The Gift of Gratitude

The Gift of Gratitude

Published Fall 2010, Your Teen Magazine

It was one of those cold, already-dark 6pm winter nights. As the computer screen flashed ominously before me, three things were on my mind: lost clothing, sunflowers and teen bedroom hygiene.

My middle schooler had just lost his third winter coat of the season, among dozens of other articles, and I was contemplating asking his school to create a custom lost and found bin with his name on it; I was in the midst of planning a time-consuming charity benefit with a sunflower theme, conscious that my resulting lack of exercise was in large part responsible for my burgeoning soft belly as I sat hunched before the computer; I was imagining my teen daughter was somewhere on the second floor spending one more evening lounging in her disaster of a bedroom, ignoring my repeated pleas to clean it. And then there was dinner. Poor, poor pitiful me.

Let’s just say my mood had been better. “If I never see another sunflower again, that will be fine by me!” I raged inside.

As I was about to enter the Amazon site to order yet another book on the teen species, I diverted to my Facebook page and saw a posting from a FB friend and fellow mom. “Check out lemmondrops.blogspot.com by mom Emilie Lemmons,” it said. “It will change your life.”

Up popped Emilie’s last blog entry, titled “The Next…and Probably Last… Chapter of my Life.” It read, in part: “As of yesterday, I am officially in home hospice care. It is time for me to start preparing to die.” Reading that solemn passage caused me to become a snooping excavator, and I soon found myself clicking backwards through her life to a time when it was not so tenuous. Thus, Emilie became me. Complaining about her whiny kids. Lamenting the peculiars of a bathroom remodel. Looking into the eyes of her toddler son and transporting herself to his wedding day.

And I was beyond frustrated over a replaceable loss of a navy blue North Face jacket, size medium?

I became transfixed, and spent the good part of the evening shamelessly prying into Emile’s life and learning one big lesson for my own. I wish I could say that the spell became permanent. That I suddenly sprang forth from that evening filled with one big vat of Gratitude Goolash. And I kinda did. But then the kids got busy, the days got even shorter, the long-planned benefit came and went, and soon, we were all on automatic pilot again.

Then came the rash.

It was an illness like no other I had ever experienced. Along with the full body rash, I had severe muscle pain akin to childbirth. Fever. Death-defying headache. Poor, poor pitiful me spent five days in the hospital. And even the narcotics-supplying infectious disease team had no clue what was wrong.

Suddenly, my duties as a mom in the face of such uncertainty and pain hit me smack in the gut. Thoughts of Emilie visited me again, though I realized I was tasting only a tiny bite of what she had once been forced to consume. But Emilie wasn’t the only one who paid a visit. Something called Humanity knocked on my door as well.

From the former pig farmer/preacher turned male nurse who hilariously exhorted to my flock of scrawny fallen veins during blood draw #16, “Stand and be counted!” to the transportation department employee who sang a Temptations tune as he wheeled me out the hospital’s front door, little instances of human kindness marched before my very eyes. Surely, they all must have their own brand of teenager with which to contend. Yet they sing, empty human waste, and hold hands in the middle of the night.

And all the connections we make as moms, neighbors, relatives and friends suddenly became illuminated. The neighbor I’ve spoken to once in my lifetime? She makes the most amazing chewy chocolate chip cookies. Not to mention that seemingly sullen, uncaring, messy teen of mine who called me each day from school to make sure I was okay. And cleaned her room in my absence. Who knew?

Still undiagnosed and maybe forever so, I returned home from the hospital to this bouquet of human connectedness. A few days later, I visited Emilie again on her blog.

She was at an event a year or so before she died, aware that her condition was serious and lamenting that, in her effort to draw attention to her relatively rare disease, the cause of breast cancer was ubiquitous with its visual pink ribbons.

“Hey!” she wrote. “How about when you see a sunflower you think of me?”

I will, Emilie. I will.

"If My Kids Were My Employees, They Would Have Been Gone Long Ago."

(Orginally published, March 2001, The Cleveland Plain Dealer.....My, how years add perspective!!)

Awhile back, I spent an entire afternoon debating with another mom the merits of a recently installed gate latch at our local baby pool. This from someone who once maintained a color-coded home library of interesting Wall Street Journal articles. What has happened to me?

I've become a stay-at-home mom. And I need help. I was never cut out for this. I'm not like the average mom. It's no question we'd both go to the ends of the earth for our kids; I'd just have to stop and ask directions.

I'm a businesswoman, you see. A doer. A high-acheiver. And all the traits that made me fly in my other life -- pragmatic, structured, strategic thinker -- don't guarantee success in this World of Unpredictability.

Suddenly, my home is my new work environment. My daily planner is crammed with everything from a tickler file of "potential babysitters" to a preliminary agenda for spring cleaning. How did this stuff become so important?

My mind is focused on the things over which I have some control. It's the unpredictable children things I can't organize. Come to think of it, if my kids were my employees, they would have been gone a long time ago.

