After 73 days and a lot of breath wasted on telling me there was “nothing to do,” my youngest child went back to school today.
And while a little over 10 weeks doesn’t sound so long in theory, when you’re trying to maintain a freelance writing career as well as attempting to keep things lively over here on my blog, that’s a lot of time trying to set up 12yo play dates and lining up rides to the beach.
But his older siblings got out of school in mid-May – a full month earlier – so if we add those additional 30 days to the mix, it brings the total number of days I’ve been interrupted by people making smoothies at 11 a.m. or catching up on all 10 seasons of “Friends” for days on end to a little over 100.
“That’s a third of 2015,” I told my pal the Girl Whisperer as he held onto the giant rubber ball I was squatting on top of yesterday morning.
“I thought you were bad with math,” he said.
I stopped to turn around and look at him and told him, “I had to learn how to figure out percentages of things after I got divorced.”
Maybe I would have fared better at math in school had I more at stake than just a bad grade.
But I’m not in the clear just yet. I still have my college grad home a few days a week as he tries to figure out how to be a grown up. Or at least, start taking steps towards adulthood.
It’s not easy.
But if he tells me he’s bored and that there’s nothing to do, I just might snap.
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Aside from my TV viewing habits – which skew towards zombies and bald methamphetamine dealers – I am a girly-girl.
I like manicures and gossip and shopping. I’m afraid of spiders. I am not adverse to long conversations about the benefits of Keratin treatments and waxing and discovering the latest Ballard Designs catalog in the mail makes my pulse race a teensy bit.
And even though I was married to a guy who played football in college and favored clicking on sporting events whenever he had the remote, and have sat in the bleachers cheering on my four children in a wide variety of games over the years – basketball, soccer, lacrosse – I can’t get a handle on any of the rules. I get the fundamentals – like, you’ve got to get past the guys on the other team and put the ball in the net – but that’s about it. I don’t understand “off sides,” “box out” or what it means to “foul” somebody. And because I’ve figured out how to master complex endeavors like caring for my swimming pool and driving into Manhattan I’m betting this deficiency stems less from stupidity and more from a general lack of interest.
All of this is not to say that one needs a penis to understand and enjoy sports. Plenty of women do. My college girlfriends are enthusiastic fans and even one of my daughters took a liking to football after spending last winter surrounded by big-screen TVs in the bar of the restaurant where she hostessed. She figured out “downs” and “holding” in between seating parties for brunch on Sundays.
The point of all this is that I tend to adhere to gender stereotypes even though I’ve tried to be all Free to Be You and Me with my kids. “Boys, it’s really alright to cry,” and all that.
Wasn’t I lucky, then, to be blessed with not one but two daughters? We all like to shop together and get manicures together and happily eat kale. When my older two kids were away at school and it was just my high school daughter and middle school son left at home, our weekly menus were definitely directed by her self-imposed dietary restrictions. No red meat or pork. No dairy. And absolutely-positively no cheese. Like, don’t even try to sneak one of those ingredients in or it will be met with tears.
Our weekly meals consisted of a lot of ground poultry and Gwyneth Paltrow recipes like Thai Chicken Burgers and sweet potato hash. We even ate kimchi.
But that picky girl flew the roost Saturday for her freshman year at college and now the onus of coming up with meals that adhere to her strict guidelines lays on her university’s food services staff. I’ve hung up that apron for a bit.
Because now I am living in Dudeville.
Now I am the only girl living in a house of boys. My oldest son – who graduated from college in the spring – is living at home with his little brother and even though we’re only about 36 hours into this new arrangement, I can already feel the shift. I can sense the very manly vibe going down around here.
When their sisters lived at home full time, there was definitely a more feminine feel in the house. Belching in my presence was discouraged and if you HAD to pass gas you needed to go outside and cut the tail before you reentered. I didn’t want anyone dragging the fart back into the house with him or her and stinking the joint up.
But now, all bets are off.
I’ve decided to embrace this new manly dynamic and surprised the boys yesterday morning with blueberry pancakes and bacon for breakfast. Later that afternoon we reclined in a darkened movie theater and ate Reese’s Pieces and drank root beer while watching “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” and went home to eat paninis and potato chips. My older son explained the intricacies of his pending fantasy football league draft and when he disappeared downstairs to try to snag a worthy running back for his team, his little brother and I watched the new zombie TV show “Fear the Walking Dead” (which I loved). And when he expelled a long string of farts during an especially suspenseful part of the show, I didn’t even tell my son to go outside and cut the tail. I actually laughed when the explosion occurred.
It’s calmer again with just two children at home. It gets hectic when all four are here and vying for my attention. It’s nice to be able to focus on just two and I sense the boys quickly felt the shift as well. They walked arm-in-arm through the parking lot on the way into the movie theater and my oldest guy – who’s not always willing to engage in any lengthy conversation with me – happily discussed fantasy football and the latest John Oliver show while I made our paninis.
As we ate our dinner, we put together a menu of dinners for the upcoming week. Over the next few nights we will be enjoying pork tenderloin, beef stir-fry and pasta with meat sauce.
“We don’t even have to use ground turkey,” I observed while eating a chip.
“Yeah!” said my little guy. “We get to eat REAL meat.”
I fear all this manly fare may take a toll on my figure but am willing to take my chances. It’s the price I have to pay to live happily in Dudeville.
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There was a time when my neighborhood – a cul de sac with about a dozen houses in suburban New Jersey– teemed with life. When we moved here a dozen years ago, we brought with us our three school-aged children and a newborn to add to the mix of kids already living here. As it turned out, there was someone for everyone.
Our house is on the perimeter of a circle that surrounds an island of three houses, and between us we must have had at least 20 kids under the age of 14 when we got here. The people in the house across the street and kind of diagonal from me had three high schoolers when we moved in and I remember thinking then how old those kids seemed. They were the ones you only saw leaving the house to get into a car. They weren’t part of the crew swarming the neighborhood on a warm summer night playing manhunt or riding scooters around the circle to pass the time on a crisp October afternoon.
My oldest son’s best friend lived a few houses away and he also had the three boys living in the cape next door to keep him company. That family also had a guinea pig, named Squeaky, that kept my younger daughter occupied snuggling on their couch for many afternoons.
My girls had a bunch of playmates in their age range as well, and there was one who sported pigtails and missing teeth and always wore some wacky Hanna Andersson-type outfit of mismatched dresses and leggings. She was a little sassy, too, so I started telling people I lived across the street from Punky Brewster. Her parents both worked out of the house and she and her little brother had a string of sitters and a Lithuanian au pair for a few years whose name I could never get a handle on so I simply began referring to her as “Sha-nay-nay. “
As my son got older, our neighborhood became the place for middle school boys to come and ride their skateboards. They’d set up plastic ramps and other pieces of junk in the street on which to grind their boards or catch some air, but mostly they stood around and popped their boards up into their waiting hands and posed in their skinny jeans and black t-shirts.
