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.

Coffee Break

This site made me laugh. Especially myth number eight.

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.

All I Want For Christmas...

... is to be Judith Warner.  

If you don't have children, you probably don't bother to read her column.  If you do, chances are high you already read her column this morning.  

But... here's today's.  

OK, maybe she isn't completely in touch with the cultural zeitgeist (tho I think she is) but she's definitely got her finger on my maternal pulse these day.  

Peace out and Happy Days.  

Word of the Day

Abnegation.

A word I’ve never had the slightest opportunity to use. Denial, the dictionary has to say about it, particularly self-denial.

I have so little self-denial! a person might say coyly when presented with — particularly this time of year — a plate of goodies, just before they reconsider — oh, well, on second thought! — and reach a hand toward a particularly tempting bite.

Other than that usage — so blithe, so redolent of pop psychology — I can’t imagine a single way self-denial might be inserted into conversation: it’s a concept that’s been stripped of meaning, an act long ago fallen out of fashion.

I’m certainly not bemoaning that fact. To practice self-denial — what would be the point? What would it be for, other than …. I dunno. To prove a point? For one’s own good? You give up smoking, you turn down a rich piece of cake, you practice self-denial. Maybe you exchange all the old-style lightbulbs in your house and turn down the heat.

Our culture keeps the concept of self-denial firmly on a transactional level. You give something up — you get something in return. You cut the sugar from your diet, you are gifted with… (I suppose)… better health.   You simplify your life, you're blessed with... tranquility and peace.

So abnegation means self-denial, and there’s little point (who cares?) discussing it.

But then there’s the verb form of the word …

Four days ago, after I gave up on driving so aimlessly and at the same time so purposefully through the neighborhood with my freight of sleepless child and all my complicated baggage — of what I needed, of what she needed, of what should happen, of what was most important — the word self-abnegation all of a sudden seemed scrawled across my afternoon in bold, black, foot-high, maybe even flaming, letters.

To abnegate: To deny, renounce; to surrender, to relinquish.

So Latinate, so medieval! And the interesting thing about the definition is the way it changes our focus from the transactional nature of self-denial (at least as we see it these days, hair shirts having gone, also, out of fashion) to something much more difficult, and powerful: the struggle. If denying, renouncing, surrendering or relinquishing isn't the hardest frigging work you’ve ever engaged in then I sure don’t want your job, whatever it might be.

In parenthood, one’s will continuously butts up against something so much larger and stronger than it is — a life force? A universe? —  and there is something downright… religious about the — I don’t know what else to call it — self-abnegation that almost always is the lesson learned.  There is nothing concretely transactional about the self-abnegation of parenthood:  I mean, I can sacrifice my desires for my child's well-being until I'm blue in the face, but it's not ever ever ever going to get me back into a size 6 pair of jeans. 

This sort of sacrifice is dangerous stuff. This is poking at the dark heart of motherhood — here there be dragons! — with a particularly strong stick. This is mixing the theological (or the spiritual) with the everyday, and to do so is anathema (interestingly enough, another religious word) to the people and the culture we are these days.

Is the self-abnegation that is part and parcel of parenthood good or bad? I’m not saying ( I don’t know; I made a C in Existential Philosophy at UGA in 1983). It just is, as loathe as we are to acknowledge it.

A couple of other religiously-connotated words:

Fanaticism.
Fervor.

Oh, they’re not words connected to us, (even should we have a religious affiliation, these things being also these days somewhat out of vogue) but belong to other people’s lives, across oceans and far away.

But throw those sorts of words into the parenthood mix and what do you get?

A culture where parent participation is sometimes elevated to a byzantine art?  Where guilt can be paramount?  One where places exist where parents must undergo interviews to get their kids in preschool?  

Wow, that world's not oceans away from us ... it's right down the street, at least from the house I most often find myself living in! 

