Where were you when you heard commercial airline planes had crashed into the World Trade Center? Or the Pentagon? Or that that one had crashed in a Pennsylvania field on its way to a Washington landmark, possibly the White House, on Sept. 11, 2001?
The events of that day created a picture you won’t ever forget.
We know where we were and even remember every detail of that day, and the days that followed, because it was more than somber, it was sobering. In our minds that day changed everything.
Now, nearly 10 years later, we mark a new memory in our minds' indelible ink -- the killing of the man largely blamed responsible for the terrorist events that killed nearly 3,000 people on U.S. soil.
When I heard the news of Osama bin Laden’s death I was watching the end of an episode of "Treme," an HBO series depicting another American tragedy -- New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
As I watch TV these days I find myself a slave to not only the ripped-from-the-headlines dramas, but also my smartphone, obsessively turning it on and off to allow the programs for email and text messages to update. (The latter obsession being the demon my husband would like to cast out.)
As he sees it, it’s not enough that we’re there on the couch, together, that matters anymore. With the constant contact of thoughts and ideas swirling around the ether, it’s what the world has to say about what we’re seeing that adds the spice.
It’s both alarming and amazing: We witnessed revolutions and every manner of revulsion alike, with strangers we know only by their avatars.
It is what it is, I tell myself in a brief sadness for the seeming demise of the simple life. Taking stock of an electronic timeline is just part of our present and probable future:
At 8:40 p.m. My children, just barely ideas before the first anniversary of 9/11, were now peacefully asleep upstairs.
At 9 p.m. we are watching television on the couch.
At 5 minute intervals I check my phone.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
Until 10:43 p.m. when the New York Times email alert read: "Osama bin Laden is Dead."
For a moment I wondered if his previously reported health problems had caught up with him. But opening the email I saw the word "killed" and realized it was not incidental.
I didn't feel anything. Numbness, perhaps. Definitely not the celebratory vibe that took hold overnight and lasted well into the next morning. I didn't even feel a sense of relief.
It's not over. We haven't closed the book on terror, or even finished the chapter. We've just torn out one sheet of paper as the prevailing wind fans all the other pages.
But it's not fear I'm feeling, either. It’s more of a low-grade dread. This interconnectedness we feel online offers the biggest disconnect of all:
As the picture on the television (now changed to a news broadcast) shows celebratory crowds in Washington and New York, I feel even greater dismay.
Not for the first time, I stare down at my phone and realize the crowd streaming into my life via the pound sign, are merely adding noise to my life instead of nuance.
I stop checking messages. I can’t be a witness to spontaneous outbursts of celebration. I can’t help them grow.
As a mother, I’m finding it’s the line I can’t cross.
There is something inherently wrong about celebrating a murder, regardless of how reviled the character.
May 2nd was an historic day, and one that will be pondered well into the infinite future. It was a day of reckoning. But it was not a day for jubilation. The day we all stand together as mothers and brothers and friends in reconciliation; that will be the day to celebrate.
Sunday, May 08, 2011
Sunday, May 01, 2011
Mirror images
"Are we there yet? When will we get there? Are we there yet? "How far have we gone? Are we there yet?"
"Yes! We're there!" I say with eye-squinted sarcasm. "And in a few minutes we'll be there, too."
She looks at me skeptically. She knew as well as I that we'd not yet passed the edge of town and it was going to be a long drive until we reached our destination.
What she didn't know was the exact number of hours in which she could continue making us wish we were rendered temporarily deaf.
"When the clock says ‘3:00’ we will be there," I instruct in my most stern Don't-Be-A-Pest voice.
I don't expect it to work.
It's not as if she were the first child to join the Society for Sapping Parents' Sanity. It's an institution that predates history. I'm sure somewhere, on the walls of a cave, there are drawings of bison hunts in which large stick figures are depicted holding their hands over their ears as smaller stick figures are cushioned by bubbles of text that would loosely translate as: "When do we eat?"
As much as we all complain about being a captive audience in a cross-over vehicle, it's all so tame compared to how it will be once we get to the hotel.
The questions don't stop they are just addressed elsewhere, often embarrassingly so.
"Why does that guy have a towel on his head? Did he forget to hang it by the tub after he showered?"
These are the kind of questions that make you wish you could just keep kids in their car seats and drive them right to the room. In fact you daydream that the entire vacation could be experienced via drive-in:In your mind a visit to the pool would be the same as popping the trunk, filling it with water and handing them swim goggles. Go ahead, kids, splash away.
The big problem we face as parents, though, seems to have little to do with our kids' big-mouthed questions and more to do with our pathetic and shriveled answers.
Often we just don't know what to say so we pretend we don't hear.
And thus continues the never-ending cycle. We avert our eyes and when we raise them again we are always catching the glinty-eyed disapproval of fellow travelers. Perfect strangers, we think, until they scrunch their noses in our direction and wonder aloud about children being seen and not heard.
We are THOSE parents. The ones all the single people hope not to be and newly retired folks have, up until now, successfully avoided. We feel slightly panicked by the notion that our kids could be an annoyance to the childless, but not enough to make us book our destination to Kid Central instead. I can't face that roller coaster just yet.
We just repeat The Rules as often as we can.
“You can not bother the desk clerk. It is not their job to get you a cookie.
“Your seat is next to mine. Do NOT try to sit on lap of the lady at the next table.
“We are not getting room service. Put down the phone. “
Thing is, children will be children wherever they go.
Ittybit strikes up a conversation with another little girl poolside and is delighted to learn they share not only the same grade number but also the same name, spelling and all. After the discovery the pair will be inseparable in their minds if not their activities roster. They call out their own names in novel delight.
The questions become more pointed.
“When can I see her again?
“Can we go to dinner?
“Can I see her room?
“Can we play tomorrow?
“Can we have a sleepover?”
I see where this is going.
"We are not going to stalk this little girl and her family. I am not asking the hotel for her room number. ... We can go to the pool and the lobby and if they're there fine ... but I don't want you to get your hopes up. Families have plans and they're not likely to include perfect strangers you meet at a pool."
She gave me the squinted-eye look again. I knew exactly what it meant.
Somewhere in the hotel was a mirror of the same conversation, being begged by a girl named Ittybit with a different last name. ... And we WERE going to stalk them.
Eventually we'd find each other and know that the really wonderful part about being THAT parent is the realization that we're not alone. And the only reason we gain this wisdom is because our children refuse to stop asking questions.
"Yes! We're there!" I say with eye-squinted sarcasm. "And in a few minutes we'll be there, too."
She looks at me skeptically. She knew as well as I that we'd not yet passed the edge of town and it was going to be a long drive until we reached our destination.
What she didn't know was the exact number of hours in which she could continue making us wish we were rendered temporarily deaf.
"When the clock says ‘3:00’ we will be there," I instruct in my most stern Don't-Be-A-Pest voice.
I don't expect it to work.
It's not as if she were the first child to join the Society for Sapping Parents' Sanity. It's an institution that predates history. I'm sure somewhere, on the walls of a cave, there are drawings of bison hunts in which large stick figures are depicted holding their hands over their ears as smaller stick figures are cushioned by bubbles of text that would loosely translate as: "When do we eat?"
As much as we all complain about being a captive audience in a cross-over vehicle, it's all so tame compared to how it will be once we get to the hotel.
The questions don't stop they are just addressed elsewhere, often embarrassingly so.
"Why does that guy have a towel on his head? Did he forget to hang it by the tub after he showered?"
These are the kind of questions that make you wish you could just keep kids in their car seats and drive them right to the room. In fact you daydream that the entire vacation could be experienced via drive-in:In your mind a visit to the pool would be the same as popping the trunk, filling it with water and handing them swim goggles. Go ahead, kids, splash away.
The big problem we face as parents, though, seems to have little to do with our kids' big-mouthed questions and more to do with our pathetic and shriveled answers.
Often we just don't know what to say so we pretend we don't hear.
And thus continues the never-ending cycle. We avert our eyes and when we raise them again we are always catching the glinty-eyed disapproval of fellow travelers. Perfect strangers, we think, until they scrunch their noses in our direction and wonder aloud about children being seen and not heard.
We are THOSE parents. The ones all the single people hope not to be and newly retired folks have, up until now, successfully avoided. We feel slightly panicked by the notion that our kids could be an annoyance to the childless, but not enough to make us book our destination to Kid Central instead. I can't face that roller coaster just yet.
We just repeat The Rules as often as we can.
“You can not bother the desk clerk. It is not their job to get you a cookie.
“Your seat is next to mine. Do NOT try to sit on lap of the lady at the next table.
“We are not getting room service. Put down the phone. “
Thing is, children will be children wherever they go.
Ittybit strikes up a conversation with another little girl poolside and is delighted to learn they share not only the same grade number but also the same name, spelling and all. After the discovery the pair will be inseparable in their minds if not their activities roster. They call out their own names in novel delight.
The questions become more pointed.
“When can I see her again?
“Can we go to dinner?
“Can I see her room?
“Can we play tomorrow?
“Can we have a sleepover?”
I see where this is going.
"We are not going to stalk this little girl and her family. I am not asking the hotel for her room number. ... We can go to the pool and the lobby and if they're there fine ... but I don't want you to get your hopes up. Families have plans and they're not likely to include perfect strangers you meet at a pool."
She gave me the squinted-eye look again. I knew exactly what it meant.
Somewhere in the hotel was a mirror of the same conversation, being begged by a girl named Ittybit with a different last name. ... And we WERE going to stalk them.
Eventually we'd find each other and know that the really wonderful part about being THAT parent is the realization that we're not alone. And the only reason we gain this wisdom is because our children refuse to stop asking questions.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Reaching the sugar glass ceiling
In the blink of an eye the mystery of Easter was forever mangled by the silver screen: The Easter Bunny (or E.B. as he's known in the diminutive) was sitting on the hood of a Volvo, hunched up his haunches. There was a clattering sound and when he stepped aside ... a pile of candy.
Ewwwwwwwwwww.
"That kind of gives new meaning to 'you're full of beans, doesn't it, mom?" said Ittybit, first as a whisper and then a wall of giggles. "Full of beans."
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
It was too late. A new understanding had already taken root. "Hop's" jelly bean fountain overflowing with a rainbow of color, which had made us all gasp at its beauty as we sat in the darkened theater, was nothing more than cartoon sewer system for all the animated inhabitants of Easter Island.
Eww.
Shh.
A tub of popcorn accidentally spilt on the floor. Two trips to the snack bar later and the credits started to roll. With them rolled Ittybit's questions: "Mom?" she said cautiously in a whisper: "Is there really an Easter bunny?"
Ah ... the seven-year-itch. The phrase generally accepted to mean the time in a marriage when the strength of fidelity weakens. The magic is gone or maybe it wasn't ever there to begin with.
In my mind that kind of thinking may start at the average age of seven, when we begin to understand that Santa was just a nice old man with whiskers moonlighting at Macy's to supplement his pension.
The gossip was probably all over school.
I knew it was only a matter of time. The fabric of the fantasy was beginning to unravel around the edges ... all those threads that were just at loose ends were now starting to fray.
I was silent. I didn't want my baby to disappear completely. Even as I roll my eyes and wish she could read the pulpy fairy stories by herself already, I didn't want all the magic to vanish.
"Did you hear me? Mom? Is the Easter Bunny real?"
"What do you think? Do you think he's real?" I ask with equal care. I don't want to douse the magic but I don't want to be accused of perpetrating an outright lie."
"I don't think there is one," she said softly, not wanting to tip off her happily oblivious brother to the possibility. Maybe she didn't even want to be right. "I think parents bring the candy."
I shrug my shoulders. What can I say? The story always seemed a little unclear. ... A rabbit, dressed in velvet and silk, hopping around the world delivering baskets of treats to kids as they sleep? ... And doing it all without thumbs?
She's probably been asking herself the same questions.
How would a rabbit even hold the baskets? Why do some children get toys and others get candy? Sometimes he hides the baskets and sometimes he just leaves them out in plain sight. And how does he deliver to all the children of the world in just one night? It takes us two hours just to go to the grocery store. It just doesn't make sense.
And those inconsistencies don't begin to explain the reasons why Hollywood has cast every single bunny as a boy. Ittybit finds it completely unfair, especially seeing as her favorite Easter story is about a mommy bunny with 21 children who defies all odds and is chosen to be The Easter Bunny. There must be a sugar glass ceiling in Movieland's ornate panoramic eggs.
It's all too complicated. There has to be a simple answer: The Easter bunny isn't real.
She takes a deep breath.
"You're the Easter bunny, aren't you?"
I shrug my shoulders.
"I can't explain magic," I tell her. "I just believe."
She smiles and accepts my explanation. But she can tell it's just the icing of denial spread thinly over a bitter-sweet chocolate cake. She only wants the frosting anyway so It's not hard to swallow. Her truth is underneath it still, waiting for her to take a bite.
Ewwwwwwwwwww.
"That kind of gives new meaning to 'you're full of beans, doesn't it, mom?" said Ittybit, first as a whisper and then a wall of giggles. "Full of beans."
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
It was too late. A new understanding had already taken root. "Hop's" jelly bean fountain overflowing with a rainbow of color, which had made us all gasp at its beauty as we sat in the darkened theater, was nothing more than cartoon sewer system for all the animated inhabitants of Easter Island.
Eww.
Shh.
A tub of popcorn accidentally spilt on the floor. Two trips to the snack bar later and the credits started to roll. With them rolled Ittybit's questions: "Mom?" she said cautiously in a whisper: "Is there really an Easter bunny?"
Ah ... the seven-year-itch. The phrase generally accepted to mean the time in a marriage when the strength of fidelity weakens. The magic is gone or maybe it wasn't ever there to begin with.
In my mind that kind of thinking may start at the average age of seven, when we begin to understand that Santa was just a nice old man with whiskers moonlighting at Macy's to supplement his pension.
The gossip was probably all over school.
I knew it was only a matter of time. The fabric of the fantasy was beginning to unravel around the edges ... all those threads that were just at loose ends were now starting to fray.
I was silent. I didn't want my baby to disappear completely. Even as I roll my eyes and wish she could read the pulpy fairy stories by herself already, I didn't want all the magic to vanish.
"Did you hear me? Mom? Is the Easter Bunny real?"
"What do you think? Do you think he's real?" I ask with equal care. I don't want to douse the magic but I don't want to be accused of perpetrating an outright lie."
"I don't think there is one," she said softly, not wanting to tip off her happily oblivious brother to the possibility. Maybe she didn't even want to be right. "I think parents bring the candy."
I shrug my shoulders. What can I say? The story always seemed a little unclear. ... A rabbit, dressed in velvet and silk, hopping around the world delivering baskets of treats to kids as they sleep? ... And doing it all without thumbs?
She's probably been asking herself the same questions.
How would a rabbit even hold the baskets? Why do some children get toys and others get candy? Sometimes he hides the baskets and sometimes he just leaves them out in plain sight. And how does he deliver to all the children of the world in just one night? It takes us two hours just to go to the grocery store. It just doesn't make sense.
And those inconsistencies don't begin to explain the reasons why Hollywood has cast every single bunny as a boy. Ittybit finds it completely unfair, especially seeing as her favorite Easter story is about a mommy bunny with 21 children who defies all odds and is chosen to be The Easter Bunny. There must be a sugar glass ceiling in Movieland's ornate panoramic eggs.
It's all too complicated. There has to be a simple answer: The Easter bunny isn't real.
She takes a deep breath.
"You're the Easter bunny, aren't you?"
I shrug my shoulders.
"I can't explain magic," I tell her. "I just believe."
She smiles and accepts my explanation. But she can tell it's just the icing of denial spread thinly over a bitter-sweet chocolate cake. She only wants the frosting anyway so It's not hard to swallow. Her truth is underneath it still, waiting for her to take a bite.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
It's a bargain, I tell you
I couldn't sell ice water in hell, and not because my conscience prevents me from profiting from another person's pain.
In fact, I'm fairly certain that were my life to depend upon getting some thirsty soul to pony up a few pennies for a drink, I'd be pushing up daisies in short order.
Weighing the value of time and energy against the perception of a finished commodity has long made me uncomfortable. It might all boil down to the fact that I hate to ask for money. I'm much better at forking it over one paycheck at a time.
My daughter, on the other hand, is at the age where there is no better use of her playtime than selling some chunk of rubbish to an unsuspecting neighbor.
The wily world of finance has her rapt attention: "This lovely piece of crystal can be yours for only five cents," she calls over the fence toward Sunday strollers.
She's always working some angle.
It was a beautiful day; the first in weeks in which people ventured out of their houses on foot. Just the sight of all the people walking past our house gave Ittybit hope that her shop would be a wild success.
Behind the fence ... yards from the road and sidewalk ... she continued to hawk her wares.
"We got rocks. Lots of rocks. ... and crystals ... Pretty crystals for sale. Five cents a pieces. Buy one get one free. Pay no money down ... Just a nickel. That's it, just a thin nickel. Give us a quarter and we'll give you back two dimes. That's 20 whole cents you'll get back. ... It's the bargain of the day."
"Get yer rocks here. We got yer rocks here."
It was all so intoxicating to her as she gathered supplies and readied her shop for the onslaught. She lined up her wares — two dozen ancient wine bottle corks, a handful of gravel and two chunks of driveway sheared off during winter plowing — and set them in neat little rows.
Repetitively she pawed through a tin box full of change and separated each coin by denomination.
"There is so much to do," she fretted, as she taped a few cardboard signs to the fence.
"5 cents per cristal!!!!!" and "Get your rocks here, cheep!!!!"
