Tag: parenting

Forbidden

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I have all manner of items—ranging from helpful to slightly odd—stuck to my refrigerator with magnets. I have magnets with helpful information—the non-emergency number for the local fire department, the hours for the dump, my plumber’s contact information. I have photos of my kids when they were much younger, the rehearsal schedule for the high school theater department, information for an upcoming summer camp job, a small calendar, and various magnets and magnetic clips.

Some things have been on my refrigerator for so long that they have become invisible to me. For example, one day last week, I suddenly noticed I still had a 2017 full year calendar stuck on the refrigerator. It had obviously arrived as a Christmas card in 2016, and it hadn’t been moved since. Until last week when I re-noticed it.

But the most unusual item on my fridge—depending on your perspective—was brought to my attention over the weekend. C was home from college for spring break, and while he was waiting for his bagel to toast, he was studying the items on the fridge. I had gone to the basement to get something, and when I returned, he said, “Hey Mom?”

“Yeah?” I responded.

“What’s this note on the fridge with the phone number that says ‘Do Not Call’?”

I burst out laughing because something that seemed so harmless to me suddenly took on a much more ominous and taunting quality. A post-it note with a phone number that we were not to call. Perhaps I was provoking my kids to see if they would take the bait and call this forbidden phone number.

Really, that was not it at all. I had been at work one day when I received one too many robo-calls on my cell phone. I contacted my carrier, and they gave me the number for the national “do not call” list. I had called, but now my kids needed to call from their own numbers. I had scrawled the number on this paper, and carefully labeled it, so I wouldn’t forget, and then, I stuck it on the fridge, so it wouldn’t get lost.

But my son’s interpretation of this note has given me an idea. If you suddenly find a note like this around your house, it’s probably not the national “do not call” registry, so I would suggest you not call it. Just don’t ask me where the note came from….

The Middle of the Night

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Many years ago, when my children were very little, I was in a writing group. This was a group of women who met every Wednesday to write. Unlike many writing groups, we did not meet primarily to critique each other’s writing. We spent much of our time actually writing with the option of sharing our work at various points in our session.

This blissful few hours each Wednesday night was an oasis from the trenches of early parenthood and my early days as a single mom. During this time, there were no diapers, no schedules, and no crying babies. It was me, this group of women, and our pens and notebooks.

When I was void of ideas, I would often start my freewriting with, “It is two o’clock in the morning, and I am….” I found this starting point could lead me in a variety of directions and was often all I needed to jump-start my writing brain. Because I am usually not awake at two a.m., crazy things would often happen on the page—a meandering sort of writing that could lead anywhere.

One memorable piece started with “It is two o’clock in the morning, and I am weeding the garden.” In the piece, I was weeding hastily, taking out the day’s frustrations on my garden. And in my haste—and the dark and the furious pace at which I was working—I accidentally pulled up something that was not a weed, but was a thing of beauty. It was, at the time, a reminder that beauty was all around me and I needed to take the time to appreciate it.

These days, there is a bit of a wrinkle to the middle-of-the-night writing prompt. The wrinkle is that I live with teenagers, and on any given night, I could write about what is actually happening in my house in the middle of the night.

It is two o’clock in the morning, and from the comfort of my bed, I hear the refrigerator close and the microwave open. It must be snack time. Either that, or all of the food in the house is being sucked into the black hole that exists just beyond the microwave’s false back. It is amazing how much food seems to disappear in the middle of the night….

And I can continue to write, documenting more of my night. Four thirty in the morning, and someone is stirring. A light comes on, and a teen is up, preparing to catch a bus scheduled for 5:30. As the heat clicks on and the wind howls just beyond my window, I remember the child out camping in the woods tonight, and I shiver.

I am usually not awake in the middle of the night, but crazy things often happen in my house—a messy sort of meandering night that is always a possibility when there are multiple teens and young adults residing in the house.

Positivity Post: Snow

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Lately, we have been walking the line between seasons. The temperatures have been rising a bit, the ground has been bare, the birds are more vocal, and it has been feeling a bit like spring. Until last night when a storm blew in. This morning, we awoke to a foot and a half of snow and no school—a late season snow day when I was done with snow days. Mother Nature had other plans.

It is March, after all. After I had my daughter in early March, I began to realize how snowy this month can be. Countless birthday parties were cancelled, postponed, or spontaneously re-created because of weather—so many, in fact, that it was the topic of her college essay. But snow—even when we thought we were heading into spring—is really just a bump in the road.

For example, this time of year, with the longer days and the warmer temperatures, the snow will melt in no time! The melt of a foot and a half of heavy, wet snow will raise our water supply, decreasing the likelihood of drought conditions in the summer.

