Silicon Valley Moms Blog

What summer is all about

“Mom,” my 10-year-old said to me the other day, “for the first time I know what summer is all about.”

I knew exactly what he meant. And I felt both glad—he should know what summer is all about—and guilty. Did it really have to wait until he was ten—almost eleven?

Well, yeah, actually, it did. Because what he’s talking about is freedom, and hanging out with friends, and playing outside and sometimes losing track of the time and being late for dinner. And until this summer, that option just wasn’t available.

Until this summer, as a mom who works full-time for a salary (there is no good buzzword for any of this. WOHM just doesn’t work for me), I put the kid in camps. I had an amazingly complicated multicolor calendar representing a patched-together summer of sports camps and art camps and drama camps and carpools.

Last summer, I left one week open as an experiment. It was a week during which I had no business travel plans, and he had siblings around to keep an eye on him in case I had meetings; otherwise, I’d be working in my home office. I thought we’d fill it with playdates. It was a disaster; all his friends were fully booked or out of town; he was bored and miserable and spent way too much time on the computer.

This summer, things have changed. For one, he’s going into sixth grade. That means I regularly leave him home alone for bits and pieces of time without worrying that he’ll wreck the house or starve to death. It also means he has a longer leash—he’s now allowed to go to a nearby playground on his own and to go downtown on occasion (during daylight and with a friend; and yes, I know not everyone agrees with this long a leash). (Of course, that usually means a stop on the Apple store where, again, he spends too much time on the computer.)

Graduating into a mad world

Last week I attended four graduation ceremonies for three kids (two for the highschooler, the baccalaureate and the commencement; one each for the middle schooler and the elementary schooler). I watched 821 kids cross stages to shake with the right and take with the left. I heard something around 30 speakers, and at least a dozen songs. I learned that middle school administrators and counselors should not give speeches, but elementary school kids can be darned eloquent. I loved the influence of the Pacific Islander community; many graduates, Islander or not, marched down the aisles wearing colorful leis—of flowers, candy, or money—from family and friends. And I got a little teary when our former nanny—who I’d lost touch with several years ago so hadn’t been able to send a grad announcement—showed up anyway at all the graduations with leis in hand, but didn’t recognize my eldest, he’d just changed so much.

The speeches, the songs, and the ceremonies kept coming back to the same theme—these kids, these new graduates, are living in a messed up world that somehow they’re going to have to fix. It’s a heavy message for what is normally a jubilant season, but it is unavoidably in the air. Some kids lost friends to recent suicides; some lost college options to the economy. And they’re all watching their older friends and siblings come home from college and find they can’t get a summer job anywhere, not even at McDonald’s.

Could swine flu sink my son’s senior spring?

One high school in Silicon Valley has already been shut down. Santa Clara County Health officials are talking about the possibility of closing schools around the region, banning public gatherings. They are reassuring people that the swine flu emergency isn’t to that point yet, but they need to consider all the options.

Meanwhile, my oldest son is on the downhill slope of what has been a grueling senior year. College applications, college decisions, tough AP classes, a yearlong crunch to prepare for a summer drama festival—that’s just about over. Left ahead—the celebration of the end of 13 years of school, including the baccalaureate ceremony, the senior class picnic, graduation, and the grad nite party, and then packing up and taking the show he’s worked on all year over to the Fringe Festival in Scotland. Yeah, it’s a busy calendar, but it’s good busy, the reward at the end of the race.

And if swine flu catches hold, heck, if they find even one case at his high school, senior spring could simply disappear. His could be the first class that holds their graduation on Facebook and then gets their diplomas in the mail.

The birds must be crazy

Edgar Allan Poe’s raven rapping at his chamber door seemed like a literary device to me, nothing more.

Until this spring. Because both my teen son and I are being tortured by birds. Not the same birds, oh no, we each have our own feathered nemesis.

I’ve never actually seen mine. I just hear it. Most mornings, just before 5 a.m. It’s got a short, high pitched, and steady chirp, kind of like a smoke alarm with a dying battery, but more constant. It is impossible for me to sleep through, and, even more frustrating, my husband doesn’t hear it, at all; I’m thinking it’s out of his frequency range. It goes on for about an hour, or long enough so it’s not worth attempting to go back to sleep when it’s over. I’ve been staggering around for days as sleep deprivation accumulates.

