Category Archives: t is for teenagers

My kids sleep all day and play all night.
Jul
22
2013

Welcome to the Habitrail

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habitrailThere was a period of time, while growing up in the Seventies, that I wanted nothing more than a pet hamster or two. But more than the critters themselves, what I really wanted to get my hands on was one of those elaborate Habitrail systems that allowed you to create this maze of interconnected plastic tubes and pods through which you could watch your pets scuttle.

I don’t know what the appeal was for me: Maybe it was my whole fascination with The Borrowers and little creatures living in a big world or I just loved all the nooks and crannies that the Habitrail offered. I probably had a distorted idea of what caring for a pet hamster would look like, believing we’d be bonding and that the fur balls would be anything more than frisky poop machines.

I also would have settled for SeaMonkeys.

But unlike me when I became a parent, my mom did not easily succumb to the pleas of pet-starved children and I never got my hands on a hamster, never mind the Habitrail. I think later, as we grew older, one of my brothers might have scored a slimy something and there might have been a bird or two but rodents never made the cut in our house.

Which, I’ve since been told, is a good thing. According to other moms I know who have caved to their children’s pestering and adopted hamsters, the rodents make a racket all night long. They apparently are nocturnal creatures, sleeping all day and then as the whole house settles in for the night, they come to life and start to play, scurry and eat.

But last night, after I powered down my Kindle around 10:00 and turned out my light, excited for a solid night’s sleep, I realized that, in an ironic twist, I was now living with creatures whose internal clocks mimicked those of hamsters.

I was living in my own goddamn Habitrail.

While my 10-year-old and I were calling it a day, the three older kids – teens and a 20-year-old – were just getting going.

Down the hallway from my room, my 16-year-old and her pal who lives across the street were hooting and hollering all gansta “yo yo”s and “what what”s. Something big must have been happening on Instagram.

My 19-year-old daughter saw 10 p.m. as the perfect time to take a bath and settled into the tub after turning the radio up as loud as it would go.

When I lumbered out to knock on the bathroom door and ask her to turn it down, it became a comical “Who’s on first?” routine.

Me: “Turn it down.”

Her: “I can’t hear you.”

Me. “Because you need to turn it down.”

Her: “I still can’t hear you.”

Sigh.

I got back into my bed and then heard the yelling and pounding of last night’s episode of True Blood playing out in the den, located right under my room. By then, too tired from the exchange with the bather, I simply rolled over and texted my 20-year-old to turn the volume down. Within minutes, I heard the crinkling of plastic bags as he foraged through the pantry searching for some late-night snack that I’m sure remnants of which will greet me – Tostito bits dribbled on the kitchen floor and a milk-coated glass stuck to the bottom of the sink – when I head downstairs today.

The house is quiet now, in the early morning hours, but I’m sure to be tiptoeing around until my little critters start to stir in their cages some time around noon.

So I say to any parent who has a child begging to bring a rodent into the house, simply tell your child that while they can’t have the furry variety now, some day, if they play their cards right and become parents themselves, they’ll be the proud owners of creatures who spring to life at night and sleep all day.

It’s in their nature.

May
30
2013

stinky way to start the day

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IMG_2483I found it in the refrigerator yesterday as I was digging out the half and half for my early-morning coffee.

There it was, sitting quietly next to the pancake mix and Frank’s buffalo sauce, like a time bomb waiting to explode.

I had sent my son to the market the day before to pick up something we needed for dinner and told him he should also buy sandwich fixings for lunch this week. He’s starting his summer job working for a landscaper and I knew he could barely afford the gas to drive to work each day, much less buying lunch.

“Get some of their good ham,” I suggested. “Or maybe a container of pulled pork.”

And while he did take my advice and get the pork, he also bought something that is banned from my house. Like, even my ex-husband, who was not great with boundaries, knew it was off limits.

It’s fucking tunafish. There’s a big, oozing tub of it on the lower shelf of my fridge and I can’t stop thinking about it.

It freaks me out.

If I ever got, like, a piece of it on my hand, I’d have to chop it off.  It is my mortal enemy.

I worked in a deli in college and had made it clear that I did not get involved with the freaky vat of tuna for subs (or egg salad, for that matter). If you were working with me, you just knew that when an order for tuna-anything came in, you would be slathering the stuff on a roll and not me.