So today, I enjoyed the snow. This morning, I got some extra exercise as I removed the snow from my car then shoveled around and under my car—a necessity if I wanted to move out of my parking place. Late in the day, I went out with my daughter and took a few pictures of the snow. My focus was on bits of snow clinging to individual branches and the manner in which the white background made the details more vivid.

    

In between, I did some snow-day baking. Homemade bagels—an experiment that I will definitely improve upon. They don’t look so pretty, but they are delicious! I also made some chocolate orange biscotti. This was made from a recipe that I discovered years ago, but haven’t made since. For some unknown reason, today was the day. The biscotti is just as good as I remember!

         

March… it really does come in like a lion. Two nor’easters so far this month with another promised for next week. After that, maybe we’ll see a restart to spring. And maybe this time, spring will stick!

The College Experience

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Over the weekend, I was walking through the streets of New York City with a woman who had been a stranger up until the walk had begun. We had been thrown together by our daughters, who had gathered for a meeting with a group of their soon to be college classmates.

As this woman and I walked, we talked about the typical things that mothers of teenagers talk about. We started with college and choosing the right school; we talked of letting go and stepping up. We discussed work and children and the challenges and rewards of each different child. Our conversation even wandered to the care of aging parents.

Somewhere in the middle of our conversation, when I mentioned that I, too, had attended the college our daughters would attend, she asked me, point blank, if my college experience had been a good one.

I paused and took a deep breath as I gathered my thoughts. College was an experience. I had been young, as most students are, and struggling to find my way. It was not the best of times for me. “Well,” I started. “It was college. And as we gather life experience, we learn that in any situation, there will be good times and bad times.”

I went on to explain that for the most part, college was a good experience, but there were some tough times and some moments of incredible growth. I was a perfectionist. I took a tough load of courses and I demanded the best work from myself. College—like life, I suppose—is tough, but when you are eighteen, you don’t yet have the life experience to know that this is the case. You have high expectations, and you don’t think it’s possible to be on a campus with so many age-peers and yet, experience loneliness. There are things that all college students should know before they leave home. Here are just a few:

College is not the best four years of your life. I know you’ve probably heard this, but if it were the best four years, why would people keep working and striving? The best part of your life comes much later, when you’ve figured out who you are and what you are about. It takes awhile to get there. Be patient and enjoy the ride.

Don’t be so hard on yourself. Just because you have gotten into your first choice college (or your second or third choice…), and most of the time you might be happy about that, there will be times that are incredibly sad or difficult or challenging. That’s the way life is, and these years prepare you to face the sad/difficult/challenging times later on. The campus environment can’t protect you from the challenges, but it does provide a good support network to find help if you need it.

Give yourself time. You are living away from home for the first time. You will need time to transition to your new life, adjust to your new surroundings, and familiarize yourself with your new schedule—just as you would in any new situation. Don’t make a snap judgment and go home after your first—or fifth—night on campus. If you find you are homesick, make a commitment to try one new thing each day—even if it is just to take a different route to class.

Power through. It’s not always easy to keep going when things happen or when life rears its ugly head and wants to take you down. But as with any situation, you have to keep moving in a forward direction. Eventually, generally sooner than you think, you will find yourself back on course, and you will be happy you kept moving.

Take advantage of all that you have available. College campuses have a wealth of resources available to students. There are professors with a vast array of knowledge. There are classes in many varied disciplines. If you think you want to try out a course in a new subject area, do it. You will also have activities and lectures and events available to you. Choose wisely, but take advantage of what is offered. If something looks good, check it out. Who knows when you may have another chance like this?

Surround yourself with people who energize you. It is a fact that spending time with people you are fond of will help you adjust to the newness of your surroundings. It will make you feel connected, and it will give you a network to fall back on, and you will have a chance to raise others up, as well.

Most importantly, enjoy! While you are studying hard and involving yourself in all that your college campus has to offer, don’t forget to enjoy the moment. Take a minute to toss a Frisbee with a friend, grab a coffee on the way to class, or take a P. E. class so you can fit in some exercise. You will be glad you did!

What if…?

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I am a worst-case scenario kind of girl. You know all those things we spend time worrying about? I can worry with the best of them.

In fact, my worrying started when I was just a tot. We would take a weekend drive in my father’s jeep out into the country and onto back roads that time forgot. They were rutted dirt roads that wound through the woods, over hills, and along streams. To my eyes, they were little more than hiking trails. I would often pipe up from the back seat, “Where are we gonna turn around, Daddy?” My tiny little worried mind couldn’t see how we could ever get back home.

But we always did.

If I let my imagination run wild, it can create situations that even the best imaginations would pass up as impossible. Not for me. Everything is worth worrying about because what if [insert worst-case scenario here] happens?

But what if it doesn’t?

