He may be 8 years old.
It may be 10:30 at night.
She still tucks a few bucks under the pillow.
She still folds around them a tiny card
she makes with her tiny
silver hand.
Tag: children
12. Things I Can Make with Him: Classroom Valentines
The note in his backpack says the students can bring valentines. Participation is not mandatory, but you must choose everyone or no one. Bug grabs the paper and gives it the once-over. “I don’t want to.” He starts to hand it back then notices the small postscript: Students may bring a small treat to share.
Now he’s interested.
“We could make teeny-tiny slices of chocolate cake,” he says. I picture his teacher trying to pass out 25 wobbling mounds of frosted pastry.
“That might be a little hard for Mrs. C to serve.”
“Cupcakes!” He says. “With icing!”
It is already 6 pm. We don’t have cupcake cups or a carrier. What we do have is reading, homework, dinner, bath. CVS sells sticker cards and the store is just two blocks from where we’re sitting in traffic. “How about just writing out valentines? We could go get some.” My offer is tepid and he knows it. He grunts. “Okay then,” I say. “Brownies. They’re just like chocolate cake, right?”
He sits on this. We’re turning onto our street and he’s in the back trying to get the dog to poke her nose out the window. Evening is sliding fast into night night and it’s been one hell of a week at work. “You know,” I say. “You don’t have to do anything. It did say no one — ”
“Oh! I know!” he cries, “GINGER SNAPS!”
I take a breath . . .The things I can. . . and urge a smile into my voice. “Okay, ginger snaps.”
With this “yes,” I’ve signed the contract.
After dinner and reading and homework but before bath, we pull out our supplies. Bowls, flour, eggs, cookie sheets. Even from scratch, ginger snaps are the easy baking project, the one my mother used to leave to my sister and me when we were home after school. The butter would be out softening on the counter, the stained recipe card leaning against the floral tin box. Mix the “wets” with the “dries,” form into balls the size of walnuts and roll in sugar. When Bug outgrew a half dozen quasi-food allergies around age 4, he fell in love with ginger snaps. He used to call them the “black cookies,” for reasons I never figured out. We made them together every few weeks. Standing on a stool next to me, he would hit the sweet spot between creative focus and sugar mania, plunging himself elbow-deep in the mess.
I didn’t realize he held a fond memory — or any memory, for that matter — of ginger snaps. We have something of an unspoken cookie ban in this house. I haven’t eaten a cookie in over two years and haven’t made one in even longer.
Even so, this recipe is printed right into my hands.
And although the stool is no longer part of the set, Bug is as thrilled as that long-ago preschooler to bring this delicious idea to life.
The kid wants to measure, pushing brown sugar deep into the cup. He wants to crack the eggs, taking one careful whack at a time. I ask him if he remembers the spices that go into the recipe. “Cinnamon,” he says. “And, um. . . oh! Ginger!” I let him sniff at the cloves to identify the third, and he says, “I know that one from the botanical gardens.” In early winter, he and I wandered through the sunny spice exhibit together, trying to identify and describe cumin, onion, vanilla, fennel.
He fits the beaters into the mixer and whips up a tornado that melts into a pungent batter the color of café au lait. Because it’s only Thursday, we decide to refrigerate the sugary mush and bake it tomorrow so the cookies will be fresh on Friday. He unties his apron and bounces down the hall to his waiting bath.
It’s late now, well past bedtime. I’ll be grumpy in the morning. Even so, I leave the heap of dishes and follow him to the bathroom, rolling up my trousers so I can soak my feet as he jabbers away in the bubbles. He’s well past baking now and is on to square roots and number lines.
I pour water down his hair and back. He hums and curls into the cascade, head tilted back, eyes closed.
There’s a good chance this boy will someday have a sweetie. There’s a good chance that she or he will drive Bug bonkers as he tries to figure out how to do the love stuff. No doubt I’ll be cringing on the sidelines, complying with the semi-permanent gag order he will have issued at puberty.
Tonight, right here and now, may be my only chance to have a say.
On any given February 12th, when Bug smacks his head and realizes he didn’t make the reservations or buy the tickets, he can always take a deep breath. Wander into his kitchen. Open the cabinets. Begin.
Step into Space
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. – Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
The theater seats over a thousand. It isn’t full but it’s come pretty close. We sit together in near silence for a minute with our eyes closed. Inside this collective pause, we pull back from what Tara Brach calls “tumbling into the future.”
This is not a spirit circle at a Zen retreat center. This is parents, teachers, and students packed into a public high school auditorium. At the threshold of something new-but-not-new, the moment tilts. Surreal. A congressman from Ohio takes the stage and tells the story of finding his breath. He is one of several voices reminding us that snapping at our kids to pay attention doesn’t do any good until we teach them how to attend. As always, we’re on the hook to show what we tell.
As the parents, teachers, and neighbors of the kids who walk the halls here every day, we have to be willing to learn. A churning stress and a “trance of unworthiness” keeps us doing, striving, reacting, and fighting. It is up to us to release ourselves from it so we can show our children how to have a say in drawing the map of their own minds.
In a county whose schools always ranks near the top of any performance rating and in a region whose inhabitants are among the most highly educated and overcommitted in the nation, this breath is a call to action.
Or inaction, as the case may be.
Any kid that hasn’t learned the pressure is on by second grade figures it out when they go through the Advanced Academics Program screening. The test determines the quality of their schooling for the next six years and no doubt well beyond that. This workshop, Managing Stress Through Mindfulness, is the first of its kind here. Overdue, of course, and also right on time.
Our children struggle as we do. Our children learn to place their attention as we do (or don’t). It is possible that we don’t need to keep ourselves in the hot grip of imagined success and looming failure to drive us to a good life. We strain towards illusion and flee fear and get nowhere right. Caught in a Chinese finger-trap, we strive ourselves into a kind of frenetic paralysis.
