How to talk to your mother

A communication guide for teenagers

Jack and I were in the car the other day, rushing to get him to his violin lesson.

I love that he still plays violin, and that we’ve gotten way past the screechy stuff to a place where I get to hear some lovely after-dinner music – a therapeutic follow up to the hours we have to spend browbeating the kid into practicing … but perhaps a topic for another blog.

On this particular day, like most, we were late.

It’s moments like these I almost despair of him ever managing on his own. The kid is fifteen years old and I swear he hasn’t learned to tell time or put his underwear on right-side-out yet.

“I told you we were leaving in five minutes, which is when you should be finding your shoes and getting your music together,” I said.

Listen to me, going on like I am the world’s most prompt person. I always think I can eek out one more thing before flying out the door, and that maybe all the stoplights will be green, that the traffic will be light, that I’ll be able to slip in just before the meeting starts. It happens. Sometimes.

Mostly not.

Rude, I know, this late thing.

And, it was kind of my regular MO anyway, then kids came along and compounded the problem about a zillion percent, as kids will.

Continue Reading

Snow morning session

snow_morning copyChip, scrape, chip, chip scrape.

Morning.
The early winter sky a brilliant blue.
Sun reflects shimmery on white, blinding me.

Chip, scrape, chip, chip scrape.

It was a little thing.
And then the next to follow the first. Both little.
One cover-up leading, as it will, to another.

Chip, scrape, chip, chip scrape.

Continue Reading

It’s okay. I’m not into drawing, anyway

line copyA friend of mine and I were comparing notes recently on the joys of parenting. He has an eighteen-month-old son and his wife is about halfway through her pregnancy with another.

He told me about how he had, until recently, held out just a little smidgen of a nugget of hope that the second baby would be a girl. You know, for a matched set.

Of course he’s perfectly happy either way.

And then we did that what-a-relief-we-don’t-have-to-ever-worry-about-parenting-teenage-girls thing parents of boys do, which we do mostly because:

  • It’s universally accepted that teenage girls can be the scariest, most dramatic, complicated and least understood creatures ever, and
  • We’re trying to console ourselves that we’ll never get to exclaim over tulle or teensy, embroidered flowers on denim hems in the clothing section. Shopping for boy clothing being more about reinforced knees and stuff that won’t show grass stains, than it is about fashion.

I did, however, have to disabuse my friend of the notion that parenting boys is downright easy. That’s like calling Indiana Jones a wussy because he doesn’t like snakes.

Continue Reading

The Learner’s Permit. Also known as Fifty Hour Glutes

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA“We taking the freeway?” Jack asks as I get out from behind the wheel and cross to the passenger side. His schoolmates hoot at him from in front of the building, impressed by his learner’s permit. He struts to the car.

“Not a chance. There’s construction,” and probably will be for the next decade. For the past several months, they’ve been squeezing six lanes into two on the route to Jack’s school. Our normal 20 minutes can take twice as long or more now, depending upon factors I have yet to fathom.

We pull away, and I mouth “SAVE ME” at the kids, pawing the window for effect. They laugh appreciatively. It never gets old. Jack’s polite enough to let me poke fun.

Continue Reading

With a little time and some Pinterest, I can mess up just about everything

Oh, shut the hell up.

A little part of me believes herself to be Julia Child incarnate.

Pesky Julia rarely feels like strutting her stuff when I have a free afternoon and no one to impress. She shows up when I’m pressed for time and need to provide appetizers for a couple dozen people.

I should feel lucky, if I’m going to have multiple personalities, at least there’s no BASE jumpers or spelunkers clamoring for space. Julia rarely puts me in any danger. She’s just overconfident in the kitchen.

And Julia really digs Pinterest boards with names like “Absurdly Easy Appetizers You Can Do Unless You’re an Idiot,” and a phone app we can use in the parking lot of the grocery store. When it comes to wreaking havoc in the kitchen, Julia and Pinterest are codependents.

Continue Reading

I so freaking love these people

boysTwo brothers, give or take six hours between school and bedtime, so many things to fight about.

Things like:

Who gets shotgun on the ride home.

