Snide Reply

Category: Blogging

  • You FAIL, Mom!

    “You’re mean, Daddy!” my daughter shouted as we walked into the house from the garage. I had just picked her up at a birthday party.

    “Why?” he asked, understandably perplexed at being accused of meanery when he hadn’t seen the child in nearly two hours.

    “You thought you were supposed to pick me up at 5 and you were supposed to get me at 4:30, so I was the last one there!” She bounded up the stairs with her party goodie bag, no longer angry since she’d laid her grievance at her father’s feet.

    “We failed,” I said to my husband in that “what else is new tone” we’ve developed for discussing our parental deficiencies.

    “Again!” our daughter yelled from her room at the top of the steps.

    Of course, she’s right. My husband and I have failed numerous times in our parenting escapades. I have a friend who insists that you don’t have to be a good parent; you just have to be a good enough parent. Intellectually, I know she’s right. Childishly, I think, “Yeah, she doesn’t have any kids!”

    My son likes to remind me of the time I left him in the car on a hot summer day while my daughter and I went shopping. It’s not as bad as it sounds. He was 13 and it really wasn’t all that hot. And it is every bit as bad as it sounds. I forgot he was in the car.

    We had gone to the library, the three of us. My son chose to stay in the car while my daughter and I returned our books and got new ones. We had a good time picking out our books. We were having such a good time that I thought we could extend it with a little shoe shopping, as my daughter needed shoes.  So, we left the library, holding hands.

    We went to the shoe store; she picked out two pairs. The afternoon was so nice and sunny, we decided to top it off with a trip to the candy store. Ours is a real, old-fashioned candy store where they make their own fudge and caramel corn. We picked our treats and started back to the car. I was in one of those mellow moods you get when you’re with your child and everything is peaceful and calm. Then we reached the car. I saw my son hanging out of the window. “Oh, shit!” I thought.

    “Where have you been!?” he screamed. Then he saw the shoe bag.

    “You went shoe shopping!” he screamed. Then he saw the candy.

    “You went to the candy store!” he screamed. “You left your son in a hot car in the middle of summer while you took your daughter shopping for shoes and candy?!”

    I did the first thing that came to my mind. I blamed him.

    “Well, you chose to stay in the car,” I said as calmly as a guilt-ridden soul will allow.

    “Because you were going to the library!” he screamed. “You didn’t tell me you were going shopping!”

    “You didn’t have to stay in the car. You could have come in the library.”

    “But you weren’t in the library, were you?” he asked. “You were shopping! For shoes! And candy! While I was waiting in the hot car!”

    “You’re 13,” I shot back. “You could have gotten out of the car any time you liked. And it’s not that hot out anyway.”

    By then, I had gotten the packages and bag of library books into the trunk of the car. My daughter and I were buckling in. It was silent for a few heartbeats.

    “You forgot me, didn’t you?” my son said, an eerie calm in his voice. He knew the answer and he knew he could use it to his advantage again and again and again.

    “I am done with this conversation,” I said and drove home. My son, however, was not done with the incident. He still isn’t done with the incident. Anytime he needs a little parental guilt to help him get his way, he merely needs to say, “Car” and he’s well on his way to winning any battle.

    Most of my failures are far less spectacular. My daughter whines more than we’d like because we will do anything she wants to make her stop. She eats too much candy and doesn’t wash her hair enough. Our son has more failing grades than I care to admit. While I realize that the grade is, in the end, his responsibility, I feel responsible. Also my fault are his lackadaisical approach to practicing scales and his enthusiastic embrace of video games. Did I mention both of their rooms are hazmat sites?

    I asked my husband if he ever felt like a parental failure. He related an incident with our daughter. He had tucked her in; she got out of bed for some tremendously important reason. He tucked her back in. She popped out again. He refused to tuck her in a third time, it being far past her bedtime. She looked him in the eye and said, “Most daddies like putting their daughters to bed and tucking them in,” then sobbed into her pillow. I consider this incident a resounding parental success. The girl had already had two tuckings, for crying out loud.

    I took a break from writing this just a few minutes ago. My daughter was downstairs having a snack. Apparently, the dinner I prepared failed to fill her sufficiently. I snagged a chip from her, dunked it into salsa and popped it in my mouth. She asked me to sit and play with her for a while. “I have to work,” I said. Not looking at me, she said, “Well, you could go back to work or you could eat chips and salsa with your daughter like a real mom.” I sat and had the chips and salsa.

    If I were a better mother, my children would be earning medals and trophies. They would be captains of teams and presidents of clubs. They would volunteer their time helping the elderly and feeding the starving. They’d win scholarships to Harvard and Julliard. But I’m not that mother. Instead, my kids are pretty health, fairly happy and completely loved. I’m a good enough mom and that’s usually good enough.

  • Gratitude, Schmatitude

    Some years ago, I asked my children what they wanted for Christmas. Actually, I ask them what they want for Christmas every year, but I’m talking about a specific year. Money was tight, tighter than it had been in years just prior. The children asked for myriad things that we couldn’t afford. I used their lists for inspiration but bought things I could afford. So, instead of the My Little Pony Magical Castle with running water and a hot tub, I got my daughter a smaller MLP play set and some MLP bubble bath.

    Christmas morning came and the children woke early, begging to go downstairs. I went with them, anticipating their whoops of joy and excitement. When she got to the tree and saw her gifts arrayed under it, my daughter said, “I didn’t ask for these things. These must be someone else’s toys.” Then she started crying, wondering where Santa had left the things she ordered.

    My children have since been instructed in the ways of Santa. Even when they still believed that their stuff came down the chimney, they knew that Mom and Dad had to pay Santa for the toys. “Why?” they wanted to know. “Because the world is over-populated,” I told them, “and Santa couldn’t possibly make all the toys for all the children in the world.” I think I fed them a line about the elves only making wooden toys; “Santa has to buy all the branded stuff,” I explained.