A few kind souls ventured down the length of driveway where the shop stood a safe distance from traffic. They exchanged a few nickels for rocks.
Emboldened by the transaction, she taped another sign to a pencil and handed it to The Champ.
"Your job is to walk back and forth with the sign. Don't forget to hold it up."
He waved the piece of cardboard in front of my face. Crossed out was: "We have ALL colors" In its place read: "We have RED rocks."
I turned and saw that all the colors of the rainbow had spilled out onto the driveway.
She watches me look at the puddle of paint.
"Sorry. Will it come out?"
Yes. It will come out ... of your profits," I say with a laugh and a faux stern look.
"Ok ... but the rest I'm donating to charity."
Turns out she's not terribly fond of profiting from another person's pain either.
In fact, I'm fairly certain that were my life to depend upon getting some thirsty soul to pony up a few pennies for a drink, I'd be pushing up daisies in short order.
Weighing the value of time and energy against the perception of a finished commodity has long made me uncomfortable. It might all boil down to the fact that I hate to ask for money. I'm much better at forking it over one paycheck at a time.
My daughter, on the other hand, is at the age where there is no better use of her playtime than selling some chunk of rubbish to an unsuspecting neighbor.
The wily world of finance has her rapt attention: "This lovely piece of crystal can be yours for only five cents," she calls over the fence toward Sunday strollers.
She's always working some angle.
It was a beautiful day; the first in weeks in which people ventured out of their houses on foot. Just the sight of all the people walking past our house gave Ittybit hope that her shop would be a wild success.
Behind the fence ... yards from the road and sidewalk ... she continued to hawk her wares.
"We got rocks. Lots of rocks. ... and crystals ... Pretty crystals for sale. Five cents a pieces. Buy one get one free. Pay no money down ... Just a nickel. That's it, just a thin nickel. Give us a quarter and we'll give you back two dimes. That's 20 whole cents you'll get back. ... It's the bargain of the day."
"Get yer rocks here. We got yer rocks here."
It was all so intoxicating to her as she gathered supplies and readied her shop for the onslaught. She lined up her wares — two dozen ancient wine bottle corks, a handful of gravel and two chunks of driveway sheared off during winter plowing — and set them in neat little rows.
Repetitively she pawed through a tin box full of change and separated each coin by denomination.
"There is so much to do," she fretted, as she taped a few cardboard signs to the fence.
"5 cents per cristal!!!!!" and "Get your rocks here, cheep!!!!"
A few kind souls ventured down the length of driveway where the shop stood a safe distance from traffic. They exchanged a few nickels for rocks.
Emboldened by the transaction, she taped another sign to a pencil and handed it to The Champ.
"Your job is to walk back and forth with the sign. Don't forget to hold it up."
He waved the piece of cardboard in front of my face. Crossed out was: "We have ALL colors" In its place read: "We have RED rocks."
I turned and saw that all the colors of the rainbow had spilled out onto the driveway.
She watches me look at the puddle of paint.
"Sorry. Will it come out?"
Yes. It will come out ... of your profits," I say with a laugh and a faux stern look.
"Ok ... but the rest I'm donating to charity."
Turns out she's not terribly fond of profiting from another person's pain either.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
In marriage, some assembly required
The next order of business: The purchase of a ground-based structure resembling an aviation contraption in which many children can play at different altitudes. It comes in a box. A heavy, heavy box. With many pieces.
Who would like to second?
All in favor?
"AYE! WILL VOLUNTEER MY HUSBAND TO ASSEMBLE IT!" I blurted, a little too eagerly, as I registered my vote during the monthly board meeting of the Marilla Cuthbert Academy for Unspeakably Charming Children.
I was angry with him, you see, and could think of no better way to express my true feelings than to sign him up to sift through a-thousand-and-one teeter-totter pieces. I was giddy just imagining him having to fuse the parts all together with a million-and-one bolts ... on his day off.
Oh, I could see it all so clearly: He'd bring all his tools ... except the one that would REALLY help. The first bolt he'd need, the M80-10, would be in a mislabeled packet on the bottom of the pile, and would turn out to be missing two pieces to boot.
The drawings wouldn't look anything like the parts strewn about the play yard, and some frowny-faced emoticon would vex him as the realization set in that some way, some how, he'd managed to install the whole contraption backwards or inside out.
My voice would ring in his head in sing-song annoyance: "You should have read the directions first."
I pictured a black cloud, heavy with his expletives, hanging low over the playground like a cartoon bubble. Unable to be borne by the wind, it would hover there until Monday when the children arrived, hopefully wearing ear muffs.
For him — a fabricator and installer of large scale sculpture — it would be more like a dare than a busman's holiday. He'd do it, of course, because there's nothing that makes a man feel bigger than when his son thinks he's a superhero. And there's nothing that says superhero more perfectly than a shiny new toy assembled out of shapes no mere mortal could ever imagine.
In this crowd of knee-high beings, there are few paths to superherodom: Wearing a suit of all one color, driving trucks that crush solid waste or being responsible for the coolest plaything on Earth.
Oh sure, he'd be swearing under his breath as he turned the directions this way and that; he'd be demanding to see the designer's credentials once the drawing diverged from reality. But that's just part of the fun. The moment his son gazed at the Not-An-Actual-Flying-Toy (Nor to Be Used as a Flotation Device) and realized HIS FATHER had been the man who made it happen, it would all be worth it. There would be a ticker-tape parade in his honor. There would be praise and adulation. There may even be the unsolicited gift of pie. Pecan pie.
Then there would be the let down. The moment when the gift horse is asked to open its mouth. The moment that inevitably reveals the punishment for that particular good deed.
"That's ... uh ... really nice ... but it would look better over on the other side of the playground. Can you just move it, please?"
I was practically salivating at all the myriad ways this simple mission would be miserable.
*Clap* *clap* *clap*
His applause brings me back from my demented daydream.
"That will be great," he answers cheerfully, giving me a sly look. "We can all go to the school on Sunday and work together as a family!"
Turns out my husband has a few bones to pick with me, as well.
Who would like to second?
All in favor?
"AYE! WILL VOLUNTEER MY HUSBAND TO ASSEMBLE IT!" I blurted, a little too eagerly, as I registered my vote during the monthly board meeting of the Marilla Cuthbert Academy for Unspeakably Charming Children.
I was angry with him, you see, and could think of no better way to express my true feelings than to sign him up to sift through a-thousand-and-one teeter-totter pieces. I was giddy just imagining him having to fuse the parts all together with a million-and-one bolts ... on his day off.
Oh, I could see it all so clearly: He'd bring all his tools ... except the one that would REALLY help. The first bolt he'd need, the M80-10, would be in a mislabeled packet on the bottom of the pile, and would turn out to be missing two pieces to boot.
The drawings wouldn't look anything like the parts strewn about the play yard, and some frowny-faced emoticon would vex him as the realization set in that some way, some how, he'd managed to install the whole contraption backwards or inside out.
My voice would ring in his head in sing-song annoyance: "You should have read the directions first."
I pictured a black cloud, heavy with his expletives, hanging low over the playground like a cartoon bubble. Unable to be borne by the wind, it would hover there until Monday when the children arrived, hopefully wearing ear muffs.
For him — a fabricator and installer of large scale sculpture — it would be more like a dare than a busman's holiday. He'd do it, of course, because there's nothing that makes a man feel bigger than when his son thinks he's a superhero. And there's nothing that says superhero more perfectly than a shiny new toy assembled out of shapes no mere mortal could ever imagine.
In this crowd of knee-high beings, there are few paths to superherodom: Wearing a suit of all one color, driving trucks that crush solid waste or being responsible for the coolest plaything on Earth.
Oh sure, he'd be swearing under his breath as he turned the directions this way and that; he'd be demanding to see the designer's credentials once the drawing diverged from reality. But that's just part of the fun. The moment his son gazed at the Not-An-Actual-Flying-Toy (Nor to Be Used as a Flotation Device) and realized HIS FATHER had been the man who made it happen, it would all be worth it. There would be a ticker-tape parade in his honor. There would be praise and adulation. There may even be the unsolicited gift of pie. Pecan pie.
Then there would be the let down. The moment when the gift horse is asked to open its mouth. The moment that inevitably reveals the punishment for that particular good deed.
"That's ... uh ... really nice ... but it would look better over on the other side of the playground. Can you just move it, please?"
I was practically salivating at all the myriad ways this simple mission would be miserable.
*Clap* *clap* *clap*
His applause brings me back from my demented daydream.
"That will be great," he answers cheerfully, giving me a sly look. "We can all go to the school on Sunday and work together as a family!"
Turns out my husband has a few bones to pick with me, as well.
Sunday, April 03, 2011
Cupcakes for dinner and other shared traits
She couldn't keep her hands out of her hair. Or maybe she couldn't extract her hands from her hair. Her knotted, bedraggled hair.
Realizing the finer point of distinction, such as it is, I find it hard to tell. I try to smooth it, saying her hair needs some kind of protein salve or cream rinse or some other product of detanglement that has thus far eluded me, too.
"Leave it be," she says and shoos my hand away.
So I rationalize her smile outshines her lank locks. That's what I tell myself as we are out in the world, just the two of us. My mini me, or so has been marveled by many-a stranger.
"She looks just like you," they'll say with a smile. I wonder if it's the long messy hair that people see in common ... or the clothes that seem to have been selected by covering the closet in kibble and seeing what the dog drags out. It can't be our features or our personalities.
As I look at her, with her easy smile and solid profile, I see each feature in terms of fruit tossed into a salad by the family tree. She has father's eyes and her grandfather's nose. She has one grandmother's hair, and the other grandmother's hands.
I find it curious how all these bits and pieces seem to have played genetic hop-scotch in shaping her, and yet I don't see myself in her at all. Especially in personality, she seems to be my polar opposite.
Yet it's near impossible to put yourself down when someone is comparing you to your child.
She is easy going. Cautious but not shy. Once she's jumped in, I know pulling her out will take all my resolve. "How much do we really need to be home by bedtime?" is a question I've asked myself far too often. We all know who runs the show.
These thoughts and more (like how long can a person go without food before they start to shake and growl and chew at their clothes) were going through my head as Ittybit snaked her way through the crowded Art Center, trying to fill up her passport sheet with stamps from each workshop station.
Drawing, check. Jewelry, check. Printmaking, check. Pottery, check. Swing dance, check. Art installation, check. Music, check.
"Hey, look. ... Cupcakes! Let's go check the kitchen."
I follow her, knowing she is following her own drum beats. And we might get lost along the way.
It's girls' night, after all. And it's a rare event. Time alone with mom usually means bursting into the bathroom unannounced and being shooed out unceremoniously. It might also mean sitting in a darkened room, crying, whilst listening to mom rattle off a laundry list of reasons why playing hide and seek with your brother must include actually going to look for him.
Doing something fun together is as rare as eating cake for dinner.
"Have one," she says, holding up a her creation: A Chocolate Vanilla Delight"
"You'll like it ... it has protein."
I bend down, brush the hair from my own face and take a bite. I don't have to tell her how many times I've eaten cake for dinner.
Realizing the finer point of distinction, such as it is, I find it hard to tell. I try to smooth it, saying her hair needs some kind of protein salve or cream rinse or some other product of detanglement that has thus far eluded me, too.
"Leave it be," she says and shoos my hand away.
So I rationalize her smile outshines her lank locks. That's what I tell myself as we are out in the world, just the two of us. My mini me, or so has been marveled by many-a stranger.
"She looks just like you," they'll say with a smile. I wonder if it's the long messy hair that people see in common ... or the clothes that seem to have been selected by covering the closet in kibble and seeing what the dog drags out. It can't be our features or our personalities.
As I look at her, with her easy smile and solid profile, I see each feature in terms of fruit tossed into a salad by the family tree. She has father's eyes and her grandfather's nose. She has one grandmother's hair, and the other grandmother's hands.
I find it curious how all these bits and pieces seem to have played genetic hop-scotch in shaping her, and yet I don't see myself in her at all. Especially in personality, she seems to be my polar opposite.
Yet it's near impossible to put yourself down when someone is comparing you to your child.
She is easy going. Cautious but not shy. Once she's jumped in, I know pulling her out will take all my resolve. "How much do we really need to be home by bedtime?" is a question I've asked myself far too often. We all know who runs the show.
These thoughts and more (like how long can a person go without food before they start to shake and growl and chew at their clothes) were going through my head as Ittybit snaked her way through the crowded Art Center, trying to fill up her passport sheet with stamps from each workshop station.
Drawing, check. Jewelry, check. Printmaking, check. Pottery, check. Swing dance, check. Art installation, check. Music, check.
"Hey, look. ... Cupcakes! Let's go check the kitchen."
I follow her, knowing she is following her own drum beats. And we might get lost along the way.
It's girls' night, after all. And it's a rare event. Time alone with mom usually means bursting into the bathroom unannounced and being shooed out unceremoniously. It might also mean sitting in a darkened room, crying, whilst listening to mom rattle off a laundry list of reasons why playing hide and seek with your brother must include actually going to look for him.
Doing something fun together is as rare as eating cake for dinner.
"Have one," she says, holding up a her creation: A Chocolate Vanilla Delight"
"You'll like it ... it has protein."
I bend down, brush the hair from my own face and take a bite. I don't have to tell her how many times I've eaten cake for dinner.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
No one really wants to rain on a parade
Ittybit was brimming with excitement. When I got home from work she greeted me at the door holding a familiar drawing, enhanced with new and unfamiliar autographs.
She'd been reticent to go to her after-school program but unable to pinpoint why. With gigantic huffs and theatrical eye rolls, she recants a litany of complaints: "It's no fun. There are bullies. No one plays with me. I can't get to the craft table soon enough. I just sit there. And. Wait."
We didn't want to minimize her concerns, but the four days a week she attends its programs getting her to leave has been similar to extracting a confession from a statue. It's just that Tuesdays, the day after her three-day respite from respite, that seem to be the problem. It's all in the lead up.
So, in an effort to get her past this moment of dread, I offer a vast and changing array of suggestions: "You could bring a game or a toy? You could bring a book and read? "Maybe you could get a game of Freeze Dance going? You love Freeze Dance."
It was plain from the tilt of her head and the diminished distance between her eyelids that I'd grown another head.
I was not deterred.
"How about you bring some drawing paper and pens?"
Her eyes widen and her head balances evenly on her neck. I had her attention.
"You know, we need kids to help us with the parade dragon we've been making. ... Maybe, if you take the drawing with you, you can explain what it is we're doing and recruit volunteers."
She liked that. It appealed to the wee little art director in her soul. And as her face brightens, I can picture her flitting from student to student trying to gain their interest.
As she stood there ... beaming up at me gripping her autographed plans, she wanted me to know the day had been G-R-E-A-T. Everyone loved the idea and wanted to be a part of it. It was going to be the best parade ever and she'd be making flyers and cookies for all who came to dance down the road under a cardboard box trailing a quarter-mile of iridescent fabric.
"Look," she said, thrusting the paper in my direction.
I turned over the drawing and found a list of names neatly printed alongside a column of phone numbers.
Numbers like 555-1234.
"When should we call them?" she wondered. "A month before? A week? How about tomorrow?"
“Next Tuesday in Never” sprang to mind, but I knew I'd need to put it more delicately.
"Honey, these phone numbers aren't real phone numbers. We can't call these. My guess is you asked some older kids who didn't want to say "No" but didn't want to get a phone call either."
"Are you sure?" she asked with a wry little smile. "Would someone really give a little kid like me a phony phone number?" she said squinting at the numbers.
"There's too many patterns. Most real numbers don't go in such clear order," I explained and showed her a listing from a phone book.
She just shrugged her shoulders and skipped off. Every bounce of her being proclaiming it "Their loss."
They won't get any of the special "dragon cookies" she'd been planning to bake for the crew. They wouldn't get to throw candy at the crowds who gather at the edges of their driveways. They would miss the best parade of the year and they wouldn't even know it.
My shoulders weren't as relaxed as I wondered aloud if I should have mentioned the deception. I could have just as easily asked her about all the kids we know well, children her own age, who'd actually LIKE to be in her parade.
My husband just shrugged his shoulders. "I think it's best to tell her the truth. She'll find out anyway. If someone's going to rain on her parade, it's probably better that it's you."
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Worries linger but construction paper fades
I had imagined parents the world over have been quietly slipping their children’s artwork in with the recycling — saving only the most precious for posterity — since the invention of paper thousands of years ago. But I had no idea it was a subject of great consternation until the New York Times in January published a much-shared expose on the most ruthless of all art critics: Mom.
Maybe the stick figure families committed to scrap paper make it to the refrigerator before finding their way into the trash, maybe they don’t. Or maybe the squiggle-made “elephant” of an undecipherable color helps start a fire moments after it is prodigiously praised for the arch of its trunk and the way its girth fills up the page space.
Health care premiums sky high, education budgets in the toilet; taxes up, jobs down – those worries will always be with us while the color on construction paper fades.
First-World problems, perhaps, but serious business nonetheless, and one more reason our kids will end up in therapy. “Mom is throwing out ART WORK? HO-MY-GAD!”
To be brutally honest, there’s only so much construction paper a one-family construction can hold. But how do we know WHAT we should be saving what we can safely toss?
Some parents have told me they save only "original works of art" that come from the child’s imagination, as opposed to a web-site’s step-by-step instructions. We hate these folks (except for my husband) and have crossed them off our Christmas card list.
