I keep forgetting to title these things

Just had the most insightful, rational, educated discussion I have had in weeks. It was with my eighteen year old son who convinced me with my own words to let him skip the remaining years of high-school (or "box-filling" as he says) in order to start his own already successful software company. That's right, bitches. Your boy was prom king. Mine is his own CEO.

Okay, totally uncalled for. But still, suck it!

I'm sure that, when he and his father and I made the decision a couple years ago, there were certain people who were highly critical of that decision. This is the only way it's done. Your fifteen year old honor student doesn't drop out of high school with no plans to return and no (real) plans for a GED. Responsible parents don't let that happen!


That was a thought communicated to me throughout the kid's childhood. Sometimes people told me. My mother still lectures me about him not having a GED, even though he already has a successful LLC, and pending contract with a very large company. Sometimes people said nothing, but I could see it in their expression. The years I lived in Richmond on my own - the first year when I let him stay behind with his dad for a year, or when I had to bring him back because I had to bring myself back first, even the extra year that I was too poor, oppressed under the weight of debt, to pay for his move back with me.

 I still remember one particularly skeevy grad student who put his hand on mine (which was on my knee), squeezed, and tried to comfort me through my obviously difficult time with a Mormon prayer.

I don't know if that's a real thing. But he was Mormon. And he did offer to pray for me.

We go through so much of our lives assuming there's only one way or there's a natural way that we just don't know how to  respond sometimes when people behave otherwise. You are a mother, the skeevy Mormon seemed to be saying, You should be with your child. 


I won't pick on that guy. Or Mormons. I like them. As much as I like any religious group.

Seriously side tracked. It's late.

I got it a lot with the kid. The questioning. The assumption that what someone else knew was best. So I decided to be the one who knew best. Or at least as well as any of us knows anything. I dedicated myself to learning as much about the universe from the inside out as I could, in hopes that I could one day share my knowledge with him. I tried a little writing on the side too, but . . .

The rat bastard was already reading at a college level in sixth grade.

This is too rambling. Too long. Too disjointed. But I wanted to write a little about my son, who I think is just  one of the coolest dudes I know. After all, how many eighteen-year-olds' Friday night discussion topics included Qaddafi, the Hegelian Dialectic, his own corporation's success, and Sisyphus?

More than your fair share

When my son was small, I used to get a lot of phone calls from his school teachers. He talked too much in class. He talked when they were supposed to be silent reading. He talked when standing in line. He talked while other students were talking. He talked while the teacher was talking. And even though the things he talked about were generally on-topic and sometimes very funny, he was disrupting the learning process for the other students. “I have only so much time for each lesson and for each student,” some young teacher would say to me. “And he’s a wonderful boy. He’s just using up more than his fair share.”

Obviously, the boy needed more attention and another outlet (and probably a little more challenging work to do). We addressed those problems. He’s slightly less disruptive now.

I was thinking about this the other night. At the restaurant. When I had four tables of guests to tend to, and one of those tables was using up more than their fair share of my time and causing the other tables to get less attention than they deserved. I wanted to tell them what I told my son:

“The teacher (server) is in the classroom (restaurant) to teach you new things (take your order) and help you when you don’t understand (bring you refills and Tabasco sauce that you forgot to ask for). The problem is that you are not the only student (guest) in the classroom (my section). There are, in fact, other students (customers) who want the same thing you do. Sadly, your teacher (server) is a mere mortal and is unable to bend the time/space continuum in such a manner as to allow her to spend as much time with each student (dumbass) as some would like. Out of fairness to other students (more patient guests than yourself), it’s important that you allow the others a turn to speak and ask for help. The only other option is for you to get a private tutor (servant) who could tend to your every need, but we both know that is much too expensive. What I’m trying to say here is, you aren’t the most important person in the world, you’re not entitled to more than the next guy, so hold on, shut up and wait your turn.”

Of course I didn’t say that last part to the kid, but I definitely wanted to tell it to my table the other night. Of course I was far too busy running after yet more jelly (oh and could we get some to go boxes even though we’re still stuffing our faces full of food that is falling out because we’re too impatient to even wait to finish chewing before we speak, oh and I’d like to switch to coffee now even though you just brought me a fourth Coke, and when you come back by to ask that other table if they might need anything . . . actually, don’t bother asking that table, I’m sure they’re fine, but when you come back I’m sure we’ll have thought up something else, so hurry!), so I didn’t have time to tell them that I didn’t have time for their nonsense (bullshit).

And in the end, they tipped me $6 on a $79 check. So yeah, they definitely couldn't afford their own private servant.

How my son survived a brush with death in the mountains of West Virginia: A holiday tale

I’ve decided to write about my trip to Iowa in several posts. I know you are excited. I’m certain you’ve been checking back here every day, just waiting to find out the details of my winter vacation to blizzard country and cursing me for not posting. So I’ll start with the trip itself. And by that I mean the travel. The twelve and a half billion hours I spent in a small car with a smelly, growly, bitchy fifteen year old boy.

I was foolish enough to be excited about the prospect of a road trip. After all, I love road trips. And some fool suggested that it would be fun – a nice time to catch up with my son, who I don’t get to spend nearly enough time with because it seems I’m always at work or at work or sleeping. Okay, so this fool was me, but never mind that.

We had the opportunity to fly – my sister found us some fairly inexpensive tickets and my mother was paying – but we would have been flying out on Christmas Eve, and since I’ve never flown into or out of Des Moines without being delayed by weather and overcrowded flights, I wasn’t particularly fond of this idea. It sometimes ended up taking two days to get there (or home) and required sleeping on an airport floor or waiting to be shuttled to a hotel where I would get three hours of sleep before having to catch the shuttle back to the airport to be told that my new flight had also been delayed. Besides, when I offered the option of flying (or the train) to the kid, he responded that he too was really excited about the road trip. Driving it was.

It wasn’t so bad at first. We’d gotten a much later start than I planned since I am terrible at managing my time outside of work and thought I could accomplish twelve hours worth of errands and tasks in only three, but we adjusted, and instead of leaving at two in the morning we left shortly after noon. That meant I would be doing a lot of mountain driving in the dark, but it was bright and sunny for the first part of the trip and the weather maps I’d consulted only mentioned brief periods of chances of rain over southern Indiana. Of course, I was about twelve hours behind the maps I’d checked the day before.

