Two Mornings, or Something Worthwhile

“I’m ready to go,” June announced for about the twentieth time yesterday morning. It was her first day back at school after an almost three-week-long break and she was raring to go. I glanced at my watch. It was 8:30, still a bit on the early side. Then inspiration struck.

“Do you want to walk?” I asked her.

“Yes!” she said in satisfied tone.

It was a bright, sunny morning after two days of miserable weather– steady rain and temperatures in the mid to high thirties. Now the air was cold, but dry. Everything looked clean and shiny. The sun sparkled on the wrinkly skins of ice that covered the puddles.

I hadn’t let June walk to school in a long while. I’d gotten tired of her pulling her hand out of mine and running away from me. But this morning June walked along with me, slipping her mittened hand into mine when we crossed the street or walked along the stretches of road that have no sidewalks.

We arrived at the school at 8:55. A few children had reverted to the teary goodbyes we saw so frequently in September, but not June. (I would have been surprised if she had, since she never cried in September either.) I helped her hang up her coat and backpack and washed her hands. Then I took her into the playroom where a group of children was building a castle out of blocks. I kissed the top of her head, said goodbye and left.

I walked home at a brisk pace, planning my much-anticipated time alone. I had just under two hours to myself. I spent about half of it reading and printing health newsletter articles for Sara and the rest reading other people’s blogs and watching the dvd with the comic-book style animated short film that came bundled with the Stephen King short story collection Beth got me for Christmas (http://www.simonsays.com/specials/stephen-king-nishere/?wsref=3&num=605&v_ref=). Then it was time to go back to school.

When June was dismissed from the front porch, she ran to me with a huge grin. I swept her up into my arms and asked her “How was your day?”

“Good,” she said. “I played with blocks.”

“It looks like you played in the sand pit, too,” I said. The long underwear bottoms she was wearing under her rainbow-striped jumper were soaked and encrusted with sand from the knees down. I surmised she’d been kneeling in damp sand for much of her playground time. There was evidence of painting on the toe of her sneaker, too. (I’d find quite a bit more when we got home and I took off her coat.) Blocks, paint, sand: all ingredients of a good morning. It must have been a tiring one, too. She fell asleep in the stroller on the way home.

This morning June wanted to walk to school again. We couldn’t, though, because I was going to Noah’s school to tutor. I wouldn’t be going back home while she was at school and we’d need the stroller for the walk home. (June’s usually pretty worn out by the 11:30 pickup.) On my way out of the parking lot, I talked to the Caterpillar’s mom. We’ve been trying to find a weekend evening when the Caterpillar and his moms can come over for a pizza dinner. It looks like we might not have mutual free time until February.

I am making one of my sporadic efforts to be more social. It doesn’t come naturally to me, but it’s a new year and a good time to stretch myself.

Tutoring has been difficult to get off the ground as well. I went to Noah’s school three times this past fall to tutor parents with limited English. Two out of three times no one showed up. I’d decided ahead of time this would be the last time if I didn’t get any takers today. I could look for tutoring opportunities elsewhere or volunteer in Noah’s classroom. I knew he’d like having me there, but I was more interested in actually teaching than in assisting his teacher with photocopying and other clerical tasks. The frustrating thing was that on the one day people did come, back in November, all three of them seemed enthusiastic and motivated and I felt like we’d even established a tentative rapport.

After that meeting one of them asked if I was an evangelist because I was wearing a skirt and had no jewelry on. I said no and the others conferred among themselves in Spanish, obviously trying to figure out the strange gringa. They decided I was “una persona sencilla. A ella no le gusta las vanidades.” (“…a simple person. She doesn’t like vanities.”) When I told my sister this story, she laughed and said their assessment of me was “remarkably accurate.”

I hurried down the path by the creek to Noah’s school. The meeting was scheduled for 9:15. In my backpack I had a bilingual children’s book I wanted to use in my lesson, a list of English vocabulary words from the book and a schedule of future sessions so I wouldn’t have to keep calling everyone on the phone. (My phone Spanish is painfully bad.) I also had a book (The Reader) for myself in case no one came. Once at the school I checked the cheery conference room with the big skylight where my group was supposed to meet. It was empty. I waited a bit, then dropped by the volunteer coordinator’s office and asked her to direct anyone looking for me to conference room. She let me know that one of the three women who had come before had a job interview and couldn’t come today.

The volunteer coordinator dropped by after fifteen minutes to check on me. I’d emailed her earlier in the week to say I wouldn’t be coming any more if no one came today. She urged me not to give up and offered to help publicize the group if I’d keep coming. I agreed somewhat reluctantly. I wasn’t sure there was a point.

I stayed in the conference room until 9:40, reading my book. Then I put on my coat, shouldered my pack full of teaching materials and left, feeling downhearted. On my way out of the school, much to my surprise, I ran into Sofía*, one of my students. She didn’t say why she was late, but she did have a message from the last woman, who was home with a sick child.

I thought briefly about the Caterpillar’s busy moms and how life gets in the way and sometimes you just have to keep trying to make something happen.

We headed back to the conference room. I’d asked everyone to bring an article from a newspaper or magazine to share. Sofía had a review of a Mary Cassat exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (http://www.nmwa.org/). She said she picked it because liked the accompanying pictures. It was short but advanced for her so we spent forty-five minutes going through it sentence by sentence. She read aloud and I helped her with pronunciation and gave her a summary of each paragraph after she finished it, partly in English, partly in Spanish. She was struggling but determined and clearly surprised that Cassat had received negative reviews during her lifetime. (The one about Cassat’s babies being ugly really seemed to get her goat.) I listened carefully to decide where she most needed help. The silent e trips her up almost every time, but after I’d explained it a few times she did manage to correct herself once.

