you are what you eat with

The day started out as usual, the baby calling to me from his crib, swaying and babbling like a drunkard, falling over and then climbing up again with a smile and a wave. There was the relay of the cereal boxes to the table and the discovery of the dead mouse in the dining room, though Emily, having vanished under the bed for the morning was not willing to take credit.

But on this day, all this normalcy couldn't stave off the weight of knowing: we'd be going to the dentist. Isaac had a check up and cleaning scheduled and like all our other appointments – eye exams, physicals for school – we were trying to get them all up-to-date before the end of the year when Mike's job and, thus, our insurance coverage runs out.

I didn't have any particular reason to dread the dentist really, on my behalf or Isaac's, except for the fact that like with most any visit to a western “specialist,” we'd be temporarily sucked into their world where, overwrought with everything dental, we'd thrash and spin until they released us again to the larger world unscathed to the naked eye.

I miss our pediatric dentist in Monterey. He had a son Isaac's age. He spoke quietly and often said things I almost agreed with.

On this day, that started out so typically, we find ourselves at a place where the staff speaks in the forced and predictable cadence of people who are trying to sound kid-friendly, but really have no interest in anyone shorter than their shoulder. Everything that is said to Isaac, naturally, is actually for my benefit and comes out in patronizing tones that imply we have not done everything humanly possibly to optimize our son's oral health and by extension that we are horrid, horrid people and even worse parents.

The hygenist continues to interrupt me while I try to read the annual issue on whether MFA programs are affective in the writer's magazine that gets all its advertising money from MFA programs, to show me a tiny dark spot on my son's molar. “That's a tooth to watch!” she says more than once. And, after I try again to return to my magazine (Can writing be taught??), “I'm just going to show mom one more thing on this side.” It's my cue to get the hell up and look – look at what I've let happen!

“Mmm-hmm,” I try as a show of concern. And Isaac with his perfect public demeanor, says nothing, just opens and closes obediently.

If it is under these conditions that I must write, then so be it. And so, I am drafting this essay real time as the passive-agressive hygenist berates me with her sighs and hums.

Chipper, faux kid-friendly hygenists' names are required to be things like Maricella, Kayla, and Leanna. The final “a” is important. Like the upturn in a smile, the circles over the I's when you are writing your name and the last name of the boy you have a crush on over and over again on your folder in high school chemistry class.

Isaac lost the two teeth that flank his upper front teeth ages ago and the replacements have not yet seen fit to grow in. This situation, as you might imagine, is impossible to bear – if you are Maricella or Kayla or Sienna or Vivianna. I might find it impossible to bear wearing scrubs with Tweety Bird on them, but there you have it.

She convinces me to do x-rays (that damn finite stretch of insurance) to see what's going on up in the gum line. Before she goes to take them though, she spells out all the tragic ways in which my son's teeth will ruin his mouth and his life. She recommends (strongly) what I've come to think of as preemptive braces to “help the teeth come down.” If, in fact, they are even there (gasp). When I ask for more information on the real implications of such a situation and the option of waiting as opposed to vomiting big bucks to spell out to my seven-year-old in orthodontia just how unacceptable and imperfect he is, she offers “He's going to look like he's missing two teeth.” To which I reply, very slowly, “That's because. He's. Missing. Two teeth.”

“I have a referral right here for you. We'll email over the digital x-ray today,” she says by way of response.

Release me, oh great goddess of orthodontia (who is married, by pure coincidence, of course, to our dental deity), out into my sordid world of dead mice and cereal. I have nothing for your altar.

sit up straight and look like a poet

I'm sure it's just jealousy. Most things are.

I've come to resent the book cover photos of the poet that looks out at you, his expression appearing as though he is startled to have found himself there, his most intimate thoughts published for all the world to see, by BOA Editions or Coffee House Press, by Michigan, Pittsburgh, Arizona, Georgia. And I have nothing to offer him in return but my undying devotion – after all, I am one of the few, the small pod of humans that buys poetry books, albeit second-hand.

And what has he got to look alarmed about? I mean, really. He must have known this was coming – writing in some disciplined way every day that he will ultimately reveal in a Poets & Writers interview from his light-filled house, churning out poems, essays, revisions, hob-nobbing electronically with his old MFA pals, submitting with some regularity to prestigious journals and being accepted half of the time. It's not as if he spends his days crawling under furniture, picking up gooey Cheerios, fleeing the house every couple days, or weeks, the baby wailing at him, stretching out his little arms for him like a drowning man going down for the last time, then having to avoid the questions from the older kids in the driveway: “Where are you going?”

“To write,” he'd have to tell them, as if none of this affected him and then get in the car, sweating.

At the cafe, the super-ordinary adultness and freedom of saucers clicking would make him want to close his journal into which he had managed in the course of 15 minutes to write the date, lower his head into his hands and weep.

No, it's not like that at all.

And it makes one think that every one of these author photos should be set up like an 80's Glamor Shot or posed on the top of a mountain – arms raised in triumph over their literary heads and silhouetted against a pink and orange sunset.

What is it with these photos anyway? Sly looks. Shy profiles. Pensive, pondering Bodhi tree expressions. Aren't poets meant to be the heralders of truth? The carriers of clarity? Open your eyes, man, and look at the camera! Isn't that what your mother, who probably spent her days crawling under furniture, picking up your gooey Cheerios so you could go off and become a freaking poet would want? And another thing on her behalf – pick up your damn feet when you walk!

this moment

California poppy blooming in Massachusetts

I have never been this kind of tired -- too tired to think well enough to write. The worst kind of tired imaginable to me.

