Nonchalance and the single mom

Today is my birthday.

If you, friend or stranger, are now feeling at least a little compelled to smile and wish me a happy birthday, you have joined the company of my parents, my brothers, old friends and others who love me, but NOT my son.

He checked the mail yesterday, as he likes to do, and it just so happened that all we received was 3 birthday cards. Frankly, I think it's some kind of miracle that there were no bills, no solicitations, no junk of various sort. Just 3 birthday cards, which is as it should be on the day before my birthday, I say.

So my son gets these cards from the mailbox and walks over to me. "Just some cards in the mail today, Momma."

I asked him if he knew why we got those cards. He said no, so I told him the next day was my birthday. He looked at me for a moment as if this information might hold some passing interest for him and then, upon clearly deciding that it did not, said, "I want to be 6. When is my birthday?"

So what I'm hearing is something along the lines of, "That's fabulous, Mom. What I want to know is how does this information affect ME, really? How can I turn this conversation into something about ME?"

This morning I went into his room while he was getting ready for school and asked him if he knew what today was.

"Um, Friday?"

"Well, yes. But it's Mommy's birthday."

"Hmm," he said as he continued to walk around his bed (buck naked, I might add) to make it up.

"Shouldn't you say something to me?" I asked. I've evidently reached the point of pleading with my son for birthday well wishes. Desperate. Pitiful.

"Oh! Happy birthday, Mommy!" he finally managed to eek out. At least he did put a little heart in it and did come fling his arms around me (yep, still nekkid as the day is long -- there's clearly no shame in our house) for a big birthday hug.

Turns out it was the best birthday present I could ask for.

School bells and the single mom

Well, it's official. My son has started school. (Insert weeping here.)



Actually, it all went very smoothly. He was a little emotional yesterday morning before we left the house -- wanting to cling to the lovie he sometimes sleeps with and bursting into inordinate tears when I asked him to leave the lovie in his room. (This is something he doesn't even remember to sleep with many nights and never brings downstairs, so this emotional show was certainly out of the ordinary.)



Once we got in the car and headed for school, though, he seemed fine -- no random displays of overwrought emotion or anything. When we got there, he was still cool.



The only small sign of trepidation was when an older student, one who'd been assigned the duty of helping the new kindergartners find their way, approached us at the door and asked if he wanted her to walk him to his class. He hugged tightly close to my arm and simply pointed at me as if to say, "No, I want her to go."



Once we got where he was supposed to be, though, he was totally fine with my depositing him there and walking away.



I confess I shed a few discreet tears in my car, but even I handled it better than I expected.



And when I picked him up that afternoon, he was in a perfectly good mood and chatted about the picture he had colored of a tree and how he had chopped it down with an axe and it had made a "chink" and then a "thud" sound (yeah, he gets descriptive).


This morning, he was the picture of "I know what I'm doing and don't need your help" cool. We pulled in front of the school, and he hopped right out and headed for the door with a little wave back to me.


Part of me is bursting with pride that he's going to school and handling it well and ready to embark on his own. The other part of me -- and I'm working to silence her for the good of my son, I promise -- hates that he's growing out of the need for me. I know that's an exaggeration; I know he'll need me for many things for much longer. Hell, I still need my mom for a lot of things and I'm 3-- well, grown up.

(Getting in the car yesterday morning to head to school.)

(Actually arriving at school.)

Not-so-fun game and the single mom

Through the influences of an older child, my son has become enthralled with a game that we all surely played as children. That would typically be fine with me -- a passing of the torch, so to speak, for my son to be playing the games I played in my youth.

This time, however, I've got little romantic nostalgia and am instead now cursing whoever invented Punch Bug.

That's right, my son has become the keenest lookout for VW Beetles the world has ever known. The boy can spot at Bug at two miles -- two and a half in clear weather.

What really makes this game irritating is that I have to willingly submit to the beating every time.

"Give me your hand! Give me your hand!" he pipes excitedly from the back seat.

At which point I drape my arm back there for him to wallop me and shout "Punch bug!"

In all fairness, he doesn't really punch. He balls up his little fist and does little more than tap me on the arm -- just enough to be able to say he's gotten me. But it remains hilarious to me that I have to deliver my own appendage to him for, albeit mild, abuse.

I guess it's better than the days that will surely come in which he'll lean forward in his seat and deliver a sock in the shoulder worthy of the growing strength and lack of restraint of an 11-year-old. Any chance Volkswagen's going to discontinue Beetles anytime soon?

A single mom's music lover

My son loves music. No, I mean really loves music.


He loves for me to turn the radio up, and he'll sing along with every song quite loudly from the backseat (sadly, he inherited his mother's singing voice, so I've had to replace a few inadvertently cracked windows, but that's neither here nor there).


He's also pretty opinionated about his tastes for a 5 year old. He tells me what CDs he wants me to play, which songs he wants me to skip and which ones he wants me to repeat.


I've been told that he walks around school singing songs throughout the day. And I don't mean songs like "Old MacDonald Had A Farm" or "Oh my darling, Clementine." No, I'm talking about the songs currently being played on country radio (which is what we listen to -- don't judge me), which invariably tickles all the teachers. "Give me that girl with her hair in a mess, sleepy little smile with her head on my chest..." is not standard preschool classroom fare.


As much as my son enjoys music on the radio or CDs, he most especially loves live music. Granted, he doesn't get a whole lot of live music in his life because, let's face it, the Handlebar frowns on my taking him down there. The one place he reliably gets live music, though, is the Saturday Market in downtown Greenville.


