Category Archives: Uncategorized

Jun
01
2015

Good-Bye Pizza. Hello Kale.

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Shhh. Can you hear them calling my name?

Most days for me begin the same: the iPhone next to my head comes to life at 6:05 and I struggle to remember – for the millionth time – what I need to do to make the thing shut the fuck up. Generally, I tap the screen to snooze it and promptly fall back to sleep. This happens another three or four times until I see that it’s almost 7:00 and need to get downstairs to make breakfast for my dear children. If I have snoozed away valuable early-morning minutes, there’s no time to brew a cup of coffee and get back into bed to write in my journal for a spell. I do like to squeeze this activity in a few days a week and take a very Bridget Jones-approach to documenting the amount of alcohol I’ve consumed the day before and my perpetually stagnant love life.

But if I’ve frittered those precious minutes away, I begin the day by first ascertaining like Nicole Kidman in “Before I Go to Sleep” where the hell I am (I don’t know why I must begin each day disoriented) and, once I’ve realized that I am in the same bedroom I’ve been waking up in for the last 12 years, I get up to use the toilet and – most mornings unless I just can’t handle the truth – get on the scale.

This is always done after urinating but before drinking anything and always while wearing the tank top/underwear combo I sleep in. Scientist that I am, I like to keep all the variables not only consistent but also as lightweight as possible. Every ounce counts.

When I am being really good about what I’m eating – saying “yes” to Greek yogurt and kale and “no” to all the beautiful, salty things sold at Trader Joe’s – I am anxious to see if my weight reflects my culinary sacrifices. I mean, if I am resisting the siren call from the plastic tub of Whole Foods chocolate chip cookies in my pantry, there better be some fucking payoff. If I can’t make love to each and every one of those gorgeous cookies, I need to know my ass somehow just got a little bit smaller.

I am the kind of person who needs to weigh myself daily to help keep me honest. I need something to reign me in when I am standing in front of my pantry and eyeing the open bag of Trader Joe’s honey sesame cashews. When the news on the scale is bad, I am more apt to move away from the pantry and just eat some baby carrots instead. However, when the scale tells me I’m moving in the right direction, I sometimes tell myself that I deserve a reward, like I am a good doggie and just sat on command. Slip me a treat, wouldja?

But mostly, knowing how much I weigh helps me stay on the right track.

But if I’m premenstrual – which I have been for the last two months (if you don’t understand this phenomenon, please discuss with any woman you know in her mid-to-late-40s/early 50s while slowly backing away from her if she’s holding anything remotely sharp) – all bets are off. I not only need those TJoe’s sweet-and-salty nuts but a cookie chaser to wash them down and don’t even think about getting in between me and those snacks or I will press my thumbs into your eye sockets and crush your skull Game-of-Thrones-style.

The other element that usually helps keep me on track that’s been missing lately is the now-famous Girl Whisperer. For a couple of years he sat on my couch and encouraged my girlfriends and I to cut out the sugar and add the protein yadda yadda yadda while we squatted and lunged around the room. He’d arrive on Monday mornings and ask us about our weekends while assessing – subtly, I’ll give him that – our bellies. And then he’d ask us to tell him what we ate. Since I am a terrible liar, I would generally refuse to tell him the extent of my naughtiness. Maybe I’d admit to a cookie after dinner but I’d never let him know about the bag of veggie sticks I ate in bed. I just hated to let him down.

But, as many of you guys know, my friend The Whisperer has been out of commission for months undergoing treatment for cancer and we’ve been left to our own devices for staying in shape. Actually, we’ve been great at maintaining our workouts a couple of times and week but my eating, which I really kept together for a couple of months, fell apart somewhere around March. Going to Hong Kong was kind of the beginning of the end. I still drink yogurt smoothies religiously for breakfast but I ate a sandwich for lunch on Friday and devoured a bowl of chips and guacamole at dinner that night. I never would have eaten any of those things a year ago.

So in a come-to-Jesus-moment, I hopped on the scale Saturday morning in an attempt to get back on track. I got up and peed and stood on the scale while saying a little prayer and when I looked down, I saw a number on my scale that I have not seen since the second trimester of my last pregnancy. Or when I was a sophomore in college.

It was a sad, sad day in Amyville. Just in time for swimsuit season, I am fat as can be and cannot fit into shorts or button down shirts and am currently relegated to wearing stretchy exercise clothing and old skirts from The Gap.

But here’s the good news: The Whisperer is coming back, like Lazarus from the dead (but that’s not my story to tell). Starting tomorrow, he will be back on my couch and talking about the evils of sugar and joy of protein. And egg whites. The dude is always talking about egg whites. But I can’t wait.

In the weeks leading up to his return, I’ve joked with a bunch of the ladies who work out with him about how much we worried about him seeing how we’ve kind of fallen apart in his absence. We’re so worried about him seeing how we look. Of course, given the circumstances, that is ludicrous thinking. Here we are, generally fit and healthy people, fretting about what a guy – who’s just endured months of having his head radiated and body pumped with chemo – thinks about our bloated bellies.

So to celebrate his return, I am heading out this afternoon to meet an old high school chum at a very hip and trendy place that’s known for its outrageously good pizza. They even make one with Nutella. I will say good-bye to carbohydrates the proper way, with a glass of two or wine while eating every bit of crust off my plate.

And when I get on my scale tomorrow, I will know for sure that the only direction those numbers are going from there on in, is down.

It’s the least I can do for my Whisperer.

Amy shares way too much about herself at ‘A’ My Name is Amy. You can follow her on Facebook and Twitter@AMyNameisAmy.

 

 

May
14
2015

That Time I Missed the Bus (Literally)

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keep-calm-and-don-t-miss-the-bus-5I woke up yesterday morning to face a big “to-do” list. We were planning to leave early the next day to drive the seven hours or so south to attend my oldest child’s college graduation and I had shiz that needed to get done.

