Teenage Wasteland

"Happy Sweet 16! Here are your wheels!" — “Happy Sweet 16! Here are your wheels!”

Our fourth daughter was born this summer. We now have four girls, aged 5, 4, 2, and 3 months.

Which means that in 13 years, we will have four teenaged girls.

I didn’t consider that scenario when we were planning our family, for the very simple reason that we didn’t plan our family. It all just happened, fast and furious, and when the dust settled this past July we suddenly had four daughters staring at us.

But I’m reminded of our teenaged future almost daily now, because whenever I venture into public with my daughters, someone will inevitably look at us and say, “Four daughters?!? Wow, that’s going to be interesting when they’re all teenagers!” And instead of “interesting,” they sometimes use words like “challenging,” “crazy,” or “horrible.”

Click here to continue reading at On the Willows.

The War on Fruit Chews

We’re almost a month into Fiona and Campbell’s school year, and the update is: it’s been the BEST back-to-school experience in our family’s history. This year, there was no Second Day trauma; everything went as smoothly as we’d hoped and prayed for (Please don’t hate me; I know I’m lucky and it’s probably just this year. But of all years, with a new baby at home, I’m grateful that the universe decided to kick an easy transition our way!)

I was never particularly concerned about Campbell. To start with, Campbell barely notices where she is as long as there are toy animals to play with. Also, she was returning to the same preschool she attended last year, for the same three days a week.

But Fiona started Kindergarten at our town’s public elementary school. That seemed like a BIG DEAL: new school, new teachers, new kids, new routine, and riding the school bus home. She loves all of it.

And we — Erick and I — love it, too. Whenever someone asks us how Kindergarten is going, we respond in unison, “We LOVE Kindergarten!!” I realize that they’re probably asking how Fiona likes Kindergarten, but whatever. As far as I’m concerned, Kindergarten is the best invention on the planet, and I don’t know why nobody told us earlier.

Get this: Kindergarten takes my child all day long, five days a week! And they return her to me filled with newly acquired knowledge! Just the other day, Fiona asked me to play school with her; she was the teacher, I was the student. And out of nowhere, she writes on the board: 17-0=17. My jaw dropped. Yes, ma’am, that’s MY daughter doing double-digit subtraction! Where’d she learn it? Not from me — from Kindergarten!!

The thing about Kindergarten is that I feel much more distant from the classroom than I did when Fiona was in preschool. I had to drop her off and pick her up from preschool, so I was in her classroom twice a day. I’d exchange greetings with her teacher and hear immediately if anything notable had happened.

Now that Fiona’s in Kindergarten, Erick drops her off on his way to work in the morning (it’s on his way, in the opposite direction from the preschool where I drop Campbell), and she takes the bus home in the afternoon. Fiona does a decent job of reporting on her day, and her teacher sends home a weekly newsletter, but that’s all I have to go on.

In the middle of second week of school, Fiona came home and announced, “I can’t have fruit chews in my lunch anymore.”

I’ve written before about fruit chews: small packets officially labeled “Fruit Flavored Snacks,” known to most non-Gong children as “gummies.” I’m not quite sure how fruit chews became a staple of my children’s diet, since I never ate them as a child and wouldn’t have purchased them on my own. I’m guessing they were introduced to our girls by friends, or even (gasp!) grandparents. I feel vaguely shameful about giving my children daily fruit chew snacks, since I’m aware that they’re probably bad for the teeth and have little nutritional value. But I’ve continued to buy them because my daughters have to eat something, and I figure that if you can’t eat a little junk when you’re a kid, when can you???

I was baffled by this anti-fruit chew edict that Fiona had proclaimed, but far be it from me to show disrespect to her teachers. Instead, I remained calm and mature, and asked, “Okay…why can’t you have fruit chews in your lunch?”

“Because,” she said, “the teachers want us to have nutritious food in our lunches, and fruit chews are just a little bit of fruit juice and mostly colored sugar.”

BAM!

Okay, so it’s quite possible that I’m not getting the full story from my five-year-old. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that she’d misunderstood something and given me information that was slightly off. I’m choosing to believe that’s the case here, because…

WHY, out of all the nutritionally-challenged lunchbox options, would the teachers choose to pick on fruit chews??? Certainly they’ve seen worse, right?

