managed expectations

The sound of his truck coming up the driveway woke me, and then his dog was in my room, all whipping tail and twirling with muscular excitement. I’d left the door to the front garden open and had fallen asleep reading.

My son was in a dark mood and unusually humorless. The hood of his truck was open, the battery wasn’t holding a charge, the alternator perhaps, he was meant to meet friends in Oregon and go backpacking.  He usually lets me know when he is going to stop by and I was surprised he was taking time off work, having only started his job two months prior.

There was more to this story.  I asked about the house I’d recently leased for him and his brother, who was in summer school.  I asked about work, and the progress I hoped he’d made with registering for classes at the community college.  He said he was on a wait list for the intro welding class. This was the condition for which I would pay for his rent, if he were in school full time.  He’d given his brother his word that he was committed.

The next morning over coffee I pulled the more truthful threads out of him: He’d quit his job. He hated Santa Cruz.  Boring, doesn’t make enough money at the berry farm to fix what needs fixing on his truck, commuting is ruining his truck, needs to fix the headlight and the suspension.  After he left I found a discarded pot dispensary receipt for two quarter ounces equaling $100 on the floor with a cliff bar wrapper.  The college campus felt like an institution, he didn’t like being there. He wants to be in nature. He’s going back to Humbolt to work on another farm with a friend.

I learn in this same conversation that his brother got 100% on his midterms.  I should have been leaning into this great news, celebrating the focus and dedication of his accomplishments and not dwelling on my disappointment and concern for his older brother.  But I am so very disappointed; I could barely sleep the night before and I remembered him at preschool drop off, hurling himself against the closed door, screaming for me. I sat on a bench outside the classroom and cried.  A year later his younger brother barely looked over his shoulder when I left, totally engrossed in the Brio track he was assembling.  They could not be more different.

I always feel an empty hole in my chest when I think of my son, an equal mixture of love and concern.  I asked him if he wanted to see a therapist, as he seemed so depressed.  He scoffed, mocking me, insulted.  I reprimanded him for being rude.  I want to help, but he wanted only for this conversation to end and his truck to start. He hugged me and he left.

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H is for Helpers

Every child should have at least two mothers. The second mother can be a neighbor, aunt, gramma, friend, spouse or well trained labradoodle. Having an extra set of eyes or hands is crucial to parental sanity.  One thing you can't have enough of is help.

 

Even Lady Granthum agrees, "Parenting is hard enough, even when you like the child."

cousins in Seattle
pic by Auntie Kirsten

When there's an age gap between siblings or cousins, it's like home-bred childcare.  Older siblings and cousins can be vital second mothers, filling in on playground and carpool duty or handing you a clean diaper, depending on the age.  Even if they complain, they enjoy the responsibility.  

My eldest has stepped in to help my sister with her kids while simultaneously she is helping me with him.  My cousin's daughter has done the same. When I was little I often stayed with my aunt's family in Texas for the summer. I was mothered by her and my five older cousins. When my parents divorced one of those older cousins came to stay with us for a few weeks to help my mom with the move, and she learned to drive a stick shift out of necessity. And I learned what skinny dipping was.  Win-win.

cousins in Switzerland
pic by Auntie Kirsten

Lady Grantham:  "One forgets about parenthood. The on-and-on-ness of it."

Isobel Crawley:  "Were you a very involved mother?.....I'd imagined them surrounded by nannies and governesses, being starched and ironed to spend an hour with you after tea."

Lady Grantham:  "Yes, but it was an hour every day."

Mary Allison Tierney's essay The Gingerdreadman is included in the anthology Mamas Write, available at Amazon, or your local independent bookshop. 

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E is for Employed

I haven’t had a paycheck in over twenty years.  This was a choice, mostly.  I did a little freelance work when my first born was an infant but he was wildly unenthusiastic about napping on a schedule or taking a bottle so I settled in to the domestic engineer career ladder.  Stepstool. Milking stool.

I'd work for this guy

My youngest is starting high school in the fall and I am acutely aware of my lack of marketable skills. When I opted out of the workforce, the Internet wasn’t a thing yet.  I had a carphone that had to be installed, laptops hadn’t been invented, and to apply for a job you mailed out paper resumes and made phone calls. 

My last job official job was in an art gallery where among other things, I reviewed artist’s work by looking at sheets of slides that were mailed to the gallery.  I mailed press materials to newspaper and magazine editors.  I visited artists’ studios to select work or dropped off pieces at collector’s homes for consideration. People wrote checks and we had to wait 10 working days until they cleared.  Back then people smoked in galleries too, which seems bizarre now. 

In the twenty one years since I retired, the art gallery as a sales venue has been all but replaced with eBay and websites, but shows do still happen. I’ve been to a handful.  My money goes to other things, like graph paper, cleats, and iPads, so I’m not a patron of the arts and my gallery opening invitations dried up pretty quick. 

So how does one step back in?  A lot has been published about this lately, or maybe I’m just noticing it. I have zero marketable skills, at least compared to an unencumbered twentysomething with a relevant degree and practical experience.  How does navigating elementary school volunteer & carpool duties translate to a W-2? I am nowhere near hip enough to be a barista or bag groceries at Whole Foods.  I’m way too hormonal to be a crossing guard.  I might be too hormonal to be around other people, or their dogs. 

I’m open to suggestions.

Mary Allison Tierney's essay The Gingerdreadman is included in the anthology Mamas Write, available at Amazon, or your local independent bookshop.

