Tag: navigating the world

Necessities

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In the living room, my son is trying to convince my daughter that some colleges don’t provide toilet paper. I’m not completely sure, but she doesn’t seem to be buying his story.

He and I had this discussion while she was in the shower. It started like this: he decided it would be good to add paper towels to his college packing list. That naturally devolved to the need to bring toilet paper, as well.

“I think you’ll find the school will provide that,” I stated, amused at the ludicrous thought that such a necessity would be overlooked.

“I hear some colleges don’t provide it,” he pushed the issue, spinning this new story as he spoke.

“Really?” I asked, recognizing he was going to make up something. “Like what school doesn’t?”

He threw out the name of an institution that one of his friends will be attending. Since his friend recently returned from his orientation, he would know first-hand if the school didn’t provide such a thing. It was a plausible story, but my son was joking, and I knew it.

“Can you imagine paying all that money for college and having to provide your own toilet paper?” I snickered. “That would just be ridiculous!”

Not to mention how that might work in a shared dormitory bathroom….

Yes, we have some crazy conversations in our house. And yes, I end up thinking about things I most likely would not otherwise consider. Sometimes, that would be a good thing.

Blooming

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At my son’s high school graduation, each of the graduates was given a white rose before the ceremony began. Each student—all 300-something—walked in carrying his or her rose, though it seemed instruction as to the best way to carry that item in a procession was missing. It was, however, a nice touch.

After a two-hour ceremony in weather that alternated between cool, hot (for about 5 minutes), and windy, the rose that was handed to me by my graduate was limp and wilted. It seemed as though it might not be salvageable, especially after we spent another half hour or more taking pictures and further ignoring it. I had a vague thought that if I put it in water, the bud would continue to droop on a stem grown weak from mistreatment.

But I am a sucker for beauty and for living (and once-living) things. So when I arrived home, I gave the rose a bit of TLC. I clipped the bottom of the stem, stuck it in a vase of water, and placed it in the center of my kitchen table. In the next hour, it began to take on new life. First, it grew a bit less droopy. The petals stuck out in awkward directions as the bud began to right itself while it took in nourishment. It wasn’t long before the bud seemed much happier.

I left the house for a while to attend a graduation party, and when I returned, there were bits of torn leaves littering the table around the base of the vase. “Which one of you has been eating the leaves off the rose?” I scolded the cats. “Knock it off!” I moved the vase to the kitchen counter because I am delusional enough to believe my cats do not frequent the counter tops.

In the middle of the night, I was awakened by a thunk and an additional strange noise and then nothing. I fell back to sleep and quickly forgot about the disturbance. When I went downstairs in the morning, the vase lay on its side on the counter, and the rose was on the floor beneath, lying in a puddle of water.

Sighing, I clipped a smidge more off the stem, and once again placed it in the water. This time, I snipped off the leaves since that was the part the cats found most appetizing.

Since then, my son’s rose has bloomed beautifully, even growing shoots with fresh new leaves where the old ones had been snipped off the stem. This rose has become a fitting symbol for the life to come for my graduate. Sometimes, things don’t go smoothly. We may be weakened by the experiences we withstand. We may face adversity. We may be torn down by those around us. But through it all, we learn that we are stronger than we might have thought. We learn to gain strength from our trials. We learn that growing in new directions is always a possibility. And we learn how to let our inner beauty shine through it all.

Cookies

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I picked up my son from the eighth grade class trip (very) late on Friday night (technically, the wee hours of Saturday morning). On the drive home, there was a tired, train-of-thought conversation that involved discussion of the things my deep thinker had been churning in his mind on the 12-hour bus ride home.

“You know, the Capitol dome was constructed of cast iron,” he told me. “In the 1850s and 60s,” he added. “That must have been quite a feat of engineering.” He stared out the window as the darkness passed by while he thought. “I wonder how they had the technology to get that up there back then.”

Nearly nine million pounds of ironwork, I have learned. My son thinks about the process of construction: how they created this immense structure. How they managed to move it to the top of the Capitol building. Meanwhile, my mother-mind wonders about the safety of the building on which that weight is resting and the lives of the people within that building. That’s a lot of weight for the walls and foundation to hold.

