Pam – Page 119 – New England's Narrow Road

Help Me, I Have A 7th Grader!

I have been parenting longer than anyone should have to. In 1988 my first kid hit middle school. He was in the “gifted” class and that meant all kinds of craziness was accepted. I was young and could handle it. It is now 2011 and I am still dealing with a middle school age child and it is not fun. I’ve done two others in between – a boy and a girl – and quite truthfully I am tired of school. Tonight I am listening to a long list of my 13 year old son’s issues.

“The teacher doesn’t like me”, ( Eight times now I’ve told him to get a new piece of paper and get to work.) “This is all stupid”. (He’s been dragging this on for hours). For two days in a row I’ve had calls from his social studies teacher saying that he is way behind all the other students with this project. He is grounded and can’t play video games or go to the lake with his friends. It doesn’t seem to light a fire under him.

I can’t even begin to explain all that has been going on, but I am tired. I never, in my wildest dreams, thought that I would be doing this in my mid- fifties! Oh, I did picture time for myself and going out to eat and traveling in my mid-life years. I pictured myself doing adult stuff, watching adult shows and hanging out with other adults, not making cookies for the end of year school parties (for the 100th time it seems) and dealing with teacher conferences. As I write this my son is flipping his pencil around with his leg up on the chair (he can’t seem to write with his butt in a chair) and mumbling about some reason that his teacher hates him – once again. Anything to waste time. He could have had these pages written hours ago. Now he is drawing on a penny, next he will HAVE to pat the cat, and on it goes.

I’ll do what I usually do, tell him to finish and leave it on the table for me to view in the morning, and go to bed. It is exhausting.

I have long believed that every couple should start out with a teenager. No baby, just a teenager. It would be great birth control.

I don’t know how I will survive the next five years of school with homework and drivers ed! I know what is coming and I am dreading it more than ever. My other three kids are grown and they turned out to be great kids. My child rearing was suppose to stop there, but nothing in my life seems to go as I plan and when I ended up pregnant at 40 the one thing that depressed me most was thinking about all the years of school I would have to do again. That nightmare is here.

Well, we do what we have to do and if we are lucky we have help. I have no help.

Walking the trail New Hampshire outdoors — Walking with my daughter

Skip Ahead to 2021

Yes, time has flown by and now my 7th grader is a grown man. He lives with his girlfriend and is a kind and caring young man. As I have re-read this post I realize I’ve forgotten the tough times, thankfully. My son has turned out well and I am still relatively sane.

I’m still alone, and no one will ever give me credit for all the years I nearly lost my mind raising kids by myself, but the job is finished. My own peace in knowing that I did my best and my kids are okay to go on into adulthood well-equipped is thanks enough, I guess.

Life goes by pretty fast. My kids will be fine without me, and I can go on to wherever we go next knowing that.

kids in summer on a raft at a lake swimming and playing — My son (that difficult 7th grader) and daughter

The Tale of a Dog

I first noticed this mean little dog (not the one pictured here) when I was heading to the bus stop one afternoon and my son had already been dropped off and had started walking up the hill toward home. As I came around the corner I saw my son bent over in the middle of the road holding his lunch box between himself and a barking dog. The dog looked like an over grown “hot dog” with long hair. I pulled up and he got in the car and I sat there for a moment expecting to see the owner come out and apologize or at the very least call the dog in. No one came out.

Since that day, I have terminated my walks as I approach the house where the dogs run loose much of the time. Sometimes they – three of them – would be on the porch and inside so it was “safe” to walk by. I have walked to the bus stop on nice days only to find that I would have to deal with the dog to get there and then again to get home. I had heard from a reliable neighbor that a friend has been bitten by the dog about a year before and the owner had lied, saying that the dog was up to date on it’s shots. My son’s friend also had his pants torn as the dog tried to bite his leg!

Last Friday I picked up my son at the bus stop and drove 2 of his friends home too. As we started up the hill a young girl who was walking home met up with the dog. Sure enough he came out snarling and barking – right into the road and I stopped the car so she could get in and get away from him. It was the last straw for me. I went home and called the town offices and they told me to call the police. The officer said he would give the owner a warning and then he would get fined if it kept up.

