Graduation Day

Being a mother of a certain age, some days I  can’t remember to put the lid down on the washing machine or whether I put milk on the grocery list –or where said list is.

However, I can remember with crystal clarity where I was 22 years ago today: giving birth to my first son, Erik. He was born at 5:54 p.m. on a Friday in Flagstaff , Arizona during one of the coldest winters on record.  Snow even blanketed the cacti outside of Phoenix.

Last Friday Erik graduated from college. I sat with my mom waiting for the ceremony to begin while my professor husband was down on the venue floor as part of the processional. To strains of ‘Pomp and Circumstance’  I imagined the words of the host of the reality show  Amazing Race as the winners cross the finish line: “Three continents….”

During his academic career, Erik studied abroad in Europe and Asia. With snowstorm  Draco hitting the prairie earlier this week,  my mom and I were reminiscing yesterday about Storm Daisy that hit Denmark a few years ago – stranding Erik and a friend in his father’s ancestral homeland.

Being a parent is an adventure. Being the parent of an adventurer adds a whole new dimension of worry  and yes, pride.

And don’t forget worry.

My Grandma Rock always poked her head in the car window as we (my mom, my late father and my younger sister and brothers) prepared to leave her house after visiting. “Be careful” she’d say and add “Don’t forget to call when you get there.”

For the most part those half hour trips home were uneventful except for the time a deer ran in front of the car, the animal flipping up over onto the hood, sending glass shattering into the car and a hoof grazing my mother’s cheek  - below her eye.

My brother Steve, sitting in the front seat between my parents (this was the old days), was wearing a little sailor hat with the brim turned down. All weekend my grandmother had advised him to turn the brim up the way the hat was supposed to be worn.

The downward turned brim kept the glass out of his eyes.

We’d been on this trip to Kalamazoo, Michigan to buy a bunk bed for my sister and me. Joan and I must have been maybe in second and third grade. I don’t remember.

I do remember once the bunk bed was assembled,  I rolled over the first night (I wanted to sleep without the safety bar) and landed on the floor. Unhurt. But I did want the protective railing after that.

With one child ‘launched’ and another due to graduate from high school in May, I sometimes long for that safety bar.

But I’m not sure whether I want it more for them – or me.

           

Punxsutawney Phil

Groundhog Day is just around the corner, and I’ve yet to write a New Year’s post. December was all about DEADlines. The last time I blogged was on eldest son Erik’s 21^st birthday on December 21. That was right before he flew home from studying abroad in South Korea. In less than a week he leaves on the first leg of his sojourn back to Seoul for the second term.

Erik spent the better part of this afternoon putting together a schedule and registering for classes. When I couldn’t give him a definitive explanation for why a class that meets for four hours a day is worth three credit hours, he was puzzled. After all I spent years teaching and advising at the university level.

I told him to ask his father.

Tonight his 16-year-old brother, Andrew, was looking at the general studies requirements for the major he’s interested in at the local university father teaches at.

This one knows better than to ask me questions on matters of academics, although in a previous ‘life’ I did have a few answers.

I don’t miss teaching and I really REALLY don’t miss advising, although I do still miss many of my students.

More than a few are parents themselves now, which kind of makes me feel like an honorary – aunt. Surely you didn’t think I was going to use the ‘G’ word?

I know all the rhetoric about age being a state of mind, you’re only as young as you feel, etc. but I ain’t buying it. When I was pregnant with Andrew, I was classified as being of ‘advanced maternal age.’ I was pushing 36.

Never, ever do I get baby fever…not even puppy fever. This morning Erik laid out the classifieds from the Omaha newspaper and circled the ad for the $500 Labradoodles (I have allergies). This same Erik is leaving the country for five more months then will finish up college and then venture out for parts known or unknown. No puppy passports right now. I told him if his father, who periodically lobbies for a dog, gives up his motorcycle I’d be happy to get us all a puppy.

No takers.

Last weekend, though, a strange thing happened. Nostalgia for the baby years sideswiped me. Even though I had babies, I’m not a baby person. My husband is wonderful with babies, I’m skittish. I went to a couples baby shower for a delightful woman in my book group. The event was for two couples; the other mom-to-be was Erik’s children’s literature teacher last year and his minor advisor. She’s sweet and smart, and watching the joy on her husband’s face as he took his turn opening presents was worth the price of admission.

I, however, spent the rest of the weekend morbidly depressed. Former students having babies are one thing, former professors of my own son having first babies?

