When I picked Tee and Bug up from the airport on Friday night, the kiddo was on the brink of tears. In the car, I finally pried it out of him. “I don’t want to go to school tomorrow,” he sobbed.
“Oh, buddy,” I smiled. “It’s Friday today. Do you know what that means?”
“No.” He was rubbing his eyes. The flight was five hours from Seattle.
“It means the whole weekend is still ahead of us. You were just away for a week of Thanksgiving vacation, and we have two more days before school.”
“Two WHOLE DAYS?”
And so it was that this morning, Bug crawled into my bed at 5:54 and told me he had been awake “for hours.” I told him my bed was only available to sleepy people. Funny how quickly he gave in.
These little dawn cuddles usually don’t last more than 20 minutes. This morning’s lasted for nearly three hours. We snored there together, right on past sunrise, right on past the honking geese and the snoofling dog. We had the yummiest, snooziest lie-in we have had in all of the six years Bug has been on this planet. When we finally roused ourselves, we stayed put, smooshing and talking about dreams and such for the other half of the morning.
It was a day of firsts, apparently. The sleep-in kicked off one of the most therapeutic home-bound Sundays on record. I didn’t even have weekends like this before Bug was born. We did watercolors and coloring books, made soft pretzels from scratch, built a railroad station out of legos complete with a border guard and a city park. We both enjoyed completely unplanned sleep-where-you-fall naps sometime around mid-day. We stayed in our pajamas until nearly 3:00pm, and we only dressed then so we would be warm enough to romp around the playground in the afternoon sun.
We never got in the car. We didn’t spend a penny. We only argued once, and it was finished in minutes with a hug and dinner.
Somewhere in there, I finally got around to creating a homework nook where Bug can plop down when we arrive home from school. This has been one of those lingering tasks I have deftly avoided for two months. I knew it would be helpful for his focus but I could not summon the energy to take it on. It is not easy to find a place on the first floor that isn’t crowded with stuff. Today, high on rest and vacation ease, tackling this project was a breeze. Bug now has a corner of the dining room complete with a bin of school supplies, two chairs, and a clear spot at our underused table. As soon as it was unveiled, Bug sat right down and went to work, covering four loose-leaf pages in pencil drawings.
Just before bath time, we took out a big piece of construction paper and some markers. We wrote “Bug’s Homework Station.” Bug decided it should be decorated with “all bright colors,” so we covered it with polka dots and lollipops. He took great care in taping the sign to the side of the plastic drawers on the table where his crayons and glue sticks now live.
While Bug was simmering in bubbles up to his chin, I sat on a stool at the side of the tub and watched. A little playmobile girl was fighting through the “gloop,” trapped and choking under the surface. His right hand was a giant sea-creature that would rise up through the froth and swoop down on her, “Chomp! Oh, bonk, argh my head!” Trying and trying again to catch her, the hand-monster was foiled every time.
It has been years since a day this good. It has also been years since I have seen my son so clearly. For this extended moment, I was quiet enough in my own head that I could look at Bug and imagine the world as it is to him. What a tilt of the glass! It is like stopping on the busy sidewalk where you walk every day, lying down, and looking up through the buildings and trees. The purpose of every angle, even the ticking of the clock and the throbbing of the human traffic, all shift into new alignment. Sometimes it takes an intentional pause to see things as they really are. In fact, such a pause may be the only thing that clears the gaze.
As he soaked, I felt myself peel open and marvel at the singular experience of the boy inside Bug’s skin and mind.
He looked up from his bath battle and stared back at me a beat longer than usual.
“What?” he asked. “Why do you look like that?”
I smiled. “Because I lo-o-o-ve you.”
He shrugged. “So?”
“And you’re my beautiful boy.”
“Arhh!” Another splash. The hand monster was about to break the surface again. The playmobile girl tried to swim away. “The gloop is around my throat and I can’t breathe!”
Neither could I.
For one fleeting moment, I understood the magnitude of my luck. It feels like waking up.
