Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth

Because, after all, a single parenting book title is worth god knows how many thousand words:

Your Seven Year Old: Life in a Minor Key

SOMEBODY'S got to do it....

A couple of weeks back, when my mom spent the weekend in the hospital, once things calmed down and we all settled into a hospital routine of sorts, I went off to run some errands for my folks. One of which was to buy groceries so their refrigerator would be full once she got home, because what else am I but a mom myself, and that's the sort of things that moms do — make sure people are fed and clothed and have clean faces.

While I was standing in the check-out lane, I picked up a Martha Stewart Living and tossed it on the conveyer belt, figuring it would give my mom something to read while she was convalescing. I'm not actually all that sure she wants to flip through Martha Stewart Living, but it seemed better than People, at least.

And the magazine did do what I'd hoped, and distracted her. Especially the section on April Fool's tricks that a person (meaning 'a mother') could play on one's family, which gave the two of us fodder for at least fifteen minutes of conversation.

When Martha Stewart tackles April Fool's Day, she does it as only Martha can: one of her proposed "tricks" (which was bee-you-tifully photographed, let me tell you) was to fry up quail eggs one by one and place them gently on tiny cocktail toasts which then could be served for breakfast on April 1.

Quail eggs?

Lady, you do know that Rome is burning out there, don't you?

But.

One of her other suggestions just happened to contain materials that I... just happened... to have on hand: milk and gelatin.
And the basic idea was to make a sort of milk jello and serve it in glasses for breakfast April Fool's morning.

What was I going to be out if I went down this path? A packet of gelatin purchased in 2003 and a cup of milk. And so, dear Reader, I presented my loving family with three glasses of "milk" this morning.

We usually don't drink milk with breakfast.

The Husband looked at his, bemused. Why did you give me a glass of milk? he asked, as if it were a vodka tonic or something equally unusual and forbidden.

The girleens, oh the girleens, they did exactly what they usually do when presented with a glass of milk — and ignored theirs.

Breakfast was winding down, the glasses sat untouched.

Have a sip of milk before you go get dressed, I urged Elder Girleen (knowing Younger Girleen was even much less likely to reach for hers).

She reached; she lifted the glass.

It's solid! she cried.

And then my long-suffering family turned and stared at me, their mother, the silly one, such a complete April Fool.

Life, and How to Live it?

Way back at the dawn of time, when I was a newly-minted mother of one, a One who in her short miraculous life had decided, at least as I perceived it, to shun sleep as if it were her greatest enemy, I did what the average 21st century mom usually does when her life throws her a curve ball she can't catch, and hied myself over to the Google. And there, prostrate before The Great Oz of the present-day, I posed this question:

Infant sleep?


Oh, the Google, it aims to please! It took me hither and yon, from Babywise to the Ferber Method, but the only place it took me that did me a lick of good was... The Berkeley Parents Network.

As the Husband points out, we live nowhere near Berkeley. The Berkeley Parents Network recommendations for earthy- crunchy pediatricians and simpatico playgroups can't help me a whit. But the section of the site labelled ADVICE... well, that's another story.

Seven years later, I still occasionally find myself trolling the Advice section of the Berkeley Parents Network. And not necessarily because it has answers. I visit it simply because it has the QUESTIONS.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

The petitioners to the Berkeley Parents Network Advice section, all — as I imagine them — wan, sleep-deprived, milk-stained mothers, ask every question you can't imagine the serene, sleek-haired mothers of your actual acquaintance ever having. Does your child walk only on her tiptoes? Light fires? Smear bodily fluids on the walls? Did having a child make you depressed? Eager to never have sex again? Unable to take care of life's most basic functions? The women (and men) who end up on the BPN Advice Forum have been there. Are you worried about Developmental Milestones, or whether an academic career is compatible with being a mom? Don't worry, on the Berkeley Parents Network you are not alone. There is no problem so great that some other mom has not already had it, and this is a very very good thing to know.

For quite some time, Younger Girleen has had a "situation" that has caused us all, parents and child both, some distress. We've talked to her pediatrician; it shall resolve itself, I know. But last week, I was feeling, well, lonely in this situation.

There is page after page of "advice" regarding this particular situation on the site... this, however, is the tidbit, I decided to read aloud to the Husband:

Our wise and wonderful pediatrician, now retired, said this: ''Ok, I think he's a little young, but try this. Go buy a family of dolls, a toy toilet, and some brown clay. Make a little turd out of the clay & initiate a game with him, with you playing the boy, him playing the mom or dad. At some point, after the game is really going strong, have the toy boy say 'Mommy I have to go poo. No I don't want to go poo'. Then watch him. If this works as it should, you may gain some insight into what is causing him to withhold.'' WELL, we got the dolls & the toilet, made the little turd out of clay, & got the game going. When I (as toy boy) said ''Mommy I need to poo. No I don't want to go poo,'' My son said, frantically, MOMMY I HAVE TO GO POO! He ran off to the bathroom & did a big one & was never constipated again. It was extraordinary. We never even got to brandish the clay turd. Whatever was in his mind about poop & pain must have been safer for him to view from the distance of play, he worked it out on the spot & has been an appreciative pooper ever since. He's 17 now.

What did the Husband do upon hearing this? He sighed heavily. He rolled his eyes. He said: Keep me out of this. If you want to put on your earthshoes and rub your crystals, that's fine, but... keep me out of this.

So I did.

I will just say that Younger Girleen's response to all this was ... quizzical bemusement.

————————————————

All that of course is water under the bridge. But last night, I was somewhere, attempting to engage in adult-type life and an acquaintance asked me this:

So, getting any writing done?