Meanwhile, around the side of the house, a male robin has decided that he wants to build a nest inside my son’s room. He, too, is an early riser. He carefully gathers strands of grasses and tiny sticks, and, beak full of them, flies into my son’s screen and beats his wings against it. This is not a case of a bird slamming into a window by accident; he knows the window is there, he just wants it open. He, too, carries on for an hour or more most mornings, hanging on to those sticks, flying to a nearby tree branch to rest and then attacking the window once more. His mate sits on the ground, watching him. The sidewalk below is turning white from his droppings. And my son isn’t getting much sleep either.

Stopping to smell the cherry blossoms

We took our kids to Japan for spring break. We gathered up all those frequent flyer miles that we’d been saving for a decade or so and figured out that while we couldn’t all go on the same flights, we could indeed all get to Tokyo the same afternoon. It seemed like a good time to turn my kids’ worlds upside down.

And Japan will do that for you. Jet lag, of course, helps; you’re physically out of synch. Driving and walking on the left instead of the right means that nothing is automatic—not crossing the street, not stepping onto an escalator, not turning a corner. You have to question everything you do. You thought you knew how to go to the bathroom—you were wrong. Handle the sniffles? Wrong again (you sniff, wear a face mask, but never blow). That soda you got out of the vending machine that’s now in your hand, well, kid, now you have a problem, because you need to find some place to sit down and drink it; read the sign (if you can), it seems to say that you're not supposed to drink it on the street.

It was good for the kids to realize that our way isn’t the only way, to watch mom and dad struggle along with them to adapt, to watch us make mistakes, to be surprised. I got in trouble when I stepped onto the carpet wearing the sandals that were meant for the stone patio; the kids took note and never made that mistake. They made other mistakes though—taking their shoes off to go through airport security? Wrong! (Though it seems we were taking our shoes off every five minutes everywhere else). That lovely platter that, in the picture on the menu, looked like an entrée? It turned out to be dessert. (The kids shared their entrees and then shared the unplanned dessert—or maybe that wasn’t a mistake).

The Downside of Digital Mammograms

I got my annual mammogram today—my first with the new digital technology. And all I can say is that the genius behind this gizmo was not a woman.

The device isn’t more accurate than a regular film xray (at least in women over 50 with normal breast tissue, like me, for younger women, maybe, studies are still being done); it is, at best, comparable. Theoretically, it could offer lower radiation doses; at this point it’s, again, about the same.

So advantages, not so much.

Disadvantages, huge. Because digital mammograms require LONGER SQUISH TIME!

I’m not sure how long the squish time on the old film mammogram was. If your technician hustled back to her station to hit the button, probably no more than 7 or 8 seconds. Now, I’m guessing it is at least three times that long, perhaps longer; I wasn’t counting, I was in too much pain. It is so long that the technician no longer tells you to hold your breath, because, she told me, I’d likely need to breathe. It is so long that I’m still feeling sore four hours later.

The solution to the ladies’ room line problem

The Palace Theatre in New York has 1740 seats—and just three toilets in the ladies’ room. I’m not thinking about this little fact when I linger at my seat at intermission, chatting briefly with the guy next to me, instead of diving into the aisle to make a mad dash to the bathroom. So I find myself near the end of a very long line that loops back and forth around the bar area. It does not look good.

And then I hear her voice—the one-woman solution to the bathroom line problem, disguised as an ordinary bathroom attendant.

“Ladies, it’s too quiet in there, I wanna hear that peepee flowing!”

“Let’s go let’s go, we got a lotta people with full bladders out here, let’s go, all right, that’s the way.”

“OK, listen to that, now that’s what I’m talkin’ about!”

“Come on folks, we want to make happy bladders, happy bladders, keep it moving.”

 “All right, you’re doing a good job, we’ve got three minutes; we can do this!”

