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.

TwitterQueens has chosen Mothers Fighting for Others for its holiday focus.

What does that mean? Rocky Turner explained to me the urgency of their situation.

Mothers Fighting For Others is a tiny group of people that is changing the life of girls living in an orphanage in Kenya. All of the money earned up to this point has gone directly to helping the girls- I will let Jeff, Rocky’s husband, describe their work himself:

No- we aren’t asking you for $1500.

Rocky needs about $500 to cover the transportation costs that will come up as part of their trip. That’s 50 people donating just $10. Easy to do- and I ask every one of you reading this post to please stop reading and click on the donate to MFFO button right next to this. Come back later if you want, but do that while you are thinking of it.

Another thing I am planning on doing is donating my social media status updates on Sunday December 13 to spreading the word about MFFO. I will add the link to the main fundraising page to these informational tweets, and I hope to raise money that way. Remember that: MFFO Day Sunday December 13. Join me in donating your status updates.

This year has been very very hard. Many of my friends are in real estate, and, ironically, many of these friends are wondering where their next house payment is coming from. It’s been that kind of year. Financially, this has been the most difficult year that I have ever faced personally as I have transitioned from real estate (mostly) into another business, augmented my income with teaching, and been overwhelmed with the debt that I faced- and carried- from having gone through my divorce.

But this year has been the best year of my life too. My children are healthy, doing well in and out of school, and my eighteen ear old- who last year was acting out so much I couldn’t predict WHAT was going to happen to him is looking forward to starting college next fall. [Okay- I won't lie. He is kind of looking forward to it and kind of being nudged toward it, but he's going]. I am blessed with new friends. I am so lucky, really.

I can’t wait for Sunday to have a chance to give back. I will be trading my avatar for this one until Sunday. Feel free to join me:

Check out Mothers Fighting For Others at the official site.

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 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.

There are advertisements asking for your time and money all over the place: in the newspapers, on television. After a while, you just shut down. As an example, on Facebook I belong to 168 groups- some of them business-oriented, but many of a giving nature.

The other day, I saw a post from my friend Dale Chumbley. I will let him tell you in his own words what he is involved in and why:

Click here to donate.

Honestly? I felt compelled in this case not to move on. I have children. My father died of a form of cancer that, at the time, was fatal within a year to those suffering from it. Both of my in-laws died of cancer or its complications. My sister-in-law- close to me in age- had breast cancer and a recurrence. What does that mean for my children?

And what does that mean for yours?

I am glad- so glad- that Dale is a cancer survivor. I am happy for his family- beyond happy, really. And, selfishly, I would have never had the chance to meet him face-to-face if we both lived fifty years ago before advances in cancer treatment had been discovered.

This picture says it all to me.

Please click here to donate- as little as $5.to Dale’s involvement in the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life. Here are some of the things ACS does.

If $5. is too hard on the budget, you can mail even $1. to:

Dale Chumbley
c/o Prudential NW Properties
17700 SE Mill Plain #100
Vancouver, WA 98683

Like it says on the American Cancer Society’s site: Happy Birthday is a Victory Song.

Please feel free to repost this.

How old am I?

It depends on which site you check me out on, because I like to mix it up. Some places I am 39. some 42, some the ripe old age of 43. I usually use the JackBenny 39 because as long as I am over 18 or 21, that’s all the site itself legally requires. Sorry for messing up your demographic-mining, guys, but there you have it.

I just hate the idea of being compartmentalized into an expectations box based on the number of sunrises I have seen. And this number matters GREATLY to some people. I was annoyed by this fascination a few months ago and posted on my Facebook status: “No, I won’t tell you my age. If you really feel that you HAVE to know, click here.”  The link went to a particularly heinous RickRoll’d- DM me if you want the link. The only regret that I had about doing this was that for several weeks after my blog flatlined because people were afraid to click on any bud.url that I had posted.

So, anyway, now you know why I am no longer married, but this segues nicely to last night’s discussion on twitter: Cougars with a capital “c.” I am not so certain what the beginning of the conversation looked like, but at the point that I butted in, it had slid down the slippery slope to age. The age of the male half of the equation was defined fairly easily- legal-to-notonebreathmorethan 30- but a simple standard (or should I say double-standard?) could not be given to the women.

