The State of Discontent

Santa Writes in Cursive

2011-12-22T10:28:00.000-08:00

Isaac's mother always writes in print. Even in letters, even on envelopes, even on gift tags. She's left-handed, you see, and she had this handwriting teacher in fourth grade who reveled in squeezing students' hands into impossible contortions and marking points off for minute smudges in ink on the practice paper. This teacher declared on the first day of handwriting class that she had no idea how to teach a left-handed person to write proper cursive, (and wasn't, in fact, to be honest, sure it could be done -- such a shame that the early correction of wrong-handedness had gone out of style). So Isaac's mother swore that once she was allowed to stop writing in cursive she would never use cursive again. And she doesn't.

Santa writes gift tags and thank you notes for cookies in shimmering green ink and perfect Palmer script. (Without smudges.)

Isaac's father is one of those people who can write a complex computer program entirely in his head and save it in memory to type out later, but comes back from the grocery store without eggs, and accidentally puts his earbuds in the washing machine. It's understandable that Isaac's father sometimes forgets small things because Isaac's father has a Busy Job and a Mortgage and Many Important Things to Remember. More important things to remember than his earbuds in his pocket, or the toys featured in this month's Target catalog.

Santa will take notes on the precise model of Nerf dart gun mentioned in Isaac's letter (the Nerf N-Strike Nite Finder EX-3), systematically search three different toy stores for the correct item, and have it purchased and wrapped (with a cursive gift tag) three days before Christmas.

Isaac's mother and father worry about spoiling him on Christmas with too many gifts. They make a point of regularly reminding Isaac, in the middle of the toy aisle, that there are children without roofs over their heads in this world, and yet here he is with a room already overflowing with toys.

Santa goes ahead and buys the activity set Isaac didn't even ask for that goes with the book Isaac did. And then, for good measure, Santa goes and stuffs Isaac's stocking with more candy that a child his size could possibly eat in a month.

Isaac's mother cries, and curses loudly too, when the Christmas tree slips in the stand and falls over, after she's already put all the ornaments on it, and there are her broken glass memories all over the floor. Isaac's mother and father argue over whether Isaac's father listened to Isaac's mother about how to cut the bottom of the tree, and Isaac's mother finally declares that she won't put all the ornaments back on again, she just can't.

But then she vacuums up the last of the glass and broken branches and gets up early the next morning and puts every single surviving ornament back on anyway. Because, Isaac says, what would Santa think?

What would Santa think, indeed.

Santa cannot, obviously, provide this level of service to billions of children worldwide all by himself. So Santa recruits helpers (though sadly, Santa never does seem to have enough of them).

When Isaac's father is asked by Santa to find a present for a little boy in foster care, he doesn't just buy one present -- he buys three. Because that's what Santa would do.

When Isaac's mother wraps the presents Isaac's father bought, she decides that a plain red gift bag from the store just won't do, and this green one won't do either. Santa does not, Isaac's mother thinks, prefer to wrap presents in boring bags. Instead, finally, Isaac's mother goes to the closet and pulls out the beautiful, glittery, hand-painted gift bag that Santa brought Isaac's first Christmas present in, the one she's been saving ever since to give again to someone special.

And Isaac's mother breaks her own rule, and writes the gift tag in cursive.

This Is Just to Say

2011-12-01T11:08:00.001-08:00

I have eaten
the last slice of pumpkin pie
that was in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving for tomorrow's lunch

Forgive me
I felt a little guilty when I took it actually, but
I cooked for eight hours straight on Thanksgiving
by myself
while I had a migraine

in our outdated kitchen which is roughly the size of a walk-in closet
and feels like an oven itself when the oven is on
and I roasted a whole turkey for you even though I'm a vegetarian
while you mostly watched the Macy's Parade*

therefore
I'm pretty damned sure I was fully entitled to that last piece of pie

*(Because even though
you're a self-styled feminist
your mother, a traditionalist
expecting you would one day expect a wife to cook for you
never taught you how to make anything more complicated than macaroni and cheese
and you've tried valiantly to learn since then
but frankly we both know
that I'm the better chef
Don't feel too bad about it though
my dad never taught me how to change the brakes on the car
either
and I'm really glad you know how to do that)

When You Have to Be THAT Mom

2011-11-12T05:25:00.001-08:00

I am that mom who bakes cupcakes, from scratch, for the entire class.

I am that mom who brings candy for every holiday party, and stays to walk the class through the holiday craft.

I am that mom who volunteers on every field trip. The one who volunteers at the school library two or three days a week. The one who goes to every school assembly. The one who shows up, early, to every parent-teacher conference meeting.

I am that mom that students greet as if she were a teacher. I am that mom who knows the name of every other parent. I am that mom who knows the name of every last staff member at the school.

I am that mom who goes along with my son to every single classmate's or neighbor kids's or friend's birthday party, and offers to help set up beforehand, and offers to bring food.

I am that mom who almost never takes her kid to fast-food restaurants, or orders takeout.

I am that mom who regularly cooks meals from scratch.

I am that mom who goes to every single doctor's appointment, asks questions, and takes notes.

I am that mom who brings to said appointments a binder full of medical records in color-coded archival sheaths.

I am that mom who plans elaborate playdates at my house.

I am that mom who never just drops my kid off at your house for a playdate, but sticks around, just at the margins, to keep an eye on things.

I am that mom who almost never uses a babysitter, and if I do leave my son in someone else's care, I am that mom who offers that person a printed list of phone numbers and instructions.

I am that mom who can count on one hand the times she has left her child with someone else overnight.

I am that mom and at least three times a day I find myself wishing I weren't.

I am that mom and it is exhausting.

I am that mom and I do work, actually -- I have three part-time jobs that I juggle, poorly, around school volunteer gigs and field trips and parties and doctors' visits and cooking. I am that mom and there are plenty of days when I stay up until 1 a.m. working and then get up at 6 a.m. to volunteer again for eight hours at my child's school.

I am that mom and I have a college degree I finished in four years while working two jobs. I have that degree, and some pleasant, fleeting memories of feeling just on the cusp of serious success as a writer, and some fading dreams of graduate school, and a thousands unfinished work projects and ambitions of a novel or five growing dusty together on a high shelf.

I am sick of seven years of strangers assuming, when I tell them I'm a work-from-home mother, that I must not be an educated or ambitious person.

My mother often worked full-time outside the home when I was a kid and I thought that once my kid was in school I would, too. I think it's good for kids to have time away from their parents, and good for parents to have time away from their kids. I swore when I was pregnant that I would go back to work after one year. I swore that I'd raise an self-sufficient adventurer. I swore I wouldn't hover.

But I am the mother of a child with a sensory disorder, a motor skills delay and an anaphylactic peanut allergy.

I am that mom of a seven-year-old who understands beginning algebra and reads college biology textbooks for fun and can add four digit numbers in his head but can barely zip a jacket or tie his own shoes and sometimes hums and mutters to himself strangely in public to drown out the world's constant noise.

I am that mom who tells her son to face the world proudly, anyway.

I am THAT mom of a child with a food allergy -- a mom who knows that every time her son walks out the door to go to school or to a birthday party or to a holiday dinner, he's risking his life.

I am that mom who lets him walk out the door anyway.

But I'm not the mom who is ready to stop following him (at a distance) just yet.

I'm just not.

Raise Your Hand

2011-08-31T14:44:00.000-07:00

Raise your hand if you're a woman blogger and critics of your work have called you a "slut" or a "harpy" or "whore" in public. (I'm raising my hand.) Raise your hand if you're a woman blogger and readers of your work who disagree with your thoughts have publicly attacked your looks. (I'm raising my hand.) Raise your hand if you're a woman blogger and you've been publicly told that your written words permanently disqualify you for the title of "lady." (I'm raising my hand.) Raise your hand if you're a grown woman and a male critic has opened his public critique of your work with "Little girl." (I'm raising my hand.) Raise your hand if you've actually, literally been told by one or more apparent lovers of outdated cliche to stop writing and get back to your kitchen. (I'm raising my hand.)

Raise your hand if you're a woman blogger and you've been excited to see your work featured in a mainstream media article only to watch the comments on said article devolve into a discussion of your supposed physical attractiveness, or supposed lack thereof. (I'm raising my hand.) Raise your hand if you're a woman blogger and you've engaged in an educated intellectual, political, or philosophical debate with another woman blogger, and later found that debate described in public fora online as "mudwrestling" or "a catfight." (I'm raising my hand.)

Raise your hand if you're a woman blogger and your abilities as a romantic partner or parent have been attacked by strangers who disagree with opinions of yours that have nothing to do with romantic relationships or parenting. (I'm raising my hand.) Raise your hand if you've been told that mothers should be seen and not heard. (I'm raising my hand.)

Raise your hand if you're a woman blogger and someone who disagrees with your opinions (or disagrees with your hair color, or your choice in shoes, or your body type, or your disability, or your sexuality or your religion or your ethnicity or your age or the very idea of women writing things on the internet at all) has publicly expressed their desire that you be sexually assaulted in retaliation for daring to open your "pretty" (or "ugly") "little mouth." (I'm raising my hand.)

Raise your hand if your critics have said you deserve to be tortured. (I'm raising my hand.) Raise your hand if they've said you should be dead. (I'm raising my hand.) Raise your hand if you're a mother who blogs and someone who disapproves of your words has said it would serve you right if your child were kidnapped. (I'm raising my hand.)

Raise your hand if you're a woman blogger and some person who hates what you've done with your words or just hates you, personally, for daring to use words in public at all, has left a comment or sent you an email or a text message or a DM directly threatening to sexually assault you, or physically harm you, or kill you. (I'm raising my hand.)

Raise your hand if you're a woman blogger and you've wondered at times, in the midst of constant gendered insults and threats, whether you might be happier and saner if you just stopped writing. (I'm raising my hand.)

Raise your hand if you've kept writing anyway.

(Well, here I am.)

Good. Now all of you that just raised your hands -- take Naomi's example, and raise your voice.

(I just did.)

This sickness has to stop.

Conversations with a Seven-Year-Old

2011-07-28T21:55:00.000-07:00

KID: I can't sleep by myself tonight. I'm scared.

MOTHER: Of what?

KID: I'm scared that a black hole will swallow the Earth before humans master interplanetary space flight. I'm scared that all the people living on Earth will die, and civilization will be destroyed, and maybe then there will be no intelligent life left anywhere in the universe. I'm scared that the universe itself will one day run out of energy and grow cold and dark and empty.

MOTHER: You've really missed your father while he's been out of town, haven't you?

KID: Yes.

Lucky Seven

2011-05-09T20:04:00.000-07:00

Seven years ago today, on Mother's Day, I held you in my embrace for the first time, and my arms trembled just a little with the strangeness and the sweetness of the new weight they had to bear. I wondered that day just whom I was greeting. Now I know.

I was holding a boy who would one day know the names of 50 varieties of butterfly, who would run for a jar to put spiders back outside saying "Quick, before someone smashes it," who would befriend the garter snake in the backyard, who would sing to his pet fish, who would never, ever, not even once, pull a cat's tail.

Seven years ago today I was holding a child who would one day step between fighting friends and push them apart. Who would hear me crying in another room and draw me a picture of flowers and slide it under the door.

Seven years ago I was holding a boy who would fight, fight harder than a child so young should have to fight, through a a sensory disorder and a motor skills delay, and win, again and again, learning to climb a ladder and ride a bike and kick a soccer ball and frighten his mother by climbing too-high chainlink fences.

Seven years ago I thought I was already falling in love hard. I had no idea, then, how much harder I could fall.

I look at you, my once-and-only-baby, all unfolded into bottomless brown eyes and tangled flaming hair and a laughing gap-toothed grin and long gangly limbs running full tilt away from me into a future I can only imagine now, and will only ever get to see part of. And the trembling woman from seven years ago is still here, longing to fold you back into the arms you have made so much stronger.

But instead, I will just say, keep running. Run far.

Overheard in My Backyard: A Space Odyssey

2011-04-11T07:41:00.000-07:00

EIGHT-YEAR-OLD NEIGHBOR: My scout ship just landed on Mars. If you're landing behind me, watch out for this dust storm I just picked up on my radar.

SIX-YEAR-OLD: It's okay. The dust storm won't affect me. My ship just landed on a planet far, far away from Mars, in a different universe. The planet has a name, but that name wouldn't make any sense here.

EIGHT-YEAR-OLD NEIGHBOR: Another planet? A far away planet? What, you mean Pluto?

SIX-YEAR-OLD (patiently): No, not Pluto. This planet is not in our solar system. My ship just landed on a planet in another universe. Beyond our solar system. Beyond the Orion Nebula. Beyond the Crab Nebula. Beyond the farthest arm of the Milky Way. Beyond all known galaxies. Beyond the expanding edge of time.

EIGHT-YEAR-OLD NEIGHBOR: Oh. okay. Well, whenever you're done with that, could you help me out with this dust storm on Mars?

Bye Bye Baby

2011-03-26T22:09:00.000-07:00

For years now my son has been asking, with some trepidation, about losing his first baby tooth. "Will it happen soon? Will it hurt much? Will I bleed? Will I get sick? What if I swallow it by accident? Has anyone ever choked on their own tooth?" he worries. "What if the new tooth doesn't come in right? What if the place where my tooth was stays empty forever?"

I lost my first tooth at age five, biting into an apple. (I did swallow it, actually, much to my chagrin. I did not choke. I did not even notice the tooth was gone, in fact, until several minutes later, when a teacher pointed the fact out to me. It's a good thing my mother happened to know that the Tooth Fairy decorates her house with pictures of teeth drawn by those unfortunate children who have lost their lost tooth, or I would have considered the incident a much more serious injury to both piggy bank and pride.)

I assumed, in that casual way parents tend to assume that our children will be just like us, that my son would probably lose his first tooth at five, or thereabouts. But he didn't lose a tooth at five. He didn't at six and a half, either. My son is nearly seven, but all twenty of his original pearly whites still stand in neat rows.

At school, one after another his friends have lost teeth. Some have lost several, now bearing adorably jagged half-grown-in grins.

Witnessing in his classmates this repeated proof of his mother's assertion that baby tooth-deprivation is not, in fact, commonly deadly to children has, I think, made my son somewhat less anxious about the potential for some personal tooth-loss related disaster.

But he is now the only one in his class who has yet to lose a tooth. He sees himself missing some bloody badge of maturity. His difference irks him. When we last went to the dentist, he asked her, nervously, "Are you sure I really have grown-up teeth waiting in my gums? What if there aren't any?"

This drawn out drama of the teeth has made me wish hard, for months, that he would just lose a tooth already and get over it. So he can see it's not that big of a deal. So he can be like everyone else in his class. So the Tooth Fairy can leave him two quarters, or a dollar, or whatever the inflated price of first lost teeth is these days, and he can start calculating the value of his remaining teeth with a gleam in his eye.

When I help him floss I surreptitiously tap his front teeth, hoping for a wiggle. I've never felt one. Not even the slightest wobble. Until three days ago.

His right front bottom tooth budged. I tapped it again to be sure. It moved again, unmistakably.

The boy officially had a loose tooth.

Again and again, I've imagined how proudly and cheerfully I would tell him. I've imagined how I would stave off any frightened tears with visions of the respect of his peers, the admiration of younger children, and cash.

Instead, I found myself turning my head and furiously blinking against a sudden vivid vision: my first glimpse, more than six years ago, of the top of my baby's first tooth, pushing in a sharp gleaming white arc through the gum. His first tooth. This same tooth. The loose one.

"What is it Mommy?" he asked.

"Oh," I said. "Oh. Your tooth. Your tooth is loose! You finally have a loose tooth. See? It wiggles. I bet you'll lose it pretty soon. Your first tooth. Your very first one. That's good news! You're growing. You'll get grown-up teeth soon."

"Oh, that's cool," he said. "It won't hurt too much, when it comes out will it?"

"No. I've told you already," I said. "I mean it. It won't hurt much at all."

I lied. It won't hurt him.

Dreaming

2011-03-02T11:17:00.000-08:00

Nearly three weeks ago I came down with a cold that I have been not at all hyperbolically referring to in public as The Cold From Hell. Despite a few days now of feeling finally able to breathe during daylight hours without the blessed aid of Saint Sudafed, certain symptoms have lingered. My ears still feel clogged. I still feel tired. And my voice keeps failing me unexpectedly mid-word, cutting out like a bad audio cassette tape.

Last night I hypothesized that my failure to recover must be the result of not getting enough sleep at night. Because despite feeling better during the day, I keep waking up struggling to breathe through a nose that feels stuffed with wet cotton, or coughing the sort of chest rattling night cough ordinarily associated with elderly chainsmokers.

So in an attempt to get at least eight hours of decent rest, last night I abandoned my bed and my husband (who is certainly handsome to look upon as the last thing I see before I close my eyes each night, but, sadly, snores like a rusty chainsaw). And I bedded down on the sofa, propped diagonally atop a pile of scientifically arranged throw pillows.

I felt more comfortable than I had in days, and fell asleep almost instantly.

So of course, at 2 a.m., the phone rang.

At first, in my first-good-sleep-in-three-weeks fog, I associated the harsh ringing sound with the tornado sirens that woke me up this past Sunday evening, announcing the storm that did this to my porch.

There's something wrong with the house, the small, awake part of my brain tried to explain to the rest of me. You have to get up.

Then as the ringing continued I awakened enough to realize that the sound was in fact the telephone and also that it was a ridiculous hour for anyone to be calling my house unless there was some sort of terrible emergency.

So I threw off the covers and popped out of bed, er, couch, only to hear the answering machine pick up. A deep, drawling drunken man's voice screamed, "WHAT?!?" so loudly my answering machine's speaker crackled. And then the line clicked off.

Wrong number.

(I hope. Because if that was some sort of prank, Mr. Drunk Dialer on a Cell Phone in 636, you need to go back to phone pranking class and learn how to block your number. Ahem.)

After that I had a hard time getting back to sleep. The streetlights outside my living room window were too bright. The furnace downstairs was too loud. I tossed and turned for about an hour and then I fell asleep and I dreamed two dreams. It feels like ages since I've had a dream I can clearly remember. And yet, whether thanks to my couch, The Cold From Hell, or Mr. Drunk Dialer, last night I had two:

In the first dream, I was volunteering at my son's school on a field trip. It was lunch time and I was helping to prepare a set of boxed lunches that had been brought along for the kids but I realized that despite telling me otherwise no one at the school had contacted the catering company or read the ingredients on anything to see whether or not the lunches were peanut-safe. So I was reading the ingredients on every variety of lunch to see which one might be safe for my son to have. And people from the school in the dream (who weren't actually people in my son's real life school, just people with vague and anonymous faces) kept telling me, "You have to take care of this problem this yourself. We don't have time to help you." And then as I was sorting through the boxes one of the sandwiches fell out and it was peanut butter. And I tried to get to the sink to wash my hands but other parents (who again, weren't actual parents I know in real life but some sort of Platonic stand in) kept blocking me and saying "We were here first. There's no room." And then one of the dream school's administrators said to me, in a smarmy voice, "Well it will be a shame if your son has nothing to eat today, and it would have been terrible if we had served him that peanut butter. But at least this is the first time we have made such a mistake." And as I stood there wringing my hands like Lady Macbeth trying to get the peanut butter off, I started screaming, again and again, to no one in particular, "THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE!"

