For three years, I have been browsing through scholarship opportunities for Dylan. I know that getting several small scholarships is the only way to pay for college, and I also know that it can be done.
I have printed out scholarship lists, and pages with individual details about specific scholarships for which Dylan is eligible. I’ve left them by his bedroom door, strategically placed them at his place at the dinner table, and directly handed them to him.
My placement of these opportunities in Dylan’s general vicinity were often accompanied by my sage wisdom.
Middle of 9th Grade:
“Dylan, you’re in high school now. I know it seems early, but it’s never too early to start planning for college. You can actually start looking for scholarships already! Here’s a website you can use to see what’s out there. We can’t really afford to pay for your college, so you definitely need to at least apply for scholarships!”
“Okay, I will.”
Fall of 10th Grade:
“Hey Dylan, I have an idea. Why don’t you spend a few minutes looking at this email newsletter? It lists a whole slew of college scholarships. Maybe you can just see what’s out there, so you know how to apply.”
“Okay.”
(five minutes later)
“All of these are for, like, seniors and stuff. I can’t do any of them.”
September of 11th Grade:
“Okay, Dylan, here’s a thought. Just apply for one scholarship every month! If you apply for one scholarship a month, that’s ten scholarships you could get by the end of the year! And you don’t have to spend a ton of time doing it. Just one per month. Here’s a whole pile to get you started.”
“That’s a really good idea, Mom. I can do that.”
(five minutes later)
“They all want essays and stuff. I’ll have to think about what I want to write.”
November of 12th Grade:
“Dylan, here’s the thing. I have been asking you to look for scholarships since you were in eighth grade. I’ve texted you. I’ve forwarded emails to you. I’ve printed out dozens of opportunities and handed them to you. And you still don’t seem to understand. We can’t afford to pay $50,000 a year for college. We need your help, and you aren’t looking for scholarships at all. You certainly haven’t applied for any.”
“You have no idea what I’ve been doing.”
Well, that much is true.
And now, time is up.
I am too wrapped up with the dog to think about the kids, or to write a blog.
The dog is doing GREAT, by the way. She’s been to the vet for three post-op appointments, and now has her bandage off. She is resting comfortably, and also jumping around way too much. In other words, she’s behaving normally.
What I learned from having a dog at death’s door, however briefly:
- In spite of being Mama Duck, I am not the only person who cares for the dog. I may be the only person who feeds her, remembers to let her out, gives her fresh water and takes her for walks (unless she’s vacationing with the grandparents), but there was a lot of breath-holding during surgery. My boys – husband, two kids and my stepson – were all equally incapable of functioning until they found out Xena was going to be okay. Even my dad was quiet and waiting.
- My mother is also Mama Duck. I know Xena lives with me, but my mother reacted exactly the same as I did. This, of course, was horrible for everyone, except the dog who didn’t realize she’d been at death’s door. My mother will be the first to tell you that having grandchildren and grand-dogs is harder than having children and dogs; you have less control and more to worry about.
- I love this dog. I mean, I really, really love her. I have been saying for ten years that I would rather have gotten a Goldendoodle, the world’s cutest dog. But this dog is the perfect dog for me and my family.
As a result, the dog now sleeps in my room. I moved her bed and water bowl in with me. Even though she has previously been known to vomit on my rug, and even though she occasionally wakes me up by ramming into the bed, she never needs to sleep in the hall again. She seems happy with the new arrangement.
And everyone is happy with her.
We are still waiting to see if she has cancer. We are also waiting to see if her autoimmune anemia is improving with medication. So we are waiting to see if the baby of the family will be with us for a few more years, or a few more months. After a few days of recovery, she is in great spirits and acting like she is going to live forever.
Regardless, we all have a new appreciation for Xena.
There’s nothing like having a dog emergency to put life into perspective.
My dog had surgery. Xena has had prior surgeries, all to have bumps removed from her skin. Even as a puppy, she had bumps.
But this “bump” was actually called a tumor. It was bigger than the other bumps.
And it was bleeding. A lot.
So this surgery wasn’t just a bump removal. It was an emergency procedure.