Category: Parenting
Happy 100 Days: 39
Being cross for a week does not make a lady enjoyable company. Every time my son goes away, my fretful nature hijacks the controls and takes me for a joy-ride (or a doomride, as it were). Solitude leaves me with too much time on my hands. The long-awaited freedom to “get some work done” takes me on a detour where thoughts spin out at 95mph and the engine burns into the red zone before sputtering out.
It is these sorts of weeks that have me deciding it is time to pursue a PhD or get a second job, start dating or never date again, expand my social circle or remove my broken self from the friendships I am surely already screwing up. Without the ritual of waking to his sleepy voice, without the practical choices the day sets before us (Waffles or pancakes, Buddy? Should we ride the metro to DC or go cut a Christmas tree?) I notice long-ignored pings in the engine and go wrestling the whole beast up onto the hydraulic lift.
What good does it serve, plunging my hands up in there? Still, who can resist? I poke into every dark corner seeking the missing piece and come out choking on grease.
Then he returns.
Every time my son comes home, I tuck my arms around him to sing him down to sleep. Everything slides back to ground level. The engine chugs to life.
It is a wonder how quickly I forget that Bug’s absence is the trigger for all my wrongness. It is a blessing how easily his presence restores me.
Happy 100 Days: 52
“Mommy, what is res-ill-ih. . .?”
We are taking turns sipping sparkly water from a red mug. I lean in to see the words on its side. “Oh, that’s ‘resilience.'” The mug is a forgotten souvenir from the Learning and Leading with Resilience conference earlier this year. Because the three grownups sharing this address take their careers a bit too seriously, the house is littered with such schwag.
Bug traces the word with his finger, sounding it out. “Res-ili-ence. What it mean?”
“Resilience is. . . ” I fumble. Apparently, the mug was not the only forgotten item from the conference. “It’s sort of when something gets messed up but comes back again, either into the old shape or into something new and better. Resilience is bouncing back.”
“Like a magnet?”
“Hmm.” I think about this. “Not exactly. More like a nerf ball. You know how if you mush it, twist it, anything, it still spring back into the shape it was before?”
“Yeah.” He is making a squeezing motion with his hand, mimicking me.
“It’s not just things. People can have the quality, too,” I go on. “It’s a way of living life. Just imagine some big unexpected change happens. Like. . . maybe a big glacier comes and busts up some guy’s house.”
“What’s a glacier?”
“An iceberg. You ever see any icebergs around here?”
He laughs. “No, they’re in the north pole!”
“Right. So this would never happen here, right?”
“I know, Mommy.” He rolls his eyes. “Just say the thing!”
“Okay. So, say some guy down the street is just strolling home after work, and he sees this big glacier roll through his neighborhood and right through the middle of his house. Everything he has is destroyed. He might cry and stomp like anyone would, even like you and I would, if all our stuff was gone. But then the guy spends the next 30 years still being sad and mad, and saying, ‘Bad things happen and it’s just no use trying, I’ll never have anything good ever again.’ And guess what? He ends up not living a very happy life, just because one bad thing happened one time. You know what that guy doesn’t have?”
“What?”
“Resilience. He couldn’t ever get himself to see a way past the glacier and the stuff he lost, even a long time after it happened. He was stuck back in the bad thing.”
“Okay, okay, okay.” Bug takes another sip of seltzer and lays back on the couch.
“Maybe instead,” I go on, “the guy stomps and cries at first, but then decides to gather his neighbors and work together to re-build. Maybe he decides to stop being miserable after a little while, and he finds the energy to design a whole new house, and maybe he likes it as much as or even better than the old one. Maybe it takes him a few years to save up his money and do the work, but he still keeps plugging away. He and his friends and family and neighbors all end up with a community that’s not quite like the old one, but it still really nice even if it’s different. You know what that guy is?”
“Yes, duh. Resilient,” he says.
“Yeah, duh, you got it.”
“Legos are resilient,” he tells me.
