parenting teens

TEXT ME, LOVE MOM – the book is out!!

It’s Happened! – Text Me, Love Mom – Two Girls, Two Boys, One Empty Nest is available from all your favourite online booksellers or from:

http://iguanabooks.com/books/text-me-love-mom-print-edition/
http://iguanabooks.com/books/text-me-love-mom-epub-edition/
http://iguanabooks.com/books/text-me-love-mom-kindle-edition/

Shea's art
My four kids have moved out into the wide, wide world. Now I’ve been the recipient of the text that said simply, “Mom, I’m lonely.” Or the more practical, “How much milk do you use to scramble two eggs?” much preferable to the famous, “Mom, it’s all gotten sketchy. Can you help?” There has also been the late night text, “Mom, you awake?” before taking part in a long conversation from the dark living room.
Back up you kids, I want to run through that all again. Except for that bit, oh and then there was that other adventure we could give a miss too, and of course, the time Lily ran away. I’ve wrapped it into a heartfelt tale of letting go when you really want to hang on tight. If you’re getting ready to send off an offspring, or are anticipating that – Text Me, Love Mom – Two Girls, Two Boys, One Empty Nest is the book for you this summer (or your friend…or your mom or …) The book was written through bouts of apprehension, strict counseling, and therapeutic laughter as I tried to satisfy my deep need for correspondence by tapping into my phone, “Text Me, Love Mom.”

Text Me, Love Mom – the book is coming!

better nestI’m so excited to tell you that Text Me, Love Mom – Navigating (Not Stalking) First Flights From the Nest – the book, will be available this summer of 2014 from Iguana Books. I can hardly wait. The painting on the cover will be the art work of my daughter, Shea Proulx.

Our four kids left home in quick succession. Not enough time passed between Zoë, the oldest, moving away to attend art school and Lily, the baby, running off to another city at just seventeen to test her independence.
In this age of bubble wrapping our kids, letting go of them isn’t easy. Text Me, Love Mom – Navigating (Not Stalking) First Flights From The Nest is the story of four artistic characters who queue up to leave the family home at a rapid pace. The media would have us believe that we have overindulged, overprotected and generally, now that parent is a verb, over-parented our kids. I was able to stay connected and endure their flights from home with the aid of satellite communications, during this anxious time of back and forth texting, calling, consoling, and applauding that goes on as everyone in our family got their bearings again. Text Me, Love Mom – Navigating (Not Stalking) First Flights From The Nest offers an opportunity to contemplate and laugh over the perpetual trial and error of another stage of parenting.
So excited to share.

Blog, by Blog, by Blog – Until There Was A Book

Both of my daughters have struggled through long distance relationships with boyfriends.  Our eldest daughter, Zoe, was away starting university in Vancouver in her lonely (with roommate but no big family) apartment and she and the guy she’d left behind pined for each other through long distance phone calls – until it just didn’t seem like the right mix.  My youngest daughter, Lily, was later off on the opposite side of the country discovery Quebec and Montreal and devotion to studies in a little studio while working her way into, and out of, a relationship that started long distance – and ended that way.  Both girls tell me long distance is hard.  Their dad and I did it too, decades ago, so I know that’s true, but sometimes  you get lucky.

It is fall, the trees are golden, the sun is warm and all my four kids live away now.  I miss them the most Sunday afternoons when their dad and I consider a bike ride or a drive in the country with not much thought to Sunday dinner.  I come from the tradition of Sunday dinner and if any of them are home I try to do it up right.   I’m okay now – after their long and gradual departure from our too big, too quiet nest.  And now we’re the ones engaged in long distance relationships.  I have friends who are melancholy because their kids have just recently left home for places in the city.  And I’ve been reading September blogs from women – strangers to me, who are pining for their recently departed kids.  For both types of parents, who I know reminisce for a September of  grumbling about buying kids new gym shoes or calculators, and the morning chaos of getting a family out the door, I’ve decided to re-post my first few ‘letting go’ blogs.

