The subject line of the email read: Cialis_Viagra_Ritalin__Percocet__Adderall!!! It’s as if they wanted to get my attention one way or the other.

Attention. Two of my children take medication for ADHD. I was thinking back to the days before they did, back when the kids were tiny. Bedtimes were an absolute horror show, because by then I was exhausted, and the ones with ADHD just got more active when they were tired.

I relied heavily on ritual. At one point I had three children really close together (an infant, a two year old and a six year old. OK, you probably had more and closer, but this stretched me.)

I would put the baby to sleep, put the two and 6 year old into their bunk beds after they were clean, and tell them a story. Sometimes it would be a book, but they liked the stories about themselves the best. They LOVED the stories about when they had been caught  doing some criminal action or another- they could listen to those night after night. “Do you remember when you were brushing your teeth by yourself and you stuffed every single toothbrush down the the sink drain? Do you remember when you were playing the piano and decided to color every single key a different color with your new box of crayons?”

If I was too tired to regale them with stories of their misadventures, we read something like “Goodnight, Moon” or “Where the Wild Things Are” or “I’ll Love You Forever”- the latter when they were older. After the story we had the nightly joke. “Knock knock.” “Who’s there?” “Banana.” “Banana who?”

“Knock knock.” “Who’s there?” “Banana.” “Banana who?”

“Knock knock.” “Who’s there?” “Banana.” “Banana who?” [continue until point of pain]

“Knock knock.” “Who’s there?’ “Orange.” “Orange who?” “Orange you glad I didn’t say ‘Banana’?”

Now they are older. Little ones bring this constant veil of exhaustion, or at least they did for me. I look at pictures of myself from that time and feel like taking the baby for a couple of hours so that I could take a nap. But once they are older they bring a whole different skill set into play.

My twenty year old lost her license because she was driving with her friends past the state-mandated curfew and the occupants of her automobile mouthed off to the officer who stopped them. No drugs, no alcohol- just bad attitudes, a towed car and a suspended license. To get the license back she would have to take an anger management class and write a letter of apology. She refused to write the letter, and still can’t drive.

And other things similar to this happen. It’s like a switch flips when they turn 16 and they feel this burning urge to create more of those criminally-oriented bedtime stories. Where the Wild Things Are? They were living in my house until my son turned 18, and then they sailed away- probably until the 11 year old invites them back.

If I had to share any tip to getting through those years it would be this: the 20 year old daughter, when she was about 16, crawled under my bed and hid. I brought some laundry up and had put it on my bed in preparation of folding it, and she snaked both hands out and grabbed me by the ankles.

When they were little, that would have sent me through the roof, screaming along the way. My daughter was disappointed because I didn’t even flinch- not on purpose. It just wasn’t in me any more to be frightened of what hypothetically lived under the bed, when every time the car went on the road with a teenager behind the wheel my nerves began the countdown until he or she arrived home in one piece.

That’s the tip: when you get that call- and chances are you will- with a crying teenager at the other end, take a deep breath. Put the hysteria to sleep until the morning and take care of business. And realize that someday they will have children just like themselves.

Orange you glad I didn’t say “Banana”?

The new year is a time when we can figuratively start fresh. Really, there is but one second separating last year from this, but the new year is a psychological Spring. Last year’s issues are boxed up into a tidy package, and we are ready to either move on, rebuild or start over.

I found this post that I had written last month for one of my other blogs., and for me it helps keep things in perspective. It isn’t business, but it helps keep business problems from being seen to be all-important. This was hammered home to me again this past week when one of my daughter’s friends died at the age of 21 from an overdose:

Last night, I was half-heartedly monitoring twitter while writing a post and saw this go by in my stream:

ladaws: My heart is aching for @military_mom.

I assumed that military_mom- whom I hadn’t followed before then- had a child sick with croup or the flu, although “aching” was an extreme usage usage of the word. I followed the stream back to the source just to make sure that there wasn’t some way I could help, and saw this:

Please pray like never before, my 2 yr old fell in the pool

Those are the most terrible words a person can read, and it would be unfathomable to write them. The child later died.
More unbelievable was that not one but several people added to this woman’s pain by implying she hadn’t watched the two year old well enough.
When Meg was nearly 2, we went to a birthday party for one of the cousins at my brother-in-law’s camp. It was located on Lake Whalom and I was nervous. Meg demanded watching every second, as two year olds do, and she was a ball of unfocused energy. I have seen 2 year olds sit and play for at least 5 minutes; this one could not be categorized like that.
So I was nervous. I got her all dressed up in a pretty foam-green party dress, and we headed over to the camp, where the party was in full swing. All of the extended family was there, including probably 10 other children. After two hours of watching me follow Meg around to make sure I knew where she was, my husband PJ said, “You’re making me nervous. Sit down and I’ll watch her for you.” So I sat down and had a burger, and caught up with PJ maybe 5 minutes later. He was sitting down. “Where’s Meg?” I asked. “Oh, she is running around with the other kids. She can’t get outside- my mother and sister are sitting in the other room.”
I blasted out of the living room looking for a tiny green dress, then headed to the kitchen where his mother and sisters were sitting talking- and where the door to outside and the lakefront beach was. “Have you seen Meg?” No. No.
I ran outside and down to the beach. There- about 6 feet out from shore, right before the dropoff- was my little girl, on her tiptoes, green dress billowing around her. I can still see it. If I had been there 5 minutes later, how could I have even found her?
I was literally spared the heartache that @military_mom is experiencing, and will experience every day of her life. This “Oh, but what if” went the other way for me, just because- not because I am a better mom, or because of a better guardian angel, or because of the grace of God. It was just because the coin happened to flip lucky side up.
Or maybe the grace of God is what we call luck. I don’t know. The only thing I know for certain is that I got to keep my daughter.
There are all kinds of things you know. You know that you need to appreciate what- and who- you have. Say I lose everything? All that means is I have been given a chance to start over.
I was reminded last night there are some things that don’t come with a do-over.

The older kids have opened their presents; Jenny still isn’t home yet.

They all got what they wanted- short list this year. But they seemed as happy as older children are- who can still remember the magic of Santa Claus, who have walked through a city of bright lights that reminded them of the Christmas star- to whom magic and miracle are intertwined, and so close that they can smell them, but not quite recapture them.

Rebecca, in particular, had an eclectic list. She is in college, unable to find a job, and is on a tight budget because she depends on us for all of her expenses to be covered. She had requested a card to a local grocery store, in addition to a couple other gift cards. I got her one, but it felt strange giving her that, and I mentioned how I felt. This was her logic:

If I get a gift card for food, I can use it for the week’s groceries. Then I can use the college money that I get for clothes.

It seemed like circuitous logic to me, and I said so. I guess she felt that asking for two clothing gift certificates would be too much, I don’t know. I said that I could follow her thought process, but it wasn’t direct for me.

Then she said, ” ‘I’ll take the crust.’ ” I knew exactly what she meant, and those 4 words sum up the entire thought process of an adult, to me.

Maybe there is always such abundance that no one ever needs to eat the crust, or the tough slice of meat. But for an adult, most of whom most of the time would trade their own life to see their child’s life spared, filling up on crusts is a small token. And Becca has recognized this, maybe in relation to her boyfriend, or her other friends, or maybe because of finances in general.

So one has made the journey to adulthood.

Fast forward from yesterday.

Yesterday I went from posting here to twitter, where a friend asked me, “If you could go back in a time machine to wherever you wanted, where would it be?”

I thought this was a cool question. Where would I stop off? I actually spent a couple of hours talking about my growing-up years with my friends, and we each learned things about each other.

Are we happy where we are? For the most part. Do we have things we would change or improve? I would say, “Yes, of course.” If your life is so wonderful that you answer no, then you better find the biggest charity you can and give until it hurts.

Hurt and disappointment are part of the bundle of living, together with ecstasy and comfort. Pain, I think, is the bumper in the bowling lane that keeps your ball from spending too much time in the gutter.

So it is not wrong to want to avoid pain- it is pretty damned natural, in fact. It doesn’t mean that you discount the precious things in your life by reassessing what is important- either by looking around you or looking back. I think that is a healthy form of self-improvement.

My friend Debbie Kirkland said it best, I think:

“If I could do it again.. I would have spent waay more time on the ski jump under the moon with wine chilling in the lake.”

As for me? I would spend more time with something on my head:

I was looking at the titles on another one of my blogs, and this one popped out at me. It struck me- NOTHING looks like it used to. I thought maybe I was referring to the aging process or something, since I have another birthday around the corner, but it was fall leaves.

What the hell. Guys don’t look the same when they get older either, although some cling fervently to the fact that they do. And why should they?

Getting older for me has been more of a mental process than a physical one. I know the physical stuff is happening, but it has been less troublesome to me than the emotional stuff.

This is me with Meg, when she was just a teeny peanut. This was the colic child, the child who later would pass out from crying, who had seizures when she had a high temperature. I used to call her my one-in-a-hundred because if there was a condition that would affect 1 in 100 people or fewer, she would exhibit traits of it.

I look at myself, and my god! I was so teeny too! I was not much older than the average of my daughters’ ages now, and I look like a teenager here. I would like to take that colicky baby from my arms and let myself take a good nap.

But what is showing in my face is not all exhaustion. It is a coming to terms. It was being a mother, which in both this family and in society in general (at least back then) meant being on-call 24 hours a day.