I watch the progression – my husband gets more and more exhausted as the week goes on and he continues to take on the brunt of the teething nights. At dinner, pasta with butter, (our farm box of vegetables rotting in the frig), he looks haggered, dark bags form under his eyes. Later, I retrieve him from our 7-year-old's room where he's fallen asleep doing bedtime and take his hand to lead him back downstairs where he squints in the harsh light.

For over a week now, the two of us whisper the same thing to each other before we go to bed, “White sand, turquoise water.” We've been trying to dream about a little cabana on the beach for just us. A hammock and a drink with an umbrella. Somewhere out on the horizon, the orange sail of a catamaran still visible in the setting sun. We just want to dream it, for godssake. So far, nothing. We are awake every two hours; we are rigid minds of havetos and can'ts; we are wasted.

Instead, last night just before dawn, I dreamed of Monterey. I had to say goodbye to everyone again. I kept going back and forth among my friends, unable to break away.

Mike is sprawled, eyes closed, on the couch now, and before him the detritus of the day maps our path: a plastic recycling truck, its back hanging open like a yellow wagging tongue; a teddy bear Isaac got as a gift when he was one leaning on its face in the corner; a remote control car that hasn't worked for at least a decade which my mother-in-law insisted we bring home with us from her basement; a container of blocks, mostly empty; a hundred wooden blocks strewn the length of the living room; a dozen board books, their spines gouged with teeth marks.

There is no clever ending to this story. There is no sharply creative metaphor. It is just the story of a family holding on, just holding on.

something to sink your teeth into

trying to look innocent, eating corn flakes and sporting avocado-applesauce shampoo.

"Does baby have a little toofy?"

There is a stranger goo-goo-gaa-gaaing at my baby on the bike path and I've warned her he may be cute, but the kid takes no prisoners when it comes to biting.

“Is there a toofy in there? Hmm??”

“Um, he has 8,” I tell the woman, who clearly has not taken my warning seriously enough.

She stops, straightens up, drops the gooey smile and looks me in the eye. “Eight?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well,” she says in a huff of exhale, as if offended by my infant's dental progress.

I'm relieved to have snapped her out of her baby talk, though I can see this will end our recently ignited relationship.

You could say Rhys experiences the world through taste. One of his favorite things to play with is the large Rubbermaid container of his socks (all of which are either too big or too small, like a true full moon, they only really fit him for a moment. Aaaaaaand...NOW! ). His favorite way to play with his sock container is to tilt it to his face and catch the falling socks in his mouth. He then grips the captured

sock or pair of socks in his teeth like a puppy playing tug-o-war and, solidifying the analogy, shakes his head from side to side snarling.

The child eats anything he can get his hands on – food, yes, but also any accompaniments – the avocado peel, for example, all the grass he can cram in his face, a cheese stick, stolen from my hands, the plastic wrapper torn open easily with his fangs before I can even react.

At the one play group I've managed to attend at the library, all the other babies were mobile but mine. Rhys surveyed the room with excitement, his chubby little arms and legs kicking and flailing at the sight of the other babes. There he sat on his blanket while half a dozen babies tottered around him or zipped by on all fours and his pleasure grew untethered. High-pitched hoots escaping his mouth, he waited until one of the wee ones got within striking distance and then – blam!-- he'd reach out as far as he possibly could, leading with his mouth wide open. Mama's little attack spider manning his web.

The other day I noticed the netting on his pack-n-play portable crib was torn in two places. Odd, I thought. Until I realized, that, no, it's not been torn, it's been bitten.

I'm thinking his first words might be “Tastes like chicken.”

conducting. the world is his edible symphony.

This Tiny Body Curled Against Mine

its mouth wide, waiting for the breast

and there I am, placed in the family

of things. Just another mammal.

And, yes, I want exactly 

what the doe and the fox mother want –

for him to one day rise, sure

in his defenses and walk

on his own power through the woods.  

paths

It's one of those times when I think: "What kind of stars exactly have had to align to find me here in this moment -- sitting in my car on a Tuesday night in rural Massachusetts in the parking lot of a Big Y supermarket listening to The Cure on the radio and eating Poptarts?" I know many of you have likely asked yourselves that very question probably a million times.

It is the Great Baby Escape 2012.

Life paths are funny things. Say to me 20 years ago - "You will have two kids and be excited when you haven't burned the lasagna!" And my 22-year-old self will laugh, "Screw off!" and skip carefree across the Ponte Vecchio while awaiting the end of the Italian train strike. Say it to me 3 years ago and I will laugh equally hard  before zipping south on Highway 1 toward a writing retreat along the Big Sur coastline.

Rhys is 10 months old today. Unless you are adjusting for his four-week early birth. These days I think of it mostly in terms of getting a jump start on that sleep deprivation.

I am at a wall. This is hard. I am tired. More than tired. My friends are far away. I am sad.

Every day I encounter people whose paths I ponder.

The podiatrist who sees me for 7-minute meetings in a dingy little office every couple months and asks with a shrug and not a glance at my little piggies how everything is going but has never inquired about my lifestyle or factors affecting the issues with my feet and who can squeeze me in three weeks later when I'm in pain... is this what he dreamed of doing with his time on this earth?