Did you just read that? My oldest child, my first-born — the one who taught me how hard it was to be a mom and how much I loved it — is about to become a college graduate (god fucking willing).

Where did the time go?

But this is not about that.

I had cookies to make, clothes to pack — especially to ensure that my little guy didn’t show up for the commencement ceremony in his typical sports shorts/soccer jersey combo — and I had to get my ass to the DMV to replace the driver’s license that was stolen out of my walled like a month ago.

There was also the matter of the license plate that recently, and mysteriously, just dropped off the front of the $400 vehicle my teenager drives nowadays and I should probably be happy that that’s the only thing that’s fallen off that beauty.

So I got the kids off to school, did a little solo exercise routine in my family room that included singing and dancing to Prince’s “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man” (PS: I killed it) and jumped in the shower.

Following my abbreviated beauty routine, it occurred to me that I might need shit out of my daughter’s car to replace the missing plate — say the vehicle registration or insurance card. Or maybe I’d need the plate that remained screwed to the back of the car. So I drove to the high school and, reluctantly, switched cars and drove to the local DMV using the tips of my right toes to press the accelerator as the power seats have long since stopped working and are permanently frozen in place for a driver with legs significantly longer than my own.

So by the time I got to the dreaded DMV with my Ziploc bagged filled with all the “points” required to prove that I was who I was, it was later than I really had wanted to get there and there was a long line of folks filling out various forms along a counter where I squeezed in to do the same.

I don’t know about you, but when I have any doings at the motor vehicle agency I start acting like I’ve committed a crime or joined the service. I want to answer every question asked to me with, “Sir, yes sir!” and a salute. So I start going into my “We’re in the Army now” routine when the phone in my bag starts to ring. I look down and see it’s my mom and look back up to answer the imposing woman behind the counter asking me questions.

Then the phone starts to ring again.

And again.

And I’m really starting to sweat, wondering if my mom wanted to talk about something more than the graduation or then maybe if there had been an accident.

I had to run outside to check the license plate number and add to one of the numerous forms I needed to fill out and when I came back in, saw my younger sister had texted me, “Hey, are you here?”

“What is Betsy doing at the DMV?” I wondered, but scurried back onto the line to finish my business with the lady behind the counter.

The phone, of course, started to buzz again and instead of ignoring, I press that magic iPhone button that lets you send a quick message that you can’t talk right now.

To which my mother responds, “This can’t wait.”

“She’s usually not so aggressive,” I think, and move over to another line.

And then she texts, “We are headed to NY,” and I have one of those experiences generally reserved for dreams, you know, the kind where you show up for a test naked or that you forgot to study?

I forgot that at that moment I was supposed to be at a rest area along the Garden State Parkway to catch a bus into New York City to see a show that my mother bought tickets for months ago. She even asked me last weekend if I’d found out yet what time I needed to be there to get on the bus and I brushed her off, reminding her it was only Saturday at that point. That I just hadn’t gotten that far yet on my calendar.

I think she knew better. She knew whom she was dealing with.

Needless to say — following a mini heart attack — I finished my business at the DMV and started frantically Googling mass transportation options to get me into the city by 2 p.m. (it was close to 11 a.m. at that point and anyone who has had to journey into New York from the Tri-State area knows you need to give yourself a lot of time to get from here to there).

I was all set to jump on  a bus that would get into the city about 15 minutes before curtain time and figured I would just run from Port Authority to the nearby theater district when I made the horrifying discovery that the show — the revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The King and I,” — was playing at Lincoln Center. Fucking Lincoln Center about 20-something blocks north of the bus station.

And then I began to despair. My mother had gone way out of her way to get me that ticket to be a part of that bus trip into the city — along with two of my sisters and some of my mom’s pals — that I couldn’t just not go. Even offering to pay her back didn’t seem right. I had been an asshole, like, how could I have not remembered such a lovely day that awaited me?

So naturally, as I do in these situations, I did the one thing I’ve done quite often over the past few years. I called my gal pal across the street and asked her what she thought I should do. She’s like the Kissenger to my Ford — although much more chic — and always knows just what to do.

“You’ve got a lot on your plate,” she immediately commiserated after I verbally vomited what had happened and my distress. “You’ve got kids moving out and moving home and the long weekend ahead of you. You just forgot,” she consoled.

“You’re going to have to drive,” she instructed. “It shouldn’t be too terrible.”

So that’s what I did. I jumped in my car in my DMV outfit and drove the 90-minute drive into Manhattan’s Upper West Side and easily parked under Lincoln Center with enough time to spare to join the group for a lovely lunch.

And the show was magnificent. I super-love Kelli O’Hara, who plays the role of the intrepid Anna who travels to Siam to be a teacher for the king’s many children. My mom and I had seen her years earlier in the Lincoln Center-revival of “South Pacific,” which was equally wonderful and provided the additional excitement of getting to stand behind Angelica Houston on the ladies room line at intermission.

I sat next to my mom in that darkened theater and kicked myself for even considering for a moment the notion of forfeiting that experience in favor of staying home and walking around Trader Joe’s.

Of course, the ride home sucked. It took a legit hour to get from Lincoln Center to the Lincoln Tunnel entrance. I mean, it’s only about 20 blocks south. And it was rush hour so things didn’t get much better when I hit the New Jersey Turnpike on the other end.

I still don’t know what to blame my absent-mindedness on. Maybe I’ve got a lot on my mind right now or maybe I’m just plain stupid. I’m really open to that. Or maybe I have “brain fog,” one of peri-menopause’s many exciting features that accompany sweating through my underwear and the cute bloat around my midsection.

But whatever the culprit was, I’m glad I didn’t pass on the opportunity to sit next to my mom in a darkened theater under the spell of beautiful music.

You can’t buy that at Trader Joe’s.

May
07
2015

Memory Hoarder: How to Let Go

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In a moment of inspiration – or perhaps after watching one too many episodes of Fixer Upper – I decided to start clearing things out of my kitchen cabinets and basement last weekend.