I set up my wordpress blog two years ago while I worked at writing a book about all the crazy ways my kids left home – four kids – four different pursuits – one stunned mom.  I was still pining over the firstborn’s swift departure, and only starting to see the humor in the second’s being held at the Canada/U.S border with all his belongings in a plastic garbage bag, at the same time confused about whether it would be a positive or negative for our third child to enter an ashram, when our youngest, a sensitive homebody, left to spend five months in Italy.   It is about how during all that our family of six, learned to disconnect, discovered independence,  (sometimes scaring the crape out of both parents) and how we all found new ways of being close.  Text Me, Love Mom – Sending Your Kids Into The Wide, Wide World – the book is finished.  To go with this ‘kids leaving home’ season I’ve decided to look back at the days when Zoë, our eldest of four was first living away from us – over the mountains, beside the ocean – far from our home, and I was afraid she would fall in with west coast nudist, vegans, (which she did) and never look back….

IS THERE A PATCH FOR THAT?

So we had our babies young by today’s standards.  While mini-SUV’s stuffed with our peers offspring were trucking between Sunday music recitals and vogue over-the-top children’s birthday parties – my husband, Will, and I had already survived hip hop concerts in our basement and read the riot act at a host of eighteenth birthdays for young-adults-gone-wild.  Of course, I didn’t feel that young.  While my same-age friends were doing espressos to make it through the day, after getting up in the night with the little one’s bad dreams and winter colds, I needed a daily fix of latte and chocolate cake because one of my kids hadn’t returned a phone call in two days and another one would be calling incessantly because the road trip he was on had gotten a little sketchy.

Life is a journey and all that.  But during what part of the journey was it easiest to deal with colic and a latent thumb sucker, and when have we learned all the skills necessary to convince a sixteen-year-old that they have to take pure math and that all the kids who say they’ve had sex really haven’t?  I was only forty-two when my oldest daughter left our chaotic home in Calgary.  I can see now that I was guilty of stalking Zoë with emails and phone calls, though it’s hard to believe I had time for stalking while still immersed in patrolling two teenage boys’ covert activities, and being a choir-mom for my youngest.

I had all these cooing babies that became boisterous teens – to fill our home and hearts and consume my time, patience and energy.  For years and years, I had never thought much about them moving out and how my heart would deal with that.  It was what was supposed to happen – the launch from the nest.

Zoë found her way to leave home with her copies of Love in the Time of Cholera, Harry Potter, and Dragon Quest gone from the shelves, her colourful collection of shoes gathered up from the closets, and the vanilla scented products stripped from the bathroom.   Were my parents just as stunned and confused to have a child slipping out of their grasp and away from their influence?  The media would have us believe that we have overindulged, overprotected and generally, now that parent is a verb, over-parented.  Could this explain why I suffered from the jitters when one by one, all too quickly, my children dispersed and I desperately wished I could visit my local pharmacists and buy a patch to help ease me off them.   What, I wondered, would be released for not NRT (nicotine replacement therapy), but rather CAHRT (children at home replacement therapy)?   A chemical that could create the sound of their cell phones chirping incessantly, or of the front door creaking and them downloading a movie at two a.m., or produce the irritation caused by the sight of their chaotic rooms, or imitate the sensation of pleasure when one of them slowed down long enough to wrap their arms around me in a hug?

An astute observer would recognize that, though I was attempting to pull myself together, I was unable to concentrate on a task and was lumbering back and forth from one activity to the next.  Bewildered, I felt like a mother bear I had seen in a film whose cub had been taken away too early.  She had rolled her head from side to side, and clumped through the forest in a distressed fashion.  Learning to deal with my first strayed cub my heart pounded, my sleep was uneven and I couldn’t concentrate to complete a task.

My kids say I could start my own lending library with my vast collection of parenting tomes, yet there was a void of information to guide me through these turbulent times, starting with the spring day that I scrunched up the envelope so I could see through its window that my daughter had been accepted at a university across an entire mountain range from home, until I realized I had worked myself out of a position with which I was damn comfortable.

