As soon as we walk in the door, Bug grabs the scissors and scrap paper and scoots a chair up to the kitchen table. He first draws a monster and then pushes that aside to create a row of pumpkins on orange paper. He asks me how to spell out a warning to the trick-or-treaters. I help him sound it out. He writes “Boo Boo Boo Boo” all on his own.
“What are you going to make, Mommy?”
Uh, dinner? And a bath? I force myself to leave the dishes for the moment. I pull up a chair and join Bug at the table. “Hmm. let me see. Something scary.” I draw a witch on a broomstick, snip her out, and paste her on a background of black construction paper. This satisfies my boy for now.
Dinner is ready. I heap the brown rice noodles and spaghetti sauce in bowls, hiding a few spoonfuls of cooked squash in the glop. Bug wolfs it down and even finishes his broccoli. I begin to peel an orange to add another serving of the good stuff to the meal.
“Wait!” He blocks me. “Don’t take the skin off! Can I have it?”
“Sure,” I laugh. I hand him the orange and take the second one from the bowl. “Can I peel this one?”
“Okay, yeah,” he says, but he is not paying attention to me. He has pushed his plate aside and taken up the marker. He draws on the orange and then cuts and colors a little strip of paper. He finds the tape under all this mess and sticks the little strip onto the top of the fruit.
“There!” He says, a big grin brightening his face. He turns the orange towards me. He has drawn on a triangle-eyed face and attached a makeshift stem. I laugh.
“That’s awesome, buddy! You made a jack-o-lantern!”
He goes back to eating his dinner. “Let’s make Halloween things all night,” he says.
“That’s a great idea,” I say.
After dinner and bath, we paste a few of our scary pictures on the front door. In bed, he takes up his clipboard while I read, drawing first a ghost, and then a vampire with red fangs, and then a leprechaun hiding a pot of gold behind a stone wall.
The papers flutter to the ground, one after the other, carpeting the bedroom floor.
Tag: working mom
Happy 100 Days: 77
Word from the bank: approved for a loan.
Before rushing off to look at the half-dozen tiny townhouses in the county I can afford, I have to remember to pause and notice this turn of events.
Approved!
For a home loan!
Bug and I are not stuck after all. At some point in the next three months or three years, the story will change again. It always does. We may stay put, we may move on. The happy truth? We have choices. We have a way forward.
I can provide a home for my son.
A home!
Happy 100 Days: 80
So hard to find my way
Now that I’m all on my own.
I make the first model for the lego cake myself. With the 8-blocks and the 4-blocks, I show Bug what I can do.
“Why don’t you add one more there?” He asks, pointing to a space in between.
“Well, a square four-block won’t fit.”
“No, I mean, you could do a two-top block.”
I look at the little model and consider the slabs of cake in the fridge. “Well, I guess I could cut one of the squares in half and make a two-top.”
We work together to make a second model. This one has an extra blue two-top in between. I wonder out loud how I will squeeze a narrow chunk of cake in between. Frosting is a little stickier than plastic, after all.
“Let’s try it,” he says.
The “us” inferred here is pretty much “Mommy.” I have been working on this cake since 8:30 last night. The real process started two weeks ago when I stumbled across block-shaped candles at the supermarket. The ideas fell like rain and were just as hard to catch. I bought a bag of block candy at the specialty sweet shop, three colors of decorative icing at Joanne’s, and four boxes of backup cake mix during my last run to the grocery store.
This whole undertaking is ridiculous. Surely, better options exist. A frosted sheet cake with a little “Happy 6” flourish will do the trick. If we have a hankering for something fancier, everyone assures me that Costco has a fine bakery. Last year, I commissioned a friend at work to make a pirate treasure chest cake for Bug’s party. Candy necklaces, lollipop rings, and chocolate gelt spilled out from under the fondant-coated lid, and the cake itself was delicious. Even with a price tag of nearly $100, the masterpiece was a steal.
