parenting

Day 14

Should anyone be actually keeping up with this thing, you may have noticed that all day long yesterday, you were waiting on bated breath for a Day 13 only to be let down. Well, Day 13 went about as well as superstition would have you believe it would. For whatever nefarious reason cooked up in the minds of Google, I was signed out of all my Google things. And THEN forced to keep changing my password, and THEN not being allowed in anyway, all the while, Google keeps sending frantic alerts to my cell phone that someone was trying to change my Google password. This went on for several hours. So that was annoying. Also annoying, I have a Chromebook. Everything was stopped. And this just cemented my decision not to switch to an Android phone. I can’t have Google deciding my level of internet activity on every device I own like some troll on a bridge. Anyway, I’m back in and back to business. Day 14 of my Camp Nano Question of the Day project actually is going to come from that Myspace quiz thing that I did the other day, but I think I didn’t answer this question then because it is generally vapid and so I deleted it. But I have been thinking a lot about this question since then and it’s a lot more valid then I gave it credit for.

What’s your favorite physical feature?

When I read this question the other day, I started to answer it but ultimately thought better of it because it sounds like a ridiculous question and I had to weed a lot of the MySpace questions out for length.

Originally I answered “My nose?” because in reality, I was lucky enough in my dna chain to be born with a standard, straight, short, thin, white girl nose that the magazines have decided is “a good nose shape”. I only became aware of it because it was the one thing I was consistently complimented on. My sister was “not so lucky”, someone (our mom) would say. And it gave her a complex. And while I had “the nose”, Julie had “the hair”. That’s the thing I “wasn’t so lucky” on. Julie’s hair was thick and straight and she could put it in this amazing ponytail that I envied. My hair was very thin and started to get curly in about 2nd grade. But it only went curly (actually, frizzy) in the top back. Everything else was straight. And I would get hit with the comb for not “combing [my] hair! It looks like a rat’s nest! Aren’t you embarrassed?!” Well, I am now, mom. And I have been for 38 years or whatever the math is. So thanks?

Look, I don’t believe any of it was intentionally said to cause long lasting traumas, and I don’t even think it was said in malice, however, once I had kids of my own, I started to remember the things that I carry because of my parents (my mom). And I try to parent the way that I wanted that parent to be when I was 12. It didn’t all come at once, but it is gradually evolving and I’ll never be good at parenting, but I have to be better.

I was shaving my legs in the shower recently and I consciously recognized the memory that plays in my head everytime I shave the back of my thighs. We were at the Del Mar Fair in San Diego when I was 10 and my mom was making fun of a woman with hair on the back of her thighs. “What does she think, hair doesn’t grow back there?”. And here’s the thing, she probably will never remember that this happened. But I do. 33 years later and it’s the reason I shave the back of my thighs even though I NEVER wear anything showing my thighs. Because “cellulite is gross” and “How do you have stretch marks? you’re 16!” and once at my swimming lessons when I was 14, “That girl is going to have saddlebag thighs, look at that! Do you see how her thighs bulge out like that?”. And this haunted thoughts affect me and my fashion choices every single day. And knowing that I hear my own mom’s voice when looking at myself and others are the reasons that I, as a mom, stopped verbally talking about other people’s flaws. And my own flaws. I have boys so they likely won’t have to worry if they have hair on the backs of their thighs and stretch marks and cellulite to keep them from wearing shorts, BUT I don’t want them to hear me, the main woman in their lives, say that about myself or other women because I don’t want them to think that about any woman. Ever. I don’t want them to EXPECT that from any other woman.

And a side effect that I didn’t even see coming, is that when I stopped trying to look for flaws in other people, I started accepting my own body a bit more. I’m not 100% there yet, but when I stopped seeing people, women as the “flaw”, I started loving them and in turn, started seeing myself in them. If I could love their cellulite, then I could love my own. If I could love their curly hair, I could love my own.

The actual turning point for me from being potentially able to accept myself to being proud of myself came from my own child. My littlest one always grabs my upper arm to go to sleep. And it’s annoying and uncomfortable. One day a few years ago he said “Mom, I like your squishy arms!” and I was DEVASTATED because of the whole arm flaps that all the ladies I know worry about. “Oh my GOD! I have squishy arms and arm flaps.”