They left home in the order they were born.  Not enough time passed between Zoë, the oldest, moving out and Lily, the baby, phoning from a crowded European city to tell me how hard it was to find a place to cry out loud, the way she preferred to cry.  Back up you kids, I thought.  I want to run through that all again.

Chill Out, Mommy. Chill Out.

Gatwick South Terminal international arrivals ...

Image via Wikipedia

March 31st, 200_

Our youngest daughter was once again about to leave home, city, country, continent.  Continent!!! To go traveling around Europe for two months.  (It gets scarier.)  She was just eighteen and had never even considered going with someone.  In less than twenty-four hours she would fly to London, England and then to meet Canadian friends already in Barcelona.  She was trying to calm the parental unit.  Rest assured, was her message, as we pictured her enveloped by a group of large Canadian seasoned travelers whose sole purpose was to take care of her.  We tried not to think that they might be a bunch of scrawny yahoos, who may or may not give a rat’s ass about her safety.

She would be traveling on her own from Calgary to London, Heathrow, then to Gatwick, from there to Reus airport at which point she would take a bus into Barcelona – a foreign city of more than a million and a half people.  And then, she said, as if this was the easiest part of the equation, I just have to get to Café Zurich and my friend, Teddy, will be there waiting.

So we are supposed to find some comfort in this guy being there, in the dark (she arrives late at night) in the café in Spain.  I wish he had a different picture on Facebook.  He is two years older than her, but the only image I’d seen of him was the one he used for his facebook photo from when he was a gapped-toothed five-year-old.

While I contemplated my anxieties around this – she should have been in the house finalizing her packing, making sure her papers were in order – passport and medical insurance forms, maps and directions, youth hostel and Eurail pass.  But she wasn’t.  She was`out with friends, saying her good-byes before her two month adventure.

Her dad and I both confessed to each other of being jealous of how much freedom she’d have in the next little while, but right then we didn’t want to think about that freedom or her being able to follow the whim of the day.  We wanted to know where she would go and exactly when – maybe even why.  Of course, our need to track her movements was part of what she was supposed to be getting away from by traveling around Europe.

She had attempted to comfort us by saying that after Barcelona she would go meet a cousin and his girlfriend in Amsterdam, who were already off on their own backpacking experience.

I’ve been to Amsterdam myself on the backpacking trip I took with a girlfriend after we graduated high school thirty some years ago.  I rememberhow after we left the train my girlfriend and I were offered coke, LSD and pot from various guys sitting on the station steps in the Netherland sunshine.  When I had left my parents at the Calgary airport I understood them to be happy, even excited, to see me off. They had informed me years later that they were scared out of their minds.  I know I sent them a few letters but that was all they heard from me for the ninety days that I was away from home.

I expected to get fairly frequent emails from Lily, but still on the afternoon before her trip, I was incredibly anxious, because any way you cut it –with all the technological advances and far reaching communication, it was still a big wide world, with millions of people who would be blocking the path between us.  I managed to take her out for a few last minute purchases and afterward we shared a quick meal together in a pub, where I delivered a few more safety lectures in between bites of quesadilla before I brought her home to pack.  I had barely time to say, oh yeah watch out for blah, blah, blah when she was out the door again.

Her final laundry and packing, and my putting a dozen items in teeny zip lock bags happened well past midnight.  What was driving me crazy was that I simply couldn’t figure out why, instead of preparing for this huge trip, my usually organized daughter was devoting way too much time to hanging out with friends and staying out late somewhere else – downloading music for her trip onto her ipod.  I think if I were to ever see my children pack ahead of time I might feel confident that they were preparing like adults.  I would take some comfort in their setting priorities and putting details in order.   Maybe I would even decide that in their time away from me they would continue to behave maturely, taking care of what needed to be done, not fall to the evils of wild and impulsive poorly planned acts.

