The kid
In anticipation of breathing freely
13 December 2011 06:00 AM
The boy loves Christmas. He loves the tree. He is interested in the story, too, the original one, about the son of the God we don’t really believe in. In fact, he recently said he likes Christmas better than Halloween because of the religious story behind it. We’ve got lights strung all over the house, bits of celebratory brightness, and he would eat every meal on the rug in front of the tree, pausing occasionally to climb up on a stepstool to get a closer look at the ornaments up top, if we’d let him. The topic of presents hasn’t come up much with him, though of course I know he’ll enjoy that, too, the only grandchild, the prince, the once and future king, feted at every opportunity.
My therapist warned me against smoking as a stress-buster. I promised my husband last spring (when I bought the pack during a time of huge emotional stress) that I wouldn’t smoke any more. I wasn’t lying, exactly, I just didn’t anticipate the need, the urge, months after the fact. I don’t think this is a permanent habit. It’s a telling one, however, a return to a misshapen coping mechanism, like punk music played at earsplitting levels and other adolescent forms of rebellion.
Talk of where our next Christmas tree would go started last January. This was an important topic, a vital one, and we had a family confab before buying this year’s tree, an attempt to avoid last December’s little boy meltdown when we put the tree in a different spot than years previous. But he’s a different boy now, a bit more flexible, a bit more agreeable. The tree is in a new spot, sparkling in the corner by the fireplace.
Maybe my urge to smoke is telling me I have to go back in time to confront certain things. I have to relive the past (in new ways; what a clever subconscious I have) in order to climb up on its remains and shake my fist at it before pumping that fist in the air, victorious, breathing freely, my fingers garlic- and mint-scented, the stink of tobacco and its byproducts long washed away. My grandmother smoked. My grandfather smoked. My friends used to smoke. The point is to figure out what the act of smoking means to me, outside of self-destruction. I do it alone. I hide the evidence. On the days when I am less hazy or stuck, I can barely draw in one poisonous breath, and sometimes, after I have unloaded whatever it is that is bothering me, I take out the pack, reach for a cigarette, and change my mind. So maybe it’s about the suppression of something important.
The tree is in front of me, the lights still on. The boy, my responsibility, my cuddly creature, the one I love unconditionally, is at school. I hear the washing machine, the grumble of a car going down our street, the tapping of my fingers on the keyboard. Asher the gray loaf of a cat is snoring lightly beside me and the dog is curled up in her bed. I have not yet washed my hands, so I still smell the past on me, the scent of smoking courts and high school and winter nights without gloves. It’s my roommate letting the smoke trail out of her window. It’s the way I used to smell after hitting the bars back when people could smoke in bars. It’s the smell of my sickness, of my inaction, the temporary stay.
In ten days, our family will start arriving for the holiday. Somehow I will have gifts, small tokens. I will prepare the cioppino, refill the drinks, smile and be polite when I need to be. We’re providing the kid with a Christmas story, with memories of family, with the illusory feeling of permanence that is so necessary in childhood.
And I won’t light a single cigarette. I won’t be able to. I won’t be alone. My mind, however, will be turning, turning, turning on itself, trying to figure out answers to questions it doesn't fully understand.
Wrote this yesterday for last night's writing group, from the prompt "Holidays." I was exhausted and emotionally spent, but so glad I went. Thank you, ladies. And thank you to rcb, for being there and for gently pushing me to actually talk instead of volleying messages back and forth or IMing.
My therapist has broken her leg. She's ok, but will be out of commission for a while. Unfortunately, this happened in the midst of opening something extremely painful (and related to abandonment). I feel like I pried open a box that I shouldn't have and now I have to deal with what popped out of it. Hence yesterday's emotional exhaustion.
From a prompt for my writing group: "Holidays."
Image by strollerdos.
Comments
The ritual maintained
29 November 2011 06:00 AM
In one home movie I will never see again, my toddler cousin and I frolic in the thin spring morning light in our Easter dresses and Easter coats (I am about four). Somehow the belt of my coat falls off. In the old days, in the darkened room with the projector, the best thing to do was to watch this movie in reverse, to see my belt snake up around my waist again to find its proper place.
These were the rituals that my grandmother maintained: the Easter dress, the little girl underclothing (always an undershirt beneath the cotton shirt or dress), the special shoes for special occasions. The year I lived with her and my grandfather, she made sure I always wore skirts to school and that my unruly hair was pulled back from my face. There were standards and she was there to keep them going and, after all, it was only twenty years before that that my own mother was a third grader, too, in the rigid fifties, and how much had really changed?
My family doesn’t really have rituals, at least not rituals that I can identify clearly. Easter in particular is a strange one for me – it’s about the resurrection, right, something I really can’t get behind, and the whole chocolate and jellybean thing, the food delivery from a humanoid rabbit, is just too bizarre to focus much on.
The boy loves Christmas, though, the evergreen spice in the air, the way the colored lights twinkle, so there’s that, the ritual of getting a tree and decorating it. He even likes the holiday narrative, despite our lack of concrete faith, having told me recently that he likes Christmas better than Halloween because it is a religious holiday, because there is a story behind it.
Maybe in spite of myself, in spite of my occasional cynicism, my atheistic mind, I’m doing something right here, passing on the importance of the story, the meaning, the details that go beyond brand new dresses outfits and the smell of pine.
From the prompt "Brand new."
Image of me at my grandparent's house (for Easter?) probably taken in 1978 when I was living with them. I found this photograph recently in a search for kid pictures in which I resemble the boy. Not sure if this counts as one of those pictures, though. It does make me wonder if all the speculation about my mother's genes -- German? Swiss? Polish -- are correct. Her mother's maiden name was Kreider and the Kreiders who settled in Pennsylvania and Delaware were of Swiss extraction.
I took down yesterday's post because it needs more work and I will not have the time to do that today ... perhaps it will show up again soon.
When the pep talk mantra doesn't work
02 November 2011 06:20 AM
It was a day of little triumphs, like the amazing feeling of getting a fidgeting, recalcitrant first grader to push through words she thought she couldn’t read. Every time she did it and I told her see, I knew you could do it, she giggled with surprise (at her abilities? at my goofiness?). We ended the session with a high five and I thought: this is the kind of stuff that makes me feel good.
It was a day of strangeness. I had my monthly medication check-in with the psychiatrist. We made Mad Men psychiatry jokes and talked about the good parts of being an introvert, and then my worries about my son’s social contentment, which are all mixed up with feelings about my social issues as a kid. It’s waking me up at 1:00 a.m., these worries, despite my constant pep talks to myself: he’s fine, there is nothing wrong with him, there was nothing wrong with you, think of all the support he has that you didn’t, he will get through childhood relatively unscathed, he’s only six, etc. etc. I was clearly fighting back tears when we spoke, which is when she asked me the salient questions. Have I been crying a lot lately? (Kind of, but for what feels like good reasons.) Any suicidal thoughts? (Absolutely not.) Usually she asks me what I think we should do with my medication. This time she made the decision to stick with my usual dosage.
There was money stress, figuring out how we were going to pay our property tax and its surprise supplementals, making sure our monthly bills were paid, doing the accounting for the next six months, complete with emergency savings plan.
Then there was the regular Thursday play date with the boy’s good friend, except something is happening to their friendship and I don’t know what to do about it. Actually, I know I can’t do anything about it. I can see what was once close fading in front of me and again my insides stir up, they tighten. It’s like I have tangled wires in my gut. They fight about everything, these two opinionated personalities that want to control the agenda in different ways. I intervene because I have to. I play monster to make them laugh and keep the peace. I want it to be easy, or at least I want to know that when this ends (if this ends) that my boy has someone else he can be comfortable with and I worry again that his social life will never be easy. How can I give him the tools to make it better for himself?
Finally, at dinnertime, with the takeout from Gregoire, my post-5:00 p.m. beer making me groggy, my everything is fine/don’t want to wallow in worry attitude not working very well, I told my son about my first grade best friend and our huge fights, the way I was jealous of her closeness with the neighbor girl, and how it got better as we got older. There was a Halloween tie-in, the story about her Halloween visit to our apartment in fourth grade when my mother followed trick-or-treating with an ill-advised reading of Edgar Allen Poe’s Murders at the Rue Morgue.
Do you have any more stories about Halloween to tell me, he asked. He’s heard them all before, but I told them again with more detail. Halloween 1976, second grade, was where my mother wanted me to wear a mask and I didn’t, because I was dressed up as a Colonial girl and Colonial girls didn’t wear masks. She refused to let me trick-or-treat without one, so I sat at home and watched the kids in their costumes, my chest tight and the streaks of dried tears still on my unmasked face (Nana was very stressed back then, the explanation always goes, and it is absolutely true). Halloween 1980, sixth grade, was where my best friend and I wandered along a windy unlit country road to get to another neighborhood and I worried about deer stampeding when I should have worried more about being hit by a car.
I don’t know how it happened, but the boy started getting teary and then I did, too, and when I walked over to hug him, I knocked my knee into his chair in a very painful way. After that, I put on pajamas and took to my bed. My husband kindly did the rest of the evening routine while I read magazines and stared at my computer.
And at 1:00 a.m., the worries spilled out again. They woke me up with their relentless whining. I concentrated on my breathing. I let thoughts of the closeness of others comfort me, and, eventually, I fell back asleep.
Image: The boy this summer.
Six kids and a minivan
10 September 2011 06:14 AM
True story: I once wanted six kids and a house big enough to hold them all. I was young and in love and I needed to surround myself with friends, with relatives, with extensions of myself who might love me or accept me. I was young enough to not worry about the fuck-ups and the way we mold our children accidentally or the way we try to mold them one way and they come out another. I thought it would be easy, because I was a child and I knew what children needed and I often sat in judgment of my own mother, who was clearly clueless about it, not self-sacrificing enough and too angry and sometimes barely there.
I was going to have these children with a man who grew up in a house of kids, was the youngest in a large family, and his extended family was big, too, with these fabulous dinners for twenty or more in his parents’ expansive dining room. You could get lost in the crowd at those dinners and you could observe at those dinners and everybody drank and sometimes I wish I had been there earlier for the really crazy family parties, when all the kids were living at home and the mom (a young mom, she started at 18) was flush with alcohol and a bit of anger, just enough to make it interesting.
But it was not meant to be. Here I am with the one kid and I love the one kid and I am trying my best to do my best. But I worry about family, about the comforting (and sometimes manipulative) group, the acceptance (or sometimes rejection) of many, the safety in numbers. When I was younger, I was willing to take on someone else’s family, at least for a time, but my own? No way. Kindly people, yes, but with weak arms, weak constitutions, so that when I needed them they couldn’t hold me up or they didn’t even see that I needed holding. Who wants to be supported by that, by nothingness? So I withdrew, from them, from the larger world.
This is not what I want for the boy, whose extended family is even smaller than mine was. In the therapist’s office yesterday, I talked about that a bit, about friends that become family, about my own connection reticence. I don’t want the boy to learn to be afraid. I don’t want him to make his slow to warmness into a fetish. I want his family, his small family, to be a comfort no matter how we arrange our lives.
