we weren’t?

 

 

 

 

Mom, You Are No Jennifer Aniston

DSC_0010

Sometimes cabinets need to be used to contain bulletin board spillover.

I have always had a penchant for collecting and pinning random things that caught my fancy to a bulletin board and later, as a grown up, on a refrigerator.

You’d think I’d be really into Pinterest because of this but if you’ve clicked on the cute little icon on my blog that urges you to follow me there, you’d be greeted by chirping crickets. I just can’t spend any more time on anything else right now (I have an acute case of Netflix Fever).

When I worked in an office out of college I took to collecting and cataloging strange hairs my coworkers and I would find around our cubicles and created a Hair Musem, pinned to the bulletin board above my desk alongside important memos and pictures of my dog.

It all sounds really weird now but at the time, this is what helped take the edge off of being low-level and underpaid workers at a women’s magazine trapped in a windowless space for 8 hours a day.

Then I became a mom and had the whole expanse of a refrigerator to work with and let me tell you, I had a lot of magnets and sometimes, even they were the star of the show. My favorite was a crying wooden baby sitting in a highchair with its little arms raised in the air. It perfectly captured that moment in my life.

The frig would be covered by photos that struck my fancy, invitations to weddings at first, then birth announcements and later, birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese’s. Then I’d add postcards the grandparents would send from their annual excursion overseas or a few-odd Baby Blues or Family Circus comics cut right out of the newspaper.

My frig canvas fell apart in 2005 when we redid our kitchen and got ourselves a big, fancy number sheathed in cabinetry to match the rest of the kitchen, which was beautiful but alas, not magnet friendly.

383327_10151151342727173_531539335_n

This just makes perfect sense.

It wasn’t long though before I was Scotch taping crap onto the frig instead and now, there’s an ever-evolving collection of Honor Roll certificates, a panoramic image of the inside of the 10-year-old’s mouth (showing teeth trying to emerge at odd angles) and my favorite New Yorker cartoon.

Lately, I’ve also taken to taping photos of celebrities on the refrigerator, as if I was a teenaged girl. And I guess because I live with a few of that breed, I get confused sometimes.

Anyway, this is a very long-winded way of explaining why there are a bunch of Ryan Gosling pictures taped to a 47-year-old woman’s refrigerator.

DSC_0004

He is always being a creep and staring. Anywhere you go in the kitchen, the Gos is watching. I kind of like it.

He’s just become, like, this ongoing jokey love-interest around here, so when any one of us comes across a good Gos picture — or one of the kids makes me, say, a Valentine’s card featuring the young actor proclaiming his love for me — it is immediately taped to the frig.

There’s also one photo of Jennifer Aniston up there, she of the fabulous legs. It’s some red carpet shot and it is complimentary to both her upper arms and shapely gams. Traits I admire and envy.

So yesterday, it seems my 10-year-old son noticed the photo of Jen, who has been hanging there at his eye-level for about five months, for the first time.

DSC_0005

Does this photo have a 100% success rate in preventing me from grabbing the Ben & Jerry’s out of the freezer drawer? I’d say no. She does look fab, though.

We were standing in the kitchen and he asked me why I had hung the picture on our frig as he started reading the caption beneath the image, which included her age.

I said, “Well, I think she has amazing legs and I’d like to remind myself of what I’d like my legs to look like every time I go to the refrigerator to look for something to eat. You know, like, inspiration.”

“Whoa, she’s 44?” he said, obviously shocked that this woman was a mere three years younger than his own mother.

“She looks so young,” he continued, looking up at me. “You should use her, like, tips.”

Well, thank you, little boy. I’m so glad I spent all that time breastfeeding you and taking you to Disney World.

I could have been working on my legs instead.

DSC_0007

The kids know I am crazy for the handmade cards and ones that star the Gos need special attention.

 

 

 

Parenting 101: The Good, the Bad and the Yucky

405091_466573723395477_1792569133_nAs a blogger, I try to balance sharing my life’s story with protecting the innocent.

Well, usually it’s the not-so-innocent who are howling about what I write here and looking for protection.

I want to be honest, to write about the yuckier side of life here, but I also don’t want those I love to feel thrown under the bus as I tell my version of what’s happening. And that’s really all it is, my side of the story.

But I’m a manipulator, too, because like everyone else I have an innate desire to paint the picture I want the world to see. I mean, it’s what Facebook was built on.

I want you to think that I had a passel of kids and then went through this super-crappy divorce but have come out the other end all enlightened and spreading joy and happiness throughout the land.

But that’s just not the case.

