"Endearments"

I know I’ve written about women who call everyone ‘hon’ or ‘dear’. And I’m sure at that time I touched on men who do the same thing.

I might even have mentioned how irritating I find it when random dudes call me ‘dear’ or ‘hon’ but the same thing from a woman doesn’t bother me.

I recently had an epiphany as to why that’s the case.

Women who use endearments for people who are not their immediate family do it to everyone. They call the lady next door, the dude checking out at the grocery store, and their nieces and nephews these things. They’ll say, “Thanks, Hon” to anyone and everyone, no matter the age, sex, or relation of the person being spoken to.

Men who use endearments…only use them at women. Dudes do not call other dudes ‘dear’ or ‘darlin’.

I even went so far to confirm with Tom that this is the case. He said that no man has ever called him ‘dear’ in the process of helping him check out at the antique store or while handing him his change at Rural King.

And I know, I KNOW, not all men (don’t @ me) who call women ‘hon’ are creeps but a lot of them are, even if they don’t think they are. They’re using the ‘endearment’, even if subconsciously, because they feel that women are beneath them, more akin to children than to the man himself. And so to call a women ‘dear’ is to remind her that he’s above her and that she’s smaller, less important than he is.

Women, on the other hand, who use endearments, do it across gender/sex lines. They do it because it’s part of their lexicon. Where I’d call someone sir, ma’am, or even dude, these ladies say dear and hon and sweetie.

Men need to stop it, by the way. The need to stop calling women who are not their wives or daughters dear. Stop calling women who are probably smarter than you things that belittle them. Even if you don’t think it does, stop it just in case, mmm’kay?

Insta-Stupid

I do love me some Instagram. I can spend way too much time browsing the search by or just watching the stories of the people I follow.

However, the ‘sponsored’ posts can sometimes be REALLY annoying. There’s this one particular ‘influencer’ I follow (her kids are adorable and yes, she’s cute too. She’s a little crunchy for me but whatever.) I don’t mind most of her posts. They’re pretty neutral.

But there was one post several months ago that has stuck with me.

She was talking about Reese’s Cups. I know, riveting.

But she started the story with something about how Reese’s cups are her favorite chocolate, which…duh.

But then she went on to stay, “But! I’m REALLY picky about my Reese’s cups. They have to be really fresh.” **Yes, she said these words with as much uppity snootiness as it might seem written out.**

Wait…what?

Fresh?

What the peanut butter chocolaty hell is this?

She talked and gave actual examples of an ‘old’ Reese’s cup and a ‘fresh’ one. The old one broke and the peanut butter was ‘crumbly’. The fresh one wouldn’t even break, because the peanut butter was too soft to break. The paper that came off the old cup was dry. The paper from the ‘fresh’ one was oily…so. Yeah.

OMG. Seriously?

Supposedly her aunt, who knew how picky her dear niece was about her Reese’s, had found a way to get the factory (THE REESES FACTORY, apparently (don’t @ me, I KNOW it’s really the Hershey’s factory, WHATEVER!)) to send this woman Reese’s cups directly to her, cutting out the middle man that is the grocery store.

She never once said this was a sponsored story. She just went on and on about how picky she is about her Reese’s and how important it is to get it fresh from the factory.

I don’t know why this bothered me so much.

Maybe it’s because if I were pickier about my Reese’s I wouldn’t be so fat that I produce my own gravitational pull. I mean, hello, if it says Reese’s it’s probably going to go in my mouth, no matter how old it is.

I don’t even know.

Playing Favorites

My mom has never really seemed to have a favorite child. We’ve all known, my brothers and I, that our mother loves us with everything she has.

My girls have never been jealous of each other. I’d like to think that’s because I’ve never played favorites.

This past Mother’s Day was lovely. Tom made me breakfast, Olivia made couple of things at school and wrote the most delightful card.

Alyssa got me a car freshener and put it on top of a note wishing me a happy mother’s day and telling me she loves me. She signed it, “Your favorite.”

Later in the day, Olivia was at the table and she asked me if I’d seen Alyssa’s card.

I acknowledged that I had seen it, that Lyss had left me the nice smelling tree now hanging in my car.

Olivia read the note and laughed at the ‘Your Favorite’ signature.

She sat and pondered for a moment and then said, quite seriously, “I think that if you did have a favorite, it would be me.”

I hope they both always think they’re my favorite. If they think that, I’m doing my job well and for a woman who has constant doubts as to her ability to mother at all, that’s saying a lot.

Teenagers

I have been lucky enough to be able to attend all of Alyssa’s track meets this year. I’m in a job where I can work extra today and take off a little early tomorrow.

