Recently, Paul said something right before bed that made me instantly and unexpectedly insecure in our marriage. But that is not what I want to talk about or collect “I’m sorry your husband made you feel that way”s about: the next morning he was surprised to find me so affected, and said he hadn’t meant it like that. (Though all that did was make me think about what a poor communicator he is, in that case, and how little he understands word implications and relationship dynamics.)

I lay awake for hours, and then fell asleep for awhile and then woke up and lay awake for a couple more hours. What I was thinking about, primarily, was how financially dependent I am, and what my options would be if Paul were to end things. (Or of course if I wanted to do so, though at the time I was imagining an abrupt ending that wouldn’t give me time to prepare.) This is not the first time I’ve realized this, and in fact I set this up on purpose and I can’t see changing it even if I could go back in time and do so, which of course I can’t. What was MOST important to me was having lots of kids, and I don’t see any way I could have combined that with a career. If right now I had a career plus only two children, because that’s the number that could have worked with a career, I guess I would not have been lying awake worrying about my financial dependence—but that would have been pretty low compensation for the loss of the rest of the children I’d wanted: I would have lived a significantly less happy/satisfying life on the gamble that my marriage would end. So hearing “Yeah, that’s why I made sure I kept my career” is not helpful in any way. I want to make sure you heard me on that: saying “Yeah, that’s why I made sure I kept my career” is not helpful or applicable in any way. I can absolutely see why that would have been a good idea, and I would encourage my children to do the same, but it was not compatible with what I most wanted, and would not have made sense for me. It means I am currently in a precarious financial situation, and I accepted that at the time, and I accept it now. (Though it makes me FURIOUS that society is set up this way.)

Our state put out a study awhile back that reported how much a person would have to earn in order to afford to live here (not even to buy a house here, but to rent a 1BR/1B apartment), and it was triple the hourly wage I make at the library, plus benefits (which aren’t available for my job). If Paul and I split up, I would not be able to afford to live in this state; but I also couldn’t move to a cheaper state, because of the kids. I could get a different job than my library job, and I’d HAVE to—but I can’t think of any job that would pay me triple wages plus give me benefits. I wouldn’t be able to afford housing that would let me have my kids live with me. Meanwhile Paul would be GREAT: he could afford to live in and maintain a house, and he would still have health benefits, and he would not need to change jobs or worry about the financial aspect of things at all. (If the kids were younger, presumably I could count on some of his salary; but two of my kids are legal adults, and the others are 14 and 16 years old, so there would not be many more years of that, if any.)

Here is what I DO want to talk about: What can be done about this, if anything, at THIS point? I am well into my forties. There is theoretically TIME to get another degree and start a new career—but I have heard that women in that situation are not particularly hireable. Also: there is still nothing I particularly feel drawn to doing, so I’d be picking almost at random and then hoping it wouldn’t lead to a job I found intolerable. But it seems like if there is a small degree (1-2 years) that I could be working on now, which could then lead to a job with a good salary and benefits, that that would be a good idea on numerous levels. If NOTHING ELSE, if everything is FINE and there is NO NEED, I can still use it to help pay the kids’ college tuitions, and to fill my time once the kids are grown.

On the other hand, I HATE this idea. I like my library job; I don’t want to quit that and train for a better-paying job JUST IN CASE something happens to my marriage. I don’t WANT to change the course of my life and make it less happy so that it earns more money Just In Case. I don’t really WANT to go back for more schooling; and I don’t really want to PAY for more schooling. I am no more career-motivated/driven than I was in my early 20s, and if I don’t HAVE TO I don’t WANT TO. But. It does seem wise to be a little more prepared for other possible futures.

Here is the trouble with choosing baseball and musicals as summer projects: VERY TIME-CONSUMING. Our intention was to watch ALL of a particular MLB team’s games, but there are so many games and they are several hours each! If we watch a baseball game in the afternoon, that means we are sitting in the living room for, say, three or four hours; do we then want to sit in the living room for two or three additional hours to watch a musical? And then perhaps spend two more hours watching a baseball movie? Clearly we should have thought this out a little more carefully.

Still, we are enjoying it! I have a notebook I use to keep track of what we did each summer, and I am glad I started lists of games watched and musicals watched, because already I am getting a little forgetful; looking at my notebook, I see we have watched seven baseball games and nine musicals. We are starting to learn the baseball players’ names, and are developing favorites; we are playing soundtracks while making dinner.

