Budding Shopaholic

It's a typical Monday evening. Daughter and I drop off Bar Mitzvahzilla at his tutoring and then, since we're stuck in North Scottsdale for an hour, I drive over to a shopping center that has a rare treat: a Nordstrom Rack.

But first I have to convince the twelve-year-old. Somehow I've raised a non-shopper. She doesn't want to go clothes shopping, she declares. She'd rather go to Michael's and buy more craft project items that we'll never use and end up stuffing in a closet somewhere.

I drag her in there and get ready to do some power shopping, or at least power looking. By then we only have about half an hour before we have to get back to pick up Bar Mitzvahzilla so map out my shopping expedition well. I decide I can only handle a foray through the shoe department.

Well, lucky me. Daughter and I are the same shoe size suddenly. Both 7s.

Then something happens. While I'm looking, and eliminating, and eventually buying nothing at all, Daughter has a tweeny/teeny moment. She has a moment in which she suddenly bursts from being a gangly, wild, child thing into being a woman.

Basically, she commandeers the cart, careens through the shoe department and picks out about twenty pairs of shoes.

I nod my head knowingly. I knew the shoe gene - not to mention the shopaholic gene - had to be passed down somewhere. She might have been pretending all these years with her resistance to shopping but look what happened when I got her in that forest of shoe racks! Though, of course, I can't buy her twenty pairs of shoes. Turns out that right at that moment that she's turning into me I turn into my own father. I say, "What do you think - I'm made out of money?" Neither of us has ever heard me say this before. She has to eliminate all but one pair.

The next week, I tell her we should go to Old Navy for our break during tutoring. She gives me a thunderous look. She doesn't want to go. She can't stand to go. Why does she have --

She walks in, sniffs the air, and immediately starts stacking clothes in my hand. The next thing I know she's in the dressing room.

Born of a shopaholic and a cheapskate, she'll never know a moment's peace. And neither will I.

Are you a shopper or frugal? Have you ever noticed that you've passed those traits on to your children? Are you turning into your own parents?

Thanks for reading,
Linda Pressman, Author of Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie

Comatose Parenting - Redux

Husband and I were kind of unprepared to be parents, at least to a baby like Bar Mitzvahzilla. Born a pound and a half, he came home after ten weeks in the hospital weighing almost four pounds and hauling a lot of medical equipment, like an apnea monitor, an oxygen tank, special foods and medications, and he had to go to various doctors and specialists three times a week.

Also, he was a smart little baby. The hospital was a twenty-four-hour-a-day atmosphere and all the nurses loved him so he learned to stay up and play with them, as well as a tiny little baby can play. Let me tell you, besides saving his life, the nurses in the NICU and the Continuing Care Nursery really knew how to love a baby. The problem was, he didn't really get the whole Sleep During the Night schtick, much to Husband and my chagrin.

So suddenly there was this tiny, needy, scary looking thing plugged in, really, all over the house to various machines, and he was awake all the time. Husband and I coped as best we could. We set up four-hour shifts of sleeping and caretaking and rotated them so that both of us could be sure we'd get some sleep and our share of middle of the night misery. We'd each hit a breaking point, kind of rotate a breaking point between us, if you will, and, depending on our mental state, our general bug-eyed appearance, the pallor of our skin, and how much of our hair was standing on end, we'd give each other a break.

That's kind of how life feels right now. Not because Bar Mitzvahzilla is in any kind of fragile medical state, which he's not. But because of our wild-eyed frenzy. We assess each other each day. Who's been driving since 6:45 in the morning, and it's now 9 PM? Who has poured herself in a heap on the bed and can't move (that's always me)? Who drove to the high school five separate times in one day because of various football-related pick ups and drop offs? Who can handle the moment, at 9 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when five hundred Jewish parents descend on the JCC all at once to pick up their teenagers from Hebrew High and who will melt down?

So who would have thought that at this late date in parenting we'd get this strange reminder of the earliest days of parenting, and via the same kid - Bar Mitzvahzilla? And that, somehow, we'd remember how to do the same thing all over again. The last one standing, the last one not crying with fatigue - that one goes for the final pick up.

Do you remember those days of bringing home a newborn? Did you have a method to balance the exhausted partners? Any random acts of lovingkindness to those you love lately?

Heat By Any Other Name

I've really tried not to write about the heat this summer. Really, what could be more boring than a blogger who lives in Arizona writing about the heat? Also, I kind of feel like I need to have a more macho attitude about it. I've lived here since 1973, folks. If I've put up with it for thirty-seven years I can take this one too.

