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…..

A New Day of a New Year

Today is the first day back to work and school for many of us. As I tossed and turned in bed last night I had that anxious feeling I get every time I know that I MUST get up on time the next day. So, my alarm was met by grown and growl.

My house has returned to its quiet daily state. I have returned to what I was working on two weeks ago and life seems to be well pretty much the same as it was last year. Every year I enter the holiday season thinking, this will be the year that is less hectic. This will be the year I do not have this anti-climax feeling that stays with me well into the new year. Well the holiday season of 2010 into 2011 is not that year. I pretty much feel the same way I always do.

As a parent of school age children it feels like years are often measured by the school calendar. We are now about half way through the school year. That means we are that much closer to having to figure out what the summer holds for the kids. Soon I begin the agonizing coordination of summer camps and activities. So I guess it often feels like life is so filled with activities that we move swiftly through without coming up for air. I am not a resolution person. I do not want to say that I will make a change and then be disappointed in myself when I do not follow through. So today I will just say that I hope this year and in many more to come I will take the time once in awhile to slow down, dance, sing, just breath and live in the moment just a few more times.