Happy 21st Birthday to my firstborn

Last night I laid awake pondering everything I need to do to meet work deadlines. Fortunately a marathon baking session on the weekend took care of the last of the big holiday prep. But I wanted to make time to write a birthday blog post about older son, Erik. He’s studying abroad in Seoul, South Korea and turned 21 today in his time zone.

Lying in bed I imagined the low tones of Garrison Keillor intoning, “It was a quiet week in Lake Wobegone” resonating in my swirling thoughts.

Except it hasn’t been a quiet anything here on the prairie with time for reflection and musings. I went back and read what I penned two years ago, which struck me as a lovely paen to a son’s birthday along with being a thoughtful essay on children growing up.

This year he’s just getting cash.

But I still feel I would be remiss if I didn’t at least note this milestone birthday. A little more than two years ago, I started blogging for a variety of reasons, including writing about holding on and letting go of children, facing a new decade, and switching to writing fulltime.

Ironically the busier I get as a writer, the less time I have to write. That’s a good thing. But I do miss mulling and musing.

On the other hand, I’ve come a long way in the holding on and letting go department. The death this week of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il didn’t send me into paroxysms of inner turmoil because I have a child in South Korea. Erik and his father talk U.S. and world politics; I prefer to handle the more mundane topics.

At six a.m., Seoul time, late afternoon prairie time, Erik called just to chat. I wished him a happy birthday and before we hung up, asked him if he needed anything. He said maybe thirty dollars for food money when he hits the San Francisco and Denver legs on the long trip home. I told him I’d have his father deposit fifty. I also like to handle another ‘m’ word: money.

This is the child who left home at 16 to be a foreign exchange student in Germany. Now that his younger brother, Andrew, is driving, I marvel we let Erik drive cross-country at age 17 in an aging Honda Civic with 200,000 miles on it and no air conditioner. Andrew could do it, but I don’t think I could stand the worry the second time around.

But of course I could and would. When it’s time for the chicks to fly the nest, and the timing is different for each son or daughter, I know to step back and enjoy the beauty of the flight. This doesn’t mean it’s not difficult, but it does mean we did our job as parents right.

Later this week, Erik will be winging his way home for a short duration. I want to wish this son, born in record cold in Arizona 21 years ago, a happy birthday.

Sometimes I marvel how I can remember each detail of that day snow dusted the cacti and can’t remember yesterday. But I think that’s why parents can let go and yet hold on.

Memories don’t leave us, even when our children do.

Happy Birthday, Mom

On the Ides of March, my mother was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan to Reinhart Rock, a pharmacist, and Violet Stubbe Rock, the daughter of a grocer. The previous year my grandmother had gone off to college with a car, a fur coat, and a high IQ, intending to study journalism. She met and married my grandfather and gave birth to my mother, Barbara. Later my Uncle Jimmy and then my Aunt Judy came along.

This is intended to be my mother’s story, but aren’t we all the product of our own mother’s stories?

My grandmother was a so-so parent… good with her children and grandchildren when they were young but lacking overall in the maternal instincts department. She wasn’t a bad mother by all accounts; she just wasn’t the superlative mother my siblings and I were fortunate to have (still). On my late uncle’s birthday he was always ‘king for a day.’ My mom and Aunt Judy were never ‘queens for a day’ on their birthdays.

Not that my siblings and I were feted like royalty on our birthdays, although we did get out of dishes. It’s just my mom was and is scrupulously fair, treating all her offspring alike.

She’s also generous to a fault, a trait inherited from her father. My mom turned her childhood pastime of collecting picture postcards into a lifelong adult avocation; for 25 years she sponsored a mail postcard sale with all proceeds going to world hunger relief.

One thing my grandmother excelled at was taking her three children (sans my grandfather who never took vacations), her sister, her nephew, and her father on cross-country trips. My grandma loved to drive, a trait neither my mother nor I inherited. Ironically, the only driving that ever did her in was hilly pre-Interstate West Virginia (birthplace of my second son).

Though a voracious reader herself, my grandmother always prodded my mother to ‘put down her’ book and go outside to play. My mom has never been an outside person.

From a very early age, as I’ve recounted before, my late Aunt Judy would make breakfast for my mom and their brother. Grandma

Rock preferred to sleep in. To this day, I tease my mom about her lumpy oatmeal; but I’m also grateful to have a mother who got my three siblings and me up every morning for school and made us breakfast.

My mom used to say all she ever wanted to be was a mother, although her original career plan was to be a lawyer. She was accepted at law school but ended up teaching school while my father finished college.