It was very melodramatic. And, I have to say, the first time I have ever had a nightmare with food as a villain. Or for that matter a dream that in any way involved peanut butter. I get the feeling, however, that this anxiety dream might wind up as a permanent replacement to that recurring dream I used to have where I would spend all day on the first day of college trying to find my classes and yet somehow manage to miss all of them and then my advisor would scream at me and tell me I was kicked out of the program.

Ahem.

The second dream was much better. In my second dream I was at a BlogHer conference, sitting in the audience at a panel, and some political argument broke out among the audience members, and women were standing up and shouting and one well-dressed young woman even gestured a threat to splash another with a bottle of Fiji water.

(For people who have never been to BlogHer, allow me to note that this sort of bloggers-gone-wild wet t-shirt catfight thing would NEVER HAPPEN. Well, except for maybe at the MamaPop party but that would be totally acceptable.)

And then in my dream my friend Erin Kotecki Vest stood up, looking as healthy as she ever has, and walked across the entire large room to a microphone and made some sort of brilliant, unbelievably logical, earthshaking statement of the sort that makes sense beyond sense within a dream and seems to expose some important cog in the inner workings of the universe, even though you can never remember, after you wake up, exactly what was said. And everyone grew silent and then burst into applause. And everyone was hugging.

I don't believe in prophetic dreams. But a dream of mine ever deserved to come true I do think it would be my dream of Erin, healthy, walking, and kicking rhetorical ass.

Besides, if a politics-based water splashing fight ever broke out during a panel at BlogHer, I think it would be great publicity, don't you?

You Really Didn't Have To

2011-02-14T13:15:00.000-08:00

Before we were married I made you cancel the layaway on the diamond engagement ring you had so carefully chosen, the one with the pretty leaf pattern in two-tone gold.

It made practical sense, under the circumstances. The non-profit you were working for had gone bankrupt and suddenly closed -- your last paycheck had bounced. After that we were both juggling part time jobs with no health insurance. And then we found out I was pregnant. Surprise!

A diamond ring didn't seem so important to me, under those circumstances.

So we were married in the courthouse, with no pomp, and no rings at all. And we carried on with none until a couple of months later, when I snuck into a store without you and I bought a matched set of plain wedding bands in silver as a surprise.

Through the years of our marriage since then, we haven't found much time to mark our romance with ceremony . The holidays and anniversaries I remember best are the ones we spent turned all upside-down -- the Christmas we spent unpacking boxes in our new house, the Mother's Day we spent repairing a storm-torn gutter. The birthday I spent at your grandmother's memorial service.

A few days ago I asked you what you wanted to do for Valentine's Day and you shrugged and looked guilty and said "I hadn't really thought about it much yet." And I wasn't surprised because -- let's face it -- I know and you know you buy gifts at the last minute, and you couldn't remember to make a restaurant reservation a week in advance if your life depended on it.

But the truth was, I hadn't really thought about what to do on Valentine's Day much yet, either.

There was a time when I would feel a slight pang of jealousy when I watched a bride walk down an aisle full of flowers in a beautiful gown. There was a time when I felt a little envy when some couple we knew told us about their romantic anniversary getaway. There was a time when I cared about flowers and fancy dinners on Valentine's Day. But I don't anymore.

Because Saturday you folded all the laundry while I read email, even though I hadn't asked you to.

Because you fold my clothes more neatly than I do.

Because Sunday when you were at the grocery store without me you bought me marinara sauce with portobello mushrooms and wine even though you don't really like portobellos or wine, either. And then you served it with dinner.

Because you bought me a box of chocolates that had only dark chocolate in it.

Because you gave our son his bath last night and read his story even though he really wanted me to read his story and we both knew he would whine about you doing it instead, so I could lay down on the sofa, because I was tired.

Because even though we said in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live, and believed it, by all stereotypes and cold hard statistics, this crazy, met-too-young, married-too-soon, stressed-too-often relationship of ours should never have lasted this long. Not through three homes and two cars and seven job changes and six birthdays of a decidedly not-neurotypical child.

And yet, here you are, still, remembering that I don't like milk chocolate. Folding my jeans.

Dinner out and roses would be a nice gift, one of these February 14ths. But a present like that would be a very little thing compared to the thousands of simpler, mundane, yet much more important everyday gifts you have given me over the years.

That diamond ring we wanted once might be nice to have, someday, too. But if you ever get around to getting me one, it had better look nice next to my old scratched and dented silver wedding band. Because I'm not taking that off.

A Cookie Like My Heart

2011-02-10T11:29:00.000-08:00

It has been over a year now since my son had a sudden and violent allergic reaction to a peanut butter cookie, after years of eating Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and peanut-flavored granola bars and Peanut M&Ms and french fries fried in peanut oil without a problem.

I've already cried over it; I've already ranted; I've already reorganized my pantry and sent lists to the school and compiled the careful, well-researched, incredibly short list of Restaurants That Are Mostly, Probably Safe. I've already dutifully, repeatedly reminded myself of the much longer and much more upsetting list of Childhood Diseases That Could Be Worse. I've already adjusted to the constant mental presence of this terrible knowledge, that the wrong bite of food could hurt or kill my son at any moment. I've made the syringe that contains the emergency medication that could save his life as essential an extension of my body as my glasses or my purse.

Out of life-and-death necessity I keep his allergy in mind every waking minute which after a while from an emotional standpoint is pretty much the same as not thinking about it at all. There seems to be a part of my brain that just does it, now. Like the part that remembers how to walk. I read ingredients and thoroughly question and instruct teachers and party hosts and babysitters and waitresses on autopilot. Solving a safe path through the world for him has for the most part become an intellectual not an emotional enterprise.

If I weren't like this, now, I'd be constantly crazy with worry and guilt and regret over aspects of childhood that I never recognized as being all that important until they were lost to him. Which just wouldn't do. Anxious, guilty, regretful people make mistakes, and this is an area where I cannot bear allow myself room for serious error.

But there are still moments, once in a while when the fact of his allergy hits me like a kick in the chest, the way it did on the day I first learned of it, and I struggle for a minute to breathe.

Like today when I was at a fancy little boutique grocery store and walked past their bakery display, blooming with beautiful extravagantly decorated heart shaped Valentine's cookies in every flavor and size.

I used to make a point, when he was younger, of buying my son, on the spur of the moment, little surprise presents of candy or food. Ridiculous things, sometimes, like rainbow lollipops the size of his head (that I knew he would never finish). I'm quite a stickler for health food in general -- in my house, whole, natural foods rule the table and fruits or vegetables are required with every sit-down meal . But I'm also a foodie, and a hobby baker, and I'm not ashamed to confess that I've never met an oversized artisan brownie I didn't like. And my son started out as a pathologically picky eater -- so resistant to eating, in fact, that for a frightening period of time he made himself ill.

So once his palate began to expand it became a joy to me to surprise him on impulse with pretty and decadent foods. Once in a while, when I saw a giant, artistically frosted cookie or a beautiful piece of chocolate artifice at a store -- the sort that makes your heart skip a beat when you see it, that reminds you of pressing your childish face to the glass in sad longing while your mother said, "No, not that, the smaller one" -- the sort you aren't supposed to spoil a child with -- I would buy it and give it to him, trying to tell him without words, See, this is what I wanted to tell you about the fun of food. This what you have been missing.

But today I knew without looking -- I've shopped hear before -- that not one of the beautiful heart shaped cookies would be labeled PEANUT FREE. I couldn't just pick one without thinking and buy it and meet him with it at the door when he comes home from school. The cookies at the bakery are just another one of so many things -- like the cake at most birthday parties and the candy from most candy shops and the ice cream from ice cream parlors -- that are off limits for him now, and may be off limits for life.

Which is why this weekend I am fairly certain I will wind up baking more homemade heart-shaped cookies, in every hue, than one child could possibly eat, and wishing I could make them as pretty as the ones at the store.

Beautiful

2011-01-26T10:41:00.000-08:00

Yesterday afternoon I sat in a cafe with my son, tapping away at a blog post for work on my netbook while he calmly ate a bagel and read a book on animal habitats for homework. "That's a well-mannered young man you have there," a grey-haired man noted approvingly as he walked past our table toward the exit. It wasn't the first time I've received a compliment on my son's behavior from a stranger. On good days, which are most days, these days, he is uncannily proper in adult-centered places like libraries, churches and restaurants.

It was only twenty minutes or so later that another little boy, perhaps eight years old, sat down at, or rather bounced into, the table next to ours, as his mother waited in line to place an order. My own son had finished his bagel now, but was still reading intently, oblivious to the new arrival.

"Hello," the stranger boy said." At first I assumed he was speaking to my son, trying to get a potential playmate's attention, but when I turned to glance in the boy's direction I saw that he was staring straight at me, expectantly. "Hello," I said, and smiled, then turned back to my work.

"It's-very-nice-to-meet-you," he said in a very measured tone, even though I was no longer facing him, and I knew at once that he'd been taught to say that, and had practiced saying it, diligently, after "Hello." I turned around.

"It's very nice to meet you, too." I said. "Thank you."

"You are using a computer in a restaurant instead of eating," the boy said. It was a statement of fact, not a question.

"That's true," I said.

"But you are not in a computer lab." This the boy said a bit more loudly, in a tone that fell somewhere between mildly accusatory and utterly perplexed. My son looked up from his book at the boy quizzically for a second, smiled politely, then went back to his reading.

I glanced at the boy's mother, still in line.

"That's true," I said to the boy. "I'm not in a computer lab, but they do let you use computers here. I'm not breaking the rules."

"Oh. Oh. KAY!"

His volume was all out of sorts, whisper one minute, too loud the next. I could see that the boy's mother, still stuck in the line, saw us talking now. Her forehead crumpled a bit, as her mouth fell into a pressed line. I smiled briefly and brightly at her, trying to convey that I was not bothered. NOT BOTHERED.

"Do you know where the restroom sign is?" The boy asked me. Not the restroom. The sign. But maybe he meant he needed the restroom, and wanted directions?

I pointed helpfully. "It's over there."

He bounded gently off toward the restrooms, then, to my surprise, came straight back to the table without going in, eyes shining.

"They're beautiful," he exclaimed. Seeing my confusion, he added, "The letters on the restroom sign on the door. They're gold. They're shiny. It's just what I wanted." Then he sat down, in his chair, blissful, as his mother hurried over, her order finally taken. She took hold of his arm and guided him quickly to an emptier corner of the room. Over the clamor of the kitchen and the chatter of the diners, I couldn't hear all that she said, but I caught the words, "Inappropriate," "talking to people," and lastly, "Now we'll have to eat in the car." She looked exhausted.

I could hear the boy's words clearly. "I'm so sorry, Momma. I didn't mean to. I won't next time."

I stood. I walked over. I said to his mother, "Excuse me. I wanted to let you know. He wasn't bothering me. Not at all. I think he's sweet."

"Thank you," she said. "But you see, we're pressed for time anyway. It's been a long day. He just got out of a class . . ." While she said this, she looked not at me, but at my son, sitting so properly at the table.

I wanted to say, four years ago I hid with that boy you see there in a phone booth in a restaurant, unable even to make it out the exit, holding the booth door shut with one hand and desperately trying to calm him with the other while his face flushed and his eyes bulged and he screamed a terrible wild pained scream, as if I were beating the life right out of him, because he had been overwhelmed by the noise of the crowd, and I was half-convinced that any moment someone would call the police.

I wanted to say, years ago on my birthday I was ushered out of my favorite Indian place with the check and a box before I'd had five bites of food because my son was humming almost silently and rocking in his chair and biting his hands because he was terrified of the food and even though there were two other toddlers playing loudly and bumping into waiters in the very next booth while their parents ignored them, the people sitting next to us were disturbed by him, not them, and complained.

I wanted to say, there but for the grace of God go I.

I wanted to say, your son is beautiful. I know you know it. Don't you see I can see it, too? He sees the beauty everywhere that others miss. He made my day just now, reminding me to look at the world instead of rushing and bumbling through it with my eyes ten steps ahead. He's a joy and he's welcome to sit next to me anytime.

But as I saw her looking wistfully at my son, a six-year-old sitting there reading a twelve-year-old's science book and sipping his juice like a perfect model of what is expected of a child in a cafe, the only words I could eke out were, "I understand. Please trust me. I do understand," and then she smiled a tight smile and nodded and left in a hurry.

So That Happened

2010-11-19T16:10:00.000-08:00

I don't really want to write about turning 30. Not in public! Not on the blog, anyway. Not where my friends will see it. Most of my friends already turned 30. Two or ten or 30 years ago. As someone who got her first job at 16, who moved out of her parents' house at age 17, who graduated college and became a paid professional writer at 21, who had a kid at 23, who started a blog at 24, I've spent much of my life as the youngest person in the room, and my friendships reflect that. Most of my friends have already survived their own inner crises about turning 30. (Or even celebrated turning 30 with no crisis at all.) Hell, some of them have even already written about turning 30 on their own blogs. They won't want to read about my issues with 30, will they? What if they find my anxieties about growing older insulting? Or silly? Or trite? What if they laugh at me?

****

Thirty is definitely too old to be worrying about whether people will laugh at me for things I write on my blog.

****

I told my husband that what I wanted for my birthday was a shirt that said I'M TOO OLD FOR THIS SHIT. He didn't buy me one.

****

In the days before my thirtieth birthday, my husband kept saying, "Thirty isn't so bad, you know." Sometimes it sounded like he was teasing me. Sometimes it sounded like genuine reassurance.

****

When I was just 21, an abnormally, dangerously large cyst that had silently grown on my left ovary for months without my knowledge suddenly and violently ruptured, causing massive internal bleeding. After I woke up from an emergency surgery that definitely saved my fertility and probably saved my life, the surgeon, who was a woman, a woman who seemed about 30, said, in a very sincere, serious, sympathetic voice, "The bleeding was severe. You will have extensive scar tissue. The effects of scar tissue on your fertility may well get worse over time, especially if you develop more cysts like this one. If you want to have children without expensive help, you should start as early as possible. If I were you, I would definitely try for pregnancy before 30."

****

When I got pregnant just two years later (while using contraceptive measures) it was by accident, at an exceedingly inconvenient time, and frankly terrifying. Nonetheless, as I stared at those positive lines on the stick, the surgeon's words echoed in my head, and I could not help but feel vague sense of triumph. Before 30.

****

My son has asked me "When can I have a little brother or sister?" at least once a month since he was old enough to ask the question. I never answer him directly but I always used to say, to myself, in my head, Not now. Not now. But surely before I'm 30.

****

Every doctor I talk to about my past surgery tells me rather gravely that my insides must be positively riddled with scars. Time after time, the mantra I hear from doctors has been the same, "If you want more children, try now. Or at least try before you are 30."

****

At various points in my life I have had no less than five English teachers mention to me their firm belief that most of the best writers peak before they are 30. Crane, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, etc. "Write a novel before 30," more than one of them urged me. On the day I turned 29, I swore to myself I would finally finish one of the five or six books that keep rattling around, unwritten, in my head. I'll write a book by my thirtieth birthday, I promised. I didn't.

****

Maybe those doctors are wrong about my prospects, anyway. How would they know? How could anyone know if I'd really have trouble getting pregnant again when I haven't even been trying? I should say we. After all, it takes two people to make one. We, mutually, deliberately, have not been trying. In a marriage, ideally, making a baby requires a set of two of matching plans for the future. Plans do not always match, you know.

****

Thirty is the age at which I always picture my mother, when I think of her, in my mind's eye. My platonic ideal of my mother is my mother at 30. I don't really remember what she looked like before she was 30, but I remember her face at 30 clear as day. I was 12 then. She was very young, for a twelve-year-old's mother.

****

Why do those babymaking expert doctors always say 30? Why 30? I know I'm not the only woman they are saying this to. When they say it it always sounds like they've said it a thousand times. That seems so blastedly arbitrary, that invisible 30-year line. Hey, I'm no scientist, but I did happen to ace the A.P. Biology exam when I was in high school, which wasn't that long ago, thankyouverymuch, and therefore I do know that the technical, scientific term for individual medical predictions based on general statistics is bullshit. Sure, it may be true that women on average become strikingly less fertile after 30, but you can't expect that rule to apply to every individual. And anyway someone's 30th birthday is a totally arbitrary point in time at which to draw a line. What if I'd tried to get pregnant at the age of 29 years, 364 days? How would that be so different than trying to get pregnant tomorrow? Of course not. Not really. It wouldn't be. Anyway, I haven't been trying at all. Maybe if I did try tonight I'd get knocked up with twins, just like that.

****

I don't think of 30 as old. I have plenty of friends who are 40 or 50, and I don't think they are anything remotely resembling "old." I do think of 30 as the end of youth, though. I always have. I always think it's weird when people call 30-something people young. Thirty used to be called middle-aged, not that long ago, remember? I don't really have a problem with that, being thought of as in the middle, immersed in life, in the thick of things. Part of me actually sort of resents the fact that fashionable people will probably keep calling me "young" until I'm 40, or 50. I've been to college. I'm married. I work. I have a son. Hell no, I'm not old, but I don't feel young, either. Haven't I done enough yet to be considered all grown up?

****

My mother was so much older than most 30-year-olds at 30. When my mother was 30, she had two kids already and a third on the way. She already had two marriages, two careers and a master's degree under her belt at 30. She had already helped organize marches on Washington and taught hundreds of students to write and taught herself to refinish old furniture and filled notepad upon yellow notepad with poetry at 30.

****

If I don't try to write The Great American Novel, I can't fail.

****

In the week before my birthday, when my husband would say, "Thirty isn't so bad" I usually replied, "You know, I don't really think you're old." But a couple of times, instead, I snapped, "It's different for you. You're a man."

****

When I think of myself as 30, I can't help but feel rather strangely that I have somehow transformed, overnight, into my mother. When I look in the mirror now, I catch glimpses of her face.

****

I am so relieved to finally be 30. Twenty-nine, honestly, just felt like an entire year of almost-30. The anticipation of 30 is far more annoying than the actuality of 30. No one will ever ask me again "How do you feel about turning 30 this year?" Also now I can stop asking my husband what it feels like to be 30. I am sure he is relieved.

****

I remember when my stepmother turned 30, I childishly asked her if getting older bothered her, and she said, "Actually, I'm thrilled to turn 30. To tell the truth I feel like I've been 30 my whole life, and my calendar age is only just now catching up."

****

People used to put black candles on your cake when you turned 30. They used to decorate your party with black balloons and paper tombstones. They used to call you Over the Hill. No one does that now, of course, unless they're doing it ironically. I blew up a couple of black balloons for a friend's party two years ago. Ironically, of course -- I mean, hell, over the hill? He'd only recently been married. He was just about to finally finish his PhD and get out of school. Thirty is just getting started, these days. Of course my friend knew I was joking. But lately I kind of feel like a jerk for those balloons.

****

When my mother was 30 she looked 25. When she was 35 she didn't look a day over 30. No, really. This one time I tried to pick up my little brother at kindergarten, and no one would believe I was his sister, because the teachers had seen my mother, and thought could not possibly have a daughter who was 17. They nearly called the police on me. Of course my mother was very proud that I'd nearly been arrested over her youthful face. The face that nearly launched a kidnapping investigation. She repeated that story for years.

****

At parks, I still regularly get mistaken for my son's babysitter. Not bad for someone my age, eh? I'm really only sort of bragging, though. It's sort of disconcerting, actually, to have people think I'm my own child's babysitter.

