Best Case Scenario - Your Child Leaves Home - Hmmmmm

     They say that the sign of success when bringing up children is that they grow up and leave.  Can someone come up with another sign please?  This payoff doesn't sound so good.
     Mothers are torn between wanting to see their children accomplish great things and staying home forever and ever. Have you seen parents drop their children off at college for the first time? Bobby or Susie immediately blends into the sea of other excited Freshmen while mom and dad linger lost in their own aching hearts. Often, colleges will post the time for parent departure for fear that dad will don his old football uniform and beg his boy to throw around the ball just one last time.
     My first son, Brendan, just graduated from the University of Chicago with honors in Physics.  (Yes.  I'm beaming.  I'm a comedian and yet I gave birth to a physicist.  God has a great sense of humor.  No wonder he was such a tough crowd.)  We went to Brendan's graduation knowing what his exciting future held.  He'd been picked from the graduating class, along with one other physics major, to go to Switzerland to work at the CERN Nuclear Collider for one year - paid!  My husband and I couldn't be more proud.  We've high-fived, Facebooked, Skyed and Twittered from the rooftops.
  In my quieter moments, I was thinking something quite different.  (Bear in mind, I often think in ways to entertain myself.)  THEY JUST KIDNAPPED MY KID.  I did everything right, read all the Mommy books, attended the soccer games, made the chocolate chip cookies and bought him the expensive calculator.  The result of my efforts were an INTERNATIONAL KIDNAPPING.  How come Switzerland gets him!
  I Gmail Chatted with Brendan this morning as he watched over a number of controls at the CERN facility.  He's been in Geneva for two months now and is doing great!  To Brendan, this is an adventure of a lifetime and it will propel him even faster toward his dreams.  We are all so proud!  Secretly, I know I had the most wonderful adventure of watching this all come to be.  It started when he was six years old in the backseat of our minivan when he asked, "Mom, what do you think about black holes?"  Being a comedian I was speechless and thought, "Yikes.  This parenting thing sure would be a lot easier if I could just answer with a joke!"

Live Your Private Dream

It's an interesting combination- piano teacher by day; standup comedian by night. To tell you the truth, I went for years denying my comic abilities, never telling the other grade school moms about the person I really was. None of them knew I'd spent most of my life, six days a week and sometimes threes shows a night, in smoky comedy clubs trying to make people laugh.

I didn't want to admit my recent past because I felt too many negative connotations come to mind in the words "standup comedian" - drinking, drugs, lewd material and perhaps irresponsible parenting. Living my teenage years at an all-girl's Catholic boarding school, I'd been engrained with a lifestyle that was not a match. And so I kept my past and dreams a secret.

I took off many years from standup comedy when my children were small. After my third child was born, I missed them all so much when I would go out to do a show at night. I continually thought, "Why am I here? I want to go home." Eventually the desire to be with my children at night combined with a healthy dose of exhaustion convinced me that I could leave standup comedy and lead a "normal" life. In retrospect, the lesson learned is - never turn your back on your dream - it will catch up with you, if you're lucky.

What happened in those years that I stayed away from the stage? I wrote and wrote and wrote. (Eventually that writing would become my first show entitled, "BIG PEOPLE, little people!") It was easy to write. I found my children endlessly amusing - let's change that to downright hilarious. I thought to myself, "What if adults acted like children?' "How long would it take for an adult who acted like a child to be committed?" Maybe less than a minute?

My son wore his Power Ranger costume to the grocery store. If I did that nobody would think I was cute. They'd commit me. They'd call the authorities. They'd call 911. They'd say, "Bag Lady in Aisle 6!"

What if I started screaming in church and tried to run up the aisle? Nobody would say, "She's kind of cranky today." No! They'd hustle me out and everyone would be very "disturbed".

What if I ate a spaghetti dinner and left the sauce all over my mouth and ran it through my hair? How do kids get away with this stuff!

And it made me laugh. And I wrote it down. And I'm still writing it down today.

The other day I was teaching a six-year-old girl a beginning piano lesson. In all her innocence, she started her own interesting conversation with me. "Mrs. Edwards. don't you hate it when you're on the monkey bars and you forget you have a skirt on, and your underpants show?" And I said quite matter-of-factly, "Yes. I do hate that! And I know just how you feel!"