    My son has graduated from wanting really expensive game systems to wanting really expensive musical instruments. We’ve taken to giving him money or gift cards that he can combine with gift cards from family to purchase what he desires. Giving cash and gift cards is so boring, though.

    One Christmas, my mother gave my siblings and me really nice fleece sweaters from Land’s End. Each sweater had a surprise in the pocket…a crisp large denomination bill. I decided to use my mom’s idea for my son. I found a cozy shearling-lined hoodie that I knew he’d like. I put a large denomination gift card in the pocket. I put it under the tree. He loved it. He looked for other presents. There were none. “That’s it?” he asked, “a hoodie?”

    “It’s nice hoodie,” I said.

    “It’s a hoodie,” he said. “I got a hoodie.”

    “Put it on,” I said.

    “Mom, it’s a hoodie. It’ll fit.”

    “Just put it on. It was expensive. I want to see if it looks good on you.”

    “Fine,” he said. I figured he’d put his hands in the pockets, the way everyone does when they try on a hoodie. He stood in front of me, arms limp at his sides, disappointment draining from his pores.

    “There,” he said. “It’s on. It’s a hoodie.”

    “Look in the freaking pockets,” I said.

    He looked in the pockets, pulled out the gift card and looked sheepish. But did he say thank you? No.

    I’m not freaking out about his apparent lack of gratitude, though. Frankly, I’m a little burnt out on gratitude. There are gratitude societies, gratitude experiments and any number of gratitude websites. Gratitude has replaced grace as the favored state.

    All this emphasis on gratitude leaves me feeling like an ingrate. It’s not that I’m not grateful for the good things in my life. I’m just getting really tired of apologizing for expressing disappointment, frustration, anger, sadness, grief, resentment and the range of other emotions we’re told are negative and will eat our souls if we let them.

    My sister is an artist and teacher. She’s tenured and has two advanced degrees in her field. Until this year, she had a job she loved teaching the art topics she loves to students who loved them. That’s all changed because of budgeting concerns in her district. She now splits her time between two campuses, traveling between them daily. Her student and class loads have been changed so that she’s teaching students who don’t want to be in school, let alone art.

    She’s angry, frustrated and sad. She’s embarrassed to talk to me about it because I don’t have a teaching job. She’s in a crappy situation. Even though I’ve told her it’s more than ok to complain to me about it, I can tell she thinks she doesn’t have that right. At least she has a job, she reasons.

    My mother died three years ago. Hers was a long, slowly-progressing illness that every year took more and more of her freedom. At the end, she was on just about every kind of support a life can need and it still wasn’t enough. We chose to end it. Her suffering ended and, for that, we are all grateful. But she’s still dead and it still sucks. And every day that I remember she’s dead, it sucks all over again.

    I’ve been a runner long enough now to know it is in repairing the tiny tears running creates that my muscles grow. I am grateful that there is benefit in the training I’m doing. But, I’ve got to do the damage first. Ice and ibuprofen help ease the pain, but only time makes the permanent changes possible.

    Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh instructs his followers to be where they are. If you are happy, be happy. If you are angry, be angry. If you are frustrated, be frustrated. If you are sad, be sad. Tell yourself, “This is me being sad.”

    When my mother died, there were days I could hardly tell you who I was. There were days I expected to be swallowed whole by sadness. I told myself, “This is me afraid I will be swallowed by sadness.” When I missed her terribly? “This is me missing my mother.”

    I will not rush to gratitude through the challenges in my life. I will sit with them; I will honor them. Then I can give myself completely to thanks.

  • Riding Elephants

    Being a mom is a lot like being in a circus act. The clichéd parallel is the juggler, but that’s not accurate. Jugglers choose to make their lives more difficult. They begin the act with one ball, then add another, then another. While one could compare that to having one child, then another, then another, that doesn’t get to the heart of being a mom. Neither does comparison with the plate-spinning guy. No, he put all those plates up there. No one else is putting plates up there and he damn well knows that the plates are going to stop spinning eventually and will fall. If he’s any good at his job, he can predict pretty accurately which plate will fall when.

    For me, being a mom is like being that woman who rides the elephant. No matter how experienced a rider she is and no matter how well she knows the elephant, at any moment a mouse could run across the elephant’s path. Instantly, she goes from a nice sedate ride on Jumbo to trying to wrangle a gentle landing from a raging pachyderm.

    I have been riding the elephant for more than 16 years now, since my son was born. In that time, many are the mice that have skittered across my path, wreaking havoc that lasts long past the time they’ve disappeared into the woodpile.

    My most spectacular tumbles from the elephant have involved my son. Every year, my sister’s family hosts Christmas Eve. Our son was 15 months old. I am a much more experienced elephant rider than I was then else I would not have allowed my son to stand on a chair and play at the kitchen table while my husband and I got on coats, gathered our contributions to the dinner, etc.

    How many stories of children’s accidents include the words, “I looked away for just a moment,” do you suppose? I looked away for just a moment. My son fell from the chair. My husband grabbed the boy from behind and thrust him toward me saying, “Is he ok?” As the child was screaming and his face was covered in blood, I decided that, no, he was not ok.

    One minute, my elephant was on its way to my sister’s house, the next it was on its way to the hospital. Four hours later, I had learned that my son is virtually impervious to pain and my husband is a rock when it comes to getting a toddler through a CAT scan. I also learned that a divorced oral surgeon is not just ok with spending Christmas Eve stitching up a little guy, but welcomes the excuse to not shop for his ex-wife.

    Four hours seems to be the requisite amount of time to spend in the ER with a child as evidenced by another elephant crash, this one when my son was three. We lived in Oak Park, which seems to have an inordinate amount of deadly nightshade growing wild. It’s actually kind of pretty with its little purple flowers followed by small berries that turn a brilliant red. Still, with “deadly” in its name . . . well. I did my best to eradicate it. I tried pulling it, thinking myself tremendously environmentally responsible. After an hour of barehanded nightshade pulling, I felt distinctly queasy and more than a little dizzy. A little research revealed that nightshade will kill you, but first it will make you feel queasy and dizzy. Further, pulling it merely signals it to grow, grow, grow. I got out the Round Up and got rid of the weed.

