Mom, You Are No Jennifer Aniston

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Sometimes cabinets need to be used to contain bulletin board spillover.

I have always had a penchant for collecting and pinning random things that caught my fancy to a bulletin board and later, as a grown up, on a refrigerator.

You’d think I’d be really into Pinterest because of this but if you’ve clicked on the cute little icon on my blog that urges you to follow me there, you’d be greeted by chirping crickets. I just can’t spend any more time on anything else right now (I have an acute case of Netflix Fever).

When I worked in an office out of college I took to collecting and cataloging strange hairs my coworkers and I would find around our cubicles and created a Hair Musem, pinned to the bulletin board above my desk alongside important memos and pictures of my dog.

It all sounds really weird now but at the time, this is what helped take the edge off of being low-level and underpaid workers at a women’s magazine trapped in a windowless space for 8 hours a day.

Then I became a mom and had the whole expanse of a refrigerator to work with and let me tell you, I had a lot of magnets and sometimes, even they were the star of the show. My favorite was a crying wooden baby sitting in a highchair with its little arms raised in the air. It perfectly captured that moment in my life.

The frig would be covered by photos that struck my fancy, invitations to weddings at first, then birth announcements and later, birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese’s. Then I’d add postcards the grandparents would send from their annual excursion overseas or a few-odd Baby Blues or Family Circus comics cut right out of the newspaper.

My frig canvas fell apart in 2005 when we redid our kitchen and got ourselves a big, fancy number sheathed in cabinetry to match the rest of the kitchen, which was beautiful but alas, not magnet friendly.

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This just makes perfect sense.

It wasn’t long though before I was Scotch taping crap onto the frig instead and now, there’s an ever-evolving collection of Honor Roll certificates, a panoramic image of the inside of the 10-year-old’s mouth (showing teeth trying to emerge at odd angles) and my favorite New Yorker cartoon.

Lately, I’ve also taken to taping photos of celebrities on the refrigerator, as if I was a teenaged girl. And I guess because I live with a few of that breed, I get confused sometimes.

Anyway, this is a very long-winded way of explaining why there are a bunch of Ryan Gosling pictures taped to a 47-year-old woman’s refrigerator.

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He is always being a creep and staring. Anywhere you go in the kitchen, the Gos is watching. I kind of like it.

He’s just become, like, this ongoing jokey love-interest around here, so when any one of us comes across a good Gos picture — or one of the kids makes me, say, a Valentine’s card featuring the young actor proclaiming his love for me — it is immediately taped to the frig.

There’s also one photo of Jennifer Aniston up there, she of the fabulous legs. It’s some red carpet shot and it is complimentary to both her upper arms and shapely gams. Traits I admire and envy.

So yesterday, it seems my 10-year-old son noticed the photo of Jen, who has been hanging there at his eye-level for about five months, for the first time.

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Does this photo have a 100% success rate in preventing me from grabbing the Ben & Jerry’s out of the freezer drawer? I’d say no. She does look fab, though.

We were standing in the kitchen and he asked me why I had hung the picture on our frig as he started reading the caption beneath the image, which included her age.

I said, “Well, I think she has amazing legs and I’d like to remind myself of what I’d like my legs to look like every time I go to the refrigerator to look for something to eat. You know, like, inspiration.”

“Whoa, she’s 44?” he said, obviously shocked that this woman was a mere three years younger than his own mother.

“She looks so young,” he continued, looking up at me. “You should use her, like, tips.”

Well, thank you, little boy. I’m so glad I spent all that time breastfeeding you and taking you to Disney World.

I could have been working on my legs instead.

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The kids know I am crazy for the handmade cards and ones that star the Gos need special attention.

 

 

 

hello muddah …

IMG_2154 Have you ever felt as though your heart was about to burst?

Like, legitimately explode?

I get that way some times watching a show on TV. Like recently I was watching the movie Juno and when she has the baby and was surrounded by her family and everyone has stepped up to be so solid for that baby and then she has to give it away in the end, I just can’t take it. I burst into tears every time.

Or the Pamper’s commercial that just shows like 20 different babies sleeping while “Silent Night” plays and they’re little mouths make tiny sucking movements and one baby gives a sudden jerky twitch and I’m reminded of all those nights I had a baby asleep in my house, sometimes curled up beside me in bed, and I wonder where that time went. Tears.

Last summer, my son went away to camp for a week and because he’s the youngest of the four kids, I wasn’t too worried about him. He’s never been given the impression that the world revolves around him so he’s pretty well-adjusted and highly adaptable. I always joke that you could drop him and kid #3 in the middle of a crowd in China and they’d be like, “Hey, hi, what’s going on?”

I felt a little tug at my heart when it was time to say good-bye and I started second guessing my decision to let a 9-year-old spend a week away at camp. Who would separate his dirty from his clean clothes? Would he remember to brush his teeth? What if he forgets to eat fruits and vegetables?

But he gave me a hug and then ran down the cabin’s porch steps and started to toss a football around with another camper.

So it came as a surprise later that week to find a postcard from him in my mailbox.

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And when I read that first line, that he felt so different without me, my heart swelled. I imagined him sitting on his bunk in the cabin, carefully crafting his note home using his best penmanship. And I remembered what it was like to be 9 and live in a microcosm surrounded by parents and siblings, friends and teachers and believe that that is the whole world. And it’s familiar and comfortable and you can never imagine anything different.

When he got home, he said that he was a little homesick but “you get pretty well-known to everyone so that makes it better.”

He’s there again this week and while I got held up during check-in, he went back to the car and dragged his suitcase and sleeping bag to his cabin and began to unpack long before I finally caught up with him.

And as much as I hope he’s having the time of his life and not even thinking about home, there is a part of me that will be looking again for a postcard in my mailbox with the tell-tale script of a boy who misses his mom.

 

 

 

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What makes your heart burst? Have you dealt with a child’s homesickness (or your own)? Tell us about it in the comments section below.

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