Today is the Day

My aversion to information is born out of my radio days, some 15+ years ago, when I hosted and produced morning-drive talk radio programs.  Sounds exciting right?  It was, hands down.  I loved every minute of working in radio.  For a few years of my early 20's, I would get up at 2:30 am every weekday morning, commute to the radio station to arrive by 4am, pull fresh stories off the AP wire and other notable sources, quickly rewrite them, and either deliver the news myself or else use the tidbits to spark discussion with co-hosts or callers. 

After a few years, I switched gears and moved into real estate, where I kept abreast of the industry-specific trends and how they related to the world at large, but I never again subscribed to a newspaper, listened to news on the radio or TV,  nor listened to talk radio.  It's as if I was just burnt out on information from the media.Over the years, I've gotten the occasional bug to take a whole morning and read the Tribune cover-to-cover or get sucked into a 20/20 episode, but I have literally made it a point NOT to suck up information if it's at all humanly possible.

Fast forward to a pair of impressionable young minds living in my own household.  Yes, I've kept up with most issues over the years by default of conversation from my girlfriend, parents, and friends, which then motivates me to look up specific points or data on the topics just so I can talk on point.  But I don't read about or get involved with politics, local, national, or world issues, unless I'm hit over the head with it or unless a headline from the Redeye sparks my attention.

Traditionally, I'm not a big activist for anything.  I hold a lot of opinions and am not afraid at all to share them, but nine times out of ten, when sharing opinions, it initiates debate that usually sheds light on new perspectives or facts that I hadn't previously considered, which thereby alters my opinions.  You see I rarely jump on board a major issue train unless I'm fully educated on the topic, and I am not fully educated on most things, unless, like Marriage Equality, they specifically pertain to me or someone I know.

The gay marriage issue was a no-brainer for me, since I've been in a committed relationship with my girlfriend for the past fourteen years.  We have two kids together, we jointly own property and investments, and we're considered 'married' by everyone we know, even those that politically may not agree with Marriage Equality.  Marriage Equality needed to be legislated, in my opinion.

I had no plans on getting involved, though, in the fight.  The invitation came from friends.  First it was the invite from a neighbor to the Marriage Equality fundraiser at a local bar I'd been wanting to try out.  Then it was the request from another friend who is also a gay parent, that urged me to take my girls out of school and join her in a day-trip to the Illinois capital city to participate in the March on Springfield and rally in support of Marriage Equality. 

After we got home late that evening, I realized that I had exposed my kids to standing up for something bigger than themselves.  I had shown them the example of how to make a difference and be part of a solution.  No matter what happened with the issue, and I honestly had no clear indication of how it would play out, I knew I wanted my kids to be educated on things that matter from here on out.

The bill passed and we're now planning a wedding for late summer, in which our kids will take part.  The issue was pretty much of a non-issue for our girls.  They never understood why we couldn't get married anyway, as they are being raised in a time period, and in a geographical location and community where kids don't see a problem with kids having 2 moms instead of a mom and dad.  They're also around lots of adults who mostly feel the same way, but even if they didn't, are uber-PC and wouldn't say anything otherwise to make our kids feel bad about having 2 moms.  It's just the way it is.  My oldest even gave a current-events speech at school on the Illinois Marriage Equality issue, one in which I drilled her in preparation for all sorts of protests or at least debate she may encounter with the issue.  She got nothing.

Conversely, we're heading to Dallas in March for a gay wedding, or actually just a reception, as the guys had to get married in another state, since Texas legislation prohibits marriage equality.  My girls don't understand why their moms can get married here, but our good friends can't get married in Texas.

"It doesn't make any sense," my 5-year-old logically stated.


Nope.  It doesn't.  My 10-year-old had a bit of an answer for her little sister, in that it was a state-by-state decision.  She had learned this from her research on Illinois gay marriage.  What she hadn't learned, though, was that the issue was still in the forefront of US history, being hashed out state by state, since it was passed here.  I had seen the Facebook posts and headline updates on yahoo, but I'd never once thought to share the information with my kids.  I'd never once thought that it might be important to them, or that it would affect people we know.