It started raining as soon as we hit West Virginia. Not so bad though – a light rain, not even a cause for the windshield wipers. Then as we hit the turnpike, it started to pour. And it was rush hour. And when we came to a rest stop, I thought I’d pull over and nap and let the rush hour traffic and maybe a little of the rain pass on by. The kid thought this would be a good opportunity to move from the front seat to the back, and since the car was loaded down with Christmas presents and luggage and anything from my son’s room that he thought he might need during our trip, this meant rearranging the car.

I refused to help him. I did this out of love. First of all, it was a teaching moment. He needs to learn to take responsibility for himself: if he wants something, he needs to take the necessary steps to get it. I provided him with a perfectly comfortable seat in the front of the car. He chose not to sit there. His responsibility to do something about it. Also, I think it’s time he learned how to properly overpack an automobile. He’s fifteen now. He’ll be driving next year. But mostly, I did this because I was getting tired and needed a few moments to close my eyes before we headed into the dark hours of the night when I would likely a) fall asleep and drive us off a mountain pass or b) become so tired and uncomfortable driving that each and every complaint from the kid about how uncomfortable he was would add to my irritation until finally escalating into a shouting match at a rest stop somewhere in Indiana at four in the morning. See, out of love.

But, despite refusing to help, I didn’t get much rest. Apparently, the kid didn’t realize that I was trying to get in a nap, what with the cold mountain breeze blowing in through the open doors and all the things being tossed about, not to mention all the whining and grumbling and inappropriate language coming out of his mouth (see, he learned how to properly overpack a car. Score one for Mom). So I stepped out and smoked a couple of cigarettes and as soon as he was finished, we got back on the interstate and drove all through the mountains of WV and KY in moderate to heavy rain and darkness.

Good times.

The moderate to heavy bitching that began shortly after we left Richmond (“I can’t see the screen on my DS! This is why we should have left at night!”) continued all the way through WV and KY as well. First it was too hot in the car. Then it was too stuffy. Then cold. Then his ears were popping because he couldn’t find the gum I’d put in his stocking for exactly this purpose. He was hungry. He was thirsty. His DS was running out of juice. I solved each and every one of these problems as they arrived (I’d also stuffed a bunch of junk food in his stocking so he’d have plenty to munch on during the trip).

Then he started to complain about my choice in music. No problem. I plugged in the iPod on which I had strategically compiled a playlist of songs we both enjoyed. Score another for Mom. For about an hour. It seems that despite my reminding him and his promise that yes, he charged it before we left, he had not charged the iPod, but had instead listened to it the entire day before when he was off school and I was at work and then running around town picking up the car and last minute Christmas gifts and junk food. So without the iPod and compromise music, we listened to the new cd’s I’d bought him for Christmas not knowing that I would have to listen to them in the car. Score one for the kid.

Somewhere in Kentucky, he fell asleep in the back seat. I pulled over to a rest stop, smoked a few cigarettes under the overhang of the building, checked the weather maps, delighted in the knowledge that the rain was supposed to taper off in Indiana. I figured if it was going to continue raining, I'd go ahead and check us into a motel for the night instead of driving straight through like I usually do. But the radar showed the rain moving east and since we were heading west and out of the rain, and I was feeling pretty alert and the kid was finally quiet, I would just keep going. I found a station playing Christmas music and for a couple of hours, drove on a mostly empty interstate, checking out the occasional display of lights on some house or business along the route while the kid snored in the back seat.

The rain did start to subside once we made it to Indiana and by the time I stopped for gas just outside Indianapolis, it had stopped completely. I again considered pulling over for a nap, but the next rest area was just under a hundred miles and I felt good about being able to drive that far without getting too tired. Idiot.

Another ten miles down the road we ran into fog. Thick fog. Twenty yard visibility fog. I kept hitching my wagon to the taillights of various semi trucks that passed me, keeping up with them as long as I could and then slowing down until I could catch the next passing truck. Years later we reached the next rest area and I pulled over, used the little girls room, smoked a cigarette, and settled into my seat with a blanket for a nap.

I have discovered that there isn’t much difference between a teenage boy and an infant. Both require copious amounts of sleep. Both require constant feeding. And both wake up cranky once the moving car they had been so soundly lulled to sleep in stops moving for too long.

The first time he woke me up (ten minutes after I closed my eyes) was when he opened the door to go to the bathroom. Not a problem. Necessary bodily functions are acceptable. The second time he woke me up was when he opened the door again, this time to get something to drink. A little more annoying since he could have bought something when he got out the first time. Whatever, I just wanted sleep. The third time he woke me up (a mere twenty-five minutes after I first closed my eyes) he was playing his video game and apparently didn’t know where to plug in the headphones. The fourth time he woke me up was when he decided to call his father in the middle of the night and apparently didn’t realize that it wasn’t necessary to shout into the phone in order for his father to hear him all the way in Iowa.

At this point, I stepped outside of the car, smoked another cigarette to calm down, then got back in, explained to the man-child the importance of my getting at least a little nap since we had opted to drive straight through instead of spending a night in a hotel and tried to close my eyes for an hour or so.

I thought we were good.

Fifteen minutes later, the deep sighing began. This was followed by occasional mumbling. Then rocking of the car as he tried to get more comfortable. Then grunting. More rocking. More mumbling. Louder mumbling. And finally, “Mom . . . Mom . . . Can we go yet, Mom?”

Because of my psychic abilities (see paragraph 5), I had already foreseen the completely avoidable explosion that followed and done my very best to stop it. But, as is the case with most psychic visions (at least the fictional kind I write about in blog posts), the events seen in such a vision are unalterable.

This was the first of my son’s near-death experiences as his very tired, very agitated mother unleashed her fury upon him with a screaming tirade. I’m sure I woke up all the other travelers trying to catch a few minutes of shuteye at the rest area and am surprised the police were not summoned to deal with the uncorked mother about to discharge her only child.

With twenty minutes of sporadic sleep behind me and daylight approaching, we got back on the interstate and traveled in silence (the radio had been turned off after the kid had the nerve to complain about his homicidal mother’s choice of music) for the next five hundred miles through fog and increasing cold. By the time we arrived in Des Moines later that afternoon, I threw him out at his father’s house, helped him lug his stuff inside, and headed to my sister’s where I was informed that everyone in the city had been calling her asking if I’d arrived yet (I forgot to mention that my cell phone was also drained of juice by the kid who, besides the rest area call, phoned his father every half an hour to give him an update on our progress and complain about his horrible mother who was keeping him captive in the back seat of a cramped automobile - I realize that I need to invest in car chargers, but they require money and unless you are new here . . . ).

