Tag: parenting

community, Family, Things I Can

76. Things I Can Lead: This Pack

smirkpretty

warthog-family

I sit cross-legged on the path and fold Noodle into my lap. A little boy who was stroking her with such a soft touch continues. Two others — younger, toddlers — step closer. One with a mop of curls squats in front of her and stares with the focus of a hypnotist. Unwavering, he peers along the length of her snout and into her steady eyes. She is so still. He ventures a touch, two fingers on the side of her head. She barely blinks. He steps closer and touches her flank. “Ga-ggie,” he says.

“Yes,” his dad smiles. “She’s a nice doggie.”

This is enough for the small one. He steps back and considers Noodle from a safe distance. His brother keeps that rhythm along her back, as regular as a metronome, as soothing as surf. Noodle’s fur drifts and settles, blanketing my black work trousers. She shifts ever so slightly and surrenders her weight to my belly. I feel her exhale. The third boy — another toddler — stands at his daddy’s shin. He grins and squeals then shoves a finger up his nose.

Behind me, Bug snaps off his rollerblades and tosses his helmet in the grass. I hear a basketball. Voices.

It is nearing dusk. Neighborhood moms call to summon their stray men home for dinner. I dump Noodle back onto the trail. She gives passive resistance a shot but her dead weight is more pliable than she thinks. Soon she falls into step beside me.

Bug is trotting around the blacktop in his socks, his blonde surfer hair flopping. Another boy passes him a basketball and Bug shoots then passes it back. I circle the park a few times watching while the boy’s dad stands and texts from center court. The duo abandons the game and strolls back and forth across the pavement. Bug trails a long stick. His companion holds the ball tucked beneath his arm. Their heads are bent together in a conspiracy of murmurs. They walk the length of the court at least six times over, six times back.

“Hey you,” I call. Noodle and I cut across the grass. Bug scratches his pooch under her chin and shoves his feet back into his skates. I chat with dad and boy. I’ve never seen them here before, although they live a block over from us. We talk schools and child care and pizza. Tomorrow, they kick off a week-long hiking trip in the Monongahela National Forest.

“I’m going to play on the playground equipment,” Bug says, rolling away. I love that he calls it that. Playground equipment. “Okay,” I shout after him. “But not in your blades.”

“I’ll take them off,” he hollers back. When the dad and I make our way over, I see helmet, wrist guards, socks, and wheels lying in a heap at the bottom of the slide. Bug is up high, straddling the outside of a suspended tunnel. His buddy is swinging from a bar. A third has joined them, a preschooler.

The small one points to Noodle. “Is she curly too?” He asks.

“Curly?”

“Yeah,” he poofs his arms around him. “Fluffy. Like that.”

I shrug. “She sure sheds a lot. You know how I know when she’s been sneaking up on the couch?”

Bug grins from his perch. “She can’t fool us!” He cries.

“She’s tricky,” I shake my head in disapproval and glare at Noodle who is straining, straining to play with the kids. “Fur all over the sofa!”

The preschooler stomps a foot. “My bro-zher is the smartest of all!” He declares.

“Are you sure? I think you’re the smartest of all.”

“No my bro-zer is! He teached me math. See?” He holds up two fingers on one hand and two on the other. “One -two-free-four.”

Bug is swaying way up high. “Do you know how to do squares? You know the square root of 100 is 10?”

The one from the basketball court swings then plants his feet. “I can divide.”

Then it’s time to go home. A mom collects her mini math whiz. Hiker dad answers a text from home. “Dinnertime, buddy,” he says. He and his boy wander off in the direction of the townhouses. Bug clambers down and slips mulched socks over filthy feet. Buckles, helmet, wrist guards, off we go. Noodle trots along beside us.

“So that boy goes to your school, huh? Did you know him from school?”

“No,” Bug says. “He’s in first grade.”

“You just met him today?”

“Yeah.”

I picture them again, whispering as they strode off together like they’d been buddies since kindergarten.

“You know what? That’s a really cool talent,” I say. “You find friends everywhere you go.”

Bug shrugs but I see he’s sort of smiling.

What a marvel.

