Author Archives: Amy Byrnes

Mar
13
2015

Even the Best Kids Sometimes Do Bad Things

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I was cleaning the bathrooms this morning, you know, wiping up the 10-pounds of hair that accumulates on the floor in a matter of days and the gobs of toothpaste and bits of toast that no one seems able to remove from the sink after they spit, when I came upon the books stacked on the back of the kids’ toilet.

I’ve always been big on scattering reading material around the house in prime locations — near toilets and piled up on the kitchen table — just in case one of the kids has an urge to look at something that’s not moving on a screen. You know, actually read something, even if it’s People or Entertainment Weekly.

Usually when I’m cleaning, I’ll just pick up the stack of books sitting on the toilet tank and wipe under them and then put them back where they were. But today it occurred to me that it’s been the same assortment — joke books, something about insults and comebacks and a novel — for a pretty long time and I was fairly certain no one was looking at any of them while they were in there.

So I started to sift through the books to see what I should get rid of, maybe swap one or two out for something new and interesting, when I came across our old copy of “A Wrinkle in Time” that I discovered had been christened with some vulgar graffiti:

Someone in my house really seems to resent this book's presence in our bathroom.

Someone in my house really seems to resent this book’s presence in our bathroom.

I'm sensing a lot of anger here.

Who else senses a lot of anger here?

 

If this was 10 years ago, I guarantee you there’d have been a full-on inquisition into whose handiwork graced the cover of the book. But nowadays, there’s pretty much only one suspect, and while I get that middle schoolers experiment with naughty words and rebellious actions, I seriously didn’t think my kid had it in him.

Which only goes to remind me, for probably the umpteenth time since I became a mom 22 years ago, that you can NEVER SAY NEVER.

My kids have done things that have shocked the shit out of me and taught me to NEVER judge someone else’s kid because you just don’t know when it’s going to be your turn to find out that your super-sweet and loving and adorable 12yo would scribble “FUCK YOU SCHOOL” on a book.

Or worse.

I am, however, going to have a little fun later when he gets home from school to see who he’s going to say did the naughty deed. I only hope he tries to pin it on the cat.

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Mar
09
2015

How Not to Be a Jerk

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thejerkI can’t say I was really happy yesterday morning when I got in my cold car around 7:30 to drive an hour and 45 minutes north to go skiing.

In fact, when I saw my girlfriend later that morning on line to take the gondola up to the top of the mountain, I told her that the only thing that could make the day any better was if there was going to be some kind of math involved. “Are we doing any word problems later?” I joked as we inched our way up to the front of the endless line.

My 12-year-old son, on the other hand, was practically giddy.

I heard him hop right out of bed when his alarm went off at 6:30 and then he poked his head inside my room to see if I was getting up.

“A few more minutes, buddy,” I told him, probably not in my cheeriest voice.

When I finally lumbered downstairs 15 minutes later for coffee, he was sitting on a stool at our island eating the toast slathered with peanut butter that he’d made himself and already dressed in warm layers for his day on the slopes. The night before, while I sat on the couch and watched “How to Get Away With Murder” and pretended the following day wasn’t happening, he was busy packing up all his ski gear in a backpack and laying out his clothes for the next day. He even put my skis and boots in the back of our SUV.

I am a reluctant skier. I came to the sport later in life and never found it very natural to strap sticks to the bottom of my feet and shoot down a mountain. It ain’t right.

But my ex-husband was passionate about the sport and back in the day, I really wanted to be the kind of girlfriend who was up for anything. You know, the Cool Girl. The one who, according to Amazing Amy in Gone Girl, “is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain.”

But I don’t think I ever totally fooled him. For one thing, I’m a scaredy cat and not a really good sport. I’m sure I didn’t make things easy. But God bless him, he was patient with me. He helped me put  my boots on and carried my skis and poles around. He followed me down the mountain and reminded me to bend my knees, lean forward and not swing my arms around. In fact, to this day, I still hear his voice in my head as I make my way down a mountain and adjust accordingly.

When our kids were old enough to hit the slopes, he’d get them all ready for a day in ski school – stuffing little bodies clad in pajamas and turtlenecks (this was before all the fancy long johns came along) into bibbed snow pants and putting all the right socks and boots and gloves on all of those little hands and feet – and wrangle them over to their lessons. Then later, he’d take them out himself, showing them the proper way to get on and off a chairlift and skiing backwards down the mountain as they followed behind, their little skis making a “pizza slice” as they plowed their way through the snow.