My daughters spent a lot of time devising different means of getting themselves around the circle and my older girl in particular came up with especially dangerous methods. She’d put on a pair of roller blades and direct her sister to get on a bike and drag her by a jump rope around the block. Once, and only once, she decided to tie the rope to our golden retriever who – thrilled at being released from the house and thrown into the mix of children – promptly charged down the street with her in tow. He quickly went off course, chasing a squirrel up a neighbor’s front lawn, and sent my daughter crashing into the curb and sprawled – scraped and weeping – on the road. A very kind neighbor found her splayed in front of his house and brought her home.
As the years went by, the tenor of the neighborhood changed. The teenagers across the street left for college and my older children became the high school kids on the block. The boys next door moved away but were replaced by a new set of three boys perfectly matched to my youngest son’s age. That crew took over the neighborhood and, depending on the season, could usually be found playing basketball in one of our driveways or soccer and lacrosse on a front lawn. They even assumed the skateboarding mantle and started dragging crap into the street to jump over for hours on end.
As a mother not remotely interested in importing or exporting children for play dates, it was the perfect set up. I’d look outside and see a gaggle of kids playing soccer on a neighboring yard and tell my kid to go outside and join them.
“Go see what the boys are doing,” I’d tell my little guy if I noticed him watching too many episodes of Sponge Bob, and he’d disappear for hours to play with the kids next door. In fact, he and his older sister spent so much time with other families in the neighborhood they started referring to themselves as members of those families.
“Oh, my other mom, you mean?” they’d say all sassy to me, referring to the neighbors’ moms.
At one point my little guy tacked the last names of the two families that lived next door and across the street from us onto his own last name and proclaimed himself “practically” a member of those families since he spent so much time with them.
And for a while that was really true. When I was going through my divorce and returning to work full time, those families became our safety net. They scooped my youngest children up and included them in their fun. They fed them. They drove them to lacrosse practice. They took them away to their ski houses and week-long trips to the beach. It gave me comfort knowing my kids were happy and cared for as I juggled work and wily teenagers and single momhood.
I made some great friends, too.
The first set of boys next door came with a mom who could make a gin martini – on the rocks in a lovely cut crystal glass – like no other. I’d look forward to getting the call on my house phone to come over for cocktail hour, and happily slip away from homework and Hamburger Helper to sit in her den and sip her icy concoction and kvetch for a spell. Her oldest was a few years older than mine and I liked getting her perspective on things. Her been-there-done-that attitude was a nice contrast to my still gooey-eyed approach to parenting. She kept it real.
The family that replaced them also came with a mommy who knew how to make a cocktail. This one’s specialty was tequila and she’d float jalapeno peppers or vanilla beans in mason jars in her freezer, which she then used to create delicious margaritas in glasses rimmed with a sweet and spicy rub. We became friendly after hours of sitting together on the beach and talking about kids and family and life while our boys bobbed in the ocean on boogie boards. Her oldest is the same age as my youngest, and I think her not-yet-jaded take on parenting helped remind this old mom how quickly it all goes by.
Punky’s mom across the street eventually decided the work/life balance was tipping heavily in the wrong direction and left her big job to stay home with her kids. I soon found a friend who also enjoyed reading the newspaper and talking about books and movies and struggled with the monotony of staying home to raise children. We’d have long conversations over many bottles of wine trying to make sense of the paths we’d chosen. Struggling with having given up the balance of power in our homes and freedom in exchange for being there every day for our children when they returned home from school. We’d wonder time and again whether it was all worth it.
In the meantime, we went to spin classes together and took our girls away for weekends of hayrides and pumpkin picking and organized camping trips with our troop as Girls Scout leaders.
But now the cycle is almost complete. The three big kids across the street have all graduated from college and long since moved away. I heard that one is even getting married this year. A few of the other families whose kids grew up with mine also left the neighborhood once their children graduated from high school and in time, we’ll move away too.
I’ve got one college grad who’s living back under my roof and this week both of my daughters leave for college. And the boys next door, who provide a near-constant source of entertainment for my youngest child, left on Saturday for their second of potentially three years living in Hong Kong. They were home for eight weeks this summer and it’s already weird not to see them jumping on the trampoline in my backyard or running across the grass in full lacrosse gear. All those boys bring so much life to our corner of the neighborhood it seems eerily quiet now that they’ve gone.
This morning my youngest daughter and I went across the street at the crack of dawn to say good-bye to Punky, who was on her way to her freshman year at a school about three hours away. The girls had spent a lot of time in the last few days reliving some of their favorite memories of all their years as best pals. They drove south to spend the day in Sea Isle City, NJ where they’d gone with Punky’s extended family every summer for years. They crammed in all of their favorite foods and activities including a trip to the arcade where one year Punky used the tickets she’d hoarded all summer to purchase a baseball hat that read ‘SUPREME’ across its brim.
Yesterday, my daughter disappeared across the street with a Monopoly box tucked under her arm to recreate one of the epic battles they’d wage a few days each summer on the floor of one of our houses.
The only tradition they did not revisit was their annual meeting in the middle of the street on Christmas morning to open each other’s presents, otherwise known as “Christmas in the Street.”
It’s a very intimate relationship that develops when you become close friends with your neighbors. The proximity kind of thrusts you into each other’s lives. You get to know their habits. You overhear arguments. They’re the first people you turn to when you need a box of spaghetti for dinner or a glass of wine to help get you through that spaghetti dinner. They become your emergency contact for school and if you live near each other long enough, emergencies do occur.
But there’s an easiness, a familiarity that exists when you spend all that time together.
So when we walked across the street at 6 a.m. in our pajamas to say good-bye to Punky, it wasn’t really that weird to walk in on the family in their last-minute efforts to get her and all her crap out the door and into the car already packed to the gills with college essentials. We helped carry the last of her stuff outside and stood in the driveway to say good-bye. She looked at me and – just to be a brat – declared she’d miss me most of all and I got teary-eyed thinking how much I’d miss her sassiness. How much I’d miss seeing the two girls siting on the couch watching “Parks and Recreation” after school and I swear, at the time, it made me want to punch them both in the face.
“It’s too early in the morning to cry,” she told us. “I’ll Snapchat myself crying later.”
She and my daughter hugged and whispered things that only they could hear and finally, they all got in their car and drove away and we went home to cry a little more.
In all likelihood, we won’t be living here this time next year. And while it’s hard to leave, I know that the friendships that have developed through proximity will continue no matter where we land. And hopefully we’ll leave in our place a young family to breathe some life back into the neighborhood. Who will join some of the other little kids who’ve settled here over the last couple of years.
