Miss Grace recommended Beverly Cleary’s memoirs A Girl from Yamhill and My Own Two Feet.

(image from Amazon.com)

(image from Amazon.com)

I wasn’t sure I’d be interested in books about Beverly Cleary, but it turned out I was. I liked the first book more than the second, but I liked both.

I did get a little tired of how hard she was on her mom. Her mom did a fair number of things that merited criticism, but it seemed like the feeling of “as do we all” was lacking. After awhile it felt as if the mom couldn’t win: she even got criticized for her basic temperament type (different than the one her daughter would have preferred in a mother), and for what her daughter THOUGHT she MIGHT be THINKING. Meanwhile, the dad didn’t seem to get his fair share of the criticism, and HE got CREDIT for what his daughter thought he might be thinking.

But MOSTLY, I loved it. It won’t sound exciting if I describe it (she grew up, she went to school, she got a job, she got married), but it’s the telling style that makes it good. I hadn’t thought much of Beverly Cleary since outgrowing the Ramona stage myself, but after reading her memoirs I love her. So I recommend trying them, if you like memoirs.

My mom has strongly recommended books by Atul Gawande to me, but I tried one and got about four pages in before being so grossed out I realized there was no way I was going to make it. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End looked less surgical, so I tried it.

(image from Amazon.com)

It’s a book about end-of-life stages, getting elderly, and dying. Sometimes it would make me too sad/stressed and I’d need to put it down and take a little break. But overall, I’d say I felt happier and better after finishing it. It IS sad to realize we’re all going to die, and that a lot of us are going to get increasingly infirm on our way there, but reading more on the topic reminded me of writing our will: the process was sad, but the result was happy.

I felt like I ended up with a better grip on old age and death being TRUE NORMAL THINGS as opposed to pitfalls I hoped everyone I loved would avoid altogether. I also felt more aware of some of the options that can improve things (for when my parents go through it, and for when Paul and I do), and I thought his overall concept of “how to decide how heroic to get” was a good and thought-provoking one. I found his matter-of-fact, friendly, calm writing voice very helpful: he seemed realistic/knowledgeable but human/normal. I would recommend trying it. I’ve heard it’s very good exercise for an aging brain to read non-fiction! Plus, I ended up feeling very motivated to eat vegetables.

(image from Amazon.com)

I read Dept. of Speculation after reading a review on Shelf Love. I thought from the review it might be too dreamy/contractionless for me, but no, I loved it, the kind of love where I want to be friends with the author now. Quotes from a book never quite capture the feeling of reading them IN THE BOOK, but I want to give you a sample anyway. She describes her husband reporting all the little household repairs he’s done, and she says to us:

This is another way in which he is an admirable person. If he notices something is broken, he will try to fix it. He won’t just think about how unbearable it is that things keep breaking, that you can never f**king outrun entropy.

Or another:

Sometimes at night I conduct interviews with myself.

What do you want?
I don’t know.

What do you want?
I don’t know.

What seems to be the problem?
Just leave me alone.

I basically BARKED with laughter and recognition. It reminded me of books by Suzanne Finnamore.

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I suddenly remembered that I used to do book posts where at the end I’d do a giveaway for one of the books. Let’s do that again, that was fun. You can leave a comment NOT entering the giveaway, if you want (sometimes that’s what I want), but if you do want to enter, you can do so by saying which book you’d want to win. I’ll choose someone on Friday the 13th. U.S. addresses only, but if you know someone with a U.S. address you can have the book shipped to them as a little giftie.

Update! The winner is Diane, who commented:

Oh fun! I added Dept of Speculation to my library holds immediately upon reading this post, so winning it would be fantastic.

Your criticism of the Beverly Cleary books makes me afraid to read them. It’s one of the things I find most difficult to deal with in real people: assuming people have specific thoughts or intent and then acting as though the assumption is FACT. No stop that right now.

Yes, me too—and I think I overstated my complaint about that issue in the Beverly Cleary books. It wasn’t that bad/frequent; it’s more that it’s the only negative thing that caught my attention!

I’ll email you, Diane!

I would like to talk a little about vacations, if you’re free right now. I know it’s late.

When my brother and I were in the 9-13 age range, my grandparents flew us to Florida to visit them over spring break, at a condo they rented during the winters. We went three years in a row, I think. Something I’ve been wanting to do for awhile is go back to that same place. I still have the address, and could rent the exact place for a week. But…well, I added up the cost. The place itself. The airplane tickets. The rental car.

