What a WOMAN!

The older my teenager gets, the more convinced I am that she is not my daughter. Case in point: She runs cross-country. I run errands, and on some occasions, my mouth. I am in no way interested in running or jogging, nor have I ever been. I am an athlete, don't get me wrong. Or at least I used to be. But I always engaged in a fun sport. Softball, football, tennis, bowling. That kind of thing. Running along the road in the hot sun, feet pounding on the unforgiving concrete, wishing instead that I was inside my air-conditioned house sitting on the couch watching "Oprah," is not my idea of a good time.

But it's how my teenager likes to spend her free time. She's on her high school's cross-country team and it's paid off nicely for her, too. She is in the best shape of her life, physically. And after a grueling meet this week, I can proudly say that she is in fine mental condition, too.

It was 102 degrees that day, and surely, I thought, they would cancel the meet. I mean, it's just cruel to make young kids run 3.5 miles in blistering temps like that . . . isn't it?? Shouldn't we be taking them out for ice cream, instead? I'm a whimp, it turns out, because the meet started right on time, as scheduled, and no other parents except me seemed fazed by it.

After the first mile, my teenager looked in good form. By mile No. 2, I was getting worried. Her face was very red and she was dripping in sweat. And I have to say, that if this is what she called recreation, it did not look like she was having much fun at all. On her last lap, she limped by me with tears in her eyes. My mothering instincts wanted to rescue her, to pull her out of the race and go get a double-scoop of Rocky Road. But then, those same instincts told me that something important was happening here.

Character was being built.

My tough little bunny fought off her genetic impulse to stop running and she finished the race. Afterward, she cried her eyes out and confided in me that she thought about quitting a zillion times during the race, that she even hatched an elaborate scheme as she was running to fall down and fake an injury, that's how miserable she was. And she was even seeing black spots at one point. But she pushed on.

She berated herself for finishing in the back of the pack, but I kept telling her, "Honey, what's important is that you finished! You didn't give up!"

Not only do I love my teenager to the moon and back. But after witnessing the strength of her character that day and her determination not to fail, I have the utmost respect and admiration for her.

Happy, happy trails to her.

What Sinks In Vegas, Stays In Vegas

I was asked to write about a memorable experience I had in Las Vegas. The thing about Vegas is that you can never go there and NOT have a memorable experience. The hard part was trying to narrow down my many trips over the years to the “best” one.

The most unforgettable time in Las Vegas wasn’t the time my ex got a royal flush on the draw poker machine and won thousands of dollars (what a thrill!); or the time when I met my friend, Michelle, who drove in from Colorado, for Elton John’s “Red Piano” concert. Great, GREAT time!

Hands down, the memory I will carry with me FOREVER was the time we sunk our SUV into Lake Mead and my now-teenager, who was only 8 months old at the time, almost drowned in the back seat.

True story.

One very hot day in July, we drove to Las Vegas from Orange County for a weekend of boating. We had just bought our boat a few weeks earlier and we were very inexperienced in the art of boat-launching. The ex’s friend, John, a veteran sailor, never showed up to help us launch, although we waited and waited for him, so the ex decided that we could handle it without John. By “we” I mean me, him and our 8-month-old daughter sipping sweetly on apple juice in the back seat of the car.

The line of cars waiting to launch boats was agonizingly long, and the 100+ temps were trying our patience. So the ex decides that he will launch the boat a little ways away from the main launch area, where it looked plenty deep. He was pretty pleased with himself that he had discovered a launch spot no one else seemed to know about. He put the car in reverse and backed the trailer into the water.

All of a sudden, the rear end of the car disappeared and the boat flew off the trailer. What we didn’t know at the time was that the pavement underneath the water had a dangerously steep drop-off, and the Parks and Rec Department was supposed to have blocked off that area weeks ago, but they never got around to it.

OK, so imagine you’re my husband, and you see your brand-new 22-ft. open-bow baby Mariah heading toward the rocks as your car is sinking, rear-end first, into Lake Mead, with your human baby in the back seat and your wife riding shotgun. What would you do? Hopefully, not what the ex did. He chose to save his BOAT! (And now you can understand why I divorced that man.) He panicked and jumped out of the driver’s seat and started swimming toward the rocks as fast as he could to rescue his new boat. Unfortunately, he forgot to put the car into “Park,” so when he jumped out, our SUV continued to roll backward.

Super Mama here, in the passenger seat, immediately leaped into the driver’s seat, put the car in drive and tried to reverse the inevitable calamity. By that time, the car had taken on a lot of water and the gas pedal was under about 2-3 feet of water, and wasn’t doing its job. We were sinking fast.