My uncharted journey called Motherhood started with pregnancy. Not once did I get weepy at the sight of a onsie. I got weepy at the sight of a twosie -- as in when I was two sizes bigger. I chose sensible decor for my nurseries, styles that would grow with the children. You won't see a Pooh Bear mural in our house. And no Barbie light switches, either.

Other moms seem to have a whole box full of "mom" tools at their disposal. For one, they can quickly summon every emotion. They cry with joy at their child's first steps. I wonder about the extra wear and tear on the carpet. They run faster than Michael Johnson to assist in a skinned-knee situation. My motto is, "If you don't cry, I'll stand by."

Oh, and I don't have The Moves. I am always fumbling. For the car keys. For an Oreo lost in the crack of the car seat. My bag always flings to the right while my body flings to the left. Who knows where my child is in this equation? In fact, I once thought I'd lost my son for good. I frantically screamed his name as I ran throughout my older daughter's crowded ballet studio. And he was in my arms the entire time.

I'm not making this up. The other moms looked at me, bemused.

I just don't share the same interests as other moms. Before I had children, a friend who is a young mother told me my shopping priorities would happily change with kids. "You'll never walk into a store again just for yourself," she gushed. "You'll always walk to their department first."

Never happened. And I don't foresee it happening until my daughter and I are the same size. In fact, shopping for me has always been a grab-and-bag procedure, unlike other moms who look at it as a leisure sport. You won't see me aimlessly wandering about the mall with my designer double stroller.

Another black mark on my motherhood resume is that I don't play well. The problem is, I'm too goal-oriented. I've come close to writing a strategic course of action for a nature walk. My brow sweats if I can't duplicate the Lincoln Log home shown on the box. Playing with the Little Tykes dollhouse makes me wonder about my own home's peeling paint on the basement walls. And what color scheme would be good for the kids' teen years.

Okay, I know what you're thinking, especially you older parents: "Enjoy this time now. It goes by so quickly."

But I've come to realize the ironic part of toddlerhood, of which my children are members. The very characteristics of their ages make it almost impossible to sit back and enjoy. I did that once and found apple sauce mixed in with my Oil of Olay.

Good thing my first child is so responsibile. She keeps me on my toes. When she was two, I asked her to give her baby brother a particular object for which he was clamoring. She reminded me he could choke on it. She was correct.

By now, you must think I'm the emotionless Grinch of all parents. Worse than Donald Trump himself if he were to ditch doing deals for diapering. And you know what? I did too, for awhile. But then I stopped watching all those Nick at Nite Brady Bunch reruns. And I stopped wondering what was wrong with me and just accepted that this is how I was made. I even found a few Others like me. At least ones who would admit it publicly. You know who you are.

Most importantly, I look at my kids. They are simply God's gift to this planet. Though this job is the hardest one I've ever had by far, where else can one actually produce and develop a Human Being? My kids are turning out pretty neat. Come to think of it, if they were my employees, a reward system might be in order. But only if they first met some pre-established goals, of course.

Help! My Teenager Didn't Turn Out Like I'd Planned!

(Originally published Spring 2010, Your Teen Magazine)


This is so not how I thought it would turn out.

I didn’t want a daughter as a shopping mate. Or to practice fancy hairstyles. In fact, I still haven’t quite perfected those skills myself. No, my daughter and I were going to lob tennis balls while discussing the classics. Jane Austen. Tolstoy. And perhaps a little Danielle Steele thrown in for good gossipy measure.

Or so this is what I imagined when the doctor placed this beautiful bundle-of-reading-potential-joy in my arms on February 3, 1996.

The experts say to model reading behavior if you want your child to love reading. So I read while breastfeeding. I read while making dinner. I read while breastfeeding and making dinner, as only we multi-tasking supermoms know how to do. You want modeling? I was Kate Moss with reading glasses.

The experts also recommend reading aloud to your intended bibliophile. And so I read to her while making Play-Doh. I read to her while playing in the sandbox and at the playground. You get the picture. I did everything by the ironic book, which we mature moms now know doesn’t exist. We are well aware that The Official Book on Childrearing is obsolete because it seems the inconsistent subject matter called kids alters the standard advice.

The day she read her first very own sentence, I immediately dragged a chair down the attic stairs for a featured spot in her bedroom. “This is your reading chair!,” I boomed. “You will go great places in this chair! China! Indonesia! You will follow a freaky talking rabbit down a hole and land in weird places with more freaky characters!

I think I may have scared her.

She read. A little. Got good grades. But really enjoyed her hair. And shopping. And pretty, sparkly things. Everything I did not. And the reading chair became a place to deposit all these shiny, sparkly things.

“Mom, about that reading chair,” my then 10-year-old daughter said one day as she bounded down the stairs with her perfectly coiffed hairdo. “Yes?” I asked expectantly, hoping she was up for a trip to the library. “The fabric selection sucks,” said she.