I am highly flawed. I often don’t know what to say in important conversations or how to course correct when situations veer wildly off-track. My knee-jerk response to challenging situations is to shut down. I just opt to do nothing and leave the issue woefully unaddressed. I avoid conflict like it’s tuna fish.

And I hate to apologize.

I’d like you believe that while there are the occasional blips in my house – like kids leaving crusty dishes in the sink or my freaking out over loud music while driving to school – overall my family is generally on solid ground.

But that just would not be true. We are on slippery ice and just when we find our balance, we see cracks threatening to spread beneath our feet. Stability can feel tenuous, at best, sometimes.

I wish I could tell you my recent whirlwind trip south to bring my college kids back to school was a bittersweet ending to a nice summer together. I wish I could tell you that the days leading up to it were filled with quality time together and that we all realized how much we loved and would miss each other.

But that would be a lie.

I was happy that the oldest two were about to disappear for three months. I had had enough of them this summer to see me through to Thanksgiving. And they, I believe, of me.

And by the end, I had stopped speaking to the oldest, who drove himself back a few days earlier. In fact, his dad and I brought his sister down and got her set up in her new off-campus apartment and we never even saw him.

We are that mad at him right now.

And I don’t know what to do, how to resolve the situation. How to wrap my brain around the idea that sometimes – regardless of how long you breastfed them or how many books you read to them or nagged them to practice their instrument or eat their broccoli – your kids will make decisions that disappoint you.

Maybe, as with so many parenting situations in the past that seemed so dire when I was in the thick of them – like when one kid refused to take Honors English or another returned home late one night bombed – time will help to make sense of the situation.

The passage of time and distance from the situation has allowed me to see that a child has got to want to be challenged academically, not pushed into it. And that kids are stupid and sometimes drink too much Fourloko.

So this trip did not result in any picture-perfect moments. There were no heartfelt embraces or Come-to-Jesus reckonings. It was more like, “Good-bye and good luck.”

On the bright side, I did spend the eight-hour drive home with my ex-husband and we had pleasant conversation. He even came into the house – for the first time since we split up for good four years ago – to use the bathroom and then fixed something that had been broken and ignored forever.

I mean, you couldn’t have told me these things were possible four years ago.

But then later that night, he sent me an angry text, assuming the worst of me about something unrelated. He couldn’t just call and say, “Hey, I noticed this, what’s up?”

He immediately went on the offense and sent a text that zinged a “WTF” at me.

But unfortunately, I just couldn’t deal. I thought about calling to talk to him about it. To assure him I harbored no ill will towards him and apologize, once again, for doing something that pissed him off. But I just didn’t have the energy.

I left it somewhere on the side of the road during the long drive home.

the college good-bye

I drove eight hours yesterday for the big college move. Again. He’s a junior and she’s a sophomore at the same school, and the novelty — at least for me — is wearing off.

And while things aren’t as shiny and exciting as they were two years ago, I can guarantee that the two-day excursion will still include a very expensive trip to WalMart, at least one meal at a fast food restaurant and chardonnay (that last part is for me).

It makes me think back to the big moment, two years ago, when I said good-bye to my oldest, and what a milestone that was in my life, and thought I’d share an essay I wrote in retrospect.

I’ll let you know how it feels to be an old pro when I return next week (I figure at this rate, by the time my youngest goes in 8 years I’ll be able to just send him by himself).

IMG_2932

There’s a picture pinned to the bulletin board in my kitchen — half hidden by silly greeting cards and bumper stickers that I’ve collected — which has become our iconic family back-to-school photo. In it, my two oldest children stand on the front stoop of our old house, a basket of late-summer impatiens drooping behind them, on the occasion of the oldest kid’s first day of preschool, just shy of his fourth birthday.

Pinned to the front of each of their shirts is a construction paper nametag that had been sent by the teacher to be worn on the first day of school. My son’s has his name on it and my daughter, who is only 17-months younger, is wearing the tag that had been sent for me to wear, but she assumed it was for her and who was I to burst her bubble? So I pinned it to her little white polo shirt and, if you didn’t know any better, you would have thought that it was her first day of school too, the way she puffs out her chest and looks directly into the camera, her lips forming the “ch” of “cheese.”  Her big brother stands beside her, looking away from the camera and grins at her, as if to say, “Can you believe this?”

That picture started a trend that we’ve continued on the first day of each school year ever since – even with the addition of two other children and when our world got a little rocky when the kids’ dad moved. Of course, as they got older, the kids would gripe about my “obsession” with organizing the first day of school photo op. Last year, that sweet oldest son, who looked at his sister with such love and excitement on his first day of preschool, actually flipped the camera the bird after I wrestled him to the front stoop to document the first day of his senior year of high school.

