Stacey's Blog

I’m really looking forward to the day when my granddaughter can be in charge of how she gets to my house, calls me on the phone, uses SKYPE, Facetime and all the other 21st Century ways that I can keep in touch with her.  Lately she’s been answering her mother’s iPhone which is amusing.

What is frustrating for me is that my son and his wife don’t always have their cell device turned on so when I want to speak with Ameilia I have to wait and wait until they listen to their messages.  Like now for example: I just texted my son and asked where she was. Apparently they are out shopping and Ameilia is home with her grandfather Chris.   I like her Grandpa Chris but I also don’t want to disturb his time with his granddaughter.

So I’ll just sit here and make myself busy, listening to Linda Ronstadt…waiting for some littler person to come over so I can make apple pie with her….

It was my girlfriend’s birthday on Sunday and as fate would have it living in a small town, I ran into her when we were both in the local drug store for different reasons. I was trying to find out where the recycle box was for their plastic bags and she was walking out the door with a few bags full of the things that people usually purchase at a drugstore.

It was a long day for her for reasons that make days long and tiring but as fate would have it, we managed to forget about our lives for a few minutes and headed over to a second-floor restaurant for a bit of girlfriend birthday cheer before we each headed in different directions to attend to our different lives.

She mentioned that she thought of me earlier when she was musing over whether or not to treat herself to a birthday drink and whether or not she should call me but then the thought of me disappeared from her head as other demands of her life needed her attention.  Funny, we thought, how the thought of me meeting her for a birthday drink wasn’t totally out of the reality for the day because we “ran” into each other anyway. Serendipity at its finest. Her aptitude for making desirable discoveries was running at an all-time high that day because she discovered me in her birthday path as I discovered her in my “there’s nothing I have to do today that can’t wait until after I share a birthday drink with my friend” path.

As we were sitting on the stools in a bar and catching up the way girlfriends do, we got on the subject of where we would like to live if we weren’t living in the Eastern Sierra. Other cities and towns were bantered about but we always came back to the Eastern Sierra.

“It’s kind of like we are the CHEERS of California,” she said. “Everybody knows your name.”

It’s true. Live in a small community long enough and a lot of people know your name, know your kids, talk about you when you don’t know it and say things that aren’t necessarily true to people who may not know your name but know your face.

A few months ago I ran into someone at the post office who was a little annoyed at running into me. It was around eight in the evening when, according to her, everyone was supposed to be home. She said she almost made it an entire day without running into someone she knew. She even went so far as to tell me that she went to great lengths to avoid being at the places she may run into someone she knew during the time she thought they would be…wherever. She even went to the gym at sunrise knowing that she would have most of the place to herself at such an ungodly hour.

I agree that sometimes I would like to live in a place where no one knows who I am but that means living anonymously in some city or starting over in some other small town where my husband and I might have to drive more than five minutes to get to the grocery store or post office.

Happy birthday girlfriend and “Cheers” to running into you at the drugstore of our small town…where everybody knew your name!

Writers Block really sucks.  Mix that in with the psychotic episodes of menopause and that is a recipe for cerebral chaos.

Just saying…

When I created the Exhausted Parent Network I was in the throws of raising two boys by myself. There were days when I felt I was drowning in bills, sibling rivalry, work that never got done and the lack of help from anyone.  I would laugh about it sometimes and cry about it a lot.  Days would come and go as would my memory. I worried about being the best parent I could but looking back, realize that I wasn’t such a good single parent.

Now with my kids in their 20′s I would hope that the exhaustion experienced during parenting would abate but it has just turned a different corner.  New money worries are on the horizon and hoping that my boys find their way on this planet is still a constant worry.  I wish I was one of those parents who could totally detach from everything having to do with parenting but I can’t. It’s in my genetic make-up to stay connected.

Maybe to my detriment.

