Perfect Dinner to Cure the End-of-Summer Blues

Credit: marthastewart.com

Credit: marthastewart.com  http://www.marthastewart.com/978784/one-pan-pasta

I don’t think I’m alone in saying that I’m over this summer. It’s like, enough already. If summer was a person, I’d tell her that she’s been very nice and all and provided us – at least here along the coast of New Jersey – with some pretty gorgeous weather but it’s time to say adieu. It’s been a lovely few months to sit in the sand and swim in the ocean or lounge around reading. But now, it is time for Mrs. Summer to leave. She’s overstayed her welcome.

In fact, that is truly the case. I learned while watching my favorite TV showCBS Sunday Morning – this week that when Memorial Day (the final Monday in May) occurs at its earliest (this past Mat 25) Labor Day occurs at its latest (Sept. 7 this year). The official summer season quite literally could not be one day longer.

One of the biggest problems for me with summer is that I flounder in unstructured settings. Of course, for someone who’s been home raising her children for the last 20-something years while attempting a freelance writing career, this is a challenging predicament. I struggle with time management. I also probably had too many children to begin with. Because when I’m also responsible for managing other people’s time on top of my own, I’m pretty fucked. That’s why I always signed my kids up for swim team and tennis lessons when they were young and insisted on summer jobs as they got older. Schedules are totally my friend.

Nowadays, the only person’s schedule I really need to manage is my 12yo son’s. He went to sleepaway camp for a week and mostly ran around the neighborhood and swam in the ocean with our neighbors for much of the summer.

Highly unstructured.

But now the neighbors have gone back to Hong Kong and my son spends his days trying to organize pickup games of soccer or watching YouTube videos on his iPhone and has yet to finish his mandatory summer reading to start seventh grade.

In other words, he needs to go to school before I murder him.

But I always feel a tad anxious at the end of every August. A bit of malaise inevitably sets in as I count the hours before the first day of school. Very little inspires me in that long slog towards Labor Day.

Which is why I kind of surprised myself the other day in my ho-hum state by whipping up this – really and truly – delicious pasta dinner. In my all-or-nothing approach to life, generally I’m not trying new things in late summer. I’m grilling hot dogs and heating chicken nuggets for my people and waiting for the first day of school to really wow them with anything resembling a proper meal.

And as for the “pasta” part, okay, right, I know. I’m really not supposed to be eating pasta. Apparently, according to someone who feels he can say these things to me, it makes me “blow up.” Fine. Yes. Sure. Whatever. As far as I’m concerned, at the end of the summer, all bets are off. The countless margaritas and pita chips I’ve consumed on the beach this summer have not helped matters.

But this dinner was so easy – you kind of just put everything into a straight-sided sauté pan and boil away – and produced such a creamy bowl of wonderful comfort on an endless end-of-summer night, it was worth wearing elastic pants the following day (truth be told, I’m often running around in workout clothes most days anyway).

I improvised slightly (shocking, for those who know me and my dedication to rule following) and browned the chicken sausage that we love from Sickles (we’re also hot for Whole Foods’ spicy variety) in the pan before adding the rest of the ingredients. I also used bow tie pasta instead of spaghetti and found it took a lot longer than nine minutes to boil the whole thing down. I dug up an article that offered other ways to improvise upon the original version and pinned both of them to my “Things I Like to Make” Pinterest board to keep in on hand.

For those of you not on Pinterest, I have to say that I’ve come to rely upon it as my own personal recipe box and refer often to that board where I’ve pinned the meals we tend to eat again and again. It’s more convenient than the jumble of recipes ripped from magazines and newspapers (remember newspapers?) and print outs from the Internet I stuffed in a binder for years. It’s worth exploring.

Now you’ll have to excuse me, I need to figure out what I’m doing today before my son wakes up and I take his iPhone away.

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Doors Open. Doors Close.

photo-1419658776233-a6a982d3ebaeFile this one under: “Sometimes when one door closes, another one opens.

Or: “Doors open and close all the time.”

It’s been strange here, this first full week of no other ladies living in my house. There’s been no one for me to tell that I’m fat (that terrible female pastime in which I often partake which drives my daughters batty). I had no one to help me put on eyeshadow when I went out last weekend; and no one here is interested in sitting around at night after dinner on the couch and watching a few episodes of “New Girl.”

The boys and I did, however, share an interesting moment a few nights ago that was quite nice. An evening that showed me that even though the girls have temporarily moved on, all is not lost. All is different, for sure, but not lost.

The boys — 22 and 12 — cleaned up after we finished the completely uninspired, yet totally devoured, meal of pasta (don’t tell them it was the Trader Joe’s quinoa-variety) with a jar of vodka sauce, bagged salad with croutons and Jersey tomatoes and a loaf of semolina bread I picked up at the Italian market in town that they slathered with the Kerrygold butter I have about 7 pounds of from Costco in my frig. And then, one by one, the three of us made our way outside and sat on one of the chairs scattered around my pool and began to read.

If you had spent every night for a good dozen years of your life squashed in between little bodies on a twin bed reading about wild things and engines that could and little boys falling down wells, this is pretty much one of the pinnacles of your parenting career. It’s that moment you realize that at least one of your parenting initiatives totally stuck.

