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My seven-year-old: Mom, can I sleep with you tonight?
Me: Nope, I plan to sleep with Daddy.
Daddy: What's wrong with your own bed, in your own bedroom?
The seven-year-old: It's so dark in there!
Daddy: Well, turn on the light.
The seven-year-old: You know I can't sleep with the light on!
That's what I tell my kids when they come to me with their problems when I am trying to write. Jane Austen was right never to get married and have kids, is all I can say, because I am dead certain that if SHE had had a seven-year-old turning up at her elbow approximately every 90 seconds to sigh heavily and say, "Mommmmm....." we would never have had Pride and Prejudice. I don't regret having kids, I can't imagine life without my kids, but there are times, and this is one, when I would really, really like to scream, "WOULD YOU PLASE JUST LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE FOR TEN MINUTES WHILE I FINISH A THOUGHT FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST?!?!" Instead, I say to them, "Come get Mommy if there is blood on the carpet or the cops are at the door," and they go away as if they have understood--when the reality is that they and I both know they will be back in less than five minutes with another Great Big Huge Honkin' Problem that only I can help them with.
In short, I've childproofed my office, but they keep getting in.
And here's the thing about parenthood: at this point, I have no idea if I am a) instilling a deep sense of worthlessness in my children, because some dumb magazine article always seems to be more important than them and their problems, or b) modeling for my children that you can be a mom and still use your brain--or what's left of it after childbirth.
I imagine that one day they will be discussing this with their shrinks. I only hope that I am still around to hear how it all turns out, because, man, I would really like to know myself.
My career as cultural arts committee chairman of the local PTA is over, and the verdict is in: I am Definitely Odd.
When I took the job last spring, my predecessor assured me it wasn't a huge task once you knew the ropes; basically, it consisted of lining up various performances for school assemblies. I thought: How hard can it be?--and the answer was, harder than it looks, but still eminently do-able. In theory. In reality, that question--how hard can it be?--is one which in my experience has always, always been a prelude to disaster. When it comes to this question, I have learned from my mistakes, and can repeat them exactly. That was my first mistake. My second mistake was thinking: I can do this pretty much by e-mail and phone, and I won't have to go to PTA meetings.
I hate meetings. My idea of a properly run meeting is the kind Ben Bradlee used to hold at the Washington Post. News meetings at the Post were held in a room that could accommodate, at most, about 20 people, and it lasted 20 minutes, max. You were expected to show up with your game on; there was intense competition to have your section's stories in the paper, as prominently displayed as possible. But there were also deadlines, and a paper to put out. To keep things moving and on track, Bradlee had this little device--a joke shop toy, I think it was--that made machine-gun noises. When somebody said something dumb or irrelevant or just started droning on too long, he'd point it at the offender--RAT-A-TAT-TAT-TAT--and, in a manner of speaking, kill him off then and there. It was hilarious--provided, of course, you weren't the victim. For that very reason, Bradlee didn't have to use his little machine gun all that much. A whole lot of work got done in those brief meetings, day after day.
This, I have slowly come to realize, is not the way most people think of meetings. There are a whole lot of people in the world for whom meetings are a kind of social life; there are bureaucracies in which the whole purpose of showing up for work seems to be to Have a Meeting. People have meetings to plan meetings; some people spend so much time complaining about having no time for meetings that they could have had four meetings in the time it took them to complain. Much of the time, meetings are like paperwork: the process of getting work done somehow becomes the work itself. Most people either don't notice this, or they find ways to cope (my husband takes laptops to meetings, and gets work done in the back of the room). But I do notice, and I seem to be totally lacking in coping skills. Being cooped up in a meeting that drags on too long is, for me, about as thrilling as growing dental plaque. Honest to God, I would rather poke a sharp stick in my eye. At least then the pain would be a distraction.
Obviously, not all meetings are the horrors I describe. I go to monthly meetings of an environmental group at my church without complaint, and, obviously, monthly PTA meetings need to happen. But on general principles, I try to avoid meetings, even routine PTA meetings. When it came to running the cultural arts committee, my plan was: a) find out what I, personally, was supposed to do; b) do it; c) report back. This way, I thought, I could avoid the slightest chance of getting stuck in a room with people whose concept of meetings was different from mine--and, given that mine is a decidedly minority view, this seemed fairly likely.
People like me should never, ever volunteer for the PTA.