Lady, lady, I felt like saying, we're way down in the trenches here. I'm making beds and role-playing with dolls in the time I used to spend on that.

A Conversation, Overheard

Elder Girleen, thoughtfully, having just finished singing "Little Bunny Foo-Foo":  

What is a goon, anyway?

Younger Girleen, settling the question once and for all:  

I think a goon is a kind of frog.  

Why I'm Not Allowed to Try My Hand at Fairy Tales

Once upon a time, there lived an old woman with her two lovely daughters, the eldest of these named Why; the younger, What's That.

The old woman, the equally old man who was her husband, and Why and What's That all lived together in in a large southern city out of reach of previous hurricanes but currently very gloomy, in a brown brick house surrounded by a picturesque picket fence intertwined with browning morning glory vines. 

Why ask why Why had been named as she had?  It suited her, just as What's That's name suited her sister, though now that What's That was three, she was growing out of her first name and into a new one — Look At Me Right Now, perhaps, or If Her Name's Why, Then My Name Will Be Why NOT.    

— Is God real?  Why asked one afternoon, elbows propped up on the table while she ate her after school snack.  She chewed pretzels thoughtfully.  — Who exactly is the Devil?  

The Devil, the old woman figured, must've been brought to Why's attention by someone in her class, because, though the conversations in the brick house rambled over many topics (— There's Barack Obama! What's That could exclaim when she saw the morning paper) the Devil was one that, surprisingly, had never before come up.  

Ummm, the old woman stuttered, stalling for time.  

— What does "lost their lives" mean?  How does anybody lose a life?

What's That contentedly rolled a Lightning McQueen matchbox car along the edge of the table-top, and the Old Woman knew that, though What's That appeared not to be listening, anything the Old Woman said could easily become a reason to wake up in the middle of the night (What's That being the sort of child who, on a recent camping trip, might wake up at three a.m. in a rented tent from REI to cry out It's dark.  I can't see my face!)  

The Old Woman also knew that the principal of Why's school had addressed the students on the anniversary of September 11th, and had probably chosen the phrase lost their lives carefully, so that any really hard questions wouldn't come until the children got home from school.

Yes, God is real, the old woman said carefully.  Lost their lives means died.  Carefully skating around the question about the Devil because she had no clue how to answer that.

I want more camel -loupe! interrupted What's That.   

Why are some people so bossy?  Why continued.  After we finish our snack will you take us to ride bikes? Why did you let me drink alcohol?

Alcohol? asked the Old Woman.  

At the Farmer's Market.  You said that watermelon drink had alcohol in it.  

Oh, said the Old Woman.  Caffine.  It had green tea in it.  Not alcohol!  

It was urban tea? said Why.  

Urban tea? repeated the Old Woman.  Oh, you mean Herbal Tea! 

Yeah, said Why.  She stood up from the table, still chewing pretzels.  Can we go ride bikes now?

 I don't know if there's time before dinner, said the old woman.  She looked at up at the clock on the wall, which said it was five minutes later than the clock on the stove, which said it was ten minutes earlier than the clock in the bedroom.  

Why, she realized, even time's elastic!  And for a second of it she felt blessed by this life that parenthood bestows upon one — so rich, nonsensical, and strange.   

Here One Day, Gone the Next

Elsewhere in the world, it may  still be the dog days of summer, but not 'round here.  

Nope, your calendar's not wrong:  it's still just early days of August, when lawns unravel into little more than crabgrass and heat leaves everything limp.  The leaves of the kudzu and the poison ivy are glossy and lustrous twining up the trunks of the trees.  The crepe myrtles have littered the ground with brassy fuschia blossoms, stridently attempting to add some color to things.  Last week, when we walked from the car to the pool,  wilted fluff from mimosas spangled the pavement.  

But even as August does what August does best, we have The First Day of School, and today the Girleens, newly-backpacked and outfitted, are off at their respective schools (first grade and preschool) experiencing life without maternal intervention.  

The house is very quiet. 

 The temperatures may be inching up into the nineties, but all you have to do is walk a first grader into their school building, opening those heavy metal doors into the smell of fresh paint and freshly-waxed linoleum floor that says first-day-of-school like nothing else can, to feel fall's onset.  It's there, like an underglaze under the panorama of summer.  

There's crisper weather ahead.  You can taste it on the tip of your tongue. 

Pool Digressions, Part II

All the swimming we've been doing around here might not seem momentous, but let me tell you, here  at "Camp Fun Mom" (which isn't, according to Elder Girleen, all that fun, and where the mornings' schedule of activities isn't complete until she teases Younger Girleen until she roars like a small enraged lion) it's a huge deal, particularly since Younger Girleen spent much of the previous month unwilling to stick much more than a big toe in water.  She didn't even want to get in the bathtub!* 

During the month of June, getting Younger Girleen in the swimming pool at all required the sort of diplomatic skills needed to diffuse high-level tensions between warring nations; once she was in the water, the only thing that kept her there was a death-grip on the straps of my bathing suit that, though comforting to her, played hell on my my sense of modesty.  Because of all that, I was pretty sure that July's twice-a-week swimming lessons, signed up for in February before we discovered this new-found dislike of water, would be a blood bath.  

I kept these dark thoughts to myself and talked up swimming lessons like nobody's business.  Wow, I have mermaids for daughters!  The teachers (from Emory U's swim team) are so cool!  They have swimming in the Olympics! The Olympics will be on TV in three weeks!  We'll stay up to watch them! 

Even so, when we got to the pool the first day, I was prepared to have to peel Younger Girleen off my body. 

But the teachers stood in a line in front of the pool and called out the names of their students.  Younger Girleen heard hers...

... and trotted off, her hand confidingly nestled in her teacher's.

