I’m a snob when it comes to certain things and I will admit that I never thought of myself as a public pool kind of gal. I’d never been to a public pool before. My only previous experience with public pools was hearing the stories my parents told of growing up in the 1940’s in Indiana, where the public pools were still segregated. My parents would tell us how the public pool was open to whites six days a week and that the only day the black kids could use the pool was on Thursday -because the city drained the pool out on Friday morning to clean it and refill it for the weekend. My only other image of a public pool was the hilarious scene in the movie The Sandlot, where the nerdy boy who can’t swim deliberately jumps in so that the attractive teenage lifeguard would rescue him with mouth-to-mouth. When I was a kid, my parents joined a private swimming and tennis club not far from our house. It must have made them feel good on some level after being restricted from public pools growing up. The private club was called Ridgetop and it was a fabulous place – large, crystal clear pool, well manicured lawns, and clay tennis courts. But seriously chubby at age 13, I couldn’t stand the idea of being seen in tennis shorts, let alone a swimsuit, so much to my parents’ dismay, I always had an excuse to avoid going to the club pool.
But last Saturday, after my youngest, Natalie, begged me endlessly to go swimming, I broke down and took her to the only heated pool I knew of - the public pool at the Sherman Oaks/Van Nuys park. A friend of ours, a closet public pool user, told us about it weeks earlier. Her beautiful, mid-century modern masterpiece in the hills overlooks the city, has celebrity neighbors such as George Clooney and Warren Beatty, but doesn’t have a pool. She said the best thing about the public pool was that it was a hidden gem, a brand new facility which was clean, inexpensive and incredibly well run. She beamed with pride as she talked about seeing our civic dollars at work, for once, providing the service and quality we always hope for but rarely get.
I was doubtful, but tired of having Natalie beg me to go swimming in a variety of formats – a note left on the dining room table, whining before bedtime, several emails with the subject heading, “When are we going swimming?,” I agreed to take them. I hurried everyone into their suits, searched frantically for sunscreen, swim caps (which I’ve yet to find) and a couple of towels which didn’t have Dora, Spongebob or a map of Hawaii on them, and headed off to the park.
At the front desk I was informed that the cost of using the pool was $2.50, discounted to $2.00 if I had a library card (which I did) and that the kids were…FREE! My favorite word! We paid our two bucks and went through the door to the ladies locker room. I hurried by the attendant, my cynical side believing that it was safer to take my purse with me than leave it with the teenager behind the caged holding area (alas there are no lockers) and took the girls out to the pool deck.
It was a glorious day – L.A. in April, one of those reasons people move here – clear skies, temperature in the low 80s. The pool was clean, new, nearly empty and had four lifeguards on duty. We swam for two hours and had a wonderful time. I was a new devotee of the public pool experience.
The next day, while my older daughter was taking dance at the Burbank Rec Center, I noticed that no one was on the public tennis courts adjacent to the building. I asked the Rec Center supervisor what the policy was on reserving a court, in the back of my mind scheming how next week I would come back, bring my tennis gear and sneak in some “me time” to play while my daughters were taking classes. The supervisor reached under her desk, pulled out a racket and balls and said, “The courts are first come first serve and we’ll even loan you the racket and balls.” Amazing!!! “What’s the fee?” I asked, because there’s always a fee. She smiled as she told me there was none. She didn’t even asked for my driver’s license so they could track me down if I tried to walk off with the rackets (which were new and in great condition). So while Nicole danced, I hit the public tennis courts.
I have to preface this by explaining that prior to the ages of five and seven, neither of my girls had been to a hotel that didn’t have a club floor and twice daily turn down service. In fact, it was really embarrassing the first time we took them to a motel and Nicole looked around and asked where the guy was who was supposed to take our bags. So they were something of snobs themselves when it came to travel and leisure and I have no one to blame but myself…and my husband, but he will always deny any responsibility for their actions unless they are being cute, brilliant or generally well behaved. But I say this to explain that before now, the only tennis courts they had been on were the ones at fancy hotels or the one at the private community my father lives in back east. The public tennis court experience was new one for them as well.
Natalie and I had a great time playing tennis. We had the courts to ourselves, which was good because we were all over them as we hit balls everywhere but where they were supposed to be. The public courts were even lighted at night and stayed open until 10pm! We played for almost an hour, although more than "playing" it was really an effort to teach her how to get the ball over the net. But it didn’t matter. We had as much fun chasing after balls as we did when by some miracle we got a volley going. When we stopped, I turned to Natalie and asked, “Isn’t this cool?” She quickly corrected me and said, “This isn’t cool, it’s awesome. Public is the new awesome!”
On our way home from the library, Nicole reminded me that she needed to start reading a book for her upcoming book report project at school, so I suggested that instead of going to Barnes & Noble, we stop at the public library that was on our way home. She looked at me skeptically. Now I am ashamed to admit that in their toddler days, we didn’t spend as much time at the public library as we should have (particularly given all of the amazing community programs they have) and I only recently realized that my daughter was confused, thinking that you bought books at the library instead of borrowing them. We parked at the Burbank Library and went into their enormous children’s book room. There were three librarians on duty and one was eager to help my daughter find just the right edition of Robin Hood to read for her assignment. As Nicole and the librarian wandered through the shelves in search of Robin and his merry men, Natalie and I browsed the displays, spotting a book by David Shannon called A Bad Case of Stripes. Natalie grabbed it off the shelf, found the nearest comfy chair – of which there were many – and began reading. When it was time to check out, we went up to the counter. As I searched through my purse for my library card, Nicole asked how much the books were going to cost. Natalie, now hip to our adventure (re)discovering the joys of public services, quickly corrected her, saying, “It’s free. This is the public library!” Natalie was right, public is the new awesome.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Friday, April 16, 2010
Short shorts, UGG boots and Doing Megan Fox
Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! If you thought venturing into the woods of Oz was a frightening proposition, try spending some time on the playground during fourth grade recess. I hadn’t really paid much attention to what other fourth grade girls were wearing until the morning fashion wars between Nicole and I started to escalate to a daily screaming and crying battle where she insisted on wearing – no matter what the weather – short shorts with UGG boots. In defense of the glaringly age inappropriate outfit she said, “All the other girls wear it!” That morning I looked around on the playground, and she was right, they were all sporting the look. I bit my tongue to keep from saying, “Yeah, but if the other girls jumped off a cliff, would you do that, too?” I knew she would ignore me anyway, and clearly I was channeling my own mother.