Who got it last time.

Who had it all last week, for crissake.

Who left the empty Cheetos bag in the back seat for someone else to clean up (righteous indignation being best expressed by flinging said Cheetos bag into the way back – indicating that mom apparently is the “someone else”).

Continue Reading

Earplugs are the coolest accessory

safe_in_sound copyMike and I were at a reception last week for a woman who would deliver the keynote address at a conference the next day. The conference chair and her husband were telling us that our guest of honor had found a note in her room from the hotel manager apologizing in advance for the concert that would be happening that night in the adjacent arena.

“What kind of crazy thing do you think they have going on there?” The woman remarked.

We knew. It was a national music festival, billing itself as 150,000 watts of bass crunch, from a brand of noise they say is so intense “you can touch in the air.” It’s the kind of music Jack and all his friends have been talking about. Dubstep. Electro house hip-hop.

And, I kid you not one freaking bit, the concert promoter recommends earplugs.

Doesn’t that sound just so outrageously awesome awful?

Anyway, we happened to know about it because that’s where we’d dropped our 15 year-old off on the way to the reception.

Continue Reading

Want to see something REALLY scary?

halloween
Check it out, people. There was a time I did THIS.

I don’t think I’m ever one to second-guess other parents … until Halloween.

On All Hallows Eve, I transform into Judge Judge-y MacJudgerson.

I am that mom. The one who cuts her kids off from trick-or-treating about the time they’re elbowing their way into puberty. I’m not following any developmental guidebook, and I haven’t looked up any studies on kids who later needed therapy because their moms put the kybosh on the candy corn prematurely. It’s just one of the many rules I was raised with that I have arbitrarily selected to enforce on my own progeny.

My own cut-off was sixth grade. Mom thought the age of twelve was awkward enough without shaking down the neighbors with a mask and a pillowcase.

I suggested just doing it for Halloween, but she wouldn’t budge.

So, by fifth-grade, I was one of those mature Hollywood starlets, nearly past her prime at an age anyone else would consider reasonably young, wobbling pathetically around the neighborhood in her pumps and shabby ball gown, jonesing for a bite-sized Snickers, knowing her time is limited.

Hell, even a packet of stale Whoppers from last Easter will work for someone just out looking for attention when the up-and-coming set is perfecting their pitchy “twick or tweeeeet!”

It’s not that I had a huge hankering for candy, but being officially ousted from the circuit was harsh.

But it got worse. In the years after I was no longer trick-or-treating, I was in charge of escorting my little sister.

Continue Reading

Stegosauri, Scooby, and Snail Mail

steg_laughingOn NPR last week there was the usual litany: Syria, Isis, Ebola and various other dismal subjects that prompt the boys and me to start more pleasant topics in the car, like laying odds on which of us would most likely survive a Zombie Apocalypse (do not bet on mom), or what the boys would do with their allotted millions when Mike or I win the lottery.

Because, surely we’ll dole out a few large to each of them, right?

I always say yes to that one. I’m a giver. Especially with money that I’m far less likely to win than I am to get run over by a reanimated stegosaurus … while street dancing in purple underwear … after being struck by lightening.

I don’t even own purple underwear.

Continue Reading

So many things I’d rather be doing

Champions league cupI have never been able to get in and out of a Best Buy in fewer than three hours, and without having fended off at least half a dozen sales guys and fielded offers of enough warrantees and insurance to nearly double the cost of whatever I’m buying. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that experience is not unique to me.

I would have rather driven toothpicks under my nails than go on Tuesday, except as I was flying by on the freeway after picking up Jack, I realized he had yet to buy his brother a birthday present for his party the next day.

Colin doesn’t ask for much. He barely even talked about his birthday except when prodded, and then asked his brother specifically for a pair of gaming headphones.

That’s it.

We refer to the shopping mall and everything in a two-mile radius as The Heart of Darkness. That includes the mall proper, and any ancillary chain restaurants, big box movie theaters, massive sporting goods stores and other bastions of excess, harbingers of societal ruin, and brokers of chintzy, mass-produced-on-an-assembly-line crapola.

Continue Reading