Yesterday, I wrote in my newspaper column about spanking and the fact that it, quite literally, can drive your kids crazy. Well, I stirred a little nest, I guess. I’ve been berated for humiliating my children and been informed the spanking can be appropriate. What do you think?
http://naperville.patch.com/articles/the-bare-truth-about-spanking-it-affects-mental-health
Ordinarily, I eschew exclamation points in my writing but, golly gee, someone asked me to write for his blog and I did it! You can check out a bit of my experience parenting my son through one of the darkest times of both of our lives here: http://blackboxwarnings.wordpress.com/2012/06/28/a-tale-of-two-meds-and-one-teen/
Read the other posts, too. The man who started the blog is also dealing with a son with ADHD and the meds that come along with it. And there are others who posted as well. It’s a valuable, developing resource for those of us taking drugs with black box warnings (means they can lead to all kinds of nasty side effects, like suicidal ideation and other fun things) and parenting kids taking those drugs.
It’s Father’s Day. I’m sitting with my Dad on the patio.
“How are you, Dad?” I ask.
“Not very good,” he says, looking down at his hands. I’ve never seen him this sad.
“Your mother rejected me,” he says and tells me, through tears, that my mother left him.
I start to cry, not knowing which is worse, telling my father that my mother died nearly four years ago or letting him believe she’s still alive and left him.
“Dad,” I say, as gently as I can, “Mom’s dead. She died almost four years ago. She would never leave you.” He looks up, confused. He’s confused nearly all the time now.
“You took such good care of her, do you remember that?” He’s trying. “She had emphysema and you took such good care of her. She was just too sick. We had to let her go, Dad.” I wonder if he remembers making the decision ending life support. He believes me. He believes and he’s sad, but he’s calmer.
I visit my dad every week these days, but I never know where it’ll be. Last week, it was Denver. He was waiting at his hotel, while my mother and grandmother shopped for houses. They’d come to Denver for a convention, something they did a lot. Traveling to conventions, that is, not traveling to Denver. He seemed anxious about buying yet another house, but he’d never really been able to say “No” to my mother. I told him I knew the feeling.
Another visit saw us in Hong Kong, having dinner with a group of executives my dad clearly didn’t like because they’d kidnapped me. Yet another visit saw us in Rochester at a bicycle factory. There was our visit in an undisclosed location in Romania, where my dad told me he was forced to sit on a minaret to escape the men trying to capture him in Saudi Arabia. Recently, my sister married the Shah of Iraq, so we have an Arabian theme going lately.
My dad’s delusions are nothing compared to the other residents. There’s the woman who gathers all of the baby dolls and stuffed animals and arrays them on a table. She dresses them all and sets them down to sleep then complains about how she has so many babies to care for. There’s the 105-year old woman who was once a singer. She still tries to sing but it comes out as screeching wails. There’s the woman who sits quietly and, when she catches your eye doesn’t say “Hello,” but “I’m afraid.” “Afraid of what?” I asked. “Of dying,” she replied.
It’s hard not to make the leap to The Snake Pit or One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest or whatever look-inside-the-loony-bin movie was popular in your particular generation. This, after all, is what crazy people are and do.
But I know better. My father and his housemates aren’t nuts. They have a terrible disease that literally eats at their brains, destroying the web that connects a lifetime of accumulated memory and leaving them with a stew of thought they continually try to make sense of.
No. They are not crazy; I am. At least, that’s what my society says. I have bipolar disorder; I am bipolar. I never know which description to use, so I use both. But no matter how I reveal my condition, I get a universal reaction, spoken or no. “That chick is crazy.” Someone even told me, “Wow. You’d never know to look at you!”
I suppose that’s a compliment; the self-harming, judgmental thoughts, over-spending and insomnia don’t show on my face. Of course, the medication helps. More likely, it’s an indication of how crazy Americans are about mental illness.
I happen to come from a family of crazies. Alcoholism, schizophrenia, drug abuse were things I learned about early. None of the crazies looked crazy. Well, ok, the schizophrenic lived in another state, so I didn’t see him very often and can’t really say he never looked crazy. Still, “you’d never know to look” at any of them that they lived with demons.
