Category: Parenting

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41. Things I Can Believe: Those Wise Words

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We need a way to forgive others, ourselves, and the fact that things don’t turn out the way we expected. Writing our experiences, our fears and our aspirations can clear away the overload of resentment and the stale taste of remorse.

– B.L. Pike in “Write Now: Why You Really Can’t Wait Any Longer”

I ask my son to help with dinner. He snaps and stomps, tells me he’s not going to cook for both of us, he’s only going to make his own snack, and it’s not fair. For once, I conquer the urge to roar back. Instead, my voice is even as it reminds him of his options. He can either make dinner for us both by himself, or he can help me make dinner for us both together.

“Why do I have to do everything around here?” He storms into my room, hauls Biggie the stuffed polar bear off the bed, and thrashes him against the mattress. Noodle comes streaking out, head bowed, ears down.

I empty the dishwasher then check the mail.

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Brain, Parenting

Tell-Tale Art

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I tell him learning anything new takes practice. I tell him he isn’t yet an expert at chess and if he wants to be as skilled as his friend, he’ll have to keep taking lessons. I tell him he’s not good at all kinds of stuff yet. I tell him he’ll become talented at just about anything he wants badly enough to practice like crazy.

“You’re being mean!” he yells. He stomps into his room and slams the door.

When I go in later, he is curled up under the covers. “All I want is to play basketball,” he mutters. “That’s the only thing.”

I start to tell him something else but it’s probably a waste of breath. What good is it to keep telling at him like this? I reach to stroke his head and he actually lets me. “Do you know why you’re good at basketball?” He doesn’t answer. I lean in close to him. “You’re good at it because you’ve been doing it over and over and over again for years. Guess what? When you were really little, you couldn’t make shots at all.”

“Yes I could. I was always really good.”

“Sweetie, you were a baby once. And a toddler. Like that girl at the park today. Remember?” His classmate’s sister was there, trying to hurl her neon pink soccer ball up, up at the basket. She chased it down the hill, over to the fence, around the field. She could barely keep it on the court let alone shoot it anywhere close to its intended target. “You were like that once. Guess what else? You don’t play as well as those college players your daddy takes you to see. Not yet, but you can if you keep at it. They’ve had a lot more years to practice.”

“Yes I am! I am as good as them!” He hmphs around and pulls the blanket over his head. I sigh. I’m clearly blowing this.

“Listen. Just about everything in the world that you like was built or made by someone who didn’t know how to do it once.” I’ve gone right back to telling. There’s no stopping me now. I tell him someone didn’t know how to make pizza. They learned. Someone didn’t know how to make giant water slides. They learned. “Baby, if people decided that the things they are good at when they are seven years old are the only things worth doing, we wouldn’t have a whole lot. We wouldn’t have video games or houses or running water or cars or legos or anything.”

“Yes we would. I could make video games.”

I should shut up. I really need to learn to shut up. This is futile. A frustrated person is as deaf as granite and about as yielding. He doesn’t want to sign up for chess. Or piano. Or soccer or swimming or art or Spanish. His reply to every suggestion? “I don’t like it. I’m not good at it.”

But I don’t shut up. I keep going. I explain that reading used to be hard. He didn’t like practicing. He still doesn’t like practicing. But the more he does it the better he gets, and now he can find his way into stories without my help. Once he couldn’t read. Now he can. The bridge between the two is practice.

He says, “I could always read. I was just pretending I couldn’t.”

Okay. Message received. I close my trap, hug my boy, and give him a giant kiss on the head. “I love you, buddy. Let’s go get breakfast ready.”

He’s grumpy eating waffles because there’s not enough syrup. He’s mad when I brush his hair because it’s tangled and it hurts. He doesn’t want to take the bus but it’s too late to make it to before-school care. I ask him how his morning is going on a scale of one to ten.

“Zero”

“Great!” I say. “It can only get better from here!”

It matters that I stand on an incremental idea of intelligence. I’ve had to tell myself I believe it often enough that now I actually do. As opposed to seeing intelligence as a fixed entity, the incremental approach holds that effort and practice can change not only how smart you are but the ways in which you are smart. You can’t measure intelligence and even talent may be an illusion. Training grows skill like a muscle. Where you focus is where you become strong and where you don’t is where you won’t. A brilliant physicist might be a monstrous manager and the world’s worst dancer. As an accumulation of behaviors, intelligence is a habit of mind rather than a meaure of it.

It matters here because this conception has been the ladder I’ve used to climb out of a lifetime of self-talk so defeating it borders on abuse. Only part of mental health is explained by physiology. Like talent, depression is as much a habit of mind as it is an expression of seratonin levels. Choosing to see intelligence as a verb helps me recognize that feelings of resistance have absolutely nothing to do with whether or not I am cut out for a particular endeavor. Stuff is hard and it is especially so when it’s new. Every beautiful or terrible thing our species has fashioned has required perseverence. It would always have been much easier to give up.

It matters too because trusting in this version of intelligence might keep me from passing on to my son this legacy of globalizing distortions. Belief in fixed capacity is fertilizer for depression. I want both of us to practice the art of speaking out loud all the ways a person can grow more proficient in any number of languages. I want Bug to learn early the vocabulary of self-efficacy. Sure, he’ll be awkward. He’ll hit walls. Some new skills will be much tougher to acquire than others. Maybe my parenting optimism is on steroids today, but if I know my son is perfectly capable of mastery and that he will learn how to chart his own course, I can be his touchstone as he does battle with his limits.