****

For my 30th birthday, my husband snagged a babysitter, got dressed to the nines, and took me out to the same club we went to on our very first date. I know, what a crazy romantic, right? The sushi was great; the cocktails, just as awesome and ridiculously strong as we remembered. But the music was lame, and the couches were worn, and the crowd seemed vapid, and the whole place was annoyingly smoky. We left at eleven.

****

For months now, I've been fibbing about my age. This summer a 70-something man at the local historical society meeting asked, "How did such a young thing like you get interested in history?" and I laughed carelessly and said, "But I'm nearly thirty!" A firefighter I met on a volunteer voter education stint said, not even flirting, "You can't be older than my daughter in college," and I retorted, "Oh, you flatter me! I'll be thirty in just days." A month ago a little boy at my son's school asked how old I was, right in front of his forty-something mother, and I outright lied. "I'm thirty," I said, and shot her a furtive glance, deeply relieved to see that she didn't raise her eyebrows and purse her lips in the way every mother at my son's school inevitably did last year whenever I mentioned my age. I felt guilty for lying. I felt like I was squandering the last year of my 20s, erasing 29, and yet, I kept doing it. I couldn't stop myself. It seemed to me that in most cases telling someone I was almost 30 had a totally different effect than telling them I was 29. There's something magic about 30. People take 30 seriously. I haven't fibbed this much about my age since I was nine years old ("I'm nearly ten!").

****

All day on my birthday, I couldn't stop thinking, again and again, I really, really, really must finish writing a book before I turn 31.

Five Reasons for Apathetic Voters to Vote

2010-11-02T15:16:00.000-07:00

Hey you. Person who is planning to skip voting today? DON'T. Let me tell you why.

5.) There is more than one question on the ballot. So you don't like either of the candidates for U.S. Senate, or you think the choices for U.S. Representative all suck and you're sick of their negative ads. So what? Your local ballot will most likely feature important local initiatives that could change your daily life in key ways. Tax legislation. Bond issues. Regulatory laws that may affect local businesses. There may also be good candidates running for city council or school board -- these might even be people you personally know from your neighborhood. If you don't vote today, you won't get to make your voice heard on local issues.

You don't have to answer every question on a ballot when you vote. If you hate your national level candidates, you can skip them. Cross them out. Vote for yourself as a write-in candidate, if it gives you a thrill. But don't let your distaste for a single political race keep you from casting your vote on other issues in your community.

4.) Seriously, it doesn't take that long. No, SERIOUSLY. It does NOT take that long. Your polling place is probably a five minute drive from your house. It might well be on your way home from work tonight. If you don't know where it is, you can find it in moments using Google or your state's Secretary of State website. I know you have heard horror stories of people standing in line for hours to vote. But those incidents are isolated. Long lines at the polls pretty much happen when there are problems with voting machines, problems with ballots, or extremely high turnout. In a midterm election, long lines are unlikely. In most elections I have voted in, I have been in and out in 15 minutes or less.

3.) Your vote actually does matter. In 2008, Al Franken won the race for U.S. Senate in Minnesota by 312 votes. If just 312 of his supporters had decided voting wasn't worth the trouble, he would have lost. If just 313 of his opponent's supporters had shown up, Norm Coleman would be Minnesota's Senator. Every vote counts.

2.) If you don't vote your complaints about bad government lose their force. You of course, can complain about your elected government officials even though you refused to participate in choosing them, but people who actually bother vote can also logically refuse to take your complaints seriously.

1.) Not everyone in the world has the right to vote. Good people fought and died to win you that right. For their sake, please: don't waste it.

Paying Attention

2010-09-08T20:41:00.000-07:00

This evening while we were eating dinner, with the television news speaking softly in the next room about a pastor who wants to publicly burn a sacred text, my six-year-old son said to me, suddenly:

"Hey, remember a while ago on The Daily Show when they were talking about that mosque in New York, and they made the Bank of America logo change to Death to America, and they turned Burger King into Burger Sheik, and Church Street into Mosque Street? That was sooo funny."

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Municipal Land-Use Update - Ground Zero Mosque

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Tea Party

And in the space of about three seconds, these are the thoughts that flew through my head:

Wait. My kid was paying attention to that news about people burning a religious text? At dinner? Crud.

Wait. My kid actually pays attention to The Daily Show reruns I sometimes watch while the he is supposedly distracted by homework or video games? The reruns he always complains about us watching when, according to him it would be "more educational" to watch Mythbusters?

How much attention is he paying to, um, er, all those penis jokes they tell on TDS? Um. Hmm. Erm. Note to self.

Wait. My six-year-old has been paying so much attention to the news in general that he not only knows enough about the supposed "Ground Zero Mosque"* to have correctly interpreted that Daily Show segment as pertaining to it, but also knew immediately to associate the furor over the Islamic community center with Dove World Outreach's Quran-burning publicity stunt?

WAIT! I haven't even really talked to him about the Park 51 Islamic Community Center in New York yet, or about Pastor Crazypants' planned burning of the Quran. I haven't talked about how when the Founders put freedom of religion in the American Constitution, they did in fact mean all religions not just Christian ones. I haven't explained to him how wrong I think it is that some people in this country are persecuting all Muslims because of the actions of a deranged few. I haven't told him about all the moderate American Muslims I went to high school and college with, who were just as appalled by 9/11 as any other sane human being, and who yet live even now with harassment and profiling. I haven't talked to him about how fear and pain and loss can sometimes cause even good-hearted people to make bad decisions and hurt their neighbors. I haven't explained well enough, have I, about people sometimes being afraid of people who are different from they are, just because of the difference? I haven't had a real discussion with him yet about how politicians and members of the media sometimes purposefully stoke public fear and anger in order to gain attention and power, and how that seems to me to be happening now every time someone brings up any news story remotely involving Islam.

Agh! I am totally unprepared for this discussion!

I mean, he's six.

And then the six-year-old said, "People think that mosque is at Ground Zero, but it's two blocks away." He shook his head.

"Oh," I said, "You've really been paying attention to the news, huh?"

"Yeah," he said. "People should pay attention. So they know what is true."

And he went back to his dinner.

*Park 51 is, for the record, folks, NOT at ground zero, or, in fact, even technically a mosque — it's an Islamic community center. Plans include a basketball court and space for cooking classes as well as a small prayer room. Thank you very little, 24 hour cable news, for your clarity on this issue!

Seeds

2010-08-03T08:57:00.000-07:00

Straight green stalks rose almost twice my height. I ran my fingers along the grooved green husk leaves tight-wrapped around one ear, and touched the spilling silk. It was prettier than the corn-husk doll at home on my mother's shelf.

Pick one, she said. And she helped me twist the ear until it snapped. In the kitchen she showed me how the husk peels back to reveal the golden kernels in their stately rows, how to pull out the last stubborn threads of silk. And I asked, how does this get in a can? And with a knife she sliced off the kernels, neatly. Oh please, I begged, can't we make something with it?

And she pulled a step stool up to the stove, and she taught me to make garden vegetable soup. And when I tasted that corn it was like a revelation of corn, a Platonic ideal of the Original Corn. But of course I didn't know those words like Platonic then. Platonic is what I think now, when I remember that taste. On that day I just knew that despite eating canned corn at least twice a week for dinner at home, I had never really tasted corn before.

***

She came to pick us up in her blue Ford Cordoba, the car with impeccably clean seats. My younger sister, the sweet one, the pretty one, like always, simpered and batted her eyes for shotgun, pointing pitifully at her once-broken leg (the leg that had already healed perfectly almost year ago— the leg that posed her absolutely no problem, thank you very much, when climbing trees or running on the playground). But the charm that almost unfailingly moved my mother and father rolled off this tiny, twinkle-eyed woman like rain off a duck.

"She's older. She has longer legs." And I sat in the front seat of a car for the first time in over a year, marveling at my good fortune, while my sister, who would have cried fat crocodile tears in any other person's car, pouted silently in the backseat, wondering how her spell had been broken.

At the Piggly Wiggly, as we marveled at porcelain figurines of ballerinas, she bought us each a Sprite. "Don't tell your mother," she said. My sister drank hers in conspiratorial glee, but I, ever the Puritan, took tiny sips. Everyone knew my mother had secret, invisible, almost-all-seeing eyes in the back of her head.

I didn't know, then, about the universal Soda and Candy Exception that is granted to grandmothers.

I should have drunk that soda.

***

We heard third-hand that she was riding through Vegas on the back of a motorcycle. A few weeks later, we heard she'd gotten a tattoo.

My mother was still furious at her for selling the family house. I was a little mad too, considering we'd been staying there at the time and had needed to move on short notice.

Secretly, though, I was thrilled by the image of her speeding past the neon lights, the wind ruffling her cropped grey hair. When I told my the kids at school, "My grandmother rides motorcycles in the desert and has a tattoo," they didn't believe me. Of course, I never told them the tattoo was of a panda. That made the whole picture seem somewhat less daring.

***

Last month, my aunt emailed to tell me that my grandmother was slowly, stealthily turning the entire grassy landscape of her assisted living community into a decorative food garden. "I try to tell her to save her money for a new computer," she wrote, "but she just keeps buying plants." Her neighbors, my aunt reported, had been recruited, and were now in cahoots in my grandmother's revolt against the grass. There were fruit trees and bean plants popping up everywhere.

In response I emailed my aunt a picture of my son standing in a tomato jungle twice his height, and said, "Grandma might like this picture." And I asked my aunt to show my grandmother my new blog on sustainable food.

A few days later I received in the mail a handwritten note on a scrap of blue paper, in my grandmother's familiar stilted left-hander-forced-to-be-a-right-hander scrawl, announcing my uncle's wedding. The last line, squeezed at the bottom like an afterthought, read, "Love your internet stuff."

***

Yesterday evening I was standing in my vegetable garden, tending to my overgrown tomatoes, when my husband brought the cordless phone out to me. And I stood still pruning and tying tomato branches in an automatic motion like a prayer on a rosary even as I heard the tremble in my mother's voice, and asked, "What's wrong?"

***

As I hold the blue note in my hand, staring at the last words my grandmother wrote to me, knowing there will never be another note, never any more words from her to me, to anyone, I can taste that corn.

Days Before Yesterday

2010-05-14T14:11:00.000-07:00

On the day of your party, playing baseball in the yard with bigger boys, your friend took a wrong swing and, smack— the bat hit your face. There I was ready to run and scoop you immediately into my already open arms to hide your tears in my embrace, but I didn't have to. Because you blinked and you blinked and you shook your head and checked your nose with your hands to make sure it wasn't broken and you squared your skinny shoulders and screwed your face into a stone mask and you didn't cry. Not a single tear.

Not in front of your friend, who, after all, hadn't meant it.

On your real birthday, which this year came on Mother's Day, just like the day you were born, I heard you say to your grandfather, over the phone, "I am planning to visit the science center. Did you know they have a new exhibit on Charles Darwin?" and it occurred to me that I couldn't remember ever telling you Darwin's first name. Like so many things you know these days, and didn't learn from me. You read it somewhere, when I wasn't looking.

At the museum you did not want to hold my hand while we walked across the bridge above the highway, and in fact when we came to the plexiglass cutouts in the floor that offer a dizzying view of rushing cars and pavement far below, you, grinning, jumped on one, hard, to show off for a pretty little girl who was scared to look down.

This week, suddenly, as if given unspoken permission by the calendar, you have become a child who runs out the back door without asking me to come with you and watch you play. I watch you anyway, from the window. You sidle, head high, shoulders back, toward the older boys next door, brandishing your yellow plastic gun by way of invitation to a game of Space Police (a game you have invented, and lead with the assurance of a director giving instructions to actors on a stage).

But yesterday you were home sick and you sat with me for nearly an hour on the couch, leaning your head against my shoulder while I wrote. When I finished working you said, "Mommy?" I said, "What?" And you said, "Mommy? Mommy? Mommy?" Smiling slyly like it was a silly joke.

Still I knew what question you were really asking. The one you suddenly feel too old, at the ancient age of six, to ask.

And the answer is yes. This year and next year and the year after that and even when you're 100 years old and I am 123, yes.

As long as I have breath to say the word, yes. Whenever you need me, I will be here.

An Open Letter to Oppressive Humorist Mommybloggers

2010-04-15T13:48:00.000-07:00

Dear Kelcey Kintner of The Mama Bird Diaries (and all other Mommybloggers Who Would Dare Lead Impressionable Women Astray),

Greetings from a suburban mother, housewife and blogger from a flyover state! I don't believe we have met before (Though, some fancy sophisticated East Coast bloggers who ought to have been setting an example for me did convince me to get a little drunk at my last BlogHer, and my memory of subsequent events is a little fuzzy. So who can say for certain?).

I am writing you a letter because I hear that you are apparently oppressing me with humor.

I suppose my female mind has been poisoned by all of the amusing anecdotes about motherhood that I have recently read on the internet, because I cannot, for the life of me, figure out just how it is that you are managing to kill feminism and force misguided Midwestern women like me to be mediocre with your humorous posts about wearing pants.

But now that I have been informed about how dangerous women writers like you are, before I go and try to write another post over at that political blog I write along with a bunch of other mommybloggers (by the way, that blogger who is telling the whole internet that women like you who write about funny stories about parenting are ruining humanity for the next generation of women might want to check our little mom-run political blog out, actually — the First Lady once posted there — I certainly hope we humble mommybloggers didn't corrupt her accomplishments by association), I think that perhaps I ought to cleanse my mind of the evil influence of women who dare to write publicly about the dirty, drudgerly work of raising children by contemplating some dead male social pundits' ridiculous bloviations on the supposed intrinsic inferiority of women:

The man who fights for two or more in the struggle for existence, who has all the responsibility, and the cares of tomorrow, who is constantly active in combating the environment and human rivals, needs more brain than the woman whom he must protect and nourish, the sedentary woman, lacking any interior occupations, whose role is to raise children, love, and be passive.- -Paul Topinard

Men have broad and large chests, and small narrow hips, and more understanding than women, who have but small and narrow chests, and broad hips, to the end that they should remain at home, sit still, keep house, and bear and bring up children. -Martin Luther

Women are directly adapted to act as the nurses and educators of our early childhood, for the simple reason that they themselves are childish, foolish, and short-sighted — in a word, are big children all their lives, something intermediate between the child and the man, who is a man in the strict sense of the word. Consider how a young girl will toy day after day with a child, dance with it and sing to it; and then consider what a man, with the very best intentions in the world, could do in her place. -Arthur Schopenhaeur

Well, that was certainly an effective washing of my mommyblog-addled brain! A bracing reminder of —

Wait a minute.

I just noticed something.

All those men. Those unevolved, sexist, influential historical men who believed that women were inherently inferior. In all those quotes I just quoted, they weren't just talking about the inferiority of women, were they?

No, it seems to me that all those sexist men I just quoted mentioned that inferior women were made inferior on purpose so that they would be perfectly suited to the inferior work of raising children. Which is obviously inferior work, because it is done by inferior women, who are inferior!

Hmm.

Could it be that labeling the work of raising children as an inferior occupation that women should avoid talking about so as not to be seen as inferior actually sets back feminism?

Because you know what? I'm pretty sure all those men I just quoted would be really pissed off by a bunch of women writers having the gumption to assume that their stories about motherhood might actually be wortth publishing in public.

Well, Kelcey. I guess you're not really oppressing me at all, are you? In fact, since the rise of blogging, women like you have been successfully subversively pissing off not just certain self-hating feminists, but also the patriarchy. Fancy that!

Carry on, mommybloggers who write humorous stories about pants.

Carry the revolution right on.

We Didn't Have a Choice

2010-04-09T20:43:00.000-07:00

When my little brother was six years old, he set our house on fire. While my sister, my mother and I were all inside it.

He found a discarded disposable cigarette lighter in a neighbor's yard. No fuel left in it, really, but it still sparked when he spun the little metal wheel with his thumb. It was the weekend, and my mother had been out earlier that day raking leaves in the back yard. She'd stacked several paper yard waste bags full of dry leaves against the back of the house, leaning up against the cedar siding.

We knew better than to leave my brother unsupervised, anywhere, for very long. But it only took a minute. Flick. Flick. Flick. Whoosh.

He stood and watched as the bags caught fire. He stood and watched as the flames licked up the cedar siding. He stood and watched as the entire back side of the house, with his family inside it, burst into flames.

My six-year-old brother was still standing there, watching, silent, when a neighbor who lived behind us happened to glance out his kitchen window, saw our house on fire, and ran outside, grabbed his garden hose, vaulted over our fence, and started screaming, "Do you know? Your house is on fire!"

And still my brother stood, seemingly unaffected, as our neighbor, and the fire department, saved our house.

This wasn't the first time my brother had started a dangerous fire. The first time, actually, he was only four years old. While my mother was taking a shower, and my sister and I were at school, he unlocked the child safety gate to the kitchen, pushed a chair up to the refrigerator, stacked two phone books on the chair, climbed on his makeshift stepping stool, and retrieved a can of charcoal lighter fluid from a high cabinet over the fridge. Then he went out to the front yard, doused a live oak tree (and, by accident, his own clothes) in the fluid, and used a discarded lighter (collecting discarded disposable lighters was a habit of his, you see), and lit the tree.

When my mother found him, the fireball had very slightly singed his eyebrows. But by some miracle, his lighter-fluid-soaked t-shirt, and the child inside it, were perfectly unharmed.

As a young child, it seemed that my brother had no sense of danger, to himself, or to others. He was defiant, persistent, and angry. He hated being told what to do. He flung toys across rooms and broke them. He threw cats across the room, and hurt them. He climbed too high and jumped too far and pushed too hard and screamed too loud. He hit people. He bit people.

If you think this had anything to do with my mother's parenting skills, think again. She had raised me, after all — a straight-A student who showed proper manners at the dinner table, helped elderly neighbors shovel snow, cleaned her room (eventually) when asked, and never once earned a high school detention.

And keep in mind, she raised me when she was a struggling teenage mother. When my brother was born, she was 30, and much more financially stable. He was her third child. She was experienced at handling kids. She was one of those moms who could make rowdy neighbor kids shut up and stand up straight just by giving them a look.

And yet, she could not control my brother.

She took him to various specialists, of course. And while everyone could agree there was something Not Right With This Child, no one could agree on a diagnosis. Oppositional Defiant Disorder? Childhood Bi-Polar Disorder? Impulse Control Disorder? Autism Spectrum Disorder?

Child Sociopath?

The experts didn't know. We didn't know.

I'll admit it. We were afraid of him.

Was he really insane?

Would he seriously hurt someone?

We knew something was wrong. And we didn't know what it was. And we were afraid.

But we never, ever, ever, ever seriously thought, not even for a second, about giving him away. He was my mother's son. He was my brother. He was part of our family. He was permanent. He was ours.

And if there was something terribly wrong with him? Well, that was our problem to solve.

When he couldn't handle school, my mother homeschooled him. When she couldn't stop him from throwing rocks at neighbors' windows, she moved to the county, to a farm. When she caught him drinking beer and smoking well, well underage, she didn't kick him out of the house.

She kept trying. She just kept trying. She's his mother, after all.

She had no choice.

