Summer break is really just a series of encounters with my children. In fact, I’m considering renaming this blog to that very title for the next two months because it may be all this space will hold in these coming weeks.
“That shower took a long time.” She is graced across my pillow with a color scheme of pencils to her exact choosing.
“Well I had to shave. All the hairs, off the body.”
“That’s weird.”
“Well, you’ll have to do it someday.”
“That’s… really weird.”
It kind of is, isn’t it.
“And the ho-o-o-ome, of the-e, bra-a-ave!”
She’s not even close, and who of us ever actually hit that note well? A small margin. The rest of us kind of lip sync, our hearts swollen proud and hands reverently gracing our chests while the “singers” fill in what we cannot. Or, we hurt the ears around us, like she’s hurting mine just now.
My little one is pounding my shoulders and kissing the back of my head. Her Frozen ballad comes next, clashing nicely with her sister’s patriotic scream.
I get out bread, crusty at the top from nearly being burned by the freezer. With a knife I spread peanut butter in swirls, trying to make it look perfect the way the old father/son JIF commercials used to advertise. Always, always I needed a sandwich after watching those. And then I’m remembering the ponds from past Country Time Lemonade ads. Kids jumping in, the narrator charming me with his raspy voice, and suddenly I want to be there too. I want the nostalgia, the feel of what’s vintage and safe and fun.
There’s a fight near the coffee table and someone has moved on to, “Now bring us some Figgie Pudding, nah nah nah…”
Time for school.
Tucked just below a small bow on her neckline are her hot pink nails, a reminder to me of how much girl runs through her veins. Her eyelashes hover over the top of her cheek and when I trail down a tad, I find a that cute little mole. Her skin, it’s creamy and perfect, unblemished by acne or scars that promise to come with future hormone changes. I will hate that time for her. And for me, because it will most assuredly test our relationship.
I do not hurry to my phone or think of how many minutes until the school bell. I care nothing of the forecast or what e-mail will need my reply. Instead I memorize the curve of her nose, the ruffle of her hand-me-down jammies around her wrist, her smell. The bangs I trim, the ones she scoots across her forehead when she’s coloring or after doing somersaults, lay ever graceful above her brow.
I’ve been a parent long enough to know these moments matter, and will not last. I will forget, and then someday ache for such early morning cuddles.
Don’t pass quickly, time. Slow your hurried self. I’m just so in love.
Not a corner in our house is sacred when your name is Mom. Not the spaces that lack speakers, Wii controllers, and Disney titles. Not the bathrooms, the pantry, or closets. One would think certain subtle clues would keep the mongrels from disturbing me. Like when I’m in the middle of a sentence on my cell phone. When the doors are locked. Even when I’m sitting in the passenger seat of my car…in the garage. No, they are not deterred.
It’s in one of these situations that the ear-splitting screams of my youngest daughter come piercing into the bathroom. She’s so distraught her lips turn a sallow gray between breaths and wails.
“He jumped on me right here!” she chokes out, hand to her nose.
I’m instantly ready to do battle, which is a conflicting emotion when the enemy is also someone you protect. I take a second to avoid reaction, to keep myself from grabbing him by the hair. Experience has taught me to be wise to the other side of the story.
“What happened? Why did you do that?”
He’s already cracking, holding back his own tears. “She hit me.”
Ah, there we have it. “But you’re so much bigger,” I say. Within seconds I’m assessing the morning and I realize we all need a time-out before this escalates. “Everyone grab a book and get on their bed.” One of the greatest parenting skills I’ve ever learned and will never master: redirection.
“Whyyy?” they moan. Well, because I’m about to tear my eyeballs out, that’s why.
“Go.”
While I really want to escape into the numbing affects of social media, I don’t. We have zoo plans and we’re not going to ruin them. Hopefully all the lions and giraffes and penguins will pull this family back together.
On the drive there I go over what happened.
