Blast from the past …

My Facebook is blinking. It's practically pulsating with a red alert that reveals someone has “tagged” me in some old picture they've posted to their wall. My stomach lurches into my chest before I even click on the link that will send me jettisoning who-knows-how-far back in time.

For an instant, I hesitate.

I know as soon as I see it the myth of myself will be shattered.

I can just imagine my expression, caught somewhere between a smile and a sneeze.

My round cheeks still chewing. My racoon-rimmed eyes either bulging or blinking.

The unfortunate perm I got one summer that made me look like Cher's Keebler-Elf cousin.

Inevitably, I will find a replica of my younger self, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a group of people I'll have trouble remembering by name, wearing a tight smile and an unflattering arrangement of clothes that I won't ever be able to forget.

Even now that I want to.

The lace-up, combat-style boots.

The boy-cut jeans.

Something with shoulder pads or bat wings or shiny buttons. Maybe all three.

The chunky sweater.

And the ever-present shearling coat that I refused to take off despite being indoors.

As if I'd just come in from the cold.

… With my tin cup full of pencils.

And my bottle of rot-gut.

I feel a little sick.

It's a kind of illness that sets upon a person suddenly, like the realization that you know virtually every REO Speedwagon song word-for-word or that you thought Milli Vanilli was “mint.”

I don't know why, exactly, but I always feel as if I'm looking at a stranger when I see myself in old pictures.

Yes, that was me. Dressed in thrift shop clothes that may have belonged to an elderly Wisconsin man, who likely met his maker while scraping ice from his driveway one winter during the previous two decades.

I'm also positive that if I were to dig deep into my dresser or wade to the back of my closet, I could find the entire unfortunate ensemble. Or worse.

Not that I will ever wear that I-Dream-Of-Genie jumpsuit again, I'm just hanging onto it for sentimental reasons.

Of course, the real horror of the trip down memory lane is that my wardrobe decisions haven't evolved.

Ten years from now I'll be clicking on a picture from last week and wondering just want I was thinking ...

The baggy jeans. The formless sweaters. The footwear that begs the question: Was I BLIND or just completely without judgement and taste?

I should be ashamed, and yet I still enjoy telling people how I paid next to nothing for the article they just complimented. … Or, even better, how I fished it from the trash.

“Oh this? Yeah, thanks. It's great isn't it? I found it one morning washed up on the beach. Thought it was a dead seal at first but when I poked it with a stick I realized it was a black hoodie. One swim through the wash, and it was good as new.”

Those, right there, are the words of a crazy person.

Because looking at the pictures, I am forced to realize such compliments are likely the result of polite small talk rather than genuine admiration.

A true blast from the past.

Tick or treat?

I used to love ladybugs.

They seemed like bright red dots of happiness punctuating the garden, protecting it from the evil aphid marauders.

That was before the scarlet ladies visited in droves one Christmas. No matter how sweet a thing seems on its own, thousands of the tiny, uninvited, arthropods swarming around our heads as we tried to unwrap Santa's loot could have been the opening scene of a horror flick.

I can't help but think of it wistfully now as if the invasion were a charming cinematic feat of the lowest budget -- visible nylon strings an all -- and I didn't appreciate it while I had the chance.

Had I known the stream of horror shows that would follow – the flea infestation of 2011, the annual summer earwig convention in the master bathroom that is becoming as common as … well … the ants that parade around our kitchen counters come May through August – I would have cherished each moment of our “Ladybug Christmas.”

Perhaps I should just pretend each new seasonal plague is just a gaggle of ladybugs in disguise.

Maybe it's fitting that Halloween is just around the corner. It makes it easier to pretend these prehistoric-looking tortilla chips, which have been crawling through cracks in the sills and sticking to my curtains, are just ladybugs in costume.

But it's hard to suspend disbelief the moment the stink bugs startle at my gall – trying to sweep them back into the great outdoors from the warmth inside – and ooze their stench of putrid cilantro.

“Cilantro?” my husband scoffs.

“That's what they smell like, cilantro.”

See, I have that gene … the one that makes cilantro smell like soap and taste like mashed bugs. Not that I know what bugs taste like. But that's beside the point.

These agricultural pests are relatively harmless to people, but they are tenacious. They stick to textiles as if they were affixed with glue. They are slow moving when they aren't flying, yet they seem to appear out of nowhere.

Evidenced by the blood-curdling screams of my children when they are brushing their teeth and one of these shield-like bugs sneaks up behind them.

“What is that thing?”

It doesn't matter. If it's small, has a segmented body and spindly, jointed legs, I will be expected to drop everything, run to the scene of the disaster and take care of the relocation and remediation.

I've decided it helps to know what I'm dealing with.

Is this a biting thing? A disease-carrying thing? A harmless thing? Is it the kind of thing that will make me want to find new homes for the pets? Is this something I can crush with a shoe? Spray with hairspray? Trap under a glass and put into the basil patch?

What happens if I just throw it – damp bath towel it's clinging to and all – into the washing machine?

Will it come back to haunt me?

Probably walk right up the porch steps one night at ring the bell.

After all, how many trick-or-treaters have shown up at our door wearing red wings, black spots and antennae?

I figure it's only a matter of time before kids start dressing up as stink bugs.

Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat.

Identity crisis

The question left me momentarily speechless.