But let’s be real here: it also doesn’t matter. My kid isn’t buying it. If he believes intelligence is fixed, guess what? It is. For Bug, being good at something means it is supposed to be effortless. A person is naturally talented at some things and those are the things he should do. This idea baffles me.

“I hate this day,” he says as shrugs into his jacket. It is only 8:40 a.m.

When I walk Bug to the bus, other parents and kids are there waiting. Anxiety about my son’s attitude is a backpack full of wet concrete. I can talk up one side of Mt. Everest and down the other telling the world what I believe but my child is only going to want to learn new things if they are beguiling enough to make him want to trade in his ease for the effort required.

What is the currency for a seven-year-old? This: whatever other seven-year-olds decide has value.

But I am a loner of a mother. Where would I begin to plug my son into the allure of new activities if he’s already decided he isn’t interested? Which kids in my son’s school play saxophone or collect snakes? I don’t have a clue what the names of Bug’s classmates are, let alone their hobbies. What I know of their parents wouldn’t fill a teaspoon. My son has been in this school for nearly two years and I couldn’t identify his best friends if they rode up past our house on a St. Patrick’s Day float.

Besides, I’m not good building community.

Making new friends is scary. Remembering names is hard. I don’t like it. Why can’t I just stay inside my cozy house and write and dance and bake pumpkin bread with my son? I like doing that stuff. I’m good at that stuff.

Thanks, universe. Got it.

The dad at the bus stop nods a hello as he has on all the other mornings. My turn to endure the telling. It whispers, Every single amazing, effortless activity in the world was hard once. I take a deep breath and re-introduce myself. I say I’m looking forward to seeing his girls out now that it’s getting warmer. Maybe we could all go to the park? He mentions that his family goes to Nationals games and that they’d love for us to join them when the season starts. “You know what?” I say, pulling out my phone. “We’ll never make it happen if we don’t exchange numbers.” He texts me his name, his wife’s, his children’s.

I’m not good at it this. The vulnerability makes me squirm. On my way home, I run into another neighbor in the hallway. It would be so easy to pass her with a polite hello but all that telling is still clanging around. The degree of difficulty of an endeavor bears no relation to its suitability. I force myself to slow down long enough to have a conversation. After the requisite small talk, she confesses she’s been having a hard time getting to know neighbors since moving in last fall. Also, could she come by to see my bamboo floors? She and her husband are remodeling and want to replace the carpet with hardwood.

Baby, the telling whispers, if people decided that the things they are good at when they are forty are the only things worth doing, our world would be a dismal place indeed.

I tell her I’d love for her to come by.

As I head out to my car, I feel a bouyancy breathing under the anxiety of these new commitments. The telling whispers, There was a time before Thomas Edison knew how to work a telegraph machine. Before Langston Hughes could pen a verse.

Thanks, I tell it back. Nice work.
 

Parenting

Heaven on Earth

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My son asks if god is real. We are brushing our teeth. I tell him some people think so and others don’t.

“But is he?”

I tell him to spit. Then I tell him he’ll have to decide for himself.

He spits. “I believe in god because if you don’t, god will get mad and hurt you.”

Where does he get this stuff? I thought his world was ruled by Minecraft and basketball. Now it’s divine retribution?

“I didn’t know god was that cruel. He hurts people just for not doing what he wants?”

“Yeah. You get in trouble if you don’t believe in him.” Bug takes a big gulp of water then looks up at me watching him in the mirror. His face is grave. “If you don’t believe in god, you should start.”

I rinse the brush and point to the towel. It would be so easy to press the point. I want to ask him if belief is enough. Do we have to let this god know? Should we write him a letter? Put out cookies and milk? Maybe he’s more interested in public displays of devotion and wants to see us serve, profess, prove our zeal. Do we cut open our wrists and make an offering? Give up Pokemon and pizza? I wonder how Bug would take the suggestion that we should shovel out or neighbors’ cars or paint adorations on the roof and the door. Or even go to church.

I’m itching to ask my boy more. Is any action a proxy for belief? If god will hurt us for not having faith, how does he know? It’s possible he has a device he can plunge into our hearts to gauge some absolute quantity that resides there. My concern is that a vindictive deity endowed with omniscience might spend his days peering into the part of us that calculates risks and rewards. It’s highly unlikely that my process of choosing fealty for the simple payoff of his favor would meet his standard of belief.

I keep my mouth shut, though. I don’t want my son thinking too hard about any of this just yet, at least not at my instigation. I try to wrap it up. I tell him we can each believe what we want and there is room in the world for all kinds of stories.

Of course, Bug sees a wrapped package and his first instinct is to tear in.

“Is heaven real?”

I try the same line. Lots of people, lots of ideas. He’s not having it.

“But what do you think?”

And here, I stumble. Sure, harps and angels are ludicrous, but my convictions are comprised of more than the rejection of a single mythology. I must think something of the concept of heaven. It’s hard to grasp. When was the last time I had to shape these ideas into words (or rather, speak my way into the shape of an idea)?

How do I know what I really think unless I can explain it with a degree of coherence to a seven-year-old?

I nudge him towards the bedroom and start teasing a brush through his long snarl of hair. Bug fiddles with the legos on his desk while I unravel the knots.

With no idea what I’m about to say, I open my voice and let something make its way up and out.

You know how when plants and animals die, they decay? Like when we see an old tree that’s fallen down, how it sort of breaks down? Other things grow from it or make a home in it. Its nutrients are food for grass or chipmunks or birds.