    Cue ominous music. I did not get rid of all of the weed. My son found it as I was readying to ride my elephant to a business meeting.

    “Mommy,” he said, displaying a handful of nightshade berries. “What are these?”

    “Oh, honey,” I said. “You must never, never eat these. They will make you very sick.”

    He started spitting immediately. I immediately took him to the hospital. I recall having a rather nasty “Screw the meeting; my kid just ate poison” call. Four hours later, I learned that the only cure for nightshade is to wait it out, treating the cardiac symptoms as they emerge. I also learned that modern toxicology tends to focus on illicit drug overdose. The ER doctor had no idea what nightshade was or even what it looked like. She was fascinated. I was appalled.

    I can’t recall a time when my daughter caused such a dramatic divergence in the elephant ride that is our life. My son seems to inspire disruption when I am in motion. My daughter has elephant repose radar. I sit down to read a book and within minutes I hear, “Mommy! Come here!”

    “What is it?” I ask.

    “I need you!” she says.

    “Why do you need me?” I ask.

    “I want a hug.”

    So, I set the book down and go give my daughter a hug. The variation on this theme is I sit down to read a book and she comes flying into the room, shouting, “Huggy!” and lands in my lap.

    Last night, the elephant lumbered to my office with me intent on writing this post. My daughter, you may recall, has trashed her room so utterly that she now sleeps in said office. I thought we could quietly share the space, so I began writing. She began reading a history of Ancient China. She began pointing out interesting facts about Ancient China and asking for assistance with complicated words like “foreign” and “conquered.” The elephant crashed, depositing me on the daybed next to my daughter.

    We read “Ancient China” for a while, lying next to each other. When the elephant stirred my “I should be working guilt,” I kicked it soundly. Then I tucked my daughter in and kissed her goodnight.

  • Welcome to the Library! Now, Please Shut Up.

    Naperville is supposed to have the best library in America. Now, I’m sure that this ranking is determined in such a way that there are at least three asterisks. Still, it’s a pretty good library. There are three branches, all of them fairly convenient to my house. I can check out a book from any branch and return it to any other. They even have these totally automated checking out thingies that make cool beeping noises when you scan your books. When I go to the library alone, I get a secret thrill over not having to share the scanning fun with my kids.

    We use the library at lot since we’ve been trying to live like church mice instead of fat cats. Just about every book or movie we want is there for the picking. Even if we have to wait a bit, the online hold system will let us know the minute our media is available. My son has assembled a large enough music collection that he believes he is entitled to an iPod with a much larger memory. I laugh at him.
    Even with all of its wonderful conveniences, I miss the library of my childhood. It probably didn’t have near as many books; I don’t recall it being all that big. The catalog was kept on index cards. The music was all on vinyl. I have a particularly fond memory of my sister, headphones on, belting out “da na na na na na na na” for the entire library’s amusement while she listened to the theme song from “Peter Gunn.”

    The fact that my sister could cause a ruckus gets to the root of my problem with the Naperville Public Library.

    It’s loud.

    The library my sister and I used as children was quiet. It was as quiet as, well, a library. One strolled the stacks silently. If you happened to be at the library with a friend, or sister, hand signals and really exaggerated mouthing of words stood in for talking. Whispering was reserved for communications at the circulation desk. Any noise louder than a sniffle was met with a “Sh!,” hissed from the nearest librarian.

    Walk into the Naperville Public Library and you would hardly know you are walking into a library. There are people talking in the lobby. There are people talking at the library catalog computers. There are people talking in the stacks. There are people talking at the tables. And they are all talking with their regular talking voices.

    This is how bad things are at the Naperville Public Library: there is a Quiet Reading Room. Having a quiet reading room in a library is kind of like having a coffee drinking room in a Starbucks. I understand why they need the room, though. People talk on their cell phones in my library.

    When my son was little, we went to the library often. I would take him to the children’s department and read him books. See, it’s ok to read books—quietly—in the children’s department. Lots of the kids can’t read yet. Even when they can read to themselves, kids still like to be read to. I like to be read to. I don’t think you’ve had the complete Harry Potter experience until you’ve had the books read to you by Jim Dale.

    At the risk of sounding like a crank, parents today just don’t care about proper library manners. My kids make fun of me when I talk like this. My son sucks in his lips and pokes out his lower jaw, giving himself an oldman-ish toothless grin. Then he says, “Back in my time . . .” It’s very funny and I get his point, but when it comes to libraries, I’m not bending.
    Back in my time, children didn’t scream in the library, even in the children’s department. They didn’t run in the library either, or chase their siblings. Elderly patrons didn’t fear for their hips because a rug rat could come barging out the front door at any minute. And parents didn’t shout at their children to get them to stop running.

    Back in my time, no one wrote in a library book. I’ve checked out books that I really wanted to read and found it impossible because some blockhead thought it would be ok to write in the book. Even though said blockhead wrote very lightly and in pencil, as if that would make it ok, my eye was inexorably drawn to whatever blockhead had underlined. Reading the book became an exercise in analyzing blockhead, pondering who would underline this particular sentence when I would have underlined that one. I knew it was time to return the book when I became angry that blockhead didn’t see the book my way.

    Back in my time, no one dog-eared pages. I once thought that the books I was reading that looked like they’d been to the kennel were used books, maybe donated by some charitable book lover. Recently, though, I checked out a brand-spanking new volume that was still on the best-seller list. I know the library got this book fresh. There were dog-eared pages. For crying out loud, ANYTHING can be a bookmark. Sure, fancy bookmarks are fun but a magazine subscription card works as well. So does a Target receipt or even an unwrapped mini-pad.

    I realize that everyone in Naperville pays taxes to support the library, but, people, that doesn’t mean you own the books, can talk in the stacks or can let your kids use it as a playground. While I refer to the library as “my library,” I know that I share it with hundreds of thousands of other people. Back in my time, everyone knew that.

