fresh eyes

At my children's request, the kid clothesline came out again yesterday. This year, it is situated a little big higher. And both kids now possess the fine motor skills necessary to hang underwear and washcloths and socks up with clothespins, which is very satisfying.


As I knotted the rope to the deck, I remembered a distant post featuring smaller children hanging wet rags out to dry. So I checked, and in so doing, I discovered it has been almost exactly one year since I began this blog. Amelia got me started on September 21, 2009.

Friends! So many of you have traveled the past year with me on Homemade Time, and for this I feel wellsprings of sincere gratitude bubbling up with fresh feeling, tightening my throat. It is no small thing to have friends and family like all of you. Writing to you - and reading your comments - has made mothering richer and sweeter. It has given me a creative place to think through the chaos of the day, and to make meaning from it. Thank you. 

It's been a whole year since Frances and I were reading The Folk of the Faraway Tree, and Dame Washalot inspired us to do some dripping wet wacky laundry of our own. Kind of funny that I just read this article by Cordelia Fine, which launches into a commentary about how bogus our gendered thinking about little kids is with her experiences (as child and parent) reading Enid Blyton. Like Ms. Fine, I do plenty of on-the-spot editing when we hit particularly egregious passages about girls being the weaker sex in our treasured oldey-timey children's classics.

But my elisions are a wee drop in a big bucket filled with all kinds of weird crap - much of which I probably do a fine job of perpetuating without even realizing it. I read a review of Cordelia Fine's book, Delusions of Gender, in the Washington Post last week. I don't feel any desire to read her scrupulous debunkings of pseudo-scientific studies that claim to prove the innate differences between girls and boys. But I'm glad she made the effort. Just reading the review did enough to get me back to thinking about gender more globally.

I felt a little sheepish reading about her book. I too am suckered in by all sorts of biological destiny-style accounts of gender. It lets me off the hook for those shortcomings of mine that seem mapped onto my gender, my persistent femininity. Too accommodating, too afraid to speak up and upset someone, lacking in sufficient personal boundaries, prone to harbor resentments rather than communicate directly about difficult issues. Etc etc. Oh, and I throw like a girl.

So when Science says it's all because of my chromosomes, those things I don't always like in myself become less personal in nature - more my womanly lot in life. An opportunity to relinquish personal responsibility is hard to pass up.

And becoming a parent, especially a parent of both a boy and a girl, has brought countless conversations with countless enlightened feminist types about the surprising "hardwired" nature of gender that we discover as we watch our children grow. Boys and girls are so different. All the preschool mothers agree. I am among them.

Yes, there are differences between most girls I've met and most boys I've met. The terms masculinity and feminity do make sense to me (more on this another day). But when someone comes along and scrambles my habits of perception a bit, I feel called out. I've been seeing through a particular lens that emphasizes certain behaviors and traits and relegates others to the periphery. Oh, there he goes with the trucks again! He's such a boy.

For example - here's some of the pervasive stuff in the big bucket I mentioned earlier - I name every non-human actor on our family stage a boy. I use the male pronoun with every backyard squirrel, stuffed animal, and Dr. Seuss creature. Where's he going? I ask Gabriel about the bird outside our window. What's that little guy doing? Oh, he's looking for worms!

Where are the girl bugs and teddy bears? (We read a book recently featuring a female teddy bear - a sidekick, not even the protagonist! - and honestly, it struck me as kind of weird.)

The only reason I know I blanket the world boy like this is that Frances corrects me when I use the wrong pronoun with her toys. Some are girls and she is truly offended when I slip up; she's like a first-time parent when a stranger gets a newborn's sex wrong. Frances also reminds me that the blood-sucking mosquitoes are mamas looking for blood to feed their babies every time I slap one and triumphantly shout: I GOT HIM!

This disturbs me, the way my language betrays my prejudices.

So tonight, I'm setting an intention: to resist the temptation of categorizing my children. To put up a speed bump at least, so I'm caught up the next time I attribute behaviors to their boyness or girlness. Or to being a typical first or second born child, for that matter. To being such a sensitive person, or a smart person, an athletic person or a bookworm.

What do those things really mean?