I called my family to let them all know I had arrived, handed my sister some cash to go get dinner from Taco John’s (oh, how I miss the craptastic Mexi-merican fast food of Taco John’s), and indulged in a little recreational activity that made the previous twenty-eight hours seem slightly more humorous.

Next time on My Mother Thinks I’m a Lesbian: How everyone in Des Moines thinks I’m the crazy one and why each and every one of those psych ward escapees is just plain wrong.

Taking off my black hat

So this is how it usually works:

The kid’s grandmother (my ex’s mom) asks my son what he’d like for Christmas and his birthday (which is just a few days later). He tells her. She goes out and buys it right away, tells him that she’s bought it, wraps it up and makes him wait until Christmas morning to unwrap it.

As a kid, the fun of Christmas for me was wondering what was in those boxes under the tree. I always hated when the surprise of a gift was spoiled for me, and even though I don’t argue with the kid’s arrangement with his grandmother, I just don’t understand it. But, as I said, I don’t say anything about it.

This year, though, it has gone too far. Last night when I got home from work – my first night off in many nights – I was informed by the kid that his grandmother told him she would get him the new Guitar Hero game for his Xbox. No big deal. I was kind of happy actually because it’s somewhere around a hundred bucks and he really wanted it, but I knew I would have to pick up a few extra shifts if I wanted to get it for him. So good for him.

But there was a catch. It seemed she had also told him he could have it early if he wanted. I was slightly irritated by this – the kid has no patience and a lot of this is due to the spoiling he received while living with his dad and grandparents – but I didn’t make a big deal out of it. I just said something about not being disappointed when Christmas came and he didn’t have anything new to open from his grandparents.

I went to my bedroom and started changing out of my work clothes when the kid’s voice came through the door.

“Grandma said she would send you the money if we went out and got it. So can we? Go pick it up?”

I moved beyond irritated. I was pissed.

“No, we can’t,” I said, opening the door to see his pathetic face. “I don’t have the cash.”

“She said she would send you the money for it,” he argued as I walked past him and into the kitchen for a drink.

“I don’t have the money,” I repeated. “If she wants to send you the money to buy it, then I can take you out to pick it up when I have time, but I do not have the cash right now.”

He argued with me for several more minutes about how he knew I had that much (I have him count my tips each night and I try to keep him aware of, if not directly involved in our budget), and that his grandma would reimburse me so I wouldn’t be out anything.

I didn’t give in. For one thing, my ex and his family haven’t always been great about paying me back. They’re very generous with the kid when he’s living with them, but as soon as he’s with me, they seem to forget that he might need or even want anything (yes, there’s a child support arrangement, but that’s a rant – I mean topic – for another time). And I’ve paid up front for many things – airline tickets, shoes, school clothes – for which I was promised cash in return, only to be stiffed and put into a financial bind when the money didn’t come. I’ve learned my lesson and I’m certainly in no position for that to happen again. For another, if his grandmother wants to get him a present, then she should get it for him. She should get it. I’m already annoyed that I have to do the actual shopping, but I find no reason why I should have to do the paying too.

The part of it that really pisses me off is that she knows we’re on a pretty strict budget. She knows I’m working two jobs and that the holidays are coming and that I’m trying to put some money toward going to Iowa over the break, so she should be aware that I’m in no position to go out and purchase the kid’s Christmas present for her. Apparently, she isn’t aware.

So she told the kid he could have something and because I am unwilling/unable to go along, I am the perceived villain, and the kid moped around the apartment all night.

My ex and his family do this stuff to me all the time. One year, the kid wanted an electric scooter for Christmas. I shopped around all fall until I finally found one I could afford. When I discussed it with my ex, he said he didn’t think it was such a good idea. The kid was still fairly young and living with his father at the time, and he didn’t think they were very safe. I disagreed, but we’re in this parenting thing together (like it or not), so I didn’t buy the scooter.

On Christmas morning, the kid was a little disappointed that he didn’t get it, but he liked the other gifts I bought instead and everything was fine. Then for his birthday, his dad and grandma gave him cash and a gift card and took him to the store where they let him buy himself - you guessed it - a scooter. He was so excited about it. He immediately brought it over to my sister’s house, where I was staying, and drove it around the neighborhood. His little face beamed as he showed me the turn signals and the working headlight, and my heart broke a little that I couldn’t be the one to make his holidays so wonderful.

My mom used to complain about my dad doing the same types of things to her, always trying to make her look bad in our eyes, always trying to make her into the bad guy. One day a few years ago, when we finally started opening up to each other about our experiences with depression and the bipolar and therapy, she told me things really changed for her when one therapist told her this: “[dhf’s father] has his white cowboy hat held on with superglue. It’s never coming off his head, so stop trying to knock it off. All you can do is take off your own black hat and refuse to wear it anymore.”

I choked up a little when she told me that. Okay, so we had been drinking and I might have become a blubbering mess (two bipolar women drinking – I gotta tell you, it doesn’t get much more fun than that). I was angry with her over the years for various things – I was a teenager – but I never saw her as the villain, and it hurt to think that that’s how she saw herself for so many years, that that’s how my father made her feel. I told her that. I told her that her hat was always white in my book. And even though I know it didn’t take away the pain she felt for so long, I think it healed her in some ways. And we cried and had a few more beers. Well, I had a few more beers. She went to bed.

I know that it will be a long time before my son can step away and really assess our performances as parents. I know that he may never realize the ways in which his father failed us both, so many times, without remorse. And if he never sees his father without the glow from his gleaming white hat, I don’t really care. But I’m not wearing the black one. I’m not going to be the mustache-twisting villain, and I’m not handing over my gold just so he’ll like me. And maybe someday over a few beers, he'll put the white hat on my head.

My opening act

My mother called this weekend and for once, I actually answered the phone. It’s not that I don’t like speaking to my mother, I just don’t like speaking on the phone in general. And she usually calls at the most inopportune times – like when I’m in line at the grocery store or when I’m sitting in my comfy chair and flipping through the television stations because there’s nothing good on and I’m bored. So by the time I actually feel I can stand holding the phone up to my ear for an hour, three weeks have gone by and I have twelve missed phone calls from my mother.