“And you know,” he continued, breaking me our of my reverie and revealing the randomness of his reflection. “The National Archives are much harder to get into than Nicolas Cage makes it seem.” I chuckled as my mind drifted to thoughts of the movie, National Treasure.

“Of course,” I told him. “That’s Hollywood. They had to make it possible, or the story line wouldn’t have worked.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “I just wanted to point that out. It’s really hard to get in there.”

“I’m sure it is. Think about what’s in there.” I paused to see if he had anything else to add. The silence stretched until I asked, ”Did you finish all the cookies I sent?”

“Oh, I finished those a long time ago… on the bus ride down on Tuesday.”

“Did you share them?”

“I tried.”

“What do you mean, ‘you tried’?” I asked.

“Nobody wanted any,” he stated, as if teenagers don’t get hungry.

I puzzled over this one for a minute. Eighth grade boys and homemade cookies. This didn’t seem right to me. “No one wanted any? Did you offer them one?”

“Well,” he hedged. “I probably could have done better with that.”

“You didn’t offer one to anyone, did you?”

“Yes, I did.” he said.

“And….”

“Well, when I offered one to Jon, he was wearing ear buds.” He paused here before he said, “He didn’t answer.”

“So you ate them all?”

Even in the darkness of the car, I could see the smirk on his face.

Emotions

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I have always been the type of person to cry at things that I find particularly moving, movies mostly—happy, sad, it doesn’t matter. I will cry. When I was pregnant with my children, I was particularly prone to crying at any little thing. I figured it was the hormones.

This past weekend, I was driving my daughter to a sports competition two hours from home. She was in the seat beside me dozing off. Despite her presence in the passenger seat, essentially I was on this drive alone with my thoughts.

Spring has landed with full force here in New England, and the hills are fluffed with an intense range of spring greens—pale green, bright green, pinkish green, yellow green. Even some flowering trees are sprinkled in, as well. As I drove, I was struck by the beauty, and my heart was full; I started tearing up.

Wait, what? I am crying at the vibrant spring greenery on the hillsides? Who cries at that??

Admittedly, it is an emotional time. The previous night, my son went off to the prom, and we are preparing for high school graduation. The emotions that I feel are in some ways exactly what I expected, and in some ways so much more intense than I could have imagined. On any given day, I will cycle from nostalgic to proud mom to happy to sad. I will run through years’ worth of memories all the way through now and to the future.

For now, it seems, I am once again particularly prone to crying. Apparently, those times come and go. This bout will stick with me, at least through the next month. Perhaps, I will keep my sunglasses handy—a good way to hide my tearing eyes—and pray for lots of sunny days so I can wear them without question.

Then again, does anyone really care if I let my emotions show?

Working from Home

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I am just finishing up my work at the job I hold during the school year, and I am shifting to a ramped up schedule in my second job, which consists of online work. It is a hectic time of wrapping up projects in one area and beginning new projects in another.

I enjoy the flexibility of working online during the summer because it allows me to be available for a more relaxed activity schedule and occasional day trips with my kids. I have been working in this position in one capacity or another for the past nine years, so my children were quite young when I started, and they have grown up watching me work from the kitchen table. However, this work is not without its challenges.

Last night, I was in my jammies, one of the perks of online work. I was on a training call with an instructor I will be supervising for the summer. Despite the fact that my children were in and out of the kitchen, preparing for bed and for the following day, the call was going relatively smoothly with few distractions. Over the years, the kids have become more accustomed to these calls that can sometimes stretch onward to two hours, as last night’s call did, and they are quiet (enough).

Midway through the conversation, the cat decided to jump onto a cabinet to make her way onto the refrigerator. Just as her little feet left the floor, my 18 year old coughed, completely throwing the cat off her planned trajectory. She touched the cabinet for only a split second—just long enough to scatter a few items onto the floor. The noise of these items scattering only served to frighten her further, and she bolted from the room. My son burst out laughing, and I could not stifle my own laughter.

Keep in mind, I had never met nor spoken with the woman on the other end of the phone before that conversation. So as not to seem rude, I explained why I was laughing. Meanwhile, her dog began barking for her to play with him.

Ah, the joys (and challenges) of online work. Of course, the flexibility and the pajama factor balance it all out.

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[A photo of the cat in question]

Editorial

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“I don’t know how to write an editorial,” W told me when I arrive home from work one day this week. “And I need to write one for language arts.”