What if I just stopped worrying? What if I recognized that many things are out of my control and worrying only makes me anxious, stressed, and robs me of the ability to enjoy where I am and what I am doing. Right. Now. What if I just stopped, took a breath, and let all the worry go? What if…?

If I were to stop worrying needlessly about things I can’t control, I would be able to enjoy the present moment. I could think more fully about the here and now. I could be present in and part of my own life. I could be a better role model for my children. What if I stopped worrying and was willing to let it go?

What if…?

Time for Action

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Dear Elected Officials,

Today is Ash Wednesday in the Christian calendar and also Valentine’s Day. It is a day to celebrate renewal, rebirth, and love. The perfect confluence of holiday and holy day.

And yet, here we are, once again shocked and bewildered by a mass shooting in a U.S. high school. We are listening to horrific accounts of students scattering to escape gunfire; hearing parents’ fear as they talk of receiving panicked texts from their children; watching the post-shooting press conferences as law enforcement officials talk of casualties. Here we are. Again.

And there you are, sitting on the floor of the House and the Senate, collecting your donations from corporations and organizations promoting their agendas. Lining your pockets with blood money. Living out your days of public service in affluence at the expense of our most vulnerable—our children—while you refuse to consider that the real problem with our county might just be a government that is sponsored by corporate interests.

Senator Chris Murphy stood on the floor of the senate, visibly shaken by the most recent news, and delivered a brief message before he moved on to business. He said you are all responsible, but then he ended with the statement, “We will hope for the best.” What?

Seventeen more lives lost, and you are going to “hope for the best”? Seventeen young people who will not make their contributions to the world. Seventeen what ifs. These were young people with their entire lives ahead of them, young people with great promise. They were everything to their families, just as your children are everything to yours.

Perhaps one of these students was to be the  brilliant mind to find a cure for the very cancer that could now take the life of your grandchild. Another of the victims would promote an innovative and workable idea to create lasting peace in the most intensely war torn regions of the world. One could have developed a system to recycle and purify the Earth’s dwindling water supply. And another would figure out a way to reverse brain damage.

We will never know what might have been. We will never see what these young people might have contributed to our society. Because they didn’t make it to their high school graduation.

Yes, Mr. Murphy, you and your colleagues are responsible. You cannot “hope for the best” while you sit on the senate floor and do nothing. In this case, “hope” is not an action verb. “Hope for the best” all you want, Mr. Murphy, but hope without action is for cowards.

It’s time, Senators and Congressmen, to take on the work of the people who elected you to office. It’s time to protect the right to life of the children already born. Risk the disdain of those around you and take some action. If you step out of your comfort zone and do rather than hope, you might just change the trajectory of our society.

{photo used with permission of my talented daughter}

Bread

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My daughter was recently telling me about an experience she had at school. Her English teacher was talking about his experiences when he was younger. He told the students that there was a time when people started to realize that bread was not good for them, and bread companies almost went out of business.

“Can you imagine if that had happened?” he asked them. “There would be no bread anymore.”

“What do you mean there wouldn’t be any bread?” my daughter responded. “People would just bake their own bread.” Because that’s a simple solution.

But then she realized that her classmates were looking at her as if vines were growing out of her head and traveling down her back. “No one bakes bread,” they told her definitively.

At that point, I imagine she shrugged, puzzled, and went about her business. She turned to a friend and quietly said, “My mom bakes bread all the time….”

That afternoon, as she told me the story, I could only chuckle. “I have to agree with your classmates. No one bakes bread anymore.”

This was one of those moments when my daughter realized that even though she might think our family is completely normal, maybe it’s not. And it was a moment for me to recognize that my kids might be a bit sheltered.

So what if my kids live a sheltered life? If “normal” means we don’t eat home-baked bread, I’d rather not be normal!

 

Painfully Obvious

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Yesterday morning, I awoke from an odd and somewhat unsettling dream. At first, I wasn’t really aware of what was unsettling, only that something wasn’t right. The dream was one in which I was interacting with people—one, a friend from childhood who I hadn’t seen recently, and the other, a woman I knew of but had never met.

I was sitting between the two of them. The woman to my right was wearing a bright sweater—striped in bold blues, yellow, and teal—and I noted that it was knit from the same yarn I had used to make a scarf. This fact intrigued me, and I got stuck on the bold colors and the coincidence. I listened as she talked, and I responded, but through our conversation, I never looked directly at her. Somehow, I just knew who she was.

As I looked back on the dream, I realized that I was unable to look at either of these two people, unable to see their faces. It wasn’t that they didn’t have faces in my dream. It was that I couldn’t look at their faces. This one small but important fact made the dream very unsettling.

