Livin' It Up on a Friday Night, or Ghost Mom

I’m jumping back in here to the blog after a long hiatus involving work and more work and then some work, and lots of bickering with Jessie—as we tried to find our way through the new “no-rule” experiment we are trying at our house (and a few major performances involving ALL our time and energy). I will share the best of the worst with you tomorrow (involving infamous text messages and a meditation breakdown) and hope that that will bring some closure to a difficult period and lead us into a joyous summer. Or at least make you laugh. Or at least make you grateful that a)your daughter has not yet reached puberty, b) your daughter is way past puberty, c)your daughter is not my daughter, or d) you don’t have any children at all!

But just in case you were wondering what I might do with all this spare time I have not blogging, or what I do for fun on a Friday night . . . I offer you this:

627

 Yes. That was the total number of notes on Jessie’s iphone when I first opened it up Friday night. Well, to be honest, the number was actually up in the 700s, but I didn’t think to photograph the number until I started to weed through and delete some of the notes and realized just how MANY 700 and some odd notes was and how long this was going to take me—since I couldn’t just batch delete, as there might be some that she wanted to keep.

Now, you might wonder why I would be the one sorting through her notes. The simple answer is because it needed to be done. And who do you go to when something needs to be done? Ghost Mama. That’s right… Us Ghost Mamas are the ones that slip in and start the work that needs to be done, leaving the finishing (and upping the odds that tasks actually will be finished) to the ones who actually own the task. I know one Ghost Mama who is, at this actual moment, virtually lurking, from her comfortable kitchen office chair up here in Ottawa, somewhere near Humbolt Redwoods State Park in California scouting out good biker/hiker camping sites for her daughters who are cycling down the West coast. There is no doubt that technology makes Ghost Mama work much easier, but it also, as I am finding, creates a new kind of adolescent messiness that rivals the proverbial teenager’s room in the kind of madness it can create. Whole gigabytes of garbage.

So. That’s what I was doing on Friday night. Taking out the garbage. Most of which involved wedding planning, along with a few Glee scripts and an invitation to Daniel Radcliffe to come volunteer at the Foodbank where, Jess assured him “I would make sure you were treated like a normal person.”

As I started to weed through the notes (and look at the clock), I realized I could be there all night. So I narrowed it down, making sure that she knew that cleaning up her note list would be one of her chores Saturday, to just the wedding invitation list, variously labelled as: “ Who’s invited to the wedding,” “who’s coming to the wedding,” “wedding guest list,” and of course “Hollywood people invited to the wedding.”

If you were not aware, my daughter is planning her wedding to her boyfriend, Drummer Boy, who seems to be as involved in this process as she is, although he doesn’t seem to have the same level of commitment to Yes to Dress. Also note that this wedding is not high on our “to do list,” as we have told Jessie that she has to live out of the house with friends before even considering booking the Santa Monica pier for her interfaith marriage (as you can see, she has spent a lot of time of this). Given that it took Dan and I 25 years to get married, I was finding it a bit disconcerting to have to scroll through more than 300 notes dedicated to guest lists for a glitter wedding in some foreign country.

But, once I had done deleting those, we (ah, I’ve gone all communal here, having spent more than half an hour swiping my finger and tapping delete. Swipe, tap; swipe, tap; swipe tap; sip coffee; swipe tap) were down to (see the number at the top of the phone screen):

281

Woo-hoo! 281 is a perfect number. Low enough for Jessie to be able to delete or sort, high enough to make it boringly painful, perhaps painful enough to convince her that having MORE THAN 300 notes about one topic is just a bit over the top.

So it went on her Saturday to do list, along with the chores she didn’t finish throughout the week, and which she had to complete before going out on her date with Drummer Boy. Ah motivation.

When Dan and I returned from grocery shopping Saturday morning, I reminded Jess that she had to sort through the notes on her phone.

“Oh, I already did that!” she said.

“How many are left?” I replied, telling her that I could show her how to email them to herself and then convert them to word docs to ….

“None!” she blithely and proudly announced.

“None?”

“No, I deleted them all at once. I don’t really need them,” she said as she disappeared into the family room to watch something on her computer.

Dan had to pull me away from the kitchen cupboard where I was slowly, repeatedly, gently—yes gently—banging my head. 

