This week the kids are off from school for spring break and Sophia is in Maine as a houseguest of one of her friends   With her gone and all of the other kids still here, it feels like a prelude to how it will feel when she goes off to college next year, an event that I suspect will be much harder on me than it will be on her.

She took the red eye  Sunday night, and aside from my Monday morning text to her to make sure she landed safely, I have resisted the impulse to call/text her with my usual barrage of questions: “How’s the weather? What are you doing today? Had any lobster?”

Sophia and I have always been very close and now that she is a young adult (almost 18) our conversations have evolved to center on more mature topics like politics and current events. There’s been some doozies in the news lately l and I felt a palpable void when I could not go into her room to discuss them with her. I reached for my phone many times to call her and stopped myself. I need to learn to let her be, I rationalized. She’s on her own and I have to let go. She doesn’t need her mother hassling her with intrusive questions. And then… last night around midnight (EST) I got the following text:

“Mom, I visited the first L.L. Bean store EVER. There’s still snow on the ground. I went to a Jewish Passover dinner. It was fun!”

She was thinking about me too. I beamed with joy.

This past weekend, Sophia and I headed East to Philadelphia to visit Drexel University to determine if Sophia would attend there next fall. After traveling on three airplanes (BBQ in Austin, deep dish pizza in Chicago and a total travel time of 12 hours) we arrived late Friday evening, after a trip to WaWa, at my sister Nina’s house in Malvern, PA.

Saturday we did the usual mother/daughter shopping bonding and made the rounds of visiting our PA and NJ cousins, who each lobbied their case for Sophia to attend school on the East Coast.

Sunday was the big day. Read the rest of this entry »

The grueling college application process is finally coming to a close and I have to say from my perspective, and from Sophia’s, it was brutal, with emotions vacillating between the euphoric victories of acceptance and the crushing defeat of rejection. I keep telling Sophia that this is a pivotal point in her life, the first time when she will truly have to face life’s difficult decisions and the disappointments that often go with them. Finding out that you didn’t get into your “reach school,” as they say in college app parlance, is a lot harder to take than not getting that part in the class play. And it only gets worse.

When Sophia started applying to schools back in November, I couldn’t help but recall my own experiences 30 years ago. Back then, it was a lot easier to get into college with less kids applying (because in those days you could still get earn a decent living without a college degree) and a lot more financial aid to do so. I applied to two colleges and got accepted to both. The schools I chose were “safe” schools, ones I was assured that I could get into. Some of my more academic friends applied to Ivy League schools and got accepted and I always wondered if I would have been accepted too had I applied as well. It is a feeling that has haunted me for years. The regret that I didn’t even try. So when Sophia told me about some of the hard-to-get-into schools she wanted to apply to, I told her, “Go for it.” Why not? She had hope. And it is that drive to attain loftier goals that sustains us. Having the courage to face rejection is a noble trait and because of that, Sophia will go far in this world. I couldn’t be more proud of her.

Sophia got into three great schools that can all offer her an excellent education. She has narrowed her choice down to two, one in Portland and one in Philadelphia. Her dad is taking her to tour Lewis and Clark this weekend and I am taking her to my home town of Philly next weekend to visit Drexel University, and then she will decide. This is only the beginning. And she’s off to a great start.

All five of my kids are looking for a job, whether it’s summer employment, babysitting or part-time work after school, they are all in the job market. Paul and I have been trying to guide them with advice on how to not only get a job, but how to do a good job.

I, for one, have peformed just about every service industry task you can imagine. Waitressing mostly, but also hotel work, bar tending and retail sales. My kids are sick of hearing me tell this story, but I have done it all. And that makes me a seasoned expert on what it takes to get and keep a service industry job. And at the risk of annoying my children, I often take the opportunity to point out the shortcomings of the wait staff in most restaurants. (I’m sure to be discreet so as not to embarrass the server for my kids.) For instance, I might advise, “If you are serving soup, make sure the customer has a spoon.” Or, “Don’t ask the customer if they want desert if they are still eating their dinner. ”

Today, while standing with Sophia at the deli counter in the grocery store, an opportunity presented itself that I consider a  ”a job seeker’s teachable moment.” While we were waiting for our very efficient and gracious server to fill our cold cuts order, there was a gentleman next to me, about my age, who had ordered a sandwich. His server was a young woman, late teens probably, and appeared to be kind of a whiner. Here’s what happened.

