tub talk, part two

When I posted about getting in the bathtub with Frances, I was trying to work out why exactly it was the right thing for us to do. So many threads came together last night: thoughts on intimacy and relationship, physical boundaries, and parent-child closeness as a child grows up. I fear it was a bit of a tangle by the end.

I didn't stop thinking about it after I published that post. The physical closeness I extolled is indeed essential - though every child and every parent is different, and the ways that closeness can be expressed are endless - but I don't think getting into the tub with Frances was actually about that. 

It can be hard for my daughter to rest easy in another's affections. It's as if she doesn't quite believe us; she can't comfortably accept the bottomless nature of our love for her. So sometimes she can be grabby with my body, demanding a hug or pulling on my hands insistently. Sometimes she rejects expressions of affection, or denies their veracity. It makes my heart hurt.

When she asked me to get in the tub, she was asking for reassurance. She was asking for a gesture that might help her believe in my unconditional love. Something that would communicate that I will never leave her, and I will never stop loving her - even if she's naughty or greedy or impolite.

Snuggling up with a book, talking about birds, and crafting together hopefully help soothe her uneasiness too. But this bath thing - during which we hardly touched at all - helped on an entirely different level. She was downright peaceful afterwards, and bedtime was unbearably sweet.

Maybe that's why it was hard for me to imagine the same scenario with Gabriel - I don't think he'd ask, because he doesn't seem to need that kind of reassurance in the same way. He's a different kid. And even though we haven't talked with our children about why locker rooms are segregated by sex, and why Frances can change clothes with her girl friends but not her boy friends, they know that that's the case all the same. I can't imagine Frances asking Mike to get into the tub with her - because she intuits that that's not appropriate. That said, I do believe now is a good time to have those conversations, and help them understand why the world is organized as it is.

As ever, thank you dear patient readers for hanging with me as I try to make sense of these everyday mysteries. I'm wishing all of you just the right balance of independence and intimacy in your lives today.

On a different note, is anyone having trouble posting comments? If so, I'm sorry about that. Hopefully the problem will be resolved soon.

getting in the tub

Long ago, I took a year's leave from graduate school to live in a persistently rainy yet charming university town in Belgium. Mike had a Fulbright to study and write his dissertation there. I took a couple of classes at the university, interned in Brussels, rode my bike to the gym every day, developed a love of Trappist beers, and read lots and lots of books. So many books. One was a collection of short stories by Michael Chabon called Werewolves in Their Youth. In one story, a divorced man's four year old daughter asks him to get in the bathtub with her.

But it's complicated. He is haunted by memories of his own sexual desire for a four year old little girl he babysat when he was thirteen years old, and he happens to have grown up to become a psychologist who makes claims to know all about how to raise kids.

Frances asked me to get in the bathtub with her on Friday night. She looked at me with a hesitant smile that suggested she wasn't sure if what she was asking was allowed, but she would very much like to do it anyway. We'd had some moments of classic Frances-Mama tension that evening, the sort during which I feel as if I am reading from a script, strangely helpless to improvise my way out of a scene that I know is going nowhere good. Our relational bad habits can be so hard to resist.

With romantic partners, sex can be the perfect way to reset - to confound the mechanics of a bad pattern. When you live with someone, all kinds of muck inevitably accumulates between you, gumming up the works. While words can and often do serve to clear it all away - so that you can really see each other again and remember how much you love each other - it sure is nice to have other avenues of expression to arrive at that sense of clarity. Physical intimacy is a way of communicating before words, around words, in the spaces between words. You allow yourself to be vulnerable; you allow the other person the same.

But, as that Michael Chabon character was painfully aware, sex is just not okay with kids. Yet physical closeness seems essential between parents and children and can work in a similar way, sweeping the avenues between us clear to make space for affection to move freely again. It is extra important for young children, for whom the limitations of language and self-understanding can be especially frustrating.

