peevish mama

Before I begin this post, there is a housekeeping matter I would like to address. I am going back to calling my youngest girl Devil Baby. Angel Baby is just too saccharine for this blog and this kid. Devil Baby suits her better, even though everything I said here still holds true. For the most part. 

I am also going to go on record as the only person in the history of the world to say something negative about the Wild Rumpus. I’ll probably be tarred and feathered by all those fresh faced mommies I saw there yesterday, but so be it. The Wild Rumpus is a really cute bookstore tucked away in a really cute Minneapolis neighborhood, with a child-size purple door and a coterie of animals, most of which are allowed to wander around freely, all of which are allowed to spread their dander and feathers and other animal debris and respiratory pollutants throughout. Chickens strut around the store, in and out of people’s legs, taking refuge behind the front desk if a kid gets too gropey. Cats lounge on ratty armchairs and in the windowsills, generally ignoring the chubby hands that pet and poke them. There are salamanders, tarantulas, ferrets, chinchillas, rats, frogs, a bunch of different cooing birds.

Normally, I love the place. It’s magical – a lovely treasure trove of children’s books, a pantheon of book-love, blah blah blah, but yesterday – yesterday everything about the Wild Rumpus just SUCKED. It was the Wild Suckus. I had decided to take Devil Baby there for “Tale Time” – get it? She’s on spring break this week, so I thought I’d start us off with a nice activity after we dropped Supergirl and Saint James off at school. The place was packed – quite literally a zoo – so after Devil Baby harassed a chicken with deformed feet (pigeon toes?), we found a spot on the crowded rug. I looked around. I could have been on Jupiter for all the connection I felt with these well scrubbed women and their pallid children.

Story time began and Devil Baby was having none of it. She was squirming and trying to lie down on the floor – she insisted on closing her eyes and pretending to snore. She kept asking for fruit snacks, gum, chapstick, hand cream. Listen to the lady, Devil Baby, I would whisper, trying to keep my growing irritation at bay. Then came the song time and – slap in the face – the child who sings constantly refused to sing, refused to do the little hand motions. Jesus! Why did I even care? But I did care. A lot. I didn’t drag myself to this hot, stinky bookstore and squish myself onto a ratty old rug, shoulder to shoulder with Minneapolis’ most earnest and loving nannies, young mommies and grandmas for nothing. Sing child! For the love of God – it’s the freaking itsy bitsy spider, child, your favorite – SING!!! But instead she flopped back for some more snoring action. I watched all the other caretakers sway and sing their hearts out, smug, blissful looks plastered on their pasty faces, and I began to feel the sticky fingers of disgust closing around my throat. Are you actually enjoying this? Like, for yourselves?

The banality of it all started to drive me crazy and to more than a few uncharitable, borderline evil thoughts. For which God promptly repaid me with an allergic puffy eye.

Despite my maniacal obsession with keeping my hands away from my face, I must have slipped and it felt like one of the cats had climbed up under my eyelid to work out a hairball. I was dying, but I couldn’t rub it or I would make it worse, turning a wretched itchy eye into a swollen monstrosity. This much, at least, I have learned in my life. In desperation I rubbed my eye on Devil Baby’s shirt. Oh shit, she’s been dragging herself all over this Godforsaken temple of dander. Goddamn it itches! Aah. Fuck me. But fuck me more if I’m going to leave before this goddam story time is over, you stupid bitches! Aaaahhhh. The agony. Itches. Itches. Shit, it itches! More fake snoring from Devil Baby. That does is. Fuck it. We are so out of here.

So I retreated as gracefully as I could with my eye in screaming red hot spasms, trying not to step on any little fingers with my size 10 knee-high Wellington boots. What a bust. What a total bust. I drove us home, horribly depressed because I am not deluded enough to think I was even vaguely in the right for having been so deeply disgusted by the whole scenario. Obviously, if it’s me versus thirty-some women and their offspring, I’m the one with the problem. I may have anger issues, but I have not lost my grip on reality.