I hope they play endless rounds of soccer on the front yard and sped hours lying side-by-side on the trampoline looking up at the clouds in the sky. I hope they wait for each other to walk to school together in the morning and meet up to go trick-or-treating together through the streets of town each year. I hope they get to do all of the things that my children and so many children who’ve lived here before them have gotten to do. And when they grow up and leave for college and jobs and to start families of their own, I hope other young families come here and take their place.
And start the cycle all over again.
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Sometimes, I can’t stand to hear some of the words that come out of my mouth.
Usually, they are the same words that used to come out of my own mother’s mouth. The ones that addressed particular behaviors and were repeated at regular intervals:
“Chew with your mouth closed.”
“Don’t pick your teeth.”
“Put your napkin on your lap.”
“It’s ‘most fun,’ not ‘funnest.’”
“Make your bed.”
“Clean your room.”
As it turns out, those same reprimands that were so annoying to hear as a kid are doubly irritating having to say as a grown up. As a child, I perceived those reminders as assaults against my character. I bristled every time my use of the English language was called into question or uncouth table manners pointed out by my mother.
It hurt my feelings.
But in the end, I walked away with very nice eating habits and an excellent command of the English language (in thanks, no doubt, to all those times I complained of boredom and was instructed to go read a book).
It’s a parent’s job to instruct. We are like the audio versions of the “How to Be a Person” manual. Sure, some of us are missing pages – hell, some of us have entire chapters ripped out– but for the most part it’s our duty to guide our youngsters towards becoming functioning members of society.
I always felt like my mom was a little too vigilant in this regard. It always seemed like she was jumping down my throat about the littlest offense. But then I had my own set of children and began to see things differently.
I am the oldest of eight siblings and now realize that while my mother was really on top of instructing me in the finer art of cleanliness and good manners, I’m pretty sure my younger siblings’ habits were not so hyper-scrutinized. I know my youngest is not held to the same standards as his big brother. Dinners when the eldest was younger included a lot of correcting of improper use of cutlery or failure to spread his napkin upon his lap. But when my little guy put his head down and started licking his plate not long ago, I found the act simply charming.
“Are you pretending you’re the cat?” I cooed, while his siblings looked on in horror.
As a result of more militant housekeeping when they were younger, my first two children still keep pretty neat-and-tidy bedrooms. Dirty laundry makes its way into the hamper and beds are generally made most days.
You would think such good behavior would have trickled down to the younger two siblings. You would assume they’d observe that type of lifestyle and embrace it as their own.
You would be wrong.
My youngest two children – an 18yo girl and 12yo boy – are lovely people. They are easygoing and team players and have great senses of humor. They also happen to be pigs.
The boy doesn’t seem particularly stupid. I mean, he’s done some dumb things that other boys his age sometimes do, but he just got promoted to the seventh grade so he must be doing something right. And man, he is a sweetheart.
And the girl – oh, my messy, messy girl. She resists doing laundry. Instead, she spreads her dirty clothing across every square inch of floor space in her bedroom, perhaps under the assumption that she is airing those items out for future wearings. Then there are a few piles of worn jeans and t-shirts shoved into corners in which she seems to be employing a method akin to composting. Whether she stirs the clothes at regular intervals remains a mystery but the piles definitely seem to be heating up.
And she’s not lazy. This school year she juggled three paying jobs and a full course load of honors and AP classes. Obviously she is capable when it suits her.
But how do you explain the empty plastic water bottles strewn across her desk and nightstand or the garbage can overflowing with crumpled printer paper and empty bags of Trader Joe’s veggie sticks?
So I’ve wasted a lot of breath over the years telling these two to clean up their acts.
“Make your bed.”
“Empty your garbage.”
“Put your clean laundry away.”
Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah.
But these two do not perceive these admonitions as an attack on their collective character. Having a clean bedroom is simply not high on their priority list.
Over time I’ve struggled with how high cleanliness should be on my priority list, too. I mean, in the scheme of things, is an organized desk that important? I’ve learned over the years in the mom business that I’d rather have someone practicing their saxophone rather than making their bed. I am, however, pretty dedicated to not letting loose someone who chews with his mouth open into the world.
In the days leading up to her departure, there were clothes all over her floor, which were joined by two giant suitcases awaiting the stacks of American Eagle jeans and Urban Outfitter tops to be squeezed inside. Her college crap had even spilled out of her bedroom and down the stairs into the den where a mound of Target bags filled with sheets and towels and lady products had started to grow.
When I last saw the room it was late Saturday night and I went in to say good-night and make sure we were still on for our 5:30 a.m. departure. By then, most of her stuff had made it into some type of bag. The giant duffel bags had been dragged downstairs and all that remained on her floor was her little turquoise Vera Bradley bag stuffed with what seemed to be the last-minute items – her packet from new student orientation and a tangle of chargers – and the new tote bag we bought online for carting her books in style around campus.
But the nightstand and desk were still in disarray and the pillows that decorate her bed – the queen-sized Ikea number she got for her 15th birthday with big drawers underneath and headboard with stacks of shelves, which took her three days to assemble by herself – were still scattered everywhere.
“Please try to leave your room clean,” I said as I kissed the top of her head. “At least make your bed.”
I know she had a lot on her mind. She was less than thrilled to have to leave for college just a week after graduating from high school. She didn’t really have time to wrap her head around all the changes awaiting her when she was diving right into it the thick of it.
So, like, why did I feel compel to nag? Can I not learn to control that dastardly impulse?
We hit the road a mere 15 minutes behind schedule, probably a new record for me, and I drove the four hours in the rain while most of the other passengers in the car dozed intermittently. We squeezed into a lot about a quarter-mile away from her dorm and tracked down a cart to carry her stuff upstairs. A college move-in day in never complete without a trip to the nearby Target or Wal-Mart so we climbed back into the car and set out to purchase another $200 in last-minute throw pillows and power strips. And of course, there’s the obligatory trip to the bookstore to check out her textbook requirements for the two courses she’s taking over the summer and to outfit her two siblings in her new school’s logo. Finally, after her bed was made and we oohed and aahhed over how cute it all looked together matched with all her Target dorm essentials, we decided to say good-bye.
And it was sad.
Very. Very. Sad.
The other two kids and I drove home in still more rain listening to David Sedaris’s “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” which was good for lifting our spirits. We got home and heated up some stuff in the frig and I went upstairs to get changed into my pajamas (read: finally take off my bra), but when I got to the top of the stairs I took a left rather than a right into my own bedroom. I walked down the hall to the first room on the right to find the door closed, as usual, to ward off any ideas our cat might have about rolling around on my daughter’s bed (which grosses my 18yo out to no end).
I pushed open the door and my heart almost stopped. I couldn’t believe what I saw.
