Michael and LaToya

Sisters, circa 2007.

Sisters, circa 2007.

My siblings and I – especially two of my sisters – look a lot alike. Most of us have brownish hair, Hazel eyes and pretty bushy eyebrows that, if left untended, would grow up into our hairlines. And, other than the oldest of my brothers, we are not the tallest people on the planet.

So naturally, when I began to reproduce, I just assumed that my children would look exactly like my people. It was like we came in one basic flavor. But genetics don’t always comply with one’s assumptions and I was surprised to end up with three quarters of my children looking exactly like their father – blue eyes, long-legged and pug nosed – and one of them looking exactly like my father-in-law, especially since she was as bald as he the first few years of her life.

Now I have two daughters with size 11 feet and who tower over me at just about 5’9″ and 5’10”. I literally stand on my tiptoes in pictures just so I don’t look so weird compared to my two tall daughters. Even my head looks really small when I stand next to those two and not in a good way.

This is me standing on tiptoe and still looking small and weird.

This is me standing on tiptoe and still looking small and weird.

But I always thought my oldest son favored my side of the family – the hair and eyes and bushy brows – despite people always saying he was the spitting image of his father. I just didn’t see it but began to assume I was delusional and that, despite my best efforts, none of my four children looked like me.

Until yesterday.

My younger three are away with their dad at a family cabin in the Poconos and my daughter texted me a picture she’d taken of a framed photo sitting on a table of the extended family, circa 1991 and at first, I wondered what my son was doing in the photo (given he was not born until the following year).

And then I realized it was me. I looked like my son in drag. I was like the LaToya to his Michael.

This was before I started fiddling with things, like my eyebrows and hair color, so there I am with short, dark brown hair and thick eyebrows. I’m only a year or two older than my son is now, so I still have that fuller, baby face and not a stitch of makeup.

I even forwarded the text to my son at work and his initial response was, “Where am I?”

“It’s me!” I told him.

“Haha that’s freaking me out now,” he answered.

I sent the same picture to my girlfriend who was more interested in my ex-husband in the photo, in which he’s looking off to the side with his hands stuffed in his shorts pockets and appears ready to flee at any second.

“That’s some freaky body language,” she noted.

But I can see our son in him, too. Our child inherited his father’s swagger; his inherent coolness. So that’s probably what people see, when they tell me they look exactly alike. They sense a vibe that goes beyond Hazel eyes and shaggy brows.

It’s funny what you end up passing along to your children. The good things – like long legs – and the bad – like cheap Irish skin. I see my own personality and inherent weirdness in some of my kids, but it’s cloaked by big blue eyes and curly hair.

I just feel vindicated that — despite all those months of gestation and all the hard work getting them out of my body —  I finally have proof that one of them is actually mine.

Even though he sometimes acts like someone else.

 

‘How Ugly is This Guy?’: Things My Kids Ask About My Dates

images “Okay, Mom,” said my 17-year-old daughter, totally out of the blue not long ago. “How ugly is this guy?”

We had been lying around our den one afternoon – along with her older sister and best friend from across the street – laughing and chatting about nothing in particular, when she asked her question.

I had just started dating someone and although it was the first real relationship I had had since I split from their dad five years earlier, the girls really didn’t want any details. In fact, the entire subject of this new guy made their faces twist in disgust and brought an abrupt halt to the conversation.

So I was surprised she would ask me anything about him, especially what he looked like.

“I don’t know,” I told her. “I think he’s kind of cute.”

She then proceeded to make gagging noises and pretended to vomit over the arm of the leather chair she was draped in. But the neighbor was all over it; leaning forward to get every detail she could about my new dating life.

“Maggie is, like, obsessed with this,” my daughter sniped and she told her friend to cut it out. She made it clear that my dating life was totally disgusting and not cool.

I always thought that by the time I got around to dating, once we were able to brush all the ashes and soot of the nuclear fallout of my divorce off and get on with our lives, my kids would be happy to see me happy.

I am so naïve.

The truth of it is that children, for the most part, are not really that interested in their parents’ happiness; especially when it puts their own happiness at risk.