Here is the issue. I have LOTS of friends who go on vacations, even every year. They go on Disney cruises, or they go to Hawaii, or whatever. They’re not richer than us, I don’t think. (Though they do have fewer children.) I’m combining that norm with something I’ve encountered in myself, time and time again, which is that I can be overly surprised at what things cost, to the point of being squirrelly and crazy when THAT IS JUST WHAT THINGS COST, THAT IS JUST WHAT YOU HAVE TO HAND OVER IN EXCHANGE FOR THE THING. I freak out about insurance. Braces. Dental work. Tickets. House-painting. Tree-removal. Toilet replacement. Property tax. Take-out. It makes me wonder: am I being squirrelly and crazy about vacations? Because I’m starting to think YES.

I’d like to know your philosophy of vacations, I guess. All around me I hear things about paying for EXPERIENCES rather than THINGS, and I get that, I do, but also the experiences are still expensive, and I can’t help but weigh those against how many things that could buy. Or, for example, how much college education that could buy. Or how much retirement savings that could buy.

Actually, no. I said I wanted to hear philosophies of vacations, but I don’t. Periodically I read someone saying that they “work hard, and DESERVE it,” as if people who don’t earn enough for vacations don’t work hard and/or don’t deserve it, and that kind of thing makes me want to throw up and/or hit somebody really hard and/or sell everything I own and go live in a hut. And I feel similarly when people talk about NOT taking vacations in a way that seems as if they want to make people feel bad. “Maybe this is just us, but we don’t want to throw our money away on fleeting pleasures when we could be buying clean water for Africa”; “Must be nice to have this to think about—we can’t even afford groceries.”

So let’s not do that. Let’s not feel like we want to throw up / hit someone / live in a hut. Let’s instead see if I can figure out what I actually want to know, which is NOT “how I justified my vacation expenses to myself” OR “how I tried to make other people feel bad for taking vacations.”

So what IS it I want to know? Okay, I think it is this: what do you think is a reasonable price to pay for a vacation? I’m thinking of a one-week thing, and I’m including all the costs: the hotel, the rental car, the flights, the meals, the thingies, ALL of it. I don’t know if what’s useful here is dollars or percentage of annual income. Because, like, I can picture celebrities thinking it was well worth spending a mere $50,000 on a nice refreshing little break, while that’s the ANNUAL INCOME for the median U.S. family. And maybe I need to say “per person,” because there are so many persons in my family.

Or, really, it doesn’t have to be based on a week, or a per person sort of thing. Maybe you don’t go for a week, or maybe you haven’t really thought of it in per-person terms, so there you sit, thinking you can’t participate in this discussion. And it doesn’t have to be based on what you think is reasonable: maybe you think a cost is not reasonable, and yet you’re glad you spent it. Or maybe you think a cost is reasonable, but it’s a moot point because you don’t have that much extra to spend. I guess what I’m trying to find out is whether I’m being weird about money/vacations. And so any information/opinions you have on this topic would be useful. I’m finding it hard to work through it on my own. Possibly what I want you to do is justify my vacation expenses to myself. It’s hard to know. I think what I want to hear is your conflicted feelings.

(Do you need the Spring Ahead printout? Here it is: Spring Ahead printout.)

I have felt almost FRANTIC to talk to you lately. Nearly every day for what feels like FOREVER there’s been SOMETHING that makes it difficult or impossible. One thing is that I had a burst of anxiety-fueled bravery and made a bunch of appointments that needed to be made (nothing interesting: things like Rob’s wisdom tooth evaluation and Edward’s vision exam), so it seems I am always sitting in one waiting room or another. Another thing is that the kids, one after another, got sick—a mild illness, but with a fever so they couldn’t go to school. (They rejoiced. That is the BEST kind of illness: when you’re sick enough to stay home, but not too sick to play video games.) (Now I’m having a flashback to a Peanuts comic strip that said the same thing, but about being not too sick to watch television. A child, probably Charlie Brown, was in bed with the television on his stomach, which bothered me a little as a child. Seemed uncomfortable/impractical.)

Anyway, with all that pent-up talking to do, it may be a little surprising that today’s topic is bed-wetting. Specifically, bed-wetting that happens in late childhood, or into adolescence.