When we took her in for surgery, the doctor sat down with me.
“I have Xena’s preliminary blood work,” she said. “And the numbers are not good. She is severely anemic, which means her platelet count is very low.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, completely lost. “What should we do?”
“The safest thing to do would be to take her to a hospital where they have the resources to do a complete blood transfusion. We don’t have the resources to do that here. A complete blood transfusion will cost you thousands and thousands of dollars. Here, we can only do the mass removal. With her platelet count as low as it is, we may not be able to stop the bleeding. But that mass has to come off.”
The doctor was telling me that my dog could die today.
I didn’t hear that. “Well, she’ll bleed to death at home if we don’t remove it,” I said. “So let’s just get it off.”
I wasn’t thinking about blood transfusions or why she would need that. I didn’t know what “platelets” were. I just wanted it all to go away so I could have my dog back again.
It wasn’t until I went home and researched that I decided to check platelet numbers. The internet said anything under 150,000 would make surgery dangerous.
So I called the vet while my dog was in surgery, and asked: “How low, exactly, is her platelet count?”
The vet secretary read from Xena’s paperwork. “Seventy-five,” she said.
I hung up and collapsed. My dog wasn’t going to survive the surgery. She didn’t have enough platelets to make her blood clot. She wasn’t going to stop bleeding.
I called my husband. I texted the boys. I put out a cry for help on Facebook.
Please pray.
And then I prayed. I alternated between denial and devastation – between organizing the cupboards and falling onto the floor sobbing. But for hours, I prayed and prayed and prayed.
Finally, the surgeon called. “Xena is out of surgery,” she said. “Everything went very well.” They stopped the bleeding. They want to give her medicine to help with the anemia. There is a long recovery period. Blah blah blah.
They stopped the bleeding.
The surgeon and the doctor were both perplexed. “She’s bleeding less than most dogs bleed in a normal surgery,” the surgeon told the doctor during the operation. “I honestly don’t know how this is happening!”
The prayers worked.
I breathed.
I called and texted. Everyone else breathed, too.
Xena came home, wrapped in a body bandage, obviously in pain. She has a long road of recovery ahead of her.
But she came home. And that, today, is all that matters.
I was listening to the radio one morning and a disc jockey was talking about his young daughter. She was leaving town to spend a week in Florida with relatives. She is a younger child, and he has been consumed for years by his parental duties.
The question of the day was: “Do you have any ideas what I should do with all my free time, since I get to press pause on parenting?”
“I get to press pause on parenting.”
What interested me about this question is the specific use of the word, “get.”
This was a joyous occasion for this particular dad. He was looking forward to having a week off and doing things without his kid around.
I cannot fathom that mentality. In fact, I rarely go on trips without my children because I miss them so much while I am gone. The last few times I traveled with my husband, I said a thousand times, “The kids would love this.”
Mostly I don’t go, saying instead, “I don’t want to go there without the kids.” So my husband travels for work alone.
While I do realize that many, if not most parents think this way to some degree, my life revolves around my kids. I don’t stare at them while they’re here, and follow them around. I don’t “baby” them or expect that they need me to do everything for them, particularly as teenagers. And I have backed off tremendously from the hovering I did when they were younger.
I have a life outside of my kids, but I would give it up in a heartbeat if it meant that I could spend more time with my kids. I can’t imagine looking forward to being away from them.
I never want to press pause on parenting. I certainly wouldn’t say, “I get to press pause.”
What would that mean?
“I get to press pause” on hearing scurries in the hallway and sudden squeals of delight or horror. “I get to press pause” on waking up to the comfort a home filled with family. “I get to press pause” on listening to stories about school, seeing artwork that isn’t perfect, and finding out what they learned about life today. “I get to press pause” on doing laundry so that the one imperative shirt is clean again for the following day.
Sure, it’s tiring. Parenting is an enormous responsibility. But this morning, while the DJ was wondering what to do with his free time, I woke up wondering if I should foster a child after my own children are gone. I missed Shane’s little face peering at me in bed and whispering, “Mommy?”
