NYC Moms

Memorial Day: Questions Too Hard to Answer

“Mommy, what’s a car bomb?” asks my daughter just as we’re about to enter the Lincoln Tunnel.

“What? How do you know about that?” I say surprised.

“I watch the news,” comes the small voice from the back seat.

“I’ll tell you later. Now’s not the best time.”  I punt.  No way I’m having this conversation after I’ve just paid the toll to drive 100 feet below the Hudson River's surface through a tube police describe as a “prime terrorist target."

An hours worth of traffic funnels into the narrow tunnel-opening, growing narrower by the second. Had my daughter asked me about sex I would have been prepared. But a car bomb?!?!  No way.

The question strikes me as particularly disturbing because it’s entirely possible, if counter-terrorism experts are right, that this won’t be the last car bomb attempt in New York City or elsewhere across the country. It’s an awful realization. My daughters may have to deal with that the way I deal with the absence of the Twin Towers--a phantom limb missing from the broken skyline.

My imagination now firmly in Times Square and Ground Zero, our car comes to a dead stop in the middle of the Lincoln Tunnel.  Please, please, please move. Go, go, go, I repeat silently--an absurd mantra I use trying to trick myself into believing I have some control over gridlock and my life.

Life is like a Poker Game

"Mommy you're coming to my ceremony aren't you? " My daughter"s eyes sparkled with excitement and a hint of apprehension. "I wouldn't miss it for anything," I said throwing my arms around her and sealing the deal with a big smile.

Then I checked the calendar. Why can't I ever seem to do it the other way around--check then accept rather than accept than check? The ceremony was the very same night as an important cocktail party. The face-time with my bosses and other VIPs promised to be "priceless." My heart sank. How could I pass that up?

As it turned out, pretty easily. My daughter also needed face-time and not the ordinary, everyday-morning-and-night kind but the this-really-matters-to-me kind. That evening, my beautiful girl sang and swayed and giggled with a friend she's known since nursery school. For a split second I thought about the reception and experienced a profound lack of remorse or guilt. That's when it happened.

Small Town Girl from Manhattan

Last weekend, my girls and I celebrated a friend's 50th birthday in upstate New York on a dude ranch with 25 other Manhattan families. Walking along one of the riding trails, my first-born screams half-laughing, half-horrified, "Oh no! I just stepped in horse maneuver." Clearly we haven't spent a lot of time on farms. And petting zoos in the city don't really lend themselves to that level of intimacy.

Still, I love living in the city. Not only can you run through the Metropolitan Museum late on a Saturday night when the crowds have disappeared but there's also a very real suburban quality to it, kind of like how I grew up but with more interesting perks. For example, sports are big in the city. My kids have played soccer in the meadows of Central Park and on Randall's Island with the Triboro Bridge rising in the distance. They've sold Girl Scout cookies during the Saint Patrick's day parade -- my daughter bringing in an astounding $280 selling Thin Mints and Samoas on Fifth Avenue holding a sign and shouting, "Get them while they last!" She called me at the height of the parade. "Mommy, the Lemon Cremes aren't selling," she said. "Don't worry. Give it time," I answered knowingly. She sold every box.

Information Overload

Just as sleep is my greatest addiction, time has become my most precious commodity.  Suspense aside, I don't have enough of either. That's why I'm on a data-diet limiting the kind of information I consume, cutting out the stuff that's just not good for me. My goal is to have a few extra minutes at the end of every day that might actually qualify as quality free time.

The short list, and it will be short as a sign of my commitment and discipline to the mission, includes the following:

1. I refuse to read anything about Kate +8, the Kardashian sisters or Heidi Montag (though I did recently gawk at her thigh cellulite which appears to have escaped the 10 plastic surgeries she recently suffered through. Sadly, dear bloggers, that fact entered my brain prior to the information black-out.)

2. I am boycotting anything to do with Housewives I don't know personally, regardless of where they live.

When I'm Away

This is the hard part. Climbing into bed after an exhausting day away on a business trip, away from my girls, missing the sound of their breathing, their tiny teeth grinding. I miss the warmth of their skin, their little hands, their hair as it falls across their face. I smile while tucking it behind their ears knowing it bothers me more than it bothers them. Their room is like a magnet pulling me in two, three, sometimes four times a night.

My body rewired itself during pregnancy. It now goes from dead sleep to full throttle if my kids so much as whimper. I spring out of bed knowing I'll never fall back asleep unless I'm sure they're covered and their favorite stuffed animal is positioned just right. I love the floppy, twisted softness of my children at rest. I'm convinced when my youngest lays on her stomach with her knees by her shoulders in a frog position, it's how she lay in my womb. I recognized it the moment I saw the swoosh of her elbow and stretch of her heel. "That's It!" I exclaimed, the mystery of the move nine-months-in-utero suddenly revealing itself.

Vicodin, Zappos, Flowers -- Oh My!!

I had knee surgery this week. I recommend it. Not the surgery necessarily, the week recovering.

