Dads Play Big Role in Parenting

Back in the ‘60s when girls’ sport were taboo, my dad taught me how to throw a perfect spiral, pitch a baseball and shoot a basket.  Each time he tossed the ball to  my brother, he also threw once to me. He made sure to hit each of us an equal number of pop ups to field. He showed me how to hold a baseball glove, pump up a basketball and take a fish off the hook.

Papa Mac passes on tradition

Papa Mac passes on tradition

Like the Pied Piper, as soon as kids saw my dad arrive home from his teaching job, they lined up for a turn at bat. Soon he was pitching whiffle balls to the entire neighborhood. Instead of grass in our backyard, we had permanent dirt-patch bases, a diamond in the rough, the Field of Dreams for an entire generation.

Even though I never saw any other fathers in the yard shooting hoops with their daughters, I never thought it odd. Chasing grounders, running passing patterns and learning the baseline drive with my dad seemed as natural as  breathing. After all, he was a coach and I was an athlete. So what if it took the rest of the society a few decades to catch up.

Today with the acceptance of girls’ sports and working moms the norm, dads’ coaching daughters is no longer an anomaly. The Women’s Rights Movement also liberated men to assume a greater hands-on role in fatherhood.

Today’s dads are free to coach Little League AND girls’ soccer, to build camp fires, make tree forts, piece together Legos, to change diapers, give baths,  bandage cuts. They can also bake birthday cakes, read Good Night Moon, cook bœuf bourguignon and grill burgers.

French dad at 1st Final Four

French dad at 1st Final Four

Throughout our children’s youth, my husband worked the score table, drove the van for our daughter and son’s teams and prepared gourmet meals for all of us. Gérald never batted an eye about running a printing business during the day, and then wearing the apron at night.  Though it may have been a typical behavior for a Frenchman, he paid the bills, balanced the budget and brought home the bacon, proud to be a family man.

Just as I witnessed my dad in multiple roles – caring teacher, inspiring coach, loyal husband -my children saw their father as tough and tender, demanding and nuturing, competitive and compassionate.

Kids raised in families with ball-playing moms and story-reading dads make for a balanced, healthy, wholesome childhood.  Whether organizing car pools, building sand castles or playing catch,  adults investing time in youth yields the greatest dividends.  Worth all the gold in the world !

Homecoming, Always a Celebration

When the kids are little, you can’t wait for the day when they won’t distract you with demands for meals, rides, and errands.  Then bad-da-boom, they graduate and head off to college and onto careers and you long for an interruption – a call, a letter or an email – from that wayward daughter or son.

As they do their best to squeeze you into their busy lives, you find yourself crossing off days until their homecoming.  You bake childhood favorites and stock the pantry with the treats your child used to love when he or she was 6 or 12 or 20.  Suddenly the volume picks up. The screen door bangs; the refrigerator squeaks and the phone rings with their childhood friends wanting to reconnect.

In a flurry of joy, you attack the chores you hate with renewed vigor, you wash bedding, clean under furniture, and air out rooms filled with memories.  Some people remodel, changing bedrooms into bureaus when the kids move on, but I am unable to discard anything. Their rooms remain the same as the day they left, like shrines to their childhood.  Sport medals hang from bedposts, favorite books perch on shelves, stuffed animals sit on bedcovers, posters of athletes and pop artists cover walls and closets remain full of Beanie Babies, Little Ponies, and PlayMobile figures.  OMG! Am I the only mom that cannot part with my children’s keepsakes decades after they grow up? Each time I step into their rooms, memorabilia lets me stop time to relive that stage in their lives, which, in retrospect, blew past the first time around.

baking family favorites

baking family favorites

My parents, edging toward eighty, still spoil their adult children.  Mom fixes my brother’s favorite meal,  “Swiss” steak, a cheap cut of meat slow cooked in tomato sauce that has nothing to do with Switzerland.  (No one is really sure it ever was his favorite, but it has become part of our family lore.) They stock up on veggies for me, which makes them laugh, because as a kid I hightailed out of the kitchen when anything green showed up.  They tidy up before one sister visits; or add an extra bit of disorder for me, more comfortable in chaos.  They indulge in the same rituals for grandchildren, fixing favorite meals and stocking up on favorite brands: Yoplait Strawberry (only) Custard Yogurt, Kraft macaroni and cheese, and Wisconsin Colby.

Homecoming is a universal ritual everywhere in the world. When we go to Normandy, my in-laws, nearing their nineties, will lay out the finest fare the land and the sea can offer. My mother-in –law still slings a basket over her arm to shop at the open market, preparing to serve five course meals with my husband’s favorites, from coquilles

traditional diner in Normandy

traditional diner in Normandy

St Jacques to strawberries in cream, while my father in law uncorks a bottle of his best burgundy.

My youngest sister recently returned home and said, “It was great.  I never cooked a meal!  Got to talk as much as I wanted.  I was the Babe again!”

Whatever your age you will always be somebody’s kid.  You are never too old to come home.

