Author Archives: Amy Byrnes

Oct
13
2017

Friday Faves: Stuff I’m Legit Obsessed With

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Let me just say that when I like something, I really like it. That holds for wine, Game of Thrones and certain ex-boyfriends. Oh, and outerwear. Can’t get enough outerwear.

Lately, I’ve been hot for a bunch of things and it goes without saying that two of them are Seed to Sprout’s Kimchi Rice Bowl (which I’ve eaten from lunch and dinner twice this week) and the pumpkin spice blend at Rook (which is where I’m headed when I’m done writing this). Need. Every. Day.

My kids are ob-sessed with these two condiments from Stonewall Kitchen (which we get at Sickles), which they slather on anything that’s not moving (watch it, puppy!).

Last weekend, my older daughter and I made took some coupons and made our fall pilgrimage to Bath & Body Works for our favorite candles. And even though it hasn’t been really autumnal here until today, that hasn’t kept me from burning this candle 24/7. It just makes me happy and smells better than the lingering stench from my 14yo’s football pads (honestly, that is a seriously smelly sport).

One of the fun things about working at my local athleisure emporium is digging through the online returns bin and finding a pair of shoes (since we don’t sell them in the store). I hit pay dirt recently and found these babies and wear them, literally, every day. Right there, I used the word “literally” in the right context. They are beyond comfortable, match everything and I get compliments galore. I am usually an 8 but my score was an 8.5 and even though the baby manager at the store cursed me for stealing them out from under her, her young feet don’t have the same concerns as my aging tootsies. Plus, they fit great. Buy them and then please write me a thank you note. Or send wine.

Oh, if you’re feeling fat like me and trying to be really good — I mean, really really good — here’s a teeny snack that I nibble on at night and it hits the spot and one bag in a mere 2 grams of sugar, which my friend Dan says is okay if you can’t live without sugar. Which I can’t (sns).

At the end of the summer, my oldest bf (this is not literal) came to visit for the weekend and proved that she is nothing if not a good friend. While I was at work folding leggings one afternoon, she drove around and kept herself busy and when she picked me up, handed me a bag from Lowe’s with a yellow plastic gizmo to unclog my shower drain. After a summer of both my girls home a lot, the shower in my bathroom would fill up like a tub in minutes. I told my pal and she took matters into her own hands. We got home and I was like, “I’m gonna go shove this down the drain,” and she was like, “I’m right behind you.” I unscrewed the drain and jammed the long thing in and gave it a twist and started to pull it back up. When we recovered from the horror that emerged from my shower drain — months and months of hair and soap scum — I asked my friend if she would describe it as the size of a baby squirrel. “No, that was a full-sized squirrel,” she said. Anyway, it’s a horrible reality (and I didn’t even go into the smell that burped its way out of the drain) but a magical way of dealing with it and way cheaper and safer than pouring gallons of Drano down there.

Finally, I am sorry to report that managing my facial hair has become a thing. Or, maybe it’s always been a thing but my uber-magnification mirror has just brought it to my attention. I mean, it’s not baby-squirrel bad, but still. At any rate, I tried scraping it all away for a while with this little gadget. But honestly, it kinda breaks after a few trips around my jawline. So this week, my brow lady suggested I buy this here doohickey and it’s battery operated and makes quick work of my de-whiskering. Am trying to lure aforementioned 14yo into the bright light of my bathroom so I can go to town on his new manly facial fuzz, which gives my beard a run for its money. It’s definitely baby-squirrel sized amount of fuzz I think.

As always, please feel free to share what’s changed your life lately. God know I’m open to any and all possibilities.

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Sep
29
2017

Friday Faves: Jersey Corn Style

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My 20yo, who’s a junior at a big state school, decided last minute to come home last weekend and take a break from exams, projects and weekend daging (day drinking+ rage = daging).

Naturally, one of the the most important topics of conversation as we prepared for her arrival, other than how she was going to snuggle me like a baby otter, was what would be on the menu for the weekend.

While my other children would be totally happy if I told them I’d just order a pizza for Friday night dinner, this girl has higher standards. Even away at school, she and her roommates cook dinner every night and I’m not just talking pasta with a jar of sauce dumped on top of it (which is probably more than I would have ever cooked when I was in college). They make curries and sweet potato hashes and work with ingredients like harissa and tempeh.

I remembered she’d pulled a recipe out of a Real Simple magazine that came over the summer that she’d pinned to the bulletin board in our kitchen but we never got around to making it before she left in late August.

/> Pasta With Chicken Sausage, Corn, Leeks, and Mushrooms https://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/browse-all-recipes/pasta-chicken-sausage-corn-leeks-mushroom

 

I took a picture of it and sent it to her and asked her what she thought and pointed out that one of the ingredients was in season right now here in New Jersey.

That cracked me up.

She arrived home just in time to help put it all together, which was perfect because there was a little bit of chopping involved — especially the leeks — and my hospitality major is a wiz at slicing and dicing things up. I am good at microwaving ears of corn and slicing the sweet, white kernels off the cob. The only change we made is, since we are spicy people, I used a hot chicken sausage. And I’m not super-mushroomy, so I didn’t go nuts with them. Just a handful for flavor.

It was so good. Like, so good. Her older brother arrived home and joined us for dinner and we kept talking about how yummy it all was.

We went out to an early dinner the next night and sat at the bar and drank smoky mezcal margaritas rimmed with some kind of magic dust and ate guacamole and tacos at my new favorite place in Asbury that I can’t stop talking about and honestly, it was a pretty perfect weekend.

I hope yours is, too.

Got a fave? By all means, please share.

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Aug
17
2017

Hair Stories: Who’s Afraid of Some Dirty Hair?

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I’ve teamed up with my pals at Gerber Salon in Keyport, NJ to periodically share my thoughts on beauty (and sometimes lack thereof). 

 

For my first post, I thought I’d let you in on my, well, dirty little secret. 

Dirty Hair, Don't Care

Photo Credit: http://www.ducklingsinarow.com/

HAIR STORIES / VOL 1 “WHO’S AFRAID OF DIRTY HAIR”

I’ve got a confession to make: I try to wash my hair as little as possible. It’s true. I am a dirty birdie. I mean, I also just hate showering in general. Like, I hate getting wet. Maybe I was a cat in a previous life? I do like to curl up in the sun but, to date, have refrained from trying to lick myself clean. I think my aversion to showering might be more indicative of my overall laziness when it comes to personal hygiene. My daily skincare and makeup routines are similarly stingy. I do as little as I can.

But my hair is different. I know that because I actually care about how I look. Vanity is my ultimate motivator. I simply don’t really love how my hair looks when it’s just been washed. It’s all kind of fluffy and resembles my goldendoodle’s puppy hair or, maybe, a baby chick. Plus, if I’m not careful when I blow it dry, the ends of my hair want to bend in and create a bit of the mushroom bob and that is NOT the look I am going for. I try to avoid the Mother-of-Four/Lady-of-a-Certain-Age look as much as possible.

