My Real Life

1. Tiny needed to be told that it was a person in a suit, and not a real raptor in the cage, in order for him to stand for that picture
2. My hair was going in that raptor’s mouth

1. There must be free breakfast
2. There must be an indoor pool (if we are traveling north) or an outdoor pool (if we are traveling south)
3. The WiFi must be free

Every time I visit my parent’s house, whether it’s a long visit or just popping in to say “hi,” my Mom sends me home with crap.

Now, granted, it’s all my crap, but it is crap, nonetheless.

I’m not sure how it’s taking up much space in her house, and I definitely don’t have space for it in my house, but I can foresee the day when I’m trying to shovel my grown children’s crap out of this house so I take it with a smile.

A few weeks ago, my Mom asked Monkey in the Middle (who will be 14 in not so many days from now) to grab a large cardboard box out of her basement and put it in the back of my car. He’s a good boy and does what Grandma asks, so before I could protest, it was on the way home with me. I haven’t, however, had the time to look through it, and so it has stayed closed and in the car for weeks.

A few days ago, we had a snow day, and so I took it as my opportunity to open the box and see what treasures awaited.

As it turned out, it was full of books from college. There were books that I read for pleasure and there were the kids books that I read as part of my Teaching Reading class. I’ve been selling everything around here that isn’t nailed down, so when I looked at the pile of books, I saw dollar signs.

Once I had removed the books, I found the real treasure in the box.

My high school and college journals.

Jack – freaking – pot.

I spent the next three hours reading my daily thoughts and actions from ages 15-22, and taking pictures of certain passages and texting them to Kim, which resulted in a lot of laughter and a lot of cringing.

In examining these journals, cover to cover, I came to some conclusions.

—–

First

I say it all the time and I’ll say it again…

I am so very, very, very grateful that I did not grow up in the age of social media and cell phones.

I was a good kid. I really was.

I wasn’t perfect, and I made a few wrong turns along the way, but compared to what a lot of kids at the time were doing, I was a good kid.

But, I when I imagine the mistakes I made magnified by a Snapchat story or an Instagram post, it makes me shudder. Yes, they live on in those journals and in my memory (although, if I’m honest, I had forgotten quite a bit of it along the way) but I could burn the journals and never speak of what is in my memory and the world would never know.

Not the case for kids today.

—–

Second

My Mom read my journals.

So, to anyone with whom I interacted in any way, shape or form from 15-22…

My Mom totally knows what you did.

Quite frankly, I had completely forgotten that I had even written these journals, so, over the years, when my mother has made small, insightful comments, I’ve always thought to myself “Wow…she is SO perceptive. How did she pick up on that?”

Because I KNOW I never told her any of the things I wrote about.

So, the conversations that went like this…

Mom: “I always thought X was interested in you,” or “Didn’t you tell me this happened at X’s house?”

Me: “What? No. Why would you say that?”

Mom: “Just a feeling that I had.”

…suddenly make a lot more sense to me.

—–

Third

High school is hard for everyone

Even the kids who seem to have it all together

At our most recent high school reunion (25th, if you have to know) there were people who said to me “You always seemed to have it so together, Amy.”

And I laughed and laughed and laughed, because no…I most definitely did not.

But, I guess I had forgotten the extent to which I did not have it together, or just how much I worried about how I stacked up next to other kids my age, until I read those journals.

The angst. The drama. The boys.

Reading this helped to put some of the angst that I hear from my students into perspective.

I can be quick to write it off and say “Let it go,” but reading my own words yesterday reminded me of that ache and that sick feeling in your stomach.

My students will say, “He clearly opened my Snap, but hasn’t responded! Who is he snapping instead of me?”

In my journal I wrote, “I’ve called him three times in the last hour, but it’s busy. Who is he talking to?”

The examples like this are endless, but they remind me that some teenage issues are timeless. It’s only the medium that changes.

If you have any of your own journals, diaries, or whatever from your high school years, I highly suggest you peek through them.

It’ll give you a good laugh, and will remind you of how awful and amazing those years were.

And, again, if you were someone I interacted with from the ages of 15-22…good luck looking my Mom in the eye next time you see her.

At the beginning of each school year, the 8th grade social studies teachers do a lesson on historical thinking.

It’s an activity that trains the 8th graders to think like an historian.

In order to create the lesson, we bring in “artifacts” from our lives and place them at a variety of stations throughout the room.

The students rotate through the stations and have to make observations about what they find and then draw some conclusions.

The students aren’t given the information that the artifacts are pieces of my life. They have to put it all together and decipher the identity of the subject based on the clues that they find, much like an archaeologist.