“Buddy, you’ve been given the gift of strength. You are powerful and jumping onto your sister’s face could hurt her. You might have broken her nose. It wasn’t okay for her to hit you but it’s also not okay for you to body-slam her.”
A giggle bursts out of his mouth.
“Let’s use that gift to protect your sisters, all right?”
“Ok.”
The small one falls asleep (hallelujah) and the older kids quietly listen to music…after elbowing each other and being separated. We bob to the likes of country music with the sunroof open, and I breathe a sigh of relief. I even start to believe this day will turn out.
Then she wakes up sassy and unwilling to do anything I tell her to do. Then the others argue with me about needing jackets and water bottles. Then the walking doesn’t end and the clouds turn no humidity into an arctic blast of frigidity. Then the whining ensues, and though the hippos are heavy with entertainment, the traffic home is not. It’s just heavy.
We enter the house bone-tired and grumpy. Everything is how we left it, all stacks, and strays of crayons and shoes and dishes. My margin for making dinner is thinned to a sliver.
While we eat I tell them how I didn’t hear a single “thank-you.” Of course then they say it as if they’re offering me fresh strawberries, but you know how those taste when they’re forced. Sour. I remind them that they need to respect me, be grateful for a mom who takes them places. Good grief the entry tickets were as much as a third of our grocery bill.
Now this morning I’m looking at a clutter of hair products near a mirror splattered with toothpaste. Demands return, nail polish is painted on the dresser, they fight over which cartoons to watch first, and I wonder why I’m so tired of it all.
When something in me shifts.
I HAVE CHILDREN.
If I didn’t, I would long for the mess atop the counter. I’d do anything to hear arguments about who sits where and who is breathing whose air. I’d ache for bad attitudes after miles of elephants and seals. I’d relish the picking up of flung jammies and washing melamine plates with superheroes.
Guess who’s ungrateful.
Yeah.
Eyes sag droopy and we are lazing around like the cold of the day calls us to do. We’re tired from staying up so late last night, talking to Grandma and watching movies well beyond a sensible hour. Friday nights over spring break demand this kind of irresponsibility.
We don’t really all fit on the Queen bed but that’s beside the point. Dad is teaching chess to the girl with stringy hair. The boy is watching, waiting for his turn in his too-big jeans held steady with a belt he found in our closet. The little one is cross-legged, coloring while she sings with abandon Father Abraham. Right arm, left arm. The pen marks she accidentally swiped across her cheeks are only cute because her voice is small and she’s three. I could never get away with such behavior.
Most of us haven’t brushed our hair, a couple of us our teeth. We’ve disregarded normal eating schedules for snacks and we’ll probably watch another movie after we’ve all been beaten by rooks and pons at least once. I’ll push for a round of Yahtzee, maybe a few deals of cards first.
One of us yawns, someone else sings in operatic tones and before we know it we’re all laughing hysterically.
This could quite possibly be the best day of my life.
Pass the Cadbury chocolates.
If you don’t enjoy or relate to stories about children, you may not want to tune in for the next 16 days, 19 hours, and 17 minutes. I’m not counting or anything but that is how much time is left for Spring Break and many of my posts will likely be about my kids. Although come to think of it, if you don’t appreciate stories about children you may not want to tune in ever. It is my life.
“Mom, can you print me a NEW Hello Kitty?” My youngest daughter has such passion, no sentence is without emphasis. “NEW,” she says again with a pucker.
“I got it. And yes, when I finish this.”
“Uhhh! I JUS,’ want, a Hello KITTY picture.”
“Sh.” I am watching Ramona and Beezus with the older kids while I eat breakfast. Hey, boundaries are boundaries and I happen to have them with my three year old. She can’t boss me.
We stretch when the credits scroll, procrastinating at getting our butts in gear for the day. I scoot them upstairs with motivational applause. “Come on, get dressed.”
As promised, I sign into the computer. The Hello Kitty picture is picked oh so carefully, thoughtfully, until all her wrongs are made right.
“Mom, can I print one too?” my son asks.
