Joys of Single Motherhood

"Age is only a number"--at least that's what the Leading Edge Boom ers tell me. This group represents those born from 1945 to 1957. These leading edge types are the cohort now heading toward the "waste handling" end of the boa constrictor that economists use to illustrate how the overall numbers of the Baby Boom move through the decades. The Shadow Boomers are those of us born from 1958 to 1964. We watched the Vietnam War on television and tend to remember more about Arthur Janov's Primal Therapy than we do about the political climate back then. Today, the Leading Edge Boomers are the ones with children in college or even kids who have already graduated and are living and working on their own. The mothers among the LEBs had their kids early and now they can put their feet up--especially if they happened to choose Mr. Right for real back when they were 19 or 20. To say that I have little in common with these folks is a vast understatement. These are the ri...

When I was a kid, an invitation to a sleepover was cause for glee accompanied by much jumping up and down and giggling "oh goody, oh goody, I can't wait". It was exciting. A sleepover invited you to experience a friend's house from the ground up. Different smells, different sheets, towels and blankets, different foods and different rules. The change of routine was positively intoxicating. (I do have one bad memory of a sleepover. It was winter and I was having a sleepover with my cousin, who was a close friend. We watched " Chitty, Chitty Bang Bang" and drank lots of hot chocolate. And we sang "Swiss Miss, instant cocoa, instant cocoa for dogs" over and over and over as we watched the movie. I'm not sure why--that part has disappeared from my memory bank. Then suddenly, I didn't feel so good and then I vomited all over the playroom. It was mortifying even at a relative's house.) I do not find the change in routine intoxicating or even ...

Divorce is a fact of life in our house. I never did any weeping except in the arms of a male friend and only once. I tend to look at the whole thing dispassionately or at least I try. My kids have two houses, about a mile apart. They have two sets of clothes and two sets of computers, video and computer games and various mysterious Ipod accessories. When one of them forgets something, I hop in the car and go over to the house and pick up whatever is missing. Our money issues are not settled but it's an amicable arrangement. It has to be for the kids. Sometimes I think that just like the marriage was only about the kids, so is the divorce. When it comes to the divorce this seems fitting. I find it ironic that in the end one of the main reasons there was nothing left of the marriage is that it had been focused for too long on only the kids. You sow what you reap. Apart from the financial decimation, I look on the dissolution of the marriage as basically a good thing. Marriages end. P...

When I was a kid and my room got particularly messy, my mother's favorite edict was "Clean up your room, it looks like a pig sty!!" I remember there were often books and clothes strewn on the floor and I suppose to her '60's POV it did look downright disgraceful. Now, almost 40 years later, my daughter's room does not resemble a pig sty when it's messy--instead it reminds me of a garbage dump...or at least an old-fashioned dump. With admirable self-control (I think), I do not say "your room looks like a pig sty!" The kid has read Charlotte's Web and most likely would describe in excruciating detail just what is in a modern pig sty. She would go on and on and on and while I tried to drown out the endless chatter, I would most likely be picking up shirts, books, Ipod headphones, Ipod cases, stuffed animals, pants, dirty underwear, empty shopping bags, scraps of cloth from a sewing project from 3 weeks ago, candy wrappers and CD cases. I rationa...

Next week I start my vacation from my vacation with the kids. I can't wait. I can leave the house each morning with it relatively neat and tidy and when I come home, it'll be the same. No pillows on the floor, or potato chip fragments embedded in the rug. No cat spitballs puddled on the dining-room table and there will be clean glasses whenever I want one. When they come home I will hear all about what Daddy bought and how gigantic the hotel room was, how big the pool was, how my son ate nothing but chicken "fingers" for a week and how my daughter wishes she could be on vacation forever. I will smile and nod but inside I will be thinking "two more days to school, two more days to school". At that point, their attitude toward school runs hot and cold. My daughter is convinced she's in "the leftovers class". In her mind, this is the class comprised of all the kids who the teachers didn't pick to be on their "teams". The kids who can...

