St. Patrick's Day Parade

So, this weekend brought another in what I think of as my own personal series of Really Lousy Parenting Moments.

Yesterday was the Baton Rouge St. Patrick's Day Parade. Baton Rouge doesn't really have much of an Irish community or any kind of Irish heritage. But we have a tv weatherman who's been broadcasting forever; I guess you'd call him a "television personality" round here. And he has some Irish roots, I gather, tho' not an Irish last name. He does have an Irish first name: Pat. Ol' Pat is a canny character. He's the one who started the St. Patrick's Day Parade more than two decades ago--and it just so happens that the parade ends right at the front door of a bar that he owns. Anyway, it doesn't matter that few folks are Irish. What matters is that this is south Louisiana, where every parade, be it Christmas or Halloween or Memorial Day or 4th of July or St. Pat's Day, resembles Mardi Gras. First, there are floats, and the float riders throw stuff--beads, mostly, but also stuffed animals, candy, plastic cups, toys, flowers, panties, condoms, and (only on St. Pat's) cabbages. Second, there are parties--everyone on or near the parade route throws a party. And third, there is alcohol. Lots and lots of alcohol, even tho' the parade rolls at 10 am. The drinking begins on Friday night and doesn't let up in some areas--e.g. around LSU--til the wee hours of Monday morning.

As it happens, we live right on the parade route. So, as required, we have a party every year. It's not hard--I make Bailey's Irish Crème brownies and Keith makes an eggy, cheesy casseroley thing and Irish soda bread; we make coffee; we fill up coolers with ice, orange juice, and champagne; we line up patio and lawn chairs, and voila', a party.

Except it gets harder when you have teenagers. Because teenagers have friends. Who are also teenagers. And these friends have friends. Who are also teenagers. And before you know it, hordes of drunken teenagers have descended on your house and infested your attic and overrun your back yard. But that, dear reader, was last year. This year, I was vigilant. I was prepared.

And I was also pissed off. Really, really pissed off. We have had a hard week with Hugh. A terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week. I am angry, so angry that when he walks into the room I want to spit on him. Truly. But beneath the raging, pulsing, shrieking anger is fear, fear and sorrow and guilt beyond measure. All these emotions burning their way through my very core, eating and corroding my soul. It's like I've swallowed Voldemort.

Perhaps it wasn't the best of times to host a parade party.

But St. Patrick's Day waits for no woman.

It was a beautiful day, as early spring so often is in Baton Rouge. Friends gathered; the brownies beckoned; the mimosas sparkled. The teenagers came. I sternly sent them on their way. All was well.

Then, it happened. I was standing at the kitchen sink, grabbing a quick glass of water. I looked out through the window to the deck that sits on our side yard along the street that runs perpendicular to the parade street. (This is a significant detail. On this side street the cops assigned to parade duty tend to gather.) I looked out the window and saw, on the deck, a group of Hugh's friends laughing and talking. . . and passing a joint around. (Hugh was not with them. Minor detail, but I thought I'd point it out.)

Now, personally, I think marijuana should be legal. But it is not. And there were those kids and there was my deck and there were the cops. Now, of course, a good parent would have walked out and pointed out the problems with their actions to the kids. Perhaps a good parent would have engaged them in a discussion of the possible consequences of their actions, maybe turned that situation into one of those learning/bonding moments that later, as adults, the kids would have looked back upon as a transformative time.

But I'm too goddamned angry and afraid and sad and guilty to be that good parent. Nope. It took less than a second to transform me from Cheery Parade Party Hostess to the Incredible Crazy Woman. I ran out, stormed onto the deck, thrust my finger in their faces, and screamed (sadly, this is an exact quotation): "GET OUT! Holy fuck! What the hell do you think you are doing?!"

They left. Looking back, I realize I should have confiscated the weed and smoked it.

I always thought I'd be a Cool Mom. The mom my boys' friends would confide in. Instead I'm That Mom. The insane one.

Zoe smiled at me!

Over two decades ago, shortly after I gave birth to Owen, a friend sent us a marvelous baby gift--what must have been the first book of collected Baby Blues comic strips (I believe there are dozens now). Nothing else quite captured the confusion, exhaustion, bewilderment, the sheer "what-the-fuck-have-we-gotten-ourselves-into" of those initial weeks of parenthood. In the strip, Darryl and Wanda's first month with colicky baby Zoe are just hellish (but hilarious), and then comes The Day: The first three frames show Darryl going through his normal routine but he's walking on air, he's floating, and he has this permanent goofy grin.The final frame includes the text balloon: "Zoe smiled at me!" 

