Being in the middle of one’s life sounds much better than being in mid-life which conjures images of comb-overs, spraying shoe polish on balding heads, the Cherry Red fast car you can afford only after the kids are out of college, or, as my daughter suggested, “mom jeans”. Today I thought I lost my keys, but then realized my jean pockets go down to my knees. Yup, middle age.
Last weekend my husband gave our three year old a rubber fishing worm out of his fishing tackle box. “Wormy” has since become an important part of our family. We have built Wormy a house, fed him, bathed him, and brushed his teeth. He has even been to work with me everyday this week. He plays I spy, taking his turn through a distorted voice that sounds eerily like the creepy kid from The Shining.
On Monday night, my husband and I got into a heated debate over what we would do if Riley decided to drink and drive. After my husband turned what should have been a hypothetical situation into an interrogation on exactly what I meant by making Riley “earn” his right to drive again, so he wouldn’t kill an innocent mother of five on the road, I said, “Are you serious? His feet don’t even reach the pedals, I think we have some time to figure this out.” “I think we should be more concerned about the fact that he is talking through a rubber worm right now which makes it blaringly apparent he is in need of a sibling,” I finished.
My husband calmed down just as we saw the fridge open and Wormy help himself to some juice.
A few weeks ago I invited my daughter on a nature walk. I was feeling a little housebound by the drizzly weather, and the phrase “nature deprivation” was running through my mind. We both took our cameras, and my hope was that we’d each take a picture of an interesting discovery.
We didn’t go far, just along the little canal that runs through our neighborhood. We saw fish, moss, mushrooms, mold growing on dog poop. We discussed the difference between the natural world and the man made world, and how both worlds converged in and along the canal. I took an interesting picture of tiny bugs suspended in dew drops on a pine needle.
Then my daughter made an interesting discovery of her own. A cell phone at the bottom of the canal. Our outing evolved from a nature walk to a quest to retrieve technology. Equipped with a long stick and a lot of patience, we got the cell phone. My daughter was elated. All the way home she investigated her discovery and discussed what she’d do with the phone once it was clean and dry.
A few days later, Avery asked, “Can we go on another nature walk? I want to find an Ipod Nano.”
I guess the nature walk was a success and I need not worry about nature deprivation any longer.
“Cause we are living in a material world, and I am a material girl.” Madonna
Upon arriving home from work last week, I asked how Riley’s day at preschool went. “It was okay,” my husband told me,“ he didn’t do the deed in the potty.” Yes, we are in the throes of potty training and unfortunately the little prince is refusing to complete the training by going all the way in the porcelain throne. I have lost count of all the Thomas the Train and Disney underpants we have thrown away because I am easily grossed out.
I looked up at my spouse and realized he looked disturbed. “So (insert teacher’s name here) asked me,” he began, “if we had a tub next to the potty.” “Uh, huh,” I encouraged because if I don’t keep it going we will never get to the point getting interrupted fifteen times by the three year old, while I am trying to change my clothes, pet the dog and make dinner. “She said, you know..” he stammers, “I-I could use the tub while he uses the potty to reassure him.” “What do you mean use it?” I asked quietly. He just stared at me.
I looked right at him as I said,” Listen up, you release one turtle dove in the sea and I am never touching that tub again.”
“Well of course I’m not going to do it!” he declares. “I just don’t know if that was what she was implying.” When I told him I was going to ask her the next day if she indeed intended on him freeing the hostages in the tub, he freaked and begged me not to. “What if I misunderstood?” he exclaimed.
In the end I didn’t say anything. I have to admit I felt a little weird the next morning dropping him off wondering if she really was meaning for him to lay cable in our nice, shiny tub. But because I wanted to avoid that awkward exchange, we’ll never know.
I recently read a review of Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers: The Story of Success. One particular concept discussed in the book caught my attention: the 10,000 hour rule. To become an expert at one particular activity, a person must devote 10,000 hours of practice. I got to thinking, am I an expert on anything? Have I devoted 10,000 hours to one particular activity?
I am a dabbler. I have many interests and practice a variety of activities. I bake, but I’m no baker. I’ve made a few quilts, but I’m hardly a quilter. I write, but I would never claim to be a writer. I garden, but dead plants tell no lies - I’m definitely not a gardener. I have not dedicated thousands of hours of practice to any of these interests. There’s only one thing to which I have devoted the majority of my time, well actually two: my children.
I did a little math to figure out how much time I’ve practiced parenting. We sleep about 10 hours a night in my house, which leaves 14 hours a day of active parenting. So just shy of my children’s second birthdays, I reached the 10,000 hour mark. My daughter is eight and a half, which equates to over 45,000 hours. My son, at six, has been the recipient of over 30,000 hours of practice time.
Yet I’m hardly an expert on parenting. I doubt there are many people who could claim expertise in this area, though they might excel at leading you to believe otherwise. Then I realized that all the time spent parenting my children might not have made me an expert on parenting, but rather an expert on my children. There is no one who knows my children as well as I do. The tens of thousands of hours I’ve devoted to my children has made me their exceptional parent, and I’ll continue to excel as their parent the more time I practice. They will be the story of my success.