The TV meteorologist who shudders at the rain in an Everyman kind of attempt at camaraderie and asks leading dramatically-presented, pre-commerical break questions such as, "Will we see any improvement by the weekend?!?" ...does he sleep well at night believing he's contributing to a better world?

The contractor, who you are supposed to imagine building something with tools and his hands despite his sharply ironed pink designer label button down and perfect hair, and who uses your name too much ("Kathryn, I'm glad we could meet today. Let me ask you a few more questions, Kathryn...")...what did he want to be when he grew up?

And me. Who knows. Who knows what I wanted. All I want now is sleep. But do remember this -- the world needs saving, people. Choose your Poptarts carefully.

Take a stroll into a flashback post...This time last year.

on rainy days, I take a shower: a wee vignette on gardening and parenting

California poppy and marigold seedlings in my garden

snaps with alyssum

I don't mean that I step outside into the rain and “shower” in a rain shower. While this conceit is quaintly poetic in a not very interesting way, what my gardening poet mama self means is in fact quite literal. Believe me, poetry aside, I know something about the literal. I live with an engineer.

I mean, on days when the weather is rainy, I step into the bathtub – a beautiful clawfoot tub one well-meaning former owner of my 116-year-old farmhouse painted green on some decorating bender which I'm sure at the time seemed like a glowing stroke of genius, and I turn on the water, which, thanks to that engineer, for the first time in 116 years, sprays from a shower pipe stationed above the green claw feet in my 5' by 7' bathroom that sits, naturally, as a modern afterthought – urban, city slicker cousin to the original outhouse – off our kitchen, itself a modern afterthought.**

I take a shower when it rains because I will probably do less gardening on these days and it seems a safe enough effort to scrub my fingernails and untangle my hair. Of course, I must qualify with “probably” because you do never know. One of my first acts of gardening after moving to Massachusetts was planting daffodil bulbs in a blizzard. But there you are.

The other part of my rainy day hygiene routine is that as a mom of a 9-month-old baby and a 7-year-old first-grader, the mornings get more than a little busy and the evenings no less so. Showering doesn't tend to happen every day, as unAmerican as that is to admit.

When I get to take showers, however, I am loathe to leave the green clawfoot. The world becomes a caressing stream of warm water, the knots in my neck show signs of wanting to unlock and ideas percolate among the synapses of my brain like gorgeous soap bubbles shimmering in rainbow colors.***

And then I get out.

“Mommy?!” “Mommy??” MOMmy!!”

** This is the kind of unending sentence that my husband tells me turns readers off. However, I like to think that someday (when I'm discovered, right?) it will be the kind of signature within my writing that marks my style. It will be, in fact, the REASON I am discovered -- some editor will be reeled in by such a layered and original voice and my college political science professor who handed me back my essays exasperated (“Kitty, can you please just give me a subject and a verb and move on!”) will have to write me an apology. (One sentence of substantial length will do, Jeff.)

***And here, I leave the literal to move toward the poetic once again, albeit in a somewhat trite fashion since these are the first comparisons that come to mind and the baby is due to wake up any minute and wouldn't it be nice to post a blog entry?

kale with rhubarb leaves

end of the allium

really tired and this is what came out

I was checking my email the other day with the baby on my lap when I noticed he was chewing something. My Page Up key.

It is difficult to capture the extreme chaos that is the first year. It is nearly impossible to explain to those with "good little sleepers" the overriding and absolute collapse that threatens hour by hour your life when you have a child that doesn't sleep well - day or night.

It is Mother's Day weekend and I arrive here broken, convinced that raising the next generation means nothing less than imminent self destruction. It should have been plain all along: They will take our place. I just had no idea it would be quite so soon.

Sometimes when I should be getting my full two hours of contingent shut eye, I instead read profiles in Poets & Writers magazine where the writer is described sitting in some beautiful room of her beautiful house with its beautiful art on the walls sipping what can only be assumed to be beautiful tea. They live in some town or city or village somewhere and no matter what you know of that place or have previously concluded about it, it now sounds beautiful. Beautiful and exotic and exactly the type of place a successful writer should live and I wonder why I don't live there and where on earth they got the money for that space they own.

And what, you may ask, does this have to do with children? Just everything. Everything.

I offer up Billy Collins' "Lanyard" (and here is the poet reading it on video) in honor of mothers this weekend and in acknowledgment of the lag time it takes children to appreciate theirs - hell, society in general still hasn't figured out what we're worth.

I swear, seven years ago, I never even gave a single thought to what might be in those strollers.

feminism never accounted for homeownership

I recently walked down into the basement of our house for the first time since we bought it. Like most of what motivates me to attempt anything beyond sleep these days, it had to do with the baby. I needed to tell the guys installing insulation in our breezeway of a house that there was a baby asleep above them. I wanted to sound friendly in a threatening kind of way. It's an art.

For their part, two of the men were trying to convince the third, apparently a transplant from Puerto Rico, that it “wasn't that cold” on this particular day. I would have stayed to side with my compañero, but I don't linger in the basement of our house. The last time I spent any time in my little field stone salon was before I'd signed on the bottom line, when the house inspector was here taking notes on the boiler and shaking his head.

I left that meeting no more the wiser about boilers or anything else down there or in the rest of the house, for that matter. In short, I can't keep up. I have no idea why we need a roof vent or what the chimney in the storage room has to do with the water heater or whether or not our siding is grounded. Where Mike nodded authoritatively at the inspector's assessments of everything from the circuit breakers to the door locks, I tagged along behind occasionally saying things like “Could you repeat that?” as if I'd figure it out if I heard it again.

