"No one told me it would be like this..."
It's been five years, dear readers, FIVE, since I wrote that sentence in the dark depths of my basement playroom, in my sweatpants, half-deranged with sleep deprivation. Yes, I said sweatpants. I hadn't even discovered yoga pants yet, that's how long ago it was. Mean Mommy, B.Y.P.
If I were being completely honest with myself back then, other mothers did tell me how it would be. In fact, the minute you announce your first pregnancy every Tom, Dick and Mommy is ready to unload all the nursing/colic/no sleep horror stories in their arsenal. But being convinced you will be a much better parent than they are and your baby can't possibly turn out like their shitty baby, you ignore everything they say, even if some of it is useful. And then you find out you're wrong and wonder why nobody warned you.
Five years later, having made it through my baby years, I still feel completely unprepared for what parenthood throws at me. I find myself saying even more often now, "No one told me it would be like this". Although we ignore the stories, baby and toddlerhood is pretty similar for all parents. We all just want our kids to eat, sleep and hit their developmental milestones. Once our kids reach school age though, those clear mile-markers are gone, and we are left to navigate parenthood's dangerous highway without a map. Five years ago, I envisioned my life as the mother of school-aged kids as a nirvana of mid-morning exercise, blown-out hair and copious writing time since all three of my children would be in school for at least half the day. I thought there might even be the possibility of my going back to work, because how much could they really need me once they were no longer babies but bonafide kids?
I wrote the post The Fourteen Month Itch when Little Man was tiny, expressing the reawakening most women experience once their babies reach toddlerhood. Your baby's need for you, specifically you, has greatly diminished. Your baby is usually no longer feeding from your body and really any able bodied person could keep them alive for extended periods of time, often times without your child even realizing you are gone. You begin to look around and wonder if maybe you couldn't do something outside of the house. The years between the ages of two and four are the years you feel like you could be accomplishing a lot more. These years are the calm before the storm. Once your kids hit elementary school, they will need you almost as much as when they were babies.
I hear you laughing at my perceived helicopter parenting, but overly-orchestrated playdates are not what I'm talking about. I am talking about the millions of little interactions and teachable moments that help shape your child into the person they will become. School pick-up, for example. There's a reason I have to drink a large cup of coffee at three o'clock. That's because at three eighteen I am hit, full-force, with a days' worth of success and despair from three small people, all whom need my full attention equally. "Lisa didn't sit with me at lunch"..."I lost at Coconut Island in gym, again"..."I won Student of the Month!" Each of these events needs to be addressed and have their attendant lessons discussed and it begins from the moment I meet my kids at the school doors, continues into the van, as we walk through the front door and right to the kitchen table for snack. By the time I am doling out the pretzels, we have covered how to deal with it when a friend hurts your feelings, how to be a good sport and how hard work does pay off.
The kids settle in for homework and then it's time for me to harass #1 about her handwriting and check #2's math since she notoriously does not fully explain her answers. She also needs to find an article for current events and we spend twenty minutes discussing the bear hunt issue in New Jersey once we've found one. Litte Man needs to work on his fine motor skills so I'm trying to convince him to chop up a Toys R Us catalogue to make his list for Santa. Now #1 needs a thesaurus because we both agree she has used the word "rocky" too many times in her report on Maine. As this all winds down and it's time to start dinner, I am dizzy, but I feel so so grateful I am here for all of this madness.
Please, please, do not take this as an anti-working rant, because it is decidedly not. I give so much credit to the women who work all day then come home and do all the things I just described, just much later and, probably, feeling much more tired. My point is, that while the physical care of my children has greatly decreased, I feel, in some ways, they have never need me more and I am still surprised by it at times. I can only imagine what I'll be hit with as my kids approach their teen years. Again, I imagine a life of ease, may be even joining a gym. But seeing how accurate my last five year prediction was I'm not getting my hopes up.
I suppose, with the title of that first post five years ago, I unknowingly described parenting - everyday brings the unexpected. No one told me it would be like this.
But could they have?
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Walk this way...(don't take a friggin' cab)
I was tempted to just jump right back into writing, blatantly ignoring my long absence sure no one would have noticed, but then I received a few concerned comments on the blog, asking if I was OK after Hurricane Sandy, so I felt like I had to at least acknowledge my hiatus. I barely remembered the password to my Blogger account today. My writing muscles are weak, so this post is the literary equivalent of doing your first Sweatin' to the Oldies video after you've had a baby. Be kind to me, dear readers.
So, yes, my nuclear family and I are just fine after the hurricane. I have major survivor's guilt since we never lost power when most of our town was out for nine days. While many families I know were going to bed at 7:30, huddled together under blankets to keep warm (shout out Donna), I was drinking a lot of wine with various guests we have had since the storm. We felt the best way to make up for our good fortune was to feed people and get them drunk so they could pass out comfortably in ur poorly heated attic bedroom. My body is currently protesting the lack of refined sugar and alcohol, since after the 7th night in a row of drinking and binge-eating Halloween candy we never got to give out, I had to get back to real life, otherwise, I was going to wind up attending Weight Watcher's and AA meetings for all of November.