A couple of times he even took the older three kids away for the long President’s Weekend to ski with his sister and her kids while I stayed home – secretly relieved – to take care of our little guy. While I sat on the couch, watching movie after movie and drinking red wine, they mastered moguls and learned to ski through wooded glades and by the time I got back out on the slopes with them a few years later, found myself once again the slowest and most remedial skier in the pack.

So when my marriage was finally ending, I joked that at least I’d never have to ski again. “It’s the silver lining,” I’d like to tell people.

Except my kids missed it. While I saw it as one giant, expensive hassle that resulted in staring down a steep, icy slope with frozen toes, they grew up thinking that nothing could be more fun. And because we’d taken them away on a bunch of ski trips over the years, they also associated it with cozy nights sitting on the floor with their cousins playing Spit and Rummy and splashing around an indoor pool.

While I was going through my divorce, my girlfriend offered me her condo in Stratton, VT for a weekend to take the kids skiing and I saw it as an opportunity to prove to myself that I could do things like that by myself, even though I still had a 6-year-old to manage. The trip started badly when I discovered, after I’d gone and rented all four of them equipment from a local ski place, that our fairly new SUV didn’t have the proper bars on top to clip on our old ski rack. I’d have to shove them inside along with all our bags and helmets and groceries I’d bought for the long weekend.

And that’s when I sat down and started to cry in the family room with my daughters looking on. But in the first of what would be many times when the kids would rally around me, the girls assured me we’d be able to fit everything inside our truck and even though we were probably pretty squished on the five-hour drive north that Thursday night, not one kid complained.

We were up bright-and-early the next morning to catch the 8:15 shuttle from the condo complex to the mountain, standing outside with all of our bags and equipment in the freezing January air, when after a while, one of the maintenance guys drove by and told us that the shuttle did not run on weekdays. So we shoved everything back into our truck and headed over to the mountain and when we pulled into the lot, saw that the shuttle bus was loading passengers to take them to the lodge.

We made a mad scramble to get all the skis and poles, helmets and bags out and over to the shuttle and I ushered all of the kids up the steps and into the back. It was the kind of bus that I imagined was also used to shuttle migrant workers around to jobs, with a big, open back where passengers stood and held onto poles.

The kids and I pushed our way into the bus that was mostly filled with silver-haired retirees, who were probably taking advantage of the smaller crowds and cheaper pricing of weekday skiing. I ordered all of the kids to hold onto something and started counting heads.

One was missing.

“Where’s Nick?” I shouted, and the three older kids just stared back at me.

“He’s over here,” came an unfamiliar voice from the back of the bus, very near the opening where I could barely make out trees rushing by as we headed towards the mountain. And then I saw my 6-year-old standing really close to that gaping opening.

“Can you grab him?” I yelled to the nice woman who’d alerted me to his whereabouts and she yanked him away from the opening and held him by the shoulders until we pulled up to the ski lodge.

I bought lift tickets and clipped them to everyone’s ski jackets, wrapping the long sticker onto the wire and thinking how easy it had looked when the kids’ dad had put our tickets on us all those years. The little guy went to ski school and the other kids and I spent the day going up and down the mountain.

But in the end, it wasn’t as much fun as it used to be. Something was missing. And maybe it was the expense of it all or that teenagers had no interest in going anywhere with just me, but we never went again.

I’ve gone a couple of times with girlfriends since then and took my youngest to learn how to snowboard at a place about two hours from here, and I waited in the lodge while he took a lesson with some friends.

But he’s been dying to do it again. And it’s not enough that his dad is taking him away for a weekend to ski this month. He needed to go skiing with me.

So when a couple of families in town were heading to a mountain in New Jersey to ski on Sunday, he was all over it. Initially I said I’d take him but just hang around the lodge while he skied with his buddies because A: I don’t really need to ski and B: I’m not the richest cat right now. I’d rather spend that $65 on a manicure and a pedicure or when the kids and I go to Hong Kong next month.

“Why don’t you see if Dad wants to go skiing with you, dude?” I suggested.

But he looked at me with those big blue eyes of his and said, “But Mom, it can be our thing.”

“I’ve never even seen you ski,” he added.

Poop.

I mean, who around here even wants to do anything with me any more? Pretty much nobody. And soon, this kid won’t want to either, as evidenced by his actions last summer. 

And for as much as I complain about skiing, there’s really no better family activity. Nothing beats having a teenager trapped next to you on a chairlift on a long ride up a mountain or laughing over dinner at night on who fell during what run or who was the last to the bottom of the trail (usually me).