What do they have to do with Frances and Gabriel in all their glorious mystery? (Or with me?) It is hard to stand back and let them tell me who they are, to sit with not-knowing and give them that space for expression.

I am not always so good at it. But writing to all of you sure does help me a lot.

a wondrously regular day

You know that feeling, when you are in poorly-lit, faintly depressing grocery store and you have picked the wrong line yet again, and the demoralized checker is operating in a fog, and a slow-moving woman in front of you is sorting through an impossibly fat envelope of coupons, and it seems as if the very effort required to remain standing and upright is more than you can muster? And all those People and Woman's Day magazines whose headlines you are scanning as you begin to teeter (Angelina Jolie has too many kids! Fat free cupcake recipe inside!) make the whole thing surreal and you grip your cart for support and start seriously considering the candy?

This morning with Gabriel at our sunny and cheerful Trader Joe's reversed whatever damage those sorts of shopping trips have done to me over the years. He makes me laugh. We both were feeling giddy and silly, so I indulged all kinds of antics with the little kid-sized grocery cart. I probably crossed a line when I tickled him as our very nice checker unloaded all the frozen berries and cereal and cheese and apples. He shrieked a little too loud in his adorable, unhinged way.

I put him down to pay and when I looked, there he was, cracking himself up with a stray paper bag.

Oh, it was so funny! Where's Gabriel? THERE HE IS!!! Hilarious, I tell you!

And as I was writing this, I looked over to the coffee table and saw a sweet remnant of our evening that I cannot resist showing you:

We learned all about what being a Title 1 school means, and I signed up to volunteer with the PTA, and we got to sit at little tables in the kindergarten classroom and watch Miss Burns use the Smart Board to show us all about field trips and the school library. But mostly I watched Frances sitting on the rug with her new friends, specifically two little boys named Quadir and Anthony. Gabriel joined them, looking right at home. I could not stop grinning as I looked over at Mike.

We're doing this thing. It's happening. We have a kid who writes her name on a blank name tag passed to her at Back To School Night in the elementary school gym. (By the way, doesn't it look fantastic? She has effortlessly captured something in her writing that indie rock boys from my youth attempted to replicate in the hopes of indicating their own authenticity.)

Well. Well well. Friends, I am feeling the flip side of the disorientation Frances endured yesterday morning. I am looking around and feeling grateful, elated, awed by how all this came to be.

How did we get here, anyway? Tonight, while the children sleep and Mike talks Pascal in seminar, it all feels strange and wonderful to me.

homesick for the mouse house

An uncharacteristically quiet mouse with adorable bedhead ran into the kitchen this morning before she was fully awake. Outside, the rain was coming down steadily. The light was gray. She looked bleary and confused under the too-bright flourescent light.

Good morning, I said.
Squeak, she whispered.

I was in the middle of making coffee but turned the heat off the water when I caught sight of her big, red-rimmed eyes.

What is it?

I want to go home, whispered the mouse. Her chin wobbled and tears were gathering and beginning to spill over her lower lashes.

But this is your home, little mouse! I'm your mama mouse!

Tears were slowly and steadily dripping down her cheeks now. She told me she didn't "recognize anything here" and wanted to go to her real home, which was "in a big field, under an old old tree." What was she doing in this strange house?

The pretend mouse story was the gauziest wrapping around a heart of very real, disoriented feelings. You could see right through it. 

I picked her up and took her to the couch, where she tried to burrow into my chest. She told me how she longed to go home, where things are just her size and right for her, and where there are lots of foods she likes to eat. Though we might love her here, "there is much more love" in her real home. I'm not even a person, she told me. And then: what is a person? And what is love? I don't even know! (More tears).

She continued: How do you even know me? You look like a human being, but I'm a mouse. How did I get here?

I told her I had known her and loved her since the day she was born, and every moment since then. Five years!

Frances gathered herself together and looked at me steadily. I live in mouse-years, as you know.

In my mind I heard that haunting, beautiful line from a Neutral Milk Hotel song, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea: can't believe how strange it is to be anything at all.

This empathetic sponge of a mama, emotional amoeba that I am, sat and clutched my little girl on the couch and tried not to cry with her. (Her sensitive brother roamed the house looking for "gifts" which he deposited next to us, asking Didi if she was happy now with each new offering). I wanted to honor her suffering, the truth of what she was tapping, without sending her over the edge.