Intellectually I know my husband got his first assistant professor position at the tender age of 27, but were we ever really that young?

Over the years I’ve been to and hosted a multitude of baby showers – and never felt the urge to return to those rewarding exhausting times.

But for a fleeting moment on a mild January afternoon, I was transported back to those days of diapers (and diaper rash), onesies, and fleece.

The trip didn’t last very long. And for my children the adventure is just beginning.

But just to be on the safe side, I recycled the classifieds.

Summertime and the livin’ is easy

So June is wound down.

Here on the prairie we get a lot more daylight than we did for the decade and a half we lived in the east. Our little city is close to the Mountain Time Zone line so it stays light pretty darn late. After returning from a weekend trip to Des Moines for my new niece’s baptism, hubbie and I could walk and see where we were going, even though it was close to 10 p.m.

When I was a teenager in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, I could ride my bike downtown to the locks and hang out with my friends. Curfew was ten p.m. because it didn’t get dark until then in that northernmost corner of my world.

On our drive back this weekend, younger son Andrew asked if he had a curfew. His father told him he’d have one when he started driving.

Somewhere down the line, I’ve morphed from needing a curfew to not being able to stay up past curfew. Six months into fifty (and more than 20 pounds lighter, thank you Kearney YMCA!), I’ve adjusted well to this new decade but still have trouble processing I’m closer to a grandmother’s age than a new mother’s age.

As I awkwardly held my beautiful niece, Reese, at the outdoor church service on Sunday, I flashed back to the baptism of my two children. Erik was baptized on a snowy February Flagstaff day. Fittingly, Andrew was baptized barefoot at barely a month old in Morgantown, West Virginia. The wonderful late Hank Brown baptized that second baby, and I can still tell you (even though Andrew turns 15 in August) what I weighed that day…let’s just say I coulda gone12 rounds with George Foreman!

Confession time: I don’t feel fifty. I vividly recall my mother turning to me in church on Christmas Eve the year she was fifty and telling me she still felt the same inside as she did when she was younger…just time was marching on.

My father, now deceased, threw himself a pig roast at fifty. Before I hit that ‘magic’ number this past December, I went back and looked at pictures of him at that party. He looked older than I think I do. Or maybe we just always think our parents are older than they are…until we reach their age. I did inherit my gray from my dad and his side of the family. My brother Steve, five years younger than me, reminds me of my father…his good qualities, not his bad or sad ones.

Growing up , I always thought fall was my favorite season. No more do I think that.

Summertime…and the livin’ is easy…and I cherish the summers I have left.

The Circle of Life

I write this having just returned last night from my Aunt Judy’s funeral. My mother, husband and I traveled to Wichita for this sad occasion, and we plowed back through snow-covered roads for more than three hours until the weather broke as we headed into Nebraska.

As often happens at this most mournful of occasions, families reconnect. I hadn’t see my cousin Chris in years since we had lived on opposite sides of the country until recently. It was really good to see him, meet his vivacious lovely bride of just over six months and his charming sons. Thanks to Facebook, we’re going to keep in touch.

As we were headed home, my mom got a call from my youngest brother. His wife was in the hospital getting ready to give birth. So as hokey and Disney-esque as it sounds, there really is a circle of life.

My aunt’s sudden death after her stroke and heart attack two weeks previous felt like a blow to the solar plexus. My heart went out to my cousin and his family and to my mom, who lost her ‘baby’ sister.

After the service, I heard two stories about my aunt’s ‘baby mojo’ quilts. One woman had been trying to conceive for 15 years when she became the recipient of one of Judy’s special quilts. She has a three-year-old now. Another friend of my aunt’s was there with her daughter, four months pregnant with her third child. She too had been gifted with one of Judy’s quilts.

My aunt had nearly been finished with a beautiful white quilt for her new daughter-in-law, Paula, when she died. Paula’s grandmother will finish that piece.

As we continue to mourn the loss of Judy, we listen for the cell phone ring from my youngest brother announcing the birth of his new child.

In a week from today, Erik, my mom’s first grandchild and my first ‘baby,’ will be home from his second sojourn in Germany. It can’t come soon enough.

50 is not the new 30, part 1

 In two months, I turn 25x2. 

 No matter how you do the math, it's still the big FIVE-ZERO. 

 When I turned 40, my older son hand-lettered a card for me that proclaimed "Forty is a BIG number!"

 Yeah, well, fifty is an even bigger number.