Yes, I’m a terrible person.

Anyway, she called and I actually answered. Okay, she called and my son answered and told her I was out picking up dinner and he talked to her for about an hour, so by the time I “returned” from my errands, she was pretty much over holding the phone up to her ear and our conversation was relatively brief. I only had time to smoke two cigarettes. Don’t start.

I’ve decided this is a good strategy from now on. My son can be my opening act. Except that while most opening acts are meant to get the audience pumped and excited, mine will just wear them down, so by the time I take the stage, they won’t really care about my performance. I’ll still be the headliner, and they can tell people they got to see (speak to) me, but I don’t really have to do much and they’ll still feel like they got their money’s worth.

And before you accuse me of using the kid, let me say that he loves to talk on the phone. And by “talk on the phone,” I mean that he likes to be on the phone, to be a presence on an open line between two people, but he doesn’t really have much to say. A typical conversation with my son consists of asking him one hundred and ninety-two questions, most of which are answered with monosyllabic grunts and sighs. The one hundred and ninety-third question, about what video game he is currently playing, is met with a forty-five minute response in which he explains what level mage he is (I still don’t even know what that means). But mostly he just sits there, breathing into the mouthpiece and refusing to take the hint when you ask him things like, “Well . . . is there anything else you’d like to talk about?” The fact that there never is anything else does not mean he’s ready to hang up. He isn’t. Unless, of course, food has arrived.

Or, you know, fake food.

I'm apparently addicted to HGTV

Over the weekend, my son and I were watching some show on HGTV where they come in and organize a messy room in some family’s house and turn it into a functional living/sleeping/dining place that will no doubt be trashed again in a few short months. This particular family had three kids between the ages of six and ten, and the kids had toys and games all over the house. So the parents wanted to reclaim their house by renovating a room in their basement – an unused, cluttered family room with fake wood paneling and poor lighting.

Then they showed the designers’ plans for the space – paint the walls white, add some primary color accents to brighten it up, etc. Then for organization, they added some shelves with brightly colored bins and a coffee table contraption to which they added plexiglass sides for the display of artwork they commissioned from the kids.

While they were working on the room, the people from the show interviewed the little tykes on why they didn’t use the basement, despite the fact that it (like the rest of the house) was full of toys. The girls said it was dark and spooky. The oldest kid, a little boy around ten years old, said, “It creeps me out.”

At this point, my son looked at me and said, “Fast forward to five years from now, they’ll just have to come back and do it again. This kid will be sitting in the basement, wearing eyeliner and black nail polish, looking around at the pictures of Barney on the wall and saying, ‘It creeps me out.’”

You may not find him charming, but my kid cracks me up. Sometimes enough that I choke on my apple juice and cough it all over the new slipcover on our chair.

New at eleven: Signs that your parents may not love you after all

Newscasters convinced my son that he was suffering from a staph infection. Oh, and that he was going to die. Immediately. Unless he was seen and treated by a qualified physician. Perhaps even an unqualified one. And the fact that I would not take him to see any physician whatsoever for said staph infection was evidence that I did not love him.

So really, newscasters had convinced my son that I am a horrible excuse for a parent.

This part is nothing new.

The kid complained Monday night that he had a mildly sore throat and he had a bit of a sniffle. I suspected this was a ruse to get out of going to school, but I told him he probably had a cold and that he should drink plenty of water and go to bed early, probably take a nap when he got home from school the next day. Tuesday night when I got home from work, he had discovered (invented) a new set of symptoms to support his theory that he would need to be hospitalized at any moment. These symptoms included but were not limited to the following:

-A tender spot on his head, suspiciously near the base of the hairs he twists into knots when nervous and/or bored.

-A protrusion beneath the backside of one of his toes. He claims to have stepped on a piece of glass when he was nine and is certain the glass is still in his toe. I felt the toe and informed him that said “protrusion” was in fact a bone. He was unconvinced.

-A burning fever. This proved to be just plain false. When confronted with his actual body temperature, he rebutted that a lack of fever did not mean he wasn’t sick.

-A red spot behind his ear. I asked what had prompted him to look there, since in the nearly fifteen years he has been a conscious being, he has failed to notice this birthmark previously.

But yesterday, knowing that I should never take my child's health too lightly, I took him to Patient’s First (love these guys, by the way) where, for a measly twenty-five dollar co-pay, my son was diagnosed with an upper respiratory virus. In other words, he basically has a cold. He was sent home to drink plenty of fluids and get some rest. And to stop rubbing that bone in his toe.

So you had a bad day

My son believes himself to be the luckiest person on the face of the Earth. As far as contests go, that is. It’s not that he’s ever won a contest of any sort or that he’s received any encouragement, but he’s certain that at some point, he’s going to hit it big. When he was seven, he signed up for some drawing for a new truck while at the mall with his grandmother, so the next week, when our own car broke down and I was stressing over how to pay for the repairs, he told me not to worry. He was going to win a new truck, and he would let me drive it until he was old enough.

The fact that I am still driving a third-hand car has not deterred him. Last night, for instance, he tore the house apart looking for missing McDonald’s Monopoly game pieces. I’m not sure what prompted the sudden search. It was almost ten o’clock, and we had eaten fast food the night before. But I arrived home from work and found him with a game piece in his hand as he shuffled papers and dug through the trash.

He was frantic.

“I have the last railroad piece,” he said, almost whined. “I had three other pieces. They were on the table. What did you do with them?”

I hung my apron near the door and reminded him that he had been the one to clean the table off and that he must have put them somewhere. He snapped back that he would have left them where they were and I must have lost them somehow.

I wasn’t interested in arguing over useless squares of paper, so I left him to his quest and changed out of my work clothes before planting myself in front of the television. But for the next hour – yes, an hour – the kid stormed up and down the apartment, in and out of the diningroom, and sulked around the livingroom, trying to figure out what had happened to his precious game pieces. He growled. He grunted. He slammed things down. He threw stacks of papers on the floor as he looked through them. He kicked boxes and grumbled because I hadn’t unpacked them yet.

He was, in short, behaving ridiculously.