Any state of being that requires extremes from an individual ... may also pull forth extremes of behavior from within them as well. In short, if you expect a person to put hours and hours and hours of time every week into their childs' ... school... sport... whatever... maybe you're going to have to not just tolerate but embrace some fervor and fanaticism as well.       

Of the Weekend, and Such

The Husband and I had an interesting "conversation" this morning during breakfast, though I say "conversation" in quotes because our exchange lasted approximately 30 seconds and was about as deep as a baby pool.  

— How often do you feel guilt? I asked him.

— About once a week.  Why?  How often do you feel guilt?

— Maybe four times a day?   

Setting aside any thoughts you might be having about how this mostly indicates my need for medication, guilt might be one of the differences between — I was going to say a man and a woman, but that's not specific enough — a mom and a dad.  

I feel slightly (not very but just a little) guilty that instead of going to Related Arts Curriculum Night at Elder Girleen's school next week, making dinner for the mother of one of Elder Girleen's classmates who just had a baby, attending a School Work Day, answering Michelle Obama's personal email message to me to man the phone banks, visiting Miss Nell next door (eighty years old and extremely lonely),  I am going off to the Hambidge Center for Artists, where, I imagine, for ten days I'll sleep, walk in the woods, read, research and — god willing — write 7-10 pages a day on my novel.  

But do I feel guilty enough not to go? Not just no, but hell, no.  

Tidbits I've gleaned from typing "Hambidge Center" into Google (or "The Google" as my mom referred to it the other day):  

That the vegetarian dinners the artists there gather for each week night are very very good.  

That it's possibly haunted.

That bear have been seen.  And mice.  (The former outside the studios, the latter inside).  

Though I know home will tug at me every moment I'm there, I'm also as excited as if I were going to Disneyworld.  Actually more so, since I'm extremely disinterested in ever setting foot in Disneyworld.

But because it would be helpful to my loved ones left at home* if before I go I get caught up on the laundry and stock the house with enough food to last a midwestern winter, this entry probably the last you'll hear from me for a few weeks.

But because reading columns in the New York Times by Judith Warner has lately turned my morning coffee-drinking into an even more delicious experience than it usually is , I leave you with her latest, here.  

What with the way politics hangs like a dark cloud on the horizon these days, we all need a reason to laugh.    

*Or because I think it would be helpful to my loved ones left at home.

Routes to Power

So... now that serving as president of your child's PTA is  being touted as a excellent qualification  for serving as Vice President of this country, it seems like as good a time as any to turn our attention to just that... the PTA.  

It's not like I'm an expert or anything.  Yeah, I'm a member of the PTA at Elder Girleen's school but that's mainly because all it required from us was writing a small check at the beginning of the school year.  I actually didn't know we had a choice in the matter:  I thought membership in the PTA was mandatory until this year, when I found out that 20% of the families at our school have chosen to opt out.  As far as I could tell, being a member of the PTA once your children hit elementary school was a prerequisite of motherhood:  you wear sensible shoes, you keep baby wipes in your handbag, you join the PTA.  No questions about it.  

Serving on the PTA in some official capacity, though... that's another thing all together.  A year on the board of Elder Girleen's preschool cured me of any impulses I might've had to volunteer for things like that,  so as far as the inner workings of the PTA goes, I'm about as clueless as the average Joe, who until Sarah Palin gave her past presidency of a school's PTA as a good reason to vote for the McCain/Palin ticket, never gave the PTA a second thought.  

I won't weigh in here the pros or cons of the organization itself (it's always existed, so it has to be worthwhile, right?) -- my interest is more in examining the idea of a position in the PTA as a route to power. 

