tell me when it's over

How quickly we become accustomed to what is out of place.

We'd heard the crying creature on and off for three days going on four. The first day I had resolved to go look for what it was, on the instinct that something was in distress. But it stopped for a while and after I got Isaac down for his nap I became distracted with whatever I'd chosen as my nap activity. Likely food or paying the past due bills.

I'd gone out eventually and located where it was coming from – just the other side of the fence by or in my neighbor's tree. The calling stopped when I got close. I'd settled on baby bird waiting for its mother to return and went back inside.

On the fourth day, Judy would be the one to find her.

A baby raccoon had gotten one of its back paws wedged in the slats of the fence and hung head down, its front feet resting on a crossbar.

“Stuck?” Isaac repeated over and over again. “No walk,” he told us, paddling the air with his hands in the ASL sign.

I dialed numbers, and more numbers the people at the first numbers gave me, pacing my garage, cursing myself for not investigating more closely, panicked that I had figured it out too late.

The SPCA wildlife division arrived within half an hour, but not before we tried to feed the little bandit a chopped up apple by broom handle.

“Stuck?” Isaac continued, but he refused to go and see for himself. He just wanted it better “Help,” he told us, “help.”

Yes, they were coming to help we assured him.

The thing is, I get it. In truth, my own gander at the critter was brief. I pawned off the apple on Judy and she took broom handle duty.

There are stories my son once loved that he won't let me read anymore, or at least he stops me before the conflicts arise. There's P.D. Eastman's Are You My Mother? in which we must skip past the pages showing the “snort” truck that scoops up the baby bird, and Mama, Do You Love Me? which threatens with its page showing the Mama angry.

When I was little, I would leave the room midpoint during the Flintstones. I couldn't stand to watch when Fred messed everything up or while the other set the stage for mishap and misunderstanding. – I just needed everything to work out and for someone else to get it to that point. I'd reclaim my seat on the couch for the happy ending.

You could say occupations like ER nurse never really occurred to me. I'm a poet who's afraid to look. I live with the irony. But what to teach my Isaac?

The baby raccoon was recovered successfully from the fence and I'm hoping to read about her release back into the wild of our neighborhood garbage cans in the next SPCA newsletter.

To witness suffering and help stop it, you must have compassion without caving in, you must hold the other's story gently as if it were your own while remembering it's not.

Isaac is small now and most of the world is out of his control. It's almost unfair to ask him to watch such things, a trapped animal, a scary snort. Life is unfair. I don't know how to nurture his sensitivity while cultivating in him the strength to take action when he can. There is another gap in my parenting knowledge, about the length of a broom handle.

word of the day

“The world is made of names; my son is learning to speak. He has faith. He believes in things. Rock, I tell him, leaf. No, this, he says, holding the rock. This, he says, holding up the leaf.”
--from “Days – poems by Gary Young”


Somehow, in Isaac’s language, the words diaper, table, garbage and strawberry all come out exactly the same: “DIE-boo.”

If you aren’t paying attention, things can start to get all tilt-a-whirl on you.

“You want Mama to draw a diaper truck?”
“You can’t eat garbage for a snack, Little Mister!”
“I see. So, what you’re telling me is the ball has rolled under the strawberry?”

Sometimes I get the exasperated look. You know the one. The one that erases almost four decades of life on the planet and lets you know you know nothing. Zero. Sometimes, I get the sly, slow smile. “Yeah!” he agrees to the diaper truck or the ball vanishing under berries. “Why not,” he implies, handing me the blue crayon.

I’m not always prepared. It’s been years since I’ve lived abroad spending day after day in conversations in which neither party knew the other’s language. I was younger then, quicker on my feet. One more reason that come nightfall parents should be hermetically sealed into sleeping bags while carefully trained elves commute to our houses from their nests in the forest ready to battle any waking children by dancing them back to sleep, bringing them water and warm milk, or gently tying them to the bed. The sooner we organize the elves, the smoother this will all work out.

“DIE-boo!” my son tells me, tapping his fingers on each of his hip bones.
“DIE-boo!” he insists, pointing at the coffee table.
“DIE-boo!” he says, stomping and lifting his arms like a mechanical claw.
“DIE-boo!” he sighs, signing the word for the fruit with his twisting pinky finger.

Dictionaries and vocabularies are for those with less imagination living in the showy world of verbal subtlety. With his whole being, no matter the sounds from his mouth, he is teaching me the same things. The tilt-a-whirl is three tickets to ride. The elves are busy filling dandelion wishes. And, please, pay attention.

July 4, 2007 - Esalen

Big Sur, CA

Here's where we spent our fourth.

my own independence day

Some days I want a little more space than I get.

(Let me start over.)

Some days, what I want is space, away, I mean, more time, I mean, to myself.

(Eh-hem. Again.)

I wish Isaac napped longer. I don’t want to have to choose between lunch, nap, watering the garden or writing.

(Take four:)

Why can’t he play by himself?!? I mean, other babies do it? If he does it, for all of ten minutes it means he’s pooping in his pants. Why potty train the kid when it’s my only respite?

(Wait. Back up. Breathe. Okay.)

Some days I want a little more space than I get. I consider myself to be an emotionally demanding person. Like mother, like son.

They say: “I just read a book, turn off the light, tell him its nap time and leave the room. He goes right to sleep.”
Drinks milk. Asks for more. Finishes that milk. Rejects book number five, asks to read something else. Starts to drift off. Sits back up. Fills his diaper. Change him. Asks for more milk... The tendonitis in my wrists I got from lugging him around as a baby has returned full force because the child seems to have to hold my pinky finger in some awkward angle in order to fall asleep. I want a nap that’s longer than the time it takes me to get him to nap.

Mama, come peez. (Just a minute, Isaac, I’m feeding Emily cat.)
Mama. Mama! Mama!! Mama? Mama!!!
Mama, watch. Mama, watch. Mama, watch. (I’m watching, Isaac.) Mama, watch.

They say: “He just plays by the door while I’m in the shower.”
I can usually count on Isaac freaking out at least once a week when I take a shower – while Mike is home - and several times a week when I tell him I’m going to the bathroom.

Mama, has to go to the bathroom, Izzy. I’ll be right back.
No! Uh-uh. No!
Honey, it’s just the bathroom. I’ll be right back.
No-uh-uh-no. Nooooo! (cries)
Isaac. I have to pee. Can I please pee.
No.
Well, I have to pee anyway. No one changes Mama’s diapers so I have to make it to the potty.
Noooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (cries frantically and busts through the bathroom door)

They say: “Isaac sleeps through the night now, doesn’t he?”
It took Mike and I three days to finish watching a movie because the creature has it in for us.

Mama, where’d do dough? Mama?

The child is Wearing. Me. Out.

And I wonder why I’m still a clockwatcher. I’m not proud of this in the least. I’m not nearly as bad as when Isaac was first born, but nonetheless, it goes something like this: “Okay, if he sleeps another half hour, but the time he wakes up, I’ll only have two hours to go before Mike gets home.” Shouldn’t it be more like …He wakes up, I drift into the yard with him, play baseball, deadhead some marigolds, he rides his radio flyer around, we watch a spider together, and seamlessly the time passes until, surprised, I look up to discover Mike pulling in the driveway.

Lately I’ve been getting them again. The comments. The ones that assume. The ones that come with shackles attached. The “Don’t you LOVE being a mom?” comments. And “You must enjoy your son SO MUCH!” Immediately, after these lines are spoken, invisible ropes of untold strength shoot toward my wrists and ankles from all directions. THWAAAAPPPP. THWAAAPPP. SHUKSHUKSHUKSHUK. I am bound. Where can I go? I am an awful person. But worse, I am an awful mother.

(NB: Don’t even think about the comment on how someday he’ll not want anything to do with me. Post it and I will eat you.)

one of my favorites: a poem by Gregory Djanikian

(thank you www.poetrymagazine.org)

Immigrant Picnic
by Gregory Djanikian

It's the Fourth of July, the flags
are painting the town,
the plastic forks and knives
are laid out like a parade.

And I'm grilling, I've got my apron,
I've got potato salad, macaroni, relish,
I've got a hat shaped
like the state of Pennsylvania.

I ask my father what's his pleasure
and he says, "Hot dog, medium rare,"
and then, "Hamburger, sure,
what's the big difference,"
as if he's really asking.

I put on hamburgers and hot dogs,
slice up the sour pickles and Bermudas,
uncap the condiments. The paper napkins
are fluttering away like lost messages.

"You're running around," my mother says,
"like a chicken with its head loose."

"Ma," I say, "you mean cut off,
loose and cut off being as far apart
as, say, son and daughter."

She gives me a quizzical look as though
I've been caught in some impropriety.
"I love you and your sister just the same," she says.
"Sure," my grandmother pipes in,
"you're both our children, so why worry?"

That's not the point I begin telling them,
and I'm comparing words to fish now,
like the ones in the sea at Port Said,
or like birds among the date palms by the Nile,
unrepentantly elusive, wild.

"Sonia," my father says to my mother,
"what the hell is he talking about?"
"He's on a ball," my mother says.