April 1, 200_

So it was April.  The first.  No April fools jokes had been played.  My baby was flying to London, England alone.  It wasn’t until I woke her to get up and head to the airport that she said, “Oh my God Mom, I’m leaving for two months and I don’t know if I have what I need.”  I swallowed all the lectures, assured her that she had, and if not, the last time I checked there were stores in Europe, and then her dad and I looked on while she tried to get her top heavy pack on her thin frame.  She thought about taking out the heels a girlfriend had advised her to bring the night before.  No, no, I said.  You’re a heels girl.  You’ll get to Europe, look around at all those beautiful women in their beautiful heels, and want yours.

In no time we were rushing out the door, her cell phone purposefully left behind on the kitchen counter, a link broken.  Her first task after customs in London would be to find her way to a shuttle to take her to Gatwick, where her second flight would depart to Barcelona.  Landing in Barcelona at ten o’clock at night (after dark, in my world – early evening, in hers) she would have to make her way to Barcelona where she would meet a friend at the Café Zurich in Cataluna Plaza.  She had been online to figure out the shuttle times between the two British airports and I trusted her friend, this guy with the impish photo, had given her directions to the Café Zurich.  Suddenly, on route to the airport, I was certain that I would have assisted my three older kids at the same stage, in finding the correct information before they left home.  Now, I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me.  What kind of a mother was I?

The one she had made me, I guess.  Nature vs. nurture is a bit of a circular argument.  I may have nurtured my kids to become one sort of person, but nature has created them to be oddly distinct individuals who in turn require an individual type of mothering.

Lily’s older brother, Hudson, came to the airport to keep the mood light and the lectures down to a minimum, though I couldn’t stop myself from pointing out how many times a pickpocket might have grabbed Lily’s possessions as she sat her small open bag here and there, while she checked in and grabbed a Tim Horton‘s chili (at ten am.)

Her brother told her, Don’t let anyone rob you, hurt you or steal you.  I nervously concurred and kissed her seven times and then two more while the young security guard looked impatiently away.  I let her go – my baby, slipping out of my grasp again.  Bon Voyage Lily.  Bon Voyage.

Parenting via Email or Swear Not By the Moon

When my sixteen year-old-daughter, Lily, was away for five months in Rome, living with a host madre, padre,and sorella (sister), I – her real mom, was forced to learn parenting via email.  Not an easy task.  It was an exercise in long distance mothering without smothering.  In the beginning our emails went something like this:

Feb. 1st: Rules

Come on, Lily. I know you’ll have no problems going along with their rules – remember Rome is a big city, with way more foreigners in it than Calgary.  (You can’t trust those pesky foreigners).

I loved hearing your impressions of Italy when you called – the shutters, the vespas, the big ancient door key.  Have you had real Italian gelato yet?

My friends are taking me out for lunch and I think the reason is ‘since I must miss you’.  Which of course, I do, but I will be just fine about it.  You are on a great adventure.  Catch up on your sleep.

Love, Mom

And in turn there were days when Lily wrote me emails like this:

Feb. 5  subject: wanted to hide away

Mom, I can feel myself getting terribly sad just thinking of how to write this email.  I’ll try not to elaborate too much – this morning my host mom took me to my school to give them some documents and I had to try to speak Italian with a couple of my new teachers. By the time we got back to this home I was feeling so homesick for my real home because it’s so scary having to pretty much start my life all over like this.

By this afternoon I was wishing that I could just hide away until this starts being fun, but obviously it doesn’t work like that.

Love, Lily

As time passed the tone of the almost daily emails were hard to predict and responses challenged my  creativity:

March 1st subject: so uncomfortable

Mama – tonight my host mother asked me how things are going with Julia, my host sister. Talk about a touchy subject. Though she doesn’t talk too much, I don’t think there’s a huge problem between Julia and I. But she really doesn’t want to go out with me and discover Rome.  We are sweet to each other in passing (how was your day – fine. Good night – sweet dreams. Could you grab me an umbrella – sure.) But honestly she just wants to stay home or hang at her friends.  What am I supposed to do about that?

Your bambina, Lily


March 1st subject: mothers hey?

