Tag Archives: Parenting

Bloody Good

I brought my nine year old daughter to the hospital last Friday morning for her quarterly blood draw.

She took her seat and warily waited for the phlebotomist to begin.

“How are you doing?” the woman asked my daughter in a cheery voice as she readied her equipment.

“I’m fine,” my daughter mustered, valiantly trying to hide her misery, “How about you?”

The phlebotomist seemed genuinely surprised. She stopped what she was doing to say, “I’m fine! Thank you so much for asking! You’ve made my day!”

As we were walking back to the car after the blood draw, I launched into the entirely predictable, tedious, teachable moment speech that tiresome parents such as myself simply cannot resist inflicting upon their children:

“I was SO proud of you for being so polite to the lady! And did you hear what she said to you? You made her day! Do you see how easy it is to make people happy, by just…”

She cut me off and said, “Of course I’m going to be nice to someone who’s about to stab me with a sharp object!”

I guess we can all have teachable moments…

Cheese

WARNING: If you haven’t had dinner yet, DO NOT READ! And, I apologize in advance for this post.

As you might imagine with a husband who teaches philosophy for a living, conversations around our dinner table tend to be rather highbrow. Here, for example, is what the professor had to say when he finally made it back home in a cast after his fall down the mountain our family now routinely uses air quotes to refer to as: “Mount Pleasant.”

“You think the leg cheese under your shin guards is bad after a soccer game,” he said to my daughter, “Imagine how bad it will be when my cast comes off. My leg will probably be completely coated in a slimy layer of ripe brie.”

To put what happened next into context, you need to know that my fourteen year old boy lives to shock us with gross stories he’s heard from his fellow pubescents or gleaned from the bowels of the internet. He is also going through a growth spurt that makes him ravenously hungry. You can’t even imagine the staggering quantities of food he eats. All this to say, it takes some high octane intellectual firepower to both disgust him and cause him to lose his appetite.

He recoiled in a rictus of visceral horror, dropped his fork with a loud clatter, and pushed his plate away.

“DAD! We’re eating! And this salad has feta in it. I seriously can’t eat any more.”

Pray for me, friends. It’s going to be a very long few months…

This Boy

My dad was working in Korea when my first child, his first grandson, was born. He was finally able to meet him when we all converged in Minneapolis to celebrate the wedding of my brother and sister-in-law.

All weekend long, as soon as my dad would spot us, he would scoop his grandchild from my arms into his own.

“You look tired,” he’d say, “I’ll hold the baby for you.” Or: “He must be really heavy for you. Let me take him.”

Because I can be astonishingly dense, the first time I said, “I’m OK, Dad. I can hold him.”

“Nah,” he said gruffly, “You need a rest. I better hold him for you.”

No one else got a chance to hold the baby that weekend…

The words “I love you” have never once fallen from my father’s lips, but that weekend I heard those unspoken words when he gazed upon his grandson and said wistfully, “You won’t believe it, but in the blink of an eye, he’ll be grown up and out the door and you won’t even know how it happened.”

Dad’s babies

Here’s that baby fourteen Novembers ago…

November 2000

I blinked and this happened:

November 2014

Today my son was wearing a t-shirt my husband used to wear when I first met him. Today we measured him, and the boy who, I swear, was a baby only yesterday, is now 6 feet tall!

Oh, Time, our greatest friend and foe! May I remember that every minute of this precious life, even in the most challenging of times, is a gift of immeasurable value. May I not squander the days that I have with these beloved children under my own roof. And when they eventually do go out that door, may they fly back home now and then to my loving arms.

What they wore

It’s that time of the year again…

In years past, I’ve resorted to sneaking into my kids’ rooms to steal all their shorts and hide them. This year, inspired by my friend’s sage advice, I’m not going to pick this particular battle. I’m going to let those crazy kids wear whatever they want to school, even if it means winter coats over shorts:

Believe me, I’ve got bigger fish to fry…

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?

 

 

 

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.