But, really- anyone could do it for a day… it’s the lifetime commitment that settled in on my lap in that rocking chair and blew me away. Sitting in my lap was the cement that was going to keep the marriage together through better or worse for as long as it could possibly be held together. That little eight pounds of human was a parade of puppies and kittens and mud and glue-gunned felt made into Halloween costumes and pulling holiday traditions out of midair, and although it doesn’t look like it, my real reason to grow up.

I read this morning (thanks, @RealtyMan) that “The hill isn’t in the way, it IS the way.” True, but you CHOOSE your way. Accepting the terrain has always been, for me, the hardest part.

I got an unusual call today. It was from another Real Estate sales agent.

When I first started in the business, I got calls several times a month, particularly after I picked up a large listing (which never did sell). I used to get recruited often, as did many of the agents in my office. Even with signs of a problem with home sales, I still heard the old saws, “People have to live somewhere,” and “real estate doesn’t lose value,” and brokerages hadn’t begun the triage process.

This calling-to-recruit activity is much less prevalent now. Everyone is more concerned with mere survival, and I know it is on everyone’s mind, the question: “What is going to happen after this new buyer incentive is gone?” Sales are up, but right now we aren’t measuring apples to apples, and foreclosure activity is showing no sign of abating.  Offices are cutting non-producing agents- or thinking about it, anyway.

So the call- I was surprised. The agent said on my VM that he wanted to ask me a couple of questions. Fair enough; I called him back.

No recruiting. What he wanted to was if a particular REO site had ever been productive for me, as far as me getting any listings there. He was very nervous. He was out of my territory, and he had done his homework (I had seen his website and he had obviously done some research), so I pointed him down a couple of paths that had worked for me for listings. We chatted a while, and he told me that he planned on going to an REO conference next month. I knew that was the Five Star Conference, and had heard good things about it and told him so.

I didn’t hand him any closely guarded secrets or magic bullets, because I don’t know of any. I was just friendly. And when I said goodbye I could hear the emotion in his voice. I was apparently the only one who had answered his questions. Ever.

You know, I have been asked by agents about bank-owned property, and really- it’s a different animal than resale. You really need some kind of set-up to deal with it. And at least one of the companies that I had been working with has gone under, leaving me to eat the electric bills and unpaid cost of snow removal. I see ads sometimes that make bank-owned look like the easiest money in the world- no weekend hours- but that’s balderdash. You have 10 properties and they need a monthly status report on the same day, and you get a call for 4 BPOs at the same time, you get it done. If the people asking me are unprepared and looking for an easy 9-5 job, they should find something else.

But otherwise, we all have to help each other. That’s what I like about twitter and some of the other social media sites- you shoot out a question, and someone will answer you.

So, for the people who have answered my questions since I hae been in the space- today was for you. I tried to pay it forward. And the agent that I spoke to today will too.

It’s the difference between surviving and living.

What does this picture have to do with the topic of this post? I am not sure yet.
But I will tell you what I was thinking about. I just came back from Delaware, visiting Maya, one of the other founders of TwitterQueens. On the long car ride home, I had the same issue with my legs and ankles that I had on the flight back from California, and now I am lying in bed with my feet propped up hoping the swelling goes down.

What a drag it is getting old…

It has been interesting to observe the creep of middle age into what we used to consider over-the-hill territory. Baby boomers have this penchant for grasping tight to middle age until the undertaker pries it loose from their stiff cold fingers. And I get this. I am thinking about starting a society called the 39 Club. We don’t make bucket lists – we just have things that we are going to get to when we have a chance, when we aren’t so busy with other things.

So here is my 39 Club List:

1. Skydiving (before the bones get too brittle)

2. See “Chicago”- the musical.

3. Take more college coursework with utter disregard for how the knowledge works into a degree

4. Go skinnydipping (okay, okay. That one was a joke. You can uncover your eyes now.)

5. Write a book.

6. Create something useful and life-altering

7. See Florence Italy for the renaissance art

8. Take a couple of months and drive around the country. Maybe that would be the basis for the book.

Really, this is it. I have no drive to own a palatial estate, although you can invite me to one anytime. I have never needed a passport, although I should get one.

This might be like the movie thing, where all I can think of for my favorite movie is Pulp Fiction, mostly for the list scene- but then I read other people’s top 10 lists and think, “Oh, I like that. Oh, and that one too!” So there are probably things that I would like to do, but only a few things that really make the list.

But where do you find time? And that is probably why the Crappy Crafter thing amuses me so much. The baking aisle in the grocery store is literally half an aisle shorter than it was 5 years ago. I used to be a pretty good artist and costume-maker; Halloweens lately have been of the tape and bow looks-good-if-you-squint variety.

