Demoralizing School Letter

             I got a terrifying form from my kid’s teacher at the beginning of the year.  I’ve gotten it before and the PTSD made me forget it.  So I was horrified anew.  It depressed me and made me feel bad about myself. It made me inform my child’s teacher that I was a giant loser.  And it looked so innocent to start….

            One warm, autumn day, #3 brings home a package from the teacher.  Some nice notes about the teacher looking forward to a great year.  A sheet asking for more information about my child.  (How to boil down hopes, dreams and fears into a few lines?!?) And one asking for information about the family.  All innocent questions.  Until  – Do you have any special talents you can share with our class? [Insert scary music] 

            Me? Special talents?  I am excellent at surfing the web.  I listen to music.  I can vacuum WHILE listening to music.  I am really good at chewing my food and rarely choke.  (Yes, that implies that sometimes I do.  Having to eat and breathe at the same time?  Hard. But I can walk and chew gum, so there!) I almost never forget where I put my kids. I know the things I am bad at but forcing me to face the dearth of things I am good at?  Well, that was uncalled for.

            It really stressed me out!  What am I good at?!  I’m a hausfrau but not fabulous at it.  I’m a mom but I am far from an uber mom.  Oh, my God!  I suck!  Thankfully, I ran into some other moms the next day and shared my tale of woe with them.  They are both professional, accomplished women.  I joked about the letter I had received and tried not to whine.  One of them said, “I can teach the class to put on makeup.  That’s about it.” 

            Ahhh, I felt so much better.  This talented woman was in the same boat as me!  I realized that there will be super parents who go in and orchestrate some fabulous project making like musical instruments out of sugar.  But, there will also be talented parents who can’t think of anything.   And the best part was when I told my daughter, “Honey, I can’t think of any special talents that I can share with your class. “ I took a breath- ready to launch into an explanation of some special talents that are unseen and like being a good friend…blah…blah…blah.  Or to explain the teacher wouldn’t like it if I tried to burp the Pledge of Allegiance…. But, before I could start the speech, she cut me off, “That’s ok, Mommy.  I don’t care.” 

            Maybe my special talent is teaching my kids that I am imperfect.  I allow them to see my flaws and joke about them hoping that they will be lighthearted about their own shortcomings someday.  They aren’t perfect either and that’s ok.  We are perfect for each other.

           

P.S. Wasn’t that sweet?  Still leaves me with nothing to share with a bunch of 4^th  graders...  At least, nothing a teacher would like but I bet the burping would’ve been a BIG hit…

Muffin Top? (P.S. Possible TMI Alert)

            I told you that I joined a gym.  Seeing the title up there you are probably thinking that I joined to rid myself of a muffin top.  Nope!  I joined because, at 42, I was at the crest of the hill and there was no turning back.  The only way to go was over.  Joining a gym could be the equivalent of tossing an anchor from my little red wagon.  It couldn’t stop me from eventually reaching the bottom of said hill but it could slow the descent from a terrifying, headlong hurtle to a leisurely amble.  I hope.  (If not I’ll be pissed!  I could’ve been watching a lot of TV and eating Ring Dings….)

            Where was I?  Right, muffin top.  So, I have definitely added girth to my mid section and it is the fault of having to make three kids from scratch.  It’s like a balloon, when you let the air out it doesn’t quite get as small as it started out.    Blow it up more than once?  [Shiver]  And while I didn’t join the gym expecting to become fabulous (because I know I am lazy), it got me thinking and hoping a little for some exterior benefit.

            So, I started thinking about my muffin top.  Well, someone made me think about it.  Snuggling with #3, my shirt rode up a little and there it was.  Begging to be poked and giggled at by my daughter. I said, “Hey, leave my muffin top alone!”  Then of course, I had to explain what a muffin top was.  Youth.  Remember when we were so young we didn’t know what a muffin top was?  Remember before we had them?  Before it was even a thing?!

            When I was explaining it to her, I realized that (for me at least) it didn’t really look like a muffin top.   It wasn’t golden brown.  (I’m Irish.) It didn’t have chocolate chips. (Why would you even bother with a muffin if it didn’t have chocolate chips?)   It looked more like a pizza crust- doughy, pasty, white.  All it was missing was a dusting of flour.   And while it seems that a little extra roll of dough would be better than my entire upper body being a big muffin topper, a pizza crust seems worse somehow.  Muffin tops sound sweet.  Pizza crust sounds…crusty.  Yuck…  

            So now, I’ve been going to the gym for a while and I’m still carrying around my stuffed crust.  (I heard you have to do something called -crunches? They sound hard. And, contrary to the name, do not involve Doritos.)  Back in the day women would wear girdles with whalebone or steel ribs to force their flesh into the desired hourglass shape.  Those days have passed.  Or have they?  Thanks to the modern engineering of nylon, I’ve heard that there’s modern girdle wear called Spanx .  Could it be the rolling pin to my dough?  I think this needs investigating. And, dammit, all this talk of pizzas and muffins is making me hungry…  Maybe I need to wear Spanx over my face to keep the food out?

