For those of you dying for the latest installment in the Fairy Saga (I'm sure there are many!), I'll just say that it's really hard to beat $9.99 fairy costumes from Target and leave it at that. The horrifying thing is that these costumes, which cost about what two lattes do, actually look pretty good, which indicates that those who made them, who live in a country that will remain nameless, must receive about -3.2 cents an hour in wages. So not only did I rob my children of the opportunity to explore their creativity by making their own costumes, I made a decision with global implications I can't bear to examine too closely.
But as far as that creativity thing goes, I've got to save mine for really important things --- like this blog.
Due to our parental slight-of-hand (fairy costume + plastic binoculars = "Dora Fairy"), Younger Girleen now thinks that Dora the Explorer and fairies are interchangable. When she got a glimpse of her fairy costume, she shouted "MY DORA!" She is, however, quite happy with it.
Friday, September 28, 2007
Kicking Down the Door to Get In
Folklore has it that the severity of the coming winter can be predicted by noticing how many acorns the oaks are shedding or how thick a woolly bear caterpillar's brown stripe is (the thicker the stripe the milder the winter). Here in the 'hood I look to other indicators:
1. Last night's Glenn School consignment sale had more merchandise than I've known it to have in five years, so much so that it was almost impossible to insinuate a hand into the tightly-packed racks of clothes enough to extract a hanger. Rumor was that during set-up a rack collapsed under the weight of the clothes hung on it, and that additional full racks would be pulled out onto the floor as space allowed.
Trivia, you scoff. But over the past five years I've noticed that when the economy dips, the used kids clothes market jumps. Making predictions based on nothing more than this, we might be facing not a dip but a nosedive.
2. Kick-in-the-Door and Grab burglaries have become our neighborhood's newest trend. The grapevine hums with details of more every day. Such breaches in the divide between those perceived to have and those perceived to want usually indicate something big is going on...
1. Last night's Glenn School consignment sale had more merchandise than I've known it to have in five years, so much so that it was almost impossible to insinuate a hand into the tightly-packed racks of clothes enough to extract a hanger. Rumor was that during set-up a rack collapsed under the weight of the clothes hung on it, and that additional full racks would be pulled out onto the floor as space allowed.
Trivia, you scoff. But over the past five years I've noticed that when the economy dips, the used kids clothes market jumps. Making predictions based on nothing more than this, we might be facing not a dip but a nosedive.
2. Kick-in-the-Door and Grab burglaries have become our neighborhood's newest trend. The grapevine hums with details of more every day. Such breaches in the divide between those perceived to have and those perceived to want usually indicate something big is going on...
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Dusting off a Golden Oldie
Today's the Glenn School Sale Preview Night, a ritual I've participated in since Elder Girleen was born. Why, you ask? See below. It ran in Brain, Child a few years back, and apologies for dusting it off, but I've got to run — and buy OLD, DIRTY clothes for my children.
My code name is CHUM.
My husband experiences the event that requires me to use this code name only through my (admittedly hyperbolic) description of it. Right now he is, in theory, watching the eleven o’clock news. But he’s really keeping a slightly dismayed eye on me as I sit on the living floor for the third night in a row.
I’m sitting on the floor rather than on the sofa beside him because I need lots of elbow room. In what I’ve discovered is a surprisingly enjoyable ritual of momhood, I’m sorting through our two-year-old daughter’s clothes, fingers crossed that I’ll be able to come up with enough cast-offs for the upcoming biannual consignment clothing sale at the Glenn School for Young Children to qualify for a ticket to its Preview Night.
So far I’ve priced and set aside, among other more prosaic things:
A tiny French knitted wool newborn outfit that arrived in Atlanta during one of the warmest springs on record;
A red plaid dress with faux-leopard trim on the collar, cuffs, and hem. (I came to like the idea of my daughter masquerading as the child of one of the Sex Pistols but this dress never actually fit her);
The infant car seat that she was too big for by thirteen months, and that all new parents are admonished never to buy second-hand;
A pink velour dress with a cat’s face picked out on its front in rhinestones;
A glittery magenta onesie.
This is my fourth time selling clothes at Glenn School Sale, which makes me neither an old hand nor a virgin. My homemade pricing kit is on the floor beside me (pen, scotch tape, safety pins, index cards, calculator and Ziploc Baggies I collected before the last Glenn School Sale and then set aside, knowing I’d use them again in six months). Three sales ago I bought two laundry baskets specifically for heaping full of clothes and stacking in my arms while I squeezed through makeshift racks of children’s clothing in an overly warm school gymnasium. I’m prepared—and willing—to spend the next three to six hours of my life writing descriptions such as:
CHUM
1 Pink Polka-dot BabyGap Girl’s Shirt
Never Worn!
12 month
1.99
onto blue (not white) index cards one after another and then pinning them to the upper left pocket area of each article of clothing, just for the chance to be among the first hundred or so allowed to go through the used clothing and baby gear.
I affix my price tags with medium sized safety pins (small ones or straight pins are frowned upon by the clothing sale volunteers who, when I bring my wares to Drop-Off, will check them for damage, wear, or any other affronts to Glenn School sensibilities). I place every item on its hanger facing left. I’ve long ago vowed I’ll never let myself be publicly humiliated the way my friend LAWN was last year, when the Glenn School Sale Volunteers turned away her stroller as “too soiled.”
Isn’t chum the baitfish that makes sharks go into a feeding frenzy? my husband asks me.
I’m too busy with the calculator to even look up. Ninety-one dollars, plus two dollars, plus seventy-five cents, plus three-fifty, I mutter. My merchandise more than meets the fifty-dollar ante for admission the night before the sale officially opens.
Ha ha, I tell my husband. Very funny. I survey the sorted, hangered, and priced clothes before me with the sort of satisfaction I imagine a prairie wife would give her fully stocked root cellar just before the advent of winter—all those homepickled cucumbers bobbing in their brine! All those tomatoes in their Mason jars, curved and luscious, rubied! Is it thrift or greed or my first slip into a sort of Stepford Mommydom that drives me, or something else entirely?
It’s 4:00 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon, and here we are, waiting in line for the school doors to open, which will happen at 6:00. “Feeding frenzy” might be an apt description of the Glenn School Sale, legendary throughout metro Atlanta, but that’s not what I think of tonight as I join the queue on Preview Night. Tonight, I am CHUM, everybody’s friend, dutifully initiating new moms (this time it’s a friend with the code name DAWN) into the intricacies of Preview Night. I’ve just introduced DAWN to LAWN and BONY, who two years ago initiated me into the same rituals. We’ve assured the woman waiting behind us that DAWN didn’t cut in line but got here the exact same second as the rest of us and then went off to the restroom in a building across the street to change out of her work clothes into an outfit better suited for sifting through quantities of used children’s clothing. We’ve got bottled water and lawn chairs and a picnic dinner to eat in about an hour.
The woman ahead of our group is sitting in her own folding chair working on some sort of crafts project and occasionally checks a list of the gear she’s hoping to find tonight. It’s an extravagantly balmy spring afternoon and the line continues taking shape behind us until it snakes around the side of the school building and out of sight. I can spot one dad. As politically incorrect as it might be, Preview Night is predominantly a female event.
In fact, if such a thing existed as the Mommy Olympics, this might be one of its highest-stakes games.
When I was pregnant —hardly pregnant at all compared to how pregnant I would become—someone mentioned the Glenn School Sale to me. Huge. Indescribable. Run like clockwork. Everything you’ll possibly need for this baby. I thanked her politely but didn’t even note of the name of the sale or ask her when it was held. I hadn’t made that first trek to Babies "R" Us yet, and I hadn’t read a single one of The Books (the ones that tell you that you need hundreds of things when you have a baby and that you should buy very few of them used). My feet were still firmly planted in before, a before that included long weekend mornings spent lolling in bed with The New York Times, popping out spontaneously for dinners that included drinks, appetizers, courses, dessert, and after-meal coffee, and actually seeing first-run movies in theaters, a life I now realize was made up of equal parts sloth and leisure.