All I can say is: Holy hoarder.

In the span of about 24 hours, I uncovered the following items:

  • A dozen slightly-yellowed cloth dinner napkins – monogrammed of course – which I received as a gift from my college roommate at my bridal shower almost 25 years ago.
  • The portacrib my third child slept in for the first 18 months of her life, set up alongside my bed in which her dad and I would wake to find her standing with her chin on the railing staring at us.
  • The copper mixing bowl my former mother-in-law gave me years ago when I fancied myself a younger, poorer version of Martha Stewart whipping soft peaks of egg whites and cream at a moment’s notice.
  • About a decade’s-worth of children’s costumes – a doggie, a sexy Jasmine, a Pink Lady, Nintendo’s Mario, Cleopatra, Max from Where the Wild Things Are and the cutest little Itsy Bitsy Spider number my baby wore as a toddler.
  • All the Halloween decorations that now have become de rigueur in neighborhoods all over town (which I had resisted for so long until my poor children, desperate for a yard full of horror, wore me down) – giant rubber hands with stakes to appear as if they had erupted from the earth; foam tombstones that read “RIP” and “Izzy Dead” that I could never get to stand up in the grass; bags of cobwebs we’d string along the shrubs at the front of the house and a string of tiny orange lights we hung around the front door to light the way for all those trick-or-treaters.
  • A crib mattress. Can’t remember what happened to the actual crib that all four babies slept in. Some for long after they were babies (#sorrymaddie).
  • The two remaining floral Tiffany plates that were part of a larger set given to me at that long ago bridal shower by my high school friend and former post-college roommate who left this world way too soon. I still can’t believe she is gone and struggle with ousting those pretty plates.
  • Four child-sized ski helmets, passed down, lent out, plastered with stickers from ski trips from long ago and most probably now, many years later, outdated.
  • A few boxes filled with so much of my ex-husband’s warm weather wardrobe – circa 2008 – leaving me to wonder what the man had left to wear the summer after he moved out and left it all behind.
  • Remnants from well-meaning projects, begun with gusto and lots of credit card expenses that never quite saw their way through to completion. Empty bottles from all the limoncello I was going to brew for friends one Christmas. Bolts of fabric for chair covers and pillows that never quite happened. And mason jars. Lots of mason jars. For what, I could not tell you.
  • The innards of a dog bed. Two dogs ago.
  • The floral-covered ottoman that was in the sunroom of our first house. Two houses ago.
  • The well-loved Brio train table I stored in hopes that it would one day be enjoyed by my many, many grandchildren only to discover that some errant graffiti artist drew a nude woman on the front. To the artist’s credit, the octopus woman does resemble something out of Picasso’s Blue Period. Including her breasts.
  • The framed poster of a tomato I brought to hang on my dorm room wall freshman year of college exactly 237 years ago.
  • A cardboard box full of trophies. Baseball. Softball. Tennis. Dance. Mostly to be filed under: Everyone’s a winner. A few standouts. Swim team MVP. Coach’s award. Those I put aside, unable to scrap just yet.
  • Serving trays. Lots of cutlery. Baskets galore. A rug. A nightstand. A metallic puffer coat I bought at Old Navy for $7 and wore once (probably the right call there). Shin guards. Tiny tennis skirts and matching panties. A Rubbermaid box full of jerseys from our town rec teams – baseball, basketball, soccer and later, lacrosse – and more blue and white sports shorts than one family could possibly need. Packages of plate hangers. A dog cage. Crutches just right for Tiny Tim.

I am going ahead and throwing a lot of stuff away — like the crib mattress and broken items. But have a hard time tossing perfectly good items so have tasked my 17yo with organizing a garage sale in a couple of weeks to help ease my conscience. I need to hurry though because last time our garage was really cluttered we found a cat and now she lives in my house and owns a Snuggie (we actually found a garbage bag full of those, too).

I had my girlfriend across the street come over to check out all the crap that had migrated to our garage and thought she was going to go into shock at the sight of it all. She’s a purger. A minimalist. She’s always cleaning something out and has about three items hanging from the rod in her closet. I had enlisted her to help me let go of all that stuff. Things I thought I needed as proof. As if all the memories living in my head and my heart weren’t enough.

She can be brutal.

I pulled a hand-painted glass cake dome out of one of my kitchen cabinets and as I stood atop a stool and admired it – remembering where it had come from and how I treasured it 20-something years ago – she walked over and plucked it out of my hands and set it down on the table along with other items to be weeded out of my house.

“Say good-bye,” she said as she walked away.

And so I did.

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May
04
2015

The Best Part

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Om.

In an effort to engage my children in conversation from an early age, I’d often go around the dinner table at night and ask my people what the best part of their day and the worst part of the day were. The “highs” and the “lows,” you might say. Generally, I’d get a lot of shoulder shrugs and eye rolls from my baby dolls, but this never deterred me. I’d press, “What was the best thing that happened to you today, buddy?” and maybe I’d get a, “Playing kickball at recess,” or, “Lunch,” and that was when they were still in grammar school.

Forget high school.

Usually though, the real conversations would come at night, in the dark, maybe after the millionth reading of Tikki Tikki Tembo when my child — softened by a tummy full of chicken nuggets and a long, hot shower — would start to open up and share some of the events of his day. Usually the worsts.

I miss those moments.

Nowadays I’ll get a call when someone has something sad to report and a text to share good news. But it’s just not the same.

I played the “Best Part/Worst Part” game a lot when I visited Hong Kong with my two younger kids last month. But honestly, there were really no “Worst Parts” on that trip. The challenge was sifting through all the cool stuff we did to pick the best “Best Part.”

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We took the tram up to the top of Victoria’s Peak.

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We ate delicious dim sum.

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We pretended we were Buddhists.

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We swam in the pools of a waterfall.

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We had cocktails overlooking the lights of the city.

