Johnny Prynce, our rock star tenant, has been traveling on tour all month and is breezin’ back into town today for a concert in downtown Santa Cruz at the Catalyst. Woo hoo!! We’re all going. The opening act is a band called Radid Fire whom I have mentioned before. Rapid Fire consists of three teenage boys around 13 years old, two of whom are the twin sons of my friend Kathryn, who is a frequent commenter here. I just talked to Kathryn and we plan to meet up and agreed to wear our ear plugs and to keep our phones on vibrate. The video above is of Johnny’s band, Dirty Penny singing “Vendetta”. Enjoy.

Yesterday was Sam’s 19th birthday and we all went out to dinner to celebrate. My girls, Eva and Sophia, were at their dad’s and did not attend, but Paul’s kids, along with Susie, his ex-wife, met up at a wonderful Chinese restaurant in Capitola called Canton’s. I highly recommend it.

It was a pleasant evening. We each had assigned jobs to order various courses, ( mine was appetizers) but desert was the usual fortune cookie. Sam went first to read aloud his fortune, but before he did he said, “I think I got Dad and Carol”s.” (Carol is me, those of you who don’t know.) It said: “You will be very happy with your spouse.”

“What a nice thing to say”, I thought, not only because he could recognize that his father and I are happy, but because he acknowledged my existence in the first place. You see, Sam and I have a very turbulent past, so to speak. There are times when he looks at me with such disdain I swear he hates me. If I had to list all the mistakes I made as a step mother,  most would  begin with Sam.

When I first entered Sam’s life he was coasting along just fine without me. Both of his parents worked outside the home and there I was working from home and therefore able to observe him not doing his homework, eating crap and playing too many video games. I felt it was my role to correct his behavior and made it my mission to do so. In hindsight, this was not such a great idea. It not only back fired in my face, it bred resentment. I hope someday Sam will look back on my “interference” as caring rather than an annoyance. Only time will tell. If I had to do it all over again I would simply leave his parenting up to his parents and stay out of it. I set myself up to be the bad guy, even though I was well intentioned. Perhaps Sam’s acknowledgement that I was  good for his father was the first nod in my favor. Maybe I am making way too much of this, but sometimes I just have to take what I can get.

Sometimes I look back on some of my posts and I think I paint such a rosy picture that maybe you might get sick of me and think that I am laying it on a little thick. I wax on about how I married the most perfect man and have the most perfect life. Well I don’t. I am here to tell you that I have snot on my couch. With five teenagers, it comes with the territory.  I have found candy wrappers under the couch, nail clippings, moldy sandwiches and now…. snot.

I did marry a lovely man. That part is true. But he did not come to me in isolation. He had three children and the blending with my two has not been an easy task. It was the hardest on me, truthfully, because I am a clean freak neat nick  as in, it bothers me if the butter knives in the silverware drawer are not facing all the same direction. Or the bath towels aren’t folded a certain way. And I cannot for the life of me understand why no one seems to do things the way I want them done. So you can see my challenges here. These days with grad school and all, my standards of cleanliness have gone lower than I ever thought they could go. But I have my blinders on. One must in order to survive. I’ve had a lot of practice. When I lived in NYC in my early 20’s the view from my apartment was a brick wall. I made it a point to never look out that window. My motto now is, “Don’t look under the couch.”

We had a bit of drama at the Shwanda house last week. My daughter Sophia and my husband Paul got into a big argument on Tuesday night over something as innocuous as the TV (he wanted to watch the Olympics and she wanted to watch a reality show) and she just had a hissy fit. She stormed out of the great room, starting slamming things around, claimed she ” JUST CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE!!!” packed her bags and drove across town to go live with her father.  It was not her finest moment and it wasn’t mine either. She screamed some expletives at her step father, which she later came to regret, and I allowed myself to get caught in the middle when I should have been backing up my hubby. I got defensive. I let my “I’m-so-sorry-for-getting-divorced-and-remarried-and-making-you-move-guilt” get in the way of reason. Read the rest of this entry »

A few posts back I  wrote about our aspiring rock star son Mark’s announcement that he was not planning to go to college because he was looking forward to living the hard scrabble life of his rock idol Slash. Last week I had the opportunity to give one of  his band mates a ride home and boy did I learn a lot. The young man told me all about the courses he was taking in school. He is a sophomore and is already tackling AP Calculus. To put things in perspective, that is something seniors usually take as an elective after they have completed Algebra one and two, Geometry and Pre-Calculus. This kid is driven. I asked him what motivates him and he said he needs to take as many AP classes as possible so that he can get a scholarship to college because that is the only way he will be able to go since his parents don’t have the money to send him.  I was impressed.

I dropped him at his house, a modest home in the working class section of town, and made the snap shot assessment that this kid is already living the hard scrabble life. And he wants better. Good for him. He reminded me a lot of myself at that age because I too came from very humble beginnings. I got my first job at 13 in a hotel laundry room and worked my way through high school and college for which I got a scholarship. And I pitched in around the house by cooking and cleaning while my  mother was still at work. In my efforts to give my kids a better life than I had  I wonder if am doing them a disservice by not giving them the hard scrabble life now so that they won’t be craving it later. You tell me. When the boy got out of my car I hollered to him, “Hey, rub some of that college stuff onto Mark. He says he doesn’t want to go.” He replied back with assurance, “He’ll go. He’s just saying that.” I hope he’s right.

Photo of a natural bridge along West Cliff

The kids all have off from school today in honor of President’s Day and they are all at their other parents’ houses. I was working in my home office when Sophia called me to ask if I would like to go for a walk with her on West Cliff Drive. How sweet to be asked. I said, “Sure.” Now that she’s got wheels she drove over to pick me up and we headed down to the beach for a power walk along the ocean. I always enjoy time alone with each of  my kids. And I’m delighted they still want to have anything to do with me.

