Apr
10
2013

the dating game

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When I first separated from my ex after 18 years of marriage, I was under the impression that there would be this never-ending supply of eligible gentlemen waiting to meet me once I was ready to date.

I was still fairly cute, could be funny and was in possession of naturally thin ankles. What’s not to want?

So I took my time. I concentrated on my kids and tried to figure out who I was and what I wanted out of my life.  You know, the emotional heavy lifting they tell you to do that I actually did (I should have put that much effort into high school).

Four-and-a-half years later, I have found that while there is no shortage of young guys who would like their Benjamin Braddock moment with chicks like me, I haven’t figured out how to find a grown up to have a relationship with. Like, a real man.

Let’s begin with what’s out there once you reenter the dating pool at 46.

Damaged goods.

This is not to say that I don’t come with my own set of baggage (fuck, I’ve got steamer trunks), but I’ve worked REALLY hard to figure out how I had ended up in the situation I was in. Just ask my therapist. I went from meeting with her TWICE IN ONE WEEK at the lowest point to my current status, where I check in with her maybe every six weeks just for a readjustment. That’s progress.

In the past month, I’ve learned to not only identify but walk away from a charming narcissist. How very unlike the old me.

What I’ve encountered during my brief foray into dating has made a great case in support of the controversial letter written by a Princeton alumna in the Daily Princetonian, urging young Ivy League coeds to find their mates while in college.

“You will never again have this concentration of men who are worthy of you,” wrote Susan Patton in a letter to the editor she titled, “Advice for the young women of Princeton: the daughters I never had.”

And while her argument focuses on women finding their intellectual equals, it is fair to say that the pool of eligible bachelors is just much larger when you’re a young gal. And less fucked up.

Strike while the iron is hot.

So my advice to my daughters is to urge them to choose well the first time around. Maybe concentrate on what a potential mate does rather than what he says. I’d tell them to go for substance over style. Because, as Sartre observed, “We are our choices.”

Believe me, I could write a book about that.

Mar
22
2013

impulse control

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My ex-husband used to tell the funniest story about the day his parents got new barstools when he was a kid.

This was the Seventies, when installing a bar in your basement and hanging a dartboard just steps away from your washing machine seemed not only relaxing, but logical.

My ex’s parents were teachers and careful about finances so the shiny new naugahyde stools that arrived that day were a big deal.

But all my ex could think of as he saw them sitting in his basement was what it would be like to slice through the seats with the Exacto knife he saw laying nearby.

So, he’s like 8 or 9, something like that, and he figures, “What’s a few quick nips with the blade?” and before he knows it, he’s cut through a few of the chairs.

He comes out of the destructive daze long enough to assess the situation and think, “I’m fucked,” and decides to wait it out in the bathtub.

Now, his dad could be intimidating back in the day. He was a high school basketball coach and gym teacher, a former Marine, and he pretty much insisted that you toe the line or he’ll reach down and break it off your foot.

So my ex is nervously bathing when he hears his father come home from work and head straight for the basement to see the new stools. He hears the footsteps reach the bottom of the stairs, pause and  a few beats later his father is screaming my former mother-in-law’s name.

I guess the list of suspects was pretty short because in no time, my ex’s dad was barreling into the bathroom and pulling his wet body out of the tub by the arm for retribution.

Remember, this was the Seventies – long before timeouts and quiet chairs – when violence was an often-used implement in the parenting tool belt.

We used to laugh our asses off at that story. I am actually laughing now thinking about it. My ex would shake his head and say, “I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking. I just couldn’t control myself.”

Now, in hindsight, I have chalked that story up to the guy’s impulse-control issues. It seems that sometimes, he couldn’t stop himself. Perhaps a red flag.

But yesterday, I started to consider that maybe it’s a universal issue, the unstoppable urge to commit a forbidden act.

While making dinner last night, I heard loud banging coming from the garage. I opened the door to find my 10-year-old son standing holding a bat in mid-swing surrounded by a pile of white chips all over the floor.