“Yeah, go brush your teeth and slick that hair down from the two-inch Alfalfa cowlick you’re sporting first.”
He hops away while I take a face pad that intoxicates the entire bathroom with an antiseptic perfume to clean the night of sleep off my forehead. I straighten sheets and pillows, and stuff a thousandth load of darks in the washing machine.
“This isn’t working,” he says with a crack in his voice that tells me he’s frustrated.
“What’s the problem?” I say squinting at the screen and clicking the links. Load. Reload. Hourglass timer. Reload again. Close the window. Open a new one. Google searched for Donkey Kong coloring pages.
“There ya go, Bud.”
I dole out to-do lists for the girls and grab stranded socks that have strayed from their partner.
“How do I do this?” He is worried he will never get his beloved page.
“Right-click. Then paste it in Wor-“
“Okay, okay,” he tells me with annoyance. “I know.”
Oh. Well of course you do. The way your father knows his way around a grocery store. Hardly at all, save for the candy aisle.
My teeth have that after-coffee grime I’m always urgent to brush off, but when I pull the drawer out for toothpaste and mentally prepare the speech I’m about to give on chores, I hear him once more.
“Do I hit ‘OK’?”
Hm, that depends. I’ll require more information. Click ‘OK’ to close the window and erase the hard drive? Click ‘OK’ to join an Over 40 single’s chat room? Send a complaint to the White House (Leave that one to me. I have a few items to discuss.)? To print?
“Let me see here,” I say, bending down to assess the situation. Everything’s off. The copy is horizontal when it should be vertical. He’s widened it far beyond the bounds of the paper size. The selection is too light of a gray, and I simply want to tell him that the next time he thinks he can do things “by himself” could he please, just, not. It would be so much easier if I did it for him.
Great advice, until I’m hit between the eyes with the force of a Mack truck. Because he’s exactly like his mom.
Don’t show me the instruction manual, keep any advice to yourself, I’ll figure it out as I go, thank you.
So how do I parent a child who is as independently spirited as myself? Let him fail, I think. Allow him to run full boar into his dreams, into what he thinks he knows. Watch him succeed and be there when he doesn’t so he’ll have a safe place to hurt. Then brainstorm about what went wrong, where the motives got skewed, come up with better options for the next time.
Try again. Always try, because you will anyway. You’ll think you know, and when you find out you didn’t, I’ll be right behind you ready to help map out the next route.
“Yep, you got it. Hit ‘OK’ and go see if it came out of the printer.”
He barrels down the stairs and is back in prompt fashion. “There were two since I clicked ‘print’ before you told me.”
Of course you did. And look how you figured it out.
Lucky Charms is hitting their bowls and smelling oddly like the yeast I use for pizza dough. They’ve already made time to fight over who will put away the milk and which spoon goes to whom. They are trying to annoy each other with repetitive noises. Thank you, I’m thoroughly exasperated.
“I read something this morning and I’m curious what you think it means,” I tell them. Their interest is tickled enough to stop poking and grunting. “Things that we can see are temporary and things we cannot see will last eternally. Ideas?”
My oldest daughter takes the challenge by starting first, which is more about not letting her brother talk and less about having something to say. I know this by the way she hesitates after each word. “Temporary…means…power,” she says with white dribbles on her chin.
I’m trying with great effort not to let myself get distracted by the learning curve of her hairstyle.
Um, no. “Try again.”
“Wait.” She is stalling again. Must. Answer. Before. Him. But his patience can only last so long.
“It means-” he begins.
“Let her finish and then you can try.”
She takes another stab at it, and at her brother. It’s a one-two punch if she can pull it off. “Temporary means, like, it won’t last forever.”
“Exactly.”
“But,” she says. “We can’t see, like, fairy godmothers or Santa Claus and they won’t last forever.”
Now I’m the one feeling a kick in the gut. Think fast. “Right, but they aren’t real. I think it’s talking about things that are real.” Whew. Save. Back to the exploration. “So the things we can see like our house, the trees, even our bodies, won’t always be around. Our souls, our spiritual hearts will live forever.”
