DotMoms

My daughter the basketball star

By Suzanne

Last month my 9-year-old daughter had her first ever basketball practice. She didn't want to sign up for basketball, but after years of windy soccer, it sounded like a nice, warm, comfy indoor sport to me. I've seen her play basketball in the driveway with her brothers. She always seemed to have fun. But she said, "I don't want to play basketball! I hate basketball!" Turns out, she was afraid she didn't really know the rules and was afraid she wouldn't be good at it. I told her, "Your grandmother was a basketball star in high school. It's in your genes.  Just try it."

So we went to basketball practice. She didn't complain on the way or cry. In fact, she seemed excited. The team is co-ed, and she was one of only two girls on the team. I stayed to watch the practice and see for myself whether or not she had fun. Well, she jumped right in, couldn't wait to do the warm-up exercises and dribble and throw -- and she made the basket about half the time. She was, in fact, as good as most of the boys on the team, and afterward she told me she had a great time and loved basketball. I was glad I'd taken her, but I wondered what I would have done if she'd acted like the other little girl on the team.

The other little girl cried and clung to her mother and refused to participate more than half the practice. Playing basketball had been her mother's idea, too. At the second practice, the little girl was there again and I noticed this time her mother didn't stay for the practice -- maybe that was a good idea. The little girl still cried and hung back, but the coach was patient and she participated more than she had before. Maybe she'll be a basketball star by high school. Maybe my daughter will, too or maybe she'll drop out and choose another activity later on. 

For now, I'm just glad she tried basketball and didn't give up on it without at least getting the experience of playing on a team. And I was glad to see the other little girl hadn't given up yet, either, though it was hard to watch her cry during the first practice.

My boys are older and at this point they've both made the decision to drop out of sports. Since they're 12 and 14, I've let them make that decision for themselves, but sometimes I wonder if they spend too much time now in more sedentary activities.

At what point do you let your kids make up their own minds about sports and other activities? If they cry or say no in advance, or after they've tried it out? And at what age?

Suzanne has been married for over 20 years and lives in small-town North Carolina with her three children.

Bunnies and bears, oh my

By Suzanne

I have a love/hate relationship with Halloween.

For one thing, it's the beginning of the entire series of holidays that require a massive amount of effort from the mom in the family -- Halloween then Thanksgiving then Christmas. It's always been the most exhausting season of the year for me.

The approach of Halloween is like a portent of doom. For another thing, once we had three children, managing them all while trick-or-treating became a nightmare. There was always the younger one who walked too slow or got tired too soon and the older ones who ran too fast and never got tired at all.

But I always loved the costumes. I have to admit, I loved the costumes more when I got to pick them out. I always picked out cute, adorable costumes, turning my darling babies and toddlers into bunnies and bears. As they grew, they wanted to be cartoon characters from movies and TV, and as they got even older, they wanted to dress up scary and horrifying and have blood drips coming down their faces. What happened to my bunnies and bears?

This year, my daughter is nine, almost 10, and she wants to be a witch, for the third year running. My boys are 12 and 14 and they don't want to be anything. They don't want to go trick-or-treating at all. "We'll just steal her candy," they say about their sister going trick-or-treating. They are both going to a party at a neighbor's house with their friends instead. 

Not only am I down to just one child who still wants to go trick-or-treating, she doesn't even want me to take her. She's going to go trick-or-treating with the neighbors. All I have to do is stay home and hand out candy at the door. This is my easiest Halloween ever.

Is Halloween still a portent of the other holidays to come? Will my Thanksgivings and Christmases become easier, too, as less and less is required of me as the mom? My kids are growing up, and it's a new phase in my life. I'm needed less by them, and that means more time for me. I'm excited about more "me" time, but it's sad, too. Like when I quit breastfeeding and when I changed my last diaper and when they didn't need me to push them on the swing. It is always a bittersweet relief.

I miss my bunnies and bears. But I have missed me, too. I have a friend who is always telling me that 40s are fabulous. I think she's right.

Suzanne has been married for over 20 years and lives in small-town North Carolina with her three children.

Is one more blue crayon drawing too much to ask?

By Suzanne

On the first day of kindergarten, my oldest son brought home a scrawled crayon drawing accompanied by this verse: "Here I am so you can see I'm in kindergarten and happy as can be." The picture sort of looks like a little blue alien. His baby book is full of early school papers and pictures -- drawings of his family (we all look like aliens), handprints out of paint, and descriptions of our family ("I hate my brother," "My sister cries all the time," My dad likes sports," "My mom has a garden.")

