Driving the porcelain bus to mom

Why do most kids wake their mothers when they aren't feeling well? And why, when they can't sleep, do they feel obliged to wake their mothers and tell them -- and then ask them to push over so that they can get it? Why don't kids, in general, wake their fathers?

Last night at around 2:30 a.m. I heard someone walking around. Within seconds the night crawler speed walked into our bedroom, totally surpassing Chaim and made a quick right around the bed to my side. By then I was already awake, but I was trying to fake being asleep.

Tap, tap, tap.

"What's wrong Yael?" (I spend a lot of time asking that question.)

"My stomach hurts and I have to throw up now."

I have tried to train her to throw up first -- preferably in the toilet or at least a waste paper basket -- and then come and get me. So far, I have a success rate of zero. For some reason it is more logical to waste the few remaining moments of pre-barfdom to come and announce your intentions so that there is an audience for the big event.

From my perspective, who the hell wants an audience at such an uncool moment? However, Yael does not subscribe to this school of thought. And as a result, most vomit explodes onto my bed or my bedroom floor. Of course, the vomiter is too busy feeling lousy after the event to do anything but sit or lie down in a catatonic state. Therefore, the spectator -- usually me -- gets the priviledge of cleaning up.

Oh yes, the vomiter feels bad about it. But, hey, what can you expect post strenuous lurch?

I wouldn't mind so much if only, now and then, when the urge to drive the porcelain bus became unavoidable, that the child in question should wake up his or her father and let him get involved in all the fun.

In my house, Chaim just sleeps through all the highlights of the program while I spend the remainder of the night keeping the patient company either in the washroom or his or her bedrooom. Chaim wakes up bright eyed and bushy tailed the next morning and I spend the day walking around like a zombie.

The truth is that when I was a kid I did the same thing. I never once considered waking my father who was only going to wake up so startled (because no one ever woke him up) that his shocked reaction would have superseded the real issue: that I felt sick or I couldn't sleep. My mother, on the other hand, woke up silently and effortlessly as if she had been lying there expecting me for hours.

Therefore, I've decided that the next time I feel sick, I am going to go from room to room and wake everyone up. Of course, I am going to leave them all sitting there in a semi-conscious state because nothing will change the fact that I prefer privacy at such moments. But at least then they can all be mom for a moment.

And finally, the laundry

Since I mentioned doing laundry in the tag line of my blog title, I think it is time I got to that subject. And coincidentally, I have a laundry story today.

This morning was one of my carpool mornings. When I arrived at the school parking lot where I drop off the kids, there was a giant box in the middle of the lot. It was about five feet by five feet to give you some idea of its size. In it were all the unclaimed school sweatshirts, t-shirts and various religious undergarments that have gone missing throughout the school year.

Since Zeve loses more than his fair share of jackets and the likes, I jumped out of the car hoping to recoup a few items. In particular, I was looking for one sweatshirt jacket that he managed to lose the very first time he wore it. I figure he lost sight of it somewhere around the noon soccer game. And since it was new, it was ripe for the picking.

So I jumped out of my car this morning and approached the box. I hesitated when I got there because it was full of what was now really grungy clothes. I guess my cleanliness instinct went into gear, but I couldn't afford to humour it because I was on a mission to redeem Zeve's many missing items.

Looking through the box is sort of like a really gross day in Filene's Basement. You have to have no shame to wade into the pile of clothes. Fortunately I was able to leave my shame in the car and get to work.

Keep in mind that almost everything in the box is some shade of school-approved blue. That's why Yael's grey and white fluffy sweater quickly caught my eye.

"Yael! This is a Shabbat sweater," I said (she was right beside me watching the goings on). "What is it doing in the Lost and Found Box?"

"Oh yeah, I wore it to school one day," she said.

A few seconds later, I noticed another very familiar Shabbat sweater of Yael's. And again, I dragged it out of the box and inquired about how it got there is the first place. Same answer.

Then came the moment that nothing in the previous few minutes could have prepared me for. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed an off-white sweater in the sea of blue sweatshirts. I looked a little closer and noticed that it had an unusual stitching. Then I grabbed for it, and checked the label. It was a Liz Claiborne zip-up fancy sweatshirt..... and I knew instantly that it was mine!!!

"Yael! How exactly did my white sweater end up the Lost and Found Box at school????" As if I didn't know. And that nine-year-old pilfering she-devil looked at me and said fake-innocently: "I don't know. Maybe you lost it and the school found it."