Palo Alto without moms, kids, or strollers

It’s odd watching a movie about your home town. I just did that; I watched Palo Alto, CA., now out on DVD after a couple of showings at film festivals and in a few theaters. It gets even weirder when you catch occasional glimpses of your kid in that movie (quite a few Palo Alto teens stayed up until 2 a.m. many nights during the summer of 06, working as extras in return for free pizza).

Of course, Hollywood takes liberties when rendering any supposedly real place, so you know it’s not going to be completely authentic—while the streets and houses of Old Palo Alto were familiar, the downtown was magically imported from Los Altos, and I didn’t recognize the high school with the long indoor corridors at all. The lack of reality was a good thing in at least one instance; it meant that the beer bottle in  my teen’s hand was just a prop.

But the oddest thing was what was noticeably absent in the movie. Daylight, for one; the whole thing took place at night, late at night, on mostly deserted streets or in wild parties that, in real life, the police would have shut down by 10 pm. Police, for another; not that Palo Alto is crawling with them, but they do pass by occasionally. Adults in general were mostly missing; only two characters were over 20—a bus driver (played by Tom Arnold), and an old lady. And moms of any sort—pushing strollers, walking with children—were noticeably absent, though there was one reference to a mother inside a house (you glimpsed her silhouette through the window) as having a perfect life. This was not the Palo Alto I know.

Where are the scandalous books when you need them?

“The best thing your kid can do is read for pleasure.” I hear this regularly; just about anyone who gives you advice about raising a successful student tells you this. And I do believe it, I believe that my passion for reading as a child gave me a huge boost academically (it sure wasn’t my high school’s academic offerings, anyway).

I expected my kids would be readers. When I had any free time at all, I picked up a book; my mother had to practically yank it out of my hands to get me to the dinner table. I figured, that, as a mother, I’d be in the same situation, telling my kids to put the book down already.

But, instead I’m dragging them away from the computer. When my kids have time to kill, the first thing they think of is going online, seeing who’s chatting, what’s new on  Facebook, or playing a game. The situation is getting a little better, they have friends who read, trade books back and forth, and at least are getting addicted to reading in bed. But they don’t seem to feel the panic I do if I don’t have a book in progress at all times; after all, the computer is always there.

I’m not blaming it all on the computer, though. I think a big part of the problem is that we haven’t had any really “adult” books create a scandal in a long time, the kind of books that everyone talks about in slightly appalled tones, the kind that kids absolutely shouldn’t be reading, so of course will at the first opportunity.

The nursing home scene: the next generation

For much of 2008, my aunt was in a nursing home. It was a good enough place, I guess, clean, airy (most of the residents spent their days in a large, well-lit atrium), and highly rated; it wasn’t, however, a high-end luxury facility, catering more to moderate income and Medicare patients.

Every time I visited I was struck by just how bored everyone seemed. Oh, they had a daily card or bingo game in the recreation room, folks that would occasionally read a few headlines and discuss them with the patients, and an ancient TV that seemed dedicated to showing videos of old musicals. But most of the patients—and all were confined to wheelchairs—just sat there. It’s not that most weren’t mentally alert, there was just nothing to do. So when I walked through to visit my aunt, I felt everyone’s eyes on me; I was something new going on, I was the show. When a patient tried to get up from a wheelchair and set off an alarm, everyone perked up, something was happening. When a woman got into a loud argument with her visiting husband, you could have sold tickets.

The nurses were aware of the boredom factor; they had one solution, which they offered my aunt when they saw her fidgeting with the blanket on her lap—would she like a baby doll? Several of the patients did carry baby dolls around, which they swaddled, and patted, and treated like real babies. Oh, most knew they were dolls all right, they’d put them down easily enough when there was something interesting going on, but it gave them something to do.

Blatantly missing, to my eyes, were computers. There wasn’t one public computer, anywhere, for the use of the residents; not one patient had their own computer as far as I could tell. Not really surprising—this was a generation that was mostly out of the workforce when computers came in, they didn’t learn how to use them, and had no interest in learning now. Indeed, if my experience trying to show my mother how to use a mouse or touchpad to control a cursor is any example, they’d find the whole thing more frustrating than satisfying.