When Mike headed for the basement door the other day after the tub wouldn't drain mumbling something about “the trap,” I had a vague notion of what he meant, but well, not really, and certainly not enough to go into the basement and find this trap thing, just enough to know it was a crummy job and I was glad I wasn't doing it. I leaned in to him and hooked my arm in his. “Oh, honey! I crooned with mock glee bending one leg at the knee, “We're homeowners!!”

I feel like buying a house has been a major assault to my feminist identity, on the off-chance that any of it was left in the first place. Mike plans projects like installing ceiling fans and dimmer switches while I think about table runners. When I question whether he might electrocute himself while ticking off his to do list, he offers reassurances that only reinforce the divide between us.

“I took classes in electricity stuff in high school,” he shrugs, the confidence pooling at the corners of his mouth like cookie crumbs.

I look over at my husband and blink methodically. “I took Home Ec. where I learned how to sew a bean bag frog. I'm so glad we were equally prepared for the world.” And here I was thinking I'd been super lucky – the semester after ours the class had gotten into a huge rice fight and from then on everyone had to stuff their frogs with boring soft filling.

We never had to carry eggs around to warn us away from parenting, like in some schools, but no egg could have prepared me for the social train wreck that follows giving birth in this country. Since I will never ever learn, Rhys and I stopped in to a couple of parents' groups this past week. At one, where kids of different ages mingled in two huge rooms of complete chaos, a leader gushed to me about how many places you could put your baby down here. Yeah, I thought, if you want him to get a fungus. Another mom revealed to me in casual conversation that she started coming for what she referred to as her “sanity.” Toddlers on tricycles zoomed by us in some kind of pre-school rush hour, somewhere in the distance children were fighting over doll blankets. “I'm not sure this is sanity,” I responded, causing her to curl her lip every so slightly.

At another circle, we were meant to talk about the question of “identity” and what may have happened to ours since having kids. When it's my turn, my five-month-old is cranky and tired, refusing the boob I'm pushing into his face as I'm passed the “talking stone.” Over his crying I blurt out a few bitter-sounding things about the hospital and the snow. “May I offer a brief the reflection?” the overcareful, over-educated facilitator asks me when I'm done. “No,” I tell her and pack my things to go.

Can I tell you that Isaac is currently studying gender bias, by the way? First grade. I can only imagine what I was studying in the first grade. Jump rope songs and choosing games, I think. My mother and your mother were hanging up the clothes. My mother socked your mother right smack in the nose. What color was the blood? Green. G-R-E-E-N. You're it! I wonder if studying something changes it. Or are we all just trapped in a fish tank – blue fins fiddling with gears, pink fins applying lipstick – to be watched with interest by our children?

god complexes and mothers and doctors and what's in a name

Two things Isaac is obsessed with right now are world records and looking things up on the internet. As you might guess, these two passions combine to make for hours of entertainment for my son as long as there is an adult to tell him how to spell and read what pops up.

About as skilled as I am with finessing his search language, Isaac sees the computer as a kind of a boardwalk palm reader -- “Ask it 'What is the biggest baby ever born?' Type in, 'Who-is-the-person-with-the-longest-ever-mustache-ever-in-the-whole-entire-world-ever?'”

“Let's look up 'Who is the most important person in the world?'” he pleaded recently.

“Who would decide who the most important person was?” I ask, devil horns sprouting from my curls. “Most important for what? To whom?”

“You know, just most important.”

“But that's a complicated question. To Rhys right now I'm the most important person in his world. Without me, he doesn't eat.”

“No, but you know. The most important person, like, the president or...like that.”

“Rhys doesn't care about the president.”

“Forget it,” my six-year-old says, and, disgusted with me, stalks off.

I can't decide if I should be happy or nervous that our surgeon carries the name of a mythical deity. I can't decide to be grateful or not when our cardiologist squeezes in a voicemail to me “between meetings” and inquires as to my “availability.” Why “between feedings,” dear doctor.

Etymologically speaking, there is this --

doctor = c. 1300 “Church father”

mother = Proto-Indo-European, from “ma,” meaning breast

Latin - mater

Greek - meter

French - mère

German - Mutter

Russian - mate

Icelandic - modher

Sanskrit - mata

Irish - mathair

Welsh - mam

Arabic - oum

Hebrew - em

Swahili - mama

Chinese - ma

Hawaian - makuahine (maka first, beloved < *ma-k Proto-Polynesian, the mother (?) + wahine woman)

I've decided to spare you the ins and outs of how we came to this point, but know it is hard-won: Surgery date - December 9.

the graveyard shift

It was my first night in a hospital. I have spent the day standing on a cardio cath recovery floor because we are "overflow," the third "high risk" baby of the day. Rhys got to do his echocardiogram and I only had to force feed him foul-tasting medicine that put him to sleep first. Almost like a party. Nine hours after we arrived we got to talk to the cardiologist. It only took the surgeon 8 and a zap to the pager.

Now, Rhys and I are settled into our charming accommodations where his monitors sing to us about numbers on blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory rate, and oxygen saturation levels.Any time I lift him to nurse, we go code blue. It's not unlike a car alarm - no one pays attention anymore since they are always set off by accident. Beyond the curtain there is a 2-week old and his mom. The little guy has already had surgery for his time in our world and has yet to breathe the air outside a hospital wing.

