iguana afternoons

In the eighties, my sister and I traveled in style. Claiming either the back or the way back of our family's minivan - a baby blue Dodge Caravan with wood paneling - we'd beg our mother to play a Debbie Gibson tape bought with precious allowance money at the mall instead of the oldies station while the world slid by on our way to a piano lesson or a girl scout meeting. In those days we lived in pastel-hued South Florida, where little lizards and enormous cockroaches populated our everyday landscape and an enduring hibiscus bloomed by the back door.

Our tenure in Fort Lauderdale, which happened to overlap with a sizable chunk of my childhood, seems strange to me now. I'm a nail biter, I get sea sick, I'm positively pale. Me, a Floridian? By 1990 we'd moved north, where I've remained every since, and my connections to that singular state and formative chapter in my life have only been revived in recent years thanks to Facebook.

But last week I found myself once again with my sister in a cavernous minivan, riding past palm trees and brilliant bouganvilla, and a tether that normally hangs slack was pulled taut. A continuity emerged. Yes, I remember sitting on sandy towels on the way back from the beach in the minivan, tasting salt in the stray ropes of hair that swing down and plaster themselves to my face, in all the heat and heaviness of the afternoon.

I had forgotten. But these sensory memories during our trip quietly linked the person I am now to the person I was then, and the family I am growing now to the family I was growing up in. Truth be told, besides the flora, Vieques, a small island off the coast of Puerto Rico, is not much like Fort Lauderdale. It is a lot less developed - wild even - which might explain its extraordinary, abundant fauna. Not so many iguanas were joining us to bask poolside when I was a kid. Nor were there roosters roaming free, herding chickens and crowing lustily at all hours,nor wild horses sauntering down narrow streets,

 nor silvery angel fish grazing our legs, gleaming in the sun that filtered down through clear blue water to illuminate the sandy bottom.

Maybe it was just the fact of being together, of navigating our days and cleaning up our meals, sharing the frustrations and surprises and little jokes. My dad's absence was felt, as it always is when I am with my mother and sister; this time it was persistent, yet gentle. It's not so often in our adult lives that my sister and I get to settle into more than two or three days together. It's nice to be reminded of who you are.

And it's damn nice to do it in the Caribbean.

 

And what of the children? From this distance, they look lovely, don't they? We had our moments. All kinds of moments, just like we do in regular life, but really, who could throw a tantrum when the sunset over the ocean is so glorious? A toddler, that's who. Gabriel, unsure of what the heck was going on in this so-called "vacation house" that had no toys in it whatsoever and ran by no discernible schedule he was familiar with, fell into tantrums if ever I left his sight or if someone else threatened to usurp our very special relationship by doing awful things like offering to wipe his nose or get him a glass of water.

NO!!!! MAMA DO IT!!!!

Mama did it, mostly, but then one night we escaped to a bioluminescent bay. My mother, sister, and brother-in-law went the night before, then very kindly offered to babysit for us so we too could kayak in the evening to a special spot filled with strange teeny tiny creatures that illuminate when the water is agitated. To be alone with Mike at night, to spin and kick and punch the magic water to great greenish glowing effects, to see the moon high overhead and delight in our surroundings...it was a gift. 

There were many gifts! A shopping trip followed by tropical drinks at a charming bar with my mother and sister, my brother-in-law's astounding facility with our rental minivan which was quite literally falling apart (at one point a sliding door fell off - this never happened to our Dodge Caravan), a week-long hiatus from hair washing, the sight of my naked kids moving gracefully in their beautiful brown bodies, reading a novel in three days!, and taking long, luxurious swims in the Caribbean.

Friday morning, gathering items for the beach, I noticed a new tranquility in our group. We were a content pile of overlapping soft brown limbs driving to the beach. The children had finally settled in, acquired a new peacefulness, and we endured nary a tantrum the entire day. I felt so good in my skin, and they did too. That day we saw fish, a stingray, and a starfish, we built a sand castle, found delicate sea fans on the shore, and had the best lemonade ever. 