Part of this is just being there for him, being supportive and firm, with boundaries and warmth and connection. OK. I can do that. I am, and the therapy is helping. The other part is living the sort of life that I would like him to live, to being an example of living life in the world. With other people. This is much, much harder, but it is doable, right?
I enter the world with my pained heart, with my eyes open. I don’t have to hand over my heart, but I do have to risk it sometimes, or understand that the risks are small, that I am me and no one can take that away, that my heart is mine no matter what. It’s been with me through the worst. It comforts me when it can, purrs to me at night and tells me that despite all my flaws, the occasional awkwardness, the generosity that I need to regain, the messes I’ve made, despite all of it, I am ok. I’ve got something to offer, just like the boy, and I can stand on my own two feet.
From the prompt "Motherhood."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by D Sharon Pruitt.
Telling the truth
09 September 2011 05:59 AM
I don’t know how we got on the subject of adoption. Maybe it came from his questions about my first marriage, though there were no babies, adopted or otherwise, from that union and about whether I had another child. From that point, we traveled to my mother’s adoption and her biological mother’s second rejection years later, her denial of contact and details.
And then I blurted it out. I want to write about it this morning, but it is one of those things that just can’t flow easily from my fingertips, so bear with me.
He was curious about babies. About whether I had any more out there. About adoption (the fact that my mother never knew her “first parents” made him cry and he resolved that we should find these people, and not just contact them, but meet them). I knew I had to tell him someday about my own experience, but I thought it would be later, much later, when it seemed more age-appropriate, but at the same time I didn’t want to keep it a secret, something dark and heavy.
So I told him my story, minus much of the emotional pain, of the stillborn baby I had when I was sixteen. I was expecting curiosity or perhaps disbelief, like the “you’re kidding!” response I got when I explained sex to him a couple of months ago. I wasn’t expecting tears, tears at the fact of the baby’s death, at the fact that he had a brother.
A brother. Tears. It was the first unfiltered response to my story that I have ever gotten. He wanted to know if he had a name. He wanted me to write it down so that he wouldn’t forget it. He wanted to know what he would have looked like. I had to explain that the baby would be almost 26 years old by now, a grownup, and he wished that if the brother did still exist, he would be still be a kid and be around to play with.
How did I know he was dead? Where did I have him? I told the story without blame. I tried to explain how someone might not be ready to raise a baby. I told him that no one knows why the baby died and that when I was pregnant with him, the still-living boy, I was closely monitored, just in case.
Oh, the depths of this conversation, of feeling, of connection, the tangibility of what went before. It makes my heart ache. It returns me to the world, and I mourn again for what we lost.
The prompt for this was "At the grocery store," which obviously has nothing to do with what I wrote. To really write about this will take some time. It was a striking conversation and healing and very sad all at once. I realized that at least I could talk about it without being so focused on me and without maligning my own parents. For once the focus was on that baby and the sadness of his death, the feeling of mourning that I still stuff down.
Photo of the boy at Point Reyes by his father.
Goodbye to all that
06 August 2011 05:37 AM
We have boxes and boxes of baby stuff, things we kept around, you know, just in case. Just in case we went crazy and did it again. We even tried to go crazy and do it again, but it was a half-hearted gesture and now I know it will never happen again for me. So I go through the boxes. I remember a different time, one that was simpler in some ways, though it was also overwhelming and painful and I was so strung out from lack of sleep that I couldn’t enjoy what enjoyable bits there were.
When we moved here from DC four years ago, the boy wasn’t even two years old yet. We actually moved from Alexandria, Virginia, where we lived in a cold drafty house, a place where we spent less than six months. The wind was biting that winter and the snow piled up and then there was sleet and rain. I felt so isolated from our cozy DC Adams Morgan neighborhood and then we were in Berkeley and the isolation continued. There was the strangeness of being in a new place, knowing no one, with a kid that was a homebody who needed me intensely.
“We need to be nice to each other,” I told my husband at the time. We were not up to the task. The stress of isolation, of moving, of his new job took it out of us. Maybe we both were depressed. My mother’s visit that first summer showed me how sludgy my life had become. Often I wouldn’t get dressed until after noon and couldn’t manage to even get out of the house once the day really began. My husband and I were snappy with each other. Mom was embroiled in her own troubles, too, the same troubles that had been distracting her before we moved.
So: the boxes. I have been going through them slowly, deciding what to hold onto in a sentimental nostalgic time capsule of unreality, deciding what is saleable (money would come in handy right now), what we should give away. I go through the geological layers of our son’s early life and our lives, too, as a relatively recently married couple with a baby, following the traditional pattern of man in the world, woman at home.
Who are we now? We are parents. Our son is an elementary schooler. There will be no more babies. Eras are ending all around me. I no longer cling to them, but take my comfort in thinking about real geologic time, how our existence on this earth is but a spark, a spark quickly extinguished. My only choice is to get on with it, be kind to those around me, and forgive myself and others for the mistakes we’ve made before I am covered by dirt, turned into ash. Before I return to the battered earth.
From the prompt "A baby."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. (Yes, I skipped yesterday. The prompt was "Obama." I didn't feel like getting political here, plus the boy is sick and I was otherwise occupied for much of the day.)
Image: The boy, me, and Nora-dog, summer 2005.
Soul container
16 June 2011 06:10 AM
I like to picture myself in the mirror of his mind, constant, perfect, beautiful. He contains my soul in cupped hands, treats me gently, always wants to know how I’m feeling.
Thinking about this prompt this morning, how I dealt with it last week and how I always want to focus back on love, the love that I am not sure I believe in, the slipperiness of sex and the danger of it, too, I thought again to the theme of being a character in someone else’s mind, fully known, maybe even created by them, and totally loved. I want a man-god to contain me, to see me from fault to fault to cracked fault. I want to matter on some fundamental level to this idealized creature, this fiction.
What is this all about? Well, isn’t this part of why I am in various therapies, to expose this man for what he is, to rip off his corny toga and see my history written on his skin? It comes back to the original story, the neglected teenage years, though I know it goes further back than that. I still don’t understand how I was allowed to essentially live on my own from fifteen onward, how I stayed in that little unheated, unplumbed guest house even after the baby was born (dead, as my mother coached me to push), how the focus was on me taking responsibility and not on my withered and suppressed grief. I was invisible, I was a blank slate for meaningless platitudes and no one was able to come in and rescue me from the situation.
I say that the antidepressants have separated me from my stories, from my past, and its true. I don’t have as much of an urge to tell the stories over and over again. I’ve contained them with words and made them public. But this story is so huge and meaningful and layered.
When I went to the psychiatrist, when I finally was ready to admit that I was depressed and needed pills, I told her the story. She was appropriately sympathetic and said something interesting: that a year or two of therapy was not enough to deal with this sort of trauma. Of course, she’s working from a therapeutic perspective. But it made me realize that yes, this event did matter, that I have to deal with it, that maybe I’ll be seeing my therapist for a while on this one, despite my urge to just pretend that with the dissipation of my depression, all is well.
So: the man-god who grasps me with his mind, who sees all? He is a vestige from the long time of invisibility, he is my childish desire for parenting, for the hand hold across the street. He plucks me from my past and saves me from myself. It’s effortless, the dance between me and this man. He massages away the scars and heals my soul.
He doesn’t exist.
From the prompt "The best feeling in the world." We're repeating prompts this last week of the Round Robin, with various choices on how to go with the prompt ranging from a new approach, a rewrite, or the insertion of a new sentence every three sentences. I went with the new approach. Here is last week's take.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image from the Pime Missionaries of North American (who knows where they got it from). It hasn't escaped me that some people get this feeling of being seen and held from religion, from an idea of G/god. But this is not an authentic path for me.
Reluctant room parent bares all
14 June 2011 05:21 AM
When we sat in the florescent-lit classroom last September, our five-year-old children ensconced elsewhere as we learned about the year ahead, what kindergarten would be like, I had no idea what I was doing. Yes, I signed up to be a room parent, one of the first on a list of four or five. I thought that it was part of my job as a sometimes-disgruntled stay-at-home mom, a hyphenated sort, to do that kind of thing, you, know, for the children or more specifically for my child, though I’d be helping other peoples’ children along the way.
Confession: I am not a gung-ho type. I like to be left alone and I don’t like to incite others to give group presents or bring treats to various parties. I don’t have fun ideas for teachers and if I had my way my son and I would spend long afternoons in imaginative splendor, him hopefully with a friend along, me coasting and thinking and being.
Another confession: I didn’t realize back in September that I was depressed, that I would take my family along on a melodramatic ride this school year, that many of our post-school afternoons would consist of me being cranky and removed, anticipating the four p.m. IPA. I didn’t know how lonely I was or how desperate, or that I would find it difficult to get motivated to even cook dinner, let alone organize our disparate group.
I know it all now. I’m feeling better, though with the new uptick in the antidepressants my sleep has gone to shit again. The lovely thing about a long stretch of insomnia is that it forces you not to care about the little things (unless it makes you a sodden sobbing mess, but the meds have dried up most of my tears). It gives me a clarity and I see our classroom, our sets of parents with their home lives and their work lives and their problems like everybody else’s and I just don’t care. I have a job to do, the gathering of cash, the classroom squirrel storing things up for the teacher’s present. I harangue you all to sign the card, to bring sugary crap to the end-of-school party. I forward the many missives to give money here or provide food there.
Some of you know me better than others. But I realize as the year winds up and I look back at my mistakes, at how my hopes for this brave new world of elementary school were naïve, at how I was looking for a way out or a new path and was misguided … I realize that it takes a long time to know anybody. My public face is deceptive, though not deliberately so. I am contained. I am a good girl with snarky, dirty thoughts. I look sweet and I may even act that way, but in reality, I am a pit of twanging nerves and imagined violent scenarios.
Or, families of Room 188, that’s how I feel this morning, up before the morning birds have started their business. I hear one of them warming up now. I thank him for his perspective, for the liquidity of his voice. I’ll get another cup of coffee and think of my day. I’ll think of the children.
Sincerely,
Jennifer (blonde boy #3's mom)
From the prompt "Warning signs." We're repeating prompts this last week of the Round Robin, with various choices on how to go with the prompt ranging from a new approach, a rewrite, or the insertion of a new sentence every three sentences. I went with the new approach.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image of shadows on playground sand by me.
Night moves
13 January 2011 07:26 AM
I'm sleeping in a swamp with the crickets, the frogs, the night insects making their lousy music. The deep coughs. The surface coughs, drips down the throat that won’t let up. The whispers, sometimes waking, sometimes from a dream (“I’m the flying Dutchman.” or “No, I don’t want to eat that.” ). Snores from the other side of the bed, sonorous, melodic, never-ending.
Then: lovely silence. So lovely that I wake up in surprise. I went back to sleep! The bed is still. Nick, curled against my calves, purrs joyfully. I am about to drift back again myself, am just about there, when two feet, solid fleshy anvils, kick against the small of my back. Insistent toes probe the waistband of my bedtime boxers. It is back to the relentless exploration of sleeping feet. I push the feet back to the middle of the bed. They return. Push. Return. Push. Return, this time with less vitriol, like they’ve gotten my point. Awake, I stare at the ceiling. I glance at the clock. 4:35 a.m. is not too early to get up.