The best part of the homemade dollhouse  project was that it was made in our art studio. Paul built it for me when we got married. It was a place for me to do my writing and seaweed art, but also a free space for the children to invent, create and make messes. We work on art projects, make candles, sew, have my Just Imaginate craft classes. It’s a fun room. When we lived at our old house, my girls had a play house that their father had built for them. They missed it terribly. This special room is for all of us and I love enjoying it with them. The photos below are of our studio.

art studio entrance

art studio interior

another view

I’ll let you in on a little secret. I’m getting old. Old as in… when I bend down to pick up something my knees creak and I’m not sure I can get back up. Old as in… I’m getting red moles of the back of my knees like my mother had. And old as in … sometimes I forget where I left my kids. For example, this past weekend Eva had a sleepover at a friend’s house and she was gone Friday night and all day Saturday. With a houseful of all her siblings and their friends, I hardly missed her. Around 5pm on Saturday night she called me on my cell phone and asked me to come pick her up. And I thought to myself, “Pick you up? Where? All this time I thought you were in your room.” Nooooooo. I’m turning into my mother. Help!!! The red moles, the denial that I am losing my hearing, sight, mind… fill in the ___________. And now… I’m losing my kids!!! When they were babies I used to have nightmares that I drove off and left the car seat on roof of the car. Those were only bad dreams. This is my sad reality. In spite of my exhaustion, when they were little I always knew where they were. Now that they are teenagers, not so much.

I guess I shouldn’t be too hard on myself since my mom was guilty of  misplacing her children too. When we were kids she used to take us to WaWa after church on Sundays. (WaWa is a Northeastern regional convenience store chain similar to 7Eleven. I wish they had them here because they have the greatest milkshakes.) While Mom was at the deli counter we five kids would run wild through the store. My younger sister Jill and I would dip our hands into the pickle barrels, lick the pickles and throw them back in. (Aahh. Those were the days.) One day, Jill must have been in the bathroom when we left the store and drove home without her. I think we were home about a half hour when my mother  realized her “oversight” and shrieked in horror, “WE LEFT JILL IN WAWA!!!!!!!!!!!” We all clamored into the paneled station wagon (which my father had decorated with embarrassing Flower Power stickers) while my mom sped like a maniac back to the store where we found Jill wandering the aisles aimlessly, oblivious to the fact that we had left her in the store and had gone home without her.  My mother covered well when she told my sister, “Come on, Jill. Time to go.” Just as I did when I told Eva, “Sure, I’ll be right over to get you.” And we wonder why some children have abandonment issues.

Sophia got her wisdom teeth out on Friday and she came through like a real trouper. I know she was scared, but she kept a stiff upper lip (even though it was ashen, like the color of her face) and I was very proud of her. It was her first time under anesthesia  and I was a bit nervous myself. I assured her all the way that it was no big deal, that I had my wisdom teeth out when I was her age and I got to drink milkshakes  and it was so fun. (I didn’t mention that I remember puking blood into a bedpan afterward. I chose to keep that thought to myself.) In those days you stayed overnight in the hospital. Now, in this day and age of revolving door medical care, it’s in and out. I was horrified, truthfully, when the nurse called out to me, “Here’s your daughter. She’s ready to go,” and presented me with a wobbly teenager still doped up from the anesthesia. The child could barely stand, but she was cognizant enough to show me a baggy filled with her bloody teeth. Eeeeew. (I kept that thought to myself too.)

Fortunately her dad, Jared, my ex, was with me and together we carried her to the car. When we got her home, Paul was there to open the door and turn down her bed. Jared sat with her while I ran to the store to stock up on milkshake ingredients. When I returned, it was time for Sophia to ice her jaw. I gave her two baggies filled with ice cubes which she held to her face. She complained of being bored because she wanted her hands free. I tried tying the bags with a towel around her head, but that didn’t work so I asked my engineer husband for a problem solving solution. “What can we tie to her head that wouldn’t be too heavy and would stay on?” Seriously, without any hesitation, he responded, “How about a bra?” He then put the ice bags in  two socks and placed them in the cups of a bra and hooked it to her head. Voila. It worked. Sophia was able to ice her jaw for several hours while she played on her computer. And she got to experience the love and attention of her three parents. I would show you the photo I took of her, but she won’t let me. Just as well since some images are probably better left to the imagination.

Sophia won, “The Don’t Eat the Marshmallow Award” in math class this past week. It  was given to her from her teacher for “showing exemplary self control, delaying gratification and focusing  on the long term goal of doing her best every day throughout the course of Trigonometry/Analytic Geometry.”  The award is named after a groundbreaking experiment held at Stanford University in the early ’70’s in which four- year-old children were given a choice. They were each given a marshmallow, which they could eat right away, or they could wait 15 minutes and then have two. Two thirds of the children immediately devoured the marshmallow, some hung on as long as they could, and the rest were able to wait  and were rewarded with two marshmallows. Fourteen years later there was a followup study done that revealed that the kids who waited were much more successful in life, with better grades and life goals, than the ones who ate the marshmallow right away. The study’s findings were that self-discipline and delayed gratification are the most important factors for success.

Needless to say, I was extremely proud of Sophia, but more importantly, she was very proud of herself. This recognition is particularly significant because Sophia does not have a natural aptitude for math. She really has to work hard at it, that entails working with tutors  4-6 hours a week plus additional studying.  I have always told her that what she lacks in ability she  makes up for in dedication and perseverance. Way to go Sophia!!! We are all very proud of you. One final note: the award was in the form of  a certificate, which we framed, accompanied by two marshmallows, which Sophia promptly ate.