Playground Fantasies

1) Free mimosas before noon

2) Free champagne after that

3) I am in charge.

4) Shade

5) That woman who is the probable mother of the savage who will not stop torturing my child has her head squashed suddenly by a falling anvil, as in Road Runner.

6) Alternatively: I walk towards her, ask her, "Is that your son?"  She nods.  I say, "You'd better watch out" in menacing tone.  She looks satisfactorily terrified.  I am badass.  She then says, "What did he do?" with quavering voice.  I tell her all about his jumping so hard on the shaky bridge while Ari was walking across  that it made him cry.  I tell her that a child her son's age (5?) should not delight in the misery of barely 3 year olds.  "It is not natural, " I say.  "Beware the ides of March," I say.  I look sinister.  She shivers and begins to cry a little.  Then she starts to beg me to leave her alone. All the other families and I cower around her, like we are the witches in Macbeth and she is the kettle, with all the newts and other dreck in it.  We start to moan like zombies.  Steam rises up from the ground.  We all look deeply into her eyes, as if into the witches' brew.  She is so scared she wets herself, and then we all laugh and disappear.

The reality was more like this:  I asked, "Is that your son?"  She said that he wasn't, but she knows him, and she is sorry for his behavior.  What the hell am I supposed to do with that?  Where do I put my maternal rage?

Going Down

A couple of weeks ago, at the school where I was doing my student teaching, I walked into the copy room and somebody from my cohort said, “Hi, Gorgeous!”  I’m pretty sure she was talking to Shardae, who came in with me, though I guess we could have been collectively gorgeous.  For some reason I still don’t understand, I was thrilled anyway, like she'd been talking to me.  It has something to do with the cohort deal, the closeness and the comfortableness and the sort of support where you feel all the successes as if they were your own.  We joke about building our own school.  We share books.  We could be socially clumsy with each other and would be immediately forgiven, but we never are.  Cedric (the only male in our cohort) is the first straight man ever to have told me that though he thinks I look nice in a suit and lipstick, he prefers me in jeans and a t-shirt.

Back to the copy room comment:  I’ve been fretting lately about losing my looks.  I love that expression and will take any opportunity to use it.  It’s so Southern and dramatic, and it satisfies me somewhere deep down.  I like to say "I'm losing my looks" while placing the back of my hand to my forehead and leaning backwards unsteadily, as if on the verge of collapse.  I was raised in the South, and I still enjoy certain elements.  You may have noticed my need to exaggerate.  That is from the South.  There is something in the air there--maybe it's the heat--that grows children who exaggerate and then are surprised when people take them literally.  I am one of those.  I also try to drink mint juleps, but I can’t because I hate them.  However, I feel strongly that I would look good holding one, with my pinkie sticking out and the mint leaf poised artfully, half wilting, in the heat.  Perhaps the mint julep is a prop that could make up for losing my looks.

While we are on the topic of dramatic poses, I shall reveal that I enjoy toddler-hood for the high drama.  I sometimes laugh when my son hurls himself on the floor and wails and pounds his little fists because he can’t have a lollipop before dinner, though of course I feel his pain.  I am proud of his dramatic prowess, and it’s hilarious.  As a parent, if you can’t enjoy some aspect of this shit, you are going to go down.

Ari's dramatic baby-hood

The phrase “going down” is another good one, one that reminds me of a story my mother-in-law told me about having a newborn who wouldn’t sleep in a 16^th floor apartment building in Brooklyn.  She used to look out the window with the baby in her arms at 3:00 am and think, “If this keeps up, we’re both going down.”  Luckily, she didn’t jump out the window because the newborn was my wife.  But I appreciate her sentiment.  High drama is the saving grace of parenthood.

I never see any of my cohort anymore.  I didn’t know this when I started grad school, but the cohort model is some kind of psychological trick.  They put a small group of people together all the time, and the result is supposed to be a supportive atmosphere, intense bonding, and increased learning.  They do it a lot with immersion programs like mine, where you complete large amounts in a short time.  Evidently, it works.  I miss my homies.  I feel a kind of chronic, low-level incompleteness. 