  • The Family That Hay Rides Together

    There’s a family I know of that runs together. Mom, Dad, the kids, all tie on their kicks and hit the streets together. I picture them, run complete, trekking into the kitchen together. Glowing with health and familial esprit de corps, they share a glass of orange juice while Mom starts breakfast. Dad helps the kids set the table, pausing to give the youngest a hug and a noogie.

    Never mind that I come home from a run stinking, trail dust stuck to my skin, glued there by sunscreen and sweat. Never mind that no one in my family even likes to run and half of us don’t drink OJ. I want to be that family.

    I’ve tried to arrange family outings with my own gang, mostly with disastrous results.

    For years, I tried to turn us into a Christmas Tree Cutting family. My sister’s family cuts a tree every year. It’s a big deal for them and they speak fondly of it. I thought I could get my own family into it. The last year we cut a tree as family, my son came down with a fever at the tree lot but insisted that he be involved in tree selection nonetheless. I no longer let fevered four-year-olds push me around, primarily because there are none in my home. But he was our starter kid so he stayed bundled in the car while my husband dragged specimens that I had selected over to him for his approval. We have an artificial tree now.

    Autumn seems to bring this family outing urge strongly to the fore for me. Every year, I resist the urge to pile us all into the car and drive miles away to pick apples. The realization that after driving twenty-five miles I would feel compelled to pick entire pecks of apples and then have to do something with them other than watch them rot holds me back. So I visit the local Farmstand, alone, where I can buy a reasonable number of apples minutes from home. Sometimes, I can drag my daughter along if I promise to buy her a honey stick.

    Actually, my daughter is game for any number of bonding opportunities. She’ll even run with me. This spring, she accompanied me on a windy, rainy day and ran one-and-a-half miles before bailing. We saw Bob o’ Links in their mating plumage. Apparently, this is something of a treat in the bird-watching world. I feel like a massive geek even typing the words. If I’ve written of this before, though, indulge me. It’s a fond memory. But it still doesn’t count as a family outing.

    No, family outings must involve my entire family. My husband claims I suffer from Norman Rockwell Syndrome, the sickness that has one believing that a painted vignette is a realistic model for modern family interaction. To which I say, “Yeah. So?”

    My most recent syndrome-induced lunacy was signing us up for a hayride. I was inspired by a field trip I chaperoned for the fourth grade of my daughter’s school. A highlight of the trip was the hayride through a working farm. Why I thought an activity enjoyed by 120 screaming fourth graders was tailor made for my crew, I’ll never know. My daughter was gleefully on board, though.

    Presented with the news that we were going to have fun, damn it, on a family hay ride, my son said, “That might be ok if you take the redneck out of it, like the hay. . .and the ride.” He advocated, instead, for something with concrete and skyscrapers that ended in deep-dish pizza at Uno. While that sounds appealing, it also sounds expensive. Twenty-eight dollars for a hayride for four sounded great to me.

    We arrived at the hayride site and my “oh, crap, this was a really bad idea” radar started beeping. There was no hay in site and no apparent imminent arrival of hay. I opted for a cheerful “hay will arrive soon” attitude. My husband and son, being manly, opted for the “we’ll figure this thing out” approach. They wandered off in search of hay. Time passed. I began casually approaching random strangers until I found someone who looked like she knew where she was going or at least looked like she was wandering around with purpose. She had her head down, reading instructions, the instructions for finding the hay ride that were included in the reservation confirmation, the confirmation that I left at home. My bad idea radar started beeping more insistently; I ignored it.

    Eventually, we found hay in wagons and groups of people waiting to pile onto the wagons and have a wonderful family outing. First, though, we were offered hot chocolate, which my daughter scurried off to find, father and I tagging along though I noted that I did not want hot chocolate.

    I have been getting things for other people for so long that now, even though they are probably very capable of getting things for themselves, I still get them for them. So, I scooped the hot chocolate mix into a little foam cup, added hot water and began stirring it. I turned to hand it to my daughter just as she jumped for joy again. “For Christ’s sake,” I said, as the cocoa spilled on my glove. I turned to make my husband’s cocoa as another family, clearly happy, arrived at the cocoa station. Though there clearly was room for more than one cocoa maker, Mr. and Mrs. Happy stood watching me make cocoa. I grabbed another cup, now in a hurry so as not to inconvenience the happy, waiting couple. As I stirred the cocoa prior to handing it to my husband, he scooted around me and started filling a third cup. Still being surveyed by the Happys, I said, “Jesus Christ, I’m making this for you!” At which point Mrs. Happy said, “Wow! Maybe you should just step away from the cocoa.”

    I chose not to ruin our lovely family outing by accidentally spilling cocoa on Mrs. Happy. Walking back to the hay wagons, though, my son, who looks like Jesus and dresses like a Ramone, said, under his breath, “Maybe you should just step away from my fist before it hits your face.”

    Now, I know this is a completely inappropriate thing for a young man who looks like Jesus to say and that I, as a responsible parent, should have been mightily appalled. But I wasn’t because at that precise moment I realized we were having our version of a fun family outing.

     

  • Number Nine, Number Nine

    My little girl is gone. The bashful baby, so cute she stopped traffic in the aisles at Whole Foods, has left the building. In her place is a creature who alternately cartwheels joyously around the house or howls in anguish over hurts imagined and otherwise. In short, my daughter has turned nine.

    Actually, my daughter has been nine for two months now. I didn’t think anything of it while planning her birthday party. Granted, she wanted a sleepover party with a Hollywood movie theme. That seemed a little more grown up than last year’s Flower Power party with its gardening-related outdoor activities. But, she’s been having sleepovers for a while. Nothing portentous, then, in this year’s birthday extravaganza. I didn’t even make much note of the playing with makeup and pretend fashion show that were highlights of the festivities.