When plants and animals die, some of the water that was in them soaks into the ground or evaporates into the sky. It falls again as rain or fills up rivers. Then other plants grow from it and other animals drink it.

The thing that happens to a tree when it falls down is what eventually happens to us. After we grow through our long, whole life, we die. Then we go back into the soil and the water. Other things like dragonflies and apples and lily pads grow from us.

Life just goes on and on.

To me, heaven is this cycle of all things growing from each other. Death makes life. After we are gone, you and I will be alive inside the rain. Inside a cornfield. Inside all the people that come after us.

This is how we live forever.

Bug has been quiet during this. He’s laid the first few ties of his lego railroad track. I move the brush around to the side of his head and try to smooth the hair over his ear. “So, yes, I believe heaven is real. We have a place we live after we die. I also believe we’re already in heaven right now.”

Bug endures one more tug before pushing the hairbrush away and hopping up onto his bed. He gives me a withering glance. “God is going to be so mad at you.”

“Yes,” I shrug. “That is a metaphysical certainty.” I pick up Marley and Me and shove my boy over with my hip. “Maybe you can put in a good word for me.”

“No way,” Bug says. “You’re on your own.”
 

Divorce, Parenting

Cause and Effect

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Waking up is relief even if it is to the dull edge of January dawn.

He is there, a red T-shirt and splash of white stripe, resting at the bottom of the swimming pool. It is too late. I know this but I dive in anyway and haul him to the concrete. Pressing air through tiny lips. The taste of chlorine. The taste of silence. Over and over and over. No tears. Breath. Press. Breath. No pleas. Just this single determination. Pushing out water, pushing in oxygen. He stirs but it is only me, my desire, my exhalations inflating the sodden puppet.

Then he turns. Just a little. Eyes crack, lips part. What are you doing, Mommy? Concern bends his brow. Wariness, too. Before he can resist, I tuck him into my arms. Gather him like fallen limbs. He is only three and still so very light.

Just taking you home, baby.

I stand with my son bundled and dripping against my chest. Warming him. Warming us. I step away. Up the passageway, past the closed doors and towards ours which must be somewhere that way. Somewhere else.

I stand knowing this is me leaving me. Me walking away from the woman on her knees bent over her drowned son. Me choosing madness over truth. Myth over pain.

The unutterable facts:

He is gone and I am the one who lost him. I turned my back. Let him leave the car at night while I hefted grocery bags and backpacks. Forgot to give him the key. Me. I am the one who saw the door was still locked and he was not in the corridor waiting. I felt the fear rising; I did not run for him then and there. I took 30 seconds too long dumping the grocery bags and backpacks. Another 30 seconds trying to find a warm coat to put on him because he hadn’t brought his home. I was the one who wasted those fateful, final 30 final looking with widening eyes down the dim hallway and up the shadowed stairwell of our complex instead of hollering his name at the top of my lungs because of. . . Decorum? Pride?

The unbearable facts:

I lost my son. The blow of awareness is sudden and blinding. My negligence is the cause, I am the cause of his death and so the blame for my suffering falls on me alone. This knowledge is itself a source of staggering shame. It seems I care more about my role in the loss than the loss itself. Me, me, me. It’s always about me.

Then, back around around again.

The impossible knowing:

A life without this boy in it.

Too much.

So I gather him up. Forever now three, complete. Just his light boyhood, his lift, his easy willingness to be carried without protest. I carry him close and walk in great strides away

from sincerity. From courage. Poised at my moment of choice,

I abandon my moment of truth.

The one closest to me wonders if he should fear my break with reality. I do not say out loud yes you should. That it is not a possibility but a certainty, but in any event, it is far from a clean split. It is a spiderweb. A slow shatter.

I wake in the dark but it is close enough to light. The house is quiet but for dog on her pallet by the sliding glass door. Cracks at the seams expand as temperatures contract, peeling back the illusion of solidity. Out there in the space between, my son, like my sanity, straddles dimensions. We are Schrodinger’s cat. Both of us are completely intact. Neither of us is entirely home. We cannot touch

and I caused this.
 

Children, Parenting

The Better Parent

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“Is it hard taking care of me?”

He asks this as we coast at long last on a hard-won current of harmony. We are under the Tinkerbell blanket and nearing the last of the songs.

I laugh at his question to buffer the twist of the knife. He has seen my jaw tonight. It has been a locked box heavy with chains. He is seven and keen to learn the cues.

His face is near. I kiss his forehead. “Some days, it’s tough just getting through it all. Home and chores. All that.” The long mess of his hair presses into my cheek. “But that’s just part of being a family. It’s not hard being your mom.” I pause. “Is it hard being my kid?”

He flashes a wicked grin. “Yes. It’s really hard. It’s terrible.”

“Why’s that, bub?”

“You don’t give me anything good ever. Not Pokemon cards. Not ever, not even once.”

We are back here again. Back at the fight that started yesterday at 3:30pm in Bug’s classroom. Tee and I had joined three other parent volunteers to run the first-grade holiday party. When I offered myself up a week earlier, I was picturing a pan of brownies and paper plates. Instead, at 9:30 the night before, I was the glassy-eyed zombie walking through the screaming aisles of Party City collecting cheap props for a class photo booth. At the actual party, I ended up pinch hitting for the mom whose sick son kept her home. This meant, on a half-beat of notice, coming up with holiday-themed movement games to play with sugared-up groups of 7-year-olds in a suffocatingly small indoor space.

