Posted by Amy Byrnes

The other night, I clicked on the Scary Mommy website and was greeted with this:

Look who’s at the top of Scary Mommy.

Yup, that weeping woman clinging to her child is yours truly.

If you’re not in-the-know, Scary Mommy is an insanely popular mom blog that’s become a community for parents to celebrate imperfect parenting. So obviously, as my parenting over the last 21 years has been sketchy at best — I mean, I have been known to do ice luge shots with my older children — I totally belonged there.

So there I was at the top of this site that gets 10-15 million unique pageviews a month (according to Scary Mommy) with my mug in full-on ugly cry mode as I said good-bye to my oldest child when we left him at college for his freshman year three years ago. Luckily, I have no qualms with any of you seeing me not looking my best, as evidenced here (cheetah suit alert).

It was actually the second piece I had appear on Scary Mommy in less than a week. I had submitted one essay last month and got the good news that it was going to be featured on the site, but not until four weeks later. “Wow,” I thought, “who knew all that scariness was being planned so far in advance?”

So I sat and patiently waited until I got the good news that the post was live and was amazed at the kind of traffic it generated and was like, “Holy crow, I need to do that again, stat.”

So I rattled my brain to come up with something good and submitted a piece I had written about my son going off to college and, due to its timeliness, it was posted on Scary Mommy the next day.

Anyway, if you are a parent, do I even need to tell you that the timing could not have been worse as the piece went live in the midst of an emotional crisis going downright next to me on our big red couch. I was like, “I hear you’re really sad,” while watching out of the corner of my eye as a big teardrop rolled down the child’s face, “but do you mind if I just jump on Facebook for a minute?”

Like, can you just hold that thought while I promote myself on social media?

Obviously, no one in the room witnessing the meltdown thought that that was good parenting. I think someone might have even mentioned my insensitivity was slightly scary. “Typical, Mom,” she said.

Ultimately, disaster was averted — thanks to clear thinking and perhaps a little wine — and I did get to enjoy, virtually, the magic of being featured on a big site that garnered me over 150 new Facebook likes, 15.8K Facebook shares, 457 Tweets, a great traffic day for my site while discovering cool new bloggers (if you guys like me, you’ll love The Happy Hausfrau).

So, for all of you sending your babies off to college for the first time — and for the many it seems with 5-year-olds who are already freaking out about that moment — this one’s for you.

Oh, and there’s nothing scary about it.

Aug

2014

Listen to Your Mother. Thank You.

Posted by Amy Byrnes

http://www.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk

This is what I am fucking sick of: People with opinions.

Not you. You can have all the opinions you want. I mean, I’d prefer it if you kept them to yourself — especially if you watch a lot of Fox News — but I am open to people having beliefs other than my own, as long as I don’t have to agree and pretend you are not crazy.

No, it’s really the people that I gave birth to whose thoughts, feelings and beliefs I am not really interested in hearing about, especially when they are in direct contrast to what I am trying to accomplish around here.

I just want them to shut up and do what I say. Toe the fucking line. Like the good old days.

In the good old days — back before they were teenagers — when one of the kids would start to act up and resist what I wanted her to do, I would just start counting to three and she’d quickly relent and come around to my way of thinking.

“Fine,” the would-be offender would say, and skulk away in defeat.

That method remained effective for years. It wasn’t perfect – sure, we had our share of little ones shoplifting Beanie Babies I wouldn’t buy for them and soap in the mouth of an 8-year-old for saying an offensive word – but overall, counting to three really worked for me.

It still worked when my oldest child was in his early teens and I couldn’t get him out of the ocean to go home one sunny summer day. You know that trick, when the kid pretends he’s having so much fun bobbing up and down in the water that he doesn’t notice his mother screaming and waving her arms from the shoreline about 10 feet away? Anyway, that was what was happening that day, but then we suddenly made eye contact and I held up my pointer finger and mouthed, “One!” and he quickly started to make his way out of the water.

“I don’t even know why I’m doing this,” he said as he passed by me to get a towel. “Like, what are you going to do when you get to three?”

That’s a good question.

But then, with the introduction of temptations more powerful than the ocean in our lives – like beer and Internet porn – I needed to find more effective parenting methods than just counting to three. Like suspending Verizon Wireless accounts and confiscating laptops became my weapons of mass parenting destruction.

