VACA is Over

Yawn.  The alarm goes off for the first time in months.  Ive gotten so used to sleeping i these last two weeks while my kids have been off this is no fun.  Between this, the menopause, the mid-life poor sleep, the snoring husband, the son home from college making a ruckus till all hours and the damned dog in my bed, I feel fatigued before I've even  begun the day. There is nothing like breaking out of a routine.  Every body needs that.  And every BODY needs that.  But that lucious unstructured time at night watching movies with the kids or long luxurious meals with no one scooting away to do homework.  I miss it already.  I am mourning it this morning. For two weeks I slept and ate.  I didnt worry about exercise or being somewhere exaclty at a particular time-- most days anyway.  It was glorious.  This is what it must feel like to be Paris Hilton's monther.  I hear donce that she sleeps till 11:00 am every morning.  Someone had asked if she could help with a school carnival and when she found out the early time required, she had to decline. Maybe that's one of those urban legends but it still cracks me up. On the other hand I'd hate that.  As much as I'd love just a few more hours of sleep, i love my routine in the end.  I love being the first one up, the dark house, the early morning routine.  I love pressing the button on the coffee-maker and pouring that first, milky cup. Vacations are vacations because they are a break from the routine.  They come just in time to rescue us from ourselves and to remind us why they are so special. So forgive yourself this week and you ease back into the routine after new years.  And break a few resolutions-- just because you can!

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Editing Christmas

This article appears in the December issue of Woman's Day Magazine:

The Best Christmas Ever

The kids were asleep, or at least faking it, as my husband and I pulled presents out of well-worn hiding places and stacked them under the Christmas tree. One after they other, out they came, wrapped in my cheap dime store paper. Some had my “Santa “ writing on little tags, others were designated with a black plain black marker.

I’m one of those Moms who buys Christmas present in July. But the problem with that is sometimes you forget how much you have. I had gone way over-board this year. There were lots of little things, nothing truly expensive. But by the time we finished unloading the stash it was an embarrassment of riches.

The next morning my kids’ eyes popped out when they spotted the tree. And as our slow, methodical way of opening them dragged on, even the younger ones lost enthusiasm for the pile. I snuck a few unopened presents away to stash for their birthday in April. So what if they were wrapped with snowman paper? I was practical and thrifty.

It wasn’t my kids who had asked for lots of stuff. This was me, trying to make it the best Christmas ever, hoping to add yet another wonderful remembrance to the family memory bank. “How did we get here?” I wondered, looking at the dozens of useless items strewn around the room.

When I thought back, my best Christmas ever had been the complete opposite of this past Christmas of excess. It had been the very first one my husband and I had spent as a married couple. Bob and I had just been married in the fall of 1988 and had moved to Beijing, China where he was teaching and I was working. Our “home” was a simple concrete dorm room with twin metal beds pushed together and no drinkable water in the bathrooms. We’d arrived in China with backpacks and had mailed a few boxes of other supplies by sea, which showed up months later. As the holidays approached, we realized we had no decorations, nothing in this communist country to make us feel like home. Both of us missed our families terribly. It would be the first Christmas each of us had spent away for them.

The week before Christmas, a box arrived from Bob’s mother packed with some practical items we’d requested like cereal, a warm vest and some tall flip flops to avoid the group bathroom’s filthy floors. Nestled between these gifts was an eight inch high, fake Christmas tree, complete with mini ornaments. Pulling the tree out of the box and unwrapping it, my heart soared. When an American couple at the school gave us an Amy Grant Christmas tape for our boom box, we had all that we needed.

I don’t remember what, if anything, I gave Bob or he gave me. It was a time in our life when we needed few possessions. We had nothing, just one another and the new foundation of marriage we were building. Our first four months in this very foreign land had been difficult in so many ways and magical in others. We had come to rely on each other, respect and love one another without the usual newlywed distractions of the brand new house, sparkling engagement ring, wedding presents, circle of friends and family in which to confide or vent.

I can still picture the room that Christmas morning in 1988 when we awoke. The song “Tennessee Christmas” will always take me back to that holiday, where we lit a candle under that miniature tree and played the Christmas tape that has now become part of our annual family ritual.

The little tree is still in our ornament box. Battered from having moved so much, it’s branches have opened and shut like a parasol for the last two decades. For the past five years, I’m not sure it has even been unpacked, so voluminous are our decorations.

In reaction to this past holiday, I have decided to make that little tree the centerpiece of our holiday this year. I will tell the story of that first Christmas to my children, explain to them that although there were no presents to unwrap, the gift to each other was the beginning of our family, the understanding that the best was yet to come as our life together stretched before us. This year there will be fewer items under the tree and more of the gifts that really count; love, music, togetherness, home-baked cookies, less rushing and more cherishing.

Of course, real life being what it is, it may not happen exactly the way I envision now in the months leading up to the holidays. But just the thought of slowing us down, of focusing on the simplicity and meaning of that little tree, rather than what lies under it may bring back some of the magic that the holidays offer to the very young and the very in love. I want to teach my children that the best gifts are the things we say and do for one another, the moments we can remember and hold in our minds long after the present has passed. These are the greatest treasures of families throughout the world, the gifts that evoke the magic of that long ago, very first tree.

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The Dodgeball Dilema

In our family, the game of dodgeball has become a kind of moral and ethical template by which we judge people’s character.

