Maternally Challenged

The Gardener's Lament

The 10-year-old, Suzanne, is on a class field trip tonight with Daddy along as one of the parent chaperones. Daddy was her choice, one that I was quietly happy about (sleeping in a bunkhouse with 60 or so rambunctious 10-year-olds is not my idea of "restful" and I am a person who needs her sleep). But I regretted not going when I heard from my husband: he reported that Suzanne was having a blast, and that the place where they were (a farm) featured laying hens, a creek where the kids caught a catfish, cows to milk and a whole bunch of other things that made me nostalgic for my grandpa's old place. My husband also reported that there were a bunch of moms along--not surprisingly, moms outnumbered dads--and that, of these moms, not one appeared to have the slightest knowledge of life in the country. They recoiled at the sight of mud. They didn't want to let the kids out of sight for a second--fearful, perhaps, of an ax murderer lurking in the hayloft. One of them got slightly hysterical at the sight of a granddaddy longlegs.

I am not Nature Girl by any means, but I do get outdoors once in a while, and yesterday, I took the girls with me down to the end of the block to the neighborhood park, where we planted bulbs near the park sign. I didn't notice this, but we had been at work only about five or 10 minutes when the girls reported that cars were rounding the corner and slowing down, and that people were looking at us. I was too busy digging to pay much attention, but they said it happened five or six times. Apparently, the sight of somebody with a gardening trowel was enough to almost stop traffic. This morning at the bus stop, Rebecca reported, one of the kids said, "Did you see those people yesterday down at the pond digging in the dirt?" Wisely, perhaps, Rebecca did not cop to her own participation. "Weird," she agreed.

When we bought our house in this neighborhood, the front yard was a barren sea of mulch; the previous owner was apparently allergic to living things, and except for a tiny patch of grass, the whole front area was smothered under ground cover and mulch. (She also had a truly formidable collection of pesticides in the garage; I was worried for a while that we had just purchased an EPA Superfund site.) I've seen Chick Fil-As with nicer landscaping than the front yard she left us, and since then it has been my mission in life to create a garden out of this barren wasteland. (It's coming along nicely, thank you.) This was how, a few months after we moved in, I was out by the driveway, digging up some roots and amending the soil so I could eventually plant something. The boy next door came over and stared at me curiously. Finally he said, "Is it Earth Day or something?" "Every day is Earth Day around here!" I replied jauntily, hoping he'd stay and talk, but he just said "Oh," and wandered back home, looking mystified.

The older I get, the more drawn I am to plant things; it's as if there's a cosmic clock inside me that says You are not immortal, you know. When I am gone, I want some trees, some flowers, some array of living things to testify to the fact that I was here; increasingly, I feel the need to put living things in the soil and coax them up into the sun. And I realize I do not know anywhere near what I need to know--so when I met Jessie, an older lady at my church who was responsible for the lovely garden in the courtyard, I immediately appointed myself as her apprentice. I need to learn at least some of what she knows, because somehow I feel that this kind of knowledge is disappearing. How do you prune a bush? When's the best time to plant ivy? Why won't my phlox bloom? Why aren't there as many monarch butterflies this year as there were last year? How long can a magnolia withstand a drought? Is there such a thing as a tomato that tastes like a tomato anymore?

It's bad enough to contemplate my own ignorance, but the kids' ignorance staggers me. In three generations we have gone from being people who at least remembered what farming and gardening was about, to people like me who realized how much they didn't know, to a generation who thinks digging in the dirt on a gorgeous fall day is just...weird. This kid would probably think it was totally normal for a grown woman to get freaked out at the sight of a harmless granddaddy longlegs.

Anyway, I am doing what I can--planting seeds in my kids and maybe a few of their friends, willing to be that Weird White Lady in the neighborhood, hoping that down the road something will sprout. I'm proof that it can. When I was a kid, you had to practically put a pistol to my head to get me to pick up a hoe. But obviously something took root, because here I am all these years later, planting things.

 

 

Beagle 1, Me 0

So we got a beagle. There's a long backstory here which I won't go into; suffice it to say that Max showed up at our house in mid-December as an 8 month-old puppy, and I have taken on the task of puppy-training. I don't know about you, but I have just enormous stretches of free time every day, and I was getting bored with the needlepoint and constant trips to the nail salon. So we got a beagle.

