Pertinent to my Interests

I’m signed up with a temp agency and I got my first assignment: a two-week position in a nearby school office.

I am looking forward to trying out this working parent thing for just the two-week stint. If it’s absolutely horrendous I can easily remove myself from the temp agency’s employment and embrace a future spent within the four walls of my house.

I’m guessing it will be mostly but not completely horrendous. Hopefully not enough to dissuade me from going back to work. It will, at the very least, be a massive learning experience for all of us.

Please send your best tips for working parents.

Discombobulating subject change:

I had a dream a few nights ago that I was playing a waterlogged piano. I remember many of my dreams and they are often very vivid, but I don’t usually assign much meaning to them beyond the obvious connections. But this waterlogged piano has me mystified. It feels like it must have greater significance, but I can’t think of what that could be.

Please also send your best guess for the meaning of the waterlogged piano.

Another non sequitur:

We have no plans this weekend, because I have a longstanding commitment to not making any plans the first weekend after school has started (thank you, Jen Hatmaker, for this and all your other parenting advice that I didn’t know I needed). I love having no plans.

The last non sequitur:

Earlier this summer I picked out the Netflix series Wednesday as my new gym-only show. The gym-only show is an important part of my motivation to go to the gym and I’ve gone through several gym-only shows in the year and a half that I’ve had a gym membership.

Today I am watching the rest of Wednesday from the comfort of my basement couch. Because you know what? I’m willing to try out the full-time working parent lifestyle for two weeks. But I know I’m not going to even attempt the full-time working parent and dedicated exerciser lifestyle. Someday I will have to, but not this time.

Well, the children are back at school and I am able to eat again.

My oldest picked up some sort of terrible stomach bug at his sixth grade orientation last Thursday, something we did not realize until we found ourselves cleaning vomit from the cabin carpet at 2 AM last Saturday.

A few more of us were felled like dominoes as the weekend progressed and as a result, I spent most of the first day of school in bed: hungry, tired, with a painful stomach, and the worst headache of my life. I would have googled “how to tell if it’s a migraine” but even looking at my phone was too painful and it was all I could do to drift in and out of consciousness for several hours.*

My youngest woke me from my strange half-dreams with a phone call demanding that I pick him up immediately from the after-school care program. We finally got him signed up this year so that I can go back to work, and he’s not particularly happy about it. I’m still (f)unemployed, but we don’t want to lose the spot so he’s going for a little bit every day.

It’s a weird year. My oldest rides the bus to middle school now. After years of being at the same elementary school we don’t even bother to read the principal’s newsletters or the parent handbook anymore, but now I’m forcing myself to read everything the middle school sends because we have no idea what we’re doing.

And my kids are at different school. The last time my kids were at different schools was before face masks, and distance learning, and mRNA vaccines. It was approximately six lifetimes ago. So I’m really confused by the fact that they now go to different buildings in different ways on different schedules every day.

And then I’ll go back to work and there will be even more change.

*I just did some research and have concluded that it was not a migraine.

We went to the Minnesota State Fair on Monday, despite the staggering heat and humidity.

“Are you a Fair person?” Minnesotans often ask each other this time of year. “Are you going to the Fair this year?”

I am probably not a Fair person. I like the bucket of cookies and the SkyGlider. I like the cows. I like that other people like the Fair, but it’s too hot and overwhelming for me.

When I was a college freshman I showed up for our week of orientation to discover one of the optional activities was taking a charter bus to the Minnesota State Fair. Having just left my tiny, rural hometown, and having been underwhelmed several times by my local country fair, I did not even consider the trip. Why would I? Why would I move all this way to live in a city and then kick off my urban experience by attending the local fair? No, thank you.

I don’t think I attended the State Fair until my senior year of college. This would be both the first and last time I would attend the Fair without kids in tow. I mostly just remember being impressed and confused about how well my friend was able to navigate us around.

We only stayed for a few hours this year. It was so hot. My oldest almost melted into the asphalt on the way to the bus stop. My bucket of cookies melted into one giant cookie while we were waiting at the bus stop.

Every year when we stumble out the exit of the fairgrounds I feel a sense of relief. I have done my Minnesota parental duty and purchased overpriced deep-friend candy bars for my kids. I have begged, once again, to go see the animals and have been disappointed, once again, by my kids’ lack of desire to see the animals. I have punished them by forcing them to go on Ye Olde Mill. I have sweated my ass off waiting for them to finish their rides in the Midway.

And now we can go home and we don’t have to do it again for a year.