“They are? I’m not sure.” I’m still thinking nerf ball, and legos seem too hard.
“Yeah. Even if you break them all apart, you can put them back together like they were before or even build something else.”
“Yes! They are resilient! You’re right.” I reach over and give him a squeeze.
“Mom! Get off!” He is grinning but trying not to.
“You know what else is resilient?” I ask.
“What?”
“We are. We had the grumpiest, growliest, no-good-very-bad-day on Saturday. And even though we were both in yucky moods, we decided to make it better. We visited friends, and played, and spoke nicely. It could have stayed an I-Hate-You day, but it didn’t. We worked together to turn the day around. It was so much fun after that.”
“Can we be done talking about this now?” He sets the cup on the side table and ooches down under his blanket.
“Only if I can have a kiss first.”
“No!” He squeals and throws the blanket up over his head. I smooch against his protests and then offer to carry him up the stairs to his bed.
“Okay,” he says. “Like a baby.” And so I slip my arms under his knees and shoulders, heft all 50 pounds of him off the sofa, and cradle him to my chest as I maneuver him up the stairs. It is getting harder to do this without banging his noggin on a door frame, but it’s okay. Sometimes feeling like a small thing is worth the risk of minor injury. I am finally coming to understand that my boy will be fine. He is resilient, after all.
Happy 100 Days: 83
After the small scuffle at the Chicken School about leaving (he hates leaving), the tiff in the car about the lipstick (he threatens to smear it on the ceiling), the cuddle on the couch and the talk about talking about feelings (“Mom, I don’t know how to explain how I feel!”), the dinner I make from scratch in 15 minutes because I had an odd moment of foresight and marinated the chicken and prepped all the sides last night (“This rice is so good!”), the conversation sputters and Bug zones out. I catch him staring in the general direction of the dark kitchen window. We loll at the kitchen table, too tired even to drag ourselves upstairs to bed. I know there is homework in his backpack, but I just can’t bring myself to force it on him tonight. Not at 8:00pm on a Wednesday, and not in kindergarten, for Pete’s sake.
I open the Style section to get my fix of Carolyn Hax, but Bug is not having any of it. He reaches for the paper and scoots closer to me.
“I want to read with you, Mommy.”
“Okay.” I turn to the Kid’s Post at the back, and we read this article about the fact that pets can have preferred paws, just as humans have dominant hands. As we work through the percentages, I pause. “Do you know what it means that 10% of people are left handed and 90% are right handed?” He does not. “Which hand are you?”
He thinks about it then holds up his right.
“You and me, we are in that 90%. Here, let’s see if we can figure this out.” I find an envelope and a scrounge up a couple of pencils. I make ten hash marks and then draw a circle, dividing it into ten sections. “Ninety percent means nine out of every ten.” We count the marks together, cutting off the single leftie at the end. I keep checking Bug’s body language for signs of resistance, but he has picked up the pencil and is counting along with me.
We talk through coloring one slice of pie for left handed people. We write together “10%” and “90%.” I don’t know if any of this is making sense to him, but his eyes are bright and he is copying every single thing I do, including my little key for which section of the graph represents which hand. We do the same exercise for dogs, which, as the article indicates, are usually about 50% left-pawed and 50% right. I ask him to compare the two circles, and see how much of each one is colored in. “See? Many more dogs use their left than people do. Half of dogs are lefties, but only that little bit, that 10%, for people.”
His eyes light up, and he breathes a big “Wow!”
“So, the article says something funny about cats. It says that 50% of them are right-pawed, 40% are left-pawed, but 10% have no preference.”
We find a fresh envelope and start on the cats. Bug is buzzing with excitement despite the fact that it’s nearing 9:00 and he almost fell asleep in his barbecue sauce. He is bent over the page now, making his hash marks and circles. I explain that he can remove all the zeroes from his percentages and make them into numbers easy to count. He decides that right paws should be dark, left paws should be dots, and no preference should be stripes. He draws a key, makes his ten-slice pie, and begins to color in the sections.
