Dear Powers-That-Be at Costco:
Today I stopped in to pick up a cake. I didn’t need anything else – just the cake – and maybe some pistachios.
I left having spent more than $200. And for that, I want to
THANK YOU! A million times: thank you thank you thank you thank you!
When I stopped in, I found – immediately – some Paleo-certified granola bars. For the past several years, I have been battling an autoimmune illness caused by poor dietary choices. It’s been horribly difficult, especially since eating a Paleo diet is incredibly inconvenient. There are NO quick, “on-the-go” foods. I am a teacher and I have two kids, so I have been dependent on quick, “on-the-go” foods.
I snatched up those Paleo granola bars! Later, I found them
among the free samples. It was the first time in forever that I could eat the free samples! I was so happy!
Just as exciting, there was Paleo trail mix. I tried it –
although I was hesitant because I don’t like mangos – and it was delicious! So
I bought a bag of that, too.
And right down the way, at another sample station, were
ALMOND-FLOUR CRACKERS. I could have cried for joy. It’s been so long since I had a cracker! I can eat
hummus with them, or soup, or – also just bought at Costco – Avocado Mash!
Another convenient food that I can eat!
I can’t thank you enough for providing so many wonderful choices at your store. Try to imagine your doctor telling you: NO wheat. NO dairy. NO soy. No starch. No potatoes. No corn. NO SUGAR.
What would you eat? I mean really, what’s left?
I will tell you – since I am living it. You would eat meat (even if you hate meat, as I do) and you would eat vegetables. And lots and lots of nuts.
Today, I bought a bounty
of wonderful items that I could eat. Oh, and I got that chocolate cake for
my son, too. But today, I feel like it’s my birthday. Today, I can eat!
Thank you, Costco.
On the way out the door for school, on the morning of his third week of Ski Club, Shane turned to me. He said quickly, “I lost my ski helmet, so I’ll just wear yours this week.”
“You did WHAT?!?” I shrieked. “You lost your hundred-dollar ski helmet?! AND your brand new $40 goggles that were attached to your helmet?”
“I didn’t know they cost that much,” he mumbled.
“And you think you can just wear MINE?! No,” I said, in complete denial. “You did not lose your ski helmet. And you sure aren’t telling me this at 7:00 in the morning on your way out the door to go skiing!”
“Well I thought I could find it,” Shane said.
“Is it in your ski bag?”
“That’s the first place I looked,” he said.
I instructed Shane to look everywhere imaginable. We went out to the garage together and browsed through stuff. We checked two cars, the basement, the bedrooms, the closets, the mud room. We checked everywhere.
Finally, Shane went to school with my helmet and goggles. Meanwhile, I contacted the lost and found at the resort where, we assumed, he’d left his helmet. I found a photo of it, emailed it, and filed an online report. I even emailed the resort directly with the photo, to make sure they knew which helmet we were seeking. Then I spent another hour scouring the house, looking for the helmet.
The kids had a half-day of school, so they came home between school and their ski trip. I was in the other room when I heard Shane tell Dylan, “I found my helmet.”
“You did WHAT?!?” I shrieked. “You FOUND your helmet?!?”
“Oh yeah,” Shane said.
“Where was it?!” I was literally screaming.
“It was in my ski bag,” he said. “I checked there like five times, but I never saw it. And then I went to get something out of my bag, and I just found it in there.”
Sigh.
I contacted the resort, un-filed my claim, emailed my apologies for my desperate pleas to find a now-found helmet.
I did not apologize to Shane. And he didn’t apologize to me.
Sometimes, this is just the way it is.
When we moved into our current home, our next door neighbor was a retired couple. They were sweet and quiet and, many years later, they downsized and moved away.
The house was sold to a couple who have so many kids, I can’t count them all. I know there are at least four, and one of them was still in the womb when they moved in. Instead of a lovely garden outside, now there is a swing set, a trampoline, a huge swimming pool, and – oddly – a refrigerator. There are balls and toys littering the yard. They also own 200 cars, all of which completely blanket the street and their driveway at night.
Okay, 200 cars might be an exaggeration. But they do have lots of kids.
Yesterday, I came home and two of their children were racing up and down the driveway, a five-year-old boy on a scooter and a younger girl yelling, “Goggy! Goggy!”
When I looked for a goggy, sure enough, the tiny person was chasing an even tinier dog.
It’s a cute dog. It’s actually the kind of dog I might want, if I decide to get another dog. It’s brown with wavy hair and looks nothing like my dog, Xena, who is no longer with us.