I think the “Best Part” of the trip for me was that of all the really cool things we did — jumping off a junk boat, riding waves on the South China Sea, swimming in the pools of a waterfall, spinning on a rollercoaster at an amusement park — my 12yo son’s “Best Part” of the trip was our visit to see the Big Buddha on Lantau Island.

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Tian Tan Buddha at the Po Lin Monastery on Lantau Island, Hong Kong.

It’s actually called Tian Tan Buddha and was built a little over 20 years old. The 200-foot-tall bronze statue sits high atop 268 steps and is part of the Po Lin Monastery. Around 20 percent of Hong Kong people are Buddhists so even though it’s a tourist destination, we got to see the reverence the site inspires among those who practice that religion.

Luckily the day was overcast making the 200+ step-ascent a little less terrible.

Luckily the day was overcast making the 200+ step-ascent a little less terrible.

Approaching the Big Buddha.

Approaching the Big Buddha.

The kids carefully watched monks walking around the grounds and Buddhists lighting incense using long, wooden sticks, placing offerings of fruit at temple altars or kneeling with heads bowed in prayer. As we walked up the long staircase to see the buddha up close, my son had a lot of questions about Buddhism.

Burning the long sticks of incense.

Burning the long sticks of incense.

Offerings in one of the temples.

Offerings in one of the temples.

Feeling it at Big Buddha.

Feeling it at Big Buddha.

“Mom, didn’t you used to be a Buddhist?” he asked.

“Did you say Buddhist or nudist?” I joked, as I’ve been neither and since I really don’t like taking off my clothes, would only consider the former.

I had offered to get each of the kids a souvenir from the trip and while my 17yo daughter chose a midnight blue silk robe festooned with colorful flowers and birds, my son chose a mini Buddha to bring home. Given there was a fair amount of weaponry — wooden swords and daggers — to have selected as his Hong Kong keepsake, I was pleased that my baby chose something so peaceful. It speaks to who the kid is.

Sampling souvenir options.

Sampling souvenir options.

While we were on Lantau Island that day, we had two other adventures. First, we hopped back on the bus — the same buses that took us to the Buddha from the ferry we took from Honk Kong Island — to check out Tai O fishing village. We careened along the windy road across the mountains to the edge of the island to the bustling tourist destination.

It’s pretty much a narrow alleyway you walk through to be assaulted with the sights, sounds and smells — wow, the smells — of a Chinese fishing village. I felt like we were on a movie set. The path was jammed with predominantly Asian tourists and lined on either side with shops and stalls displaying am impressive array of shit you can do with sea life. It hung dried from lines. It swam in colorful plastic buckets. It got formed into a ball and fried. It was beyond fascinating although some people in our party could not get out of there fast enough.

We hopped in taxis to get back to the monastery because we wanted to take a gondola that would head us back to our friends’ flat in Stanley.

As we approached the ticket counter for the gondolas, we saw that the line divided into regular ticket holders and those who upgraded to the “crystal cabin.” The grown ups looked at each other and I was like, “Crystal. Totally.”

I read that to mean “VIP.” I did that once for a ride on the London Eye. In that case, I think some booze might have been included and the upgrade expedited our trip to the front of the line.

In China, the upgrade brought instead a higher level of terror to our journey over the mountains and briefly over the South China Sea as the floor bottom of the gondola was glass. You could see straight down.

The secret to getting through about 25 terrifying minutes is to let go, which is what I did. Instead of imagining the cable snapping and our car plummeting through the treetops far below; or focusing on the fact that this would all be going down in China and isn’t that where lots of crazy things happen; I sat back and took in the breathtaking scenery we were gliding through.

Obviously, we survived.

It’s been about a month since we’ve returned from this life-changing trip and we’re already talking about where we’d like to go next.

My son came home from his first day back at school after Hong Kong and as he dipped his cookie into a glass of milk asked, “Hey Mom, can we go to England for spring break next year?”

And whether we can swing that or not a year from now, I love that that’s how he’s thinking.

Big.

That’s the best part for me.

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Apr
29
2015

My Hong Kong Trip, Part 2

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When we last left this blogger, she had staggered off a 16-hour flight, spit out an expletive and proceeded to tour Hong Kong with her expat neighbors along with her two youngest children.

The China trip had always seemed so far away because we booked it so far in advance. I am usually pretty last-minute and willy-nilly about everything in my life so making plane reservations for the vacation six months ahead of time was a completely foreign concept (and really, setting the tone for the entire adventure). But we pulled the trigger in October, bought the tickets, and then started counting the days.

It turns out, I am not a great counter because all of a sudden — somewhere around mid-March — I realized we were scheduled to leave about two weeks hence and had done nothing to plan our itinerary. Zippo. I reached out to my girlfriend, who moved to Hong Kong last summer with her family, to ask her if she had any ideas and she messaged back, “Actually, what do you think about this?”

We were just a little busy.

We were just a little busy.

It was like a dream come true. We literally just had to get our asses over to the other side of the world, and our friends had made plans for the rest. It was like being on a tour or something.

The best part about the trip – well, one of the best parts about the trip – was that we had locals as our very own tour guides. And we were their first visitors, so things were still relatively new for them. It wasn’t like, “Oh, there’s that giant Buddha again (*yawn*).” They were as excited as we were.

Because we were with locals who don’t own a car, we not only got to experience the thrill of riding in a Hong Kong taxi, but we got ourselves some Octopus cards (Hong Kong’s equivalent of NYC’s MetroCard) and rode all sorts of public transportation, like the rollercoaster double-decker buses, the crazy little green minibuses and the MTR (or subway) all over the island. We also took a couple of gondola rides, but that’s another story.

We jammed a lot in during our week there, including breathtaking hikes, yummy dim sum, foot rubs, a twisty-turny rollercoaster ride above the South China Sea, a junk boat tour and a visit to the aforementioned Giant Buddha. And we ate at some outstanding restaurants but did manage to have a brush with some of China’s creepier food choices. Never — I repeat — never order a chicken Caesar salad for your lunch at a Chinese beach snack bar. Shiver.

