Invasion!

My legs are bruised from knee to ankle and my ice cream is missing. My home is littered with debris and my furniture is all askew. There are smears all over my windows and my blinds have been violated.

Was it a burglary? A hate crime? A hostage situation?

No, it was a tiny (not tater) tot convention, an invasion of the Grammy snatchers. It was my grandkids.

Although they try hard to maintain what's left of my sanity, the longer I’m in Portland, the more things my kids think up to do so that I can keep their kids. But I’m not complaining. The primary reason I make my twice-yearly trip to the West Coast is so my grandchildren can realize how wonderful I am.

And they have! They think I’m great! That’s because I let them eat chocolate and run rampant. I don’t make them go to bed and, one time, I let Miles watch South Park when I couldn’t find his mother-approved wussy cartoons on television.

My kids don’t dare complain because I’m free and available and I don’t do drugs or text my boyfriend while I’m babysitting. They do get a tad testy about the chocolate, especially when I give it to the little overstimulated urchins right before they come to pick them up.

And I do love those grandchildren of mine, their sticky sweetness, their hugs when I don’t even beg, their goofy smiles, and their childlike, yet discerning, retorts.

But, boy, do they wear me out. Just getting them in and out of their car seats is an exercise in fortitude. Back when my kids were small, we just threw them in the car and prayed for their safe arrival. Now you have to have big biceps, strong thumbs, and a tolerance for cursing just to shoehorn the little tykes in and buckle ‘em up.

And now, you can’t just send your kids out of the house and lock the door. You have to slather them with sunscreen having something called an SPF and make sure the Child Welfare people aren’t being called when they bang on the window when their protection wears off. They're like mini vampires, waiting for the sun to go down before they can venture out.

And then, there’s the park. They always want to go to the park. Even Georgia wants to go to the park, although she often falls asleep in her stroller on the way. Cami’s favorite thing to do is to go up (but not down) the slide. How can a kid who isn’t even two figure out what the rules are so she can break them? Miles’ favorite thing to do at the park is to strip and pee. Right there in front of God and derelicts. My job is to first tell him no he can’t pee at the park and then to shield him from perverts and the police as he carries on with his plan.

When I have all three of them over, it’s like inviting drunken sailors to a tea party. They lurch around and fall down; they fight over the smallest things, pretend to mourn their bad behavior, and then break out into furious tears over the slimmest slight, all the while swilling and spilling and spewing outrageous claims. The rules of war are followed as they adhere to a stringent pecking order: Miles takes advantage of Cami; Cami gets the best of Georgia; Georgia cries; and Miles gets back at Cami. There seems to be no real fear of retribution (at least while Grammy is there), and to put it bluntly, they act just like children.

Bath time is my favorite time, partly because the little imps are somewhat corralled. I've bathed two at a time; never all three. I have bathed Miles and Cami while Georgia tried to climb into the tub. They are so much fun when wet, although they can be slippery. They love to pour the dirty water into cups and suck on the washcloth. I’m pretty sure there’s some urinating going on in there but, so far, no number two.


Since my time with my grandkids is relegated to two weeks at Christmas and six weeks in the summer, I'm realizing that each West Coast visit I make becomes like a snapshot in time. Never again will these three look, act, or be like this, and when I have a moment or the energy to think about it, it feels so precious and makes me a bit melancholy.

But, although I would like to sit and mourn the sweet but sad passing of time and the delicate texture of experience, there's some dried spaghetti I need to scrape up off the living room floor and a diaper in the trash that's starting to stink.

Thank God.

Proximity Worry

My kids call this syndrome “proximity bitching” but it’s really more about worrying than anything else. It seems the closer I am to my grown kids physically, the more I worry, which, I guess, factors into increased bitching (at least from their perspective).

Since, in any given year, I spend just eight weeks or so in Portland (two at Christmas, six in the summer), leaving forty-four weeks in Atlanta, poor Molly carries most of the burden of my anxiety. I worry about her school work, her health, her sleeping patterns, her money management, her cats, and her (lack of) cooking skills.