In a good faith effort to determine how bad fruit chews really are, I took a closer look at the box. Right there on the front, it said: “Made with Real Fruit Juice*”

That’s right: an asterisk. Uh-oh.

But that asterisk just leads to a statement that these snacks are made from fruit juice concentrate, and aren’t supposed to replace actual fruit in the diet. Well, duh!

So here’s the skinny: Fruit chews are mostly artificial colors and sugars, including corn starch. But they’re also only 80 calories, and they provide 20% of the recommended daily value of Vitamin C.

That’s not great, but it’s not terrible. In a lineup of snack foods, fruit chews strike me as fairly innocuous. Which begs the question: If you ban fruit chews, where do you draw the line? What about fruit chews’ flat cousin, the Fruit Roll-Up? Potato chips and Fritos? Cheez-Its and Goldfish? What about those “Pizza Fridays” in the school cafeteria? What about a cookie for dessert? (Fiona tells me that baked desserts are okay, but not chocolate bars — another fine line, it seems).

But let’s assume the teachers are okay with their morally ambiguous food restrictions: WHY wouldn’t they draft a letter to the parents informing us of what’s on the banned list? I never received any written instructions as to what I could or couldn’t pack in Fiona’s lunch. Which leaves me, now, in the anxiety-prone position of having to second-guess whether the lunches I pack meet some unknown nutritional standard.

Do I seem overly defensive here?!?!

I suppose I am. In truth, I’m embarrassed that Fiona’s teachers have seen my shame and refused to look away.

That, in a nutshell, is probably the biggest challenge for parents entering this new world of school: We’re sending out our most precious things — these little beings in whom we’ve invested so much of ourselves — into a larger world where they’ll be judged according to standards that are not always clear or fair. And we have no control over it.

If we don’t watch ourselves, we may end up getting defensive over silly things like fruit chews.

Finding My Drink

Almost immediately after I turned 21, I started on a quest to find “my drink.” It seemed like an important part of being a legally-allowed-to-imbibe adult. I wanted to have my own signature drink, a reliable cocktail that I could order whenever I went to a bar.

College, where I turned 21, was all about beer — mostly the beer-flavored drink known as Rolling Rock. But I’ve never been much of a beer drinker, never loved the taste.

During January of my senior year of college, I took a wine tasting class that a local restaurant offered to over-21 students. It was fun, informative, and gave me a good idea of what it looks like to know about wine. But wine is about as lost on me as beer; I’ll drink it with dinner if everyone else is, or to appear sophisticated, but to this day I can’t appreciate the various bouquets and flavors and finishes. White wine tends to give me headaches, red wine tends to give me stomachaches, that’s all I know.

That final year of college, my roommate promised to sell me on the virtues of the “Fuzzy Navel,” a drink she claimed to have perfected. For those who aren’t in the know, a “Fuzzy Navel” is made by mixing peach schnapps with orange juice. It’s delicious in a light, fruity way. One of those dangerous, “You can’t even taste the alcohol” kind of drinks.

But, I’m sorry, you can’t possibly continue to order “Fuzzy Navels” when you move to New York City for your grown-up, post-college career life.

During my early days in New York, I tried what other people were having to see if anything stuck. This was the heyday of “Sex and the City,” so I ordered my share of Cosmopolitans (vodka, triple sec, cranberry & lime juices). Not bad, but the thing about Cosmos is that they’re just a slightly more grown-up version of the “Fuzzy Navel:” light and fruity and frilly. Also, in New York City, Cosmos typically cost a lot of money for very little actual drink. And the biggest problem: everyone else was ordering them, so they weren’t really “MY drink.”

Then I started dating Erick, and for a while I had what he had: orange Stoli and tonic. Meh.

Towards the end of our time in New York, Erick and I (now married) had some friends over for a party. One of these friends — a big, boisterous Australian — handed me a drink and said, “You should try this.” It was a Scotch on the rocks.

I don’t remember what kind of Scotch it was, but it was a revelation. Something in me went BAM! THIS is my drink! It might have been generations of alcoholic Anglo-Saxon ancestors talking, but I listened.

Scotch continues to be my drink of choice. I consider it the perfect drink; a woodsy flavor that’s just the right amount of strong, a drink that can stand alone or go well with dinner. I’m far from a connoisseur, mostly because you really shouldn’t drink Scotch while pregnant, and I’ve been pregnant for the past six years. But I’m not anymore!

