The Ultimate Relay Race of Parenting (or How 'bout Helping your Mother out and Grabbing the F'in Baton?!?)

Ah, the Olympics.
Every four years the event comes around and I am hooked. My addictive personality kicks into full gear and my obsessive little competitive soul gets the nourishment it craves.
That's right. For 16 days my ass rarely leaves the couch during the evening hours.
I suck up all the statistics and devour all the back stories.
"For crying out loud," I'll say to an empty living room, since the kids aren't nearly as enticed as I am, and have long disappeared from my view. "That poor girl was a REFUGEE and swam three hours to GREECE to flee to safety. Now she's competing in the Olympics. Can you even believe it?"
Silence.
"Hey, did you guys know Michael Phelps arm length spans 80 inches from finger tip to finger tip?"
Crickets.
I know they're all just biding their time until this whole thing is over and their mother returns to "normal."
I'm pretty sure they haven't had anything more than a Hot Pocket for dinner since opening ceremonies. Whatever. They're still better off than that poor Syrian swimmer when she was in the refugee camp.
Now my latest fascination has been the women's 4 x 100 relay race. The determination, the importance of the hand-off, the do-over, the finish...
Makes me think of the stages of parenting.
All the stages, all the roles, all the sprints - they're all important.
Your first stage- the beginning position... that's like when the gun goes off in the race and the baby is born. You're just running like crazy, especially if you're a first time parent. You're not even sure if you're doing it right, you just know you have to survive. You have to survive the sleepless nights, the endless worries. "Lord, Jesus," you think to yourself. "Just let me get through this and get to a stage where this baby is sleeping through the night and I have time to shave my legs again."
Then comes the second position. In relay races, this is often the fastest sprinter. And in parenting, this strategy makes sense. Because as a parent you're always sprinting to get things done in this stage - you're running them to school, you're racing them to activities, you're always on the go, go, go. You think this stage of your life will never end. You look at couples who don't have young children and practically go insane with envy.
There are some race theories that state the worst runner is in the third position of a relay. I don't like the term "worst." I think that runner may not run as fast as the others, but they're just as important. Just like when the third stage of parenting starts. As a mom, I may not be sprinting as fast as I was earlier, but my work is just as important. I have to continue with the baton, and keep racing toward the hand-off. Now I have to make sure my kids have the all-important life skills necessary to continue on their own leg of the race. While I'm still running around and making sure their basic needs are being met, I'm now trying to install a sense of pride, hard work and social responsibility into their incredible little personalities. I'm still running in this third position, determined to do my role on this relay team. But it's tiring, all this running. You still want to make sure you're doing your part so they can win this race.
And one of the most physically and emotionally exhausting things you can do in the parenting relay is when you finally reach the next runner's extended hand, and hand off the baton of responsibilities. In this case, the next runner is your teenager. You watch them sprint off, the so-called "best runner", and take off at an unbelievable speed toward their future. You're wiped out, bent over with your hands on your knees, watching them.
Finally you stand straight, take a deep breath and yell after them, "Now go win this bitch!"

When Your Mom Learns to Text

Isn't it amazing how certain things come full circle?
Back in the early 80s, my younger brother and I would sometimes be home alone while our mother was working as a nurse at the local clinic. She always gave us the same instructions: "Only call me in an emergency."
Right.
We had that number memorized within a hot minute and would call her up in record speed, on a rotary, the second either one of us pissed each other off. Which happened often, since one of our games was called War, and the sole purpose was to inflict the most amount of damage on each other.
She would answer as soon as we paged her and all she would hear would be this gurgling statement, "He is KILLING.ME. Mom!!!"
And I'm sure she'd tilt her permed head down, close her eyes, and sigh. I can't believe she didn't come home and throttle us both, because we sure deserved it. And every day it would be rinse and repeat.
Fast forward a few decades.
Now it's me at work, sitting at my desk. A big part of my job is answering the phones and talking to clients. And I've had to tell my mom eerily familiar instructions: "Mom, only call me during the day if it's an emergency." She's retired now, so maybe our versions of emergencies are different. Don't get me wrong, I love my mom...but we will admittedly drive each other nuts some times. That's the soul of the mother-daughter dynamic.
One of her last "emergencies" was declared after I answered my cell phone hurriedly at work one day. "Hey Mom, what's up?"
"Well, I'm at Kohls..."
The funny thing is, almost all of my friends can share the exact same story about their moms. It truly comes full circle. But in this case, once the vein in my forehead stopped throbbing, I immediately texted my dad. "You need to teach Mom to text. Like ASAP. Thx."
Shortly thereafter my mother learned to text. And it was a glorious thing. My next suggestion to her was to text me when at all possible, rather than call. Mainly because my house is like a bunker and it's hard to get reception.
"But I like to hear your voice," she said. Ok, I get it. I like to hear her voice too sometimes.
My next strong/fierce suggestion to them was to call before they just randomly showed up at my new house. And in full disclosure, my parents were almost always stopping by to do something generous and wonderful - like installing a microwave or dropping off banana bread.
But one time my dad showed up on a Saturday morning and I had to have a come-to-Jesus with my mom.
"Mom, you guys cannot just show up. Especially on weekends. What if I had a dude over who had spent the night?"
My mom looked at me hopefully, "Do you?"
"Well, no. But I could. And it is certainly not going to help my dating life if I have to worry about my dad having to introduce himself to some guy in the hallway."
Message received. As of today, I'd say their compliance rate is a strong 90%.
AND my mom has become a pretty efficient texter, too. She even handled herself remarkably well when one of my good friends, let's call her Sylvia, somehow - inadvertently - mistakenly texted my mother instead of me. How Sylvia had my mother's cell phone number, we will never know. But Sylvia ended up texting my mom (thinking it was me) about her recent frustrations with online dating. "Seriously, all they want to do is fool around and eat your ass. Doesn't anyone buy a girl dinner anymore???" Trust me, the three of us have been laughing about that for MONTHS. Truly though, I think part of my mom's innocence was forever crushed that day she received the accidental text.
Things have really changed with texting the last few years. You can basically have full-blown conversations with minimal words and lots of emojis. And emojis will run the gamut, too. It's no longer just a couple versions of the smiley face. Now you can use the eggplant emoji when you're describing, um, a man's genitals. And you use the kitty cat when you're describing the woman's um, "kitty cat." Sexting with emojis...how cute.
I'm not sure if my mom knows all of that yet. She just started using the coffee cup emoji correctly when she tells me to come over.
She's been working a lot outside this summer. What if, god forbid, she sends me a text: "Ur dad and I are going 2 work in the garden. I hope he shows me his (eggplant emoji)."
If that happens, I think I'll tell her to skip the texting and just call me from now on.
I promise I'll pick up the phone.
Every. Single. Time.