The first day of school, we took a picture of him standing at the door, backpack on his back filled with new crayons and markers and glue, ready to start the long adventure of his formal education. He was a little scared, a lot shy, but eager and excited to be a big boy who went to school. I was eager and excited to only have two children, instead of three, at home all day with me. 

At the school, all the mothers followed the new kindergartners down the hall to watch them put their backpacks away and be seated at the little tables in their little chairs. It was all very cute. The mothers hung around and hung around and hung around. The principal came down and promised everyone their children would have a great day and all the mothers kept hanging around. Most of them were wiping their eyes and some of them were introducing themselves to each other and planning the first school party and the cookies.

I tore myself away fairly early. I stayed long enough to see that my shy boy was handling it, and I danced out to the parking lot with my other two children in tow, celebrating the advancement toward my freedom. One down, two to go!

Now all three of my children have been in school for years. I've been through two more first kindergarten days and watched countless more mothers wiping their eyes outside the kindergarten classroom with their noses pressed to the glass window in the door, unable to tear themselves away. I never had much trouble tearing myself away. Two down, one to go! Three down -- lift-off!

And yet this school year I don't feel so eager. My oldest son starts high school this week. Where did the time go? How can he be going to ninth grade already? Child-rearing seems to last forever until you hit big milestones. The next time he starts a new school, it will be college! While he is at high school, he will learn to drive, maybe fall in love for the first time and discover what he wants to do when he grows up, make lifelong friends and get his feelings hurt a lot deeper than in kindergarten, and possibly do some other stuff that I will be better off not knowing about.

Why do people cry at the kindergarten door? They are still babies then, with their whole childhood stretching out before them. High school -- THAT'S the time to start crying!!  And yet I don't think there will be a gaggle of mothers gathering outside the ninth grade homeroom, wiping their eyes, noses pressed to the glass until the principal drags them away.

Well, maybe one. Me.

The rest of the mothers will probably be more cooperative about not embarrassing their children.

Do you think I could ask the homeroom teacher to make him draw a self-portrait of his first day so that I know he's okay? I miss blue crayon pictures.

Suzanne has been married for over 20 years and lives in small-town North Carolina with her three children.

Life is a deck of Pokemon cards

By Suzanne

My oldest son had the most perfect Pokemon card collection you've ever seen. He kept the cards in a two-tier container similar to a toolbox, with partitioned slots to organize the cards in some mysterious way I never quite understood. Birthdays, Christmases, allowance money -- there was always something put toward the Pokemon collection.

His younger brother has his own collection. His collection can be found under his bed, strewn across the floor, and in corners of the hallway, but he does have a notebook in which he keeps the most precious cards. He might be messy, but he can recite Pokemon facts and make it sound like rocket science. Phone conversations with friends sound something like this: "First go to the guy in Saffron City on the fifth corridor down from the MoonStone. He can tell you where to find the Zapados. Then you fly over to Cinnabar Island and surf up and down until you find the sixth mark." WHAT?

One day when my oldest son was 12 he suddenly carried his precious, uber-organized box of cards to his sister's room and said, "Here, you can have it." The same box he would have knocked her to the ground and throttled her if she'd dared touch a day before was all hers. His voice was changing and he was getting hair on his legs, too. My little boy was gone, poof, with that deck of Pokemon cards.

The other day, my 9-year-old daughter, who is incapable of managing her money enough to buy her own cards, came downstairs with not just her older brother's uber-organized container but a big, fat Pokemon notebook.

"At first he gave me two sheets," she said. "Then he gave me all of them, including the trainers!"

Another one bites the dust of childhood. My second son is now too old for Pokemon cards, too. He is too mature, too sophisticated, too cool for the obsession that once ruled his boyhood world. I sighed in sadness, then my daughter leaned over and confided, eyes shining: "I stole his Charizard card once, then I gave it back. I just wanted the glory of having it for one weekend."

I've still got one baby!!!

Suzanne has been married for over 20 years and lives in small-town North Carolina with her three children.

The Keeper of the Bread

By Suzanne

My grandmother grew up on a farm in the hollers of West Virginia, and when she was a little girl it was her job to make bread every day. Every day. She learned to make bread from her mother, and her mother learned it from her mother before her, and so on. She taught her daughters to make bread, and when my mother was a young bride brought to West Virginia by my dad, my grandmother taught my mother to make that bread.

When I was nine years old, my mother taught me to make the bread. I made bread periodically as a teenager -- it wasn't "my job" like it was my grandmother's job. We mostly bought bread at the store, but whenever anyone in the house -- my mother, my sister, or I -- made that bread, everyone was excited and it went fast.

