Posted by Amy Byrnes

You might have read here that I am on a quest to bring the minivan back.

I’ve been rocking my Town & Country rental all week.

Since I started driving my shiny white beauty following a little run-in with a tractor-trailer, I’ve started thinking a lot about – given all the vehicle’s bells and whistles, not to mention roominess – why so many of us parents insist on driving around the suburbs in big rigs.

It’s got me wondering why we need to define ourselves by the vehicles that we drive and resist being labeled by who and what we really are – moms and dads who spend a fair amount of time hauling kids to school and soccer and the mall.

It’s fascinating that we need to pretend that we are something that we’re not – like a cowboy, maybe, or a contractor— because that’s who should be driving vehicles with a two-ton tow capacity and four-wheel drive.

Why is the SUV cooler, presumably, than the minivan? And why does it matter?

For years I hauled my guys around in a giant Chevy Suburban and while I really loved it and could parallel park that thing like it was a VW Bug, it was a pain in the ass. It ate gas, you had to hoist baby seats up and in because it was so high off the ground, and the extent of any parental conveniences was maybe five cupholders. My first Suburban even had the back door that swung open off to the side, not even straight up so you had to make sure the coast was clear before you released the hounds, so to speak.

Minivans are just chock-full-of conveniences for parents, with magic sliding doors and a deep well in the way back to hold $200 worth of groceries and prevent anything from falling out when the door is opened. And if yours is full of a few months’ worth of The New York Times neatly bundled, as is mine, you can STILL load all your groceries on top, as I did yesterday.

I think if Cadillac or Audi made a van, they’d fly out the door.

Over the years, I’ve logged a fair amount of time sitting on my therapist’s couch and talking about why I worried about what others thought of me. Why I needed to feel validated by how I thought things looked to the outside world. It was how I measured my self-worth.

It wasn’t until I started worrying about what was going on underneath the shiny exterior that things started to change.

And it lets me sit next to the other mom driving a Land Rover in the next lane, presumably on her way to a safari, at a red light and not feel weirdly less.

I’ve become much more concerned about what I think of me rather than what others think of me and while it’s not totally perfect – I still struggle with my vanity and ego – it’s a work in progress.

I was watching Kelly and Michael this week (I haven’t even mentioned how OBSESSED I am with Kelly Ripa) and heard them talking about a recent survey about what ladies consider the sexiest cars for men to drive and the pickup truck was at the top of the list.

Michael joked that the minivan was probably the least sexy vehicle for a dude to drive.

“I don’t know,” said Kelly, wearing some adorable outfit. “I see those guys driving around a whole bunch of kids and think that they’re obviously sexy to somebody.”

When I was younger, it was the glitter of the outer shell that really caught my attention. “OOOOh, shiny,” I’d think, mesmerized by all the flash.

But now I know better.

Now, I know you need to pop open the hood and make sure everything is running smoothly underneath. I know now that I like things that make my life easier rather than putting up with shortcomings because of how something looks.

I’d rather have solid and dependable — with good highway mpg — than zero to 60 in a heartbeat.

Because sexy is fun but reliability and practicality are better suited for the long haul.

Feb

2014

Am I Stupid?

Posted by Amy Byrnes

It happened again this week. For maybe the fifth time in his life, I left my youngest child some place he wasn’t supposed to be.

And he’s getting tired of it and frankly, I can’t say I really blame the kid.

Someone should take away my mom license.

I dropped him off yesterday afternoon at the elementary school in town about a mile and a half away from our house for what I thought was a 4:00 basketball practice.

I even had a nagging feeling while doing so — because practices are usually on Wednesdays — but I checked my iPhone and, yup, I was in the right place at the right time, according to my calendar.

I waited as he slowly made the walk from my car to the gym door, a sulky trip since he was mad at me because in his mind, I was somehow the reason kids had homework. Yes, that’s right: I’m the culprit. He’s resisting doing his homework lately, which is really out of character, but he’s busy blaming me, his teacher and really just THE MAN for the nightly 30 minutes of work that takes him away from looking at one screen or another or bouncing a Nerf basketball off his bedroom wall.

I returned home to my laptop, which I spent so much time looking at while working for my former employer that now that I’m out of work, find myself automatically opening up and wondering what to do with myself.

About a half hour later, the doorbell rang and I opened the door to find my 11-year-old standing there on the front step, his big blue eyes brimming with tears.

“Did I mess up the time?” I asked, and he burst past me and stomped up the stairs to his room.

By the time I got him to unlock the door for me, I found him sitting on his bed rubbing his legs, which were bright pink from making the long walk home in his basketball shorts with nothing more than a sweatshirt on top.

Did I mention it was about 20 degrees in my part of New Jersey yesterday afternoon?

I held out some cozy sweatpants to cover his freezing legs and brought him downstairs to the den to lie down on the couch in front of the fire and tucked his favorite blanket around him and left him alone.