And that was that.  

And by the time I looked at the other end of the pool,   Elder Girleen was occupied with her class, doing the back stroke.  Doing the breast stroke, which I didn't tackle until probably age 10 or 11.  

And me?  A moment's work, and there I was, transformed, for thirty minutes at least, into the sort of mom I'd always noticed and often envied, but never imagined I could ever be:  she who sits under an umbrella with something icy to drink and reads while her offspring are occupied in the water.  

Of course, because such a thing had never happened before, I had nothing to read.  But by the next lesson, I was prepared, with a copy of this year's Best American Short Stories (the one edited by Stephen King), tucked into the enormous tote bag any trip to the pool requires these days.  

I found my chair shaded-by-umbrella, I got my something icy from the snack bar upstairs, I opened  Best American Short Stories  to the first page of the first story.  

A mom acquaintance strolled by.  

— What're you reading?  she asked.

I closed the book and turned it so she could see the cover. 

—  Grown-up reading!  she said admiringly.

I admitted I hadn't actually read more than the first sentence; she resumed her stroll. 

Elder Girleen's lesson was taking place at the near end of the pool.  I glanced up from my book, searching for a glimpse of her wet, sleek head.  She was hanging on the side, listening carefully to the instructor as he modeled proper form for the crawl.  He said something, she nodded, a broad white-toothed smile transformed her face.  

I bent my head to my book and read the second sentence of the first story.

I looked up and toward the other end of the pool.  Younger Girleen's class sat at the edge of the pool, feet dangling, as their instructor took them one by one into the water. Younger Girleen's turn came; her instructor stretched out her arms, without hesitation Younger Girleen jumped into them.  

I bent my head and reread the second sentence of the first story.  

How odd it felt, to be off-stage.  It wasn't a bad feeling, by any means, but it was an unfamiliar one.  To step back and see my children as themselves, to be able to observe them from a remove:  parents of children under the age of six or so are seldom given such opportunities. 

I looked up again.  Elder Girleen hung on the side of the pool, chatting to the girl beside her.  

I bent my head and reread the second sentence of the first story. 

At the other end of the pool, Younger Girleen was steering a kickboard through the water,  serious as some small tug boat.

I looked down at my book.  And closed it.  

I suppose some mothers have the knack — of using their time wisely.  Of compartmentalizing...of making use of every single spare second they've got to keep a more grown-up life afloat.

Some mothers have the knack, but apparently I'm not one of them. 

I know I spend a lot of time — probably too much time – on this blog hashing out the either/or of motherhood and work, the before and after of childlessness and parenthood.  For some folks, these aren't even categories that invite discussion.  They don't matter — or maybe those folks just gotten past those questions.  

Me, I'm still standing here in the shallow end,  wondering how to make sense of my life, now that I'm audience, stagehand, and sometimes, yes,  even bit performer shoring up the leads, all of us participating in such a beautiful, beautiful, mesmerizing show.

 *Are you afraid of going down the drain? asked Shortsighted Mama when we first started having this "situation." Oh yeah, said Shortsighted Mama's higher-IQ'd offspring, grasping that tow rope of explanation thrown out so handily, even though such a thought had never occurred to her before).  

Pool Digressions, Part I

— Writing about driving??? an astute reader might ask.  —This woman thinks she writes a lot about driving?  Geez, her last six or so posts talk about the swimming pool! Not to mention the fact that we've visited that tired old that-was-then (before children), this-is-now (after them) rumination before.  

The astute reader who pointed this out would be right, of course.  I could retort it's my blog and I'll repeat myself if I want to, but I've only got about two people reading this who come to this site of their own free will and not because they're searching for information on potty training by the signs. God knows, I don't want to alienate them.  Besides, I'm a little bugged by this pattern myself.  

Ah ha!  Therein lies the rub of blogs, or one of them at least. Off-the-cuff, written on-the-fly, or seemingly so, blogs might be most seductive in their immediacy.  They're not life by any means, but they're more like the verbal equivalent of some running video-cam left pointed at a room than any writing that came before them. 

We live in such a segmented world.  A television channel devoted only to science fiction? Another only to labor-and-delivery stories?  Who would've thought it? There are better examples (or at least more bizarre ones) out there, but you get the gist.

Though saying I've chosen "writing" and "motherhood" as my beat (with digressions now and then into nature writing) implies a bit more agency about the decision to start this blog than there actually was,  I am writing within certain (self-imposed) confines.  It's a little like writing a sonnet, or a  villanelle:  because of the structural rules, each bears a family resemblance to the next.  And because of the requirements of the form, a lot is whittled away.  

And in my case, what seems to be left once all that whittling has taken place seems to be ruminations about youth, and the swimming pool.   

But as we all know,  the first axiom trotted out in a writing class is always this:  write what you know. 

And right now — apologies to everyone reading this stuck in an overly-air conditioned office out there somewhere — if I know anything, I know the pool.  

My Transformation into a Pod Person is Now Complete

One of the great sadnesses in Elder Girleen's life, in fact, her largest cross to bear, is that we possess neither a satellite dish or cable TV, which means we don't get the Disney Channel.  Since we don't have the Disney Channel, she can't watch Hannah Montana.  Two years ago I'd never even heard of Hannah Montana, and I'm still not entirely clear on all the details, but I think you can watch Hannah Montana on the Disney Channel.  I'm not sure. 

Hannah Montana is often mentioned in the same breath as High School Musical, but Elder Girleen tells me they are different phenomena.  I know that my ignorance in these matters is about the same as if, thirty years ago, my own mother had turned to me and asked if the B-52s and Devo were the same band. While she put air quotes around the word band,  so that I'd know that she considered what I was listening to music only in the loosest sense of the word.  