 Lotta talk that fifty is the new thirty. When I was 30, I was pregnant with Mr. Card Giving Son. Fifty is definitely not the new thirty.

 Uh uh.

 Whining about the topic makes me feel petty and shallow.  Over the years, good friends have died way too young, leaving behind children. Another birthday should be celebrated, not reviled.

 I am the mother of two children whom I fiercely love and adore. I even like them too.

 Once I joked that if I turned up pregnant with number three, the doctor would have a lot of explaining to do. My mother sagely pointed out that  it would be me who would have a lot of explaining to do.  My husband’s mother had a ‘surprise’ baby at forty, which I think ‘scarred’ my poor husband for life!

 I’m not a baby person. Ask anyone who knows me. I hold them out, stiff-legged as tho I’ve never seen, or mothered one, before. I prefer ‘em walking, talking and most definitely toilet-trained.

 ‘Grandmother fever’ has certainly not infected me yet, either. My husband and I waited nearly nine years, on purpose, before we had kids. Ours are still in their teens.

 And yet…

 Turning fifty seems to slam the door shut on that part of a woman’s life: the feedingdiaperstoilettrainingpreschoolhomeroommompto-ness of it all.

 When I was in 5^th grade I set my goals: I wanted to have ten children, live in Connecticut and be a writer. I’m too chubby to be a reality show star, I’ve never been to Connecticut and I’m finally at the point in my life I’ve always wanted to be at with writing.

 Embracing my gray hair has been easy, now I need to make peace with the number that goes with it.

Mother's Intuition

So this week, Erik (our son spending a semester at University of Rostock, in Germany) has been sick. Could be the European version of the crud here but sounds like a sinus infection, to which he is prone. When I wrote this originally, it had been a few days since we’d ‘skyped’ but his girlfriend, a funny, smart, adorable girl attending a small eastern college, is my Facebook friend and she keeps me posted.

Now I have a ‘partner’ in worry, and it’s comforting. Sure, I have my husband, and he worries too. But in a quiet, sensible, non-gnashing-of-the-teeth sort of way.

Totally at odds, thank goodness, with my penchant for overreacting.

When Erik was seven weeks old, he refused to nurse on one side…howling and drowning out Star Trek: The Next Generation, the 2 a.m. feeding program of choice. (My over-the-top crush on Jean Luc Picard, as well as the time Mr. Rogers started to look real good to me, is the topic for another post. Or not at all.) With a screaming baby propped up in one arm, and “What to Expect the First Year” (the great follow-up to “What to Expect When You’re Expecting”) in the other, I read up on possible reasons.

Ear infection caught my bleary eye.

Off I trudged the next day with infant in tow to the pediatrician’s. The doctor was not an unkind man, having ‘signed off’ on the two of us staying an extra day in the hospital when the pipes froze in our apt. in Flagstaff, Arizona…coldest winter in recent years there. Later we’d tell Erik the story that there was ‘even snow on the cactuses’ that December.

The doc told me point blank that babies that young do not get ear infections but he’d humor me and look in the kid’s ear.

Much to the doctor’s surprise…a bright red ear infection met his eye.

We changed pediatrician’s.

The familiar tale follows of more ear infections, tubes, later allergy shots. Erik’s a fairly healthy kid, except for the recurring sinus and a rather stoic one…like his father.

Nevertheless, I worry. This son is an ocean away, battling a bug, taking classes in a language he’s fairly fluent in…but still.

But still I feel vaguely sick…homesick for having him home, knowing all the time, as I did the first time he went away for a protracted amount of time, that it’s just the harbinger of things to come…the natural order of things.

If we do our job right as parents, if we follow our intuition and care for our children, it’s their job to leave us.

Peter Pan

I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up

Not me!

Not I,

Not me!

Not me!

I won't grow up...

We sat in the pediatrician's office, waiting for a routine 'well baby' check up...maybe our baby was three months old?  The woman across from us cradled a much larger child, silky black hair spilling down his shoulders, a tiny spittle of drool at the corner of his mouth. He wore blue. His actual age was four. His mental age was six months. And would be forever. He had been thrown from the back of a pick-up truck along a stretch of Arizona highway when he was just a baby. The woman was his caseworker waiting with him for a check-up.

Now our baby is a world away on his second sojourn, navigating university classes in a foreign language. When Erik first  approached us about going to Germany, he was barely in his teens.  At sixteen off he went, as a foreign exchange student. So many people asked us how could we let him go? 

How could we not?