It's Sunday and even though it has been about forty years since I went to church regularly, I wonder just about every week about whether my kids utter disinterest in religion is good or bad. As a child each week I'd try to listen carefully to the minister's sermon and try to feel something other than boredom. The connections between these abstruse stories and life were always a mystery to me. The hyms however, touched me on a different level and I still remember many obscure lyrics to even more obscure hyms. When my daughter was born she was baptized a Catholic in order to affirm her identity as an Irish American. My then-husband felt it was important as part of the whole Irish thing and I had no objections. The service was held in the same church where his great-grand parents had married right before they sailed back to Ireland. This was before the priest scandals and also before my father-in-law passed away. It was more for him than for anyone else--to celebrate the circl...

I am leaving tomorrow for a brief vacation with my little darlings. We are going to the mountains to see friends and to swim, and to make our annual attempt to get up on water skis. (My attempts to water ski resemble those horrifying videos of prisoners at Guantanamo experiencing a form of torture called "water-boarding" but my pal says I'm exaggerating. Maybe.) My kids are fairly excited about our trip to the mountains but as always they are much, much more excited about their upcoming vacation adventure with their father. He's taking them for a week to one of those crowded places on the shore with big waves and wall to wall souvenir shops. They'll play mini-golf, eat lots of fried foods and come home with tacky tee shirts and hundreds of dollars worth of plastic souvenirs. Most of these highly treasured little tributes to capitalism will have sharp edges or come in tiny little collections. The first three days I will hear a constant chorus of "Hey, where...

There are homemade brownies in my refrigerator right now and they are calling to me. Fortunately, I am hiding on the third floor so their siren call is faint. Why are there brownies in your refrigerator if they are so tempting you ask? I made them for my ex-husband's birthday. I swore my daughter to secrecy and made her promise to tell everyone at the birthday barbecue that she'd made them all by herself. My ex dislikes homemade anything--just one of his oddities. I often wondered if maybe he thought I had a hidden stash of strychnine that I might sometime use in his food in a particularly manic moment. The brownies were a smash hit and as ordered, the plate came home empty. But I saved some to take as a gift on Tuesday and now I must resist the call. My father is a baker. There must be a baking gene because while I never baked with him or for him, it seems to be in my blood. I find it relaxing and exciting at the same time. How pathetic. I like to cut corners in Julia Child f...

For years I never dabbled in the "get the kids" to eat game. It seemed like a sucker's deal to me. I remember clearly staring at a well-done piece of shoe leather steak as a kid and hearing my mother bray "There are children starving in Biafra, now eat your protein!" (Yes, my mother really talked like that. She still does. I'm afraid I say the same thing--"eat your protein") I wasn't smart enough to realize that there was no connection between my lousy cut of steak and starving kids in Biafra, but my kids seem more geographically astute and more advanced in the study of logic. Does Biafra even still exist? Or is it now part of the Sudan? It doesn't matter. Stupidly, I somehow fell into the "eat your dinner" trap. It was a slow tumble into the pit of nonsense. My kids are thin--way thin. My daughter may weigh 55 lbs now and my son tops out at 44.5 lbs. They're fine. In fact they're built the same way their father and I were...

Any parent will tell you that there are certain stages in child development that will just about drive any parent up the freakin' wall. Sometimes those all-knowing little parenting books most of which were written back in the Pleistocene era will hint at an upcoming rough patch, but usually either Mom or Dad ends up experiencing these little patches. Recently, I was reminded once more of the often excruciating paradoxical nature of the "tweener". My ten year old daughter is 17 one minute and 3 the next. She's rebellious one minute and then five minutes go by and she's yelling "where is MY BLANKIE??" I wish I was making that up. I'm sure one of the hallmarks of terrible parenting is having a 10 year old child who is still attached to his or her "blankie". I prefer to think of it as my own little experiment in attachment gone awry, however. Can you blame me? One minute she is howling about her iPod headphones and then she reverts back to year...