I tried to convince Nicole not to wear the outfit, without giving too much detail as to why I think the look is trashy and wrong for someone whose hormones haven’t even kicked in yet to be running around with half their butt hanging out. I simply said that they weren’t appropriate clothes for school and that short shorts are best for summertime, the beach and playing at home and that winter boots are best for wearing - big surprise – in winter. Short shorts and UGG boots worn together…please explain to me when the “dressing like a hooker on Hollywood Boulevard” look became fashionable with the under ten set.
Trust me, back in the day, but that day being college not elementary school, we would dress in provocative ways to go out to parties and clubs. Mini skirts, thigh high boots, lingerie cami tops that flashed both belly and cleavage were mandatory. Hell, we’d even wear some craziness like that to class on occasion. But we knew what we were doing and clearly the objective was to attract attention from the opposite sex. But when fourth graders start dressing in similarly provocative fashion, what is the objective? What image of themselves are they projecting to the world and particularly to the hormone raging, just-on-the-cusp-of-puberty fourth grade boys? And in a society where we already have issues with the objectification of women, I don't think it is a good idea to allow them to dress in a way which screams, “It’s all about the booty, forget I have brain!”
At drop off the other day, I was explaining my frustration to a mother of 2 boys when another woman leaned in and joined our conversation. Her daughter lives in short shorts and UGG boots and the mom immediately became defensive about her daughter’s fashion choice. “It’s a cute look,” she said, forcing a smile. “They’re so innocent they don’t attach any sexuality to it.” I tried not to laugh. They aren’t so innocent and they know exactly what the look says. (Once you’ve heard your seven year old refer to a shirtless guy on a basketball court as “hot,” you will never again question their awareness of the opposite sex.) The mother went on to say how her nine year old doesn’t even know where babies come from yet, that they are naïve and this is just their way of being in style. Later, Nicole told me that the girl knows the facts of life – her father told her because he said her mother would be too freaked out about it. I wonder if the parents who let their young girls wear short shorts, UGG boots and other provocative looks are the ones who are denying that their kids are blossoming from babies into young people, with all the associated body awareness, sexual curiosity and a desperate need to be guided through this incredibly confusing, awkward and exciting life change.
The girls aren’t the only ones engaged in this pre-adolescent social preening and interest in the opposite sex. A mom with a fourth grade son told me he came home and asked his parents what a blow job was. He said the boys in the bathroom – why do these conversations always go on in the bathroom??? – were talking about how they wanted Megan Fox to “do one” on them. I don’t remember at nine ever having sexual conversation like that with my peers. Now, granted, I was never a nine year old boy and maybe the conversations in their bathroom were significantly more advanced than the ones in ours. When I was growing up, for the girls, the big thing was playing truth or dare to get you to admit who you liked, playing spin the bottle but then being too frightened to give anything more than a kiss on the cheek, and running into the boys’ bathroom to see what the only heard of but never seen urinal looked like. Talking about sex acts with celebrities was so beyond anything we considered at that age. It worries me because it shows that this generation of kids is so accelerated in everything they are exposed to, say and eventually, will do. We need to put the brakes on their childhood, let them slow down and not race through every stage of life. There will be time for short shorts and UGG boots – when you’re at least a teen or old enough to hang out at a bar, not when you’re still sipping juice boxes at elementary school.
I tried to convince Nicole not to wear the outfit, without giving too much detail as to why I think the look is trashy and wrong for someone whose hormones haven’t even kicked in yet to be running around with half their butt hanging out. I simply said that they weren’t appropriate clothes for school and that short shorts are best for summertime, the beach and playing at home and that winter boots are best for wearing - big surprise – in winter. Short shorts and UGG boots worn together…please explain to me when the “dressing like a hooker on Hollywood Boulevard” look became fashionable with the under ten set.
Trust me, back in the day, but that day being college not elementary school, we would dress in provocative ways to go out to parties and clubs. Mini skirts, thigh high boots, lingerie cami tops that flashed both belly and cleavage were mandatory. Hell, we’d even wear some craziness like that to class on occasion. But we knew what we were doing and clearly the objective was to attract attention from the opposite sex. But when fourth graders start dressing in similarly provocative fashion, what is the objective? What image of themselves are they projecting to the world and particularly to the hormone raging, just-on-the-cusp-of-puberty fourth grade boys? And in a society where we already have issues with the objectification of women, I don't think it is a good idea to allow them to dress in a way which screams, “It’s all about the booty, forget I have brain!”
At drop off the other day, I was explaining my frustration to a mother of 2 boys when another woman leaned in and joined our conversation. Her daughter lives in short shorts and UGG boots and the mom immediately became defensive about her daughter’s fashion choice. “It’s a cute look,” she said, forcing a smile. “They’re so innocent they don’t attach any sexuality to it.” I tried not to laugh. They aren’t so innocent and they know exactly what the look says. (Once you’ve heard your seven year old refer to a shirtless guy on a basketball court as “hot,” you will never again question their awareness of the opposite sex.) The mother went on to say how her nine year old doesn’t even know where babies come from yet, that they are naïve and this is just their way of being in style. Later, Nicole told me that the girl knows the facts of life – her father told her because he said her mother would be too freaked out about it. I wonder if the parents who let their young girls wear short shorts, UGG boots and other provocative looks are the ones who are denying that their kids are blossoming from babies into young people, with all the associated body awareness, sexual curiosity and a desperate need to be guided through this incredibly confusing, awkward and exciting life change.
The girls aren’t the only ones engaged in this pre-adolescent social preening and interest in the opposite sex. A mom with a fourth grade son told me he came home and asked his parents what a blow job was. He said the boys in the bathroom – why do these conversations always go on in the bathroom??? – were talking about how they wanted Megan Fox to “do one” on them. I don’t remember at nine ever having sexual conversation like that with my peers. Now, granted, I was never a nine year old boy and maybe the conversations in their bathroom were significantly more advanced than the ones in ours. When I was growing up, for the girls, the big thing was playing truth or dare to get you to admit who you liked, playing spin the bottle but then being too frightened to give anything more than a kiss on the cheek, and running into the boys’ bathroom to see what the only heard of but never seen urinal looked like. Talking about sex acts with celebrities was so beyond anything we considered at that age. It worries me because it shows that this generation of kids is so accelerated in everything they are exposed to, say and eventually, will do. We need to put the brakes on their childhood, let them slow down and not race through every stage of life. There will be time for short shorts and UGG boots – when you’re at least a teen or old enough to hang out at a bar, not when you’re still sipping juice boxes at elementary school.