So even while the oldest three kids started to drift from my family action plan – coming home on time, saying “No” to drugs and getting straight-As – I could always count on my little guy to toe the line. He was young enough that he still happily drank my Mommy Kool Aid.

But lately, as he starts to inch closer to 12 than 11 and prepares to enter the sixth grade, the kid is starting to get a little sassy. And unlike with his three older siblings, I no longer tell myself that it’s a passing phase. It’s a sign of things to come, and frankly, I don’t really have the energy to try to break one more person’s spirit.

Case in point: Yesterday I was driving my youngest child and his two friends – our neighbors who are leaving for Hong Kong in two days – to the beach. I wanted to stop at the ATM and get some cash so he could go buy himself, like, a $3 Coke or $5 fries at the snack bar to live it up during his friends’ final days in New Jersey.

“Do we have to come in?” he asked and I told them they could sit in the car and listen to Z100 while I ran into the bank. Unfortunately, I failed to mention not to touch anything while I was gone since I have issued that disclaimer so many times in the past, I did not see that it would be necessary in this instance.

I run in and find myself behind a young woman who did not wish to avail herself of one of the tellers sitting around and chatting to make her deposit, but rather go through the lengthy process at the ATM and causing the rest of us to stand and watch her slowly press whatever needed to be pressed and feed envelopes into the machine to complete the transaction. My turn finally came and I am so good at taking cash out lately that I zipped through the process and was stuffing the cash into my wallet as I walked down the sidewalk to my car when I heard the sound of a key turning in the ignition and realized it was my own vehicle being started.

Now, unlike my older children – who didn’t even touch the car keys until they started to learn to drive — my 11-year-old is well versed in how to turn the car on and off and I’ve even let him steer down our street and into the driveway on occasion. Since his older siblings have gotten into so many accidents already in their driving lives, my new strategy is to get this little one as comfortable behind the wheel as early as possible to hopefully avoid similar situations and $500 deductibles.

My son was returning to the passenger seat as I opened the door and I asked him what he was thinking about, knowing perfectly well that he was just being bossy and trying to show off his car-starting skills to his friends.

Did I mention it was August in New Jersey?

Then I looked in the backseat and saw the two friends looking a little more moist than when I had left them five minutes earlier, their hair damp and sweat building under their eyes, and I kind of freaked out.

“What?” my son responded, and I could tell by the tone in his voice, he was not remotely sorry as he kept telling me to calm down.

“Do you know how much trouble I could get into?” I yelled. “I mean, the police station is literally in the same parking lot!”

It literally is.

Sticking to his guns, he said, “Mom, what’s the big deal?”

And because he probably hasn’t been reading in the newspaper lately about all the moms getting into big trouble for leaving kids in cars to run into 7Eleven and stuff, he had no idea the ramifications of someone walking by and seeing three middle school-aged boys sitting in a hot car with the windows rolled up and Iggy Azalea blaring within on a hot, sunny day in August.

And all I wanted to scream, as he continued to talk back to me and argue his point, was, “Just do what I fucking say.” If I say, “Don’t turn the engine off and sit in a hot car in August,” I don’t want to fucking argue and debate whether or not that’s a good idea. If I said it, it’s pure genius.

I guess the point of this rant is that I can see it coming, that shift from agreeable child to contrary teenager. The days of my fourth child doing something wrong and remorsefully saying he was sorry are just about behind us. I am no longer delusional and under the impression that it won’t happen to my kid, that my kid won’t go down that path of angst. They mostly all do.

I was complaining about his newfound freshness to his sisters and they immediately pointed the finger of blame at yours truly.

“You’re a terrible power figure,” said Daughter #2, insisting her brother listened to her because she was much scarier than his own mother.

“You literally raised him with no concept of ‘No’,” said the oldest daughter, probably still smarting from having to return that Beanie Baby to the store after I found it stuffed at the bottom of her sister’s stroller as we piled back into the car all those years ago.

But I know better than that. I’ve been the bad cop and I’ve been the good cop and in the end, don’t think it really matters. The change is as inevitable as underarm hair and zits.

I guess I’m just not in the mood.

Jun

2014

Being True to Yourself

Posted by Amy Byrnes

This print sits on my desk and is referred to often as I try to make sense of things in my life.

One day, during the early days of my divorce – when I lost 10 pounds in a week subsisting on wine and carrot sticks – I went to get my brows waxed (and mustache if you must know) and spilled my tale of woe to the woman grooming my facial hair.

