Lunging Rabid Dogs

I took Teddy up along Rattlesnake ridge today. It was so confusing. The posted rules state that your dog needs to be well-behaved and that you have to pick up any messes. Well, I get that. I love that. But they go on to say that people may not want to meet your dog. So, I did that thing where I hooked Teddy up any time I saw people coming along the trail. He was annoyed. He likes running free. Part of me wanted to let him stay free, but I get that icky feeling some people get when they meet a loose dog on the trail.

No. I didn't have a problem with the posted rules. They're clear and it mostly works. Mostly.

There were two groups who had dogs on the trail who weren't friendly. One group called out a friendly warning, quickly leashed their wayward dog, and apologized profusely. Their other dog got a chance to play with Teddy because the first time we met on the trail, this dog came running up to us and the people held tight to the crabby dog. That totally worked. The second time we passed, we all stayed safely on our leashes.

No. I didn't have a problem with these people. They were clear and careful. They were friendly.

But then, there was this other guy. Teddy ran ahead of me on the trail while I was taking a picture. When I saw the guy and his dog, I called Teddy, but he didn't come. He was initiating play mode, focused. I called out to say Teddy was friendly, but the man said nothing. I called Teddy again. Then I walked to Teddy and hooked him up. I said again that Teddy was friendly, but the man still said nothing. He didn't move.

Okay...

I eventually went on up the trail toward them even though I'd thought I should turn around. It was getting late. I didn't want to be near this strange man. He just stood there, glaring at me.

"Well, he is friendly," I said as we were passing. Just then, his dog lunged at my dog.

"My dog got attacked here last week," he said. "It was vicious."  He stood there, still glaring at me. I stopped talking about my dog and walked on. If he could let a statement go by without responding, so could I.

I tried to keep my mouth shut. I really did.

"Well, that's a shame," I said, trying to round out an uneven conversation. I kept walking fast. I wanted distance between the crazy man and his rabid dog. Despite the waning light, I went up to the snow line before I turned around.

Even still, when I turned around, I caught up and passed the man on the way back down the hill.

"I'm not intentionally dogging you," I said as I passed him, cringing at the unintended pun. He said nothing. His dog lunged and growled again. He held it tight and I held Teddy's leash against my thigh. I walked way too fast down that hill. My knee hurts now. I've learned that I need to respect my natural pace, until there's rabid dog on my heels. I hated having them behind me. I couldn't take any more pictures. I couldn't even slow down for fear they'd be at our heels, snarling.

When I got home, I told Mike that there were too many mean dogs on leashes on the trail. He said people with mean dogs have a right to walk their dogs too. I said they should go where all the dogs are required to be on leash so there's no question about who's at fault when my friendly dog wanders over near them. Mike insisted that these people had freedoms.

Yeah well, freedom is great until it lunges at me on the trail. I think people and dogs with rabies should be put down, but that's just my opinion.

Thank you for listening, jules

Corporate Olympics

I'm still feeling crabby about NBC. Tonight should have been a slam dunk. They had us. The women's free skate probably had the biggest natural audience of all the winter sports the Olympics had to offer. Piece of cake, right? All they had to do was rerun the skating and throw in a bunch of commercials. At our house, we would have watched each one so that we didn't miss a thing. We would have made a night of it. I would have served food reminiscent of the Super Bowl. We could have begun as early as 7:00pm and ended at 10:30.

Wrong!

At 7:00pm, there was nothing. We switched to the Canadian channel, CBUT. Yay Canadians! By 8:00pm, the Canadians had shown almost all of the women's free skate! It was great! I even liked their commentators even though I didn't recognize them from the skating world. These people actually stopped talking and watched the performance now and then instead of talking through each jump. Then, since Mike got a call and missed the end. We grudgingly switched to NBC. At some point, they aired one skater, someone who had no chance to win. Good. Keep it going. We might have been on a roll, late start or not.

Next, they took away the momentum completely by switching to skiing after that first skater. Mike switched back and forth between NBC's commercials amid ski coverage and a dumb movie. I'll tell you this - we got to see most of the dumb movie.