After he had some time to pretend to fall asleep, I came in with a big mug of hot chocolate with extra marshmallows and a big splash of half and half, just the way he likes it.

“How about you do your homework in here tonight by the fire?” I suggested, and he took a sip of his cocoa and nodded his head.

His body and his mood thawed and eventually, he was happily showing me how good he was solving the evening’s math problems.

I apologized for the hundredth time as he was getting ready for bed later that night.

“It’s okay, Mom,” he said, but really, it’s not. If his dad kept leaving him the wrong place, I’d be all like, “What’s his problem?”

What the hell is my problem?

So far, I’ve left him alone in the neighbor’s basement when he was about four while we all went out to deliver Thanksgiving dinners (he told me he jumped on their trampoline to keep busy until we got back), and at the wrong baseball practice that left him sitting on the curb until I returned some 90 minutes later. I even bought him a cell phone last year to avoid these mixups.

I’ve also left his older sister off the wrong time for a basketball game and left my oldest son, who was probably around 5 at the time, playing outside on the swing set in the backyard while I drove his two younger sisters to a babysitter for the day.

I remember looking into the back of the minivan through my rearview mirror about 10 minutes into the trip and not seeing his head, told him to sit up in his seat.

“He’s not here,” piped up one of the sisters.

Really, you didn’t think this was important information to share with me?

And I don’t know what to cite as the cause. Certainly, it can’t be because I have too many kids (since half are away at school right now). And it’s certainly not because I’m a working mom (because I am currently unemployed).

It’s not even because I was busy making dinner (since the kids went to their dad’s last night for that).

Methinks perhaps I’m stupid.

Which was confirmed earlier today when I loaded about three months worth of New York Times daily papers, all bundled and tied, into the back of my minivan to drop off at town recycling center on my way to the grocery store first thing this morning.

They’d been tied up and sitting on my mudroom floor for about a week and I just couldn’t look at them one more second.

I had noticed on our town website that there would be no recycling pickup on my usual day this week – Wednesday – because of Lincoln’s Birthday (I mean, what?) and the center would be closed as well.

But I forgot today was Wednesday. I thought it was Tuesday. I’m all mixed up in the head.

So I went not once but twice to the recycling center this morning, sitting in my minivan and staring at the locked gate blocking the entrance while mentally composing the snippy phone call I was going to make to borough hall when I returned home.

And then I realized that it was Wednesday.

I drove home and saw my neighbor Susan had put a bunch of cardboard boxes out for recycling pick up and instead of texting her that there was no pick up today, I went and dragged a giant box out of my garage and added it to her pile.

So, what can I chalk this all up to? Super-early dementia? Dumb-dumbiness? I am alarmed.

However, since I was so encouraged to learn the other day that I wasn’t the only one hoarding baby teeth, I’m hoping maybe you guys can share some of your own not-so-stellar-moments in scheduling. Or parenting, I suppose.

I’d like to feel like less of a dope.

Feb

2014

Museum of the Fairly Ordinary Life

Posted by Amy Byrnes

There’s a house around the corner from us, set along a busy thoroughfare running through town, which has had stacks of books piled up on an enclosed porch in front for as long as I can remember. The entrance is lined with curtained windows through which passersby can see mountains of books surrounding the room, piled high into the middle of each window.

You couldn’t always see what was going on inside their windows until some trees in their front yard were blown down during Hurricane Sandy, revealing the stacks of books and papers that push aside curtains and seem to take up a lot of the space in the house’s entranceway.

We’ve even affectionately dubbed the people who live there “The Hoarders,” and actively monitored their post-hurricane activity.

“Oh, The Hoarders finally got that tree out of there,” I’d say to the kids, or “Looks like they’ve got a lot of stuff out back in that garage, too,” my daughter observed one day.

The thing is, I don’t feel like I’m judging the people who live in that house and allow things to pile up — other windows in the house belie a propensity to accumulate — because I tend to have a hard time letting go of things as well.

I just do a better job of hiding it.

All of my magazines tend to pile up – Real Simple, Oprah, The New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, People – spilling out of baskets in bathrooms and scattered all over the kitchen island.

Bills, mail and other paper detritus teeter in a giant bowl on a side counter in my kitchen and it’s so pretty, the bowl, painted black with a colorful rim and flowers along the bottom, which you rarely get to see since it’s always filled with permission slips and Pottery Barn catalogs.

Most surfaces in my bedroom are covered with stacks of self-help books, collections of essays on writing, camera parts and iPhone charger cords.

And the other side of my king-sized bed, when not occupied by a certain 11 year old, is a great place to store a couple of books, reading glasses and usually a dirty tissue or two.