And for me, the most interesting thing about examining the PTA in that light is just how non-threatening it sounds.  Hey, our moms were in the PTA.  Some of us might've even had moms who served as president of the PTA. It's as American as apple pie!  Whatever things the PTA actually undertakes, it also serves — and maybe this is its most important function? — as a very traditional, feminine way to have, or take, power.  Within its very codified structure, a woman can become very powerful... without neglecting her primary duties as mom (because it's for the children, even though they may be at home with a babysitter during PTA meetings).  Serving as president of the PTA has none of the negative (ie, unfeminine) connotations of ... what?  Community Organizer (sounds vaguely commie-pinko, doesn't it?)  Human Rights Activist?  (ditto).     

If I have little idea what the PTA really does, I have even less of one about what the PTA does at a national level.  But one thing I do know is that a PTA president is probably not making policy. 

When I next need to sit down across the table from a potential employer, will I mention the fact that I served on the board of my child's preschool and sat around conference tables at City Hall East attempting to win City functionaries over to the idea that our neighborhood deserved a park that served as more than a trash heap for malt liquor cans and a play structure that wasn't being partially held together with plastic security webbing?  You bet.  Because whether the outside world chooses to recognize it or not, it's work, and it's important work. And it's as difficult, or more so, than any job I received a paycheck for.  

Whatever genius thought up the McCain/Palin strategy of highlighting Palin's PTA presidency and status as hockey-mom is hoping women will focus on that and not much more.  Wondering what exactly those qualifications have to do with running a country makes you... what?  A sexist?  An elitist?  Someone denigrating women's work?

But here are the facts:  the larger picture doesn't really impact a PTA president.  Reasons a child might need reduced-price lunch, or a family might feel completely incapable of volunteering to organize a bake sale... or an auction... don't have to matter to a PTA president. They might matter to some of them, but they don't have to.   Heck, a PTA president doesn't even need to understand that children or families which such issues exist. 

 

I know, there are so many other scary things going on right now — but gosh, let's be sure to add that one to the list.  

Because I ... Just... Can't... Stop... Myself...

Just another reason why politics belongs on a blog about motherhood.  

Here.  

State of the Union: September 2, 2008

I don't remember if I read this somewhere, or if it's something someone told me, but here's a stat plucked from the ether:  the average blogger (as opposed to the superstar blogger, who makes money from their avocation) keeps a blog going for about six months. 

Who knows what a blogger's ability to keep a blog going for six months means (or, equally,  if it means anything).  Maybe it takes six months to get bored with yourself.  Or maybe it takes six months to run out of anything to say.   Or maybe it takes six months to use up the goodwill of any friends out there in cyberspace who might be checking in on a regular basis.

No, I'm not pulling the plug — though these days I post so infrequently maybe I should.  But the past few weeks, between getting kids to school, keeping carpool schedules straight in my head, helping Elder Girleen weather the slings and arrows of first grade's early days (It's hard! she's wailed once or twice) and assisting Younger Girleen as she navigates the rocky shoals of her newly nap-less state, I've found myself wondering.  Wondering not why? not what's the point? but just wondering. 

OK, maybe why? and what's the point? do play a part in whatever it is that I'm wondering.  

So much of my life never ends up here.  (And maybe that's a good thing, the editoral voice that's never very far from hand chides me.)  Maybe it shouldn't.   The self-professed slant of this was "mixing the water and oil of motherhood and writing" after all. 

But at this particular second, those parameters feel like a bit of a box.  

Maybe it's that motherhood epiphanies are few and far between as you shepherd a child through first grade — it's not kindergarten when everything's new; instead, it's just life.  Or maybe it's that a summer of such active parenting has led me to a fallow fall.  Or maybe there are certain motherhood junctures when one feels the strongest need to give voice:  when the baby is born, when the first one starts school, and now just isn't one of those times.    

Soon enough, I predict, Media Studies scholars will take as their research topics like that, and we'll all be the wiser. 

But in the meantime, what we've got going on around here is just life.  

This morning, Younger Girleen and I took my car to the shop, driving eight lanes of interstate to get there.  Early morning sun palmed the guy-wires supporting the cell towers arrayed along the right-hand shoulder of the road.  A guy in an Expedition, the name Magnolia snaked across one forearm, asked in gestures if I'd let him merge in front of me.  I complied.