"That's roll!" I say, throwing up my hands,"
as in hot dog, hamburger, dinner roll . . . ."

"And what about roll out the barrels?" my mother asks,
and my father claps his hands, "Why sure," he says,
"let's have some fun," and launches
into a polka, twirling my mother
around and around like the happiest top,

and my uncle is shaking his head, saying
"You could grow nuts listening to us,"

and I'm thinking of pistachios in the Sinai
burgeoning without end,
pecans in the South, the jumbled
flavor of them suddenly in my mouth,
wordless, confusing,
crowding out everything else.

boy at the big water

“Use your words.”

You may have heard caregivers, parents, or teachers patiently offer this advice to the stomping toddler whose toy has just been stolen or who's beet red, fists balled up in a yet undefined rage.

Far be it from me to point out the limitations of language as a creative tool of communication, but I'm beginning to question the “use your words” approach in certain instances.

The truth is, I started to pitch this line myself (limited resources and brainpower, just like our kids, we absorb what we hear). It does seem mostly appropriate at those times, for example, when Isaac has jumped straight to whine without asking outright for what he wants, assuming parental resistance and digging in with impatient demands.

But the other day, I caught myself saying the “words” deal when my obviously overtired baby reached up for me, ignoring my request that he pick out a book. What a stupid thing of me to say. First of all, Isaac only has just so many words, and most of those sound strikingly similar. What did I think he was going to say? His message was crystal clear: “Rock me the hell to sleep, Mom.”

I stopped myself in the very moment and began to wonder what message we might be leaving with children on this point. Are we teaching them that nuance or body language is unimportant or not worthy of our attention? Listening demands something of the listener and should be done with more than the ears. It is not the passive skill it is sometimes billed as .(Nor is reading the passive opposite of writing and the idea that it is contributes to students and citizens without the ability to predict or read critically.)

I witnessed and studied many exchanges as a grad student and teacher of ESL where the breakdown in communication had much less to do with the language ability of the non-native speaker and much more to do with attitudes of the person they were speaking to – someone who assumed no responsibility for the success of the interaction, deciding even before they began that their partner's accent was too unfamiliar or their English too “broken.”

Words are a ridiculously small part of how we move in and understand the world. I'd hate to give my boy only letters in his life portfolio.

crossroads

As I drive along near the fairgrounds one Sunday not far in the past, punching at the radio buttons in a vain search to find music worth listening to, I realize something I've forgotten again. So I turn off the blasted radio and roll down the window. I can hear it, but not well – a sax riff, the beat of a bass, a hum gearing up to the next chorus. It's the last night of the blues festival. I sail through the yellow light into another year's wait.

What's a blog for if not embarrassing confessions?

In eight summers here, half that time living in walking distance to the fairgrounds, I have never gotten to a blues festival. It's weird. Every year I say I want to go and every year I don't.

I seem to hear artists talk all the time about what music filled their houses growing up. Their dads with Sinatra on and their head under the hood of a car, or their parents away and the kids playing the Billie Holiday record over and over again.

What will Isaac say? “I have no idea how I ever came to tour Europe singing opera. Must have been all that talk radio I grew up listening to.”

What kind of artistic environment am I giving my kiddo besides a mom who disappears once in a while to create frustrated half-poems?

Shouldn't art be absorbing what you know and then letting go into possibility and visceral emotion? Sometimes I feel like my “art” is simply about thinking and over thinking. And lately I've been thinking that the problem with this blog isn't that I need to revitalize it, but maybe that I need to put it to rest. Mike says it isn't “Fetal Positions” any more, that it needs a new look and focus.

This is the last official day of my week-long drive to write every day. I did. But I'm not sure to what end. I of course have lots of other stories about my amazing, aggravating, beautiful son who is going to drain every little bit of energy out of me if it's the last thing he does. I've been less able to pull those stories from the pages of my journal in the last months and glean from them any pithy truths or witty verbiage.

If you read this thing, please send a comment and let me know if you do. Now would be the time to check in.

land of the free

Ah, the Fourth of July approaches, a time of year when my neighborhood, already dripping with charm and class – concrete yards featuring red rocks in a star formation, plastic likenesses of Winnie-the-Pooh playing golf, woodland creatures peering out of two-foot chainlink fences – adds kiosk after kiosk of fireworks for sale. I mean, what's a vacant lot for, anyway?

A couple miles in any direction and they're illegal. But not here. No. Here, in my neighborhood where you are far more likely to spot a parole car circling than you are that cute little downtown bus they've dressed up like a trolley, you can buy your very own piece of independence to shoot off at your leisure.

Oh, but don't worry, most of those kiosks are sponsored by the churches. They are fundraisers, since selling dynamite is clearly the Lord's work. And if they continue to wake my baby up with their holy thunder, I'm planning on kicking them from here to the here after.

Imitating bombs. This is what we've come up with for entertainment and, unbelievably, a feeling of freedom.

In an effort to tire Isaac out enough to sleep through the racket, I often take him to the park in the afternoons. We have several in walking distance. The closest one is the least impressive of the lot, but it has Isaac's favorite swings.

I push him “high-high” on the “wee-wah” as instructed, over the glass-riddled sand, until his feet reach above the roofs of the pimped out El Caminos stopping at the corner market for chips and beer, out toward the line of cypress and across to the ocean, his “big water,” until he is giddy, the wind stealing his breath, and he finds another freedom, sees a way out.

it's a boy thing

You may have read about our affinity for salvaging things. When Isaac was still pretty little, Mike came home from one of his second-hand adventures with a little foam-filled kid's couch for Isaac's room. It is covered in blue material patterned with baseballs, footballs, basketballs, and baseball, football and basketball players. I didn't really give it much thought at the time, especially since Isaac didn't, though I knew for certain that I'd never actively seek some such thing out and purchase it new.

Lately, he's taken more interest in the drawings of uniformed men passing and swinging and slamdunking.

“'N' dis?” he questions me, pointing at the baseball player.

“Baseball. You know baseball.”

“Bayball,” he says.

“'N' dis?” pointing to the basketball player.

“Basketball. It's the game you play with the hoop,” I tell him, referring to the little Nerf hoop closed into one of his dresser drawers.

“Bahball.”

“Basketball.”

“Bah-et-ball.”

“Right.”

“'N' dis?” he demands finally, looking to the padded quarterback.

“Football,” I say, keeping any other commentary to myself.

He looks at me curiously and holds out his right toe. “Foot?”

“Uh-huh. Foot. Ball.”

“Football.”

There's a pause.

“Yeah, me, football?”

“You don't have a football, Iz.”

The brow furrows deeply as if to catch rainwater.

“Yeah, me, football!”

“We'll work on it, Izzy.”

Later that night he was out looking for various essentials with his dad, things like a gallon of scented bubbles, when he apparently again took up his campaign for a football. Inexplicably, he requested a “small, small football!” and, inexplicably, Mike found a bag full of tiny superballs in the shape of footballs.

“He must have been excited,” I said when Mike told me the story.

“He danced,” my husband responded.

My house is now confettied in thumb-sized footballs which can look at first glance like little turds lying about, and in these days of potty training, it's not really what you want to see.

My concern is not that my son may develop an interest in various sports, but rather that his myriad interests will be corralled into only what looks acceptable for a boy.

Isaac adores gardening too. Spends inordinate amounts of time planting and watering with me. Weeds at parks before heading for the slide, steps carefully over seedlings, and rescues cutting from the compost to plant them so they'll grow “tall-tall, up da boon!”

Recently, I put my name down on the mailing list at our local cuttings fair, forgetting about it almost immediately, until a week or so ago when I got the call. It was on my voicemail. An invitation to a fancy hat luncheon at the dump.

How can I, in good conscious, expect my son to continue with an activity that culminates in old women sitting around in straw brimmed numbers topped with feathers and sipping chai? (BTW, I'm inventing here, I didn't actually go to the luncheon so I don't actually know what the old ladies' hats were made of or topped with. I don't want to be associated with these groups any more than I imagine Isaac will.)

Short of the idea to get him a loveseat covered with hoes and spades, I feel kind of hopeless. Like all this is already in motion and way beyond my control. Why do “boy” things seem cool and “girl” things seem...girlie? Why can we even understand what that sentence means?

As for the fancy hat luncheons, it's like when you have someone on your side that you know will bring the cause down.

I ask my two-year-old who's driving his truck.

“Um, a guy,” he says.

“Oh. Do ladies drive it sometimes?”

“No.”

“How about this truck? Do any ladies drive it?”

“No.”

“How about your plane? Can a lady drive a plane?”

“No!” he says, impatiently raising his voice. “Guy!”

Show me to the country, the neighborhood, the patch of grass where I can retreat to and rewrite
this script.

play ball

After a mere few innings of watching baseball played on the diamond across the street from the sports center where Mike takes Isaac swimming, Mr Baby has fallen in love with the game he calls “Dough, Bump, Nun.” (First someone doughs the ball, then someone else bumps the ball, and then you have to Nun!!!)