Aside from my therapist, my brow and hair coloring ladies serve as important sounding boards for my life. I’ve been going to them both for so long, they knew me when I was a brunette with babies instead of the blonde-of-a-certain-age I am today.

So after I filled her in on what was going on, I laid still on her table as she tweezed away and talked. She explained that I had just entered a dark tunnel of my life, with no light yet visible on the other end. She said I could see the light from the entrance growing dimmer, but had to just keep moving forward and have confidence that at some point, I would see the light again.

I can’t tell you how often I thought of that tunnel metaphor as I moved through the darkness of my divorce. How often I wondered if I’d ever see the light on the other side and then, finally and without warning, I could see a little pinprick of sunshine coming through the other end.

As I sat up on her table, the paper crinkling as I adjusted myself, my brow girl reached down and pulled a silver cuff bracelet off her wrist and said, “I want you to have this.”

It read: Be true to yourself.

I read the words etched into the metal and as I slipped the thin bracelet on, became emotional as I told her how special it was. It became a part of my armor that helped me get through my darkest days and reminded me why I had to go through the pain and sorrow of divorce. It reminded me of whom I needed to be.

I wore that bracelet religiously for about two years – I never took it off — and then, one day, I returned the favor. I was with another woman struggling with similar bullshit and slipped the bracelet off and gave it to her to wear. “Be true to yourself,” I told her.

Because I no longer needed to look down to be reassured by those words. I had read them so many times that they had become etched on my own heart. I didn’t need a piece of jewelry to remind me I needed to honor who I am.

Who is, of course, some chick with nice eyebrows and no mustache, at the very least.

Jun

2014

You Can’t Always Get What You Want

Posted by Amy Byrnes

The Black Lagoon redux.

When I am dead, I would like the following engraved on my headstone: “She got what she wanted.”

And while you might think that that is a really awesome thing, getting what one wants, I’ve learned over the last 40-blah-blah years that actually getting what you want is not all it’s cracked up to be.

I read a quote recently about women never really wanting what they actually need — and that might be a giant blanket statement — but it seems to be one of the major themes of my life.

Witness the swimming pool in my backyard.

When we bought the house about a dozen years ago, it was everything I ever wanted: a traditional colonial in a nice neighborhood with four bedrooms and pool out back.

Who wouldn’t be happy in that set up?

But it turns out, having all the trappings of a happy life does not guarantee actual happiness. No, no it does not. That my friends has to come from within, which took me a couple of years and like, 800 hours of therapy, to figure out.

In the meantime, I still have this pain in the ass pool to deal with. For some reason, the monster has always been my problem. Over the years, I’ve had to figure out the complexities of vacuuming, maintaining chemical levels and scooping the inevitable bunny or mole that finds its way into the water but, alas, not its way out each summer.

And, because the pool was already about 20 years old when we moved in, there’s always something that needs to be replaced each season and it always costs $1,500. It’s weird.

There’s so much else that still needs to be done to keep it up, like fixing the concrete deck that’s steadily sinking near the deep end and replacing the robotic cleaner that meanders listlessly along the bottom of the pool like some drunken sailor, pushing the debris around with its tail. The money and energy required to keep the thing going can be overwhelming.

When I called a few weeks ago to schedule this year’s opening with my current pool service – and I’m convinced that they are all thieves — the woman on the other end was like, “Well, we’re pretty booked up so you won’t have it open for Memorial Day,” all condescending like she was simultaneously crushing my dreams and kind of happy about it.

She didn’t know whom she was dealing with. “Fine by me,” I told her happily. “Perfect, in fact.”

I was in no hurry to unleash the monster.

The best day of the year for me – well, aside from my birthday in August and the day after Christmas – is the day my pool is closed for the season. It’s just one less thing to clean and take care of. In fact, the pool is often the one thing that tends to slip through the cracks each summer. But unlike neglecting, say, a child, no one’s going to start making regular visits to make sure I’m taking care of my pool. No one’s going to arrest me if my pool walls turn green.

I finally had the pool opened last weekend and much to my surprise, it didn’t look half bad. Historically, the pool dudes pull aside the green cover and the water underneath seriously looks like it just got back from a stint at the Black Lagoon. You really expect to see some scaly dude with gills pulling himself up from its murky depths. But this year, the water was pretty clear although the bottom covered in some mysterious type of silt that just seems to absorb its way through the pool’s cover each winter.

