Nine years ago tonight, I floated in a rented birthing tub in northern Michigan, trying to relax and breathe.  My husband hovered near the tub, along with my midwives.  The Amish midwife held my hand, squeezing it tightly.  The “English” midwife listened to the baby’s heart-tones with her stethoscope.  My labor support people stood around, watching.  (I felt like I had an audience, but my mind was so disconnected that I didn’t care.)  By this time, darkness had fallen and I’d asked that the overhead light be turned off, but Lonnie pointed out that she needed the light for the video camera.

So, I squeezed my eyes tight and concentrated on not fighting my body.

And what do you know?  At 10:42 p.m., my third son was born.  He was the pregnancy the doctors said was “unlikely” to happen, the baby I was eight weeks pregnant with before I even took a pregnancy test.  Weeks before I took the test, I told a close friend that I was either pregnant or dying from a terrible disease.  And yet, after nine years of assuming the doctors were right and five years after adopting twins, the lines on the pregnancy test assured me that I was, indeed, pregnant.

I planned a home-birth.  In our previous church, I’d met a midwife.  We were waiting to adopt at the time and this lovely woman answered all my questions about birthing at home.  Then, her grown daughter invited me to be at her home-birth.  Witnessing the peaceful birth changed how I thought about birth forever.  So, I never even contemplated a routine hospital birth when I became pregnant myself.

I labored for forty-three hours, most of them not difficult.  The first twenty-four hours were humdrum, though at the time, I regarded the contractions with the serious contemplation of a first-time mother.  I breathed.  I knelt.  I concentrated.  Only toward the end when I struggled did I realize that the earlier contractions were nothing, mere blips on the pain scale.

The baby was born under water at 10:42 p.m.  An hour later, I was tucked beneath my flannel sheets, my sweet baby boy inches from my face.  We slept all night in the king-sized bed my husband and I had purchased in anticipation of the birth.  In the morning, my 4-year old twins came rushing in to see their baby brother.

When a friend of mine came to see the new baby, she exclaimed, “Look at his crooked pinkies!” and sure enough, I noticed for the first time that my baby boy had inherited his daddy’s hands and feet.  As the years have passed, this boy of ours resembles his father more and more and I finally understand why tear sprang to my mother-in-law’s eyes when she told me that my husband had been a joy to her all his life.  My husband’s son, this “unlikely” baby boy has brought me undiluted joy from the day I knew he was snuggled into my womb.

And he makes me laugh.  When he was about four years old, he once told me, “I know why they call it duct tape.”  “Why?” I said.  “Because,” he said, “It’s sticky and it smells like a duck.”

One whole summer, we had to call him “Thunder.”

Before he went to kindergarten, he insisted his middle name was “Dayba,” and only his kindergarten teacher could convince him that it was really “Davis.”

When he was three, he instructed me to make a hopscotch, numbered from negative 11 to 3.  He has always had a thing for numbers.  He knows his multiplication tables better than his 13-year old twin brothers do.

I love my boy.  He has a soft heart, a goofy sense of humor and a sharp mind.  I want to keep him here at home forever so he’ll be safe and secure and sweet.  Today he is nine.  Tomorrow, he’ll be nineteen and I already miss him.

I wish Judy were my neighbor.  Read this and you’ll understand: 

Another book idea. This one is for children. It’s to be called “This Is Mom”. In it, the child will follow what ‘mom’ does all day. I’m getting sick and tired of books about what the child does all day. One page will be “This is mom eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with you. She loves you, but she hates peanut butter and jelly and can’t wait for you to take your nap so she can eat the M&M’s she has hidden away. Although, she has to eat them on the run, or she will not have the dishes washed, laundry going or dinner started before you wake up, requiring a diaper change.” That particular page COULD have an element of ‘scratch and sniff’, I’m not sure about that yet…

That just cracked me up!

In other news, today I was sitting at my computer “working” (or reading blogs or checking email, who knows?) and I heard my 4-year old daughter screaming upstairs:  “I DO NOT HAVE A BRAIN!  I DO NOT HAVE A BRAIN!”  She repeated this several times which could only mean one thing:  one of her 13-year old brothers had wandered upstairs and was torturing her by telling her she has a brain.  For several months, she has insisted that boys have brains and girls have hearts.  (Leading to the inverse truth:  boys do not have hearts; girls do not have brains.)  We cannot tell her otherwise and so, this particular brother delights in teasing her by saying (out of the blue), “Hey, Gracie, do you have a brain?” and then she yells, “I DO NOT HAVE A BRAIN!” 

He finds this funny.