When we’d finished reading the article we tried chatting in English for a while and finally we turned to the children’s book. Sofía seemed relieved to have something easier than the Cassat review to read. First we went over the vocabulary list and then I read the book to her. She stopped me a few times with questions. I asked her to bring a children’s book next time and encouraged her to read to her daughters at home in English and in Spanish. She said her English wasn’t good enough yet, but that she was improving. I gave her the tutoring schedule, every other Friday morning from now until the end of May.

As we left the room, Sofía tapped me on the shoulder and asked if we could meet once a week instead of every other week. I said I couldn’t. These sessions aren’t the kind of teaching I’m trained for and they leave me almost as worn out as June is when she gets home from school and I do need my alone time, but I was still happy she asked. It made the hour and fifteen minutes we’d spent together seem like something worthwhile.

*Not her real name.

Tag, You’re It, Part 2: Christmas is Coming

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat
Please put a penny in the old man’s hat.

Traditional Christmas Carol
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_Is_Coming)

We’ve been watching a lot of Christmas specials these days—Frosty, the Snowman; Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer; How the Grinch Stole Christmas; The Year Without a Santa Claus and A Charlie Brown Christmas so far. As you can see, we mainly stick to the classics from our childhood. Beth, Noah and June did watch Frosty Returns, but I opted out to fold laundry during that one. Why should Frosty return? The original is perfect as is.

This is hardly an original observation, but watching these specials so close together always brings back to me how, aside from Frosty, they all have the same plot. Something endangers Christmas—a big snowstorm, a green monster whose heart is two sizes too small, the indifference of the world’s children and Santa’s bad cold, materialism and the ennui of small children who talk like adults. Something saves Christmas—Rudolph’s shiny nose, the green monster’s redemption on hearing Christmas music, the children’s discovery of the power of faith and generosity, Bible verses and a scrawny Christmas tree that magically grows healthy branches once decorated. But all this begs the question, why does Christmas need so much saving in the first place? Why is it so perennially endangered?

The easy answer is that it creates a problem to solve, and that creates a story to tell. But why is it always the same story? Why is it so often Christmas itself that teeters on the brink? I can’t really say, but to me it feels like there’s some emotional truth in it. Expectations are so high for Christmas, that if you don’t feel joyous for whatever reason, it can be easy to end up feeling let down. And even though I love Christmas, it’s often hard for me to get into the spirit.

This year it would be easy to blame the economy, but I don’t think that’s it, even though like most people, we probably should be cutting back. We’ve lost a good bit of the money we’d invested to build an addition to the house so that June can have her own room someday. But other than that, we’re not really feeling the pinch. Others have it much worse. So, as I said, it’s not really money. Partly it’s being so worn down from being sick. Shopping, decorating, and baking all seem like extra work and it’s hard to get interested in extra work right now. I’m even thinking of skipping or scaling back the annual Christmas letter I write. I’ve done a little shopping. I have Beth’s present taken care of and a few days ago I ordered The Complete Adventures of Curious George for June since she has fallen so completely in love with the little monkey over the past few months. I was spurred to do this by my mom calling for gift ideas for June last week. “Christmas is coming,” she reminded me on the answering machine.

It is, I know. We’ve been listening to Christmas music and watching our Christmas specials, as I mentioned. We have a nice wreath on the door that Noah picked out at the farmers’ market yesterday. I’m just not feeling enthusiastic about Christmas. It’s not really a surprise either. It’s been this way a long time.

One possibility is that even though I’m in my fourth year out of academia I still miss the rhythm of the academic calendar that I used to measure time for most of my adult life. It just doesn’t seem like Christmas without the adrenaline rush of papers and exams to write or grade beforehand. I miss being surrounded by eighteen and nineteen year olds proud of their semester’s accomplishments and excited by the upcoming break. (What I don’t miss is the inevitable outbreak of end-of-semester plagiarism cases.) I’ve even wondered if I should re-read The Hobbit this time of year since it was the last book on my fall semester Genre Fiction syllabus for the last few years I was teaching. I don’t think it would help, though, unless I could coax a local teenager to come to the house and discuss it with me several times for fifty minutes and then write me a five to seven page paper on the quest motif in it. This doesn’t seem very likely.

But even while I was teaching, a lot of Christmases got spoiled by the fact that the annual convention of the Modern Language Association (http://www.mla.org/), a huge gathering of academics in English and foreign languages, is held right after Christmas. The convention is where many colleges and universities hold their first-round interviews for jobs. More years than I care to admit during my long, fruitless job search I spent Christmas mourning the fact that I hadn’t gotten any interviews or nervous about interviews I did have.

So, the Christmas spirit is often elusive for me. Yet it almost always comes. It might be while making gingerbread with my sister or the kids, or helping decorate the tree, or watching someone’s face light up as he or she opens the perfect gift.

Last year it was on Christmas Eve. We were at my mother and stepfather’s house. Home renovations had filled their living room with yet-to-be installed kitchen cabinets and there wasn’t much room for Mom’s traditional decorations. We thought we could squeeze a tree into one corner, but in the end we decided against it. Mom was upset about the lack of Christmas feeling in the house. And then we went to Longwood Gardens (http://www.longwoodgardens.org/) on Christmas Eve to see the lights and fountain display and the elaborately decorated greenhouses. It was a lovely, magical evening. We think we might make it a tradition.

I know that feeling will come sooner or later. On Friday I’ll be tutoring at Noah’s school, watching his class’s holiday program and dropping off June’s outgrown buntings at his school’s winter coat drive. When he gets out of school we’re leaving on our annual weekend Christmas shopping trip to Rehoboth. Service, seven and eight year olds singing songs and reciting speeches in Spanish, some family time away from the distractions of home and a chance to take a long walk on the beach sounds like a good way to get in the spirit to me.

Meanwhile, Tyfanny of Come What May (http://www.btmommy.blogspot.com/) tagged me with this Christmas quiz so I have filled it out. Here goes.