It’s me. Devil Baby has no attention span for storytime because, um, I haven’t taken her very many times. At least not when you compare to Saint James and Supergirl. When I offer to read Devil Baby a book she runs away screaming because she thinks I’m going to try to put her to bed. My child – my child – my poor, pathetic, third born, daughter-of-a-spent-husk-of-a-mother child, is a philistine at the tender age of two. I have let her watch too much TV. She knows the words to commercials for acne creams but can’t sit still in a room full of kids to watch a very animated young woman read books. She can take pictures of herself with the Mac, but she doesn’t know that it’s ok, actually encouraged, to read books during the day time. Her favorite song is Rihanna’s Disturbia, but she won’t row row row her boat with the rest of the kids. I feel like a failure when it comes to Devil Baby. I feel like I got all used up with the first two.

Have all my songs been sung? At least those not involving thumpin’ base lines, catchy hooks, screaming guitars or trippy synth?

After the Wild Suckus debacle, I loomed around in a state of melancholy, the weight of my inadequacies crushing my chest. My head felt like a waterballoon, stretched precariously thin, ready to pop and gush forth tears of guilt and self-pity at the slightest provocation. The weather sucks, there is no easy out like going to the park where fresh air and the smell of green can act as its own balm on our ragged psyches. I just needed the day to be over.

And that’s the beauty of days. They end. And start again. Today the weather still sucks, but I decided I would take Devil Baby to Club Kid so I could go to yoga. Club Kid is a pay by the hour child care alternative which I only use in a pinch, mostly because it smells like a daycare which sends me Proustian synapsing back to my working days and because the hourly pay thing feels like the kiddie equivalent of a hooker motel. Today, however, qualified as a pinch. For everyone’s sake, I needed to fix my head and my heart and there is no better way known to me than a good sweaty yoga class. And it worked. What’s more, I ran into my betties and was able to vent, just a bit, just enough, bless their hearts. Thank you Nanook and JJ. I feel better. 

And right now I’m home with Devil Baby. She’s watching TV while I type, but we’re under the same blanket. She keeps pressing her little feet into the side of my leg. And this, I think . . . I hope, is good enough for today.

I was picking through the wreckage of boots, school papers, backpacks, lone socks, disemboweled lunch boxes and half-way inside-out snow pants strewn across the floor of the mud room when I stumbled upon something. I found some crumpled up candy wrappers stuffed into one of the cubbies.Laffy Taffy. I’m no candy Nazi. I don’t particularly like candy for the most part, so I don’t carry around a lot of angst about it. There’s no love/hate, forbidden fruitness to it for me. Which is a round about way of saying that I let my kids eat candy in moderation pretty much whenever it happens to be around, which is not always, but sometimes. I don’t know. I just don’t think about it that much.  As long as we have no cavities, I’m cool.

What I do know is that the lime green Laffy Taffy wrapper signaled the dawn of a new era in our house: the secret life of candy. 

For a long time, I knew exactly what candy my kids were eating because it all came from me, or at least, through me. I either bought it, doled it out, saw it as we read through Valentines, or knew it came out of their Halloween pillow cases. As I turned the crinkly wrapper over in my hand I realized I couldn’t answer the simplest of questions: whose was this and how did they get it? When did they eat it and why didn’t they ask me? As sure as the wrapper was peeled off that candy, my kids are peeling off of me.

My older guys are out in the world. They’re gone at school all day, leading entire lives I know very little about. They’re on the bus, on the playground, in the halls - working it. Navigating, negotiating, hustling, trading, bluffing, posturing, lying, stealing.* Do you remember being a kid? You work hard for your money! It’s not easy. It’s not pretty. It’s a dog eat dog world, even for kids. Especially for kids, who are very early on in the journey of evolving from rude and selfish little brutes into compassionate and complete human beings. Kids are mean, man. 

Whose candy was this and how did they get it? A bet? A dare? How?

On the other hand, childhood isn’t necessarily something that unfolds with the Rocky soundtrack soaring in the background. It isn’t necessarily an after-school special from the seventies. It’s not all fisticuffs and pecking order – jeering and bullies. There is also plenty of sweetness and light and maybe some kid simply pulled the Laffy Taffy out of his coat pocket and gave it to Supergirl because they’re friends or he wants to be her friend. Maybe Saint James got it from his teacher for good behavior. Maybe he traded his Granola Bites at lunch. Who knows? The point is, I don’t. 