And that big, boisterous Australian who poured me my first Scotch? True story: He’s now the pastor of a church outside of Boston. One of the many reasons I love God.

NOTE: Please don’t read this as condoning alcohol abuse. Drink responsibly, everyone! Just saying that it’s nice to have a drink to call your own. Mine is Scotch, and I enjoy a glass of it every once in a while after the girls are all tucked in.

Jump in a Lake

One of my favorite things about living in Vermont is that my daughters have become lake swimmers.

I was raised with the belief that the world is divided into two types of people: lake people and ocean people. My mother, who grew up spending summers at her family’s camp on New Hampshire’s Merrymeeting Lake, is a lake person. My father, who grew up escaping industrial Lawrence, Massachusetts, by packing into a car with friends and heading for the New Hampshire beaches, is an ocean person. Since as a daughter it was my job to reject everything relating to my mother, I grew up proclaiming myself an ocean person.

Click here to continue reading my latest “Faith in Vermont” column for The Addison Independent.

Little Women

Since the birth of our fourth daughter, several people have made the comparison between the four Gong Girls and the four March sisters — protagonists of Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel, Little Women. It happens that our daughters are familiar with Little Women (in the form of an abridged version by Usborne Books), and the comparison is not lost on them. “Which one is Georgia?” they’ll ask whenever I read it to them, “Which one am I?”

Louisa May Alcott divided the March sisters into easily identifiable types; the types you might expect based on the conventional wisdom of birth order. Meg, the oldest, is responsible and steady, with a weakness for fashion. Second-born Jo is the tomboy, a temperamental writer. Beth is sweet, sickly, self-sacrificing, and prefers quietly playing her piano. The youngest, Amy, is a spoiled, petulant, artistic type.

In families with multiple children, each sibling tends to carve out a distinct role. But when we read Little Women and they ask, “Which one am I?” the most honest response would be: “Not the one you think!”

Our girls don’t conform to the sisterly types created by Louisa May Alcott. Sure, the Gong girls are still in the process of becoming, and Abigail’s still an unknown quantity, but I’m fairly confident that our family has no sweet, quiet, sickly Beth. Most days it feels like we have four Jo-Amy hybrids: independent, temperamental, outspoken bundles of energy.

The thing is: None of my girls is turning out to be whom I thought she’d be.

Like most parents, I brought certain expectations to the table based on my own upbringing, the birth order archetypes I’d learned in college psychology classes, and sibling characters like those in Little Women. But I’m finding that one of the most fun and rewarding parts of parenting is setting those expectations aside and watching as my children are gradually revealed to me. I know that some parents never let go of their expectations and force their children into molds of their own making. To me, parenting feels more like archaeology: My children came to me already themselves, like fossils embedded in rock, and it’s my delight to gently chip and brush away the extraneous dirt to uncover who they really are. (And hopefully instill some manners along the way).

Take my first- and second-borns, for instance. Fiona: a sweet people-pleaser with a strong dramatic streak and a love of all things pink and princess-y; I’d pegged her for the shy, girly girl who’d gravitate towards dance and theater. And Campbell, who’s always been a little bit of a rebel, who loves yellow and lions and seemed tougher than her older sister; I assumed she’d be the outgoing, sporty one.

It looks like, in both of these cases, my first assumptions were totally wrong. Fiona is definitely the classic firstborn responsible people-pleaser, but she’s not particularly shy. And she’s not interested in dance or theater; her love is sports, something I never saw coming. She’s already a solid swimmer, she’s proud of her fast running and will race anything that moves, and she’s looking forward to playing soccer next year (although apparently, despite never having picked up a racket, she’s “mostly interested in tennis.”)

Campbell has little interest in sports. She’s certainly independent and “tough,” in the sense that she doesn’t care what others think of her. But she’s also the most introverted of all my daughters. She loves animals and nature: She’s happiest playing ponies by herself, or picking a bouquet of flowers. and her career plans at the moment vary between veterinarian, florist, artist, and mountaineer.

And then there’s Georgia. It’s hilarious that Georgia is the one in the “sweet third daughter” position, because she bears absolutely zero resemblance to Louisa May Alcott’s Beth. Georgia is a fireball: She’s outgoing, never stops talking, fiercely independent, afraid of nothing, and she loves to eat. She’s only two, so it’s still hard to separate the essential Georgia from the terrible two-ness, but she seems inclined to grab life by the neck and throttle it. (Or maybe the frequency with which she bites her sisters is really an indication that she wants to take a big bite out of life).

