Mundane Monday

When Sophie was an itty bitty and Katie was a twinkle in my eye, we all took a trip to visit friends who had two children.  Their kids were potty trained, going to school kinda kids.

 I love staying at a friend's home, because you spend some good meaty time together.  You are like roommates on good behavior for a few days, negotiating eating, cooking and bathrooms.  I enjoy being a guest (and having them in my home) because I snag a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a family. I can see what they have in their fridge, how they discipline (or don't) and a new aspect that I discovered on that visit - how laundry was handled.

At some point I had to put some clothes in the drier that got wet from the pool.  Simple enough.  I entered the laundry area, and I was floored by the huge, overflowing piles of clothes that spilled everywhere, from the tops of the washing machines, to the floor and out of various hampers.  Surveying the area it wasn't clear what was clean, dirty or a sedimentary layer from the Paleozoic area.  I tossed my damp clothes into the drier and stole one more look at the mayhem. I stood in the hallway viewing the carnage, mentally wagging the finger of  judgement at my friend's laundry room.

I talked about this wreck of a laundry room for weeks after the visit.  I made sweeping pronouncements to my husband that we would never, ever let our laundry situation get that far our of hand.  "I mean, we have a washer and dryer right in the house!  It couldn't be more accessible than that!  Walk three feet, toss some soap and clothes in - boom - we're done!" 

It is easy to be judgemental.   I did it more when the girls were little and I was unsure of my own strength.  I hadn't built up the self-confident parenting muscles that I have today.  I still judge though - it is a bad habit and I am cutting down.   Really.

But back then,  I was so clueless.  I had no idea the shit storm of dirty clothes that would follow with two kids.  At the time of laundry judgement Sophie was a baby.  There were barely three of us in the house. We hardly made a mess.

Cut to -  my day today and the large slice of humble pie I ate and the hulking giant of laundry that needed to be slayed.   I spent three hours this afternoon sorting, folding and washing clothes.   A small dent was made before I had to stop and pick up the girls at school.  I just came back from round two.  One more hour and I have destroyed the laundry beast.  At least this time I had a glass of wine to drink to ease the pain of the calluses that formed on my fingers from all of the folding.

 Now we have the problem that since every single piece of clothing in the house is clean - we don't have enough drawer space to fit it all.

So to my friends whose laundry room I judged - I am sorry. If you guess it is your home that I am writing about - I owe you a few rounds of drinks - and the free reign make fun of me the entire time.

As the days go by

A good friend called me this morning.  We have known each other since we were single and untethered  and luckily we embarked on this parenting journey at the same time.  We live a parallel existence, miles apart.   We talk often - we are a life raft for one another in this often overwhelming storm of mothering. 
"Give me some inspiration Stephanie!" she said.    I laughed.  I snorted.  I picked up the 409 and got to cleaning the crumbs and smears of peanut butter on my kitchen counters.  I usually clean while we talk, because I hate the drudgery of cleaning.  I talk on the phone while I clean so I can be distracted by the soul-suck of daily housework .

"Give me inspiration - Wow!"  I said, "Right now, I don't think I have any.  I am knee deep in just regular living.  We have yard work to do.  Laundry to fold.  Kid birthday parties to attend.  Everything is so...regular.  Normal.   I am not inspiring.  Not right now." 

It got me thinking about that great Talking Heads song, Once in a lifetime, that I have found myself often singing since I became a mother.  When the girls were barely two and a newborn, and I was in the endless custodial world of diapers and onsies and healing from birth I would find myself bleary eyed staggering through the house singing , "This is not my beautiful house!  This is not my beautiful wife?!"  The song got me through some low times.  I find myself turning to it again, but a new line keeps playing on repeat in my head, "You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?"

When did this normal existence happen?  How did I get here?