So that is how I found myself on Sunday standing on a line akin to one you’d find waiting for Space Mountain on Good Friday to rent the kid a snowboard for the day. We stored our bags in lockers and made our way outside and I marveled for not the first time at how easy my ex had made all of it look. And after a rocky first run that found my son on his butt more than standing upright on his board, he quickly found his rhythm and we had a great day. Even though he had two buddies to fool around in the terrain park and see who could catch the most air, he also wanted his mom as part of the pack.

After one run we stopped at the bottom to take some pictures of our group with our phones and I asked my friends if they’d take one of my son and me. As we stood with our arms around each other’s waist and our helmets touching, he said, “I really like seeing you ski, Mom,” and I cursed myself for being such a dick earlier that day. For even considering not doing something that would bring him so much joy.

Sometimes, it pays not to be a ... errr ... jerk.

Sometimes, it pays not to be a … errr … jerk.

It’s like those old MasterCard commercials, in which I’d tally up the costs of our ski day – the lift tickets, equipment rental, $4 slices of pizza, my lost beauty sleep – and then tell you, in no uncertain terms, that the end result was truly priceless.

(And look, there was even some math involved.)

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Mar
06
2015

My Kids Won’t Stop Getting Older

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IMG_5270I had a baby 21 years ago today. My second. A girl.

She came two weeks early and easily, swimming out quickly into the world like a good little Pisces. She joined her older brother, who came 17 months earlier and was so naughty, you’d have thought I’d have done anything that I could to prevent having another baby so quickly.

But when you get a night out alone with your husband and college friends and drink one-too-many Mount Gay and tonics, you find that your decision-making skills have become impaired. The booze softens the memories of engorged, leaky breasts and raw umbilical cords. It tempers just how helpless one feels alone watching QVC at 3 a.m. with an inconsolable infant. Or how long the days can feel stuck in a house with a toddler and a cabinet full of Barney videos.

So I got knocked up when my weepy first baby was a mere eight months old and while he had evened out by the time his sister came along nine months later – by then he had stopped crying all the time and had become a sweet little toddler – I had my hands officially full.

I was 27 and had no idea what I had gotten myself into. Not that I’d actually planned any of it, obviously. But while most of those college friends were building their careers and enjoying the freedom of being young and single in Manhattan, I was learning the words to Raffi songs and cutting boiled hot dogs into tiny, chewable pieces (this was back when hot dogs were still a highly-acceptable food staple for little ones).

And I’ve thought about it a lot, about whether I’d change things if I had the chance to go back in time. Would I be smarter about birth control? Some of those questionable hair styles? Would I even have gotten married?

But I spent a lot of time paging through photo albums this morning and picking through the shoeboxes that hold the photo overflow, the B rolls that didn’t make the photo album cut. And I’m reminded looking the kids in their Halloween costumes or opening Christmas presents or covered in bubbles in the tub that even though so much of it was hard – not to mention boring and thankless – I wouldn’t change a thing.

I mean, maybe I wouldn’t wear a scrunchie out in public or overalls the second time around, but I’d pretty much like to go back and do it all over again.

I’d really savor every second of the little voices, the little bodies, the little problems.

It’s hard to believe that that same little girl who I met late that night 21 years ago is now closer to my age that I was when I had her than I am. It reminds me of A: How old she is and B: How young I was and C: How old I have become.

She’s coming home this weekend for spring break and I’m looking forward to seeing her in person. To having a glass of wine together out in public and getting her to myself for a whole week. And even though she’s a good six inches taller than me now and by all accounts, a legit grown up, that girl will always be my baby.

Sure, she can buy cheap booze legally now, but she'll always be my little baby.

Sure, she can buy cheap booze legally now, but she’ll always be my little baby.

 

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Mar
02
2015

Listen to Your Mother, Dammit

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Screen-Shot-2015-02-23-at-11.41.51-AMHere is a story about not giving up, an idea I don’t always embrace.

Recently, I had an audition for this show called Listen to Your Mother, which was about an hour’s drive north of my home. The North Jersey show is one of a series of LTYM performances held on Mother’s Day weekend all across the country and features folks getting up on stage in front of an audience to read something they’d written about motherhood.

The stories are funny and poignant, bittersweet and brutally honest and weave together all the threads that make that great big blanket that we call motherhood. This video fills in some of the details:

I had actually auditioned for last year’s show and was not selected. I had picked something that I had posted on my blog and thought was funny and practiced reading it aloud a bunch of times and drove north to do the same in front of the show’s producers, who were very nice but in the end did not select my story.

So when I began to think about what I would audition this year, I combed through my blog posts again to try to find something I’d written that resonated with readers about being a mom. I sent one contender to a friend of mine, who is serving as one of the producers of this year’s show, and she very gently responded by telling me to think beyond the kind of writing I usually posted on my blog.

