The Penultimate Peril

One of our favorite words around here is ‘penultimate’ – why I’m not sure. I have no recollection if my two sons and I ever got to Lemony Snicket’s The Penultimate Peril, one of a series which we read individually and occasionally collectively when they were young.

Today is my very own ‘penultimate peril.’

Friday morning my youngest son moves into the dorms here at the University of Nebraska-Kearney.  I will be absent from this event, as I was from freshman orientation, due to a doctor’s appointment. I offered, actually begged, to be allowed to attend the afternoon session. But my pitiful parental pleas fell on disinterested teenage ears. This made me absurdly proud and morbidly disappointed at the same time.

I got over it.

All-day meetings will keep college department chair husband busy and not part of the moving in experience either. Future freshman did say if I wanted to help carry stuff up seven flights of stairs to his room, I could tag along.

No thanks. There are elevators, but I have claustrophobia.

His older brother has been in Seoul since early February at his first ‘big boy job’ out of college. He’s currently making plans for his future, none of which seem to involve returning to this continent for an extended period.

I miss him like crazy, but he’s been on the go practically since his forceps delivery twenty-three years ago this December.

Son number two is only going two minutes away, as previously chronicled, but it’s not the minutes – or the miles – but the milestone.

The eldest of four siblings, I only know how to be the first to venture out into the world, the first to get married, the first (barely) to produce a grandchild. 

So with my unconventional firstborn, who practically had his permanent travelin’ bags packed before he had a driver’s license, I adapted a certain stoic stance toward parenting a child infused with wanderlust.

Now it’s time for my youngest, fiercely independent in his own ways, to leave home – even though home will be less than five minutes away. My mom has lived with us since this son, who turned 18 last week, was three. She and I know we’re going to miss him.  A lot.

Recently I read two great pieces on sending children to college, one published in a women’s magazine and one by my friend Diane Tarantini.

I miss my sons because I like them as well as love them. Sure, this one will be close by, but he’s started that journey to adulthood that no parent could possibly wish a child wouldn’t make.

So come Friday and future Fridays, Grandma and I will rattle around in the suddenly empty house – steadfastly refusing my husband’s hints we could get a puppy.  I don’t need anything to take care of now just because both sons will be out of the house.

Besides if I got a dog, it’d probably just run away, not from home, but to something.

Just like my sons.

The Empty Nest

In a few weeks my youngest son moves into a dorm at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, which is two minutes away from our house. The way I’ve been carrying on you’d think he was headed for a college campus thousands of miles away.

I’ve spent a lot of time this summer pondering why I could have been so stoic when my older son left home at 16 to be a foreign exchange student in Germany – and never looked back. He now resides in Seoul, South Korea.

Thanks to my mom, some good friends (thank you Susan and Karin) and years of lecturing parents of incoming freshmen on ‘holding on and letting go’ in a previous life as a college adviser at a big university back east, I know the answer: It’s the end of an era.

The empty nest is truly upon me. No turning back  to the days of field trips to the pumpkin patch and parent-teacher conferences.

As I was writing the above several days ago, my husband passed on e-mail about the move-in schedule for my son’s newly refurbished dormitory.  With each stroke of the keyboard, I was wracked with guilt for feeling sad when other parents have to let go in much more permanent ways.

Last week a 12-year-old boy from this closely knit community died in an accident a few towns away while visiting relatives. He and his parents attended/attend the same large church my family does, and his older brother was in my cohort of confirmation kids, although not in my small group.

The morning of his funeral, despite the good advice of my mom and my wonderful friend Karin, I went to the standing-room only service. I sought Karin’s advice because this  extraordinary mom of a teenage daughter eloquently and tenderly chronicled in her newspaper column the death of her other daughter several years ago--as a baby to a rare disease.

Through the plate glass windows behind where I sat, in the overflow seating in the narthex, I watched the sky cloud over and raindrops spatter the glass. I listened intently as our insightful minister told those assembled that “twelve-year-olds are not supposed to die” and exhorted the congregation to celebrate the deceased boy’s life. Pastor Gary read letters from the late boy’s teachers extolling his heart and kindness. He said not to seek answers where none are available, instead to celebrate this boy’s life – a kid who chose to be an organ donor in his young years.

