Tag Archives: Parenting

En route

I woke up and for a few seconds was disconcerted to find the walls and windows in the wrong place. And then I remembered I was in the bed in my parents’ basement. I stretched and tried to stay in bed – sleeping in is such a rare luxury. Guilt overcame me and I decided I was being too much of a sybarite. Time to get out bed! I glanced at the clock, thinking it was at least 8 o’clock. It was 6:37, or exactly seven minutes after I usually get out of bed.

Last night when I arrived in Arlington a little after 10 pm, my mother had already gone to bed, but my father was on the couch, waiting for me to show up. The minute I walked in the door, he shooed me to bed.

“Now, go to bed! Go to bed.”

“But Dad, we’re not leaving early tomorrow, right?”

He looked me straight in the eye and said impressively, enunciating each word for emphasis: “We’ve called a taxi, and it will be here at ELEVEN am. So GO to bed.”

Sure, whatever…your middle-aged daughter with three kids of her own will go to bed, because you tell her to…And we certainly wouldn’t want to oversleep and miss the taxi that will be out there at ELEVEN am!

I went down to the basement and reorganized some of the things I had packed. A creaking noise alerted me to the presence of my mother. I went to the foot of the stairs to see her pajama clad figure looming above me in the darkness.

“Hi, Mom! I thought you were asleep!”

“I was in bed, but I couldn’t sleep because I was so worried about you, but now you’re finally here. What took you so long? Anyway, GO TO BED!”

I’m on Mom and Dad time now. My parents and my sister and I will be getting into a taxi at ELEVEN am and heading to Dulles to catch our plane to Seoul…

When I got home from work yesterday, I had just enough time to have dinner with the people I order to bed and more importantly, order to pose for photos:

“Whose knee is that?!”

“I think it’s Dad’s finger!”

“Come on, SQUEEZE your heads in!”

“BAHAHA! I love how Dad turns the phone around to see if his finger is there!”

“N! SMILE, don’t SNEER!”

“I can still your finger!”

“AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! OK, we are so done!”

Catch you on the other side of the Pacific.

xoxoxoxox

We

We are a messy, disorganized, attention-deficient tribe. We stomp noisily around the house like a herd of dinosaurs. Too lazy to get up off the couch, or the armchair, or the bed, we communicate with each other by roaring from opposite ends of the house. We are histrionic. We are intemperate in our appetites. We are severely technologically-impaired, but we cannot be bothered to read instruction manuals. We break things. We lose track of time; we lose track of things. We lose our tempers.

I say “we,” but there is one member of our family, who is not like this at all. My twelve-year-old son is gentle and good-natured. He is a marvel of efficiency and organization. At 6:30 am sharp, when the rest of us are pressing our snooze buttons, he is letting the dogs out and filling their bowls with food and water. On the days his little sister decides she wants to ride the bus in the morning, he’s the one who escorts her to the bus stop, because at 7:11 am when her bus arrives, the rest of us are in the middle of eating our breakfast, or fixing our hair. Like clockwork, at 8:05 am, he heads to the bus stop himself, his backpack laden with homework that he always manages to finish by the time he steps off the school bus in the afternoon.

He is so soft-spoken that we constantly have to ask him to repeat himself. He does this with infinite patience, though by the third or fourth time we’ve asked him to repeat what he said, it’s clear by the tone of our voices that our own patience is wearing thin.

When things break down, he’s the one we call to the rescue. Even my parents, who live two and a half hours away, anxiously await his visits, so that he can fix the backlog of things that have gone wrong during his absence. Whenever one of us loses something, my son is always the one who diligently helps us to search until it is found. If one of us seems upset, he is the first to notice and the first to offer a hug and words of encouragement.

Long after the rest of us have had seconds and thirds, he is still picking at his food like a bird. Though he’s a picky eater, I once had to take his plate away from him to stop him from eating a failed culinary experiment that was universally acknowledged to be disgusting. It tasted so vile it was literally making him gag and bringing tears to his eyes, but he was trying to choke it down anyway, because he didn’t want to hurt my feelings.

I write this as a sincere apology to my dearly beloved son, who couldn’t find his watch this morning and had an epic freak out. There’s something very unnerving about seeing the calm center of a storm falling apart. I hated seeing him get so agitated. It upset the natural order of things. It made me feel jittery and irritable. Selfishly, I took it as a personal affront that he was causing such a ruckus. In a Bad Parenting Move for the record books, instead of doing what he would have done – comforting him or helping him look for his watch, I yelled at him for getting so worked up about it and for stressing the rest of us out.