“You need to tell a story,” she told me. “There needs to be an arc.”

And I was like, “Wait. What?”

Because I’d never thought about the structure of my writing. About telling a story that included how I felt rather than just writing about my feelings.

A complete lightbulb moment.

But I still didn’t know exactly what story I wanted to tell. Or better yet, I couldn’t think of any story of worth I had to tell and I shot down that rabbit hole of self doubt. Watching all of the YouTube videos from last year’s show for inspiration didn’t help either.

One reader was better than the next.

“Who do I even think I am?” I’d think after each video ended. “There is no way I am in the same league.”

I probably worked on about three or four different stories in earnest right up until the day before the audition and the Universe kept handing me reasons to throw in the towel. I’d just gotten back from a few days away and had plenty of other things to focus on other than spending hours trying to write a story. And then my ex decided that weekend didn’t “work” for him, and I would have the kids for a weekend I was not planning on having them, which included three basketball games on Saturday, the original day of my audition.

But my desire to be a part of LTYM was stronger than my inner quitter and after much hemming and hawing, I switched my audition to Sunday afternoon.

I wrote as much as I could on Saturday but still it wasn’t coming together. I even brought my laptop to one of my son’s basketball games, but I didn’t really have a good kicker. Then Saturday night came, along with a lot of dancing and other, weirder things at a party, and I awoke Sunday morning with about three hours left to pull everything together and leave to drive north.

And maybe I’m the kind of person who can only find inspiration in the 11th, do-or-die hour, but all of a sudden, I knew just what the story needed and once I put that nugget in place, the rest of the essay came together quickly. I made the hour drive to the audition listening to Lyle Lovett — interspersed with the bossy Siri telling me where to go — and felt satisfied with my story. If nothing else, I thought, stretching out something I had written earlier into a full story — with a beginning, middle and end — was a great writing exercise.

In fact, I said that to the three producers to whom I read the piece a little while later. They laughed in some places and sighed in others and while I didn’t think it was my finest five minutes, I also didn’t think I really killed it either.

So I was over the moon a few days later when I got the call that I had been selected to be a part of this year’s show. Like, screaming-to-my-kids, jumping-up-and-down excited.

I sat next to my daughter on the couch and tried to settle down and get back to the Walking Dead episode we were watching on our DVR. But every once in a while, I’d remember my great news and I’d start to nudge the 17yo and squeal. But she was kind of over my accomplishment and was really much more interested in the mayhem going down on our television and told me to calm down.

“Dude,” I said, “I can’t help it I’m just so excited. It just feels like everything has been going wrong for me lately up until now.”

She turned to look at me and said, “You literally just got back from the Bahamas.”

And, like, touché to that. She’s totally right. I am blessed in so many ways but creatively, professionally, I’ve had a crisis in confidence. I’d kind of lost my writing mojo and was feeling like, “Why bother?”

So it was the boost I needed. That reminder that I’m not totally terrible. And it’s not only an awesome feather in my writing cap but also lets me meet and work with some super-creative people. Yes, yes and yes.

I’ve loved seeing all the names pop up on Facebook after the official announcement to congratulate me on being picked and feeling all the love.

Screen Shot 2015-03-02 at 11.35.58 AM

It’s official.

 

A bunch of people have expressed interest in buying tickets for the May 9 show, and you can find all of the details here. I would love to see as many friendly faces as possible in the audience that night and think that drinks afterwards will definitely be in order.

So what is the moral of the story? For me, more satisfying than the validation this gave me as a writer, is finding success in something I had really worked so hard on. And while, sure, it was cool looking at my writing in a new way, it’s great knowing that hard work really does pay off.

I hope my kids are paying attention because another thing I’ve learned, of course, is that you should always listen to your mother.

To learn more about Listen to Your Mother North Jersey 2015 show on Saturday, May 9 at the South Orange Performing Arts Center, hop over here. Want ticket info? Go here for all the details.

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You can also follow me on Facebook and on Twitter, which will be fun since none of my kids will let me follow them.

Feb
28
2015

(Clean) Banana-y Pancakes

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When I’m not eating Trader Joe’s veggie sticks on my couch late at night (#donttelldan), I generally try to eat pretty healthy. Pretty “clean,” as the kids say.

What that looks like is a lot of fruits, veggies and protein. After two years of trying to eat this way it’s gotten to the point that I think pretty long and hard before I put a piece of bread or cookie into my mouth.

Unless I’ve been drinking. Then all bets are off.