Lest my previous post about our allowance strategy lead anyone to think that I have my shit together, I am posting today about how I often struggle to stick with things.

Earlier this year we started doing gratitude journaling at dinnertime. It was easy, it took about thirty seconds, and all I had to do was remember to get the pens and journals out as I was setting the table. This lasted for maybe three months, and now the journals are abandoned somewhere on the art cabinet, buried beneath many hand-drawn diagrams of the kids’ extensive Minecraft plans.

My big plan for this summer was to teach the kids to type. I mean my big plan was for Mavis Beacon to teach them how to type. I don’t understand why they haven’t learned to type in school, but I figured just ten minutes per day in the summer would get them a solid foundation at least. But between our ten-day vacation in June, our whole week at the cabin in July, two full weeks of camps that same month, and then tonsillectomy at the beginning of August they have barely done any typing. The few weeks when we did it consistently were very successful, but now I’m staring down the last week of summer and wondering if it’s even worth it to start them back up on this project.

My hobbies suffer from this same lack of consistent interest and care. I’ll read five books in one month, and then go two without reading a single book. I love playing the piano but will play for hours over the course of one week, and then let the keys collect dust for the next six weeks.

I think the only things I can keep up with consistently are the things I have to keep up with. There are serious consequences if I don’t feed the kids every night. There are very fragrant consequences if I don’t do the cat litter every day.

I wish I could be more consistent. My friend sent me a bunch of information about getting kids to contribute to the household without chore charts and nagging. It looks like a really good idea, a good system. But… can I keep it up consistently? I know how I am. We’re going to have one busy day that saps my bandwidth and the system will crash down around me as I straighten the shoes and wipe down the table myself.

Is it worth it to even try to do these things if I know I can’t stick with it?

A little more than a year ago, I instituted a new allowance strategy in our household.

We had a problem with the previous allowance system in that it was paid out at random times and sent directly to the kids’ bank accounts. The kids had no real idea how much money they had and thus my youngest was constantly spending money and my oldest was never spending money and I was questioning the entire purpose of allowance.

We certainly were not teaching them how to handle money.

So I started the Give/Save/Spend system, which I read about in an irritating book. The system annoys me, for reasons I can’t quite articulate, but it works.

Our Give/Save/Spend system is all cash, which works great for the kids to see and feel how much money they actually have. I bought cute little money containers on Etsy, and on the first of each month each kid receives $60 split evenly between the three categories.

My youngest can no longer buy whatever he wants at any time. He had a $6 online subscription going for a while, but cancelled it after two months when he saw how much less spending money he had. If he wants something expensive, he has to wait to save the money. Usually this doesn’t happen and his monthly spend money goes straight to the CEO of Roblox who is making huge amounts of money off of gen alpha. But I think it’s instructive for him to go to stores, see a stuffed animal he wants, and have to put it back because he cannot afford it.

My oldest–an actual squirrel–is being forced to spend. I told him when we started this system that the spend money had to be spent; there was no option to move spend money into the save category. This may seem perverse, but I think it is necessary for a child who is wound too tightly and sees the spending of money as a massive failure of self-control. I told him if he didn’t spend all his spend money by the end of August I would be taking it and using it to buy expensive chocolate for myself, so he’s been slowly working on purchasing things that make him happy, mostly manga.

My plan for the save jars had been to watch the cash grow for a year and then transfer it to their savings accounts, but we ended up deciding to teach them about investing instead. Well, my husband is teaching them about investing. He took the cash they had saved and helped them pick out funds and now they each have money in the markets, which they check on from time to time. We talk about how much more money they will make if they can keep their money invested as long as possible. I hope this is instructive.

And that brings us to the give jars. My oldest gave some money to a class trip fund earlier in the year, but otherwise the give jars have just been ignored. I guess I’m not much for philanthropy, but I decided we needed to address the overflowing give jars before the end of summer.

We sat down yesterday to start researching charities, and it didn’t take long for the kids to find out that if you donate enough money to the World Wildlife Fund they will send you a stuffed animal. So we are now expecting three new plushies to arrive before the end of this month. Money was also given to Heifer International, Scratch Foundation, and the Animal Humane Society. It was a good exercise in thinking about giving priorities and how to make the world a better place.

Although I still find the Give/Save/Spend system annoying, it has worked well for us and we will keep using it. The cash aspect is probably the most difficult part, but also–I think–super important so kids can see and feel how much money they have. If you wanted to start the system in your household, I would recommend setting yourself up for success by ordering the containers from Etsy and going to the bank and taking out as many twenties as possible all at once.