Subject: Like Seriously

Yesterday, I woke up early to work on a looming (is there every any other kind?) deadline. Of course, it is on morning like this that you can almost guarantee that Jessie will not wake up and just go about her usual routine. No, it is on mornings like this (after a Monday morning where she slept in TWO HOURS past her alarm and missed work at the Foodbank) that she will choose to challenge every little bit of routine that we might demand of her.

We collectively devised a very simple routine with just a few simple rules (like the Rule of One, and we know how well that is working) that she has agreed to follow. We review why we have this list: to help her become more independent, but mostly so we DON’T FIGHT about what she is supposed to do. So, on this morning, of course, because I have a deadline, because I gave her 2.5 hours of my billable time yesterday to drive her to a performance to celebrate International Day of Persons with Disabilities, because, just because, she slept in and why follow a routine anyways? Yes, on this morning, she decides to push every button and limit. From deciding to go straight on to the computer (no breakfast, no getting dressed) . . .

what she was working on on her computer ... and I know this because she LEFT HER COMPUTER ON  when she went off to rehearsal

. . .  to yelling at me because it is almost time to leave and she is missing her bus pass and her wallet and . . . (but she always throws in a few responsible accomplishments into the mix, like brushing and “waterpik”ing her teeth, putting in a load of laundry and responding to e-mails).

This absolute panicked fear of mine that work and words will not have space to bloom (or even just meet deadlines) appears to be a common advent theme amongst some of my favorite bloggers (when I get a chance to read them). See Addie and her missing babysitter, or Amy Julia's ordinary hard stuff.

At any rate, its all good when I can email my love at work. Somehow the venting lets me move on to the next page, both literally and figuratively.

Let's Be Clear

Okay. So let’s be clear—we love our daughter, we really do. With all our hearts. But there are times, like this weekend, like Sunday afternoon from 1 to 3 pm in particular, where Dan and I are tempted to drop her at the bus station with a one-way ticket to Timbuktu.

It was between 1 and 3 on said afternoon that our family had a major confrontation about chores not done and plans in jeopardy (Jessie having her friend Rachel over for pizza and TV) because said chores were not done.

It was a busy weekend—that is true (Saturday morning Jessie helps teach dance, Saturday afternoon she has drama, Saturday evening was a karaoke night at the community centre hosted by Lifetime Networks Ottawa). And I did not sit down with Jessie on Friday night and have her develop her usual weekend planner (see image)—that is true. And she did have a lot of laundry and other chores to do—that too is true.

But she is expected to do her chores, and we are pretty clear about that. In fact, I can’t think of a weekend (other than those when she hasn’t actually been here) when she hasn’t been expected to do her chores. We certainly give her freedom in letting her determine when, and we certainly give her support in providing her with checklists so she knows what is expected of her. We certainly try to model actually doing the chores. And we certainly provide a structure and tell her when those chores need to be done by. That’s pretty clear, isn’t it?

Jessie herself had a plan for getting all her tasks done and had written it down . . . all the steps that led up to the evening including: doing her chores, going the bank and getting money out for the pizza, finding the phone number for the pizza, cutting up veggies (the healthy counterbalance to the pizza), making a curry dip etc… That indicates a certain understanding and commitment to getting certain tasks done, doesn’t it?

And yet, when I came back from church on Sunday, I found Dan huddled under a blanket on the family room couch muttering to himself and Jessie singing and dancing upstairs in her bedroom to some loud Disney-esque tween star music.

Apparently, or from what I could gather from Dan’s mutterings, Jessie was not able to complete even one of her chores in the four hours that I was gone without getting sidetracked, and despite numerous reminders, which he is trying NOT to do because he wants to give her some freedom and was hoping that she would step up to the bat because here HE was doing chores and being a good role model, but oh no! And there is no WAY she would survive out there on her own and how on EARTH is she ever going to pursue ANY of her dreams if she doesn’t have the discipline and gets so DISTRACTED and . . .

I refrained from saying “Welcome to my life”—I had, after all, just gone to church—and instead called Jessie down. Our discussion quickly turned into a yelling match with Jessie having a meltdown and insisting that Rachel was coming over no matter what! and they were ordering pizza no matter what!

What it came down to, once we had all calmed down enough to let Jessie speak without interruption, was that we, apparently, had not been clear. “OH!” she said, when we pointed out the list of tasks that had to be done—but were still undone—before Rachel came over. And then she looked at us straight in the eye with an accusing glare, “But you weren’t CLEAR!”

It was at that point that Dan and I got in the car and drove to the bus station to buy ourselves one-way tickets to Timbuktu.