Sometimes I wonder how a child like him ended up in a family like ours. Sometimes I think it must to be hard for someone like him to live in a household like ours. Always, I am astonished and grateful that he is one of us. We would be lost without him.

Related post: The Tidal Basin…or: L’enfer, c’est les autres.

Weekend Snapshots 22

Saturday

7 am. My daughter and I headed to the Charlottesville Farmer’s Market at the crack of dawn. Her Destination Imagination team is fundraising for their trip to the Global Tournament, and they procured a spot at the market to sell their produce bags. Despite high hopes and the kids’ best efforts, including my girl’s creative attempt at eye-catching millinery, the bags were not a big money-maker.

Kentucky Derby here she comes?

When the totals were tallied, and factoring in the $6.00 I paid for parking, our family unit made negative $1.20. Oh well…we still had fun!

10:10 am. Soccer, naturally.

I have expressly forbidden my three young soccer players to do headers…Do they listen to me?

Damn it! There go her SAT scores…

8 pm. We went to my husband’s concert with Zephyrus, an early music vocal ensemble.

It was a beautiful performance, but it was a rather late night for the younger ones. This is how they looked during the intermission:

They perked up (a little) post-concert:

Sunday

9:15 am.

We got to church a little early so my daughter could learn her instrumental part for next Sunday’s service…

6 pm. My son and I took some photos before the two of us headed back to church for his confirmation examination.

Confirmation

I am just about to finish up my three-year term as an elder of our church. To be completely honest, I am delighted to be stepping down. I hate going to meetings and I’m terrible at making decisions, the two things which pretty much make up the job description of an elder. There are three things I have enjoyed though…I’ve enjoyed saying loudly and often, “That’s ‘RULING Elder’ to YOU!” Cracks me up every time. Unaccountably, it doesn’t make my family so much as crack a smile anymore. Twice now I have been able to serve communion to my own children, and I will always cherish the experience of watching them come down the aisle toward me to receive the “Bread of Life” and “Cup of Blessing.” Finally, tonight I was able to be at the “examination” (really a friendly conversation) for my oldest son’s confirmation as a member of the church.

The confirmands and elders were scattered at different tables. A boy my own son has known since they were toddlers was seated at my table. It turns out, the real confirmation was that I am the world’s biggest sap. I was so moved by how thoughtful and well-spoken he was, it was all I could do not to break down and start blubbering in a completely unseemly fashion. He’s a tall, handsome young man now, but all I could see was the toddler he was…I swear it was only yesterday. Of course, I was thinking of my own son, and how he was faring at his table on the other side of the room.

As we drove back home tonight, we had one of those rare talks that only seem to happen in the car, in the dark, when the moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars…We talked about how lucky he has been to have had such stability in his life…to have grown up in a place he’ll always know as home, and to have been surrounded by really good people since the day he was born. We talked about what it means to live an honorable life. He told me how he answered the questions posed to him at his own table. The last thing the confirmands were asked to discuss was an experience of grace they may have had in their own lives. My son reported that he hadn’t been able to answer that particular question, because he didn’t think he’d had one yet.

I didn’t tell him this, but that talk with him in the car tonight was one of the sweetest experiences of grace I‘ve ever had.

Weekend Snapshots 21

Saturday

I put well over 100 miles on my chariot of fire in one day, ferrying the three kids to their soccer games all over town. I usually share the driving with my husband, but this weekend he was tied up with a conference he was running. With just one driver, the margins were razor thin. As soon as one game was done, I would have just enough time to get home to pick up the next kid. It was cold and rainy all day, so instead of standing around on the sidelines like I usually do, I ran errands. Some of the errands were important ones – like buying groceries and a new dishwasher. Others were less important, but so very satisfying.

Around this time last year, I discovered the joys of a store called Tractor Supply. I was lured into the store for the first time by a huge sign in the parking lot that was announcing “Chick Days.” My far more urbane siblings are rolling their eyes for sure as they read this. My husband is breaking out into a cold sweat as my agrarian fantasies once again rear their sweet, sweet, fuzzy little heads:

I didn’t bring home any chicks or ducklings. This time.

As soon as the last child’s soccer game was over, we raced back to the house so that he could get showered for his piano recital. We made it to the church just in time:

As we were waiting for the recital to begin, my daughter and I were admiring a spectacular floral arrangement that was on the altar. I was dying to go up and feel the flowers to see if they were real, but that would have been really uncouth and embarrassing. So I made my daughter do it. She took a photo too:

They were real!