I kid you not.

Over the years, I have not been as diligent about documenting certain events that I did when the kids were younger. The Christmas slideshow is no longer an inventory of each gift the kids received and really, do we need to memorialize every Easy-Bake Oven or Harry Potter Lego set that comes into our house?

But back-to-school photos I strictly adhere to.

I got creative and copied that iconic first-day-of-preschool photo to make a card for my son to open after we dropped him off to start his first year away at college. It was tucked into a bundle of frames his sisters and I had picked up at Target and filled with family photos, all tied in a big bow and left on the desk in his dorm.

In the note, I reminded him of the occasion of the photo and how proud I was of the person he had become in the years since the picture was taken. I wrote in the note that I knew he would continue to excel in college as he had throughout high school and looked forward to watching what he would do next.

The whole family had driven the eight hours south to see him off and get him settled in this new chapter of his life. We hung his posters and made his bed and all took a ride over to the local Wal-Mart for extension cords and light bulbs. We walked around the sprawling campus with the rows and rows of imposing grey stone buildings and picked up his software for his major and the million-dollars worth of textbooks at the bookstore.

And when it seemed we could do no more, I left the bundle of photo frames on his desk and had him walk me and his sisters out to the car in the lot behind his dorm to say good-bye.

It’s that moment you’ve kind of been anticipating your whole career as a mom. The moment when you have to push your little bird, whose gaping mouth you’ve been lovingly placing worms into for years, out of the proverbial nest. It’s scary to imagine how hard he’ll need to flap to stay aloft. Or how empty the nest will seem without him.

We stood by the car and my oldest daughter, who had stood next to her brother so proudly on our front stoop so many years before, turned and wrapped her long arms around him to say good-bye.

Then my son stepped in front of me and I knew the moment had arrived to say all the things I had meant to say — like reminding him to floss daily and to say no to drugs and study hard — but all I could do was throw my arms around his neck and cry. Then I felt his back moving as he sobbed and was grateful that he, too, was sad. And it was then, that my younger daughter snapped our picture with her camera.

It’s the newest addition to our first day of school photo gallery and perfectly captures what it’s like to watch your child leave your nest. In it, my son’s back is to the camera and his head leans down towards me in an embrace. My face is contorted in an ugly cry and my arms hug him tight around his back with my left hand wrapped around the back of his neck, holding it the way I did when he as an infant.

We pulled apart and wiped our eyes and said our final good byes and I somehow navigated the car through the traffic-clogged roads surrounding the dorms and eventually back onto the highway. The girls and I sniffled a little bit more, and then settled in for the long drive home.

I sent him a text the next day to see how he made out his first night in the dorm and if he had found the pictures and card we had left on his desk.

“Yeah I got them thank you,” he texted back. “Sad card.”

His text continued, “When you get the chance, can you send me my basketball I left in the garage?”

And it seemed that his wings would work just fine.

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in good company

DSC_0100 I took a big bite of freedom earlier this month, tearing into it with a fierceness I didn’t know I could muster. And as I greedily swallowed all that aloneness in big, ragged pieces, I realized that it was the most liberated I’d been since I became a parent almost 21 years ago.

And it tasted fucking good.

I’ll admit, at first it seemed kind of strange, like some weird-flavored Dorito, you know like the Zesty Taco or Enchilada Supreme varieties. But the more freedom I tasted – really inhaling its full blast of flavor  – the more I wanted to stuff that shit down my gullet.

And I am here to report that (unlike the weird Dorito), only having myself to worry about for nine days tasted super-sweet.

In fact, I’d compare the usual mom getaway stuff – like going to get a massage or away on a girls’ weekend – to those little bits and pieces of bland honeydew melon used as fruit salad filler here in the U.S.  But when you go some place exotic and bite into the same type of green fruit, you can’t believe the difference. “Now this is a melon,” your brain shrieks as you lick the juice running off your fingers.

Going off by yourself for an adventure is sweet and juicy and you can’t stop reaching for just one more slice of it.

This is how I would best describe what it was like to leave my everyday life as a single, working mother of four kids behind to sail around the Greek islands for a week by myself.

It rocked.

And in retrospect, the memory has become all the sweeter as I’ve return to seething, end-of-the summer angst at home with my kids stressing about bedding for college apartments and U-Hauls to cart said bedding and assorted pieces of furniture to school.