I paid no mind to his growling and grunting. I reminded him that beating my table top would not make anything appear. It is not a magic table. Just a wooden one. With benches. I stared at him – the puzzled, I-know-you-didn’t-just-do-that, mom-stare – when he threw things on the floor. And after a moment of glaring back with a yeah-I-did-it-now-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it stare, he recovered his senses and stacked things back where they belonged.

At one point during his apartment-ravaging-tantrum, I asked him if he hadn’t put them somewhere in order to keep track of them and then forgotten where that somewhere was. I do this sometimes. Okay, all the time. I suggested places he might have hidden them. I even joined his search for a few minutes, before telling him that it was (by now) almost eleven and he needed to go to bed and that wherever the pieces were in the apartment, they would still be there tomorrow when he got home from school and he could find them then.

This sent him into another mini-tantrum in which he again accused me of moving his things and of having too many of my own things lying about.

I suggested he go to his room. He did, but not without shouting on the way there.

At this point, I was pretty angry and frustrated myself. I had about an hour between the time I got home and the time I should be going to sleep to relax, and every bit of it was spent dealing with an unreasonably upset teenager. I wanted to shout too.

But I didn’t. I let him cool down. And eventually, he emerged from his room and apologized and acknowledged that perhaps, just maybe, he had behaved slightly irrationally. And I listened as he told me that he was almost certain he had all four of the game pieces needed to win a hundred bucks and how he knew if we had that hundred bucks it would really help out and he was just so mad because it was like he lost money.

I told him that it was likely the fourth game piece he found was probably a duplicate of one of the others, but I assured him he would find them so he wouldn’t have to wonder. And I told him I understood his frustration, and that I too was tired of living out of a half-unpacked apartment, but there wasn’t much I could do about it right then and that we would work on the weekend to get everything in order.

We sat and talked about the rest of his day. He had a crummy day at school, he said. There’s a field trip next week for the kids with the best grades and he was expecting to go, since he’s gotten hundreds on all his work, but his English teacher claimed he had missed a quiz (which was given the first week when I couldn’t get him enrolled yet) and hadn’t turned in homework, which he says he did. And his technology teacher misplaced a project he and another student did in class and turned in, so in both classes he has lower grades, and he won’t be going on the field trip. And then he came home and one of the kittens had peed on his new magazine, which he hadn’t read yet. And then he tried to play a game on his new XBox, and it kept freezing up on him. Then he tried to take a nap, but workmen are tearing up the parking lot at our complex, and every time he almost nodded off, the sound of machinery or shouting workmen woke him up.

The source of his frustration became clear.

The thing is, I could have yelled. The moment I came home from my second job only wanting to relax and was met with an irate teenager, I could have joined him in his anger. We could have shouted, escalating with each back and forth exchange until one or both of us was in tears. Or behind a slammed door. Or in a squad car.

But what good would that have done?

My kid, the hero

My son and I adopted two kittens on Saturday!

And that was basically the highlight of my weekend. There are few highlights in my work-filled life, as you can no doubt tell by reading this blog. My week pretty much starts Sunday afternoon at the restaurant and ends Friday night, again at the restaurant, interrupted only by time at the office and an hour or two of television and conversation with the kid when I get home. Save for the occasional dinner or drinks with friends and that little bank-robbing gig I have on the side, the only real highlights, the two things I look forward to with any sort of fervor are Thursday nights when The Office and 30 Rock are on, and Monday night, when I come home after my fourteen hour day and watch Heroes.


It's an exciting life, I know.


In order to catch Heroes though, I have to depend on my son to tape it. Yes, tape. We are one of the last families to still own and actually use a vcr. And because I have still not unpacked all the boxes from our move, I haven't yet found the remote control for said vcr. I did the responsible thing and packed all remotes in one box before the move. I even marked the box to avoid all of this hunting, but when I unpacked the box I found controls for the tv, my son's tv, the stereo, an air conditioner I no longer own, another stereo, an old dvd player that no longer works, my son's PS2, another remote for the tv, and an orb-shaped remote control with two buttons. I have no idea what it operates. But no vcr remote, which means I can't use the timer function on the vcr.


Thus, I am dependent on my son to turn on the machine and hit the record button at 9pm each Monday evening. This sounds like a simple enough task . . .


Last night the restaurant was dead so I was cut from the floor early, early enough to make it home by nine. But the kid was running low on deoderant (again, my life is exciting) and he'd used up all the ketchup and so had refused to eat anything in the house for two days, so I stopped at the grocery store on my way home. And I'd had to pick him up early from school yesterday because his "stomach was about to explode" which I think was code for "I want to go home and play with the kittens," but I bought it, and since he'd been "sick" all day, I ran through the drivethru because he'd said something about wanting french fries the night before. And I stopped to fill up with gas and picked him up a soda. Because he's my son. And I love him. And I do things for him. Because I care.


And when I made it home a few minutes before ten, I handed off all his goodies and settled into my chair, ready to stare at my favorite flashing lights. And he stared at me in horror when I asked him to put the tape in for me.


I just sighed.


He moped around the house for a few minutes, pretending to feel guilty for depriving me of my few moments of weekly joy. He even went so far as to pretend he wasn't interested in the fast food I brought home for him. I assured him that I wasn't mad (I wasn't) and finally convinced him to eat. After several minutes of silence, he offered the following excuse:


"It wasn't my fault," he said. "I was tired. And I fell asleep because the cats wouldn't get up from my lap."


I didn't buy it, but I told him it was fine and to stop obsessing. I really didn't want him to feel bad about it. I was annoyed, and I may joke around, but I don't want him to carry around a bunch of guilt. And it was, after all, just a tv show. I told him I'd watch it Saturday when they play it again. I would just have to avoid any spoilers online this week (I did not. I promptly logged in to tvguide.com to read a recap when I got to work. I suck).


So we went about our night, talked about his (half)day at school, about my night at the restaurant, about the newest video game he has to get for his sometimes-working XBox. But mostly, we sat around and watched the kittens play with a new toy I picked up at the grocery store. And there's something about watching ten-week-old kittens chase a feather on a stick and pounce on each other and roll around on the carpet that just makes everything all right. We sat in our chairs and stared at them, both of us grinning, mesmerized by these tiny, ferocious beasts, and the kid finally let go of his guilt.


Then he turned to me and said, "We could just watch them all day. We don't even need a tv."