We made rum drinks and dinner, watched the sunset, and ate ice cream. I felt just right. In the morning, packing up the last bits before our flight, I put off getting dressed as long as I could. The very thought of corduroy pants made me want to cry. To willingly return to gray March days, just when we'd found our groove here?

After a very long and blessedly hitchless travel day, during which Gabriel's mounting enthusiastic anticipation of his reunion with all his trucks and books spread like a happy contagion, I walked into my kitchen. It was about 6:30 and the evening light shone gently through the windows. The warm pink walls gathered around me, the soft brown floor came up to meet me, and I fell into a physical sensation not unlike a sweeping embrace that took me unawares, though my arms were laden and my mind hurtling towards dinner: we were home. I thought of Madeline's return from her dalliance with the circus gypsies:

The best part of a voyage--by plane,

By ship,

Or train--

Is when the trip is over and you are

Home again.

Indeed. Now it is spring, and yesterday I planted peas. In corduroys and a sweater. And I felt just right.

preparing for a brief, sun-drenched hiatus from blogging

Dear friends,

There is a lot on my mind. Sleep eludes me of late. I am mid-way through Meghan O'Rourke's New Yorker article on her mother's death, and I have been wanting to tell you about the resonances with my own father's death. It happens to be a sensitive season for me, this painfully slow lead up to spring. When March 22nd rolls around, as it does every year, my mind will involuntarily slide past all the nearly fifteen-year-old moments of our last days together. His delicate gray-white pallor, the way I asked for a hug in Spanish when I said goodnight, the loose soft skin of his hands. The intensity of grief lessens over time and becomes easier to bear. But the absurdity of someone you love disappearing - someone who was so fully present, in every way - never seems to abate.

But I can't really get into it, because another absurdity is fast approaching this family, and well before March 22nd. This one is the good kind of ridiculous. A tropical vacation kind of ridiculous! This Saturday my mother is whisking all of us, and my beautifully pregnant sister, and her husband, off to the isle of Vieques. We are going to laze around in the sunshine (as far as lazing around with two little ones is possible) for an entire week to celebrate her 60th birthday. Can it really be?

Before that happens I will finish an article on perinatal depression (for this magazine, on whose homepage you can see a sweet photo of F &G for an article I wrote), take Gabriel to the doctor for the second time this week (ear infection today), figure out what to pack, go to work in Baltimore, go to a Ladysmith Black Mambazo concert tonight with an extraordinary pal, spend time with a family full of dear friends visiting from Lancaster (Jill: this is not additional stress! I can't wait to see you), find my flip flops, and write this blog post while I make dinner. Sauteeing vegetables need so little attention, really. It totally works.

I just couldn't leave you all with Gabriel at his most infuriating and this muddled mama wringing her hands. Of course I rarely tell you about improvements in the problems I report on here. Right now Gabriel is pretending to be a chick hatching out of his egg, asking periodically to be toweled off because he is all wet and his feathers are sticking together. He's doped up on Children's Tylenol and the ear infection is a distant memory. He's happy! The tantrums persist, but not with the ferocity of a few days ago. In short, I see the light.

If you have any beach reading recommendations, advice for air travel with children, tales from Puerto Rican travels past, or items to add to my to-do list that I have forgotten thus far, please share! I'll miss connecting with you all here, and promise to give a non-gloating report with minimal tropical paradise-type photos when I return.

Gotta go, dinner's ready.

xo
Meagan

love and hate on a thursday afternoon

Last week I received emails from two people asking me to apply for two different social work jobs. Both of them were appealing; one was very full-time, and in Baltimore. I gave this some thought, and came up with a few reassuring conclusions: there are indeed jobs out there I could be passionate about and engaged in, at last I am establishing some connections around here, and finally, I'm not ready to leave my family for fifty or sixty hours a week. Not even close, I explained to my mom. And miss all this? It might be right someday, but that day isn't coming very soon.

