things we're all too young to know

Lately I’ve felt annoyed with Beatrice. This isn't exactly remarkable, I know, because kids are annoying. But Beatrice has many social gifts, and she plays some important roles in our family, and even though she is five years old, Mama-Annoyer normally isn’t one of them. She definitely grates on her siblings at times with her carelessness and quick tears. She has a willfulness that shines hard and bright when it is time to get dressed; the logic of her fashion sensibility is discernible only to her and her adherence to it is completely unbending. She is fixated on sweets in a way that can come off as borderline pathological. She would like to get her way 100% of the time and protests when she doesn’t by draping herself over a chair and whining.

But all of these things seem par for the preschool course, and like I said, her social gifts are such that mini-conflicts that arise around them are typically quickly resolved. For example: when I collapse on her floor, belly up, cushioned by the mat of interlocking brightly colored alphabet letters that I have tried in vain to remove and replace with a more tasteful rug, staring up at the ceiling and groaning about her INSANE INSISTENCE on the SAME DIRTY PAIR OF LEGGINGS with a HOLE in the KNEE, LORD, Beatrice, WHY oh WHY do we do this every morning? We HAVE to find a better way to get dressed!!! Or, more recently, It is 90 DEGREES OUT TODAY and you want to wear a SWEATER and you HATE being hot and when I pick you up you will complain and look at me like it’s MY fault that your cheeks are SO HOT and your head is SO SWEATY but YOU ARE THE ONE WHO WANTS TO DRESS FOR JANUARY IN MAY. 

And while I rant she stands over me in her mint green underwear with pink edging, the cotton little girl kind with a waistband that hits around her belly button and fits like a sweet 1950s bathing suit bottom, a baby Marilyn Monroe with a slight slouch, her shoulder blades poking out like wings behind her and her hair a tangle, flashing her blue eyes sympathetically down at her wreck of a mother on the floor. 

Mama, I know. I hate getting dressed too. It’s okay that they’re dirty. Just let me wear the pants.

Beatrice can be very persuasive, and in these moments she looks and behaves eminently more reasonable that I do. I just have to smile. Or not - sometimes I’m past the point of regaining my balance and continue my lunatic mother routine and say FINE FINE, WEAR THE PANTS and inside-out them and help shove her long feet into each leg, making a mental note of the dirty ragged toenails, tonight I must cut them tonight and also when did she last have a bath? and also is it so bad to have infrequent baths? and then I’m brushing her teeth and she’s dancing in a goofball way while I do and making me smile and making herself laugh with toothpaste foam leaking out the sides of her mouth and by then I’ve already forgotten the moment of unhinged irritation on the floor five minutes ago.

But lately, I have a hard time shaking it off. And she has a hard time refraining from whining. 

I listened to Annette Benning on Fresh Air the other day. She was talking about a clip Terry played from a movie in which she played a single mom raising her teenage son. After he makes a scary mistake, her character grills him, asking him why he did something so dumb. The son turns it back on her, saying well, why are you smoking yourself to death? Why don’t you care that you’re sad and lonely?

She replies something to the effect of you’re not allowed to say that to me.

In the interview Annette Benning laughed and said, that was the best the character could do in that moment. That was simply all she had. Just a tiny shred more than nothing. She was basically parenting on empty.

And that’s how I feel with Bea sometimes. She’ll respond to a request or refusal from me with the beginning of a tantrum or a whine, or some piece of typical illogical pissed off five year old truth, and I’ll just stare back at her blankly.

What do I do now again? What am I supposed to say? Could someone please hand me the script? I seem to have forgotten my lines.

Or worse, I’ll say something that I know is useless. Such as Beatrice, if you can’t stop that right now you’ll have to have a time out upstairs!

Then she stares back at me momentarily, dumbfounded, before the hysterics ramp up even more.

Whoops. Wrong line. 

I’m parenting on empty. I’m texting and emailing and chatting with other parents at drop off and with the grocery store checker and the woman from PPL and the bank teller on empty. I forget my lines all the time. Or I have to think really hard to remember what they are.

How am I…? What does one say in response to that again? Terrible, sad, tired, disoriented, distractible? No, no, no. 

It’s fine. You say I’m fine, thanks. How are you? 