My shoes were off, my clothes were folded neatly on a chair and the woman reading off the bullet points on my chart had seen a big old blank next to “occupation.”

So she filled it in, I can only assume, by tearing a page out of the script for “Mad Men.”

“Sooooo …. You're a housewife?”

Housewife? Did she say HOUSEWIFE?

Honestly? She could have told me I'd sprouted a second head that required immediate amputation, and I'd have been less shocked.

The dictionary describes “housewife” in its first definition as a married woman who stays at home, does cleaning, cooking, childrearing, gardening, sewing, manages household accounts and generally refrains from paid employment outside the domicile.

That's not me.

OK … well it kind of is, since I do most of those things (excepting that last one).

In its second definition, the dictionary explains a “housewife” as a needle case or small sewing kit. Basically a thing you send your sailor off to sea with so he can mend his own darn socks.

Ugh! Another moment in life when a person's identity doesn't fit neatly in a four-inch gap in an application form.

So there I was, blood pressure cuff on, waiting to explode.

“You know … my husband puts “self employed” on his questionnaires and no one ever asks him if he's a househusband.”

Of course that term – Househusband – only came into being in the 1970s as a putdown describing a married, graduate student whose wife's skills and salary exceeded his own.

I know this is my own battle.

This isn't about a word use. It's about identity crisis.

My jobs are old-school in a new economy. They are part-time and flexible. They fit around the kids and dog and the personal needs of other people. They no longer supersede them.

I am a mom. A wife. A writer. An editor. A photographer. And I do all the same things at home now that I did and home when I worked in an office for someone else: I sweep floors, do laundry, accompany children to doctors' appointments and occasionally cook inedible meals.

And, it's true, I have picked up some new jobs out of necessity. For instance, I mow the front lawn and take out the trash. Duties that, I'm told, in a traditional household would be performed by the “breadwinner.”

Who's got time to wait?

She apologized for treading on my landmine.

I accepted her apology, but I didn't feel better.

It wasn't her fault. Salt in a wound ...

Thing is … I did feel a little better when my kids got out of school later in the day and gave me my just desserts as I met the bus.

Of course, my son pestered me for the 57th time to sign him up for the after-school program his sister attended when I worked full time. And as icing on the cake, my daughter asked if I liked being a “stay-at-home-mom.”

And then it occurs to me what's really bothered me.

“You know … I don't stay here when you're at school right?”

They were stunned …

They had the same vacant stare that glazes their faces when they see their teachers at the grocery store.

“What? You're not home!!!!”

I'm not a stay-at-home-mom, I'm a work-from-home freelance journalist who gets in twitter fights and burns water but who is reachable by cell phone.

What? It's a thing.

Go ahead, look it up.

No pain, no pain

The worst pain I can recall (prior to childbirth) I suffered when I was 17.

A half-dozen people (I can barely remember now) piled into a rickety old panel van and drove to a concert venue three hours away. Typical weekend in high school.

But don't worry, it wasn't tragic.

Actually, decades later, it seemed like comedy.

I don't remember what month it was, but it was definitely winter. And the chill in the air was compounded by a drafty old truck with a broken heater.

It felt like being seat-belted into a vegetable crate and shoved in a walk-in freezer.

By the time we got to my house in the wee hours of the morning, I slid out of the van and realized instantly that I couldn't stand up. As my friends pulled away, leaving me in a cloud of choking exhaust, I hobbled inside as if I were still sitting. I didn't know such a thing was possible, but evidently the fluid in my knees had frozen.

The actual pain happened a few hours later as I began to warm up under a pile of blankets that would have rivaled the stack of mattresses from “The Princess and Pea” story. Free-ranging ice crystals seemed to be clinking around, stabbing me in the hollows of my knees as I tried to sleep, and then alternated between kicking me in the shins and shackling my ankles.

Honestly, I thought I would die.

I had similar thoughts last weekend as I was finishing up the first mile of the 5K I shouldn't have been running because my ankle twinged with remaindered pain from a run a few days earlier.

But there I was, taking in the news of my fastest mile ever with the face-crinkling reality that the pain in my leg was no longer in receding.

I wanted to cry.

More precisely, I wanted to teleport home through a portal in the universe and pretend this lapse in judgement n-e-v-e-r happened. I just wanted to disappear into the nagging self-doubt that is my own personal prison.

But as luck would have it, the course – held on the inside of a local apple orchard within fifteen-foot fences – proved to be as restraining as an actual prison.

I imagined myself scaling the fence to get back to the road, hitchhiking the mile or so home, and feigning ignorance to anyone who might have seen me running. Who was I kidding? I might as well ask for fairy dust, or start searching for a cellphone app that would help me materialize an invisible flying scooter that would whisk me home.

I was humiliated enough. I did the crime, now I was going to have to do my time.

So I started to walk … or limp …. toward the finish.

Seventeen minutes later I was probably another 20 minutes away from being sprung when I realized another painful truth: It hurt more to walk than it did to run.

So I started to jog. Mind over matter, I told myself. Just put one foot in front of the other.

Fourteen minutes later it was over. Almost.

I still had an “urgent care” visit to muscle through, which, I can admit, I was anticipating like a cavity search.

“So … what happened?” asked the nurse.

“I broke the cardinal rule. … I ran on a painful ankle.”

“So … how long was your run?”

“Oh … It took me about 44 minutes,” I answered with disappointment.