The secret life of candy. The candy is beside the point (at least until the candy becomes something really naughty like cigarettes or booze). The point is the secret life – countless glances, exchanges, high fives, jokes, giggles, stories, shoulder buts, rivalries, embarrassments and slights to which I have not been privy. Saint James and Supergirl are out there fending for themselves, figuring out who they are and how they want to walk through this world and not only am I not helping them with it, I’m not even seeing it. Could it be true that I have given them most of what I will need to give them by the age of five? 

So Saint James and Supergirl eat a little candy I don’t know about from time to time. No biggie. But soon they will be those high school kids at Dairy Queen, eating whole meals I won’t know about. And there will be mothers with little kids eating nearby, sneaking shy peeks at them while they jostle and flirt and refill their Cokes and text and twirl their hair and drum their fingers on the tables and laugh and share ear buds and go about their lives – quite apart from their mothers.  

Soon, that will be them. I’ve got the proof stuffed in my jeans pocket.

*I sincerely hope not lying and stealing and I sincerely believe not lying and stealing, but I would not bet my favorite pair of boots on not lying and stealing because, well, if you see a roll of Smarties fall out of a seventh grader’s pocket and you pick it up, is it really stealing?

So often it feels like we don’t get to pick what kind of mama we want to be. The way we mother feels like an extension of who we are and that’s about as easy to change as the ebb and flow of the tides. Not that we don’t try. I’m constantly beating myself up, vowing to do this or that differently, falling down, trying again – all of it laced in mother guilt. My mantra: every day is a new day. And sure enough, every day is a new day. Usually, I wake up with tons of energy (post coffee), the well has been mysteriously filled in the dark hours of the night and my children’s soft and sleepy faces are all I need to know I am doing exactly what I should be doing. As the day wears on, however, shit happens and sometimes – often – I end up really far away from my blissful start. And so I begin again. And again. 

On Sunday I had one of those weird “what should I do?” moments that brought my role as a mother into hyper-focus.  I very consciously got to choose how I was going to act, and it was a tad odd, if empowering. I had taken the kids ice skating and since I thought they would just be messing around, I didn’t make them wear their hockey helmets. Before long, Saint James sidled his way into a pick-up game with some boys and their dads: Edina’s finest. I could tell he was jazzed and stretching way beyond his normal level of play. The dads and older boys weren’t wearing helmets, but the kids that looked to be Saint James’ age all were. I grabbed his helmet, picked my way across the ice and called him over. He took one look at the helmet, said he didn’t want to wear it and skated away, chasing the action. I stood for a few seconds holding the helmet in front of me like an offering. 

I could walk away. I could bark after him and force him to put it on. By skating away from me, Saint James had closed the door on my attempt to give him his helmet under the radar screen. Right now – in this moment – what kind of a mother was I going to be?  

I opened my mouth. I closed my mouth. I sighed and walked away. 

He didn’t bully me. I didn’t give in to him. In that moment, I made a choice. A choice between letting my son skate around with his balls intact or grabbing him by those same balls and bending him to my will. I chose not to be the overbearing overprotective mother, knowing full well that if he got hurt, the pain would be uniquely and exquisitely mine.  I thought of his eyes and teeth, exposed to all matter of hard things and sharp edges. I thought of his delicate temples, protected by nothing more than the thin layer of a wool ski hat. I thought of all that is already in his beautiful brain – all that is yet to come.

Why did I walk away like a rejected suitor holding a droopy bouquet? Why did I accept Saint James’ petulant decision and spend the next hour feeling slightly queasy, when it would have been nothing for him to have indulged me and put it on? I don’t know. I guess I can imagine being a boy on the ice with a bunch of better hockey players. And I know – I just know that my voice scraping across that ice would have sounded shrill and unwelcome. No matter how hard I tried to seem casual and cool – no matter how many “buddies” I threw into my cajoling sentences, his cheeks would have burned in the cold air. I chose to let him be. I won’t always make that choice, but in that moment, it just seemed right. Wrong for me. But right for him. So I held my breath, my heart in my throat, until he skated off the ice his face lit with pride, right into my arms.

