stay-at-home-computer-mom

My kids hate my job.

Check that: my kids are dubious that being the editor of an online news source even qualifies as a real job when it’s happening from a desk in my bedroom.

To them, it makes no difference whether I’m writing about an arrest or if I’m posting “LOL!” on Facebook. As far as they’re concerned, my focus is on my laptop and not on them.

And it’s been a struggle this first year of working at home, trying to set boundaries and not letting my work bleed into time I should be spending with my family.

So one of my New Year’s resolutions, next to getting more organized about my finances and cutting down on my weekly wine intake, is to be more present with the kids when we are together – not listening distractedly as I check my e-mail or being glued to what’s happening on Twitter. To really be focused on what they’re saying.

I even saw a quote attributed to Buddha posted on Facebook (naturally) that I was inspired to share with the rest of the family on a chalkboard in the kitchen. I got out my fancy chalkboard markers and while a few of them watched in anticipation, I wrote: “I am awake.”

And the collective response from my people was: “lame.”

But in the week or so since I’ve written that, we’ve had a number of opportunities to talk about what it means to be “awake” to life.

For instance, the 9-year old insists on losing his new NorthFace jacket twice a week. By last week, he had misplaced the fleece during the big cold snap we had along with his new basketball sneakers, which coincided with the start of the season. After making him scour all the basements in the neighborhood and under all the furniture in our house, his sister found the sneakers in a metal bin in his room that is supposed to hold Nerf guns and other weaponry, not footwear.

Then this morning, the same finder of lost sneakers was running late, trying to slurp the last spoonfuls of soup for breakfast, and ran out of the house to high school wearing fuzzy socks and slippers. She called crying, mortified by her fashion blunder and even madder at herself for having been so discombobulated. This comes on the heels of rushing out of the car last night to play practice and dropping the iPhone – all of two-weeks old – that was on her lap onto the pavement and shattering the screen.

And I am just as guilty of not being present. It makes the kids crazy when I can’t remember something they just told me and I have been known to drive off and forget to take a child or two with me.

We all have complicated lives – with kids and work and dinners and dogs that randomly poop on your rug – and sometimes it’s hard to keep it all in check.

But I am determined to slow it all down, to appreciate this stage of my journey into the wilds of parenting.

So I’ve made a standing date with my high school girls each day after school. I close up my laptop and head down to the kitchen to greet them when they walk in and try to lure them into talking about their day.

I positioned myself down in the kitchen after school last week and they burst through the front door, looked at me and started up the stairs.

“Wait,” I called after them, “don’t you want a cup of tea?”

“Nah,” said the older one.

“We hate tea,” said the younger.

“But we could just talk,” I reasoned.

They slunk into the kitchen and sat down at the table begrudgingly answering my innocuous questions.  I turned my back to grab a spoon and they fled as if from an interrogation, and I thought, “These are the same people who feel like I don’t pay them enough attention?”

When I actually look at them they act as if I’m Medusa and they’re about to be turned to stone.

So let them hate my job and complain I’m always online. Even when I didn’t work I had my nose buried in e-mail and Amazon.

They can complain I don’t pay attention to them, but maybe someday they’ll see what the job gave them, like college educations, and that I found something that allowed me to provide that and still be a presence in our home and have tea in the afternoon.

The kids were sitting around the kitchen table recently and the three older ones were poking fun at my job and what it was exactly that I did and the youngest chimed in, “ She’s like a stay-at-home-computer mom.”

I’ve been called worse.

This essay was originally posted on Patch.com on January 11, 2012

wing mama

 

For most of their lives, my children had the luxury of having me as their Wing-mama.

If they forgot their gym clothes, homework, instrument or after school snack, I generally would be available to run the errant item over to the school.

If they were feeling slightly under the weather during the school day, and by that I mean either sick or perhaps just sad about one thing or another, I would fetch them and bring them home.

And after school let out, I would pile them in the car—with their granola bars, juice boxes and equipment—and shuttle them around to soccer, CCD, dance or swimming, cheer from the sidelines, and then cart them all back home.

In my children’s minds, things would just magically happen back here at the ranch; there would be chips and cookies in the pantry, their clothes were cleaned and folded and dinner was on the table by 6 p.m. most days.

It was a nice little fantasy I created for them and although I was involved in plenty of volunteer activities and did some freelance work, I made sure it didn’t affect their lives. All the work happened behind the scenes while they were off at school.

But then I went back to work full-time.

Right now, our pantry has a shelf littered with broken bits of potato chips and pretzels and an old can of nuts. We ran out of school drinks earlier in the week and don’t even think about looking for a fresh piece of fruit (there are some petrified lemons in the fridge drawer).

