Archive for Motherhood – Page 2

One Direction Wardrobe Consultation for Moms

By Nancy Davis Kho · Comments (15)
Wednesday, June 13th, 2012

Tomorrow evening I’m taking my 14 year old daughter to see One Direction, the British/Irish boy band sensation that’s sweeping the nation, and I thought I’d take a minute to share my outfit selection criteria for the other moms who are generous or insane enough to do this for their children.

Now, normally when I see a show, I wear what I consider the mullet of concert attire: business on the bottom, party on the top.

No one can see what you’re wearing from the waist down at a show, so comfort is key. Maybe in college I could have worn high heels or flats for a general admission show, but that ship sailed with the simultaneous onset on my 40s and podiatric problems. So I always go with Dansko clogs, which I possess in a vast range of colors from black to black. It’s the only way to stay upright through the second encore.

As for pants I am a purist: jeans. Jeans with enough pockets to hold keys, lipgloss, tickets, money, and the ID for which you won’t be asked. Pretty soon I’m going to break down and buy reading glasses, at which point I may switch to cargo pants. But for now, jeans will do.

On top is where the fun starts. I like to choose a shirt bright enough so that there’s a tiny hope that a shoe-gazing bass player might spot me that one time he looks up from the mic stand for eye contact. Is it so much to ask to break the 4th wall momentarily, for what I’ve paid for my tickets? So I pull out the fuschia pinks and turquoise blues. If my seat is way back in the room, I’m not afraid to throw a little bit of leopard at the problem.

But as any mom of a teenage girl can tell you, there comes a time when you start to fade into the background as she takes her rightful place at center stage. Nowhere is this going to more apparent that at a One Direction show, when every single hormonal teen girl is going to be trying with every fiber of her being to attract the attention of Zayn, Niall, Harry, Louis and/or Liam. You can fight the encroaching invisibility, or accept the inevitable like the Queen Mum with her daily cocktail and a fabulous collection of hats and handbags.

My role at One Direction night is to be unseen beside my daughter, to be that uninterrupted visual field so she’ll stand out, like the mat in a picture frame.  Maybe that’s what Justin Bieber means when he sings “I’ma make you shine bright like you’re lying in the snow.” I’m being generous. I don’t think anyone, least of all Bieber, knows what he means.

So this is what I’m wearing: Dansko clogs – I’m going with the black. Black jeans. And a black shirt I bought at Target 7 years ago. It has sort of a sexy pirate lacing situation going on, but I’ll be sure to lock that down before I get out of the car. That’s probably when I’ll put in my earplugs too.

The overall effect should be French mime, ninja, anarchist, or one of those Broadway tech crewpeople who scurry around the stage feigning invisibility while the actors with lines get all the attention.

Oh, one more thing. Does anyone have a black balaclava I could borrow?

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A Pool of Passive Aggressiveness

By Nancy Davis Kho · Comments (11)
Friday, June 8th, 2012

I know you probably think I’m lying, but I know from passive aggressiveness. Growing up we shared our giant t-shaped driveway with a family whose dad was the sociology/history teacher at my high school. It was common knowledge that when he got to the unit on philosophies of child-rearing, he used “my next door neighbors” as his case study on the passive aggressive approach. Since the neighbor on the other side was the Widow Crane and her tchotchke collection, there wasn’t much question about where he’d acquired his clinical expertise.

The heavy sigh and the slumped posture, the carefully calibrated observations that make me sound like a martyr and you like a jerk? I literally do not know how else to react in the face of interpersonal conflict. And since I am a productive and functioning member of society, at least according to me, I don’t know that I should.

Which is why, despite the fact that we hardly have the time to get there, I can’t drop my family’s membership to the local pool club. Because the club president sends out a once-a-month newsletter that drips passive aggressiveness like a white club towel that’s been dropped into the deep end, on purpose, despite all the signage that prohibits such behavior. Sigh.

This month’s opening line is a perfect example of how the Prez uses the newsletter to make his paying customers feel just awful about the work they cause him:

“It’s beginning to look like summer and little problems are starting to mount.”