Frances and Gabriel can't keep their hands off one another. They like to spend long stretches of time rolling around, making the sorts of ridiculous noises that only siblings really understand, pushing the limits until someone gets a foot in the face and starts crying. Then a few minutes later they're right back to wrestling on the couch. (The picture above is of Frances's feet with Gabriel leaning over them, inside a fort this morning). It's like they're sealing the deal over and over: you're mine and I'm yours. Just where exactly you end and I begin is mysterious, so we'd better keep rolling around until we figure it out.

But you can't quite wrestle like that with your parents. The nature of the relationship is so different. When Frances asked me to come in the bathtub with her, she was asking me to be vulnerable with her. To trust her, to come into her space. To be naked! She was asking me to affirm my love by eschewing some of our regular boundaries and norms.

So I did it. I washed her, and washed myself, and answered her questions about our bodies' differences without giggling too much. It's one thing to get dressed in front of my kids; it's another thing entirely to sit naked in a lukewarm bathtub together. When I rose to step out and toweled off, she looked up at me with her eyes sparkling and said, Mama, that was so fun to take a bath with you.

Was it? I don't know if I would characterize it as fun. Intimate, yes. Stretching the limits of my comfort zone in order to give her some reassurance, yes. But my body used to be her home, after all. After she was born, it basically still was. As she grows up and leaves babyhood farther and farther behind, both of us have to negotiate the growing physical boundaries between us without losing our physical closeness, with its power to heal whatever hurts we rack up in daily life. (Maybe its power to connect Frances back to the safety and simplicity of being a babe in my arms, too.) It's not always easy.

Being naked with bigger kids makes adults squeamish, all the moreso when the child is of the opposite sex.  Who knows how I would react if Gabriel wanted to take a bath with me at age six? I'm not sure why, but I might respond differently. Are we parents afraid of what we might do, some psychic hurt we might inflict without knowing it? Yet I suspect withholding our bodies from our children when they are longing for physical closeness is a potentially more damaging position to assume.

Maybe getting in the tub is about sharing myself without being afraid. Maybe it's modeling vulnerability. Physical closeness with children can facilitate integration - we can accept all the parts of them with gestures that speak more resoundingly than words. You can be loud, or mad, or wild, or crying for no reason or drawing the same picture over and over all afternoon. A gentle touch can say so much: you can be all those things. You can feel all those feelings. You will still be you - a person I love unceasingly, unconditionally. I would like my children to know that deep down, in their soft skin and growing muscles, neural pathways and pliable bones. Because what we know in our bodies counts for a lot. 

pretty good kids

I guess I'll keep them. As far as kids go, I guess they're pretty great.

I've been sick for about two weeks with a strange antibiotic-resistant sinus infection. I've been run down and achey, popping ibuprofen every five hours and marshaling my energy reserves for the most essential tasks. When I've been able to, I've rested. I'm not much of a rester, so it hasn't been easy (though more episodes of Glee than I care to count and lots of historical fiction have taken the edge off).

Time was, the children found it unbearable if I stretched out on the couch and cracked a book in their presence. But on Saturday afternoon, I stretched out on one leg of the L-shaped couch with the New Yorker, and slowly but surely the kids found their way to me. I braced myself for complaints of intolerable thirst, or pleas for drawing pictures together, or pretend kittens pawing at my feet. But no! One at a time, they quietly found books of their own and climbed up on the other half of the couch next to me. How companionable and quiet we were! There was nary a complaint, nary a request - simply communal absorption in our reading materials. Gabriel studied his horse book, Frances her bird book, I the tale of a whistle blower at the NSA. Occasionally someone would look up and share something of interest, then nestle back in to the pillows to read a bit more.

Later that evening we went to the home of one of Mike's colleague's for dinner. The hosts are a lovely couple, older and childless with a beautiful, clean home and the most impressive, orderly floor-to-ceiling bookshelves I've ever seen. Another older couple whose children are grown also joined us. I was a bit nervous about how the kids would do in this decidedly adult atmosphere, but they took to it like fish to water. They swam about, basking in the attentions of so many grown ups, and conducted themselves fabulously. Looking through everyone else's eyes they seemed, as my dad would say, like a couple of real neat kids. They looked beautiful in the evening light, were relatively kind to each other, and remembered to say thank you.