Several times a day he demands I pitch him his squishy orange ball or one of the whiffles that have come over the fence so he can swing himself into a vortex, then run wildly in any direction.

There is a small problem with this affinity for baseball. I am from New York and my husband is from Massachusetts. If people don't know the sincerity of the rivalry, let me tell you that I once attended a game at Yankee stadium with a woman wearing a Boston hat. The only reason we escaped without injury was that she spoke with a British accent and acted confused. On our recent flight to Boston, the flight attendant announced our flying time, the captain's name, and that any Yankee fans on board get off.

My son spent his infanthood in a Boston Red Sox onesie (a gift from my brother- and sister-in-law) with a Yankee bib over it (a gift from my sister – a Mets fan, but she acquiesced.). There is only one known picture of Isaac in the Red Sox get up and its blurry. Color me passive-aggressive.

I think I should win this tug-o-war since until recently, I've watched the Yankees faithfully for a really long time. I remember when Willie Randolph was team captain before he ever thought about standing around holding guys at third base. I know what Phil Rizzuto did before he did commercials for the Money Store. Then there's Mike who's somewhat shaky on the rules.

When Isaac tires of swinging at the air and collecting the whiffle from under the coffee table, he usually resorts to imaginary ball. Something he loved before he ever knew of a bat to bump it with. Imaginary balls are easier to throw, easier to catch. My guy makes a click of his tongue as he swings with perfect timing and his invisible bat makes contact with the invisible ball, sending it far into the seats.

Perhaps Isaac can survive this insurmountable division in his family by suggesting invisible ball be the team we all play for. (Don't forget to click your tongue.) And then maybe we can play imaginary war with invisible bombs. It's a slippery slope, one I'm ready to find myself at the bottom of. It'd be only a matter of time before we'd all tire of that too, and ask to read books.

you know you're a...

I'm currently fighting hard against the urge to write a “you know you're a parent when” piece.

Still, some days, I desperately need confirmation that out there in the world there are others like me - the days of spelling things out to your partner, the anguished cries from the shower, plastic boat sails imbedded in feet, colorful ducks nipping at ankles, the moments of glancing through the entertainment section and thinking, “What am I not taking advantage of any of these cultural events?...Oh yeah...”

Please, the jobs I have - teacher, writer, mother - are isolating at best. Tell me: Are there more of us who linger in friends' living rooms when picking up our children from playdates, so that we can stare into the frames of the wedding pictures on the mantel, look at the couples in those pictures and imagine how they fell in love: his dimple and clear blue eyes, her soft shoulders and wide laugh, and wonder if they wonder, how they got here?

do you remember when mom could fix everything?

Isaac and I are playing the front yard when he halts mid-run and stares at the walk.

“Bee,” he says (bee being his generic word for all bugs).

I come look. It's a dead moth being consumed by a swarm of ants. Nice.

“Yeah, baby, it's a bug,” I confirm.

“Down boom,” he next informs me.

“Yup, it looks like it went down boom.”

“Fly away wings?” he inquires.

“I don't think that one's flying anywhere right now, sweetie.”

“Yeah,” he concludes. “Need mama.”

remember me?

I always check the box.

When I sign in to my blog site with username and password, I check off "Remember me." But sadly, these days with yawning gaps between entries, my computer rarely does. "Oh, did you used to write a blog?" it seems to say, spinning its little hourglass at me. "Okay, let's see here..."

On Sunday, with still one more week to go of Isaac's break from preschool and early deadlines for the paper looming thanks to that bloody (literally) fourth of July b.s., I decided there would never be a good time and so I'd just commit now. Commit to writing a blog entry every day for a full week. So there. Yeah. Mmm-hmmm. C'mon, I'm every woman.

No, your refresh button didn't let you down, I'm afraid there were no entries for Sunday or Monday.

I mentioned to just one other person besides my husband that I was planning this ambitious project, and he talked about blogs that use too much filler and spend too much time referring to other blogs. He maintained that a couple well-written essays a week (i.e., my articles for the paper) were enough for any busy, distracted mom.

And yet, I couldn't help but dip into that unconscious belief honed over sooooo many years against my will that I should be able to do it all - all of it - ALL OF IT. As a man, my friend can't quite appreciate the sincerity and fervor with which society has stoked the fires of such ideals, or how, despite all our talk, advances, my midwife's bumpersticker calling all Uppity Women to Unite, the white noise behind being female hasn't changed much in a whole lot of decades.

In fact, it's grown. We've taken over. We now make choices to do it all, snap our own whip.

I know, I was just talking about a dumb blog for godssake. And now we're knee-deep in the women's rights movement and the mommy wars. As usual, there is likely more in the way of connectors going on in my brain than I have time to spell out here.

When I was little, I had a huge fight with my best friend, Patti, over what the first day of the week was. It was the most significant disagreement we had in our eight-year friendship (from age 2-10) . She said Sunday was the first day. I said it was Monday.

Since I'm currently in a review class of childhood mentality, I'd like to propose that Tuesday is now the first day of the week. I'll be writing a blog every day for this week that begins today - Tuesday. And if you don't think Tuesday is the first day of the week, then I just won't share my playdough with you.

what's in a name?

So there we are, trying to get Isaac to sleep for the night. It's a delicate process that involves a nice exhausting afternoon at the park, a nighttime snack, a long debate about which toothbrush to use, a lot of luck, and the right books. An easy bedtime is the difference between parents who get to enjoy a couple hours of each other's company before collapsing and parents who just collapse. In other words, it's huge.

As the president of PADST (Parents Against Daylight Savings Time), I'd like to say that bedtime is that much harder these days. Not to mention, the routine of bedtime can be mind numbing. We have recently jettisoned our pile of dedicated bedtime books and been testing out new material in an effort to liven things up.

It was time. The tension around whether the duckling will be reunited with his family has long since drained away and so help me, if Corduroy has taken a bath once, he's taken that bath a thousand, freaking times.

It's important in a bedtime book that there not be any flaps to lift, any textures to sit up and feel, any dinosaurs roaring too loudly. We've gone with the sure thing. We've turned to Pooh. Trying to stave off the boredom that will eventually, inevitably come with this new selection of books as well, and being general cute and goofy, Mike plays up the voices. Not known as a man of many accents, my husband does the best he can.

Rabbit, it seems, is from somewhere around Mexico City by way of Moscow. Owl, and, now that I think about it, pretty much all the other occupants of the Hundred Acre Wood minus Eeyore speak in an accent that falls between an Irish brogue and a cockney guy who's just been punched hard in the mouth.

On one particular night recently, I was holding Isaac's hand and Mike was reading along from his odd little UN cast when Eeyore suddenly came out as “Igor.” I shook Isaac's little toddler bed trying to hold in silent laughter. Igor, the depressed donkey, had lost his tail you see, but now Isaac wanted to know what the hell was wrong with Mama and, well, we had to go back to square one on the road to getting him unconscious. I could feel my evening slipping away.

But the Great Story Teller wasn't done.

Peter found Igor's tail hanging as a bell pull outside Owl's house. Yes, that's right, the famous Bear of Very Little Brain? The one with his nose in the honey pots? That one. His name is Peter. Winnie-the-Peter. Suffice to say, that was it for our evening.

When, at well after 9 we left Isaac's room, I cautioned an inquiry: “Peter?? PETER?” “It was dark,” Mike defended. “You're pathetic,” I told him and kissed him goodnight.

playing to strengths

In the spirit of recognizing my Isaac’s strengths, I’d like share why he’d make a great…

- Geologist. Rocks are cool. Rocks on the ground must be picked up. Walking by a rock you could have otherwise pocketed is a sacrilege. More rocks than you can carry are really what you’re after. Rocks are SO cool that they trump trucks, dogs, and dirt in the field of coolest toys ever.

- Astronomer. The moon is cool. Moon trumps sun easily (see below). The moon’s real name is “Boon” and we look for Boon every chance we get, inquire about its whereabouts at 2 in the afternoon, request to be wrapped in a blanket and carried outside in the early morning or right before bed to visit with Boon. We spot it way before Mama or Daddy; we love it in every shape it comes in.

- Underwater cave dweller. When you are a Pisces, Aquarius cusp baby, and you were born in the pouring rain, you gravitate toward dim, watery worlds. Case in point, “Isaac, should Mama open the blinds and let the sun shine in?” Answer: “No.”

- American tourist abroad. If you aren’t understood the first time you ask for something, you should say it slower and louder. Example: “Bloobloolaee?” “What, Isaac?” “BLOO. BLOO. LA. EEEEEE!”

I'm sure the list of lifepaths/career possibilities will only continue to grow, and I, called to duty, will note them down.

sweet dreams: evolution over one generation?

Shorty after Isaac was born, I was digging through my own baby book for stats revealing genetic links to why our son was already popping tooth after tooth painfully out of his gum line. I was happy to have the book to refer to, since we weren't getting any on Mike's side. His “baby book” consisted of half a piece of paper that listed a random weight and height – the end. The youngest of four, his mom was apparently over it by the time baby Mikey hit the scene. I am also the youngest of four, but what might have saved my infant info from a similar fate was the eight year gap since the last baby in the family, marking my birth – whoopsie that it was – something of a novelty once again.