Friday, April 9, 2010
Relative-ly Speaking
I had a horrible fight with a relative this week – yelling, name calling – at times I felt like I was arguing with my seven year old instead of someone decades out of high school. I’m sure they felt the same way about me. It was a mean argument. The kind you have very rarely, if at all, where you say things you’ve thought and bit your tongue to avoid saying for years. Each person accused the other of a lifetime of awful things and horrible behavior and oddly, in retrospect, I realized that most of the things they accused me of, were character traits they possessed. Many of the taunts I launched at them like armour piercing ballistic missiles were things I do myself. It was as if two mirrors got into a reflecting contest, but the reflection of one only showed the other.
So this horrible fight, which unfortunately took place in front of my children, colored my entire week in a variety of ways – mostly bad, but in a few cases, good. I was so hurt by the cruelty of what was said to me and how it was delivered, in that sort of passive aggressive, underhanded way that some folks excel in - me, I’m the type to stand up on a chair and call someone a jerk face right out – never been good at being subtly manipulative – that I cried buckets throughout the week, showering down at unexpected moments when a memory of what was leveled at me rose up like the L.A. river about to overflow its banks – that’s a joke for anyone who lives in L.A. and knows that the L.A. river is about as deep as spit. I hated for my kids to see me that way, vulnerable, mad beyond belief, and shocked that people I thought loved me, on some levels told me they felt just the opposite.
The good thing that came out of the fight was that I realized I never wanted my children to experience someone being so verbally mean to them, certainly not family, certainly not me, and the argument made my look at and treat my children in a very different way this week. I appreciated them more, took time to speak with more care, and was quicker to explain things to them than I was to get angry. I’d look at them in the early morning, sleeping, knowing that in a few minutes I’d have to wake them up, disturb the peace that only sleep can bring, and I wondered how I’d feel about them as adults. How we’d communicate, what lines we’d cross as a mother, daughter and friend. Would we even be friends?
I started to think about the accident of birth. Not that the birth itself was unplanned or an accident, but that having a baby is the equivalent of a human crap shoot. For that matter, who your parents or siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins anyone you're going to have to stare across the table at on any given holiday, is the ultimate gamble. You toss the dice on the table, and never know what numbers are going to come up. As parents, you decide to have children. You bring them into the world, love them, raise them, send them off, but you never know what you’re going to get when infant turns into adult. You don’t pick your kids off a shelf in Costco and say, “Oh, I’ll take the one that will grow up to be a Stanford graduate, electrical engineer, have two kids, and live in the suburbs, preferably someplace I'd like to retire to." You might end up with Mother Teresa, Charles Manson or Bill Gates, but more likely, someone in between, much less infamous (good or bad) and probably not as rich. And you have to be mature enough to respect who that child becomes. You might end up liking them, the relationship maturing to a level beyond family and into a lifelong friend. I like to judge if I’ve reached that level with someone (family or otherwise) by applying the martini test – is this someone I’d like to go out and drink a martini with? If so, they’re a keeper. If not, I tend to want to lie, say I’m going to the restroom and then slip out the back door before they’ve even gotten to the olive in their drink. But the thing we never think about as parents is what happens if our kids grow up and we don’t like the person that child has become? Makes it a hell of a lot more difficult to keep the already complicated –okay, let’s be real – messy, emotion filled, layered, contradictory, strained and yet important ties between family members connected. And why should we keep them connected?
I wrestled with that question this week, coming up with reasons such as the need for family, for my kids, for emotional support in our senior years, both mine and theirs. But in the end, I am still not sure that is enough to justify or allow decades of bad behavior just because you’re related. Is that the price you have to pay to be in a family? If so, I’m thinking I’d rather pay the sixteen bucks a head to take my kids to see Avatar in 3D. Hell of a lot cheaper than staying connected with family, and I get popcorn with the movie.
I’m still licking my wounds and a part of me hopes the other person is doing their own emotional triage. I haven’t decided if I can venture back into the ring to do battle with family again. It’s not a well refereed fight. There are often punches below the belt because let’s face it, these are the very people you have known since you were born, who pushed you out themselves or were raised up along side you...they know all your vulnerable spots and often find it easier to take all of their own career, health, relationship, family frustration, anger and disappointment, turn it into a large emotional switchblade and stick it into you where they know it will do the most damage. Why is it easier to dump on family than to really address what’s bothering you in your own life? Good question, one my own children have probably wondered about themselves, if not now, they will one day, probably during an expensive therapy session where their mother will be to blame for all their presumed short comings. So, why is it easier to dump on family? A friend of mine who I’ve known since I was four, summed it up brilliantly. She said, “It’s because your relatives think attacking family is safe. They can dump all their shit on you and believe that because you’re family, you’ll take it and still be around later…until you’re not.” I realized how right she was. At a certain point, when it becomes too toxic, you can step away from your family’s dysfunction, particularly when their dysfunction is screwing up your own. And believe me, I value my dysfunction. I've honed it to a fine art and apparently work on a daily basis to pass it on to my own offspring, who again, will blame me for it in therapy years from now.
The other good thing that came out of the argument was that I realized I never wanted my daughters to be as angry at me as I was at the person I was shouting at over the phone. It made me think about family and relationships with spouses, parents, siblings and all the assorted crew. It made me think about how I want my daughters to remember me when they are adults, long after I’m buried six feet under –by the way, I’ve decided that on what I want my tombstone to read - “I’m so tired, I could go to sleep right now,” which pretty much sums up how I feel almost all of the time. But I digress...I want my girls to know me as a person who allows them to grow up to be who they are and who recognizes that they have changed from children into adults, and that I will not continue to attribute their childhood faults and failings to them long after they have left them in the crib. I want them to know me as the type of person who values them for who they are, not what they (or their spouse) do, what college they attended or if they have a vacation home. Vacation home? Huh? We’re barely able to keep the home we have from completely falling down around us as home improvement projects get pushed aside in favor of those frivolous little things like paying the mortgage! I will have an interest in what they do, emotionally support them when they fall and cheer for their successes. I want Nicole and Natalie to know that our family can love and support each other without them having to compete with their siblings or their parents. And mostly, I want them to know that whoever they grow up to be as a person, that I loved them from the start, will continue to work on our relationships through the ups and the downs, and will always love them no matter what, in a genuine, substantive way. And when I'm old and come to visit them, they should take comfort in knowing that my emotional switchblade won’t make it through the metal detector and will be confiscated by airport security.
