Silly Saturday: I Quit

Before going back to work full time three years ago, I was home taking care of the kids for 18 years. And while a lot has changed in our family over the last few years, working from home has allowed me to still be around for them when they get home from school each day or to grab them when the school nurse calls or drive them to practice or work.

In fact, because I spend most of my days sitting around in yoga pants in front of my laptop, my youngest son describes me as a “stay-at-home-computer-mom.” I may be busy trying to hit my monthly goals for work but as far as he’s concerned, I am buying another pair of shoes on Zappos.

Anyway, I saw this video while trolling Facebook this week. It’s a takeoff of another really popular one in which a young woman who has had enough of her job as a video content churner quits via an awesome video she created of herself dancing through her office and announcing she was done. (As if that didn’t make her clever enough, I also found out she had a “Modern Love” essay published last April. Bitch.)

Only in the video below, the woman works from home, surrounded by all her family’s piles of stuff and I could totally relate. Sometimes you just want to say, “Adios,” even if it’s just to go out and get milk.

Enjoy.

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Risky Business

DSC02004At this stage of the game, even my therapist has had enough.

We met last week and she asked me how the dating was going, since I had been making such a big stink about being ready to get out and start meeting men.

Finally.

“Um, not so good,” I told her. “I signed up for Match but, like, I’m just not feeling it.

“They’re all too, I don’t know … meh,“ I said, shrugging my shoulders. “Nobody is killing me.”

On the one hand, maybe it’s just that there’s too much jam from which to chose online.

Or maybe, just maybe, the problem is that I’m just not as open to love as I’ve claimed to be.

If there’s one person riding in the singles boat who I relate to right now, it’s not the recently-separated woman I know who is having a blast fooling around with men she’s meeting online, or another who’s already had a few relationships with dudes she’s met on Match since her divorce this year.

The woman I relate most to is the character Julia Louis-Dreyfuss plays in the movie “Enough Said,” who’s been divorced for 10 years and makes announcements like “There are no men at this party I am attracted to,” and admits that this is not unusual.

[SPOILER ALERT: As much as I hate to see you go, you might want to stop reading if you plan on seeing the movie this weekend. I’m about to give it all away.]

Anyway, she goes on a date with James Gandolfini’s character, even though “he’s a little fat,” and discovers she can actually get past the lack of initial physical attraction. But she starts to second-guess her growing attraction to him after she accidentally befriends his ex-wife, who can’t stop talking about the shlub she used to be married to.

Here’s a scene between Dreyfus’s character Eva and her friend, Sarah (played by the amazing Toni Collette):

Eva: “I have lost all perspective. I’ve been listening to this woman say the worst things about the guy that I’m starting to really like. She’s like a human TripAdvisor.”
Sarah: “Albert is not a hotel.”
Eva: “If you could avoid staying at a bad one, wouldn’t you?”

Eventually, her relationship with the two is uncovered – and it’s one of those scenes that makes you cringe – and Eva tearfully explains to Gandolfini’s Albert that, in so many words, since she’d already been divorced, she was making sure she wasn’t making another bad choice.

She was just trying to hedge her bets.

And that’s what I get. Totally. Love is risky business.

You guys, my heart was broken. Shattered into a million pieces. It hurt so much I didn’t think I would ever be able to get out of bed and move on with my life.

But I did. I swept up all the chunks and shards of what was left of that heart and dumped the pieces into a vault that’s keeping that sucker safe while it slowly mends.

Sure, my kids stomp on it all the time, but I know those assholes love me. I know they actually care if they hurt me (usually) and want to make me happy (most of the time).

Because our love for each other is unconditional.  I will still love them when they smack up my car or punch a hole in my wall. I will still love them when they slam their door or say snotty things to me. Even when they say they hate me. And they love me, even when I’m being a jerk or when another sibling seems to be getting more (money, cookies, love – fill in the blank).

Our love is not predicated upon what we can do for each other. It’s not tit-for-tat. I do things for those jerks because I just love them. And I know deep inside the core of their soft-and-chewy centers, underneath those hard-and-crunchy shells, they love me back.

So, how am I supposed to trust an outsider? Someone who’s not been completely vetted? How am I going to let him open that box and hold my heart in his hands without knowing, beyond reasonable doubt, that he’s not just another jackass who’ll drop it on the ground and step on it like it’s nothing?