While flipping around my baby book, I came across a small piece of paper that for all intents and purposes seemed to be a recipe written on a doctor's prescription pad. A closer look sent me dialing my mother at once.

“Mom, I found the 'recipe' for my baby 'formula',” I shot into the phone.

“Oh really,” my mother sighed distractedly, unsuspecting.

“Whole milk and sugar?!? Mom.”

“Oh no,” my mother hummed, “You couldn't take the whole milk. We switched to skim.”

“Mom!”

“Yes, dear?”

Let's put aside for a bit the myriad nutritionally misguided and bereft aspects of this diet to focus on one: the sugar.

Caffeine addict I am not. Vegetarian- 100% - no I eat fish if my cousin Larry the chef cooks it. or Free range chicken on the third Mondays of the month. No. Vegetarian. – going on 16 years. But sugar? Well, let's just say that after two weeks of trying to eat healthy alternatives, stuffing carrots and cashews in my face for snacks, I grabbed the front of my husband's shirt in my fist. “I need cookies, see? Cookies, you got it? I NEED cookies!”

Not wanting my boy to take this path of lunacy, plus diabetes prevalent in our family history, formidable dentist bills commonplace, I've done my best to curb (read: hide) my habits and mold my bean's tastebuds into freewheeling lovers of flavors sour and spicy, or natural sugar enhanced.

One Sunday during Isaac's nap, Mike had cooked up a mini-batch of chocolate chip cookies in the toaster oven, when suddenly kiddo was awake - Doh! He pointed at the still-warm treats. “Yeah... yeah,” he nodded. “Oh, give'm a cookie,” I told Mike, resigned.

We all sat down at the table and Isaac proceeded to slowly munch a quarter of a cookie. “Do you like it?” I asked. He nodded rather noncommital.

When he was done his fourth of a cookie, he took up his fork and continued his snack of carrots and beets I had cooked him not long before while Mike and I finished off the cookies beside him.

These days, Isaac gets his cookie fix by asking his dad to make biscuits every day for breakfast so he can cut out the dough in the shape of dinosaurs and Christmas trees.

I'm not simple enough to believe this is the end of sweet temptations, and in fact, I worry that it could just be a fad, those cute things kids do for what feels like a millisecond before dropping them completely. Even if they aren't gone yet, watching, you know someday you'll long for them – things like constantly asking us to draw doors, or announcing proudly whenever asked what cows say “Boo!! Boo!!”, obsessing about nuclear families – if there's a mommy bunny and a baby bunny in the book, for God's sake, where's the daddy?

But for now, in the field of snacks, I'd like to think – I did it!!

The Wuggie Norple Story: a story of addiction and recovery

Perhaps you've heard of the children's author Daniel Pinkwater. Perhaps you know the name because he reviews kids' books for NPR's weekend edition. Or, perhaps, like me, the name didn't ring any bells when you came across it at the dump.

It was a Saturday, and not unlike many Saturdays before this one, I found myself with my family at the dump.

At this point, I should fill you in on a few things. One is that my husband and I revel in scrounging- uh, recycling, if you will. I used to regularly give guests the thrift shop tour of our apartment, informing them which objects used to be part of which others and which pieces of furniture came from which thrift stores, how little we'd paid for them and how they used to look before they were painted, recovered, or otherwise improved upon post-sale.

Just this past weekend we spent a glorious Saturday morning garage saling. We scored a barbecue, a CD rack in the shape of a lizard for Isaac, and several cans of paint with which to paint the bookcase we'd recently dragged home that someone had left out by the curb for trash.

The other thing you need to know (in case you're getting images of my baby boy scaling a land fill and battling seagulls for treasures hidden under rotting garbage) is that our dump has a store. It's called Last Chance Mercantile.

Not long ago, Mike had found Isaac a couple Clifford books there that he adores, so we were again checking out the book section when we discovered an orange hardcover picture book with a cat on the front, and no dust jacket: The Wuggie Norple Story. Flipping through, I knew we wouldn't be leaving behind the illustrations of a groovy hipster family and a cat named Wuggie Norple. Those were two quarters we could part with.

Mike drove home and I read aloud. Lunchbox Louie, the whistle fixer, and his wife, Bigfoot the Chipmunk, had a son, King Waffle, and an ever-growing kitten Wuggie Norple. I couldn't make this up if I tried, but, you see, that's the point, Daniel Pinkwater did. I can't remember the last time I laughed so hard. The kind of laugh where no noise comes out at first, then it bursts forward in a choked rush of hilarity.

A dog enters the story – Freckleface Chilibean, then a six-year-old razor back hog named Papercup Mixmaster.

I rocked back and forth in my seat gasping, my seatbelt the only thing restraining me from doubling over. Tears swelled in Mike's eyes, and I started to worry that maybe he should pull over.

Behind us, Isaac was growing more and more concerned. “Mama! Mama!” he called frowning and pulling his index fingers down his little cheeks. “No, Isaac, Mama isn't really crying. Well, I am, but I'm happy.” “Mama!” he called again, unappeased.

The horse's name was Exploding Poptart, the elephant's Laughing Gas Alligator. There were wild caterpillars, whistles whittled out of carrots, picnics at Nosewort Pond.

“It's okay, Isaac,” Mike got out between snorts. “Mommy and Daddy are having fun.”

Isaac wouldn't let us read him the book when we got home. “Aw, c'mon!” we begged. “This is the best book ever!” “No!” he said with finality, stomping away.

Okay, so some people even though they love their kids and want the best for them, still can't get off the drugs? It was like that.

Mike and I tag-teamed at the computer, obsessively looking up information about Daniel Pinkwater and Wuggie Norple. His window, open to Pinkwater books on amazon.com was covered over by my window of the Daniel Pinkwater homepage, then both were blotted out with the text of an interview Pinkwater'd done for a publication called “Fat!So?”

I'd arrive home to find the book in the middle of the kitchen table. “Been reading Wuggie?” I asked Mike. “Isaac didn't want to,” he shrugged.

The peak of our addiction came when we discovered copies of the book – paperback edition – were going for like 200+ bucks. Not that we'd part with ours.

Things had just about gotten back to normal, Isaac even let us read him the book once in a while, when, on a trip to the library yesterday I found Pinkwater's book Spaceburger. Isaac would have none of it. I mean, one of the pages didn't even have a picture! “But,Isaac, the boy who said 'Ho' instead of 'Hi;' the song about lovely ravioli!?”

It wasn't easy, but I walked away. I figured I best go home and work on lesser habits - maybe paint our roadside bookcase. I stroked Spaceburger's light blue cover and then turned. I scooped up the truck books, the dinosaurs going to bed, the one about bugs, and didn't look back.

La Garrapata

“Una Gar-ra-pa-ta?!” She drew out the word when she repeated it, squeezing her lips into a crooked line and pulling her face to the side in disgust.

And that’s how I knew that I had indeed correctly remembered the Spanish word for ‘tick.’

I was at the Aquarium with my friend Georgina. Isaac was begging us to hurry up and get to the otters; her boy was slowly sidling backwards toward another exhibit and out of sight.

That morning at the breakfast table, Isaac scratched the back of his neck. “Mama, boo-boo,” he’d started. I almost didn’t look up from my waffles, assuming he was referring again to the small scrape of mysterious origin we’d discovered by his right ear the day before. But I put down my fork. “A boo-boo, honey?”

On lifting his hair, I saw what looked at first like an odd mole that had been picked at and irritated. “It’s a bug,” Mike pronounced. “It’s a tick.”

My reaction was immediate – complete repulsion – which I then tried to cover as quickly as possible with a smile. “Daddy will fix it,” is what came out. I patted his leg while Mike went for the tweezers.

I tried to be light and nonchalant when I told Isaac not to scratch it, please, Daddy’s coming. There was a whimper just behind my frozen grin. That this creature, this blood-sucking, disease-carrying creature would find its way onto the perfect body of my baby, into the tiny divot in the small of his fragile neck, at the wispy blonde hairs, at that vulnerable spot, was clearly unnerving to me.

Mike came back with the metal pinchers I knew he needed, but I was not reassured by the sight of them. “You can’t leave any of it in there,” I told Mike, voice quavering. He stopped; looked at me; lowered the tweezers a half inch in the air. “I know,” he replied carefully, and I could feel in his tone what he was holding back, that he was summoning all the patience he could find in that instant not to tell me to go to hell. It was a stupid thing to tell a boy scout after all.

Isaac cried out when the tweezers tweezed. I was jiggling nervously in my seat, restraining his hands from going to the back of his neck.

“I got it all,” Mike said after the painful few seconds were up.

It was fortunate, I now realize, that Isaac was strapped into his highchair at the time, making the pinchy but successful extraction slightly easier.

Lyme disease is pretty rare in our county, though it exists, and as if the bugs observe county lines. To have it tested, we had to send it three counties away and pay $29, which makes me think no one is really keeping track of how prevalent the disease is. How many other neurotic people out there are keeping the blasted bug and mailing it away with a check? Right.