I found myself working with a friend one weekend afternoon our senior year, and although we were sorority sisters and had lived together the year before, she was having none of my tuna-bullshit.

An order came in for a tuna sub and she turned to me and asked me to make it. I balked.

“Make the fucking sub,” she instructed, and I knew I was being difficult and irrational, but I was actually afraid of the stuff.

In the end, it turns out I was even more afraid of her, and found myself scooping the smelly brown glop from a tub and smearing it on a sub roll.

Traumatizing.

On a recent flight to San Francisco with the kids, a family seated a few rows behind us – reluctant, it seemed, to pony-up the cash for inflight dining snackboxes – cracked open their lunches from home and the smell of tuna immediately filled the cabin.

It was all I could do not to turn around and give them the hairy eyeball for subjecting 20 rows of passengers to their lunch stench. Selfish.

And now it’s living in my house.

I’ve seen my son make a sandwich. I’ve witnessed the aftermath of debris all over the counter and sandwich matter caught in the teeth of a serrated knife lying in the sink. I don’t know if I could handle bits of tuna lying on my granite counter or perhaps dripping down the side of the container and threatening to infect the innocent pint of strawberries sitting nearby in the frig.

My first instinct when I saw the tub yesterday was to quickly wrap it up in a Target bag and throw it out in the trash in the garage.

“Don’t do that,” advised my daughter, who was almost as freaked out as I was by the discovery, but definitely more pragmatic. “It would be such a waste.”

And I know the tuna-buyer would certainly tell me I’m being a baby (which I’m sure he will after he reads this) and that’s possibly true, but he’s got his own list of of phobias (used Band Aids and hair in the drain, come to mind).

So maybe he should understand how bugged I am.

In the time it took for me to write this, I’ve heard him banging around downstairs making lunch and getting ready for another day working in the hot sun. I hope his sandwich is especially delicious when he eats it in a few hours.

And if he ever were to ask me how much I loved him, I wouldn’t say, “I love you from here to the moon and back.”

I’ll tell him, “I love you so much, I let you keep tunafish in my refrigerator.”

Because that is truly love.

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May
24
2013

winter is coming (and it’s only memorial day)

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P1000028I was lying on a bed in a hotel room in the-middle-of-nowhere Virginia last week, waiting for my daughter to finish her final exam for the semester, when I posted the following on my Facebook wall: “Winter is coming.”

And I know that Memorial Day is here, and maybe I’ve been watching way too much Game of Thrones lately (hello, Khal Drogo), but I just couldn’t shake that imminent sense of doom.

Because like the good people of the House of Stark living in the north on the HBO series, I know that hard times are coming. On the show, they’re always ending conversations with the ominous, “Winter is coming,” tagline. Only now I totally get what it’s like to see the shadows quickly creeping towards you. I might start guzzling wine like Cersei before too long.

The summer months have always been challenging for me and now I fear the seasonal shift will be even more pronounced as I go from tending to the day-to-day needs of only two children back to the full load of four.

It’s like someone lifted a giant weight off my shoulders only to sneak it back on while I was folding laundry.

I don’t want to assume I’m doing what’s expected of me, just minding my own business while working on my laptop or turning ground turkey into one magical thing or another, only to turn around and get my head lopped off, Ned Stark-style, by some terrible enfant.

And so far, it hasn’t been terrible. My oldest son, at 20, seems to have come to terms with many of the conditions for living with his family and has been seen clearing dinner dishes and wiping counters and I’ve heard he might have even pet the cat once or twice. And his sister, who’s 19, has come in handy picking up and dropping off her younger siblings to work or baseball or sometimes she even drives me if I want to have a cocktail or two. I have also hired the older two to handle the cleaning of our pool,which  currently resembles the Black Lagoon, a task that has always fallen under my purview. It’s time to pass that time-consuming baton to those who actually have time.

Don’t get me wrong, though. Things aren’t like all rainbows and puppy dogs over here. I came down this morning to find a number of shoes lying around the family room floor and a pair of bunched up socks stuffed behind an ottoman. There’s generally a few bowls sitting in the sink, the remnants of a late night snack of ice cream or spaghetti and sauce caking the surface and much of our stainless steel sink, to greet me each morning.

And I hesitate to mention the big dent that recently appeared in the rear of our car.

