Category Archives: Parenting, step-parenting

Lessons from an elementary school dance

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A few weeks ago

I was standing in a pack of parents

In the dark, hot gym of my son’s elementary school

Watching my son and his kindergarten friends

Get down to the latest Top 40 hits

At the annual dance and “fun-raiser.”

And as I leaned against the stage,

Grinning,

Something occurred to me:

I was having

So

Much

Fun

Just watching Victor and the other kids

Get crazy on the dance floor,

Their small bodies twisting,

Arms flailing,

Faces upturned to the D.J. on the stage,

Hoping he would toss a glo-necklace or

Mardi Gras beads their way.

At that moment,

There was nowhere else in the world

I wanted to be than in

That sweaty gym,

Watching my kid lose himself utterly to a

Katy Perry song.

I had

No

Idea

Parenting could be this fun.

I remember in my 20s

Making absolute proclamations:

“I’m never having kids!”

Realizing with existential wonder one day that

Kids are just

Small human beings,

Not another species.

Cautiously hypothesizing to my dad that,

If I did end up having kids

(Big “if”)

I wouldn’t change my life much.

“I’ll just take the kid with me

Wherever I go.

They can just hang out.”

(I think my dad just chuckled,

Didn’t even bother to respond.)

For me,

The desire to have kids came on like a

24 hour flu:

One summer day in 2004 I didn’t want kids,

The next morning I woke up

NEEDING

To be pregnant

That instant.

A year later,

The kindergarten dance phenom was born.

It took me a few years to

Learn to

Enjoy

Parenting.

I adored my son,

Cheered his accomplishments and

Squeezed his small body with a ferocious kind of love.

But get inside his experience?

Lose myself in his sheer joy of physical movement

And discovery?

I was kind of too busy.

I would take him somewhere,

The zoo, say,

And optimistically bring along a magazine

Hoping to relax in the old way

With him just

There, too.

Victor disagreed with my methods

And rarely allowed me to read.

“Oh, okay,” I would think as I eased myself down on the floor

To play a seemingly pointless game of

Car chasing or

Block-tower stacking and

Destruction.

15 minutes was about my limit

Before I would contrive a chore:

Gotta get dinner ready,

Or vacuum,

Or make a phone call.

“Two more minutes, Buddy.

Then Mom’s gotta go.”

Change happened through my campaign to just

“Be in the moment,”

That hippy-dippy phrase that’s the subject of

Books in the New Age section of the library

And shares in my 12-step meetings.

Go on someone else’s timeline.

Slow down.

Shut up.

Busy yet bored nearly all the time,

I thought, “What the hell,”

And gave it a shot.

Planned only through the rest of that day,

Then the next hour,

Then the next five minutes,

Until I got there:

The moment.

Instead of coming up with an excuse to

Sit on the pool deck in a chair

While Victor swims and asks me

Over and over again

To get in the water,

I just get in the damn pool and splash around and get my hair wet.

Now one evening a week after work,

I try to just

Hang out with Victor,

Whatever he’s doing–

No phone,

No laptop,

No book–

Instead of rushing him through his evening routine:

Dinner, bath,

Stories, bed,

So I could have “me time” before I went to bed,

Which usually consisted of aimlessly surfing the Internet.

We were leaving the school dance–

Victor wanted to leave before I did!–

And we walked down the hallway where

Chairs had been set up for parents.

A few were doing that bored-waiting-parent thing:

Leaning forward,

Elbows on their knees,

Tapping around their smartphone.

Every few minutes,

They would sit up straight and stretch a bit,

And heave a deep sigh.

Done it.

Still do it.

But for that one night,

I managed to relish this

Whole new experience I’ve discovered,

That I can have,

When I want it,

If I let it,

As long as Victor will have me.

Step parenting is hard

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I broke my own rule the other night:

When Joe is disciplining my son,

And I don’t agree with what he’s saying

Or how he’s saying it,

I support him at the moment in order to provide a

Unified front,

And bring it up with him later,

In private,

In our bedroom,

After the kids are tucked into bed.