The tick lived on top of my bookcase over the weekend in a plastic Rubbermaid container I normally fill with raspberries, or peas, trail mix, or some other treat I’ve carefully selected for Isaac’s snack. Every time I thought of it up there, I shivered. I figured it’d be dead by the morning, but it was very much alive, alive and well the whole time until we sent it on its way on Monday. There was a nano-second, each time before I rounded the corner in the hallway to where the bookcase is, that I imagined finding the vile bug had busted out of its plastic prison to sit lounging on one of the shelves catching up on its reading – Kafka maybe.

If anything had a chance of killing it, maybe it was the postage meter, but I was beginning to feel doubtful that even that could do in the predator. It seemed to need nothing – not air, not food…Well, no. I guess it had already filled up, hadn’t it.

The results came back negative for Lyme disease and the other day Isaac, just awake from a nap, felt the back of his neck and smiled. “Mama, boo-boo ‘mall,” he said.

I’m not sure what to take away from this experience – how about that Isaac associates his father with saving the day, or that I’m still rather far from any Buddhist agenda when ticks (or snails) are involved, or maybe that unexpected villains can enter the picture of your life in unexpected ways and grab hold of what is most precious.

The cost of having the tick you pulled off your son tested for Lyme disease? - $29. A new Rubbermaid container? - $1.35. Knowing what’s on your bookcase won’t move until you pick it up? – Yeah, you got it - priceless.

the tomato plants

- Ten-day-old seedlings my son carried home from the cuttings faire.

He tells me over and over again about his baby plants – the fact that they are babies, holding his arms as if cradling an infant and rocking, rocking. Holding his thumb and index finger as close together as they’ll go without touching and scrunching his eyes closed, signifying their littleness.

He picks out a place in the garden where he wants to plant them. “Dare! dare!” he points, jumping in place. I suggest we wait until they’re stronger to remove them from their plastic cup, a little bigger than the two-leaf, one-inch-high sprouts they are now, fragile by any measure. He reluctantly agrees.

They are so different from what they will become: bold, thick-stemmed plants with arms bending to the weight of their charges- green, then reddening into brilliant sunsets. My son has no idea of their potential, no fear of what ills they might contract, but loves them just as they are, knows only to dig the hole and watch.

the rain

“Da dar!” my two-year-old says from his carseat, dribbling his fingers down his head in imitation of the rain.

It takes me a beat, but only that. We’ve been together all day after all, me deciphering his language, his mind.

“The rain is on the car?” I try.

“Yeah!” he says, relishing whenever he is understood.

“The rain is everywhere,” I tell him. “The rain helps the plants grow. We like the rain; it’s a good thing,” I add for balance, reminded as I am of the significantly higher number of songs, sayings, and opinions whistling the news of rain as bleak and depressing.

“Dib, dib, dib,” he continues happily, being the drops. “Dib, dib, dib, dib.”

And his fingers rain puddles, slick with excitement at his feet as we drive, the wipers brushing aside the shiny wet stars that won’t stop falling.

borrowing faith

I've already covered to some extent my husband's rampant optimism in the face of the move. “We'll be together, and we'll be fine” was one of his mantras from the start. Apparently, he held the opinion that our little family could withstand realtors on illegal visits and a month of double rent and a 60-day termination of tenancy notice and all the rest. His faith worked me, eventually loosening a few of my anxieties, though I held fast to some of my favorites.

The place we've moved to is nice. Smaller, more expensive, and nice. One of the things that we like about it is that we sit tucked off the main street, behind a church parking lot. Maybe that's two things: the tucked away part, and the proximity to the church.

For the last six weeks the marquee out front of the church has said the same thing: “Sermon: God's Love.” I'm not a church person, but I can tell you that I love watching the women in their white square-heeled pumps and matching purses – full-hipped women shaking out the pleats of their flowered skirts as they walk. Flare right. Flare left. Boom, swing, boom, swing, as they traverse the hilly asphalted parking lot.

And there's the singing.

The day I met our current landlord, it was a Sunday afternoon. Standing out in the front yard of the house, my attention was divided between the details of a prospective rental and a congregation on fire. “Whoah!” I say indicating the raucous clapping and singing coming from under the steeple. “They mix it up, don't they?”

“Oh, don't worry,” my landlord said, worriedly waving his palms. “It's not like this all the time!”

“I love it!” I told him.

I met our neighbors, the Johnsons, while hauling boxes out of my trunk. “I'd love to have you over once we get settled,” I said to Mrs Johnson. “Whenever that is.”

“No one's going anywhere,” she said, with a hint of an accent I think is German. “No one goes anywhere so fast anymore. I'm 80 and my husband's 89.” A man in blue coveralls waves from the open garage door before continuing to hunt through a metal box for some kind of tool.

“It's quiet here,” she offers. “Very quiet, this neighborhood.” There's a small pause. “Except on Sundays. They get a little loud with their singing at the church.”

Three days after we've turned in the key to the old place, I turn my back on my living room piled in boxes and grab my gardening gloves. People are starting to arrive at the church. Boys in ties race each other to the door, girls play freeze tag around an SUV.

Then, from my squat beside the callas, I hear the sermon start – at first mostly muffled noise. I plant the snap dragons I bought – velvet red and lemon yellow stalks; I debate where to put the fig tree. The preacher is working himself into a fit of praise, washing over his congregation with waves of sound that appear to be questions. Mud cakes my jeans, and I unearth more earthworms. Slowly, the volume of the service rises until I can hear words and phrases clearly.

“The power,” he is saying. “The power! The power here...”

A woman's voice answers. “The power!”

Preacher: “The power here is love!”

Congregation: “The power!”

Preacher: “The power here is love!!”

Congregation: “The power here is love!!”

Preacher: “The power! The POWER!! The POWER here is LOVE!”

Then the singing starts.

Isaac is TWO

The birthday hike --> Crowned King Baby -->

Surfacing

That's the title of one of Margaret Atwood's early novels. I haven't even started yet, and I digress -- go figure. So, my son turned two just four days and one hellish move after the last post. Allow me to put up a couple pictures...

daffodils

Because of my son's fascination with the answering machine buttons, we get to hear the real estate agent's message over and over again. Her voice sounds almost bored -- “as convenient and painless as possible,” her dog barking in the background.

My buffer is gone, nothing between me and the outside world, which has apparently just become even more hostile. Where should I put the daffodil blossoms?

Holding Isaac in the rocking chair, he is long asleep, but I don't dare put him down. It's like the weight of him is rooting me, like without him I will just float away, or he will, or both of us, in separate directions.

Mike comes home; the house is dark. He finds me, finally, in Isaac's room. “What are you doing?” he asks. “Holding the baby,” I answer. “You have to put him down some time,” he says. But I shake my head and rock.

people

People are made of concrete and splinters. They are made of tear gas and florescent lighting. People are made of latex, and litter, broken brown beer bottles left in paper bags and spoiled seafood. People are made of Sweet n Low, cayenne and anything they can get their hands on. People are made of glossy pages and construction sites. People are made of red lights, asbestos, the smell of too many copy machines in one place with no ventilation, hang nails and road kill.

Our creeds read like deeds the devil owns. Our minds are lists of sweatshop toys

when people are made of lactic acid and vertigo, barbed wire, Taco Bell, and melanoma, when people are made of minor chords and smog.

renters’ haiku

My sister still talks about the haiku I wrote in the entry from over two years ago when I was a starving, raving preggo locked out of my car at the pool. So, in the whirlwind of stress that has been my last two weeks, as my landlord prepares to sell our house, prepares evil messages on lawyer letterhead, as my son recovers from a stomach flu that had me wondering if we would just run out of things to wear that weren’t already covered in vomit, as, as, as…I thought I’d offer just a couple renters’ haiku. Nothing like some 5-7-5 to still the mind:

Application hell
your references haven’t called
meanwhile homeless


the pet deposit
she’s a CAT, not a RHINO!
are you kidding me?


No one trusts the cat
maybe I’LL pee on your rug
or just get a fish


“Why don’t YOU buy it?”
realtor asks in a sweet tone
someone hold me back

moving and marriage

I knew what he was, but I married him anyway. My husband is a dedicated optimist. I think they even have their own clubs, these people. You don't hear about it, though; it's secret, like the masons.

When my favorite houseplant, the one with the hint of yellow-orange in the center of each leaf, began dropping those leaves one by one, Mike's take on it was “Maybe it's just part of its cycle.” I've heard the “cycle” line plenty – right before my rosemary bit the dust for good, and when the umbrella plant browned and withered to nothing.

This move has brought out the worst of his optimistic tendencies.

“What if the garbage man at whatever new house we find doesn't wave to Isaac?” I worry, the anxious knots in my stomach worthy of an Eagle Scout. “Maybe it'll be the same garbage man!” Mike pipes.

“Geezuz Christ!” I tell him. “You would think of something positive to say at a time like this!”

the blessings of renting (or, another house about to be sold out from under us)

I am writing this from where I'm holed up inside Isaac's bedroom waiting for the people who've come to look at the house to go away. Isaac is asleep. Has been for an hour. I told the landlady he would be and if they wanted to see the whole place and not tiptoe around, she should change the time. She didn't. It's her house, we just made a life here.

