I’m not hopelessly uncool. I’m sporty. I know this because it says so right there on the side of my big boxy mini-van. “Grand Caravan SPORT.”
I had never wanted a van. I was not a van person. I shuddered at the very thought of a giant, boxy vehicle roughly the length and width of a football field. Then I watched the rivets that adjoin the side panels in a garbage truck pass inches beyond my nose while my daughter, then three, wailed in terror from the rear seat. At that moment, as my cute little sporty sedan was dragged sideways in a sickening crunch of metal, I wanted an enormous, air-bag laden vehicle in the worst way.
It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn’t.
~ Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
The nice thing about getting married is that you inherit a whole new set of people to fret about.
My niece, for example, is aflutter about learning to drive. According to the State Department of Motor Vehicles she will be eligible to drive within the next thirty days. This is impossible, of course, because she is only eighteen months old. Okay, sure, the calendar says she is going to turn sixteen soon, but I know she’s only eighteen months old because I just met her yesterday, or so it seems, when my husband-then-boyfriend took me to meet his sister and her “baby.” She was a cherubic toddler resplendent in a bride’s costume for Halloween, I was the new-girlfriend unaware of my future as a bride. Now the years have telescoped in on themselves to bring us to this place where she will, inexplicably, be sixteen years old and entrusted with a driver’s license.
I think I just gave her a Barney the Dinosaur toy telephone last Christmas didn’t I? Oh no, that’s right. Last Christmas was the Victoria’s Secret tote. We’ve come a long way baby, indeed.
Practice. Nieces, I think, are good practice for daughters. There a million little things – and big things – a meddlesome aunt like myself would love to foist off on my unsuspecting niece. In 700 words, however, things get boiled down to the basics and I can pretty much sum it up nicely in two: be safe.
A car is an awesome responsibility. Yet, like most teens my niece has undoubtedly heard all the “near miss” and “I can’t believe I walked away from that!” stories that families inevitably tell. Don’t we all grow up hearing about how Uncle Hooty leapt from an out-of-control truck and walked away with only a scratch? We thrill to tales of how grandma once drove cross-country in station wagon packed full of kids, cargo, and a dog on her lap for three-fourths of the trip that blocked her view of the roadway for at least half.
I am fully guilty for my own “meet cute” automotive story. Mine revolves around the fact that on my way to meet my now-husband for our first date, I completely destroyed not one car – but two. The “cute” part is that I shook off having totaled two vehicles due to nothing more than not paying attention, and asked ever so sweetly if the nice officer would pretty please drop me off at the pre-determined meeting place of my eagerly awaiting first date? (For the record, the nice officer did).
I want my niece to understand that my “meet cute” story could have ended tragically. That runaway trucks are as likely to kill you as leave you without a scratch. That driving across the country with a dog on your lap is probably a bad idea.
Do as I say, not as I do, indeed.
Warn. Our hearts quicken and throats tighten as we open the newspaper to yet another story of the tragic loss of teen drivers and their passengers.
We talk and we lecture and we preach and we pray. We tell them to be careful. Be cautious. Be smart. Be safe. We tell them to just say no to every and anything that could cause them harm. Yet teens, by design, seem to live in the moment. You just can’t seem to tell them that life is a great big wonderful ball of risk.
Humor us, I want to say. You seem – and feel – invincible. Only time, God willing, will show you how fragile life really is. Life is too short, and it can be over in a heartbeat. Don’t take your safety or your number of days on this Earth for granted. As you head out the door, stop what you are doing, and remind yourself that you love your life, and your family loves you.
Until then, I worry. While every young driver behind the wheel isn’t your niece, or mine, perhaps we’d all drive just a bit more carefully if we pretended that they were.
And in the coming months, please drive with special care because mine, after all, is barely two.
I know this is a blog about life and all the funny little things that can happen when living it. I hope you generally enjoy it. Yet, that’s the thing about life, its not always happy.
We learned this summer about a little boy in our community who was gravely injured in a backyard accident doing nothing more than the exact same thing countless people do everyday without incident. His injury is probably extremely rare. One in a million even.
I can only imagine what his mother is going through. Reality and statistics must mean nothing when it’s your child. Your child is that one and suddenly that one is a very big and important number.
When that door opens and your child – or his health - is standing on the other side and you are powerless to help it must be the most difficult thing in the world. How impossible to accept that you, who were born to be this child’s mother, cannot make it all better.
