Always a Mom

Growing up we had pets. At times we had way too many cats for our small apartment. But that was a temporary situation. When I met my husband it did not take me long to realize that he was Dr. Doolittle. Life with him would always be full of animals. It was one of those things that at first was strangely exciting. He came with a dog. I had never really had a dog. He came with a bird. I definitely had never had one of those. He came with many fish. These were expensive fish, not like the goldfish I had as a child. My nurturing nature often kicked in and I found myself caring for these pets. At first for some of the animals the unspoken agreement was that they were my husband’s responsibility. He brought them into the relationship. Our home grew from one dog to two very quickly. Somehow they became “our kids.” The bird became birds, but that is entirely different story. The number of fish tanks increased. I began pushing the limits of what I provided in the way of pet care. Once we had human children the number of pets grew. My husband found a coy way of getting new pets. He would smile and say “but the kids want it.” Before I could even give him a disapproving stare there was yet another pet to care for. Picture your child looking at you with those puppy dog eyes ( no pun intended). I was promised by all family members that there would be no more work for me. The child that wanted the pet would care for it. Somehow that is not how it ever works out. Yesterday, I had a pet experience that made realize how far this has gone. My children have leopard Geckos. They live in my daughter’s room. They were purchased while I was out of town of course. But the story was the same “Don’t worry Mom we will take care of them.” Pinky the Gecko has not been feeling well. My husband got concerned and said that it was time for vet trip. Of course this is not a trip to our regular vet. We have to take this little Gecko to a specialty vet. This vet that specializes in exotics is located over an hour away. My husband could not take the Gecko and my children can’t drive nor were they up for accompanying me. That is right…. I ended up taking this little creature to the vet. As I listened to what the vet was telling me my inner voices were bickering. On one side I unconditionally care about this little animal and was trying to take in everything I needed to know to care for her. On the other side I was giggling and thinking once again here I am. I am always the Mom, the one who cares for the sick. This two hour tour cost me over two hundred dollars. I amazed myself in how easily the credit card came out of my wallet to pay the bill. The irony in this little tale is that I am never the one who wants the pet but I am often the bad guy who has to be the voice of reason and refuses to get one more animal. However, I am often running the pets where they need to go, caring for them and “helping” a child clean up after one. As much as they wanted the pet they did not really want to clean up after it. Somehow my mom instincts really do extend past my human children.

The Soccer Mom Saga

“The goalkeeper is the jewel in the crown and getting at him should be almost impossible. It's the biggest sin in football to make him do any work.” -- George Graham

My husband, who is a former goalie, has said before that being a goalie is like being alone on a desert island. He goes on to explain, you are the player that looks different than the others, your strategy and skills are different. Most of all when you miss a save and that ball hits the back of the net that is the play the fans gasp at. Both my son and daughter have chosen to follow in their Dad’s footsteps on the field. My son plays only goalie. My daughter still plays in the field for part of the game.

After a rather tense game this weekend I commented to my Son that being the parent of a goalie is also like being on your own desert island. He laughed and asked what I meant. I am the mom that sits a bit away from the other parents. That is often by choice. It is difficult to hear other people commenting on my son’s play. Again, I go back to when the goalie misses the save everyone is a critic! I can see the disappointment on my Son’s face. He is very passionate about the game and takes being a goalie very seriously. He carries the weight of the world on his shoulders each and every time he steps into the goal. Soccer is a contact sport. I know that. I also know that every kid on the field can get injured. However, I believe that incidents of goalie injuries might be the highest. So with every game I hope that when my son tries with all his might to keep that ball out of his box that some stray kick will not take his teeth out. Soccer parenting 101 is very clear about your role. You are to remain on the side lines and the coach will attend to your child when he or she is injured. I abide by that rule but there are times that my momma instinct kicks in and it takes everything in my being not run out on that field. To date I have watched my son get kicked so hard in the chest that he has had trouble breathing. I have seen cleats hit his face. I have seen two players fall over him and step on his head. Each and every time he gets up and goes back into the goal. Each and every time, my heart skips a beat as I wait for the end of the game. The more competitive the play the more my stomach does flips. I do not make a scene. I am not even sure I make a sound but the other moms see it on my face.

I know that we are all in this for the long hall. So I guess I better start working on Zen meditation or something. Remember every player on that field is someone’s child. Soccer is a team sport, that ball got through all those players before it hit the goalie.

Graduating Class of When?

I think I have been in shock since the day my eighth grader brought home something called a four-year plan. At some point I heard him saying; blah, blah AP classes, blah blah need to graduate, blah blah COLLEGE, blah blah HARVARD! Wait did he just say college and then say Harvard?