“Bug, look what you did! You made pictures to compare dominant sides for a whole population of dogs, cats, or people. This is really cool stuff, and it makes the numbers easier to understand.”
Beaming, he writes “cats” on the top of his last drawing and tells me again what it all means. I am dumbfounded. This, from the boy who claims he is too tired even to set forks on the table at dinnertime?
On nights like these, I am more resolved than ever to keep a TV from setting foot in our someday-home. It is nearly an hour past bedtime at the end of an exhausting day, and my boy would like nothing more than to stay up half the night creating a graphic model of an animal population. Who would be more tickled by this, Edward Tufte or Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi? Perhaps Bug’s own granddaddy, who is at this very moment down in the basement puzzling out one of his mutivariate equations, those Faberge eggs of math, adorned as they are with their many-shaped numerals and their strange Greek baubles.
When Bug is finished, he makes a giant check mark on the bottom of the page and draws a big smiley face just like the teacher does. He is delighted enough to grade his own work and give it high marks. I quiet the urge to tell my boy how happy this makes me. That’s the sweet little secret of intrinsic motivation, isn’t it? The itch is his to notice and to scratch. And it doesn’t matter one smidge who is proud of Bug, other than his very own self.
Parts, Whole
In the dark chill at the end of another wearing day, the third in a succession of days managed on five hours of sleep, I stand on Tee’s doorstep. Inside, my boy is wailing. It is dropping into the 20’s tonight, and behind me, a river of cars, cars, cars, rushing in every direction.
In the early fall, I used my tuition waiver to take a course on somatic skills for conflict resolvers. In intervention situations involving extreme stress, when the intense feelings of the conflict parties can blindside even the most seasoned professional, it is wise to remember the wisdom of the body. Lift and align the posture, raise and expand the vision, breathe into the belly. The full range of our intellect is more available to us when we root ourselves in physical balance. Now, as I stand on the doorstep, I make a practice of allowing my vertebrae to slip into place. I lift my chin. I open my eyes. Hearing the sobs before me and the roar of traffic behind, I breathe.
Inside, my son is a crimson-eyed nuclear meltdown. Tee tells me the boy did not sleep at school on a day disrupted by two field trips. Bug yanks himself from me, rocketing up the stairs in his socks and t-shirt. It is late. Between this moment and the comfort of his bed is dressing all over again, another commute, dinner, pajamas. Tee and I try to speak calmly to Bug as he hides and cries upstairs. Whatever reserve of self-control the child has is tapped out. He twists himself away from us, flails, weeps. These days, such outbursts are rare. But what can you expect? Without rest, none of us is any good. I understand this. I am experiencing this, on my third overdraft from the sleep bank.
I cannot stand to see my child so miserable. I pull Tee around the corner and whisper, “I would be fine if he stays here tonight. We can trade a day. I’ll help put him down. I just hate to drag him out of here when he is so tired.” Tee stares, blank. The response, or complete absence of one, is so typical of this man that I am surprised to find myself surprised. His passive face calls up no indication he has even heard, let alone can summon a thought. One beats, two, three, four. No words. Until this: he steps back around into the stairwell and calls up:
“Come on, Bug, time to get your shoes on and go.”
And then I am up, hefting a giant tornado of a boy without a lasso, wobbling down the stairs. I am splayed in my work skirt in the foyer of Tee’s house with this arching, spitting 40-odd pound wildcat on my lap. I force his shoes on, and the heels of them, flailing, crack me several times on the shins. Tee sits on the bottom step an arm’s length away, silent, watching. Bug’s body wrenches with sobs. He is speaking in gobbledygook, wanting everything and nothing. I long to lift my child and carry him up to his bed. Crawl in next to him, let him surrender to my strength, sing him “Friend of the Devil,” rub his back. But that bed is not his tonight, no matter how badly he wants it or I want it for him. There is nothing for us to do but drag ourselves out on the serrated night.