Bottom line: I’m scared.

And I know, I’m nothing special. People get their hearts broken all the time and they pick themselves up and try again. I’m just letting my fear trip me up.

But when I think about all the things I’ve done that have scared the shit out of me – like giving birth, competing in a triathlon, getting a divorce – I know that while those things terrified me while I was in the midst of them, I felt like the fucking boss when I came out the other end.

I felt like I could do anything.

And of course, my therapist was quick to point these things out.

“What’s the worst that can happen?” she asks. “A breakup? You’ve survived that. You could survive it again.”

And it’s true: I can and I have.

“You don’t want to miss out on such an important part of life,” she continued.

And that’s where she got me, because she knows that I want to experience all that life has to offer. I don’t want to miss out on anything. Especially real love.

Then she directed me to go out and have 10 experiences — like coffee dates — before we meet again next month.

Whoa. That’s a lot of small talk. But I’ve accepted her challenge and am scrambling to dig up 10 bodies. Feel free to help, and I’ll keep you posted.

I’ll let you know if it’s worth the risk.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Scarlet Fever is Awesome

photo(58)Is it me, or is everybody sick right now?

I’ve spent the past week shuffling around my house, unshowered and wearing the same pair of grey sweatpants I’ve been rocking for days, and feeling lousy.

I’m at the tail end of it now, where I no longer feel like my eyes are about to cave in and can’t peel myself off the couch. Now I’m just working through a hacking cough that really seems to get going around 3 a.m. and sounds as if I’ve inhaled a pack of cigarettes.

Sadly, I am not a good sick person.

While I scoff at those who want to wallow in their own misery – you need to be spiking a fever over 100 for me to let you stay home from school or else I’m scooching you out the door – I’m a big, fat hypocrite. When I feel yucky, I really want you to feel sorry for me. I need you to feel my pain.

It all goes back to the scarlet fever.

When I was maybe six, I remember my siblings and I all came down with strep throat simultaneously. I guess there were about four of us around then, my three brothers and I. My mom, pregnant at the time with our sister, hauled us all to the pediatrician in our VW Beetle and one at a time, we had to lie facedown on the examination table and get a shot in the rear end. Back in the day, mothers didn’t have to fool around with two tablespoons of glutinous medications three times a day for seven days like some fucking chemist.

Back then your kid would get a shot in the ass and be her way to wellness.

I don’t remember getting my shot but I do recall how one of my brothers carried on about it. He became so hysterical that they had to bring in some additional medical personnel to hold his flailing body down. When it was over and he was released, I could see a gaping hole left in the paper that covered the exam table, torn open from all his crying and yelling.

So the shot did the trick for the boys, but after a few days I still hadn’t recovered and when my mom brought me back to the doctor, she was told the strep had advanced to scarlet fever.

Now this was something.

When you are one of many siblings, pretty much just a face in the crowd, you dream about something that will make you stand out. Something that says, “Hey, this one needs some special attention.”

Even if you can’t swallow.

And scarlet fever did the trick. I could sense that my needs were immediately elevated above the rest of the crowd, could hear in my mom’s voice as she updated my grandmother over the phone that I would require special treatment.

I wish I could remember what that special treatment looked like. If she set me up in her bed the way I arrange my children when they are sick, serving them their soup and sandwich on a special metal tray with legs I picked up at WalMart years ago.

Mostly I just remember getting to be alone with my mother and that she kept asking me how I felt. And that it was nice.

To this day, even though my seven siblings and I have given my mom all sorts of injuries and illnesses to address over the years, she will still pull the scarlet fever out of the bag of ills and hold it up as something to be remembered.

Sometimes we’ll be sitting around going through the list of the family’s notorious medical moments – like the time my brother fell out of a moving car or when my sister was struck right between the eyes by a neighbor swinging a golf club – and shake our heads at the gruesomeness of each case.

“Well, remember the time Amy had scarlet fever?” my mom will throw out.

I sure do. And it was great.

Divorce 101

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Find more of Sandra Lippmann’s artwork on Instagram #100circles.

 

I’ve always been ahead of the curve when it comes to major life events.

I was in a huge rush to get married and had the ring on my finger by the time I was 23 and two years later, I was pregnant with my first child. I am familiar with being the one to provide all the firsts as the oldest sibling in my family and oldest grandchild on both sides of my family. But I also stood alone in my close circle of girlfriends in thinking that getting hitched and knocked up so young were especially good ideas, so became the first among us to sail into those unchartered – and as it turned out – stormy waters.

