Bamboo forest

november

As a child, my mother sometimes called me, with amusement, her “little pacifist.” It was more political than personal – I was a hitter and a hair grabber when boys teased me but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why our great nation hadn’t figured out a better way to deal with the world besides weaponry. My intense political ostriching actually led me to a firm belief that we should not only NOT battle, but we should NOT help, either. Just turn inward, feed our own damn hungry and let the rest of the world figure it out for themselves. My mother, appalled, called me an “isolationist.” Her father was in the navy and, however complicated her politics (she really liked Perot), she still teared up at the national anthem.

I suppose I have evolved enough to want to help the world when possible, but I still can’t help but wonder how much we “help” in our worldwide involvements and I do sometimes wonder if just backing the hell off everything wouldn’t be a teensy bit beneficial. But I digress.

Meanwhile, in other bits and pieces of my childhood, I am constantly reminded lately of my mother’s firm belief in raising children like puppies (and oh, is my child like a puppy with his friends…), backing off as soon as they learn to do things, letting them be as independent as they possibly can, having the goal ALWAYS be to raise a kind and competent grown-up rather than to keep them tiny and helpless.

All of this comes crashing down upon a person when one is faced with one’s child’s parent teacher conference.

There was nothing particularly eventful in the conference, other than the revelation that my child muttered that his teacher was stupid under his breath and got called on it (in a most loving way that resulted in a class talk and, hopefully, no more of that). The revelations, as usual, are selfish in nature. I am mortified by his actions. I hate that he is “experimenting” in this way. I hate that he is rough and physical and interested in bad guy play, ever, at all. And I hate that I hate it all so much, that I can’t detach enough to let him experiment and learn and experience. I hate that I feel an urge to blame the other children, to stick him in a bubble.

I hate that I can’t stick him in a bubble.

But I hate myself for wanting to stick him in a bubble.

I am a pacifist, an isolationist. I’d like there to be no hint of violence, no outside influence. Leave me in my bubble, in my hole, in our house where no mean things ever come and the play is all sweet animal families and kindness. Let’s play penguin baby hatching again. He’ll be the baby, covered by his soft, sweet abba-blanket and I will gently rest my torso on top of him. He will twitch and I will say my egg is hatching and sit up as he pops out from under the blanket and peeps, “Mama!” and we will hug and hug.

Ahem.

I hate that I am sad that he is growing up.

Also, I hate that the world isn’t like me. Couldn’t we all just make a pact to socialize our children in a kind and peaceful way, one that does not allow any toys to turn into guns, one where bad guys can be explored psychologically instead of physically, one where the whole effing world shares our family’s most important rule of Don’t Hurt Anyone? Those other parents think they share that rule but they buy their kids toy guns. I just will never understand. And I feel furious about it, furious that any parent ever utters anything about BOYS WILL BE BOYS. ARRRRRRGGGGGGGCHHHHHHHHHHSZJKLDFGBDSFAS:hudagHGK:GHHGHGHGHHHHHHHHHH!

No. Boys will be people. Boys will be mothereffing people like the rest of us. People with hormones. And maybe there is some part of that hormone that might make them more prone to some aggression or violence or something, I don’t know. But I do know that my hormones make me a raging she-bitch every damn month and yet society has never deemed it okay for me to go punch people in the face when I feel like it. So whatever the hell the hormones are saying, we can say louder, peaceful stuff and change the story. I really don’t think I am going to be able to stay quiet and polite the next time someone pulls that line, that hideous line that I blame a tiny bit for some of what he is suddenly playing and interested in.

Sometimes, just for a second, I almost sort of miss Quaker school (even if it is the Quaker school of my parental fantasy rather than reality). I think what I really wish is for a school where we test all the parents on their childrearing, political, and social philosophies before admitting their children.

And yet… I hate that I am being so ridiculous.

I hate when I get into this place of feeling a feeling and then hating myself for feeling a feeling.

october

I hereby proclaim this a summer blog, with no promises for anything other than a monthly check-in throughout the school year.

I made what felt like a huge decision last month to not attend this BlogHer writing conference that starts tomorrow night. My bloggish friends are in town for it. I could have gone. It probably would have been fine to take a personal day on Friday, nervous though it makes me with a preschooler who still catches every cold and needs me to have a plethora of days available to stay home.

