Not Missing The Baby Days

When my son was a baby people would come up to me in stores or in restaurants, bend down to look into my son's seemingly innocent blue eyes, gaze at his big blonde curls and say, "Oh, I miss this stage!" And I would smile sweetly and think to myself, "They must not remember what it's really like."

I like babies but I'm not a "baby person." I also learned during the mom's group that I attended during his infancy that, compared to his peers, mine was not an "easy baby."

"He's spirited!" The maternity nurse said as my son screamed like a banshee in her arms. "He's out spoken!" His daycare provider explained. My all time favorite quote was from one of his preschool teachers who told me, "He lacks a certain subtly of emotion." And yet he really was cute, and very smart and, when he wasn't screaming like a banshee, very charming which made me wonder, would I too miss this stage when he outgrew it?

My son just turned 12 on Tuesday and I think I have my answer: No.

For one thing he's still cute smart and charming but the screaming-like-a-banshee-thing didn't stand the test of time. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't have fond memories and those baby/toddler years provided me with tons of wonderful stories but still, I don't miss those years. The fact is I really, really like who he is now.  Yes, I know he's an adolescent and that this can also be a challenging stage.  He reenforces that point whenever I try to take him clothes shopping (for those of you who have younger boys, be forewarned; once your child hits the double digits he will no longer indulge you while you window shop at the mall).

But although he certainly has moments of "hating me" so far those moments don't last any longer than they did when he was younger and they haven't increased in frequency.  He shows no sign of being embarrassed by me at all.  If anything he seems rather proud to call me mom. As for being less affectionate...well this morning he came into my room to give me a hug because he thought a hug would be a good way for me to start my day so that's a bridge I don't have to cross yet.

And is (and continues to develop into) a really cool individual.  So many of his observations about society and our world are not only spot on but are incredibly insightful.

And he hasn't lost his sense of wonder at all despite the fact that he once worried that he would.

See, shortly after his fourth birthday I took him to a Natural History museum (one of his favorite things to do). He had a great time but once we left he got very quiet, then teary. Finally he told me what had him upset. "What if, when I get older, I forget how wonderful dinosaurs are. What if I just don't feel it anymore?"

It was such an odd and moving question (coming from a four year old) that it actually took me aback.  "That might not happen," I said. "Maybe you'll always love dinosaurs. Who knows? Maybe you'll become a paleontologist."

And I'll never forget the little smile that took form on his lips as he considered this. For about six years he insisted that yes, he would be a paleontologist.  Now he's not so sure but he is still impressed with dinosaurs. He still finds new new scientific studies, paleontological and archeological finds awe inspiring.  He is interested and...and awake enough to understand how fascinating our world is. The fact that he's been able to maintain that while maturing and becoming more independent...well it just thrills me.

So as much as I loved who he was I don't pine for those years.  I'm too excited about the now and next. What career will he choose? What college will he want to go to? How will he handle himself in high school? Will he still want to be part of his school's DC trip next year?

Will he give me a hug tomorrow morning?

So many possibilities...

-Kyra Davis

 Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Mystery Series
, and
So Much For My Happy Ending
order the latest release, Vows, Vendettas & A Little Black Dress today!

I'll Support Him In Whatever He Does...But Does It Have To Be That?

The other day I went snooping through my son's Google account (this should be a requirement for ALL parents of adolescents).  And I did find something shocking. Stories that he's been writing. Lots, and lots, and lots of stories. A few of them were clearly meant to be the beginning of a book. 

Throughout my son's 11 years of life I have tried to facilitate his interests. When he was two he became interested in Ancient Egypt and so we went to the library and found countless books on the subject.  By three and a half I was reading him Egyptian mythology as bedtime stories.  I took him to see artifacts and taught him how to spell his name in hieroglyphics. But it was also around the height of his fascination with Egypt that he expanded his interests to include dinosaurs and paleontology.  So again, we got books, we went to museums, we collected fossils, we even checked out fossil replicas from the Los Angeles Natural History Museum's educational department so we could study them in our home for a week. And when he told me he wanted to be a paleontologist I thought of the tedious work of cleaning fossils with a toothbrush, the grueling hours of digging in the hot sun and the mediocre to low pay and I said, "If that's what you want to do, I'll support you all the way." 