I never want to press pause.
That doesn’t mean I have to suffocate them and know what they’re doing at every moment. While I want my kids to be independent and grow into strong adults, I pray that they will stay in touch with me. I want them to come home and visit, to be part of my life, to call me and tell me how things are going, and know they have a soft place to fall as long as I am here.
Parenting is the best job I have ever had. And I want to do it until the day I die, every minute and every hour of my life.
When I was growing up, I wanted to vote. It made sense to me that everyone would get a vote. And it was a right of passage for me.
But by the time I was old enough to do so, I wasn’t terribly interested in politics. And I only wanted to vote for one person: the President. I read an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that clarified the positions of the two candidates, and then I voted for Michael Dukakis. He seemed to think like I did.
That’s as far as it went. I didn’t know the difference between Democrats and Republicans, or even if there was a difference. I didn’t realize that I would also be voting for a whole slew of other people, besides the President, and I didn’t really care.
Since my first voting experience, a lot has changed.
My children, on Election Day, asked when we would know what was happening. We watched some of the stories of the polling issues on MSNBC. And it isn’t even a Presidential election year.
They remembered chanting along with 800,000 other people: “Vote them out! Vote them out!” in the heart of our nation’s capital.
This year, they know what’s at stake. They know how important this election is to our country – and they realize that their votes will count in every future election. They are concerned about the issues. They want things to happen in these United States that make sense to them. They want a say in their own future, and the future of their families..
They want to vote.
And I couldn’t be any prouder of them for that.
Shane came home from school early in the year, math homework in tow. He went upstairs to finish it.
About an hour later, he was back downstairs still working on a single Algebra 2 problem.
“Dylan, can you look at this?” he said. The two of them sat down on the floor and looked at Shane’s worksheet. They were there for a long time.
I thought it was nice that Shane was asking Dylan for help, but he wasn’t. Shane was concerned that the problem was wrong. Something about the equation didn’t sit right with him, and he was asking his big brother if he saw any glaring errors.
“I think it’s wrong, too,” Dylan said finally, getting up.
“What’s wrong?” I asked somewhat absentmindedly.
“The problem doesn’t make any sense the way it is,” Shane said. “I noticed it in class, and I told my teacher, but she said she would think about it later and then she never said anything else.”
There is a paraeducator in Shane’s math class, which I remember because Bill told me all about her after Open House. The paraeductor has a motorcycle.
“Don’t you have two teachers in that class?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” Shane said. “I think I’m going to ask the other teacher what she thinks tomorrow.”
And he did.
“What did she say?” I asked later.
“She said she thinks it’s right the way it is,” Shane told me. “But I know it’s wrong.”
I pushed for details. Given that Shane has such a propensity toward the literal, I assumed that he was reading the problem wrong somehow – that he was taking something too literally.
Shane explained that it was a complex algebraic equation, and that it was too hard to explain why it was wrong if I didn’t really know algebra. I took Algebra 2 – twice, actually – but I really didn’t understand anything algebraic. So I didn’t push for details.
“I have an idea how to explain it better,” Shane said. “I’m going to show it to the other teacher again tomorrow.”
And he did. Then he didn’t say anything about it for weeks.
But a few weeks later, I said, “Whatever happened to that one problem that you thought was wrong in math?”
“Which one?” Shane said. “There were two of them like that, in two different places. And the same thing happened with both of them.”
“Well,” I sighed. “What happened with both of them?”
“I explained to the teacher why it was wrong,” he said. “And she finally understood. Then she had to explain it to the other teacher. And then the teacher had to re-teach the entire class how to do the problem the right way.”
“Really?!”
“Yeah,” Shane said.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t think about it,” Shane said. “I mean, it doesn’t really matter.”
Maybe it didn’t matter to my son, but I was impressed. My 14-year-old freshman had to teach the teacher – twice.
But Shane just cared that the problem was done the right way.
And so – finally – it was.
I moved around a lot as a child. I lived in nine houses, six cities and five states before I graduated from high school.