At the time, I thought the woman (who was passing along a huge tip, though I was too inexperienced to recognize this) was nice enough but possibly a little nutty: I was barely even showing, for goodness’ sake, and just how much stuff would one single baby who was still practically hypothetical at this point going to need? I had no idea just how much gear I was going to buy in the next few years of my life and just how thoroughly I was going to agonize over the purchase of every single article of it (should we go with the complete transportation system or just use a carrier until our child could sit up in a stroller?). I had no idea just how many pairs of newborn socks my mother would rush out to purchase the day after we brought my daughter home from the hospital (twelve—she was born in January) or how many times she would kick them off before we’d understand she would never actually wear them (dozens). I had no idea that while gear doesn’t make the baby, just as clothes don’t make the man or woman, things (whether we like it or not) may be one of the ways we process what happens to us. We plan nurseries to distract ourselves from, and convince ourselves of, a future that is almost unimaginable in its enormity.
We buy because we love, even when we know better. The week after we brought our daughter home from the hospital, my husband ran out to the grocery store so often “just to pick up a couple of things” that I had to beg him to stop. To be a parent is have an overwhelming desire to provide, and provide well, but what that actually means is something we can learn only through experience.
The Glenn School Sale is run by an experienced crew. Its procedures have been honed over the years to a fine edge, and cut through the crap, which may go a long way toward explaining the sale’s seductiveness: It’s one of the few experiences I’ve ever had in parenthood that allows you to do things by the book and still end up with the outcome you desire. Preview Night always starts at six o'clock on a Thursday night and the line will always begin to form at three o'clock that afternoon. The doors will open for the “official” sale at 9:30 a.m. the next morning, by which point Preview Night veterans tell themselves the best bargains have already been snatched up. No children are allowed into the building before noon, and this means you. Saturday will be half-price day, but by then you’re taking your chances. Follow those rules, and you’ll come home with your child’s entire wardrobe for the next six months.
There are people, I’ve been told, whose children regard the Glenn School Sale as a kind of Christmas: They run downstairs the day after as if expecting to find not second-hand clothes, but the presents Santa left them.
A few months after my daughter was born, I met LAWN in a postnatal yoga class. Everyone else’s babies were sleeping peacefully on blankets on the floor while their mothers settled on their haunches in the cat pose. LAWN’s eyes met mine over the heads of the squalling infants we held. By then I’d discovered that babies grow out of their tiny outfits the second or third day after they first wear them, so I was much more open to the idea of consignment sales in general. But LAWN wasn’t just talking about the Glenn School Sale. She was talking about Preview Night, which elevated the sale from a simple rite of passage to blood sport. Was I game? she asked me. LAWN was a veteran of the trenches: she’d gone into labor with her second child at the previous Preview Night, an event that had already become an Atlanta legend. Was I game? You bet. This sounded like some inside track, and I’d almost forgotten what it felt like to be on one. Besides, at my age, standing in line at Preview Night was probably as close as I would ever get to camping out for Bob Dylan tickets again.
The Glenn School Sale Volunteers start moving down the line at 5:45 to check our required photo IDs and make sure we’re not slipping in illegally (tickets are NOT transferable). LAWN, BONY, DAWN, and I have eaten our picnic dinner, checked in at home by cell phone, and briefed DAWN, the newbie of the bunch, on some of the lore of previous sales, including that of the couple behind us in line last year who confessed they’d once earned fifteen hundred dollars from selling the toys of a three-year-old.
As people start taking their chairs back to their cars and shifting their empty laundry baskets to their hips, an palpable frisson of excitement travels down the line, which by now wraps all the way around the building and out to the street and contains numerous mommies I recognize—the yoga teacher from the class where LAWN and I met, a woman who once regaled the entire waiting room at my obstetrician's office with the blow-by-blow of her extremely difficult labor, the wild-haired mom BONY spotted at the playground last week attempting to round up four children and clearly dangerously close to her wits’ end.
Amy Carter’s here, BONY turns to me and whispers, referring to the daughter of former president Carter, who still lives in Atlanta. A soft murmur works its way down the line, as if the presence of Amy has just bestowed upon the sale its ultimate seal of approval. On a quick run to the restroom, I catch wind of a rumor that a woman somewhere in line gave birth yesterday, and I overhear discussion of the one who went into labor here last spring (our LAWN!).
I make it back to my place in line just as the doors open. We hand over our Preview Tickets and file into the building.
— O, dingy hallway packed with bulbous plastic slides and Cozy Coupes, still sticky with the residue of all those years of Cheerios …
— O, unpopular unpeopled room stacked floor to ceiling with barely-used infant car seats, where that necessary item nobody will ever buy used must go to die …
— O, official toy room, with cardboard box after cardboard box labeled simply Teething Toys, where everything is tatty, plastic, brightly-colored, and just walking in triggers the toy-induced equivalent of insulin shock …
— O, Exersaucers and Barbie Playhouses …
— O, boneyard of stacked up baby gates …
— O, wily moms, who snuck your stained and button-missing Zutano pajamas past the eagle-eyed gatekeepers; who priced flannel shirts (size Boys 4T) at seven bucks (too high) and five Medela bottles at one dollar (a steal), depending upon nothing more than your whim or how much sleep you got the week you sat up pricing after the kids had gone to bed; O, my sisters, who sort and cull sprawled out upon the floor with cheerful camaraderie, whose shirts occasionally gap open to reveal nursing bras you’ve forgotten to hook the flaps back up on …
— O, uncomfortable dads: the husband who earned fifteen hundred dollars; the cheerful, sweating man standing in for the wife who at this moment is defending her dissertation; the grandfatherly type whose job seems to be to carry a folding chair from place to place for his wife; O, dad participating by proxy, you of the car idling in the parking lot, who stands supervising two unruly kids made drunk by the novelty of being up this late when I go past to deposit my first full laundry basket into my car …
It’s only stuff.
Or is it? Every time I attend Preview Night, I end up buying the cast-offs of a woman code-named LEAF, who clearly shares my taste in children’s clothing. When BONY, LAWN, DAWN, and I file downstairs with our overflowing baskets, I catch a quick glimpse of a woman still sorting, whose pile looks like it mostly contains my cast-offs. While I was sorting through the boxes full of shoes, I noticed that the woman beside me was looking for shoes a size smaller: when I came across an immaculate pair of Stride-Rites, I passed them right over. DAWN’s basket contains not only things for her boys, but clothes for her sister’s daughters. The spring I had a sinus infection and couldn’t face the line, BONY and LAWN (both the mothers of boys) harvested the Girls 2T racks, finding my daughter a wardrobe of sundresses that drew the compliments of everyone who saw them, including my own mother.
It’s only stuff. But here in this overly-warm school auditorium, something else is being handed down as well. We might be provisioning ourselves for our longest, most strenuous haul; we’ve come together here to shore ourselves up. For life with children can be so much like the Glenn School Sale itself: so greedy and unheeding of larger events, so over-the-top and rare, so excessive and effusive, so must-be-experienced to be believed.
My code name is CHUM.
My husband experiences the event that requires me to use this code name only through my (admittedly hyperbolic) description of it. Right now he is, in theory, watching the eleven o’clock news. But he’s really keeping a slightly dismayed eye on me as I sit on the living floor for the third night in a row.
I’m sitting on the floor rather than on the sofa beside him because I need lots of elbow room. In what I’ve discovered is a surprisingly enjoyable ritual of momhood, I’m sorting through our two-year-old daughter’s clothes, fingers crossed that I’ll be able to come up with enough cast-offs for the upcoming biannual consignment clothing sale at the Glenn School for Young Children to qualify for a ticket to its Preview Night.
So far I’ve priced and set aside, among other more prosaic things:
A tiny French knitted wool newborn outfit that arrived in Atlanta during one of the warmest springs on record;
A red plaid dress with faux-leopard trim on the collar, cuffs, and hem. (I came to like the idea of my daughter masquerading as the child of one of the Sex Pistols but this dress never actually fit her);
The infant car seat that she was too big for by thirteen months, and that all new parents are admonished never to buy second-hand;
A pink velour dress with a cat’s face picked out on its front in rhinestones;
A glittery magenta onesie.
This is my fourth time selling clothes at Glenn School Sale, which makes me neither an old hand nor a virgin. My homemade pricing kit is on the floor beside me (pen, scotch tape, safety pins, index cards, calculator and Ziploc Baggies I collected before the last Glenn School Sale and then set aside, knowing I’d use them again in six months). Three sales ago I bought two laundry baskets specifically for heaping full of clothes and stacking in my arms while I squeezed through makeshift racks of children’s clothing in an overly warm school gymnasium. I’m prepared—and willing—to spend the next three to six hours of my life writing descriptions such as:
CHUM
1 Pink Polka-dot BabyGap Girl’s Shirt
Never Worn!
