Tag: parenting

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.

Re-naming

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Earlier this week, I renamed our cats. Because I’m crazy like that. They are, after all, CATS, and they don’t really care what we CALL them, as long as we feed them regularly and let them sleep on the beds. In fact, they’d be happiest if they OWNED the beds.

While I cooked dinner, the cats were swarming at my feet, their way of reminding me that they need dinner too, and I had a burst of whimsical inspiration I decided that the cats should all be named after characters from Shakespeare. I re-named them Puck, Lady Macbeth, and Desdemona.

“Who is Puck?” C asked when I announced the cats’ new names.

“He is a character from Midsummer Night’s Dream. A sprite.”

“And what play is Desdemona from?” he asked.

“Hmm… let me think.” Shakespeare’s female characters all blend in my brain while I try to sort them out—Ophelia, Portia, Desdemona, Regan, Miranda…. They are like bright colors swirling in the white paint of my brain. Desdemona is from….

But C was impatient, so he Googled it. “Othello. Desdemona is in Othello!”

“That’s right! I should have known that right away. One of my students was working on a paper for Othello a month or so ago.”

While I do think Desdemona is a very fitting name for my young lady kitten, the cat names… they were never meant to be serious. Perhaps we might keep it as a secondary name. The brief foray into renaming did accomplish a short discussion of Shakespeare, which is never a bad thing.

C is continuing to call the cats by their “new” names, and every time he does, I smile. My literary cats.

Just wait until I bring them to the vet. When Lady Macbeth (formerly Asia) shows up, won’t they be confused? Oh, I think I could have some fun with this….

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?

Roadblocks

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Last week, my son was chosen to attend a conference at a local university. While he was happy to be chosen and excited about attending the conference (and missing school), this was the first time that he would have to navigate an unknown route on his own.

His concern began the week before. “I need to know how to get to the university,” he told me. (My children do not have smart phones or a GPS. We rely on old fashioned maps in our house. Actually, that’s not completely true. Mapquest is my navigation system of choice in most instances).

“I can tell you how to get there,” I told him. “Or you can look it up.”

“How do I do that?” he asked, triggering a twang of annoyance in my head. I cannot even begin to tell you how much this question irks me.

“Really?” I responded. “You can spend hours on the Internet, and you don’t know how to find directions?” I sighed as I realized he has not needed directions before now. I had a brief memory of my father’s irritation with me when, at 18, I didn’t know my way to a venue over an hour from our home. It was a place we visited every summer, but the drive through farmland, over twisty back roads always induced an intense case of day-dreamy-ness in me. Because I wasn’t driving, I didn’t have to pay attention to the route. “I’ll help you find the directions, but I’m not going to do it for you. It’ll be a good exercise.” And that was the end of the discussion and the immediate effort, but not of his worries.

The day before the event, he once again expressed his concern that he did not know the way. “I’ll Google it and show you,” I told him, but I had a scheduled meeting, and he didn’t want to move from the activity of the moment. So I closed my computer and left for my meeting.

When I returned, he was packing up his gear for the next day. “Can you help me with the directions?” He looked up and smiled a sheepish smile.

“I tried to show you before I left. Go pull it up on the computer, and I’ll go over it with you.” And so it was that he was finally able to get directions. We scanned the map together, and I pointed out the route, the trouble spots, and gave him tips for navigating the morning rush hour traffic. He printed out the directions and a map of the area, tucking them into the bag he would bring with him.

The next morning, he left on schedule. He had allowed twice the time it would take for the drive. Fifteen minutes after he left, my phone rang. It was him. “What’s up?” I answered.

“So… River Road is closed.”

“What do you mean ‘closed’? Is there a detour?”

“I don’t think so. There’s just a barricade and a guy telling people not to go that way.”

“Where are you now?” I asked him as I sat down at my computer. “Give me a minute to bring up a map.”

“I’m pulled over on the side of the road.” He paused. “From the map, it looks like I can get there if I take School Street all the way out.”

I surveyed the map on my screen. “I think that will work,” I told him. “Can you get to School Street from where you are?”

“I should be able to. There are several roads that lead over there.” He hung up, and in another fifteen minutes, he sent me a text to let me know that he had reached his destination.

He thought he was prepared for the day when he left home, but there are things we don’t plan for on our journey. Sometimes, unexpected things come up—detours, roadblocks, wrong turns. All we can do is prepare the best we possibly can and be flexible. Because he had printed out the map and tucked it into his bag, he was able to recalculate his route and make it to his destination with time to spare.

Mistakes

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Writing 101, Day 13: Play with word count….

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This evening, in an effort to get to bed earlier, I made the mistake of asking my children to start their own lunches for tomorrow. If they don’t have time to eat the lunches I make, they will definitely not have time to eat the lunches they made.

It was an experiment that became the mistake I am not likely to repeat….

