Stacey's Blog

When people turn 21, most have dreams of a weekend in Las Vegas. They want to gather their friends around and pick one of them to be the designated driver for the night so the celebrating 21-year old will have a babysitter in close proximity. The 21-year old will usually ingest obscene amounts of alcohol and if he/she is lucky they survive into the next day. Most likely the “new adult” spends the next 48 hours nursing a horrendous hangover with remedies that range from more alcohol (I’ll never know why people order Bloody Mary’s after a night of binging) to drinking gallons of a liquid sports drinks or buying Alka Seltzer. Be careful however if you are in Ireland because their cure for a hangover is to bury you up to your neck in moist river sand.

When my oldest knew the moment of true adulthood was upon him, he wanted to do one thing and it didn’t have anything to do with alcohol. “Mom, I want to go skydiving.  With you.”  I would assume that his skydiving idea was something ‘out of the blue’ but I know better.  Kids remember things we tell them. In fact, sometimes they remember with such detail that its scary.

Apparently, my then-21 year old remembered the story I told him some years back about my skydiving experience when I was in college. Three friends of mine and I decided to drive up to Medford, Oregon at two in the morning and jump out of an airplane. The leader of the pack was a friend who had already experienced the thrill of falling through the sky and thought that we should have the same experience. It didn’t matter to us that it was in the middle of the night when we started north on Highway 101 from Arcata all the way to Medford.  We were young and full of spirit and adventure.

We arrived just in time for our eight o’clock class which lasted four hours. I remember toward the end of the class having to jump on the ground from about four feet up which was supposed to simulate the actual ground landing. It didn’t. My landing wasn’t, how would a professional skydiver say, “on the mark?” Cutting to the chase, I missed the target and landed in a field of thistle plants and thistle plants have sticky thorns attached to every stem. Lets just say picking me out of the thistle field was a mess.  But I loved the skydiving part of the story.

I know I left some choice pieces of that tale out of the edited version I told my little Capricorn but I’m guessing he remembered the part when I said, “It was amazing…the most ‘quiet’ I’ve ever experienced.” And he also remembered me telling him that I promised I wouldn’t go skydiving again until both kids were 18.  I was sort of hoping he’d forget that part. He didn’t.

I remember trying to come up with several reasons why I shouldn’t go skydiving that year and here was my pathetic list:

l   I’ll have to tell my mother

l   There are things on my body that flap around in the wind that didn’t when I was 20.

l   My bladder isn’t as strong as it used to be

l   I have a novel to finish

l   I can’t remember where my life insurance policy is…or if I have one

l   I’ll have to tell my mother

But a promise is a promise and I will eventually jump out of an airplane with my oldest. I think I even called the younger of the two-man swarm and asked him if he wanted to join us.

“Are you kidding me?,” Erik said emphatically. “I don’t want to see the ground coming at me that fast but I’ll be on the ground tanning, waiting for the both of you to land but I ain’t jumping out of a plane. I’m too pretty to die this young.”

It’s now 2012 and a few years after my oldest turned 21. In 2010 I watched as my husband jumped out of an airplane with his daughters for his birthday but I have yet to do the deed with my son. I suppose I should get it over with and stop with the excuses.

Speaking of excuses, he’s a dad now. Maybe he’ll want to wait until his daughter is 18. If that’s the case, then I’ll have another 15.3 months to get up the courage to jump out of a plane again.

By that time it can be a true family affair. I hope they have airplanes that can hold nine people because jumping out of an airplane with my entire family would be a dream come true.

When we adults decide to become parents and have more than one kid, the consistency of splitting things evenly between the kids is in the top-ten list of what makes a decent parent. I’m not sure when the “if-he-has-that-then-I-get-one-too” syndrome starts and I’m sure it’s different for every gang of siblings.

Maybe it starts with the older kid wanting to get fed a bottle too because his baby sister gets to be fed by mom and lie peacefully in her arms. Or maybe the right-of-equality starts when the kids are toddlers and the parent have to buy an equal amount of ice cream for each sibling.

My boys shared a room when they were little and I had to make sure that I read them each the equal amount of books before bedtime. I sometimes had to read the same book twice because if one kid got to hear the story close up then the other kid had to hear the story close up. (I finally figured out that if I had them both in one bed when reading one book, it saved time.)

Somewhere along the line they figured out what “shotgun” meant when riding in the car so if I had both boys with me on an excursion one would have to ride “shotgun” on the way there and the other would have to ride “shotgun” on the way home.

If one spent a special night with grandma then the other had to have a special night with grandma. And so on, and so on. Parents hope that the siblings-in-question eventually grow out of or start to “not care” if their brother or sister gets a bigger piece of the apple pie.  At least that’s what we hope.

Fast forward to a few days ago.  My youngest son (who is 23) had a desire to visit his family in Mammoth Lakes but there was a condition. He would come to visit on the condition that “said mother” had to make sure to bake her almost-famous chocolate chip banana bread and stuffed shells so “said son” could bring the “said entrees” back home with him.

I had no problem with that. I enjoy cooking for the kids. It’s like I’m making up for the time in their lives when I could barely pour them a bowl of cereal let alone make up my own recipes for them to devour. So when I’m asked by one of the kids (and this includes my new stepdaughters) to make something they like – and I’m not in the middle of a hot flash which would preclude me from wanting to be anywhere near an oven – I do it with love and gratitude: With love because I love my kids and with gratitude because I’m grateful that I can cook something they actually want to eat.

My youngest came and then left two days later before the heavy snowfall prevented him from trying to drive home in his two-wheel drive vehicle. Erik had to go back to his world of make-up artistry so he couldn’t afford to get stuck at mom’s house. I loaded up the freshly baked chocolate chip banana bread and the stuffed shells into the back of his Jeep, dusted of the snow from his windows and waved him goodbye as he backed out of our driveway.

Erik has specifically asked me to make the above treats so I was totally caught off-guard when I received a text message from Erik’s brother (who is 25) that read something like, “You made ‘E’ stuffed shells…wtf?” I seriously didn’t even think to take a portion of what I made Erik and save some of it for the older sibling. Oy.

That’s the thing about texting…you never really know if the person is really mad about something or not because unless they text, “LOL,” after a statement…they could be irritated. I found myself wanting to defend my actions and texted back, “Well, he asked.” I was wondering if the older sibling felt slighted because his brother got something from me that he didn’t.

Turns out that he wasn’t mad about me giving all the stuffed shells to his younger brother but he did ask me if he could come over and have some of my special baked sweet potato slices for part of his dinner.

I said, “Only if you text Erik to let him know that you got to eat them and he didn’t.”  No matter what the age, that sibling rivalry thing never really goes away. It just gets more subtle.