Actually it's not exactly the same, because I cared about this sort of thing when I was thirteen, and Elder Girleen is... six.  

But Hannah Montana is the bomb, as anybody reading this already knows.  At Elder Girleen's elementary school, which — multicultural, scruffy, arty —can sometimes resemble the school in the movie Fame, kids are welcome to sign up to perform at the school-wide Morning Meeting after announcements and the Pledge of Allegiance (after their offering has been vetted by the principal, of course), and about a week ago, Elder Girleen came home and announced that she and several friends would be performing today and her dad and I had better be there.  

We won't even go into the fact that I have a hard time grasping that my elder daughter, who, as far as I'm concerned, was still in diapers just yesterday, now has an entire social life that I know nothing about.  (They practiced this?  They've arranged for music?  But they can't even feed themselves!)

The main thing is that this morning, Elder Girleen and three friends climbed up on the stage in the auditorium in their school and when they announced that they were going to sing a Hannah Montana song, the entire student body groaned appreciatively with one voice, as if those four six-year-old girls had just gotten up there and announced that they were going to give away free ice cream.  

That's the power of Miley Cyrus.  The librarian took the CD they handed her, found the track they wanted, and away they went.  They'd even made up choreography.  Or maybe they hadn't, maybe they were mimicking choreography one of them saw on the Disney Channel, but since we don't have the Disney Channel, I don't know that, and let me tell you, a choreographed dance is that much more meaningful to a parent if you think your own child came up with the moves.

The song they sang was "This is the Life," which until the moment they opened up their mouths, I would have considered a prime throw-away bit of bubble gum pop. 

The chorus goes like this:

This is the life!  Hold on tight!

And this is the dream

It's all I need!

You never know where you'll find it

And I'm gonna take my time, yeah

I'm still getting it right

This is the life

Elder Girleen stood up on the stage and sang her heart out, and what was pablum magically became profound, at least for about two minutes.  

This is the life.   

Hold on tight.   

 

  

  

Weather Reports: Spring and Siblings

Mid-May.  How did we get here so fast?  The trees to be seen from the curve of the window arabesque-and-reverse in the cold front, or what passes for one this time of year, blown in last night. Newly-leaved; as graceful as girls in spring dresses.  

Mid-May. The blackberries fingering the ditches are laden with knot-like white blossoms.

Mid-May.  A couple of weeks ago I retrieved from the attic and unpacked the box labelled Clothes: Age 3, so that Younger Girleen would have shorts and skirts and sundresses for the summer. Sitting on the floor of her room unfolding them was like thumbing through a photograph album:  oh, the dress Elder Girleen was wearing the night she had her first S'more, that week we spent at the beach...the skirt that arrived in the mail from Godmother M... When Elder Girleen was three, she might as well have been seven:  I had no frame of reference but younger:  three-years-old and she seemed grown-up, enormous.  

At the same age, Younger Girleen is still a baby.  So little!  We carry her around like she's a newborn. Those hand-me-down clothes seem so diminutive, so "cute."*

I was an older sibling myself, and I found my parents' laxness regarding my younger brother such a bitter pill to swallow!  I mean, the first PG movie I got to see in the theatre was The Bad News Bears — I was probably eleven.  My brother, a mere 8 1/2 at the time:  what was the first PG movie he ever saw?  Bad News Bears.  I undertook a careful accounting and the results were clear:  he got to be the baby but at the same exact time he got all the perks that should have gone only to me, being older.  No fair!

 Yesterday, I was putting away clean laundry and discovered a stash, a cache, at the back of Elder Girleen's underwear drawer.  There, carefully tucked at the back, were at least half of the 3T skirts and shirts I'd unpacked for Younger Girleen two weeks ago.  

But these are too little for you, I pointed out to Elder Girleen (secretly impressed by the extent of her subterfuge).

But I LOVE them, she said.  They were my baby clothes.  

I thought of the way teams retire jerseys in commemoration.  They were yours, I agreed and closed the drawer, letting them stay there, an homage to her younger self.    

*I would say that girl's clothes reach the pinnacle of cuteness at size 3T.   

  

Drinking from the Motherhood Cup

Way back in those early days when I only had one child and that child was a babe-in-arms and my house seldom rang with conversations along the lines of

Elder Girleen: P, you're bothering me! You're in TIME OUT

Younger Girleen: Arghhhh! You Poopy Head! Moommmeee, A says I'm in TIME OUT.

I'd observe families that contained elementary school-aged children with the internal equivalent of slackjawed wonder. Not because I was wondering how on earth they managed but more because they might as well have been aliens from another planet. There I was, fretting about sleep and how many dirty diapers my kid had, attending playgroups where folks debated types of diapers and the dangerous outgassing caused by miniblinds hung in a nursery — and in the very same universe these folks were attending soccer games every single Saturday morning of their lives, being Girl Scout leaders, explaining to kindergarteners what drugs were (think about how hard that actually is), carpooling, baking things for bake sales.

They were brash, they were loud, and occasionally they had our sedate little family of three over for dinner, when they carried on heated discussions about politics at the same time as a three-year-old created an extremely hands-on art installation out of his mashed potatoes and a seven-year-old had the sort of very verbal crisis that is caused by being six or seven and having a brain that is way too big and moves way too fast for the emotional wellbeing of anyone within a ten mile radius.