“I didn’t mean to do it,” he blurted about one second after I opened the door and assessed that he had been banging the shit out of the sheetrock in a corner of the garage right by the kitchen door.

I freaked out, screaming for him to get a dustpan and clean it up and wondering out loud what he was thinking about, because he is so NOT impulsive. He’s cautious and careful and incredibly thoughtful.

But maybe, like Hannah in the season finale of Girls who just had to shove those Qtips in her eardrums (seriously, what the fuck), some urges are impossible to resist.

I mentioned this theory to my girlfriend Joanie and she started laughing, remembering how she and her siblings burned holes into the interior door of the new car her dad had brought home when they were kids. They had found the cigarette lighter and sat in the back seat and pressed circles into the nylon of the two back doors, much to their parents’ chagrin.

And then I was reminded of a time I discovered the lighter in the back of my grandfather’s car. I had pressed it in, not knowing what it was and when it eventually popped out, I pulled it out for inspection. Somehow I remember knowing I probably shouldn’t press my pointer finger inside to touch the glowing red coils. But I couldn’t resist. I remember trying to hide the pain from my dad and the white-callused tip of my finger that had just sustained a first-degree burn shoved between my knees.

And I’d like to tell you about the time I found a razor blade lying around my grandparents’ house when I was eight, but I’ve got to go return a bunch of things I bought online late one night last week.

 

 

 

 

Mar
20
2013

dear sheryl

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Dear Sheryl,

OMG, I totally love Tina, too!

I read Bossypants once and listened to it, like, three times on long drives. I even let my then-9-year-old son listen along, which I’m aware is incredibly inappropriate, but I can’t help but hope that some of Tina’s funny, feminist wisdom seeped into his budding male psyche.

And I know you’ve got a couple of kids, so I’m wondering if it was Tina’s “A Mother’s Prayer for Her Daughter” that moved you, as it did me. Did this wish of hers resonate with you, too?: “And when she one day turns on me and calls me a Bitch in front of Hollister, Give me the strength, Lord, to yank her directly into a cab in front of her friends, For I will not have that Shit. I will not have it.”

Amen.

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

And, wait, you love Anna Quindlen? I love Anna Quindlen. I’ve followed her since my mom introduced me to her “Life in the Thirties” column in the Times and lapped up everything she’s written since. In a pivotal moment of the fantasy Lifetime Movie of my life that loops through my head, I actually got to meet Ms. Quindlen while in the throes of my divorce. Afterwards, when faced with the challenge of a bullying ex-partner or out-of-control teen, I would actually think, “What would Anna do?” And 9 times out of 10, I’d think, “She would not be putting up with this bullshit,” and react accordingly.

Sheryl, I also couldn’t help but notice that you are familiar with the Shel Silverstein lexicon. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent curled up on a twin bed with a few bodies tucked alongside me reading our favorite Where the Sidewalk Ends poems over and over. “One Sister For Sale” was always a favorite, but I liked to go back to “Jimmy Jet and His TV Set” from time to time as a cautionary tale for my little ones (sometimes I’d check their bottoms to see if cords were starting to sprout).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And when the kids were just old enough, I made sure our “Free to Be, You and Me” CD was on heavy rotation in the car as we drove around town to remind the kids that a penis, or lack thereof, does not dictate who you are or what you are to become. Oh, and that “Parents Are People,” too.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0_qbtLnsVI

And YOU want to meet JK Rowling? I want to meet her, too! But whereas there is a very good chance that you will actually meet Harry Potter’s creator, I had to settle for a trip to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando a few years back.

So, it’s weird. When I read the interview with you in the Times’ “By the Book” feature last weekend and noticed all these similarities, I was like, “Holy crap. Sheryl Sandberg and I are, like, practically the same person.”

It leaves me asking this: How is it that you ended up the COO of Facebook and I became a New Jersey housewife?

Just wondering,

Confused in the Garden State

Mar
12
2013

knocked up

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Everybody’s good at something. For instance, my neighbor Susan makes delicious cupcakes, my friend Kathy is a really fast runner and my ex-husband shovels snow like, well, nobody’s business.