It was the summer of 2000.

I had had my driver’s license for less than a year, the first of my friend group to acquire both a license and a vehicle. I spent a lot of time that spring and summer navigating my 1987 Ford Ranger (AKA Trucky Poo) around my small town with a cadre of friends packed in beside me.

Trucky Poo had a stick shift, a hidden rifle rack, and power windows. Cutting edge in 1987 but not in the year 2000 when we all desperately wanted CD players in our car. Trucky Poo had a CB radio, but no CD player, so although most of my music collection at the time was on CD I was stuck rotating through cassette tapes in the car. My friends pooled their cassette resources, and I ended up with a weird selection of tapes, perhaps most notably the Beavis & Butthead Do America soundtrack (which is not as good as it sounds like it would be).

But–as noted above–this story takes place in the summer of 2000 and that was the summer that Eminem dropped his second album, The Marshall Mathers LP.

Unfortunately, my mom subscribed to Rolling Stone magazine at the time and was very aware of Eminem and what his music was all about. She had declared that under no circumstances were any of us allowed to listen to Eminem and we were certainly not allowed to own any of his albums.

I really wanted The Marshall Mathers LP, but I lived in a painfully small town. I couldn’t risk buying it at the local record store because there was a good chance the record store guy would mention my purchase to my mother the next time she was in browsing the vinyl. I could not risk this.

At some point that year I drove myself down to visit my grandparents in their small town three hours away. I took a detour on the way home, through the much larger town down the highway, and managed to find a random record store in a strip mall. Remember, these were the days before smartphones and I couldn’t just search for nearby record stores!

It was here, somewhere off I-82 in Eastern Washington, that I purchased the Marshall Mathers LP on cassette tape.

I loved The Marshall Mather LP, and so did all my friends. From then on Beavis & Butthead Do America was out and Marshall Mathers LP was in. There were only a few tracks that I regularly fast-forwarded through, but otherwise I spent most of the years 2000-2002 awash in the homophobic, misogynistic rants that characterized that album.

I think it’s the combination of rapid-fire, lyrical rapping along with amazing beats and production that appeal to me. And although the messaging is truly awful, in a lot of ways the topics made a lot more sense to my white small-town self than, say, Tupac or Notorious B.I.G. ever did. I had a parent with a substance abuse problem too! I knew people who lived in trailers, I knew teenagers who took Vicodin for fun, I knew people whose mothers were more interested in their white trash boyfriends than in their own children. Eminem rapping about his white boy anger resonated in a way that Dr. Dre rapping about gang violence and being targeted by the police did not.

And let’s also be clear: it was the year 2000. Mainstream culture was threaded through with homophobia and misogyny. There wasn’t anything Eminem was rapping about that I hadn’t already heard at a party or in the high school parking lot or on cable news.

Still, my mom was right to ban Eminem, and I knew it. I worked hard to hide the tape from her. I never left The Marshall Mathers LP in the tape deck, and I never put it back in the case with the other tapes. No, The Marshall Mathers LP lived up in the hidden rifle rack when it wasn’t being played, usually shoved in behind some terrible vanilla berry perfume spray and a packet of Bubble Yum.

I still love The Marshall Mathers LP, but now instead of hiding my music from my mother I’m hiding it from my children. I’ll turn it on when I’m in the car alone and I get an immediate boost of serotonin when the first lines play. Stan brings me right back to the high school parking lot and all the boys showing off their newly installed subwoofers by blasting the song at full volume. I still laugh so hard at the Steve Berman skit. Every time. And I can still rap every single word in Criminal.

Eminem’s new album, The Death of Slim Shady, dropped a couple weeks ago. It happened to be a week when I was doing a lot of driving, and I loaded it up on Apple Music as soon as I had dropped both my kids off at their respective summer camps.

I really like this new album. It feels like a return to The Marshall Mathers LP, and therefore it feels like a return to my teenage years. Here I am, cruising through town with my giggling, shrieking friends on a hot Saturday night in July. Here I am, pulling up to my piano teacher’s house and turning down Drug Ballad lest she discover that I listen to anything other than Bach.

I am not in a position to unravel the cultural significance of Eminem. I’m too mired in nostalgia, and always will be. But I think in some ways Eminem feels safe to me because the destructive bigotry that he’s rapping about isn’t something I’ve ever agreed with. I know that deep down I don’t hate women or gay people. I never have and I never will. Still, I wince even as I’m rapping along to know that these songs gave others license to do and say terrible things to my gay friend back in high school.