That’s the ideal.

But it didn’t work quite that way on Friday.

Me, Joe and my six-year-old Victor

Went to a circus-like burger and malt shop for dinner,

Magenta and azure murals of dancing cartoon figures on the walls,

Us glaze-eyed from a long week of school and work.

My boy wasn’t listening:

“Don’t run,”

And he’d run.

“Don’t put your burger on the table,”

And he’d put his burger on the table.

The more he didn’t listen,

The more Joe fixated on him not listening:

“If I have to talk to you

One more time,

You won’t get a root beer.”

Victor tried to climb into my lap.

“Mom, I get a root beer, right?”

“Not if Joe says you don’t,”

I said wearily.

It went on like this for a few minutes:

My boy lapped at his water like a dog,

And Joe told him not to.

My boy blew bubbles in his milk,

And Joe said, “Stop.”

I tried to restrain myself,

But I finally couldn’t.

My mouth just opened and

Brightly, I said to Joe,

“Let’s talk about what Victor’s done right today.”

Joe’s gaze swung across the formica table top

To me,

And then he and I started going at it:

“You need to lay off.”

“But he needs to listen.

It’s a safety issue.”

“But this isn’t working.”

“He’s doing it on purpose.”

“No he’s not. He’s six.”

“Well, something needs to change.”

“Does it? Is something wrong?”

And on and on.

So here’s the underpinning of this

Conflict:

Joe doesn’t love Victor like he’s his own son.

Victor has a dad,

And Joe has children.

Those roles are filled.

Same with me.

Joe’s kids have a mom;

They don’t need another one.

We both love our step kids;

But not in that

Blindly unconditional way we do our own.

When Victor doesn’t listen,

I assume he’s just a distracted six-year-old

Developmentally incapable of following

Every

Single

Direction

He’s given.

Joe sees some insolence,

Some intention in the behavior,

That would

Never

Occur to me.

The thing is,

We’re both right.

And sometimes,

We can both admit that.

Step parents can offer a lot:

They aren’t befogged by unqualified love–

Their objectivity can clarify the most

Confounding parental delusion.

Joe and I can do that for each other–

Not every time,

But enough to be hopeful.

Somehow,

On Friday,

It happened:

We had a productive conversation about

Step parenting

At the moment of disagreement,

In front of one of the kids.

I truly witnessed Joe’s face

Soften

With hurt feelings as he described how

Victor ignores his attempts to

Ask what happened at school

Or at wrestling practice.

And he listened

Non-defensively

To my points about

Developmentally normal behaviors

That don’t always need to be

Disciplined.

Afterwards,

It was Joe who was the lightest of all

Walking out of the restaurant,

Jokey with Victor, and flashing

Grateful looks in my direction.

So it worked

This time,

And for today.

Maybe it was the malts.

That’s not my name: Mrs. Joe Brzycki

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It’s started

Just as I knew it would:

With Christmas cards the first holiday season

After the wedding

Addressed to

Mr. and Mrs. Joe Brzycki.

I don’t want to sound ungrateful,

Because I truly enjoy Christmas cards,

Even the drugstore ones with the dashed-off signature and nothing else.

But it makes me chuckle:

Mrs. Joe Brzycki?

There’s no such person.

I get it:

People assume that I changed my name,

Because that’s what most women do.

Or they don’t know my last name,

Or they know it but are unsure of the spelling.

Actually,

Of the three last names in our house,

Mine is probably the easiest to spell:

Brzycki (Joe and his kids),

Hietalahti (my son),

Niemela, (me).

I’ve thought about those smooth gray stones

You can order at the State Fair:

“Welcome to the Smiths!”

The neat and tidy family surname:

Everyone in the house with the same last name!

We’d need a boulder for all the names in our family.

But I love all our last names.

There’s a lot of history,

In the grand sense:

Polish and Scandinavian immigration to America–

And the modern dramatics of a blended family–

Marriage, kids, divorce, remarriage.

(And now another kid on the way who,

Incidentally,

Will have my last name

Because,

Why not?)