And I must have had some stupid look on my face that reminded him about my forgotten recording because he blushed and looked down at the ground and said, "Well . . . "

The Kid in the city

My son has spent most of his life in the suburbs, the only exception being when he was nine and the two of us lived with friends in a row house in Oregon Hill, one of the older neighborhoods in Richmond, and not necessarily one of the safest (though it's been getting better). That year was his only experience living in the city - a year during which we were dirt poor and I was in the midst of my own depressive episode - and it is the only experience on which he has to base his opinions of city life. So for the past several years, whenever we discussed his inevitable move back to Richmond, and even last year, when the two of us lived in a house in the Virginia countryside, I heard nothing but complaints about how horrible it was going to be living in the city.

In response, I've taken it upon myself to teach him the joys of the urban lifestyle. He has, for instance, completely warmed up to the convenience of being able to call for food to be delivered to our door. Not just pizza or sweet and sour chicken, no, he can order burgers and spaghetti and black and bleu salads. Okay, not so much the salad, but he's excited about the options, nonetheless. He's even developed a platonic crush on the dirty, tattooed, Fu-Manchu sporting Birkenstock boy who delivers his favorite burgers. And he's starting to warm up to his new status as a city boy.

So yesterday I thought it was a good time for his initiation to another urban lifestyle institution - the laundromat. Now I know what you're thinking. Laundromats are everywhere, you say. What's so urban about a hot, stuffy, strip-mall occupying washeteria?

Well, I offer you this, in the kid's own words:

"I love the laundromat [ed. note: WTF?!]. You've got homeless guys sleeping on the plastic chairs inside. Snooty white people and hippies going to the health food place next door. Strange men asking to bum cigarettes. A crazy woman talking to her towels while she folds them. And some dude breaking up with his girlfriend on the payphone." And I think he would have added a bit about the college girls in their laundry day shorts too, but he never talks to his mother about such things.

Anyway, I think he's starting to warm up to the place.

Compulsory education - almost no child left behind

So I spent much of yesterday finding ways to look busy enough that people wouldn’t bother me. Or at least that those who found it necessary to bother me would excuse themselves for interrupting (my trying to look busy-ness) and move along quickly once I barked out an answer. I hate being bothered. Especially at work.

But really, I was waiting all day to hear from my son who started his first day at his new school. Finally. School here in the river city started almost two weeks ago, but because I didn’t sign a lease on the new place until the last minute and therefore couldn’t prove residence to the new school, to any school, I couldn’t register him. Apparently, they don’t just let you ship your kid off to whatever school you find convenient – you actually have to prove that he belongs there, and this requires more documentation than it does to say, ship him off to war. Or get him a credit card.

So when I finally had a lease to show and knew which school the squirt would be attending, I requested his records from his old school be sent to his new school and I went to the new school to fill out paperwork and hand over the myriad of documentation required to register a child for free public indoctrination in the state of Virginia. This included a birth certificate (to prove he was indeed born in these United States and is entitled to a free government brain-washing, er, education), his last report card from his previous school (despite the fact that this very document will be included in his school records), the aforementioned lease or proof-of-residence, his social security card (to ensure that the correct serial number is recorded on the microchip to be implanted in his brain), and a copy of his shot record (to ensure that said microchip planting has been accomplished).

Failure to provide ALL of these records results in the inability of said child to attend school, which is by the way, mandatory (but only in the you-must-send-your-child-to-school-or-we’ll-charge-you-with-truancy-and-neglect kind of way, not in the we-the-government-must-provide-your-child-with-an-education-without-burdensome-complications kind of way).

Having submitted all such documentation to his school last year, I assumed this procedure would be relatively quick and painless. I found out of course that you can never underestimate the ineptitude of a government institution. Especially one meant to serve the public directly.

I showed up with said son on the first day of school, documentation in hand, assuming his records had arrived in the week and a half since my request. Again, underestimating. No such records and no child in school. I filled out another form, this time with his new school, to be faxed to his old school in order to request the records again. The woman in charge of enrolling new students said she would call me as soon as they arrived and I could bring him back then and she’d register him for classes. I assumed this meant his records would be faxed or emailed in a nice, tidy pdf document to his new school. I have to stop assuming.

After the second day of school had come and almost gone, I called the enrollment woman at his new school. She didn’t know if she had the records yet and that she’d have to call me back, and after taking my name and phone number, she hung up and was not to be heard from again until the next afternoon when I, tired of waiting to hear from her, called her back. Once again, she took my name and number and said she’d call back.

At this point though, I was on to her game and called his old school myself to inquire about his records. This required two phone calls and an email before receiving the response that his records had been sent on Tuesday (the first day of school, the day the request was faxed – not the day I originally requested them a week earlier). But apparently the school system is unaware of the wonders of modern technology, and my son’s records were instead sent via United States Postal Service. And not the one with the shiny new trucks and aero planes, but the one with the Conestoga wagons and foot messengers.

Still, by the fourth day of school, I assumed the records would have arrived. They were, after all, only being sent from one county to another. Forty miles. Another stupid assumption.

Monday morning I got the kid up, made the kid shower, brought the kid to work with me, and in between coughing fits, called the enrollment woman at the new school to say I was bringing the little monster in as I was sure she had received his records. She was not so sure and said she would call me back.

She did not.

Apparently, her phone only works for incoming calls.

By noon, I was suffering from full-on respiratory fits and dragged the kid home to our new, underfurnished apartment where I passed out on the floor until well past the time I could call this woman back. For the next three days, I made a phone call in the morning, only to be told she hadn’t received the records the previous day and would allegedly call me to let me know if she had them now. She seemed unalarmed that my fourteen-year-old was missing out on the first weeks of the school year, and seemed to imply by her nonchalance that I should be unalarmed as well.

Meanwhile, my bored yet happy not to be in school son kept me from squandering too much of my sick time on napping and complained about how he didn’t want to go to this school anyway, about how he didn’t have any clothes to wear, about how he wasn’t going to make any more new friends here, and about how the world had yet to bend to his glory.

Friday, certain that I was enjoying myself more than I had a right to, and desperately in need of nicotine, I dragged myself to work and left the child alone. I drafted a very pointed letter to the enrollment woman, detailing my every effort to resolve this records situation and get the kid in school, and I faxed it off.

Within twenty minutes I received a phone call. The records had apparently been placed in someone else’s box and that someone else had no clue what to do with a set of school records for a new student, so there they had sat. But now everything was fine, and he could come in on Monday. And by the way, he could just come in alone, there was no need for me to be there.