The older three kids are now in charge of their own laundry and judging from the mound of clothes in one of my daughters’ rooms, she must have run out of clean underwear some time last Tuesday.

While my oldest child is mostly annoyed by the food situation (“Mom! Work will not fall apart if you go food shopping!”), it’s my youngest guy, who’s 8, that has really been feeling my absence lately.

Every morning he whines about getting out of bed and going to school. He then mopes around getting himself together before the bus arrives and he begrudgingly boards it for another day in the trenches. Unlike his siblings, he goes to the after-care program at the school each day, and gets picked up usually around 5 p.m.

I made the mistake a few weeks ago of promising him that we would have a special day together, and then I never followed through. The day came and went and I just couldn’t find a hole in my schedule to accommodate him. But last week, I knew I had to find time for him, and so one morning, I told him to grab my calendar and meet me in the kitchen.

We looked together and I pointed to a square not too far in the distant future.

“Write your name right there,” I told him, and he did so in big, block letters.

“Do you see that?” I asked him. “That is officially ‘Nick Day,’ and I’m not going to plan one more thing for that day. It’s just going to be me and you.”

He grinned from ear to ear and had a little bounce in his step as he grabbed himself a box of Honey Nut Cheerios for breakfast.

We also put a big “NICK” on my work planner and office calendar, to not only illustrate to him how important the day was but also to prevent me from scheduling anything else.

We told his siblings all about this new holiday, and they went along with it–acting like it was really special–until my daughter found out that Nick and I were thinking about going into the city to see the new Harry Potter exhibit that just opened.

“Whoa,” she said, “I thought he was just, like, staying home. I didn’t know he was going to do something special alone with you.”

It now seems that in the very near future, I will be organizing a “Maddie Day.” I can’t imagine the older two teenagers have any interest in being seen anywhere alone with me, but am willing to declare days in their honor as well.

It’s still a struggle, striking that balance between work and family, but I’m willing to keep trying because I love both parts of my life. I don’t think it’s a terrible thing for the kids to have to do some things for themselves and also like that they see their mom as something other than their personal assistant.

And in just a few months, I can sense them slowly starting to come around.

Nick plays a lot with his friend, Jack, across the street, and his mom sent me this e-mail of a conversation she overheard between the two boys recently:

Nick: Have you even seen my mom’s Web site?

Jack: I’ve seen it with my mom.

Nick: Isn’t my mom a good writer?

Jack: Yeah, I think.

I take heart that he has developed this sense of pride in what his mom does, even in the face of jelly sandwiches and stale chips. And I am pretty sure that neither he nor his siblings ever treated clean clothes or taco dinners with the same amount of respect.

It’s his day, and he’ll have 70 mph blown in his face if he wants to.

The essay was originally posted on Patch on April 13, 2011.

the family bed

Since my ex moved out a couple of years ago, I’ve had a constantly rotating schedule of bed partners. Some of them steal all of the covers and kick me with their long legs, while others are so short that their presence barely registers in my king-size bed.

What’s that, you ask? Am I some type of little person-loving, Chelsea Handler type? Have I joined the ranks of the Moms Gone Wild divorced gals?

Sadly, or perhaps happily, it is usually one of my four kids who have staked his or her claim on the coveted spot beside me each night.  Often, I come home late from an endless municipal meeting to find my room darkened and a big lump where reading material and remote controls usually sit. My immediate reaction is irritation: I’ve got stuff to do. But then I look at that sweet, sleeping face and am glad it’s so close, even though it’s keeping me from Facebook.

Don’t get me wrong, the kids don’t come to my room just for the great company I provide. I happen to have an amazingly comfortable bed. It’s like a big marshmallow, with the softest Costco sheets and a heated mattress pad for when the temperatures dip outside. There’s a ceiling fan to keep things fresh and a new flat screen TV to replace the ancient TV/VCR combo, with a Care Bears movie stuck inside, that my ex took with him when he left.

While I often just stumble upon the kids in my room, a lot of times my roommate du jour and I enjoy activities other than just sleeping side-by-side, like reading or watching one of the many fine On Demand movies available, like the seminal Justin Bieber classic, Never Say Never.

A few months ago, my 8-year-old-son asked, “Hey, Mom. You want to get into bed and watch Cougartown?”  Aside from the insane inappropriateness of him even knowing what that show is (youngest of four), how could I not have fallen for a line like that?

There was a time, in the early stages of my separation, that I worried that I was creating a weird mother-child dynamic and potentially unhealthy sleeping habits. But now, I just enjoy the company for the most part and the opportunity to spend that time together. The older two kids are already over the novelty of my boudoir and it’s only a matter of time before the younger two follow suit.

