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Selling my soul from the garage

Claire is hellbent on having a garage sale.

She sorts through our things: DVDs, clothes, and toys, asking, "What about this mom? Do you want to keep this?"

I've hemmed and hawed and told her maybe in spring we can have a garage sale. The trouble is, I hate garage sales. I avert my eyes when I drive past them. I can't imagine spreading our cast-offs across tables, with price tags, and advertising for people to come paw through it all. The whole endeavor makes me squirm.

I haven't said that, because who am I to be too good for a garage sale?

Maybe it'd be an effective way to sell my manuscript... hawk copies for a few bucks each.

I heart my mom

Today is my mom's birthday. She turns 63. I found this photo of her, around the age of 17, plastered into an ancient photo album. When I peeled it out and scanned it, I noticed my Grandma Lucy had written, in small, lowercase letters on the back, my baby.

My mom and I are close. How could we not be? She's supportive, realistic (but also optimistic), fun, strong, and well-loved. I don't know a single person who's met my mom who hasn't adored her.

But the very best thing about my mom is her ability to enjoy life's small pleasures. A cup of coffee on a sunny porch, a lunch out, a vase of homegrown flowers on the table. Any one of those things can bring her joy.

Happy Birthday, mom. I'm so glad I'm your daughter.

Attention-seeking missile

Here we are in early November. And I survived Halloween! Hooray!

I made it through a long pumpkin patch field trip, the usual classroom festivities, plus the begging for candy at sundown on the 31st (even though I wasn't the adult to actually partake in the canvassing of the neighborhood).

This year, J. and I opted out of our annual kids' throwdown. The party began as a way for us to give Max something fun to do during which I controlled all the food in his vicinity, ensuring he could gorge himself on whatever candy or cookies he wanted without, you know, going anaphylactic. The halloween party was something that, as an unentertainer, I dreaded. All the kids! The cooking! The cleaning! The bickering spiral that J. and I would inevitably slide down! It was horrible! The only redeeming thing about it was that Max and Claire had tons of fun.

Still, this year halloween fun had to take a backseat to sanity.

So, we promised the kids extra trick-or-treating. Which, considering that in the past they only visited three houses, wasn't hard to improve upon.

And yet…I can't bring myself to be the one to take them. Everytime someone hands Max a Reeses or a Snickers, a little bit of my heart melts away. I know, I know. Boo-hoo, people are giving my kid free candy and it's awful!! But that's how it affects me.

Thankfully, the good and kind (and not usually bickery) J. who doesn't weep every time Max politely accepts something he's allergic to, took the kids while I stayed home doing dishes and sipping pumpkin ale. Not a bad trade off. At least for me.

*****

Lately I've been quizzing Max and Claire about quality time. "Would you rather have me volunteer in your class and do things to help your teacher, or just hang out with you guys?" Of course, they answer, "Just hang out with us!" I'll ask, "Do you consider my cooking dinner while you sit and talk to me as 'hanging out'?" "No!" they chorus. "What about this?" I say. "What we're doing right now? Reading and chatting? Is this quality? Is this hanging out?" They agree it is.

They're little black holes of neediness. They're attention-seeking missiles. But still I feel like I'm not giving enough.

*****

I hate being referred to as a "Mommy Blogger". My boss does it. Some of my friends do it. I blog about lots of things! But this post isn't helping my case, is it?

*****

(This little experiment in blogging daily is really difficult for me. Not the writing part, but the posting of the boring details of my life. If you're looking for insights or wry observations during November, move along. This is going to be a glorified diary. And now, with a grimace and twitching fingers, I hit Publish.)

Scared with happiness

I reach for a SpongeBob graham cracker, because they are there and they are good. Before having kids, SpongeBob graham crackers were never around.

*

Max and I read a book together about aliens. He's a good reader. He forgets to pause at periods and often goes so fast he loses his place, but for seven, he's amazing. The book wigs him out and, after we're done, he winds himself around me and stays that way for a long time.

*

I help in Claire's classroom Tuesday morning. For the first time, the Kindergarten teacher was unable to come in. Car trouble. The sub is a seventy-something woman, kind and energetic. A little terse in the way older, hard-of-hearing people can sometimes seem.

She is late and the kids are thrown off. Most of them rise to the occasion, helping the sub find her way. They are surprisingly knowledgable. One girl and one boy dissolve in tears. The boy, in particular, wants to wind himself around me the way Max did while reading the alien book.

I am sitting on the rug with the boy who is sad, and another boy, seemingly unaffected by the teacher's absence, wraps his hands around my head and pulls my ear to his mouth. "The miners are coming up today," he says. A few minutes later, he does it again. "Have you heard about the miners?" 

