Life Begins at 40

By: Holly VAnderhaar

I love being in my 40s. No, really. I do. It’s not all a bed of roses, of course. I don’t love all the gray hair (or the cost involved in hiding it), and I’m not crazy about the tendency of body parts to expand and/or move southward. I expected to be battling these things in my 40s, though. The physical deterioration comes as no surprise, and, anyway, I still look pretty good for my age. What is surprising is that, inside, I feel about 25. Better, actually. At 25, I was an emotional train wreck —or, at best, a partial derailment. Now I’m responsible, a reliable employee, a good parent (most of the time), and on an even emotional keel. But I don’t feel “mature” in the way that my younger self would have expected to feel at this age. I thought that when I was 45, I would feel 45, whatever that means. I don’t, not even close. I giggle with my girlfriends like we’re still in high school. I’m happier than I’ve ever been. I’m more optimistic.

I think what’s made the difference is that I don’t care anymore what people think, and I don’t compare my life to others’ and find it wanting. My 25-year-old self, hearing a fortysomething express those feelings -that cliché that life begins at 40- would have thought, “How sad.” My 25-year-old self would have seen it as a massive rationalization, or self-consolation, or a kind of giving up. She would have thought, “That person is trying to make peace with the inevitability of getting old,” and she would have pitied that person, even while she was going out to a bar that she really didn’t feel like going to, or suffering through another blind date when she would rather have been at home in sweat pants, watching Northern Exposure with her cat and eating ice cream out of the carton.

When I was 25, I was constantly scrutinizing myself —my physical self, my relationships or lack thereof, my career or lack thereof— to see if I measured up. Inevitably, I didn’t. I was mired in the trap of trying to create a persona, to craft an identity, and it was all very plastic and crazy-making. At 25, I had to go out on Friday and Saturday nights, even though many times I would have preferred to stay home, because Monday morning at the office, someone would inevitably ask me what I did over the weekend. Not having plans would have been too humiliating for words. In contrast, the 45-year-old me is quite happy to put on her pajamas at 5:30 on Friday and doesn’t care who knows it.

Maybe some of this is the wisdom that comes with age, but most of it is due to motherhood. When I decided to become a single mom by choice, and had my daughters, I finally got what I’d always wanted. Much of my former unhappiness was caused by the fear that I wouldn’t find a husband, or wouldn’t find one in time to have kids, and since the one constant in my life has always been my desire for motherhood, all my future happiness depended on it. When I decided to stop waiting for it to happen to me, and started to act on my own behalf to make it happen, it opened up a whole new realm of possibilities. If I could make this dream a reality, maybe I had it in me to make some of my other dreams come true as well. I started to believe in myself. I stopped apologizing for my life and started living it. And if I had to become middle-aged to achieve this kind of peace, so be it. This gray hair is a battle flag, not a white flag…even if I do pay someone to cover it up every six weeks.

Traveling and Muffins

By: Wendy Rhein

I am traveling for my day job this week, which means my life job suffers. Maybe “suffers” is the wrong word – my life job, raising two boys and living with an aging parent who needs some help, gets the hiccups. I am more comfortable with that: gets the hiccups.

I have found the equation that works: Days out of town = days of preparation for going out of town.

As a single mother, I’m grateful that I don’t have to travel weekly, as many people do, for their jobs. When I was lucky enough to have more than one job offer a couple of years ago, the infrequency of travel was one of my key decision points. And, I’m incredibly grateful that my mother is able to stay with my boys while I’m away. I honestly don’t know what I’d do otherwise. She does the best she can with them and they have the consistency of having her there, like they do every day. And as long as I plan everything out and deal with the details, there are few, if any, tears.

It is all about the math. Away for three days/two nights? That’s three dinners that need to be prepared and frozen, or at least all the elements placed together in the fridge and labeled in the cabinet. Don’t forget to get the colander off the high shelf because my mother can’t reach above her head any more to get things down. Miss that step and expect to hear that dinner for three nights was scrambled eggs and toast. If I am only gone one overnight, I can pack two lunches in the pre-dawn hours for that day and the next without guaranteeing it will go stale. How many snack packs of carrots can I pack in advance? Six seems to be the limit before my son wrinkles his nose at them. Are there enough chicken apple sausages for Sam because that’s all he wants for lunch on the days he’s not in daycare. Don’t mess with the sausages. If I make 2 dozen morning glory muffins before I go, that’s enough for breakfasts and after school snacks for 3-4 days for all involved.