But I don’t really have a problem with getting rid of all the reading material and plowing through the paperwork at least once a month. It’s more of a laziness issue, really, combined with a fairly high tolerance for clutter. But every so often I’ll walk around with a big, black garbage big and fill it with Ballard Design catalogs and Sexiest Man Alive issues of People and pay the lawn service and my gas bill (generally late because who can develop a system out of all those piles?).

But then there are the things that I could never part with, like pretty much every card I’ve received since college, Playbills (Rent!) and my children’s teeth. Oh, and some of mine, too — all four wisdom teeth plus a few incisors. It’s like I’m a character that would fit right into the Silence of the Lambs series, standing alongside Dr. Lechter and maybe stringing necklaces out of his victim’s teeth or something.

Total weirdo.

I’ve been holding onto various souvenirs from the past – old datebooks, postcards and notebooks filled with to-do lists and Easter menus from 2003 – stuffed in bags and boxes throughout my house for years. I recently pulled a couple of them up from the basement and was surprised to find a sheet of photos of me smoking a cigarette that accompanied an op-ed piece I wrote for my college paper circa 1988 about why I loved to smoke (really?) and extra copies of my wedding invitation floating around in a Ziploc bag. I mean that was like 24 years ago.

Like unearthing long-forgotten masterpieces, I found pictures my kids had drawn for me when they were small, potato-shaped figures with stick arms and floating faces with “MOM” painstakingly written beneath, more precious than any Picasso or Manet (can you tell I just finished reading “The Goldfinch”?)

It’s like I’m stockpiling artifacts for a museum dedicated to myself and my fairly ordinary life. Visitors will be able to inspect strips of sonogram photos, baby announcements, entries from my 1998 datebook including that my older daughter had Show and Tell on Sept. 28 and I got my hair done a few days later. Or even more foretelling, a card for my 27^th birthday sent to me by a high school girlfriend, joking about the old ladies on the cover and wondering if we’d be like that “in 60 years,” who never made it past her own 45^th birthday.

Just like the home movies I dug up a few months ago, it’s painful looking through all the memories, but when I can stand it, enlightening too. Looking through all the cards and notes I’m reminded how much my ex-husband and I loved each other and all the hopes and dreams I held not just for myself but for my children, too. And even though things didn’t work out the way that I had planned all those years ago, it wasn’t a waste but an important part of where I am today.

I’m reminded at how full my life has been.

So I’ll gladly give away that Banana Republic shirt that never fit quite right and clear books off my shelves that really don’t stand the test of time (so long, Mitch Albom). In the end those are really just things.

But after I’ve sorted through the giant Rubbermaid containers and assorted dust-covered cardboard boxes that are scattered about my den, I’ll carefully return all the items inside and hoist them back down to my crawlspace until it’s time for another retrospective of a very ordinary life.

Plus lots of teeth.

Feb

2014

Three is a Magic Number

Posted by Amy Byrnes

For those keeping track, I locked the keys inside my shiny, white minivan rental Friday night, bringing the number of not-so-great things that have happened to me this month to a total of three (well, four if you count that whole Kelly Corrigan wild goose chase).

So, as these types of things tend to happen in waves – often, I am told, in three’s – I should be done, right? Happy days are here again, and all that.

I’ve done plenty of stupid stuff over the years – one time I locked the keys inside my old minivan along with two of my young children on one of the hottest days of the year. Luckily the car had been running and the AC on full blast, the kids safely strapped into their car seats, my oldest son sucking happily on his Binky and staring at me through the window until the AAA guy arrived.

Another time I left the car running with the kids strapped inside to drop something off at a girlfriend’s house. In those days we were probably starved for grownup conversation and were having a full-blown discussion on her front stoop until we saw the van begin to back down the driveway. My oldest – probably around three or four at the time – had unbuckled himself from his car seat and toddled up to the steering wheel and put the van into reverse, not only setting the van in motion but also automatically locking all the doors.

This really happened.

Luckily, having locked myself out of this minivan one too many times before (see above), I had placed a spare key in a little magnetic box and attached it above the tire, which somehow as the car with my two young children was backing down my girlfriend’s driveway, I had the wherewithal to reach under and pull the box off the car, rip out the key, fit it into the keyhole on the driver’s side door, get in and stop the car.

Like I was a stuntwoman or something.

Interesting that I had the presence of mind to perform all of those heroics when I was in my 20s but on Thursday couldn’t even remember to get the driver’s license of the guy whose rig hit my car.

So in retrospect, the recent turn of events has been far less dramatic. I enjoyed my first week of unemployment – minus the car accident and all the snow days and delays from school.

And, when I can access its keys, I am having fun tooling around in my minivan and think it’s hilarious how impressed the kids’ friends are when they get in.

“Whoa, this is so cool,” said my young neighbor when I picked him and my son up from school the other day and he watched the side door automatically slide shut.

I think I’m bringing the minivan back (cue Justin Timberlake).