Maybe I should stop listening to Eminem, but I probably won’t.

I will keep hiding it. Not from my mom anymore (she reads this blog after all), but from my children. When they’ve slammed the car door shut behind them and are halfway to the school doors, I will welcome my good friend cognitive dissonance into the passenger seat while I queue up The Death of Slim Shady on my iPhone. I don’t have a cassette case to hide anymore, and I can just hit the skip button instead of fumbling the timing on the fast forward.

And I will be thankful that my kids are growing up in a world where Eminem is considered even more perverse and offensive than he was in the year 2000. At least we’ve come that far.

We’ve been in Mode: Tonsillectomy Recovery for a full week now. It has been… okay? There was a lot of pain the first 3-4 days, but he’s really perked up in the last couple days here. We are still doing the Advil/Tylenol shuffle and staying close to home.

I thought staying close to home for so long would be terrible. Despite being a homebody myself, I do make an effort in the summers to get the kids out and about regularly–I have found we are all happier if we leave the house for a couple hours in the morning.

Early in the week we went to Home Depot to purchase cardboard and bamboo stakes, and the kids have spent two full days crafting cardboard weapons for themselves. This has been fun, but I sense they’ve just about cycled through this activity, so I’ve got to come up with something low key for us today. My youngest isn’t allowed to be rambunctious for two full weeks after tonsillectomy!

The week was also broken up by the new on Tuesday morning that our governor is now the vice-presidential nominee!

I am having a lot of feelings about this. I love Tim Walz. I think he’s a thoughtful, genuine leader and I’ve been really happy to have him as our governor all these years. We used to watch his regular addresses during the pandemic and also during the 2020 civil unrest and his leadership was a source of comfort. I always felt he was doing his best to keep us all safe without overreacting.

I am sulking a little bit about sharing him. I think he’s great, I think he was the right choice for this ticket, and I love how pumped the rest of the nation is about him right now, but he’s my governor! We found him and elected him first! But… he’s what America needs right now and we Minnesotans are generous so… I guess you can borrow him for eight years.

Anyway, Tuesday’s announcement propelled me into a flurry of political excitement and that was it for me. I’ve used up all my enthusiasm. I’m now done paying attention until Election Day.

Staying close to home has given me a chance to work on planning our trip to Japan next summer. I’ve gone through several guidebooks, consulted a close friend who went to Japan recently, have watched dozens of YouTube travel videos, and have spent hours on TripAdvisor. I feel like I am finally getting a handle on what we want to do and how much time we’re going to need to do it.

What had originally been conceived of as a Tokyo/Kyoto trip has now expanded into a Tokyo/Hiroshima/Kyoto/Osaka trip. My husband suggested that he really wanted to go to Hiroshima, and despite the extra travel hassle I do think it’s a great destination for us. I have always wanted to go to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, and the famous torii in the sea at the Itsukushima Shrine is nearby.

Osaka was added because my youngest insists that we must go to Super Nintendo World in Osaka, and despite our pleading that we could do the same thing in California (and soon in Orlando) he has been unpersuadable. And let’s be honest, am I going to be absolutely thrilled to board Yoshi’s Adventure Ride in Japan? Yes, I am.

I did stop working on my Japanese a few weeks ago and I really need to get back to that!

Oldest Kid
My oldest had his first job this weekend: kitten-sitting for the neighbors.

Kids get all the best jobs.

He walked up to their house twice a day all weekend. He fed the precious babies, he played with the precious babies, he scooped their precious poop from the litterbox. He took the responsibility very seriously and did it all himself. He’s very good with animals and probably would have done this for free just for the quality kitten time, but they paid him $100.

$100!!!!! Kids really do get all the best jobs.

Youngest Kid
My youngest had his tonsils removed last week. He’s always been our sickly child, and after seven bouts of strep in one year we finally decided the tonsils had to come out.

This is not a decision we made lightly. I was also a sickly child who got lots of strep and every virus imaginable, and once my tonsils came out I was significantly healthier. Even knowing what a difference it made for me, we were hesitant to put him through general anesthesia and surgery and a long, painful recovery.

He’s been recuperating on the basement couch for five days now and surviving on a steady diet of sushi, ice cream, and Roblox. Aside from the pain (which is mostly controlled with Advil and Tylenol) I think he’s kind of enjoying himself.

CK
CK is our older cat at eleven years old. He doesn’t act like he’s eleven. He hangs out on top of the refrigerator, wants to be carried around like a baby all the time, and still steals chicken nuggets from the kids’ plates if given the chance. He’s the best cat ever, my emotional support cat, and he’s going to live forever.