In place for a night of monitoring, I am thinking of making a leaf rubbing of the springs on my cot. A handsome man breezes into our room around 10 pm or so and introduces himself as Dan. Hi, Dan. He looks like he just walked off the set of one of those medical drama shows. Dark chest hair curls out of the top of his scrubs. He has an easy manner, quick with the jokes.

"I'm the doctor on duty for the night," he tells me, and by way of further jovial explanation: "It's my job to keep everyone alive overnight."

"Mine, too," I say.

"Really?" he inquires, all earnestness and curiosity. "What do you do?"

"I'm a mom."

Mama Bear Goes to Boston

Rhys: over it with the doctors, but still trying to stay balanced in the yin and yang of it.

Black bears rarely attack. But here's the thing. Sometimes they do. All bears are agile, cunning, and immensely strong, and they are always hungry. If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and pretty much whenever they want. That doesn't happen often, but –and here's the absolute salient point—once would be enough.

- Bill Bryson, from A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

The first 3 out of 4 days we spent in Massachusetts after arriving this summer from our final stop (the lower Hudson River Valley) at the end of our cross-country insanity, the front page of the local paper was splayed with pictures of bears. Bears, eating from people's compost piles. Bears, exiting people's homes through kitchen windows. Bears, just chilling in people's yards.

The animals were beautiful, striking in their bear-selves and the juxtaposition displayed: with an obviously wild nature that challenged everything about their domestic surroundings.

Despite the bear on the flag of California, I have never heard of one wandering into our old neighborhood. Judging by the construction drive that seems set on paving over every sage bush there, we'll be lucky if the skunks make it. The bears? They are long gone, having had to submit to things like the bear and bull fights back in 1800s Monterey with its red-tiled roofs and neanderthal modes of entertainment lit by whale blubber. But enough about our shining past.

The two times we came to see this house when it was on the market, the seller's realtor must have tripped over herself trying to mop up the puddles of drool she left on the floor after salivating about the young couple with the preggo wife who would surely be ensnared by all the charms of a 100-year-old farm house. She saw the belly and knew her marketing tactic immediately.

“Kathryn!” she'd coo to me. “Look at this!”

“This” would inevitably be some stupid-ass thing, like a picture of a laundry shoot window that once existed or her perceived convenience of the washing machine in the kitchen (?!?...coming in another entry...). She thought she'd found the perfect preggo, that sales push-over, the Nesting Mama. Unfortunately, she had me pegged all wrong. She'd found Mama Bear.

“Is that asbestos on those pipes in the basement?” I'd ask narrowing my eyes on her latest dream detail (“There's a light in this closet! And look, Kathryn!...”)

---

“If I can help the other 4 families you'll see this year with a kid with TOF, let me tell you, you need to explain more information up front. Nothing for nothing, Doctor, but that handout you left us with told us nothing and only made us scared.”

“Oh, well, I'm sorry. That was never my intention. My intention was to leave you with enough information to investigate. The name of the condition Rhys has is called Tet-tra-lo-gy of Fa-llot.” (Why, some of my best friends have Tetraology of Fallot!)

Bitch, start with me.

Can you say, fired? She's been replaced. (Why, some of my best friends are doctors!)

The local scene just beginning to show signs of hope with a new cardiologist on board, this weekend we also head to Boston – our first trip to Children's Hospital. We will be consulting with a cardiologist and a surgeon. Rhys will undergo a sedated echocardiogram and then have to spend the night for observation. I will stay with him. I'm packing my honey pots and holding my breath.

And since I don't yet know how to communicate the intensity of the stress we've been under for the last 4 weeks, that's all for now.

...Nothing worries and antagonizes a female bear more than to have people between her and her brood...

Bay-buh-Bay-buh

If I were to post a wanted ad for friends, which I indeed need in my new home, I might require a quality that I can't quite put my finger on the name of. Rather, let me tell you a story that might illustrate it.

One day Isaac and I were at the children's museum and I happened to run into a good friend of mine, Alicia, with her twin girls who were probably about four at the time. All involved were please by this chance encounter and after the kids had had their fill of playing restaurant and hospital, we headed out together to a taquería close by.

Waiting for our food at the booth, Alicia pulled out of her purse a copy of Gabriel García Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. “I've been trying to read this,” she said simply. “I brought it along in case.” I have always had a deep respect for Alicia; we have fun together; we can talk about all kinds of things; we were friends before we had kids; we've stayed friends after having kids; she has wrapped her mother world into her preexisting one. Unflappable, she acknowledges the changes motherhood has brought to her life while maintaining her interests, her poise, and her personality.

And in that moment, when I saw the book, not only did I again fall madly in love with her, I understood on some level without a name how it was we came to be such good friends. Anyone who carries One Hundred Years of Solitude around hoping to catch a moment when her twin preschoolers are occupied long enough that she might read a line or two? These are my people.

I no longer have the option of having people meet me pre-kid(s). That's an interesting space for me to ponder.

I can remember when Mike and I first arrived in Monterey and I began my graduate program. It weirded me out slightly that everyone meeting me was meeting me as part of a couple. It was particularly odd seeing how Mike and I were very new to coupledom at the time. We'd taken off together after knowing each other not all that long at all and we had no idea where this thing might go, or if it might just die a quick and dirty west coast death.