Snacks (2)

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It is a rare occasion when I arrive home from work and have both the time and the motivation to make a real meal for dinner. I am good at whipping up something quick—spaghetti, chicken parmesan, tacos, etc. But making a full, more complicated dinner takes time and energy that I don’t usually have when I get home from work.

So last week, I planned ahead. I made pasta salad on Sunday for a potluck, and I doubled the recipe so we could have it for dinner on Monday, the most hectic day of our week. Pasta salad, ham, and broccoli—a simple, quick dinner.

As we sat down to eat, C looked at the food. “This is what I had for lunch.”

“This is what I had for a snack,” J piped up.

“You had this for a snack?” I asked. Then I looked at C. “I packed you a sandwich for lunch,” I responded. “You didn’t have pasta salad.”

“Yes I did,” he retorted. “You packed me a snack. I eat lunch when I get home from school.”

“What?” I studied his face. He was serious. “Wait… you eat a full meal when you get home from school?”

“Yeah, Mom. We eat so early at school, that’s just my snack. I eat lunch when I get home.”

“Every day?” I asked him.

“Yeah, pretty much.”

Well, that might explain where all the food has been disappearing to….

Writing Space

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Written in response to Writing 101, Day 6: The space to write….

My children were very young when I became a single mother—my youngest was 14 months old—but I have never stopped writing. I have “paused” every now and again when life becomes overwhelming, but I have written, at least a bit, through each stage of their lives. Because I also took on an online teaching position, I became accustomed to working with much distraction.

When the children were young, I would work and write while they played—sometimes in the other room, and sometimes right near me. Often, the children would have their various craft projects or drawings-in-progress splayed across the kitchen table; I would squeeze myself in, claiming a tiny little spot of table real estate, just big enough for my laptop. Crayons, markers, clay, googly eyes and cast-off drawings inched nearer with every movement they made. When they were quietly engaged in their own activities, I could write without a problem. However, I developed tactics to deal with noise and distraction.

On one particularly memorable day, I was sitting at the kitchen table working, and W was sitting across from me, bent over some project or another. He might have been about eight at the time. The other two were in the living room, and they were not being quiet, by any stretch of the imagination. I was working, but to keep my focus, I was dictating to myself as I typed.

I saw W look up from his project, so I watched him as I typed. He looked at me, cocked his head and narrowed his eyes as he studied me, pondering what to say. I stared back without pausing in my typing or my dictating. “Mum, can you type silently?” he asked me.

I raised my eyebrows in question and halted my dictation and hence, my typing. “Do you hear your brother and sister?” As if on cue, one of them squealed, and they both giggled. W nodded. “That is why I can’t type silently.” He held my gaze for a long moment before he sighed and turned back to his work.

Since then, I always try to type silently. But sometimes, when the distractions are just too much to handle, I have to type out loud.

Social Media

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This post was written for Writing 101, Day 5: Respond to a quote…

“Just as we teach our children how to ride a bike, we need to teach them how to navigate social media and make the right moves that will help them. The physical world is similar to the virtual world in many cases. It’s about being aware. We can prevent many debacles if we’re educated.”     —Amy Jo Martin

 

The great thing about social media is that it is (for the most part) public. We can see what others are posting, saying, doing, thinking. Social media allows us to navigate a different world—to create a persona, if you will, of how we see ourselves or would like to be seen. Because it is so public, it provides great lessons for parents who are willing to trot out their ‘friends’ as examples, both good and bad.

A few years back, a young acquaintance of ours made an impulsive tweet in a moment of adolescent thoughtlessness. Hundreds of miles away, his tweet was picked up by people paid by our federal government to monitor such things, and he ended up squarely in the center of their radar. By the time he arrived at his first class of the school day, the local police were there to meet him. His parents were called, and ultimately, he was asked to quietly withdraw himself from the school—a private institution—and finish his senior year elsewhere.

What parent wouldn’t use this incident as an example for his or her children? Granted, this is an extreme example, but nothing that ends up on the Internet is private. Or unmonitored. Or irretrievable. If SnapChat postings actually did “disappear,” the terms and conditions wouldn’t ask users to agree to allow them to store all posts forever. But who reads the terms and conditions, right?

Every now and then, I see things on the Facebook sites or blog posts of the adult crowd. “I don’t think she should have shared that,” I grumble to my children. “Her children might not be on Facebook, but their friends and their friends’ parents are….” I wonder sometimes if people consider the ramifications of the things they post.

As C prepares for college, he is going out into a different world—his own world, away my watchful eye, where he has to make his own decisions and create his own identity and purpose. What I don’t want is for him to suddenly find that his Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, or whatever are under scrutiny and not be prepared for that. This is the world in which we live, Friends. If you are putting yourself on the Internet for people to see, you very well may fall under scrutiny. That scrutiny may mean that you are held as an example within the private world of your “friends,” or it may have much bigger implications.

This lesson is one that each of us—teen or adult—will benefit from keeping in the forefront of our minds as we venture ever further into the virtual world.