One of the things that needed fixing in the car was the radio, which has been on the blink for months.  The mechanic changed a fuse and .... voila!     As we drove back through town, Atlanta suddenly looked like the setting of a movie.  A movie along the lines of The Wire, but a movie all the same.  

Everything looks good when you've got the right soundtrack.  

 

Food For Thought...

First grade.  Those first few weeks as the family transitions back into the school year schedule can be a killer.  Elder Girleen has bags under her eyes like she's been cramming for a final, but honest, Ms. M the First Grade Teacher, she's in bed by eight!  

Last night, though, I know she was up a little later:  I could hear her in her bedroom reading On the Banks of Plum Creek to herself for at least half an hour.  Reading a chapter book.  The second week of first grade.  I myself don't remember much about first grade besides the tedium of Sally, Dick and Jane and the morning nit-check (it being 1970 in small town Georgia after all).  

First grade is just not what it was back then in those primitive days; in fact, a couple of times it has already seemed to me like Elder Girleen's first grade is my first grade experience, completely inverted.  She can read like nobody's business already; I was grinding through books with little more two words on each page at that age.  But on the other hand, I was walking by myself to school.  Elder Girleen can't.  

Her school isn't within walking distance from our house, which makes things easier for me:  I don't have to face any hard choices about whether or not she should.  But every morning when I drive her there or carpool with the neighbor, I think about the way things used to be — the quarter bestowed upon me so I could stop for ice cream at the soda fountain at the pharmacy on the way home, the fact that once I walked all the way home from school backwards, and down one of Athens, Georgia's main artery streets, no less — and the way they are now, when letting a first grader play in the front yard of your house may be a fraught proposition.  

All this is a rich vein to mine.  And Leonore Skenazy, a New York City mom and New York Sun columnist does just that, here. In case you missed the uproar (as I had), Skenazy let her nine-year-old take the subway home from Bloomingdale's without a parental escort and then wrote about the experience for her column.  Two days later she was on the Today Show (this is much worse than ending up on the cover of "Bad Mommy Monthly").  

Not saying I agree with everything she says ... but it is food for thought.   

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.  

Skirted-Suit Ballad; or Summer in the City

Summer hangs heavy.  

I don't mean it hangs heavy on our hands, for this summer Elder Girleen has embarked upon that magical, knobby-kneed, tanned, tangled, sunbleached time of her life when summer lasts only a second, is a whirlwind gust of fun perfumed with chlorine and hot asphalt, and some of that magic rubs off on everyone who comes in contact with her, even me.  

It's just...summer has its own weight,  like hot ripe fruit weighing down a bough.  The city has begun to wear its summer look, frayed around the edges, redolent of garbage.  

Driving back this morning from delivering Elder Girleen at circus camp,  I spotted a tattoo-clad hipster strolling through the 'hood, licking at a bright red popsicle.  At ten in the morning, no less!  Elderly ladies wait beneath black umbrellas at the bus stop.  Even the graffiti scrawled across the flanks of buildings seems to have gone limp in the heat.  

In such circumstances, what's a good mom to do but take her children to the pool?  

I could write a whole 'nother essay about the swimming pool as potential crucible for America's anxieties about race, gender and class, but I suspect it's been done better here.  Besides, years of motherhood have blunted my ability to handle such weighty topics.  

All the same, I have to admit that this summer I've gotten a probably inordinate amount of pleasure from the fact that we have yet to pay our way into a swimming pool.  The City of Atlanta pools offer "free swim" periods daily; generous friends with memberships have cheerfully allowed us to take advantage of them.