And not to get all braggy (but I totally am), my older guy was reading The Grapes of Wrath after quickly ploughing through East of Eden earlier this summer.

So we all sat in silence and read as the sky above us began to darken. I’m pretty sure my little guy farted at one point but nowadays, that’s less and less a rarity. Farts tend to happen a lot with boys and they are always met with laughter and a look on the farter’s face akin to Will Ferrell’s after his “Did you hear that?” burp in “Elf.”

As the mosquitos began their nightly feast and the air turned cool, we slowly made our way back into the house, one by one, and retired to our respective rooms.

We’d probably only been outside reading together for about an hour – tops – but I savored those 60 minutes. I slowed the pace I’d set tearing through the book I’d been reading to relish the moment. I gave myself an internal pinch and resisted the urge to put down my book and stare at them while they read. They hate when I do that, the children. The staring makes them nervous.

But I wanted to burn the image deep into my memory reserve. I wanted to have it on hand so I can pull it up and remember it with great clarity the next time I am certain that I have failed as a parent. The inevitable moment when I’m sure I’ve let one of them down. I’ll take a deep breath and pull the memory up and turn it every which way in the light and remember the ease and stillness and perfection of sitting outside on a cool summer night and reading alongside my sons.

And then I’ll slowly exhale.

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Yes, Please (Part 2)

il_570xN.228470474-1To be filed under “Everyone’s a Comedian.”

Also: “Just say ‘Yes.’”

My 12yo son and I went to Trader Joe’s yesterday to stock up on English muffins and frozen strawberries. A weekly event.

As we scurried through the hot parking lot toward the icy interior of the store, a woman I had noticed as I pulled into my spot – who seemed as if she was looking for someone – stopped me and asked if I wanted to hear a joke.

Let me just say right here that I am suspicious of overtly friendly people. When I flew to the Midwest for the first time for my first job out of college, it took me a while to realize that the folks behind the ticket counter at the airport in Minneapolis didn’t actually know my fellow passengers. I thought by the way they asked, “How are you doing?” that they’d recently spent time together. No, they were actually just being friendly. They were being nice to strangers.

It was confusing to someone who’d lived her whole life in New Jersey.

And recently, on a trip to the middle of Pennsylvania, the kids and I stopped to eat lunch at a place called Moe’s – a Chipotle-kind of place – where each time a person walks through the door all the workers behind the counter stop to shout enthusiastically, “Welcome to Moe’s!”

I would never eat there again.

The woman was a good 20 years my senior – with her grey hair pulled back and blue eyes bright behind her eyeglasses – and didn’t come off as nuts. She didn’t look like she was going to spit at me or push me down, right there in the Trader Joe’s parking lot (but sidebar: why do weird things always happen to me at Trader Joe’s?). So, against my better judgment, I said, “Of course.”

She looked over at my son, who had continued walking towards the store and stopped to eye her warily, and motioned him over telling him, “You’ll like this, too.”

And then she dove right in.

A mushroom goes to see his psychiatrist and lies down on the couch and tells him he’s been feeling down in the dumps.

‘I don’t know,’ the mushroom says, ‘I just haven’t been feeling very happy lately.’

The doctor looks the mushroom up and down and asks, ‘What’s the problem? You seem like a fun guy.’

The woman stopped and waited until I started to laugh and a smile spread across her face as she realized I got it. Fungi. My son shook his head smiling, too.

“Isn’t that great?” she asked, and then she turned and began walking through the parking lot and – presumably – towards her car.

Or maybe she needed to get ready for her next show.

At any rate, the moral of this story is that if anyone ever stops you in a parking lot and asks if you want to hear a joke, your only response – in the immortal words of Amy Poehler – should be: Yes, please.

It will make your day.

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Welcome to Dudeville

The denizens of Dudeville.

The denizens of Dudeville.

Aside from my TV viewing habits – which skew towards zombies and bald methamphetamine dealers – I am a girly-girl.

I like manicures and gossip and shopping. I’m afraid of spiders. I am not adverse to long conversations about the benefits of Keratin treatments and waxing and discovering the latest Ballard Designs catalog in the mail makes my pulse race a teensy bit.

And even though I was married to a guy who played football in college and favored clicking on sporting events whenever he had the remote, and have sat in the bleachers cheering on my four children in a wide variety of games over the years – basketball, soccer, lacrosse – I can’t get a handle on any of the rules. I get the fundamentals – like, you’ve got to get past the guys on the other team and put the ball in the net – but that’s about it. I don’t understand “off sides,” “box out” or what it means to “foul” somebody. And because I’ve figured out how to master complex endeavors like caring for my swimming pool and driving into Manhattan I’m betting this deficiency stems less from stupidity and more from a general lack of interest.

All of this is not to say that one needs a penis to understand and enjoy sports. Plenty of women do. My college girlfriends are enthusiastic fans and even one of my daughters took a liking to football after spending last winter surrounded by big-screen TVs in the bar of the restaurant where she hostessed. She figured out “downs” and “holding” in between seating parties for brunch on Sundays.