“No,” she chuckled, “how many miles did you run on a hurt ankle?”

“Sometimes it seems like all of them.”

“Don't worry. It's not tragic. Next time, just stop running when it hurts.”

I wonder if there's an app for that?  

Omens and omissions

My husband doesn't believe in signs. Even the posted ones – the ones that clearly translate important information such as speed limits and wait times and even the one's exclaiming “YOU ARE HERE!” with a big, red “X” – are met with some degree of skepticism.

He certainly doesn't believe in omens.

So it was somewhat of a surprise to me that, as we walked inside the entrance to the corn maze after having signed the official waiver of indemnity and responsibility for bodily harm, he instructed the kids to first notice a tiny sandpiper, which had lit in front of us, taking two or three hops before taking off again into the stalks, and then to follow it.

Of course, his instructions were only implied, as his actual words said “Look, that sandpiper is trying to show us the way,” but he should have known our kids would interpret the meaning thusly: “Follow that bird!”

I don't know how you feel about them, but I feel slightly off kilter and extremely thankful that I am not a single parent whenever faced with the proposition of visiting the agricultural destination mecca that corn mazes have wrought.

I BELIEVE in signs, especially the one I just read at the mouth of the maze that instructed us to keep our children within sight throughout the whole of the attraction. Yet, sprinting through weather heaved and stalk-riddled corn rows isn't within my abilities.

It only took one visit – an ill-fated 2009 solo sojourn to a big, destination farm in which I lost my oldest child in the corn rows for over an hour as I clasped her baby brother's hand in a too-tight grip as I screamed her name over and over in a panic – that convinced me “family togetherness” in such situations is the only thing that matters.

Well, that, and a working cell phone – which I am now crushing in my too-tight grip as my school-aged son takes off at a full-out gallop after the bird.

One turn at the head of the row and he's gone.

My husband realizes the error of his ways and tries to correct the mistake. He levels the only thing known to man (and boy) that has any chance of keeping the boy from flying off into the abyss … Ice cream.

We take turns yelling: “STOP RUNNING!” and “You won't get any ice cream if you get lost in the maze.” It feels like we're just hollering into the wind.

Each time, the boy returns. Though, he is silent as he stalks back under a dark cloud. “You are NO fun!” he accuses.

Still, we play the game.

There is trivia to learn and stations to tick off along the way as if collecting stamps on a passport. A sign that would prove “we were here.”

It took longer than he expected, even though the sign said to expect a two-hour walk.

But in the end he could agree, we got no help from the sandpiper, which, to the children's delight, seemed to lead us through the maze. Flitting this way and that, from one dead end to another, until we eventually found the exit.

I don't think birds really believe in signs, either.

Sins and sons

I see little boys everywhere.

Happy little boys who look like mine. Little boys who wear the same clothes day in and day out like a uniform.

Little boys who hug and say sweet, if not slightly inane, compliments because it's Sunday, and everyone needs something to get them steeled and ready for Monday's grind.

My little boy is like those little boys.

A splash of mud here, a magic marker slash there. Sometimes quiet. Sometimes loud. Sometimes rough and tumble, sometimes timid and shy.

He smiles. Talks to strangers. Tells them about his dog.

And how she died when she got too old.

They smile. Uncomfortably.

They try to change the subject.

He talks about the new dog. Who looks like the old dog. And you know what happened to her ...

Of course, when this one dies he wants to replace her with a Chihuahua.

I smile. Uncomfortably.

He's such a sweet kid.

He knows there are rules now. He makes his own from time to time. He tries to follow them all, but he also wants to see how far they will bend.

That seems natural.

He has moods, now, too. Anger slips into them on occasion. Sometimes arbitrarily.

I think that's natural, too. I just wonder. … Was he always this angry?

Or do I see him differently because he's a boy and I've never been a boy?

Or maybe it's because he's in school and the pressure to be liked by his teacher is overwhelming.

I know he saves his anger for me. A safe person. A person who loves him. No matter what mood he's in between dinner, homework and bed time.

Yet. … Every outburst. Every cross eye. Every ounce of resistance ...?

Do I have to worry?

Little boys who don't growl at their sisters, or argue with their best friends over imaginary rules they have no intention of heeding.

Do these saintly little cherubs tell their mothers they hate them?

Or chew their toast into the shapes of guns?

Do they paint the kitchen with yogurt splatters?

Or jab their best friend with a pencil in retribution for trying to sneak a peek at “a secret notebook” ... A volume that is almost certainly imaginary?

“What happened to the first rule? 'Don't hurt anyone inside or out?',” I demand.

“That's not the first rule. That's the fourth rule,” he argues.

“Well, in this house it's Rule No. One.”

Do their mother's ever worry about getting a call from a teacher … or the police?

I shouldn't have read “We Need To Talk About Kevin.”

I shouldn't listen to the news, and its talk of increasingly disenfranchised boys.

Boys who don't go to college.

Who can't find jobs.

Who aren't getting married.

Who live with their mothers.

Forever. Or until they live inside barbed wire fences.

“My brother stabbed me in the back with a screwdriver when we were kids,” said a woman, trying to reassure me that her brother, now a respectable citizen, didn't mature into a sociopath. “He still feels terrible about giving me a scar.”

I feel better.

It has a familiar ring to it.

Or maybe something that is more of a “clunk.”