I thought of that comic strip yesterday. I got my haircut in the morning and then had a hectic but totally unproductive and unsatisfying day. I came home feeling cranky and stupid, and then I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror with my short, short hair, and I thought, "Oh god, I've turned into one of those haggard academics with the what-the-hell hair." I turned around and there was Hugh. I'll be honest: despite my cheery "Hi honey! How are you?", inside I was cringing. Hugh is 17 and therefore brutal. "You're not wearing that, are you?" "Don't you think it's time you updated your shoes to at least the 1990s?" "No offense, but you look really fat in that." "No offense, but your gray roots are totally showing." "No offense, but those leggings are for someone wayyyyy younger, you know."

I waited for the put-down.

But then, well, Zoe smiled at me:

Hugh: "You got your hair cut!"
Me: "Ye-e-e-s."
Hugh: "You look really good!"
Stunned silence.
Hugh: "You look just like Anne!"

Anne. My fiercely fit, uber-urban, totally trendy, gobsmackingly gorgeous 30-something niece.

I walked on air, I floated, all evening long.

Being a Mom on Mardi Gras

We went to New Orleans for Mardi Gras and didn't see a single parade.

How pitiful is that?

Now mind you, we've seen hundreds, maybe thousands, of parades over the years. By some standards, we are Mardi Gras experts Moreover, there doesn't seem to be much hope that we'll be living anywhere else anytime soon, so we have many, many more Mardi Gras opportunities ahead. Still, why trek out to New Orleans, why pay for a hotel room, why shove our way through the crowds--if not to join in the celebration?

Because, dear reader, we were, once again. tricked. Duped. Manipulated. Hoodwinked. Fooled and  flummoxed. Yet again teenaged Hugh pulled our strings and made us dance to his music.

Supposedly we were enjoying our last Mardi Gras with Hugh before he grows up and heads off to college. Supposedly we were introducing his classmate to the Mardi Gras experience--parades costumes and beads and masks and marching bands and "throw me something, mister!" In actuality, we were paying ridiculous sums of money to allow two horny teenaged boys to hook up with a crowd of nubile young things who attend the girls' school across the street. No parades, no interest in parades, just lots of masterful twisting and turning, flipping and flopping, obscuring and obfuscating, until we're left, a couple of confused, middle-aged, well-meaning souls, wondering why we're sitting in this ridiculously priced hotel room at 11 pm and where is our son and how in the hell did we let this happen again? Goldangit and goddammit. Why are we still so friggin' bad at this?

One of the Wonders of the World

Hugh is due back home in 24 hours. Hugh is 17. I am girding up my emotional loins.

Oh wait. Does "girding up one's loins" means preparing to run away?

As good as an idea as that may be, that's not what I'm doing. Forget the girding.

 I Am Preparing.

 I will be Zen Mom. I will be Gandhi, except with clothes. And without the hunger strikes. Maybe forget the Gandhi.

 I will be a fat, laughing Buddha, implacable in my joy, unmovable in my serenity, a pudgy pyramid of calm assurance. Birds can shit on my head, dogs can piss on my lap, adolescent boys can scream in my face, but I will smile resolutely on. I am going to be one of the Wonders of the World. Parents will whisper my name in awe-struck tones; mothers of teenagers will light incense before my photograph; high schoolers will bow before me.

It's going to be a great weekend.

Holding

It's early Sunday evening, Hugh has returned to boarding school for the week, and I am consoling myself with a too-large tumbler of Jameson's. Not because he's gone. Because the two days he was home were just so truly awful.

Oh GAWD. It's all so mundane. Fights with the teenager. I'm not sure if it's the fights themselves that are so soul-destroying or the realization that your life is playing out according to some clichéd script that's been acted out on countless stages so very very many times before.

Somehow it seemed so different when I was watching in the stalls rather than acting on the stage.

And yet-- I remember watching my cousin and her parents. Sue was something of a terror; she dared things I didn't even dream of and she drove her parents around the bend, over the mountain, into the deep. There was shouting. Now decades later my Auntie Jean is dying, and Sue faces the loss of not only her mother but her best friend, the person she talks to every day, the buddy she shops with and giggles alongside and trusts absolutely. And I watch her grief and remember what that relationship once was, and I am in awe at what time and just holding on can do.

I don't aspire to be Hugh's best friend but I have to believe we'll be better than what we are right now. And I'm good at holding on. I am, in fact, a bit of a maniac when it comes to holding on. So, please God, give us time. I'll hold. There will be (more) shouting. But I'll hold.

