"What Would Happen If..." v. 100%

I have two kids in high school. The Boy is a freshman and Claire-Adele is a senior, and both are such different people it is surprising they are from the same planet, let alone the same parents.

Claire-Adele is a great student. She is curious in the sense that she likes different subjects. This year, she is taking Psychology, Stats, U.S. Government, and Comparative Goverment. She is organized and motivated, almost to a fault, more concerned about her grades than she should be. She comes home from school and announces how well she has done on a bunch of tests. One hundred percent on this, one hundred percent on that. As a parent, I claim no credit or responsibility for having a child like this.

The Boy has the exact opposite personality and I wonder how he will survive high school. Not that he isn't motivated or curious, but just in a way that doesn't always match the expectations of conventional learning. Give him a robot or a rocket to build and he is off to the races. He will play and explore and test and try, for hours, for weeks, for months. For three years in middle school, he was in Rocket Club where he and his teammates spent month exploring what will happen if we change the fins of the rocket? Try a smaller motor? A large motor? Add more ballast? The Boy was always the last to leave the launch. His unflappable math teacher turned rocket coach would put up with the Boy's unpredictable moods and uneven temperament because Mr. G knew Boy cared more about rockets than any other kid out there.

I wish school were more like this for the Boy. I wish it were a giant lab that celebrates discovery where he could spend all day answering "What would happen if?"

Budget versus "Fend for Yourself"

This summer, we got the kids debit cards so they could buy lunch during the school day. This is different from buying a school lunch, as the kids usually grab a bite at Whole Foods, Starbucks, or a local burger joint within blocks of RHS. For the previous three years, Claire Adele would pack a lunch or scrap together a few bucks for a bagel at Whole Foods. Now that I am working--or so I tell myself--I don't have as much time to shop for food. Since there is generally less food in the house, I don't want the kids to starve during the day because I didn't feel like running to QFC the night before.

Last night, Jack and I went to dinner with some of his colleagues, and the kids were left to fend for themselves for dinner. The Boy went to Kidd Valley and got a burger. I am not sure what Claire-Adele did, but I am sure she ate.

After dinner, I checked the kids' bank accounts. I usually keep no more than $50 in each account. Both kids had less than $10, so I transfer money so they could buy lunch the next day. I noticed Claire-Adele made an online purchase.

"She bought a Camp Orkila shirt," the Boy said. He was aware that she made an online purchase. Last week, the Boy bought a new and much-needed sweatshirt with our permission.

"The kids need to learn to budget," Jack said. "We can't just keep handing them money." He paused, "But they do need to eat lunch and dinner."

I was thinking about this. I'd love for my kids to learn to budget, but right now I need them to learn to fend for themselves because I don't have time to take care of all of the little crap that I used to take care of, like making dinner on a regular basis. I am glad Claire-Adele bought her own t-shirt and I wasn't involved.

While I am not expecting masterful budgeting from the kids, I do expect them to be responsible. The minute I see upgrade charges for games for their phone on the debit card is the minute the card is canceled. But food and clothes? I am fine with funding them to fend for themselves.

Embracing Kumquat-itude

Claire-Adele is a senior and applying to college.

I can't wait for this whole thing to be over.

She is so stressed out and worried about it in a way that I never was and therefore cannot relate. I think I'll be the only parent who will be happy the fall they send their kid off to college. I won't be happy because I'll be kicking my daughter out of the house, but because it means the entire college admissions, rejection and acceptance process will finally be over.

This morning while I was making biscuits for breakfast, Claire-Adele came downstairs. She told me one of her college applications asks a few simple questions:

What books have you read in the past year for class that you have liked?
What books have you read for fun that you liked?
What media or publications do you read?

Those seem like a good way to quickly learn about a potential student. This college might think you are what you read. Are you curious? Serious? Funny?

Claire-Adele is a news junkie and followed last year's presidential election closely. While she was at camp for a month in the summer of 2016, I was expected to print out and mail articles about the election to her from a variety of news sources. "For the media, I am going to put down the New York Times and Cosmopolitan."

"That's fine, but what about the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal?"

"I don't want to list those. I don't agree with them all of the time," she said.

"You don't have to agree with what you read. In fact, it is good to read things you disagree with, that challenge your assumptions."

"Nah," she said.

"What about the books?"

"I am going to out down Hillary's new book," she said.

"Great," I said. "What else?"

"I can't think of anything," she said.

"You spend hours reading," I said. "Just put down what you read, even if it is Harry Potter for the fifteenth time or Susan Mallory* or whatever."