So this horrible fight, which unfortunately took place in front of my children, colored my entire week in a variety of ways – mostly bad, but in a few cases, good. I was so hurt by the cruelty of what was said to me and how it was delivered, in that sort of passive aggressive, underhanded way that some folks excel in - me, I’m the type to stand up on a chair and call someone a jerk face right out – never been good at being subtly manipulative – that I cried buckets throughout the week, showering down at unexpected moments when a memory of what was leveled at me rose up like the L.A. river about to overflow its banks – that’s a joke for anyone who lives in L.A. and knows that the L.A. river is about as deep as spit. I hated for my kids to see me that way, vulnerable, mad beyond belief, and shocked that people I thought loved me, on some levels told me they felt just the opposite.
The good thing that came out of the fight was that I realized I never wanted my children to experience someone being so verbally mean to them, certainly not family, certainly not me, and the argument made my look at and treat my children in a very different way this week. I appreciated them more, took time to speak with more care, and was quicker to explain things to them than I was to get angry. I’d look at them in the early morning, sleeping, knowing that in a few minutes I’d have to wake them up, disturb the peace that only sleep can bring, and I wondered how I’d feel about them as adults. How we’d communicate, what lines we’d cross as a mother, daughter and friend. Would we even be friends?
I started to think about the accident of birth. Not that the birth itself was unplanned or an accident, but that having a baby is the equivalent of a human crap shoot. For that matter, who your parents or siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins anyone you're going to have to stare across the table at on any given holiday, is the ultimate gamble. You toss the dice on the table, and never know what numbers are going to come up. As parents, you decide to have children. You bring them into the world, love them, raise them, send them off, but you never know what you’re going to get when infant turns into adult. You don’t pick your kids off a shelf in Costco and say, “Oh, I’ll take the one that will grow up to be a Stanford graduate, electrical engineer, have two kids, and live in the suburbs, preferably someplace I'd like to retire to." You might end up with Mother Teresa, Charles Manson or Bill Gates, but more likely, someone in between, much less infamous (good or bad) and probably not as rich. And you have to be mature enough to respect who that child becomes. You might end up liking them, the relationship maturing to a level beyond family and into a lifelong friend. I like to judge if I’ve reached that level with someone (family or otherwise) by applying the martini test – is this someone I’d like to go out and drink a martini with? If so, they’re a keeper. If not, I tend to want to lie, say I’m going to the restroom and then slip out the back door before they’ve even gotten to the olive in their drink. But the thing we never think about as parents is what happens if our kids grow up and we don’t like the person that child has become? Makes it a hell of a lot more difficult to keep the already complicated –okay, let’s be real – messy, emotion filled, layered, contradictory, strained and yet important ties between family members connected. And why should we keep them connected?
I wrestled with that question this week, coming up with reasons such as the need for family, for my kids, for emotional support in our senior years, both mine and theirs. But in the end, I am still not sure that is enough to justify or allow decades of bad behavior just because you’re related. Is that the price you have to pay to be in a family? If so, I’m thinking I’d rather pay the sixteen bucks a head to take my kids to see Avatar in 3D. Hell of a lot cheaper than staying connected with family, and I get popcorn with the movie.
I’m still licking my wounds and a part of me hopes the other person is doing their own emotional triage. I haven’t decided if I can venture back into the ring to do battle with family again. It’s not a well refereed fight. There are often punches below the belt because let’s face it, these are the very people you have known since you were born, who pushed you out themselves or were raised up along side you...they know all your vulnerable spots and often find it easier to take all of their own career, health, relationship, family frustration, anger and disappointment, turn it into a large emotional switchblade and stick it into you where they know it will do the most damage. Why is it easier to dump on family than to really address what’s bothering you in your own life? Good question, one my own children have probably wondered about themselves, if not now, they will one day, probably during an expensive therapy session where their mother will be to blame for all their presumed short comings. So, why is it easier to dump on family? A friend of mine who I’ve known since I was four, summed it up brilliantly. She said, “It’s because your relatives think attacking family is safe. They can dump all their shit on you and believe that because you’re family, you’ll take it and still be around later…until you’re not.” I realized how right she was. At a certain point, when it becomes too toxic, you can step away from your family’s dysfunction, particularly when their dysfunction is screwing up your own. And believe me, I value my dysfunction. I've honed it to a fine art and apparently work on a daily basis to pass it on to my own offspring, who again, will blame me for it in therapy years from now.
The other good thing that came out of the argument was that I realized I never wanted my daughters to be as angry at me as I was at the person I was shouting at over the phone. It made me think about family and relationships with spouses, parents, siblings and all the assorted crew. It made me think about how I want my daughters to remember me when they are adults, long after I’m buried six feet under –by the way, I’ve decided that on what I want my tombstone to read - “I’m so tired, I could go to sleep right now,” which pretty much sums up how I feel almost all of the time. But I digress...I want my girls to know me as a person who allows them to grow up to be who they are and who recognizes that they have changed from children into adults, and that I will not continue to attribute their childhood faults and failings to them long after they have left them in the crib. I want them to know me as the type of person who values them for who they are, not what they (or their spouse) do, what college they attended or if they have a vacation home. Vacation home? Huh? We’re barely able to keep the home we have from completely falling down around us as home improvement projects get pushed aside in favor of those frivolous little things like paying the mortgage! I will have an interest in what they do, emotionally support them when they fall and cheer for their successes. I want Nicole and Natalie to know that our family can love and support each other without them having to compete with their siblings or their parents. And mostly, I want them to know that whoever they grow up to be as a person, that I loved them from the start, will continue to work on our relationships through the ups and the downs, and will always love them no matter what, in a genuine, substantive way. And when I'm old and come to visit them, they should take comfort in knowing that my emotional switchblade won’t make it through the metal detector and will be confiscated by airport security.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Less is More
Spring Break - Two words which usually spark fear in my heart. I know I will need to entertain my children for a week – morning, noon and night – with no school to occupy the daytime hours. This year, I got smart; I arranged to take spring break week off from work so that I didn’t have to invest a fortune in a babysitter or camp. One year, I was even foolish enough to bring them to work with me that week. At first, I thought it was not very fair to my kids because they would be bored sitting up in my office all day. Silly me! They loved it. Six straight hours of playing on the extra computer in my office, eating junk food from the vending machine and playing the son of a co-worker who was also condemned to serving his spring break time at the office. They ran up and down the halls, visited my co-workers in their offices, shredded papers for the office manager, watched videos and ate pizza in the conference room. Not fair to my kids…actually it really wasn’t fair to my co-workers who had to endure the children invading their territory for five days straight. But my co-workers were good natured about it – to my face – I worry what they said behind their office doors or at the water cooler. But my kids had a ball. They beg to go back to the office any time school is on break.
