Headphones & Hormones

They've outgrown the highchairs, they can't hear a word you say, and you don't know whose hormones are worse, yours or theirs. Here's my take on parenting teens as a perimenopausal single mom in 2025.

  • Family “Vacations”

    My family and I have just returned from our vacation in Ocean City, Maryland.  It was a good trip, albeit far too short, but we all had a really great time.  I spent the morning cleaning out the car and unpacking our stuff, then uploading all of our vacation pictures and displaying a few favorites on Facebook and Instagram.

    Ok, you got me. I’m full of crap.  I’ve never unpacked less than 48 hours after returning from vacation and I probably never will.  It sounded good though, right?  My suitcases are actually still quite full and sitting in the middle of my living room floor, the only items removed being daily necessities like toothpaste and contact lens solution.  And I still have at least ten empty water bottles littering the floor of my car, along with a plethora of toys, blankets, and various umbrellas as well.

    But I really did take some nice pictures, though.  Like these:

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    So even though the trip was fun and I have the photographic evidence to prove it, that’s not to say it was all hunky-dory every single minute.  (What on earth would I write about if it were??)  Any parent who has ever spent at least one night away from home with a child will tell you that there is no such thing as “the perfect family vacation.”  I’m using quotations to emphasize just how mythical that idea is.

    Here are my five least favorite things about vacation:

    1-Traveling.  Whether it’s eight agonizing hours in a car or three miserable hours on a plane, traveling with kids is the absolute worst way to start a vacation.  Unfortunately, it’s usually the only way to start a vacation.  For us, driving on the way there was actually pretty awesome since we left at 7 p.m. to ensure the kids would sleep throughout the whole drive (thankfully they did).  Our options were to leave late and possibly check in sometime after midnight or leave early and possibly spend five hours driving with a  pissed off toddler in the backseat.  We felt physical exhaustion was the way to go, so we chose to leave late. 

    The ride home wasn’t nearly as pleasant, however.  You know what’s even more fun than sitting in traffic for half a day?  Sitting in traffic for half a day while listening to every season two episode of the Fresh Beat Band booming through your car speakers.  On repeat.

    2-Crappy Hotels.  Due to unforeseen circumstances (I forgot), I booked our trip kind of last minute and ended up with very limited hotel options. So I just selected one with a decent price and fairly good reviews, and hoped for the best.  

    But of course it sucked. 

    I officially loathe the people who gave this hotel its good reviews.  May all of their internet connections be severed indefinitely, and may they be rendered unable to write a faulty review ever again.

    When we got into our room, exhausted from the long car ride and anxious to rest our heads, we immediately discovered that there were flies buzzing around all over the place.  So we told the front desk that we wouldn’t stay in that room, and five minutes later two guys showed up at our door armed with fly swatters and bug spray.

    Um, say what?  I KNOW you are not about to start killing flies up in here.

    We got to a new room eventually, and the next day decided to hit the beach.  Those of you familiar with my blog might be aware of my ill feelings for the beach, but that’s mostly because the beaches here in Staten Island leave much to be desired.  As in, I desire sand that will not stain my bathing suit orange and I desire water free of sharp, broken shells and hypodermic needles.  I guess I’m just picky like that.

    The beaches in Maryland are clean and relaxing enough even for a beach-hater like me.  We spent practically the whole day by the shore having a great time– Little M splashing around in the waves and Little D throwing fistfuls of sand at all of the passersby. But we stayed for so long that I must have forgotten to change Little D’s diaper at some point and, as we walked back to our room, she ended up peeing all over me.

    So I made a mad dash for the room to clean us both up, but to my unpleasant surprise, my key card wasn’t working when I got there.  I couldn’t even get in the door! I then had to stand there as patiently as possible, covered in an aromatic combination of sand, sunblock and urine, while it took three different people to get the damn door to our room open.  Good times.