Like anywhere else where groups of people who usually don't rub shoulders find themselves in close proximity with one another, the pool can be a fascinating place:  what with its gangs of languid teenage girls who hug the edges of the pool like shimmering schools of fish, all those oiled up bodies littering the concrete (are they dead or are they sleeping?), and the stalking, whistle-bedecked presence of the lifeguards.  It was a stroke of genius that made writer Tom Perrotta set so much of his black-comedy of domestic life Little Children at the swimming pool. 

Last weekend we attended a birthday party held at a pool and here's a trick question:  how could you tell the mothers from the childless women?  Not necessarily by their bodies (some mothers, though I'm not one of them, have regained their pre-baby shapes); not necessarily by their position at the pool (frantically rubbing sunscreen on someone or prone with a paperback).  

No, you know the mommies by their swimsuits.  I would say that in this, the summer of 2008, in Atlanta, GA, the mommy who does not own a sporty little skirted swimsuit is an anomaly.  

Lands End may be to blame, seeing as they're the company that single-handedly convinced thirty and forty-something women that the sort of suit formerly seen only on women over sixty who come to the pool decked in swim caps clutching kickboards is a flattering and stylish fashion statement.  

And often they are.  Looking around at all the moms at the pool, I like to tell myself we resemble 1940s starlets confident of their allure despite their swimwear's conservative cut.

  

But then I think:  would I have been caught dead in a swim suit like this in my twenties?  

Last week, I also had the chance to take the Girleens to the pool I haunted as a teenager and college student:  the University of Georgia's outdoor pool.  Which is, in fact, now that I think about it, the pool where I learned to swim, the pool where I hung desperately onto the side and then flung myself across the pool's width  in a rudimentary crawl.  Later in life, I oiled my legs with Hawaiian Tropic, SPF 4 (ah, we were so young then, and so foolish!) at this pool, keeping my eye out for certain members of the opposite sex I knew would soon show up, who would, with the elaborate, diffident habits of their time and gender, stretch out faded towels next to me and ask as if they had no stake in the answer "you goin' to so-and-so's party tonight?"

Oh, the summers spent on some friends' porch, parsing out such conversations! (The boys never said "wanna go with me?" once it was established that one would be going to the party later, they hedged their bets by saying "maybe I'll see you there.") Oh, those summers, when the backyards of the rental houses we all lived in hummed with cicadas and expectations and our hope that something interesting happen, soon!

Back then, I laid out my towel at the far end of the pool, as far away from the faculty families with their splashing children as possible.  So it had always been at the university pool, from time immemorial, and so it was when I took my children there last week.  Families with children in the shallow end near the entrance, near the concession stand and the shady awning. The middle for the lap swimmers going about their serious business:  grad student t.a.s desirous of outracing time and age with a perfect back stroke, retired faculty made bouyant by all that recently-acquired leisure time.  The far end for all the indolent sorts who picked each other up, and cast each other off, all while they gossiped idly, stretching out their long long legs. 

How lucky I am, I realized as I walked my children to the pool's edge, to have had the sort of life where I can see this place again.  Even though now I'm at the near-end of it, in a skirted suit. 

I looked across the long blue expanse of pool from one end to the other, and then I jumped in, becoming, for a moment, weightless.    

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.   

  

Days, of the Motherhood Variety

Sometimes it's easy for me to forget that a blog is a narrative construct as much as any other form of writing that might come down the pike, that it's as shaped and whittled in certain directions as personal essay or short fiction.  To keep a blog may not be art, but it certainly is craft ... and once you start crafting something, you snip and darn and leave things on the cutting room floor.  

But in service of keeping it real, I submit the following "stuff" that's ended up on my cutting room floor lately

• The Husband, having started a new job, now leaves the house at 7 a.m. and returns to it at 7 p.m.  This is not abnormal, this is, in fact, life-and-how-we-live-it for most of America; but I am reeling from our family's new math:  if he sleeps the requisite eight hours, and spends an hour getting ready in the morning, that leaves three hours for him to live the rest of his life in.  And as his home life consists of less, mine consists of more:  more racing kids to schools, more emptying and loading the dishwasher, more errand running, more guilt, more feeling like I seldom converse with anyone over six.  This sounds like kvetching and it is, and wrinkles in the family schedule always iron themselves out, but it's struck me that most people would not consider this "quality time." And this is all the time that most American families have got.  (And our family is blessedly middle-class. Where does that leave single parents, those taking care of aging parents themselves, the blue-collar?)