Others — *cough*NOT ME*cough* — will save only the stuff their kids insist on sleeping with because they know if they take their eyes off it for even a millisecond, their glorious glitter-covered princess will be art napped and never heard from again.
There rest of us fall somewhere in between. We save probably more than we should, push it around our desks for a while. Moving it from closet to closet — maybe even from old house to new house — before we decide to let some of it go.
We know beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so most of us tend to save art work based on our own preferences. In addition to just "liking" something, I tend to save anything that has words used in explanation or that include stories. (Drawings containing misspelled expletives are framed).
But HOW we save it becomes another conundrum.
The following is a list of the most popular methods for saving cherished works of kinderart, which vary by cost and complexity:
Hold the dough, sauce and cheese-y goodness The most cost effective storage: Use a clean, empty pizza box to store artwork by year. Use one box per school: Elementary and Middle school. (High Schooler’s works will probably be off limits. They save what they want themselves). These can easily be stored on closet shelf or under a bed.
Artist Colony You can save all kinds of flat work a handled portfolio case. They are relatively compact but are large enough (if you are discriminating in what you save) to hold most two-dimensional creations a child makes during their entire educational career, unless they plan on going to an art college. In which case they will likely burn all their old drawing and use the case for their "real work."
Artistic Ant Colony This would be similar to the above portfolio case option, but scaled down in size to fit into ordinary office binders. This means parents are limited to keeping only art that conforms to the standard 8 ½” by 11” paper size. Think Origami originals.
Art Recycling Using techniques of collage, create new artworks from old ones: Laminate and make placemats or bookmarks or greeting cards. Use as gift wrap. Or literally recycle by putting lesser-loved works the revolving file ... in the middle of the night ... on the eve of recycling day ... whilst your petite Picasso sleeps. (Then pray the truck makes it to the curb before the bus comes).
The Mother of All Storage Schemes The overachiever parents among us** are digitally documenting each and every work of art Junior makes — from his pencil squiggles to his pipe-cleaner sculptures — and using any one of a growing number of self-publishing sites to turn them into carefully composed coffee table books that can be admired and cherished for generations.
**I have not done this … though I have take pictures of some of my favorites and uploaded them to the photosharing website flickr, where I’ve tagged them as "art" so I can search for them later. (But I pray, perhaps even more fervently than for schools to hold on to their arts programs, that flickr doesn’t go out of business taking all my carefully archived photos with it into the ethosphere).
Now, with the Whats and the Hows solved, the only question left is Why? What will eventually happen to all this pent up creativity?
One day you'll drag it out, dust it off and present it in all its musty glory to the artist, now grown and in possession of piles of his own children's creative genius. What he does with the collection will be the final answer to what has been the real question all along: whether hoarding ... like artistic prowess ... is an inherited trait.
Maybe the stick figure families committed to scrap paper make it to the refrigerator before finding their way into the trash, maybe they don’t. Or maybe the squiggle-made “elephant” of an undecipherable color helps start a fire moments after it is prodigiously praised for the arch of its trunk and the way its girth fills up the page space.
Health care premiums sky high, education budgets in the toilet; taxes up, jobs down – those worries will always be with us while the color on construction paper fades.
First-World problems, perhaps, but serious business nonetheless, and one more reason our kids will end up in therapy. “Mom is throwing out ART WORK? HO-MY-GAD!”
To be brutally honest, there’s only so much construction paper a one-family construction can hold. But how do we know WHAT we should be saving what we can safely toss?
Some parents have told me they save only "original works of art" that come from the child’s imagination, as opposed to a web-site’s step-by-step instructions. We hate these folks (except for my husband) and have crossed them off our Christmas card list.
Others — *cough*NOT ME*cough* — will save only the stuff their kids insist on sleeping with because they know if they take their eyes off it for even a millisecond, their glorious glitter-covered princess will be art napped and never heard from again.
There rest of us fall somewhere in between. We save probably more than we should, push it around our desks for a while. Moving it from closet to closet — maybe even from old house to new house — before we decide to let some of it go.
We know beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so most of us tend to save art work based on our own preferences. In addition to just "liking" something, I tend to save anything that has words used in explanation or that include stories. (Drawings containing misspelled expletives are framed).
But HOW we save it becomes another conundrum.
The following is a list of the most popular methods for saving cherished works of kinderart, which vary by cost and complexity:
Hold the dough, sauce and cheese-y goodness The most cost effective storage: Use a clean, empty pizza box to store artwork by year. Use one box per school: Elementary and Middle school. (High Schooler’s works will probably be off limits. They save what they want themselves). These can easily be stored on closet shelf or under a bed.
Artist Colony You can save all kinds of flat work a handled portfolio case. They are relatively compact but are large enough (if you are discriminating in what you save) to hold most two-dimensional creations a child makes during their entire educational career, unless they plan on going to an art college. In which case they will likely burn all their old drawing and use the case for their "real work."
Artistic Ant Colony This would be similar to the above portfolio case option, but scaled down in size to fit into ordinary office binders. This means parents are limited to keeping only art that conforms to the standard 8 ½” by 11” paper size. Think Origami originals.
Art Recycling Using techniques of collage, create new artworks from old ones: Laminate and make placemats or bookmarks or greeting cards. Use as gift wrap. Or literally recycle by putting lesser-loved works the revolving file ... in the middle of the night ... on the eve of recycling day ... whilst your petite Picasso sleeps. (Then pray the truck makes it to the curb before the bus comes).
The Mother of All Storage Schemes The overachiever parents among us** are digitally documenting each and every work of art Junior makes — from his pencil squiggles to his pipe-cleaner sculptures — and using any one of a growing number of self-publishing sites to turn them into carefully composed coffee table books that can be admired and cherished for generations.
**I have not done this … though I have take pictures of some of my favorites and uploaded them to the photosharing website flickr, where I’ve tagged them as "art" so I can search for them later. (But I pray, perhaps even more fervently than for schools to hold on to their arts programs, that flickr doesn’t go out of business taking all my carefully archived photos with it into the ethosphere).
Now, with the Whats and the Hows solved, the only question left is Why? What will eventually happen to all this pent up creativity?
One day you'll drag it out, dust it off and present it in all its musty glory to the artist, now grown and in possession of piles of his own children's creative genius. What he does with the collection will be the final answer to what has been the real question all along: whether hoarding ... like artistic prowess ... is an inherited trait.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
All roads lead to the highway ... except the ones that lead to oatmeal
I took a left when I should have taken a right.
I was out of my element, more than an hour from home and it was dark.
As I turned I'd had the feeling I'd gone in the wrong direction, but continued on just for confirmation.
I thought about turning around.
One street. Two streets. A mile of streets. Another mile of streets.
Might as well keep going, I tell myself. Eventually I'll find something I recognize.
In a day in age when gasoline prices are eating into food budgets and car exhaust is poisoning the planet, other motorists might retrace their steps and cut their losses. I motor on through. I tend to think there are only six streets of separation from me and any major highway, and that all roads eventually lead to some place I'll recognize. I reason, maybe the drive will, at the very least, help my over-stimulated children, bickering side by side in their car seats, fall asleep.
I can hear my husband's voice in my head ...
"What are you doing? This is crazy. Turn around."
Even when he's not in the car, he tells me how to drive.
In fact I'm sure, were I to think on it any further, he'd intervene with some form of pocket-sized salvation designed to contradict my fabricated understanding of the universe.
"Being lost isn't the worst thing. Sometimes it leads you to places beyond your wildest dreams."
The bickering stops for a blessed moment. I checked the rear-view mirror. Ittybit's eyes were wide.
"You don't KNOW where we ARE!?!"
"I said some of that out loud, didn't I?"
"We're LOST!?"
"We're not lost, really. I know generally where we are, I just don't know exactly where we are."
"You know what this means, right?"
"It's going to take us longer to get home?"
"No. We are going to have to sleep in our car, and in the morning we'll have to go to one of these houses and beg for food. ... Only they probably won't give food to you, because nobody will give food to an adult ... so I'll have to go up to the door and you'll have to hide in the bushes. ..."
"I am not hiding in the bushes," I say emphatically. "We are not going to pull a bait and switch on a homeowner. Besides, we are NOT going to be lost for long ... I'll find the highway and we'll be home before you know it."
"You know," she continues as if I hadn't spoken. "If they have oatmeal you will have to eat it. Beggars can't be choosers."
"We are not going to have to beg for food. Look, there's a sign for the highway. We're almost back to where we started. Why don't you just relax and listen to the radio."
She's quiet for a while as I turn onto the highway.
"Ah ... mom?"
"What, hon?"
"We're on the highway?"
"Yep. We are. It's the highway alright."
"You know what this means, right?"
"We'll be home soon?"
"No. It means we are going to STARVE! There are no houses on this road."
Sunday, March 06, 2011
Putting out small fires is just part of the job
We can tell ourselves "parenting isn't a job it's a relationship" and other philosophical truths. But we all know it's work. And work can be exhausting. Vacations, on the other hand, are supposed to be refreshing. Yet, while the family may be doing something different for a week at a time, someone still has to do the laundry. And dispose of kitty litter. And put out small fires.
You may plan to be a tourist in your own town, sit poolside or read The Weekly World News to your heart's content, but when the junior miss and mister are bickering over who gets the last pretzel, and the boy sprays purple grape juice over the girl to make his point, it's likely to be you who is called to put out the fire.
It's just a fact. Similar to the understanding marriage is work, though no one would ever call it a job.
Now I'm not trying to create a gender war, here. Mom isn't the only one separating skirmishing siblings and scrubbing purple from duds. Although many-a-smart man has had the laundry duties removed from his Honey-Do List permanently if for no other reason than to ensure that her favorite cream-color wool zippered cardigan doesn't end up doll-sized and pink.
Let's just call it a matter of drathers.
I'd rather fold laundry than shovel sidewalks.
He'd rather shovel than have me drive his tractor into the house.
I'd rather scoop kitty litter than trap mice.
He'd rather be hung by his toenails and drained of blood than deal with the cat's recycled Nine Lives.
I'd rather clean bathrooms than cook dinner.
He'd like to eat.
So it's really not a he-said, she-said kind of fight I'm picking.
It's more of a everyone's going to be blind after we get done getting our eye for an eye.
For instance. Let's just say a certain person -- HIM -- discovered the kitty litter had been disposed of improperly.
Dumped unceremoniously into the backyard with the dog poo.
Now, to the dump scofflaw -- ME -- it's all poo, and it will be cleaned up in the spring.
However the dump discoverer -- HIM -- figures .. it's gross and I'm the one who's going to get the shovel job.
Commence the launching of arms:
Don't you know the dog sees this as a delicacy? It's gross. What will the neighbors say? It's gross.
Counter attack:
It's poo. I will clean it up in the spring. There's a fence. I said I would clean it up.
Fight, fight, bicker, bicker. Fight some more.
It's never really the thing you're fighting about that's the problem. It's the WAY you both do it.
Poke. Eyes. Poke. Eyes. Until each of you sit there blinking back blinding rage.
Eventually the argument ends and you try and put it behind you. Chalk it up to stress and short tempers. It's only kitty litter. Even the name of the stuff sounds funny. Kitty litter.
But some piece of it stays with you like sand from the beach.
Hurtful words that can't be taken back easily.
I'm still thinking about it as I load the wood stove, improperly. And the log I now realize won't fit completely into the stove is catching on fire. The gloves aren't where they should be. Nor is the fire extinguisher.
I calmly tell the kids to get on their coats and go outside to wait for me to call them back inside. And then I call him in a panic, yelling the words no one wants to hear after they sing-song a happy "Hello."
"WHERE IS THE FIRE EXTINQUISHER?"
What? Huh? What's going on?
Long story made shortened by another JUST TELL ME WHERE IT IS ... A log is on fire and I can't shut the stove door.
Just throw the log out into the snow! He says.
THERE'S NO GLOVE!
Use my good gloves. They're leather. They'll work.
I find them, return to the stove and the log still balanced precariously, and quickly open the door to the backyard.
But I'm standing there, now with the flaming log securely in his dress gloves ready to toss it into the snow, I can't help but laugh at what I see.
The Christmas tree he disposed of in late January is just a few paces from my little pile of improperly discarded kitty litter.
I toss the log between the two.
As the hiss of snow extinguishes the log, my shoulders release their grip on my ears. I won't say a word to him about this epiphany, or my feeling of victory. I'll just tell the neighbors.
You may plan to be a tourist in your own town, sit poolside or read The Weekly World News to your heart's content, but when the junior miss and mister are bickering over who gets the last pretzel, and the boy sprays purple grape juice over the girl to make his point, it's likely to be you who is called to put out the fire.
It's just a fact. Similar to the understanding marriage is work, though no one would ever call it a job.
Now I'm not trying to create a gender war, here. Mom isn't the only one separating skirmishing siblings and scrubbing purple from duds. Although many-a-smart man has had the laundry duties removed from his Honey-Do List permanently if for no other reason than to ensure that her favorite cream-color wool zippered cardigan doesn't end up doll-sized and pink.
Let's just call it a matter of drathers.
I'd rather fold laundry than shovel sidewalks.
He'd rather shovel than have me drive his tractor into the house.
I'd rather scoop kitty litter than trap mice.
He'd rather be hung by his toenails and drained of blood than deal with the cat's recycled Nine Lives.
I'd rather clean bathrooms than cook dinner.
He'd like to eat.
So it's really not a he-said, she-said kind of fight I'm picking.
It's more of a everyone's going to be blind after we get done getting our eye for an eye.
For instance. Let's just say a certain person -- HIM -- discovered the kitty litter had been disposed of improperly.
Dumped unceremoniously into the backyard with the dog poo.
Now, to the dump scofflaw -- ME -- it's all poo, and it will be cleaned up in the spring.
However the dump discoverer -- HIM -- figures .. it's gross and I'm the one who's going to get the shovel job.
Commence the launching of arms:
Don't you know the dog sees this as a delicacy? It's gross. What will the neighbors say? It's gross.
Counter attack:
It's poo. I will clean it up in the spring. There's a fence. I said I would clean it up.
Fight, fight, bicker, bicker. Fight some more.
It's never really the thing you're fighting about that's the problem. It's the WAY you both do it.
Poke. Eyes. Poke. Eyes. Until each of you sit there blinking back blinding rage.
Eventually the argument ends and you try and put it behind you. Chalk it up to stress and short tempers. It's only kitty litter. Even the name of the stuff sounds funny. Kitty litter.
But some piece of it stays with you like sand from the beach.
Hurtful words that can't be taken back easily.
I'm still thinking about it as I load the wood stove, improperly. And the log I now realize won't fit completely into the stove is catching on fire. The gloves aren't where they should be. Nor is the fire extinguisher.
I calmly tell the kids to get on their coats and go outside to wait for me to call them back inside. And then I call him in a panic, yelling the words no one wants to hear after they sing-song a happy "Hello."
"WHERE IS THE FIRE EXTINQUISHER?"
What? Huh? What's going on?
Long story made shortened by another JUST TELL ME WHERE IT IS ... A log is on fire and I can't shut the stove door.
Just throw the log out into the snow! He says.
THERE'S NO GLOVE!
Use my good gloves. They're leather. They'll work.
I find them, return to the stove and the log still balanced precariously, and quickly open the door to the backyard.
But I'm standing there, now with the flaming log securely in his dress gloves ready to toss it into the snow, I can't help but laugh at what I see.
The Christmas tree he disposed of in late January is just a few paces from my little pile of improperly discarded kitty litter.
I toss the log between the two.
As the hiss of snow extinguishes the log, my shoulders release their grip on my ears. I won't say a word to him about this epiphany, or my feeling of victory. I'll just tell the neighbors.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Mommy intuition not included
I could see it in the doctor's eyes as he wondered what symptoms had brought us in.
I was wasting his time.
No fever? No sore throat? No runny nose?
No. No. Um, no.
I was worried about the rash-y skin.
But up until the moment I decided I couldn't wait until Monday to call their regular doctor, I had been holding off, applying cream and hoping for spontaneous healing.
Winter skin. Chapped, dry, over-licked, eczema skin.
It's just a rash, I tell myself. The little voice in my head, though, the one that listens to pharmaceutical ads as if they were horror movies come to life, clucks at my rational self and starts tossing words around like streptococci and Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus … more commonly known as MRSA.
Don't jump to conclusions, I tell myself. You always jump to the worst-possible-scenario.
It's just my natural response ever since pharmaceutical companies started to cast their nets for potential patients, turning every ache or pain into the the beginning of the end. Even if you would rather have the disease than the cure, you listen unblinkingly to the laundry list of potential side effects that have rarely, though sometimes, been associated with the unpronounceable chemical cure.
I tend to switch channels as fast as I can so I don't end up calling the doctor to see if I shouldn't be taking something for whatever dysfunction their selling.
But having lunch with parents from Ittybit's class, who casually noted this was the year of symptom-less streptococci infection, I started thinking. …
She's in their classes …
Been on play dates.
She had a fever when all their kids were coming down with strep.
She had a headache.
I worried about it a little at the time. But it went away.
And then I didn't worry about it. There had been no sore throat. No excessive coughing. No lethargy or listlessness. The kids were their usual selves.
98.6 degrees of normal.
I never said anything to my friends they recited a commercial-sized list of symptoms that can be overlooked, I just listened with wide eyes.
It's just unusual, they said. They don't always exhibit classic symptoms. They sometimes get rashes. Strange coloring on their faces. Sometimes nothing at all. …
Which lead me to obsessing …
Which then lead to Googling …
Which ultimately lead to a Sunday morning visit to an Urgent Care.