    It was at work one evening that the enormity of my daughter’s age hit me. Three evenings each week, I put my very expensive Illinois state teaching credentials to work providing enrichment in language arts and math to children. I teach every grade level from Pre-K through middle school. By and large, I love my classes. The students are respectful, cooperative and, on the whole, a pleasure to teach.

    There is one class I dread every week, though: the fourth graders. My third graders are a delight. My fifth graders are beginning to show the spirit that will mark them as adults; we have interesting conversations about the work at hand. My fourth graders are a disorderly lot of boisterous, impulsive, barely-controllable hooligans. Every class is a test of my ability to retain my composure while imparting at least some of the learning I am expected to deliver. I’ve developed a style of teaching them that owes more to fencing than to Piaget. I allow a certain amount of pandemonium, then lunge in with a bit of instruction. We continue this way throughout the lesson.

    Recently, during an off-task moment, I happened to ask one of the students her age. “I’m nine!” she said. Well, gob smacked me. I was able to retain the outward appearance of a professional educator, but my brain was screaming, “She’s the same age as my daughter! How could I not have realized that!? How much time do I have before my daughter becomes a howling, uncontrollable hooligan?”

    I didn’t have much time at all. As if aware that I’d been awakened to the true nature of her tribe, she began swinging from sweet to foul faster than a cup of milk left out on a hot day. Happily playing outside with the neighborhood children one minute, she’d come flying into the house in hysterics the next, howling incoherently as she ran to her room and slammed the door.

    When she was little, my daughter would say some of the cutest things. At night, after being put in her bed, she would pretend to read herself a story, beginning each with “Once up a time. . .” My heart would melt. When she got a little older, her mis-sayings still had the ring of innocence to them. Dancing with me to some old disco music, she loudly sang out, “Shake your boob thing, shake your boob thing. Yeah, yeah!”

    Now, she’s beginning to sound like an old soul. Her room is a disaster of epic proportions. She has taken to sleeping in the day bed in my office because she can no longer find the top of her own bed. I have cleaned her room. My husband has cleaned her room. My sister has cleaned her room. Within mere hours, her room looks like Japan after the tsunami.

    “Mom,” she said to me recently, “my room is too small.”

    “Why do you think your room is too small?” I asked.

    “Because there isn’t enough room for all of my stuff.”

    “Oh, but there is enough room for all of your stuff. Everything in your room has a home, you just never put things back where they belong.”

    She sat still, looking down at her hands, considering my words. Without looking up, she said, “Maybe I have issues.”

    One of the issues she has is a fascination with her ability to wail. Crying is no longer enough. Everything must be done on a grand scale these days, leading to fits of seemingly out-of-control sobbing. I say “seemingly out-of-control” sobbing because I now have admissible evidence that some, if not all, of her hysteria is histrionics.

    This weekend, my husband and I determined that we would present a united front to our children over getting chores done. Never having succeeded with full family meetings, we held separate semi-family meetings with each of our children. Our daughter went first. We worked out her responsibilities and the consequences for not meeting them. For instance, anything she leaves on the kitchen table will be confiscated if not removed before dinner. She can buy it back for 25 cents per item. This sounded fine in theory. She was pretty upset about the execution, but I believe a consequence isn’t effective until I’ve seen fear strike their little hearts. Still, she left her conference calmly enough.

    When her brother sat down for his and we engaged in a little pre-torture conversation about Batman, she insisted the three of us cut to the chase. “Get back on topic!” she shouted at us. We continued to talk about the Dark Knight just a few minutes longer. She exploded. “It’s not fair!” she howled. She howled, in fact, for quite some time. We ignored her, going about our meeting with our son. “No one’s making me feel better!” she wailed.

    I ignored the caterwauling until I thought I heard two cats wauling. About a week ago, my daughter spent her allowance on a spy kit, complete with digital recording device disguised as a makeup case. What I heard was the sound of my daughter crying into the recorder then playing back and crying along with her own crying.

    Ironically, my daughter has begun requesting that she be comforted in the midst of her meltdowns. At first, I resisted, not wanting to reward the behavior. I relented, though, and fought through the wall of wail. I held her in my arms, rocking her as I did when she was a baby.

    Being a grown up is hard; becoming one is even harder. So, I’ll hold my little hooligan if it helps her. And I’ll pity my husband and son living with a tween and a woman struggling with menopause.

  • Wedded Blitz

    She was a big woman, with tightly permed hair perched on top of her head like a nest, a ‘do that made her face look all the more round. She was driving a big pink Cadillac, with the top down, and she started whooping and waving as she turned down the street to my house. Well, I assume it was my house, since I was sitting on the top step of the big front porch like I owned the place. And since it was my dream, I figured I did own the place.

    Unlike my real abode, my dream home sat on the top of a rise, oozing old-fashioned charm. I had a good view of Charlaine as she motored up to the house, calling out to me. “What the hell is Charlaine Harris doing at my house?” I thought, both in my dream and in that part of the brain that realizes that we’re dreaming.

    Those of you who know me well know I love TrueBlood, the HBO series. Many of you also know that Charlaine Harris wrote the Sookie Stackhouse books that inspired the series. So, Ms. Harris is something of a pop fiction writing goddess in my orbit of the universe. What, indeed, was Ms. Harris doing riding her pink Cadillac convertible down my not-street to my not-house?

    “You should be writing about your mother!” she called, leaning back in her Caddy, one arm resting on top of the steering wheel, one extended so that she could point directly at me while admonishing me. There was a Dr. Pepper in the cup holder.

    “But I’m not ready!” I called back. I think I heard her mutter a “P-shaw” under her breath before she gunned the Caddy and pulled away shouting, “Yes, you are!” and waving as she pulled down the street.

    She missed my reply. “Hell, no, I’m not ready to write about my mother!” I yelled at the retreating car. When I told my sister about the dream, she said something like, “Oooooooh!” which I took to mean that she thought just because I had dreamed I was ready to write about my mother that I actually was ready to do so. I figured, it being my dream, I was completely at liberty to ignore it.