She gave him his sandwich and he decided to order another one, and get this, she got annoyed with him. She hissed, “I wish you would have told me sooner that you wanted two sandwiches, it would have been so much easier to have made them both at the same time.”

I cringed. Surprisingly, the customer actually apologized and explained that he had just made up his mind to order a second sandwich. Unbelievable. I seized the moment and pulled Sophia aside and cautioned her, “Never, ever, ever, speak to a customer that way. If you do, and your supervisor hears you, it would be grounds for immediate dismissal.”

To Sophia’s credit, I don’t think she needed to be told. I shudder at the thought of all the kids who don’t know any better.

Yesterday, while I was having lunch alone in a cafe, there were three men sitting at the table next to me. It was close quarters, so I couldn’t help but eavesdrop on their conversation. They were all young fathers with toddlers. One was expecting a second child soon and they all speculated how the older child, about 3, would adjust to having a younger sibling. The father announced proudly that he thought his son would adapt just fine. He announced, “He’s getting very independent. He’s almost potty trained.”

As a mother of five teenagers, I chuckled to myself. All of those early milestones… holding a cup, feeding yourself, taking your own bath and doing your own algebra homework are all significant and worth remarking. Now if only they could get a job, pay off their student loans and take care of us in our old age. Now that would be an accomplish worth  celebrating. Those three fathers have no idea. Ignorance is bliss, I suppose, otherwise no one would procreate. All I can say is, “Good luck to them.”

In the midst of all the college applications and financial aid forms, I’m getting quite sentimental that Sophia, my oldest daughter and first born child, will be heading off to college in the fall. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, “Where did the time go?” My mood of nostalgia was further ingrained a few weeks ago when I watched Toy Story 3, as Andy, Woody’s owner, packed up his toys to put in the attic while he too prepared to leave home. Any parent, Andy’s included, who has stood in my shoes knows exactly how I feel. It made me want to preserve Sophia’s childhood and I frantically wondered, “Whatever happened to Chou Chou Baby?”  Chou Chou was a doll that ate, drank, cooed, cried and wiggled its legs like a real baby. My girls each had one and they loved her. Her plus all the American Girl dolls and their accompanying paraphernalia Read the rest of this entry »

Cheryl and I had a stepmother/stepdaughter lunch yesterday. I had been promising her for weeks to take her to lunch and shopping as a belated  birthday present. She turned 13 in November and with my graduation, the holidays and her soccer schedule, we just didn’t get around to it. We went to a fantastic barbecue restaurant called SmoQe, which we had been wanting to go to for some time. Cheryl loves anything barbecue and the pulled pork sandwich she ordered yesterday was, in her words, “The best sandwich I have eaten in a long time.”  I had a bbq chicken, bacon and apple pizza and for desert, we toasted marshmallows to make s’mores at our table.

The food was great, but the best part was the conversation. Read the rest of this entry »

I am one of those types of people whom my children refer to as a “clean freak.” I got my training early on because I, myself,  had one of those crazy clean freak moms who could have coined the phrase (which she often invoked) “cleanliness is next to godliness.” Every Saturday morning in our house was cleaning day. We stripped the beds, and I kid you not, moved them away from the walls so we could wash the baseboards. Stuff most people did once a year, like washing the windows, my mother did once a week. Our house always smelled like Mr. Clean and Pledge and by god, it was clean. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s one am on a Saturday night, or should I say Sunday morning, and I am still awake waiting for my 17-year-old daughter, Sophia to come home. Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago, Sophia came to me and asked me if she and her friend, Rita could drive to San Francisco, which is 75 miles North of Santa Cruz, to spend the day at Golden Gate Park to picnic and visit some museums. It was Memorial Day weekend and they were looking for an adventure. She and her friend are both 17, actually Sophia was 16 at the time, and I thought about it for a few minutes and said “no.” As in, “no way.” It’s not that I didn’t trust her, I  was afraid of the holiday traffic and that they were not experienced enough to drive there by themselves. Sophia’s friend ending up going with her younger sister, Maria, 14 and they had a great time. No accidents or mishaps, no flat tires, no tragedies. Read the rest of this entry »