Musings of a Midlife Mama and Other Stories

Dear Jack,

I’m writing today because I need to make promises to you when you are a senior in high school.  I know, I know, you’re only in first grade.  But that’s why I have to tell you now. You don’t know this but time goes by fast. I realized this when Molly graduated from high school.  And now with Kelly’s graduation near, I want time back. 

I’m losing you, aren’t I?  I’m not making sense. Yes, you can go outside and look for bugs in a minute. 

Listen, I’ve made some mistakes with the girls.  Without realizing it I followed the credo, why do today, what you can put off tomorrow? Here it is many tomorrows later and I have a lot to do.  I won’t put off writing this letter.

Here are my promises to you.  I promise to go to every parent-tag-along day at your high school.  Today you like having me around, most of the time.  So in seven years, I like to think you will still like hanging out with me.  As you get older, you will never, ever admit this.  I get it.  I promise not to call you out about this in front of your buddies.  But just know that I know. 

I promise to try to like the girls you bring home.  You will bring them home to meet me, right?  Liking them is going to be tough.  Just ask Molly and Kelly.  They will tell you while I have been cordial and polite to their boyfriends.  They will also say they knew exactly how I felt about these boys.  They were not good enough.  Simple fact: no boy or girl, man or woman are ever going to be good enough for my kids.  No one.  But I also want you, and Molly and Kelly, to be happy.  So I promise to be nice to those people who are good to you and who make you happy.  I will grumble about the girls you bring home behind closed doors.  I promise. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the transition from high school to college, from childhood to adulthood since I’ve been writing (and rewriting) the memoir about when Molly went off to college.  And Kelly will be graduating in three months.  All this ruminating over this change, these changes, has made me understand I haven’t found ways with dealing with this loss.  Make no mistake, it is a loss.  But I’m learning with loss there is gain. Henry Wadsworth said in his poem, Loss and Gain, ” Defeat may be victory in disguise; The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide.”  I know, Jack, I’m quoting poetry I’ve gone too far.  Haven’t I?

Okay then one last promise.  When you are a senior in high school I promise not to get mushy and cry every time there is an ending, the football banquet at the end of the season, the last high school dance, the last baseball game, the last report card.  This is the way I was with Molly and now Kelly.  I cry at everything.  I promise I won’t when–Who am I kidding?  I will cry.  I warned you. 

Yes, yes, now you can go outside.  Go ahead and flood the ant colony.  Dissect the caterpillar. 

I love you!

Mom

If you read nothing else, read this.  Take photos with your daughter.  You say, I don’t have a daughter.  Then take photos with your sister, best friend, your mother, your Uncle Bob, your favorite teacher, your fish.  Take photos of you and those people and things that matter most. 

Put down your spatula.  Stop cooking.  Don’t worry about not having make-up on or that your hair is a mess.  It doesn’t matter the Lakers are down by one point and in this instant Kobe could win it.  Your son is asking you now to go out and play baseball with him.  Your daughter wants you to get off the phone so you’ll take a photo with her.  Hold on.  Hold on, you say.  But there is no holding on because time goes fast.

As your daughter grows older, and she will without your permission, you will start looking for opportunities to be with your daughter, to capture moments.  They come but you must be a huntress and hunt for them because they are few and far between. You are reflective. You realize your daughter is of a different generation where her and her friends take thousands of photos.  They are brilliant at taking photos of everything.  You hope this will continue when your daughter has her daughter.

If your husband, who is a photographer, comments there are not many photos of you and your daughter, you stop to ponder. You think back to all those times you were on the other side of the camera taking the photo, all those times you didn’t ask that stranger, Would you please take a photo of my daughter and me? 

How many times did you say, I hate having my photo taken.  The camera adds ten pounds.  I look older, fatter, uglier than in real life.  Really I do, you’ll say. 

John Lennon said, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” This is what happens to you.  One day your litte girl is little.  One day she is all giggles and smelling like baby powder.  The next day she is off running with her friends playing hopscotch and barbies.  Days past and she is going to dances, staying out late, and waking up grumpy because she hates mornings.

If you do nothing else, step away from the computer, paying the bills, talking on the phone, saying to your child, “Give me one more minute.”  Because soon there won’t be one more minute, soon they’ll be gone to college and you will be sitting in your living room surrounded by your family photos.  You’ll be foraging for those mother daughter photos you wished you would have taken.

I’m a yes whore.  What is that?  It’s someone who can’t say no. 