I always imagine that parents of an ill or injured child were in my shoes not too long ago. Unless they were born ill, everyone who has a sick or injured child once had a healthy child which means they’re not very different from me or you at all. Their child was a “normal” happy and healthy kid who left shoes by the door and milk on the counter and lost toys between the sofa cushions. And then, just like that, in the blink of an eye, the unthinkable – unspeakable - happens. Thus, they were all me at one point. Going about their daily life, enjoying themselves but maybe taken it all for granted too (at least I know I do). Then they – we - are struck with the powerful realization that life is so fragile and that the delicate balance of our health, happiness, and very existence is held together by a very fine thread which can snap so easily and without warning. That is when you realize that nothing in this life is so sacred that it cannot be taken away.
Matters. I’ve heard so many tragic stories like this one lately that my heart hurts. I don’t mean to be melodramatic but it’s true. Life seems so unbearably fragile lately.I am a pessimist. I tend to see the glass half-empty. I believe that carrying an umbrella will prevent the rain. I have to predict the worst in order that I might be pleasantly surprised if it does not come to pass. Maybe that’s the key…always expect it.
I hope we can all take the time to appreciate the simple moments that really aren’t so simple at all. To remember that what matters is health and family and friends, and safe harbor.
Not housing rates, the global market, the race for the presidency or the price of gasoline.
Tonight I’m thinking about all the children – and their parents – for whom fate turned on a dime. Or a lump, a bump, a bad break, or bad brakes. All the lives impacted in the moment when time – and reality –were forever altered. For all those whose lives are sharply divided by a distinct “before” and “after.”
Today I want to hug my children a little harder, be kinder to my friends, and say an extra special prayer for all of us whose destinies and realities are waiting right around the corner. It says so much about what we have and what we think is important that what we think we cannot bear to lose and what we can survive are two different things. That what we think is untouchable and important really isn’t. That in the end the only thing that cannot be destroyed is our faith. It is the power to help us and carry us through.
In truth, it is shameful how often I pray that I am not tested, even as I pray for those that are.
“So … honey, about that unfortunate incarceration…”
No, too vague.
How about, “So honey, once you make bail you are really going to laugh!”
No. Too flippant.
OK. I’ve got it. “Please don’t kill me and/or divorce me I really, really meant to mail in that speeding ticket payment for you but you know how one thing goes into another and before you know it you find that you’ve tucked the ticket in the visor of your car and completely forgotten to send it until about five days after it was due by mail if you didn’t want to appear before the judge, and oh, by the way, you were supposed to appear before the judge yesterday and of course, you didn’t.”
Whew! It’s a mouthful, but I think it’s believable if I say it fast and, preferably, over the telephone. Long distance seems best.
Mistake. See, I didn’t mean to get my husband in trouble with the law. Not really. I meant to mail his traffic ticket. I really did.
There are few things more pathetic (and I mean that in the ‘causing and provoking pity’ sense of the word, not the ‘miserably or contemptibly inadequate’ sense - thanks, dictionary.com) than the site of my ten year old girl, tucked up on the sofa for the second day in a row, completely at the mercy of this dreaded winter ‘flu.
Here in Australia, and in freezing-cold Canberra to be exact, there are some nasty winter bugs going around, and the girls in this family have all succumbed, one by one. My eight year old had it a fortnight ago, last week was my turn, and now it’s Madeleine’s. This poor kid’s annual winter bout of the ‘flu usually involves a trip to the ER in the middle of the night for a dose of something to open her airways. She has a tendency to develop croup when she catches a cold, and I’ve seen her lips turn blue enough times now that we now know to take her in the minute she starts sounding even remotely seal-like. We took her last night at about 8.30pm, and fourteen hours later she’s happily ensconced on the sofa with her iPod, the remote control, her Nintendo, the electronic thermometer and a banana smoothie, breathing easier. She never complains, she just looks at me with bloodshot, teary eyes and pulls Buster the Bear in a bit tighter. Which is all a parent really needs to hear, really. More chocolate, darling? OK. Here, have a whole block.
Compare this act of incredible bravery with my own experience a few days ago. I was actually weeping. I would like to tell you that my aches and pains were FAR WORSE than Madeleine’s struggle to breathe but I’m pretty sure that argument wouldn’t fly. But I really, really felt terrible. Everything ached, nothing fixed it, and nobody was giving me chocolate. And did I complain? You BET I did. I complained to my husband at every opportunity, begged him to make the nasty aches go away, implored him to do something, anything, to make my life less miserable. Yes, it was extremely undignified.
