It’s October, and so the Halloween decorations have taken over. Actually, they started taking over right after Labor Day, but I refuse to indulge them by paying attention. And since I have had to acknowledge that the last time trick-or-treaters came to my door was about five years ago (or more), I can no longer make excuses for buying the jumbo bag of mini-Twizzlers (which I mostly devour by myself, often eating so many that I have had to run out the night before the big day and buy another bag — just in case.)
So I was admiring the windows in some of the stores downtown, the pumpkins and witches and scarecrows, when I walked by the lingerie shop. Along with the lacy La Perla bras and Hanky Panky panties were some manikins wearing costumes — a French maid, a Marie Antoinette-like French getup (but with a lacy miniskirt), etc.
That’s often how we women dress on Halloween — we flaunt our sexuality, whether as a French maid or a nurse or a sexy witch. I have lent the same nurse costume to a friend for several years now, and each year she tells me what a hit it is. I’m guessing she doesn’t wear it like Nurse Ratched did.
I’ve worn it myself, of course, but after a while it was boring being a nurse. So when I was invited to a Halloween party two years ago, I went as a dominatrix instead; for whatever reason (best not to ask) I had all the various parts of the costume at hand. Needless to say, it was a pretty popular costume.
Two years before, the man I was dating and I decided to play dress-up for our own private Halloween party. I told him I’d be a nurse, but then my friend wanted to borrow my costume and so I showed up as the dominatrix.
He was disappointed. Wrong fantasy!
But, why is it that we women tend to go for “sexy” on Halloween?
It would seem that Levi Johnston’s 15 minutes of fame would have come and gone by now. Once his would-be mother-in-law, Sarah Palin, lost her bid for vice president, you’d have expected that the somewhat hunky, hockey-playing, self-described “f-ing red neck” former boyfriend of Bristol Palin would have settled into his normal life in Wasalia, Alaska, doing whatever it is they do up there. After all, he’s not really famous for anything other than knocking up his teenage girlfriend.
I suppose he could have become a role model for teen parents, chatting up birth control (or abstinence, as Bristol has been) and personal responsibility.
But instead, the 19-year-old is kissing and telling and trash talking about his infant’s grandparents — and has landed on the cover of Vanity Fair. Because that’s how you get noticed nowadays; you dish dirt. Or you pose naked for Playboy (and Levi had been weighing an offer from Playgirl. Can’t say what he looks like nude, but he cleans up very nicely in some pricey designer togs in VF’s photo spread).
I’m not getting paranoid or anything, but I’m starting to feel that it’s a really crappy time to piss someone off, whether you intended to or not. It’s just that nowadays your misdeeds, real or perceived, are going to land you on a confessional TV show, the cover of a magazine or someone’s blog.
The e-mail came late the other night — I need u to send me a photo of the family. Thanks!!
"Family" meaning him, his brother, his dad and me. Whose idea that was — his or the teacher's, I have no idea. Teachers and schools don't really get divorced families, the need for two sets of paperwork to go to two separate house, etc. And that "family" isn't always Mom, Dad and kids.
There always seems to be one teacher who needs pictures of his or her students’ family; I understood it in elementary school when most young kids are still trying to figure out who’s connected to whom and why — especially since most parents throw them curve balls by calling longtime friends “Aunt” or “Uncle. But in high school?
And there never was a problem back in elementary school, because I was a SAHM and married and I was keeper of photographs, as most mothers are.
But now, I am a full-time working divorced mother, and “family photo” has a different meaning. Our family looks different now. Which family is the teacher talking about?
This has been a year of bailouts, but in my house, there have been bailouts for years. I’ve been the Bailout Queen since Day 1. You know — the kind of mother who drops what she’s doing to drive over to her kid’s school to drop off the lunch she notices is still sitting on the countertop, or the homework or field trip permission slip still on the kid’s desk (well, in the case of my family, on the floor).
I have come to my kids’ rescue throughout their young lives.
When it comes to technology, I'd have to say I'm not one of the outliers. I only got a DVD player a few years ago, and that's because it was a gift (never mind that my TV is about 12 years old and isn't flat-screened). I was forced into getting a CD player, but still have my turntable and cassette player. My iPod is so old that it can't load any new songs onto it without freezing up, so I'm forced to listen to the songs that were my "fave" songs — three years ago. I have a serious love/hate with Twitter and Facebook, and with four e-mail accounts at work in addition to my personal e-mail account — meaning hundreds of e-mails a day — I am starting to hate e-mail, period.