In all those years of asking/suggesting/demanding that she clean her room, my daughter would eventually comply but never 100 percent. There was always crap piled under her printer table or clothes shoved onto her closet floor.
But on Sunday I opened the door to something out of a magazine. The bed was made and the throw pillows artfully arranged. The desktop had been organized and no clothes lurked at the bottom of the closet. The hangers draped with clothes that usually hung from her floor lamp had also been put away.
The high cost of a clean room.
She had outdone herself.
And now it all just sits. Empty. Lifeless. All that energy that used to fill up every last inch of that room has now relocated 263 miles west of here.
So now I have that made bed I’ve been dying for, along with the clean clothes put away and emptied garbage pail.
I just hate the price I had to pay to get all of it.
But good luck to her new roommates. They’re gonna need it living with that girl.
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Yesterday I was sitting at my kitchen table looking at my laptop when my 12yo son came in from playing outside and I was reminded, not for the first time, of the miracle surrounding puberty.
It stinks.
He’d come home from school earlier without much to do. There were no games or practices to get ready for. The school year is winding down so he didn’t have any homework to keep him busy and he hadn’t made any plans with friends to hang out (I have been instructed to no longer use the words “play” or “play date” to describe these events).
But he’s generally pretty good at keeping himself occupied. He’s the kind of kid who can just go outside and kick a soccer ball into a net a million times. Like, he was definitely a giant golden retriever in a previous life who found great joy in endlessly fetching a ball. Over the holidays, when the ground was covered with snow for weeks on end thus preventing said ball kicking, my guy decided to use an indent in our sectional couch as his goal. He’d move the coffee table out of the way before school and just kick the soccer ball into the couch over and over and over again. KA-KUNK. KA-KUNK. The noise didn’t really bother me. I’d stand in the kitchen making a meal or wiping counters and watch him work on his scoring technique. But it drove his older three siblings nuts.
“NICK,” his older brother would scream from his basement lair, “CUT IT OUT.”
His sisters upstairs didn’t care for the repetitive thumping either. One of them stalked down the stairs and grabbed the ball out from under him and returned to her cell while the 12yo just stood and watched the ball disappear upstairs. Then he fished his lacrosse stick out of the mudroom and stood in the back hallway, tossing the rubber ball against the door leading out to the garage. KA-KUNK. KA-KUNK.
When our neighbors relocated to Hong Kong last summer, one of the many wonderful things we acquired temporarily was their trampoline and – for as much as I NEVER wanted a trampoline and have a video of my grown daughters jumping on it in our yard and yelling, “We have a fucking trampoline!” – the thing does keep bored people busy.
So my guy came home from school yesterday and foraged in the pantry to find something to eat other than the raw almonds and Trader Joe’s quinoa and black bean-infused tortilla chips the older children turned their noses up at as they raped and pillaged the pantry all day while the little brother was at school. After nibbling on a handful of turkey jerky – his sadly best option – he made his way outside to jump around.
I sit most days on a chair at the end of my big, pine kitchen table that backs into the curve of a bay window overlooking our backyard. The seat provides the perfect view of the trampoline that takes up the far end of our yard and I love sitting there and watching the kid’s moves.
He ran for a while around the perimeter, taking big, long strides inside the surrounding net and stopped occasionally to throw some punches, a few upper cuts for good measure. He’d hooked his iPhone up to our Spotify account and was pumped up listening to his 12yo jam, songs like “Bohemian Rhapsody” and Billy Joel’s “For the Longest Time” (these also happened to be songs he sang at his end-of-the-year chorus concert). I watched as he continued running in circles and eventually he plopped down on his back to rest, staring up at the leaves dangling from branches high above and singing along to Queen.
After a while I stopped stalking the child and resumed work and didn’t really notice when he appeared standing at my side some time later. At this point, he’d been jumping around for a while under the hot afternoon sun and his face was visibly moist, the ends of his shaggy hair soaked with sweat. But I was so preoccupied by what I was doing I didn’t really pay attention to his presence until my nose sounded the alarm.
“WHOA,” I said, turning to look at his sweet, shiny face. “You stink.”
I mean, it wasn’t like I’d never smelled anything like that before, and I’m not even talking about that homeless person I walked by in the Christopher Street subway station one hot July afternoon in 1990. No, I’ve had close encounters of the super-smelly kind with his older siblings when they were in the early stages of puberty. I could always sense a shift — before obvious things like deepening voices and growing breasts provided the visible evidence of change – by the way they smelled, which is best described as “ripe.” Overnight, I’d go from wanting to bury my face in the tops of their heads to inhale their sweetness to getting a whiff of their hair when they walked by and smelling what could only be described as “hair,” and not in a Gee-Your-Hair-Smells-Terrific kinda way.
My favorite “So You Think Your Kid Stinks?” story was the time I ended up in the ladies room during a middle school basketball game and my daughter and her teammates rushed in to use the facilities before the start of the second half. I remember sitting in the stall as they milled around the sinks thinking, “Holy crap, one of these girls totally stinks. What the hell?”
It was like July 1990 all over again.
After the game, our family trundled through the cold school parking lot and piled back into our car and it wasn’t long after the doors had closed and the heater was switched on full blast that I made a horrible discovery: I had given birth to that smelly kid I’d encountered in the ladies room.
So I wasn’t shocked or anything by my little guy’s strong body odor after his trampoline workout. This is not my first puberty rodeo, you know. It was just a reminder of not only the power of hormones but also the effectiveness of Old Spice when used accordingly.
I told him to run upstairs and jump in the shower before he left to have dinner at his dad’s and reminded him, because it seems sometimes certain people need to be reminded, to avail himself of any and all soaps and shampoos lying around the shower stall. “Go nuts,” I instructed.
He took his sweaty self upstairs and I picked up my cell to text his father. “You’re welcome,” I wrote and added the emoji wearing the surgical mask, which is what I wished I’d been wearing a little earlier.
We joked via texts about our baby’s smelliness for a while but honestly, I hope the odor doesn’t go away any time soon. I hope our child still finds pleasure in marching around a trampoline by himself and lying on his back and staring off into space for weeks and months to come. That stinky smell is the warning sign. It indicates that the end of childhood is nigh. It breaks my heart not only because I’ve so enjoyed this child, my last, but also because he’s it. When he turns the corner and bids childhood “adieu,” I will no longer have a legit child of my own. No one will need me any more to hold their hand to cross a street or cut their steak or kiss their knees when they fall.
And, fuck, I used to complain about having to do all that shit for them but now, man, I’d like to go back and punch myself in the throat (to borrow a phrase) because here I am, 20 years later, missing the shit out of Easter eggs and Nickelodeon and having to shampoo little heads every night. I officially would like to eat all my stupid words.