My family had a series of beagles when I was a child--Cleo, the matriarch, who I barely remember; Princess, her daughter, who would eat anything and everything, up to and including a greasy paper napkin I fed her once; Smokey, the half-beagle, half-mutt granddaughter who was my sister's devoted companion for many, many years. I loved them all and remembered them fondly--so fondly that there were a whole bunch of things about beagles I used to know and which now are coming back to me, to wit: they are hard-headed. They can smell food from 5,000 yards away. They were born to steal. They do bad things, an then look at you mournfully as if to say, "You knew I was a hound when you adopted me."

Max is living up to all of these standards, and then some. Max is unaware that dogs walk on four feet. Max walks on two, the better to do the BCC--Beagle Counter Cruise--which consists of tippytoeing around the kitchen island to see if there is anything up there remotely edible. Failing that, Max will repair to the sofa table in the living room, where, if someone lays down, say, a scarf for 10 seconds, the scarf will disappear. You'll find parts of it later, in itty-bitty shreds all over the carpet. Today my husband came home from a doctor's appointment to pick up some stuff on his way to work, and while we were talking he laid some things on the sideboard in the front hall, whereupon Max very delicately rose on his hind legs, snagged some earmuffs and stole away. Yesterday the 14-year-old looked up to see her 40-pound backpack leaving the room: Max was laboriously dragging it down the hall with the intention, apparently, of taking it up to his spot on the landing for purposes of plunder. We have spent probably $60 on various dog toys and busy bones, none of which really suit his fancy; the only thing he really, truly loves is a real bone from the butcher's. Rebecca and I were watching him work on one of these one day--it was brand new--and I swear I saw his eyes roll back in his head in pure bliss. It was hilarious. The only other time I've seen his eyes roll back that way was yesterday, when I was working on one of my dog-training drills with him. "Stay, Max," I said, and I swear to you his eyes rolled back in his head like a sulky teenager. Clearly, he was thinking, "AGAIN with this 'stay' shit. Well, all right, if that's what she wants..."(Huge, moody, teenaged sigh.)

The other major thing we've learned about Max is that he can levitate. I was standing in the kitchen the other day, stuffing down a leftover piece of Kentucky Fried for a quick lunch, when all of a sudden there was a beagle looking me right in the eye, demanding, "Where's mine?" It would have been scary except for the comical effect created by these two long ears flung out on either side. (For some reason this reminds me of Sally Fields in that old TV show "The Flying Nun." Remember that weird white thing she wore on her head? That's what Max's ears look like.) This dog has a vertical leap that Michael Jordan would envy. I mean, proportional to his height, he makes Michael Jordan look like an inert land mass.

There have been moments when I think I must have been insane to do this. What do I need a dog for? Do I really like shampooing carpets for a hobby? The cat's not thrilled, either; Max doesn't know what to make of her, and the other day he got a face full of stickers when he stuck his head under the bed to say hi. But then there are also moments when I think, Oh, yeah. Now I remember. Like seeing my 10-year-old curled up on the landing, sound asleep next to the dog she's wanted for so long. And this morning, when I had to stop work for a few minutes to take Max out for a walk, and I looked at those snow-heavy clouds and said to him, "Max, we're about to get some white stuff." Max was okay with that. Working at home is a solitary business, but I always thought I liked it that way. It has taken Max's arrival for me to realize how lonely it's been, and how nice it is to have somebody to talk to.

On Her 10th Birthday

Me: So exactly 10 years ago today, you were born. And they handed you to me, and I gave you your first kiss.

Her: Where?

Me: On the cheek.

(Pause, while mom feels sentimental.)

Her: Well, it was about time I got out of there. It smelled like cheese.

How to Make Work for Yourself

1. Head into the kitchen for lunch. Stand in front of fridge meditating on what to eat. Decide on salad. Pick up the lettuce to discover it's sitting in something slimy. Spend the next 45 minutes cleaning out the fridge. Spill lots of water on the floor in the process. Look down. What the hell, floor needs mopping too. Eat lunch 90 minutes late.