After hearing ad nauseam about my sleeping issues, many of them apparently caused by nighttime proximity to a small, loud, kickboxing child, readers may wonder why this kid is still allowed in the bed. I am beginning to wonder the same thing.
The little guy has been there since the beginning, since our first nights home from the hospital. He takes comfort in closeness. When he is healthy, the sleeping is better, although I often wake up when he gets into our bed. I don’t have the heart to stop it, keep on reminding myself that this is temporary, that we are providing a solid base of love for him, love and comfort and support. Who knows if I could sleep normally again anyway?
I never went into my mother’s room when I was little, though I do remember crawling into my grandmother’s bed the year I lived with her, getting warm on chilly snowy mornings, listening for school closings on the radio. I spent many of my childhood nights terrified, my head hidden under the pillow, the pillow hidden under blankets, with a small breathing hole near my nose. Asthma attacks? The sudden onset of a stomach virus with epic vomiting? Night terrors? I stayed in my own bed.
When I was three and my mother and I were living with a man named John, she had a paper delivery route that required leaving the house in the middle of the night. Sometimes John would go with her and I would be left in our apartment alone, presumably sleeping. Sometimes John would stay. Knowing the waking patterns of small children, I must have woken up in that empty apartment on occasion. Once I did wake up when John was there. Something happened. I had a fit or was disobedient. He spanked me with a spatula, left red marks on my backside. My mother was livid.
What was she supposed to do? She was young and poor and had a child to support. Our life was what it was and she was who she was. Still, I often think my hands-on, intense, ignore-your-own needs parenting style is in part a reaction to my childhood. It’s hard for me to tell where to draw the boundaries. I focus on kindness and the desire to provide a solid framework of support and love to the detriment of myself and my relationship with my husband.
So I wake up to a chorus of night sounds. I am blanketed with kicks, with tossed limbs. The boy cuddles against me, reaches out to stroke my belly. I change sleeping venues, move to the boy’s room or go downstairs. When my husband is out of town or sleeping off his illness in another room, I switch sides of the bed, enjoy the moments of aloneness until the boy edges his way next to me again. I remember that all this is temporary, am grateful that at least the boy is in his own bed for a chunk of the night, tell myself that I can always sleep when I’m dead.
Image: In the beginning. The boy and my husband sleeping in mid-2005.
The big reveal
05 January 2011 03:25 PM
How much should we tell our children about our own childhoods? I don’t mean the happy stories, the toys and TV shows, the long afternoons in the sun. I’m talking about the bad ones, the dark side of their grandparents, the shouts and thwacks and the nights we went to bed without any dinner.
The Nana my son knows is a patient and kind 60-year-old. This was not the mother I grew up with. It usually works this way, thank goodness. Grandparents do not often revisit their parenting crimes on their grandchildren. The stakes are lower. The grandparents are older. They’ve let go a bit.
Still. I have the stories. When I tell them, I do it with as little anger as possible, though sometimes they come out in a you-have-no-idea-how-lucky-you-are-kid mode and afterwards I feel cheap, like I’ve used my history the wrong way. Not surprisingly, given my dinner table memories, these conversations come up most often at mealtimes, treacherous territory for me. You are unhappy with the food I prepare: well, when I was a kid, mealtimes were horrible. First we lived with a guy who made me stand at the table. Later I had a stepfather who berated me or simply refused to talk until I left the table. Then Kevin came along and my mother stopped eating with me altogether, left me food on a plate while she went down the street to his house. We’re not even getting into the spinach soufflés, the bitter mugs of hot carob, the flattened, honey-sweetened cookies, the sugarless world my mother left behind when Kevin appeared. No, we’re not talking about food. We’re talking about family and how children learn to feel comfortable in the world.
Two nights ago, after we had successfully and calmly pushed through a dinner of whiny petulance, the boy and I started talking about fights. For him, fights are an ugly thing, to be avoided. Sure. I understand this, especially because fights with angry grownups can be frightening to the little guy. But, as I explained, fights are often necessary and there are ways of fighting that are more productive than others. People have disagreements. We get angry because we are human, because we can’t always get what we want, but if we learn to fight productively, we . . . get what we need? Well, not exactly. But there are definitely ways to disagree that are more functional than others.
At some point in this discussion, I got teary, because I remembered the childhood fights with my mother. They were frightening. Nasty. My mother threw food, glasses, a honey jar. I threw things back. We were cruel. There were no apologies when things calmed down. I’m glad not to remember too many specific details about those fights, so long ago, though I remember their later incarnations, the bad years when I was in Ohio and my mother was under great stress. Our phone conversations (always when I was at work) were so nasty that I would have to go to the ladies room afterwards to press away the tears and splash water on my face. It took me years (and a patient husband) to learn how to fight calmly, to try and trace my anger back to the source and understand that my point of view wasn’t the only one, that I didn't have to rip into someone when I was angry.
I told the kid about some of those early days, about how scary Nana was, because I can’t imagine hiding it. I wanted him to know parts of my story, in addition to explaining why I occasionally lose it, why the old ways return to me, though they return less and less. We talked about how Nana is a different person now. The woman he sees in pictures, with the long, straight seventies hair and bellbottoms, or in those wedding photos where she and my dad, nineteen and eighteen, look like embryonic versions of themselves, doesn’t exist anymore.
As he gets older, I’ll have to deal with the other stuff, too, the more complex issues of my later childhood. I recently found myself thinking that I didn’t matter as a parent, that whether I was here or someplace else would make no difference to him. The source of this thought is unclear. He and his dad have a wonderful, playful relationship that I am not totally a part of, but I understand that. What really struck me as I analyzed the thought was that at some point both of my parents must have been operating under the (unacknowledged) assumption that they did not matter to me.
They were wrong.
The idea that I would think the same thing about my own importance to my son was frightening, for what it says about my current state of mind and for what it would make me capable of. Clearly I have more to work out, for his sake and for mine.
So I'll keep on writing, put "find a new therapist" on my to-do list, and remind myself that I am important, in small and big ways, in my son's life. I'll keep on telling him the truth about my life, when it seems appropriate, while letting him know that people change and grow, that nothing is static.
I've been a writing fiend. Why? I don't know. I can't help myself. If you are still reading this blog, thank you. If you've been reading for a long time, then some of this may be familiar, a return to deep themes.
The Nana my son knows is a patient and kind 60-year-old. This was not the mother I grew up with. It usually works this way, thank goodness. Grandparents do not often revisit their parenting crimes on their grandchildren. The stakes are lower. The grandparents are older. They’ve let go a bit.
Still. I have the stories. When I tell them, I do it with as little anger as possible, though sometimes they come out in a you-have-no-idea-how-lucky-you-are-kid mode and afterwards I feel cheap, like I’ve used my history the wrong way. Not surprisingly, given my dinner table memories, these conversations come up most often at mealtimes, treacherous territory for me. You are unhappy with the food I prepare: well, when I was a kid, mealtimes were horrible. First we lived with a guy who made me stand at the table. Later I had a stepfather who berated me or simply refused to talk until I left the table. Then Kevin came along and my mother stopped eating with me altogether, left me food on a plate while she went down the street to his house. We’re not even getting into the spinach soufflés, the bitter mugs of hot carob, the flattened, honey-sweetened cookies, the sugarless world my mother left behind when Kevin appeared. No, we’re not talking about food. We’re talking about family and how children learn to feel comfortable in the world.
Two nights ago, after we had successfully and calmly pushed through a dinner of whiny petulance, the boy and I started talking about fights. For him, fights are an ugly thing, to be avoided. Sure. I understand this, especially because fights with angry grownups can be frightening to the little guy. But, as I explained, fights are often necessary and there are ways of fighting that are more productive than others. People have disagreements. We get angry because we are human, because we can’t always get what we want, but if we learn to fight productively, we . . . get what we need? Well, not exactly. But there are definitely ways to disagree that are more functional than others.
At some point in this discussion, I got teary, because I remembered the childhood fights with my mother. They were frightening. Nasty. My mother threw food, glasses, a honey jar. I threw things back. We were cruel. There were no apologies when things calmed down. I’m glad not to remember too many specific details about those fights, so long ago, though I remember their later incarnations, the bad years when I was in Ohio and my mother was under great stress. Our phone conversations (always when I was at work) were so nasty that I would have to go to the ladies room afterwards to press away the tears and splash water on my face. It took me years (and a patient husband) to learn how to fight calmly, to try and trace my anger back to the source and understand that my point of view wasn’t the only one, that I didn't have to rip into someone when I was angry.
I told the kid about some of those early days, about how scary Nana was, because I can’t imagine hiding it. I wanted him to know parts of my story, in addition to explaining why I occasionally lose it, why the old ways return to me, though they return less and less. We talked about how Nana is a different person now. The woman he sees in pictures, with the long, straight seventies hair and bellbottoms, or in those wedding photos where she and my dad, nineteen and eighteen, look like embryonic versions of themselves, doesn’t exist anymore.
As he gets older, I’ll have to deal with the other stuff, too, the more complex issues of my later childhood. I recently found myself thinking that I didn’t matter as a parent, that whether I was here or someplace else would make no difference to him. The source of this thought is unclear. He and his dad have a wonderful, playful relationship that I am not totally a part of, but I understand that. What really struck me as I analyzed the thought was that at some point both of my parents must have been operating under the (unacknowledged) assumption that they did not matter to me.
They were wrong.
The idea that I would think the same thing about my own importance to my son was frightening, for what it says about my current state of mind and for what it would make me capable of. Clearly I have more to work out, for his sake and for mine.
So I'll keep on writing, put "find a new therapist" on my to-do list, and remind myself that I am important, in small and big ways, in my son's life. I'll keep on telling him the truth about my life, when it seems appropriate, while letting him know that people change and grow, that nothing is static.
I've been a writing fiend. Why? I don't know. I can't help myself. If you are still reading this blog, thank you. If you've been reading for a long time, then some of this may be familiar, a return to deep themes.
Fun until the cold sets in
01 January 2011 07:48 AM
The boy has been in snow before. Our last winter in DC -- really in Alexandria -- was cold, blustery, and white. He was a year and half old. He had the boots, the heavy coat, he had sweaters and mittens, but he doesn't remember the walks with Nora to local parks, the shivering, our noses dripping as we crunched on a thick crust of melted and refrozen snow, the way he was fascinated with the snow-dusted buddha in a community garden, the one he had to touch directly with reddened bare fingers.
So there was much excitement about visiting the snow, the snowmen we would build, the igloos or snow caves we would construct. Once we got to the actual stuff, it was more about tromping and sledding and finally about a project: removing snow from tree branches, banging off the ice. The day was joyful until it abruptly turned ugly. He was suddenly cold, angrily, painfully cold, and we race-tromped back to the car as he squealed (unfortunately, when he gets angry or upset he whines at a pitch that reminds me of Minnie Riperton hitting the high notes in Loving You. It's unfortunate because I immediately think of the song, which makes me laugh at the contrast. Not a sympathetic response to an upset child.).
But before there was anger, there was joy. Here he is, removing the snow from the trees -- though I'm not sure this is so much joyful as, umm, intense. He's wearing a pair of rain/snow pants from a surplus store, modified for his five-year-old figure. The pants looked pretty comical.
