Mama Say Mama Saw

We all know motherly advice.  One asks every time she sees her daughter if she’s had a productive bowel movement, reminding her to eat her fiber.  Another focuses on hydration.  Have you had your eight glasses?  My mom’s aunt would always call out “Come back like you went!”  In early years, she was referring to honesty and integrity.  Later, she was talking chastity.

Don’t talk to strangers, or swim right after eating. Wash your hands, don’t bite your fingernails.   

Oddly, my mother used to push shoulder pads.  After discovering that a sturdy set could make one’s neck look longer, she became a crusader.  Big interview?  Get your shoulder pads!  Feeling slouchy? Shoulder pads!

We desperately try to save our kids from mistake we’ve made.  My husband’s great grandmother repeatedly told him to take care of his teeth: brush twice a day, floss, don’t eat hard candy.   Having grown up in the age of poor dental hygiene, she knew what it meant to lose a mouthful of teeth.

The more we experience life, the more we become aware of what can go wrong.  Bend your knees if you stand too long.  And we just want to tell our children how to avoid some of the awful things we’ve seen.   Wear your seat belt, don’t hitchhike, and remember the solar glare!  Don’t answer the door, even if he’s wearing a gas company hat.  Never tell someone your social security number over the phone.  Don’t share drinks, or lick your hands after feeding a cow. 

Our awareness has been so heightened, even doctors, coaches and clergy are no longer automatically trusted.

Don’t leave your drink at a party.  Even if it’s just soda, someone can spike it or slip you a “roofie” and then assault you.  Never accept a drink from someone you don’t know, even if it’s in a can.   Wipe off all flip-top lids in case they’ve been tainted with drugs or poison.   This really creates pressure for those trying to follow mom’s other advice to stay hydrated.  

In this cruel world, I often wonder if I’ve underestimated the shoulder pad.  It does make you look bigger and perhaps more threatening.  Some of those outfits transform a petite woman into a linebacker.  You could also probably hide a weapon in one, a GPS locator in the other.  And let’s face it:  if you’re wearing shoulder pads, you have purpose.  You’re heading somewhere- to work, a seminar, your arraignment.  Someone is waiting or looking for you.  An assailant would definitely have trouble wrestling you to the ground or into a car if you were packing pads.

 As my daughter gets ready to go out, I anticipate the inevitable eye roll as I remind her not to set her drink down anywhere.  I know I only have a few moments to ply her with all the advice I think she may need for the night.  

And I feel a strong urge to slip her a few shoulder pads.

 

Megan Davis Collins, LICSW loves a good dose of motherly advice. Email her megdavcol@gmail.com  

Hey, Has Anyone Ever Told You That You Look Like….?

 

                I have learned to appreciate my pleasant but not super-attractive looks, grateful even for not being a bombshell.  I began to see how annoying it would be to have people staring or clawing at you all day, lurking around you as you try to shop or walk or order a drink.   

                So, over the years, I have cherished the occasional comment about my beauty- (three to be exact, and one was my grandmother.)  I always felt like I had basically settled into a pleasant cross between Danny Partridge and Angela Lansbury. 

                       So, over the course of my lifetime, I have been injected with just enough confidence to be ready for a compliment when it comes my way.   

                As my husband and I pulled into O’Connors parking lot, an older woman approached our car tentatively and confused us slightly by asking Jeff a question about some batteries and a fire alarm.   

                She looked at me coyly, pulled another box out of her plastic bag and began peppering Jeff with questions about the expiration date on another smoke detector.  But she seemed to have another agenda.  Then she made her move.  She leaned in, over Jeff and pointed right at me.  “I thought you were that singer”, she confessed with amusement, “ I thought, is she really here?”

                I perked right up. It didn’t matter that this person might have been senile, or even blind

                  When she mentioned the possibility of me being a famous singer, I melted just a little bit.  I turned to face her, as I if I understood how she could have made such a mistake.  It happens all the time, I seemed to say.

                 Famous Singer?  Not Madonna? I was hoping for Katy Perry.  Or Pink? But this woman was in her eighties.  Carly Simon?  Who do I look like?  Joni Mitchell?  It couldn’t be Jewel:  there are limits to my beauty, after all.   

                “Yeah that singer from Scotland on America’s Got Talent, what’s her name?”  My jaw dropped:  “Susan Boyle?”  “Yes!  I came right over to see if it could really be her.”

                I was frozen.    DID SHE JUST ASK ME IF I COULD REALLY BE SUSAN BOYLE?

                I sat stunned in the front seat, as Jeff entertained her with answers, guesses really, about her purchases and whether she should return anything.  I had tuned out by then.     

                   As I got out of the car, I approached my little friend.   Was I looking for a fight? A second opinion?   She looked me over and then apologized, saying that now that I was out of the car, I didn’t really look like her.   Relieved, I hugged her.  Then the truth hit me.  We strolled arm in arm into O’Connor’s, my eighty-three year old admirer with her bagful of expired smoke detectors and me- the one she thought was almost, but not quite, as cute as Susan Boyle.

 

Nothing To Fear

Our fears are often uniquely personal, some grounded, some irrational, and people can’t talk us out of them.    What scares me may actually amuse or even bore you.  

Between my sister and me, we fear much of the natural world: tornadoes, black ice, salamanders, toads and inch worms.

I don’t like heights or confined spaces, so flying poses a problem.  I often joke that it wouldn’t be so bad if we could just go a little lower.  Why can’t the aircraft hover at a comfortable 30 feet? With the windows open?

