Author: Jenny

Like a magpie, I've always been drawn to things that have sparkle, from rhinestone-embellished housewares to gold lamé get-ups in second-hand stores or beetles whose metallic armors reflect in the sun. But in my interactions with the world, oh, how I can fixate on the not-sparkly stuff: ill-timed traffic lights, a web page that won't load, the impolite server. Post-pandemic, I took to saying, "Everything's broken, and nothing works." It's not good for the soul, and as a lifelong writer, I've noticed it's also not good for creativity. This blog is about redirecting my attention to what's good in the world -- seeking and finding joy in the same way I notice sparkly objects around me -- and writing about it. There is an old nursery rhyme about magpies, "One for Sorrow," which tells us a solitary magpie symbolizes sorrow, but two magpies symbolize joy. This blog is about looking harder for the good stuff. Here's to finding those second magpies.

Hello, Tweendom. Is That You? (from the Momplex Blog archives)

March 13, 2013February 27, 2023 Jenny15 Comments

Too old for toys, too young for boys. That’s the description I found when I Googled “age of tweens” the other night. Obviously, I’d had a bad day with one of my kids. I just had to confirm what I was sensing: that my little girl is molting her girlishness. How long until it’s a sad, dry husk of yesterdays and used-to-be’s? Almost suddenly it seems she’s entered the halls of that mystifying place mothers have been telling me about (read: warning me about) since I first held her nine and a half years ago.

Nine and a half. What was I doing at that age? Like her, I was in the midst of the third grade, learning how to multiply numbers and spin around the monkey bars with just one leg hooked. I had a number of “best friends,” and we often gabbed in annoying baby voices that made my mom want to split her wig. We played chase and kickball and thought boys booger-nosed and unessential. I fancied myself a stellar singer despite mounting evidence to the contrary. I also thought myself a wowzer of a dancer, artist, runner, roller-skater—basically an ace of all trades. My parents had to endure a lot of painfully stupid living room performances in which the whole point was for me to be watched, watched, and watched some more. Yeah, I was a lot like my kiddo.

Yet I sense something is different with her version of nine and a half. Namely, I don’t remember being embarrassed of my mom at that age. I don’t remember kind of hating her or resenting her, trying to make her feel like an idiot, eagle-eye nitpicking her for everything from a mispronounced word to a chin hair. I don’t remember trying to annoy the crap out of her, poking at the wasp’s nest with little misbehaviors I knew would set her teeth on edge. Sometimes, I think that’s what’s happening under my roof. Is it really already time? Are we on the precipice of the age of eye-rolling, on the age of sullen brooding during camping trips once filled with flower-picking and imagined woodland pixies?

Last summer I said to my husband, “I have a feeling this might be her last little-kid summer. Let’s take a good trip and enjoy it.” Ultimately, we couldn’t. Financially it just wasn’t within reach. Instead we camped and swam and went bike-riding and on picnics. It was a good summer, full of water balloons and tree-climbing. She ran around naked a lot. While my husband started asking her to please put on some underwear in the name of all that’s holy, I quietly appreciated the persistence of her childish lack of modesty. Big kids cover up. Little kids let it all hang out. It’s a very clear line of delineation between two worlds.

It won’t be long before the line is behind us, that dry husk of little girlishness shrinking almost out of view. Sure, my heart will ache a bit when I revisit images of her still-round face surrounded by a happy, wild mess of curls as she jumps for joy on my bed at age two, age four, age seven. But I will try not to let it get to me when her eyes narrow now as she pushes at the boundaries of my patience with hints of sarcasm, a head turned away from a kiss, and her completely annoying and exaggerated disapproval of every food, movie, outfit, song, activity, you-name-it that I suggest—simply because it was me who suggested it. I’ll try to laugh at the obnoxious juvenile humor that has come to replace her not-quite knock-knock jokes that never made any sense. (Knock, knock! Who is it? It’s me, you cow eyeball!) And hardest of all, I’ll have to accept that even though I can insist on respect, I can’t insist on being liked. Sometimes I’ll be hated. That sucks. All you veteran mothers, you warned me.

