Author Archives: owonderful

I am truly evil.

In terms of my relationship with my adolescent, this past year can be summed up with a series of pictures and graphs:

rough roadThe rough road we’ve traveled this year with our son has lined my face with new wrinkles and has added gray hairs to my head.

At first there were road blocks that had to be negotiated. Eventually, the way was blocked off entirely.road closed

For a long time, there was no easy way to get through to the other side.

no bridgeBut just when I had lost all hope, the foundation of a new and stronger bridge was put in place.

rebuilding bridge

And then, one fine day:

new bridgeWhere once my son’s moods could be described by this sine wave:

fig. 1fig. 1

They are now more like this:

fig. 2fig. 2

Nowadays, when I open my mouth to say something, I can reasonably expect NOT to have my words immediately torched to cinders as if by a giant flamethrower.

Lately, I can generally get through the day without being reduced to a quivering mess of raw, exposed nerves because of some act of poor judgment or lack of impulse control on my son’s part.

It is so sweet.

It’s time to celebrate this time of intellectual and emotional growth that has come hand-in-hand with my son’s physical growth. It’s time to rejoice in the relative peace and harmony that has descended upon our household.

It’s time…for payback!

I am now going to reveal a delightful secret to those of you who may have children on the cusp of adolescence…Right now, your young adult is at the most sensitive, vulnerable time of his or her life. They are yearning for approval and acceptance by their peers. It doesn’t take much at all to embarrass them. Think of this embarrassment as the very wellspring of your own illimitable powers. Yes! Be glad! Breathe deep the heady aroma of your own might, (while at the same time willing yourself to ignore the stench of the sweaty socks strewn about your minivan and home). These days, even as my son grows taller than me by the minute, my power over him grows at an even more astonishing rate. I have in my clutches the ultimate weapon – the power to embarrass, and the shamelessness to deploy this cruel, cruel weapon.

This past weekend one of Nicholas’ friends came over for a sleepover in the middle of the night when his parents had to make an unexpected trip to the ER. I got out of bed to help Nicholas blow up the air mattress while Colin went to pick up the friend to bring him back to our house. Nicholas kept insisting that he could handle it himself, and kept urging me to go back to my room. He was getting more and more agitated about my presence and I simply couldn’t comprehend why until at last he said, “He’s going to be here soon. Don’t you think you should put some pants on, or something?”

I looked down at the ratty, oversized tee-shirt I was wearing as pajamas, and because I am an evil, evil human being, who suffered the tongues of flame in the deepest bowels of adolescent hell this year, I replied nonchalantly, “Nah. He’s just like family. He won’t mind at all.”

Oh, how I relished every second of my son’s squirming until I finally took pity on him and went to change. When I considered all the many battles we fought over his wardrobe over the course of this past year, I couldn’t help but think that I’d let him off too easily.

Later in the weekend he told me that he was going to DJ for the upcoming school dance. The perfect opportunity, once again presented to me on a gleaming silver platter! How could I possibly resist?

“So, I’m sure they’ll want parents to chaperone, right? Because I’d love to be there for your gig.”

An eerie silence immediately filled the car. The words “shock and awe” sprang unbidden to my mind.

“Mom. I love you so much, but...”

I cut him off with my wild, demonic cackling.

My God! Life really IS good!

Thus Spake…

A few quotes from my favorite Nietzsche-reading young philosopher with companion quotes from Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Thus Spake Zarathustra: “Behold, I bring you the Superman!”

Thus Spake Zarathustra: “How lovely it is that there are words and sounds. Are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between things which are eternally apart?”

Thus Spake Zarathustra: “Good and evil, and joy and pain, and I and you – colored vapors did they seem to me before creative eyes. The creator wished to look away from himself, – and so he created the world.”

Happy Monday!

Football

A few staggering football facts:

Scott Stadium seating capacity: 61,500 vs. population of Charlottesville: 43,500

Coach Mike London’s salary in 2012: $2.1 million vs. President Teresa Sullivan’s salary in 2012: $680,000

Debt for Scott Stadium upgrade: $100 million to be paid off by 2025

You can even get paid to lose:

Coach Al Groh’s severance pay buyout when he was fired in 2009: $4.3 million (I keep offering to lose some football games for half, or even a quarter of that amount, but no one’s taking me up on my offer. Hello? Hello?!)

UVa was paid $1.1 million by the ACC in 2011 to appear at the Chick-fil-A Bowl in Atlanta when they lost to Auburn…

BUT!