I find this annoying because I am in dire need of peace and quiet and deliberately provoking a four-year old to shriek does not promote household harmony. 

(And now, 3 p.m. on the dot and doorbell rings.  The first neighborhood kid of the day has arrived.  I can’t wait until summer gets here and I can shoo all the kids outdoors all afternoon.  I’ll even throw in two dozen popsicles, a small price to pay for silence.)

Despite the holiday-status of this day, my teenagers had to go to P.E. at the YMCA.  While they were gone, I cleaned up the kitchen, then decided to clean their room.  They have a loft bed with a second bed underneath, but that bed’s metal bed-frame bent a week or two ago, so the box-spring had been sitting directly on the floor.  Since I had some spare time today, I screwed together the wooden bed-frame that matches the loft bed.  I bought the set at a garage sale, with full knowledge that the lower bed-frame would need a repair.  The previous boys who owned the bed broke the wooden support when one of them dived from the upper loft bed onto the lower bed.

Imagine that.

But I’d had the wooden frame repaired and so today, I put it together.  After vacuuming the carpet and pushing the bed into place, the room looked fairly decent.  I’d also vacuumed the family room and done some laundry before my husband liberated me from my happy home and sent me into the rainy world at 2 p.m.

Today Value Village had a half-off sale, so I perused books and second-hand clothing.  I spent twenty bucks before heading to the movie theater where I saw “Breach.”  (Good movie.  I recommend it if you like spy movies and promise not to be too distracted by the lump on Ryan Phillipe’s forehead.  What is that all about?)  I returned home at 6:45 p.m., fifteen minutes before I was expected home.  I exercised, then settled in to watch “24.” 

And somewhere between 10:00 and 10:30 p.m., one of my twin boys appeared at the doorway with a sheepish look on his face.  “Uh, mom?” he said. 

“Yes?” I said.

“Um, [my brother] uh, broke his bed.”

“Broke the bed?”  Heavy sigh.  Do I even want to know?  No.  Then, “Fine.  Go to sleep.”

Of course, when I went in there to investigate a few minutes later, I found the wooden support slats broken in two places (the repaired place, plus a new, previously unbroken place).  I said, “How did this happen?” and he claimed he merely sat on the bed, which we all know is a complete lie.

He admitted to “plopping” on the bed and honestly, I am so sick of my boys being so rough on belongings that I was speechless.  I told him to pull his mattress alongside the frame and to just go to sleep.  Tomorrow I will have to disassemble the bed and return it to the storage room until I can beg a woodworker to fix it again–at which point I will use it in my daughter’s room where it will be safe from teenage boys “plopping” on it.

I hate it when my work is immediately undone by the folly of children.  But there’s no point in going apoplectic over a broken bed.

Also?  I’m not going to shave my head over this. 

Last week, I read these words by P.D. James (Time to Be In Earnest): 

The suicide of the young is more common now than it was in my youth.  I can’t recall the suicide of a single friend or acquaintance during my childhood or adolescence.  Perhaps today we all take happiness as our right and unhappiness is seen as shameful or insupportable.  Or is it that some people have an imperfect appreciation of linear time?  For them, the present moment is immeasurable, fixed in an eternal agony.  There can be no hope that things will be better tomorrow, because the idea of a tomorrow has no reality.

I sometimes lose sight of the fact that time marches on.  But the empty milk cartons in the fridge tell the story of the voracious appetite of teenagers.  Those teenagers who stand and look me in the eye were seven months old just yesterday, it seems.  My baby girl declares, “I am a big girl now!” and looks forward to her fifth birthday (in September).  The mirror reflects back an aging face.  I put my fingertips just below my eyebrows and lift up my sagging eyelids in a parody of my youth.  The crocuses push out of the earth, eager for their turn to bloom. 

I thought this week about those moving walkways you find in airports.  You can stand still, yet be propelled down the hallway, moving while not moving at all.  Time is that moving walkway, carrying us along regardless of our willingness.    Even if I stay inside all day and cuddle with my children by the fireplace (and turn off all electronics!), time races along, carrying us into a new moment, into a new day.  Whether we’re ready or not.  (Ready or not, here I come!)

I remember when I was a teenager, feeling like I was stuck in a vast whirlpool, never actually moving forward, just swirling around and around in the angst that is adolescence.  And yet, though I thought I was circling, I was moving forward, propelled (in slow motion) toward adulthood.  No experience, devastation, delirium or delight was eternal.  Time inches us forward, so slowly sometimes that we can’t tell we’re in motion, so quickly at other times that we get carsick. 