It's just a simple swab to put my mind at ease, I tell myself.
Negative.
Funny, though It doesn't put my mind at ease.
It just proves the instincts I thought came with the job are nowhere to be found.
Worry for nothing, and the waste of a perfectly good afternoon. The kids are starving and tired, and look at me with faces that could have done so many other things beside play Angry Birds and wait.
I was wasting his time.
No fever? No sore throat? No runny nose?
No. No. Um, no.
I was worried about the rash-y skin.
But up until the moment I decided I couldn't wait until Monday to call their regular doctor, I had been holding off, applying cream and hoping for spontaneous healing.
Winter skin. Chapped, dry, over-licked, eczema skin.
It's just a rash, I tell myself. The little voice in my head, though, the one that listens to pharmaceutical ads as if they were horror movies come to life, clucks at my rational self and starts tossing words around like streptococci and Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus … more commonly known as MRSA.
Don't jump to conclusions, I tell myself. You always jump to the worst-possible-scenario.
It's just my natural response ever since pharmaceutical companies started to cast their nets for potential patients, turning every ache or pain into the the beginning of the end. Even if you would rather have the disease than the cure, you listen unblinkingly to the laundry list of potential side effects that have rarely, though sometimes, been associated with the unpronounceable chemical cure.
I tend to switch channels as fast as I can so I don't end up calling the doctor to see if I shouldn't be taking something for whatever dysfunction their selling.
But having lunch with parents from Ittybit's class, who casually noted this was the year of symptom-less streptococci infection, I started thinking. …
She's in their classes …
Been on play dates.
She had a fever when all their kids were coming down with strep.
She had a headache.
I worried about it a little at the time. But it went away.
And then I didn't worry about it. There had been no sore throat. No excessive coughing. No lethargy or listlessness. The kids were their usual selves.
98.6 degrees of normal.
I never said anything to my friends they recited a commercial-sized list of symptoms that can be overlooked, I just listened with wide eyes.
It's just unusual, they said. They don't always exhibit classic symptoms. They sometimes get rashes. Strange coloring on their faces. Sometimes nothing at all. …
Which lead me to obsessing …
Which then lead to Googling …
Which ultimately lead to a Sunday morning visit to an Urgent Care.
It's just a simple swab to put my mind at ease, I tell myself.
Negative.
Funny, though It doesn't put my mind at ease.
It just proves the instincts I thought came with the job are nowhere to be found.
Worry for nothing, and the waste of a perfectly good afternoon. The kids are starving and tired, and look at me with faces that could have done so many other things beside play Angry Birds and wait.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Let's pretend ... to like each other
I wish we could all share in the true sentiment of primary school Valentines.
When we are in primary school the beauty of its simplicity is wasted on us. A little past primary and we get caught up in the emotion of romantic love … mostly the complexity of it … and in the confusion the whole thing tends to leave a bad taste in our mouths.
Somewhere between this angst-y state of desire and some version of mature fulfillment we decide Valentine's Day is just some ridiculous notion cooked up by marketers to relieve us of our hard-earned cash.
So, we dust our hands of it, happy to be rid of its fakery.
That is … until our kids reach the age when paper hearts and printed confections are as exciting as the sunrise on a brand new day. Then, like it or not, our hands become soiled again in glitter and glue.
I know a lot of folks would like to see the tiny hearts of this holiday shrivel up and blow away. I'm sure at one time or another I was one of them. No thing is the same for any one of us, after all. Some of us can't be bothered, others are bothered beyond belief.
But it wasn't until I helped Ittybit make a class-load of valentines that I understood what I'd been missing all those years.
She selected a project that seemed easy enough. She'd draw pictures of each of her classmates using the class picture as a reference. Taking some advice from the internet, I drew the chins, necks and ears to make the sizes similar. She drew the hair, faces and wrote in the names.
It took us two days and a slew of do-overs until she was satisfied with the results.
In those two days we talked about each of her friends. What made them unique. What made them special.
She didn't like Isaac's nose. So she erased it … made it better. More like the nose she was used to seeing on him.
Corrine's hair was all wrong. She wore it loose, not in pig tails. Erase, erase, erase. Sweep, sweep, sweep. Scratch, scratch, scratch. That's better.
She asked me how to spell "sweet" and "treat," and wondered if we could include some with the cards.
I nodded.
I could never have imagined this scene only a few years ago. I would have railed against the idea that children should be conduits-of trumped up emotion in all its lace-doily artifice. I would have wondered if maybe all this forced friendship wasn't the beginning of some soul-crushing lie.
We spend hours laboring over some sweet nothing that is destined to be tossed in the trash.
"What's the point?" We ask our selves. "It means nothing." Or maybe the opposite, it means too much.
We try to reason that we can't like everyone, so why should we pretend we can? Don't our problems as adults come from stuffing these feelings of discord so far down in our psyches that the pressure of it eventually threatens to blow a hole the size of a heart in our souls?
For whatever reason, we think this false holiday fosters the potential for dashed hopes and unrealistic dreams.
Wouldn't it be better to celebrate any one of the OTHER manufactured holidays that fall on February 14?
There would be no hard feelings over Clean Out Your Computer Day, League of Women Voters Day or Library Lovers Day. Who wouldn't go all in for National Ferris Wheel Day or Race Relations Day? Because, certainly, if there was no Valentine's Day no one would have to create a Quirky Alone Day, or National Call In Single Day.
Yet, instead of throwing Valentine's Day away, I find myself wishing we could boil it down to its purest form and bottle it.
Even if we have to pretend, liking each other seems so much better than the alternative.
When we are in primary school the beauty of its simplicity is wasted on us. A little past primary and we get caught up in the emotion of romantic love … mostly the complexity of it … and in the confusion the whole thing tends to leave a bad taste in our mouths.
Somewhere between this angst-y state of desire and some version of mature fulfillment we decide Valentine's Day is just some ridiculous notion cooked up by marketers to relieve us of our hard-earned cash.
So, we dust our hands of it, happy to be rid of its fakery.
That is … until our kids reach the age when paper hearts and printed confections are as exciting as the sunrise on a brand new day. Then, like it or not, our hands become soiled again in glitter and glue.
I know a lot of folks would like to see the tiny hearts of this holiday shrivel up and blow away. I'm sure at one time or another I was one of them. No thing is the same for any one of us, after all. Some of us can't be bothered, others are bothered beyond belief.
But it wasn't until I helped Ittybit make a class-load of valentines that I understood what I'd been missing all those years.
She selected a project that seemed easy enough. She'd draw pictures of each of her classmates using the class picture as a reference. Taking some advice from the internet, I drew the chins, necks and ears to make the sizes similar. She drew the hair, faces and wrote in the names.
It took us two days and a slew of do-overs until she was satisfied with the results.
In those two days we talked about each of her friends. What made them unique. What made them special.
She didn't like Isaac's nose. So she erased it … made it better. More like the nose she was used to seeing on him.
Corrine's hair was all wrong. She wore it loose, not in pig tails. Erase, erase, erase. Sweep, sweep, sweep. Scratch, scratch, scratch. That's better.
She asked me how to spell "sweet" and "treat," and wondered if we could include some with the cards.
I nodded.
I could never have imagined this scene only a few years ago. I would have railed against the idea that children should be conduits-of trumped up emotion in all its lace-doily artifice. I would have wondered if maybe all this forced friendship wasn't the beginning of some soul-crushing lie.
We spend hours laboring over some sweet nothing that is destined to be tossed in the trash.
"What's the point?" We ask our selves. "It means nothing." Or maybe the opposite, it means too much.
We try to reason that we can't like everyone, so why should we pretend we can? Don't our problems as adults come from stuffing these feelings of discord so far down in our psyches that the pressure of it eventually threatens to blow a hole the size of a heart in our souls?
For whatever reason, we think this false holiday fosters the potential for dashed hopes and unrealistic dreams.
Wouldn't it be better to celebrate any one of the OTHER manufactured holidays that fall on February 14?
There would be no hard feelings over Clean Out Your Computer Day, League of Women Voters Day or Library Lovers Day. Who wouldn't go all in for National Ferris Wheel Day or Race Relations Day? Because, certainly, if there was no Valentine's Day no one would have to create a Quirky Alone Day, or National Call In Single Day.
Yet, instead of throwing Valentine's Day away, I find myself wishing we could boil it down to its purest form and bottle it.
Even if we have to pretend, liking each other seems so much better than the alternative.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Just a little something to stuff in the suggestion box
There is nothing more loathsome than that note home from school ...
You know the one. It's sitting in your kid's bag just waiting to reveal your failure as a parent.
Oh sure, it's usually disguised as a suggestion ... an easy way to make learning fun and to reinforce all the hard work they're doing in school. You know, pretty much all the stuff you are undoing on weekends and over the spate of recent snow days by letting them watch TV and play video games until their eyes cross.
But when you read it you almost wish it was a bad grade or a notice of expulsion.
Anything is better than the three words that top the list of contributions we could be making to society via parenting: Family. Game. Night.
Now, I don't know what happens in your house, but you take one competitive and rules-obsessed dad, a fun-loving but slightly devious first-grader, a strong-willed and impishly sly preschooler, a mother who'd rather smooth the waters than ride a wave and mash them around a table to play a game of Monopoly Junior and you are just asking for the war to end all wars.
In fact the only reason I can even fathom why a teacher would suggest such a thing is if he or she had a couple of brothers named Parker, or the kids in their family skipped the ages of three through six.
"Well that's the point, really," you imagine them saying over your objections. "It helps children learn rules and sequences. It gives them practice reading, counting and taking turns," they'll explain. "Everyone can have fun together. And what a memory you'll be making."
All the happy well-adjusted people in the world add on that last one just rub your face in the fact that they're pretty sure your kids will spend their adulthood trying to blot out all their childhood recollections.
And you can't really disagree if the game of Dora the Explorer Chutes and Ladders you played in the falls, winters and springs of 2008, 2009 and 2010 were any indication.
They all kind of blur together in my memory, but the scenes have an uncanny similarity: The dad, sitting on the ground, legs all knotted in a pretzel, tries to keep an eye on his game piece (Boots the monkey) while objecting to the willful disregard of simple rules; The Champ takes every opportunity to move Boots around the board, knocking over his sister's Dora piece, who is screaming her objections until the room erupts into an irritating series of squawks. "Hey, dude. You are Diego. Where's Diego?"
The boy shrugs his shoulders.
"Great," I groan. "Now I'm going to get to scour the house looking for a two-inch plastic explorer or accept the fact that none of our games will ever be yard sale worthy."
The eyes upon me after that remark reveal that I have won the Bad Sport Award, and it doesn't matter that I took one for the team by selecting the cootie-filled Backpack as my game piece.
I know eventually it will be fun to play a game of Crazy 8s or Apples to Apples with the apples of my eye, but right now feels a little like tooth extraction: one kid makes up her own rules, which are designed to bring her a win while the other is putting the dice down his pants or trying to deal cards all over the living room. Add in a husband who using Parliamentary Procedure to interpret the game outcomes. They're all taking turns being sore losers and bad winners.
We'll spend a few more minutes trying to bring the game into earnest play, before we hurl the remaining pieces back in the box and trade it all in for Family Movie Night ... a choice that has yet to appear on any lists of scholarly suggestions.
Seriously.
If the makers of boardgames were legally bound to show a Your-Results-May-Vary representation of the gaming experience on the box top, Monopoly money would be everywhere, the families would be crying, whining, showing pouty faces (one parent would be screaming), and a tiny, besmudged little hand would be tossing the game pieces as far as their little arm could throw.
I'm guessing if that scene were plastered all over game boxes Family Movie Night would have a shot of getting into the teacher's suggestion box.
You know the one. It's sitting in your kid's bag just waiting to reveal your failure as a parent.
Oh sure, it's usually disguised as a suggestion ... an easy way to make learning fun and to reinforce all the hard work they're doing in school. You know, pretty much all the stuff you are undoing on weekends and over the spate of recent snow days by letting them watch TV and play video games until their eyes cross.
But when you read it you almost wish it was a bad grade or a notice of expulsion.
Anything is better than the three words that top the list of contributions we could be making to society via parenting: Family. Game. Night.
Now, I don't know what happens in your house, but you take one competitive and rules-obsessed dad, a fun-loving but slightly devious first-grader, a strong-willed and impishly sly preschooler, a mother who'd rather smooth the waters than ride a wave and mash them around a table to play a game of Monopoly Junior and you are just asking for the war to end all wars.
In fact the only reason I can even fathom why a teacher would suggest such a thing is if he or she had a couple of brothers named Parker, or the kids in their family skipped the ages of three through six.
"Well that's the point, really," you imagine them saying over your objections. "It helps children learn rules and sequences. It gives them practice reading, counting and taking turns," they'll explain. "Everyone can have fun together. And what a memory you'll be making."
All the happy well-adjusted people in the world add on that last one just rub your face in the fact that they're pretty sure your kids will spend their adulthood trying to blot out all their childhood recollections.
And you can't really disagree if the game of Dora the Explorer Chutes and Ladders you played in the falls, winters and springs of 2008, 2009 and 2010 were any indication.
They all kind of blur together in my memory, but the scenes have an uncanny similarity: The dad, sitting on the ground, legs all knotted in a pretzel, tries to keep an eye on his game piece (Boots the monkey) while objecting to the willful disregard of simple rules; The Champ takes every opportunity to move Boots around the board, knocking over his sister's Dora piece, who is screaming her objections until the room erupts into an irritating series of squawks. "Hey, dude. You are Diego. Where's Diego?"
The boy shrugs his shoulders.
"Great," I groan. "Now I'm going to get to scour the house looking for a two-inch plastic explorer or accept the fact that none of our games will ever be yard sale worthy."
The eyes upon me after that remark reveal that I have won the Bad Sport Award, and it doesn't matter that I took one for the team by selecting the cootie-filled Backpack as my game piece.
I know eventually it will be fun to play a game of Crazy 8s or Apples to Apples with the apples of my eye, but right now feels a little like tooth extraction: one kid makes up her own rules, which are designed to bring her a win while the other is putting the dice down his pants or trying to deal cards all over the living room. Add in a husband who using Parliamentary Procedure to interpret the game outcomes. They're all taking turns being sore losers and bad winners.
We'll spend a few more minutes trying to bring the game into earnest play, before we hurl the remaining pieces back in the box and trade it all in for Family Movie Night ... a choice that has yet to appear on any lists of scholarly suggestions.
Seriously.
If the makers of boardgames were legally bound to show a Your-Results-May-Vary representation of the gaming experience on the box top, Monopoly money would be everywhere, the families would be crying, whining, showing pouty faces (one parent would be screaming), and a tiny, besmudged little hand would be tossing the game pieces as far as their little arm could throw.
I'm guessing if that scene were plastered all over game boxes Family Movie Night would have a shot of getting into the teacher's suggestion box.
Sunday, February 06, 2011
Sometimes we miss the point until they've gone beyond it
She received an IllusStory for her birthday, which is the perfect gift for a kid who wants to write (and publish) her first book before she's forced to blow out an even 10 candles on her cake ...
No. ... Wait. ...
That was me ... (never mind).
Although she has told me she wants to be a writer, she hasn't revealed any timetable that's breathing down her neck. I envy her calm.
Where was I?
IlluStory.
This is essentially a writing kit that helps kids formulate an outline and create a book in a series of pages you then mail off to some place that prints it, binds it and mails it back.
Amazing times, huh?
Anywhooo.
Ittybit unearths this creative gem from her pile of presents that she's been slowly savoring since December, and decides she'd like to make it a biography, which happens to be the first suggestion on the instruction sheet.
Being in the news business, I wonder aloud if she might want to interview one of her grandparents and write her book based on those interviews. First-person interviews, I think, will be easier to teach than footnotes, and wondering aloud makes it seem as if I'm not married to the idea. If I play it cool she just might take my suggestion as her own.
For a second, as I waited for her answer, I had this flash: She would ask all the questions people wish they'd asked a grandparent but never got the chance ...
She shook her head. And that second ended. Nope. She'd decided. She wanted to write her biography about Martin Luther King Jr.
Now, I can't say I wasn't surprised. I would have guessed she'd have chosen someone in pop culture -- a Justin Bieber or a Taylor Swift -- but I knew Martin Luther King Jr. had been a topic of study in preparation for the celebration of his birth in January and Black HIstory Month in February. She'd been asking questions about him, too.
So I asked her how I could help.
"You can help me find interesting facts about him," she said pointing to the computer as she sharpened a pencil.
As I Googled, she came and sat on my lap to look at the computer screen.
"When was he born?"
"Where was he born?"
"Who were his parents?"
"Where did he go to school?"
"What's his most important accomplishment?"
We talked about what we found. We looked at a map. She was interested that he was originally named Michael, and that his father changed it to honor Martin Luther, the father of the Protestant Reformation.
We discussed what the word assassinated means.
I don't know how to explain the courage it takes to stand up against a wrong that had been so widely accepted and so fervently protected.
But I try. His legacy, I say, is everwhere we look.
We were both silent for a while.
She uncapped her markers and went to work drawing his likeness for the cover.
She asked me to write the words so they'd be neat, and got to work on designing the first page, a picture of a family in a living room - a mother holding an infant and a father looking down at the child from his seat next to them on the sofa.
She took her time and drew carefully.
It wasn't until after I'd convinced her two pages was enough for the first day's work and was rummaging through her book bag for homework that I found the stapled booklet of coloring papers she'd brought home from school: "He Had a Dream."
I held it up: "Hey ... maybe we could use this to research your biography."