I am going to talk very GENERALLY about this topic. I wasn’t sure I could discuss it at all, but it seems to me it falls into that category of Parenting Topics that Get Sorely and Sadly Neglected Online. If I want empathy and ideas about potty-training a toddler, I can find ENDLESS discussion on ENDLESS blogs. If I’m worried and frustrated about a early elementary-school-aged child who is still wetting the bed at night, I can find plenty of companionship and know I’m not the only one handling it. But when kids get older, we get understandably squirrelly about discussing their personal and potentially embarrassing issues. Which leaves us all stranded, feeling like we’re the only ones going through all these things. That’s not good either.

So here is the thing. I have access to some information on a topic that I think falls into that category of topics that parents shouldn’t need to feel stranded about. Who even knows WHY I have this information? It could be because I’m parenting a kid with this issue; it could be because it was something I personally dealt with as a child; it could be that a friend is going through it with her kid; it could be that I have been trying to get out and about more and so I attended an informational talk at the library; it could be that a book on the topic caught my eye; it could be that I have a friend who works in an office that deals with this issue. Whatever the reason, I have some information, from a doctor who treats this issue. And here it is:

1. Later bed-wetting is much more common than you’d think. (Unless you already knew it was this common. In which case it’s as common as you’d think.) This is another of the downfalls of not talking about it: it feels RARE, when actually it is not at all rare. Kids who have it tend not to discuss it. They tend not to go to camps or other places where it would be discovered, especially when they’re too big to wear pull-ups. Their parents tend not to discuss it.

2. It doesn’t have anything to do with potty-training. That is, many parents think they screwed up the potty-training and that’s why the child is still wet at night. Maybe they should have been stricter, tried harder, been less laid-back about it, started earlier/later, used a different training philosophy. But no, that is not why it happened.

3. It isn’t yet certain why it DOES happen. There seems to be a large genetic component: if one parent has some family history of later-childhood bed-wetting, the children have a 40% chance of having that issue; if both parents have some family history, the chance goes to 80%. But because of the aforementioned “not talking about it” thing (an even bigger issue in families than in blogging), people may not know they have a family history. It’s understandable if no one told you your cousin or grandpa or uncle wet the bed until age 16.

4. Another likely contributor is the thingie that makes the hormone that stops people from peeing in their sleep. It’s supposed to kick in during the potty-training years, but it doesn’t always, or doesn’t always make enough of the hormone. If it doesn’t, that is a SIGNIFICANT LIKELY CONTRIBUTING FACTOR, as you might guess.

5. Another possible contributor is constipation. The doctor said about 50% of his patients have it, and about 95% think they don’t have it; it’s not always obvious, if it’s not causing discomfort. The bowel presses on the bladder and also causes muscle contractions; during the day, it’s not an issue, but at night it is.

6. Many people think a contributor is deep sleep, and almost all parents report that the child is a deep sleeper and has trouble waking up. But it’s not a likely factor: in a room of sleeping children, half bed-wetters and half not, attempting to wake them up wouldn’t give you information about which of them were the bed-wetters. However, there DOES seem to be a correlation between a certain KIND of sleep and bed-wetting: the same kind of sleep that leads people to sleepwalk, talk in their sleep, turn off their alarms in their sleep, etc. That kind of sleep activity indicates that the “You are asleep, so don’t move or do anything” situation is inadequate covered.

7. MOST cases resolve in adolescence: a big batch at around 11-12, and another big batch at around 16. Something about puberty seems to reset the brain for most people. If adolescence doesn’t do it, college usually does. It’s possible that the change in schedule/circumstances contributes. Or maybe it’s just that some people have a little more adolescencing to do, and this is when it happens, and then the brain gets reset and everything’s okay.

8. Almost never is anything WRONG. That is, if you are worried that the kidneys are deformed or there’s something wrong with the bladder or whatever, that’s generally not a concern if the accidental wetting is only at night and if the daytime peeing seems normal in other ways. If it’s only at night (and has ALWAYS been that way—that is, it’s not that the child was night-trained but then started wetting again), it’s usually that hormone thing, or constipation, or an unknown-but-self-resolving delay.

9. Almost never does it Not Go Away by adulthood. It DOES go away. Like teething and colic and everything else that seems like it’ll never go away.

