50-something Moms Blog

Bad mommy, how dare you turn your cell phone off?

I’m old enough to remember parenting before cell phones. That is, when the elementary school had your home number and your work number, your husband’s work number, and the always-requested never-used emergency-backup-friend-or-relative number. And that was it. Back then, if your kid was feeling a little feverish at school and went to the office, they’d have the kid sit or lie somewhere to rest, would leave messages at home and work, and if you actually got the message and showed up in an hour or two, you were amazingly prompt and responsive and thank you very much. If the kid was lying on the ground bleeding, they’d call an ambulance; they wouldn’t sit by the phone expecting that you’d call back immediately.

But now, apparently, I’m supposed to be instantly, always, available for calls from the school. Yesterday I slipped out of my office during my so-called lunch hour (not that I usually go out for lunch then, a couple

Drawing different hands in the genetics gamble

Sometimes you see a family in which it’s clear that each kid drew nearly the same set of cards in the genetics gamble. I recently interviewed a guy in his office; on the top of his bookshelves were five pictures of a blonde boy; they looked like the exact same boy at different ages. Actually, they looked like the guy must have looked as a child. “Are those your old school photos?” I asked. Nope, they were his five sons.

A friend of mine calls his eight siblings the evens and odds—the odds, numbers one, three, five, seven, and nine in the birth order—all have red hair, freckles, and aren’t particularly tall. The evens are tall and blonde.

My daughter and sons don’t seem to hold very many matching gene cards; the two boys look somewhat alike, my daughter not much like either. And it’s not just looks. My 16-year-old already sings professionally, my daughter is tone deaf (just like me) but has great rhythm (clearly tempo and pitch are different genetically). Pretty much nothing disgusts my daughter; she’s the kid that at age seven helped the other kids at summer camp with their squid dissections and then enjoyed a meal of the leftover squid; my youngest son can’t look into a compost bin without losing his lunch. Each

Mom, can I take a banana to school tomorrow?

"Mom, can I take a banana to school tomorrow?"

“Sure,” I answered my 16-year-old son at the dinner table last night. “For a snack, do you mean?”

“Uh, no.”

“Then for what?”

“For Living Skills class.”

OK then, now I knew what he was talking about. Living Skills, for the uninitiated, is not about balancing your checkbook and basic cooking, it’s a euphemism for sex-and-drugs 101.

I glanced over at the rapidly diminishing bunch of bananas in the fruit bowl, debating if we’d have enough to make it through the week. I wasn’t sure.

“How about a zucchini?” I offered.

Even Bruce has some rude fans

Fellow blogger Martha and I went to the Bruce Springsteen concert in San Jose this weekend. Martha scored general admission tickets for us, which means, if you’re lucky, you stand up front, if not, you stand a bit back, but still reasonably close. Bruce, of course, was Magic. My one disappointment with the concert itself—no Patti! As a Jersey Girl, I’m as much of a Patti fan as I am a Bruce fan, but Patti stayed home, Bruce explained, because they have three teenagers now. To paraphrase, “As we were leaving, the hash brownies were coming out of the oven, 100 pizzas had been delivered, and the Girls Gone Wild bus pulled up, so Patti decided one of us had to hold down the fort.” That’s life as a 50-something rocker mom.

Anyway, this post isn’t about the great concert (though you should have been there to see Bruce and Clarence canoodle in “Fire,” a great moment). It’s about the crowd, the good people, and the three not-so-good people we had to deal with.

First I have to explain the General Admission system. You arrive between 2 and 5 (we got there around 3:40) and get a numbered armband. At 5 pm, the 800 people with armbands lined up in numerical order.

A little dig from Digg

Maybe I’m just sensitive. But I think Digg could have phrased it. I finally signed up for Digg, just filling out the basics, name, age, city. A few days later, I discovered that Digg turns that formulaic info into a description, and my description is “A 50 year-old lady from Palo Alto, CA ( US ) who joined Digg on February 26th.”

This was probably the first time I saw myself described as 50 (it was only a week or so after my birthday). And it must have gotten to me, because the first time I read the sentence, I thought it said “a 50-year-old old lady.”

Until then I didn’t think that I was tripping out about the turning 50 thing, but Digg proved me wrong.

Original 50-something Moms Blog Post

You never forget the times you lose it

My friends and I are trying our bests to be parents of the new millennium. We don’t spank. We know that in other places in the country ongoing debates engender countless letters to the editor about the virtues of spanking or not spanking. We read about them in the piles of parenting magazines in our bathrooms. We, however, don’t spank. We try not to scream at our kids, unless one of them is about to run into traffic. Instead we discipline with time-outs and come up with “appropriate consequences”.