Anyway, here are some of the highlights:

Hiking the Dragon’s Back

Since our friends moved to Hong Kong, they’ve posted lots of pictures on social media of amazing hikes they’ve taken around the island with their three young sons. I had indicated that we’d love to do some as well during our trip. So when I went to my local Athleta store to buy some fresh new tops for sightseeing and hiking (a goodwill gesture towards the Chinese people so that they would not subjected to seeing me in an item pulled from my old pile of stinky, pit-stained workout tops), I told the very enthusiastic sales woman that I didn’t anticipate any serious exertion. “They’ve got young kids,” I told her, “so we’re really just going to be going for walks and not quote-unquote ‘hiking.'”

So, it turns out that those expat friends of mine are fucking hiking with their kids. Like, strenuous stuff. Our first hike was the famous Dragon’s Back – named for the way the mountains the trail traverses resemble one of those fire-breathing creatures — which is part of the Hong Kong Trail. We climbed eight or nine miles of hills and steps, and it was kinda hot and we were kinda tired from the time change and maybe a tad dehydrated but then we looked around at the drop-dead gorgeous scenery and shut the hell up.

 Hitting the Beach at Big Wave Bay

The Dragon’s Back trail ends with about 1,000 steps down (literally) to Big Wave Bay, which is where we crashed (literally again)  for the rest of the afternoon. Who knew China had beaches, much less boogie boarding? Oh, and shark nets. That’s a thing.

Walking Around SoHo

We spent Easter morning in the SoHo section of Central — the big city on Hong Kong Island — and walked around a little after brunch.

Sailing Around the Island on a Junk Boat 

Later that day we walked down to Stanley Pier, right down the road from our friends’ flat, and boarded our very own junk boat. When my girlfriend told me before we left that they had made reservations on a junk boat, I envisioned we’d be on one of those old-fashioned Chinese-y sailboats with the red sails. You know, one of these deals:

Seen from our junk boat.

What I thought was a junk boat, as seen from our junk boat.

But, no. We boarded a lovely two-level sea vessel replete with beanbag chairs for lounging and a crew to make us dinner and sail us around the island. We stopped for a while off Big Wave Bay — outside the shark nets, I might add — to do a little swimming. Beer totally helped get me past the threat of sharks or the very large, red jellyfish we kept an eye on. As my girlfriend would say — and I began to follow suit — about a thousand times while we were there whenever we encountered something not-very-American, “Welcome to Hong Kong.”

Victoria Harbor Light Show

After dinner and a competitive game of Uno, we headed to the north side of the island to see the famous Symphony of Lights show. Asian countries — admirably, in my opinion — have a thing for lights. Like, the more, the better. This holds true in Hong Kong where all the crazy tall skyscrapers lining the harbor light up as the sun goes down and then at 8:00 each night, laser lights stream from the top and sweep across the harbor for the light show.

This is totally not my video. Thank you, YouTube.

Honestly, we had a hard time — sitting there on our junk boat in the middle of the choppy harbor — gauging just when the show started or stopped. We were a little underwhelmed. But we happened to catch the show a few nights later from a restaurant high above the city, and it seemed a lot better. But who cares? It was a spectacular setting.

Oh, and there was a full moon.

But Wait, There’s More …

I think we’re going to need a Part 3. There’s so much more to show and tell you about. We still haven’t even gotten to the Big Buddha, the insane gondola ride over mountains and the South China Sea or all the smelly fishing village we visited. Not to mention all the toilets I took pictures of. No, we’re going to need to do this again.

Stay tuned.

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Apr
02
2015

A Lot Can Happen in a Year

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Calendar Image-1524x975About a year ago, I was standing in my TV room with my two neighbors – good girlfriends – lifting weights over our heads when one of my pals started to cry.

For about a year we’d been gathering at my house two mornings a week to exercise under the ever-watchful eye of our Girl Whisperer. He’d sit on my big, red couch and boss us around, telling us to work a little harder, while monitoring the bloat around our middles and asking what we’d been eating. Because while he’s all about working out – he makes us do endless squats and push ups – he’s a firm believer that it really all comes down to what you put in your mouth. So over the course of the almost-two years I worked out with The Whisperer, I eliminated a lot of the naughty things that were part of my daily food triangle – Doritos, CheezIts, and pizza – and replaced all that yumminess with a lot of protein and vegetables.

Boring, I know, but the bloat did subside a bit. I’ll give him that.

And for as annoying as the Girl Whisperer initially was — harping on protein and how sugar was poison ad nauseum — the guy started to grow on me. Over the course of hours and days and weeks and months, I really got to know the man who was sitting on my couch, wearing all black and telling me what to do. I got to know about how he’d overcome so many struggles and sadnesses in his life and how that shaped his incredibly positive attitude.

I mean, this cat was a legit prison guard in his previous life and tells stories involving shanks and grown men’s feces. A lot of other bad things happened to him before he found fitness but he came through it to become one of the most grounded people I know and someone who can always put life’s challenges in the proper perspective any time I tried to whine to him about something, like my job or my love life.

“A bad day is when you find out you have cancer,” he’d tell us while we complained about how heavy the weights were or how much our legs hurt. “Today is not a bad day,” he’d add.

“Now, eat more egg whites, please.”

So, we were exercising when my girlfriend started to cry, which was weird – she’s pretty stable and not prone to random weeping.

“Michael was offered the job,” she cried and we knew what that meant. For months, her husband had been talking about the possibility of moving to Hong Kong for a job opportunity and his wife had been filling us in. It was all okay while the whole thing was in theory, she was kind of open to the idea then. But the reality of uprooting her three young boys from the really nice life they had built on the Jersey Shore kind of had her freaking the fuck out.

My girlfriend is a Jersey Girl. I mean, a real Jersey Girl, not the kind you see on a reality TV show who is really someone who hails from one of New York’s outer boroughs and wound up living somewhere in the Garden State.

