With the Kids Away, the Snoop Will Prey

Posted on August 2, 2011 by Susan H. Greenberg

The house is quiet. The counters are strangely uncluttered. No dirty socks lie balled beneath the coffee table, no empty glasses litter the top. The bathroom sink remains eerily free of toothpaste streaks.

Yes, it’s the high point of our summer: all three kids are away at camp. No vacation with them is quite as restful or productive as being home alone without them. But now that I’ve thrown away the year’s school projects and washed their sheets, I’m wrestling with that difficult question that has confounded parents since the dawn of time: should I look through their stuff?

I pride myself on respecting my children’s privacy. When I was a teenager, my mother snooped through my drawers, occasionally uncovering contraband or–worse–my angsty adolescent journals. Once, when I wasn’t home, my parents actually opened a letter to me–this was in the snail mail heyday of the late 1970s–from a camp friend who they clearly didn’t trust. True, the letter described, in psychedelic detail, her experience with hallucinogens at a rock concert. But it was addressed to me! And just because she wrote me about it didn’t mean I was doing it.

So I vowed never to spy on my teenagers. And mostly, I haven’t–beyond the occasional check of each laptop’s website “History.” But with no one home, I find myself lingering in their rooms, hoping that maybe they’ve left some clue to their inner lives–a list of goals, a pack of rolling papers, a love note, a pornographic novel–lying around.

Is it snooping? I’m not opening drawers or scouring the dark recesses of the closet. Yet it does seem to fall slightly outside my basic rule of parental “creeping,” as my kids would call it: anything left in public view is fair game. An open email on the  family-room computer, a math test on the kitchen counter, a photo posted casually on a Facebook wall–these I am entitled to gawk at. But what about the text messages that flash on their phones when they’re out of the room? The pictures I might see in their drawers when I’m putting the laundry away? Are those fair game, too?

My standard was sorely tested last summer when my oldest daughter mailed home a box of belongings from Colorado, where she was spending five weeks. I left it sitting, unopened, on her desk–until she called and asked me to check and see if contained a certain pair of jeans. It didn’t, but it did harbor a pretty little journal that she had completely filled up. She must have forgotten it was in there! My fingers caressed the blue cover. I could see little scraps of paper, ticket stubs and photos peeking tantalizingly from between the pages. I confess, I opened to a random page and started reading… but almost immediately, my conscience cried out in alarm. Summoning all my willpower, I slammed the book shut and left it on her bed. Then I called and let her know how honorable I’d been.

Now, if I am being truly honest, I will acknowledge that I didn’t read her journal mainly because I’m not worried about her. She is happy, communicative, responsible, mature, self-respecting and an excellent judge of character. But if she weren’t, I’m not so sure I would have stopped myself from reading. Her younger siblings are headed for a different  kind of adolescence entirely, and I suspect I might not react with the same restraint to uncovering the gold mine of their journals.  When I was a teenager, parental snooping felt like a huge violation and an explicit expression of distrust. Now that I’m a parent, I see it as just another way of making sure your kids are okay. So, Mom and Dad, I still think you shouldn’t have read my mail. But I completely understand why you did.


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Zipping Down the Line

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Susan H. Greenberg

In recent weeks, my son has become obsessed with the idea of building a zip line in our backyard. To me, it sounded like a cockamamie idea–one of his crazy projects that would soon give way to plans for building a hammock out of rope or breaking the record for the world’s biggest rubber-band ball. We ignored it for a while, but he persisted. He researched. He measured. He sketched. He plotted. He decided he could build a better, cheaper version of the kits sold online. Finally he persuaded my husband to take him to Lowe’s, where he spent $180 of his own money on 150 feet of quarter-inch steel cable and other hardware. They spent hours in the backyard, figuring out how to string it up, sinking eye bolts into various trees and bickering occasionally about what was feasible.

Once the wire was hung, my husband tired of the project and wandered inside to check his email. But my son stuck with it. He and a pal built a wooden platform 15 feet off the ground in a maple tree  to serve as the starting point. Then he hit a roadblock: we couldn’t find a local store that carried the ball-bearing trolley needed to slide down the wire, so had to order it from Amazon. Delay of game: two days (free shipping).