At the end, they write a biography of my life based on the info, which is always highly entertaining.

Some of the artifacts that I use at my stations are a wedding picture of my Great Grandparents from Denmark, my high school yearbook, an Archie comic, an album, an antique book, a glucose monitor and many other items.

Some of the kids struggle to make meaning of the items, others are able to see connections, and even others are able to weave a fairly accurate biography based on what they observed.

However, my favorite part of the entire process, every year, is listening to the students try to guess what a few of the objects are.

For example, even though I’ve heard that vinyl is making a comeback, the students hold the album in their hands and don’t even realize that there is something inside.

“What is this? Who is this a picture of? Do you think it’s her brother? Wait, is this a list of poems on the back? What IS this?”

Then, when someone in the group discovers that the side of the cardboard opens and there is a vinyl treasure inside, I hear…

“Oh! It’s a case for this frisbee!”

Students who have a dim recollection of seeing one of these artifacts at their grandparents homes ask questions like “This plays music, right? Is there only one song on this thing? How does it work? I don’t understand how the music comes off of here if it isn’t digital?”

Some of the items are fairly straightforward, and still, they struggle.

My Great Grandparent’s wedding picture is from the 1890’s. It is obviously from the 1890’s.

And yet…

“Do you think this is her wedding picture?”

Gee. Thanks, guys.

Then, the students pick up the glucose monitor.

“Oh, I know this! I saw it in a vintage shop. I think it’s a Yarakuchi. No, a Kapalanchy. Wait…it’s a Tamagachi! It’s like a virtual pet that you have to take care of or it dies.”

Yep. That’s it, kid.

And then comes the Archie comic.

Not a vintage Archie comic, mind you. One that I bought at ShopRite last summer.

“OMG…this is, like, one of the original comic books.”

“You think?”

“Yeah, totally. Look at what they are wearing. That’s like, clothes from the 1800’s.”

“I don’t think so. I’ve heard of this comic. This isn’t the original comic. The original comic was Scooby Doo.”

“Wait, the dog that solves mysteries?”

“Yeah. Scooby Doo came first. This is a total rip off of Scooby Doo. I think they go around and solve mysteries but without the dog.”

“Lame.”

—–

I share this, not because I think my students are anything less than brilliant, but because it amazes me, sometimes, how little today’s kids know about the items from their parents generation, much less their grandparent’s.

I feel like, when I was a kid, I knew all about my parent’s childhoods.

I knew the toys they played with, the music they listened to, the celebrities they worshiped, and understood their cultural references.

But my students, my own children, don’t seem to have those cultural connections.

They live in their world and have blinders on to anything outside their own experience.

Is it technology? Does it fill their every waking moment so much that they don’t have space to learn about the items and experiences from the past?

I don’t know.

But I truly hope that it this doesn’t become the new normal; that each new generation exists in a vacuum.

Although, it wouldn’t be a huge loss if the next generation were ignorant of all things Justin Bieber.

I just think that the sharing of culture is an important rite of passage between generations, and as the ancients shared their traditions with their children to preserve their civilization, so should modern adults continue the process, and modern children be willing to receive it.

Because, if they don’t, Corey Hart and his nocturnal sunglasses could disappear forever.

And that, my friends, would be a real tragedy.

Today I turn 45.

Even with super long life expectancies, I’m guessing that this means that, at this point, I am officially moving into the second half of my life.

45 doesn’t feel that different from 44 which wasn’t that different from 43 and so on and so on.

Yet, 45 feels quite different from 35 and oh so much different from 25.

At 45, I don’t worry so much if people like me because I like me.

At 45, I see a baby and I pick it up and hold it and snuggle it and kiss it and love it and then I give it back and no longer feel the emptiness in my arms and wish for “just one more.”

At 45, I haven’t been to the hair salon in ages to cover up the gray because I kinda like those silver strands that are peeking in and feel like I’ve earned them.

At 45, while I am working hard to get in shape, it is only so that I can be healthy enough in the second half of my life to do all the things I have yet to experience.

At 45, I realize that “in shape” doesn’t mean “bikini-ready.”

At 45, I regret nothing I have ever done and only regret the things I was never brave enough to do.

At 45, I treasure my friends that have been with me since I was a child and I love the friends I have made as an adult.

At 45, I recognize how precious it is to have been married for 18 years to someone I have known for 29 years and still likes me anyway.

At 45, I enjoy my kids.

At 45, I realize my house doesn’t have to be perfect to invite a slew of people over. It’s the people that matter. Not the building.

At 45, I realize that I am an acquired taste and not everyone is going to like it and I will not apologize for being me.

At 45, I’m happy to be 45 because 45 is so much more than so many people ever get to see.