Here’s the deal,

Ladies:

I don’t care what you do.

Change it,

Keep it,

Hyphenate it,

Tack it on at the end,

Slip it into the middle,

Make up a whole new name so

Everyone has to get a new drivers license!

For me,

Ever since the age of eight or nine,

When I realized that

Most women take their husband’s names,

I knew I would keep mine.

I haven’t wavered in that.

Ever.

There are so many reasons I’ve kept my last name

Through one marriage and into another.

(Never had to change my passport

Once.)

Yes, it’s about

Gender politics,

Symbols, and–

Dare I say the F-word–

I’m gonna say it–

Feminism.

To me,

The idea of being Mrs. Joe Brzycki

Subsumes me into Joe

In a way that anyone who knows us

Would find absurd.

But I also kept my last name

Because I just like it.

I know what it means:

Peninsula, in Finnish.

I imagine a point wooded with pine and birch

Jutting into a clear,

Boulder-bottomed lake.

Like a Boundary Waters campsite.

I’m a writer.

Words–

Names are words–

Are important to me.

Not just the aesthetics of how a word looks

Or sounds.

But what words mean.

Why choose one word over another?

Loneliness,

Or solitude?

Brzycki,

Or Niemela?

Does it matter?

It does,

To me.

Professionally,

Personally,

Even as part of a family unit,

It’s my policy to keep a part of myself

Just for me.

And my own name,

From beginning to end,

Is a manifestation of that part of myself.

It’s like the

Silent,

Black

Space

Just before I fall asleep at night,

When no children,

No husband,

No job,

Need me.

The divine chemicals of sleep

Bathe my tired brain.

It’s just me: Jennifer Niemela

At rest.

Dying and being born

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My mother is dying.

We’re all dying,

But she is actively dying

Lying completely still in the

Hospital bed in my parents’ room

At home.

We stopped transferring her to the

Wheelchair the day after

Thanksgiving.

Perhaps her last act of sitting up

Was dozing through the Thanksgiving meal,

The waist strap on her wheelchair keeping her from

Keeling sideways onto the floor.

In bed now,

She lies with her face turned slightly toward the window,

For the light?

Or because she had a mild stroke on the right side,

And she now lists that way?

We don’t know.

Anyway, her face tilts toward the gray winter light.

They–

The hospice workers and nurses–

Don’t give a prognosis,

But days or weeks

Are more likely than months now.

They will say that.

Be ready,

Is the implication.

And I think I am.

It’s been nearly seven years

Since the first symptoms.

But no matter how prepared you think you are,

It’s still a shock,

The hospice chaplain says.

And I believe her.

I’ve never done this before.

What do I know?

It’s not like in the movies

Where you sit gazing into the

Dying person’s face.

You can’t do that for hours on end.

I sit in the recliner next to her bed and

Read my book,

Or work on the laptop,

And look up between chapters or emails

To see if her eyes are open.

If they are,

I might lean across the bed to get my face into her line of vision.

I might smile, and say,

“Hi Mom. Are you awake? Hi.”

It’s rare now for her eyes to focus on mine,

Or for a smile to flicker.

That’s another thing that’s not like the movies:

The dying person staring off into the distance,

Past your shoulder,

At the sky,

Or God.

She’s just not looking at anything.

There’s no focus point that

I can gather.

They say at the end,

The dying person withdraws,

That their focus is inward.

Maybe that’s it.

It’s impossible to speculate,

Or even accurately describe.

I guess I’ll know myself someday.

And by then, I won’t be able to tell you about it.

It’s peaceful, her room.

Their bedroom for 25 years.

Nurses and home health aides pass in and out.

They speak quietly and gently.

Some are more efficient than others;

Some work hard;

Some sit on the couch and text.

But they are all gentle, quiet women.

The room has the same beige carpet and

Floral-striped wallpaper it’s always had.

It’s warm and quiet,

And I rock in the recliner.

I’m 18 weeks pregnant,

And rocking quietly,

I can feel the first flutters and pops of the baby’s movement.