Unfortunately, I’m not especially good in the role of leader. I’m much better taking my cues from someone who’s already done all the work. Maybe that’s the issue, I’m just lazy. I’d rather be the Indian than the chief.

So I’ve also spent a lot of time surrounded by people who never know quite what to do or say in a given situation and woefully unable to guide them. I never know what to say or do, either.

I memorized “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” and hoped for the best.

When I was going through my divorce at 42, it felt as if I was the only person I knew to enter Dante’s 10th Circle of Hell. At the time, no one in my immediate circle of friends had called it quits in her marriage and once again, I felt like some weird trailblazer.

I could have used a “What to Expect When Your Marriage is Crumbling,” but unfortunately no one has penned that guidebook yet.

I live in a small town and was so self-conscious during the height of my own personal scandal that when I would venture out I felt like I had a big “D” emblazoned, Scarlet Letter-style, on my chest and that everyone was staring at me and whispering.

It also didn’t help that I had an ex running around town with another woman. Literally, they jogged around our little town each morning as all the other moms and I drove our kids to school.

One of my pals told me at the time it was all she could do not to swerve and knock them off the road. A true friend is someone willing to commit voluntary manslaughter for you (someone should put that on a cocktail napkin or t-shirt).

So I tried to keep a low profile and kind of dropped off the grid. In retrospect, I don’t really know who I thought I was, Jackie O or something? I practically wrapped myself in a headscarf and dark glasses to pick up cold cuts at the supermarket. Did all the good people in town really care about my marital woes? I mean, they did only long enough to dish a “Did you hear?” or “Would you believe?” before moving on to the next piece of gossip.

It’s what we all do.

I got a divorce because I needed to get out of a bad relationship. I wasn’t looking to find myself or somebody else. I just knew the situation had unraveled beyond repair and I needed to make my exit.

And it was scary and terrible and I do not recommend it unless you have no other choice – much like an amputation  — but it also turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made, right up there with coloring my hair.

I’m a better mom and a better friend. I’ve been able to develop professionally and grow creatively. Divorcing has let me move closer to becoming “the girl I intend to be,” as my girl Sarah Bareilles so smartly sings.

Next week will mark five years from the day I told my then-husband I wanted a divorce. Actually, I said I was unhappy and he countered quickly with, “You want a divorce? Get a lawyer.”

And for that I thank him. Without that big push, I’d probably still be standing on the ledge, wondering whether I should just turn around and make dinner.

Instead, I jumped.

And now it seems like every other woman I know is taking the divorce plunge.

In the past few weeks, I’ve had two women call for attorney recommendations. One friend’s request came as no surprise but I almost fell off my chair when the other woman told me why she was calling.

Who knew? Apparently, there are a lot of unhappy people out there.

Now there are ladies getting divorced all over the place, it’s like an epidemic. There’s one gal in my knitting group who has started down the scary path and one of my college buddies ended her marriage recently, too.

A woman in town who I used to see a lot when our girls were little emailed me to say nice things about my blog and mentioned that she had divorced since we were last in touch. What?

And the other night at the local Chinese restaurant I ran into another mom in town I’ve known forever, someone I would see for years with her husband at band concerts and back to school nights, telling me what Match.com had done for her love life since she separated from him, while I waited for my wonton soup.

Sometimes I still can’t believe I’m divorced. I can’t believe I had the energy and the nerve to see the thing through. But I guess it’s like having a baby: Painful and a little bloody, but worth the effort in the end.

And there’s not one dirty diaper in sight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5H-qIovNnw

 

 

Old School (Or That Time I Drank Jungle Juice)

2334_53244111157_1008_nI drank something called jungle juice this weekend and as I lifted the Solo cup brimming with the icy yellow liquid to my mouth, I realized that I needed to retract a statement I made recently – that you couldn’t go home again – because dudes, sometimes it’s like you never left.

Let me explain.

I drove eight hours south for parents’ weekend at my son’s fraternity this past weekend and found myself standing on the back deck of the “house,” as the brothers call it, Saturday morning and being handed the alcohol-laden beverage.

Here are the ingredients: 30 cans of Keystone Light, a handle of Aristocrat vodka, a package of powdered lemonade and ice.