This week, when the temperature hit one hundred fifteen degrees, the word "hot" seemed a little inadequate. Like we were saying it was hot when it was ninety - twenty-five degrees ago. For one hundred fifteen degrees there really should be a new word. Cooking terms seem strangely well suited: broiling, cooked, boiled, burned, searing. Hot isn't going to cut it anymore. 

So, since my brain is literally boiling inside my head, my skin is seared when I walk aboutside, the sun is overhead in the sky burning down at me, and, as a result, my goose is cooked, I haven't exactly wanted to do much. Well, I'll admit I DO want to drop Daughter off at theater camp every day so I manage to get her there. I DO walk in my exercise class by 9:15 everyday because I'm some kind of robot-woman. But by the time the class is over it's already 104 degrees. That's it for the day. 

In Arizona if you're interested in using your air conditioning at all in the summer and not paying eight hundred dollar monthly bills you end up having to do a lot of time of day calculations to determine if you can actually turn the unit on. We're on the free use between 7 PM and 12 Noon plan. So the house is lovely, even wintery, many of those hours. Husband chills the house down to 68 degrees because he knows what's coming after noon.

Between noon and seven all that 68-degree air has flown out of our paper-thin walls to the outside. Since Cheap economical-minded Husband only allows us to turn on the a/c on one side of the house or the other during this time period, I have to decide where I'll be, where the plants are wilting, the produce rotting, where the children are melting. And that's where I turn it on. I plop down on my bed and decide what I'll do. My main question: does it require thinking?

Some positives about this weather? Well, just in case I thought I bought too much clothes at one time or another, I'm actually going through at least three complete outfits everyday. That's good, right? Also, I'd been thinking about doing Bikram Yoga but I was worried about the 105 degree room. Now I don't have to worry. It will feel cooler than what I'm used to.

Right now? Weekend rates. Ah.

How hot is your summer turning out? Am I the only one whose brain appears to have melted away? Does anyone else live with these strange power bill calculations like we do or should I blame that on Husband?

Old Money Bags

Husband had a Big Birthday yesterday. While I blab about my upcoming 50th birthday all over the place,  he's a little more touchy about his which is - do the math - five years older than me.

We did all the obligatory family celebratory things: Bar Mitzvahzilla, Daughter and I all drew him handmade cards. We planned a romantic, candlelit dinner, but then realized the kids wanted to come along. They were unsympathetic to our desire to be alone. Weren't we alone every single night at bedtime?

Then, after our celebration was through, it was time for Husband's Lamentation, a yearly ritual he must go through, tormenting both himself and me about why he's not a millionaire yet.

I don't know if this is just a guy thing, but each birthday since Husband was about 45 he has moaned and groaned about how rich he should have been by each respective age. Millions and millions of imaginary dollars should have been in the bank, apparently. And, again apparently, as he casts a withering glance my way, it's all my fault.

I have to withstand the glare because I guess it's true. I've spent all the money. I don't think it would have been millions, but I'm responsible for some significant portion of frittering. Over seventeen years of marriage, who knows how much?

There's the ill-advised vintage Barbie collection in our den gathering dust, something that seemed like a good idea twelve years ago when I was in my second bout of infertility inbetween having the kids. There's the fact that we have enough furniture in the house to fill a house twice this size, that there are enough pictures standing along walls to fill walls twice as high, and the fact that I have enough clothes - all from sales racks - to change my shirt several times a day and never run out.

But here's how men and women are different. When I hit my birthday each year I think, "I should have had a book published by now," or some other miserable writing related mantra. I never think that I should have been a millionaire. Truly, growing up with as much deprivation as I did, I'm amazed every day that I have any money at all. Only a man would think that.

I try to look on Husband lovingly and benevolently during this time period because I know it's tough on him, this longing for Money That Never Was. And I can afford to be nice right now anyway. For this six-week time period, from January 22 to March 7th each year, I'm actually six years younger than him each year instead of five, a youthful babe to his doddering old man. Who can blame him for festering?

Do you have an achievement lurking in your mind that you expect to accomplish by a certain age?  Does your spouse or partner have a completely different goal? Is it monetary, fame, success, love, happiness, or what? 

A Dunce of a Mom

Daughter is in her fifth day of being sick and today had her second doctor appointment, at which I finally convinced the doctor to put Daughter on an antibiotic. Then I told my mom about it.

My mom loves nothing better than to search and search out a problem and find a solution. The solution to the problem of Daughter being sick was simple: it was because of my shoddy parenting. Everything can always be blamed on me.