The sad boy won't leave my side until, when it's time to go, another parent pries him from me. I kind of think Kindergarten classrooms need an emotional surrogate, to help ease kids from home to school. At least for the first few months.

Claire, throughout the hour I was there, shot me and the sad boy the stink eye. She wanted to be the one sitting on my lap.

Later she tells me she wasn't giving us dirty looks, that she wants to help people who are sad. "I like to sing and help," she says. "Those are my favorite things."

She also likes to make sure everything in the house that remotely resembles a living being (stuffed animals, dolls, sock puppets) are in a state of constant, delirious coziness. Not a day goes by that I don't stumble upon a row of moppets covered to their chins with a blanket. And oh, how I love this.

*

Max overhears me telling his dad the story about the kid in Claire's class preoccupied with the Chilean miners. "What miners?" Max asks. It occurs to me we haven't shared this particular and amazing story of hope, and technical and logistical genius. So we do. And he's riveted. Just before the kids go to bed, the first miner emerges from the metal tube that brought him up from deep in the earth.

Max is moved. Very moved. He doesn't know how to articulate this, so says only, "I'm scared with happiness."

I think, How perfect. Me too, son. Me too.

Summer

 

The best thing about summer is having time to hang out with the kids.

Watching them both jump into the pool for group swim lessons yesterday was a beautiful sight. Something we've struggled a long time and paid a lot of money to achieve. Their new confidence in the water filled me up and almost made me cry.

We've churned a lot of ice cream and played way too many games of Uno. There is no homework about which I have to nag and no setting my alarm in the morning. I wake up when Fruit Bat strides into my room, his eyes bright and rested.

The worst thing about summer is having time to hang out with the kids.

I crave some sort of structure. Which I usually rail against. But with kids, at least a modicum of it is necessary.

They are awake until 9:30 every night. They want my attention all. the. time. I don't have much space in which to write. I have to take them with me to the grocery store, which is almost comical in its chaotic misery. Please mom I want this and this and let's get that over there and can we go look at those and I'm just going to stand right here obliviously while people try to push their cart around me.

But still, flip flops and iced coffee and cold beer drunk in the setting sun.

It's mostly good.

We are young

The kids and I are in Northern Michigan, hanging out in my homeland for two weeks.

I haven't lost my temper with Fruit Bat and Kitty Cat at all. Not once. Despite that they can't seem to adjust to the 3-hour time difference, they've been flexible and sweet and have proven they are mostly good company. I'm proud of them.

I've run into people I haven't seen since high school. I watched a woman walk down the sidewalk, a hat in her hands, with a strip of hair lining the lower half of her skull. The rest of her scalp, covered in soft fuzz, was exposed to the summer breeze.

We've fed fish and pigs and "helped" my dad at his farmer's market. We've gotten sand in our ears and mouths. We've splashed in sprinklers and flung a frisbee to and fro, watched a small-town parade and swirled orange sparklers through a twilit night. We've ogled fireworks from my parents' porch, three miles from the bay where they were detonating. It was perfect. The sultry wind was wild and we could see dark silhouettes of trees lashing, set off by red and purple lights.

I've sorted through old photos, the ancient, chemical smell of the paper shrill and pleasing all at once.

These days are big. Heavy with meaning. 

I'm trying hard to appreciate this time, while the kids are young, but old enough so I can breathe and think (sort of) and my parents are young and I, compared to what the future holds, am still young. 

I'm afraid, though, I can never give these weeks the reverence they are due. 

Only in retrospect, will they shape themselves into memories, some clear, some not, but all bearing the weight they deserve.

Scarlet

She's yelling in the night. I stumble from bed, barely conscious. I had so hoped for a healthy stretch of sleep after my long (albeit self-imposedly long) weekend.

When I get to her room, she is sitting, saying that she threw up. I look and there it is, spread across her pillow. I feel terrible for her. I had turned off the monitor earlier in the evening and forgotten to click it on again. She'd been calling, she said, for a long time.

Her cheeks are violently red. She's the most composed little patient. This has always been her way. I change her pillow, get her a bucket, a cup of water. She is fiery hot, but amicable.

I sleep in her room, on a lumpy futon. Several times she wakes and asks for me, not sure if I'm really under the tousled blankets. No more vomit though. Thank God.

When I get up in the morning, not quite rested, J. is already gone. He has a filing due and will be away until midnight or so. Great, I think. I feel like I'm being punished for taking a chunk of the weekend off. 