And then this morning, when I called in to RE: RnD Radio, I was excited that the topic appeared to be about RE BarCamps. Having just come back from running a social media camp in NYC, I was pumped full of empathy. I had sweat buckets of blood trying to get sponsorship, cooperation from the hotel while our base camps were located in Massachusetts and Delaware, and publicity for an event that because of its generic membership floated below niche radar.

The first question floated directly at me was, “What is the age definition of a Cougar?”

And the funny thing is- this question IS important;  the question is really whether or not older women are considered attractive and vibrant enough to still be viable in any arena they choose to be in. In the population, 32.2% of all women in the United States are aged 50 and above. This shift in age demographics has forced open doors that had been nailed pretty tightly shut before, I think- go ahead and post on your Facebook status that older women aren’t sexy, I dare ya to.

The thing with Cougars is this: where (some)people would once have been truly disturbed by this type of May-December union, a more European attitude is trending. Even better, I think, is that people are looking at the trend with a wink and a smile

and humor is definitely the milepost of transition.  Age should not be the defining factor when it comes to finding a soul-mate or even a lover; why can’t a person open all of the boxes looking for that missing jigsaw piece, instead of just the ones located on THAT shelf?

Older women in business, older women as stars in movies, and -yes- the emergence of Cougars as a socially accepted phenomenon as opposed to an oddity or even a stigma (think: the Graduate) are, I hope, indicative of a time where speaking of age and sex as distinguishing features will be in as much poor taste as describing someone by other superfluous- and just as irrelevant- characteristics.

HeyAmaretto is of the opinion that Cougars are older than she is, although this opinion may not be justified given the definitions found in urbandictionary.com. She is a fan of run-on sentences. She would like to remind everyone that exploitation is never pretty, regardless of the ages of those involved.

I am my father’s daughter. He was an engineer at Raytheon, and before that an auto mechanic, and my mind works the way his did, like it or not. I analyze everything to a fault, and, based on my conclusions, am stubborn to that same fault. Just like my father.

It is funny how where you are today is the sum total of your experiences. Your parents, and their parents, built the beginning of the road you are traveling on. You can try to build a better or completely different road if you don’t like the scenery that came before you, but most of the time you end up with a road that runs parallel to the original one- or at best perpendicular. That original road is always the touchpoint.

So here I sit on this gloomy Father’s Day, missing my dad and thinking how his life- more than his words- shaped me. Trust and helpfulness were a huge part of him, and I grew up thinking everyone was like that. It has created in me a blind spot of naivete.

He possessed a wicked sense of humor as well, or was possessed by it, more likely. He and his brother brought my mother out to dinner for her birthday one year, and privately informed the waitress that she was hard of hearing but loathe to admit it, and the waitress would need to speak loudly and clearly to her. By the end of the evening, both the waitress and my mother were shouting at each other- the waitress to be understood, and my mother in vain denial of her deafness. Happy 50th, Mom!

Then there are those days that time is frozen in your mind. I remember when my mother called me up and asked me what multiple myeloma was- the doctor had called her and told her on the phone that a blood test indicated that that my father had that condition. I remember sitting on the stairs in my old house after looking it up and calling her back, in essence opening up the envelope to read to her my father’s death sentence. He was sick from both the chemotherapy and the pain of the cancer the entire last year of his life, and the man who spent his life finding ways to help others finally learned that life is about accepting help when you need it, too. I don’t think the equation came close to being balanced in sum, but that’s the way you want the scales to look at the end of the day, I think.

When he died, I was three months pregnant with my second daughter, now 19. A lot of water has passed under that bridge, but I still remember the feeling that the safety net was gone and here I was- on the tightrope of adulthood, or maybe off the tightrope and learning to be that safety net for my own children as the elder for a new generation.

So, Dad, thank you. Thank you for expecting the best from people. Thank you for exposing me to an unswerving expectation of personal responsibility. Thank you especially for that sense of humor- it comes in pretty handy.  And thank you for the gift of realizing that with great depth of joy in relationships inevitably comes equally deep sorrow unless you are very lucky- and that’s okay and you can live through it.

And thank you to all of the fathers out there who are setting that same example for their children.