The poet Sylvia Plath wrote in “Morning Song:” “I’m no more your mother than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow effacement at the wind’s hand.” I used to think Plath had a detached view of motherhood because she was depressed, but now I understand that line differently. I don’t know where these kids came from. Sure, there are certain aspects of their personalities that I recognize as coming from me or Erick, but there are other, HUGE parts of who they are that I can’t even relate to. One of Fiona’s favorite parts of kindergarten is P.E., which was exactly what I dreaded for my entire school career. Where did THAT come from???

Of course, my girls are still very young, and all of the things I’ve just written about them are subject to change in the coming years. The essential point remains, and here’s an illustration: Now that Campbell and Fiona are attending separate schools, Campbell is emerging from her big sister’s shadow and into her own. This mostly means horrible fights, but the other day when Fiona was getting a little too bossy, Campbell looked at her and said: “I am NOT you! I am A DIFFERENT PERSON!”

And that’s just the thing about parenting: Our children are, and always have been, different people. That’s either scary or exciting. At the moment, I’m choosing to focus on the exciting.

Secrets and Truths

Shortly after this picture was taken, I imposed a “bottoms must be worn at all times” rule in our house. (Because really, you never know when the Queen might drop by).

When I feel guilty as a mother, it usually stems from the vast distance between the parent I thought I’d be, the parent I’d LIKE to be, the parent I present myself as in public and on Facebook — and the reality. I know I’m not alone here, but because I try to keep certain parts of my parenting under wraps, it sometimes feels like I’m alone. In an effort to correct this, here are some of my guilty parenting secrets:

-We have a drawer full of Barbies in our living room. We also have Barbie books, and the girls check out Barbie movies from the library on a weekly basis. I don’t love this, but I’ve allowed it.

-Speaking of the library: I live in fear that someday our local library will be able to trace all of the books that are repaired with packing tape back to our family, and we’ll have our library cards revoked for life.

-While I make feeble attempts to provide a variety of healthy food options, my daughters essentially live on a diet of Cheez-Its and what I optimistically refer to as “fruit chews.” Every non-Gong child I know calls “fruit chews” “gummies,” which is a more accurate term, since these processed snacks contain absolutely no natural fruit products.

-My daughters drink a lot of water, and each one has a personal water bottle — a stainless steel bottle with a plastic flip-top and rubber straw. I tote these bottles around in our diaper bag, and if you were to take one apart you would probably be appalled at the musty odor and visible mold on the rubber straw. I blame Thermos for creating a water bottle that’s a pain in the neck to clean, but I also credit Thermos with my daughters’ hardy immune systems.

-I have an iPod, but it’s no longer really mine; it now contains more Tinkerbell, Sesame Street, and My Little Pony games than my own apps. That’s because the only way I’ve been able to get my oldest daughter to stay out of my hair while her younger sisters nap is to hand her the iPod. She probably spends way too much time on it, and I’ve had to limit her to downloading one new game per week. But without that iPod, this blog wouldn’t exist.

-We don’t own a T.V., but the portable DVD player we received last Christmas has saved my sanity many times — and not just during long road trips. In an attempt to be a good mother, I limit the girls to 30 minutes of daily “screen time,” watching DVDs they choose at the library. This means that, especially during the summer months, they almost always watch 30 minutes of videos per day. How did anyone cook dinner before videos existed?

-I usually forget to give Abigail her daily vitamin D drops. She rarely gets daily “tummy time.” Abigail spends most of her time in her carseat or in the Moby wrap.

-On the first day of school, when every other parent is putting up Facebook posts about how they cried while dropping off their kids, I am gripped by the fear that I don’t love my kids enough. I have never once, not EVER, even become mildly choked up when dropping my kids off on the first day of school. Instead, I fly out the door with arms spread wide yelling, “FREEEEDOM!!!!” (Then I buckle the remaining 2 kids into their carseats and go grocery shopping).

-While we’re on the subject of school attendance: On those rare days (thank you, Thermos!) when a daughter is sick and can’t attend school, I don’t feel sympathy so much as I feel wrathful and vengeance-seeking.