But the other night, he was falling asleep and I was telling him that eventually he has to be able to fall asleep without me because how would he ever be able to spend the night at a friend’s house or go to Outdoor Lab and he said he would build a robot mom that was exactly like me with my squishy arms “but maybe nicer” and that would help him fall asleep if I wasn’t there.

The idea that something that I have been so self-conscious about is the thing my child would purposefully build into a better version of me if he needed to has drastically changed my opinion of myself. I’m not a monster that needs to adapt to a better physical form, I’m perfect (except maybe could be a little nicer) to one of the only people’s opinions that even matter.

And this whole thing probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense but I’ve had a revelation and it feels very important.

Sorry this whole project that was supposed to be helping me with my novel has becoming an oversharing, online, unsolicited therapy session, but, here we are.

Day 11: The Hurting

Day 11 of this Camp Nano project was thisclose to being about baseball because I have A LOT to say about the importance of the meaning of baseball and because of the Angel game last night and the tribute to Tyler Skaggs being more magical than a scripted movie about the the tribute to Tyler Skaggs written by and starring Kevin Costner could possibly be, and I still have a LOT to say about it, but it felt cheap to use that as a talking point today. So I sat on it. And I did my day, which included petting puppies at a wine tasting and I thought I would just not write anything today, take a day off and try again tomorrow, and then I was scrolling tumblr and saw a post about Songs form the Big Chair, the sophomore album from Tears for Fears hitting the #1 spot for the fifth week in a row today back in 1985 and I became that meme of the dog with the birthday cake that focuses in on his eyes like he’s having an existential crisis. So we’re going to leave the baseball romantics for another day and focus in on my pain. Like birthday cake dog. Welcome.

What album defines your childhood?

source: Probably buzzfeed or a myspace quiz

Songs from the Big Chair is THAT album for me. I was 8 nearly 9 when, according to a tumblr post, this album was the #1 album in the US however many years ago today.

One night in August 1983, my parents sat at a restaurant with my sister and I while they signed divorce papers. I was 6 (or 7? but the math on this isn’t adding up and I’m tired and I hate it because I always assumed I was 7) anyway, I was tired and I didn’t know what adult things they were up to and I just wanted to go home, so I threw the only fit I remember throwing out of “teenager” age. We ended up leaving the restaurant, because of my dramatics and we all got into the same car and a few minutes later, as Metro by Berlin played on the radio, we slammed into and then went over the hood of another car in an intersection near my dad’s new apartment.

I will be 43 in a few days and while I know full well none of it has anything to do with me AND it was like a hundred years ago, I’m not lying when I tell you that I still feel somewhat responsible for the car accident, my parents’ divorce, and ultimately, the entire breakdown of my childhood.

Yeah, I know.

So what does this have to do with Tears for Fears? you ask?? NOTHING and everything. My dad was always into the newest, coolest trends, music included. And he had been playing this album called The Hurting by this new band called Tears for Fears for awhile at this point (of the car accident). And I remember learning that Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal (the Tears for Fears guys if you didn’t know) met each other at school and they both came from broken homes and supposedly a whole bunch of The Hurting album was about dealing with your parents’ divorce which became REAL relevant to my interests.

I loved listening to records with my dad. He had his finger on the pulse of music while my mom was listening to old Wings albums and Journey. Now, listen. If you know me, you know how I high I place Wings in “greatest bands of all time”, but when you’re 7, 8, or 9, 10, etc, Wings is at the bottom of the cool barrel. Journey was even lower. I also had a lot of resentment towards my mom because of the divorce but that’s a whole other book.

In Summer of 1985, Everybody Wants to Rule the World was the song we were all singing, from my best recollection. My sister and I, along with a boy named Jamie from Iowa that I had a crush on, and a few more kids I can’t even picture, were all in some kind of summer day camp babysitter situation and the only things I can remember from it are Jamie from Iowa who I was going to marry, us being teased by a bunch of boys because we (my sister and I and another girl) weren’t in training bras yet, and walking through some wooded areas looking for an abandoned house that had Farts in a Can on the shelves. Oh, and singing Everybody Wants to Rule the World as we walked around and balanced on logs like we were in a movie, and it seems like it was unsupervised. It was the 80s. My mom, who had, up until the divorce, been a mostly stay at home mom, had to get a full time job which meant we went to babysitters. I hated it and I felt anxious and socially awkward the whole time I was at someone else’s house and thank god I had my sister with me. I VOWED if I ever had kids, I would never make them go to an all day babysitter. This, by the way, was the beginning of the worst of my childhood when I was with my mom, and the best of it when I was with my dad.

