As a single woman slightly past her thirties, the season between New Year’s Eve and Valentine’s Day can be tough. I sighed as I spotted the red velvet hearts and ubiquitous teddy bears smiling like furry cherubs from the shelves right next to the Christmas candy in December, as if to urge me to hurry and find someone, quickly! However, this is not a process one wants to rush into, believe me. Last February, my friend Mike hosted a Valentine’s Party for a large group of single friends who did not have a plus one to spend the evening with. The evite’s only requirements were to bring something sweet to share and RSVP to the S.A.D. party.
A friend had posted a clip of recently found footage of the shuttle explosion from January of 1986. It was hard for me to watch, even twenty three years later. I was walking out of an accounting class at UCF on that clear, cold January day and rushed to get a good view of what had become a pretty common occurrence. My middle school science teacher had walked our class across A1A to the beach to watch the first launch of Columbia five years earlier. The Cape curved out into the blue Atlantic, just north of us and we had an extraordinary view of the liftoff and the vapor trail. I made a mental note to myself that this was something to remember forever and each launch after that always gave me goosebumps.
I work with a special education population and I know we can get a little uptight with the semantics of labeling our kids. Frankly, why we worry about labels is kind of funny to me, because I have yet to meet two children with an identical ”label” who are the same at all!! I admit to having a sensitive ear and heart for my students who are often marginalized in a society that tends to focus on only the best and brightest. Too bad, because you miss a lot of great people along the way who have gifts and abilities that are not always easily quantifiable but just as valuable. So it was with great interest that I watched the furor that the R word whipped up this week in politics as two public figures ended up with their proverbial foot in their mouth.
James Cameron’s ex-wife (number 4, I think), Linda Hamilton, made a statement to the press this week about why their marriage failed…in 1999. His Oscar buzz for Avatar, not to mention him vying for the award against yet another ex-wife, made her statements topical for the moment. She shares details of living with a volatile man who was married to his work and ignored his wife and child. To paraphrase her quote, this was because he had the “opportunity to be one of five people in history to do what he does, 
anyone can be a husband and father”. Narcissistic much James? She goes on to illuminate his poor choices, but curiously did not call him out on his affair with Titanic actress, and wife number 5, Suzi Amis. Maybe that would be the pot calling kettle black since Hamilton’s relationship was also the result of an affair on the Terminator set while Cameron was married to Kathryn Bigelow. Yikes.
I have come to that point in my life of my boys being old enough to have some independence, but young enough to rely on me for transportation, financing and general wrangling of schedules that often overlap and collide. I often remind them that I am M.O.M not A.T.M, but they just laugh because they think I am kidding. Sigh. My oldest is turning 15 this summer and is chomping at the bit to get his restricted driver’s permit. This strikes fear into my heart and I have been secretly praying for Sonny Perdue, in a flash of brilliance, to change the driving age to 18 before heading out of office. But this is a governor that chose to furlough teacher’s salaries for an additional 6 days (work without pay) but protect his beloved fishing hole project in podunk Bonaire, Georgia to a tune of fifteen million dollars in his final budget. I never underestimate what God can do, but I probably shouldn’t expect much from Sonny at this point.
It was a one-two (three) punch. In a matter of weeks, I had three students leave my school. All of these students were in a special program for kids with significant behaviors, often accompanied by an autism spectrum diagnosis. My job is not for the faint of heart, but I have always loved a challenge. One of these students I have had since she was in Kindergarten and K. fit that description to a T. Tall with a flat affect and a deep voice belying a little girl, she could make me break a sweat usually within ten minutes of starting therapy. Her favorite game when she was little was to spontaneously pop up out of her chair and dive across the floor to the safety of a spot under the middle of the table, just out of arms reach. She would giggle furiously while I crawled on my belly (again), to retrieve her and try to get her focused on the goals in front of us. Anyone looking in the window of my door would wonder who was the one in charge!
I came across Rush Limbaugh’s open letter to the President that he broadcast last week. In the spirit of full disclosure, I consider him a complete blowhard capable of shameless self-promotion, a la P.T. Barnum, who captured a 400 million dollar contract . He is paid to stir the pot, I get it. In reading the written transcript of this call to action, I began to get really mad. Cloaked in faux concern, he opened his letter with the statement that he wanted the President to think of him as “the dad he never had”, and he launched into more of the tired rhetoric of divisiveness. Blah, blah, blah.
I was waiting to be seated at a local Mexican restaurant when a little boy and his mom stepped up behind me. I smiled at him and his mom began a discussion with me while we waited for our respective tables. I asked her son where he went to school and he cheerfully announced where he attended Kindergarten. His mother then offered, without provocation, that he was the only Kindergarten student to get into the TAG (talented and gifted) program at his school! She beamed at me and I wasn’t sure if I should shake his hand or give her a thumbs up. Luckily the hostess rescued me from this self-congratulatory family moment.
I bought my ten year old son tickets to the Royal Rumble WWE wrestling event last October as a Christmas present. Three tickets were wrapped in a box, one for him, a friend and the chauffeur, me. I didn’t realize when I bought the tickets that this event was not just a wrestling event, but THE pay-per-view extravaganza of the year!! He was beside himself and has been counting down the days until Sunday, January 31. We drove to Phillips Arena in downtown Atlanta and found a parking space relatively close for the highly unreasonable price of twenty bucks. I was so glad we got there an hour before the start time as we had to wait in the cold, wrapped around the CNN building for almost an hour before we went in.
I remember that song from my Girl Scout days, “Make new friends,but keep the o-old, one is silver and the other gold. A circle’s round, it has no end. That’s how long I want to be your friend…” How I can remember that, but not where I park my car at Target is amazing to me, but that is a whole other discussion!! The song came to mind this weekend as I finally aligned the stars and the moon to catch up with three circles of friends that I hadn’t seen in a while. Like most moms, I am caught in a weird twilight zone of schedules that include work, kids, activities and have to dos. One of the very few benefits of being a single mom is that I get 48 hours every other weekend to myself. This usually flies by with the to do list that I avidly try to avoid dragging my boys through, so I have learned to schedule my friend time ahead wisely.
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