The point of all this is that I tend to adhere to gender stereotypes even though I’ve tried to be all Free to Be You and Me with my kids. “Boys, it’s really alright to cry,” and all that.

Wasn’t I lucky, then, to be blessed with not one but two daughters? We all like to shop together and get manicures together and happily eat kale. When my older two kids were away at school and it was just my high school daughter and middle school son left at home, our weekly menus were definitely directed by her self-imposed dietary restrictions. No red meat or pork. No dairy. And absolutely-positively no cheese. Like, don’t even try to sneak one of those ingredients in or it will be met with tears.

Our weekly meals consisted of a lot of ground poultry and Gwyneth Paltrow recipes like Thai Chicken Burgers and sweet potato hash. We even ate kimchi.

But that picky girl flew the roost Saturday for her freshman year at college and now the onus of coming up with meals that adhere to her strict guidelines lays on her university’s food services staff. I’ve hung up that apron for a bit.

Because now I am living in Dudeville.

Now I am the only girl living in a house of boys. My oldest son – who graduated from college in the spring – is living at home with his little brother and even though we’re only about 36 hours into this new arrangement, I can already feel the shift. I can sense the very manly vibe going down around here.

When their sisters lived at home full time, there was definitely a more feminine feel in the house. Belching in my presence was discouraged and if you HAD to pass gas you needed to go outside and cut the tail before you reentered. I didn’t want anyone dragging the fart back into the house with him or her and stinking the joint up.

But now, all bets are off.

I’ve decided to embrace this new manly dynamic and surprised the boys yesterday morning with blueberry pancakes and bacon for breakfast. Later that afternoon we reclined in a darkened movie theater and ate Reese’s Pieces and drank root beer while watching “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” and went home to eat paninis and potato chips. My older son explained the intricacies of his pending fantasy football league draft and when he disappeared downstairs to try to snag a worthy running back for his team, his little brother and I watched the new zombie TV show “Fear the Walking Dead” (which I loved). And when he expelled a long string of farts during an especially suspenseful part of the show, I didn’t even tell my son to go outside and cut the tail. I actually laughed when the explosion occurred.

It’s calmer again with just two children at home. It gets hectic when all four are here and vying for my attention. It’s nice to be able to focus on just two and I sense the boys quickly felt the shift as well. They walked arm-in-arm through the parking lot on the way into the movie theater and my oldest guy – who’s not always willing to engage in any lengthy conversation with me – happily discussed fantasy football and the latest John Oliver show while I made our paninis.

As we ate our dinner, we put together a menu of dinners for the upcoming week. Over the next few nights we will be enjoying pork tenderloin, beef stir-fry and pasta with meat sauce.

“We don’t even have to use ground turkey,” I observed while eating a chip.

“Yeah!” said my little guy. “We get to eat REAL meat.”

I fear all this manly fare may take a toll on my figure but am willing to take my chances. It’s the price I have to pay to live happily in Dudeville.

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Everything’s Quiet in My Neighborhood

IMG_2924There was a time when my neighborhood – a cul de sac with about a dozen houses in suburban New Jersey– teemed with life. When we moved here a dozen years ago, we brought with us our three school-aged children and a newborn to add to the mix of kids already living here. As it turned out, there was someone for everyone.

Our house is on the perimeter of a circle that surrounds an island of three houses, and between us we must have had at least 20 kids under the age of 14 when we got here. The people in the house across the street and kind of diagonal from me had three high schoolers when we moved in and I remember thinking then how old those kids seemed. They were the ones you only saw leaving the house to get into a car. They weren’t part of the crew swarming the neighborhood on a warm summer night playing manhunt or riding scooters around the circle to pass the time on a crisp October afternoon.

My oldest son’s best friend lived a few houses away and he also had the three boys living in the cape next door to keep him company. That family also had a guinea pig, named Squeaky, that kept my younger daughter occupied snuggling on their couch for many afternoons.

My girls had a bunch of playmates in their age range as well, and there was one who sported pigtails and missing teeth and always wore some wacky Hanna Andersson-type outfit of mismatched dresses and leggings. She was a little sassy, too, so I started telling people I lived across the street from Punky Brewster. Her parents both worked out of the house and she and her little brother had a string of sitters and a Lithuanian au pair for a few years whose name I could never get a handle on so I simply began referring to her as “Sha-nay-nay. “

As my son got older, our neighborhood became the place for middle school boys to come and ride their skateboards. They’d set up plastic ramps and other pieces of junk in the street on which to grind their boards or catch some air, but mostly they stood around and popped their boards up into their waiting hands and posed in their skinny jeans and black t-shirts.

My daughters spent a lot of time devising different means of getting themselves around the circle and my older girl in particular came up with especially dangerous methods. She’d put on a pair of roller blades and direct her sister to get on a bike and drag her by a jump rope around the block. Once, and only once, she decided to tie the rope to our golden retriever who – thrilled at being released from the house and thrown into the mix of children – promptly charged down the street with her in tow. He quickly went off course, chasing a squirrel up a neighbor’s front lawn, and sent my daughter crashing into the curb and sprawled – scraped and weeping – on the road. A very kind neighbor found her splayed in front of his house and brought her home.