At 45…not every day, because let’s be real…but today, at 45,  I am happy.

I’m not into parent shaming.

I believe that, for the most part, we are all just doing the best that we can.

I recognize that we tend to see each other’s parenting skills in snapshots, and, in those small moments, it is hard to get a full picture of how a parent functions in their role as caregiver and disciplinarian.

However, every now and then, I get a glimpse of something that shocks me, rocks me, and shakes me to the core.

Let me set the scene:

My Mother spent Thanksgiving in Paris on a free trip she received as a result of an engine malfunction on a river cruise last summer.

Rough life…I know.

She came back into town at the end of this week and she and my father offered to take our family out to dinner at Friendly’s on Saturday night so we could catch up and enjoy some time together.

Restauranting with kids can be tough.

I understand.

We’ve had plenty of “SSSSSSHHHHHH!” moments throughout the years, combined with, “No, you can’t get out of your seat, we are in a restaurant,” “Please give your brother the blue crayon back before he makes a scene,” “We don’t bang our fork on the table,” and the old stand-by, “Bathroom? Again? But you’ve been three times!”

So, I get it.

As the kids have gotten older, we have had less of those incidents, but I am still sympathetic to the cause and just tell my kids not to stare when someone else’s child is having a moment.

On Saturday night, my Mom was regaling us with tales of her cruise when Real Man completely interrupts her and just starts repeating, in a low voice, “Ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod.”

We all turn to him, as it is pretty out of character for him to interrupt, but it’s totally out of character for him to react in such a way to anything, and we (as well as the girls at the table next to us) follow the direction of his eyes to the booth that was behind my Dad.

In the booth was a father and two sons…if I had to guess, I’d say ages 8 and 7. Possible 7 and 6. But definitely school-aged children.

Earlier in the meal, they were loudly fighting over a tic-tac-toe game and a word find, but Friendly’s is a noisy restaurant, to begin with, so I thought nothing of it.

Actually, the younger brother was the one who was doing the arguing and yelling, and his older sibling was looking at his father waiting for an intervention that never came.

So, now, we all follow Real Man’s gaze and find the younger brother with his head thrown back, ketchup bottle firmly attached to his lips, doing a two-handed squeeze of ketchup directly into his mouth.

It lasted about 30 seconds, however, RealMan had been “ohmygodding” for about 30 seconds before we all caught on, so it’s safe to say the boy had a minute’s worth of ketchup in his mouth, and dripping down his face.

Dad looked at him, and continued to eat.

At our table, we all just looked at each other with “Did that just happen?” faces and the girls at the table next to us just stared at each other in disbelief.

And then he did it again.

And again.

And again.

We eventually got on with our dinner, pausing every time he lifted the ketchup, to silently watch the spectacle.

And then he picked up the salt.

At Friendly’s, the salt containers are glass, and you have to twist the end to crush the rocks of salt inside and then it comes out.

Head back, grinder on tongue, twisting and twisting the salt onto his tongue.

Dad watched and, again, said nothing.

Back and forth: mouthful of ketchup, bite of burger, tongueful of salt, fry.

And, lest you think there was no ketchup on his burger, he actually used a napkin to wipe all the extra ketchup off of the bun as it squished out when he squeezed it to fit in his mouth.

At one point, the boy said to his father, spitting burger and ketchup onto the table as he spoke, “I want ice cream. I’m going to get ice cream.”

And the father, finally interacting with his son, said “When the waitress gets here. Don’t get up, or you won’t get any ice cream.”

Which prompted the boy to get out of the booth and walk to to the front of the store where he disappeared for three minutes.

When he came back, he sat down and continued to eat, as did his father, who had nothing else to say.

The waitress arrived and asked if everything was okay, and the boy said “I want a scoop of plain chocolate ice cream.”

She looked at Dad who nodded, and she walked away.

He ate his ice cream without incident, other than demanding another scoop from the waitress when the one scoop he ordered arrived.

The meal ended, they paid, and left and the waitress immediately arrived with a bussing bin, spray and a washcloth.

I leaned over and said “Excuse me…you need to take the ketchup and salt off the table and throw it away, because…”

The waitress interrupted and said, with big eyes, “Oh, I know!!! I said something to the Dad early in the meal, but he didn’t do anything about it! I am throwing them away!” and then proceeded to scrub the table and booth with the zeal of a hospital custodian cleaning up a surgical suite after all of the victims of twenty-three car accident have been through.

So, if I’m not into parent shaming, why am I sharing this?

I share this because it’s one of those, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you type of stores, but I also share this so that maybe the next time you are at a restaurant with your kids and they spill their apple juice, you will remember…it could be worse!