In the overflow section, I sat by a display board extolling the boy’s elementary and middle school accomplishments. I couldn’t stop looking at the smiling pictures and the certificates honoring his exemplary achievements. Just a couple months ago, my own graduating high schooler and his friends had similar boards on display at their graduation parties. I likened the round of celebrations to cotillion season in the long-ago south. It was such a joyous time.

That rainy morning was saturated with sadness.

As the video montage of pictures of the deceased boy and his family played, I wept as did everyone else. Again, recently I’d sat in that same church with my youngest son and husband and other families at a luncheon honoring high school seniors.

I had trouble sleeping the rest of the week.

This weekend at Sunday brunch conversation at our house turned to college move-in day and activities for incoming freshmen, as well as packing and shopping. My youngest son’s enthusiasm was contagious.

I’m done mourning the end of one era and am ready to embrace the knowledge my youngest child is moving on to a new phase of his life.

Because somewhere another mother’s child is not.

I have to let go--but in a way that makes me want to fall on my knees and be grateful for the opportunity.

Mom Math

For a girl who couldn’t pass basic math modules in college, I excel at stats, memorable and minutiae-ish:

• Birth weight of first son:  6 lbs.
• My weight at first doctor’s apt for first pregnancy: 165 lbs.
• Exact weight of aforementioned son’s “George Bailey” suitcase on the scale at Omaha’s Eppley Airport in the wee hours of the morning on first leg of his trip back to Seoul, South Korea to take a one-year job at the university he attended on a study abroad program: 49.5 lbs. (Over 50 lbs. $100 charge)
• Weight of the world on my shoulders: Pressing but lightening.

Wow.

I hate numbers but yet seem to excel at keeping important stats close to my heart.
 
I wrote the above the day eldest Erik left for Seoul. And then couldn’t think of what else to say. Those who know me well will be guffawing in their seats, unable to imagine me at a loss for words.
 
Lots of ‘em.
 
Eloquent articulation eluded me, however. Especially the eloquent part. And I’m dealing with story problems galore, never my strong suit.
 
“If son A is a gazillion miles away on another continent in many other time zones, and son B is in this time zone and graduates from high school in approximately nine weeks, do we serve a nacho bar or pulled pork and turkey sliders for the graduation party?”
 
See what I mean?
 
What’s going through my mom head – and heart – makes as much sense as those old word problems “If one train is traveling west at 100 MPH from Boston, and another train is traveling 150 MPH east from Chicago, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”
 
Yep, you do see what I mean.
 
Five years ago this month, my husband, younger son (Andrew, he of the upcoming high school graduation), and I traveled to Germany on spring break to visit Erik. He was spending his junior year of high school as a foreign exchange student. It was the ultimate ‘holding on and letting go’ experience for me as a parent. Others followed.
 
Next fall, fall his younger brother heads to college and dorm life five minutes away but it’s not the miles but the milestones that are meaningful (although the miles are a BIG deal too).
 
In another lifetime, I used to spin my spiel about ‘holding on and letting go’ to parents of incoming freshman at a large university back east during incoming student orientations.
 
I still firmly stand by my resolute belief if we do our job right as parents, our children are successfully launched into the world – able to make their own decisions (right and wrong) and deal with the successes and consequences.
 
But I still don’t know if nachos or pulled pork sliders are the answer to my story problem.
 
And I’m excited and nervous to see what the next chapter is.

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.

           

Love is (was) in the air...

…or it would be, if it could find a place to breathe among the piles of papers scattered around my home office. The Valentine’s Day card I bought for my husband more than a month ago is safely tucked away in my sock drawer – I think. And we have tentative plans to go to a $2 showing of The Muppet Movie at the mall theater, plus it’s ‘free popcorn’ night.

In six month’s from tomorrow, we’ll celebrate our 30^th wedding anniversary. My goal is to have the office shoveled out by then. But I can’t complain since it’s my mess. Piles = projects = work = employment in the life of a freelancer.