    3-Unavoidable exchanges with random strangers.  Being originally from Brooklyn, I generally don’t interact well with people I don’t know.  It started off as a safety measure and eventually just became a natural part of being a New Yorker. Whenever I venture beyond the great Empire State, I find overly friendly people to be very irritating.  Like just shut up and keep to yourself, weirdos.  Big M says this is me being bitchy.  He might be right.  Oh well.

    Here are a few examples of what I mean:

    There was a lady I kept seeing on the beach who I then ran into one night on the boardwalk.  She yelled loudly to me “hey! you look different with clothes on!”  Awkward much?

    And, of course, there were a few of the usual “are ya’ll from New Jersey or New York or somethin’?  I can tell by yer accents!” Mystery solved, detectives!

    But let me not forgot the incessant elevator chitchat that accompanies any typical hotel stay.  Since our hotel’s elevator was borderline homicidal and closed on just about every part of my body at least once, I had the same conversation about how obnoxious it was every time I found myself next to someone on it.  Constantly having to talk about it was more painful than whenever it actually closed on me.

    4-Going out to eat. I think the worst part of vacationing with your kids is going out to eat too much.  I can take going to restaurants in small doses, but back-to-back meals spent wrestling my daughter into her highchair while keeping her from violently tossing her apple juice at the waiter’s head is just asking too much.  Kids are too unpredictable for such formal settings– even kids that are well-behaved.  My nephew was an amazingly well-behaved toddler, for example, but he still projectile vomited across a table and down my sister’s shirt at the diner once.  You just never know what can happen with young children.

    One particular restaurant where we dined during vacation did not bother to put a changing table in the restroom.  They were “kid-friendly” enough to have fancy Rubbermaid highchairs and to serve kids meals in cute little sand pails, but not enough to give a crap about where you could wipe your kid’s ass.  Have you ever crouched down to change a shitty diaper while holding a squirmy toddler over your knee in a cramped bathroom stall before?  Well, now I have.  Next to child birth, it might have been the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.

    On our last day of vacation, we tried to have lunch in a restaurant but Little D decided to start screaming at the top of her tiny little lungs the moment we walked through the door.  After getting a dirty look from every single unsympathetic asshole in that restaurant, I finally just said f*** this and walked out.  Big M got the food to go and we ate outside on a boardwalk bench with the sweltering afternoon sun beating down on us, while Little D dropped more greasy spaghetti in my lap than she put in her mouth and Little M almost got crapped on while trying to catch a seagull.

    5-Never-ending bathroom breaks.  Whenever we go out in public, Little M takes so many bathroom breaks that he sometimes makes me wish he were still in diapers.  At home, he can go half the day without peeing once, but as soon as we go out he suddenly has to go every five minutes.

    If we go out to eat, he unfailingly needs to use the bathroom the very minute the food arrives.  If we are in a line somewhere, he always starts doing his little peepee dance as soon as we are next in line to go.  The night we went miniature golfing, he had to stop us at the 2nd hole, the 12th hole, and then once again on the way out, for good measure.  At the beach we couldn’t even tell him to just go pee in the damn ocean, because that’s when he suddenly had to do number two.

    Car rides are the worst of all.  On the way home from Maryland, we’d been driving for several hours when he said he really had to go.  So Big M pulled into a rest stop and brought him to the bathroom, but then he then refused to go in the toilet. Frustrated, Big M brought him back out to the car and we continued on.

    Suddenly, a few miles later, he began crying and  screaming “I HAVE TO GO COCKY RIGHT NOW!!!!” causing Big M to immediately pull the car over and let him shit in the grass right there on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike.  I am not kidding, that actually happened less than 20 minutes before we got home.

    I guess it’s true what they say.  A vacation just isn’t over until someone defecates in public.

    It’s good to be home.

  • Mommies Don’t Get Sick Days

    I recently came down with some kind of virus or infection that made my tonsils so large I was actually rendered unable to speak normally for a few days. I guess science is the only thing that can truly shut me up.