My Towels

I apologize, oh blog people, for my absence. I have been frozen in a state of teenager-induced psychosis.

Why is it that parenting a teenager so rapidly reduces one to teenagerdom?

Hugh was heading back to school. The bus was waiting. We'd had a horrid weekend, a horrid week, a horrid month. As I handed him his various bags (it is amazing what this child needs for 5 days; every weekend it's like moving day), I realized he had packed my towels. The good ones. Not the ones I bought him for school but my towels. "Wait," I say. "What are these? Why do you have these towels?" He shrugs. "I don't have any towels. I don't know what happened to mine."

I'm immediately pitched into a state of outrage. "Well, FIND THEM! And you can't have these towels. These are my towels."

He shifts seamlessly into fighting mode. "I just told  you, I DON'T KNOW WHERE THEY ARE. Are you deaf? And these aren't your towels; they're MY towels."

We're in a parking lot. People are watching. People are waiting. People are judging.

"What do you mean, they're YOUR towels? These aren't YOUR towels!"

"Yes, they are! They were in MY linen closet."

"YOUR linen closet? Don't you mean MY linen closet, in MY house, paid for with MY salary?"

And on and one we go.

Needless to say, when the bus pulls away, Hugh is on it and so are my towels. And my self-respect. And the last few bits of my sanity.

God, he was such a cute baby.

Child-free Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving approaches and I am depressed. Also relieved. But mostly depressed.

For the first time in 21 years, I face a Thanksgiving without at least one son. Son #1 is staying in Oregon to focus on his senior thesis. (This is not my fault; I did not give him this work ethic.) Son #2 is in, of all places, Sri Lanka.  (Can I just say, this is not normal; we are not the sort of family who holiday in Sri Lanka; I, for one, have never been to Sri Lanka or anywhere in the vicinity of Sri Lanka.)

So I face this child-free Thanksgiving and I am depressed. I'm astonished how depressed I am.

And here's where the relief comes in. I've wondered-- fairly frequently in the last few years-- if I lack some essential Mom Gene, if I'm deficient in fundamental maternal, uh, stuff. Because many of my friends and acquaintances have kids about the same age as mine, which means many of my friends and acquaintances are sending off their youngest child to college or university, which means many of my friends and acquaintances have been slogging around in various stages of grief as they confront the absence of young Taylor or Tyler or Madison or Morgan. And I nod, and hold hands, and say, "Oh, I know," --but I don't. I don't. Hugh went off to boarding school last year, and with Owen off in Oregon, that left us with an empty nest, and well, frankly, in our childless house, Keith and I look at each other and go, "Cool!"

Except now it's Thanksgiving, almost, and my boys aren't here and damn. Damndamndamndamn. I am sad. I miss my guys. And suddenly I realize this is it, they won't be here much any more, hardly ever really, and the ache in my gut and heart really really hurts. Which is kind of a relief. It's good to know I'm not some sort of deficient Un-Mom.

Except it hurts. It really really hurts.

Damn. I need someone to nod and hold my hand and say, "Oh, I know."

Shit. I need my boys.

Cursing Doris

Oh lord, Doris Kearns Goodwin on The Colbert Report. I hate seeing historians on Colbert and Jon Stewart. Overcome with longing, I watch in sorrow and think, "why not me me me?!" Obviously I don't think this when the guest is a rock star or a movie actor or the president. But an historian?? Damn damn damn. I coulda been a contender! Instead, I had children. Sigh.
 
Not that I'd trade the kids for fame and fortune or a chance to chat with Jon Stewart. Except sometimes.

Such as last Sunday morning, for example, when Keith and I were driving up and down and around every single friggin' parking lot on the LSU campus. It's a big campus: 35,000 students, God knows how many administrators, a few faculty, and lots of cars. Lots and lots and lots of cars. Amidst which we were hunting ours. Just one nondescript black Honda Civic, lost by our horrifyingly non-penitent teenaged son during a drunken tailgating session the day before.

Sorry, what? You say you don't know "tailgating"? Ahh, guess you're not from the American South, eh? "Tailgating" = 24-hour party that precedes all Southern university football games. Picture massive encampments of those temporary pavilions, Weber grills and smokers, gargantuan generators fueling large-screen tvs and stereo speakers mounted on pickup truck beds, coolers the size of industrial refrigerators, people of all ages painted in purple and gold, vats of gumbo and jambalaya, platters of fried chicken, barbecued ribs and boiled crawfish, and miles and miles of red Solo cups filled with cheap beer. And now picture my extremely sociable, not-very-consequences-minded teenaged son in the midst of all that.