So, I don’t usually tell people I’m bipolar, though I’ve been doing it more often lately. Maybe it was the “you don’t look” it comment; maybe it’s my own growing acceptance. I’ve been more active in the blogosphere lately and the anonymity it affords makes it easier for crazies to hang out and connect with each other.
In America, you can pretty much tell who’s a flag-waving conservative by, well, the flags waving on their houses. I decided, some time ago, to take back the flag. This is my country, too, I thought, and hung the flag on our porch.
So, I’m taking back crazy. I’m a mom, a writer and a teacher. I have two great kids and the obligatory pets that go along with living in one of America’s most famous suburbs. I’m happily married.
This is what crazy looks like, people.
Enroll two kids in a few summer activities and let the good times roll. I’m not going to add up the mileage I’m putting on my little red Rav; it’s enough to tote up the cost of driving them. One more reason to look forward to the school year starting!
Here’s the link to this week’s column: http://naperville.patch.com/articles/where-s-the-lazy-in-this-crazy-summer
I’m not ordinarily interested in anniversaries, commemorative dates and other forced significancies. I barely remember how long I’ve been married and don’t really think it matters much. Frankly, staying married is really just a matter of not getting divorced when things get bad. Things have always gotten better for us, so being married for 20 years is more luck than hard work.
I don’t understand why we have to celebrate birthdays, either. I get older every year; so do you. Why do I have to go out to eat somewhere really fancy on April 22? Maybe I’d like to go out to eat somewhere really fancy on June 26 or October 13. I’m considering putting tokens in a jar for all of the events we’re supposed to commemorate. Then, if we feel like doing it up one day, we can just take out a token and celebrate whatever we happen to pull out. So, if I want to, I can celebrate my October wedding anniversary in March.
Publishing 100 posts on Snide Reply, though, is apparently something to crow about. I’ve actually published 101, but I didn’t write one of them. I recently re-blogged a post from sweetmotherlover, a blogger I follow. Because I’m busier than a suburban mom driving her kids all over town to various summer activites, I decided to break my no-commemorations rule. I am celebrating writing 100 posts by re-blogging the first post I wrote, two years ago. Back then, I had about 35 followers. Last time I checked, I had about 144145147. Not the biggest following, but more than I ever thought I’d reach. I happen to think my first is also one of my funniest posts and hope you think so, too. Enjoy.
Thanks friends, family and followers! I’ll keep writing if you’ll keep following.
How old were you when you first stayed home alone? My kids think it’s great. I think it’s a terrible idea, imaging every kind of disaster possible. So, of course, I wrote about it. Here’s the link:
http://naperville.patch.com/articles/how-old-is-old-enough-to-stay-home-alone
Do you remember staying home alone? How old were you? I had an old sister and younger brother so was seldom home alone. Maybe that’s why I love being alone now. Hm….yes! Let’s blame it on the siblings!
One look at him and I knew he wasn’t done. Brow furrowed, mouth turned down, eyes wide, he was half an inch from starting up again and I had no idea how to stop him. Then the tears started.
“Why are you crying?” I asked as gently as possible.
“Because of the lump in my froat,” he said, still too young to get the “th” sound right.
“The lump is in your throat because you’re crying,” I said. “So, why are you crying?”
“Because of the lump,” he said. I sighed. The physiology behind tear production apparently isn’t part of the public school kindergarten curriculum.
“Well, when we are sad, we cry and the lump means that you are thinking about something sad and then you cry because of the sad thing, not because of the lump,” I explained. Then, he cried in earnest.
“Why are you sad?” I asked.
He cried.
“Are you thinking about mommy?” I asked.
He cried harder. Ah, I thought, something to work with.
“Well, stop thinking about mommy,” I said.
The crying paused, as he considered whether it were truly possible to stop thinking about mommy when he was sure that mommy had abandoned him at math enrichment class. He began to cry again.
“Think about math,” I said. Well, I thought, that was the lamest thing you could have said. Sensing the lameness of my advice, he continued crying.
“Wait! Wait!” I said. “I have an idea! Let’s try this!” He paused.
“Take a deep breath and pretend you’re smelling a big bunch of flowers.” He inhaled.
