Should we salute?

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Now that I am no longer officially a “working” mom (oh my god, I know all moms are working, just calm down), I don’t really know what to write about. So for now, I will tell a funny story.

Once upon a time, before my husband and I knew about nap schedules and potty training, we went to Thailand for vacation. My husband has some long lost uncle or something (I still don’t know who he is) who lives in Bangkok, so once we were settled in our hotel, we called him. The first thing we learned about this “uncle”: he does not speak a word of English. And he wanted to take us around Bangkok for the day. We do not speak any Thai, but were psyched to have a native Bangkokian (that’s actually a word, I looked it up) take us around the city. Turns out the language barrier was no big deal – the “uncle” was the perfect tour guide, and drove us to some cool places we’d never heard of. And it allowed my husband and I to openly snark and make crass comments without worrying about offending anyone. It was really a win-win.

So it’s almost dinner time, and through a series of charades, “uncle” tells us we’re going to a nice restaurant. We pull up at a building with a large red sign with one word in English: “Abalone.” “Uncle” points at the sign and nods and says with enthusiasm, “Abalone!” So clearly, we’re going to eat abalone.

The restaurant has a formal, strangely Western feeling — white tablecloths, lots of silverware, American music playing, and lots of waiters and waitresses dressed in stiff white dress shirts and red tuxedo pants. My husband and I sit down and exchange glances to say: what the hell is abalone, why is 50 Cent playing on the radio, and why do the waiters look like they are in a marching band?

An older male waiter comes over to take our “uncle”‘s order. My husband notices the waiter’s nametag says nothing but “CAPTAIN.” He nudges me under the table to get my attention and we chuckle a little, wondering if his name is actually Captain, or if that’s the semi-cheesy title they came up with for waiters at this seafood restaurant. At least we think it’s a seafood restaurant – is abalone seafood? No idea. Still.

After an awkward silence at our table where “uncle,” husband, and I all stare at each other, Captain brings out our food. On my plate are several small, round slices of…something (meat?) that is pinkish and shiny, and covered in a clear, thick sauce. “Uncle” looks very proud and motions for us to eat. My husband and I are something other than proud. But not wanting to offend this man who has been lovely to us all day, we dive in. And it is not good. I mean, it’s not offensively bad, but it is rubbery and lukewarm and dense and kind of fishy. Wait, I think that’s the definition of offensively bad.

So my husband and I are trying to eat this new food without offending “uncle,” we’re jet lagged, 50 Cent is actually playing on a loop, and we’ve been sucking down tuk-tuk fumes for the past 6 hours. Then Captain’s helper, looking lovely and gracious in her dress shirt and red pants, comes to see if we need any water.

And her nametag says, “ASS CAPTAIN.”

For the rest of the meal, it was all my husband and I could do to keep abalone from flying out of our noses. I think the “uncle” took our stifled laughter as giddiness over our food, and everyone else probably just thought we were rude Americans. Which we totally were.

I can’t wait to travel internationally with the kids and expose them to other cultures. But maybe we should do it before they learn to read.

Yay

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There is an ad on TV where a woman is constantly saying “NO!” to her family’s shenanigans. Her husband walks out of a dressing room with skinny jeans on and she says, “NO!” Her son tries to bring some slimy creature in a shoebox into the house and she says, “NO!” Her husband asks to quit his job and start a blog and, obviously, she says, “NO!” Because that’s just crazy.

Well, for some unknown reason, my husband did not say “NO!” when I asked to quit my job and start a blog.

I mean, the discussion didn’t go exactly like that. I don’t just want to start a blog, and it wasn’t like I said out of the blue that I wanted to stop working and just see what happened. Well, maybe it was a little bit like that. Anywho, long story short, I quit my job and am taking an “investment interval,” as Anne-Marie Slaughter would call it. I’m still technically a lawyer but I am not currently practicing, and I can’t even explain how good that feels.

This break has been a long time coming. I got sworn in to the Maryland bar in 2004, about six months after I’d graduated. I had already been working for a few months as a lawyer at that big-law-firm-that-shall-remain-nameless, and was beginning to really grasp what I had gotten myself in to. For my swearing in, I put on my best suit. My husband and I drove to a courthouse in Annapolis feeling celebratory and excited, and he snapped pictures while I stood up and took my oath. After the swearing in, I stood in line to get my official certificate that I was now a bar-certified lawyer. And I waited there, in that line of other newly minted lawyers in their nicest suits, and shook my head and cried. These were not happy tears. It was that kind of snorting, pathetic cry, where you’re surprised and embarrassed to be crying, which just makes it harder to stop.

I felt like I had just bought a pair of really expensive shoes that everyone said were beautiful, and I had just finally put them on and discovered they hurt my feet. And even though they hurt, I knew I was going to have to walk in them for a long, long time.

Turned out it was about 8 years.

But today I’m wearing flip flops.

