Category: Daily life

Exit Poll

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My fourteen year old is in that stage where he doesn’t really want to talk to anyone, especially people he doesn’t know well. Suggest he talk to a teacher about an assignment? Um, no thanks. Ask him to call a store to find out their hours? No way!

So imagine my surprise when he recently started racing to the phone to answer political calls. He picks up the phone, and if he senses there is a real person on the line, he says, “Hullo?” If there is only a recording, he stands still, listening to the message until he gets bored.

If someone is talking to him, asking him questions, he generally acts as though he is trying to back away from the phone. The receiver is held a bit away from his face as he tips his head in the other direction. The conversation usually has a number of statements of, “I don’t know.” Sometimes, he looks to me for guidance, but recently, he has started acting as if he has the answers the caller is seeking.

This evening, the phone rang. No surprise, it was dinnertime. Everyone else in the house was ignoring the phone when W said, “I’ll get it!” and walked to the phone on the wall. “Morristown, New Jersey,” he read from the caller id as he picked up the receiver. “Hullo?” he said in the deep voice that I no longer recognize as belonging to my youngest child.

There was the customary pause as the caller made a pitch about something or other. And then the questioning began. W responded with a perfectly poised, “Well, I am not really sure.”

He listened some more. “I don’t know,” he said into the receiver. The caller, it seemed, was persistent in his pursuit of answers. Finally, I heard W say, “I’m not eligible to vote.”

I was close enough to the receiver to hear the far off voice of the caller respond, “I understand. Thank you for your time.” And he hung up.

W looked at me and smiled. “He asked me who I voted for, so I told him I wasn’t eligible to vote.” I just shook my head and rolled my eyes.

Clearly, the caller did not understand, as he said he did. If he truly understood, he would not have been trying to find out the vote cast by a fourteen-year-old boy.

Phony

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Unlike many people I know, I still have a landline phone in my house. I keep it because it is bundled with my cable and internet, but also because it is the receptacle of all sorts of junk phone calls. It is, in essence, the garbage can for phone calls. The only calls I generally answer on that phone are from my mother.

The upcoming election has brought an onslaught of political phone calls. These calls are so frequent that I have stopped bothering to even look at the caller ID.

One day, as the phone rang, W approached, read the caller ID, and stood pondering the phone, still ringing insistently. Finally, he picked it up and said hello.

There was a long pause on this end as he listened to what the caller had to say. “I…” he stopped, unsure of how to handle this situation. “I don’t know,” he responded, the phone falling away from his ear as he attempted to pass it off to me.

I shrugged in response and shook my head, as if to say, Don’t look at me. I didn’t answer it. But he thrust the receiver into my hand, and I had no choice but to take it. Well, I could have hung up…. But I didn’t.

“Hello?” I said, hopeful for something other than a politician or solicitation. The caller began his pitch, asking for money that I do not have. I sighed and hung up, shaking my head at W. “Next time, don’t answer it,” I told him firmly.

As the elections approach, the calls become more frequent, more insistent. One day last week, C was on the couch working on the computer. The phone rang through its cycle of 5-plus rings for the umpteenth time that hour. “Can you unplug the phone please?” he requested.

“No. What happens if someone needs to reach us?” I don’t know what I was thinking when I said that.

“Mom, you are not even answering it. Just unplug it!” He had a point. But then again, maybe the ringing would stop at a reasonable hour, so we could all get some sleep. Not long after this conversation, I left the house for a dance class.

The next morning, I had to call in a prescription refill. It was early in the morning, and the pharmacy has an automated refill line that allows you to call in the refill after hours (or before, in this case). I picked up the phone to dial the number, but there was no dial tone. “Hello?” I said into the silent receiver. Nothing.

I hung up the phone, waited a couple of seconds, and picked it up again. Still nothing. Ugh! I dreaded the call to the cable company—it would take half an hour just to get out of the hold queue. I checked the connections to my handset, but then my eyes fell on the two plugs dangling amongst the other cords.

Ah ha! In my absence, someone had taken care of the persistent politicians. Well, maybe not the politicians per se, but they had severed the communication device from the outside world. Good choice!