Then she just left and went up the hill to her class. "Yael, don't you ever take my clothes to school again." I think I said that more for me than for her. I am willing to bet that she has no intention of abiding by that rule.

I was so shocked that I mentioned the entire event to my friend Esther. Then she said the funniest thing. "I remember the day my daughter's feet outgrew my shoes. It was a great day." I knew instantly what she meant.

The other moment of reckoning today was that after all that searching, I found two of Yael's previously unknown-to-be missing sweaters, one of my stolen sweaters and only one of Zeve's myriad missing items. The one item I specifically got out of the car to find remains missing. And all the other items are in their second run through the washing machine.

Hello? Wood Collectors' Hotline, can I help you?

One of the things that I forgot to mention about wood collecting for the upcoming holiday is that unfortunately we live smack dab in the middle of the best wood burning sites on the east side of the city. As a result, my house is the depot for wood. It is also the first place the parents call when they can't find their children -- which is most of the time. And it is where all the kids show up when they are finished collecting wood and just want to play. This usually occurs in the middle of dinner time.

(Not that anyone here is actually eating dinner except me.)

As a result, I spend a lot of time operating my ad hoc missing children's inquiry hotline. If I had a dollar for every call I received .... I would have made about $6 today alone.

When I was growing up in Nova Scotia, kids wandered. It was the late 1960s and early '70s in a city with 30,000 people max. Despite our best efforts, there just wasn't a lot of trouble to find. Ra'anana is like that today. I suspect that most of Israel is the same. Kids wander and no one worries. Well, the immigrant parents worry because we all come from places like Toronto, New York, Chicago and Miami where absolutely no one lets their children out of their sight until they are 18 and leave for university. (In Toronto, kids never leave home for university -- I guess their parents are just too scared.)

My boys have been wanderers for several years now, but letting my daughter and her friends out together but alone is an entirely new experience. As it turns out, I am a lot more sexist that I thought. That said, she is still out there somewhere with at least a few other third grade girls. I fully expect her to show up in the next half hour. (Late Breaking News Flash: She's home.)

One night last Spring Chaim came out of his office and he asked me where Zeve was. Zeve was 10 at the time and it was 9:00 p.m. It was fortunate that he asked because no one had noticed but Zeve was not home. As an aside let me add that Zeve is truly a kid who needs a computer chip homing device inserted under his skin. Chaim, in true Chaim form, panicked. I just grabbed my shoes and started to retrace what I figured was Zeve's possible route. I found him on the third try.

The biggest problem that this wandering business causes is that I realize I can never take my kids back to Toronto to live. They have no concept of how to live as caged animals, which is exactly how we would have raised them there. I usually spend the last half hour of our flights to Canada telling them that upon arrival in Canada they cannot leave my side under any circumstance because they could get killed or kidnapped just like that.

It's funny how the tables have turned. People all over the world are afraid to come to Israel because it is sooooo dangerous. Me, on the other hand, I am afraid to take my kids out of Israel and into the big, nasty world which in my mind is the truly scary place. And in that big bad world, there is no Wood Collectors' Hotline.

Hey, that's my sweater

I encountered a problem in the past few days that I did not expect to confront for another four or five years. My nine-year-old daughter Yael came down for breakfast wearing one of my sweaters.

When I looked at her with that you-better-not-have-taken-that-out-of-my-drawer look, she fake-innocently replied: "I found it in my drawer so I figured it was mine." Yeah, right. I don't doubt that she found it in her drawer -- my cleaning lady isn't on a Solomon-like wisdom level, but the "so I thought it was mine" part just got me going.

I know she covets some of my clothes. Even though her closets are busting at the seams full of tons of fun stuff to wear, somehow my clothes seem more interesting to her. And while she is not that large and I am not that small, I know she is already thinking ahead to the days when my cashmere sweaters will be hers. One of her favorite lines while "helping" me get dressed for synagogue on Saturday morning is: "when you're dead, I want that (fill in the blank with an item of clothing)."

In actuality, she has pretty much laid claim to every last female item in the house in anticipation of my pending death. The crystal, my jewelry (Oh don't get excited, there isn't that much of it), my clothes, my shoes, and anything else that she has rationalized will one day be hers. I'm thinking of hiring body guards just to keep her at bay until I have time to grow old gracefully.

And just in case you are thinking that she is an unnaturally covetous child, I want to set the record straight with a funny story.

