I Don't Have a Headache, I Have a Thirteen-Year-Old

I'm driving Daughter to school one day last week and I know I've got to tell her that she lost her allowance for the week but I'm dreading it. Am I dreading it because I hate to take away her money? No, she's miserly enough that she's probably got millions stashed around the house. Am I dreading it because it's too harsh a punishment for a few missed chores -- in other words, is my mother's heart weakening? Again, no. This child misses so many chores so much of the time, she has to have missed egregious amounts to finally lose her allowance. If I just counted the chores she made for me by her constant carrying things from one area of the house and dropping them off in another, I would earn a tidy allowance.

I'm dreading breaking it to her because there are better places than the interior of a car to have a thirteen-year-old pitch a fit and start screaming her head off.

But I can't resist. It's become our fight-a-day, the ride to school, whatever she's mad about that particular day, and this, her money, she will scream about all the way there: As I leave our neighborhood, turn onto the major street, drive down three miles, turn again, drive up two miles, and deposit her at the school doors, only the door slamming shut restoring the car to silence. 

She breaks the sound barrier as we drive down the road. Maybe even the windows. And that's when I realize I have a headache. And then I think, wait a minute. It's kind of early for a headache - only eight in the morning! I haven't really even done enough today to get a headache. Then then I realize the truth: I don't have a headache, I have a thirteen-year-old.

When Daughter was born, Husband and I looked on her with some bewilderment. After all, our first baby had weighed a pound and a half at birth. Who was this gigantic, loud, crying, jaundiced child, weighing in at a whopping six pounds nine ounces? Bar Mitzvahzilla hadn't even gone home with us for nearly ten weeks. We practically had to break him out of the hospital at the end, the doctors were so reluctant to release him, so reluctant to try him on outside air. But with Daughter there was no delay; she was ours driving home just a few days after birth.

Husband and I had been rightfully worried about Bar Mitzvahzilla -- born so tiny, he had come home with an apnea monitor and oxygen tubing. Once he moved out of our bedroom, we bought a sophisticated monitor just so we could listen to his every sound. If I could have crawled in the crib with him, honestly, I would have. But after Daughter moved out of our room and proved that her cries needed no amplification, no monitor, no microphone, to travel from one side of the house to the other, we gave the monitor away. We both felt completely confident that this child wasn't going anywhere without yelling her head off.

Of course, we were right. And, of course, I don't have a headache, just a little residual thirteen-year-old, recently disembarked from the car, clearing up a little later in the day, and to return about pickup time.

Have you lived through your child's adolescence? Did you find that they had just the right combination of screams to bring on a headache? Any baby screamers not needing monitors?

To Sleep or Not To Sleep

One thing about giving birth to Bar Mitzvahzilla - besides him being born a pound and a half, besides the whole prematurity thing, besides the coming home with an apnea monitor and an oxygen tank - he was never one of those kids who would fall asleep in the car.

We had to go a lot of places when he first came home from the hospital. Four times a week back to the pediatrician to monitor his weight gain and recovery from recent hernia surgery; a cardiac surgeon; an ophthalmologist; other specialists. And they were all very far from my house, like near the hospital where Bar Mitzvahzilla had been born. Could he have fallen asleep one time?

Instead I'd be driving along the interminable mountain passes of Phoenix on a thirty-minute ride downtown with a squalling by then four-pound baby sunk into a rear-facing car seat facing away from me in my car. Do you know how this drove me nuts? Can you imagine how many times I had to stop to make sure he wasn't strangling on something in the sunken tunnel of his car seat? Because he couldn't really fill the thing up.

Now Bar Mitzvahzilla is nearly sixteen. A big clunk, really, and thank goodness for it considering his beginning. I pick him up at school and he is irritable. Everyday. I guess he doesn't remember those heartbreaking scenes from next to his incubator. Finally, we descend into silence after he realizes that, whether he likes it or not, one particular day I'm bringing him to our store to work. Then it gets too quiet. He's sleeping.

A kid who could never even close his eyes as a tiny newborn now finds that the motion of the car lulls him tranquilly to sleep, in bright daylight and at nearly sixteen-years-old.

I shake my head at the contradictions of parenthood, happy for the silence from my teenager, wondering if every time he fights with me I could just somehow trick him into the car and make him falls asleep. Then I drive on, towards our store.

Did you have a kid who fell asleep in cars or stayed alarmingly awake? Any annoying sleep tales of teenagers?

Linda
Author of Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie
Available on Amazon, Kindle, B&N, and other retailers

Supermom

                                                                               

When Bar Mitzvahzilla was younger, there was one question he loved to ask me that I never could answer to his satisfaction, yet about which he and Daughter could jabber about for hours. What superpower would I choose if I could have one?