10. Suggested treatment is going to vary depending on the person/situation/doctor. The doctor I encountered is not keen on medication in general, but approves of desmopressin for situations where he thinks the likely cause is lack-of-hormone as opposed to constipation or some other unknown delay; it can be used even long-term, and then discontinued when no longer needed. (If he thinks the likely cause is constipation, he instead begins by treating that.) Other possible tools are hypnotism and guided thinking (“Imagine an alarm clock attached to your bladder”), acupuncture, bladder-stretching exercises (drinking more water and waiting longer to pee); there are also more medications to try.

11. It’s not anyone’s fault. It just happens to some people for some reason, and there are things that can be done to improve the situation.

Rob took the PSATs awhile back: usually that’s a junior-year thing, but his school lets sophomores take it if they just want to see what it’s like or see how it goes. Or if they want to get out of part of the school day, whatever. So anyway Rob took it, and I believe I see how this test is funded: BY SELLING THE STUDENTS’ NAMES AND ADDRESSES TO EVERY COLLEGE MAILING LIST IN THE WORLD. Our record so far is ELEVEN ads in one day from colleges.

I am reading Brooke Shields’s most recent memoir, and Paul keeps saying, “I think you should stop reading that book. It’s making you cranky.” Well, YES. Making me additionally cranky is that it feels as if anything negative I say about the book is attacking the person of Brooke Shields, and that feels mean. If our positions were reversed, I’d be wondering why she felt she needed to volunteer those opinions publicly. Perhaps she could have just stopped reading my book if it was making her so cranky, I might think to myself indignantly. Nobody’s forcing her to read it.

Nevertheless, I want to tell you what I think of the book. Let me see if I can put a finger on what the issue is. Do you sometimes find you’re listening to someone tell a story, and the story doesn’t sit right? Like, you don’t know what the problem IS, whether something’s MISSING or ADDED or MISLEADING or WHAT, but WHATEVER the reason, the story doesn’t sound REAL? A good example is when someone is telling their side of a fight, where you KNOW it’s not right because the dialogue isn’t fitting together: one person seems to be talking the way you do when you’re lying awake thinking of other ways a conversation could have gone, and the other person seems to be talking like a completely ridiculous parody of an irrational unfair jerk, and it just doesn’t WORK. Or maybe the story contains details that are incompatible with other details. Or maybe some details don’t make sense—like, how is this family with twins doing seven loads of laundry a day? Or maybe events are described in a way that doesn’t line up with what you know of human behavior. WHATEVER the issue, something is amiss.

Or sometimes someone is telling a story, and you can tell THEY think it’s a true story, but you have little flashing lights going off EVERYWHERE. A good example is when someone is talking about how the other person in their romantic relationship has been behaving. “He just has to work SO LATE! Sometimes they call him at 11:00 at night and he has to go right into work and doesn’t get home until morning! But they’re not paying him for the overtime at all, so there’s no difference in his paycheck! In fact, they’re not even counting the hours! And the office is closed when he’s there, so I can’t reach him! Also, we’re having a weird problem with our phone: it rings, but when I answer, there’s no one there! Oh, and I have a funny story: there was a BRA in his car and it wasn’t mine! I was so upset for a minute, ha ha! But it turns out he found it on the sidewalk and picked it up to throw it away but then left it in his car by mistake! Ha ha!” And you’re like, “Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmm,” wondering if you should say something or if you should leave them to the version they seem to prefer. I mean, who knows, you could be wrong; who knows better, the person IN the situation, or YOU?

And also, have you encountered that thing where someone blames EVERYTHING THAT EVER HAPPENS on one single situation in their lives (their parents’ divorce, for example), until it doesn’t matter HOW sympathetic you start out, pretty soon you are going to start wishing they’d think of another reason and/or take some responsibility themselves and/or AT LEAST STOP TALKING ABOUT IT SO EXTREMELY MUCH NOW THAT IT HAS BEEN DECADES SINCE IT HAPPENED? Like, just because something is non-ideal, that doesn’t mean it is THE SOURCE OF EVERYTHING THAT IS WRONG. And even if it REALLY IS the source of everything wrong, does that mean it needs to be re-said EVERY SINGLE TIME something bad happens, until people are reminded of Dustin Hoffman in Rainman, or of that game where you add “in bed” to the end of every fortune-cookie fortune?

Also, the whole tone of the book is “How dare you incessantly attacking my mother for earning money by having me play alarmingly sexy roles when I was a child!! Instead you should incessantly attack her for drinking too much!!”

