Making the most of a Monday

Second Son took a job at a local pizza joint a few weeks ago, so we haven't seen him around the house much except when he sails through and drops off leftovers from the pizza kitchen on his way upstairs to play online video games with his buddies. Since he's got cash in his pockets, he gets to go out and play on the weekends, and he's out late enough that I'm usually sacked out by the time he gets in.

I've mostly been pleasantly surprised that the regular addition of pizza to my diet (if "regular" means most weeknights) hasn't caused me to balloon to the weight I was carrying around when that one was born—suffice it to say, substantially more than I should have weighed even if he had been twins. In fact, between making a point of playing fetch with the dogs a couple of times a day and Number One Son cooking generally nutritious food for me when the pizza runs out, I've actually managed to keep my weight close to where I think it ought to be, which is around 22 on the body mass index.

Since NOS has been out of work for a month and depression was beginning to set in (the good news for today is that he reports to a new job tomorrow), I've found myself missing my visits with SS, who is probably the most like me of my three kids. Besides sharing a lot of my political views, he also enjoys a level of gentle teasing that I enjoy but NOS considers rude; I guess a lot of it depends on perspective, although I have to admit the crowd I tease that way is pretty small.

Saturday night was an exception. My sister from Irving was in town, and the sister who lives here had invited us to join her and her husband to an evening of a home-cooked meal and "Guys and Dolls" at the local little theater. I enjoyed the show and would surely have enjoyed visiting my sisters more afterward, but the to-do list has been out of control for some time, and I wanted to knock off a couple of items before bed so I could start farther down the list Sunday morning.

One of those to-do items was connecting SS's laptop to our wireless printer, a project that we had never accomplished with our previous wireless router and that had been perplexing to me with my own laptop earlier in the week; but since I had conquered mine, I felt confident that I could conquer his, too.

Not so much; the task took a good deal longer than I had expected, so that a little time on the next item down the list put me awake well past midnight. NOS had some issue I needed to resolve before tucking in for the night, so I was still awake when SS came in from his evening out with friends. He drifted into my room and chatted randomly about everything from the new boots that weren't breaking in to suit him to the friends who are on their way to additional schooling in distant places to his struggles with learning to be a man while growing up in a house with estrogen to spare between his sister and me.

Somewhere in that last batch of information, he looked squarely at me and said, "You know, you've made it pretty hard on me to find women."

I could see how that fit the notion of too much estrogen around here; I don't know how to be a man, and I sure never figured out how to teach my sons to be. We had discussed the fact that he had made lots of good attempts to find good male role models, and I think he had done pretty well. He had tried out for football and made the middle school "starter" team; he had taken band to try to develop a relationship of sorts with his dad, who had been in band through his tour with the Marines; he had immersed himself in our church and developed a warm relationship with his male teachers; he had ultimately gotten into high school wrestling, where he found a sport where he could log some wins and had a coach he adored. So while I had certainly not been the influence he needed, I thought he had done a respectable job of finding role models who had much to teach him.

While he acknowledged that the lack of a father had made his life difficult, that wasn't the problem that remains. Instead, it was the fact that I've kept an eye on my weight, and except for my pregnancy with his sister, I have never reached a BMI over about 23 or 24, depending on how tall I claim to be. Either way, keeping my weight under 140 hasn't been a huge challenge, but it's been my stop-and-reconsider mark for years.

Turns out, SS is having a hard time finding women who weigh less than I do, and that irritates him. "They'll tell me they're 5-ft-3 and weight 140 pounds, and I have to tell them my mom is 5-ft-5 or -6 and weighs less than that. They don't have any excuses." It wasn't much of a compliment, but this was SS; I thought that was pretty major.

I crashed a little later than that, and Sunday I had a long list still before me, so while I let his words roll around in the back of my head, I pretty much kept said head down and went to work checking items off the list, not thinking much about the conversation of the night before.

This morning when I got ready to dress for work, though, I pulled out a pair of skinny-leg jeans I like and a long-sleeve t-shirt to keep back the light chill of an early fall day. Since the jeans are longer than I usually wear, I slipped on a pair of sandals that elevate my height almost another 3 inches but are still amazingly comfortable for standing and walking—a requirement on Monday when I have to teach two classes.

Something about the cool weather, the skinny jeans and shirt, the nice but comfortable shoes, and SS's comment that women his age have to look as good as his mom to make him happy put me in an unusually good mood for a Monday.

It's nice to get unsolicited compliments from your son!