Chicago Moms Blog

The Myth of the Family Dog

Our family has certain myths that are told and retold out of tradition and evasion - the Tooth Fairy, "Dinner Will Be Ready In Five Minutes", Santa Claus, and recently added to the list, the Family Pet.

I'm ambivalent about the custom of catering to my children's sense of wonder by creating magical creatures who enter the home while everyone sleeps. But I have no qualms about perpetuating the illusion that our family will someday harbor a slobbery hairball who needs assistance cleaning up his leavings.

"When are we going to get a dog?" ask my girls once again and I give my usual reply.

They Used to Call it a Hi-Fi

"So, we're preparing the house for when Phil comes home from Manor Care."  My aunt's voice, reedy and faint, nearly drowns under the phone's static.

"Tell me what you're doing with the house," I reply, one hand holding the phone against my ear and because sometimes I am a terrible niece who merely plays at being a dutiful daughter, the other hand clicking my computer mouse. To save Ruth's feelings, I turn the monitor volume down so she can't hear its bright "You've got mail!" With her fading hearing, she probably wouldn't catch the robotic chirp in the background, but if she did, I know with certainty she would not remark on it. She already feels she is an imposition in my 600-mile distant life, enough so to be willing to share my complete attention. She is not an imposition. But I do need a slight fissure in the fortitude required to phone what used to be my home. And some of the sites I click are ones offering advice to primary caregivers.

Is This A Mid-life Crisis?

The question came to me tonight as I was curling my hair an hour before my belly dancing debut. "Am I in a mid-life crisis?" Here I am, forty-five years old, once again as of late, stepping way out of the box.

Five years ago I had my second child, who I knew would also be my last child, and hit the magical forty year mark in the same month. A unescapable sense of mortality struck me in the gut then, not just in the head. There’s a real end to all this dithering around, I thought to myself. And not just in general – that’s MY dithering!

But only in the last few months have I started taking some leaps of faith into unknown territory. Me, doing figure eights with my hips in front of a crowd at CJ Arthur's, Wilmette's nowhere-near-new bar and grill. Me, in yoga class, executing the first back-bend and headstand I've done since I was a pre-teen. Me at Karaoke night, sober as a judge, getting up to warble Fleetwood Mac's "Go Your Own Way." And getting up again for a Patsy Cline song. And again for a "Pressure" duet. And again. And again.

Not that I am doing any of these things beautifully or even well. But I did them. I'm doing them. Swallowing my pride and my fear and nervousness and jumping into the great beyond. Applying thick wobbly lines of eyeliner. Making loaves of brick-heavy bread. Trying.

I'm Addicted to My Anti-Depressant

Waiting for the start of my first 5K felt like standing around before the methadone clinic opened. If the extent of my experience with methadone clinics is limited to the memory of one scene in the movie Sid and Nancy, that didn't make my jonesing for a hit of a run any less urgent.

I felt jittery and surly. I longed to get moving. A few too many cheery race volunteers hugged coffee cups and boomed out happy good morning conversation in the church courtyard where we waited. I hunched over on a folding chair next to a table loaded with plastic water bottles and studiously ignored the woman who wasn't sure how to ask me for her seat back. 

My mind worked in miserable circles: "Why do they ask us to be here at 7:15 when the race starts at eight? I could still be sleeping right now. I should just grab a map and start running. These volunteer people are way too happy. WHY ARE THEY KEEPING ME FROM MY RUN?"

The saner part of my brain was telling me that I would really enjoy the excitement of the starting gun and the communal feel of running in a pack. I listened to that part of my brain and ten minutes later, we were on the move. Twenty minutes after that, the padding in my old running shoes was threatening to give up the ghost and my running bra was refusing to cooperate. Threads of spit involuntarily blew out of my mouth with each ragged breath. Didn't matter. I was in heaven. I felt on top of the world.

I've become a bit of an exercise junkie.  

The Horn of Plenty is a Parade Float

It's been hours since my last meal, but I have that uncomfortably stuffed Thanksgiving Day feeling. It's not a full belly that is making me feel over-served; it's reading the latest dispatches from Haiti. 

Forty thousand people are camping in Jean Marie Vincent Park in the devastated city of Port-au-Prince. Shelters made of sheets, cardboard and pieces of wood shade families from the sun and rain. Women wash clothes in plastic tubs on the basketball courts. To get clean water, residents carry jugs and buckets to a slow filtration system installed by Operation Blessing. "We have nothing," says the young mother, waiting for food.

I turn away from the pictures of the Port-au-Prince encampment. Suddenly my family's average American home and our average American lifestyle strikes me as strange as that of the space-age Jetsons. 

Bedtime Stories

Any parent who has laughed with their kids at the comic work of Mo Willems knows that Easy Readers sometimes contain brilliance. The other night during bedtime reading with my girls, I came across a Frog and Toad story that just about blew my mind. 

