Here I sit

The doorbell rang.  A neighborhood mom asked if her boys were here and I had no idea.  But they weren’t.  Upstairs was just one extra boy with my youngest son.  My other sons are playing football in the street with a gang of other boys.  My daughter is upstairs watching the two play Nintendo. 

My husband just called to let me know he’s on his way home.  We’re going to have dinner tonight at someone’s house, so we farmed out our kids so we’ll be childfree for that event.  I’m just excited that I don’t have to cook.  I hope I don’t have a coughing fit . . . I’m at that lovely stage of this cold.  Fun.

What I’d truly like to know is why small children who go to bed late do not sleep in?  Why do they wake up even earlier than they normally do?  This makes no sense to me.  When I am queen, I will put a stop to this nonsense immediately.

Piles are threatening to overtake my desk.  Here is what I see:

1)  A novel that arrived by mail.  A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin.  It came highly recommended and I’m looking forward to reading it, but first, I’m reading The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene. 

2)  A Chicken Soup book.  I’m writing a piece to submit to one of those books and brought it down for inspiration.

3)  An empty Super Big Gulp cup from 7-11.  Diet Coke.  Mmmm.

4)  An empty tissue box, further proof of the severity of my cold.  A full tissue box.  More proof.

5)  A thesaurus.  I’ve been writing lately.

6)  An old journal, a printed out email, notes, a magazine, a Bible . . . all piled up in one mass.

7)  A second pile of notebook paper, coloring sheets, and a spiral-bound notebook.

What do I hear?

The laundry circling in the dryer.  The hum of the refrigerator.  The murmur of distant children’s voices.  And now, a blood-curdling scream from the four-year old.  

What do I smell?

Nothing.  Remember that cold?

That completes this Saturday’s game of I-have-nothing-to-say-that-I-can-say-in-public.  Tune in tomorrow–or the next day–for more nothing.  Or something. 

A survey of my interior

I want a day without shouting.  I want my children to be the Brady Bunch, bell-bottoms optional.  I want the house to clean itself.  I want the cats to stop pooping.  Forever.  I want a pedicure.

I think scattered thoughts.  I think best when no one is talking to me.  I think talking is overrated. 

I need to vacuum.  I need to change the sheets.  I need to sort through my daughter’s closet to rid us of her outgrown clothing before she reclaims it.  I need more sleep.  I need an agent.  Or a cheerleader.  Or both.

I regret laziness.  I regret burned bridges.  I regret burning all my diaries that I wrote before I was eighteen. 

I dream strange dreams between 5:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m.  I dream of a day when my children are grown.  I dream that they’ll turn out all right and, in turn, create happy and healthy families of their own.  I dream of a cottage where I can dream.  I dream of writing stories that change people’s minds and hearts.

I love chocolate chip cookie dough.  I love reading good literature.  I love People magazine.  I love my husband, the man who makes me laugh more than any other.  I love blue skies and tall trees and crashing ocean waves.  I love my children, even when they spill whole pitchers of water on the floor and leave a trail of Cheez-Its from the kitchen to the playroom.

I hate being misunderstood.  I hate fleas.  I hate hearing children in movie-theaters when the movies are not intended for children.  I hate running out of a key ingredient while I’m in the middle of baking something.  I hate stepping in gum.  I hate being stuck behind a bus in my car.

I like sleeping in.  I like shopping in thrift stores.  I like hearing people’s stories.  I like farmer’s markets.  I like daffodil fields.  I like parades and fluffy clouds and shade on a hot day.  I like walking.  I like comfortable shoes.  

I dread making mistakes.  I dread making phone calls.  I dread conflict. 

I need to telephone potential volunteers for Vacation Bible School (VBS).  I need to find a babysitter for Saturday night.  I must catch up on laundry.  I need to return all my shoes to my closet.  I need to find a way to get all my work done and still carve out time to feed my soul.

What about you?  What do you want, think, need, dream, love, hate, like, dread, need to do? 

