For Sale: Mama Guilt

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who feel guilty about everything and those who don't. For many of us, guilt was a part of childhood. My mother was great at administering guilt in just the right dose (but I'll save that discussion for another post). 

Once you have crossed the line into parenthood, however, guilt is here to stay. Read about my latest bout of Mama Guilt on my new post at Chicago Moms Blog. Feel free to leave a comment there or here.

Photo credit: Image 313291 by Aaron Murphy.

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Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

Once I built a railroad, made it run, 

made it race against time.

Once I built a railroad; now it's done. 

Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once I built a tower, up to the sun, 

brick and rivet, and lime;

Once I built a tower, now it's done. 

Brother, can you spare a dime?

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? (1931), lyrics Yip Harburg

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who fundraise and those who are hit up by fundraisers. Seems everyone has a hand out these days. Magazine sales for two different schools. Pleas from WBEZ, my beloved local NPR station, to shorten the fall fundraising drive by pledging now. Dunning notices. Late fees. A plummeting Dow. Yikes, man.

I think we are all more than a little frightened about money these days, and with good reason. The Dow fell 777 points on Monday, the biggest one-day drop ever — bigger than the Black Tuesday that precipitated the Great Depression; bigger than the 684 points it fell on the first trading day after 9/11. I like to joke that a falling stock market doesn't affect me — I'm too broke to own any stock — but the fact is, we are all affected by the economic mess in which we find ourselves. 

I'm no financial genius (huge understatement here), but there is one investment I know will never fail: education. If we want our children to make a difference in this world, to build a clean, cost-efficient public transportation system and make it run, to build a green tower using the power of the sun, we must support public education.

This post is a response to my first Chicago Moms Blog challenge, in which those of us who contribute have been asked to write about DonorsChoose.org. Last year's challenge helped more than 75,000 students in high-need public schools. I have mixed feelings about hocking my readers for a donation, so I offer this post as information only. I've checked out the group and it seems pretty cool. One of the most interesting aspects of it is that it allows donors to choose which specific educational project they would like to support. 

This is the time of year when many of us count our blessings, as well as our pennies. As you you count yours, if you find a few extra pennies under the cushions, considering passing them on to a cause you support. It's free to comment or make a pitch for your favorite cause by clicking here. 

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Bickering Be Gone — CMB Post

Originally posted on the now defunct Chicago Moms Blog.

Thing 1: "Don't Touch me."
Thing 2: "I'm not touching you."
Thing 1: "Yes you are."
Thing 2: "No I'm not."
Things 1&2: "Mo-om!"

Thing 2: "That's mine. Put it down."
Thing 1: "No, it's not. I got it at Jack's birthday party."
Thing 2: "Give it. It's mine."
Thing 1: "No, it's not."
Things 1&2: "Mo-om!"

Bickering. Brother-baiting. Driving mom bananas. Call it what you will, but I am done. D-O-N-E — done.

My two youngest boys (ages 10 and 11) are just 16 months apart and have been either best friends or worst enemies their entire lives. I used to boast that the ratio was 90/10 to the good, but lately I have felt the balance shifting as their arguments have increased both in frequency and volume.

Normally, I don't get involved in this standard squabbling fare. The rule in our house is: if he bothers you, that's too bad; if you bother me about him bothering you, that's a catastrophe. A couple of Saturdays ago, however, they woke me up with their bickering; I heard it from an entire floor away.

I now freely admit to you that the consequence my children suffered that fateful morning was stolen from my best friend, who learned it from a grandma type a few years ago when her kids were bickering in public. The basic premise is this: if you have time to bicker, you have time to clean.

The simple eloquence of this consequence should not be underestimated. Instead of blowing my stack over having been so rudely awakened, I simply got up, got dressed and got busy. I explained very calmly to the two rowdy culprits that I was wide awake (thanks to them) and had a lot of work to do, and since they had time to bicker, they had time to clean.

What?

"You heard me. Get dressed and eat some breakfast. We've got work to do."