It was good to get away for a couple of days. It got me thinking about always feeling like an outsider, about what I'm struggling with, about the way we learn to calm -- or is it ignore -- our bodies and minds (kids with their spastic limbs, with their tossing and turning and twitches, with their life in the moment), things I'll write about in the new year.
Top mage: The kid in the snow, Alexandria, VA, early 2007.
Video: The kid desnowing a tree, December 2010.
Hidden in plain sight
28 September 2010 07:48 AM
Southern California, the early 1970s
The boy squints from the bushes. He is trying to make out the snow. A dusky layer of smog almost obscures the San Gabriel mountains, making them look like a dream, like a memory of coldness. Every year his parents drive him and his brother up Mount Baldy. His mother packs a thermos of hot chocolate and a tin of shortbread. They make a big deal of the thick socks and sweaters, the heavy boots. The drive takes not much more than an hour, but it feels like forever. For the second half, he puts his hand against the window, watches a fuzzy outline form around it on the glass as though his hand has been breathing against it. The thinning air makes everything outside look sharper, more real. Sometimes he picks a tree, any tree, and follows it with his eyes so that it looks like it is standing alone in a field of blurred obscurity. Finally, his father pulls the car over. The boys thrust skinny arms in winter coats a size too large. They pull on mittens. For half an hour, they have snowball fights and make snow angels. His father smokes cigarettes and tosses lightly packed balls at them that fall apart the moment they hit something solid.
Visiting the snow, the long drive, the feeling of dampened jeans and chilled hands, this is what he thinks about as he hides in the bushes by his elementary school. His mother has dropped him off early for afternoon kindergarten and he doesn't know any of the other children. He is scared. He waits for the bell.
Maryland's Eastern Shore, the mid-1970s
The girl fidgets on the asphalt, pulls her sweater tight. She sits in a circle with the other kindergarteners. The circle on the dark rectangle surrounded by a square of grass feels vast, insurmountable. A heavily lidded sky presses down upon them. The girl thinks about comfort, the warmth of her grandmother's bed, the smell of sausage cooking, the sway of wheat in a late summer wind. This moment, dark and cloudy and weighted with the possibility of being chosen, is a trap.
Her classmate comes closer. The girl presses her hands against the blacktop, just in case. Her cheeks flush. Slow and deliberate, the boy rounds the corner. Her heart is fluttering. There are wings in her chest, delicate, the feathers fine and white, struggling to lift her up.
“Goose!” he shouts as he taps her barrette. She thrusts herself up, but he is fast, too fast. He makes it back to her place before she does. She feels foolish, ashamed of her performance. Now it is her turn. She will have to go through it all over again.
East Bay, 2010
The boy lines up with the other children to go to the cafeteria. He is fascinated by this room in almost the same way he is fascinated by minotaurs and werewolves. It is big and epic with unknown corners and secret powers. The space is dark, as dark, he imagines, as a torch-lit labyrinth. The other kids, too many, 20, 40, 60 of them, are unpredictable. They ask him questions that he ignores. Their voices echo around the space until they blend together, a constant mumble, nothing to do with him. He concentrates on the small, immediate things, finding a seat, pulling his lunchbox zipper open to get to the confounding containers inside.
There are fans hanging from the ceiling. He carefully counts them out: 1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 4 . . . 5 . . . 6 . . . 7 . . . 8. Eight. He counts again. He thinks about what will happen when someone turns them on. The blades will whir and whir. Their strength will pull him from his seat. They will chop him to a million pieces. He imagines tying his legs into a knot around the table leg or grasping his seat as tight as he can against the pull. He practices his grip. The fans are never on. This both relieves and worries him. He knows he must keep watch.
Visiting the snow, the long drive, the feeling of dampened jeans and chilled hands, this is what he thinks about as he hides in the bushes by his elementary school. His mother has dropped him off early for afternoon kindergarten and he doesn't know any of the other children. He is scared. He waits for the bell.
Maryland's Eastern Shore, the mid-1970s
Her classmate comes closer. The girl presses her hands against the blacktop, just in case. Her cheeks flush. Slow and deliberate, the boy rounds the corner. Her heart is fluttering. There are wings in her chest, delicate, the feathers fine and white, struggling to lift her up.
“Goose!” he shouts as he taps her barrette. She thrusts herself up, but he is fast, too fast. He makes it back to her place before she does. She feels foolish, ashamed of her performance. Now it is her turn. She will have to go through it all over again.
East Bay, 2010
The boy lines up with the other children to go to the cafeteria. He is fascinated by this room in almost the same way he is fascinated by minotaurs and werewolves. It is big and epic with unknown corners and secret powers. The space is dark, as dark, he imagines, as a torch-lit labyrinth. The other kids, too many, 20, 40, 60 of them, are unpredictable. They ask him questions that he ignores. Their voices echo around the space until they blend together, a constant mumble, nothing to do with him. He concentrates on the small, immediate things, finding a seat, pulling his lunchbox zipper open to get to the confounding containers inside.
There are fans hanging from the ceiling. He carefully counts them out: 1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 4 . . . 5 . . . 6 . . . 7 . . . 8. Eight. He counts again. He thinks about what will happen when someone turns them on. The blades will whir and whir. Their strength will pull him from his seat. They will chop him to a million pieces. He imagines tying his legs into a knot around the table leg or grasping his seat as tight as he can against the pull. He practices his grip. The fans are never on. This both relieves and worries him. He knows he must keep watch.
****
This post is for the quiet children, observant and quick inside their heads, but slow when it comes to speaking, the ones who are overwhelmed by crowds and noise, who are sometimes afraid to tell grownups about their fears. It is for the perfectionist children, too, anxious, wanting everything to be right on the first try, who don't want to be observed while they figure things out. Really, it's for my son, beautiful, smart, and incredibly imaginative, hidden in plain sight.
I want life to be easy for him. I want him to have fun playing games, to feel free and loose when he draws or forms letters. I want him to sail through the crowd, to tell jokes to the classroom just like he does at home. I want him to regale everyone with his stories and silly rhymes and to let go of his anxiety about getting things just right. But those things aren't easy for him. They weren't (and aren't) easy for me or his father.
So. I promise to support him, to not try to make him into something he's not, to gently help him push him through when necessary. Because I was a child once, too. Because I want him to be happy with who he is. And because I know how hard it can be to feel comfortable in the world.
Top image of San Gabriel mountains by danorth1.
Middle image: Me, in kindergarten.
Bottom image: The boy in plain sight, playing with the saber tooth cat sculpture on the UC-Berkeley campus.
All stories based on actual experiences. We did reassure the boy that the fans wouldn't pull him up to ceiling or chop him into a million pieces.
All meringue
02 September 2010 12:01 PM
I've made a resolution to keep this space happy and deceptively light, like freshly whipped cream, like chocolate souffle or mousse, like flaky layers of puff pastry. The blog will be fluffy. All meringue.
OK.
Maybe this resolution is what is keeping me from being able to think, it's keeping my brain tied in knots and my fingers from the keyboard. Maybe what I want to write about can't possibly be lightened.
My trip to Seattle was fabulous, full of good food and good company, lots of walking, and an appropriately scary (and sometimes sad) ghost tour, but there was an undercurrent of tension that was based on an old and tiresome narrative. And, frustratingly, it's something that I don't feel comfortable writing about here, for various reasons, one of which is I don't want to indulge myself, would rather just give it up because resolving it by writing about its manifestation is impossible and complicated. At one point, this would have been perfect blog fodder, but I have no desire to go there any more. How much public kvetching and self-analysis can one person do?
The kid's first day of school was also fabulous. We hung out with him while the classes lined up, even got to accompany the kids to the classroom (parental paparazzi, with our cameras and our shout-outs to the stars), and then off we went. There was no trauma. He emerged at the end of the day unscathed. He was ready for it, to be with kids his own age, learning and playing.
There he is, a normal little kid doing normal little kid things. I've been holding memories of my own early childhood at a distance, the multiple moves and mid-year school changes and how they affected me. I am not him. His father and I are giving him things that my parents weren't capable of giving me. I've even been coming around to the idea that I might be a good mother, not a perfect one, but a good-enough one, that maybe he really can grow up like a normal, well-adjusted kid.
So, here the words are, light, but not overly airy, with a touch of sugar, yeah. The struggle will be what to work on if I'm not going to go heavy, dark, and bitter. How do I frame my writing life again after a month or more off, after years of indulging my dark predilections? I have stories in progress. I can always turn to memoir as long as I give it a happy twist. Otherwise, I'm out of ideas, feel like my imagination is stuck, stuck on me-me-me. I worry that I will never transcend the mundane.
I am so tired of me. I want to write about you, your quirks and funny ways, they mystery of how you make decisions, the way you exist in the world.
I guess we should start hanging out more, me and you, meeting in the coffee shops, skimming the whipped cream off our café mochas, burning our tongues on chai. We'll speak low over glasses of wine, bump into each other on the BART train, in the library, at the dry cleaners, while walking down the street. I'm certainly not going to find you in the guest room, standing by my desk. It's time to get off my ass and walk out the door.
I'll meet you at Caffe Trieste tomorrow at nine.
Image by Kristin A of the Meringue Bake Shop.
Melancholic, baby?
26 July 2010 11:18 AM
If you are a regular reader, you might have surmised that I am a sad sack, always focusing on events and people long gone but still present in my emotions. If you followed me around for a few days, you might be sure of it, as I break into tears here, punch at the air there, as I growl and curse. But I also dance and laugh so hard that I have to catch my breath, feel the thrill of being alive.
Life is sweet even when it feels like it isn't.
A couple of weeks ago, my son and I were doing our usual evening routine, discussing the day's events before saying goodnight. "I love you so much, I'll love you even when I'm dead," he told me. Perhaps stupidly, I responded in kind, which led to a longer discussion about death and love. It ended, of course, in tears. He wanted me to stay like I was, didn't want me to change. Maybe the pictures we've shown him of his grandparents when they were young have been sobering. They look unfamiliar with their shining hair and the tight, unlined skin of youth. He doesn't recognize them as the people they are today and he imagines what will happen to his father and me, the sagging and bulging, our faces turning into topographic maps, our bodies weakened. But I also think he's mourning the moment, who we are right now, and feels the desire to hold on. He's confronting the painful inevitability of change.
When I was eleven, I felt adulthood looming. Growing up meant a loss of self. I mourned who I was before I was gone. I had already lost so much -- would I forget the perspective of the dependent child, helpless, attached to capricious and sometimes unstable adults? Here's where I start to cry again, with surprising emotion, and I think -- what the fuck? Can't you get over it already, Jennifer? Plenty of people had it worse than you. But the emotions are still here, waiting for permission to leave.
My son has a childhood. He has his father and he has me and we will let him be a child, will protect him when he needs it and will prepare him for adulthood. These temporary moments, the joy he has in playing and being with us, the way the imaginary is real and present for him, all of this will change or disappear. This is what is supposed to happen. But we will do our best to make sure that nothing changes prematurely, that he doesn't worry about us or feel unsafe or take on larger worries. I hope that he will be able to look back at his childhood with happiness, that the preordained loss won't sting too much.