We watched In the Heights, which we liked pretty well. We watched High School Musical, which made me think of how Seventeen magazine pretends to be for high school girls but is actually aimed at pre-teens; then we watched High School Musical 2, because we couldn’t imagine what MORE there could be to that story. Now we feel pressured to watch High School Musical 3, but so far have had other priorities. We watched Sunshine on Leith after commenter Shawna mentioned it; I’d never heard of it and really enjoyed it.

And then we watched Phantom of the Opera, which I’d never seen. This paragraph is going to contain spoilers for a 35-year-old musical based on a 110-year-old book. I liked the music pretty well, but I found the plot so thoroughly repellent I almost certainly would have stopped watching it if I hadn’t considered it a cultural literacy project. A grown man, who is repeatedly referred to as some sort of genius though I didn’t see any supporting evidence given for that, lives below a theater as he stalks and spies on and messes with the mind of a young orphaned child, convincing her that he is some sort of “angel of music” and/or the spirit of her dead father, and becomes increasingly obsessed with her as she becomes a beautiful teenager; he builds upon those years of deception and emotional manipulation in order to try to make this young girl fall in love with him / have sex with him / live with him in his gross cave under the theater; and then, when she finds it disturbing that he keeps murdering people and so forth (and we wonder why she doesn’t find it additionally creepy that what she thought of as her dead father’s spirit is trying to seduce her), and she falls in love with a boy her own age, the older man claims that everyone rejects him because of his disfigured face, which isn’t even all that bad, and also claims that NO ONE has ever shown him ANY compassion, even though as a child he was saved/hidden by a girl approximately his own age, now a grown woman who continues to care for him and protect him and make sure he has what he needs as he creepily pursues a teenager she thinks of as a daughter (a situation she KNOWS ABOUT?? and doesn’t do ANYTHING TO STOP??); meanwhile, HE is the one hiding from society, murdering anyone who doesn’t do what he says, and feeling sorry for himself because everyone is “making him” do this. He’s like an exaggerated parody of an Internet Incel guy, and really the best moment of the entire play is when the young girl says “Yeah, no, your face is actually no big deal? It’s your corrupted soul that’s the problem here.” The worst moments are when the actress, who was an ACTUAL MINOR CHILD during filming, has to repeatedly swoon and be groped by and then make out with the actor playing the phantom, who was more than twice her age. The actress also has to make out with the actor playing her fiance/boyfriend, who is approximately thirteen years older than she is—so, if she was 16 or 17, he was THIRTY YEARS OLD. The two male characters frequently fight over who should get to have access to her body, and try to make her reject the other male character in the way they wish; her own wishes are not as interesting to the director as the thigh-high white stockings she apparently wears to sleep in at night, along with a white CORSET and, like, white lace CAPE/TRAIN. And these were all CHOICES: it was a CHOICE to cast an underage girl as the lead, and then dress her that way, in apparently REAL rather than decorative corsets (the actress says she could hardly breathe, and that she thinks they affected her growth); it was a CHOICE to make a minor child the focus of the lust and possessiveness of two much older men; it was a CHOICE to have the child actress actually make out with and be groped by both of those older men (in one case until she had to put ice packs on her lips—I guess they just could not get that scene quite right and needed to do it again and again and again, my goodness what a perfectionist the director must be!); it was a CHOICE to lean into the teacher/father element of the phantom and then have her “tempted” by that rather than fleeing in revulsion and horror. My guess is that I said “THIS IS NOT APPROPRIATE,” like, more than two dozen times while watching the movie; I said “GAH!”/”GROSS!” perhaps twice that many times. Then I listened to the soundtrack while making dinner.

Here is something I have noticed, but have been unsure if it’s something we want to talk about or not. I noticed that I went through a stage of feeling kind of sad and panicky that in all likelihood I was never going to fall in love again, never going to have another first kiss with someone, etc. It’s not that I was unhappy in my marriage, but that it suddenly seemed like the stage of Dating Thrills had been such a short stage, and I hadn’t done enough of it when I had the chance.

And what I’ve now noticed is that at some point I seem to have stopped feeling that way. Just as the previous feelings weren’t because I was unhappy in my marriage, the disappearance of those feelings wasn’t due to any particular contentment/happiness in my marriage: it’s like those feelings run on a different track. Now I feel like if I were to be widowed, I wouldn’t want to date again. I feel weary at the idea of it. I don’t pine for those New Romance feelings.