To my right, this clickety-rolling kiddo who enters every setting as if the place has been waiting for him to arrive. He strikes up a conversation. He jump-starts a game. He conjures up companions, assuming friendship is a given.

To my left, Noodle the Wonder Dog, a magnet for toddlers ready to face their fears. A touchstone for kids who still believe that contact with a fellow earthling is the high point of any day.

And me in the middle, a mama leading this bold pack out into the world.

This force, small yet mighty.

My family.
 

.

 

Parenting, Things I Can, Writing

68. Things I Can Send: One a Day

smirkpretty

Airmail Letters

In Zimbabwe, I wrote letters. Some were to my parents, some to friends, a couple to myself. Mostly, I wrote to a boy who’d loved me when I left but wouldn’t when I came home. During those months making sadza with my Sisi Portia and singing songs at human rights retreats, I covered thin blue airmail pages with stories and wishes and questions and promises. Sometimes the outsides of the envelopes were canvas, and I’d doodle around the address and play word games at the flap.

The highlight of any week was finding something in the mailbox from the states. How young I was then. Deep in the Masvingo province, red soil stained my shoes as I blistered my hands digging the foundation for a schoolroom. At the edge of Harare, I crammed myself into the back of an emergency taxi with six strangers to make the commute back to my host family. Passing through the market, I breathed smoke rising from tin drums where the maize was roasting. I ducked my head against catcalls from men too long at the beer hall calling, “Hey, musikana, marry me! Buy me a walkman!”

Here was this 20-year-old girl learning to carry on an entire exchange in a Bantu language, and it was still the mail from home that lifted me.

It’s too long ago to remember anything in those letters. The boy and his housemate wrote to me together a time or two, though they mercifully kept me in the dark about their new status. The content of any correspondence mattered far less than the fact of it. I wanted to touch a place that held me, or maybe just know I was remembered.

I understand now that mail from home was a status report on the acceptability of the exchange. This was its real value. My correspondents were still in the game. Play could continue.

I was too busy writing to realize that the act itself was shaping the journey. As much as these missives were “mail,” they were diary and commonplace book, hymnal and captain’s log. An envelope from home was an invitation to keep coloring in, keep making the story into what it was trying to become.

When I returned to the states, the boy handed me all that stamped and creased paper I’d sent from Africa, now neatly tied in string. He gave me back my pile of words. I hated him more for that than for choosing the other gal. The letters were for him to cherish. For that semester in Zimbabwe, I rode high on a precious delusion that he prized every word. I pictured him sneaking into his room and closing the door to read, re-read, get drunk on ink and fall a little more in love with me.

Did I mention how young I was?

I figured he’d guard those letters with his life. And here he was, handing them back to me.

Maybe I took them but it’s hard to remember now. Too many moves, too much life. I looked away, and the decades absconded with the bundle. I wish I had grabbed them from him and stashed them in a fireproof box. I wish I’d known what a story they’d make.

I wish a lot of things.

Today, I wish that on my son’s first day of his first year of sleepaway camp, the newness will offer him an untried self, the guides will provide a net, and the knowledge of home — out here, always here — will run so deep in him, he forgets to need me at all.

But in case he does, his mom will be there. Every day at mail call.

 

Mindfulness, Parenting, Things I Can

67. Things I Can Catch: Worries like Soap Bubbles

smirkpretty

Soap Bubble

He squeezes his eyes against the suds and grabs for a dry cloth. His hair is long again, melting down his neck and licking at his shoulders. He glows like cherry wood. Cross-legged and bare as he is with his hair slicked back, he is small. Almost like a girl. Like a picture of me gleaming up from an old album.

He rubs his eyes and they redden. His lip trembles now. The soap was patsy. A more formidable foe flicks through the shallows.

“I don’t want to go to sleepaway camp,” he murmurs. And with that, his whole body collapses into sobs.

What ensues is a conversation, gentle questions, analogies about basketball, acknowledgment of feelings. Words, words and more words. I perch on my knees, a thin bathmat meager protection from the sturdiness of the tile. I lean in and let the easy expression settle across my features. A smile, beaming almost. A gaze, open as petals. I remember very little from The Art of Listening, but this stays with me: Approval, Delight, Respect. A hypnotist’s voice in a bedtime cadence carries the blood-deep lyrics of reassurance across the foam. Yes, and Yes.