My brother is a teenager now. He's obsessed with Avatar, and Star Wars. He likes to play board games. He's an excellent reader, and wickedly smart. He has lots of friends. He's not always great about doing chores on time, but he helps my mother a lot, raising chickens and rabbits and horses on the farm. When my family came to visit last year, he insisted on carrying my mother's luggage out of the trunk of the car so she wouldn't have to lift it.

He goes hunting deer sometimes, with my stepfather. With a rifle.

Because he's the kind of kid you can actually trust with a gun.

He wants to be an auto mechanic, or maybe a construction foreman, or maybe an electrical engineer. Some job where he can use power tools and build things with his hands. (And yes, maybe occasionally set something on fire.)

He's a really awesome kid, my little brother.

* * *

I did everything right during my pregnancy. I stopped drinking alcohol the day I saw the plus sign on the test stick. And not only that — I cut out caffeine. Entirely. I cut out soft cheese and bean sprouts and sushi. I didn't smoke. I didn't even hang out around smokers. I ate a very carefully balanced diet.

I exercised. I made my husband change the cat litter. I avoided gasoline fumes. I read seven different reference books on how to have a healthy pregnancy and delivery. I arrived at every OB-GYN checkup ten minutes early.

Apparently, none of that mattered a whit when it came to the small tumor that formed on my son's skull while he was still in my ridiculously healthy womb.

* * *

My son didn't sleep through the night on a regular basis until he was two years old. From the time he was a newborn, until the time he was about eight or nine months old, he actually never slept more than three hours together at a time, and some nights, he would wake up just about every hour.

Which meant that I had to wake up, every hour.

By the fifth month or so of this I was such an exhausted mess that I stared to hallucinate, sometimes. I'd see weird shadows morph into monsters at the corners of my eyes. It was not good. I knew it was dangerous. What if I fell asleep sometime, holding him? What if I dropped him?

But what could I do?

I tried everything to get him to sleep. Co-sleeping. Not co-sleeping. Gentle training. Gradual sleep training. Ferber. It didn't matter. Nothing worked. If I tried to leave him alone in his crib when he woke up at night, he would just cry more and more loudly, until his cry turned into bloodcurdling screams, and he would hyperventilate until I thought he might vomit.

Whenever I turned on the vacuum cleaner, or the food processor, or a power screwdriver, or anything else that made a certain pitch of whrrrrr, my son used to widen his eyes, arch his back, turn bright red, and scream as though he were being flayed alive. Even after I turned off the offending machine, he would shudder and whimper for several minutes afterward. Like the noise had horribly, physically hurt him.

My floors got very dirty.

As a toddler, whenever people sang or clapped in unison, my son used to cry and shiver like he'd just seen a ghost. I found it necessary for us to excuse ourselves from the singing portions of birthday parties. We could not take him to church services or weddings or children's events involving clapping or singing, or even restaurants where people might sing, without risking a meltdown.

Until the age of three my son could not stand blankets. As an infant, whenever I would try to nurse him under a blanket, he would tear it off. If I put it back on again, he would cry or stop eating. If I kept on trying to cover him, he would bite me.

At night, he would not sleep under a blanket no matter how cold it was. I could only sneak blankets on him after he was already sleeping.

Which was easy enough to do during the two years I almost never slept.

All of these problems paled, of course, in comparison to the eating issues. After the surgery to remove his tumor, he stopped eating. He was terrified of trying new foods. He would spit and gag and act like he was choking on a spoonful of soft stewed peas. There were some days when I spent hours and hours just trying to get him to take a single bite of a single cracker.

I spent thousands of dollars taking him to doctors. An endocrinologist, a gastroenterologist, a food allergist, a nutritionist. I didn't care how much it cost. I just wanted them to fix him.

At his thinnest, you could see every rib and every knob of his spine, and legs were like sticks and his belly curved inward. Like a starving child in a public service poster. Every time I changed his clothes, I fought back tears.

There were so many times when I thought "Why me?" or "I didn't expect this. I didn't ask for this." There were times, especially late, late times during yet another night of too little sleep, when I fantasized about running away.

But did I ever think, really, about giving him away? Hell no. He was my child. His problems were my problems. I would fix them or I would die trying.

I had no choice.

* * *

So forgive me if I cannot understand this:

How can a parent who has a adopted a child who has turned out to have special needs feel that she has a choice about whether or not to continue to care for that child?

How does one justify returning a child like a piece of defective or mislabled merchandise?

"I'm sorry. This box said PERFECT FAMILY ADDITION! on the label. There was nothing, nothing at all in the ingredient list about EXTREME SEPARATION ANXIETY or DEVELOPMENTAL DELAYS or EXPLOSIVE ANGER. I demand you make this right!"

The very idea of someone returning a child they have chosen because that child turned out to be difficult to parent makes me so angry I shake.

Do not, for a moment, misunderstand me.

I understand how it feels to be told you're about to have one kind of change in your life, only to realize you are faced with something entirely other. I understand how headbashingly difficult parenting a child with special needs can be. I understand how utterly terrifying lifeshakingly hard it can feel when you realize that instead of that nice trip to Italy you planned, you just got a one-way ticket to Holland. Or Swaziland. Or, hell. Antarctica.

I've seen families torn apart by the strain of raising children with serious health or mental problems. I've seen happy couples get divorced. Healthy children get neglected or hurt. I've seen people lose jobs, homes, dreams. Years of their lives.

I've stood in a house that was set on fire.

I understand feeling desperate. I understand feeling scared. I understand feeling like you just can't live this way anymore. Like it's not fair. Like you shouldn't have to face this. Like you're going crazy. Like you're at the end of your rope.

What I cannot understand — what I do not think I, as the mother of a child with special needs, will ever understand — is how you can feel that you have a choice about being a parent to a child you have already chosen and claimed as your own.

Those of us who choose to bring children into our lives through our own wombs do not get to totally abdicate responsibility for those children just because they, at some point, turn out to be less healthy than we hoped for or expected.

I when I was going into labor, I didn't get to check a box on some form saying "Not willing to give birth to a child with special needs."

It was my choice to have a child.

I didn't have a choice about having a child with special needs.

It just happened that way.

No matter how you become a parent, you cannot, ever, fully control how your life with your child will turn out. Every child will have problems. Every child will cost money you don't have. Every child will exhaust and hurt you and make you secretly dream, at some point, about running away. And some children will make you have that dream more often than others.

But the point of being a real parent (no matter whether your child was born into your arms or crossed an ocean to come home to you) is that, no matter how hard it gets, no matter how tired you are, no matter how much help you have to ask for, you don't abandon a sick, hurting child who needs you.

Real parents don't allow themselves that choice.

Yes, You're At the Right Place

2010-04-06T12:52:00.000-07:00

I'm just rearranging the furniture.

The Break That Wasn't

2010-03-31T12:25:00.000-07:00

Last week, my son was home with me all day every day for spring break. And despite the fact that I knew that would mean I would get a lot less work done (especially since my husband had a Big Work Project planned that would keep him very busy and not so much available on the parenting front), at the beginning of last week, I was very happy about the prospect of hours and hours alone with my kid.

Since he has started full-day school (and moved to a school all the way across town), I've missed having him around. There are days now when I literally don't see him for more than an hour or two before bedtime. I had grand plans for all the wonderful things we would do in a whole week together.

We would go to the zoo! We would have a play date with another blogger and her daughter! We would bake bread, and cookies (all peanut-free) and plant broccoli seedlings in the garden. I would play all of his favorite board games (all the ones I got so sick of before he was in school, that I now sheepishly admit miss).

Yeah, no.

Tuesday morning at 3 a.m. I was awakened by excruciating, burning abdominal pain, from my left hip straight up to my bottom left rib. A few hours later, after various tests and consultations with two doctors, I found out I'd had an abnormal ovarian cyst rupture. (More on the interesting medical saga related to that discovery later, when I feel well enough to write it.)

If you've never had this happen before, either because you are one of my ovary-less readers, or because, unlike unfortunate me, your womanly parts have all always functioned beautifully and harmoniously as nature intended, allow me to describe the pain:

1.) Less painful than natural childbirth.

2.) More painful than anything else that has ever happened to me (besides, of course, the last time I had a dangerously large cyst.)(Oh yes. Did I mention this has happened before?)

3.) If you are still not understanding this description of pain because you're one of those humans who bear their reproductive parts outside the body, just imagine one half of one of your testicles exploding.

(You're welcome.)

So, yeah. That sucked.

Later that same day, as I lay in bed really starting to regret my decision to not take the prescription for heavy narcotics the GYN who confirmed my diagnosis had sympathetically proffered, my son started complaining of a headache.

The next day, he developed a full-blown miserable, snot-nosed head cold from Hades.

And so it came to pass that, instead of "resting for a few days, limiting physical activity and monitoring body temperature for any signs of infection until the pain subsides" as a doctor had oh-so-helpfully suggested, I spent the next few days trying not to yelp in pain every time I hauled my sad sorry, busted-lady-bits-bearing self up off the couch to get my feverish, exhausted, kid with a sinus headache and a hacking cough a cup of water or a tissue or another dose of medicine, while we both sighed and muttered and whined and watched bad TV.

Leaving the house, at all, was pretty much out of the question.

By Monday we were both feeling a bit better. By Tuesday morning, he was well enough to go to school.

And me? Well, I could finally take the stairs down to the basement without wanting to cry.

But I'd caught my son's cold.

I need a vacation.

Conversations with a Five-Year-Old: The Pain and the Pedant

2010-03-12T14:56:00.000-08:00

MOTHER: Please go wash your hands before dinner. Your fingers are covered in marker. I don't think you want ink in your food.

CHILD: Aw, man.

MOTHER: What?

CHILD: I have to wash my hands again? I just washed my hands at lunch time.

MOTHER: Yes, you need to wash your hands more than once in a day. Go wash your hands.

CHILD: Hmph.

CHILD stalks slowly off toward the bathroom, muttering to himself.

MOTHER: Oh, there she goes again. Your mother. Always trying to take care of you and keep you safe and healthy. Always trying to keep you from doing things like eating food flavored with ink from a marker. She's such a pain.

CHILD (whispers): In the B-U-T.

MOTHER: What did you just say, young man?

CHILD: Nothing.

MOTHER: You're missing a T.

CHILD: What?

MOTHER: Butt, as in your bottom, rear, posterior, that thing you sit upon, is spelled B-U-T-T. You mean to say I am a pain in the B-U-T-T.

CHILD: Oh, right! I always get those confused.

MOTHER to FATHER: We need to work on his ability to spell insults.

More conversations.

To My Friends Who Work Outside the Home

2010-03-10T08:57:00.000-08:00

To my friends who are mothers who work professionally full time (or more than full time), and often must leave their children:

I have told this story before many times in various ways on various comment sections on various working mothers' blogs, so I apologize if you have heard this before, but it I think it bears repeating.

When I was a poor college student putting myself through school, one of my three jobs was being a part-time nanny, for several years, for a busy professional couple with two little girls. The girls' mother, who loved her children deeply, was a professional writer and small business owner. She sometimes worked from home in her office while I watched the kids, but sometimes her business meant she had to leave, for hours, or for whole days at a time.

When the girls' mother had to leave for work, sometimes, they would cry. They would throw their arms around her and beg her not to leave. As they got older, and could articulate their feelings, they would say things like, "Don't leave me Mommy! You leave too much! I miss you when you're gone."

I could see the guilt and longing in their mother's eyes, on those days, as I pulled her tearful, clinging children away, and she walked out the door to the sounds of their sobs. Not yet having a child of my own, I did not then understand her pain as fully as I do now, but so I could sense that these moments weighed on her — that echoes of her daughters' cries would linger somewhere in a corner of her mind all day.

Five or ten minutes after she left, the kids would recover completely, and start laughing and playing with me just as they did on the days when their mother was in the next room.

Sometimes, the older girl would get out a box and pretend to type on it as if it were a computer.

"I'm a Mommy. I'm working," she would say. "I'm a writer writing things."

And that little girl would sound so proud.

Your children miss you when you cannot be with them. Of course they do. And they miss their Dad when he isn't around (or their other Mom, or their Grandma). And when they're home alone with you, I bet they miss their favorite babysitters and teachers, too. All kids would prefer to have all of their favorite people available 24 hours a day, to be summoned or dismissed at childish whim.

But they love you, the whole of you, more than anything, and even at an early age, they understand that your career — your drive to create things of value with your skills and your mind, not just at home, but out in the wider world — is part of who you are.

And because they know that about you, they also know that one day they can also be great parents AND great workers. They are the girls who will play games of "Office" alongside their games of "House." They are the boys who will see no problem with Daddies who push strollers or Mommies who get invited to speak at conferences.

And they will be women and men who, one day, I hope, will come to understand how you felt (how I've sometimes felt, too) about having to walk out the door on those certain hard days, as your children cried. Who will realize that even on those days you walked away, you were doing it, as you did everything, for them — to support them, to build a better life for them, to change the world, for them.

And I do not think they will hold those times against you.

A Point of Clarification

2010-02-25T10:15:00.000-08:00

When I was in fifth grade, a new student at a new school, a popular girl in my class took a dislike to me on my first day, according to her, because I "played kickball wrong,"" talked "too smart, like a book or something," and "had a weird name."

My response was to ignore and deflect. She called me ugly. I would respond with a phrase I'd heard my mother say, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." She called me stupid. I would roll my eyes and head down the hallway to my gifted enrichment class. She called me clumsy. Well, I was clumsy. There was no point in arguing there.

But I didn't attack her back, in the way she was attacking me. I didn't call her names. Even as she called me a coward and spat in my face while the other students, cowed by her, laughed.

I wasn't a coward. I wasn't a doormat. I was a Christian (then, at least in name), and I had been taught by what I had read about Jesus to turn the other cheek. I was a book addict. I had read Tolkien, and Lewis, and L'Engle. At ten, I plucked my personal morals from fantasy worlds where heroes triumphed by sticking to their values, and the high road always led, eventually, to victory.

And perhaps more importantly, once, a few years earlier, I had let a visiting step-cousin of mine pressure me into joining her and some friends in publicly mocking a kid in our neighborhood who everyone thought was a little quirky. As I had seen the tears well up in that little girl's eyes, and seen her turn and run away to her mother's house while the circle of children I stood in laughed, I suddenly had to suppress an overwhelming urge to vomit.

I apologized later that day. But the hurt in that girl's eyes didn't disappear with my apology. I had broken a trust between us. It was irreparable.

We would never be friends.

And that day, I vowed never again to join in a mocking circle meant to destroy another person's self-worth.

So, I deflected, and avoided, and ignored. My refusal to be goaded into a petty reaction by that popular girl in my fifth grade class infuriated her. She tore my books. She stole my homework. She wrote fake love letters to boys in my name. She lied to the teacher to try to get me in trouble. She lied to my friends and told them I had done terrible things.

The more I refused to fight back, the more I refused to run and cry-- the more I just stood there and took it, the angrier that girl became. "You're jealous of me," she would scream. "You wish you could be just like me."

I didn't.

I really didn't.

Maybe I should have fought back. Maybe I should have insulted her in front of everyone, or spread a rumor about her, or smacked her in the face. This was, after all, the real world, the real, savage world of human children, all jockeying for position in a social hierarchy, playacting at a very serious game they had watched their parents play. In the real world, sometimes turning the other cheek turns out badly.

In the real world, sometimes you have to hit back.

But I hadn't read Lord of the Flies yet.

So one day, when that girl, antagonized beyond words by my simple refusal to fuel her drama fire, icily informed me that she had scheduled a fight between the two of us on the playground at recess, and that if I didn't show up, her enforcers would find me and make me pay for the insult?

I showed up. I stood tall and faced her livid face as two of her lackeys distracted a teacher and the schoolchildren gathered around in a tiny circular mob, whispering their chant, "Fight! Fight!"

And I said, "Hit me."

The girl sputtered. "What?"

I repeated it. "Hit me. Go ahead. Hit me as hard as you can. Hit me if you want to, but I won't hit you back. I'm not like you. I don't hit people just because I don't like them. So go ahead. Hit me."

"But it's a fight! You have to fight!" She rocked back on her heels and whipped her head back and forth, searching the little crowd, which had gone silent.

"No, I don't. You're the only one who wants to fight. I didn't ask you for a fight. You asked me for one."

A few of the kids in the crowd giggled.

They weren't giggling at me.

The popular girl screamed a terrible, primal scream of frustration. And ran. She pushed through that little crowd of children, and ran away from me.

I write about this incident from my childhood today because that moment changed me. It made me, in many ways, who I am.

I'm wise enough now to know the high road may not always lead to victory. I also know myself well enough to know that, try as I may, I don't always succeed in taking it. I'm a terribly imperfect person, as easily ruled by fear and emotion as anyone else. I sometimes say things I don't mean out of anger, and later regret them. I sometimes fail to say things I should, out of fear.

But know this: every time someone responds to an honest disagreement I have with them by lobbing a petty insult at me, or telling a lie, or spreading false rumors, or demanding that I fight, (or censoring my posts on a community site for political reasons, or blocking me on Twitter, or defriending me on Facebook, or any of the other hundreds of petty ways people slight one another on the internet these days) I am inevitably drawn back to that day on the playground, and the peace and strength that suffused my whole being in that one moment of triumph, when I said, "Go ahead. Hit me."

So, go ahead.

Hit me.

I'm not like you.

And no, actually, I'm not jealous.

What I've Been Writing Lately Elsewhere

2010-02-19T13:14:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week I posted about my favorite Indian cookbook on my lovely friend Debbie's blog for the vintage-obsessed, Did You Buy That New.

On Sustenance, I put up some beginner's tips for starting seeds indoors.

And today I posted to MOMocrats about the 21st century American phenomenon of health-insurance-based marriages of convenience.

In Which I Resume Chronicling My Gardening Addiction

2010-02-15T20:01:00.000-08:00

Readers of the backyard food growerly persuasion take note:

Sustenance is back in action.

Oh, and that's broccoli.

Writing, Parenting, and Sensory Disorders

2010-02-13T09:43:00.000-08:00

I write fairly often about my son's struggles with Sensory Processing Disorder. About his eating issues. About the way his motor skills delay affects him on the playground. About his problems concentrating in a noisy environment at school. I write about how these issues affect me as a parent, about my own struggle to smooth a path through this world for a child with a developmental delay.

I worry, sometimes, about writing publicly about these things, because I don't want to embarrass my child by revealing too much about his personal struggles. I don't want to unreasonably skew the way others who have never met him in person might see him. I don't want to label him permanently as a person with a problem. I want the world to see him as a child with a disorder, not as a disorder attached to a child.

So I worry. And I censor myself, sometimes. And sometimes I freeze up altogether, unsure of how much to write.

I think carefully about what I do write. I weigh the costs and benefits of telling a story about my child, carefully, before I push the publish button. If I write this story, will it help me think through a problem? If I share it, will that help me find advice from others who may have had similar experiences — advice that may help me help my son? Will it help raise awareness about sensory disorders? Will it help another parent of a child with sensory issues feel a little less utterly alone?

I like to think that by writing publicly about my family's experiences with my son's sensory problems, I am helping to create a future world in which those problems will be better understood. I hope that one day, the acronym SPD will be as familiar and commonly understood as ADHD, and that the label will carry as little mystery as an ADHD label, and no stigma.