Why do we complain? Does it actually make us feel better, somehow, to be explaining to somebody else just how rotten we feel? Do we do it for the sympathy, for the chance for a cuddle or some flowers or just some acknowledgment that what we’re going through really is awful? Is complaining just another way of seeking validation? Maybe it is. But that doesn’t explain why some people complain and others don’t. Don’t we all need validation for the way we are feeling?
I’m a shameless complainer. OK, maybe not completely shameless. Sure, I feel a bit ridiculous afterwards, especially if the person I’m complaining to calls me on it and points out how pathetic - in the miserably or contemptibly inadequate sense - it is to see a grown woman weeping about a little upper respiratory infection. A dear friend of mine has just been through several harrowing sessions of chemotherapy and the only time I’ve heard her complain was when she was getting frustrated with the turban covering her bald head, because it kept slipping sideways. I’ve heard about chemo, I’ve seen people in the movies go through it - it looks like sheer bloody hell, but I never once heard a peep of a ‘why me??’ from my friend. Why doesn’t she ask for sympathy? Doesn’t she need somebody to tell her ‘you poor bugger, I’m so sorry, that must be awful, you’re very brave’?
Maybe she doesn’t. Maybe she has made peace with the fact that this is just something she has to go through, something that will eventually make her stronger and wiser. Maybe when you’ve got something that awful happening to you, it just seems like a complete waste of energy to be undignified and ask someone else to agree with you that it’s awful. Yes, that must be it. And that would explain, I suppose, why I wept at my aching body… in the great scheme of things, a mild upper respiratory infection really isn’t that bad. In fact, it’s pretty contemptibly inadequate. I wasn’t weeping because it hurt so much, I was weeping because of the futility of having a cold that had knocked me completely on my arse without teaching me anything profound about myself other than the certainty of my own pathetic-ness.
I think I’ll just stick to my job as chief medicine-distributor and chocolate-provider and try to remember to take some echinacea next winter so I can avoid getting sick and miserable in the first place.
It seems that our nation’s retailers and I have come to a complete and utter impasse as to what “back to school” entails.
Different ideas. I see it as an opportunity to send our students off to school freshly dressed, pressed, and appropriately outfitted to learn. Retailers apparently see it as an opportunity to outfit our nation’s daughters for stripper school.
Where, pray tell, have all the sweet little plaid skirts gone? The Mary Janes? The pinafores?
I am not a morning person. In the morning, if forced to get up at all, I prefer nothing more than silence, and a cup of coffee as big as my head.
I prefer, as a rule, not to be accosted at my bedside by an aggrieved child holding aloft a tiny pearl white speck in a baggie while babbling something about the tooth fairy?
The tooth fairy?
The tooth fairy!
Great. Just when I thought I had a lock on Mother of the Year, I have to go and forget to schedule “the tooth fairy.”
In all those blissful early years of having children (babies, really), I had big plans to do very little. I was full of proclamations of what I would and would not do with my children as only the ill-informed and pathologically stupid can be.
Having no real world experience in parenting beyond wiping, rocking and toting my children along with my whims and wishes, I was wholly unprepared for the day that my children would turn into, well, people.
People. People with wishes. People with dreams. People with opinions. People with agendas.
People who want to do crazy things like sign up for cheerleading, soccer, piano and drum lessons all at the exact same time.
In the early days of parenting when they took lessons (or didn’t) was completely dependent on my schedule. Thus, I vowed that no child of mine would be enrolled in more than one activity at a time, semester, season or quarter as it may be. That seemed so simple. So workable. So quaint.
Now it is as if I’m looking back and remembering a simpler time when we all rode around in horseless carriages and churned our own butter for purity and fun.
My children have a variety of interests. Competing interests - both literally and figuratively. They have loved soccer forever (or at least since age five). So soccer is a shoe-in. Our daughter, however, is finally eligible for pee-wee cheerleading. Can a person deny an young female person the right to pom-poms and pyramids and not live to read about herself in a tell-all book later? I don’t think I’ll risk it. Music lessons appeared this year at the request of both children. One favors piano, the other drum. All I need is a tambourine player and a garishly painted bus and I’m halfway to Partridge Family fame! How can I say no? Do we really want to the be parents who chose to forego culture in favor of sport?