I realized that I hadn't kept my promise of educating myself and my kids further on issues that not only affect us, but on issues that simply have a clear side for us to stand on. While it's great that my daughter was able to fill in the blanks for my little one, as she can seek out issues and news on her own now, it became apparent to me that I need to start taking a more active role in the news and issues of our day, so that I can not only be knowledgeable myself, but also so that I can help answer questions and/or debate issues with my very-informed children, and be knowledgeable enough to help them form their own opinions.

So, today is the day I draw a line in the sand regarding what's important. Today, I vow to pull myself up by my bootstraps and get back on that horse.  Today is the day I pull my head out of the sand and get up to speed on what's going on in this world.  I can't promise I'll debate the issues or even have an interest in much of what I learn, but I do promise to be aware from this day forward.

Any suggestions on where to start? 

Blame It On Texas

It's so hard to be a good parent. Sometimes I just want to be a not so good parent. It's a daily struggle to make sacrifices to do the right thing by your kids. And sometimes I wonder if I'm overdoing it and trying too hard to be a good parent.

Today I’m not overdoing it.  My nine-year-old doesn't need to be sitting on the couch at home from school today. She could have gone to school, but she would need to have breathing treatments every so often.  She's home because I don't want to walk over to the school every four hours and give her a breathing treatment and I don’t trust the school nurse to dose it out to her.  I’m being lazy.  I want some time to myself.  It’s been weeks and weeks of sickness and out-of-town visitors and obligations and requirements.  I just want a minute to myself.  So when I called the asthma doctor to get an appointment for her today and was told to be prepared to wait for a while when there, I lost it.

Sometimes it all just piles up and I feel like I'm going to suffocate. I feel trapped in my own life.  I don’t want to spend my day dropping kids off, picking them up, and waiting for an opening at the doctor’s office.  I want to be in the yard with my fun flighty friend pulling weeds and having no worry larger than ‘Should I move the Hostas to the other side of the yard or leave them where they are?’  I want to be completely selfish.  I don’t want any responsibility today. 

I usually end up doing the right thing as a parent but I always wonder if I will. Today I told my partner that I’m at the end of my rope.  I don’t feel capable of doing it anymore. She already knew and she was there to back me up with a solution.  She’ll take the sick kid to the doctor and I can be selfish and stay home for a few hours of sunshine and dirt in the back yard.  I’m lucky.  I know I’m lucky. 

For now, though, as I watch my four-year-old struggle with her interactions with her nine-year-old sister, I subconsciously wonder why she’s being so snippy and rude.  A sweet, considerate girl otherwise, she is prone to sassiness from time to time.  But today, sassiness doesn’t even begin to describe what I’m hearing. 

“Quit talking,” she says as she cuts off her older sister.  “I don’t want to hear you anymore.”

“You’re not being nice.  I’m never going to play with you again,” she threatens when she doesn’t get her way.

Seriously?  They’re already both sitting in the Work It Out Chair, which means they’re trying to work through a disagreement that has been tagged by me, but I am unable to intervene. They’re supposed to stay in the chair, sitting side by side, until they can each admit their wrongdoing to one another, apologize to each other, and give each other a hug.  It starts out great every time with the apology.  But instead of acceptance moving on to the hug, the acceptance keeps getting followed with a BUT.  The BUT negates the apology and acceptance.  Then it’s back to fighting again about the BUT.  It’s exhausting even to hear.

“Blah, blah, blah…..,” singsongs the 4-year-old to the 9-year-old.  “I don’t want to listen to you anymore,” she says with her hand in the air as a blockade in front of her sister’s face.

Intervene I must.  No longer a productive ‘work it out’ session, I’m now witnessing a diminishing level of respect coming from a toddler.

“To your room,” I order.  “Time out.”