It could be worse though, according to a girlfriend, whose two college kids brought home ants and mumps, respectively.

And I know it pissed the older kids off when I wrote about this before, and although they are the divas of the brood (NOTE: If you are reading this, my loves, don’t even pretend this isn’t true. It’s part of your charm.), it’s not really the specific people. It’s quantity over quality in this matter.

There have been some bright spots. I looked out the kitchen window one day earlier this week and saw the two older kids sitting in beach chairs in the backyard with their noses buried in books, and for some reason, I was not annoyed. If they were sprawled on the couch in the middle of the afternoon watching Vampire Diaries or Adventure Time, I think I would screamed the way I did when I found a certain someone still asleep at 12:30 yesterday afternoon.

But it was nice to see that all those nights of reading to them when they were young, learning for the thousandth time what happens when you give a moose a muffin or put a sister up for sale, weren’t for nothing.

So I’ll put up with the shoes scattered all over the mudroom and the daily “What’s for dinner?” because it’s a part of the package of being their mom. And aside from the fantasy of shipping all, maybe a few, okay just one of them off to the proverbial Wall, Nights Watch-style, what are my options?

Oh, the things I do for love.

 

 

 

 

May
08
2013

mommy math

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images-3I have a confession to make: although I purport to be this harried mother-of-four – making a sandwich with one hand while blogging with the other — the truth is that over the last nine months two of those kiddos have been far away at school.

The brother and sister are back-to-back grade-wise so he graduated and left for college in 2011 and she followed suit the next year.

And do you know what I’ve learned in that time?

That basically I was a fucking asshole for carrying on the way I did way back when about NEEDING four children. Seriously, ask my former husband, I cried.

Having two kids is AMAZING. Seriously, hats off to all of you who had the good sense to stop at a pair. It’s easy street.

There’s just less of everything: laundry, shoes scattered in the mudroom, food crumbs in the pantry, plastic water bottles in the recycling and definitely a reduction in personalities. That right there is worth the cost of two college tuitions.

So I read with interest a newly-released survey by the geniuses at the Today Show this week reporting that parents with three children are seemingly more stressed out than parents with four or more children.

“Call it the Duggar effect,” the article on Today.com proclaims. “Once you get a certain critical mass of kids, life seems to get a bit easier.”

Please, somebody, help me do that math. Because as far as I’m concerned, it’s a numbers game, people. And even though I majored in English and couldn’t convert a fraction to decimals if you paid me, I clearly understand that 2 children + 2 children = more of everything.

Like, get in a cage with three monkeys and throw another one in and it just compounds the amount of poop, screaming and jumping around you have to put up with.

Here’s the kind of math I understand: Remember Schoolhouse Rock’s Four-Legged Zoo? Just like the animals in that cartoon zoo, all those feet (that need expensive sneakers), mouths (that need palate expanders and braces) and ears (that don’t hear a fucking word you say) just multiply with the more children that you add.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGfKbo770uw

And things get dangerous (usually for the children) the more you have if,  like me, you tend to leave one behind every now and then.

Like once I drove off in our minivan and about 10 minutes into the drive told the oldest (probably 7 at that time) to sit up in his seat way in the back, only to hear his sister say, “He’s not here.”

Another time I took the two girls to Petco to stock up on dog food and we loaded the giant bag into the car and my older daughter and I got in and I started to drive away. We drove right past the other sister, who had gone to return the shopping cart. She just stood there, watching us drive.

“I was kidding!” I assured her as she climbed in the car teary-eyed. I could tell by her face she wasn’t buying it.

But the fourth kid is the one who always seems to be slipping through the cracks. To date, I have left him alone in a neighbor’s basement while we all went out to deliver Thanksgiving dinners to the needy (he said he alternated his time between watching television and going outside to bounce on the trampoline). And two years ago we dropped him off for baseball practice only to discover two hours later when I picked him up that there had been no practice (he spent some time at the playground, apparently).

So, do I regret having four children? Don’t be silly. Being their mom has made me a better person and my life feels full and blessed with them in it.

But do I enjoy only having to cook for two kids every night and clean up our little end of the kitchen island that we can now comfortably fit around?

Well, you know what they say: Three is a magic number.

 

 

 

 

Apr
14
2013

take the plunge

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I know I’ve said in the past that one of the few times I missed having a man around the house was when it snowed.