It cost $800,000 to transport the team, band, cheerleaders, staff, etc. to the game, and Coach London and his staff earned $277,377 in bonuses for the team’s bowl appearance.

_______________________________________________

Last Saturday I took the kids to watch the University of Virginia’s first football game of the season, and our very first football game ever. Through my work, we’d gotten free tickets to a luxury suite. (Leases for these suites start at $59,000 a season)! Being in the suite proved to be a godsend when the heavens opened and rain started dumping all over the stadium, and especially when the threat of lightning forced an evacuation of the stands that lasted over two hours. We were shocked to see the stadium fill right back up shortly after it reopened for the rest of the game. UVa has some die-hard football fans.

It was a nailbiter, but about six hours after the game began, our team won!

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The Tooth Fairy Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

Back in the day, when the tooth fairy used to come around…

My sons came to me one day, giggling conspiratorially.

“Mommy,” the younger one said with a knowing gleam in his eye, “We think we figured out something. You’re the tooth fairy, right?”

“You got me, boys” I confessed with a sigh, pretending I was crestfallen to have been discovered, “But let’s not ruin it for your sister by telling her.”

Inside I was saying to myself, “Think you’re so smart, boys? You just shut down an easy revenue stream for yourself!”

I’m not kidding about the easy revenue stream. One night I entrusted Colin with performing the tooth fairy’s sacred duty. The next morning my oldest son came gleefully skipping down the stairs, clutching a twenty dollar bill.

“Look what the tooth fairy left me!” he gloated.

I shot Colin a dirty look and said, “That’s funny. Usually, the tooth fairy leaves one dollar.”

“Hmph,” Colin said, “A twenty must have been the only cash the tooth fairy had in her billfold last night.”

Nowadays, there’s no more anticipation, no more thrill of discovering a dollar (or twenty) under the pillow, no more fairy dust…no more magic at all. These days, even my daughter has to shake down the tooth fairy to get her due.

Last week I yanked a tooth out of my younger boy’s head at his behest. Relieved to finally have the bothersome tooth out of his mouth, he took off with a broad, bloody, gap-toothed smile. I was left standing in the bathroom, gazing at the little baby molar in my hand. I took considerable care to rinse off the blood clinging to the uneven root, while I considered what to do with the tooth. It was, after all, a little piece of my son. It had been a part of the sweet, shy little smile I had known and loved for a decade. It contained his DNA.

I held it nestled in the palm of my hand for a little while and then…I threw it away.

The next day he showed me a second wiggly tooth. It prompted him to ask me what happened to the tooth he had just lost the day before.

“Oh! Uh, the tooth?” I asked guiltily, “Well…I, ummm. I threw it away.”

He shot me a look of mingled shock, accusation, and disappointment.

“I could fish it out, though!” I said, “Shall I get it out of the trash? I could easily do that!”

“Nah,” he said, and then after a short pause and a meaningful sideways look in my direction he added, “But I’m going to keep this tooth.”

I trace my cavalier attitude to my own upbringing. After going through the whole tooth fairy charade with my two older sisters, the tooth fairy of my childhood, a.k.a. my dad, was pretty much over it by the time I came along. The morning after losing a tooth and tucking it under my pillow, I would awake with joyful anticipation. I’d lift the pillow to discover…nothing.

“Dad?” I’d say glumly, “The tooth fairy didn’t come.”

“Hunh,” he’d say with a studied nonchalance, “Well, check again in another couple of hours, I bet she’ll have come by then.” I repeatedly find myself using this very same line on Tatiana these days.

By the time my little brother lost his first tooth, the tooth fairy was truly sick and tired of coming to our house. When my brother would sadly inform my dad that the tooth fairy had forgotten to come, he would say as he fished around in his pocket for loose change, “Turn around and put your hands behind your back. I’ll call the tooth fairy for you.”

My poor brother. My poor son. I’m going to blame it on the genes.

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My Brother is Special, Pt. 2

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about how my genius brother managed to game his way into the local preschool for children with learning delays. Yesterday I wrote about the few shows we were allowed to watch on television before my mother decided to destroy the set in as dramatic a fashion as possible. These posts got me thinking about another incident that involved my brother, school, and our family’s warped relationship with popular culture via the television…

Bow-tieMy brother Teddy discovered Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids in Kindergarten. He became completely enamored with the show, and with the character named Mushmouth in particular. Mushmouth is the slack-jawed character, who speaks with the slow, rhythmic cadence of a simpleton. He adds “buh” to every word so that he sounds something like this: “Heybuh, Fabuh Albuh.”