So, keep on smelling my son, I say. I hope you stink all summer long and well into the next school year. Because as long as you do, I still get to be a mom to a kid. I’ll happily drive you and your little knucklehead buddies to the mall to watch “The Avengers” and put up with all of you running around my backyard later whipping sneakers at each other. Whatever it takes to keep you a kid. Before long you’ll be way more interested in finding out where all the cute girls in your grade are going on a Saturday night and walking around town with a backpack full of Keystone Lights.
Growing up can wait.
I will, however, continue to insist you use the deodorant I bought you last week because, dude, no one needs to smell that bad.
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My little guy and I were talking about something the other night when he turned and asked, “Mom, why don’t you ever volunteer for anything for me?”
“What do you mean, dude?” I asked, knowing full well what he meant. I could smell where this conversation was going.
“You, like, never help out at my school.”
And, since there wasn’t really much more I could say to that very astute observation, I lowered my head and said, “Busted.”
Of course, what I wanted to point out to my littlest boy was the sheer scope and breadth of my volunteering history, beginning when his older siblings were very young. It was as their overactive mommy that I cut my teeth on the ins-and-outs of cupcake making and pumpkin picking while they were still in preschool. By the time my third kid went to nursery school I was helping to produce the monthly school newsletter.
Cupcakes, newsletters, pumpkin picking … those were just the gateway activities to the more heavy-duty volunteering I got mixed up in as the kids got older.
I moved on to some light pumpkin seed counting with the first grade and pouring juice for the various holiday parties. Later, I served countless years as the kids’ class mom and rode in school buses to chaperone field trips to museums and local productions of The Nutcracker. One year, I even helped hot glue ornaments signed by all of the children in the class onto a wire wreath as a Christmas gift to their teacher (I was just the trusty sidekick in that scenario).
I chaired school fundraisers, like luncheons and book fairs, and eventually worked my way up to serve as co-president of the Parent Teacher Organization the year I gave birth to my fourth child. That was also the year my left eye twitched uncontrollably for months.
As the kids got older, my volunteering extended to overnight activities. I spent a few days in the January of each of my three older children’s seventh grade year chaperoning a trip to a state park about an hour away where I went snowshoeing for the first time, learned survival skills and discovered, most importantly, that an American Girl sleeping bag was not intended to be used by a 40-something American girl.
I also went along to Washington, D.C. when my girls were in eighth grade respectively and learned how to herd wily teenagers around our nation’s capitol and watched teachers break up some harmless grinding going down in the back of our bus on the ride home.
Dudes, I was even a Girl Scout leader for, like, five or six years and am proud to say that I not only went camping on more than one occasion, but only lost one scout in all that time. I also misplaced one of my own children during a scouting activity but that’s a story for another day (or until I can send that child to receive the proper therapy he deserves as part of his recovery).
I even had a magnet on my refrigerator — back when I had a refrigerator I could stick magnets to — that read, “Stop me before I volunteer again.”
And to top it all off, I served on our school board for three years, which taught me that being an elected official was much scarier than just regular volunteering as your fellow parents are quick to turn on you when they feel you want to take away one of their fifth grade teachers or something. At least that was back in the day before Facebook groups became a Petri dish for parental outrage.
But then I had that fourth kid. And got divorced. And started working full-time. And instead of saying “yes” all the time, I started to say “no.” Instead of feeling compelled to sign my name up to do something when a sheet went around at a meeting, I’d resist the urge and sheepishly pass it along to my neighbor.
I just had too much on my plate.
Eventually, I stopped feeling guilty about not volunteering to, say, make a dinner or help starving children in Africa. I was no longer convinced that if I didn’t step up, things wouldn’t get done.
And that thinking was fine until it wasn’t.
Until the people around me were raising money to improve the technology at our high school or helping out weekly at our local soup kitchen or bringing books to at risk kids. I started to remember how good it felt to be a part of something. To help organize or raise money or just hot glue something for a cause that was important to me.
A lot has changed in five years. Things are hectic right now with all four kids living back at home for the summer. But when there are only two kids living under my roof who are capable of dressing and feeding themselves and one is old enough to drive, I’m not as overwhelmed as I used to be. I mean, I still forget shit all the time. But I’m starting to think that’s just me.
Probably right when I was having this major epiphany, an email arrived in my inbox trying to get folks to help out with the annual middle school art show and quickly, before I could over think it, I signed up to help.
And then I promptly forgot, that is until I got the reminder email this morning from the art teacher thanking me for volunteering and asking that I show up in the cafeteria around 10:30 to help take the artwork down off the walls.
“Shit,” I thought when I saw it and immediately started coming up with reasons why I couldn’t help.
“What will Facebook do without me?” I worried.
A short time later, I was showered, dressed and engaged in very pleasant conversation while pulling pastel and watercolor masterpieces off the walls lining the school’s tiled hallways. The school was warm and buzzed with end-of-the-year energy as teachers moved up and down the halls during their breaks.
I ran into the music teacher who’d taught all of my kids how to play band instruments over the years while having a whole passel of her own children. I waved “hi” to the school nurse, who let one of my kids spend an inordinate amount of time on her cot when things were pretty rocky here at home. And I exchanged pleasantries with the older kids’ fifth grade and language arts teachers who both spent some time in our kitchen helping to ensure whatever the kids learned the year before didn’t slide out of their ears into the sand over the summer months.
And I was in the school for, like, an hour. Ninety minutes, tops.
But seeing all those familiar faces of all of the teachers my children have had over the years reminded me why I spent all that time pouring juice and selling raffle tickets. Sure, I needed a reason to get dressed and get out of the house back then but it also let me really get to know so many of those wonderful teachers and they, in turn, got to know my children. And in a way, it made me feel a part of the process.
As I was pulling masking tape off the wall, the bell rang and middle schoolers exploded out of their classrooms. They flooded the hallway and hopped over the piles of artwork we’d been setting on the ground. Some particularly sweaty gentlemen came in from their outdoors gym class and I noticed one happened to be my very own 12 year old.
“What are you doing here?” he asked when he saw me frantically waving to him in the hallway.
“I’m VOLUNTEERING,” I shouted.
“Oh,” he said as he began to walk a little quicker past me. “That’s weird.”
And just like that, my baby learned to be careful for what he wished. He might have thought he wanted to have his mom hanging around his school doing stuff, but his older sister – who once watched in horror as her mother did the Macarena while chaperoning a dance – could have told him there was nothing more awkward than having your mom hovering around all the time. She is so not cool. She’s kinda weird even.
I’m thinking I should see if they need anyone to help out at field day. This could be really fun.