He cries some more then talks. Pouting, furrowed, but he talks.

My hand inside the sage green cloth weaves between and under the words. I dip it into the water, stroke it along his shoulder. Dip it into the water, trace his ear. Dip it into the water, outline his cheek.

After he has dried off and brushed teeth, he climbs onto the bed and worms up under my shoulder. His sunburned cheeks are an electric pulse under the damp straw and silk. He giggles and crawls on top of me. Laughing now throaty and wild, his need gives way to a different sort of crying: “Cuddle, cuddle, cuddle!” He whoops and burrows into my ribs. He has grown to twice his size, unfolding like a sponge drunk in the surf.

 

Home, Poetry, Things I Can

61. Things I Can Add: Music Room

smirkpretty

piano keys

The piano may join us
in this corner we call the dining nook
where our family that is two
keeps a bucket
filled with markers and pens
next to the salt
shaker. When we move again
the table and sofa
remaking our one room
into the many we covet
this becomes the sitting
place and the piano
will be doing that already.
It can stay. A song now
glitches on a hand-me-down
laptop. These machines age
in dog years. The choice
is between upgrading or losing
one lyric after another
to the exponential rise
of force X point O.

Option C is none here,
the above too poor an excuse
for music. It is hardly a maker, 1s and Os
whipping in packs along circuitry
delivering a canned calliope, midway
carousel operating
by remote.

I also want to be new
as if mounting the horse with fresh
paint might offer a ride somewhere
other than where I started
as if I am the lucky one. You are young
enough to believe capacitive touch
means building with light. Still at the table,
you are angry that screens are not invited here
and I lift my wrists in an extended rest, too few
fingers for the chord
my angers weave.

The piano may make us
play the old music
as if for the first time. One note
yours. One note, mine.

All together now.

Soon we will trade these keys for those,
string the hammered
steel tight across wooden belly and let heavy
dampered echoes reach
between us, press down,
tumbling our separate weights
into a sound only four hands
can make. Like us, the instrument
will have to share
this room of a dozen uses. It will join us
at our sharp corners.

You empty your glass. The wall here
is the color of leaves, or maybe one leaf
of blank sheet music. We each draw
a marker from the bucket. The first lines
decide everything.

 

Children, Growing Up, Things I Can

60. Things I Can Give Up: My Claim of Ownership

smirkpretty

inline jump

He fits into my rollerblades now. It’s true that this actually happens. A moment comes when an eight-year-old kid zips off in his mama’s grownup skates. Then the moment goes racing off along with him.

Given the origin of these blades, it’s disingenuous to say I’m giving up my claim. The title was hardly mine. I swiped them from my own mother a decade ago, so it’s fitting (pun intended) that my kid wears them now. We’ve just transferred custody. No doubt this is a temporary arrangement until my kiddo outgrows them.

Which he will.

Because he’s eight, and he’s the tallest boy on his basketball team. He towers over every kid in second grade at his overpopulated suburban school. Around here, “outgrow” is a verb on par with “breathe.” This year alone, he’s done away with his booster seat, basketball shoes, an entire fall and spring wardrobe, all his swimsuits, and every pair of underwear and socks. He’s also outgrown half the pop songs he used to love along with any interest in legos, Pokemon, picture books, lullabies, and G-movies.

One thing he hasn’t left behind? His lust for speed.

As a toddler, we parked him in a spring-loaded Johnny-Jump-Up hanging from his bedroom door. As soon as those feet launched, his eyes went wild and his squeal cracked glass. He bruised his 18-month-old shins on the doorjamb and roared even louder. We put up pillows. He kicked them away.

He hasn’t touched down yet.

The scooter I gave him when he turned four still bangs its way around our living room and out along the busted sidewalks on the way to the park. His skateboard travels with us to the playground. His bike is a required conveyance for grabbing a mint-chococalte-chip cone from the Italian restaurant up the street.

And the rollerblades?

His rollerblades?

