Mother Earth

"But what do you have in common?"

This is the question Marc kept asking me over and over about my relationship with Roberta on the way home from Georgia. Coming back to Vero has left me with a serious low feeling after so much bliss in Atlanta. There were so many highs there (being with friends, the chilly fall weather, the marathon, the community), it is difficult to come back to the lows here (the heat and humidity, the cranky elderly people, the old, run-down feeling this town resonates). Some days I feel like there is really nothing here for us. Maybe this is just the normal Post Marathon Blues I always seem to suffer from? The kids are excelling in tennis and all their extracurriculars, but apart from the time and financial freedom we have gained, I still feel empty in so many ways. How can this be our lives? How did we really land here, in Florida? Not possible.

Talking to another swim team mom at the pool tonight rekindled the warmth of the weekend. When she asked what we did for the Thanksgiving holiday and I told her, she emoted, "Oh! I LOVE Atlanta! I would live there in a SECOND! The schools, the town, the people....but my husband is from Vero and he will never leave here..." her voice trailed off as he threw her a disparaging look. I had to agree how fabulous Atlanta really is, at least what we experienced of it. This mom, Alisa, is from Los Angeles, too and we are in agreement that Florida is just not where it is at. We agree that we need not be back in LA necessarily, but that this is not where it is happening for us. We complain about the schools and the seasonal people and the pace of life at every practice.

It is funny because I always read my kids the Clifford The Big Red Dog books. The characters live on Birdwell Island, some little fictional island off the East Coast that seems the ideal place to raise kids. On Birdwell Island, the kids and their dogs roam the town and run on the beach and grow up in a wholesome neighborhood with exactly the perfect mix of various ethnicity and no racial tension. It seems the perfect little beach town, and they never seem to have any insect issues? Vero could almost be like Birdwell, except that there is racial tension (this may as well be the South) and the Confederate flag flies proudly here (say it with me: scary). The bugs are ridiculous and there is a racial divide.

Anyway, today I had to think about why Roberta and I are such good friends and how we have managed to remain so tight for all these years. What is it about our relationship that works? We met almost 14 years ago when she trained me as a server at the restaurant we worked at together in Malibu. She was going through a change of career after a life crisis and I had transferred back to school in LA out of Santa Cruz liberal hell. We both needed the money that place brought us and we closed the bar together many nights. We knew how to work the tables and customers and we always took the best of both. She was like a sister to me, always watching out for me and my best interest with men, dating, money, and school choices. I think I was her security blanket of someone who was always around once we moved in together and I was her biggest fan and cheerleader. That woman is Mother Earth. She was an amazing teacher and now that she has kids, she is Super Mom. She is the super volunteer, the team mom, the cake baking extraordinaire, the substitute teacher for all ages, and the fill-in-the-gap for any other need the school/neighborhood/community has. Roberta is the one they call when they need food, carpools, clothes, or babysitting.

So, what do we have in common? She is a Jewish Democrat, I am Christian non-partisan. She loathes exercise and sweat, while I am a cardio junkie who laces up my Nikes twice a day. She is the amazingly laid back, semi-messy mom who does not require her kids to use seat belts. I am the Paxil-needing, strung-out safety supervisor who cannot stand it when water spills in the car. She loves to cook and allows her family to indulge in many of life's guilty pleasures. I hate cooking and think of food as the Enemy. Our differences have become magnified now that we have kids. We parent with very different styles and with very different ideas. But, we both love our kids more than words can say and we both want to nurture in them a love of learning and curiosity and wonder. We want them to love reading and sports and have tons of friends and shoes.

But I know I want more of what Roberta has...she has a serene, carefree way about her that blows through the room like a warm summer afternoon breeze (in Malibu). She is fanatical about cleaning her kitchen counter tops, but she lets the kids draw on the windows ("It comes off with Windex"). She has a particular way she loads her dishwasher, but she doesn't care if the kids spill snacks in between the couch cushions. She is insistent that the kids always brush their teeth, but she only requires them to shower every third day and laughs about how stinky they get. She runs her kids ragged with activities and takes them to the ends of the earth. I, on the other hand, am such a stickler for the schedule and allowing for downtime. Her TV is on midday and her kids trudge in and out of the house in shoes. In our house, TV is a rare treat and we are a shoe-free zone. Her kids call her by her first name and their crayons are stored in empty frosting cans. I am not sure my kids even know my first name, and I cannot bring myself to allow my kids to eat anything with hydrogenated oils, let alone save the can for storage. I cannot skip reading the labels and counting the grams of sugar my kids might eat, constantly tallying up fat grams I do not want them to ingest. Roberta just lets her kids be kids and I want more of that. I want to be more of the person I am when we are together. She is almost haphazard in her parenting, and I desire to have more of that tendency. She is so creative and carefree, while I sometimes feel so "in the box" and "follow the guidelines" in my parenting.

What do Roberta and I have in common? Not at lot, quite honestly, but she teaches me that I want to be liberated. I want to put into practice the freedom she lives with in rearing her kids. She takes her little people to (gasp!) fast food, and while I don't think I can ever really go there, I recognize the need for balance. Berta fed our kids Lucky Charms the morning Marc and I were at the race. My knee-jerk reaction was to cringe (I hope I didn't show that outwardly). But, at the end of the day, is sugar cereal really going to kill them? We told them it is only sold in Georgia, by the way, now that we are back home and my four year old is asking for cereal with marshmallows in it.

Speaking of balance, I am seriously considering running the West Palm Beach marathon this Sunday. I know it seems crazy to run 2 marathons 10 days apart, but the idea of staying here in Vero this weekend is just too mediocre. Truly, the idea of staying here and having nothing on the books this weekend is enough to make me consider taking antidepressants. Berta would go (if she ran 26 miles at a time) and let her kids eat chocolate cake with trans fat in the car on the way. Shoot. She would probably let them watch videos all weekend long with lollipops hanging out of their mouths, too. Whose house would you rather grow up in?