1. Wrapping paper or gift bags? Usually paper, sometimes bags.
2. Real tree or Artificial? We never have our own tree because we always travel to the grandparents’ houses, but I prefer real trees.
3. When do you put up the tree? See above.
4. When do you take the tree down? See above.
5. Do you like eggnog? Yes, and I love eggnog lattes.
6. Favorite gift received as a child? A bike, when I was nine. I loved it because I could ride all over town by myself, so it represented freedom to me.
7. Hardest person to buy for? My stepfather.
8. Easiest person to buy for? Beth and the kids.
9. Do you have a nativity scene? No.
10. Worst Christmas gift you ever received? Leg warmers from my grandmother when I was a kid. They were in style then, but I was never into them. My sister and I each got a pair and we ended up using them to block the drafts in our bedroom window at my dad’s house, so I guess they did come in handy.
11. Favorite Christmas Movie? I like the Christmas specials I watched as a kid, especially Frosty and The Grinch, but as for real films—It’s Wonderful Life. In my twenties and early thirties I watched it every year on television, but I’ve gotten out of the habit.
12. When do you start shopping for Christmas? Too late usually. I’ve barely started now.
13. Have you ever recycled a Christmas present? I don’t think so.
14. Favorite thing to eat at Christmas? Just one? Hard to narrow it down between gingerbread, fudge, buckeyes and ribbon candy.
15. Lights on the tree? Yes.
16. Favorite Christmas song? “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen,” which is kind of an odd choice because it’s religious and I’m not and there‘s plenty of secular Christmas music. I just think it’s pretty, though.
17. Travel at Christmas or stay home? Travel to my mother and stepfather’s or Beth’s parents’ houses on alternate years. This is Beth’s folks’ year.
18. Can you name all of Santa’s reindeers? Let’s try: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donder and Blitzen. (And Rudolph.) I probably couldn’t have done that if I hadn’t been reading “The Night Before Christmas” to June today.
19. Angel on the tree top or a star? Angels at both grandparents’ houses.
20. Open the presents Christmas Eve or morning? We usually open presents from the grandparents we aren’t visiting early so we don’t have to pack them. We either do it on the night before we leave or on the Solstice. The rest we open on Christmas morning.
21. Most annoying thing about this time of the year? Decorations up too early in stores. This drives me crazy.
22. Favorite ornament theme or color? I like a mix of things.
23. Favorite for Christmas dinner? Sweet potatoes, cranberries and pumpkin pie.
24. What do you want for Christmas this year? For my kids to have a magical day. For Beth to have a white Christmas. To have a good book and time to read it. To enjoy the company of loved ones. For none of us to be sick.

I think that would be enough for any year.

All Dressed Up, But Where to Go?

“Why are you dressed up all fancy?” Noah asked me as we headed out the door to wait for his bus. Apparently, a denim skirt and a white turtleneck qualify as fancy at our house. Okay, maybe it was the tights. Tights have practically become a Thanksgiving and Christmas-only wardrobe item since I stopped teaching.

“I’m going to your school today,” I told him. I’d volunteered to tutor parents with limited English at Noah’s school and today was my first day. Communication from the school had been spotty so I wasn’t sure if there was going to be any training first or if I was supposed to jump right in. I’d packed some lined paper, two sharpened pencils and two sections of The Washington Post in case there were no materials to use. I thought I’d ask Alba* which article she was interested in reading and either have her read aloud or I’d read to her while she followed along, depending on her level of proficiency. Then I’d ask her to write a little about the article if she could.

After I dropped June off at school I walked down the path along the creek to Noah’s school. I signed in at the office, put a Volunteer sticker on my shirt and asked for directions to the Family Room.

It was a small room with chairs, a sofa and a table laden with food—grapes, bread, some covered dishes. There were a half dozen Latina women and several kids all talking in Spanish. One woman was feeding a baby grapes but no one else was eating.

“Is Alba here?” I asked in English. All the women shook their heads. I sat down in the only empty chair. Conversation resumed. I could follow it a little. One woman was afraid the baby would choke on the grapes but the women feeding her said she’d be fine. A few people wondered where Alba was anyway. Mostly, though, I was lost.

After a while I noticed one woman was helping another fill out a form. They were trying to figure out whether the unrelated persons who lived with her were part of her household or not. This must be Ms. B, the volunteer co-ordinator, I thought. When they’d finished with the form, I introduced myself in halting Spanish and said I was waiting for Alba.

Ms. B didn’t seem surprised that she wasn’t there. She suggested we switch over to English, said she’d assign me another parent and took my contact information again. She asked if a teenage boy would be okay. I said sure. I used to teach college freshman and I actually miss teenagers. She mentioned he was close to illiterate in Spanish and English. I said that was fine. It would be completely out of my experience, as the ESL students I’ve taught have for the most part been well educated in their native languages and advanced enough in English to have graduated out of ESL classes. But, in for a dime, in for a dollar, I thought. I have a lot of reasons for volunteering. I miss teaching terribly, but I’m not sure if it’s the pure act of teaching I miss or just the luxury of discussing my favorite books and my favorite ideas about them with well-prepared, enthusiastic undergraduates. I’d like to know. It might help me decide what to do with my life.

Ms. B thought for a while and reconsidered. She wasn’t sure how motivated the boy was and she wanted to assign me someone who would actually show up. She said she’d get in touch with me. I took advantage of having a face-to-face meeting to ask a few questions. Would I be working on reading and writing, or just conversation? A mix. Was there a quiet place we could work? Yes. Would the school provide any materials? No. She suggested I look for something on the Internet. That wasn’t the answer I was hoping for, but I was glad to know anyway. I decided when she assigned me someone I’d try to find out what the person’s level of literacy was ahead of time. The newspaper could be too hard. Finally, she asked if I spoke Spanish. Apparently she’d forgotten we started the conversation in Spanish. “Un poco,” I said, and left it at that. She invited me to stay and eat–it was a meeting of the Padres Latinos club I’d walked in on—but I thanked her and declined.

I left the school a little let down. I’d been nervous and keyed up about doing something so new for me and it was disappointing not to get started.