It reminds me very much of the stage in which I desperately wanted more children, and then at some point no longer did, and so I think it’s likely that all these feelings are related to biology/hormones. I remember when I was feeling as if I couldn’t have a happy life unless I had another baby, and I talked to the OB/GYN about it, asking him if those feelings would ever go away, and he said, “I can’t tell you what will happen for YOU. But I can tell you that in my practice, at some point my patients stop talking to me about it.”

Well. I mean. That seems like it could easily be explained by women giving up hope: it’s one thing to be perishing for want of a baby at age 33, and another thing entirely at age 53: no sense talking to the OB/GYN about it at that point. But in my experience, that wasn’t the explanation; in my experience, the feelings of desperation just stopped. I still wish I HAD HAD another baby back then (and I don’t think I will ever be able to forgive Paul for that), but I no longer want a new baby NOW.

Similarly, it’s not that I gave up on experiencing new love again, it’s that I stopped wanting to. I still wish I’d had more romances before getting married so I could think back on them, but I no longer want a new one NOW.

Anyway. I don’t know how universal this experience is. I know that when I was feeling some despair at never having a New Love / First Kiss again, I talked with various friends about it, and a few of them were like “OH ME TOO, HOW CAN THAT WHOLE THING BE OVER FOREVER” and some of them were more like “ARE YOU KIDDING ME, I NEVER WANT TO GO THROUGH THAT HELL AGAIN,” so I know there is some…variety. Same with babies: some of my friends DEEPLY IDENTIFIED with the desire to have another baby (and with the concern that maybe we’d NEVER feel “done”), and others were like “God no, I’m so glad that part’s done with!”

Exciting personal news: I believe I may have located my “sit bones”! The yoga instructor kept mentioning them, and until recently I thought that was her special word for “butt”—but, unless I am still mistaken but in a different way this time, I think I have discovered what she means, and it is Not Quite the butt! Or, like, it’s the butt, but not the way I would usually sit on my butt. And the reason it’s exciting is that it is a small development that makes some yoga stuff easier / work better, including sitting cross-legged, which I still can’t do easily, comfortably, or for long, but can do noticeably more easily, more comfortably, and longer with practice and WITH LOCATING (I think) MY SIT BONES! Or at least being in the NEIGHBORHOOD of my sit bones!

I have discovered that I don’t like anything the instructor refers to as “flow.” It seems to mean “doing the same set of poses over and over again, but too fast for me, so that I feel upset and frustrated and left behind, and also as if I am not doing ANY of the poses correctly, and also it’s boring.” I can see how, in the future, if later on I can do the poses easily and rapidly, it might feel meditative and nice to do them in a loop like that, but that is not where I am now. Right now I want to take plenty of time to get arranged in a position and do all the little adjustments to make it as right as I can make it, and then I want to stay there for awhile and “breathe into the upper back” or “feel that generous stretch in the trap” or whatever (don’t tell me what a “trap” is: I’m trying to learn from context, as with sit bones). Today I stopped a video halfway because we were doing a cobra-plank-downward-dog-lunge loop that was making me feel yucky and unhappy, and I switched to something for the neck and shoulders, which was really nice until she shared that someone she knows says that neck pain comes from “not seeing both sides of the situation.” Sigh.

There is just no way to adequately frontload “No, not outdoors at real games; no, not listening to games on the radio” in order to avoid those suggestions being made and doubled-down on, is there! I do understand: sometimes when someone says no to something but gives a reason that doesn’t click with me, it is almost irresistible to try to make them see it my way instead—worse than if they’d never mentioned what they didn’t want and why they didn’t want it! Anyway, I was telling the entire thing to Paul, and he went into the other room for awhile, and when he came back he said he had gotten us basic cable and now we can watch baseball on TV in the living room, and if we don’t like it / it’s not worth it / I can’t bear the price, we can cancel it.