What you didn’t tell me was that there are so many new things to love: She’s already traded in her dress-up clothes for a Beatles shirt, running pants, and a skateboard, and, oh, how I like to see her becoming something a world of Disney princesses could never shape. She uses her manners. She leaves me notes. Lately when she notices me exercising, she’ll fill up a glass with cold water and bring it to me the very moment I’m done. She’ll help her little brother without being asked. Her personality and talents are taking shape in a clearer way, and I like the person I see when I see her interacting with the world. She sometimes chooses “chat time” with me now over “read-alone time” before lights-out, cautiously revealing secrets that are big to her but so small and still-innocent to me: a cute boy, a bad word, a friend’s fib. Little by little, she shares her foreign world with me. She still needs me, even if she wants to choke me sometimes.

How Parenthood–and a New Heart–Taught Me to Appreciate My Dad (from the Momplex Blog archives)

March 6, 2013February 27, 2023 Jenny9 Comments

For six months, I had a battery-operated dad. This is different—significantly—from having a battery-operated “boyfriend.” (We all know what that looks like.) My dad’s battery was a big, heavy square that fit into a wearable pouch given to him in the cardiac ICU. He’d just had open-heart surgery, and the battery connected to a tube that ran through a grotesque little hole in his stomach and up to a device that helped his heart pump. The hole and the device, called an LVAD, were put there on the advice of Mayo Clinic doctors. That’s because my once healthy 62-year-old dad had rapidly and suddenly plummeted into acute heart failure over the six months prior. The doctors called it a mystery of sorts. And they called the LVAD a bridge to transplant.

Before any of this happened, I had a long stretch when I didn’t get along with my dad, for about 15 years. I tried. He tried. But it was really strained, and our fights were poisonous. However sweet my earliest memories of him, they could not support the weight of our inharmonious personalities as I grew up and developed opinions (and hormones). Tender days of horsey-back rides faded miserably into the distance as I traveled the roads of adolescence and beyond. For a time, I suspected he didn’t even like me. Loved, yes, but not liked–and the feeling was mutual. During my mid- to late 20s, we managed to tread lightly around each other, which had the effect of looking like we’d made peace. But sometimes the veneer would crack open. Angry tears were never far away for me.

When I was 31, I gave birth to my first child, a cherubic little girl, and my dad became Grandpa. He was smitten. I have a picture of him sitting next to her on the brightest green lawn during her second spring. He’s showing her how to make a blade of grass whistle. The conversation looks serious, resembling a photo my mom keeps on the fridge, one of my dad having a fancy tea party with their neighbor’s toddler. Lace gloves were involved. Tiny teapots. In the picture, my dad has the same thoughtful look, like he’s at the labor-negotiations table again. He’s really at that party. I’m a grown woman, but when I first saw the picture, it made me jealous. Why didn’t my dad do those things for me? Why didn’t I get that guy?

At least my daughter got him. And as I watched his delight in her unfold, as I walked my own path as a parent, I forged a bridge of empathy toward him. I learned what he’d meant when he once admitted he always loved but didn’t always like me. I learned how hard it was for him to temper his cutting words, because I struggle with that same flaw as a parent. I learned that even the most lovable kids are exhausting. I discovered that sometimes, yes, you’d rather lick an outhouse than play another game with them, especially if it involves you doing voice-over for their toys. I learned that it’s easy to be strong out of the gates but hard not to get whittled down. Mistakes pile up, and you worry you’ll be remembered in the worst light—not as the horsey-back parent you once were but as the parent you became, the one who sometimes lost her shit over nothing.

My daughter was eight and my son was three when Grandpa became battery-operated. I was sick with worry but tried to hide it from them. The thought of them growing up without him, forgetting him even, was overwhelming. Ambulance sirens in the distance would give me an indigestible mix of sympathy and anticipation that’s hard to explain to anyone who’s never awaited a life-saving organ donation. Every time I watched the MedFlight helicopter zooming overhead, the yin and yang of it would choke me up. “Let’s pray for that person to be okay,” I’d tell my kids. And we would. Guiltily, anxiously, I’d wonder if the sirens signaled the phone call my family had been waiting months to receive.