This morning found me in the kitchen making crèpes for the kids, which is slightly labor intensive in that you can only make one at a time unless you go crazy like the Swedish Chef on the Muppets and start in with two, maybe three separate frantic pans. As I was flipping crèpe after deformed crèpe, I heard Saint James and Supergirl singing in the dining room.  It went a little something like this:

We need fun,

We got nowhere to run.

This ain’t fun,

We got nowhere to run.

We need fun,

We got nowhere to run. etc., etc.

The child of the seventies in me thought - Wow, that sounds like something that would be great in a newly released Annie musical – a modernized version of  It’s a Hard Knock Life! ? Budding Andrew Lloyd Webbers?

The gold roped, diamond grilled, bling-ditty-bling-bling hip hop producer in me thought - Damn, chil’ren, that hook’s off the heezy, gots ta make it eazy, fo ya sweet mama peezy. A little like this.

And the mother in me, the mother who has basically dedicated her life to making their lives “fun,” thought - You pint size fuckers! What more fun could you possibly handle in your chocked-full-o’-sports-and-activities little lives? Saint James, sometimes you go from hockey to soccer to skiing all in one day. And who’s driving your skinny, fun lovin’ little ass? Right. Me. And Doctor Dash. When I was your age I barely did any activities. And my parents took me to see Reds – with Warren Beatty.  Do you have any idea how boring that movie was? And how long it was? It was so long it had an intermission! And they made me go and sit through it – and did my mother think to bring me something to draw on? Of course not. Her purse had TicTacs and cigarettes in it – not crayons and markers and squishy balls and little plastic animals and playdough. It was not a treasure trove of fun – in fact, we weren’t even allowed to touch her purse! And now, in the cruelest of ironies, I’m getting it on the other end with the boring movies when I have to sit through Alvin and the Chipmunks (hell) and Hotel for Dogs (purgatory). Good luck, my malcontented spawn, finding parents as “fun” as us! Actually, this is the land of milk and honey when it comes to nice families, so you just may be able to find other fun parents. But be careful what you wish for, you ankle-biting ingrates! Your new fun parents may make you bathe way more than we do, eat many more vegetables than we do, do many more chores than we do – and they may be more into board games (read: bored games) than dance parties, and then you will be singing a different tune altogether. Quite. A different. Tune.

BUT -

Fo shizzle ma nizzle. Lock it down, little chumps.

I gots ta admit – I feel y’all. Y’all real y’all.

Oh fa-show.  I need some fun, I got nowhere to run.

Yo, mama needs some fun – she gots nowhere to run.

Today was parent pick-up day at school, meaning there were no buses, meaning the parents were supposed to pick up the children.  I had it written in my calendar, I swear.  But in an effort to clean, I had momentarily moved it.  Apparently, if my calendar isn’t yawning open, shaking its calendar tits in my face  I’m a goner.  I’m like a baby who hasn’t figured out object permanence.  Where’s the ball?  It’s gone!  Forever!  Oh, there it is.  Now it’s gone!  Calendar shut means no appointments, nothing going on, nothing to remember.  Total Freebird. 

And I don’t even have the decency to have a good excuse.  What was I doing when I got the humiliating call from Lenore, the school secretary, who had a forgotten and baleful Supergirl sitting in her office?  I can tell you I wasn’t racing against the clock to file a brief, I wasn’t listening for a heart murmur on my cardiac patient, I wasn’t squinting down the eyepiece of an electron microscope, I wasn’t ladling soup at a shelter. I wasn’t kneading bread, or making a soufflé or cleaning my house.  No, I was downloading My Kinda Lover by Billy Squier off iTunes.

I’m having a personal pendulum swing moment.  After years of watching my children like a hawk, not letting them go anywhere without me, hovering, ever vigilant, scanning the horizon for signs of danger – pitbulls, clowns, men in trench coats, fat ladies with puppies and candy, rusty vans – I am starting to mellow.  In my gut, I have been feeling like Saint James and Supergirl need a little space, a little freedom – for them, for me.  Maybe I’m just exhausted and the jagged edges of my catastrophe-addled mind are being worn smooth by the day to day struggle of keeping everyone fed, dressed, relatively clean and happy.  Or maybe, just maybe, I’m doing that thing that we humans do so well – I am learning.