 As much as I fool myself into thinking that I am still this subversive, city dwelling twenty something, I am most certainly not.   I am a married woman with two children.  My husband and I have been together for 15 years.  We have a mortgage.  I drive a Subaru station wagon.  I belong to the frickin' PTA!  I cannot get more regular and normal than that.

 It is a mind-trick, this normal adult existence.  I carry around with the me the dorky, awkward eighth grader that I was and other times I am the girl in her 20's who rents an apartment and waitresses and I have all the time in the world to figure out who I want to be when I grow up.  Maybe I am starting to experience that time quickening phenomenon.  The cliche is true -  life speeds up.   And since forty is a reality, I know that sooner than I realize, fifty will be here.  And that is a whole other world of adulthood - there is no denying your age at that point.   I still have a threadbare safety net of youth left.  My kids are in elementary school, I can pass for thirty-nine.  But not for much longer. 

My questioning should not be confused with being unappreciative.  I am deeply grateful for our health and home and the butterflies and the financial fact that we can afford to buy organic foods and shoes when we need.  I love that the girls and I ride our bikes in the morning to school.  I love the ritual of afterschool snacks and dinners together.  And even though I could do without the housework, I love our home that Cliff and I and the girls are creating together. I have no desire to pack us all up and live off the grid in Canada.  I am happy with where I am. 

 I am simply dumbstruck with the feeling that this normal life seems to have snuck up on me.

Yes!

Last week the girls and I took our annual tri-state area spring break road trip. For the past three years, I pack up the car and visit my parents in Connecticut and then fan out to various friends in the New York tri-state area.  I have close, generous friends who open up their homes to the three ring circus of the Lazenby girls. I try to be a good house guest, bringing food and wine and my own bedding. I love this trip and I want to be asked back by my friends.

 Part of my purpose of the trip - besides trying to fill a week off from school - is to expose my girls to my homeland and the people that I come from.   This corner of the Northeast is not multi-cultural  - it is very white.   I feel that it is important for the girls to get into a city and hear some noise, see people in different colors and hear forgein languages being spoken. It is a good lesson for myself too, in how to handle questions on the subway asked in a loud kid voice of - "Mommy, everyone in here has darker skin than us - do you see?" I see.  And it is true. 

 I started this trip years ago because I needed to prove to myself that I could still get a glimmer of that person I was before I had children.  I did it to prove to myself that I could be independent. Even though I was with them every moment of the day, taking a trip like this was the great duality - I was in a place where I remembered the free, childless person I was, yet, I was very responsible for these little people that were my children. 

It takes balls and planning and patience to road trip for a week with young children. Most day I have two out of the three.  We don't have video screens in the car, so we do it without movies or downloaded television shows.  The girls pack books and pencils and notebooks and with the advent of Pandora we can sing Katy Perry and Madonna for miles and miles.  I may love my dirty rock & roll, but having this girls has allowed me to indulge in my love of sugar pop music. 

This trip is important because it gives me a break from being a daily task master.  A barking sargent, hoisting them (and myself) out of bed and getting ready for school.  I feel as though I say "No" too much as a mother.  No to junky snacks, no to play dates because it is a school night, no to television.  As a mother, I am constantly monitoring, the girls and myself.  I am monitoring their manners, how much organic fruit they eat, how much sleep they get.   On these trips it is good reminder to myself that saying "YES!"  is fun for the girls - and myself.  

 Sophie shared with me her journal that she kept for our road trip.  Do you know the moments that stuck out to her for our week away?  The fact that at the aquarium she and Katie got Doritos and popcorn from the vending machine!  She thought staying up late with me and our friends to watch American Idol was "so cool!"  That although he was "wicked bummed" that she had hiccups at the Museum of Natural History it was "way awesome" that they got ice cream with sprinkles from a street vendor and they could sit on a bench and watch the people go by. 

"Yes" is a great word.  This trip really was a great reminder to use it more often in my daily life as a mother.