No, it turns out my kids would rather see me alone, surrounded by cats and stacks of newspapers and back issues of The New Yorker, than with a significant other.

And for a long time, that seemed to be my trajectory. I was really busy with a demanding full-time job and managing the fallout of the divorce – all of the emotional ups and downs – to even think about dating. I had a pissed off ex-husband and three ornery teenagers so I didn’t really feel the need to develop any new relationships. I had enough personalities on my plate to manage, thank you.

But five years after everything imploded, even my therapist was like, “Start dating, already.” And I tried. I signed up for online services and never said “no” to anyone trying to fix me up with someone. I even gave a checkout guy my number, for gods sakes.

But my heart wasn’t really in it.

So, unlike all the glasses of wine and cups of coffee I shared with a litany of fix ups before, I went on a date not long ago with not only an open mind, but an open heart and kind of liked the guy enough to go out again the next night.

And I’ve got to admit, the whole thing came out of the blue. One minute I’m going to meet yet another guy at a bar for a drink and the next, we’ve gone out together seven times in two weeks.

So the kids were annoyed that this new relationship briefly took me away from being on call 24/7 for sandwich making duties and counter wiping. They like the idea of me standing in our kitchen at the ready as they go about their lives. They like to know that I’m around on the off chance that they might need me.

And they’ve been jealous of things that have taken my attention away from them in the past – like my girlfriends and my former job – but nothing compared to the disdain they employed when discussing my love life.

One night, as I rushed around the kitchen putting out taco fixings for dinner before I got picked up to go out on a date, two of the kids were complaining that I was going out with this guy again and I threw up my hands and asked, “You guys, don’t you want me to be happy?”

And the two of them looked at me and said, unequivocally, “No.” They barely blinked before they said it.

My 20-year-old daughter told me she had come home from a summer class the night before and was feeling cranky about the course and when she saw her older brother sitting on the couch watching TV, she asked him where I was.

“Out on a date,” he said.

“AAARRRGGGHH!” was, I think, the response she said she gave him and he immediately snapped back, “Cut it out. Mom deserves to date.”

So, at least a quarter of my progeny can see past themselves and support my love life.

I tried to talk to each kid about it privately. I tried to assure them that I wasn’t going to marry the guy. We were just dating and that if it wasn’t him, at some point it was going to be somebody else.

I told this to my little guy, and he just said, “Face.”

“Face?” I asked. “What do you mean face?”

“I want to see his face,” he told me. “Take a selfie so I can see what he looks like.”

But it never came to that. The relationship lasted the duration of two gel manicures — for whatever reason — but it taught me a lot about myself and what I want. And I think it was a really good experience for the kids. It helped brace them for when I am in a relationship that lasts longer than a month.

No matter what he looks like.

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Always Be My Baby

Eleven-year-old showing off his handiwork.

Eleven-year-old showing off his handiwork.

One morning last week, my 21-year-old son came into the kitchen and asked if I’d help him make a cup of coffee.

Now, if any of you own one of those newfangled Keurig machines, like the one I have, you know that it’s fairly simple to operate. You open the doohickey and stick the plastic K-cup filled with the coffee into the chamber, select the size cup you’d like and press “Brew.”

That’s about it.

But he’s my first baby. He’s the one who benefitted from having a super-young and enthusiastic mommy who was more than happy to lay out his clothes each night for the next day, trim his sandwich crusts and peel his thinly-sliced apples.

Nowadays, I am hard pressed to even buy an apple, much less peel it.

So I suppressed my urge to laugh when he asked for help with the coffee, but when he proceeded to sit down and start to look at his iPhone, I realized he didn’t really want help trying to figure out how to make coffee. He just wanted me to make it for him.

“Okay,” I told him, “you need to walk over to the machine and open it up.”

I walked him through the whole process and, like magic, he was enjoying a hot cup of joe in no time.

A little while later, his 11-year-old brother came into the kitchen and made himself an omelette.

He got out the pan and heated it over a low flame, cracked an egg into a bowl and added a little extra egg whites from a container in the frig, sprayed the pan with Pam and cooked up his breakfast. He doused the entire thing in Frank’s Hot Sauce and sat and watched Drake and Josh and enjoyed his eggs with some hot chocolate he made in the Keurig.

