"How are YOU today?"

Earlier this summer, we had a group of Swedish students visit our church and perform a free concert.  

To save money on lodging during their tour from New York to Miami, the group asked if members of our church would open our homes to them before they set off for south Florida the next day. 

We happily obliged. At the end of the evening we caravanned home from the venue with seven Swedish young people in tow.  

“One thing I am confused about,” shared one of the young men after he became comfortable with us,  “Is how I should answer the question ‘How are you today?’  What should I say?”  

As Americans, we just don’t realize how “American” this question is.  

It is the safe and acceptable question to ask when other topics, like football or the weather, elude us.    “How are you today?” is the Wonder Bread of American questions.  

Because we HATE silence.    

I recently had an experience at Walmart in which the woman behind the counter didn’t ask me any of the “usual” questions.  I was met only by a tired silence.  She looked harried and battered down by life, and hardly seemed able to have ANY more interactions with her customers that day.    

And you know what?  That entire interaction (or lack thereof) was horribly awkward.

A new television show called “Welcome to Sweden” began airing on the NBC Thursday night line up this summer.

Bruce (Greg Poehler), the main character, has moved with his girlfriend to her native Stockholm.  His clueless, wide-eyed ignorance to the subtleties of her culture is providing endless amounts of comedic material.

In fact, this very question came up in one of the very first episodes.

“I mean,” Bruce says to his girlfriend, Emma,  “What’s wrong with asking people how they’re doing?”

“Well,” Emma replies, “it’s fake. In Sweden, we just do that if we really want to know the answer, you know?”  

“But I DO want to know the answer,” Bruce exclaims.

“No, you don’t.”  

“Yes,”  Bruce insists.  “I genuinely care about how people are doing.”  

“Okay,” Emma says.  “But if you care about Swedes, leave them alone.  Okay?”

Bruce doesn’t buy it. 

“Say, ‘Hej, hej’ at the most,” Emma says.  “If you do more than that, people will think you’re weird.”  

Confused, Bruce says, “Well how do you get to know new people?”

“That’s the whole point, honey.”

Yesterday, Maggie’s Girl Scout leader asked me,  “How are you doing?”

Now, I almost always attempt to answer this with the accepted “I’m fine.”  But suddenly, I just couldn’t.  

Perhaps she seemed  SAFE.  Perhaps I felt as if she really “wanted to know the answer.“  I am not sure.    

“I am sooooooo happy the kids are back in school.  I am not going to lie: this summer really was difficult,” I blurted out.

Summer, the time when activities ~ such as Girl Scouts ~  ceased, was ironically the time where we NEEDED  those activities the most.  

Summer began full of hope and dreams of sleeping in, adventures  and fun-filled days.

But it ended with fighting.  A LOT of fighting.  

And tears.   

And “I’m BOOOORRRRRREDs.”   

And unreasonable, tyrannical demands.  

The “adventures” we had tried to incorporate just turned into different, more exotic places for the kids to try to scratch the other’s eyes out.    

This particular summer melded into one giant blur of angst and crushing thoughts of inadequacy about our parental competence.  

I AM damn happy the kids are back in school.  

There, I said it again.  

And the children are happy to get away from us, too.There have been zero tears. There has been much excitement on both ends.  

And this school year has started afresh with different kind of hopes and dreams, adventures and fun-filled days.  

So.  

“How are YOU today?”

Chinese Water Torture and Fine Wine

Today was a great day.

The culmination of the Chinese water torture phenomena that I call "summer vacation" came to a head this morning. My morning was spent partially hung-over from the "back to school" celebration bottle of Shiraz I shared (I use that term loosely) with my husband the night before, and urging my apparently half-deaf children to get dressed, eat and brush their teeth.

The urgings were gentle at first, but as the directions (orders) went unheeded, the urgings morphed into a full-blown freak-out where I threatened bodily harm and drop-kicked the said children out the door.

The uber parents walked with their children, hand in hand, to the bus stop and waited by their little sides until the bus arrived; my children walked, shell shocked and confused as to what exactly happened to their mother. I let out a whoop that probably was heard within a five-mile radius.

More caring individuals might have thought longingly of their children a bit during the day, concerned that they were indeed new students in new schools and that one of the said children was beginning his first year of high school. Alas, I thought about what I was going to have for lunch and decided that a strong margarita would really hit the spot.

I believe the problem with the summer was that it was jam-packed full of changes and wackiness for the adults, which unfortunately trickles down in such a way that often produces whiny, demanding children.

They were endearing occasionally, generally in sleep, as I gazed down upon them and felt a little guilty about the several times that day that my shrieks scared not only them, but our poor little dog, a scrappy Cairn Terrier, who had begun to skulk away from me with his tail between his legs whenever I entered the room.

I've always been a bit sensitive to stressful situations and it might be an understatement to say that I don't deal with stress very well. My husband loves me in spite of this wee character flaw and has only had to take drastic measures when, for several weeks straight, I laid in bed and set an acoustic Counting Crows CD on repeat. Looking back, I can understand his concern.

I think with age I have mellowed out, like a fine wine. Or a Golden Retreiver.

The freak out events occur on a less regular basis these days, and although I would love to have my children speak of me as my husband speaks of his mother (his exact words: "I never remember my mother ever yelling at us...") my personality is such that those will never be words my children utter.

It will more likely be, "I remember that first day of school when we were living in Florida...her head almost exploded, it was the weirdest thing. The dog was hiding under the bed and the neighborhood kids were kinda scared of her."

That will most likely be my legacy. And I think I will be okay with that because my eight year old told my husband he missed his mom today.

I think I probably missed him a little bit, too.