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I was standing in the kitchen talking to my 17yo daughter this weekend when I noticed her looking over my shoulder. This is nothing unusual. Nobody really pays any attention to what I have to say around here unless it’s what I’m making for dinner or that I don’t have $300 lying around to help fund a spring break trip to the Keys.
Anyway, I was probably saying something like, “Do you think you’re going to college next year?” or “If you don’t clean your pigsty of a room you’re not going out tonight” when she shouted, “Look what’s inside that tree!”
She pointed out the window over our kitchen sink to a giant maple tree in our neighbor’s yard, right on the other side of the chain link fence that separates our properties. Its trunk splits into two like a “V” as it reaches up towards the sky and then each half splits again. About 20 feet up, the whole shebang starts bending towards my house so all the limbs, branches, twigs create a canopy over my narrow back yard. It actually used to have a sister tree about 10 feet to its north, also right at the edge of the fence, and the two of them had been the bane of my existence since I moved into this house over a dozen years ago.
It turns out, maple trees generate a variety of little pieces of crap that they drop throughout the year — you know, those helicopter things we used to call “Pinnochio noses” when we were kids that fall in late summer, and bright green blossoms in the spring. And then there are all the leaves. And all of it — the buds, the leaves, the helicopters and all that ensuing pollen — float right into the swimming pool that takes up about half of my backyard.
I really wanted that pool when we were trying to buy the house. I really thought it was going to be so great to have it for the kids to swim and play and invite their friends over and our friends over. But I have learned after taking care of the 30-year-old thing over the last 12 years that swimming pools should be filed under “Things That Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time.”
Ironically, the tree closest to the pool came crashing into our back yard the night Hurricane Sandy blew through, its giant limbs tearing through the dark green pool cover that had just been pulled on top a month earlier. The power had already gone off when the tree fell but the wind and everything going on outside created such a racket, we never even heard it come down. We eventually noticed the branches, which earlier that day were 40 feet above our yard, lying on the steps outside our back door later that night.
Now, the remaining maple tree is not looking in much better condition than the other one did before it keeled over. A pretty big limb fell off a few years ago, leaving it looking a bit like an amputee, and there’s a big hollow in one of the trunks that indicates that the tree might not be in the best of health.
If this one goes down any time soon, it should probably be filed under “Things I Should Have Taken Care Of.”
Like that weird lump on my finger or the sinking concrete deck around the pool.
So I looked out the window at the tree my daughter was pointing to and inside the hollow was a raccoon, just sitting there staring back at us. It looked almost fake, like someone had put a muppet inside the hole, with its pointy snout and little black mask across its eyes.
And we were like, “Awwwwww.”
And now, for the past two days, we have been absolutely obsessed with the thing. We even named it.
I initially felt strongly that it was a girl and suggested we call her “Rhoda” or “Rhianna.” When those ideas were shot down, I began referring to it as “Bandit” or “Badger” but that ultimately pissed my 12yo son off, as he kept insisting we could not call our raccoon “Badger” since that was, like, the name of another kind of animal altogether.
Okay, whatev.
Then my daughter was like, “It’s definitely a guy,” and suggested we call him “Kenneth” and we all agreed that name fit him perfectly. He is such a Kenneth.
Standard raccoon meme.
Lately, I spend most of my days at my kitchen table sitting at a chair tucked into a bay window area that looks right out at Kenneth’s tree about 20 feet away. All day yesterday, while I should have been doing other things, I watched him dozing in his hole and occasionally would see the top of his head moving up and down as he groomed himself. Every once in a while, he’d stop and push his face out of the hole a little to enjoy a rush of cold air going by. A few times, he actually stretched his body out of the hole and basked in the afternoon sun, closing his eyes and luxuriating in its warmth, and then he’d go right back to scratching himself. I decided right then and there that more than anything else, I wanted to come back as a raccoon in my next life. I wouldn’t mind spending my days napping and grooming myself and taking a break to feel the sun on my face or the breeze in my fur.
Sounds perfect to me.
(The above is a terrible video that really doesn’t show anything except how sick my daughter was when she went outside to try to film Kenneth this weekend).
There was a bit of debate as to whether Kenneth had always been living in that hole, watching us going on with our lives while he nipped at the bugs on his belly, but we ultimately decided he must have moved there more recently. Our real neighbor, the man who owns the actual property behind us where Kenneth is living, recently had a whole crew of tree dudes in his yard chopping down most of the trees back there (other than the one that’s eventually going to kerplop into my yard).
“Kenneth was probably living in one of those trees,” my daughter deduced, and that seems like the best explanation to me.
She came home from school yesterday and walked over to where I was sitting, my chair angled to get the best view of Kenneth’s activities, and we both sat and watched him for a while. Every time he stopped his grooming and looked up towards us, so we could see his pointy little ears and the mask, we’d stop mid-conversation and say, “Ohhh.”
As the sun went down and we could no longer see the tree through the window, we speculated over dinner as to what Kenneth was up to. We joked that he had made his way up to my daughter’s bedroom and was in her bed (she doesn’t even like me in her bed, much less a hairy wild animal) or that we would come down in the morning and find him sitting at our kitchen table with a mug of coffee.
Alas, when we did come down to start our day this morning, there was no sign of Kenneth anywhere. He’s not in his hole and we’re beginning to get a little concerned.
“GO LOOK FOR HIM,” my daughter texted from school earlier. “DO SOMETHING.”
But I really don’t think there’s much I can do when it comes to looking for a lost raccoon. It’s not like I can call the police or the SPCA. I can’t imagine, even though he’s really cute, that anyone is going to call to report that they found someone’s raccoon. Even one with a proper name like Kenneth.
So, because I couldn’t stare at our raccoon this morning, I took to looking at my son instead. I told him how handsome he looked wearing the same husky Gap corduroys — the kind where you can cinch in and let out the waist as needed — that he wears about four out of five school days during the week and his standard soccer jersey on top. I followed him into the mudroom as he went to grab his sneakers and he finally said, “Okay. You don’t need to watch me put on my shoes.”
Maybe that’s why I liked watching Kenneth so much. I’ve got fewer people who let me stare at them around here. I miss when they were little and I could marvel at how they could speak and move all on their own and their perfect little bodies. Now when I try to admire them for any length of time, I’m told I’m acting like “a creeper.”
Not to fear, though. I’ve been vigilant today, on the lookout for Kenneth, watching to see if maybe he crops up in a new nest or maybe in the next yard over. It seemed like he had such a good set up though. I’m struggling with why he would leave. Maybe all our staring got to him after a while. Maybe it was all a little unsettling.
And I mean, if worse comes to worse, I could always just go and stare at my cat.
She’s just no Kenneth.
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In the mental photo album I keep tucked deep within the cracks and crevices of my ever-failing memory, lay the snapshots of certain key moments of my life. They’re the ones I pull out to study in the middle of the night or while driving alone in my car. The ones that I can’t forget.
