Paper Jam

Here's the scene: it's my bedroom. The bed, to be exact. Nicely made, every thing looking normal, except there's a very large and disorderly pile of papers on the bed. Very, very large.

Suddenly the pile of paper moves. It breathes. It coughs. A voice can be heard from inside the pile of papers - my voice - exclaiming at the volume of paper, the quantity of paper, the sheer duplicative quantity of paper.

Of course - it's the camp paperwork and I've gotten buried beneath it.

My kids have gone to the same summer day camp almost every summer for the last six or seven years. The first year the amount of paperwork was a terrible surprise. I paid the camp fees, filled out a nice little two-sided sheet with our family information and a credit card number and, with a smile on my face, prepared to walk away. Suddenly I was handed a brick of paperwork and told to complete the forms contained in it for each child and then registration would be complete.

There's the normal stuff in there, like the contact sheet with phone numbers, and then there's stuff like the "Get to know your camper" sheet where I have to tell them about my children's psychological foibles to maybe smooth their way through their weeks there. Husband and I have had no small amount of fun over the years imagining what we'd really like to write under "Child's Three Favorite Activities" as opposed to what we actually write there. Not to mention the "Three characteristics that best describe your child." There's the challah order form, the lunch order form, the aftercare form - which needs to be filled out whether we use aftercare or not - and the friend request form. Then there's the one form I have to fill out twice: the medical/immunization form.

I've come to realize this form is created only to torture me since I must obtain my children's immunization records and then transpose those records onto the form. Each year I peer quizzically at the immunization form from the doctor's office, where they've abbreviated certain shots under one name, and tried to match them up to the form, where they've abbreviated them another.

As the years have gone by, my dread of doing this paperwork has sometimes become a deciding factor in whether my kids will go to camp, kind of like the "Sponge-worthy" Seinfeld episode. Is it paperwork-worthy? Is one week of camp worth it to fill out the paperwork? A resounding no. Two weeks? Three?

I jump back in the pile, pick up my pen with my claw-like hand, and finish the task.

Are your kids in summer camp? How voluminous are the enrollment forms? Every get overwhelmed and discouraged by paperwork?

Blame it on the Blemishes

I have an important motto I've made up myself that is related particularly to the raising of children. At least I think I've made it up.

It didn't occur to me quite away because, frankly it wasn't needed. It occurred to me when Bar Mitzvahzilla went from being a smooth-faced twelve-year-old several years ago, into a raging, hormonal thirteen-year-old. And then the pimples came.

It was a normal night. The kids were up too late. The husband causing a ruckus in the house because those same kids had managed to mess up the house in the most minute ways; ways that seemed intended to drive us to the brink of insanity. I was hiding in my office, trying to get some writing done and wondering - lamenting - why my office didn't have a door. Oh yeah, I know. Because it's the living room.

Then Bar Mitzvahzilla marched in for a goodnight kiss. No knocking because, of course, there was no door.  He presented a face full of pimples for me to kiss. And I, of course, kissed the pimples.

It's not like I spent my life purposely kissing pimples. The common wisdom when I was heading into high school was that you could catch these things if you made out with a boy who had them. Since I already had enough of them to send makeup counter ladies running in horror from their stations in the mall, I wasn't going to purposely rub faces with someone who had worse pimples than me. There was also all the other stuff we believed about our skin right then: chocolate causes pimples. Rubbing alcohol will cure pimples (topically, not as a drink...). Use a blackhead popper on your pimples (hello, scarring!). We even believed that one day soon we'd grow out of them.

And, just like my nascent belief, as a teenager, in the fact that a ten-pound weight loss could change my life, I also believed that if I strategized just right, I could declare war on the pimples, and fix my social life.

I don't think Bar Mitzvahzilla was philosophizing quite as much as I had, as an adolescent girl. But he did march into my office for a kiss. So here's my motto, reiterated in case you missed it, used in the fullness of loving parenthood: Kiss the Pimples. And then get that kid to a dermatologist.

Any horrible acne stories from your youth? Archaic beliefs or practices? Any experience with this situation? Anyone else spend a lot of time in the dermatologist's office and not for Botox and Juvederm?

Linda Pressman, Author of Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie
available on Amazon, Kindle, Barnes and Noble.com, libraries and other retailers

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

Daughter vs. the Wall

Lately Daughter's been on a cleaning spree. Not of our kitchen island, on which she has scattered arts and crafts supplies and anything and everything she could dump on there. Not of our family room where she has snuck plates, wrappers, cups, and cans, treating "her chair" in the middle of the room like it's her private garbage can, while not having anything actually make it into a garbage can.

