For New Old Moms to Learn Old New Tricks
I’m unpregnant, but my labor will last 72 hours. “All you can do is wait”, Nurse Trish advises. When waiting in a 6 by 8 foot Maternity Ward bonding room, with your husband, mother, sister, another woman’s newborn and a rotation of cheerfully Republican nurses, while BabyMama has three days to decide if she can give her newborn up, one might like to advise waiting…
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Dear Reader: This is the origin story of This Old Mom, and happened in 2012. Since I’ve been blogging on Huffington Post, I’ve been going back to the beginning, before two kids took over my life. Clarification: Babymama is NOT my biological mother, but a birth mother we met two days before she gave birth to the infant we hoped to adopt. While chatting up…
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This post was an email response to my last post- I Don’t Look Like This Place– by an acquaintance who asked to remain anonymous. Dear This Old Mom, It is a tough reality check when your child begins to learn that their brown skin may not be as good as the kid with the yellow hair. The memories came flooding back as you were describing…
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Despite my well intentioned white ignorance, Grace’s hair is growing in beautifully. For a year we’ve been dutifully massaging Jamaican Black Castor Oil and Oyin Hair Dew into Grace’s hair every morning. Also, Grace has been taking castor oil vitamins without complaint, which is mighty brave of her. I am more proud of Grace’s five inches of curly resilient hair than my marriage. Even better,…
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Do all mothers Gypsy-Curse their kids? My mother, who I miss thoroughly, Gypsy-Cursed me when I was a wee raging ball of eczema and dozens more inflated or imaginary medical symptoms. When I was seven, I’d routinely wake up at 4am, screaming from a charley horse, which if you are not a child or a hypochondriac, is a spasming calf muscle. ME: I HAVE POLIO!!!!!…
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What we’ve taught our four year old (so far): We don’t clean rocks in our mouth (even pretty rocks). We don’t blow our noses in our shirts, unless Mom forgot Kleenex (which is often). We don’t NOT wipe our butts because we need to resume playing. How to snap (her fingers). What I’ve learned? Kids teach us much more. If we let them. Filled with…
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Since I’m old and sometimes lose the plot of my own stories, let’s start with the end of this story: When you turn fifty, don’t hide anything. Because you will never ever find it again. Upon turning 50, I bought myself a simple gold bar earring made by the exquisite minimalist, Kathleen Whitaker. I was content to buy only one, not only because it was…
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Words cannot fully convey the embarrassment, shame and helplessness one feels when adoption lawyers, social workers and even one’s own mother urges one to ‘make black friends’. Of course, one does know black people and consider them friends, or friend-ish… and one has phone numbers and emails and Instagram and Twitter accounts to back this assertion up, but when one examines one’s soul, especially after…
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Why does every teachable moment in my poor kid’s life begin with This Old Mom making a ginormous mistake? Either I’m not listening or listening while multi-tasking which is basically not listening or it’s impossible to understand what Grace is saying because her current stabs at English give her an accent that veers from Brooklyn to Boston to Creole- sometimes in the same word. One…
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It’s the aisle I’ve never been in before. Actually it’s not even a whole aisle. Somewhere after the Do-Rags, one is suddenly intently staring at replacement wiper blades. Odd how abruptly Ethnic morphs into Automotive. I’m kneeling in the Ethnic Aisle because my mother cursed me, long ago. As a kid, I begged my mom to let my limp, fine hair grow long like the…
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