I’ve been dreading this time of year for months. Why? Because I don’t like to wear bathing suits! Not that a summer full of sunshine should indicate that I have to wear a bathing suit but it is warm and I do like to swim. I’m not so keen anymore on laying out under the sun unless there is an umbrella separating me from the rays and I’ve never been a swimsuit prancer but still…

I’ve taken to doing laps in the indoor pool at the local sports club and I always bring one of my big towels from home. No offense but the little, white towels at the club are for size “4’s” and under. Even two of them don’t do the trick for a well-proportioned, zaftig, meno-pausing and “uncomfortable-in-anything-tight” body. Trust me on this one.

Even when I go on an island holiday it is usually to a place where swimsuits are optional because everybody looks the same and no one cares if the latest style of swimwear attire is being pranced around the beach. There are lots and lots of eye contact, lots and lots of laughter and all egos are thrown by the wayside. AND…I will most likely not run into anyone I know.

During the hurricane season of 2010 my husband and I planted ourselves on a “special” beach on the Caribbean of St. Martin/St. Marteen. There were not loads of tourists coming off of cruise ships and the looky-loos were at a minimum. Some people are actually afraid to be in the Caribbean during hurricane season. Go figure.

We met an amusing couple from Wisconsin. They were about 10 years older than us and had everything SPAM™.  The bottom of their thongs (yes that is what we used to call sandals: “Thongs”) had the word SPAM® on them so you always knew where the Wisconsin couple was walking when they were on the sand. They had a SPAM® umbrella attached to their beach chair and their towels had the SPAM® logo written all over. They told us that they visited the SPAM® Museum located in Austin, Minnesota and spent a small fortune in the gift shop. Yes, there is really a SPAM® museum and their website says, “Few experiences in life are as meaningful and meaty-filled as those you’ll have at the magnificent SPAM® Museum. Referred to by some meat historians as The Guggenham, Porkopolis or M.O.M.A. (Museum Of Meat-Themed Awesomeness), the SPAM® Museum is home to the world’s most comprehensive collection of spiced pork artifacts.”

We aren’t going to be going to the Caribbean any time soon but the opportunity for wearing swimsuits is still going strong. What if I get invited to a pool party? What if my stepdaughters who are living with us this summer want me to go with them to lay poolside at Snowcreek or Whitmore or Keogh’s or just on our deck?

I conducted a small survey on my Facebook page asking how my woman-friends felt about wearing bathing suits. Most of them said they didn’t care anymore what they looked like in a bathing suit. A few said they just don’t go out in the sun and another woman actually claimed to not remember what a bathing suit looked like. Three or four said they dreaded shopping for a bathing suit and another claimed that she starved herself for the big bathing suit “unveiling’ and when the day came she was so weak from not eating that she almost passed out.

Bottom line is I’m still going to be doing my laps in the pool and will continue to bring my bigger-than-life towel to the club but it would be really great if they could have a 30 minute period of “bathing suit optional” time at the lap pool…say…between two and three in the morning?

Okay, so the Olympics only come every four years but enough is enough already.  I haven’t seen a movie on Showtime, HBO or Encore since the world has been tuned into London!  Even when it’s not blaring live events, the husband has been recording events while we sleep so he gets up and watches the recording of tennis or swimming or, or, or…

Thankfully the sky sparkled and boomed earlier tonight so I could sit on the deck and watch something other than a race for a medal.

Don’t get me wrong. These athletes are amazing and have worked harder at their goals then most of the human race. All I’m saying is that I would really like to watch a re-run of Harry Potter something or an old western.

I suppose I can stay up until four in the morning again. Then at least I’ll get some much-needed HDTV time.

Father’s come in all shapes and sizes and I’ve known several of them during my life.  Of course the first father I came into contact with was my own, sweet dad.  The other day I was asking my mom about my father and was surprised that there was once a soft, romantic dreamy-eyed young man under the tough and stern exterior who I knew to be my father.