Obligatory-Post-Recital-Closed-Mouth-Portrait-Because-There’s-Enough-Reception-Food-Crammed-Into-Those-Cheeks-To-Feed-A-Small-Nation:

No-Way-Am-I-Cooking-Tonight-Post-Recital-Celebration-Dinner:

Sunday

I got to spend a few blissful hours getting my hands dirty in the garden:

 

Joséphine

After a fitful night, I was groggy and crabby when my daughter burst into my room yesterday morning. But when she asked me if I could put her hair in a bun and if she could borrow one of my dresses for the project her group of friends would be filming at school that day, I immediately sprung out of bed, fully awake and with a big foolish grin pasted across my beaming face. This kind of thing doesn’t happen very often around here. This is how my girl usually likes to dress up:

She’s no dainty flower, that’s for sure, and I love her all the more for it. Sometimes, though, I do try to cultivate the softer side of her.

Lately, I’ve been trying to break “Thugerella” as we affectionately like to call her, of her habit of thundering up and down the stairs as if she’s being chased by all the demons of hell. I swear it sounds like a herd of buffalo.

“Imagine that with each step, you’re walking on top of your mother’s head,” I coax her.

For some reason this particular admonishment has not yielded the desired effect…Whenever I hear her pounding down the stairs, cracking her dear mama’s skull with every step, I have to resort to bellowing, “HERD OF BUFFALO!” in a most unladylike fashion. At that point her footsteps usually quiet down to a mere dull, concussion-inducing thudding.

“There WILL be pictures,” I said, as I pulled her hair into a bun, beside myself with excitement. “And YES, I’ll absolutely be putting the pictures on my blog.”

Poor girl. All she could do was sigh heavily and wince as I stuck her with a million bobby pins. I personally think the pain was worth it…

I present to you: Empress Joséphine de Beauharnais!

“Look regal,” I instructed.

It’s impossible to thunder up and down the stairs in an evening gown…

We laughed about this yesterday…

Yesterday when I was waiting with my son for his ride to DC, we reminisced about this incident from last year. I originally posted this on April 9, 2014…

The cherry blossoms hadn’t quite popped yet, but the Cherry Blossom Festival was in full swing this weekend.

After lunch, we decided to go paddle-boating in the Tidal Basin.

Two people had to peddle in our four person boat. My three kids argued over who would get to peddle as if they were vying for seats on the U.S. Olympic rowing team. The man who was helping us into the boat solved the problem by suggesting that we return to the dock halfway through to switch positions.

“Remember! You’re not allowed to switch positions in the middle of the water,” he warned, “When you’re ready to switch, you have to come back here and we’ll help you do it.”

The boys took the first shift while my daughter and I relaxed:

Halfway through the hour, we returned to the dock so that my daughter could have a turn. My oldest son graciously gave up his coveted spot to switch positions with her…

Moments before all hell broke loose.

…and immediately transformed into a crazed martinet. “FASTER! Peddle faster, you maggots!” he shouted gleefully.

His siblings bore his strident orders with good humor at first, but the relentless nature of his hectoring soon began to pall. Undeterred by my dirty looks and increasingly forceful requests that he put a sock in it, he kept goading his younger siblings. We were like the characters in Sartre’s Huis Clos, who eventually come to realize that they are in hell, and that their punishment is being trapped for eternity with each other.

To distract the kids, I suggested that we go investigate some white rocks I could see in the distance. I didn’t recognize them and wanted to get a closer look.

The two kids got the boat fairly close to the rocks, but not close enough for me to make out what they were.

“I still can’t see what they are. Can you get a little closer?” I asked.

My conscientious eleven year old, our family’s own Jiminy Cricket, advised me against this unwise course of action. “It will take us too long to get back to the dock if we get any closer to the rock.”

“But I really want to see what they are. How about you get us just a little closer?”

Meanwhile, my eldest took this as a signal to renew his taunts.

“CLOSER! Get CLOSER! Peddle harder, you maggots! I want to see bubbles in our wake!!!”

Against his own better judgment, Jiminy Cricket steered us close enough to the rocks so that I could see at last that it was the new(ish) Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial:

“OK, let’s head back now!” I said, sneaking a peek at the time.

“How much time do we have left to get back to the dock? NO! Don’t tell me, it will just stress me out. OK, go ahead and tell me.”