Last month, those problems evidently included cars taking up two spaces instead of one, lap swimmers who are interrupted by other swimmers, and Water Aerobics Evening Class participants who are unhappy about having their classes cancelled during the summer months. To them he has a special message. “This shouldn’t come as a surprise; it was a condition of me allowing the class in the first place.” Sigh. Past bottles of whine have included the outrageous cost of running washing machines to launder the complementary towels, the rising expense of providing state-mandated health care to employees, and that one time he had to replace a pool heater unexpectedly.

His philosophy seems to be: if it weren’t for the cost and hassle of running a business FOR YOU, I’d enjoy running this business.

I like to think of how other professionals might write a newsletter to compare to this one. From a teacher: “It’s spring and we’re working hard on memorizing the alphabet. It would be a whole lot easier if the children could be less interested in playing outside on sunny days, but I guess they just don’t want to learn.” From an accountant: “Once again, April was a very busy month. It sure would be nice if everyone didn’t seem to think it was my job to get the taxes done by April 15.” From a writer: “Writing would be great, if it weren’t for all the reading I’m expected to provide.”

So while I could probably do without the three summer pool visits which, at this point, cost me something like $1398 per visit, I’m not sure I could do without the monthly reminder that there’s one guy out there worse than me.

I’m sure there are other Parents of Teen Bloggers you like better than me. I mean, it’s not like I mine all my parenting mistakes to make you feel better about your choices, or anything. I’m just saying: there’s a contest. And you can vote once a day til June 20th. Sigh.

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The Benefits of Moving On

By Nancy Davis Kho · Comments (22)
Thursday, May 24th, 2012

As this season winds down and sees us saying goodbye to an elementary school that has nurtured our kids since they were age five, nostalgia is whipping unchecked through the hallways. The 5th grade graduation rehearsal, I’m told, is interrupted by sniffles from both boys and girls as they prepare whichever heart-wrenching song is going to lay the parents low in a few weeks. Every “last” is commented upon: the last fieldtrip, the last project in computer lab, the last Pajacky Hair Day (that’s Pajama Day and Wacky Hair Day, combined due to Oakland budget cuts.)

At the last school Open House, I heard 5th grade parents coo at kindergarteners and say to one another, “Oh! I can’t believe Joshua and Ashley were ever so small! I miss that!”

Here’s my dry-eyed take: I’m glad my two aren’t that small anymore, because there are a lot of things I do not miss about having very young children. Sure, having a teen and a tween is a whiplash ride I may not survive, my IQ is plummeting every minute in my children’s estimation, and I’ve learned that I have no taste in clothing.

But guess what? I no longer have to play Chutes and Ladders. Remember those hours and hours? You’d think you were just about done nudging one child along to blessed victory so you could start cooking dinner and then – nooooooo! – that child made an unlucky move and slid down the ladder to the bottom of the board. You were looking at another 20 minutes of carpet time and a 9 pm dinner.

Similarly, much as the kids love the Carl books – Carl, the bull mastiff left in charge to babysit a toddler by parents who were obviously addicted to prescription pain meds if they thought that was a sensible plan – I had a big problem with them. THEY HAD NO WORDS. Parents had to make up the story as they read. And a.) I was never good at improv and b.) my kids had photographic memories. “No, Carl is not jumping to get the balloon, Mom,” they might say, shaking their heads. “Last time you said he is jumping to get the cake. Read it again.” Each page brought new adventures in correction.

When the girls were very young I wrote movie reviews for a site that parents can use to decide if a book, movie, or television show might be appropriate for their child. (CommonSenseMedia.org. It’s a fabulous resource and I still use it frequently.) I got to keep the screener copies, so volunteered for the ones my kids would watch with me, and that meant: Barbie movies. Each year Mattel picks another fairy tale off the shelf to bastardize. So, for instance, “Barbie: Thumbelina” took the Hans Christian Anderson story about a diminutive heroine as a jumping off point, kept the diminutive heroine and discarded the rest of the story in favor of flying fairies called The Twillerbees. Did the original Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol” need improvement through the addition of new characters, a famous female singer and her childhood-pal-turned-costume-designer? Did they have to rename the crippled child Tiny Tammy? You can understand, perhaps, how relieved I was to leave all that behind.