This morning I was up at the crack of dawn putting a pot roast in the crockpot (the way I cook with a crockpot doesn't really lessen my labor, it just moves it to another time, say, 6:25 in the morning); as I write this people are dropping off eggs for the neighborhood egg hunt tomorrow, which I somehow became the organizer for ("And I ask — how did I get here? This is not my beautiful house; this is not my beautiful wife...") and I've just realized that the neighborhood egg hunt, which used to consist of about seven kids, may be extremely successful this year, so much so that the older kids of which there used to be NONE in our neighborhood may run roughshod over the tiny toddling one-year-olds whose parents are imagining this egg hunt as a lovely spring photo opp. I've also realized that one of those bulls in the china shop will probably be my own offspring.

One of the most overused platitudes around would have to be that annoying old chestnut before you judge a (wo)man, walk a mile in their moccasins but sayings become old chestnuts because they're especially apt, right?

I can't think of a single place where more shoe-trading goes on than Parenthood World. If I said this strange and wonderful place I find myself in now had heightened my ability to empathize I would sound like a saint or something, and that I most definitely am not. But because of it, the thread of my life has been more tightly woven into the fabric I only know to call community.

It's a beautiful tapestry, isn't it?

State of the Union, February 26, 2008

Elder Girleen's philosophy of life might be Get Down and Boogie (when it's not It's No Fair!) but Younger Girleen, who, though she looks much like her sister, is her own little person, swaggers through life like a pirate. 

I'm often dumbstruck with admiration at this  joie de vivre, but I also find the take-no-prisoners approach to life a little exhausting.  If no guns for hostages is the way you should approach toddler terrorists, despite our best intentions, the Husband and I may have lost the fight.  At the age of 2+, Elder Girleen was mercurial but easily distractible; Younger Girleen,  on the other hand, has never once in her short life forgotten anything once she set her mind to it.   

Right now she's finally settled down into a nap, and as I tiptoed out of her room after reading The Bears' Picnic for the umpteenth time I realized how quickly the earth spins on its axis and how fast the time goes.  Soon, no matter how strong my denial about the necessity of it is, she will have to sleep in a big girl bed.  The nap that's my daily reprieve has probably only a few short months before it's history.   (If I'm going to write the draft of a novel while my toddler naps I better get cracking.)    All this will happen whether I actively facilitate or not.  We are here right now, and soon we will be there. 

There is something very soothing about this.  One of the bonuses of having a second child is that it puts you firmly in your place, and I mean that in the best of possible senses.  With the first child, I earnestly read parenting books and thought it was all up to me.  With the second one, I understand that I'm not actually Master of the Universe.  This is humbling but liberating at the same time, and you're welcome to remind me that I thought so when I start going through the four stages of grief (Denial, Bargaining, Anger, Acceptance) over the loss of her nap, probably right about the time that school lets out for the summer.   

Introducing the Mom Who Can Screw Up Cake-Mix Cupcakes

Here it is, 4:50 p.m. on Valentine's Day, and Elder Girleen is working off her sugar high at dance class. Younger Girleen, who missed her nap due to parental attendance at the class "valentine's dance-party" at the elementary school, is sleeping.

This time of day, Younger Girleen shouldn't be doing this, in fact, moms among the readership are thinking to themselves, Oh, she can't DO that. She must be woken IMMEDIATELY! the way viewers of a horror film groan when the heroine goes out jogging alone late at night. Doesn't she see the danger ahead? Don't I?

I say Damn the Torpedoes and let the baby sleep.

Comments I heard moms make today, Valentine's Day:

Oh, you MADE valentines!

Oh, you remembered the kids had to BRING valentines!

Oh, I need a nap.

I know in my heart of hearts that scissors out in the momosphere have been busy crafting beautiful things for Valentine's Day but because I seem to have become preoccupied with revealing the dings in every Pristine Surface, let me assure you that ours weren't in that category. They were nothing more than hearts cut out of cardstock, on which Elder Girleen had written her classmates' names, and they were lovely, they were fine.

At least until 7:12 last night. Which was when Elder Girleen realized that they would be terrible, awful, suitable only for throwing in the garbage — unless each and every one had a "poem" written on the back of it. The poem was

Roses are red,
violets are blue,
sugar is sweet,
and so are you.

I admired the sentiment and the creativity she was displaying but it was now 7:23. The bathwater was running, there are fifteen children in Elder Girleen's class, and above and beyond all that, she's in kindergarten, and any parent of a kindergartener knows just how laborious the writing process is: that poem wasn't even going to fit on the back of those valentines.

It took until about 8:30 to talk her down from the ledge of the building on that one (a family effort, Younger Girleen's contribution: "Sister, be HAPPY!")

Once both kids were really asleep, Husband and I had an hour-long discussion about Elder Girleen's recent trip to the dentist and the discovery that braces are an option for six-year-olds, then Younger Girleen woke up for an hour in the middle of the night, and then presto, chango! we're up and at 'em, and it's Valentine's Day.

Because I had spent the night before Valentine's Day contemplating Elder Girleen's need for braces before her permanent teeth come in rather than taking care of business, the first thing I had to do once the Husband and Elder Girleen had left for work and school was to make cupcakes for the "dance-party" Elder Girleen's class would be having in the afternoon.

Occasionally I have moments where I think to myself I am MOM, hear me roar!, and completely disregard the Rule of Threes, and this morning was one of them.

The Rule of Threes is simple: Multi-tasking is all well and good and two things can sometimes be accomplished at the same time. But three? Not humanly possible.

Younger Girleen was eating a late breakfast. I needed to make cupcakes. I needed to make some phone calls. We needed to be out the door in 45 minutes. Can everything that's supposed to happen, happen? Piece of cake (sorry -- cupcake)!

Organic Wild Puffs cereal on the floor
Child cries
Phone clenched between shoulder and ear,
Mom lugs standing mixer into kitchen

These were cake-mix cupcakes. I didn't have very high expectations for how they tasted: I just wanted them to look like cupcakes. NIce domed cupcake tops. Instead, what I pulled from the oven was 24 cupcakes kinda become one.