Lily, I guess I see your point.  But I also know you are mature enough to see that sometimes politeness will need to come before independence, so that you do not seem to snub them by setting off on your own continually.

It’s March! You’ve been a Canadian in Italy for more than a month.  You can figure out the right amount of time to ‘hang’ with Julia.  I know you can.

Xoxo Mom

My favorites were the ones that gave me a giggle and rolled along like this:

April 5:  Subject: Just Clumping Around

Mom, I’m so tired of seeing American girls walking around this city in these beautifully put together outfits when I’m just clumping my way around with my messy hair and dirty shoes and lumpy hoodie, looking for that clean creative look every girl but me has. Then sometimes I just stop dead in my tracks and wonder if it even matters, if I’d be happier just to go home and climb in bed and fill my already cluttered head with more teachings of Nietzsche.

Love, Lily

April 3 subject: what of Italian boys

Why don’t you get Julia to recommend a salon and let them trim your hair so that it is even and blunt – that was one of the best cuts you ever had – you know like in the photo with Santa I keep on my dresser.  Now that you aren’t nine – it would look dramatic on you.

Be brave.  Comb your hair.  Throw your shoulders back and go right up to that boy you like and ask him a question.  Try out your Italian.  See if he answers.

love you, Mom

And I tended to dread the ones near the end that made my palms sweat:

June 13th Subject : I need to vent

Mom, I miss you being my mom sooooooo much. It is so difficult with my host mom sometimes.  Okay, so there was this stupid immersion program get together in the basement of a community hall – the idea was for myself, and the other four girls who were placed in Rome, to talk about our impressions of the program in front of this big group of Roman kids who are about to do immersion programs all over the world.

So we all said something and then they called everyone’s host family’s up and asked the families if they had anything to say. My host mom told everyone- all these Italian kids, all their parents, all the other host families, and all the volunteers, about how it was so hard for her and Julia to get used to having me in the house because Julia had just got back from her immersion in Brazil.  She made it sound like I was homesick and distraught all the time, but with the help of the wonderful volunteers they managed to overcome all that inconvenience I caused. I was just standing there in awe rubbing my forehead as she went on and on and on, making everyone think I was some kind of disaster, using me as a precautionary tale to all the embarking young students. After all that, when we were leaving she told me she thinks I might have I gotten fatter in the time I’ve been here.

Well, I’ll be gone soon. Lily

June 13th subject: oh Lily baby

If ever there were a time to stay calm and try your hardest to get along – this would be it.

You’ll be back here so soon. I have to think that you are with good people there, but five months has been a long time for all of you, especially with the language barrier.  Just a few more weeks and hopefully you can leave with fond memories, and you’ll have succeeded at what so many kids your age would never attempt.

Love you Sweetie Pie, Mom

ps. Honey – who knows what was really going on?

Until finally we arrived at this:

June 24 Subject: stiff upper lip

Dear Lily,

It is one of those Junes where it rains every day – so it’s green and lush like spring, not hot summer.  I’m dusting and vacuuming your room and washing your sheets and there is an air here of anticipation of your return.  Love you so much my Lily.  Love you to the moon.  Mom

June 24 subject: not the moon

No, swear not by the moon!  The inconstant moon that monthly changes with it’s circular orb!

Hung out with friends last night, but tonight I need to be alone. I’m going to go watch the sunset by piazza venezia. I have enough things to do now because I’m doing my last times.

Tonight will be my last night in Rome.  I’m realizing a lot of truths about my time here. I want to be mad at Rome because being mad at it is emotionally easier than being heartbroken to leave it, which in all actuality, I am.

After dinner I’ll walk around Trastevere and go up to GIanicolo to look over the city. It’s better to say goodbye to all of it at once.

Ciao, Mama, Lily

A Place to Cry Outloud

Having our daughter Lily leave, at the age of sixteen, to live with an unknown family in Italy, as part of a foreign language immersion program was one of the biggest nest-departing challenges I’ve faced.  Lily had never minded checking in with me and sharing what was going on.  What I found hard to set boundries around was that when she told me details other kids would never divulge. I had a hard time not opening my mouth and attempting to guide her through her often impulsive, sovereign exploits.