    Last Monday, October 10, was my mother’s birthday. You may recall, I wrote nothing. It was a holiday, for crying out loud. A lame-ass holiday to be sure, but a holiday nonetheless. I’ve gotten into the habit of giving myself a blog break whenever my children get a break from their grueling schooling and was glad to take it if it gave me an out on the Mom post.

    Writing about my mother is problematic in so many ways. She died three years ago, so there’s the grief stuff to wade through. She wasn’t a particularly simple woman, either. So, my thoughts about all things Mom are pretty complicated. Add to that the fact that many of my readers knew my mother and some of my readers are my Dad and siblings and, well, blogging about Mom just doesn’t have whole lot of appeal.

    I know that it doesn’t have to be Mom’s birthday for me to write about Mom. I could, for instance, write about Mom this week. But I have another excuse! Today, you see, is my wedding anniversary. I am, indeed, so averse to writing about my mother that I will gladly write about my marriage. How’s that for avoidance?

    I am pretty sure I have been married for 19 years. I say “pretty sure” because I am really bad with ages and dates. I have no idea how old my father is, for instance. He’s somewhere around 75. My kids I have to keep track of for school and other official business. My dad? Nah. Actually, my kids are what I call time anchors. In the temporal muddle of my mind, I can always grab on to one of their ages and get a rough guess about the age of something else. Our house, for instance, is as old as our son. So around the time he is going off to college, we will need a new roof.

    My husband is the keeper of things like anniversaries. He has a Ph.D. in history; he knows when everything happened in our lives. It probably used to bother him that I can never really remember that our anniversary is October 17 and not October 16. I say the right thing when I’m asked lately, but I still have to pause and remind myself that we got married on the 17th.

    I’m sure there are people who consider 19 years a long time to be married and I suppose it is. Marriage is, in some ways, like a really long nap. You know the kind where you lay down thinking you’re just going to snooze for a little while and then get up and be really productive but you wake up two hours later and wonder how the hell that happened? You could swear you were only asleep for twenty minutes, but the clock doesn’t lie.

    So I don’t really feel like I’ve been married 19 years. But I have two kids, one old enough to drive. My husband has lost a lot of the hair that he had when we wed. I’ve gained a crepe-y, looseness around my neck. We’re both heavier than we were. He’s in worse shape; I’m in better shape. And I gloat about it. We used to go to the symphony and opera. Now our big thrill is watching Modern Family a season behind on DVD.

    I was pondering marriage as I folded laundry yesterday afternoon in our bedroom while my husband watched TV. He flipped around and finally settled on a historical film. I recognized the male lead, Richard Burton, but not the woman. I meant to ask, “Is that The Taming of the Shrew?” but it came out, “Is that The Tamming of the . . .” which my husband immediately picked up on and said, “Yes, it’s Tammy and the Shrew, starring Connie Stevens and Richard Burton!” We both lost it, giggling “Tammy and the Shrew” at each other for quite a while. Recovering, I grabbed another t-shirt to fold, and thought, “This is how you stay married. Find someone who giggles at the same things you do, doesn’t mind (much) when you gloat, and understands that even a fat lady with a bad perm in a pink Cadillac can’t make you write about your mom if you’re not ready.

     

     

  • A is for Atheist

    In the list of parental daydreams, wondering if your child will become president is probably right up there with imagining eight consecutive uninterrupted hours of sleep. Among those who’ve adopted internationally, there is even some discussion of whether our children can even run for president.

    I will admit that I did, on at least one occasion, wonder if my son could be President of The United States. He’d be a fine President, I thought, based on the good judgment he showed in being born to my husband and me. As he grew and matured, it became clear that our son was much more interested in making music than in making laws. It’s a good thing, too, because research indicates that more than half of all Americans wouldn’t even consider voting for someone like our son.

    You see, our son is an atheist. When he first said that he was an atheist, I thought he was being provocative.  I wondered if he even knew what an atheist didn’t believe. At this point, though, it’s pretty clear that he knows what he’s saying when he declares his graceless state.

    You might think that our son doesn’t believe in god, with a big or little “g,” because he didn’t go to church. My husband and I don’t really come off as get-up-and-go-to-church folk. Frankly, my husband isn’t even a get-up-and-go-before-10 a.m. kind of guy. But at least until our son was about ten, we were regular churchgoers. I sang in the choir; I served on committees. We went to potlucks. We hosted potlucks, for crying out loud.

    Now, before I get grief from those in the know, I will admit that the church we attended was a Unitarian Universalist congregation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hear you: UUs will let you believe anything. There is something to that; dogma isn’t really on the offering plate at a UU church. But the idea of questioning and questing for spiritual truth was what drew me to the congregation. I am what initially drew my husband and two-year-old son. We stayed because we found that church thing that can be so elusive: a community of like-minded individuals who also seemed to like us.

    Our son started his religious education in the nursery, playing “I love the earth and everyone in it” kinds of games and having his diapers changed by tolerant, loving people. He moved through the RE program without a hitch. He played his roles in the annual Christmas pageant with more or less enthusiasm, depending on his role. Cow in the manger? Not so hot. Shepherd complete with fake fur tunic and Bedouin head covering? All over that one. He was dedicated in front of the entire congregation by a minister he still considers “bad ass.” He grew up with a number of other children who were known and loved by the congregation.

    I was raised Roman Catholic. I don’t recall thinking any of the parish priests from my childhood were the equivalent of “bad ass.” I’m not real sure “bad,” “ass” and “Catholic priest” should even be in the same sentence, but I wrote it, so I’ll have to live with it. I don’t have any recollection of any of the priests even knowing I existed. My strongest recollection of being raised Catholic was the terrible revelation, at a fairly young age, that my dream of being a priest was just that. After years of saying mass to my stuffed animals and little brother, I felt betrayed in a way that still stings. Eventually, I found Buddhism and I practice it today. My kids will tell you I need the practice. I say they are the reason why.