Ari, just because

I’m listening to this trilogy by Philip Pullman in the car.  The first one was called The Golden Compass.  I forget the other two titles.  Most people have probably heard of them.  They are hot shit in the middle school English classroom.  Anyway, they’re fantasy young adult books, and the people in the books have daemons, which are animals who contain half of their souls.  The daemons cannot go more than like 20 feet away, or the people they are a part of freak the hell out.  They get all bleak and frantically depressive, and they must have their daemons back, or they eventually go catatonic and die.  I think this part of the books is neat.  It reminds me of Ari, and how much I miss his soft, heavy body when I’m away from him, or when he’s just sick of being cuddled.  It reminds me of my cohort, and how we were forced to bond and then cruelly torn asunder.  It is very dramatic.

I also like the books because they are the first truly radical things I’ve read in a long time.  They include a pair of gay angels who are banding together with other “good guys” to try to kill God.  Cool, right?  They are pissed (the good guys) that God has made man do all this dumb stuff and fight all these wars and generally submit to His will.  Oh, and in the books, God is a big liar.  Such drama!  Such sacrilege!  I love it.

I enjoy drama that is low key, that seems almost as if it might not be dramatic.  One example of this is a story I was told by one of my cashiers in my former life as a retail manager.  The cashier is named Alain, and I guess because he was gay (and very dramatic) we'd grown close.  He was Haitian, and he told me he'd seen Sade in concert in Haiti.  The concert was outdoors, and she performed in full daylight.  It was over 100 degrees.  According to Alain, Sade sang for more than two hours without breaking a sweat.  I've wanted to see her ever since I heard this story, because it makes it seem like Sade becomes her music as she performs it in some essential way.  She gets all cool and mellow, no matter how hot it is.  Of course, it has occurred that Alain had to be lying, and I'm grateful.

In my fantasy Sade concert (based loosely on Alain's story), I lie all over the place.  Because Alain said the concert was outdoors, I place it on the beach.  I place it at sunset, sort of Carly Simon/Martha's Vineyard.  I put the attendance around four.  Me and Barbara, barefoot, dancing.  Ari and his excellent babysitter off playing in the sand.  I can see them if I want to, but I don't because I'm not worried.  There is champagne in a flute B and I are sharing, and it is ice cold and stays that way.  We are well rested and would rather be dancing than sleeping.  I can hear Ari giggling in the distance every few minutes.  And of course, Sade doesn't sweat.

Happiness is making fantasies and then seeing huge chunks of them are real.  We have each other, a refrigerator, some decent prosecco, and some Ipod speakers.  We have a nice balcony.  We laugh a lot.  We have two good sitters, and Ari loves other people.  The missing parts aren't important.  Because if you can't believe that, then you are going down.

Like Getting a Band-aid out of a Blanket

Froggy, next to can of soda to show actual size

Today my son (Ari, in case you forgot his name) dropped Froggy in the toilet.  I know, I know.  You are already riveted.  You are wondering frantically, "Who is Froggy, and how did this happen??!?"  I am certain that you've heard nothing all week that rivals the suspense and fascinatingness of this event.  So, Froggy is this cute little dude, sort of a found object.  We had Ari's third birthday at the park, a park we don't usually go to.  At some point, Ari found Froggy on the floor near a trash can.  Some other child had lost him, and probably drooled on him.  He was all dirty.  Gross, right?  I thought so.  But Ari insisted on bringing Froggy home, and I put him in the laundry, and he came out much cleaner.

Froggy's moved in with us.  Ari loves him more than any other stuffed animal.  Once, Ari lost Froggy for a time (perhaps three days), and every morning when he woke up his first words were, "Froggy? Did you find Froggy?"  Then Froggy appeared, to our great relief, on the living room floor.  It was a scene out of a romance novel.  Ari saw Froggy on the floor, galloped across and scooped him up, held Froggy close to his face crooning softly, "Froggy!  Froggy!"

As usual, this has very little to do with the rest of my post, except that dropping Froggy into the toilet was distressing for Ari, and the only other thing that has been as distressing as this was the Band-aid in the blanket incident which happened a few days ago.  Here I know you are on the edge of your seat.  Ari is obsessed with several things.  There is a little girl named Leila, who wears sun dresses like a seven year old and other normal adult-like clothes.  There is Froggy.  There is his tutu.  Lastly, there are Band-aids.