When they were younger, the kids very rarely slept in my bed. I’d occasionally scoop a crying infant out of its crib and let it nurse alongside me as I slept. And one time, my oldest daughter had one of those scary high fevers in the middle of the night that required monitoring. After cooling her down in the tub and filling her with Motrin, I brought her burning hot body into my bed where she created a small oven in the pocket between her father and me while we waited for the fever to break.

But emergencies and personal needs aside, three people sleeping in one bed is annoying. The little kid in the middle, who starts the night all cute and cuddly, becomes a swirling dervish of arms and legs once the lights go out. I need my sleep.

And I never understood the parents that went and slept in their kids’ beds. Haven’t we done our time in stiff, twin beds when we were children? Don’t we do enough for our kids during waking hours—crust removal, hair washing, butt wiping—to absolve us from working the night shift? Enough already.

Last week, I returned home at bedtime from a few days away with the oldest at college orientation while the other three kids stayed home, and we all cuddled on my bed shortly after I walked through the door. Because in our house there seems to be a constant need to claim things—calling “fives” on the TV remote or the last cupcake—my 8 year old “called” sleeping in my bed while the others had briefly left the room. Naturally, the 14-year-old returned and tried to do the same. They argued for a bit, and I suggested everyone slept in their own beds since they couldn’t agree and I didn’t have the energy for mediation.

They muttered for a little bit, and then my older daughter said, “Nick, you want to sleep in my room?”

And before I knew it, they jumped off my bed and went down the hall to her room. I walked by a little later to find the light already off and soft laughing coming from behind the closed-door.

For a moment, I was sorry to not be a part of the fun. But then I went back to my quiet room and snuggled in my big marshmallow and turned on Cougartown.

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(don’t) call me maybe

I became a parent in the prehistoric age when it seemed that only people who received a paycheck for their jobs had that nifty little item called a cell phone (in other words, not stay-at-home-moms like me at the time).

I did have the very high-tech call waiting feature on my home phone and eventually, caller ID, but if I was out at the library or the grocery store, or even the backyard pushing someone on the swing, you weren’t going to get in touch with me.

Before I finally got a phone, probably around 2000, there were a few instances that I’d return home to find messages from the school nurse or my husband on the answering machine trying to hunt me down to fetch a sick child or attend to some other mini-emergency. But it never made me panic.

And even now, with all the texts and e-mails and iPhone and Facebook, I don’t feel compelled to check in every time I get back from a trip to the bathroom (although I do like to keep an eye on my Patch and fix its hair fairly often).

So when my daughter went away to Italy over spring break with her high school during her junior year and decided to leave her cell phone at home, I was surprised by the anxiety I felt by not being able to check in with her while she was so far away from home.

I assumed, though, that she would either use one of the chaperones’ phones or get herself to a pay phone at some point over the course of the nine-day trip to let me know she was okay. By Friday, the day before her return, it became very clear that she wasn’t of the same mindset: I never heard from her.

On the one hand, I was proud of her independence and knew that no news truly was good news; she was probably having the time of her life seeing the Vatican and eating gelato and had nothing to complain about.

But there was another part of me that was sorry she didn’t need me to share all the details of her adventure: she had her friends for that.

When I told my neighbor Susan that I hadn’t heard from my daughter in over a week, she seemed fairly incredulous.

But Susan, who’s about six years younger than me and whose oldest child was seven at the time, seems to be part of a younger generation of parents that are used to being connected all the time. She recently was reprimanded by a fellow yogi for keeping her phone next to her mat during class.

I don’t have a problem with unplugging; in fact, I went away for a few days by myself and easily detached from the day-to-day communicating associated with work and home. (I bragged about that to my boss who said, “Great, that’s called a vacation.”)

But not knowing where my daughter was and what she was doing was difficult and a precursor to what life will look like ten years from now when all the kids are out of the house, and while it’s freeing, it also makes me nostalgic for the days when we even traveled en masse to the bathroom.

But when I went to the high school to pick up my European traveler from the trip, I easily spotted her towering over her peers and when she saw me, she broke out into a big smile and said, “There’s my mommy!” She made her way over to where I was standing and folded me in a big hug and I knew that not calling me was nothing personal. She was just growing up.

This essay was originally posted on Patch on April 7, 2011.

Anchors Away

Twenty 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 from Hoboken, 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 being whisked off to the neonatal unit for him and the operating room for me.

I ended up on the sad-mommy floor, the section of the maternity ward that shielded moms whose pregnancies went 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 bed.

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, 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 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 (which probably didn’t compare to the mind altering pain of the cracked nipples his siblings induced while feeding in the future, but I digress).

So, here’s what I learned 20 years, three more kids and one less husband later, I was reading the wrong book 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 are in many ways setting sail in 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 their 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 20 years ago that my life would follow a certain trajectory, I’ve discovered that it’s better in the Bahamas.