I wrote the above a week ago, and that’s as far as I got. Valentine’s Day is history, and we’re on to Fat Tuesday. I did find the card, we didn’t make the movie, and the work hasn’t let up -- which is still a good thing.

Mulling exactly where this is going (a treatise on the passage of time? a paean to true love? a procrastination tool to avoid the deadline work staring me in the face?), all that comes to me is how happy it made me to take the morning ‘off’ to dust.

I love dusting, watching the powdery surfaces (okay it’s been awhile!) gleam from a combination of elbow grease and Murphy’s Oil Soap spray. Okay, this chore gets done enough that not much elbow grease is required.

Bathroom cleaning is high on my list too.

Lest I sound like Snow White and Cinderella all wrapped up in one (minus the teeny tiny Disney waistlines, perfectly coiffed hair, and dewdrop eyes), let me add I loathe cooking. Given a choice between sweeping the hearth and preparing a meal, hand me the broom. I’d take soot over char any time.

Fortunately the only time I have to cook is when my spouse is out of town. If I were single, a bowl of Cheerios would be on the menu most nights, but my mom (who lives with us) and I will take turns making dinner when our ‘chef’ is gone. Usually I cook for us, and she cooks for the teenager. His standards are higher than ours. Teenager also can cook as can his older brother, who makes fabulous sushi.

They take after their dad.

I used to cook in the early days of our marriage: homemade macaroni and cheese, beef ‘roly poly’ (yes, it made the eater resemble the name), popovers with Chicken a’ la King….

And I baked, oh did I bake…. (in my defense I do still enjoy baking but try to avoid the kitchen unless scrubbing pots and pans or Windexing something) Pies, cakes, cookies, brownies, lemon bars, biscuits, cinnamon rolls… just typing the words expands my hips.

Of course that all changed when my husband was diagnosed with diabetes more than a decade ago. He took over the cooking to the betterment of both of us.

We’re not thin by any means, but we aren’t as pudgy as we were during those early years. I collect cookbooks (oh the irony!), and sometimes I’ll see a fabulous recipe and think maybe I should try cooking once in a while.

Then I think ‘why’? I know how good I’ve got it (I’m very proud of the fact I’ve never cooked/ruined a Thanksgiving turkey). I have a husband who not only brings home the bacon, he fries it up too.

Saves us a lot of calls to the fire department.

Happy Mother's Day

Happy Mother’s Day, Part 1

Once again, Happy Mother’s Day to all who mother.

I attribute my happiness in life to having a wonderful, supportive mother. She never berated, belittled, or criticized. Rather, she nurtured the very best in all her children and was unfailingly on our side. This doesn’t mean she condoned bad or inappropriate behavior -- not at all. Her standards were high; her love was unconditional. She made being a mother look so effortless that when I had my first child I accused her of making parenting seem too easy.

It wasn’t.

Married to a workaholic school administrator, she was a stay-at-home mom who forged a decades-long writing career that has resulted in more than 50 published novels.

She is my mother, my writing partner for the last 20+ years, and my best friend.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.

Happy Mother’s Day, Part 2

In addition to being a daughter, I am also a mother. An old mother by my reckoning, married at the tender age of 22 and a first-time mom five days shy of my 31st birthday. Had my second son when I was pushing 36.

They turn 16 and 21 this year, so you can do the math.

Unlike my mother, I sadly run a loose(r) ship. Like my mom, I endeavor always to be supportive and value the importance of children stretching their wings.

The other night my older son, Erik, was packing for a train trip East. After a layover in Chicago, he’ll arrive in Pittsburgh, take a Greyhound to Morgantown, WV, liberate his girlfriend’s car and drive to Baltimore to pick her up from college.

I must have asked him half a dozen times if he had packed his tickets.

Like his father, Erik is a transportation junkie. Trains are his preferred mode of travel and his interest in locomotives started at an early age. From “The Little Engine That Could” to Virginia Lee Burton’s better-than-Mike-Mulligan’s-steamshovel “Choo-Choo” to all things “Thomas the Tank Engine,” Erik was a train aficionado.

Of course he had packed his tickets.

I explained to him I feel like I need to catch up on some ‘hover mothering.’ He had come home from his ‘final’ final that same day and announced he’s now a senior in college.