I want my hair a little less perfect than that. A little flatter. More piece-y. I don’t even mind when the ends stick out in different directions. Sure, I use some product on Day 1 to try to mimic that just-slept-on effect – like my Oribe hair cream and texturizing spray – but it’s just not the same. Nothing gives you bedhead better than your actual bed.

I was first inspired to back off daily shampooing by my hair colorist, who is not only a bit of a magician with chemicals – she makes my greys disappear and gives my tresses that golden, sun-kissed look – but is insanely cool. She’s like a rock-and-roll Patricia Clarkson and in the almost 20 years I’ve been letting her have her way with my hair color, she’s never let me down.

She’s tiny with super skinny legs and is always wearing something that I totally admire yet could never pull off. I’m just not that edgy. And her long, blonde hair is always kind of pinned up haphazardly unless she’s wearing it loose and it’s wavy and a little messy and definitely cool. She said that one of her tricks for getting that slightly disheveled, very sexy look was that she doesn’t wash it every day. Or even every other day. She encouraged me to do the same and because I am thoroughly unoriginal and a shameless copycat of those I admire, I gave dirty hair a whirl.

When my hair was longer, I could go legit DAYS without washing and my hair would still look fine. In fact, the only thing that would get me into the shower was when the cowlick on the back of my head would become really pronounced after a few days of feeling its oats. That’s when my teenaged daughters would step in and tell me to wash my hair. When I looked like I’d been sleeping on someone’s couch for a few days or was coming down from a serious bender.

Now that my hair is shorter – I’ve been keeping it a couple of inches past my chin – it seems to require more frequent washings. I can get away with only about two or three days of dirty hair before it’s obvious that something is amiss. When my hair starts getting that oily look it used to get when I’d go, like, a day without washing my hair in high school. Another moment in time my hormone fluctuations were off-the-charts. Only now I fear what’s giving my hair a faintly oily sheen is in fact the last of my estrogen. I believe that’s how it’s making its escape from my body. It’s leaking out of my scalp.

Sadly, the only time I can’t really push my hair-washing boundaries is after a blow out. I can make it last about 48 hours and then it starts looking dirty. Like, too dirty. And I know it’s not just me who thinks so. I tried to keep a blow out going for three days over a girls’ weekend with college friends last year until finally one of my pals told me in no uncertain terms I needed to wash my hair. She actually said, “You need to wash your hair.” Having good friends can hurt sometimes.

My girlfriends closer to home always joke about my propensity for dirty hair. They claim they can’t stretch washings out as long as I do, but they get their hair colored just as much as me. Their hair fibers are up to the challenge. “You need to train your scalp,” I tell them, coaching them to try going just one extra day without washing. But they remain dubious.

Recently, one of those girlfriends – the one who, despite having a serious head of hair, is devoted to daily hair washing – emailed our group the link to a recent article that blasts the whole dirty-hair-is-cool trend called “Are You Not Washing Your Hair Enough?”
“Is this an intervention?” I emailed back, and I was assured by all that it wasn’t. But I’m still not too sure. Maybe it’s hard for them to look at me, or maybe I kinda smell?

I still prefer my hair on Day 2 so will need more evidence from loved ones before feeling compelled to wash it daily. And with the warmer weather coming, I’m about to stop drying my hair altogether and adopt a more au natural look. It will free up even more time for things like writing and checking Facebook.
I mean, who wants to be a slave to her hair? Especially when it looks good? There’s plenty of other stuff to tend to, and if you are a woman of a certain age, you know what I’m talking about. Get your bikini waxed. Your nails did. Your face Botoxed.

Your dirty hair will patiently wait its turn.

This post is sponsored by Gerber Salon in Keyport, NJ, where I visit every 5-6 weeks to worship at the altar of Lorraine’s color magic.

 

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Aug
04
2017

Friday Faves: Stuff I’m Obsessed With This Week

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It’s the first Friday in August but honestly, by this time of the summer, all the days begin to blend. The only way I really can tell it’s the weekend nowadays is that it’s impossible to park near the beach and my adult children — who’ve “moved out” — are standing in my kitchen eating all the Tostitos in the pantry.

I spent some time this week having a mini reunion with a bunch of women I went with to St. Barths last summer. We gathered in Bay Head, a swanky beach town along the Jersey Shore, where one of the girls rents a house for the summer. We tried to relive the magic of the Caribbean via Jersey with cocktails and yummy food and a little late night dancing for good measure (apologies to the neighbors). It wasn’t quite the Beyonce situation that was St. Barths but it wasn’t shabby, either.

My girlfriend owns a store up in Chatham, NJ that sells tons of cute gifts and accessories so I always show up sans jewelry and just pick from her amazing array of baubles. I borrowed the cutest pair of yellow dangly earrings to jazz up the outfit I had on for dinner and briefly contemplated pocketing them the next day to take home. Always the ethicist, I instead asked her if she could get me a pair from her store and she said they were long gone.

“They sell them here in town!” she told me and explained how to navigate my way to the most darling shop (Carrie Dunham, 92 Bridge Ave.) owned by the woman who designs a handbag I have been lusting after for years. Those bags are kinda pricey for me right now so instead I picked up the cutest little polka-dotty number that’s perfect for holding my phone and lipstick when I go out. I was in a hurry when I stopped in and need to get back to give the place a more thorough once over. And a house of my own in Bay Head.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Other stuff I’m heavily into this week:

  • These socks, which stalked me hard on Facebook for so long I finally had to relent and buy them. I know. I’m a part of the problem. But they’re really cute and soft and, what can I say, I’m a sucker. Plus, bumblebees.
  • I am really not into wearing real bras, which may because of all the pinching and wires or also may be because menopause has caused an expansion in that region. Whatever the case, I continue to be obsessed with these bras and we just got some cute colors in at work and had to buy 2 more. They’re not exactly the most supportive and probably not meant to be worn out to dinner but that’s just how I’m rolling these days.
  • I’m on a bit of a Netflix role and cranked through “Friends From College” in no time and am now working on “Ozark,” even though it got iffy reviews. I mean, anything with Laura Linney in it can’t be all bad. And it’s not.
  • No week is complete without a good cat video.
  • There are some mornings this summer when I wake up and look in the bathroom mirror that I’m surprised a glass of rose isn’t staring back at me. Between bars hawking “froze” and “Rose All Day” memes, it’s, like, everywhere. It stands to reason that they’d start selling the stuff in cans and now, they do. I picked up a 4-pack to bring with me to Bay Head and it was quite the hit. I mean, who doesn’t want to drink their fizzy cocktails out of straws? It’s just plain festive.
  • Finally, last Friday my Lady-cation pals and I went into NYC to see “Come From Away” on Broadway. We had gone on an adventure to Newfoundland last year and — after doing some shots and kissing a cod — have come to think of ourselves as honorary islanders. The show focuses on the days after Sept. 11, after 7,000 people flying that terrible day were diverted to the island and taken in by a small town there. It’s a fascinating bit of history and if you can’t actually get to Newfoundland, probably the next best thing. Plus, it’s trendy.