We trusted him. Dumb, eh? Sure seemed so as we forsook our usual leisurely peruse of the Sunday papers and instead toured acres and acres of concrete expanses strewn with grimy plastic red cups and broken beer bottles and chicken bones and crawfish shells.

Eventually we found the car. Son has lost the right to drive. Son thinks we are unfair. Mom is staring at the television and cursing Doris Kearns Goodwin. Sorry, Doris.

Smoking

So Hugh smokes. (Cigarettes, that is--other stuff? Lord, I dunno.)

He started smoking at least a couple of years ago. We first began to suspect because he was spending a ridiculous amount of time in the alley. There's not a lot to do in our alley, unless you're really into garbage cans or stray cats. Then came the air fresheners in the car. Finally one night he came in and when he asked me a question, the stench of stale cigarettes on his breath almost knocked me down. "When did you start smoking?" I asked him. "I'M NOT!" he howled in outrage. Sigh.

As if I don't know tobacco breath.

I grew up amidst clouds of cigarette smoke. My dad smoked constantly and four of my five older brothers were smoking by the time they hit their teens. To see the tv I peered through a smoky haze;  washing the dishes at home meant scraping the cigarette butts out of the ketchup puddles in which they'd been extinguished during dinner;  crumpled-up Kool packets littered my life; I just assumed everyone stepped out of the car reeking of tobacco. And of course, almost everyone did.

Then, as I hit my late 20s, the smoke began to dissipate. This amazing cultural shift took place. Bit by bit, the ash trays, the omnipresent butts, the smoky clouds, the acrid-smelling clothes, all disappeared.

Until Hugh hit his teens.

When I mention to friends that Hugh smokes and that, apart from not allowing it in the house, we're not responding--no "consequences"--they recoil in horror, as if I'd casually mentioned my son was a serial killer or a child molester. But I pick my battles. Lord knows, Hugh and I fight on many fronts.  This one, however--geez, this one I'd lost long ago. While just a toddler, Hugh became amazingly adept at finding the one single cigarette butt on the sidewalk. Before I could pounce, he'd have it in his mouth in a spot-on imitation of a serious smoker. At age 4, he pronounced he was going to be a Bad Guy when he grew up because Bad Guys smoke. At age 6, he declared my brother JT his favorite uncle. "Why?" I asked, somewhat mystified, since Hugh hardly knew him. "'Cos he smokes," he explained.

So Hugh smokes.

And you know, he's still as beautiful as when he slept, smelling of rising bread dough, in the cradle beside my bed.

Tho' he doesn't always smell so good.

A Presidential Debate, and the Grace of God

Oh dear. Once again I've missed my self-imposed target of two blog posts per week. And this time I can't blame my vulva.

I blame Mitt Romney.

OK, I admit he probably didn't set out to sabotage my blog, but nevertheless that is what transpired. After That Debate, after Obama just stood there as Lie after Lie after Lie spewed forth from that horrid J. C. Penney-model-man's mouth. . . well, Things Got Difficult.

I am in a fragile state, dammit. Walking on the precipice of depression, just barely holding my own as I step gingerly through the minefield of professional failure, personal lacklusterdom, parental terror, and general middle-aged oh-dear-God-is-that-really me crisis. I do not need, I cannot cope with, a looming political apocalypse.

So I didn't. I withdrew into a total funk. But I am, slowly, bit by horrendous old-lady bit, emerging from my funk. And, weirdly, it is all due to Sunday's Communion (aka the Lord's Supper, Mass, Eucharist,  Love Feast, that weird semi-cannibalistic thing Christians do). I'm still amazed. I mean, who really expects Grace to come washing in via something as standard, as orthodox, as a communion service?

Maybe the key thing is that it wasn't a very standard communion service, at least not by Presbyterian standards. My church is in the midst of massive renovations and so we are now meeting not in our sanctuary but in our "fellowship hall." We sit in stackable chairs in a multi-purpose room, devoid of all aesthetic beauty, acoustic utility, or liturgical symbolism. In this room, Communion Sunday presents some logistical challenges. See, the thing is, we Presbyterians, we usually do communion in one of two ways: We sit in our pews and pass around heavy trays laden with individual teeny-tiny cups of wine and torn-up little itty-bitty pieces of bread, or we process to the front for "intinction." (Intinction means you stand in line--kind of like you're a Catholic except you don't fold your hands in front of you, unless you're an ex-Catholic; born-and-bred Presbyterians keep their hands swinging by their sides to show their Protestant liberty from papist tyranny--and when you get to the front, you tear off a piece of bread from a common loaf and dip it in a common cup. You eat the intincted bread. You sit back down.)