She looked at me in horror, like I'd lost my mind.
"No! That book doesn't say anything about Martin Luther King Jr. other than his name in the beginning, it's all about people he brought together.
"He needs his own book."
No. ... Wait. ...
That was me ... (never mind).
Although she has told me she wants to be a writer, she hasn't revealed any timetable that's breathing down her neck. I envy her calm.
Where was I?
IlluStory.
This is essentially a writing kit that helps kids formulate an outline and create a book in a series of pages you then mail off to some place that prints it, binds it and mails it back.
Amazing times, huh?
Anywhooo.
Ittybit unearths this creative gem from her pile of presents that she's been slowly savoring since December, and decides she'd like to make it a biography, which happens to be the first suggestion on the instruction sheet.
Being in the news business, I wonder aloud if she might want to interview one of her grandparents and write her book based on those interviews. First-person interviews, I think, will be easier to teach than footnotes, and wondering aloud makes it seem as if I'm not married to the idea. If I play it cool she just might take my suggestion as her own.
For a second, as I waited for her answer, I had this flash: She would ask all the questions people wish they'd asked a grandparent but never got the chance ...
She shook her head. And that second ended. Nope. She'd decided. She wanted to write her biography about Martin Luther King Jr.
Now, I can't say I wasn't surprised. I would have guessed she'd have chosen someone in pop culture -- a Justin Bieber or a Taylor Swift -- but I knew Martin Luther King Jr. had been a topic of study in preparation for the celebration of his birth in January and Black HIstory Month in February. She'd been asking questions about him, too.
So I asked her how I could help.
"You can help me find interesting facts about him," she said pointing to the computer as she sharpened a pencil.
As I Googled, she came and sat on my lap to look at the computer screen.
"When was he born?"
"Where was he born?"
"Who were his parents?"
"Where did he go to school?"
"What's his most important accomplishment?"
We talked about what we found. We looked at a map. She was interested that he was originally named Michael, and that his father changed it to honor Martin Luther, the father of the Protestant Reformation.
We discussed what the word assassinated means.
I don't know how to explain the courage it takes to stand up against a wrong that had been so widely accepted and so fervently protected.
But I try. His legacy, I say, is everwhere we look.
We were both silent for a while.
She uncapped her markers and went to work drawing his likeness for the cover.
She asked me to write the words so they'd be neat, and got to work on designing the first page, a picture of a family in a living room - a mother holding an infant and a father looking down at the child from his seat next to them on the sofa.
She took her time and drew carefully.
It wasn't until after I'd convinced her two pages was enough for the first day's work and was rummaging through her book bag for homework that I found the stapled booklet of coloring papers she'd brought home from school: "He Had a Dream."
I held it up: "Hey ... maybe we could use this to research your biography."
She looked at me in horror, like I'd lost my mind.
"No! That book doesn't say anything about Martin Luther King Jr. other than his name in the beginning, it's all about people he brought together.
"He needs his own book."
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Evergreen until green no more
For most folks, Christmas is pretty much over in the early days of January.
You unplug the lights, pack away the decorations and tactfully dispose of all those photo cards from family and friends and the end of a year of change and growth is officially over.
Oh ye of sharp efficiency ... weeks ago your Christmas trees sat curbside, having by now received their final mulch. You've dusted your hands and moved onward into the New Year.
I envy you.
I have always had trouble letting go of Christmas' past.
This has to be the earliest I’ve even considered dismantling a tree. Most years, it's Valentine’s Day before I gather up the gumption to toss our bone-dry tree and stow away the ephemera that collects during the jois de’ yule. One year I watched my husband drag out a bare, needle-less stick with branches a few days before St. Patrick’s Day.
I considered that year a personal triumph. Most folks would assume it’s a keen laziness that keeps a person from putting all the pomp back into the shoe boxes in a timely, efficient manner. But I believe it's a softer kind of laziness that supplies the reason for procrastination. Although the enthusiasm for putting away the holiday flair rarely matches the exuberance for putting it out.
It also doesn't help that the kids have named the tree "Firdinand" and were checking daily to see if he'd like a cool beverage.
With the house empty and no one mourning the demise of poor Fird-y, I take the opportunity to snag my clothes on the parched pine needles and collect the pieces of glitter-covered cardboard hanging from its branches in peace. I’ll have to find more boxes to store the ornaments that multiply with each passing year.
Throwing away any piece of the collection doesn’t seem like an option.
There’s a new paper plate angel a reindeer with hand print horns a Santa made of construction paper, Poly-fil and Froot Loops. I pluck from the tree six balsa wood stockings that have been painted in the style of Jackson Pollock and 12 colorful paper orbs scratched from black paint. There’s a mouse made of chocolate kisses, a felt owl and a long paper chain with each link numbered in order. Scattered around here and there I find 17 stars and one wonderfully misspelled solar system — Sun, Murky, Venis, Earth, Marz, Joopeter, Sater, Yernis, Neptude and Paluto — carefully colored in crayon.
How can I slip these holiday creations in with the coffee grounds, sink strainer contents and whatever leftovers became the science project at the back of the fridge? It doesn’t seem right.
As I dropped little "Paluto" into a hastily procured storage box I pictured Ittybit’s face —her knitted brow as she came to me to ask if it was alright to include the little lost planet in her project, her smile when I told her it could orbit our tree. After all, it has been difficult for many of us to come to terms with its universal demotion. It's never easy to lose something familiar.
Eventually, though, we do have to say "goodbye," or at least "farewell for now," and move on.
I know someday the kids will stand around the boxes I’ve filled with stuff and wonder why their mother kept a paper cup with yarn hair and googly eyes, or a smear of paint on a chip of wood. I hope they will turn over each one and find their names in early handwriting.
In the end, though, I hope they do toss these faded bits of paper and mouse-eaten breakfast cereal masterpieces … I just hope it doesn’t happen before they have trees of their own filled with ornaments just like them.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Cat fight
In her Wall Street Journal essay “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” Yale professor and author of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” Amy Chua poked a sharp stick at her newly acquired nemesis, The Mama Grizzly. In her essay, she pegged the American parenting style as lax and deemed it responsible for producing children who can’t live up to their potential because they aren’t forced to do so.
Her memoir, she says, gives readers a deeper look into the inner workings of a family that raises “stereotypically successful kids.”
She knows what it takes to make musical prodigies and math whizzes, she says, because she’s done it ... with an iron fist. And it takes metal she doesn't see in western parenting methods. For instance, her daughters were never allowed to have play dates, attend sleepovers or select their own extra curricular activities. They were not allowed to play an instrument that wasn't a violin or piano, but they had to play one or the other ... for three hours per day, minimum. They were not allowed to get any grade below an A and they were expected to be the top student in every subject that mattered to her — no excuses.
Reading the essay is gut wrenching. But not because of the presence of stark competition we've systematically tried to erase from our children's childhood experience. Nor is it because of the implied competitiveness we parents have started recording in permanent ink. It's painful because in some way we know none of us — mothers especially — can be sure our children won't resent us regardless of how they were raised.
We all make mistakes.
Chua's are magnified by her candor.
She unapologetically describes calling her children “garbage,” threatening their toys and screaming herself horse as they continue to flub their music lessons … hour after tedious hour. She is jaundiced by her own light even as her daughters get straight As and win prestigious musical competitions.
Parents from all corners of the ethosphere came out swinging.
They called her abusive, surmised she was raising robots who would have no stars to reach in adulthood after playing Carnegie Hall in their teens. They wonder about her husband, and how he could stay married to such a ferocious beast. They predicted the damage she was doing to her family would come full force – or to a deafening silence – when the lessons stopped, bags packed and the return visits never begin.
Nevertheless, her mistakes don’t seem so uncommon.
I pictured myself where her critics picture her: Alone in her advancing years. The difference being that I'll be shunned for saying horrible things in the heat of frustration whilst trying to get my kids to pick up their toys.
One of the most cogent Grizzlies awakened by this Tiger’s memoir, oddly enough, seems to be New York Times Columnist David Brooks, who contends Chua’s Tiger isn’t so much a cultural phenomenon as a class one — and not a new one at that. He says she’s doing everything pushy, over-bearing, upper middle class parents do in trying to give their kids advantages, she’s just more relentless. When he raps her knuckles, he does it by calling her a wimp for protecting her kids from the most demanding of tasks -- understanding where they fit in with the rest of society.
“Where,” he asks, claws extended, “do they learn to detect their own shortcomings?”
I imagine Chua would just smile her pointed tiger teeth and growl at him in response. Why, from her, of course.
It’s a fascinating subject, really.
Here we are in a time when the U.S. seems at the precipice of losing its generations-old grasp of the top of the world food chain; schools are losing education funding left, right and sideways; and jobs are going where wages are cheaper and fear is rampant.
We have precious little control in our lives when it pertains to others, and more ideas about what it is we're supposed to be doing as parents than we have experience actually doing. We tend to raise our kids as we were raised, making changes based upon any number of influences … Chua and Brooks among them.
But we aren't convinced our ways are right either, are we?
I wonder if we’d be so outraged if we didn’t think there was a sliver of truth in what Chua said, despite her grandstanding.
For me, I suppose, the takeaway wasn’t about being relentless in the pursuit of excellence or the acceptance of limitations. It is that self esteem isn't something we can give our kids by protecting them from failure. It's something they take for themselves when they learn from their mistakes. It's the natural outcome of doing something they thought impossible.
I’m know I don't have the killer instinct to be a Tiger Mother or a Mama Grizzly, but I think I can certainly learn from both breeds.
Her memoir, she says, gives readers a deeper look into the inner workings of a family that raises “stereotypically successful kids.”
She knows what it takes to make musical prodigies and math whizzes, she says, because she’s done it ... with an iron fist. And it takes metal she doesn't see in western parenting methods. For instance, her daughters were never allowed to have play dates, attend sleepovers or select their own extra curricular activities. They were not allowed to play an instrument that wasn't a violin or piano, but they had to play one or the other ... for three hours per day, minimum. They were not allowed to get any grade below an A and they were expected to be the top student in every subject that mattered to her — no excuses.
Reading the essay is gut wrenching. But not because of the presence of stark competition we've systematically tried to erase from our children's childhood experience. Nor is it because of the implied competitiveness we parents have started recording in permanent ink. It's painful because in some way we know none of us — mothers especially — can be sure our children won't resent us regardless of how they were raised.
We all make mistakes.
Chua's are magnified by her candor.
She unapologetically describes calling her children “garbage,” threatening their toys and screaming herself horse as they continue to flub their music lessons … hour after tedious hour. She is jaundiced by her own light even as her daughters get straight As and win prestigious musical competitions.
Parents from all corners of the ethosphere came out swinging.
They called her abusive, surmised she was raising robots who would have no stars to reach in adulthood after playing Carnegie Hall in their teens. They wonder about her husband, and how he could stay married to such a ferocious beast. They predicted the damage she was doing to her family would come full force – or to a deafening silence – when the lessons stopped, bags packed and the return visits never begin.
Nevertheless, her mistakes don’t seem so uncommon.
I pictured myself where her critics picture her: Alone in her advancing years. The difference being that I'll be shunned for saying horrible things in the heat of frustration whilst trying to get my kids to pick up their toys.
One of the most cogent Grizzlies awakened by this Tiger’s memoir, oddly enough, seems to be New York Times Columnist David Brooks, who contends Chua’s Tiger isn’t so much a cultural phenomenon as a class one — and not a new one at that. He says she’s doing everything pushy, over-bearing, upper middle class parents do in trying to give their kids advantages, she’s just more relentless. When he raps her knuckles, he does it by calling her a wimp for protecting her kids from the most demanding of tasks -- understanding where they fit in with the rest of society.
“Where,” he asks, claws extended, “do they learn to detect their own shortcomings?”
I imagine Chua would just smile her pointed tiger teeth and growl at him in response. Why, from her, of course.
It’s a fascinating subject, really.
Here we are in a time when the U.S. seems at the precipice of losing its generations-old grasp of the top of the world food chain; schools are losing education funding left, right and sideways; and jobs are going where wages are cheaper and fear is rampant.
We have precious little control in our lives when it pertains to others, and more ideas about what it is we're supposed to be doing as parents than we have experience actually doing. We tend to raise our kids as we were raised, making changes based upon any number of influences … Chua and Brooks among them.
But we aren't convinced our ways are right either, are we?
I wonder if we’d be so outraged if we didn’t think there was a sliver of truth in what Chua said, despite her grandstanding.
For me, I suppose, the takeaway wasn’t about being relentless in the pursuit of excellence or the acceptance of limitations. It is that self esteem isn't something we can give our kids by protecting them from failure. It's something they take for themselves when they learn from their mistakes. It's the natural outcome of doing something they thought impossible.
I’m know I don't have the killer instinct to be a Tiger Mother or a Mama Grizzly, but I think I can certainly learn from both breeds.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
You never know
He wasn't happy. He didn't want to be in the parking lot of the ski area watching his sister schlep herself and a pair of rented skis across the road to the trail where a group of colorfully clad classmates are waiting.
But the lesson wasn't for him. He was too young to participate.
"Next year buddy," I tried to be reassuring. "Next year you will be old enough to go, too."
Cue waterworks.
So I did the only thing I could think to do; I picked him up, snowshoes and all, and carried him across the road and joined the group.
"We'll just follow along," I said to myself as I set him in the snow.
As the class started to slide awkwardly into the woods he muscled through the snow with ease if not grace.
"They're skis are longer than mine," he started to complain. "They aren't slipping."
His sister -- who was trying diligently to turn around by making "stars in the snow," or keep her skis straight out ahead like "French fries," or shape them into a wedge for controlling her speed -- was having a hard time staying upright.
So when he pitched forward and face planted into a drift of pure white powder I knew it wasn't an accident. He just wanted to do everything the other kids were doing, even falling.
It's funny how you can see their minds turning sometimes. You notice the smile in their eyes when the big ideas come to them. You know it as if you'd thought of it yourself.
When I picked him up and stuck him upright in the snow he was giggling. It's an intoxicating laughter, enough to make you think you know everything about your kids.
Yet, as one kid is muscling through the winter landscape, the other is struggling to stay on top of it. She's doing what the instructor advises, but everything is new and awkward. Her skis cross. She falls. It's hard to get back up. People are watching. Some kids are speeding past her with a combination of co-ordination and fearlessness. She falls again.
I put myself in her place and help her up again. I see the tears and try talking them away with "dust-your-self-off" encouragements.
She just stands there.
I smile painfully at the instructor, whose made the same assessment of the situation: Things are not going well.
Soon the class will be over. I walk, she skis next to me and we don't speak of what has happened.
I assume she's not going to want to return, though I don't want to make it official.
She's getting older, more aware of how things look if not how they seem. I have to be careful not to put things in her mind that weren't there to begin with.
Of course I'm not thinking about any of this as I trudged and she swooshed along the snow-covered path toward the final hill of the day. I'm just thinking about next week and what types of acrobatics it would take to get her out here again. I'm replaying all the variables I know of and imagine "if at first your don't succeed" speech falling victim to the "Because I said so, that's why" edict.
When we reach the rest of the group, I stay silent as she tells the instructor she'd rather walk down the last hill. But I smile when she changes her mind. As she starts downward, It takes every ounce of my flabby self-control not to reach out and catch her as she starts to wobble and lean backward.
She steadies herself and stays upright, and I bend over backwards in overdone praise. Her eyes glaze over.
I know that last bit of hill wasn't enough to erase the hour-long frustration of skiing. I fall silent again.
She schleps the gear back across the road, still sniffling. I'm afraid to ask, yet she volunteers: "That was really fun. I can't wait for next week."
As my children head toward the lodge together I stand in the parking lot with an odd sense of relief, but also an unsettling wisdom: You just never know.
But the lesson wasn't for him. He was too young to participate.
"Next year buddy," I tried to be reassuring. "Next year you will be old enough to go, too."
Cue waterworks.
So I did the only thing I could think to do; I picked him up, snowshoes and all, and carried him across the road and joined the group.
"We'll just follow along," I said to myself as I set him in the snow.
As the class started to slide awkwardly into the woods he muscled through the snow with ease if not grace.
"They're skis are longer than mine," he started to complain. "They aren't slipping."
His sister -- who was trying diligently to turn around by making "stars in the snow," or keep her skis straight out ahead like "French fries," or shape them into a wedge for controlling her speed -- was having a hard time staying upright.
So when he pitched forward and face planted into a drift of pure white powder I knew it wasn't an accident. He just wanted to do everything the other kids were doing, even falling.
It's funny how you can see their minds turning sometimes. You notice the smile in their eyes when the big ideas come to them. You know it as if you'd thought of it yourself.
When I picked him up and stuck him upright in the snow he was giggling. It's an intoxicating laughter, enough to make you think you know everything about your kids.
Yet, as one kid is muscling through the winter landscape, the other is struggling to stay on top of it. She's doing what the instructor advises, but everything is new and awkward. Her skis cross. She falls. It's hard to get back up. People are watching. Some kids are speeding past her with a combination of co-ordination and fearlessness. She falls again.
I put myself in her place and help her up again. I see the tears and try talking them away with "dust-your-self-off" encouragements.
She just stands there.
I smile painfully at the instructor, whose made the same assessment of the situation: Things are not going well.
Soon the class will be over. I walk, she skis next to me and we don't speak of what has happened.
I assume she's not going to want to return, though I don't want to make it official.
She's getting older, more aware of how things look if not how they seem. I have to be careful not to put things in her mind that weren't there to begin with.