I would like to tell you something that is bugging me about exercise videos: it’s when the instructor is using left/right the opposite of how it is for me, facing them. I need to MIRROR their actions, and at this point also need to hear the instructions, in order to know what to do. So if they are SHOWING their right arm crossing over to the left, for ME that is left arm crossing over to the right; but then they SAY right arm crossing over to the left, and I have to pick between the instructions my EYES are receiving and the instructions my EARS are receiving. And it’s hard to figure out a way around this, because SOMETIMES I am NOT facing the instructor, like when the exercise is done lying on one’s back, and then the instructor would have to remember NOT to swap left/right! So I don’t know what the fix is. It’s just something I wish to complain about.

We watched the newer (2014) version of Annie, the one with Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz, and I liked it MUCH MUCH BETTER than the older version (1982). I’d expected the children to enthusiastically agree, but they had mixed opinions: they liked some things about each version. I think for ME the newer version was cooler / funnier / less precious, and had cooler music, and I appreciated all the fun cameos (Mike Birbiglia! Ashton Kutcher! Mila Kunis! Michael J. Fox!) and little references to the older movie; but for the KIDS, the newer version was the DATED kind of cool, and Trying Too Hard To Be More Contemporary/Relatable (and was therefore Cringe), and they didn’t recognize the cameos, and they weren’t familiar enough with the plot to catch all the winks/nods to the older version.

The kids and I are finally making progress on choosing some summer plans and getting started on them! I know it’s already July. But one kid was still wrapping up virtual learning a couple weeks late, and then I wanted to give him a week or so of that NO OBLIGATIONS OR PLANS OF ANY KIND feeling, and so anyway we are getting going now.

First plan: We are watching musicals. It is a mad mix right now, because we are not being picky/organized about it, except that for the purposes of this project we are not considering cartoons-with-singing to be musicals. So we’re watching mostly movies that were made of successful stage musicals. First we watched My Fair Lady, which I have seen countless times, and I wondered if it would be too dated for the kids, but no: big hit.

Then we watched Rent (the one with Idina Menzel and Sarah Silverman). I’d seen Rent on stage, and it was a very mixed-abilities production, with a couple of cast members who seemed EXCEPTIONAL (Angel, Maureen) and the rest of them doing a lot of yell-singing and thrash-acting, so it was fun to see a different version. Angel and Maureen were good in the film version, too, though not as transcendent as in the stage production I saw; but everyone else in the film was better than the stage version, and much better singers, so that made up for it. Seeing it a second time, I could appreciate parts of it more, while also still feeling like a large part of the plot is. Um. Dumb. (When the guy is like “Oh, babe, you’re suffering/dying but I have GREAT NEWS for you: I finally wrote MY MEDIOCRE SONG!! Here, let me play it for you, tell me what you think” and gets his guitar out!!!! We SCREAMED.)

Next: Annie. The Carol Burnett version. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it, or maybe I saw part of it and didn’t like it and stopped watching it, because some of it was very familiar and some of it was utterly unfamiliar. I did not enjoy it, except for It’s the Hard Knock Life, which slaps. (I’m linking to my preferred version of the song, which is from the more modern movie with Cameron Diaz, which is also on our list to see.) A large part of it is that I am so heartily sick of the “Ug, an older woman still interested in men, how HILARIOUSLY GROSS!” trope. Also the “precocious precious special child” trope. And it felt like the people who made the movie were hoping to create The Next Shirley Temple, but it was the wrong era for that, so it didn’t work, and comes across as dated and odd. Fun to see Tim Curry and Bernadette Peters.

Then, for Independence Day, we watched Hamilton. I loved it. I had expected to at least LIKE it, because so many other people went so bonkers for it, but I loved it and definitely plan to make this a new 4th of July viewing tradition. The kids liked it somewhat less (though they DID like it) and had more trouble following what was going on. My grasp of history and historical details is Very Poor, so that wasn’t it; I had some trouble hearing/understanding lyrics, too, so that wasn’t it either. Well, we’re all interested in watching it again to get more out of it now that we know the gist. I spent some fun time on Wikipedia afterward looking up various people (the actors and also the people they portrayed) and finding out things about them (the actor who plays King George III also voices Kristoff in Frozen) (the Hamiltons actually had eight kids, not two like in the musical, and the oldest and youngest sons, born 20 years apart, were both named Philip; two of the daughters were named Eliza and Angelica) (Eliza’s sister Angelica also had eight kids and named two daughters Eliza(beth) and Angelica, AND had a Philip and an Alexander, which makes the whole “Oh dear, can I name my baby a name that is somewhat similar to the baby’s cousin’s name??” question we get all the time on the name blog seem even less important than usual).