Instead, she's suddenly started cleaning out her room. First she had an idea, which she presented to me and Husband in compelling detail: her room is too small and we need to take the wall down between it and the room next door. She had some drawings handy for how this would be accomplished, had chosen paint colors, and had a white board showing the eventual placement of her futon (she doesn't actually have a futon) and her walk-in closet (ditto). Every morning during my recent illness, the first thing I saw when I cracked my eyes open was Daughter standing at the foot of my bed with her white board and easel, ready to provide me with a detailed presentation on the subject. And, by any chance, do I happen to have the blueprints for our house laying about? 

Husband expressed some doubt that she could actually keep a space twice as large clean. "Let's see you clean up the room you've got and then we'll talk about it," he said.

His statement, I'm sure, is what triggered the cleaning frenzy.

This is how our lives were before: once a year or so, Daughter would lure me into her room on some pretense, I'm not sure what, and I'd find myself still sitting there about two days later sorting through junk, Daughter by my side and two gigantic bags nearby - one for giveaway and one for garbage. We'd slowly move through the room until it was clean, or at least vacuumable.

But Daughter, in her present cleaning frenzy, is handling things differently. She is slowly divesting herself of everything in the room, till now it resembles a prison cell or nun's chamber. Basically, there's a bed in there.  She's emptied out her dresser, one whole side of her closet, packed away some chairs she once loved, and has told me she doesn't need her bookshelves anymore. Or books.

I'm unsure of what's exactly going on here. Is she moving out? Because she's only eleven. I'm all for the kids moving out but I had kind of thought they'd wait till they got through middle school.

Husband thinks he can hold her off, keep setting new and more miserable cleaning tasks for her, trying to avoid the home renovation issue, the big daughter/small room issue. But I know what's going to happen. With Daughter's indomitable will, once she's done with her emptying, she'll take down that wall herself.

Do you ever recognize a will stronger than your own in your child or children? Messy kids? Determined kids?

From the Sick Bed

Okay, so I'll admit it, I've been sick. Like really sick. Right when I'm supposed to be full of energy, launching my newly published book into the stratosphere, promoting it, signing it, mailing it off to editors and columnists, what am I doing? I'm laying in a heap on my bed, my eyes replaced by Xs, like a cartoon.

And what's worse is that I have a mysterious type of ailment. Part asthma. Part exhaustion. Part massive  throbbing headache. Could it be the years upon years that I've spent staying up till two in the morning writing the darn book? Could it be all the years of getting four to five hours of sleep per night, all catching up with me at once?

Gone are the days of me waking up like a robot, showing up at my exercise class, magically appearing everywhere I'm supposed to be. Now I'm lucky if I can lift my head from my pillow. I crawl out of the house just in time to pick up Bar Mitzvahzilla from high school at 2:20 each day and then I creak over to Daughter's school to get her at 3:15. And that's the total of my big daily activity. I walk back in the house and fall back on my bed exhausted. I can feel my muscles atrophying.

Yet, somehow, when Husband hauled me off to the ER, I wasn't sick enough for them. They triaged me right to the bottom of the list, making me wait six hours and talking to me about the "impression of not being able to breath." Although with all the tests they did I guess I know it's not fatal.

You know you're really sick when, instead of the daughter taking care of the elderly mother - like I normally do - the eighty-year-old mother has to call me ten times a day worried sick about whether I'm dying. Today she even had my nearly deaf eighty-six-year-old stepfather call. I could hear her yelling at him in the background as he fumbled with the phone, "WHAT BOB? YOU CAN'T ASK HER HOW SHE IS?"

And, because of the hearing thing, because of the eighty-six-year-old thing, when he asked how I was, it was just simpler to say, "Fine, I'm fine."

And maybe I will be. Tomorrow.

Ever had illness get in the way of your plans? Ever had to become the patient when you've been the caretaker?
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My book is available now on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and on Kindle!
http://www.amazon.com/Looking-Up-Memoir-Sisters-Survivors/dp/145647068X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1305613872&sr=8-1

The Un-Mother's Day

I didn't really get anything for Mother's Day. Even I had to confess that I didn't deserve anything.

It wasn't because I'm not a good mom. I'm a good mom. When you take the Exemplary Mom days and the Pathetic Mom days and average them out, I think I come out a solid, average Good.

But here's why I didn't insist on a monetary gift. In our family we have a bunch of our own personal "holidays" that come up in rapid succession early in the year - Husband's birthday in January, our anniversary in February, my birthday in March. If you wiggle that around a little (and, compulsive shopper that I am, I do wiggle it around a little) I manage to loop Chanukah in from December, Valentine's Day in February, and spread it out into Mother's Day in May, which has the affect of leaving Husband not knowing if he's coming or going. It's a nonstop spoiled wife festival, to the point where I practically have him buying me a present for his birthday in January and wondering if perhaps we should start celebrating April Fool's Day, with him the fool.