I am sitting on the floor with my back barring the door and feeling more than a little like a protective mother bear. I didn't want Isaac to wake up and find strangers wandering around his house, and, frankly, I didn't want to have to deal with them myself – didn't want to worry about how much to smile or smirk, or where to be while they peered into our closets and sniffed around our salad spinner. Okay, I'm lying – we don't have a salad spinner, but you get the idea. Mike's out there; and I'm in here.

Isaac hasn't moved from the position I put him down in. He's tired. Been out with his dad playing in the dirt all morning. But all these new energies in the house must be reaching him, at least you'd think. Aha, he's starting to stir. I just want him to hold on until all this is over.

It must be a blessing. This shuffling, this moving against our will. Four rented houses in three years' time. How grateful I am as a writer to be given this opportunity over and over again to reinvent, live in turmoil, flare with anger at realtors and property managers, the former arriving in canary yellow Porsches and standing in the driveway discussing my family's fate with the landlady. Thank goodness I am forced to review my years one by one, or by season, (“Hmm, that was spring, we must have been living on 10th Street.”), forced to look hard around me at what would soon be taken away.

Why just the other morning I swelled with joy and nostalgia on seeing that man in the black knit cap walk past the white for sale sign in the front yard. He walks past every day. Every single day, talking to himself. I sometimes hear him shouting at invisible people as he approaches from farther up the hill. Whenever I back the car out, I look for him first. You never know when he'll just appear, one shoulder sagging, always dressed too warmly for the weather, muttering crossly and staring at the ground. He waved at me once. In a couple months, I'll never see him again.

He'll be banished into history like the man who used to wander around the Forest Avenue apartment – that was four moves ago already – his big belly never quite willing to remain under his striped teeshirt, his beard wild. He came to our garage sale, bought my Matisse prints for 50 cents each.

What would I rail against? What would I worry about? If landlords kept promises and leases were more than leashes? How would I be able to write so carefully and with quite as much ardor about the sunflowers in the small square of dirt the gophers tilled for me, their rust and gold plumage blooming nearly to the size of hubcaps a foot from the ground, and when they're through, bowing their starry heads.

the essential nature of context

Isaac: “Dai?”

Me: “We can't go outside until you put on clothes, Isaac.”


Isaac: “Dai?”

Me: “Okay, you're ready to go inside?”


Isaac: “Dai?”

Me: “Yeah, if you hang it there, it'll dry.”


Isaac: “Dai?”

Me: “Well, penguins don't really fly, Iz; they like to swim.”

the color of justice

It was Mike's idea to go fancy.

I was in Goodwill looking for an old, ornate frame for one of Isaac's paintings. He's an interesting toddler artist, my guy. Gets in close with his markers, concentrating on the lines he's about to make. Chooses each new color with fanfare. His favorite new sign, by the way is 'rainbow.'

With a paintbrush the other day, he watched the thick strokes carefully. One pass with red. A second pass. Orange next, coming in curving complements. As if he were raised crawling around studios and galleries, he steps back, stares at his work, tilts his head, replaces the brush, pronounces it done, and walks away.

My friend, whose son is busy slathering layer number six of red on red, his canvas a solid block of goo, looks over at us, stunned. “That's a framer!” she comments.

It was a Saturday, and Goodwill was busy. Everything with a black tag was half price. The wide gold frame had potential but wasn't quite right. And the popularity of metal, mauve numbers was simply not acceptable. I had already determined this lack of cool, old frames in the right size, but lingered, checking out the burnt orange sectionals and rows of identical flower vases. There were two boys playing nearby in the toy section. Well, really only one was playing – he looked about nine, his brother was about two, not much bigger than Isaac.

The two-year-old was trying to play, but his older brother kept thrusting a giant stuffed green snake in his face, pushing him over with it, half frightening, half annoying the tyke. Again and again it happened, until the snake was abandoned for a yellow truck and then a large white bear – the little one squealing in protest, moving away, begin pursued, crying, the cycle repeating itself.

Their mother appeared not to be fully tuned in to the scene, busily choosing among sleeveless turtlenecks in shades of blue and grey from a rack of knit tops.

It bothered me more than I would've imagined, this teasing, this sibling rough housing, maybe because only one side was being rough, or even had the ability to be. This was a classic case, and I routed for the underdog with more emotion than I had at any other time I could remember. I was incensed, but seemingly helpless.

We drifted apart, me and the victim/victimizer. Then, just as I decided I was done and began a brisk stride for the door from the back of the store, I saw him again – the nine-year-old. He was walking in my direction holding the snake, looking a confident master of his world.

Damn me if you must. Put me down as perpetuating the violence. I am guilty of a lack of compassion for the aggressor. Mea culpa. Mea culpa.

Ever so subtly, I edged over as we passed each other, crowding the boy in next to a rack of pink and purple plus-sized women's blazers. Just a toe, only that, turned out just enough.

I kept my eyes focused ahead of me, but I felt the bump of his sneaker hitting into mine, heard the muffled thud of a small frame meeting thin, brown, industrial carpet.

the truth about trucks

Once we made it to the board book section of the bookstore, all hell broke loose.

Apparently, Isaac's truck obsession is shared by one or two other little kids, since on the shelf were parked about two dozen books on various trucks, these books taking the shape of the truck they starred, wheels afixed to the bottom.

Isaac arranged all 24 on the floor like some emergency scene/late night truck stop, while I perused the other books, humble though they were without the benefit of parts to make them ambulatory.

“There are trucks for all kinds of jobs,” I read aloud while Isaac crashed a cherry picker into a gift collection of Harry Potters in Spanish. “This dump truck is hauling coal from a mine.”

“Oh,” I continued, still speaking aloud, “I wonder what kind of health insurance the miners have, Isaac. Mmmm, yummy. Burning coal,” I added sniffing the air. My son ignored me, a tractor book in one hand, fire engine in the other.

Isaac's fascination with trucks knows no bounds. It is his sole purpose for getting in the car – to look for big trucks (“dig ducks”). He has had a personal relationship with the garbage man since he was 16 months old. Construction sites send him into peals of joyous laughter. He can hear a truck that's thinking about turning up our street from blocks away. “Vrrrrrooooom!” he narrates gleefully and races to the window. His little feet stomp and dance when he catches sight of the phone book in anticipation of the towing section. But both of us tired of the same old flatbeds in the yellow pages, we had headed to the bookstore.

In the middle of the store, before we had journeyed as far as the children's section with its fleet of mobile literature, Isaac suddenly and uncharacteristically broke free of my hand and ran pell nell toward a display just ahead. “Dig duck! Dig duck!” he squealed, clutching a jigsaw puzzle box to his chest. When I could finally pry it from his arms, I discovered the picture on the box showed dump trucks and backhoes positioned about in some sort of quarry setting – clearly a fantasy destination for my boy.

My mind is far, so far from what you could ID as simple or innocent, far from this pureness of fascination. Sometimes I worry that I am the wolf put in charge of the sheep, raising this child. Whose version of the world will win out? Will his, in its enthusiasm, lurch forward ahead of mine, its darker sister? Will it have to be me who tells him, “Isaac, those trucks bulldoze the trees you love, and those over there pollute the air so that we sometimes get sick.” Or will he pull me over to his side in one clean burst of ferocious, simple love?

two kinds

There are people, like us, who arrive at the playground early and wipe the bird shit off the slides. And then, there are the other people who get there later - after someone else has already done the dirty work.

the phone: an evolution

A baby is born. You call everyone you know to tell them.

The first week goes by. Everyone you know calls you to congratulate you.

The first months go by. Your baby reaches curiously for the phone when you are talking on it; you are easily able to distract him.

A few more months. Your baby figures out what you never could - how to change the ringer on the phone. It is now a high pitched ding-a-ling piercing through the scene of your every day.

You survive the first year. Your baby becomes wildly jealous of the phone, howling like an abandoned pup whenever you touch the receiver.

Toddlerhood full-blown. Bedtime routines are revamped and fortified. You turn off the ringer so the phone doesn't wake up the baby while you're putting him down. You often forget to turn it back on.

More time passes. More friends recede from you. You no longer have to turn the ringer off; no one calls anymore.

fantasy future

Sometimes I think about all the trials Isaac could be subjected to growing up– the stupid pranks, the name-calling, the peer pressure to do any number of things, the just-plain cruelty that kids can dish out onto one another, that leave us doubting ourselves, or doing things we don’t want to, or believing that someone else knows more about us than we do, that, in turn, leave us wounded, even as adults, of course as adults, that make us questioning, and vulnerable, and writers.

I can’t bear to think of Isaac going through these things, and I told Mike recently that I often catch myself imagining just the right thing to say, the right way to go about it, so that Isaac won’t have to suffer the indignities of childhood. I told him, laughing at myself, that I just need to believe for a while longer I have the power to protect him. I told him, I am just not ready to accept that he will have to go through some form of nonsense no matter what, or that (god forbid) he may not listen to his mother and therefore find himself trying to juggle his doubts in the aftermath of some less than positive incident. I have decided to hold onto the notion, for now, that I will find a loophole through which I will pull my son to safety.