12 month
1.99
onto blue (not white) index cards one after another and then pinning them to the upper left pocket area of each article of clothing, just for the chance to be among the first hundred or so allowed to go through the used clothing and baby gear.
I affix my price tags with medium sized safety pins (small ones or straight pins are frowned upon by the clothing sale volunteers who, when I bring my wares to Drop-Off, will check them for damage, wear, or any other affronts to Glenn School sensibilities). I place every item on its hanger facing left. I’ve long ago vowed I’ll never let myself be publicly humiliated the way my friend LAWN was last year, when the Glenn School Sale Volunteers turned away her stroller as “too soiled.”
Isn’t chum the baitfish that makes sharks go into a feeding frenzy? my husband asks me.
I’m too busy with the calculator to even look up. Ninety-one dollars, plus two dollars, plus seventy-five cents, plus three-fifty, I mutter. My merchandise more than meets the fifty-dollar ante for admission the night before the sale officially opens.
Ha ha, I tell my husband. Very funny. I survey the sorted, hangered, and priced clothes before me with the sort of satisfaction I imagine a prairie wife would give her fully stocked root cellar just before the advent of winter—all those homepickled cucumbers bobbing in their brine! All those tomatoes in their Mason jars, curved and luscious, rubied! Is it thrift or greed or my first slip into a sort of Stepford Mommydom that drives me, or something else entirely?
It’s 4:00 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon, and here we are, waiting in line for the school doors to open, which will happen at 6:00. “Feeding frenzy” might be an apt description of the Glenn School Sale, legendary throughout metro Atlanta, but that’s not what I think of tonight as I join the queue on Preview Night. Tonight, I am CHUM, everybody’s friend, dutifully initiating new moms (this time it’s a friend with the code name DAWN) into the intricacies of Preview Night. I’ve just introduced DAWN to LAWN and BONY, who two years ago initiated me into the same rituals. We’ve assured the woman waiting behind us that DAWN didn’t cut in line but got here the exact same second as the rest of us and then went off to the restroom in a building across the street to change out of her work clothes into an outfit better suited for sifting through quantities of used children’s clothing. We’ve got bottled water and lawn chairs and a picnic dinner to eat in about an hour.
The woman ahead of our group is sitting in her own folding chair working on some sort of crafts project and occasionally checks a list of the gear she’s hoping to find tonight. It’s an extravagantly balmy spring afternoon and the line continues taking shape behind us until it snakes around the side of the school building and out of sight. I can spot one dad. As politically incorrect as it might be, Preview Night is predominantly a female event.
In fact, if such a thing existed as the Mommy Olympics, this might be one of its highest-stakes games.
When I was pregnant —hardly pregnant at all compared to how pregnant I would become—someone mentioned the Glenn School Sale to me. Huge. Indescribable. Run like clockwork. Everything you’ll possibly need for this baby. I thanked her politely but didn’t even note of the name of the sale or ask her when it was held. I hadn’t made that first trek to Babies "R" Us yet, and I hadn’t read a single one of The Books (the ones that tell you that you need hundreds of things when you have a baby and that you should buy very few of them used). My feet were still firmly planted in before, a before that included long weekend mornings spent lolling in bed with The New York Times, popping out spontaneously for dinners that included drinks, appetizers, courses, dessert, and after-meal coffee, and actually seeing first-run movies in theaters, a life I now realize was made up of equal parts sloth and leisure.
At the time, I thought the woman (who was passing along a huge tip, though I was too inexperienced to recognize this) was nice enough but possibly a little nutty: I was barely even showing, for goodness’ sake, and just how much stuff would one single baby who was still practically hypothetical at this point going to need? I had no idea just how much gear I was going to buy in the next few years of my life and just how thoroughly I was going to agonize over the purchase of every single article of it (should we go with the complete transportation system or just use a carrier until our child could sit up in a stroller?). I had no idea just how many pairs of newborn socks my mother would rush out to purchase the day after we brought my daughter home from the hospital (twelve—she was born in January) or how many times she would kick them off before we’d understand she would never actually wear them (dozens). I had no idea that while gear doesn’t make the baby, just as clothes don’t make the man or woman, things (whether we like it or not) may be one of the ways we process what happens to us. We plan nurseries to distract ourselves from, and convince ourselves of, a future that is almost unimaginable in its enormity.
We buy because we love, even when we know better. The week after we brought our daughter home from the hospital, my husband ran out to the grocery store so often “just to pick up a couple of things” that I had to beg him to stop. To be a parent is have an overwhelming desire to provide, and provide well, but what that actually means is something we can learn only through experience.
The Glenn School Sale is run by an experienced crew. Its procedures have been honed over the years to a fine edge, and cut through the crap, which may go a long way toward explaining the sale’s seductiveness: It’s one of the few experiences I’ve ever had in parenthood that allows you to do things by the book and still end up with the outcome you desire. Preview Night always starts at six o'clock on a Thursday night and the line will always begin to form at three o'clock that afternoon. The doors will open for the “official” sale at 9:30 a.m. the next morning, by which point Preview Night veterans tell themselves the best bargains have already been snatched up. No children are allowed into the building before noon, and this means you. Saturday will be half-price day, but by then you’re taking your chances. Follow those rules, and you’ll come home with your child’s entire wardrobe for the next six months.
There are people, I’ve been told, whose children regard the Glenn School Sale as a kind of Christmas: They run downstairs the day after as if expecting to find not second-hand clothes, but the presents Santa left them.
A few months after my daughter was born, I met LAWN in a postnatal yoga class. Everyone else’s babies were sleeping peacefully on blankets on the floor while their mothers settled on their haunches in the cat pose. LAWN’s eyes met mine over the heads of the squalling infants we held. By then I’d discovered that babies grow out of their tiny outfits the second or third day after they first wear them, so I was much more open to the idea of consignment sales in general. But LAWN wasn’t just talking about the Glenn School Sale. She was talking about Preview Night, which elevated the sale from a simple rite of passage to blood sport. Was I game? she asked me. LAWN was a veteran of the trenches: she’d gone into labor with her second child at the previous Preview Night, an event that had already become an Atlanta legend. Was I game? You bet. This sounded like some inside track, and I’d almost forgotten what it felt like to be on one. Besides, at my age, standing in line at Preview Night was probably as close as I would ever get to camping out for Bob Dylan tickets again.
The Glenn School Sale Volunteers start moving down the line at 5:45 to check our required photo IDs and make sure we’re not slipping in illegally (tickets are NOT transferable). LAWN, BONY, DAWN, and I have eaten our picnic dinner, checked in at home by cell phone, and briefed DAWN, the newbie of the bunch, on some of the lore of previous sales, including that of the couple behind us in line last year who confessed they’d once earned fifteen hundred dollars from selling the toys of a three-year-old.
As people start taking their chairs back to their cars and shifting their empty laundry baskets to their hips, an palpable frisson of excitement travels down the line, which by now wraps all the way around the building and out to the street and contains numerous mommies I recognize—the yoga teacher from the class where LAWN and I met, a woman who once regaled the entire waiting room at my obstetrician's office with the blow-by-blow of her extremely difficult labor, the wild-haired mom BONY spotted at the playground last week attempting to round up four children and clearly dangerously close to her wits’ end.
Amy Carter’s here, BONY turns to me and whispers, referring to the daughter of former president Carter, who still lives in Atlanta. A soft murmur works its way down the line, as if the presence of Amy has just bestowed upon the sale its ultimate seal of approval. On a quick run to the restroom, I catch wind of a rumor that a woman somewhere in line gave birth yesterday, and I overhear discussion of the one who went into labor here last spring (our LAWN!).
I make it back to my place in line just as the doors open. We hand over our Preview Tickets and file into the building.
