Family Nonsense

Three, and you’re under the host

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‘Dorothy Parker was right about those martinis’

Lately I’ve been missing the good old days when The Child was in elementary school. No, I haven’t been missing the struggles with those terribly-hated absolutely-required socks every morning. Nor have I been missing the phone calls from the Headmistress, like the one informing me The Child had been forging her violin practice notes. (Story on that little incident coming soon. Or not.) And nope. I most certainly have not been missing discovering notes in her backpack five minutes before the bus comes that say things like ‘You may send your daughter to school today in a simple Halloween costume‘.

No, I’ve been missing the martini parties.

You see, The Child went to a Quite Distinguished Private All-Girls School in New York City, whose name I choose to omit for fear of embarrassment (mine as well as the school’s). In her class were some terribly nice girls (some of whom have remained her close friends; yet another reason to omit the School Name). And there were these terribly nice parents who had this idea to throw a get-acquainted-with-the-other-parents party. These parents lived in a glamorous apartment right across from the Museum of Natural History, and they were quite sophisticated. (Still are, I’m guessing). Continue reading

The Motorcycle Diaries

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Get your mother runnin’ (alongside a Honda 125)

Yes, it’s called ‘Motorcycle Diaries’ (plural) because I really do have stories (plural) involving motorcycles. Remember the one about Elvis flirting with the five-year-old me while revving a white Harley? (Elvis being the one doing the revving, not the five-year-old me.)

Well, my motorcycle story for today is in honor of Mother’s Day. And how I almost didn’t get that shiny Vespa in the picture at the top because I almost didn’t get to be a Mother. Continue reading

The Princess and the Parent

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‘Stuck in the Maternal Memory Loop’

Yesterday The Child turned 24. How can that be, when just yesterday The Child turned four (!)

Welcome to the world of the Maternal Memory Loop, where scenes from the past find themselves superimposed over the present. And insist on being played, and replayed, in the Maternal Head. Stuck there, until I slap myself silly (figuratively, that is) in a futile attempt to dislodge them.

See, my conscious mind knows that The Child is a Grown Woman who works in Boston as a Software Engineer. But my memory-loop mind insists that she is a Child who works in her Room as a Kindergartner. (Cue adorable photos):

Continue reading

On being (a) Yo Yo Ma

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‘The Empty Nest has its Ups and Downs’

By now you probably know more facts about The Child than The Child feels comfortable about you knowing. But she’s off in Boston making a name for herself as a software engineer and therefore can’t roll her eyes heavenward in ‘My Mom is Oversharing Again’ dismay. At least not where I can see her.

So I’m going to riff a little about ‘parenting’. First, let me make my distaste for terms like ‘parenting’ clear. The use of nouns as verbs (‘crafting’, ‘birding’, even ‘blogging’) tends to make my own eyes roll heavenward. I mean, if I’m ‘parenting’, is The Child ‘kidding’?

But I must admit that I rather like my new not-yet-trendy term ‘Yo Yo Ma’, which I will explain shortly. But first, have you heard of Snowplow Parents?  Continue reading

Sex is like Santa

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‘Birds and Bees? Ho Ho Ho.’

Did someone spike the eggnog? Last week it was Incest. (See ‘The Incest Mug’ for details, but not just yet.) This week it’s Sex Ed. Fingers crossed everyone’s out of the house bolstering the economy, especially The Child. Because this post is about how You-Know-Who learned about You-Know-What.

The story begins innocently enough, with me walking said Child home from school. Third Grade, I believe. Which would make her about eight at the time.

So this adorable innocent girl holding my hand looks up at me through impossibly-long eyelashes and says: Continue reading

That’s my Bob

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‘Your family is who you think your family is’

My Middle Younger Brother Roger is many things: filmmaker, banjo player, wind miller, and maker of the best chili on the planet. Who knew he was also a trailblazer? Yes, Roger was a member of a ‘blended family’ way before ‘blended’ was a term stuck on the front of ‘family’.

That’s Middle Younger Brother Roger standing behind the couch and behind Mom

See, back when Roger was just a tyke, my dad was transferred to Memphis for his job and our young family landed (somehow, I’m not sure how or why, I was only seven at the time) in a very large house near a university. To help pay the rent, my parents took in boarders — a couple of college guys, one named Bill Something-or-Other and another named Bob Sipowich. They lived upstairs, kept to themselves. Everything worked out fine. Except for the time we kids (there were three of us at this point) all came down with the measles over Christmas at my Gramma Peterson’s so we had to stay there till we got well and the boarders didn’t feed or water our parakeet Petey while we were away and he (gasp) died.

Anyway. That was traumatic. Just had to get it out.

That’s Roger, practicing Dad’s “Whoa-Back” move, at about the age of this story

Back to the story. Continue reading

Daddy said ‘Don’t touch’

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Steve Jobs holding forbidden iPad

‘Tech Giants’ kids don’t play with iPads.’

All right. I promised never to rant in this blog. So I’ll try not to. Really. But I ran across this article in the New York Times and couldn’t keep myself from sharing and ranting (er, commenting) about it.

It’s titled ‘Steve Jobs Was a Low-Tech Parent’, and it’s by Nick Bilton.

It’s all about how people like Steve Jobs (you know who he was) and a bunch of other tech giants (Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, for example) deal with the issue of children and the devices they desire.

Most of these people, CEOs and founders of companies like Twitter, the afore-mentioned Wired, and even Blogger — people who make their living in and around the use of personal technology — strictly limit the use of Continue reading

Gone Baby Gone

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Mom Vase

‘The Nest. Is it half-empty? Or half-full?’

I think I can trace my rather non-involved mommy style back to a certain babysitting gig where I had to keep track of the kids’ poops on a chart. There were two of them (kids, that is), and a correspondingly healthy number of poops.

That, and a few other instances of dealing with what we now call ‘helicopter parenting’ put me off hovering. But I have to admit in all honesty that I was never destined to be one of those let’s-bake-a-zillion-cookies-and-then-whip-up-some-papier-mache-heads kind of moms.

The Dude (thank you!) was happy to handle Playground Duty. When the Child would say ‘Run, Mommy, run!’, I was apt to reply ‘Mommies don’t run; babysitters run’. And when well-meaning adults would exclaim Continue reading