The next day I went for a walk and as I passed the house all was quiet. The day after that a sign went up in front of the dog’s house that says, “thanks a lot neighbor, the dogs are gone”. It’s the buzz of our tiny neighborhood, but general consensus is that it was one too many complaints on an animal that needed to be tied up.

As for the owner blaming the “neighbor” for the trouble, well, you be the judge. I pity dogs that have fools for owners.

I May Be Moving To A HOME!

I hate to get my hopes up, but I’ve found a home that I would like to buy. I’ve been busy getting the paperwork -mounds of paperwork- ready and mailed, delivered, etc. I’ve had an inspection and realize that fixing up is just part of owning a home. This one is pretty nice inside and quite “liveable”, but the outside has been neglected and needs work and even some excavating done.

I visited my favorite wood stove shop to see about getting a new wood burning stove inset for my fireplace and now must sell my old stove, or put it up for consignment. I am just waiting to make sure the whole house thing goes through.

The photo is of my son upstairs in his “bedroom to be” and he is excited too.

I also had to have my appendix out last week and now I can’t lift anything over 20 pounds for a month! Guess the packing will have to wait until the last minute. I do better at the last minute anyway!

Meanwhile, I sit here wasting another Spring and Summer season, but staying inside gives me the opportunity to work and build up my savings account for all the home renovations to come. Fingers crossed.

Melancholy Spring

It’s ironic that just when the earth is blooming and becoming colorful after the gray of winter, I become most depressed. That is when I feel most trapped and stifled and must look for a way to enjoy life without doing what most other people this time of year are doing.

As I headed to the store a few days ago, I passed numerous home-owners out in their yards raking away the dead stuff and sweeping the sand out of their driveways. I suppose they are all looking forward to getting out in the gardens and doing yard work for the few short months we have up here in the northeast to do so. I know how they feel. I remember just beginning to realize how fast things had to grow up here, and how imperative it was to start early with getting the ground ready for planting, when it all came to a halt.

Since my ex-husband lost our home, I have struggled to get through this time of year. For 25 years I lived in my own home and I did all of the yard work – except for cutting the grass. I planned out and planted my Florida gardens which included Azaleas, Camellias, Jasmine, Crepe Myrtle, pineapple plants (those were fun), a magnolia tree, an orange tree, a rain tree (blown over by hurricane Charlie) and many others. I loved my Florida yard and it was hard to leave, but once I moved to the northeast I realized that there were lots of great plants to grow.

We moved into a house with a yard that held a couple of small gardens that had obviously been let go. One was full of asparagus plants (yummy-ness straight from the yard!), and the tulips were gorgeous (and new to me, since bulbs don’t grow in Florida). The side of the yard near the road was planted with a forsythia hedge that was stunning the two years I got to enjoy it. There were lilacs, a hydrangea tree and even a big wisteria vine covering a heavy duty arbor. It never flowered while I lived there.

I’m sure I pulled up little plants that I thought must be weeds when I first began to dig around in that yard, but slowly I learned what to keep and what to pull up. We have a couple of good farms in the area and I bought new plants for the gardens as I expanded them. The dirt in that yard was really good, lots of worms, and things grew well. Someone who had once lived there was a gardener, but it wasn’t the people we bought the house from. I added a dogwood bush near the back porch and numerous other plants. The fun of Spring is seeing your work come back once again and remembering what you’d planted from the year before and planning for the new stuff this year. It kept me in shape and kept me happy. I had it good and didn’t realize how good.

I’m getting better about Spring. I am still renting, but hope to change that soon. Within the next year, I hope to have my own place – which of course must have a yard for gardening! Rebuilding a life takes a lot of time, but I am making headway, so there is hope. I used to cry a lot when driving around in Spring, and couldn’t watch t.v. because of all the home related commercials on, but I am much better now. The snow just melted off the Lilac I had planted in my rental yard (a gift from my daughter) and it is crushed from the snow that flies off this metal roof. Crushed, but still alive. I’ll dig it up and take it with me when I go. I have decided to do nothing in this rental yard this year. I am not wasting another penny to fix up a place that is not mine. As much as I love to garden, it’s not much fun any more. I will take care of what is already planted and grow a container tomato, but that’s it. I will focus on moving, whenever that day comes, and try to ignore, once again, all that has to do with Spring.

Growing a Flower Garden Fit to Photograph