So, if you missed any of this past week’s posts and have no clue what I am talking about (car accident, minivans, what?), you can catch up here:

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File:Viele Einkaufswagen

Weekend Warriors

During the many years that I stayed home to care for my young children, I made it a point to avoid any and all supermarkets/warehouse clubs on Saturdays and Sundays. I could do that because I had the luxury of being able to hunt and forage for pantry staples like Pop Tarts and Tostitos while everyone else was at work during the week. (READ MORE … )

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Just Like Me

I don’t know what I’d do without my friends.

They lift me up when I’m sinking, listen patiently to my many stories mostly about myself, celebrate my victories, teach me to knit (and then tolerate when I show up for knitting with nothing to knit), critique my resume, go speed dating with me, invite me to their homes to write and always, always share their wine. (READ MORE … )

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I Went to See Kelly Corrigan and Had a Nice Beet Salad Instead

You guys, I have never tried to pretend that I am very smart over here. As a matter of fact, I often seem to be attempting to prove quite the opposite.

I’ve told you how I thought an undiagnosed case of scoliosis was the cause for my back fat and have shared pictures of myself on the Internet wearing a cheetah onesie (which I may or may not be wearing right now).

(READ MORE … )

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Choose Happy

When I started to see all those posts this week of everybody’s Facebook movie, I was like, “Really? It’s not enough we need to complain about the weather and post those Throwback Thursday photos, but now we need to set it all to music?”

When will the oversharing end? (READ MORE … )

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Putting Happy to the Test

In theory, this is a funny story.

So, you know how yesterday I was all like “Be happy, bitches”?

Well, the universe – or whoever’s running the universe (clearly having nothing better to do) – must have sensed my cockiness and thought, “This one’s a little too perky. Let’s throw her a real challenge today and shut her up.”

(READ MORE … )

Feb

2014

I Went to See Kelly Corrigan and Had a Nice Beet Salad Instead

Posted by Amy Byrnes

You guys, I have never tried to pretend that I am very smart over here. As a matter of fact, I often seem to be attempting to prove quite the opposite.

So even though when I was quickly Googling some last minute details before I left my house yesterday afternoon to drive an hour north to hear my gal Kelly Corrigan read from her new book at an appearance in Montclair, NJ, and a bunch of links were coming up Montclair, CA — as in on the other side of the country — I just figured that was a problem on Kelly’s end.

I just assumed that the only possible explanation was that, like, data had somehow merged and accidentally combined so that two of her upcoming appearances — one in California and one in New Jersey — had gotten mixed up.

Am I an idiot?

This is the same logic I have brought to other situations where I am just so dead set on one result — like I’m not going to get fired or I’m going to have a happy marriage — that I ignore all of the red flags waving frantically in my face.

A college friend had messaged me last week to tell me Kelly was going to be in Montclair for a signing of her new book, Glitter and Glue, and that was pretty much the extent of my research on the matter. I was like, “Great, I’m in. Who can I get to go with me?”

And although I tried to lure a number of people into my car to go see Kelly, I only ended up with one unsuspecting victim, my poor friend Susan.

And the kind of funny part is that she told me over our big glasses of red wine at the restaurant we got to by about 5:00 because I wanted to be REALLY EARLY AND GET REALLY GOOD SEATS, that even though she hadn’t even read any of Kelly’s stuff, her New Year’s resolution had been just to say “yes” to things.

Ironic, no?

So, we had lovely conversation — as always — and split a very nice beet salad with toasted pistachios, and as we were settling the bill, I saw a message come in on Facebook from the same friend who had told me about the Montclair event.

“Hey Amy! Hopefully u figured out way before I did that Kelly’s actually in CA tonight and not in NJ!”

I looked up at my friend and said, “Susan, you’re going to kill me.”

In the end, she did not. We drove the hour south back down the parkway and stopped off at the local Barnes & Noble where I bought us each a copy of Glitter and Glue.

It was the least I could do.

So, while the stars seemed, briefly, to be aligning so that not only would my photo be a part of Kelly’s video but I’d actually get to see her in person, it looks like I’ll have to settle for just hearing her voice come through in her writing.

So if I ask any of you if you want to come with me to do something, I suggest you vet the event beforehand.

And if you have a bridge you’d like to sell me, the answer is: I’ll take three.

Feb

2014

That Time I Got Laid Off

Posted by Amy Byrnes

The final story I worked on before I was laid off on Wednesday was an obituary and I don’t know what could have been more ironic since I’d been sitting Shiva for that job for about the last six months.

It was similar to the end of my marriage, when I could see the writing on the wall — I knew I needed to jump ship – but couldn’t muster the courage or the energy to make the leap. There was something that kept me sitting in my deck chair long after the lifeboats had sailed.