I am still relatively new to motherhood and now I will become new all over again. Different baby. Different phase. Different rules. But soon, people passing me on the street will just see the ladywiththebaby. The mom. I have yet to reconcile completely with my mother identity, but in some kind of insane apprenticeship, I've decided the best way to get there is to try again.

We call the baby “Baby-Baby.” Since Isaac will always be my baby, the logic goes that this one must be Baby-Baby. Isaac has somehow shortened it recently to sound a bit like Elvis, lip curled: “Bay-buh-Bay-buh,” he'll pronounce. Our Vegas star will be here in another month or so.

I wrote so much poetry during the time I was pregnant with Isaac, and I've basically written close to zero in the last eight months. I feel the desire to get some out about this pregnancy before it's over, before the new little one appears. It will be the last time I carry a child like this, from within the intimate space of blood and darkness. I am cautious of what things the power of another being will shift in our lives, just as I am also enamored of him/her, protective, mama-bear-hormone in love. My belly protrudes into the world as a tease to me, a taunt representing the directions out and away.

Soon, Mama, I will have the ability to move out there. I will move away from you. I will leap unprotected and you will be lucky to capture the trail of my laughter as I go.

Day Five: Lo Lo Mai Springs Campground, South of Sedona

“Why is everything red here?” -- Isaac

I have no pictures of the actual campground, which was quite lovely as a matter of fact. All the state park sites we tried for were full up, so we headed for the private one that brought you around in a golf cart to pick out your site. (Isaac adores golf carts. He had a smile plastered on his face for hours. Maybe he picked up the obsession -- not to mention my own community obsession -- when we went to Catalina Island, in utero.Couple pics here.) I have no pictures because we were all a bit sick there (and super excited to be spending two whole nights in one spot). Pictures were not a top priority.

Isaac, who'd started to get a red, itchy eye a couple days back, now had two red, itchy eyes and a runny nose and just didn't look so hot. Allergies, we thought for the most part. Except in those dark recesses of evening when you are sure your child has a fatal disease and you've done nothing to help him. Are most parents familiar with this surety? Am I off in my assumptions here?

He woke up after our first night in Sedona asking for water and then spewing same projectile vomit style back up. Dehydration. I'd broken my baby. Crap.

And had the cat peed in the last 24-hours? And OMG, my ankles were the size of logs, and Mike's back was barely holding steady at “somewhat strained.”

“We should drive above the valley, get out of this heat today,” Mike argued.

“We should stay put in our shaded spot and not drive anywhere for a day,” I countered. “We all need a break.”

Sedona was somewhere we'd been looking forward to being for long before the trip started. Also, before we blew our cushion day by leaving Monterey so late and spending a night in that charming Paso Robles spot, we'd even considered chilling for a third night here. (We still had to make it to Santa Fe by Monday for a conference for Mike.)

Mike and I had come to the Sedona area years back, pre-kid(s). We'd caught Flagstaff on Flag Day (I have a vague memory of pig races down the main street.), went to Slide Rock State Park, an amazing natural water park, and tumbled further down the canyon to the red towering cliffs of Sedona. We enjoyed exploring the hills, and we liked the town itself – cute and ready with a multitude of cultural crafts.

I bought a beautiful jade ring in one of the shops and made the mistake of asking the proprietor some detail about the Native American history of the town, a question I was forming after visiting the landscape that I guess I was hoping a local could fill me in on. “I do not know,” the woman at the store told me rather haughtily. “They are people of the earth.” She pointed to the floor. “While I (pause) concern myself with things of a higher plane.” She fluttered her hands around her face for effect.

Right. Got it.

In short, we had very fond memories of our time in this town and, in that way that parents sometimes do, we looked forward to sharing this experience with our child, forgetting that, well, we had a child.

Isaac wouldn't care about the quaint coffee shops, he would miss the amusement to be derived from fluttery women not of the earth, he'd probably think the “Pink Jeep Tours” that sped tourists over the red rocks kicking up dirt and scaring away the canyon wrens were cool rather than obnoxious. His Sedona was bound to be entirely different than ours.

Before and after we came to the campground some 12 or so miles outside of town, we worried about having to drive back into the center with Emily in the van and no shade over the public parking and temperatures spiking at at least 95 for no good reason I could see. How would we get to do anything? Meanwhile, we were set up at a site with a river, mature Cottonwoods, a pool, a playground, laundry, and even some limited Wifi.

But, but, what about SEDONA??

“He should get outside and get some fresh air,” Mike said, always good for some stoic, fatherly advice.

“Leave him be. He's resting.”

Had my marriage gone through a time warp and come out in the 1950s? I wiped my hands on my flowered apron, then held one to my boy's forehead.

After Isaac had thrown up more water and the two bites of banana we'd tired to cure him with, he wanted to read a book. He and I settled in on the bed of the van together and I read him some soothing tales of extinct carnivorous reptiles.

“This is what I've been waiting for all night and all morning,” he said, resting his head on my shoulder.

“What?” I asked perplexed.

“This,” he replied definitively, and clasped my arm to snuggle in closer.

The Birthday

So Isaac had his birthday and turned six. It must be like the Grinch in Who-ville at Christmas – it comes without blog entries, comments, or tweets. Amazing. Better bloggers/mothers than I am would have posted many words accompanied by many pictures on the actual day of my child's birth. But you, dear readers, are stuck with me and the piece meal retrospective.