The other day I was foolish.  As a parent, I am only human.  I try desperately to think ahead to every possible catastrophe, and I am smart.  Almost never do I allow unpleasantness to touch my darling child.  However, I failed the other day.  I allowed my son to wear a Band-aid to bed.  I thought, "What could be the harm?"  I thought, "He is three, surely he will not attempt to pull it off and eat it.  He hardly ever eats anything that doesn't have sugar in it."  I thought, "Oh, I want to let him sleep with the Band-aid!  It will make him so happy!!"  Foolishness!  He did not choke to death while attempting to eat the Band-aid.  No, something far worse happened.  The Band-aid got stuck to his blanket.  

Blanket with Band-aid

For days I have been trying to pick it off.  I finished grad school last week and am currently unemployed, so I have a lot of time.  But no amount of picking did anything.  Finally it occurred to me that I needed to use these fine tipped scissors we have, so I went looking for them.  B, who is in New York for the entire month of May (Have you ever heard of anything so awful?), evidently took them with her.  So I had to wait until she got home for the weekend.  (Okay, so she comes home weekends, but I am still suffering here without her.)

The scissors

This evening I had my moment, and I was alone with the blanket and the scissors.  I had envisioned the scissors neatly removing the Band-aid from the blanket a thousand times.  To have them and the blanket and good lighting was almost more happiness than my OCD self could take.  Then I started cutting.  What a disaster!  After fifteen minutes, I had made no progress.  The nap of the blanket was too short to cut, and the threads were too many, and the f-ing Band-aid was not coming off!  I struggled and suffered and almost wept.  I cried to B (who knew to come and support me, but not too closely because she would have blocked my light), "Help!  Help!"  Eventually, I muttered to her, "I can't sit here and keep trying to cut this Band-aid out of this blanket.  I don't even know if I am alive anymore!"  I admitted defeat, and I sat with my head in my hands, considering buying a new blanket.  (They're only $14.99 at Target.)  But I am unemployed, and besides that, the blanket is perfectly good.  I considered--and this was really hard--allowing the Band-aid to remain on the blanket.  What would Ari think?  Would he be okay with that?  Would I?  Of course not.

I got back to it, and I eventually succeeded.  I ate lots of candy, and that helped.  But mainly what helped was accepting that I could not rest until I got it out.  Whenever writers have characters who "can not rest" until something is accomplished, I know exactly what they mean.  Not literally, of course, because I slept fine for days with the Band-aid stuck to the blanket, but I am with the idea in spirit.  Is this OCD?  Is this why Ari doesn't like art?  Because it's messy, and because OCD is genetic?  Will he notice the Band-aid is gone?  Yes.  Will he think his mommy is crazy?  No.  What is normal, and what is not?  And after my fight with the Band-aid, am I even alive anymore?

The Carnage: bits of Band-aid, candy wrappers, scissors

Spirituality for Atheists

Like any decent parent, I have PTSD.  I am Jewish, not in the sense that I believe in God or anything (Let's not get carried away.), but in the sense that I have a unique cultural blend of rational thinking and neurosis.  I believe that this makes me superior.  And there is nothing wrong with that.  If I didn't think Jewish moms were awesome, then I wouldn't be one.  Right?  I hope that every parent believes that his or her parenting is superior.  That is as it should be.

Back to my PTSD: mostly, mine stems around Ari's asthma.  There were the usual stresses about sleeping and waking, talking and walking, listening and rebelling, eating and pooping.  But the asthma SUCKS.  Ari's first bout of RSV was in July, 2008.  He was four months old.  He was hospitalized for days, mostly as a precaution, but either nobody told me that, or I was too distressed to hear it.  What followed basically involved my weeping in some doctor's lap, him running out of the room for a psych consult (mild exaggeration), and all three of us (that is, the two mommies and the cat) freaking out every time the baby coughed Forevermore.

Ari recently had what was probably RSV again, and he left a new trail of contagion.  Barbara and her boss and I had bronchitis and pneumonia and sinus infections which lasted weeks while Ari was well in about five days.  Anyway, we are all always sick, though it seems (Please, Jesus!) to be better this year.

