Flying Solo Christmas Morning

I’m hiding out at Starbucks this morning while Maggie and her kids open gifts and enjoy their Christmas morning. I didn’t think a pathetic, tearful roommate skulking about would do much for the festive, holiday atmosphere.

Yesterday, I hugged my kids extra tight… and for most of the day. My shopping was done, gifts wrapped and under the tree and all my holiday preparations were complete. I made sure there was nothing to distract me from the task at hand, because today, I’m faced with a reality I’ve not encountered in all the years I’ve been a mom: Christmas morning without my kids.

For years, Ben and Lucy’s dad and I agreed that their Christmas mornings should be spent in the place they consider “home.” So, for six Christmases, we’ve enjoyed Christmas morning at our house and invited dad to join us. He would come early and see the kids open their gifts, we’d share breakfast and then we’d divide the rest of the day however was most appropriate given our circumstances at that time. I’m proud we were able to maintain that set-up for such a long time and for such formative years of the kids’ lives.

But many things have changed this past year, including dad moving in with his girlfriend and her children. This year, dad wanted his own Christmas. It’s certainly “his turn,” there’s no doubt about that. And I know I’m being a bit of a baby about it. Most single parents face the reality of Christmas morning without their children in the first or second year of their divorce. I’m incredibly lucky that I’ve not had to face it before now. But knowing I’m lucky for all the years I’ve had, and knowing it’s completely appropriate and fair that dad should get the kids for his own Christmas doesn’t make me any less sad. I can rationalize my feelings all day long, but it doesn’t stop me from experiencing them.

So here I sit at my local Starbucks waiting for the three hours I’ll get to spend with the kids this afternoon. Thinking that looking better would make me feel better, I got up early, showered, put on a reasonably cute outfit and did my hair and make-up for my solo morning. The make-up might have been a mistake, however. I cried before even getting out of the house and the mixture of eyeliner and smeared concealer has produced an ever-so-slightly deranged effect. I think my alarming appearance may have startled the barista who took my order. Or maybe it was the ferociousness with which I swatted her hand away when she reached for my travel mug intending to put coffee in it.

I may be sad. I may look deranged. I may be a big-ole baby and it’s entirely possible I truly am pathetic. But I still have the wherewithal to put on a kick-ass pair of boots, my cutest jeans and hold my head high with a mimosa in my hand (even if that mimosa is in a travel mug with “Ben” Sharpied on the side).

Hands off the mimosa, lady. Sheesh.

That's Gonna Leave a Mark

A boy hurt my feelings this week. A sentence I likely spoke when I was five years old is the most accurate description of what happened. Some things never change I guess.

I liked this boy – I really did. He was handsome, smart, funny and charming and we had great conversations. We really seemed to connect. But, alas, he met someone he liked better and we never made it to our first official date. Disappointing, but it happens.

We seemed so very “in sync” and he appeared to be transparent, upfront and honest – qualities I value highly and feel I also possess. He assured me he didn’t play games and that “what I saw was what I got” with him.  I trusted him. And as we got to know each other, I shared with him a difficult story from my past. I told him something deeply personal - something about which I’m self-conscious. I shared this with him in the spirit of being open and honest and getting to know each another.

When he decided he didn’t want to date me, instead of telling me the truth about having met someone else, he chose instead to say it was because of the deeply personal story I’d shared. I’m sure deflecting the responsibility onto me made it easier for him, but the result was humiliation, shame and hurt for me. He said during this conversation that I could add him to the list of assholes who had hurt me. He seemed almost comforted by the knowledge that he would not be the first asshole to leave a mark. Because that’s what happens, isn’t it? Every hurt leaves a mark – a scar of sorts. Every humiliation shapes us. Every shame changes us.