When I got married, one of the first things I bought was a bag of flour and bread pans.  I had never been in charge of grocery shopping before, so I didn't really think too hard about how long flour could last and how much flour is really needed to make bread for just two people. I bought a 25 pound bag of flour. I have a family of five now and I still don't buy flour in 25 pound bags! That bag of flour lasted a long time! But I made a lot of bread, trying to use up that 25 pound bag, and I fell in love with baking.

My brother has a son, and my sister has five sons, and yes, of course, we can and should teach our sons to cook and to bake (my 12-year-old son loves to be in the kitchen), but there is just something about a bread recipe that has been passed down from mother to daughter for over 100 years in my family that makes it special that I have a daughter. 

She is the only granddaughter in the family. She's nine now, and the other day I told her, "It's time for you to learn how to make bread." She asked where the recipe was. I told her, "There is no written recipe. I'm going to teach you and you're going to remember it for the rest of your life and someday you're going to teach it to your daughter."

She looked a little doubtful at the prospect of actually remembering a recipe for that long, then she said, "Are you sure you're the right person to teach me how to make bread? Aren't you the one who blew up the bread pan??" Okay, yes, that did happen. It was an oven malfunction, I swear! The oven got too hot one day due to a temperature problem with the thermostat and when I took the pan out, the glass bread pan exploded everywhere and I was finding tiny bits of glass in corners for weeks. I reminded her that I'd made hundreds, maybe thousands of loaves of bread over the years and had only blown up one pan.

So we got started and I had her doing every step on her own, me just watching. She started stirring in the flour and she was getting a little tired of stirring and she said, "Don't we have electronics for this now?" Well, yes, in fact we HAVE a bread machine.  My husband bought it for me, and I tried it out a few times, but it's just not homemade bread if it isn't made by hand, and that machine is collecting dust somewhere in my cabinets.

Making bread from scratch without using a bread machine is a lot of work, but there are several benefits -- for one thing, kneading bread is great exercise and good stress relief -- but more importantly, putting your fist into the dough is like touching the past.  People, particularly women, have done this very thing, stuck their fist into dough and kneaded it to a perfect elastic ball, for thousands of years. My mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother, and my great-great-grandmother made this bread, stuck their fist into this dough. There are few things left in this sophisticated day and age that are more elemental, more intrinsic to human existence, more real, than making bread.

I explained all of this to my daughter, and her eyes glazed over slightly, then I pointed out, "You are the only granddaughter, remember? That makes you The Keeper of the Bread." Now that made sense to her, and suddenly she was very proud. And once she got into it, she thought kneading was fun. All that punching, you know. The bread turned out wonderful, and she couldn't stop reminding her brothers that she'd made it, all by herself. She can't wait to bake again.

Do you have any special traditions that have been passed down for generations in your family? Or have you started any special traditions of your own?

Suzanne has been married for over 20 years and lives in small-town North Carolina with her three children.

Playing Barbie

By Suzanne

Recently, my daughter implored me to come upstairs and play Barbies with her in her room. She has no "girl" friends in the neighborhood since she had that big fight with Savannah and told her she was NOT GOING TO BE HER FRIEND ANYMORE.

Now, I haven't played Barbies in a long time and when I posted about this experience on my personal blog, I was fascinated by the responses from other women about their own Barbie-playing days. I thought I didn't know how to play Barbies anymore, that I'd forgotten. But in truth, I think I'd just forgotten what playing really is.

When I went up to my daughter's room that day, she had all her Barbies set up in the Dream House and they all had names. Currently, they're sporting names from characters in "The Nanny" because that is her show du jour.

She said, "Play!" I said, "But I don't know how to play. I'm not 9, you know!" She said, "But you had Barbies when you were little." I pointed out that was a long time ago, plus MY PARENTS WERE MEAN AND I ONLY HAD ONE BARBIE, NOT 50 LIKE YOU. (And she only has two Kens. Man, those are some lucky Kens, living in the Dream House with 50 Barbies...) But she insisted, so I played.

First, I sent the mom and dad Barbie off on a date, leaving the other Barbies home with the babysitter. Then babysitter Barbie called her boyfriend. Next thing you know things were were turning pretty steamy in the Dream House. This is what happens when a romance writer tries to play Barbie.

I said, "I had better go." And she was crying, "BUT I LOVE HOW YOU PLAY, MOMMY." Which left me sort of blinking... But I don't know how to play.

My daughter, the expert on playing since she is, after all, a child, thinks I do know how, and it made me re-evaluate. 