I was rushing around to get dinner started before I had to run out again to pick up J from theater practice. “Why don’t you Google it, look at a couple examples, and I can help you when I get back from picking up your sister?” I acknowledged his statement, though I didn’t completely register what he was saying.

When I returned, he tried again. “I have to write an editorial from the point of view of a character in our book, and it has to be ‘historically accurate.’ Can you help me?”

“What do you need help with?” I asked.

“I don’t know how to write one.”

“Didn’t your teacher go over it in class? She must have given you some examples,” I queried, hoping he would think back to the class and remember what he was supposed to do.

“Not really. She never told us how to do it.”

“I’ll bet she did, but you shut off,” I stated, probably more bluntly than I should have.

“What?” he asked, unsure of my meaning.

“You shut off,” I repeated. “Your teacher was talking about it, and you decided it was information you would never need. So you shut off.” A smirk of recognition crept across his face.

“She never talked about it. She gave us newspapers, but she never said we’d need to know it.” Imagine that!

I stifled a groan, and I hoped he couldn’t hear my eyes rolling….

Surprise Memory

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I was cleaning a drawer today, on a crazed hunt to find matches for the socks that had become separated from their mates months ago. Sometimes, the matches reappear in a future batch of laundry, and the individual socks linger in the drawer, one buried and the other floating near the surface. Once in awhile, I am motivated enough by the mess that results from my daily “stirring” of the drawer’s contents that I take the time to sit and straighten things out.

This morning in my straightening, I came across a pair of socks that I put in the drawer for safe-keeping, a pair that I frequently forget I have saved. It is a pair of teeny tiny baby socks that I received before C was born, 18 or so years ago. Each time I come across them, they catch me by surprise. The socks are so tiny that it’s difficult to believe he actually wore them in his first months. But he did.

Each time I stumble across these socks, I am reminded how quickly time passes. I finger the soft material as I mentally measure the passage of time in the exponential growth of my children. I click through each of their stages, from infancy to now.

I see smiles and a hint of mischief in their eyes, feel the warmth of their tiny hands in mine, remember random moments like how each of them would lick soap off their hands when I washed them after supper. I can hear their little voices, their footsteps, their cries. The socks bring back images and memories of so many of the things that have happened in our lives: the funny things they said and did, the experiences we had, the life struggles we faced. All of these things we did together.

Each new rediscovery of these socks is a gift. I find the socks, Itake a walk down memory lane, and then I place them back in the drawer where I can find them again in a month, a year, or two. Perhaps when I discover these socks again in six months or a year, when C is off at college, the walk down memory lane will be even more bittersweet.

 

[Image is a photo of the socks in the hand of the child who once wore them.]

Teens and Hints of Adulthood

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Twice in the past week, I have heard about a teen who has been kicked out of his or her home at 16 or 17 years old, essentially (in the parents’ mind) “aging out” of the need to be sheltered, nurtured, and—no doubt—financed. In one case, the individual came home from school on his sixteenth birthday to find his belongings outside the house, the locks changed, and a note on the door saying, “You’re 16. Get your own d**n place.” Happy birthday. In the other case, the mother decided she needed space for her newest project, so she told her daughter, “You need to leave as soon as possible.”

In both cases, the understandable response of the teen in question was to cry. No doubt, these tears originated from an array of emotions: grief for the loss of a “parent,” sadness and self-doubt at the depth of such rejection, fear and anxiety over the completely overwhelming thoughts involved in, what happens next? And in both cases, even though I do not know either of these individuals, my heart breaks for the young adults who are not yet ready to fly, but are being pushed out of the nest.

I have worked with teenagers for thirty years [which definitely makes me sound old…]. I have worked with teens in classrooms, in dormitories, on the playing field; I have worked with teens in large groups, small groups, and one-on-one. I have been a teacher, a coach, an advisor, a dorm parent, and a parent. From my [somewhat extensive] experience, I will say, it is a rare kid who—at 16, 17, or even 18—is ready to be self-sufficient. It is an even rarer kid who can pick him or herself up from such devastating total parental rejection and move forward unscathed.

As I look at my children, I can see the hints of adulthood emerging from their more-adult-than-child physical selves. I see responsibility coming through in more areas of their lives each day. I see them beginning to take the lead in situations in which they might have been followers in the past. I see glimpses of the adults they are becoming.

