Punishment and the single mom

I picked my son up from late stay at his school yesterday, and he came bounding out of the door, happy to see me. I got a cursory hug and a quick, "Hi, Momma" before he had a question for me, one that had surely been eating at him all day.

"If I get yellow or red (on his class behavior report), can you ground me?"

Another mother walking by me at just that moment actually laughed out loud. And wouldn't you? Who asks to be grounded?

"I guess so, son. Where did you learn about grounding?"

From one of his classmates, he said, who is apparently grounded for having yellow or red days at school.

I've never used that particular term with my son, so I wasn't sure if he'd gotten a description from this friend at school or what.

"What do you think grounding means?" I asked my son.

"That you take away all the stuff I sleep with, and I have to sleep on the ground," he said, matter of factly.

No wonder he's asking to be grounded! In his mind, it's a little adventure where he gets to sleep on a pallet on the floor. Hopefully I nipped that misconception in the bud before he started acting up at the school just for the joy of being "grounded."

Tattoos and the single mom

My son, like pretty much every kid his age, loves temporary tattoos. I think he'd be covered in them head to toe every day of the week if I didn't draw the line.

He recently came home to me after a weekend away with a fresh one on the middle of his back. According to my mom, who was the one who obligingly applied said tattoo, he wanted it there because that's where Uncle J.J. has a tattoo.

So this is where this is going -- the real thing vs. the fake one.

I have a small tattoo (about the size of two quarters) in a discreet location on my body. My son saw it the other day, not for the first time, and asked why I always had that "picture" in the same place.

How to explain the a real tattoo's permanence? Turns out, straightforward is the best approach.

"My tattoo doesn't go away. It's there forever," I told him.

He very nearly visibly cringed.

"I never want to do that," he said.

If you felt a sudden rush of breeze blow by you yesterday morning, it was probably my enormous sigh of relief wafting across three states.

I know, I know -- that stands very likely to change in the years to come, but I don't know if I could stand the idea of a real tattoo being appealing already to my 5 year old. I'll take the cringe any day.

The report from the front and the single mom

Well, my ex's visit has come and gone -- and frankly gone a lot better than I expected. My son spent the past two weekends with his father and handled it exceedingly well.

For the first weekend, I specifically avoided calling to talk to my son. His time with his daddy should be fairly uninterrupted time with his daddy, I thought, and so with great effort, I put the phone down.

While it was torturous for me, I figured it was in my son's best interest for me to keep my distance since he tends to get needy and whiny when he "remembers" he misses me. That hunch turned out to be right when I finally called Sunday morning, at which point he immediately launched into, "I want yooouuuu," complete with tearful voice and plaintive whining.

(An aside to this tale: my family and I had a big boating trip on the Intracoastal Waterway planned for that weekend, which my son obviously did not get to join us for. I had planned on -- and was succeeding in -- keeping it a secret so that he didn't feel left out. But you know what they say about the best laid plans.

As soon as I got on the phone that Sunday morning, my niece, who was on the trip with us, blurted out that she wanted to talk to my son. I didn't hear what she said to him, but I'm guessing she spilled the beans because as soon as I picked my son up on Sunday, he launched into a scathing criticism. "You went to the beach without me. That's not fair! I wanted to go to the beach!"

I didn't even get a "Hi, Mommy" or anything, just complaints. "But you got to spend the weekend with Daddy," I offered as some comfort. My ex would have cringed to hear how quickly his son blew that off as completely irrelevant and downright boring compared to going on the boat with his cousin.

I fielded these sort of comments for a solid hour before I finally put my foot down and told him I wasn't going to talk about it anymore.)

The second weekend with his father (this past weekend) went fine as well. I again stayed away from the phone for the most part and was pleased that I didn't get any wailing bedtime calls ("But I want you, Mommy. I want to come home."), as I have during past visits.