As the darkness fell around us on the back deck, and everyone sat chatting and waiting for dessert, Gabriel climbed into my lap and rested his head against my shoulder. All the adults were sharing pet stories, and some of them included sickness and death. Gabriel looked up and asked me how dogs die. Also, where do they die? What happens to them? I answered as best I could. He fell silent, and then looked up at me, pinching his neck with both hands as he does whenever his anxiety level is on the rise, and asked very seriously: do people die?

Yes.

But do they grow up again, after they die?

No.

Then he wept. I told him that everything that lives, dies. I told him that maybe we live again in a different way, but we don't know much about it. I told him how the plants in the garden die in the winter, and come back green in the spring.

But will it be spring again?

We were right there at the table, surrounded by such kind people, some of whose ears must have tuned into our private conversation. I could not stop from crying myself, and I didn't mind if anyone saw. I cried for my boy, for the deep sadness shaking him while he sat in my arms. And I cried for everyone I love who has died, and for my own mortality, and more than anything for my children's mortality. I held his head close, and stroked his back, trying - futilely - to protect him from a new awareness that caused him, and will continue to cause him, terrible grief.

I haven't really stopped crying since it happened. Truth be told, I'm not quite ready to write about it. Ah well!

And then what happened? He gave a little shake, sat up a bit, and asked everyone present, Will the dessert be very sweet?

Nice segue, I thought. So nice that I'm going to try it myself, just in case you, too, find a three year old's dawning awareness of death a bit much to bear.

Let's talk about granola, shall we?

A painful symbol of my persistent sickness has been the empty granola jar sitting on its kitchen shelf. We are hooked on this granola, friends. Not a week goes by - normally - when I don't make a batch. I have tweaked it to just the right combination of sweet, nutty, toasty, and a wee bit salty. My simple version started here, and that version began in this excellent cookbook. (If you'd like my recipe - let me know and I'll post later. I'm afraid this post is long enough as it is!)

On Sunday morning, I woke up healthier. Finally. By 7 am a new batch of granola was cooling on the stovetop. I filled the jar. All was right with the world. I went to church, and still reeling from the talk with Gabriel, in between episodes of fighting back tears, I sang It Is Well With My Soul. Oh, dear readers! The body heals itself, grace is real, and sometimes, on a good day, I do believe, it truly will be spring again.

big girl

For the past five years, 10 months and 16 days of my life, excepting that scant handful of mornings in which I have woken up somewhere far from my children, I have had no need of an alarm clock. At least one kid is up and running most days by 7 am. And on the few occasions that someone has slept til 7:30, or even 7:45, I have savored the freakish quiet. If a child in my house is able to get the rest he or she needs, it is something to celebrate, not interrupt. I mean, come on. Never wake a sleeping baby! 

But Frances is no longer a baby, and she was sound asleep this morning at 8 o'clock. (It's no wonder, since her parents allowed her to stay up way too late and eat way too many cookies the night before). Tuesday is a school day, after all, and so I found myself sitting on the edge of her bed, looking down at her still, pale countenance - lips parted, hair fanned out on the pillow. I shook her gently. She woke with a start, grabbing my hand at her shoulder, looking at me with wide, scared eyes. 

It's just me. It's Mama, just Mama, I whispered.

She closed her eyes and reached out to me for a hug, murmuring, I love you Mama. 

Oh! It's not often that she is able to express that kind of easy affection. I leaned down to hug her and told her that it was time to get ready for school. She told me I was mistaken, and that she needed to go back to sleep. Later, at the table, balancing her spoon on a finger and looking down blankly into her oatmeal, she suggested I call the school and tell them she had died and would not be coming in today. Then she could go back to bed, you see.

Her reluctance to go to school continued. She refused to get dressed, so I cornered her and slipped her pajama top off with a sudden jerk. Frances yelped and held her hand over her mouth, then carefully spit out the tiniest baby tooth imaginable. When Gabriel saw the strange bloody tooth he suggested the best thing to do would be to put it in the trash. As if. Right now it's under Frances's pillow, waiting for the tooth fairy to come. Her second baby tooth!