She cries, she sobs, and she wants attention.  After a few minutes, I enter the room to find her crumpled in the corner of her room, crocodile tears running down her face.

You’d think I’d ask her why she’s crying or what she’s thinking about.  Not me, though.  I force her to climb on my lap and listen to my words and ask her if she understands.  I honestly don’t give a shilling what she’s crying about or what she’s thinking.  I just want her to lose the attitude.

“Who did you learn this disrespectful language from?” I ask incredulously.

“I don’t know,” is her reply.

“Was it so-and-so or whatchamacallit?”

“No.”

“Did you see it on TV?” I inquire.

“I don’t think so,” she says uncertainly.

We talk about respect and treating people the way you want to be treated and asking forgiveness and truly meaning it…the whole ball of wax.  She takes her ridlin of punishment and I release her from the time out to again join her sister in the Work It Out Chair to tie up loose.  From the sounds of it, it’s going to be a long day.

Incredibly, they work out their differences and return to the board game they had started earlier.  A few minutes into it I see the 4-year-old take her hand and sweep it across the board in anger, knocking all of the game pieces off the board.  She’s had it with her sister and the game.  I’ve had it with both of them. 

“To your room,” I ordered again, giving the tot Miss Allen Eye.  Miss Allen was my elementary school principal.  Super kind and supportive woman and great principal, but when you pushed her buttons, she tilted that head to the side, squinted up the right eye, and glared at you so hard with the left, that the intensity damn well may have burned a hole in you.  The rumor among school kids was that it was a glass eye that allowed for the laser-like glare.  Real or artificial, my sister and I spent many an hour trying to perfect Miss Allen Eye over the years.  But to be honest, I’ve never actually used it on anyone before.  There’s a first for everything.

Little Miss Tantrum marches off to her room again, scared to death of me.  I’m scared to death of me.  I’m screaming and stomping and slamming doors because I am just sick with grief over the girls’ behavior.  I’m sick of myself too!

Truth be told, the asthma medication is the real culprit of today’s bickering.  The more my eldest takes of the steroid, the worse her mood becomes.  The sicker she gets, the more medicine she takes, the snottier she acts.  She can’t help it….it’s a side effect of the meds to be cranky.  She's moody, broody, and short with others. As a result, she pisses people off, and to add insult to injury, everybody else starts acting insufferable in response, including her parent….a huge Catch 22. 

But I don’t think of that when I go in to talk to my toddler.  I ask her again where she learned such inappropriate behavior. 

“Is it your girl friends at school?” I want to know.

“They sometimes act like that,” she replies honestly, “but that’s not where I learned it.”

“Well what about what’s-his-name,” I ask, “does he act like this?”

“No,” she carefully responds, “he doesn’t.”

Before I can ask another question I realize that she’s picked up her behavior from me and doesn’t want to make me angrier by telling me!

It was me stomping through the kitchen and slamming the freezer door because I was so pissed!  It was me who cut off my 4-year-old and wouldn’t let her explain, so I could get MY point across.  It’s me she’s freakin’ mimicking!  Holy tamole.  What a bomb.

After I’ve dropped the toddler off at school and I am driving home, I consider that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.  I remember getting in trouble myself in high school for using profanity toward a teacher.  

When my father got word, he screamed, “Goddammit, Jesus Christ, Stacy…where in the hell did you learn to use such language?”

Ha.

It’s the world spinning around, over and over, year after year, and people doing the same stupid shit their parents did before them and their parents’ parents did before them.  What a trip.

I’m laughing to myself about parenting and what a crap-shoot it can be, as I’m cruising home in my beater car that probably has no business sharing the road with others, when a fancy shiny black car pulls out in front of me from God-knows-where without warning.  I come close to ramming the car from the rear.  I go to honk and realize our horn has been eternally broken for over 2 years.  We replace the fuse over and over again, and it goes bad usually after the first good use of the horn.  If I’m not too fired up and just casually using the horn as a warning or reminder to drive, the fuse may last through 3-4 short bursts, but if it’s a good long, “What in the Sam Hill are you doing?” honk, the fuse is usually blown after that. 

