I crashed my bicycle a few weeks ago. One of my friends said, “Don’t you know you can’t crash at our age? It takes too long to heal!” And I ignored her.
Fast forward to three weeks later, maybe a month. I’ve lost count. The cuts on my skin are still there. That alone says one of two things. It either says, Those were some pretty deep cuts! or it says, It takes too long to heal!
The cut on my leg, which was not deep because I was wearing pants, is almost gone. I wonder if Shane had gotten the same injuries, if he would have been healed in a week. He’s only 40 years younger than me.
When I crashed, I landed on my right arm. Somehow this jarred a portion of my core; my entire right side hurts when I stretch. This is an improvement. It used to hurt when I moved even a little, and that went on for a week.
The landing also appears to have slammed something in my neck onto a nerve. A week after the crash, I woke up unable to lift my right arm. It took me several days and some consultations (with softball players, not with doctors) to realize that it was a pinched nerve. The giveaway: Bill pushed on my neck in one specific spot, and my brain spun. The whole room went around, and I was just lying still. It was insane.
After the room spin, though, my arm lifting got a little better. Unfortunately, at the same time I was revisited by sudden spells of vertigo. This morning when I woke up, I couldn’t hold myself upright. But hey, I can lift my arm! Not as well as I could a month ago, but … I can lift it.
If I stretch my neck a certain way and lie very, very still for a long time, my vertigo goes away. Mostly. This tells me that I’m correct about the pinched nerve. My softball buddy says he was told by two neurosurgeons that a pinched nerve requires immediate, drastic surgery of the neck. He chose to go to a chiropractor instead – something he didn’t believe in – and after three weeks, he was functional again.
Bill is my version of a chiropractor. He is very kind about trying to “fix” me – although I shudder to think what I would do without him. I sure wouldn’t be lifting my arm yet. To be honest, I’d probably have given up sports long ago if he didn’t assist with my ailments. He is a saint.
I suppose I would go to an actual doctor, or a chiropractor, if he weren’t around. But I trust Bill more.
So while I wait for him to come home from work so that he can work with me, I will just rest. (This, of course, is also thanks to Bill.) I am glad that we don’t have softball today, because playing without my throwing arm is unacceptable. By next week, I expect to be fully healed. Or at least by next month.
What I have learned from all of this is: don’t crash the bike.
After Dylan returned from college last spring, we all knew that something needed to change.
For Dylan, he preferred to never come home again. And he really, really tried to accomplish that. In four months of college, he barely spoke to us, almost never returned our texts, and complained whenever we called that he was “really busy.” We got the idea – and backed off.
We didn’t bother him, but he didn’t notice we were living our lives without him. Even now, he still hasn’t asked about our lives over the past four months. A lot has happened, but he knows nothing about any of it. He isn’t interested.
When we were making plans to pick him up from college, Dylan decided that he would rather put everything he owned in storage than to come home even for a few days, and instead drove with his girlfriend to Texas to spend three weeks with her family, vacationing.
Eventually, he came home.
In the meantime, I prepared. I didn’t want to spend another summer arguing over Dylan’s inability to get out of bed by noon, his dark and smelly room, his constantly being late – and making everyone else wait – even though his dinner was ice cold.
In fact, I didn’t want to argue with Dylan at all.
So I got a book called Failure To Launch: Why Your Twentysomething Hasn’t Grown Up … And What To Do About It. While Dylan has “launched” pretty darn well, he hasn’t taken charge of some aspects of his life, and I wanted to know what to do about that. Because what I’ve been doing has never – not ever – worked.
And sure enough, like most parenting books, I learned what I’ve been doing wrong to cause his persistent behavior. The gist is: I’ve been doing too much for him, “helping” when it’s no longer my time to help. If I do everything for him, he will never learn to do what he needs to do for himself.
It’s pretty much been the answer to everything since Dylan turned 12. I just keep re-learning it.
The best thing I learned in this book is that I am now more of a “consultant” than a “supervisor.” It’s not my job to tell Dylan what to do – he already knows. And he is doing a pretty great job, actually. His grades are great – all A’s and B’s – and he’s keeping himself healthy. He may have forgotten how to shave, but he is feeding himself and will probably work this summer. He’s careful with money, he’s careful with people, and he’s kind.