But I didn’t. It didn’t feel right. I am not devoted enough to my writing right now to spend money on a conference. I don’t want to go listen for a day, feel inspired and then come home and dive right back into the hard work of the job that pays me and the family that I love. I knew how that would make me feel after – gross and guilty, like I’m somehow not doing enough because I can’t hold down a demanding, exhausting and exhilarating full time job plus raise a kid plus take care of a house and a marriage plus write a memoir. I should not feel guilty for that.

I still want to be a writer but I am going to be a librarian first.

How are you?

Things that are happening:

Work is craze-tastic because of space crunches related to construction that creeps ever closer to completion each day. I thought that I wouldn’t mind at all since my child will be benefiting from the fantastic new building. I thought I could handle working in a tiny space because, after all, I enjoy cruise ship cabins ever so much. I thought the most difficult part would be the constant flow of noise from the classroom next door, the constancy of hearing another teacher talk to her class over the not-a-wall bookshelf that divides us. In fact, that has turned out to be the easiest. I barely hear her. We are considerate neighbors and she has arranged things well. It’s the size. Apparently, I would not enjoy a cruise ship stateroom so much if I had to share it with 10 Second Graders. I try to cling greatly to the bit about a benefit for my child. Cling cling cling.

Ahead, after this crazy space crunch, lies total crazy uncertainty and intense opportunity. I love opportunity and change. I despise uncertainty but must live with it. It does not do good things for my sleep. I am mind-remodeling, mind-collection-weeding, mind-cataloging…. and when it gets to be too much, I tend to sew half the night just to feel like I can accomplish something, start it and finish it and control it even if I don’t actually know what I’m doing (I made a skirt! And a shirt! And some pants for Beckett that were cute but split down the butt seam the first time he wore them!). I have a constant ache in my face, one of those weird fibro signs that I am stressed out. One week I couldn’t move my jaw properly because I was clearly clinching in my sleep. I feel run down and dragging, disorganized.

But. Hopeful.

Things aren’t perfect in our family at large or with our house and certainly not with our finances. But Wes and I stumble along, barely speaking about more than the mundane for weeks and then struggling to be sure we check in or talk or just sit together more often. Know what we talk about most? You don’t really want to know. It’s gross.

OK.

We talk about our little boy, our glorious and beautiful four year old and his amazing, astounding brilliance and perfection.

Only after he goes to bed, I promise.

We sneak in and stare at him while he sleeps. We tell endless funny stories. We scan his endless writings for photo albums. We stare open-mouthed at his dramatic song performances. We revel in his insane reading abilities. We cuddle him no matter how often he asks, no matter what we should be doing instead, because we know it is fleeting. We are having so. much. fun. being his parents right now.

We would do it again if we had lots and lots more money. If Wes could stay home for several years and then we could afford lovely private schools for multiple children and if we could still afford to travel and gallivant and buy nice things… we would have more. But we can’t. So we won’t. It sucks sometimes. But other days it is totally perfect.

"Dirty Sock Band, please play Bad Habit Boy"

This week he is obsessed with The Dirty Sock Funtime Band and with the book It’s Not the Stork. Which means we have endless handwritten song requests to the band (he is seeing them on Saturday for the second time) and endless, weird quotations from the bird and the bee in the book (“If the fetus grows as big as a watermelon, will the mommy pop?” “Hope not!”). His best friend’s baby sister will be born this week. Some days Beckett talks of wanting a brother or sister. Other times he talks about how much he hates babies. Mostly he just talks about how he is a rock star. Which he freaking is.

september

I usually write something on September 11th. Sometimes I get grouchy about the coverage and all the non-New Yorkers co-opting it. Sometimes I get maudlin and disturbed, thinking how close Wes was and how awful it would have been to lose him to the subway tunnels under the Towers. This year I just… froze. We were away on Sunday, at a B&B and then Storm King Art Center for Wes’ birthday. I felt quiet and separate. The B&B had the ceremony on, muted, as we ate breakfast. I felt almost angry to see it there, being lightly discussed by the old people. But then we were outside, in nice weather, surrounded by art. And it seemed to me that we really should spend every September 11th surrounded by acts of creation rather than destruction. I am sure someone else has thought this, written it. It sounds cliched. But I really felt it deeply this year.