That was more time than I’d intended to spend talking about the First Summer Plan.

Second summer plan: Baseball! None of us know anything about baseball, so I thought it might be fun to learn about something that is almost utterly foreign to us but is normal and familiar to almost everyone else. We could watch some games on TV to get used to it, and then maybe spend some time reading up on it or looking up Wikipedia articles on the players or following whatever caught our interest about it, and watching baseball-related movies, and then maybe we could actually go to a local game once we knew what we were seeing. I did some research, found what channel we needed to be on, found it was a free channel through our Roku; we got all set to watch, we clicked the button—and it made us do some sort of code verification, and then told us we did not have that channel through our cable provider. Which, what. We do not have cable, so I know we don’t have it through our cable provider, and that is why I looked for something we didn’t need cable for. But apparently that is not a thing that exists, so now I don’t know what to do. We are all discouraged. We USED to have cable, but finally we had only the VERY CHEAPEST AND MOST BASIC package (so that we could get PBS and, like, the news, and weather warnings, and presidential debates, and see the ball drop on New Year’s), and over the space of a few years the price of that service was raised from $11/month to well over $30/month, so we noped out and got an $800 TV antenna installed so we could watch all those free channels for free. Then right after that success story, we sold that house and moved. So I am despairing. I guess we need to start all over and get another expensive antenna (which will STILL pay for itself in just over two years’ worth of Very Cheapest and Most Basic cable), but I can’t face it. So I guess we will skip baseball for now. Maybe another summer.

(I asked about this on Twitter, and there were a lot of suggestions that we could go to local games, or listen to games on the radio. But…we don’t know anything about baseball yet! We need the good camera angles to show us where to look, and to zoom in on faces so we start to recognize players, and we need the replays, and we need the commentators to tell us what we’re seeing!—and we need to SEE it, while they’re commentating, because we don’t know anything about baseball yet, so we can’t imagine it in our heads while listening to the radio! And anyway I don’t in general enjoy the outdoors, or crowds, or figuring out parking! And we’ve found the thing where MLB posts a few select past games to watch for free, but we all agreed that did not appeal at all. We want to see, like, all Our Closest MLB Team’s games in real time, not a few already-over games between other MLB teams. I think this is just a problem with no work-around: we either need to pay a lot of money for something we’re only sort of interested in, or else we need to find a different summer project.)

Third summer plan: Baking! Not many of us are doing this. Elizabeth and William were both interested (they’ve already both made bread, and William made soft pretzels), and the plan was for them to do bake-offs, perhaps of things we had seen on The Great British Bake-Off, but then William bailed on the very first one. Elizabeth made a cake roll, chocolate with whipped-cream filling. I don’t know if she’ll keep going with it if William doesn’t. I am also doing a little bit of cookie-baking that might lead to more cookie-baking. I started by trying to find cookies that were good with Cadbury mini-eggs as the chocolate chips, but now I’m almost out of Cadbury mini-eggs, so that might be the end of it—or maybe I’ll start experimenting with another chocolate-chip alternative.

Fourth/fifth/sixth/etc. summer plan: We have a bunch of other things where only one or two or three of us were interested, and now we wait to see if anyone takes any action. For example, I am the only one interested in studying some of our recent presidents; but then at the end of my shift on Friday, I went to the Reagan section of the library to choose a book, and got overwhelmed and didn’t choose anything. For another example, ALL the kids are interested in learning ASL, but so far no one has made a move to START. For yet another example, we are all a little interested in a “learning swap,” where each of us teaches something we know to the others—but none of us has yet picked a thing to teach, or set anything up. For a final example, we were all kind of interested in watching some long-running show (maybe Buffy, or Grey’s Anatomy), but no one has yet picked a show or started watching it, and also, we’re already watching musicals.

My morning exercise routine, which was a mentally and physically necessary burden during the pandemic, has changed into something new now that I’m back to work. I get plenty of exercise at work, so I’m not MAKING myself do exercise at home anymore—but it’s turned into something I would almost say I “want” to do. I apologize for that. It’s not something I’d want to hear from someone else, either. Super irritating. But here are some of the WHYS, which I feel/hope make it a little less irritating: it’s because the exercise is now something I’m doing privately up in my room (continued gratitude to Sundry for this life-changing idea); and it’s because I am now doing exercise in order to address certain specific issues I’m having with my active job, and/or for mental health.