When the trolley arrived, he hitched up his rock-climbing harness and did a few test runs from halfway down the wire, then two-thirds, then three-quarters. He picked up a fair bit of speed and nearly crashed into the tree at the end. So he devised a brake system: a rope attached to the harness that a “spotter” would pull back on–hard–if the rider appeared in danger of losing life or limb. My older daughter served, gamely, as the first spotter. As her brother jumped off the platform and hurtled down the wire, she planted herself with the braking rope firmly between her palms. But as he flew past her and neared the tree at the end, the rope slithered forcefully through her hands, causing a blistering burn–and stopping him just in time.

She went inside for ice. At this point–now that I knew the zip line wasn’t going away–I  became invested in the project. I agreed to be his anchor on the second run, and donned work gloves in order to save my hands along with my son’s life. But I wasn’t prepared for the sheer velocity of his ride, and as I clung to the rope, the force pulled me down and dragged me a few feet across the grass, skinning my knee. Zip line two, family zero. With his work crew hobbled, my boy came up with a new plan: he tied the braking rope to a nearby tree so that it would stop the rider, not too abruptly, just short of the end of the line.

Testing it out on baby sister.
“You won’t hit the tree–I promise!”
All’s well that ends well.

It worked. The kids and various friends spent all weekend happily riding down the zip line. I have not tried it yet, but I plan to–as soon as my knee heals. Once again, my son proved that he is capable of great ingenuity, patience, commitment, and perseverance–just not necessarily on his homework. But if the middle school ever needs to install a zip line, nobody will do it better.

 
 
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Holy Mackerel

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Susan H. Greenberg

Like many representatives of his gender, my son is project-driven. Do not ask him to sit and have a conversation, unless it’s about the melting point of copper or where to find 25 pounds of modeling clay. Our house is littered with the detritus of ongoing or abandoned experiments (it’s hard to tell the difference): wooden boards sprouting odd arrangements of nails and wires; pennies soaking in mysterious solutions on the counter; a cup of birch leaves in the freezer; 24 pounds of leftover clay hardening in the basement. We have a mantle full of old medicine bottles and containers, which he dug up with a metal detector in the dregs of an ancient trash heap in the woods. And if ever I’m missing a wooden spoon or mixing bowl, chances are it’s buried in mud and tin foil in the backyard, for reasons only he could explain.

To my credit, if I may say, I am fairly tolerant of all this messy experimentation, perhaps because it is familiar. My father–an engineer–was an inveterate household putterer and handyman, whose forays into plumbing regularly ended with swearing, flooded floors and expensive weekend calls to the professionals. My husband, Mr. Seventy Percent, is famous for starting and partially completing all manner of unnecessary projects (see Yard Work is No Picnic). So when my son texted me from a fishing trip he was on last week with the news that I didn’t need to make dinner because he was hauling home 50 or 60 mackerel, these are some of the things I refrained from saying:

“Since when do you like fish?”
“There’s a reason you never see ‘mackerel’ on a restaurant menu!”
“Sounds like a stinky, bloody mess to me; don’t bother!”
“I’ll order the pizza just in case.”
 

He and his buddy came home, proud and disgusting, spread garbage bags on the picnic table my husband had actually succeeded in refinishing, got out a knife and, in a blaze of fish guts and excited chatter, hacked the Band-Aid sized filets right out of those little mackerel. Then the boys slathered the morsels in butter and herbs and fired up the grill. They took exactly two bites apiece before asking for the leftover pizza. Trying to be a good sport, I put a piece of fish on my plate and dug in. It was oily, mealy and tasteless, but I choked it down anyway. The dogs, however, found the mackerel delicious, and it’s comforting to know that if we ever run out of dog food, we’ve still got 25 pounds of dead fish sitting in the basement freezer.

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The Cursing Toddler

Posted on July 19, 2011 by Susan H. Greenberg

Hey, check out my guest post on Scary Mommy, the site of fellow blogger Jill Smokler!

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The Last Armed Democrat

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Susan H. Greenberg

Our arsenal keeps growing. We already own a pretty good quality bow and arrow and several AirSoft guns; for those of you with pacifist sons or daughters only, these are “toy” weapons that shoot little round pellets, which are neither soft nor biodegradable, despite the claims on the ammo bag. Now my 13-year-old son is angling for an Air Gun. As far as I can tell, this is a euphemism for “BB gun” designed to make it sound more benign: just gentle little puffs of air occasionally interrupted by piercing metal projectiles.