I’m at a profound loss about what comes next for me once June’s in kindergarten. I know I’m not cut out to be a full-time stay-at-home mom for the long term. I miss the mental stimulation of work. Plus, I don’t make friends easily and I find staying home lonely and isolating. Sara and I recently discussed the possibility of ramping up my work for her in a few years. Sometimes it seems like the perfect thing. I’m good at the work, she pays me generously and because she’s my sister she’s very understanding of my home situation and my need for flexibility. On the other hand, sometimes I think I’d really like colleagues again, and a reason to leave the house that didn’t involve taking June to the library, Kindermusik or school.

While I was waiting outside June’s school waiting to pick her up, the Dragonfly’s mom struck up a conversation with me. She wanted to talk, of all things, about the pros and cons of working versus staying home. She works part-time and is thinking of quitting to stay home full-time. I said I might be a little atypical since I didn’t decide to quit my job to stay home with the kids. I lost my job and, after an unsuccessful two-year long job search, decided to quit looking for a few years and just stay home. Okay, I left out the part about my job search. It’s not that unusual for academics to look for work that long and fail to find any, but most people don’t know that and I’m painfully aware of how it sounds if you don’t.

What it kept coming down to, for the Dragonfly’s mom, was “Is it easier?” Again, I waffled. I do think the logistics of our family life are easier with me at home, especially now that we have two kids, but it’s hard in other ways. “You get frazzled,” she said, indicating she understood being with small kids almost 24/7 could be tiring.

I nodded. “And I miss office life, having colleagues, people to talk to…” I said.

“Adults,” she said. I nodded.

I didn’t give her any advice. How could I? I know what it’s like for a family to balance a full-time job, a part-time job and an infant. (Beth worked part-time from the time Noah was four months until he was thirteen months, while I taught full-time.) I know what it’s like to juggle two full-time careers and a toddler, and then later a preschooler. I know what it’s like to be pregnant and home with a preschooler. I know what it’s like to be home with two kids. But I don’t know what it’s like to be her. I don’t know her children’s temperaments, her husband’s role in the family, her hopes, her needs or her dreams.

Our lives can be so opaque. I was talking to my mom recently about how it’s ironic that Beth’s the one working now since I liked my job more than she did or does, and how Beth would like more time with the kids and how I’d some time away from them and a chance to do more outside my role as mother and how we’re both a bit dissatisfied with the way things stand.

My mom said she thought I liked staying home. I do like some things about it, I said, and I do. But I was surprised she didn’t seem to know how restless and sad I feel sometimes. I thought it showed. Then again maybe it doesn’t. I’ve worked at that. Part of the reason I started writing this blog in the first place was to help myself see the good things in my life at home, the little moments of domestic life that show how it is between the four of us. My New Year’s resolution for several years running has been to avoid self-pity, to focus on what I have and not on what I lost when I lost the academic career I trained for and loved.

I did get some things in return. I can’t say what without sounding sappy but if you’ve been reading, I hope you know.

This afternoon, June and I picked lettuce for salads. She loves picking things in the garden and sometimes brings me lettuce leaves when we’re outside and tells me they’re for dinner. I tried to help her rip the leaves off gently and not uproot the plants, but every now and then she’d hand me a lettuce plant, roots and all. I didn’t scold her. The garden will be finished soon anyway.

As I washed the lettuce, June asked me. “Are we in our house?” I said we were. “Are we fine?” Again, I said we were.

Do I like this life? Is it easier? Am I fine?

Often. Maybe. Yes.

*Not her real name.

The Very Merry Month of May

Turning forty-one is anticlimactic. There’s no getting around it. This year it was especially so since we celebrated my birthday (along with Noah’s and my sister’s boyfriend’s and Mother’s Day) the day before my birthday at my mother and stepfather’s house in Pennsylvania. My sister and her beau Dune are visiting from Oregon and due to the convergence of early to mid-May birthdays and Mother’s Day, we decided to have one big celebration. Saturday ended up being more convenient than Sunday since we were planning to drive back home early Sunday afternoon so Noah could attend a birthday party.

The weekend was too short. Everyone knew it would be ahead of time, but we didn’t want to pull Noah out of school and he didn’t want to miss Elias’s party (they’ve been friends since nursery school) so we had a pretty short window of opportunity to see Sara and Dune. This was complicated by the fact that we go to bed and get up really early and they don’t, plus they were on West Coast time and June naps in the middle of the day so there were remarkably few hours when everyone was awake at the same time.

We arrived on Friday evening close to eight and headed straight for the kitchen to admire the beautiful and nearly finished renovation Jim has been working on for over a year. Then we let the kids stay up an hour past their bedtime to socialize a bit with Grandmom, Pop, Auntie Sara and Dune. Noah went to sleep pretty easily but June was so wound up it was another hour before she got to sleep. Then she was up three times during the night and Noah woke up for the day at 5:35, so none of us was what you’d call well rested for the big day. We would pay for this later.

In the morning, Mom and Noah played the Ungame (http://www.boardgames.com/ungame.html), a therapy tool she uses with her clients. It’s a board game in which you discuss different feelings depending on where you land. Noah loves this game. He plays it with her almost every time we visit. During the course of their game I learned that the Penguin Secret Agency dissolved this week, as the members quit one by one. It seems Noah had a very specific vision about how it was to operate and wouldn’t compromise with his fellow agents. He said he didn’t understand why people didn’t want to do what the club was for in the first place. In any case, the last member quit on Friday. Noah seemed not only disappointed about this but also a little mad. He even said Sasha wasn’t his best friend any more.

Sara and Dune got up around eleven. We hung out for a while until it was time for June to have lunch and take her nap. I elected to sleep with her since she was sleeping in a bed that was pretty high off the ground and I was exhausted. Sara wanted to take Noah to an arcade to play Dance Dance Revolution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_Dance_Revolution). I thought it was going to be just the two of them, but she talked Mom and Beth into going along. Dune was taking his own nap and Jim was working outside so when June woke up she and I were on our own for a couple hours. When Dune woke up we talked politics for a while and June ran around the house insisting she was “the biggest most famous.” She must have been repeating something she heard somewhere but I can’t think what. When Dune asked, “Are you the biggest most famous?” she said, “Yes,” in a matter-of-fact tone.