Are there enough clean clothes for everyone? Diapers? Is there an extra gallon of milk just in case? I find myself mentally scanning the calendar a week before I leave for field trips, apartment maintenance schedules, Mom’s doctor’s visits and half days at school. I’ve been known to make a midnight run to the store before a 4:00 AM alarm for extra toilet paper and sandwich bread. My mom struggles in the cold and wet weather that this time of year brings so I need to be sure that as many outside trips as possible can be avoided. This time, because I have a Friday night red-eye home with a very early Saturday arrival, I also booked our favorite babysitter to meet the bus on Friday and take the boys to the park, order in pizza and give my mother a break. Two days and two nights of child care are pretty much the limit without outside reinforcements.

I can sleep on planes very easily, generally out of sheer exhaustion and adrenaline let-down. By the time I’ve navigated getting dressed in the dark without waking anyone, left love notes for everyone including the cat (because it was loudly noted last trip that the cat was sad I did not leave him a love note so I better come home right away and kiss the cat) and lugged my pre-packed luggage out the door, fought traffic, and navigated the airport, my day is half done. Just getting to the departure gate is a trip in itself.

Some say I should relish this time away. The chance to sleep a full night or eat in a restaurant without a kids’ menu. I admit that I do like the chance to drink a cup of coffee in the morning before it grows cold. But mainly I miss my family. I feel like less than who I am without their hugs and small faces inches from mine. By the end of a day away, I itch to go back where I belong.

Here is the recipe for the Morning Glory muffins that my family inhales. Based on a recipe from King Arthur flour, I’ve made some changes. They are sweet and moist and full of mother-approved nutritional goodness. I may not be there, but the muffins are, and for a day or so, that works.

Morning Glory Muffins
Makes 24-30 depending on your desired muffin top (the muffin’s, not yours, though I suppose there is a cause-effect relationship here)

1/2 cup yellow raisins
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 cup packed brown sugar
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon allspice
1/2 teaspoon cloves
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups grated carrots
1 large apple, grated (I leave the skin on and pick a tart apple like a Granny Smith)
2/3 cup sweetened shredded coconut
1/2 cup chopped walnuts or pecans
1/3 cup wheat germ (shhhh… don’t tell them. Or omit it, it’s optional)
3 large eggs
2/3 cup vegetable oil
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 375°F. Line a 12-cup muffin pan with liners.

Cover the raisins with hot water in a small bowl and set them aside to soak. In a mixing bowl combine the dry ingredients (flour, spices, sugar, baking soda and salt) and set aside. In a separate bowl, combine all the wet ingredients and the nuts. Whisk those together to thoroughly combine and break up the eggs. Add to the flour mixture, and stir until evenly moistened. Drain the raisins and stir them in. Divide the batter among the muffin cups, almost to the top.

Bake for 25 to 28 minutes, until nicely domed and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Remove from the oven, let cool for 5 minutes in their pan on a rack, then turn out of pans to finish cooling.

Lake Quinault Getaway

By: Allison Norris

I just got beat by a woman covered in jewels and with perfect hair named Judy at cards in the main lodge. She’s 65 and from Beaumont, Texas with a southern twang so sweet you wish she was your grandmami. She asked Toby and me if she could play cards with us because she was absolutely furious with her husband Clay. You see, he ordered a pizza with mushrooms on it and she hates mushrooms. She also hates television except for CNN, FOX, 700 Club and the Young and the Restless. She doesn’t like wine, seafood, cell phones, or Mormons because her 21-year-old daughter just married one. She told her husband that he needed to go back to his room alone because she couldn’t even look at his face. She told us this when she sat down with us and asked us what we would do in the situation. Feeling guilty from a similar situation earlier, I told her that I had bought several snacks for our trip to the Lake Quinault Lodge in the Olympic National Park rain forest, and all of them had sesame seeds in them… Toby is allergic to sesame seeds. I’m not totally sure what I would do in her situation. Then she beat me at Spite and Malice and Gin Rummy. Oh Judy…

Toby and I hiked five miles today… through lush moss that hung from branches and old growth trees that are a thousand years old. My cell phone still worked (thank God), but I felt completely removed from anything busy. I had nowhere to be, and nothing to do except observe a gorgeous waterfall, crack open a Pacifico on the trail, snap tons of photos and pee sitting on a nursing log. It was absolutely breathtaking and I got to do it with my love.