As we bagged up the party’s limp remains and the kids licked the last frosting from their fingers, Tee was in the back corner trying to convince Bug to pose for a photo. Our son was the only student who hadn’t had his glamour shot taken. Twenty other children had donned reindeer antlers and glittering top hats to ham it up for Tee’s camera. Not Bug. He’d flat out refused.

Instead of letting it ride, Tee cajoled. He begged. I dressed up for one. Tee dressed up and had me take one. Bug wouldn’t do it.

Tee wouldn’t let it go.

(Allow me to step aside here for a minute and say that Tee is super-dad. He’s the dad that eats, dreams, and oozes dad-hood. He’s engaged and loving and patient and on board with Bug’s all-around development. He coaches Bug’s basketball team. He comes to all the parent-teacher conferences. He takes the kid camping and ice skating and makes him do his homework. He is the father everyone wishes they’d had so they wouldn’t have all their daddy issues. He’s also a fantastic co-parent.)

Okay. Back to it.

Tee bribed Bug to take the photo. Bribed him by saying the next time Bug stayed with him, Tee would buy him Pokemon cards.

Bug posed for the photo. Tee reminded him that it would be Friday before they stayed together again.

Also? Tee made this same deal two weekends ago to convince Bug to go to a concert. Pokemon cards. Straight-up bribe.

It’s Tee’s issue, yes? His to deal with? If my son’s dad exchanges goodies for favors, not my problem, right?

Wrong.

When I picked up Bug from school after the party, the kid cracked into a dozen pieces. Sobbing. Wanted to go to Wal Mart. Said his daddy promised. Begged me to let him stay with his dad. Told me he didn’t like my house and he never wanted to stay with me ever again.

On our way out the door, the after-school care folks cheerfully reminded me of the potluck to be held the next day. Reminded? No, wait. Informed. For the first time. So, after working all day at my job and then volunteering in the classroom doing Rudolph Says with three dozen wired mini humans, I was to go home and cobble together some festive dish to take back to school in 13-1/2 hours?

“Remember, no nuts or pork! Thanks! We can’t wait!”

Me neither.

But we were still hours from the menu planning. Right on the heels of the car meltdown came galloping in an epic homework battle. Bug scrapped with every sentence. Tore at the paper. Slumped. Drew on the table. Deliberately misspelled every other word then flipped out when he had to correct them. Took 30 minutes to do a 5 minute assighment.

Finally, we ate. Bathed. Sang extra-long Christmas carols. Bug crashed. I went into the kitchen to make brownies, prepare a cheese platter, and assemble Bug’s lunch while finishing up wrapping gifts for the holiday exchange at my office.

Bed for mama sometime after midnight? Did I even dare look at the clock?

Fast forward to tonight.

I pick up Bug at school. Collect the brownie tins and cheese tray. Play the last two rounds of Pictionary with the kids.

Then.

“Why can’t I stay with my dad? He promised me Pokemon. And it’s Thursday which is the start of Friday so you’re a liar and I hate you!”

Ding Ding! Round 2!

Bug wails and rages and sobs the whole way home. Claims he is homesick. That his daddy is better because he gives him the food he likes and he has all the good toys and he buys Pokemon. Everything about his dad is better. And I’m mean. And he hates me.

Another homework battle. Another long lecture.

Another chokehold on my temper.

Here’s mom breathing. Mom steadying herself. Mom only yelling once and immediately changing tack. Mom talking through feelings and expectations. Mom explaining that homework is his own, his name is on it — not Mom’s name — and it’s his choice to do his best or not. Here’s mom methodically making dinner. Pausing to kiss the boy on the head. Ironing the fuse beads. Chatting calmly over grilled cheese sandwiches and broccoli.

So, at bedtime? Sweet mercy, we fall into reading and cuddling as we do every night. As if nothing in the world is ever very big, as if three is the magic number.

Three books to call up some fallen angel’s wings. Three songs, the incantation that wraps them around us.

“Is it hard taking care of me?”

This tap-tap on the sealed edge of my door. This spinning of the combination lock.

When he tells me it’s hard to be my kid because I never give him anything good, I chuckle instead of wincing. This is the third invocation in the spell of threes. This is the charm that animates the thing embracing us and warms it to life.

I laugh. He tries again.

“You don’t ever give me Pokemon ever.”

(Which isn’t true, but)

He curls into my arms and tickles my neck with his breath. I say, “I give you more good things that you can even count.”

I say this to him. To me. I say this to oil the hinges and thaw loose the frozen clasp.

I say this:

I give you cheese quesadillas.
A gazillion books.
Trips to the library.
Rides to the ice rink.

I give you a hot breakfast every morning.
Clothes you can move in.
A sweet doggie.
Cuddles. Hugs. Three songs every night.

I give you art stuff in every room of the house.
I give you a home.
Near a park.
And walks to the park all the time.
And walks all over this town.

I give you bandaids.
Time with your grandma.
Playdates with friends.
Help with your homework.

I slow down. Bug’s eyes droop. I ease up on the list and start the same last song I sing every night and will sing every night for as long as this fleeting eternity lasts.

Baby Beluga in the deep blue sea.

And I say without saying the words between the lyrics:

I give you my steady face. My calm half-attention when I reach all the way in and half is the most my fingers will grasp.
I give you my breath.

When I know the beast inside is snapping for bones, I give you the locked door.

I give you my best self. When I haven’t seen her in days and don’t know if she’s even in this time zone, I call her back home. I sit her down in the place I just was and let you have her version of love.