And usually I’m happy eating the same-old-things everyday. A plain, Greek yogurt/fruity smoothie for breakfast, a poached egg on something for lunch and chicken or ground turkey as a platform for something for dinner (like curried chicken or turkey ragu for the squash I spiralize with my veggetti — I really just like saying “my veggetti.”).

But even someone who really doesn’t like change needs a change every once in  a while.

So, I’ve discovered a new breakfast lately — a yummy, pancake-y deal — courtesy of my Food52-addicted, slightly paleo, Gwyneth Paltrow-lovin’ girlfriend across the street that requires three ingredients. Four, if you want to count cinnamon as an ingredient.

It’s chock-full of sweetness and protein and also takes about three seconds to make. Perfect, if you’re a lazy sugar addict like me.

I really need to teach myself how to take better pictures. Especially early in the morning. This photo does not do my yummy cakes justice.

This year, I really need to teach myself how to take better pictures. Especially early in the morning. This photo does not do my yummy cakes justice.

(Clean) Banana-y Pancakes

1/2 to 3/4 squished banana

1 tablespoon peanut butter

1 egg

pinch cinnamon

Smoosh all the ingredients together in a bowl. Heat non-stick pan and spray with coconut oil. Pour in batter and let sit for a bit. I break into half with a spatula and then flip each half. Done! My daughter loves a few chocolate chips in her pancake and I think some blueberries or raspberries would be yummy, too.

Now you’re on the road to good health and wellness, just stay away from the veggie sticks.

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Feb
26
2015

Lost

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IMG_3857My friend and I trundled into the back of the pickup truck this morning and when the driver closed the door behind us, she turned to me and said, “Well, say good-bye to your life.”

And we started laughing like crazy.

“I almost made it to 50,” she snorted and then we tried to pull it together before the driver got in behind the wheel.

It all started innocently enough. She needed to be at her pediatrician’s office this morning at 10:00 with her son so we bundled up for an early morning snowshoe trek and headed out in her car at 8 a.m. for the woods.

It’s a place I know well and have been visiting a few times a week for the past five or six years. When I was younger, it would be in a pair of shorts and a tank top to run up and down the wooded hills with one or two girlfriends while we panted and shared some of our darkest secrets. We were definitely applying the, “What happens in the woods stays in the woods,” approach to over sharing in those days.

It was running along a trail one day when I stopped short and broke down sobbing, telling my running mate that my marriage was in big trouble. The woods became the place where I ran away from all of my troubles. The leaves and trees swallowed me whole, shielding me from all the scary shit raining down on my head on the outside. It was where I escaped.

After I determined that needing to run through knee pain until the joint went numb was probably not the smartest thing I could be doing for my body, I went to the woods a few times a week with a friend and our two big, goofy dogs and we’d let them off their leashes so they could tear ahead of us on the path and then turn and run back to see what was taking us so long. I swear, my dog would be grinning from ear-to-ear during those long, woodsy walks together.

When Rudy, the finest dog a girl could ask for, moved onto the big wooded trail in the sky, I continued to walk up and down the dirt hills with friends, our conversations shifting over the years from divorce, to work, dating and SATs. And our periods. We’re always talking about our periods.

There’s been very little that’s kept me away from the woods for more than a week or two each year, and that was mostly because of rain or snow. But I found a way around the latter last year when my neighbor and I bought ourselves snowshoes off of Amazon after the first or second snowstorm of the season.

Atlas Elektra 10 Series Snowshoe - http://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Womens-Elektra-1023-Snowshoe/dp/B004MOWDZK/ref=sr_1_20?s=sporting-goods&ie=UTF8&qid=1424977350&sr=1-20

Atlas Elektra 10 Series Snowshoe – http://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Womens-Elektra-1023-Snowshoe/dp/B004MOWDZK/ref=sr_1_20?s=sporting-goods&ie=UTF8&qid=1424977350&sr=1-20

We marched around the trails I had spent years running along in shorts and sneakers and then my pal went all Pocahontas and shifted off the marked trails and we ambled through brush and branches for a bit until we somehow ended up back in the parking lot.

We even started exploring another nearby wooded park, which lacks the steeper hills but makes up for it with windy paths and narrow hollows. But we’re not as familiar with those trails and, frankly, they don’t seem as well marked as those on our usual walk.

At least that’s what we were telling ourselves this morning when, after about an hour and a half of walking around the cold woods we could not find our way back to our car. We kept coming to splits in the trail and trying to determine which icy and snowy path would head us towards the parking lot. We’d start to trudge down the path for about 10 minutes and then see something up ahead on the trail – like an open field or the back of someone’s house – that we knew did not look familiar. That told us we were heading in the wrong direction. So we would turn around and start heading in the opposite direction.