I finally have to wrap the full power of my embrace around Bug’s torso from behind, force him still, all while doing the one and only thing I can remember to do: breathe, breathe, breathe. My grip tight, my core willed to softness, I whisper into his prickling scalp. “Deep breaths, baby. Shh, shh. Mommy’s got you, you’re safe, you’re okay.” Against my own rising fury, I speak these comforts. Anointing Bug with my scant supply of serenity has a cooling affect on me. The waves of rage at this passive man so close and so remote, and waves of distress about my own insomnia-wrecked body, and the waves of despair about the impossibility of rescue, they just roll on over. Without crashing into me or taking me down, they only pass by because I’ve got my boy in my arms, and I can breathe through them, and they cannot drown me.
I hope my love for my boy is enough to bridge these rifts in his world. A friend of mine, a hopeless romantic, tells me one of his guiding quotations is this:
Love, in the purest sense of the notion, can only be given and received completely. Anything less may be of great value, sustainable, and appreciated, but it is only a reflection of love.
He is childless, of course. Still, I marvel at the sting of the sentiment. My heart swells, aches, bursts open for my son. What could be more pure than the love a mother has for her child? And yet, do I truly give it completely? I deny him the single home, the one bed, the place he is always safe where both his parents are there to carry him to his sole sanctuary when he is unable to get there himself.
I wonder if I am capable of such pure generosity. I choose to follow a calling which carries me away from a man who cannot fulfill his promise. Bug is the one who pays for this choice. It would have been so easy, at any point during the past eighteen months, to say, “My heart can endure its own loneliness. It can even bear intimacy in the absence of faith. But it cannot stand my son’s suffering.” I could have asked Tee to stay, and offered our child that one, concrete gift of happiness. Is mine a true love, if I offer my boy only a fraction of what I have to give?
Without warning, Bug surrenders. He puddles, his skeleton and muscle dissolve to brine and beginnings. I pour him into his sweatshirt, gather first him then his backpack and my keys, step into boots, fumble with this shifting cargo out the door into the where traffic growls and pounds against the night. All I want is to slip my boy into the cocoon of his becoming, close his ears to all of this noise. I carry him, still sobbing, then drive him, still sobbing, through the tangled knots of congestion. Home, home. And when we come in, he is almost sobbed out. I am thankful for the small favors of grandparents who let us stay, for a warm and lit house, for someone to dust the toast with cinnamon and slice the apple. My boy, wrung out, eats in bed, slowly but with an insatiable appetite. I read to him from The Secret Garden and sing, finally, the song about running from the law straight into the arms of temptation.
Today, a poem called “Descartes in Love” lands in my inbox from The Academy of American Poets:
Love, accepting that we are not pure and lucent hearts, ricocheting towards each other like unlatched stars—no, we are tainted with self. We sometimes believe the self is an invisible glass, just as we believe the body is a suit made of meat. Doubt all things invisible. Doubt all things visible.
Because I hear no pulse up on the scarred surface of things, it can seem as if nothing living is left down below. Then, on pure chance, I tap a buried vein. Up flows nourishment almost too rich to stomach. I have neither the courage to trust in its permanence nor the strength to claim its limit. Faith in the moment as it slips through my fingers is the best I can do.
I am still more tired than I have ever been. But my boy sleeps now, his belly full on my breath, his soft spine curled into my unbending one. I will keep vigil. My love may be an imperfect force, but for this one night, its current is constant; its source, bottomless.
Ken Chen’s “Descartes in Love” is part of the series, “Brief Lives.” It came by way of Poem-A-Day from poets.org.
Citizen Bug
Thank goodness for The Washington Post. Where else would a tired mama go to learn about the candidates in a local election? It is tough to rally for these in-between years – not a Congressional Rep or Governor on the ballot. All the obscure offices are up for grabs. These may have a greater impact on Bug’s and my immediate existence than the presidency, but I am still oblivious to who is running the community show. I am not alone. Yesterday’s paper forecast low turnout at today’s Virginia polls. I refuse to be among the missing.
Shannon E. Williams 