I can’t afford bargains of that variety anymore. I couldn’t then. Also, “fancy” is not the objective, which begs the question: What is the motivation for this two-week long undertaking? If not expedience, expense, or keeping up with the Mrs. Stay-at-Home-Jones, then what?
It’s hard to say. I guess I just like the idea of making things by hand. Even though I never have time and it wears me out to do it, I still try to make the holiday ornaments, invitations, and napkin rings myself. For Bug’s party tomorrow, I coated two giant sheets of cardboard with tempera paint and decorated them with bright letters and patterned duct tape. It would have been a lot less time consuming just to use poster board and markers, or to have spent $2.99 on a pre-cut birthday banner. I just couldn’t help myself. It’s as if my right brain has not bothered to open a paper in a few years and is oblivious to the news that I am now a working single mom. My brown-eyed girl is still out slipping and sliding all along the waterfall, trying to catch a rainbow.
She is also the one who is awake here at nearly 11:00pm waiting for the sourdough bread in the oven to finish rising. She thought baking a fresh loaf from scratch while also cobbling together a two-tier lego cake for Bug would be “fun.” Every time I try to explain to her that I am applying for a home loan, too, and that somehow in all of this, I still have to raise this child and earn a living, she just sort of wanders off in the vague direction of the misty morning.
Do you remember when
we used to sing?
Sha-la-la-la-la . . .
Something is undoubtedly going to give (something undoubtedly already has), but today, I am making a lego cake. My only moment of existential doubt arrives when I am trying to frost frozen marshmallow halves and they keep sticking to the fork and spatula, flipping over upside-down and smearing the cake. I look down at the glop of red-beet-dyed pink glop smearing my fingers, the counter, and everything but the marshmallow, and ask, What the hell am I doing? I have already snapped at Bug a half dozen times today and at Giovanni seven more, assembling a neat baker’s dozen of profanities. What I am teaching my son? That celebrations are stressful? That cooking is drudgery? That anger is a suitable sidekick for unchecked perfectionism?
I am nearing the point of tears when Bug walks into the kitchen. “What is that, Mommy?”
“Hands at your sides, kiddo. No touching.”
He steps up onto a stool and considers the multicolored blocks on the counter. With effort, he keeps his hands down. Then his face breaks into a grin. “That’s the cake!”
“Yep, it is.”
“What are you doing?” He looks at the pepto-bismol pink glop and the dripping skewer in my hand.
“Marshmallows.”
He thinks for a moment. Then, “Oh! I know! Those are the little knob things that make the legos snap together!” He gazes at the mess, watching me back-flip one circle into place. “Can I help?”
“Oh, why not.” So much for perfection. I find a few extra knives and toothpicks. Together, we mangle a few pink marshmallows and then start on the chocolate ones. Bug is diligent, spreading all around the edges and even the bottom to help everything stick together. He looks at the cake now as if seeing it for the first time. “Is that going to be the blue two-top?”
“It sure is.”
He steps down and finds the two mini models we made, one with the extra blue piece and one without. He holds them up, comparing the two miniatures with the massive cake. “You made it fit!”
“Yeah! You said I should try it, so I did. And it worked.”
Bug can’t stop ogling this creation. “Wow,” he says. “That is so much cake.” He is really smiling now. He picks up another marshmallow and starts back to work.
I see now. I see what he sees (which is what I saw and then promptly forgot). I see the way inspiration can fall like rain. So much, so fast, so free, so very hard to catch. And when it lands in the vicinity of your hands, you don’t wait until you are better rested or better employed or better situated. You open them to it. You follow its lead. You make whatever something is asking to be made.
—
Many thanks (and apologies) to Van Morrison for Brown-Eyed Girl
Happy 100 Days: 82
We are driving home in the almost dark and Bug drifts off to sleep. He stretches awake when I pull into the driveway, and I ask him again whether he wants pizza toast or eggs for dinner. He does not answer. When I gave him the same choices at Chicken School, he’d answered, “Lasagne and Thai food.”
“What’s it going to be, Buddy?” I ask as he slouches out of the car and yawns his way into the house.
“Mom, can’t we just sit on the couch and talk about it?”