My father picked my mother out of a sorority photograph from Los Angeles Community College when he was on leave from the Air Force.  My Aunt Susan knew my mother and she asked her brother (my dad) who he thought looked like someone he would want to meet from the sorority photograph. Their first date was sometime in 1956.  My Grandmother Bess called my mom and asked if she would go out with her son (my dad) when he came home for a week from his Air Force duties.

The first time my father met my mother was at her apartment located on Blackburn Avenue in the Miracle Mile District of Los Angeles. My mom said the first meeting didn’t go very well because she was having a party at her place when my dad came over.

“A bunch of my friends came over when your dad met me for the first time,” said my mother. “We were dressed in knee high socks and Bermuda shorts and dancing the Jitterbug in the middle of the living room. Your dad wasn’t too impressed with a bunch of teenagers being loud and running around so I’m surprised he asked me out on a second date.”  My mother went on to say that he was much more mature than her friends because he had already been in the Air Force for a few years. Apparently meeting my mother’s rowdy friends didn’t dissuade my father because he asked her out on a second date.  And this is where my jaw dropped:  He took her dancing!  Wait!  My father danced?  Since when did my father like to dance?

“Oh Stacey,” my mother swooned. “Believe it or not he was a good dancer.” After the second date my mother told me that my father went home and told his parents that he just had a date with the woman he was going to marry. Three dates later my dad did ask her to marry him. “I told him he was crazy,” said my mom. “I told him that he couldn’t possibly know me after only five dates.”

For the next few years they courted each other through the mail. My mother still has a stack of the “Par Avian” letters that he sent her from his base in Newfoundland where he was a cryptographer for the Air Force. He was asked to re-enlist but married my mother instead and began the journey of family man and then pharmacist.

The dad I knew wasn’t a very happy person and always looked like he wanted to be somewhere else other than with his family but I guess that wasn’t always the case.  My mother helped shed some light on who he was before he smothered himself with a sense of responsibility to everyone around him…but not to himself.

The life he chose drained him and his will to live. Maybe he thought that the only way he could get out of his groove was by doing what he did – ignore the symptoms of his prostate cancer until it was too late.

So my message to all fathers out there is this: The kind of father you end up being to your kids all depends on the choices you make now. How do you want your kids to remember their life with you when they become parents and start reflecting on their upbringing? Don’t wake up in the morning with regret about anything you are doing with your life.  If you are, change your life. Your kids will respect you more because of it. Whether you like it or not, you are the first hero your children will know and love.

It’s not too late to be a hero to your kids. Start with loving the life you lead and make this coming Father’s Day count.

I’ve never been diagnosed with Adult Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) but throughout the years I’ve had my moments. Lately I’ve had a lot of ADD moments. I lose things all the time but at least they are the same things: My keys, my computer glasses, my flash drive, my sunglasses, my distance glasses, my hair ties.

I’m not as organized as I’d like to be either. This past year I made some stupid mistakes at work and booked two separate guests on the radio for the same time and the same day. I did this a few times and had to call one of the guests and apologize. It was a careless mistake and all I had to do was look at my day planner.  It’s too bad that I seem to always forget to look at my day planner.

I have the years and years of columns I’ve written in several boxes and I know that I have to organize them but the thought of sitting down for several hours going through them is daunting. I also do things like walk away from the cast iron skillet as it’s heating up on the stove after being rinsed out. Cast iron skillets can’t go in the dishwasher and they have to be rinsed, heated then oiled after use. I know when my husband says, “What’s that smell?” or “What’s burning in the kitchen?” that once again I’ve turned the burner on under the cast iron skillet and walked away. From now on I have to consciously stand next to the skillet while it heats up on the stove and tell my brain “hush up” until the burner is turned off under the skillet.