“Ummm, well, we have about ten minutes.”

Now Jiminy Cricket was pissed. He started scolding both of us.

“You HAD to see the rock! And NOW we’re going to be late getting back to the dock. Don’t blame me if they make us pay more for the boat! I TOLD you it would take too long, but NO, you HAD to get closer.”

“Don’t stress out about it! If we have to pay extra, we’ll just pay extra. It’s not a big deal,” I tried to reassure him.

All the while, his brother provided a steady dose of maddening counterpoint: “Is that the best you can do? We’re not even moving! Come ON! Peddle for all your worth, Maggots!”

Jiminy Cricket lost it: “YOU peddle then. I’m not going to peddle anymore!”

“I’d be glad to peddle, but we’re not allowed to switch.” (For some reason, now my eldest son switched to a velvety, smarmy English accent dripping with evil).

For dramatic effect my second son stopped peddling, even though I know it was killing him not to be making any progress back toward the dock.

“Well somebody has to peddle…,” I ventured, as the boat came to a standstill.

At that point we realized the youngest was not feeling well.

“I think I might throw up,” she moaned.

“Just stop peddling. STOP PEDDLING! Take your feet OFF the pedals. I can manage myself!” shrieked my poor little Jiminy Cricket as he resumed peddling as fast as he could, “UGH! My back is KILLING me! My legs are killing me!”

“QUIT your whining, you maggot and peddle!” (I whacked the boy to shut him up – to no avail). “Don’t tell me that’s the best you can do. Peddle harder!!!”

The ridiculousness of it got to me and I started shaking with silent laughter.

“You think this is FUNNY?!” asked Jiminy Cricket, apoplectic with rage.

“NO! I’m sorry! It’s not funny at ALL!” I said trying to get a hold of myself, “I’m sorry, I wish I could help you peddle, but….”

Finally, we made it back to the dock, about fifteen minutes past the time we were due. Fortunately, they took pity on us, and let us stagger off into the sunset without any additional payment.

As we walked on, my sweet Jiminy Cricket said, “Thanks so much for taking us on the awesome boat ride, Mommy.” I looked at him suspiciously to see if he was mocking me, but he continued with earnest sincerity, “It was so much fun!” (That one’s a keeper, I’m telling you)!

The three siblings reconciled…

and we headed back to meet up with my sister for our ride back to Arlington.

 

Fifteen

Our birthday boy is now 6’1 and needs to shave. It’s much more difficult to nag and scold a boy when he towers over you. In any case, there’s far less cause for nagging or scolding these days…To my great joy, nowadays more often than not our conversations are easy and filled with laughter.

Other things have changed too…Every once in a while, my son used to sing with a beautiful, pure countertenor voice that would make me drop whatever I was doing to listen. I had to be surreptitious about it; he would immediately clam up if he thought anyone was paying attention to his singing. When his voice fell, the sweet tone that once held me spellbound became harsh and ragged. He still hasn’t been able to find his singing voice, but he’s still making beautiful music…These days he can often be found at the piano or at his laptop with headphones on, creating beats.

Some things never change…We sent our son off this morning on a trip with friends. Packing this morning involved lengthy and heated negotiations. As we stood shivering in the unseasonably cool weather, waiting in the designated spot where his friend’s dad would be picking him up,  I realized I never retrieved from the dryer the one pair of long pants he was planning to wear – a pair of jeans I had stayed up late to wash and dry for his trip. While we stood waiting for his ride, we made idle talk. He described to me at great length the bout of “sleep paralysis” he had experienced for the first time this morning, complete with a hallucinated “dark figure”. He was freaked out initially, but then exhilarated for having experienced a phenomenon he had only ever read about. My side of the conversation was far more prosaic and pretty much boiled down to the same request phrased in different ways. “Cool story. Hey! Remember to text the woman who gave birth to you to let her know you’re still alive. You owe that much to her. Oh, wow! You felt like the dark figure was sucking you in, but you couldn’t move?! Must have been so scary. So anyway, I’m sure you can find time to send me a one sentence text or even just a photo once or twice a day, right?” (It’s 9:30 pm and I haven’t heard a peep from the boy)…

I re-read this post from April 25, 2013 and had to smile.

The past two weeks have shaken us all to the core and have left us feeling raw, exposed, and vulnerable. There was the vicious bomb attack at the Boston Marathon, the devastating fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, and the catastrophic earthquake in China. Closer to home there have been great sorrows that have not made it into the news cycle, but have made the people around me painfully aware of how precious life is and how cruelly capricious the tides of fate.