I am glad that my children are protecting the privacy and solitude of their home environment. Endless political phone calls every night through the dinner hour will not help them to choose the most effective candidate. In fact, the more calls we receive, the more fed up I become with our current political process. So, bravo to the person who unplugged the phone—I should have done it long ago!

Now, I can’t wait for the politicians to pack up and bring their baggage to another state.

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Growing Pains

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“Mom, I don’t have any pants that fit.” It was Sunday morning, and we were getting ready for church when W entered my room with this report.

Admittedly, my brain had not yet woken up. No pants that fit, I thought. If these kids don’t stop growing like weeds….

But then my mind started to wake up and deconstruct that thought. I thought back over the past few days. He had pants that fit yesterday. He had pants that fit the day before yesterday. No pants that fit? Hmm….

“What do you mean, you don’t have pants that fit?” I asked him.

“I don’t have any pants,” he responded. “Only pants that are too small.”

“There’s a basket of laundry in the living room,” I reminded him (because doesn’t every body keep a basket of laundry in their living room?). “Did you look there?”

“No,” he admitted without the slightest hesitation.

“Perhaps you should. I bet you’ll find some pants in there that fit.” He left the room without further comment. I imagine he knew that suggesting again that he had no pants would do him no good.

I heard no more. When I went downstairs, he was wearing pants, and they seemed to fit. Well enough, anyway. The length was debatable, but who was going to argue?

At 14, he really can grow out of his pants overnight. In fact, it has happened. In my bedroom, I have a large bin of clothes that are on hold, castoffs from his brother just waiting for him to grow so they can be claimed and worn again. However, I opened that bin over the weekend, and it was nearly empty. A few pair of jeans, some shorts, and a handful of t-shirts lingered in the bottom. His older brother’s growth is slowing down. And, of course, the size that W needs now is the size that C skipped. And so, I am doomed. We will have to go shopping and actually try on jeans and figure out which size, style, cut, etc. he wants. And then I’ll have to pay for them. Doomed, I tell you.

But W could consider himself lucky. He will have brand new pants. The era of wearing his brother’s hand-me-downs has passed. Hopefully, he won’t outgrow the new ones overnight.

Meanwhile, on Monday night, we left a meeting and were walking to the car to drive home. The light from the nearly full moon skipped across the ice dotting the pavement. “Hey Mom,” W said, through the darkness. “These shoes are too small.”

Sigh.

Sanity

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I have been working with teenagers since I was barely out of my teens, myself, so when I had my children, I remember wondering what I was ever going to do with these tiny babies. I was pretty sure I would be fine once they reached their teens, but the baby stages… they puzzled me. Nonetheless, I made it all the way from the baby stage to now, layering years and parenting and experiences to get to this point. Now that they are teens, I am still pretty sure that these are the best years yet. Complicated, conflicted, confusing, confounding, but definitely, the best yet.

Every now and then, however, there is a moment that makes me question. You know all those things you’ve heard about teens being moody and unpredictable from one minute to the next? Some days, those things are not true at all. But other days, those things are incredibly spot on.

From one child to the next, it seems I have a pattern in which I “forget” some of the more challenging things. There are days I have to consciously remind myself that some battles just aren’t worth fighting. One morning this week, it was about a sweatshirt. Fact: child in question didn’t have one. He did have a jacket, so I suppose that was a step in the right direction.

“You’re going to be cold in school,” I informed him.

“No I’m not,” he retorted with complete certainty. No. Of course you’re not.

“I hope you don’t plan to wear your jacket around school all day,” his sister chimed in. “That’s just wrong.” And the next thing I knew, he was off moping in the other room. Because moping. As we’ve all heard, it’s what teenagers do.

His absence from the room gave me a brief moment of pause in which I considered what it was that drew me to my work with teens…. Perhaps I had been misleading myself all along. But the teens I work with are other people’s kids. They don’t usually treat me like I’m ignorant.

Moping child came back into the room just in time to pack his backpack and scoot out the door. “Don’t think that just because your jacket is zipped up all the way that you’re fooling me!” I called after him.