Like I was going to miss my chance to sit in her office and make her uncomfortable. Right.

Upon hearing the news that he would be starting school on Monday, the kid smiled and hugged me and thanked me profusely for all my hard work.

Okay, so he said something along the lines of, “Screw that. I’m not going.”

Of course, he assumed I cared what he thought.

I did not.

So I spent most of yesterday waiting for his phone call, waiting to hear about his first day, about how his teachers were all stupid and his classes were all stupid and the other students were all backward and completely unworthy of his time. What I got was this:

“Hi, Mom. I’m home from school. It was okay. My friend came over. Hope that’s okay. We’re going to the community center. I’ll call you later. Love you. Talk to you later. Bye.”

I didn’t even get a chance to respond.

Burn, Philip Morris! Burn!

Sorry for the long absence, but I grew up in a polygamist sect and I had this little court thing to attend. You’re right, incredibly insensitive of me. Especially when the truth is that I’m just lazy.

So, much has transpired since my last pseudo-post before the big end-of-summer holiday. For one, I spent Labor Day weekend at the beach. That’s right, the beach! And I know what you’re thinking, what kind of fool goes to the beach on Labor Day weekend? Isn’t it just full of all those amateur vacationers trying to squeeze a few moments of desperate fun/relaxation out of the last bits of summertime? Isn’t it crowded and noisy and just entirely unpleasant?

Hah! I say. First of all I say this because my last vacation was almost two years ago: I traveled to Iowa to spend a week with my son over his spring break. In March. In Iowa. Iowa. Let me recap: I traveled from Virginia, where the average temperature nears sixty degrees in March, to Iowa, where it is known to snow well into April. The weather did not disappoint that year, and while the folks back here in ol’ Virginny were enjoying days spent reading under early-blooming dogwoods, I was enduring a full-on blizzard, a term which, by the way, was first used by an Iowa newspaper to describe and Iowa snowstorm sometime in the nineteenth century. That was my last vacation.

The friends with whom I spent this summer, seeing how much I’d been working lately, insisted I come along with them for their weekend at the beach, and though at first I balked – I really should have been moving in to my new apartment, not to mention I missed out on a Friday night shift at the restaurant and my son was flying back on Labor Day – they convinced me that a free (did I mention they were paying for everything?) weekend at the beach was deserved by me.

So I went. And for three wonderful nights I got my own room in their suite, complete with surfside balcony and privileges on their oceanfront balcony. We played in the ocean with their kids, we flew kites, we ate at all their favorite restaurants (including one really plush one overlooking the sound), we took afternoon naps with the balcony doors open, and I sat in the hot tub and took a sunrise stroll along the near-deserted beach. That’s right, I said deserted. See, we skipped the commercial, big-resort, boardwalk baloney of Virginia Beach and instead headed to the Outer Banks. And I have to say, for Labor Day weekend, it was under-crowded.

Of course, all of that joy and wonderfulness came to a too abrupt end, and I had to be back in the RIC Monday evening to pick the kid up at the airport and then rush off to my evening shift at the restaurant. Of course, I didn’t realize I would have to go through the gate to pick up the unaccompanied minor, and I had a purse full of lighters. Now I know that last statement makes me sound a bit sketchy, but allow me to explain. I lose things. All kinds of things. Especially the kinds of things that can be stuffed into pants pockets and apron pockets and purse pockets and you get the idea. So I am constantly leaving the 7-Eleven in the morning with my nicotine, only to discover that I’ve left my lighter on the windowsill at home or the pants I wore last night. Consequently, I end up owning at any given time between five and ten lighters.

And since the friends I was staying with have two adorable little girls, impressionable little girls, I had to be very careful not to leave any such dangerous flame-producing tools lying around, and all of them (the Bics, not the girls) ended up in the bag I was carrying all weekend at the beach and then to the airport, where I had to go through the stupid security checkpoint to pick up the kid, and where I had to pause to throw out six cigarette lighters from the bottom of said bag. The scary thing is, when I got to work later and was digging through the bag for a pen, I found a lighter I had missed. A lighter the Transportation Security Administration workers and their high-tech bag x-raying machine had also missed.

So, as payback for enjoying myself for a few days, last week was incredibly busy with work and moving in to the new place and work and registering the kid for school and shopping for furniture at thrift stores (okay, that was fun) and turning on utilities and more work. Then Sunday I came down with a cold, which turned out not to be a cold, but the bronchitis and all I have to say to that is, “Screw the bronchitis!” Okay, in an email to a friend earlier, I used the F-bomb, but I’m practicing restraint. I’m trying anyway.

And the worst part of it is, and you all knew this was coming, I have to give up smoking.

Fuck giving up smoking!

I said I was trying.

Stupid pulmonary inflammations!

So I spent much of this week, sitting in my half-furnished, half-moved into, entirely unpacked apartment, staring at undecorated walls and the kid’s sour mug, and praying for the Philip Morris plant on the south side of town to catch fire and send tobacco smoke spewing into the air and for a freak wind to blow it north west over my apartment. Not that I would be able to inhale anyway with all the hacking and wheezing I was doing. But a TSA bypassing girl like me can dream.

My bad form

When I woke this morning, forty-five minutes after my alarm should have and probably did go off, I had the briefest notion to just call in and tell The Man I wasn’t coming. I should have done it. I’ve been about an hour behind all day long. I missed a meeting. I realized I didn’t have access to not one, but two databases to which I’ll need immediate access. And I got a parking ticket because I forgot that I parked in the two hour parking zone – because of my tardiness – and not in the deck where I usually park. Don’t even get me started on the parking ticket.

But in those few moments of eye-fluttering, what-the-hell-time-is-it, rising to consciousness, when I considered not coming in at all, I convinced myself that work was a necessity. Why? For one, I have only been at the new job a couple of months and I don’t want get a reputation as a slacker. And second, if I don’t go to the daytime job, I can’t in good conscience go to the night time job either. It would just be bad form.

And I need the money.

I hate money.

Yet I need it so.

I am money’s bitch.

See, I’m between homes at the moment. I’m not homeless, just staying with friends until I find suitable habitation. And by suitable, I mean something I can afford located within a decent school district. The kid will be back in a few weeks and he will need to be in school. Apparently there’s a law.

You would think that finding such habitation in such a school district would not be that difficult. But no.