    I’m going to lay credit for our son’s godlessness at my husband’s feet. He is a Jew. This is something quite different from being raised religiously Jewish. He didn’t go to temple; he didn’t study Torah, he wasn’t bar mitzvah’d (apologies to my Jewish friends for any awkward use of Hebrew). He is culturally Jewish. This means, for him, that he values education, debate, political inquiry and really good lox. We have tried to build a Jewish identity for our children that is both meaningful and fun. My husband is less interested in the fun; he’d rather our Seder were more sedate. The kids, though, still get a kick out of flinging mini-marshmallows and plastic farm animals, among other things representing the ten plagues.

    I would worry about my son’s immortal soul if I were more sure about my own immortal soul. The thing that truly frightens me about my son’s atheism is that it could get the crap beaten out of him.

    Atheists in America are more reviled than Jews or Muslims. I suspect that there is more tolerance of gays than there is of atheists. Americans would vote for a candidate of any religion before one without a religion. I know there is a gay and lesbian support group at his high school. I haven’t seen anything of its kind for atheist youth. I regularly see postings on Facebook about how hard it is to be Christian in America. Really?, I think. Try being an atheist.

    Now the thing that really compounds my worry for my son, is the fact that he has no problem saying he is an atheist. To anyone. He regularly gets grief from Christian friends about his unbelieving. He never tells them they are wrong to hold their beliefs. Recently, though, he posted on his Facebook wall that he only asks for the same respect for his beliefs that he gives others for theirs. It was a brave statement; it got lots of likes.

    I’m deeply proud to be raising a young man who is confident in what he believes and willing to stand up for himself, despite considerable pressure from both his friends and his society. He is tolerant, kind, generous, funny, intelligent and outspoken. He’s all the things I’d like to see in the President of my country. It’s so sad that half of my country wouldn’t even give him a chance.

    © Copyright 2011 by Janice M. Lindegard. All rights reserved.

  • Happy Anniversary To Me

    “Dear husband,” I said, “it’s been a year.”

    “No!” he answered. “Really?”

    “Yes. A whole year at the end of this month,” I said.

    “But what about that time our daughter had a sleep over and our son didn’t come out of his cave for hours?”

    “Oh. My. God,” I said. “It hasn’t been a year for THAT! And don’t tell me it feels like it!”

    “Well, then I’m at a loss,” he said.

    Normally, I’m the one who forgets anniversaries, particularly my wedding anniversary. I got married on either the 16th or 17th of October. Never can remember which. So, whenever anyone asks me when I got married, I say, “Saturday. It was a Saturday.” My husband has the PhD in History. He remembers the date and rolls his eyes when I don’t.

    It has been a year since I started writing and publishing Snide Reply. At the risk of sounding like a Holiday Letter, I thought I’d go through some of my old posts and update you on some of the more popular. For those who jumped on the Snide wagon later in its run, I’m including links to the original posts.

    I started running just a couple of months before I started blogging. At that time, I could run about 3 miles. I am writing this having run 9 miles this afternoon. Of course, I can barely get out of my chair to hobble to the kitchen and refill my teacup.

    I still don’t have an attractive website. I have a really cool domain name and I have a website. The two shall not meet in my lifetime. See, the website is totally lame. I built it myself when I had no idea where my life was going. That happens when you make plans and life does that mice and men thing with them.

    I have a better idea where my life is going these days so maybe it’s time to re-tackle the website. To my endless stupefaction and glee, I am now a parent columnist. Me! The self-admitted queen of parental immaturity. Ok, so it’s only been a couple of weeks, but a girl has to start somewhere. Look at Jenny McCarthy! Her parenting qualifications are . . .what?  Oh, yeah, she posed naked and had a baby. Do you think T. Berry Brazelton ever posed naked?

    The worst I’ve done is go commando thought the pharmacist who knows has moved on to Wal-Mart. Actually, I may be going commando again soon. And my husband had to skip the briefs at least once. Laundry used to be his responsibility and lawn mowing was mine. We tried to get our son to do the lawn-mowing thing because he hated doing the litter box thing. He wanted nothing to do with the lawn because it was, as he said, “outside.”

    “Look,” I said. “you either mow the lawn or you do the laundry.” Ha! I thought, now I have him.

    “Cool!” he said. “I love laundry! Laundry smells awesome!”

    So, now my husband mows the lawn and my son does the laundry. We have realized, though, that having a teenage boy with ADHD responsible for keeping us in clean undies was probably not our best parenting move. Many is the time a load made it into the washer and stayed there . . .and stayed there . . .and stayed there. Our son has learned that laundry only smells awesome if it makes it from the washer to the dryer in fewer than 24 hours.

    The portal to hell is still outside our front door. The dog is still insane. The cat is on a diet. So far, so good. He hasn’t broken anything out of spite. He may have taken a nibble or two out of the fish, though, which is looking rather ragged of late. The end is likely near, as evidenced by his tendency to swim sideways. I predict he’ll go to the great toilet bowl in the sky before the end of the year.

    I’m still a pretty bad Buddhist, according to my kids. My son pointed out to me just a few days ago that a good Buddhist probably wouldn’t call the driver who cut her off a “freaking idiot.” I’m better about the cyclists who fly past me on the prairie trail. I no longer mumble obscenities at them. I am saving my obscenities for the people who are treating the prairie as their personal cutting garden these days. My daughter suggested I try out a nearby trail that runs through an equestrian center. I’m pretty sure even Buddha couldn’t keep his cool running behind horses, but then again, it would definitely keep me mindful and aware.

    As my episodes on the prairie illustrate, I still have anger issues. I still hate liver, read crap and get jealous, too. But, I haven’t taken a serious trip to Funky Town in a while. My son is ok with “Spithead” and no one has puked around here lately. My kids are still pikers when it comes to sibling rivalry.