So, I am not looking for videos that are STRENUOUS or unpleasant to do. I don’t want to SWEAT. I want to feel mellow and good, and I want my body to be a little stronger / more flexible, and I want to do something toward preventing my active job from injuring my body, and I want to occasionally try something and discover that I can do something I didn’t think I would be able to do (and/or find I can do it more than I used to be able to). So sometimes I choose stretch-filled videos for back pain (here are a couple I’ve done numerous times: Yoga for Back Pain; Upper Back Love); or sometimes I choose a SHORT video to work on core strength (I mostly like this one: 12-Minute Core Conditioning); or maybe for variety I choose one called something like yoga for anxiety or yoga for stress; or sometimes I choose a video with more details about how exactly to do a particular pose, to help me with another video (I am STILL not sure I know how pigeon pose works). If I am doing a video and the instructor starts putting us through difficult and/or rapidly-changing poses and I can’t / don’t want to keep up, I opt out for that part, and I do just little versions of what she’s doing: if, for example, the instructor were doing full sit-ups with crossed arms, instead I would do little tiny partial lifts with my hands behind my head. If she’s doing planks moving rapidly into cobra and then arriving at downward dog while I am just finally getting myself into the plank, I just stay with the plank, and then move SLOWLY to cobra, and at some point I skip ahead and rejoin what the instructor is doing. I’m getting some of the exercise, but I’m getting the amount I want, and I don’t have to get frustrated. If I do the video again another day, and I feel like I want to try doing a little MORE like what she’s doing, I do a little more like what she’s doing; otherwise, I stick with my own littler/slower version. Or I lie on my yoga mat and breathe and think about the nice dream I had the night before. Or whatever. It’s CHOSEN time; I don’t HAVE to do it. I can skip or modify.

And it’s pretty cool to start out with a sore back that was kind of bothering me during the night, and then do a video, and then my back feels better. Or to do a short core video a few times, and then find that at work I’m already feeling those muscles kick in while I work. And some of the stretches I’ve learned from the videos are helpful to do at work if my back feels like it’s getting dicey, or after work if I come home feeling sore.

I don’t AT ALL do it every day. I have my alarm set for the time I have to get up if I’m just going to shower and dress and eat breakfast and check email without being rushed before work. If I wake up earlier, sometimes I will choose to go back to sleep, or just lounge around; other times I will think “Ooo. If I get up now, I’d have time to do that nice back-stretching video before work.” Or sometimes I will reach for my phone and play Candy Crush until I have to get up.

On days I don’t have work, I’ve started seeing that waking-up time as a (again, I apologize for talking about exercise this way) treat. I bring my laptop upstairs the night before. I wake up when I want to. Then I play Candy Crush in bed for a little while. Then I get up and change into my exercise clothes, which I am gradually making improvements to (switched to a tank top, which I owned ONLY to keep myself from buying any more tank tops, and now my t-shirt doesn’t fall oppressively over my face in downward dog). Maybe I do the short core yoga video and then think that’s all I want to do, and I go on to take a shower and get ready for the day. Or maybe my back is sore, and so I pick one of the back pain videos with all the nice stretches. Maybe I do BOTH the back one AND the core one. Meanwhile, for all of this I am ALONE IN MY ROOM, and there is that “day off from work!” feeling, and the feeling of doing what I want and taking my time getting into the day. Anyway it’s nice, and it’s a nice change from “UG now I HAVE TO go on a walk.”

Already I have a problem with that post title; let’s spend two paragraphs on that and then get to the main point. I’ve been unthinkingly using the term “co-ed” to mean…”girls and boys,” I guess, and I don’t even KNOW what would be a better and more inclusive and more accurate word. I’m not sure “mixed sleepovers” is clear enough. And maybe co-ed is fine! It’s just, I’m remembering how female students were sometimes referred to as “co-eds,” as if making something co-educational means “adding girls to a thing that is by default for boys,” and that is not a connotation I want to bring into the year 2021. But maybe there is no such connotation anymore, just as the word no longer has to refer to an educational context; and maybe “co-ed” easily and neatly includes people who are non-binary, and maybe there is no issue here—but if you know of a better adjective, I’d be grateful to hear it. Or maybe the solution is to remove the adjective, and just say “sleepovers,” but for this post I need a word that means “NOT ONLY GIRLS, AS THE SLEEPOVERS OF MY YOUTH WOULD HAVE BEEN WITHOUT QUESTION.”