Well, of course this stumped me. While he'd look at me expectantly - just waiting to give me his answer - I'd draw a blank. Invariably I thought of Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie. What superpowers were those?  Since I had to come up with something I'd say the only one I could think of, immortality, and be subjected to my son's scorn. Why in the world would I want to live forever when none of the people I loved would be able to? That was apparently the worst superpower. The best ones? Mutability, Invisibility, Superhuman Strength.

If he asked me today I wouldn't have any problem picking one. Easy. All I'd have to do is think back to the last three weeks since he started high school, since I've looked at my planner each day and found that each one of them contained unresolvable conflicts - two places I actually had to be each day at the same time. Both things invariably for my kids. And important stuff.

So I know which superpower I'd pick: cloning.

Was I living in a cocoon all these years, being the mother of two kids who attended the same private school? The ease and comfort of driving both kids to the same school, having one school calendar, of only having to beg with Husband each morning to take my assigned driving days because, invariably, I had stayed up till two in the morning blogging. 

But not anymore. Now Bar Mitzvahzilla has to be off in one direction to arrive at 7:30; Daughter in another to arrive at 7:55. There are the things that we planned that sounded really good during the summer, but in practice? Not so good. Like football everyday after school. Then various Jewish or school-related activities that keep the boy and me hoofing it till 9:00 each night. High school, then home; JCC, then home; tutoring, then home. And back. This, I believe, might just be why people actually buy their teenagers cars.

But here I am, finally. Able to blog after a week and a half. Three whole posts this month.

Now I'll go disappear into my genie bottle until tomorrow.

And what would you pick for your superpower? Ever felt like you've spent the whole day driving, and you weren't on vacation? 

Hurry Up and Wait

My Mom was going out to eat with my sister's family the other night. I wanted to see if I could swing by and drop off some stuff before she left.

"We're not going to be home."

"But you still have an hour before you have to be at the restaurant."

"We're leaving now."

"But Ma, it takes five minutes to drive there.  What are you going to do with the other fifty-five minutes before they get there?"

"Well, we have to park."

"Yeah?"

"And walk in."

"Right."

"That's it."

"How long could it take to park and walk in a restaurant?"

"Well, Bob's driving."  Right. Half an hour to pull into a parking spot and half an hour to find the door.  Not that I'm that much better.  Today we went on a high school tour with Bar Mitzvahzilla and I led us to the wrong parking lot, like on the garbage bin side of the high school, not the front door side.  We had to hike a mile to get to the door.  Then we went to his basketball game after school and I directed Husband to the wrong school.  So I can relate to this stuff.

But an hour to drive five minutes? 

There's no arguing with my mom.  I tell her I'll drop the stuff by the next day and agree with her, saying "You'd better hurry up."

Car and Driver

Husband and I fight for several easily categorized reasons.

First we fight because I'm an inept fool in the kitchen and can never figure out anything nutritious to feed Bar Mitzvahzilla and Daughter. Despite this, and bewilderingly, they continue to grow. Husband isn't convinced by this evidence. He'd like to see some changes, like the introduction of the crockpot into my lexicon.

The second reason we fight is because after the kids eat whatever I pop out of the microwave, rather than them driving me nuts all night while I wait for Husband to come home, I park them in the front of the TV. Well, not quite. First homework and two chores, then TV. This allows Inept Mom to write. Of course, Husband thinks there should be no TV. I totally blame it on him that the last TV series I watched on an ongoing basis was Seinfeld.

These disagreements are almost manageable. The one area that can get ugly is when Husband is driving the car and I'm the passenger.

Husband's theory of driving is wound up with the preservation of the household vehicles - he wants them to last one hundred years. He wants us to drive our cars until they fall to pieces beneath us in the roadway and we're left jogging to our destination. To this end, his driving technique - he has a technique -is intended to reduce wear and tear to all car parts. He never wants to pay for repairs for anything that could have been used more tenderly.

To preserve the brakes, Husband will scan the roadway ahead - like ten miles ahead. If he sees the tiniest hint of a red traffic signal anywhere - like even with binoculars - he takes his foot off the gas and starts decelerating. Why speed up to get to a red light?, he asks. This creates quite a problem in the roadway. People start passing us and honking at us; suddenly there's an island around us, a slo-mo island.

He also takes courtesy too far. If we're driving past the entrance of a building, he's a little too meek. He'll scan the store; he'll scan inside the store. Is there anyone at the checkout stand who might be coming towards the parking lot sometime soon? If so, then he'll slam on the brakes, nearly sending me through the windshield.