    I am overjoyed to report that the shed never went up. The cosmos aligned in a gigantic “I told you so,” when my neighbor hired someone to survey the property line. I left the hot pink flagging tape which proved the line did, indeed, fall exactly where I said it did as long as possible. We found, in fact, that we have a lot more property than we thought we did. My neighbor and I have entered a sort of cold war, though. He no longer speaks to me and his children run like rabbits whenever I come out of the house. I’m thinking it just needs a little more time and a lot more of me being the nicest, most cheerful person I know how to be. Stop laughing; I can be very cheerful.

    I’ve made lots of people laugh in the past year. I think I’ve made some cry. I know I’ve hurt feelings, unintentionally of course. Still, I’m more careful about what I write and how I phrase things. There are certain things I’ll never write, at least not here and not as non-fiction. But I’ll keep writing and I hope you’ll keep reading.

    Thanks, from the bottom of my heart, for a truly wonderful year.

  • My Kids Always Love Dad Best

    I keep coming home from work to find my family in a great mood. The kids are getting along wonderfully. Maybe everyone is playing Monopoly. Maybe they are all in the kitchen doing homework together. Regardless, everyone is smiling and interacting beautifully.

    It’s really starting to tick me off.

    Not too long ago, we had dinner together every night. Studies showed that kids who ate nightly family dinners were less likely to drink, do drugs, smoke, get depressed, have eating disorders and begin reading sooner. If studies showed it, I was all for it.

    So, I made sure we had dinner together every night. When we first started family dinners, I had visions of me in the kitchen, rattling the pots and pans, with the kids around the table, peacefully completing their homework. As dad entered our charming abode, the kids would put their homework away and promptly start setting the table.

    I was delusional. What I get on the nights I’m home for dinner is my son popping down from his cave around 5 to ask what’s for dinner. News of the night’s meal is met with “Awesome!” or “You’re freaking kidding me!” Fried chicken? “Awesome!” Grilled salmon with a butter dill sauce? “You’re freaking kidding me!” He has learned to replace “You’re freaking kidding me!” with “I’ll make myself a pot pie.”

    My daughter is usually either playing at her friend’s house, or, on a day when she needs a break, watching TV and scattering five million Littlest Pet Shop figurines around the family room.

    Sometime between 6 and 6:30, I start dinner. I call my daughter to do her homework. I bang on the ceiling for my son to come unload the dishwasher.

    Silence. I remain alone in the kitchen.

    I call to my daughter again. I bang on the ceiling again.

    Eventually, my son bounds down the stairs, growling, “What!?” if it’s a “you’re freaking kidding me” dinner or “Is dinner ready?” if it’s an awesome! dinner night.

    “Have you done your homework?” I say.

    “I’ll do it later,” he says.

    “Then you can unload the dishwasher,” I say.

    “Later. I have to do my homework.” And he’s off to the cave.

    “It’s time to do your homework,” I say to my daughter.

    “I don’t have any,” she says, plopping on the couch.

    “I need you to clean up your Littlest Pet Shop things so we don’t have to look at the messy family room during dinner,” I say. Ok, I probably actually say something like, “I need you to pick up all of your things in the family room. I’m sick of living in a pig mess.” I give myself Good Mom points for saying “I need” instead of just going straight for “Pick those toys up before I throw them all away.”

    At this point, we have a meltdown. My daughter begins crying that I am mean. I don’t particularly care if she calls me mean. With me, it’s all about tone of voice and my daughter has a tone somewhere between a car alarm and a banshee’s wail.

    “Fine!” I yell. “Don’t clean up the toys, but I’m going to throw away these things you’ve left on the kitchen table if you don’t come get them right now.”

    She doesn’t move; she doesn’t flinch. Eyes glued to the TV she says, “Ok.”

    By the time my husband gets home, I have generally had two fights with my daughter over toys and homework. My son, being 16, is far less predictable. We may be laughing and joking when dad comes home, or I may have left the house, mumbling something like, “I bet Mexico’s nice this time of year.” I pretend I am so eager to see my husband that I had to come meet him at his bus stop. I’m sure he has an inkling that I’m eager to see him, but maybe not for the reason he’d prefer.

    So, when I come home from work and find that dinner has been made and eaten with no fuss and the entire brood is happily doing homework, playing cards or just hanging together, I want to strangle someone.

    I am convinced that my kids love Dad best and it’s not just the difference in dinnertime that provides my evidence.

    Take, for example, how our son treats each of us. My husband is affectionately known as “Daddy Poo-pookins.” He gets head rubs. He gets hugs.

    I am known as “Big Dumb Mom” and it is said in a voice something like the Hulk’s. I get woken at 6:15 a.m. every morning and told, “I’m leaving.” This is code for “Come downstairs and say ‘goodbye to me’ .” I do, giving my son a hug that he accepts standing completely still. When I kiss him, he turns his head so that the kiss lands not on his cheek, but somewhere between his neck and his chin. I tried not giving the hug, and just saying “goodbye” once. My son glowered at me, refusing to budge until I gave him the unreturned hug.

    My husband wakes at 5 every morning and doesn’t get home until 7:15 at night. On the weekends, we let him sleep. This means that he stays in bed until 10 a.m. The children tiptoe past the bedroom door. When I tell them to “get your father out of bed,” they balk.

    Recently, while I was taking a nap after getting about four hours of sleep the night prior, my daughter came skipping in the room, jumped on me and said, “Mom, you only have ten more minutes to nap.” Then she left.

    Another recent incident gave me a window of opportunity into why Daddy Poo-pookins gets away with parenting murder while Big Dumb Mom gets the shaft. At the grocery store, my son snarls when I suggest a store-brand alternative to his favorite cereal. “It will taste like (insert disgusting noun modified by equally disgusting adjective).” Son and husband came home from the grocery store last night with store-brand frosted wheats. I snarled at my son.

    When my son explained that Daddy Poo-pookins would get mad, I said, Big Dumb Mom gets mad. “But he really means it,” my son said, “you’ll change your mind.” And he’s right. I will change my mind, given a good enough argument. Throwing away generic frosted cereal has taught me that some things are worth a little flexibility. By the way, I’m looking forward to saying, “I told you so” about the cereal.