Huh? Seems like only yesterday we were winging to Germany to visit him during his high school exchange year. His little brother, Andrew, is nearly done with his sophomore year of high school.

Erik will be back in a couple weeks, then he’s off again (this time to NYC for a university writing workshop) – via train.

In the fall, he’s hoping to do another study abroad (he studied in Germany again in college). Eventually he’s going to go for good.

Then it will be Andrew’s turn. But it won’t be a totally empty nest since we’ll still have Grandma, thank goodness.

Somehow I recall knowing when I held my tiny (at six pounds we called Erik a ‘little monkey baby’) firstborn son in my arms that long-ago December in northern Arizona, when it was so cold there was snow on the southern cacti, I wouldn’t get to keep him forever.

I just didn’t know the time would come so soon.

Back to the drawing board….

I spent all morning writing a blog post about a defining moment in my life, and Martin Luther King Day seemed the day to articulate these thoughts. We’ve come a long way since Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, but we still need to keep the dream alive.

I then spent less, but more frustrating, time scouring the house for my 1978 Lake Michigan Catholic High School Yearbook. Before doing so, I even logged onto a classmates website for the ‘free’ membership in hopes of finding the photo I was looking for.

Even tho a picture of an old cute neighbor boy of mine popped up as the ‘newest’ member of the site, I still wasn’t tempted to pay the $9.95 not-so-free fee to gain access.

One of the reasons I started blogging was to find my individual, as opposed to collaborative, voice as a writer. Since my writing partner is also my mother, she’s highly supportive of the whole endeavor. Also, I wanted to finally write about things I’ve mulled for years. Like defining moments from my older son’s younger days that have helped shape me into the ‘holding on and letting go’ mom I am.

We spoke yesterday after he returned from the Berlin airport where he saw his girlfriend off on her return trip to the States. Even though Erik flies back in three weeks, he said it was really hard to go to the airport and not be getting on a plane to come home.

So I have a lot on my mind, the words need visuals, and the dishwasher needs unloading.

All I ever wanted was to be a mom and a writer. And some days I just struggle to do either well enough.

Out of the Mouths of Babes

"I quit," I said.

However, as my mother has been kind enough to point out to me in the past, when you’re the mother you can’t quit.

Sigh.

I spent all afternoon writing two pieces, one of them a new blog post. Which I promptly dragged to the trash and emptied. Permanently.

The next logical step was bursting into tears. Which I promptly did.

Parenthood isn’t for wimps.

When you hold that little baby in your arms, you have no idea of the words he or she will say to you down the road…such as “We’re stranded in Denmark.”

Over the weekend, Erik and his girlfriend, Morgan, went to Copenhagen. As I write this, a huge snowstorm has stranded them in a town ‘a piece’ from the village where the ferries dock. The road to the village is impassable, the ferries aren’t running nor are the buses. A train derailed yesterday because of the snow.

And I sobbed over ‘spilt milk,’ or rather lost words.

But not really, which both my older son and I understand. He’s a lot like me, that one. He handles the big things with aplomb, but minutiae such as a coffeemaker not working, frustrates. In a handful of years, he’s handled travel problems that would turn my hair gray…if it wasn’t already. The best word to describe his wonderful girlfriend is ‘plucky.’ They still like each other, even after wading through snow up to her waist to get to a bus to get to a hotel, when the buses were still running.

He’s uber resourceful, like his father. They’ll make it back to Germany, then to the States. I intend to hide his passport when he returns home, however….

Fortunately, for comic relief, I have Erik’s younger brother. High school freshman Andrew and I have a tacit agreement that I won’t write about him unless absolutely necessary.

This is necessary.

Last night, Andrew and I were chatting. He had just watched a movie with Laurence Fishburne in it. He said to me: Do you know that Laurence Fishburne is younger than you. He’s only 48.”

I said “But don’t you think he looks older than me?”

Andrew said “Yes, but he’s built differently than you” to give ol’ Laurence some slack.

Yes, he’s a tall solid black man; I’m a short plump white woman.

Out of the mouths of babes.

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.