Everybody Loves Me!

Happy Mother's Day, world. (Or, part of the world where today is Mother's Day - my Irish mother-in-law had her Mother's Day a month or so ago.) 

Because I am a lucky duck, I've been able to coach my younger son's Odyssey of the Mind team for the past 6 school years. Their final competition was last month, and yesterday was our final wrap-up party. For several years, one of the families has hosted the team families for a great afternoon full of Indian food and chatter, and I pass out certificates to each of the boys (every year I coach 7 boys; 5 of them have been the same crew since we started when they were in 3rd grade.) 

And every year I get a plaque. I can't even tell you how much I love these plaques. I can't even tell you why I love the plaques, but I just do. They adorn the wall in my study, and I may or may not stare at them when I'm supposed to be staring at my computer and writing instead. 

This year, since these families are amazing, talented, and kind, they also made me a couple of extremely special gifts. 

There's a photo book, with pictures of the teams over the years, and narrative of their tasks and competitions. They also included a DVD of the performances. I keep re-reading it, delighted with this trip down memory lane and all of the unbearable cuteness of the boys getting taller each year, but no less goofy.

And! A couple of the moms made me a gorgeous quilt from the t-shirts of each of the team's 10 competitions. (Right there in the middle - the red one with the Rubik's Cube and the grey one with PacMan - are the first and the last of the tournaments.) It's so pretty and cozy, and while it's currently draped over the futon in my study, it'll end up being dragged all around the house as I curl under it. (Bonus: I have each of these t-shirts and wear them all the time, so odds are good I'll match my quilt.)

Anyway, I'm feeling incredibly cared for, and mainly privileged to have gotten to spend so much time with this funny, sweet, smart group of boys for several years. My son has lovely friends, and as they enter high school, with so many new interests and activities to fill their time, I'm sure they aren't going to miss Odyssey nearly as much as I'm going to miss coaching them.

Today my husband and sons took me to a delicious Mexican lunch, and the boys gave me a card that made me cry, and also cookies and a muffin and a Kiva gift card and time to chill out and write and read and light-refracting glasses and hugs. So all in all: lucky duck.

Laughing Through My Commute with Sedaris

Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris
(Little, Brown and Company / Hachette Audio, 2013)
Format: audio download via library (narrated by David Sedaris)

From Goodreads: "From the unique perspective of David Sedaris comes a new book of essays taking his readers on a bizarre and stimulating world tour. From the perils of French dentistry to the eating habits of the Australian kookaburra, from the squat-style toilets of Beijing to the particular wilderness of a North Carolina Costco, we learn about the absurdity and delight of a curious traveler's experiences. Whether railing against the habits of litterers in the English countryside or marveling over a disembodied human arm in a taxidermist's shop, Sedaris takes us on side-splitting adventures that are not to be forgotten."

If you're not familiar with David Sedaris - well, fix that. Also, probably you're wrong, because you'll have heard him on This American Life or somewhere. (You do have a podcast directory full of NPR and books-chat podcasts like me, don't you?) (Oh! Check out Book Riot's fairly new-to-the-scene podcast - it's a great deal of fun.)

Darcy!

When my awesome niece stayed with me for a few weeks this summer and joined me on my commute to work, I took the opportunity to correct some of the vast oversights of her cultural education. (I'm nice that way.) (Also opinionated.) (BUT good at my job - after all, I also introduced her to the deep and abiding joy of the BBC / Colin Firth version of Pride & Prejudice last time she stayed with me. Also Project Runway. I think we can all agree those are valuable additions to anyone's cultural landscape.) Anyhoo, this time I sent her home having seen Monty Python's The Meaning of Life and having listened to David Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty One Day and Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls. (The poor girl. Even I was nauseated by some of the food stuff happening in both Python and Sedaris, and she's a vegetarian.) 

My point here is that Sedaris is hilarious. He mines the fallow field of his relationship with his dad for material, as well as the joys of travel, home-owning, and talk radio. It's quite a lot of mining, all told, and he tells it brilliantly. There's a good deal of absurdity and middle-aged angst and ranting about people who rant about Obama, and it's basically Mel Crack, is what it is. With an overlay of nausea, because part of the humor is the going just too far when describing, for example, how he feels about Chinese food, or what kinds of refuse he finds along the roads near his rural English home. This collection didn't have anything as dangerous to my successful operation of heavy machinery as The Youth in Asia or Six to Eight Black Men, but still, we laughed and laughed.

It's great to read Sedaris, but orders of magnitude better for him to read to me. He's superb with his material. Perfect timing, and inflections that just make everything more pointed and intensely comic.