Somewhere along the way, though, he stopped thanking me for virtually everything. He thanks everyone else – he’s very polite – but he sees me as the enemy. It’s as if he needs to completely ignore me in order to “prove” that he’s an adult, instead of learning how to have an adult-to-adult relationship.
I assume that will come in time, if we try.
Meanwhile I am supposed to treat him not like “my child,” because he’s not a child, but more like a distant relative who’s come to visit. So every day I imagine that my cousin’s son, a delightful young man named Graham, has come to visit me for the summer. When I am deciding what to say to Dylan, I think: Would I say that to Graham?
The answer is almost always: No.
To be fair, Graham would not need any of the reminders I think Dylan needs. But for now, I remain a consultant, living with my distant relative.
And so far, we aren’t arguing about anything.
It’s quiet in here.
Bill has gone to get the pizza. Dylan – who is finally home from college – has gone upstairs to his room. Shane was already upstairs in his room. The dog has been walked and is resting on a chair in the living room. Unlike our other dog, Loki rests in another room sometimes. He isn’t glued to my legs.
I have checked my emails, played my daily SongPop, browsed a bit through Facebook, and ordered some probiotics online. It’s cold and rainy outside, so I am staying indoors. I await pizza – and movie night, a tradition we’ve had since before the kids were born. (Even though I can no longer eat pizza, we have “pizza and movie night” regularly.)
Until it starts, though, I have nothing to do. I’m thinking ahead to the “empty nest” that is coming, and I’m looking for ways to control the outcome (the kids don’t grow up and leave home?) and I’m realizing that it’s going to be quiet in here a lot of the time.
So I am turning to the internet for help.
I spent many years shopping on eBay for everything I owned as a kid, so that my kids would not be deprived. I spent years after that shopping on Amazon so that I could get anything I wanted just a little more cheaply than in the stores. After I realized that Amazon was being taken over by international sellers and knock-offs were rampant, I shopped on the Target site.
After all those years of online shopping, I then browsed the library catalog. At some point, I found Facebook. At another point, I realized Facebook was emotionally more painful than it was worth. So I started looking for other things to do.
And that’s where I got stuck.
There are more than a billion websites available to me. I can find a job or a friend. I can date or complain about a bad relationship. I can travel virtually or explore new cuisines. I can take classes or learn how to change a flat tire. I can fix my printer, my washing machine, my toilet or my picture hangers. I can build a bookshelf, a closet or a new engine for my lawn mower. I can watch videos about cats who play piano, or I can teach myself a foreign language.
I can jump into dramas of all kinds: support groups, educational meetings, animal rescues, environmental groups, political masses or musical theater. I can delve into the dark web (assuming I could find that) or practice fly fishing in my living room. I can download recipes, calendars, ancestry photos, old restaurant chain logos or TV theme songs from a prior century. I can color, study horticulture or become acquainted with any species of wildlife ever in existence.
But you know what I did today – like every day? I hopped onto Facebook, looked around, then hopped back off of Facebook. I wondered what the heck I should look for on the internet, and then realized I have not one single reason to go anywhere on the internet.
There are more than a billion websites and I can’t think of a single one to browse. I don’t feel like learning. I don’t feel like virtually traveling. And I sure don’t want to get to know any more people.
So I wrote my own blog post instead. After all, I have one of those billion websites. I may as well use it.
I ordered some items from Target for pickup. I masked up, and went to get them.
At the store, I grabbed a couple of grocery items. I bought them, then went to get my pickup order.
I didn’t have the Target app, which apparently has an essential barcode feature for pickups. Still, they located my order and I headed out. But…
I had ordered a small wallet that was, I noticed immediately, way too big for my purposes. So I walked four feet from the pickup area to the return area.
The woman behind the counter said, “Do you have a receipt?”
“I just picked it up 20 seconds ago,” I said. “They didn’t give me a receipt.”
“Okay well, you will have to go home and within 24 hours, you’ll get a receipt. Then you can return the item.”
“But I don’t want to go home and wait for a receipt. I’m here right now! Isn’t there anything I can do?”
“I guess I can give you merchandise credit,” she said. She held up a little black card labeled merchandise return, which I could use the next time I shopped at Target.