Cleaning day usually starts with one task. I will plug in the vacuum cleaner and then discover that the shelves need dusting. While the vacuum cleaner sits in the middle of the living room waiting its turn, I start to dust the shelves but then I realize that the plants need to be watered. So while the vacuum waits patiently in the middle of the room and the wet rag lies on the shelf, I start to fill the water jug for the plants. However, as I start to carry the water jug toward the first plant I remember that the clothes in the dryer have to be folded or they will wrinkle.  I pull the clothes out of the dryer, fold them on the dining table, carry them downstairs and on my way to the bedroom I notice the tray of pansies sitting on the front porch that I have to plant before the sun goes down.

I throw the clothes on the bed, put on my garden shoes and sunhat and head outside. As soon as I get outside into the garden the pattern starts to repeat itself. I set the pansies down and while looking for the trowel notice that many weeds have sprung up in between the rocks seemingly overnight. I kneel down and start pulling weeds when I realize that it will be much easier if the dirt is wet. I turn on the hose and as I begin to water the weed area for better pulling I also start watering the tulips, the aspen trees and then fill the bird bath with the fresh, clear, mountain liquid. I sat the hose down trying to remember why I came down to the garden in the first place and it was there in the middle of the garden that I had an epiphany. While the vacuum, wet rag, wrinkled clothes and house plants still needing attention, I had a garden epiphany.

Working in the garden is the perfect place for someone with a slight case of Adult ADD, especially if the garden is not very big.  All the chores that need to be done in my garden are within a space the size of a large RV so it didn’t matter if I went from one garden chore to another because eventually they all got done. I watered, hoed, planted and swept the mess of twigs the blue jays were making under the deck. It took about an hour to get my garden work done, including planting the pansies, and by the time I went back into the house to start vacuuming I was beat.

I don’t know if this is something that I’ll have to ask the doctor about but I’m sure that if I was to make an appointment to go see her I would think of something else to do on my way to the office.

Why is it that people have to take a test to drive a car and absolutely anyone can become a parent? Teachers spend hours and hours learning the best ways to teach our kids how make a positive difference in our world yet some of the parents of the kids they teach have no right to be raising children in the first place.

As I was browsing the Internet deciding what my topic was going to be for this week’s column I came across a news piece which literally had me in tears by the time I finished watching these stupid, stupid parents.

On Yahoo Shine, there was a video showing the silent footage from a Laundromats security camera. At first nothing seems amiss but then a father, if you can call him that, picks up a small child and shoves him head first into a front-loading washer, and shuts the door. The article on Shine goes on to say that the father and the mom seem amused at first, but panic quickly sets in when they realize that they can’t get the washer door open. It’s locked automatically, and the child is trapped inside as the washer starts to run.

I watched as the child tumbled helplessly, trapped in the machine, water pouring in, while the parents struggled with the locked door and then went to search for help. Finally, an attendant runs over and disables the machine. It takes a few more seconds to get the door open and the child out.

Are you kidding me?!?! Lucky for the stupid parents who put their child in the washing machine that Yahoo Shine did not release their names or the name of the Laundromat where the parents did that terrible deed to that child. What if it wasn’t even their child? What if they were babysitting a sibling’s child?  How are they going to explain that to the other family members who are wondering how the little person got all those bruises and bumps? Idiots.

No one really knows if the New Jersey “Tanning Mom” really took her daughter into the tanning booth with her because several stories have surfaced and all have contradictions. However, the story remains that the little red-headed five year old daughter did get sunburn from somewhere. Even if it was not in mommy’s tanning booth maybe the parents should do some research on sunblock or sun-protective clothing! Natural born red-heads have a history of being sun-sensitive so keep your daughter out of the harmful sun mom! Idiot.

And then there is the disgusting mother from Upland, Nebraska who apparently was so broke that she decided to sell her two daughters – ages 7 and 14 – for sex, so she could pay her bills. When I read the story of what the mother did to her two daughters, I wanted to throw up. She has damaged her daughters for life. What a selfish “you-know-what.”