Because what happened--you could see this coming, I'm sure--was a Tragic Miscommunication. Basically, I was told at the beginning of the year that the PTA didn't have any money for cultural arts, that the budget had been depleted by a big equipment purchase for the school the year before, and that for the time being I needed to work on getting some grant money. So I did, and then....the PTA got some money....and then (yes, I know this sounds weird), somehow, I never found out about it. How, you ask, is it possible that the cultural arts committee chairman never found out about the thousands of dollars she had to spent on cultural arts? Simple: a) nobody told me and b) I didn't go to PTA meetings. My only defense here is that everybody was on notice about my aversion to meetings, and there's nothing wrong with my phone or e-mail. I mean, I let people know what I was doing. And I knew money was coming in--the usual fund-raisers and stuff--but I figured that there were priorities, and that when Cultural Arts got some money, somebody would tell me. This is what's known as a Fatally Flawed Assumption. (Remember the old saying? "Never ASSUME. It makes an ASS of U and ME.")
Meanwhile, October, November, December were passing, and unbeknownst to me (busily working on grant proposals in my office at home) I am getting a rep as a Major Slacker. And then this week, everything finally comes to light, and somebody else leaps in to line up some acts for the rest of the year (from a list of potential acts I'd drawn up last August), and I offered to resign, and they took me up on it. And I am delighted, actually, because this was a job I am not suited for, and somebody else could do better.
But the fallout here is that in the Momworld that is an elementary school PTA, I now have a rep. Exactly what it is I'm not sure, but I am pretty sure that it's not as a team player, or as the exemplar of what a committee chair should be. With the facts people have at their disposal--and, really, it's not worth it to explain all this in detail, because the bottom line is, what needed to be done got done--I am pretty sure that people's impression of me is going to be that I am just, you know, somehow...not right. Which, believe me, is truer than they realize--I have the hospital records to prove it--but it's not true in exactly the way they are thinking. And of all the not-nice names people could conceivably call me, "slacker" is not one that would really stick.
Anyway, yesterday I took a bunch of papers over to the school to drop off so the PTA president could hand it over to whoever gets the job now. I was planning to stick it in the PTA mailbox, but when I got out of the car I saw one of the co-presidents getting out of hers, so I said, "Hey, can I just leave this with you?" And we chatted for a moment, and she said how unfortunate it was that I wasn't going to be cultural arts committee chairman anymore, and I was trying to think of a way to say how happy this very fact made me, all the while thinking that this lady was giving me a strange sort of sideways look. And so that's when I looked down and realized that I had my husband's jacket on, and that it was inside out.
Yup. Definitely odd.
The night before last, our cat spent the night outside--which isn't supposed to happen, but it did. So yesterday morning we discovered the fruits of her night on the town: a dead mouse right smack in the middle of the front walkway. I saw it as I was rushing out the door and made a mental note to throw it in the underbrush later. When I came back it was gone (I later discovered my friend Ann had been by in my absence and had moved it just under the hedge to get it out of the way). Then Suzanne came home from school with her best friend, and the two of them found it, of course, and decided to give it a proper burial. Put on gloves before you touch it, I said, and they said they would.
So I'm busy, and I hear them running around, and about half an hour later Suzanne grabs me. "Mommy, come look where we buried the mouse!" she says, all excited, and I allow myself to be dragged out the back door into the yard over by the woodpile, where--
(cue Psycho soundtrack here)
--Suzanne, with her friend's help, had buried the mouse up to its neck, leaving its grisly little head--bloody mouth agape, one eye missing--staring back at me like a little furry miniature Freddy Krueger (sorry to mix horror movie metaphors here, but I'm still creeped out and it's all that comes to mind).
I've spent a great deal of my life striving for normalcy, God knows I have, and the results so far have not been promising. And now it looks like I am going to be raising kids who are just as afflicted as I am, because while Suzanne and her friend thought this whole thing was hilarious, especially the part where I screamed, I am quite sure that this is Definitely. Not. Normal.
Got a voice mail from my doc, The World's Most Wonderful Gastroenterologist. I love him because he talks to me like I'm an intelligent person and we are two intelligent persons discussing complicated topics. Those of you who haven't spent as much of their lives being a patient as I have may not know, but that is a rare thing in medicine these days. Anyway: "Tracy, I've been trying to reach you. I have your path[ology report] here and it's okay, nothing to worry about. Call me tomorrow--ask for Stephanie, she'll know how to reach me--and we can discuss it in more detail."
Again--thanks, everybody. You guys are settin' the bar pretty high in the friendship department here. I hope I can live up to it if the shoe's ever on the other foot, which I hope to God it will never be. But I'm just sayin'.
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