Maternally Challenged

And They Call This 'Not Working'

So today, in honor of the fact that yesterday was Mother's Day, I thought I would give a quick rundown of an Average Day around here, and how I spend my time. (Because, frankly, I don't even know myself most of the time.)

Today: Up at 6 to have a little bit of quiet time with the newspaper and drink coffee to wake up my brain. At 7, dragged the seven-year-old out of bed, coaxed her downstairs, made her breakfast. Said goodbye to the husband, who's going on the road for three days. Coaxed the seven-year old into her clothes. Coaxed her into actually eating her breakfast; brushed her hair; screamed "I'M LEAVING NOW" in an attempt to convince her that it really was 8 a.m. and TIME TO GO...and drove her to school. Back home, in time to unload the dishwasher and clean up the kitchen and make a vet appointment for the cat, who has managed to get into another catfight and who is clearly got some infected bite somewhere. Helped the 11 year old blow-dry her hair. Did the second school schlep of the morning, which involved taking her and picking up her friend Briane, and dropping them off at school.

Home at 9:30. Into the office, where I worked for two hours on writer-y stuff. Then looked at clock, realized the house was still a wreck, and I had to get the cat to the vet by 12:20. Went into white tornado mode--picking up dirty clothes, making beds, tidying up. Dashed into the shower. Removed one load from the dryer, folded it, put another load in. Discovered I had no time to do my own hair. Threw a scarf on my head, threw the cat in the cat carrier, and hit the road. From noon until 2:30, I was at the vet's, at Verizon getting my cellphone fixed, and at the hardware store, where I bought spackle and the wooden stakes for the compost pile I'm going to create as soon as I get the time. Stopped at Wendy's to grab the least caloric thing I could find, then back to school to pick up the seven-year-old and her friend Lily, who is coming over for a playdate. Back at home. Check e-mail. Did one more load of laundry, checked phone messages, got a drill and fixed the broken curtain rod holder in the seven-year-old's bedroom. Swept out garage. Made a chicken pot pie for dinner out of the chicken that was thawed and is going to go bad if I don't use it. Helped seven-year-old with homework. Handed off Lily to her mom. Served dinner. In a spare moment, used the spackle I bought at the hardware store to plug the nail holes in the stairwell wall, which I have been meaning to do since we moved into this house six weeks ago. (Tomorrow, if I'm lucky, I'll find the touch up paint.)

Now it's almost 7 p.m. and I have reading to do for work, plus the 11 year old's homework to check up on, plus there's that last load of laundry to fold, plus a few random things that need to be ironed. Not to mention the nightly bedtime hassle, and an e-mail I need to send to the seven-year-old's teacher. And there's out of town houseguests coming this weekend, and last night the toilet next to the guest room overflowed. And I realized I have no towels down there that are not in rags, so there's a trip to Target in my immediate future.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what millions of unpaid caregivers do in America every day--the privileged ones, that is, who are not actually bound by economic necessity to punch a time clock five days a week. Many tens of millions more unpaid caregivers do all this, more or less, and punch a time clock. For those in the salaried work force, it's called "juggling"--as if all this were some kind of fun circus ball to play with. For those of us who do it full time, it's called "not working"--and someday our Social Security checks will record this period of our lives as "out of the labor force." None of the work we do will be counted as part of the Gross Domestic Product--even though it would certainly count as labor if somebody else, say a child-care provider, were doing it. Nor will this work qualify us for any kind of tax credit. It's just--poof!--not there. Nonexistent, in the eyes of the government and Wall Street and the whole academic army of economists out there.

If it strikes you that this maybe is not really fair, check out this website, and also this one, and do a little reading. And then maybe write a letter or two or three. And happy belated Mother's Day to us all.

Empathy, Schmpathy

So I'm driving Suzanne to school this morning and my mood is not happy. I've had a fight with my sister (via e-mail, of course) and now, in the aftermath, I'm doing what people tend to do when it comes to internecine family warfare--i.e., imaging the conversation going differently, coming up with some devastating, lay-'er-flat line, wishing that just for ONCE we could communicate, just generally feeling aggrieved and hurt. My bad vibes are filling up the car. From the back seat, Suzanne says, "Mommy, did I do anything to make you sad?"

"No," I reply bitterly. "I have somebody else taking care of that for me, thanks."

A short silence.

"Mom, did you say that to be funny?"

"No, not really."

"Because it was."

Bribery 101

So we are officially Moved, as in all the boxes are unpacked and we are now back into the Random Stuff Accumulation Mode that passes for normal life, and one of the things we have accumulated around here is new friends for the kids. Suzanne (7) has adopted, or been adopted by, a posse of little boys who live in or near our cul de sac, and they now spend their afternoons whizzing around on their bikes so fast I can't keep track of them.

Which is no doubt why last week she and two of the little boys were upstairs in Rebecca's bedroom without permission. As I later reconstructed the crime scene, Suzanne was looking for something behind Rebecca's bed and as she was squeezing in between the bed and the wall she accidentally yanked the curtains down with her, in the process pulling the curtain rod off the wall. Thinking fast, she then spotted the little net bag where Rebecca had been stashing her allowance and pilfered it for $1 to pay off the witnesses. Because, really, when you're going to bribe somebody, why use your own money? It's just so wasteful.