Well, it felt good to get THAT off my chest. Who’s with me?

Traffic in Vermont?

When we first moved to Vermont, my husband noticed something unusual about the news coverage on our local NPR affiliate: there was never any traffic report. To compensate, the weather forecast often ran as long as ten minutes.

Continue reading my latest “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

A Cure for August Annoyance

I once heard that Facebook, the social media site originally founded as a way for college students to connect, has found its target audience in a new demographic: 30-something stay-at-home moms. That certainly rings true to me; on those days when we don’t leave the house and my only adult conversation happens after my husband returns from work, it can feel like a refreshing little escape to log on to Facebook and see that there’s a whole other world out there: a world of friends, my age, who are eating ribs RIGHT NOW!

I’ve been logging on to Facebook more often than usual this summer. The major reason for this is that we have a new baby, which increases the number of days when we don’t leave the house. I’m spending about 12 hours a day feeding the baby. Half of the time I’ll feed the baby with one hand while with the other I cook dinner. change another child’s diaper, or repair the transmission on our minivan. But that still leaves almost 6 hours when I’m feeding the baby in peace; the perfect time to check Facebook.

I’ve particularly needed the escape of Facebook during August. Why? Well, as of the moment this post publishes, there is one day until school starts. Want to know how many hours? 19! Anybody else counting down to the first day of school? Can I get an “Amen!”?

Yes, in August we entered the “Countdown to School” portion of our summer: that time when summer starts to lose its glow, when we’ve all spent too much time together, when the girls are bickering constantly with each other and driving me nuts.

The first week of August was the worst, because my two oldest girls spent every morning at an outdoor nature camp. They loved this camp, and then they’d come home filthy and exhausted and be terrible people until bedtime. One daughter chose this same week to become obsessive-compulsive about her clothes; she’d change outfits 20 times a day until we finally responded by moving all of her clothes to the basement. There was eye-rolling and door slamming and angst; nobody warned me that adolescence starts at kindergarten.

I was grouchy and annoyed with my kids. I sought solace in Facebook.

The thing is, that wasn’t a very happy time on Facebook, either. For a couple of weeks, I couldn’t log on to Facebook without encountering some tragedy, and all of these incidents involved parents or their children. I won’t go into detail here, because these are not my tragedies to share — they involved my friends’ friends or family: toddlers dying, newborns dying, parents dying in childbirth or just prior to the birth of their children. The kind of things we like to tune out, to pretend don’t happen anymore in this time and place. The kind of things that remind us of how we’re all walking around with pianos dangling over our heads, and it’s just a matter of time until the rope snaps. That could have been MY child. That could have been ME.

One afternoon, I logged on to Facebook during naptime as an alternative to clawing my eyebrows out after a particularly frustrating encounter with a daughter. I found myself choking back tears while reading the account of a baby who’d died days after birth. Then it hit me:

It is a LUXURY — a BLESSING — to be annoyed by my kids.

Annoyance means that they’re here, and I’m here, and we’ve had the gift of enough time together to really get under each others’ skin.

I’m still counting down the days, hours, and seconds until school starts. I don’t expect that I’ll stop feeling annoyed with my kids anytime soon. But when I do, I will remind myself that annoyance is a by-product of time, and time is a gift that not everybody gets.

Life Lessons from the Dog Whisperer

Our dog suffers from anxiety issues and low self-esteem.

Before owning a dog, it never occurred to me that dogs could suffer from anxiety and low self-esteem. There are a LOT of things that never occur to non-dog-owners; then you get a dog, and the next thing you know you’re consulting a dog whisperer and shelling out $16 at the natural food co-op for “Rescue Remedy,” a plant-based stress-reliever with which to lace the doggie bowl water.

True story.

Click here to continue reading over at On the Willows.

Kindergarten and Community

My oldest daughter begins kindergarten at our town’s public elementary school next week, so last spring I attended the school’s “Parent Information Night.” More than anything else in the past five years, attending a kindergarten information night made me feel like a grown up, like a MOM, …old. It’s one thing to have children and be responsible for their upbringing; it’s another thing to sit on plastic chairs in a stuffy music room and realize that you’re about to become part of an entirely new community: a school community, with its teachers and administrators and volunteer commitments and dates-to-remember.

Click here to continue reading at The Addison Independent.