I hope that ten years from now, when my son explains to someone why trying new foods unsettles him and the sound of a vacuum bothers him and climbing a staircase makes him nervous (and also why he can memorize the drum track of a song after hearing it just a few times, and why he never fails to notice a friend's new haircut, and why he can tell you what precisely seasonings went into a sauce, and why he can tell from across the house when cookies in an oven are finished baking, just by the slight shift in their smell) that instead of "You have a sensory disorder? What on earth is that?" he will hear "You have a sensory disorder? Oh, that makes sense!"

And I hope, too, that one day, when my son is grown, he will understand that is why I wrote about him. To pave his way.

Backstage, Center Stage

2010-02-11T12:36:00.000-08:00

When I was in high school, all of my best friends were in theater. The boy I went to prom with Junior year and the boy I didn't go to prom with Senior year and the boy I went with instead of that other boy I didn't go with were all actors, who had taken more than one turn under the bright lights on our battered school stage. My friends went to acting workshops out of school, and sang musical theater songs at the tops of their lungs while driving with all the windows open down the highway, and worked at The Muny or The Fox in the summertime just to be near the stage.

I was never an actress. As a teenager, I had terrible stage fright. I took Drama one year in eighth grade as an elective, and I would freeze up so badly just acting in front of a twenty-person class of my friends — stammering my lines out, my whole body shaking — that my teacher took pity on me and found an excuse to declare me her "Assistant Director" for the rest of the year so that I could hide in a corner with a binder and a pen, taking notes on blocking and lighting and whispering my friends' forgotten lines.

Later, in high school, I worked backstage. I learned how to saw wood and paint shadows and hang lights and program a sound board and make an empty black box look like castle courtyard or a Manhattan living room or a submarine or a one-room schoolhouse or a forest in June. While my friends took the spotlight, and the applause, I dressed in black to better blend in with the shadows and made sure their cues came on time.

And I liked it that way.

These days, I don't stammer or shake when speaking in public. I can give a presentation to a room of 50 bloggers without breaking a sweat. I can meet famous people I admire without swooning (okay, except for Alice Bradley). I can speak on TV or a radio show without butterflies. I can interview members of Congress without blinking an eye.

But I still don't like the spotlight. I'll stand under it when I need to, because it helps me meet people I need to meet, or reach people I need to reach, or get the word out on issues that are important to me. I'll take center stage, because it helps me get things done. But I don't seek it for its own sake.

What can I say? I'm still an introvert. An introvert who has learned to play extrovert fairly effectively when need be, but still feels an uncomfortable twinge at the idea of seeing her name in lights.

After all these years, I find I still prefer to be the one behind the scenes.

Last week I learned my son's school will be having a talent show. I asked him if he'd signed up to be in it. He said no.

"I had a choice to be on stage or in the audience, and said I would just be in the audience," he explained. "I couldn't really think of any talents I have."

No talents? My child? No talents?

No way.

"Everyone has talents," I responded. "Everyone has something special they are good at. There is not a person in this world who is not talented at at least one thing. And you are talented at many things. I've seen you show lots of talent. Don't tell me you don't have any talents!"

But then, mid-stage-mother-encouragement speech, I suddenly wondered: What if he didn't want to be in the talent show? Not because he thought he was not talented, but because he had no interest in performing in front of a crowd? I mean, I want to encourage my kid to believe he can achieve great things in life and all that, but he is five years old.

What if the idea of performing in front of the whole school made him nervous? What if he was just genuinely excited at the idea of watching his friends?

It's not like there could even actually be a talent show if every kid in the school were fighting for a spot on stage.

In every theater, someone has to be in the audience.

And someone has to work backstage.

So I said, "I want you to know, there is nothing wrong with wanting to be in the audience — the audience is just as important as the people on stage. Without an audience there would be no one to see a performance. So if you want to be in the audience this time, so you can watch and support your friends, I think that's a very good and very kind thing to do. Or if you would like to help your friends get ready for their performances, that would be a good thing to do, too. But I want you to remember that you do have talent, and you do know how to do lots of things that other people might like to see. So I'm happy that you want to watch your friends perform this year. And maybe next year, if you feel like it, you can take your own turn on stage . . ."

"Oh, wait!" he suddenly shouted, interrupting what was surely about to turn into a very exciting lecture from his mother on dramatic theory, "I forgot. I can play the piano!"

(He forgot he can play the piano? Seriously? How much money have I spent in the past two years on those weekly piano lessons?)

"I will play a song on the piano!" he continued. "I'll play it and everyone will watch me and it will be great."

And every day since he has been talking excitedly about how he will play the piano, in front of the whole school, and they will all see how good he is at playing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star." Is he nervous? No. Not a whit.

Just excited as all get-out that he'll be in the spotlight.

I get the feeling this may be the only first of several performances in his future.

And I'll be so proud to support my little performer, as usual, from backstage.

Literary Overflow

2010-02-02T11:23:00.001-08:00

The gods of literature and learning may strike me down, but this morning, while putting things away in my son's room, I had the thought, "My child has too many books."

One of the first things I bought for him before he was even born was a set of board books. My uncle sent me an Amazon gift card with instructions to use it to buy "things the baby will need," and my very first thought was, The baby will need books!

At my baby shower I was disappointed to receive only two children's books as gifts. When he was born I lamented the fact that only one small shelf on the bookcase in his nursery was actually occupied by books, the rest being filled with clothes and toys. For the first few months of his life I scoured used book sales. When people asked what he wanted for his first birthday, I slyly hinted that due to the generosity of his several sets of grandparents, he already had far too many toys for our small apartment, but a book — a book we would have room for. I repeated this message at his second birthday. And his third. And I kept using this excuse even after we moved to a bigger house.

So he acquired books about cars, books in about pets, the Thomas the Tank Engine books, the Little Bear books, and the Dr. Seuss books. Then his youngest uncles outgrew their books, and he wound up with a series of hand-me-downs.

We bought a bigger bookcase.

Then we joined the library storytime club and once a week while he listened to the librarians read books I looked over the library book sale table (Used Children's Hardbacks for Only 50 Cents!) for kids' science books that weren't too outdated. Suddenly his shelf bloomed with gently worn books about fish and birds and trees and honeybees and butterflies and the solar system.

Now he's in school and we get the Scholastic catalogs and we go to the school book fairs and his teachers send home free donated books.

And his bookcase shelves are bowed with the weight of his books. And his nightstand is covered in books. And he has books creeping onto my own overflowing bookshelf, and books on the coffee table in the living room, and books on the floor.

Last night he brought home a free book from school and this morning I realized I had literally no place to put it.

His room is already so packed with books and toys that there is certainly no room for a new shelf. He has outgrown so many of his books. Maybe it's now time to give some of them away? I mean, we'll have to make room, someday soon, for Little House on the Prairie and The Chronicles of Narnia.

But what to give away?

Sometimes, even now, when he's sad or scared at night or he's not feeling well, he still asks me to read him The Runaway Bunny or Goodnight Moon.

And I can't give away Moo Baa La La La. That's the first book he ever read all by himself! I should frame it or something.

And Green Eggs and Ham is a classic. Come on. Kids never outgrow that book. (Especially kids who are picky eaters.) So what if I have it memorized? Tossing out Green Eggs and Ham is like tossing out Chaucer.

Of course he needs two Mother Goose collections. They each have different versions of the poems. What better way to demonstrate to a five-year-old how regional variations develop in oral poetry?

A Color of His Own cannot go. That's the first book I ever read to him. And anyway I keep thinking it's sort of an allegory about exceptional people not fitting in to society and he'll probably appreciate that when he's older given his giftedness and his sensory disorder and all that.

Gatos? Hell no I am not getting rid of that little battered Baby Einstein board book about cats. It's not just the first book I ever read to him in Spanish — it's also the book I took to comfort him when he had surgery and he clutched it all night long. GATOS HAS TO STAY.

Ahem.

Perhaps we need a bigger house.

Things I Have Recently Learned

2010-02-01T12:27:00.000-08:00

I have recently learned that teachers who can tell the difference between a picky eater saying a food tastes weird because he's picky and a picky eater saying a food tastes weird because he's suddenly and totally unexpectedly developed an allergy to it and is about to go into anaphylaxis are worth their weight in gold. Especially when that teacher tells you later that she is so sorry this reaction happened under her watch. (Sorry? For jumping in and making my kid toss out the Cookie of Death when lesser classroom heroes may have told him to shut up and eat? Seriously, that action earned you possible naming rights to my next kid.)

I have recently learned that yes, despite his eventual total recovery from his allergic reaction after a double dose of Benadryl, my son did in fact show several bright waving red flags indicating anaphylaxis during his allergy attack, and the emergency room doctor who treated him should have given him a child-sized shot of epinephrine immediately instead of a second dose of Benadryl, and in fact took a big fat unnecessary risk by not doing so.

(So, if your small child ever eats something and then immediately complains of an itchy tongue, breaks out in hives, develops facial swelling, flushes red all over, complains of stomach cramps, and then starts coughing without cease, and you take him to the hospital and some stonefaced overtired ER doctor who seems irked at having to even speak to you tells you to just give your kid a little more Children's Benadryl, ~~PUNCH HIM IN THE FACE~~ ~~STICK HIM WITH HIS OWN NEEDLES~~ make sure you politely insist that the doctor give your child an age-appropriate dose of epinephrine.)

I have recently learned that if your primary care doctor's office staff, who are normally quite competent, call the wrong phone number to tell you the results of a key blood test indicating the possible severity of your son's brand new peanut allergy, even though you had called the office just one hour prior to confirm with the staff which number they could reach you at to give you the results, and then they leave a useless message on your answering machine saying that the results have come in without actually telling you what those results are, even though you've officially authorized the doctor's office to leave a message with the actual test results if you don't answer the phone, and then they close their office phones ten minutes early on a Friday, so that even when you miraculously manage to arrive home and hear the useless misdirected message just in time to call the doctor's office staff back according to their publicly stated phone hours, you still can't get a hold of anyone to give you the damn blood test results, and you realize you won't be able reach anyone at the doctor's office at all until Monday, and so you track down the number of the blood lab that did the test to call the lab yourself, by God — when that happens, some really nice guy at the blood lab named Pete, when he hears you trying not to cry with frustration as you relate this story to him on the phone, will totally bend protocol and fax you a fast-tracked application form so you can get the test results faxed straight to your house from the lab. (Thank you, Nice Blood Test Lab Guy Named Pete.)

I have recently learned that all those parents of kids with serious food allergies were totally right when they told me about so many people, smart people, good people, even medically trained people, not taking food allergies at all as seriously as they take other serious, potentially life-threatening health problems.

That it's really difficult even for me to wrap my mind around the idea that my child could theoretically now be as seriously endangered by a large bag of peanuts as a loaded unlocked gun, because that idea just feels so patently absurd.

That many people will ask you what medical steps you are taking to deal with a brand new food allergy, and many people will try to help you find information about food allergies, and many people will tell you all about how happy hearing about your experience makes them that their kids don't have food allergies, and many people will remind you how lucky you are because "it could be worse!"

But only a few very kind and thoughtful people will think to ask you how you feel about having just a few days ago watched your child narrowly escape death by cookie. By a #&@!& @!*&%!!! cookie!

I have recently learned that I feel pretty awful about that whole experience of holding my kid's hand in a speeding car and feeling totally helpless while he flushed redder and redder and his lips swelled and he coughed uncontrollably and I tried to stay totally calm and comfort him by talking to him about innocuous things in a cheerful voice all while wondering whether he might stop breathing at any moment, and what I would do if he did, all because he had taken two bites of a cookie.

That if I think too hard about it now, I can relive it in excruciating detail. That the whole watching your child have a bad allergic reaction thing is wretched, actually. That it sucks. That I really don't recommend panicked trips to the hospital as a regular family excursion.

I have recently learned that those really thoughtful people I mentioned, those people who take the time to ask a parent who has just experienced her child having a serious allergic reaction how she feels about what just happened, can make that parent feel a whole lot better.

I have learned that I am lucky, that it could have been worse.

I have learned that my five-year-old does not cry when I tell him he can't eat the fries at his favorite restaurant, or when I say he can't always have the same treats other children are having school. That when he sees other children eating what he no longer can. right in front of him, he does not scowl at them or mutter about how life isn't fair.

That he did not throw a fit when I took the bag of candy his grandmother sent him, and gave it away to the kids next door.

That instead of getting angry or upset about the long, long list of restrictions he now suddenly faces due to his allergy, he will instead (usually) tell me that chips are just as nice as fries, that he doesn't mind asking his teacher first before trying a cookie, that we can always buy more candy, that EpiPens aren't quite as scary as vaccine shots, that he doesn't want me to worry about him.

I have recently learned that my son is braver than I am.

That stylish, durable, comfortable, affordable, boyish medical alert bracelets for brave little boys that are not made of mystery metal or mystery plastic or some cheap nickel alloy are nearly impossible to find locally in St. Louis, but are available on the internet.

That your friend with a daughter with diabetes will not only answer your middle-of-the-night emails about where to find nice kids' medical bracelets, but ask her Twitter friends to help you out.

That I find having to wait several days for my kid's medical ID bracelet to arrive in the mail really, really, really annoying. Like, annoying enough to consider buying myself an engraving machine and making my own.

That my son's favorite kind of candy, that he wanted to give out on Valentine's Day, plain M&Ms, are now totally forbidden to him, because Mars does not segregate its production lines and Peanut M&Ms sometimes slip into the plain M&M package.

That I can order nut-free candy-coated chocolate pieces that theoretically also melt in your mouth and not in your hand on the internet. At double the price of the regular kind. Plus shipping.

That I am willing to pay double the price of the regular kind plus shipping. Not just for my kid, but, if necessary, for his whole elementary school class. Just so he can feel normal on Valentine's Day.

That Chipotle and Cici's Pizza and Burger King are peanut-free restaurants. That Chick-fil-A and Chili's are not.

That I am channeling so much ridiculous energy into things like getting my kid a decent ID bracelet and finding some nut-safe candy before Valentine's Day and making spreadsheets of restaurant nutrition information because those are problems I can fix. I can fix those things. I need to do things I can fix right now.

Because I can't fix him.

I can't fix the peanut allergy.

Not right now.

Maybe not ever.

***

Bonus Thing I Have Recently Learned:

That, according to the long-awaited results of his allergy blood test, my son, who has been begging me for a pet cat almost every day since the day he spoke his second word (which was "Kit-tee-cat!" which later changed, adorably, to the inventive Spanglish hybrid,"Gato-ki!" a joyous cry I heard sung out daily, for years, to real cats toy cats and pictures of cats and shadows that sorta looked like cats, with more enthusiasm than "Mama," until he was somehow suddenly old enough to hand me written explanations of Why We Should Have Cats instead) is apparently not only suddenly allergic to peanuts but also suddenly allergic to cats.

Nice one, universe. Nice.

*sigh*

Things I Need To Know

2010-01-30T07:42:00.000-08:00

How do I transition from, "I know your sensory disorder sometimes makes trying new things harder for you than for other people, but remember, new foods are not going to actually hurt you. If something tastes bad you can just spit it out. It won't kill you. Please try new foods. Try everything!" to "Always ask an adult before you take a bite out of anything you haven't had before. Read labels on food packages. Don't eat or even touch anything that says PEANUTS or PEANUT BUTTER or PEANUT FLAVOR or MAY CONTAIN NUTS or MAY CONTAIN TRACES OF NUTS. Don't allow other kids to share food with you. Don't eat at a restaurant, ever, unless I am there with you and I've brought your Epi-Pen."?

How do I do this? How do I tell a child who once spent an entire year of his life starving himself nearly to the point of mandatory feeding tube insertion because he was afraid of eating food that certain foods he could eat without trouble a week ago can now, suddenly, KILL HIM, without sending four years' worth of constant effort to get him to eat well careening back to square one?

How do I convince a child for whom certain shirt tags feel like little knives constantly stabbing his back, a child who can feel a tiny crease in his sock as though it were a rock in his shoe, a child who is terrified of needles, that he must now carry an Epi-Pen with him at all times, and practice repeatedly with a dummy pen to learn how to inject himself with it, and that if he feels a severe reaction coming on and there is no one around to help, he must use it, he must stab himself with a needle, and he must hold it there on his leg, and he must hold still and let the medicine flow, no matter how much it hurts him, no matter how scared he is?

How do I protect a child who was already quirky, skinny, short, bookish, nerdy, dreamy, uncoordinated, red-haired, and dangerously smart from getting teased by children or excluded by adults even more than he already was before, because he now has an allergy that many people seem to find so inconvenient to deal with that they'd like to isolate the children who have it entirely from other kids at school?

How do I convince not-so-medically-savvy family friends and relatives who have seen my kid eat peanuts before without trouble that no, he can't have just a little, and yes, in fact, three bites of a peanut butter cookie could actually, now, kill my son?

How do I make myself really believe the words of our brand new allergist, that my child probably won't die from this, that he may even outgrow it, that there are treatments down the line that could help him overcome this entirely in five years, or ten, that this won't change his life to terribly, that really, truly, everything will be okay?

Notice

2010-01-29T15:12:00.001-08:00

Well, @#$%.

The Reaction

2010-01-28T13:27:00.000-08:00

When Isaac was eight months old, he had emergency surgery to remove a periorbital dermoid cyst — a sort of benign tumor on his skull, next to his eye — after a CT scan had determined it was less than a millimeter away from infiltrating his brain.

After the surgery, my son, who had already proven himself quite a finicky eater in my early attempts at introducing table foods, became extremely orally defensive, and began to refuse solid food almost entirely. I did not know, at the time, that he had sensory processing disorder, and had no idea what was causing him to refuse food, or what sort of therapy might help him.

In the months that followed, his weight dropped lower and lower on the growth chart, and his growth slowed, until he finally met the criteria of failure to thrive. We took him to see several pediatric medical specialists without a successful diagnosis. During our months-long search for answers and help, we had him tested for common food allergies with a simple blood test, but the test came back negative.

We were advised at one point by a pediatric dietician to introduce peanut butter into his diet, because of its high nutrient and calorie content. (It is, after all, what doctors feed starving children.)

I was skeptical of this advice. Back then, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that parents delay introduction of peanut products until age 3 to reduce the chance of allergy (this advice has since been shown to be not only totally scientifically inaccurate but in fact detrimental — think the "All those doctors who have been telling parents for decades to put babies to sleep on their stomachs to prevent SIDS have just been scientifically proven to be totally talking out of their posteriors! Because they've been actually CAUSING SIDS with that unscientific, unproven advice! Who knew?"sort of wrong and detrimental — but of course I did not know that in 2005).

Plus, having seen his strong gag reaction to other really sticky foods, I wasn't optimistic that he would appreciate the finer points of peanut butter. But at this point I was desperate. And we had already had him tested for allergies once, hadn't we? So I took the dietician's advice. And at the age of 14 months, I fed my son a spoonful of peanut butter for the first time.

He promptly spit it out. And gagged. And made a face. And cried. And refused to eat or even touch anything else on his plate, apparently on the grounds that it might have been tainted with the Horror That Was Peanut Butter.

Fifteen minutes later, his eyelids puffed, and his cheeks swelled to twice their normal size.

And. I. freaked. out.

I was home alone with him, without a car. My husband was at work several minutes away. I called 911. Two burly EMTs from the fire department down the street showed up with the fire ambulance.

And they laughed at me.

"I don't see anything wrong with that baby," one said. "You're overreacting, I'm sure he's fine," said the other. "I don't see this swelling you're talking about."