I cry, but the tears are mixed in with joy and sweetness and everything in between. This is life. I am alive.
Image: The boy at his birthday party yesterday, wielding a balloon sword.
Lost years
14 July 2010 11:32 AM
I was sitting at a playground when this revelation hit me. The boy had a shovel in his hand and was tossing sand through the sieve, pausing occasionally to tell me what he was doing, giving me the story behind the game.
I’ve been sitting in playgrounds for almost five years now, sitting in them when he was tiny and all he could do was slump in a swing or hold on to my hands as we walked on wood chips or on springy recycled tires. There was a time (the really lost years) when we just moved to California that he hated playgrounds, when we spent dark rainy days and bright sunny days in our house or yard and I didn’t talk to anyone but him and my husband or my mother on the phone, talked in dark clipped resentful tones.
Because I’ve gone underground during the last five years – and especially the last three, after we moved to this unfamiliar place with a rainy season and foggy mornings that burn off into cloudless sky. I stopped caring what I looked like (despite my occasional forays into style). I stopped showering every day and sometimes didn't even shower every other day. I stopped using an ATM card and instead relied on my husband to give me cash infusions, like I was asking for egg money. I stopped reading much. I stopped going anywhere by myself and when I did the feeling was either exhilarating (“I’m riding on BART to San Francisco by myself!”) or scary and unfamiliar.
There have been afternoons spent at playgrounds, chasing the kid, talking to him about castles, or taking on the voice of Dress Me Monkey. We’ve trekked to libraries and Habitot and hopped on the BART to the city or to Fairyland. One long fall we regularly traveled a mile to a playground by a large playing field with the sole goal of sitting in a play structure and watching a high school football team practice. That was all the kid wanted to do there, plop himself on our little seat (growling at any other child who wanted a turn) to watch these teenagers in bulky colorful outfits run and tackle and pass.
I sometimes still walk long distances with the boy in the stroller, despite the fact that he will be five years old at the end of this month and weighs about 43 pounds. Since I don’t drive or bike, but love to walk, I’m thinking that a stroller may come in handy for a while longer even though pushing him up sloped Berkeley streets isn't always pleasant, even though I know that people think it's time for him to walk or ride a bike. (Ever walked 2+ miles roundtrip with a bike-hating five-year-old beside you? If so, let me know.) But he also walks with me, too, his warm hand in mine. We stop to pick flowers or retrieve sticks that he turns into spears or swords or arrows.
The lost years. The worst of these meant isolation and – yes – boredom for me. The kid has only recently been comfortable playing on his own with friends when we go to the park, so most of the play time has been on me. I am not one of those inventive mothers who always has a kid project going, some sort of craft or messy activity. A lot of the time I’ve felt like a stay-at-home-mom failure, a woman who isn’t actually suited to the job, but has taken it on anyway only to complain about it.
The best of these years has been the sweetness, the fun we have when I allow myself to live in the moment, the feeling of his hand in mine, the real conversations we have about his stories or our lives or even about his fears. I know that the conversations will only get better (except, maybe, during his teenage years). I know that our playground trips will be more and more about him playing with his friends until playgrounds cease to interest him. But I also know that the sweetest things will disappear. Soon he will stop holding my hand or asking for 20 kisses before he goes to school. He will stop patting and kissing my belly, will cease to bob back and forth to music he likes, no matter where he hears it. He will become self-conscious in new ways.
My son starts kindergarten on September 1st. It could be the beginning of my return to the world, the found years. In preparation, I am working out and showering daily, wearing things other than stretchy knit pants, and dusting off my ATM card. I have a short solo trip -- my first since the kid's birth -- planned for next month. But I also hope that the sweetness will last for as long as it can, that despite the changes the boy will still keep the cuddliness, will still tell me "I love you 3-a-million" before going to sleep.
It's possible, right?
Image: The kid, looking into the future.
I've written this post in the middle of a four-day business trip for my husband. So far things are going pretty well with me and the kid AND I'm still getting to shower (and exercise) daily. It's a good start to the found years.
On not escaping
19 June 2010 05:10 PM
The road trip: the long car ride down and then back up the coast, along Highway One and Route 101, those final curves of Big Sur where the kid got carsick (and I was grateful that he'd refused food before then), the rental cottage in Pasadena where I realized that I had forgotten my inhaler and so spent a few hours on our first night there sitting up and trying to take deep breaths. Then there was the graduation ceremony, me and the kid running on the beach in Santa Monica beforehand, the long blah blah blah of the ceremony and the happiness afterwards. We spent some time with the father-in-law and the brother-in-law and the aunt. We ate in lots of restaurants and went through boxes of WWII memorabilia and old family papers and keepsakes.
We went to Disneyland, a day trip where we terrorized the kid by taking him on rides that he wasn't quite ready to experience. He was dying to go into the Haunted Mansion, but as soon as we walked in, he wanted out of there. It was too late. In the days since he's been going over the experience again and again mainly to the birdies in the car (that is, to my index fingers and thumbs, which make convenient bird puppets). He explains what happened and then he has them go through a mini version of it ("Birdies: the room is stretching!"). OK, OK, OK -- I get it. He's working it out. But I still feel guilty for exposing him to that too early. And it wasn't only that. We also got on Star Tours and the Pirates of the Caribbean rides. Star Tours merely scared him. The Pirates of the Caribbean had him burying his head in my chest, asking when it would be over. And I'm not so sure that finishing with the bizarrely psychedelic Winnie the Pooh ride was a good idea for any of us.
Then the trip back home, a greasy dinner, an overnight in Morro Bay, the chill of the wind coming offf the ocean, the seals and cormorants, Morro Rock.
What we brought back with us: a sword, a shield, a retractable dagger, a gumball machine, an old globe, rosaries, a prayer book, the carbide miner's headlamp that belonged to my husband's maternal grandfather. More plastic knights. An extra inhaler. A new pair of shoes. New used clothes.
And now I'm back, wondering where my head is, wanting to escape, really escape. Just me and a book, the swing of a hammock, a cool glass of chamomile tea, a long sleep. This is the state of my fantasy life. Safe, soothing, and solo. I haven't spent a night away from the boy since before he was born. I love him. I need a night away. I'm wishing that I was the type to build him a network, to take a thread here and there and connect him to other people so that we weren't the only ones. I wish all that was effortless for me. But it's not, and here I am, still in the intensity of it all, hoping that it will all turn out ok for him, and desperately wanting a little time to be a grownup away from the toys and the tears. Just a night is all that I ask. Maybe two. The second night for my husband.
Image: The kid at Morro Rock.
B is for . . . bad influence
02 May 2010 09:10 AM
There’s nothing like picking up your son from preschool where many of the other, much smaller, kids are talking about “pwison,” knowing who exposed them to that grownup concept. The kid is the oldest there by almost a year and sometimes two, which is a big deal for the under four set. He spent his first year and a half at this place just watching, sitting on the bench and observing, so we (and, more importantly, the preschool director) decided it was a good idea for him to stay while other kids his age moved on. And it's been wonderful to see him change from the boy on the bench to the kid running around and having fun. He's ready now to play with kids his own age and we are looking forward to kindergarten in the fall.
But at the moment there's the weapon thing (swords and now guns, with a vengeance) and the prison thing, which can sometimes cause discord. And on Friday evening, when we were talking about war and soldiers (thanks, Looney Tunes – "Bunker Hill Bunny" and National Geographic – article with a picture of woman whose legs were blown off by a land mine in an issue with something innocuous, like dinosaur fossils on the cover), I decided to bring up the song “War” as sung by Frankie Goes to Hollywood on YouTube. For the music. But, oh – the footage, compelling black and white shots from WWII (and perhaps earlier) of soldiers with guns and grenades and that picture of dead bodies piled in a foxhole. I think he should start to get an idea of what it's all about, war, or at least that part of it is about death, and he seems to understand on the level he needs to now, so I don’t mind him seeing those fixed images so much. We talk about them, the weapons and the damage done. What I know is going to come back and bite me is the line he fixated on: “Who wants to die?”
Monday afternoon I’ll pick him up at preschool. He’ll be there in his cop hat/helmet, climbing a hay bale castle, screaming “Who wants to die” at the top of his lungs. The other kids, the two- and three-year-olds and four-year-olds, might be shouting it, too, to the best of their ability. If I’m lucky, he won’t start planting “land mines” there, like he did in the park last week, me trying to play along (wan smile, less enthusiasm) while also trying to explain how terrible land mines were.
“These are cartoon land mines, Mom,” he told me. We talk about it. He knows the difference. Anything with a trigger, full of explosive capability, is huge fun, as long as no one gets hurt.
Image: Army set up on our porch.
From a prompt: B is for . . .
Welcome to New Jersey, where the Santas stare all night
03 April 2010 06:29 AM
The kid at Belvedere Castle in Central Park on a chilly (but not rainy) Wednesday.
Santas in the pantry at my father and stepmother's house, watching me as I hopped onto a neighbor's wireless connection at 3:00 in the morning (Eastern time) on Friday.
Me and the kid at the long-term parking at SFO, 10:00 a.m. (Pacific time) on Friday. The kid stayed awake through the entire flight, even after being up since essentially the middle of the night, even though he was also sick. As we reached our stop on the parking shuttle, his eyelids finally started to flutter and I staggered off with him flopped in my arms.
More words on Monday.
The low spark of a high-heeled boy
21 October 2009 11:14 AM
Here was the scene: my four-year-old son wearing a pair of old high heels, a canary-yellow birthday party hat on his head, grasping a sword in either hand. It was another one of his many guises, a funny mix of feminine and masculine, underpinned by the dark potential for violence. He gave my husband a birthday hat and a sword (we have a large supply of both) and they began a battle, two "spirits" hashing it out. Soon after, the kid swapped out the swords for a stick turned gun. If you are my Facebook friend, maybe you saw one of the resulting photographs, which I put up with the heading “The Low Spark of a High-Heeled Boy.” It was one of those annoying isn't-my-kid-clever-and-cute posts. But just look at him. Isn't he?
Every day at preschool, my son dresses up in costume. It might be as basic as a police officer hat. Sometimes he adds bat wings or an elephant nose. At home he puts on his batboy costume and flaps his wings as he takes flight in the living room. Playing with the concept of name and identity, he uses aliases at our Music Together classes. The alias used to change weekly depending on his book-obsession of the moment -- Art Dog, Mrs. Grizzle, etc. -- but now his chosen identity lasts for months. After weeks of singing "Hello to Chipmunk" one of the summer session parents had assumed that was his name. "You know, Berkeley," she said with a shrug after I set her straight. "You never can tell here." Last week he went to class in full pirate regalia, from scarlett hat to skull-and-crossbones vest to sword. "Nobody will know who I am," he told me with a sly smile.
Part of his dressing up and taking on identities, his love of costume, has something to do with shyness. These are ways to be in public with being totally seen. But I also think he has a bit of the dramatic in him. Like all children, he has a rich imaginative life. He makes a set of bike wrenches into a train, builds a boat out of a pile of sticks, creates robots out of spare toys and junk. My son truly believes that if he runs and jumps fast enough, he can fly. I remember flying, too, that heady moment of lift as I raced across my grandparents' family room and landed in the dark green chair in the corner. It happened. I can't deny it.