— O, dingy hallway packed with bulbous plastic slides and Cozy Coupes, still sticky with the residue of all those years of Cheerios …
— O, unpopular unpeopled room stacked floor to ceiling with barely-used infant car seats, where that necessary item nobody will ever buy used must go to die …
— O, official toy room, with cardboard box after cardboard box labeled simply Teething Toys, where everything is tatty, plastic, brightly-colored, and just walking in triggers the toy-induced equivalent of insulin shock …
— O, Exersaucers and Barbie Playhouses …
— O, boneyard of stacked up baby gates …
— O, wily moms, who snuck your stained and button-missing Zutano pajamas past the eagle-eyed gatekeepers; who priced flannel shirts (size Boys 4T) at seven bucks (too high) and five Medela bottles at one dollar (a steal), depending upon nothing more than your whim or how much sleep you got the week you sat up pricing after the kids had gone to bed; O, my sisters, who sort and cull sprawled out upon the floor with cheerful camaraderie, whose shirts occasionally gap open to reveal nursing bras you’ve forgotten to hook the flaps back up on …
— O, uncomfortable dads: the husband who earned fifteen hundred dollars; the cheerful, sweating man standing in for the wife who at this moment is defending her dissertation; the grandfatherly type whose job seems to be to carry a folding chair from place to place for his wife; O, dad participating by proxy, you of the car idling in the parking lot, who stands supervising two unruly kids made drunk by the novelty of being up this late when I go past to deposit my first full laundry basket into my car …
It’s only stuff.
Or is it? Every time I attend Preview Night, I end up buying the cast-offs of a woman code-named LEAF, who clearly shares my taste in children’s clothing. When BONY, LAWN, DAWN, and I file downstairs with our overflowing baskets, I catch a quick glimpse of a woman still sorting, whose pile looks like it mostly contains my cast-offs. While I was sorting through the boxes full of shoes, I noticed that the woman beside me was looking for shoes a size smaller: when I came across an immaculate pair of Stride-Rites, I passed them right over. DAWN’s basket contains not only things for her boys, but clothes for her sister’s daughters. The spring I had a sinus infection and couldn’t face the line, BONY and LAWN (both the mothers of boys) harvested the Girls 2T racks, finding my daughter a wardrobe of sundresses that drew the compliments of everyone who saw them, including my own mother.
It’s only stuff. But here in this overly-warm school auditorium, something else is being handed down as well. We might be provisioning ourselves for our longest, most strenuous haul; we’ve come together here to shore ourselves up. For life with children can be so much like the Glenn School Sale itself: so greedy and unheeding of larger events, so over-the-top and rare, so excessive and effusive, so must-be-experienced to be believed.
Monday, September 24, 2007
I Have Measured Out My Life With Coffee Spoons
I grow old... I grow old...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
The second I went into labor with Elder Girleen, my relationship with Time completely changed (and then, when I went into labor with Younger Girleen, it changed even more: I'm here to tell you there's nothing as brief as the 90 seconds between one contraction and the next when you are in "back labor," and nothing as long as the amount of time each one of those contractions lasts).
On the other hand, it may not be that it's having kids that makes time move so quickly most of the time now: it could just be that we bought a VW Passat Wagon (apparently there was a tiny yuppie sell-out buried in my unconventional heart) a few months after Elder Girleen was born, and Passats are equiped with tripometers that can tell you just how long you've been driving around Atlanta dropping kids off at school, running by the grocery store, and popping in Target for green tights because fool that you are, you sold both daughters on the idea of being Apple Blossom Fairies for Halloween, and as any idiot knows, Apple Blossom Fairies have to wear green tights.
A month ago, Younger Girleen started going to preschool three mornings a week, and for about 7.3 minutes I harbored the delusion that this was going to open up huge vistas of Time in my life. 12 hours a week! Add in the hour from 5:30- 6:30 every morning, and gee — I could write a novel in my spare time! But now, thanks to the engineering whizzes at VW, I realize how much of my day I spend in the car, and I'm here to tell you that this is really a good thing. On days when Younger Girleen is in school, I spend anywhere from 30 minutes on up in the car just getting her there and back, which is too much information, even for me. (I know, I know, you're thinking why doesn't she just put her child in a closer preschool, or fit in another hour after the kids are in bed, or write novels in her head while she's driving).
The scary thing is that occasionally I wonder now if VW (or someone) magically installed some strange tripometer in my head as well, because now I can calculate time and the details that suck it from your life as exactingly as an accountant. Sometimes this is great, because, for example, I now know that I can shop for a week's worth of groceries (as well as spend a huge sum of money) at Whole Foods in approximately 37 minutes. I can also spend exactly the same amount of time buying a single gallon of milk at the Kroger two minutes from my house, though I won't spend near as much money.
I now know that I can push the limits of one hour so that it can include:
waking up two children and a husband
making and feeding two children oatmeal
eating my own breakfast
making one sack lunch
emptying the dishwasher
dressing two children
showering
dressing myself
brushing my own teeth and that of two children
Getting two children, lunches, backpacks, library books, etc etc into the car and on the way to school
Back in the youth that I now realize was wasted upon me, I couldn't even get a cup of coffee drunk in that amount of time.
P.S. Here's an example of how the accounting works: Target has perfectly acceptable fairy costumes for 14.95, but does not carry green tights. However, due to the fact that I wasted approx 13.2 minutes ordering fairy wings online, if I buy Target costumes I will possess four sets of fairy wings (one for each member of the family). Which will take more time, returning fairy wings or finding green tights? And have you just had complete confirmation of my insanity?
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
The second I went into labor with Elder Girleen, my relationship with Time completely changed (and then, when I went into labor with Younger Girleen, it changed even more: I'm here to tell you there's nothing as brief as the 90 seconds between one contraction and the next when you are in "back labor," and nothing as long as the amount of time each one of those contractions lasts).
On the other hand, it may not be that it's having kids that makes time move so quickly most of the time now: it could just be that we bought a VW Passat Wagon (apparently there was a tiny yuppie sell-out buried in my unconventional heart) a few months after Elder Girleen was born, and Passats are equiped with tripometers that can tell you just how long you've been driving around Atlanta dropping kids off at school, running by the grocery store, and popping in Target for green tights because fool that you are, you sold both daughters on the idea of being Apple Blossom Fairies for Halloween, and as any idiot knows, Apple Blossom Fairies have to wear green tights.
A month ago, Younger Girleen started going to preschool three mornings a week, and for about 7.3 minutes I harbored the delusion that this was going to open up huge vistas of Time in my life. 12 hours a week! Add in the hour from 5:30- 6:30 every morning, and gee — I could write a novel in my spare time! But now, thanks to the engineering whizzes at VW, I realize how much of my day I spend in the car, and I'm here to tell you that this is really a good thing. On days when Younger Girleen is in school, I spend anywhere from 30 minutes on up in the car just getting her there and back, which is too much information, even for me. (I know, I know, you're thinking why doesn't she just put her child in a closer preschool, or fit in another hour after the kids are in bed, or write novels in her head while she's driving).
The scary thing is that occasionally I wonder now if VW (or someone) magically installed some strange tripometer in my head as well, because now I can calculate time and the details that suck it from your life as exactingly as an accountant. Sometimes this is great, because, for example, I now know that I can shop for a week's worth of groceries (as well as spend a huge sum of money) at Whole Foods in approximately 37 minutes. I can also spend exactly the same amount of time buying a single gallon of milk at the Kroger two minutes from my house, though I won't spend near as much money.
I now know that I can push the limits of one hour so that it can include:
waking up two children and a husband
making and feeding two children oatmeal
eating my own breakfast
making one sack lunch
emptying the dishwasher
dressing two children
showering
dressing myself
brushing my own teeth and that of two children
Getting two children, lunches, backpacks, library books, etc etc into the car and on the way to school
Back in the youth that I now realize was wasted upon me, I couldn't even get a cup of coffee drunk in that amount of time.
P.S. Here's an example of how the accounting works: Target has perfectly acceptable fairy costumes for 14.95, but does not carry green tights. However, due to the fact that I wasted approx 13.2 minutes ordering fairy wings online, if I buy Target costumes I will possess four sets of fairy wings (one for each member of the family). Which will take more time, returning fairy wings or finding green tights? And have you just had complete confirmation of my insanity?
Mistress of the Metaphor
If I think too hard on what actually might be the point of all this, I'm pitched headfirst into the Slough of Despond, but that's kinda what happens whenever I think too hard about anything that has to do with writing. Your — the reader's — entertainment is certainly higher priority than my — the writer's — edification, but all the same, I'm learning things, and I hope my readers don't feel ill-used by being part of this grand experiment.
First things first — being artfully artless, one of the chief goals of any good blog, is a hell of a lot harder than it looks. As I'm seldom artfully artless in Real Life (I was never a good flirt, and as far as my life goes, things that are difficult also generally look difficult) it would stand to reason that I'd find this a challenge in my blog-life as well.