"I don't know. I did read Nicholas Sparks," she said. "But I can't put that down."

"But you have read other stuff. You read all of the time," I said. She drifted off to something else, and that was the end of the conversation. We've had other conversations of a similar ilk. In this college admissions process, it seems Claire-Adele's goal is to make herself as vanilla and boring as possible. She wants to leave her favorite activity, Sports Boosters--the art club that makes all of the spirit signs around the school--off her applications.

"Why?" I asked.

"It is too hard to explain what the club does, and it isn't that interesting," she said.

"But it is you," I said. She didn't reply.

Later this morning, Carla asked me how the college admissions process was going, and I told her about my conversations with Claire-Adele.

"The college admissions committees are making a fruit salad when they pick their incoming classes," I said. "They get tons of apples, but they need strawberries, raspberries, bananas, and oranges. Claire-Adele is a little odd, but in a good way. She isn't an apple. She's a kumquat, and I wish she would embrace her kumquat-ness, but no. She wants to be an apple."

Carla nodded and listened. One of her kids is a papaya, so she knew where I was coming from. I suppose it is hard for kids who are different to embrace that, even if it is what makes them special.

* Claire-Adele wrote some short fiction romances for a class once, and they were great. Susan Mallory writes romances and has published 25 million copies or some crazy number of her books. I think Claire-Adele should get in the romance writing business. But no, she doesn't want my opinion.

What Do I Do All Day? and Venn Diagrams

I've been in my new job long enough that I've gotten paid three times (yay!) but I still haven't figured out how to explain to people what I do. A few nights ago at dinner, the Boy, Claire-Adele and Jack all talked about their days. I talked about what I ate for lunch. I ran into my neighbors while walking Fox who were just thrilled to hear about my new job, and I surely disappointed them when they asked what I do and I said "Uh..." After I a minute, I thought of how I deal with data like it is a jigsaw puzzle, but telling a story of how to solve a jigsaw puzzle would be infinitely boring. "First I did the yellow pieces, then I did the edges, and finally I did the sky. I was almost done and then I found a piece under the coffee table..."

I told my friend Carla about my situtation. She is an accountant, which in spirit isn't much different than what I do, except almost everybody knows about money. Not nearly as many people know about data.

As I was walking to the Macrina Bakery for lunch the other day (see? I'm doing it - talking about lunch instead of what I actually do), I saw an ad for the new Blade Runner movie, which made me think about venn diagrams, because in the past two weeks I've drawn a lot of venn diagrams.

While this has nothing to do with what I do at work, it has everything to do with what I do.

Should I have made the "Ryan Gosling" circles one circle or two? Hmm. This type of question is what I ask myself at work.

Back to Work and Life At Home; Or 400 Socks

I started a new job just over a month ago. I've gotten paid twice! Yay! Two weeks into my job, my manager checked in and asked how I was doing.

"Home is harder than work," I said. "Not in a bad way!" I quickly clarified, but he got the point. I went for coffee this morning with Ellen. She went back to work five years after her kids were born. I said work seemed reasonably easy compared to being at home. She laughed. 

"It is complete bullshit when people say you are lucky to stay at home with kids!" I said. "I get to dress up and go out to lunch and people are generally respectful and kind."

Ellen laughed again. "Work is the best!"

I know the honeymoon will come to an end at some point, but for now I am content with my delusions.

One major discovery I made about my home life since I've started working is that no one in my family besides me puts the clean laundry away. Jack will fold it, and put it on the bed. When it is time for bed, the laundry then goes back in the basket. Like a sand castle on the beach erased by the tide, folded laundry in the basket resorts back to its original unfolded state. Since I've started working, we have accumulated 400 single socks in the laundry basket at the foot of the bed. I say 400 for exaggeration purposes, but seriously, if we have four people in the family there were maybe twenty pairs of socks per person in that basket which means there were realistically (4x20x2) 160 single socks in that basket. How do we have that many socks? The favorite socks were picked off the top of the pile, while the less loved socks gravitated towards the bottom of the clean laundry basket, like unpopped popcorn kernels in the bowl.

Jack can load it into the washing machine, but just today I realized he was never fully trained on how to operate our new machines we purchased three months ago when our other washing machine died. 