She loved her house – filled with her cat and her dog and all those boys. She and her husband taught them to surf in the summer and snowboard in the winter and there is nobody – literally, nobody – who cheers louder from the sidelines during the boys’ lacrosse games than their mom.

And there’s no place she’s happier than sitting on her beach chair with her painted toes dug into the Jersey Shore sand with a margarita in her hand (preferably one she concocted with Trader Joe’s mango juices and the tequila she infuses with jalapeno in a mason jar in her freezer).

Pretty much, she’s, like, the only woman I knew who was thoroughly content with her life.

So the prospect of pulling up stakes to move to China did not thrill her.

“That’s amazing!” we told her. “What an opportunity for the boys!”

We continued to talk her off the ledge as we lunged and squatted and by the end of the hour, she seemed much calmer about the move.

And it turns out, not even six months later, they had cleared every last Lego out of their house and moved the whole kit-and-caboodle to Hong Kong.

And we were really sad. For ourselves.

All of a sudden our neighborhood, that for years had teemed with boys running abound with lacrosse sticks and making skateboard ramps out of crap they found in their parents’ garages, became really, really quiet.

“We are SO coming to visit you,” we had told them a million times before they left and we totally meant it. But we meant it in that “some day” kind of way. Like, in a year, or something. Some day.

But a few months into their relocation, my girlfriend messaged me to say they really wanted visitors. And not “someday,” but “now.”

So I hemmed and I hawed as I figured out how we could do that and how I could eliminate one of my kids from the equation so I wouldn’t have to buy so many plane tickets. But in the end, my 17yo had to come, too, because – man – when do you get the opportunity to go to the other side of the world?

So one year after my girlfriend cried about uprooting her family from the Jersey Shore and moving to China, they have settled into their new life in Hong Kong and seem really happy. The boys love their new schools and they even get to play lacrosse. And they’ve already taken advantage of being in Asia and have visited Thailand and Vietnam as a family and their oldest boy went to Beijing for a few days on a class trip.

And one year after I told my girlfriend that I’d totally come visit them some day, we are making good on our word and taking off this afternoon to spend about a week with them in Hong Kong.

I know. I’m dying.

But I’m also struck by how much things can change in a few short months. How a life that seemed so firmly planted in one place can – with some effort – be plucked out and replanted on the other side of the world. And how you can end up taking a trip you never imagined you’d be taking so soon in your life.

And that brings us back to the Girl Whisperer. While everyone around here’s been moving and traveling, he’s been on a journey of his own. A few months after our friends moved to China, he found out he had cancer. And it’s not been kind to him, which has surprised so many of us with how someone so strong – both physically and mentally – could be shaken to his core by the disease and ensuing treatments.

Like, he just had a feeding tube removed not long ago.

But he tells me in his sporadic texts that he’s getting better. That he’s going to fight it. And I believe him. He’s overcome so many other challenges; he will eventually show cancer who’s the boss. Just like he showed me.

You just don’t know what life has in store for you. There are so many good and terrible things that await us all. And I think the only answer is to live. Really live and love and make the most of all the time we have here. Together.

So I’m getting on a plane today for 16 hours to see the faces of my neighbors that I’ve missed so much and have an adventure. I am going to really live my life and help my kids really live theirs.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

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Mar
24
2015

Our New Neighbor

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mrgrsI 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.”

Like getting married at 24.

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.

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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Mar
20
2015

The Upside of Being Sick: Broad City and Transparent

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proxyI’ve been sick for the past few days. Not tired with some sniffles or not feeling 100 percent like myself sick. No, this was like legit fever, chills and feeling like my head-would-explode-and-splatter-all-over-the-walls-of-my-bedroom-at-any-second sick.

For days.

I can’t even remember the last time I felt that sick. And I mean, a fever? When does anyone over 12 have a fever? Or maybe it’s more like when does anyone over 12 even think to take their own temperature?

But I came home from a thing at my daughter’s high school one night last week, while I was still pretending that everything was okay, and for some reason thought, “I wonder if I have a fever?” and shoved the thermometer in my ear.

102.3.

And it’s like I needed that validation. Like it confirmed that feeling like I was going to die was not a figment of my imagination and I didn’t have to power through it. I could stop pretending that everything was fine. It’s like I finally had permission to put on my pajamas and get into bed.

For, like, three days.

At one point, my oldest daughter insisted I get in the shower as she was concerned I was beginning to look like “a homeless person.” It’s my hair, really. When I haven’t washed it in a while the cowlick I’ve got going on in the back gives my hairdo an especially unkempt look. The way it might look, perhaps, if I’d been sleeping on a park bench or on a piece of cardboard set up on a sidewalk.

The upside to all of this lying around was that I got to watch a lot of shows I’d been meaning to get to and even a couple of zombie movies for good measure.

On Saturday, while my younger two kids were away skiing with their dad, my older daughter and I sat on the couch for an entire day watching TV. We watched the zombie movie 28 Days Later and then followed that up with the sequel 28 Weeks Later.

It turns out, I had already seen the first one (I realized, like halfway through) but we decided after a now-steady diet of Walking Dead, the movie was not so scary nor very gruesome. But we liked it enough to keep going and watch the second and even though it starred more famous actors than the first movie (Jeremy Renner, the guy who plays Rumplestilskin on “Once Upon a Time” and Rose Byrne — and ps: what isn’t Rose Byrne in nowadays?), we thought it was pretty dumb.

But we made up for all of that by watching the entire first season of Comedy Central’s “Broad City.”  

You guys. It is so insanely inappropriate — rampant drug use, sexual situations and naughty language — but it had me and my 21yo dying watching these two best friends, Abbi and Ilana, do whatever it is they do all over New York. Later, when my younger daughter came home and watched some with us, she decided she was dedicating her life to becoming Ilana. I mean, who wouldn’t love a show that describes the vagina as “nature’s pocket”?