But this spring break, even though I had taken time off, out of financial necessity and timing, we opted out of taking an expensive or even moderately priced trip somewhere and decided to have a staycation. I approached this idea with hesitation, certain that my girls would gripe. They love traveling, going to hotels, hanging out at the hotel pool. They’d much rather be on vacation than at home. But for that matter, so would I, so clearly it comes naturally to them. Instead, I planned a trip each day of spring break to somewhere in Los Angeles that they’d never been before. We went to Chinatown, the Mexican market at Olvera Street, rode the shortest railway in the world, Angel’s Flight, hiked to the Hollywood sign and went to the beach in Malibu. Each day when had lunch out and each girl got to buy a souvenir. They went to bed tired and happy every night. Happier than I’d ever seen them on a vacation to some swanky beach resort, which is always fraught with arguments and teary eyed moments about some portion of the trip. I was surprised and thrilled to learn that they’d be so happy with so little. Other than restaurant lunches and trinkets from tourist stands, they loved just spending time together as a family. Spring break at home has got me rethinking our summer vacation plans, which just may end up getting ditched in favor of having a summer staycation as well!
But this spring break, even though I had taken time off, out of financial necessity and timing, we opted out of taking an expensive or even moderately priced trip somewhere and decided to have a staycation. I approached this idea with hesitation, certain that my girls would gripe. They love traveling, going to hotels, hanging out at the hotel pool. They’d much rather be on vacation than at home. But for that matter, so would I, so clearly it comes naturally to them. Instead, I planned a trip each day of spring break to somewhere in Los Angeles that they’d never been before. We went to Chinatown, the Mexican market at Olvera Street, rode the shortest railway in the world, Angel’s Flight, hiked to the Hollywood sign and went to the beach in Malibu. Each day when had lunch out and each girl got to buy a souvenir. They went to bed tired and happy every night. Happier than I’d ever seen them on a vacation to some swanky beach resort, which is always fraught with arguments and teary eyed moments about some portion of the trip. I was surprised and thrilled to learn that they’d be so happy with so little. Other than restaurant lunches and trinkets from tourist stands, they loved just spending time together as a family. Spring break at home has got me rethinking our summer vacation plans, which just may end up getting ditched in favor of having a summer staycation as well!
Friday, March 26, 2010
Anger, Threats, Fear
It’s official. The health care bill is now law. Many people are angry. Some are making threats. Others fear this new law will take away their freedom instead of improving the quality of their lives. Anger, threats, fear…I understand those feelings and share them, but in a very different way.
I am angry when I think of my twenty-three year old friend who died from kidney failure because he didn’t have health insurance and was no longer covered on his parents’ policy once he’d graduated from college. Even now, almost two decades later, I remember visiting him in the hospital room. He’d already slipped into a coma by the time I’d arrived at County, the Los Angeles hospital known for handling low income and indigent cases. I crowded into the tiny room with his mother and another friend and we sat, watching his labored breathing, not knowing, but suspecting that in a few hours, he’d be gone.
When it was time to go, his mother walked me into the hallway and we talked briefly. I knew him, but not her. He was like so many of us in L.A. who are the far flung progeny that ended up moving away from our families and childhood homes, a young man who’d come to town, found a job, made friends, created a surrogate family when his own was so distant. I had never met his mother until that moment. Meeting under such circumstances was both awkward and freeing. After trying for a moment to exchange the usual greetings, she burst into tears. Strangers, we hug and held onto each other, sharing our mutual sadness over her son’s needless and imminent death. Her pain was so excruciating, so deep. It was only the second time I’d witnessed the pain of a mother who knew she would have to bury her own child. As my grandmother said when my own mother was dying, “Burying your own child is wrong, it’s unnatural, and it’s not how it was supposed to be.” I wasn’t a mother then, and until I had children of my own, I really had no sense of how much this woman and my grandmother had hurt. Now, just the thought of something little harming my own children, the flu, a broken bone, fills me with worry and sadness. Losing a child to an illness, particularly when the death might have been prevented if the person had medical insurance is a pain no parent should have to suffer. My friend’s mother and her husband had worked for the government their entire lives and were now retired. She had given a lifetime of service to her country, yet her country had failed her now by not providing her son with desperately needed medical care which might have saved his life.
I have had several relatives who have had long periods of hospitalization, one who was almost bankrupt by it. They had medical insurance, but the coverage had limits and once they’d reached the lifetime limits they were expected to pay out of pocket. In the case of my aunt, a retired teacher, her hospitalization cost over a hundred thousand dollars. Hit with huge bills, having to make the choice between eating, keeping a roof over your head, providing for your family, the hospital bills, the amount so overwhelming that owing that much almost seems surreal, they chose to ignore them. They stopped picking up the phone when first the hospital then the collection agencies started to call. Those are the real threats. When the cost of saving you threatens to destroy your life and everything you’ve built up over the years. In my own family, I’ve seen what was a very real threat under the old health care system – that we are all really one major medical emergency away from going bankrupt.
Years ago, while traveling alone abroad, I fell ill. I was staying at a small B&B in the French countryside, came down for breakfast and passed out before making it to the table. I awoke on the sofa to find the owner of the B&B, an elderly French lady with shocking white hair who wore a slim fitting black cotton dress everyday of my stay with her, putting a compress on my head. She didn’t speak English, and my French was passable for a tourist, but limited to questions about asking your name, finding the restroom and knowing how to greet you morning, noon and night. I did not have the vocabulary to discuss serious medical issues. When I was rested, she walked me to door and pointed in the direction of the town’s hospital. I had been sick, a small cold, I thought, but I was traveling and wasn’t going to let feeling a little under the weather interfere with my adventure. As I made my way down the cobblestone streets of this ancient town which couldn’t have had more than five or six hundred residents, I grew fearful, not of what was wrong with me, but of how I was going to deal with whatever illness it was while traveling abroad. I wasn’t at home with my doctor. I had health insurance, but surely a small hospital in France would be considered an out of network facility. I wondered if I would even be able to communicate with the doctors. Would my care be good or would the language gap cause a miscommunication which would cause something worse to happen to me? What if I couldn’t afford to pay what I assumed would be the astronomical costs of an emergency room visit in a foreign country? I imagined what a visit to the emergency room in L.A. would be like, waiting two to four hours just to be seen and if I was at a hospital that wasn’t covered under my insurance plan it would cost me hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars to pay for treatment. I prepared for this to be worse.