Kitty Cat and I manage to get Fruit Bat to school.

And then we come back and collapse onto my bed. She watches cartoons while I meet deadlines on the laptop. I find I'm enjoying it. A quiet day fetching food and drinks, taking her temperature, doling out Tylenol. Her cheeks are still crimson. While she naps, I kiss them. She wants me close. I want to be close. We huddle that way until Fruit Bat gets a ride home.

He is delightful. Empathetic. Checking on his sister. He and I actually get a little time alone while she rests. We eat dinner across the table from each other, just he and I.

In the not so distant past, the thought of a day stuck at home with a feverish child while J. worked worked worked would've sent me into paroxysms of anxiety. I would've wrung my hands, ground my teeth. I'm a little nervous about what tonight will hold, afraid to hope for a long stretch of sleep. But now I have perspective, older children, and it is better. Much better than it was.

Enjoy this

If there's one thing that makes you want to reach your arms around your children and pull them into a silken cocoon where all that is served is strawberry milk and chicken nuggets, where nothing but Magic Schoolbus plays all day, where growth is arrested and everyone stays exactly the age they are for eternity, it's being around teenage boys.

One day this week, during Fruit Bat and Kitty Cat's winter break, we went up to the school to ride bikes. Slumped across the play structure were three kids, all male, all about sixteen. One was of Indian descent, the other two were white, with longish, scruffy hair. You know how they wear it now.

"What do you want to do?' one of them muttered.

"Get picked up by your mommy?" This was said, in an Indian accent, by a white kid, and was directed at the Indian boy.

"Nah."

"I wanna shoot people," the other white kid said.

The Indian boy: "I bet you do."

I watched Fruit Bat and Kitty Cat whizzing back and forth across the pavement on their small bicycles. Oh God, I thought. Oh, please. I hate these boys.

"So, man. What do you wanna do?"

It was right then that I reminded myself to enjoy this. Not being near the obnoxious teenage boys this. But having a six and four-year-old this. Because this is now and this is here, when Fruit Bat and Kitty Cat will still wind themselves around me like koalas grasping gum trees.

And it will not last forever.

Better now

We just came back from San Diego, where we went to visit J.'s mother. She lives in a retirement facility (?) Independent living compound (?) Or, as Kitty Cat calls it, her Compartment. I never quite know how to refer to where my mother-in-law resides.

It's this sprawling, multi-winged stucco structure with spanish tiled roofs and dark, thickly carpeted hallways and a special space for Walker and Wheelchair Parking outside the dining room and lots of balding men with scabby heads and frothy-haired old women and sparkling swimming pools and the smell of salisbury steak everywhere.

J. finds the whole endeavor depressing. Being around the elderly reminds him of what's coming. And if there's one thing J. doesn't want to think about, doesn't want to be, it's old.

I understand where he's coming from. You can't help, when you're surrounded by it, pondering what you'll be like in thirty or forty years, what will ache, what will have stopped working, what surgeries you will have had. How it will feel to know that any day your body could just give out.

But I like the geezers, too. I always have. When I was in middle and high school, we had a Senior Citizens' center located two doors from my dad's chemistry lab, down the hall from the band room. The Seniors would eat lunch in the same cafeteria as the students. A handful of us were recruited to help them carry their trays, fetch their condiments. Good Morning America even, in 1980, came and did a Feel Good story on the integration of Seniors and kids (Of course, they rearranged us to look like we actually sat with the old folks and chatted while we ate, which we did not, like we walked down the hall side by side with them between classes, which we also did not (an early lesson in how media distorts reality)). My point is, I've always been comfortable with the over-seventy-five set. I feel for them. I admire them. I see the hunger and the resignation and the gleam in their eyes.

I don't mind hanging out for a while at the Senior Housing Development (?) Fruit Bat and Kitty Cat dig the long, racetrack-like corridors and the lemon trees and wild rabbits and the pancakes in the dining room.

So we just do it, once a year. We go there. I sneak in my six-pack or my bottle of wine and we sleep with the window open (albeit, all in one room which is crazy-making after the second day) and cobble together meals that are safe for Fruit Bat and we take the kids swimming and J. puts on his lawyer's hat and looks at papers for his mother and, as long as Kitty Cat doesn't get too princessy and foot-stompy, I'm okay with it.

How to explain the pencil-lead point I teetered on last night after we got home, then? Travel logistics? Trying to communicate with a grumpy spouse? Re-immersion? Post traumatic Elder Community (?) Sleep deprivation?

I don't know, exactly, but I'm better now, startlingly happy, today, to be alone with the kids.

Pure