“Ugh!! Teenagers are so obnoxious!!” my daughter stated with an overly dramatic eye roll as she put on her jacket. And we laughed together before she slipped out into the darkness of the early morning. And I focus on this.

Some days, I wonder if I will make it through the teen years with my sanity intact. But each time this household spirals into the depths of teenage moodiness, there is someone to pull me through it with a joke or a smile or a sarcastic comment. There is always someone to add a layer of fun or silliness to the situation. And as my son is so quick to remind me, “Mom, you didn’t get into this with your sanity intact!”

The Road Ahead

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On Friday after school, W had an orthodontist appointment. When it was over, he got in the car and put his feet on the dashboard. The soles of his shoes. “Get your feet off there! This is a brand new car.”

“It’s not brand new,” he informed me as he took his feet away. Two dusty shoe prints adorned the black surface above the glove compartment. He glanced at me sheepishly as he used his blue jeaned knee to awkwardly wipe at the prints. “It’s like… four months old.”

“And in my life with cars, that’s brand new. The van is ten years old. I plan to keep this one twenty… or maybe fifteen.”

“So four months is two percent of its life,” he informed me. He had me there; you can’t really say that a toddler is a brand new baby. “Anyway,” he continued. “By then, there should be some sort of legislation banning gasoline powered cars.”

“They can’t do that,” I stated emphatically. “That would be way too expensive! Everyone would have to trade in their cars, and you can’t expect everyone to buy an electric car.”

He pondered that for a minute. “Well, they should ban the production of gasoline powered cars. That would be a step in the right direction. Electricity is so much more efficient. If this were an electric car, you’d be able to accelerate much faster!” His eyes brightened at the thought.

I sighed. My car accelerates just fine, thank you very much. And the limited acceleration will keep his acceleration under marginal control once he starts driving… in another year and less-than-a-half. “I’m good,” I informed him. “I like this car.”

“I’m just saying that electricity is much better. It’s more efficient for everything.”

“Except for heat,” I told him. “Our house used to have electric heat. It was not so efficient and very expensive.”

“Electricity is good for heat,” he stated. “It’s better for most things.”

“Okay,” I conceded, eager to steer the conversation in another direction. My STEM skills are passable, but they are no match for W’s STEM skills, and if we continued this conversation, he would launch into a technical discourse that would rise above my comprehension in five seconds.

“You know Mom, I figured out what the unused switches in our circuit box are for.” They were used for the electric heat.” The words caught my gut and sent my heart into overdrive. I glanced at him then back to the road.

“Huh. How’d you figure that out?” I wondered aloud as I tried to keep my racing thoughts to myself. I shuddered at the thought of him poking through the large bundle of wires that ran from the circuit box up into the suspended ceiling, easily accessed if you just move a ceiling tile or two. I kept my right eye on him while my left eye did the driving. I saw him smirk. And squirm. He looked down then out at the road in front of us. With each of my children, the path I travel has a unique set of bumps.

“I just figured it out,” he said, offering nothing further. And somehow, I think that’s all I’ll ever know.

I sighed as I turned both eyes back to the road. The Long. Road. Ahead.

Resolutions (2)

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It is January first, and I am feeling unmotivated. I want to set some goals for the year and work on the things that need fixing—to write more, to clean and organize, to focus on health and fitness, and to find ways to give back.

But today, I am unmotivated.

I want to write a blog post every day, though based on my past performance, I might focus on writing one post per week. This drop in expectation is not because I am unmotivated, but because I am a single parent to three children, and like many single parents, I maintain two jobs to cover expenses. And well… priorities.

I may be unmotivated, but today, I am realistic.

This is the year that I will sort through my clutter, clean, and purge. I realized at the end of this past year that if I tackle one small area per day/week/whatever, I will get through the trouble spots (eventually) and deactivate the clutter magnets in my house. At the rate of one small area per day (or week), my house will not be clean and clutter-free as quickly I might like. But little by little, the house will become uncluttered. My hope is that by January 1, 2017, I can blog about my success and how amazing it is to live in a house with a manageable amount of stuff. In the meantime, I can blog about the fun (okay, interesting…) stuff I uncover while de-cluttering!