We saw the world’s largest Sitka Spruce tree today. It was really friggin’ huge. On the way to the tree, we completely missed the signs and ended up down a beautiful road containing farms and old trees… and elk. Toby had been dying to see elk (and a cougar, which I did NOT want to see), and there in the road were 20 huge elk just staring us down.

When we stopped in Forks at the chamber of commerce which really only contained Twilight paraphernalia, the lady who worked there told us she had nine dogs and an elk-proof fence that was 12 feet high and had special links or something. Then she told us that the elk still managed to kick her dog in the head through the fence. I did not want to get any closer to the big brown beauties.

We counted 12 eagles on the drive, which took us over ferries, along rivers, and through quaint towns. We stopped at multiple junk stores, and enjoyed each other’s company the entire weekend. My skin felt soft in the crisp mountain air and my hair has never felt more healthy after washing it in truly clean water. It was so gorgeous… Lake Quinault, not my hair.  I can’t wait to go back again for more!

Rejected Hand-Me-Downs

By: Barbara Matousek

Recently on Facebook, one of those viral status updates about brothers was making the rounds, one of those posts you’re supposed to read and feel all warm and happy about and then cut and paste in to your own status if YOU have a brother who will always be there for you. I never had a brother so I wouldn’t know what that’s like, but I do have a sister. An amazing sister who put up with being tortured by her older sister and frequently had to wear my hand-me-downs or play with toys that were originally bought for someone else.

Last year when I had photos taken of the kids and I was trying to figure out what shots to blow up in to wrapped canvases for a collage on my living room wall, I sent a few ideas to a friend. She looked at my proposed layout and said it looked great but it seemed “a little Sam heavy.” She admitted this came from her middle-child perspective. I told her I understood, that there was a lot of Sam compared to how much Eva there was, but Eva was just six months old. Sam was 3 and 1/2. I had a lot more Sam under my belt, a lot more Sam material available.

I come to this parenting thing as a first born. I never had to put up with an older sibling demanding that I do what they say or I will tell Mom and Dad. I never had to wear someone else’s hand-me-downs or play games with torn cardboard and missing pieces. I never had a bigger, stronger sibling sitting on top of me holding me down and threatening to spit in my face (sorry, Annie). But I also was the one who got in the most trouble for everything. I was the one caught by the all-encompassing “You’re older and you should know better.” Yes, I got a lot more attention from Mom and Dad, demanded a lot more attention from Mom and Dad. But I also got a lot more of the blame and a lot more of the responsibility.

Eva’s first word was not ball or doll or puppy. It was “stop.” As in “Sam, stop that!” Sam is older and during that first year (and still sometimes now) whenever I was exhausted or overwhelmed and just needed something to change for just one second, it was Sam I would demand things from. Stop. Now. Stop whining. Stop running. Stop kicking your chair. Stop hanging on me. Stop bouncing off the walls. Stop.

This weekend I went to all the usual places to find something clean for Eva to wear so I could put off laundry just one more day. I glanced over the piles of too-small pants stacked in her bedroom closet, piles I haven’t had time to move to storage or donate. I dug through the drawers of the changing table. I pulled out the Rubbermaid bin of still-too-big clothes handed down from my cousin. And when I came up empty-handed I remembered the cardboard box of Sammy’s clothes that had come back from a neighbor after she’d sorted through it and decided not to take all of it. Not just Sammy hand-me-downs, but Sammy’s rejected hand-me-downs. I dug out a pair of 2T jammies with little green and orange dinosaurs. They smelled like a musty version of Johnson’s Baby Shampoo mixed with Dreft. I chased down my naked toddler who is happiest when her big belly is sticking out and she’s running to get away from Mommy, and she sat perfectly still while I pulled on her big brother’s hand me downs.

I will never know what it’s like to be a younger sibling, never know that feeling of wanting to be like an older sibling, of waiting patiently for an older sibling or an overwhelmed parent to notice me. But when I watch my children together and the way they interact, Sammy always trying to get Eva to bend to his will and play what he wants to play, Eva always trying to get in the middle of whatever Sammy is doing (even if it involves small pieces or red markers or sharp objects), I get a small glimpse into my own childhood. I feel so incredibly blessed that I have a little sister that has always been there for me, and when Eva sat up straight in her new jammies and ran her hands over the dinosaurs on her legs and grinned, I wanted to call my sister and tell her how grateful I am…even if I don’t cut and paste any viral Facebook post that says so.

