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

Putting the A in Awkward

The other day we were all walking down one of the quaint downtown streets of Flagstaff on our vacation - me, Husband, Daughter and Bar Mitzvahzilla. We were all pretty normal looking. That is, with the exception of Bar Mitzvahzilla. We'd made the mistake of buying him some sunglasses earlier that day and were paying the price right then. He loped along, supercool. Shades blocking his baby blues. His body built up from a summer of football training. A swagger in his step. My boy, somehow a tough cool guy. The kind of guy I would have hated in high school.

Yet one day earlier - same vacation - we were at the hotel swimming pool and he was ready to go swimming with Daughter. He sat there next to me wracked with indecision. Should he take off his shirt? Swim with his chest showing? What about those teenage girls who were frolicking in the hot tub? Was anybody watching him? I glared at him. Aren't girls supposed to be the ones who drive you nuts? My boy, somehow as insecure as a, well,  teenage girl. The kind of guy I would have liked in high school.

Then another night we all went down for an evening dip in the Jacuzzi and there I ran into my third Bar Mitzvahzilla of the vacation.

First he frolicked with Daughter in the Jacuzzi and then in the swimming pool, playing like a seal or a porpoise, I don't know. I swear he would've balanced a ball on his nose if we'd had one. He was doing acrobatics, swim racing, and then, when we got back to the room, they staged a "death by arrow" video using the arrow Daughter had bought on the reservation nearby. The kind of boy I would have liked -  in grade school.

My three sons, all contained in one fourteen-year-old boy, for one last fleeting moment before they all disappear or coalesce into one. Into the man he'll turn out to be.

Did you ever catch your kids just on the cusp between one age and another? Kid to tween, adolescent to teen? Teen to adult? Where there are flashes of the kid he or she was and the person he or she will be at the same time?
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This post is part of the Bigger Picture series hosted this week by Corinne at Trains, Tutus and Teatime, where bloggers write about events which tie into the bigger themes of our lives. Please visit Corinne's blog to participate and to link up your blog!

The Hormone House

Yes, it's true. After months of anticipating it, of being horrified over it, of moving forward day by day by day with extreme trepidation, today was my birthday. I'm now officially fifty and I want to say that the stupidest thing I did to prepare myself for this birthday was that I ruined my last couple of months of being forty-nine preparing myself for it. I spent so much time saying I was turning fifty that I wasted my last chance ever to say I was forty-nine.

All I can think is that it must be some kind of cruel joke, a mom heading into menopause, her hormones going nuts, with a son who's busted through adolescence, also a hormonal mess, and a daughter who's starting to develop, a pre-teen, and yes, also a mass of raging hormones. All in the same household, all at the same time. Everyday we wake up and there's an assessment: who's the biggest nut today?

My behavior comes out in a kind of heat-motivated panic about the state of the household. One more dropped toy of Daughter's; Bar Mitzvahzilla's whole wardrobe, somehow, stashed behind the bathroom door where he changes each morning; the idea that they ran out of soap in their shower apparently months ago and just kept on taking showers with no soap instead of asking for a new bar. This drives menopausal mom crazy. Actually, I think this would drive any mom crazy.

Then there's Bar Mitzvahzilla. He's taking a lot of showers lately. Either he's discovered that, yes, he has body odor or I don't want to know why. When he's outside of the shower he's now spotless. He alternates between being untalkative, mainly because he's got earbuds in his ears, or too talkative, presenting a pressing case for why he needs to get Xbox Live - because all of his friends have it - and how unbelievable it is that he doesn't have it. He has limitless, inexhaustible energy for this conversation, but I am a ticking time bomb.

Then there's Daughter. Her exhibit of hormones shows mainly in her great exits. Just like a movie star in the 1950s, she loves to make a final dramatic remark and storm out of a room. She thrives on this. I should've known something like this would happen, after all, I had her when I was thirty-nine. That meant she started Kindergarten when I was forty-five. Yes. So now - Menopause and Puberty at the same time.

I try to think back to what I remember of this when I was a kid but all I come up with is when my mother went through menopause. For ten years. 

The final member of our household is mild-mannered and poor beleaguered Husband, not a hormonal mess and not in a midlife crisis. Despite a blameless life, he's stuck living with the three of us in the Hormone House.

Are there any hormonal problems in your house?  Do you remember having one growing up? Any evidence of midlife crisis? Did you like your birthday post-childhood?