That is not true.

I also wish there was somebody else around here (there doesn’t even need to be a penis involved) to help out when I see dead things floating in the pool and when a toilet starts to overflow.

Which seems to be happening around here a lot lately.

Now, I’ll take responsibility for failing to mention to my children that toilet bowls aren’t like really fancy trash cans. You can’t just put anything in there and flush without thinking there are going to be repercussions months, or sometimes even seconds, down the line.

I walked into my own bathroom last week (which now everyone uses because of the kitty litter box lurking in the kids’ bathroom) to find mounds of paper towels filling the bowl. One of the kids had cleaned something off the bathroom mirror and instead of tossing it into the trashcan literally one millimeter away, she opted to dispose of it in the toilet (yet failed to seal the deal with a flush).

Having grown up living with a temperamental septic tank, I was incredulous that anyone would even consider flushing anything but toilet paper.

“How was I supposed to know?” asked the culprit, rather nonplussed, and more than a little irritated that her mom was being such a freak about the toilet.

I also didn’t think I had to mention to the girls, in this day and age – what with all the signs posted in like every goddamn public restroom stall you sit down in – that only toilet paper should be disposed of in the toilet.

The girls were shocked to learn that feminine products, no matter how small and seemingly streamlined they may appear to be,  cannot be disposed of through the toilet. “Wait, what?” said one. “That’s stupid.”

Stupid, perhaps. But only until toilet water is starting to pour down the sides of the bowl. Then, as you are trying to remember where the fucking plunger is, it starts to make perfect sense.

.

Mar
08
2013

deal with it. period.

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There are a lot of hormones pulsing through my house right now.

Between the pimples, bad moods and sweating (okay, maybe that’s just me), this place is a powder keg.

Now that I’ve moved into the land of perimenopause – a hormonal carnival ride whose dips and spins just won’t relent – and my youngest guy, at 10, is starting to feel his oats, we join the other feisty threesome who have been battling the hormone demons for years.

Since their dad moved out a few years ago, my two boys are now outnumbered by the ladies. We used to joke and say our dog Rudy would help balance the gender scales but now that he’s gone, too, the hormone levels have shifted around here.

The two boys, who are 10 years apart, have adjusted very differently.

My oldest son, who’s 20, is irritated by all the signs around the house that he is surrounded by women. He is freaked out by all the long hair that gets tangled in the shower drain, the tampon wrappers in the trash and the never ending loop of Vampire Diaries and Full House playing on our family room television.

While he was home a few weekends ago, he emerged from his den in the basement to discover the kitchen filled with women – me and his sisters and a few of their friends. He turned around in disgust, heading back down the stairs and grumbling about all the “estrogen around here.”

My prediction, I can feel it in my bones, is that the guy is going to grow up and have all daughters.  And then I shall laugh.

My younger son, however, has adapted quite well to often being the only dude around here. He knows all about periods and can quote the movie Pitch Perfect, and when I suddenly start taking off my top in the kitchen, he asks, “What’s wrong mom? Another hot flash?”

But that’s what I admire about him, he’s okay with all of the girl-stuff because he’s grown up surrounded by it. There are no mysteries here.

My youngest son is completely in touch, and okay with, his feminine side.

But my girlfriend recently said that she didn’t want to install the iPeriod app – that helps track Aunt Blood’s visits – on her iPhone because her three young boys often use her cell to play games.

She said she worried that if they discovered it, one of the boys would feel the need run into school and announce his mom was bleeding from her butt. Sound the alarm.

But I think if it’s just a part of your life, something your mom has to deal with every month, minus the gory details (because you don’t need to scar the fellas), it would be significantly less traumatizing.

Another friend just posted on Facebook that her son got dragged along for Spanx shopping with her, and while shopping anywhere is generally torture for boys, it’s good for them to see all the shit we women go through: Smoothing our lumps and bumps, waxing our mustaches and bleeding out our butts.

Being a girl is a pain in the ass.

But the sooner they know it, the better off all our boys will be.

Grrrr.

Ladies man.

Mar
05
2013

the messy, messy girl

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When I was a kid, my mom gave me a picture book that told the story of a little girl with a super messy bedroom – like banana peel-on–the-floor messy room – and how she had to come to terms with giving into her mother and cleaning it until it sparkled at the end.