(Just now I asked William, age 20 and a combined computer science / linguistics major, if he had any negative connotations with the adjective “co-ed,” and if he thought it excluded/included people who were non-binary, and he said he had no negative connotations and that he thought it could easily be inclusive, since it’s “co-,” which is together/with, and not “bi-” or “duo-” or anything else that means/implies two. So there is one single data point from The Youth.)

ANYWAY. Here is my issue: Elizabeth’s friend group includes boys and girls (and possibly also people who identify otherwise, but that has not yet been confided in me). They all turned 16 in the past year. Once they are all vaccinated, they would like to start having entire-group sleepovers. And it turns out, I have some Upbringing to work through on that!

Elizabeth has actually ALREADY BEEN to sleepovers that included boys, but it was A Particular Boy who has been in that other close neighborhood friend group (which occasionally invites others, as they did with Elizabeth a few times) since preschool. Leaving him out of things just because of his sex would have meant leaving out ONLY HIM, and no one wanted that. (Also, I suspect none of the parents wanted to try to draw the line between “He’s six years old so it’s fine to have him sleep over” and “He’s N years old so it is suddenly no longer fine, and Here’s Why.”) I didn’t know ahead of time that there would be A Boy at the sleepover, and Elizabeth was extremely shruggy/eye-rolly at my raised eyebrows when I picked her up afterward. (The attitude was “GAH, Mom, it’s not *huge sarcastic air quotes* ‘a BOY,’ it’s NOAH.”) Which left me thinking over what it was I thought was so inappropriate about having a boy there. Like, what EXACTLY. And finding I did not have a good, simple answer to that question, all I had was some mental flailing. Like: IT SEEMS LIKE IT’S NOT ALLOWED. …FOR SOME REASON.

Plus, thinking over the rules of my childhood all the way through to the rules at my Christian college, those were…extremely hetero-assumptive. No one even ASKED if we were heterosexual; we were all heterosexual by absolute default. Like, if I’d been interested in girls, I could have had girls in my room with the door locked EVERY DAY/NIGHT OF THE WEEK and there would have been no rule against that. (And in fact, looking back on it it’s PRETTY CLEAR to me that several pairs of roommates in my various college dorms were girlfriends living together.) So I’m looking for policies that make a SHARP TURN from that. And this is where I welcome chipping in, because…what policies DO make a sharp turn from that, other than not having policies?

Do you see what I mean? Any rules I make about WHO can sleep over, WHO can be in the room with the door closed, etc., have to take into account that my children have not yet confided in me what their own situations are, and I don’t wish to make assumptions. And furthermore, I’d like to have policies that don’t include the icky implication that any two people of theoretically-compatibly-attracted status will immediately start having sex if they’re allowed in a room with the door closed. I was pretty annoyed as a teenager that I was not allowed to have male friends in my room, as if there wasn’t any such thing as being “just friends” with a boy. (The explanation for that rule throughout the Christian community, including again my Christian college dorm experience, was that we should “avoid the appearance of evil.” Perhaps we should also avoid teaching children that sex = EVIL.)

But as soon as I try to customize something appropriate, I run into trouble. I start out so well: I think, “Well, what if we get to the TRUE GIST of it, and we say that the rule is that they are not allowed to have someone in their room if they’re…”—wait, how do I complete that sentence in a way that doesn’t feel stupid to say? “You can’t have a person in your room if you’re dating them, or if you might LIKE to date them”? Really, am I going to say those words? And is that actually a rule we want to make? Sometimes when I try to transfer the Christian parenting/school rules of my own upbringing to rules that stand on their own without God/Bible/religion, I find that there IS no transfer, and that the whole concept of the rule needs to be thrown out, and maybe that’s what’s happening in this case. Maybe my kids are allowed to have ANY peers in their rooms, and maybe it’s none of my business what the exact relationship is. Maybe sleepovers can be with WHATEVER friends they want to invite, and we don’t need to discuss what sex those friends are, because that doesn’t actually matter. (If as a teenager I’d had a co-ed sleepover that included even my actual boyfriend, I still wouldn’t have felt inclined to, like, make out with him IN FRONT OF THE GROUP, any more than I felt inclined to make out with him at the school lunch table, or when we went to the beach with a bunch of friends.) WHAT IS IT EXACTLY that I think is inappropriate about certain combinations of people (1) in bedrooms and/or (2) at night, and what part of that thinking needs to be tossed into the trash and which part is legitimate, I guess is a question here.