She's a big girl alright, wishing she could crawl back into bed and spitting out baby teeth in between getting dressed and finishing her homework. All of this I can pretty much embrace with humor and acceptance, but the moment we had later when I dropped her off at school made me want to scoop her up in my arms and run back to the safety of little girl play dough and story books at home.

When we arrived at school, she put a hand on the car door, and hesitated. Her other hand flew up and felt the back of her head. I could hear the tears moving up into her voice. 

Mama. Mama! You didn't put my hair in a ponytail! I need a ponytail everyday, I've told you that so many times! You have to put one in right now!

Ah. In 30 seconds she will be officially Late to School, plus the ponytail obsession bugs me because it forecloses on other adorable hairdo possibilities that her newly-long golden brown locks suggest to me in whispers all the time, and I don't have a rubber band on me anyway. Why does she need a ponytail everyday? Is it really worth crying over?

Nobody likes me when I don't have a ponytail. 

What?

Everybody at school hates me if I don't wear a ponytail! 

I pull into a space and get out of the car. I look her in the eye and tell her that that isn't true (how do I know?) and that she needs to go to school now before it gets any later. (How did ponytails and being liked get tethered together in her five year old mind?) She is standing now at the chain link fence, refusing to budge, repeating those awful words, but more stark and terrible now: Everybody at school hates me.

I felt like crying, and like shaking her, and like taking her home and calling the school to tell them that Frances had died and would not be coming in today. If only growing up was simply about the joy of acquiring new capabilities: reaching the light switch, buttoning your own shirt, learning to swim. If only we could somehow skip the part that hurts - or at the very least swoop down to lift our children up when we see a painful episode approach! We recognize the pain of childhood because we've been there before - yet we can't do a thing to protect our children from feeling it too. How frustrating. All we can offer is our presence, and the kind of love that shines regardless of hairdo. 

Frances, I don't know exactly how the details of your inner and outer realities have combined to make you feel so bad about school. But I do know this: everybody at home loves you. Always. 

the little things

As my long, NPR-laden commute drew to a close this evening, I turned onto our street, passing a mother pushing a brilliant green stroller. I pulled into our driveway just ahead of her. As I opened the car door I heard screams of delight and saw Frances dart around the side of the house and hide behind a tree in the front yard. Our friends Katie and Chester, who often walk by our house in the evening, had clearly been roped into the game and were running across the yard in different directions. As I slowly approached, I saw Gabriel, no longer able to bear the suspense, come out of his hiding spot and run into Katie's legs, making his scary face and yelling ARGH!

It was a zany free for all, loosely organized around piracy and hide-and-seek. There was Mike, who for the past week has been held captive by the grueling end-of-semester rituals at St. John's. (He's back there now, as I write, for the Enabling Meeting. Sounds weighty, doesn't it?) What a pleasure to see him really play. There were the kids, operating under totally different rules, but the pirate talk somehow united them. There were Katie and Chester, the world's best neighbors. I saw it all through the eyes of that mother pushing her baby slowly by, and it looked so inviting.

On the drive home, I had half-listened to All Things Considered and half-contemplated the fresh (yet familiar) muddle I seem to have wandered into of late. Questions about what I am called to do professionally have been elbowing their way back through all the concerns that normally mill about relatively peacefully in my mind, reclaiming center stage. Goals? Long term plans? Got me. All is muddle.

But I took a walk and talked about it with my dear colleague Monique in Baltimore this afternoon. And then I saw my family and friends playing, loose and comfortable in their bodies, golden in the spring sunshine. And when I opened the refrigerator door to consider dinner possibilities, oh my goodness it got even better - there was a cold beer in there with my name on it. And on and on it went, until after bath time, when I suggested to the children that we sing instead of speak everything for the rest of the night.

You mean even when we're reading Farmer Boy?