Two years ago, I was standing in synagogue after the festivities on one of the fun Jewish holidays (not to be confused with the solemn Jewish Holidays). I was talking to one of my friends, when I noticed her look over my shoulder and her jaw fell slack. "Those are my new shoes!" she said. Since she was talking about shoes I turned around to have a look as well. And there were her new shoes -- shoes she had not yet worn -- walking into the synagogue on the feet of her teenage daughter!!!!! And the best part was that her daughter wasn't even being coy about her footwear. She just thought it was natural. And I am afraid that that is the normal course of life. When your daughter turns a certain age you have to run for cover with every material thing you love.

No more hanging clothes on hangars. No more folding things nicely and putting them in the drawer. If you have an ounce of self preservation then you better be prepared to sleep with your favorite items under your mattress. Or, there is always Plan B -- 1-800-NOT-OUCH Bodyguards.

A quickie tip: A sure fire way to find your children

Let me start by saying that this only works with pre-teen children -- or at least I sincerely hope so.

I can stand in my kitchen for an hour calling people's names. I can walk up the stairs and continue to call out to my kids. No one ever answers me. I can threaten. I can offer rewards. I have tried all of these tactics. None of them work. We don't live in such a big house that the kids can insist that they didn't hear me.

But I have found one thing that never fails. It is the foolproof way to round up your children when they are in the house but completely inaccessible. All you need is one bathroom. One toilet. And for your own sake, one clouded-glass shower.

Here's what you do. GO INTO the bathroom. Get undressed to take a shower or sit on the toilet. Either approach will work. I can promise you that within 30 seconds of you being completely unavailable your kids will find you.

And if your kids are anything like my kids, they are not deterred by a closed door or silence from my end. No siree. When they want me, they will move heaven and earth to find me. There is no door strong enough to keep them out.

So now, I have turned this knowledge to my advantage. I always start by simply calling their names, but when that doesn't work, I just say to myself: "Hey, I could really use a shower." And by the time I am undressed and in the shower (hence the need for clouded glass), at least one of them will come barging into the bathroom with his or her most recent catastrophe.

Try it. I guarantee success. It has never failed me yet.

I really wish Ari could drive

The other day I had more things to do than I had time to do them. I am sure you all have lots of moments like that. The worst part was that my 13-year-old son, Ari, was home, wandering around, whistling Dixie without a care in the world.

In all fairness, he asked me if he could help out. I said: "sure, go get your drivers' license and then I have a zillion things you could do for me." With that, I stomped out the door to go pick up one of my other kids from yet another after school program. If I thought for one second that the kids learned anything of value in school, I would drop at least half the after school programs. But alas, they are still in way too many programs.

Later, when I was calmer, I was thinking about how normal parents probably want to keep their kids out from behind the wheel of a death-enabling machine for as long as possible. What, then, was wrong with me????

Now I have had time to think it through and I have come to the realization that parents want it both ways. We want our kids to stay young, safe and at home where we can control most situations. On the other hand, we want them to be independent and go out and conquer the world -- which cancels out all the things on the previous list.

This whole contradiction is further exacerbated in Israel. We all know when we move here that eventually the army will come calling. The day your child turns 16 they mail you their first "welcome, we know who you are and where you live" letter. From what I have heard from my friends, it is a pivotal moment in every parent's life. I'm not sure what the kids think but the parents recognize it for what it is ... the inevitable approach of the end of childhood.

And then, as if you didn't get the point, they send you regular reminders over the next few years to tell you that they haven't forgotten about your child. Very Orwellian if you ask me.

Which brings me back to driving. Now that I have thought it through more completely I have decided to continue complaining and doing carpool. I intend to keep my son as close to home as I possibly can over the next few years -- knowing full well that he will be pulling away as much as he can. However, I have also decided that he should learn to drive before he learns to shoot an M-16. And then I am going to pray that he drives well and never has to shoot that gun.

Back to How I Got Here -- Part 3

The week in Netanya was a real eye opener. Dave, Chaim's friend, came home from his business trip. That actually cramped our style a bit because, after all, it was his house and I felt more self-conscious with him there.

But I had no idea how self-conscious I had yet to feel. A day after Dave arrived, so did his Russian girlfriend who, for these purposes, I will call Bratslava (in English that translates to Bitchella). She was a hot blonde babe -- with a four-year old son. She had left her abusive Russian husband (or so she and/or Dave reported) and had moved in with nice (much wealthier, Canadian) Dave.

She couldn't have made less effort to befriend us if she was in a deep coma. Actually, I think that people in deep comas are capable of responding to some stimuli -- she was not. At least not to anyone who wasn't male, available, drooling at her feet, and heavy walletted.