Arnold Lobel's collections of stories about the devoted friends Frog and Toad have been around since the seventies. Lobel's tales even inspired a hit musical on Broadway in 2003, based on his work. However, the story "The Surprise" from the collection Frog and Toad All Year was new to me until last week. It unreels in 12 brief pages, told in typically simple, declarative sentences. The repetition of the phrases becomes nearly a hypnotic chant and I was close to zoning out as I read the words to my girls. Until I came to the story's twist.

"It was October," begins Lobel. 

Frog looks out his window and sees leaves all over his yard. He decides to help out his friend. "I will go to Toad's house...I will rake all the leaves that have fallen on his lawn. Toad will be surprised." 

An American Momma in Copenhagen

When I found out that Dear Husband might be going to Copenhagen to work on the videos for Chicago's Olympic bid presentation, I insisted we make it a family trip. We returned from Copenhagen, Denmark this week after a thirteen day visit. 

Well, we didn't get the Olympics, despite Randy's fantastic work (at least to my proud eyes.) But this post isn't going to be Monday morning quarterbacking about how great/tragic it is that Chicago dodged a bullet/lost the bid.  

While I was explored the city with my two daughters, I experienced a bit of culture shock. Perhaps the word "shock" may be too harsh a work in a land of soft skies and kindly Danes - perhaps I should call my reaction to the Danish parenting attitudes a cultural surprise.

I won't claim to have taken the pulse of a country in a week, but as I bumbled through Copenhagen's strange but beautiful cityscape, I did notice very different expectations and customs from what I see in the midwestern United States. The kind of parenting I encountered was mostly that of relaxed attitudes, tolerance and patience. Parenting in the age of anxiety? Not so much in Northern Europe. 

Patience is the Name of a Game of Cards

I have a vision, a still unrealized vision, of my family of four.  In the picture in my head we are sitting at a round table, playing a game of cards.  Nothing fancy or complicated, just Go Fish or maybe Crazy Eights.  Even War would be fun, but that game might be too challenging for four-year old Nora, who still needs to stop and think before she remembers that ten is more than nine.

We have a long way to go before this vision becomes real.  Six-year old Mia still insists to the point of tears on winning any competitive games she plays.  She's happiest engaged in fantasy play with no clear winner or loser, narrating elaborate adventures for her little plastic animals and magnet fairies.   When Mom or Dad try to join in, we usually end up being chastised by our little megalomaniac as if she were directing a Hollywood blockbuster.  "No, no, no!  You need to move the kitty like THIS!"

There's another obstacle to the realization of my dream-evening.  My husband has been working crazy hours.   On the weekends when he is not at the office, we pack our days with outings.  We don't often have the luxury of empty time with all four of us together.  When both parents are at home at the same time, it's such a rare treat that I usually choose to go for a run or attempt to scale our perpetual mountain of laundry.

Crime and Punishment

I was big news in our village last week.  

The suburb where we live, north of Chicago, is so small (HOW SMALL IS IT?!) well, our village is so small you're guaranteed to run into someone you know at the local ice cream shop, so you better comb your hair before you go if you're into that sort of thing, but it's okay to let your freak flag fly if you're not.  Our village is so small I regularly cross into the towns that border on the north and south during my daily walks.  So small that when I told my husband and my friend Kristen that my credit card had been stolen, they both had the same reaction:  "You're going to be in the Police Blotter!"

Our local weekly paper prints a list of the latest area misdemeanors off the town police blotter.  Minor thefts, DUIs, high school vandalism -- it's the only part of the paper I read.  I usually smirk at the news, picturing little old ladies accusing hired workmen of pilfering their misplaced brooches.  In a neighborhood where violent crime is a rarity, kids spray-painting "Penis" on a garage door is the heights of hilarity for the neighbors not involved.  And my own little brush with crime left me largely unscathed so I was just curious to see how the paper would mangle the details.

The week before, at the fitness center, I'd had a funny feeling from the girl coming out of the locker room wearing wintry clothes and carrying no bag. I did nothing of course, just grabbed my purse out of the locker and went home.  Luckily, the credit card company called a couple hours later to ask if I had spent $800 at Best Buy or $70 on cigarettes at the gas station that morning.  Which I had not.

The Season for Reading

I have a summer confession.  Given the chance, I could read all day.  Let the ants take over the sink of breakfast dishes, let the damp pool towels pile up; I'll be on the couch with my book. Talk about the lazy days of summer.

Spring has its cleaning; fall is all about preparing for school; winter days get filled with labor-intensive holidays followed by the survival mode until spring.  Now we have time and ease.  School-year obligations have disappeared.  The children are happy at daycamp and their world of play has expanded to the yard, the neighbors, the sidewalk, the parks, the beach, the pool.

In the last month or so I've neglected a long list of projects,