Some very close family and friends did not fare so well, which is a stark reminder that not everyone was watching movies at night and wondering when the kids would be going back to school. Or, more like, wondering when your husband would go back to work, since he was stalking around the house after a week like a caged animal. My children have known no wrath from me like that I exhibited when they got upset about Halloween being a bust for the second year in a row. One, two, maybe even three bouts of disappointment I can understand, but when people you love dearly have no home, you can shut the hell up about not having a pillowcase full of Butterfingers under your bed. And I would've taken all of those anyway. A lot of people are still really suffering, so for those of my readers who are not local, and would like to help, please consider donating to the Red Cross relief effort.
I can't blame my lack of writing entirely on Sandy. Well, I guess I can't blame Sandy at all since we had power. I'll blame my husband and children for being under foot for almost two weeks. I will also blame it on preparing for, and recovering from, the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer.
Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, to all of my readers, many of whom I have never met in person, who generously donated to my walk fund. The walk in New York alone raised 8.3 million dollars. Yes, I am proud to have helped with that, but I am even prouder of the fact that I actually finished the walk.
I have to confess, when I signed up I thought, "How hard could it be to walk 39 miles over two days?". I've run 13 miles then gone about my regular day! My partner and I did a few "training walks", ten miles or so, mostly to break in our new walking shoes. I got into the car at 4:30 Saturday morning to head into the city sure this would not be a problem. You know where this is going.
Fast forward to 2:30 in the afternoon at mile 26 and I am on the verge of tears. My partner and I had been walking the streets of New York for eight consecutive hours, stopping only to pee, get water and grab a sandwich at the lunch station. I developed a huge blister on the back of my left heel and my left calf was cramping after hours of altering my gait to compensate. The course had begun at Pier 84 on the west side of Manhattan, and snaked uptown, downtown and across three bridges. We walked past landmarks I had never seen up close like the Intrepid and Grant's Tomb. We walked near the latter and further north during the wee hours of the morning, thanks to the sharp planning of the walk coordinators. I was glad we had a motorcycle escort at six a.m., since the residents who were awake in those neighborhoods were not at all psyched about thousands of women dressed in pink racing along their sidewalks.
That's right, I said motorcycle escort. We had quite the tough gang of bikers, many with pink accents hanging off of their bikes, meeting us at various crossings to ensure our safe passage. The walk people really made sure, not only that we made it out of the 'hood safely, but that the out-of-town rubes didn't get mowed down by a city bus, by having crossing guards as well. These were less consistent in their type and quality. There were many lovely volunteers who cheered us on our way appropriately. Then there was Inappropriate Hugging Guy and the guy shouting "Do it for the boobies!". And you didn't just run into them once, they ran all over the city to get ahead of the pack. By our third meeting with IHG, he knew to stay the fuck away from me or get a swift one to the nads. I would've taken a guard of any type and quality though, at noon on the Brooklyn Bridge. Between hipster wedding parties taking Instagram photos of the beautiful day and European tourists screwing up the flow of pedestrian traffic, it was like a game of Frogger.
The walkers also varied in their type and quality (more on that). There were plenty of two and three person teams such as my partner and myself. There were also families and the survivors they were supporting. There were corporate groups with professionally embroidered golf shirts such as the Testes for Breasties team. There were A LOT of breast puns. There were huge fundraising teams who were doing their 10th walk together, many decked out in costumes. Pink boas and tutus abounded. While cute, I could only imagine the chafing and sweatiness they would generate come mile 10.
Now about walker quality. Don't get all judgy. I don't mean the survivors, or the elderly. I mean the able bodied gals, like myself. After the first few miles, the pack thinned out according to pace, and you generally found yourself walking near the same people on and off again. This was fine unless you wound up walking five miles next to Loud-mouthed Lucy and her partner Megaphone Marcy. No, I don't care how your neighbor's house is in foreclosure or about your sister's prolapsed uterus (I do not kid), so pipe it down, sister.
The other walkers I took issue with were The Cheaters. At mile 13, we happened upon some boa-sporting ladies at a red light who asked us incredulously, "Jeez, are you guys running?". When we pointed out we all seemed to be keeping the same pace, they guffawed, "We went to breakfast and took a cab here!" We passed another team on the Upper West Side who was waiting for a flea market to open to do some shopping. All of this made my blood boil. I know this walk was not a "race", per se, but, true to my type A personality, I took it on as a physical challenge, and my partner and I wanted to finish in the top 100. How demoralizing to be numbers 20 and 21 at Rest Stop 3, then 62 and 63 at Rest Stop 4 because pople were cab-hopping all over the place. In the post-race survey, I recommended some kind of chip for those who wanted to keep track of their progress and no chip for those who wanted to go to brunch.