She didn’t like teaching; she liked being a mother. Decades ago my pregnant mother thought she had indigestion from Christmas dinner, but it was just me… coming a little early.

This is one of our shared stories, a part of the family mythos. In a December eons later, I gave birth to my first son on one of the coldest days on record in Arizona. ‘It was so cold there was snow on the cactuses’ has become part of the thread of our life stories.

In addition to being my mother, she’s also my writing partner. She’s the author of more than 50 novels, and the co-author with me of more than 30 of those.

In addition to being my parent and partner, she’s something else.

My mother is and always has been my best friend. She never hovered but was there when needed. She never belittled and always encouraged and always had my back. She’s continually been there for me and my siblings and now our families, always knowing the right thing to say and do. For more than a dozen years, she’s lived with my husband, sons and me. Sure we have our differences, but we never stay mad for long.

I’m fond of another family story, one where my five-year-old self stood at the top of the stairs and threw a tiny brass vase down at her. She gave it back to me when I was 18. I try to stay on her good side.

Twenty-nine years ago this month, my Grandma Rock died. I was a senior in college, struggling through a physics class to meet a science requirement (because I’d flunked a science class the previous spring). Another class was also giving me fits. I was taking way too many hours, working at the university newspaper and applying for jobs, making sure I’d graduate so I could get a job and get married.

I loved my grandma. She spoiled me rotten (but I knew it so that made it less odious, I think), letting me stay up til all hours of the night watching Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, and old Clark Gable movies. She used to fill paper cups with M&Ms, mini-marshmallows, and cashews for my ‘midnight snack.’ No mystery why when my son and his girlfriend were stranded in Denmark in a huge snowstorm a couple years ago, I buried my face in a bag of candy-coated comfort. She was a good grandma when we were young.

Because I loved my grandma and because I was afraid I was going to flunk yet another science class, my mom gave me a wonderful gift. She told me to stay home from the out-of-state funeral and study, absolving me of all guilt for not going.

That’s the kind of mom my mom is.

Happy Birthday, Mom. I love you.

Happy Birthday, Leigh

I’m a whiner. I admit it. Not about the big stuff but the middlin’ stuff like shoes that pinch and birthdays that end in zero.

So I spent most of 2009 whinin’ and complainin’ about turning 50, which I did last December 26^th. I shoulda just kept my trap shut since I had the best birthday ever thanks to my wonderful friend, Leigh Limerick Rosenecker, formerly of North Carolina, currently residing in Morgantown, West Virginia.

As I wrote last year in this space Leigh, “mom extraordinaire, ace cake decorator and one-day Jeopardy champ, set up a Facebook group to secretly gather 50th birthday greetings for me. She printed the messages out, cut them into strips, punched holes and stuck multicolored birthday candles into them before mailing them off to my husband.”

Once I stopped crying, I had simply the best birthday ever. New friends gathered to help me celebrate as my cake with 50 candles blazed, the greetings from family and old friends more warming than the flames.

Tonight when the clock strikes midnight Leigh hits one of those ‘ends in zero’ birthdays. And I want to wish this extraordinary friend an extraordinarily happy birthday.

We met one summer nearly a decade ago in room three of Martin Hall, home to the school of journalism at West Virginia University, in a reporting class I was teaching. She was an ‘adult student,’ along with our still-friend Steven. Her presence left one classmate ‘star struck’ because he’d grown up listening to her father, Doug Limerick, a longtime radio newsman /sometime replacement host for Paul Harvey.

Her presence immediately enriched my life. Some people tell stories; Leigh is the story. When she started talking in her rich voice ripe with traces of her North Carolina-ness, I never wanted her to stop. Whether it was about making biscuits on an old cast-iron stove or covering a story for her then employer about antique firearms, I wanted to hear more.

Leigh’s heart is as big as her talents, which include writing, baking, being smart (‘Nice girl but about as sharp as a sack of wet mice,’ is the self-effacing Foghorn Leghorn quote she embraces & uh, Jeopardy big bucks winner!) and mothering. She has two adorable towheads, Colin and Charlie.

Because it’s your birthday, Leigh, I won’t make any comments about Alton Brown-like hairstyles! Leigh is not a fan of Mr. Brown and should probably be the next Food Network star, though she shuns the spotlight.

This woman is stunning and funny and warm and sincere and ribald and clever and the best friend, the kind you can just pick up with after months of only conversing via a social media site.

If you were the 21^st century equivalent of the little match girl, Leigh would take you in, warm you up, introduce you to her goldfish, and feed you cookies.

And if you were a whiney, cranky woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown over a date on your birth certificate, she would gather up words, your most cherished thing (besides your own children) and shower you with them.