9/11

Reading through everyone's 9/11 recollections on Facebook made me think of this...  

     There are moments in your life that change you forever.  I remember the first time I went shopping by myself after my daughter was born thinking, "Wow.  These people have no idea of this HUGE event that has happened to me."  As I continued shopping I remembered how, when I was young, we would do timelines in school.  Sometimes we did a timeline of our own lives. I thought of my life timeline and how a huge line had just divided it.  There was now before and after I became a mother.  How everything had changed for me.  In ways both wonderful and scary...

     Nine months later, I was riding home in silence with my brother from St. Vincent's hospital where we had just watched my sweet, gentle mother take her last breath.  I was looking out the car window at the pretty, sunny day.  Everywhere I looked people were going about their regular lives.  In my head, I was SCREAMING, "You have no fucking idea what just happened to me!  How can you all just be walking around when my mother is dead?!"  I suddenly thought again of the timeline.  This time I felt like someone had taken a giant, ugly black marker and scribbled this horrid, jagged line right down the middle.  Dividing my life into the before and after in a shocking and mutative way.  

     A little less than three years later was September 11, 2001.  I won't go into the details of that morning.  When I think of or talk about that morning, I get caught up in the minutiae.  For many of us, it was a morning like many other mornings.  Like a thousand other mornings we have forgotten.  Until we heard the news.  Until we saw the pictures.  Now every average moment we had before we heard the news is seared into our memories.  

   On 9/11, my brother was at his new job in the WTC.  My husband worked across the street and WTC was his subway stop.  My brother-in-law was a police officer responding to the emergency.  It was a long agonizing day.  Calling cell phones that weren't picking up.  Waiting.  But they all came home.  We were soooo incredibly lucky.   

     While nursing my 3-week-old son in the middle of the nights that followed,  I would flip on the TV.  Always scared that something else had happened during those few hours of sleep. I watched the recovery efforts, floodlights illuminating the scene, as hope waned that a pocket of survivors would be found.  I sat in my rocking chair in the quiet of night thinking and praying.  I thought about the baby in my arms and wondered what kind of world he would grow up in.  I thought of my mother and the value of one life.  How many lives a person can affect and how many lives are forever changed by that one person's death.

     Again, I thought of my timeline.  Of the country's timeline.  Of so many people's personal timelines and the ugly black lines changing their lives forever.  And, of the timelines that stopped way before they should have...

     Today, I remember the 2,977 and the people who still love and miss them every moment of every day.

Evil Mom Thoughts

            Do you ever have evil thoughts as a parent?  I love my children but sometimes they make me crazy and I want a little passive-aggressive payback.  OR, because they haven’t been on the Earth as long and are gullible, I want to have a little fun at their expense.  Is that so wrong?  Ok.  I guess it’s a little wrong.  But still fun!

            Sometimes, I have these creepy, “Chucky” thoughts.  I don’t act on them.  But, still, I think, “Hmm, what if those little dolls are not tucked into their beds in the morning but are sitting at the desk with a pen…  You ask, “What would they be writing?"  I don’t know…  a ransom note to Ken about Barbie?  A note that say’s to my daughter, “You look so cute when you are sleeping!”  How fun would that be?!  Okay, not that fun because she would have to sleep in my room for the next year.  But it’s fun to think about…

            Sometimes, I feel like making them the juice pops they like (frozen juice in a mold) with beet juice just to see their faces.  Or covering their doors with plastic wrap while they are sleeping.  Or short sheeting their beds.  (Which my father used to make sound like a great prank.  Seems kind of dull to me but probably the nicest trick I could play on children…) 

Short sheeting would be nicer that putting black X’s on a doll’s eyes… Or making a chalk outline of a doll on the floor.   What’s wrong with me?  (I think I need to stop watching Law and Order.  And maybe grow up…)  It’s not as if I like having pranks pulled on me.  I am a chicken.  And I have spawned three chickens.   I think it’s just the problem of a wandering mind and an overactive imagination.

            This week, I succumbed to a good idea and opportunity.  I couldn’t resist!  We recently got a new desktop computer to replace the dinosaur we’ve been using.  Because the dinosaur was, well, a dinosaur, we couldn’t print from our laptop.  The old D-Rex couldn’t network.  Saturday, my son asked to go on the big computer to play Roblox.  I was in the other room setting up the laptop to network/print.  I needed to test that it was working.  I had to print something.  But what?