I worry about the future of his imagination, about the coming imposition of what it means to be a boy. When he goes to school full-time next year he will be immersed in the culture of the group, where rule-happy children and adults start forcing kids into slots. I remember school as a place where creativity isn't valued and anything different is quashed. I want to protect him, to take his imagination and cover it in gleaming armor, to let him know that flying will always be possible.
The change will happen. It is inevitable. But I hope that he will hold tight to his creativity, protect himself when he needs to without smothering his imagination. The further he gets out in the world, the less control I will have. All I can offer is my love and support.
Image: The high-heeled boy at home, October 2009. Photo by Mr. Trinkle.
New selections from the back catalog of the blog in Best and Rarest!
Every day at preschool, my son dresses up in costume. It might be as basic as a police officer hat. Sometimes he adds bat wings or an elephant nose. At home he puts on his batboy costume and flaps his wings as he takes flight in the living room. Playing with the concept of name and identity, he uses aliases at our Music Together classes. The alias used to change weekly depending on his book-obsession of the moment -- Art Dog, Mrs. Grizzle, etc. -- but now his chosen identity lasts for months. After weeks of singing "Hello to Chipmunk" one of the summer session parents had assumed that was his name. "You know, Berkeley," she said with a shrug after I set her straight. "You never can tell here." Last week he went to class in full pirate regalia, from scarlett hat to skull-and-crossbones vest to sword. "Nobody will know who I am," he told me with a sly smile.
Part of his dressing up and taking on identities, his love of costume, has something to do with shyness. These are ways to be in public with being totally seen. But I also think he has a bit of the dramatic in him. Like all children, he has a rich imaginative life. He makes a set of bike wrenches into a train, builds a boat out of a pile of sticks, creates robots out of spare toys and junk. My son truly believes that if he runs and jumps fast enough, he can fly. I remember flying, too, that heady moment of lift as I raced across my grandparents' family room and landed in the dark green chair in the corner. It happened. I can't deny it.
I worry about the future of his imagination, about the coming imposition of what it means to be a boy. When he goes to school full-time next year he will be immersed in the culture of the group, where rule-happy children and adults start forcing kids into slots. I remember school as a place where creativity isn't valued and anything different is quashed. I want to protect him, to take his imagination and cover it in gleaming armor, to let him know that flying will always be possible.
The change will happen. It is inevitable. But I hope that he will hold tight to his creativity, protect himself when he needs to without smothering his imagination. The further he gets out in the world, the less control I will have. All I can offer is my love and support.
Image: The high-heeled boy at home, October 2009. Photo by Mr. Trinkle.
New selections from the back catalog of the blog in Best and Rarest!
It's all over until next year
01 November 2008 10:08 AM
The kid, in non-Sam Kinison mode.
Soon to come: a change of pace with November's blog of the month and another set of recipes in Vegetarian TImes!
Channeling Sam Kinison
30 October 2008 02:25 PM
Illustration from YTMND.
MOMMY! I WANT MOMMY!
(here I am!)
NO! NOOOOOOO! I WANT DADDDYYYYY!
(ok, he’s standing right there; parents switch positions)
NOT DADDY, MOMMY!
(well, Daddy is the one who is here right now. Would you like robot pajamas tonight?)
NOT THE ROBOT PAJAMAS – THE SHARK PAJAMAS! I WANT THE SHARK PAJAMAS!
(the shark pajamas, buddy?)
THAT’S WHAT I S A I D: THE SHARK PAJAMAS!
(parent begins dressing child in shark pajamas)
NO! I WANT THE ROBOT PAJAMAS ON!
(parent and child together): AHHHHHHHHRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!
Another day ends in tears at the writing to survive household. Maybe our three-year-old son is developing neural networks at incredible rates and his thoughts are pulling him in different directions. Perhaps he is experimenting with control – how much does he have? How will we, the beleagured parents, react to his cries of frustration? It’s normal (right??), but exhausting, and patience-trying, and sometimes it’s hard to see the humor in it all.
Bath time last night was a screamfest. I wasn’t there – baths are generally my husband’s responsibility – but I could hear every outburst. I finally realized what it reminded me of: my son was channeling the long-dead 80s comedian Sam Kinison.
Here is a little taste of my current home life, minus the lunges and hair pulls, with a very young-looking, relatively thin Kinison on the David Letterman show. The comedian was known, as Wikipedia puts it, “for his extremely vitriolic humor” and can be offensive, so viewer beware.
writing to survive – where one day you can read about Gertrude Stein and Edgar Allen Poe, and the next you can watch Sam Kinison.
Now you know about my tasteless side.
Jailbreak
29 August 2008 09:17 PM
November 29, 2004 began the final weeks of my last hurrah.
It was the end of an incredible, challenging half-year. I’d spent June through October in New York, studying culinary arts at the Natural Gourmet Institute, living in a studio sublet in Chelsea. By day I’d take notes on “health supportive” food and create vegetarian gourmet fare with my fellow classmates. Evenings were for wandering Manhattan. The Hudson River was a few blocks away from my apartment, and the West Village was an easy, entertaining stroll. Sometimes I’d go the distance to Midtown where the streets were hopping with humanity and the buildings were a mix of architecture spanning three centuries, old brick storefronts intermingling with structures of concrete and glass.
The streets of Manhattan were overwhelming to me: too much stimulation, every block packed with shops and restaurants, with signs and graffiti (“Mama Loves Neckface”?), every address crying out for attention. Night subdued the signs, softened the calls. So I walked and watched, sometimes talked on the phone with my husband, who was back in DC. We’d go over the days humiliations and occasional triumphs. A few late nights in Brooklyn with my friend Jules – drinking, talking, attempting karaoke (never, never again) -- sealed the New York experience.
I went back to DC for six weeks before my internship at Greens Restaurant and spent the time preparing to start a personal chef business. During this break I appeared on a local television news program cooking contest, which led to a later on-air meeting with Anthony Bourdain. My world was opening up into something completely new. It was shiny and scary, anxiety-producing and freeing, a chance to create a business and change my life.
So. November 29, 2004. I was in my favorite city, San Francisco, about to work at Greens, my favorite restaurant. But something was distracting me from restaurant job panic. The day I started my internship, I also had to track down a drugstore. No matter how many tests I tried, the results were always the same. I was pregnant.
One new world slipped away as another one appeared. This was an alien planet created with an equal mix of worry, sacrifice and love. What would it be like to have a little creature totally dependent upon me? Was I up for the task? Was the pain I carried around hereditary, something involuntarily slipped in through the genes, a burden to be shared? I was terrified.
The 80-hour internship went by in a blur. I was a solitary, preoccupied figure, standing in place at the salad and dessert station as other employees, efficient in their clogs and hats, sharpened knives prepared for work, zipped around me. I would look at my slow, inexperienced hands as they grasped the serving spoon and tipped that night’s curry onto a plate. I methodically patted out tart dough as dinners were plated around me, carefully removed the skin and pith from scores of oranges in a haze of prep staff conversation, inexpertly mixed the ingredients for the filo pastry of the day in the cold of the isolated back kitchen.
It wasn’t enough time to even get my feet wet. My inexperience would never get the opportunity to disappear. I was going to be permanently interrupted.
But was I?
Since my son was born, I’ve been living as though all that was ever going to happen to me already had. I’ve let the experience of being a mother stop me from participating in the larger world. The stories I write here are about the past, about the life I had when I had a life outside of my house.
On the other hand, by writing these stories I am reentering the world, slowly emerging from my own head. And I find that my dreams have changed. That shiny new world of four years ago is no longer relevant.
I can’t wait to find out what happens next.
It was the end of an incredible, challenging half-year. I’d spent June through October in New York, studying culinary arts at the Natural Gourmet Institute, living in a studio sublet in Chelsea. By day I’d take notes on “health supportive” food and create vegetarian gourmet fare with my fellow classmates. Evenings were for wandering Manhattan. The Hudson River was a few blocks away from my apartment, and the West Village was an easy, entertaining stroll. Sometimes I’d go the distance to Midtown where the streets were hopping with humanity and the buildings were a mix of architecture spanning three centuries, old brick storefronts intermingling with structures of concrete and glass.
The streets of Manhattan were overwhelming to me: too much stimulation, every block packed with shops and restaurants, with signs and graffiti (“Mama Loves Neckface”?), every address crying out for attention. Night subdued the signs, softened the calls. So I walked and watched, sometimes talked on the phone with my husband, who was back in DC. We’d go over the days humiliations and occasional triumphs. A few late nights in Brooklyn with my friend Jules – drinking, talking, attempting karaoke (never, never again) -- sealed the New York experience.
I went back to DC for six weeks before my internship at Greens Restaurant and spent the time preparing to start a personal chef business. During this break I appeared on a local television news program cooking contest, which led to a later on-air meeting with Anthony Bourdain. My world was opening up into something completely new. It was shiny and scary, anxiety-producing and freeing, a chance to create a business and change my life.
So. November 29, 2004. I was in my favorite city, San Francisco, about to work at Greens, my favorite restaurant. But something was distracting me from restaurant job panic. The day I started my internship, I also had to track down a drugstore. No matter how many tests I tried, the results were always the same. I was pregnant.
One new world slipped away as another one appeared. This was an alien planet created with an equal mix of worry, sacrifice and love. What would it be like to have a little creature totally dependent upon me? Was I up for the task? Was the pain I carried around hereditary, something involuntarily slipped in through the genes, a burden to be shared? I was terrified.
The 80-hour internship went by in a blur. I was a solitary, preoccupied figure, standing in place at the salad and dessert station as other employees, efficient in their clogs and hats, sharpened knives prepared for work, zipped around me. I would look at my slow, inexperienced hands as they grasped the serving spoon and tipped that night’s curry onto a plate. I methodically patted out tart dough as dinners were plated around me, carefully removed the skin and pith from scores of oranges in a haze of prep staff conversation, inexpertly mixed the ingredients for the filo pastry of the day in the cold of the isolated back kitchen.
It wasn’t enough time to even get my feet wet. My inexperience would never get the opportunity to disappear. I was going to be permanently interrupted.
But was I?
Since my son was born, I’ve been living as though all that was ever going to happen to me already had. I’ve let the experience of being a mother stop me from participating in the larger world. The stories I write here are about the past, about the life I had when I had a life outside of my house.
On the other hand, by writing these stories I am reentering the world, slowly emerging from my own head. And I find that my dreams have changed. That shiny new world of four years ago is no longer relevant.
I can’t wait to find out what happens next.
That was then, Part II
24 August 2008 06:05 AM
That was then:
October 1972, Hollywood Beach, my 3rd birthday?
The above photo was taken at my grandparents’ house during the John the Murderer era.
Christmas 1976, Wilmington
Jim, the future and former stepfather, took this holiday shot. Memories of this apartment: no car; no money; asthma attacks; three dead cats and one poisoned hamster; the bus ride to a movie theater showing Star Wars; juicy cherry tomatoes straight from the garden out back (the garden that also contained a kitty graveyard with little wooden crosses); iced chamomile tea; hot carob instead of hot chocolate. For my mother, it was a time without hope. A year later she returned to college to complete her bachelors degree, thus solving the hopelessness problem for a time.