Nightmares and the Need for Sweet Dreams

One of my goals for this weekend was to write a post about some books that made me smile. Instead, I spent most of it reading books that made me cry. Or maybe, crying anyway, and using books to keep me from focusing too much on the reasons why. Either way, I will have to get you all the smiley stuff later, because the tears took precedence. 

So, my 16 year old was in an accident Friday night. He is uninjured. Everyone is uninjured. The other car is undamaged. His car is totaled. Really, totally totaled.

He'd just left to head into town and I was on my way out to a friend's house for dinner. My phone rang with his special ringtone (Yaz's "Don't Go" because a) I'm that old and b) I don't always like having a son this old) and I was a little put-off, knowing he would be on the freeway and obviously we're not so encouraging of him using his phone while he is driving. He was on the freeway, all right. Standing on the shoulder and saying, "Mom, I had an accident."


He was changing lanes. There was a monster truck in his blind spot - specifically, its big ol tire. Then his car was spinning, and he was slamming head-on into the barrier, and meeting his air bag up close and personal. 


He doesn't remember all the details, except that it seemed to go on for a long time. And then there was the acrid smell, orange flames under the hood, gray smoke in the car.

The truck driver pulled over - he and his passenger were fine, his tire seems to be fine (though it sure left a lot of rubber on D's car door.) They made sure D was fine - he is. Even his violin, which was in the back seat (he was on the way to a performance) was still in tune. The police, tow truck, and fire truck were all on the scene before I managed to babble something semi-coherent and vaguely reassuring to K and get there myself. 


I was relieved to see him standing beside the car when I pulled onto the shoulder myself. The paramedics had already cleared him, and the fire truck pulled away shortly after I arrived. There was almost literally not a scratch on him, but there is a little scrape on his knee. And some skin burn from the airbag, but that faded quickly. Fading not so quickly - my fear reaction, R's fear reaction, D's fear reaction.

The police helped us clear off to a nearby parking lot where the exchange of information and so forth happened, and I got my first good look at what deployed airbags and a crumpled frame looks like. 

Hooray for Honda, I have to say. We got this car new in 2003, and R drove it just a little while before I claimed it, so it was my car, my baby, until January when I got my Honda hybrid & passed it on to D. Kind of rough to see it all destroyed like that, and silly of me to imagine it sacrificing itself to keep D safe, but I can't help feeling it. That car was a dragon protector, and I love it for shielding my baby. 

I still remember one of our first drives in it, when he was 7, sitting in the back seat, his brother's booster seat beside him, and I told him that when he was older it would be his car. He was so proud when it became his - laughing as he cleaned out all my various hair clips and books and whatever and putting his own crap in there.


Now all that crap is in my trunk, where we stashed it after dropping the wreck at the collision center, knowing that we were likely to never see it again. Sight unseen, the insurance agent said it was 99.8% sure to be totaled. If he'd seen it, I think the odds would have been higher. 

After cleaning it out, I drove D downtown for what was left of his performance. Passing the scene of the accident, seeing bits of his tire on the road - it was not easy, for either of us. D's adrenaline high crashed when we talked about his driving again, and among other things he said he thought the time he blew a tire on the way to the DMV was going to be the worst of his teenage boy unfortunate driving experiences. We agreed that this one is more than enough to get him through high school, and hopefully college. 

The next day at 6 am, I put D into a stranger's car for a 4 hour drive into the country (scout thing) and R and I alternately texted him and asked each other if we'd heard from him until he called in the afternoon to check in. The reception was spotty, but hearing him was vital to me. Like us, D was going through a lot of "what-ifs" by then, and since he was the one with the spinning and the smoke and the impact, I imagine it was even worse for him than it was for us. I mean, maybe. Because he knew he was okay, and yes, I also knew he was okay, but did I mention that this boy is my baby? That he is so amazing and vital and essential to my existence, and he had an accident and it could have... It might be worse, the stuff going on in his head. But I think the stuff going on in my head is plenty bad enough.

So Friday night, Saturday night - not a lot of sleep. I stayed up most of Saturday night reading (and crying - lots of cathartic tearful things happening in Robyn Carr's work, I've found.) Once he got home safely on Sunday (and I dosed myself up with some bedtime tea Sunday night) I slept a little better, but still with the nightmares. It's getting better. I cried when talking to D about trying to balance my need to wrap him a cocoon with my logical side's argument that he was going to have to drive again someday soon. I cried when writing to my friends about this. I cried last night watching a tv mom see the wrecker towing her tv daughter's car. I cried just now.

We are insanely lucky that he is okay. He was unhurt. No one else's person or property was hurt. But I am going to keep crying periodically. I am going to have some weird sad scary dreams for a while, and I think D will, too. And R. And K, too. (My sweet empathetic K has been quite the dispenser of giant hugs lately. That boy rules.) I really, really want my family to have sweet dreams again. 