The fraternity had organized a lovely dinner the night before at a local country club for the parents and the next day we gathered at the fraternity house for an early tailgate before the football game kicked off at noon.

I had watched earlier as one of the guys wheeled a cooler across the deck and set it on top of one of the picnic tables. You could tell that this was not the cooler’s first tailgate. He lifted the attached lid and boys surrounded the cooler and started popping open cans and pouring beer directly into it.

“Here, just try it,” said my son, who had gone right over to scoop himself a Solo cup full of the juice. I took a sip and felt Amy, circa 1986, start to come to life.

“Go get me some,” I told my son.

When in Rome, dudes, when in Rome.

I have to confess that I know my way around a tailgate. And fraternity houses too, for that matter. I went to a big state university and joined a sorority and while I’m pretty sure I never missed one tailgate in the four years I was there, I also don’t think I ever made it in to see one football game.

So I get the excitement of game day. I understand the culture that makes a cooler into a cauldron of high-octane booze to be enjoyed at 10 a.m.

But 25 years later, I discovered that you notice more of the details. You’re no longer seeing things through the hazy filter of someone enamored with drinking cheap beer surrounded by friends and that cute guy you want to ask to the sorority formal. The beer and the boys, those were the focus points back then. I hung out in dank bars that had quarter mug nights and musty fraternity basements where you knew not to go near the punch.

But when you briefly return to Greek life after a 25-year break, you realize that your standard of living has risen dramatically. Like, I now enjoy things such as toilet paper and clean floors, neither of which was available at Saturday’s tailgate. I was so skeeved-out standing outside on the deck that I had to switch out of the flip-flops I was wearing and put on the pair of flats I had tucked in my bag, just to increase the distance between my feet and the rotting wood below.

And don’t get me wrong: the boys had worked hard to provide a well-stocked bar and put out a barbecue spread with a pulled pork so tender it would make you weep. There were just some details the guys neglected to take care of, like the aforementioned toilet paper. And, okay, I’ve had to go without paper a time or two in my life, but then there was the actual condition of the ground floor bathroom.

You. Wouldn’t. Believe. It.

I guess the best way to describe it is the tell you to close your eyes and imagine what the bathroom in the “Animal House” fraternity must have been like, and then imagine yourself standing inside it with your pants pulled down and squatting.

And then there was the mop.

As it had started to drizzle, the guys set the buffet up inside and we all filed in to stand on line. As I was waiting just inside the back door, I noticed to the left a mop propped up against the wall and was so glad I had switched out of the flip-flops.

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I can guarantee you that in 1986, I would not have thought twice about that mop. In fact, we probably had one propped somewhere in our own sorority house. And if you interviewed any of my former roommates between 1984-1990, they would probably tell you that I was not the cleanest cat in the litter box. It never would have occurred to me to change my sheets, vacuum a rug or scrub the tub. I was oblivious to filth.

Today, I can’t walk by a littered counter without wiping it and I pay a woman to come and clean my floors and wash my sheets once a week.

I have standards.

The biggest difference, though, between 1986 Amy and the woman I am today is that now, I know exactly where my off button is (well, for the most part).

The old Amy would have had three or four cups of jungle juice instead of sharing one with a couple of the other people I was standing with. The old Amy would have had a hard time tearing herself away from the back-porch-fun to hike the mile or so in the rain to sit in the stadium and watch the game (well, the first half anyway). And the old Amy definitely wouldn’t have decided, after stopping back at the fraternity after the game and assessing the trash strewn across the deck and the girls dancing on the table, that it was best to turn around and leave.

Instead, we headed back to one of my daughter’s friends’ apartment where we peeled off our wet jeans to throw in the dryer and lounged around in borrowed sweats watching “Pitch Perfect” and “He’s the Man.”

And when nighttime came, I drove the whole crew of girls back to my daughter’s apartment and sat around and gabbed with the girls for a while, and then when it seemed they might want a drink or two, I packed up and went back to my hotel.

I posted a bunch of photos of me and the kids on Facebook over the weekend and one friend commented, “I wish I could go back to college!”