But in our temporary fellowship hall accommodation, neither of our usual communion procedures would serve: No little circular cup holders in which to place our empty communion glasses, no wide aisles in which to process for "intinction." The powers-that-be, then, decided on a new format; a big loaf of bread, wrapped in towel, and a large common cup of wine, to be passed down each row. As you received the bread, you were to tear off a large hunk, dip it in the wine, and ingest. Then pass the bread and wine to the person sitting next to you and say "The body of Christ, broken for you. The blood of Christ, shed for you." Okey dokey.

Except for a slight problem: If you stick a large hunk-o-wine-dipped-bread in your mouth, it is then very difficult to say, "The body of Christ" etc. So there we were, good Presbyterians all, trying desperately to mind our table manners and not talk with our mouths full, yet to be liturgically correct and not just sling along the bread and wine without the proper blessing as if it were just ordinary ol' white bread and screwtop red wine.

And as I watched this ridiculous scene repeated, pew by pew, Presbyterian by Presbyterian, all these wonderful souls endeavoring to negotiate between liturgy and etiquette, to chew and to swallow and to bless all at the same time, suddenly I saw God--God stuffed in the mouths of mannerly Presbyterians.
God of the drips and the crumbs and the choking coughs and the awkward giggles.
God of the white bread and screwtop wine.
God of the stackable chairs and multi-purpose rooms.
God of the professional failure, the lackluster personality, the terrified parent.
God of the middle-aged.
God of the politically weary.
God of the frightened and the funked.

God of me.

Secret Worlds

'Tis the roach season.

Well, ok, yes, it's south Louisiana. Every season is roach season.

But this time of year, the nights get a bit cooler, and the roaches, accustomed to our usual subtropical temperatures, get nervous and scuttle indoors. Every morning, every room bears witness to their occupation: the night's leftovers, the aged or too enthusiastic bugs who flip over and are left flailing on their back sides, waiting for the kitties to bat them around until I come and squash them. The thrill of squashing the big bad bugs is poor compensation for the knowledge that for each roach squashed, dozens, oh lordy, hundreds, lurk. A secret world, alien creatures, right here among us.

Then the roofing guys come and solve the problem of our rather large living room leak: The wooden planks beneath the shingles feature several rather large holes--and a large, exuberantly healthy, and well-entrenched colony of termites. Apparently we've  been sharing the house with the termites for quite some time. . . . another hidden and horrifying universe, existing parallel to my everyday reality.

I retreat to the comfort of my laptop. I miss my boys. So like any good mother, I log onto Facebook and go stalking.

But but but--who are these people? where are these places? when did that happen? what the fuck are they talking about?

Secret worlds, hidden universes. Except you can't squash these alien creatures.

Upgrade

Hell hath no fury like a 17-year-old deprived of his cell phone upgrade by his older brother.

No doubt about it, it was Hugh's upgrade. And he'd been counting, actually counting, the days til the release of the iPhone 5. And no doubt about it, Owen should not have grabbed the upgrade without checking with us. Us, as in We the Parents Who Pay.

And now we're paying big-time as we deal with Hugh, who is incandescent with fury, almost in tears with utter, absolute rage, shaking with thwarted iPhone desire. I get it. Phones don't matter to me, but I know what it is to enjoy something and to want something and to expect something--and to have those expectations suddenly shattered, and to stand there, impotent and angry, knowing that I did not make this happen and that this was not fair.

Safely out of reach in Oregon, Owen is apologetic but cool, "Hey, man, sorry." He went swimming and forgot the phone in his back pocket. His phone was soaked and ruined; he needed a new phone; his cheapest option was to take the family's available upgrade. It must have all seemed so clear under the Hugh-free skies of Portland. And yet, since this is only Owen's second phone in eight years and since Hugh has grabbed approximately 75 percent of the collective upgrades due to the four of us, I can see my older son's point.

"Fuck him!"

They launch their weapons at each other but somehow always hit me instead.

The voice of the turtledove

We have a new assistant pastor. He's lovely--looks about 16 and like he should be riding a skateboard. He preached for the first time this morning and in an incredibly gutsy move, did so on the Song of Songs:
Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away,
for lo, the winter is past,
the rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth,
the time of singing has come,
and the voice of the turtle dove
is heard in our land.

You don't get a lot of Presbyterian sermons on the Song, for fairly obvious reasons-- "his fruit was sweet to my taste"-- "your breasts are like twin fawns"-- "I had put off my garment, how could I put it on?"-- you can just hear the feet shuffling and bulletins rustling.