As soon as we’re in the door, he kicks off his sneakers and shoves on those wheels. He rides all over the neighborhood, his big helmet encasing his most precious parts. Just two weeks ago, he was wobbling along, stepping through grass to keep from actually gaining speed. Now he aims for the hills and finds his center as he goes. He has two skinned knees, a bruised rump, and scuffed palms, but he bounces up now. I watched him today as a wheel caught a crack in the sidewalk. He whipped a 180 with his arms pinwheeling. Catching himself on two hands, he lowered himself into a sort of 4-point squat and pushed up to standing. Then off he zipped, brushing away dirt and picking up speed.

My boy has yet to break a bone. I figure it’s a when rather than an if. It’s really okay if he falls (I tell myself). I know the shortcut to the ER. The last time I claimed those rollerblades as my own, I passed the better part of the evening with the residents there wrapping my wrist in a cast.

As it is, the mantle of Speed Demon conveys with the skates.

It’s all his.

I’ll stand on the sidelines with the car keys and ice.

 

Adventure, Things I Can

56. Things I Can Read: The Travel Section

smirkpretty

We pinned a world map to the living room wall. It guides our fingers and our eyes when we trace our neighbor’s travels or the origins of our takeout spring rolls. The radius of our life spans less than an inch on one pink edge, missing the rainbow sprawl of continents, canals, deserts, and seas.

The tax on growing older is an unsettling measure of frugality and caution.

It also demands a revised dictionary.

Continue reading “56. Things I Can Read: The Travel Section” →

Career, Determination, Parenting, Things I Can

47. Things I Can Celebrate: A New Morning

smirkpretty

Tomorrow begins the new schedule. It’s my first official day on the campus just a few miles from my house.

The office waiting there is a loaner crammed with British academic journals belonging to a professor on sabbatical. Two other advisors will share the space with me on alternating days. The phone will remain our Oxford colleague’s line, and the computer being delivered this week lacks monitor and a printer connection.

My fellow advisors and I should receive an actual office assignment in January. That said, the building itself is so old, its cinderblocks and scarred linoleum are next up on the university’s demolition list. We might be in our “permanent” space for all of a year before the wrecking ball arrives. Then we’ll squat somewhere else on campus for the duration of the construction.

What fool would give up five days a week in an office all her own in a new building with reliable technology, functional windows, and a full kitchen just a few steps down the hall?

The fool who prizes time far more than space.

This is the same calculation that led me to withdraw my offer on a 2-bedroom, 2.5-bath, end-unit townhouse with a yard and a ridiculously affordable mortgage payment. That fantastic find was perfect except for its zip code. Another 10 miles west beyond the town where my son was in school, where we had begun building a life, might add another 30 minutes to a commute that was already taking 45. And that’s just one way.

The people who loved me helped me count just how many days of my precious life I’d be signing over to the VDOT highway system. Every minute in my car or on the metro is one minute away from my kiddo. Or away from my pace, my dance, my words, my breath. The true cost of all that space and grass was my relationship with everything I love.

That’s just a tad too pricey for me.

Instead I bought the condo within two miles of the metro and a few blocks of Bug’s school. I pay more money for less space. It’s been two years since I signed, and regret has yet to find my address.

Tonight, Bug buzzes through the house long past his bedtime. He’s laying towels to the dog’s crate as red carpet and lining the walls with nightlights. He piles extra pillows in under her blanket. Her food bowl and toys make their way into the room, creating a dining nook in one corner and a play zone in the other. He flips the blinds closed and clicks off all the other lamps. Shutting us in, he names my bedroom Noodle’s “Royal Palace,” and there in the shadowed light, he performs his karate kata for the recumbent queen while I intone an ancient ode.

On any weeknight before this, I would snap and fret. Get moving, Mister. Bedtime. Now. Because every minute awake is a minute less sleep, and that adds up to another morning late for work.

But tonight, I remember what waits for me tomorrow. Then I remember again when we’re brushing teeth. And again when I sit here to write. Each time, the realization cools and soothes, like air, like the grip of cramped wings unfurling from my shoulders.

Each time like the first time.

Tomorrow, enthroned on a busted office chair in my palace of mold, I will be exactly where I belong. The journey there has taken 5 years of muscle topped with at least as many months of luck. Doesn’t this happen on long rides? You see only when you’re well on your way that the landscape is changing right under your feet, and now you can map out a shortcut.