But those marks – those scars – are what make us who we are, just as much as our joys, triumphs and proud moments. My parents gave me life, but my life made me who I am. My life and all the experiences that have been part of it make me “me” and I’m pretty happy with who that is (most days). I believe the scars are beautiful and I’m honored beyond belief when someone shares one of theirs with me. So it’s unlikely I’ll stop sharing mine with those I care about. And if my scars are subsequently used against me, I’ll learn from that, but I won’t let it cause me to hide them.

This week a boy hurt my feelings and it’s going to leave a mark. It’s true that I can add him to a list, but it’s not a list of assholes as he suggested. It’s simply a list of people. People who have touched me - many in good ways, some in bad ways, and mercifully few who have hurt me intentionally.

All in all, I feel pretty lucky.

I Believe

This morning Lucy asked, "Mom, did you put Harry Harold in the dining room?" I looked at her like she’d lost her mind and said, "Seriously? Do you really think I have the time, energy or inclination to sneak around this house, taking the notes and gifts you leave for him and eating the food you give him? Do you honestly believe I would get up in the middle of the night, every night for weeks on end to move that elf around? Pfft.” I turned away from her to pour my coffee, shaking my head and muttering under my breath, “Did I move Harry Harold? Ridiculous.” Then I turned and called over my shoulder, “Now stop talking crazy and feed that elf his breakfast.”

We have an Elf on the Shelf named Harry Harold. This magical creature arrives at the beginning of the holiday season each year and lives with us until Christmas Eve, keeping tabs on the behavior of the children in the house. Each night our elf travels to the North Pole to report to Santa and each morning he returns. He very rarely returns to the same spot in the house and the kids love hunting around to find him every morning. According to the book that came with our elf, the kids are not allowed to touch him lest he lose his magic. And he is not allowed to talk to us, but the kids are welcome to talk to him, sharing their Christmas lists and other secrets. They leave notes for Harry Harold, small meals and the occasional gift (pennies, stickers and the like). Harry always eats the meals (when no one is looking, of course) and takes the gifts and notes with him when he leaves at night.  Occasionally, he'll even answer a question posed in a note, by circling the provided, "yes" or "no".  "Did you take our note to Santa?"  (Harry Harold circled "yes".)

I’m convinced my kids love Harry Harold more than Santa himself. Last year on Christmas Eve when most kids were climbing into bed smiling, eagerly anticipating Santa’s arrival, Ben and Lucy were sobbing while saying their goodbyes to Harry Harold, clutching him as if they were sending him off to the horrors of war instead of the holly-jolly-joy of the North Pole (we bend the rules about touching on Christmas Eve so that they may hug him goodbye for the year). But their sorrow turns to exuberance in equal measure when Harry Harold returns the next year. This year he arrived in a Barbie car and actually rang the doorbell. The kids were thrilled beyond belief with his ingenuity.

Lucy has planned ahead this year for how much she’ll miss Harry Harold when he’s gone by putting on her Christmas list, “A stuffed elf that looks like Harry Harold that I can keep all year. Not a real one, like Harry Harold – I know he can’t stay all year, but a toy elf.” I’m so glad she understands the difference and I hope that the toy elf she’s likely to receive as a gift will comfort her when our real elf leaves on Christmas Eve. (Note to self: give Lucy her toy elf on Christmas Eve instead of Christmas morning.)

But I found myself wondering today just how long Harry Harold will stay with us. Will there come a year when he simply doesn’t return? I think the answer to that question is pretty simple, really. I think Harry Harold will be with us as long as we believe. If we believe he’s magic, he will most certainly be magic.

And I think the same can be said of life itself. Sometimes I lose sight of this, but I know in my heart that if I believe there is magic in my every day life, it will most certainly be there. If I resolve to see it, I will see it. If I believe, the magic will be there as clear as the nose on my face.

Or the elf on my shelf.

I, for one, choose to believe.