And when I reluctantly fell for an ad pitch to upgrade my basic but serviceable cell phone to a fancy Blackberry for free, I hated it and after a week I switched phones with my older son.
Of course, I grew up in a family that was the last family in the world to get a color TV. My father was so against it that he rebelled by watching our old B&W TV for years after it suffered some sort of malfunction that split the screen in half, with one half displayed upside down.
OK, I'm not that weird, but all this technology often makes me ache for a time when I didn't feel so plugged in all the time.
So I've wondered — is technology really bringing people together or is it yet another diversion that keeps us from connecting on a genuine level?
I’m feeling like I’m a little behind the times, well, maybe the high times.
I was all ready to blog about boozing suburban moms after reading author Stefanie Wilder-Taylor’s confession in her Mommy Track’d column “Make Mine a Double: Tales of Twins & Tequila” that she had a drinking problem, when I discover that moms have moved on to pot — just like we warn our kids!
“Middle-aged, middle-class soccer moms are smoking pot ... a lot. These women aren't stoners: they're teachers, lawyers, and, perhaps, even your neighbor who prefers puffing a joint to sipping chardonnay,” writes Gina Kaysen Fernandes in “Marijuana Mamas!” on Momlogic.
There are two kinds of moms — the kinds who hope their kids will become something — politicians, doctors or lawyers — and the kinds who hope their kids don’t become something — drug dealers, hustlers or the kind of people who talk to themselves on street corners.
I’m one of the latter moms, as you probably guessed.
Not that that’s the mom I planned to be; it’s just that when my first-born was young, I was always unsure of the way he played.
“Are you dating someone?” my 15-year-old was asked by a relative while a group of us were celebrating his brother’s high school graduation.
“No. I’m just hooking up.”
Hooking up!?! Did that mean that my “baby” was on his way to becoming a playa?
Now, I'm a hip mom. Of course I've heard of kids hooking up — it's not exactly a new phenomenon. And hooking up to my middle-aged brain means sex (and not the oral sex is the new sex version, either).
As usual, my kids teach me much more than I think I know whenever I stop talking and just listen.
I had planned to bring a wad of tissues because I'm such a girl when it comes to things like this. But I didn't cry. I was just so happy that the day arrived, that he made it through high school, that he survived his teens.
As he told me recently, "A lot can go wrong when you're a teen."
You raise your kid in a safe little nonsexist, organic, Brio bubble, and one day the "Grand Theft Auto" world infiltrates their brain and takes over.
It hit me the other day when I tried to engage my 15-year-old son in a conversation — a noble attempt on my part, but one that should come with a warning: not for the faint of heart.
Needless to say, he didn’t want to talk to me. Most 15-year-old boys don't want to talk, period.
"You're boring," he told me.
"Really? Why?"
"You don't talk about what I talk about with my friends."
"Well, what do you talk about with you friends?" I naively asked, opening the floodgates.
After a long pause, he said, "Who's hot."
"Hot as in who's pretty?"
"No."
"Then, what's hot?"
"A hot body."
I should have stopped there, but, of course, I didn't.
When I told a friend that I was going to — finally — start my own blog, she asked me "Are you a mommy blogger?" (well, after making a snarky remark about entering the 21st century).
I had a visceral reaction, which surprised me. It felt a little like a loaded question, like she was Dirty Harry asking me if I felt lucky — "Well, do you, punk, er Mom?"
Or like she was asking me if I were a good witch or a bad witch a la "the Wizard of Oz."
What is it about "mommy blogger" that give me pause?
I know that on the stress-o-meter, the death of a loved one and divorce are at the top. But if you’re a working parent, having a sick kid or unplanned time off from school is just as stressful. It means someone is going to have to scramble, either changing his or her workday to stay home with the kid, or begging or paying for someone else to do it.
When the swine flu hit recently, it had a lot of parents freaked out, for more reasons than just the flu itself.
Do you go back to the beginning, like Steve Martin so comically did in “The Idiot:” “I was born a poor black child …”
Do you start somewhere in the middle, the wedding, the years of endless diapers, your 40th birthday?
Or do you start now, with the cumulation of experiences, good and bad, that brought you to this place?
Do you focus on the positive — the loves, the marriages, the births, the graduations, the friendships, the promotions — or the darker stuff — deceptions, addictions, mental illness, divorces?
We can tell our story so many different ways, and all, in part, are true.