Of course I'm not thinking about any of this as I trudged and she swooshed along the snow-covered path toward the final hill of the day. I'm just thinking about next week and what types of acrobatics it would take to get her out here again. I'm replaying all the variables I know of and imagine "if at first your don't succeed" speech falling victim to the "Because I said so, that's why" edict.
When we reach the rest of the group, I stay silent as she tells the instructor she'd rather walk down the last hill. But I smile when she changes her mind. As she starts downward, It takes every ounce of my flabby self-control not to reach out and catch her as she starts to wobble and lean backward.
She steadies herself and stays upright, and I bend over backwards in overdone praise. Her eyes glaze over.
I know that last bit of hill wasn't enough to erase the hour-long frustration of skiing. I fall silent again.
She schleps the gear back across the road, still sniffling. I'm afraid to ask, yet she volunteers: "That was really fun. I can't wait for next week."
As my children head toward the lodge together I stand in the parking lot with an odd sense of relief, but also an unsettling wisdom: You just never know.
Sunday, January 09, 2011
You can't fail if you don't tell anyone
The war is on.
The new year is upon us and resolutions are whizzing around as if catapulted by slingshot. We're collectively going to exercise 24 hours a day and lose a few trillion pounds. We're going to stop smoking and start living healthier lives. We're going to be different. We're going to be better. We're going to be happy.
It's nothing, really. Just a moment in the wee hours when we promise to make changes, great and small, that we hope will stick.
Hope being the key word and preeminent weapon in this internal war on our interminable human shortcomings.
Of course, not everyone shares the desire to engage in the annual ritual.
Occasionally, however, one of these forward-thinking missiles ricochets off some soft object and hits a hard-boiled cynic, causing them to hoot and holler and dance around swearing a stream of obscenities that would make a sailor blush.
Resolutions, this kitten-hating group thinks, are for the romantic saps who, by January's close, will be outside freezing their fingers off in the designated smoking areas near the dumpsters, bumming cigarettes from their friends who didn't quit buying.
Cynicism, therefore, is for anyone whose ever bought a lottery ticket that didn't pay out. Why bother trying?
I shrug my shoulders. Who am I to judge?
From midnight to midnight on the cusp of any given year I have no idea on which side I'll be standing amid the skirmish.
Will I be taking my last bite of a white-flour-refined-sugar confection or swearing off striving for an iota of improvement?
The side of me that wants to eat more vegetables, get exercise and make choices that lead to fewer regrets is counter balanced by the side that wants to foster a greater acceptance for that which isn't perfect.
Acceptance of ourselves and others seems to be the thing in shortest supply.
Some folks think that's as it should be. Acceptance, after all, is just as easily defined as acquiescence rather than agreement. It is the tarnish instead of the silver. Silver can only be polished with hard work and caustic chemicals.
Who is right? Who is wrong? Who really cares?
Truth be told, I've found agreeing to disagree to be the utmost of challenges.
As I surf through my social network I see the difficulty isn't a growing problem so much as a lingering one. The same old slights and complaints rise in daily status reports. Thumbs Up for hating Mean People. Sure. That's easy. All Nice People hate Mean People. Deciding which is which, though, that's the trick isn't it?
I should stop reading status reports.
Maybe I'll vow to stop searching stat counters and worrying about how many people are following, unfollowing or unfriending me. I wish those terms and others (refutiated) never web crawled their way into my lexicon.
I've tried to be the righter of wrongs. I've repeated mistakes as much as I've learned from them. "Look before you leap," I tell myself. "Don't be so quick to judge." I've spoken in superlatives and jumped on bandwagons that have subsequently overturned.
Balance isn't as easy as it seems.
Maybe that's my mission as this new year opens to a host of possibilities: Whether I resolve or revolve, it matters not. So long as I keep it to myself, I can't fail.
The new year is upon us and resolutions are whizzing around as if catapulted by slingshot. We're collectively going to exercise 24 hours a day and lose a few trillion pounds. We're going to stop smoking and start living healthier lives. We're going to be different. We're going to be better. We're going to be happy.
It's nothing, really. Just a moment in the wee hours when we promise to make changes, great and small, that we hope will stick.
Hope being the key word and preeminent weapon in this internal war on our interminable human shortcomings.
Of course, not everyone shares the desire to engage in the annual ritual.
Occasionally, however, one of these forward-thinking missiles ricochets off some soft object and hits a hard-boiled cynic, causing them to hoot and holler and dance around swearing a stream of obscenities that would make a sailor blush.
Resolutions, this kitten-hating group thinks, are for the romantic saps who, by January's close, will be outside freezing their fingers off in the designated smoking areas near the dumpsters, bumming cigarettes from their friends who didn't quit buying.
Cynicism, therefore, is for anyone whose ever bought a lottery ticket that didn't pay out. Why bother trying?
I shrug my shoulders. Who am I to judge?
From midnight to midnight on the cusp of any given year I have no idea on which side I'll be standing amid the skirmish.
Will I be taking my last bite of a white-flour-refined-sugar confection or swearing off striving for an iota of improvement?
The side of me that wants to eat more vegetables, get exercise and make choices that lead to fewer regrets is counter balanced by the side that wants to foster a greater acceptance for that which isn't perfect.
Acceptance of ourselves and others seems to be the thing in shortest supply.
Some folks think that's as it should be. Acceptance, after all, is just as easily defined as acquiescence rather than agreement. It is the tarnish instead of the silver. Silver can only be polished with hard work and caustic chemicals.
Who is right? Who is wrong? Who really cares?
Truth be told, I've found agreeing to disagree to be the utmost of challenges.
As I surf through my social network I see the difficulty isn't a growing problem so much as a lingering one. The same old slights and complaints rise in daily status reports. Thumbs Up for hating Mean People. Sure. That's easy. All Nice People hate Mean People. Deciding which is which, though, that's the trick isn't it?
I should stop reading status reports.
Maybe I'll vow to stop searching stat counters and worrying about how many people are following, unfollowing or unfriending me. I wish those terms and others (refutiated) never web crawled their way into my lexicon.
I've tried to be the righter of wrongs. I've repeated mistakes as much as I've learned from them. "Look before you leap," I tell myself. "Don't be so quick to judge." I've spoken in superlatives and jumped on bandwagons that have subsequently overturned.
Balance isn't as easy as it seems.
Maybe that's my mission as this new year opens to a host of possibilities: Whether I resolve or revolve, it matters not. So long as I keep it to myself, I can't fail.
Sunday, January 02, 2011
Coming in from the cold
I don't have clear memories of spending hours building giant snow fortresses or populating the front yard with lopsided snow people. I'd always just assumed that's what happened since I clearly remember the results. I'd just figured a substantial chunk of my childhood winters were spent thawing out, just as I'd spent an entire month of every summer submerged under water. My lips would be blue and my teeth chattering and still I'd insist I was fine.
"I don't know where they get the energy," said tired moms over every kitchen table where I sat sipping cocoa and swinging my legs, as my boots stood helter skelter in an ever-expanding puddle of melting snow on the linoleum.
Perhaps I just have the seasons confused. Maybe the puddles were from waterlogged towels.
I certainly remember the sky blue-colored snow suit with the faux fur around the hood. After I'd outgrown it came a royal blue colored replacement with a hook-closure belt and yellow racing stripes along one side. I called it my snowmobile suit, though no one I knew ever zipped around on one.
Things felt different back then.
I remember a world that seemed perpetually white after the Thanksgiving leftovers had been polished off. I remember the excitement of waiting for a big enough dump of snow to bury the school day ... maybe even two.
I remember having popsicle toes. On more than one occasion.
What I don't remember is how long it took to get dressed in the prerequisite layers of thermal duds, the degree of difficulty in getting last year's boots over three layers of socks, or the dilemma of whether to tuck the pants into the boots or put the boots over the pants.
The holy grail was to keep any and all elements from getting through the armor. The smallest amount of precipitation down a boot or the back of a sweater would put the brakes on everything, except perhaps cocoa commotion.
I don't remember searching for matching gloves or a hat that fit. I don't remember getting a scarf wrapped around my entire body like a snake coiling its dinner. I certainly don't remember taking hours to put on all the gear and spending mere minutes in the snow.
I don't remember my mother pretending to be a horse and racing through knee-deep drifts of snow hoping to recreate the feeling of sledding since the grade of our hill was as flat as Florida.
Florida. It's warm there ... although not lately.
Bad example.
I digress.
Back then it never occurred to me I'd be standing in waist-high snow with two kids laying prone on a red toboggan behind me as the wind grinds fine crystals of snow into their cheeks. One pass through a make-shift sled run and the novelty has already worn off.
"I want to go back inside."
I look at my watch. It had taken 45 minutes to turn my children into trussed up turkeys and six minutes for their pop-up thermometers to blast off.
"Yeah, I'm cold, too. My wrists are freezing. I can't feel my nose."
They're too young to remember this, I tell myself as I drag the sled back toward the house. They just stare up at the sky and moan melodramatically ... "We can't even see the house it's so far away."
I tell them we will be home and warm soon but they aren't convinced.
"We'll freeze like ice cubes before we get there. I'm so hungry. I might even starve. It's already been hours."
"No it hasn't," I assure them. "It will just seem that way."
"I don't know where they get the energy," said tired moms over every kitchen table where I sat sipping cocoa and swinging my legs, as my boots stood helter skelter in an ever-expanding puddle of melting snow on the linoleum.
Perhaps I just have the seasons confused. Maybe the puddles were from waterlogged towels.
I certainly remember the sky blue-colored snow suit with the faux fur around the hood. After I'd outgrown it came a royal blue colored replacement with a hook-closure belt and yellow racing stripes along one side. I called it my snowmobile suit, though no one I knew ever zipped around on one.
Things felt different back then.
I remember a world that seemed perpetually white after the Thanksgiving leftovers had been polished off. I remember the excitement of waiting for a big enough dump of snow to bury the school day ... maybe even two.
I remember having popsicle toes. On more than one occasion.
What I don't remember is how long it took to get dressed in the prerequisite layers of thermal duds, the degree of difficulty in getting last year's boots over three layers of socks, or the dilemma of whether to tuck the pants into the boots or put the boots over the pants.
The holy grail was to keep any and all elements from getting through the armor. The smallest amount of precipitation down a boot or the back of a sweater would put the brakes on everything, except perhaps cocoa commotion.
I don't remember searching for matching gloves or a hat that fit. I don't remember getting a scarf wrapped around my entire body like a snake coiling its dinner. I certainly don't remember taking hours to put on all the gear and spending mere minutes in the snow.
I don't remember my mother pretending to be a horse and racing through knee-deep drifts of snow hoping to recreate the feeling of sledding since the grade of our hill was as flat as Florida.
Florida. It's warm there ... although not lately.
Bad example.
I digress.
Back then it never occurred to me I'd be standing in waist-high snow with two kids laying prone on a red toboggan behind me as the wind grinds fine crystals of snow into their cheeks. One pass through a make-shift sled run and the novelty has already worn off.
"I want to go back inside."
I look at my watch. It had taken 45 minutes to turn my children into trussed up turkeys and six minutes for their pop-up thermometers to blast off.
"Yeah, I'm cold, too. My wrists are freezing. I can't feel my nose."
They're too young to remember this, I tell myself as I drag the sled back toward the house. They just stare up at the sky and moan melodramatically ... "We can't even see the house it's so far away."
I tell them we will be home and warm soon but they aren't convinced.
"We'll freeze like ice cubes before we get there. I'm so hungry. I might even starve. It's already been hours."
"No it hasn't," I assure them. "It will just seem that way."
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Gaining perspective on a Sunday Morning
It’s Sunday morning. And since it is Sunday morning, more than likely my husband and I are on the couch watching “Sunday Morning” with Charles Osgood. It’s practically a family tradition, one that dates back to the Charles Kuralt days ... before children. Before we even knew each other.
The kids complain for a while when they realize the tube isn’t transmitting their two–dimensional friends.
That’s practically a tradition, too.
They give up their protests, however, when it’s pointed out that parents sometimes get to commandeer the remote control, especially when there are copious amounts of toys corralled in their rooms. … Toys that are lonely. … And potentially in need of new owners. … Owners who WILL play with them. Nicely.
They'll dart away — eyeing us with squinted scrutiny — to make sure nary a plaything has been toy-napped.
In the peace and quiet I've cajoled with threats against forgotten presents, we'll listen to the segments enjoying music, art and nature. We'll laugh at Bill Geist and wish we had a job like his. Any job that includes visiting the National Taxidermy Championship or reporting on the ugliest of Christmas sweaters would be worth its weight in sculpted butter, especially if it included travel expenses.
For 90 minutes we sit back and are entertained. Time slows down.
There’s no Earth-moving scoops or stories that seem too far out of the ordinary. Instead of The News, It feels more like sitting down with an old friend who tells a good story.
But it's not always easy listening to friends. Sometimes their stories make you visit places you've heard of but try to avoid.
It's not as if I hadn't heard about Beads of Courage, a nationwide project that offers glass beads to children battling cancer. It was just the type of story I try to hum through, as if NOT knowing the details could protect the people I love. After all, it seemed so simple as to be insignificant anyway — glass artisans make beads and give them to children with cancer. But seeing the children on Sunday Morning and listening to their stories, I couldn't look away.
Just a token, perhaps, and yet each bead represents something that the child has endured: Hair loss. Tests. Chemotherapy. Radiation. Surgeries. Transfusions. A list that is daunting and seemingly never-ending. These beads, strung together, are weighty reminders of the strength and courage of the children who wear them.
I couldn't help but cry. Especially when the mother of a child who lost her battle spoke of how her daughter's necklace, now enshrined in a shadowbox on the wall, gives her strength to get out of bed in the morning and go on living.
I can imagine losing a child. What I can't imagine is having the strength to face it with such amazing grace and courage.
My face is puffy and red when my kids make their way downstairs again, having no doubt counted and recounted their most prized possessions until they were satisfied all was well. The show had transitioned into its closing segment. Ittybit wonders why the birds, gently chirping against the sound of water flowing downstream, have upset me so.
It's not as if I've forgotten how lucky I am. It's not as if I don't know that this luck I feel could change come Monday morning. It's just that sometimes we all need a friend to remind us that life really is beautiful, even in places and at times you'd least expect.
Happy Holidays to you and your family, from me and mine.
The kids complain for a while when they realize the tube isn’t transmitting their two–dimensional friends.
That’s practically a tradition, too.
They give up their protests, however, when it’s pointed out that parents sometimes get to commandeer the remote control, especially when there are copious amounts of toys corralled in their rooms. … Toys that are lonely. … And potentially in need of new owners. … Owners who WILL play with them. Nicely.
They'll dart away — eyeing us with squinted scrutiny — to make sure nary a plaything has been toy-napped.
In the peace and quiet I've cajoled with threats against forgotten presents, we'll listen to the segments enjoying music, art and nature. We'll laugh at Bill Geist and wish we had a job like his. Any job that includes visiting the National Taxidermy Championship or reporting on the ugliest of Christmas sweaters would be worth its weight in sculpted butter, especially if it included travel expenses.
For 90 minutes we sit back and are entertained. Time slows down.
There’s no Earth-moving scoops or stories that seem too far out of the ordinary. Instead of The News, It feels more like sitting down with an old friend who tells a good story.
But it's not always easy listening to friends. Sometimes their stories make you visit places you've heard of but try to avoid.
It's not as if I hadn't heard about Beads of Courage, a nationwide project that offers glass beads to children battling cancer. It was just the type of story I try to hum through, as if NOT knowing the details could protect the people I love. After all, it seemed so simple as to be insignificant anyway — glass artisans make beads and give them to children with cancer. But seeing the children on Sunday Morning and listening to their stories, I couldn't look away.
Just a token, perhaps, and yet each bead represents something that the child has endured: Hair loss. Tests. Chemotherapy. Radiation. Surgeries. Transfusions. A list that is daunting and seemingly never-ending. These beads, strung together, are weighty reminders of the strength and courage of the children who wear them.
I couldn't help but cry. Especially when the mother of a child who lost her battle spoke of how her daughter's necklace, now enshrined in a shadowbox on the wall, gives her strength to get out of bed in the morning and go on living.
I can imagine losing a child. What I can't imagine is having the strength to face it with such amazing grace and courage.
My face is puffy and red when my kids make their way downstairs again, having no doubt counted and recounted their most prized possessions until they were satisfied all was well. The show had transitioned into its closing segment. Ittybit wonders why the birds, gently chirping against the sound of water flowing downstream, have upset me so.
It's not as if I've forgotten how lucky I am. It's not as if I don't know that this luck I feel could change come Monday morning. It's just that sometimes we all need a friend to remind us that life really is beautiful, even in places and at times you'd least expect.
Happy Holidays to you and your family, from me and mine.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
On birthdays, bribary and brainstorming
Dear Ittybit,
I know I should feel terribly embarrassed by all the excess we’ve exhibited at birthday parties.
More than two dozen people invited to a two-hour event. At Christmas time, no less.
But I don't feel embarrassed.
Conflicted, maybe, but not embarrassed.
The much reviled gift bag is in full production mode at our house. You are busy choosing tiny toys and notebooks for each of the kids who will be in attendance.
I understand the disdain for such things. Before I was even born, I've been told, the party WAS the present.
However, when I was growing up a few kids would go home with prizes, which was probably how all this excess was born. Everyone, as they start having children and hosting yearly parties of their own, remembers feeling like a loser as they left time after time empty handed.