It was good to know those things last week. But today I hit a wall. If you read my last post, you might have already seen the looming shadow of this particular wall of dirty, gritty, solid bricks. I slammed into it this afternoon after a day of tantrums. I thought to myself: full time? Yes. I'll take it. Right now, please. Sixty hours a week spent with rational adults who only ask once, who get into and out of cars without assistance or coaxing, who zip their own coats, who have learned to refrain from bursting into tears if it's time to go and they don't want to, who say please and thank you without prompts, and who don't pee in their pants? Not much, anyway? In a flash I saw myself re-oriented to working, complete with urgency, deadlines, full-time child care, and a robust sense of independent adult identity. As I hung limply over the car door in the school parking lot, watching Gabriel put on his screw-you-world toddler show (in this act, refusing to get in his seat) and Frances yelping over a stuck coat zipper and tangled backpack strap, that alternate universe looked pretty darn good.

We grumpy three came home. The children hurled demands in my direction. I gritted my teeth, reminded them of their manners, and stewed. As I made dinner, they began some elaborate pretend game with tinker toys near my feet in the kitchen that erupted into low level conflict every few minutes. My inner simmer began to bubble more violently. What was I doing hanging out with these irritating small people, anyway? Then Frances began to tap my arm insistently, and said: pause button.

That's most often used in our house to indicate a break in the pretend game, as in, "pause button. We're not alligators right now, we're just Frances and Gabriel. Mama, what do alligators really eat?" before getting an answer, then jumping back in the game with both feet. Or all four, as the case may be.

I stopped chopping garlic and turned toward the source of the tapping, which was a small person who weighs in at forty-two pounds and has almost embarrassingly wide, ardent eyes when in the heat of pretending. She repeated: Pause button, Mama. Mama, we're doing a talent show and there are 7,000 people in the audience!! Isn't that a lot? 7,000 people are watching us right now!

Then she burst back onto the talent show stage, and I began to listen to her play the MC, the performers, the encouraging director/partner to Gabriel (or whatever his stage name was), who was utterly oblivious to the 7,000 people before him and yet pretty happy to go along for the ride. Get this. I felt a new wave of irritation towards these children of mine - because it is impossible to stay mad at them.

I had been getting attached to being pissed off, because it kept the normally open, breezy doorway between us tightly shut. It allowed me to embrace the idea of leaving those irrational, adorable, crazy-making kids and finding some professional certainty and path to follow. Full disclosure here: I received my first official rejection a couple of days ago, for an article I submitted to a magazine I like very much. I've been tentatively trying on this writer identity of late. Sometimes it feels great. Sometimes it's more like selecting a pair of jeans that look just right on the rack, only to discover in the cruel fluorescent dressing room light that they cannot under any circumstances be coaxed past my hips. Forget about zipping them up.

So my funk isn't entirely due to annoying kid behaviors (though the tantrums haven't helped). I still work two days a week, with a very lovely group of dedicated people. I am grateful for the learning I have been able to do, not to mention the flexibility of the job. But the fact of it does not settle my stirred-up feeling that ebbs and flows but never quite goes away: what shall I do? Who shall I be?

The only known part of the equation is my family. I can't fool myself. I am called to spend a lot more than breakfast and bath time with my babies. Love and hate are part of all intimate relationships, right? Taking care of small children is a particularly intense experience of intimacy; I must cycle through love and hate countless times a day. This morning my heart melted into a puddle watching Gabriel play. This afternoon I could have killed him.

In my old job, I did my best to walk with the poor. I shared their feelings with them; I tolerated their painful inner lives so that they might learn to do the same. It's not so different now. I walk with the small. Sponge that I am, I share their feelings with them. On a good day, I can tolerate and contain all those extremes of emotion, and hopefully that will help them learn that it is safe to feel it all, to let the world in. They won't break. On a bad day, I need a little help remembering that despite uncertainty, frustration, loneliness, and shaky confidence, neither will I.

a chapter on tantrums, in which our sensitive boy loses his grip

Mama, watch this.