To my surprise and relief, my husband shares my fantasy.

“But what if we can?” he said.

And that was all it took. I was right back up on the rocks with him, standing, waiting to swing out over the creek at a moment’s notice, the rope secured to the tallest tree, one foot coiled around it and resting on the knot at the bottom. Parents at the ready, and all possibilities open, as we gaze out ahead of us at the smooth, calm waters of our boy’s future.

signs of the times

Today was exciting. I received two DVDs in the mail that I'd ordered on sign language for babies/kids thanks to a friend's recommendation.

We've watched one and a half so far, which is amazing considering Isaac wanted me to replay the section on "train" 150 million times (approximately). They didn't teach "truck," so I guess it was the next best thing. Having the train sign will be good, since he's had the misfortune of acquiring the word "choo-choo" for train and in most words Isaac says he tends to replace the first consonant sound with a "d."

Whenever I tell people that I'm teaching my son sign, they say things like "Oh! Great! ...(extended pause)... Is he...?" "No, he hears perfectly well," I manage.

I know I should be educating, telling them about the advantages both socially and intellectually for the child who learns to communicate with his or her hands, regardless of hearing ability, and I do, usually, though it's rare they are truly interested. What I really want to do when faced with these people is hang myself boneless across an armchair like my friend's 10-year-old at Christmas brunch, look up at them with a mix of disbelief and disdain and then say things like "Can we go ice skating? SOMETHING? Anything is better than THIS! I'm so BORED!" Because really, that's how they make me feel. Bored with their tiny little narrow vision of the world.

I'm left with a question: With a fondness for such small boxes to stuff all they know in, why do they need such big SUVs and McMansions?

PS - there is a great online dictionary of American Sign Language with video demos.

the wisdom of youth

I remember how excited I was when Isaac learned to shake his head “no” and nod “yes.” What a world of difference it made in our communication possibilities. He has a new, similar tool at this stage of the game – his own version of “little” and “big.”

To say “little,” once must hold one’s thumb and pointer finger as close together as possible; also, squinting one’s eyes closed while doing so adds emphasis. To say “big,” one raises a slightly cupped palm over one’s head – such that it resembles someone about to attack someone else, and utter the word “Bo” (pronounced something like the beginning of the word “ball”).

With little and big, Isaac describes just about his entire world. I know which truck he’s looking for, I know his perception of the dog we just passed. He knows which pot to hand his dad to make the oatmeal, and how to tell us how much oatmeal he’ll be eating.

Today, while cutting open (at Isaac’s request) one of the three pomegranates left in our kitchen from the by-now defunct season, and already covered in bloody juice, my knife slipped. Normally, this would call for much shaking and sucking of the effected area of the hand, cursing, pronouncing my impending death, and repeatedly whining about my discomfort. Since becoming the parent of a sensitive toddler, however, my days of melodrama are over. Any cry of pain from Mama is very distressing to my boy. (This is the same child who sobbed uncontrollably when the floating Christmas candles singed a leaf on the plant next to them.)

Naturally, upon the knife making contact with my left ring finger, I did make one of those sounds, the kind that mean “Ouch.” plus a touch of “How stupid could I have been?!”

Isaac grows solemn. Then, frowning, pronounces “Mama,” accompanied by the sign for “pain.”

“Yes, Mama has a boo boo. Let’s just go take of care it,” I tell him, all the while aching to throw my maimed body on the couch and wail.

I get out the box of bandaids, my babe watching me closely. The first one I pull out seems good enough. It’s one of those H shaped things that I think are for fingers but I’ve honestly never been able to use. I quickly decide this would be the day to start taking advantage of first aid engineering.

“This one’ll work,” I tell Isaac.

“No,” he says seriously. “Nooooo, Mama. Bo!” he explains, his attack hand in the air.

“Yeah, this one,” I tell him. “It’s not too big; look.”

At first, application goes well, but the upper half of the H won’t cooperate. The cut is too far up on my finger.

“Bo, Mama” Isaac keeps repeating. “Bo.”

“We’ll just wrap this part around…”

“No.”

“See? It’s perfect.”

“No. Bo, Mama.”

For the next hour, any time Iz catches sight of my wrapped finger, he shakes his head. “No. Bo.”

It might have been less than an ideal fit, but I wasn’t giving in. “Mama likes it big. Look, it covers my whole finger. It feels better this way.”

“No, Mama.”

Finally, I couldn’t ignore the flapping bits of bandaid impeding my work and play.

“Well, looks like I’ll throw this away, Iz. It’s not working anymore,” I admit to Isaac, extracting my wounded digit and discarding the bandaid.

He makes the motion again, fingers splayed, back of the hand arched, then shakes his head for the last time and lets out a heavy sigh. “Bo,” he says, and shuffles off, leaving me alone in the kitchen.

Dammit. I hate it when they’re right.

Isaac, Christmas 2005 (p.s. Nice hair.)

What a difference a year makes!

coming home

It's like entering a crime scene.

The Three Little Pigs are in the hallway. Dr. Seuss sits open on the couch. The sweetly embroidered sweater I bribed him into that morning lies wet and muddy on the floor next to the hamper. The cat's bowl overflows with kibble; the cat herself slithers out from underneath the love seat to complain about it.

I start to deduce things: They ate cereal. I step gingerly around the books, the cat, the fire engine, the scattered blocks, one shoe.

I can hear the bath water running. Isaac is talking a steady stream – his language, not ours – although every day we win him over just a little more with our strange dialect.

The faucet sound halts and I hear Mike's voice say “Let's see what's in those pants.”

“Nothing!” he exclaims a second later. “No more poopies. You had a lot of poopies today. Three poopies.”

Despite the fact that I may have been out in the larger world, flung into whatever paltry respite it can provide under its broken wings, in general, once I step back over that threshold, I'm home instantly. As if I'd never left, the chaos envelopes me again, and I can't remember the adult conversations or the way I sashayed down the block alone, savoring freedom.

This night also I am nonplussed by what I'm overhearing, and I might have missed it altogether, the chance to step away from my life and see it, really look at it from an outsider's viewpoint. But then my husband begins to sing.

“Once. Twice. Three times a poopie.”

"Happy New Year!"

...that's just what two guys walking down the street said as I frantically tried to dig the cell phone out of my bag, my husband's 1993 Honda del Sol stranded in the middle of the intersection beside us, its clutch history.

"Thanks," I said. "Thanks a lot."

Last day of the year. Don't tell me cars aren't sentient beings. It's just like with babies - you have no way of knowing just how much they understand.

My angel this time came in the form of Sandy - the random woman who pulled over and helped me push/pop start the sucker get it into the hotel parking lot and then drove me home.

I didn't have Isaac with me this time - what with the del Sol being a two-seater n all. I can be grateful for these details.

I went searching for my last car-broke-down blog entry from 2005 so I could link it and had the hardest time finding it in the archives, until I realized I wasn't going back far enough. The Jetta screwed us in August, we didn't get the new car until November! Nuts. Anyway. So much to write, but had to get this out of the way first.

Thanks again, Sandy. And Happy New Year. For real.

Isaac and his clothes, another installment

There are moments when you learn, in a deeper way, what it is to be a parent.

Take for example, one evening recently, when I found myself tucking a pair of shoes into bed. No child attached mind you; the child was standing next to me watching me do it. In case I need to say it, it was his idea. It was the only way I was getting those shoes off of said child and the path of least resistance in this house is quite definitely cleared of brush and well-trodden.

The tucking in of the shoes went on for maybe a week or so. And while that's past, Isaac's attachment to his clothes is only just beginning. Like many toddlers, he enjoys helping to pick out the clothes he will wear for the day. However, just because he's picked them out, don't expect him to put them on.

Isaac is always most attached to whatever he is currently wearing.

“But if you take off the hippo pajamas, you get to put on the froggie shirt.”

Isaac stares at me dubiously and jabs a tiny finger fiercely into his chest where two smiling hippos loll in the grass.

“Let's put on froggies and look in the mirror!” I suggest brightly.

The gods are merciful on this particular morning, and he nods.

Without further ado, I whip the hippos off, snaps unsnapping all in a burst, before he can change his mind. The key now will be to hide all the books referencing hippos for the morning. If he discovers a hippo in the pages of his reading material and is made aware again that his counter hippos have been taken away, it's mutiny.

I place Jump, Frog, Jump in clear view and head to the laundry hamper.

warm wishes

The Mexican women at the bus stop across the street huddle and bounce in the chill, hands tossing long black braids over their shoulders then returning to the pockets of their fleece jackets.

It’s cold here.

Okay, okay. It’s not THAT cold. It’s not igloo, Denver airport, fjords cold. But for the central coast of California, it’s cold. We all make choices. If you’ve been shoveling your driveway this morning, don’t blame me. I chose to live here amongst the cypress and abalone. For this privilege, I pay exorbitant rents and wallow in the knowledge that I will likely never be able to buy my own home.