• Younger Girleen has been laid low by another bout with some sort of toddler ick.

• That means she's napping right now; that also means that she was up at one a.m., three a.m., four a.m., five a.m., and five forty-five a.m.  She went to sleep at 6:20, but by then it was only 25 minutes until Elder Girleen had to get up, so I just gave up.  
• More power to all those folks out there using the internet to figure out how and when to potty-train by the signs:  starting on an auspicious date has given us mishaps just about everywhere you can think of (and if you want to feel sorry for yourself, being on hands and knees cleaning up human feces gives you the perfect venue, let me tell you).
  

In the midst of a week where most of my business ended up on the cutting room floor so to speak, being neither pretty nor finely-crafted nor literary nor interesting (instead it was just Life, warts (or poop) and all,  I took a break for a few minutes and checked a friend's blog, which led me to click a link, which led me to learn about a book called The Mother's Guide to Self-Renewal.

My Mother's Day gift to myself is going to be to look at the downloadable fourth chapter.  And I dunno... if you're down in the trenches scrubbing the floor this week, this might help.  

Sometimes "online" connectivity is like a visit to a really good thrift store:  when you least expect it, you find a shirt that fits you perfect, and it only cost a quarter!

One for the Mommy Olympics, or: Too Much Information

It's a parenting truism to say that every and each child in the world is unique, but it's a truism along the lines of people saying "wow, you're life is really going to change," when your bulging belly first begins to reveal that you are pregnant with your first child.  Simple statements both,right?  No — they contain worlds  of complexity.  You think your world's going to change?  You can't even imagine.  No child is like any other?  Why do you think in generations past unskilled, less patient parents than we are sometimes resorted to telling their offspring:  you're no child of mine? 

Elder Girleen and Younger Girleen bear a family resemblance to each other both emotionally and physically, but in a lot of ways they're as different as night and day, and discovering these differences has been a joyful part of the parenthood journey.  When Elder Girleen gets stressed, she gets revv'd up.  When Younger Girleen gets stressed, she falls asleep.  See?  Every child is different.  

But before Younger Girleen's arrival in our lives, my main experience with dealing with the after effects of certain sorts of stomach-related accidents consisted only of owning a cat prone to hairballs.  There's probably a nicer way to put this, but I can't think of it right now:  Younger Girleen is affectionately known around our house as "Our Little Puker." Vomit down the cleavage is a necessary part of motherhood, and I'm happy to say it's not as scarring as you might think.

On Thursday, as sort of a cherry on top of a sundae of a tough week,   Younger Girleen started throwing up all over the back seat of my car while we were stuck in what seemed at the time to be THE WORST ATLANTA TRAFFIC EVER.  We inched forward, she puked, we inched forward, she puked.

The car is her favorite place to engage in this behavior, and first time it ever happened the mopping-up operations almost broke me.  The car seat, the buckles, the sister's car seat, the back of the front seat, the mother, the child!  All over the only new car (now no longer new) I will probably ever own in my life!  And then, the ordeal of putting the car seat cover and buckles back into the car seat frame once they were clean.  It took me almost an hour.  

I realize I've just told you more than you ever had any interest in knowing about my life.  I may have just relegated Younger Girleen to years  of therapy on down the road.  But to who else can I broadcast my pride over the mastery of a new skill but you?

I pulled off the road, stripped a three-year-old, wiped and redressed her with aplomb.  And just now, I put the complication of a Britax car seat cover and its parachute-like array of buckles back together in about 2 minutes tops.  And as I did so, I wondered why did this ever seem hard?  