That was on Saturday and as of this writing – some five days later – that crap is still clinging to the bottom of the pool. It’s hard to motivate to get out there and go through the whole rigmarole necessary to vacuum, but I don’t know how many more days I can stand the disappointment on my 11-year-old’s face when he bursts through the door from school asking if he could go for a swim.

I mean, what’s the point of having a pool?

I’ll admit, when it finally comes together, the pool has proven to be quite fun. The girls and I have spent hours over the years soaking in the steamy water of the spa at night, surrounded by candles and watching the bats swoop low over the pool’s dark water. And the kids have gone through hundreds of plastic bottle caps playing “dibble” (in which they pitch it into the pool and then have to find it) and seeing who can make it across the pool the fastest in one breath.

I know I sound like a brat — boo hoo me and my pool – but I’ve just figured out that more/bigger/better isn’t what makes for a happy life. Just a more complicated one.

In the future, I’m going to focus on nabbing the things I need instead of the stuff I want, or think I want. I mean, the idea is certainly not revolutionary — Mick Jagger figured it out about 100 years ago. But still. Some of us are just a little slower than others to figure out what’s really good for them.

Just ask the guy whom I work out with who was constantly baffled that a woman of fairly reasonable intelligence could not figure out that eating a box of Wheat Thins in bed each night was not the path to weight loss and good health.

I’ve finally cut all that extracurricular nibbling out of my diet — as he had been suggesting — and lost some weight recently and he was all, “It’s about time.”

“What can I tell you?” I said to him. “I’m a late bloomer.”

Maybe it’s not too late to start making smarter choices — from what I eat to whom I love — in my life so I’ll be able to edit that tombstone to read: “She got what she needed.”

Mar

2014

That’s What She Said

Posted by Amy Byrnes

So, lately I’ve drawn much of my inspiration for this blog from things going on in the news, mostly because there’s absolutely nothing going on in my life. Absolutely. Nothing.

It’s so bad that in the five-year memory book I try to write in at the end of every day, just a quick recap of what transpired in the previous 24 hours, I actually noted: Picked Nick up from karate.

Actually, the entire post read: Still sick. Still fat. Spin Class. Whole Foods. Drove Nick to karate.

I mean, what the fuck? I used to have a life. I used to really do somewhat important-ish things. Now I am relegated to karate carpooling and steaming turnips.

But while there’s currently not much going on in my life, there does seem to be a bunch of things going on in the rest of the world. So much, in fact, that I really can’t get to writing about everything that’s caught my eye of late.

So I thought I’d share some links to interesting articles I’ve stumbled upon in the paper or trolling Facebook (which I now spend an inordinate amount of time on).

Herewith, some rabbit holes to jump down:

– Like, a day after I write about turning 50 (some day), I discover I’m not the only one wringing my hands about it.

– And if you missed the reference to crying about a future big birthday, here’s a refresher.

– As if turning 50’s not bad enough, a doctor will try to stick something where?

– Just when you thought Snapchat was the most worrisome app on your middle schooler’s iPhone, now there’s this.

– Although some media people can build a whole career out of that kind of stuff.

– Will you go ape shit if you read one more contradictory piece on parenting? You’re not alone.

– “Conscious Uncoupling” gets a blast of fresh air.

If you’re still looking for something to do, why don’t you subscribe to the blog via email to get new posts delivered straight to your inbox? Just look for the box here that encourages you to do just that. Easy. Peasy.

Mar

2014

Free to Be You and Me at 40

Posted by Amy Byrnes

When I became a mom about a hundred years ago, there were a lot of things that came as a surprise, like how much babies cried, how challenging it could be to breastfeed and the power and force of a tiny colon. Who knew poop could fly like that out of something so small?

But there were also a lot of things that I knew for sure: like, that my kids would love to read, never watch television and listen to everything that I said.

And if you’re an ‘A’ My Name is Amy reader, or one of my children, you know how that all worked out.

I also was determined to bring a very “Free to be You and Me” approach to my parenting. You know, like we are all equals, be who you are, accept others’ differences, kumbaya.

I even had the Free to Be CD playing on heavy rotation in our minivan, along with our Shel Silverstein and Roald Dahl collections and the soundtracks from Oklahoma! and The Music Man.

That turned out to be a tall order.

Despite my best efforts, we have conformed to traditional gender stereotypes around here – the boys take out the trash, the girls help clear the table – with narrow views (Boston University was deemed “weird” when my son saw a girl with purple hair on her way to class).