On November 10, 2011, just after noon, I got that call.

“Dad, I’m in a meeting,” I loud-talked into the phone over the din of the restaurant. I was having lunch with a client. “Did you need something?” He was yammering away, and I kept repeating more loudly that I was in a meeting.

“I have a HEART!” he finally shouted. “They found a match.”

The first thing I did once I stopped blubbering into my lunch was to call my daughter’s school and have her pulled from class. As I collected her into her seat and steered toward the sitter’s to pick up my son, I finally divulged to her how very serious this surgery was. I’d held off until then, because I hadn’t wanted to scare her. And, selfishly, I hadn’t wanted to field questions that would scare me. Kids ask hard questions.

In the rear-view mirror, I saw in my daughter’s eyes the most penetrating concern and hope and love. She just wanted Grandpa to be okay. And I felt the feelings right along with her. I wanted him to live long enough for her to remember him, for my son to get to know him, and for me to tell him I was happy to have him back, warts and all. Thanks to one amazing stranger, one generous donor, that’s exactly what happened:

babies · grandparents · humor · preschoolers

10 Reasons the Elderly Are Not Like Little Kids (from the Momplex Blog archives)

February 28, 2013February 27, 2023 Jenny3 Comments

I’ve heard it my whole life, the notion that elderly people are a lot like little kids. I know regression takes place over the final years. I’ve seen firsthand how Father Time eventually subtracts some of the most basic skills, leaving behind a storeroom of Depends and the impulse control of—well, a preschooler. But having spent much of today with my nearly 90-year-old grandfather and my 4-year-old son, I’m not convinced the analogy holds much water. Here’s why I don’t think the elderly are much like little kids:

Although my grandpa did fall and get a rug burn on his forehead just before I arrived to take him out, he did not start screaming, “BAND-AID! BAND-AID! I NEED A BAND-AID! I’M BLOODING!”
While my grandpa has indeed reached the stage where incontinence is an issue, he never wiggles around pinching his wiener through his pants and swearing to God that he really does not have to go.
Although my grandpa did shout, “WAITER!!!” loud enough to cast a spell of startled silence over every single patron in the IHOP where we ate today, he came off like a regular Emily Post next to my son, who at that moment was creeping out from under the table with something balanced on his index finger while saying, “Mom! People wipe boogers under this table!”
My grandpa requires naps and can fall asleep anywhere, but he does not sprout horns and devolve into a blubbering, fit-throwing devil during the 20 minutes prior. He also does not demand any particular bedding be present, and although he does like a good reclining chair for the deed, I’ve never once seen him pitch a fit if he doesn’t get one.
My grandpa carries a handkerchief with him everywhere and deposits his boogers in it instead of on walls, in his hair, or worst of all, in his mouth. He also does not spend time marveling at each specimen he removes.
My grandpa’s jokes don’t all end somehow with someone pooping or falling into poop or smelling like poop or eating poop or being poopy. They pretty much never involve poop.
My grandpa never shows up to the dinner table nude.
My grandpa may hoard things that clearly belong in the trash, but at least they’re remnants of things that were once used by him and might possibly serve some purpose in the future. They are not someone else’s rubbish plucked up from playgrounds, parking lots, grocery store floors, or worst of all, the mall play area.
No matter what he’s served, my grandpa eats every…single…thing…on…his…plate….right down to the last nanoparticle of butter. Then he licks his fingers. Enough said.
Once he goes to bed, my grandpa is down for the night. He does not call out requests for water, back scratches, hangnail doctoring, different speeds on the ceiling fan, lights dimmed or brightened, another trip to the toilet, or answers to random questions about God, death, or private parts.

Think about it. Can’t you name way more differences than likenesses between little kids and the elderly, too?