Leanne Shirtliffe ~ Ironic Mom

When the word ironic appears in the title of your blog, it’s perfectly acceptable to post Whiteboard Wednesday on a Thursday.

Today’s guest blogger is Candace. When Candace’s eldest left for university, Candace went looking for a instruction guide for her daughter’s departure from the nest.  And while her first son took up residence on a ski hill, the second son journeyed to Morocco, and her youngest daughter flew off to Rome, she was madly writing her way through the flight manual she herself had hoped to discover.  Readers have been entertained, scared, and comforted by her blog–  www.textmelovemom.wordpress.com and soon will be treated to the complete stories of Text Me, Love Mom – Navigating (Not Stalking) First Flights From The Nest. 

Summer After Summer After Summer of Love

I was young when I had the first of my four kids – twenty-five which I think they call ‘the new eighteen’, but in 1985 no one was putting my rash behavior down to the fact that my frontal lobe wasn’t fully developed, the way I warn my children now that they may know not what they do without that part of the brain that we’ve learned is responsible for; organizational skills, judging risky behavior and – surprise- long term planning.

“Just one more,” I said, over and over again with little planning involved, until I was surrounded by babies and toddlers and a five year-old doula (before I knew what a doula was.)

While mini-SUV’s stuffed with our peers’ offspring were trucking between Saturday soccer games and vogue over-the-top children’s birthday parties – my ‘baby daddy’ and I had already survived hip hop concerts in our basement and read the riot act at a eighteenth birthday party for young-adults-gone-wild. I was insisting that they had to take pure math at the same time I was trying to convince them that all the kids that said they’d had sex really hadn’t.

So of course, I could survey my four kids for a litany of ridiculous things they’ve driven me to say.

I know my eldest daughter would choose a quote from the day after a particular rowdy party that took place during the ‘summer of love” when my vigilant eye was observing her friends ‘hooking up’ at an alarming speed.  I decided I had to warn said daughter about rash desire and uncontrolled passion, and how she should engage in planning and exercise control when being tempted by amorous feelings.

“Okay,” my clever and cheeky daughter said, “but you and dad had us four kids in five and a half years. Are you saying, Mom, that we were all planned?”

And then I said it, my infamous quote:

Your turn: 
How “planned” were you? Your children?

I am pleased to present this week’s guest blogger, C. L. Landers. She is a mother of four who works full-time in corporate communications. She reads books obsessively in order to avoid housework.

Someday she will write a novel that will see the world beyond her hard drive. Maybe even before the kids leave home. No, probably not.

Ironic Mom’s blog takes me back to the days when my kids were small, bizarre, and unpredictable creatures. Now that I’m mom to two teens and two tweens, they are large, bizarre, and unpredictable creatures. Today’s post is my chance to give Ironic Mom a preview of what she’s in for when Thing 1 and Thing 2 hit puberty.

There was a time when my bank account hemorrhaged diapers, baby wipes, and day care tuition. I thought that when my kids got older, I would have so much extra money it would be like having a third income. I didn’t account for the way teenagers go through tennis shoes and jeans like they’re made of wet cardboard. The cost of high school yearbooks leads me to believe that every page is hand-sewn by armies of unionized book binders. Extra-curricular activities bring daily demands for costume money, uniform money, pizza money, t-shirt money, admission money, and on and on and on. If my checkbook had a heartbeat, my kids would be mainlining its lifeblood away.

My finances aren’t the only part of my life feeling the effects of the monkey show that is adolescence. We live in a fixer-upper that’s sustaining damage faster than we can patch it up. Judging by the state of the walls, I strongly suspect the boys have full-contact football sessions indoors when we’re not home. I will never understand why the same boy who can make a three-point basket from across court can’t hit a standard 16-inch toilet seat. At least all our furniture matches—only because all the pizza and soda stains have blended together into one uniform shade.

I don’t find myself saying quite so many bizarre things to my kids anymore. More often I’m stumped by the bizarre things they say to me. My fifteen-year-old daughter can list fifteen reasons why she loves her butt. After a full semester of driver’s ed, she climbed behind the wheel of my car and earnestly asked, “OK, which one is the gas and which one is the brake?” They are so entrenched in the internet culture, I’m seriously considering listing YouTube as a second language spoken fluidly for college applications. However, when I was giving my daughter an abstinence speech, I was shocked to hear myself say:

It seemed like safe bargain to strike, given that her odds of meeting her favorite band are roughly equivalent of her being crowned Queen of England.

Or actually listening to my advice.

~~~
Your turn:
What are some memories you have of being a tween or teen?
Did you destroy your parents’ house?