This decision is clearly too much to tackle. I drop our bags in the doorway and follow him into the piano room. Granddaddy is in the den eating a sandwich and watching a show, no doubt gearing up for the vice presidential debates. I fold myself around Bug and he presses into me, resting his head against my chest. We do not talk for a while. I kiss his forehead over and over, just because it is so close. Finally, I ask again about dinner.
“Okay,” he sighs. “Eggs, I guess.”
Bug’s grandma is in Germany, so she is not here to help me figure this out. Also, I did not have the foresight to prep a meal. Such flashes of organization never strike twice in one week. I rise to go into the kitchen.
“Mommy, can you play something with me?”
“Can’t, Buddy. It’s time to make dinner.”
I start washing out the containers from Bug’s lunch. He follows me in, bringing the new science kit his aunt sent from Germany as a birthday gift. He opens it and digs through all the tubing and rubber gloves and strange pictures.
“What do I do with it, Mommy?”
I dry my hands and come over. The instruction booklet is long, and I tell him I cannot help him with it. “This weekend, baby. We’ll have lots of time.”
He sighs again and puts everything away. I have him set the table and wash his hands. He is still exhausted, still wandering around and looking for something to do. I remind him of his “H” collage for school. I set a magazine and some scissors on the table, but he can barely hold his head up.
Finally, dinner. We eat our spinach eggs, share the bacon, nibble at the cinnamon toast. We look together through the Kid’s Post and Highlights for words with “H” in them. Hockey, High Five, Third, Hidden. We find a picture of a hug. I help him cut and he glues the scraps into his journal.
Then it is time to clean up and get ready for bath. Bug finds a book sitting on the kitchen table. It is one of his new favorites, The Witch’s Supermarket.
“Mommy, can we read this book?”
I look at the pile of dishes, the unfinished laundry, the snacks still needing to be packed for tomorrow. I haven’t started the bath. If I don’t iron something tonight, I’ll be wearing yoga pants to work in the morning. Even with Giovanni watching the dog for the week, even with someone else paying the mortgage, all I can manage is another “no.”
And so I finally know this: loneliness is nowhere near the worst part of being alone.
“I really need to clean up. You could help me, and we would be done faster so I could read to you.”
I see my boy deflate. Even the book seems to droop in his hands.
“I really like this story,” he says. He is so tired.
“Sorry, baby, I can’t read it right now. I’ll read it to you at bedtime. If you are done helping, you can go look at it by yourself until I’m finished here.”
“Okay.” He trudges away.
Some days, I would give anything not to be a single mom. Okay, maybe not anything, but in certain low moments, the devil could show up with a contract and a fountain pen, and he’d walk away a soul richer.
I start the dishes. Then I stop.
How stuck in our ways are we? Really, how blind do patterns make us to their existence?
And how willing are we to come un-stuck?
We are not alone in this house. Yet somehow, we keep giving that truth so wide a berth, we can’t even discern its edges.
“Hey, kiddo. Let’s go ask your granddaddy. Remember that guy?”
We walk into the living room. Bug pauses, transfixed by Gary Oldman’s giant face on the screen. We chat for a moment with my father about Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and then we ask if he would be willing to read Bug this book while I finish preparing for bath and bedtime.
“Why, sure!” He turns off the TV. “Get on up here, big boy!”
Piece of cake.
Bug ooches up onto the couch, pressing his insatiable body into his granddaddy’s frame. The old man takes the book. “Let’s see what we have here. Uh oh. Witches!”
And they begin.
As I putter and pack and start the washing machine, I overhear my father taking his sweet time. He puts on a cackling voice and even reads through all the disgusting signs at the Witch’s meat counter. “Eyes of newt, lizard’s gizzards. . . ” This catalog of dark magic gives me a few extra breaths which I offer up to Carolyn Hax and the other guilty pleasures of the Style section. This is my moment of nothing. A booming racket and a fit of giggles burst from the living room, and I hitch a ride on it, free and easy.
Easy?
Free?
Imagine that.
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.
Shannon E. Williams 