I am really good at getting pregnant. Seriously, it just comes naturally to me. My ex just had to give me a sexy look and nine months later we’d be drowning in dirty diapers and tears (often our own).

So, this natural talent of mine really jibed with the overwhelming urge I had as a young married woman to have a lot of babies. In retrospect, it’s clear that I was trying to work through some earlier conflicts, which was mixed with a desire to create the family I always wanted. But at the time, I just thought I had a bad case of baby lust.

Had I been left to my own devices and perhaps had a better marriage, who knows how many kids I would have ended up with. But after a while, my ex finally took matters into his own hands and with a quick snip, shut me down at four.

Had he had his way, we would have stopped at two children. We had a boy and a girl, my ex reasoned, and they were both healthy — arriving with the requisite number of fingers and toes. Why tempt fate?

Probably most other couples would have already had the “How many children do you want?” conversation well before they were saddled with two kids already in diapers. But he and I were never really ones for planning, or important conversations, so it came as a shock to me to hear he wanted to shut my baby factory down when it was just getting going.

It’s hard to say what drove my insatiable thirst for more and more children. Maybe I liked growing up with a lot of siblings and wanted that for my own children. Maybe there was an innate desire to feel special as the mother of a large brood. Or maybe I just found something I was really good at.

My oldest two kids were only 17 months apart, so I bided my time before I began my campaign for #3. But when my ex appeared to be holding his ground, I steamrolled right over him and got knocked up anyway.

But the universe has a way of reminding you just who is in control, and I ended up miscarrying that pregnancy. I wallowed in that loss until my ex finally succumbed and gave me baby number three — like a sympathy pregnancy. I did, however, have to guarantee that the child would grow up to receive the Heisman Trophy, which is going to be tricky since she’s terrible at football.

Now, you would think at this point, with three kids in four years and not more than 30 years old,  I’d have been crying uncle. My life was a never-ending loop of Barney, baths and chicken nuggets.

But I have never been very good at finding my “off” button when I’m doing something that I liked, and craved just one more child to feel complete.  I actually told my ex that a fourth child would complete me, like I was goddamn Jerry Maguire.

When reason failed, I had no option but to once again put my baby making plan into covert operation. But, seriously, how my ex really believed that I was all of a sudden really into getting it on all the time, makes me wonder whether dudes employ thought or reason in that department. And that’s where the guy didn’t even stand a chance.

Boom! I got pregnant. And then, Boom! I had a miscarriage. And then Boom! I got pregnant and once again Boom! Lost that baby, too.

And that, my friends, is when I decided to shut the factory down myself. The loss was too overwhelming, I just couldn’t live through it again. So I gave away all the strollers and bouncy seats and baby clothes and all that baby shit in my crawl space and focused instead on the three babies I already had.

And, of course, you probably guessed what came next. I got pregnant and this one stuck. My youngest child was born almost six years after I had baby #3.

And you know what? I’ve never felt the baby itch again. My guess it that teenagers will do that to a person.

Mar
08
2013

deal with it. period.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being a girl is a pain in the ass.

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

Grrrr.

Ladies man.

Mar
05
2013

the messy, messy girl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enter: The Messy, Messy Girl.

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

But man, she’s a slob.

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

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

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

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

But no banana peels. Definitely no banana peels.

Feb
28
2013

No, I am Not Winking at You

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tumblr_nlwm21V2YY1u8ntcpo1_500

Whoa. Is mine this crazy?

In the last 24 hours, I have Googled the following terms: “impetigo,” “hard cat poop” and “mesothelioma.”

It goes without saying that the visual horror unleashed by the first two terms is something that will stay seared in my memory banks for the rest of my life.

But it’s clear that I’ve got a lot of weird stuff on my mind and it’s beginning to manifest itself outwardly. Again.

Once or twice a year I get an eye twitch.

The first time it happened was about 10 years ago as I began packing up to move to a new house while pretty pregnant with my fourth child and serving a term as PTO president.

