The Musings of a Latte Queen: Narratives of Everyday Life

I was talking to a couple friends of mine last week about my son and his high school career. The first friend and I both have children in the class of 2012.  We often commiserate about their at-times lack of focus.  We share about the missed assignments, the triumphs of an accomplishment, and the overall trials and tribulations of high school.  And we reassure each other that they will be juniors next year and hopefully we won't have to feel like we are back in the hallowed halls of adolescent knowledge. My other friend hasn't even been to kindergarten yet with the kids.  They are still in the oooh and aaah stage of child rearing, the most stressful thing is getting them to daycare in time for their busy careers.  This friend told me that I shouldn't have to hourly monitor my son's studies because I'm not the one in high school.  I silently laughed and said, oh, just you wait, your time is coming. We, my other high school parents and I, monitor our ...

So I can probably say I am having one of those days that can be termed "free flowing." Well, not actually.  I mean, how free flowing can it be when your newly minted sixteen-year-old woke up at 4:30am literally spilling his dinner in the bathroom sink?  That was my Tuesday morning. Said kid cleaned it up (hey, if he can drive...NOT...he can clean up after himself), took a shower, and stumbled back to bed.  Only to get up an hour later and do it again...this time hugging the toilet bowl. This went on all day Tuesday. Then Wednesday, that is today...right...?  I spent most of it driving around picking up assignments for said kid who was still getting sick as late as 7:30pm Tuesday.  Oh, and did I mention that my husband was gone because Tuesday was the university's graduation and today he is gone on a one day (meaning, late, late tonight) trip for a professor to receive an award?  Yep, he missed out on all the excitement...and the mounting laundry. I v...

Tomorrow is Mother's Day. I always have mixed feelings about that day. My mother died when I was four.   People may not realize the deep loss and impact that single event can have on one's life.  It certainly affected the lives of my younger brother and I.   Anchor-less.  That is probably the way most motherless kids have described it.   The mother is a certainty, you know you belong to her.  I do not have that knowing, she died before I could remember anything.  I was barely four, my younger brother was still a toddler and a newly minted three-year-old.  We were babies. When I was growing up on 311 Gordon Street, I felt the lost most keenly.  I had a step-mother who claimed to love me and my brother, and perhaps, in her way, she did, but we certainly were not recipients of unconditional love.  She kept me alive when asthma would cause body-jerking spasms in my pencil-thin frame.  She taught me how to keep a house and prepare ...