Golden Birthday

Posted on 10/25/12 by Grown and Flown

Mary Dell writes: “Golden Birthday” was an unfamiliar term until our daughter recently clued me in, “Mom, that’s the birthday when your age is the same as the date on the calendar. So, when I turn 17 on November 17th, it will be my golden birthday.” Not sure where I will get my information after she goes to college, leaving me in my empty nest!

In anticipation of her upcoming GBD, I began thinking about birthdays past. When my sister and I were little, our parents hosted traditional, circa early-1960s, parties at home with our school friends and neighborhood kids, cake and ice cream. During my teenage years, my girlfriends all held slumber parties to celebrate our big days. Though it meant we could be served alcohol legally, I don’t recall any special drink-fest marking our 18th birthdays. Neither do I think 21 was any different from 20 or 22.

But as my 25th year drew to a close, I was in school far from my Texas family, feeling homesick and stressed-out from classwork. On October 26th, my GBD, a gorgeous bouquet of 26 yellow roses arrived at my dorm room. Neither my dad nor I knew it was a “golden” day for me; he simply wanted to me to know he was thinking of his daughter and sending love, long-distance. This was a birthday I never forgot.

By 30, I had graduated and moved into Manhattan. A group of friends threw a party, making me feel like I had dropped onto a Woody Allen movie set, in a good way. Five years later I married and moved to the suburbs. So long, Woody!

At 39, I was pregnant with our second child and began to plan my 40th birthday “bash,” dinner out with my husband and our five-year old son. I remember what I was wearing – a pink maternity dress – and recall how the three of us celebrated. My husband had a glass (or two) of red wine and our son and I, ice cream.

Our daughter was born three weeks later and remains my very favorite birthday gift. The yellow roses come in second.

So, in three weeks, our now nearly grown and flown daughter will receive roses from her father. While I’m not sure what color he will pick, we all know how many he will send.

4 1/2 Ways Nursery and Dorm Room Shopping are Alike

Posted on 8/23/12 by Grown and Flown

From Mary Dell:

All summer college freshman and their moms flock to stores for dorm room shopping. Mothers look overwhelmed, aware of the finality of this back-to-school excursion. But is there another reason we moms share a universal look in our eyes? Do we time-travel back 18 years, when we prepared the first tiny rooms for these same children? Once again we are gripped by nesting instincts as we experience 4 1/2 ways nursery and dorm room shopping are alike. Continue reading →

Unexpected Pleasures of Parenting

Posted on 7/5/12 by Grown and Flown

One of life’s great pleasures is having our expectations exceeded. And of all the unexpected pleasures life gives us, perhaps none is greater than becoming a parent. For no matter how much we know we will love our children, the actual experience of loving them is almost beyond words. With a heady cocktail of inexperience and overconfidence I thought I knew what parenthood beheld. I thought I had my mind wrapped around parenting and had realistic expectations of what was to come. Of course, I had no idea.

The surprises:

Being a parent is having a front row seat in the theatre of someone else’s life. It is a chance to witness the entire arc of a life from the first breath, to that first awkward day of middle school, to the moment we hit the replay button and our children have children. Continue reading →

Lessons at the Knee of the Master, My Father in Law

Posted on 4/12/12 by Grown and Flown

The first time I left my eldest child was to go to a wedding, overnight. The celebration was obligatory and I was a wreck. I was worried beyond all reason that something would happen to my thirteen-month-old baby and truly did not want to abandon him for an hour let alone twenty-four hours. My husband convinced me that I had to learn to leave him and that my father-in-law, my son’s grandfather, would care for him, perhaps not exactly like I would, but my son would be in good hands. When I came home, all I can say, is that both sets of hands, big and small, were covered in chocolate. Continue reading →

Broody in the Empty Nest

Posted on 3/13/12 by Grown and Flown

In England they call it being “broody,” the clock ticking feeling that the one thing in the world you want to hold is your own baby. It strikes women in their twenties and thirties and if not dealt with can bring on a sense of panic. But I am in my fifties, almost in an empty nest, and yet I have been having that familiar tug, that feeling like I want to pick up the babies of perfect strangers and have a little cuddle. When I see a young mother struggling with a whiny toddler and a crying baby, I want to walk over pick the baby up, put her over my shoulder and with that rocking motion we mothers know so well, calm her to sleep.

At first I thought that this was some sort of game that mother nature was playing with my head, making me broody when my childbearing days are over, but then I thought again. Mother nature is not playing with me, it is I who played with mother nature and if I remember my margarine ads correctly, this doesn’t end well.

I had my kids in my thirties, long after she intended me to bear offspring. On my clock I have kids in college and could be a decade away from meeting my grandchildren. On her clock, I should have already purchased the layette, hosted the shower, offered to take the baby for the weekend and just maybe visited on Grandparents Day at nursery school. You see I fooled with the timeline the universe had set out for me, yet someplace deep in my soul, deep in a very basic part of my brain the message didn’t get through.

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Laughing Baby

Posted on 3/6/12 by Grown and Flown

A new Rear View Mirror series post.

A colleague forwarded a YouTube video today that shows a baby gurgling with laughter as his father tears a sheet of paper in front of him. Every tear – the sound of it, the sight – sets off peals of happy laughter, unadulterated joy. My response? I cried. Not the sort of “laugh-until-you-cry” moment. Tears of loss and sadness as I remembered my own laughing baby.

I have so few memories of my children laughing like that, or of laughing with them in that way. I went back to work when each of my boys was 12 weeks old. For the first years, I commuted to the city. I had to catch a certain train every day to get home in time for the sitter to catch her bus, and if she missed her bus, it meant strapping two kids into car seats and driving her home, and then coming back to start our evening together. To bathtime and stories. I don’t regret that I have always worked outside the home. I had no choice about this, but I also have no remorse. Continue reading →