 |
|||
|
|
|||
|
House of Testosterone by Sharon J. O'Donnell Mom's 'to do' list Someday soon, I promise, I will take down the nativity scene from the middle of the family room coffee table. It’s May now and the Christmas decorating season was five months ago, but I honestly haven’t had the time to put up a few holiday-related items still lying around the house. Of course, the main reason the nativity scene is still out is that we can’t find the specially-cut, Styrofoam box the ceramic pieces fit into – probably thrown away in all the post-Santa wrapping paper debris. Even the expensive digital camera my husband gave me for a gift is still sitting in the same corner it sat on Christmas morning, the camera box never opened. And reading the instruction booklet for the oven we got six years ago has been on my ‘to do’ list forever; sure, I know the basics of how to use it, but there are some buttons and whistles on it that I have no clue about and no time to figure out. From other moms I’ve talked to, this problem of not enough time seems to be more prevalent than ever. There’s always a list of things to get done, with some items continually getting moved to the bottom of the list because things come up that take priority. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that a list will be a permanent fixture in my life. Last week, I went to read books to a group of children in my 6-year-old’s class at lunch. I stay with 5 or 6 kids in the classroom and read to them while they eat lunch (as I drool over how good those rolls on their plates look). Jason, my-six-year-old, sat down in the circle for me to read only to realize his juice box did not have a straw attached. Everyone knows a strawless juice box is pretty useless. So he said, “Mom, I’ll just run back down to the cafeteria and get another one.” He jumped up as I shouted, “No, Jason, don’t run. You can’t run in the halls!” Later I asked him how he knew the word ‘run’ could be a figure of speech instead of meaning the physical act of running. “You’re always running errands, Mom,” he said, “but you never really run.” Spoken like a boy who has had to tag along on too many errands: the post office, the pharmacy, the bank, the grocery store, the dry cleaners. You ladies know what I’m talking about. With another birthday rapidly approaching, I’ve vowed to move one item up on my list and that is to take better care of myself. It took me a while to gather all the stuff I needed, but now my windowsill displays not only the multi-vitamin I’ve taken for years, but also fish oil tablets, women’s aspirin, Lucite eye tablets to ward off macular degeneration which runs in my family, and calcium chewables with vitamin D and magnesium for better absorption. You get to a certain age when taking daily medicine feels more like working on a factory assembly line. Getting away somewhere has also been on my list of things to do, either some place with my husband or by myself. However, mother guilt keeps me from pursuing this goal. Recently, I was out of town for a night at a book reading to promote my book. When I returned home, Jason hugged me and looked at me with sad eyes. “Mom, when you’re not home, I feel like I’m all alone,” he said softly. That, of course, made me feel terrible for leaving him. With just my husband and two older sons there with him, I knew he probably didn’t get much nurturing and perhaps had to even fend for food by himself every now and then. But I had no idea Jason had felt this badly. I told my husband Kevin that Jason said he felt alone when I wasn’t there that night. “There was a baseball game on,” he replied, as if that explained everything. That kind of male logic is what makes me hesitant to leave my family for an extended time. So I will be content to stay a home, adding items to my ‘to do’ list. Maybe I’ll have the nativity scene stored away by Halloween.
Sharon J. O’Donnell is an award-winning newspaper columnist, who specializes in humor columns. Since 1998, Sharon has been a columnist for The Cary News, in Cary, NC (just outside of Raleigh) and has won awards for those columns. She has also written for Good Housekeeping, The News & Observer, and Blue Mountain Arts greeting cards. Sharon is a 1984 graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (she used to live in the same dorm as Michael Jordan!!) with a degree in print/broadcast journalism. Since then she’s worked in radio promotions, special events planning, public speaking, and public relations. Her current project is a humorous book of essays about what it’s like to be the only woman in a houseful of males, dealing with a husband, three sons, and a male dog. Sharon also writes fiction. In 1997, her novel manuscript, Hand-Me-Downs, was a finalist in the Heekin Group Foundation’s James Fellowship for the novel-in-progress division. An excerpt from her current novel-in-progress, Bluebirds Fly, was published in the Sunday Reader section of The News & Observer, the Raleigh paper, in December of 2002. In the spring of 2003, she won third place in the short story division of The Paul Gillette Memorial Writing Contest, sponsored by the Pikes Peak Writers Conference. Since 2000, she’s taught narrative writing through week-long writing residency workshops in schools and is a writer-in-residence through the United Arts Council. She has also done public relations consulting that has resulted in successful media coverage for various programs and events. Jacob’s Ladder, a volunteer group she helped start in honor of her nephew who underwent a successful bone marrow transplant in 1993, won a national award called the HOPE award in 1997 for raising testing money and promoting the bone marrow registry to minorities. She lives in Cary with her husband Kevin and their three sons ages 14, 11, and 5 (ages of this writing in late 2005). Her Websites are www.momsofboys.org and www.sharonodonnell.com.
|
|||
|