This is now:
August 2008, Berkeley
My son and my mother, having a good time. We had a great visit. And yes, no one ever seems to look directly at the camera in this family. (That was then, Part I can be found here.)
From the inside
15 August 2008 05:12 AM
Mary of Do You Digg It recently posted a review of my blog. It’s a positive review, though reading it unsettled me a bit.
Part of what unsettled me was the link back to my own words (which I’ve changed to better reflect my feelings). The “why” of writing to survive was initially a rather bleak description of what life was like for me for the first two years of my son’s existence. This was a difficult time with many struggles to maintain eveness. I lost a lot of myself, my marriage changed, and I’d have to say there was some depression tossed into the mix, too, though I was never treated.
So. I love my son. I am lucky to stay home with him. He makes me laugh. We dance and sing and talk and read together. He has also been an impetus for change, a reminder to slow down and enjoy. With him I am able to remake my own childhood, borrowing the good bits and discarding the bad. I am lucky to be able to do this AND write.
Which brings me to my husband, an amazing man who is my biggest supporter. When I need reassuring about my parenting skills, he is quick to soothe. He loves to read my work. He gets take-out when I am tired of cooking. He understands when I use naptime (when naptime happens) to write instead of clean. We are truly a team. I love you, H.
There are nuances to this angst, and as I’ve been writing here and privately, the angst shifts and dissipates. The words have saved me.
This is writing to survive.
Part of what unsettled me was the link back to my own words (which I’ve changed to better reflect my feelings). The “why” of writing to survive was initially a rather bleak description of what life was like for me for the first two years of my son’s existence. This was a difficult time with many struggles to maintain eveness. I lost a lot of myself, my marriage changed, and I’d have to say there was some depression tossed into the mix, too, though I was never treated.
So. I love my son. I am lucky to stay home with him. He makes me laugh. We dance and sing and talk and read together. He has also been an impetus for change, a reminder to slow down and enjoy. With him I am able to remake my own childhood, borrowing the good bits and discarding the bad. I am lucky to be able to do this AND write.
Which brings me to my husband, an amazing man who is my biggest supporter. When I need reassuring about my parenting skills, he is quick to soothe. He loves to read my work. He gets take-out when I am tired of cooking. He understands when I use naptime (when naptime happens) to write instead of clean. We are truly a team. I love you, H.
There are nuances to this angst, and as I’ve been writing here and privately, the angst shifts and dissipates. The words have saved me.
This is writing to survive.
A talisman against loss
30 July 2008 02:02 PM
Sickness descended on my household last week. The kid was the first to fall, and I was next in line. So far, H has escaped the sinus headaches, the post-nasal drip, and the world-weary sense of fatigue.
Some children sleep though high fevers, resting up as their bodies fight off the germs. Not our little one. The heat disturbs his sleep. For several nights he woke up in the 2 - 3 a.m. time slot, asking "Is it wake-up time?" Well, no, but we didn't have much say in the matter. Time for a drink of water, maybe for another dose of Motrin, and then we'd settle in for cuddling and long attempts at getting back to sleep. Two hours later, once he was out, I would be able to sleep myself.
The combination of being sick and not getting enough sleep put me in a strange frame of mind. Everything seemed fraught with premature nostalgia. The Duplo block set he got for his birthday, with a castle and the toy knights? A relic of a childhood soon to be over, the toys destined to languish in an attic. The recent photographs of our growing boy? Documentation of a time we won't be be able to remember a year from now. My cuddly 3-year-old will change into a different person, perhaps several times over, and each stage will be as fuzzy in my mind as his first weeks of life. It cut, this realization of the slipperiness of time and memory.
Along with an ache for what has not yet passed, I started to see danger in almost every moment, as though I was preparing myself for an inevitable loss. The bee I saw crawling on our grass -- would it deliver a fatal sting to my son, sink its poison into his chubby bare foot? (Never mind that we have no idea if he is allergic. It is a genetic possiblity). Would this be the dog walk where I would lose my balance and fall backwards, landing on my son, strapped to my back in an Ergo carrier? (Oh, for those days when he insisted on wearing his bike helmet at all times!)
And what about me? Was I paying enough attention to the dangers that I faced? Is the morning coming when, groggy and uncaffeinated, I will accidentally dip my low-hanging robe sleeve into the burner flame, stare in shock as the sleeve is consumed? Would I finally miss that step and go tumbling into a crumpled heap of bone and flesh on the floor below?
Maybe if I tried to keep the dangers in mind, tried to remind myself that what we love can be taken away, that no moment is innocent, I would have a mental talisman against loss.
That was a few days ago. Sleep is improving and my outlook is returning to normal. Neurotic worrying is not what protects us from danger. I am lucky to live in an incredibly safe part of the world, with access to clean water, plentiful food, and good medical care. I don't have to dodge bombs or gunfire. I don't need a talisman.
But I am going to watch my step when I go down the stairs.
Some children sleep though high fevers, resting up as their bodies fight off the germs. Not our little one. The heat disturbs his sleep. For several nights he woke up in the 2 - 3 a.m. time slot, asking "Is it wake-up time?" Well, no, but we didn't have much say in the matter. Time for a drink of water, maybe for another dose of Motrin, and then we'd settle in for cuddling and long attempts at getting back to sleep. Two hours later, once he was out, I would be able to sleep myself.
The combination of being sick and not getting enough sleep put me in a strange frame of mind. Everything seemed fraught with premature nostalgia. The Duplo block set he got for his birthday, with a castle and the toy knights? A relic of a childhood soon to be over, the toys destined to languish in an attic. The recent photographs of our growing boy? Documentation of a time we won't be be able to remember a year from now. My cuddly 3-year-old will change into a different person, perhaps several times over, and each stage will be as fuzzy in my mind as his first weeks of life. It cut, this realization of the slipperiness of time and memory.
Along with an ache for what has not yet passed, I started to see danger in almost every moment, as though I was preparing myself for an inevitable loss. The bee I saw crawling on our grass -- would it deliver a fatal sting to my son, sink its poison into his chubby bare foot? (Never mind that we have no idea if he is allergic. It is a genetic possiblity). Would this be the dog walk where I would lose my balance and fall backwards, landing on my son, strapped to my back in an Ergo carrier? (Oh, for those days when he insisted on wearing his bike helmet at all times!)
And what about me? Was I paying enough attention to the dangers that I faced? Is the morning coming when, groggy and uncaffeinated, I will accidentally dip my low-hanging robe sleeve into the burner flame, stare in shock as the sleeve is consumed? Would I finally miss that step and go tumbling into a crumpled heap of bone and flesh on the floor below?
Maybe if I tried to keep the dangers in mind, tried to remind myself that what we love can be taken away, that no moment is innocent, I would have a mental talisman against loss.
That was a few days ago. Sleep is improving and my outlook is returning to normal. Neurotic worrying is not what protects us from danger. I am lucky to live in an incredibly safe part of the world, with access to clean water, plentiful food, and good medical care. I don't have to dodge bombs or gunfire. I don't need a talisman.
But I am going to watch my step when I go down the stairs.
Is it over?
17 July 2008 06:57 PM
OK, so I knew it wouldn't last forever, those sweet 2 - 3 hour afternoon interludes, the house quiet and my mind active and unfettered. The jig would be up at some point in the misty future.
But I really didn't expect my son to stop napping before his third birthday (about a week away). Last Wednesday, he made a decision: no more naps. Even in the monotony of a long drive, even when his lids were at quarter-mast, when he was a little zombie boy in the carseat, he stayed the course. My attempts to coax midday sleep out of him have been unsuccessful.
It's all well and good when there are two of us around to entertain him, but what happens next week when it's just me and him? He isn't a big fan of playgrounds, he doesn't like hanging out with other kids. One can only take so many dog walks and trips to the library. Maybe this is our big opportunity to explore San Francisco, take the BART into the city and get culture. Or take a bus into the Berkeley hills, or to campus, have a little public transportation adventure (!!).
My boy is funny and often self-entertaining. He loves books and trains and motorcycles. Spending my days with him is a joy, but I am a person who thrives off of quiet time. Uninterrupted time. I'm scared. I need that time. After a full day of child chasing, my brain is mush. How am I supposed to write?
Thank goodness for his two school mornings. And for early bedtimes. Sometimes as early as 6:30.
But I really didn't expect my son to stop napping before his third birthday (about a week away). Last Wednesday, he made a decision: no more naps. Even in the monotony of a long drive, even when his lids were at quarter-mast, when he was a little zombie boy in the carseat, he stayed the course. My attempts to coax midday sleep out of him have been unsuccessful.
It's all well and good when there are two of us around to entertain him, but what happens next week when it's just me and him? He isn't a big fan of playgrounds, he doesn't like hanging out with other kids. One can only take so many dog walks and trips to the library. Maybe this is our big opportunity to explore San Francisco, take the BART into the city and get culture. Or take a bus into the Berkeley hills, or to campus, have a little public transportation adventure (!!).
My boy is funny and often self-entertaining. He loves books and trains and motorcycles. Spending my days with him is a joy, but I am a person who thrives off of quiet time. Uninterrupted time. I'm scared. I need that time. After a full day of child chasing, my brain is mush. How am I supposed to write?
Thank goodness for his two school mornings. And for early bedtimes. Sometimes as early as 6:30.
Reality
24 June 2008 08:23 PM
It's not a gravy train, this being a stay-at-home mom thing.
True, I am happy not to be in the working world. I can't imagine anyone else taking care of the boy on a full-time basis. I am a worrier and a control freak and I would miss him. There is no job waiting interesting enough to pull me away and I'm a poor juggler. The rush to work, the rush home, the mad dinner dash -- I didn't like it when I was childless. Mix in a needy little one and I would be a raving lunatic, in a less fun way than I am now. A full-time care situation would also be less than optimal for my total homebody, somewhat mommy-obsessed son.
(Note: There are many reasons to be a working parent. My mother was a working parent. Most of my friends are working parents. I love them all and admire their ability to have a working life and a home life. Their kids are generally happy and well-adjusted. I have nothing against mothers who work.)
Then there is reality: money. Farting around with my fascinating life story isn't going to bring in the cold, cold cash. My husband bears the burden of supporting us in a very expensive part of the U.S. I haven't contributed to Social Security in almost four years (yes, I still cling to the quaint idea that Social Security will exist when my time comes to cash in). And I miss having an outside focus.
To make money writing salable stuff takes concentrated effort. A plan. It takes time to implement a plan. And seven hours a week of childcare isn't a lot of time.
My solution: stop sleeping.
Though I don't sleep much as it is.
True, I am happy not to be in the working world. I can't imagine anyone else taking care of the boy on a full-time basis. I am a worrier and a control freak and I would miss him. There is no job waiting interesting enough to pull me away and I'm a poor juggler. The rush to work, the rush home, the mad dinner dash -- I didn't like it when I was childless. Mix in a needy little one and I would be a raving lunatic, in a less fun way than I am now. A full-time care situation would also be less than optimal for my total homebody, somewhat mommy-obsessed son.
