The Mamahood

40 Things I Did Before I Turned 40

I'm reaching a certain...ahem...age milestone in less than a week. So I figured it was time to take an assessment of some of the things I've accomplished (before I figure out what I need to do next. Here's my list. What's yours?

 

1. Met the love of my life (though I don’t remember meeting him).
2. Became a mom—and loved it so much I did it again.
3.  Learned to surf in Hawaii.
4. Joined a rock band.
5. Walked on the Great Wall of China.
6. Attended an L.A. movie premiere.
7. Spent the day with Anne Rice.
8. Survived a Lifetime-movie-of-the-week-bad relationship.
9. Built up a massive tolerance to alcohol (and then lost it).
10. Snorkeled two of the best reefs in the world.
11. Lived through a kitchen remodel.
12. Survived layoffs (sure wish that wasn’t plural).
13. Wrote a (horrendously bad) screenplay.
14. Lost too many people I love.
15. Survived a lousy high-school social life.
16. Made friends that feel like family.
17. Went vegetarian—and then went back again.
18. Spent more on a single meal than I spend on my wardrobe.
19. Ate animals I never thought I would.
20. Glutted myself on press swag.
21. Stood on a Broadway stage (three times!)—and resisted the temptation to launch into “New York, New York.”
22. Cooked an entire Thanksgiving dinner.
23. Took my parents to DisneyWorld.
24. Was someone’s boss (a good one, I hope).
25. Was my own boss.
26. Wrote a book.
27. Learned to speak Mandarin.
28. Partied in Vegas.
29. Gave a commencement address.
30. Swam with sea turtles.
31. Petted a whale.
32. Learned how to make marshmallows.
33. Was the voice of Betty Crocker.
34. Learned (the hard way) that semi-permanent black hair dye is actually permanent.
35. Switched sides in the perennial pop/soda debate.
36. Started giving my kids that old-person, “when I was a kid, we didn’t have…” spiel.
37. Went over to the dark side because it pays better.
38. Bought a ridiculously large TV.
39. Experimented enough that I don’t feel like I squandered my youth, but not enough to leave permanent scarring.
40. Still haven’t quite figured out what I want to do when I grow up.

Green with Envy

Every evening, as I wander the neighborhood with my rabbit-chasing puppy, I find myself discovering that the grass really is greener, pretty much all over my neighborhood.

Because I start every spring with great expectations: This will be the year when I turn my overgrown front yard into a charming English garden (just a touch on the wild side). And by year's end, I have a somewhat lovely but totally overgrown mass of green (with plenty of weeds thrown in for good measure).

Unfortunately, I bought a house in a neighborhood populated with the types of people who can manage a landscape. There are an abundance of able-bodied retired folk, who have nothing left to tend to but their luxe emerald lawns (so soft and plush I want to lie down and nap on them). There's also a significant number of stay-at-home moms who have kids in school—and so have a leisurely morning to spend planting pansies and keeping the dandelions at bay. And of course, there's a small minority of working couples with no kids, who may not be tending their gardens during the week, but aren't spending their weekends constantly running kids around to karate practice and birthday parties, or ensuring their kids don't run into the street after a ball.

I can literally walk down any street in my neighborhood and pick out the houses of women in my working-mom boat—the overgrown, brown-patched lawns, the virtually nonexistent (or ridiculously ungroomed) landscaping, the days' worth of newspapers thrown into the bushes.

I know that someday I'll be one of the retired folks, tsk-tsking at the miserable mess of my neighbor's piecemeal attempts at home upkeep. Until then, I'll be spending my time growing girls instead of begonias.

Taking My Daughter to Work...When I Work From Home

I love the whole concept of take our daughters (and sons, if you have them) to work. They get a chance to see what you do all day, and what it's going to look like when they finally hit the workforce (unless, of course, by then we're all wearing Jetson suits and working from our home pods).

Next year, when my daughter's finally old enough (and they won't plan a field trip on the same day), we have a few options for her. She can take the early morning train into the city with her father, get a glimpse of how he edits stories speedily and sends them on their way (and engages in whatever newsgathering activities they have planned for the kids—corporations here now have very fancy programs set up for the kids). I could probably take her into the city and let her try her hand at creating clever advertisements at my main client's place—it'll be a rare treat to be in the city for a day for both of us.

But in some ways, I'd like to have her really see what I do all day. So she'd stay home with me, curled up on the couch with a laptop and a dog. I'd let her help me with my content matrix for a client—and pick our entertainment to accompany the activity (audiobook or movie?). We'd take a laundry break—then later, a lunch break to cobble something together from the kitchen. And then interview a few people for a story that's due next week. And maybe shop for some clothes for my daughter online. (She's growing like crazy, you know.) I'd let her borrow her dad's laptop to pull together a great blog post about our day together, then we'd head out on our route of pickups and errands.