I had survived a round of layoffs last summer, and had often imagined what it would be like to be let go out of the blue. I knew things weren’t great at my company and realized some bad news might be coming at some point. I just didn’t expect it to be Wednesday.

But apparently I have lifelong issues with reading signs in general. I recently watched the video we made when I gave birth to my third child (minus all the gory details). There I was, sitting up in the hospital bed still out of breath from the ordeal of getting the baby out of me, and while everyone else in the room was bustling about – suctioning the newborn and cutting the cord – I could be heard saying over and over, “Can you believe it?”

I guess at the time I was still bowled over by the whole miracle of life thing, but watching myself almost 17 years later so surprised to have ended up with a baby that day, I can only wonder what everyone else in the room had been thinking.

So imagine my surprise on Wednesday, which started somewhat off schedule as the kids had a delayed opening because of some overnight snow but then quickly got back on course with my regular 9:45 workout – to find out it was also my last day of work.

“Your roles are not part of the go-forward plan,” I was told on a quickly-scheduled conference call with a few hundred of my colleagues. “Today is your last day of work.”

Cue the chopping sound.

And while I’d always imagined that hearing those words would cause me to freak out about the imminent loss of income and health insurance – not to mention the nice laptop and iPhone that had come with the job – that wasn’t my immediate reaction.

I mostly just felt relief.

It had been a long three years as a full-time working and newly-single mother of four, exhausting and overwhelming at many points.

It was also one of the most satisfying challenges I’d ever taken on and I’m proud of how much of myself I put into the job. Other than being a mom, I’d never worked harder at anything in my life and my coworkers were much nicer to me than my teenagers.

And while I could feel miffed by the turn of events, I am left feeling grateful for the experience.

The job – although highly demanding and at points leaving us working 60-hour weeks – gave me so much: A reentry to the work-force after an 18-year absence; an opportunity to hone my writing and reporting skills, not to mention opening the door to mastering 21^st Century online media knowledge – I learned everything from how to shoot and edit a video to crafting SEO-friendly headlines.

(Don’t try to tell this to my teenagers because they invariably view me as a struggling Luddite and can’t stand to even watch me text. “It’s painful,” my 16-year-old daughter said recently as she watched me type a message with my right thumb.)

But the job left my life in much the same way it had entered it: out of the blue. I hadn’t been looking for a job three years ago when a friend and fellow journalist told me about a new company that was hiring for a job that seemed to be almost too good to be true, since it would allow me to do what I loved to do AND work from home AND offered things like dental plans and 401Ks.

And it was a great ride and I met so many wonderful people along the way and most importantly of all, the job gave me the self-respect and confidence I so badly needed. I rediscovered that girl I was long before I became a wife, a mom, a dinner-maker, laundry-folder, cupcake-baker and counter-wiper.

Now I know I can be all of those things and more.

So I’ve decided that for now, I am just going to breathe. I think I might concentrate on this blog and bother all of you a little bit more each week and build some momentum on a writing project that had been nagging at me but I lacked the time and the energy to nurture.

I will also have more time now to do things like check to see if my 11-year-old did his homework and ask my high school junior even more annoying questions about where she wants to go to college.

Won’t they be thrilled?

In the meantime, when I wasn’t getting fired this week or frantically trying to transfer three-years worth of photos and music onto another laptop, I blogged about this stuff:

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Guilty as Charged

I don’t know if it’s the Catholic in me, the mother in me, the daughter in me or just the woman in me, but I spend a fair percentage of each day feeling guilty about one thing or another.

Whether it’s my reluctance to buy into purchasing organic products, the poison I pay a service to put on my lawn to keep it green that is probably leaching into my children’s drinking water, or that I am morally and ethically opposed to wet cat food although it would probably make her a lot less fat, I feel bad about a lot of stuff. (READ MORE … )

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Snow Kidding

My cell phone, positioned on the nightstand next to my bed and about three inches from my head, rang at 4:40 this morning and because I have this deep-seeded aversion to answering any calls coming in from 1–800 numbers, I let it go to voicemail.

I figured it was The Gap calling to tell me my payment this month is like, three days late. I could understand if I was three months delinquent in paying something. By all means, give me a heads up and maybe a little attitude. But The Gap gets snippy when you forget to pay within the allotted pay cycle and starts suspending your card and calling to strong-arm you and shit. (READ MORE … )

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Jan

2014

Snow Kidding

Posted by Amy Byrnes

Don’t they know I’m well-intentioned? I just tend to put things off, like paying bills and getting things fixed. It’s a character flaw, to be sure. But I’m very friendly.

I would like to know how some people handle the stress of not paying their mortgage for like two years straight. I’ve got straight up PTSD from being a month late to pay The Gap.

Anyway, as I probably should have known had I not been dreaming about getting on an airplane (my go-to dream theme) seconds before the piano ringtone began to trill by my head, The Gap doesn’t begin its strong arming tactics until more traditional business hours and it was instead one of those Code Red calls from the middle school to say that school would have a delayed opening this morning because of the snow.