I am not by far the perfect parent (like my mother wasJ) but what happened to common sense when it comes to some of the things that parents do to their kids? It’s become such a national and probably international problem that there is actually a website called BadBreeders.com. It is run by Trench Reynolds who has this to say about his site: “…this blog chronicles the worst in some may call parenting. In my opinion the people in these stories don’t deserve to be called parents hence the term Breeders because it seems they just breed children and not raise them properly.”

I’m happy to say that most of the parents I know personally are amazing but I also want to put out there that if you see a parent acting badly towards a child and in a way that harm may come to that child…Call 911!

And if you are reading this and you are here in the Eastern Sierra, call Wild-Iris. There is absolutely no excuse for child abuse of any kind.

“If you can’t be good, be careful.” I was sitting at a table in the corner at The Java Joint working on a writing project. Deb Searles walked in. There were several young men sitting on the leather couches in the back, all who looked to be in their early teens. They seemed to know Mrs. Searles and as they all got up to leave, she fed them the above line. I laughed out loud.

It made me think of the upcoming Mother’s Day. Once a mom, always a mom and it doesn’t matter if the kids are yours or someone else’s. The mother instinct is forever ingrained.

When I first found out I was going to be a mother the spring of 1986 I’ll be honest, I was not thrilled. I was plagued with all the insecurities of someone who never had the mother instinct. Or so I thought. I never ran up to newborns and asked the mothers if I could hold them. I never fawned over the amazing baby photos taken by Annie Leibovitz either. I just didn’t see the cuteness of babies sleeping while resting in various versions of fruits and vegetables or in flower pots. It was a bit weird for me.

However, when in January 1997 I officially became a member of the mom club, the mother instinct kicked in but so did a whole new slew of worries. Will I be able to keep him safe? Will I be able to be a good mother like my mother? Will I read to him enough? Will I make sure he brushes his teeth every night? Will I be able to tell the difference if he’s really sick or just making an excuse not to go to school? How will I know if a fever is just teething or something more serious? Will I nag them too much?  Will I ignore the signs if my sullen teenager is in more trouble than it seems? Will I like his friends? If I don’t like his friends will I have the courage to tell him why?

Old News flash: I had two boys who are now in their mid-twenties and I still worry about them. I tell parents who have kids in grade school, middle school and high school that in some respects it gets easier but in other respects, it doesn’t.

There are many emotional events that a mother endures as the kids grow up. Losing the first tooth, the first day of school, a first date, helping your offspring mend a broken heart…they are all important but one of the most traumatic events a mother goes through is when your teenager gets his or her driver’s license. There is a terrific Subaru commercial out where a father is leaning inside the car from the passenger side telling his daughter the rules of the road. At first she is about six or seven then the commercial cuts back to the father and by the time it cuts back to the teen, she is sixteen and raring to go. She backs out of the driveway and then the scene cuts to her father waving her goodbye.  That scene gets me in the heart all the time.  All we can do as parents is hope that our kids paid attention during driver’s education, driver’s training and pay extra special attention when driving amongst the millions. Even now when my grown boys are going on a road trip I ask them to at least text me when they arrive at their destination.

I worry about their careers. I worry about their health. I worry about their peace of mind.

I found this poem by Chris Marcum who said it best:

Will they make it to trimester three?

We worry about how much they eat

and even when we they poop and pee.

We worry when they’re two and three,

all the scraps, bumps and boo-boo’d knees.

We worry about them cutting hair

and how much of their sister’s they’re willing to spare.

We worry about all the teeth that must come free

and if they will need Orthodontistry.

We worry if they will pass the class,

from their first day of school until their last.

We worry about them going off to college

and if we gave them enough knowledge.

We worry for them when their heart does break

and the scar that they might never shake.

We worry for them on their wedding day,

that the love they share may never fade.

We worry for them when their baby comes

now their worrying has just begun.

A Mother’s worry never ends.

It just evolves and grows and starts again.

From one exhausted parent to many others, “Happy Mother’s Day!”