More Candy Wrapper Wisdom

This morning Lucy came to me and said, "Hey mom, when I got my toothbrush out earlier I knocked Ben's into the toilet, but it's OK, I got it out." Maintaining my composure, I raised my eyebrows and looked at her suspiciously, "Hmmm... after you got it out, where'd you put it?" She took my hand and led me to the bathroom where the door to the medicine cabinet was standing open. “Right there,” she said, pointing to a shelf where my toothbrush lay…with Ben’s right on top of it. I smiled weakly, told her thanks for fishing it out of the toilet and that if it happened again, she should just throw the toothbrush away (all the while desperately trying to remember the order in which everyone brushed their teeth this morning).

In the small bathroom that the kids and I share, the medicine cabinet spans the entire wall above the sink and the toilet. Since moving to this house I’ve asked the kids easily a hundred times to keep the toilet lid closed to avoid the exact scenario that happened this morning, to no avail (obviously). When I sat down at the end of the night with a sizeable glass of wine, I unwrapped a Dove Chocolate Promise. I figured a day that began with a toothbrush in the toilet warranted a little indulgence. The advice dispensed on tonight’s candy wrapper couldn’t have been more fitting: “Set your goals high but not your expectations.” Who’d have thought at this point in my life, though, my loftiest goal would be a consistently closed toilet lid?

My roommate contends you must tell a child to do something one thousand times before they will do it without being told and she swears she has empirical data to support this contention. (I’m suspicious of her research methods, though – when questioned, she’s dodgy and vague.) One thousand times seems high to me, but what if she’s right? I estimate I’ve told those kids three times a day since moving in to close the toilet lid. At this rate, that toilet lid won’t be closed on a regular basis until sometime around August of 2011.

Just to be on the safe side, I think I’ll heed the advice of my Dove Chocolate Promise wrapper and keep my expectations low.

Tomorrow I plan to stock up on toothbrushes.

Sometimes I Let the Laundry Pile Up

I sort, pre-treat, wash, dry and move it into a basket. But that's when it breaks down. I don’t always fold the laundry and put it away in a timely manner. The other night I tried to move a laundry basket full of clean, but not-yet-folded clothes off my bed so that I could go to sleep only to discover there is not enough floor space in my tiny bedroom to accommodate a regulation-sized laundry basket.

My room is small, there’s no doubt about that. But I’m not the least bit sorry I gave the larger bedroom to Ben – it’s what moms do. We do what it takes to make sure our kids have what they need. However, I’m one who craves the repose of home and cares deeply about the space in which I live. A true Taurus, I’m a nester who loves creature comforts and needs to feel at peace in my own space. It’s not about the size of the room or expensive things, it’s about how the space feels. And on closer examination a couple of weeks ago, I realized this space – my little room – felt sad.

To remedy this, I took a break from unpacking and organizing the playroom (a task that promises to take months whether or not I give it my full attention) to spend some time (and even a little bit of money) making my room feel better. I knew there was no cure for the size of the room, but there was most certainly a cure for the depressing feel of the room. We don’t have a lot of money and I felt guilty diverting even a small amount from other uses, but I know myself (I have many problems, but self-awareness is not of them) and I knew that making the little bit of space in this house that is 100% mine a place in which I’m comfortable was important.

So I put aside my guilt, ignored the voice in my head telling me it was frivolous and went to work decorating and organizing my room. An inexpensive new quilt, sheers to conceal my closet, cubbies from Target (requiring assembly, of course), pillows I sewed myself and a $20 package of thumb-tack-afixed wall-art flowers got me started. And a couple of little things like embellishing my plain window shade with a row of beads and adding pretty fabric to the bins that slide out of my cubbies made it even better. My room was beginning to look stylish and beautiful, but more importantly, it was beginning to feel cozy, comfortable and soothing.

But the best purchase I made for my room was a new light fixture. The old light was a dome fixture in the ceiling, butted up against one wall as if my room had been part of the one next to it at one time. It was odd, inefficient and unattractive. When my dear friend, Traci, won a $50 Visa gift card in a Halloween party costume contest wearing a costume I helped design, she gave it to me, asking that I use it to buy something special for my room. And I did just that. I bought a beautiful, hanging light fixture that I could center in the room with a ceiling hook. That light fixture added the perfect finishing touch to my lovely, little sanctuary. And the fact that it was a gift from my sweet Traci made it even better.