And I’ve decided that college is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

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Gangsta Blogger

WARNING: The following post contains an insane amount of profanity. Which I find very funny. Others, I know, are less amused by curse words. Please move forward accordingly.
A pal sent me a link the other day to a parody of a Google site and somehow, when you plug a search, in you get in return a gansta version of whatever you’re looking for. It’s named, appropriately enough, Gizoogle. Apparently it works best for news sites and blogs and so naturally, he googled his favorite mommy blogger and the results are hilarious.
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Girls Just Wanna Have Fun (Movie Review)

darcy I first met Mr. Darcy on a cold Sunday in January 1999.

My then-husband left for the day to see the Giants play a post-season game and I decided to pop in the first of six VHS tapes my mom had lent me of the BBC version of “Pride and Prejudice” to keep me company while I tackled taking down the Christmas tree.

Five hours later, the ornaments long boxed and put away, the kids and I were riveted to the couch as Elizabeth and Darcy declared their love for each other and the Bennett sisters (well, a few of them anyway) ended up with men of good fortune and, so it seemed, true love.

Sigh.

And so began my love affair with Austen – “Pride and Prejudice” in particular – and all-things Darcy. I’ve gone on to read the book a few times, watch Colin Firth – oh I mean the series – another time in full and then see the more recent movie with Keira Knightly and that really cute new Darcy who marches all manly through the misty field to declare his love in the end.

And apparently, I’m not alone. We all know Bridget Jones had a thing for her own Mr. Darcy (Colin Firth, again!), but then there’s the extreme as displayed by the main character Kerri Russell plays in the new movie “Austenland,” which I went to see Friday night.

And I know, it didn’t get great reviews (one review’s headline “Comedy Lacks Sense, Sensibility”) and my clearly-refined movie snobbishness should have had me mocking the movie Jane’s obsession with, and search for, Regency-period love, but dudes, I really liked it. The movie was super-cute and lots of fun.

Was it “Blue Jasmine”? No, it was not. But as great as that movie was, let’s all admit that it was a bit of a bummer seeing the fabulous Cate Blanchett unravel at the end. And while I don’t need books, movies, etc. to have happy endings, there’s room in my life for both kale and cotton candy.

“Austenland” is light and airy, like sticky strands of spun sugar, and who’s not a sucker for romance and the notion of bewitching a fellow – especially a cute one with a great British accent?

Sign me up.

Those romantic fantasies are what render us unable to stop watching “The Notebook” or “Crazy, Stupid Love” when we stumble upon them while channel surfing. I’m like a deer in the headlights, caught in the glare of make-believe love.

I don’t know, maybe it’s why I’m still single, buying into the notion that there’s some Darcy-like love in my future. You’d think I’d have become a little more realistic by now.  Five minutes perusing Match.com should do that to a person.

On Sunday, I got back on the female fantasy movie train and snuck into to see the new movie “Adore,” and I say “snuck” because the premise is kind of dirty and I, of course, was there in the interest of science and not because I wanted to see Naomi Watts and Robin Wright get it on with hot young dudes.

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

Don’t get me wrong: I really like young dudes. Legit. But the boys that these 40-something moms end up with – each pairs with the other’s son – are even younger than my own son and that is just creepy. Let’s raise the cap on the age of men we sleep with, ladies.

But it’s a movie, so you go with it. And it’s fun to look at the gorgeous Australian coast where they live and frolic, not to mention the perfection of the four main characters.

And that’s where it gets interesting, because while “Adore” should be making us ladies of a certain age green with envy that we weren’t born tall and lean and blessed with striking cheekbones, we learn that even the genetically perfect worry about aging. When Naomi Watts stared all sad at her slightly sagging face in her bathroom mirror, I was like, “I’ve been there, sister.”

Overall, the premise is slightly lurid and the dialogue laughable at points, but you’ll be so busy looking at the scenery — not to mention Robin Wright’s great hair — and marveling that beautiful creatures fret about wrinkles just like you, you won’t even notice.

And there’s nary a Darcy in sight.

Top 4 Things I’m Way Too Old to Deal With

Artwork by Sandra Lippmann featured on A My Name is Amy.

My friend Sandy in very cool and lives in Brooklyn and paints amazing pieces like this one. Check out #100circles on Instagram to see more.

#1.  Summer Reading

With less than 24 hours until the first day of school this week, my soon-to-be-fifth-grader had yet to complete the second of two books that needed to be read and reported upon by the next day.  At that point, I was beyond tired of talking about it. And nagging about it. And yelling about it. And yet, there we were down to the wire.