 

Anyone need to hide a corpse?

Because the boys’ hole is now big enough. 

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Added to answer some questions:

When I asked one son awhile back, “Why?” he said, “Because we’re boys.”  That’s the clearest explanation they can give.  They have been unearthing big rocks, which seems to be the goal of the moment.

My husband couldn’t care less.  Our backyard is quite untamed and dominated by a giant Rainbow play structure and edged by overgrown laurel hedges.  (They kids play inside the hedges which are just beyond the hole.) 

The dirt has been spread down the little slope just below the hole and mounds up now on the sides of the hole.

I’m hoping they lose interest soon so I can refill it . . . but I can’t see a reason to make them stop.

Also, the in the picture, only one of those boys belongs to me.  The others are neighbors.

One lump or two?

Yesterday, my fingers discovered two lumps in my neck, one directly under my chin and one under the corner of my jaw.  I’m not prone to lumps in my neck, though my dad was.  While showering, he felt a lump in his neck and one thing led to another.  He had Hodgkin’s disease while still in his twenties, so I was introduced to the terror of cancer when I was a young girl.  The cancer didn’t kill him, then, though.  It took another bout with cancer–melanoma–twenty years later to do him in. 

At any rate, lumps kind of scare me, even though I know that we all have strings of glands in our necks which swell when we’re fighting off infections.  I know this.  And I am dragging a little bit, fatigued, clearing my throat a little more than normal.  So, even though I can’t stop fingering these symmetrical lumps, I am certain (mostly) that I am in no danger of dying young.  (I will die, however, since that is the fate of all human beings.  Alas.)  I’m just fighting off a little virus which is no surprise since my daughter was sort of sick last week.

But I can’t stop teasing my husband.  He wanted me to make popcorn for him and I said, “Yes, I and my lumps will make you popcorn.”  And we talked about how I could just be disposed of in the Back Yard Hole.  (Please, though, send flowers.  Lots of flowers.  No donations in my name to any charitable cause, just an excess of flowers.)

Really, the truth is that I and my lumps are going to bed early tonight, partly so we can finish reading To Kill a Mockingbird and partly because we are utterly exhausted from checking our email every ten minutes without fail throughout the whole day.

Weekend Update

And so life goes on.

Saturday morning my 4-year old’s best buddy came over to play with her.  They spent most of the chilly morning in the back yard.  She shuns shoes and a jacket at all times.  I cannot understand this–I wear slippers during the cold months and can hardly stand to wear shoes without socks during the summer months.  A neighbor boy showed up and the three of them spent a long time collecting pine cones in a plastic bucket.  (Occasionally, the kids decide to have pine cone fights.)

When my husband returned from his Saturday morning meeting (at 2 p.m.), I abandoned the family.  I saw a movie (“Disturbia”) which was entertaining, but the most distracting thing happened during the whole movie . . . the movie was subtitled.  So, instead of just watching the movie, I kept comparing the words the actors spoke and the sound effects (which were all described!) with the white words on the screen.  I’m considering writing a complaint to the theater owners because I hated the experience so much.  Now, if I knew that someone in the theater were hearing impaired, I wouldn’t have minded.  But, I have no idea why that happened and the unexpectedness of it annoyed me.

Also, to the person with the little white car that smelled like cigarettes . . . you’re welcome.  I turned off your lights.  Good thing you don’t lock your car.

Yesterday was a quiet day . . . my only noteworthy accomplishment involved the tangles of leave-stripped ivy in the front yard.  Earlier in the spring, twelve boys played a rowdy game of baseball in my ivy-dominated yard.  The ivy turned brown and appeared dead, but now green shoots have appeared.  I thought it best to untangle as many of the vines as possible and trim it back as much as time (and the yard waste bucket) allowed.

And yes, that is as boring as it sounds.  My yard is a disaster.  And the hole in the backyard continues to grow thanks to the combined effort of every boy in the neighborhood who jumps into it and hacks away at the dirt.  (Me:  “Stop using my garden tools!”)  I’m pretty sure it’s big enough to bury a cow now.