And then there is kid’s music. I may not love everything I find magically downloaded to my iPod, a side effect of the girls’ tastes and Apple Home Sharing. But hey, at least it’s not Raffi, or worse, the new age-y lullaby CDs that just beg you to smudge a sage stick and name your kid “Heatherwind Moonrise.” I couldn’t scratch those CDs fast enough.

So when you see me sobbing at school next month? Pick any of the above and remind me. Thanks in advance.

The musical turning point of parenthood came when we discovered Dan Zane. The former lead singer of the Del Fuegos, he does kids’ music that everyone can love by drawing on American folk songs and backup singers like Debbie Harry, Suzanne Vega, and a Jamaican rapper named Father Goose. This was one of our favorites, because it’s funny when kids sing “Pay me my money down, pay me or go to jail.” It just is.

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Things My Family Is Spared from Knowing

By Nancy Davis Kho · Comments (28)
Friday, May 18th, 2012

My husband and I have a running joke. At least I think it’s a joke. Every night after he takes Achilles outside one last time, he says, “I took the dog out for you,” as though the dog’s nightly eliminations somehow belong in my category and he’s doing me a big favor. My responses range from, “I bore your children for you,” to “I made the coffee for you,” (even though I’m the one who drinks it) to dead silence and a head tilt, which never ends well.

Everyone has their role to play in a family, and his happens to include taking the dog out at 10 pm. He also specializes in When to Refinance the Mortgage and How to Wax the Car.

But there is an equally weighty list of things my family can rest assured that I will always know for them.

1.) Where the spare rolls of toilet paper are stored. Yes, there are always a few rolls under the bathroom sinks, but do they know where the TP Mothership is parked after I haul it in the door from Target?  Why would they? They have never in their lives been caught without a square to spare.

2.) How to buy or address a distant family member’s birthday card. These appear magically on the kitchen table, with the “Dear [Name]” section filled in, the address and stamp already on the envelope, and a pen lying across the top. All they do is step up and apply a John Hancock.

3.) How long to microwave anything. Who has time to read a box? Just ask Mom. She’s probably read that one before. Also, ask her which dish to microwave it in. She’s magic that way.

4.) Where to buy filters for and/or how to clean the many filter-needing products in the house. Water filters, coffee filters, refrigerator filters, HVAC filters, I’ve got them wired. I know when to change them, where to buy refills in bulk and on the cheap, and where to store them (hint: near the TP Mothership.) If I go, please buy my family bottled water and coffee coupons.

5.) When and how to apply preventative medications to the dog. My family wouldn’t know where to find the tick oil and heartworm medication stash in this house, or what to do with it if they did. All they know is once a month, when they walk in the door from school or work, they’re greeted with “Don’t touch the dog’s back until the tick oil sinks in and for god’s sake keep him off the furniture!”

6.) The dates of school related activities. We operate on a Just-In-Time Information Inventory system around here. I am not about to tell them that the Middle School Open House is in two weeks because everyone is busy and they’ll forget anyway. I like to fill their lives with happy surprises by springing it on them 90 minutes ahead of time.

And if you think I’ve made any of this up, I’ll just share a stanza from the lovely Mother’s Day poem I received from my eldest daughter this week, entitled “6 Ways To Look at a Mother:”

The only one

with a concrete

sense of

what is happening

at any given moment

Here’s to not knowing, and feeling fine about it.

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School of Thought

By Nancy Davis Kho · Comments (11)
Tuesday, May 15th, 2012

School HallwayThe decisions are made. The die is cast. After six months of researching school options for our kids, both of whom enter new schools next year, we’ve made our final choices. No going back. Go Toros! Go Bulldogs!

You can tell I’m nervous, right?

Where I grew up, there was none of this “Which schools are you applying to?” crap. Every last one of us went to the local public elementary school. Then the middle school. Then the high school. Yes, there was a parallel parochial system that drew all the Irish Catholics in my neighborhood, but once those kids got onto the Holy track it was the same thing for them: first Lady of Lourdes, then Queen of Peace, then Our Lady of Mercy (girls) or McQuaid (boys.)