Yes, it’s hard to be your mom.
Some days I just give you a mom.
But you deserve her, this mom of yours.
I’m still figuring out how to be her.
 

Children, Parenting

Turning Rite

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A rattling on metal. Something like gravel on the roof of a train. It echoes down four stories and then back again through the flue reaching above mine and the one above that, all the way out to night. The fire is a mere whisper of its former self, a glow in a carpet of gray. I reach in with the hook end of the poker and creak down the damper. Rain gushes down outside, washing away the remains of dozens of exploded snowballs, our frantic footprints, the tiny snowman with the stick features we built in the first dusting on the basketball court. It will melt away the ice that has already canceled school for tomorrow, carrying it down curbs, into sewers, away to the Chesapeake bay.
 
At dinner tonight, we slurped soup and talked of rituals. Tea ceremonies and such. “What’s a ritual?” Bug asked. Our guest and I tried our best to puzzle out a definition. Like a habit that you do over and over, but with more meaning. Sort of. And like a tradition, sort of. “Like brushing your teeth every night?” Bug asked. We pulled out the Oxford dictionary. We looked up both “ritual” and “habit.” The former is marked by its regularity and invariability, and it often has a religious and ceremonial quality to it. We tried to come up with our rituals. Are the three books and three songs every night a routine or a ritual? Where do our prayers and passages reside? Do we have a sacred fixation?
 
My boy sleeps now. Out through a reflection of green-pink-everycolor lights, the street below is a river. Ice-tipped peaks and silvered trenches first soften to hills then flatten to black.
 
Our last book at bedtime was a new one from the library: The Man Who Walked Between the Towers. It is the true story of the feat of one Philippe Petit who, in 1974, snuck a cable between the two buildings of the World Trade Center as they were still under construction. He walked it, danced it, and even lay upon it as the sun rose over New York City. The book tipped me vertiginously too high and too far behind all at once. Dizzy, I had to catch my breath. Those towers are gone and Bug wanted to know why.
 
This question was going to come. Even with this certainty, I knew I would never be prepared. Shutting the book and setting it aside, I scooted down close to him. “There were some people who wanted to hurt America,” I explained. “They hijacked airplanes and flew them into the buildings. The buildings fell down. People died.”
 
True to his engineering mind, he actually wanted the how, not the why. I filled in the gaps easily. Too easily. It is all as fresh as if I am watching it now on that giant screen, the same silence choking us — bound as I am to the anonymous, forever Us of that moment — in a university lounge just a few miles from the Pentagon. Bug asked one straightforward question after another. “Did they fly into one building then out and into the other?”
 
“No, baby, there were two different planes. And a couple of others.” I kept it simple. In the spots where he plunged the shovel of his curiosity, I elaborated. We meandered around that day, finally making our way to the moment the passengers on board the last plane stopped the bad guys by crashing into a field. After Bug found where to place his period at the end of the story, he leaned his shovel against a tree, slid down into the bed and asked me to sing.
 
It is legend to him. Ancient history. No frisson shivers through a spectator with quite the intensity it does for a player. These are lines on maps and pages in books. When you are here and now instead of there and then, you trace them with your finger. You maybe imagine visiting. Normandy. Vietnam. Manassas. In other places, too, shadows of what was human made and human razed streak the land. The ones who remember delineate the shade. Those who don the mantle of memory after the last survivors are gone then call those phantoms back again and again until ghosts knit to earth like a skin under the now. Library of Alexandria. Berlin Wall. Twin Towers.
 
It should come as no surprise that Bug is not frightened by the story I tell. It is no different from any other history lesson. People work. Build things. Invent and discover. Go to war. Lead and follow. Make art and families and cities and revolution. Hurt each other. He’s learned already that villains are real. That heroes help. That people can come together to change what is into what could be.
 
That danger lurks and courage grows.
 
My boy’s classroom doors have little black accordions of paper clipped up high in the windows. He tells me these are for when the bad guys come in. While the kids hide, a teacher can unclip the little curtains to block anyone from seeing in. Bug told me this on the way to the car and then asked if I’d brought a snack.
 
My son sleeps. Rain rattles against the damper then dulls to a hum before finally falling silent.
 
He asked for extra songs tonight. Tiny lights glinted from tree branches in the living room. A velveteen Santa sat on a side table with a key silent in its back, having earlier tinkled down its wordless version of what we’ve all learned to know without even trying. I curled into my boy and called from memory the first few verses of the old standbys. Silent night, holy night. . . My voice slowed and and thinned as his eyes drooped. Christ is born in Bethlehem. . . Planted in the furrows of my brain, these hymns. As Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ on Christmas day in the morn. . . I settle my child to sleep with the lyrical story of a God we do not worship in an ancient land that is not ours. Born is the king of Israel. . .
 
The evergreen outside the window sheds its silver husk. Boughs that protected a soft patch of snow from the freezing rain earlier now dip and shudder in the downpour. Inside, an ember pops. The scaled lip of the last log glows for one fulgent moment before turning to ash.
 

Growing Up, Parenting

Homesick

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“Can I please stay at my daddy’s?”
 
“You’re with me tonight, buddy.” His backpack is weighing down my shoulder. One of the four books he’s checked out of the school library is a hardback Harry Potter, which we happen to have at home. “What do you like about your dad’s house?”
 
“I like my bunk bed.” His hair falls over his face as he drags himself along the sidewalk. “Daddy lets me play toys before bed.” My son’s pace diminishes in inverse proportion to my edginess. I open the car door for him and wait, forcing my face calm. Finally, Bug piles in, lobbing his lunchbox across the back seat before harrumph-ing down in his booster.
 