I was raised in a family in which we never plan to keep our cars. When the payments stop, we get rid of them. We are constantly seduced by shinier, newer models, or we want a different color. If something breaks, that's it. We want that car towed away, never to be seen again, even if it just needs a battery. Since we're not rich people, this can cause some problems.

Husband only has one thing to say about my complaints: he asks me if I'd like to drive.

Lead Foot

I have a reasonable amount of credibility in my family, by which I mean that if I say something happened, the people in my family normally believe me. Like if I yell out, "Scorpion!" my husband will show up with the scorpion spray, he won't come to inspect whether it actually is a scorpion while it runs away under our bed.

So, when I kept telling Husband this week that my car was having a hard time starting, since he's in charge of our cars, it would have been nice if he would have given me some credibility. Then a light came on in my dashboard that included an exclamation point. My car, normally mute, was trying to tell me something. I know the rules of writing and the use of exclamation points - they are to be used sparingly. They connote excitement, urgency. So I sat up and took notice.

The light in the dash finally got Husband moving, especially because he could finally use some of the dust-covered tools he's bought and stored in our garage. First he just got to use the tire gauge to measure the air pressure, but then, for true excitement, he got to turn on the thunderous air compressor and fill those tires up.

This afternoon, however, the car stopped moving. Husband had paid attention to the most apparent issue - the exclamation point in the dash - but hadn't paid attention to the other issue, the car barely starting. Luckily, the car worked fine for everything that I leisurely did today: exercise, shopping, a meeting, lunch. It was just when I was about to do what I'm actually supposed to do - picking up Bar Mitzvahzilla and Daughter from school - that the car wouldn't start. Because Husband is a slave to our carpet store, I had to call my mother to rescue us, which entailed her zooming over in her souped up, bare-bones Toyota Matrix, and then taking me on the ride from hell.

My mother didn't start driving until she was 34. She had a car before then, a faded red Chevy Nova, which was parked under the tree in front of our house in Skokie. She was afraid to learn to drive so it just sat there rusting under the tree while she schlepped out of the house each day with her baby buggy and shopping baskets and 7 daughters, going grocery shopping at the National store about 5 blocks away. Finally, in 1964, she learned how to drive and, as she proudly told me today while she hugged the center line, braked hard for dips in the road, and sped up as she approached red lights, she's never had an accident in 45 years. Maybe if she tries harder.

We got the kids and then my mother briefly considered letting me drive her car. It was like high school again: me, the anxious, shifty teenager waiting for the car keys to drop into my hand so I could zoom out to a boondocker in the desert. Then she shook her head. No, she couldn't risk it. I've only been driving 32 years. That's not long enough.

So she put the pedal to the metal to get us back home. After a few more close calls, we got there.

Defensive Driving School

My defensive driving class wasn't that bad this time. It was bad in the way that it was 5 hours long, the room was ice cold on one side and heated on the other side, and it was pretty much lit with strobe lights. But it turns out that I'm now so old that I can kind of reminisce about all the defensive driving classes I've had, and compare them all to each other, grading them on a scale of overall human misery.

Like, was the instructor a pompous, overbearing ass who treated us like pond scum for getting a ticket, acted like a drill sergeant about breaks, lambasted us with threats of dire consequences if we went to the bathroom, like the last time I took the class? No, this class was taught by a sweet old man wearing a bolo tie, whose assistant, his sweet, befuddled and mummified wife, cued him on things he forgot or what he was supposed to lecture on next.

Were there a lot of belligerent, angry strangers, mad about being stuck there for five hours, mad about getting their photo radar tickets, mad about being spied on by the government, mad about the fee, or mad about the bad picture the photo radar took of them, like the last time I took the class? No, I took the class in Scottsdale and it was a pretty mild crowd. We took to our sweet old coot, kind of adopting him. We didn't want to hurt his feelings.

Were there a lot of accident fatality videos intended to scare us to death so that for weeks we'll be paranoid about driving, paranoid about seatbelts, paranoid about kids in the car, strapping them in with extra rope, paranoid about red light runners, paranoid about passengers, paranoid about lawsuits, paranoid about alcohol, even paranoid about driving under the influence of an aspirin? Yes, just like every single time.

So I sat there, refreshing my horror at all the dangers out there, at how my sweet little car, the car I lovingly call my pony is actually a dangerous piece of heavy equipment, then, at 9:30 pm, we were set free to wreak havoc upon the roadways. I creakingly pulled my car out of the parking lot, crept up to the first stop light looking for the horrors of a red light runner, fearfully drove home watching for lane changers, speeders, drunks, drug addicts, rear enders and sideswipers, and especially for photo radar.

Then, after taking about an hour to drive the two miles, I successfully got home.