Thoughts of motherhood, menopause and the meaning of life
Flushed down the toilet bowl of life
My college sophomore came home last weekend for his brother’s 30th birthday party and he told me over dinner on Friday night that the tire pressure sensor on his car kept going off.
“How long has this been happening?” I asked him, reaching across the table for a slice of sausage/pepper/onion pie — because when you come home from the middle of Pennsylvania, you need decent pizza. My 19yo had picked his sister up in Philly on his journey home, and we’d gone about a mile down Main Street to a classic Jersey Eye-talian restaurant — cavernous rooms that are wood-paneled, with lots of booths along the perimeter. Our waitress looked like she’d been hand-picked by central casting, all dark eyeliner, thick accent and business as she bustled about refilling our Cokes and getting us our mozzarella sticks on the table on the double.
“Actually, it’s been happening for a while,” my son told me, taking a bite out of his slice of meatball pie. “I keep filling it with air but the sensor keeps going off.”
Like that questionable tire, my mom alert went off, and I said, “Buddy, this isn’t a Friday night announcement. This is something you should have told me about earlier in the week so I could have made a service appointment at the dealership.”
Then the teenager pushed back and acted like I was being a crazy helicopter mom. “It’s gonna be fine,” he told me. “I’ll get it looked at when I’m home for Thanksgiving.”
I would like to interject right here that, contrary to what my children believe, I am not really a helicopter mom. I’m way too lazy for that. I mean, you should see some of my friends. They are super dedicated moms who’ll drop anything in service to their children. They monitor grades on parent portals and the amount of time their kids spend playing video games.
I, however, prefer the path of least resistance and if you want to talk me out of something that’s going to require me to go above and beyond my usual routine, I am amenable to backing off and seeing what happens.
After some back and forth it seemed over dinner that I had talked him into promising he’d take the car that I lease to the dealership out by his big state college to have them check the tire. I figured he’d made it the four or so hours home, he could make it back and then take care of it.
But when we talked about it again on Sunday, my son got slightly belligerent and insisted the tire could wait until Thanksgiving. “You’re making a big deal about it,” he told me.
That’s when I knew I had to take matters into my own hands. I went online to see if we could schedule a service appointment first thing Monday morning, and an 8:00 slot magically appeared. I told him I was booking the appointment and that he’d have to wait to leave later Monday, and he growled something about how it better not take too long and marched up to his bedroom to watch yet another episode of Breaking Bad.
In December, that usually pleasant fourth child of mine will turn 20, thus ending the long and never-ending chapter of my life that I like to think of as “The Age of Teens.” Much like the Jurassic and Triassic periods, the 17 years that I have lived with one to three teenagers at a time has seemed to stretch across millennia. At times, it felt like I’d be eaten at any given moment and lived under the looming threat of a giant asteroid just waiting to blow us all up to smithereens.
It didn’t help that I got divorced just as the two older kids entered their teenaged-hood, adding another layer to their angst. The amount of drama I documented in old journals — staples in heads, self-harm, illegal contraband stuffed into the crotch of an old teddy bear (an unwitting mule) — it’s enough for three Netflix specials.
But somehow, we made it through to the other side. Now my older kids are contributing members of society who I love spending time with and who often come to me for advice. And I am trying to learn that I need to keep that advice — and my big opinions — to myself unless asked to share.
But a 19yo is still a kid who remains under my parenting jurisdiction and needs to be given direction from time to time. No matter how much he pushes back and acts like he knows absolutely everything. The secret to life? I’m sure he’s figured it out. Just like I had when I was his age.
***
Back at the dealership, I stood next to my son while the service guy told us that it looked like there was a big chunk missing out of the front right tire and that we needed a new one.
A month or two earlier, the teen had come home to our new home to report he had just narrowly avoided an accident when he failed to yield at a clearly marked yield sign and slammed into the curb to avoid an oncoming car. “Yield signs aren’t suggestions,” I told him, and he pushed back about how the other car had switched into his lane at the last minute and it was really that driver’s fault. “Dude, a cop would give you a ticket for not yielding,” I said, but he didn’t want to hear it. He was feeling pretty self-righteous about the episode.
So at the dealership, I wanted to throttle him for being such a know-it-all, which I guess I wasn’t keeping to myself. “Your mom looks like she wants to kill you, bro,” the service guy said to my son.
After about five minutes of driving in silence, I turned to my youngest child and asked him if he wanted to know why I was so annoyed, and he said, “Yes.”
“Accidents happen. That’s fine, we can deal with that. But you pushed back so hard and got kind of belligerent, when I knew there was something wrong,” I said. “I’m not saying I know all the things, but I do know some things.”
He quickly said, “I know and I’m sorry.” And that was that. He got the new tire, packed up the car and he and his sister hit the road before lunchtime.
After we made up and were friends again, I asked my son if he’d learned anything from the whole episode, and he was smart enough to say yes.
I told him, “Everything is a lesson buddy — the good stuff and the bad,” and thought about what living with the teenage population for so long has taught me. Unconditional love, for one thing. That’s the only way you can live with this subset of our species without murdering them.
And also how getting through all the tough stuff — all the car accidents and run-ins with the law and cans of Four Loko in my frig — had weirdly brought us all closer. The teenage years were one big crazy waterslide, filled with sharp turns and unexpected drops that spit you into a giant funnel where you all spin around like a big toilet bowl before slipping through the bottom into the calm water below. When you all emerge, you keep talking about the ride for the rest of the day, and then periodically it will come up and you’ll laugh about it for years to come.
All the crazy episodes become a part of the family lore that you and your loved ones shake your heads over and wonder how you ever got through it all.
But you did. You made it to the other side. Who knows what will happen next?
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SUNDAY SHARES: Read, watch, cook, buy
Life imitates art. Right before I moved closer to the sea, I read a book called A Year by the Sea: Thoughts of an Unfinished Woman, and I think that was one of the factors that pushed me toward renting my new place. My therapist had told me about it years ago, and the slim memoir had sat on my bookshelf until this spring when I opened it on a whim and began to read. It’s about a woman whose nest has become empty and she feels unsettled — about her marriage and just where she is in life. So she decides to move to their summer home on Cape Cod for a year and undergoes a period of self-discovery that is just lovely. Try it.
Bitch bag. Do you know about the trend in some circles to get ironic sayings monogrammed on one of those classic LL Bean totes? Chronicled on the Instagram account, some of the sayings are so damn funny. Some funny ones I like include: ANXIOUS, AS IF, AND HIGHSTRUNG. Inspired, my sister gave me one for my birthday that reads, BITCH, and it makes me laugh and wonder what the people on the beach in Avon, NJ think about the lady walking through the sand with that bitch bag.
Fashionista. I am kind of obsessed with Zara. My sister came home from Barcelona this summer and was like, “I got you a dress,” and it was a super chic black-and-white-number that made me feel very international when I wore it to the office in Holmdel, NJ not long ago. I am eyeing a number of items that Instagram has been feeding me, but the only thing I’ve bought so far is this striped top, which is kind of perfect, especially for $30.
Moms have got no game. I like to keep up with what the kids are watching so this weekend I watched the new Nick Kroll comedy special on Netflix. He’s the creator of Big Mouth, which I know my kids love, and he seems kind of zeitgeisty — I’ve seen articles about him in a bunch of places and he’s part of the whole “Don’t Worry Darling” cuckoo cast. My review is that the one-hour special made me laugh a lot and his take on moms — especially as he wraps it up at the very end — was really powerful. It made me feel so emotional when he finally realizes after the birth of his son why moms always pick up on the first ring.
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