The new house was probably more than we could afford at the time and the packing up of every last teaspoon and Lego and hauling boxes filled with books and skillets inspired the sciatic nerve running down the left side of my body to revolt. That combination of stress and crazy pain made sleep impossible and resulted in a tremor in my right eye that persisted for months.

Five years later, and despite spending a fair amount of time upside down in a yoga studio, the wink was back as I navigated through the legal and emotional tumult of ending my marriage of 18 years.

And now as a full-time working single mom (I’m like the suburban Ann Romano with more kids and no Schneider), I find the twitch appears more frequently but for less-extended periods of time.

Last week, the eyeball earthquake was back, but it’s hard to say just what triggered it.

Was it having to pony-up the balance for the new pool cover I had to buy when a giant tree smashed through my backyard during Hurricane Sandy? Or maybe the remains of said giant tree, all 40 or 50 feet of it, cracked and hovering close by in the neighbor’s yard?

Maybe the mountains that needed to be moved last week to get my college son home to have a wisdom tooth removed caused just enough stress. Or how about the big fight he and I had later that night?

It could have been my mom’s recent knee-replacement surgery that took a brief turn to the scary when she spiked a high fever and had my seven siblings and I spinning in circles for about a day. Then everyone started fighting.

Or maybe it’s the increasing demands of my big, corporate employer that has become as insatiable as the flesh-eating plant in Little Shop of Horrors, minus the show-stopping numbers.

Dump all this on top of all the regular activities on my to-do list, like making sure there are school-approved snacks for fourth grade, cat food and endless dinners, eyebrow waxing appointments, reeds for my son’s saxophone and toothpaste.

And then there are my worries. Why is my cat so fat? Will my 19-year old find a major? Will I ever find a good man/read Dickens/lose weight?  Is there life after death?

This, my friends, might also explain why I drink a lot of wine, but even that is starting to grow old.

I’d like to lie down and forget about it all, but I can’t, because my eye is twitching.

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Feb
22
2013

wish you were here

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

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

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

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

And that, I figured, was that.

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

What do I fucking know?

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

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

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

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

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

This fire was too far away for a quick dousing.

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

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

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

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

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

 

Feb
18
2013

the name game

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As I was getting ready to finalize my divorce, I opted to take advantage of the one-time opportunity to legally change my name the day the deed was done at no cost. After spending a grillion dollars to get out of the marriage, it seemed like an offer that at least needed to be considered.

But the decision did not come easy.

I kept polling my kids about how they would feel if my last name was different from theirs, and finally one of my daughters was like, “Just do it already.”

The tipping point came while I was serving on our school’s board of education. Board members’ names are called throughout the monthly meetings – Robert’s Rules-style – for voting. It’s always the formal names used too, no “Kevin” or “Kathleen,” but “Mr. Smith” or “Mrs. Jones.”

During one meeting a few months before my divorce was final, I just couldn’t answer to Mrs. X again. Here I was doing something that was mine, all mine, while answering to somebody else’s name. My wooden name plaque was updated following the divorce and I was proud to sit behind it for the rest of my term on the board.

An article in the Sunday New York Times Style section yesterday explored how some women not only revert to their maiden names following divorce, but go one step further by adopting invented surnames or forgoing the last name altogether.

While I could get behind being known as Amazing Amy or Mrs. Ryan Gosling, I kind of liked returning to my old name. It’s like I never really gave that old Amy a chance. I never really let that girl show me what she could do before I was busy shrugging her off to slip on a new name like it was a new pair of shoes.

When I got married at 24, I didn’t think twice about changing my name. I was in love and apparently didn’t think twice about a lot of things. I would suggest to my daughters when they are getting married to give it some thought. Not in case things didn’t work out with their future husbands, mind you, but as a way of staying connected to who they are.

Sometimes we lose sight of that. I know I did.

It’s weird that women give up their names so easily in our culture and men very rarely do. I think couples should assess who’s got the better name and run with that.

When I went to the DMV after the divorce to change the name on my driver’s license, clutching a Ziploc bag filled with all the ID points you now need, an older woman straight out of central casting sat behind the desk and grabbed my plastic bag. She scrutinized all my information and just when I thought she was going to tell me I needed to go home and dig up another utility bill or Social Security card, she looked up and said, “I like your maiden name better.”