To keep our selves from dying of stress, B and I have developed quasi-humorous rituals.  We kneel at the foot of our bed and pray.  We bow down before Allah and meditate to become one with the Buddha.  We make deals and promises and melodramatic proclamations to the Norse gods and the Egyptian mummies.  Whatever.  We don't want to miss anyone.  Just in case.  It is a lot of worship and prayer for a house full of atheists.  We giggle at our contortions, but we feel okay about the giggling because no well-meaning deity could fault us for giggling while doing our best to honor him or her.  Right?

I feel we are a study in what happens to PTSD victims/survivors who have no faith.  We waffle in our faithlessness because honestly, what sane parents put their beliefs in front of their children?  I would become a Republican evangelical in a heartbeat if I thought it would keep Ari healthier.  Who's with me?

Laundry pile, Cat, and B

On a good night, it goes like this:  We hear a cough over the baby monitor, and we discuss whether to go and give him a treatment like two rational, atheist mommies, and then one of us, needing some tension relief, starts to pretend pray.  The other one checks on him, and he's breathing slowly, sleeping soundly, what asthma parents call "moving plenty of air."  She comes back to find the other still prostrate in devotion and announces, "he's fine."  Our eyes meet over the heap of unfolded laundry, and the standing one pulls the other one up off of the floor.  Then there is some kind of a romantic moment, somehow, with us half entangled in the laundry and engulfed in gratitude for so many, many things.  Free breathing, midnight make out sessions, humor in trying times, the love of our absolute lives in this house in the form of our three imperfect selves.  There's a spirituality to it, even though we're only making fun.  And then, oh excellent deity, we throw the laundry aside and sleep.

Three Muskateers (Cubed)

Last June, I quit my job as a retail manager and went back to school.  I'm in a school immersion master of arts in teaching program, which basically consists of 39 credits, a student teaching internship in an urban public high school with a mentor teacher, and a very long commute.  It's a ten month program, and I graduate in May.  Most of my experience has been positive in that I feel very close to the 15 other people in my cohort, I have a great mentor teacher, and the students are sweet.  I have dealt with the commute by using Audible.com, and no, they did not pay me to write that.  (Oh, but I wish they had!)

I have two friends in my cohort who complain with me more than the others.  (Though they are all excellent complainers, which is a fine quality indeed.)  Min and Shardae are my favorite complainers.  They have style.

Min is a stealth complainer.  She is very earnest, smart, and hard working.  One would never know that she complains at all.  In fact, I hardly do.  We are too busy to really talk anymore, so we gchat (and Google didn't pay me to say that either, sadly.)  She chats me about papers and students and professors.  Her complaints are all quite reasonable and mild, which makes me feel superior somehow to the things and people we are complaining about, since Min and I are both clearly Supreme Beings if we can be so level-headed when irked.

Shardae is more of an irreverent slacker.  She is an eye roller, a sigher, a blatant texter during lectures, and she sees the pointlessness in almost everything.  This is, I have found, an underrated skill.  She complains so well I almost want to cheer.  Truly, one has to be grateful when one's friend is capable of turning shared misery into a standing ovation.  Plus, she procrastinates, but never panics.  She is sneakily supportive about my pathetic job search, and she's funny.

I'm grateful for my cohort in general--I don't know how anyone gets a masters in ten months without one.  But I am extra grateful for Shardae and Min.  This kind of effortless friendship always seems to happen in threes.

Ari is in a new (3-year-old) classroom at his school.  He moved there in January.  With all of the snow days, illnesses, and staffing changes at his school, it has been a rough transition.  His teachers have been complaining to me that he is not always listening.  Because I am training to be a teacher, this sends me into an absolute tizzy of fear.  I imagine he has oppositional defiant disorder and 17 other emotional-behavioral disabilities.  You know, the ones I see in my students and learn about and study every single day.  Of course he has no other symptoms and is generally quite eager to please, but logic has about as much to do with parenting as marshmallow peeps have to do with shoes.

Today I arrived at school to pick Ari up, and his teacher told me that he had listened so poorly that he was not allowed to go outside during recess.  He and his two friends Lulu and Ms. Hunnicutt (I share her last name because I like the southern sound of it.) were all throwing toys on the floor and laughing hysterically.  They all had to stay in during recess.