2. Hear older daughter say she has urgent need for cardboard for a school project. I need big boxes! she says. Put out an APB for big boxes, hear from neighbor she has some she was getting ready to put in recycling. Go over at night to fetch boxes, in middle of downpour. Get home only to hear daughter say, "I'm really sorry, Mom, but I decided not to do that project." On recycling day, have fun taking out your neighbor's trash.

3. On trip to mailbox, notice that the veterans' charity that was supposed to pick up those six bags of stuff you put out by the curb never made an appearance. Call up charity to chew them out REAL GOOD about asking for donations and then not showing up. Half an hour later, notice the bags are gone; the truck was just late.

4. Buy 50-foot-long garden hose on sale. Get home, realize it's long enough to water your neighbor's lawn three doors down. Conclude that maybe husband was right: we didn't need a hose this long. Buy big hose winder thingy to keep it on. Practically pull arms out of sockets winding it up--then discover it's the only thing you have that will reach the new magnolia tree at the end of the lawn. Unwind.  

Your Childhood Will Be Over in 5...4...3....

Yesterday Suzanne is sitting on the sofa putting on her shoes for school, talking about her birthday coming up. She will be 10. This is my baby. There's already one teenager in the house.

"So for my 10th birthday, my expectations are these," she said. "I am going to walk to the bus stop by myself, and I will no longer need bedtime stories."

I made an involuntary whimpering expression. Already? Really?

"Mom." She fixes me with a "get serious" stare. "I am going to be a pre-teen."

This is the kid who used to gnaw on my chin as a baby, when she was teething. I remember saying, "Someday I'm gonna miss those toothless grins." That seems like it was about two weeks ago. Time is ripping by.

That's What (What?) Friends Are For

Friends are on my mind these days, a lot. One of my kids is having severe friend problems at school, which (as mothers of daughters know) can be piercingly painful. I don't know how to solve it; there may not be a solution, except to endure it. I also seem to be losing friends. A friend of my youth died 18 months ago; she had kids the age of mine and her death came far too young. We had been friends, close friends, for 15 years or more; I don't know exactly how long, because evidently she stopped thinking of me as a friend for quite a while before I finally got the message. Other people noticed, but I brushed it off. "She's busy," I said. "It's okay. We have a history." But she died, and I never got a chance to say goodbye, or figure out what had happened, or .....there will be no final reckoning. I'll never know what happened.

More recently, another old friend--one dating from the same period of my life, about 25 years ago--stopped communicating. Well, people are busy these days; I'm not always very good at keeping in touch myself, she lives in another state....But finally I called. It was a strange, very one-sided phone call. I said, "You guys should come see us," and she said, "Well, now is not a good time...." and her voice trailed off. I found myself babbling, just to fill in the blank spaces. I have a horrible feeling I've done something awful, said something that hurt her, but I don't know what. I didn't mean to, but I've done thoughtless things before and found out about them after the damage was done. Maybe I've done it once too often.

This all sounds pretty pathetic, except that I'm doing the same thing to two other people right this very minute, thanks to the Internet and its various social media. One's a person I knew 30 years ago, and for some reason she wants to stay in touch and I just....don't. We were work friends three whole decades ago; we have nothing in common anymore that I can see--and life, as previously noted, is busy. The other is a more recent acquaintance who I liked at first and then, for some reason, the liking cooled, and that's all I can say. Friendship is unpredictable that way. You can't make somebody like you; you can't make yourself like somebody else, even if that person is a good person and deserving of friendship. There is no moral judgment here. Some friendships run their course. Some never really get off the ground.

The problem with this is the asymmetry of it--what happens when the friendship has run its course for one party but not the other. Why does this happen? Why do some friendships endure through the years and all kinds of vissicitudes and then, like Al and Tipper, just quietly die when nobody's looking? Then there's the flip side, the people in your life who seem to be fellow-travelers on the same journey--the people you can resume a conversation with even when it paused eight years previously, the people who can disappear for decades and then, somehow, come back into your life and slide into a hole in your heart that was waiting for them all along. I have two or three people like that in my life. How I deserve them I'll never know, but there they are. 