After surgery on them, we ended up with 12 fallen apart and in the garbage and 12 ready for the party, and we happily careened on with our day, which would end up including Younger Girleen flipping backwards out of a chair onto the concrete floor of a coffee shop, saving herself from concussion by biting her tongue instead; the double-mom tackle attempt semi-successful in that we stopped the force of her fall and avoided the emergency room and only spilled a water glass in the process, instead of two lattes, a plate of bagels and a plate of quiche.

And all that before we even got to the Kindergarten Class Dance-Party.

Which consisted of 15 kindergarteners who could care less whether cupcakes look like something out of Martha Stewart Living and just needed to wolf down some sugar before they could get down and boogie.

Which they did. Earlier in the day they'd decorated part of their classroom with a disco ball and black construction paper taped to the windows. One of their two teachers got "Who Let the Dogs Out" queued up on her ipod. The other turned off the light.

It was a kiddie rave, a kindergarten mosh pit, it was the future: and it was beautiful. Little Boy J, whose dance style included some interesting travolta-esque moves (me to his mom: does your husband dance like that? her: oh, yes, it has been known to happen). Little Boy j 2, who recently had his hair cut in a big boy hair cut, and who, when he played excellent air guitar, looked like nothing so much as a newly-buzz-cutted army recruit cutting loose on the dance floor in the bar on the base. Little Boy J3, who has got some crunkin' moves and in a few short years will break some hearts. Little Girl A, who pogos toward the ceiling like she's going touch heaven. Little Girls T and H and K and C, who are now dancing in a circle to Hannah Montana, and who run over to include Little Girl E, who is feeling shy.

Us grown-ups are all so scared we're going to screw things up. The mom who, when she said to me "oh, you made valentines!" and was thinking "and I didn't!" The mom who said "oh, you remembered to send valentines" and was thinking "and screw-up that I am, I FORGOT." Me, who made some ugly cupcakes and was late for everything and caused a scene in the coffee shop with my crying child.

I don't know how I managed it, but this post is a blending of both the Wry Jocularity School of Parenthood Writing and Maudlin Momhood Sentiment. Doesn't matter. Sometimes it's good to be reminded: You gotta dance like there's nobody watching.

And Now We are (Almost) Six...

As of this time tomorrow we can tally up six years of life for Elder Girleen! Six years of parenthood for the Husband and myself! Almost three years of sisterhood for Younger Girleen! The world spins on its axis, time moves inexorably forward. Life is good.

When Elder Girleen turned one, I started a ritual, which was to write her a birthday letter every year. This makes me sound like I have my shit together a lot better than I actually do, in fact, it almost makes me sound like one of those uber-moms you read about in magazines or crafty blogs who do beautiful and meaningful things for and with their kids while the rest of us are down in the weeds wiping snot-nosed faces and wondering what happened to our youths (or putting together homemade valentines all alone while the kids who were supposed to benefit from the project pull the cat's tail out of boredom).

So just in case you're forming that kind of opinion about me from reading this, just remember that this too is a narrative, and think upon the pristine surface it displays.

Most years, I read over the birthday letter I've just written and cringe, because it sounds so silly. But with time, everything acquires a lovely patina. And because of that, and because virtual space has become such a good way to document and save and organize things, I was tempted to use this space as the piece of paper this year's letter is written on.

But then, on second thought...

What you write to your first born and what you write for posterity and what you write for a blog are all very different things. Right now I"m doing some freelance work that involves reading a lot of personal essays or manifestos or ... I'm not sure what you'd call them... (and I won't be any less vague than that) and — talk about the Wry Jocularity School of Parenthood Writing!!!

Maybe it's not just parenthood that lends itself to such a genre: all the essays I'm reading right now are pretty wry and jocular. And there's a time and a place for that, but .... you got to be careful about these things.

I'm sure there are many social, political, and aesthetic reasons why Wry Jocularity (I know I'm just as guilty of it as the next mom, so I"m not throwing stones!) has become such a cultural shorthand, but I think I'd have to put the "internets" at the top of the list as a factor.

Anything written for online consumption is, rather overtly or not, addressed to some collective but nebulous "we." And just as you'd probably narrate a story differently for a group of people gathered within earshot at a cocktail party than you would for your best friend, narrative undergoes a seachange once it becomes blog fodder.

This is not necessarily bad. I love the various blogs I visit or stumble upon and I'm finding that having one myself has jump-started my creative life in a lot of ways.

But the heartfelt letter addressed to one person, the short stories... I hope they won't become the babies thrown out with the bathwater as we move toward spending more and more of our lives online.

The Pursuit of Happiness...(Dispatches from the Front)

Younger Girleen is currently very interested in figuring out the concept of Happiness (and the concept of unhappiness, for that matter).

Are you happy? she asks. Are you not happy? When something doesn't go her way, she roars like a small lion and then turns her tear-stained face toward me, sobbing I'm NOT HAPPY. It turns out that she's one of those children capable of hyperventilating the second she starts crying, so she can barely get the words out, and that makes it just that much more heart-wrenching.

The endearing thing is that, a minute or two later, after I've hugged her, or distracted her, or read her If You Take A Mouse to the Movies just one more time, she looks at me earnestly and says: I'm happy now.

She is wonderfully self-possessed, and not just that, she has lightning-fast powers of recovery. What if we were all that articulate, and wouldn't it be great if reading If You Take a Mouse to the Movies (something I've read until my eyeballs could fall out) could change your mood so quickly?

I know I'll forget things like this before I know it (poor, Elder Girleen, I already forgot most of her cute two-isms!), so just for posterity's sake:

Oatmeal has been transformed into Eatmeal.

