I’ve recently noticed a group I’d never really noticed before: grandmothers bringing up their grandchildren. One reason I hadn’t noticed it is that I started having children younger than is currently typical, and so other mothers are pretty much always older than me—sometimes by quite a bit. In the group of women I get together with every month or so, we all have children the same age, and I am the second-youngest member of the group—and the youngest one had her first child when she was just barely out of high school. Some of the women are more than ten years older than I am.

So when I saw women in that age group with children, I assumed the women were the mothers of the children—or, more accurately, I didn’t think about it one way or the other. But if you’d said to me, “Hey, what do you guess is the relationship between those two people across the room at this open house?,” I would have said, “Mother/child.” Then I would have wondered why you were asking, because that’s kind of a weird question.

Recently, though, I’ve encountered three women, all of whom have primary care of their grandchildren. (My main contact is with only one of them, but she’s friends with the other two so now I’ve met them as well.) I’ve found their situation extremely thought-provoking. I’m not sure I even have much to say about it other than that.

Well, no, I DO. For one thing, of course it makes me imagine myself in that situation, and I wonder what that would be like. Probably none of these women expected to be taking care of kids full-time again at this stage of life, and yet here they are. I realized I’ve definitely been assuming that the kids would leave home and then Paul and I would move on to the next stage—but in one woman’s case, her youngest was still at home when her eldest had children and then abandoned them, so she even has overlap: kids AND grandkids to raise.

I’ve also thought about another implication of being in a situation where I was raising grandchildren: it would mean something had gone seriously amiss with one of my children. So here I’d be, back to a job I’d thought I’d be done with, and worrying/sad about a grown child, and also feeling out of line with my peer group.

(As an aside, I remember learning in high school that we “raise” livestock and “rear” children, but when I use “rear”/”rearing” it seems wrong. My dad was a writer after he stopped being a pastor, and one thing I remember him telling me is that if it sounds wrong, it’s wrong—even if it’s technically correct. So you’ll notice I first used “bringing up” instead of “rearing,” and then I used “have primary care of” instead of “are rearing,” but now I’m giving up and using “raise.”)

My 3/4ths cup measure broke somehow: there’s a split right down its plastic side, as I discovered when I tried to measure water with it last night. My first mother-in-law gave me this set of measuring cups, saying the 2/3rds and 3/4ths cups had dramatically improved her life. At the time I had mixed feelings about the gift: my mother-in-law did all the cooking and cleaning at her house even though she and her husband both worked, and I felt like the gift came with a message: “These are for you, because you are the wife and the household chores belong to you.” I wish I had been a little less inclined to read things into things. On the other hand, I like the idea of giving chore-related household items as a joint gift to the whole household. Although now that I think of it, I think I’ve many times since then given a household item to only the girl. Well, the system needs work, and perhaps I can polish out the details in time to accidentally send the wrong message to MY daughters-in-law (“I assume you are too incompetent to cook,” perhaps, or “I assume my perfect child shares household chores evenly,” or “I assume my child does all the cooking while you loaf around doing nothing”).

Back to the first hand, I WAS the one who did all the baking, and I LIKE to bake, and I REALLY LOVE those measuring cups and I use them all the time (especially for the chocolate chip cookies recipe I use, which calls for 3/4ths cup brown sugar, 3/4ths cup white sugar, and 3 x 3/4ths cups flour), and kept them after that husband and I split up even though in general we tried to divide possessions based on whose family they came from. I worried that the measuring cups would always make me think of my first marriage, and they sort of do, but over time it’s more of a positive association with my first mother-in-law and how kind she was to make overt efforts to make me feel welcome even though she was bewildered by two 19-year-olds (one of them a little unnecessarily prickly) getting engaged, rather than a negative association with the marriage. And if I HADN’T kept the measuring cups, I would have made the association every time I had to use two measuring cups instead of one, so it was pretty unavoidable and this way I got to keep using one measuring cup.

But last night the 3/4ths one finally broke, after many years of active duty. I went on eBay and I searched for vintage Tupperware measuring cups (I don’t like the shape/balance of the newer ones, and neither did my former mother-in-law: she’d gone to some trouble to find me an older set), and I found and bought a set that was just the 2/3rds cup, the 3/4ths cup, and a 1 cup: I could use another 1 cup measure, and I don’t need any more 1/4, 1/3, or 1/2 cups, so I might as well get the missing-pieces set instead of up-bidding a complete set. I got orange this time: the set from my first mother-in-law was white speckled with grey, but the orange reminds me of my grandparents: my grandmother’s cookie and cracker containers were orange Tupperware, and I have one of them. I mean my grandPARENTS’ cookie and cracker containers.

I just finished watching Moonrise Kingdom (Netflix link, Amazon link).