Part of why Beatrice has been hard is that she is the child most attached to me, most dependent on my emotional state to stabilize her own. We’re really in this together. It’s that old tiresome thing - when things in your life are really hard, and you need your kids to step up and just be good please, they fall apart. Your stress eats away at their own sense of balance, but they can't tell you that. Instead they miss the toilet, or cry wildly because they can't have a toy in line at the store, or refuse to put on their shoes, or pick a fight with you about your appalling arrival time at school.

Two nights ago, I was with Beatrice on the floor of my bedroom for her bedtime routine. She's taken to leaping from my bed onto her mattress which is situated on the floor below, then clambering up the side of my bed and doing it again, and again, while I sing songs and say prayers.

This bothers me. It can't possibly prepare a child for restful sleep. When it's time to count to ten in French while stroking her forehead (don't ask how this step in the routine developed) and adminstering three "sprinkle dusties" I insist she get under the covers. I say things like it's time to relax your body, and she says things like well I can't.

Fair enough. We do our best. Then I stay with her for a few moments. This started immediately after Mike died, when she felt afraid to fall asleep. I would sit with her, holding her hands and murmuring various mantras of my own devising about being safe and loved until she fell asleep. Now this time in our routine has no soporific effect at all; Beatrice just braces herself throughout the quiet moments for when I will get up to leave, at which point she clings to me and begs for another hug.

So. This night I got onto her toddler-sized mattress and wrapped my arms around her and waited to relax, and let go of the irritation, which indeed thankfully happened. I felt her body relax too. I felt quiet and sleepy and so in rushed thoughts of my husband. Mike, Mike, this girl of ours! Mike, how will we get through this without you? Mike, I'm worried I'm messing them up. Oh Mike. 

Suddenly Beatrice pulled her head back and looked at me, hard. 

Mama. You're going to start crying.

I guess I am. How did you know?

You started breathing like this - and she demonstrated a pattern of inhales and breath holding. 

The girl knows before I do.

I guess you're right, Bea. I was about to cry. I'm just thinking about your Papa.

I know.

*          *          *          *          *

About a year ago someone stole the antenna off our car. For some reason I feel incapable of doing anything about it. The radio comes in very crackly and is often impossible to listen to. Normally when I drive I turn to the soothing sounds of NPR, and that habit is so deep that I have learned to tolerate quite a bit of crackle in order to maintain it. So much crackle that if you asked me, at times I couldn't even tell you what show I was listening to. I just keep hoping the reception will miraculously improve.

But when I was in Annapolis cleaning out our house, I found a big box of CDs and pulled a few out to take home with me. One was the 69 Love Songs box set, and I loaded all three into the car stereo. So now instead of crackle I listen to Stephen Merritt sing love songs in the car. 

And all of them - at least the ones he sings - are for me. And Mike. In the spirit of:

I should have forgotten you long ago
but you're in every song I know

It could be a memory of hearing the song with Mike, or the sentiment, or the humor. It feels like Mr. Merritt is in the car with me, offering various stylized ways to express my sorrow in his marvelous bass voice.

Why would I stop loving you 

a hundred years from now?

It's only time. 

Marry me. 

It made me think about the night Mike and I were lying in bed, talking about the possibility of my remarrying. I don't want to, I said, because I already have a husband. And Mike said but when I die, you won't anymore.

It was utterly shocking. Why would his death alter the fact that he's my husband? But then we both remembered the words we said to each other. Until we are parted by death. When one of you dies, the marriage ends. How bizarre. How impossible.

So I drive around and cry. I remember a Magentic Fields show in New York in summer with Mike. I ordered a bloody mary and the bartender made a joke about it not being breakfast time. I asked him to please make it spicy and told him he should try one right now, at night, because it was delicious. We heard Stephen Merritt sing Book of Love accapella, and the room felt very still and dark, and I leaned lightly against Mike's shoulder and chest just behind me, and could feel he was less moved than I. No matter; it felt good to be in that time and place together.  

My minivan failed inspection this morning. I'd like to ignore the busted rear brake pads. I'd like to drive around in a failed car, parenting on empty, crying, listening to Papa was a Rodeo over and over with the kittens mewing along in the backseat and the children begging me to turn this weird music off already while we head off into the blazing sunset.

Well. I'll probably fix the brake pads. But the rest will happen this summer. By August they might be singing along.