Here’s the terrifying truth: I have absolutely no sense of direction. Like, it’s kind of sad and I think something that should be filed under “Amy’s Many Learning Disabilities.” I can’t tell you how many vacation days were ruined with my ex-husband as he drove through some foreign locale while I sat beside him with a map on my lap trying to be the navigator. My cluelessness combined with his impatience left us silent and fuming.

So, I can’t find my way out of a paper bag and it turns out my snowshoe mate, a very smart girl who put herself through law school and listens to “Crime and Punishment” while driving around, is equally impaired. We stood on a path and studied a PDF of the park map I had pulled up on my iPhone and tried to figure out which “P” represented the parking lot where we parked. I mean, the basics, people. We could not even figure that out.

Eventually we ended up clear on the other side of the woods at the park’s activity center. I’ve been there a million times over the years with my little ones to walk through the reptile house and watch one of the Copperheads slither through its tank or a turtle listlessly flap its arms in a few inches of water. We spent many fall afternoons walking the nature hike, turning logs over in search of salamanders our oldest daughter would snatch up and admire, and where our oldest son had his fifth birthday party and we saw a stick bug up close.

My pal and I decided we officially needed help and slipped off our snowshoes and walked down the stone path to the main building and saw that it did not open until 10 a.m.

That’s when we started yelling for help.

Okay, maybe that was just me.

But while I was yelling, “Hello?” into the darkened reptile house, my pal caught site of movement behind the building and ran over to see if she could get someone’s attention.

And that is how we found ourselves being shut into the back of a county vehicle by a man who initially – I have to be honest – made us a little nervous. I mean, we were relatively smart women who knew that getting into a car with a stranger was not a great idea. But we were cold and pretty hungry and tired of clomping along the seriously icy trails. We were willing, apparently, to take the risk.

It turns out that Ron – that’s our driver/hero’s name – was a very nice man who works for our county park system. He told us we had strayed pretty far from where we had parked and offered to give us a lift. As he drove the windy road back to our car, he told us how challenging this winter had been and how he’s had to wear a face mask lately to clear the snow and ice from trails because of the single-digit weather we’ve been plagued with here in New Jersey.

We climbed out of his cab and thanked him for keeping our parks so beautiful and got into our car and started laughing our butts off and blasted the heater.

So maybe our next purchase off Amazon should be a compass. Or a Sherpa. Do they sell Sherpas on Amazon? Maybe we’ll have to go to Target for that.

IMG_3852

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.

 

Here are some directions I’m really good at!

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Feb
25
2015

The Girl on the Plane

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9780385682329_0I went to the Bahamas for a few days last week with a girlfriend and was very ambitious in the amount of reading material I packed for the trip.

Not only did I download The Girl on the Train on my Kindle, but I packed about 20 pounds of magazines — a few Peoples, Oprah, the Vanity Fair Oscar issue — along with my fairly heavy journal into my carryon bag. I almost tried to squeeze my new, 500+ page hardcover copy of All the Light We Cannot See into my suitcase — on top of the four pairs of sandals, running shoes, straw hat and separates that would have lasted me over a month on the island — but decided at the last minute to pry it out of the bag. I slipped in an extra pair of shoes instead.

Which was a good thing because I didn’t even crack open the latest Entertainment Weekly (not even the back page to check out EW Bullseye!), much less an actual book.

Do you know how you really connect with some people more than others and never run out of things to talk about? You can just jump from topic to topic? That’s how it is with the gal I went away with. And when we weren’t examining each other’s histories and solving each other’s various and sundry personal and professional issues, we were enjoying pitchers of rum punch and roaming around the resort carrying our wine glasses.

In other words, we were busy little bees.

And while I never would have gotten through All the Light We Cannot See on the trip, I did manage to bang out The Girl on the Train flying back and forth. I even stayed up well after midnight upon my return to finish the last few chapters.

Two thumbs up.

There’s been a lot of press that the British import is the new Gone Girl and while I did not find the main narrator of Train, Rachel, anywhere near Amazing Amy’s sketchy status (I mean, hard to top that nut), she does make for a fairly unreliable narrator in her own way.

The thriller is hard to put down as the story unfolds and Rachel’s heavy drinking creates holes in what she’s able to piece together, which was a little unsettling for someone to read after mainlining pina coladas poolside for a few days.

According to some of the reviews I’ve looked at after I finished the book, it’s apparently not perfect. And Rachel can make some really annoying decisions. But it’s super fun and sometimes, fun is enough for me.

I mean, it’s not like I’m marrying the book or anything.