I say yes to all sorts of things, yes to obligations and extracurricular activities, to my children, to opportunities, to work associates and partners, to…to…and the list goes on.

I say yes when I mean no.

This propensity to say yes became obvious when Molly was a senior.  “Yes, I’ll drive you to L.A. for your volleyball tournament.”  “Yes, you can have money to go buy clothes.”  “Yes, I’ll call you out of school.”  I could not not say no.  My excuse? It was Molly’s last year of high school.  When would I ever have the chance to do this with or for her ever, ever again?  And while this was true, there is an emotional shift that’s almost physical that forever changes when your child is about to graduate from high school and becomes an adult, I said yes because I wanted to hold on to Molly.  I wanted her to like me enough to stay forever locked in our relationship as my little girl who needed me to take care of her. 

Being a mom is the epitome of being needed, and this doesn’t change whether they’re six like Jack or almost eighteen or twenty one like Kelly and Molly, respectively.  And I like being needed…most of the time.

But I say yes for other reasons.  You give me a compliment, and I’m yours.  I was roped as co-president of a mother-daughter philanthropy organization because a number of the moms came to me and said, “You have been such a great coordinator.  We think you’d be great as a president.” Me? President?  Hell, yes.  Tell me I’m smart, pretty, creative, a good writer and I will stay up all night doing whatever project it is you were greasing me up for in the first place.

I say yes because god forbid I’m bored.  My adult attention deficit disorder makes me easily distracted.  “Oh, what’s that pretty activity over there? That looks so much more interesting than what I’m doing now or what I’m supposed to be doing.”  I’ve been living my life by the motto, “If you want to get a job done, give it to a busy person.”  That’s me, busy and competent.

But lately, I’ve grown resentful, regretful, rundown, rageful and any other “r” words I can think of because of my overcommitment to too many things.  David, my husband, has pointed out that I am a yes whore.  Maybe not in those words but he does question my compulsion to say yes to everything and everybody.  Although he will also say “Funny, not when it comes to me.”  He wants me to start saying n-n-n-no to things.  And I’m trying.

Not long ago, the classroom mom from Jack’s class approached me to be the PTA president.  “You did an amazing job with the holiday party.  You were so organized [clearly she hasn't seen the inside of car] and both the parents and kids enjoyed it.  You’d make a great PTA president.”  Me? President?  I can’t believe I considered it because working with other parents can be um, challenging.  But I did.  She called me smart.  I smiled broadly at her, puffed out my chest and said, “Thank you, but no.” 

This month CrossFit is having qualifiers for their statewide meet, and the owner of the gym where I do CrossFit commented that he thought I’d be great and would easily qualify.  I ran home, okay I drove, but the compliment made me feel like I could run the six miles home.  I told David I would be competing in the CrossFit qualifiers. 

“Michelle, let me guess…he called you strong.”

“Well, maybe…but…”
“And you fell for it?”

“You don’t think I’m strong?  You think I’m too old or–”

“Nice try. You’re deflecting what’s going on here.”

“I know.  I’ll tell him n-n-n-o.”

See, I’m working on it. 

My name is Michelle Zive, and I’m a maybe lady of the night.

“The tarot card reader told me I wasn’t there about my future,” Reba said.  “She said I was there to forgive.”

Reba and I were having lunch at PF Chang’s.  We were celebrating that she’d finally quit the job that was draining her energy and in the words of her husband  turning her into a bitch. 

Although she knew quitting the job was the best thing for her and her family, she still fretted about the what ifs (What if I don’t find another job?) and the whats (What next?).  When a friend recommended Reba get her cards read, Reba leapt at the chance of someone, anyone, telling her what the future held and providing her direction. 

The tarot card reader had set the cards out on a table between her and Reba, and was about to flip one over when she brushed the cards to the side and said to Reba, “You’re here about forgiveness.”

“Forgiveness?” I asked Reba.

“Forgiveness,” Reba said spooning a mouthful of rice into her mouth.

The word, FORGIVENESS, settled between us as Reba chewed the rice.  Then she explained, “The woman told me I’ve been beating myself up about quitting my job.  In my mind, I’d failed and I wasn’t letting go of this failure.  I’ve been a perfectionist all my life and wasn’t letting myself off the hook.  I wasn’t forgiving myself for being human. ”

Goose pimples raised on my arms.  The hairs on the back of my neck stood rigid.  The sound of the murmurs in the restaurant stopped.  Everything stopped.

Forgiving myself for being human. 

Forgiving myself for making mistakes. 