“I don’t want to carry around an extra card,” I said.
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s the only thing I can do.”
I looked at my bag of groceries, which cost way more than the $12 wallet I was trying to return. “What if I return some of these items?” I asked. “Then I can buy them again with the merchandise credit, and I won’t have to carry around the card.”
“You can do that,” said the girl. “But you can only use $75 a year of merchandise credit.”
“Huh?”
“Well if you have to return something else this year, you might go over your limit. You can only spend $75 a year on one of these cards.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
Someone walked by and said, “Just give her the card.” This made both of us happy.
She “returned” the little wallet.
Meanwhile I pulled out a couple of things from my grocery bag, which she also “returned.” Then I watched her re-scan and “buy” the grocery items.
Finally, she handed me my receipt – and my little black gift card. “You have $12.22 on the card,” she said.
“I still have to carry the card?” I asked, perplexed.
“Sorry!” she said. “It didn’t come out even.”
I took the gift card, and picked up my bag of returned-then-bought-again things. I was too tired to argue.
I was halfway to the car before I realized what had happened.
She’d returned the grocery items as merchandise credit, instead of crediting my account. Then she “bought” them again with the same merchandise credit. So I still had to carry around the little black gift card.
Worse yet, I got back slightly less than what the item actually cost. That’s because when I bought the grocery items, I’d used my Target credit card and gotten a 5% discount. So I paid more for the same items the second time I bought them.
I didn’t have the energy to go back inside and re-do everything. I puzzled and moaned the whole way home, but I’d reached my limit. Let them keep their 75 cents.
I forgot all about it … for three days. Then, out of the blue, I got an email from Target.
The email said: We have refunded the full cost of your order. Thank you for shopping at Target!
I am not even going to ask.
In my quest for understanding, I frequently think about a guy who, when I was incredibly young, showed me how the other side lives. And by “other side,” I don’t mean politically. I mean, he had a perspective on life that was so far removed from what I believed, I literally thought he was joking.
I lived with Larry for three years. I was a 20-year-old college student, and he was a 36-year-old biker. College was never in his life plan, and I’d never lived a blue-collar life. I learned a lot while living with Larry.
I learned that loyalty and friendship are as important as blood; once you trust someone, you never turn your back on him. I learned that family is forever. I learned that what you do and where you go aren’t nearly as important as brotherhood.
I learned that when you live from paycheck to paycheck, there isn’t any more money if you’re hungry or – in my case – if you want another beer. Until you get paid again, money will not magically materialize.
This lesson boggled my mind, since I’d always had everything I wanted. I had to learn to do without, so I also learned that I could live with much less than I thought I needed.
In Larry’s world, every day was an adventure. He never complained about his job. As a machinist he said, “I’m a skilled laborer. That means I have a skill. I can work anywhere in the world!” I just thought it was cool that he could wear yesterday’s jeans and t-shirt to work.
On warm weekends, Larry would say, “I’m going out to work on the bike.” This was a regular event which required him to sit all day amidst small metal objects and oil. People would stop by and chat, standing and staring at the motorcycle. They stayed for hours.
We ate burgers and pizza; we never cooked. We watched football at the VFW. Larry had a country band, so we played guitars and sang together, often on dark, tiny stages. We were always out.
Larry’s beliefs were dramatically different than mine. Larry once told me he was addicted to cigarettes because his mother smoked when she was pregnant.
Did you smoke when you were an infant? I wondered. Larry was serious.
Our world was lily-white, mostly bearded men. The few women were “old ladies” like me: scantily clad trophies who didn’t talk much.
Once, while sitting at a stoplight on the back of Larry’s motorcycle, I pointed out a Mazda Miata convertible. It was my dream car.
“You like that piece of [bleep]? Get off my bike!” Larry roared. He wasn’t kidding; I had to walk miles to get home. That’s how I found out that Mazda is a Japanese manufacturer. This apparently was not okay – especially for a machinist who wanted to continue working “anywhere in the world.”
I was supposed to be terrified of Hell’s Angels (“they’ll slit your throat”), but to ride without a helmet (“freedom, Baby!”). Everything required some risk.
But living Larry’s life – because he never lived mine – offered me a pinhole peek into the anger, the ignorance and the upheaval that is pouring from some people lately. Larry never struck me as a White supremacist, but his concern about race, foreigners and skin color baffled me.