But I am from Pittsburgh. I graduated from high school in the Pittsburgh area, then spent my young adulthood there. And while I went to college in Ohio, stayed briefly in Florida, and have lived in Maryland for 25 years, I am – and always will be – from Pittsburgh.
I don’t know how it works for all home towns, but the bond between Pittsburghers is strong. Once a heart connects with the city, the grip never loosens. It’s not that Pittsburgh is the most wonderful city in the world, or that it has the best weather, or even that its sports teams are extraordinary (although they are). It’s just not a place one can ever really leave behind.
Most people who were born in Pittsburgh stay in Pittsburgh. My mother hails from a large family there. In addition to an army of her cousins who never left, all of my mother’s sisters and most of her nieces and nephews still live there. Even the nieces’ and nephews’ families still live there.
That’s just how Pittsburgh is. People rarely leave.
So when an insane person walks into a synagogue on a Saturday morning and fires bullets into a crowd of gentle Pittsburgh families, the pain of their neighbors is real. And their neighbors extend far beyond the borders of Squirrel Hill, throughout the surrounding suburbs of Pittsburgh, and include the hearts of people all over the world who have ever called Pittsburgh “home.”
After hearing the tragic news, I could immediately picture the neighborhood where the shooting took place – a place to which I’d occasionally walked miles, just to be there.
Squirrel Hill is where I bought record albums at a world-class music store, and ate Mineo’s pizza bought from first-generation Italians. It’s where I followed cute boys down the block on Friday nights and it’s where I had my first taste of Haagen Dazs ice cream.
And now every memory of this beloved city will be slashed with a tragedy that, before Saturday, was entirely unthinkable. I will now remember the people who woke early to celebrate a new baby, and who never made it home. And I will think about those they left behind, their lives forever in tatters.
My heart, as always, is with you, Pittsburgh. My only wish is that someday, the healing will be as deep as this pain.
Dylan got into college.
He’s waiting for a full package to arrive in the mail, and he’s waiting to hear from the other colleges. And he needs to have everything in front of him before he decides. So he still doesn’t know what he’s going to do.
But Dylan got into a college.
The threat of community college is off the table. He now has a place that he can go, should he choose to do so, that will accept him with open arms. Dylan is going to actually go to college.
All the years of my boorish repetition: “You’ll never get into college if you don’t turn in your work.” Well, that’s out the window.
In fact, all of my threats are out the window. “You’ll never get into college if you _______________.” That’s null and void.
He got into college! He got into a pretty good college, too, with a stellar educational program. Students are generally happy there; they smile a lot.
Consistent smiling was a strong criteria when Dylan was choosing colleges. If the students looked miserable, Dylan didn’t want to go there.
So now, at least, Dylan has one choice of a place he can go. He has a place where he can study and grow and, most importantly, get away from Mom and Dad and live independently.
Looking back over the past few years, it is obvious that Dylan actually earned this opportunity. He may not have done everything – or even anything – the way I would have done it. But he certainly did get things done. He kept his GPA up above a 3.0, which is awesome given the severity of his ADHD and teenager-like behaviors. He got awesome SAT scores. And he has a varied and extensive resume of extracurriculars.
Dylan earned the right to go to college. And I am incredibly proud of him.
In the mornings, sometimes I wake up before my alarm. I am a light sleeper, and sometimes it happens.
I always get up before the kids on school days.
Normally, I set my alarm – a pleasant sort of wind chime effect – and when it goes off, I turn it off and get up. Long ago, I learned that the “snooze” button is a nuisance that just disrupts my sleep.
One day, I woke up before my alarm – but not early enough to get back to sleep.
I heard Dylan’s alarm – a screeching, obnoxious BAAAAAAM BAAAAAAAM BAAAAAAAM sound – from all the way down the hall. It was going off half an hour before mine was scheduled to go off.
Five minutes later, I heard Dylan’s alarm again.
Five minutes after that, it went off again.
And five minutes after that. And five minutes after that. And five minutes after that.
From the time I heard it the first time, it went BAAAAAAM BAAAAAAAM BAAAAAAAM every five minutes for 40 minutes. In addition to the sound, he has a bright light set on an alarm in his room, which brilliantly illuminates his entire bedroom.
