Tag Archives: parenting

Feb
02
2015

My Prom Date

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IMG_1872In the middle of one day last week I was busy working on my laptop when my phone dinged with a text from an unknown number asking how many retweets it would take for me to go to prom.

Since I don’t get asked to prom every day, I texted my 17yo daughter to see if she knew what was going on.

She immediately texted back in the affirmative and told me to come up with the number of retweets I would need to go.

I balked and then she texted, “Boys think ur a milf.”

Seriously.

I texted back her name in all caps and lots of exclamation points and she texted, “It’s a compliment.”

“Just play along,” she added.

So I thought, why not? What harm could it do? Why do I always have to overthink everything?

I tried to come up with what I thought was an impossibly high number of retweets based on my own Twitter account and came up with 25.

In retrospect, I know.

She came home from school later and told me laughing that she had been at lunch and one of her guy friends had joked about asking me to prom and that’s how it transpired. She explained that sometimes when a guy wants to ask a girl who’s out of his league to prom he’ll ask her if she’ll go if his tweet gets a certain number of retweets on Twitter.

“So usually the girl comes up with a crazy number,” she told me, “like, 4,000.”

“I am such an idiot,” I said.

She laughed, “Yeah, when he heard 25 he was like, ‘Wow, your mom doesn’t really value herself.’”

I got another text from that phone number last night with the good news that his tweet hit the 25 retweet mark with a bonus 10 favorites.

My daughter and I were busting up over it and her little brother walked in and we told him that I was going to prom.

Live and learn.

Live and learn.

“That is, like, gross,” he said.

And it really would be if I took any of it seriously. If I didn’t think it was pretty funny but also kind of sweet. It’s a nice compliment at this late stage of my game. The only thing my little guy’s friends will ask in six years when they’re starting to think about prom is why his grandma lives with him.

And now, if nothing else, I know that 25 retweets is peanuts on Twitter.

Damn.

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Dec
12
2014

The Time My Daughter Told Me I Was a ‘Terrible Mother’

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keep_calm___by_trl_phorce-d5ipns9-1A few weeks ago a girlfriend sent a text to me and another woman about picking a date to coordinate a ladies night out to celebrate the holidays.

“I want to make sure the date works for you guys before I send it out to the whole group,” she texted us. We went back and forth about a couple of dates but pretty much I was like, “Everything works. I’m good.”

We settled on next Wednesday, Dec. 17 and she sent out a big group text and a whole thread ensued about who can make it and who still needed to find a babysitter. I was secretly pleased that I no longer really needed a sitter, my high school girl could handle herself and her brother for the night, and I thought about what I was going to wear instead.

So last Sunday I stood in the cold with the girls night organizer and another friend listening to the middle school chorus sing holiday tunes before the annual lighting of our town tree. The subject of our night out came up and we all stood shivering and agreed that our destination would be fun and then the other mom said she was still having a hard time finding a sitter.

My 17yo had just arrived from work and walked over to join our circle. I turned to her and asked her what she was doing that night — thinking maybe she could watch my friend’s kids — and then I stopped myself and said, “Wait, she’ll be watching my little kid!”

We all started to laugh and my daughter asked, “What night is this, anyway?”

“The 17th,” the organizer told her.

“Oh,’ said my daughter, giving me a look, “you mean your son’s birthday?”

Crap.

“Amy!” shouted the organizer, “you told me you were free that night!”

“I thought I was!”

And right on cue, the 17yo said, “You’re a terrible mother.”

“I have a learning disability you guys,” I continued, trying to recover, “I can’t remember things.”

And then I thought a little bit more and observed, “And I don’t even have a job.” In the past, I would use that as an excuse for my forgetfulness; for when I dropped the ball somewhere in my life. And with only two kids living at home right now, I couldn’t even pull the ol’ “I’ve got four kids” card out of my back pocket.

Now I didn’t even have that to blame.

Maybe I was just legit stupid.

At that, the teenager grabbed the car keys out of my coat pocket and said, “That’s it. I’m taking the car and driving home,” and she stormed off into the crowd.

The other moms and I laughed and I promised that I’d still be there, albeit after the obligatory trip to the local hibachi place to celebrate a 12th birthday.

I told the story to another girlfriend as we exercised the next day in my living room and she shook her head when I got to the part about forgetting my kid’s birthday and I repeated the “learning disabled” bit.

“Maybe you need an IEP,” she suggested and that really got us laughing but then I thought, “That’s not such a bad idea.”