Stranger danger.  There is nothing, and I mean NOTHINGmore terrifying than the thought of my child being abducted.  It is the stuff of nightmares and masochistic calamitizing.  (To calamitize is to imagine horrible scenarios, letting them play out in your mind in painfully vivid detail.  I thought I was the only one who did this, who could literally make myself cry imagining, for example, my funeral, my kids and husband sitting in a pew with their dear heads bent, sobbing, dressed like somber mismatched ragamuffins.  Then I started to ask some friends and it seems many women and girls do it – it’s not so much a guy thing.  Why would you do that? asks Doctor Dash, mystified by the strange and alarming workings of my mind.  I’m not sure why I do it.  Is it preparation?  An attempt to ward off horrible events?  You know, the whole if you think about it, it won’t happen theory?  Somewhere, I stumbled upon the term calamatizing and just having a name for these peculiar self-induced flights of the psyche appealed to my need to categorize things.)  In any event, the combustible combination of the media’s bloodthirsty, sensationalistic, scavenging coverage of abduction cases, muddled with my own calamitizing could easily send me over the brink, imagining pedophiles and kidnappers lurking in every nook and cranny.  

Fortunately, although I do have a vivid imagination, I have an adequate grip on reality.  I know that the incidence of abduction by strangers has not increased in the last fifty years, it’s just that we hear about cases in Florida and Nebraska on the news so it feels like it’s happening every day, in our own back yards.  It’s fear mongering, plain and simple, and I have been feeling the need to push back.

To me, the trick has always been to keep a watchful eye on my guys, without their knowing it.  If they can’t actually have the freedom we had to run around the neighborhood all day, returning home sweaty, dirty and mosquito-bitten at dusk, then they at least deserve to have the perception of freedom.  I have always felt this in my core, in an amorphous, non specific way:  there cannot be too much fear, or there will be no courage.  

And now I’m reading this book.  (You knew I was gearing up for something).  The book is called Last Child in the Woods, by Richard Louve, and it is rocking my world.  It’s one of those books that is compelling and provocative and perfectly pitched for where I am right now.  Louv’s message dovetails with the vague stirrings I’ve been experiencing.  Embedded within his larger message about the crisis being brought about by divorcing our children from unfettered, unstructured contact with nature (more on that at a later date, for sure), is a discussion of stranger danger.  It is one of many reasons our kids are being shooed out of the woods and into their homes. 

What struck me most about all of this is that by attempting to protect our children, we may actually be putting them at greater risk.  In short, by keeping them safe inside, we are basically raising a bunch of pussies.  He didn’t quite put it that way, but that’s the gist.  Kids need real world sensory experience, idle dream time, space for imaginative play, opportunity for spontaneous socializing and conflict resolution.  These things breed self confidence, inner fortitude, street smarts, world smarts – the first lines of defense against bad people.  We don’t want our kids to be afraid of all adults – what kind of adults will they be?  We want them to be open, to be community minded, to be involved and engaged in the lives of the people around them, to be able to discern the good guys from the bad guys (and not just on a video screen).  If everyone is out and talking to and watching out for each other, it makes for a safer and healthier community.  How likely is a kid to care about the old lady down the street when he grew up with a joy stick in one hand and a bag of Cheetos in the other?

So in reading this book, I have shifted from believing that my kids need to experience perceived freedom to believing that they need real, actual freedom.  They need to brush up against the world, with all its potholes and dark corners, and feel empowered to navigate it.  I’m not at all sure how to go about this.  I haven’t even begun to figure this out.  I can only hope that in my awareness and intent lie the seeds of change.  We all want to keep our kids safe.  But at what cost?  