This year we let the children choose (see also: “inmates running the asylum.”) They chose to say “yes” to almost everything.
Sporting. I went to bed one night a nice, normal kind of person with a nice, normal kind of life and woke up the next morning to find myself reborn. I have become a soccer mom. In a literal sense I am also a cheer mom, and music mom too. We can’t possibly sign up for anything else as I’ve run out of room for team magnets on the rear of our vehicle. We live in the van, eat on the run, and are cagey with friends concerning plans to come for fear we might inadvertently over-book ourselves and plan a play date right in the middle of kick-off.
Weekends have gone from rest and relaxation to soccer in the early hours and cheer in the afternoon. I live in fear of my daughter showing up for cheer squad in a short skirt and soccer cleats. Weeknights often mean whisking our children off practice fields and straight off to music lessons. I don’t doubt that my son’s music teacher wonders why we think shin-guards are necessary for drummers?
Mine are thoroughly modern kids leading thoroughly active lives. They mix-it up, they make it work, and they multi-task with ease. They aren’t stars and I don’t imagine they’ll be first draft picks for anything. Why then, do we do this?
Maybe because when keeping my own score I find that there are lessons far beyond those learned on the field or at the keyboard.
They are learning that winning isn’t everything but putting forth your best effort is.
That you will win some and lose some and that it would serve you well to learn to do both with grace and ease.
That when people are counting on you, you better show up. Period. Morevoer, once you make a commitment. You stick with it. Even if it seems hard. Even if it seems futile. Even if it sucks.
That if at first you don’t succeed, you can – and should – try again.
I’ve never been a big fan of sports or overscheduled kids it’s true. But I have to believe that these life lessons will last long after all the practices, games, and music lessons have long passed.
Isn’t THAT really the ultimate parenting goal? And, if done well, a real score
Having two children less than two years apart teaches a person a lot about parenting. The problem is that the person will be too bone tired for the first six years to remember a single bit of it.
For some, that new baby when the other baby was still a baby was a surprise. A happy surprise, no doubt, but a surprise nonetheless. For others, it was a conscious decision painstakingly choreographed. There is much talk of the children being “close” to one another.
Close enough to poke an eye out, maybe.
There are also many in the “get it over with all at once” camp. As if childrearing were really just an elaborate hazing ritual or painful rite of passage between graduation and that sporty little roadster and the comb-over you’ve had your eye on for your upcoming mid-life crisis.
I’ve tried everything: regular night-time routines, punishment, exhortation, guilt-trips, yelling, begging, bedtime guardian, even melatonin… and nothing ever worked for long.
Fast forward a few years and now we find 6 1/2 year old twins who won’t go to sleep until 10pm or later and wake me up at night for bad dreams, water, and concerns about the international situation.. or whatever.
In short, life as a parent at night completely sucks. 24/7 suckage.
Sleep deprivation may be amusing as a 20-something who stays too late listening to a band play and mooning over the cute guitarist, but as a 40 year old anything less than 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep is simply untenable.
I was sharing my ongoing dilemma with my younger brother, and he gently suggested that I might want to start trying to have limits with them at night.
Huh?
“You know, rules they have to follow if they want to sleep with their door open,” he calmly explains.
Then, “If they don’t quiet down, then you tell them you’ll shut and lock their door. They’re old enough now, they know you love them, they are secure, and what they need is sleep.”
I pondered what he said, girded my loins, breathed deeply into my intestinal fortitude and sat down with the girls earlier this week and had a talk: I explained that they could no longer wake me up at night, that they need to sleep in their own beds, without playing, making noise, or complaining of the various imaginary concerns they usually sing to me about. I explained that I want them to sleep because I love them and I love myself and that if they want me to be a loving mother, I need sleep.
Rather than have fits, or argue, or otherwise disagree, I was floored when they simply nodded, asked me to repeat the consequences, and peacefully slipped into dreamland with the least amount of fuss we’ve had around these parts in years.
I was stunned.
Limits, it seems, were all that was missing over in this house of mine. Go figure.
"Try as hard as we may for perfection, the net result of our labors is an amazing variety of imperfectness. We are surprised at our own versatility in being able to fail in so many different ways." -- Samuel McChord Crothers
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Posted
September 6, 2008 at
12:24 pm by
Kymberly 
Comments (3)
Posted
August 17, 2008 at
8:32 pm by
Posted
August 6, 2008 at
12:17 pm by