Being a mother is harder than I thought.

My daughter is four and a half and as the youngest child and only girl in my family, she exerts her will on her brothers by crying.  Sobbing, weeping, screaming, in fact.  Which makes my ears bleed and my head spin on my neck.  Her brothers, ages 14, 14 and 9, cannot remember being four years old.  They can’t remember being irrational or whiny or unreasonable.  They demand that she act fairly, that she adhere to rules, that she not follow them around.  They accuse me of letting her get away with everything.  They critique my parenting and tell me how I ought to do it.  And they cannot get get along with her.  So she cries.

This dynamic is driving me nuts. 

They whisper something to her just to get her goat.  She wails.  I holler.  They protest.  She sobs.  I lecture.  They comply.  She stops.  Until the next time. 

I am a terrible mother, no doubt about it.  As I mentioned to someone in an email, I thought I would be a dandy mother, a singing in the kitchen, humming under my breath, eye-crinkling, smiling at all times mother.  But then again, I thought I’d give birth to Jo, Beth, Meg and Amy and we’d sit around embroidering, playing sonatas on the piano and conversing in quiet tones about Papa.  (In lilting British accents.)  I would have been a terrific mother to reasonable, sane, crafty, gentle girls.  (I would.  Don’t argue with me.) 

But I am the mother of whiners and kids who stink.  I am the mother of kids who have the temerity to point out my faults to me.  I am the mother of children who sass me on a regular basis and question my authority on the basis of my flawed human judgment.  I am the mother of boys who have devoted the spring to digging a coffin-sized hole in my backyard, the mother of a daughter who will not wear shoes outside even when it’s only forty-five degrees.  I am the mother of children who demonstrate no interest in contemplation or meditation or quietness.  And they leave wet towels and underpants turned inside out on the floor.

I am a mother with chipped edges and missing parts, a mother who lost the map and wonders if maybe she ought to turn around rather than forging ahead into the wilderness.  I am a mother who has no clue if I’m doing all right or if I am destroying my children with my temper tantrums.

Tonight I thought of that sunny afternoon in September of 1989 when my dad called my sisters and I into his brown-toned living room.  He sat in the rocking chair.  Terror filled me because we were not a family who had family meetings or a family who sat around and chatted for no good reason.  I knew this was a meeting with a purpose and that purpose would be bad.  I knew in my thumping heart.

The sun shone through the blinds marking a horizontal pattern on the carpet.  My dad took off his glasses, wiped his balding head and face with his hand.  His hands were always rough, his fingertips so dry they cracked and sometimes, I’d say, “What did you do to your hand?” and he’d shrug and say, “I don’t know.”  I couldn’t imagine that, not knowing where the blood came from, but now I’m a mother and my hands are worn, dry and sometimes, I find a streak of blood on my finger and I have absolutely no idea where it came from.  I don’t even notice the pain. 

He started at the beginning of the story, describing the time he noticed he couldn’t read some writing on a piece of paper.  This puzzling event led him to the ophthalmologist, who sent him immediately to a neurologist who sent him for tests which revealed a brain tumor.  That news led to a prognosis:  four months to two years.  As he told us this, he broke down and cried and I reached for him in an awkward hug–we were not a hugging family, but this news called for a hug, even an awkward one.  Some time passed while we sobbed, and then we stopped. 

Then he mentioned a hidden two-pound bag of M&Ms and we broke it open and ate M&Ms in defiance of the certainty of his impending death.  Which is odd, but that’s the way it was.

I wondered for the first time tonight if he wasn’t actually crying for himself.  I don’t think he feared death at all.  But as a father, did he look at us and see orphans, victims of his cancer?  He knew that we’d suffer the loss, that we’d be broken, that we’d have to find our way through his illness, his death, his funeral, the grieving, the unknown.  He’d miss his grandchildren, his retirement, the vibrant changing colors of fall, Kringle at Christmas-time, hot-fudge sundaes, bratwurst you could only buy in Wisconsin . . . but he was a father and I think he cried because he knew that his death would cut us to the bone. 