This past week I was about ready to turn in my mother license.  I was horrible.  Crabby. Impatient.  Everything was annoying me, mostly my children with all their NEEDS.  If I have to rip open and dump another box of Annie’s mac and cheese into boiling water, I will start to scream and I won’t be able to stop.  Mac and cheese has become a total farce in our house.  I pretend to make them a meal (which I know I’m not because it’s just starch and fat and whatever corn-based Franken-glue they use to bind it all together).  They pretend to eat it (which they don’t, because they don’t actually like mac and cheese, and why would they?  It tastes like playdough vaguely infused with what an extraterrestrial would imagine tastes like cheese based on reports from planet earth).  I pretend that they ate it as I dump the congealed orange clumps into the sink.  And then we all pretend that the pretzels and cheese and popsicles and popcorn and watermelon and Doritos and granola bars and grapes that they eat the whole rest of the day are just snacks and desert, as opposed to actual meal substitutes.  Very bad.  Very bad, indeed.

But it gets worse.  The Tooth Fairy, that indolent, irresponsible, dental whore, has FOR THE SECOND TIME, failed to fulfill her duties to Saint James.  That slut was probably smoking a cigarette in bed with one of her cheesy dentists, her sack of quarters strewn over the shag carpeting in a fit of passion.  Or, more likely, she was on her hands and knees, her rump in the air, searching for all the baby teeth that fell out of her pockets when she was pretending to laugh at his teeth jokes.  The first time she forgot to show, I had to tell the kids to go back upstairs to look again and frantically threw a couple bucks into a big wooden urn thing we have by the fireplace, concocting some farfetched story that she probably had to rush out of here when Doctor Dash got up to pee.  Not that I needed any improvement, but parenthood has made me a pretty good liar.  Anyone who says they don’t lie to their kids is a liar.  

And this morning . . . this morning my heart is breaking because Saint James announced in a flat voice, scarcely moving his eyes from the Saturday morning cartoons, that the Tooth Fairy didn’t come.  Like he’s been burned by this dirty vixen one time too many, and now knows what the rest of the world knows: she’s a slovenly hussy and she can’t be trusted.  So, stupid, desperate, chastened me, I smuggle a couple bucks upstairs and throw them into his pillow, knowing it’s too late to actually take the tooth.  A few minutes later when I pretend to make this befuddling discovery, Saint James mutely takes the money and stuffs it into his red British phone booth piggybank.  

Best case: he’s puzzling over the possibility that she missed the tooth, like he missed the money the first time he checked his pillowcase.  

Worst case:  he realizes that the Tooth Fairy is a slothful slacker and a forgetful shit head.  

Worst-worst case: he realizes she is me.

Spread too thin.  Today is Saint James’ last day of second grade.  It brings to a close his time on the sweet lower campus of our school which cocoons the precious kindergartners through second graders.  I decide I will pick him up at school to mark the occasion, maybe go for some ice cream to celebrate this itty bitty rite of passage.  

As I wait, I chat with some moms, keeping an eye on Devil Baby to make sure she doesn’t hightail it into the street in her hot pink Crocks.  I watch her climb into someone else’s jogging stroller.  I know better than to try to get her out and, really, who’s going to care?  I watch her stand up in the stroller.  I watch her tip it over, her forehead passing mere centimeters from the jagged, immutable corner of a brick wall.  Isn’t it funny how when your kid falls, it’s in slow motion but you’re never quick enough to catch them?  Actually, that’s not true – I’ve had plenty of saves in my day – more than I can count.  But those aren’t the ones I remember.  I remember the gasps and screams and slips through the fingers and just out of reaches.  

I hold poor little Devil Baby, her wails muffling into my sweatshirt, feeling like a jerk that I hadn’t stopped her from falling while other moms cluck words of concern around me.  I notice blood on her sweater and am overcome by a feeling of woozy trippy calm while I try to figure out where it’s coming from.  I hold my breath, hoping I’m not a nanosecond away from discovering an ER worthy gash.  At some point I become vaguely aware that Saint James and Supergirl are standing nearby watching.  Devil Baby does have a gash on her chin, but it turns out not to be too bad and, plus, she’s a tough petutie.  So she’s just hanging out in my arms, blinking her teary eyes and making those dear little post-crying hiccupy sounds.  (I hate to admit this, as it sounds like I’m one hysterical tick away from Munchausen’s By-Proxy Syndrome, but sometimes it’s nice when your kid is mildly ill or maimed because they’re quiet and docile and want you to hold them and what can be better than that?)  Since things are under control, I resume my conversation with my friend, ignoring poor Saint James, totally forgetting my plan to make a big hoopla about his last day of second grade.  Worse yet, I snap at him when he interrupts with a whiny can we go home now?  (I hate interrupting, especially if it’s whiny and inconsequential.) 