Then, at around 9:15pm, they aired another skater! Yay! Skating. Was Mike going to see it after all?

Nope. After the second skater, they switched to something else again. And, we were back to the dumb movie again.

I can't believe that we watched a dumb movie during the last days of the Olympics! I had been watching on and off all week, but mostly on the Canadian channel. I never did find the biathlon on NBC. I didn't see many of the speed skaters and what I did was on CBUT. On that channel, I watched the luge and skeleton, sports I'm not usually interested in. Plus, they got me involved in watching curling. Yup! Curling was cool. There's so much precision in curling, physics, and strategy. I didn't understand a word the players said, even when they spoke English, but I had a good time watching. I loved the commentary and even some of the patriotic commercials. I had wanted to see some cross-country skiing too, but I didn't find that on NBC. I didn't find much on NBC at all.

So, at about 10:00 pm, NBC finally got into a groove of the women's free skate and Mike switched away from the stupid movie. We were seeing it. It was pretty exciting, though I already knew the scores from watching the Canadian program.

Mike loves watching the women skate. He has an eye for their abilities, for their jumps and their scores in artistry. He's hard to please. I love almost all of the skaters. I'm generally enthusiastic but clueless. Mike can pick the best just watching them warm up. He sees all errors and can put a name to them.

But something broke with this dedicated fan tonight. At 10:30 pm, Mike got up and went to bed without watching to the end. He was disgusted with all the waiting, with the interweaving of other events, and with the stupid movie. I don't blame him.

The days of gathering around a coffee table littered with chips, dip, and red, white, and blue napkins during the Olympics are over. The days of watching the talents from each country are over. The days of patriotism over our own athletes are over.

Welcome to Corporate Olympics. Watch if you can tolerate it for more than an hour at a time.

Thank you for listening, jules

Ready for a Straight Jacket

I used to be that kid who had a problem when she got an A- on her report card instead of an A. I tried not to worry too much, but I did anyway. I knew that good grades were my way out and up. I knew that my dad wanted me to get a good education. I knew that I loved school, books, teachers, the smell of freshly sharpened pencils, all of it.

These days, I'm absolutely batshit out of my mind crazy. Yes, I could qualify for an 4-F exemption if I were drafted by the military. If there were a mental institution within a hundred mile radius of my house, I'd have been put there by now.

Why?

My son is careless about school, about doing homework, about turning work in that he's completed, about preparing for tests. The thing that gets me the most is that he's either smarter than I am or just as smart. I've studied his skills. Well, crap!

I spend hours nagging him to get working. I can still feel the anxiety that comes of procrastination even when it's not my work. I want him to succeed. I really do. I'm trying to figure out a way to back out of it completely, but he's in seventh grade. He's not quite mature enough for me to leave him totally alone when it comes to initiating homework time.

It's not working. If I tell him at 3:15 to get a snack and get started by 3:30, I'm still nagging at 5:30 when it's time to leave for karate. I'm nagging when we get back home and he surprises me, after doing some work in the car, with work he'd forgotten was due tomorrow, or an upcoming test.

Tomorrow, he's retaking a test he failed because he was sick last week. I get that. In fact, his teacher said that he could retake the test, that it was no problem. On the way home from karate, he announced that he was done with all of his homework.

I started to breathe again.

"Well, I have a Language Arts packet that I need to do too. I'm done with Math." Tears sprang to my eyes as they began to sting.

"And I have to retake a test tomorrow at lunch. I failed because I missed last week."

"Yes, your teacher said you might have some problems with that. So do you understand the material now?"

"No."

"So, if you took the test again right now, you'd get the same grade you got the first time?" My breathing became ragged. My heart rate increased by at least 50% and I tried to keep from swerving off the road as my vision blurred.

"Probably."

So what the hell are you doing?, I want to scream at him. Instead I tried to tell him that I was a National Merit Finalist, that I got three scholarships to college, that I was on the honor roll so much as I kid, it didn't mean anything to me unless I got straight As. I tried to tell him that his skills at the same age were comparable to mine, probably better in math. I tried to tell him he has the capacity if he only took the initiative.