(image from Amazon.com)

When I was about halfway through watching it, I emailed my parents to recommend it. I said it reminded me of The Royal Tenenbaums, and of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. (More precisely, I said it reminded me of “that weird movie we saw with Bill Murray and a boat, and that weird movie with three siblings…started with a T.”) It turns out that the reason those movies remind me of each other is that they’re all Wes Anderson movies, which puzzled me greatly because Wes Anderson does horror movies and none of those were horror movies at all. And THAT turns out to be explained by it being Wes CRAVEN who makes horror movies. Which led Paul to share this clip with me:

So apparently I’m not alone.

Where was I going with this? Oh yes! I liked the movie. If you like Wes Anderson movies and/or quirky indie movies, I think you will like it too. If you don’t know if you like Wes Anderson movies, I think it is a good one to start with. If you don’t like horror movies, that’s okay because that’s somebody else who does those.

Also, while I am embedding YouTube videos, here is one that makes me love people more (in a mild way, not like those “guy dancing all around the world” and “wedding party dancing up the aisle” ones):

I already liked the song from the radio, but then the video is a spoof of a Robert Palmer video, which perhaps you should watch first if you haven’t seen it, to full appreciate the Ingrid Michaelson one.

So many things are BUGGING me right now. A lot of them are song-related, which is the downside of having a radio in the kitchen: on one hand it significantly improves my attitude toward kitchen chores, but on the other hand after I’ve heard Adele’s “Someone Like You” for the thousandth time, it is REALLY BUGGING ME that she would behave that way and think it was okay. The part that bugs me most, I think, is the lyrics “for me it isn’t over.” I get what she’s trying to say, but if her ex is married to someone else, it IS over for her too. She may not have GOTTEN over it, but it IS IN FACT OVER. FOR HER. Sometimes it lasts in love, and sometimes you need a restraining order.

Another song bothering me is the Justin Timberlake one where his greatest compliment is that looking at his loved one is like looking in the mirror. Wow, that’s pretty fantastic praise. Also, he feels that no other girlfriend would have helped him get more famous than this one did, so. It reminds me of a sermon my dad did back when he was a pastor, making a distinction between two types of love songs/poems/letters: the kind that celebrate the loved one, and the kind that celebrate the loving one. “What do we know about the loved one, after reading this?,” he’d ask, to demonstrate the distinction. In this case the answer is, “That he or she is dating someone who thinks very highly of himself.”

Wait, that reminds me of another one: I wrote earlier that I really liked Katy Perry’s song “Dark Horse,” but over time that’s evolved into liking the sound of it but really disliking the lyrics. SHE IS SINGING ABOUT HOW AWESOME SHE IS. That is the whole point of the song. Then she gets another singer to sing about how awesome she is, too. If I were considering dating someone who sang that song to me, I’d be like, “You know, maybe it would be better if YOU played with your OWN magic and I found someone who considered themselves mortal.”

I am feeling a bit STRESSY, though much less so now that:

1. This month’s I-hate-city-driving trip to Edward’s specialist is over, and

2. I’ve called to reschedule his next appointment, which I’d accidentally made for the same day as another appointment, and

3. I’ve gone to my doctor appointment follow-up that I didn’t even know why I was going and probably should not agreed to make the appointment because it was a huge waste of everyone’s healthcare dollars, and

4. I went to the grocery store even though I JUST WENT, and got all that put away, and

5. I cut up the raw chicken and put it in the crock-pot for tonight’s Crockpot Chicken Tacos.

All of those were much-dreaded and now over.

Next up to wring my hands over is a school trip Rob is going on. It involves airplanes and hotel rooms, and it does NOT involve parents. He is 15 years old and can absolutely handle this, but I have made a mental list of things to worry about that includes:

1. “What if he doesn’t understand about mini-bars?”

2. “What if he dramatically misspends the cash I give him and it puts the chaperon in a very awkward situation?”

3. “What if he drops his bag on someone’s head while trying to use the overhead compartment?”

4. “What if he oversleeps?”

5. “What if he’s a loud silly annoyance on the airplane?”

6. “What if he stays up too late talking with the other students?”

7. “What if he forgets something?” (both directions)

8. “What if it SAYS he only needs his student ID but then at the airport that turns out not to be the case?”

*pant pant*

Most of them seem to boil down to “What if I’m not there to do what I usually do OMG I REALLY WON’T BE THERE TO DO WHAT I USUALLY DO!!!” It is somewhat helpful to remember that the chaperons are accustomed to high school students and that there are systems in place for dealing with these trips. Also, if I think about how I’d be as a chaperon, I would not be freaking out (more than usual): I’d explain to the kids beforehand about taking off their shoes and not making jokes, and I’d make sure they had their tickets and their luggage, and I’d probably ask the hotel not to have mini-bars or movies available in the rooms. So everything is probably okay.