I always thought it was weird my mom gave this particular book to me because there were no banana peels on my bedroom floor. Are you crazy? My siblings and I weren’t allowed to eat food anywhere but the kitchen and making your bed every morning was the norm.

I grew up with a mother that would wake long before dawn each day to clean our house.  I have no idea what she was doing those few hours while the rest of us were in our beds, all I know is that I would come down and find her showered, dressed and ready for the day.

But there were eight of us, plus pets, and I had spent enough time at a girlfriend’s house growing up to see six children’s worth of laundry pile up on their basement floor to know what happens when you don’t stay on top of things.

At some point, part of the daily routine for at least some of us kids, was to not only make our beds before school, but to give our bedroom floor a one-over with the vacuum. As I said, no banana peels here.

So of course, now that I’m a mom with kids and lots of beds that need to be made and rugs that could use some vacuuming, I’ve had to come to terms with my own level of cleanliness and decide what I can live with.

It turns out, that for as much as we sometimes question and rebel against earlier generations’ ways, I don’t like living in a pigsty. I make my bed every morning, take out the trash and run my dishwasher every night and like to keep the pillows on my couch zhoozhed (think Carson Kressley on Queer Eye).

Okay, I do have hoarding tendencies when it comes to paperwork and reading material and if you went into my bedroom right now, you’d fine a few piles of such on tabletops and maybe a couple on the floor (it’s tax time, people!).  But I try to keep it in control and not let it bleed into other parts of the house.

Enter: The Messy, Messy Girl.

I have a teenage daughter who’s lovely. She’s pleasant, will help out making dinner and can wield a drill and level with mad skill. She gets good grades, babysits often and works a few days a week in a local store.

But man, she’s a slob.

On her floor right this minute is a giant plastic bag stuffed with bedding used on a ski trip in January; two brown paper lunch bags containing Tupperware containers from school lunches last week; inside out sweaters, jeans, underwear and socks, socks, socks, all scattered in piles across the room.

It’s a fucking shit show, and while I support an individual’s right to live as he or she pleases, I am drawing the line at squalor in my own home.

We’ve been down this road before – where I’ve taken away her laptop and/or cellphone – and she does a big clean up. Then a few days later, it will be hoardersville again.

This morning, I peeked into my 10-year-old son’s room and found he’d taken a page from his sister’s messy book. There are clothes scattered all over the floor, his bed is unmade and there’s an empty can of silly string lying alongside an elbow pad and some USB cords.

But no banana peels. Definitely no banana peels.

Feb
22
2013

wish you were here

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When my oldest child, who’s now a sophomore in college, began looking at schools, its distance from our home was never a concern. And frankly, at that point in our relationship, my thought was that a little space might do the two of us some good.

So when he decided to go to a school that was an eight-hour drive away from our house and far from any major airports or train stations, my reaction was, “Have fun!”

Kid #2, a daughter, was just one year behind and when she decided she wanted to apply early decision to the same big, state school, I went along with it. At that point, new to being single and working full-time, my parenting strategy was that if it wasn’t on fire and screaming, “SAVE ME,” I wasn’t about to over think it. “Go for it,” I told her.

In August, we stuffed our car with color-coordinated bins, towels and comforters from Target, set up her dorm room as if it was about to be featured in a House Beautiful spread, waved good-bye and journeyed home.

And that, I figured, was that.

They’d be busy with classes and making new friends and learning all about beer bongs, and before we’d know it, they’d be home with a mountain of laundry for Thanksgiving.

What do I fucking know?

It turns out, college can be stressful for these kids. There are exams that you bomb and classes that need to be dropped. You need to get used to having a flexible schedule and managing your time and getting to bed before 3 a.m. There’s no shrewish older woman living with who reminds you to wake up and go to sleep. No one is there to cut up a kiwi for your breakfast or tell you to eat your broccoli. No one gives a shit.

And then the moment arrives, a few weeks into fall semester, when the new college student comes to the stunning realization that he actually misses that place from which he couldn’t wait to escape and the people that live there. It dawns on that freshman that home was actually not so bad. And neither was his family.

And as a mom, it’s not so easy being on the other end of a text or a phone call when these moments hit. When I can’t just gather that kid close and tell him or her it’s okay and maybe sneak away to get lunch and spend time alone. Just us.