My ex actually delivered my son directly to my mom on Sunday afternoon. (My parents had taken a long weekend to go camping and were keeping my son Monday while he was out of school for Fall Break and I was still at work.) Mom said that he was a little whiny and pouty while he was with them, but he was pretty well back to his normal self after a good night's sleep Monday night and a day off with me Tuesday (Fall Break continued).

So, all in all, good news to report for the ex's visit. No temper tantrums. No crying jags. No newfound defiant streak (sometimes a symptom of the daddy visits). I'm counting my blessings.

The prodigal father and the single mom

He's baaacck! My ex-husband that is. He arrived home from Afghanistan for his two-week leave earlier this week and is, just as I'm typing these words, picking our son up from school to see him for the first time in about 8 or 9 months.

I've tried to hype the visit to my son so that he'll be excited about being picked up and carted away from his home and comfort zone by a veritable stranger. (I swear I've been more positive than that when talking to him.) And I was patting myself on the back a little for doing a decent job, it seemed, at balancing infusing a little excitement without loading him with too much expectation.

I made sure he knew exactly when and where he'd see his father so that nothing was unexpected. I used that happy, high-pitched voice parents use when they're trying to impose cheerfulness on their children (I make no bones about the game I've been playing and the obvious pretense involved. As much as I generally hate this phrase -- it is what it is).

And it was working. My son would cheer when we talked about his daddy picking him up from school and talk about getting to see his daddy soon to other people.

But then last night, the house of cards came tumbling down around me. About 30 minutes after I'd put my son to bed, he called for me. I went in to his room to find his lower lip quivering and his eyes welling on the verge of a real crying jag.

"What's wrong, baby?" I asked.

"I don't want to stay with my daddy all weekend," he wailed, bursting into tears. "I want to stay with you."

The plan was, has been, still is for my ex to pick my son up from school today and spend a few hours with him and then bring him home for the night. He'll then pick him up from school again tomorrow and keep him all weekend. It's an all-or-nothing arrangement for the weekend because I'll be out of town and unavailable to pick him up mid-weekend.

As I said, I'd been informing my son of the schedule so he knew what was coming. And what made him, after days of seeming excitement, break down into pitiful tears over the prospect, I have no idea.

I consoled him as best I could, reminding him that he was first going to see his father for just a little while and then come home. Still, it took several minutes to get him to calm down and drift back toward sleep.

I might normally shrug this off as a not-unexpected emotional reaction to all this change (and I'm not saying it's any more than that), but my son has been upset in the past about going to spend nights with his father, calling me in inconsolable tears at bedtime and frustrating my ex to no end. I know it hurts his feelings that his son wants to come home to me (as it naturally would anyone), and I'm not sure he has enough experience with the delicate emotions of a child to deal well with the situation.

For now, I don't think there's much to be done about it, at least from my end. I'll continue to encourage my son to be positive. I'll do my best to console him when needs be. I don't know that there's much else to do. Got any brilliant ideas? I'm open to suggestions.

Anatomy and the single mom

Dear readers, I apologize for my extended absence over the past (nearly) two weeks. I really do try to blog about twice a week, but schedules and conflicts and general fatigue sometimes win over my good intentions. Last week, though, I was trampled instead by strep throat. Ick!

I'm fully recovered now, though, and eager to recount a little anecdote for your amusement.

My son was taking a bath the other day. (No, that's not the whole story, although impressive enough in and of itself). Just as he was beginning to wash up, he asked me, "What are my nipples for?"

After I got done biting through my lip to try to keep from bursting into laughter, I replied simply, "Nothing."

"When they grow up, girls use nipples to feed babies ," I said. "But nipples don't have any particular use on boys."

As amusing as the very question itself is, if you're a reader of this blog, you know there's always a second punchline coming when it comes to my son.

With a slightly pensive, slightly puzzled look on his face, he then said, "So they're just there to make me look handsome?"

Behavior, embarrassment and the single mom

I spent a couple days deciding whether or not I wanted to write this blog entry. I know that there's nothing perfect about parenting. I know you, dear readers, know that too. But I'm still loathe to admit my own shortcomings in such a barefaced and public way. (Surely that's a condition of all humanity, right?) On the other hand, if the point of this blog is to share my experiences with even one other person who might empathize or just not feel alone, then I need to be honest (mostly).