In less than the time it took me to register the word “dog” in my brain, I wanted to cry. But it wasn’t just the new puppy reminding me of my loss. I saw the little boy on the scooter and the little girl running after that dog and without forming the words, my brain tossed out the idea: Not mine anymore.
I looked down my own long, empty driveway. There are no scooters, no balls left outside, no puppy chasing the children. There’s no one playing basketball under the rusty hoop, no one romping through the yard, no one squealing with delight for no apparent reason. Our trampoline is covered in leaves and debris, and no one can be bothered to clean it off, even for a few minutes of fun.
My kids are grown; they’re leaving home. They spend their afternoons without me, preferring the company of friends in a chat room to board games with their old mom. They’re heading for a new life, one that doesn’t include me, one that doesn’t include running and romping and jumping.
And in case that were insufficient reason to be melancholy, eleven years ago, we got a dog. My boys ran and played with that dog in the yard nearly every day – rain, snow or sun – until their little legs were too tired to continue. We took her for car rides, walks up the street, hikes in the woods. We took her camping and boating. We took her to the store, the library and school. She rode with us to two different elementary schools, a middle school, and a high school.
She was even show-and-tell at Shane’s preschool.
And now Shane is in high school. Dylan is on his way to college. And our beloved family pet is just gone. For me, those days are over. My time as “Mom” is dwindling down, and my neighbors are just starting up.
They have no idea how fast it will go, even if they try to hang on with every fiber of their being.
Dylan has never turned in a school form on time in his life. Since the days when his teachers physically removed parent permission forms from Dylan’s little red folder, no important school document has been turned in without great aggravation.
Until today.
This week – which has totaled only three half-days of school, thanks to snow and below-zero wind chills – Dylan had no trouble turning in his form.
In fact, he got the form, brought it home, made sure I signed it, then took it back to school, and made sure both his vice principal and his case manager signed it. Then he turned it in to his guidance counselor.
It was the permission form so that he could drop those extraneous three classes.
I just got a note from his counselor saying that, starting Monday, Dylan will be done with school after Period 4. He will take Radio Production with his brother, then AP Psychology, then his required math and English classes. And then he will be done for the day.
I guess we will not be discussing this next week at the IEP meeting.
Dylan is so incredibly happy. He feels like an enormous boulder has been lifted from his shoulders.
So I am happy for him. A little wary, but happy for him.
Dylan’s final – forever – IEP meeting is next week. One more semester until graduation. It’s very hard for me to believe.
The new semester started yesterday – a half-day, followed by a full-day school closing, thanks to snow. Dylan has had each of his seven classes for exactly 20 minutes.
And he wants to drop three of them.
Dylan came home with an idea – one that he’d already discussed with his school counselor. He believes that if he drops his electives, he can focus wholly on his academic subjects: math, English, AP psychology and radio production. He already has three of his four academic classes before lunch, so he wants to leave school at lunchtime.
“I wouldn’t have to focus for seven whole hours,” Dylan said. “I would only have to focus in the morning, and then I could get all my work done in the afternoon.”
He thinks having a half-day would be mentally and emotionally cleansing. He envisions working ultra-hard all morning, then relaxing and listening to – or making – music all afternoon.
But Dylan got a lead role in the school musical. Since he has play practice almost every day for the next two months, he would have to go back to school – or stay at school – to be ready for rehearsal. And he doesn’t own a car. Someone would have to drive him both ways.
I will not be driving him both ways every day for two months. I have a job.
So Dylan said, “My counselor already said that I can stay in the counseling office and finish my work whenever I can’t go home.” And there are places within walking distance (on days when it’s not so cold) that would allow him to sit and study.
If he were actually turning in his work on time, I’d be fine with him doing whatever he wanted in that time period. But I am still waiting for the evidence that the work will get done. ON TIME.
A shorter class schedule, of course, is more like a college schedule. Will this be representative of what he can do in the future? Or will it just be a way for him to do less in high school?
“I think it would really help me to concentrate on what I need to do, and get it done on time,” Dylan said.
Dylan is often inspired at the beginning of a quarter. And he is very inspired by this option.
Since he started taking high school classes in middle school, Dylan doesn’t need any extra credits for graduation. His GPA is up, and he’s already been accepted by several colleges. So he doesn’t need a full, seven-class plate.
What he needs are study skills and organizational skills. He needs to know how to force himself to get through his work, even when it’s boring, even when it’s not what he wants to do. He needs to develop the skills to carry him through college. He needs to know how to be responsible for himself and his work.