And here's how kids are different. Rebecca (11) was OUTRAGED and SHOCKED that Suzanne had gone into her room WITHOUT PERMISSION, which, even had she asked, Rebecca wouldn't have granted in a MILLION YEARS, because little sisters are so ANNOYING. The fact that her little sister was using her allowance for hush money--that aspect of the crime blew right past her. Whereas for Suzanne, the idea and the execution took about two nanoseconds. Which just goes to show: great criminal minds are born, not made.

Only in First Grade is a Rash a Social Asset

Bad weekend around here: my 7-yea-old, Suzanne, was walking around with a hollow cough that made her sound like Tallulah Bankhead after a weekend bender, so it was off to the doctor and then to the drugstore for a round of antibiotics. On Friday night (these things always happen on weekends) she sprouted a weird, vividly red rash on her butt. Thinking she is having an allergic reaction to the amoxycillin, I call the on-call physician, who says yeah, that's probably what it is, and prescribes a new antibiotic.....which we forgot to get on Saturday, since by then she was already feeling better.

Then, on Sunday, the rash spreads, she develops a wicked earache and my husband and I look at each other and go, Hey, why didn't you go pick up that prescription?? Because, of course, the only way to deal with something like this is to immediately blame your spouse. Anyway, back to the store, new antibiotic, but the rash persists. So yesterday, once again, we are hauling up the road to the pediatrician. This time, the doctor looks at Suzanne's butt and says, "Well, her ear is already better and I can't hear anything in her chest."

"So what about the rash?" I say.

"Don't know what it is," the doctor says. "But it's getting better, so don't worry about it. Sometimes we never figure these things out." And she ruled out lethal staph infections and ringworm and bedbugs.

Back in the car, headed this time to school, Suzanne sighs happily. "I can't wait to get to class!" she says. "When I tell everybody all about my rash I am going to be soooo popular!"

Check, and Mate

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!

Show Me The Blood

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.

What Would Normal Look Like/ Part Deux

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.

What Would Normal Look Like?

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.

Best Christmas Gift Ever

It's Christmas Eve, the kids are in bed, and David and I are about 45 minutes from collapse ourselves...but for some reason tonight I was thinking about a Christmas that happened when I was somewhere between eight and 11, on the cusp between childhood and adolescence.

My mom was big on Santa Claus. At Christmas she did all kinds of things to encourage our belief in him: she would ring bells in the hall outside our doors on Christmas Eve to convince us the elves were there; she talked to Santa on the phone; she helped us write letters to Santa; she encouraged us to look at a map of North America and figure out his progress over the course of Christmas Eve (since of course he came straight to our neighborhood; how he made it everywhere else was not an issue I bothered much about). One memorable year, she even got some boots, rubbed the soles in ashes from the fireplace, and made ashy footprints all over the carpet in the living room as proof that Santa had indeed come down the chimney.

Some people may say that this was a dangerous thing, that no parent should have gone to such lengths to perpetrate a myth, that when the truth came out the child would be disappointed and angry. Not true, at least not for me. At some point, of course, I figured out there was no Santa, and I was disappointed. But mostly I was impressed with the lengths my mom had gone to while the magic had lasted.

The Christmas I'm speaking of happened one year when I had pretty much reached the conclusion there was no Santa, but I had not actually said so out loud. I wanted there to be a Santa so much that giving him up was painful, and I enjoyed the mystery. On this particular Christmas Eve, I remember sitting with my mother on my parents' bed in their darkened bedroom, looking out the window over the neighborhood, and "seeing" Santa visit all the other houses.  I saw him  go to Jimmy Blacks' house, and Brenda Culverson's house, and Jimmy and Leanne  Pitts' house,  and then to my grandparents' house next door.  And then he flew away--because, my mother suggested, he realized I was at the window watching him. He would be back later, after I was asleep. I wasn't seeing anything, of course, but the pretense was magical. And it was a moment we shared, just the two of us.

The next year I was too old for such nonsense, and for years after that I thought of that incident as just an example of my mom's silly side. I think I had to become a mother myself to truly appreciate what she did for me that night. My mother never went to college; she was orphaned during the Depression and I am reasonably sure that there was never a moment in her own childhood when she enjoyed a similar moment of magic. Her childhood was so deprived that at one point she and her sister ate out of garbage cans to stay alive. But somehow this woman who had been given so little in life found a piece of imagination and creativity to pass along to me, along with the unspoken message that imagination and creativity were qualities that could create new realities in a humdrum world. It was a kind of faith that there was a reality beyond what our senses can tell us. Where she got this insight I do not know, but she gave it to me, and it's a gift I'll never forget.

Merry Christmas, all you moms out there.

And Why Should You Escape?

So today we are sending out the last of the Christmas cards, some of them with a letter enclosed, and it occurred to me that all four or five of my readers out there might be interested in our Yearly Recap, too. Hell, it took  me a WHOLE DAY to write:

At this house, our motto for Christmas letters is “All the news that fits, we print,” but we still pledge to keep it relatively short. For 2007, this will be no problem because, frankly, there are a few stretches of 2007 you wouldn’t want to hear a lot about. 