The differences between the first and fourth child never gets old to me. It always amazes me to see how much the younger child has benefitted from neglect. And how much all my hovering stymied my oldest kid’s ability to WANT to do things for himself, which is very different than being actually able to do things for himself. He’s more than capable.

In fact, he showed me that today when I dropped him off to catch the bus that would take him an hour north to start a summer internship. It’s the kind of gig that requires business-casual attire and behaving like a grown up and when he came into the kitchen for breakfast before we left for the bus, it took my breath away to see an adult standing there at the counter pouring a bowl of Reese’s Puffs.

This is not to say that there wasn’t a fair amount of hand holding going on in the week leading up to his first day at work. We went out and bought some big boy clothes, bought his monthly bus pass and did a test run to check out a big commuter lot where he could park all day for free. Reading the bus schedule also proved to be slightly challenging but then again, what does he know? He’s never had to do anything like this before. The younger kids have benefitted their whole lives from their oldest brother’s firsts — from learning to play an instrument to getting into college — he’s paved the way and showed them how things are done.

So it was weird watching him get out of my car this morning and make his way over to the throng of people waiting to board the commuter bus. A part of me wanted to get out and make sure he was getting on the right one, but I resisted the urge and drove away, watching the back of his new jacket slowly recede in my rearview mirror.

He texted me later to tell me he was on the bus and on his way (thumbs-up emoji). “Thank u for ride and everything else mom (lovey and heart emojis),” he wrote. And I knew he really meant that. The two of us may often bump heads but he knows at the end of the day, I’ve got his back.

I know there’s a fine line between being a helicopter parent and simply helping a brother out. I hope I’m doing the latter. And I know that by the time the little guy heads off into the real world 10 years from now, there will probably be less hand holding involved because he’ll have watched his three older siblings go through that rite of passage.

But I’m getting ahead of myself because after this morning, I’m glad I still am the proud owner of a little boy. Someone who will still just wrap his arms around my waist and squeeze for no reason, sing Maroon 5 at the top of his lungs in the shower and occasionally forgets to use shampoo.

Because it goes fast, people. In the blink of an eye you go from handing your kid a Gatorade to a commuter mug and I know people say that kind of stuff all the time and when you’re in the thick of carpooling and chicken nuggets it just seems like it’s never going to end and then some of it does start to wind down and you’re like, “What the fuck?”

You can’t win.

All I know is that I’m looking forward to picking him up from the bus later and hearing about his day over the dinner I’ll make tonight to celebrate his big day. Because he may have graduated from skater duds to khakis and a dress shirt, but he’s still my baby.

An Overall Bad Look

320px-Bib-braceI am super sorry to report that for a good portion of the 1990s, I could be found sporting a pair of overalls. I would like to have said I was actually “rocking” them if, in fact, overalls could indeed be rocked.

Hard to say.

I wore them to the playground. I wore them to take the kids to preschool. I wore them to the grocery store. I wore them to cook Hamburger Helper for dinner (with ground turkey, I’ll have you know). I wore them to snuggle in bed with little bodies to read Tikki Tikki Tembo and Courduroy. And I wore them to sit on our back deck after I’d tucked everyone in at night, sipping a glass of Chardonnay and listening to a bullfrog croak in a nearby pond, and wonder if being a mom would ever get any easier.

LOL.

And apparently, as I discovered while sifting through old photos this morning, I liked overalls so much, I even wore them to  visit other people’s babies …

Circa 1999, holding, I believe, my niece Emily.

Circa 1999, holding, I believe, my niece Emily.

to family gatherings …

Circa 1994 holding my very own Annie Banannie.

Circa 1994, holding my very own Annie Banannie.

and to celebrate Christmas one year.

Circa whenever-it-was-okay-to-wear-overalls-on-Christmas.

Circa whenever-it-was-okay-to-wear-overalls-on-Christmas.

Yikes.

