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There are two kinds of moms — the kinds who hope their kids will become something — politicians, doctors or lawyers — and the kinds who hope their kids don’t become something — drug dealers, hustlers or the kind of people who talk to themselves on street corners.
I’m one of the latter moms, as you probably guessed.
Not that that’s the mom I planned to be; it’s just that when my first-born was young, I was always unsure of the way he played.
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An odd thing has happened.
School has been out for two weeks, and I haven’t heard one “I’m bored” yet.
I’ve been afraid to mention it, fearing I’d jinx whatever’s going on, but it did make me wonder, what the heck is going on?
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It’s been a pretty exciting year for me so far.
Not that anything great has happened to me personally, but I know five people who are getting married and one is pregnant.
When you get to be middle-aged and you watch your friends and acquaintances get divorces or become empty-nesters as their kids graduate high school, it’s nice to experience the excitement of new love in its various forms.
The most amazing story of all the weddings, however, is the one of my recently retired co-worker, Beth Ashley. At age 83, after two marriages — one that ended in divorce, another that made her a widow many years ago, she is getting married. What’s even more heart-warming is that it’s to a man on whom she had a crush as a child.
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It is Father’s Day, and so it isn’t unusual to have thoughts about dads.
Moms have been on my mind lately, mostly because of reading Ayelet Waldman’s book, “Bad Mother,” and my chat with her. Interestingly, you don’t hear much about dads agonizing over whether they’re Good Father or Bad Father.
Mostly, as she writes in the book, dads just have to show up to be Good Father.
But I think it’s more than that .
Dads have typically provided the financial backbone for most families, and that’s a lot.
They often don’t have the choices many moms do — stay home, work part time, work full time. And increasingly women want men to do more than just be the providers. We want a man to share the household chores and childcare, too.
Looking at my own dad, I have to wonder — was he a Good Father?
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It wasn't until I was a middle-aged woman, a mother of two boys and heading toward a divorce that I finally asked my mother whether she had been happy in her marriage.
I certainly had my ideas about that; after all, her marriage was my main model, and I’d been watching her and my dad all my life.
And now that I was about to have my family torn apart, my dad sent me pleading letters — don’t do it! — while my mom mostly worried about me, how I’d survive.
So I wanted to know — had she been happy?
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I read a lot of mommy blogs — daddy blogs, too — and I've sometimes felt uneasy about what I've read and seen.
Lots of details about what the kids are doing, sometimes with snarky remarks; lots of confessions about frustrations, anxieties, anger over dealing with the kids; lots of pictures of kids being cute, or not.
If the kids are older and know what's going on (and give permission), that's one thing; when the kids are young, that's another.
Is it OK to reveal so much about our kids in such a public, permanent arena as the Internet?
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“Are you dating someone?” my 15-year-old was asked by a relative while a group of us were celebrating his brother’s high school graduation.
“No. I’m just hooking up.”
Hooking up!?! Did that mean that my “baby” was on his way to becoming a playa?
Now, I'm a hip mom. Of course I've heard of kids hooking up — it's not exactly a new phenomenon. And hooking up to my middle-aged brain means sex (and not the oral sex is the new sex version, either).
As usual, my kids teach me much more than I think I know whenever I stop talking and just listen.
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Yesterday was a pretty monumentous day.
My oldest son graduated from high school.
I had planned to bring a wad of tissues because I'm such a girl when it comes to things like this. But I didn't cry. I was just so happy that the day arrived, that he made it through high school, that he survived his teens.
As he told me recently, "A lot can go wrong when you're a teen."
That’s an understatement!
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I’m getting older, and that sure stinks.
Literally and figuratively.
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It's hard being a parent.
You raise your kid in a safe little nonsexist, organic, Brio bubble, and one day the "Grand Theft Auto" world infiltrates their brain and takes over.
It hit me the other day when I tried to engage my 15-year-old son in a conversation — a noble attempt on my part, but one that should come with a warning: not for the faint of heart.
Needless to say, he didn’t want to talk to me. Most 15-year-old boys don't want to talk, period.
"You're boring," he told me.
"Really? Why?"
"You don't talk about what I talk about with my friends."
"Well, what do you talk about with you friends?" I naively asked, opening the floodgates.
After a long pause, he said, "Who's hot."
"Hot as in who's pretty?"
"No."
"Then, what's hot?"
"A hot body."
I should have stopped there, but, of course, I didn't.
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When I told a friend that I was going to — finally — start my own blog, she asked me "Are you a mommy blogger?" (well, after making a snarky remark about entering the 21st century).
I had a visceral reaction, which surprised me. It felt a little like a loaded question, like she was Dirty Harry asking me if I felt lucky — "Well, do you, punk, er Mom?"
Or like she was asking me if I were a good witch or a bad witch a la "the Wizard of Oz."
What is it about "mommy blogger" that give me pause?
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I know that on the stress-o-meter, the death of a loved one and divorce are at the top. But if you’re a working parent, having a sick kid or unplanned time off from school is just as stressful. It means someone is going to have to scramble, either changing his or her workday to stay home with the kid, or begging or paying for someone else to do it.
When the swine flu hit recently, it had a lot of parents freaked out, for more reasons than just the flu itself.
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Where do you start your story?
Do you go back to the beginning, like Steve Martin so comically did in “The Idiot:” “I was born a poor black child …”
Do you start somewhere in the middle, the wedding, the years of endless diapers, your 40th birthday?
Or do you start now, with the cumulation of experiences, good and bad, that brought you to this place?
Do you focus on the positive — the loves, the marriages, the births, the graduations, the friendships, the promotions — or the darker stuff — deceptions, addictions, mental illness, divorces?
We can tell our story so many different ways, and all, in part, are true.
This is my story.
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