I turned the corner and was surprised to find a hospital building with a modern exterior jutting out from the town’s ancient stone walls. The nurse didn’t understand English, but took the time to speak to me slowly in French, as if talking to a young child, using words and phrases I could grasp. They quickly whisked me into an examination room. The nurse took my blood pressure, temperature, drew some blood. The doctor came in right away, listened to my chest, looked in my throat and ears. He explained to me, again very slowly and patiently in French, that I had an ear infection which caused me to lose my equilibrium. That coupled with a fever and being generally run down had caused me to collapse. The doctor wrote me three prescriptions and sent me back out to the nurse’s station. As relieved as I was that my illness had been minor, I was afraid that seeing the bill would make me sick all over again.
The nurse sat me down at her work station and put the bill on the table. In French, she explained the different charges and pointed out the final total. My mind was on overload, sick, trying to calculate dollars from francs, guessing at the exchange rate. When I figured it out, I was certain I was wrong. In disbelief, I asked the nurse in French, “The total is twenty-five dollars?” She nodded and added in French, “If you can afford to pay it.” The cost of my emergency room visit was nominal and I didn’t have to pay for it if I couldn’t afford to. I was being treated under their national healthcare plan which stated that everyone had the right to good care regardless of their ability to pay. I pulled a wad of fracs out of my fanny pack and handed her the money. I shook hands effusively with everyone from the doctor to the nurse to the janitor mopping up the floor on my way out the door.
I clutched my three prescriptions in my hand and again walked down the cobblestone streets towards the pharmacy, giddy about my good luck at the hospital, but certain that at the pharmacy, I wouldn’t be so fortunate. At home, three perceptions, even with my health insurance, could still cost me anywhere from thirty to fifty dollars. When I approached the counter, the pharmacist took my prescriptions and started to fill them. Since he didn’t speak English either, he called his son in from the back room and the boy translated. The kid couldn’t have been ten, but his English was perfect, as if he’d spent hours of classroom time honing his accent or watched way too much American t.v. His father handed him the bill to explain to me. Again, I took a moment to make the conversion from francs to dollars, but when I did, I was certain my calculations were wrong. The boy saw the confused look on my face and said, “Yes, it is seven dollars.” His father said some thing to him in French too quickly for me to understand and the boy added the same phrase I had just heard at the hospital, “If you can afford to pay for it.” Payment was optional? When was the last time you were in a pharmacy in the U.S. and someone said that to you? I happily paid my seven dollars for three prescriptions and returned to the B&B to take my medications and recover from my illness.
The owner of the B&B made soup for me and encouraged me to put my feet up on the sofa, bringing over an afghan that someone, maybe she, had lovingly crocheted, and put it over me. I was sick six thousand miles away from home. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to afford to take care of myself, that even if I could pay, the treatment would be poor and I’d get sicker or die as a result. But my fear was unwarranted because the country I was in had decided that the health of its people and even visitors like myself was a priority. I was cared for most certainly better than I would have been at home.
Now that has changed. The passage of the health care bill will ensure that everyone in the U.S. has a basic level of coverage and quality of treatment. I’m not saying the new law is perfect, but it is a start. There will be some difficulties and challenges at first, and the anger, threats and fear may continue for some time, but in the long run, it will help our our nation to have the assurance that the health care needs of the people most important to us – our aging parents, our families, our children - will be met.
I am angry when I think of my twenty-three year old friend who died from kidney failure because he didn’t have health insurance and was no longer covered on his parents’ policy once he’d graduated from college. Even now, almost two decades later, I remember visiting him in the hospital room. He’d already slipped into a coma by the time I’d arrived at County, the Los Angeles hospital known for handling low income and indigent cases. I crowded into the tiny room with his mother and another friend and we sat, watching his labored breathing, not knowing, but suspecting that in a few hours, he’d be gone.
When it was time to go, his mother walked me into the hallway and we talked briefly. I knew him, but not her. He was like so many of us in L.A. who are the far flung progeny that ended up moving away from our families and childhood homes, a young man who’d come to town, found a job, made friends, created a surrogate family when his own was so distant. I had never met his mother until that moment. Meeting under such circumstances was both awkward and freeing. After trying for a moment to exchange the usual greetings, she burst into tears. Strangers, we hug and held onto each other, sharing our mutual sadness over her son’s needless and imminent death. Her pain was so excruciating, so deep. It was only the second time I’d witnessed the pain of a mother who knew she would have to bury her own child. As my grandmother said when my own mother was dying, “Burying your own child is wrong, it’s unnatural, and it’s not how it was supposed to be.” I wasn’t a mother then, and until I had children of my own, I really had no sense of how much this woman and my grandmother had hurt. Now, just the thought of something little harming my own children, the flu, a broken bone, fills me with worry and sadness. Losing a child to an illness, particularly when the death might have been prevented if the person had medical insurance is a pain no parent should have to suffer. My friend’s mother and her husband had worked for the government their entire lives and were now retired. She had given a lifetime of service to her country, yet her country had failed her now by not providing her son with desperately needed medical care which might have saved his life.
I have had several relatives who have had long periods of hospitalization, one who was almost bankrupt by it. They had medical insurance, but the coverage had limits and once they’d reached the lifetime limits they were expected to pay out of pocket. In the case of my aunt, a retired teacher, her hospitalization cost over a hundred thousand dollars. Hit with huge bills, having to make the choice between eating, keeping a roof over your head, providing for your family, the hospital bills, the amount so overwhelming that owing that much almost seems surreal, they chose to ignore them. They stopped picking up the phone when first the hospital then the collection agencies started to call. Those are the real threats. When the cost of saving you threatens to destroy your life and everything you’ve built up over the years. In my own family, I’ve seen what was a very real threat under the old health care system – that we are all really one major medical emergency away from going bankrupt.