However, for the eight weeks I’m in Portland, Melissa and Billy are the lucky recipients of my hovering. Just recently, Billy had a series of severe headaches a doctor semi-diagnosed as cluster headaches. As you might guess, within twenty-four hours, I was an internet expert on the topic and the poor guy not only had the headaches to suffer through, he also had his mother texting him every few minutes with stupid messages like“how r u?” or "rate pain 1-10". In addition, after just a couple of days following Miles around, I’m already obsessing over him running out into the street, as if Melissa doesn’t handle Miles and the street all months other than Grammy months. Molly, on the other hand, is getting some time off as I have no idea what graduate projects she has due or what she’s burning for dinner.

I think proximity worry partially has to do with time zones. When I’m in a different time zone from my kids, I don’t fret as much. It’s almost like they aren’t living in real time. For example, when I wake up in Atlanta, it’s still the middle of night in Portland and I figure most people don't do anything really stupid just before dawn. Conversely, although Molly stays up too late and sleeps too late (in her mama’s opinion), it doesn’t bother me as much when I'm on west-coast time, since our personal clocks seem better synchronized from three time zones away.

When I was a young adult, having achieved the status of working woman, wife, and mother, I believed my parents were done with worrying about me, and they certainly didn’t seem to be overly interested in how I was doing, even though we shared a state and a time zone. They retired and traveled, had a cabin on a river in south Georgia, and finally built a retirement home on that same river. Of course, those were the days before cell phones, texting, Facebook, twitter, and Skyping brought immediate information on the good, the bad, and the ugly of us all into virtual proximity. As my parents were merrily puttering down the inter-coastal waterway, they weren't constantly checking their Blackberries for updates on my bad judgment.

I do remember my father being incredibly mad at me when Gary and I split up. Except for wanting his sympathy (which I didn’t get), I believed it really wasn’t my father's place to have an opinion on my screwed-up life. Boy, do I now see things differently. To continue with my somewhat wet analogy, Daddy thought his little girl was safely moored and battened down, and then, all of a sudden, she was back at sea, and unfettered at that. I now know his new worry probably caused his river putter to sputter a bit, knowing I was knee deep in life change.

Just recently, I was talking to Molly about my obsessive worrying and she pointed out that it probably has something to do with loss of control. When my kids were little, I drove them to school, took them to the doctor, and fed and bathed them. Although I did none of those things particularly well, I still accomplished them in my own way, in my own time. Now, my parental tasks involve mostly sitting and waiting - and worrying - and texting some.

I know mental health experts and well-meaning others would tell me to get out, to get a life, to volunteer, to get a turtle or a bird, to pray or meditate. I do use those stress-relieving and centering strategies (other than the turtle, the bird, or any real volunteering), but I have this weird philosophy, which pretty much says if I worry enough, nothing bad will happen. Take income taxes. If I obsess enough over how much I'm going to owe, the outcome will be good and I might even get some money back. Of course, an accounting course could also have a good outcome in that I would learn how to handle my taxes and what exactly to expect, but that accounting thing just sounds so boring.

Back to my kids. The one time I didn't worry about Molly and her health, she ended up in the hospital with emergency gall bladder surgery over Christmas vacation. Even when she showed up at my house with yellow skin and glowing eyes, I didn't worry, or at least I packed it away to be opened later with my winter coat and gifts for the grandkids. We boarded a plane for a cross continental flight with a Vegas layover and landed just in time for a breakneck trip to Good Samaritan and a family Christmas dinner in the hospital cafeteria.

And so, it seems I'll most likely continue to obsess and fret and do smart things and dumb things, worrying when I shouldn't and not focusing on real problems when I should. I'm pretty sure I won't be making any major changes as to how I navigate the world at this late date, so I'll just keep on putting one step in front of another as I stumble through life, figuring it out as I go along. It's not particularly pretty and it won't win any prizes, but so far, it's worked out pretty well.

Except for that layover in Vegas followed by emergency surgery in Portland part.