But I guess back then, fashion was the least of my concerns. I’d had three babies in five years by 1997 and with all the other things I needed to think about — like how many times a day it was okay to watch “Toy Story”  and whether my daughter would be doomed to a life of crime after swiping a Beanie Baby from a local card store — I needed to eliminate as much decision making as possible.

Overalls made an excellent uniform for a mommy. They accommodated both turtlenecks and tshirts and could even be repurposed for warmer weather dressing should a hole appear in one knee.

As we all know by now, I fancy one-piece clothing. If you were to stop by, you’d find a couple of jumpsuits hanging in my closet (an affinity for all-things 80s) and the fleece onesie I wore all winter to keep my crumb-filled tummy warm still hanging from a hook on the back of my bathroom door. So overalls are a natural fit, pun intended.

I’d like to blame my many years in Catholic school for my daily struggle with dressing and ensuing affinity for the one-size-fits-all approach to it. Growing up wearing a uniform every day for almost 12 years made it tricky for me to get dressed in civilian clothing post high school. It was, like, an overwhelming task having so much to choose from.

And overalls are easy, which suits my lazy nature. They were not only good for handling errant spit up and Banana Burst Go-Gurt, they also were good for hiding a bevy of postpartum symptoms, like lactating breasts or that last five pounds. Cover it up in denim, I say (especially since there was no spray tanning back then).

Which leads me to a write up I saw in the Times Style Section today about the comeback of overalls this spring, which is both exhilarating and alarming news.

Be still my heart.

Be still my heart.

“Comfort is a good look,” notes the article, but at prices starting at $300, these new overalls are completely out of my shopping ballpark.

I’m sorry my daughters weren’t old enough, way back when, to tell me to hang up my coveralls. I might have needed them around to tell me enough was enough already. Nowadays, in moments of fashion fatigue and just looking for comfort, I have been trying to get away with wearing the jeans/sneakers combo, a look that horrifies my two girls.

“Mom!” one would shriek after spying me in my comfiest Old Navy jeans and sensible New Balance sneaks. “Take them off right now! You look ridiculous!”

And every time we’re in a store where I can try on a straw fedora, one will inevitably look over at me and say, “You look terrible.”

In all likelihood, they’d have similar reactions if I brought home a new pair of overalls. I’d never make it past my bedroom door. Apparently, I’m too old for many of these trends and while I’d still like to find a cute straw beach hat, I’m willing to bet no one wants to see some old broad like me dressed like a farmer.

So they can keep their fancy $300 overalls. I won’t be needing them this spring. I’m very happy sitting around in my pajamas all day, thank you very much.

I totally rock them.

 

Letting It Go

2364When my oldest was a junior in high school, I couldn’t wait to start looking at colleges. He and I drove north over his spring break that year to stay with friends just outside Boston to visit a couple of schools, and you would have thought I was going to Disney World.

Libraries! Dining halls! Dorms! I don’t think Space Mountain could have rivaled the excitement I felt as I walked around those campuses.

And I really love Space Mountain.

My son, on the other hand, was mostly annoyed with the entire process and refused to sit through any of the schools’ information sessions. He did consent to removing his ubiquitous headphones for the actual tours but would then quickly pop the buds into his ears when we got back into the car.

I would spend hours – like a nut – paging through the big college guides we had bought at Barnes & Noble and trolling the Internet, plugging in his SAT and GPA to determine whether he had a chance of getting into this school or that. I often joke that he was lucky I was also going through a really messy divorce at the same time, which prevented me from getting totally weird about the whole thing.

In the end, we probably visited seven or eight schools before he applied to about 10 the December of his senior year for regular admission.

And when the letters started to trickle in that spring, there was really no rhyme or reason to where he was accepted, rejected or wait listed. He ended up going to a school we didn’t visit until after he was accepted, to which he had applied more as an afterthought because some of his friends had visited and liked it. It seemed like a good fit because he wanted to major in engineering (or maybe that was me) and the school was known for its engineering program and then, of course, he ended up switching out of engineering by the end of his freshman year and all reasoning went out the door.

Kid #2 the following year was pretty easy in that she was all about applying early to her brother’s school and by mid-December we had the whole thing wrapped up and she was looking for a roommate on Facebook.