Oven Lovin'

For the past few years I have been cooking with an oven that works intermittently at best. My range has only two working burners. It started three Christmases ago, while I was roasting some sort of huge hunk of meat, and my oven began beeping with an ominous repeating display of F-5.

What F-5 meant was my oven just stopped working and I had eight people at my house to feed and the roast beast was medium raw at best.

Over the years I have learned how to adapt to my stove's incompetence. I know that once I turn my oven on, I may have to keep it on for hours at a time, because once I turn it off, it is done for the rest of the day. I have kept my oven on for eight hours at a stretch. I have been cooking on a daily basis, for my growing and always hungry family of four with only two burners. It has been a frustrating experience, because I really do enjoy cooking and feeding my family and friends. Some people out there that hate cooking. I am not one of them. (My hatred for CLEANING however will be another post!)

When owning a home, there is a never ending list of working parts to purchase and maintain just to keep the house treading water - such as a furnace (a luxury in New England) and washing machine. Unfortunately, the stove worked it's way down the list. We knew we needed a new one, but I kept muddling through, crossing my fingers while cooking our traditional Thanksgiving lasagna that F-5 didn't appear and shut the entire operation down.

Until the last six months. That frickin oven has taken a nose dive. The remaining two burners began to do what I called, "The Big Finish". I would turn the burner off, there would be a pause, and then, there would be a final poof! of blue gas flames. Safe. Very safe. And then the oven. I could not use it if I had the burners on - it was one or the other. And then when it was on, it would be inconsistent at best. Sometimes it stayed on long enough to roast a full chicken dinner. And then sometimes it would stop after 15 minutes, leaving me to slow roast brownies for hours using only the residual heat to complete the task.

I could not take it any longer. I meet Cliff at the door one Friday night like a crazy lady, screeching to the tune of "we're not going to eat dinner until 11o'clock tonight and if we don't get a frickin oven pronto! We're going to be eating take-out until it happens!"

And now, after much research and haggling on my part with salespeople (I love the haggle!) we just had a gorgeous, shiny, black stove delivered first thing Thursday morning.

I have to admit, it is taking some getting used to. The power and precision of the four burners. The oven turns on and off. And on again! I find myself a little clumsy when cooking. My rythym is off. It is like having a new lover. We need to get used to each other. It keeps catching me in the corner of my eye. I giggle when I walk by - I have even caught myself saying, "Oh, hi. Well, lookit you here. All new and wanting to be touched. I'll be right over." Excuse me for a moment. I have some cooking to do.

Because I'm worth it

I began playing with my hair color at thirteen by dousing it with Sun-In, hoping to get those blond highlights so coveted by most American white girls. By high school I was making the cool girl pilgrimage to Astor Street haircuts in The Village in New York City, trying out oh so 80’s asymmetrical cuts and painting my hair with uneven blond peroxide chunks.

My best friend is a hair stylist and when I first meet her in 1991, she often needed a hair model. That means whatever technique she was learning at the time, she had to try it out on a real person, not just a mannequin head. In turn that model received a free cut or color. Since I had little money, and she was -and still is - fantastic company, I would ride my bike up to where she worked at Vidal Sassoon’s on 5th Ave and 59th street. I found it very NYC exciting, locking my bike across the street from the Plaza Hotel and walking into a busy, uptown salon dressed in my grunge uniform of baby doll dress and bike shorts and Doc Martins. An assistant would bring me a coke to drink and my girlfriend and I would laugh and cackle as she worked on my hair. My hair was very short for a few years, and a range of colors.

My hair has grown longer since then, but I have remained a (drum roll for pun) die hard hair colorist - red being my preferred shade. I have been happily coloring my hair for twenty years. It is a fun part of dressing up and being a girl, in the same way that I wear lipstick and jewelry every day. But one new color has crept in that I want no part of – grey. I am late in the game of getting those first grays. Only because of genetics have I been able to put off the inevitable this long. But, they have started to creep in, through the swirl of my cowlicks at my temples, sticking up at the top of my head, like a grey middle finger.