    This tonsillitis, as my doctor called it after shining a 100,000 megawatt light directly into my face and shoving a q-tip shaped yardstick down my horribly inflamed throat, pretty much put me out of commission for about four whole days. In mommy time, four days is more like a month. Stuck in the house with two very whiny young children who alternate between beating the crap out of each other and begging for fruit snacks every five minutes, with no other adult present, barely able to move from the couch and shaking uncontrollably with chills and a fever, while trying desperately to keep at least one eye open to make sure the kids don’t end up killing each other or themselves or possibly the dog, is a teeny tiny glimpse of hell on earth.

    If you have kids, you’ve surely been there once or twice before. If you haven’t, don’t get all cocky. Your kids probably just haven’t yet begun attending that germ-infested virus party called “school” and have yet to wake up screaming their heads off at 2am with a 103 fever, dragging their little sick asses into bed next to you so that they can blow their noses directly into the freshly washed Egyptian cotton sheets you will no longer be getting any sleep on.

    But anyway, back to me and my own ailments.

    Here’s a little recount of how those marvelous four days went for me:

    Thursday

    Happy Birthday to me! Apparently the birthday karma police are mighty pissed that I dared to write a blog post declaring my disdain for birthdays, and have thus decided to give me the generous gift of feeling even shittier than I did the morning after that time in my early 20’s when I tossed back about 10-15 “birthday shots” of straight vodka. Well played, karma.

    Every part of my body is throbbing, I’m hot and cold at the same time, I can’t even get my morning coffee down, and I pretty much feel like death. But I’m not worried. Big M is home, he’ll watch the kids and I’ll spend the day relaxing and sleeping this thing off. A whole day in bed actually sounds kind of awesome. Plus I’m sure I’ll be fine by tomorrow. It’s all good, yo!

    Besides, who needs to have a drink on their birthday when they’ve got fever-induced delirium?

    Friday

    I wake up to Little D’s routine early morning love slap on the head, which, by the way, is still on fire and pounding. Big M is back to work today, so it’s just me, the rugrats, and my golf ball sized tonsils for the next eight hours. But I got this. I think. Little M can miss a day of camp, Little D’s doctor’s appointment can be postponed, and there are enough shows between Nickelodeon, Disney Junior and Sprout to keep them both occupied long enough to leave me alone and let me rest for at least a little while.

    A half hour later I realize that the person who thought that television was enough to subdue my psychotic children was clearly not in her feverish, right mind. So far one kid has thrown a tantrum because he didn’t want blueberry toaster waffles for breakfast and the other one took off all her clothes, diaper included, and peed on the rug. Only 7.5 hours until Big M gets home….

    Saturday

    I’ve been popping Advil every four hours for three straight days now and it looks as though my body temperature is just going to stay at a scorching 101 forever. My tonsils are two giant globes in my throat, each with a growing, self-sustaining population of tiny tonsil people who wage war on any liquid or solid substance I attempt to sneak past them.

    I think it’s time to see a f***king doctor.

    Oh, and these kids? Are one fruit snack away from being shipped off to work in an Indonesian sneaker factory.

    Big M is working again today, so I call him up and basically threaten divorce if he isn’t home by noon so I can go to the doctor before the office closes and before I drop dead right here on my Home Depot area rug. Thankfully for our marital status, he obliges.

    Sunday

    I’ve been on antibiotics for almost 24 hours and there is finally a light at the end of this wretched tonsillitis tunnel. I’ve been so out of it for the past three days that someone could have broken into my house and I would’ve just looked up from the pillow long enough to ask that they leave the air conditioner, take the kids, and go.

    I climb out of bed and go inside to assess the damage. The children haven’t bathed since Thursday, and judging by the tower in my sink, neither have the dishes. The laundry is overflowing from the baskets, and the toys from the kid’s bedroom have spilled out into the kitchen and the living room floor.

    I step over a cabbage patch doll in the hallway and make my way to the bathroom to look in the mirror, then recoil in disgust at the bird’s nest piled high atop my head. There is no uglier sight than that infamous “sick hair,” the unattractive combination of not washing nor brushing for several days and the nappiness created by endless hours of sweating profusely and restless tossing and turning. Not pretty.