Skateboarder Pastor Guy talked about intimacy, about our having been created for intimacy with God and with each other. He referred to the Creation story, to Adam saying to Eve, "You are flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone," and he recalled a service in which the minister had had each member of the congregation turn to the other and say those words. Imagine, he said, if we did that, if we thought that, if we realized that on a daily basis: "You are flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone."

So I come home and 17-year-old Hugh is sitting at the kitchen counter. I walk over, give him a big hug, and say, "You are flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone."

Hugh springs up and shouts, "Geez, Mom what the FUCK does that mean?!"

Still waiting to hear that turtledove.

A Very Weird Mother

I wonder sometimes what it would be like to be normal, you know, as in "mainstream," part of the general current, floating in the middle with everyone else. I don't think of myself as a contrarian and I'm certainly not much of an original thinker and I really rather like feeling like I belong.  And yet it so rarely works out that way. Maybe it's the consequence of being the first daughter after five sons; maybe that experience of being the outlier just got woven into the fabric of my being. More likely it's just happenstance, the random throw of the dice. But somehow I ended up a political and theological liberal and an impractical humanities grad in a family of fundamentalist Republican moneymakers, a Midwesterner in the Deep South, a city lover submerged in strip malls and subdivisions, a sports agnostic in a universe of football fanatics, a European with an American accent.

And, evidently, a Very Weird Mother.

I have just begun a new position as the sort of academic head honcho of a residential college at my university ("head honcho," that is, in the sense of "the person in charge of making lots of phone calls and begging people to do stuff," not, mind you, "the person with power or prestige"). Now, if you're my age, and you attended an American college or university, you probably lived in a dorm. You are old. Dorms are no more. Now we have residential communities, or if you're really cutting-edge in the student services industry (and yes, oh yes, what an industry it is), residential colleges. Which is all well and good, and if you're really interested, go Google it, but the point is, I now have more exposure to the parents of university freshmen than I've ever had before. And I've come to realize that I am not a normal mother.

Normal Mothers--or perhaps, given the range of my data, I should say "Normal Mothers of Freshmen Attending Public Universities in the Deep South" but then again it's an Election Year when we're all used to general conclusions based on the flimsiest bits of anecdotal evidence so hell, let's just go with "Normal Mothers"--Normal Mothers accompany their children on Move-In Day.  They come in with enormous refrigerators and microwaves and flatscreen tvs and they demand to know when Brittni's WiFi will be available. They storm down from the room with long lists of Things That Must Be Repaired Immediately. They stand in the various dining hall/mailbox/rec center lines in loco offspring-is so that their children can be free to do whatever it is such children do. Normal Mothers know their children's course schedules by heart--they know course titles, times, classroom assignments, professors, the required book lists, the tentative dates of the midterm and final, and the various ways these courses fulfill the General Education requirements. They say things like "We're thinking about Engineering. Or maybe Interior Design. We're not sure yet."

Weird moms like me? We stick the kid on the plane with a suitcase, $50, and a big hug. And then we wait for him to call. And when he doesn't, we figure he's doing ok or he'd call. And we avoid looking at his baby picture or that beautiful painting he did when he was ten and we let him be.

I guess I'd thought that was the whole point. Raising him, releasing him, letting him be. Except it's so damned hard. And now I find out it's just weird.

Well, shit. Can we rewind?

Deodorant

It's the deodorant that really gets to me.

As I've mentioned, both boys are home for the summer. I come home and every kitchen cabinet door is open, dirty dishes clutter the counter, greasy pots and pans crowd the stovetop, the toilet stands unflushed, impossibly gargantuan shoes litter all the rooms, wet towels wind their way through the hallway, and seed pods cover the sofa (Hugh is addicted to sunflower seeds; it's like living with a Really Big Squirrel).

I cope. Barely.

And then, there sits the deodorant stick. Atop the coffee table. Perched on my laptop. Nestled amidst the kitty bowls.

And I totally lose it.

I mean, who are these creatures? Why can't they perform their ablutions in the bathroom, like normal people? Why must they wander around the house with deodorant? Geez louise. Didn't their mother teach them anything?

Dang.

Laundry; or, Things Happen

I'm not proud of much in my parenting career, but I do feel quite chuffed about one achievement: I taught both boys, once they reached middle school, to do their own laundry. Lights versus darks, hot versus cold, gentle versus permanent press versus heavy duty. . . we covered the lot. There were a few blips along the way, like the time Owen ran out to stop me before I backed out of the driveway to ask if it was ok to put a shirt with buttons in the wash. (God, he was so adorable.) But, blips and all, I released them, to discover the woes of shrinkage and the mysteries of lost socks and the horror of dye seepage all on their own.