After all, it's his choice, his life. I'm not going to judge or tell him what his priorities should be.  I continued to support him when he updated his goal from paleontologist to paleo-geneticist.  I'm not even sure there IS such a thing as a paleo-geneticist but if he wants to pioneer a new field, more power to him.

But a writer? That one's a little harder for me to get behind. In the last eight years I've written and published 6 books, a short story and a few articles and essays.  The ups and downs of this profession are intense.  The rejection gut wrenching.  The wins fleeting. It's a hard life. I've chosen it for myself and while I don't regret it I do occasionally wonder what it must be like for those who have a passion for other things like, oh, I don't know, accounting. If there's a kid out there who is lying in bed, dreaming of becoming a CPA, well I think that's a kid who's going to be okay. His path has been tried, tested and is ready to go.  And until the government comes up with a tax structure that is easier to understand (yeah, right) there will always be a demand for those who have a love of adding, subtracting and turning family vacations into deductible expenses.

And yet my whole philosophy as a parent is to support my son in any and all educational extracurricular endeavors he chooses to pursue. I'm not the Tiger mom. I'm not going to force my kid to play the piano if he hates the piano and I'm not going to force him to practice tennis for four hours a day thereby turning something that was once enjoyable into a chore. But I will help him to understand that pursuing his passions, be they in science, history or some kind of creative expression, can be an exciting and invigorating thing to do and more than worthy of his focus and dedication. So who am I to advise him against harboring dreams of becoming a writer if that's what he wants?  Who cares if it's a tough profession?  It's not like there's a huge job market for paleo-genetists either. 

Of course the difference is that I have no idea what it's like to try to break into and sustain yourself within the field of paleo-anything. I DO know what it's like to be a professional writer. I have the burden of too much information.

So I asked him. In the most neutral voice I could conjure up, I asked if he was interested in becoming a professional writer.  He paused, thought about it, and then said, "I think it's better as a hobby." I suppressed a squeal of joy and settled for a nonchalant nod of agreement.  

And yet when he created a storyboard to help him put together a play and recruited another friend to write the score, I began to wonder if "hobby" had been a euphemism for "serious career possibility." Ah well. I'm getting my seatbelt on and my pom-poms out. This could be a bumpy ride and I intend to suck it up and cheer him on all the way.

Kyra Davis

Bestselling Author of:

The Sophie Katz Mystery Series

and

So Much For My Happy Ending

Order Vows, Vendettas & A Little Black Dress today! 

The Ultimate Stalker-Mommy

While in Maryland my three-year-old nephew asked me to read him a book titled Love You Forever by Robert N. Munsch.  I had heard of this book, I know it's a favorite for a lot of people, but I had never read it before.  So I pulled my nephew close to me and began this new literary adventure with him.  I found the first page sweet, although I did think it was a little odd that the mother "crawled across the floor" in order to check to see if her baby was asleep before picking him up and singing to him.  I mean is the kid that light of a sleeper? And if he is maybe she shouldn't pick him up.  Still, the sentiment is nice.  And she does the same when he's a troublesome toddler.  Again, crawling weird, rocking and singing to a sleeping child not so much.

But when she does the same thing to her boy when he's a nine-year-old and later when he's a teenager I began to worry about the family dynamics that existed in this household.  My son is eleven and while I could still pick him up I certainly couldn't do it without waking him.  The fact that this mother is able to do so to a teenager makes me think that maybe her son has a drug problem.  No one above the age of seven can sleep that deeply naturally.  And why is she still crawling?! Is it so she can scurry across the room and crouch in a dark corner in the off chance that her Ambien-loving son wakes up from his nightly coma?  And if she thinks her son would object to her being there maybe she shouldn't be! Maybe the whole reason he's taking drugs is because he's self-medicating to help himself cope with his stalker-mommy. 

But I didn't say any of this to my nephew.  I just kept reading.  It wasn't until we got to the page where the son is an adult in his own house and the mother has taken a ladder over to his place in the middle of the night, crawled in his window when he's asleep, used her bionic-woman-like strength to lift him into her arms (with out waking him...definitely drugs) that I got the chance to speak up.  My nephew pointed to a kitten in the illustration who was stretching his legs toward the open window and asked,

"What's dat?" 

"Oh, that, is a funky looking kitty-cat," I said in my gentlest voice, "and he's trying to escape because this crazy mommy just broke into the house again."