I went in for the operation at 7:30 Monday morning and in less time than it takes to get highlights, I was fixed, stitched and on my way home. I’d been a bit nervous about the anesthetic, aka the Michael Jackson cocktail but when done properly (shock) in a hospital (shock) with highly-trained anesthesiologists, it’s spectacular. I have no recollection of the surgery, or the surgeon showing me the LIVE images of the tear in my meniscus. I can’t even remember how I got down to the recovery room or how I got the bruise on my right calf. I just remember the nurse waving my mom over to my curtained cubicle and the look of relief on her face, as if she hadn't breathed the entire time. We took a taxi home because that’s what you do after surgery in NYC.

Doing "Nothing"

Here it is Saturday afternoon and we’re sitting at home watching a Looney Tunes movie for the fourth time. That’s right. Viewing number four. “Mommy, look, look!” says my youngest daughter urgently grabbing my face anticipating the funny part. I laugh for the fourth time because, well, funny is funny.

My other daughter, sitting next to me, grabs my laptop and types the following line about her sister: “My daughter is now doing the tango.” The tango it most definitely is not. It’s more like hip-hop funk in blue princess underwear choreographed to the dramatic rhythm of the do-or-die basketball game featuring Bugs Bunny and Michael Jordan on one team, space aliens on the other.

My youngest starts to laugh her silliest laugh and, seeing a new opportunity, reaches for my laptop.

“Scram-a-lam-a-ding-dong," I tease, “you’re going to break my computer.”

“I don’t care,” she says. Of course she doesn’t. She’s so age appropriate.

I know we should be at a museum right now walking through the Temple of Dendur, or learning about American Indians, or traveling though the universe to Mars at the Intrepid. But truthfully we all had a very long, somewhat emotional week and

What happened in Haiti...

They are images of ghosts -- the bloody, shell-shocked faces of the Haitian people. The tableau of human tragedy plays out on our flat screen television and illuminates our bedroom.

“Out!” I say to my daughter who has barely stepped through the door. “These images are not appropriate for you right now.” By the urgency in my voice, and a quick glance at the television, she knows it’s non-negotiable. I can’t look away. Yet, I can’t let her look at all.

The night it happened, I explain to my little girls there has been a terrible earthquake that hurt many people on an island called Haiti near Florida. “Will Manhattan sink?” asks one. “No, earthquakes don’t hit New York City,” I explain. “Will the people be OK?” asks the other. “I hope so. I think so. Don’t worry. It’ll be alright.”

I find myself hiding newspapers, flipping the channel, shielding the truth from my children and feeling totally helpless. Haiti, as you’ve heard a lot lately, is one of the

"Don't Make Me Come Out there..." or Thoughts on Disciplining Kids

My child has absolutely no respect for my authority,” said an exasperated dad sitting next to me at a dinner party. "She knows she can behave hideously without any serious consequences.” The wine was flowing. “When I was a kid, my dad would have smacked me and that would have been the end of it. Now I yell and my daughter laughs in my face!"

This master of the universe had met his match – she was small, defiant, and used to being indulged. The rules of authority this man had learned as a child no longer applied and the ones at his disposal did not seem to be working.

When I was growing up it was different. Discipline was discipline. You knew which lines not to cross. Forget and back came a withering stare, a dangerous tone, an outright threat of impending consequences. "Don’t make me take off my belt,” said my gentle, loving father who grew up at a time children were seen and not heard.

My dad’s favorite phrase was ‘Stop crying or I’ll give you something real to cry about,” said a friend laughing at the memory of her mom threatening her with a wooden spoon. Another woman confided, her divorced mom hit the back of her legs with a thin, balloon-stick. One dad made his kids kneel on a broom handle. The best was my extremely elegant European aunt who never drove the family’s Volkswagen camper without her riding crop which she used to keep her five rowdy kids under control (this was before seat belts were mandatory).

Being a Good Mom & the Art of Being Invisible

Every year during my childhood my parents traveled together to Europe. It was a precious time for them to reconnect amidst the chaos of kids. For me, it inevitably meant some exotic souvenir from a place I one day dreamed of visiting – Paris, Geneva, Brussels. Anything from “over-there” seemed mysterious and exciting, with one exception.

I was in fourth grade and my parents had just returned from their annual trip. They’d bought my brother the coolest tennis outfit I’d ever seen. I held my breath as my mom reached into her suitcase and handed me a small, fist-sized gift. "Hmm…it’s too little to be a tennis dress,” I thought ripping open the paper. Time stood still. They’d been away from me an entire week and my beloved mom and dad had bought me....drum-roll…soap.

“Soap??? You got me soap??” It had to be a mistake. There had to be more. My self-pity was rising in direct proportion to the lump in my throat. “Soap?!?! Didn’t the hotel have anything better you could steal?” I see it as vividly as if it were yesterday-- the suitcase, the soap, the self-absorption. My mom had let me down. Ironically, it’s the gift I liked least that I remember most.

Being a mom is like that. It’s not the hundreds of things we DO each day but the one or two things we DON’T DO that get all the attention.