Category Archives: Parenting

Is that so wrong? Part 3

Last spring was a very rainy soccer season. I had to make countless calls to the school office to ask the receptionist to relay to my son the news that his after school practice was cancelled. It got so embarrassing, I started to make my husband call instead. Finally, I decided it was time to break down and buy my middle-schooler his very first cell phone.

The Verizon salesman asked me what kind of phone I was looking for. Before I could even answer he started pulling phones to show me…

“This one is really cool. It’s got everything a kid could want. A full QWERTY keyboard for texting, touchscreen, front and rear camera, plenty of memory for any kind of games or apps he might wa…”

I interrupted him before he went any further.

“What I’m looking for is the kind of phone that can only make and receive phone calls. Possibly through smoke signals. I’m looking for a phone that has no games on it or anything that smacks of the least bit of fun…the kind of phone the other kids at school might make fun of my son for having…”

“Well.” he said after a moment of stunned silence, “I can honestly say that no one has ever come in here asking for a phone with that criteria before.”

I ask you: Is that so wrong?

Is that so wrong? Part 2

When my first child was little, he never seemed to hear me until I was shouting at the top of my lungs. I began to suspect that there might be an underlying medical condition which would explain this, so I took him to get his hearing checked. When the doctor announced that his hearing was perfect, I was just the teeniest, tiniest bit disappointed…

Is that so wrong?

 

 

 

School Boy Fantasies…

My twelve-year-old son just made a rather exciting discovery. As he flipped through the pages of a catalog that arrived in our mailbox, he gasped in wonder and amazement.

Every now and then he’d whisper, “WHAT?!”

At one point he turned to me and asked, “Does this always just come in the mail?”

“Yeah,” I answered.

“And you never showed it to me before?!” he asked in an accusatory voice.

And with that he said, “Goodnight, I’m going to my room. Is it ok if I take this to bed with me?”

Sure, kid. Go crazy!

Gangsta

This past weekend, for about a split nanosecond, I had some serious street cred.

On our way to that gangster hangout also known as the National Book Festival, we passed by an Ace Hardware Store.

“Let’s go in here for a second,” I said to my kids. “I need to get a new switch plate.”

“What did you just say?!” my fourteen year old son asked me incredulously.

“I need a new switch plate. You know…to replace the one you broke in the basement?”

IMG_2404

The boy’s shoulders sagged visibly and he said glumly, “Oh. For a second there, I thought I had the coolest mom in the world. I thought you said you were going to buy a switchblade.”

When we got to the convention center, it was swarming with thugs like:

Kate DiCamillo

and:

Captain Underpants

and these shady characters:

The boys decided they wanted to explore on their own. We said we’d keep in touch by phone, but then I forgot to take mine out of my purse.

I guess my son had forgotten all about my desperate attempts to make contact with him this summer when he was away at the beach and in Vermont, because when we finally caught up with each other again, he scolded me like an apoplectic squirrel: “We called you a million times and you didn’t answer! Do you EVER check your phone?!”

Payback, baby! With zero effort and no switchblade required! Gangsta.

Spotted at School

I saw this at the parent teacher conference I went to yesterday for my daughter, who is just beginning fourth grade:

WHAT? She didn’t find her dad’s “politic book” The Ethics of Lobbying gripping stuff?!

That moment you realize (again)…that you’re insane

The thing I find most disconcerting about being the parent of a teenage boy is our sudden inability to communicate with each other in any sort of meaningful way. Last night, for example, we had this heart to heart exchange:

“How was school today?”

“Fine.”

“What did you do?”

“Science, Math, History…”

“But I mean, what did you actually do? For example, what did you do in Science today?”

“We wrote things down on paper.”

“What KINDS of things? What are you learning about?”

“What living things are.”

Overnight, he’s become a covert CIA operative, trained to take his highly-classified top secrets about what he did in Biology class to the grave.

He recently spent a week away in Vermont with his friend’s family. Having had so little contact with him when he spent a week away at the beach earlier in the summer, I laid down some rules before he left for this second trip.

“Keep your phone charged. I expect you to make contact with us at least twice a day. Once by text and once by calling home.”

The boy kept his phone charged, but never once followed through on the making contact part. On the days that I didn’t initiate contact myself, I didn’t hear from him at all. When I did hear from him, our conversations were entirely unsatisfactory:

The week he was in Vermont, one of his closest friends, who moved away a few years ago, happened to be visiting Charlottesville with his family. The rest of us went to meet up with them for frozen yogurt one evening. Shortly before setting out, I tried and failed to contact my son. I knew he should be arriving in Vermont after two days of travel, and I wanted both to make sure that he’d arrived safely and to give him a chance to talk to his friend over the phone. The first time I called, I could tell he picked up the phone and hung up on me. When I called him a second time just moments later, he didn’t even bother to pick up.