So this year I let him off the hook for Mother's Day. We celebrated with the one mother we have between us, mine. A present for her.

I'll make do with the one I got for Ground Hog Day. 

Do you get spontaneous gifts from your partner or do you feel like you need to hypermanage this issue? Are you a great, spontaneous gift-buyer?

Kitchen Dysmorphia

This week, having a little more time on my hands since my book got published, I returned to my kitchen.

Not that I haven't been in there at all during the months I was editing the manuscript. I was in and out. When procrastinating my work, I'd grab something to eat in front of my TV, watching the stupidest shows I could find (Hoarders and Say Yes to the Dress). When not procrastinating, I'd grab something to eat in front of my computer.

This week I got ambitious. I started cooking.

My family looks on my cooking ambitions with some trepidation. For some reason, maybe it's coming from a gigantic family, maybe it's the deprivation my parents experienced during the Holocaust, maybe it's because I used to be much bigger and part of me wants to eat a house, but I can't seem to cook normal quantities of food. I only cook for armies.

When I make barley soup, I overestimate the amount of barley needed - the barley pearls are so tiny, who can tell how many is the right amount? Suddenly I end up with sludge-like soup, quicksand textured soup. A mallet is needed to stir.

This week I made a chinese noodle salad. I used twelve packages of ramen noodles. Twelve.

But then, of course, I panicked. What if twelve packages of ramen noodles weren't enough? Maybe I should put in an extra pound of spaghetti noodles? Well, I'm here to tell anyone who's curious about it that you can't actually boil twelve packages of ramen noodles and one pound of spaghetti in any normalish kind of soup pot, unless maybe you're a witch and own a cauldron.

So I'm the bane of my family. They're terrified to see me enter the kitchen, to see me hauling up my gear - three, maybe four, soup pots for the one dinner that night, bags of potatoes and onions - they're terrified because there always will be a lot of leftovers. Like for the whole neighborhood.

And tonight? I threw those noodles away.  

Does anyone else cook the wrong amount of food all the time? Cook for an army when there are many less than that living in your home? Worry about never having enough?

Book Come Lately

A long, long time ago - okay, December - I said that my book would be out in about two weeks. That would have made it the middle of January. Needless to say, it wasn't. My book, Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie, was just released this past Tuesday, April 19th, which would make it about three months longer than the two weeks I estimated. That's all. About normal for my usual combination of procrastination and angst.

Why did I say that my book would be ready to roll in two weeks? Was I insane? Was I intent on causing myself full-blown depression and paranoia? Did I need even more pressure on myself than the regular pressure I had of just trying to write a book about being raised by somewhat insane Holocaust Survivor parents in a Chicago suburb in the 60s, the sixth of seven daughters, where normal was very abnormal, indeed?

Obviously, I said it'd be done in mid-January for a couple of reasons. First of all, I believed it. Second of all, I underestimated the poisonous combination of a neurotic perfectionist (and, trust me, a book can never be perfect) and a book project. Third of all, I had to get used to the idea that writing memoir is like running through the streets naked. Did I really want to run through the streets naked?

Then the intervening months took place. Like anyone who's gotten used to blogging, I missed it, but felt I'd pinned myself in. The next blog entry had to be about the book being published. How could I skulk back here and act like everything was normal with no book in hand?

So here I am, back in Bar Mitzvahzilla-land, the blog now moss-covered, stale, somehow frozen (so to speak) on a snowy December day in Flagstaff, my kids now four months older. Now, thank goodness I can leave the insanity of my childhood behind and get back to normal - the usual insanity of my everyday life. 

Do you miss blogging when you take a break, or miss reading blogs if you take a break from that? Do you write down topics so you can cover them later or are they forever gone?

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If anyone would like to lend a hand with my virtual book launch, email me at barmitzvahzilla@hotmail.com or leave me a comment here. All help is appreciated!

The Need to Freeze

There are many things illogical about living in Arizona. There's the summer, for instance, when we get very excited as the weather "cools down" to 105 degrees. There's the general weirdness of people decorating cacti for Christmas because that's one of the only living things in the front yards. Okay, there's even the general weirdness of being a Jew in Arizona - being rare, like a unicorn or Big Foot.

But one of the strangest things about being an Arizonan is the way we all go seeking snowy weather in the winter, like there's some genetic need to freeze built into our DNA - like the salmon swimming up river in Washington State - and we head out. Since I was born in Chicago and Husband was born in Milwaukee, you'd think we'd have worked this need to freeze out of our systems as kids, but no, here we are, in the middle of our now annual exodus to Northern Arizona.