I hope you all have sweet dreams, always. 

Parenthood Was My Idea

I self-identified as the nurturing one. The babies were my idea, especially that first one. The one we had when I was 25, and he'd just turned 27, and we'd only been married for 2 years and 3 days. But I had always been Little Miss Mommy, babysitting my way from middle school to college. Go on, ask me to recite The Wizard of Oz from memory - A & I watched it every Monday afternoon my whole senior year at UCSC.

What I'm saying is, it's a good thing Robert didn't put up a fight about having kids. In my young mind, it was simple: we loved each other madly, we were married and had a home and jobs, and kids were next on my agenda. It could be that he was overjoyed at the idea, but I wouldn't know. Didn't ask, or not in a way that wasn't passive-aggressively designed to secure his agreement. Mostly I just started in checking my basal body temp and stressing about how long it took before the bun was securely in the oven.

I had hints that the smart, tall, dark, handsome, studious author I'd married would be a good dad. He was a teacher, after all, and you have to be at least somewhat good with kids to hang out with a bunch of high school boys all day. Plus, his sisters each had three children already, and wasn't that the revelation to me, the day I first saw him playing around with the toddler nephew? He was Pied Piper with them, and clearly enjoyed it. So I was sure my agenda would be fine with him.

But I had no real idea. Yes, it was beautiful to watch him cradle our first-born while singing "Yellow Submarine" in our hospital room. And he was quite excellent at ensuring that I had everything I needed to stay home with the newborn while he went back to the high school. Diapers, long sessions pacing the floors while humming and bouncing, wigging his bushy eyebrows to make the baby laugh, all of that. He was everything I suspected I'd need, and since I was, after all, the nurturing one, mostly the boys just needed me, right? I even joked ("joked") that I would raise them for the first 10 years, and since Robert was so used to teenage boys, he could handle their second decades.

Ha.

The joke's on me. Robert turned out to be an amazing father. I spent those first 10 years of each son's life listening to friends tell me how lucky I was, genuine awe in their voices, and they didn't know the half of it. Sure, they knew about the soccer coaching, the den leadering and cubmastering, the goofiness around the campfires and the running around the front yard being joyously (loudly) attacked by plastic lightsabers. They may have noticed his overprotective streak, or the fact that he always made sure they had sunscreen on and were happy with their meals.

They didn't know about Ted Bear or Hercule McGrew, the heroes of many, many invented bedtime stories that went on for so long that the boys never got to sleep on time. The songs sung, and the guitar chords he's taught them. The hours spent playing games, both raucous and cerebral (and sometimes both.) The facile imagination he brings to family outings - not engaged by straight-up history? How about if you're all members of F Troop, and there's a mission to complete, and an enemy on the horizon? Lefty will send you scouting ahead, but watch out for any snipers hiding behind those barracks. The questions answered, the carpools driven, the homework explained, the meals cooked, the rules enforced, the laughter shared. The many, many, many puns.

And here we are, both boys in that second decade. Not quite as many Ted Bear stories or F Troop adventures (still lots of puns.) And Robert and his boys are still "bone pals," as defined by a preschooler D - pals forever, even when they're reduced to mere bones. I'm sure I was plenty nurturing for the first 10 years. I do try, still, even though it's rare for a 16 year old to want to curl up in Mommy's lap. (The 12 year old is more accommodating. Also, shorter.) It's not that my Mommy-ness is diminished by the fact that Robert is an inventive, engaged, active and loving father. I suspect it enhances my own parenting as much as it enriches the lives of our sons. What it really does is humbles me. I don't get to take all the credit for what interesting and fun boys I have. I can't look at anything about them and think, "That's all me. I am the Mommy who made this excellence possible." Robert has been far too wonderful a father to them, has touched too many vital aspects of their existence. And the mundane ones. He's everywhere, and they're so lucky.


I'll keep claiming that parenthood was all my idea. But I think I'll have to change the story, just a little. I think I'll have to pretend to some prescience - that when I picked Robert to be the guy I'd spend forever with, I just knew, with the brilliance inherent to a head-over-heels 23 year old, that no man on earth could be a better father. Yeah, that's it. All part of the plan.

Happy Father's Day.

Thanks for Everything, Mom. In Return, I Wrote a Blog.

It's Flag Day! Also known as Mel's Mom's Birthday! Cute story: when Mom was little, she thought the neighbors all hung flags on June 14 to celebrate her. Reality: they do. Wave your flags for my mom, y'all!

Here's the thing about my mom. Well, a few things. She had her first baby in May of 1968. She had her fourth baby in October of 1972. Those were my brothers - my sister and I were in between. So, as you might guess if you do the math, she had a lot of years there of maternal blur. Happy years, if my memories serve. (They may not. I was a bit young.)