More interestingly, though, (at least from a writerly perspective, this insight and 4 bucks'll buy you a cup of coffee in the Real World) I've also noticed that the more unappealing I find some aspect of parenthood, the more apt I am to use metaphors to describe it. Thus, Younger Girleen's preschool has appeared in the same sentences as allusions to:
a soap opera
the Jonestown Massacre
A soulless corporation
Wonderland, as in where Alice Ended Up
the royal court of Marie Antoinette
My sense that XXXX Preschool gives me the opportunity to experience a world (I always wanted to time-travel, I just didn't know having children would make it possible!) full of political intrigue, Machiavellian plots, and character assassinations has, if anything, grown in the past few weeks. And in fact, I've realized that I actually like thinking of XXXX Preschool this way.
Once upon a time, way back in those days of peasant blouses and bellbottoms known as the early '70s, a well-meaning hippy-ish couple sent their first born off to the world of public school in small-town Georgia clutching a brown-paper sack lunch. At noon, when she sat down to lunch in the cafeteria redolent with the smell of overcooked collard greens and unpacked a Roman Meal bread sandwich wrapped in waxed paper (less plastic in landfills) and a bruised Red Delicious apple, she looked at the Twinkies, the SnakPak puddings, the lovely pillowy Wonder Bread bologna sandwiches of her peers with the first real envy of her young life. That is, until she met the only other third-grader forced by her parents to eat sandwiches made on whole wheat bread. They became inseparable, inventing games that got them through the school day: they were spies, they were detectives, the school rotunda was haunted by the ghost of the man the school was named after... And everyday at lunchtime, they unwrapped the waxed paper from around the sandwiches made from peanut butter purchased at the town's only health food store (less sugar), closed their eyes and said to each other fervently: maybe if we pretend real hard that we're actually eating pizza, these sandwiches will start tasting good.
Metaphor enlarges our lives. This might be why "it is what it is" is such a frightening buzzword. If you extrapolate from "it is what it is," a good many of the tasks we are forced to undertake in parenthood (this is probably true of life, too, but we don't take on that weighty subject here) are — let's face it — just plain tedious and unnecessary. Given that alternative, wouldn't you rather see yourself as a a cloak-and-dagger courtier skulking in a dark corner of the royal palace? Or an anthropologist taking notes out in the field? Or a clandestine operative working undercover?
Plus, I have to say I enjoyed giving this entry the header "The Mistress of the Metaphor" — as if I were some sulky dominatrix.
Metaphor. I did it again. I wonder what kind of inappropriate search engine tag will come from using that one.
First things first — being artfully artless, one of the chief goals of any good blog, is a hell of a lot harder than it looks. As I'm seldom artfully artless in Real Life (I was never a good flirt, and as far as my life goes, things that are difficult also generally look difficult) it would stand to reason that I'd find this a challenge in my blog-life as well.
More interestingly, though, (at least from a writerly perspective, this insight and 4 bucks'll buy you a cup of coffee in the Real World) I've also noticed that the more unappealing I find some aspect of parenthood, the more apt I am to use metaphors to describe it. Thus, Younger Girleen's preschool has appeared in the same sentences as allusions to:
a soap opera
the Jonestown Massacre
A soulless corporation
Wonderland, as in where Alice Ended Up
the royal court of Marie Antoinette
My sense that XXXX Preschool gives me the opportunity to experience a world (I always wanted to time-travel, I just didn't know having children would make it possible!) full of political intrigue, Machiavellian plots, and character assassinations has, if anything, grown in the past few weeks. And in fact, I've realized that I actually like thinking of XXXX Preschool this way.
Once upon a time, way back in those days of peasant blouses and bellbottoms known as the early '70s, a well-meaning hippy-ish couple sent their first born off to the world of public school in small-town Georgia clutching a brown-paper sack lunch. At noon, when she sat down to lunch in the cafeteria redolent with the smell of overcooked collard greens and unpacked a Roman Meal bread sandwich wrapped in waxed paper (less plastic in landfills) and a bruised Red Delicious apple, she looked at the Twinkies, the SnakPak puddings, the lovely pillowy Wonder Bread bologna sandwiches of her peers with the first real envy of her young life. That is, until she met the only other third-grader forced by her parents to eat sandwiches made on whole wheat bread. They became inseparable, inventing games that got them through the school day: they were spies, they were detectives, the school rotunda was haunted by the ghost of the man the school was named after... And everyday at lunchtime, they unwrapped the waxed paper from around the sandwiches made from peanut butter purchased at the town's only health food store (less sugar), closed their eyes and said to each other fervently: maybe if we pretend real hard that we're actually eating pizza, these sandwiches will start tasting good.
Metaphor enlarges our lives. This might be why "it is what it is" is such a frightening buzzword. If you extrapolate from "it is what it is," a good many of the tasks we are forced to undertake in parenthood (this is probably true of life, too, but we don't take on that weighty subject here) are — let's face it — just plain tedious and unnecessary. Given that alternative, wouldn't you rather see yourself as a a cloak-and-dagger courtier skulking in a dark corner of the royal palace? Or an anthropologist taking notes out in the field? Or a clandestine operative working undercover?
Plus, I have to say I enjoyed giving this entry the header "The Mistress of the Metaphor" — as if I were some sulky dominatrix.
Metaphor. I did it again. I wonder what kind of inappropriate search engine tag will come from using that one.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Oh, How Are the Mighty Fallen...
After nine months or so without a real babysitter ("trading" nights with neighbor moms is great in a pinch but doesn't give me the same joie de vivre as paying someone to watch my kids while I go out to kick up my heels, no strings attached), The Husband and I are going on a real date. To the theatre. To see this.
Apparently, this is how we kick up our heels these days. As I Lay Dying with puppets.
(I admit this could probably be considered filler but a send-off for a school functionary so choreographed to heighten parental emotion it almost resembled Triumph of the Will and a dentist's appointment were also on the books for before 10 a.m. and I've got to keep you checking back in somehow).
Apparently, this is how we kick up our heels these days. As I Lay Dying with puppets.
(I admit this could probably be considered filler but a send-off for a school functionary so choreographed to heighten parental emotion it almost resembled Triumph of the Will and a dentist's appointment were also on the books for before 10 a.m. and I've got to keep you checking back in somehow).
Let This Be a Lesson to Us All...
Younger Girleen, who we usually think of as so biddable (suckas!), feels that this would be a good time to remind everyone within earshot that she is not her sister and that she knows her own mind.
— No, no, NO, she said last night during yet another dinner discussion about who shall be what for Halloween. —Not FAIRY! DORA fairy! DORA fairy!
You can tell she's a second child — the first one had yet to taste the joys of Dora the Explorer, dark chocolate or soda when she was 27 months old.
The Husband, who for reasons inexplicable to himself, wants Younger Girleen to be a fairy for Halloween as much as I do, now that the idea's been lodged in our heads, has come up with a solution: a pair of binoculars around the neck will accessorize the original fairy "look."
There! Everybody's happy, and we can still make use of the fairy wings already being shipped.
Rumbles of discontent from Elder Girleen, who puts down her fork:
— I don't want to be a fairy. I want to be a PRINCESS.
— No, no, NO, she said last night during yet another dinner discussion about who shall be what for Halloween. —Not FAIRY! DORA fairy! DORA fairy!
You can tell she's a second child — the first one had yet to taste the joys of Dora the Explorer, dark chocolate or soda when she was 27 months old.
The Husband, who for reasons inexplicable to himself, wants Younger Girleen to be a fairy for Halloween as much as I do, now that the idea's been lodged in our heads, has come up with a solution: a pair of binoculars around the neck will accessorize the original fairy "look."
There! Everybody's happy, and we can still make use of the fairy wings already being shipped.
Rumbles of discontent from Elder Girleen, who puts down her fork:
— I don't want to be a fairy. I want to be a PRINCESS.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Entering the World of Fairy, or, I Did This To Myself
As anyone with a lick of sense knows, the second most important day in the year is RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER. This being the case, I figured I better start polling the Girleens about what they wanted to be for Halloween, because woe betide the mom who leaves this to the last minute.
They said "Fairies." Or, more accurately, Elder Girleen said "FAIRY, Fairy, Fairy!" and Younger Girleen studied her closely and said "Ohhh-Kay." I was so thrilled that the answer was not "PRINCESS, Princess, Princess!" that I highed myself over to the computer and typed in "fairy wings," because, as anyone with a lick of sense also knows, to transform two small children into delicate fairy-like beings takes time.