So I gave it up, just as my award-winning athletic sister learned to do one beautiful fall day while prodding her young son to join her in a football toss. (This is the same boy who had heretofore decided the dirt baseball infield was a much better canvas for drawing monsters with random sticks, as opposed to catching careening hard balls.) As the football lofted through his skinny outstretched arms and landed in a pile of leaves, he exclaimed, “Mom! Look at these amazing leaves! Let’s go make a collage!” As she tells it, that’s the day she put away not only the football but her expectations. She saw the football; he saw the leaves.

A funny thing about these things called Parental Expectations. No matter how hard we try to hide them, the kids know they’re there. And not always, but something often happens when we parents put away our expectations. The kids want them back. But on their own terms.

It has happened a bit with my teenage girl. I’m not going to lie and say she’s a junior literature professor. But she reads a little and likes it. And the minute I stopped talking about tennis, she started. She plays on her school team and I feign interested indifference. Just last week she asked me to volley with her, but I was too tired. (Note: I was 14 years younger when I thought we’d make a good pair.)

More importantly, I have learned that adventures are not always reserved for reading chairs and young children. They are all mine, thanks to my daughter’s wisdom. I now notice the silk knotted fabric trim on fancy restaurant chairs. The world of hair straightening products has been mine to discover. And don’t even get me started on Project Runway!

When we love our kids for who they are, we learn a few things about ourselves. This is so not how I thought it would turn out. It’s better.

Temporary Best Friends

(Orginally published April 2002, The Cleveland Plain Dealer)

I think it was somewhere between the pot stickers and chop suey that I looked up and saw her. And all I could think of was the lyrics to Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road.”

As she made her way closer to our table, my memory overflowed with boys and “the Buzzard,” softballs and sore legs. Then, just as suddenly, the type of guilt often associated with painful break ups hit me in the gut. I wanted to hide.

She was my confidant, my kooky sidekick. Her page-long autograph is featured on the inside cover of my yearbook. She is someone I don’t know anymore. She is one of my long-ago temporary best friends.

We all have them. People whose contribution to your life is measured not by duration, but by direction. They are in large part why you stand where you do today. And there’s usually no reason and every reason for why they fade from your life. But your smiling eyes linger a bit longer on their names each year when organizing your holiday card list.

I wanted to hide when I saw her because I knew our conversation would be, at best, awkward. I also knew how wrong it would seem that what we had would be reduced to long pauses and nervous giggles in a Chinese restaurant. Most of all, I didn’t want to Make Plans. I just didn’t. Somewhere along the way, our lives didn’t fit together anymore.

Not all of my former temporary best friends elicit this response. Sometimes you’ll find me sprinting through a mall to grab a hug from one of “those people I don’t know anymore.” Maybe their contribution to my life has become romanticized over time. Maybe some of them wouldn’t even be held in such high regard if we had become friends of a more permanent kind.

But when I truly think about this subject, my mind immediately wanders to the summer of nearly two decades ago when the planets were perfectly aligned to summon to my realm of the Universe an amazing group of temporary best friends.

It was the best and worst of times. I had finally come to the realization that my seven-year relationship was not going to produce a potential marriage that was going to produce a potential son named Brandon Alex who was not going to potentially stand at the corner of Elm and Pine to catch a bus to the school where I would potentially be PTA president in six years.

I felt like an astronaut who had lost her tether to her mother ship. And then they arrived to pull me in. Some were new friends, some old. Our common thread seemed to be that we were all “in between” things -- marriages, careers, colleges. Perhaps we needed each other.

Soon, this city girl was camping and white water rafting. I even stopped wearing make-up and became a vegetarian folk concert goer. Rather, we became vegetarian folk concert goers.

On any given night, you’d find us dusting the dirt with our bikes on the path. And every mile I pedaled that summer, with sweat and shallow breath, was one more mile towards my new uncertain future.

I often think of a photo I have from that time taken on the day the guys moved me into my very own apartment -- the apartment that would eventually come to foster my independence that led to self-financed vacations and solitary hikes through the Metro Parks. The place where I was re-introduced to me.

My smile is exuberant and my arms are wrapped around my personal movers. And they are holding me up with one arm and flexing their sofa-hauling muscles with the other. Literally and figuratively.

Soon after my move, I stopped considering dates’ last names as my own. And after that, I stopped considering dates at all. I was too busy biking all over Canada and experimenting with vegetarian recipes. And when I met what was to be my future husband, the fact that I had a life gave me life.

What has become of this group? Most of us try to arrange a gathering every year or so. We are no longer “in between” but well in the middle of our careers, marriages, children. Sometimes there are awkward moments as we catch up on our daily lives. But mostly we give bear hugs, look deep into each other’s eyes and see how far we have come.

So here’s to all of our temporary best friends. Our camp buddies, college party animals and former co-workers. It’s not that we hardly knew ‘ye. It’s just that, for a very short time, we knew you very well. And we are far better for it.

And here’s to my future temporary best friends – those soccer moms and school levy parents I’ve yet to bond with and share a different sort of challenge – growing children years. I can’t wait to meet you. But I’m warning you. I make a mean tofu casserole.