I assumed that in some circles, I would always be Mrs. X. In the beginning, my kids’ friends would say, “Hi, Mrs. X” and then cringe as if they said something wrong and I would assure them they had said nothing offensive. Now, they don’t give it a second thought. The kids of a close girlfriend of mine dabble with an assortment of names: “Miss X,” “Ms. X,” and the teenage girl finally settled on “Amy,” which her mom quickly squelched and now I’m back to Mrs. X. And that’s okay.

There’s confusion living in a small town for so long and being known one way, only to try to get everyone to call you something else.  Fast-forward a couple of years, and my new old name has started to stick. A woman I know in town told me that she was telling her husband – who I’ve only gotten to know after my divorce – that I had sent him an e-mail, but she was using my married name. “Who’s Mrs. X?” he finally asked.

I worry that it makes my kids feel that we’re even less of a family now that we all have different last names. But then I think about the few women I know who married and kept their maiden names and despite confusion at doctor’s offices and calling to set up play dates, at the end of the day the kids know who their mom is.

Maybe there’s hope for younger generations. When my youngest son and I were addressing envelopes to mail to his sister at camp last summer, I showed him how I had written my name for the return address and he asked if he should do the same on his letter.

“Well, you’ll use your name, buddy,” I explained, pointing to the upper left hand corner of the envelope.

“I think I’ll use yours, “ he told me, starting to write his first name and my last name together in blue ink. “You know, I am half yours.”

And so he is.

A version of this essay was posted on Patch.com on July 20, 2011.

Feb
14
2013

valentine’s day is stupid

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I am not a festive person. I do not come from festive people.

As such, I do not own colorful sweaters, necklaces that light up like Christmas tree lights or candy cane earrings.

It used to bum my children out that I didn’t want to create a cemetery in our front yard for Halloween or string twinkly lights in the front bushes in December. Isn’t it enough I buy costumes and put up a tree? Can’t they be happy with a wreath?

Seriously.

But it’s the make-believe holidays that make me crazy. Mother’s Day. Father’s Day. Valentine’s Day.

These are the phony holidays created solely to get you to spend money on things that nobody needs, like Barbie Pez and ties.

So, imagine my chagrin when I found myself last night at Target searching for Valentine’s Day goodies for my two kids still living at home.

Nothing says “I’m a horrible procrastinator” like standing in the seasonal aisle at Target at 5:30 the night before Valentine’s Day, huddled with all the other working moms and clueless dads in front of the few remaining pink stuffed animals and Necco Wafers that all the organized parents hadn’t already scooped up last week. It was like landing on the Island of Misfit Toys: Valentine’s Edition.

But there I stood, thinking, “This is stupid,” while one young mom kept telling her preschooler he was a brat and another mom, who had three little kids hanging out of her shopping cart, employing the “f” word to stop the all their bickering. Right there next to the bags of miniature Snickers bars.

This was obviously not a happy time of day to be at Target (and man, I am usually really happy to be at Target).

Of course at this point, there is not one box of Valentine cards to be found for my 10-year-old son to bring to school the next day. No Dora. No Thomas the Tank Engine. Nothing.

I was talking to my younger sister, who is  like 14 years younger than me and has one toddler, on the phone while casing the joint and reported my findings.

“Go on Pinterest!” she says, and starts describing excitedly something she saw where I’d take my son’s picture holding out his arms and print it out and tape a lollipop to it. And I’m thinking, “Okay, I can do this,” and grabbed one of the remaining bags of lollipops from a bottom shelf.

I turned the corner and ran into a big display of Fun Dip cards that are pretty much the paper pouches containing the sugary dip and weird candy stick that kids can write classmates’ names on. I reached my hand out and hesitated for about two seconds, remembering then that you pretty much can’t send any food items into school anymore due to allergy restrictions, and then grabbed it anyway.

I’ll take contraband over crafting, all day long.