When everyone returned I learned the plan had changed to miniature golf while they were out and that Noah had a huge meltdown at the seventeenth hole because he noticed the other course had a water hazard and he wished they were playing that one instead. Beth had to pick him to get him off the course and she says he was completely out of control. We can only guess it was frustration about the dissolution of his club coupled with a poor night’s sleep. He’s also got a mouthful of loose teeth, which feel funny and make it hard for him to eat sometimes. After a long talk with Beth and me, he agreed to apologize to Mom and Sara, though he could only bring himself to do it after piling sofa cushions around himself and delivering the words of the apology in scrambled order. (Mom had told him when it’s hard to say something you can start in the beginning, the middle or the end, whatever is easiest.)

Mom and I went out for coffee before coming home and starting dinner, an enchilada casserole that turned out quite well. It took longer than expected to assemble, however, so we decided to open presents while it baked instead of waiting until afterward. Mom, Beth and I had Mother’s Day presents and cards to open. Dune, Noah and I had birthday presents. Even Sara, whose birthday was in March, had a late present from Mom (a set of glasses), which Mom had held onto because they were too fragile to ship. Sara squealed when she saw her glassware—it was just like glasses she’d admired in Italy. Dune laughed with surprise when he opened the spirulina bars we bought him. “I love these! Sara must have told you.” Noah was very excited about his Snap Circuits Jr. kit (http://www.fatbraintoys.com/toy_companies/elenco_electronics_inc/snap_circuits_jr.cfm). I read the long and mushy message in the Mother’s Day card Noah picked out for me aloud. He’d signed it twice, so I’d know it was really from him. (And not from some imposter son? Kids can be mysterious.) Beth and I also had homemade Mother’s Day cards from school. He’d drawn our names in jellyfish tentacles just like the ones he had Beth draw on the goody bags for his party. Meanwhile, June busied herself with the paper and ribbons and didn’t seem to notice that nothing was for her.

Even with the schedule change, by the time we’d eaten dinner and cake and ice cream and gotten the kids ready for bed, it was nine o’clock again. This time, though, both kids dropped off right away and Beth and I got to sleep a little earlier as well. June slept through the night for the first time in a few weeks and Noah woke briefly at 5:40, only to go back to sleep and sleep in until 7:05.

We had a Mother’s Day brunch around ten, without Sara and Dune, who’d been out visiting friends until two in the morning and were still asleep. Noah had no trouble chewing the French toast and ate four slices. Mom finally roused Sara and Dune around eleven thirty, as we were packing to leave. Sara was sad about missing brunch and wished we’d woken her earlier. She sat on our bed, watching us get ready and said she finally realized who June reminded her of—Cindy Lou Who from The Grinch (http://jpbutler.com/images/cindy-lou-who.jpg). She’s the tiny little girl with blonde hair and big blue eyes. Beth said there’s no way the Grinch could have put one over on June like he did with Cindy Lou.

Driving home, we remembered we’d left a couple of June’s sippies in Mom and Jim’s fridge and that we’d also forgotten to take some of the cake with us. I was a little disappointed to think there would be no cake on my real birthday, but we stopped at Starbucks and I put a sizeable dent in the gift card Noah got me for my birthday, buying coffee and juice and pastries for everyone.

We got home in time for Noah to make Elias a birthday card on the computer and for me to plan some dinners for the next week and put ingredients on the shopping list. Beth took June shopping while Noah was at the party and I was left alone. This is my regular time to do housework, but I decided to read a book Beth got me for my birthday (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_Century_Ghosts) instead. It felt rather decadent. I’d also told Beth to buy some Brie while she was out shopping. I’ve been trying to cut back on fat a little so this was a luxury, too. It started to rain pretty hard soon after Beth, Noah and June left. I curled up in bed with my book and read a story. When I finished it I felt too tired to keep reading so I decided to rest my eyes a bit and listen to the pelting rain. I woke up forty-five minutes later. I resolved to be a little bit useful and I unpacked everyone’s clothes, unloaded the dishwasher and watered the plants.

I opened my gift from Andrea when everyone came home and we had lentil soup, Brie and apricot jam on flatbread for dinner, followed by cupcakes Beth picked up at the grocery store. She asked me whether I wanted one with blue, pink or orange frosting. Remembering how my sister and I always fought over the pink cupcake whenever Mom bought the Sara Lee variety pack, I chose the pink one. Later that night my sister called to wish me a happy birthday, since she’d forgotten to earlier in the day.

It was a low-key birthday, a bit overshadowed by other celebrations but that’s because we have so much to celebrate in this merry, merry month: having and being a mother, having a wonderful partner to share my mothering, the birth of my eldest child and the man who makes my sister laugh like none of her other boyfriends ever did and Noah’s oldest friend. Plus I had over two hours to myself with minimal responsibilities and I got the pink cupcake. That sure doesn’t happen every day.

Seven Snapshots from My Past

Beth and Noah were reading this poem, alternating lines, with breaks for him to recover from helpless, hysterical laughter:

“One Winter Night in August”
By X.J. Kennedy

One winter night in August
While the larks sang in their eggs,
A barefoot boy with shoes on
Stood kneeling on his legs.

At ninety miles an hour
He slowly strolled to town
And parked atop a tower
That had just fallen down.

He asked a kind old policeman
Who bit small boys in half
“Officer, have you seen my pet
Invisible Giraffe?”