I realized with horror that because my son was so thin for a toddler — he was in the third percentile for weight — the EMTs could not tell his face was swollen at all. They thought he looked like a normal baby. He did look like a normal baby. But not my baby.

They took my child's temperature and then left, refusing to take me to the hospital. I gave my son a dose of liquid Benadryl, scooped him up, and ran to our family doctor's office, which, thankfully, only was a mile and a half down the street. As soon as I walked in the door the receptionist, who had seen my son before, could tell there was a problem.

By that time, the swelling was already going down, and my annoyed and itchy toddler was returning to his normal cheerful self. But our doctor ordered a series of allergy tests at Children's Hospital just to confirm that peanuts, which seemed the obvious culprit, had truly been the cause.

For days, waiting for the testing appointment, I worried, convinced my child had a peanut allergy. I rounded up all the food in our house that was not clearly labeled peanut-free — including several of my son's few accepted foods — and despaired at the thought of throwing it all away. I already had an underweight child who was afraid of food for no apparent good reason. How many orders of magnitude more difficult would it be to try to help that child overcome his fear of food if he now had a legitimate reason to be afraid?

In those few days I lived the afflicted life of a parent who has just discovered her child has a food allergy. And then came the tests.

And they all came back negative. Every single one. Including the one for peanuts.

"He's not allergic," the allergist said. "There is no way he would have a total lack of reaction to peanut protein in a skin test if he had just had serious a reaction a couple of days before. It's something else in your house. Maybe he put his hands on a counter right after you cleaned it and then rubbed his eyes and got cleaner in his eyes, right before lunch? Kids this age have sensitive skin. We see mysterious reactions like this fairly often. You might never know what it was. Just hope it doesn't happen again."

So I threw out all my synthetic household cleaners. And a few weeks later, I tried peanut butter again. He still didn't like it. But his face didn't swell up.

In the four years since then, he has never taken a liking to peanut butter sandwiches. But he's certainly had the occasional Reese's Peanut Butter cup, and Peanut M&Ms. He's had trail mix with peanuts, and chocolate sundaes with peanuts, and peanuts in granola. He's eaten french fries cooked in peanut oil more times than I can count (Before you judge that junk food list, Judgy McJudger parents: remember — picky eater! Who needs to gain weight).

He certainly doesn't eat peanut products daily, or even weekly. But he has had them at least a couple of times a month for years.

Two days ago, at a school assembly, he tried a peanut butter cookie. And he made a face. And he spit it out.

And he broke out in hives.

And flushed bright red. And developed a blister on his upper lip. And he started itching all over, and complaining that his stomach hurt.

And then he started coughing and he couldn't stop even after a Benadryl Fastmelt and we had to take him to the emergency room. Where a doctor with a bedside manner about as warm and friendly as an avalanche falling on you gave him a double dose of Benadryl, prescribed us an Epi-Pen, terrified my five-year-old by jabbing a dummy demonstration pen into his thigh just to show us how it worked, without explaining to my son what it was first or warning him (and without telling him it had no needle in it) and then charged us $200 for ten minutes of his time.

And now I'm waiting. Waiting for an appointment at the allergist's office. To find out whether my son is allergic to peanuts.

A St. Louis Charity Helping Out in Haiti

2010-01-24T12:35:00.001-08:00

In December of 2008, during a time when food price inflation and natural disaster damage to crops in Haiti had caused a months-long food crisis so severe people were eating cakes made out of mud to avoid feeling hungry, as part of a series of post on global hunger I was writing for MOMocrats.com, I interviewed Dr. Patricia Wolff, the founder of Meds and Food for Kids.

Founded in 2004, Meds and Food for Kids makes an inexpensive, easy-to-store nutritional supplement for children called Medika Mamba. Made from peanuts, which can be grown locally in Haiti, the vitamin-fortified supplement is specially designed to help young malnourished children return to health, and does not require cooking or refrigeration (a key benefit in a country with poor infrastructure and highly unreliable electricity).

Before the earthquake, Meds and Food for Kids was already working to save literally thousands of impoverished Haitian children from illness and death. The organization has also provided a livelihood to many Haitians — though the administrative offices of Meds and Food for Kids are located right here in my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, the factory where they produce Medika Mamba is in Haiti, and they purchase Haitian-grown ingredients from Haitian farmers at fair trade prices.

After the Haitian earthquake, I contacted Dr. Wolff to find out how the Meds and Food for Kids facilities in Haiti had fared, and what the organization might need to continue delivering vital food supplies, not only to the hungry kids they were already serving before the earthquake, but also to the thousands of newly homeless and hungry families who will now need food aid.

According to Dr. Wolff, the MFK factory, located in Cap Haitien, about 80 miles away from the devastated capital of Port au Prince, survived the earthquake intact, and can begin increasing production of nutritional supplements right away — if the organization can get enough supplies. And therein lies the problem — the MFK warehouse in Port au Prince was destroyed; a shipment of six months worth of ingredients has gone missing; many of MFK's local suppliers have sustained damage to their own infrastructure, and the transportation bottleneck in the capital has made getting imported ingredients to replace the lost food expensive and difficult.

So, today I am putting a button in my sidebar that links to the Meds and Food for Kids donation page. There are many wonderful aid organizations working to help save lives in Haiti, but I encourage my readers who would like to give to the Haiti relief effort but are unsure about where to give to consider donating to MFK.

They were helping in Haiti before the earthquake, and they will continue to help in Haiti long after the news cameras leave.

Questions My Five-Year-Old Asked Me Today

2010-01-19T12:04:00.000-08:00

My son is home sick from school today with a cold, an ear infection, and suspected bronchitis. It's his fifth day being sick, and now that the antibiotic our doctor prescribed him is starting to kick in, his energy is returning and he is bored out of his skull. He's tired of TV, he's tired of books and yet he's still not quite well enough to play. So, desperate for conversation, he has been pelting me with questions without cease since his eyes opened this morning (My need to actually get some work done after five solid days of attempting to entertain him notwithstanding). And these aren't questions like "Where is my Slinky?" or "Can you play racecar rescue with me?" or "Do you think vanilla or chocolate ice cream is better?" Oh no. My kid doesn't let me off that easy.

Since I can't actually seem to manage to get the blog post I planned to write today written in between answering my kids' questions, here, in its place is an abridged list of the questions he has asked me so far today:

What are some things that bad bacteria do to hurt your body when you have an infection?

How do antibiotics help your immune system destroy bacteria?

Why is there momentum?

What do you mean "an outside force"?

What are the forces that make things stop moving?

What makes friction?

Why do light things fly through the air more easily than heavy things do?

How did Isaac Newton discover gravity again?

What is soy milk made of?

Where does chocolate come from?

Is the word cocoa related to the word cacao? Why are they different? Who named the chocolate tree?

Is spinach related to lettuce?

What number comes after a googol?

What is the last number anyone has ever come up with before infinity?

Why is there infinity?

How did people discover the idea of infinity?

What is at the end of forever and forever?

Why did people think the earth was flat thousands of years ago?

Why do people make up constellations?

If stars are moving and orbiting other stars and stuff all the time, why don't we notice the stars moving when we look up at them at night?

Did the Greek and Roman gods really exist?

Why do people make up stories about why things happen?

Why did people used to not use science to explain things?

What does geography mean?

What does geometry mean?

How is geometry related to geography?

And my favorite the question of the day:

What is a virgin?

(He was reading a book on astronomy. With constellations. Including Virgo the Virgin. THANKS SO MUCH, ancient astronomers, ancient religion-makers, and modern writers of children's astronomy books for providing me with the most interesting conversation of my day.)

Guilt and Gratitude

2010-01-14T18:57:00.000-08:00

I was in a relationship once that turned abusive. My fiance at the time, in the midst of a deep depression, started drinking heavily, calling me constantly when I was away from home, jealously interrogating me about friendships with other people, punching walls and throwing dishes when we argued, etc. He shoved me once "by accident" and dislocated my shoulder. I could see where this was going. I had no plans to become a statistic. I got out.

But to get out, I left everything. Everything I owned that wouldn't fit in a helpful friend's car. My books, my clothes, my dishes. My CDs. My TV. An apartment lease that was in my name. My home. My cat. (MY cat. Not his.)

I was in my early twenties. I had just graduated from college. I had no savings. I had no car.

I did have massive student loan debt, crushing medical debt from a near-death experience that my insurance company had decided was not enough of an emergency to warrant emergency surgery, and an underpaying job. And, a few weeks after my well-timed exit, I had a bona fide death threat from the ex, convincing me, firstly, that I'd absolutely done the right thing by leaving, and secondly, that I'd likely never see my material possessions again.

With no family in town in a position to help me, it took me a while to get back on my feet. I stayed with friends for a while, until I overstayed my welcome. I found one temporary sublease, then another. I bummed rides and took buses and sometimes walked several miles to work. One night, unable to get back to a temporary home before my next shift at work, I slept in a friend's car. Or rather, I didn't sleep, but spent the night having seriously uncomfortable flashbacks to a few weeks I once spent homeless as a child.

A few months later, I found myself in a sparsely furnished room, lying on a frameless mattress I had purchased myself, in an apartment that was actually paid for and mine. (With my cat back, and at my feet.) And as I lay on that mattress on the floor in that spartan little room, I felt a flood of gratitude. Overwhelming, profound gratitude of a strength that I had never felt before. Gratitude that I was alive, gratitude that I had a bed to sleep on, gratitude that I had a roof over my head, that next week, that same roof would still be there. And for days, when I would come home from work and find myself in that room in that bed, I felt the same gratitude wash over me in a healing wave. I no longer missed the material things I had left behind. I had what I needed. And that was enough. So much enough that it filled all my empty spaces almost to bursting. I was happier than I could remember, living in gratitude.

But it didn't last. It wore off, that beautiful sense of being grateful for having everything I needed to get by in the world. Before long I was wishing for things I didn't have again. Wanting nicer clothes, wanting nicer food, wanting nicer things again, wanting, wanting. Worrying about money again, complaining about my job again, getting wrapped up again in the petty details of typical American life.

In the years since I have tried often to force myself to recall how I felt, during that brief time of living in gratitude, with limited success. I often get angry at myself for being so seemingly unable to step back and appreciate my own luck at just being alive on Earth, let alone alive and with ample access to food and shelter and medicine and kind companionship and high speed internet and cable television and caffeine. I am painfully aware that there are far too many people in the world who do not have one tenth of what I have. There are people in my own country who do not have a tenth of what I have. But I still so often can't seem to find contentment, let alone gratitude.

I fret over my rusting fence, while in the past year, three houses on my street have gone into foreclosure. I worry about how to pay for my son's medical care and private school, while there are parents on the other side of the globe selling their children into slavery to save their lives because they can't afford to feed them.

What has happened to my gratitude?

Last night, climbing into bed after a day of watching television coverage of the post-earthquake crisis in Haiti, I felt it return. Surrounded in clean sheets, on a soft bed, in a strong house, in a neighborhood that's still standing, with my neighbors alive and well in their homes, I suddenly felt as grateful as I've ever felt for all of it. For my home and my full belly and my slaked thirst and my child sleeping safely in the next room with all his limbs intact. I wanted to kiss my home's standing walls.

And then I found myself trying to reject it. Wanting to feel guilt instead of gratitude. Because this disaster is too, too terrible for me to want to make any sort of selfish, self-centered silver lining out of it. I mean, what a typical privileged American way to react to a crisis, right? A city the size of my own town was completely flattened, and children are dying in the streets, but, hey! I am finally grateful for my own life and home!

I didn't want to feel gratitude in response to someone else's tragedy. To so many someones' tragedies. I had just spent a day seeing terrible pictures, seeing mothers crying next to the bodies of children crushed in their own homes. I didn't want to feel my luck in comparison to them. I wanted to feel some part their pain. As if by feeling some tiny part of it, I could somehow take some of it away.

But as I lay there, fighting unsuccessfully to push away that all-encompassing gratitude I have so often tried to force myself to feel without success, I suddenly realized that our gratitude, the gratitude of the fortunate, the gratitude of the spared, may be exactly what people in Haiti need.

Because we do have what we need here. We do have enough. We do. We in the United States have just spent a year in the worst economic recession in 80 years, and many of us have lost money or jobs or homes. We don't all have what we want right now. We don't even, in many cases, have what we need.

But when we look at what our neighbors in Haiti have just lost -- have lost when they already had so little -- how can we possibly say we are not wealthy?

We have enough, more than enough, and we can share it. And I am grateful that we can share it. I am grateful. And I believe most of my countrypeople are also grateful. Grateful enough to tune out, to drown out, the few selfish, cynical voices telling us not to give.

Food Karma

2010-01-06T11:49:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, I found myself sitting at my dinner table, silently rejoicing because, for the first time ever in his life of five and a half years, my son ate a whole hot dog, complete with bun, without my prompting, wheedling, or bargaining with him to get him to finish it.

A hot dog. And not one of those fancy organic locally processed free range all-natural nitrate-free hot dogs, either. Just a hot dog. From Oscar Meyer. I bought it in a bright plastic package at the grocery store, on sale, plucked from a whole refrigerator case full of processed meat.

All right, it was a turkey-based highly processed, highly packaged, nitrite-filled factory farmed meat hot dog. But still.

I am a vegetarian. I am an environmentalist. I am a gardener. I am a from-scratch baker. I read every book Michael Pollan writes. I am concerned about the health and environmental consequences of our heavily industrialized food system. I feel morally troubled, not so much over human consumption of meat in principle (hunting animals for food is, after all, a thing we apex predators evolved to do), but over the particular treatment of domestic animals in the factory farm system.

When I can afford it, I try to buy locally grown and/or organic food. In the summer, I grow my most of my own vegetables and buy my much of my fruit at the farmer's market. I sneakily swap free-range chicken and beef into my carnivorous husband's diet.

And yet I take my son to Burger King and let him choose a hamburger that has probably been processed with a mechanically rendered beef fat slurry treated with ammonia. I let him eat cheap chicken nuggets sometimes from Tyson (which once plead guilty to 20 violations of the federal Clean Water Act in a town just three hours away from mine, was investigated by the Justice Department for illegally smuggling Mexican undocumented workers into the country to work for little pay in dangerous conditions, and was investigated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for animal cruelty after a shocking video released by PETA).

And I rejoice when he eats a hot dog.

Before my son was born, I, like so many people who do not have children but plan to, held a vision of my future as a parent that was thoroughly colored by idealistic naivete.

Certainly, I had encountered children who were picky eaters before I myself became a parent. I had gone to school with children who would only eat cheese pizza, plain hamburgers, and french fries; I had been a babysitter to a girl who would not eat anything that was green; my own (much) younger brother once went through a month-long phase during which all he would eat willingly was white rice seasoned with butter, salt, and pepper.

Outwardly I sympathized with the parents of these children (including my own beleaguered mother), and would never have breathed a word of criticism to their faces, but, secretly, I judged them. By and large, I thought, parents of picky eaters who subsisted on junk food simply hadn't tried hard enough to get their children to eat more wholesome things.

Wasn't my own mother much more lax with my little brother, her youngest child, in every regard than she had been with me, the oldest? Didn't she allow him liberal access, as a toddler, to nutritionally questionable foods like white bread and soda, both of which had been largely forbidden to me in my early years in favor of wheat bread and juice?

Not that I blamed her, exactly, for going a little soft with my kid brother — she was much busier as a mother of three than she had been as a mother of one, after all — but, well.

I was sure I that, whenever I got around to having my own child, I would be capable of preventing any junk food addictions and overcoming any picky tendencies with proper planning and diligence.

My child would learn to prefer fresh fruit to cakes or cookies, because I would limit sweets and provide a wide variety of the tastiest fresh organic produce at all times.

But, at the same time, my child would not develop a secret, deprivation-driven obsession with desserts and confections, because I would not deny them to him altogether; he would have candy at Halloween, and cake at his birthdays; I would be reasonable.

My child would learn to love broccoli and spinach, because I would introduce vegetables at an early age, and eat them at every meal myself in front of him.

My child, if he ate meat, would learn to be ethical in his choices. I would do my best to serve him organic, hormone-free milk, and eggs from free-range chickens. I would offer him sausage from locally hunted wild deer, or hamburgers from ethically raised grass-fed beef. We would not eat at fast food chain restaurants except under serious duress. (Not that I always followed this rule myself, of course. But I would when I was a parent.) When he was old enough to understand, I would tell him why I, as his mother, made these choices about our food.

My child would never develop a taste for highly processed, environmentally hazardous junk foods, like Oscar Meyer hot dogs, because I simply would not have them in my house.

My child would never go on a month-long rice-only jag.

Right.

I had no idea, before my son was born — in fact, I had no idea before I started trying to feed my son solid food — that I would one day find myself praying desperately to a variety of divine beings I don't even necessarily believe in that my son would eat even just one bite of white rice.

That despite my best intentions, despite my most diligent efforts, despite my careful consultation of all the most respected child-rearing manuals (from Sears to Spock), despite advice from family members and friends and pediatricians and dieticians and nutritionists and, later, as the situation grew more obviously dire, a whole host of medical specialists with much longer titles, the goal posts for getting my child to "eat healthily" would move from "Teach him to eat organic vegetables and whole grains!" to "Teach him to eat, um, anything besides breastmilk and three flavors of baby food?" to "Dear God, please get my child to eat ANYTHING AT ALL."

Yet that is where I found myself, just a few years ago: at the table, in a house with a pantry and fridge filled top to bottom with healthy, tasty, natural food, facing an underweight, slowly wasting toddler with failure to thrive, desperately trying to feed a clearly desperately hungry child who would eat almost nothing I offered him.

At his thinnest during this period of self-imposed starvation — at around 12-18 months,when his weight was no longer even present on the growth chart for a child his height and age — Isaac was so thin he looked sick to me. Though he was an energetic, intelligent little boy with bright eyes and a quick smile, when his clothes were off, you could count every rib and see every knob of his spine. He lacked the characteristic pillowy paunch of a toddler. His belly, instead, curved inward. I could not bear to look at his terrible thinness, and yet I could not look away. He looked like a public service poster of a starving child. But he was a real child, in front of me. He was MY child.

These were, without a doubt, the most frustrating, depressing, terrifying few months of my entire life. When I think back on it now, I still shudder. I've been attacked on the street for the last ten dollars in my purse; I've spent nights sleeping hungry and cold in car too young to understand why I'd lost my home and not knowing if I'd see a home again; I've had my heart so utterly broken by a lover's betrayal that I felt it might never beat again. And I would take any of those days over my worst days of fear and helplessness worrying over the health of my son.

I spent thousands of dollars I did not actually have at this time taking my son to expensive medical specialists. An endocrinologist. A pediatric gastroenterologist. A pediatric food allergist. A child psychologist. He was tested for every genetic disease, every bacterial or viral infection, every hormonal imbalance or food intolerance or oral-motor developmental delay or structural intestinal defect these experts could think of that might cause an otherwise healthy and normally developing child to simply refuse to eat. I held my screaming toddler down while phlebotomists with impossibly large needles withdrew vial after vial of his blood from his tiny arms. I strapped him to a table while specialists taped bizarre plastic devices to his private parts to collect urine samples. I restrained him while an allergist pricked his naked back with 40 simultaneous needles. I watched him wheel away, sedated and anesthetized, to a room where a doctor would shove a camera snake down his throat to examine his intestines. Every time I held my child and allowed someone to hurt him in the name of helping him, I wished desperately that they were hurting me instead.