Thank you again, my dear friend. And Happy Happy Birthday!

P.S. Your real present will be in the mail…

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.

Happy Birthday, Nancy Drew

Intrepid girl detective Nancy Drew is 80 today, a fact I learned from the Facebook status update of one of my former journalism students when she linked to this USA Today article. (Thanks, Melissa Hostutler!)

Immediately I followed suit, linking to the article and wishing ‘Nancy’ a happy birthday too. Soon other friends of mine were sharing their reminisces of the books that gave all of us countless hours of joy when we were young.

Several prominent women, including Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and former First Lady Laura Bush have listed Nancy Drew as an influence.

Nancy Drew was a huge influence on my decision to become a journalist (I’m too cowardly to snoop around scary attics!) and a writer in general. Ironically, as big a mystery fan as I am…I don’t have a mystery writer’s ‘voice.’ And my mother/writing partner (my other big influence!) and I don’t have a collective mystery voice together.

But we share a love for stories with mystery and mayhem.

Nancy and her pals Bess and George were always on the trail of bad guys (or gals…?), zipping around in her speedy roadster. Good-natured Ned was secondary, and we readers know poor Mrs. Gruen could never rein Nancy in.

Years later, as a mother, I think Nancy would never have been allowed to get into all the ‘scrapes’ she did if her mother was alive. No figuring out “The Clue of the Velvet Mask” or “The Secret in the Old Attic” or “The Mystery at Lilac Inn.”

As a child, nothing made me happier than to get to stay home sick from school, tucked into my top bunk in the room I shared with my sister, a pile of Nancy Drew mysteries by my side.

When I was a child organized sports didn’t exist for girls (I woulda been a halfway decent soccer player…at ten), and it wasn’t until mid-year of sixth grade that the fairer sex was allowed to wear pants to school in the small Michigan town I lived in.

Happy Birthday, Nancy Drew. You’ve come a long way, and so have we.

Best Birthday Ever

My wonderful friend Leigh Rosenecker, mom extraordinaire, ace cake decorator and one-day Jeopardy champ, set up a Facebook group to secretly gather 50^th birthday greetings for me. She printed the messages out, cut them into strips, punched holes and stuck multicolored birthday candles into them before mailing them off to my husband.

Now that’s a true-blue friend.

I had the best birthday ever. Thank you Leigh, my husband, my mom, my sons, the friends who joined us tonight and the friends and family near and far who gave me the best birthday wishes ever.

Fifty is the new fifty.

20th Birthday

30th Birthday

40th Birthday

50th Birthday!!!

Fifty is an Even Bigger Number

One can take a multitude of approaches toward aging.

There is the poetic and profound:

The Young Man’s Song by W. B. Yeats
I whispered, "I am too young,"
And then, "I am old enough";
Wherefore I threw a penny
To find out if I might love.
"Go and love, go and love, young man,
If the lady be young and fair,"
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
I am looped in the loops of her hair.

Oh, love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away,
And the shadows eaten the moon.
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
One cannot begin it too soon.

Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

There is the concise:

As we grow old…the beauty steals inward. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is the tongue-in-cheek approach, such as this one for soon-to-be-empty nesters:

The best way to keep kids at home is to make the home a pleasant atmosphere...and let the air out of their tires. -- Dorothy Parker

I’m rather fond of this folksy truism:

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter. -- Mark Twain

Finally, I derive comfort from the following:

I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming... suddenly you find - at the age of 50, say - that a whole new life has opened before you. -- Agatha Christie

Fifty.

Anyone who’s been within close proximity, literally or cyber-ly, to me this fall knows I’ve been moaning and groaning my way toward fifty. Dear Husband and I went the other day to order the cake for Saturday’s birthday pasta party (if the ground blizzards and fitting 50-mph winds don’t keep even in-towners away!). The bakery manager, a cancer survivor and recipient of a two heart stents, told me she’ll hit that number in July and embraces every birthday. She reminded me to do the same. When I wasn’t begging my husband to tell me I looked much younger than her, despite the gray in my hair, he gently pointed out cancer will age a person.

Personally I think the stress eating I’ve done this month has plumped me out so much a wrinkle won’t show until the spring thaw.

But enough about me.

Or at least about this blasted birthday. So I didn’t lose the ten pounds I wanted to, instead managing to find a few. I will, I always do. Beginning now, I’m a full-time free-lance writer, my childhood goal. And for the record, I’m glad I’m not Mrs. Donny Osmond or Mrs. David Cassidy (like there ever was a chance).