And now I feel horrible . . . which is pretty much status quo these days.  I start out with the best intentions and then . . . and then . . . something happens, and everything gets derailed and I end up one hundred and eighty degrees away from my original point of destination, like some sort of hapless maternal Gilligan.  

So instead of a big smiley, huggy song and dance with an ice cream chaser, Saint James got a crabby, brow-furrowed quasi-medical emergency and a reckless minivan ride home.  It wasn’t until later, quite a bit later, that he got a proper hug, some words of congratulation and a careful look through the paper bag full of end of the year stuff.  Then I puffed up my chest, pointed my finger in the air and declared that we would have a movie night tonight and quickly shooed Dash, Saint James and Supergirl out the door to go pick something out.

They have returned with The Little Vampire starring that annoying blond troll of a boy with spiky hair, glasses and a lisp from Jerry Maguire.     

Adequate penance for being spread too thin, I think.

I want to be able to do what Doctor Dash is doing in this photo.  He’s just relaxing, chilling out – two deep breaths away from a little meditation – five deep breaths away from falling asleep.  His ability to unplug and shutdown is enviable.

I can’t take a nap.  I can’t even fall asleep at night unless I read myself to sleep – the words need to be blurring together and the whole bending the page, putting the book on the night stand, turning off the light motion needs to be quick and seamless.   If it isn’t, I need to read a few more pages and try it again.  I know, it sounds a little crazy. 

In yoga the first time I heard about the monkey mind, I had a huge “aha” moment.  The monkey mind.  I recognized myself completely.  It’s when you can’t quiet the chatter and your mind jumps from thought to thought, like monkeys from branch to branch – wild and unruly, wily and rude.  The minute I lie back in savasna after yoga practice, my mind starts to wander . . . what are the kids doing?  what do I feel like eating when I get out of here?  how long has the dirty laundry been moldering in the chute? what’s up with the medium size ants invading our house this spring?  can my yoga teacher tell my mind is racing?  why does Posh Spice have such a skeletal scowl on her face all the time?  Is it because she’s starving?  What’s with Tom and Katie taking them under their wing?  Are they trying to convert them to Scientology?  What’s up with those freaky Scientologists?  FUCK!!!!  WHAT AM I DOING????  

Savasna – corpse pose.  It’s an opportunity for total and complete relaxation and surrender and although I need this sooooo badly, I’m a total and complete spaz.  I’m the furthest thing from a corpse.  Quite the contrary, I’m like a girl on ecstasy at a rave, but the rave is in my head, and it’s a rave for monkeys and I cannot, for the life of me, just notice them and then let them go and get back to the sensation of the sound of my breath, the blood pulsing through my veins, my muscles melting into the floor.  No, I bounce over to monkeys, chewing gum really hard with a huge grin on my face, my feet doing complicated little made-up hip hop moves, and join in their reindeer games. But the monkeys are very naughty and distracting, and ultimately, they’re monkeys, so let’s face it, they’re not that interesting.  So then I feel bad and I try to get back to savasna, and then one more monkey stretches his hairy hand toward me, and I grab it . . . and savasna is suddenly over.

And it’s not only that I want to be able to meditate or fall asleep.  I want to be able to BE IN THE MOMENT.  This chaotic, frenetic, exhausting time with my young family is so fleeting, that I’m afraid I’m going to miss it.  It’s like sand slipping through my fingers, but I’m so tired and frayed that I just open my fingers wider, letting it go go go . . . 

Little kids keep you very busy - busy with your hands: getting milk, wiping noses and bottoms, checking backpacks, making lunches, reading books, changing diapers, picking up toys, tying shoes, opening yogurts, washing blueberries, hoisting into swings, catching at the bottom of slides. Meaningful labor, but labor nevertheless.  The problem is that while your body is in motion, most of the time your mind is, well, how to put it delicately, not necessarily working to full capacity.  You don’t have the time or the quiet to concentrate on anything.  My kids are as bright and interesting as the next, but they’re children and so even though my mouth may be explaining the order of the seasons for the twelfth time, my mind is elsewhere (sometimes thinking those absurd thoughts I discussed in my first entry).  And I don’t want to be elsewhere.  I want to be here, with them, completely present.  Because soon enough, my three guys will be elsewhere and I’ll be longing for the days when all they wanted was ME, when all they needed to be happy was my attention and affection.  