So if you’re starting to think about what to pack for your upcoming Spring Break trip and, like me, favor easy-breezy over Camus (Smartypants: you know who I’m talking to) for your beach reading, give The Girl a whirl.

Tell me: What are you packing to read for Spring Break?

Hey look! Here's, like, the one photo I took on vacation while we were squeezing out the last drops of the one perfect beach day and obligatory bottle of white wine.

Hey look! Here’s, like, the one photo I took on vacation while we were squeezing out the last drops of the one perfect beach day coupled with the obligatory bottle of white wine.

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Feb
10
2015

When Pets Lose Their Marbles

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IMG_1344The other night I was sitting on the big, red couch in my TV room, all cozy in my pajamas, watching the most recent episode of ‘Fixer Upper‘ – my latest TV obsession. I was never really much of an HGTV person — but my 17yo totally is –and we wasted a lot of time recently watching ‘Property Brothers’ and ‘Love It or List It’ when she was home sick for a week with the flu.

But our fave home improvement show nowadays is ‘Fixer Upper.’ If you don’t know, ‘Fixer Upper’ features the most adorable couple — Chip and Joanna Gaines – who help other couples find and fix up houses in and around Waco, TX. They have amazing style; it’s all charming, farmhouse-looking remodels with lots of cement countertops and ship lap (I know, I’d never heard of that either).

Even my little guy is hooked on the show. The 12yo told me the other day that when he makes it big as a video gamer (sigh), he’s going to buy a house for us in Waco. What a guy.

We watched so many episodes of ‘Fixer Upper’ while my daughter was recuperating from the flu that we started to feel like Chip and Joanna had become our really good friends. We cheered when Jojo nailed a flip on the trampoline in front of her four little kids in one episode and shook our heads when Chip ate a bug in another. In fact, while we were sitting around in our pajamas one day (obviously I try to spend as much time as possible in my pajamas), my daughter Snapchatted my reaction to Chip plowing through a wall:

So anyway, I was sitting there on the couch when the cat jumped up next to me. She is not a snuggly creature and usually keeps her distance, licking her belly or snoozing for hours on a nearby chair, so I thought, “Oh, how cute. She wants to snuggle.”

I turned my attention back to ‘Fixer Upper’ when suddenly I felt something warm and wet spread across my back.

“Holy shit!” I yelled and jumped up to find the cat urinating on the couch next to me.

Legit peeing, right there on my couch.

She looked up at me, gave her back legs a big stretch, and hopped off the couch like everything was fine-and-dandy.

And since then, I have watched her relieve herself on my couch, a fairly new and nice couch, at least two more times. And while most of my children’s responses to this behavior has been, “Can we please get rid of her now?” the Cat People that I polled suggested she might be struggling with a urinary tract ailment and suggested I take her to the vet.

Okay, some backstory: this cat just appeared one day in my garage in the middle of a snowstorm, a bag of bones and with the side of her face burned. We felt bad and took her in and she set about establishing herself on the family food chain somewhere higher than the dog but lower than me. Her weapon? Pee and poop. She constantly peed on the dog’s bed and pooped once on my side of the bed and whether she succeeded in replacing me as the alpha chick around here is debatable, but she did prove her tenacity.

So the prospect of having to get her into a carrier to get to the vet made me very nervous. I had to have a pal come over and cage her during the Hurricane Sandy aftermath so I could board her until our power was restored and it was like trying to cage the Tasmanian Devil.

I ambushed her one morning last week and wrapped her in a beach towel and dumped her in the crate and headed – with my heart pounding – to the vet.

Three hundred dollars later (more sighing), they drew some blood and told me they could not access her bladder and sent me home with a kit to collect a urine sample myself.

You’re fucking kidding me.

But somehow I managed to trap some pee the other morning and enlisted my 12yo to hold the sample vial while I sucked pee into a syringe CSI-style and dropped if off at my vet.

Good news, I got a call from the vet Saturday morning and everything came back negative. Her blood work seemed normal and her urine was clean.

Which means she’s fucking crazy.

The vet suggested I rethink the type of litter I’m using. She also gave me the name and number of a local woman she calls the “Cat Whisperer.” She’ll come over and assess the situation and help you modify the bad behavior. And it should only cost another $100 or so.

Oh, or I could try putting the cat on Prozac.

And of course, these things only happen at the most inconvenient times, which means I was going away for the weekend and had to go to Home Depot to buy plastic tarps to cover all of our furniture while I was gone.

So that’s pretty much where we stand. I’m headed out to buy a new kitty litter box in the event that the current one is not meeting the cat’s urination standards. And then I’m actually considering hiring the Cat Lady to come over and try to reason with her.