As the years went by, the tenor of the neighborhood changed. The teenagers across the street left for college and my older children became the high school kids on the block. The boys next door moved away but were replaced by a new set of three boys perfectly matched to my youngest son’s age. That crew took over the neighborhood and, depending on the season, could usually be found playing basketball in one of our driveways or soccer and lacrosse on a front lawn. They even assumed the skateboarding mantle and started dragging crap into the street to jump over for hours on end.

As a mother not remotely interested in importing or exporting children for play dates, it was the perfect set up. I’d look outside and see a gaggle of kids playing soccer on a neighboring yard and tell my kid to go outside and join them.

“Go see what the boys are doing,” I’d tell my little guy if I noticed him watching too many episodes of Sponge Bob, and he’d disappear for hours to play with the kids next door. In fact, he and his older sister spent so much time with other families in the neighborhood they started referring to themselves as members of those families.

“Oh, my other mom, you mean?” they’d say all sassy to me, referring to the neighbors’ moms.

At one point my little guy tacked the last names of the two families that lived next door and across the street from us onto his own last name and proclaimed himself “practically” a member of those families since he spent so much time with them.

And for a while that was really true. When I was going through my divorce and returning to work full time, those families became our safety net. They scooped my youngest children up and included them in their fun. They fed them. They drove them to lacrosse practice. They took them away to their ski houses and week-long trips to the beach. It gave me comfort knowing my kids were happy and cared for as I juggled work and wily teenagers and single momhood.

I made some great friends, too.

The first set of boys next door came with a mom who could make a gin martini – on the rocks in a lovely cut crystal glass – like no other. I’d look forward to getting the call on my house phone to come over for cocktail hour, and happily slip away from homework and Hamburger Helper to sit in her den and sip her icy concoction and kvetch for a spell. Her oldest was a few years older than mine and I liked getting her perspective on things. Her been-there-done-that attitude was a nice contrast to my still gooey-eyed approach to parenting. She kept it real.

The family that replaced them also came with a mommy who knew how to make a cocktail. This one’s specialty was tequila and she’d float jalapeno peppers or vanilla beans in mason jars in her freezer, which she then used to create delicious margaritas in glasses rimmed with a sweet and spicy rub. We became friendly after hours of sitting together on the beach and talking about kids and family and life while our boys bobbed in the ocean on boogie boards. Her oldest is the same age as my youngest, and I think her not-yet-jaded take on parenting helped remind this old mom how quickly it all goes by.

Punky’s mom across the street eventually decided the work/life balance was tipping heavily in the wrong direction and left her big job to stay home with her kids. I soon found a friend who also enjoyed reading the newspaper and talking about books and movies and struggled with the monotony of staying home to raise children. We’d have long conversations over many bottles of wine trying to make sense of the paths we’d chosen. Struggling with having given up the balance of power in our homes and freedom in exchange for being there every day for our children when they returned home from school. We’d wonder time and again whether it was all worth it.

In the meantime, we went to spin classes together and took our girls away for weekends of hayrides and pumpkin picking and organized camping trips with our troop as Girls Scout leaders.

But now the cycle is almost complete. The three big kids across the street have all graduated from college and long since moved away. I heard that one is even getting married this year. A few of the other families whose kids grew up with mine also left the neighborhood once their children graduated from high school and in time, we’ll move away too.

I’ve got one college grad who’s living back under my roof and this week both of my daughters leave for college. And the boys next door, who provide a near-constant source of entertainment for my youngest child, left on Saturday for their second of potentially three years living in Hong Kong. They were home for eight weeks this summer and it’s already weird not to see them jumping on the trampoline in my backyard or running across the grass in full lacrosse gear. All those boys bring so much life to our corner of the neighborhood it seems eerily quiet now that they’ve gone.

This morning my youngest daughter and I went across the street at the crack of dawn to say good-bye to Punky, who was on her way to her freshman year at a school about three hours away. The girls had spent a lot of time in the last few days reliving some of their favorite memories of all their years as best pals. They drove south to spend the day in Sea Isle City, NJ where they’d gone with Punky’s extended family every summer for years. They crammed in all of their favorite foods and activities including a trip to the arcade where one year Punky used the tickets she’d hoarded all summer to purchase a baseball hat that read ‘SUPREME’ across its brim.

Yesterday, my daughter disappeared across the street with a Monopoly box tucked under her arm to recreate one of the epic battles they’d wage a few days each summer on the floor of one of our houses.

The only tradition they did not revisit was their annual meeting in the middle of the street on Christmas morning to open each other’s presents, otherwise known as “Christmas in the Street.”

It’s a very intimate relationship that develops when you become close friends with your neighbors. The proximity kind of thrusts you into each other’s lives. You get to know their habits. You overhear arguments. They’re the first people you turn to when you need a box of spaghetti for dinner or a glass of wine to help get you through that spaghetti dinner. They become your emergency contact for school and if you live near each other long enough, emergencies do occur.

But there’s an easiness, a familiarity that exists when you spend all that time together.