No Visible Means of Support

By: Holly Vanderhaar

I was recently approached about submitting an essay on single motherhood to a magazine. I sent the editor a précis of my motherhood to date: began trying to conceive when I was 36, unexpectedly conceived identical twins, babies contracted twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome in utero. Had experimental surgery. Babies survived. Had tons of help from friends, sister, and Mom. Moved half a country away when my daughters were four. They’re now almost nine.

The editor asked some follow-up questions. Could I talk more about my support network? In what ways is it harder to build one versus having a built-in one, i.e., a partner? What do I do when I want to brag to someone about something “awesome” my kids have done? And whom do I talk to when I want to tear my hair out?

I thought about this for a while before I responded. The editor seemed genuinely perplexed. “But how do you cope?” seemed to be the subtext of most of the questions.

Having never been married or otherwise in a long-term, committed relationship, I don’t know any different. How could I possibly articulate how parenting is harder or easier as a single woman? Sure, it would be nice to have another adult in the house when I’m facing a deadline and I need a couple of hours of uninterrupted work time. If I need to run to the drug store at 9:00 after the girls are in bed, it would be terrific to just be able to go. There are lots of logistical things that would be made much easier by having a man around the house.

On the other hand, it’s a relief sometimes to not have to put the work into keeping a marriage healthy. One of my friends was undergoing fertility treatments at the same time I was, only with a husband. Their daughter is just a couple of months younger than my girls. And my married friend is just as likely to feel that I have it easier, because I’m doing it alone.

In this Internet age, it isn’t hard to share my pride and frustration. I can snap pictures with my phone and send them instantly to family and friends. The girls are old enough to chat on the phone, to text, and to email. My mom and my sister are still a big source of moral—and occasionally financial—support. We miss their physical presence. The emotional support is there even at a distance.

But the one thing I’ve learned about myself on this road is that I’m much stronger and more capable than I ever would have believed. It’s not easy, not by a long shot, but most of the time it’s hard in a way that parenting itself is hard, or at least hard for everyone who wants to do it well.

So I told the editor all of these things. I’m still waiting to hear back. It’s possible that they don’t need my contribution for the issue after all, or that they’re still deciding. But sometimes I wonder if it’s easier to sell the story of single parenthood as martyrdom.

How To Completely Change Your Life in Just Two Weeks

By: Allison Norris

My little (and huge) brother is so cool… getting cooler by the day too. Here’s what happened:

To be totally honest, $55k per year to attend University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, WA was just too much money for my family. My brother is 18 and has no idea what he wants to do with his future (other than be awesome), so walking away with over $200k in loans was just absurd. Not to mention, Tacoma smells (I went to school in Tacoma too) and although the campus is gorgeous, it isn’t where he wanted to be, and he knew it.

My mom sat him down and asked him how much he loved it… $200k worth? While he made some amazing friendships, and loved playing football for the Loggers, he knew he could be doing something more. When he graduated from high school last June, there was so much pressure to attend a four-year university. Pressure to play football, and live in a dorm with the other kids who had just left their homes for college. I agree and understand that this is all very important, but living in San Diego on the beach attending community college to save some cash and have some fun sounds very important as well. Suddenly not attending a four-year right out of high school wasn’t as big of a deal – he realized that nobody really cares, and if they do care, who cares? He didn’t. So he packed his car…

He was snowed in at our mom’s house on Whidbey Island the day he was supposed to drive south to the sun. My parents were panicked and worried about his determination to make the trek over the snowy passes… after killing a few days playing in the snow and even building an igloo, he finally hopped in his jeep and arrived in San Diego two days later.

Just seven days before his arrival, he had made the decision to move. On day five, he signed up for classes at Mesa college, withdrew from his last school, and spent a day making sure of the credits that would transfer and what would happen to his financial aid. Then he left!

He stayed with my fabulous aunt Christy until today… he finished loading the last of his items into his new place last night. That’s right, he found a place just a few houses down from the beach with two guys who go to USD. In the middle of moving, he bopped over to a hot spot cafe called Cafe Mono for a job interview… apparently Lady Gaga was just there for a coffee. Knowing him, he’ll get the job, and they’ll probably make him employee of the week or something by the end of his first week.