“Why sure I haven’t seen him.”
The cop smiled with a sneer
“He was just here tomorrow
And he rushed right back next year…”

The poem goes on, but this is where Noah really lost it. He loves nonsense. Alice and Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are among his favorite books and we have read them both countless times. I keep meaning to get The Phantom Tollbooth for him from the library, but we haven’t read it yet. What cracks him up most about this poem are the contradictory references to time, the winter night in August, actions described in the past tense which are said to take place in the future. “Next year is in the future,” he insisted, giggling.

As silly as the poem is, it does hint at an essential truth. The past, present and future are hopelessly entangled with each other in all of our lives. We are who we are now because of our pasts, and we try to imagine or make sense of the future, based on both the past and the present.

I was tagged recently, which means another blogger, Not the Mama, (http://notthemama.wordpress.com/) nominated me to write a blog containing “seven random or weird” facts about myself. I wanted to do it, but struggled with what to write. Surely, there are an ample number of weird facts about me, or at least facts that put me outside the mainstream of American society. Seven would be a conservative figure. Here are some I could have used for starters: I’m a bisexual, a vegetarian, and an atheist. I don’t have a driver’s license and I haven’t had a hair cut in twenty-five years. I have a PhD, and I know more about vampires than a normal person should. Somehow, though, none of this inspired me. It didn’t hang together; I didn’t know how to make sense of it. And yes, I know that’s what “random” means and randomness certainly has its place in life, but when possible I like things to have a narrative. So instead of isolated facts, I decided to give a brief account of what was going on in my life thirty-five, thirty, twenty-five, twenty, fifteen, ten and five years ago. The arbitrariness of the dates should impart a certain level of randomness while keeping the narrative arc going. Here goes:

1) November 1972: I was five and a half and living in Brooklyn with my mother, father, and nineteen-month old sister, and attending kindergarten at a Montessori school. The following month we would move to Philadelphia, when my father left his job at The Wall Street Journal to take a job as an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer.

2) November 1977: I was ten and a half and living in Newtown, Pennsylvania with my mother, father and sister. My parents had decided to move out of the city and to a small town within commuting distance, partly in hopes of getting a fresh start on their struggling marriage, not that I knew that at the time. They would separate the following March. I liked the small town atmosphere, being able to ride my bike anywhere I wanted and I had a close-knit group of three best friends. I think I was pretty happy.

3) November 1982: I was fifteen and a half and living in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania with my mother and sister. We’d moved there after the divorce to be closer to my mother’s work and school two years earlier. Since the move, she had finished a Master’s degree in nursing at the University of Pennsylvania, was working as a psychiatric nurse and she’d just begun dating the man who would become my stepfather. The previous spring I had fallen in love with my best friend and I was coming to terms with the fact that I was either lesbian or bisexual. The friend had suddenly and mysteriously dropped me at the end of the summer. She said she would explain later and I waited, heartbroken and confused, for months for that explanation, but she never supplied it. I suspect she’d realized the nature of my feelings for her. I spent most of that fall completely miserable, mooning over her, sure I would never find anyone who would ever love me.

4) November 1987: I was twenty and a half, spending a semester in Córdoba, Spain. The summer before I’d had my first lesbian kiss, which quickly led to my first lesbian relationship. (With a young woman named Beth. I’ve mentioned her before, right?) Despite this, I was engaging in an ill-advised flirtation with a Spaniard. (See my July 22 entry for details if you want them.) I wish I’d had more sense, but I was young and foolish.

5) November 1992: I was twenty-five and a half, living in Washington, DC with Beth and a friend of ours from college, Kris. It was ten months after our commitment ceremony. I was working as a grant-writer for Project Vote (http://www.projectvote.org/), a non-profit organization that registers low-income African-Americans to vote. The organization is non-partisan, but I wasn’t, so I was pretty euphoric about the election of Bill Clinton. Beth was working at HRC (www.hrc.org/) and we’d both been putting in long hours in the months leading up to the election, so we took a vacation and went to visit my sister in Santa Cruz. We rented a convertible and drove to Big Sur. We traveled a lot, pre-kids, but this stands out in my mind as a particularly happy, carefree trip.

6) November 1997: I was thirty and a half, and still living in Washington, DC, with Beth and Kris. (Beth and I lived in that apartment eleven years, eight of them with Kris. It’s the longest I have ever lived anywhere.) I was four years into my PhD program at the University of Maryland, with two to go. My financial aid had run out so I was teaching as a part-time adjunct at George Washington University. It was my first semester there and I was delighted with the students who were both more serious-minded and more fun than any I’d taught at either The University of Iowa or Maryland. Teaching was a fulfilling and welcome diversion from the morass that was my dissertation.

7) November 2002: I was thirty-five and a half, living in Takoma Park, Maryland with Beth and Noah, who was eighteen months old. We’d bought our house six months earlier and I was in my second year of full-time teaching at GW. I was teaching a class on genre fiction for the first time that semester. I’d designed it to complement the horror class I’d been teaching for a few years and I was really enjoying it. Noah was in daycare for the first time that fall and it was a hard adjustment for all of us. (Beth had been working part-time to care for him while I was teaching before this.) After a couple months, with the help of a warm and loving teacher, he got used to daycare and was happy there. He stayed at that center for three years, until I lost my job.

That takes us up to now. If you’ve been reading this space, you know all about that, and as for five years from now, as Noah says, that’s in the future. I do know I’ll have a first-grader (again!) and (even more shocking) a middle-schooler. Having both kids in school will no doubt change my life in ways I can’t even imagine now. The future is unseeable, but here nonetheless, like an Invisible Giraffe. I can reach for her, feel her outlines, but I can’t quite make her out.

Note: Now I’m supposed to tag seven more people. I don’t think I can. I read a lot of blogs, but not too many on a regular basis. Since Not the Mama only tagged four, I will finish up her seven by tagging three, one each who remind me of my past, present and future.