My son started texting me this week and asking about wisdom teeth and when does one know they need to come out. I’ve had very little experience with this subject, other than having my own removed in my early 20’s. (The incident proved yet another missed opportunity to realize that when my soon-to-be-husband, who accompanied me to the extraction, fainted in the recovery room upon seeing me, thus seizing all the attention of the medical staff, that I would never be the star of that relationship.)

So when my kid’s texts morphed from “What’s up with wisdom teeth?” to “My mouth fucking kills,” I was still hoping to downplay the situation. “Gargle with a little salt water,” I advised. “Take some Tylenol.”

This fire was too far away for a quick dousing.

I made an appointment for a consultation with an oral surgeon when my son returns home for spring break in March, and thought I had a handle on the situation.

Until that child called me around 11:00 Wednesday night, upset. Like, really upset because his mouth felt like it was actually on fire.

There I was lying in bed, half delirious with Stephen Colbert and his silliness lighting up my darkened room, with a really upset kid/man on the line and feeling helpless.

But of course, by 9 a.m. the following day, I had wrangled a prescription for antibiotics and made an emergency appointment with an oral surgeon this weekend. He and his sister will make the long drive home in the car they have down at school and regardless of whether that thing needs to be pulled or the doctor can just do something temporary to get my kid through to spring break, I am happy that I will be able to just have him here. I won’t have to rely on an iPhone photo or a text from him to know what’s going on. There’s great comfort in that.

And when Kids 3 and 4 start their college search, you better believe they won’t be going anywhere I can’t get to in just a few hours.

 

Jan
20
2013

dude night

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As the girliest of girls, I am an advocate of activities like shopping, spa days and seeing big Broadway musicals. And as the mother of two, now-teenage, daughters, I have enjoyed looping them into my girly fun.

Over the years, we have done the requisite mall excursions, mani/pedi outings and weekend getaways to Vermont with more girls to check out foliage and farm markets and browse the local book store.

And my two boys were having none of it.

“You know mom, that’s just not fair that the girls always get to do special things,” my 10 year old son told me not long ago.

His brother, older by a decade (and who never seems in such a hurry to really do anything with me), chimed in, “It’s true, mom. You never take us anywhere.”

They needed a dude day.

So I decided that I would get tickets for the three of us to go see a Knicks game and give them to the boys for Christmas. It seemed like a simple win-win: the older guy is a huge NBA fan and the little one just likes sports.

But, maybe because I need to make a big production out of everything or have to know every detail before I make a decision, I had a hard time pulling the trigger and clicking the “Buy” button as I searched for them online.

First of all, do you know how much tickets to a professional basketball game cost? You have to buy them through Stub Hub because all of the scalpers have already scooped up every ticket for every game at Madison Square Garden and would like you to pay double the face value. Thieves.

So now that it’s turning into more of an investment, I needed to make sure we’re going to the perfect game and have the best seats. The Bulls or the Celtics? All the way up top in the center, or down a little lower behind the net?

Who knew being a dude was so much work?

Eventually, I sealed the deal, printed out our tickets and wrapped them up for Christmas and when the boys opened their boxes that morning, I could tell they were duly impressed.

I navigated us into the city on a rainy Friday night and took them to a midtown pub for a dinner of chicken wings and a pizza loaded with three different types of meat. Man fare. I ate a salad and drank chardonnay.

We joined the throng entering the Garden off Seventh Avenue and I navigated the boys off to the right where fans were lined up three-deep in front of a glass counter filled with Knicks merchandise and hawking all the premiere names.

Growing up, my kids knew not to ask. Whether we were in a supermarket or at Disney World, they just knew that I wasn’t going to buy them that pack of gum at the checkout or the water bottle with the misting fan atop, so there was no use asking.

“Do you want one?” I asked the youngest as he eyed the row of blue and white jerseys hanging in front of him.

He stepped closer to his brother and said in a half-whisper, “Did you hear that? She said we could get one.”

My oldest son is too-cool-for-school. He rocked the skinny jeans and the Bieber hairdo long before the looks were de rigeur for the middle school set. But when the vendor handed him his white Carmelo Anthony jersey, he slipped it right on over what he was wearing and readjusted his Knicks baseball cap — flipped backwards — just right on his head.

Standing behind the two of them as we took the five escalators required to get to our seats high up in the arena, I knew that however much I paid for those crazy expensive basketball jerseys, it was like that VISA commercial.