She says, "You probably didn't dress her warm enough. That's how she got sick in the first place."

Thanks, mom.

Or, "You didn't feed her enough. She's too skinny. She wouldn't get sick if she weighed more." Okay, that's number two. But since she's starting to rile me up, I'm wondering if it's time to get off the phone yet. Have we talked long enough?

Then I get, "You never should have taken her to the football game yesterday."

Look, if it was up to me, you can bet I would have chosen a day at home with Sick Daughter to a day with eighty thousand screaming and yelling fans at a football stadium, but my mom knows Cheap Husband pretty well by now. There's no way he would willingly say goodbye to $200 on Daughter's unused seat at the game. This is actually outside the realm of possibility.

I'm not saying I'm not a complete dunce of a mother. There are some things that I'm so stupid about that it's scary. I can't put a meal together to save my life. I'm too lenient, constantly wanting to give my kids the childhood I never had by buying it for them. But I know my medical. With nearly lifelong asthma and eighteen years working for a Gigantic Insurance Company, I know my medical. I can diagnose, I can treat. I just can't prescribe or I would've had Daughter on an antibiotic already.

Now that I've been insulted enough, I'm ready to get off the phone, but my mom's not. Before our call ends, she squeezes one more in. One to ruin my week and give me guilt. She says, "You can't send her to school tomorrow. You better keep her home all week."

Thanks, mom. Glad I called.

Threadbare

My mother calls me up. Because her TV's on so loud, she yells into the phone, "Do you have any old towels? Bob and I are going up to the cabin tomorrow and we need new towels."

Now, if anyone else asked me for old towels I'd think maybe it's for a project or for cleaning a car, or maybe drop cloths are needed for some reason. But not with my mom. Just like she said: my old towels are her new towels. She's trolling for my cast offs.

I tell her I have to think about it and I do. I have to examine my towels to see if it's time to give them away.

One time I was over at her house and I made the mistake of opening her linen closet. This is the house we bought in the wilds of North Scottsdale when our whole family moved here in 1973 from Skokie, but from looking at the collection of towels in her linen closet it didn't look like my mother had cleaned it out since the day we moved in. It also didn't look like she had left anything behind in Chicago. It was like being transported back in time. All the towels we had in the 1960s were in there. It was like a time capsule. Does my mother ever throw anything out?

I'm pretty sure my mother's never bought a towel in her lifetime. Since we owned a laundry in Chicago, maybe she got her first towels from the ones that simply showed up at the laundry loose or got separated from a customer's wash, instantly becoming part of our motley household towel collection. And here they are still: in 2009 Scottsdale, threadbare - vintage maybe.

One time, when I was first meeting my husband's family and we were staying with my sister-in-law, I was about to take a shower so I asked her for a towel. She handed me a pile of rags. I looked down at it, actually not comprehending why she had handed me these schmattas. Maybe she needed me to do the dishes before I got in the shower? Scrub the windows? The toilet? But she said, "It's your towel." I held it up and I could see through it, it was so threadbare. Both my husband and sister-in-law then looked at me completely straight-faced and said, "Towels only get soft when they're threadbare."

So, since it's obviously genetic, this predisposition to using things until they disintegrate in my hands, I guard against it by making sure I buy new towels once every two years. How do I know when it's time to get them? Easy. It's like clockwork - exactly when my mother calls asking for the old ones.

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.

Shopping With the Food Police

Today I went shopping with the Food Police - that would be my husband. Since we are off one day a week together (okay, I'm really off every day) we go to a warehouse store on Thursdays. There we get to amuse all the other shoppers by fighting up and down each aisle about what I want to buy and what he doesn't.

I have many nostalgic memories of food I ate as a kid. I want to raise my kids on this nostalgia. I want to give them my childhood in Skokie, almost all of it. Like the Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres on TV and Spaghettios and Frosted Flakes in their mouths. I want them to have the idyllic childhood I had but without the Holocaust things, of course. So that's how I shop. I buy food to make them happy, excited. I look at the DVDs for fun and more fun things to watch. I'm like a ten-year-old in a grocery store.

This drives the Food Policeman nuts because he's a grown up married to a baby. He wants the kids to fall in love with lettuce and with unflavored Cherrios. If he was the mom, he'd probably have a food pyramid chart as art work.

I just need to face it: my husband is really meant to be the wife. He's good at cleaning the house, washing the dishes, and he cooks a good nutritious meal. He can shop a list at the grocery store with so many coupons they finally pay him to get out of the store. And so where does that leave me? Under arrest by the Food Police.