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:

daughters · humor · motherhood · speed-posts

Rose-Colored Glasses on a Someday Badass (from the Momplex Blog archives)

February 21, 2013February 27, 2023 Jenny5 Comments

My daughter wants to be Angelina Jolie when she grows up. That’s not how she puts it. She doesn’t even know who Angelina is. But she’s been telling me for years that she wants to “adopt nine or ten kids someday, from all over the world.” I guess that as long as she doesn’t take up any other Angelina tendencies, like making out with a cousin or blowing up her lips to look like two boffing slugs, I think it’s pretty cool.

I’m happy when my daughter tells me she aspires to having kids. It makes me feel like I’m making this gig look easy, which it isn’t, and rewarding, which it is. Interestingly enough, a Living Social psychic tried to tell me a couple of months ago that my daughter was “going to have kids at an early age.” I pressed the woman for details, and she said, “Not too young, maybe around 19.” Excuse me? Because this woman feels that 19 is a reasonable age to have babies—and because she had to ask if I had kids in the first place—it was easy to laugh her off.

The great and wise man-child Justin Bieber tells us we should never say never, but I feel pretty good that my daughter’s not going to fulfill that psychic’s prophecies. However, she might just fulfill her own. I see the kind of sister, daughter, and friend she is, and I just know she’s going to be damn good at motherhood when it’s her turn. And, hey, just look at this list of “Possible Jobs” she made last week:

The last item on that list has “motherhood internship” written all over it. Being a mom to a deserted baby penguin seems like a half-okay set of training wheels for actual motherhood, right? I love my girl’s optimism, her bold vision. Part rose-colored glasses, part bad-ass, I’d say she’s totally on the right track to fulfilling her dream.