So now they're both home for the summer. And they continue to do their own laundry. And, to my horror, they do not Separate. Completely ignoring all  my carefully inculcated lessons, they just throw all their whites and darks, towels and cotton shirts, jeans and undies, all together in one big undifferentiated mass. "What's the point?" they ask. "It all goes on cold--regular," they point out. "It's fine," they insist.

And it is fine. They're not walking around in pink undershirts or weirdly bleached jeans or horribly shrunk tee-shirts.

Except it's not fine. One cannot not Separate laundry. There are Rules. Whites do not float promiscuously with Darks; undies do not spin with dress shirts; sheets must not fraternize with khaki shorts. Consequences will ensue. Catastrophe looms. You start mixing socks with delicates and, well, Things Will Happen.

The thing is, my boys aren't afraid of Things Happening.

So much to learn. And, with my 52nd birthday lurking just ahead, so little time. I'm going to start tomorrow morning by throwing in my white blouse with my blue jeans. And so it begins. Laundry and a life where Things Happen.

This, I didn't expect

Hugh said he needed a new shirt for prom. "What about that black shirt you wore to the dance last year?" I asked. He rolled his eyes, disappeared, and returned a few minutes later, with his neck bulging out of a much too-tight collar and six inches of his forearms extending out from the cuffs. "Right," I sighed.

"Hey," he said. "At least I'm not a girl and you don't have to buy an expensive new dress for every dance."

"Well, who says I would?" I asked.

Hugh stared at me, stunned. "What!? Are you serious? You really wouldn't do that, would you? Don't you know how important the dress is for a girl?" I laughed at him. He accused me of child abuse. I got indignant.

And there we were, arguing, fighting, practically pummeling each other over my failure to buy my mythical teenaged daughter a mythical new dress for her mythical prom.

Remember What to Expect When You're Expecting? And What to Expect in the First Year? Someone need to write What to Expect When You're Too Friggin' Tired and He's a Teenager.

Bad Neighbor

Well, dang. A "For Sale" sign, right there in Carole's front yard. Life will be so much less interesting without her.

Carole hates me. I have no idea why, but I've enjoyed it immensely for years.

It all started when Owen was a pre-schooler, and desperate for friends in the neighborhood. We were in our house on Cherokee, and Carole and her husband and two little boys lived just around the corner. We had met at a couple of neighborhood functions. I'll admit there was no immediate attraction. Carole is the kind of person for whom the word "coiffed" was coined. And her house sported "window treatments" rather than shades and drapes. Still, several of my best friends have window treatments and a number of them could even be described as coiffed. I'm a tolerant soul. Plus, my kid needed some nearby playmates. And there they were, Carole's Edward and Charles. They suited our needs:
1) They were kids.
2) They lived close by.
3) They seemed normal despite their Little Lord Fauntleroy playsuits and their royal names. (And I can say with a certain degree of pride in my self-control that I never ever gave in to the very strong temptation to call these kids Teddy and Charlie, and certainly not Ed and Chuck. But, can I just note that eventually Edward and Charles had two sisters named Isabella and Eugenia? 'Nuff said.)

To continue: Determined to get Owen some neighborhood buddies, I pursued Carole whenever I saw her on the sidewalk, trying to engage her in conversation, asking about the boys, talking about this and that. And she'd smile her perfectly modulated smile and nod in a kind of "oh, mmm, yes" way. I then pinned her down by issuing an outright invitation, complete with date and times, for her boys to come over and play. She agreed, but insisted that Owen come to their house instead. "Great!" said I. "And then I'll have your guys over next week." Wow. Her facial expression taught me what "brittle smile" really meant. The Play Date arrived, I dropped Owen off (God, he was so excited) and an hour later--an hour earlier than agreed--Carole brought Owen back. "We all had such a good time," she said politely, "Bye bye."

Now look. Owen was (and is--you've just got to embrace the tattoos) a perfectly normal, friendly, fun boy. He behaved himself at other people's houses. He wasn't mean or squirrelly or inappropriate or obnoxious. Even at age 4, he went out of his way to please the other kids, to do what they wanted to do, to play their way. In other words, no way in God's green earth this child caused any trouble in an hour. Yet Carole communicated, clearly and absolutely, that the first playdate was the last.

