DotMoms

DotMoms Daily: Pregnancy perils, teacher crushes, and more

Photo Illustration: Kim Carney, MSNBC

In family-related news:
> Sleep trouble isn't inevitable during pregnancy (Reuters/MSNBC)
> Steroid use in pregnancy mostly safe (Reuters/MSNBC)
> Anxiety may persist after miscarriage (Reuters)
> CPSC: Lead toy recalls due to reduced clout (AP/CBS)
> Like a supervised 'Real World, for children (NYTimes)
> Teacher crush spells good grades and giggles (MSNBC)
> Krochet Kids teaches Third World women a marketable craft (MSNBC)
> Americans giving up friends, sex for Web life (Reuters/MSNBC)
> Refeathering the empty nest (NYTimes)

Home again

By Ellen

You know all the articles you read about college graduates who move home once they receive their degrees? Well, it's happened to me.

My son graduated from the University of London and spent the summer as a teaching assistant in a northeastern prep school. He loved being in the classroom. His reviews were great. He felt at home there, even chafed a bit at not being given free rein to do what he wanted to do (though he did teach an innovative chapter of a Toni Morrison novel that involved the kids sitting around a pretend dinner table and re-enacting the dialogue).

He came back to North Carolina convinced he was intended to be a teacher, and eager to get some more experience under his belt while pondering graduate school next year (and incidentally saving up some money).

A month later, he is working part-time at a bookstore and slowly adjusting to some painful facts of life: he has a small savings account, and it's not enough for grad school quite yet. It's cheaper to grit his teeth and live at mom and stepdad's house, instead of moving into his fantasy apartment. He doesn't have a car (who needed one in the UK?), and so he's driving his stepsister's boxy old Toyota, on loan from that side of the family but certainly not his idea of sharp wheels. He's trying to decide whether to make friends in this town in which he didn't grow up -- therefore putting down those dread things, roots -- or hold himself aloof and focus on next year.

It's a change for all of us. I was lucky enough when I graduated to have a sputtering used Fiat, a damp basement apartment in Atlanta, and a job that paid $8,500 a year. I thought I was the ruler of my own destiny, and I guess I was.

He doesn't have quite that freedom here. Mom still wonders why he has to go out for coffee after midnight; stepdad wonders if he's really doing enough around the house to help out. He is on the phone and the Internet sending resumes and letters, but there are spurts of activity followed by a complete dearth of interest (or so he must feel).

I know something will come along, and I try to reassure him. Sometimes he hears me; sometimes I'm just a pain. Sometimes sitting down at dinner with the family seems like drudgery to him; other times he's winning and friendly and talkataive. Sometimes we sit around and talk about books we've read and laugh at past episodes of "The Office" together, and it's great. I haven't had my little boy around in a long time, so I hope he forgives me for hanging on to these moments when we are mother and son again.

Because just as people tell you to enjoy your children when they are small -- for the time will be gone before you know it -- so do I know that this phase too shall pass. He'll get the phone call, the job, the car or the ticket back to the UK for grad school. He'll probably make friends here, there and everywhere and be around less and less often. He'll make his own life -- maybe not the one he envisioned he'd have at 23, but an OK one just the same.

So, I don't apologize for having a college graduate living in my house. I'm happy to be part of this phase of his life. Even if I do nag him to hang up his towels.

Ellen is a 50-year-old mother of two, stepmother of two, who lives in North Carolina with her family.

A Different Kind of Summer

By Ellen

They were here briefly, both of them. And now they've gone north for the summer. And I'm missing them like crazy!

My son graduated, finally, from the U of London and is now off at a "prestigious prep school" in Massachusetts as a teaching assistant for the summer. He is trying out the teaching profession to see if he likes it or not ... so far, he is over the moon about it. I'm just happy he's back on my side of the Atlantic, and happy that he will get the chance to impart his fierce love of English literature to those boys and girls.

Meanwhile my daughter came home from college in Georgia, slept like a log for days, then departed for the other end of Massachusetts, to be a painting/drawing instructor at a coed camp for kids. She was nervous and excited, having never laid eyes on the place before. She was immensely brave, getting on that airplane with her list of counselor duties and her favorite paints, and I think she'll have a positive impact upon a cabin of 11-year-old girls.