I did the only thing left for a mother to do. I spun around toward the back seat to save my baby, who by then, had water up to her knees. I pounded on the car seat’s release button, which, thank God, was working perfectly and yanked my daughter out of the back seat. I then screamed to my husband, “Help us!” who finally realized that maybe he should be more concerned about his family drowning than his new boat picking up a few scratches.

By then, a crowd had formed on the dock and I heard a woman scream, “There’s a baby in there!!”

The ex swam back to the car and arrived just in time for me to pass our baby daughter to him through the window (which, thank GAWD, I had rolled down right before this fiasco). I grabbed my purse, popped out the portable CD player, and had seconds to swim out the window before the car was completely submerged in water.

I stood dripping wet on the dock with a death grip on my baby daughter. I stared, unbelieving, at our red SUV at the bottom of Lake Mead, thinking, “What if I hadn’t rolled that window down? What if my daughter’s car seat buckle had jammed? What if . . .?” Shaking and crying from post-traumatic stress, I was barely a shadow of my former brave self, the one who had acted quickly and calmly during a life-and-death crisis less than five minutes ago.

The Parks and Rec ranger drove us to the Las Vegas Hilton where we had reservations. A few good Samaritans down at the lake had helped the ex retrieve our water-logged bags from the back of our submerged SUV. We looked odd and rather comical standing in the lobby of the Hilton, three wet rats holding suitcases filled with water. People stared. I imagined fish tumbling out of our bags.

This story ends with a plug for the Las Vegas Hilton. I wanted everyone to know how nice the staff was to us that day. They went out of their way to dry our tears and our clothes. Housekeeping washed all our lake-soaked clothing in the hotel’s laundry facility, and returned them to us pressed and folded. What’s more, the Hilton upgraded us to a bigger suite because they wanted us to relax and forget about the near-drowning incident. It kind of worked. Especially the complimentary champagne and cheese tray that was delivered by room service.

But obviously, I haven’t forgotten about it, and I never will. More than a decade later, I still feel that panic. I still wonder what would have happened had I not rolled down the automatic windows just minutes before to cool off my hot baby in the back seat.

I look at her now, my baby, nearly Sweet 16, and I am dearly grateful for happy, dry endings.


This is a TravelingMom dedicated post.

FIRE!

The other day, I went to pick up my teenager from school and noticed a plume of smoke in the distance, getting darker and thicker by the minute. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't concerned. There's a lot of dry brush around here, and coming from Southern California where wildfires burn out of control every year, I 've learned to take these "smallish" fires seriously.

By the time we drove back into our neighborhood, many of the streets were closed off by police. Uh-oh. I had left my youngest daughter and her friend at home with my sister, and all I could think about was getting to her, somehow, to make sure she was safe. My maternal instincts took over the wheel, and I managed to find the one street that wasn't blocked off.

My perspective was all skewed. The fire that looked like it was off in the distance was right down the street from where I lived. The barranca was in flames. A few houses had been evacuated as a precaution, but none were burning. No one knew what caused the fire. It had been a hot day, with temps up near 100. But I don't think the sun caused it.

An armada of fire trucks surrounded the area. Two helicopters tag-teamed to dump water and flame retardant on the blaze. (I snapped off that picture for you!) A little scary, but I had every confidence that those darling men in the yellow rubber uniforms would put my fire out. I mean, "THE" fire out.

The upside is that I finally got to meet a lot of my neighbors. I haven't really met too many up until now. Nothing like an impending disaster to bring a community together.

The next day, I bought renter's insurance. You just never know . . .

F.A.R.T.

As I was driving around running errands today, I pulled up behind this Nissan Maxima being driven by what looked like a middle-aged guy with a bald spot right in the same area of his head where it would meet a headrest.

I had about 30 seconds to stare at his rear-end (of the car, people!), and noticed something funny. He had one of those personalized license-plate frames that had this acronym on top: F.A.R.T.

OK, I thought, typical guy stuff. They love to talk about farts more than anything. (To be fair, I got somewhat of a cheap thrill out of typing in FART as the title of my blog.) Then my eyes jumped below the plate numbers, and that's where the acronym was explained:

Fathers Against Radical Teenagers.

Now he had me . . . and my sympathy! And it certainly explained the bald spot. I wanted to pull alongside him and compare teenager horror stories, but instead, I groped wildly for my cell phone, that I had tossed into the other seat, so that I could take a picture of these plates and share them with you all on this very post. Then I recalled the whole purpose of my errand that day: I was on my way to the Verizon Wireless store because my phone can't hold a charge and keeps going dead on me.

No phone, no picture. You'll have to imagine the FART plates for yourself. Sorry 'bout that!