What are you obsessed with? Please share in the comments below because I’m always looking for a new bee in my proverbial bonnet.

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Jul
28
2017

Moving to a New House: The Final Act

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When she came home at the end of the school year in May to find moving boxes still on the floor of her mother’s office and pictures stacked against the walls, my youngest daughter finally realized she needed to take matters into her own hands.

By that point, we’d been in the new house for well over a year and had ample time to settle in. We’d bought it in the beginning of 2016 and officially moved in that March, but some remodeling continued through April. So, while there were new carpets and refinished hardwood flooring and pretty much every square inch of wall space and trim had a fresh coat of paint, I still couldn’t bring myself to hang pictures on the walls or find a home for boxes of knickknacks I’d dragged from our old house.

In the past, my home interior design aesthetic veered towards the busy; I loved color and patterns and whimsy and never met a picture frame or window treatment I didn’t love. But in the new house I was hoping to tame those baser instincts and instead go for a cleaner, more grown up (if you will) vibe. I painted all the walls a pale, pale greige and only put blinds on a few windows for privacy purposes. I had no problem unpacking boxes of pots and pans and office supplies, but had no idea what to do with all the sentimental doodads I’d amassed over the years, which then sat on the floor of my office for months.

I had a big moving box filled with all the photo albums I carefully curated throughout the 1990s to document my children’s lives — which they then thoughtlessly pulled apart in the following decade — leaving countless empty plastic sleeves and visual gaps between Christmases and Easters of long ago. There were smaller boxes filled with all the overflow photos from a time when you’d pay a little extra to get doubles when you got your film developed, and then ended up with more copies than you’d ever need of people looking away at the last minute or errant fingertips.

Another box contained binders full of news clips I’d written over the years. Carefully clipped articles I wrote for my college newspaper were stuffed in folders alongside pieces I’d written for journalism courses, typed on thin sheets of typing paper with comments along the margins from various professors who suggested stronger ledes or less adjectives when describing, say, the university’s mineral collection.

And then there was the box holding all the weird chatchkas I’d assembled over the last 25 years. The colorful collection of wooden cats my younger daughter and I had taken to bringing home for each other from trips; the street sign from the first house we lived in the town we’ve called home for almost 23 years; a jar of seaglass I gathered off Stanley Beach on our last day in Hong Kong, amazed that there could be so much worn down glass in one place – a seemingly never-ending supply – and wondering how exactly the Chinese people disposed of glass bottles and jars; and a weird amount of signs with positive affirmations folks have given me over the years ranging from “Don’t Forget to be Awesome” to “The Ocean Fixes Everything.”

As is my wont, I learned to accept the boxes and wall hangings that took up a fair amount of real estate in my new office and went about starting and abandoning a host of other projects. It’s pretty standard that I’d go through the entire moving process – from getting my old house ready to sell to packing up 13-years’-worth of Legos and hair elastics to overseeing a new kitchen and bathroom remodel – but stall at the very end. Like, after picking out cabinets and appliances, why was it so hard to hang things on the walls?

One of the things I love about our new house is that it has lots of nooks and crannies for people to get lost in. It’s a Tudor-style built in 1929 and unlike houses built today, with big open spaces, our house has lots of clearly-defined rooms separated by walls and doorways. And while we struggled in the bedroom department – I needed to figure out how to stuff 5 grown people into 3 bedrooms – there was a fair amount of living space to spread out in.

Initially, I thought I’d make the sunny room running along the back of the house another place to watch TV. The former owners took advantage of the great light the room gets at all hours of the day and used it as a kind of sun porch; a great place to sit and chat or read or watch TV. But I already had one or two of those rooms and really, who even watches TV on a TV nowadays? Then, when I was trying to figure out where to set up my writing desk and wondering whether I could squeeze it into this new sitting room, it occurred to me that THE WHOLE ROOM COULD BE MINE. I could make it my office and fill it with all the things I love: my books, my pictures and my doodads.

I bought a couple of bookcases from Ikea (the Liatorp) to hold all my books and my printer and some office supplies. A set of drawers from World Market to store smaller supplies and stuff like notecards and stamps. And a super groovy and comfortable Lucite desk chair from IKEA that balances the heavy desk that was from my younger sister’s childhood bedroom but that I’ve repainted and repurposed a number of times since I acquired it 25 years ago.

And then, I proceeded to store anything I didn’t know what to do with in the room for six more months until I bought a reading chair from Ballard Design and needed to make room for its arrival. It’s my dream piece of furniture. Something I’ve lusted after for years. I fantasized about curling up on a cold winter afternoon to read a good book or propping myself up on pillows to work on my laptop. In other words, it would become my downstairs bed.

But to prepare for my beloved’s arrival, I needed to get hella boxes out of my office and this coincided with my younger girl’s arrival home for the summer, who helped get my butt into gear. She’s super a little bit bossy and a lot taller than I am so she uses that height to her advantage. She’s all about threats and intimidation. She said she’d help me create a picture gallery on the wall near my desk but told me that first, I had to get to work unpacking those final boxes.

So one weekend in May, I got tough on a lot of the crap I’d been hanging onto for years and filled up a number of contractor’s bags with signs about cats and picture frames I bought at Marshall’s in the late ‘90s. Then, I went to Target and bought a long storage piece with 8 baskets into which I shoved all the photos and wooden cats and other things I couldn’t figure out what to do with but wasn’t willing to part with, either.

And then we went through all the pictures stacked on the floor and finally found places to hang them on walls throughout the house. When we were done, all that was left was my collection of really special pieces that friends and family had given to me that I’d been dreaming of making a wall gallery out of for years next to my desk.

So that’s what we did. We spread them out of the now-clear floor of my office to figure out how they should be grouped and when it seemed a little finky (adj: a word used by a friend’s mother to mean not enough or sparse or just plain lacking in something), we grabbed things off my bookshelves to give a little oomph to the project. I threw in a sign my baby from another lady embroidered for me along with that old street sign and grabbed my favorite sign about teenagers that sat on the windowsill in my old kitchen for years. We finished it off with a random mirror I bought at an antiques store last summer in Woodstock when I had visions of recreating the amazing Airbnb we stayed in; and finally, we added a framed illustrated print my bestie gave me of all-time-favorite books from my childhood (hello Forever).

To make sure the display would transfer from the floor to the intended wall, my daughter traced each object on a big roll of brown paper, which she then cut out and arranged on the wall using blue painter’s tape. We moved them around a bit and adjusted the spacing and when we thought it looked just right, used Command Strips to hang everything up on the wall. That part was my girl’s job because she is all about measuring tape and a level and I am all about taking chances and regret.