So I doubt that Larry is following that movement; he’s likely just still singing and keeping his head down. I think about him, though, and I thank God I survived those years – and that I have the life I have today.
In my dream, I am Mom to Lisa Simpson. I do not have giant blue hair – I am just me – but Lisa Simpson is my daughter, and it’s the morning of the SAT test.
I can’t think of anything to feed my daughter. I want her to have something with protein, something that will nourish her brain. I end up scooping out a mound of peanut butter the size of a baseball and putting it into a bowl with some bread underneath. It’s the only thing I can imagine that has protein.
Lisa Simpson pushes the peanut butter around in the bowl. She looks at me helplessly.
“Do you want something else?” I ask. “Did you pack a snack?” I start to get up from the table where, apparently, I’ve been sitting next to her like she’s a toddler.
Just then, about ten complete strangers walk through our kitchen. They are all heading out the door to go to school, boisterously.
“Is it really 7:50?” I screech. I look at Lisa Simpson; there’s fear in both our eyes. We know we needed to be there at 7:45 or we wouldn’t be able to take the test.
Poof! We are in the school. It’s 7:51.
“Please,” I beg the vice principal, who is guarding the door. “Please let her take the test.” Wordlessly, the vice principal ushers her in, rolling her eyes at me for my incompetence. Lisa Simpson disappears down a long hall, away from all the other students for social distancing reasons.
It’s then I realize: she doesn’t have her snack! I whip out a toddler cup with a lid, containing chopped apple, and I slide it down the hall like a skee-ball expert, and it lands at the doorway of the exact right room. An adult hand reaches around the doorway and picks it up.
Then I panic: She doesn’t have her water! She doesn’t have any water! How is she going to get through the whole test without any water?
But it’s too late. She has no water, and she’s late for the test, and all she’s had for breakfast are a few bites of crunchy peanut butter. It didn’t even occur to me to give her extra number-two pencils or a calculator.
My soothing, clanging alarm went off as I realized: I am the worst mother in the world.
I got out of bed and went downstairs to find Shane making peanut butter toast for breakfast. I slathered on the peanut butter, just like he likes it, because he let me. I got him a banana – but I offered to chop an apple for him.
Then I raced to get him a water bottle – one that would keep the water cold for hours – and filled it to overflowing. Proudly, I added that water bottle to his pile.
I asked Shane 14 times if he had his snack, his calculator and his pencils. I could see that they were right in front of him, along with his COVID mask, but I asked anyway.
Then I drove Shane to school for the first time in more than a year, and dropped him off to take his SAT test.
I eat too much sugar. This is something I know, and watch, especially given my tendency toward having reactions to foods that I eat too often. They cause me to blow up like a balloon.
Even worse, I have known for a few years that eating sugar after, say, 3:00 p.m. makes me wake up in the middle of the night. If this happens, I am usually up for an hour or more.
Still, after Easter, I couldn’t help but eat my Cadbury Creme Eggs (gluten-free!) and, of course, I stayed up for an hour in the middle of the night.
The next day, I finished off the Cadbury Eggs earlier in the day and it was slightly better.
But I also had a “carrot” made of orange Reese’s Pieces, the candy I loved so much in college. Once in a blue moon, I eat these and it takes me right back to my freshman year, when I would eat a pound of them in one sitting. (This is why I don’t eat them very often anymore.)
Unfortunately, I decided to eat my “carrot” of candy at 7:30 p.m. Then I went to bed, knowing I was in for a rough night.
But I slept straight through till morning.
I woke up, well rested, and thought nothing of it – until I got hungry for breakfast and thought, “What did I eat last night?”
I ate candy.
Okay, so I need some protein… I started to calculate. And then I stopped.
I ate CANDY?!?
The answer hit me as fast as the question: There’s no chocolate in Reese’s Pieces.
You would think I would be smarter than I am. After all these years of watching what I eat, paying close attention to my intake of any number of substances, and after giving up alcohol, cigarettes, caffeine, and soda, you would think I already would have known.
Chocolate contains caffeine.
I looked it up and instantly, it was verified. The darker the chocolate, the more caffeine – but all chocolate contains some caffeine. Consuming caffeine of any kind is just rough on my body.