It’s all very circle-of-life.

And yes,

It’s a comfort to everyone

That I’m actively pregnant

As my mother is actively dying.

My two pregnancies will likely have

Book-ended mom’s

Alzheimer’s.

It was when I was pregnant with my son,

Six years ago,

And living overseas,

That my parents came for a visit,

And I first noticed it:

She kept leaving books behind at restaurants,

And once she nearly stepped into traffic,

Not noticing the light.

“Does Mom seem more forgetful to you?”

I asked my dad,

And he said,

Yes,

They were starting to notice things.

Now, more than six years later,

That grandbaby watches cartoons in the next room

While I sit in the dying room.

She is unlikely to see this baby,

Due in May.

Dad told her I’m pregnant

A few weeks ago,

And he thinks she understood.

She grew animated,

And smiled, he said.

That seems so impossible now,

Just weeks later.

She is calm.

She doesn’t seem afraid.

Maybe that’s a final blessing of a disease that

Destroys the brain–

Maybe she’s not conscious anymore of

What’s happening.

I imagine that,

Like her new grandchild,

She feels tactile sensations

Like warmth,

And hears muffled sounds;

She grows closer everyday to the

Next stage,

And has no awareness of

What’s coming

Or what’s gone before.

But I don’t WANNA ask for help

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Image from telegraph.co.uk

Got back Thursday night

After four nights on a business trip.

Took a taxi home from the airport through the

Dark streets of my city.

I came in the front door

And stood for a moment in the dimmed, quiet living room.

Then I went into my son’s room and let myself

Wake him up a little–

I couldn’t resist–

By rubbing the warm back under the shirt.

My son speaks in complete sentences

When you wake him up,

As if picking up in the middle of a conversation:

“Will you sleep down here tonight?”

“No, but I’ll check on you before I go to sleep.”

“Do I have school tomorrow?”

“Yes, tomorrow’s Friday. Go back to sleep now.”

And he does!

I hate being away from home overnight because

Yes, I miss my family,

But also because

When I’m gone on a school night,

I have to ask three or four people for help.

And I hate asking for help.

I have to ask Joe to change his schedule,

I have to ask my brother or dad to

Come over in the morning to

Get my son to the bus stop,

I have to ask a neighbor to take my son after school once or twice.

And of course I have to ask my son

To be good, don’t be sad

While I’m gone.

So many people inconvenienced,

I always think.

So I call Joe the second night and ask about my son,

“How is he?”

Expecting reports of tantrums and tears.

“He’s fine,” Joe says.

“I think it’s good for him to get some time with me.”

I get a voice mail from my brother:

“Hey it was nice to spend some time with him.

I don’t want to wake up at 6 everyday to do it,

But every once in a while,

It’s really cool.”

And the neighbor:

“Yeah, the boys played cars and it was great.”

And my boy after I got home:

Perfectly normal,

In fact, particularly well-behaved.

Unaffected, it would seem

By my absence.

(I forget:

I’m not as important as I think.)

The fact is,

I don’t want to ask for help.

I don’t want to owe you,

Or have you balk at my nervous request.

“No, no, we’re fine. I got it,”

Has been my mantra.

But,

If I don’t ask for help,

You don’t get the chance to help me.

It’s selfish to

Not

Ask for help.

I need to give you the opportunity to be of service,

And give my son the opportunity to have a

Different experience–

Without me.

It’s scary though.

What if you say no?

Well I guess I’ll find out on my next overnight trip:

The day after Halloween.

All Saints Day.

Give my brother the chance to grope for sainthood by

Waking up an hour early to come over and help get

My son to the bus stop.

You’re welcome, Doug.

After 10 years without, a television

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We got a TV.

It’s the shape of a movie screen.

It teeters on a circular stand–

It looks precarious, like one bump

Could send it over onto its face.

I haven’t owned a TV for ten years.

It all happened very fast:

Football season

Combined with an unexpected chunk of bonus cash,

And now we own an HD plasma smart TV.