Over the course of the next couple of hours, Thing 1 picked up all the rotten crab apples in the back yard, took the dog for a long walk and watered the flowers. Thing 2 emptied the dishwasher, took out the garbage and recycling, and helped me fold three loads of laundry. "Folding laundry is boring," he informed me. Really? We have six people in this household and I do laundry every day. Don't tell me about boring.

While the boys delivered folded clothing around the house, I hit upon a stroke of genius (she says humbly). "Put on your bathing suits and meet me in the bathroom," I said. Armed with scrub brushes and a short demonstration, I put one of them into each of our two shower stalls and set them to work, telling them to call me when they thought they were done. After a few false starts, they did a great job and finished off the exercise by taking a shower and washing their hair. Everything and everyone was clean and shiny.

Call it indentured servitude if you must — ransoming their freedom for a little peace and quiet and a couple of clean bathrooms — but it worked. We got a lot done that morning and they played together beautifully for the rest of the afternoon. I can't wait for their next argument. I think we'll clean the closets.

This is an original post to Chicago Moms Blog. When Susan isn't forcing her children into slave labor, she posts on her own blog,Two Kinds of People, and has recently started The Animal Store Blog for her family's pet shop in Lincolnwood, IL. She hopes to find away to put the dog to work soon.

Photo credit: Cleaning by Bies.

Visit Me @ Chicago Moms Blog

Bothered by bickering? Frustrated by family feuds? At your wits end over arguments? Check out my new post, Bickering Be Gone, on the Chicago Moms Blog.

Photo credit: Cleaning by Bies

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Night and Day

My candle burns at both ends

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends —

It gives a lovely light.

— Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

A Few Figs from Thistles, 1920

There are two kinds of people in the world: morning people and night owls. 

When I was a kid, my mother let us extend our bedtime by 15 minutes each year. As a consequence, I came to believe that by the time you were an adult, you didn't need to sleep at all. This would explain four sleep-free years at college (well, this and lots of No-Doz and even more diet Pepsi).

I used to hate going to sleep at night. I loved pushing past the point of no return to finish a book — even a lousy book. I loved late-night TV — talk shows, bad movies and infomercials. I loved hanging with dormmates or roommates or friends and solving all the problems of the world before dawn.

As a working woman, I would still push the envelope. In an office, you need merely to be polite and professional in the morning, not necessarily friendly. After a few hours and a little caffeine, everything would be all right again.

Then came children. It should be illegal, or at least biologically unfavorable for a night owl to give birth to morning people. Three of my four offspring, however, are morning people and one of the little mutants is known as the "Crack-of-dawn Boy." 

You can't get by with simply grunting at your children in the morning. You have to be awake. And pleasant. And ready to go. You don't get weekends off. There are no holidays from these morning people. There they are, every day, little faces hovering over you as you sleep, whispering anxiously: "Mama, are you awake?" 

No. 

"Now are you awake?"

The only human in this bunch would sleep to a reasonable hour if it weren't for the fact that the poor bugger shares a room with Crack-of-dawn Boy. No matter how much COD Boy is threatened by the late sleeper or me, he just can't seem to resist waking up his brother. 

My children have forced me to adopt a semi-pleasant morning outlook. I no longer hit the snooze button 75 times before I finally drag myself out of bed. I have learned by rote to smile and say "good morning". I have developed a reasonably effective routine that keeps me from killing anyone before 8:00 a.m. And I do it all without caffeine. 

But I have not trained myself to go to bed at a regular, reasonable hour. Instead I have developed a schizophrenic cycle of pushing myself to ridiculously late hours three or four nights in a row, and then having to crash by 8:00 p.m. for the next two or three nights. 

Van Gogh said: "I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day." Of course, he cut off his ear and committed suicide.

I know I get my best, most creative work done at night. Perhaps there are fewer distractions. Maybe I have come to think of the night as my time. Maybe it's just a bad habit. But if you find yourself fighting insomnia, send me an email. Three or four nights a week, I'm likely to respond.

Let me know if you are a(n) annoying, perky, pain-in-ass morning person or a normal, creative, interesting night owl by clicking here. In the meantime, it's 1:10 a.m., so before I cut off something important, I'd best get to bed.