“Now, blow it out and pretend you’re blowing out the candles on a cake.” He exhaled.
We inhaled and exhaled for a while ‘til he calmed enough to think about math. We got through the lesson. He never knew I learned “smell the flowers, blow out the candles” while helping care for my own mother, who died of emphysema.
I didn’t cry for my mother in public other than those dainty little trails so insignificant that they barely need to be wiped away. I remember holding my daughter’s hand as we walked down the aisle behind my mother’s casket. I spied a friend in a pew toward the front. Tears came to my eyes. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes until the tears passed, not in time to keep one from trickling down my cheek but before my mascara suffered any damage. My mother would have approved.
I’d like to tell you that my aversion to public crying is based on aesthetics. Runny, ruddy noses and red-rimmed eyes are unattractive at best. But I know that I really do think crying is for sissies and I am no sissy. No, I don’t think this is a particularly healthy stance, but it’s the one I’ve got. And, yes, I do know that big girls, and big men, do cry.
It’s not that I don’t feel like crying. I feel like crying so often I might be able to cry a river. Between hormone fluctuations and bipolar disorder, my brain chemistry is pretty much primed to turn any amount of pathos into a bawl. Remember that Coke
(ok, so it was Pepsi) commercial with the little boy being pounced on by a pack of puppies? Had me in tears every time I saw it. Now, I’m not talking little sniffles. I’m talking about tears that lasted way past the commercial break. That Procter and Gamble spot with all the moms dragging their sleepy kids out of bed so they (the kids, that is) can become Olympic athletes? Wrings sobs from me. Is it no wonder I’ve trained my tears to stop on command?
My kids, particularly my daughter, have picked up on my propensity for becoming maudlin over recorded fare ranging from the sentimental to the insipid. We’ll be watching a movie, say We Bought A Zoo, and everything will be going along swimmingly until the dad-figure and the son-figure have a touching moment that begins to heal the rift they’ve felt between them since the mom-figure died. Only seconds after my eyes begin to fill up, my daughter says, “You’re crying, aren’t you?” Doesn’t even have to look, she just knows it. My sister suffers the same schmaltz-induced weeping. Her kids are far less kind. “Look!” they say, “Mom’s crying! You’re crying, aren’t you?” I believe I’ve seen my sister stick her tongue out at them.
My daughter may have taken a page from my niece and nephews. Recently, she and a friend were cleaning up the family room. By that I mean they were listening to music, dancing and performing gymnastics amidst a myriad of books, stuffed animals and craft supplies. A particular Selena Gomez song came on; I’ve written about this song before. My daughter knows it makes me cry. So, in consideration of my tender feelings, she said, “Watch this! This song always makes my mom cry. See! There she goes!”
There, indeed, I did go. My daughter’s friend’s mother apparently does not cry at sappy Selena Gomez songs. Friend looked at me as if I were some exotic creature. “Why does this song make you cry?” she asked, cocking her head to one side like a scientist. I resisted the urge to hand her a clipboard and pencil.
“Well,” I said, “lots of women have a nasty voice inside their heads that tells them they are ugly or fat or stupid. It makes me sad that I have that voice in my head and I hope my daughter never does.”
She nodded her head and went back to turning cartwheels. Yes, in fact, I did cry writing that last paragraph—in the peace and privacy of my office.
When I started blogging, I didn’t read other people’s blogs. I was new; what did I know? Frankly, it never really occurred to me that anyone beyond my immediate family would care what came out of my fingertips, unless it was Dr. Pepper. Quite a few people in my family would be impressed if I could shoot Dr. Pepper out of my fingertips. Or lasers. It’d be pretty cool to shoot lasers out of my fingertips.
While my list of followers is not that large—I know people who’ve had more guests at their weddings than I have on Snide Reply—it’s far more than my gene pool alone could supply. I learned pretty quickly that you gotta spread the blog love. If you’re writing blogs, then you should be reading them, too. Blogosphere tit-for-tat.
I discovered that there are certain blog posts that are de rigueur. As I write, I have a headache otherwise I would remember all the different kinds of posts I’m supposed to write. There’s the Search Terms post; that’s the one in which you write about all the crazy search terms people used that brought them to your blog. When I wrote my search terms post, “penis” was in all of the top five terms. Today, I am pleased to report there is not a single “penis” in the top five. Ok, there’s a “dick,” but I’m not counting it. Could be someone is looking for their Uncle Dick, not their uncle’s dick.