For this latest obsession, I blame YMCA camp. My son ranked the overall sleepaway camp experience a 6 out of 10, but the riflery class got top marks. Apparently he’s a pretty good shot and earned several awards; I don’t know if that makes me feel better or worse. But what really won him over was the riflery counselor, an accomplished marksman, hockey player and all-around resourceful good guy–who also happens to be a staunch Democrat. He wears an Obama belt, my son said.

This is just the sort of role model I’ve always dreaded. In the past, we could temper his militaristic streak by tarring him with our family’s worst slur–“Republican!”–and accusing him of kowtowing to the NRA. But now he’d found a totally cool, gun-slinging, ammo-packing, laser-eyed, steady-handed Obama supporter. He could have it both ways.

It made me long for the days when the only views the kids had were ours. When my son was two and a half, I dragged him and his big sister through a driving rainstorm to Washington so we could attend the Million Mom March, an anti-gun Mother’s Day rally on the mall. This was in 2000, a year after Columbine; I was working for Newsweek at the time and conducted an interview with three Scottish mothers whose kindergarten-age daughters had been killed in a school shooting in Dunblane four years before. They had come to Washington to show their support.

As the mother of young children, an animal lover, and an unrepentant pacifist, I identified  strongly with their cause. I couldn’t envision a single situation that I thought a gun would benefit. I still can’t. But what’s a parent to do when your child loves something you don’t, whether it’s guns, eyebrow piercings or Republican politics?

Oh, if only I had video of that day on the mall! My son leaped out of his stroller, clutching a hot dog, and joined a small line of children giggling and chanting, “No more guns! No more guns!” I think he was even holding a sign.

His inner Rambo began to emerge soon after. Driving in the car two years later,  he grabbed a graham cracker, took a few strategic bites, and said “Look! It’s a gun!” before pointing it at my head. From there we moved, at his persistent urging, into water pistols and cap guns, and then eventually to AirSoft. At first there were all sorts of rules–no pointing them at anyone’s head, no using them without an adult at home, no guns in the house. But before I knew it there was a rifle propped on the family room couch, and little white pellets rattling around the dryer and stuck in the cracks between our old floorboards. Posses of boys I couldn’t recognize through the goggles and camouflage gear were sneaking regularly across our back patio. My son was so desperate for a constant shooting companion that when his little sister turned 8, he bought her an Airsoft starter pistol–in pink.

I remain staunchly opposed to the acquisition of the “Air Gun.” But I am well aware that I once felt the same way about the cap gun, and the AirSoft rifle. Banning weapons is a slippery slope, as any Republican will tell you. I even know a couple of Democrats who might say the same.

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Camp is Just Ducky

Posted on July 5, 2011 by Susan H. Greenberg

It was a 603 number, and the caller ID read, “Merrimack Valley YMCA.” My heart dropped. My 13-year-old son had been at a YMCA sleepaway camp in New Hampshire for a little over a week, and he still had six days to go. The only contact we’d had so far was a form postcard the camp clearly forced him to send: “Dear Family,” it read. “I arrived at camp. This week I am taking…” then in his barely legible scrawl, “basketball, fishing, riflery, archery and campcraft. I miss you and hope your [sic] having fun,” it went on. Before signing his name, he had crossed out the “From” printed on the card and scribbled “Love,” beside what looked suspiciously like a heart. I tried desperately to read between the lines, but the visibility was poor.

So now I was certain the camp was calling with bad news: he was miserably homesick,  or–more likely–he was being difficult, mean, obnoxious or uncooperative, and we needed to come pick him up right away. Maybe he’d snuck over to the girls’ camp after taps, or taken a kayak without permission, or duct-taped the counselor’s mouth shut. The possibilities were endless. “It’s the camp nurse,” the voice said. I felt instant relief: so it was only appendicitis or a broken collar bone! At least he wasn’t getting booted for bad  behavior. “Unfortunately we’ve had an outbreak of duckage,” she said, “and he’s one of the unlucky ones.” “Of what?” I asked. “Duckage,” I heard her say. “It’s a parasite they get from the lake.” “Intestinal?” I asked in dread. “No, it creates a histamine reaction in the body.” “Respiratory?” I wondered. “No,” she said, “it causes itchy red bumps on the skin.” She had buried the lead: he had a rash. “We’re treating it with Zyrtec and hydrocortisone cream. Look it up on Wikipedia; they have a great entry.”