"How do I set this again?" he asked. Oh my fucking god, I thought. This dude manages ECMO machines that bypass the heart so kids can have circulating blood and he can't use something as simple as a washing machine? I immediately assume this is some form of passive aggressive behavior, where he believes if he acts as if he can't do this simple task, someone else (meaning me) will do it for him. He did manage to take the clothes out of the washing machine and place them in the dryer. And he did fix the violent rattling that sounds like machine gun fire when the washing machine starts on the spin cycle. He took an old Kleenex box out of the recycling, folded it up a bunch, and stuck it between our stacked washer and dryer. The rattling stopped.

We just bought the washer and dryer set this spring so it probably still under warranty. "We could call Sears and have them fix it," I said. 

"One of us would have to stay home from work while we waited for four hours for them to show up," he said. Fair enough. The Kleenex box works.

While we were both standing at the washer, we carried the clean laundry from the dryer to the laundry basket, where there sat the 400 socks. The laundry beast in the basket had overflowed onto the floor. It could not be ignored. 

"I'll put the sheets on the bed," Jack announced. Jack always announces when he is about to do a chore. Like a child in December waiting for Santa Claus, he wants to make sure his good deeds are noted. 

Like the elves battling the Orcs, you can't stop after you knock down a few of them. We had to empty the entire basket. You would have thought it would have taken hours to sort and put away the 400 socks, but it really only took about fifteen minutes, maybe less. But they are now put away, until the beast comes back.

All About the Bass, or How the Boy Broke my Car

Over Labor Day, the Boy went to Bumbershoot, a three-day live music event at the Seattle Center. There, he learned what a bass drop is. I am not sure I can explain it, but it is when the music revs up to a point and then a large bass beat "drops." He said he could feel the bass in his whole body.

"You can't get that from listening to music with headphones," he said.

"I hope not. You would blow your eardrums out before the rest of your body would feel it," I said.

The next week, we had an hour-long ride home from his soccer game. Jack was working, so it was just the Boy and me in the car. We drove my car, which is a 2003 Lexus ES, which has what I thought was a decent stereo system. They Boy was tired and a little cranky, so on the ride home we listened to music instead of talked. When he mellowed out, we started to chat.

"Can I adjust this?" he said as he started pushing buttons on the stereo systems touch screen. He found the tuning section and cranked up the bass.

Before I get too far, let me say the target market for the type of car I drive is a sixty year old woman. We bought the car used with 45,000 miles on it in 2006. It was in perfect condition except for a ton of scratches under the driver's side door handle. I figure the previous owner's jewelry scraped the paint as she got in her car.

The Boy cranked up the volume, and we could feel the bass as we were driving 65 mph south on I-5. It was a warm sunny day, and the windows were down and the sun roof was open. It was great.

After about twenty minutes, we heard a rattle. Every time the bass hit, the something in the car would shake. After we stopped for lunch, the Boy climbed into the backseat while I ran the stereo.

"The upper brake light vibrates against the window every time a bass note hits," he said. "At least the noise is in sync with the music."

As we were driving up our street, "Lonely Boy" by the Black Keys came on the radio. We parked the car, rolled up the windows blasted the radio in a car with a stereo that was designed for listening to NPR or bands like Air Supply. The rear window rattled and the rest of the car rocked.

The next day, I drove home from the grocery store. The kids were doing homework so I sat in the car. I plugged in my phone to the stereo, and cranked The White Stripes "Seven Nation Army." It wasn't the same as a rock concert, but it wasn't bad for a Monday after grocery shopping.

Sleep, or Lack Thereof

The male creatures in my family are conspiring against me. They don't want me to sleep.


I. The Boy

The Boy doesn't turn his devices off until 9:30 or 10:00, after much pleading. After his device is locked and charged, he becomes very chatty at the exact moment I want to collapse from exhaustion. Sometimes he chats about the mundane.

"Mom," says the Boy, "Look how many times I can flip my toothbrush on my finger."

Go the fuck to sleep, I think.

Other times he want to talk about things far from mundane, like his future life plans.

"Mom," says the Boy, "I've been thinking that M.E. is going to be the right choice for me. I like building things and understanding how they are made. I think mechanical engineering is going to be a good fit for me."

Lovely, I think, but could we have had this same conversation when the sun was up?

Other times, the conversation are profound.

"Mom," says the Boy, "I just feel better after a long run. I love getting up in the morning and starting my day running cross country with the boys."

For this, I stay up and listen, and force my eyelids open as he tells me how running is transformative for him. Why does he wait until I am so tired to talk to me? Does he know that he will have an open mike, that I am too tired to respond? That I will expect him to keep it short, thereby putting no pressure on him? Perhaps.

II. Jack

Jack has been on call at the trauma center this weekend. The new residents communicate by text instead of phone calls in the middle of the night. You think this might be an improvement, but it's not.