If you're still awake, check out this truly angsty interpretation of Cole Porter's classic Night and Day by U2:

Photo credit: Thot nigth by Gian-boy via flickr.com.

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Assuage Any Trouble

"I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage." — Charles De Secondat (1689-1755)

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who love to read and those who don't. I don't remember learning how to read. In fact, I don't remember not knowing how to read. 

I do remember the feeling of power that reading gave me — the power to travel, to explore, to learn, to laugh, to escape. The power to be someone else. The power to imagine. It seems this essential skill has always been imbedded deep in my brain cells, due in no small part to my mother, the librarian, who read to us generously from our earliest days and gifted us with her own love of reading.

I have been a flashlight-under-the-covers reader for as long as I can remember, and I have only recently given myself permission to stop reading a book I don't like. Like my mom, I love reading to my kids. The big kids and I are slowly working our way through the final Harry Potter book. It has taken forever, not because we aren't enjoying it, but because it's hard to find time with teenagers and none of us is willing to let one of the other two get ahead in the story. I'm on my second time through the Rowling series, this time with the little boys, and we are nearly finished with book four. I love that this woman had kids waiting in line to buy her books.

I'm not a fast reader; I read one word at a time, which has limited the number of books I have been able to absorb, but greatly enhanced my enjoyment of the ones I have read. I was delighted this summer to discover that "close reading", the way I do it, is a virtue according to Francine Prose (isn't that a perfect name for a writer?) in her passionate exploration of words, sentences and paragraphs called Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and Those Who Want to Write Them.  

Have you ever walked into the library or bookstore and been totally overwhelmed by the number of possibilities? If you're looking for some guidance, check out the 2008 edition of Field-Tested Books. This Chicago publication contains 143 short (300-500 word) reviews from more than 90 contributors. The question asked of each reviewer was how their perception of a book was affected by the place in which it was read (or vice versa). The online counterpart has even more (and longer) offerings. Let me know what you discover.

Given the surfeit of reading materials — more than 190,000 US book titles published each year, thousands of magazines and countless Web pages — I'd like to thank you for spending some of your reading time on my blog. 

I'm also excited to announce that I have been invited to be a contributing author on Chicago Moms Blog, a collaborative group of moms writing about their lives in Chicago. I will be submitting to this site twice a month and my first post, Lousy Lice, went up today. I look forward to your feedback. Check the sidebar for an updated list of where you can find my writing elsewhere on the Web.

Read — for pleasure, read to your kids, read to learn something new or just to escape. Read to assuage your troubles. And as always, I look forward to your comments — just click here.

Photo credit: Day 110 - Judy and the Dream of Horses by margolove via flickr.com.

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Road Trip

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who take driving vacations and those who don't. Let me preface what may turn into a bit of a rant by acknowledging that during a summer when gas prices topped $4.00 a gallon, any vacation was a luxury (thanks, Mom and Dad).

So now that you know I'm not a total brat, I'd like to say that vacations just aren't what they used to be. I vaguely recall flying to foreign countries, sailing on the crystal clear waters of the Caribbean, and dining in ridiculously expensive restaurants in some of the world's best big cities. Though the memories are distant and few, I know I was there because I have the pictures to prove it (OK, non-digitized slides, so you'll have to take my word for it). 

Now, vacations are all about driving. I was raised in a family that traveled almost exclusively by car. We took wonderful vacations all over the eastern US and well into Canada, and my parents took great care to make the road trip part of the vacation. I don't know how they did it. Perhaps it's because we weren't going to visit anyone, we were just traveling.

I really like to drive and my four kids are topnotch travelers, so when my parents lived in Michigan, I thought nothing of throwing everyone into the car and driving the 268 miles to their house on Pleasant Lake (exactly 4.5 hours door to door). My parents now live in Florida and we have made the trip from Chicago to The Villages about a half dozen times. I know my folks are happy there in the Sunshine State, but no matter how you slice it, 1,200 miles is a looooong road trip. We've tried everything to make it better:  

• Interstate all the way (through IN, KY, TN, GA to FL; or through IL, KY, TN, AL to FL) — relatively efficient, but excruciatingly boring.
  