All in good time; now that I had someone on the phone who had actually seen my son in the past 24 hours, I wasn’t about to let her go so quickly. “So, how is he doing?” I asked with forced nonchalance. She didn’t hesitate for a second: “Fabulous!” she said. “They are having the world’s greatest time. Space aliens ‘invaded’ camp last night, and tonight they are having a social with the girls’ camp.” I wanted to kiss her. That was more information than I was ever going to get from the source. Never in my life have I been so happy to have a “rashy kid,” as our pediatrician once called him after treating one of his many outbreaks of poison ivy, some of them self-inflicted (see my brother’s humorous recollection at Globalfit.com).

I got off the phone, still beaming, and typed “Duckage” into the Wikipedia search box. Nothing. So I Googled it–still nothing. Puzzled, I Googled “itchy rash caused by swimming in lake” and there it was: duck itch. A rash caused by duck poop. Oh, happy day!

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Bracing for the Crash

Posted on June 29, 2011 by Susan H. Greenberg

I got a very good piece of advice from a friend whose oldest child is a few years older than mine: do not, under any circumstances, buy a new car within two years of your child’s taking Driver’s Ed. My friend did, and her Toyota Highlander hybrid now bears a series of minor scars inflicted by the daughter she came to call, jokingly, “Crashy.”

So far, my daughter has only nicked a fence post in our driveway. But I am prepared for worse. I have come to realize that this 16-year-old, who is more mature and responsible than many adults I know, and to whom I would entrust my life in countless other situations, does not know what she’s doing behind the wheel of a car. She has completed the required driver’s ed classes–conducted, she said, by an instructor who spoke agonizingly slowly because Massachusetts law mandates only hours of class time, not mastery of content–and has been out with a driving teacher 8 or 9 times. But whenever I let her drive with me, she says confidence-inspiring things like, “Whoa, this is scary!” and “Oh no, traffic!”

I appreciate her honesty; it is indeed strange and frightening to sit in the passenger seat while the child who once had trouble mastering a tricycle commands what my friend Tim called (when his daughter was learning to drive), “a speeding death machine.” Driving is not intuitive to someone who hasn’t been doing it for 30 years. My daughter, for instance, still has trouble figuring out which way to turn the steering wheel when she backs out of a space. And the other day, she started to follow the car in front of her directly through a four-way stop sign. In her defense, I was playing iPhone Scrabble at the time–a diversion I quickly abandoned right before I yelled “STOP! DON’T YOU KNOW YOU HAVE TO OBEY THE SIGN, TOO?” Apparently, she didn’t. I calmed down and explained how to navigate a four-way intersection (didn’t they cover that in Driver’s Ed?). When we got home, I found a triple-letter spot for my Q.

A few weeks ago I let her drive home from Cambridge, which required a difficult merge in heavy traffic onto a highway under construction. (Thankfully, I’d had a cocktail.) She stopped at the stop sign on top of the ramp and waited, instead of inching forward and forcing her way into the traffic stream, as an experienced driver might have. The cars behind us started honking and swerving, irritated, around her. I wanted to kill them. And this is how driving with my daughter has made me a better person: now, whenever I see a car traveling erratically or too slowly or too close to the curb, I no longer think, “Asshole!” Instead, I imagine generously, “It must be a teenager learning to drive.”


Posted in Family life, Kids, Parenting, Reality check, Teenagers | Tagged , | 6 Comments

And Don’t Forget to Write

Posted on June 26, 2011 by Susan H. Greenberg

He didn’t even have his cellphone for comfort. Electronics, of course, are not allowed at summer camp, so when we dropped our 13-year-old son off yesterday at the bus that would take him into the wilds of New Hampshire, he stood around awkwardly, not knowing what to do with his hands. In a cruel twist of fate, the friend he was supposed to go with broke his leg a few weeks ago jumping off a trampoline, and is out of commission all summer–except, his mother joked, for jewelry-making and weaving classes. My stomach knotted as I watched my boy crane his neck to see who else he might know, then march alone up the steps of the bus.