For some reason, the idea that it was a group rebellion made me relax about the whole thing.  Watching Ari with Lulu and Ms. Hunnicutt, I saw their bond more than their disruption.  I saw his pleasure in being with them, and it reminded me of some non-listening, disruptive moments in my own life.  It reminded me of Min and Shardae and I, all grown women, whining and refusing to listen to the instructions for our papers and research projects.  It reminded me of another time, too.

When I was in seventh grade, I was on a school bus with two of my friends, Gabriella and Amy, and we were doing something disruptive.  I don't remember what it was.  The window was open, and I was sitting in the seat next to it.  Gabriella was on my left.  Amy was across the aisle, standing up.  (She was supposed to be sitting.)  The bus was moving; the wind was in my hair; the sun was shining.  Someone was yelling at us.  We were not listening.  I was smiling, and I recall this feeling of unity with Amy and Gabriella, this feeling of knowing my place and being at home in it and knowing that my friends and I were rebellious and cool.  It is one of my favorite memories, in spite of its vagueness, because it holds a feeling which I have rarely reclaimed.  Still, when I think of it, I am almost breathless at the sense of well-being it evokes.  It was a euphoric moment, one that I would not trade.

So, when I think of my son not listening with Lulu and Ms. Hunnicutt, throwing toys on the floor and laughing, I hope for him to have that kind of joy.  I hope that when he is 38, he has a memory like mine.  And I don't worry anymore.

Those Special Someones

Ari and B at the park

So, being a queer mommy is a lot like being a straight mommy.  (I imagine.)  Even when there are two parents (in our case, both hard-working, non-shirking, and engaged) and only one child you feel somehow, eternally, outnumbered.  I have been toying with potential solutions.  There is the age-old one of hiring a nanny, preferably someone who will live in your enormous home, somewhere removed but always accessible.  Someone who speaks several languages, has no discernible prejudices, has endless energy, no romantic aspirations but no social diseases would be ideal.  In other words, the impossible.  And then, when you find that person, you can't afford to pay them and, if you are me, you don't have the enormous house anyway, so what is even the point of looking?  And I don't.

But I do have an imagination, and for the past threeish years I have been toying with the idea of marrying someone else.  Not as in leaving B (Heavens no!), but as in adding to the number of adult parents in the domestic situation.  Because, as I said before, we are somehow outnumbered.  Even though there are two of us, and we both work as hard as we can, we can't keep up.  The world is ahead of us.  Ari's cup, which has 570934972097 parts that must all be washed by hand and are shaped like bendy straws, lies dirty in the sink, and no matter how many I buy, eventually I have to wash one.

Yesterday I made him pink cupcakes with pink frosting and sprinkles because he asked me to.  He has eaten exactly one half, and I hate them.  (Too pink tasting.)  But I cannot complain about him not eating enough sugar, can I?  It is all so complicated.  Today I made him banana bread which he refused.  He is perfect and an icon of kissability, but an endless chore-creator.  Even shopping for his clothing, which I do almost all online, is a daunting undertaking.  He is long on top, short on bottom, and evidently the skinniest toddler in the United States.  Yes, I know, I should take him to the store and have him try things on, but have you taken an almost three-year-old clothes shopping?  He is agreeable and will happily try things on, but then he wants 12 of the same shirt and cries when he can't stay in the suitcase store all day.

Again, I digress.  I have been looking for other couples to marry.  Not romantically.  (Though I would have to like them, and they could not be ugly because life's too short.)  But, domestically.  I think we should find some other couple with good parenting skills and shack up in an enormous mansion which we could easily afford on the four person income.  We could then take vacations together and help raise each other's children and babysit for each other on date night and be friends and use energy more efficiently by combining laundry loads and whatnot.  Sounds complicated, I know, and I'm probably just trying to be cute and trendy by even considering it.  But I can't help myself.

I spend time sizing up the potentials.  When Ari was first born, B's best friend Cindy came to visit.  She held the baby while I shoveled grapefruits down my throat.  All I wanted to do those first few weeks was sleep (Ha!) and eat grapefruits.  She made protein shakes I actually liked.  She made excellent dishes, which I was too exhausted to commit to long-term memory.  Though of course I realize she was on her best "new baby support" behavior for the days she stayed with us, I considered her.  She was already B's best friend, so obviously they got along.  If it hadn't been for her husband, whom I just don't know well enough, I might have proposed to them.  Desperate times call for desperate measures.