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    I open the fridge and there are leftovers in there from a dinner I don’t even recall making. The bread is almost gone and the peanut butter jar is scraped totally clean, which leads me to believe that my kids won’t be in the mood for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches again for a very, very long time.

    Little M looks up at me from his video game, a huge smile on his face.

    “Hi mommy! Do you feel better yet?”

    Aww. He’s so sweet. I look at him and Little D and suddenly a huge wave of guilt washes over me because these poor kids have been stuck in the house all this time too, their sad, little faces pressed against the windows wishing we could just go outside and have some summertime fun. All this time I’ve been bitching about them being so obnoxious to me, when really they were just being regular kids. If anyone was a total nightmare, it was me.

    Now I feel like a whole new kind of shit.

    And then he adds “if you feel better, can you clean up this mess now?”

    ………Does anyone know of any sneaker factories in Indonesia that are hiring?

  • Hoarders: Toddler Edition

    It’s official. I am never cleaning my kids’ room again. I’m leaving it like this forever:

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    There is no point—it’s LITERALLY insane to continue doing it all the time. I read somewhere that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I’ve cleaned that godforsaken room almost every day for the past four years, always with the same hope that I will someday be able to still see at least SOME portion of the floor a day or two later, but it has yet to happen that way. Insanity.

    Forget a day or two later; I can’t even keep the room clean WHILE I am cleaning it because I have a tiny gremlin who follows me around, gleefully emptying toy bins behind my back not ten seconds after I’ve finished filling them up and putting them away.

    And those bins! Those stupid, useless, toy storage bins. Is anything else on earth more of a joke than ANY form of organization system for a child’s bedroom?

    Ikea, you ignorant slut!

    Whoever seriously believes that putting rows and columns of orderly, colorful, possibly even labeled (HA!) toy storage bins in their child’s room will actually keep it neat for any period of time must not have a child of his or her own. Or else perhaps this naïve person has never witnessed the mischievous joy on the face of a child while they pointlessly yank out a bin and heave it violently to the floor, not even bothering to play with any of the spilled-out toys after the mess has been made.

    Whenever I tell Little M to clean up his room, you know what he does? Well, first he spends a good hour in tantrum mode, crying and bitching that he “doesn’t know how to clean a room.” But then he takes everything, EVERY single object in sight, and dumps it all into a gigantic heap inside Little D’s crib. Gee, how helpful. Thanks for putting the box of diapers at the very, very bottom of the pile–won’t be needing those anytime soon, I’m sure.

    That crib, by the way, is no longer functioning as a crib but a halfway house for stuffed animals.

    I’m starting to believe that the only way to keep a kid’s room neat is to lock them out of it altogether. I suppose it would also help if toys were confined to a playroom of some sort, but not everyone is fortunate enough to have one of those. Obviously I’m not one of those fortunate people. Are you? Yes? Well screw you, go watch an episode of Cribs or something.

    You think I’m kidding, but I’m dead serious (about not cleaning the kids’ room, not about screwing yourself). I am taking a stand. I will no longer be a slave to their little toy lair; tirelessly separating Matchbox cars from action figures, LEGO’s from Lincoln Logs, princesses from superheroes, markers from crayons, and Leap Pads from iPads, all the while wondering if the random little plastic pieces I keep finding everywhere belong to a dollhouse or a Batcave or some shit I threw away two years ago.

    I will never again spend an hour of valuable time assembling an elaborate race track, only to return barely twenty minutes later and find it already broken up and destroyed, pieces scattered all over the room– under beds, behind the toy chest, in upturned buckets and basically everywhere BUT where I just left it after sixty long minutes of meticulous labor spent putting the damn thing together.

    I will no longer be victim to cuts, bumps, bruises, scrapes, ankle twists, stubbed toes or possible concussions whilst attempting to clear a path through a dangerous toy-laden battlefield. I refuse to trip over train tracks, slip on coloring books, nor step directly on top of any awkwardly shaped dinosaurs with sharp, pointy tails pointed up toward the ceiling.

