Tag Archives: family

Post Script

Last night I showed our children the photos I had taken of the grotesquely large Eastern Hercules Beetle I’d found lurking around our front porch:

There goes the neighborhood.

I was fully expecting them to congratulate me for my incredible, heroic feat of bravery. I had managed to get so close to the beast as to even slide a quarter right next to its body for scale.

Instead of congratulations, I was subjected to a Greek chorus of reproach and bitter recriminations.

“Why didn’t you catch it in a jar for us so that we could keep it as a pet?”

“YEAH! It would have been so awesome!”

“I can’t believe you didn’t catch it for us…”

Next time, kids…next time.

City Kitty

The other day I was bragging to my coworker about my recent summer vacation to exotic Pittsburgh and glamorous Buffalo. For some reason she looked unimpressed.

“So do you have a fabulous summer vacation getaway planned?” I asked.

“I do! I’m going on a two week backpacking trip in Wyoming,” she announced gleefully.

“Ohhhh…wow!” I said, inwardly noting how her plans all of a sudden made schlepping around the mean streets of Pittsburgh and Buffalo in a zillion degree weather with a whole passel of kids seem all kinds of sexy and amazing.

“I hope you don’t get your period!” I blurted out loud. To cover for this gauche outburst, I explained to her that I’m not an outdoorsy kind of person…that I hate bugs and sweating and that I like cities and sidewalks and asphalt and air-conditioning and indoor plumbing.

“You’re an indoor cat!” she concluded.

By Reward (Photographer: Reward)

Indeed.

It wasn’t always this way. When I was little I would spend hours on my back in the grass, gazing up at the clouds. I loved digging in the dirt and exploring the woods near our house. It was only when I got a little older that I realized that my natural habitat is actually a bug-free, centrally air-conditioned interior.

Maybe the sad truth of the matter is that I always crave what I can’t have. When I lived in New York City I became obsessed with the idea of having a garden. I would check out towering stacks of gardening books from the public library and would look longingly at the flower porn. My hard-core fantasies revolved around pleached linden allées, garden follies, and pergolas. When we first moved to Charlottesville, it seemed like all my dreams were going to come true. I threw myself wholeheartedly into the project of gardening…despite the fact that instead of soil we have pure red clay studded with rocks…despite the fact that there are exactly two and a half days out of the year when it’s actually pleasant to be outdoors…despite the fact that I can’t stand bugs.

I have come to my senses once again. For me, “to thine own self be true” means retreating to the Great Indoors. These days I’ve just about given up on gardening, only venturing out when absolutely necessary. When I weeded for just one afternoon last month, I ended up having to be on a course of antibiotics for Lyme Disease for three weeks. I got off lightly. My son was seriously ill with Lyme Disease for months.

Enough is enough. It’s time to move out of the woods and get closer to civilization. I scheduled a meeting with a realtor. Before she came to assess our property, I thought I should try once again to tackle the thicket of weeds that has overtaken what was once my garden. Believe me, the motivation to move was the only possible thing that could lure me back out into the scary outdoors. The result of that one lousy half hour of weeding is that I now have weeping poison ivy pustules all over my body.

This weekend when my husband and I were swanning around the magnificent 1000 acre Trump Winery I jokingly said to him, “Just think of all the mowing you’d have to do if we lived here.”

“Oh no,” he gently corrected me, “You’d have your entire staff of minions to do your bidding. Yes, I can just see you now as the Lady of the Manor giving your orders. That’s really what you were born to do.”

I chose to pretend that for once in his life he wasn’t being sarcastic. See, it’s not that I don’t like the outdoors, really. It’s just that I don’t have the adequate staff to make it worth my while…

But is it air-conditioned?

Last night I didn’t have the heart to awaken the butler, who usually takes the dogs out for their last pee of the day. I took them out myself, and as I clutched myself uneasily, batting away gnats and listening to the toads croaking and the crickets chirping, I was startled by what sounded like someone knocking on our door. It turns out, it was a new neighbor dropping by to introduce himself:

There goes the neighborhood.

Yep. It’s definitely time for this city kitty to find some new digs.

An Update

Remember my new grandchildren? The creepy little ones with pinchers?

My grandkids

They are far, far creepier than I could have even imagined. I had just about come to grips with the idea that I would now have two grandchildren, when that wayward son of mine brought home three.