I returned to find there’s one child who STILL can’t get a handle on what the rules and regulations are here in my house. Plus there’s a green pool in my backyard and a sizzling electrical socket in my daughter’s room, and massive layoffs coming at my company. And the cat just barfed.

And all I can think is: “Can’t someone just grab me a beer and let me sit here in the sun and read?”

Because it’s hard to shake how sweet it felt to have no responsibilities for a week. A fantasy, really, that everyone should step right up and sample.

I decided to book the trip after seeing another single mom’s photos of the same excursion to Greece on Facebook last year. I was longing for some real adventure and tired of waiting around to find a travel companion to accompany me.

I think I suffer from a by-product of living in New Jersey, which the incredible Junot Diaz described in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as: “A particularly Jersey malaise – the inextinguishable longing for elsewheres.”

So I pulled a Single White Female on my friend and made my reservation for the same trip for beginning of August.

But the goal of the trip morphed over time and while at first, my giant ego worried that people would feel sorry for me for going on vacation alone, that eventually became the whole point of the journey.

I am a person who enjoys living in the cozy little box I’ve built for myself – often ordering the same meal whenever I go to certain restaurants because I know what I’m getting – and am not naturally inclined to venture out of my comfort zone. And I certainly try not to do so alone.

But one of the benefits of my divorce has been learning to stand on my own. To show up for parties and dinners solo, which means I might not have a wingman to sidle up to if I need to take a break from being sociable, but it also liberates me from having to wait for someone else to finish a drink or telling a story or having fun before I can leave. I can just pick up my bag and walk out the door. Sometimes I don’t even say good-bye.

So as the departure date drew nearer, I fretted about all those meals I’d be eating alone and whether I’d feel like a third wheel as the only non-paired person on the week-long sailing trip (I met up with two couples and a pair of friends).

It was a challenge figuring out how to get over myself and stop worrying about what other people might be thinking, and focus instead on what I thought and what made me happy.

And if you are a parent, you know that that is about as natural as well, pushing a baby out of your bottom. It just doesn’t feel right. But somehow, it is.

I’ve especially enjoyed the reaction I’ve gotten from people when they’ve learned about my solo trip. I’ve liked watching their faces change as I explain how I went off to Greece alone and then maybe I get a fist bump or a “Wow” in return.

My college roommate called to welcome me back and said, “I can’t even go to the movies by myself.”

And the taxi driver who drove me from my hotel in Athens to the Acropolis couldn’t believe I was a single woman travelling alone in a foreign country. “No family?” he asked. “No one?”

“Ah, okay, it’s good, it’s good,” he finished, but I could tell he still thought it was kind of crazy as I stepped out alone into the hot Athens sun.

But the most interesting reaction came from the Korean lady who owns my dry cleaner. I ran in the day before I was to leave on my trip, begging her to hem an adorable pajama-y bottom pants I had just bought and desperately wanted to take with me. She finally relented and as she pinned the bottoms of the gauzy fabric for hemming, she asked me where I was going.

“Greece,” I told her and she looked up at me with widened eyes, pins clenched between her lips.

I went back to drop some stuff off to be cleaned after the trip and she asked me how it was. I told her it was great and somehow it came up that I had gone by myself.

“What?” she asked. “I couldn’t go anywhere alone,” she confided.

This is a woman who speaks English with a heavy accent and obviously came to the United States from some place else. Like, she’s had to step out of a comfort zone or two as some point in her life but still feels uncomfortable being by herself.

Some day I hope to return to Greece with a companion; someone to swim with in the salty Aegean and look up at the blanket of stars at night overhead and wake up with to the sound of a rooster crowing at dawn.

But I had a bigger journey to make this time around. I needed to go someplace a little scary and know, no matter what, I’d always be in good company.

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My kids sleep all day and play all night.

Welcome to the Habitrail

habitrailThere was a period of time, while growing up in the Seventies, that I wanted nothing more than a pet hamster or two. But more than the critters themselves, what I really wanted to get my hands on was one of those elaborate Habitrail systems that allowed you to create this maze of interconnected plastic tubes and pods through which you could watch your pets scuttle.

I don’t know what the appeal was for me: Maybe it was my whole fascination with The Borrowers and little creatures living in a big world or I just loved all the nooks and crannies that the Habitrail offered. I probably had a distorted idea of what caring for a pet hamster would look like, believing we’d be bonding and that the fur balls would be anything more than frisky poop machines.

I also would have settled for SeaMonkeys.