I climb in and start the car. “I sort of remember someone playing legos on the bedroom floor at our house before bed every single night. Maybe that’s some other little boy.”
 
He doesn’t take the bait. “Why can’t I go to daddy’s?”
 
We edge into a tiny gap in the tight string of red taillights lined up outside his school. It is so dark now. We were scaling the monkey bars at park before dinner just weeks ago. Was it years ago? “Our house needs you,” I tell him. “You have to come around to help all the rooms remember you. The dog, too.” Traffic is at a crawl. We have to wait through three turn signals to get to our street. I grip the wheel and babble on, cluttering the car with my major-key noise. “Our family isn’t complete unless you’re there.” Bug puts up a half-hearted argument and then falls quiet.
 
I weave around to discussing his new daily book – one after dinner but before bath and bed. His teacher wants him to practice reading aloud then and re-telling books on his level.
 
“So I get four books every night?” he says.
 
“Yep. You’re one lucky kid.”
 
In our complex, I pull into our spot and collect the backpack, phone, and keys. I open my door and start to get out but Bug is still in his booster. He doesn’t move to open the door. I turn and see him gazing off and slightly down. He is fiddling with the buckle of the seat belt and chewing on its edge. The clock is ticking past dinnertime. A surge of impatience crests. I order my shoulders lower then settle into the pause, letting my boy have this long minute to be exactly where he is. I reach back and stroke his leg. The sweatpants are fleecy. Cozy.
 
“What’s going on, Bud? Are you feeling something right now?”
 
He shrugs. “I’m homesick,” he says.
 
This is a new one. “Homesick. Boy, I know how that feels. Do you want to have a little cuddle and a book on the couch when we get in?”
 
“Okay.” He lets go of the buckle and collects his lunch box.
 
Outside, black night already, a fingernail moon. Bug stops in his tracks. “I can see the rest of it. The round part.” I glance up. The shadow of the moon’s full belly is hidden under a purple shroud. The shape is clear but only if you look a little bit away.
 
Bug is already up the stairs with my keys in hand. After banging open the door, he clomps right past the dog and into his room, kicking his shoes off in the corner. I give the pooch her momentary fix of head-scrubs and ear-flaps before joining Bug. He is on the floor with a Tupperware of little rubber bands. Three elastics are looped over his fingers.
 
“Do you want to do this instead of reading?”
 
“Yeah. See? This is how you do this new way.”
 
I sit down and pick up three of the bands. “Is this the fishtail you told me about?”
 
“Uh-huh. And you use your fingers like this. The bottom one goes – see – over the top.” He shows me and then watches me once through to make sure I do it right. Pink, blue, purple, pink, blue purple. Dinner is still just an idea. The clock pants and strains at her leash. I open my grip and let her run.
 
Bug and I sit together in the low light right in the doorway. We are half-speaking, half-turned away from each other. I-66 rumbles in a nearby distance. We each come to a decent wrist-length of woven elastic. We help each other stretch the bands wide to loop the finishing hook around to the other end then slip on our matching bracelets. When I get up, he follows me like a shadow. I am unaccustomed to his need for nearness. “Help me choose something to bake,” I say. He sits with me as I scroll through internet for a cake-mix-halloween-candy recipe I can use for tomorrow’s office baby shower. He hugs my leg like he did as a toddler then stays right at the bar to plays legos. Dessert goes in the oven and broccoli comes out of the microwave.
 
After dinner, we fall onto the couch with books. He reads Henry Builds a Cabin and re-tells how the bear (who he only half realizes is Henry David Thoreau) sits in the sunshine outside his new walls, calling the clearing his library. Bedtime has already come and gone. I restrain the urge to rush Bug through tough words. “Staircase.” “Shingles.” He leans into me as he finishes. “Then it starts to rain and he wears his house.” He smiles and looks up at me before a cloud crosses his face. “I still feel homesick.”
 
“I think it’s pretty neat that you are inside your home and you feel homesick at the same time. You have two homes that are yours. You can love them both and miss them both sometimes.”
 
He slips his arm through mine. “Still.”
 
The breath of my ever-growing task list is hot on my neck. Dishes in the sink. Dog needs walking. Lunches need packing. I force a pause. “What helps when you feel homesick?” I ask.
 
“Reading books in your bed. Extra cuddles. And staying with you all night long.”
 
I laugh. “Oh, baby. I don’t know about that. Neither of us will ever sleep.” I get up. “Listen. Let’s get your clothes changed and I’ll wash up.” He disappears into the back and then comes sashaying back into view.
 
“Mommy, you forgot dessert!”
 
I toss the sponge on top of the pile of dishes. The last of my restraint goes with it. “You know, it would be much more useful if you said, ‘Mommy, what can I do to help,’ instead of just telling me what I forgot.” He stops in his tracks and his face collapses in. I can’t unsay the words. The closed, angry boy I know so well appears before me just like he’s been here all along. He plods over to his stool and disappears inside his legos.
 
My tone is the too-familiar grit texturing our compressed days. The rough edge of my stress and clock-watching abrades my boy little by little, snap by snap. It becomes a day then a week then it just is. It is us, it is who we are together. I scour my boy flat and square-edged. I cannot press my fingers in to get a hold, to reach him. My attempts slip off.
 
How much of my son’s chilliness is protection from mine?
 
