Show Me the Daughter...Uh Oh

Not too long ago I was watching a TV show and an actress on the show said, “Show me the daughter and I’ll show you the mother.” The actress happened to be dying in the show and she was talking to her mother. She was praising her mother for raising her to be a strong, confident, and loving individual. It was a real tearjerker. Yes, I was watching the Lifetime channel.

Those words, “Show me the daughter and I’ll show you the mother,” really stayed with me. I pondered them for a while, ran them through my head, and then I thought, “Oh crap!” I’m not sure what concerned me more. Was it the images of the girls playing with their dolls and doing a high level of disciplining? Or was it Megan’s obsession with worrying? Her fear for everything from the destruction of the world to the milk is almost out. Or was it Hailey’s carefree, loves a good party mentality that has me threatening to send her to the same college as Megan who will help keep her under control. These fears were compounded when my thoughts were interrupted by screeching and screaming from the girls bathroom where they were yelling about who hit who first. Just great….”Show me the daughter and I’ll show you the mother”. Whoever wrote that must be a perfect parent or better yet, not a parent at all.

Much to my distress these words would not leave my mind. The next day spring conference schedules came home. It appears to be a growing trend in the public school system to have regular fall conferences with every parent and then optional spring conferences. The teachers seem to reserve the spring conferences for students who are having challenges or for any parent who specifically requests the conference. I am proud to say that my daughter’s teachers have not felt it necessary to have a spring conference with Tom and I.

Tom and I, on the other hand, along with our daughters have felt differently. Conferences are a rare opportunity to sit down with a third, non-biased, party and hear all the good things about our children. Tom and I need those moments to reassure us that we are doing a good job. We need those moments to hear about how awesome other people think our children are. It’s purely selfish and ego boosting for Tom and I. As for my daughters, well they like conferences for the same reason. They like to hear about their teacher bragging on them. I think it also sends a message to them that Mom and Dad care about how school is going, and we want to be involved in their lives. After all the girls spend 7 hours out of the day at school which is a significant amount of time. We want to know what is going on while they are away from us.

So, I sent back the form and requested a spring conference for both girls. Tom and I attended the conference, and as usual we received glowing reports on our daughters and their academic lives. “Show me the daughter and I’ll show you the mother,” started to have a slightly different sound to me. Suddenly I began focusing not so much on the negatives which I hope with maturity will fade a little, and I focused more on the positives as well as how some of the negatives could be positives. Hailey’s carefree love of life is often contagious. She is a ray of sunshine not only in our home but everywhere. She also has a big heart and 99.9% of the time if you ask her for help she will gladly respond with a, “yes”. She is a hard worker with a service heart. Megan also possesses a big heart. When she sees a person hurting you can almost see the hurt on her face too. She hates to see a person crying and when she does she is quick to offer comfort and reassurance. She is a nurturer with a caring heart. Her tendency to worry has benefited her in school. She is very studious and places great importance on her grades. What parent would complain about that? Megan studies hard and has great respect for her teachers.

I think all too often as parents we tend to hone in on negative character traits or behaviors in our children, and we forget to take time to focus on the positives. Tom and I have often used school conferences as an opportunity to soak in the good, but we need to do a better job on our own throughout the year. “Show me the daughter and I’ll show you the mother,” crosses my mind regularly now. When it does, I seize the opportunity to look at the positive things in my children, and I also let it serve as a reminder of the women I want them to grow to be. It also challenges me to be a better daughter so people can see what a wonderful mother I have. “Show me the daughter and I’ll show you the mother,” oh that Lifetime channel, it’s good, it’s real good.

The Babysitter

Finding a good babysitter is a challenge. I have always worked outside of the home. This full time stay at home mom thing is a new gig for me. When my daughters were babies, my Tom and I held off putting them in daycare for as long as possible. We managed this with the help of family and flexible work schedules. I dropped down to part time after having Megan so it was pretty easy. We did the whole daycare thing for a few years until Hailey turned 5. She was enrolled in a Young Fives program so we only needed someone to watch her 3 mornings a week. We decided to have a woman come to our house and watch her there. We found a wonderful woman who we will call Jenny.

Jenny was great. Hailey loved Jenny. I’m confident that she loved Jenny more then me and I am secure in my relationship with my daughter to be okay with that reality. Of course it helps that we later moved and put 200 miles between us and Jenny, but I digress. Jenny was cool. Jenny believed Hailey when she said that Mommy always lets her grab a stick of butter and eat away. Feel free to go vomit right now if you need to. Jenny took Hailey shopping when Hailey “had nothing to wear.” Yes this has been an issue since….well since birth. Yes, Jenny was cool and Mommy was drool. The truth is that I loved Jenny too. She was amazingly patient with my head strong, fiery Hailey. I could tell that she genuinely loved Hailey which is a great thing to find in a babysitter. Those of you who have been in my situation know that all you want is someone who will care for your child almost as good as you do. Jenny was everything you could want in a babysitter. She was a day at the spa, a night out with the girls, the realization that your favorite movie is starting on HBO right when you turn on the TV. Simply put she was fabulous.