The feeling of satisfaction was kin to the sort you have when you realize your exercise regimen has taken you from walking one mile to running five.  Or from lifting hand-weights to benchpressing ... whatever... amount.  

I may not be able to benchpress my body weight but I'm a dab hand at the messy side of motherhood, and that must be good for something, right?

Too Weird to Resist Writing About

Over the years, standing in line has apparently held me in good stead, professionally.  I once paid for Bruce Springsteen tickets by writing an article for the Athens, GA weekly paper about waiting line for Bruce Springsteen tickets (article headline:  Born to Stand in Line).   The essay I published a few years back in Brain, Child about waiting in line before preview night at one of intown Atlanta's most (in)famous consignment sales might be one of the more widely-read pieces of writing I've done.  

Given all that, how could I resist saying something about the sight I walked past this morning?  A row of family-type cars parked nose-to-tail along the curb in front of the neighborhood elementary school, hatchbacks tilted up to meet the dawn, minivan doors slid back to reveal welters of sleeping bags and water bottles and  fast food wrappers?  And on the sidewalk, a gathering of unshowered, tousle-headed parents (mostly dads) that eloquently expressed the middle-aged need for coffee?   

 Oh, the blessed ignorance of the childless! Once upon a time, back when I was in that state, the fact that the Georgia lottery funded preschool meant less than nothing to me.  My head was full of weighty matters (which convenience store sold the cheapest cigarettes; what restaurant served brunch at 4 p.m. in the afternoon).  I didn't even know the difference between daycare and preschool.  I didn't even know what preschool was, for God's sake.  I myself had gone to a single year of nursery school before kindergarten back in those dark late-sixties days when parents still occasionally spanked their kids and said "NO, STOP IT!" rather than "That's not okay." 

But I would say that the three topics most engrossing for groups of intown Atlanta parents who don't know each other all that well might be, as follows:

1. Intown real estate:  how much it costs, who's selling it, who's buying it, and whether the restaurant in the ground floor of the latest loft, "green-living" or "live/work" development is child friendly.
2. Sleep:  the parents' lack of it, their children's ability to go without it.
3. Preschools —where to send kids, why to send kids, and, most importantly, how one might to get into a state-funded preschool program the year before kindergarten.    

Why might this be important?  Well...because, thanks to the lottery, it's free? Well... because, if you've got an older child already attending elementary school, it would add years to your life if you only had to orchestrate one drop-off and pick-up a day?  Because, to paraphrase the sentiment from Field of Dreams,  the state of Georgia built it, so you might as well come?

I haven't ever had a dog in the state-funded preschool hunt (elder girleen didn't go, and younger girleen isn't at the age for it), but you can't live in intown Atlanta and not be aware of it.  When Elder Girleen was a baby, I remember a new friend mentioning that she'd gotten up at 4 in the morning to stand in line to sign her older son up for pre-k (as that year before kindergarten gets called) at the school a block away.  That was six years ago:  this year the line began to form at that particular elementary school four days in advance of pre-k registration.  And that's not even a record.  Last year the line started two days even earlier than that.  That's six nights, folks, of sleeping in your car.  Rumor is that this year a group of parents at that school has rented an RV for the duration.

All that happens north of Interstate 20.  South of that divide, in the part of Atlanta some people still consider the wrong side of the tracks, there was no pre-k line until last year.  Last year, it formed the night before.  This year, two nights before. At the rate we're going, nobody's gonna be able to call this the wrong side of the tracks much longer.  

As I type this, parents stand in front of the elementary school in our neighborhood, marking time.  22 hours to go.  Good Lord — I only waited for Springsteen tickets overnight!  The Dylan line in Austin  in 1990 was aided by a six-pack and flirtation.  At least somebody brought a guitar!