It is also somewhat helpful to remember that I went to a week-long camp in Colorado when I was 15, with a youth group I’d never met before, and if I picture myself at that age and my mother going berserk fretting about me remembering to fill my water bottle after security, I roll my eyes with all the mighty eye-rolling power of that age. BUT—that is also the trip on which I took TEN hardcover books in my suitcase, because I somehow lacked the logical thinking skills to figure out that I wouldn’t be able to read that many books in a week at HOME, so I CERTAINLY wouldn’t at CAMP. ALSO, I started DATING a BOY I met there. PLUS, I’d been on a lot of airplanes by age 15 (Rob hasn’t been on one since he was 10 months old), and airplane-travel was significantly more casual at the time. Here is a detail to demonstrate how casual it was: I used SOMEONE ELSE’S airplane ticket and it was no big deal.

It is somewhat helpful and somewhat not-helpful to think that this is what we’re going to be doing now: he’s going to be doing more and more on his own, and that’s what’s supposed to happen.

My parents are trying out a plan where they live part of the year elsewhere to try to alleviate my mom’s asthma symptoms. This plan is a bummer for an assortment of reasons, but one thing that IS nice about it is that it gives me an excuse to do some mild traveling, and I LIKE mild traveling.

I was planning to go visit them for a few days this summer, and then I had the idea to bring a child with me. Only Rob has ever been on an airplane, and he was 10 months old at the time so that doesn’t count. The main activities will be shopping and hiking so I decided to bring Elizabeth, who likes both. (The other four kids were like, “Aw, WHAT?” until I explained the planned activities, at which point they reluctantly agreed with the selection while also trying to use it as leverage for future trips of their own.)

This has generated a lot of excitement, as you can imagine, and also a lot of stress. I’m really looking forward to going, and so is Elizabeth. Buying the plane tickets was the usual advanced-math logic puzzle: “Let’s see, THIS flight is a good price but there’s a 30 minute layover and that’s too tight; THIS flight leaves at a reasonable hour but has two 3-hour layovers; THIS flight is perfect in every way, except that there’s no return flight on the day we want…”. When I finally found flights, it let me choose our seats from a seating chart; but then, after I’d spent a lonnnnnnnnng time choosing The Exact Perfectmost Seats, it informed me in red text that seat selection was not actually decided until check-in time. Ah.

I’d rather not have to check bags, so we’re going to try to manage with two carry-ons each, and I’m already fretting about that. I bought some of those plastic bags that squeeze all the air out of things (the roll-to-squeeze kind, not the vacuum-to-squeeze kind); we’ll see if those help. I’m more worried about the lugging of them through the airports, and with the managing of overhead compartments.

I’m also fretting because our flight home is a night flight. Elizabeth is very excited about this and thinks she will stay up all night and that it will be fun; I am picturing something more like her getting over-tired and crabby and weepy and not being able to sleep and complaining all night. She’ll be 9 years old by then, though, and I think I’m imagining her toddler self. Or possibly I’m imagining me.

When I was buying the space-saving bags I saw some travel neck pillows; do those help someone sleep upright without slumping onto the person in the next seat and/or doing that thing where you fall asleep and your head starts to fall and then you startle awake, over and over and over again? There were several different varieties; are some better than others? They’d take up a fair amount of space in our limited-space luggage, so I want to make sure they’re worth it. Do you know of anything else that helps on a nighttime flight? I’ve never been on one before.

I was talking recently with one of the women I volunteer with (we were on our own so had more time to chat than usual), and she has confirmed a lot of my worries about volunteering. She started three years ago when her youngest started school, so she’s three years ahead of me, and already she is in over her head. She says as soon as they find out you’re reliable and willing, they call for EVERYTHING. She signed up just to help with an event, but they put her in charge of it; she hasn’t been trained, and she’s going nuts with how much work it is, and there aren’t enough other volunteers to help (the school hasn’t sent out a request, so no one even knows volunteers are needed), and the office and teaching staffs are complaining about how she’s doing it, and complaining more because she can’t stay after school or come back in the evenings (she needs to be home when her kids come home from school), and phrasing requests “Couldn’t you just…?” (stay a few more hours, do the massive post-event clean-up—other things that are not at all “just”). I said, “Don’t they realize you’re VOLUNTEERING??” and she said “I think they honestly do forget I’m not paid.”

Anyway. Discouraging. But it hasn’t happened to me yet. I think I need to work ahead of time on my “Oh, sorry, I can’t that day” response. Or if I do volunteer for the local nursing home to see if that’s where I’d like to get a job later on, I could say, “Oh, sorry—this year I’m volunteering at the nursing home.”