As I moved through my day trying to process this strange dream, I came across an article in the New York Times that discussed Smartphone addiction and its effects on us and on our children. Sherry Turkle, a social scientist, “found that children now compete with their parents’ devices for attention, resulting in a generation afraid of the spontaneity of a phone call or face-to-face interaction. Eye contact now seems to be optional” (Popescu). If we are not making eye contact, if we are not looking at the people we are interacting with, we are not fully experiencing the moment, the conversation, the relationship.

And this article brought me back to my dream. No doubt, the dream emerged from the stress of adjusting to the hectic schedule of a new teaching assignment added to my other responsibilities. The need to juggle so many different pieces often takes away from my ability to be in the moment, experiencing interactions and relationships as fully as I might. This juggling ties me to my computer and keeps me connected to technology.

If we pay attention, our dreams can tell us things we didn’t already know, but sometimes they hit us over the head with the painfully obvious. The other night, I had one of those dreams and I woke up confused, but as the day wore on, I began to see how this dream fit into my life and the message I needed to gain from it.

I am a creature of habit. I do things because they work in some important way. Or maybe because they have worked at some point in the past, in some other iteration of my life. Perhaps, if I were to really examine what I have been doing, these things might not be addressing my current needs. They might not be feeding my soul. Maybe it’s time to reevaluate and restructure in important ways that will permit me to grow with the changes in my life.

And maybe it’s time we all recognize that by not interacting with others—over dinner, over the phone, standing in line, etc.—we are doing our children a disservice. It is up to us to teach them how to interact with us, with each other, and with the strangers they will encounter on a daily basis. Perhaps it’s time we recognize that technological connection is minimal and human connection… it’s everything.

Wrecked

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Over the past month, I’ve taken to watching an occasional cheesy, feel-good movie on a certain well-known television channel. While I don’t spend a lot of time watching tv, every now and then, I turn on this channel just to get my “fix” with one of their very predictable movies.

Christmas is a good time to tune in because they have a number of good holiday movies, and they repeat them often enough that if you miss a good part, you can catch up the next day.

Needless to say, when my kids came home from Christmas with their father, I had been watching these movies, and I continued to watch when they were home. Initially, the kids would pick on me—and on the movies—relentlessly. But then my daughter warmed up. Even though she still had lots of complaints about the acting, the predictable story lines, the staged settings, etc., she could see some of the good points, as well. Perhaps she even liked the feel-good ending of all these movies….

The other night, as she and I watched a new movie, W began to comment on all of the problems he noticed.

“That’s some great acting there,” he commented in a tone that dripped with sarcasm.

“We don’t expect great acting,” I informed him. “Just a cheesy, feel-good movie.”

“I bet I can tell you how it’s gonna end,” he continued.

“So can I,” I replied. “That woman right there,” I pointed to the screen, “Is going to end up with the guy in that last scene. And… I knew that in the first five minutes of the movie.”

“You know,” he ventured. “I think I’m going to start a new channel. My channel will entertain viewers with movies where nothing turns out right and nothing ends up all nice and tidy. The guy and the girl will never get together.”

“You’re not likely to get many people to watch,” I informed him, though in the back of my mind, I considered whether this was true.

“They’d all be first time watchers,” he informed me. “They would think they were getting a movie with a nice, happy ending, but nothing would turn out well in the end.”

“And they’d all be so shocked by the ending, no one would watch a second time,” I informed him. However, I later realized that people might watch again just because they wouldn’t believe that all the movies would end badly. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized there might just be a niche market for this type of programming.

Creating these movies might not be a good strategy to reel in the viewers like me, but train wreck tv is a thing. It’s generally a reality tv thing, but who’s to say these same viewers might not want to watch a movie every now and then? I think he might be on to something.

Positivity Post: Presents

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As if I don’t have enough trouble keeping track of the things I own with teenagers around the house, I have this cat. And the interesting thing about this cat is that she is quite a quiet little love by day. By night, however, she turns into a fearsome hunter of the most amazing objects. And as she is “hunting,” she likes to announce (with a shockingly loud meow) to everyone in the house that she has found something worth sharing.

Her favorite nighttime “prey” used to be anything in a plastic sandwich bag, and generally, the heavier, the better. For a while, she would carry a bag of mosaic tiles from the basement to the second floor each evening. Each morning, I would find the tiles on the floor and carry them back to the basement where they belonged. One very special night, she brought me “breakfast in bed,” a banana muffin in a bag that she retrieved from the kitchen counter.

Recently, she has a new favorite. She has discovered a paint brush which was never used, but clearly, I thought about using it for a project one day. I left it somewhere readily available to her, and she now looks for it each night. She carries it to the bedroom of one of the kids and leaves it—sometimes on the floor, sometimes in their beds…. The kids think it’s funny… and cute.

So now, when I say to them, “Has anyone seen my…?” I fully expect to hear them respond, “Who knows, Mom? Maybe the cat took it!”