Valentine’s Day as a parent is…
– Watching your kindergartener with pride as he fills out his Valentines by himself
– Buying drugstore candy because you don’t have time to get anything else and know your spouse will like it better than the fancy stuff anyway
– Arguing with a two-year-old in the middle of the night about changing his mysteriously wet pajamas
“They shouldn’t have given you a time estimate,” the customer service representative said. My eyes narrowed and I resisted the urge to throw the phone across the room. It was 10:30 PM at night. We hadn’t had natural gas service to our house for more than 24 hours. And now this person was telling me that they didn’t have a clue when we would get our heat and hot water back.
This whole thing started two nights earlier, on Super Bowl Sunday. I walked outside to empty the compost when a neighbor walked past me, then doubled-back. Stopping for just a moment, he said, “You know, I smell natural gas on your block.” Sniffing the air, I caught a faint scent of rotten eggs.
“Thoughts and prayers for me as I face one of the biggest challenges of parenting (and yes, I’m very lucky I’ve never done it before) – having the kids for the weekend by myself,” I posted on Facebook two weeks ago. For the first time, I had the kids to myself for more than a day.
In the past, my husband Chris, has always been back by dinner. While I’ve gone on several work trips over the years, he’s never gone on a trip on his own. But two weeks ago, he was headed off to Las Vegas to visit his sister and her new baby.
He deserved it. I owed it to him.
I was also scared shitless.
“An 12, huh,” I muttered to myself, looking at my computer screen. I had just taken the “Are You a Sensation Seeker?” self-assessment on the Highly Sensitive Child website. I finally had a word to put to something I’ve known for a long time about myself. And more importantly, I also had a word for something I realized much more recently about my older son.
“Back in my day, kids roamed the neighborhood without supervision and nobody had these fancy birthday parties,” says yet another article about how childhood was different “back then.” While the world has changed for the good and the bad, I feel like my children’s experience isn’t all that different in some ways than mine or even my mom’s. Looking forward, it’s different in so many good ways as well.
No, it’s not a gate fence!” I giggled. As we drove to one of our favorite yearly events, the Maryland Renaissance Faire, we passed the time playing Twenty Questions. It had taken a turn towards the silly, with my then four-year-old guessing the animal I was thinking of was a fence. Even though we were stuck in traffic, we were all laughing hysterically. While the Faire itself was great fun, that half-hour playing 20 Questions is what I remember the most.
Peering through a plexiglass wall, I held my two-year-old steady as he stood on a narrow ledge.
Ten minutes earlier, we had been on the other side of that plexiglass wall, on the ice of our town’s outdoors skating rink. Unsteady on my own skates, I held his left hand while his right hand gripped the wall. His feet flailed beneath him, slipping backwards, then forwards.
“I was such a rule follower! What happened?” I said to my husband after my kids once again ignored my directions and ran away laughing.
While they follow directions pretty well in school, I know I’m not the only one their anti-authoritarian streak comes out around. My mom has given them The Look she perfected after decades of teaching. They shrug it off. If you start counting without a very specific consequence attached to it, they just look at you, wondering what the point of this counting is. Authority for authority’s sake does not resonate for my children.
My five-year-old son ran into the living room, his hands over his mouth. The first words out of my mouth were, “Why are you up again?” It was the third time he had gotten out of bed that night. The next words out of my mouth were, “Are you okay?”
He looked confused, then ambled back to his room. Then, we heard retching.
This balloon represents an act of everyday heroism.
The balloon had been in my older son’s room since his birthday in June. Lately, it’s been losing some serious air and drifting from room to room like a festive ghost. Somehow, it floated all the way to the basement stairs. So when someone left the door open (okay, neither I nor my son closed it), it drifted right out into the wintry mix.