Those who know me well

Know

How conflicted I am over the

Introduction of the

Black screen into our home,

Yawning at me from across the living room.

As a kid I loved TV like everyone else,

After school watching Little House on the Prairie in the

Cool dark basement,

And when it was over at 5:00,

Supper time.

My brother and I got 1.5 hours of TV per day,

And we had to page through the TV guide that came in the Sunday paper

And highlight the shows we wanted to watch for the week.

As a teenager, I had a small black-and-white TV in my room.

All I watched was the 10:00 news on KARE-11,

And a M*A*S*H rerun if I could stay awake for it.

I think it was in college.

That I developed my squeamishness for

TV.

Dorm rooms,

Dorm lounges,

Apartments with roommates:

It seemed like there was

Always

A TV on.

Laugh tracks,

Guns shooting and tires squealing.

And always someone on the

Couch scooping food into their mouth while

Completely transfixed by whatever was on the screen.

Yep, I judged.

Here we were,

At college,

Supposedly developing our minds into

Critical,

Creative

Vessels.

And everyone seemed to

Mindlessly

Lap up

Whatever the screen disgorged.

“It’s relaxing,” people would say.

It didn’t relax me.

TV made me anxious.

The chunky stop-and-start sound of

Channels being flipped through,

The blinking and flashing of the

Lights from the screen on the

Walls of a dark room.

When I left school and started living on my own,

I ditched the TV

Who has time to watch TV anyway?

Even before I had kids,

I was busy enough without it.

And then when I was around a TV,

Like in a hotel room,

Or at my parents’ house,

It felt like a treat to turn it on.

But then I’d flip

And flip

And flip,

And finally just settle for HGTV because there was

Nothing

Else

On.

I made Joe promise we would set parameters

For the kids.

The idea of a child

Staring for hours at the screen

While the sunlight of a lovely day outside

Tracks across the walls,

Is anguish to me.

So we set some rules.

Joe has promised a minimum of flipping and a

Reasonable volume level.

And Netflix has Glee episodes,

Which this former show choir nerd has been wanting to check out

For years.

Actually,

The house is empty right now, and quiet…

Maybe I could figure out this remote control and

Watch a quick episode of Glee before anyone comes home.

The sacred lunch hour

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My son comes home after a summer with his dad and

Everything changes

Schedule-wise.

That’s what I’m looking for, actually.

A wise schedule.

The one thing I know is

Exactly how to spend that

Workday lunch hour.

Five free hours per week.

No kids!

“I never know what to do with my lunch hour.

I just wander around the skyways.”

I’ve heard people say.

Not me.

I know exactly what do with it.

Lately,

It’s swimming laps at the YMCA,

Or today, writing my blog post.

Sometimes it’s a 12-step meeting.

Use that hour

Effectively.

‘Cause evenings and weekends,

They don’t belong to me.

Which is great.

I love the hectic family life.

But my lunch hour is sacred.

If I schedule a lunch with you,

I’m giving something up.

You don’t need to know that;

I’ve thought it out

And made the decision after some deliberation.

And once a week,

That’s not a big deal.

But I might say,

“Sorry,

I can’t this week.”

And the secret is,

It’s because I gotta

Hide at the corner table of a

Skyway cafe

With a styrofoam cup of soup,

A plastic spoon,

My journal,

And a pen.

An hour to gird up

For the ceaseless action of home life.

So if you see me sitting alone

At a two-top

In a skyway coffee shop,

Don’t go out of your way to say hello.

Believe me,

I won’t take it personally.

We can even pretend we didn’t see each other.

For all I know,

You’re on your way to your

Lunch hour hideout

For your own delicious

Hour of solitude.

Have a good one.

See you around.

Got my son back

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People asked in the days before I left

To bring my boy home,

“Are you excited?”

“Yes,” I would say

Slowly.

“Of course.”

But the truth is,

It’s not excitement I feel.

It’s relief.

Relief because this

Separation

Is nearly at an end.

Relief because I’m nearly whole again,

Whereas when my boy is gone,

There’s a bit missing.

So excitement?

I don’t get excited about much these days.