Ten years is a long time. The year the Towers fell was the year I started going to Quaker Meeting, the five year anniversary of my mother’s death. I was engaged. My boss retired and I somehow became the person with the most seniority in my department even though I was also the youngest at 26. A few months after September 11th, I was made Chair because the one we had lived in Battery Park City and had too much to deal with at home. Our wedding planning seemed strange and frivolous, and we shrunk our flower budget, decided on no dancing, made fewer calls to the wedding planner. I cried every day. I had a crazy PTSD newspaper-hoarding reaction, buying papers I would never normally read and devouring them all. I could only think about the disaster. I couldn’t be alone with students for several days; unlike my co-workers who found solace in working, I looked at the tiny kiddos and just felt horror that the world they lived in was one where such a thing could happen. I headed to my therapist each week bawling, collapsing in her chair and delivering a litany of what I had absorbed, jumping at the sound of sirens. My time on the subway was spent imagining death scenarios, bombs. I had an asthma attack a few months later that I feel certain was related to air quality.

Wes still has to fill out the WTC Health survey each year. He was covered in ash.

It doesn’t feel far away, when I think about what it was like to live here that month. It does feel cosmically strange, though, when I look at my students, the oldest of whom are ten years old. They were born after, for the most part. Nearly all of the students I teach were not born yet. I can’t begin to conceptualize how to share any of it with them, let alone my own child. How hideous to ever have to try to explain.

I know I will start with this book:

image from amazon

water-related. again.

The basement is flooding again. Pretty bad. Bad, actually. We’ve had water around the edges. We’ve had to pick up the carpet tiles and dry them out a couple times. But this is the worst since the masses of money we spent 14 months ago to repair it. It’s almost like it did nothing. We are both incredibly defeated by this. And it’s Wes birthday on Monday. And just last night, in a fit of needing to really celebrate, we made last minute reservations at an upstate B&B for Saturday. There is almost no chance we will be able to go and it’s not refundable. And the first week of school is, as always, kicking my ass. So.

Beckett loves Pre-K 4, though.

wishful

Beckett got frustrated with me for something small today and said he wanted me to disappear.

“I don’t want to disappear because I want to be here with you,” I told him.

He grumbled a bit and went back to rolling around on the couch. Then he looked up at me. “You might die.”

“No, I am not going to die for a long time,” I said. It feels terrible saying this as though I know. I say it because I know it is important to make him feel safe and because it is at least fairly likely that I will live for a while. But I know better than to be so certain.

“Like, when I am 23,” he said, and my heart imploded a little.

“No,” I lied some more. “When you are 70. Or 80.”

Go big or go home, I always say. I might live to 112, right?

“No. You are going to die,” he said, his confidence in this growing in spite of my lies.

It was so hard not to admit it to him. Instead I dug for the cause. There have been a growing number of discussions of my dead mother. He likes to comfort me, telling me that now I have him so I shouldn’t be sad about my mom. It sort of works.

“Are you worried that I might die? Because my mom died and so you think I might die, too?”

“Yes,” he said, seeming highly unworried. “But Daddy will take care of me.”

“Um.”

“When you die, Daddy will take care of me.” He smiled a little to himself. “Daddy is so funny.”

Suddenly it was clear. He may have been a little worried, but he was also a little bit fascinated with this death thing. If mean, annoying Mommy went away, he’d be left with super fun Daddy! All the time!

“IF. IF I die, Daddy will take care of you. You are safe and we will take care of you and I am not going to die.”

“Yes. You are.”

I am done with this.

“What do you want for breakfast, kid?”

more things I carried

The rest of my last week of summer vacation involved fun with more heavy items!

On Tuesday, Beckett had a bigtime hearing test in the city way uptown. I intended to go to the zoo, then to pick up our CSA veggies and then maybe to the playground to meet up with some of Beckett’s friends after the appointment so we brought the lightweight stroller. The hearing test was fine and just happened to be around the corner from Crumbs cupcake bakery so, um, that was required. Then the Central Park Children’s Zoo, which was fun. Beckett spent most of his time on the tiny stage in one tucked-away corner, performing a long dance show about animals. Then it was time to head back to Brooklyn so we could try to find his friends. But I got off the train about a mile and a half from our house so we could pick up the veggies.

The earthquake happened while we were on the train, so I had little to no cell reception for a short while. I couldn’t call Beck’s friend’s nanny to check whether they were still at the playground, 16 blocks away from where we were. So I decided to try to hurry, get the veggies and hope we caught them. Normally, CSA veggies can be carried in two not-heavy bags. And normally I bring the car anyway, just in case. This time… there was a cantaloupe. And SEVEN ears of corn. And dozens of tomatoes. And zucchini. I loaded the stroller so intensely that I thought the frame would collapse. And then I began pushing the massive load of food and my massive kid up the hill 5 blocks and 11 blocks over to get to the playground. I was just… dripping. I thought my arms would fall off. And then… they weren’t at the playground when we got there.