All in all, the walk was an incredible experience that I highly recommend. Walking, or hobbling, through the balloon arch at the finish on the second day, I felt like I had really taken part in something wonderful. I had raised a lot of money ($2100!) and pushed myself through physical pain, for a good cause. And, once and for all, proved I should never run a marathon. Walking one almost killed me. And no, I'm still not putting a queer sticker on my van.
So I am back, dear readers. Expect more posts next week. Unless there's an earthquake or swarm of locusts.
So, yes, my nuclear family and I are just fine after the hurricane. I have major survivor's guilt since we never lost power when most of our town was out for nine days. While many families I know were going to bed at 7:30, huddled together under blankets to keep warm (shout out Donna), I was drinking a lot of wine with various guests we have had since the storm. We felt the best way to make up for our good fortune was to feed people and get them drunk so they could pass out comfortably in ur poorly heated attic bedroom. My body is currently protesting the lack of refined sugar and alcohol, since after the 7th night in a row of drinking and binge-eating Halloween candy we never got to give out, I had to get back to real life, otherwise, I was going to wind up attending Weight Watcher's and AA meetings for all of November.
Some very close family and friends did not fare so well, which is a stark reminder that not everyone was watching movies at night and wondering when the kids would be going back to school. Or, more like, wondering when your husband would go back to work, since he was stalking around the house after a week like a caged animal. My children have known no wrath from me like that I exhibited when they got upset about Halloween being a bust for the second year in a row. One, two, maybe even three bouts of disappointment I can understand, but when people you love dearly have no home, you can shut the hell up about not having a pillowcase full of Butterfingers under your bed. And I would've taken all of those anyway. A lot of people are still really suffering, so for those of my readers who are not local, and would like to help, please consider donating to the Red Cross relief effort.
I can't blame my lack of writing entirely on Sandy. Well, I guess I can't blame Sandy at all since we had power. I'll blame my husband and children for being under foot for almost two weeks. I will also blame it on preparing for, and recovering from, the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer.
Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, to all of my readers, many of whom I have never met in person, who generously donated to my walk fund. The walk in New York alone raised 8.3 million dollars. Yes, I am proud to have helped with that, but I am even prouder of the fact that I actually finished the walk.
I have to confess, when I signed up I thought, "How hard could it be to walk 39 miles over two days?". I've run 13 miles then gone about my regular day! My partner and I did a few "training walks", ten miles or so, mostly to break in our new walking shoes. I got into the car at 4:30 Saturday morning to head into the city sure this would not be a problem. You know where this is going.
Fast forward to 2:30 in the afternoon at mile 26 and I am on the verge of tears. My partner and I had been walking the streets of New York for eight consecutive hours, stopping only to pee, get water and grab a sandwich at the lunch station. I developed a huge blister on the back of my left heel and my left calf was cramping after hours of altering my gait to compensate. The course had begun at Pier 84 on the west side of Manhattan, and snaked uptown, downtown and across three bridges. We walked past landmarks I had never seen up close like the Intrepid and Grant's Tomb. We walked near the latter and further north during the wee hours of the morning, thanks to the sharp planning of the walk coordinators. I was glad we had a motorcycle escort at six a.m., since the residents who were awake in those neighborhoods were not at all psyched about thousands of women dressed in pink racing along their sidewalks.
That's right, I said motorcycle escort. We had quite the tough gang of bikers, many with pink accents hanging off of their bikes, meeting us at various crossings to ensure our safe passage. The walk people really made sure, not only that we made it out of the 'hood safely, but that the out-of-town rubes didn't get mowed down by a city bus, by having crossing guards as well. These were less consistent in their type and quality. There were many lovely volunteers who cheered us on our way appropriately. Then there was Inappropriate Hugging Guy and the guy shouting "Do it for the boobies!". And you didn't just run into them once, they ran all over the city to get ahead of the pack. By our third meeting with IHG, he knew to stay the fuck away from me or get a swift one to the nads. I would've taken a guard of any type and quality though, at noon on the Brooklyn Bridge. Between hipster wedding parties taking Instagram photos of the beautiful day and European tourists screwing up the flow of pedestrian traffic, it was like a game of Frogger.
The walkers also varied in their type and quality (more on that). There were plenty of two and three person teams such as my partner and myself. There were also families and the survivors they were supporting. There were corporate groups with professionally embroidered golf shirts such as the Testes for Breasties team. There were A LOT of breast puns. There were huge fundraising teams who were doing their 10th walk together, many decked out in costumes. Pink boas and tutus abounded. While cute, I could only imagine the chafing and sweatiness they would generate come mile 10.