We kinda think we killed it.

We were so impressed with ourselves, we made another gallery situation on another wall in the office, this time using picture frames I’d bought at Target, like, three years ago that sat in the basement of my old house. Sadly, they’ve been up for about two months and – true to form – I still haven’t put pictures in them. The daughter is not pleased.

And for our final act, we decided that all the remaining signs of affirmation and children’s artwork I’ve been clinging to all these years would look perfect on the stairway leading down to the basement.

And it does (although this picture is horrible due to the tight angle of the stairway).

We’ve taken a break from our mad wall gallery making and buying bulk packs of Command Strips at Costco. I’m thinking we might be at our gallery limit for one house but then again, I am a firm believer that you can never have enough of a good thing. I’ve got my eye on the wall along the stairway leading upstairs or maybe on one of the halls on our upstairs landing, which remain blank while I ponder my options.

Obviously, I need to hurry up and make up my mind about what I want to do before the girl goes back to school next month because I have no idea how to work a level. Or measure, for that matter.

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Jul
25
2017

The Dog Days of Summer

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This summer, when he’s not working out with the freshman football team or playing basketball or trying to get something popping most nights of the week, my 14yo son has been making his way through all 8 seasons of That ‘70s Show.

It’s impressive watching the kid plow through all 200 episodes, which — at 22-minutes apiece — clock in at around 73.33 hours. At the rate he’s going, I’m feeling confident he’ll be done by the end of the month. Maybe even this week, if he really buckles down.

He should be this dedicated to his summer reading.

Honestly, this has never been a show on my radar. I mean, I know it’s how Ashton met Mila and where that chick from Orange is the New Black got her Big Break. But it ran from 1998 through 2006 and coincided with some of my prime baby making years. Or, if I wasn’t exactly making a baby, then I was nursing it or cleaning it or driving it to preschool. In other words, I was too busy for TV back then.

Funny story: some time during that period, the house phone rang a little after 9 p.m. and it was another man in town looking to talk to my husband.

“He’s asleep,” I told the guy, annoyed that he’d even be calling the house so late.

“Is he okay?” the man, who only had one child, asked in alarm.

What I should have said was, “OF COURSE HE’S OKAY. HE’S JUST EXHAUSTED. WE’RE ALL EXHAUSTED AROUND HERE AND CAN’T WAIT TO LIE DOWN AS SOON AS WE CAN AND NOT HAVE TO, LIKE, WIPE HINEYS OR CLEAN BITS OF CHEESE OFF THE FLOOR UNDER THE HIGHCHAIR.”

What I probably did was laugh and say he was fine and had just fallen asleep a little early. I probably failed to mention that I wasn’t that far behind him.

So now, thanks to Hulu, I guess I’m making up for lost TV time. It seems at all hours of the day the “Hanging Out” theme some is playing in our TV room followed by about 21 minutes of double entendres and a cheesy laugh track. Every once in a while I find myself pausing as I go past the room and watch for a minute or two. The characters always seem to be hanging out on couches in someone’s basement and talking about getting laid. Or not getting laid. Or wanting to get laid.

I forget how racy primetime TV has gotten over the years. Cheers and The Cosby Show seem downright Disney-like compared to what aired in the following decade.

And I wonder, not for the first time, whether I should suggest that my child get off the couch and go find something better to do. But that’s the great thing about my youngest. When I strongly suggest ask him to do something, he usually just does it. I pop my head in and tell him he’s had enough TV for the day and to go outside and throw the lacrosse ball around and he says, “Okay, Mom,” and turns off the TV and goes out into the heat of the day.

In short time I hear the TV go on again in the TV room and I go in to investigate and find what looks like a scene from a soft porn movie unfolding on my flat screen TV with my 20yo watching from the couch. She’s been bingeing the HBO series “True Blood” and with 80 approximately 60-minute episodes, is giving her little brother a run for his money as she wiles away the hours watching television when she’s not at work or food shopping for me. There are shoes scattered all over the small room and an empty plate on the coffee table from the muffin she ate for breakfast hours earlier.

Unlike earlier summers, I’m trying to be a little less agitated about all the TV watching, provided the children are doing all the other things they really are supposed to be doing. Sure, I’d rather they still just watched shows on Animal Planet or better yet, read a book. But that ball’s in their court now. I’ve modeled plenty of good reading behavior over the years and monitored their TV viewing when they were younger with the same zeal Tipper Gore brought to what the youth of our nation could listen to in the late ’80s.

And, with everybody growing up and moving out, it’s only a matter of time before the only sound in the house will be my fingers on the laptop or my dog crying to come sit with me.

I guess the good news is that all this TV-watching gives our puppy someone to snuggle next to and helps him forget that I’m in another part of the house, trying to write.

And not get distracted by the television.

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Jul
21
2017

Friday Faves: Things I’m Obsessed With This Week

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Friends, I know. I am a terrible pen pal. Honestly, this is probably why I don’t have any friends from grammar school. I’m just not great at staying in touch.

But I’m trying to turn over a new leaf.  I’m going to attempt to lift this blog from the hot and humid ashes of New Jersey in July on a little more regular basis. I’m hoping this doesn’t go the way of my knitting career or the time I thought I’d learn to speak Italian. Let’s just say, I remain monolingual.

So while I’m figuring out how to tell you about my second child moving out of the house recently or the surgery I had on my old lady foot, I thought I’d share a few things I am ob-sessed with lately. Here they are in absolutely no particular order:

  • Melissa Clark’s new cookbook, Dinner: Changing the Game. Historically, I’ve stopped actually cooking dinner — like, chopping or roasting — by this time in July. Usually by this point of summers past, we’re eating a lot of hamburgers or takeout. And I can’t tell you the last time I bought a cookbook and back in the day, I used to buy a lot of them. But with the interweb, I find there’s no need to pay for something when you can get it for free online. But this book is worth it and full of tons of great dinner ideas. So far we’ve made both the Harissa Chicken (you can get harissa at Trader Joe’s) and Sausage and Cauliflower (with cumin and Turkish pepper — which you can get at World Market) twice, but my 20yo has gone through and marked about a dozen other recipes with post it notes.
  • Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid. I’m on a reading roll and in under three days gobbled this slim novel that weaves a little magical realism with the story of a city under siege and the plight of refugees.
  • Broken Open, by Elizabeth Lesser. This is literally (okay, not literally) the Bible for figuring out how to make lemonade out of the lemons that life throws your way. I read it 8 or 9 years ago when my marriage was falling apart yet for some reason, it resonates even more now. The quote from Anais Nin in the book’s prelude says it all: “And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
  • This Ted Talk video. 
  • This New Yorker cartoon.
  • Selina Meyer. I’ve been watching Season 5 of Veep and during each episode, think, “I need to write down some of these lines.” The things they say are off-the-charts hilarious and vulgar. But neither pen nor paper was required to remember this beauty, which I’ve used already on numerous occasions (if you don’t like cursing, please do not click).