Mother guilt – could there be a bigger cliché?

It’s paradoxical – the fact that the key to plugging in and being present is to unplug, stop thinking, let it all wash over you.  I should become a Buddhist.  That’s really what I’m talking about here.  Or I could have a stroke.  I read about this neuroscientist from Harvard in the NY Times who had a stroke and found nirvana – her left brain was damaged to such a degree that she lost her powers of analysis, speech and judgement, leaving her open to this sensation that everything was unified and blissful and part of a shimmering connected whole.  Oh my God.  That’s great.  For her.  

You know, I’ve always called my children monkeys, as in “Hop in monkeys,” “Into your pj’s monkeys,” etc.  I considered switching to squirrels once when Saint James became obsessed with them, but it never stuck.  Little kids are just simian – from birth, with their little clutching fingers and later – well, they don’t call them monkey bars for nothing.  

So maybe if the monkeys that are distracting me and taking up all my time and making me play and dance and rub my temples are MY monkeys, then it will all shake out in the end.  In the mean time, I’m going to read a book to Supergirl and I’m going to try to pay attention (reading aloud, like driving, can be accomplished using a mere sliver of your faculties) and I’m going to try not to think about the monkey we saw at the zoo who looked exactly like Kris Kristofferson.                                                                                                     Artist Heather Gorham

I never particularly imagined myself to be the type of person who would blog. I will fully admit to being a bit of a technophobe, although I try to gloss it over in the rosy sepia tones of a cute “throw back.”  I fancy myself someone who would have been better suited to life before high fructose corn syrup and email.  I like the feel of paper between my fingers, the heft of a book tucked in the crook of my arm.  I enjoy the fact that reading a newspaper in the wind draws on myriad skills spanning from wind surfing to origami.  

On the other hand, although I inhaled the Little House on the Prairie books as a child, I have no interest in all that harsh physical labor necessary for survival.  I’m not so much into  churning my own butter, canning foods, or washing clothes by hand.  I don’t particularly wish to plant anything aside from the occasional ornamental perennial procured at the adorable garden store that sells Buddhas of every size for your zen garden.  I like antibiotics and dishwashers.  

I have concluded that I should have spent my meaty years in the 1960’s and 1970’s.  By meaty, I mean ages 25 through 45.  The fifties housewife thing wouldn’t have worked for me and I look horrible in any sort of garment that requires a cinched waist, not to mention the fact that those bouffant hairdo’s would have made me look like a complete horse face.  But hiphugger bellbottoms, platform sandals, handkerchief sleeve blouses . . . now we’re talking.  And, as I matured into a late thirty-something mother, the seventies would have been the time to do it – what, with the rockin’ jump suits, chic flyaway collars, big slouchy purses and even bigger sunglasses to hide my puffy eyes from the previous night’s debauchery.  Wooh mama!  

Those were the days when the mothers sat in the sun smoking and drinking, baking themselves to a toasty nut brown while their kids ran around and did WHATEVER!!!  These days you are not allowed to relax.  No, you’d better be slathering sunscreen on your kid or rooting through your carryall sack for a tupperware of freshly washed grapes or on your knees digging in the sand panting upbeat words of encouragement in an animated puppet voice.  Attentive mommies make for successful, well adjusted chicklets. God forbid they learn to entertain themselves. 

I long for the days of laissez-faire child rearing.  I want the days of teetering out to your chaise on fur-trimmed kitten heels trying to keep your gin and tonic from sloshing out of your glass tumbler. Or the idea of it, anyway. Lord knows, I don’t want to be more detached from my kids. I just find our current state of hyper focused child-centric super mothering and the guilt that inevitably goes with it rather exhausting. Now if you’ll excuse me, mommy’s just going to rest her eyes for a moment.