Nuts

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Oh I love this story. And not just because the way the parents handle the potentially awkward situation is so thoughtful (it really is), but because of the image at the end — with the kids’ beloved obsessions laying discarded on the floor while they move on to the next thing. It makes me think of parents (myself included) who are all, “My kid is CRAZY about pirates!!!” Like the kid went to the store and paid for the pirate comforter and pirate Legos and t-shirt and shoes and eyepatch all by himself. Arghh, matey, who’s really the pirate crazy one? So many times when my kids are going through a phase I don’t really understand, I obsess about it, and then when I get it figured out, they’re on to the next thing. The next thing that I don’t understand. So I try to tell myself that it’s not worth investing too much. But how do I know that for sure? How do I know what’s going to be a discarded Buzz Lightyear toy and what’s going to have an actual impact on their lives? And I guess you just don’t. You don’t really know if your baby banging on a plastic keyboard means they have musical talent, or if your toddler’s knack for a fart joke means they have a gift for comedy.

Which is kind of terrifying, and liberating.

A few years ago, after I’d had my son, I went to lunch with a senior partner at my (old!) firm. He had three grown kids and was a devoted dad. And his sage parenting advice to me? I quote, “Raising kids is a total crapshoot and all you can do is keep them safe and hope you get lucky.” Um. Here was a guy who’d made a career out of manipulating juries and controlling legal battles, telling me that raising kids was out of my hands and mainly about getting lucky.

At the time it sounded totally fatalistic to me, but now I think it’s kind of a beautiful (and liberating) idea: that it’s not up to you to determine who your kids are, what they like, how they feel about something. That you just keep them safe and cross your fingers.

Which reminds me of the best parenting advice I’ve ever gotten. Not from my mom or my best friend or a neighbor, but from a total stranger (who may have been wearing a lime green sweatshirt with a large gray scotty dog made out of fuzzy yarn jumping across her boobs). She sat down next to me at Costco and stared at my son while I was giving him some pizza, and right before I was about to get up and move because she was skeeving me out, she said with this faraway look in her eye, “I wish I’d sat with my kids more and just watched them, instead of trying to get them to do what I wanted to so much.”

I think about that lime green fuzzy dog sweatshirt woman all the time, and not just because I have nightmares about her shirt. Or because she was buying a whole flatbed cart of cashews in bulk. (Seriously. What do you DO with that many cashews? Where does she store them? Does she have a cashew closet in her house? Does she make cashew butter? Does she work at a zoo?) Some of my favorite memories of my kids are from watching them when they don’t know I’m there – like hearing my son console his sister when she can’t find her favorite doll, or hearing my daughter tell her big brother that she loves him “so so so much” after he tells her a ridiculous joke (about poop, of course). If I’d been shuffling them out the door to their next activity, or up in their grills trying to entertain them, I might have missed that altogether.

And that poop joke was too good to miss.

Guilt shmilt

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My husband travels for work, and he was gone all week last week. After a week of dinners, baths, and putting the kids to bed by myself, I couldn’t wait for the hubs to get home and give me the night off. So he comes home, I kiss the kids good night and shuffle them upstairs with their dad – and instead of relaxing, I immediately felt SO SAD. Like the kids were going to miss me or have trouble getting to sleep without me there. I thought, “WHAT IS THAT?!!!” I will tell you: guilt. Soul sucking GUILT.

It’s apparently everywhere. I read this article about the regrets of a stay-at-home mom last week, and it’s been bugging me since I read it. Instead of some thoughtful advice for new moms, this feels like yet another example of a mom feeling guilty for her seemingly reasonable decisions. Some women’s decisions to stay at home are fairly cut and dry: if you make about the same amount as it costs for child care, and you want to stay home, then stay home; if you can’t survive without your paycheck, then get to work. But the author of this article had what seems to be one of those legitimately close calls. She admits she had little to no work life balance, she was emotionally strung out after the death of her father, she missed her babies, and she was able to do some freelance work while hanging with her kids. All of those seem like totally legit reasons to stay home. And 14 years later, she’s in a tough financial position and telling the world not to stay home with your kids?! Come on! (Also, it seems to me like the advice here should be “do some long term financial planning,” but nobody asked me.)

And then I see this “study” and think two things: one, how long till that kid scribbles with that sharpie on the computer?, and two, goddammit! When does it end?! I am over it, just so done with wasting time thinking that I should be doing something different or better or more thoughtfully or with more shamrock sprinkles (yes, I may have felt guilty earlier today for not making green cake pops with shamrock sprinkles for my son’s preschool party – again, WHAT IS THAT?!). So I’m not going to think about the laundry or the workout I should be doing, or the intellectual activity I should be pursuing (OH I just giggled typing that).

Instead, I will watch The Bachelor, and make snarky comments in my head about the women’s outfits and the ridiculous things Brad says. Wheee!

What size does a newborn marmoset wear?

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Sandwiched right between the sad, sad headlines about the Japan earthquake and tsunami today, I discovered this little nugget. And now, to avoid seeing anything else about shocking natural disasters, excuse me while I spend the next two hours researching West Virginia monkey clothes makers.