My little brother reminded me how important it is to take risks. He’s never been one to do things in order to fit in – being nice to everyone and winning them over with his good looks and charm has kept him at the top of social circles and in good standing with his superiors. And now I know he has balls. I am so proud of him for trusting his gut that he didn’t want to stay at UPS because he wasn’t totally happy… he had been dreaming about something else just a few states away and he did it. He made it happen, and in only two weeks. There won’t be the opportunity to pack up and move away from everything and everyone forever – he has truly seized the day and after trusting his gut, he is picking the “Y” in the road of his life. Insert very cliche quote about following your dreams and making shit happen here.

It has been two and a half weeks since he decided to go and he has a new school, awesome place to live, a new job and a few friends. Success! Can’t wait to live vicariously through my little bro because that’s what I do these days… Each picture text of the beach he sends me makes me daydream about being 18 in southern California with few responsibilities and a beach cruiser… and tan legs… and surfers… and really perky boobs.

My Bay-Be

By: Allison Norris

My baby is now a kid. A boy. I don’t know how it happened, or when, but he’s big and smart and amazing me every day. Singing in the car, operating a laptop or an ATV, helping me put groceries in the cart, or requesting a napkin for his lap – he’s big.

Why does it feel so scary to watch them grow up? Movie after book after mother weeping at her child’s wedding – I now understand the upset of raising a child and having them leave. I know I’m a little ahead of myself here… he’s only 2 and a half… but I’m seeing his passions, his sense of humor and his obsession with “getting bigger.”

He told me yesterday that he had finished all of his dinner so that he could grow bigger and be big like me. He also told me that he would have hair in his armpits some day and then I got grossed out. I don’t want him to have hair anywhere but his head.

I’m so lucky to have a healthy, beautiful, growing child, I know. I’m in amazement that I could create something so wonderful.

I started thinking about day-to-day life as a mom. I am lucky to be able to work less than 20 hours per week and stay at home with him during the day. The question often comes up – so you stay at home with him – what do you do all day?

I remember when I worked for the real estate developer. Every day was busy… emails, facebooking, conference calls, spreadsheets, meetings – the work never ended and I felt this sense of pressure and stress to complete all of my tasks. It’s the same with being at home. I feel stress and pressure to make sure the toys are away, to make sure lunch is at 12:15 and that my laundry is done and put away. Nobody comes over every day… it’s not like I host gatherings or guests from out of town. There really isn’t a reason to vacuum at 5pm every other day, other than to make sure it looks clean and that I have done my jobs. It gives me a sense of importance and structure. It’s the same way while I nanny. Sure, I’m playing with play doh and blocks, but it’s important to be engaged with the babes while they play and to make up fun stories about elephants who can fly. It may not be the same as making million dollar decisions on which finishes will look best in a high-end condo unit, but it’s my new job and it’s important.

We’re watching Finding Nemo (for the hundredth time) because it’s 6:30am… the beginning of my 14-hour work day. Baylor has started making himself the main character of any movie or show we watch. “Look, Mom, I’m swimming away from the whale.” His imagination, sincerity in his beliefs, and need to tell me which characters are good and bad remind me that he is changing and maturing every day. The mess is worth it… the sleepless nights are fine… only buying second-hand clothes – who cares? It’s a pretty fun gig, and it isn’t going to be here forever.

I remember holding his whole body on my lap – even stretched out he didn’t fill the space. Now he’s almost too heavy for me to hold, but I don’t ever want to put him down.

A Curve in The Road

By: Barbara Matousek

Packing up the night before it hadn’t occurred to me that we could go in a ditch, that my Subaru could keep sliding as the road curved. And to be honest, even after we saw the first pile-up of cars where I-90 turns and crosses the Mississippi River in La Crosse, I wasn’t concerned about the roads. I had called my mother and told her I was watching the weather, and I had checked the forecast at least thirty times that morning. The Weather Channel and all the local TV stations had said the worst of the snow would move in between 11am and 5pm, and up until the moment we got on the road just after noon, I wasn’t sure if we should go early and try to get ahead of it or wait and go in the morning.