Virginians were the last to practice Massive Resistance. What is Massive Resistance, you ask? Basically, it was the good ol’ boy way of giving the finger to those liberal nut jobs in Washington who desegregated the school systems. The short version is that instead of integrating, local governments were allowed to shut down public schools and grant money so families could send their kids to all-white, private academies. The practice ended sometime in the mid 1960’s. Sort of. It still pretty much happens in Richmond. The only difference is, they’ve left the public schools open.

Here’s how: The city is spread over the county line between Chesterfield and Henrico Counties. Each of these counties have excellent schools, for the most part. The problem is, the “city” of Richmond (ie the poorest part) is not a part of either county. Richmond city has its own public school system. Richmond city’s school system is not on par with the counties. It gets better at the high school level, but many of the schools aren’t fully accredited (not enough of the students meet the minimum Standards of Learning as set forth by the state of Virginia – thank you, GW and No Child Left Behind), are generally under-funded, and are in physical disrepair (an understatement). And because the Richmond City School System is so bad, most of the (white) people who can afford it send their kids to private schools.

So what happens is that in very lovely, racially and socially mixed neighborhoods, only the poorest kids go to the public schools. And generally, because of institutional failures, and yes, racism, there are few if any white kids in Richmond City schools.

And, yes, I am part of this racist behavior. And I hate it.

The first year my son was in Richmond, for fourth grade, I lived in Oregon Hill, a basically all-white neighborhood near campus and I sent the kid to the neighborhood elementary. I knew when I enrolled him that he was it – the one white kid in fourth grade. But I didn’t care. He didn’t either.

But with kids, anyone who sticks out, anyone different is the object of bullying. I made him stick it out for the rest of the year, but that summer I sent him back to his father. Partially because even the best schools in the county don’t compare to those back in Iowa, and partially because I was having my own difficulties and thought it was best for the kid to be with his dad at the time. It wasn’t. But lesson learned.

When I decided to bring him back to Virginia last year, we moved out to the middle of nowhere with a friend, in an excellent school district. But that didn’t work out either. So now I am between domiciles, looking for a place I can afford, that isn’t in a school district where only half the kids are passing the state’s Standards of Learning.

This is why I had to jump out of bed and endure the day instead of rolling over and going back to sleep.

He may not be a morning person

The three of you who have are actually suffering through reading this blog (all three previous posts) already know this, but it has been several years since my mother asked me if I was living an alternative lifestyle. But in the unlikely event that anyone else ever ends up reading this garbage, I thought perhaps I should let them in on the origins of the title, so I thought I should post that one. And yes, I wrote in present tense. And yes, I have reasons for that, but I would have to get up on my literary high horse to tell you about them and if you aren’t one of my literary friends you would probably get bored and click on the “next blog” button and end up reading about some cool kid puking in the subway in Manhattan after a night of seven dollar Coronas.

So here in the present day, I am finished with grad school (and by finished I mean, I still have one class to take and a thesis to turn in, but as my thesis and laptop were stolen and I still owe the university for a semester of tuition and can’t register for any new classes and thus will not be able to take classes until I pay that shit off, I am finished), I am working at the university from which I failed to graduate, and I am no longer living with my friend, but still reside in the former seat of the Confederacy. With my son. Who is now fourteen.

Which brings me to the point of today’s post:

I woke this morning at four to put the wunderkind on a 6:45 flight to the Midwest, where his father will be picking him up so they can spend the rest of the summer hanging out in their underwear, eating day-old pizza from cardboard boxes left on the floor, and watching reruns of Viva la Bam and all the R-rated movies the kid’s horrible mother would not let him see while he was here. Despite his father’s promise to me that they will watch no such films.

And upon his return, it will take me another nine months to de-program him, just enough time for him to go back to his father’s again.

But still not my point.

While I was working yesterday, and still while I was doing laundry and getting the kid’s things together to be packed, he was at a theme park with some family friends. Last night was my night off from the restaurant – one of two nights per week I am not working – a night I usually spend napping, hanging out with and feeding the kid, and then going to bed early. It’s an exciting life, I know. But last night, as the kid had to be prepared for his father’s house, I skipped the going to bed early part (I did manage to get a short nap in – ahhh, napping!).

He showed up sometime after nine and immediately launched into a plea to be taken to the mall, and after the mall had definitely closed, to wal-mart in order to purchase a new video game for his long (six hour) trek to see his father. From my son’s lips came phrases such as, “I love you, Mommy” and “You’re the best” said so saccharinely that he could have had naked pancakes and they still would have rotted his teeth. He finally gave up sometime after eleven, and I sent us both to bed, though I didn’t make it there until about midnight.

So, on an entire four hours of sleep, with me having to work until after twelve tonight, I shoved the kid toward the shower, threw his bags in the car and we headed to the airport. For the next thirty minutes, me without nicotine or caffeine because we were running late, this was the conversation:

Kid: Why do we have to leave so early? This is stupid.

Me: Your father bought the ticket. I guess this worked out best. Ask him.

Kid: Why couldn’t I just take the train?

Me: Once again, ask your father.

Kid: I’m going to be on a plane all day. This is bullshit.

Me: Watch your mouth.

Kid: I can’t watch my mouth. That’s just stupid.

Me: I love how pleasant you are in the morning.

Kid: Well maybe if you didn't make me get up so early.

Me: It’s too early to argue. Just don’t speak.

Kid: Your car smells.

Me: Crank the window.

Kid (rolling down the window):It's the outside that smells.

Me: I can't help you there.

Kid: Now I’m going to smell. I can’t even take body spray on the plane.

Me:

Kid: This is stupid. Like I’m going to take down a plane with my can of Axe. Airline people are stupid.

Me:

Kid (once arriving in the parking garage and unloading his bags): Why do I have to bring so much crap? Now I have to carry all this (as I unload and roll his bags down toward the terminal).

Kid (in the terminal, seeing the two people ahead of us in line at the ticket counter; upon being asked to put luggage tags on his skateboard and carry-on bag; upon seeing the line for the security checkpoint; upon being asked to remove his belt before going through the metal detector; and upon having to put his shoes back on after the security checkpoint): Oh my god!

Me (at 6:55; upon lighting my first cigarette of the morning, after handing him over to the airline employee in charge of the unaccompanied minor): Oh . . . my . . . god . . .