In retrospect, she should probably be at some small, liberal arts college closer to home, but at the time I was happy not to have to go through the whole rigmarole two years in a row.

So now, this third time around the college merry go round with my high school junior, I am trying to keep things in perspective. But it’s totally not easy and I fluctuate between being really into it and totally over it.

We went to visit a couple of schools at the end of last week, bringing our total number of colleges visited to four, and I can tell you one thing: I’ve got Chronic College Tour Fatigue (CCTF). I don’t want to walk through one more student union or hear one more anecdote about a bench or chiming bells.

And please don’t make me shout something about who we are. I’m not fun like that.

I found myself back home this weekend going through the Fiske Guide to Colleges 2010 and plugging in my daughter’s data on Cappex, and after about an hour of studying various schools’ acceptance and retention rates, I was like, “What am I doing?”

I don’t want to get caught up in a lot of hand wringing about finding the perfect school for her and whether or not she can get into it. Because now that I have a sophomore and junior in college, my concern has shifted to what they’re doing AFTER college. The thought of anyone I just spent, like, 50 grand to educate sitting in my basement unemployed playing XBOX or watching Breaking Bad really makes me agitated.

There’s no science to any of this. Getting into the perfect school is some great American myth, brought to you by the same folks that came up with the legend of the white picket fence and the fantasy of the Victoria’s Secret swimsuit catalog.

There is just no such thing.

So, I think I just need to take a deep breath and put it all in my daughter’s hands. She’ll figure out where she wants to go and how to get in if that’s where she really sees herself. I will inevitably relapse and get crazy about something — SAT subject tests or a pending deadline — but hopefully I’ll have the wherewithal to calm down fast.

I will need to, in the immortal words of Princess Elsa, let it go.

But I take comfort in the fact that I won’t have to traipse around one more quad or tell one more kid walking backwards that she’s about to slam into a light pole for another six years when it’s my little guy’s turn to look at schools.

Hopefully, my CCFS will be in remission by then. Or maybe, like learning to tie his own shoes or riding a bike, my youngest will just take care of it himself.

 

 

How to Cope After a Miscarriage

Credit: John O'Neil

Credit: John O’Neil

Someone I know had a miscarriage last week and when I called to tell her how sorry I was for her loss, she said she never expected to be so sad, and stopped to cry some more.

“Just in disbelief,” she texted later, and I totally got it.

I had three early miscarriages in my quest to have four children and while some might have seen the difficulty maintaining a pregnancy as a red flag – a sign from the universe that perhaps I shouldn’t have four kids – my uterus and I persevered.

Too bad I didn’t bring the same determination to other avenues of my life.

But I understood when she cried how truly devastating it was to lose a pregnancy, no matter how brief.  As soon as that stick turns pink, the baby is real. It already has an approximated birthday, name and Ivy League school that that soon-to-be-brilliant child would some day attend.

There are so many hopes and dreams pinned to that tiny little ball of cells that when it turns out that that’s all it really is — just a ball of cells that don’t quite know what to do with themselves – it makes for a very sad revelation.

But it’s also something that nobody ever really talks about. It’s like we need to keep that sad news to ourselves because it’s going to ruin everybody’s day. Like it wasn’t a big enough deal to trouble anyone else with.

But it is to the woman who, however briefly, patted her belly thinking she was carrying a new life. A new member of her family.

And this doesn’t even take into account the moms who lose full-term babies or actual children. Like, I can’t even go there, it’s so terrible. That type of loss is in a whole other ballpark.

And then there are the women who just can’t sustain a pregnancy. Another ball of sadness wax.

But in the world of loss, suffering a miscarriage falls quietly somewhere on the spectrum of grief.

You’d have thought by now that some marketing genius would have identified this as an underserved market that’s yet to be tapped. I’m surprised Hallmark hasn’t come come up with condolence cards or that Always hasn’t created special sanitary pads marketed for the miscarriage. Maybe some K-Y product designed for after the coast is clear, when the time is once again right.

I told the kids that someone we knew had lost a pregnancy and they were super-sad. They are ready for a new baby, especially my youngest child.

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “I had three miscarriages before I had you.”