Unfortunately Jenny developed pneumonia about three months after she started watching Hailey. She was off work for a couple of weeks. Hailey went into the deepest depression that a Wiggle watching 5 year old who has everything she could ever possibly want can enter into. Her life was off kilter. No more spontaneous shopping and no more lunches of straight up butter.

When Jenny returned to work all healthy and eager to see Hailey, Hailey was overjoyed. Fun Jenny was back! Hailey ran up to Jenny and hugged her and said she was so happy to have her back. Upon my leaving for work, Hailey took Jenny by the hand and asked her to go upstairs to her room. When they entered Hailey’s bedroom, Hailey said, “You have got a lot of work to do. Just look at my room since you have been gone. Mommy tried to make me clean it but I didn’t want to.” Oh yah, that’s my daughter. You can imagine how desperately I wanted the floor to open up and swallow me when I heard about this. The pathetic thing is that Jenny found it all amusing and she cleaned the little brats room.

Just in case you are wondering, Hailey does clean her own room, and we asked Jenny to please not clean up after Hailey. But you can see how I can sympathize with the challenges in finding a great babysitter. It seems we have always gone from one extreme to the other. Let me share with you the other extreme.

The other extreme is a teenage, Cell Phone Junkie, gum chomping, girl who can only say, “Yah,” when the phone is not in her hand. When I just need to go out on a date with Tom, the Cell Phone Junkie will do. What annoyed me about the Cell Phone Junkie was, well actually a number of things. When Tom and I returned home on the last night that we had Cell Phone Junkie babysit, I walked into a kitchen sink piled high with dirty dishes. Macaroni and cheese was smeared all over the counters. The sugar bowl was on the counter with a spoon sticking out of it and clumps of sugar stuck to it. $100 says it was Hailey who convinced Cell Phone Junkie that I allow her to eat sugar straight from the sugar bowl. Hailey has progressed from butter to sugar. Choose your poison. Beach towels are lying all over the floor. Apparently the girls went swimming like 20 times and not only needed a new towel after each time but failed to pick any of them up. All the relaxation and enjoyment of my night out with Tom was sucked out of me like fat pulled from a liposuction machine. I take Cell Phone Junkie home, thank her for watching the girls and get the usual, “Yah,” and head back home. When I walk in the door, I see Tom walking into the kitchen from the back porch with a noticeable scowl of annoyance and carrying…soaked paper towel?!?! I guess in addition to allowing my children to eat sugar straight from the sugar bowl, I also allow them to take whole rolls of paper towel, soak them in water, and throw them on the trampoline simply for the joy of seeing the clumps splatter all over the place and ultimately dry in disgusting odd shapes. Why you might ask? Well, according to the daughters the next day, “because we thought it would be fun”.

So in the words of my linguistic Cell Phone Junkie babysitter, “Yah,” it’s hard to find a good babysitter.

Plumbing Plague

Tom and I seem to be plagued with plumbing problems. As I look back on all the houses we have lived in over the years there is only one that never gave us any plumbing problems. For the lucky people who are gifted in the area of home repair this is not a problem. However, I learned very early on in our marriage that Tom was not shall we say a “handyman”.

Our first traumatic experience was a couple years into our marriage. Megan had joined our family, and she was sound asleep in her room which happened to be right off our kitchen. I mentioned to Tom that the kitchen faucet was dripping and wouldn’t stop. Tom said this was no problem and he could fix it. He stepped right up to the sink and began twisting and turning the faucet with a wrench with an appearance of knowledge. I was just about to ask Tom if he thought he should turn the water off when, SPLASH. Old Faithful erupted in my kitchen. The water shot straight up from the faucet like it was coming out of a hydrant. Water was spraying all over the little kitchen. Tom yelled for me to go turn the water off. Ah, little late there Tom. I yelled that I didn’t know where the water shut off was located. Tom ran to take care of it while I felt the instinctual need to run over to the faucet and hold my hand over the nozzle which was jetting water all over the kitchen. In hindsight this seems really ridiculous because there was no stopping the water. It was coming out and all I was managing to do was redirect the spraying to all over me. After what seemed like forever, Tom got the water turned off. We surveyed the water damage which wasn’t too bad all things considered and set to work cleaning up the mess. Remarkably, Megan slept through all the excitement. My dad came over the next day and helped Tom fix the faucet. I’m not sure what we would have done all these years without my dad who has always been willing and able to help with minor home repairs. Let that be a lesson to single ladies, if you are not handy, and you’re not marrying a handy guy, then you better have a handy father.