But so far, there’s no moral to this story – as far as I can tell – other than pets are a pain in the ass.

And expensive.

Maybe I should just consider sending her to Waco.

Got any suggestions? By all means, send them my way. As long as it doesn’t cost me any more money. 

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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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Jan
27
2015

How I Learned to Shovel Snow

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70538-11805-103536-1-dudley-do-rightI’ve spent most of my life being capable. Adaptable. Resilient.

I’ve never really been one of those damsel-in-distress-types. But sometimes, I’d really like to slip into that role. I’d really like some Dudley Do-Right to come galloping to my rescue and, like, fix my running toilet or figure out how to move my router.

But because I don’t really come off as needy, I’m generally left to fend for myself. The upside to this is that it means that folks assume I am on top of things. The downside is that I’m outside shoveling snow and trying to start generators with all the husbands while the wives sit inside and watch Kelly and Michael.

And when I was married, I didn’t have to worry about things like snow and generators either. I live in a part of the world where people toe a fairly traditional gender line. Most of the dads go to work in offices and the moms stay home with the kids. Men do the manly things like mow lawns and get rid of dead things that show up in and around their yards and women make dinner and mail out Christmas cards (although I recently met a guy who actually took on that job each year when he was married and I am fascinated by that). Before my husband moved out, I never even touched a snow shovel.

Now I get to be in charge of everything. The lawn. The Christmas cards. Dead things. When I was married, I couldn’t even handle the feel of a dead bunny that weighted down the end of the net I was trying to scoop it out of the pool with. It took me about 20 minutes to stop carrying on and lift the thing out of the water and into the waiting plastic Target bag and then even more time to psych myself up to carry the bag to the trash can in the garage.

Now I’m an expert at removing stuff that ends up dead somewhere in my yard. A few years ago, I even helped my neighbor Susan get rid of some weird dead bat that appeared at the base of the pine tree in her front yard. I went to my house and fetched one of the hundreds of plastic sleeves I store under my kitchen sink that my newspaper is delivered in each day – it’s one of those items I feel compelled to hoard, like shopping bags and shoe boxes (you never know) – and marched back to Susan’s to pick up the bat carcass. I slipped my hand inside the blue plastic bag and picked the bat up off the ground and then pulled the bag back over my hand so that its body fell to the bottom of the bag, which I tied off and handed to Susan to throw into one of her trash cans.

“Tell Michael I said, ‘You’re welcome,’” I told her, since I had just done his job for him.

But my two younger kids and I are staying with Michael and Susan over spring break at their new digs in Hong Kong so I guess the Universe has more than repaid me for helping a brother out and getting rid of the dead bat so that he didn’t have to.

But really, I’m okay with being stuck with the dude jobs around here. Number one, it’s a small price to pay for not having to put up with someone’s shenanigans just because they’re good snow shovelers and number two, it puts my life in more of the Free to Be, You and Me alignment that always appealed to me as a kid.

But it’s still a work in progress.

We woke up this morning to discover that the BLIZZARD OF 2015, the storm that was predicted to dump three feet of snow on my yard that had me out yesterday combing the stores for “D” batteries and loading up on water (I have serious Sandy PTSD), was pretty much a dud. I’m a terrible eyeballer of measurements, but it’s safe to say that we didn’t even get one foot of snow, much less three. But it still needs to be managed. We will still need to get out there and clear the driveway and path to the front door like good citizens.

But I’m sitting here in my bed waiting to see when my neighbor Bill starts to shovel. I use him as my snow removal barometer since he seems to be really on top of this kind of thing. I usually look out our front windows after storms to monitor his activity. I mean, he even owns a snow blower, which is a clear signal that he takes his snow removal very seriously. Until I hear that motor, I know I can remain here tucked under my covers and enjoying the lazy morning like all the other mommies.

My girlfriend across the street – you know, Punky’s mom – texted a little while ago to ask if my little guy would help her teenaged son shovel the driveway of some of our neighbors who are well past the shoveling stage of their lives.

I had also mentioned to my son as he put on his boots that he should also shovel the driveway of the elderly couple next door to us and told him that I would be out in a bit so we could get going on our own driveway.

“What,” he squeaked. “I don’t want to have to shovel three driveways.”

“You’re a dude,” I told him. “Get used to it.”

“That’s so sexist,” the little 12-year-old reminded me and I was like, “Poop.”

So, maybe he’ll live more in a world where men send out Christmas cards and make dinners and women go outside and shovel snow.

Which is where this damsel is headed right now.

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