The Bearded Stranger

I was driving somewhere with Bar Mitzvahzilla the other day when I looked over at him and I saw not one, not two, but three long, white, meandering hairs growing out of his chin, gleaming in the sunlight.  I said, "What is that?" Then he covered up his chin, refusing to show me. How did those grow there, and grow that long, without me noticing?

We've had our awkward adolescent days. We had last summer when he refused to swim without a shirt on, and I had to wonder what was growing under the shirt. Was it a siamese twin growing out of the side of his body? There are the fangs growing in on both sides of his mouth. There's the routine humiliations of adolescence - the pimples, the braces - things the whole world can see. But a sparse, scraggly, hillbilly-looking blonde beard?

Clearly the fact that this thing exists can be blamed on Husband. Just like I'm always on the look out for Daughter's signs of adolescence ("Do you want a training bra yet? How about now? Now?") it's up to Husband to be on red alert with his responsibilites. He should've noticed scraggly hair number one before it began multiplying. And just because Bar Mitzvahzilla has somehow managed to pop out blonde facial hair in a family of swarthy Jews, that's no excuse for Husband not to notice it.

I grew up watching my dad shave with a double-edged razor and shaving soap in a cup. Because he had a cleft in his chin, each day he'd come away wounded with tiny pieces of toilet paper stuck to all the cuts on his face. Not only would he get wounded, but the minute he was done, right after he'd slapped on his Old Spice, his 5:00 shadow was growing back in, he was that hairy.

I can handle all the nitty gritty discussions with Bar Mitzvahzilla and Daughter about sex, all the generalities about how this works or that, but when it comes down to teaching the boy to shave, Husband's just going to have to take out the stropping blade and teach him. Before scraggly hair number four grows in.

The Camper Returns

Bar Mitzvahzilla came back from camp on Sunday. I had gotten a Twitter update that the camp buses left early, so I was stalking the parking lot they'd be pulling into, hovering there for my boy. Two buses pulled in. I stood there, watching the doors of both buses, a smile frozen on my face, my head flipping from side to side - one bus, then the other bus, one bus, then the other bus- when suddenly both were empty. No Bar Mitzvahzilla. Then someone told me there was a third bus that had pulled in while I was watching the first two.

Of course, I missed him completely. I found him over by the mountain of duffel bags -and his lone rolling suitcase - standing there, dirty, with a weird-looking medieval monk-type haircut. It was his hair but with three and a half weeks of grease in it.

Still, there he was! My boy! The joy! The relief! The love!

Then things got back to normal.

Here's what he did immediately. Since he knew Husband and I were pretty much complete blithering wrecks after him away, and after getting his increasingly harrowing letters about camp life ("Mom, this place is like the Holocaust: Never Again."), he pressed his advantage, asking if he could get access to his banned electronics for the night. We caved. So much for a joy-filled evening of camp stories.

In the middle of his anguished month away, when I was afraid to open his letters because of his pleas for me to come get him ("Again, Mom, could you please come pick me up?"), and in order to make sure he wanted to survive camp and live long enough to come home, I promised Bar Mitzvahzilla two things in my return letters: a completely redone bedroom and a night over at his cousins' house before we leave on vacation.

I'm not going to go into a big description of what his bedroom looked like before but let's just say that if I stood at one end of our pretty long hallway with his room at the far end, I could smell it. Also, it was like a museum of his childhood. I guess we just hadn't sorted through the toys for a few years. We had sorted through them back when the Power Rangers had to go, but we hadn't sorted ever since Spiderman had to go. And we had never sorted through the books. I mean, Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear? was in there.

So I spent days crawling on my belly with a crevice tool, wearing a chemical poisoning suit from head to toe to grab his bedding and throw it out, and, finally, to reassemble the room as no longer that of a boy, but of a teenager.

He came home and walked in there, mesmerized. A double bed. A macho comforter -not Sponge Bob anymore - toys cleared out except for age-appropriate weaponry hidden underneath the bed. There's a chair and ottoman, so he can entertain.

And then he laid around like a bum. He watched too many DVDs. He monopolized the computer. He had to look through every little thing I bought him from his school supply list to make sure all of it met his exacting requirements to be both macho and cool because, apparently, certain colors need not apply. He was hungry on the hour and ate food by swallowing it whole, but anything he did manage to chew ended up on the floor.

Just when I was starting to get just the tiniest bit impatient with him, he charged up his dormant cell phone and called in the second part of my promise, the night over at his cousins' house. And now? Gone.