So we have some T’s to cross and some I’s to dot, but we are going to discuss this option with his IEP team. We’re going to figure out if this will be in his best interest – or detrimental to everyone’s sanity.
I keep expecting that I will feel better with time. Dogs die. It happens. Time will pass and I will feel better. I will feel happy about the time we spent together.
The other day, I was feeling so much better that I forgot, momentarily, that Xena wasn’t here. I looked around and said, out loud, “Where are you?” As if she might suddenly appear.
And then I did the unthinkable. I answered myself the way Xena would have answered.
I responded as if I were Xena, in that silly voice I’d used for ten years to “be” Xena, to represent her thoughts. It was the voice I used when the boys were little, when they needed to understand how a dog might feel if you pulled her tail. It was the voice I used when we were riding in the car, when she had her head hanging out the window, “showing” the boys what was out there while they giggled in the backseat.
It was the voice I used when Xena was excited – as she usually was – to express (and add to) “her” excitement. Eventually Xena learned that when I used that voice, it had something to do with her – and it always made her tail wag.
“Where are you?” I asked, moving “her” pillow on the couch, so she would have it where she wanted it, just as soon as she returned.
“I’m right here, Mama,” Xena said, out of my mouth, before I realized what I was doing. “I’m always right here.”
Because that’s what she would have said, if she’d been here. Because she was always right here. Right next to me. ALWAYS.
And now she’s not.
And then I broke down sobbing again. Because she’s not here. She can’t be here anymore. And she belongs here.
Today my baby turns 15.
When Shane was born, he cried so long and loud, he popped a little hole in his lung called a pneumothorax. They had to rush him to the NICU at the hospital and plonk a pacifier into his mouth so the little hole would heal. Conveniently, the birth had been so traumatic for both of us that I was allowed to stay in the hospital for three whole days, healing with him.
I remember the first time Shane heard my voice, how his eyes got huge like blue saucers. He knew me. He knew who I was. That simple fact made me ecstatic just to be alive.
When Shane was in preschool, he was sweet and quiet and content. But one day, the teacher pulled me aside after school. She explained that Shane had spent his recess with his head inside a giant dollhouse – the rest of his body didn’t fit. She couldn’t get him to come out of the dollhouse, so she thought we might want to talk to him and see if anything was wrong.
We talked to Shane and indeed, something was wrong. A little girl had told him he couldn’t go down the playhouse slide. Rather than standing up for himself and sliding, he stuck his head in the dollhouse. That very day, we started to spend more time with Shane, working on social skills and getting his needs met. I, especially, gave him as much positive encouragement as I could. Until that point, he’d seemed so content, we thought he didn’t need it.
When Shane was in kindergarten, his teacher noticed that he wasn’t looking at her during carpet time. He would yell out the answers to questions and always knew what was going on, but he sometimes sat on his head instead of “criss-cross applesauce.”
He’d sat on his head his whole life, I told the teacher. Even when he was a baby, he’d put his face on the floor and his diaper in the air. He seemed perfectly content, like he was soaking in the music of the world. The teacher thought we should have a meeting with the special ed team, just in case.
Thank God for that teacher. Shane had a vision processing disorder and couldn’t focus visually on anything. He spent two years in vision therapy, which allowed his vision to catch up with his other, exceptionally alert senses. Without vision therapy, Shane would never have been able to read.
When Shane was finally able to express himself, he discovered magic and became a performing magician. He loved acting classes and the science museum and writing stories and songs. He adored his few close friends and idolized his big brother. Shane was always interested in numbers and cared more about how many pages were in a book than what the story held.
He is sensitive and sweet, yet ultimately cool. He’s so laid back, sometimes you have to guess if he’s paying attention. But he soaks in everything around him, like a giant, happy sponge, and uses it to his advantage – often in increasingly humorous ways. Shane is incredibly funny.
Shane has been a delight in my life for the past 15 years. He’s made me realize that being slightly off-center is not just a good thing, but a wonderful and exceptional part of being real. Shane has made me appreciate the way I am, just by being who he is. And “who he is” is so incredibly special, I can’t even begin to put it into words.
Happy birthday, Shane. Thanks forever for being you.
After Dylan’s disastrous attempt at turning in his school work on his own, I emailed his teachers. My email went something like this:
In order to prepare Dylan for college, we are trying to allow him to complete and turn in his own assignments ON TIME, without any “encouragement” or “help” from us. If he doesn’t know how to turn in high school work on time, he will never be able to keep up with the work in college.