Like the sound of a wooden push toy hitting the head of a little girl who tried to take it away from me.

Afterward I felt terrible, too.

Gone around the bend

The man's expression was transparent. His half smile and head tilt were as clear as the words that formed through silent lips: "Hang in there. School is just around the corner."

I didn't even blink.

I know how I must have looked ...

A sullen, if slightly zombified, version of the Staples mom, who danced through the office supply store back in the late 1990s, knocking school supplies into her cart, as her children shuffled along behind looking as if someone had just run over their dog.

My kids, in contrast, race down the aisle, in different directions. All of us talking too loudly. They screech in jubilation: "School is starting!" Which means new clothes, backpacks, pencils, pens and all manner of stationary staples we already own but aren't fresh and new for a fresh, new school year. I scold in frustration: "Stop running. We don't need an electric pencil sharpener. NO! You can't have a walkie-talkie."

The sum of it all means spending more money than a week's worth of groceries and taking some teachers' names in vain, trying to find the exact size and brand of glue stick demanded on their supplies list.

The word for it is frazzled.

I suppose I am. Frazzled.

The bickering has gotten the better of me. And when the school bus stops and blinks its red lights waiting for my children to climb aboard, I will breathe a sigh of relief. I'll pour myself another coffee and actually get something done.

… During the daylight.

But it's a bit of a cliché. I feel more like the kids in those old commercials than the parent.

There's a whole lot of schoolday things I'm not looking forward to. I know things will be added to my to-do list that are not always within my control.

Homework. Tests. Clashes of personalities.

The thing I've always disliked most about being a parent is that horrible, suffocating feeling that my failure is no longer my own.

Every flaw seemingly multiplied under a magnifying glass, burning pinholes into my soul.

At times, the whole thing just seems too big to manage; A new curriculum, new tests, more ways to fail. Consolidations have meant more students, fewer teachers, and the possibility that education could get so big it can't possibly do anything but fail.

Finally, I blinked.

The man is still there, holding a basket of real office supplies, not the pint-sized colorful ones I'm juggling as my kids find something else they are sure will help them get into the back-to-school spirit.

Portable music players with headphones … the kind that play CDs, and totally cover their ears.

They rejoice and carefully put their packages in the basket when I laugh and nod my head. After all, they have an hourlong bus ride to school each way, and in these impossible-to-open clamshell packages are a vintage of technology that I truly understand.

Thing is, school isn't 'just around the corner' anymore. Sometimes it seems like it's gone 'round the bend.

I swear

I swear.

I do. Cross my heart.

Of course, I don't swear nearly as much as I used to back in high school, but I still lace my lexicon with a complicated pattern of curse words from time to time.

My foul mouth amuses my husband no end. He smiles and tells me I'm just like a truck driver, and tries to shush me when the words echo around the family room during morning cartoons.

He likes to think he can control the mouth his mother probably tried to wash out with soap here and there during his childhood. But he's no saint. If I swear when I wake up late, or stub my toe, or hear Matt Lauer's voice first-thing, before my morning coffee; he swears for no apparent reason whatsoever.

Though who am I to judge?

I swear when I'm happy. When I'm sad. When I'm excited. When words fail me.

Of course, I've tried to temper my tongue around the children (other people's children to be specific) and folks I don't know too well.

The idea that too much salty talk has a tendency to shrink the impact of other interwoven words – the way salt dehydrates a slug – was not entirely lost on me.

But I didn't cotton to the notion that words – in and of themselves – could be bad. Not entirely.

They are merely inappropriate for the time or company.

There are words we can't use in front of teachers or employers or grandparents.

Especially grandparents.

Keeping our mouths closed while chewing, and our elbows off the table are challenging enough. Peppering polite dinner conversation with impolite language might put regular breathing in peril.

Of course, there are words we NEVER say. Words that don't belong to us or that cause pain for no particular reason. There are phrases we should wean ourselves from because they can affect our thinking. …

I can't. ...

I'm bored. …

I am stupid. …

You are stupid ….

These are the things I try to impress upon my children.

That there are things we don't say, and things we try not to think, but we can't shut out every unpleasant thing.

So when an expletive slips out from the center of their cherubic cheeks, I don't suck in my breath and shrilly demand to know where they heard such things.

I know where they heard it. Everyone knows. They hear it over breakfast in the morning … on the way to the bus … while I'm cooking dinner … and when they're brushing their teeth. Anywhere accidents happen or dawdling occurs, four-letter words are always there to punctuate the response.

In some ways, I suppose, I think of these little stabs of the tongue as an inoculation of sorts. An immunization against the searing nature of harsh words.

Say it often enough … it will lose its meaning.

I toyed with the idea of giving them a swear word on their first double-digit birthday. A curse word they could use at home to their hearts' content.

Somehow, such a gift seemed hollow and overly contrived.

Cursing, I think, is all about taking, not about giving.

But that's not entirely true either.

Anyone who has ever used one knows that a well-placed curse word can be as satisfying (and relaxing) as a cup of tea and a mid-afternoon nap. It can also seem empowering:

Ittybit: “Mom … I know you told me NOT to wear my new school clothes, and I did … and I got ink on them … but you don't have to worry. I got the ink out.

Mom: “How did you get it out?”

Ittybit: Soap, hot water and curse words.

Mom: It really worked?

Ittybit: Totally! I swear!

The in be tween

I look at her sometimes without recognition.

