Too Many Notes

It was not their first opera, but it was their first opera at the Orpheum and it was really special to me. I was crying before the opera even began.

It was a complicated morning - picking up the girls from their dad and Frank from Boy Scout Camp and getting them all dressed for the opera and making it to Omaha by noon. (It was actually more like 12:30 by the time we got to the restaurant where we met our friends.) I dropped them off at the front door while I parked and managed to get the last spot in the lot one block from the Orpheum. I cruised through the door as they were closing them. I scurried to Orchestra C (ORCHESTRA! BEST SEATS I HAVE EVER HAD!!!!!) and saw the backs of their heads. I teared up.

We talked about it on the way to the car. The same silly miscommunications and games that still show them selves in TV sitcoms. The kids and I went up into the balcony to see the forte piano in the orchestra pit. We talked about the music and singing and Italian.

"I think it had too many notes," Frank said wryly. We all laughed. (That's the review that the Emporer gives Mozart in the movie "Amadeus.")

My kids and I have inside jokes about opera.

Life is good.

And a Dorothy Hamill Haircut

A friend of mine recently observed that her kids will not be Olympic Athletes. Thay have not had the early chidlhood lessons needed to be figure skating champions, for example. She is not willing to make the sacrifices that Olympic atheletes in training parents make (or at least the ones that they tell stories about).

There has been a shift in my generation as we lose touch with ourselves and focus everything on the kids. I was at a soccer game with a like-minded mom friend once who commented that she doesn't remember her parents following her around to her activities, she followed them. She would hang out at the bowling alley while her parents bowled, for example. Her parents didn't arrange play dates for her, they took her along to their friends' house so the adults could play cards and the kids were shoved together out of convenience, not out of planning.

My kids all went to a really nice school in a really nice neighborhood with a bunch of parents who need to get a life. ;-)

I am on my second high school kid now and it is painful. I realize now that you get a break from preschool through middle school. High school is where your heart aches and you lay awake at night worrying about them. It feels a bit like when she was a baby. In some ways she is more work now. It is also where you start to let go. And I realize that it is on purpose. I am shoved away and blocked out and we separate out of necessity. She is preparing both of us to be separate people. I don't plan her playdates anymore.

I am not a huge fan of the Winter Olympics. I turned the Olympics on this week while I was folding laundry. Slowly the kids gravitated to me. They talked to me. Even the teen.

We talked about the Turkish skater whose parents gave up their jobs and lives in Turkey to move to Canada to help their daughter train. There are a LOT of stories like that lately when it comes to the Olympics. I don't remember it always being that way. I am not sure if it is the times we live in or just my perspective as a parent. I talked to them about the Cold War and the Soviet Union. I described a government that tested and evaluated children from an early age to determine aptitude. Athletes, dancers, academics - were routed and trained and raised differertly. (And incidentally, did I make all of this up? Is it just Cold War Lore?) The kids were fascinated. We had a great conversation about talent and the role of the government and the role of parents.

Earlier in the week I had a terse conversation about the life long consequences of bad chocies with the teen. I talked with her about my hopes for her. (They do not include Olympic Gold. We're focusing a little lower here.) What I realized the night that we all gathered around the laundry baskets and watched cross country skiing and bobsledding, is that what I want most of all is to have a relationship with my kids. I want them to love me and think about me and hang out with me. We try and make that happen by bringing fruit snacks to soccer practice and painting sets at the high school and standing in the rain at endless sporting events. Can't the government just take care of this parenting thing for me?

The Grocery List

One morning, not long after I had moved into my first apartment, I used the last of the milk at breakfast. I threw the half gallon container away, and left for class. When I came home from work that evening I opened the frig to get something to eat and there was no milk to drink with my sandwich.

That realization hit me in the chest and traveled to my legs and feet. I was unable to move for several minutes. If I run out of milk, I need to buy more milk, or there isn't any milk. Obvious, right? Except that I had at that point spent my entire life with parents who made sure that if we ran out of milk, that there was more milk in the frig next time I went to get it. Oh the magic of being a child with parents who provide for your basic needs! I knew on some level that I was out of milk and that I needed to buy milk, but the shift from child to adult had not fully occured until the moment that I realized my responsibility for myself.

I am feeling some similar feelings now as I leave a home of a different kind. And there are so many similarities - the awareness of all parties that it is time to leave home, but the pain that goes along with that - the missing what wasn't working or fitting for you right now, which doesn't quite make sense. When I left my parents' home, it was time, but it's an emotional process and practical process to leave home.

I've left home and I need to remember to buy the milk. But? I can buy any brand or kind I want to buy. Or I can choose to drink juice instead of milk. Responsibility, but choice. That's the upside of moving out on your own.