We had planned our trip to Great Wolf Lodge in Wisconsin Dells months ago, and Sam had been counting the days until we stayed at “TT’s hotel.” A year and a half ago we’d stayed at TT’s hotel in Chicago on our way to visit relatives in Michigan, and last summer we stayed at TT’s hotel in Milwaukee while I ran in a 5-mile race to raise money for Children’s Hospital. TT is Sam’s grandma, and when we travel with her we stay in her hotels. TT’s hotel in The Dells has a waterpark, and we’d all been looking forward to this trip long before January first pretended to be spring and then quickly turned frigid and reminded us of her true colors.

We were in the car about twenty-five minutes when we came across an accident scene just after we crossed in to Wisconsin. Traffic that had been moving a steady sixty miles an hour came to a sudden stop, and I pushed the brakes slowly and thanked God the semi behind me had been following a safe distance. Eva was still awake because Sam had been screaming for several minutes that he couldn’t get his Leapster Explorer to do something he was absolutely sure it should do. I had long since given up on trying to convince him to be quiet and let me concentrate.

“Look at the fire trucks,” I said, and Sam looked up, suddenly quiet.

Mangled pieces of cars and SUVs littered the ditch and four or five firemen in coats with bright yellow striping lifted a woman wrapped in black blankets on to a stretcher. Her neck was in a brace and the SUV next to her was bent and caved in on one side.

“See why you need to be quiet and let me focus on driving?” I said without thinking, just grateful for a reprieve from the back seat screaming. “It is very dangerous out here. I would not want to go in the ditch.” My hands gripped the wheel and traffic crept forward and I glanced at the cars facing the wrong direction on the other side of the highway.

Sam looked up at the two firetrucks with flashing red lights and the smaller ambulance parked in front of it. He said nothing.

“Look at the firemen,” I said. “They are helping that lady. They’re going to take her to the hospital.”

Traffic merged in to one lane and I let the semi next to me pull ahead of us. I turned on the wipers and sprayed the windshield with blue fluid that froze almost immediately.

“Don’t worry, Mommy,” Sam finally spoke just before going back to his video game. “They can fix her.”

The accident scene scared me, made me hold the wheel a little tighter, let up on the accelerator slightly, focus more intently on staying at least six car lengths behind the vehicle in front of me.

Sam was, thankfully, unaffected. My anxiety hadn’t spread. About five miles later as I quietly cursed at a souped-up pickup that whizzed past us and then switched back in to our lane leaving us in a white out right behind his bumper, Sam started yelling about needing something to drink RIGHT NOW and when-are-we-going-to-get-there and “Where else does TT have hotels that we can go to?” By the time we arrived safely at TT’s hotel an hour later my fingers were cramped and the sides of the windshield were caked with blue ice, and Sam and Eva were sound asleep in the back seat.

Velcro Mom

By: Wendy Rhein

If I were a superhero, I would be Velcro Mom. Who can leap over piles of laundry in a single bound (with a child hanging off her arm)? And debone a turkey with one hand (while the other is filling a sippy cup)? And who can type 60 words a minute – with one hand while blowing bubbles with the other?

It’s Velcro Mom!

I can’t remember when I last was able to spend a whole day of mundane tasks with both hands. I’m sure it happened, maybe four years ago, but I haven’t slept more than 6 hours in a row in two years so I can’t remember. I’d like to think I have but who the hell really knows.

My boys both want a lot of me right now, and they’re not willing to settle for my intellectual banter or pithy definitions to newly acquired words like “hot” or “disintegrate.” As a single mom, I don’t share this need for contact and hugs with another parent so I’m outnumbered. A zone defense instead of man to man. The younger one is in a mini-me stage with his big brother so if Nathan sits on my lap, Sam wants to sit on my lap. And not just on my lap but exactly where his brother is currently sitting. If Nathan is holding my hand, Sam wants to hold that same hand. You can see where this is going. And it doesn’t end well. I am mastering the art of “sharing Mama” which allows for both kids to be touching me at the same time. After a little while Nathan gets bored and will peel off but Sam wants to stick to me like, well, Velcro.

Literally as I type this, Sam is on my lap and I’m typing around him, struggling to read the screen over and around his head as he bobs and weaves, giggling, thinking we are playing a game. Nathan is at my feet, or actually ON my feet, under the desk.

I admit that there are days, normally late on Sunday afternoons during a long weekend, when I actually look forward to going to work where no one will tug on me. I love my kids, but I think my arms are two different lengths now, one to reach a 6-year-old, one longer to reach a 2-year-old. I wonder if I can put singlehanded multitasking on a resume.