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Jul
05
2017

Amateur Psychology

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Lately, I’ve discovered that all the hours of therapy I’ve been paying for over the last decade have really started to pay off. Sure, working with a mental health professional on a fairly regular basis has helped me start to sort out complicated feelings I have about all the people in my life. It’s helped me begin to figure out what the story it is I’m telling myself about lots of different situations, and then try to dig into exactly why I’m perceiving certain things and what I can do about shifting those narratives. Pretty much, my therapist helps me figure out how I’m contributing to conflict, why that is and how I can change.

Believe me, it’s all a work in progress.

But even though I’ve still got a lot of work to do, I find that I’ve absorbed enough basic information that I’m able to channel my inner-therapist when I’m working in the dressing room at the athlesiure emporium where I work part time folding leggings and dispensing free counseling to our customers. When it comes to trying on swimsuits, women require a lot of hand holding and it turns out, a lot of them feel really bad about the way they look. In memoriam, Nora Ephron should have felt pretty great that she only felt bad about her neck.

I can’t tell you how many women apologize to me for their bodies before they even pull the curtain back to show me how they look in whatever they’ve tried on. Like, even women in really amazing shape whose bodies I would kill for tell me they hate trying on swimsuits. “Et tu?” I think. Like, please don’t tell me that because that means the rest of us are screwed.

They tell me they’re going to lose 10 pounds or they haven’t been able to get to the gym or that breastfeeding their babies was the death knell to their once-perky boobies.

“Stop!!” I tell them. “You look great!”

Then I assess the situation as the swimsuit professional that I now am, and maybe we decide to try a bigger bottom or a smaller top. Maybe, I bring her a few different styles to see if she feels a little more comfortable in one of them. I want to help them feel and look good and sometimes, I feel like a customer is really feeling it and other times, I think it’s what it must feel like to be my therapist listening to me unable to let go of my past. She’d probably like to shake me and tell me to snap out of it much the same way I’d like to tell some of the women I help that having a flat butt is not the end of the world. That she needs to move on and stop staring at her rearview in the mirror.

For a lot of the younger women who come in and complain about their shifting midsections, I find myself playing the role of the Ghost of Summer Future and urging them to enjoy their current tummy situations and warning of what’s to come. “How old are you?” I’ll ask the young mommy, who’s usually somewhere in her early 40s. Sometimes they balk before telling me they’re, like, 42 — as if they’re sorry about that, too — and I tell them I’d kill to be 42. Then, like a real spook, I’ll tell her how shifting hormones and a slowing metabolism will begin to wreak havoc on once-trim tummies as they move towards menopause. Well, at least it did for me.

I mean, it doesn’t help that I offset lots of protein-laden smoothies and kale salads I eat daily with pizza and ice cream every now and then that camouflages the results of all my squatting and crunching. Somewhere under all that blubber I have some really strong stomach muscles just kind of hanging out incognito.

And this is where I need to take a good look at myself in the full-length mirror and say, “Amateur Doctor, heal thyself.” Because even though I’m telling everyone they look great – and I really mean that because aren’t we all beautiful just the way we are? – inside I’m no better than the rest of womankind. I hate that I’ve gained weight over the last few years and that none of my usual tricks are working in the fight to slim down. I hate catching a glimpse of myself in a mirror as I’m scurrying around at work helping other women feel good about themselves, only to see the dimpling in my upper arms or the love handles bulging through my workout top.

And all that feeling bad about myself makes me angry. Am I seriously going to waste whatever time it is I have left on this earth trying to conform to some bullshit cultural fantasy about how I should look, despite bringing four children into this world and hoping for a legacy beyond how I looked in a swimsuit?

It makes me think of a conversation I listened to not long ago between Ann Lamott and Kelly Corrigan, both of whom I love for their very realness. Like if I was ever interviewed by The New York Times for their weekly By the Book feature in the Sunday Book Review – and got to answer the perennial “which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite to a literary dinner party you’re organizing?” – these two would be in the running. I think we’d get along great and eat lots of bread together while laughing about the stupid patriarchy.

Ann talked about her own struggles with appearance — her thighs and arms in particular — and remembered a shopping trip she took with a dear friend, Pammy, who was just weeks away from succumbing to breast cancer at 37 and leaving a young daughter behind. The two went off to Macy’s to find Ann a dress for a date, with Pammy in a wheelchair wearing a wig. Ann came out of the changing room and asked whether the dress she was wearing made her thighs look big. “Annie, you don’t have that kind of time,” Pammy told her and Ann says that was like her Helen Keller-WATER moment. That moment when everything came together and she just got it like Keller recognizing that Annie Sullivan was squeezing the word “water” into her hand.

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting to have that kind of denoument. Case in point: while getting ready for the beach yesterday, I struggled to find the right bathing suit to wear. Lately, I’ve been favoring a black, strapless one-piece number from JCrew to keep the whole midsection situation under wraps. While my shoulders are nice and tan, I hate how pale the rest of me looks and wanted to start evening things out and yesterday was forecast to be long on sunshine. But I also knew that the beach would be packed like Coney Island and pretty much every person in my town would be there and obviously judging my less-than-toned-tummy (honestly, the ego can be so stupid).

I slipped into a swimsuit top I bought recently at my store. I’d been eyeing the twisty maroon number for a while and when it seemed that it might get sold out, tried it on one day when I was there shopping for swimsuits for my older daughter. One of my cute young managers came in to see how it looked and I found myself apologizing to her as I held the dressing room curtain in front of my torso.

“You look great!” she said, and even though the top really did fit well – my girls were tucked in and not jumping out like dolphins playing along the surf – I didn’t want her to see what was happening down below. I didn’t want her to know the truth about my bloated belly or pale, mottled thighs. “Stop!” she said, and told me to buy the top.

I called my daughter upstairs yesterday morning to assess my situation. I asked her if I looked terrible in the two-piece. “You look fine,” she told me. “Your stomach is just really white,” which I took as code for: DO NOT SUBJECT THE WORLD TO YOUR MIDSECTION.

Instead, I put on my dependable black tankini top and some jazzy floral bottoms and spent much of the day pulling the fabric up while lying prone to expose my white belly – the same one that cooked four little beings into tender golden morsels – when I thought nobody was looking. I ended the day with a red, painful square of burned skin that just makes my tummy look really, really angry. Honestly, I just need to go get a good spray tan and call it a day.

Obviously, I still have a lot of work to do in the body image department. I still have a long way to go before I give a fig about what other people think about how I look, which probably comes down to that they’re so busy struggling with their own body stuff, they don’t have time to think about me and my almost 51-year-old physique.