This morning at church, a 4-year old boy nodded to my daughter and said to me, “Where is her other mother?”  I said, “I’m the only mother she’s ever had.  She just has one mother.”  He asked me because last summer, his mother killed herself.  He has another mother now.

And yesterday, I went to a memorial service for a 23-year old man who ended his life.

Words fail me when I try to make sense of this sort of hopelessness and decisiveness.  I understand sorrow.  I understand loss.  I understand the terror of feeling that life will never change, that things will never improve, that the clouds will never lift. 

But I also know that with dawn comes hope.  Time itself brings a change–if not a change of circumstance, at least a change of scenery and perhaps a change of perspective.  Time, linear, sequential, inevitable.  Time, our friend, our enemy, rushing us along, even when we feel like we’re slogging in slow-motion through quicksand.

No more time for those with broken hearts who break the clock, stop the hands from tick-tocking.  Farewell, strangers I never knew.  All the same, I feel the empty space where you should be and hear the silence you left behind. 

Along with my protest of Science Fair Projects, I must add my critical voice to the issue of half-days of school.  While I understand the benefit of half-days for the teachers and administrators, I hate half-days.  I hate getting up in the mornings to get my student off to school only to have him return three hours later, hungry for lunch.  Today, I hated the noise of children running through the house all afternoon and the shouting . . . half-days are loud days around here.  Some days I tolerate loud less well than other days.  Today was one of those days.

That is all.

Oh, and kudos to the local school district which cut short a dance (and cancelled future dances) because kids refused to stop simulating sexual intercourse on the dance floor.  Someone ought to give those school administrators a large cash reward.  Hooray for sensible adults.

So, I was too lazy to get up early enough to make heart-shaped pancakes.  I have such great intentions at night, but very little follow-through in the mornings.  But, I did redeem my myself by hanging up decorations–those vinyl clings that stick to the window and a banner that reads HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY and some red cupid cut-outs.  Then, my daughter and I baked homemade cut-out cookies in heart-shapes with sprinkles.  She created some “valentimes” with scissors and glitter glue and markers.

I will gloss over the two hours this afternoon when I went stark raving mad, crazily vacuuming and picking up toys and dirty socks and bowls and empty Triscuit boxes . . . we had a babysitter coming over, a 15-year old girl, and I absolutely could feel her Eye of Judgment on my house which I maintain at a low level of constant clutter because I do not have a pantry nor storage appropriate for Play-doh and its accessories, a plastic tea-set, and extra cases of Diet Coke.  I really do try to keep the piles to a minimum, but where am I supposed to put stuff like food? 

Anyway, I exercised this afternoon, then turned into a cleaning lunatic before jumping into the shower (with its newly renovated water pressure) and preparing for a dinner date with my husband and two other couples.  We had a nice time and returned home at 9:30 p.m. to find my daughter sound asleep on the couch and the house still in order. 

This week is conference week at school which means half-days.  I hate half-days.  Seems like such a hassle to get ready for school only to return home a few hours later.  My house was full of running, screaming children all afternoon–while I was trying to get stuff done.

By the way, did I mention that I’m sending the novel Children of Men to Kimberlie?  And My Losing Season to Suzanne?  And The Handmaid’s Tale to Mopsy?  Well, I am.  I have more books to get rid of, so stay tuned. 

And Happy V.D. for another thirty minutes (Pacific time!) . . .

Reason Why I Am The Worst Mother in the World:  When my almost 9-year old son said, “Oh, mom!  Tomorrow is the deadline for the Science Fair!” I said, without pause, “Oh, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you’re not participating in the Science Fair.”  (Had he not noticed he failed to pick out a project?  Had he done any work?  Uh, no.)  So, I declared him a non-participant.

Why?  Because:

1)  I hate science fair projects.  All the moms (and maybe some dads) do all the work.  What’s the point?

2)  I hate extra work.  Isn’t schoolwork during school hours enough?

3)  I am lazy.  Did I mention I hate Science Fairs?  I hate experiments.

Reason I Am The Dumbest Mom in the World:  When the water pressure in my shower fizzled, I figure it was a costly repair, probably a pipe about to explode, maybe a faucet in need of an expensive fix.  A handy friend came by to take a look at our problem.  Yeah.  Turns out that a little filter in the shower-head was clogged with mineral deposits.  He untwisted it, pulled out the filter, said, “I usually throw these things away,” and voila!  My shower-head now pulses with power.  I will be able to thoroughly rinse my hair out in the morning, unlike the past four mornings when I’ve huddled under a trickle of hot water.  I may even shave my legs.

Reason I’ll Be Able to Redeem Myself Tomorrow:  Heart-shaped pancakes.  Heart-shaped pizzas.  Homemade heart-shaped butter cut-out cookies. 