Any time I announce that we're headed to the market, his first question is if we can listen to the music. And, unless we're bizarrely pressed for time or something, I let him indulge in it for as long as he wants, which, as it turns out, can be a really long time.

We went to the market this past weekend. After patiently tolerating my irrational insistence on purchasing some blackberries and peaches (We're here for the music, Mom, not this pesky food!), we headed straight for the tent where a man and woman were playing simple folks songs to an audience of exactly zero. In all fairness, I'm sure a few folks walked by a little slower or at least turned their heads in the general direction of the music, but no one was sitting around listening.

Enter my son.

He plopped down in the middle of the street (yes, it was closed off the for the event) and sat mesmerized for song after song after song. Every few minutes, he'd stick his hand in the plastic bag by his side and pull out a blackberry to pop in his mouth. Aside from that, he was like a little cross-legged boy statue.

And he was completely content for ages. After every song, he'd look up at me with these pleading eyes and ask if we could stay "just one more song." "Just one more song" turned into about 15. I get the feeling that music lessons of some sort need to be in his future.

A harbinger of things to come and the single mom

I've had two back-to-back instances this week that are reminding me of the fears I have long harbored about being a single mom raising a son. There are going to be things I can't explain, things I don't quite understand and certainly things I just plain don't know about.

And then there are going to be those things that I wish I didn't have to deal with, times when I could probably come up with the knowledge but that I'd much rather a man deal with. Turns out, we're there already.

My son was climbing into the backseat of the car with me the other day after we'd been on a trip with my parents. As he buckled up, he said something along the lines of, "It feels weird when my pee-pee sticks out, and I have to push it down." (Forgive me if that's not verbatim. I'm doing everything I can to wipe the memory from my internal hard drive, but it's not working. It's burned in there permanently, it seems, in the way only traumatic, scarring events are.)

Sure enough, I look over, and there he is, pushing down a little hard-on over and over. I suggested maybe if he stopped pushing on it altogether, it wouldn't stick out like that in the first place.

"But I like the way it feels."

Well, no duh. But, damn!, I'm not equipped for this conversation with my 5 year old.

And then a night or two later, he was getting ready for bed. He had stripped down to his birthday suit and was walking around the room gathering pajamas and pull-up and other bedtime accoutrements, the whole time with his penis in his hand.

I glanced over at him and told him to stop walking around playing with his penis. Ever the obedient child, he promptly sat down to continue playing with his penis.

I texted a (male) friend about it, and his response was, "What else could he do?"

I'm trying to be enlightened about this. I don't want to teach my son, either purposefully or accidentally, that it's wrong or shameful to explore his own body. I just don't want to see it while he's walking around his room!

So, brothers dear, if you're reading this, I'm calling one of y'all next time this situation comes up (no pun intended) so that someone, anyone other than me, can start explaining to him about discretion and privacy.

The eye of the beholder and the single mom

This is just a short little entry to share a funny comment my son made the other day (yes, in the car).

He, like many other children, likes to pretend he's different things. In fact, most days when I pick him up from daycare, the first thing he asks is, "Know what I am today?" It's often an animal of some variety or a superhero or something. (Or sometimes something bizarrely specific and rather odd like "a regular boy who has a red sword that can transform into a big truck." Um, OK.)

On a recent day, he was being a car.

"I have eyes and a mouth. But no nose. That would be silly for a car to have a nose, right Mom?"

Yes, son, totally silly for a car to have a nose. Totally normal and unsilly to have eyes and a mouth. But a nose? Well, that's just one too far.

"Silly," it seems, is in the eye of the beholder.

Names and the single mom

Driving down the road the other day (yes, all my meaningful and/or interesting interaction with my son seems to occur in vehicles), my son asked me what his name was going to be when he grew up.

The ensuing conversation was amusing in and of itself -- and we'll get to that in a moment -- but what first caught my attention was that he didn't ask IF he'd have a different name when he grew up; he skipped ahead and asked WHAT that name would be.

This is a question that I seem to ask a lot, but where in the world did he get that idea?? Sometimes I can perceive or deduce where the seed of some bizarre question started, but I've got nothing here. Where ever did the idea that he'd change names come from?

At any rate, I told him that his name would be the same as it is now. This, as it turned out, was not an answer he was pleased to hear.

"I don't want my name to be the same," he announced rather petulantly.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because I don't like it," he said.

Well, so-ooooo sorry about that, buddy boy. Didn't realize I was saddling you with the world's worst moniker.

Despite my slightly wounded feelings, I gathered my mommy wits about me and realized that arguing with him about the relative merits of his name would get me nowhere, so I accepted the premise of the conversation and simply asked what he'd like his name to be.

He calmly responded that he'd like his middle name to be his new name. I told him he could go by his middle name if he wanted (a confession: I wasn't serious about that offer in the least because I want him to go by his first name, but I was taking an appeasement approach on the fairly reliable assumption that he'd forget about his newfound stance in a day or two), but that wasn't good enough. He wanted the order of his names switched altogether, thank you very much. His middle name would be his first name, and his first name would be his new middle name.

"I will henceforth be known as this," he pronounced. OK, maybe he didn't use that exact language, but he did make a clear statement to the effect that he was reordering his name whether I liked it or not.

Again, going with the approach that picking an abstract fight with a 5 year old was a losing game no matter what, I simply said, "OK."

Of course, my earlier statement about the short-lived nature of his conviction was correct, and by the time the first opportunity to directly address him by his name rolled around, he had completely forgotten and answered happily to his (real) first name. And I've heard nothing further about it since then -- for now at least.