Ironically, it’s the older women who come in to the changing room to try stuff on who don’t give a hoot about how they look. They’re certainly not apologizing before they emerge from behind the curtain and sometimes, they don’t even close the curtain. Recently, a cute, little 70-something with a salt-and-pepper pixie cut had me stand by while she slipped on a pair of capris, which she quickly deemed perfect and chatted with me for a bit while standing in her skivvies before handing me the bottoms and getting dressed. She was trim and had obviously spent some time in the sun (note to self) but she looked like 70-something lady and didn’t seem to care about wrinkles or dimpling. She just needed some comfy pants.

And maybe that’s what it’s going to take for me to have my WATER moment. To get to the point that I realize I just don’t have that kind of time to worry about what I look like. I like exercising and eating healthy, but also like pizza and ice cream, and wonder when I’m lying on my death bed if I’m going to wish I’d had better abs when I was 50. Somehow, I think not.

But, as is often the case, it’s so much easier to solve other people’s problems. It’s so much easier to hold other people’s hands and tell them they are perfect just the way they are than to really feel that about myself. In the meantime, if you’re in the market for a swimsuit, the doctor is in.

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Jun
22
2017

Adios, Middle School

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If my calculations are correct – and really, feel free to check because I am not known for counting, much less calculating – my youngest child’s last day of 8th grade this week brings our family’s 19 years in our town’s public school system to a close and ends what for me has been a lovely era of my life.

Of course, that’s how I remember it now. It’s easy to feel all gooey about school Halloween parades of days gone by from the comfort of the cozy chair in my office. Back then, I could have done without having to find a parking spot about a mile from the school (#alwayslate) and hauling myself – and whoever I was pushing in the stroller or dragging by their sticky little hand – behind the elementary school to squeeze through the crowd so that our little cherub dressed as a ninja/ghoul/sexy witch could see us as he/she made their way along the parade path.

As you would expect, I am a very different person now as a 50-year-old lady than I was when my oldest started kindergarten in 1998. I was 32 with three little kids at home and kinda excited about letting somebody else take care of at least one of my children for a part of the day. I was getting tired of filling those days with story time at the library and hauling everyone in and out of the car seats in our mini van for a trip to the grocery store. And, I thought, it would be nice to go to the gynecologist without hearing a small voice close to my feet trapped high up in the stirrups saying in horror, “Mom … your fanny” (I did not make that up).

Alas, our town still had half-day kindergarten back then, so it wasn’t until the kids hit first grade that I started to see some relief of the constant mothering. In fact, about 10 years later, and after about 16 years home with children full time, I ended up shipping my fourth off to a full-day program when our town’s half-day situation just wasn’t enough. Let me tell you, that little bus that came and scooped him up every morning and then deposited him home nice and tired in the afternoon probably saved at least two of my older children’s lives.

When the oldest began kindergarten, I think I was about as clueless as he was in the ways of Big Kid School. I had no idea how things worked. I mean, I was still trying to figure out preschool. For instance, I didn’t realize that those pastel-colored flyers that came home in my son’s backpack at the end of each day, tucked between pages of penciled letters and numbers, contained vital information. Back before school websites and CODE RED ALERT texts and emails, moms had to rely on finding and retrieving sheets of paper to find out, say, when to expect Back-to-School-Night.

I learned about my child’s first back to school night while standing one morning at the bus stop when another mom – you know, the kind of mom who somehow made you feel bad about these things – informed me it was later that evening. The same night I had plans to take a train into the city to meet my old work-wife for some fancy fashion thing she’d asked me to, and I cried at the conundrum; the injustice of something standing in between me and a night away from washing squirming little bodies and enjoying conversation about things other than children’s sleeping habits and grisly details about a recent stomach virus.

In the end, I put on a pair of high heels and toddled into the city for a lovely, grown-up evening, but inside I felt like a Bad Mom. Way before it was cool to be a Bad Mom.

And who knows? Maybe it made me an even Better Mom. I certainly never missed another back-to-school night, and with four kids, I had a lot of them.

Of course, I still have four more years of Back-to-School nights when my youngest enters high school in the fall. But there are plenty of things – annual events and activities – that have defined the pattern of the school year around here for as long as I can remember. Some ended when the kids timed out of our elementary school and moved to the middle school in fifth grade, and some have been traditions since our family’s Ice Age. Here are a few:

  • Box Tops: For as long as I can remember, I have religiously clipped little squares off boxes of cereal and Ziploc products to earn the kids’ schools 10-cents-per-square. I even bought toilet paper megapacks at Costco for the bonus 5-Box Top coupon. I’d tuck them in a sandwich bag taped to a side cabinet near my sink in the old house and send them in when the bag got full. In the new house, the Box Tops started in a sandwich bag in our junk drawer and now they seemed to have spilled out and float amongst all the rubberbands, matchbooks and mystery screws. Let me know if you’d like them.
  • Band and chorus concerts: Since 2001, when my oldest was in third grade, spring and holiday music concerts have been a staple in our school calendar. Singing and learning to play an instrument wasn’t even an option for the kids. It’s something I made sure they did, with varying success. My oldest daughter swears she mimicked playing the clarinet throughout middle school, and my younger daughter used her reluctance to play an instrument as an excuse for her near-daily visits to our school nurse during my divorce. After my umpteenth visit to discuss my girl’s agita, the nurse patted my hand and said, “Mom, let go of the flute.” And so I did. But I’ll miss sitting in a darkened gym listening to a bunch of kids play the theme from Star Wars and marveling how the music teachers get them to do that when I can’t even get my own kids to learn what day to put the garbage out. What I won’t miss is the panic that set in the morning of pretty much every concert ever looking for black bottoms and white shirts that fit and weren’t a wrinkled mess.
  • Class trips: Back in the day, every grade piled into a bus and went somewhere over the course of the school year and as a busybody parent who was often and Class Mom for one of my kids, I often got to tag along. Over the years, I went pumpkin picking and visited museums both near (in Newark) and far (Natural History in NYC) and a zoo in The Bronx. We visited sites of historical significance and attended local performances of The Nutcracker. I sat at long tables in museum basements that smelled of old sandwich to eat our bagged lunches and got to know the kids’ teachers and their classmates. Later, I’d do overnight stints with my three older kids to a state park where they performed team-building exercises and square danced in the lodge at night. I rode along on the bus for a few nights in Washington, DC with my daughters and chatted with parents and teachers as we herded our group of teenagers through our nation’s capitol like a litter of kittens through a yarn factory. My most recent chaperoning gig was to Six Flags with our middle school band and really, nothing brings two mothers together like a rollercoaster ride packed amongst a bunch of overheated teenaged boys on a 90-plus degree day in May. I’ll always remember the taste of that freshly-baked cider donut they handed out after picking pumpkins with my daughter’s first grade class, or all the snow that fell the year my younger daughter’s seventh grade class had their three-day outdoor adventure in the woods. How it floated down as we hiked to our various activities, crunching under our boots and added magic to an already special outing. But mostly I’m thankful that all those trips let me get to know so many of the teachers who were an important part of my children’s lives.
  • First day of school: Before we had to worry about maniacs coming into our schools – when parents could just pop through the front door to drop off homework and lunches without undergoing a screening process akin to trying to visit an inmate at Riker’s – parents would gather each year in the multi-purpose room of our elementary school to watch our kids line up with their classmates on the first day of school. They’d form little clusters along the walls with nametags pinned to their crisp polo shirts and sundresses – clutching their new Transformer and Lisa Frank backpacks – to meet their new teachers. At the appointed hour, they’d rise and line up and say the Pledge of Allegiance and sing a few patriotic songs and every year, as I stood packed in the room surrounded by all those little voices, I’d lose it. Nothing makes me choke up like a rousing rendition of “You’re a Grand Ol’ Flag.” Then they’d file out to start their new school year and I’d wipe my eyes and go home and get on with my day, happy to have one less person in my shopping cart.
  • Everything else: Field days, Christmas tree lightings, Memorial Day parades and band performances, Family Fun Night (an oxymoron if ever there was one), Art shows, Book fairs, fruit sales, Rec sports and summer camp, paper report cards (RIP), picture day, bake sales, aforementioned Halloween parade, school dances, our 8th grade graduation ceremony and probably lot of other things I’ve already forgotten.