The teenager she will be in four short years has already wiped her muddy shoes on our welcome mat and made our acquaintance.

Become a little too familiar, even.

This strange new guest ransacks our daughter's room, stuffs dirty socks between couch cushions and chews on her hair until it's drenched.

Her hair – long and tangled, locks akimbo as strands attempt to escape their binding -- seems to have a will of its own as the mane flaps between her shoulder blades. A weightless plait of matted ravel.

She thinks it's perfect just the way it is, rats' nest and all. On this I do not fight her.

We are not so dissimilar.

She is small and large. She seems both young and old. She is a mixture of me and him, and yet, she is not really ours.

In the dressing room of her mind, she tries on personalities as if they were costumes for a future play.

But these days I never know which character she's in the midst of developing will walk out on stage.

Will it be the sweet sister? The helpful daughter? The social butterfly?

Or will it be the prickly pear?

We call that one Attitude-y Judy.

She wears sullen and moody like an oversized hat. She paws at it as it wobbles around on her forehead changing her expression. She adjusts the tilt obsessively until I demand she take it off. I know it won't be long until it fits a little too snugly.

More and more it feels as if we talk at each other. Neither knowing how much the other hears.

She can be a non-stop fount of questions.

Other times she's the know-it-all who has no qualms about telling strangers all the ways I'm doing it wrong.

She's my Best Friend Forever one day and my Best Friend Nellie Olsen the next.

Sometimes she's the little girl she used to be, playing with dolls and asking me to read a story from a favorite book.

Nowhere contains more evidence of her splintering self than her bedroom. A four-poster bed sleeps the girl and all of her favorite stuffed animals. A hanging chair, where she nests to read, has Barbie Dolls and back issues of Tiger Beat magazine. A variety of clothes are strewn about after they'd been modeled but not worn. They mingle with clothes of the doll variety, props modeled by diminutive doppelgangers simultaneously. The dolls still have subordinate roles in this new endeavor.

The strangeness, though, is not confined to her transformation. It has afflicted mine as well.

She sings a rambling song of repetition in a made-up language. I just want to shush her.

She tells me she wants to say silly things to a toll collector and I hiss: “Don't you dare.”

She gets a glint in her eye and snaps back: 'You said 'Dare'.”

But she doesn't dare.

Not yet.

For the time being, Attitude-y Judy is satisfied with just popping in now and again, snooping through bath cabinets and testing bedsprings. She doesn't feel completely welcome.

Not yet.

I know it won't be long until her visits seem interminable.

By then the welcome mat won't matter.  

Are we there yet?

Six days before departure they've each packed two suitcases with essentials: She has all her dresses, a blue poncho, six pairs of earrings and a dozen shades of homemade lipgloss. He has four pairs of swim trunks, a broken snorkel and a boatload of impractical toys.

Daggers flicked out at me from his eyes when I plucked two plastic vials of a chemistry set and held them up between my thumb and forefingers … daring to question the need for experimentation during our annual sojourn to southern Maine.

He opened his mouth but said nothing as sharp as his eyes had already conveyed.

I gingerly put them back. I know this is not a battle I will win directly.

If I have learned anything since becoming a parent it's that children may be unable to measure time or distance with the precision of an adult, but that doesn't mean they are oblivious to the need to keep track of its cosmic forces.

“When are we leaving?”

It is a question I will have answered four-thousand-eight-hundred-and-fifty-six times before the car pulls away from the house on that magical day … five days from now.

Roughly four days after I'd washed every stitch of clothing in the house; three days after I'd run errands and returned library books, and one day after I'd repacked their bags to include practical summer attire, such as sweatshirts and changes of underwear.

We will get four miles out of town, and the question will change. Slightly.

“When are we getting there?”

Honestly, it's a question that has no correct answer.

We could say: “Four hours … if we don't stop … or hit traffic … or decide to turn this clown show around and go back home.” Four hours might as well be four minutes or four days. … and it's always losing pieces when taken in chunks.

“What time are we getting there now?”

We could make them work for it: “When the clock on the dashboard says '1:30' … if we don't stop ... or hit traffic … or decide to join the circus.”

“That clock is wrong,” my daughter reminds me.

“Then add four minutes.”

My husband sets his jaw and grips the wheel a little more tightly. He wonders why automotive companies don't make family vehicles that employ sound-proof partitions that can be raised and lowered with the ease of power window technology.

He also wonders how we managed to make children who can't be distracted with portable electronics.

“Hey! Let's play I spy. … or Twenty questions … or The license plate game,” he'll say as we inch along on the highway adding who-knows-how-many-minutes-to-this-ordeal.

Predictably, each attempt at entertainment ends in disagreement: “I saw it first” … “I can't think of any more questions” … “I can't read Indiana!”

He grips the wheel even tighter.

There is no way around it. No way to avoid stop-and-go traffic. No way to avoid the zillion and one questions about arrivals and departures and the tedious fights that break out over whose gaze trespassed beyond their side of the car.

I used to think vacation angst was a problem of planning. I wondered whether it was a shortfall of stealth.

Couldn't we save ourselves all of this angst if we said nothing, packed in the dead of night and took off one morning as if we were just going off to the grocery store for a gallon of milk and a loaf of bread?

Wishful thinking.