The Ghost of Bloggers Past: Kath (http://www.momsworld.com/portal.php?blog=2). This blog is defunct, so the point of tagging it is not to get the author to participate, but just to direct new readers to her blog archive, which is still available online. In the late 90s and early 00s, Kath wrote an online parenting column with message board attached (it was a blog before the word existed really) on the Moms Online Forum she founded. It was called the Daily Alexander. After the birth of her second child she renamed it Life in Progress and after a long hiatus it was reinvented as the Mom in Progress blog, where the link above will take you. I have been reading about Kath’s family since her oldest was a toddler (she has four kids now). Her writing is touching and down to earth and it was the inspiration for my own blog. So even though she’s not writing now, I can’t help paying tribute to her.

The Ghost of Bloggers Present: Chris (http://www.silverspringvoice.com/apparently/). Chris lives here in Takoma Park. We met when our older kids were in a drama class together last winter and spring. He’s a stay-at-home dad with kids close in age to mine (his oldest is a year older than Noah and his youngest is a year and a half older than June) so we go through a lot of the same things. He’s a cool guy. I recommend his recent post on giving thanks. Most of the time the comment function on his blog doesn’t work so if you visit and try to comment it might not show up.

The Ghost of Bloggers Future: Liza (http://lizawashere.com/). Liza is the founder and administrator of Lesbianfamily.org. I have only begun to explore this website but I hope to find some good reading material and community there. Liza has a son about June’s age who is named Noah. This tickles me.

Rules
1. Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 random and or weird things about yourself.
3. Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
4. Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

That’s all folks!

It’s Not Time to Talk About Flamingoes

June had just drifted off to sleep. I lay on her bed, curled around her, wondering where I’d left my stack of papers on household toxins. If her nap was long enough I could read and highlight the whole thing and get it in the mail tomorrow before Noah got home from school, which would be two and a half hours earlier than usual, due to an early dismissal. Whenever I can I like to mail my packets to my sister on Fridays. I try not to do my research on the weekends and I like having my paid work done for a few days. It’s a luxurious feeling for an ex-academic who used to spend her weekends grading papers. The Friday mailing was looking iffy this week, though. Between running out of ink yesterday and forgetting to take the early dismissal into account until today, I’d fallen behind schedule.

Here I should note that the schedule is entirely of my own making. Sara sends me a topic and I send her the research when I finish it. She always says, “When you get a chance” or “June permitting” and she never makes me feel pressured or rushed. I do that to myself.

I climbed halfway out of June’s bed. And she woke up, crying. I put the pacifier back in her mouth and rubbed her tummy lightly. That will often do the trick, but not this time. She cried harder. I settled back into the bed, waiting for her to drift off again. And she didn’t. I began to sing “Hush Little Baby,” then “All the Pretty Little Horses,” about a half dozen times each. She was not sleeping. Every now and then she’d pop up to her knees and I would set her gently down on her back. This went on for about a half hour. We’d started the nap later than usual because she’d slept in the stroller during our morning walk. I might be able to get her to sleep again by putting her in the stroller again and going around the block a couple times, but even if I did it would be too late to get any work done before Noah got home from school. That much was clear.

I got up out of the bed, leaving her to wail while I collected jackets and shoes for both of us. Then I came back, picked her up and took her to the bathroom to change her diaper and get her coat and shoes and mittens on. I did not make eye contact or speak to her during this operation. I was fuming.

When Noah was a toddler there was nothing he could do that could make me madder than resisting naps. Beth and I were both working full-time then and he was in daycare only about half-time. I was doing a lot of my work at home with him, under real deadlines. A missed nap could mean not turning back papers on the day I’d told my students I would (which I hated to do) or having to stay up late, not knowing how many times Noah would wake me up or at what ungodly hour he would want to start the day. (I make smart, pretty, charming babies, but good sleepers, not so much.) I resolved that this time around it would be different. There’s just no point being angry with a child who can’t sleep. It’s not her fault. And even it were, what do I gain from it? Taking care of her is my primary responsibility most days. Anything else I do, whether it’s research, doing laundry or getting dinner on the table is extra. It’s gravy.

Somehow, though, when she won’t sleep it feels just as urgent and disastrous to me as it did five years ago. Even if what I was going to do during the break is non-essential, the break itself feels essential. I am just not an on-all-the-time kind of person. I need my alone time, even if I’m working during it. That’s why teaching college suited me so well and I can’t fathom teaching all day like elementary and secondary teachers do, day in and day out. Of course, I parent all day without a break some days, but often I do it badly, with ill will.

We had twenty-five minutes before Noah’s bus came, time for two circuits around the block. I’d been harboring the tiniest sliver of hope that June would fall asleep right off the bat, allowing me to go back to the house and get just a little work done, but near the end of the first circuit she was still awake. As we passed the baby swing hanging in a neighbor’s yard, a swing we’ve been granted permission to use, June began to struggle in the stroller and say “Out!”

“You are not riding in that swing!” I said, not in my kindest tone. “It’s time to sleep.”

A few houses later, we passed another neighbor’s pink lawn flamingoes. “’Mingo!” June declared.

“It’s not time to talk about flamingoes,” I said uncharitably. “It’s time to sleep.”

The second time around the block, on the part of the walk that goes by the creek, I noticed I was walking under a red maple, most of the way turned. The early November mid-afternoon light made the green-tipped red leaves glow. All around me trees were in various stages of turning, some still green, others greenish yellow, others fiery red. The trees burned and were not consumed.

It would be nice to say the beauty of nature made me forget my anger and filled me with appreciation for life and its cycles, but that’s not precisely what happened. I noticed the maple and considered how I’d walked right by it without seeing it ten minutes ago, and what a loss it would have been if I’d never seen it at all. I felt my anger abate just a little. I was calmer. As I reached the uphill part of the walk, I concentrated on feeling my muscles push the stroller up the short, steep stretch of asphalt. I tried to clear my mind of negative thoughts and emotions.

When we went by the swing again and June again started to struggle and say “Out!” I checked my watch. There wasn’t time. I used a nicer tone of voice, however, when I told her we wouldn’t stop.

And when we passed the flamingoes and she identified them, I just said, “Yep, those are flamingoes all right.”