The other kind of post that I can remember is the Goodness Gratefulness Post. I did do a gratitude post some time back; it got Freshly Pressed. But it pretty much thumbed its nose at the idea of being grateful ‘cause, really, must we be grateful all the time? I think not. Still, I’ve been kinda down and thought maybe focusing on what’s good might help. So, here are the things that strike me as good today.
My son earned a D in American Studies.
Asian parents abound in our neighborhood; for many of them, the only achievements worth celebrating are As. Then there is my family, whooping it up over our son’s D. We are celebrating the fact that a D is not an F. We are celebrating the fact that our son seems to finally understand that it doesn’t matter if you think your teacher is a douche bag bad teacher nor does it matter if you can get an A on the final without doing the homework. My husband and I now understand that grounding is far more effective when there is something at stake, like driving around aimlessly with one’s friends.
There is no wolverine in my garage.
Garages and basements are the same thing in my mind, except that the garage has immediate access to nature. Creepy, cluttered, spider-ridden, dark and dusty, basements are the stuff of horror shows. Mine would be a blockbuster. But as scary as basements are, they have the advantage of being rather more difficult to infiltrate than, say, a garage. While my garage is no Taj, it would make a commodious abode for any wandering wildlife. So, I always step gingerly into the garage, particularly at night, despite six years of venturing there without incident. I shall remain vigilant. Hell, there’s an opossum living under our deck; why wouldn’t there be a wolverine in the garage?
Coyote pups are really cute.
Early in the spring, a coyote crossed my path as I ran through the prairie preserve near my house. Feigning disinterest in devouring me, he stared me down then slunk silently into the reeds ringing the marsh to the north. Feigning nonchalance, I reversed my running course and fled—I mean, jogged calmly away—resisting the urge to run forward while looking back.
Approximately two months later, a pair of coyote pups crossed my path while running through the same preserve. Looking more like teddy bears than predators, they scurried into the grass at the side of the trail, barely hid their fluffy little faces and watched me jog calmly by. They were gone by the time I had doubled back, headed toward home. Hunting, I supposed. With their dad. Far from me.
There are lots of baby bunnies this time of year.
I spied a baby bunny in my yard this morning. He looked so much like the fiend that devoured my roses when we first moved here that I gave an involuntary cringe. I shooed him away, toward the prairie preserve and the darling coyote pups. Hey! Circle of life, people. It’s a bitch.
There’s bacon in the fridge.
I have a friend who doesn’t get bacon, as in “Bacon? What’s so special about bacon?” I try to understand her point of view by remembering that she loves beer. Now, I like beer. Lately, I’ve been drinking beer on a semi-regular basis. I even have some in the fridge right now. But I won’t drink just any beer. My dad would drink any beer, especially any cheap beer. My friend and I are far more discriminating. And that’s where the beer and bacon comparison falls apart. There are bad beers. There are spectacularly bad beers. But there is no such thing as bad bacon. There is bacon that is a little too salty, or too fatty or not cooked exactly the way you like it. But it’s all bacon and it’s all good.
I was not given a car when I turned 16, when I graduated from high school or when I graduated from college. In fact, I have never been given a car. So, maybe it’s jealousy I feel when I see my son’s 16-yo friends getting cars–brand new ones!– but I think it might be something more sensible. Here’s my Monday newspaper column on the subject.
http://naperville.patch.com/articles/what-s-so-sweet-about-giving-16-year-olds-cars
Did you have a car in high school? Who bought it? I used the family car until I bought my own.
My children have their last day of school tomorrow. Technically, it’s really just their last hour of school before summer break. The school district is calling that hour a half-day; I can’t help but wonder why we wonder that our children have a hard time with math.
My kids will be home all day for 83 days minus one hour. We’ll reconnect. We’ll sleep late, go to the beach, make cookies, go out for lunch, run through the sprinkler, watch movies, go to the library. By then, we will have made it to about day six. And then I will want them the hell out of my hair.