But back to my daughter. A lot of life is about losing, I want to tell her. It hurts. There is no avoiding the hurt. Being middle aged, I also know that hurting beats the alternative, which is not feeling anything at all--but she's too young for this to make sense. So what I tell her is that being hurt this way stinks, but it will eventually give her a kind of strength she didn't have before: the ability to see somebody else who is being shut out, for whatever reason, and to know what that person is feeling. It will give her a kind of insight into the human condition, an entree into meeting people she never had before, and these people--some of them, anyway--might turn out to be amazing people she never would have noticed otherwise. All this the Popular Girl will never learn; all she'll know is the ever-present fear of not being popular, which will keep her from learning anything else. But not being popular is a very liberating experience, and the sooner my daughter figures that out, the better.

As for why friends come and why they go--well, I'll tell her, welcome to the mystery.

Smart People Part Deux

Well, I seem to have bombed on this topic. First, I managed to piss off some people, which really wasn't my intention; and secondly, my list of things smart people were no good at has been critiqued and found wanting.

So let me clarify (and pay attention: there will be a quiz at the end):

1. I think rating other people's friend potential on whether they have intellectual gifts equivalent to your own is just a very limiting idea. Friendship is SO much more than IQ (though obviously IQ is hardly irrelevant). I freely admit that I would get bored pretty quickly if I found myself with a group of people who didn't want to talk about anything besides the latest episode of "Real Housewives of _______", or who hadn't read a book in the last year, or who had no idea what the Gettysburg Address was. But is that because they are stupid? Maybe, maybe not. I've known geeks who aren't much interested in anything except their own very narrow scientific field--but they were brilliant; I've known very smart people who watch "Real Housewives" the same way Margaret Mead once watched those folks in Samoa. It's hard to explain, but it's like this: I've met some very smart people who didn't know how to be funny, but I have never met a funny person who wasn't also smart. You can go around looking for smart people to be with, and risk ending up with some humorless folks who can discuss Goethe--or you can look for funny people, and know that no matter what, you'll have a good time in their company.

2. Obviously, my list of things smart people are no damned good at was off base, or at least I am told this is the case. My mistake here was in generalizing too much from my personal experience. I do know that at the beginning of my brief career as a PTA organizer, I thought, This will be a piece of cake. Why not? There was no reason to think managing a PTA committee would be any harder than, say, writing a page one story for the Washington Post. But it turned out that PTA work is about 25 percent intellectual and 75 percent interpersonal, and I am a person who loathes meetings and prefers to do everything pretty much on my own. (Plus I have this weird ability to make people mad without even trying, a trait I believe I have just demonstrated.) It gave me new respect for those parents who DO take over PTA organizational stuff, and it taught me that smarts alone is not enough. Or look at Jimmy Carter, who is an extremely brilliant man and prescient in a lot of things he said as President, but who was really lacking in leadership and managerial skills. President Obama is obviously brilliant, but you see him struggling at times to be "just folks" and to tone down his "I'm the smartest kid in class and I know it" enough for people to hear what he's saying.

(OFF-THE-SUBJECT TANGENT HERE: I watched a speech of his in Montreal last week, and since the translation was in French I was free to concentrate on his body language. I am an avid Obama supporter, but now I can see more easily why the mere sight of him makes certain people pop a few blood vessels. It's in the way he cocks one eyebrow, the slight tilt of his head--it all says, "I'm here to tell you the Way It Is." I don't mind it, but I could see how some people would.)

3. I never, ever said that being smart precludes the possibility of being empathic and friendly and all sorts of good qualities. Really. I didn't. (Pause, to allow my critics to re-read.) I did say, and I have told my two very intellectually gifted daughters this, that putting IQ at the top of your desired traits in a friend is ....well, it's not likely to expand your horizons much, or make you a lot of friends.

Okay, now the quiz:

Which would you want on your tombstone:

A."She was a wonderful person"

B. "She had an IQ of 175"

There is no correct answer--only natural consequences. 