Also, Brooke Shields got a 1000 on her SATs and she went to Princeton. Imagine: her high school counselor tried to discourage her from applying, considering her academic record and test scores! But she REALLY liked the look of the campus, and felt like she wanted to go there, so she applied and got accepted. (P.S. Rob has not yet heard from Princeton.)

Periodically I stress afresh about finding a job. I wish so hard that there was something I WANTED to do. Right now it is almost impossible to GET a job (I can’t work summers yet, for example, and dislike working with other people’s children), but if I had a job in mind for the relatively near future, then I could start taking classes or volunteering in that field, so that I’d be more ready when the time is right. Instead I go around in circles.

One problem is that it’s hard to know what jobs even EXIST, or what those jobs INVOLVE, or what is required to FIND and ACQUIRE those jobs. Lots of people are in very satisfying jobs they would never have drawn a picture of in first grade, because “accounts receivable” wasn’t a field that sprang to mind.

So here is what I would enjoy talking about, if you would enjoy talking about it too: I’d like to know what your job INVOLVES, and what it REQUIRES (education-/skill-wise), and maybe what you personally find satisfying and unsatisfying about it, and what you’d advise someone else to do in order to ACQUIRE it. This may mean very long comments, and you just go right ahead with that: I will be hanging on your every word. And you don’t HAVE to answer all the questions, either: sometimes I feel awkward if I only want to talk about one part of what a blogger is asking about, but sometimes I have 30 seconds and limited interest, so I get it if that’s your situation here.

I’ll go first, to give an example. I worked as a pharmacy technician for a couple of years. I found it because my mom was picking up a prescription and noticed a sign taped to the counter saying that they were looking for a pharmacy technician; if I wanted that job again, I’d go ask at various pharmacy counters. I’d continue to ask periodically, because at least at my pharmacy it wasn’t the kind of job where they kept applications on file; they’d start over every time they needed someone. It can have relatively high turnover, so I would definitely take a subbing or part-time position, feeling fairly confident that it would be full-time/permanent soon.

It’s an entry-level job with on-the-job training: no education is required. Customer service skills would be good to have: a lot of the job was interacting with customers. General computer comfortability would be nice to have; I had one co-worker who found computers inexplicable, and so I liked very much to work with her, because she would handle the register/customers, and I would handle the computers/medicines.

It’s hard to estimate, but I’d say about 50% of the job was filling prescriptions (counting pills or pouring liquids from fetched bottles, bagging them up and handling the paperwork, reshelving the bottles, filing the bags in the drawer), about 40% of the job was register/customer work (ringing up purchases, dealing with complaints, taking phone calls), and about 10% of the job was miscellaneous (putting away the weekly shipments of medicines, going through the drawers to get rid of prescriptions that hadn’t been picked up, filing original copies of prescriptions in storage boxes, restocking the supply of empty bags and bottles, going through the shelves of medications to find the ones expiring in less than a year).

What I found personally unsatisfying about the job was most of the register/customer work. One problem I have is that I am smiley and polite and friendly, and so my bosses think “SHE SHOULD BE ON THE REGISTER!!”—but I SUFFER. Every snippy or unfair thing a customer says stays with me FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE. I handle it politely and then go cry in the bathroom and/or lie awake thinking about it years later. Not a good fit for me, especially considering how many people feel free to vent to clerks. I also wasn’t fond of restocking, but I don’t think any of us were.

I also found the pay unsatisfying: $8/hour, with a raise to $8.50/hour after I’d been there a year. And there wasn’t much room for advancement: I could become a certified technician easily (by taking a pass/fail test), but that came with nothing but a small pay raise and a potentially improved pecking order among the other clerks, and after that the only remaining step was a pharmacist degree, which didn’t appeal. (That’s a job of careful, diligent, meticulous data-checking with potential fatal consequences for errors. The motto is “If it’s not 100% right, it’s 100% wrong.”)

What I found very satisfying was inputting (i.e., taking the paper prescription and putting it into the computer) and filling (i.e., counting/measuring the medicine and putting it in a labeled bottle) the prescriptions. I liked the process of taking a pile of work to be done (a list of one hundred refills when I arrived in the morning, for example), and turning that into a pile of finished work. I liked bustling around rapidly, taking an armload of bottles off the shelves and pairing them up with their refill paperwork. If we lived in a more populous area or near the right kind of business, I might be able to get a job that was all filling prescriptions, no helping customers, and I think I would genuinely enjoy that. Alas. Well, the pay would still be unsatisfying.