So when we walked across the street at 6 a.m. in our pajamas to say good-bye to Punky, it wasn’t really that weird to walk in on the family in their last-minute efforts to get her and all her crap out the door and into the car already packed to the gills with college essentials. We helped carry the last of her stuff outside and stood in the driveway to say good-bye. She looked at me and – just to be a brat – declared she’d miss me most of all and I got teary-eyed thinking how much I’d miss her sassiness. How much I’d miss seeing the two girls siting on the couch watching “Parks and Recreation” after school and I swear, at the time, it made me want to punch them both in the face.

“It’s too early in the morning to cry,” she told us. “I’ll Snapchat myself crying later.”

She and my daughter hugged and whispered things that only they could hear and finally, they all got in their car and drove away and we went home to cry a little more.

In all likelihood, we won’t be living here this time next year. And while it’s hard to leave, I know that the friendships that have developed through proximity will continue no matter where we land. And hopefully we’ll leave in our place a young family to breathe some life back into the neighborhood. Who will join some of the other little kids who’ve settled here over the last couple of years.

I hope they play endless rounds of soccer on the front yard and sped hours lying side-by-side on the trampoline looking up at the clouds in the sky. I hope they wait for each other to walk to school together in the morning and meet up to go trick-or-treating together through the streets of town each year. I hope they get to do all of the things that my children and so many children who’ve lived here before them have gotten to do. And when they grow up and leave for college and jobs and to start families of their own, I hope other young families come here and take their place.

And start the cycle all over again.

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Friday Faves (or ‘What’s That Smell?’)

Soy-Candle-Composite-Lit615If you’ve been out of the country or locked in a closet or somehow not tapped into the Worldwide Bloodstream (see video below), you might not be aware that I recently put my house on the market. It’s been a challenging process — clearing out all our clutter, sprucing the place up and keeping it clean all the time. I also picked an interesting time to undertake this endeavor with all four children home for the summer and about 13 pounds of sand that makes its way onto the mudroom floor every day, courtesy of my 12yo son’s bathing suit.

But by far the biggest challenge I’ve faced these last few weeks is keeping the place smelling fresh and not like a fraternity house. The last thing I want is a prospective buyer to walk through the front door and get a big whiff of freshly cooked porkroll or the dump someone just took in the powder room. So I’ve instilled some basic rules for the children, like NO COOKING and NO POOPING DOWNSTAIRS.

These edicts have been met with varying success.

The other preventative measure I took was loading up on products that might mask the stink of adolescent boy that sometimes hangs in the air here. The stink of teen spirit.

I am a firm believer that sometimes, more is more, and thus use the products liberally, often and simultaneously.

  • The number one thing I am totally obsessed with are these candles — in particular the beach sage flavor but I also love the apple slice variety upstairs in my bathroom — that I used to load up on at Target until I saw they started carrying them at our nearby Harmon. I really think you are going to thank me.
  • When my neighbors pulled up stakes and moved to Hong Kong last year, I made out like a bandit when — in an effort to get all of their stuff out of the house for renters to move in — they just started dropping bags of things off at my door. Trader Joe’s chips. Band Aids. Cotton balls. Good stuff. One of the items buried in one of the bags was this room freshener spray from Alex & Ani. I mean, who knew they sold that stuff there too but apparently they do. When I know someone is coming to check out the house, I start running from room to room squirting the stuff into the air.
  • When I went to Hong Kong last spring (seriously), we made our way to the Captain’s Bar for cocktails one Friday night and it was swanky, to say the least. In fact, as soon as we stepped into the hotel we were enveloped in this citrusy, floral scent that they apparently pump through the place through a diffuser and it smells divine. So when my girlfriend came home to New Jersey for the summer, she brought me a bottle of the spray, which I also run around squirting throughout the house when things are smelling a little stale. Now if someone would just make me a proper Old Fashioned, it would be like being back at the Captain’s Bar.
  • Speaking of bars and drinking in general, I’d like to suggest what you adopt as your go-to summer drink before it’s too late. It’s a Mexican Mule and you get yourself someone ginger beer (like the type they sell at Trader Joe’s) and mix in your favorite tequila and perhaps some seltzer/club soda to lighten it just a bit. I have to admit, I’ve enjoyed a few of these this summer. And speaking of tequila, life has gotten much easier for my Hong Kong pal who used to spike her tequila by letting it marinate in a mason jar with a couple of jalepeno peppers to spice up her famous margaritas. But we recently discovered at our favorite local bottle shop that some evil genius has invented already bottled spicy tequila and it is delish.
  • Finally, I had some time on my hands this week and revisited Broad City, which I binged on while sick this winter. I can’t even. And this clip in particular totally nails what it’s like living with Millenials who stop mid-conversation to stare at their phone and start to laugh. Annoying.

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Happy Birthday, Halle Berry!

Things that make turning 49 less awful. Like Halle Berry.

Things that make turning 49 less awful. Like Halle Berry.

I don’t know if it’s because I’m a Leo, or an extrovert or just a raging narcissist but I’ve always loved my birthday. I love being the center of attention.

I’ve totally come to terms with it.