This morning I realized how much these events have crept into my psyche. I had been up to 2:30 am (the only time I could find to write) and had woken up at 6 am to help my son get packed for his three day school trip.The night before, when he had announced that he was too tired to pack and would wake up early to do so, I knew with absolute certainty that this was a terrible idea. I knew this morning would not be pretty, but I didn’t have the energy to argue the point or to start the packing myself.

So this morning at 6, I sat on my bedroom floor with an open suitcase and my laptop opened to the emailed packing list my son’s teacher had sent.

“Bring me three pairs of long pants and three long-sleeve shirts!” I called out to him.

He slowly shuffled into my bedroom with one pair of pants and one t-shirt.

“THREE pairs of pants and THREE LONG-sleeve shirts!'” I bellowed with exasperation, “CHOP CHOP!”

Seasons changed, my skin began to sag, and more grey hairs sprouted as I waited for him to reappear. Finally he showed up bearing…another t-shirt and a sweater.

When I protested, he claimed that he couldn’t find what was asked for in his drawers.

I rifled through his drawers myself and discovered one or two of the things he needed, but confirmed the fact that the rest of the items simply weren’t there. They were buried deep in the mountain of unwashed laundry that I hadn’t been able to get to all week.

You can probably imagine the snarling and generally churlish behavior that ensued, but we finally did get him packed. Already running late, I began getting myself ready for work. As I was getting out of the shower, I could hear that my husband was about to leave the house to drop him off at school for the field trip.

There was one crucial thing I had forgotten, and I didn’t want to miss my chance. If I’d learned anything in these past two weeks, I’d learned that sometimes you never do get a second chance.

I raced out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around me and my hair streaming with water. At the top of the stairs, I barked out his name.

He turned around, and from the bottom of the stairs he looked up at me with a doleful stare and sighed, “Yes?”

“Yes?”

The word was imbued with that unique teenage inflection that makes it abundantly clear that behind that monosyllable is irritation, a lifetime of suffering, and the sure expectation of more unreasonable parental behavior…

I tried to modulate my own tone, but failed.

“I LOVE YOU!” I snapped.

A momentary flicker of surprise registered in his eyes and after the briefest pause, he muttered “Love you” and ambled out the door.

Destination Imagination

Part I:

I’ve recently discovered that there’s a right and wrong way to praise children, and I, of course, have been doing it aaaaall wrong. Not only have I been “cheapening” my words when I’ve praised my children, I may have actually been harming their development. I’ve created praise-junkies, afraid to to take risks for fear of not getting their next hit of approval. In fact, when I think I’m praising my children, I may actually be “belittling” them, because I am sending them the message that their every move is some sort of high wire performance for my benefit and judgment.

Now whenever an errant “Good job!” escapes my lips, I clap my hand over my mouth and try to counteract the bad I’ve put out into the universe by immediately shouting out something more appropriate:

“I mean: ‘I can see that you worked hard on that!'”

After my child wins a soccer game, rather than “Great game!”, I have to remind myself to say, “I loved watching you play…Not because you’re a good player or anything, but because I truly enjoy sitting in the blazing sun/freezing cold/pouring rain watching you and your friends kick a ball around the field for an hour.”

It’s frankly exhausting. What? It’s not enough just to keep these little people alive?!

My daughter has been a part of a Destination Imagination team for three years now. Last year was the first year her team was old enough to compete. They had a wonderful time, but did not advance beyond the first round of competition. This year, before they had even competed, she was chirruping away about the Global Tournament. I felt that it was my duty to manage her expectations. I kept gently interrupting her reveries by saying things like, “…It’s actually quite difficult to qualify for Globals. Only a few teams get to go…” and “Let’s see how you guys do at the Regional Tournament first…” She took it on the chin for awhile, but one day she narrowed her eyes and said, “Wait a minute…Do you have low expectations for us?!”

Clearly, I haven’t yet hit upon the right balance.

Part II

Two weekends ago my daughter’s team competed at the Regional Tournament and qualified to advance to the State Tournament, so this past Friday she and I headed to Harrisonburg, Virginia. We shared a hotel room for the night with our good friends, who also happen to be the DI team manager and her son. I think my daughter may have slept three hours. She spent the rest of the night thrashing, getting drinks of water, going to the bathroom, and being shushed by her increasingly grumpy mother…

Can you tell someone is excited? “I look like a crazed llama!”
Crazed llama? Underslept, dazed mamas

The rest of the team and the rest of our family showed up the next day for the competition.