As I travel through the first year without my mom, every landmark is a landmine. Isaac appeared at my side at the breakfast table the morning of his birthday with a heart-shaped stone a friend gave him at Christmas time. “When I roll this around in my hand, it makes me think of grandmom,” he says to me. “Try it.” I dutifully take the stone. “Can you feel it?” he asks hopefully. “It makes me think of her because you think of her, honey.” I try to give it back to him. “You can keep it,” he urges, “I don't need it.” And so he doesn't. As for me, I carried it in my pocket for days.

We had a party. Isaac sharing my inability to narrow themes, had requested a T-Rex party with a pirate treasure hunt and a king cobra cake.

We played “Pin the Useless Little Arms on the T-Rex.” We had a treasure hunt for dinosaur bones (Inside, Arrgh, Matey! since the rain refused to cooperate. Successful thanks to my husband's mathematical genius and the small size of the guest list.). We played a dice game where the kids themselves were the game pieces tromping through a giant game board I constructed that I'm sure my son's friends' fundamentalist/creationist parents loved (“Ichthyostega crawls out of the swamp and breathes air! Move ahead 3 spaces!” and “Asteriod hits! Go back 100 million years!”).

What can I say? I'm here to offend. Really, I'm here to amuse myself and it takes priority over much else. How else would you expect me to survive half a dozen women I don't talk to on any regular basis and have nothing in common with parked on my couch for three hours discussing recipes and Facebook? Without other sources of sanity, I'd have to take a page out of Isaac's book and hide in the closet. Which is where I found him at the end of the day – the two girls at the gig otherwise occupied and content, the four boys engaged in a massive balloon fight in his trashed room, and the host, my sensitive son, holed up against the din and chaos. 

Below: Isaac and a friend at their behind-the-scenes tour of the aquarium - only available to 6-year-olds and up. Notice the birthday button.

birthday as cultural commentary

Isaac's birthday will be here in less than a month. He really wants a party. To date, I have managed to avoid any controversy or heartache over his lack of parties. Of course, it's not that we haven't celebrated.

When he turned one we had just moved and had a combination house-warming, bring your one-year-old over too kind of day.

When he turned two, we had – eh-hem – just moved again and served the friends that helped us some carrot cake with a candle on it.

At three, we tried a very small at home thing where a couple kids and Isaac dug in dry beans to find bouncy balls and took home seeds in clay pots instead of goodie bags.

Four was the new adventure of roller skating topped off with some ice cream and shared with our friends' twin girls.

I billed five as his big family/snow birthday, two things he doesn't usually experience. We spent that one at his grandparents' house in Massachusetts where grandma made him a strawberry topped cake to order and his cousins pulled him around the ice outside on an inflatable tire.

All in all, not bad, I'd say. And now we approach six. I thought I had this one in the bag – six is the year they are allowed to do behind-the-scenes tours at the aquarium. I mean, dude. Pick a friend, hit the tanks, twenty bucks later call it a birthday. Only problem is, it's not flying.

You must understand, I am contending with the insidiousness of things like the pony party, the bounce house blow out, and what I call the “drag net birthday” - invitations handed out to every flipping kid in the class before their parents even get a say, invite ev-er-y-one, doesn't matter what you think of them, what they mean to you, collect your present and eat your cake, too – which undoubtedly has been bought from Costco and contains five-inch thick day-glow green icing, and then send them home with gender specific goodie bags filled with plastic dollar store crap and candy.

Truth be told, I keep Isaac home from every birthday party I possibly can. I'm a proud evil mom. And he still goes to plenty...with Mike. I have no tolerance whatsoever for these fiestas or the idle chit chat that circulates among the parents during same.

The other day Isaac had in hand his second invitation in a week. There would be ponies. There would be lunch (MAJOR red flag – Capri Suns and pizza if you get off easy. Or else burgers and hot dogs your veggie kid can't eat at all served with Hot Cheetos and soda. It's like a psychedelic trip down the river of processed foods brought to you by your guide and companion: high fructose corn syrup.). We planned a family day and told the birthday boy's mom we'd be out of town. That Friday, the family brought cupcakes to school and the ponies were all the buzz. “I wanna go to Duncan's party!” came my boy's well-practiced whine.

The morning of the grand event our plans had shifted and I could no longer be a part of the family day. Isaac hadn't mentioned the party since his token whine, but Mike and I were careful not to let it get past the time of the soiree without directly addressing the fact that we wouldn't be there, lest it prove meltdown material later. We reminded him that we'd already told Duncan's family we couldn't make it and that maybe he could do something really special with Daddy that day. He was quiet for a minute, then he asked Mike to play “ice cream truck” with him (You have to walk up to the windows of the car as different customers and order.). No mention of ponies. Nothing. They went on to have a day involving a hike and homemade cookies.

When I think about this little incident, it's not unlike the triumphant feeling I had over the holidays when, killing time during intermission at a concert, Isaac sat oblivious to the two young boys in the row in front of us playing games on their parents' iphones while our family played several rollicking rounds of Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Look, I've got nothing against ponies or iphones, not exactly... It's just, well, those birthdays? They'll fly by faster than we're ready to admit. We live in a complicated world. Why drag our kids into it before we have to? Let's skip the bounce houses and ponies and let them take it one birthday at a time, with their feet firmly on the ground.

almost six years old

In a week that included discussions of who Martin Luther King, Jr and Cesar Chavez were, and why grandmom was cremated and not buried, and how anyone knows what the center of the earth is like, and if dogs or cats can see better, and why hurricanes don't come to where we live, and are we sure?, and whether alligators are omnivores... there was also the following conversation, which reminds me once again that children require simple answers, not because they are simple, but because there is just so much freaking else to get on with.