"But Mom..," he said and grinned at me through the rearview mirror.

"What?" I asked, hoping I'd finally gotten through to him.

"I'm stronger than you ever were."

Certifiable, I'm telling you. I'm sure I qualify for the padded room by now and even then, they might have to keep me tied to a guerney.


Thank you for listening, jules

NBC Fails the Olympics

Dear NBC,

You have ruined the Olympics. Two and four years ago, you started messing with the sports we loved, blending different events until my husband and I were exhausted by staying up until midnight every night to finally see what we were most interested in. Eventually, you managed to satisfy us to some extent. At least we could switch to the Canadian channel when we couldn't see the whole picture. Or we could sit down at the computer and pull something up on the Internet.

This year is different. Your stupid domination is so complete that in the three days the Olympics have been on television, we haven't seen more than three minutes of programming we'd like to see. That's it. Three minutes. I'm sure we've watched ten times that much in commercials just trying to hang in there. You might call that a success, but it's not if we stop watching. Right? You're losing us here.

My husband and I like to watch figure skating. That's pretty much it. Oh, we'd watch curling and the biathlon if you managed to show them at any hour but 3:28am, but we'd be happy simply seeing the skating since you can't seem to cover much else of what's happening in Sochi.

First, you aired the men's short program the night before you advertised the Opening Ceremonies. Shoot, as far as I knew, the Opening Ceremonies was the beginning of the Olympics, so I didn't know that we had already missed a sixth of what we most wanted to see before things even started.

Then, you buried the women's short program this afternoon. We had no idea we were missing another sixth of our favorite part of the Olympics.

Tonight, at 7:00 pm, my husband dutifully sat down and started watching. Nothing. Oh, you've shown guys crashing on snow boards and people flouncing around, dancing, in ridiculous outfits on ice skates, but you didn't show him anything he wanted to see, so he went to bed. Done. Tried that. Three hours later, he was done. Cooked. Finished. Great job, NBC!

At some point, rather than give his full attention to the television, he got onto the computer. You did want his attention, didn't you? Lost it! He looked for the men's and women's short programs, the third of what we were really interested in, remember? He figured we could watch it somewhere on the Internet. Somebody, YouTube, maybe, would show some of the spectacular falls and surprising grace of figure skaters around the world. He couldn't find any of it on the computer. Anywhere.

We were willing to watch your damned commercials in order to see it, but where the hell is it?

He checked Xfinity On Demand, but you have your hooks into them as well and all we could get are two minute highlight clips. We want to watch the whole thing, not just a couple of the Americans or a famous Russian. You know, there are more than just two countries in this world. Have you checked the map lately?

Years ago, when we first started to watch the Olympics, we could sit down and see someone from Indonesia floundering on the ice. It was great! We could compare Russian skaters, Canadians, Japanese, and Chinese to each other and to the skaters from the United States. It was riveting. There was so much going on in our living room and it was all focused on that one television station.

Oh, there were a lot of commercials, but it we loved it and sat absolutely glued to the television. It was like having a Super Bowl party over a period of a week or so. We invited friends! Then, there was the analysis afterward. We even watched that. You had us, NBC. We watched falls and foibles over and over and over again. We loved it, commercials and all.

Four years ago, you started blending other sports together with what we really wanted to see. Our interest waned. We'd flip channels back and forth until a piece came on. We stopped inviting our friends over to watch The Olympics. We tried to see what was happening in other countries as you made them fade into the background. Then, it seemed as if there were only three or four countries and little content. Same volume of commercials, but we were stuck watching skiing, speed skating, and the luge. OH MY GOD! It was boring.

I have no idea what you're up to here. Are you systematically driving us away from watching the Olympics? Would you like us to simply give up and wish the athletes that we love all the best without ever seeing a single event?

Seems like it.