An IEP is shorthand for the Individualized Education Program that’s tailored for students who are classified in school with some type of challenge that’s getting in between them and learning. Like, I could really use having somebody sit down with me and kind of help me sort through my life, identifying the things that challenge me – like arriving anywhere on time or dropping my son off at the wrong place  – and figuring out ways to overcome them.

We’d call it my ILP (Individualized Life Plan), which would be a grown up version of the IEP and my kids could even have a copy of it to make modifications as we discover future challenges.

Or maybe I could just pay better attention to things.

I checked my phone as the concert ended and Santa screeched by on the firetruck, its sirens blaring and lights flashing in the darkening December sky, and saw that my daughter had texted that she was sitting in the car waiting for me.

I searched through the crowd for my son and we headed out to the parking lot behind the borough hall. I opened the door and slipped into the warm car and my daughter said, “Seriously, Amy.”

“I know, dude,” I said. “But isn’t it part of my charm?”

We laughed about it during the quick drive home and I thought of ways of breaking it to my son that I would be going out for a little bit after hibachi next week.

That is, if I remember.

Give yourself the gift of Amy. Don’t worry, I’m not jumping out of a box Christmas morning. But you can sign up to get all my posts sent directly to your inbox. Just plug your email into the “receive new post in your inbox.” Oh, p.s., it’s free.

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Oct
12
2014

I Went to Buy a Car and Had a Baby Instead

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photo (3)Twenty-two years ago today, I bought a car. Or at least, I started the day buying a car and ending up having a baby instead. It all happened so fast.

My husband at the time and I, babies ourselves, had just moved to the suburbs and were in the market for a second car as we prepared for parenthood. 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 that day in search of an extra set of wheels and ended up in a hospital room with me barfing up a giant meal hours before giving birth.

Note to all expectant mothers: Do not gorge on prime rib whilst in labor. You will live to regret every fork full. Please. Trust me.

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 When You’re Expecting,” but none of it prepared me for the reality of actually having the baby. I had been so focused on the birth that I was not prepared for the day-to-day slog of parenting. For sitting around and watching it cry and poop all day.

And so I had my truly excellent natural childbirth (no drugs, yo), 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 OR.

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 after giving birth 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 was a mess.

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 and 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 yeasty white patches inside his pink mouth and for me it meant searing pain across my left breast. Like the thing was on fire.

So, here’s what I learned 22 years, three more babies and one less husband later: I was reading the wrong how-to manual all those years ago. “What to Expect When You’re Expecting”? That’s completely misleading. Moms-to-be should read something like, “You Don’t Even Know What to Expect When You’re Expecting.”

We all set sail into unchartered waters when we become parents. We think we are clever, with our courses 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 us off course in a heartbeat. So we often end up standing on the shores of some strange land — nowhere near where we expected to be — much like Columbus landing in the Bahamas rather than Asia.

But here’s the thing: As much as I was so sure 22 years ago that my life would follow a certain trajectory, I’ve discovered that even though I’m far from where I thought I’d be, it’s better in the Bahamas.

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Oct
08
2014

The Beginning of the End

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Credit: Wikipedia Commons

Sometimes, the moments strike when you least expect them. Right when you’re sitting there, in the third row of the high school auditorium chatting with another mom while both your daughters, now seniors, sit onstage and wait to be inducted into some honor society that will look good on their college resumes.

You’re sitting and chatting about the girls – maybe about how they keep turning their heads to avoid having their pictures taken by you – when they suddenly stand and start filing towards the front to receive their certificates.

And all of a sudden, when you try to take a picture of your young neighbor, the same little girl who moved across the street a dozen years ago whom you described to people as Punky Brewster and who has become a staple in your house for the last decade, your vision blurs as the tears start to fill your eyes and you get that burning feeling at the back of your throat.

And you’re not even getting your period.

You don’t even try to take a picture when it’s your own daughter’s turn to walk to the front of the stage and receive her certificate. You just want to take it in, the beginning of the end. Over the next few months, there will be a lot of these ceremonies. Your daughter and her fellow hard-working students will be honored at various inductions into this society or that as they round the bases towards June.

They’re all heading down that same path that zillions of high school seniors have walked in the past and with, for many, the same inevitable end. They will graduate and a month or two later, will take their proverbial shows on the road to college.

And I know I’ve been down this road myself a time or two with my older children but for some reason, it’s really hurting a little bit more this time around. When the first one left and then his sister, it was like, “Well, there’s plenty more where that came from.” But now that well of children is starting to run a little dry.

Punky’s mom across the street happens to be in the same ever-shrinking boat. When Punky ships off to school in August, my pal will be left at home with her hubby and 15-year-old son to keep her company.

“Next year the only thing I will hear are farts,” she texted me the other day.