One of the benefits of going to the meets is being able to take Alyssa with me when she’s done with her event (she’s only high jumping this year.) After a particularly far away meet, I signed Alyssa and her friend Tessa out of the meet and they rode home with me. For those gasping that I signed out a student who is NOT my child, whatever. I had her mom’s permission.

The ride home was fun. I got to listen to all the teenage gossip and was brought up to speed on all the drama that’s happening between a freshman boy (B) and a junior girl (G.)

See, this freshman boy has a crush on a senior. We won’t name the senior. B, the boy, started dating G, the junior girl after he realized that the senior girl wasn’t going to date him.

Wait, let’s stop here and remind everyone that freshmen in high school are fourteen and fifteen years old. This kid, this BOY, is the same age as Olivia. Let that sink in. He’s fourteen and making a play for a senior who is 19. The junior, G, is eighteen, which is still icky when you’re talking about a fourteen year old.

Anyway, as Lyss and Tess talked, it came about that B tried to break up with G but G didn’t accept his break up. She told him, “No, we’re going to work on this relationship.”

And…he just accepted that.

I was saddened by this. I quickly reminded the girls in my car that it takes two people to make a relationship work and one person to break up. B didn’t have to accept G’s insistence in making the relationship work. He could have walked away, blocked her on all social media, not answered her calls/texts/tweets/chats, etc. But, alas, he fourteen and she’s eighteen and she decided they were going to make it work so apparently they’re ‘making it work.’

Can you even imagine this scenario if the genders were reversed? The ick factor is already high but imagine a fourteen year old girl telling her parents that she’d tried to break up with her eighteen year old boyfriend and he’d told her no. There would be restraining orders and possible arrests and what have you.

I don’t know if B told his parents about trying to break up with G. I don’t know what they know but if I were his mom and I knew the situation, I’d be all over that girl, letting her know that she was not welcome in my son’s life.

Sigh. I wish I could say that B and G looked cute at prom, but they just looked awkward. G was smiling as if nothing was wrong and B just looked out of place and uncomfortable.

Yes, yes, I know. Alyssa was a freshman and N was a junior when they started dating. But Lyss was fifteen and N was seventeen, so…not quite the same thing. And, as far as I know, Lyss never tried to break up with N only to have her breakup denied.

Post-Cancer Mindset

There was a time, way back in my teens and twenties and maybe even my thirties that I felt like I was invincible. I felt like I was going to live forever and that I’d always be young and healthy and beautiful.

Then I was diagnosed with cancer when I was 46.

Reality and my own mortality smacked me in the face so hard that it knocked me over.

So yes, my cancer was found very early and I was never actually on the verge of death but hearing the words, “You have cancer,” well, it does something to you, emotionally, mentally, maybe even physically. It’s like a slap, it hits you so hard you can barely breathe.

And once you’ve heard those words, at least once I heard them, I can’t stop thinking that every single twinge, every new pain, every ache and cough is the first sign that the cancer is back, this time with a vengeance that won’t be stopped by mere chemo and radiation.

I recently had a pain on my tongue (gross, sorry) and it hurt like a mother-trucker. My first thought was that it was cancer…yeah, of the tongue. My second thought was to worry I’d have to have surgery to remove my tongue. Would I be able to work if I couldn’t speak? Would the removal of my tongue just be the beginning and after a while, the surgeon would have to go back and remove part of my jaw? Would I have to wear one of those weird plastic half-masks to cover my disfigurement?

All this went through my head in an instant.

What the hell, Brain? Seriously?

I mean, the whole pain on my tongue was probably from eating an entire bag of butter mints over the weekend. Once I’d rinsed my mouth with saltwater and then again a few times with the antibacterial mouthwash the orthodontists gave Olivia for the sore in her mouth, guess what? The pain was pretty much gone.

But for those few hours between the pain manifesting itself and my home remedies, my brain went to the dark place, the place where everything is cancer, everything is leading to my untimely death.

I know that everyone who has faced a serious illness feels this way and we all do what we can to get past it so we can at least enjoy the life we’re lucky enough to still be living.

The moral of this story is to not be a glutton and eat so many butter mints in one sitting that it makes one side of your stupid tongue raw. I might be an idiot.

Speeding By

I knew back when Alyssa started her freshman year that her four years of high school would fly by.

I knew that I needed to try and cherish every moment, every band concert, each evening at home watching television with her (at the time, we were engrossed in The Middle and The Goldbergs), very school musical, every track meet, every homecoming dance and every prom.

I knew that the days would drag but the weeks, months and years would sprint past us.