“Wait,” he said, his big blue eyes growing even bigger. “Does that mean I would have had, like, six brothers and sisters?”

“No, dummy,” his teenaged sister said. “That means you might not have been born.”

And you could tell by the look on his face that he didn’t really know what that meant.

But I did. It meant that, somehow – no matter how sad – things really do work out in the end.

Bounce Your Muffintop

Here we are in the fall of 1993 thinking we could take on at least five more kids each. #ignoranceisbliss

Here we are in the fall of 1993 holding each other’s baby and thinking we could take on at least five more kids apiece. #ignoranceisbliss

My friend Tara, who lives in Connecticut, and I have shared many of the same life experiences.

We both fell in love with boys at a certain military academy and the four of us found we had lots of fun, perhaps too much fun, together.

We attended each other’s weddings not long after college and then the babies started to come.

We had our first babies within months of each other and got together when those babies were old enough that at least I was already pregnant again with my second child.

We strolled the babies down to a nearby playground and pushed them on swings and talked about our plans for the future.

“I’d like to have at least four,” she said of the body count she had in mind for her family, and then reconsidered. “Maybe six.”

I nodded my head and said I’d been thinking I’d like to have that many children, too.

Clearly, we were so delusional we thought that having six children would be as easy as having a single one-year-old. Taking care of a one-year-old is like having a three-year-old dog except with the diapers.

Like, you just have to keep it alive.

How were we supposed to know then the challenges that would come with having multiple children, like the endlessness of two kids in diapers, temper tantrums in stereo and everyone crying and drooling because of Coxsackie sores?

I can’t even get started on the joys of owning multiple teenagers which makes a strong case for tubal ligation.

In the end, cooler heads (and husbands) prevailed and we both held steady at four kids apiece and are now both down to just two living at home with the other off at college.

In the early days, our husbands worked for the same Russian shipping operation in Manhattan and we’d see each other annually at the company Christmas party at which it always seemed one of us was either pregnant or breastfeeding and way too sober for the crazy antics going on around us.

Russians are nuts.

A dozen years later, it seems that Tara and I both are going through another one of life’s obstacles together: The Midlife Muffintop.

She emailed me this video yesterday (which she needs you to know is NOT of her) and I laughed at the mom’s rap about her struggle with her bulging middle and took comfort when I saw hers that at least mine might be categorized as a mini-muffin.

It’s a fascinating mid-life phenomenon, this slowing down of the metabolism and carb bloating, and one of those things people fail to mention so that you can anticipate, like the trauma of pooping after you have a baby.

Anyway, I take comfort that I’m not alone on my journey through love, babies and muffin tops.

Enjoy the show. And bounce carbohydrate, bounce.

Flat Abs! Better Sex! And Other Lies We’re Sold

photo-10My 11-year-old son looked at me not long ago while we were sitting in our kitchen and said,”Mom, you should get flat abs.”

He had just been looking at the recent issue of Women’s Health sitting on the counter that I had picked up in theory for its recipes but in reality because of the picture of Heidi Klum on its cover and the FLAT ABS NOW! that screamed alongside her and her bared and toned tummy.

Lucky enough for my son, my hormone levels were fairly stable that day, thus allowing me to resist the urge to strangle him.

Instead, I lifted up my shirt and asked, “What? You don’t think my abs are flat?”

And sitting there on the stool, my belly did not necessarily look like Heidi’s but more like a Shar Pei, without all the fur.

“Ew, Mom,” was the response.

And it’s true, my once fairly flat middle has been going through some changes as I climb through my 40s, despite another caption on the Women’s Health cover that declared “40 is the New 20.” Maybe hair coloring and Botox can help  mask the ravages of time but there’s no magic pill for a slowing metabolism and bloated belly (yeah, yeah, yeah, okay — maybe less chocolate and Tostitos — but they never used to be a problem before I turned 45).

Hormones are not helping.

I told my daughter on the drive to high school this morning not to be surprised when she came home to find she had a new baby brother or sister because I can’t think of any other explanation for the terrible cramps I’ve been experiencing other than I’m in labor. And I could use an epidural.

That never used to happen, either.

