ALARMS

Remember alarms?
Remember the coffee routine before the day started?
Remember making school lunch or planning a dinner that was "regular'?

I miss getting the automated call from the High School telling me my kid was a few minutes late.
I miss picking him up at school and talking/not talking in the way you do with a teenage boy.

I miss yelling at him to get up! I miss being bossy in that way that seemed meaningful.
I miss knowing that he wouldn't sleep all weekend because he had basketball.
It stinks that it's my job to create some normal in this abnormal world.

I'm the mean one: I'm the "tardy" call.
I'm his new badass, his new mean teacher, his tough couch.
Now, I am his crappy new routine.

The girls have settled in easier than him: home-college is not so bad.

He? He misses everything so fundamentally and physically, I can feel it in the way he smiles and jumps around and goofs off and then seems so sad.  He is sixteen and stuck inside.

Tonight, he said to his sister, "I think God doesn't want me to be a Varsity athlete."

This was interesting to me because the GFYO wasn't raised with religion.
This was interesting because even for the GFYO the world feels wrong.

Remember alarms?
I think I have to blare some everyday: WAKE UP!
Let's hit the hoop! Let's study music for ten minutes!
Let's make some waffles and talk about history!

Maybe I can remind him that when the alarms go off, the world will be okay or okayish?

PIN BALL WIZARD

Let's be honest up front: I have weaved in and out of looking for a "job" for two legit reasons.

1) After a "career" in the music biz, some publicity self employment, three kids, badass volunteer work, a blog (omg) (is that even a word used anymore?), some minimal success writing for actual money, and a TV Show for kids (back to that volunteer thing).... my resume isn't exactly hopping. And no, like everyone, I can't do Excel.

2) Also, every step out seems like.. well, I'm right back in. "I left my backpack with all my gear -- and I need it for a game" two hours away, or "do I have a social security card and this office is scary and I want to cry" or "is it normal for my finger to swell up after I cut it with a knife?" or "MOOOMMMMMM! Practice is right now and you have to take me!"

So that. All of that.

I guess I can push that worry and self-doubt aside right now, because I doubt the job market is waiting for me. What is waiting for me? Today? Like all the other days, but even more now: food, dinners, laundry. A smiling face. A sense of normal.  I think that might be the reality for many of you, or... sorta, or in some kinda way.

I bat one ball away. Ding!
I bat another. Ding!

One slips through. The lights explode! The game goes nuts!
You got one more ball. Ignore the lights....
Focus. Do better this time...

If I am right, I can make sure all is well -- him, them, her, she, they, everyone.
Pull it back, take a breath and SHOOT...

There is no paddle I can operate fast enough or with wizardly skills to keep these balls at bay!
The game was hard enough to begin with.

Pacman?

B

(You can read back and see what I wrote about Her then...)

She is who I saw back when she was little.
Not a lot has changed: she is vulnerable but also so brave and strong.
She takes too much of me, all of us, on her shoulders.

She is resilient, despite me.

We sat on the bus together traveling through Italy with her soccer team. We saw so many beautiful things and laughed so many times. We also whined, because it was weird and busy and like a race. When we returned, she was cut from the team. She had to pack up and come home. Soccer -- her identity -- done.

She seemed destroyed, and she was: drunken face plant on her day back to school.

Since then, she did what she always does: fixed it, changed it.
No soccer? How about the ski team? Cool. Tour guide, yes!

Also, she's in love.

This kid, my guide, my North Star...

THIS IS HOW IT IS

If you want to read some lame boring quarantine crap with ideas and strategies and Pintersty ideas that mostly make a girl feel like shit, google on. This isn't that.

We are the people who have run out of toilet paper. We are the people who have yelled at each other more often than we have played all those games you might have seen people playing. We are the people who wonder what the limit is for "together time"?

A happy family is such a wonky model. Shake it off!

I admire the stories of couples and families enjoying this self-isolation, but I am slightly suspect.
I doubt any Monopoly session could fix what is essentially the process of becoming an adult.
No amount of board games will fix what these kids are losing.

The GSYO (sixteen now) needs his friends and school to do what we all have done, what we all did: navigate a path to adulthood out there in the world. B and R are similarly stunted.

I don't have the words to make this better and I don't have a plan.
There are not words that I can write to fix it.

When your heart breaks, where do you hold the pieces?

So Anyway 2

How do you say hello again to an old lover?
Do you whisper it, do you slap a noisy kiss on the cheek?
Do you sheepishly wander around the perimeter and hope you are seen?

None of these seems like a good idea. No idea seems good.
So anyway...

The wind is howling outside a new fence, less picket than the old one, but still, here we are. Me and the Kid, and the Three Drunk People, who actually have been drunk (they are 20, 18 and 16 -- don't judge), because yep, that happens. New house, same small town, same Kid, same me. Sort of.

So what's up?
Oh and me? I did some writing work for money. I started a community TV show for kids. I got gray. I tried Botox. I once went to a writing workshop but I still haven't finished that book I meant/mean to write.

Oh, and the Three: they are shockingly well, despite me. Except for the fact that their worlds have exploded in the last month, except for the fact that these three happy kids -- two one foot out -- are now forced to have both feet inside.

So yeah, I mean it's fine.

SO ANYWAY, I'm writing here again because the truth is that the tap tap tap on the key board makes me happy.  And I stopped because I felt I should protect them as they got older...

I have been in more embarrassing snap chat/tik tok/insta stories, that, well....

Maybe it's alright that I start writing again?