Thirteen is a little old to be going to sleepaway camp for the first time. He’s been to day camps and on a two-week backpacking trip, but not to traditional camp, like his sisters, and I am less confident than I was with the girls that he will love it. I was a camp kid, reveling in everything from the bug juice and campfires to the tennis lessons and talent shows. I was never so happy as I was those summers, conducting “heart to hearts” out in a rowboat, hiking up the mountain, or engaging in the camp-wide Olympics-style competition known back then as Color War. My daughters, 16 and almost 9, have inherited my love of summer camp, and in fact attend the very same YMCA girls’ camp I did–which, thankfully, remains unchanged since I learned to play tether ball there 35 years ago.

But my middle child and only son is pricklier, antsier and more defiant than his sisters. (No wonder the idea of sending him away sounded so appealing.) He fancies himself something of an outdoorsman, and I fear he will find traditional sleepaway camp too formulaic and cushy; he’s the kid who has, on more than one occasion, asked me to blindfold him, drive him into the countryside, let him out of the car and then time how long it takes him to find his way home–a request I have so far denied, though I have little doubt he’d make it by dinner.

Still, I believe there is value in pushing your children–and yourself–beyond the comfort zone, which is why I didn’t let him back out of camp even after his buddy had to. To his credit, he only protested for a day or two, and not with any real conviction. He helped, or at least watched, me pack the trunk, and voiced a few opinions on footwear and towels. I am sure his stomach was as knotted as mine when he turned to us outside the bus door and said cheerfully, “Bye, Mom, Bye, Dad,” allowed a very brief hug, and climbed the steps.

I flashed back to when we moved from New Jersey to the Boston area six years ago, and I had to drop him and his big sister off for school that first day in an unfamiliar building full of total strangers. We all smiled bravely, but I felt like I was pushing them off a cliff. And I flashed forward to when we will, if all goes well, deposit him on some leafy college campus, probably with the same trunk we’d just loaded onto the camp bus. Parenting, I realized, is actually an endless series of goodbyes with a lot of laundry in between, from the first preschool drop-off to the wedding march down the aisle. The sick feeling in your stomach may never disappear, but you can’t let that get in the way.

My only option now is to wait for a letter, and I know full well that could be a long wait.  At least when he goes to college, he’ll be allowed to bring his cellphone.


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My Unaccompanied Minors

Posted on June 19, 2011 by Susan H. Greenberg

Now that the plane has landed, I can admit it: my three kids flew alone together from Boston to Orlando this morning, and I was petrified. For Christmas last year, my sisters-in-law and their partners gave my children the best present ever: a trip to Disney World. They would fly from Chicago and meet my kids at the Orlando airport. It was a win-win:  the kids would have a blast, and my husband and I would get to avoid Disney while enjoying a week to ourselves. So why couldn’t I sleep at all last night?

It wasn’t the travel itself that worried me; my children are relatively self-sufficient, at least when I’m not around, and I have total faith in their ability to navigate the tribulations of travel. (Plus they have cell phones, and cash.) Three years ago, when my big daughter was 13, I put her on an Amtrak train from Boston to New York, with instructions to transfer at Penn Station to New Jersey Transit to visit one of her childhood friends. She relished the adventure, and felt very grown-up embarking alone. Unfortunately, I was so confident of her competence that I had neglected to check Amtrak’s minimum age for independent travel (which, FYI, is 15). When the conductor asked her how old she was, she told the truth–as taught–and got me in a heap of trouble. I had to talk him down on the phone, and he insisted on calling for a police escort to meet her at Penn Station, an unnecessary precaution that she successfully evaded by making a mad dash from the Acela to her New Jersey Transit train.

Plane travel is different. I don’t mind flying alone, and I rather enjoy flying as a family. But I do get panicky if my husband and I fly somewhere alone together (is wherever we’re going really worth the risk, however minimal, of leaving orphans behind?) and, I know now,  when all three kids are flying without us. I am sure I am not the only parent who has thought about this–though I may be the only one with the need to publicly acknowledge it–but if that plane goes down, my life is over, too.