My day began at 4:00 a.m. when my 4-year old daughter pushed open my door and said, “Mommy, can I sleep with you?”  I mumbled, “Yes, climb in,” and she did.  She assumed her rightful position, curled up with her legs firmly pushed against my spine and began to cough and wiggle.

That delight lasted until 5 a.m. when I bolted upright in bed and said, “Okay!” and she whimpered, “But I don’t want to sleep in my bed!”  I replied in a fog of delirium, “I don’t care what you do . . . you can lay on your floor and watch a show!”  She agreed to this unexpected offer with glee and I turned on Nick Jr., covered her with her Dora blanket and turned off her bedroom light. 

I didn’t think I’d be able to go back to sleep, but I did, only to be awakened at 6:15 a.m. when my husband woke up to prepare for his usual early-morning Friday breakfast with a few guys.  At 6:45 a.m. he told me, “It’s 6:45,” and I agreed and decided to sleep for five more minutes, as if that would help.

At precisely 6:50 a.m., I rolled out of bed, pulled on a giant hooded sweatshirt, 10-year old velour pajama pants and my glasses, grabbed my pillow and went downstairs to lay on the couch and wait for the doorbell to ring.  The schoolchild that we’re providing before-and-after-school care for arrived at 7:00 a.m. on the dot.  His mom is almost exactly my age and this boy shares a birthday with my boy.  But this morning, we had virtually nothing in common–her hair had benefited from a curling iron and she was wearing a cute outfit for work, while my hair was an uncombed tangle and I looked like I’d just stumbled from bed.  Which I had.  She kind of laughed, but I do not take that personally.  I am a mess in the mornings.  

I showed the boy into the living room where he watched television while I crawled back into bed for fifteen more minutes of sleep.  Then I woke up my son so he could get ready for school.  I prepared breakfast for him, combed his unruly hair, signed a permission slip and gave him popcorn money.  The boys left for school a little after 8 a.m. and I took a shower.  For some reason, our water pressure in the shower has, without warning, slowed to a trickle.  I am afraid to investigate the reason for this because what if I have to call the plumber again?  That can’t be good. 

But I couldn’t wash my hair because it would have taken a few hours to rinse the suds from it.  But don’t tell.  I don’t look that bedraggled.  Compared to a homeless person.

My older sons are coughing up lungs and sneezing out their brains, so we hurried through schoolwork as quickly as we could.  They are playing computer games and Nintendo in their room now, so theoretically, they are well enough to do more schoolwork, but I had developed one of those lack-of-sleep headaches, plus I didn’t want them to sneeze on me anymore.

My daughter napped for a good two or three hours on the couch.  I ate two ibuprofen tablets and drank three cans of Diet Coke, so I will live.

And this concludes today’s episode of Mel’s Blog.

What is going on?

First, 43-year old Lisa Nowak drives 900 miles wearing diapers so she can abduct and possibly murder another woman? 

Then, 39-year old Anna Nicole Smith is found dead in a hotel room?

Next, you’re going to tell me that mothers across America drink alcohol when they get together for play dates with their children!

I hatched a plan this afternoon while my ears were bleeding from the shocking amount of noise my four children produced.  When my husband arrived home at 5:30, I had my shoes laced up, a clean shirt on and my computer tucked into a bag. 

I went to the local Barnes & Noble which has an attached Starbucks.  I thought I’d work for awhile on a small writing project I have.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t get my computer connected to the Internet there.  I’ve never tried to do that before.  So, I went to the library and did my work there (still with no Internet).  I need to figure out the whole finding-WIFI-while-out-in-the-world-thing.

Working in the murmuring quiet of the library was lovely.  Staring at my reflection in the window was not quite as pleasant–outside in the rainy dark, headlights slid by, a traffic light shone red, then green, and I could see my naked face and somewhat frizzy hair in the window.   But I did get some work done, despite the distractions of my face staring back when I looked up from the computer in contemplation and thought.   

Then, I browsed the library shelves a bit, and then stopped by the store to buy some milk and other provisions before returning home at 9:00 p.m. 

I timed that so I would not have to put my daughter to bed. 

When I got home, I exercised–the amazing power of an exercise streak left me no choice–while reading P.D. James’ autobiography (checked out from the library last weekend–I am so thrifty!).  I am loving the book for so many reasons.  A glut of P.D. James murder mysteries is undoubtedly in my future.  I have several of her novels already on my shelves, just waiting. 

And with that, apparently, I’ve run out of things to say.  It’s nearly time for David Letterman and I need my beauty sleep. 

The End.