Devoted mom or sinister stalker? You be the judge.

“If you become a crocus in a hidden garden,”
said his mother, “I will be a gardener. And I will find you.”

I call my 8 year old son, Eli, “my little bunny.” Today I tossed out the endearing appellation and he looked at me askew and said, “Why do you call me that?”

I told him it was from one of my favorite children’s books, “The Runaway Bunny,” that I used to read to him when he was a toddler. He had no recollection of the book. “Oh, it was such a sweet book,” I recounted. “It was about this little bunny who wanted to run away from his mother.” Hmmm…in this instant it didn’t seem all that sweet to me. “And no matter how he imagines himself running away, his mother always finds a way to hunt him down and drag him back to their sheltered little bunny hole.” OK, I didn’t actually say that last part. But it’s the truth. Suddenly I am not sure what was wrong with me that I not only read that book to my little boy countless times, but that I dubbed it my favorite and actually took to calling him “my little bunny.” OMG, I’m a monster.

I went back and reread the book. My greatest fears were confirmed. Talk about helicopter moms. Everything was starting to make sense; Eli’s intrepid approach to social situations, his continued vows to not attend overnight camp, his insistence that he will never (ever) leave home. It was all my fault. The poor boy thinks that if he even ventures a few miles away from the homestead, I will come after him like some kind of vicious Cassowary and forcibly “guide” him back to where he “belongs” and where I’ll be best able to keep my Machiavellian claws dug deep into his stifled spirit.

Oh, how horrific. “If you become a sailboat and sail away from me,”says the fictitious rabbit, “I will become the wind and blow you where I want you to go.” This mother will stop at nothing to get her wayward youngster back. The saddest part of the whole story is that by the end, the poor hare, whose only goal was to get away from his domineering matriarch, gives up entirely, and resigns himself to an Oedipal life with mama rabbit, eating carrots and believing himself incapable of ever venturing into the world on his own.

Eli starts at a new school next week. I think I’m on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He’s excited to meet his teachers and a whole new cadre of potential friends in the neighborhood. I’m petrified.

Letting them “run away,” even if it’s just to a new school, is harder than you’d think. Maybe I’m being too hard on Mama Rabbit.

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Overdue

I got an $80 collection notice yesterday from the Scottsdale Public Library. $80! Are you kidding? It was for four books my adorable imps had checked out like a decade ago. I was fuming.

I waited until they were strapped into my car after school to spring the news on them. “Mom, can we go for frozen yogurt?” Levi, my 11-year-old, asked. “No, I’m so sorry sweetie,” I cooed, “We have some things to take care of at home today.” My statement hung in the air like a luminous storm cloud.

“Um…what things?” he asked. Hah! He took the bait. “Well,” I casually started, “We have some things that aren’t ours at home and we need to return them and apologize for their tardiness.” I then let the silence sink slowly into their realities. They perplexedly swore their innocence with the conviction of serial killers on death row.

Finally I dropped the other shoe. “When is the last time you boys went to the library?” “We haven’t been to the library in months,” Eli, my 7-year-old, proudly announced. “Uh oh,” murmured Levi. “We forgot to return our books didn’t we?” I reticently mumbled affirmatively and explained that they would need to find the books, take them back to the library, and personally apologize for their laziness. Then I addressed the matter of the fine.

“I am going to pay the fine because if I don’t we will be turned over to a collection agency who will stalk us, threaten to ruin our credit and torment us to the brink of insanity. Then, each of you will pay me back for your share of the bill. No one may set foot in a library until the fine is 100% paid. Clear?”

After the requisite agreements to my terms, Levi asked how much the fine was anyway. “$80,” I replied. Then, as you might expect, came the tears, the pleas for mercy, the imploring sob stories about how long it took to save up that much money. But I was the picture of perfect maternal moderateness. I never flinched, never wavered, never even suffered a moment of my usual neurotic self-doubting. I knew this was a lesson that would pay off down the road and I was teaching it with aplomb.