I’ve heard that nonsense about how planes are a million times safer than cars, and I let my kids drive around in all sorts of carpools that, for all I know, could be commandeered by closet jihadists. But the fact remains, you are considerably more likely to survive a car crash than a plane crash. And what terrifies me most, now that I’m really getting into the morbid nitty-gritty of analyzing it, is not only that all three of my kids might die, but that they would have those last few–four? 10?–minutes of panic, of knowing their fate, without me there to hold and comfort them and remind them one last time how much I love them.  That I cannot abide.

Which is why I sat, glued, to the JetBlue flight tracker on my laptop this morning, watching that plane climb from 3,000 to 12,000 to 33,000 feet. I imagined the kids playing Old Maid, drinking Sprite and enjoying their individual seat-back TVs. I worried that maybe my baby’s ears were hurting as I watched the plane descend–25,000 feet, 9,000…. Then my iPhone bleeped happily with a text from my daughter reporting that they were on the ground–long before JetBlue refreshed the page to say “Landed.” Already I have started checking the weather report for Friday, when they will be flying home.

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The Best Things in Life are Freeloaded

Posted on June 16, 2011 by Susan H. Greenberg

This summer, my kids will swim in a series of private pools. My son will golf at a country club. We will vacation in Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.  And it won’t cost us more than the price of a ferry ticket, a few good bottles of wine and some choice hostess gifts. That’s because, lucky for us, some of our closest friends not only possess swimming pools, country club memberships and vacation houses, but are also unflinchingly generous in sharing them.

Somewhere along the way, between unforeseen job changes, unplanned expenses and a worldwide economic crash, we stripped our budget bare and jettisoned luxuries like vacations. But thanks to our friends, we haven’t had to let that get in the way of our taking them. Rather than spend all summer in an un-air-conditioned house in an empty town, we will be enjoying a swim in our neighbors’ pool and sunset cocktails on a breezy deck overlooking Nantucket Bay.

We are master freeloaders. And while it’s not a position I aspired to, it’s surprising how easy it’s become to accept. Partly that’s because our friends are particularly gracious in  making us feel like honored guests instead of poor and pathetic hangers-on with no where to go. But I am not so naive or self-aggrandizing so as to believe that our delightful companionship is all that’s required. Freeloading is hard work. Being a perennial guest, I am always performing calculations in my head: how many times must I empty the dishwasher, sweep the floor, make pancakes, wash and dry the towels, before I’ve earned my keep? Does preparing a really good dinner count for extra credit? Should my husband offer to fix the broken shower door? Should I lose at Bananagrams on purpose?

Freeloading has its down sides, beyond the obvious ones like having no money or vacation house. I worry that we’ll overstay our welcome, or that our friends will grow weary of accommodating my 16-year-old’s vegetarianism and my strong preference for half-and-half in my coffee. I fear the whole arrangement will create imbalance in the friendship, and that we’ll never be able to repay the generosity. And I worry that my children will become entitled and spoiled, and take for granted all the kindness and opportunity they’ve been shown.

As always, the kids remain the biggest obstacle to our being invited back. My little daughter, now 8, has been known to walk into a well-appointed living room in a lovely light-filled beach house full of games, books, toys, people and pets, and announce, “I’m bored.” Once, while swimming with our neighbors in their pool, she and my son, who’s four years older, had a knock-down-drag-out screaming fight complete with tears, as if they were in their own backyard. I was mortified. “There is no fighting when you’re swimming in someone else’s pool!” I hissed, and made them go home. Last summer, while visiting our friends in Nantucket, my son, then 12, instigated a wonderful little game called, “Let’s see how many rocks we can land on the roof of that car,” eventually shattering its rear window. For the $900 it cost us to replace it, we might as well have rented our own place.

But then we would have missed out on the things that make sharing a house with  friends so delightful, at least for the freeloaders: the hanging out in PJs over morning coffee (and half-and-half), the late-night rounds of Catchphrase, the private chats conducted while making up the guest-room bed. If things ever turn around for us, and we find ourselves with a vacation house somewhere–maybe the Berkshires, or Vermont, or the Cape–I know we will fill it with friends, food, wine, laughter and endless rounds of hide-and-seek in the twilight. Until then, I promise to cheerfully wash as many dishes as it takes.

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