CurrentMom

Saying Goodbye

Truth Thursday

24 trees.  I just counted 24 beautiful maple saplings adorning the street I used to travel down with my youngest son on our morning walks to school.  Two years ago, when they were first planted, and he was in his final year of elementary school, there were 27. 

Where did those three missing trees go?  Did they not survive? Were they uprooted? Or perhaps they are a symbol of my three children, whose lives are starting to scatter, and who are uprooting me in all sorts of ways.

With this post, I am saying goodbye to my regular weekly blog at Current Mom. I will no longer be walking around with one ear tilted towards conversations, one eye roving and finding things that inspire.  “Oh!” I would often think.  “That’s the blog this week!” Or, in the middle of a conversation I would suddenly blurt out, “I feel a blog coming on!” 

Whether it was about my three sweet children, or about my life as a mom who works out of the home (as a consultant when I first started blogging but now with a mind-boggling full-time job and a position of semi-senior leadership in an organization I both adore and which drives me batty,) as a wife, a sister, a daughter, a daughter-in-law, a friend, a member of a civic community, a spiritual community, a soccer/basketball/baseball/field hockey rooter, a chauffeur, a commuter, a citizen of the neighborhood, community and world – I have been seeking the very personal and particular and trying to make connections to the universal for four years.

Unmentionables

Truth Thursday (published a day early)

I just finished an early Saturday morning drive to my daughter’s field hockey practice – called for 7:00 am, which meant leaving the house at 6:45 with a teen who has been getting up at 5:45 all week for the first week of high school. You can imagine how happy she was.

But despite the enlightened advocacy in our community around later school day starts, I was, frankly, less concerned about her early start than my having to drive that early in the midst of the dizzy spell I had woken with.

I’ve had these spells for a while.  At first, I thought they were symptomatic of something dreadful, perhaps fatal (I’m from the headache-to-brain tumor in 60 seconds camp, after all.)  But as they continued to come with some regularity, and nothing else ever seemed wrong, I have added them to the growing list of hormonal tics my body is facing as I face down … peri-menopause. 

The Blessing of a Carpool

Truth Thursday

I remember the very first carpool I was in. My oldest son, two years old, was entering half-day pre-school.  We were very pleased with our choice of pre-school, but we were stumped as to how we were going to get him there and back. Our wonderful nanny at the time did not yet have her driver’s license, and we both worked full-time in the opposite direction. 

Somehow we learned about people in our neighborhood whose children were also attending this pre-school, and we figured out a carpool. I remember crying as I was trying to sketch out how this was all going to work – it just felt overwhelming and new and undoable.

Of course, it eventually all worked out, and except for one day when one of the fathers in the carpool forgot to pick the kids up (yes, I still remember that) it all ran pretty smoothly for the year. After that year, things start to blur a bit as to how we got our son to pre-school, but I think our nanny finally learned how to drive, and eventually, when my younger kids were going, I was also working at home as a consultant and could drive them as well. 

So that oldest son is now at college and no longer in need of a carpool. In fact, I haven’t driven him anywhere for years. He was never involved in team sports, and so the clubs and activities he chose were all at school and accessible. And because he is so independent, he chose to find his own way all these years – via metro, bus, car and foot.

But, as they so often do in parenthood, the tides are once again changing, and I am about to enter my next phase of parenting. Call it the Sports Carpool phase. And I am already starting to feel those tears of overwhelmed-ness well up again. 

Departure

Truth Thursday

It was about 8:00 in the evening, and my contractions had really started to holler. My husband and I got in the car and he drove me through the park to the hospital, with the windows open. I remember screaming into the soft, summer trees as we drove past, the pain was so extraordinary. 

At 6:44 the next morning, after a night of contractions and challenges, our son was born by c-section. Because his heart rate had dropped during my labor, he was whisked away to the NICU before I could hold him. My mother arrived while I was still in recovery and came barreling into the room and held me tight. All I wanted to know was that my baby was ok (he was) and that we would be reunited soon (we were.) He went home on the hottest day of the year half swaddled in the bunting she had lovingly chosen for him.

He was a challenging baby.  Didn’t nurse easily, didn’t reach any of his milestones on time. We worried a lot. But eventually, he reached them all. Including the doozy of all milestones - his departure for college.

We just dropped that baby off at his freshman college dorm.

It really does go by in the blink of an eye. I can remember – viscerally – the torture of being up with my newborn every night for two months, as he found the hours of 1:00 – 5:00 am to be the best for playtime. Sitting on our porch swing, waiting for the newspaper to be delivered. He would finally go back to sleep for a couple of hours and I would doze until he woke.  The memory of the physical pain from getting through those two months with no sleep and taking care of a newborn will never leave me.

I ran into the wonderful director of his wonderful pre-school the day before we hit the road for college. It was an omen of grace and goodness, as I would have kept all three of my kids in her charge for their entire school careers if I could. She wished me luck, and we reminisced about how she used to go into the classrooms with a Polaroid camera on the first day of school to bring a snapshot to the parents who were waiting upstairs in the “Tea and Sympathy” room.  She told me she never took a picture of a child crying. My child was merely curled up in a fetal position in the corner. We still have that picture.

Nobody's Perfect ... But This Is Ridiculous

Truth Thursday

I made not one, not two, not three but four doozy mistakes this week – at both work and home. I am self flagellating. I am eating crow with those affected. Although some of my errors have worked themselves out, I am still fairly miserable about others.

That’s a lot of distress to manage in a very short period of time.

In my worst moments, I am also thinking like a giant child. I can walk off the job. I can run away from home. Who hasn’t had those liberating thoughts when faced with an unpleasant mess to clean up?

I don’t have excuses. I take responsibility for what I’ve done. None of them were hanging offenses … at least I don’t think so. But I am sobered by the fact that even after all these years, I am not perfect – either at my job, or in my personal life.

I’m still more sobered by the fact that I have a friend who, earlier this spring, lost her job, quite unceremoniously, after a mistake that I also would characterize as not being a hanging offense. And yet others disagreed, and overnight she was out of work. 

She also self flagellated, but it didn’t matter. She still had to recalibrate her entire life. So I am aware that it’s not always up to me to determine what is bad and what is really bad.