Last week, Lucy sat on my bed one night, examining the crystals, books, cards, kid-art and trinkets I’ve arranged on the shelves. She said, “It’s all about peace and love in here.” I smiled and gave her a big hug. She looked up at me and said “There’s a lot of happiness in your room, mom.” She had no idea just how right she was.

My little room is filled with peace, love and happiness, but no laundry basket of clean, but not-yet-folded clothes. Who cares, though, if there’s not enough room on the floor for that laundry basket? Maybe that will be the impetus I need to work on my laundry-folding procrastination problem.

I’m nothing if not self-aware.

Confessions of a Rule Follower

This may surprise you, but I’m a rule-follower at heart. Always have been. I respect rules and appreciate their importance in any society that strives for something better than complete chaos. I’m comforted by rules. They make me feel safe. I do choose, sometimes, to break the rules, but I always do so fully prepared to accept any consequence that may result.

In 1961, The Milgram Experiment studied people’s reaction to authority by ordering participants to administer an electrical shock to a subject failing to answer questions correctly. A surprising 65% of participants progressed through increasing voltage and what appeared to be increasing pain for the fake subjects (who were not, in reality, receiving electrical shocks at all) when they were instructed to do so by an authority figure. I would like to think I would have been part of the 35% who refused to deliver the final, massive shock. But, if compliance with authority is (as I’m certain it must be) a continuum, then I would fall solidly in the “rule-follower” section of that continuum. And while I strongly believe that my being a rule-follower has its advantages, it most assuredly has its pitfalls as well.

Years ago, while vacationing in Savannah, Georgia, my sister and I spent an afternoon at a swanky spa while our husbands golfed. The spa’s website touted a Scotch Spray among their signature services and this was included in nearly every spa package available. The fact that the website offered no description of this service should have been my first clue, but being the rule-follower that I am, I plodded haplessly along making my appointment. An appointment that included a Scotch Spray.

After a massage and a relaxing soak in an aroma-therapy hot tub of some sort, a spa employee came to collect me for my Scotch Spray. Dressed in only my fluffy spa robe, I followed the employee into a tiled room with several shower heads running the length of floor-to-ceiling pipes. The employee ordered me to disrobe and stand in an area surrounded by these pipes. An awkward moment passed while I waited for her to leave but then, realizing she didn't intend to leave, I obediently disrobed and stood among the shower-head-studded pipes. She turned a knob and I was pelted from all sides with warm water. I was thinking, “This isn’t so bad,” when the spa employee shouted an instruction that I was sure I’d misheard. I looked back over my shoulder and said, “I’m sorry… what?”  “Grab hold of the two pipes directly in front you,” she repeated. I looked back one more time, wearing my trepidation on my face like a mask, to find her standing there, holding what appeared to be a fire hose, nodding somberly. Knowing I was doomed to comply by a quirk of my personality, I hung my head dejectedly, turned around a grabbed the pipes.

What followed was not unpleasant, and I may have even enjoyed it if only I could have kept at bay the images that crept into my mind of 1970s women’s prison films. My one small victory against authority in this story came when the spa employee shouted for me to turn around and face her. While I’d like to tell you I said something flippant, sassy and defiant, the truth is I only managed an oddly apologetic, “No, thank you.” Yep, I really fought the power. Pretty proud of that.

Rule-following and compliance with authority has a place in my life and I wouldn’t want to change that… much. But maybe moving just a bit closer to “dissident” on the continuum of compliance with authority would serve me well. Perhaps being quicker to break the rules and more confident standing up to authority, especially when those rules and that authority threaten my happiness and that of my children, is something for which to strive.