But how could I have really thought I would get different results when I wasn’t really being “me”? I spent much of my life trying to compress that girl. To get her to stop being so bossy, so loud, so weird. To stop arguing with everybody’s husbands about their bad politics (a blow job is worse than a baseless war?) and penchant for go-go bars (seriously?).

I wish I could have stayed the same girl I was when Free to Be first aired on television, which happened 40 years ago this week. In 1974, sitting in the small yellow room that served as our TV room and watching that program, I knew that it was alright to cry, that boys could be afraid of mice and that ladies shouldn’t always go first.

I also believed that I could do anything. I used to sit in my room and practice being on the Merv Griffin show – yukking it up with ZsaZsa Gabor – so I’d be prepared when greatness came my way.

But I drifted far away from that 8-year-old girl over the following 20 years. I became less sure of myself. More uncertain about the way the world works.

It took a lot of work to turn that around but now I do feel free to be me and I hope my kids are taking notes. I still think that all of the Free to Be ideas and values remain relevant as well as challenging today as they were 40 years ago.

And maybe you can absorb them all when you’re a kid or maybe you need to live life a little to figure out who you really are.

Kumbaya.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_26FOHoaC78

Mar

2014

S’no Joke

Posted by Amy Byrnes

Get out your onsies, kids, because it sounds like those of us living in and around New Jersey are about to get socked in once again by snow.

I don’t even care. I’m, like, waving the white flag and telling Mother Nature, “I give up.”

I mean, what’s the point? Especially now that I’m not working.

When I was, my job was to cover the news and newspeople — not necessarily me, mind you — get hard-ons for snow storms. We’d have higher ups urging us to post articles about when it’s coming, how much is coming, whether the local police and DPW crews were prepared. We’d cover it as it started to come down and then the aftermath, with our own photos and tried to get readers to post photos of their own — which usually meant pictures of patio furniture covered in snow. That always seems to be people’s go-to for illustrating the amount of snow that has fallen.

But now I can just sit in my house, in my onesie, all day long and play Walking Dead Monopoly while watching the snow fall outside my TV room window.

Now, if only this weather pattern would shift to take place during the midweek, when everyone’s already done all their food shopping because sadly, I’m still on a weekend hunting and gathering schedule. Which put me in my local Costco Saturday at about 2 p.m., which also happened to be the exact center of Hell on Earth.

Sigh.

And I needed stuff you can’t get around, like kitty litter and toilet paper.

I would have tended to all this earlier in the week but my high school girl and I decided fairly last minute to haul ass to the center of Pennsylvania on Thursday to check out Penn State as a potential college choice. And while it’s known to many as “Happy Valley,” as it’s the “happiest place on Earth,” on Thursday at around 2 p.m. it might also have qualified as the “coldest place on Earth.”

The college kids leading the tour, bravely walking backwards across icy paths through the sprawling campus, lacked the good sense to bring us into buildings rather than just standing in front and talking while the bitter wind whipped and snow obscured our vision while we stared longingly at the warmth of the library before us.

Anyway, that’s about as exciting as my life has been this week: Costco and college road trips. No accidents and all my teeth remain in my head (although I did have another dream this week about all of them just falling out, which I thought was a fairly common dream but have yet to find someone else whose had one).

In between, I squeezed in some of this stuff, in case you missed it:

_____________________________________

20 Days Unemployed

Greetings from Day 20 of my unemployment!

I am here to report to those of you still working that aside from the paycheck and insurance benefits, having a job gives one a sense of purpose each day. Being employed generally keeps one showering regularly and a reason to get out of bed in the morning besides coffee. (READ MORE … )

_________________________________________

Bounce Your Muffintop

My friend Tara, who lives in Connecticut, and I have shared many of the same life experiences.

We both fell in love with boys at a certain military academy and the four of us found we had lots of fun, perhaps too much fun, together.

We attended each other’s weddings not long after college and then the babies started to come. (READ MORE … )

_________________________________________

This photo of a model, presumably well under 40, is sadly taped to my frig for inspiration/agitation.

Bikinis After 40: Good or Gross?

To wear or not to wear?

That, my friends, is the question I struggle with lately at the start of each new swimsuit season.