Let's suffice it to say, we* did not hit it off. The only time she even acknowledged my presence was the day she crawled out of bed around noon and noticed that I had fed her son breakfast and lunch. You would think that that would have broken the ice. It didn't. And then, later that evening when she and Dave asked us if we wanted to go out with them, we naively asked who could we get to stay with the kids. Yet again, she looked at me like I was a really offensive, irritating alien. You will luuuuuv the answer.

David (rather sheepishly) told us that they don't get babysitters; they just left the 4-year-old at home alone when they went out.

I don't think I have to tell you how that ended. They went out. We stayed home.

The next few days were more of the same, and I was counting down the days until we could leave outer Netanya and go to some place with people I could "get".

Finally, after a week of "fun" we packed up our new rental car and drove down the highway about 20 minutes to Ra'anana, where we spent the next three weeks.



NOTE: (*WE, in this case was me and Bratslava... Chaim probably thought she was a hot babe too. It's a man thing. Of course, recreation and procreation bring out different feelings even in men.... I think.)

Facebook Subversion

Let me start by saying that I always wanted children.... before I had them.

I didn't get married until I was 32 and once that was done, I was focused on what I figured was the next logical step.... expanding my gene pool (isn't that what men usually say about their sperm?).

I think we can skip all the details about getting those children but suffice it to say that I ended up with three. One came with the husband. That gives me a total of four.

Now generally I would have to say that I am glad I had them, and always thought (despite my friends' protestations to the contrary) that they would get easier with age. My thinking was that if I could leave them alone in the house for a few minutes or not have to go with them to the bathroom, I would be essentially emancipated from the drudgery of motherhood. I can barely stop laughing long enough to continue this post, which is a nice way of saying I WAS WRONG!!!

Which leads me to the events of this past week. Last Friday night my 13-year-old son's friends were hanging around in a local parkette. I am not a big fan of pointless hanging around, but the kids don't see it that way at all. Let me start by saying that my son wasn't there. However, one of his friends apparently showed up with a bibi gun. At this point, it is obvious that the story is headed downhill.

Why he had the bibi gun is a fair and logical question, but it is really tangential to the story and even if it wasn't, I don't know the answer. What is important is that one of the 13-year-old girls who was there ended up with the gun and inadvertently (?) shot some other kid in the face. Fortunately, it was the other kid's cheek that suffered the brunt of the pelleting, but as you can imagine, that kid was less than amused.

Apparently (I wasn't there so I feel obliged to keep saying "apparently") the victim walked up to the shooter, grabbed the gun from her hands and proceeded to crush it to smithereens. That, in turn, led to further decline in the festivities. (No surprise there.)

Suffice it to say that there was name-calling, personal fashion insults, and so on.
Which leads me back to the kid who owned the gun.

When his parents found out about it, apparently (see above) they were pretty much non-plussed because (so I heard) it was only "boys being boys". I am always speechless when civilized people in the 21st century say stupid things like that. Where do you go from there?

Okay, so now, without being directly involved in any of the goings on, I realize that I am really peeved. And to add insult to injury, I hear that this gun-toting kid's older brother has a nasty home page on Facebook. Yes, the parents supposedly know about that too and yet again, are unphased for the same reasons as noted above. And me, I am just getting more and more peeved.

I went home and reported the entire series of events to Chaim because I knew I was preaching to the converted. That's when we decided to try to get on to the older brother's Facebook page to see if all the gossip was true. (As one of my friends later asked: "And what were you going to do with this knowledge?" I don't know, but at the time that wasn't the point.) We were trying to remember that everyone is innocent until proven guilty. And if we couldn't, we were just going to have to go with our verdict of "Presumed Guilty".

This is when I learned a little something about the inner workings of Facebook. If you aren't invited to be someone's friend, you can't access their home page. And let's be honest here, there aren't many 15 year old boys inviting me to be their Facebook friend (not from lack of asking or even begging on my part).

When I told a friend about our attempts to access unfriendly Facebook pages she told me to call another mutual friend (who I cannot name here because I may need him again in the future) who is an unofficial (Facebook) Subversion expert.

When I talked to the Facebook Subverter he explained how complicated it could be to break into a Facebook page and that he (acting on behalf of my subconscious) decided that it was too much risk considering that my objectives weren't clear -- well, at least those beyond curiosity.

So, now, I am left to look at this kid and wonder if he is as creepy as I now think he is. He looks so innocent, but it's too late for that -- I have my suspicions. And I really want to have his parents sent to have their heads checked, but you can't go around insisting upon that in a democratic country.

And in the meantime, I am going to do everything in my power to keep my kids away from him/them.