"Kyra!" I turned to see my sister-in-law glowering at me.  "I've read this book to all of my children when they were this age," she continued. "Do. Not. Ruin it!"

For the record my nephew really liked the way I had answered his question and now had a lot more eager questions for me but his mother was now standing over us and flat out forbid me to answer, repeatedly reminding me to "stick to the script."

I did.  I got to the scene where bionic-mommy is on her death bed and her son sings to her for once and yes, the scene did pull on my heart-strings.  And then I get to the page when he comes home, lifts his sleeping daughter up from her crib and sings the song his mother has been singing to him to his infant child...which begs the question: If he was really asleep while his mom was singing the song how does he know the words? So maybe he isn't a drug addict.  Maybe he has been faking sleep this whole time in order to avoid the otherwise inevitable confrontation that would have probably begun with, "Mom, you need to stop this crawling-stalker stuff."

But those weren't the first questions that popped into my mind. The FIRST question was:

"He has a kid?!?! How did that happen?" 

Because honestly, if I knew that my mother was breaking into my house on a semi-regular basis and sneaking into my bedroom I would never have sex. Period.

Now I would never write anything in my blog that I thought might have the slightest chance of causing another author career problems but Love You Forever is already a children's classic and nothing I say is going to deter its continued success.  And I understand why it's a success.  It reinforces the idea that no matter how old you get, or how much you misbehave, your mother will always love you (in the book the toddler version of the son flushes his mom's watch down the toilet, something even my 3-year old nephew was horrified by).  It also has the repetition that young children respond to so well in literature.  And I'm sure many of you are thinking, "Hey! I love that book! My kids love that book! That book has serious sentimental value to me and my family!" Again, I get why it would.  I really do.

I'm just saying that for me personally, as an adult, it sort of freaks me out.  I think that any mother who climbs in her adult child's window in the middle of the night might have a few issues.  I'm just sayin'.


Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Mystery Series
and
So Much For My Happy Ending
Order Vows, Vendettas & A Little Black Dress today!

Parenting Is Quite The Adventure

On Monday my son turns eleven.  Eleven! That hardly seems possible.  Just the other day I was watching him pour himself  a bowl of cereal and thinking, "How did that happen? How did we go from my having to feed you with a baby spoon to your blithely making your own breakfast?" 

I was the first of my friends to get married and the first to have a child.  In fact the early interactions my friends had with my son may be the reason so many of them are just now finding the courage to have children of their own.  My child was not an easy baby. Smart, yes, the child showed his brilliance when he started speaking at 7 months old.  By the time he was a year he was speaking in sentences.  But good God he was a handful and a half.   He wasn't a good sleeper and he only stopped crying when I held him, bounced him and sang to him all at the same time.  Otherwise he would just scream.  The whole Ferber method was a joke.  The child could easily scream all night long.  It's a miracle he didn't damage his vocal chords.  Once in a fit of desperation I put him into the automatic swing at three in the morning and when that lulled him to sleep I left him in it, swinging for four hours straight while I crashed in my own bed.  My mother kept him at arms length during those first two years admitting that she was, "a little scared of him."  When he was two months old I sought out a mom's group run at a birthing center and run by a nurse practitioner.  There was no doubt in my mind that I needed the help of the experts.   A large group of women would sit in a circle and each would have their chance to ask a question or voice a concern they were having in regards to their new baby.  A few years back I ran into two of the women from that mom's group.  We took a few minutes to catch up and then one of them said, "I loved that group.  I would go every week and I would listen to everybody talk about their problems and I'd think, oh, okay, so I don't have the most difficult child in the world."

The other woman nodded in agreement and then turned to me.  "What I remember was you.  You would always be in the back of the room, standing up and bouncing your son, trying to keep him calm and I would just feel so much better!"

"Yes," I snapped, "because I did have the most difficult child in the world! That's what I got out of that group!"

And that is how it felt.  The nurse practitioner suggested I test him for food allergies but as it turned out my son was just intense  And yet I remember the first time I heard him laugh.  I have a picture of that yet I don't have to look at it to perfectly visualize what he looked like at that moment.  I was singing the Beatles to him, Love, Love Me Do and he thought it was the funniest thing he had ever heard in his full ten weeks of life.