I wonder what she'd think of my work day, my type of work, my attempts (often lousy) to try to balance my work and life. And I wonder what her work life—and her work-life balance—will look like when she's the mommy.

My name is Lisa and I am a workaholic...

I've been an overachiever since the day I was born. I did my ABCs by 18 months, and was reading before I turned 3. In school, if I didn't get a perfect score on something, I considered myself a failure. And now, at age 30-something, I measure my worth by how much work (and money) I rake in.

This wasn't that big a problem when there were some boundaries with my work—when I went out to an office and came home, leaving most of the headaches on my over-cluttered desk. But now that I'm an entrepreneur who works from home, I never leave my office.

And that means that, in essence, I never stop working. I'm crafting ideas for new stories when I hit the playground with my kids. I'm conference calling while I cook dinner. I'm checking e-mail from Disneyworld.

It's not entirely a bad deal. I could wear pajamas to work every day if I didn't have to slog my kids off to school. I can sneak away for a couple of hours to hit Costco, a school play—or once in a blue moon, get my hair done. And I can multitask in ways you can't in an office—like folding laundry or fancy paper for my daughter's Chinese lantern craft project while I'm taking a meeting.

But there are times I'm tired of this feast-or-famine, workaholic lifestyle, when the constant pressure I put on myself to be more successful and more productive starts to make me dream of my former, cushy-window-office and clothes-allowance lifestyle. But that's before I see my oldest daughter sprint toward me with a giant grin and a huge bear hug when I pick her up every day after school. That's the kind of perk no clothing allowance could ever touch.

Woman's Work

We're supposed to be living in an enlightened age, where, as the song goes, women can bring home the bacon and fry it up in the pan—and have their husbands scrub the pan clean.

But even though most of the marriages I've been watching over the past decade seem relatively egalitarian, I'm noting a trend. Our fabulous husbands may be willing to change diapers, fold laundry and cook dinner, but there's still a whole class of work that guys seem completely impervious (or is it oblivious?) to.

The girls, it seems are still doing the bulk of the social heavy lifting. We're the ones buying the gifts for the seemingly endless litany of birthday parties—and writing the invitations, packing up the goody bags and sending the thank-you notes out when it's our kids' turn in the birthday lottery. We're the ones making dinner and playdate plans with our pals (and his)—and we're the ones who send the holiday cards out to everyone on our list (because if we don't, odds are our mothers-in-law won't get a card, as happened to me when I tried to outsource about 6 of our 95 cards to my husband this year). 

It's not that I mind shouldering this particular burden. But because these tasks are pretty darn invisible, they're often not noted when we're renegotiating the chore workload. And that is how I end up filling out over a dozen valentines for my daughter's preschool class at 1:30 a.m. the night before the party. 

So let me know—what duties inevitably fall to you?

When Good Kids Go Bad

We just got back from a fabulous DisneyWorld trip (a more detailed review to follow on my review site), and we're still dealing with the Disney hangover here—after days and days of racing all over four parks to ensure we ride the Tea Cups 10 times (my youngest's favorite) and every other ride on the planet, and staying up later than usual and eating my daughter's weight in sugar—we're all crashing hard. Everyone's out of sorts, cranky and not too pleasant to be around. And the dregs of the luggage, which still sit on the floor of my living room, aren't helping matters.

Kids seem to realize that on vacation, they can push their boundaries farther—because Mom and Dad aren't going to take them back to the room for a timeout if it means that they miss that fabulous dinner reservation that they'd been planning for months. And so, by the end, my kids were behaving badly—and as a result, I was as well. 

I'm hoping that by the weekend, everyone will have gotten enough rest to feel better, and my kids will be back to their more sane and normal selves.

Best Gift Ever

The best gift under my Christmas tree wasn't the most expensive, the most beautiful or the most practical. But it was the kind of gift that brings a smile to my face every time I look at my hand.

My oldest daughter's school held a Christmas shop, so kids could choose from a vast assortment of dollar-store type items and "shop" on their own for the perfect gifts for family members. We sent our daughter in with $24 and a list of six relatives to buy for. She was the perfect bargain hunter, scoring all the gifts (plus a little something for herself) for $16.75.

For my dad, it was a ball filled with glittery blue water that sloshed beautifully as it rolled. My mom got a bejeweled pad of paper and a fancy, feathery pen to jot down her to-dos. For her little sister, my oldest scored a petite red purse fashioned after the Louis Vuitton line, except about five inches long and obviously not made of fancy leather. (My youngest doesn't care.) For her daddy (a noted softie), my daughter found a tiny teddy bear hugging a silk flower. Nothing practical—but something that's displayed proudly in our living room.