The mystery of this thing known as vacation only intensifies after arrival. “Are we there yet” morphs into sixty million new questions, all of them leading up to the inevitable “When are we leaving?”

Little stinker

I had been fast asleep until I felt a nudge.

“Will you let the dog out?” he asked, in a voice that put the request clearly in the column of “I'll Owe You One” on the imaginary chalkboard of marital tabulations.

I hadn't even heard her barking. (Not that that's unusual. I have a tendency to ignore the obvious).

“What time is it?”

“For the love of Pete, it's time to let YOUR dog out.”

So much for Owing Me One.

It certainly didn't take long for his sense of humor to wear thin. I had barely swung my legs over the bed, let alone found my slippers, before one more plaintive bark caused him to transfer ownership and cancel any late-night goodwill.

How fickle we are.

It's his dog when she's all cuddly and cute on a winter-coming evening before we break down and switch on the furnace. She's my dog when she eats the bath sponge and vomits soap bubbles and blue foam bits under his desk.

In truth, though, she is MY dog.

I was the one who thought she was special. I was the one who saw her face on the shelter's website. I was the one who dragged the family to meet her. I was the one who pushed for her adoption.

It was also me who worked with her (with varying degrees of success) this past year on not peeing in the house; not chasing the cat, not chewing up all of our insoles; not shredding toys, or pillows, or old plastic bags; and not barking at us for no apparent reason whatsoever.

When she walks at a heel I take full credit.

But not on this night.

This night, as I stumbled down the stairs, somewhere between awake and asleep still wondering what time it was, I wished for fish. Quiet, docile fish.

I didn't even realize my mistake when I opened the door and the dog burst out into the backyard, a writhing, snarling, barking blur.

The noise abruptly coming to a halt with a yelp.

It wasn't until I re-opened the door and she streaked inside on a wave of acrid air that I truly woke up.

It was evident she had been skunked, and I couldn't ignore it in the same fashion I ignored her barking in the first place.

But that didn't stop me from trying.

I slipped back into bed. The foul air had followed me up the stairs and into our room, even though the dog had made a B line in another direction: The kids' room.

How could I sleep knowing what I knew?

“I'm not sure,” I lied. “But I think the dog got skunked … and that first rule … the one about not letting a skunked dog back inside the house? Well … yeh … too late.”

That woke him up. In fact, he bolted out of bed and into the hallway searching for the dog, who had abandoned the kids (thankfully) and was in the bathroom trying (unsuccessfully) to remove the rancid smell with her tongue and forepaws, and a basketful of dirty laundry.

She stopped what she was doing and sat upright, a cowering mass of stench and oily fur. It was as if she calculated her mistake and the potential consequences of it, and was using the remnants of her shelter-dog experience to beseech our mercy.

“Please make this stop. … I'll be a good dog now. Don't send me away … I can do laundry. I think.”

He gaged and then relented. I couldn't feel my tongue. “Poor dog.”

We worked silently.

I measured the amounts of peroxide, baking soda and dish soap called for by Dr. Google.

He found a cloth and rubber gloves.

An hour later – and two rounds of warm, soapy water -- the air still tasted bitter. There was nothing left to do, so we tried to sleep.

“Someday you'll laugh about this,” he said as he drifted off.

But it wasn't my sense of humor that worried me. It was chalking the nebulous “Who Owes Whom” tab that would keep me awake.especially since the dog was surely MY dog since she was exuding a choking olfactory sensation all around us.

“As long as we can reclaim our sense of smell,” I told myself. “I'll be happy.”

Story of my life

Telling a story is an art.

An art I have never seemed to master. Not in so many spoken words, anyway.

It's been this way since I was a kid.

“Can I say something?” I'd ask at the dinner table, and then follow up with a long period of silence.

Predictably, conversations would continue without me.

I'd sit there, fuming. “No one ever listens to me.”

Grumble, grumble, grump.

“You need to jump in,” my mother would say, annoyed. “You have to start talking. You can't wait for an engraved invitation.”

“But then you say I'm interrupting,” I challenged, completely confused.

“You have to wait until people stop talking before you jump in. Then, you have to keep their attention by saying something interesting.”

That's some tough love for a child of five.

Sadly, I don't think I have ever arrived at the right conversational balance.

I still can't seem to hold my own when it comes to small talk.

Take, for instance, the chat I had with another mother, recently:

She had marveled at the colorful confections I proffered for the community theater bake sale table. They were perfect, she said, for a children's play centered around Dr. Seuss.

I beamed. My iced vanilla cupcakes topped with red striped marshmallow hats were a hit.

She wondered how it was that I came to think up such a confectionary novelty.

And then I made the mistake so many of us make when faced with a smidgeon of attention.

I explained the process … in excruciating detail.

I first told of my internet research, and the trials and errors of completing the very first batch. I told of lopsided hats, grocery store chats and an accounting of marshmallows fed to the dog. I used my hands and minced several words pertaining to the final construction.

And though I could see her eyes glaze over somewhere between “Pinterest search” and “prototypes,” I couldn't stop talking.

By the time she was able to wriggle away to attend some imaginary task, I knew she was never coming back.

I didn't feel bad about it, though. I've been in her place. Quietly rearranging my closet as someone tells me their life story, complete with weather forecast, after I had smiled in their direction and remarked about having a nice day.

My son has been showing some of the same proclivities in his storytelling pursuits.

One night, at dinner, as we were discussing plans for the summer, he broke down in tears.