I'm proud of both of them, because they found these jobs themselves, aced the interviews and made the travel arrangements. I know they're okay. Mom? Not so good.

I miss summers with the kids in a way I didn't anticipate until now. This is the part of children leaving the nest that is bewilderingly sad for me ... I can rationalize them both being away in college, studying and making friends and groaning over tests and calling home for money and the like ... that's normal and right. There is a season for everything, and fall/winter/spring is the time go away and live the life scholastic. I have my own life, after all.

But summers should be all about drinking lemonade together, playing board games, going to the beach and to grandma's house, complaining about being bored while secretly enjoying it, sleeping really late and disagreeing with each other over the briefness of one's swimsuit or the length of one's hair.

Now my children are, in essence, extending their growing-up season into the three months of the year when I most want to have them with me ... when sitting around talking about life and watching the lightning bugs from the screened porch is so lovely and right, when everyone and everything slows down and reconnection can happen, when they walk in smelling hot and tired and outdoorsy and evoking the little-girl, little-boy fragrances of summers gone by. 

I miss that. I miss them. I have to content myself, for the time being, with sporadic phone calls and emails, or pull up the websites at the camp and school where they are and peer at the screen for a glimpse of them in photos. Or (yes, I admit it) going into their rooms and pulling out the jackets they each wore home and burying my face in them, just to believe their spirits still linger in my house.

Being a mother is all about connection, separation and reconnection, sometimes coming so rapidly that it takes your breath away. I can't hate myself for wanting the good old days of summer to return, even as I'm proud of them and their efforts to fill the summer months with growth. I just have to "ride the wave" until August, and do some growing up myself.

Ellen is a 50-year-old mother of two, stepmother of two, who lives in North Carolina with her family.

Beginning a new mothering chapter

By Ellen

I have to confess that I’m uncertain about my motherhood status at the moment. You see, I’ve entered a new chapter in the parenting book, and I am not at all sure how I feel about it.

My 18-year-old daughter departed for college in early September, joining her 22-year-old brother in the shared pursuit of higher education, independent lives and the future. And while I’m glad they are both happily settled in institutions of their choice in two wonderful cities (London and Savannah), I’m not so happy some days about where it leaves their mom: disconnected.

What’s my role now that the nest is empty? How do I quell my panic when the girl who called me almost daily from her high school in Virginia doesn’t even call weekly from Georgia? How do I resist pushing her for more information when all she says in her rare phone calls is “yep” or “nope”? I’m supposed to be good at this long-distance mothering thing, and yet knowing vitually nothing about my daughter’s classes, friends or feelings leaves me feeling like a rank amateur. Her brother says she talks to HIM and that she’s having a great time –- I guess that’s a relief. But I want my own confirmation! And visiting the school Web site just doesn’t do it.

I’m whining, and I always swore I wouldn’t, that I would never become one of those poor, tearful, depressed empty nesters you read about in women’s magazines or see in sitcoms. I DO have a life of my own! I have a wonderful and demanding job, a loving and supportive husband of two years and a 14-year-old stepdaughter at home, but that child has her own mother nearby and I’m more of a laundry consultant and chauffeur for her than anything else. Somehow it doesn't seem appropriate to throw my temporarily underused mothering skills her way, nor do I think she'd accept them. 

Meanwhile, during the evenings I sometimes walk restlessly around my house, fighting the urge to pick up the phone and call my kids. I want them to feel free and unfettered, to make their own way, not to depend on Mom for advice. But I don’t understand why I feel so sad when the phone doesn’t ring, the e-mails don’t come and that fierce bond between mother and child doesn’t feel as tangible as it once did.

I know all of you mothers of young children are saying to yourselves, "This will NEVER happen to me." I said that, too. And I did a lot of reading and thinking about how to prepare myself for the empty nest stage ... to little avail.

I've been surprised by my daughter's reaction to sudden freedom, yes, but MORE surprised about my own feelings, whatever they are. Discontent? Low self-esteem? Anger? Probably a mixture of all three. Writing about this all may help; that's why I've offered to start a new category for DotMoms called "Empty Nester."

Please send me your thoughts and share with me your perspective if you have experienced this yourself (or remember it from the viewpoint of your own departure from home). I'll be interested in seeing how -- with your help -- this new chapter of motherhood will read.

Ellen is a 50-year-old mother of two, stepmother of two, who lives in North Carolina with her family.