They do this, kids. They start out making you weak at the knees with the love you feel for them – their tiny little fingers and sweet smelling heads – and then push you to the brink of homicide after a few short years of  incessantly asking, “Why?” and “Why not?” By the time they are teenagers, you really start to wish that they would just go away. And then, just as suddenly as they entered your world — they start to make their exit.

And you’re like, “Wait. What?”

But of course they come back, bringing bags of laundry and a newfound disdain for midnight curfews, but it’s never the same. It all starts to seem a lot more temporary.

I look forward to the future, but I’ve really loved being a mom. And not that I’m not going to be the mom anymore, but it’s just changing. I mean, sometimes the kids call me “Amy” when they’re trying to make a point and some are old enough to get staples in their head and CAT scans without my consent.

And I think if I could have any super power, what I’d really like to be able to do is to go back in time. I’d like to go back and spend a late afternoon, between naps and making chicken nuggets, sitting on a park bench and watching my little ones go up and down the slide for hours and beg me to push them on the swing. And, unlike before – when I’d resist as long as I could and tell them they needed to learn how to swing themselves – I’d get up and go over and give them a great big push.

 

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Sep
16
2014

Insulting Things Said to Me Over Dinner

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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.

Aug
21
2014

Who’s a Scary Mommy?

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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.

Aug
14
2014

Forty-Eight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ha.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You betcha.

Happy birthday to me.

Happy birthday to me.

 

 

 

Aug
08
2014

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.

 

 

Jun
16
2014

What’s in the Fifth Grader’s Laundry Basket?

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photo-29I feel like I spend an inordinate amount of time doing my 11-year-old son’s laundry. Every time I turn around, the hamper in his room is full or he’s just returned from a weekend at his father’s with an overnight bag brimming with dirty socks.

Luckily, his is the only other pile of dirty clothes that’s my problem nowadays, so I don’t really do the laundry as much as I used to. Back in the day, when I was doing all four kids plus my then-husband’s wash, I put a load or two in every day. There was no way around that. But then I threw in the towel (LOL) and told the older three that they were on their own in the laundry department.

So now that it’s just me and the fifth grader, I only do laundry like twice, maybe three times a week, or whenever I run out of exercise bras.

But even though I’m only doing the wash every three days, for some reason, I’m washing what seems like a week’s worth of my little guy’s clothes. There’s no correlation between the number of days and amount of laundry. The load I folded this morning, consisting of about four day’s worth of clothes, contained the following items:

  • 11 t-shirts/athletic jerseys
  • 6 pairs athletic shorts
  • 4 pairs socks
  • 2 pairs regular shorts
  • 1 baseball uniform
  • 1 pair underwear
From left: xxxxxx

From left: 8 pairs of shorts, 11 t-shirts, one pair underwear.

If I didn’t already know better, I’d be wondering what was up with the underwear. Or lack thereof. But one of the upsides of having a passel of kids is having the advantage of history. I’ve found in parenting, it tends to repeat itself.

So when his older brother was the same age, he spent two weeks at sleep away camp and I was especially focused on making sure he had 14 pairs of underwear to see him through. I went to Target and bought a few packs of Fruit of the Loom, labeled them with his name, and packed them for camp.

When he returned home two weeks later, I opened the bag — preparing to be greeted by an onslaught of dirty underwear — and found instead one rumpled pair. The other 12 pairs were still neatly folded. It turns out, he changed his underwear exactly once the entire two weeks, which jibes with the one shower he reported taking during his stay as well.

“Mom,” he told me when I reacted in horror to his disregard of personal hygiene, “did you see how disgusting those showers were?”

That long car ride home was memorable less for all the Amish people in buggies we passed and more for the odor inside the car. Dirty boys of a certain age can be very ripe.

Luckily, it’s because of that older brother that I am confident that my little guy won’t always be so gross. At some point, I have seen that they grow out of it and become nice-smelling men who put on a clean new pair of underwear every day.

And I should be happy there’s just less for me to fold. Pretty soon, his dirty laundry will be his problem and I won’t have to see how many pairs of underwear he’s wearing each week.

The showering, however, will continue to be monitored because no one wants to sleep down the hall from someone who smells like a homeless person.

 

Mar
21
2014

How to Get a Tattoo

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Credit: Magnus Manske

Credit: Magnus Manske

I have a tattoo.

And if you have gotten any sense from this blog of the boring, pretty traditional kind of person that I am, then you understand that it is truly the weirdest thing about me.

I never even really wanted one.

The night I got it about a dozen years ago, I was just kind of along for the ride to watch my then-husband and sister-in-law get inked and then go out to dinner. I was in it for the food and drinks, basically.

