Story of the Day 8/ 16/ 2009

I am a Jewish mother.
Literally and figuratively.

I mean , I am Jewish and a mother, and I am also often filled with worry about my husband and my kids, and other people’s kids. I can’t help it.
I know that we are made fun of- an entire of genre of jokes is devoted to us. But, don’t’ fool yourself- EVREYONE needs a Jewish mother.
I mean, someone should care about if your flight arrived safely. Someone should care if you are getting over your flu. Someone should make you cookies and your favorite meals. And someone should worry that you have clean underwear and don’t get electrocuted or die in a fire in your sleep.

Unfortunately, many people do not have a Jewish mother to worry about them, but , luckily for my son, he does!

We dropped him off at college, today.
That is a poor description. We had a caravan of vehicles to get him up to college and settled. Which is also a poor description.
There were two cars. Sarah and I in one, with a lot of his luggage, and Larry and Aaron in “Carla”, with the rest of it.
This wasn’t’ really because he had so much stuff. He could have easily enough. Okay, I am lying, not easily, but we could have done it- squeezed all of his crap into one car- Carla, and he could have driven himself up to college.
BUT, Sarah and Larry had never seen his college. And , when Esther went to college, all the way off in upstate New York, we couldn’t’ all easily go and take her. So, my husband drove her up, and then came back alone. A trip that meant taking most of a week off from work.
And I didn’t’ get to see her college until I went to pick her up, that spring. When her freshman year was done.
And, neither Aaron nor Sarah have ever seen her college- because , for those trips, taking them would have meant no room in the car for Esther’s things- or, maybe for Esther….
So, this was really our first chance as a family to drive a kid up to college and drop them off- even tough this kid has his one car- Carla- and he could have done it himself and saved himself the embarrassment of his peers seeing his …family.

So, I drive ahead, trying not to lose Aaron and Larry who is sitting in the shotgun seat of Carla and trying not to cringe as Aaron goes on and off a couple of highways- for the first time I his life.
I was lucky, and I got to drive the other car. This is because I puke when I am the rider.
See, getting car sick does have its advantages! Although, Larry said that Aaron actually did a very good job……….of course, he is comparing him to Esther.
So, we get o the college and have the usual number of mishaps getting to the right building, and then we unload the stuff from eth cars and carry it up…..and find that the room has platform beds with NO rails- and that the beds move easily and are narrow- the twin sized sheets are big on them………width wise. And Aaron is the kid who has been known to roll out of his double bed and land with a thud on the floor, still asleep.
Only , a fall like that….

Years ago, I refused to buy bunk beds- with rails- for my kids. Yes, his friends had them- but there were numerous reports of injuries, even when they had rails, and the percent of kids who ended up in the ER with injuries was big enough that there were articles warning about it.
So, after a real back and forth discussion ( luckily, Sarah took my side, she must have inherited that Jewish mother trait), we moved the mattress down to the floor.

Well, and after moving the desk and the bureau into rather odd places. Because they were under the platform bed- with a walk area between it and the roommates bed.
Other than that there is a standing closet- and a waste basket for each kid- and a small amount of floor space- which has now gotten smaller.
In fact, despite arranging and rearranging to take up as little space as possible, the best we could do was to have Aaron’s small bureau go slightly past the middle of the room in front of the window- in other words, slightly into his roommate’s space.
Which is making al lot us nervous. This is the roommate who wasn’t’ sure it was gonna be okay to room with deaf guy- and also thought that Aaron’s being Jewish was an issue.
Oh yeah, and he has the egg chair, which was gonna be a tight fit in the small room before this………

So, we left Aaron with his rather unconventional room- but with a mother ( and a sister) who was less likely to have a nervous breakdown, but with another potential cause for a roommate “issue”…….

And we drove on home. Well, after fortifying ourselves with milk and coffee .

About 5 minutes after leaving the campus, Larry and Sarah were fast asleep in the car.
Well, okay, I was the only one who had coffee, and I was driving so that was okay. But the alck of conversation gave me time to think…and a few minutes later a really awful thought went through the mind of this Jewish mother.
Thank God we had moved the damned mattress!!!
Aaron is deaf.
Oh, did I mention that already?Anyhow, being deaf means that he needs certain “ adapted” equipment- like a flashing smoke detector.
With his hearing aids on, he can actually hear a regular one But with them off , he can’t. And, guess what? He sleeps with them off.
And sleeps- well, u know how most people wake up to the buzzing from their alarm clock? Or maybe a radio station or CD? Doesn’t’ work if you are deaf.
If you are deaf, there are basically two types of alarms- well 3…we’ll get to #3 in a minute.
But the two most common are the flashing alarm clock- just like the smoke detector, and the bed vibrator.
Well, the flashing one is good for some people, but Aaron has been known to sleep with his blanket over his head, so it didn’t’ work well for him.
And he ended up with a bed vibrator.
The bed vibrators can be used in a couple of ways. You can put the vibrating part under your pillow- this works really well if you head tends to stay on eth pillow. But Aarons’ doesn’t. So, what a lot of people do is to put the vibrator under the mattress.
The platform bed was different than other platform or bunk beds I have seen- although, the importance of that difference wasn’t’ clear in my head until that drive home.
You see, it is wire mesh. Wire mesh with maybe 3 inch holes between ……..this is a guess based on my faulty memory- but not a real small mesh- and Not even very smooth- lots of ends to the wires.
And the vibrating part would have gone between that and the mattress. With lots of places where the metal mesh would press against the wires of the vibrator- the not especially think wires carrying the electric current to the vibrating unit……which could mean, after a bit of pressure from eth mattress, and from the vibrator vibrating ,as well, frayed wires- and a shock - big or small- and a possible fire.
So, I really don’t’ care what the roommate says, the mattress is not going back up there.
Now, I must admit, there is one more type of alarm . Aaron’s clock actually has it. It is a very loud alarm buzzer. On his it is louder than a typical smoke detector . So, theoretically, Aaron could use that, although, I doubt his roommate, as well as several of the kids in neighboring rooms, would like it. It also isn’t really and option, because, we have tried it, and even at 110 db ( I looked his model up on the Sonic Boom website), it doesn’t wake him up. Of course, considering his hearing loss, it isn’t any sort of 110 db to him- it is probably a nice pleasant sort of background noise.

So, Aaron now has a kind of oddly arranged room, but I can sleep at night. Whoops, I mean he can!