I was at work one day when the school nurse called to tell me that my fourth grade son was in the nurse’s office. My heart skipped a beat, as it always does when I hear that one of my children is in distress. Fortunately, it has never been too serious. The worst was a fall which resulted in my son breaking his eyeglasses. Then there was the time the nurse called to tell me Ben had vomited on the playground. Schools frown on having vomiting children in their classrooms, so I was asked to pick up Ben and take him home. It turns out that he was investigating a bug on a leaf in the playground when the bug suddenly disappeared. Could it have flown off? Possibly. But my son jumped to the more obvious conclusion that he must have accidentally ingested it. Gag. Puke.
This time, however, the nurse called to tell me that Ben reported sticking a bead in his ear — and he thinks it’s still there. Having already checked my son’s ear for bead work and finding only earwax, the nurse called to suggest I have Ben seen by his pediatrician. Hoping to someday use my vacation time for… oh, I don’t know.. a vacation, I left work early and got Ben to the pediatrician’s office within the hour. Sure enough, she extracted a minute glossy pink bead.
The next day at work, I shared Ben’s antics with my co-workers, a group of women ranging in age from 30s to 60s. Lori, who has children the same age as mine, wondered, “Isn’t Ben a little old to be sticking stuff in his ears?” “You would think,” I said. “But this is Ben.”
Poor Lori. It was too late. She had set the parent karma wheels in motion and within weeks her fourth grade son stuck a BB up his nose where it stayed until the pediatrician extracted it.
It’s tempting to think that fourth graders sticking beads in their ears and noses is a “boy thing”, but my daughter pulled a similar “ought-to-have-outgrown-that” stunt when she picked up a piece of ice she found on the store floor next to a spilled cup of soda. She was six. First off, the three second rule never applies to ice. And it certainly never applies to any item on the floor of WalMart. Eww. Like my son, the thought nearly made me gag and puke.
So the moral of the story is…
Just when you think your children have outgrown a particular phase, they haven’t. Now, won’t you sleep better tonight?
Once in a while you’re fortunate enough to experience an event you know will be logged in the memory banks for a lifetime, a serendipitous moment of grace and love and laughter, for who could have anticipated that the children’s tapes we listened to over and over again on road trips would find their way into my daughter’s hands years later as she scoured the house for tapes to play in her first car, a ‘97 Rav4 equipped with only a radio and tape deck.
I arrived home from work Thursday evening to find my nineteen year old daughter searching for tapes. Erica had already found the Walt Disney tape, the D-I-N-O-S-A-U-R tape, and the soundtracks to Tomie de Paola’s storybook, Strega Nona, and Ray Charles reciting the children’s book, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. She was eager to listen to them, but the only tape players available were in her car and mine. With that, she grabbed the tapes, I grabbed Louie the Shih Tzu, and the three of us climbed into my Toyota mini van parked on the driveway. Having just returned home from a long commute and even longer workday, I had no intention of going anywhere. I turned the key enough to power the stereo, Erica popped in a tape, and Louie, who loves car rides, eagerly awaited the trip. Finally realizing we weren’t leaving the driveway, he settled in for a nap.
The D-I-N-O-S-A-U-R tape was the first, a nondescript white tape with the artist and song names printed in small black letters on each side, its case clear and cracked. Erica vaguely remembers hearing a woman sing for her Kindergarten class and thought I had bought the tape to be enjoyed at home. And so it began. From the van’s stereo we heard, “D-I-N-O-S-A-U-R… That’s the way you spell dinosaur…” Erica quipped that, to this day, she can’t write the word dinosaur without singing the phrase. The tape included other sing-songy hits about the Oviraptor, the Allosaurus and the Tyrannosaurus Rex, songs whose melody and lyrics were so simple yet effective that my daughter and I were amazed by how well we remembered the words now some fourteen years later.
The concert in the car got sillier with the Walt Disney tape. My daughter listens to diverse music and her tastes have expanded from children’s classics to classic rock. The Disney tape was a benefit for pediatric AIDS research and included songs sung by Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Sting, Paul McCartney, Meryl Streep (say wha?), Harry Nilsson, James Taylor, Pat Benatar, and Little Richard, among others. You haven’t heard This Old Man until you’ve heard Dylan’s version with his distinctive intonation.
The concert hit its peak with Little Richard’s Itsy Bitsy Spider. You can’t simply sing along to Little Richard’s version of this classic. It’s a whole body experience, complete with hand gestures, bouncing in your seat and trying to mimic his high pitched squeals. This was about the time my daughter asked me to calm down because the neighbors might see me. Like that was going to stop me.
A few more songs and laughs and I was ready to close the curtain and call it a day. Towns everywhere have streets named for numbers and letters. Fortunately, every town, street and even household has a Memory Lane that can be traveled at will. The trips can be long or short, happy or sad. On a Thursday night in Elk Grove, Memory Lane was the length of a driveway — but it was a trip of a lifetime.