We found the books and the boys hesitantly went into the library to explain their plight to the kindly librarian at the checkout desk. She feigned a stern reproach and then thanked the boys for their honesty and courage. At home, I collected $40 from each of them. I will admit to feeling a great deal of shame upon prying open my little one’s basketball bank and scooping out every last nickel and dime he had to cover his loss. Levi, on the other hand, brought me a wad of crunched up singles, a few fives and a twenty dollar bill he’d been saving since his birthday in September.

Now, if you’ve never had to take money from your children, let me tell you, it is not an enjoyable task. You feel low, dirty and basically like you’re some kind of hopped up addict who needs to steal from her kids in order to score her next fix. It’s ugly, even when you’re doing it for the right reasons. But I pushed through because I knew that in the long run, this was a lesson in responsibility I did not want to be teaching with much higher stakes five years in the future.

All of this would have been a great maternal success story had it not been for one thing. I called this morning to give the collection agent at the library my credit card number. But I’d been empowered to beg for financial mercy myself by a friend whose daughter had lost a library book once. She told me that there was actually wiggle room when it came to library fines.

I pleaded my case to the grandmotherly librarian on the phone. She explained that she couldn’t erase my fine. But she offered me a significantly lower option that I immediately agreed to. Without getting into specifics, and I don’t want to encourage other violators to take advantage of the kind-hearted folk who work at our public libraries, but let’s just say that Andrew Jackson was happy to help me out and foot this bill entirely.

So here’s the question; do I tell the kids I only had to pay a fraction of the fine? Or do I keep their hard-earned allowance money to drive home a lesson that will serve them well in the future? This truly is a conundrum. Keeping the money would be like making a profit off my children. That definitely cannot be right. But giving it back makes the consequence too lackluster and teaches them that there are always ways to squirm out of taking responsibility.

Why is it that the one time I’m actually certain about my convictions, someone does something kind and admirable and I’m right back in the midst of self-doubt, confusion and parental anxiety? Somehow this just doesn’t seem fair.

Please, tell me what to do!

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Back to school roller derby

Who will be the next School Supply Roller Derby Queen?

Lace up your skates, moms. It’s time to hit the aisles and go for the gold. If you’re fast and tough, you might actually secure that Justice League lunch box and water bottle your kid’s been pining for all year. Show no mercy. It’s back to school time.

God help me I hate school supply shopping. I hate everything associated with school supply shopping. I hate hordes of people fighting over number 2 pencils, I hate trying to find wide-ruled notebook paper amidst piles and piles of college lined loose leaf. I hate having to buy 4 large glue sticks when they always come 3 to a pack. I hate that despite the fact that every school in the world insists on kids bringing ziploc baggies and disinfectant wipes, they never put that stuff with the school supplies and you have to traipse through the entire store with a million other people to get to the cleaning supply and home storage areas before they run out of the items you need to complete your list.

Argh!!!! It’s awful. It was better this year because I took each boy separately. Trying to navigate two supply lists while maneuvering a shopping cart and corralling two young tykes was nearly impossible last year. At least I wised up a bit.

But the whole process is so utterly angst producing. I’m not even sure why. I love shopping, for almost everything. But this is…just…not fun. I spent over $300 for both boys. That sounds like a lot to me. I mean, that doesn’t even include text books or any real type of learning material.

I saw this one woman, who looked equally distraught, and she said that at her school you can pay extra money and they’ll do your school supply shopping for you. Unfortunately, she had flaked and missed the deadline this year. “Rest assured,” she bemoaned, “that wont happen again.” For a moment I wished our school did that.

But then, in some weird masochistic side of my brain, I heard a voice saying, “but you’d miss such a meaningful mom-son experience if you didn’t go school supply shopping each year.” The fact is, given the choice to abdicate all school related shopping excursions, I probably wouldn’t take it. Because even if I tell myself that instead of the crowded Target aisles, we could go to the water park or the movies or somewhere equally fun and carefree, something else would come up and we’d miss that time together and then it would feel just like every other missed moment I feel guilty and forlorn over.