    I will not be tempted to back my car over any more freakish, talking, stuffed dogs with no “off” button who randomly belt out the ABC’s or count to ten on maximum volume whenever something nearby has breathed or moved a pinkie. I will replace nary a single battery on anything that walks, talks, roars, jumps, hisses, barks, or urinates.

    I will never again gag upon the unsettling discovery of some misplaced, putrid-smelling, half-empty baby bottle of rancid, clumpy milk hidden in a dark corner somewhere behind a dresser or bed for God only knows how long.

    I will never again waste a whole afternoon folding, sorting, organizing, rearranging, and vacuuming every inch of my children’s disastrous bedroom, then watch in horror as they stampede through it and undo all of my hard work within milliseconds like two insane little Tasmanian Devils on crack.

    I don’t even care if I can no longer FIND my children when they are playing in their room. All the better! Out of sight, out of mind, I say.

    I swear I am never even touching a toy again.

    Anyone else with me?

  • Not A Happy Camper

    Last month, Little M received the “most enthusiastic” award from his pre-k teacher at his preschool graduation ceremony. She said he brought “an energy and special sparkle” to their classroom every day. I was beaming with pride.

    However, of the words I would use to describe my son’s disposition when leaving for his second week of day camp this morning, neither “enthusiastic” nor “special sparkle” come to mind.

    Not only did he cry hysterically the whole way there, he then refused to go inside the building and begged me to take him home.

    I almost gave in and took him back home after about ten minutes of tears and protests but then his camp teacher came along and promised to let him play with the iPad during free play time. He reluctantly decided to give in, since he’s kind of obsessed with video games of any kind. Thanks for passing that on, Big M!

    Please don’t think I’m a monster for making him go to camp during his summer vacation, even though right now I feel like one. While I admit I did it partially because I feared that having both kids up my ass nonstop for 75 straight days would drive me clinically depressed and/or insane (again), I honestly thought he would get used to it quickly and be loving camp by the second week.

    Boy, was I wrong.

    After I dropped him off, my heart was heavy with the guilt of having talked him into doing something he didn’t want to do partially for my own benefit. So a little while later I decided to risk looking like a pedophile in stealth-mode and creep super-slowly past the camp’s playground with my windows up to see if the kids were playing outside– if I could catch a glimpse of Little M on the monkey bars or playing tag with some new friends then perhaps I could liberate my conscience and reassure myself that I’d done the right thing by leaving him there. Sure enough, the kids were all outside, running through the sprinklers, playing hopscotch, and having a total blast. Well, most of the kids were.

    Little M was sitting on a bench in the corner all by himself, looking like his puppy just died.

    What’s that sound you hear? Oh, that’s just my heart breaking into 40 billion pieces.

    I learned a new interpretation for the word “restraint” today, because it took every ounce of restraint in my entire body not to immediately throw the car in park, snatch my baby off that wretched playground and never look back.

    Why didn’t I just do that, you ask? Well, when Little M started school two years ago, he was also miserable at first. Crying, bargaining, refusing to go, the works. That smart little mofo even used to lie and say his stomach was hurting so that they would have no choice but to call and make me pick him up.

    But eventually, as expected, he began to enjoy going to school. He actually started to look forward to going and seeing his friends every day. Added bonus for me? I got to enjoy doing my grocery shopping in the morning without being tempted to leave my children alone in the candy section until I finished checking out.

    His pre-k teachers were not at all kidding about Little M’s enthusiasm; he really is a silly, fun, happy, energetic, sweet, crazy little boy. But the problem is that he just doesn’t do well in new places or around new people, a characteristic he admittedly gets from me. When I was a child and my parents put me in camp, I used to cry so much that they usually broke the rules and put me in the older groups with my sister and brother just to shut me the hell up. I refused to eat, to make friends, or to participate in any activities at all. I was a camp counselor’s total nightmare. Come to think of it, I’m surprised someone even bothered to jump in and save me that time I fell into the deep end of the pool….