You can bet my panties were in a twist…

I resorted to texting the boy:

 

Oh really? He “couldb’t” spare two minutes to talk to the woman who was responsible for his existence on this planet? It was time to pull out the oldest trick in the book…the old bait and switch.

 

 

How to convey to you how I felt when he agreed to talk to his friend with such alacrity? So many emotions…a whole gallery of feels:

There just HAD to be a reason that he spurned me, but was now perfectly happy to talk to his friend…I mean: a reason other than the fact that I’m his mother and had been neurotically stalking him all the way to Vermont. I just had to get to the bottom of this mystery:

It seemed as if there was no way the poor boy could wriggle his way out of this one. And then he texted the magic words that cleared up everything. The sun shone again, a rainbow arched across the blue, blue sky, the birds started singing their sweet songs, and all was right with the world:

Of course! I giggled, giddy with relief and explained to my husband that the reason our dearly beloved firstborn hadn’t wanted to talk to me was that he’d been sitting on the toilet!

My husband very gently suggested an alternative explanation, generously assigning his hypothesis no more validity than my own conclusion: “Ooooor, is it possible that he was helping unload suitcases from the car?”

Ummm, yeah, OK, whatever. But the point is: all of this Stürm und Drang could have been so easily averted with a little communication.

BFFLs

Everyone needs a Best Friend For Life…even hermit crabs.

After the grisly murders that took place in our “Crabitat,” the last thing I wanted in my life was another hermit crab. But no sooner had we buried the second victim than my son began his campaign for a friend for my namesake: Adrienne, the hermit crab murderess.

“Are you kidding me?!” I asked him, “Have we learned nothing from the events of the past few weeks? Do we really want to send another hermit crab to its certain death?”

Yes. Yes, we did.

Apparently, hermit crabs are sociable creatures. They live in huge colonies.

“They can die of loneliness, Mom,” my son informed me with big, sorrowful eyes. He looked kind of like this:

My hermit crab really needs a friend…

I ask you: How could I possibly say no?

We went to four different pet stores, looking for a hermit crab big enough to fight off the murderess if it came to it. The largest one we could find was only about half the size of Adrienne.

With great trepidation we put the little crab into the tank. We compulsively checked on the two crabs every few minutes, ready to break up a fight if we needed to. The crabs avoided each other for a few tense days.

We finally relaxed when we saw them perched side by side on the little stick in their tank:

BFFLs

 

The Truth

Here’s the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth…

TRUTH: I am overly concerned with capturing moments for posterity. It’s probably an illness.

TRUTH: In my ruthless pursuit of this goal, I can be extremely annoying and unkind to the people I love the most in the world.

TRUTH: I wanted to have a “First Day of School” photo for 2014.

TRUTH: As usual, we were running behind. (As I was driving my daughter to school post-photo, I said, “We wouldn’t want to set their expectations too high by actually being on time on the first day of school, right?” She concurred out of politeness).

TRUTH: Even though we were running late, I was going to have my photo, come hell or high water.

TRUTH: Hell and high water came…in the form of an unhinged lunatic wielding a grin-enforcing camera like a cudgel.

TAKE 1
TAKE 2

TRUTH: I made my daughter change her skirt for the photo, thereby delaying our departure for school even further.

TRUTH: I made my oldest son “put on a nice shirt” for the sake of the photo. He gamely put on a hot, itchy flannel shirt in the middle of steamy August to please his crazy mother.

TRUTH: I made my younger son, who wanted to get himself packed and ready to go, extremely anxious by forcing him to pose for a photo…”SMILE! Come on, SMILE! NO, try to look natural. Pretend you’re happy!”

TRUTH: The photo IS the truth. My son is about to lose it.

TRUTH: I was so dissatisfied with my annual “Back to School” photo that I seriously considered forcing the children to do another fake first day of school photo session.

So help me, God. I obviously need it!

Life is much scarier than any amusement park…

Roller Coaster

Life is pretty damn scary. News headlines read like horror movie synopses these days. You could be going for a casual stroll around the block, when a knife falls out of the sky and into your head. Even our day to day social interactions can be fraught with peril. Given the inherently risky, unpredictable, and often frightening nature of our everyday reality, I have always been utterly mystified by the fact that crazy people (such as myself) pay lots of money to deliberately put themselves into uncomfortable, and even terrifying situations at “amusement” parks.

It’s not as if they don’t warn you about what you’re getting yourself into. When rides are given names like The Apocalypse, Mind Eraser, Piranha Pandemonium, Shark Attack Hammerhead, No Way Out, and Tower of Terror, you only have yourself to blame for the suffering you endure when you elect to go on them.