"Do Lily and Emma have a dad?"

"Nope. They have two moms."

(concerned look, big sigh) "So, I have a question..."

"Yes?"

"Do computers know EVERYTHING in the whole entire world??"

school search - part VI

There is a hair cutting school in my neighborhood where you can get walk-in five-dollar cuts. It's a good deal, if students with scissors don't make you too nervous and if you have some extra time (cuz these cats are trying to get it right...). I took Isaac there to get the hair off his ears and out of his eyes.

While waiting in the reception area, the young man who would be our hair dresser for the day approached and introduced himself. Before he could lead us to the hair chair, however, a woman stopped him to ask for his urgent help. The dryer her mother was sitting under was too hot and was beginning to scorch her scalp. The man turned down the heat dial and confirmed with the customer that the new temperature was good for her. Before leaving them, he addressed the daughter. “If it heats up too much again, just turn this dial to a lower number,” he said, pointing out the huge white markings on the chair's controls affixed in plain sight. “Oh,” replied the woman, as if this were new and strange technology she wouldn't dare have thought to tamper with. “Okay.”

Now, nothin for nothin people, and with all due respect for the 10 months these hair folks spend studying how to give perms and fool your friends with extensions, did that woman seriously not think it was within her own power to turn down the heat? Did she never investigate? Did the mother never consider removing her head from the assaulting burn? Are we so helpless as a species? Such obedient sheep to follow along until we are in physical danger or worse? Such rule followers as to be completely out of touch with our own instincts?

I have two major concerns about public schools and they have nothing to do with academics. The first is demonstrated above. We think that “discipline” issues are bad in schools, but consider this blog to weigh in on the problem of obedience, the lost art of free thinking.

So, Isaac gets his booster seat and settles in for an hour-long cut. (Don't try this at home folks!) The poor thing was having to pull out every little bit of hard-earned Montessori concentration to sit there in the chair. I wasn't any less fidgety since I was pretty certain I was going to die of bad pop music while there and kept swiveling this way and that hoping to find the radio switch to smash.

Of course, we did have plenty of time for conversation, the young man and I at least, since Isaac was refusing to speak. During that time I made sure to point out to my son his hair dresser's Barbie pink fingernails.

Isaac has been very influenced by a couple friends, who don't even live in the area anymore, but whose rigid ideas of gender they managed to pass on quite successfully on some level to my son.

(“I'm not going to have an earring when I grow up. I'm going to be a real boy!” he once said to me. Images of Pinocchio in a sterling earcuff float through my mind. WTF??)

I learned that hair dresser guy, had a Halloween party for his birthday every year, since it fell at the end of October and that this year he was going to be a pirate. I also learned that he was graduating next month. And finally, I learned that he was born and raised in Salinas, which caused me to have to stop myself from grabbing his arm, the one with the black rubber bracelet that said “Vanity,” and blurting out, “Oh my god! That must have been terrible for you!” Salinas, California, known as it is for its associations with Steinbeck, big agriculture, and gang violence, isn't quite as note-worthy in its general ideas of tolerance.

Which brings me to problem number two in the public schools: a lack of emphasis on compassionate social interaction and integration.

I mean, let's face it people. We are at war. What do we have to teach our kids about empathy or cooperation? Gee, can't imagine why bullying is a problem...

I'm planning on going as my worst nightmare for Halloween this year: a soccer mom. “Are you gonna scream a lot?” my friend asked me, “Because you need to scream a lot.” (Capri Sun, anyone? Pictures to follow.) While I went searching for a blonde bob wig in the drug store the other day to round out my costume, my gentle, loving son battled an invisible victim with a bloody plastic hatchet, behavior I find all the more disturbing since the kid's only ever watched a few hours of television in his life and most of that consisted of Dinosaur Train and the Olympics. You might find it odd that I connect fumbling foreign policies, youth sports teams, dumby weaponry and the absence of kindness, and if so, then, I still have more convincing to do. Later. Just how I like to think about where to send Isaac to school next year. Later.

found out

Iz: Do we have any cardboard? I want to make a sign.

Me: What kind of sign?

Iz: One that says, "Please Don't Park In the Driveway" so Daddy won't drive on the beautiful chalk mural I'm going to draw.

(After obtaining cardboard and pen, we sit on the front step...)

Me: (writing) "P-L-E-A-S-E... Dddd-Oooo-Nnnn-Tttt...  Hmm. "Park." How do you think I'd spell "Park?"

Iz: Pppp P!

Me: Okay. And Aaarrr...Aaarrr...

Iz: ??

Me: A-R...

Iz: A-R!

Me: What would "Park" end with?

Iz: K!

Me: Oh, right - K. Oh, and Isaac, wait til you see -- "Drive" has one of those silent E's!

Iz: Hey! Are you trying to learn me to read??

Me: Wouldn't think of it, kid.

musical leanings

Is it my fault that Isaac is in love with the "Rent" Soundtrack? The boy has taste. Is it any worse than him running around the house singing "Ay ay ay, put your hands up high, 'cause you never know how long you're gonna live 'til you die" from Spearhead? Like I said, taste.

"The opposite of war isn't peace, it's CREATION." 
- from "La Vie Boheme" (Jonathan Larson)