My sister-in-law had gotten a bee in her bonnet about getting a tattoo – doing all sorts of research on, like, the cleanest place to get one locally and the best artist to do it – and it just enabled my husband’s long-held desire for skin art. So her husband and I accompanied them to their destiny with a needle.

But when we got to the tattoo parlor and were faced with the pages of samples of potential body stamps – cartoon characters, Chinese symbols, flowers – my husband started to think it would be a good idea if I got one, too. A REALLY good idea, he said.

I have never been very good at saying “No.” When handed a cigarette as a youngster I gladly puffed away, and when my BFF in high school suggested we take her dad’s BMW out for a spin, even though we were still a year shy of having drivers licenses, I got in and fastened my seatbelt. I made an excellent accomplice.

So, maybe lifelong issues have stemmed from poor decision making.

Anyway, the husband started some slight pressuring and before I knew it, I was hunched over in a chair with some guy sitting behind me and dragging a needle through my lower back.

I wasn’t even drunk.

And let me tell you, I have given birth to two children with absolutely no medication. Zilch. Zippo. Nothing.

And while the process of getting a baby out of you really hurts, I found natural childbirth fairly manageable. You just need to keep your wits about you.

You should have seen me then, carrying on in the tattoo parlor, sweating and feeling weak with my wits scattered all over the linoleum floor. I was in so much pain that someone had to run next door to the Cumberland Farms to buy some orange juice to keep me from fainting.

Later, one of the other tattoo artists came in to the little curtained-off area to survey the two-inch butterfly sitting on my lower right hip and said, “That’s what all the fuss was about?”

This was a man thoroughly covered in ink, with artwork creeping out of his shirt and all the way up his neck.

The four of us ended up getting tattoos in various shapes and sizes on different parts of our bodies, and then headed off to dinner at a local seafood place. We sat outside on a deck overlooking the river in the soft summer air, pulling steamers from their shells and marveling over what we had just done, feeling just a little bit giddy about our bandaged tats.

As a stay-at-home mom with three kids, it felt so edgy and naughty to say I had a tattoo. This was back before it became de rigeur for all professional athletes and everyone under 30 to be inked up and probably a cultural turning point for tattoos in general when mothers of three from New Jersey were getting body art. If you charted the history of tattoos on a timeline, that summer probably marked the moment when having a tattoo went from being cool to so last year — like Facebook and Uggs.

For the most part, I’ve never really regretted getting it. It’s fun to pull out as a party trick after a few drinks and I liked that my husband thought it was sexy. Now that he’s not around, I still don’t hate it. I’ve never thought of having it removed and since it’s on my back and out of sight, I often forget the bluish butterfly is even there.

But none of this is to say that I would ever support any of my children marring their bodies permanently with ink. One of the upsides of having a tattoo is that I always assumed it would act as a deterrent to our children from getting inked. I mean, who would want to do anything that dorky?

So I thought it was funny when I heard that President Obama was using the same rationale with his daughters. He has said that if Sasha or Malia got a tattoo, he and Michelle would get inked as well.

“Michelle and I will be right there and we’ll post it so that everybody will be able to see it and we’ll say we all got matching tattoos,” he told Ellen DeGeneres this week.

But I have one daughter who keeps talking about getting a tattoo. It would be meaningful though, she tells me. Not some stupid butterfly.

I’ve already come to terms with the increasing number of holes running along the perimeter of her ears. Every time I see her, it seems like there’s another one (thank god no freaky gages, though). But I cannot stand the thought of her ruining a perfectly good ankle or shoulder – covered in all that beautiful skin I spent years patting dry after a bath and slathering sunscreen on for a day at the beach – by some stranger with an electric needle. It really bothers me.

And even though I’ve never had an urge to get another tattoo, when my daughter brings up wanting to get one, I pretend to get all excited about us doing it together. I suggest we get the same beef-and-broccoli sign on the inside of our wrists or whatever.

She just stares and gives me the same withering look she reserves for when I suggest she gets a job at school or takes her car in to get the oil changed.

It’s quite scary, actually.

Before she turned 18, my daughter needed my permission to get a tattoo but now that she’s 20, she can walk in and get the side of her face tattooed Mike Tyson-style if she wanted.

It’s hard as a parent to sit back and watch your kids mess with the things you worked so hard to nurture and protect when they were young — like brain cells, lungs and flesh.

I’d like to ask my mom what she thought about four of her eight children having something permanently inked on their bodies, but I don’t think any of us have had the nerve to tell her yet about our tattoos.

Do you have a tattoo? Do you regret it and have you told your mother?