On Thursday, Beckett had his four year physical. I was stressed about this because I knew it would involve shots AND occur at his naptime. He doesn’t always nap anymore, but he rests. And often sleeps if we are out and about in the stroller or the car. I was hoping I could skip the stroller because it was pouring rain and I wanted to just deal with umbrellas. But he had a massive tantrum about this, since he was completely exhausted and ready to sleep at the moment we had to leave. I let him ride. I brought the giant umbrella to try to cover us both and regretted it within two blocks. I also walked far further than I normally do for the subway because I became convinced that we HAD TO STOP FOR CANDY because that would help the shots thing.

By the time we’d walked one block away from the 7/11, kiddo was asleep in his stroller. OUT. Totally out. I knew he needed that nap so damn bad. We were 4 blocks from the subway and waking him up to make him walk down was going to lead to a big tantrum. And then shots. I wanted him to have that damn nap.

So I started walking in the rain, figuring I would walk the mile to the nearest station with an elevator. It was raining a lot and holding the big umbrella while pushing the stroller was ridiculously hard. It was grossly humid. I was a sweaty mess. By the time I got 11 blocks and saw another station, I just wanted to be on that train. I decided to try to carry the stroller down.

Now, I had sworn never to do this again because it is hard and I am not strong. The last time I tried to carry him in the stroller down some subway stairs, I nearly killed us both. It scared me so much that I should have been permanently dissuaded. But. No. Naturally no one was around to help me. I took each stair slowly like a toddler. One foot, the other foot. One foot, the other foot. All the way down, holding on for dear life. Literally. We made it. Obviously.

He slept all the way there. He slept as I hefted him UP the stairs in Manhattan. And he slept as I wheeled him into the doctor’s office. I was trying to wake him when we were called back (immediately – I do not patronize doctors who make me wait!). He was groggy and sort of freaked. The nurse wanted to get his weight and height and he just wouldn’t stand on the scale. So out came the gummy bears. He went along well after that.

Then there was the fine check-up and the hideous, hideous, hold-him-down-while-he-screams shots. HORRIBLE. Gummy bears barely helped.

And Friday. I went with all the other terrified Brooklynites to Lowe’s. But I was actually there for other, non-hurricane stuff (good thing since they were sold out of batteries and flashlights!). I was making some frames for some cool children’s book-related fabric I found, and I ended up needing six 1×2′s. Did you know those things are, like, eight feet long? They are. They are hard to load in a cart and push through Lowe’s without decapitating anyone.

Finally, I carried a bunch of stuff around in our basement trying to save them from the giant flood I was convinced we would have. We didn’t. Just a trickle, really. I am grateful.

Back to work today. The tiny library is full of boxes that need hefting.

summer goals, (partially) met

This is my last week before work starts. I always hit this week and start freaking out internally about how little time I have left with the kiddo and I finally get around to doing lots of fun stuff we could have been doing all along (if it hadn’t been so dratted hot).

I haven’t been working on writing stuff at all because in addition to hitting the end of summer Beckett-fun-extravaganza moment, I also hit the I FAILED At All The Things I Wanted To Do This Summer place. So I broke out the Personal To Do list in my Evernote, which I last updated in June.

 

 

Please note that writing is such an eternal To Do that it never makes it onto a list. It probably should, along with a scheduled spot on my calendar. I’ll put scheduling that on to the Autumn To Do List.

 

While I only completed a few things, I had my most successful summer yet as far as breadth of projects tackled. I will say that the sewing stuff only happened because I hit this week and realized that it was on my list and hadn’t been done. Plus, I have been searching for a cute, small backpack that will fit my iPad. I haven’t seen one I really like and became convinced I could sew such a thing. I studied a bunch of tutorials and then, on Sunday, I broke out my fabric stash and started pondering. I thought I’d just play around but I ended up having so much fun trying to figure out a way to make the pockets and iPad slot and all the rest I had envisioned… that I stayed up until 3 a.m. THREE A.M. Almost finished it. Planning to spend Friday, my last day off and Wes is taking the kid to work daycare, looking for the Garment District items I need to be done and work on one for Beckett. Maybe pictures soon if they turn out OK.

Rabbit