And for months of this, no one could give me an answer.

I was constantly worried that my son might stop eating altogether require surgery to install a feeding tube. I was terrified — cold sweats, nightmares terrified —that someone among this team of experts who could not solve the problem of why my child would not eat would decide that I must be purposefully starving him — that I was abusing him, that I was one of those awful evil Munchausen by proxy parents (which I only even knew existed after watching The Sixth Sense). During my nightly fevered internet searches for things like "failure to thrive" and "post surgical post-traumatic feeding disorder of infancy" and "infantile anorexia" and "Dear Sweet Internet Gods, why the F@#K won't my starving child eat?" I had come across a single message board posting by the friend of a relative of an innocent woman who had supposedly had her failure to thrive child taken away from her by the state under suspicion of abuse, only to have child services discover that the child would not eat in foster care, either, and in fact had a terrible medical condition underlying her self-starving ways, which of course only worsened during the stress of separation from her parents, etc.

Because I hated myself (what mother who can't successfully feed her child doesn't hate herself?), I bookmarked it and reread it from time to time in ritual self-flagellation.

In reality, I spent nearly every waking hour either attempting to get my child to eat, or thinking about how I ought best to attempt to get my child to eat.

I was a terrible bore at playdates and children's birthday parties. "What is going on with you?" the unsuspecting might ask. And I would say, "Oh, my son still isn't eating well at all. I'm very worried. I don't know what to do." And then, compulsively I would relate, in obsessive detail, my latest medically-guided attempt at intervention. A detached part of myself would observe my nervous patter and mentally shout, "Change the subject! Talk about the weather!"

But for me, there was no weather. There were only Days When Isaac Ate Well, and Days When Isaac Did Not Eat.

Friends and family gave me constant well-meaning advice that made me want to punch them in the face. It's not natural, or at least is certainly seems unnatural, for a seemingly healthy, hungry child to refuse all food for months on end, and so naturally most people with casual knowledge of my situation assumed I must be making some simple parenting mistake.

"Don't try so hard to encourage him to eat." "Try harder to encourage him to eat." "Stop breastfeeding him." "Nurse him more often." "Strap him to his high chair and don't let him leave all day until he's finished his whole plate." "Tell him if he doesn't eat one bite of peas you'll make him eat the whole bowl." "Try plainer foods." "Try spicy foods." "Let him see other children eat in front of him." (When he ate with other children, he would, in fact, helpfully give the other children all of his food.) "Get someone else to feed him." (His father, his grandmother, and his aunt had all tried.)

Others assumed I was exaggerating the extent of the problem and advised me he would simply grow out of not eating if I just left him alone.

Every time I spoke in public about my son's eating problems, unintentionally hurtful judgment and well-meaning but uninformed advice surrounded me until I thought I would drown in frustration and self-loathing. And yet I had nothing else to speak about. Because my days were consumed with trying to solve this problem.

When an occupational therapist finally helped my family find a diagnosis — sensory processing disorder — and I finally, finally found therapies that would slowly but surely help my son overcome the severe tactile sensitivity and texture aversions that were driving his fear of solid food, every bite my son took of every new food seemed like a blessing. It didn't matter, to me, whether that new food was a fresh-picked organic locally grown Winesap apple or a hot dog. It was FOOD, damn it, and my son was eating it. My new motto became "If it has calories, and it's not obviously poison? He can eat it."

I know better, now, than to judge the parents I see feeding their children chicken nuggets and fries and soda at McDonald's. Not until I've walked a mile in their shoes. Not until I've taken the beam from my own eye.

But now, with a solid space of four years between me and the worst trauma and fear over my son's initial failure to eat enough to thrive, I am beginning, once again, to judge myself.

Has my gratitude at his graduation from pathologically picky eater to typical picky eater — his transformation from a child who was thisclose to life on a gastric feeding tube to one of "those" picky children, who only (ONLY?!?) reliably eats plain-tasting sweet breakfast cereals (that must be dry), toast, plain, white flour pancakes with plain syrup, plain scrambled eggs, bacon, chicken nuggets, hamburgers, hot dogs, grilled cheese sandwiches, plain quesadillas, plain macaroni and cheese, Swiss (it must be Swiss!) cheese and crackers, french fries, corn chips, potato chips, ketchup, applesauce, sugar-sweetened cooked carrots, mashed sweet potatoes IF they have marshmallows on top, strawberry-flavored fruit leather, the occasional raisin or dried blueberry, vanilla ice cream, and vanilla or banana-flavored yogurt — has my utter, blessed, soul-healing relief that my child finally eats enough of a variety that we can take him to a fast food restaurant and order something he will actually eat off the menu, given me an unjustified feeling of permission to stop trying in the healthy food department?

Have I given up entirely on that dream of a child who blithely eats homegrown tomatoes, organic green vegetables, Indian lentils, and Thai curried tofu?

How do I feel, really, about my weekly purchase of Tyson chicken and nitrite-laden Oscar Meyer hot dogs?

The truth is, there is a little unhappy voice in the back of my brain that still protests every time when I plop factory-farmed meat and preservative-laden snack foods in my grocery cart. Even when I know we can't really afford this week to try the organic grass-fed beef hot dogs, at the very real risk that my son will reject them because they don't "taste right" like the brand he's accustomed to and they will rot and I will have to throw them away.

I struggle regularly with how hard to push my son about the fact that he eats no green vegetables, at all, ever.

As soon as he was old enough to hold a trowel I started involving him intensively in my work in the family garden, hoping that his enthusiastic affection for the bean and pepper plants he so carefully planted and watered himself might translate into some sort of affection for green peppers or green beans, but that hope was in vain. Oh, he's gamely popped fresh homegrown organic baby peas just picked off the plant into his mouth at my insistence, more than once, and screwed up his face in displeasure, and spit them out again. And I let him.

I've tried ordering beautifully presented, perfectly seasoned vegetables for him at restaurants, and he dutifully tries them and spits them out, and I let him. I've tried hiding vegetables in sauces (which he doesn't much care for anyway) and homemade breads, and he tries them and spits them out, and I let him.

After such a long exhausting battle to get him to eat enough solid food at all, I don't want to make his life, or mine, all about his eating now. But when he's grown, if he still hasn't developed a taste for vegetables or fresh fruit — if his limited diet starts once again to affect his health — if he, ever the sensitive soul, always rescuing stranded earthworms after a rain and asking his father to put spiders outside rather than smash them — realizes the impact of his childhood diet on animals and the environment — will he blame me?

Will he think I didn't try hard enough? Will he think I tried too hard?

Rage Against the Machine

2009-12-18T15:13:00.001-08:00

Isaac has been at his new school for five weeks.

Earlier this school year, while my son was struggling desperately in public kindergarten, coming home every day exhausted and sullen, crying every morning and begging me not to take him to school, I was careful, very careful, about what I wrote here about my struggle to make things right for him there. So careful, in fact, that I nearly stopped writing here altogether out of fear that my emotions might overcome my logic and cause me to write something I might later regret.

My frustration with the bureaucracy standing between my son and the classroom accommodations and occupational therapy he clearly needed; my anger at a few particular school employees' and district officials' ignorance, ineptitude, lack of compassion toward my son, or lack of respect toward me; my righteous political indignation at the glaring cracks in state and local government regulations that my child with both special needs and a gifted intellect kept falling through again and again; my despair at failing, again and again, despite my best efforts, to surmount these difficulties to help my child: all these overwhelmed me and I longed to use this place as an outlet for my emotions. As a podium for my activism on his behalf. But I thought I could not.

Because I felt I had to work with these people. With this school. With this district. In this county in this state. I did not know whether I would be able to find a suitable private school situation; I did not know whether I would be able to afford an appropriate private school if I found one. I did not know how homeschooling, if we chose that route, would work out— I did not know whether I would have enough time to devote to it while also working, or whether my son, who loves people and enjoys the company of other children, would thrive shut up all day most days in the house just with me. I did not want to burn any bridges. I did not want to cause a group of people who seemed suspicious of my intentions from the moment I first questioned their methods and assumptions to become even more hostile toward me.

And I was also careful because I doubted myself and my emotions. I know teaching children is an extremely difficult job. I know that districts are underfunded and understaffed. I know that, as a mother, I am prone to bias in my child's favor. I know that, as a mother, I am very emotionally wrapped up in my child's day-to-day happiness. I was worried that maybe I was wrong about some things, and these professional educators were right. I was worried that my initial reactions toward the school were overly judgmental.

After seeing the drastic change in my son in this new, more understanding environment, I am beginning to think that before, I was not judgmental enough.

And I don't feel like being careful anymore.

One of the things Isaac finds most challenging about the school environment is all the fine motor activity. He has a documented motor skills delay. He has been diagnosed with serious motor planning problems— meaning he has difficulty thinking through motions ahead of time and telling the different parts of his body where to go— and when we had him tested extensively by the school district's own developmental testing team at the age of three, he scored significantly behind his peers. Now, at the age of five, his fine motor skills are about that of a three-year-old.

He grasps a pencil incorrectly, and colors with his whole arm instead of just moving his wrist. When he uses scissors, he has difficulty keeping them perpendicular to the paper, and often forgets to hold what he is cutting with his other hand. With intensive practice at home and with his private occupational therapist, he has learned to write most letters, but he is still slow at it, and his forms are shaky. Sometimes his numbers come out backwards. He struggles to write his own name.

It's not that he doesn't know what the letters are supposed to look like. He knew his alphabet by one and a half. He read his first word at the age of 21 months (and was reading whole phrases, and, ahem, certain proper names, just a few months later). Now he browses through my college intro planetary science textbook at the dinner table, trying to parse the big words, and asks me things like, "Mommy? What's a therm-o-nuclear explosion?"

(You may think I'm making that up to be funny. I'm not. Lock up your smoke detectors, people.)

But there's a disconnect somewhere in between the perfect image of the letters and numbers in his brain and the signals that tell his hand how to form them. He knows when his writing comes out wrong— he can tell you that he's just written a B backwards, or that he left off the silent E on the end of the word. But his slow hands just can't keep up with his quick brain, and so he inevitably winds up incredibly frustrated.

In public kindergarten, his in-class assignments and homework consisted almost entirely of worksheets that required coloring, cutting, and writing.

Letter recognition worksheets, where he had to color the big A and small a, trace the big A and small a, cut out several tiny paper apples, and paste them in neat order on a tree. Number recognition worksheets, where he had to copy this number, circle that number, draw a line from here to there.

These worksheets took him forever. He had to do them several times a day. He hated them.

Not only were they hard for him, but they were boring. Downright tedious. "They're still doing letter recognition for the kids in class who have never learned to read before," he'd tell me, sighing and rolling his eyes. I would explain to him that every kid is good at some things, and every kid struggles with other things. I would remind him that even though reading is easy for him, writing is hard, and he needed to practice, and this was a good way. I would sit with him, sometimes for an hour or more, at the end of each day, and help him push through homework that was meant to take ten minutes.

And in class, it was even worse— not only was he forced to do work that was simultaneously overwhelmingly difficult and mind-numbingly boring, but he also had a time limit, and was surrounded by distractions.

A child as sensitive to sensory stimuli as Isaac cannot not hear a child across the room whispering or rustling a paper. He can't not see the sudden movement of a another child's elbow out of the corner of his eye. Now imagine twenty children whispering and rustling and moving, all around him.

He has to fight constantly to forget the scent of lunch cooking down the hall or stop feeling the draft from the vent on his face or ignore the vibrations caused by the vacuum passing in the hallway.

So when he would color or write or cut in class, he would hum quietly to himself. Trying to drown out the noise so he could concentrate. He would fidget, trying not to feel the rivets in the back of his chair. He would sometimes get up altogether and walk around the room for a minute, trying to calm down get his mind back on his task.

And his teacher would scold him. And tell him to be quiet and sit still and stay in his seat.

And he would fail to finish his work as quickly as the other students. And be punished by having to sit and finish it while the other kids played at center time.

He was scolded, and punished, daily. When he would come home, he would say terrible things. About himself.

"I'm the slowest."

"I'm the worst."

"I was the only one who couldn't."

"I'm bad at writing."

"I didn't finish."

"I was afraid."

His teacher had access to his records— both the records of the school district, and the medical records I had added to his file. She knew he had a diagnosis of Sensory Processing Disorder. She knew he had a motor skills delay.

I asked her if she could take that into consideration when assigning him activities in class. She told me she didn't think his sensory problems could have anything to do with not wanting to write. She told me thought he just didn't want to do the work.

His teacher knew he could read. She knew he'd gotten advanced letter and number recognition scores and a nearly perfect report card in preschool. She knew his preschool teacher considered him gifted. She knew he had taken a standardized developmental test and received a verbal score in the 99th percentile.

I suggested that perhaps if she offered written work that would be more interesting to him, he might be engaged enough to focus on it despite his difficulties with writing. That if he didn't find his homework boring he might be inspired to finish it even if the fine motor aspect of it was hard.

She told me "We don't want him getting too far ahead of the other children."

When I asked if we could have him tested for the school's gifted program, that would have taken him out of class one day a week to a place with smaller class sizes, more one-on-one attention, and more interesting material, she said, "He would fail the drawing test. I could overrule that, but I'm not sure I would. I'm not sure his IQ is high enough."

Isaac has been at his new school for five weeks. The paper above is a sheet of math homework he did this week. First grade math homework.

He did it in ten minutes.

He did it without complaining.

In fact, he has done not one but two math homework worksheets four nights a week for four weeks now.

He almost never makes a mathematical mistake.

I want to mail his old teacher a copy of every damned page. Screw mailing them, actually. I want to march into her classroom carrying a sheaf of them and slap them down on her desk.

In fact, I want to hand-deliver copies of this homework to every damn person at the school and the district who closed ranks around this teacher and dutifully stood in my way when I dared to challenge her evaluation and treatment of my son.

Yesterday my son asked me if, after winter break, I could ask his new teacher for some multiplication problems to add to his homework. He says addition and subtraction are getting old.

His IQ wasn't high enough for the gifted program, Old Kindergarten Teacher? REALLY?

I don't care what I have to do. I don't care if I have to sell a kidney to keep him in private school for the next several years. I don't care if I have to homeschool. I don't care if I have to sell my house and move. As long as people who want to pound "different" children like mine down until they fit into neat little boxes are in charge, MY CHILD IS NEVER GOING BACK TO HIS OLD SCHOOL.

And when he's a astronomer, or a science teacher, or a Senator, or any of the other things he's been telling me lately he wants to be when he grows up— now that he's no longer so stressed by school that he could barely think about the next day of his life, let alone the next few decades— when he's such a successful adult that no one cares anymore that he sometimes fidgets and sometimes hums and has bad handwriting— his first Kindergarten teacher, the one who could not see past the disability to see the child— she will not be the teacher he will thank.

The Isle of Misfit Parents

2009-12-14T18:45:00.000-08:00

Two women sit together on a bench in a hallway in a school, chatting animatedly together as they wait for their children to be dismissed from class. With their subtle brown eyeliner and casual lipstick and fashionable-but-not-too-high-for-daytime heels and well-matched jewelry and designer handbags and perfectly highlighted hair they look very much like certain mothers I remember from the exclusive private high school I attended on scholarship, mothers of my friends, who seemed so different from my own mother, my hurried, serious, bespectacled mother in her short hair and khakis and sensible shoes.

I sit apart from them, alone on a chair across the room, like my mother used to sit apart. Despite my own subtle brown eyeliner and fashionable coat and Nine West (on clearance!) purse and cute, if sensible, shoes. All of which I wear like a semi-opaque lacquered sheen that I feel absurdly will crack and fall away the moment I speak.

They are talking about a charity fundraiser; they are talking about their husbands' jobs; and I find myself thinking how suddenly strange it can feel to me, still, after five years, to sit in a room full of mothers and be one of the mothers in that room. How strange it is, still! To think, here I sit, as my mother sat. Past tense.

And there are those mothers, still talking as if no one else were in the room and really, they might as well talk as if no one else were in the room because I am not talking to them, am I? I am instead sitting here alone thinking about how strange I feel sitting here alone thinking. I am a stranger precisely because I am sitting alone feeling strange.

I am sitting frozen in the conviction that if I speak to them I will intrude someplace I am not wanted.

And then one of the other mothers, the well-coiffed, magazine-cover mothers, says, with emotion, "I worry so much about her starting middle school. I mean, how will people treat her? How will she find her way around such a big place? How will she ever play sports? How will she even open her locker?"

And the other nods in sympathy.

And across the room, I do too.

And I realize I fit right in here. We all do.

Everyone raising a Misfit Child is welcome on the Isle of Misfit Parents.

Next time I'll have to say hello.

If you liked this post you'll probably also like Cocoon by Amalah. And no, she didn't pay me to say that.

Priceless

2009-11-10T10:19:00.001-08:00

Private school tuition: More than some people's yearly salary dollars.

Private school tuition after lovely generous financial aid package from lovely generous foundation that has now earned itself a place in your will should you ever actually become a famous wealthy author: Still only slightly less each month than your mortgage payment.

Knowing that in his new school, no one will accuse your child with a medically documented fine motor skills delay of "just not wanting to do the work" when he struggles with writing, no one will confuse attention issues caused by a medically documented sensory disorder with willful misbehavior, no one will keep him from joining the second-grade reading class just because his delayed handwriting lags behind his advanced reading ability, and no one will call you "hostile" during a teacher meeting for very politely requesting basic accommodations that your child with a medical condition is technically entitled to by law?

Priceless.

There are some things money can buy. And I've realized I'd rather worry about how to afford my son's school than worry about whether my son's school is killing his love of learning. I'd rather swear off restaurants and new clothes for a year and live off of peanut butter sandwiches and live with the draft coming through my cracked basement window than fight daily against the urge to swear at the mechanical representatives of a soulless, broken bureaucracy who cannot ever seem to say anything to me about their continuing failure to effectively do the job my tax dollars pay them for other than endless variations on the phrase "We're sorry, we can't help you."

But have I given up on trying to fix my local public schools? Hell, no. Not every family has even our modest means to sacrifice to pay for private school.

If the public schools think I'm out of their hair for good, they have another thing coming. My goal has never been just to fix things for my kid with special needs. All kids with special needs deserve better treatment than the American school system and medical establishment currently offer. I feel compelled to do something big about this. I'm just not sure yet what.

A Pinch of Love

2009-10-29T10:23:00.001-07:00

Suppose, hypothetically, that you are visiting your husband's ailing grandmother in the hospital.

Suppose she is in her 90s, frail, and in recovery from a recent heart attack. Suppose she has just been diagnosed, in the hospital, with an advanced form of cancer.

Suppose this lovely, kind-hearted elderly lady -- who lived through the Great Depression and the Second World War, raised several children, grew her own vegetables, washed cloth diapers by hand, sewed her own babies' clothes, and continued to support a large family after being widowed much too soon -- who yet, now lies helpless and tethered under harsh lights in a hard and unfamiliar bed in a room with no windows -- tells you a story, while you are visiting her, about the near-magical powers of spiritual transportation possessed by her mother's legendary Christmas mincemeat pie, the mystic recipe for which has been tragically lost to time.

What can a granddaughter-in-law, universally known in her spouse's family for reliably producing cheesecakes, brownies, and holiday pies of several flavors do, under such a circumstance, but promise to return to the hospital with a home-baked mincemeat pie?