When I spoke with other women about this, I found that they recalled similar scenarios in their own Barbie play. Bad Barbie wasn't unusual at all. Their Barbies were involved in multiple relationships, breakups, and divorces. Barbie was kidnapped, mutilated, tortured, and often naked. Barbie was basically living in soap opera land. And what do many of us do when we grow up? Watch soap operas!

Once I related Barbie play to soap operas it all suddenly made sense to me. Play, for kids, is in some ways practice for being grown-up, but it's also an indulgence in other behaviors -- from a fantasy standpoint -- they know they would never do but are "allowed" to do with Barbie. 

Transporting ourselves to other lives and experiences, sometimes super-dramatic and even illicit, is the same thing we do as grown-ups when we read books and watch movies and TV.

So the next time my daughter asks me to play, I won't say I don't know how. Hey, I watched "All My Children" for 20 years! My Barbie's name is going to be Erica Kane.

Suzanne has been married for over 20 years and lives in small-town North Carolina.  She has three school-aged children.

The fall-out of fall

By Suzanne

Sand, sun, beach... Summer vacation is just a reservation away. And I'm ready. I'm so ready!

Wait, I'm not ready. I am the family reservation agent, and I am the worst family reservation agent in the world. I procrastinate something terrible. I have a million things on my plate and in February, summer vacation seems a world away.

So when I sat down this week, decks cleared, to make summer vacation plans, I discovered that, of course, the entire planet was way ahead of me and all the good summer houses and early summer dates (pre-peak prices) in the Outer Banks were taken. Except, you know, the ones that cost $10,000 a week. Well! I'll just whip out that $10,000 bill I've been saving for a rainy day! ::thunk:: 

Or we can take the only almost-affordable houses left (you know, the leftover ones that no one wanted) in peak pricing time a mile off the beach and drive to the public parking every day. This wouldn't be so terrible if I hadn't had my heart set on sitting comfortably on the deck while I watch the kids play in the sand. If we take a house off the beach, we won't spend nearly as much time ON the beach and everyone will be cranky for a different reason, but cranky doesn't fit my fantasy image of my week at the beach.

And so I finally concluded that taking the kids to the beach this summer wasn't the greatest idea in the world. Instead, I'm taking them to the beach in the fall. Not only are beach houses drastically reduced in price, but the crowds will be thinner and the temperatures bearable. This means taking the children out of school for a week. My kids are straight A students with no outrageous behavior problems (you know, that they exhibit AT SCHOOL), so I know they can catch up. They also aren't prone to frequent illnesses, so a few days lost from their allowable days out of school shouldn't hurt them, either.

However, it still means they'll miss a week of school. I remember when I was a teacher a family took their kids out of school for a week to go to Europe. At the time, I remember feeling a shade of annoyance since it meant organizing makeup materials for the student and some extra paperwork. Now, as a mother, it also means quality family time by taking vacations at a time of year that is more affordable and less crowded --and I bet that's why they went to Europe when they did. Yet I wonder how other people will react -- condemnation? Or maybe a little wishing-they-were-going-too? Or maybe I shouldn't even care. Maybe my mommy guilt is acting up again.

Have you ever taken your kids out of school for a family vacation? How did others react, and how did you handle it?

The summer of 9

By Suzanne

When I was 9 years old, summer meant grass between my feet, ants moving from anthill to breadcrumb and back again, pools to swim in, books to read, and time to blow. Hot sun, long days, laughter.

Today, summer means.... ACK!!!! My kids are home and they are under my feet all day and they're begging to DO THINGS THAT I DON'T HAVE TIME TO DO.

Why can't I be 9 again? I want summer. I want grass between my feet, time to watch ants scurry across the sidewalk, cold pool water as I dive in, and nothing, nothing, nothing to do. I want my mom to be baking chocolate chip cookies when I come inside and I want to go watch "Petticoat Junction" for the umpty-hundredth time and dream about marrying hottie pilot Steve.

For the past several years, or okay, for as long as I can remember right now, I've had so much work to do all summer that all I could do was put my automatic pilot on September and tell it to get there because my nose was going to be down, on the grindstone.

This summer, I have no work. No deadlines. Well, one teensy one, but it's only for the first few weeks of summer. After that, I have deliberately avoided all obligation. I am going to the pool. I am watching ants. I'm reading books, blowing time, baking chocolate chip cookies, and if I can find "Petticoat Junction" on Nick, I'm watching it.

I'm going to be 9, just like my daughter. I can't wait.

What are you doing this summer?