Now that all four of my kids have graduated, it’s probably time for me to graduate from middle school, as well. I knew it was time, too, when I realized not long ago that I’d become one of those parents who was resistant to change. Who liked things just the way they were. The same ones who annoyed me when I was a young upstart and thought some of our school traditions needed tweaking. Now, some of my beloved traditions are starting to change and I’m glad to be getting out when I am and before I say something I regret on Facebook.

Now, there are probably only a handful of parents left in the school system who remember that sweet first day of school ceremony for the little kids or even paper flyers. Who filled out forms for countless gift wrap and cookie dough fundraisers or manned the sand art room at the dreaded Family Fun Night. We are a dying breed. The Brontosauruses and T-Rexes of our school system.

To all you younger parents I say: take good care of our schools. Go the the art shows and encourage your kids (boys, especially) to sing in the chorus. Volunteer when you can. Get to know the teachers. Even run for the school board. It all seems like such a pain now, but I promise you’ll never regret it. All the concerts and tree lightings and meetings will add up to countless happy memories. At least they did for me, times two (I think I just did algebra).

Everything looks shiny as I look behind me. Everything, that is, except Family Fun Night. That just made me sweat.

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Jun
12
2017

Letting It Go

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Two of my kids embarked on very different adventures recently and all I could do was hope that one of them posted a photo or two on social media so that I knew he was still alive. But, this being 2017, if the kids did post anything on social media, it would be on Snapchat – where I’ve been blocked from seeing either’s Snap story – or on their Insta story, where I have also been banned. So basically, I was just hoping for the best for a few days.

While it’s just a weird coincidence that the trips overlapped, I’m beginning to understand that I compensated for not having any control over one of the trips by crazily micromanaging the other. I don’t think my youngest child – a boy who taught himself to tie his own shoes and ride a bike when he determined at a young age that everyone around him was too distracted to step in and help – had received that much attention since the time he fell as a toddler and knocked his tooth back up into his gums. You can always count on blood to get me to sit up and take notice.

My oldest left for an overnight flight to Barcelona for a week’s vacation with a friend, and I didn’t even know what airline they were flying on. I mean, I know he mentioned it at some point, but I was busy trying to memorize other details, like arrival and departure dates and where they were staying. So I guess that fairly major one slipped through my mental cracks. I tried Googling it but didn’t have much luck finding a flight that left Newark bound for Spain at 11 p.m. the night he left.

After about 10 minutes of searching, I realized I was running behind schedule if I was going to prepare the special breakfast I’d promised – a porkroll and egg sandwich – for my 14yo who was leaving early for the iconic 8th grade trip to Washinton, DC for three days.

I’d gone on that same trip with his two older sisters years earlier and had hoped to continue the tradition this year with my baby, my one-last-middle-school-hurrah. Alas, the administration did not feel equally nostalgic about inviting me to come along. In an uncharacteristically organized and prompt manner, I’d sent an email to the principal on the first day of school announcing my desire to chaperone the trip and enumerating my many qualifications. I hit SEND and then sat back and waited for my anointment.

Instead, I got a note from the school secretary about a month later thanking me for my interest but informing me that there just wasn’t enough room to accommodate all of the requests they received.

“Don’t they know who you are?” my 20yo daughter asked in horror when I reported my rejection over glasses of rose.

“Apparently not,” I told her, taking a long sip. “It seems I’ve been running on fumes these last few years and I got passed over.”

Note to younger parents interested in nabbing a future spot as a school trip chaperone: you’re only as good as the last fundraiser you ran. Or race you organized. Or three-years spent on your school board (that was my golden ticket for a number of years).

I’d run into other moms of other 8th grade boys at our local Bilabong store where we all flocked after learning our sons needed to wear collared shirts for touring, and we agreed that boys were so easy to dress. I ended up buying my guy three pairs of shorts and two shirts and honestly, I won’t have to buy him any more clothes until he transitions to longer pants in, like, December.

I brought his bag of new clothes into my room for safekeeping, so the crisp new shorts and shirts with tags wouldn’t get swept up into the detritus littering his floor or, one of his favorite tricks, stuffed into his dirty laundry hamper. Later that night, I laid them all out on my bed and added underwear and socks to create an outfit for each day, which I then showed my son before packing into his suitcase.

“Should I get post it notes?” he asked, obviously getting into having a mom who does things like, pack his suitcase and create outfits for him.

Earlier, we’d gone to pick up some snacks and beauty items for him to take and we unwrapped the zit cream from its package and popped it into his dopp kit along with his deodorant and sunscreen. I could tell he was taking it all a little more seriously than his usual slapdash packing jobs – you should see the crumbled mass of clothing he brought with us for a recent long weekend in Boston – because he was even packing a toothbrush. He didn’t bother to bring one to Boston.

In the meantime, I kept an eye on the clock and considered the best time to text my oldest to give him a speech about safety overseas without coming off as crazy or, worse, that I didn’t have faith in his decision making abilities.

I’d messaged him on Facebook an article I’d seen earlier in the week about what to do in the event you find yourself in a terror attack. Tips like “Don’t use the elevator, take the stairs instead,” and “Don’t play dead.” Useful things like that. But just six months ago, the kids and I had spent a lovely afternoon walking over the London Bridge and poking around nearby Borough Market – eating Scottish quail eggs over greens and crisp Asian dumplings – before we headed to a nearby pub for a pint. The same path terrorists recently took to attack innocent people. Tourists like us.

So of course, I worry.