The bad news first. Tracy underwent some ECT treatments last winter for a severe depressive episode and we’ll spare you the details because, actually, we don’t remember them. ECT is known for doing a number on one’s memory of recent events, so it’s been a year of surprises: outfits we don’t remember buying, e-mail correspondents we don’t remember having met… On the plus side, it also wiped out the memory of several really bad Disney movies, and it helped Tracy recover. ECT is very effective that way—but then, amputation is effective on gangrene, too, and there are good reasons why neither treatment has ever really caught on. Still, while humans can’t sprout grow new limbs, they can and do grow new brain cells. It was a long haul, but we are pleased to report that things are now back to what passes for normal around here. Work-wise, Tracy has several projects going: you’ll see her in the Civil War Times soon, she’s working on something for the NYU Law Journal which will involve traveling to The Hague to interview an eminent judge who sits on the World Court, the paperback edition of her book came out this summer, and there may be another book idea out there somewhere. Life goes on.

In extraterrestrial news, David’s working on a NASA project that would, if funded by the Powers that Be, map the universe’s distribution of Dark Energy. What is Dark Energy? you ask, to which the brightest minds at NASA would answer: We dunno. All scientists know is that it is a mysterious force which accounts for about 25 percent of the energy in the universe, and it is, like, totally awesome, dude: it sends stars careening around galaxies, it can bend space and time, and it keeps that donkey kid in back of you kicking your seat for the entire duration of a trans-Atlantic flight. The official name for the project is ADEPT (Advanced Dark Energy Physics Telescope), but around here we just call it The Map of Where Is, Is. 

On the kid front: Rebecca is now 11, making her officially a ‘Tween, and so we have been introduced to the Great Big Honkin’ Attitude years. Not that Rebecca has ever lacked an Attitude, but up to now she had not brought it to bear on clothing. All that changed when she and Tracy went shopping for back-to-school clothes this year, and Tracy’s idea of fashion (subdued things with interchangeable components) fell victim to Rebecca’s fashion vision (spangles, sparkles, sequins and drapey things cut on the bias, all in hues unknown to nature).  Compared to this kid, Porter Waggoner would have looked like a funeral director. Well, okay, maybe that’s exaggerating a bit, but still: you see the potential for conflict. Rebecca is also deeply into the Cat Warriors books, and can diagram all the cat clans and interconnections thereof for anybody who displays the faintest interest, as well as for lots of people who don’t. (Our advice: don’t.) She has also caught the Horse Virus from her Aunt Nonny, and as any parent knows, “adolescent girl” + “horse” = “second mortgage,” so thanks a lot, sis. Rebecca takes riding lessons once a week at a nearby stable, where, besides learning how to ride, she is also learning to work with an implement known as a “pitchfork.” Our hope is that not only will she learn some horsemanship but that her expertise may someday transfer to using implements known as a “yard rake,” a “mop” and a “broom.”

Suzanne started first grade this year and has already won two professions of love from little boys in her class, which puts her one up on mommy at the same age. But then, Suzanne has these adorable freckles, which gives her an unfair advantage. She is a bundle of spontaneous bursts of enthusiasm (told for the fourth time to get out of the bathtub one night, she replied, “Okay, Mommy, but first I have to DO THE WET NAKED DANCE YEAH! YEAH! YEAH! BABY!!”—and there went another 10 minutes) and non-stop creative energy. At home, this means piles of paper, markers, paint, clay and other art projects in various stages of completion all over the place. At school, this recently resulted in a phone call from the vice principal informing Tracy that Suzanne and an unnamed male co-conspirator had been thwarted in their plan to tie each other up during recess. Suzanne has been banned from even touching a jump rope until after the first of the year; fortunately, the school supply list does not include "whips" or "chains." Otherwise, she keeps us busy with Inscrutable Questions (“Who invented broccoli?” and “How dark is pink?”are a sample) and creative manglings of common expressions (notably, “Fruit of the Loo,” which Tracy is thinking of marketing in the U.K. as a new brand of toilet paper).

No exotic vacations this year; we spent ours this summer a whole 100 miles from the house, at a mountain cabin in the Shenandoah Valley, where we went to a county fair (lots of fun, and who knew pigs could be so squeaky clean?), spent the day at a water park, did a bit of hiking (which prompted another Inscrutable Question, this from Rebecca: “Why is the Appalachian Trail so steep?”), and learned that a tiny little mountain chalet is way too small for three high-maintenance females and one outnumbered husband/father about two millimeters from the end of his rope. The kids had a blast; Tracy and David survived.

So that’s the year. And now that we think about it, it hasn’t been dull at all. Really: how many people get to map the universe? Or get paid for putting words on paper, for pete’s sake? So, as usual, once we look at the big picture we realize the good vastly outweighs the bad, and that goes triple since the recent pathology report came back marked "benign." (See previous posts.) Compared to 99 percent of the world, we are filthy rich; by any measure, we are incredibly blessed. We hope this finds all of you similarly situated. Merry Christmas.