We had another Old Faithful moment in our next house but this time I knew where the water shut off was located. It also helped that we were renting that house so it was the landlords problem and not Tom’s. Well, let’s be honest here it wasn’t my dad’s problem.

Two houses later we experienced our most costly plumbing problem to date. We were living in a two story home with a finished basement. The basement had an office, family room, toy area and bathroom. When we had visitors they would stay in the family room on the pull out sofa which enabled them to have their own bathroom. Hailey was now an active member of our family. My mom was visiting us one weekend. On Saturday night she went downstairs to get something from her luggage and yelled for Tom and I to come down right away. The carpet was soaked all over the bathroom and well into the family room. Roto Rooter was called first thing in the morning. As the snake started down the toilet, I remember feeling sick with fear. What if there was significant root damage? What if a drain tile was broken? “What if” are such scary and potentially costly words when it comes to plumbing mishaps. It wasn’t too long when I got my answer. What if it is a bunch of Polly Pockets sent on a swim down the toilet by a potty training 3 year old who loves to flush the toilet! Roto Rooter man wasn’t too surprised. He said he usually gets Lego’s. Fortunately it wasn’t a costly plumbing problem, but it was a costly repair from flooding problem. $10,000 later we had the family room and bathroom cleaned, repaired and user ready again, and Hailey received a strong lecture on exactly what is allowed down the toilet.

I shouldn’t have been surprised that 3 months into our next home the sump pump broke and slightly flooded that finished basement. We were lucky that time because we caught it early enough that the only real water soaking was in the storage area. Nevertheless it did require some clean up efforts and a minor headache.

It appears that we are destined to have plumbing issues no matter where we live. When we made our most recent move, we were cautioned against buying a house with a basement because there are flooding issues in this area. Our realtor downplayed the issues as any good realtor would and said that the flooding was only in certain areas and not where we happened to be looking. I told Tom that if a basement was going to flood, it would be our basement, and it would be when he is out of town. No basement…not taking any chances. So we bought a house that does not have a basement. We moved into the house in December. The day after we moved in, the area experienced some of the coldest temperatures ever. I put a load of laundry in the washing machine. When I went to take the laundry out of the washer and put it in the dryer, I was greeted with standing water all over my laundry room. The pipes had frozen. There is just no getting around it. We are cursed. But we are also becoming very skilled in flood clean up. It makes me curious as to what will be our plight in the next house. Toilet? Sink? Shower? Who knows. One thing I am certain of is that odds are there will be a plumbing problem.

Maggie and Naggie

My Tom is directionally challenged, very directionally challenged. When we got married, we decided to move to the city he had grown up in. It always made me laugh because he could get lost in the city he had lived in virtually his whole life. It doesn’t really help to give him written directions because he can still get lost following those. After we moved to the suburbs of a major city, he would call me and ask me to look on the map and help direct him home. He would still get lost.

This inability to follow directions caused me to do something drastic. I bought Tom a Magellan Roadmate for Christmas two years ago. Tom affectionately called her “Maggie”. Tom and Maggie had a special relationship. Maggie was always patient and sweet to Tom. She was patient and sweet even when he blatantly disobeyed her verbal directions and missed turns. See…even gets lost with a GPS. Don’t send this man out into the forest with a compass. You’ll never see him again. I’m not kidding. Yes, Maggie would tell Tom to turn right at the next intersection, and he would fly right through it. Maggie would tell Tom to keep to the right on the highway, and he would stay in the left lane resulting in an exit or a merge onto the wrong highway. When these things would happen, Maggie would simply redirect Tom or politely ask him to, “make a legal U-Turn whenever possible.” Meanwhile, I would be sitting in the passenger seat about ready to explode because Tom is having difficulty following the simple and precise directions from a GPS that he seems to have great affection for.

I told Tom that I was going to invent the “Naggie”. Tom asked what the “Naggie” was, and I explained that it would be a GPS designed for women with husbands who have difficulty following directions. When Naggie told the driver to make a right turn and the driver disobeyed, Naggie would say, “What part of right turn did you not understand?” When the driver failed to veer to the right, Naggie would say, “You went left, and I said ‘right’. I guess I should have said, ‘Your other right!’” Naggie would also have a built in sensor for when the driver was excessively speeding and she would yell at the driver to, “Slow down! You don’t need another ticket!” Tom was not at all amused by my plans for Naggie.