And yet here we are, on the cusp of her high school graduation and I’m looking back and wondering where it all went. We have pictures to prove we lived it all but it seems like just last week she was rehearsing for her role in Shrek and yet that was freshman year.

She’s already pulling away. She has been for months. She basically spent the weekend of prom away from home. And that’s okay. That’s how it should be. But it’s bittersweet for me and Tom. We already miss her and she’s not even truly gone yet.

I want so much for her. I want her to enjoy every minute of her life, not be waiting for the next thing and then the next. I want her to wring the joy and fun out of each experience, to know that this one moment can be the best until the next best moment comes along.

I hope I’ve instilled even a little bit of whimsy in her. I hope she takes time to find the whimsical trees planted beside office buildings and the pleasure of sleeping late. I hope she sees that the world can be so very magical even though there is so much that needs to be changed and fixed.

High school isn’t the best life has to offer but it can be amazing. I think she’s had a good four years. She’s made wonderful friendships, found love, worked hard and played harder…I hope.

We still have years of love and fun ahead of us.

I just wish I could slow things down, even just a little, for her and for me. I want to freeze these moments and step through my magical tree once in a while to revisit the evenings on the couch, the times around the dinner table, the Saturdays at lunch and the moments when she was fourteen and obsessed with Pentatonix. I’d go back to when she was four and pretending to be a horse, or a lion or the little mermaid, just to watch her, to soak her in, her innocence, her beauty, her imagination. I’d preserve some of those precious parts of her and give back to her so she can fall back on them when life gets hard and boring and lackluster. I’d give her those moments back so she can use them to get through adulthood with a little bit of whimsy still inside her.

She’s growing up so fast; too fast. I want to grab her and hug her close and remind her that her entire adult life is ahead of her and she needs to slow down and be a kid for as long as she can. The whole wide world is waiting for her and she’s going to do amazing things in it but she doesn’t have to do them all right now. She can stop for a minute and just remember that little girl who bravely switched schools when she was seven, who made new friends and played Hunger Games with those new friends in 4th grade. She can be the girl who memorized all the members of Pentatonix birthdays and quizzed me regularly to ensure I was paying attention. She can play board games on a Friday night and sleep in on Saturday, hugging her stuffed dog in her sleep.

The world will be there when she’s ready and I know she’s ready now. But maybe I’m not quite there yet.

A Prom

Prom We all remember what was happening last year, right? I was at home with my entire family. We were attempting to finish up the school year via Zoom and trying to stay healthy and safe.

This year is different. Many (but not enough) of us are getting vaccinated or are vaccinated and we’re slowly re-emerging into our lives.

The girls have been in school all year. Olivia was quarantined as a close contact once this year, way back in October. Alyssa, somewhat to her own annoyance, was never quarantined. She continued to work, go to school, hang out with a select number of friends (many of whom also worked with her) and basically has lived her life.

And on the first of May, she got to go to her senior prom.

They sort of had a prom last year. If you call getting dressed up, meeting at a nearby hotel, having dinner served by your parents and then getting prizes a prom. I mean, there were no outside guests allowed, only juniors and seniors that attend our school were allowed. If you were lucky enough to be dating either a junior or senior and were a junior or senior yourself, well, hey, you got to go with a date. It was fine. They were all lovely.

But this year…they got to have a ‘real’ prom. They got dressed up, they went to each other’s houses for pictures, the prom was held at the school. The junior moms decorated the gym and there was dinner and dancing in the cafeteria (our school calls it the ‘auditoria’ which is stupid and I won’t use that word other than to point out that it’s stupid.)

Olivia was a little worried on Thursday about where she’d each lunch because the cafeteria had been overtaken by the juniors and seniors for prom.

After the ‘social hour’, during which family and friends could come (if they had a ticket because there’s still a pandemic out there) and sit in the bleachers in the gym and each couple would be announced and proceed around the gym, stopping at three different points for pictures.

It was cute.

And fun.

And the senior class, because they’re lovely people, voted the exchange student the prom queen this year. She’s so sweet and fun and I’m so happy for her. She’s from Italy and I hope that her ‘abroad’ experience hasn’t been too awful, seeing as she’s stuck in freaking Edon, Ohio, population 850+ give or take 10. Talk about a disappointment.

But like I said, she’s fun and seems to be making the best of her “American” experience. She was a cheerleader for football and basketball. She had a supporting lead role in the musical. She’s running track and just putting herself out there. It’s more than I can say I did my senior year and I was still in the same school I’d started at when I was five. So…perspective.

I feel for the seniors of 2020 who missed out on all of this. I know most of them have moved on and sure, they have quite the story to tell but it still sucks. They’ll never get their high school senior year back. And I feel for the parents of those seniors. They missed out on so much too.