I shut off the water and watch Bug at his legos. Homesick. Herein the place I worked so hard to secure, the place with a room of my own and one for my son, I carry my own version of the affliction. It is a faraway sort of sensation cleaving low into you. You can hear echoes across a divide whose depth you can’t quite grasp and whose other rim you can almost-but-not-quite touch. Over in that before, all the hopes and plans and comforts live on. There, nothing has been tested. Nothing has been upended and the crew hasn’t come to break down the set and expose it for the plywood and clever lighting it was all along.
 
I can barely wrap my hands around the space where this ache resides. How can I possibly expect a seven-year-old vocabulary to capture it?
 
Maybe for all his usual stubbornness, for his fire and ice, this boy is not so tough. Maybe he needs me to be his safe place more often than not. My son took a risk by sharing his homesickness with me. Can I be the grownup here? Can I let him be small?
 
I leave the dishes, rehearse my new lines silently, and bend to him. “Listen, Buddy,” I kiss him on his head. “I’m sorry I snapped just now. That wasn’t fair. Why don’t we try again. You ask for dessert with a ‘please,’ and I’ll respond in a different way.”
 
We practice. We share double helpings of cavity-inducing, yellow-cake-Milky-Way treats. We sit close. After brushing teeth, I let him choose the books and climb into my bed for reading and songs. He falls asleep halfway through Baby Beluga, and I stay there until he is deep down. The cool blade of the sickle moon slips in between the blinds. I slide my arms under my boy like he’s a newborn and carry him to his bed. There, we curl around each other, breathing each other’s breath, drifting in our own in-betweens, alone together.
 

Parenting, Reading

Mad Skills

smirkpretty

His teacher says we need to have them read to us. “A book a day at least.” I have not been doing this. Judging by the other parents’ shifts and murmurs, I am not alone. We are all folded into the small desks with our knees bent up to our shoulders. Mrs. P smiles. “And one more request. Please, please teach your children to tie their own shoes.” Groans now. Giggles.
 
Tee and I look over the sign-up sheet for parent-teacher conferences in November. We are the only twosome negotiating for a time slot. At every other desk, it is just one mom or dad – mostly mom – checking the schedule. Divorce comes with a handful of unexpected side benefits. They’re pretty expensive and probably not worth what our son has to pay for them, so we guard them with our lives. Tee and I both attend every event. We used to argue over who gets to chaperone the school trip until we realized we could handle it together. We have already set a theme and divided up cake- and game-duties for a birthday party over a month away.
 
“Geez, I can’t get here at 12:30 on a weekday,” I say. All of the morning and afternoon appointments are filled. Tee and I have our calendars out. “There’s a unit meeting on Monday I can’t miss,” he says. Our negotiations are stalling the process for everyone. Another mom takes mercy on us and offers us her 8:15 slot. She stays at home mom and lives right near the school. She’s our new favorite person. Tee and I put up a symbolic fight for about three seconds before erasing her name and squeezing our two onto the blue line.
 
The teacher introduces the parents to the Spanish teacher and the weekly schedule. Then the bell rings for us just as it does for the kids. Parents scatter. Tee and I are alone in the hallway, engaged in the eternal yet forever interrupted conversation about raising our son. Other parents might be doing this at home with each other. Maybe they’re not doing this much at all. Tee and I talk. We talk in corridors, over phones, between meetings at work. Scraps and patches. We find compromises lightning fast now without even discussing the values beneath our positions. We are a million miles apart but right on the same page.
 
Some days.
 
One of the things I miss and don’t miss in the slightest is having Tee in my home and private space, thinking with me about raising our son. I don’t know what I’m doing 95% of the time. Now, I bumble around in isolation. I ache for another set of eyes while knowing my ex husband’s presence wouldn’t actually help. I don’t understand the way he sees. We have decided to be in complete agreement on all things practical and to cross our fingers that we won’t bump too hard against the Whys of our choices. There are walls between us that we still don’t know how to scale.
 
Tonight, in perfect alignment, we are the envy of our friends and neighbors.
 
“So, do you have him read to you?” I ask.
 
He smiles a little. “Nope. We still do our three books and sometimes he points out a word, but. . .” he shrugs.
 
“I guess we should start.” I’m thinking about the inevitable struggle with Bug. Like just about every other human on the planet, he resists change.
 
“One a night?” Tee asks.
 
I nod. “I’ll start tonight.”
 
Bug has already had his bath when I bang through the door. He and my mother are sitting on the sofa looking through a picture book about spies. Bug slumps off to the bathroom to brush his teeth while I hear the run-down of the evening. Good dinner, chip on his shoulder, won’t talk to her about anything. I don’t bother telling her again that this is his personality right now. His attitude hurts her feelings regardless. I saw the other truth, though. They had been leaning in together, close and quiet in the orange glow of the lamp. Maybe it was only three minutes. Maybe we have to take what we can get.
 
She heads out and I brace myself. “All right, kiddo. Bed.” No slush time tonight. I just know this shift in our routine is going to drag us down to first gear. My nights with my kid are precious but they are so very long. It’s been years since Goodnight Moon. These days, three books and three songs can fill an hour, easy. If Bug has to read? We’ll be bumping along on the shoulder, me craning my neck for the exit ramp. The dinner dishes are heaped in the sink, the lunches are not made, the dog has to be walked. . .
 
Clearly, Bug’s not the only one who dreads change.
 
Right here, right now. I tell myself.
 
“Okay, Buddy. Tonight, you get to read one of the books out loud to me.”
 