Unlike the stacks of albums and shoeboxes I have brimming with over 20 years of memories – little ones holding up Easter baskets filled with colorful plastic eggs or smiling in front of Cinderella’s castle – my mental snapshots are a mix of more authentic occurrences. They are the moments that weren’t staged to document our happiness. They’re the real deal.
There’s me, sitting in Newark Airport early in the morning after my 1990 wedding — long after the official wedding photographer had gone home — with a big smile on my face each time I remembered I was finally married to the guy I had chased and loved for so long. There I am again, weeping with relief a dozen years later when an ultrasound revealed the sex of my fourth child—a boy – which I knew would help soften the blow of that pregnancy for my husband. And another instant, this time me standing next to my soon-to-be-ex in a drab county courtroom reciting the names and birth dates of our four children before a judge and thinking how it ended much as it had begun: the two of us standing side-by-side and saying a bunch of words.
There are more happy moments: Lying next to my husband and listening to raindrops softly falling on our tent in the middle of the woods and thinking there was no place on Earth I’d rather be at that moment than lying atop that air mattress. Sitting beside my oldest son on a chairlift making its slow ascent to the top of the mountain and hearing nothing but the silence of the icy trees and snowflakes swirling around us and the sound of his teenaged voice really talking to me without the distractions of Twitter and YouTube. Or rocking in a glider at 2 a.m. with an infant curled like a kitten on my chest, his tiny head tucked under my chin while his tiny back rose and fell beneath my hand as he slept.
There’s a song that comes towards the end of Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” (which is now a new movie that I saw the other day) that cleverly observes how life is the slow, steady grind of work and husbands and wives and family and children and doing what you’re supposed to be doing. But every so often there is a flash, an instant that stands out from all the other instants and a moment we file away to be remembered later.
My therapist is hot for this idea, too. She likes to tell me — after I’ve sat on her loveseat and complained about yucky things in my life — that the bad stuff lets us see how good the good can be. And as much as I wouldn’t mind a life filled with rainbows and unicorns 24/7, I kind of get her point.
A few years ago I was driving home from a dinner out with my four children to celebrate my oldest girl’s high school graduation when she plugged her iPhone into the car stereo and the song “Landslide” began to play. It was the Glee version of the Fleetwood Mac song, and as Gwyneth Paltrow began to sing all four of my children started to sign with her. Like, even my oldest son who is neither a joiner nor a singer. I began to sing as well and as we sailed through the dark towards home, we sang about time making you bolder and children getting older.
“And I’m getting older, too,” we sang, and I couldn’t help feeling that for a second, everything — our whole lives — had been working towards that moment in the car and singing that song. Like we were in a movie or something. “Landslide” is a song about making changes and you could feel the energy in our car and how – despite the divorce and our struggles trying to stabilize in its aftermath – we were all connected. It was pretty epic.
And since then, we’ve kind of considered “Landslide” our unofficial family song. I even wasted tons of space on my iPhone recently recording Stevie Nicks twirling onstage and singing it when I saw Fleetwood Mac in concert in October.
So on Christmas, after all their own loot had been unwrapped, the kids took turns giving me their presents. I got legit moonshine — procured from one of my oldest son’s southern fraternity brothers — replete with what I initially feared might be testicles floating within that I was later assured were in fact peaches; and a t-shirt from my oldest daughter that read, “Trust me, I’m a writer” (which is funny because nobody about whom I write trusts my writing in the least). And my little guy gave me hat and gloves I had bought for myself at the JCrew outlet that I gave to him to give me, which I kind of thought was better than anything he was going to find for me when he shopped at the Five Below on Christmas Eve. Like, I do not need a “Fault in Our Stars” poster.
But the gift that made me cry – and apparently the children go into Christmas morning with the goal of making their mom weep – was from my youngest daughter who used the lyrics from “Landslide” to create a paper tree from which she had dangled five hearts bearing all of our names.
Seriously.
Landslide.
She explained the framed picture was something she had come across on Pinterest and I don’t know if she’s actually finished writing her college essays or even sent in all of her applications for next year yet, but man, if she put this much time into those endeavors she’d be going to Harvard. I’m just saying.
So now there’s a new moment in that mental shoebox crammed with 48 years-worth of memories stashed away in my crickety brain. Somewhere lodged beneath the snapshots of the babies and the terrible fights and the ride when all five of our voices sang out in our car on a warm spring night is me, unwrapping a gift that reminded me that not even a landslide could bring us down.
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This is an updated version of something I wrote last year cursing this annual insanity.
It started the day after Thanksgiving last year, the annual marketing campaign going on in homes across the country that gives new meaning to the term Black Friday.
Inside my mailbox on that day, along with 20 pounds of Pottery Barn catalogs and Bed Bath & Beyond coupons, sat the first holiday card of the season.
Ho. Ho. Ho.
I think the special delivery vexed me for two reasons. First, it was a reminder that I needed to get my act together to accomplish a great many things in the ensuing weeks before Christmas, which included dealing with all the Christmas tchotchkes crammed into about a dozen boxes in my basement and the stupid Elf on a Shelf.
Secondly, that card signaled that I needed to plan how I would be marketing my own family this holiday season because that, let’s be honest, is what it’s all about.
But don’t get me wrong: I drank the Christmas card Kool-Aid years ago and have spent a lot of time, money and patience creating the annual “aren’t-we-something” campaign. I am the ultimate Mad Mom.
Parents nowadays have no idea what it was like producing a card back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and before digital cameras were de rigeur. When I, and every mom within a 10-mile radius, had to bring my roll of film (actual film) to the CVS to be developed, and then wait a few days in hopes that at least one of the 24 shots would be a winner. I prayed for that one frame where all eyes would be open, looking straight at the camera and not rolled up in small heads in disgust.
Then I had to get 100 copies made of that one tolerable photo and then stuff said photos into cards, that needed to be signed and maybe a bow needed to be tied, and then stuffed into envelopes, licked and addressed, stamped and mailed.
I’m not saying you young moms have it easy, but seriously, you have it so freaking easy.
Nowadays, you just scroll through a photo gallery and upload a variety of images to an adorable card that’s personalized and ready to be mailed when the shipment arrives on your doorstep.
It’s fucking magic.
I thought I could make a clean break from sending holiday cards when my husband moved out in December 2008. It was such a terrible time and I figured I’d have to be some kind of marketing genius to generate a card that said, “Look how happy we are.”
So I just kind of knocked it off my mental check-list of holiday tasks for that year until one of the kids asked about it.
“I’m thinking we’re not gonna send one this year,” I told my oldest daughter.
“Wait, what? You’re not doing a card?” she asked. “It’s our tradition.”