Wait, what? Snow?

Has it gotten to the point this winter that an impending couple of inches of snowfall doesn’t even register on our radars any more? That it’s snowed so much this winter that we only take note when legit blizzards are bearing down on us? That even the media takes a ho-hum stance and not its usual, “IT’S SNOWMAGEDDEN!! GET TO THE SUPERMARKET NOW AND BUY ALL THE MILK AND BREAD YOU CAN AFFORD.”

Well, that seems to be the case, because I had absolutely no idea that snowfall was imminent and I’d be enjoying the kids’ company a little later than usual this morning.

And for maybe the thousandth time, I am thankful that I work from home. I’m glad I’m not supposed to be up and dressed for a meeting in an office 45 minutes away, and can instead have a proper conference call in the comfort of my leopard onesie while cooking up some French toast for my stragglers.

Of course, it could be worse. I saw a post on Facebook yesterday from my college girlfriend who has been trapped inside her Brooklyn apartment this week with her two little guys because of the wickedly-cold temperatures here in the Northeast, unable to let off some five-year-old steam at the playground. Or another mama I know in the Chicago area whose kids have been home from school for days because of the weather, coating her living room floor in dress up clothes and stuffed animals.

My guys will gone by mid-morning and I’ll be able to return to my regular routine of checking my e-mail and Facebook every 8 minutes and wiping the kitchen counter.

I’ll still be rocking the onesie, though. There is snow on the ground, after all.

Dec

2013

Twas 6 Days Before Christmas: An Ode to Stress

Posted by Amy Byrnes

Twas six days before Christmas and all through my house,

I’ve got so much shit to do I almost wished I had a spouse.

The stockings are stuffed in my mudroom without care

In hopes that come Christmas Eve they get pulled out of there.

The children will be sleeping until noon in their beds

While visions of PS4, iPhones and spring break trips dance in their heads.

And Mama in her scrunchie, with piles of lists on her lap,

Is hiding in bed, sipping a nightcap.

And so, my friends, that’s all the cleverness I can muster because I’ve got to get to the outlets, yo, for some last-minute gifts. And the grocery store. The liquor store. The post office. Dry cleaner.

Oh, and work. I’ve got that job.

Any attempt to blog this week has been sidelined by the Internet, ironically. I’ll quickly pop over to Firefox to, in theory, check my emails and all of a sudden I’m ordering something on Amazon and admiring folks Christmas trees and cats on Facebook.

But whilst trolling Facebook, I did come across the following ad from Apple and, as the mother of a reformed teen age boy who has been known to have his nose in his smartphone, it just resonated with me.

It’s not easy being a teenager, or the mom of a teenager, and I think we probably have no idea what those darling creatures are thinking most of the time. And while none of my kids have ever produced such a clever and moving video, they have endured many a family gathering over the years and sometimes even smiled.

Get out your tissues and some wrapping paper while you’re at it so at least you’re doing something about getting ready for next week while surfing the web.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImlmVqH_5HM

Dec

2013

One Mom Tries to Make Sense of Guns After Newtown Shooting

Posted by Amy Byrnes

I have always enjoyed group activities with large groups of women.

Over the years, I’ve learned to knit, trained for triathlons, talked about a lot of books and drank plenty of wine in the company of women.

And while I’m more than comfortable going cross country skiing or traveling to a desert spa with a group of girls, I was surprised to find myself early one Saturday morning last month at a gun range with eight other women.

“Shooting is like the new bowling,” reported The Wall Street Journal earlier this week and apparently, I am right on trend.

Shooting alleys are the latest destination for a ladies’ night out, according to the article, with women becoming one of the largest growing segments of gun buyers.

I can’t tell you how confusing this is to me.

I don’t like guns. In fact, I believe in my heart that the world would be a much better place if firearms were left in the hands of trained professionals.

I was driving in my car on the morning of Dec. 14 last year when I first heard about the shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. I listened in shock as reporters described the chaotic scene as emergency workers and frantic parents descended on the school.

I quickly made my way home and sat on a stool in my kitchen and spent the rest of the day watching the tragedy unfold on CNN. Slowly, pieces of the terrible puzzle came together: the small elementary school, quiet New England town, faces of the tiny victims and the teachers and administrators who so bravely tried to protect their young students.

Watching the hours of non-stop media coverage – the aerial view of the scene with the lines of children being rushed away from the school and the armed guards walking past colorful playground equipment – I was struck by how familiar so much of it looked.

It’s the stuff my days were made of. School age children. Backpacks. Jungle gyms. Bike racks. Drop off and pick up.

Maybe that’s why I cried so much that day. I could feel deep in my bones the horror that tore through that community on a quiet December morning a few weeks before Christmas.