And maybe it’s because I grew up with so many siblings and never had a proper birthday party as a kid, or that my birthday falls during the summer so I always missed out on any sort of school celebration, but I usually organize some type of gathering of friends to help celebrate the day. And it doesn’t have to be just one event. Some years, I start celebrating my birthday as soon as the calendar page flips to August and squeeze in any number of birthday-related events – lunches, drinks, dinner. I consider August my birthday month and need to have as many people as possible pay attention to me.

One of my friends recently dubbed this phenomenon “Amy-ka” as the celebrations tend to drag over at least seven days.

But this year is different. This year I’m turning 49 and it doesn’t really make me feel like celebrating. What it really makes me feel like doing is sitting down in a dark room and looking at pictures of myself 10 years ago. Or making an appointment for a face-lift.

It seems I’ve hit an age snag.

And it’s ridiculous, I know. Any time I hear someone stressing about turning 40, I want to punch them in the face. I’m sure anyone reading this right now over the age of 50 would like to smack me, too.

In my head, I hear the good old Girl Whisperer telling me how good I’ve got it. My health and that of my children. Good friends. A nice roof over my head. Yes. Yes. Yes. I know all of this and am usually able to quickly reel myself in when my pity party goes into full swing.

I guess I just didn’t see it coming. I didn’t think 49 would trip me up like this.

Usually, I don’t even think about my age. If anything, inside I feel pretty young. I tend to like younger things – music, movies, zombies. Recently, I was sitting around on the beach talking to my group of Little Mommies. It’s what I’ve dubbed the ladies I’m friends with whose oldest children are all the same age as my little guy. And even though they range in age from about 40-45 and thus are not chronologically THAT much younger than I am, my experience with my three older children – the harrowing years between middle school and college graduation – have aged me considerably. In mom-years, I am probably double their tender ages.

So we were chatting about someone doing something and I was like, “Is she our age?” and then I thought about what I’d just said and rephrased. “And by that I mean is she 42?”

You see? A lot of times I usually forget how old I really am.

I’m just surprised to be nearing the end of my 40s. It’s been a great decade. I’ve done a lot of assessing and made a lot of changes to correct the course my life had been heading in the preceding four decades. I left my marriage, got a full-time job reporting, started a blog and was published in a national magazine. Not bad for some mommy whose claim to fame up to that point was successfully breastfeeding four children.

There’ve been some not-so-great parts, too, like losing said job and my attempts at dating, but let’s not go there right now, shall we? Let’s stay positive and all that.

But if I was going to be really honest, really expose a little bit of my soul to you, I’d also admit that some of my anxiety also stems from being 49 and single. A while ago I was out doing some errands and returned to my car to notice this on the rear windshield:

Seriously. Not. Funny.

Seriously. Not. Funny.

It turns out my younger daughter had put the stickers on as a joke but I freaked out and drove immediately to the car wash where I paid a man $5 to scrape it off the window. I mean, is this how I want people to see me as I drive around town in my mom-car? “Hey! How ya’ doin? I’m 49 and like cats and often drink wine by myself!”

Granted, all of these happen to be true, but still. This is a sad way to illustrate one’s life.

But here are two things that give me hope as I round the corner towards 49 (please notice I’ve mentioned nothing here about 50 because 50 is bullshit and I can’t think about that yet). Item #1 … an essay in the NYTimes this weekend by Dominique Browning about being too old for so much of the hand wringing I’ve just blathered on about.

She writes, “Young(er) women, take this to heart: Why waste time and energy on insecurity? I have no doubt that when I’m 80 I’ll look at pictures of myself when I was 60 and think how young I was then, how filled with joy and beauty.”

I read those lines while lying in my bed reading the Sunday paper and quickly grabbed my laptop, Googled the piece and shared it on Facebook. Not long after, not one but two friends texted and messaged the same link to me along with notes that the article had somehow reminded them of me.

I can think of worst ways to be thought of.

Here is the second tidbit that brings me comfort in my final hours of 48: Halle Berry turns 49 the day after I do.

Of course, Halle and I have literally nothing in common except we’re both women and Leos (she was born on Aug. 14, 1966). She has been blessed with smooth ebony skin and the money to do something about it should it begin to sag whereas I’ve hit the cheap Irish skin lottery that acts as a flimsy covering to withstand life’s slings and arrows. It’s like going through life wearing a white linen suit and not having the money to get it dry cleaned.

Regardless, I like knowing Halle is right behind me. And that we’re in good company. Robin Wright and Salma Hayek were also born in 1966. These women are no slouches. They are strong, accomplished and beautiful.

I like being in that boat of ladies. It helps make this milestone a little easier to pat as I pass it by like the giant planter I round when I get to the end of the boardwalk and start speed walking back towards home.

Here’s what I hope: that this is only the beginning for me. It took turning 40 to really shake me out of a decades-long reverie of complacency. Realizing then that I’d hit the halfway mark in life really made me sit up and take stock of things. And now that I’m starting to move briskly through that second half of life, I hope it’s time for another course correction. I hope I can point myself towards all the things I really want to do before it’s too late.