Twenty years ago, wearing a two-piece wasn’t even an issue. In fact, it was 20 years ago this year that I put one on over Memorial Day weekend after having my second child that March. But back then I guess my body was a lot more elastic than the thing I’m working with today. (READ MORE … )

________________________________________

While the kids are out playing in the snow, don’t forget to like me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter @AMyNameisAMy, subscribe to my blog (look over to your right) and hand me a glass of wine — not necessarily in that order.

Feb

2014

Bounce Your Muffintop

Posted by Amy Byrnes

Here we are in the fall of 1993 thinking we could take on at least five more kids each. #ignoranceisbliss

Here we are in the fall of 1993 holding each other’s baby and thinking we could take on at least five more kids apiece. #ignoranceisbliss

My friend Tara, who lives in Connecticut, and I have shared many of the same life experiences.

We both fell in love with boys at a certain military academy and the four of us found we had lots of fun, perhaps too much fun, together.

We attended each other’s weddings not long after college and then the babies started to come.

We had our first babies within months of each other and got together when those babies were old enough that at least I was already pregnant again with my second child.

We strolled the babies down to a nearby playground and pushed them on swings and talked about our plans for the future.

“I’d like to have at least four,” she said of the body count she had in mind for her family, and then reconsidered. “Maybe six.”

I nodded my head and said I’d been thinking I’d like to have that many children, too.

Clearly, we were so delusional we thought that having six children would be as easy as having a single one-year-old. Taking care of a one-year-old is like having a three-year-old dog except with the diapers.

Like, you just have to keep it alive.

How were we supposed to know then the challenges that would come with having multiple children, like the endlessness of two kids in diapers, temper tantrums in stereo and everyone crying and drooling because of Coxsackie sores?

I can’t even get started on the joys of owning multiple teenagers which makes a strong case for tubal ligation.

In the end, cooler heads (and husbands) prevailed and we both held steady at four kids apiece and are now both down to just two living at home with the other off at college.

In the early days, our husbands worked for the same Russian shipping operation in Manhattan and we’d see each other annually at the company Christmas party at which it always seemed one of us was either pregnant or breastfeeding and way too sober for the crazy antics going on around us.

Russians are nuts.

A dozen years later, it seems that Tara and I both are going through another one of life’s obstacles together: The Midlife Muffintop.

She emailed me this video yesterday (which she needs you to know is NOT of her) and I laughed at the mom’s rap about her struggle with her bulging middle and took comfort when I saw hers that at least mine might be categorized as a mini-muffin.

It’s a fascinating mid-life phenomenon, this slowing down of the metabolism and carb bloating, and one of those things people fail to mention so that you can anticipate, like the trauma of pooping after you have a baby.

Anyway, I take comfort that I’m not alone on my journey through love, babies and muffin tops.

Enjoy the show. And bounce carbohydrate, bounce.

Feb

2014

20 Days Unemployed

Posted by Amy Byrnes

Greetings from Day 20 of my unemployment!

Sure, I wore a lot of Lycra while I worked full time from home, but since I was laid off nearly four weeks ago, even the leggings are starting to seem kind of fancy compared to the grey Gap sweats I tend to gravitate towards when dressing most days. Yoga pants seem like a good in between.

There has also been a complete reversal of too much and too little in my life. For instance, there were never enough hours in the day to squeeze in all the things I wanted to do – like writing, yoga and meditation – vs. the things I needed to do – like my job, folding laundry and food shopping.

Now, I have so much time I don’t even know what to do with myself, leaving me unfocused and unproductive. It’s just like freshman year of college, when all that unstructured time and lack of accountability left me sitting in my dorm room most days smoking cigarettes and watching General Hospital.

While I was working, my inbox would be flooded with about 100 emails each day – press releases, BNN reports and annoying spam from Zappos – but now that I’m unemployed and using a new email (and one that few people know) I get about five emails a day. Legit.

My calendar is also looking a lot different than it did a year ago. Back then, my days were filled with calls for work, meetings to cover as a reporter and basketball practices for my son. The only event still on my calendar for today is a game for my 11-year-old’s rec team tonight at the middle school in town.

At least a reason to shower.

Initially, being out of a job was kind of nice after three years of crazy, non-stop work. It was like a giant weight had been lifted from my shoulders.

I started working full time when I still had four kids living at home and had to juggle the usual mom stuff with all the joys of raising teenagers – driving lessons, car accidents, alcohol, underage drunkards, college visits, college applications and wild and unpredictable mood swings.