You need to know that it's 10:46 pm on Saturday night. My television is off. I don't intend to stay up until 12:53 in the morning to see my favorite part of the Olympics because you thought you could keep us hanging on, watching other crap, until then. In the past three and a half hours, I hadn't seen a single thing I sat down to watch. Why should I keep trying?

It's as if you've blended the Super Bowl, the NCAA final four championship, and the world ballroom dance championships into one event. Your avid Seahawks fans would tear down the pergola if you tried to make us sit through that shit. Well, they already did that, but you get my point.

You can't make us fans of downhill skiing if we aren't. You can't keep our attention during snowboarding. You can't expect us to begin to enjoy ice dancing if we don't. You're right up against losing your entire fan base in this house.

Is that really what you want to accomplish?

Thank you for listening, jules

Food and Shame

I hate people.

About a year ago, my son's doctor called him fat to his face and told me I shouldn't let him drink so much soda. He doesn't drink soda and when I said as much, she rolled her eyes at me. She also recommended that we go to the nearby children's hospital for 'Wellness.' It's a program for fat kids and anorexics.

We got a new doctor that day because nobody should make my son feel bad because of the way he looks. Nobody, least of all a pediatrician.

But, out of open-mindedness, we took Nick to Children's Hospital to talk to a doctor and a nutritionist about his weight. We started last June. Mostly, since then, Nick has gone to the appointments and felt bad about how he looks. Sometimes he feels bad about eating, but mostly, he feels bad about how he looks.

I tried to keep an open mind. I did.

Finally, at our last appointment with the doctor, I asked what their track record of success is. The doctor was honest and told us that they don't keep track. I asked him why not and he shrugged. Then, I asked him what his impression was. He said that it seemed as if most patients hold steady in general and then revert to where they had been before they started the program. And I was about to ask what his end-game strategy was. There is no end-game strategy in that answer. We've been going there, without success, for eight months. All I see in Nick is more resistance to eating healthy food and a sense of shame about not getting the program to work for himself.

Today, we were fifteen minutes early for an appointment with his nutritionist and she was running thirty-five minutes late. What, was there a nutritionist emergency that held her up? We had time scheduled with Nick's trainer forty-five minutes after our appointment was over and when we finally got in to see this nutritionist, I told her that we had to leave in twenty minutes, that we couldn't afford to stay later than that. I had asked if we could reschedule, but she didn't want to do that. I should have insisted. I chaffed at the idea that we were here, being reminded that we were failing at our appointed jobs and in the meantime, Nick was going to be seriously late to the one thing that has been helping him the most, time with his trainer. So, I asked the question again. What is your track record of success? The nutritionist said that she had no statistics, but she felt, if her patients are trying, really trying, that they reach their goals.

So, it seems that we're not really trying. All those discussions about nutrition, all those conversations about this food versus that food, is not really trying. It may not have been producing the desired results, but dammit, we have been trying! I was feeling pretty crabby, but for some reason, I'm seriously not sure why, I ended up being the one to apologize for leaving to go see the trainer so we didn't miss our appointment with him entirely. Why wasn't she apologizing to me? We weren't the ones who were late!

I wanted to tell her that my son is trying really hard to get good exercise and eat healthy food. I wanted to tell her that we're tired of making him feel bad. I wanted to tell her that we want to do all of the things that she recommended, things that we generally knew about anyway and tried at home anyway, without having a ration of guilt once every three or four weeks at our appointments. I wanted to tell her we had to leave because Nick's trainer was waiting and this trainer is patient and kind and has gotten Nick excited about sweating it out and doing reverse lunges and squats. I have to tell you that it seems like a sort of miracle to me that anyone can get anyone else excited about doing lunges and squats. Nick loves going to the gym to train. He loves it! What is that?

I just wonder if we've done more damage than good with these nutrition appointments. I hate the idea that Nick feels ashamed whenever they get him onto a scale. I hate that he had to answer the question about what he ate today, that he felt bad about that extra sandwich. The worst part is that he had to go to every appointment knowing that he hadn't succeeded. He knew before he walked in. Poor kid.