The race to the metro to grab a parking spot before they fill, to grab a seat on the train before the guy behind me does, to power the two blocks to the building before the clock strikes nine. . . That race is on hold. Tomorrow will be an easy shot to my son’s school where I can visit him in the cafeteria at lunchtime if I get the urge. Where I can arrive well before the closing bell to ferry my young prince home.

Tomorrow is the gift of inversion. Instead of giving myself to the clock, the minutes offer themselves to me.

This means the night is ours for wandering.

And the morning is mine for setting the pace.

Growing Up, Parenting, Things I Can

44. Things I Can Remember: The Lyrics

smirkpretty

“Can you sing tonight?”

This request stuns me silent. It is an hour past bedtime. The bath and books are done and we’re actually in bed, which is no small feat at the end of a day involving a swimming pool, a river kayak, and a playground. He’s wiggly. He’s stalling.

What stuns me more than his request is the realization that I don’t remember which lullabies used to accompany us during this sweet, sleepy time. Half a year has passed at least. Maybe more? A parent once wrote that none of us knows when it’s the last time we read Goodnight Moon out loud, or the last time we give our kiddo a piggyback. Only later, when weeks have passed or maybe months, do we realize we’re characters in a whole new chapter. The one before is over and we failed to catch the moment the page turned.

For Bug and me, singing slipped away as silent as seasons. December 2013 is the most recent reference to bedtime songs here on SmirkPretty. Those nights of music are now impossibly long ago. He’s already tall enough to fill the bed.

Tonight, though, he cuddles up against me.

“Baby Beluga?” I ask.

He scrunches up his nose and shakes his head. “Anything besides that one.”

I stroke his damp hair. “You know what’s weird? I don’t remember any of the other songs we used to sing at bedtime. Do you?”

He thinks for a minute. “Oh yeah! ‘The Cat Came Back.’ And also ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain.'”

Yes. Our trio of lullabies comes riding the current and spills over me. The same three songs, every night for what seemed like forever but turned out to be just a blink.

So I begin.

Old Mr. Johnson had troubles of his own,
he had a yellow cat that wouldn’t leave his home.

My lips shape the words, my throat the melody. It comes from somewhere other than conscious memory, rising from down in that pocket of the brain where the old rituals live. The lyrics are stored deep in there alongside maps of my childhood neighborhood and the uncanny ability, even after neglecting to touch a piano for decades, to play Chopsticks flawlessly on the first go.

I understand now that this moment could be the first in a reawakening of bedtime music, or might be the farewell tour. The only certainty is that it’s here now.

They thought he was a goner
but the cat came back,
he just couldn’t stay away.

Bug’s head settles on my shoulder and I sing each line, full and slow. My voice wraps itself around my boy. He falls into its waiting arms and lets it carry him to sleep.

Outdoors, Parenting, Things I Can

43. Things I Can Play: The Villain

smirkpretty

I know, Sweetheart. Your talent for reading the future has yet to flower as fully as mine. You have every reason to be skeptical.

Nevertheless, here is What Will Be:

In 30 minutes, your cheeks will flame pink as you rocket up the half-pipe at the skate park. A grin will split your face and your hair will fan like wings when you catch the air. Kids will find you, kids you’ve never met before. They will absorb you as theirs. Your gang will explode into a game of tag so epic that when the metal joint of a ramp scrapes an inch of skin off your knee, you won’t even stop for a band-aid.

Ignore or accept this Truth. It’s your choice. Hate me. Fight me. Dawdle, negotiate, whine, and snarl. These responses are understandable when your clairvoyance reaches only as far as losing the comparatively wan pleasure of Bloon’s Tower Defense Five. So, take these few moments to rage against the injustice, though I urge you to save some of your fight for a less certain fate.

Put the tablet away, get your socks and shoes on, and get in the car. You might as well get on with it.

Your destiny is written.

Play is inevitable. Exhilaration, your cross to bear.

Home, Parenting, Things I Can

41. Things I Can Believe: Those Wise Words

smirkpretty

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.

Continue reading “41. Things I Can Believe: Those Wise Words” →