“I’ll start tomorrow,” he says.
 
“Tonight,” I say.
 
“Next week? Please? Wait! I know. I’ll start when I’m seven.”
 
“Baby, you practically are seven. And Mrs. P didn’t say to wait a day or a week or anything. She said now. You’re teacher said it, so even Mommy has to do it.”
 
Bug deflates. I read two from the pile then root through it again and pull out one of the shorter ones. It is from the library and neither of us has ever seen it before.
 
“What’s this?” he asks.
 
“I don’t know. What does the title say?”
 
“Oh, Mom! Come on.”
 
I point to the first word on the cover and wait.
 
“H-h-hondo. And. Fuh – what’s that?”
 
“Fay-buh—”
 
“Fabian?”
 
“Yep.”
 
“Hondo and Fabian,” he says.
 
We open the book. He reads the first line. Not a single stumble. He reads it just like any old reader would do it. I have to hold back the wave of Wow that surges up in me. If I don’t keep my cool, he won’t keep going. We turn the page. His voice rolls smooth right over the next line. Then the next. Hondo and his friend Fred are playing in the waves. Fabian the kitty is playing with the toilet paper. Bug is giggling. I use my fingers to cover parts of a long word and he pieces together “chicken.” Then, just like that, Hondo and Fabian are asleep. We close the book and I turn to Bug.
 
“You just read to me, baby. You just read a whole book!”
 
“Yeah, yeah. Whatever.”
 
“Whatever your own self. I had no idea you could do that! Look how all your hard work and practicing is making it so you can really-for-real read.”
 
“Could you just sing please?”
 
My mother is right. He does have a chip on his shoulder tonight. It’s no different than just about all the 182 nights I have with my flinty boy. That’s not nearly enough squares on the calendar to waste any one of them on wishing he were different, wishing any of this were something else. I pull the pillows down behind us and curl into him. He pushes my hand off of his side and twists away.
 
“Old Mr. Johnson had troubles of his own.”
 
“Will you rub my back?” His little voice. His one concession to attachment. I lift his shirt and trace my nails down his spine. His muscles roll as he hums a little laugh.
 
“I’m really proud of you, baby,” I whisper. “You’ve worked really hard. It’s going to be so fun reading together.”
 
Bug doesn’t say anything. I pick up the song’s drifting thread.
 
“He had a yellow cat that wouldn’t leave his home. . .”
 

Children, Parenting

Stretch

smirkpretty

Under the blanket, the smell is rank. Is it him or me? My son’s hair is a chrysanthemum explosion too close to the earth. He pushes into my body, twisting the sheet and blanket away from my folded knees. Morning breath and cool autumn air snake in around my neck.
 
He bathed last night and now the faint scent of berry shampoo joins the mix. In the tub, he stretched himself to his full length. His head was submerged over ears, up to jaw, past hairline. My boy became a naked mask, bald and brown, hovering just above the surface of the water. “Put your hand under me, Mommy,” he said. I did, floating it down below his back and in the open space under his calves.
 
“You’re levitating,” I said. “Is it magic?”
 
“It’s a trick. I push my head against one end and my feet against the other. It lifts me up.”
 
If he’d pointed his toes, he wouldn’t fit. My son is this tall. I said it aloud but he mouthed, “I can’t hear you.” I dipped my hands under the water and cleaned his ears. I pressed the soapy cloth into neck creases that are quickly disappearing.
 
Now, we linger in bed longer than usual. We have time to talk about nothing. He rides the school bus for the first time today. My boss agreed to let me have a late day once a week, a 9:30-6:30 sort of day, as much for my kid as for my working students prefer after-hours meetings. The bus comes late around here. Usually my kiddo is already deep into some before-school activity and I’m parked at my desk when the other neighborhood children are lining up on the street with their backpacks.
 
When we finally untangle ourselves from the blanket, I pad into the kitchen to throw together banana-oat waffles while Bug assembles a lego spider truck. Steam rises from the waffle iron. Warm syrup. A dog walk. A long shower. I never could have imagined such weekday luxury. I drag my bike out the door and we bump to the curb where a mass of families is assembled. Is it possible this many kids from Bug’s school live in our neighborhood? My son’s smoothed white hair falls down around his eyes and he slows, wiping it back, surveying the crowd.
 
We meet Ray and Rose and Marianne. Bug presses himself close to my side and whispers something. I bend down. “There’s BK from my class.” He points. The gesture is tiny but certain. A mom with a daughter in Bug’s grade walks up to us and introduces herself. “You’re new here,” she says. A dad carries a baby girl on his shoulders while his son charges ahead. The crowd surges closer to the street as the bus rounds the bend. It hisses to a stop and blinks in dumb excitement, doors grunting open. The driver is a big man in a Redskins jersey.
 
One boy on the sidewalk screams and sobs. His backpack slips from his shoulders. His mother discharges him into the grip of an older brother who tries to cover the little boy’s mouth. Big brother gives up and simply frog-marches the shrieking child up the steps. The bus swallows them whole. Parents cluck and shake their heads. The kids all wait at a safe distance until the show is over then they press forward in pairs and trios to climb aboard.
 
Bug gives me one last appraising glance up from under his curtain of hair. He does not smile. He disappears inside, his blonde head now just a shadow passing through the crowd. I click on my helmet and wave. He takes a seat, scoots to the window, and turns away from me. He is already talking to his neighbor. The doors thump close. I throw my leg over the saddle and push off towards the metro as the bus wheezes off, carrying my son away.