Later when I had my wits about me, I asked about the Harvard thing. I was thankful to hear that he was using that as an example. My wallet sighed with relief.
It is mid-February and he has registered for classes for freshman year of high school. I do not think a week goes by that I do not say to someone: "You know David starts high school in the fall." I think somewhere deep down inside I think if I say it enough it will sink in. Last week as my son and I got ready to walk out the door to head to the high school my husband says: "Everyone tells me the next four years will fly by." My inside voice started rambling! There are days when I think about where we will be in four years. Most times I think about what loan or credit card will be paid off. Then I catch myself and realize that in four years my first born will be starting college. Suddenly, I want to stop time.

I often find myself looking at my son and thinking who is this person and what did he do with my little boy. The person that stands before me is often a self-centered teen. He looks less and less like the boy I used to hold in my arms. He looks more and more like the man he is becoming. He has not had his growth spurt yet. This is something that upsets him greatly. I sit back wanting him to have what he wants, which is to grow. But I also sit back knowing that once that height comes I will look at him and the traces of boyhood will be invisible.

I am cautious person by nature. I also like things to move along slow and steady. Change is something I like to prepare for. I think parenthood has taught me that time moves forward at lightning speed. I have this mental file of little snippets of our lives. Those memories are mine to pull out whenever I need them. I hope my children have some of those little snippets as well.

Looking back at the past with current vision

Do we see it all clearly?

My children often ask me if I remember being their respective ages. They inquisitively want to know if I remember having this or that experience. Well there are days that my mind is so full of the present that I am lucky if I remember why I walked into a room. The kids are starting to approach the ages that I can vaguely remember things about my own childhood.

I find myself at times fixated on the teenage population. We are right on the cusp of entering those years. What comes to mind when I observe teens are questions; “Did act like, dress like, talk like those kids I see around town?” I was far from the perfect child and I certainly provided my father with many gray hairs. Overall, I was an A student. I had group of friends, at times boyfriends, who I hung out with and we did teenage things. I have stumbled across teens that do not say thank you when one of my children holds the door open, they can be loud and intentionally draw attention to their sometimes misplaced behavior. I know I just sounded like my parents.

Dressing the part

In my hazy view, I see myself as a kid that did break rules and curfew. I did wear make-up before my parents deemed it appropriate. The rule growing up was that I could not wear make-up until I was sixteen. At fifteen, not twelve, I would apply thick eyeliner while riding on the bus to school. I would wash my face before my parents got home. This left me looking like I had been crying or rubbing my eyes all day. Today, J. Crew puts out bathing suits for my nine year old that will give lift and shape to her non-existent breasts! On any given day I can spot a young lady that makes grown men turn their heads, only to realize that she is just a tween. This all leaves me confused. I also look at my little girl and think what will the trend be when she reaches teenhood?

Keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road

I grew up in a city so drinking and driving, actually driving at all was not an issue my parents had to deal with. I knew when we decided to live and raise our family in the suburbs that I would face this issue. I did not have the forethought to realize that I would have to worry about other issues that might impair my children’s driving. Things like texting while driving never entered my mind. Now that has to be added to the list of concerns parents have as their teen takes the wheel.

The times they are a changing

When my son was a baby, pagers were in vogue. When I saw a young teen with a pager on his belt, the conclusions I drew about why he could possibly need this device were not good. I naively looked at my Dad and said, “My son will never have a pager!” My wise father chuckled and said; “When this boy is a teen he will wear a wristwatch that is phone and can possibly beam him home.” Well that was a bit farfetched but he does have a phone that can do many things that a small computer can. We got him this phone so we could get in touch when dropping him off at soccer practice. I scratch my head at times and try to remember what we did before cell phones. My kids often joke that when my husband and I were young the dinosaurs still walked the earth. The world I remember was filled with an innocence that I carried into my tween years. I was expected to do laundry and other household chores at a much younger age then my kids. I did not walk up hill both ways to school but I did walk to places. I was not driven up the street to hop on a bus. I learned that sometimes you win and other times you lose. Not everyone was a winner and there were no universal prizes for just playing the game. Each generation faces different challenges. Technology has opened many doors for our youth. The information highway is available for their journey. It has also created intricate bends in the road that can cause them to derail earlier in their development.

The world will continue to evolve and for each generation, parents will try to remember their own youth and pull out the fundamental principles they can apply to raising their kids. We know that most things are not how we remember it and to move forward you can’t look back

My hard drive is out of Memory

I have commented to friends that I believe that I lost part of my ability to remember things when I gave birth to my children. I am sure that there is no medical explanation. It is more about having children giving birth. My oldest child is twelve and right after he was born, I began to notice that I could not remember what I needed to buy at the store or whether I packed everything, I needed in the diaper bag when heading out. Three and half years later when our family grew by two more feet, I realized this problem was getting worse.