But in spite of our resolve to be modern, rational parents, sometimes we lose it. Maybe it was easier a generation ago, when, if you spanked your kids, you thought you were raising them right. Because when we lose it, the kids may forget in minutes, but we feel guilty for days, weeks, or longer.

One of my friends swatted her three-year-old on the bottom recently. After a long week of time-outs for picking on her younger sister, the three year-old deliberately poked the two-year-old in the eyes. My friend smacked her. She couldn’t have hit her too hard, since, unpracticed at this spanking thing, her

Parallel tracks

Joy and I had our first conversation when we were 20 or so; she was living in Pennsylvania; I was in New York. We’d seen each other around, had summer jobs in the same New Jersey beach town, had mutual friends. I don’t remember where we were when we first talked, a New Jersey party or bar, most likely. I do remember one subject, however. We had both recently spent romantic weekends in Maryland. A week apart. With the same guy.

    We briefly considered organizing another weekend trip to Maryland—together. But, while the look on the guy’s face would certainly have been entertaining, we quickly decided that he wasn’t worth the trouble, and really we had much more in common with each other than we ever did with him.

    For the next decade we were single gals in New York, Washington, Texas, California; sometimes living in the same city, but never at the same time. We visited back and forth a few times a year, weekends of speed-talking as we took out all our disasters and triumphs and worries and crises and spread them all out in front of us in a game of conversational go-fish. “You’re feeling this or that about your job? Wow, I’ve been feeling exactly the same way.” “You’re sick of the whole dating thing? Yeah, me too.” And then

Perimenopausing and not liking it

      

    I’ve been one of those women with a super-regular period. Twenty-six days start to start; I’ve always known exactly when it’s coming. Whenever I’ve been late, I’ve been pregnant. Even nursing round-the-clock barely broke the cycle (how unfair is that), with each kid I got my period at exactly six weeks after the birth, and went right back onto that 26 day calendar.

    So being 10 days late, as I am right now, is a huge deal. Yeah, I’m old enough to know, intellectually, that this was something that I’d be facing soon; hey, I had my first hot flash about a year ago (not to be repeated so far, thank goodness). And I suppose I had a more recent clue, that is, I had a weird period last month—the period that wouldn’t end, something like 12 days instead of the usual 5 or 6.

    But old habits die hard, so my first thought, of course, was “Oh my god what if I’m pregnant.” Never mind that that’d make medical history, since my husband got snipped something like eight years ago, and

It feels so good when it's over

I’m feeling pretty good right now because my boobs are not being screwed into a nasty plastic vise. Sure, my neck still hurts a bit, an aftermath of an injury a year and a half ago. And I’m sniffing a little from allergies. But right now, I’m hardly noticing those chronic annoyances because my boobs are free!

    Yeah, I did the annual mammogram thing today, early this a.m., figuring I’d get in before things got backed up in radiology and be at my desk by 9 a.m. I took an ibuprofen before, thinking maybe that would block the pain a little. It didn’t. The mammogram technician thought that a shot of tequila might have worked better; next time I’ll schedule my test for the end of the day. But I don’t think there’s any drug in the world that could make having your breasts squeezed in a high-tech waffle iron fun. And no, it’s not a consolation to me that I

Ancient History

I read the whole bugaboo debate on Silicon Valley Moms Blog, and realized that I am so out of it that I don’t know what a bugaboo looks like; I wouldn’t recognize one if it crashed into me at Whole Foods. And that all my parenting knowledge is so, like, old-fashioned.

    I used to have the parenting thing down! With three kids spanning seven years, I knew all the brand names, I could spend hours discussing different brands of diaper covers and strollers and carseats; I had all the latest parenting gear in the most fashionable colors (remember purple and teal, anyone?). I knew enough to fill a book. Heck, I did fill a book.

    And now, merely eight years since the birth of my youngest, fifteen from my first stroller purchase (a Perego Pliko, BTW) my knowledge is completely obsolete. By the time I am a grandparent I clearly will know absolutely nothing.

    Here’s how ancient I am (in parenting years, anyway):

    I bought my maternity clothes at Pea in a Pod and Motherwear. Most of them involved dorky sailor collars, ducks, or little bunnies. Even my best dress-up dress had little anchors on the buttons; not quite