Rumor is that next year Atlanta Public Schools may finally distribute spaces in the state-funded pre-k program through a lottery.  Will that be fairer?  More sane?  Yes.  Nobody will miss the line.  But a part of intown Atlanta parenthood that has become more folkloric than any other will be gone.   I doff my hat to local color.     

 

What I Can See from Here (Stories at 6 a.m.)...

...The ornate southern-belle frills of the bank of white azaleas shoring up our yard....

...The light cast against miniblinds in the window of the house across the street that means that a five-year-old in the house slipped out of bed early and is watching cartoons...

...The long-haired walking dude, who patrols the neighborhood with walks before daylight, moving briskly past our house and in the direction of his own...

...garbage day here in the 'hood, when the empty boxes stacked up on the curb either once contained HD televisions or baby gear, a sight that leads straight to the assessment: GENTRIFICATION...

....another sixth birthday party invitation arrived in the virtual mailbox as we embark on an April during which possibly every child in Elder Girleen's class was born...*

————————————————————————————

Spring, the thick of it, when you can reel off the names of things as they flower like telling a rosary —pear to cherry, azalea to dogwood, and now cascading over the rims of abandoned buildings as effervescent as champagne, the wisteria — and our front porch is liberally floured with pollen.  Birds sing up the sun with such zeal the world might as well be newborn. Younger Girleen's preschool is being wracked by the firestorm of controversy and complaint that shakes it every year about this time.*

And yesterday afternoon, I picked up the phone to call a friend at the hospital to schedule the brief visit to welcome her just-born, her first- born, son to the world.

Parents among the readership know the drill: the way you navigate the maze between the parking lot at Piedmont Hospital and Labor and Delivery, which seems deliberately designed to confuse when you're dazed by contractions and labor but a piece of cake once you've had done with all that yourself.  

The way you walk into the hospital room and set down the brightly-colored bag you brought with you, that instead of everything you wish you could tell a woman who just had a baby contains a t-shirt or a dress that will be worn once or twice.

The way you walk over to the sink set into one corner of the tiny room to wash your hands like a surgeon scrubbing up for surgery. 

And then, the way you turn towards the complicated slant of the hospital bed and say Beautiful, beautiful and then, could I hold him a minute?

But by the time I was able to make the phone call and schedule the visit, this friend, who is practical and wise beyond her years, had decided, after hours and hours of labor finally falling asleep with the baby in her arms just long enough for the hospital's photographer to walk into the room and wake her up, to go ahead and check out and head home.

So I missed the ritual hospital visit, but at least I was able to share in the just as important telling of the birth story usually spun out during that visit over the sleeping (or fussing) baby's head.  

Sorry for all the gory details she said when she got to end, which is of course that little human bean, extruded-looking and red-faced but beautiful all the same, strapped into the car seat beside her (they were driving home when I called). 

Why is it that so often we feel we have to apologize for what might be the most important stories we have to tell?  I used to be hip but now I'm just Mommy, a new mother mourned yesterday in an online neighborhood forum I happened to read.  

I remember being twenty-seven or so, unfettered, free, and I and another graduate student sat in a windowless room at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas reading slush for a literary magazine:  oh, that younger self that I once was, who saw things as so cruelly cut-and-dried!  When I cast my eyes over a story that included babies, or birth, or motherhood, my eyes tended to glaze over.  

Not gory at all, I want to say into the phone to my friend who just had a baby. I never get tired of this story. Tell me again.

----------------------------------

*What happened six years and nine months ago that led to this boomlet? Six years and eight months ago, the Towers fell, and as fitting as it would feel, narratively speaking, to explain all these April Birthdays with that fact, the math doesn't quite work.

**All the pillows and stuffed animals from Younger Girleen's classroom are in a black plastic garbage bag on the front seat of my car, newly washed and ready to take back to school, because of this firestorm, which this year involves squirrel encroachment on school territory (inside the water fountain???) along with more usual personnel wrangles and base and baseless discontent.