Have you ever walked into a room and stood there dumb founded trying to remember why you came into this room in the first place? You think the way to avoid forgetting things is to keep a list but low and behold, you can’t remember where you put the list. Come on, admit it… it has happened to you. Those are some of the early signs that your brain is at times so over-loaded that it has to purge something. When I was young, single and childfree, my memory worked just fine. I even had the ability to forget selective things like what time my curfew was. Now, I can’t even remember those days.

As a child I used to giggle when my grandmother, who had eight children and twenty six grandchildren, would look right at me and scream out several other family member’s names and then finally give up and say, “You girl, come here when I call you!” Now I finally get it. I think my memory is failing with two kids, she had so much more to keep track of. The even funnier thing is that I have managed to look right at one of my children and call them by the other one’s name, I even through my husband in the mix sometimes.

My husband and children’s favorite sign that I am losing it is that I get frantic about whether I have locked the front door, closed the mudroom door and finally the garage door. To my knowledge, though I could be forgetting, I have never left any of those doors unlocked or open. This “obsession” only gets worse when we are leaving on vacation. With that I have a track record of forgetting a diaper bag and realizing I did not have it right before reaching the airport terminal. I read once that to try to remember something you should repeat it to yourself several times. My family flat out falls on the floor laughing when I pull out of the garage and repeat all the way up the driveway closed the door, closed the door.

I know that some memory loss is attributed to aging. I want to believe what I am suffering has more to do with my internal hard-drive having so many things to keep track of that it simply cannot keep up. Maybe one day they will invent brain RAM or I will be able to get some new sort of chip that speeds up my processing. For now, I struggle through and hope that the next time I tell a story I am not repeating it for the millionth time. So remember, wait I forgot what I wanted to tell you.

Mommy plays dress up

I lived the corporate office life for fifteen years. Though I work for a company that is very liberal in their definition of corporate casual, I still had to get up every morning and look presentable. For years on my birthday my mother would buy me traditional business suits. When I tried to explain that I did not need to get that dressed up for work it fell on deaf ears. She would always respond, “You might have a meeting or something.”

Now I work in a home office. Though I try real hard to not to “go to work” in my pjs, I always have the option. My office uniform is usually jeans. There are days that I see no one but my family and the pets.

So no matter how infrequently it happens when I go out for lunch or dinner with a friend or some other social gathering, I dress-up. I do not pull out those old business suits or an evening gown. But I do wear some of those corporate casual clothes that are gathering dust in the back of the closet. There are even times when I will wear make-up and accessorize with my good jewelry. My husband always laughs and says something like, “Where are you going all dressed up, are you having an affair?” He is completely joking but never the less he does not understand why I do this. I have no really good answer. I know that it makes me feel nice. Lately I have noticed when I go places and see women dressed in their business attire I wonder about their jobs. Somehow in my imagination their appearance glorifies the necessity for corporate clothes.

My children have become so accustom to me dressing the way I do now that they will often remark when I look a bit more spiffy. They were young when I dressed in corporate wear. They have no memory of how many blazers and blouses they spit up on, spilled on or just plain destroyed.

I was headed out the other day for one of those social gatherings. I was in no way dressed to the nines but I was definitely more polished. My daughter looks at me and says “Mom, what is all that stuff on your face, are you wearing make-up?” I smiled and said yes. Then her follow-up question sounded just like something her father would say. “Why are you all dressed up, where are you going?” This time my response was simple. “Mommy is playing dress up, dear.” She looked at me with this perplexed expression. I felt at this time it needed no further explanation.

I have no desire to go back to an office setting, especially if I had to “dress” each day. For now I am happy getting the chance to play dress up in my own closet.

Blog On

You should start a blog. I have heard that line a thousand times. Then tons of questions flood my mind. What should I write ? Where do I start? What format do I like? Should I try to find a template? Is it ok to write a blog that is just like every other one I read?

I guess I will never know until I try.

So I have titled my blog Go to Time Out. Time out is a familiar parenting technique. If you have kids or have ever stumbled across the show Super Nanny, you know what I am talking about. I have often believed that I should go to time out. I do not want to sit on a little chair for the number of moments that equals my age. What I am envisioning is more like Calgon taking me away for a peaceful time.

I am not sure that I really understood needing a moment, an hour, a day away from my normal life before I became a mother. I also did not know how much brain and body power it would take to manage a full –time job and family.

So why does the phrase time out come to mind when I think I need to take a break? We tell our children to go to time out as a form of discipline. The operative word in that sentence is tell. As mothers we often need to be told to take a break. When I think I am about to snap and I am right on the verge of a class one, core melt down I do not have the sense to put myself in time out. Often my husband steps in and tells me to go. So I have to silence the voice of mommy guilt, the thoughts of work and home tasks that might be left incomplete for just a bit longer and let go.

So the next time you just cannot take it anymore, take a deep breath and go to time out…..