The first step in cultivating creativity and possibly even a sense of belonging in this world is a not forward or backward. It is a step into space.
Over the edge is a place between stimulus and response where the pause quietly waits.
If you Stop to Put Out the Fire, Turn to Page 8
My eye keeps tripping over the red square on the Google calendar. It says “Class Assignment Surveys Due” but I can’t recall if it’s for work or Bug or something else entirely. While I’m trying for the fourth time to re-arrange the month of June, my weary brain gives me a nudge. Remember? Yes. The survey is an annual collection of parental insight into our kids’ quirks and métiers. These descriptions supposedly help the school determine class assignments for the coming year. Our perspective is mere garnish on the overfull plate that our precious darlings serve up to teachers and playground monitors every day, but it must add some texture to the mélange.
I get on the horn to call Tee. “Surveys are due next Friday,” I say. “I think we have to pick them up at the office.” He doesn’t recall the email so we bounce around about the details before finding the PDF online. I ask Tee if we could each jot down some ideas and then combine them to submit to the school. He hedges before asking, “Why can’t we each just fill one out? I’m sure they won’t mind getting one from each of us.”
We have come to this juncture so many times, the page is coming loose from the binding. If you disengage, turn to page 47. If you try to collaborate, turn to page 82.
Continue reading “If you Stop to Put Out the Fire, Turn to Page 8”
Pistachio
He arrived with a pack
of yogurt in plastic tubes
and nuts rattling
in their shells. Our children
ran to the creek. I didn’t know
his middle name and he didn’t know
my sister’s first and neither
of us saw the way the earth sloped
to a gulley until we stumbled
on two lost soccer balls
caught in ropes of mud.
The stage was set
into the side of the hill.
He leaned against me. I called out
mirror. He called out washing machine.
The children’s arms banged
against weathered boards.
It seemed so easy
to find a game, to play
at family.
We broke
to breathe and fill
bellies. I love these the girl said.
Nut splitting free. Salt licking
foreheads and beading on lips. No one kissed
yet. We took turns holding a dixie cup
motionless in the water to catch minnows
flitting just out of reach. We all believed
it could work,
this falling together
like a shell hinging shut
again, like a seed
starting over.
Tell-Tale Art
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.
One Evening as the Sun Went Down
He is asleep
I think until he lifts
his shoulder
into my chin and says keep singing
so I turn
my voice to the first verse
of the second tune
of the triology
that has scored four years
of nights
like this
but also not
at all this
one
Taken Literally, part II
Inside the brain of the reader, a transformation takes place. Words may become pictures to enjoy, or mysteries to be solved, or conversations to engage in. Sometimes readers surrender to a text and sometimes they scrap with it. Reading is woven into the rich fabric of experience, and it cannot be separated from speech, pleasure, challenge, play, and curiosity. As much as it is an activity, reading is a habit of mind.
From part I of Taken Literally on SmirkPretty, October 2011
It is not an assignment. I require nothing. No chide or nudge prompts him. I do not even issue an invitation.
“Hey, Mom. Look at this.” He plops down on the red sofa and I scoot over to make room. Not too much room, though. I wrap my arm around his belly as he flips open his latest library book. Out loud, he reads.
“What’s the main ingredient in puppy biscuits?”
I shrug. “Bacon?”
He looks up at me through his wild hair and grins. “Collie-flour!”
We both crack up and fall into each other. He turns to the next page. “Which vegetables do little dogs like best?”
“I dunno.” I screw my face up. “Carrots?”
“Pup-peas!” He hollers.
We groan and moan and giggle through the rest of the book. My boy’s voice is low waves rolling the jokes up to where they crash on the punch line’s bright shore.
Here is register. Inflection. Vocabulary. Comic timing. This is no longer the dog paddle. It’s freestyle in open water.
He rides the current. Without even taking a breath, he plunges through words that have never shown up on a spelling list. Ingredient. Biscuit. Vegetable. We splash over and under every page together. Flitting through the sea of high-frequency wheres and yous are these surprises, these oddities. Rafting. Sunbathing. Hunting. He does not slow. Happened. Bloodhound. Goldfish. Tough.
He is doing this. My boy is reading.
And laughing.
Reading.
And surging.
This is not homework. It is not an assignment. He is choosing
reading.
And loving
reading.
The Price is Right
It’ll cost you
the title, your hero,
your favorite villain,
and at least half the notes
you’ve added to the score.
You’ll be charged the magic carpet
of your pride and its rareified view
from a distance that has shrunk
so mercifully the proportion
of your never diminishing guilt
along the contours
of your history.
Into this dowry will go your cardinal
north and the map you drew
with measurements meticulously
if mistakenly
taken. You’ll hand over the slide rule
along with the legend
of triumphant good and forfeit
the last word,
the last laugh, the last time
you’ll ever have to deal with that shit again.
Hidden fees will take your breath
away and the fine print
sting your eyes:
You can’t throw anyone
under the bus, gather an audience,
hand-pick seeds
to sow, spin bristles into yarns,
tally fault, count beans,
spit venom, or squirrel spite
into the pocket of your cheek
and chew its cud in righteous silence.
You will pay yourself empty
of the solid weight
of your myth
just to buy a ticket
to a lottery whose odds are against you
and whose prize is nothing
more than a single fleeting frame
of sun-warmed bleachers
in an early spring thaw
where you loll with your son
and the person who shared
the bed where he was made
watching a stuttering rainbow
of children cast balls from turf to net
and another family
maybe taking shape
and maybe changing the currency
that drops in your palm
one penny at a time.
Heaven on Earth
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.”
Shannon E. Williams 