The other kids sitting in the kitchen nodded in agreement and I realized that the stupid card had become about more than how others see our family. It had become about how we see ourselves, too.
And sending out a card that year signaled to the kids that life would still go on, even after their dad moved out. There would still be cards, wrapping paper and Christmas for them all.
Just like everyone else.
I decided to bang my cards out earlier than usual last year to take advantage of all the Cyber Monday sales. I checked a couple of sites for the best deals and instructed the older kids to send me photos of themselves to use since we didn’t have any great shots of all of us together.
I struggled, as I have these last few years, with how to personalize the card since the kids and I have different last names. Hyphenating the two seemed weird and just using the kids’ name, the one I had used for 20 years, didn’t seem right either.
So I finally settled on sending love to all our friends and family last Christmas from “4 Walsacks and a Byrnes.” Awkward, perhaps, but it just felt more right than the other options.
I think the end-result, while far from perfect, said, “We’re doing okay.”
I tried to get out of doing cards again this year. I’m not really feeling like a millionaire and thought that that $200 could be better spent on, like, one of the many new iPhone 6s Santa is expected to bring down our chimney this year.
So I casually floated the idea at dinner one night last week while ladling some soup into bowls but my 17yo daughter was having none of it.
“Now we’re going to seem even less together,” she said in only that way a teenage daughter can say to remind you of what a failure you’ve turned out to be as a mother. Like, a constant disappointment.
But it also reminded me that no matter how long your parents have been divorced, you really need to feel like you’re just like everybody else. You want people to know that it wasn’t the end of the world. That you’re doing okay.
So I dutifully combed through the last 12 months in my iPhoto to find some decent shots and then scrolled through TinyPrints to find a card that had the smallest number of photo boxes and a saying that didn’t seem too bullshitty. No “It’s a Wonderful Life” or “Love and Joy” for us. I’d actually like a job at a greeting card company so I could help come up with content for those of us who hate pretending. What about a “We’re Doing the Best We Can” card or one that says “Hope and Pray”?
Now, those are sentiments I can get behind.
I settled on “Merry Christmas” in the end and the box of all 100 of them is already sitting on my kitchen island, waiting for me to get off Facebook and mail them to everyone on our list.
But the box also sends a signal to my kids that everything really is okay. We might have different last names now and a dad who lives in the next town, but we’re still a family.
I couldn’t think of a better way to spend $200.
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A few weeks ago a girlfriend sent a text to me and another woman about picking a date to coordinate a ladies night out to celebrate the holidays.
“I want to make sure the date works for you guys before I send it out to the whole group,” she texted us. We went back and forth about a couple of dates but pretty much I was like, “Everything works. I’m good.”
We settled on next Wednesday, Dec. 17 and she sent out a big group text and a whole thread ensued about who can make it and who still needed to find a babysitter. I was secretly pleased that I no longer really needed a sitter, my high school girl could handle herself and her brother for the night, and I thought about what I was going to wear instead.
So last Sunday I stood in the cold with the girls night organizer and another friend listening to the middle school chorus sing holiday tunes before the annual lighting of our town tree. The subject of our night out came up and we all stood shivering and agreed that our destination would be fun and then the other mom said she was still having a hard time finding a sitter.
My 17yo had just arrived from work and walked over to join our circle. I turned to her and asked her what she was doing that night — thinking maybe she could watch my friend’s kids — and then I stopped myself and said, “Wait, she’ll be watching my little kid!”
We all started to laugh and my daughter asked, “What night is this, anyway?”
“The 17th,” the organizer told her.
“Oh,’ said my daughter, giving me a look, “you mean your son’s birthday?”
Crap.
“Amy!” shouted the organizer, “you told me you were free that night!”
“I thought I was!”
And right on cue, the 17yo said, “You’re a terrible mother.”
“I have a learning disability you guys,” I continued, trying to recover, “I can’t remember things.”
And then I thought a little bit more and observed, “And I don’t even have a job.” In the past, I would use that as an excuse for my forgetfulness; for when I dropped the ball somewhere in my life. And with only two kids living at home right now, I couldn’t even pull the ol’ “I’ve got four kids” card out of my back pocket.
Now I didn’t even have that to blame.
Maybe I was just legit stupid.
At that, the teenager grabbed the car keys out of my coat pocket and said, “That’s it. I’m taking the car and driving home,” and she stormed off into the crowd.
The other moms and I laughed and I promised that I’d still be there, albeit after the obligatory trip to the local hibachi place to celebrate a 12th birthday.
I told the story to another girlfriend as we exercised the next day in my living room and she shook her head when I got to the part about forgetting my kid’s birthday and I repeated the “learning disabled” bit.
“Maybe you need an IEP,” she suggested and that really got us laughing but then I thought, “That’s not such a bad idea.”
An IEP is shorthand for the Individualized Education Program that’s tailored for students who are classified in school with some type of challenge that’s getting in between them and learning. Like, I could really use having somebody sit down with me and kind of help me sort through my life, identifying the things that challenge me – like arriving anywhere on time or dropping my son off at the wrong place – and figuring out ways to overcome them.
We’d call it my ILP (Individualized Life Plan), which would be a grown up version of the IEP and my kids could even have a copy of it to make modifications as we discover future challenges.
Or maybe I could just pay better attention to things.
I checked my phone as the concert ended and Santa screeched by on the firetruck, its sirens blaring and lights flashing in the darkening December sky, and saw that my daughter had texted that she was sitting in the car waiting for me.
I searched through the crowd for my son and we headed out to the parking lot behind the borough hall. I opened the door and slipped into the warm car and my daughter said, “Seriously, Amy.”
“I know, dude,” I said. “But isn’t it part of my charm?”
We laughed about it during the quick drive home and I thought of ways of breaking it to my son that I would be going out for a little bit after hibachi next week.
That is, if I remember.
Give yourself the gift of Amy. Don’t worry, I’m not jumping out of a box Christmas morning. But you can sign up to get all my posts sent directly to your inbox. Just plug your email into the “receive new post in your inbox.” Oh, p.s., it’s free.
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After 73 days and a lot of breath wasted on telling me there was “nothing to do,” my youngest child went back to school today.
I was standing in the kitchen talking to my 17yo daughter this weekend when I noticed her looking over my shoulder. This is nothing unusual. Nobody really pays any attention to what I have to say around here unless it’s what I’m making for dinner or that I don’t have $300 lying around to help fund a spring break trip to the Keys.
In the mental photo album I keep tucked deep within the cracks and crevices of my ever-failing memory, lay the snapshots of certain key moments of my life. They’re the ones I pull out to study in the middle of the night or while driving alone in my car. The ones that I can’t forget.
It started the day after 
A few weeks ago a girlfriend sent a text to me and another woman about picking a date to coordinate a ladies night out to celebrate the holidays.