(Note: There are many reasons to be a working parent. My mother was a working parent. Most of my friends are working parents. I love them all and admire their ability to have a working life and a home life. Their kids are generally happy and well-adjusted. I have nothing against mothers who work.)
Then there is reality: money. Farting around with my fascinating life story isn't going to bring in the cold, cold cash. My husband bears the burden of supporting us in a very expensive part of the U.S. I haven't contributed to Social Security in almost four years (yes, I still cling to the quaint idea that Social Security will exist when my time comes to cash in). And I miss having an outside focus.
To make money writing salable stuff takes concentrated effort. A plan. It takes time to implement a plan. And seven hours a week of childcare isn't a lot of time.
My solution: stop sleeping.
Though I don't sleep much as it is.
"Tell me a story"
16 June 2008 09:02 PM
I've never thought of myself as a good storyteller. Getting the sequence of events in the right order, building the proper tension -- I can't do it out loud. Maybe it's a self-confidence problem, or it's my ever-present worry about getting things wrong or saying something horribly offensive (that's a childhood hangover right there), but piecing together a narrative is real work for me, work that I can't do with an audience. Trapped in an ice of anxiety, my imagination retreats and my mouth ceases to work properly.
Then my son started asking for stories before bed. Yes, my internal editor even made an appearance here. I had to thaw my mind, to stop caring about being bad at storytelling. Of course, he is a very receptive audience, a three-year-old with a love of the surreal. He throws out an idea and I run with it, with a little input when necessary (fun fact: did you know that monsters eat pears?).
It's freeing and satisfying, this flow of connected silliness with just a touch of plot. Good practice for writing.
If only he would fall asleep after the story. Perhaps I should be more boring.
Then my son started asking for stories before bed. Yes, my internal editor even made an appearance here. I had to thaw my mind, to stop caring about being bad at storytelling. Of course, he is a very receptive audience, a three-year-old with a love of the surreal. He throws out an idea and I run with it, with a little input when necessary (fun fact: did you know that monsters eat pears?).
It's freeing and satisfying, this flow of connected silliness with just a touch of plot. Good practice for writing.
If only he would fall asleep after the story. Perhaps I should be more boring.
Schlump
04 June 2008 01:53 PM
Web page whirlwind, recipe testing ruckus, no creative writing for me.
Am I the only person in the world who needs time, real time to exist and think and be by myself, to write? Extemporaneous writing just doesn't do it for me. Just sit down and write ... but what if I have nothing to say? Sometimes I need to sift through my thoughts, to make sure everything is all clear, before words come out.
Write about what you know. Hmmm. Maybe I need to get out more. I don't particularly feel like writing Mom-lit. I love the little guy and find practically everything he does worthy of mention (did I tell you about his pteronadon song? "you are my friend pteronandon, you make me smile ..."). To write about him, however, would box me into this life. I need an escape hatch or, at the very least, a window to open to let in the breeze.
Just keep writing, 1000 - 2000 words a day, wrote a commenter here recently. I admit, I got defensive. It isn't so easy to just sit down and write so many words for me, partially because of the nature of my life (and I probably wouldn't be writing at all if I had a job outside the house) and partially because I've never written like that. I think too much, maybe, and the thoughts get tangled up in each other. My internal editor tries to sort things out, to make sure all is nice and neat before letting the words loose from my mind.
I have a friend (are you reading, Bob?) who shows up periodically in my in-box, long e-mails about his life, writing, academia, and philosophy. If he were working on the 2000 words a day quota, one e-mail would practically take care of it. Bob has always been this way -- the words flow. They're not always the most well-crafted, but he is a good writer and he gets there eventually. I'm jealous.
When I decided to start writing, Bob -- who has 3 children and teaches and writes for a living -- told me that he didn't know any writers who sit down for blocks of time and just write. Everybody fits it into the odd moment, writing ideas on a scrap of paper here, tapping away at a laptop there.
I'm creatively bereft at the moment. No ideas, no tapping. This is a theme here lately, but just writing about it makes me feel like I am getting back into the swing.
Say, how many words is this???
Am I the only person in the world who needs time, real time to exist and think and be by myself, to write? Extemporaneous writing just doesn't do it for me. Just sit down and write ... but what if I have nothing to say? Sometimes I need to sift through my thoughts, to make sure everything is all clear, before words come out.
Write about what you know. Hmmm. Maybe I need to get out more. I don't particularly feel like writing Mom-lit. I love the little guy and find practically everything he does worthy of mention (did I tell you about his pteronadon song? "you are my friend pteronandon, you make me smile ..."). To write about him, however, would box me into this life. I need an escape hatch or, at the very least, a window to open to let in the breeze.
Just keep writing, 1000 - 2000 words a day, wrote a commenter here recently. I admit, I got defensive. It isn't so easy to just sit down and write so many words for me, partially because of the nature of my life (and I probably wouldn't be writing at all if I had a job outside the house) and partially because I've never written like that. I think too much, maybe, and the thoughts get tangled up in each other. My internal editor tries to sort things out, to make sure all is nice and neat before letting the words loose from my mind.
I have a friend (are you reading, Bob?) who shows up periodically in my in-box, long e-mails about his life, writing, academia, and philosophy. If he were working on the 2000 words a day quota, one e-mail would practically take care of it. Bob has always been this way -- the words flow. They're not always the most well-crafted, but he is a good writer and he gets there eventually. I'm jealous.
When I decided to start writing, Bob -- who has 3 children and teaches and writes for a living -- told me that he didn't know any writers who sit down for blocks of time and just write. Everybody fits it into the odd moment, writing ideas on a scrap of paper here, tapping away at a laptop there.
I'm creatively bereft at the moment. No ideas, no tapping. This is a theme here lately, but just writing about it makes me feel like I am getting back into the swing.
Say, how many words is this???
Throw it away
21 May 2008 01:46 PM
The kid woke up today with a fever and a very cranky disposition. I'm feeling time slipping through my fingers, the few hours I have to write -- and for what purpose anyway? -- disappearing. Do I try to work on the stillbirth story? Finally plunge into creating a work of fiction? Continue conversations that I've let slide in the blogging world? Do much-needed housework? Exercise?
Or write up my petty complaints on my blog? Bingo.
Right now I feel like a frustrated housewife who has this little writing pipe dream. I wish I had more energy at night to write with conviction. If only the kid went to sleep before 9:30. If only he went to sleep unassisted. If only I'd started writing a decade ago, when time spread out before me and my brain was just a wee bit larger.
I know I'm lucky to have this life, to have a little time. It's just enough time to waste.
And now he wakes ...
Or write up my petty complaints on my blog? Bingo.
Right now I feel like a frustrated housewife who has this little writing pipe dream. I wish I had more energy at night to write with conviction. If only the kid went to sleep before 9:30. If only he went to sleep unassisted. If only I'd started writing a decade ago, when time spread out before me and my brain was just a wee bit larger.
I know I'm lucky to have this life, to have a little time. It's just enough time to waste.
And now he wakes ...
Leaving on a jet plane ...
06 May 2008 06:20 AM
tomorrow morning as C and I accompany H on a business trip to DC. Back home, essentially.
Since I can't bear to tear myself away from the blogosphere, I'm bringing my trusty laptop along. Hopefully I will have time to write other stuff, too, though that will be tough in a hotel room with little respite from watching the kid. I also want to work on a new layout for the blog. Naptime will be packed.
We'll be seeing my mother for the first time since last September. C is excited (this breaks my heart; even though they've had very little contact, he clearly loves her). I'm sure she is, too. I guess I am as well. If the air is clear and we're all feeling friendly and happy, the show will go off without a hitch. We will link arms and walk offstage, filled with warmth and love. If anyone's mind is clouded with worry or with things left unsaid, the performance will be off. Everyone will breathe a sigh of relief when it's over.
I'll let you know how it goes.
Since I can't bear to tear myself away from the blogosphere, I'm bringing my trusty laptop along. Hopefully I will have time to write other stuff, too, though that will be tough in a hotel room with little respite from watching the kid. I also want to work on a new layout for the blog. Naptime will be packed.
We'll be seeing my mother for the first time since last September. C is excited (this breaks my heart; even though they've had very little contact, he clearly loves her). I'm sure she is, too. I guess I am as well. If the air is clear and we're all feeling friendly and happy, the show will go off without a hitch. We will link arms and walk offstage, filled with warmth and love. If anyone's mind is clouded with worry or with things left unsaid, the performance will be off. Everyone will breathe a sigh of relief when it's over.
I'll let you know how it goes.
Buzzer beater
21 March 2008 07:54 PM
This has been a really long, particularly non-creative week.
(Begin boring complaint)
(End of boring complaint)
Now he is awake. 'Later.
(Begin boring complaint)
First, C got sick. Then H developed the same cold. When C gets sick, he sleeps like the baby he once was: poorly. Also violently, with lots of tosses and turns and kicks. When H gets sick, he snores more. My cold symptoms started on Tuesday, the same day C developed pink eye, guaranteeing that daycare was a no-go for Wednesday. Babysitter doesn't want pink eye either. Finally, after the first night of good sleep in five nights, yesterday C decided to skip a nap. I have pink eye for the first time since third grade. And I've spent most of his nap time today cleaning up in preparation for the babysitter (at least his pink eye went away).
(End of boring complaint)
Now he is awake. 'Later.
Players win and winners play
12 March 2008 03:11 PM
Is this a lucky day?
Another long no napper today. My ole nubbin brain keeps on shrinking, with very little to show for it. I did learn that toddlers (at least my toddler) enjoy raking clean cat litter and can turn almost anything into a digger -- even themselves with the proper equipment (dust pan and litter scoop).
I'd like to transcend the day now, please.
I've been reading Beautiful Children , a first novel by Charles Bock. Some of it is very well done. The portrayal of how a marriage can slowly fall apart captures a sense of sadness and inevitability when people no longer communicate, can't bridge the distance they've built between themselves, but still care about each other. What happens to the couple when their only child goes missing is also poignantly written. Many of the characters are real and believable. It's a long and ambitious book with various interweaving story lines. I can feel the struggles he had writing it -- ten years and at least four rewrites -- and it is on the bombastic side, well maybe some lower form of bombasticity, since his language is simple for the most part. Just over the top. Maybe he should have stayed with the couple and their struggle, but I'm not sure that would have been as interesting for Bock or his readers.
Another long no napper today. My ole nubbin brain keeps on shrinking, with very little to show for it. I did learn that toddlers (at least my toddler) enjoy raking clean cat litter and can turn almost anything into a digger -- even themselves with the proper equipment (dust pan and litter scoop).
I'd like to transcend the day now, please.
I've been reading Beautiful Children , a first novel by Charles Bock. Some of it is very well done. The portrayal of how a marriage can slowly fall apart captures a sense of sadness and inevitability when people no longer communicate, can't bridge the distance they've built between themselves, but still care about each other. What happens to the couple when their only child goes missing is also poignantly written. Many of the characters are real and believable. It's a long and ambitious book with various interweaving story lines. I can feel the struggles he had writing it -- ten years and at least four rewrites -- and it is on the bombastic side, well maybe some lower form of bombasticity, since his language is simple for the most part. Just over the top. Maybe he should have stayed with the couple and their struggle, but I'm not sure that would have been as interesting for Bock or his readers.