I know the day is coming when I will get my two hands back to work together on the simple things – like cooking dinner or buttoning a shirt. I will be grateful for the physical independence and freedom. And I know that there will come a day when I will make the same face Sam does when I tell him no, he can’t sit in the shower with me, when I want to hug or kiss my boys in the carpool lane and they jump from the car before I can touch them. I will want to remind them of the days when they couldn’t get enough of me and they’ll roll their eyes and snicker. I will keep sharing my hands and arms and lap with them for as long as they will have me, and remind myself of these days when they walk away on their own.

Teach Your Children Well

By: Wendy Rhein

I’ve been struggling with writing this all day. I have drafted more first, second, and seventh paragraphs than I care to admit and trashed them all. The truth is, my kid and many other kids I know were hurting last week and it infuriates me.

Last week I heard and endured several painful stories about how children interact and label each other. In my own life, and in the lives of no less than three friends in just seven days, I find myself thinking much too much about how kids treat those they consider different.

In one case, an older child, along for a playdate with a little one, felt the need to tell my friend’s child that not only was she adopted, but that her birth parents couldn’t take care of her and she was ‘given up’ so she would have a better life.

And then again, a young girl adopted by a single mom who sometimes joins her precocious daughter for lunch at school.  Last week the mom was dismayed that children at a shared lunch room repeatedly asked her daughter why she doesn’t have a daddy, why she looks different from her mom, and told her that her “real” mom didn’t want her so she came to live here.  Those are some pretty heady ideas for five-year-olds to come up with on their own.

Then there is the young teenage daughter of two wonderful dads who came home from the bus stop when she should have been on the bus heading to school. Through the tears and blood smudges, she told her stay-at-home dad about the teasing she endures daily about her “queer dads” and how on that particular day she had had enough. She said she knew better than to go to school having beaten the crap out of another girl in their neighborhood. She knew that she, not the offensive and mean-spirited girl, would be the one suspended.

And finally in my own family. This past week my first grader was studying Martin Luther King, Jr. and one of the boys in his class said that all King did was make white people and black people fight. He went on to say that King was just a troublemaker.

As a child of an African American father and Caucasian mother, Nathan sometimes questions his racial identity and I have left the label, if one is necessary, to come from him and not me. I tell him he is the best of both of us, that naming his color is not as important as remembering that he is more than white, more than black. He’s his own person.

I was so angry that this little 6 or 7-year-old child in my son’s public school classroom had that kind of power to cast doubt and darkness over the meaning of Dr. King’s work that I launched into an intensely personal and political conversation with Nathan. He learned what “racist” means, that even now people who will judge him, his brother, and many others by the color of their skin and not the content of their character; and we talked about the power of words to change the way people think. I was exhausted. We drifted in and out of different elements of the conversation for hours. I tried to balance his maturity and his age, what he was capable of absorbing and not wanting to scare him or worry him. He’s a thinker, a dweller, and he likes to have a lot of information once he latches on to a topic. But he is six. Just six!

After the lights were out for the night and the last tuck in and good night kisses were shared, he asked me if I knew people who thought that white people should stay with white people and black people with black people. I told him the truth, that yes, I have known those people. He was quiet for a little while. Then he said that if they had their way, we wouldn’t be a family. Not him, not Sam, not me. And that would be awful. Thank God they don’t, I told him.

I imagine that my friends whose stories I mentioned had similar, exhausting, and draining conversations with their kids this week. And I imagine that they all kissed their children goodnight, closed the bedroom doors, and then cried quietly for a while, trying to not wake our dearly loved children in rooms nearby. Hoping and praying that we said or did the right thing. And wondering how much therapy was going to cost us a few years down the road.

What amazes me is that we nontraditional families outnumber the traditional families with 2 parents of 2 genders and biological children. The tradition is no longer the norm. And yet these old ideas about what makes a family and the need to justify how we became a family and why our family is made up of a variety of colors and genders are playground and lunch room conversations among the under 10 set.

These ideas come from somewhere closer to home than a television show or movie. Some kids seem to need to separate “like me” and “others” into separate circles, and the like me circle is increasingly shrinking for those kids. I implore their parents and grandparents to open their own minds and circles so as to not close their children’s.

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