Because I’ve been appraising other challenges, I’d never actually been able to see my daughter’s team perform this year. She looked like this!

The gym before the Award Ceremony looked like this!

There’s no diplomatic way to put this…It smelled like a million sweaty socks in that gym!

The kids were feeling rather glum when the awards were announced and they didn’t place high enough to advance to the Global Tournament. I was mentally preparing my consolation speech, when they were announced as the winners of the Instant Challenge part of the competition!

At the very end of the ceremony two “Wild Card” teams were pulled out of a cup. The only teams who could qualify for the drawing to advance to the Global Tournament had to have placed first in either the Instant Challenge or the Main Challenge…They won!

This awesome  hard-working team is going to the Global Finals in Knoxville, Tennessee!

Two years ago when my son’s team advanced to the Global Tournament, my daughter was crushed when her mean mother didn’t pull her out of school so that she could accompany her brother to the tournament. Here she is saying goodbye to him as he headed off back then:

And here they are on Saturday!

Knoxville, Tennessee here she comes…despite all the damage her mother has inflicted upon her psyche over the years!

Driver’s Ed

We made a very quick, long overdue trip to Arlington to see my parents this weekend. The last time we saw them was at Christmas when we were all together at my sister’s house in New Jersey. The kids have been missing their grandparents. As for the grandparents? When I talked to my dad over the phone a few weeks ago, he said in a forlorn little voice, “So…you’re not going to visit us anymore?”

We had a lot of catching up to do. My oldest son is about to turn 15 in a couple of weeks and so at the top of the list of discussion topics was the astonishing fact that the state of Virginia would be prepared to give this baby a learner’s permit a mere six months after his 15th birthday.

EYES ON THE ROAD!!!

I’ve written before about the conversation I had with my son a couple years ago when he was about to turn 13 and was already then excitedly musing about the fact that he could legally get his learner’s permit in less than three years.

Obviously, I couldn’t shirk my moral responsibility and duty as his mother to disabuse him of the notion that this was a given. “Killjoy,” “Wet Dishrag,” and “Party Pooper” happen to be my middle names. This is why I get paid the big bucks after all.

“It’s not just about how old you are,” I replied. “We would have to see that you were really ready for the responsibility of driving. We’d want to make sure that you were mature enough to handle that responsibility.”

I watched the light die in his eyes. He was silent for a moment as he pondered my words and performed some mental calculations before coming to an unwelcome conclusion, “If T (his sister who was then 7) is driving me around when she‘s fifteen and a half, I’m going to be really, really mad!”

The fact that his brother may soon be driving has apparently been weighing as heavily on my 12 year old son’s mind as it has on mine.

“N. will be learning to drive soon,” he said to me one day as I was ferrying him back home from some activity. “That’s a pretty scary thought…Can we make sure he doesn’t drive with me in the car until he’s at least 18?”

I reported this conversation to my dad and we chuckled about it. Our conversation reminded me of the day my mother finally got her driver’s license at the age of 50 after years of trying. She never actually failed the test, she just lost her nerve every time she was about to take it. It wasn’t her fault. Every time she would screw up the courage to start learning how to drive, she would get into a serious car accident. I don’t even think she was driving the car any of the times that it happened. It was just extraordinarily bad luck and timing.

When she finally came back from the DMV clutching her brand new driver’s license, she was giddy with triumph.

“You got it! That’s amazing, Mom! Tell me all about it!”

“Well, the man told me to drive around the block and so I did. But THEN, he told me to do a U-turn! I said, ‘WHAAAAAAAAAT?! I don’t know how to do a U-turn!!'”

“Uh-oh…So then what happened?”

“He reached over and turned the wheel for me,” she replied as if this should be perfectly obvious.

Here’s where the story got confusing. Who pulls a stunt like that and then actually passes the test and gets her license? My mom. That’s who.

“And that’s when I knew she had magical powers!” I said to my dad, “I mean I’d always suspected it, of course, and I knew she could get people to do whatever she wanted them to, but that was definitive proof that she really is some kind of a witch.”

To this day, I have a recurring nightmare in which I find myself in a car with my mother at the wheel. But to her credit, the day she got her license was the last day my mother ever drove a car. It was enough that she had slain the dragon. The best witches know their limits.