I’m not saying I don’t think kids should have some work to do to keep everything they learned throughout the school year from spilling out of their ears and onto the sand during the long stretch of summer vacation. I just don’t want it to be my problem any more.

I was actually angling to adopt that strategy at first. A girlfriend was complaining to another friend and I on the beach in early August about her battle with her incoming high school senior to get his summer reading completed.

“You need to let it go,” advised our friend. “He’s a good student. You know he’ll get it done one way or another so why are you wasting your breath and making it your problem?”

“That’s good advice,” I chimed in. “Do you think I should lay off my 10-year-old and leave it up to him to finish his reading?”

“Um, he’s still a little young,” I was told. “He probably still needs you to stay on top of him.”

Dammit.

#2. Sleepovers

They have been the bane of my existence for about a dozen years and a childhood ritual I try to avoid like the plague. It means there will be a pile of pillows and blankets that will need to be put away the next day and a sofa bed requiring repair. My job as hostess will be to either produce some type of cooked breakfast or go out in my sweats to fetch bagels. I’ll be required to be the heavy at some point, too, lumbering down to the basement to turn off Cartoon Network and shush excited guests. And I’ll have to pretend to be nice and act like it’s all a lot of fun.

It’s a lot of work, and that’s if things go well.

Because when you go through the movie-watching negotiations, air mattress blowing, searching for every nightlight you own to light up the downstairs and ease jitters and then the guest decides he’d rather be home in his own bed, leaving your own child crying in his wake, there is absolutely nothing to be gained through the exhausting exercise. I want a return on my investment. Like, if I’m going to go through the whole sleepover rigamarole, I want the benefit of having created a buffer between myself and my child. Something to keep him busy for 8 or 10 hours. And not busy crying about his life.

#3.  My Period:

(DUDE WARNING: I know, you are sensitive to these issues. I know this girly mystery freaks you out. So, in the interest of honoring the two or three dudes who read my blog and your aversion to all-things menstrual, I’m going give you the heads up that too much period information is about to be shared and you should just skip down to #4. You’re welcome boys.)

I know that at 47, I still have a few years left of this thing and need to remain in the acceptance phase for a while longer. However, it’s been, I don’t know, well over 30 years of this monthly occurrence and I still can’t get a handle on it. It never comes when I think it’s coming and other times it shows up out of the blue. My symptoms change month to month and year over year and just when I think it’s starting to slow down, it comes on with a vengeance. And can I have just one month when I don’t have to throw out a pair of underwear or wash my sheets? I mean, what the hell? You’d think I’d be good at this by now but I’m not because I want it to go away.

#4.  Dealing with other people’s poop:

Recently, it became obvious that the toilet in my bathroom was starting to clog. It does this from time to time, requiring me to dig up the always-missing plunger and relieve it of its congestion. It wasn’t until I spent a week in Greece (not to mention on a small sailboat), where flushing ANY paper (forget feminine products) was strictly forbidden, that I realized that I use my toilet like a veritable trash can. Any time I blow my nose or take off eye makeup, the tissue goes straight into the toilet and not the garbage located about 3 centimeters away from it. I figured I was cutting down on the landfill, man.

At any rate, I guess I’d been wearing a lot of mascara because the toilet was definitely in need of relief, but that night I was running out to meet someone for a drink and figured I’d rather not get involved in latrine duty wearing my cute JCrew shorts and would deal with it upon my return. During the date, I get a text from a child frantically looking for the plunger. I can never remember where I’ve put that thing so told the kid to just leave it and I’d fix it when I got home. I thought it was nice this kid was trying to be such a team player and unclog my potty, until I returned home to fine that the urgent nature of the text was triggered by this child blithely pooping on top of the clog, and who, when relieved of any responsibility for the literal shit show, promptly went out with friends.

So there I was, 10:00 at night in my cute outfit, plunging a poopy potty and sending venomous texts to the pooper. I’ve spent years working with poop – first my younger siblings’ diapers (as the oldest of 8 kids), assorted pets (including the dog whose way of dealing with my ex-husband’s move out of the house was to just defecate daily on the TV room rug), and my own little babies’ up-the-back disasters. I’d really like to claim this time in my life as the poop-free era and institute a you-dropped-it-you-deal-with-it rule.

No shit.

 

 

 

You Can’t Go Home Again

383327_10151151342727173_531539335_nFor 16 years, I had a child at home with me for at least a portion of the school day.