Teddy began talking like Mushmouth. Constantly. Concerned, his conscientious Kindergarten teacher alerted the specialist at the school, who began to pull him out of his regular classroom for intensive speech therapy.

When my dad got wind of this, we knew it was going to be ugly. As punishments were always meted out communally in our household, my sisters and I were all made to sit alongside our brother on the couch as my dad ranted on and on and on. It seemed like the hailstorm of words pelting down from that normally monosyllabic, phlegmatic man would never stop. In a thousand and one different ways, for what seemed like a thousand and one hours, he told Teddy that if he continued to talk like Mushmouth, people would think he was a Dummy, a Straggler, and a Weakling!

At long last, his lecture came to a terrifying crescendo with a thundering: “DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?!”

Teddy answered:  “Yehbuh.”

Our jaws dropped involuntarily and my sisters and I froze in a tableau of mute horror. We held our breaths as we waited for the axe to fall. But so habitual had become this idiosyncratic way of speaking, my Dad didn’t even notice.

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The Sound of Music

Last week I recounted a conversation I had with my sister in which we were trying to figure out what would possibly induce anyone to scale a mountain if they weren’t, say, fleeing from Nazis. It later occurred to me that The Sound of Music reference might not be as immediately obvious to everyone as it was to my sister, who, like me, grew up immersed in the world of the von Trapp family.

Our fluency in popular culture was severely hampered by the fact that our mother got rid of our TV in a rather dramatic fashion. Even before this incident, we were only allowed to watch a select few shows. That limited, but weirdly eclectic selection included: Saturday cartoons, The Waltons, the Charlie Brown specials, the Miss Universe pageant, The Wizard of Oz, and last, but certainly not least: The Sound of Music. This movie, which we watched only once a year, played a disproportionately influential role in our lives.

The Sound of Music was always one of my mother’s “favorite things.” She would get starry-eyed whenever she watched it. When she was in a particularly good mood, we might hear her humming Edelweiss in her rich, melodious voice. Drunk on the unabashed sentimentality of The Sound of Music, she loved to indulge the fantasy that her own children would one day hit the road as The von Kim Family Singers. The closest the von Kims ever got to performing in public, however, was the occasional church service. My mother would try to recreate the movie’s magic by having my sisters and me sing a hymn in three part harmony. Somehow the effect was never right. There was always some important element missing, but she could never quite put her finger on it.

One day it hit her like a bolt of lightning. She had always been particularly fascinated by the scene in which Julie Andrews fashions play clothes out of curtains for the von Trapp children. Inspired by this brilliant example of ingenuity and frugality, my mother one-upped Maria herself. She laid her hands on some stiff maroon crushed velvet upholstery fabric from which she made each of us matching pantsuit ensembles…

We wore these. In public. And not just to church, but to school as well. This would be around the same time that we were stealing food from squirrels.

Fortunately, there is no photographic evidence of us sporting these outfits, but my sister has lovingly recreated them for you:

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Goodbye, Ned

One day early this summer, my daughter visited me in my office. I showed her the spider that had taken up residence in the corner of my window. We were about to leave for vacation, and we worried that he might be swept away by the cleaner while I was gone. Hoping to avert such a disaster, my daughter made this sign for the spider, whom she named Ned.

We had big plans for Ned. When we got back, we were going to make some spider-sized furniture and maybe hang some pictures to make him feel more at home.

Alas, when we returned, Ned and his cobweb were nowhere to be seen. When my daughter found out, she gave me this look:

I left the sign where it was, hoping he might find his way back home…Every morning when I get to work, I’ve been checking to see if he’s come back, but there’s never any sign of him.

Today I finally accepted the fact that, like this beautiful, too-short summer, Ned is gone for good.

We miss you, Ned. It was nice knowing you.

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I’m the Worst. Mother. Ever.

I cringed all day whenever I recalled the lecture I gave to my daughter as I dropped her off (late) to school this morning.

Worst Mother Ever:  (in an accusatory voice) What were you doing upstairs when I was calling and calling you to come down?

—Guilty silence—

W.M.E.: What were you doing? You were reading weren’t you?

My daughter: (mumbled, barely audible, sheepish response) Yes.

W.M.E.: You’re not allowed to read in the morning anymore! Got it? NO READING ALLOWED! Now you’re going to be late for school, because you were…READING!”

Poor, poor kid…and it’s only the fifth day of school.

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