Almost all of her contacts with home during her Italian Immersion program were through email.  What she discovered about her peers in Calgary at that age was that out of sight was almost out of mind.  As a result of that, I’d like to say I was treated to an almost daily email, but they were definitely not always a treat. At just barely sixteen, in such a unfamiliar situation, Lily needed guidance from me and her dad.  My headstrong daughter didn’t always agree.  Parenting loses a lot of its punch when you are a continent away from your child.  When you say, “hang out with your host instead of that stranger you met on the bridge,” and your honest daughter tells you she isn’t going to comply with your rules, it is hard to enforce consequences.

So we bickered via email, I was forced to make great strides in the art of the consoling email, and we gave each other a sense of the life we were separated from, zapping our words across countries and oceans.  Lily did tell me that she found a place to go to cry out loud – her preferred style of crying- and during those months she had reason to go there.  Her older sister, Zoë, and I had a friendly wager about whether or not our sensitive, finicky Lily would last the full five months without sobbing that we had to bring her home.  It was hard to determine the odds.

So On the Level

“Can you believe I’m doing this and I’m only sixteen?, my daughter, Lily, asked as she helped haul her two giant suitcases out of the trunk at the airport.  She didn’t realize how seriously I was trying to understand why the hell I did go along with this proposal from its inception.  Lily was organized, motivated, and I think, fairly sensible.  She was a kid who, simply put – got things done.  But whole books have been written about that other side of her personality.  By definition she is what you call, a sensitive person.  Sensitive to other people’s moods, to the clothes she wears, the food she eats, and especially to the shades of light in a room.  How could I agree to such an undertaking for her, as five months in the home of stranger’s in a foreign culture –  as part of a language immersion program, and why, oh why would she seek that out?  The most reassuring theory is one that I read years ago when I first began to worry about her adaptability.  The theory was that these kids (sensitive kids) are, in fact, the ones that grow up and seek out adventure and unheard of challenges, because they feel they have been challenged and forced to adapt all their lives.   If you didn’t know someone like Lily (and you probably do), you might say she was just fussy.  It is different than that.  It seems to me that while so many people are willing to just go along, people like Lily strive to seek out the best circumstances for themselves, though it can be distressing when she feels her disappointment in failing to do that so deeply.

Lily has learned that ordering chicken quesadillas in a restaurant almost always works out for her – of course, she checks to make sure the onions are green, not white and has explained to me that that the biggest issue is the chicken – “it has to be the kind of chicken that rips in strips, not that weird white chicken that can be cut into neat little cubes.  Anyone would agree that stuff is gross.”   (Really, she had a point with the square chicken bits.)  If the onions are white and the chicken is square she switches to a pepperoni pizza, though she prefers the pepperoni on top of the cheese, please.

This daughter, who went out of her way to seek out well-lit interiors and spoke some French, but very little Italian, and worried too much about who liked her, this daughter had decided to immerse herself in a far away land on the other side of the Atlantic ocean, surrounded by strangers who would speak a foreign tongue and who may or may not like her, and who would likely abide in shadowy, ancient homes.    Still, she spent a season  walking home from school, hugging the last rays of sun on short winter afternoons listening to Italian CD’s.  She had experimented with different pastas, and had agreed to try inner crying, rather than sobbing aloud when circumstances defeated her, and had said she couldn’t wait to see what everyday life in Rome had in store for her.

And hey, it’s true, she has cried in public places, but joy overcomes her too, and she’s been known to merrily skip in public, or burst into song, or make candid observations to others – complementary, but surprising all the same.  “Try not to be a weirdo,” I said as we headed for the airport check-in counter.  “Don’t worry, Mom”, she replied, understanding perfectly what I meant.  “I will be so on the level.”  She made a broad gesture with her hand, slicing straight and even through the air and raised her voice so that other traveler’s eyes were on us.  “So on the level.”