Being realistic means that I will acknowledge my limitations.

Then there is the “taking care of me” resolution. I have two health goals for the immediate future. The most important is to sleep/rest more. Five hours of sleep a night is tough on a healthy body, but such limited sleep on a not-so-healthy body makes it nearly impossible to maintain normalcy. My second goal is to get back to regular exercise—walking regularly will be a step in the right direction. And baby steps are better than no steps. There are a lot of years between me and my most fit self, and I don’t expect to regain that level of fitness in the foreseeable future. But I do know that taking better care of me will allow me to take care of others. And that is important.

Which leads me to my final resolution…

… to actively look for and act on opportunities to give back. It’s not always easy to see beyond the chaos that follows me like a cloud and obscures my view of my surroundings. Paying attention to the people and opportunities around me will keep me grounded and present and will foster a greater sense of community connection.

These changes, I think they are doable. They are memorable—meaning I won’t forget them halfway through the month of January—because they are important. Of course, I set goals knowing they could always be derailed by more pressing issues.

What are your goals for the New Year?

Macaroons

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I am not afraid to admit that I enjoy food. Good food. And I was lucky to grow up with a mother who was a good cook. But recently, I have been restricted in what I can eat.

I was placed on a gluten free diet as one step in the treatment of an illness. However, having spent the past many years—well, all of my life, really—as a lover of all things gluten, this change has been a difficult one for me to digest… quite literally. But I have been trying to be good because I know that watching what I eat will help me to feel better.

Over the weekend, I was lamenting the loss of all things tasty, wishing for something good and satisfying. I determined that on Monday, I would find some sort of treat. To that end, I scoured the aisles of my local grocery store and discovered a gluten free coconut macaroon, one gluten free food that I now actually look forward to eating. (Did I mention, I am a fan of food? Apparently, just not the gluten free variety….)

The other morning, while the kids were getting ready for school, we had a discussion of coconut macaroons. In fact, it became evident that the macaroons that I had been storing in my car—to keep them away from the hungry teenagers in my house—had traveled into the kitchen. What I didn’t tell the kids is that I bought a new container to keep in my car and I brought the nearly empty container into the house.

“Are those coconut macaroons?” W asked, a nearly imperceptible excitement in his tone.

“These are gluten free,” I told him matter-of-factly. “You can’t eat them.” I was satisfied that my reasoning would work to convince him that I was right.

W looked at me for a minute, his brows furrowed. He eyed the macaroons. “Mom, that’s not how gluten free works. People who are gluten free can’t eat food with gluten, but people who can eat gluten can also eat gluten free food.” Hmm, good point.

Yep, my son tutored me in the whole “Gluten Free” thing because somehow, I missed the fact that I am on a one-way street. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to let him eat my macaroons!

And if you happen to have a gluten free macaroon recipe, can you send it my way? Thanks!

Mixed Up

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My mixer died at the worst possible time. Last week, as we were preparing for Thanksgiving, my chef-son was making focaccia bread. He had a large lump of dough in the mixer being kneaded with the bread hook. The normal whir of the motor was strained, with skipping pauses each time the hook traversed the bowl.

“That doesn’t sound good,” I told him, thinking he had put too much dough, or the dough was too stiff. It was a warning, really. I could hear the mixer deciding whether or not to continue its work.

“It’s fine, Mom,” C retorted in that terrible, sarcastic I’m-a-teenager-and-I’m-smarter-than-you way. “This is what it’s designed to do.”

Now, don’t get me wrong. I know that mixers are supposed to, well… mix. But my mixer is 20+ years old, and because I am a baker, it gets a lot of use. Every year at this time, it whips up batches of gingerbread, sugar cookies, butter cookies, chocolate pretzel cookies, and armies of snowmen. At this time of year, it is mixing twenty-four-seven. Well… almost.

And that’s why I was concerned that the normal whir was sounding like a hiccupped whine. It is “this time of year,” and I am just about to ramp up my baking.