Oh  yes, I told Frances. And then I sang about Almanzo and his farm chores to the tunes of Little Richard songs as I toweled her off. The girl thought it was hilarious. Fall on the floor funny. Gabriel, already in his Spiderman pajamas, was a little wary. He stood with a frozen smile on his face staring at us. I couldn't stop singing because Frances couldn't stop laughing. I finally crossed the line when I waxed poetic about milking to the tune of the Star Spangled Banner, and the kids (rather than me, for a change) firmly brought the silliness to an end.

So, you know, I think it'll be just fine. Mike will come back to us in just a few short days, the spring will give way to summer, and I will keep putting one foot in front of the other, even when the way  forward isn't perfectly clear. I can get so wrapped up in the forest sometimes that I risk missing the trees with their delicately-veined leaves and feathered inhabitants, their graceful branches and thick trunks dotted with strange and exotic fungi. 

It's nice to live with people who are attuned to the little things that, strung together, make a chain of meaning that quietly winds it way through our days. Here they are, admiring two tiny earthworms found in the garden.

silver bells and cockle shells

Aren’t we lucky to be living in this extraordinary pro-garden moment? We are riding the triumphant wave alongside countless other families who also delight in seedlings pushing their way through backyard soil and proudly share the tomato bounty with neighbors. But I must tell you: organic gardening is way harder than one is given to believe. (Especially if your expectations are drawn from photos of Michelle Obama gracefully pulling feathery fennel from the abundant White House lawn.) Are we supposed to arrange the beds north-south? Or is it east-west? Rotate crops every year, or every other? Pair the marigolds with the beans, or was that basil? And which bugs are the good kind, anyway?

Without Mike’s obsessive care, our gardens would never flourish. And even with his daily attentions, so much can go wrong. Blight, beetles, a determined deer. An active toddler tramping about with heavy feet, oblivious to the distinction between garden beds and garden paths. When my kids were babies, I didn’t have it in me. It wasn't just the work and attention required. There simply wasn't room in my heart, mind, or body for more vulnerable creatures that needed constant attention.

Creating a garden takes creative energy, determination, and a willingness to suffer - because loss is inevitable. A strange fungus has already taken hold of the basil that bloomed with such glowing health just a few weeks ago on the windowsill. Once you transplant those seedlings, letting them put down roots in a world of variable weather and hungry bugs, anything can happen.

This is the first growing season that I've truly cared about our seedlings and the first I've been aware of the zen-like detachment required to nurture a garden. Rather than keeping my children out of the garden, I am finally able to invite them into it. They're big enough now to share my newfound and decidedly un-zen-like attachment to plants.When Gabriel and I planted the pea seeds, he carefully covered each and every one of them up with a dirt blanket and wished them a happy nap. Now that they have woken up and are stretching upwards, his tender paternal feelings towards them have not dimmed a bit.

Plus there are all those excellent garden accoutrements to attract the kids: trowels, garden gloves, the kid-sized rake and shovel. And if the garden doesn’t appeal, they can play on their own somewhere else in the backyard. How novel, how amazing! Sometimes I squat down and weed, or simply contemplate the ruby-veined chard leaves, all by myself, without a child climbing up my back. For a few minutes, anyway.

The result is that I have the space and inclination to fantasize about gardening for the first time. This seems to be a theme developing - an awareness that I am able to put more creative energy into other pursuits, and consider things independently of how they relate to my children. It’s funny, because as I look around and realize with delight how much more my mind and body are my own these days, a part of me has been thinking more than ever about when the children were tiny babies. Remembering the physical intimacy that blurred boundaries unlike anything I’ve ever experienced: nursing a tiny golden babe, watching her peaceful face in profile, or falling asleep with a little one curled in the crook of my arm.

Isn’t change always like this? You can’t get a break. Just as I am leaving that time, and glorying in all the goodness waiting for me beyond it, a voice inside is absolutely yelping in protest. Don’t leave those babies behind!

But what can I do? Somehow over the course of many days and nights, inhabiting this strange temporal reality of very long (sometimes excruciatingly so) moments embedded within days that breeze by in a blur, so fast you can’t remember whether it is Monday or Tuesday or Friday already, my babies have become kids. Before too long, I’ll be marveling at my big teenagers who can do incredible things, and remembering them at age five with an ache of bittersweet longing in the pit of my stomach. Parenting is just so weird. You can’t wait for them to get bigger, and you can’t bear for them to change. Anyway you look at it, it hurts.