“No one ever listens to me,” he lamented after repeating “You know what?” about a gazillion times.

Grumble, grumble, grump.

I try to stop my mother's words from forming in my throat, but couldn't hold the words in check: “You need to jump in. You have to start talking. You can't wait for an engraved invitation.”

He just looked at me with tears streaming down his face. Evidently the equivalent of an engraved invitation is necessary:

“Go ahead. We're waiting.”

He sniffled and brightened.

“Did you know sharks really like meat and they're often mistaken. If they see a surfboard, they might think it's a fish, but when they take a bite they eat the human instead. It's real. You can look it up.”

He didn't wait for a response, he just went back to spearing his steak with his fork, happy to have gotten that morsel of information off his chest.

In the stunned silence that followed it occurred to me that perhaps effective storytelling has more to do with paring an invitation with a non-sequitur than it has to do with art.

Well, that and brevity.

Secret Rival

Turns out I'm a competitive sort of person.

Secretly competitive.

 Shocking, I know.

 I've spent all my time up until now telling myself that winning doesn't matter.

That enjoying something and advancing through teamwork and commitment are the only true rewards for my efforts. This non-competitive nature I had cultivated extended toward my every endeavor from school to career, and from marriage to motherhood.

 Even the state of my yard with its weed-choked gardens and miss-mowed lawn patches screamed “Not even trying to keep up with the Joneses!”

 I never needed to be the best, let alone anywhere near the top half; and yes, failure was certainly an option.

 And then I ran my first 5K.

 Now … I knew that I wasn't going to win (I can walk almost as fast as I can run) but somewhere near mile 2.5 I realized I could probably finish without stopping.

It was a miracle. I was about to do something I hadn't thought was even remotely possible.

 And just around mile 2.51 I realized it wasn't enough just to finish … I had to beat someone.

 I started looking around me. Narrowed my eyes. The woman who crossed the starting line alongside me was too far ahead now. I'd never catch up.

 Should I pick the pair of high schoolers who, for the past mile, had been running ahead of me in the shady spots and then holding back in the sunny stretches? I could probably take them, I told myself.

But maybe I should play it safe. I knew that last stretch of roadway was tree-lined and possibly breezy.

Best to pick the septuagenarian I had been trailing the entire course. He looked as if he were ready to slow down.

 So I settled on a seventy-year-old as my secret rival, and, as I predicted, a few hundred yards before the finish line, I passed him. I was ecstatic! And a little bit nauseated. And freakishly red in the face … But I beat that guy fair and square.

 As I walked around to try and find my family in the river of onlookers, I was already planning what my next step would be.

 It's not enough to Just Do It; I have to do it farther and faster than I did it before.

 It took until midlife, and smartphone app called “Map My Run” to show me that I have a need to “one up” myself. Up until that moment I was happy to just run as far as I could in the time I had allotted myself two mornings a week.

Now, with a melodious-for-a-computer-type voice telling me how far I had gone and how fast (and throwing in calories burned as an added bonus) I started timing and tallying everything.

Turns out I can walk 16-minute-miles to the playground and back. 164 calories.

The dog and I walked 19-minute miles to the post office. Too much sniffing. 132 calories.

I can bike five miles in 34 minutes. 118 calories.

 I count laundry days as an exercise, since I climb stairs for the equivalent of a quarter mile.

 Each week I try to log more activity, go faster andfurther than I did the week before. 

I feel possessed. But I have high hopes for the next race.

Watch out, grandpa. I've got you in my sights.

Are you going to eat that?

People for Less Unrest in Marriage, or PLUM as I like to call it –- a wholly imaginary but incredibly well-organized think tank for which I sometimes find myself a not-so-well organized spokesperson -- would like to share the following true-life event as a public service:

“Are you going to eat that?”

“That” being whatever was in my hand, already making its way toward my mouth.

You might think I was eating the last chocolate chip cookie that would ever be baked in the entire world. Ever. Again.

But that's not even close.

“I wouldn't eat that if you made me. Not even if you twisted my arm.”

My husband stands before me with a curled lip and stink-eyed expression, sneering openly as I am about to eat yet another tasteless hunk of fiber board, which must have fallen from a store shelf and into my shopping cart as I was weaving recklessly through the Earthy-Crunchy section of the supermarket like the lunatic, female shopping cart driver that I am.

Why else, his expression taunted, would this almost inedible food product be in our house?

It's the kind of look that always makes me want to hurl something – preferably something pungent, overripe and difficult to clean out of facial hair -- in his direction.

Coming from his mouth “Are you going to eat that” is not a question so much as an indictment. A statement of disbelief. An affirmation of what must be my dubious sanity. A declaration of our differences.

The man just can't wrap his mind around the fact that I might actually enjoy some tasteless piece of “bark,” slathered with only a thin layer of “compost.”

Foodie I am not. To me, sustenance is simply fuel to keep the moving parts running.

Nor am I a chef. It's an affront to some, the way people like me trample on the complexity of delicate tastes and textures by drowning them in hot sauce or burning them to a crisp.

I refuse to be ashamed. I have just accepted the fact that there's not a lot of "ours" in the snack cabinet, there's just his, hers and theirs. And every once in a while lines are crossed, and samples are taken for research purposes.