Dylan has assured me that he has turned in ALL of his missing work. We are just trying to determine if he’s actually turned in his work, or if he’s still completely unaware of which assignments are missing. We just want to know if there is any hope for a collegiate future.
His teachers’ responses were completely unexpected.
“He is still missing four assignments,” one teacher said. “A fifth one will be due today. He is usually aware of what he has not completed and turns it in as soon as he’s aware.”
I wasn’t sure what to think of this. Dylan is missing four or five assignments – but he’s turning it in quickly? According to what I was seeing online, Dylan was missing 15 assignments in this class. Maybe what I was seeing online wasn’t all that accurate.
A clue came from another teacher, who said, “Dylan is caught up on his work; I just need to grade it and put it in the grade book. He’s been very good this year about checking in with me without prompting and making up his work before I’ve even had a chance to ask him about it.”
Without prompting? Briefly I wondered if this teacher knew my son. But this is actually the second time he has had this teacher. I guess he’s improved tremendously since 10th grade!
The most telling response came from Dylan’s AP teacher – where he is doing college-level work and, apparently, doing it quite well.
“Dylan has turned in all of his late work,” his teacher said. “He has been verbally proving himself in class each day. The information is in there! I truly believe he will do well. He is so insightful and has so many brilliant moments in class that I believe he really is pulling it all together now.”
Dylan is pulling it all together. The disorganized, late, confused, frustrated son I’ve seen at home is pulling it all together at school! Insightful. Brilliant. THAT is the Dylan I know from childhood! He’s emerging!
We still have months to observe his behavior. We still have months of prayer. But we may have to pay for college after all!
Every day after school, the boys come home and go straight up to their respective rooms. They shut their doors and I don’t see them for hours.
Sometimes I whine during dinner. “Nobody talks to me anymore,” I say. Or, if I think about it, I ask if anyone will ever play a board game with me again. The kids will talk during dinner. Mostly they make fun of me for being … well, me. This is a great source of amusement for them.
So I drive the kids to school in the mornings. This, I think, is an opportunity for me to bond with my children, stay connected, find out what’s going on in their lives. I also throw out reminders about what they should think about, you know, during their day. The reminders are probably unnecessary and I can guarantee they are unappreciated.
Mostly, I just want to have a conversation – any conversation – with them. I want to know how they feel about things, what they’re thinking about, what songs they’re listening to with those earbuds shoved into their ears. So on some mornings, I try to talk about my feelings.
Like today: “I had a dream about Xena last night.”
No sound from the backseat.
“Well, I guess trying to talk about my feelings is getting the same results as saying nothing at all, so I guess I will just talk to myself,” I said.
Shane piped up. “I said, ‘uh.'”
I didn’t hear “uh.” But truthfully, that is about as much as I get from them these days.
I feel bad that I didn’t appreciate their incessant talking, singing, humming, and maniacal laughter when we drove to elementary school. I kept telling them to tone it down, be quieter, blah blah blah.
What I wouldn’t give, now, to relive the insanity of their childhood.
It is snowing. There’s at least a foot of snow on the ground.
It doesn’t snow much where I live, so snow is always a time for celebratory sled riding. It’s also a good time to stay indoors, and cuddle up with a nice book.
Since they were tiny, little boys, I’ve taken the boys out sledding – even on tiny, little hills. The thrill of rushing down that hill in the cold is like no other. Even when they were toddlers, we bundled up for 45 minutes and drove out to the nearest ten-foot drop. It took longer for us to get dressed than it did to ride down that “hill” a dozen times.
As the boys got older, we found the biggest hill in the area: an enormous, whale of a hill that takes almost a full minute to descend. The walk back up is always a chore, but it’s worth it – just to do it again and again.
Last year was the ultimate. The boys were both old enough to tackle the hill completely on their own – and for the first time, I was able to ride down the hill with my dog.
Xena loved sled riding – and I didn’t know it until last year. She loved being in my lap and flying down the hill. She loved running back up the hill. At the age of 10, she was an expert sledder. She sat very still until we came to a stop, even when we slid 300 yards. And when we finally got to the top of the hill afterward, Xena could hardly wait to get back on the sled again.
So the boys went sled riding without me this year.
This year, I couldn’t go. Instead, I wanted to cry all day. I wished I had tried to put her on a sled much sooner, so she could have had that fun with us every year. And this year, I didn’t feel like having any fun without her.
Maybe I made the wrong decision. Maybe I should have enjoyed the little time I have left with the kids instead of worrying about the time I don’t have with Xena.
Either way, the snow day came and went, and I am still without my dog.