Let this be your source for breaking news: there are 495.00 dollar fairy wings a bride can wear to her wedding. Fairy flower girls are now a marketed concept. In fact, I could spent the rest of my natual life trolling internet sites about fairies.
Mattel's recent packaging of Tinkerbell and her "friends" aside, fairies have become the role-playing choice du jour of daughters of beleaguered women everywhere. Princesses carry HUGE baggage (for grown-up women at least, four-year-olds, who have the dress sensibility of drag queens, just like the spangles). Fairies, on the other hand, are magic, can fly, and are mischievous. Plus, they still get to dress in spangles.
Actually, now that I think about it, a more accurate observation might be: due to Mattel's recent packaging of Tinkerbell and her friends, beleaguered women everywhere have been convinced by their daughters under six, who swim in a media sea we can't even begin to imagine, that fairies are a better role playing choice than princesses.
Elder Girleen, unique being though she is, tends to go with the mainstream: she was Cinderella the Halloween there were twenty other tiny Cinderellas roaming our block. Astute anthropologist that I am, I realized this was also the same exact second that Disney repackaged the Cinderella movie and I suspect Tinkerbell is a calculated, mercenary attempt to cash in on the conflicted emotions of our nation's moms. Let me know how many tiny fairies knock on your door come October 31.
But because I'm the kind of mom who can be convinced that fairies might somehow be "better" than princesses, I've also deluded myself into believing that store-bought costumes suck originality from our children's lives: way back in the dark ages of the 1970's, we made our costumes, utilizing our creativity (Actually, we were utilizing our mothers' creativity). To avoid fairy costumes with Tinkerbell's face printed front-and-center on the bodice, I would make the Girleens' costumes. Some fairy wings, tutus and leotards they already have, glitter, and there you go! Instant fairy.
Then I found the Apple Blossom Fairy.
Yeah, the poem's a little cloying, but oh, those fairies!!! That petal collar for the younger one! And the older one has brown hair exactly like Elder Girleen's! Flower fairies apparently were an Edwardian craze and just say the words "Edwardian craze" (as opposed to 2007's marketing concept in girl's toys) and I'm all over it.
How hard could it be? Buy some fairy wings, make a little collar for Younger Girleen, and find a apple-blossom green flowing nightgown for Elder Girleen.
This is how the moms we all love to hate are born. You know, the ones whose children never have dirty faces, who make pies from scratch, etc etc .... insert whatever aspect of momdom makes you feel most lacking here.
The only flowing nylon nightgown I've been able to find that doesn't have a branded character on it will cost 40 bucks.
Storebought costumes might be the name of the game.
They said "Fairies." Or, more accurately, Elder Girleen said "FAIRY, Fairy, Fairy!" and Younger Girleen studied her closely and said "Ohhh-Kay." I was so thrilled that the answer was not "PRINCESS, Princess, Princess!" that I highed myself over to the computer and typed in "fairy wings," because, as anyone with a lick of sense also knows, to transform two small children into delicate fairy-like beings takes time.
Let this be your source for breaking news: there are 495.00 dollar fairy wings a bride can wear to her wedding. Fairy flower girls are now a marketed concept. In fact, I could spent the rest of my natual life trolling internet sites about fairies.
Mattel's recent packaging of Tinkerbell and her "friends" aside, fairies have become the role-playing choice du jour of daughters of beleaguered women everywhere. Princesses carry HUGE baggage (for grown-up women at least, four-year-olds, who have the dress sensibility of drag queens, just like the spangles). Fairies, on the other hand, are magic, can fly, and are mischievous. Plus, they still get to dress in spangles.
Actually, now that I think about it, a more accurate observation might be: due to Mattel's recent packaging of Tinkerbell and her friends, beleaguered women everywhere have been convinced by their daughters under six, who swim in a media sea we can't even begin to imagine, that fairies are a better role playing choice than princesses.
Elder Girleen, unique being though she is, tends to go with the mainstream: she was Cinderella the Halloween there were twenty other tiny Cinderellas roaming our block. Astute anthropologist that I am, I realized this was also the same exact second that Disney repackaged the Cinderella movie and I suspect Tinkerbell is a calculated, mercenary attempt to cash in on the conflicted emotions of our nation's moms. Let me know how many tiny fairies knock on your door come October 31.
But because I'm the kind of mom who can be convinced that fairies might somehow be "better" than princesses, I've also deluded myself into believing that store-bought costumes suck originality from our children's lives: way back in the dark ages of the 1970's, we made our costumes, utilizing our creativity (Actually, we were utilizing our mothers' creativity). To avoid fairy costumes with Tinkerbell's face printed front-and-center on the bodice, I would make the Girleens' costumes. Some fairy wings, tutus and leotards they already have, glitter, and there you go! Instant fairy.
Then I found the Apple Blossom Fairy.
Yeah, the poem's a little cloying, but oh, those fairies!!! That petal collar for the younger one! And the older one has brown hair exactly like Elder Girleen's! Flower fairies apparently were an Edwardian craze and just say the words "Edwardian craze" (as opposed to 2007's marketing concept in girl's toys) and I'm all over it.
How hard could it be? Buy some fairy wings, make a little collar for Younger Girleen, and find a apple-blossom green flowing nightgown for Elder Girleen.
This is how the moms we all love to hate are born. You know, the ones whose children never have dirty faces, who make pies from scratch, etc etc .... insert whatever aspect of momdom makes you feel most lacking here.
The only flowing nylon nightgown I've been able to find that doesn't have a branded character on it will cost 40 bucks.
Storebought costumes might be the name of the game.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
The Wry Jocularity School of Parenthood Writing
All my life, whenever I've relocated to a new place, the first thing I've always done, often even before the household goods are out of boxes, is pay a visit to the public library and apply for a card, an impulse which means the library cards I've held serve as a pretty good road map of where I've been:
Writer that I am, I still find it a fairly admirable trait: to receive spiritual sustanance from books, and for libraries to serve as the churches one turns to for solace. But to put this same trait in a perhaps less positive light: I am always on the look-out for Operating Manuals (capitalization intentional), a method of moving through your life which means you damn well better have a library card. If I don't know something, I assume there's a book out there that can fix this lack in me, a lifelong search for meaning through the written word that might explain why The Husband and I have checked out a total of 27 books about bathroom renovation in the past six weeks, though the fact that much of the upcoming weekend will probably be spent trying to undo an abortive attempt at bathroom caulking indicates either that we never read them or that we forgot every instruction they gave within seconds after reading it.
All this is a roundabout way of saying that as soon as Elder Girleen was born, I hightailed it to the library for my fix. And oh, did I score! As Elder Girleen slept a total of approximately fifteen minutes in the first two months of her life, I was particularly fixated on infant sleep and in quick succession read:
I now know that some children simply don't sleep and there was no answer to my problem. But at the time, (just to continue the odd religious thread of the past few posts), I felt as devastated as if I had staggered to a church and found the door barred against me.
Because I was nursing Elder Girleen (a lot, because remember, she didn't sleep), and I had gotten so proficient at it that I could read voraciously while I did so, I was also simultaneously reading every single "motherhood" book I could get my hands on. (Talk about being a glutton for punishment — where else, given all this, could I possibly have ended up but on the primrose path to postpartum depression?)
What was I looking for? I think what I was looking for was a lifeline, a comforting voice that would say something along the lines of hey, it's okay if you think you suck at this; in fact, it's also okay if you actually do suck at it, as long it's in a sort of minor way and you're not like, a crack addict who sold her baby or something. Or maybe what I really wanted that comforting voice to murmur was Forget sucking at this parenthood stuff! It's actually okay that you hate it, or some of it, that you'd rather have ground glass shoved in your eyes than go to another playgroup, that what you want more than anything else is to go see a movie or walk in a coffeeshop with your prebaby body back and unencumbered...
Most of the writing I found instead seemed to fall into one of two camps. The first, which I've come to think of as the "And Then I Stared Down at the Little Miracle in My Arms" school of parenthood writing was so unrelentingly sentimental that I had to return those books to the library unread (I like my sentiment as much as the next girl, but it has to be leavened with something... I dunno, gore, or something). The second took the place of the lifeline I'd been looking for. Frayed, it was a lifeline that wasn't pulling me anywhere I particularly wanted to go, but at least it kept my face out of the water. "The Wry Jocularity School of Parenthood Writing." It felt subversive, even though it often schizophrenically veered off into "The Little Miracle in My Arms" territory in its final paragraphs. I liked it. It made me feel better. But if the "Little Miracle" school was formulaic, so was all this Dry Wit.