    Luckily for Little M, he and my introverted younger self differ in that sooner or later he WILL warm up to camp and his true, amazing personality can emerge and help him make some new camp buddies. I just don’t know how many more tearful mornings we have to endure until that occurs, and this guilt I feel may drive me to give in before it does. It also may drive me to drink before noon, but that I can live with.

    Is it just me, or is this whole “parenting” thing getting harder and harder every day?

  • Go Shawty, It’s Ya Birthday!

    Birthdays. They used to be so awesome. When you were a kid, you got new toys and games. When you were a teenager you got new clothes and maybe a new cell phone. When you were in your twenties you got free shots at the bar.

    But in your thirties (and beyond), all you really get is the sudden appearance of crow’s feet, frown lines, and grey hairs.

    I’m coming upon the 10th anniversary of my 21st birthday and to say I’m not thrilled about it would be a pretty big understatement. Basically, I’d rather undergo a root canal without novocain while floating on a tiny raft in the middle of the Pacific ocean, surrounded by bloodthirsty great white sharks, than turn another year older.

    To add insult to injury, my son has just turned five and he’s lost all signs of his mushy-faced, chubby-bellied, lispy-speeched toddler-ness. He’s just like this regular school-aged kid now. That means I can no longer claim to be the young, cool, new(ish) mom whose kids are way too young to make her anywhere even remotely near middle aged– and who totally looks like she may have even been on an episode of Teen Mom.

    Mark Twain once said “age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” He’s definitely got a cleverly worded point that offers some reassurance, but people sometimes take it a little too far. Case in point:

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    Oh, Tan Mom. You might not mind but the rest of the world kinda does.

    Another year older or not, birthdays pretty much always suck—sometimes even before family life comes along. They’re like New Year’s Eve, when there are all these high expectations and you feel like you have to be doing something spectacularly awesome and thrilling or else you should just go find a very tall bridge and jump off it. So you think ahead and make a plan, and you’re all dressed up and ready to go out and have fun, but then something goes wrong and you drink too much and next thing you know you are waking up on your bathroom floor with tile marks on your face, and you can’t find your purse or your left shoe and the last thing you remember was flirting with a guy who makes erotic balloon animals for a living at a restaurant where the waitresses are all Asian transvestites.

    Or something like that.

    My point is, part of growing up is realizing that birthdays are just going to get worse every year. Even more so if you have kids, in which case the only birthdays that even matter anymore are the ones with expensive cartoon character-covered birthday cakes, twenty screaming kids on a sugar high and a clown/face-painter/magician who charges more per hour than your shrink will after the whole traumatizing experience is over.

    Unless you’re married to someone with some imagination who genuinely gives a shit about your “special day” (like if, say, your husband wished you a Happy 30th Birthday on the jumbotron at Madison Square Garden, which actually happened to one lucky friend of mine), then chances are your birthday is going to bite the big one. You’ll eat some fattening cake that you’ll regret later at the gym, get a gift card or two from any family members still kind enough to buy you a gift even though now you have kids that they’re stuck buying gifts for too, you’ll gush over the adorable homemade card that your kids made for you even though when you opened it a gallon of glitter fell out and divided itself between the living room rug and the dog’s fur, you’ll hit “like” on the 75 mildly sincere birthday wishes on your facebook wall, then you’ll slap on an extra coat of wrinkle cream and call it a night.

    And I’m cool with all of that. Really, I am.

    Just please don’t tell my husband I am, because birthdays are rarely a big deal for adults in his family (see his mom’s delightful partially melted 49th birthday Carvel cake below) and so he’s always super clueless whenever mine rolls around. I’m usually okay with that, as annoying as it might be. But I’m expecting a little more from him this year after he recently told me on Mother’s Day “I really hope this breakfast I made for you justifies my lack of a gift. Or card. Oh and did you get my mom anything yet?”

    He’s really not a big fan of sleeping on the couch and I can scramble my own eggs, so if you see him, tell him kick it up a notch this time? Thanks.

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