This past weekend I was visiting my new niece in Minneapolis. (More on this tomorrow). When I got back, my son told me that while I was away, one of the hermit crabs had murdered the other one in the middle of the night. He had heard chirruping and had thought his new charges were playing with each other. When daylight broke, he awoke to the stink of dead fish and the sight of the hermit crab’s lifeless, dismembered body.

We have buried Abel and have painted the murderer’s shell with the mark of Cain. And now it’s just Cain and my namesake, Adrienne.

The next day we left on our family vacation. We are trying to regroup after the tragedy in a glamorous, exotic locale whose charms may help us forget, if only for a little while…We are in Pittsburgh.

 

Nieces are Nice!

This past weekend we celebrated my niece’s sweet sixteen birthday party in Princeton, New Jersey. My niece was the first baby I ever fell in love with and the first of my parents’ nine grandchildren. I’m going to write more about this next week, but here’s a sneak peek:

The Girls

This weekend I’ll be traveling to Minneapolis for Wheat Belly Weekend III…The big twist this year is that we’re going to spend the weekend with my brother and his newly expanded family. We’re going to celebrate the birth of our newest niece and the youngest baby in the family.

 

For the next couple of days, I’ll be reposting the first Wheat Belly posts in honor of WBWIII!

 

Call Me Grandma

Momentous changes are afoot around here…

One minute, I was a brand new mother:

I blinked, and then this happened:

Middle School Graduation

It’s hard to believe that baby I held in my arms is now a high schooler who already towers over me.

It’s hard to face the fact that I can no longer be the one making all the decisions for him.

Like what he should wear for Halloween, for instance:

“What?! You don’t want to wear a skirt for Halloween again this year?!”

It’s hard to face the fact that I have to let this boy spread his wings and fly. It’s a daily struggle, but I’m doing the best I can.

Right after his middle school graduation ceremony, I saw him off on his own adventure. He is now at the beach for a week with friends from school and adults who are not his own mother and father. As I drove him to their house, I gave him a lecture on letting his conscience dictate his behavior and about making “good, responsible choices.”

The morning after they arrived at the beach, I got a message from one of the parent chaperones saying that my fourteen-year-old firstborn son was now himself “a proud parent.”

Attached was this photo:

My new grandchildren.

Sure, I know that every kid has to make his own mistakes. It’s all part of growing up. But had I known that sending my adolescent son off to the beach by himself would mean that I would become a grandmother overnight…I can assure you I would have locked that boy in his bedroom until he was…oh, I don’t know, 35? 40?

Obviously, what’s done is done. I had to find some way to make peace with this news. I had to regain some modicum of control over the situation. So, I reached out to him in the only way I knew how…Facebook instant messaging, of course. It hasn’t always worked out for me, as you’ll note from the message dated May 21st. This time, though, I think I really got through to him:

Oh yeah, Grandma’s still got it!

(And in case you’re wondering: UnYoung is my Korean name and NOT a reflection of my age. It means “bright like silver”…NOT old or decrepit or anything like that)!

This morning…

On my way home from work yesterday I heard on the radio that there would be a once-in-a-lifetime chance to witness a spectacular meteor shower with the potential for hundreds of shooting stars per hour. The peak time to view the spectacle would be between 2 and 4 am.

I’ve always wanted to see a shooting star, so I decided I’d wake up at 3 am to try and see my very first one. I told the kids about “Camelopardalids,” and asked if they wanted to wake up early with me to watch for the meteor shower. It’s always a struggle getting them up for school at 6:30, so I was doubtful that they would want to be woken up at 3 on a Saturday. When they all three said they would wake up with me, I warned them that if they fussed or complained, I wouldn’t keep trying to get them out of bed. To my great surprise, when the alarm went off at 3, all three kids leapt out of bed, ready to go.

Still in our pjs, we drove to the lake in our neighborhood and watched until 4 am. We shivered in the dark, craning our necks to look up at the night sky. We didn’t see hundreds of showers, maybe just three or four…five at the most. Today’s articles are widely reporting that the highly-touted meteor shower was a dud. At 4 o’clock, we drove back home and we all went back to bed.

When I woke up again at a more decent hour, it seemed like it might have all been a dream. But when I met the kids at the breakfast table, they grinned as they remembered seeing the shooting stars.

“It was so awesome!” they said.

I got to see a shooting star, something I’ve always wanted to do. But what I’ll remember most of this once-in-a-lifetime occasion is the weight of my daughter on my lap in the cold dark hours of the morning, the cries of surprise and delight each time we spotted a shooting star, and the feeling that we had shared something miraculous together.