Or we could try taking a glass-half-full approach. Here goes: as our children grow, we grow and change with them. There are so many surprises waiting, and they are not only about who my kids will become. They're about the person I am becoming in relationship with them as they grow. I never knew I loved tending a garden before. For that matter, I never thought of myself as a writer. Without my kids taking so much of me, and then slowly giving it back - transformed - I could never have arrived at this place, luxuriating in an hour of writing time, gazing out the open door at a robin hopping about the flowering cat mint. Thanks, kiddos.        

to do lists are for the birds

I couldn't sleep last night. The duties of the week were all mixed up in my head, making for an awful insomniac stew: following up on an interview for an article on local immigration, bringing supplies for a Teacher Appreciation breakfast at Frances' school by 7:50 this morning, writing my yoga group to see if they still want to meet even though it will be Mother's Day on Sunday, emailing Doris because my vacation hours are screwed up at work, booking a flight to Iowa next month to welcome my new niece or nephew, shopping for the after-school cooking club on Thursday...etc.
 
I finally fell asleep, and when I woke up, all the items on my jumbled list remained undone. So I tried to do a little here and there, a stolen email while making breakfast, a note to myself scribbled before we pulled out of the driveway. After a morning of errands, I returned home with Gabriel feeling a bit low on energy yet privately plotting out the most efficient afternoon possible for myself. And can you believe it? The kid wanted some of my time and attention. Had he not gotten the memo about all those other big fish that needed frying?

So I made us lunch and we ate it outside in the treehouse, which is the platform at the top of the slide and a rather nice nook in our swing set. We were quiet. We listened to the birds talking and singing their sweet little birdie heads off and Gabriel suggested we pretend to be Eastern bluebirds in a nest, eating some beetles that happened to look like grapes. For the first time in hours, my mind emptied out and the spring breezes swept through. A clean house. I exhaled. Without that kid to slow me down, I might drive myself nuts.

We spotted so many birds from our quiet perch. At one point a cardinal fluttered onto a wire but a few yards away from us. I pointed him out, and just as Gabriel located him, he opened his bright orange beak and began to sing. Really sing, as in songbird-opera-style singing. Frances and I just studied her bird book together last night and talked about how much we'd like to learn bird calls so we could recognize the voices that wake us in the morning.

He was singing so lustily, I could not resist. I answered him. Gabriel looked at me with his big brown eyes widening in awe. 'Mama! You whistled like the cardinal!' I sure did. Here is the best part: he sang back. Then I whistled my imitation of him, and then he replied, and we went back and forth like that for a minute or two, each singing a few measures, before he flew off to the shelter of the big magnolia tree.

Friends! I had a conversation with a bird today. Maybe this happens to you all the time. But with the exception of an expressive cockatiel named Mabel that we had when I was five, I have never in all my life talked to a bird like that.

When Gabriel did some wacky trick to get my attention this morning, saying 'Mama, look at me,' I was able to understand it in a brand new way. Instead of my long-held take on that kind of thing (a universal megalomaniac cry of childhood reducible to ME ME ME!), I heard an invitation. I had been distracted, I had felt burnt. Gabriel danced in front of me, saying come out of yourself, Mama, and enter into relationship with me. Let's be together.

His mind is not hurtling itself towards a future filled with obligations, questions, and potentialities. He isn't busy anticipating all the things that come next. So when a child says look at me, sometimes what he or she is really saying is look with me. Look with my eyes, so you can see how amazing this tiny ant, this sticker, this cracker I have chewed into the shape of a horse really is. Look with my eyes, and hear with my ears. And maybe, just maybe, we might learn to sing a bird's song together.

p.s. I know these backyard bird pictures are impossibly hard to discern, but can any of you identify this little gray songstress? Black cap, black tail feathers, noisy as heck? Our bird books are coming up short.