My first concert ever was September 8, 1985 when Tears for Fears played Red Rocks in Golden, Colorado. My mom was livid that my dad took my sister and I to our first concert claiming that my dad didn’t even like Tears for Fears. And then to one up him, she took us to a Berlin concert with her then current boyfriend.

And when I listen to Tears for Fears, I get this sense of calm. Like a hug from my dad’s dimly lit living room that I’m going to be okay. That someone has my back. That I don’t have to protect everyone all the time.

I don’t feel that feeling very often. And I talk about it even less. But anyway, not to bring the party down…

What’s your favorite album? How did it define your childhood?

The Purge

It sounds like a horror movie and to be honest, it feels like one. Does throwing things away expunge the soul of everything holding us down? Does it release the heavy? The “sin” of sloth?

I know two types of people, those that throw everything out, including yearbooks and old math tests from 1994 senior year without ever looking back, and then there are the hoarders. Not one of them seems particularly happy and as much as we all lie to ourselves about it, everyone is either a tosser or a keeper.

I’m a keeper. Probably not in like the relationship sense if we’re basing anything on my poor, unfortunate husband’s defeated eye rolls and sighs, but a keeper in like the “keeping the napkin I was holding the time that Prince (yeah, that Prince) sat next to me at a cafe at Universal City Walk that they’ll find under a rat carcass in the hallway when I’ve been forcibly removed from my home by Human Services or a reality show” sense. My husband is the thrower-out type. I’m surprised he hasn’t tossed me. It’s because he’s a saint.

I do not want to be a hoarder. I don’t. I see Pinterest, I am aware of the “freedom from clutter”, the Scandinavian Chic, the lie that is the Shipping Crate home. It doesn’t work for me because Pinterest hasn’t told me where to put my Prince napkin and my homework from that Italian class I took in college 20 years ago. Because what if I remember how to read in Italian, Pinterest? What good would that be if I’ve thrown away all those verb conjugations? I’d be sitting on my faux fur, white rug, backdropped by my exposed brick living room wall with nothing to read.  I also have children which means that carpet wouldn’t stay white for long. In my living room, there are currently three bins overflowing with Rock Em Sock Em Robots, torn comic books, every Lego magazine that has ever been mailed to us, a broken, plastic dreidel, trains, cars, baby toys (no babies here), broken army men, a blue and white Dodgers’ wig (it’s cursed, that’s a different post), A Tim Salmon bobblehead, and a karate belt (we’re not in karate). There’s art projects and homework papers and little notes that say “i LOvE YOU mOM”. I can’t throw that away. And yet somehow I was able to condense a huge bin of every piece of schoolwork my 4th grader ever brought home into an easy to manage folder yesterday. And if I think about all his handprints and backwards letters and spelling tests that are in the trash can now, I’ll cry. So I have to pretend that they don’t exist anymore and that’s a lot of stress. How do the Pinterest people relax and just live??

Tossers?? How do you live?? Have you no souls?

On the opposite end, I’m tired of moving no less than seven shopping bags of old fabric scraps and half-finished sewing projects every time I need to use my desk and I’m pretty sure that less stuff would give the cat hair less area to cling to. Who knows though, it tumbles down the hallway regardless.

I promised the husband that I would clean out these toy bins before the kids get home from school. I have done nothing but toggle back and forth from tumblr and this post while yelling at the cat to stop scratching the couch since 8 am.

But I’m on a quest. To de-stuff my life. It won’t be Pinterest pretty (unless someone knows of a Pinterest board that can help). Just note that I have been attempting The Purge since at LEAST 2013 blogspot days which doesn’t bode too well for me.   I think what I really need is a Roomba.

How powerful is a Roomba? Like if it found a dead rat, hypothetically, could it remove it before the reality show people bring my mom into this?

The Elf on the Shelf

I’m re-gifting this post like a holiday basket of meats and crackers. Grab a beverage and enjoy this Christmas tale as old as time. Or two years. Whatever.