But, like everything else in life, nothing is free. Everything comes at a price. So if the fee for continued self awareness and living a more authentic life is a few more wrinkles on my face and that crepey thing happening on my eyelids, I guess I’m willing to pony up. In the end, I’d rather be the woman I am now at 49 rather than the more taut gal I was at 39. Hopefully this all makes 50 a little easier to swallow next year.

But first, I need to get through all those birthday celebrations.

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Abandon Ship! Leaving Your Kids Home Alone for the Weekend

Harbinger of things to come discovered four years ago behind the cute little hedge of mini boxwoods along my front path.

Harbinger of things to come discovered four years ago behind the cute little hedge of mini boxwoods along my front path.

A few weeks ago I attended a big blogging conference in New York and was excited to meet the ladies behind Grown and Flown face to face. Their site focuses on parenting issues for those of us with kiddos in the 15 to 25 age range. In other words, parents who thought — all those years ago when we had babies and toddlers and didn’t know any better — that our parenting responsibilities would be lightening up by this point. Things would start to be slowing down as the kids got older, we thought.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

But I think the Grown and Flown tagline really nails it: Parenting never ends. I didn’t understand that all those years ago.

Grown and Flown hits all my sweet spots as a mom, writer and blogger, and that’s before you add in the fact that the ladies have been interviewed by both Katie and Savannah. They’ve got it going on.

As we walked around checking out the goodies at the Blogher expo (I did fondle and whisper sweet nothings to a Wolf oven that would be perfect on my countertop), I mentioned to Mary Dell and Lisa it was the first time I’d ever left my kids home alone for the weekend.

“You should write about that for us!” said Lisa, snapping me out of my Wolf reverie. “You could call it ‘Home Alone.'”

And so I did.

Read about how I found the courage to abandon my ship for three nights and to return home to find nary an errant ping-pong ball or beer bong (but did discover some mighty clean bathrooms), which is featured on Grown and Flown today.

The site is also chock-o-block full of very timely musings on sending kids off to college and things you definitely shouldand should not be — packing to outfit their dorm rooms. Good stuff.

As for me, I’m thinking about changing the name of my site to “Grown and Hasn’t Flown.” Maybe that’s what I’ll write about for them next.

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Where We Live

And just like that, it's time to go.

And just like that, it’s time to go.

I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but around here people tend to stick around. They buy a house, raise a family, send their children off into the world and then, quite often, the kids come back to buy their own house nearby and raise a family of their own and begin the cycle all over again.

I live in a town of about 6,000 people in New Jersey and it sits at the bottom of a peninsula that juts east towards the Atlantic Ocean and is surrounded by two rivers. And while there are lots of fun things to do in and around those rivers – sailing, fishing, paddle boarding – for a lot of us, it’s all about the nearby beaches. There’s a bridge at the end of the peninsula that connects us to a skinny spit of land that is dotted with public beaches and beach clubs, which runs north and curls into Sandy Hook. This is where we spend a majority of our time in the summer months. Going to the beach. (Not the “shore.” Nobody around here goes to the “shore.”) But I mean, don’t get crazy. Nobody around here goes to Sandy Hook between Memorial and Labor days with outsiders. We stick to ourselves.

Because of the geography, we are a pretty insular community. We eat here. We drink here. We shop here. In fact, people always seemed shocked when I tell them I do most of my food shopping at the Wegman’s about 20 minutes away.

For Wegman’s, I am willing to travel.

So I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised when a bunch of the people who showed up for my open house this weekend already lived here in town. They all have young children and are starting to feel the pinch of their capes and ranches. They’re looking for a little more space to store all those bikes and American Girl dolls.

It was a busy two hours and I am thankful I had a wonderful friend help me show everyone around my house and point out the big garage that use to teem with scooters and pogo sticks and the finished basement where we stored our own impressive collection of American Girl and Bitty Baby merchandise. But now that garage is down to two bikes with flat tires and the basement is mostly a place to go play XBOX or smoke pot. Actually, I said that last part just to be funny but certain people around here have over the years thought the basement an excellent place to try to get stoned.

I’m giving selling my house without a realtor a shot and have to say that the Internet certainly makes marketing and getting the word out about an open house pretty easy. Most people who came through on Sunday had seen my “for sale” post on the almighty Zillow or through word-of-mouth, which I attribute to a few things I had posted on my own Facebook page that a lot of lovely people shared with their “friends.”

And so it was through the magic of the Internet that among the day’s visitors was the family that had lived here for 30 years, who saw that the house was on the market and stopped by Sunday afternoon to check it out. I had bought the house a dozen years ago from the people who had bought it from them. Those people were here two years, made some quick improvements and updates and a giant profit off us. What can I say? That’s the way the real estate cookie crumbles. I was super-pregnant with my fourth kid and crazy.

I had seen the former owner’s name here over the years. Every once in a while, some mass mailing arrives in my mailbox with her name on it. And I’d also pieced together that she had also gotten a divorce while living here but stayed in the house to raise her kids. I had developed an affinity for this woman I’d never met. I felt kind of a solidarity with her. A kinship. So I was thrilled to discover that the lovely woman standing in my foyer with a European accent was indeed the former owner who had arrived with her son, who’s now in his late 30s, and his wife.

And they were adorable.