Here we are — adults, a whole lifetime later — trying to compensate for all the mild disappointments with small bag of trinkets to be handed out to the children we sugared up and are sending home with their parents, who will no doubt, at some point during the year, repay the favor.
Entitlement and consumerism are blamed for what happens these days.
Some of us — but not all — rent places and spaces, trying to create memories that will last until next year ... when we'll try to top ourselves. We hire horses and clowns and enthusiasts of all ilk to entertain. The naysayers tell us we want to be the envy of our friends.
In the abstract it sounds so much more of an indictment of modern life than it seems in practice: “It's only money” is nothing if not the polar opposite of “it's such a waste.”
I watch you as you plan and prep the bags. All my angst and anticipation channeled into a plastic and paper assembly line of things that don't really matter; things that will wind up forgotten at the bottom of a drawer.
... Except that they do, somehow, matter in the moment we are here together “brainstorming.” In the minutes we spend planning, shopping and producing we are sharing a moment that may be or may never be forgotten.
Only time will tell.
I had begun to think it didn't matter; that it doesn't matter. But I've shrugged that feeling off. It does matter.
The thing we lose by being so caught up in the details is the big picture; this celebration of birth and belonging and life gets lost in the minutia of the minute.
More than seven years ago, when I sat on an examining table in a paper robe listening to the doctor telling me I would have a Christmas baby ... I felt sorry for you, a person I didn’t yet know.
Back then, I thought you would be forgotten in the hoopla that is the holidays.
I had no way of knowing what a gift I would get in you that Christmas. I didn't have the forethought or clarity — and still don't — to understand how Christmas would be forever changed because of it. Each year brings a new revelation.
So as we ready for the day you will turn seven, I want to tell you to just enjoy this moment for all that it is and for all it could be. And I'll try to do the same.
Time has a way of changing things … not always for the worse.
Love and just-about-birthday kisses,
— Mommy
I know I should feel terribly embarrassed by all the excess we’ve exhibited at birthday parties.
More than two dozen people invited to a two-hour event. At Christmas time, no less.
But I don't feel embarrassed.
Conflicted, maybe, but not embarrassed.
The much reviled gift bag is in full production mode at our house. You are busy choosing tiny toys and notebooks for each of the kids who will be in attendance.
I understand the disdain for such things. Before I was even born, I've been told, the party WAS the present.
However, when I was growing up a few kids would go home with prizes, which was probably how all this excess was born. Everyone, as they start having children and hosting yearly parties of their own, remembers feeling like a loser as they left time after time empty handed.
Here we are — adults, a whole lifetime later — trying to compensate for all the mild disappointments with small bag of trinkets to be handed out to the children we sugared up and are sending home with their parents, who will no doubt, at some point during the year, repay the favor.
Entitlement and consumerism are blamed for what happens these days.
Some of us — but not all — rent places and spaces, trying to create memories that will last until next year ... when we'll try to top ourselves. We hire horses and clowns and enthusiasts of all ilk to entertain. The naysayers tell us we want to be the envy of our friends.
In the abstract it sounds so much more of an indictment of modern life than it seems in practice: “It's only money” is nothing if not the polar opposite of “it's such a waste.”
I watch you as you plan and prep the bags. All my angst and anticipation channeled into a plastic and paper assembly line of things that don't really matter; things that will wind up forgotten at the bottom of a drawer.
... Except that they do, somehow, matter in the moment we are here together “brainstorming.” In the minutes we spend planning, shopping and producing we are sharing a moment that may be or may never be forgotten.
Only time will tell.
I had begun to think it didn't matter; that it doesn't matter. But I've shrugged that feeling off. It does matter.
The thing we lose by being so caught up in the details is the big picture; this celebration of birth and belonging and life gets lost in the minutia of the minute.
More than seven years ago, when I sat on an examining table in a paper robe listening to the doctor telling me I would have a Christmas baby ... I felt sorry for you, a person I didn’t yet know.
Back then, I thought you would be forgotten in the hoopla that is the holidays.
I had no way of knowing what a gift I would get in you that Christmas. I didn't have the forethought or clarity — and still don't — to understand how Christmas would be forever changed because of it. Each year brings a new revelation.
So as we ready for the day you will turn seven, I want to tell you to just enjoy this moment for all that it is and for all it could be. And I'll try to do the same.
Time has a way of changing things … not always for the worse.
Love and just-about-birthday kisses,
— Mommy
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Sign of the times
The sign on the bedroom door — though affixed with a single thumbtack and curling at all four edges — couldn't have been more unequivocal: "Do Not Enter."
Whom it was supposed to keep out, however, was a little unclear.
We had just arrived at the party and the hostesses' daughter was sequestered in her room with several children who'd accompanied their parents to the late afternoon soiree.
Ittybit stood next to me at first, and then slid behind me, holding onto my jacket and hiding her face. I'm sure she thought it was yet another place she wouldn't be allowed. Even a year's difference, for a bigger girl, could make her out to look like a baby.
Whenever we go some place new it takes a few minutes for the kids to find their place in the fray. Ittybit observes for a while before she jumps in and tries to take over. The Champ usually hides in inconvenient locations and pretends he is a super agent spy.
Mostly he gets shooed out of bathrooms.
I didn't think the sign was meant for her. I knocked and poked my head through the paneled door. The tiny hostess smiled and greeted us warmly. "Come in, come in" she said excitedly to my girl.
Turned out the sign wasn't even meant to deter The Champ, our three-year-old whirling dervish, who doesn't readily take "No" for an answer anyway.
The sign remained a bit of a mystery as I made several trips from Adult Conversationland downstairs to the Fantastical World of Primary Folks happening simultaneously upstairs. ... just to make sure all was going smoothly.
The first time I trudged up the stairs I had noticed a chandelier over the dinning room table -directly under the floor on which they were bouncing - swing to and fro with the uneasy vibrations.
"Oh ... it's nothing. Just a pig pile," said my cherubic daughter, who peeked out of the door when I knocked. "They've decided to stop. Too dangerous," she whispered.
I went back downstairs.
Until I heard some screaming ... that could have been the gleeful shrieks of girlish delight ... or might have been the feral wail of a little boy being locked in a closet. Such things have been known to happen.
Her face was again cherubic as she came to the door.
"Oh that? That was just a little fun. Nothing to worry about. Nothing at all."
Next it was their turn to venture forth.
A few would snake between the throngs of party guests, gathering up provisions and ferrying the loot to their party upstairs. I couldn't help but laugh at the sight of it; they resembled overburdened drones hauling mother lodes of baked goods and juice boxes to their queen.
"What are they doing up there?" asked one mom, who thought it might be time for an intervention.
"I don't really know. I've seen six clothing changes for each girl, and there seems to be dress-up clothes all over the bathroom."
The mom smiled a knowing smile. "Project Runway. My kid LOVES that show." There was no need to be concerned.
The idea that the sign — which was probably written well before the party and forgotten was meant for people who'd either reached the age of maturity or were allowed to play with matches — hadn't occurred to me until that moment.
For all the kvetching I do about NOT being able to have an adult conversation, you'd think I'd be a little more ready for the closing of doors. I'd always just been there, hanging out with the kids, sitting under tables taking pictures.
I had an idea and knocked on the door.
"You know, Fashion Runway has cameras ... I could ..."
But they were onto me.
"No pictures," said one girl with the smile of play but the stance of steadfast.
"That's my mom. Always with the camera," said Ittybit, feeling the need no doubt to smooth over my transgression.
"Oh, don't listen to them," said the motherly hostess. "I bet if you just sit with them for a while they'll forget you're even there."
I knew she was probably right, but it wouldn't be the same.
This is the beginning of their secret life. The one that doesn't always include me. That can't include me. The life that either sorts itself out or that travels down the stairs in an avalanche of jumbled words that need to be smoothed.
It was time to let them have their party. To put away my camera and let the moment go undocumented. And that's what I did.
I suppose I knew all along the sign on the door was for me.
Whom it was supposed to keep out, however, was a little unclear.
We had just arrived at the party and the hostesses' daughter was sequestered in her room with several children who'd accompanied their parents to the late afternoon soiree.
Ittybit stood next to me at first, and then slid behind me, holding onto my jacket and hiding her face. I'm sure she thought it was yet another place she wouldn't be allowed. Even a year's difference, for a bigger girl, could make her out to look like a baby.
Whenever we go some place new it takes a few minutes for the kids to find their place in the fray. Ittybit observes for a while before she jumps in and tries to take over. The Champ usually hides in inconvenient locations and pretends he is a super agent spy.
Mostly he gets shooed out of bathrooms.
I didn't think the sign was meant for her. I knocked and poked my head through the paneled door. The tiny hostess smiled and greeted us warmly. "Come in, come in" she said excitedly to my girl.
Turned out the sign wasn't even meant to deter The Champ, our three-year-old whirling dervish, who doesn't readily take "No" for an answer anyway.
The sign remained a bit of a mystery as I made several trips from Adult Conversationland downstairs to the Fantastical World of Primary Folks happening simultaneously upstairs. ... just to make sure all was going smoothly.
The first time I trudged up the stairs I had noticed a chandelier over the dinning room table -directly under the floor on which they were bouncing - swing to and fro with the uneasy vibrations.
"Oh ... it's nothing. Just a pig pile," said my cherubic daughter, who peeked out of the door when I knocked. "They've decided to stop. Too dangerous," she whispered.
I went back downstairs.
Until I heard some screaming ... that could have been the gleeful shrieks of girlish delight ... or might have been the feral wail of a little boy being locked in a closet. Such things have been known to happen.
Her face was again cherubic as she came to the door.
"Oh that? That was just a little fun. Nothing to worry about. Nothing at all."
Next it was their turn to venture forth.
A few would snake between the throngs of party guests, gathering up provisions and ferrying the loot to their party upstairs. I couldn't help but laugh at the sight of it; they resembled overburdened drones hauling mother lodes of baked goods and juice boxes to their queen.
"What are they doing up there?" asked one mom, who thought it might be time for an intervention.
"I don't really know. I've seen six clothing changes for each girl, and there seems to be dress-up clothes all over the bathroom."
The mom smiled a knowing smile. "Project Runway. My kid LOVES that show." There was no need to be concerned.
The idea that the sign — which was probably written well before the party and forgotten was meant for people who'd either reached the age of maturity or were allowed to play with matches — hadn't occurred to me until that moment.
For all the kvetching I do about NOT being able to have an adult conversation, you'd think I'd be a little more ready for the closing of doors. I'd always just been there, hanging out with the kids, sitting under tables taking pictures.
I had an idea and knocked on the door.
"You know, Fashion Runway has cameras ... I could ..."
But they were onto me.
"No pictures," said one girl with the smile of play but the stance of steadfast.
"That's my mom. Always with the camera," said Ittybit, feeling the need no doubt to smooth over my transgression.
"Oh, don't listen to them," said the motherly hostess. "I bet if you just sit with them for a while they'll forget you're even there."
I knew she was probably right, but it wouldn't be the same.
This is the beginning of their secret life. The one that doesn't always include me. That can't include me. The life that either sorts itself out or that travels down the stairs in an avalanche of jumbled words that need to be smoothed.
It was time to let them have their party. To put away my camera and let the moment go undocumented. And that's what I did.
I suppose I knew all along the sign on the door was for me.
Sunday, December 05, 2010
Christmas all wrapped up in lights
It felt like I should have a major award. Or something.
We'd selected the tree, rigged it up in the stand and dragged out the ornaments, just as we have every year at around this time since I don't know when.
It's all so rote at this point but having decorating done and over with seemed like something to celebrate; Lights. Camera. Christmas.
Yet this time, as I plugged in the extension end of the three-strand band of lights, which had been carefully connected and wrapped around the tree, there was nothing.
I tried the nearest light switch. Maybe it had closed off the juice to the outlet.
Up. Down. Up. Down. Up-down-up-down and one more time, up, just in case. Nothing.
Well, almost nothing. As I jostled the branches of the tree, the strand of lights saddled around the middle blinked on with a moment's hesitation. It was as if the midsection had burst out from having too much Thanksgiving dinner while the other lights couldn't wake up from their tryptophan comas.
What twinkling there was seemed more fire-hazard-y than jolly.
So out we went to the hardware store to buy a new set of lights.
I'm ashamed to admit, it was kind of exciting.
I couldn't remember when we’d bought the last set. It's not something that tends to burn itself into memory, like where I was when I learned of Sept. 11 or what was playing on the radio when we found out we were having a girl.
I'm sure, way back then lights were lights. You had your "Tasteful and Unobtrusive Holiday White" bulbs, and then you had the "Holy Holiday Batman, Who Robbed the Crayon Factory and Added a Disco Strobe Color" bulbs.
These days you have the choice of regular lights (which are impossible to find, and just pretend I hadn't mentioned them) and the energy-saving LED lights in bright white, warm white, red, green, blue, gold, pink, orange and purple, also multicolored. They come shaped as strawberries, raspberries, snowflakes, stars and teddy bears. They come in cords and nets and icicle dangles. You can get trunk lights, twinkle lights, and battery operated candle lights.
Staring at the shelves reaching to the ceiling, piled higher than I could reach with a ladder, I just wanted to turn around and go home. The 'No End' to the possibilities could very well have been literal.
I don't want to care about Christmas lights.
"Just pick something already and get it over with" came the demand from by overtired brain, which at that moment wanted nothing more than to just settle down for a long winter's nap.
And so I let the kids decide.
Who does this? Just moments earlier Ittybit and The Champ had been occupied with trying to get out of their coats without unzipping them, all the while trying to out stare each other. So it really was without a hint of parental scrutiny that one 100-count strawberry strand in traditional warm white, one strand of bright white snowflake minis and one strand of multi-colored snowflake minis went unceremoniously into the cart, through the check out and into the car.
Still, I was feeling pretty good as we drove up to the house; the tree was up, the shopping was done all that was left was the decorating. Sitting around drinking cocoa in our holiday-illuminated house would be the reward.
As we unwound the coiled wires and got ready to drape them around the tree, I became entangled at each turn in the little plastic nubbins that jutted out from the snowflake lights. They attached to each other, and then to my sweater and then on each other again. They snagged on everything excepting the tree.
I swore under my breath, calling them every name in the book. I lost patience and reason. Every move felt as if I were being strangled by twinkle lights.
When I was finally free of the lights — having removed them from the tree and restrung them twice — I plugged them in and held my breath.
They lit up. ...
Like a striped shirt of clashing colors.
Before I had time to process the sight, I had a flash of understanding. It was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad thought:
Up until that very moment I had identified with all the long-suffering mother of A Christmas Story. I was the mother whose kids hadn't eaten voluntarily since they were born ... or who hadn't had a hot meal for herself in 15 years.
But in the glare of the mix and match lit tree I knew I was more like the father; swearing under my breath on the one hand and clinging to my "special award" with the other. We were both beaming in gaudiness from front window ... for everyone to see.
We'd selected the tree, rigged it up in the stand and dragged out the ornaments, just as we have every year at around this time since I don't know when.
It's all so rote at this point but having decorating done and over with seemed like something to celebrate; Lights. Camera. Christmas.
Yet this time, as I plugged in the extension end of the three-strand band of lights, which had been carefully connected and wrapped around the tree, there was nothing.
I tried the nearest light switch. Maybe it had closed off the juice to the outlet.
Up. Down. Up. Down. Up-down-up-down and one more time, up, just in case. Nothing.
Well, almost nothing. As I jostled the branches of the tree, the strand of lights saddled around the middle blinked on with a moment's hesitation. It was as if the midsection had burst out from having too much Thanksgiving dinner while the other lights couldn't wake up from their tryptophan comas.
What twinkling there was seemed more fire-hazard-y than jolly.
So out we went to the hardware store to buy a new set of lights.
I'm ashamed to admit, it was kind of exciting.
I couldn't remember when we’d bought the last set. It's not something that tends to burn itself into memory, like where I was when I learned of Sept. 11 or what was playing on the radio when we found out we were having a girl.
I'm sure, way back then lights were lights. You had your "Tasteful and Unobtrusive Holiday White" bulbs, and then you had the "Holy Holiday Batman, Who Robbed the Crayon Factory and Added a Disco Strobe Color" bulbs.
These days you have the choice of regular lights (which are impossible to find, and just pretend I hadn't mentioned them) and the energy-saving LED lights in bright white, warm white, red, green, blue, gold, pink, orange and purple, also multicolored. They come shaped as strawberries, raspberries, snowflakes, stars and teddy bears. They come in cords and nets and icicle dangles. You can get trunk lights, twinkle lights, and battery operated candle lights.
Staring at the shelves reaching to the ceiling, piled higher than I could reach with a ladder, I just wanted to turn around and go home. The 'No End' to the possibilities could very well have been literal.
I don't want to care about Christmas lights.
"Just pick something already and get it over with" came the demand from by overtired brain, which at that moment wanted nothing more than to just settle down for a long winter's nap.
And so I let the kids decide.
Who does this? Just moments earlier Ittybit and The Champ had been occupied with trying to get out of their coats without unzipping them, all the while trying to out stare each other. So it really was without a hint of parental scrutiny that one 100-count strawberry strand in traditional warm white, one strand of bright white snowflake minis and one strand of multi-colored snowflake minis went unceremoniously into the cart, through the check out and into the car.
Still, I was feeling pretty good as we drove up to the house; the tree was up, the shopping was done all that was left was the decorating. Sitting around drinking cocoa in our holiday-illuminated house would be the reward.
As we unwound the coiled wires and got ready to drape them around the tree, I became entangled at each turn in the little plastic nubbins that jutted out from the snowflake lights. They attached to each other, and then to my sweater and then on each other again. They snagged on everything excepting the tree.