I’ve been thinking about forgiveness a lot lately.  At the beginning of my memoir is a scene with my dad when I was ten-years-old.  He and I were sitting across from each other at the kitchen table.

“You know you pick your parents?” he told me. 

It was the first time in what would be many my dad informed me that I’d actually taken part in deciding this life, my childhood.  Somehow I’d decided I wanted an alcoholic father who changed careers like other people changed their underwear.  And more than that, if I could choose my parents, than I had control over how the rest of my life turned out, right?  Wrong.  Molly’s ruptured appendix and my separation and divorce from Bill were slaps in the face of my perfect persona. 

For the last fourteen years, I’ve been beating myself up for not getting Molly to the hospital as soon as she became ill, for not staying married to Bill, for being messy. 

Forgive me.  I’m human.

I’ve been holding on to my anger over my dad being an alcoholic throughout my childhood, my abandonment.  And it is only  after writing the memoir I realized I wasn’t forgiving my dad for being human.  I realized he did the best job he could under the circumstances.  It was only when I’d said something very similar to my girls about how I’d parented, that I realized it had come full circle.

Someone once said, “Forgiveness means letting go of the past.” 

I’m letting go…

I heard you can tell who a person is by looking in their medicine cabinet and through their trash.  I think this is true.  Why are there “professional” dumpster divers searching through the garbage of famous people.  Does Halle Berry really use Cover Girl blush and mascara?  What about Madonna?  Does she only eat raw, macrobiotic food or would you find a charred piece of steak in her trash?  Does she feed Lourdes, Rocco and David Chicken McNuggets from McDonald’s? And forget about the link between a person and their medicine cabinet.  What would a cabinet full of Vicodin and Ambien say about a person?

Aside from these two places being able to describe the character of a person, there is another, the inside of a car. 

The other day I was in my Mitsibushi Outlander for the bazillionth time.  At a stop sign, I glanced around my car and realized there was a lot of crap, quite literally, strewn all over the inside of my car.  You would think this would compel me to go home and clean it.  Instead I finished my work day, went home, and took the following photos. 

Mojo wrapper, etc in driver's door

The inside of the driver’s door: Mojo wrappers from eating on the run, straw wrappers from my ninety-nine cent 42 ounce Diet Cokes (at least two a day), Trident White spearmint papers.

Driver’s seat: Nonfat Greek vanilla yogurt schmear from eating in the car.

Diet Pepsi cans

Middle console: Two empty Diet Pepsi cans.  Got addiction?

Passenger seat: Laptop computer (I’ve been known to open the computer and look for an email while “driving.”) and book bag. Work is never far away from my fingertips.

Broken umbrella, ella, ella...Everyone needs one of these, right?

Passenger floor: Broken umbrella, empty Ziploc baggie (Need to recycle it, but won’t happen if I leave it in my car.) and “old” phone charger from my previous cell phone…HELLLOOOOOO!!!!

Jack's jet drawing

Backseat floor: Hiking shoes from when Jack and I hiked Cowles’ Mountain about six weeks ago.  Socks are there, too. Empty water bottles…see I drink water, too, and recycle them when I clean out my car.  Jack’s drawing of a fighter jet.  More work papers.

Hiking shoe...oh, there it is.

Back of the car: Data and protocols  from my consulting job at SDSU, reusable grocery bags, McDonald’s toy from Happy Meals, Jack’s drawings, bungee cord for securing my surfboard on my roof (when I surfed), shoebox from boots I had repaired and never put them back in the box.

Trunk trash...the name of my new band

What does the inside of my car say about me?  I’m a harried woman with kids, a Diet Pepsi (can)/Diet Coke (fountain) addiction, who eats and works while driving.  I’m environmentally conscious with my use of recyclable grocery bags and my contemplation to recycle plastic bottles.  I’m messy.  I have other priorities besides cleaning, obviously but who doesn’t? And I have difficulty saying no to things and organizing my time and my surroundings.

I’m not the first one to contemplate character and cleanliness. 

“Cleanliness is next to godliness.”

“Krishna insisted on outer cleanliness and inner cleansing.  Clean clothes and clean minds are an ideal combination.” 

I like this one by Dr. Laurence J. Peter, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk?”

Clearly this clutter is bothering me (and you’re probably thinking it should, for the love of Pete).  And this messiness is not just in my car.  It’s my purse, my bedroom, bathroom, kitchen cupboards, my office, my email mailboxes, etc., etc.  So starting tomorrow I’m going to start to clean up my car and my character but there is no promise about the godliness part.