We have other friends who might do.  One couple has this cute little boy and works very hard, both domestically and career-wise.  They are fashionable and funny, even cute.  There is, however, this mammoth dog who lives with them, and I guess he would have to move in, too.  Forget it.  There are others--some pregnant couples--one of whom makes their own beer.  Some of them already own nice homes.  Of course, we'd all have to move to make a "joint" decision about where to live together.  And the couple who makes their own beer would have to cut back on their hours at work.  And the other couple has a lazy man in it.  That would not do.

Is this normal?  Do other parents dream of dividing the labor by marrying their friends?  When Clinton said "it takes a village," was she kidding?  Was it a cruel joke?  Or does she just not realize that THERE ARE NO VILLAGES IN THIS COUNTRY!  I love Hillary more than anybody, but the only way to make the village is polygamy.  Preferably the queer kind.

That Damn Cat

Let me start with the cat.  Her name is Sasha, which my son pronounces "Sassa."  He sort of lisps when he says it, which I guess is standard two-year-old pronunciation, and normally I think it's cute.  Right now, though, nothing is cute, and I can't decide if I hate my hair more than my cat.  My hair falls into my eyes whenever I look down, and I am annoyed by this 75093-485-74597324 times a day.  (Please ignore hyphens.  I don't have a number pad on my laptop, which means my frustrated large number creation spaz attacks don't even work properly.)  Anyway, back to the hair.  I would  cut it, but there is the aesthetic.  Luckily, I don't usually have sharp objects in my possession during my fits of irritation, because I would probably stab own eyes out in attempt to cut hair off.

But I said I was starting with the cat.  My mother in law is visiting, and she keeps forgetting her glasses.  She cannot read, see, walk, or hear (I know.) without them, so I am unsure why she ever takes them off.  When I ask her she says, "Stupid habit" and then takes them off again.  I am learning to avoid the topic.  I love my mother in law.  I truly do.  She is sweet and eccentric.  She loves my son, and Ari loves her.  She spends time playing with him when I and my wife are sick and/or exhausted.  She tries to teach him to read.  She cuddles him and brings him large bags of clothing and the best toys he's ever gotten.  But I swear to God if I had a staple gun, I would staple those glasses to her eyeballs.  And if I had a tube of Superglue, I would glue them to her face.  Because every time she enters a room, even somehow if it is THE ROOM HER GLASSES ARE IN, she says "Oh, I forgot my glasses" and turns around (which takes her 15 minutes) to go back for them.  The only way to avoid her long disappearance is for me to leap up, race to the place where I know her glasses are, somehow get around her (She invariably is blocking the door in these crucial moments.), and retrieve her glasses before she leaves.  Alternatively, I can try and distract my son who wants desperately to play with her until she returns, but this is time consuming and he typically likes her better than me, so I take one for the team and race off to fetch them.  I do this several times an hour.  It is exhausting.

But I said this was about the cat.  In the midst of my glasses retrieval missions, I have the cat to deal with.  She is crazy.  She wants fresh water, with ice cubes, 57924852098-6235543 times an hour.  She meows and meows at me for this.  She inserts her fuzzy little body in front of my feet, tripping me, yearning madly for fresh water, which must be cold, and must have left the Brita within the past ten minutes, or is rejected.  (At the reject times, she digs with her paws on the linoleum to "bury" her water bowl, I guess to protect it from other animals in case she is ever desperate enough to drink the abhorrent, 11-minute-old water.)  My mother in law has taken to giving Sasha fresh ice cubes whenever they are in the kitchen together.  The two of them stand there in the kitchen, my MIL making mishaps by dropping ice cubes and knocking over cups of fluids and then slipping on the spills and banging her head accidentally on the freezer door with Sasha weaving lovingly through her legs.

I know to stay out of the room.  Still, I am grateful at these times to have them occupying each other.  Nobody needs their glasses.  The water refreshing is happening without me.  My son looks on from the safety of the living room, giggling happily.  I am not stupid: I know a gift when I see one.  I sit on the couch and take a breath, and all, for now, is well.