Almost twenty years later, that occurred to me.  What’s shocking is how keenly I feel the loss of him the older I get.  He was the guardrail, keeping me on the road, keeping me from fall off a cliff to certain doom below.  And although I can stay on the road without a guardrail, I drive so much more carefully, I worry so much more, I fear sliding off the road entirely.  I resent the fact that my father was taken from me when he was so young, while I was so young, just when we were getting the hang of being father and daughter. 

I suppose that has nothing to do with the fact that I feel like a substandard mother on days like today when I said too often, “Please!  Go play!” and rushed to judgment instead of walking down the stairs and investigating the crying.  Being a parent is hard.  I thought that my parents were just not very good at parenting, but as it turns out, they did the best they could under the circumstances.  The job itself is just really difficult.  Especially when you aren’t parenting little women but real kids who forget to brush their teeth unless you walk them into the bathroom and point at the toothbrush.

All-American Past-time

I judged my parents harshly for their failure to attend any of my softball games during the three years I played in an organized league as a child.  I think they slowed down the car and I jumped, rolled into a ditch and then stumbled onto the ball field dragging my mitt behind me.  Or something like that.  But, seriously, they never attended my games.  They were busy.

Tonight, I had the distinct pleasure of driving my 9-year old son twenty-five minutes away to a soggy ball field so he could play baseball.  (My husband had a scheduling conflict.)  I pulled the key out of the ignition and that’s when my son smacked himself on the forehead and said, “I forgot my glove!”  I am pretty sure I rolled my eyes and then said, “You are kidding me.  You didn’t bring your glove to a baseball game?” and then he started to cry.

He and his 4-year old sister trailed behind me as I strode across the newly mown field toward his coach.  I delivered him to the coach, explained that I’d be going back to get the glove and that I’d be back in time for the game.  (I am such an optimist at such random times.)  Then I dragged my daughter back across the field and to the van.  Forty minutes later, we were back, lucky us.  The time was 7:25 p.m. and the other team was up to bat. 

I did a quick count and estimated that about one hundred people were involved in this recreational activity.  We all stood around.  Raindrops kept falling on our heads.  My daughter finished her snack and began to beg to go home, stopping only to inform me that she needed to pee.  Off we went, across the gigantic field, to the restrooms in the community center.  Once inside the building, we followed the trail of grass clumps.  Then, back to the game, which was now being played in semi-darkness and increasing rainfall.

My son never got to bat.  (Fourteen teammates were present, plus on Saturday he opted to skip the “Jamboree” and attend a birthday party instead.  My husband told me in advance that if he were the coach, he’d make our boy sit on the bench for two games as a result of that choice.)  My boy was put in left field for one inning where he missed the one ball hit his direction.  At least he got to touch the ball as he threw it in field.  For this, I drove a combined hour and twenty minutes, maybe a little more.  I stood in the cold rain.  I listened to my daughter whine for at least thirty minutes.  Everyone was late getting to bed.  (The game lasted until 8:30 p.m., which, if you ask me, is late for a school night.  My husband suggested that perhaps I’d like to run for baseball commissioner and I said, no thanks, I’d rather just be Queen of the World and then he wondered aloud if I’d tolerate the dissenters and pointed out that I prefer feedback only if it’s positive.) 

At any rate, I hated the whole baseball in the rain at dusk experience.  I can’t believe we all put ourselves through that in the name of fun.  Now I kind of understand why my parents skipped my games.  (I’m only a little bitter now, instead of a lot.  Mom, if you’re reading this, I’m just kidding.)