Years ago, while traveling alone abroad, I fell ill. I was staying at a small B&B in the French countryside, came down for breakfast and passed out before making it to the table. I awoke on the sofa to find the owner of the B&B, an elderly French lady with shocking white hair who wore a slim fitting black cotton dress everyday of my stay with her, putting a compress on my head. She didn’t speak English, and my French was passable for a tourist, but limited to questions about asking your name, finding the restroom and knowing how to greet you morning, noon and night. I did not have the vocabulary to discuss serious medical issues. When I was rested, she walked me to door and pointed in the direction of the town’s hospital. I had been sick, a small cold, I thought, but I was traveling and wasn’t going to let feeling a little under the weather interfere with my adventure. As I made my way down the cobblestone streets of this ancient town which couldn’t have had more than five or six hundred residents, I grew fearful, not of what was wrong with me, but of how I was going to deal with whatever illness it was while traveling abroad. I wasn’t at home with my doctor. I had health insurance, but surely a small hospital in France would be considered an out of network facility. I wondered if I would even be able to communicate with the doctors. Would my care be good or would the language gap cause a miscommunication which would cause something worse to happen to me? What if I couldn’t afford to pay what I assumed would be the astronomical costs of an emergency room visit in a foreign country? I imagined what a visit to the emergency room in L.A. would be like, waiting two to four hours just to be seen and if I was at a hospital that wasn’t covered under my insurance plan it would cost me hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars to pay for treatment. I prepared for this to be worse.
I turned the corner and was surprised to find a hospital building with a modern exterior jutting out from the town’s ancient stone walls. The nurse didn’t understand English, but took the time to speak to me slowly in French, as if talking to a young child, using words and phrases I could grasp. They quickly whisked me into an examination room. The nurse took my blood pressure, temperature, drew some blood. The doctor came in right away, listened to my chest, looked in my throat and ears. He explained to me, again very slowly and patiently in French, that I had an ear infection which caused me to lose my equilibrium. That coupled with a fever and being generally run down had caused me to collapse. The doctor wrote me three prescriptions and sent me back out to the nurse’s station. As relieved as I was that my illness had been minor, I was afraid that seeing the bill would make me sick all over again.
The nurse sat me down at her work station and put the bill on the table. In French, she explained the different charges and pointed out the final total. My mind was on overload, sick, trying to calculate dollars from francs, guessing at the exchange rate. When I figured it out, I was certain I was wrong. In disbelief, I asked the nurse in French, “The total is twenty-five dollars?” She nodded and added in French, “If you can afford to pay it.” The cost of my emergency room visit was nominal and I didn’t have to pay for it if I couldn’t afford to. I was being treated under their national healthcare plan which stated that everyone had the right to good care regardless of their ability to pay. I pulled a wad of fracs out of my fanny pack and handed her the money. I shook hands effusively with everyone from the doctor to the nurse to the janitor mopping up the floor on my way out the door.
I clutched my three prescriptions in my hand and again walked down the cobblestone streets towards the pharmacy, giddy about my good luck at the hospital, but certain that at the pharmacy, I wouldn’t be so fortunate. At home, three perceptions, even with my health insurance, could still cost me anywhere from thirty to fifty dollars. When I approached the counter, the pharmacist took my prescriptions and started to fill them. Since he didn’t speak English either, he called his son in from the back room and the boy translated. The kid couldn’t have been ten, but his English was perfect, as if he’d spent hours of classroom time honing his accent or watched way too much American t.v. His father handed him the bill to explain to me. Again, I took a moment to make the conversion from francs to dollars, but when I did, I was certain my calculations were wrong. The boy saw the confused look on my face and said, “Yes, it is seven dollars.” His father said some thing to him in French too quickly for me to understand and the boy added the same phrase I had just heard at the hospital, “If you can afford to pay for it.” Payment was optional? When was the last time you were in a pharmacy in the U.S. and someone said that to you? I happily paid my seven dollars for three prescriptions and returned to the B&B to take my medications and recover from my illness.
The owner of the B&B made soup for me and encouraged me to put my feet up on the sofa, bringing over an afghan that someone, maybe she, had lovingly crocheted, and put it over me. I was sick six thousand miles away from home. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to afford to take care of myself, that even if I could pay, the treatment would be poor and I’d get sicker or die as a result. But my fear was unwarranted because the country I was in had decided that the health of its people and even visitors like myself was a priority. I was cared for most certainly better than I would have been at home.
Now that has changed. The passage of the health care bill will ensure that everyone in the U.S. has a basic level of coverage and quality of treatment. I’m not saying the new law is perfect, but it is a start. There will be some difficulties and challenges at first, and the anger, threats and fear may continue for some time, but in the long run, it will help our our nation to have the assurance that the health care needs of the people most important to us – our aging parents, our families, our children - will be met.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Bench Me, Coach
I was up at 4am, had the local news on t.v. and was fumbling with the coffee maker, trying to brew the elixir of life which keeps me functioning, when I heard a news story about the dangers of over scheduling your children. (http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news/health/your_health&id=7334049). It talked about how today's kids are becoming stressed from so many classes, play dates, sports practices and family obligations that parents were seeking new ways to slow down their lives. But when they got to the part about how many new parents were hiring parenting coaches to help them de-clutter and de-stress their lives, I almost dropped the coffee pot on the floor.
Parenting coaches? Apparently, it is a relatively new and unregulated profession, an off-shoot of life coaches in some ways - where people with no real credentials and/or very little formal training other than just being a parent themselves, get to hang out a shingle and charge around $300 a month per client for other parents to call or email them for advice. They also provide such services as overhauling your family schedule to limit the family's activities and bring order to the house by sorting through and throwing out the growing mountain of outgrown toys and clothes.
Whatever happened to asking a mother, sister, brother, neighbor or friend for advice? And that's free. What happened to taking responsibility of your own home and schedule by limiting your own family activities and cleaning out your own toys and clothes? I don't see why you have to hire out to do this. Parenting coaches argue that asking friends or family for advice brings an agenda ridden response which isn't helpful. In some cases, yes, that may be true. But for the most part, even in a friend of neighbor's personal opinion, you can always find some helpful part that may work for you. And if not, move on and ask someone else until you do find something useful. Or pick up a parenting book and do some reading.