My life in shoes

By Suzanne

There are 5,397 pairs of shoes in the front hall of my house.

Okay, that's an exaggeration, but not by much.

I have three children. They each have a pair of athletic shoes for regular school days. Then they have church shoes. Baseball shoes. Basketball shoes. Horseback riding boots (pink, one pair of those). Playing in the creek shoes. Fuzzy slipper shoes. Not to mention the I-don't-know-whose-these-are-shoes no one will claim, but whenever I take them to the giveaway pile in the garage they somehow miraculously make their way back to the front hall because SOMEONE IS WEARING THEM.

I first became aware of the shoes-that-are-never-put-up phenomenon when my oldest child could put on and take off his velcro-closed shoes on his own and was thus responsible for putting them away. It wasn't so bad then. One little pair of size 4 Batman shoes by the door. How cute. Then I had another child, and another child, and their cute little feet turned into nearly adult sizes that I sometimes can't tell apart from my husband's shoes. And, oh yeah, he has about five pairs of shoes in the front hall, too.

Visitors to our house have to climb over Mt. Shoe Everest to get past the front hall and come inside. I'm sure they wonder just how many children do they have? I've tried various methods of controlling the unruly shoes over the years, everything from disciplining the children about where shoes really belong to stacking shoe compartments by the door to even building a hall closet in our old house AS IF THEY MIGHT PUT THEM AWAY THERE. No matter what, the shoes creep back. Before I know it, there are 5,397 shoes strewn about my front hall again. It's like fighting kudzu.

Despite this amassing of shoes in plain sight, the most frequent thing I hear in the morning as it's rush-to-make-the-schoolbus time is, "I CAN'T FIND MY SHOES!" 

::head bang::

I have moments when I imagine how beautiful my front hall would be if it weren't decorated in shoes. Then I realize there is only one way that I will ever have a clean front hall: My children will all grow up and move away. I'll probably always have enough milk then, there won't be a stack of permission slips and sports schedules littering my kitchen table, I'll never have to watch cartoons again, and no one will be screaming MOMMY outside the bathroom door.

Maybe I don't mind the shoes so much, after all.

My mother didn't have to worry about this!

By Suzanne

How many of you kept a diary when you were a teenager?

I kept one. It was full of my private thoughts about my "mean" older sister, the boys I liked, the blatant unfairness of my parents, and my latest shopping expeditions. It was Top Secret. 

I hid it in various locations -- under my mattress, beneath clothes in a drawer, in the back of my closet. I never let anyone see it. 

Years later, I read portions of it to my husband -- the parts from when we first dated (we met just before my 15th birthday) -- and we laughed. But I've never let him touch it on his own. There are some pages I don't want even him to see. Still!

My daughter is nine, and she has a diary. She writes in it about how "mean" her older brothers are, and she draws pictures of horses. She lets me see it. Her thoughts aren't that secret yet. But soon, I know that will change. She'll have secret thoughts she doesn't want to share with her mother. Like about how blatantly unfair her parents are, no doubt. Not to mention the boys she likes.

Girls (or boys) keeping diaries is certainly nothing new, but today there are more options than when I was a teenager. A diary doesn't have to be hidden under the mattress or beneath clothes in a drawer or in the back of the closet. It can be placed in plain sight on the Internet, where even there it might be hidden from parents' prying eyes if they don't know about it.

In our house, we keep a strict watch on our kids' Internet time. They have a computer in the den for their use but it's restricted to games and homework. There is no Internet access from that computer. If they use the computers in the house that do have Internet access, they have to ask permission and be logged on by a parent and supervised. But of course we all know our children have access to computers and the Internet through other sources -- their friends' homes, libraries, schools, and when they're old enough to drive, Internet cafes.

Where will our children keep their secret diaries? Teenagers are blogging in growing numbers, and with the explosion of free and easy blogging communities, anyone with almost zero technical skills can have a blog up and running in a matter of minutes. Teen blogs contain all the same joy, angst, and therapeutic ponderings of friendships and love as our old-fashioned notebook diaries we hid under our beds -- but the big difference is, who is reading them and are teens protecting themselves from both the physical and the emotional dangers of revealing too much?

I hope that as my daughter grows older and more independent that she'll tell me if she starts a blog. But I have to admit, there's a chance she won't. Looking back on my teenage diary, I remember too well that I didn't want my parents to see it, though if the Internet had been available, I might have been tempted to put it online as a blog for my friends to read and comment on.

So now there's one more item to add to my List of Things to Warn My Children About on the Internet.

How do you feel about the prospect of your teenager someday starting a blog?