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Christmas time means that houses around the nation are flooded with all these naughty little elf faces doing all these naughty little elf things while reporting back to Santa on whether you washed your hands after you peed or not. The elf knows. He was watching you while he left mint poops in the toilet. And now we all know because your mom posted a picture of it on Facebook.

Now if you know anything about me, you know that setting up tableaux of espionage and wicked tomfoolery to mimic something I saw on Pinterest and then posting it on Instagram for status elevation is right up in my wheelhouse, and yet there is something about those cherry-cheeked little rats and their clandestine operations that sets my alarms to “Nope”.

When my oldest child, or Wally as I like to refer to him on the web because it subconsciously plants the “Amy’s like Donna Reed and totally has her life together!” seed in all your minds, well when Wally was around 2 years old, everyone kept asking me when I was going to hop on the Elf Express and invite one of these smiley spies into my home for the month of December. Intrigued, I did the natural thing and hit up my local Pinterest to check what these little rascals were about. Oh my eyes how they twinkled at all the glittery laughs and innocent fun!

“I’ll do it!”, I exclaimed to no one with a wink and one of those jaunty cross-body punches the kids do.

All that drunken Pinterest spirit fizzled, though when I saw that the toy store was selling those things for like $40 a pop. Forty dollars. For a stuffed elf. Plus those elves are kind of creepy looking, anyway. I don’t need that thing going all Chucky on me and slicing my Achilles tendon as I step out of bed one morning. It is not worth $40 to invite a demon into my home when I’m fairly certain I can do that for free with some red paint and carefully placed candles. Plus I don’t think that real demons can even hold knives so, cheaper AND safer.

Needless to say, the elf remained on the store shelf and I lived vicariously through my Facebook friends and their ever-increasing elf scenery that showed up on my tiny iPhone screen.

Still, the need to over-do everything nags at me to this very day and every year I wonder if I should either break down and buy an elf, pose some dinosaurs in festive ways, or just give in full stop and dress as the elf myself. The only problem with this plan is that I would have no photography assistance. My husband not only can’t manage to take a clear photo, but he also stays far away from my grand schemes and nonsense, so he’s out. Then there’s Wally who only takes selfies or really close up, arty shots of action figures doing strange things.

 

Source: my son

 

Source: my son

That just leaves The Beav and he’s 6. He’ll just take my phone, walk away and start playing Bubble Witch with it.

Also, the manipulation of this elf stunt is a whole different matter in that Wally, while incredibly imaginative, is also very scientifically biased; if he can’t see, touch, hear, or smell it, it doesn’t exist. For example, Wally informs me one Easter that “haha, the kids at school think the Easter Bunny is real, Mom! When it’s clearly just a man in a suit that comes into our house. Hahah fools,” and two years after that it was “Fairies don’t exist! Mom, please. It’s a man in a pink dress that comes in my room in the middle of the night and takes my tooth and leaves me money. Hahahah tooth fairies. Please.”. Because apparently a man in various costumes breaking into the house in the middle of the night, isn’t the weird part. I wonder if he thinks they’re all the same guy. So no matter how elaborate my lies about the elf menagerie become, he’s still going to know they’re not really spying on him and his brother and reporting back to Santa, and I don’t really need my kid being THAT kid that spoils it for the rest of the Christmas celebrating believers at the elementary school.

He would appreciate a James Bond themed elf set-up…. hmm…still no.

The more I think about these elves, the more I feel like sad, lonely business man, Michael Douglas who has just signed his life away by cashing in a gift certificate that my drifter brother, played by Sean Penn, gave me for a birthday gift, but I don’t know that anything is weird, yet, until the creepy clown, (elf), that I almost run over in my fancy, rich people driveway, (toy store), and decide to bring into the living room with me for some reason, (Pinterest and Facebook likes), starts to talk through the tv and vandalize my house while Jefferson Airplane blasts in the background as depicted in David Fincher’s 1997 film, The Game, that nobody wants to talk about with me anymore because, “Amy, that movie is like 20 years old. We’ve seen it. It’s good, but let it go!”. I hate everyone that I know.

Quite obviously, my desire to The Game everything is still in tact and I’m creeped out by inanimate things smiling at me. Put your smug face away, Elf, and tell me what you think you know. And don’t kill me please. Or tattle on me to Santa. Just, you know what? I’m just going to watch you ratting out all the other families this year on Facebook from the comfy position of not wearing pants and slouching on my couch.

 

Happy Holidays!