I swore under my breath, calling them every name in the book. I lost patience and reason. Every move felt as if I were being strangled by twinkle lights.
When I was finally free of the lights — having removed them from the tree and restrung them twice — I plugged them in and held my breath.
They lit up. ...
Like a striped shirt of clashing colors.
Before I had time to process the sight, I had a flash of understanding. It was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad thought:
Up until that very moment I had identified with all the long-suffering mother of A Christmas Story. I was the mother whose kids hadn't eaten voluntarily since they were born ... or who hadn't had a hot meal for herself in 15 years.
But in the glare of the mix and match lit tree I knew I was more like the father; swearing under my breath on the one hand and clinging to my "special award" with the other. We were both beaming in gaudiness from front window ... for everyone to see.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
'Good Parents' just have less experience
Her gaze was sharp as I unfolded the sheet of paper she'd just handed me:
It read: "Will you com to are show?"
"Check 'yes' or 'no'" she said, jabbing her finger toward the rectangular shapes she'd drawn under the invitation, which was more of a misspelled demand gussied up in a question mark.
"The E in 'come' is silent," I said taking the pencil from her, erasing ARE and rewriting OUR.
What I neglected to do was check a box.
She frowned and asked again.
"Is it a 'Yes' or a 'No?' What's your answer?" she said, tapping her fingers repetitively on the paper as her foot stamped at the floor.
I stalled. Trying to think.
A good parent would be excited their child was displaying such creativity.
A good parent would happily check the box marked “Yes.”
A good parent would call the neighbors. Invite the grandparents. Get out the video camera.
A good parent would then follow their pint-sized usher toward the bedroom where The Show to End All Shows had been prepared.
A good parent would smile and applaud the unscripted play in which anything (though not likely anything good) could happen.
A good parent would wait around patiently until the bitter (and I do mean BITTER) end and demand an encore.
I was a "good parent" once, the experience changed me.
The last play I was invited to witness lasted longer than The Ring of the Nibelung and ended when the not-old-enough-for-prime-time players bounced precariously on the "bed stage" and started tossing all their props into the audience with gleeful, though ear-splitting, shrieks.
It was the elementary school equivalent of a 15-hour opera.
This new production had all the same earmarks.
"What is this play about?" I inquired pointedly.
"That's up to you," she said craftily, explaining that she and her friend had produced several themes from which we, the audience, could choose. "Like at the movie theater."
"No. Definitely not. I am not going to your show."
Her eyes narrowed to mere slits.
"Why not?"
"Let's just say not everyone finds unscripted entertainments entertaining."
"That's so MEAN! Why won't you come to our show?"
"Because ... if it's anything like past shows, it will end in drama. And drama isn't our strong suit. Drama just leads to time outs, rescinded dessert offerings and early bedtimes."
"This time will be different," she pleaded. "I'm in First Grade now."
But I know it won't be different. There will be a darkened bedroom theater with no place to sit but the floor. There will be a kerfluffle over the gate -- most likely one that questions the authenticity of The Champ's ticket. There will be a long list of previews, the titles of which will verge on inappropriate, but no feature performance. And someone will end up crying either because they weren't allowed to finish or they fell off the stage.
I'm serious when I say "Nothing good can come of a play."
The potential for hurt feelings is more real and the duration could go on forever. Think: the airing of family squabbles. Think: How some folks REALLY FEEL about stuff they just barely tolerate. Think: Do I really swear like a long-haul trucker? I must because she's added it to the script.
"Well what WILL you watch then?"
How about a music video? We'll pick a song and you can dance and sing, and it will only last two and a half minutes -- tops.
It read: "Will you com to are show?"
"Check 'yes' or 'no'" she said, jabbing her finger toward the rectangular shapes she'd drawn under the invitation, which was more of a misspelled demand gussied up in a question mark.
"The E in 'come' is silent," I said taking the pencil from her, erasing ARE and rewriting OUR.
What I neglected to do was check a box.
She frowned and asked again.
"Is it a 'Yes' or a 'No?' What's your answer?" she said, tapping her fingers repetitively on the paper as her foot stamped at the floor.
I stalled. Trying to think.
A good parent would be excited their child was displaying such creativity.
A good parent would happily check the box marked “Yes.”
A good parent would call the neighbors. Invite the grandparents. Get out the video camera.
A good parent would then follow their pint-sized usher toward the bedroom where The Show to End All Shows had been prepared.
A good parent would smile and applaud the unscripted play in which anything (though not likely anything good) could happen.
A good parent would wait around patiently until the bitter (and I do mean BITTER) end and demand an encore.
I was a "good parent" once, the experience changed me.
The last play I was invited to witness lasted longer than The Ring of the Nibelung and ended when the not-old-enough-for-prime-time players bounced precariously on the "bed stage" and started tossing all their props into the audience with gleeful, though ear-splitting, shrieks.
It was the elementary school equivalent of a 15-hour opera.
This new production had all the same earmarks.
"What is this play about?" I inquired pointedly.
"That's up to you," she said craftily, explaining that she and her friend had produced several themes from which we, the audience, could choose. "Like at the movie theater."
"No. Definitely not. I am not going to your show."
Her eyes narrowed to mere slits.
"Why not?"
"Let's just say not everyone finds unscripted entertainments entertaining."
"That's so MEAN! Why won't you come to our show?"
"Because ... if it's anything like past shows, it will end in drama. And drama isn't our strong suit. Drama just leads to time outs, rescinded dessert offerings and early bedtimes."
"This time will be different," she pleaded. "I'm in First Grade now."
But I know it won't be different. There will be a darkened bedroom theater with no place to sit but the floor. There will be a kerfluffle over the gate -- most likely one that questions the authenticity of The Champ's ticket. There will be a long list of previews, the titles of which will verge on inappropriate, but no feature performance. And someone will end up crying either because they weren't allowed to finish or they fell off the stage.
I'm serious when I say "Nothing good can come of a play."
The potential for hurt feelings is more real and the duration could go on forever. Think: the airing of family squabbles. Think: How some folks REALLY FEEL about stuff they just barely tolerate. Think: Do I really swear like a long-haul trucker? I must because she's added it to the script.
"Well what WILL you watch then?"
How about a music video? We'll pick a song and you can dance and sing, and it will only last two and a half minutes -- tops.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Making allowances for personal hygiene
I leaned across the breakfast table and smelled her hair.
“You owe me two dollars,” I said calmly.
She just stared at me, her expression slightly askew, as if her lips couldn’t decide in which direction to curl.
“… for the shampoo,” I added, looking in her direction from my peripheral vision as I poured coffee into my cup.
One half of her face decided to meet the other in a smiling grimace.
“Too much? Right?”
The fake cherry smell from the no-tears formula brand had followed me from the kids’ bathroom, down the stairs and into the kitchen. And yet, Ittybit’s hair still smelled of grit and grime.
“What I’d like to know is how is it possible for you to use an entire bottle of shampoo yet manage NOT to wash your hair?”
She shrugs her shoulders and says: "I'm sorry."
I'm Sorry is a pretty effective panacea at our place. Said with any degree of sincerity, an I'm Sorry is the universal Get Out of Jail Free card. It's akin to five minutes in the penalty box for murder via hockey stick. It's pretty much how we prefer to dust our hands of all unpleasantness.
But not this time. This is a battle I've decided to fight. This time it's serious.
“No, seriously, you owe me money.”
"I said I was sorry. I won't do it again."
Ah ... the "I-Won't-Do-It-Again" pledge.
The thing everyone says because they have a certain amount of security that the I'm Sorry card is actually a fairly equivalent substitution for the Get Out Of Jail Free card.
In fact, the only thing that seems to trump the cards she's stuffed up her sleeve is the calendar, and how quickly the numbers are careening toward Christmas, which is barreling toward my wallet at an ill-advised speed.
Slowing it down seems imperative.
The obstacles we've already encountered seem to indicate an epic crash is heading our way. We've seen grocery bills balloon, fuel prices rocket, not to mention having to bid farewell to a few hundred paper presidents we had planned to put elsewhere.
It's only money, we like to think. But the costs add up faster than a tub full of suds.
“Two. Dollars. Please.”
“Well,” she begins, “You know … I would pay you, because I've saved a lot of money -- from birthdays, chores, the tooth fairy -- but I have it hidden all over the house and it won't be that easy to find.
“Right. Now.”
“Well, eh-heh. This is kind of funny, because I've been thinking of all the things we could do to SAVE money and I think once The Champ is completely out of diapers we can use more shampoo.”
She thinks I'm bluffing.
“This is not interchangeable poo. This empty bottle of shampoo is a waste of unnatural resources, and you still owe me two bucks.”
“Speaking of poo … have you smelled The Champ?”
“Don't change the subject.”
“Well he IS in need of changing.”
“I tell you what. I'll give you two dollars if you change him.”
She smiled, her nose pitched in a knowing crinkle, as she disappeared into her room. A few minutes later she returned with a wadded up Lincoln.
“You owe me three bucks.”
“You owe me two dollars,” I said calmly.
She just stared at me, her expression slightly askew, as if her lips couldn’t decide in which direction to curl.
“… for the shampoo,” I added, looking in her direction from my peripheral vision as I poured coffee into my cup.
One half of her face decided to meet the other in a smiling grimace.
“Too much? Right?”
The fake cherry smell from the no-tears formula brand had followed me from the kids’ bathroom, down the stairs and into the kitchen. And yet, Ittybit’s hair still smelled of grit and grime.
“What I’d like to know is how is it possible for you to use an entire bottle of shampoo yet manage NOT to wash your hair?”
She shrugs her shoulders and says: "I'm sorry."
I'm Sorry is a pretty effective panacea at our place. Said with any degree of sincerity, an I'm Sorry is the universal Get Out of Jail Free card. It's akin to five minutes in the penalty box for murder via hockey stick. It's pretty much how we prefer to dust our hands of all unpleasantness.
But not this time. This is a battle I've decided to fight. This time it's serious.
“No, seriously, you owe me money.”
"I said I was sorry. I won't do it again."
Ah ... the "I-Won't-Do-It-Again" pledge.
The thing everyone says because they have a certain amount of security that the I'm Sorry card is actually a fairly equivalent substitution for the Get Out Of Jail Free card.
In fact, the only thing that seems to trump the cards she's stuffed up her sleeve is the calendar, and how quickly the numbers are careening toward Christmas, which is barreling toward my wallet at an ill-advised speed.
Slowing it down seems imperative.
The obstacles we've already encountered seem to indicate an epic crash is heading our way. We've seen grocery bills balloon, fuel prices rocket, not to mention having to bid farewell to a few hundred paper presidents we had planned to put elsewhere.
It's only money, we like to think. But the costs add up faster than a tub full of suds.
“Two. Dollars. Please.”
“Well,” she begins, “You know … I would pay you, because I've saved a lot of money -- from birthdays, chores, the tooth fairy -- but I have it hidden all over the house and it won't be that easy to find.
“Right. Now.”
“Well, eh-heh. This is kind of funny, because I've been thinking of all the things we could do to SAVE money and I think once The Champ is completely out of diapers we can use more shampoo.”
She thinks I'm bluffing.
“This is not interchangeable poo. This empty bottle of shampoo is a waste of unnatural resources, and you still owe me two bucks.”
“Speaking of poo … have you smelled The Champ?”
“Don't change the subject.”
“Well he IS in need of changing.”
“I tell you what. I'll give you two dollars if you change him.”
She smiled, her nose pitched in a knowing crinkle, as she disappeared into her room. A few minutes later she returned with a wadded up Lincoln.
“You owe me three bucks.”
Sunday, November 14, 2010
It's hard to accept the 'gift' of the present
“Are you finished?” the waitress asked.
I looked down at my half-eaten swiss cheese omelette. Three plates were already piled on top of it.
‘It didn't get much more finished than that’ I thought as she lifted up the rattling tower of breakfast dishes. She was still waiting for my answer, her gaze smiling after my children who had just left with their father.
“Oh … I'm finished. Thank you,” I said and went back to finishing my coffee.
“So just the two, then.”
I laughed. She wasn't talking about food.
No matter. My answer was still the same: “Oh yes, two and through.”
It's rare that we go out for breakfast. One child only eats bacon and sausage and the other refuses to eat anything but chocolate and air. Trying to coax them into eating something relatively healthy, at least for appearances sake, doesn't usually make for a pleasant meal. For anyone.
She'll ask for juice, but she'll twist her mouth and scrunch her nose at all the offerings.
And while she's deciding, he'll drop his knife … and then he'll drop his fork.
She'll want syrup with her plate of cholesterol, which is masquerading as meat.
Having retrieved his fork and knife from under the table, he'll drop them again.
Then he'll ask for yours.
The food will arrive and be inhaled … literally. There will be no noticeable depreciation as they declare themselves finished and ready to go.
“Eat one more bite,” is the mantra I've adopted through each and every meal since they've been chewing on solid food.
It's also rare in these moments to have the luxury of finishing a cup of coffee while it's still warm There's always a game of 20 questions aimed in my direction. …
“What are we doing now? Are you finished yet? What are we doing next? Are you finished yet? Can we go now? I'm done. Are you done yet?”
The more I think of it, the more I realize it's usually a variation of two questions asked 20 or more times.
“When I'm finished with my meal then we will go.” This is neither a satisfactory nor satisfying answer.
“But when will that be?”
“Soon. I'll be finished soon. Try to be patient.”
My husband is just as eager to get moving. He knows from experience that antsy children are just one outburst away from potential implosion. He's failed at noticing the warning signs before, and he's none too excited about witnessing a epic meltdown.
I don't blame him. Time is something that only moves slowly when you're looking forward to what comes next.
When it's not something you relish, time spins out of control.
It's the biggest cliché going, and I'm living it. Not too long ago, these tiny people begging me to finish my breakfast weren't even thoughts in my mind. Now, I'm fairly certain I won't recognize them by the time I pay the check, pull on my coat and walk the two blocks to the library to meet them.
My children won't even be there, I imagine. The librarian will inform me the girl had gone backpacking through Europe and the boy was in just last week with his own kids. She'll console me by directing me to the audiobooks, where my husband will still be searching for the latest titles.
He'll be grumbling something about the how few adventures are left.
But, as usual, I am getting ahead of myself. Failing to live “in the moment,” as it were. I rush ahead to a future I can't fully imagine for no other reason than the present is what I've been coaching myself to “get through.”
Of course when I get there, the children are as they'd left me, knee-high and needing help reading titles. When they see me they drop everything and run toward me. In this moment I don't need reminding that the present isn't just another chore … it's a gift.
I looked down at my half-eaten swiss cheese omelette. Three plates were already piled on top of it.
‘It didn't get much more finished than that’ I thought as she lifted up the rattling tower of breakfast dishes. She was still waiting for my answer, her gaze smiling after my children who had just left with their father.
“Oh … I'm finished. Thank you,” I said and went back to finishing my coffee.
“So just the two, then.”
I laughed. She wasn't talking about food.
No matter. My answer was still the same: “Oh yes, two and through.”
It's rare that we go out for breakfast. One child only eats bacon and sausage and the other refuses to eat anything but chocolate and air. Trying to coax them into eating something relatively healthy, at least for appearances sake, doesn't usually make for a pleasant meal. For anyone.
She'll ask for juice, but she'll twist her mouth and scrunch her nose at all the offerings.
And while she's deciding, he'll drop his knife … and then he'll drop his fork.
She'll want syrup with her plate of cholesterol, which is masquerading as meat.
Having retrieved his fork and knife from under the table, he'll drop them again.
Then he'll ask for yours.
The food will arrive and be inhaled … literally. There will be no noticeable depreciation as they declare themselves finished and ready to go.
“Eat one more bite,” is the mantra I've adopted through each and every meal since they've been chewing on solid food.
It's also rare in these moments to have the luxury of finishing a cup of coffee while it's still warm There's always a game of 20 questions aimed in my direction. …
“What are we doing now? Are you finished yet? What are we doing next? Are you finished yet? Can we go now? I'm done. Are you done yet?”
The more I think of it, the more I realize it's usually a variation of two questions asked 20 or more times.
“When I'm finished with my meal then we will go.” This is neither a satisfactory nor satisfying answer.
“But when will that be?”
“Soon. I'll be finished soon. Try to be patient.”
My husband is just as eager to get moving. He knows from experience that antsy children are just one outburst away from potential implosion. He's failed at noticing the warning signs before, and he's none too excited about witnessing a epic meltdown.
I don't blame him. Time is something that only moves slowly when you're looking forward to what comes next.
When it's not something you relish, time spins out of control.
It's the biggest cliché going, and I'm living it. Not too long ago, these tiny people begging me to finish my breakfast weren't even thoughts in my mind. Now, I'm fairly certain I won't recognize them by the time I pay the check, pull on my coat and walk the two blocks to the library to meet them.
My children won't even be there, I imagine. The librarian will inform me the girl had gone backpacking through Europe and the boy was in just last week with his own kids. She'll console me by directing me to the audiobooks, where my husband will still be searching for the latest titles.
He'll be grumbling something about the how few adventures are left.
But, as usual, I am getting ahead of myself. Failing to live “in the moment,” as it were. I rush ahead to a future I can't fully imagine for no other reason than the present is what I've been coaching myself to “get through.”
Of course when I get there, the children are as they'd left me, knee-high and needing help reading titles. When they see me they drop everything and run toward me. In this moment I don't need reminding that the present isn't just another chore … it's a gift.
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