Customers of parenting coaches say they love the service because any time they have a question about how to toilet train little Suzy or wonder if little Johnny should be biting in the first grade, they can pick up the phone and call for help without the judgment a friend or family member might impose on the question or the expense or stigma of going to a therapist. When my oldest, Nicole was younger, any time she started doing something unusual, which to us as new parents seemed like every other minute, I'd pick up the phone and call my father, a child psychiatrist and ask for his advice. I'd think, how great, I have one of the country's leading child experts on speed dial and I don't even have to pay a session fee. I'd get Dad on the line, tell him what we were observing and then ask for his opinion. The conversation always went something like this:
Me: So, what do you think?
There would be a long pause on the other end of the line and then,
Dad: Did you read that parenting book?
I'd laugh and ask again, and he'd point out how helpful the book could be. Sometimes he would weigh in with his opinion, but he didn't want us to get into the habit of throwing up our hands and turning to others every time we had a parenting question. As parents, we needed to learn to work through and solve issues on our own using the tools we had.
If some parents can and want to pay $300 dollars or more a month to have someone manage their parenting issues, then that is their choice. But think of how much more empowered and accomplished and confident they would feel about their parenting skills if they didn't relinquish that power to someone who, in many cases isn't any more qualified to be a parenting coach then they are.
The article compared a parenting coach to a baseball coach, saying that they are there for support and guidance. They help you improve your swing and hit a home run. They help you to feel comfortable on the field, and pull you off when it is too much. I'm not against getting help from time to time when issues seem insurmountable, but to have a personal coach on call to help with every parenting concern seems like overkill. If anything, all I'd want my coach to do is bench me, preferably by convincing my husband that I need a break from dishes, laundry, grocery shopping, errands, school pick ups and drop offs, work, and fixing up the house and would do better with a week or two or three on a tropical island sipping rum punch. Do you think I could get the parenting coach to recommend that?
Parenting coaches? Apparently, it is a relatively new and unregulated profession, an off-shoot of life coaches in some ways - where people with no real credentials and/or very little formal training other than just being a parent themselves, get to hang out a shingle and charge around $300 a month per client for other parents to call or email them for advice. They also provide such services as overhauling your family schedule to limit the family's activities and bring order to the house by sorting through and throwing out the growing mountain of outgrown toys and clothes.
Whatever happened to asking a mother, sister, brother, neighbor or friend for advice? And that's free. What happened to taking responsibility of your own home and schedule by limiting your own family activities and cleaning out your own toys and clothes? I don't see why you have to hire out to do this. Parenting coaches argue that asking friends or family for advice brings an agenda ridden response which isn't helpful. In some cases, yes, that may be true. But for the most part, even in a friend of neighbor's personal opinion, you can always find some helpful part that may work for you. And if not, move on and ask someone else until you do find something useful. Or pick up a parenting book and do some reading.
Customers of parenting coaches say they love the service because any time they have a question about how to toilet train little Suzy or wonder if little Johnny should be biting in the first grade, they can pick up the phone and call for help without the judgment a friend or family member might impose on the question or the expense or stigma of going to a therapist. When my oldest, Nicole was younger, any time she started doing something unusual, which to us as new parents seemed like every other minute, I'd pick up the phone and call my father, a child psychiatrist and ask for his advice. I'd think, how great, I have one of the country's leading child experts on speed dial and I don't even have to pay a session fee. I'd get Dad on the line, tell him what we were observing and then ask for his opinion. The conversation always went something like this:
Me: So, what do you think?
There would be a long pause on the other end of the line and then,
Dad: Did you read that parenting book?
I'd laugh and ask again, and he'd point out how helpful the book could be. Sometimes he would weigh in with his opinion, but he didn't want us to get into the habit of throwing up our hands and turning to others every time we had a parenting question. As parents, we needed to learn to work through and solve issues on our own using the tools we had.
If some parents can and want to pay $300 dollars or more a month to have someone manage their parenting issues, then that is their choice. But think of how much more empowered and accomplished and confident they would feel about their parenting skills if they didn't relinquish that power to someone who, in many cases isn't any more qualified to be a parenting coach then they are.
The article compared a parenting coach to a baseball coach, saying that they are there for support and guidance. They help you improve your swing and hit a home run. They help you to feel comfortable on the field, and pull you off when it is too much. I'm not against getting help from time to time when issues seem insurmountable, but to have a personal coach on call to help with every parenting concern seems like overkill. If anything, all I'd want my coach to do is bench me, preferably by convincing my husband that I need a break from dishes, laundry, grocery shopping, errands, school pick ups and drop offs, work, and fixing up the house and would do better with a week or two or three on a tropical island sipping rum punch. Do you think I could get the parenting coach to recommend that?
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Customer Disservice
I had a run in with an exterminator the other day. He told his boss that rather than standing me up for an appointment on three separate occasions, that he’d been out to my house to service it. The problem was, there is no way he could have performed the service because it was an inside issue and I was home waiting to let him into the house, but he never showed up. The manager insisted that I was wrong, that the technician had been out and completed service to the house and that somehow I’d missed him. Now unless I was having a psychotic break and missed letting a strange man with a canister of deadly pesticides inside my home, the technician wasn’t telling the truth and was trying to cover with his boss.
I fired Antimite because of the bad experience I had with them, found another company that my network of mom neighbors recommended – all I had to do was send out one email asking for names of exterminators and I got a dozen responses back within minutes – but I realized how much time and effort we waste out of our day dealing with the maintenance and upkeep of our homes and families. It’s time I would much rather spend with my hubby and kids.
I feel like a massive amount of time is sucked out of my life dealing with exterminators, carpenters, lawn guys, rug cleaners, auto mechanics, not to mention doctor’s, dentists, orthodontists and optometrists. Yes, time must be spent taking care of our bodies, our homes and our vehicles so that they all run safely and efficiently, but sometimes it makes me feel like the focus of my life is on the upkeep of it, rather than the living of it.
I fired Antimite because of the bad experience I had with them, found another company that my network of mom neighbors recommended – all I had to do was send out one email asking for names of exterminators and I got a dozen responses back within minutes – but I realized how much time and effort we waste out of our day dealing with the maintenance and upkeep of our homes and families. It’s time I would much rather spend with my hubby and kids.
I feel like a massive amount of time is sucked out of my life dealing with exterminators, carpenters, lawn guys, rug cleaners, auto mechanics, not to mention doctor’s, dentists, orthodontists and optometrists. Yes, time must be spent taking care of our bodies, our homes and our vehicles so that they all run safely and efficiently, but sometimes it makes me feel like the focus of my life is on the upkeep of it, rather than the living of it.
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