So, I’ll keep body-checking 12 year-olds to get the last package of yellow highlighters and pushing distracted moms’ carts out of the way to retrieve that one Yoda pencil box that my son simply cannot live without. I will do this year after year after year. Because I’m a mom. And that’s just what we do.

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Give me back my Kindle!

I’m okay sharing my bank account, my bed, my body, my children, my soul etc… But don’t ask me to share my Kindle! Look, there are some things that are just not shareable, and my KIndle is one of them.

Okay, so it’s not really MY Kindle. If you want to be technical about it, it’s his. I bought it for him for his birthday last year. It is probably the only gift I’ve ever given him that he actually enjoys. He used it all summer during our travels and he used to use it each morning on the ellipticle. But he got busy at work, ceased exercising altogether and left it to atrophy on his bedside table.

I tried to leave it alone.I knew it wasn’t mine. And honestly, I didn’t think I would become so attached so quickly. But after three trips to various Barnes & Nobles, searching for my latest book club book, I decided it was absurd to waste my time looking for a hardcover version of some $25 book that I was literally going to read and then throw away. So in a weak moment, I ordered a book from the Kindle store and started reading.

Then I was hooked. I started using it every night before bedtime. After a few nights, I started taking it with me during the day for down-times during my carpool regime. I started to wonder how I had ever lived without it (kind of like garage door openers or television remote controls.) I began reading voraciously. One night it finally ran out of juice and I could barely cope. Luckily I found a way to stretch the cord to my bed so I could manage my now ritualistic nighttime reading.

And then it happened. I climbed into bed a about a week ago, turned on my bedside lamp and reached for my new addiction. It was gone. My husband was innocently snoozing beside me. I leapt out of bed and began racing through the house in search of my drug of choice. Finally I found it lodged between two cushions on the couch. I gently cradled it in my arms and safely returned to bed with it. But when I “slid and released the power switch to wake” my coveted mechanism, I was met not with Dinesh D’Souza’s Life After Death: The Evidence but instead found myself smack dab in the center of Norman Podhoretz’s Why are Jews Liberals? It was an afront to my psyche. The last thing I need to be reading before bedtime is some of my husband’s right-wing political propaganda.

I was able to find my spot back in my D’Souza book and his well researched data and philosophical musings helped to ease my mind and allowed me to drift off to sleep peacefully. But this was more than a one night mishap. Every night for a week I’ve gone through a similar trauma. One night I landed mysteriously in Stock Market Wizards by Jack Schwager. Another night proved particularly upsetting when I found myself trapped in the mystical Kabbalah, Science and the Meaning of Life by Rav Michael Laitman. But perhaps most disturbing was my accidental forray into Stevens Levitt and Dubner’s SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance.

I ask you, objectively, are these the kinds of books one should be reading as one relinquishes consciousness and ventures into another dimension? Certainly not! And more importantly, should I be forced consistently to rampage through the house in a frantic effort to locate this pint-size electronic device?

So I have decided to allow my husband the use of his Kindle under the following circumstances:

1) He must accept the fact that it is now my piece of equipment and while he may use it from time to time, he must remember to always keep it charged and replace it from whence it came.

2) I officially have the right of first refusal regarding Kindle usage.

3) Should a Kindle conflict arrise, I alone will assess the situation and render a fair and just judgement as to who is entitled to Kindle usage at that time.

4) He will be responsible for any maintanence/repairs needed on said Kindle.

5) Finally, should we fill up all available Kindle space we will jointly determine which books to delete. (With me obviously having the final say should we come to a standstill.)

Well, I feel much better. It’s wonderful when two people can learn to live harmoniously together. All it takes is a little effort and communication.