I had just asked my girlfriend to replace the fuse last week and apparently she hadn’t gotten around to it, though, as no sound comes out now. In this case I have to make my own sound of warning, so I scream through the closed window toward the man driving the black car with closed windows.

“Expletive Expletive, you’re an Expletive Idiot!” I yell at the top of my lungs.  As I look down at the license plate, I realize it’s a Texas plate.

Offreakingcourse it is!

I can’t stand Texas, but even worse, I can’t stand when my kids pick up my bad habits.  I’m going to blame all of today’s bad behavior on having lived in Texas.  Today I wipe the slate clean of my southern parenting slips and I decide I’m going to give my kids and myself a do-over.    

Own Your Happiness

I was sitting on the front steps of a building listed for sale, with my real estate agent, when it happened:  I used my kids’ happiness and well-being as a justification for a decision I was making.

The agent and I were discussing the community where I currently reside with my family.  She asked me why my girlfriend, Katie, and I wouldn’t consider moving our family to another neighborhood, less than a mile away, where the local school was, in her opinion, as good, if not better than the one our daughter currently attends, as it would open up additional housing options for us.

I answered her question with reasons that included the proposed school does not have equally high test scores, the suggested neighborhood is too hoity-toity and unfriendly, and we don’t want to start over in a new place and circle of people.  

And then I topped off my explanation with, “And most importantly, we don’t want to uproot the kids from their current school, friends, and community.”

And there you have it.  I was using my kids’ security as an umbrella motive for the choice to stay in our ‘hood.  I’ve done it before and I’ve definitely heard other people do it.  This parenting trend of using our children’s happiness as just cause for action was brought to my attention a few years ago, when Katie and I were considering another major life change, moving back to Chicago from Dallas.  At the time, my parents thought we were crazy for considering a move away from the shiny, happy north Dallas suburban neighborhood where we resided, back to the gloomy, dirty, city streets of Chicago.  Our last home in Chicago, where we had lived as a young couple with a new baby, faced the back end of a commercial building which housed a discount store that discarded irregulars every night out of their back door into the dumpster.  Homeless people would wait for the discards every evening and carry them off, in some cases even wheeling the whole dumpster down the street, while drug users would huddle around the abandoned lot next door to get their fix without too much observation.  Conversely, in Texas, eight pristine 2-story stone homes with perfectly manicured yards, neatly concealed garage doors, and well-groomed families, separated my sister’s home from ours, which overlooked a green space attached to the newly built elementary school.  Our collective children were not only close in age, but the best of friends.  

Judging on that alone, most folks were shocked with our decision to move back to Chicago, after living in Texas only four years.  In response to their awe, I’d list point after point as validation for our anticipated move back north, but I’d always end it with, “I just don’t want my kids to be raised like this.”

After giving my dad the same schpeel over the phone one evening, he called me out and said, “Stacy, you’re using your kids’ well-being as an excuse for something that you want to do.”

He was right.  As parents, we use often use our kids’ best interest as a rationalization for our actions.  Since when did it become socially acceptable to hide our own adult intentions and reasoning under the veil of “I’m doing it for my kids”?  For the life of me, I don’t know why we feel the need to tug at the heartstrings of folks by throwing the kids in there!  

While I can’t speak for all, I can only surmise that, like me, most of us are just weary of standing up for our own convictions and choices at times, as we don’t always have the capacity to field through the oppositions, so we throw in the kids’ well-being as an across-the-board explanation.  While most times others’ opinions don’t even register one iota on my radar, occasionally I find myself trying to keep things copasetic, and customizing my talking points to the audience in front of me.  I don’t question my own decisions, as much as I try to soften the blow to those I know will disagree with my choices.  While it shouldn’t matter what anyone thinks of my decisions, so long as it makes sense to me and my family, the reality of the situation is that every now and then I falter, not wanting to rock the boat, especially if it’s a family member, whose opinion in fact matters to me.  