Her lost little mouse was expressing a primal in-the-world-but-not-of-it realization, an existential shiver that shook her from whisker to tail. To feel oneself a mouse amongst people, to feel onself not quite fitting into the world as it is, to feel one's separateness and yearning for a home where everything is beautiful and these distances between us disappear. A real home, a mouse house. It is a lot for a small person to hold all at once.

Which is why, thankfully, this moment soon slid naturally into more light-hearted mouse family play. How tenderly I felt towards her. How painful growing up can be. How strange it is to be anything at all.

carrot and stick

As Frances explained to every adult whose path she crossed on this brilliant Thursday (every adult who showed a shred of interest in her, that is), today was Rosh Hashanah Day, so there was no school. Instead we spent the breezy morning at Quiet Waters Park. As time wore on the playground filled with more and more children, until suddenly it was packed with chaotic toddlers and crashing too-bigs and Gabriel ran up to me with serious alarm in his eyes, grabbing my pants and explaining: there are too many children here, we have to go NOW!

So we did. Post office, grocery store, baking with Frances during Gabriel's nap, visiting with a neighbor friend, a bit of reading, a bit of drawing, dinner, bath, and there you have it. Sounds like a satisfying day, right? I thought so too. But for my new kindergartener, something was lacking. Where are the organized activities, and what are the rules? Good lord, where is the structure in all this having-a-pleasant-day-at-home business?

The poor girl was driven to such lengths as creating cards with numbers on them directing us to our proper chairs at the dining room table, suggesting new rules for our family (among them today were "no fake laughing allowed" and "no hitting people with chopsticks"), and devising ways she might be helpful and thus earn whatever our equivalent of respect tickets might be. Of course we have no school store in which she could spend her respect tickets. And we have no tickets. But if only we did...!

The kid has never been interested in being 'a good helper' for its own sake (that line of motivation occasionally works beautifully with her brother). But the idea of earning something - of moving ahead on the board game, collecting rewards - suddenly helping is where it's at. Frances has asked if we could have a "system" like the one at school. Think stickers, color-coded, perhaps a chart displayed publicly in the kitchen. The consequences and rewards would be clear and well-defined (time out vs. candy). Tonight she asked if she could do the dishes every night "for the next sixteen years." (Just think of the respect tickets she'll be swimming in by 2026!)

Geez, what have I been missing out on? In a way it seems so concrete, oppressively so, but I suppose a five year old is concrete! This is where I always trip up with Frances; I fall into the mistake of treating her as if she understood things the way I do. As if she had some sophisticated perspective on her own rocky emotions. But she's a kid, one with a wild imagination and a tendency to get stressed out by the unpredictable nature of this world and the people inhabiting it. Adults giveth and taketh away, and sometimes it feels cruelly arbitrary.

No, you cannot watch a video today. Because. Because I said so.

What if I could point to some garish chart on the refrigerator covered in gold stars and sad faces the next time she asked WHY? WHY CAN'T I??? Maybe such overt documentation would help Frances feel more in control and thus more relaxed.

Or maybe spending half an hour drawing pictures like the one above after school serves the same purpose. I hope so, because the truth is I'm too lazy to create and enforce a "system." And frankly, I'm too attached to the power I wield, even though it may feel cruel and arbitrary at times. I want to reserve the freedom to do things simply because they seem like a good idea at the time. 

And how about that picture Frances drew? It is of an imaginary school, not hers, but you can see how powerful these first days have been. The headings in each box are Ball, Music, Homework, Jim (Gym), School Bus, Recess, Line, Rules, and Sharing.

I am fascinated by the ways Frances talks about and illustrates racial differences. Her teacher is black and many of her classmates are too, but she doesn't understand them as belonging to one group. Frances has always understood people as falling somewhere on the lighter brown to darker brown continuum (she herself is "light brown"). She always describes new people in great detail, and has recently talked a lot about one of her new friends who wears her hair in corn rows with beads (how she admires them!). The detail below shows a little girl with blue beads on the ends of her braids, dancing in music class with her teacher.