Was it worth it? Absolutely.

 

Last night in bed

Last night in bed, I felt the earth move.

If you’re having salacious thoughts, shame on you.

Here’s what happened. My husband was downstairs working away at the keynote address he’ll be giving at a conference in some far-flung country for which he’s abandoning us for a couple of weeks. (Very alluring, right)?!

I called him on his cell phone from my cell phone, because that’s how we romantics roll.

“Did you feel that?”

“What?”

“Didn’t you feel the rumbling? I’m pretty sure we just had an earthquake.”

“Oh,” he replied, “I thought maybe it was just you, walking downstairs.”

Shame. on. him.

FOMO

I suffer from a particular brand of FOMO. For me, it’s more like FOMOOPO…fear of missing out on a photo opportunity.

I left straight from work late Friday afternoon for a fun long weekend in New York City with a friend…It’s been crazy busy at home and work and I was looking forward to getting away to one of my favorite places in the world with a friend I haven’t been able to spend much time with lately. The only problem was that I was going to miss out on taking photos of my son dressed up for his first formal dinner dance. As I left for work Friday morning, I said my good-byes and extracted promises from my husband to take lots of photos. From my son I extracted promises to pose nicely for them. If you’re wondering why I’d have to get these assurances, let me present into evidence this:

*sigh*

You’ll notice that this is a pretty old photo…This kind of nonsense has been going on for years.

“Please pose nicely! Do it as a Mother’s Day present for me!” I cajoled. I shamelessly laid it on with a trowel.

It worked!

Here are a couple photos my husband texted to me:

Picking out a tie.

Check out the size 11 1/2 puppy feet!

 

Chic Sister Chronicles

It is an accepted fact that my sister is the fashionable one in our family.

This winter whenever I would see my father, he would invariably be nattily dressed in a sweater that I knew he would never have picked out for himself. My father, who had never before in his life expressed a shred of interest in clothes or fashion, would pat his torso in satisfaction and say to me, “See this sweater? Your sister bought it for me. It’s a really nice one.”

My mother, who favors shapeless black turtlenecks and sweatpants for herself, looks at my get-ups with resigned pity and says, “You always wear weird things. That’s your taste…Your sister always looks beautiful in whatever she wears.”

When I was living in New York, I would buy clothes every now and then at the ubiquitous street fairs. My mother would look askance at a skirt I’d be wearing and say, “Quit buying one dollar clothes! They look terrible!”

“Hey!” I’d protest, “This actually cost me five dollars!”

A couple of weekends ago when my sister and I were debating about the clothes I should wear to our cousin’s wedding, (mine or hers), I told her, “People at work have told me they think I dress fashionably.”

“That’s really sad,” she replied with perfect sincerity.

Recently I needed to buy a pair of shoes to wear with a certain outfit. I looked through thousands of pairs of pumps on that rabbit hole of a website called Zappos until my eyes started to glaze over. I was getting nowhere until I tried to pretend I was my stylish sister as I looked through the gazillions of shoes. I finally settled upon two pairs I thought she might approve of and sent her the links. I picked them, in fact, because to me they were reminiscent of the shoes she had worn to the wedding. I immediately got this three word message in return:

“Old lady shoes.”

“Maybe because I used ‘wide’ in the filter?!” I wrote back, bewildered.

“Get over yourself and your ‘wide’ feet!” she snapped back at me by text message, “You are not wide, you are just whining. Beauty hurts.” And then she proceeded to text me pictures of sleek $300 to $400 dollar shoes.

“But do they come in pot roast size?” I mused to myself…The answer, of course, was “no.”

My sister eventually picked out a pair of wide pumps for me that I could actually afford and today, when I got home from work, there they were waiting for me on my doorstep:

They looked so sleek, I had to double check to make sure they were really wide. I put them on and marveled at the way they magically made my fat feet look narrower.

Sometimes when my family gets together, my sister entertains us all by imitating the way I walk in high heels. Picture her walking around like a cowboy with rickets drunkenly swaying to the loud and hearty guffaws of my family. I decided to make sure the shoes really fit by walking around in them as I cooked dinner. I made a concerted effort to not teeter swaybacked and bowlegged as I walked back and forth between the fridge and the stove. I thought I looked pretty damn good. I tried to channel my sister as I sauntered around in my beautiful new suede high heels.

And then I dropped a huge blob of mayonnaise on them.