Daddy, daddy she wailed the other night. I need a Kleenex. I got BURGERS.

Ask a Silly Question...

Me to Younger Girleen:  We don't bite people!  Why did you bite (Elder Girleen) on the back?

Younger Girleen to Me:  Because I couldn't bite her on the front.

Snippets

Yes, I've been a lame blogista the past few weeks.  Sometimes life gets in the way. Held a tamalada (tamale-making party) a few weeks ago (causing me to be more intimate with pig than I've ever been before:  I'm here to tell you you really don't want to eat tamales more than one or twice a year); then Elder Girleen and I squandered The Husband's last frequent flyer points with a whirlwind wonderful weekend visiting friends in The Big Apple.    

So, per the New Yorker, we've already established that diaries are full of dross; blogs, blather. What do you call it when you simply recount your life?  David Sedaris and Jerry Seinfeld discovered this long ago, but if nothing else, blogging has made me realize that  riffs about nothing may be inherently more comedic than ... well, life.  

This may be why the Wry School of Parenthood Writing is so popular and pervasive in the blog world.  The absurd is funny.  The day-to-day is just ... the day-to-day. 

In the homestretch to Christmas, though, I've got nothing going on but the day-to-day.  

And really, now that I think about it, what a jaded, crazy world we live in that I would breathe the words day-to-day and trip to New York in the same few paragraphs.  And since this will float around attached to my name for eternity, let me set the record straight:  we don't actually jaunt off to Manhattan on a regular basis.  

Back in the dark ages B.C. (Before Children), my mother, fretting about my advancing age and seeming diffidence about having offspring, would say Oh, but you get to experience childhood all over again!  (This wasn't her only persuasive argument by any means; she was also fond of saying but I want to be a grandmother!).  At the time, because I had no experience of childhood but a child's I was unmoved.  The thing I remembered most about my childhood was my painful overwhelming shyness.  No way did I want to experience that again.

The lovely, scrumptious center of the candy-coated experience that was our trip to NY was a matinee showing of Mary Poppins, not just Elder Girleen's first experience of Broadway but mine as well.  This tells you just how much the world has changed:  she is five, I'm 10 days away from 43.   

At the end of the performance, when the actress that plays Mary Poppins soars up and over the audience on wires, her umbrella unfurled, I glanced over at Elder Girleen.  She was clapping wildly and her eyes shone like stars.  In fact, veering into sentimental territory, you could practically see her soul shining out through her eyes.  She was completely and utterly happy.

Oh, I realized, so that was what my mother meant.  It's not just that you get to re-experience childhood when you have children, it's that occasionally you get to re-experience childhood within the context of your battle-hardened adult life.  

And that might be the most magical thing I've ever experienced.  

The Turn of The Screw

Those who know me best know I have this thing about ghost stories. Not only do I love them pure and simply, so much so that in spite of all the navel-gazing I can engage in, I've never even bothered to examine why I might be so drawn to them, I love the sort of conversational down-time that leads people to reveal ghost stories to one another.

Luckily (or not, depending upon how you view things), I've had plenty of employment chock-full of the sort of heel-cooling that lends itself to the telling of ghost stories. Nothing like cleaning national park cabins in the rain to get two maids making beds in the mood for swapping ghost stories! Smoke breaks from waiting tables: also a good source. Ditto long aimless car trips taken in your twenties.

I've never heard a bad ghost story, because even the most rudimentary snippets of one carry so much cultural weight that you can pretty much fill in the blanks yourself. Even the worst storyteller can raise the hairs on the back of your neck with a few choice ghostly sentences.

Stay-at-home-momdom, it turns out, sometimes involves that same sort of downtime, particularly when one spends a lot of time pushing a stroller in the company of other moms. Taking walks for over five years, I've heard fascinating things (all to be kept private for the sake of the tellers) over the years.

Yesterday, while walking, I learned that someone who knows someone that I know is being troubled by ghosts. The family is newly moved into an aging grande dame of a Victorian house that when they purchased it was sadly in need of a face lift, which, threats of divorce and bankruptcy aside, they were thrilled to deliver.***

The house is now freshly-painted, wired for electronics, pristine, lovely.

But late at night, after the rest of the family has gone to sleep, the mother of the house has begun hearing what sounds like the rattle and turn of an ornate flourish of brass doorknob, the one attached to a particular closet door in the upstairs hallway. She tends to hear the noise most often when she's brushing her teeth. She rushes out of the bathroom and peers down the hallway: nothing but late night and sleeping house. Goes back into the bathroom to rinse and spit, and there it is again, that small insistent rattle.

The closet, the friend who knows the friend tells me, is the only interior door in the house that had a sturdy latch on it, placed at adult height.

What do you want to bet, the friend tells me as we walk along, that that was the Victorian time-out closet?

I'm too lazy to look it up, but wasn't it the presence of a child in a ghost story that Henry James considered the turn of the screw? Ghosts are all well and good but throw a kid into the mix: well, now you're cooking with gas!

Lately, I've been spending a lot of time sitting on the floor of the bathroom while Younger Girleen fumbles toward figuring out potty-training (this will come as no surprise to astute readers). I mean a lot of time. In fact, I spend more time sitting on the bathroom floor conversing with Younger Girleen while she sits on the potty than I probably do on anything else right now (this may be why I'm so concerned about effective use of my free time).

This afternoon we were having one of our periodic bathroom klatsches when Younger Girleen looked up.

Daddy's here! she said brightly.

Daddy's at work, I explained.

Then who's that man?

What man?

That man I hear talking?

Where is he talking?

In the back yard.