What a golden era. Entire tranches of our young brains were spared the indignities of “shadow visits” and researching afterschool clubs and language requirements, and could instead be devoted to memorizing lyrics by Hall and Oates or devising strategy for epic games of bike tag. Where am I going to go to school? Why, where my brother went. And my sister before him. When I showed up for kindergarten, the teacher said, “I remember you! Your sister brought you here for show and tell when you were a newborn!” I don’t think parents spent nervous hours worrying whether it was worse to impose adult edicts and crush a child’s tender spirit, or to defer to the educational preference of a person who, given the choice, would eat a 100% sugar diet.

Now, for all I know no one who grew up in my birth ZIP code still follows the same lockstep process I did. My niece and nephews who live there did, though, and one of them even had the same German teacher as me. The public schools I went to were excellent, empirically excellent. I remember getting to college and thinking how much easier some of the classes were than in my high school.

But in Oakland, one has choices. One must consider the choices, given the vagaries of state educational funding and the decimation that Prop 13 has wrought on the quality of California education. (Adjusted per-pupil spending – We’re Number 47! Thank god for Alabama making us look good.)

So that means Sunday school open houses, Wednesday night information sessions, conversations in the grocery store aisle with fellow parents about what they’ve heard about this school or that. It means applications, recommendations, interviews. It means driving by the school during let-out time, to see if it’s as chaotic as you’ve been led to believe, and stopping by ostensibly to drop off paperwork but really to see the school in action when it hasn’t been buffed to a high sheen by an admissions director.

It means frank family discussions about budgets, goals, worries. What kind of a future do you want for your child? What school is best suited to get her there? Who else will be attending, and is that a community in which you can envision yourself? Where do you see yourself in another four or five years?

That’s a discussion I was hoping to have with and about the kids when they were 18, not 11.

To their eternal credit, my kids were reasonable, calm, and determined throughout this process. One knew from the get-go where she wanted to attend and just had to bring her parents around. The other was open to all possibilities and, because of that, made us particularly proud of the confidence with which she made her final choice.

They’re going to public schools, just like their dad and I did. But we sure took the long way ‘round.

Although, obviously, if the School of Rock were not fictional, they’d be heading there under the tutelage of fake Ned Schneebly.

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A Mother’s Day to Remember

By Nancy Davis Kho · Comments (20)
Friday, May 11th, 2012

I keep this picture on my bedside table. It’s my favorite picture of the kids and me, taken ten years ago, a blurry snapshot from a Napa Valley getaway. Real photographers would probably say that it’s not a keeper. The image is overexposed, the baby’s not looking at the camera, and aside from the earrings which I lost shortly thereafter and still miss, I look like a slob.

But I love it, because my daughters and I look like the branches and trunk of a single tree. Despite what may have actually been going on that day – diaper shortage, toddler fits, goldfish crackers ground into my car upholstery – I seem confident and strong, and the girls are grafted right onto me. I prefer to think of the light on the left hand side of the frame as the universe giving us our spotlight dance, saying, “You are blessed with these particular children, who will enrich your life in ways that it will take you the rest of yours to comprehend.” We look, simply put, intertwined.

Ten years later, with my kids growing up and independent in all the right ways, we aren’t so physically attached (my hips couldn’t take it) but we are still connected.  If they haven’t checked in with me for a half hour, I find myself wandering through the house looking for them. “Whatcha doing?” I ask, as I peer into their bedrooms or into the family room. It’s the inverse of the the long ago days they used to come find me in the kitchen, touch my knee, and return to their paper doll games, the unseen sonar of familial reassurance. Sometimes it’s hard to remember with any clarity the time of my life when they weren’t flanking me.

Which is why, on this Mother’s Day, I am holding a special thought for the children of moms no longer alive to to be that reassuring home base. And for the mothers whose children have left too soon.

It has been a hard spring, full of loss for people near and dear to me. But whoever you are, there are people all around who have lost a parent, or a child, knocking that precarious balance off center. They’ve had to figure out how to put one foot in front of the other every single morning, how to present an appearance of solidity to the world when all they want to do is dissolve into a thousand pieces. They are our neighbors, friends, parents, siblings, husbands, and wives, all of whom have had to un-learn the reflex of “I’ve got to remember to tell my mom the next time I call her” or “wonder what time my daughter will get home?”

It takes fortitude and courage to keep moving after such a loss. There are specific days of the year that it sucks to be the one left behind.