Sadly I must report that Tom and Maggie have broken up. A couple months ago Tom came home with a new GPS. I asked him what happened to Maggie. Tom said that several days prior Maggie wouldn’t turn on for him. She was cold. Wouldn’t respond to his touch. Suddenly she had a change of heart the next day, and she was back. All lit up and ready to serve. Two days later she left Tom again. This time Tom kicked her to the curb. Well, actually he kicked her to a corner in the garage. He ended their relationship. He said he could take her back after the first time but not after the second time. Tom’s new GPS remains nameless. He is trying to keep this relationship strictly professional so as not to have any hurt feelings. No feelings of being let down. His new GPS also speaks 12 languages so it is way more impressive then Maggie. It would be difficult to have a personal relationship with all 12 ladies.

Still, I felt bad for Maggie, seeing her lying there in a heap in the garage. I took pity on the poor girl and welcomed her into my car. She doesn’t have the same glow about her. She’s a displaced GPS. She took a gamble playing games with Tom, and it cost her big time. She’s doing ok in my car. She hasn’t let me down yet. I guess she learned her lesson. Poor Maggie. She did last longer then a Naggie would in Tom’s car. I’m certain he would kick that to the corner of the garage after one day. Who needs a Naggie when they have a wife?

Reality of Plastic Surgery

Sadly I’ve noticed over the past 16 years that my face seems to be developing wrinkles at an alarming rate. As I vainly examine my wrinkles, I notice they are a road map to my past. There are the, “Will I pass this final exam?” wrinkles which were birthed while I was in college. The, “Will I get a job?” wrinkles came shortly after. Tom and I both sport the, “Will we be able to make ends meet?” wrinkles which first came into existence at the beginning of our marriage and have deepened periodically since. We also both have the, “Can we afford to have a baby?” and “Oh no, this next baby is coming about a year and a half early!” And, I am sure that we will never lose our, “Am I doing the right thing as a parent?” wrinkles.

A while back I was complaining about the deep wrinkles between my eyes. My cousin asked me why I scowled so much. She assumed this to be the cause of the wrinkles. In actuality I’ve learned it is from squinting at the sun. I now wear sunglasses nearly all the time when I am outside as a means to combat the enemy. I’m not that confident that it is working.

Tom likes to tease me because anytime I see a commercial for a new face cream claiming to restore youth, I buy it. I’m clinging to the hope that just one more bottle ought to do the trick.

Not all my wrinkles are bad. I have some deep lines around my mouth and some wispy ones by my eyes which say, “I love spending time with my family,” and, “I have the best friends.”

At one time I thought about getting Botox. I figured if this was the one vain indulgence I afforded myself then have at it. Well, one night I was watching a reality TV show and a woman got Botox on her face in the same exact troublesome areas that I have. As the doctor came at her face with a giant needle, I screamed. The reality TV star wasn’t screaming but that is OK because I was screaming for her. I was also shouting, “He’ll poke your eye out!” I decided after that to stick with my creams. No way was a doctor getting that close to my eyes with a needle.

At one time I also considered liposuction. It was a very brief dream shortly after the birth of my daughters when no amount of diet and exercise seemed to be having an impact on my saddlebags. Again, I was watching a reality TV show and liposuction was performed. That doctor rammed an iron stick up and down into this poor woman’s body over and over. He looked like he had an ice pick in his hand and he was fanatically chipping away at her. My hips and thighs were instantly sore. It was as if they had a mind and eyes of their own and could see what was happening to this poor woman. They were screaming, “Please no! Please don’t do that to us!” I comforted my hips and thighs with a donut and assured them that we would never let that crazy doctor near us with his ice chipper.

I have very thin hair. It is genetic. When thoughts of Botox and liposuction were banished, I thought maybe hair plugs would be the way to go. Perhaps I could be happy with wrinkles and saddlebags if I at least had a full head of hair. Well as fate would have it, I saw a man get hair plugs on, you guessed it, a reality TV show. First the doctor scalped the patient and then they treated his head like a giant pin cushion. I almost vomited. I did develop a raging headache. If the need arises, I will just use a wig. If it was good enough for Grandma, then it is good enough for me.

As I write this column, I realize one of two things is clearly evident. One, plastic surgeons should stop performing their services on TV. They are scaring away their customers. Or two, I watch too much reality TV. Perhaps both are true. Either way, I think it is safe to say there will be no Botox, liposuction, or hair plugs in my future. I’ll stick to creams, running, and wigs.