And the best piece of advice about this birthday came today from my Great-Aunt Lou, who turns 90 in February.

“It’s just a number, don’t sweat it.”

Thank you poets and scribes and Aunt Lou.

Happy Birthday First-Born

A blizzard plunged the mid-Atlantic region and the East Coast into chaos over the weekend, dumping snow, snarling travel and sending Weather Channel reporters scrambling for shelter. A couple weeks ago a large storm hit here in the Midwest, but since fewer people and less major airports were involved it didn’t merit around-the-clock television coverage.

Nineteen years ago a similar spell of weather affected this part of the country, stretching into the Southwest. It was so cold there was even snow on the ‘cactuses.’

Snow dusting the prickly pears down in Phoenix became part of the ‘mythos’ surrounding the December 21^st, 1990 birth of our first son, Erik, in Flagstaff, Arizona. It was so cold in ‘Flag,’ as the locals called the town nestled at the foot of the San Francisco Peaks, that the pipes in our townhouse froze. My doctor finagled another night’s stay for baby and me so we didn't go home to no water.

My parents braved the bad weather and flight delays to come out to see their first grandchild. At six pounds, Erik was so tiny we called him our little monkey baby. Every year on his birthday, I pull out the scrapbooks (old-fashioned notions in this digital age) and marvel at the small, serious infant cradled in his grandmother and grandfather’s arms that first Christmas. His father looks tired but happy, and I look exhausted.

You start to collect the stories of your baby’s life through photos and memories. The endless sleepless nights that give way to finally sleeping through the night…or not as the case may be with Erik. Thanks to Facebook, even though he’s a world away, tucked behind the old ‘Iron Curtain’ on study abroad on his second sojourn to Germany…I can see he still stays up all night.

Parents of newborns don’t have time to ponder deep truths, such as the goal is to someday have them leave you and go out on their own. Constant diaper changes, 2 a.m. (and 3:00 a.m. and 4 a.m.) feedings, teething, and ear infections all keep a weary mom and dad occupied. Before you know it, your baby walks and talks and turns that milestone of one.

Sooner or later, that toddler gets toilet trained and the momentous first day of kindergarten comes.

Then one day you’re sitting with your spouse at a departmental beginning-of-the-year picnic, and your high school sophomore wanders up and tells you, out of the blue, that he’d like to go to Germany. Glibly, parents say in unison “Find a way to pay for it.”

So your child does and off he goes, at 16, to a foreign country for a year as an exchange student. He writes a new story of his life. The Cliff Notes version: he gets accepted to college a year early, comes home, drops out of high school, gets his GED, goes to college a year early. Then goes back to Germany on a university exchange program.

I was afraid for a moment when we left the hospital 19 years ago that the nurse wasn’t going to give me my swaddled-in-yellow-bunting baby. Somehow I though she was going to tell me I hadn’t studied the mythical ‘parenting manual’ enough and was going to flunk motherhood.

The manual doesn’t exist, and motherhood is a fluid occupation. You love them, and squeeze them and roll with the punches.

And collect all the stories you can.

Happy Birthday, Erik.

Pity Party

My older son is working on his blog about differences he’s observing between eastern and western Germany, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Meanwhile, my professor husband is updating his blog about sweeping changes taking place in the media industry.

Me? I’m indulging in a public pity party.

Recently I had a conversation with my friend Elizabeth, a much younger mom, who is juggling a toddler, a new baby and a full-time job, albeit one with a modicum of flexibility. She’s handling it all with grace and aplomb (and no those aren’t her kids’ names).

Talking to her made me think of Gail Sheehy’s road map to adult life “Passages,” which I haven’t read and Nora Ephron’s paen to sags and bags “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” which I have read.

As the date of my 25x2 birthday approaches, I find myself reflecting (wallowing is more like it) in self-introspection.

I loathe self-introspection. Ask my dear friend Susan.

But I’m not going gently into that next stage or phase or whatever term you prefer.

I spent my thirties having babies and my forties losing (and gaining some back) the baby weight. In addition to working fulltime, writing and doing the whole route of church and school volunteerism (sometimes only a sentence fragment will do!).

As a new decade roars toward me, I stand on the precipice of change.

I love big sweeping change. Ask my husband. Get-used-to-small-things change like new glasses or even new shoes, not so much.

This passage has snuck up on me. I’m no longer the young mom juggling a dozen sticky-fingered balls in the air. Instead I’m an older mom who’s watching her children grow into these amazing near-adult-like creatures.

Maybe I’ll skip the pity party after all and start shopping for a whole lot of birthday candles.

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.