One of his eyes has grown cloudy seemingly out of nowhere. A quick google search confirmed it’s probably not something serious like cancer, but it is a sign of aging, maybe cataracts, and might need to be dealt with. I made him an appointment at the veterinarian but am in deep denial of the possibility that he is growing old. He is not. He cannot. It is not allowed.

BT
BT is our younger cat at four years old. He’s a real cat’s cat. He wants to be in the room with us, but not where we can reach him. He does not like being picked up but will accept respectful petting. I have no update about him except that he remains unbearably handsome and every day I ask him “what is it like to be so handsome?” and every day he responds by glaring at me.

I have one of those cool sunrise/sunset alarm clocks, which I like very much except for the bright red numbers on the display which–despite being turned down to the lowest setting–have been screaming into my eyeballs all night every night for years.

About two weeks ago I figured out how to turn the time display off completely.

This has been an interesting experiment in not knowing the time when I’m in bed. I just have to guess based on how many chapters I’ve read and whether or not my husband has already fallen asleep with his laptop propped open, mid-email.

Similarly, I’ve had to guess about the mornings based on sunlight coming through the edges of the air conditioner and how many kids I’ve heard in the hallway.

I seem to be pretty consistently getting up between 6 AM and 7 AM, although one day I slept in until 7:45 AM and this morning I accidentally got up at 4:55 AM (I was very confused by the fact that it was so dark, and I was convinced–in my half-asleep state–that it was the sun that was late rather than me that was early.)

The best part is the drop in my sleep-related stress level. If I don’t know what time it is I can’t even begin to construct an anxious thought related to sleep and the possibility of not getting enough of it.

Overall, I think this has been an improvement to my life and I intend to keep the numbers turned off even when I need to start setting the alarm again in the fall.

I ended up at the cabin for one night by myself last weekend. We happened to have two cars for 48 hours (long, boring story) and my husband wanted to take the kids to the local amusement park for the day on Saturday.

“That’s fine,” I said. “I’ll go up to the cabin for the day to mow the lawn and water the trees and clean the beach.”

Being alone at the cabin is the introvert mom’s dream, right? A whole day spent just with my own thoughts, only feeding myself, only picking up after myself. A silent retreat of one person, but with a screening of The Shining at the end of the day.

I didn’t even really enjoy my alone time. I missed my stupid family. Not making dinner was great, and not picking up after anyone else was also great, but otherwise it was just kind of lame.

It made me wish that I could be with my family but without the level of responsibility that usually entails.

My personality, I think, is not really optimized for the role of “mother.” I’ve concluded that my best-fit family role is probably “friendly-but-skittish cat.”

We have a friendly-but-skittish cat. This cat wants to be in the same room as us, generally. He even likes to share the couch with me, but he always sits just out of arm’s reach. No petting allowed. He’ll purr super loudly at me, but he’ll depart quickly if I talk to him too much or try to lean too far and pet him.

I think “teenage daughter” is also a good match for my personality. Everyone in her family annoys and embarrasses her, but she’ll show up for family movie night and maybe leave halfway through. She’ll refuse to play Rummikub even when pressured to do so, but then will sit in the living room with a book listening to the rest of the family mixing tiles and chatting. She’ll do chores if you tell her to, but only if you tell her to. When her little brother starts freaking out about spelling words she just walks away.

The role of “mother” is just not working for me. Who makes every meal? Mother! Who knows where the beach towels are kept? Mother! Who listens patiently to long stories about anime characters? Mother! Who validates emotions and settles sibling disputes? Mother! “Mother” is the star of the family show and I am, frankly, not star material.

I am meant to live on the edge of family life. I want my family around me, but I don’t want the all-consuming and endless responsibility that comes with having a family. And let’s be clear that I don’t just mean the chores that come with parenthood. The part that really tires me out is the emotional part, having to balance and rebalance the emotions of all the family members. Anticipating needs. Dealing with the fallout of disappointment.

And this isn’t the sort of thing you can hire out. Even with a full-time cook, full-time nanny, full-time housekeeper, and hyper involved spouse, there are things that can’t be outsourced from the mother. Sometimes kids just really, really need to tell their mother about this cool new theory on Shanks’s origins.

Anyway, I’ve permanently aged out of the “teenage daughter” role and can’t be “friendly but skittish cat” in this life, but I’m hoping “empty-nester mother of mostly-well-adjusted adult children” ends up being a good fit for me when we start recasting roles in seven years or so.