Incidentally, my husband wanted a full report.  I told him what I just told you.  Then he said, “Who won?” and I looked at him with incredulity and said, “Who cares?  I have no idea!” because I couldn’t see anyone even keeping score.  Furthermore, they don’t play a particular number of innings, but a certain length of time, I think.  And I was distracted by my whiny daughter.  All I know is that the pitcher on our team seemed to hit about every third player on the opposite team . . . and he had an earring and I just have to wonder what kind of parents let a 9-year old boy pierce his ear.

Fargo movies

Dinner Party Conversation

Tidbits from a dinner party, all uttered by different people:

–He drank so much coffee, he couldn’t sleep.  So, “after I ran fourteen miles at 4:00 a.m., I started to feel better.”

–Someone mentioned having a gun.  “I have a gun!  I have a Derringer and a 22.”  This said by a refined, elegant, silver-haired, woman who retains a Southern accent.  The gun owners outnumbered those of us who are unarmed.  

–After being trained by the military to be a supply clerk, “I thought the curriculum was so boring, so I asked about becoming a SEAL.”  When we all gasp, he says, “I was one of the ones who actually liked the training.”  (He served in Vietnam, among other places.) 

–And what do you do, someone asks another man.  “Oh,” he says, “I train pilots to fly 737s.”

In the company of such humility and wealth of experiences, all I had to contribute to the conversation was my knowledge of Philip Yancey and Donald Miller’s book, Blue Like Jazz.  I have never trained to become a Navy SEAL, flown a jet, owned a gun or run more than the required one mile during the Presidential Fitness test in junior high.  I have given birth twice at home in a birthing tub surrounded by women and not a single doctor, but somehow, I’m thinking that’s not fit conversation for a dinner party where not only did we use silverware, but also fancy china with silvered edges.

Give me some earplugs!

I’m turning into my grandmother with her intolerance for noise.  Macular degeneration stole her sight, so she sits in one chair, mostly, listening to the silence when she isn’t listening to the Bible on tape.  I hardly ever take my kids over there because I know she can barely tolerate the noise.  She’s 101.  What’s my excuse?

I am a quiet type of person, one who wouldn’t turn on the radio or television if I were alone all day (which I never am).  I have no need for conversation or for expending a certain allotment of words per day.  I have had to develop my ability to make small-talk because chatting doesn’t come naturally to me.

And yet, I’m living with a bunch of people who just can’t stop talking to me.  My daughter is the worst of the bunch.  If I sit down, she appears like a pesky genie, begging me to get a snack from the “covered” (aka the “cupboard”) and asking me if I “bemember” when she was three and cut her hand on a barnacle.  She uninterested in snuggling or playing with Play-doh or lying down to rest, even if she tells me how tired she is.  No, she just wants to talk, talk, talk.

If I happen to be alone, thinking actual thoughts while washing the dishes, my sons will traipse through the kitchen on their never-ending quest to drink all the milk without my knowledge and they will ask me crazy questions, questions that spring from the murky space in their brains where they are piecing together the mysteries of life and plotting to get their hands on some Chinese egg rolls soon.  Just because I’m standing still, working, does not mean that I’m not occupied in my head, pondering something or another.  To them, I look like a fount of knowledge, the person who can answer any question which might flit through their heads.

I can’t have two coherent thoughts in a row which positively frustrates me and honestly makes me feel a little crazy as if I’m being tortured by the systematic drip-drip-drip of words. 

I want to spend my days stringing words together like so many fancy beads, but I can’t.  I can’t because I’m living in a madhouse with chatty kids.  And I’m complaining about it which definitely disqualifies me for the Mother of the Year. 

My daughter will turn five on September 2.  She misses the local kindergarten cut-off date by a day.  I never thought I’d do this, but I am likely to send her to preschool because she has turned into Miss Extrovert who asks every visitor who appears at our door, “Can I come to your house?”  She wants to go, do, talk, visit, play, and then go some more.  She’s wearing me out which makes me feel guilty and old.  Also, uninteresting and uncreative. 

Silence is all I want which is ironic because I spent so much of my twenties crying because all I wanted then was a baby.  I just can’t be pleased.  Now I just want to be alone.

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