He shouted, “No way!” a lot as they walked through the house and he pointed out different things to his wife, like the way the paneling in the den had been painted over or that the bar that had been in the basement was no longer there. I even discovered that the light hanging in the foyer was not some cool, Shabby Chic number that the people I had bought the house from had found in some upscale shop – because they acted like it was a big deal when I asked if they would leave it – was instead the same fixture that’s always been hanging there except it had been spray painted white.

Overall, they seemed pleased with the changes that had been made to the house in the 15 years since they moved. They liked how we combined the kitchen and dining room to make one big living space in the back of the house and how that now opened up to the family room in the front. They described how the back deck used to be higher up off the ground and how a pool table used to take up a big portion of the basement.

The son joked that had he known the house was going up for sale, he wouldn’t have just bought an apartment in Hoboken and they laughed about how weird that would have been.

After we’d said good-bye and I continued to show young families around the house, it occurred to me that that’s going to be me in 15 years. I’ll be in my mid-60s and my oldest son will be edging towards 40 (which is messed up, but whatever). I hope that someday we’ll be able to come back and see what has transpired here in our absence. I mean, the stuff you can see – like decks and kitchens. Whether or not this is a place to come and get divorced remains to be seen.

I did, however, get to peek recently at the house we lived in before we moved here. My oldest daughter and I had to pick something up from the family that’s lived there for I think over a decade and the owner asked us if we’d like to come in and look around. We’d moved there when that daughter, who’s now 21, was an infant and her older brother had just turned 2. We had another girl a few years later and so the house is mostly remembered by me as a place where I raised my babies. The kitchen that always had a high chair crammed in the corner or booster seats strapped to our old Ikea kitchen chairs. Where we’d spend rainy days around the table working with crayons and glitter and PlayDoh. On sunny spring afternoons we’d fill the big plastic pool I’d bought at ToysRUs with water and they happily splash the hours away or play in the nearby sandbox their dad had built for them one weekend. And the bathroom we built in our bedroom downstairs had a big Jacuzzi tub that easily accommodated three little soapy bodies to soak and make bubbly beards before bedtime.

In fact, it took me a long time to get over that house. I had terrible buyer’s remorse after we’d packed up every last Lego we’d accrued over eight years and moved to the bigger house across town. I regretted the impulse to upgrade our life. It turns out that bigger is not always better.

So my daughter and I walked around the house and a little bit down memory lane. The owner pointed out some things they had done – like refinish the basement – and some things that were the same – like the Dutch door that led out to the screened-in porch where we’d sit on summer nights and listen to a bullfrog croak in a nearby pond.

Once we sell this house, we’re still not going very far. We’re planning to stay in town. My youngest in going into seventh grade and we love our school system and I don’t want to pluck him from the middle school action and move to a nearby town. It’s bad enough that his parents are divorced.

I just want something smaller that I can afford along with my portion of two college tuitions and still get my hair done every six weeks.

And maybe some day one of my kids will come back and buy a house in town and we will be neighbors. When they were small, I liked to ask the kids where they thought they’d live when they grew up. Back then, I hoped they’d think bigger than I ever did and say they wanted to live in a big city or some exotic country. But now, in retrospect, maybe it’s not such a bad thing to just like what you have. What you know. Maybe I should have been proud when they answered, “Here, duh.”

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Finding the Courage to Sell My House

This week I posted the following on Facebook:

Making the leap.

Making the leap.

It’s been a move months in the making. Actually, compared to the other three major real estate transactions I’ve participated in, this go round was not a knee-jerk reaction precipitated by a pregnancy and raging hormones. I seemed to have made many big decisions in my 20s and 30s based on my heart and not on my head. I jumped right in and hoped for the best.

But this time, I wanted to take a more logical approach to buying and selling a home. I didn’t want my heart to get anywhere near the situation. Selling my current home is somewhat financial — I mean, two college tuitions suck — but mostly just a practical move. My kids are getting older and I don’t require all the space we needed so desperately a dozen years ago.

My parents separated the summer I turned 12 and the following year my mom got remarried and we pulled up stakes and moved an hour away. It was like the rug had been pulled out from under me and I never wanted my children to feel the same way. When I first got divorced it was critical to me that the kids’ lives weren’t turned upside down any more than was necessary. It was bad enough that their parents had to split up, I didn’t want them to have to move on top of that.

And that’s pretty much how I operated until a few months ago when I said something about moving to one of the kids and she was like, “What took you so long?”

As I mentioned in the Facebook post, I’ll miss a lot of the amenities around here, specifically my kitchen that still brings me great joy. I still come down to it every morning and can’t believe it’s mine. It makes all that counter wiping and taco cooking that I do a little less terrible.

Of course it would be easier just to stay put and hope for the best. But I’ve been down that road before and learned that as painful as change can be, it’s where you find the place you need to be rather than where you thought you were supposed to be.

Does that make sense?

But it took me a little bit to finally make the leap and put the sign up front. It seems sometimes, in the absence of hormones or an impending newborn, I have a hard time figuring out what to do. I’m afraid to dive off that ledge and do something that scares me.

But this week I did. I took a deep breath and jumped.

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