Also, I think it would be better to have an entirely different system. What if instead of volunteers, there were several positions every year for odd-jobs type parents? Kind of like substitute teaching. There would be a list, and when miscellaneous temporary workers were needed, the school could go down the list and see who was available; the same as volunteering (irregular hours, different activities) but paid minimum wage. My guess is that those jobs would be hotly sought-after: I know I’d enjoy having a way to earn a little bit here and there, and I know a lot of other at-home parents who are looking for the same thing. And then we wouldn’t have this crazy system where there are jobs that simultaneously MUST be done and ALSO aren’t important enough to pay people to do, and where volunteers end up feeling trapped and overburdened, and where nothing is particularly regulated because it’s just volunteers (my co-volunteer said one teacher asked her to make her a sandwich [I should clarify that this was considered BIZARRE and chalked up to this one crazy teacher, and is not typical of the other teachers at all]; another asked her to clean up a spill in the cafeteria [in this case, my co-volunteer thought this was because of the difficulty of telling volunteers apart from employees]). And it really is SUCH a strange thing to ask of people: “Hey, do you want to come do some work for us, but for free? Like, you do the work and we benefit from it, but we don’t pay you anything?”

Last fall I planted thirty-five new tulip bulbs to join the fifteen to twenty I already had, because seeing the tulips come up in spring is one of my favorite things and I thought it would be nice to have more of that.

The results this spring: eight tulips. Total. Of those, seven are extra bulbs I’d planted in a new location because there wasn’t room for them in the main tulip patch; only one tulip came up where I used to have twenty and was hoping to have more like forty. Our diagnosis so far is VOLES, from seeing certain kinds of evidence (tunnels in the melting snow, tunnels in the top of the dirt) and from listening to the words people said with their mouths after I finished weeping and wailing to them about it.

I’m trying not to treat this like some sort of catastrophe instead of a minor gardening setback of a purely decorative nature—but it gave me this Big Picture feeling of “But I only have a certain number of springs to see the tulips come up! And now this one is lost! LOSSSSSSSST!!”

Also, if the tulips had just been victim to some one-year-only weather issue, I’d just think, “Well, I’ll plant more this fall, and everything will be fine.” But if I plant more this fall, the voles will probably eat them again, and I will feel EXPONENTIAL despair NEXT spring.

We have been the recipients of many vole-repelling suggestions, but all it does is point out to me how unwilling I am to do any of them. I am JUST BARELY willing to put tulip bulbs in the ground; THAT is my level of interest in gardening. I am not willing to:

1. Dig up, store, and move the bulbs each year to a different location
2. Put out vole poison
3. Dig up the whole flower bed and put special cloth around the bulb section
4. Plant narcissus instead, because voles hate narcissus

Well, although, about #4: we have a bunch of very nice narcissus (I don’t know what kind, but they’re small and white with a tiny ring of red around the rim of the trumpet, and they have a nice strong scent) that the previous owner of our house planted along the back of the house, where we never see them and where they rarely bloom (no sun, or too crowded, or proximity to raspberry brambles—I don’t know anything about them). In a fit of vole-related rage yesterday, I dug up a large clump of narcissus that had spread out too far into the yard and transplanted them to where the tulips should have grown. This is a project nearly entirely doomed to fail (there could hardly be a worse moment to try to transplant bulbs), but maybe it will show those stupid voles a thing or two.

A woman in a group I’ve been getting together with for well over a year now is leaving her husband. As you can imagine, this is a riveting piece of news for the whole group. I was pleased that all but one person had what I would consider a good response to the announcement (variations on the themes of sympathy, concern, hugs, supportive remarks, offers of help, non-pushy and sympathetic questions), and that the only person with the bad response is the one group member I don’t like. You know how people will make lists of things NOT to say to someone going through something hard? I hate those lists: I always open them eagerly, thinking finally I will know The Right Thing to Say—and then they contain ALL THE POSSIBLE RESPONSES, INCLUDING NO RESPONSE, all marked as Wrong, each with the intended meaning wrung out of it so that it now means something horrible and hurtful. But such lists ALSO contain a bunch of things that really no one should even be thinking about saying (“Oh! Well, in that case, do you mind if I date him?”), and she basically went down that list, including things such as, I am not even kidding: “No one ever leaves unless they’re having an affair. WHO IS IT??”

This woman gives the rest of us (well, or ME, at least) so many good character-improving negative examples. I suspect I was not the only one who was wondering if there were Someone Else, but the MINUTE The Woman I Don’t Like came up with that concept, I was completely unwilling to make such guesses/assumptions. “What a completely gross and ugly and pursed-lips thing for someone to assume!,” I thought, hurriedly scraping that guess out of my own mind, perhaps to lasting good effect. It’s a reason to keep this woman around.