It's not as if he hasn't foraged through the kitchen, looking for a late-night snack and – with only crumbs left in the plastic tray of chocolate sandwich cookies that he keeps stashed behind the dishware – helped himself to mine.

I don't mine. It's not as if I keep an accounting of each apple in the crisper drawer. In fact, I encourage sharing. (As per the job descriptions in the manuals of Motherhood and Kindergarten Teachers, subset 789).

Pilfering I can handle. It's the smugness I can do without, and the dramatic displays of distaste that punctuate his reaction to the first bite of anything not foisted upon him.

Can he really be so incensed by my reaction:

“Is it really necessary to roll your eyes and claw at your tongue as it lolls from your mouth like an unfurling carpet? That kind of response seems a bit excessive.”

After all, he was the one who insisted on snitching the high-fiber snack cracker smeared with mashed chickpeas and mustard dollops from my lunch plate. It's not as if I twisted his arm.

Kids today

It's amazing how much unsolicited advice a person attracts once they become a parent.

You name it, and there is someone out there who has an opinion about the best way and the worst way to do it.

There is nothing too small to evade scrutiny.

Everything you do. Everything your kid does. Everything you do because your kid did something becomes part of a discussion that is so big it seems to envelope the world.

And it usually starts with a problem … “The problem with kids today ...”

Trouble is the problem doesn't always end with a workable solution.

The problem is other kids … parents ... schools ... teachers ... politicians … government … bullies ... guns ... boredom ... drugs ... corporate giants ... factory farms … car emissions ... toys from China … calculators ... computers … the internet …

The list is so big it can't easily fit on a bumper sticker (which, truth-be-told, is the place all the best advice is usually filed – second only to the flip file under the kitchen sink).

More and more I'm thinking the problem is a construct of our imaginations.

A good portion of the time, though, it's our interpretation of a stranger's sideways glance or our mother-in-law's two cents that have us squinting in rage and spitting venom. It's not the event itself.

The problem is we want to be the seekers of knowledge and not have knowledge foisted upon us.

You only need to think about all those gift guides we poured over for Mother's Day and Father's Day to know just how useful that was.

“Thanks for the ruffle “up-cycled” apron and the book of iphone pictures of me barbecuing. I will cherish it forever.”

That's not to say that we shouldn't seek help, or that we shouldn't look for ways to solve the problems that vex us. It's just that maybe we should do so with the understanding that the answers we find might not be one-size fits all.

We just have to be willing to understand that if the answers differ for all of us, we are probably all a little bit different.

The thing – above all others – that has surprised me about parenthood is how much my children have taught me about being not only a parent, but also a person.

It's more than handling the grocery shopping meltdowns and helping them solve their own school yard crises. It's more than fretting about the future and all the what-ifs.”

It's right now.

It's in the moment.

It's just doing the best you can and having faith that tomorrow will present a new moment.

In so many ways, it's tuning out all of the noise that makes us doubt ourselves.

The more I think of it the more I see that the only real opinion that matters – the only proof of effectiveness – will come from our kids … when they are our age, with children of their own.

And then … well ...

Then we will give our grandchildren cake for breakfast and wax nostalgic about "kids in our day."

Molehills and mountains

The summer is here …

And I can't escape the dampness.

Or … the laundry.

It's not just the infernal rain and the wall of humidity that has me down -- though the depressing idea of traveling around inside a mosquito net has crossed my mind numerous times – it's also the moisture that just naturally trails children wherever they go.

The winter may be long gone, but there are still runny noses, which, despite my objections, are often dried not just by their shirtsleeves, but also by bed sheets, bath towels, and decorative pillows.

There are the showers, to which both kids have graduated, where a gap in the curtain causes a small river of water to pool by the sink.

And then there is the pool … which I can't understand for the life of me how no one in the entire family – including the husband – can manage to bring a towel with them to mop up the afterswim.

I suppose the joy of crashing into the cool water at the end of these overheated days obliterates the need to be prepared.

Who needs to make plans when they still have me – the lifeguard, waiter and de facto cabana boy – to step and fetch it?

Still, long trails of water stretch through the house, forking off into various directions as each of them dashed for dry land.

I am never quick enough. No one can wait all drippy and shivery at the door for the few minutes it takes to gather a few sheets of terrycloth, which haven't been clean long enough to be folded and stacked away.

And it's not just from swimming, either. The boy has taken to making “experiments” using tap water and soap in his room, and the girl has to wash her hair using every product in the bathroom … both usually end in explosions and the need for clean-up crews.

These are the summer rituals I could do without.

I used to love summer. Longer days, walking around barefoot and the anticipation of vacation plans made ordinary workdays seem restful. Even at home, it seemed the weight of the world always lifted in direction correlation to the weight of the laundry basket.

Gone were the double layer pants and heavy sweaters. In their stead were light, cotton shorts and sleeveless shirts. Even a mountain of them seemed like a molehill.

I'm not sure what changed, but something has. The washer and dryer are in operation daily, and the linen closet is always empty.

The laundry molehills have returned to their mountainous size, though now they come in a multitude of colors.

I can't seem to take a step without tripping over piles of freshly laundered towels, now soggy and peppered with sand.

“Didn't I just wash these?” I say to the dog, who is the only one in the house who pays much attention to me (even though she is also likely to ignore whatever it is I say unless it involves the words “dinner,” “walk” or “squirrel”).

Now, if I could just train her to use the washer and dryer.