So it’s not the sugar that’s been waking me up at night; it’s the chocolate.
I gave up caffeine almost ten years ago, after an incident on the softball field where my heart wouldn’t stop beating uncontrollably fast. I had about six ounces of green tea once after giving up caffeine, and I was up almost all night.
How could I have not considered this?
I allowed myself these Easter treats because I think it’s self-defeating to be completely deprived all the time. But I don’t see much point in eating sugar if it’s not either fruit or chocolate (and I’m not fond of fruit). So now, oddly, I learned from this experience.
You’d think I’d have known. Sometimes I think it’s selective ignorance.
I am the worst mother ever.
Shane had his first job interview yesterday. Since I was originally scheduled to be in Nashville that day, I started panicking about logistics at least two weeks in advance.
I sent an email to my husband, cc’ing Shane, providing the specifics: name of interviewer, phone number, address, date, time. Then, sure that they would lose the email anyway, I sent the email to myself so that I would have it available when they called me in Nashville and asked where to go.
As luck would have it, Dylan changed his plans and I did not need to pick him up in Nashville. Woo-hoo! I was able to take Shane to his job interview. No more worries!
On the 15-minute drive, for which we had 30 minutes, I grilled Shane with pre-interview questions. I had printed out a copy of his original job description from Indeed.com. After he reread that, I asked him what questions he had about the job.
“I don’t really have any,” he said.
“Then you aren’t going to stand out as an applicant,” I said. “You are smart, you look nice, and you are going to do a great job. But if you don’t have any questions for her, she will think you don’t really care about the job. So you need to think of some questions!”
We were already in the parking lot when he finally came up with some good questions. And they were actually great questions! I couldn’t have thought of them myself, nor could I have answered them. I was very proud of his brilliance. I knew he was ready to go inside.
Plus, he was 10 minutes early: the perfect amount of time for him to get inside and casually, calmly do his thing.
“So where am I going?” Shane asked, looking around. The parking lot was nearly empty.
Suddenly I remembered the email I’d sent to Bill a week earlier. Wasn’t there a different address on that email…?
I quickly pulled out my phone and checked – then I panicked. The interview was across town!
And it was happening in nine minutes.
We took off like a shot. I ran a red light coming out of the parking lot and skidded onto the main road.
In my race to get to the right place, I ignored the GPS and completely missed my turn. I came flying back up a side road, catapulting over speed bumps that were meant to slow me down. The whole time, I was bashing myself aloud for being such an idiot, and half-apologizing to Shane, who wasn’t really that panicked.
“Should I tell them why I was late,” he asked, “or would that just make it worse?”
“You should absolutely tell them,” I said. “And blame me! It was my fault for not knowing where I was going.” I didn’t mention that Shane should have known the address, too; but why miss an opportunity to be a bad parent? As long as Shane got the job offer, I didn’t care if they thought I was a moron.
With less than a minute to spare, I drove straight up to the door. I felt like an Olympic skier doing a victory skid at the bottom of the hill. Shane hopped out and very calmly went inside.
His interview went well, although we have no idea if he got the job. But the important lesson for the day: I should never believe I know what I’m doing. It’s probably at the root of all of my issues.
Three days before the end of the third quarter, I checked Shane’s grades. Since Shane is usually way ahead of the game, and he doesn’t need any help from me to remember to do his work, I hadn’t looked at his grades in months.
When I tried to sign in, I had to download and acknowledge the obligatory “interim report” page. This is a report that comes in halfway through the quarter, every quarter, and I always have to acknowledge that I’ve seen it, even when it is a list of Shane’s A’s and B’s in every subject.
But this time … it wasn’t. Shane’s interim report included C’s in two classes, and a failing grade in Statistics.
Failing? SHANE?!?
I quickly looked at his grades for the quarter: A’s in Digital Art and P.E. B’s in almost everything else. And Shane was still failing Statistics, three days before the end of the quarter.
Shane is taking Honors Statistics this year, in preparation for college-level (AP) Statistics next year. Even though he got an A last semester, maybe this wasn’t the class for him after all.
“SHANE!” I roared, loud enough to get his attention on the other side of the house and in spite of his noise-canceling headphones.