But their “formative years” are not over just because they are teens or they reach the age of majority. As they begin to navigate some of the biggest decisions of their lives to date, the groundwork may have been laid early in their lives, but the direction, the guidance… these things are such an important part of the parenting process. Guidance in these big decisions will help my children to learn to be better decision makers as they proceed through their lives. My willingness to be available as a shoulder, an ear, a sounding board will help my teens to grow their self-confidence and learn how to consider all sides of an issue. And it will let them know that they are not alone. If they stumble, I will be here as a safety net.

Leave my kids to their own devices and kick them out of the house? No friends, my job here is far from done. I only hope there is someone to pick up the pieces left by the parents who are done.

 

[Image is a picture drawn by my daughter and used with her gracious permission.]

Lyme Awareness #1

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I recently learned that May is Lyme Disease awareness month. Most likely, May was chosen because this is the month when nymph ticks are most active—from May to July. And because nymph ticks are so very tiny, they are extremely hard to detect….

I was feeling pretty good the day I was diagnosed with Lyme disease. I was tired, but I had been traveling with my daughter. Under the circumstances, that was normal fatigue, right? Then again, as a single mother, I am not sure I have any idea what “normal fatigue” is since I seldom get more than five or six hours of sleep at night. I scheduled a visit with the doctor because I had a strange rash—large blotches covered my torso and had begun to spread down my left arm.

I had first noticed the blotches in the hotel bathroom mirror.  The first day, I had a couple of spots. Strange, I thought, examining what appeared to be a welt with an odd grayish color at the center. I touched it. It didn’t itch, and there was no pain. Huh, I pulled on my pajama top, dismissing the spot from my mind, as if covering it up would make it go away.

The next morning, the spot had faded (though it hadn’t disappeared), and I dressed quickly to get to our morning commitment. We were attending an athletic competition that kept us busy and away from the hotel for the majority of the day. We also spent long hours sitting around—in stadium seats and on the floor of the field house.

Back at the hotel at the end of a long day, I stumbled into the bathroom, exhausted. As I lifted my shirt, I caught my reflection in the mirror. My heart skipped a beat. The two spots had multiplied, and now covered my torso in angry pink and grey blobs that wound across my side and on to my back. The sight was startling. I took a deep breath and tried to compose myself as I dressed. My brain was reeling while I consciously tried to calm myself enough to go back into the room without alerting my daughter to anything unusual. Funny how deep-rooted our mom instincts are.

It’s nothing, I told myself.  I probably picked up some nasty fungus or something from the field house floor or the hotel or….  I breathed slowly, deliberately. My thoughts were convincing enough that by the time I was ready for bed, my mind had moved on to other things.

The spots remained through the following day, Thursday, and when I finally arrived home on Friday, I was able to schedule an appointment with the doctor for that afternoon. By this point, I had convinced myself that it was something I had picked up from one of the many unclean surfaces I had come in contact with on my trip.

The doctor took one look and immediately said, “That’s Lyme.” I was shocked. But then again… Suddenly, all the other symptoms I had been experiencing over the previous months came together. A series of odd, unexplained viruses? Not at all. One diagnosis and everything made sense.

I consider myself lucky that I had that rash. I was lucky that I didn’t brush it off as nothing and wait for it to go away on its own. I very well may have contracted Lyme in my house from a tick that hitched a ride on my cat. But I was lucky. I am lucky.

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Zigs and Zags #atozchallenge

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Recently, I departed my parents’ home to drive to a college visit with my daughter. The road was circuitous, winding through small towns, farmland, and valleys on its way to our destination. This trip was one that I had taken many times throughout my youth and college career, though I had not traveled the road in decades.

As we zigged and zagged along, J dozed in the seat next to me. While I was confident in our journey, the landmarks had changed over the years of my absence, and buildings existed in new forms along the route. I was hit with an occasional twinge of uncertainty.

It suddenly struck me just how deeply my children trust me. When my daughter gets in the car with me, she assumes that I know where I am going. Despite the zigs and zags of our path, she is right there, believing in my ability to get us from point A to point B safely.

Fostering and maintaining such a deep and abiding trust is a huge responsibility. I hope I never lose the trust of my children as we travel life’s zigs and zags together.