When he was 14 months old he was giving me a hard time while I was feeding him and I stepped away, took a deep breath and counted slowly to ten. When I was finished my baby looked at me and said, "Eleven."

I hesitated.  "Eleven?"

"Twelve."

"Twelve?" I repeated again, trying to wrap my mind around the significance of this.  

"Thirteen, fourteen!" He said triumphantly.

"Sweetie," I said carefully to my 14 MONTH OLD CHILD, "you can count to fourteen?"

He flashed me a sly closed lip smile before smugly saying, "Try twenty."

The next day I went to Toy R Us and returned the toy I had planned to give him that I had imagined would help teach him how to count. Obviously it wouldn't be needed. My mother was right, he was a little scary.

And you can't say he wasn't empathetic.  When I first sang to him about the ten little monkeys jumping on the bed he cried for about a week, bemoaning the fate of those poor injured primates. 

And when he was three I found him crying over a show he had been watching on Animal Planet while I was in the shower.  "They're cutting down the trees!" he moaned.  "They call it deforestation and all the animals are dying!"

I sat down next to him.  "I know." I said.

He looked at me accusingly.  "Do something about it! Get on a plane and tell them to stop right now!"

I hesitated a second too long and my son's angry gaze shifted to one of bereft grief.  "You can't do anything, can you mommy?  This is bigger than you." And then he started crying in earnest.  I think at that moment I began to realize how scary the world must be for someone who is that young and yet that aware.  Three year olds should only have to worry about lost toys and popped balloons.  They shouldn't be stressing out over deforestation.  When a baby hears a song about monkeys falling they should be laughing about how funny it would be to see a bunch of monkeys jumping on a bed, not what it means to actually hit your head and feel pain.  Eighteen month old children shouldn't be able to understanding anything they overhear on a CNN report.  When he was five and struggling in school a psychologist suggested to me that he had an anxiety disorder.  When I told a friend of mine this he laughed, "What does a five year old have to be anxious about?"

I didn't answer, but in the back of my mind I was thinking, a lot. 
Of course when I would dare to whisper the world "gifted" teachers and other parents would scowl at me and accuse me of bragging.  Excuse me? I was seriously sleep deprived, I was constantly having to calm my boy down, I had gone through three preschools trying to find one that worked for him (none of them did for any length of time), I hadn't been able to go back to work when I had initially planned to and they thought I was bragging because I thought the child was smart? At that point in time I would have jumped at the chance to trade a few IQ points for an hour more of sleep every night. 

It hasn't been an easy road.  He struggled with fine motor skills, his anxiety held him back in school despite his intelligence. In fact most schools just couldn't handle him at all.  He made a few close friends but his inability to keep it together in a classroom made things more difficult socially.  Of course the close friends he made stuck by him like glue.  He still talks to kids he met in preschool who have long since moved out of state and clearly the affection he feels for these children is mutual.  But his quirks and eccentricities have meant that I've had to manage his life more than I would have liked to.  I homeschooled him for a while which means that I was also responsible for setting up all the playdates (there are no friends to hang out with at recess when you're homeschooling), his fine motor skills made it difficult for him to do certain tasks independently, I've paid huge amounts of money to psychiatrists, occupational therapists and private schools (most of which didn't work out). 

But now we're a few days away from eleven and something has shifted.

It hasn't been a sudden shift.  I can see that it's been gradual and yet it still managed to sneak up on me.  He has a cell phone now and with it he arranges his own playdates.  He has a favorite radio station and it's different than my favorite radio station.  His fine motor skills seem to be improving by the day and at long last I seem to have found a school that he is incredibly successful at.  He even made it on the student council.

And then last night at three in the morning he came into my room upset by a nightmare.  "I dreamt about all those dying pelicans on the gulf," he said, his sleepy eyes all teary.  "This is worse than global warming because at least we can do something about that.  We can drive less and recycle and stuff. But there's nothing we can do to stop this spill and the animals are going to keep dying!"

I kissed him on the forehead and put him back to bed, filling his head with fantasies about magical lands filled with all his friends and favorite animals. 

Things have changed a lot. But maybe not that much.

And I just love that he's making his own breakfast.

Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Mystery Series
and
So Much For My Happy Ending
Order Vows, Vendettas & A Little Black Dress today!