Before:
Pager screeches at 4:00 a.m.
Jack turns pager off and goes to other room to talk.
I fall back asleep or don't hear pager screeching in the first place.

Now:
Cell phone "pings" at 4:00 a.m.

A light flashes from the phone.

tap, tap, tap, goes the text reply

Swoosh.

pause for twelve seconds

ping
flash of light
tap tap tap tap
swoosh
pause pause pause
ping flash
taptaptapswoosh

Ping...

I am wide awake after the eighth ping. It is like chinese water torture except instead of water it is noise. They could use this method to wake people from comas. I bet I could tset this on someone in a coma to see if they would revive. If they did, I could write a paper and get a grant and be famous for bringing people back to living.

I tell Jack to make a phone call instead of texting. He does. The next night he is on call again. He sleeps on the couch. Thankfully.

III. Fox

Even the dog is keeping me awake. He has been wearing a cone since he was bitten by a raccoon so he doesn't lick his wound. Now when his head itches in the middle of the night, his leg whacks the cone. Loudly. And the cone prevents him from actually scratching the itch, so he just tried harder. The harder he tried, the more it itches and the more his leg whacks the cone. Egads. I pick up the dog, scratch his head, and put him on the bed, where he sleeps like a rock.

I wish I could do the same.

Ada J and the Missing Milestone

Claire-Adele started her senior year of high school this week and the Boy is a freshman. This year marks the first time since Claire-Adele started sixth grade that both of them are in the same school. Wednesday, I was waiting for the bus to go to work when I saw them walking to school together. This marked the first time ever the kids walked to school together. Prior to high school, both kids took a bus to school.

This is a big deal, both kids in high school--a major milestone for them and me. I have a missing milestone this fall. As some of you who read my blog know, I had a full-term stillbirth many years ago. Ada would have been nineteen next month. She would have graduated from high school last spring, and left for college this fall. I have countless friends whose kids are leaving the nest--some the oldest, some the youngest, some the only. Monica's and Jen's kids left early August. Ashley's left two weeks ago. Others are waiting for UW to start in a few weeks. Thankfully, all of these departures are spread out over two months, otherwise there might be a giant wail-fest and/or celebration depending on the mother and child in question. I am grateful for the staggered start of college so I don't have to drink in all of the departures at once.

I have other friends whose kids have left for college before, but I am paying more attention this year than I have in the past in part because Claire Adele will be going next year, but in part because this would have been/could have been, my year, too, to launch a kid off to freedom and independence.

One of my husband's colleagues had a daughter leaving for Magill. "This is the time you reflect on whether or not you were the parent you wanted to be," she told Jack. When kids leave for college, they stop needing their parents every day. I remember reading all of the "books" (shorthand for parenting books) when I was pregnant with Ada. I had all sorts of ideas about "I will do this" and "I won't do that." All that got tossed out the window and reset when she died.

I re-read Where'd You Go Bernadette this week. Bernadette had several miscarriages before her daughter Bee was born. When Bee arrived, she had a major heart defect. Bernadette made a deal with god that if the baby lived, she'd stop being an architect and take care of this child. The kid lived and Bernadette kept her end of the bargain, which resulted in major complications.

I didn't quite make the same deal with god, but I did something similar. I quit my job when I was pregnant with Claire-Adele because I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I lost another pregnancy. I wanted to stay at home and absorb every moment with her that I had missed with Ada, nevermind Ada would have been shuffled off to daycare because I made more money than Jack at the time and my salary paid the rent while his salary covered his school loans. I wanted to be there when Claire-Adele took her first steps and said her first words. I wanted to be there when she learned to read and do jigsaw puzzles and kick a soccer ball.

Is it or is it not a coincidence that I got a job when Ada would have left home? I am not sure, but at times I think it isn't. I could say the need to get a job was connected to when the Boy started high school or before Claire Adele leaves for college. Yet, something maternal in me is telling me I am done, that I have crossed a finish line. I have two more finish lines to go, but I feel like my first marathon is done. When I see Allison, Rick and Priya leaving for college, I feel as if Ada is leaving with them, even though she is a ghost. I feel a little bit like one of my own has left the nest, even though this little bird was never made it to the nest to start.

My rational self tells me none of what I wrote in the previous paragraph makes any sense. I wonder if there is a hormonal timer that was imprinted in me when Ada was born that started a clock ticking on my experience of motherhood. The timer was set to go off after nineteen years and wake me up, unaware that Ada had died before the timer started.