This Sunday, Mother’s Day, would be a good day to take a moment and think about those in your life who have lost a mother or a child. Shine your own spotlight on them, by offering a funny remembrance or a kind word about the one no longer here. Remind them that you also remember.

And the rest of us who still have the branches of our family trees intact? Even in the worst moments of parenting, or being the adult child, try to recall: we are actually the fortunate ones.

Here’s a song from an album called The Reminder, by Feist. 1,2,3,4, tell me that you love me more…

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Hey Shawty

By Nancy Davis Kho · Comments (6)
Friday, April 13th, 2012

A few weekends ago we had a toddler staying in our house, and it brought back a rush of memories: the years in which I walked in a permanent stoop as a tiny girl clung with her whole fist to my forefinger, careening from living room to dining room or up a set of mountainous stairs. The years when I had to lean down to kiss the top of a sweaty head, or pick up a daughter and place her on my hip so she could be at eye rather than knee level with visitors.

Those memories comfort me, now that I have a barefoot kid who looks directly into my eyes while pressing down on my shoulders with two hands and says, “Bwahahahahahaha, Dad, I’m taller than Mom now! I am! Come see!”

The truth is that I still have about an 1/8th of an inch on her, but that difference will probably be erased by the time I get to the end of this paragraph. I may as well say it: my 14 year old daughter is as tall as I am, and showing no signs of stopping.

I’m not short, either – 5’8” if you believe my driver’s license, by which I am also 5 pounds lighter so, you know, take it with a grain of salt. But I’m at least 5’7 ½”. Tall enough to be that woman in the grocery store who gets asked by old lady shoppers to reach for things, to be that wife who prides herself on never asking her husband to get down the pans stored on the topmost kitchen shelves, tall enough to order the Long version of clothes from catalogs. “On the tall side” is part of my identity.

And I always dated tall guys, with the exception of a German/American dude when I lived in Munich who got a pass because I didn’t have to explain idioms to him, which masked a LOT of his shortcomings. No surprise then that my husband still has three inches on me even when I wear my tallest heels. He comes from tall people.

I used to tease my late father-in-law B.T. about a family picture from the 1930s in which he is 16 years old, about to leave his family in Indonesia to move to Holland for college. (Bad timing: World War 2. Minority students put into German work camps. Story for another time.) At any rate there’s B.T., towering over his parents and siblings by a factor of two. I used to say, “B.T., they were probably happy you were getting ready to leave, so they could have some of the food you were hoovering up the whole time.” He always laughed. But never denied it.

So really, this having a child who is my height and still growing shouldn’t be a surprise. One might say I brought it upon myself. I just wish she wasn’t so darn gleeful about it. And soon there will be two: the younger daughter recently tried on a dress that fit her sister at the same age, and it was about two inches too short on her. Somewhere at a dim sum restaurant in Heaven, B.T. is cracking up.

But I do still have some small satisfaction. Because along with height comes another physical attribute: big feet. My gunboats aren’t small.

But I bet they’re going to be downright dainty compared to my kids.

Here’s a weird little tune that I always loved – Neil Finn singing “Sandy Allen,” an ode to the world’s tallest woman, who he once met on a talk show. (The first two lines that are cut off are “Hello Sandy Allen, the world’s tallest woman…) I love the little note of universal self doubt – “we made friends in New York, don’t know if you remember?” She was probably good at recognizing people by their scalps.

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Ticket Torture

By Nancy Davis Kho · Comments (16)
Tuesday, April 10th, 2012

That keening scream you heard from the West Coast, two Saturdays ago? It was the collective dashed hopes of thousands of future Mrs. Harrys, Liams, and Nialls wailing their displeasure.

There was a point at which I worried that my children would have unreasonably high expectations around concert-going, due to their fantastic and wholly unusual first concert experiences (think crowds gently insisting they stand in the front row, security guards bringing them chairs, concert posters rolled and pressed into their tender little hands.)

But the rose-colored glasses are broken, crushed as if they’d fallen to the floor of a mosh pit. They recently tried to buy tickets online for the super-hot boy band One Direction. In so doing they had their introduction to the Hell that is Ticketmaster.