This isn’t the first time one of my children has traveled to another country solo. Both my girls – who are bookended by their brothers – flew to Europe over spring break with their high school during their respective junior years. This spring break, my younger girl visited Italy as part of a class she was taking in college to study European hospitality. She initially balked at my request that she text from time to time to just let me know she was alive but in the end, we were in constant communication.

I saw her on Instagram sitting with the hills of Tuscany in the distance and she texted photos of amazing meals she was enjoying . Thanks to SnapChat, I also saw her holding one of those giant drinks – you know, the kind that comes with a bunch of straws – late at night surrounded by a bunch of other kids. Apparently, hospitality was alive and well in Tuscany.

I was happy she was having fun but also couldn’t stop thinking about that Amanda Knox documentary I watched on Netflix and tried to slide in texts to her like, “Fun! Don’t leave the bar with a stranger!” and “TTYL! Oh, and pay attention if you wake up and there’s blood all over your bathroom!” I tried to be cool, I threw in some emojis for good measure, but it’s hard as a mom not to worry about your kids getting, like, implicated for murder in a foreign country and shit.

When my older daughter went to Italy during high school, things were pretty chaotic at our house. By then I was divorced and working full time at a relentless job and had four kids in four different schools and – as an added bonus – three teenagers living under my roof. This was probably around the time that the baby took matters into his own hands and learned to do things for himself.

After my daughter left, I realized I had no idea when she was expected to return. I mean, I knew the day – thank God – but not the time the buses would pull back into the high school parking lot. School was closed for the break and I didn’t really know any of the other parents well enough to call up and make a joke about the whole thing. No one who would laugh and be all like, “Been there.”

No, instead I had to call the parents of a boy with whom my daughter had gone to grammar school. The kind of parents that really seems to have their act together. The kind of family that sends all three of its children to Ivy League schools. The dad, who I knew even less well than the mom, answered the phone and had a hard time hiding his dismay when I confessed my sin. “It’s in all the paperwork,” he told me.

“LOL. Paperwork,” I thought, wondering how I could still have in my possession Bed, Bath & Beyond coupons that expired three years earlier and not papers containing vital information for this Italy trip.

The dad gave me the arrival time and then assured me it was accurate as he’d confirmed when his son called the day before. Then it was my turn to hide my surprise that he’d actually heard from his child on the trip. All I got was radio silence and then some some slightly stale biscotti upon my daughter’s return.

I mentioned all this to my friend Dan, how I worried about my oldest navigating a foreign city and whether I’d taught him everything he needed to know to stay safe.

“That’s how we learn,” Dan reminded me, and I thought about my own maiden voyage overseas. How, following a terrible breakup, I enlisted a pal to travel super-low-budget to Europe for 10 days and, having only been on a few jaunts to Florida during high school, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. And that was 100 years before the Internet and cell phones.

We were so clueless, we even got on line as soon as we entered the International Terminal at JFK to have our baggage searched, not realizing it was for people flying to, like, the Gaza Strip or some shit. And I packed an actual suitcase for the multi-city journey, which was sans wheels, and ended up lugging that thing through train stations in Milan and Paris and up and down the cobbled streets of Trastevere and Nice looking for cheap hostels.

My friend and I learned the hard way that beer in Europe was much stronger than the Busch beer we were used to drinking at fraternity parties, and that Italian men were good kissers but terribly persistent (we had to dodge a pair for a few days who’d come back to take us to the beach that we’d drunkenly agreed to visit the night before).

Upon our return to New York, tired and pretty broke, we discovered that the subway back into Manhattan from JFK could get a little dicey, circa 1990, making stops in Bushwick and Bed Stuy. But we survived with nary a scratch (but maybe a few hickies that we tried to cover up with our new Parisian scarves) and learned going forward to always go easy on the Italian beer and – for the love of God – pony up the extra 20 bucks for a cab out of JFK.

I ended up texting my oldest guy after work the night of his departure and reminded him to call so I could wish him a bon voyage. When he called a little while later, he quickly got annoyed and told me he felt like I was judging him, which I probably was. He was leaving for the airport way later than I would ever leave to catch an international flight. (Interestingly, the only time I am never, ever, late is when flying.) But my son sensed my vibe, the one I tend to put out when people aren’t doing things the way I think they should be doing them. I get a tone. For those who love me, it makes them nuts.

But I apologized and asked a bunch of questions and we got back on track. After a few minutes, he told me he was going to finish up eating dinner and get ready to go.

I wanted to say, “Watch out for terrorists,” or “Keep your wits about you” or at the very least, “Can you send me your travel itinerary?” but in the end, just told him to have a great time. And then, because I just couldn’t help myself, asked if he’d just text me when he got to his gate. And maybe again when he landed.

“Mom,” he said, “I’ll text you when I can.”

So I woke up early the next morning and remembered my child was somewhere in the air over the ocean and that’s when I tried to figure out what flight he was on before making breakfast for my other guy. While I was flipping his egg, my phone dinged and I looked down to see a text from my oldest son. “Just landed. Here safe.”

And that was that. I’ve seen daily photos on Instagram and a whole album on Facebook, but haven’t really heard from him again.

In the meantime, I received an all-points bulletin when the 8th graders’ buses departed and my girlfriend got a text from her kid reporting that they’d made it to Maryland.

Ten years ago, when that same boy who is in Barcelona traveled with his 8th grade class to D.C., there was no communication until the buses pulled back into the school’s driveway three days later. There were no CODE RED texts and emails and he certainly didn’t call or text. I don’t even think they were allowed to bring cell phones with them back then.

So maybe I’ve just become conditioned to be able to contact my children at any time of day or night over the last decade. And, thanks to location sharing technology, I can even stalk three out of the four kids to see where they are at any given moment. But the person I really want to keep track of – my wily 14yo – is the hardest to pin down as he’s usually blown through his allotted amount of data about four days into our Verizon billing cycle, rendering him unable to text or be tracked until the 20th of the following month.

And maybe I should be glad for that. Maybe in the end it helps me let go of trying to control and monitor his every move. Give him some latitude to figure things out on his own. Kind of like he’s always done.

I’m thankful I didn’t have the technology available today around when my oldest child was still in the grip of my highly-involved parenting style. Back then, I would have put a chip in him if that was an option. And I think I was so up his butt when he was younger that by the time high school rolled around he spent a good deal of time trying to shake me loose. It wasn’t pretty.

Ten years and three kids through high school and two kids through college later, and I’ve managed to reign in my desire to micromanage my kids’ every move. (Almost.) I’ve learned to have faith in their decision making and, more importantly, to learn from their mistakes. (Pretty much.) I’ve decided it’s much healthier to adopt a “let it go” attitude. (Well, not so much.)

But I have my limits. I still want to know when their plane lands after a long flight or they’ve arrived at their destination following a lengthy drive. I’m not a worrier in general but do fret when they’re in transit. I need to know when they’ve dodged the travel bullet.

I guess everything else is gravy.

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