“Broad City” started as a web series but now it’s a legit 30-minute show on Comedy Central. Amy Poehler, one of my personal heroes, is a producer and directed at least one of the episodes and I saw Abbi and Ilana on The Daily Show not long ago and John Stewart was fawning all over them so get on it now so you can tell everyone you knew them when.

And that brings me to Amazon’s “Transparent.” 

Go.

Stop reading this right now and start watching it.

You need to know up front that it, too, is pretty raunchy. Lots of sex.

And I am not Jewish, I did not grow up in Los Angeles and I don’t really know any transgender people but I just TOTALLY GET IT. The whole vibe is fabulous and Jeffrey Tambor’s portrayal of Maura is so lovely and poignant and it’s helped me understand a little of what it must be like to go through life masquerading as someone else. His kids are selfish assholes and his ex-wife, played by Judith Light, is a total character and he’s just trying to be true to himself.

Here’s the trailer:

I can’t tell you how much I loved when he tells his daughter that he’s been dressing up like a man his entire life.

Wow.

Anyway, I’m now way behind on “House of Cards” and “The Americans” and am all over Netflix’s “Bloodline” when it starts streaming this Friday, so maybe I’ll need to start feeling a little under the weather again.

Um. On second thought, pretty much nothing was worth feeling that bad.

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Mar
09
2015

How Not to Be a Jerk

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thejerkI can’t say I was really happy yesterday morning when I got in my cold car around 7:30 to drive an hour and 45 minutes north to go skiing.

In fact, when I saw my girlfriend later that morning on line to take the gondola up to the top of the mountain, I told her that the only thing that could make the day any better was if there was going to be some kind of math involved. “Are we doing any word problems later?” I joked as we inched our way up to the front of the endless line.

My 12-year-old son, on the other hand, was practically giddy.

I heard him hop right out of bed when his alarm went off at 6:30 and then he poked his head inside my room to see if I was getting up.

“A few more minutes, buddy,” I told him, probably not in my cheeriest voice.

When I finally lumbered downstairs 15 minutes later for coffee, he was sitting on a stool at our island eating the toast slathered with peanut butter that he’d made himself and already dressed in warm layers for his day on the slopes. The night before, while I sat on the couch and watched “How to Get Away With Murder” and pretended the following day wasn’t happening, he was busy packing up all his ski gear in a backpack and laying out his clothes for the next day. He even put my skis and boots in the back of our SUV.

I am a reluctant skier. I came to the sport later in life and never found it very natural to strap sticks to the bottom of my feet and shoot down a mountain. It ain’t right.

But my ex-husband was passionate about the sport and back in the day, I really wanted to be the kind of girlfriend who was up for anything. You know, the Cool Girl. The one who, according to Amazing Amy in Gone Girl, “is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain.”

But I don’t think I ever totally fooled him. For one thing, I’m a scaredy cat and not a really good sport. I’m sure I didn’t make things easy. But God bless him, he was patient with me. He helped me put  my boots on and carried my skis and poles around. He followed me down the mountain and reminded me to bend my knees, lean forward and not swing my arms around. In fact, to this day, I still hear his voice in my head as I make my way down a mountain and adjust accordingly.

When our kids were old enough to hit the slopes, he’d get them all ready for a day in ski school – stuffing little bodies clad in pajamas and turtlenecks (this was before all the fancy long johns came along) into bibbed snow pants and putting all the right socks and boots and gloves on all of those little hands and feet – and wrangle them over to their lessons. Then later, he’d take them out himself, showing them the proper way to get on and off a chairlift and skiing backwards down the mountain as they followed behind, their little skis making a “pizza slice” as they plowed their way through the snow.

A couple of times he even took the older three kids away for the long President’s Weekend to ski with his sister and her kids while I stayed home – secretly relieved – to take care of our little guy. While I sat on the couch, watching movie after movie and drinking red wine, they mastered moguls and learned to ski through wooded glades and by the time I got back out on the slopes with them a few years later, found myself once again the slowest and most remedial skier in the pack.

So when my marriage was finally ending, I joked that at least I’d never have to ski again. “It’s the silver lining,” I’d like to tell people.

Except my kids missed it. While I saw it as one giant, expensive hassle that resulted in staring down a steep, icy slope with frozen toes, they grew up thinking that nothing could be more fun. And because we’d taken them away on a bunch of ski trips over the years, they also associated it with cozy nights sitting on the floor with their cousins playing Spit and Rummy and splashing around an indoor pool.

While I was going through my divorce, my girlfriend offered me her condo in Stratton, VT for a weekend to take the kids skiing and I saw it as an opportunity to prove to myself that I could do things like that by myself, even though I still had a 6-year-old to manage. The trip started badly when I discovered, after I’d gone and rented all four of them equipment from a local ski place, that our fairly new SUV didn’t have the proper bars on top to clip on our old ski rack. I’d have to shove them inside along with all our bags and helmets and groceries I’d bought for the long weekend.

And that’s when I sat down and started to cry in the family room with my daughters looking on. But in the first of what would be many times when the kids would rally around me, the girls assured me we’d be able to fit everything inside our truck and even though we were probably pretty squished on the five-hour drive north that Thursday night, not one kid complained.

We were up bright-and-early the next morning to catch the 8:15 shuttle from the condo complex to the mountain, standing outside with all of our bags and equipment in the freezing January air, when after a while, one of the maintenance guys drove by and told us that the shuttle did not run on weekdays. So we shoved everything back into our truck and headed over to the mountain and when we pulled into the lot, saw that the shuttle bus was loading passengers to take them to the lodge.

We made a mad scramble to get all the skis and poles, helmets and bags out and over to the shuttle and I ushered all of the kids up the steps and into the back. It was the kind of bus that I imagined was also used to shuttle migrant workers around to jobs, with a big, open back where passengers stood and held onto poles.