Now about walker quality. Don't get all judgy. I don't mean the survivors, or the elderly. I mean the able bodied gals, like myself. After the first few miles, the pack thinned out according to pace, and you generally found yourself walking near the same people on and off again. This was fine unless you wound up walking five miles next to Loud-mouthed Lucy and her partner Megaphone Marcy. No, I don't care how your neighbor's house is in foreclosure or about your sister's prolapsed uterus (I do not kid), so pipe it down, sister.
The other walkers I took issue with were The Cheaters. At mile 13, we happened upon some boa-sporting ladies at a red light who asked us incredulously, "Jeez, are you guys running?". When we pointed out we all seemed to be keeping the same pace, they guffawed, "We went to breakfast and took a cab here!" We passed another team on the Upper West Side who was waiting for a flea market to open to do some shopping. All of this made my blood boil. I know this walk was not a "race", per se, but, true to my type A personality, I took it on as a physical challenge, and my partner and I wanted to finish in the top 100. How demoralizing to be numbers 20 and 21 at Rest Stop 3, then 62 and 63 at Rest Stop 4 because pople were cab-hopping all over the place. In the post-race survey, I recommended some kind of chip for those who wanted to keep track of their progress and no chip for those who wanted to go to brunch.
All in all, the walk was an incredible experience that I highly recommend. Walking, or hobbling, through the balloon arch at the finish on the second day, I felt like I had really taken part in something wonderful. I had raised a lot of money ($2100!) and pushed myself through physical pain, for a good cause. And, once and for all, proved I should never run a marathon. Walking one almost killed me. And no, I'm still not putting a queer sticker on my van.
So I am back, dear readers. Expect more posts next week. Unless there's an earthquake or swarm of locusts.
Monday, October 15, 2012
Time marches, not runs, on...
1. Tendonitis of the right foot
2. Immobilizing back spasm
3. Labral tear of the left hip
4. Strained iliosacral muscle
5. Plantar fasciitis
No, this isn’t the injury list of the Yankee’s DL, it’s list
of the “sports injuries” I have incurred over the last eighteen months (except
for #3, wassup A-Rod!). I even had
to go to the orthopedist, and twice weekly physical therapy for the last two
instead of exercising through the pain like I usually do. What the hell happened?
I got old.
I am used to the slow, but insistent, signs of aging that
have crept over my body and face during the last decade. My hair color is no longer
recreational, and my anti-aging creams are no longer preventative. But this? To have my body slowly begin giving out on me? Was a shock.
And it’s not just me.
When I posted on Facebook, looking for local physical therapist
recommendations, I received ten suggestions in as many minutes. When I went to the therapist in New
Town, I expected it to be full of doddering old folks, recovering from hip
fractures. There were a few of
those. Among them, the school
crossing guard who had mysteriously disappeared in May. Thank God, because I was afraid he had
died of a sudden heart attack, but was telling the kids maybe he went to go
live with his grandchildren in Florida.
The crossing guard version of “we sent the dog to a farm”. But along with Mr. Stevens, were a huge
number of people my age recovering from self-induced recreational injuries.
This entire generation, has become obsessed with proving their youth with feats
of physical strength and endurance, only to kill ourselves in the process.
Will any of these, Iron Mans, Rugged Maniacs, or Marine
Corps Marathons ever stop the march of time? Staying fit will improve your
quality of life, and probably prolong it, but it won’t bring back your
twenties. And what’s so wrong with
aging, anyway? Why is younger
always better? Yes, youth is
further away from death, but it’s closer to the time when you didn’t know who
you were or what the hell you were doing.
We need to accept aging as a natural part of life, with all the changes
in appearance* and performance that come along with it. Wouldn’t it be better to embrace a new
age bracket and be the best version of your current self, than pathetically
cling to your old demographic? And
that’s not to say you stop working out and, buy elastic waist pants and comfort
shoes, but perhaps stop trying so hard.
Like, so hard, you wind up needing hip surgery.**
It’s surprising how aging creeps up on you. One minute you’re a semi-attractive
young, new mom, the next, you’re standing at your youngest child's pre-school pick-up with women
young enough to look like your daughter. Did you really think you'd stay young forever? You can't and you won't. Have a drink and accept it.
Even though you can outrun those moms, you can't outrun Father Time.
Even though you can outrun those moms, you can't outrun Father Time.
*See also: Botox and facial fillers
**Which, had physical therapy not worked, would have rendered me unable to even bear weight on the repaired hip for six weeks. Other than the very real possibility of my being institutionalized not being able to work out some of my manic energy, how would I possibly care for three children? The smug Physician's Assistant at my, otherwise wonderful, orthopedist's office said, "lean on the good leg while you pack the lunch boxes." I almost said, "Now I understand why your only a Physician's Assistant."
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