I realize it’s not very mom-like to dread spending large amounts of time with your children. I realized this when I admitted that I could quite easily spend six weeks away from my kids without really missing them that much. I assumed that the six weeks would be spent doing things like, I don’t know, a writer’s retreat or teaching English in France or writing and reading on a beach in France. Whatever it was, it involved France. Further, I assumed there would be telephones and computers with Internet connections, probably even Wi-Fi, because—again, making an assumption—I figured that they have advanced technology in France. So, I could write and read on a beach in France and my kids could text me. We might even be able to Skype.
But I was reviled. The other mothers pounced on my uncaring attitude toward my offspring. How on earth, they thought, could I be separated from my kiddies for so long? Apparently, these moms assumed they would spend the six weeks in a sensory deprivation tank. And that their partners would cease to exist or would instantly become insensible, incompetent boobs completely incapable of caring for children.
Admitting to being cool with a six-week vacation wasn’t the first time I realized there’s a dark side to this mom. That happened about two months after my son was born.
I remember falling in love with my son. Not loving him, but falling in love with him. Smelling the top of his head and swooning. Taking pictures of his tiny toes and the soft fuzzy back of his neck, then kissing both. I was smitten. At the same time, I sometimes had an almost overwhelming desire to spike him like a football in the end zone. What kind of mother fantasizes about slamming her baby into the Astroturf, I thought? A bad one, came the answer. A really, really bad one who should have her child immediately removed from her custody.
“This is completely normal,” said my therapist, admitting that while her fantasies were much less violent—she was just going to open her arms and let the baby fall to his fate—they existed nonetheless. Great, I thought, I’ve got a really, really bad mom for a therapist and her child should immediately be removed from her custody.
My therapist also thought it was completely normal when I admitted later that I loved IKEA because I could shop in the calming comfort of cheap Swedish design while someone else watched my kid. I even admitted that, gliding down the escalator, I thought, “I could walk out the door, get in my car and drive away. I could be a long, long way away before anyone even noticed.”
Eventually, I accepted the balderdash my therapist was feeding me: that good moms have deep dark fantasies involving their children. Just because other moms weren’t admitting it didn’t make it any less true.
I didn’t spike my son nor did I leave him at IKEA. He’s sixteen now and still living with us. We even had another kid. Though I have never fantasized about spiking her, I still have my dark moments.
My daughter cries about every little hurt, bump, or scratch she gets. She also cries when she makes a mistake or has an accident. Now, I’m not talking tears spilling gracefully from her cheeks. The biggest—and most racist—misconception about Chinese girls is that they are all delicate, quiet and well behaved. You know, that “uh, uh, uh, oh-oh, Little China Girl” thing.
There are no dainty trails of tears from my daughter; there is wailing, sobbing, whining and lamentation. It drives me crazy. It makes me want to smack her. It makes me clap my hands over my ears. I know these are inappropriate responses, so I calmly tell her I can’t understand her when she cries. She cries more because now she is not just in pain, but also misunderstood. I tell her I need her to stop crying. Now she is crying harder because she’s making mommy mad. I tell her she has to the count of five to stop crying. Now she is crying even harder because she’s being timed. I get to five and tell her I’m going to start charging her a quarter for every minute she cries. All the while, my inside my head voice is screaming “Suck it up, you little baby!”
My husband admits that he has had dark fantasies, particularly involving our son. Our son is not a demon though some have thought so. He has always been difficult and my husband came to parenting late. So, who could blame him when he screamed at his mother that at least he wasn’t “out whoring and drinking” when she mentioned how he might improve his fathering techniques.
Our daughter appears to have cured my husband of his darkest fantasies. Now he’ll more likely fall into despondency over his failures as a father. He does sometimes fantasize about driving away and not telling anyone where he’s gone. He admitted, though, that he’d just go to a hotel for the night and watch old movies in peace.
I realize I’m not painting a very loving picture of myself, but being honest about my darkest thoughts helps take away their power. There are days when going to the beach with my kids is exactly what I want to do. Then there are days when I’d rather clean the cat boxes. So, I’ll suck it up for the summer. The first day of school, though, I’m headed for France, at least in my fantasies.
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