In the conversation with my dad about moving from Texas, it took a while for me to recognize my faulty justification process, but once I got the connection, I came back to him with authority and stance.  The real deal is that I didn’t want to be tempted, as a parent, to raise my own children with the entitlement that was common in children in our surroundings in Dallas.  As an individual, I did not want to have to constantly check myself so that I too, wouldn’t fall prey to the siren of what’s good for The Jones’ is good for me, in regards to blatant disregard for living within one’s means and using material possessions as a symbol of status.  As a partner/girlfriend/lover, or whatever ridiculous name I had to use to describe myself, in relation to the person that should be my wife, I did not want to continue to have to repeatedly explain the relationship to new people I met, who just didn’t get it, and usually clung to its novelty as a talking point for future conversations, reducing us to simply ‘the lesbians on the block.’  And finally, as a normally optimistic, fun-loving person, I simply did not want to be unhappy anymore because I didn’t fit into the stereotypical mold of the region.

The bottom line is that we parents are, in most cases, adults that can and should not only make, but also take ownership for, our decisions without trying to appeal to the senses of our audience by using the kids.   More importantly, we should not be kidding ourselves that our actions are prompted by the wants and needs of our children.  If we’re honest with ourselves, by the mere title of parent, we should be factoring our children into our daily decision-making process, without it having to be a separate line-item.  Parents are human beings with needs, wants, hopes, and dreams of our own that are not all specifically tied to our offspring.  

There is no doubt that by feeding our own happiness, we will inevitably be better parents, partners, family members, workers, and friends.  Yet why, when we cross the threshold of parenthood, do we no longer take our own joy, for personal gratification’s sake alone, seriously?  It’s possible there’s no time to take stock of where our actual lives fall in relation to our pre-parental expectation of our lives, because we’re constantly on kid duty.  It’s likely that we’ve lost track of who we really are as individuals in that same full-time mentoring role.  It’s also conceivable that we’ve just gotten lazy in our thoughts, similar to our yoga-panted dress code, and decided to coast under the radar and just view ourselves as mothers and fathers instead of multi-faceted people with the desire for fulfillment; we know and use the fact that the title of parent is a stand-alone for worthiness when viewed by society at large.

While I functioned under that auto-pilot guise for a few years after the birth of my first child, it quickly grew stale.  It took years, though, for me to identify it as such.   Fast forward through the rocky years of trying to re-emerge as a creative, opinionated person, that has no fear of, and an eternal want for, change, and I’m back in business.  After much trial and error in identifying and prioritizing my wants  as an individual and balancing them to those of my family, I’m now at a place where I deem my own well-being as prominent as my family’s, in my decision-making.  While I’m not afraid of factoring myself in, I still sometimes err on the side of defaulting to my children’s future when it comes to explaining my decisions to others.  Maybe it’s because the ‘others’ I speak of today are much different than the ‘others’ of a few years ago.  A longtime serial friend accumulator, I have mostly ditched the vast quantity of casual friends and acquaintances once held and replaced them with long-term, quality friends, of whom I’d never hesitate to call ‘family’. 

So my final answer to the question of why not move to a new neighborhood to my real estate agent, who, of course is also a longtime friend whom I also view as a ‘family’ member, I had to finally laugh and say, “Enough with the kids.  It’s really for me and Katie, as we love where we live.”

We have finally found and united with a tight-knit co-op of inventive people, who not only subscribe to the “it takes a village” mantra, but also foster their own artistic endeavors.  In this true community of neighbors and friends, where we all give and receive of one another without ever second-guessing the relationship, and exist with all of our various talents, traits, and shortcomings, I am truly happy.  I wouldn’t give that up for the world.  In this scenario, I proudly say I am putting myself first, and the kids at second fiddle, where they should be. 

I am a parent and that makes me responsible for setting a good example for my children.  If I want my children to be happy, I need them to see me cultivating my own happiness, so they can in turn, learn to feed their own.