I understood. I got it. I immediately abandoned all hopes of Edward and Charles as preschool pals. (I am not as clueless as I appear.) But, you know, I'm a mom. And there was no excuse to do that to my boy. So, well, umm, ok, fact is, I decided to drive Carole nuts by pretending to be that clueless, by continuing to call and drop by and accost her on the sidewalk, by greeting her enthusiastically whenever our paths crossed at neighborhood parties, by acting as if I didn't notice that my very presence caused her pain. Her face, ah, her face, our first Halloween back after four years out of the neighborhood, when she and her kids (all four of them by this time) showed up at our door--different house, she had no idea--and I greeted her like an old and dearly beloved friend.

I shouldn't have done it, I'm sure. My mother raised me better. And yet, really, did I do any harm? And more to the point, boy howdy, it was fun.

Bye, bye Carole. I'm gonna miss you, darlin'.

S.M.A.

Hi, my name is Facing-50 and I'm a shitty mother. I am thinking of starting Shitty Mothers Anonymous. Want to join?

This weekend I was tired and feeling crummy and crabby and Hugh backed me into a corner (which, in my defense, is something that he does ruthlessly) and I just exploded. In public. Left him to deal with a disabled shopping cart full of groceries on the pavement and ran for the car. It was dumb, the sort of behavior that you see in a 17-year-old single mom of a cranky toddler and you think, "Tsk, tsk." But I'm so not 17. And not single. I know better. I've got a wealth, criminal really in its extent, of social and intellectual and financial and emotional resources at my fingertips. Sigh. So Hugh finally gets to the car and goes nuts. Screaming and swearing and even crying, "You left me! You left me!"

Oh God. My adopted son. My adopted baby screaming that I left him. Oh geez.

I'm still reeling, still trying to come to grips with it all, to sort my way through the questions of guilt and responsibility and sheer fucking personal stupidity.

Time for an S.M.A. meeting.

Choosing Y

I'm typing with great hesitancy because there's enough of a third-grader left in me to believe that if I acknowledge the wondrous thing that seems to be happening, I will jinx it and the wonderful will all go away. But--into the breach she leaps, quietly [I'm whispering now]: We've just concluded our third conflict-free weekend in a row with 16-year-old Hugh. Yes, that's right. No arguments, no shrieking, no swearing, no slamming doors, not even any eye-rolling. How weird and wonderful is that?

The cynical me thinks, "yeah, it's just because you've been sick and so too doggone weary to fight." But that's not it because the point is, the sharp-skewering-eureka point is, that Hugh has not picked a fight. Which counts as a totally "holy cow!" development.

I imagine it's just serendipity, the right alignment of hormones and school successes and driving privileges and what Keith made for dinner. But I would like to believe, in fact I am going to believe until facts intrude and force me to believe otherwise (just hate those damn facts), that we, Keith and I, that we did this. At least in part. Because, you see, these good weekends follow a somewhat epic clash with Hugh's boarding school authorities. (Ok ok, maybe not epic, maybe not even supermarket paperback, still, this is our life, you know, so it does seem to matter.)

School. Such a strange thing, really. You have a baby and you obsess like mad over every little detail and then the baby is 5 and whoop, total strangers have control of him for most of the day. You can assiduously investigate various school options and agonize over private vs. public and spend huge chunks of your life touring facilities and reading brochures and interviewing principals--but in the end, he spends most of the day in the hands of individuals that you do not know and that you have no say in selecting. And you have to trust them, support them, back them up. . .particularly when you have a kid who tends to lie, so of course you believe the teachers and you align yourself with The Authorities and you lecture your kid about respect and consequences and obeying the rules even when he doesn’t think they make sense.

But sometimes you confront a situation in which your gut, your heart, your instinct, all cry out: something just seems awry. I’ve been in that situation, and made the wrong choice. When Hugh was 7, his classroom teacher became seriously ill and for three months he was in the hands of a substitute. Hugh's behaviour and academic work deteriorated immediately and I knew, no, I felt something was wrong, but I stuck with my head, ignored my heart, supported The Authorities, did as I was told—and hurt Hugh. The sub, from her first day, labeled Hugh as Bad and treated him as such--and "documented" it with vindictive glee in a little notebook that the regular teacher, horrified, discovered after she returned. And I let it happen.

"Err on the side of love.” I don’t know where I heard that, but it’s become my mantra. So now, here we are, several years later and the school says X and Hugh says Y, and everything I know and feel says only Y makes any sense--despite the record, the history, the apparent evidence.

Err on the side of love. We chose Y. At least, if I screw up my kid, it will be because I believed in him too much, trusted him too much, gave him too much of my heart and my soul. Not because I didn’t.