So I've decided to stand up for myself, and for Ben and Lucy, in an effort to preserve our happiness and fight for a better life for all of us.  I'm going to break some rules if that's what's needed. Question authority. Move a step away from “rule-follower” and a step closer to “dissident."  Who knows, maybe I’ll even stick it to the man.

Or at least say “no” next time to a signature spa service disturbingly akin to an enhanced interrogation technique. That’ll show ‘em.

Every House Should Have an Extra Mom

I’ve been single for six years. For six years I’ve raised kids in a house where I’m the only adult. If I need to get a kid to gymnastics and the other one really doesn’t want to go along, there’s no option to leave that one at home. If I’m in the middle of cooking dinner and realize I’m missing an ingredient, I can’t run out for it without getting coats and shoes on two kids and loading them in the car (usually against their will). Or even worse, if a kid is puking his guts out with a raging fever, they must be dragged to the store when I run out of Tylenol. And if Ben is having a hard time, Lucy has nowhere to go to avoid it. And if I’m helping Ben, there’s no one else for her to talk to or play with.

This has been our reality for so long I had honestly forgotten there was another way. I’d say that it’s starting to come back to me, but truth be told, living in a house with another mom is a kind of support I’ve never known before.

The morning after we moved into our new house with our new roommates, we really needed to take the kids out to breakfast. Everyone needed a good meal and the kitchen was virtually inaccessible. Denny’s was most definitely in order. But Ben, already stressed by the chaos of the move, was not on board with our plan. It was Sunday and on Sundays we get donuts. I tried for just a few minutes to reason with him, but quickly realized it was a losing battle. My compromise was to take Ben for a donut and then meet the rest of the group at Denny’s. But my compromise fell on deaf ears because Ben was already past the point of no return. Feeling strongly that I needed to power through, I began to get him ready so that we could get his donut and then get some actual nutrition into his stressed little body. While I was struggling to put his shoes and coat on, I barked at Lucy to get herself ready so that she could come with us. Lucy was rushing about trying to help me when Maggie put a hand on my arm and said very calmly (but loudly enough to be heard over the screaming), “We’ll take Lucy with us.” It hadn’t even occurred to me that was an option.

So Ben and I drove to Krispy Kreme by ourselves, purchased a donut at the drive-through and drove back to the restaurant to meet the rest of the group. Ben screamed almost the entire time – close to 30 minutes in the car by time we accomplished our mission and made it back to Denny’s. He pulled it together enough to sit with the group and have some breakfast, but he was definitely on edge, telling us repeatedly to stop talking (something very difficult for Lucy, in particular, to do).

When we finished eating, Maggie and I both had errands to run before returning to the house but Ben looked at me and said, “Mom, I need to go home right now,” and I knew he meant business. I sighed, took a moment to resolve myself to not accomplishing what needed to be done and turned towards my car. Maggie stopped me and said, “I’m going to the grocery – give me your list.” I handed it to her gratefully and started to walk away with both Ben and Lucy in tow, Lucy’s face clearly registering just how difficult it would be for her to sit in the car in complete silence in order to keep Ben calm, and how sad it would be for her to get home and be ignored by her only sibling. But Maggie, seeing her face, stopped Lucy with an arm around her shoulder and said, “Why don’t you come with us, honey?”  Lucy's face brightened instantly and she trotted off happily with Maggie and the other kids.

Living in a house with another adult has opened up a whole new world for us and I believe that everyone in this house benefits. But perhaps no one benefits more than Lucy. And maybe that’s just as it should be. Maybe it’s about time that sweet child got a break from being a big girl all the time – a break from being responsible and helpful and always worrying about Ben... and me. Maybe it’s about time Lucy was able to just be a kid.

One might think that having an extra mom around would make the household stricter, but I think it’s quite the opposite. Having an extra mom around allows us the grace to be less strict, have more fun, be more present. And to take care of who needs caring for without feeling like we’re slighting someone else.

Maybe every household should have an extra mom. I’m certainly glad mine does.