I’m a tough sell.

Steadiness and

Peace,

My watchwords,

Preclude excitement

For good or bad.

Relief is the right word

Relief to squeeze the small body to me.

(It is painfully unnatural to

Not

Touch your child for

Months on end.

Painfully.)

My separation time is over for now,

Which means his father’s is just beginning.

At the airport

His father watches us go through security.

I hoist the boy up three or four times to wave.

His dad stays until he can’t see us anymore.

Six days till I get my boy back

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On Friday, I fly to Finland to

Bring my son home.

We’ve been doing this for three years,

So I’ve got some experience with the

Airport reunion.

Last year

When I went to get him,

I hadn’t seen him in person for

Seven

Months.

(Every-other-day Skype chats

Make this all possible.)

At the Helsinki airport

I came out a different door than

He and his aunt were expecting.

As I came up from the side,

I could see him

Standing on his tiptoes,

Looking for me to come through the

Security doors.

Smiling.

He was smiling.

That’s important.

I grabbed him from the side;

He never saw me coming.

The body was stout and thicker than I remembered;

The giggling face rounder.

Leaving the airport,

He became shy with me and

Ran up to his aunt,

Grabbed her hand.

No way, I thought.

I scooped him up,

And gave him a fart kiss on his belly,

And he laughed,

And had no problem holding my hand after that.

After seven months in Finland

He wasn’t speaking any English.

There were times I had to ask his aunt or his father,

“What’s he saying?”

But I decided:

I’m the mom,

And I’m not going to waste one minute not acting like it.

I’m not going to

Ruminate on

What it means

That I have to ask someone to

Translate for my own son.

No.

Stop.

Act like the mom.

Take him to the bathroom.

Pay for his lunch.

Help him put his shoes on.

Choose his clothes, and help him get dressed.

Don’t stop and think.

No analysis and no self-pity.

(Even jet-lagged.)

Because there he was at a Helsinki park:

Scampering to the top of a small cliff,

The sun in his butter-yellow hair.

He pointed to where he wanted me to stand,

Then leaped off the rock,

Laughing,

His solid body hurtling toward me,

Completely trusting that I’ll catch him.

“Saada minut!” he yelled.

Get me!

I will, buddy.

That’s why I’m here.

Divorced parenting with benefits

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Before I say anything,
A disclaimer:
Of course
I would always prefer to have my son
Here
With me,
Playing with toy cars on the
Rainbow-striped pile rug
In his bedroom.
But,
I have to say,
My husband and I have had a couple of
Very nice kid-free weekends this summer.
Between two co-parenting schedules
For three adolescent kids,
We get five to seven kid-free weekends
Per year,
Mostly in the summer when my boy
Is with his dad.
On the Friday of a kid-free weekend
We look at each other across the
Weirdly tidy living room and say,
“What should we do?”
Mostly,
We can’t think of
Anything.
It’s my fault.
Joe comes up with ideas–a movie, a late concert–
And nothing feels momentous enough for me.
(Or else I’m too tired.)
The other night,
I was so determined to think of something
Amazingly adventurous and fun,
And I was so completely unable to do so,
That I spun suddenly into the
Sadness death spiral
Where I miss my son so much
That I want to crash to the rug
And lie there unmoving,
Not even crying,
Just blinking and staring at the dust heaps
Under the couch.
(I did rally that night,
And we played cribbage and listened to music,
The death spiral averted.)
The best kid-free weekends are ones that are either
Planned far in advance:
Tickets bought and
Time booked (concerts, camping),
Or the spontaneously inspired ones:
Yoga classes together,
Playing cribbage and listening to music,
Even grocery shopping,
Just the two of us,
Feels like a date.
But the best parts
Are the moments when,
Undistracted by other people’s needs,
I’m fully attentive to my husband
As he’s talking.
And I realize
I haven’t seen him clearly
For weeks or even months;
Seen who he is,
Not what I need him to do next.
Is being away from
Our children
Worth those rarefied moments?
I don’t know.
It’s our life
And I’ll take it.