I was discussing this with Elizabeth, telling her that I was having trouble figuring out (1) if there needs to be rules and (2) if so, WHAT and also WHY, and she was very amused by the whole thing. At one point she said, “You do NOT need to worry about Caleb and Cameron!!” (the main two boys in her friend group) and I said, “No, I know, I’m NOT worried about Caleb and Cameron, I’m worried about…” and I absolutely trailed off, to the escalation of her amusement. I could not finish the sentence! What AM I worried about? Is it in fact NOTHING?

I got up this morning and made a bunch of phone calls, FINALLY, including one that necessitated another phone call, to our pediatrician’s terrible referrals clerk, who asks in a challenging, bet-you-can’t-answer-THIS-one tone for things most patients would not know (“What’s the NPI number?” “Is she also a specialist in X?”) and then acts as if she is literally unable to write the referral without ME PERSONALLY providing that information to her, even if I have successfully answered all her other questions (the practice’s address, phone, fax, email address; the doctor’s first name and last, and specialty). The previous holder of her job had no such trouble, asking just the doctor’s surname, the reason for the visit, the name of the practice, and the day of the appointment; sometimes she’d say “You don’t happen to have their fax number, do you?,” and if I said no, she’d say “No problem, I can find it!” She NEVER asked me for the NPI, presumably because THAT IS NOT SOMETHING PATIENTS GENERALLY KNOW. I look back wistfully upon those happy times.

With another call, a receptionist claimed she could not let me make an appointment for my over-18 child, because of HIPAA. I have gone through HIPAA training twice, and this is not a thing. With only a few exceptions, ANYONE can make an appointment (or refill a prescription, or pick up a prescription) for ANYONE: I can call and make an appointment for my mom, or for my spouse, or for a friend, or for an elderly client/neighbor, or, yes, for my 20-year-old child. HIPAA prevents information from going THE OTHER WAY: the receptionist/clerk may not tell ME anything about the person on whose behalf I’m acting (unless the person in question is my minor child, or unless the office/pharmacy has a document from the person saying it’s okay to tell me things): they may not tell me how long its been since the person’s last appointment, or what kind of appointment the person is due for, or what prescriptions the person is taking, or their recent test restuls. But I may tell the receptionist/clerk anything I want: I may say the type of appointment I’d like to make for the person; I may give the person’s full name and address and insurance information; I may tell the receptionist what the symptoms are or which prescriptions need to be renewed. And the receptionist may schedule the appointment / leave a note for the doctor to renew the prescriptions, without needing to go through any sort of vetting process to make sure I am authorized to make these requests. But I know the futility of arguing with someone who is trying to enforce a rule they didn’t make and think they are required to follow, so I gave up without protest.

I ALSO made a call I THOUGHT would be terrible, and certainly there is still time for this to turn (as with so many other insurance issues) into a long SERIES of frustrating calls—but at least my FIRST call went quickly and easily. Here was the situation, if you enjoy a little empathetic cringe: I had in my hands (1) a bill from my doctor and (2) a letter from my insurance company instructing me not to pay it. (The doctor had apparently asked for a certain type of bloodwork that was not covered under the doctor’s contract with the insurance provider.) I had to call the doctor’s billing department and explain this. (WHY IS THE PATIENT EVER EVER EVER USED AS A MESSENGER BETWEEN DOCTOR AND INSURANCE COMPANY???) And the person I talked to was just “SIGH it would be nice if they would tell US these things! Okay, I’ll take care of this, you should be all set, just call us back if you see anything else about it!” (But my guess is that when they opened the file they DID see that the insurance company HAD notified them; I don’t think they would have canceled it just because I said so. I think they send out the bills on purpose anyway, because a certain percentage of patients will accidentally pay them.)

This batch of calls reminded me how satisfying it was to have Rob make all his own calls before he left to stay with my parents: he was astonished by how LONG everything took, and by how one call could lead to SEVERAL MORE calls. It’s also satisfying to think that at some point all five children will be taking care of all of their own calls/appointments. That’s going to be even better than when they all started taking care of their own seat belts.