The kids and I pushed our way into the bus that was mostly filled with silver-haired retirees, who were probably taking advantage of the smaller crowds and cheaper pricing of weekday skiing. I ordered all of the kids to hold onto something and started counting heads.

One was missing.

“Where’s Nick?” I shouted, and the three older kids just stared back at me.

“He’s over here,” came an unfamiliar voice from the back of the bus, very near the opening where I could barely make out trees rushing by as we headed towards the mountain. And then I saw my 6-year-old standing really close to that gaping opening.

“Can you grab him?” I yelled to the nice woman who’d alerted me to his whereabouts and she yanked him away from the opening and held him by the shoulders until we pulled up to the ski lodge.

I bought lift tickets and clipped them to everyone’s ski jackets, wrapping the long sticker onto the wire and thinking how easy it had looked when the kids’ dad had put our tickets on us all those years. The little guy went to ski school and the other kids and I spent the day going up and down the mountain.

But in the end, it wasn’t as much fun as it used to be. Something was missing. And maybe it was the expense of it all or that teenagers had no interest in going anywhere with just me, but we never went again.

I’ve gone a couple of times with girlfriends since then and took my youngest to learn how to snowboard at a place about two hours from here, and I waited in the lodge while he took a lesson with some friends.

But he’s been dying to do it again. And it’s not enough that his dad is taking him away for a weekend to ski this month. He needed to go skiing with me.

So when a couple of families in town were heading to a mountain in New Jersey to ski on Sunday, he was all over it. Initially I said I’d take him but just hang around the lodge while he skied with his buddies because A: I don’t really need to ski and B: I’m not the richest cat right now. I’d rather spend that $65 on a manicure and a pedicure or when the kids and I go to Hong Kong next month.

“Why don’t you see if Dad wants to go skiing with you, dude?” I suggested.

But he looked at me with those big blue eyes of his and said, “But Mom, it can be our thing.”

“I’ve never even seen you ski,” he added.

Poop.

I mean, who around here even wants to do anything with me any more? Pretty much nobody. And soon, this kid won’t want to either, as evidenced by his actions last summer. 

And for as much as I complain about skiing, there’s really no better family activity. Nothing beats having a teenager trapped next to you on a chairlift on a long ride up a mountain or laughing over dinner at night on who fell during what run or who was the last to the bottom of the trail (usually me).

So that is how I found myself on Sunday standing on a line akin to one you’d find waiting for Space Mountain on Good Friday to rent the kid a snowboard for the day. We stored our bags in lockers and made our way outside and I marveled for not the first time at how easy my ex had made all of it look. And after a rocky first run that found my son on his butt more than standing upright on his board, he quickly found his rhythm and we had a great day. Even though he had two buddies to fool around in the terrain park and see who could catch the most air, he also wanted his mom as part of the pack.

After one run we stopped at the bottom to take some pictures of our group with our phones and I asked my friends if they’d take one of my son and me. As we stood with our arms around each other’s waist and our helmets touching, he said, “I really like seeing you ski, Mom,” and I cursed myself for being such a dick earlier that day. For even considering not doing something that would bring him so much joy.

Sometimes, it pays not to be a ... errr ... jerk.

Sometimes, it pays not to be a … errr … jerk.

It’s like those old MasterCard commercials, in which I’d tally up the costs of our ski day – the lift tickets, equipment rental, $4 slices of pizza, my lost beauty sleep – and then tell you, in no uncertain terms, that the end result was truly priceless.

(And look, there was even some math involved.)

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Mar
06
2015

My Kids Won’t Stop Getting Older

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IMG_5270I had a baby 21 years ago today. My second. A girl.

She came two weeks early and easily, swimming out quickly into the world like a good little Pisces. She joined her older brother, who came 17 months earlier and was so naughty, you’d have thought I’d have done anything that I could to prevent having another baby so quickly.

But when you get a night out alone with your husband and college friends and drink one-too-many Mount Gay and tonics, you find that your decision-making skills have become impaired. The booze softens the memories of engorged, leaky breasts and raw umbilical cords. It tempers just how helpless one feels alone watching QVC at 3 a.m. with an inconsolable infant. Or how long the days can feel stuck in a house with a toddler and a cabinet full of Barney videos.

So I got knocked up when my weepy first baby was a mere eight months old and while he had evened out by the time his sister came along nine months later – by then he had stopped crying all the time and had become a sweet little toddler – I had my hands officially full.

I was 27 and had no idea what I had gotten myself into. Not that I’d actually planned any of it, obviously. But while most of those college friends were building their careers and enjoying the freedom of being young and single in Manhattan, I was learning the words to Raffi songs and cutting boiled hot dogs into tiny, chewable pieces (this was back when hot dogs were still a highly-acceptable food staple for little ones).

And I’ve thought about it a lot, about whether I’d change things if I had the chance to go back in time. Would I be smarter about birth control? Some of those questionable hair styles? Would I even have gotten married?

But I spent a lot of time paging through photo albums this morning and picking through the shoeboxes that hold the photo overflow, the B rolls that didn’t make the photo album cut. And I’m reminded looking the kids in their Halloween costumes or opening Christmas presents or covered in bubbles in the tub that even though so much of it was hard – not to mention boring and thankless – I wouldn’t change a thing.

I mean, maybe I wouldn’t wear a scrunchie out in public or overalls the second time around, but I’d pretty much like to go back and do it all over again.

I’d really savor every second of the little voices, the little bodies, the little problems.

It’s hard to believe that that same little girl who I met late that night 21 years ago is now closer to my age that I was when I had her than I am. It reminds me of A: How old she is and B: How young I was and C: How old I have become.

She’s coming home this weekend for spring break and I’m looking forward to seeing her in person. To having a glass of wine together out in public and getting her to myself for a whole week. And even though she’s a good six inches taller than me now and by all accounts, a legit grown up, that girl will always be my baby.

Sure, she can buy cheap booze legally now, but she'll always be my little baby.

Sure, she can buy cheap booze legally now, but she’ll always be my little baby.

 

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