I liked taking the doctor’s scribbles and putting them neatly into the computer; I liked learning/knowing the codes doctors use to write prescriptions. I liked when insurance would reject a prescription, and I had learned enough to be able to figure out why, and then to either fix it or at least to be able to explain to the customer what had happened and what needed to be done (as long as the customer listened and understood, rather than giving me more things to lie awake thinking about). I liked knowing brand/generic name combinations, and I liked how eventually I got familiar enough with dosages to be able to notice when one was weird (1 mg instead of .1 mg) and mention it to the pharmacist. I liked that after awhile I knew which prescriptions were antibiotics and which were painkillers and so forth.

Okay, so that’s the sort of thing I mean, and I understand if you don’t want to write so much, but I wanted to give you an idea of all the SORTS of things I’m asking about. I am PARTICULARLY interested in jobs that require one year or less of education: I’ve got a nearly-useless (because of how old it is and how I haven’t had any job experience in the field since then) college degree in business already, and it’s hard to imagine justifying the expense/time of another when we’re about to try to help five children through college and when I don’t feel strongly about any particular career. That is, if I KNEW DEEP IN MY HEART that I wanted to be something that required a degree, I guess I’d go back and get another degree. But I DON’T know that. And I do HAVE the 4-year degree, in case a job requires “a college degree in whatever.”

I talked a little with Rob last night about romantic presents.

Oh! And I want to interrupt myself to mention something that is working really well for us: the concept of Dinner Helper. Each week, one of the two big kids is in charge of emptying the dishwasher (the weekly system was developed when we got tired of trying to figure out whose turn it was)

Oh! I want to interrupt my interruption! We have a useful way to remember whose turn it is with anything that involves (1) two kids and (2) taking day-based turns (for example, when two kids are taking turns setting the dinner table, or taking turns getting the first bath/shower, or taking turns choosing bedtime books). Here is the system: one kid is odd, and the other is even. Then as long as you know the date (iffy, I realize, but it can be discovered through research), and as long as everyone goes into it knowing the Odd Kid occasionally gets two days in a row (the 31st of a month followed by the 1st of the next month) and that this is a Good Example of How in Life Things Are Not Always Perfectly Fair, then you get to STOP ARGUING about whose turn it was yesterday! Instead you get to argue about which child is odd and which is even!—no, what we did was figure out a way to remember it. For example, if one child’s name has an odd number of letters and the other child’s name has an even number of letters, or if one child’s birth day/month is odd and the other child’s is even.

Back to the original interruption. Okay, so we do the dishwasher-emptying chore by weeks instead of by days, so each week one kid is Dishwasher Child. The OTHER kid is the Dinner Helper and has to help whichever adult is making dinner IF the adult wants help. Many nights, I’d rather be by myself in the kitchen. But some meals are more work, or some evenings we need to move faster, so then I have a Dinner Helper available.

At first, as with ALMOST EVERYTHING ABOUT PARENTING, having a dinner helper was more work than it was worth: I had to tell the kid EVERYthing, while ALSO doing my own work. Times two, because I trained both big kids. (The littler ones are seriously too much trouble to be worth it for me right now. I work on the philosophy of “Wait until it’s PAST the time they’re trainable for a particular task, and then it’s way easier to train them.”)

But at this point, now that we’ve been doing it awhile, it’s so worth it: I have my tasks and the Dinner Helper has his tasks, and the unexpected benefit is that it’s also Talking Time. The Dinner Helper does not always want to talk, and that works just fine too: we listen to the radio either way. But I’ve noticed all the kids seem to hover below their Preferred Attention-Getting Level, so generally there is talking.

Back to the original topic: this is Rob’s week to be Dinner Helper, and he asked if I had anything to talk about (we sometimes save issues just for Dinner Helper time), so I took the opportunity and I asked about The Girl and whether he was interested in dating her. He said that he HAD been: that the two of them had circled around the topic a bit, with her initiating the conversations about whether they should date—but then she started dating someone else, so he figures that’s a pretty clear indication that she came down on the side of no. He asked why I’d asked, and I said that a couple of his gifts to her recently had been of a sort that could SEEM romantic. He pointed out the girl is one of his two best friends, and that he had given similar gifts to his other best friend (also a girl). He said he likes to think of himself as a good gift-giver and so has been working on that.