My son picks up a small box. “Like this gum. We chew it and when we’re done we spit it in the trash.”
OK. Well, I think we got lost somewhere. Go get ready for school.
She’s trying to hold it together in the off chance there’s still a sliver of hope she can convince me. Oh, how she barely balances steady while she awaits her fate.
“But Mom, I didn’t exactly do my homework because I edited as I was writing the other night.”
“I understand. But you didn’t talk to me about that when I told you twice to get it done, and as I’m looking at it now, there is work we must finish.”
She starts to waver, feeling her case falling.
“I erased an “s” on one of the words and I changed a letter to capital,” she says.
“I think you barely looked it over because you wanted to watch T.V. And that’s the point, isn’t it? That you didn’t really do it.”
“But Mom.” Her voice cracks as it dips and heaves like waves. She crosses her arms and plops down angry. I try not to laugh.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “You don’t get T.V. today. We’ll fix your story together tonight before you write the final draft.”
She pouts silent and in a flash I’m back to my third grade year. Arguing with my mom about why I should stay up late, the valid reasons other kids got to linger after the college basketball games. They were perfectly good reasons, I tell you. And they would have worked for me too, if she would have just listened.
The begging, the pleading, the drumming up of any excuse that sounds legitimate. The trying to sound mature and the severe incompetence to do so, what with the sobs and hysteria when I didn’t get my way.
I had a friend that would sneak to her phone and call me. She’d whisper into the receiver, “I’m grounded. What do I say?” I’d look over my shoulder for the enemy (my mother) and whisper back. “Sound super sincere, and tell her you’re sorry and that you’ll really try to do better.” She’d call back twenty minutes later. No whisper. “I’m still grounded.”
These flashbacks happen in odd ways now that I’m a mother. I connect dots I never would without having my own children, because I see the other side. Was my mom thinking what I’m thinking now? You see, dear one, I know this scene. I’ve been where you’ve been. And I know what you don’t. How much more it will benefit you if I teach this lesson instead of acquiescing and teaching you another. I promise with all my heart, I get how this sucks. (no, she would never think the word “sucks”) I recognize the game. Though you might think you aren’t winning, you are with what this is cultivating: character.
There was great weeping and gnashing of teeth as her siblings started cartoons. More desperate pleas were tried without success. She made her brown-sugared toast. I poured some coffee.
“I want you to sit in the front room.”
“But I’m not watching.”
You know that look where you aren’t even weighing the options, you just mean what you said? I did that. It was awesome. “Go in the other room, please.”
Mighty stomping, crumbs flying.
We sat with the sun making stripes all around us. I didn’t check Facebook like I really, really wanted. Instead I engaged, surprising even myself.
“What are you going to be when you are grown up?”
“I have no idea.” She chews a bit. “I like art.”
“You are great at art.”
“I learned this thing at school where you hold some clay between two fingers and you stretch it.” She tips her chin and clanks the spoon against her teeth. (Yes, my children save extra brown sugar for scooping at the end.) However I’m more interested in the fact she’s telling me something I hadn’t heard yet. I always wonder how to pull these details out of them each day. Yank electronics and watch them bloom, I suppose.
“That’s cool. You could go to college for design or architecture.”
“I want to make a house with secret passageways and stuff.”
“I love that.”
Before I sense it, a connection is born and a morning is changed.
Who cares about homework? Not me.
My face is the color of a clown nose as I stand before a first-grade teacher who towers me with her black high heels. A seemingly odd choice for a day of field trip pandemonium to the local dump. I second-guess my flats, thinking perhaps I am being too cautious.
Nope. No I’m not. It’s trash. Loads of it. What is she thinking?
These mornings when I have to forgo the usual running shorts I don’t run in and mismatched ankle slippers I hide beneath the steering wheel of the carpool line, I perform my own circus act. I juggle Cheetos and freezer packs and vitamins and disciplines over wrestling matches and the long lost partner of more than one pair of Converse tennis shoes.