Post Apocalypse

Inspired by these names, my husband started gleefully tossing out ideas for other names of rides that had a similarly masochistic ring to them…Rides like: Do It Yourself Circumcision, Pass-a-Kidney-Stone-o-Rama, Red Hot Poker Up Your Ass, or Sulphuric Enema.

I duly noted these ideas down in the “Notes” app on my iPhone. A few days later a new Note appeared on my phone from my fourteen year old.

“Do It Yourself Circumcision, Mom? You know I can totally read your notes on my computer, right?”

Talk about uncomfortable experiences…

Return to Six Flags

This Saturday we went to “Hurricane Harbor,” the water park at Six Flags. Our last visit to this so-called “amusement” park tested my mettle. I staggered through the fiery crucible and emerged with a new awareness of what I am capable of…a better understanding of who I truly am as a human being.

In a world full of thrill-seekers and adrenaline junkies, I’m a chill-seeker and a “settle-in junkie.”

Chill-Seeker and “Settle-In” Junkie

Some people have nerves of steel. I have nerves of overcooked spaghetti. There are lots of tough cookies in the world…I’m more like a meringue. Badass? More like Squishyass. Man or a mouse? Is there a third option? Because I’m terrified of mice. You get the picture.

If nothing else came of that first experience at Six Flags, at least I learned my lesson. I couldn’t dissuade my daughter from revisiting the park for her birthday celebration, but I could arm myself with knowledge. This time around, I studied the Six Flags website harder than I studied for my doctoral comprehensive exams. I memorized the “Family Rides” and “Kids Rides” lists. I even studied the “Thrill Rides” list in order to avoid any nasty surprises. I ordered a “Luxury Package” cabana, which promised food and beverage wait service, a TV, inner tubes, beach towels, cold beverages, and a pizza.

Are you envisioning me reclining languidly in my lounge chair by the wave pool as scantily-clad cabana boys waved pond fronds and proffered me grapes? I was too.

The luxury cabana was a ratty brown polyester tent that was stifling hot. After our first session in the wave pool, it was clear that there would be no relaxation or lazing about at all that day. Imagine a seething scrum of humanity interspersed with giant, view-blocking inner tubes. Imagine a phalanx of teenage lifeguards stationed every ten feet at the edge of the pool. The whistles never left their lips, because they would have to blow them at least every ten seconds or so. (I am now convinced that this must be The Worst Job In the World. The stress of it would put me in an early grave). Imagine me and my husband in the wave pool, constantly scanning the horizon and counting over and over again, trying to keep track of the six children for whom we were responsible – our own and the cherished offspring of our friends. At one point I saw my husband lifting a kid I didn’t recognize out of the water and walking him to the shallow end. Later I learned that he had been clinging to my daughter, shouting, “Help! I can’t float!” I had assumed she was in an inner tube at the time, but she informed me that she hadn’t been. “He was pulling me under! I thought he was going to drown me. I could barely support his weight!”

Clearly it was time to check out the other “attractions.” I gamely followed our group, acting as chaperone and Sherpa. My twelve-year old son, who shares my risk-aversive nature, trailed along beside me:

Charter members of the Comfy Benchsitters Club

The other kids amazed me by their willingness to go on rides that were so hair-raising, I would have to avert my gaze as we walked past them. Every once in a while, my sidekick would venture to do something like the “Lazy River,”or he’d splash happily alongside the toddlers at Buccaneer Beach:

Buccaneer Beach

I was thoroughly exhausted, but elated when we returned to Charlottesville safe and sound on Saturday night. Everyone had a good time and best of all: no one died. I call that a good day.

We were a little sad that our 14-year old had to miss out on the fun. He is spending the week in Vermont with his friend:

The very next day 24 people got stranded at the top of The Joker’s Jinx, a very scary ride that my older son had forced my 12-year old to go on with him on our first trip to Six Flags:

Joker’s Jinx

Aftermath of Joker’s Jinx:

Joker’s Jinx Close Up

I called my 12-year old downstairs to look at the headline:

His eyes grew wide as he read the breaking story. He covered his mouth in shock, and he turned white as a sheet.

We decided we had to share the news with his older brother:

 

Sometimes it’s hard to believe that these two people are even related…

P.S. Eventually, everyone was safely rescued from the ride.

P.P.S. As we were driving home, my daughter said, “We should do this again when we’re all 16!” Her little friend replied, “Yeah, but we’ll go by ourselves. By then I’ll be able to drive, and I’ll take us there.”

Oh dear Lord, will the thrills never end?!