We had frost the other morning; show me some sympathy here.

Despite the fact that his mother has been wearing the same two pairs of jeans since he was born, Isaac is a clothes horse. When I held up the jacket he loves as we headed for the door yesterday, he shook his head vehemently. “No!” he told me. And, because my child believes in clarity if not a bit of drama, this familiar mantra was followed by “No, Mama!!!” with hand held out in a stop sign.

“Okay, not this jacket. How about your orange vest jacket, Isaac?”

“No,” he says simply and quietly now, reengaging in his previous game of building block towers and losing forever the initial momentum we had worked so hard to muster in order to get out of the house and to the grocery store.

“Okay, Isaac,” I try again, returning from his closet. “We’ve got blue hoody sweatshirt,” I hold it out in my right hand. “And we’ve got red sweater with balloon buttons. Ooh! Red sweater with balloon buttons!” I add with enthusiasm, lifting the hand-knit cardigan up for him to see.

“No,” he says without looking up from his precarious pile of wooden cubes.

“You have to wear a jacket, Isaac. What do you want to wear?”

He makes the sign that often means ‘fish’ for him – as in “Please, mother, I’d like to visit the aquarium today, or at least the pet store.” His hand wiggles rather high above his head, however, and I soon realize he means ‘airplane.’

“Plane, Iz?” I’m lost.

He points up at something that I’ve long since stopped taking notice of. It’s his Halloween costume hanging for the past two months from the handle of a cabinet over the closet, a hooded baseball sweatshirt Mike covered in silver material, a propeller beanie attached to the hood, pieces of shiny insulation sewn onto the sleeves for wings. Isaac wore the costume for about a total of two minutes before a kid in a scary mask left him screaming, face hidden in my neck and he was officially done with the holiday. Now, however, he’s determinedly pointing at the symbol of his young pain.

I’ve been waiting for this moment, the one when I join the ranks of other parents I’ve been watching all my life, the ones towing around kids wearing big pink rain galoshes on a bright, sunny July day, or reading solemnly as their kid flies about the dentist’s waiting room in superman pajamas.

Even though part of me has been waiting for it, maybe forever, I’m taken by surprise when it happens; and I throw back my head and laugh, loud and open-mouthed.

Happy holidays and stay warm, any way you can.

dr. duck

Besides his sign language, real and invented, Isaac now says a bunch of words, most of which sound exactly alike, making context and the generosity of a mother’s ear crucial. There is for example, Hot, which comes out kind of like “Dot” as does Cut, Stop, Drop, and Pop. Then there’s the proverbial “Duck,” meaning Sock, Stuck, Truck, and, in fact, Duck.

Birds were Isaac’s first love, and though at this point his obsession with trucks rules large, his obsession with ducks falls not far behind.

Due not to any example or encouragement from me, Isaac constantly wants to see ducks and feed ducks. Duck books that have gone missing in the house have been known to cause inordinate amounts of trauma, and anything in a book even slightly resembling a duck, must, by the laws of Mr Baby, be a duck. A chicken or an ostrich, for example. “That’s an ostrich. An ostrich bird, Isaac,” I tell him staring at the same damn page of that First Words book for the umpteenth time. (God knows why ostrich needs to be one of his first words.) “Duck,” he assures me. “Duck.”

Many children have negative associations with the doctor’s office. Isaac does not. Besides the fact that our pediatrician is incredibly personable for someone with a medical degree, he keeps a drawer full of little plastic animals that he gives out to the kids after visits. There are starfish, frogs, bunnies, lots of stuff. There are probably no longer any ducks, however, because I’m pretty sure we’ve wiped him out. I counted at least seven bobbing along next to Iz during his last bath.

Here’s an example of a conversation I’ve had with my son more than once:

Me: “We’re going to go see Dr H today, Isaac!”

Isaac: “Duck!”

Me: “You’re going to get a shot! Cool, huh?”

Isaac: “Duck!”

(Later than same day…)
Me: “Here we are at the doctor’s, Izzy!”

Isaac: “Duck!”

(In the examining room…)
Dr: “How are we today?”

Isaac: “Duck!”

Once, when Isaac went to get a vaccination (a whole separate and contentious topic worthy of much blogging), the nurse made him cry, not with the needle, mind you. He got upset when she wanted him to sit naked on the cold scale and went about calming him in oh-so the wrong way. Trying to tempt him with an early toy, she waggled the bit of orange plastic in front of him saying “Look at the octopus! Look at the octopus!” Nevermind that it was really a hippo, which was where she lost credibility with me, it was certainly not a duck. After the dumb, mean lady was gone, Isaac reached into the drawer two-fisted and pulled a pair of little red ducks, wiping his eyes on his sleeve.

Ernie’s got nothing on my boy.

another metaphor for which i will be condemned

Having a child is a little like having PMS.

It’s not that the feelings you have aren’t true and real, it’s just that the intensity with which you feel them is on a much greater level. At the beginning of course, the reasons behind this are the same as the reasons behind PMS – hormones, hormones, hormones. See, and you thought I was just being flip.

As things go on, however, the worry and exhaustion of parenting takes over as the driving force behind emotional magnification. Like, you know already that we live isolated, work-driven lives, but having a child throws that into high relief. You know that you’d like to end homelessness, that you can’t get back to sleep if woken up after 3 am, that you hate the way your husband eats a bagel, but thanks to the miracle of that little angel in your life, you can see all these things that much more clearly.

It was a typical morning.

The plastic penguin was drinking out of the cat bowl, my coffee table was covered in trucks of various size and ability, the CDs – well, most of the CDs from the bottom rack were missing completely. When I’d asked Isaac where he might have left them, he just shrugged his shoulders, palms upturned. “Uh-oh! Uh-oh! Where?” was all he offered as a clue.

Currently, that same petty thief I call my son is planted on the floor in front of the bookcase speedreading through my Russian literature collection. One after another he absorbs and discards the classics, pulling a book off the shelf, flipping through it, then tossing it over his shoulder with a cry of “All done!” The Complete Works of Nikolai Gogol. “All done!” Doctor Zhivago. “All Done!” Pushkin, Lermentov, Tolstoy. “All done!”

Shh! We have to be very quiet. Penguin is taking a nap. He is swaddled in a blanket that covers him completely and is snoozing soundly in the colander on the kitchen floor – an improvement over his other common nap space, the refrigerator, which is where he spent the better part of yesterday.

In the outside world, I imagine people purchasing new bed clothes, bunches of bananas, talking amiably with store clerks, listening to the news, showering. Sometimes I wonder what the mailman thinks glancing into the window – sill lined with boxes of baby wipes, cheerios and mis-matched socks. But most days, I’d much rather be completely ignorant of his thoughts.

Isaac escapes a diaper change, sliding expertly off the bed and racing through the house barebottomed calling “Nun! Nun!”

Penguin has awoken from his nap and is being alternately cradled and bitten by my son, who finally throws him passionately onto the floor. Penguin rocks briefly on the spot where he’s landed, then stills and remains there, facing the wall.

betrayal

"Look, Isaac! The moon! It's beautiful!"

He points at it, his face beaming.

"Ball," he says.

The next morning, he looks again for it and, not finding it in the sky, turns to me, silent and alarmed.

To know betrayal before the age of two.

happy endings

When people tell you “I was up half the night last night!” or “It's crazy with two!” or “It's so difficult managing Jacob's allergies.” Why do they always have to ruin it by adding “But things are fine.” and “Mostly we're having a great time with the kids!”

Why can't people let it be? Why can't things just suck?

dream states

I am awoken from a dream by the baby dreaming.

"No! No! ...Mama!" he's calling.

I am at a cafe, somewhere in Europe. There are flowers. I have just shared a joke with the tall man in brown when I hear the baby cry out.

"Mama's here," I comfort. "Mama's here."

On such lies we raise our children.

Wednesday mornings

It's something about the consistency and enthusiasm with which he greets my son each Wednesday morning when he doesn't really have to, in the middle of his busy day. And then there's Isaac at the window - waiting, waiting, waving, waving. Cupping his hand and lifting his arm, making the grumbling mechanical noise.

They understand each other these two, a mutual respect that makes my mother's heart yawn wide and scoop them both in together: my toddler son and the garbage man.

And the Zap/Iz roll, which has appeared on this blog previously

My babies

Izzy learned to play with Zap before he could crawl

I found more! Zap and Iz together

Zap Mama (April 30, 2000 - August 26, 2006)

Buds.

grumpy cat

beautiful girl

tolerating my hugs

the joys of the holidays

Zap and Em unmoved by Isaac's antics

Isaac and his girls

Hmm. Someone's been sleeping on my changing table.

Two cats, a baby, and Elmo

Checking on her baby

Boxes, they're not just for shipping anymore

And then she had to share us - the addition of Emily, the indignity

One of my favorite shots of Zappy

After we first brought home the cat that "would never bond with a human"

She knows where my heart lies: Zap and the bookcase.

Tiny little Zap when she came to us as "Mama Cat" with 4 little ones