Oh, and I had just gotten a divorce.

I had never worked harder in my life than in the first 18 months of the job other than when the kids were small and my days were more physically than mentally grueling. And it was great.

Then just as fast, I only had two kids living at home, with the other half away at college, and it bears repeating that those of you with two kids are geniuses. It’s much more doable than four.

But now I have two kids and zero jobs and it’s kind of boring.

I have had some minor victories: I did put together a resume and updated my LinkedIn profile; I’ve already paid all my bills for the month and yesterday I finally figured out how to sync all of my Apple devices and cloud with my updated Apple ID.

Today I might investigate the iTunes Home Sharing to sync my music library. I mean, what the hell?

So what have I learned about myself in these last four weeks? Pretty much that I am really good at making excuses. Whereas before there wasn’t enough time to write a book/lose weight/find a boyfriend/clean out my crawl space/make healthy meals/finish knitting that sweater, now I realize that it’s just a matter of doing it.

“The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too,” Goethe wrote. “Begin it now.”

Or you’ll be stuck wearing sweats in your kitchen with kind of dirty hair.

Feb

2014

Mrs. X

Posted by Amy Byrnes

Credit: Eviatar Bach

When I was in the end stages of my divorce a few years ago and struggling with whether I should reclaim my maiden name, my college roommate advised against it.

“What are your kids’ friends going to call you?” she asked, and went on to explain how her high school boyfriend’s mom was always Mrs. Whatever, even though she and her husband had been divorced for ages.

“You’ll always be Mrs. X,” she said.

In the end, I decided that that demographic of the population – the friends of my four children – would have to adjust just like everyone else. And for the most part, that’s what happened. In a little over a year, people came to know and refer to me using my maiden name. Everything from my credit card statements to the nameplate that sat in front of me during monthly board of education meetings was adjusted to reflect the change.

And when I sent an email to one of the officials in my town for business and inadvertently used an old email address that had my married name, and the wife of said official told him to look for that name in his inbox, he asked, “Who’s that?”

Mission accomplished.

But three years after the name change, the people who have no idea what to call me remain the kids’ friends and frankly, I don’t know what to tell them. Or their parents.

Nothing sounds right.

For my older kids and their friends, it didn’t really seem too weird to tell them to just keep calling me Mrs. X. That’s how they had known me for most of their lives and it just seemed easier and frankly, do they really care whether or not I am married or actually use that name any more? No.

And while initially, that strategy worked just fine, the further away I get from ever having been Mrs. X, the weirder it’s starting to sound.

I went out to dinner with a slew of parents and children Sunday night – literally, there were like 15 kids sitting down at the far end of the table, my 11-year-old son happily eating his French fries among them.

So needless to say, it was loud, and I was busy chitchatting with the moms at the opposite end of the table, so wasn’t especially tuned in to what the kids were doing.

But then I heard a voice rise above the din and my son, apparently trying to get my attention because he needed my iPhone, was telling the boys around him to call for Mrs. X.

“Interesting,” I thought, that the person who knew me for the least amount of time when I used my married name would still think to refer to me as that.

And I don’t know why it is that calling me Ms. Y seems so weird, too. I’ve seen a lot of parents try to get their kids to refer to me as such. “Say ‘thank you’ to Ms. Y,” they’ll coax their kid after a day playing in my basement. Or, more interestingly, I’ll be referred to as Mrs. Y. Sometimes I’m “Miss Amy.” That’s weird, too, making me sound like some old spinster with cats crawling around my legs.

My decision to change my name was so not a political, feminist or angry statement. In the end, it just felt more authentic to go back to the name I was born with.

So maybe the answer, even though I was always a stickler for having my kids call all grownups “Mr.” or “Mrs.,” is for their friends to just call me “Amy.”

One of my older guy’s friends tried that out at a holiday party I had right before Christmas. Everyone had had a few cocktails and the boys were heading out and my son’s friend was saying good-bye but didn’t quite know how to address me.

“Yeah, Mom,” said my son. “My friends never know what to call you.”

“Just call me ‘Amy,’” I told them.

“Really?” my son’s friend asked. “Well, okay. Good-bye, Amy,” he said before the two of them walked out the door.

I saw that friend maybe a week after that and thought it was interesting that he greeted me with, “Hi, Mrs. X.”

So, I guess it’s going to take more than a few cans of Keystone Light to make that change stick.

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Amy Byrnes

life in fits and starts

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