Part of what remains of our
collection from the 70s

I don't know what she thought of it all, while making sure we ate our vegetables (or pretending not to notice that I fed all my peas to the dog), went to bed on time (my sister and I shared a room until I was 8. I think they bought a bigger house so she wouldn't have to come threaten us into silence every night), played well together (best inventive punishment: sitting us under the dining table looking at each other until we stopped fighting), and generally had a good life. She bought each of us our own Han Solo action figures so we wouldn't fight as much during our many Star Wars games. She rewired the attic when my sister and I earned (by dint of being teenage girls, I believe) our own phone line. She eventually stopped trying to serve me peas.

So it was a good thing, growing up with my mom as the mom. But, you know, kids. I was pretty involved with negotiating complex alliances with my siblings, playing Little House, throwing tantrums, being The Best Student My Teacher Had Ever Met, checking out more library books than I could carry home, enjoying all of the early-adopted technology Mom got (BetaMax! Atari! Cable TV! Commodore 64! Walkman!), and being otherwise a self-absorbed kid to give my relationship with Mom much thought. I mean, except when periodically convincing myself that I was the favorite of her four children, but it was easy to reassure myself on that point, and then I could move on to adoring my cat (he also loved me best) and bartering with my brothers and sister over the chore chart.

So that was my first 18 years. Then I went off to California and England for college / grad school (oh, yeah, thanks Mom & Dad, for funding my education.) I got married. And at 23, I went to work for my family business. Well, I'd worked there off and on - that's the deal with family businesses. The kids end up answering phones or taking inventory or (if they're Mom's favorite) helping to layout the new catalog. I can't tell you how impressed I was watching Mom use the adding machine - her fingers flew over those keys. (I tried to impress my 12 year old with my own 10-key skills last week. He shrugged. I do believe kids who take keyboarding in 3rd grade and start texting in 6th ought to have more respect for the fleet fingers of their forebearers.)

But this was full time work. A job. As it turned out, a career. If you want to know how a woman with an MA in Creative Writing ends up VP of a multimillion dollar corporation, just check in with my mom. Because it's not like I knew a lot about AP, HR, or IFTA reports before I started working at Fixtures. I learned everything by helping her, then taking over some of what she did, and eventually taking over most of what she did. I love Dad and all, but was never very interested in the manufacturing side of our manufacturing company. (Sis was, and that's why she took over his side of things. Parents have to retire sometime.) (That was an instruction, not an observation. Parents, retire already!)

And it's surprisingly fun, how well I can rock a spreadsheet. I like my job. (Well, you'd hope, since I've been there full time for 19 years now.) But as awesome as time cards are, the best part of those 19 years has been working with Mom. Sharing office space, eating lunch together (okay, for a long time, eating whatever she brought for lunch. I feed myself now, usually, but I admit: grown up, and my parents make my lunch.) Bringing my sons to work when they were babies. Talking constantly about my kids, my husband (only good things! I promise! I mean, not promise, but....), remodeling our kitchens, and always having a sympathetic ear. We talk about books while doing the books, we laugh at ridiculous government reporting requirements together, and no one else in the world will roll her eyes with me if I just mention the name of that one vendor's AR person. Or that other one, either.

It has been so great, working this closely with Mom. (She should still retire.) So, happy birthday, Mom, and thanks for teaching me, well, everything. Except how to rewire the attic, but that's okay, I didn't really want to know. I love you.

Resolved: In 11 months I'll send holiday cards.

Happy 2012!
Despite being a family blessed with a passel of delightful friends and family whom we love dearly, we not only didn't send out holiday cards in 2011, we also didn't even send our usual holiday email. (We did make the usual donation in lieu of cards & postage, this year to my favorite library ever.) (What do you mean self-serving? Pshaw.)

So here's a picture of my family playing at being Typically American, sitting on the front porch on Thanksgiving 2011. Note: not our porch. Imagine it is accompanied by a charming letter sharing my thoughts about the year that has just ended, a pithy observation or two about the passage of time and aging of our children (D is 16! K turns 12 today!), and, of course, our warmest wishes for all of you. We do hope you have - oh, wait, had - a great holiday season, and that 2012 is a fun, fun year full of many good books and good times and a good kiss or two.

Also, here's a spreadsheet of the 301 books I read in 2011, which had nothing to do with my failure to compose a holiday email. I could totally have done that while listening to an audiobook.

Thanks to those of you who've said such kind things about this blog, which has been going for a year now. And to those of you who read it without comment, and to those of you who ignore it but at least don't make fun of me for writing it. You're all the best.