So here goes... my child, in his first few weeks of kindergarten, is apparently already a discipline problem. His school (and others, I'm learning from friends) has a color chart indicating each child's behavior for the day. It's not unlike the terror alert system, actually -- and let's face it, 5 year olds can be a terror. From best to worst, the colors go green - blue - yellow - red.

What color day each child has had is sent home daily in his or her homework folder. Most days of the week, my son is on green or blue. But a couple prominent times, he's been on red.

Never on yellow, mind you. Always totally good or totally bad. He's either an angel or an absolute demon all day long. All or nothing, baby, all or nothing.

On the days he's on red, his teacher will write me a little note about what the problem. "He had trouble listening today and used mean words and voice to talk to two of his friends." "He had a hard time following instructions today and had to be told repeatedly to complete tasks." Heartwarming things like that.

And then the piece de resistance came when I got an email from his teacher the other day asking for us to meet next week to come up with a plan to address his "behavior/attitude in class." Oh, things just keep getting better and better in my little world.

I acknowledge that my son sometimes has to be told two or three times to do something. It's a common problem I wrestle with at home. But I didn't think he was extraordinarily stubborn or defiant. It's normally that he's not paying attention or is easily distracted by a toy on his way to do whatever it was I asked him to do. I recognize also that listening the first time and following through are important skills for him to master now that he's in school.

But here's the thing -- I have no idea what kind of "plan" to come up with. We talk about his listening the first time. It does no good. I fuss at him for not listening the first time. It does no good. I take away privileges or toys for not listening the first time. It does no good.

This is decidedly a failing on my part, but that doesn't alleviate the fact that I still don't know what to do. And now I'm not only frustrated but also mortally embarrassed because it's grown from a frustration inside the four walls of my house to a public exposure of my wickedly poor parenting.

OK, I'm exaggerating for effect, but I am still embarrassed at having to be called in to talk to the teacher in the first few weeks of school. And unless she has some brilliant insight or bag of tricks that I've heretofore been ignorant of (and maybe she really does -- that's the hope), I'm not sure this meeting is going to have much purpose other than making me feel like more of a failure as a parent than I already do. Ugh, this is all just so awesome.

Reincarnation and the single mom

My son takes after his mother in more ways than one. He's got my eyes and my way with words and, sadly, my attitude on some days. Most pertinent today, though, is the fact that he is not a morning person. Learning to get up early to accommodate a school schedule has been an intense challenge for both of us for the past two weeks.

This morning, he was more tired and more reluctant to get out of bed than usual. I have no one to blame but myself for that because I didn't get him to bed on time (we had dinner with a friend last night and just didn't leave when we should have). So when I went to wake him, he was especially groggy and grouchy.

It took a few minutes of coaxing, but I finally got him to rouse to consciousness and then went back across the hall to my bedroom to continue getting myself ready. I called out to him a few minutes later to make sure he was getting dressed, to which he confessed he wasn't yet. I walked in there to find him curled up on the bed with his arm draped over the cat.

"Baby, you need to get up and get dressed," I told him.

"But I'm cuddling with Henry," he said.

"Well, you need to stop cuddling with Henry and get dressed."

"Why does Henry get to lay in bed while I have to get up?" he asked.

"Henry's a cat. He doesn't do things like go to school," I replied.

And now, here comes the punchline...

"I want to be a cat," he said.

Brilliant thought, son! Wouldn't it be great if we could all pick the most ideal creature in the world and just become that? I might choose a lizard -- sunning myself on a big rock day after day. Or perhaps a lion -- a boy, not a girl. Lounge around in the sun, shaking my impressive mane and roaring while the lionesses do all that tedious chasing and hunting for me.

But then again, a cat's not a bad choice. Sleep, eat, sleep, stretch, bat something around a little, repeat. I'll take it!