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H is for Houdini

This was the first piece of writing I had published. (Marin Independent Journal)  Motherhood is a minefield. Motherhood is a goldmine. Oh yeah. 

Houdini at 8

Houdini Toddler


There’s a cold dark place you go when you can’t find your child. I went there once. This isn’t the run of the mill can’t pick out your kid’s head bobbing in the pool, can’t sift through all the hooded toddlers at the park, just focused on a sale rack for a second and now you’re on your hands and knees at Nordstrom.

This is an all hands on deck, EVERYBODY is looking and minutes are ticking by and your toddler is GONE. This is when someone gently leads you to a room so you can scream while they hold you.

I stepped into the Toddler Room to pick up my two year old son and in the scramble for lunch boxes and hanging up of jackets I couldn’t see where he might be. The afternoon kids were settling in for lunch and the hip-height chaos was all around me. A few seconds passed before I could move into the room and peek around the corner to the area where I usually found him painting. Not there. His teacher saw my questioning look and helped me look. She opened the door to the outside play area, asking several parents and teachers if they had seen him.

In seconds the entire school was in lock down mode with all able bodies calling his name and looking in the garden, upper school, kitchen, parking lot, office. This is when it became cold and dark, and I was led by the elbow into an office. I remember screaming for someone to call 911.



Parents and teachers had begun looking in the creek that runs behind the school and were fanning out into the neighborhood, when a local resident came out of her house and asked if we were looking for the little boy she had in her arms. He had slipped out the gate in the back of the school and disappeared up a flight of stairs leading to the Homestead Valley Community Center. Like Popeye’s Sweetpea, skirting disaster at every turn, he had gone past the pool, through a parking lot with a blind driveway, along Montford, a typical Mill Valley neighborhood street with no sidewalk or shoulder, across Montford and up this neighbor’s steep driveway.

The fact that he wasn’t run down by an SUV was a miracle in itself. Ten years have passed since that day, and the two preschool teachers have since retired and moved away. I send them both a Christmas card each year and get one in return. I know they went to their own cold dark place that day.   2007

He's 18 now.  Still pulling Houdini's.  Off to college in the fall. 

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F is for Fan

I am a San Francisco Giants fan with a small f. I have some shirts and caps and attend a few games each season. I love to watch them play, have minor crushes on players and I always root for the Giants. I do admire the the die hard Fans, the facepaint, dye your Mohawk, full orange and black battlegear FANS.

I went to my first Giants game when I was visiting a family friend, Lance, and he took my friend May and I to Candlestick and we froze our asses off. In July. We were teenagers from Phoenix and this was a harrowing experience. I’d never been to a Major League baseball game before, at that time the Diamondbacks didn’t exist. I earned my first Croix de Stick pin, without knowing what it was.

 I was living in New York in 1989, had just opened a beer and settled in to watch game 3 of the Bay Area World Series when the screen went black. Being New York I assumed it was the cable. Soon we learned of the Loma Prieta earthquake and watched sportscasters doing hard news as they interviewed drunk tailgaters in the Stick parking lot holding up chucks of fallen concrete and yelling ‘Go Giants!’

 When I moved to San Francisco in 1991 we started attending games, and my son went to his first as a four month old, complete with his first Giants cap. I have a picture somewhere of both my boys at the last game played at the Stick, with their grandfather in 1999. They lost to the Dodgers. Boo! I learned that day that The Beatles played their last complete concert there in 1966.

The Giants move to AT & T (PacBell/SBC) Park coincided with my daughter’s birth. Our first game at the new park I had a three month old Bjorned to my chest and was terrified she’d get beaned by a foul ball. Our seats were now behind third base and the Giants dugout, and she’s grown up attending games and has become a real Fan with a capital F.


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A is for Appetite

 A is for Appetite

My oldest son was hungry from the moment he emerged from my body. He weaned himself from the breast when he was first able to hold a spoon and navigate it to his mouth. I was wistful but relieved as he preferred to nurse around the clock. He was a typical red headed firecracker and I was exhausted.

 His brother entered the world and immediately took a nap. He was mildly interested in eating, but his first priority was to watch his brother pinball round the room. He sustained life for years on goldfish crackers.

This patterned continued, with the older inhaling his meals and the younger making a marathon out of a single slice of pizza. When my daughter graced us with her presence, she ate like a normal human, favoring fruit, but with little fuss. As they grew, stocking the fridge and pantry has always been a considered thoughtful endeavor. Price, value, quantities and quality all factor in. Costco bulk for the cheap price. Farmers market for quality. Trader Joes for price, quirkiness and convenient, as it’s nearby.

All this escalated enormously when both my boys were in high school. Giant drums of cream cheese, four gallons of milk. Two dozen bagels. Costco became my weekly market. My kids work at the farmer’s market on Sundays, so I was glad to have vendors load us up with freebies on occasion.

 But when my eldest left for college and the dust settled, I found myself throwing out food. Milk would linger, crowding the fridge. Hummus went bad. I stopped shopping at Costco altogether and let my membership expire. Turns out it was just him eating almost everything, his younger brother just a grazer, and his eleven year old sister eats like an eleven year old girl.

I no longer knew how to grocery shop for my family. It felt odd to only buy a half dozen bagels and a normal brick of cream cheese, a half gallon of milk. With my eldest living out of the house, a muffin can sit on the counter for an hour or two, untouched. My daughter almost never has to leave a ‘Do Not Eat’ note on her plate when she leaves the room for a moment.

 She still needs to hide chips from her other brother, that will never change.


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