I live in a quiet town, with a small elementary school that my four children attended filled with artwork lining the hallways and loving teachers in the classrooms. Like Sandy Hook, our school is locked up tight and visitors need to be buzzed in by the main office and students and staff often performed lockdown drills.

But none of that mattered in Newtown. All of those safety measures would not have mattered at any school that day.

And this brings me back to the confused part: Why are we not trying to curtail the number of guns circulating in this country or at the very least, passing legislation to make it tougher to obtain a weapon in the first place?

I spent a week last summer sailing with people from all over the world – Canadians, Europeans, Australians – who wondered the same things about our country. They expressed dismay over American’s unwillingness to let go of their right to bear arms unlike many of their own countries that have enacted stricter gun laws following mass shootings.

According to a report in The New York Times, we have more guns per capita than any other country, with some 300 million firearms in circulation. That’s nearly one for every adult.

And we have the murder rate to show for it; ours is roughly 15 times that of other wealthy countries.

So imagine my surprise when I found myself nearly a year after all those children and teachers were killed in Newtown, holding a Glock pistol and feeling the weapon recoil as I fired at a target 20 feet away.

I had wanted to understand the fiercely-protected Second Ammendment and the rights it guaranteed me. I wanted to know what the fuss was all about.

The women I went with were part of a newly-formed group looking to try new experiences and when one of the women suggested a trip to the gun range as a possible activity, I immediately said, “I’m in.”

And it was a really fun day.

We all joked about the pink revolvers for sale in the glass display case and that we would all be prepared in the event of a zombie apocalypse.

We were required to take an exhaustive two-hour class prior to the actual shooting. Our instructor Bob – wearing a Smith & Wesson t-shirt and a belt around his waist supporting a holster, his cellphone and a large ring of keys – went over everything from home invasion to cleaning a gun barrel. (I would like to add a side note that it is not mandatory for gun buyers here in New Jersey to take any type of safety or how-to class prior to purchase.)

You could tell Bob, who was maybe a little younger than my dad, got a kick out of us but he also took gun safety – and the right to bear arms – very, very seriously and I admired that.

He patiently answered questions about permits and registration and passed around his own hand guns — a .22, .45, Glock and revolver — so the group could hold them and feel their heft. We were able to observe the parts of the weapons close up: the muzzle, the hammer and the barrel. We could look into the bullet chambers and feel the free play of the trigger.

When Bob had finally imparted all he deemed necessary for us to shoot a firearm, we headed off to the adjoining range and donned the mandatory ear and eye protection before entering through a metal door plastered with warning signs.

It’s a large and loud room with 10 stalls divided by thin partitions, various targets pinned to cardboard sheets that automatically move forward and back and empty casings pooling on the floor around the feet of the shooters that one of the men patrolling the range would occasionally come by with a big broom to sweep out of the way.

And sure enough, we weren’t the only women there shooting that day. But while the women in my group were all in the late-40s-to-early-50s range, most of the other women looked to be more in their 20s and accompanied by boyfriends or husbands. And while our group was sensibly dressed in long sleeves and sneakers, the other women looked like they could be spending their day shopping at the mall. One of the girls wore skinny jeans with ballet flats in an animal print, a thin, gold chain wrapped around her ankle.

We took turns shooting with Bob and I watched several members of my group go before I took my place before a counter upon which sat a .22 caliber handgun, a box of bullets and a magazine. Bob instructed me to fill the magazine with the small bullets much the way you would load Pez candy into, say, a Bart Simpson dispenser.

And while it was super-satisfying being able to slam the magazine into the handle when I was done, Angelina Jolie-style, the actual firing of the weapon was nerve wracking. There’s a lot to keep straight – between the positioning of your hands and lining up your sights on the intended target, and I didn’t really set any records with my shooting. Bob stood alongside me the whole time, adjusting my stance and instructing me to lift the gun higher and not to put my finger on the trigger until I was told to do so.

After each shot, he’d say, “Good girl.”

As the day progressed, the group was very busy taking pictures of each other and posting our badass selves all over social media. We all went out to lunch afterwards and did a round of Fireball shots to celebrate our experience.

“Are you having a mid-life crisis?” my 19-year-old daughter posted on Facebook when she saw the picture of me shooting a gun.

I sent a picture of myself shooting the .22 to a friend of mine who is a big gun advocate and happened to be away hunting for the weekend.

“Nice!” he texted back. “Did you love it?”

But I didn’t respond because I didn’t know what to say. As much as I really enjoyed the experience of shooting a gun, I still don’t get it. It wasn’t like when I tried kayaking a couple of summers ago and now dream about owning a kayak.

I don’t think I’ll ever buy myself a gun.

I thought shooting at a target was kind of boring after a while and couldn’t wait to get out of the gun range and go get something to eat. Maybe shooting at a picture of a zombie would have been more fun.