I knew that my son would be shocked if the printer suddenly went on and that he would check to see what printed. I started hearing an inward, maniacal cackle.  When the printer turned on I called in to my son, “Why are you printing?  It’s not set up yet.”  He said confused, “I’m not.” Here is what he saw:

Hi L _______,

This note is from God. 

[I heard a gasp.  Then he read on.]

I love you.

(And so does your mommy.)

“Moooom!”  I was laughing.  “You scared me!  I thought I did something wrong…”  I went in and he had his hand on his heart and he said, “You really scared me. My heart slammed…”  And then I felt guilty.  Why did I have to be so mean?  How could I make him feel like God was about to yell at him through the printer?  (And, why couldn’t I stop laughing?)  Evil mommy…

And, yet, I have to admit that I am a bit annoyed with myself (since he did think it was from God for a moment there) that I didn’t send a more meaningful message.  Like, “Do your homework.” Or, “Study hard.” Or,  “Stop playing electronics and go outside.” Or, “Your mother hates cooking.  Now it’s your job.”  I wonder if this would work on my husband….

Bronx Zoo Repeat

            Summer time is “Mommy Camp” time and today (now, when you’re reading this, it’s in the past) we went on a field trip to the Bronx Zoo.  I love going to the zoo with them and I always look forward to our trips.   Like one of the kids, I am all excited as we approach the gate.  But after about a half an hour, I’m not as excited.  I think that between three kids, many years and multiple visits, I must’ve been to the Bronx Zoo about a quadrillion times.  Which doesn’t mean that I don’t like to go- it just means that once I’m there I am constantly in a deja vu state where half-memories are ghosting the reality.

            Something both funny and disturbing about me is how easily I forget things.  Like your 85-year-old grandpa, I repeat stupid jokes that you have heard before.  Except I think I am being clever in the moment and that they are new stupid jokes!  I think I am being original but I am stealing my own material.  Luckily for me, since I have Swiss cheese for brains, I am amazed by the same things year after year and re-laugh at my own same jokes.  But I guess it’s monotonous to some around me…

            Children have excellent memories.  They will remember the ice cream you promised to get them but never followed through on for the next 20 years.  (And make you pay for it!)  I think they have excellent memories because their brains are much emptier.  When they have lived through all these years and all these experiences, they will still remember that ice cream they were denied but won’t remember what they were saying two seconds earlier. Their brains are like nice clean desks and mine is like a hoarders house. 

            My children are getting bigger and my oldest is at the wonderful age and stage of pointing out how wrong I am and how little I know all the time.  (And how old I am. Which I hate! And if I’m so old, shouldn’t I know more than her?)  So today, with an eye roll and an exasperated statement, she made me realize how porous my brain has become.  Or always was, I can’t tell. (And even if I figured it out, I forgot!)  Shortly after we arrived, we got on the Wild Asia monorail and I saw the safety stickers.  They were the universal red circle with the line through them and the usual ones- no eating, no smoking and no standing.  However, the little stick figure for the no standing had his arms extended up like he was dancing to Y.M.C.A.  As I am sitting down I say sternly, “Oh, kids, look.  No jumping jacks.”  The eye roller rolls… all right you know what she did…and she accompanies it with a disgusted, “You said the same thing last year.”  I did?  You sure?  Huh.  I don’t remember that.  But, hey, it was funny right?  No? Apparently she thought it was lame then.  Now it’s lame times 365. 

            Thankfully, I have younger ones who will laugh kindly at my bad jokes but soon enough they will be eye rollers as well.  I am not looking forward to that.  By that time, I’ll be saying the joke for the 6^th, 7^th, 8^th time!  I can’t imagine they will be any kinder than the oldest.  Maybe I should record my corny jokes so I don’t have to exert myself repeating them every year.  Or, I could just write them down as soon as someone (you-know-who) points out my gaff.  Then, try to rewrite them differently for use the following year?  It’s not my fault I repeat myself!  I’ve lived through the Bronx Zoo experience a quadrillion times!  It’s like my own personal Groundhog's Day.  Maybe I should just put all my usual statements on index cards to hand out at the appropriate time.  Like, “Sure I’ll take a picture of you with the giant fox ears.” (I could fill a scrapbook with those.)  And, “Look at all that poop? Who gets to clean that up?” And, "Yes, it is sooo cute." And, "I don't know why their butts are big and funny colors." (That's in the baboon section, not the restroom.)  And, their least favorite, “If you wanted souvenirs you should’ve brought your money with you.”

                                     *          *          *          *

            A NEW conversation that I thought was interesting took place at the Bug carousel.  

Me:        Wow, listen to this.  The preying mantis kills her mate

               and then eats his head!

Them:    EEEEWWW…

Me:        What if I killed daddy and ate his head during Wipeout?

Oldest:   Why during Wipeout?!  That’s very specific…

Really, that’s the part of the statement that seemed wrong to her?!