Three Highly Valuable Skills "Smart People" Are No Damn Good At

I came across a blog the other day called Raising Smart Girls that I needed to explore, since my husband and I raising two of these creatures ourselves, and read an entry about how the author was having trouble making friends and finding people to talk to, who shared some of her interests and were intellectually challenging. And I thought: hmmmm--because I've felt like that at times. But then her conclusion--"I'm just too smart for my own good"--kind of put me off a bit, maybe because I've found myself thinking that, too, and it's a trait in myself I don't like much. And that got me started thinking about all the things I have learned about in my Motherhood Life which are really valuable, and which I have proven time and again to be no damn good at. Mind you, this list doesn't mean that the people who are good at these things are dumb--far from it. But people who are good at these things tend not to be people who hole up with books and their Phi Beta Kappa key, worrying about the dearth of Smart People to talk to. 

Anyway, here's what I came up with:

1. Community organizing. A good community organizer is a person who will listen patiently to someone who is a total nut case, and make them feel valued, and manage to enlist their support in a worthy group endeavor. The world is full of eccentrics and oddballs and quirky characters and tedious old people and blowhards. Super-smart people tend to fidget when one of these walks in the room; super-smart people tend to think, Get to the point, goddammit! when they are listening. Super-smart people have lapped the track three times while these folks are just making it to the first turn, and having to sit around and wait for this other person to understand that what they're proposing can't be done, or isn't worth doing, makes super-smart people want to bang their heads against a wall. Super-smart people find it hard to remember that everybody deserves to be listened to, and that all kinds of people have valuable experiences and points of view to bring to the table.

2. Seeing into the future. Super-smart people tend to forget that, being human, they are never working with a complete set of data. They take success at a small set of predictions to mean competence at much bigger predictions. History is full of brilliant people who confidently predicted a future which failed to materialize--though sometimes they did get parts of it right.

3. Dealing with knuckleheads. My guilty secret is that I like to watch "Judge Judy" when I get a chance, because that lady is really good at slicing her way through a thicket of nonsensical babble and getting to the heart of the matter. Judge Judy is one of those people who does not suffer fools gladly, and it's hilarious, now and then, to watch her cut some preening nincompoop down to size. "You lived under their roof for three years, you took money from these people to buy a car and never repaid them, and now that you've moved out you want your set of Ginzu knives? Get over yourself. Judgment for the plaintiff." But while this is amusing to watch, I suspect it's not very socially useful. In fact, I think it's kind of corrosive. Nincompoops will go on being nincompoops, and will loudly defend their RIGHT TO BE NINCOMPOOPS, THANK YOU VERY MUCH, and the rest of us can all look down on them--but in the meantime, nobody is addressing the problem of just how this 25-year-old mama's boy is ever going to become self-reliant, or just why this 18-year-old girl has three babies by two different men, and now that she does, how is she going to raise them. Ministers, social workers, guidance counselors--people who hardly ever are described as "super-smart"--get stuck with the last job, and the low pay scales for these professions reflect the amount of value society places on the incredibly valuable work they do.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. It's just what I came up with.

My bottom line: intellectual giftedness--the kind of smarts that enables people to talk about Hegel and plan intergallactic expeditions and find cures for rare diseases--is a wonderful, amazing thing, but we tend to value it at the expense of a lot of other things equally wonderful and amazing. In the world my daughters will inherit, being able to build a sturdy door frame may well be more valuable than the ability to compose a lovely sonnet. It takes all kinds of smarts to make the world go around--and while I see that I have two kids with lots of the kind of IQ that college admissions officers will someday value, I hope I can teach them to value other ways of being smart beside their own.

Mutual Assured Destruction

Love has something to do with the definition of "family"--but the real sticking point, the place where things get bolted together, is the knowledge that everybody else has the goods on you, and you have the goods on them. Mutual Assured Destruction, I think they call it. I've got your back and you've got mine, because otherwise I am going to let the world know about that disgusting thing you do with your toenails in bed, or about that time they had to close the baby pool after you crapped in it, or....You get the idea. These, friends, are the ties that bind. I realized this on vacation.

We were on our way back from visiting the relatives in Wisconsin, with a side trip to Ohio, and the trip odometer was inching up to 2,000 miles. We were tired, cramped from sitting in the car too long, a little punch drunk, and a little crabby. We'd stopped at a little diner to eat, and I can't remember how it started; I tuned in when I heard Rebecca saying to Suzanne, "If you ever do THAT to me, I'll tell about the Eric Incident." I saw Suzanne giving her older sister a glare that would have bored holes in granite, and in an attempt to divert Sibling Fight #47 of this trip, I said, "Yeah, Suze, but think of what you could tell on HER."