The brilliant illumination started in the middle of the BAAAAAAM BAAAAAAAM BAAAAAAAM and continued lighting his room for another half an hour.
Dylan is scheduled to be downstairs for breakfast 25 minutes after my alarm goes off. Yet he doesn’t get out of bed until the time he’s supposed to be downstairs.
Since someone turns off the alarm every five minutes, I would assume that Dylan wakes up – many, many times – substantially earlier than he gets out of bed.
Since he is a teenager, he stays up late. Then he sets his alarm a full hour before he needs to get up, so that he can stay in bed until he’s late in the mornings, too.
BAAAAAAM BAAAAAAAM BAAAAAAAM is not a pleasant way to wake. But BAAAAAAM BAAAAAAAM BAAAAAAAM for a whole hour? Every day? That’s just miserable.
And lack of sleep is the absolute worst thing for someone with ADHD. It exacerbates the symptoms, and makes focus nearly impossible. In Dylan’s case, it means he needs to jump around and sing way more than he does when he is completely rested.
I have provided Dylan with documentation about all of this. I have told him, over the years, that the worst thing he can do in the mornings is to disrupt his sleep by setting his alarms early. I have suggested that he get up with the very first alarm, and get directly into the shower.
“Feet on the floor,” I have said. “Once your feet are on the floor, you can get yourself to the shower.”
I have printed out articles from the internet, on neurology and sleep disorders and ADHD. I have provided him with statistics and facts and education on the subject until I can’t provide any more information about disruption of sleep.
And Dylan is almost an adult. He is supposed to be responsible for himself. And he does, usually, eventually, get out of the bed.
With an hour less sleep than he needed, when he technically needs more sleep than most adults do.
And he’s late anyway.
I got stuck behind a school bus.
For some people, this would be a source of frustration. My gut-level response is a sense of disappointment because I won’t be able to drive as quickly on the road as I normally do.
But on this particular day, I was in no rush. And the school bus was on my own street.
In other words, it was our school bus. In fact, it was the same school bus that my boys can ride home from school every day. They can – although they usually stay after school for an activity or make-up work or a walk to the plaza.
Still, I know this bus. Dylan and Shane (supposedly) get off at the second stop. In fact, most of the kids get off at the second stop.
The only child at the first stop is a little girl who went to kindergarten with Dylan. I remember her long, midnight-black hair and precious, tiny-toothed smile. She was quiet and bright and beautiful, and I secretly hoped that someday Dylan would have the good sense to marry her.
I remember her well because, even on her first day, that little girl would ride the bus all the way to the second stop by herself. Even though it’s only about a quarter-mile, I thought she was so brave to ride alone on that giant school bus.
But on this day when I got behind the bus, and it stopped at that same first stop, I hadn’t seen that one brave girl in a long time. Sure enough, though, she hopped off alone, and waited for the bus to pull away.
As it did, she turned her head to look at me, that same long, midnight-black hair swooping back behind her, And she smiled, shyly, as I drove past. I briefly stopped breathing.
Her smile was dazzling. She looked like she’d stepped off the cover of Seventeen magazine. With her black backpack slung over one shoulder and her quick gaze, my mental snapshot was something you’d find in college catalogs and romance movies.
That little kindergartener is now a beautiful high school senior. In a flash, she went from 5 to 17 – just like Dylan did. After all, they are the same age. But with my kids, I try to forget that flash of time.
I try not to think about sitting outside with my toddler, waiting for Dylan to bound off of the school bus with smudges of paint on his shorts and his latest finger painting in hand. I try not to remember how my boys would jump from the bus and “climb” onto the low-hanging branch of a tree that’s long been cut down. I try to forget the way we would all run together down our long driveway, me worried about their “big” feet causing skinned knees. I even try to forget after-school snacks of berries and milk, back when we shared snacks. At the table.
Most of all, I try to forget how long, long ago all of that took place.
And from now on, I will try harder not to get stuck behind that school bus.
