It’s been a rough week, here in C’ville. On Monday, my daughter fractured her foot. Yesterday, we got rear-ended by a teenage girl on her cell phone. And on another order altogether – the unthinkable has happened again. Another teenage girl, a student at UVa, a beloved daughter, sister, and friend has gone missing.
It’s scary out there…Hold hands with the people you love and hang on tight:
This Saturday we went to my friend’s son’s Bar Mitzvah. For the longest time I debated whether or not to bring the kids. I knew it was going to be a long service (two hours)!, most of which we would not understand. I knew with absolute certainty that we were going to have tortured negotiations about what they should wear beforehand. “No, you can’t wear those cargo pants.” “Or that lurid shirt.” “You call this lurid?” “Yes. Yes, I do.” “Sneakers are not appropriate.” “Black socks, not white socks.” And I knew they would not be thrilled about having to miss their soccer games. They would have to miss their studio piano class too, though I was pretty confident they would find this far less devastating.
It was a beautiful and deeply moving service. There was much that was unfamiliar, and much that we didn’t understand. (The biggest shocker for my sons might have been the silky turquoise yarmulkes they were asked to wear)! But the bar mitzvah is all about the universal human experiences of separation and connection. The boy’s individuation from his parents is acknowledged and celebrated with their loving blessings, and in the warm embrace of the community that binds them together. I too left the synagogue feeling connected to a larger community of faith, and to a larger human family.
And since we were all dressed up…
My husband and children beg me to go to yoga. If ever I’m wavering about whether or not to go to class, I can count on a chorus of earnest entreaties, urging me to go, please, please, for the love of God, you should really GO! I know full well they only want me to go, because I’m usually so much nicer and maybe slightly less high strung when I come back. In the spirit of the meditative and transcendent practice of yoga, I try to register only gratitude for their concern, and not feel too offended by their desperate eagerness to get me to go.
It’s been a long time since I’ve had a chance to go to yoga. The children’s school and activities have started up, and we’re still getting used to the schedule. Getting everyone to where they need to be always involves some impossibly complicated choreography, which can include stints at neighbors’ houses, help from babysitters, meeting up in parking lots to trade off children, drop-offs by one parent, and pick-ups by another.
“So who am I driving or picking up today?” I asked my husband yesterday when I got home from work.
“I’ll take the kids to soccer and violin and I’ll just stay in Crozet and pick them both up when they’re done,” my husband generously offered, “You go do yoga. It will do you good.”
As I drove along I-64 on my way to the gym, I saw three or four fire trucks and some police cars racing in the opposite direction. They were heading toward Crozet, where my husband should have been picking up my son and daughter…that is, unless he’d been involved in the huge accident or the raging fire to which all of those vehicles were now headed.
I pulled into the parking lot of the gym and tried to call my husband. He didn’t answer. While this happens all the time, this time his failure to pick up his phone obviously meant that he was lying in a ditch in Crozet somewhere. Meanwhile, my kids were waiting to be picked up and were wondering why their dad wasn’t showing up to get them. My life as a widow unfolded before me. In my mind’s eye, I could see a split screen. On one side, I was lying in a darkened yoga studio, snoring gently away in full-on savasana; on the other side, my husband was lying on a stretcher, about to be rushed off to the hospital. I was thinking about my poor, dear, possibly dead husband, of course I was. But I was also thinking about how unseemly and embarrassing it would be for me to have been doing yoga, while he had been bleeding out on the road. “And it would really be all his fault,” I reasoned to myself unreasonably, “Because he forced me to go to yoga! But I wouldn’t be able to yell at him, because he’d be dead…” I imagine you’re getting a pretty clear picture as to why my family feels that yoga is so very essential to my existence.
Waves of enlightenment repeatedly washed over me throughout the class: I should not be here. I am truly a terrible person. I’m also really, really hungry. Also? I have the patience of a chipmunk. I’m going to be an old woman by the time this pigeon pose ends. When the instructor announced in a hushed and breathy voice that we would hold the pose for just one more minute, I immediately started counting in my head: “ONE Mississippi, TWO Mississippi.” An elderly woman rudely interrupted my countdown to complain that the pose was hurting her shoulder. I was outraged. The instructor had already explained how to modify the pose by lying on one’s back. I was even more outraged when the instructor slowly, deliberately walked up to her and very sweetly suggested a whole catalogue of other poses she might try. My inner hissy fit sounded something like this: “HELLO? have you forgotten about the rest of us poor sods whose ligaments are ripping away from our bones as we hold pigeon pose for one more minute plus a year?!” I popped up like a jackrabbit as soon as savasana was over. Any benefit that I may have gained from the practice drained away as I drove home, listening to the news on the radio about Ebola, Ukraine, and ISIS. The final blow was the drag racers who roared past as they weaved around my car and others.
I pulled into our driveway. I noted with relief that my husband’s car was in its usual spot. My children were safely tucked away in bed. I was home. Another day done. Namaste.
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?”
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:
and:
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.
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?!
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.
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:
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:
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.
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!
No joke – my family has been busily preparing for Christmas since July. We’ve already decided who’s hosting. This wasn’t so much a decision as a confirmation, since we always descend upon the only sibling with a house big enough to contain our supersized family. We’ve already discussed the number and type of presents each child should receive. Most importantly, we’ve reminded everyone of their duties with regard to keeping our family’s most cherished Christmas traditions alive. My sister sent my brother a note saying how thrilled she was that he was going to be able to come with his entire family this year, which now includes Dandelion’s adorable baby sister. She sent him this photo as a reminder of the last time we saw him at Christmas:
My second sister said she thought Dandelion should be added to the Noogie List this year too.
“And you can’t leave out the baby – she gets a baby boogie!” I added in my own contribution to the Christmas email thread.
In response, my brother emailed us a photo of his own with this message: “Show this to the kids so they won’t forget…”:
I’m already feeling the love…
Summer is winding down. The kids start school this week. Our last summer weekend was all about hellos and goodbyes.
We were glad to welcome our fourteen-year old son back after he spent a whole week away in Vermont.
We squeezed in visits with old friends:
We went to a BBQ in Free Union to bid a fond farewell to another friend, who is off on a new adventure on the other side of the world. We had fun discovering a new part of the world in our own backyard:
We revisited favorite places:
and had one last visit to Chiles Peach Orchard:
We appreciated the last flowers of the season:
and even the delicate beauty of our eight-legged friends:
Goodbye, summer.
Hello, fall…
o wonderful, wonderful 