For a program like this to work, the person running it needs to have struggled in the same way Nick has. Other kids should be there to talk about how they're doing so that the kids can cheer each other on. No appointment with three or four or five weeks in between will be effective when it comes to changing a teenager's habits.

I can tell them this - their program doesn't work. There may be a reason why they don't keep track of how it's working for their patients. It's not.

Thank you for listening, jules

The Season of Falling Away

I did my nails tonight. They still smell of polish, that fresh wet chemical smell that makes me wonder about cancer. Yet, I'm sure that something entirely different will take me out someday. Not even the headache that this nail polish is causing is going to kill me. My nails don't even look that good. I kind of made a mess of them, but I've learned that if I wash my hands in cold water in the morning, the stuff that I painted onto my skin the night before will peel off and it almost looks as if I had them done. Almost.
Nick doesn't want me to smooth his hair any more. Today, he told me that he's old enough to manage his own hair. He is. We see eye to eye when we stand together. At least he still hugs me. He's solid, more like a man hugging and somehow supporting his mother instead of a boy clinging. I can feel him giving something back to me now. He knows that it aches for me to see him grow up so quickly.

"I'm going up, Mom," he says proudly when he sees that look in my eyes.

"I know sweetie," I say and never manage to keep it inside without some tears spilling. I had to wait in the car this morning for a few minutes while he ran into the orthodontists office for his appointment. He got braces today. Afterward, he looked suddenly older, a boy on the cusp, so nearly a man.

I took him to lunch to celebrate, sushi. We sat at the sushi bar and watched food move past on the conveyor and I suddenly felt dizzy, as if I'd fallen out of time for a second. He talked about how he had to enunciate more clearly now. Maybe that's what is making him seem older. He just couldn't stop smiling. Back when I was a girl, kids with braces spent the first three weeks trying to hide their faces. Some really cautious ones, hid their teeth at all times, painfully aware that they looked different every moment until the day they got the braces off and their beautiful new smile was revealed. Now, getting braces is a rite of passage.

After the sushi bar, we were going to buy Nick some new clothes. He needs new clothes. I'm not sure what happened to his old ones. I should know that they gradually ended up on the pile to donate as he grew. But I was suddenly very tired and wanted to go home. I didn't even walk the dog today, poor guy.

Why was today so difficult for me? Oh, Nick said he was too tired to shop, that he'd had enough by 1:30 when we finished lunch. He probably was. Even brushing your teeth when you have braces is an ordeal. Flossing is absolutely impossible. But I was tired too. Why?

Some days, remembering the incredible feeling of connection with my baby, it's excruciating to feel separate again. I had that kind of connection with my grandma, though I only saw her on weekends and later, when I was older, only on vacation time. I so seldom had a whole day with my grandma just to myself to revel in that feeling she gave me. I remember when hugging her turned from something she gave me to something I gave her. I was much older than Nick when it happened. I was technically an adult, but hadn't wanted to let go of being a girl, her girl, for as long as I could.

It's no wonder I don't want my boy to grow up and away. Yet he will only be healthy and in truth, I will only be healthy, as I let him go.

Nick will be driving when he gets his braces off. He will likely experience his first kiss in braces. I never had braces. Oh, I may have needed them, but I didn't have them. I can only watch what will happen next for him and soon, very soon, I won't even see much of his life as it unfolds. I will be given school breaks and vacation days. When Nick was little and I'd talk to him about when he grew up and moved away to college, he'd insist that he'd never leave home, that he'd live here forever. I could not convince him that he'd change his mind.

I can still see that clinging little boy when I look at Nick, but he isn't clinging anymore. I am.

And I'm going to have to let go, at least a little every day until he flies off into his own world and lives his own life. I'm going to have to straighten my back, to walk the dog every day, tired or not, and wait for those precious days when he comes to hug his little mom. At those times, he will give me back what I had given him, something I had learned from the hugs my grandma gave me when I was a little girl.

There's a season in that touch, a longer season than a simple spring turning to summer then fall. It is almost too long a season for me to see, but I see it now, rolling down through time, first holding things together then letting them fall away, over and over.