He appeared immediately.
“What is this?” I asked, as calmly as I could. “You are failing Statistics?”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “I have five missing assignments. But every time I try to do the assignments, I can’t figure them out. And I emailed the teacher like two weeks ago, and she never got back to me. I am going to talk to her after class tomorrow.”
Three days before the end of the quarter. This made me a bit queasy, since Dylan had lived like this for six years.
“Okay,” I said.
The next day, Shane came downstairs at lunchtime and said, “I’m meeting with my Statistics teacher after school today.”
“Do you need me to drive you to the school?” I asked. They’d recently started a hybrid learning model, and there are now people at his school.
“No,” he said. “I’m doing it from here.”
My thoughts festered as I drove home from the library that day. What if Shane can’t handle AP Statistics next year? I planned to email his teacher – something I rarely did for Shane, since he is a great self-advocate.
But I came home from the library and Shane was sitting on the stairs, talking to his math teacher.
“Just please ask her,” I said, “if you should take AP Statistics next year or Quantitative Literacy.” Shane did not want to take Calculus, so these were his only two math options.
Shane asked.
His math teacher responded as loudly and clearly as she could, so that I could hear her answer: “Absolutely positively take AP Statistics! Definitely. And if you don’t take AP Statistics, I will hunt you down and drag you into the counselor until you change your schedule so I can get you back into the class.”
A few minutes later, Shane got off the Zoom and said he’d finished three of the five of his missing assignments, and that he now understood how to do the other two. A few days later, Shane’s grade had gone from a 36% to something like 87%.
I think Shane is going to do fine in AP Statistics.
I lived in a small town for 4.5 years of my childhood. I would say I grew up there, even though I went to three different schools and lived in three different houses during that time.
Middle school was hard for me. I was a quiet kid with maybe one friend. I didn’t have enough confidence in myself to speak up when someone shoved me down. So at the end of seventh grade when I heard we were buying our first house – no longer renting, and therefore staying! – I finally considered coming out of my shell.
We only moved to the other side of town. I made a handful of friends in my new neighborhood, and felt liked by peers for the first time ever. I went to East Middle with that handful of friends in my pocket, and practically smiled when people said hello.
In social studies class, assigned seating put me next to a boy named Dennis Jones. I was the new girl, and he was the class clown. Dennis was nice to everyone. The first time he saw me, he smiled and said a genuine but simple, “Hey there!” His smile was contagious.
Dennis was drop-dead gorgeous with white-blonde hair swooping over sparkling green eyes, and he spoke to me as if I were human. He joked about my being quiet, but he treated me like a friend. Dennis stormed past my shyness and made me feel okay. For me, “okay” was the best I’d ever felt.
We had a student teacher who had no idea how to discipline a group of eighth graders. Every day, Dennis would come up with a new way to agitate the teacher, and he looped me into the daily games. We would all drop our pencils at the same time, or individually clear our throats, or just sit and smile and stare at her. The teacher once slammed a yardstick onto a desk and snapped it in half – her face beet red, her voice hoarse from screaming.
As a current teacher, I know that this was horribly unfair. But as a student, it was the most fun I ever had – and I was sitting right next to the superstar instigator, playing my part. While he was never more than an acquaintance, Dennis made me feel accepted.
After only four months in that school, we moved again. I asked Dennis if I could take his picture since I wouldn’t be getting a yearbook. He quickly posed a group of kids for my photo album. I looked through the viewfinder at those sparkling green eyes and could barely take the shot. He was breathtakingly beautiful.
When I joined Facebook, Dennis is the only person I “friended” from 8th grade. Dennis grew up to be a frontman for Everybody Wants Some, a Van Halen tribute band. He made a perfect David Lee Roth. I had a couple of opportunities to see the band play, but I decided to wait until the kids got a little older. And then the kids got older, and I got older, and Dennis got older. I never saw his band.
Last week, a notification on Facebook said simply, “Dennis Jones passed away.” He’d had a massive stroke at 57. It’s an unfathomable tragedy. Dennis was the life of the party for 50 years; the sympathy is still pouring in.
For me, though, Dennis was the one who made me feel “part of” a world that, I believed, didn’t want me. He made everybody feel like they belonged; it was just him. Rest in peace, Dennis.