So even though I've lived in Arizona since 1973, even though I hadn't seen snow since my that last winter in Chicago, last year when we got to Flagstaff it all came back to me. I immediately remembered it all. Layered clothes, bundled up, always prepared. Similar to the Brownie I once was, but the snowy version. And last year it made sense. It was a glorious winter wonderland. Freezing cold with pristine, untouched snow everywhere, we didn't have to bother with a dedicated sledding area; everywhere we looked was a sledding area. We went sledding behind our hotel; we practically went sledding to our car since each night it was frosted in.

This year, except for some gray, piled up frozen slush, there's virtually no snow. Patchy hillsides with slush, mud, rocks and trees, so we can break our necks hurtling down a mudslide on our speeding snow disks.

We try to put a positive spin on it for Bar Mitzvahzilla and Daughter. It's still cold, right? It's good to be cold, right? How nice to be away from home on vacation! And look at the nice hotel we're staying in! Free breakfast everyday! And now, with all that stupid sledding out of the possibilities, we can spend all our time eating out, right? Let's go to another bookstore, kids!

Are we going to get away with this? Let's put it this way: Daughter was packed a week before we went on vacation. She made a list of all the restaurants we'd go to ahead of time and the days we'd go to each. Both kids are up at the crack of dawn, dressed and waiting for Husband to awaken and take them to the hotel breakfast. Children this neurotic aren't going to let us get away with anything.

Next year: Tucson.

Do you go on vacation seeking something in particular at different parts of the year? Have you ever sought out snow intentionally or is the seeking always for beach and sun? Anyone else have kids this driven?

I'm happy to report that I'm getting close to publishing my book and hope to have it available in the first half of January. I'll post here when it's available in both in print and e-book form and am sorry I've been so sparse lately with blog posts. Thanks to everyone for all your  encouragement.

A Wildebeest Kind of Winter

I was driving in my car with Bar Mitzvahzilla, then three, in December 1998. Of course there was no snow, this being Arizona - instead there were Christmas lights on all the palm trees and cacti in the neighborhood, especially the yard of one neighbor who seemed determined to offset our unlit Jewish house by putting up so many lights that his house could be seen from outer space.

I was ready for my his questions. He'd been too young the previous two years to notice anything as we drove around our tiny Jewish world - to our synagogue, to his Jewish preschool and back to our Jewish home. This bubble had to burst sometime.

It wasn't like he hadn't been exposed to the outside world. My family is so diverse it's like a United Nations conference. I was ready for an age-appropriate discussion of religious pluralism. Sure enough, I noticed he was staring out of the window, his mouth open, his eyes wide.

He pointed at the neighbor's house and yelled, "Mom! A wildebeest!"

This I didn't expect. Of course, I knew there wasn't actually a wildebeest in my neighbor's front yard. Even my HOA couldn't be that lax. But I said, "A wildebeest? Where?"

He was pointing at a reindeer. I thought quickly. Should I tell him the truth or should I let him have a little magic for one more year?

I said, "Wow! A wildebeest!"

Sometime earlier that year Bar Mitzvahzilla had become obsessed with the movie "The Lion King." After watching it every day for a year, I came to like it, too. For some reason, his favorite scene was when Simba's father Mufasa fell off the cliff into the stampeding wildebeests. He re-enacted this in our home day after day, clinging to the clifflike edge of my bed, while I, Mufasa's evil brother, Scar, flung him off the cliff. Bar Mitzvahzilla would fall to the floor onto a herd of toy wildebeests that just happened to be stampeding by on the carpet.

So he was a little obsessed with wildebeests. Having them appear all over the neighorhood that December was an truly a wonderful thing.

After he noticed the first wildebeest in our neighborhood, we started taking walks each night for wildebeest sightings. There were the ones who moved their heads up and down as they fed, the ones that looked off to the side, watching warily for lions, the ones that were frozen, caught in mid-prance, or skittering in the hunt, running from hyenas. If something didn't make sense - like the wildebeest that leapt in the air with the blinking red nose - Bar Mitzvahzilla just ignored it. His only disappointment? That there were no elephants adorning my neighbors' lawns, no giraffes with their heads sticking up as tall as the palm trees, and no actual predators lurking in the bushes.

Eventually it ended. He grew older, and we had the talk we needed to have. But for a while, our neighborhood became an African savannah, with wildebeests magically standing in each yard and lions just around the bend.

Has your child ever made up their own answer to a question that was very different than the answer you may have given? Any obsessions with movies, watching them over and over again? Do remember seeing magically through your kids' eyes?

* Although I've always written original pieces for this blog, I wanted to tell my Wildebeest story so I reran it here. This piece originally appeared in the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix on December 11, 2009. Here's the link to the original piece: http://www.jewishaz.com/issues/story.mv?091211+winter