So I’m feeling quite proud as I walk into the classroom with coffee and a go-get-’em attitude, on time.
A week earlier I had texted my mother-in-law.
“Hey, any chance you’re free next Wednesday to watch the little one?”
I give her the drop-off, pick-up, nap, and lunch rundown. The next day I’m texting again.
“Oh Renee. I have too many schedules. The field trip is Thursday. Are you free then?”
Whew, that was close. How embarrassing it would have been to show up the wrong day.
With pride I’m reflecting, standing among the masses of dirty fingernails and all that is elementary. Not only am I a scarved goddess, I’ve gotten everything in it’s place. All the kids, all the brown bags with our names written in Sharpie, myself, and with minutes to spare. I can hear applause if I listen closely.
Scanning the room I wonder who the lucky ones will be. I mean, when this day is over I will have made my son the cool kid. It’s a known fact through the third grade classes that I am a ringmaster when it comes to these kinds of things. Oh yes. I simply crack the whip of Simon Says, let them pick a team name for the day, and they become but sleepy lions in my hand.
Lions, nonetheless who ultimately will never be tamed on the bus ride back. Ah well, I do what I can.
He comes up to me head first, tears right on the edge. I know this face, the one burrowed in my stomach. Sometimes it’s over a bad dream, other times it’s that someone we love has moved on to a better place. And sometimes it’s when he’s seen the calendar says the field trip is next Thursday.
You know those movies with the endings that play back all the clues you’ve been seeing yet missing for two hours to reveal a grand finale and final piece of the puzzle?
The black high heels, the absence of other chaperones, the slow cadence of her steps as she pushes her way through the incessant tellings of first grade innocence. Everything is rushing at me in a torrent and I can feel my complexion getting hotter. The scarf is much too much now.
“It’s not field trip day, is it?”
And in her mind she was probably saying, “What is she thinking?”
Nights are growing longer like the way she’s growing her hair. She agreed to let me crop it for summer and then missed how it used to fall around her shoulders. It’s in the not-yet-light hours when she turns our door handle.
“Mom, I’m freezing.”
“Well go put on more clothes.”
We are shouting these whispers in the medium between a whirring fan and the solitude of the slumbering. She returns quickly with a pillow, Heart Pup who has been by her side since she barely fit into a carrier seat at the hospital, and a little more desperation than necessary.
“I need a blanket. I’m still SO cold. Will you get me one?”
I say nothing, contemplating the alternative I’m going to give her because I know for certain that I won’t be getting out of my cocoon for what she can do herself.
“Mom? Can you get me a blanket?”
“You can grab your comforter off your bed.”
Her abandoned pillow lies faithfully on the floor while she’s off retrieving. Dad has made a rule that when he’s home, in other words when he’s still in bed, no big kids allowed on that sacred Queen size. It is why our youngest will be resented, though I don’t think she minds. She’s too distracted being the only one cuddling between us.
During weekdays all remaining four of us pile in to listen to the garage door lift and the truck growl to life. We revel in our freedom and defiance until elbows start to fly because someone is touching someone is touching someone.
I hear her snuggle up and we are quiet, we two awake ones. Words of a friend from long ago come to me.
“Why don’t you play too?”
You see, I once used that same desperate whine as my daughter.
“While I’m doing dishes and cleaning up, he’s wrestling and tickling the kids. If he would help me then we could all get stilly together.”
“And what would happen if you just left the dishes?”
I raise my palms, eyes closed. “Whoa, whoa. I can’t do that. I mean, they’d be dirty, all over the counter.”
With a fistful of covers that I roll back in a triangle, I take my own pillow and steal some pink quilt. She scoots closer and I can hear the way she tries to control her excitement.
“Hi Mom.”
“Hi Sweetie.”
I can play too.
Whispers of a Scattered Mind 