Oh, the season of falling away makes my bones ache.

Thank you for listening, jules

A Stomach Bug

I have a stomach bug. We all have it.

See, right there we have a problem with too much information. You are picturing me praying to the porcelain god or worse.

Yet, the best scenes in movies show that shit. Remember 'Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist,' when the drunk girl pukes into the toilet and then picks her gum out and begins to chew it again? What about the pie eating contest in 'Stand By Me?' Or the guy's first win in 'Here Comes the Boom?'

Do I really want to think about this right now?

No. I don't. It's a bad day for me to even burp. Lets just say I brushed my teeth a lot today. The bad news is that all three of us have it. The good news is that it's a mild case.

When Nick was about three years old, we got him a new bed, a double in case we were tired as we tried to get him to sleep. Oh, the official reason was for those eventual sleepovers, the early ones where you could tuck two small boys into the same bed. But the real reason was that we were sick of cajoling him to fall asleep on his own and it was easier to lie down and fall asleep next to him because we were inevitably more tired than Nick was.

Yes, I know we were supposed to teach him to stay in his room alone at night. Yes, I've been told that they cry for three or four nights and then stop. We couldn't bear hearing him wail. We really couldn't.

About when Nick was four, when that bed was still new, he came down with a stomach flu. Oh, this was a doozy. That night, both Mike and I stayed up with him, taking turns changing sheets and pajamas and doing laundry. We quickly learned that it's easier to let a small child puke in position than to run through the house with him puking on the walls and floor in a trail to the bathroom. The bathroom was not all that far from his room, but it was still easier to pat him on the back, try to aim him in an already nasty direction and tell him to let it all out, that he'd feel better when he let it all out. He was young enough that he resisted putting his face into the clean little plastic bucket we put in front of him. My dog Teddy is still that way. Of course, Teddy crawls under the deepest table in the room with the nicest carpet and then moves along to another corner as he goes. Another story. Sorry.

So, Nick was so very sick that night that we were worried he was getting dehydrated. In between bouts of vomiting, he was barely getting to the toilet in time. And forget vomiting in there. He had absolutely no desire to vomit where his butt had been. I get that. I really do. Nick would get going all over again any time we gave him a sip of water. How do you explain to a thirsty toddler to sip the water? Many trips to fill a tiny glass, we learned. We quickly became exhausted.

At about 3:00am, after three or four light loads of laundry, Nick began to slow up.

And then I started in. At least Mike could handle Nick by then and let me be on my own. The only problem was that I found very quickly that Nick had a favorite bathroom. How can you have a favorite bathroom? Well, he did and I was in it. I had never realized that I had a favorite bathroom too.  I was pushed downstairs into the cold bathroom. I shivered as I alternated between sitting and praying. You get my drift. All the while, Mike was upstairs with Nick on his own. After an hour or two more, I settled into a quiet moment and wandered upstairs as dawn broke. It was a beautiful morning. Why is it always beautiful outside when you're really sick?

Nick and Mike were both asleep in their underwear on top of layers, garbage bags under putrid towels. A blanket was thrown over both of them, though it too was gross. The whole upstairs smelled of vomit and shit. I went out to the living room to the wet couch, the first catastrophe. I turned to the linen closet to get a towel or something to put down over the wet spot. Nothing. Even the larger hand towels were gone. I grabbed a couple of wash cloths, put them over the spot and sat down. Just as I was getting comfortable, beginning to doze in front of a stupid movie, Mike came running out of Nick's room with that look on his face and Nick began to cry.

"Can you?" he said as he closed the door to the favored bathroom.

"Sure," I said getting up again, though I was weak with fatigue.

I'm telling you that you never forget the moment you crawled into a bed wet with puke and a little shit to snuggle up with a very sick toddler on top of a layer of garbage bags and towels. Never. It's amazing that sleep comes, even with the awful smell, the sticky blanket, the wet towels, the garbage bag stuck to your ankle, and the glorious morning light shining through the window.

Thank you for listening, jules