So there we have it. I take anything a teenager tells me as The Official Press Release. That is, I’m not assuming this is the entire, complete, accurate story; I’m assuming this is the version I get with my Parent-Level Security Clearance.

Rob wrote a girl a fugue for Valentine’s Day. This is a girl who is a good friend of his, a girl who is dating someone else right now. I was uncertain how much I should Explain Things, and how much I should let teenaged life take its course. I went with completely the latter. I remember grown-ups explaining dating/romance/social stuff when I was a teenager, and how silly they sounded—and, frankly, how silly they STILL sound to me now that I’M a grown-up.

Anyway, I caught myself thinking, “He wrote her a FUGUE? How can she resist that?” Then I realized I was absolutely feeding into that mentality I HATE AND FEAR about how someone can be awesome enough to deserve someone else’s love (or friendship, if that’s what’s being sought). Like, if someone is REALLY NICE and REALLY GREAT and does REALLY NICE THINGS for you, you OWE them your romantic love (or, again, friendship, but I’m going to drop that part of the theme here and concentrate only on the romance one). I totally see how that point of view gets started (“But the guy she’s dating isn’t as great as Rob! Look how great he is!”) AND simultaneously totally see it as ridiculous and potentially very dangerous.

When I was in high school, a boy drew a portrait of me (using my yearbook photo as the model), and gave it to me all wrapped up. He’d worked on it for AGES. It was a very romantic and special thing to do. But I didn’t have any romantic feelings for him, so his offering, his gift, his effort—they didn’t elicit the reaction in me that they would have elicited if I’d had a crush on him. Looking back on it now that I’m the mother in that set-up, I can see how someone from the outside (the boy’s parents, or the boy’s friends, or someone who had a crush on the boy) would think “He drew her PORTRAIT? How can she resist that? The guy she’s dating isn’t as great as this guy! Look how great this guy is!”—and potentially going from there to “She must be cold, she must be heartless, she must be awful, she must be…” etc. But that doesn’t WORK. That’s not how ROMANCE works. That portrait could have turned my heart if the potential feelings were already there, but it couldn’t MANUFACTURE those feelings.

That same boy once argued with me at length on the phone, because I was interested in his best friend but not in him. He considered himself and his friend to be enough alike that if I wanted to go on a date with one of them (I’d said yes to his friend), I should want to go on a date with the other of them (I’d said no to him). He thought this only made logical sense. (This argument would now set off HUGE red lights for me. At age 16ish I found it only exasperating and also somewhat flattering.) I think this is one of those situations where VAST BENEFITS can be achieved by flipping the situation around to make sure it still works: if he thought it only made sense that I should like his friend AND him, he should have thought to himself, “And does that work for me? Do I have a crush on HER similar-to-her friend? And would it work for someone to argue with me that I OUGHT to have a crush on someone I DON’T have a crush on? Do I think she is going to say, ‘Oh! You’re right! I guess I DO have feelings for you, then’?”

So. I have shifted from thinking things like “I would have LOVED a boy to write me a song in high school!” to thinking things like “I would have LOVED a boy I LIKE-liked to write me a song in high school!” Because actually I would not have loved it from a boy I DIDN’T feel romantic about. I want to make sure that that’s the mindset I’m passing on to Rob, too, in case his gift is not received as he may hope.

I can hardly believe it, but I bought the Dove Cream Oil lotion AGAIN. The last time I bought it, I found it smells like a combination of half a dozen magazine perfume samples. It’s not an unpleasant smell per se, but it smells to me like Someone Else’s Perfume, so that I kept catching whiffs and wondering what/whom I was smelling. I finally donated it. And then yesterday, I saw some on clearance and went through the exact same thing again: “Ooo, the expensive lotion at a good price, and I love Dove!” followed by “Oh yes: the magazine perfume samples” followed by donation bin.

It’s just so surprisingly perfumed! I wouldn’t even call it “scented,” I’d call it PERFUMED. Like, if that were my perfume, this would be an incredible deal on expensive perfumed lotion.

How is this for an abrupt subject-change: I have a question about composting.

Long, long ago, when Rob was a preschooler obsessed with the Magic School Bus episode/book about water treatment, we took him on a tour of our local water treatment facility. There, they told us that after all the stuff is removed from the water, it is put into giant composting thingies, and later sold.

So this is my question: Does this mean that if we put stuff down our garbage disposals, we are composting it? It sounds to me as if that’s what it means.