It’s one hell of a balancing act- working through the list before  you literally can’t any more. And if someone wants to give me an advance on that book, I can get started right away.

I really like this video. Swings things back into perspective for me when I am having one of those days.

There are few times when you go back and everything is exactly the same.

Visit your old grade school, and the teachers are no longer (as) scary, the water fountains are way too low, and forget using the toilets. Even the walls are a more cheerful color.

This flux is so consistent that it is almost jarring when you go back and everything is identical. You expect Twilight Zone music. I took my daughter to Willard Brook today, a place to which we had gone  frequently ever since her oldest sister (now 24) was about 5. We haven’t been for the past few years, and Jenny didn’t remember it from its description.

We pulled in and I could almost feel the wheels turning in Jenny’s head. “I’m remembering one thing after another,” she said- the place was that unchanged. Same beach, same buoys stretched from a tree on one side to a tree on the other, same stand of cattails. The same babies are dragging a bucket of wet sand, Pullups peeping out the top of their swim tanks, crying when they tip over from the strain; same 4 mothers over on the rocks sharing smokes- not kidding- as if they had been supplied by a central casting somewhere, or kicked off the set of The Truman Show. Coolers, beach balls, Frisbies, ice cream truck…

It was absolutely jarring. Especially since I am acclimated to hunt for change in the online landscape, stasis in the physical one was a little unnerving.

But it is really pretty here. I can smell the charcoal fires that people are using to grill their hamburgers and hotdogs, and likely marshmallows for s’mores.  Worth the time it took to come here, and the $5 per car charge has not increased since we used to come a long time ago.

S’more side note: You can tell a lot about a person by the way they toast their marshmallows. In my family, the perfectionist toasted hers slowly and carefully, to the point of being able to describe it as “golden brown.” The one who had a few challenges with the old fine motor coordination skills always had hers drop off into the coals. Then there was my ADHD poster child. He always started off really well, got distracted, and the next thing you know had this huge ball of dripping fire at the end of the stick. I was always kept busy toasting replacement marshmallows and salving egos.

I am in San Francisco, and it is just wonderful. I am here for RE BarCamp San Francisco and Inman Connect, and aside from some- well, let’s call it jet lag for want of a better word, I am excited and happy.

Yesterday was the first day of the two-pronged (un)/conference. At Trulia Headquarters, RE BarCamp began at 8:30. The entire day was filled with seminars given by one expert after another in the field of social media. My favorite part is learning about new technology. There is always something new coming out, and to me it is fascinating to see if the new apps address an issue that was found with a previous app, if the app combines the features of two or more preexisting apps, or if it is the result of an Einsteinian leap and is truly new. The taco truck came by at the end of the day.

Today was the first day of Inman. The morning was filled with workshops, which I did not attend, and the afternoon was conferences that touched on new technology and discussed where the market was trending (leveling off or improving, for the most part). The best part was just walking around talking  to everyone.

After the cocktail hour, I decided to walk home and take a break for a while. I walked for a bit, and decided to pop into a Burger King because I was hungry, and they were advertising Angry Burgers. That just seemed so funny I had to order one. I got my order and sat down at a bar facing the window. I notice restaurants doing that now for the advertisement value, and it seems to be effective.

As I was sitting there eating, a gentleman walked slowly by. He stopped at the trash can positioned in front of the window, reached his hand in, fished around for a bit, and came up with a closed box. He checked inside of it, found that there was something in it, took it out, and walked off eating.

A couple minutes later, a woman came up to the same trash can. She had a large pair of tongs, and proceeded to extract cans and bottles out of the receptacle. She left in a few minutes with her bounty, and was followed by another person- a man this time. He attempted to find himself something to eat but between the first man’s lucky find and the woman’s dumping the contents of the bottles back into the barrel, he came up empty handed.

What’s the point? I don’t know, other than it is an observation. Ginger Wilcox (@gingerw ) pointed out during R E BarCamp SF that 25% of the people in San Francisco did not have the money to meet their needs.

Can any one person fix this? Can ALL of us together with all of the resources possible at our disposal fix this? My guess is the answer is no, because you have addiction and mental illness tossed into the mix. I have dealt with both of these issues in family members- no, I take it back. I have not dealt with these issues. I have been forced to learn to accept these issues. I have been forced to learn to eat these issues for breakfast, lunch and supper, and trust me- that is the angriest sandwich I can imagine.

So when I see a person eating out of the trash can, the only thing that runs through my mind is, “That could be my son. That could be my daughter.” Because it could. And while I do not condone addiction or mental illness, I have to acknowledge it.

And I can’t help but buy my son or daughter lunch in spite of it.

Diane has too many children. If you choose, you may donate to the RE BarCamp Housing for Homeless initiative. The link is located in the right hand side bar.