Gabriel jumped off his bike, walked up to a sturdy oak tree in a neighbor's front yard, and banged his head against it. Stepped back, considered, then banged it again. After the third collision, I asked, How does that feel?

Good, he replied definitively, before the fourth and final slam into the tree. At least he was wearing a helmet. Mike went through a presumably helmet-less head-banging stage as a toddler. I'm sure I dabbled, going by my mother's reports. Being a big kid isn't easy.

And he is a big boy, isn't he? Just one month shy of his third birthday, Gabriel is taller, leaner, diaper-less, comfortable on a bike, smitten with superheroes, and more gaga than ever for dump trucks and all their vehicular relations, from forklifts to log loaders. Which is a good thing, because we will need one of those powerful front end loaders to clean up the emotional wreckage Gabriel is leaving in his wake these days.

What happened to our user-of-words, our sensitive child, our resident master of the I statement? We've seen minor tantrums, but in the past, after a few minutes I would catch his eyes and he'd run into my lap and tell me he feels sad or angry and the episode would end with some peaceful snuggling. I knew this golden time couldn't last. But I didn't know just how disorienting and upsetting it would be for the rest of us to witness Gabriel in the grip of toddler irrationality and high emotions lodged just beneath the surface, always ready to erupt. Every request made of him is a potential tantrum-trigger. Oh, time to put on shoes you say? There's my cue!

Yesterday, he hit Frances. I gave him a time out. He sobbed and screamed and shouted NO! over and over in his room - an unprecedented display that unsettled his mother and sister. After two minutes I walked in. He took one look at me and said: You leave! I want to be alone!! So I left, and he kept on screaming NO. A few minutes later, he quieted down, and I walked back in and sat down in the rocking chair. He looked at me, nose and ears streaming, his face red and wet, his expression utterly bewildered and exhausted. My heart broke for him.

I'm sorry you are feeling so sad, I said. He clenched his fists, became redder still, and yelled: DON'T SAY THOSE WORDS TO ME!

We rarely feel angered or frustrated by this piteous behavior. He seems to be in the grip of a mind-scrambling, emotion-disordering outside force. A relentless, merciless demon is after our angel Gabriel, and it sucks. The tantrums began soon after potty-training; there must be some connection there. Along with life in underwear came a new body awareness for Gabriel, who is alternately delighted, confused, and concerned by his penis.

Today I am emerging from two days of awful sickness, during which I was pretty unavailable to the kids. This morning I was finally able to do things with them again, and after a round of irrational tantrums, Gabriel and I were able to go to the library and read piles of stories, do a little bike riding, then return home with some fresh inspiration: making a spring tree.

We had been so reluctant to dismantle the valentine tree that I saved the stick. So I brought it out, and showed Gabriel how to make tissue paper flowers. He wanted there to be butterflies, so I cut them from paper and used pipe cleaners for antennae. I was pulling out paints to decorate the wings when Gabriel began flying one of them around the room, fluttering his wings against my cheek and landing him gently on my hand.

Be quiet and gentle with him, warned Gabriel. And then: you be the other butterfly. So we fluttered around a little, until Gabriel's butterfly sidled up to mine and said, I have a pretty big penis. What's your penis like, little butterfly?

Oh! Good gracious. I said I didn't have a penis, because I was a girl butterfly. Gabriel said, Well what's your softy called then?

My softy? I won't transcribe the entire conversation, but suffice it to say, it was kind of mind-blowing. We've explained body parts and the differences between girls and boys in the past, but only now does he seem ready to take it all in. Here are our butterflies, grappling with the strange big world together. The tree will be a nice reminder for me: be quiet and gentle with him. I know he will fly through this storm somehow, despite the strong March winds buffeting him this way and that.