It went down like this. At 4 pm on a Thursday, pre-sale tickets for the One Direction show in Oakland would be available for those with the magic and 1derful code. All over the East Bay region, hyperventilating teens hovered with their cursor of the “Purchase Ticket” button. I know of at least three houses where there were actual teams of girls, each armed with a laptop, arrayed so that they might increase their chances of good seats.

In my house we had a desktop computer and laptop for a tandem ticket assault. I felt just slightly like Yoda. “Ok, make sure you create an account and log in at least 10 minutes ahead of time, you don’t want to mess around doing that when the ticket sale starts. Click past the band info page straight onto the purchase page to save time. Open up the seating chart in another window so we can see if they are good seats without navigating away from that page, you should. ”

Good seats? Try no seats. As soon as the clock struck 4, we all hit “purchase” only to learn that there were no seats available. Refresh. Try again. Nothing. Refresh. Change the number of seats. Nothing. Refresh. Try for the special $350 VIP Exclusive package which, I think, involved One Direction washing my car. Nothing. At 4:05 I called it and said, “We’ll try again when the regular tickets go on sale.”

Only Saturday at 10 am, it was a repeat. No tickets, in any combination, even though we were hitting “purchase” at 10:00:01. We checked around – not a single person we know, out of dozens, was able to buy a ticket on Ticketmaster. The ones who do have tickets did what we ended up doing – jumping over to StubHub, the site dedicated to reselling extra tickets at huge markups over the face value. Out of the kindness of my heart and the cynical writer’s instinct of “oh, that concert review will pay me back in spades” I paid more for those two tickets than I have ever paid to see a show. (Tickets for the front row, which had a face value of $73, were selling for $1,730 so compared to that I got off cheap.) The fees, which my daughter agreed to cover, cost nearly as much as one of the tickets, had we been able to get one of the tickets at face value.

And it’s not like I have the tickets in hand: according to StubHub, they’ll be delivered to me by the mysterious seller two short days before 1D hits the stage. I have no idea whether this will actually happen or not, but they sure deducted the funds from my account efficiently.

I understand that Ticketmaster tries to outwit the ticket dealers using captcha images, but it doesn’t seem to make a dent. So here’s the philosophical question: What possible incentive does Ticketmaster have to make tickets available on the regular site, with only their puny $10 “handling fee” and $12 “mailing fee” or, my personal favorite, the fee they charge you when you decide to print your own ticket at home thereby saving them handling and mailing costs? The answer: none. The automated dealer algorithms that snap up tickets and make it virtually impossible for a normal person to buy a ticket at face value for a popular show is just sound business strategy.

This is a band purpose-built to appeal to young teenage girls, girls not old enough even to have after school jobs beyond babysitting. For them to buy the super high priced StubHub tickets is unrealistic. Why do I have the sinking feeling that the audience in June is going to be a bunch of 1 %’er offspring plus one music writer and her very, very lucky daughter?

I don’t know why the musicians aren’t more pissed off about this. Though not a single one of my daughter’s friends scored a ticket, they’ve vowed they’ll wait outside the theater just the same in order to breathe the same air molecules as the Fab 5. Aren’t those really the fans you want listening to you, inside the venue?

Radiohead and Bruce Springsteen have both done shows where tickets are available at will-call only, which means that the person who bought the ticket must show up with ID to pick it up at the venue. It’s a pain if your plans change but seems fairer in every other way.

There are, of course, two simple alternatives, but the 8th grade girls I explained them to found them hard to stomach. “You have to find another band to like that is musically talented but not photogenic; they’ll never go mainstream,” I said. “Or you can wait 25 years and go on a One Direction themed cruise when the boys have hit bottom.”

Sometimes truth is the worst torture of all.

Remember when you prayed your date for the 8th grade dance wouldn’t move like Thom Yorke of Radiohead? Say what you will, but the guy knows how to put real fans into seats. Lotus Flower, from The King of Limbs.

 

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That’s What She Said

By Nancy Davis Kho · Comments (1)
Wednesday, March 28th, 2012

You know you’ve done it. Uttered the phrase you heard eight million times when you were growing up, clapped a hand across your mouth and thought, “I sound just like my mother!”

Even when I think I’m being clever and original, I’m still saying exactly what my beloved mom said to us kids. I’m just using an updated set of words.