Tickets to Knicks game: lots of dollars. Parking for train into city: too much. Pizza and burgers: more than you’d ever pay at home. Knicks jerseys: I’d never want you to know.

Spending the night sitting in between your two sons and cheering for your team while they explain everything about the sport of basketball to you for two hours: Priceless.

 

Nov
15
2012

wing mama

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For most of their lives, my children had the luxury of having me as their Wing-mama.

If they forgot their gym clothes, homework, instrument or after school snack, I generally would be available to run the errant item over to the school.

If they were feeling slightly under the weather during the school day, and by that I mean either sick or perhaps just sad about one thing or another, I would fetch them and bring them home.

And after school let out, I would pile them in the car—with their granola bars, juice boxes and equipment—and shuttle them around to soccer, CCD, dance or swimming, cheer from the sidelines, and then cart them all back home.

In my children’s minds, things would just magically happen back here at the ranch; there would be chips and cookies in the pantry, their clothes were cleaned and folded and dinner was on the table by 6 p.m. most days.

It was a nice little fantasy I created for them and although I was involved in plenty of volunteer activities and did some freelance work, I made sure it didn’t affect their lives. All the work happened behind the scenes while they were off at school.

But then I went back to work full-time.

Right now, our pantry has a shelf littered with broken bits of potato chips and pretzels and an old can of nuts. We ran out of school drinks earlier in the week and don’t even think about looking for a fresh piece of fruit (there are some petrified lemons in the fridge drawer).

The older three kids are now in charge of their own laundry and judging from the mound of clothes in one of my daughters’ rooms, she must have run out of clean underwear some time last Tuesday.

While my oldest child is mostly annoyed by the food situation (“Mom! Work will not fall apart if you go food shopping!”), it’s my youngest guy, who’s 8, that has really been feeling my absence lately.

Every morning he whines about getting out of bed and going to school. He then mopes around getting himself together before the bus arrives and he begrudgingly boards it for another day in the trenches. Unlike his siblings, he goes to the after-care program at the school each day, and gets picked up usually around 5 p.m.

I made the mistake a few weeks ago of promising him that we would have a special day together, and then I never followed through. The day came and went and I just couldn’t find a hole in my schedule to accommodate him. But last week, I knew I had to find time for him, and so one morning, I told him to grab my calendar and meet me in the kitchen.

We looked together and I pointed to a square not too far in the distant future.

“Write your name right there,” I told him, and he did so in big, block letters.

“Do you see that?” I asked him. “That is officially ‘Nick Day,’ and I’m not going to plan one more thing for that day. It’s just going to be me and you.”

He grinned from ear to ear and had a little bounce in his step as he grabbed himself a box of Honey Nut Cheerios for breakfast.

We also put a big “NICK” on my work planner and office calendar, to not only illustrate to him how important the day was but also to prevent me from scheduling anything else.

We told his siblings all about this new holiday, and they went along with it–acting like it was really special–until my daughter found out that Nick and I were thinking about going into the city to see the new Harry Potter exhibit that just opened.

“Whoa,” she said, “I thought he was just, like, staying home. I didn’t know he was going to do something special alone with you.”

It now seems that in the very near future, I will be organizing a “Maddie Day.” I can’t imagine the older two teenagers have any interest in being seen anywhere alone with me, but am willing to declare days in their honor as well.

It’s still a struggle, striking that balance between work and family, but I’m willing to keep trying because I love both parts of my life. I don’t think it’s a terrible thing for the kids to have to do some things for themselves and also like that they see their mom as something other than their personal assistant.

And in just a few months, I can sense them slowly starting to come around.

Nick plays a lot with his friend, Jack, across the street, and his mom sent me this e-mail of a conversation she overheard between the two boys recently:

Nick: Have you even seen my mom’s Web site?

Jack: I’ve seen it with my mom.

Nick: Isn’t my mom a good writer?

Jack: Yeah, I think.

I take heart that he has developed this sense of pride in what his mom does, even in the face of jelly sandwiches and stale chips. And I am pretty sure that neither he nor his siblings ever treated clean clothes or taco dinners with the same amount of respect.

It’s his day, and he’ll have 70 mph blown in his face if he wants to.

The essay was originally posted on Patch on April 13, 2011.