Adventures In Motherhood

Desperate times call for desperate measures and more than halfway into the summer, I was desperate for a few hours to myself. Selfishly I craved time to write, to attend yoga, or simply to use the bathroom ALONE. I was desperate for a creative alternative that didn't include screen-time, arguing or debate, when lo and behold, the perfect solution presented itself, to include my kids bonding (without my guidance) and exercise on bikes! The hours of entertainment were sure to please everyone, including this desperate mother of four kids. What is this Utopian solution? Vintage arcade games! They didn't harm us as kids and beat the hell out of the violent first person shooter games my kids' friends play. Frogger, PacMan, Asteroids, Centipede, Donkey Kong, you name it, Ground Kontrol has it and it's only a four-mile bike ride away. My sons say it even builds hand-eye coordination for baseball, though I'm less persuaded. Just yesterday I set out on a Forced Family Fun...

Arriving at the outdoor swimming pool with my 8-year-old on this sweltering 96 degree day, I was relishing the opportunity to melt in the shade, all alone for once finishing a favorite Jenny Lawson memoir, while my son experimented swimming with his new birthday snorkel set. Unfortunately, summer camp kids and families with the same plan to cool off overtook the pool. Surveying the landscape, there was nary a chair in sight for this weary, anything-but-lazy mother who had just finished canoeing 5 miles in windy conditions with my 13-year-old for 'extreme forced family fun' (#FFF) on the Willamette River. I considered the hard swimming deck cement my consolation prize in motherhood. Spotting a chair near the elementary school summer campers sitting on their towels playing cards, I eagerly asked the camp counselor if it was taken. "Yes," she replied, "the boy who can't swim sits there." Dumbfounded, I struggled with this logic while the chair remained un...

I'm so f'ing tired (pardon my French)! Parenting is exhausting and let's be real with the issues. I'm tired of waking at 2 am f'ing hot. Not as in sultry sexy, but sweaty and awake to the world. This mid-life crisis is maddening as my husband is content in layers of covers and I feel his heat radiating from the other side of the bed. Blackout curtains pulled dark, I have no choice but to crank the a/c to polar ice cap temperatures, capable of freezing my son's urine mid-stream as he races to the bathroom at 6 am in the morning. I'm tired of waking up tired at 6 am when I hear the crystallization of my son's fire hose stream, my neck in shear agony. Pillows are my nemesis and as soon as I befriend one, she turns on me faster than my teenagers' hormones, angering my neck and what I refer to as 'mom pain', a chronic neck and shoulder spasm sure to be relieved when the children move out of the house. This is not to be confused with the 'm...