But unlike me when I became a parent, my mom did not easily succumb to the pleas of pet-starved children and I never got my hands on a hamster, never mind the Habitrail. I think later, as we grew older, one of my brothers might have scored a slimy something and there might have been a bird or two but rodents never made the cut in our house.

Which, I’ve since been told, is a good thing. According to other moms I know who have caved to their children’s pestering and adopted hamsters, the rodents make a racket all night long. They apparently are nocturnal creatures, sleeping all day and then as the whole house settles in for the night, they come to life and start to play, scurry and eat.

But last night, after I powered down my Kindle around 10:00 and turned out my light, excited for a solid night’s sleep, I realized that, in an ironic twist, I was now living with creatures whose internal clocks mimicked those of hamsters.

I was living in my own goddamn Habitrail.

While my 10-year-old and I were calling it a day, the three older kids – teens and a 20-year-old – were just getting going.

Down the hallway from my room, my 16-year-old and her pal who lives across the street were hooting and hollering all gansta “yo yo”s and “what what”s. Something big must have been happening on Instagram.

My 19-year-old daughter saw 10 p.m. as the perfect time to take a bath and settled into the tub after turning the radio up as loud as it would go.

When I lumbered out to knock on the bathroom door and ask her to turn it down, it became a comical “Who’s on first?” routine.

Me: “Turn it down.”

Her: “I can’t hear you.”

Me. “Because you need to turn it down.”

Her: “I still can’t hear you.”

Sigh.

I got back into my bed and then heard the yelling and pounding of last night’s episode of True Blood playing out in the den, located right under my room. By then, too tired from the exchange with the bather, I simply rolled over and texted my 20-year-old to turn the volume down. Within minutes, I heard the crinkling of plastic bags as he foraged through the pantry searching for some late-night snack that I’m sure remnants of which will greet me – Tostito bits dribbled on the kitchen floor and a milk-coated glass stuck to the bottom of the sink – when I head downstairs today.

The house is quiet now, in the early morning hours, but I’m sure to be tiptoeing around until my little critters start to stir in their cages some time around noon.

So I say to any parent who has a child begging to bring a rodent into the house, simply tell your child that while they can’t have the furry variety now, some day, if they play their cards right and become parents themselves, they’ll be the proud owners of creatures who spring to life at night and sleep all day.

It’s in their nature.

hello muddah …

IMG_2154 Have you ever felt as though your heart was about to burst?

Like, legitimately explode?

I get that way some times watching a show on TV. Like recently I was watching the movie Juno and when she has the baby and was surrounded by her family and everyone has stepped up to be so solid for that baby and then she has to give it away in the end, I just can’t take it. I burst into tears every time.

Or the Pamper’s commercial that just shows like 20 different babies sleeping while “Silent Night” plays and they’re little mouths make tiny sucking movements and one baby gives a sudden jerky twitch and I’m reminded of all those nights I had a baby asleep in my house, sometimes curled up beside me in bed, and I wonder where that time went. Tears.

Last summer, my son went away to camp for a week and because he’s the youngest of the four kids, I wasn’t too worried about him. He’s never been given the impression that the world revolves around him so he’s pretty well-adjusted and highly adaptable. I always joke that you could drop him and kid #3 in the middle of a crowd in China and they’d be like, “Hey, hi, what’s going on?”

I felt a little tug at my heart when it was time to say good-bye and I started second guessing my decision to let a 9-year-old spend a week away at camp. Who would separate his dirty from his clean clothes? Would he remember to brush his teeth? What if he forgets to eat fruits and vegetables?

But he gave me a hug and then ran down the cabin’s porch steps and started to toss a football around with another camper.

So it came as a surprise later that week to find a postcard from him in my mailbox.

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And when I read that first line, that he felt so different without me, my heart swelled. I imagined him sitting on his bunk in the cabin, carefully crafting his note home using his best penmanship. And I remembered what it was like to be 9 and live in a microcosm surrounded by parents and siblings, friends and teachers and believe that that is the whole world. And it’s familiar and comfortable and you can never imagine anything different.

When he got home, he said that he was a little homesick but “you get pretty well-known to everyone so that makes it better.”

He’s there again this week and while I got held up during check-in, he went back to the car and dragged his suitcase and sleeping bag to his cabin and began to unpack long before I finally caught up with him.

And as much as I hope he’s having the time of his life and not even thinking about home, there is a part of me that will be looking again for a postcard in my mailbox with the tell-tale script of a boy who misses his mom.

 

 

 

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What makes your heart burst? Have you dealt with a child’s homesickness (or your own)? Tell us about it in the comments section below.

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