• Staying over one night with two full days of driving — the most straightforward and least taxing, but still boring.
• Staying over two nights and trying to do something "fun" along the way — cuts into the time you have to visit and it makes it feel like as soon as you get there, it's time to go home.
• Driving straight through starting at 2:30 in the morning — not as bad as it sounds, but pretty exhausting (and it made my father a nervous wreck worrying about us).

Part of the problem with driving between Chicago and Florida is that it's impossible to avoid Tennessee. My apologies to all you Volunteers, but the fact is that I have never been to Tennessee without encountering some form of weirdness. It's not that anything is ever completely wrong in Tennessee, but nothing is ever completely right, either. A couple of examples:

• We stopped at a grocery store that had a tattered sign on the conveyor belt that read: "Belt broken. Please push groceries forward by hand."
• We stopped at a hotel and ordered a rollaway bed. When it was delivered to the room, the springs meant to hold up the bottom half of the mattress were missing. When I pointed this out to the gentleman from housekeeping, he took off his belt and jerry-rigged it saying: "There, that ought to hold you for the night."
• We stopped for drive-thru fast food and it took 54 minutes.

While we're at it, you should also know that it is impossible to get through or around Atlanta without encountering at least one major traffic jam. It doesn't matter what time of day or what day of the week it is, if you get within 100 miles of Atlanta, you will lose at least an hour to gapers' block.

How, you may ask, do we keep from going crazy during this long journey? That I can tell you in one word: tradition. Our traditions are ancient and, truth be told, we have no idea how they started, but they always include at least these three things: Egg McMuffins for breakfast, plenty of books on tape (or rather, CD) and listening to the entire soundtrack of Fiddler on the Roof at least once.

Along the way, we've had more than our fair share of adventures: a blowout on I-65 near Elizabethtown, Kentucky — at midnight, in the rain; having to replace a damaged car-top carrier in the parking lot of Sears in Merillville, Indiana — in December, in the rain; and locking my keys, purse and cell phone in the car — first time ever, thankfully not in the rain. 

This year's excitement came in my parents' driveway when I put the key in the ignition of my car and it would not turn. I jiggled the key; I tried turning the wheel; I tilted the steering column; I tried the remote start; I even read the manual. Nothing worked. One tow, four days and $319 dollars later, I had a brand new cylinder and could turn the key just fine.

Not all of our adventures have been disastrous. On one trip home, we were stuck in a traffic jam — Kentucky, this time, on I-65. Nothing was moving for miles in either direction. I'm a patient driver, but I hate just sitting in traffic, so we decided to go off route. 

We were deep into the story of Tom Sawyer on CD, just at the part where Tom and Huck are rafting out to Jackson's Island on the Mississippi, when we somehow found ourselves driving through Mammoth Cave National Park. It was beautiful wending our way through the twisting roads of this magnificent forest. Along the way, we came upon a strange sign that read: "Road Ends in Water." I had absolutely no idea what that could mean, so we continued on over a hill when, sure enough, the road ended in water — the Green River, to be exact. 

I was just about to turn around when I saw a man at the lip of the water waving us down to him. We crept down the hill to find that he was standing on a small cable ferry. He guided us on board and ferried us across the water to where the road started up again on the other side. I swear, during those few minutes aboard the cable ferry we felt like we had joined Huck and Tom on their log raft and it was pretty cool. You just don't get experiences like that on the Interstate. On the other hand, it took us an hour and a half to go fifteen miles, we were more than happy to return to I-65 and its 65-mile-an-hour speed limit.

I'll admit that our adventures have taught us a few things. My kids have learned that there is nothing we can't handle (after a momentary freak-out, of course). They have all become expert at reading a map and looking for alternate routes. And we have heard some classic tales on CD that none of us would ever have plowed through in print (Swiss Family Robinson, Five Little Peppers and How They Grew and The Borrowers, to name just a few).

Let's end by taking just a moment to honor the two most important accessories for a successful car trip: a cell phone and books on tape. Don't leave home without them, and look for my tips for painless road trips on my HubPages soon. Share your favorite road trip adventure by clicking here.

Photo credit: Lignting fast [sic] by Pedro Vidigal via flickr.com.

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