It all started with my nephew Collin at a family dinner. We were grilling him about a kid his age, someone we vaguely knew. “He’ s an OK guy,” answered my nephew, thoughtfully chewing his burger. “But he cheats at dodgeball.”

We got it. We all got it. Dodgeball, a game we all played in the summer, had become the arbiter of whether or not someone was a decent human being at their core, honest and ethical.

For those of you who don’t know, the game of dodgeball has made a comeback. There are even college teams. It’s kindler and gentler now and much more PC than when I was in middle school. You don’t try to nail the chubby girl in the back row who eats paste or the kid with duct tape on his glasses who picks his nose.

Dodgeball is a process of elimination; a survival of the fittest. It begins with organized chaos as two teams square off with dozens of balls being hurled in the air. Unlike baseball or basketball, where all eyes are on the person who has the ball, dodgeball has dozens of balls all flying around at the same time with the goal of nicking any body part below the neck. If you get hit, you are out. Pure and simple. In the craziness of the first few minutes, it is often one person’s word over another’s. This means it is largely up to the individuals to police themselves.

There are those that get hit and try to get away with it. There are some who fight the call when challenged. Others give in and slyly slink off when called on the carpet. And then there are those who immediately come clean when they’ve been hit. Even when no one is watching, they pull themselves out of the game and onto the sidelines.

As a parent, I aspire to raise one of those kids. Oh, I’m well aware that cheating at dodgeball doesn’t mean a kid is destined to a life of robbing banks, kiting checks or pulling the legs off flies. But I found it interesting that my own nephew had arrived at the dodgeball test on his own. I like the fact that one teen could identify a kind of touchstone to determine the stuff of which his peers were made.

I recently watched an R-rated movie with my daughter and two of her friends. It was mostly inappropriate humor but I made sure to ask both kids if this was OK with their parents. I was impressed when each girl wanted to call their mothers to double check.

When I commented to my daughter about how wonderful it was that her friends did this, she immediately jumped on me. “Mom, I have never seen an R rated movie ever. And I would always ask you first,” she huffed defensively. OK, she passed the dodgeball test on that one.

The dodgeball test may be one little marker, one silly way we can look at an element of a person’s character. But cheating at dodgeball is just one of many small but critical transgressions I see today that we need to remain vigilant about when it comes to our kids. So many of life’s little lessons are being lost in our haste to be “friends” with our kids, or unnaturally force our lives to be completely “kid-centric” (a term that makes the hairs on my forearm stand up).

By being afraid of drawing too many boundaries, we are letting slide a lot of opportunities to teach good old-fashioned citizenship and manners. Like the dodgeball test, we can all be judged by an aggregate of the little things; respect for the elderly, giving up your seat on the train, looking people in the eye, delivering a firm handshake. As parents, we get sick of nagging about these things, but in the end, their presence or absence tells us something about an individual. I have a warm spot in my heart for a young man who calls me Ma’am, even though it makes me sound like an ancient crone.

I want my children to understand that there are consequences for actions. That means we need to follow through with our threats, not make the hollow remarks I hear screamed at kids in the grocery store aisles.

There is a famous parenting story about a family traveling to Disney World. Maybe you know this one, although I wouldn’t be surprised if it is an urban myth. Exasperated by the dreaded “when will we be there” question, the parents told the kids if they asked one more time, they wouldn’t be able to go to Disney World. Legend has it when little Johnny broke the rule, they stuck to their guns. They had to. The miserable parents went to the park by themselves all day, hiring a sitter for the kids in the hotel room.

I know I sound just like the grandmas of a generation before, cluck-clucking at that hip-swivelin’ rock’n’roll music. Or, heaven forbid, I sound like Tipper Gore sounded to me in the 80s about record lyrics, until I had my own kids and listened to some of the misogynist bondage rap stuff on the radio one day. I began to channel Tipper Gore that day, taking back everything I had ever muttered about her and freedom of speech.

When we lived in Phoenix in 1995, in the span of two weeks I left my wallet on top of my station wagon twice and drove away. Those were really exhausting days with two kids under four and a full-time home business. The second time it happened, I set the wallet on top of the car as I wrestled both kids into their car seats and then drove away. When I got home, I realized immediately what I had done and burst into tears.

Lo and behold, the phone rang a few hours later. A man had found the wallet and he lived 20 minutes away in what I knew to be a somewhat shady neighborhood. I was making bets that the money was gone and I was furious with myself because I had just been to the cash machine and withdrawn my bi-weekly budget. Planning on giving him some of the money in my wallet as a reward, I also stopped and bought a 12-pack of beer. I figured in his hood they could all have a little party.

When I rang his bell, clutching my two kids to me in the dark, the man who answered the door was in flowing robes, with a top knot of hair. I quickly reached into my limited knowledge of Eastern religions and dimly recognized that he was a Sikh. As I thrust the beer at him in gratitude, he practically jumped back in disgust. “We don’t drink in our religion,” he said. And my humiliation at my sanctimonious neighborhood profiling was complete. The wallet was intact, with every dollar accounted for.

One thing I knew for sure. If that man, the one who found my wallet on the asphalt of the grocery store parking lot, had been tagged out in dodgeball and nobody saw him? He would have quietly taken himself out to the sidelines. Can you say the same?

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