My body is playing a new trick on me, this aging thing. This in your face grey hair thing. I don’t like it. Not one stinking bit.

I have been through the major body re-shifting after having two kids. I’ve experienced massive weight gain and weight loss and the various flabby body parts that I have tried to tone and keigel over the past few years. I’ve come to a place of acceptance and pride at the magic that my body has performed. I try to be aware of being positive in how I talk about my body, especially having daughters. They will never hear me call myself that awful, ugly word – fat.

I am at peace with these changes that having a baby has done to my body. I am not surprised at most aspects of getting older. Body signs like the classic small crinkles around the eyes. I learned from reading newsstand tabloids that as Demi Moore ages, her knees sagged (she had a lifting procedure to correct this abnormality) so I was prepared for this knee, skin drooping thing to happen. And of course, I know that humans get grey hair as they age, so it is no great surprise that I too will join the ranks and have graying hair.

However, I find grey hair to be the most unsettling part of this growing up process. I think that I can gracefully handle when the sweet crinkles become lines – I don’t see spending money on Botox or silicone fillers. But I will be very happy to color my hair for as long as I can. I have yet to be an all-over, shimmering, golden blond.

Balance Shmalance part deux

Or maybe the title could be, "This is why all of those celebrity, and fashion magazines can go suck it for perpetuating the myth that you can have it all."

I know that Gwyneth bashing can seem as if I have sour mommy grapes. We are not supposed to want to spew venom at blond, pretty, Hollywood royalty. She likes to tell us how busy she is ,just like us, feeding her children dinner and baking cupcakes for school, and fitting in a girls night out. However, her day is also spent dashing out the door to her clothes fitting with private stylists and having a car service. I just find GOOP and Gwyneth and everything about their lifestyle to be condescending.

These are some wealthy, privileged women who are giving tips and quirky slice-of-life moments that are meant to seem as if they live these lives just like the rest of us. They write about their hectic days filled with meetings with Adidas and Bono and they still manage to eat a full rounded breakfast. Trainers and acupuncture at your home saves time! Weekly hair blow outs are a lifesaver!

Maybe if these celebri-mommies would just admit - "Yes I have mountains of money and access to car services, nannies and house cleaners. I am nothing like the legions of you who read about my life. You, lowly people out there clean your own toilets. Boy, I am sure lucky I don't have too! Well, gotta go, busy, busy, time to eat out again!"

At least Stella McCartney admitted that she has a nanny.

Nice and Easy

I am a child of the 70’s. I am drawn to all things having to do with The Love Boat, Seals and Croft style soft rock am radio, and Free to Be You and Me. I love it for the nostalgia of my childhood, proud that I experienced a time when my friends and I rode in the way back with the window open of my dad’s faux wood paneled station wagon. We barreled down the highway, not strapped into anything, face whipped by the wind, mouths stained red from guzzling Hawaiian Punch, and my parents smoking cigarettes in the front seats. There was no doubt in our minds that what we were doing was so perfectly right.

Today, I strap my girls in tight with their seat belts, and they automatically snap on their bike helmets and I carefully monitor what they watch on the television, and I wouldn’t dream of doing it any other way. However, I experience a strange satisfaction knowing I survived without bike helmets, car seats and heavy doses of Fantasy Island.

I can get lost for hours looking at pictures from that time, caught in a swirl of shiny jumpsuits exiting studio 54, the rock and roll denim, and of course, the large amounts of hair. Whether it was Farrah Fawsett’s golden mane or Grizzly Adams, there were grand, copious amounts of hair. Jennifer Aniston may have had an iconic haircut with The Rachel in the ‘90’s but it does not nearly have the same impact as the gorgeous pride of Angela Davis’ afro. People just seemed hairier in the 1970’s. It was a time when long hair represented power, rebellion and the waxing industry was a far off, distant dream.