According to the notations made by the volunteer-mom shopkeepers, my daughter lavished most of her budget on me—and found a beautiful "diamond" ring that's very reminiscent of my wedding band (silvery metal, a long strand of sparkling jewels). There were so many reasons to find joy in that gift—the excitement and happiness on her face as she presented me with the treasure she'd found all by herself, the realization that she'd obviously put a lot of thought into what I'd like and hit on something great, and the fact that I'm so lucky to be receiving a gift from this wonderful little girl.

And so, even though four of the six "diamonds" have fallen loose from their moorings, and the band makes my skin itchy and inflamed, I wear that ring on my right hand every day. It is the perfect embodiment of the idea that "it's the thought that counts," and it is, without a doubt, the most wonderful gift I have ever received.

Tales of a Scatterbrained Mom

This is the time of year when already overloaded moms the world over add another billion to-dos to their lists. Among them:

• Figuring out what to get for the various and sundry relatives—both hers and his.
• Working through the delicate set of equations necessary to determine if the number and size of gifts presented to each child looks about even, mirrors their wish lists at the given moment and won't cause tears if the children get different gifts and suddenly, one decides that she likes what the other one got instead. 
• E-mailing furiously with the other completely overwhelmed moms to see if there's a mutually agreeable tiny chink in the overpacked schedules of holiday shows and pageants, shopping, visits to Santa and cookie baking to squeeze in a little visit. If only to allow said moms to drink coffee/eggnog/tequila and take a minute to breathe.
• Trying to remember who moved in the past year, trying to locate the change-of-address e-mail, then sending a sheepish, "Sorry, I'm a dolt who couldn't take the time to copy and paste your new address into my computer address book...send it again" e-mail to the person.

(And I have found, invariably, that the dads of the world simply don't worry their pretty little heads about this...their brains are way too busy trying to figure out what to get their wives, who don't need or want anything and don't have any time for the foolishness of "hobbies" because they're too busy figuring out what to get their kids and filling out 95 Christmas cards.)

And so, inevitably, with all the work a mom's doing, her brain becomes overheated and melts. Just a little bit. Which allows things to happen as they've happened this week. I've forgotten an appointment or two. I purchased not one, but two of the very same amazing (and not so cheap) gift for my dear husband. (He won't need but one.) I marched away from my daughter's school with her backpack and lunch one day. And I've been calling my cats/dogs/children all by a string of all of their names—Matty/Turkey/Boo/etc./etc. Somewhere in there, I hit on the right one.

I still have many cards to send out, several gifts to buy, and not a single cookie baked. And yet, I've agreed to take on a last-minute, tight-turnaround project for a brand-new client. We'll see if I have any brains left come 2010.

It's a Scream

There's no hitting allowed in our house—including spanking. But as my neighbors can attest, the volume tends to go up around here—especially when the kids are being their most out-of-control selves. Now the experts in a new New York Times article are saying that yelling can be nearly as detrimental to a child's psyche as spanking. 

Which is great, because we're not all carrying around enough guilt because we bottlefed with BPA-ridden bottles, work and have to leave our kids with someone else, let them watch TV before they turned two and generally did the kinds of stuff our parents let us do back in the day (and we turned out okay). We definitely need to be made to feel even more terrible about raising our voices when our kids are snarling, screaming and fighting for dear life for the same pair of fairy wings.

Honestly, when the timeouts, the 1, 2, 3s, and the rah-rah sticker charts aren't working, I kind of run out of other options—and the patience to try them, too. I'd love to see the experts try their best "dears, that's a bad choice" on my daughters when they're worked up to a frenzy. I bet I wouldn't have to get to three before the experts started their screaming.

A Very Important Date (Or 10)

Egads! It's only a couple of weeks into school, and I already feel bombarded trying to keep track of our new schedules. My oldest daughter has some sort of class or another every single day of the week—and is thinking of signing up for the Daisy troop the mom of one of her classmates is planning to start up. In addition, she's been invited to three birthday parties within the next few weeks—and then it's Halloween, with several events related to that.

Our youngest's schedule includes three days a week of preschool, with a very slow progression each week toward finally hitting a 2 1/2 hour day, gymnastics on Saturdays and speech therapy every Thursday. And we do need to fit in a few follow-up appointments at her ENT (we need to start talking about whether she's a candidate for atresia repair, AKA opening her ear canal), and a visit to the allergist to see what's causing her eczema, which is better but still not under control.

And then there are all the back-to-school nights, family socials, potential playdates...and I'd like to squeeze in an apple-picking day sometime before the orchards are picked bare.

This doesn't even factor in my own very important dates—deadlines (I have a ton of them coming up, thankfully), and perhaps an actual, honest-to-goodness date with my husband once in a while.

And so, I've downloaded some heavy-duty scheduling software to my iPhone to keep track of my overscheduled life, and I'm constantly syncing it up with my computer and setting alarms to keep me reminded of all of these very important dates. I know it's only a matter of time before something slips through the cracks.