My sister once waited in her car in the driveway, for a glassy-eyed chameleon to leave her front stoop.   We kidded her, still in her work uniform, paralyzed by a tiny reptile minding its own business on her doorstep.  I tried to explain that if she just opened the car door, the thing would dart away.  But, you can’t always talk someone out of fear.

And no one was talking me out of my fear of car washes, thanks to an old car with a back window that didn’t close completely.  During a car wash, sudsy water gushed in.  Naturally, someone seated back there could easily develop a fear of car washes.  Or, more accurately, a fear of drowning by gushing, foamy water, or of suffocating by a large whirring brush.

Elevators present another issue for me:  My father introduced us to New Orleans by bringing us up the outside of a tall building, in a glass elevator, defying both logic and my survival instinct.  My body told me repeatedly to get out of the transparent box that was creeping up the side of a building.  So I shrunk in the corner and screamed, while he pointed out various landmarks and historical sights.  In the other corner, my sister had her own problems to sort through, immobilized by a nearby spider.  He wasn’t talking us out of anything.  Not even the elevator.

Once, while driving in the Midwest during torrential rains and thunderstorms, my worst fear spun into town.  Barreling west on the interstate, I tracked an impending tornado on the radio.  Like a misguided storm chaser, wrinkled map clutched in one hand, steering wheel gripped in the other, I tried to outrun the twister that was heading right at us from the South, temporarily forgetting my fear of hydroplaning and leaking backseat windows.  I couldn’t pull over, due to my other fear of being slammed from behind by an eighteen-wheeler.   

Desperate for reassurance, I tried to wake my sleeping sister who could barely open her eyes as she scolded me for being too loud.  I wanted to tell her there was a salamander on the dashboard. 

My baby sister, the one who couldn’t look a toad in the eye, had yawned through my biggest fear, essentially talking me out if it.  Her calm during my storm was just what I needed to gain some perspective. 

And to realize that I would have been safer on an airplane.

A Milano in the moment tastes better than despair...but after you've swallowed it, the pain is still there...

Trumpet Tears

I’ve always told my children that they should find balance between sports and the arts.  I thought they should play an instrument.  And they did.  Until they told me they didn’t want to any more.  I forced it for a while, but even I knew that resuscitating a silenced piano with forced lessons helps no one; nurturing and encouraging can quickly become bribing and intimidating. 
 

Throughout all of the music lessons, I temporarily enjoyed the sounds of banging drums, fumbling piano keys, even the nasally whine of the recorders until finally, I was rewarded with the melancholy sound of my son’s trumpet. 

When my son fell in love with the French horn at a concert, I was thrilled.  He carried that passion for years, playing the trumpet first, to build up to the complexity of the French horn.  And he was a decent player.  I imagined him playing Taps one day. 

 

Then the inevitable happened.  His friends dropped out, one by one.  The music became more difficult.  He got too hungry on the band bus after school.  He stopped practicing.  Then one day, he forgot the lesson altogether.  So did I.

We tried a variety of approaches (bribes).  Ok you can have a donut when you go to band.   You can stay up to watch that show if you practice for 20 minutes.  If I don’t hear that trumpet, you’re not going to hear that iPod!  And then finally, slowly, I came to my senses, remembering that you can’t extort passion from someone.  Nor should you.  A parent’s job is to lead the baby horse to water, not to dunk its head in it.

I’m not sure why I was slightly tearful when we finally told him he could quit playing trumpet.  True, I was mourning his childhood a bit, witnessing perhaps the last musical instrument to come bellowing through our house.  But was I also watching him say goodbye to his passion simply because it became too difficult?  Had I sent my son the wrong message by letting him quit?   Did we teach him enough about the value of practice and discipline? 

 

Then I thought of my son, this child who stays out in the backyard catching pop flies until well past dark,   the same boy who clears away snow in the driveway, so he can practice his foul shots.  I’ve seen him scramble out of bed early on Saturday morning to catch his dad heading to the field with the dog, in the hopes that if he brings his bat and glove, he might get in some hitting or pitching practice, this kid who goes to basketball games just to take shots on the empty nets on the other side of the gym. 

My son didn’t get the wrong message about quitting.  And he didn’t miss the lesson on the value of practice and discipline.

When he set down his trumpet, this boy wasn’t saying goodbye to his passion; he was making room for it.

 

Twittering in My Boots

Ok I just did a trial run, sending invitations out to some friends to this blog.  I sent one to myself, because the first round of invitations didn't go out properly.  Well, they went out, but they are still out.  They never landed.   My column in the paper this week has my name under a picture of a local artist...somehow, funny flattering and awkward.  I hope she laughs the way Jeff and I did this morning...I may ask her if I can just use that picture since it is much better than any of mine...

Dirty details...exerpts

But, no matter the type of detail, let me be clear: when I take the time to send a text, I like a little something back.  Even if you want to talk about halogen headlights or rack-and-pinion steering.  Give me something.  What I do not want to find, ever, when I open a text, is this:  k
That makes me want to send back this: fu
 At least say something like:  “k let’s do lunch sometime” or “k how awesome are you??!”   Every time I see that lame little k, with nothing else, I become enraged.  
If people who feel overwhelmed by too many details have the right to say TMI, then I am going to start saying NEI (NOT ENOUGH INFORMATION)  
Then when they tell me to STFU, I’ll just say “k”.  See how they like it.