So, there’s the grim truth of it, and I tried to make that clear to my son that a lot more women out there look like his mother than Heidi Klum.

“This is what real women look like,” I told him, drawing a circle around my rippled middle with my index finger. “That lady’s picture probably was photoshopped to make her abs look even flatter,” I said, all know-it -all like. But I’ve seen Heidi’s picture wearing a bikini in People — another troublemaker magazine — and her abs look pretty amazing in real life, but I’m trying to keep expectations low for my kids.

This is not to say that I did not go on to make three of the four recipes from the article,”Your Flat-Belly Day” and read up on Heidi’s exercise regimen detailed in the magazine.

I may be going down but it won’t be without a fight.

 

 

valentine’s day is stupid

IMG_3118I wrote this post last year and what a difference 12 months can make (or maybe not having a job).

This year, not only had I purchased cards and candy well ahead of Valentine’s Day, I even was organized enough to send bags of candy to the two college kids in Virginia that even GOT THERE EARLY.

I’m never that together.

I also stumbled upon the aisle of boxed Valentine’s cards when I happened to be in Target in January, yes January, and called my fifth grader to tell him what was there and get ahead of the game.

“I’m not doing that,” he almost spat when I suggested he make a selection.

“But they have a million choices!” I told him. “Sponge Bob. Superman. Transformers.”

In the end, he relented to my prodding and picked NBA-themed cards.

I brought them home and they’ve sat on a counter in our kitchen until yesterday.

“Buddy,” I said to him last night. “Don’t you want to start working on your Valentine’s cards?”

“Nah,” he answered. “I’m not going to bring them in.”

So as it seems to happen so often in my life, my timing was once again way off. 

So if any of you parents are feeling frantic because you forgot to get your kid cards in time, as you’ll see below that I did last year, you can come on over and grab mine.

I have a whole box.

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IMG_3123I am not a festive person. I do not come from festive people.

As such, I do not own colorful sweaters, necklaces that light up like Christmas tree lights or candy cane earrings.

It used to bum my children out that I didn’t want to create a cemetery in our front yard for Halloween or string twinkly lights in the front bushes in December. Isn’t it enough I buy costumes and put up a tree? Can’t they be happy with a wreath?

Seriously.

But it’s the make-believe holidays that make me crazy. Mother’s Day. Father’s Day. Valentine’s Day.

These are the phony holidays created solely to get you to spend money on things that nobody needs, like Barbie Pez and ties.

So, imagine my chagrin when I found myself last night at Target searching for Valentine’s Day goodies for my two kids still living at home.

Nothing says “I’m a horrible procrastinator” like standing in the seasonal aisle at Target at 5:30 the night before Valentine’s Day, huddled with all the other working moms and clueless dads in front of the few remaining pink stuffed animals and Necco Wafers that all the organized parents hadn’t already scooped up last week. It was like landing on the Island of Misfit Toys: Valentine’s Edition.

But there I stood, thinking, “This is stupid,” while one young mom kept telling her preschooler he was a brat and another mom, who had three little kids hanging out of her shopping cart, employing the “f” word to stop the all their bickering. Right there next to the bags of miniature Snickers bars.

This was obviously not a happy time of day to be at Target (and man, I am usually really happy to be at Target).

Of course at this point, there is not one box of Valentine cards to be found for my 10-year-old son to bring to school the next day. No Dora. No Thomas the Tank Engine. Nothing.

I was talking to my younger sister, who is  like 14 years younger than me and has one toddler, on the phone while casing the joint and reported my findings.

“Go on Pinterest!” she says, and starts describing excitedly something she saw where I’d take my son’s picture holding out his arms and print it out and tape a lollipop to it. And I’m thinking, “Okay, I can do this,” and grabbed one of the remaining bags of lollipops from a bottom shelf.

I turned the corner and ran into a big display of Fun Dip cards that are pretty much the paper pouches containing the sugary dip and weird candy stick that kids can write classmates’ names on. I reached my hand out and hesitated for about two seconds, remembering then that you pretty much can’t send any food items into school anymore due to allergy restrictions, and then grabbed it anyway.

I’ll take contraband over crafting, all day long.