And I still don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know what would have prevented the rampage at the Sandy Hook School last December. And I still cry when I think about all of those lives that were lost.

But I have to imagine that more guns won’t solve anything.

Nov

2013

The Girls

Posted by Amy Byrnes

Between us, we have 19 kids, 9 weddings, 3 ex-husbands, 2 boyfriends, over 25 years of memories and a lot of opinions.

Since we met as students at the University of Delaware in the mid-80s, our gang of 8 friends has come a long way from our days of sitting around dorm rooms and sorority dens in oversized Forenza sweaters and big Jersey hairdos, telling each other what to do.

We’ve seen boyfriends – and those bad hairstyles – come and go. We’ve danced at weddings, celebrated the births of all those babies and when the towers came crashing down in 2001 and took one of the husbands with them, the group swooped in to support our friend bowing under the pressure of all that grief.

We’re scattered now up and down the East Coast – with one West Coast outlier – and don’t keep in touch like we should. We don’t send cards for birthdays, reply-all to group emails and only a couple of us are active on Facebook (which is confusing to those of us who can’t imagine a day without it).

Without the Internet grapevine, we still know the big stuff – like who’s getting a divorce or moving to a new state – but the little things – like where the kids are headed for college or news on a parent’s hip replacement – gets lost in the shuffle of daily carpools and holidays.

So when we do get together every few years, catching up is our number one priority. We are expert interrogators.

We gather around dining tables and lounge around sofas gleaning as much information as we can about kids, jobs, husbands, parents, siblings and every facet of each other’s lives while slipping back into the easy friendships that began in college.

There’s always a carbohydrate involved and we laugh a lot.

But it’s a challenging crowd. They put the “Boss” in Bossypants. In fact, there are so many chiefs in the group, I just get in the back seat and try to keep my mouth shut like a good little Indian.

And I can be a bit of a loudmouth in my regular life.

But in much the same way that we revert to old behaviors when we get together with our families, when my college girlfriends and I gather, we assume the roles that originated almost 30 years ago.

View from me and the Jet Setter’s room at the swanky Wythe Hotel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

We convened this weekend on the east end of Long Island – after a quick night of eating and drinking in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (ground zero for hispsterdom) – and by the time we drove the few hours out to the beach on Friday, we had fallen back into familiar patterns.

There was the Spy, the Smart One and the Jet Setter. Bossypants, the Nice One and the GDI (Godddamn Independent). The Senator was declaring her allegiance to Chris Christie’s presidential campaign by nightfall and I am supposedly the Funny One, but I think I am way more amusing on the page than in real life.

During previous gatherings, I had discovered that I tend to lose sight of 30 years of personal growth and become thin-skinned around the group. This year, I didn’t want our gathering to be clouded by hurt feelings and all my, like, stuff.

So I went back and skimmed my copy of “The Four Agreements.” I reminded myself not to take everything so personally or to make assumptions. (They happen to be two of my favorite internal hot buttons.)

My resolve was quickly put to the test Thursday night when we were freshening up in the hotel room before dinner when the Boss – who has been in the fragrance and cosmetics industry for 25 years – cut me off in mid-sentence to question my lipstick choice.

“I don’t like it,” she said, rubbing the dark stain from my lower lip with her thumb.

Five years ago, I would have been crushed. I would have taken her words as a personal affront. She was the same person who, when I made a comment about the group of girls sitting around her dorm room bleaching their mustaches with Jolen, came close, stared at my upper lip, and said, “Not for nothing but you might want to think about it.”

But as I listened to her explain that at our age, we should veer away from deep stains and formulas that sank into the crevices that have formed in our aging lips and opt instead for more neutral tones that used more of an emollient to literally gloss over our old mouths.

She was helping a sister out.

And that was that. I didn’t dwell. I thought it was funny and moved on.

We spent the rest of the weekend eating great food, drinking lots of wine and discussing our sluggish digestive systems at length. We also got some very detailed information about somebody’s bikini waxing preferences — using raingutters as a metaphor and ensuring I would never look at the outside of my house the same way again.

We walked along the soft sandy beach in Amagansett and shopped in tony East Hampton stores where I found the perfect pair of short black boots, only to discover that they cost over $900.

Sunday came much too quickly and soon, we were all heading home via planes, trains and automobiles knowing that we would gather again next September and get serious about planning our oft-discussed 50^th celebration.

The emails started that night, everyone chiming in to say what a great weekend it was.

“I adore all of you and love having you in my life even if it’s just once a year,” wrote one pal.

“It was so nice to see everyone and you haven’t changed much, funny thing,” chimed in another. “It’s so easy to be with all of you and to just continue on where we left off.”

The way good girlfriends do. Who could feel bad about that?

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Amy Byrnes

life in fits and starts

Category Archives: Uncategorized

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The Girls