That is a long time to be restricted to scheduling dentist appointments, grocery shopping and personal grooming in between preschool pickup and drop off and nap times.

Those are a lot of years of organizing trips to the playground and MyGym classes and playdates to fill our long days. Many hours spent negotiating television watching, minutes left playing in the McDonald’s play area and drinking a glass of milk at lunch.

And when the day starts at 6 a.m., that’s a good 13 hours of crust cutting and potty mouth patrol. After about a decade or so, I was done.

At one point, I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. Could start to taste what it would be like to have all three of my kids in school for a full day, none of that two-and-a-half hour nursery school and kindergarten nonsense.

But then I accidentally got pregnant when my third child entered kindergarten and what would have been my home stretch became my freedom swan song.

Because when he arrived, this new fella even wanted to hang out in the middle of the night with me. For months. There was no escaping him.

I don’t know, maybe I wasn’t the ideal candidate to have four kids in the first place, but that ship seems to have sailed a long time ago.

Maybe I should have chosen a different route and gone back to work after my first child was born. But I’ve never been that ambitious. Except when it came to having kids.

And honestly, I also loved those early years home with little ones. I loved mornings spent at Gymboree playing with their cousins and then sitting down at the bagel shop for an early lunch before I took them home and put them down for afternoon naps. Maybe we’d head to the playground when they woke up and then back home for chicken nuggets and a soak in the tub and a story or two before bed.

It was easy and we were happy. Or at least, that’s how I remember it now.

And maybe that’s what I wanted to go back to the fourth time around: happier times. I joke that the kid was a booboo but that was hardly the case. I had tried for a few years to get knocked up with him and when things just didn’t seem to be going in that direction, I threw my hands up in surrender.

And immediately got pregnant.

But, as they say, you can’t go home again. There were too many things pulling me in too many different directions at that point – the three older kids, an increasingly-challenging marriage and my desire to get back to writing.

It just wasn’t the same.

So by the time that little guy was 5 and about to start his THIRD year of preschool (Pre-K since he’s a December birthday and missed the October cutoff for kindergarten), I made a last-minute decision to send him to a school that not only had a full-day program, they even provided busing.

I felt a huge weight lift off my shoulder after I signed him up and then went to an end-of-summer party and filled two women friends in on the recent development.

And was surprised by their reaction.

“Won’t you miss him?” asked one woman who had three kids, the oldest around third grade at the time.

“I’m not sending him to the Army,” I told her. “He’s just going to school.”

The vibe both these moms gave off was that not wanting to spend all my time with my kids made me a bad mom. Or at least that was the message I took away that night.

But what they failed to understand was that stretching four kids out over 10 years had dampened my enthusiasm.

I super-love my kids, but I do not want to be with them 24/7. I don’t always want to be on call – to explain why I don’t want a lizard or pour a glass of milk or drive to the skate park or hear about how there’s no food in the house.

And after a good four months this summer of having at least one of the four kids hanging around eating Tostito chips or watching Netflix, the start of the school year yesterday nearly brought tears to my eyes. With the older two back at school for a few weeks, it was the last piece of the get-out-of-my-hair puzzle.

The youngest is starting fifth grade and his first year at the middle school in town and the teen-daughter is a junior in the public high school. I made them a big breakfast and complimented their straightened and slicked-back hairdos and we made sure to take lots of pictures before they left.

And when they were gone, I congratulated myself for once again having avoided committing any homicidal acts during the summer break — go self-control! — and poured myself another cup of coffee.

Then I got dressed and went about my workday and before I knew it, they were walking back through the door.

And it was great. I loved hearing all about their time out in the trenches. I wanted to get the scoop on all of their teachers, who was in their classes, what friends they sat with at lunch.

“It was so great, mom,” my little guy reported. “All the teachers knew who I was.”

And you could tell he loved that. Loved knowing that, because of his three older siblings, there was brand recognition.

And so he’ll follow in their footsteps for a while, and it will be fun to see what stays the same and how much of it will change.

And maybe five years, 10 years from now, I’ll look back on these years and remember them as easy and wish I could return to this very moment. And I’ll remember that we were happy, too. Because in the end, who’s to say we weren’t?

 

 

 

 

Mom, You Are No Jennifer Aniston

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This just makes perfect sense.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I could have been working on my legs instead.

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