Downsizing Hurts the Heart

When I look out in our carport I am still shocked….”Honey, who shrunk the car!” Our new vehicle looks a fourth of the size of our old van, as if somebody waved a magic wand and turned it into a shiny compact model. Now my ride is so sporty and spotless, I am afraid to even turning the key in the ignition.

As empty nesters in a first painful step toward downsizing, we bid a fond farewell the 7-seater packed with memories of mountain drives, trips across France and basketball tournaments throughout Switzerland. But better to shrink the car than the house.

Even though in the absence of children, our home, small by American standards is too big. Our four floors, stacked like building blocks, house only two inhabitants, yet every closet is crammed and every shelf overflowing. I need the space to store all the memories.

My house begs for a major make over, a purge, a clean sweep, but I remain immobilized, as if parting with anything is like pitching a priceless heirloom. Shelves overflow with books marking each stage of childhood from Goodnight Moon to Bernstein Bears to Harry Potter to Lord of the Rings. I find it no easier to toss old board games like Candy Land to Life to Scrabble. Old sweatshirts and t-shirts representing every team my son and daughter ever played for – or even supported – line closets. Random basketballs, footballs, and soccer balls still bounce off shelves.

And the toys! How can I part with Nic’s pirate ship and electric train set or Nathalie’s Little Ponies and Beanies Babies, all 300, that she once so lovingly recorded by name and birth date, replacing the pets we never owned.

Alas even harder to part with are the papers, like my own Taj Mahal of colored binders filled with decades of anecdotes, stories and journals capturing first smiles to first spills from first races to braces, first cars to colleges, stacked from the floor to the ceiling recounting each age, every stage of our lives.

Even though I understand intellectually that my daughter, soon a medial resident, anywhere USA and my son, filled with American college coursework and commitments, have embarked on their own career paths thousands miles away. In my mind, I know they return home as temporary guests before embarking on their next adventure, yet in my heart, I am unable to part with the past.

In every room of the house fleeting reminders of ball games, art projects, research papers, road trips, and special occasions bombard me. As if by discarding anything, I would shatter that perfect illusion in the collective kaleidoscope of memorabilia that made our family unique and beautiful.

Empty nest

Sept. 13, 2009. Now that printed word is dying, the only way I foresee getting published in the near future is 10 seconds in cyberspace. So Gerald sent me up to become a blogger even though I am of the fraidy cat generation anxious about technology. The economic crisis of 2009 has become so dire that many worry newspapers will not survive. Magazines will be the next to topple.And lastly, books may bite the dust. A bleak outlook for a wannabee writer.Pessimism abounds in our home. As a printing company director, Gerald sees the writing on the wall, but refuses to read it –what is life without words? Email, SMS, Facebook, twitter, blog, it’s a brave new world. How will the over the hill, hard print loving, fifty somethings – ever fit into 21st century.

The existential crisis is nothing new for me.I never outgrew the adolescent angst about, “who am I? ”My life course complicated the question. I moved 12 times in 18 years between 4 different countries on 2 different continents. Since the age of 26, when my pro basketball career ended in a harrowing accident abroad, I kept rewriting the script.

My most recent transition… empty nester. Our daughter long gone enters the medical world as a doctor-in-training in Minneapolis. Our son joins her at Macalester in the Twin Cities. Our living room is tidy, the grocery bill dropped, washing machine stopped spinning, phone never rings, and no one limits my computer time. The house has never been so neat, organized and easy to run. What am I crying about? The emptiness, the haunting loneliness, the bittersweet nostalgia of days gone by when I was M-O-M on call 24/7.

Waves of sadness hit me at random moments when I least expect it. At 8 am as I drive to school sans an inert jean-clad, body slumped in silence under a hoody riding shotgun next to me. At 5 pm when I come from work, the trail of snack wrappers, Poweraid bottles and notebooks trailing from the kitchen to the bedroom has disappeared. Lebron T-shirts, mesh shorts and blue jeans no longer dance in the breeze on the line outside my window. No one asks, “What’s for dinner?” “Can you take me to practice?” “Got any money?”

If my refrigerator, gas tank, and pocket book are so full, why is my heart so empty? Everyday I give myself a pep talk… Isn’t this what I longed for, uninterrupted time alone, no socks to wash, no meals to cook, no one asking to toss the football, catch the rebound, or edit an essay, “ASAP it’s due tomorrow, Ma!”

“Quit moping! Snap out of it,” I repeat like a mantra. He didn’t get hit by a car, fall off a mountain slope, join a cult, drop out of school, get sent to Iraq or any of the zillion other things a mother worries about. Instead he accomplished more than we ever dreamed. He graduated with honors and flew off to college 4,000 miles away. While he enters new adventures, his dad and I remain behind marveling at how that kid, who now towers above us, grew up so fast when we weren’t looking. In a blink, he is gone from day to day lives, but never far from our hearts where he remains cherished at every stage, all ages, always and forever our beloved, green-eyed, Franco-American boy.