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.