Part of loving reading may be a longing for that elusive, inexplicable moment when, reading something, you think yes, that's it, that's exactly what I felt. The two schools of parenthood writing, as formulaic in their ways as romance novels, could be good reading, were good writing, were sometimes excellent writing, but the jolt of recognition I occasionally got from them was more like the sort of feeling you get when you talk with a kindred spirit at a cocktail party that it was a profound expression of emotion. (And who am I to expect this from anything, anyway, now that I think about it?)
Two weeks of this blog under my belt and I'd be thrilled if any of this served as good example of the Wry Jocularity School of Writing — I mean, I want my Dear Readers to want to read this, want them to be at least momentarily entertained. At the same time, I'm also seeing how easy it is to fall into one of these two camps when you start writing about Parenthood. Is it because we live in sound bites, these days, and both techniques, the sentimental and the jocular, lend themselves to that? Is it because there's something ineffable about the very state of parenthood, and that words fail it?
One of the definitions of ineffable is "not to be uttered" and maybe the problem is that parenthood may be one of the last social realms we have left that's full of taboos. (Using the words "hate" and "parenthood" together in the same paragraph made me more uncomfortable than I like to admit). Or is it that the state of parenthood is bent almost to the breaking point by its cliched baggage?
Writer that I am, I still find it a fairly admirable trait: to receive spiritual sustanance from books, and for libraries to serve as the churches one turns to for solace. But to put this same trait in a perhaps less positive light: I am always on the look-out for Operating Manuals (capitalization intentional), a method of moving through your life which means you damn well better have a library card. If I don't know something, I assume there's a book out there that can fix this lack in me, a lifelong search for meaning through the written word that might explain why The Husband and I have checked out a total of 27 books about bathroom renovation in the past six weeks, though the fact that much of the upcoming weekend will probably be spent trying to undo an abortive attempt at bathroom caulking indicates either that we never read them or that we forgot every instruction they gave within seconds after reading it.
All this is a roundabout way of saying that as soon as Elder Girleen was born, I hightailed it to the library for my fix. And oh, did I score! As Elder Girleen slept a total of approximately fifteen minutes in the first two months of her life, I was particularly fixated on infant sleep and in quick succession read:
- Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child
- Baby Wise
- Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems (The Ferber Method)
- The No-Cry Sleep Solution: Gentle Ways to Help Your Baby Sleep Through the Night
- Dr. Sears Baby Book
- What to Expect the First Year
- Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care
- Some book put out by the American Academy for Pediatrics that you get for free if you join the Publix Grocery Baby Club
I now know that some children simply don't sleep and there was no answer to my problem. But at the time, (just to continue the odd religious thread of the past few posts), I felt as devastated as if I had staggered to a church and found the door barred against me.
Because I was nursing Elder Girleen (a lot, because remember, she didn't sleep), and I had gotten so proficient at it that I could read voraciously while I did so, I was also simultaneously reading every single "motherhood" book I could get my hands on. (Talk about being a glutton for punishment — where else, given all this, could I possibly have ended up but on the primrose path to postpartum depression?)
What was I looking for? I think what I was looking for was a lifeline, a comforting voice that would say something along the lines of hey, it's okay if you think you suck at this; in fact, it's also okay if you actually do suck at it, as long it's in a sort of minor way and you're not like, a crack addict who sold her baby or something. Or maybe what I really wanted that comforting voice to murmur was Forget sucking at this parenthood stuff! It's actually okay that you hate it, or some of it, that you'd rather have ground glass shoved in your eyes than go to another playgroup, that what you want more than anything else is to go see a movie or walk in a coffeeshop with your prebaby body back and unencumbered...
Most of the writing I found instead seemed to fall into one of two camps. The first, which I've come to think of as the "And Then I Stared Down at the Little Miracle in My Arms" school of parenthood writing was so unrelentingly sentimental that I had to return those books to the library unread (I like my sentiment as much as the next girl, but it has to be leavened with something... I dunno, gore, or something). The second took the place of the lifeline I'd been looking for. Frayed, it was a lifeline that wasn't pulling me anywhere I particularly wanted to go, but at least it kept my face out of the water. "The Wry Jocularity School of Parenthood Writing." It felt subversive, even though it often schizophrenically veered off into "The Little Miracle in My Arms" territory in its final paragraphs. I liked it. It made me feel better. But if the "Little Miracle" school was formulaic, so was all this Dry Wit.
Part of loving reading may be a longing for that elusive, inexplicable moment when, reading something, you think yes, that's it, that's exactly what I felt. The two schools of parenthood writing, as formulaic in their ways as romance novels, could be good reading, were good writing, were sometimes excellent writing, but the jolt of recognition I occasionally got from them was more like the sort of feeling you get when you talk with a kindred spirit at a cocktail party that it was a profound expression of emotion. (And who am I to expect this from anything, anyway, now that I think about it?)
Two weeks of this blog under my belt and I'd be thrilled if any of this served as good example of the Wry Jocularity School of Writing — I mean, I want my Dear Readers to want to read this, want them to be at least momentarily entertained. At the same time, I'm also seeing how easy it is to fall into one of these two camps when you start writing about Parenthood. Is it because we live in sound bites, these days, and both techniques, the sentimental and the jocular, lend themselves to that? Is it because there's something ineffable about the very state of parenthood, and that words fail it?
One of the definitions of ineffable is "not to be uttered" and maybe the problem is that parenthood may be one of the last social realms we have left that's full of taboos. (Using the words "hate" and "parenthood" together in the same paragraph made me more uncomfortable than I like to admit). Or is it that the state of parenthood is bent almost to the breaking point by its cliched baggage?
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
My Little Missionary or Life On Fire, Footnoted
OK, two weeks of this under my belt, and I have to say I love the way blogs "manage" your writing. Labelling, sorting and archiving posts sorta legitimizes the whole process, doesn't it? I don't have "thoughts" -- I have Thoughts. Ditto regarding the way I can link and footnote. When I was working on my first novel (that's the unpublished one in a box in my attic if you were wondering, thanks for asking!) I sometimes found myself making weird tree diagrams with stacks of real cut-and-pasted manuscript pages, trying to figure out what went where (you only have to resort to this if you're ambitious enough, or stupid enough, to try to create a novel from six points of view). If only I'd written it in blog form! I could have easily linked portions of the narrative, like this:
In her Friend V (she of the fire-n-brimstone grandma), Elder Girleen found her first theologically-inclined buddy. Last year in preschool, Elder Girleen and V discovered that they both knew the words to "Jesus Loves You" (taught to Elder Girleen by her grandmother, not on my watch), which they then with great relish taught the whole preschool class. Causing so much consternation that the teacher felt obligated to put the following into her weekly newsletter for parents:
"Some of you have asked why I am teaching your children the words to religious songs. Some of the children have enjoyed teaching songs they know to other children in the class. Learning religious songs is not part of the instruction at XXXX Preschool."
Just so we've all got our separation of church and state straight.
In her Friend V (she of the fire-n-brimstone grandma), Elder Girleen found her first theologically-inclined buddy. Last year in preschool, Elder Girleen and V discovered that they both knew the words to "Jesus Loves You" (taught to Elder Girleen by her grandmother, not on my watch), which they then with great relish taught the whole preschool class. Causing so much consternation that the teacher felt obligated to put the following into her weekly newsletter for parents:
"Some of you have asked why I am teaching your children the words to religious songs. Some of the children have enjoyed teaching songs they know to other children in the class. Learning religious songs is not part of the instruction at XXXX Preschool."
Just so we've all got our separation of church and state straight.
Friday, September 7, 2007
Three Little Words, Revisited
An astute reader reports that she's run across the new sanitized Wheels on the Bus (with "the mommies on the bus say 'I love you'" replacing "the mommies on the bus say 'ssh, ssh, ssh'") elsewhere, as well as a sanitized version of "Rock-a-bye Baby"--instead of "down will come baby, cradle and all" they sing the last line as "mommy/daddy will catch it, baby and all."
Oh, the years of therapy the Girleens will need — not only were they sung the wrong versions of these two songs, but also "Hush Little Baby" complete with lines about horses and carts falling down.
OK, I have now parsed out The Wheels on the Bus as much, as not more, as the author of last Sunday's Modern Love column.
It's all either Grist for the Mill --- or I need to get a life.