"Yeah," Suzanne said grimly. "Like you-know-who in math class that somebody has a crush on." 

"Why stick to boys?" I said. "how about that time she was three and gave the Miss America wave all the way down the plane aisle on the way to the lavatory?"

Rebecca said, "Parents don't get to play."

"I don't know why not," said her dad.

"Fine." said Rebecca. "Then how about that time you rode your bike to work and forgot your pants?"

"Don't forget," said her dad, "I have those baby pictures of you naked in the backyard pool. What will your prom date think of those?"

"'OH MOMMY,'" Suzanne mimicked, "'IT'S SOO BEEYOOOTIFULLL!''--a reference to the time Rebecca's enthusiastic admiration for the set of "The Nutcracker" caused widespread titters throughout the orchestra level and up to the loge of the Warner Theater. And the mayor's wife was in the row just in front of us. The recollection of this caused me to laugh, which was a mistake.

"Okay, Mom," Rebecca said. "Might I mention the time you tried to get into the wrong hotel room? Or--wait! How about the public toilet incident in Paris?"

"You weren't even alive then."

"So? Or how about watching you trying to get out of the inner tube at Great Wolf Lodge? Or the John Hancock Incident?"

She had me there. I was an adult, in my 30s, old enough to have been around for awhile, but I was buying my first piece of real estate for more money than I could bear to think about, and I was nervous. My kindly real estate agent was walking me through the whole thing and I was doing exactly what he told me to do, exactly, so when he put the formal offer paperwork in front of me and said, "Just put your John Hancock there on that line," that's....exactly.....what I wrote: John Hancock. Man, I thought, these real estate customs are weird. The look on my agent's face when he saw what I'd done said as clearly as words could ever say, Oh my God, I have been wasting my time with a complete Looney Tunes.

I will never live that down, because my kids will never let me. But that's okay: I have pictures stored away, and a few poopy diaper stories, and some information about the exact location of that chicken pox rash. We are a very close family that way. Very close.

Let's Give Us All A Pat On The Back

The other day my oldest, Rebecca, was talking about some kid who had been in one of her classes this past year. "He has ADHD, too," she said, "and my grades are soooooo much better than his. I think I deserve a pat on the back for that."

Which she did, and I gave her one--though with a little cautionary lecture about not defining success as "better off than X," because a) who knows what problems X has and b) next week, she could be X and c) it's just rude. But the moment ended, and I was left to think to myself: What about a pat on the back for me?

And on the heels of that thought came another thought: what about a pat on the back for ALL the parents like me--the parents of kids who have some special challenge, whether relatively manageable, like mine, or seriously daunting. All those parents out there who, like me, spend all that time in parenting classes, trying to figure out why their toddler is behaving so badly; who progress to Anger Management classes, to help them cope with the toddler who is behaving so badly; who spend all that time figuring out which expert to go to and what questions to ask, and how to get insurance to cover some part of it; all those parents who schlep back and forth to psychiatrist appointments that their kids don't want to go to, and staring up at the ceiling at night wondering if those pills the shrink just wrote a prescription for are going to permanently damage their child's brain; all those parents who schelp the kid back and forth to psychotherapy and social skills groups and occupational therapy and tutoring appointments; all those parents who go to the 504 meetings and the IEP meetings and stay up late at night e-mailing teachers about some missing assignment or the latest outburst.

Parenting kids like ours can be a lonely task. The only feedback we are likely to get is when there's a problem, and then there will be a lot of people who are eager to tell us what we are doing wrong and how they fixed that same problem at THEIR house (not understanding that maybe their problem and yours aren't the same at all). And though all parenting involves a lot of work, this kind of parenting involves vast amounts of extra work that nobody outside your immediate family is likely to hear about or see, much less give you credit for.

If this sounds self-pitying, I don't mean it to be; my kids are my greatest joy. It's just that Rebecca's words made me think that I deserve a little credit too, which I am hereby giving myself--and also to all you other guys out there, whoever you are. Because we are doing a very tough job.