I stood over the mixer, watching it knead the dough, debating whether to turn it off and have C knead by hand, or let it keep struggling. And just as I was about to say, “Stop!” …it did. Not exactly the way I meant. It just stopped working. For a moment, I stared in shock. What am I going to do now? I wondered to myself, thinking about the dozens of cookies that would not be mixed and baked for Christmas.

I looked at C, my mouth still hanging open, but he was already removing the focaccia bread dough from the bowl, preparing to knead by hand. He wasn’t going to let a little mixer malfunction stop him.

I swallowed hard and took my cue from my son. I closed my mouth and moved on with my Thanksgiving preparations. It was a lucky thing that my mixer died two days before the Black Friday sales. I got one heckuva deal on a new one—one that is (according to W) almost twice as powerful. I’m looking forward to my holiday baking.

If I really think about it, my mixer died at the best possible time!

Self Improvement

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The other night, I had to take a quick run to Target. As I was putting up our Christmas tree, I realized the string of lights that I use around the trunk wasn’t working (yes, I put lights around the trunk before I put on the rest of the lights. I believe it adds depth or some such nonsense…). I didn’t have extra bulbs (or patience) to work through all of the lights on the dark end of the string in order to figure out what was wrong. And since W has been after me to get LED lights, this was going to be my first tentative step in his direction….

“I wanna come!” J announced.

“Okay,” I replied, but then I backtracked. “Wait. Didn’t you say you have a lot of homework?” I’ll admit it would have been more fun (albeit more expensive) to peruse the aisles of Target with my daughter in tow than to do so alone.

“Yes…” she drew out the word just a smidge too long. “But I can still get it done.”

I glanced at my watch. It was nearly 8:00 on Sunday night. “No, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Aw…” she pouted for effect, trying to get me to change my mind. I threw a stern look in her direction. “Fine!” She turned to go back to her room. “But can you get me some hair scissors?”

“What?”

“Some hair scissors,” she repeated, as if I had difficulty understanding her language. (And I will admit that sometimes, I just might. But not this time…).

“Um, no.” Since she has a scheduled hair appointment this week, I certainly wasn’t going to buy her scissors with which she could create a disaster, or even attempt one. Perhaps she had forgotten about the time—the day before W’s baptism—that C took a pair of scissors to her hair. Right. In. The. Front. But I digress….

“I’m not going to ruin it,” she read my mind. “Just trim some of the …” she paused. “Extra.” She waved her hand toward some little flippy pieces that wouldn’t be there if her mother was willing to make her hair appointments monthly rather than bi-monthly. And pay for said extra hair appointments.

“No.” My cynical response left no room for question. Or comment. She grunted in half humorous teenage disgust and retreated to her room.

She didn’t really think I was going to buy her hair scissors. At least I don’t think she did…. Did she?

Sarcasm

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The other day when I was cooking dinner, I decided to listen to some music from my younger days. I played a Styx “Classic” album as I prepared the meal. I was even remembering most of the words, though I will admit there were a couple songs I didn’t know. The boys were in the living room finishing homework, and J was still at school, attending a theater meeting or some such activity.

Dinner was nearly ready when she walked in the door. “What are you listening to?” were the first words out of her mouth when the song hit her. She wrinkled her nose and her tone was one of disgust. It was a tone a parent might use when asking a teenager what she was listening to.

I feigned shock. “What? You don’t like it? This is my 80s head-banging music!” I made a head-banging motion; in response, she rolled her eyes as she slipped off her shoes and headed for the living room.

It was a few minutes before I called all three kids to the kitchen to help set the table so we could eat. My voice no doubt fully pulled the boys from their activity. “Mom,” C ventured. “What are you listening to?” It was the exact same tone his sister had used only a few minutes before. J laughed when I proudly responded “It’s my 80s head-banging music!”

She came into the kitchen. “Mom, what’s the chance we could turn off the 80s grunge?”

I was looking for a little nostalgia while I cooked dinner, and look what I got: teenage sarcasm with a side of humor! In my house, who would expect anything else?