March 5th, 2010 01:56pm
Feeling Clingy
Over the summertime, my son started becoming extra clingy. I would be in the next room, and he would call out to make sure that I was still there. He wouldn’t go to his dad’s house without a fight because he didn’t want to leave me. He was constantly worried that I was going to abandon him, or that I might die. So I wrote an article about it, and got a lot of feedback from other parents that were going through the same thing. And it appeared that it was going on with kids around the same age as my son.Here’s one comment in particular:
My 8 year old daughter seems to be going through this. There was no event that seemed to have caused it aside from turning 8. She refuses to go to her dad’s house, and hasn’t been able to have a sleep over. She has tantrums about going to her father’s a week in advance. She constantly asks to sleep in my bed. She can’t be on the second floor of the house without someone else being there unless she is somehow preoccupied. It’s hard to help her cope because I feel suffocated. I’d love to hear some advice. by Kim (more…)
Growing up, I was fortunate to have both my parents in the home. My dad is a real estate appraiser, and though he worked a lot, we were often able to accompany him on local road trips when he went to look at houses. Sometimes we’d ride along with him, fascinated by the beauty of some areas that we never would have seen otherwise. Other times he would drop my mom and us three girls off at the park so we could have a picnic. He’d join us when his appointment was done.
Dad was the one who had the ideas for fun places to go and things to see. Who knew that sitting in the lobby of a fancy hotel, as if we were guests, enjoying hot chocolate by the fire could be so much fun. But with Dad, it was his way of instilling make-believe in us. 
Matthew Gollub of Tortuga Press wrote me this morning in response to “Teenagers and Technology”, the article that ran in the newspaper today. Here’s what he had to say:
“We had to take away the Xbox again last night,” a friend lamented to me. She had caught her son in the wee hours of the morning, plugged in with his headset on, chatting with friends across the country as he maimed opponents in his latest game. It wasn’t the first time, and she was aware that it wouldn’t be the last. And short of taking the game system and throwing it in the Russian River, she wasn’t sure what to do. 
Life seemed to start when my daughter was born in February of 1998. I was 20 years old and I knew nothing about motherhood. 3 years later and I also became the mom of a son. But when I look back at all that now, I can see that this was only the prologue. Life changes, and mine certainly did when I became a divorced mom with two kids to raise.