Today I’m over on the wonderfully entertaining “It Builds Character…and Other Parenting Cliches” site, talking about Maternal Catch Phrases,Then and Now. I hope you’ll stop over and take a read and let me know – which of your mother’s catchphrases do you hear yourself saying (word for word, or in code) all the time?

 

After that I’m just going to sit back and wait to hear one of the kids say to my grandchild: “But I need another pair of red shoes!”

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Obsolete Technology

By Nancy Davis Kho · Comments (16)
Tuesday, February 21st, 2012

At my first real job at a tech consulting company in Germany, my boss handed me six boxes of software to install, along with their manuals, and said, “You know what you’re doing, right?” Like I was going to admit the truth and get sent back to America; I just nodded and started installing. That trial by fire eradicated any sense that technology is mysterious or that I’m going to break it by pressing the wrong button. That’s why I’ve always been the person in the house who is called upon to defrag the hard drive, figure out why the printer is stalled, and format Excel tables.

However, I can see that my reign as Tech Support Queen is coming to a rapid end. In a cycle repeated endlessly, across all disciplines, the old gets replaced by the new. I am not even being replaced by the 14 year old, who is herself very tech savvy. It’s the 11 year old who is our self appointed new Geek.

My mom has never loved computers but during her visit last week we talked her into getting an eReader – her lifelong love of reading being the one thing that we thought might get her on board with modern technology. The youngest daughter took it upon herself to set up a self-paced instructional module called “How to Be Moderately TechieTM” for Grandma. It culminated with a written test showing photos of various devices whose primary function had to be chosen from a multiple choice list (good luck with the iPhone answer.)

There was also a long list of desired search results, for which Grandma had to write down the proper search phrase she might use to elicit them.

Thus began the biggest “Who’s On First?” debacle this house has ever seen, with the granddaughter saying, “Ok, how old is Lea Michele? What phrase would you use to look that up on Google?” and my mom saying, “She’s 20. I just read it in Parade Magazine.” My daughter would sigh heavily and ask again, and my mother would just as firmly say, “I know she’s 20 so I don’t have to look it up.” On to the next question: “What would you search for if you wanted to know the name of Madonna’s latest song?” “Oh, that’s easy. It was during the Super Bowl. She was wearing some sort of gladiator costume.” It was like listening to two weary travelers from far distant lands meet at a crossroads and try to provide a helpful weather report, each in in her own tongue.

The child’s particular expertise is AT&T U-verse and the operation of our one television. I believe it’s related to her ardent love for things that appear on its screen, including but not limited to Dance Moms; if there is troubleshooting to be done, she materializes magically, grabs the three remotes it takes to operate our TV/DVR/VCR, and juggles them like a circus pro. Her ways are inscrutable, but she’s never yet been defeated.

Last Sunday afternoon, though, I thought she’d met her match. I got the first tech support call, from my husband and father who were hoping to watch the Pebble Beach golf tournament. Neither my regular tricks nor my advanced hacks worked, and I ended up on the phone with AT&T support, scheduling a repair visit for Monday morning. So much for the Grammies, and worse, as I announced right before dinner, so much for Downton Abbey.

Downton Abbey, which runs until 10 pm,  provides the only exception to the 9 pm bedtime of our nascent tech guru, so she was off to the races. From the kitchen we could hear her talking to the TV; it was definitely taking her longer than usual to do her magic. My husband finally went down to provide moral support, which is when the bickering started. Dad clearly was not on board with whatever approach his daughter was taking, and she was just as clearly sure she was right. About ten minutes later we finally heard the telltale “Got it!” and the sounds of voices coming from the tv.

My husband came upstairs, shaking his head. “Do you want to know how she fixed it, in case it happens again?” he asked.

“First, put the movie ‘Elf’ into the VCR, and watch it for seven minutes. No other movie, and no less than seven minutes. Then, and only then, press the ‘Exit to TV’ button on the DVR remote control. That’ll reset the whole system.” He went on demonstrate her unique swish and point technique for operating the remote, which looks suspiciously like Hermione Granger schooling Ron Weasley on Wingardium Leviosa during Harry Potter 1.

Our daughter joined us, looking quite pleased with herself. “But Dad,” she pointed out, “it worked.”

The Queen is dead. Long live the Queen.

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