Oh, the years of therapy the Girleens will need — not only were they sung the wrong versions of these two songs, but also "Hush Little Baby" complete with lines about horses and carts falling down.
OK, I have now parsed out The Wheels on the Bus as much, as not more, as the author of last Sunday's Modern Love column.
It's all either Grist for the Mill --- or I need to get a life.
Thursday, September 6, 2007
Life, On Fire
Last night, over dinner, Elder Girleen presented us with the following example of deductive reasoning:
"V-- said that her grandmother said that if you say bad words you will live in fire." Pause. "When I was three I said bad words and I don't live in fire." Pause. "Live in fire. I don't know what that means." Pause. "I think V-- was confused. I think what her grandmother said was that if you say bad words you will be FIRED."
This is what happens when dinner conversation for the past month has revolved (in code, we thought) around corporate layoffs.
"V-- said that her grandmother said that if you say bad words you will live in fire." Pause. "When I was three I said bad words and I don't live in fire." Pause. "Live in fire. I don't know what that means." Pause. "I think V-- was confused. I think what her grandmother said was that if you say bad words you will be FIRED."
This is what happens when dinner conversation for the past month has revolved (in code, we thought) around corporate layoffs.
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Three Little Words
I tend to read the "Modern Love" column in every Sunday's New York Times the way one slows going past a car crash: with equal parts disgust with myself and prurient interest. It's never one's better self who taps the brakes driving past someone else's tragedy; it's certainly not my better self that immediately after scanning the Book Review (I admit, there are vestiges enough of my writer self left that I still read the Book Review first) immediately flips to the Modern Love column in the Style section.
No offense to any of the writers published there (I'd certainly be one if I could), but I had no idea that navel-gazing could be elevated to such an extraordinarily high art within the pages of a daily newspaper. In a blog, yes. But in the New York Times?Does the world (or New York, or those small portions of the country that actually read the New York Times) _really_ need to know what it's like to... be a egg donor... an abused woman... at the losing end of a bad breakup... or, as was the case this past Sunday, what it's like to be a mother who doesn't particularly like to say "I love you" to her two-and-a-half-year-old?
(Don't get her wrong... it's not that she doesn't actually _love_ her child; she just doesn't care to say it much, a realization that dawns on her after she hears a woman sing the following verse of The Wheels on the Bus — "The mommies on the bus say 'I love you,' 'I love you,' 'I love you...' — to her stroller-strapped offspring.
First things first. I've NEVER heard this verse of the Wheels on the Bus. And I've been singing the Wheels on the Bus, a song I was lucky enough to never even have heard of until I had children, until I'm blue in the face for the past five years, particularly at Mommy and Me Swimming classes, a scam foisted upon well-meaning middle-class parents who, being led to believe that you can actually teach a toddler something that resembles swimming, pay good money to stand waist-high in a swimming pool singing the Wheels on the Bus and This is the Way We Splash Our Hands while their child, and every other in a two-mile radius, screams its head off. I mean, how stupid do we think children actually are? The Wheels on the Bus is no way interesting enough to distract anyone from the fact that they're being dunked in water, which, in case you didn't realize it, Mom, you can drown in.
All that aside, there are a couple of ways one could react to this essay:
1. When the song The Wheels of the Bus leads you to start parsing out your relationship with your kids, it's time to reevaluate your life
2. Maybe this was published in the Times so that all of the rest of us parents — whether bad, run-of-the-mill or stellar — can feel good about something. We may forget to pick up our kids at school, may exchange store-bought cookies for homemade ones when it's our turn to bring snack to preschool (provided one's preschool allows cookies), may buy our kids Barbie outfits at Target so that we will have five minutes to stand in the dressing room to try on t-shirts that make us look pregnant (having, as we move through our child-bearing years, travelled the ignominious road from wearing Exhilaration! to Mossimo to Cherokee Woman) without having to contend with a child who is either screaming or trying to squirm under the dressing room stall door into the adjoining stall where a 65 year old woman who does not like children is trying on brassieres. We may do all that, but at least we are ok about telling our children that we love them.
Of course, like every other parent, this woman makes herself feel better about her disinterest in saying those three little words by making the whole act of doing so seem vaguely suspect, as if it were akin to
1. Letting your child watch too much t.v.
2. taking them to MacDonald's
3. Bribing them with sugar
What a pretty pass things have come to. The other day I was in the check-out line in the grocery store and against my better judgement picked up Real Simple's Family issue. Did you know that letting your child eat something that's dropped on the floor gives you two stars in a one to five scale of bad parenting? Likewise, sending your child off to school without a scarf or mittens? Don't even ask how many stars neglecting to make them brush their teeth one single night can give you.
Forgive me, for I have sinned. My youngest daughter trolls around on the dining room floor after dinner occasionally popping that morning's dropped cereal into her mouth. My children are congenitally incapable of wearing mittens, and more power to you if you can get them crammed on their recalcitrant hands. Sometimes when the Husband has been away on business for four nights running, we ... forget... to brush our teeth.
I guess the title of this post should really be: I Just ...Don't... Want... to ...Know.
No offense to any of the writers published there (I'd certainly be one if I could), but I had no idea that navel-gazing could be elevated to such an extraordinarily high art within the pages of a daily newspaper. In a blog, yes. But in the New York Times?Does the world (or New York, or those small portions of the country that actually read the New York Times) _really_ need to know what it's like to... be a egg donor... an abused woman... at the losing end of a bad breakup... or, as was the case this past Sunday, what it's like to be a mother who doesn't particularly like to say "I love you" to her two-and-a-half-year-old?
(Don't get her wrong... it's not that she doesn't actually _love_ her child; she just doesn't care to say it much, a realization that dawns on her after she hears a woman sing the following verse of The Wheels on the Bus — "The mommies on the bus say 'I love you,' 'I love you,' 'I love you...' — to her stroller-strapped offspring.
First things first. I've NEVER heard this verse of the Wheels on the Bus. And I've been singing the Wheels on the Bus, a song I was lucky enough to never even have heard of until I had children, until I'm blue in the face for the past five years, particularly at Mommy and Me Swimming classes, a scam foisted upon well-meaning middle-class parents who, being led to believe that you can actually teach a toddler something that resembles swimming, pay good money to stand waist-high in a swimming pool singing the Wheels on the Bus and This is the Way We Splash Our Hands while their child, and every other in a two-mile radius, screams its head off. I mean, how stupid do we think children actually are? The Wheels on the Bus is no way interesting enough to distract anyone from the fact that they're being dunked in water, which, in case you didn't realize it, Mom, you can drown in.
All that aside, there are a couple of ways one could react to this essay:
1. When the song The Wheels of the Bus leads you to start parsing out your relationship with your kids, it's time to reevaluate your life
2. Maybe this was published in the Times so that all of the rest of us parents — whether bad, run-of-the-mill or stellar — can feel good about something. We may forget to pick up our kids at school, may exchange store-bought cookies for homemade ones when it's our turn to bring snack to preschool (provided one's preschool allows cookies), may buy our kids Barbie outfits at Target so that we will have five minutes to stand in the dressing room to try on t-shirts that make us look pregnant (having, as we move through our child-bearing years, travelled the ignominious road from wearing Exhilaration! to Mossimo to Cherokee Woman) without having to contend with a child who is either screaming or trying to squirm under the dressing room stall door into the adjoining stall where a 65 year old woman who does not like children is trying on brassieres. We may do all that, but at least we are ok about telling our children that we love them.
Of course, like every other parent, this woman makes herself feel better about her disinterest in saying those three little words by making the whole act of doing so seem vaguely suspect, as if it were akin to
1. Letting your child watch too much t.v.
2. taking them to MacDonald's
3. Bribing them with sugar
What a pretty pass things have come to. The other day I was in the check-out line in the grocery store and against my better judgement picked up Real Simple's Family issue. Did you know that letting your child eat something that's dropped on the floor gives you two stars in a one to five scale of bad parenting? Likewise, sending your child off to school without a scarf or mittens? Don't even ask how many stars neglecting to make them brush their teeth one single night can give you.
Forgive me, for I have sinned. My youngest daughter trolls around on the dining room floor after dinner occasionally popping that morning's dropped cereal into her mouth. My children are congenitally incapable of wearing mittens, and more power to you if you can get them crammed on their recalcitrant hands. Sometimes when the Husband has been away on business for four nights running, we ... forget... to brush our teeth.
I guess the title of this post should really be: I Just ...Don't... Want... to ...Know.
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