At the bus stop, the stay-at-home dad who waits for his son there mentioned that his preschooler gets up at five on a bad morning and six on a good one and that he has given up his afternoon nap almost entirely. It could be worse, I thought. And later, I decided, we’d go back to the flamingoes.

On Turning Forty

“I don’t think we’ve consulted you on your cake,” Beth called from another room a few days ago. June was fussing and I only caught about every other syllable. I had to think a while to re-construct what she might have said.

“You said consult and not insult, right?” I said.

“Yes,” she said, laughing.

“So it’s not going to say ‘Over the Hill’ on it or anything?”

“No.” She was still laughing.

I turned forty today. Somehow those birthdays that end in zero lead to introspection and a little prickliness. Well, maybe not all of them. I don’t remember much soul-searching at my tenth birthday, though I do remember a pretty cool cake decorated like a pirate chest. (My mom made great birthday cakes.) And my twentieth birthday was mainly memorable for a surprise party my friend and sophomore-year roommate Jim threw for me. He kept it surprising by throwing it four months before my actual birthday. I’d been complaining about how my mid-May birthday was always during reading period or finals and how I wished it was during the January term at Oberlin when everyone was taking just one class and actually had the time to go to a party. So four months to the day before my birthday, I had my party. There were balloons; there were presents; there was cake. He even contacted my mom and got her to send me a card. It was one the nicest things anyone has ever done for me.

I don’t remember what Beth and I did for my thirtieth birthday, probably something that seemed unremarkable at the time (like dinner and a movie by ourselves) that would be an almost unthinkable luxury these days. What I do remember is how miserable I was to be turning thirty. I was mired in the dissertation-writing process, a year into it and all I’d done was write and rewrite the prospectus four times. My committee finally and grudgingly allowed me to start on the introduction after the fourth draft, but my confidence was pretty low by that point. Meanwhile, I’d decided I definitely wanted children a few years earlier but Beth was unsure and between her ambivalence and my academic paralysis, it seemed like it was never going to happen. I started haunting websites for moms and lurking on pregnancy message boards. To make matters worse, it was clear by that point that Beth and I were going to fall short of our goal of visiting all fifty states by our tenth anniversary that July. I felt like my life was going nowhere.

Fast forward ten years. I accomplished most of the unfinished business of my twenties in my thirties. I received my Ph.d at thirty-two, had my first child at almost thirty-four, visited the last state (Alaska) with Beth and Noah at thirty-eight, and had my last child at almost thirty-nine. So what’s left? It’s looking almost certain that the academic career for which I suffered through the Ph.d is just not going to happen. I spent the first two years of the last decade as a graduate student, the next two as an underpaid adjunct, the next four as a decently compensated but never secure “full-time temporary” assistant professor and the last two years unemployed (aside from the business of raising my kids). I’ve been on the market for a steady teaching job about half of that time. I don’t know if it’s turning forty or the dwindling response to the applications I send out, but I’m starting to feel for the first time that it’s time to call it quits, not in a year or six months if things don’t look up, but now. In a way it’s a relief, like getting off a merry-go-round that’s been making you sick for some time, but still, I step off with a heavy heart. The horses were so pretty and it always seemed like they really were going to go somewhere someday.

This leaves me somewhat adrift. I loved teaching freshman writing seminars at GW and it will be hard to think of something I would find as fulfilling. But some time before June gets on that big yellow bus I will need to come up with a Plan B. For now the work of being the primary caregiver to an aspiring toddler and an active kindergartener is overwhelming enough to keep me from thinking too deeply about it. Every now and then I pick up an academic odd job (tutoring a grad student writing a seminar paper, editing a chapter of a dissertation, scoring the written portion of the SAT) but mostly I am mommy. And while there’s real psychic danger to living too much through your kids, I think more about their accomplishments these days than my own. Noah is reading in two languages now, having learned to read in Spanish at school and how to read in English largely on his own (assisted a bit by the twenty or so episodes of The Electric Company we watched this winter and spring). June has learned two baby signs (cheese and shoes), is up to about ten spoken words, and as of a few days ago, she’s walking! She took her first step a little over a week ago. Over the next few days she would take more and more at a time. Then on Wednesday afternoon, while we were waiting for Noah at drama, she started to experiment, taking a step forward, then one to the side, one backwards, etc. It was almost like watching a dance (a careful, wobbly sort of dance). Then she sat down, stood immediately back up and took nine steps straight to me, ending by hurling herself into my arms. I laughed out loud and hugged her tightly, whispering, “I am so proud of you, Juney.” It was a moment of unalloyed joy for both of us.

Beth is six months older than me so she has scouted out the territory of our forties a bit for me. Right before her birthday, our gynecologist told her that when you turn forty you start to fall apart. Sure enough the day after she turned forty she had a gallbladder attack. She had it out in January and since then she’s had a lot of complicated dental work done. Right on schedule, I am having my first crown later this month. Other than that, though, I haven’t noticed much physical deterioration. The gray at my hairline is a bit more pronounced and in a certain light I can see tiny wrinkles on the backs of my hands, but overall I am holding up pretty well.

We went out for pizza tonight. Noah was not as badly behaved as he was last week at the Thai restaurant but I can’t say he was well behaved. June was restless in her high chair so I took her out and from then on it was a struggle to keep her from grabbing everything off the table while she was on my lap or eating off the floor while she was crawling under the table. My forty-year-old self thought somewhat nostalgically of the birthday dinner my thirty-year-old self must have had. Unmemorable though it was, I’m reasonably sure no one at the table cried and Beth and I must have finished quite a few sentences in a row. Even so, I know how my thirty-year-old self would have cherished a glimpse of this future, these children, however frustrating and imperfect. There was a woman at the next table over eating with her children. The oldest looked about ten and the youngest four or five. There was no one crying or whining and everyone stayed in his or her seat. Both my thirty-year-old self and my forty-year-old self looked on with interest, wondering what forty-four will bring.