What is he saying? I pursued, curious.

This took a little thought on Younger Girleen's part. He's saying Mama, she said. He's saying Mama, mama, I want my mama.

God help me, I actually stood up and flicked back the curtain and peered out into the back yard.

Everybody wants their Mama, even ghosts in the backyard.

***Interestingly, the house is in the neighborhood that was also the location of the very best ghost story I ever heard, told around a campfire at Big Bend. I've concluded this particular neighborhood is Atlanta's ghostliest, but local readers should feel free to put in their votes...

Just Put Me On the Cover of Bad Mommy Monthly (Repeat Once More, With Feeling)

Last night, Younger Girleen was troubled by a very particular sort of rash that made her a very unhappy camper. How do I know this? Because between 11 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. she sobbed out at intervals "Mommy, Daddy! My bauble hurts!"

First off, I suggest we ALL begin referring to our girly parts as "baubles" (If we are of that portion of society that possesses them). Authors of Mother-Blogs I've found myself reading occasionally wax anxious over what name they should teach their girl children for the the body parts that make them particularly girlish (fathers do not have this anxiety about their sons' body parts, and actually, now that I think about it, mothers probably don't either). But now, hooray— here's Younger Girleen, to save the day! In my book, bauble wins hands-down over "front bottom," a moniker a mom acquaintance actually once uttered in my presence. Without laughing.

(Even my parenthetical expressions have parentheses! This is a writerly talent on a par with being able to manage flashbacks within flashbacks, right?)

All this being said, nature abhors a vacuum, as we all know, and there's no vacuum like the brain of a mother who's lying in bed, every nerve tingling, waiting for the next cry of a child that she knows has not had done with crying for the night. Last night mine quickly became the perfect space for the Bad Mommy Spectre to insinuate herself into into.

O, Bad Mommy Spectre, my old friend, where've you been? I was missing you!

First things first, the Bad Mommy Spectre let me know in no uncertain terms that Younger Girleen most certainly had this particular rash because I had fallen down on the job. In fact, if I'd really been on top of things, she wouldn't even be in diapers at this point. Bad Mommy Spectre and I then moved on at a merry clip to revisit the conversation I'd had earlier in the day with Elder Girleen's teacher about the fact that seeing a picture taken of herself on a recent field trip with her eyes closed had forced Elder Girleen to have a complete and utter emotional breakdown for a portion of the school day.

Bad Mommy Spectre and I then hand-in-hand revisited the rest of my day (Bad Mommy Spectre shares some traits with the Ghost of Christmas Past from A Christmas Carol) and determined that the chaos of the dinner table, the kvetching, the refusal to let certain foods touch certain lips, the penchant for getting out of one's chair and making a complete circuit of the house before sitting back down are of course all due to my neglect of my duties.

We then dwelled upon the fact that Younger Girleen's best friend is moving in March (he's her best friend mainly because his mother is the mother I most often choose to hang out with, but still...) and because of my lack of attention to her social life, I have no idea who we will invite to her birthday party next May. If I were a good mother, I wouldn't be walking us over to X's house so I can have coffee with X's mother while Younger Girleen and X play, I would be forging friendships with the mothers of two-and-a-half-year-olds who won't be moving any time soon. Even if I don't like them!

Even recounting all this makes me tired. You get the picture, though.

Bad Mommy Spectre's best friend is Bad Writer Spectre. Having less material to work with these days, Bad Writer Spectre just shows up every so often to tell me I suck, and then wanders off for a smoke break.

Go, Frere

The past month or so, my day begins with the sound of a small hiccup of crying.

Poor Younger Girleen, it must be those molars!

About 5:30 in the morning, she abruptly and wordlessly mourns for a moment (the operative word is wordlessly, not silently: she whimpers). Then: Go Frere? Go Fair? No Fair! she grieves sorrowfully. Sleep is a river that carries her small boat along, and for a second there, we hit an eddy strong enough to wake her. Then, just like that, she subsides back into sleep.

Because I'm her mother, I, on the other hand, am up for the day. And because I'm her mother, I know exactly where she got that pronouncement (astute readers that you are, I know you know it too!)

Her elder sister. Who uses it like a teenager, and dear god, she's only five!

Yesterday, Younger Girleen and I saddled up to run errands while Elder Girleen was at school.

Where we going, Mommy?

Shortsighted and foolish woman that I am, I tell her the way I'd tell Friend J, sitting in the passenger seat beside me:

First, we're going to the coffee shop so Mama can run in and get a cup of Special Blend Coffee*** Then to the florist that has the show of paintings by a mom-turned-painter Mama heard about. Then to look for Grandmommy's birthday present!

Sounds like a blast to me.

Go Frere? Go Fair? NO FAIR! Younger Girleen pronounces.

You'll be happy to know I conceded the point and aborted the mission. After the coffee, of course; every mom's allowed her vice.

But oh, to be a younger sibling! Always toddling to keep up. Immersed at an unsuitable age at media aimed at her sister's generation (the options are pretty benign around here --- I'm talking SuperWhy? on PBS). Where's Sister? she says on rising. Where's Sister? she wonders before she slips into sleep at night. She's the mascot of her sister's kindergarten class. (Will she ever get big? a boy in the class asks.)

Yes, they torment each other, but oh, how they love each other! Mom and Dad are constants, but Sister: she's the pinch of salt that pulls the family dish together!

All of us with siblings, we must have been that way once.

And then we grew up.

That early bond, though: it's not a bad thing to think about on the eve of Thanksgiving, as the season when families are at their most dysfunctional gets underway.


*** Occasionally when I order my Special Blend Coffee, the barista says oh, yes, of course you can have a LARGE SPECIAL FRIEND.