Even if said granddaughter-in-law has never before, in fact, cooked, or even tasted, mincemeat pie?

Indeed, it seemed such a logical and obvious notion that I hardly knew the words were leaving my mouth before I heard them hanging in the air: "Oh Grandma, I'll bring you a mincemeat pie! I'll make one."

I didn't really feel the pressure of this promise until later that night, when I got home.

A mincemeat pie?

A mincemeat pie?

What, exactly, goes in a mincemeat pie?

Specifically, what goes in to a mincemeat pie so powerfully good that the mere memory of its taste could transport an ailing woman 80 years back in time to a the heavenly aroma of a warm Christmas Eve kitchen?

I did what any Millennial housewife would do under such a circumstance; I consulted Google.

Do you know that there are approximately eleventy frillion different varieties of mincemeat pie?

Well, now you do.

There is mincemeat pie with meat.

There is mincemeat pie without meat.

There is mincemeat pie without meat, but with beef fat.

There is mincemeat pie with nuts. There is mincemeat pie without nuts. There are mincemeat pies made primarily of apples, and mincemeat pies made mostly of pears; there is mincemeat made with brandy or mincemeat with sherry or mincemeat with bourbon whisky. And there are mincemeat pies that are alcohol-free.

Trying to find some signpost that might point me in the direction of the One True Pie, I studied up on regional variations of mincemeat. On the history of mincemeat. The more I read, the more I realized I was chasing a culinary unicorn.

Mincemeat, you see, was essentially a fancy way for the medieval British lady (who was then, after all, still the Hlaf Dy -- the Giver of Loaves) to say, "It's the middle of winter. We're almost out of everything useful. And you're asking me for a holiday pie? Tell you what. Let's take what ever scraps we've got left in the larger, chop them up, douse it all in sugar, spices and enough alcohol to sterilize rot." It was the original Mom's Famous Leftover Casserole.

THERE IS NO ONE TRUE RECIPE FOR MINCEMEAT.

I was going to have to gamble on a random internet recipe, or make it up as I went.

When backed into a corner, do true baking heroes follow, or lead?

I decided to make it up as I went.

The only thing I knew for certain going in was that Grandma preferred nuts to meat, and sure as hell would not want me to omit the alcohol.

I went to the store to shop for ingredients. My husband, ever a hunter-style shopper (plan it grab it and go before you have time to realize you are shopping) , followed me, perplexed and annoyed, as I pulled things off shelves and put them back, squeezed and prodded and smelled fruits and nuts and spices, and considered bottles of bourbon with a critical air. "Can I help you?" he asked. "Can I get something? What's on your list?"

"I don't have a list," I said. "I'm making it up as I go depending on what strikes my fancy, and on what else is here in the store. I'm shopping. For the best stuff. Like a cook does. Don't you ever watch Food Network?"

He was not amused. He paced in a way I have seen fictitious fathers-to-be pace on television outside a hospital delivery room. My husband knew this business of Making The Pie for his grandmother was not to be trifled with, and yet, being, as he is, an utter novice to the mysteries of baking, he could do little but watch anxiously, second-guess me, and annoy me with questions.

I can't tell you exactly what I put in the pie.

Not because it's a secret, but because I really don't know. I didn't measure a damn thing. A pinch of this. A splash of that.

I used a base of prunes, raisins, and a shredded fresh Granny Smith apple my son hand-picked off a tree. I added orange and lemon zest I candied at home. I added nutmeg and cinnamon and cardamom and allspice in nebulous quantities. I soaked these things in a liquid mixture of bourbon, Triple Sec, apple cider and lemon juice for over a day. I poured it all over chopped pecans and wrapped it in a butter-based crust out of a 1950s cookbook. I guessed on the oven temperature and the baking time.

I was half-convinced the pie would overflow, or scorch, or melt, or catch on fire and cause my stove to explode.

But it came out looking like this:

Which is pretty much how a mincemeat pie is supposed to look.

When I bought it to my husband's grandmother to taste, resigned to the fact that, whatever it was, it almost certainly wasn't her mother's pie, she took one bite, and said, "Ah, I see you found the secret ingredient!"

"Copious quantities of bourbon?" I asked?

"No," she said. "A pinch of love.

"It's what my mother always put in her pies. It's what she always put into everything she cooked. That's what she taught me to do with my own cooking. That's what I missed. The food here, it's all right. But no one puts any love into any of it. I can tell you put love into the food you make, though. Who cares if your pie tastes like hers? "

Of course you've heard this cliche of a cooking proverb before -- this adding a pinch of love.

I'd heard it before, too.

But I've never heard someone mean it so much. She looked me in the eye as she said it, with the intensity of a sage trying to impart some sort of sacred knowledge to an untutored acolyte. And as she said it, a flood of taste memories returned to me. The impeccable fresh peach ice cream served shyly to me by a silent girl on a Mennonite farm during a feast made as thanks to a midwife. The wine-soaked, melt-in-your-mouth poached pears I made on a whim in a rusty old oven with my best friend in the world. The wedding cake I baked myself, because we had no money to buy one, that managed somehow to come out soft as velvet despite my mixer having broken. The soup my grandmother taught me to make with fresh vegetables out of her garden on the day I first saw beans on a vine. My great-grandmother's apricot preserves that seemed like captured sunlight in a jar. The first tomato of the season plucked off the vine I raised from seed. One thing tied them together: an ingredient that is never in the recipe.

Cliche or not, I have tasted that pinch of love. But I've tasted it less and less often as I've grown older. The bustle of life has, more and more, habituated me to the life of a hurried, distracted cook and a hurried, distracted eater. Once I used to savor an hour spent over the stove, creating some alchemical reaction in my pot; now more often than not, I pop in and out of the kitchen, watching the clock impatiently. Someone or something else always wants my attention. To grant full mental focus to the food I'm creating seems like an indulgence I no longer have time for. After all, I'm a busy woman. I'm somebody's mother!

Which is all the more reason why I need to remember more often to add that pinch of love.

An Open Letter to Every Teacher of a Child with a Sensory Disorder

2009-10-15T19:24:00.000-07:00

Trust me, I really, truly do want my kid to learn to follow the rules we adults set for children in school about sitting still, sitting up straight, being quiet, paying attention, waiting in line, waiting one's turn, following directions in order, focusing on the task at hand, putting things away in their proper place, etc., etc., etc.

In fact, before I became a parent to this particular child, I had very firm notions about how, through the application of strict (but not too strict), rational (but not too rigid), consistent, enlightened, loving discipline at home, I would produce a superior school citizen, who unfailingly said please and thank you, shared playdough equanimously, lettered his own name neatly in crayon at the top of each paper, bussed his own tray at lunchtime, and could pronounce words like equanimously on the first try.

Well, at least I succeeded with that last one.

You see, I am a good parent, with good intentions. I do believe in discipline and in hard work and respect. I understand that most, at least, of your classroom rules exist for a reason. And I sure would like for my child to be able to follow them.

My kid is smart. Really smart. Gifted-smart. He's playful. He's funny. He's kind to other people. He sure does look like a typical child. And heaven knows, I have prayed since the moment I first noticed there was something amiss in reactions to the world that he would just act like what he looks like. A normal kid.

But since his diagnosis, I've had to learn to accept that sometimes he literally can't.

It's not his fault his brain doesn't work in an ordinary way. It's not his fault that when he hears a vacuum cleaner start up in a distant hallway, his nervous system triggers the same alert response that a fire engine siren would cause in another child, and he suddenly can no longer concentrate on his writing lesson. It's not his fault that in a bustling room full of chattering children, he can't always filter signal from noise enough to hear your directions, and sometimes fails to follow them.

It's not his fault that when faulty messages from his vestibular sense leave him with a poor understanding of where his body is in space, he has difficulty figuring out how to hold a pair of scissors properly, or where to direct his crayon on the paper. It's not his fault that his nervous system gets confused and tells him he's off balance when he's climbing a ladder, causing him to freeze halfway up to the slide.

It's not his fault that after running around on the playground or in gym class, trying to keep up with children whose motor planning skills are literally years ahead of his, his compromised senses are so confused that he feels compelled to spin around or shake his head before he can sit still. It's not his fault that he fidgets when he does sit, because he can feel the rivets in the back of his school chair the entire time he is sitting.

It's not his fault that he can't eat well or quickly in a crowded lunchroom where he can't not hear every single conversation happening around him, and can't not smell every last ingredient in everyone else's food.

I know that people can't see, on the surface, just what is different about him when they first meet him. Not in the way you would see a difference of ability in a child who was wearing a hearing aid or sitting in a wheelchair. But that doesn't mean the difference isn't there.

And when you, as a teacher, fail to acknowledge that difference, you are failing him.

And the last thing I want is for a brilliant child to feel like there's no point in trying at school because, in your eyes, he can't do any of the little things right.

It's not that I want him to get some sort of extra-special consideration. I just want him to get the same consideration any child with a professionally diagnosed medical problem would get.

I put my child in a mainstream school despite the fact that I knew he would have difficulties in a typical classroom — despite the fact that I had been told by competent medical professionals that he would have difficulties in a typical classroom — precisely because I DON'T want to coddle him. Because I know that the world won't coddle him.

I want him to understand that if something is harder for him than it is for everyone else, that means he'll just have to try harder. He's a smart kid — really smart, gifted-smart — and I know he can do really well in school, eventually, if we all try.

But that's just it — we all have to try. He has to and I have to and you have to try, too. You have to try to see that he is trying. That he wants to learn. That he loves learning. That he wants to behave. That he wants to show respect. That he wants to get along well with you, and with the other children in his class.

That he knows he is different. That he wants, more than anything else in the world, to be able to act like a typical child. And the effort he expends, every day, to do just that — to do it for himself, for me, for you — is exhausting him.

I know your job is hard. But so is his.

Cut him some slack.

Voiceless

2009-10-07T22:17:00.000-07:00

In August, I lost my voice.

I don't mean figuratively. I mean literally.

I caught a bad respiratory infection. (The Swine Flu? The Bird Flu? A cold? Who knows.) And then a secondary bacterial infection. Bronchitis. Laryngitis. I developed a fiery sore throat and a hacking cough. My voice grew gravelly, and then it went whispery, and then it started cutting out altogether, without warning, mid-word, and I could no longer make myself understood.

That same week, the week I lost my voice, my son started kindergarten.

There were things, many things, I wanted to tell his teacher. About his sensory disorder. About his difficulty properly holding a crayon, about his inability to sit still for long periods of time, about his inability to concentrate in the presence of certain types of noise. About his facility with language, about his ability to multiply single digit numbers and read chapter books. About his sensitivity — about the time he cried because a girl didn't want to take a card he had made for her. About the fact that he not only knows the names of all the eight planets (and poor demoted dwarf Pluto) but also is capable of explaining that a black hole warps time itself with extreme gravity — that once caught in the trap of a black hole, nothing, not even light, can escape.

I wanted to tell her these things, but I couldn't tell her all of these things, because I had no voice. On Meet the Teacher Night, hopped up on medication, I rasped vaguely and asked whether she had had a chance yet to look over his preschool records.

On the second morning of school he cried and asked not to go. He cried and begged for me not to take him to class on the third and the fourth and the fifth day of school. And the sixth. And the seventh. And the eighth. And on the ninth and tenth days of school the boy who used to hop happily onto the bus for preschool without so much as a wave goodbye refused to eat his breakfast and cried so hard he almost vomited.

And still I could barely speak. I could barely eat. I was prescribed a second round of antibiotics. A chest X-ray.

I left barely audible messages on my son's teacher's voice mail, and received formulaic responses.

During the second week of school, my son did not want to eat dinner, or take baths, or go to sleep. One night, as I sat beside him in a dark room, he asked me to estimate the likelihood of the Earth and everyone on it being swallowed up by a black hole before dawn.

And so when my voice came back, it could only say one thing. And that thing was, help him. Help him. Help him.

It's practically all I've been able to say for almost two months now.

I am not being well listened to.

I'm about to get louder.

Conversations with a Five-Year-Old: Life, the Universe, and Everything

2009-08-03T18:43:00.001-07:00

"Why are we here?" he asks from the back seat of the car.

Because this is the road we need to be on to get where we need to go, we say. We are going to the ice cream store, like you asked us to, and this is the road that leads to it.

"No, no no no, no no NO," he says. "Not why are we here, on the road. This has nothing to do with ice cream. Why are we living? Why are we here?" And then before we can even begin to think of an answer, he adds, confidently, "That's a hard question."

It is, we say. Philosophers, we say — philosophers, those are people who study hard questions — and scientists, and writers, and all sorts of people have thought and thought and thought about that question and not found an answer.

Then I think for a minute and I ask him, "Why do you think we are here?"

"Maybe we are here to help animals," he muses. "But then, what are the animals here for?"

"Maybe we are here to help each other," his father and I say, at the same time.

"Maybe," I add, "We're here just to learn as much as we can about the universe."

"I'll go with that one," the child says. "Or maybe the other. Or maybe a different one. Hmm."

As we drive down the road to the ice cream store in silence, I think: I used to wonder, too. But now I think I know. I'm here because this is the road I need to travel on to get where I need to go. I'm here because of you, child. Because of your father, too. I'm here because of you.

Still Recovering from BlogHer

2009-07-30T00:00:00.000-07:00

I came home from BlogHer to a garden overflowing with green beans and wax beans and Juliet tomatoes and watermelon vines overgrowing into my garden fence in a way I'd decidedly discouraged them from doing just before I left town. (But you know, I was gone, and their Dad was watching them, and so I guess they thought they could get away with anything.)

I came home to an inbox overflowing with email from people I'd met and people I'd re-met and old friends I'd made plans with.

I came home to a husband who was just finally, thankfully getting over a terrible respiratory virus (that the doctor insists is Not Swine Flu) when I left and overdid it playing SuperDad while I was gone by taking the kid to the pool and the mall and a birthday party and is now coughing rather pitifully again.

I came home to a kid who DIDN'T MISS ME and ISN'T WORRIED ABOUT STARTING KINDERGARTEN IN TWO WEEKS and REALLY, REALLY ISN'T TERRIFIED OR IN ANY WAY SENSORY OVERLOADED RIGHT NOW BY SWIM CLASS and is showing all this lack of worry or concern about anything by attaching himself firmly to my hip and glaring at me whenever I get near a computer.

So.

I have some serious thoughts on BlogHer, and some interesting stories to tell. But I've been busy the past few days picking up the pieces of my trip. I hope to have time to write much more here tomorrow.

Girl Trouble, Part Two

2009-07-22T16:31:00.000-07:00

He was reading, silently. As he read, it seemed, he came across the word "bell." I heard him whisper.

"Bell. Like Bella. Bella. That's what Isabella likes to be called."

"Did you say something? Are you talking to me?" I said, pretending I hadn't heard him, in case he hadn't meant me to.

"Oh, I just said something about-- about--"

Then he leaned toward me, and whispered in my ear, "About Isabella."

"Isabella?" I said. "You mean your friend Isabella, who you met in summer school? The one who likes to sit next to you on the bus? The one who taught you how to do a jump shot with a basketball?"

"Yes," he whispered.

"But why are you whispering about her?"

"Because Grant said girls are bad."

"What? A boy in your class said girls are bad?"

He nodded.

"Why did he say that?" I asked.

"I don't know. He just did. He said girls are bad, and no fun to play with. He said they're boring, and they can't play sports. And he said boys couldn't be friends with girls."

"But you don't think that, do you?"

"No."

"You have lots of friends who are girls, right?"

"Yes."

"And I'm a girl. You don't think I'm bad, do you?"

"Oh, Mommy. Of course you're not bad."

"Well, that kid doesn't know what he's talking about. It's okay to be friends with girls," I said. "Don't let anyone stop you from being friends with a girl if she's nice to you and you like playing with her. Girls aren't bad. Girls are just as good as boys are."

But I wondered, how many times will I have to say it to him?

And I wondered, even if I convince him he is right to treat women and girls with respect, how will all the other boys who have been taught otherwise treat him if he acts the way I teach him to?

And I wondered, with so many voices fighting for his attention, will mine, one day, be drowned out?

Ginger

2009-07-17T08:24:00.000-07:00

As a crowd flowed from the surrounding neighborhood, past the bright red municipal fire truck specially buffed and polished for the occasion, into a park already filling with picnic blankets and lawn chairs and children waving glow-sticks and flags, two families who had never met before spotted each other across the crowd, and began moving toward one another subtly, inexorably, through the sea of people. One family party was composed of a mother, a father, and a five-year-old child; the other, two parents and twins aged two or three.

Sharing only the briefest of glances, the two groups moved without any overt appearance of intention until both families settled, side by side, in a little grassy hollow to just the side of the main crowd, an island to themselves.

The newly formed circle remained silent while unpacking their camp chairs and blankets and snacks. Then, once everyone was seated, the father of the twins said, joking, "Boys, that's not your brother over there." The parents of the older child laughed.

All three of the children had ivory skin and brilliant, copper-colored hair.

And as the stranger families sat together, isolated, together, as they were, in anticipation of the fireworks, no one asked the blond and brown-haired parents of these redheaded children "Where on Earth did that red hair come from?"

No one half-jokingly accused the children's mothers of dallying with a milkman (and really, who has a milkman to dally with these days?) .

No one gushed loudly and incessantly about taking the children's hair color and bottling it. No one insisted upon rubbing the head of a child they had never met for good luck. No one threatened to play connect-the-dots with freckles.

No one called the boys fairy changeling children, or brought up elves, or attempted a bad Irish joke. No one confused the boys by winkingly insisting they must have been left out in the rain to rust.

No one made a crack, in front of the children, about the parents being guilty of kidnapping.

No one asked, in front of the children, quite seriously, whether they had been adopted.

No strained, compressed explanations of the rules of basic Mendelian genetics or vague references to Scottish great aunts or lamely delivered jokey replies or cold stares were necessary.

No, indeed -- after that first remark acknowledging the reason for their sudden compainionship, the two families sat in amiable silence, quietly admiring their children's similarity.

Two families who had never met sat together on the Fourth of July, applying the old adage of safety in numbers, and gained two hours of rare, blessed silence from strangers about their children's red hair.

It was nice.

Conversations with a Husband: BlogHer Bacchanal

2009-07-13T18:38:00.000-07:00

WIFE: So, I think I might get my tattoo recolored while I'm at the BlogHer conference. Or maybe get a new one. I don't know. I bet lots of people will be getting tattoos there. I heard there's even a tattoo place giving a discount.

HUSBAND: What kind of conference gets you a discount on tattoos?

WIFE: My kind of conference.

HUSBAND: What else will you be doing up there? Who are you driving with again?

WIFE: I'm going with Kelli. And Kelly. In a convertible. We've agreed to wear Thelma and Louise shades and headscarves. Oh, and there's this other blogger who is going with us not for the conference but just for the parties . . .

HUSBAND: There are people going to Chicago just for the parties?

WIFE: Oh, sure.

HUSBAND: . . .

WIFE: I intend to engage in all manner of drunken debauchery. It's really too bad you can't come along. Maybe I should bring you next year.

HUSBAND: . . .

WIFE: You'd have fun! You'd be surrounded by hordes of hot geeky chicks with laptops.

HUSBAND: Are you sure that would be . . . safe?

WIFE: Are you afraid we'll go into a frenzy and tear you limb from limb as a sacrifice to Dionysus?

HUSBAND: Maybe.

WIFE: You'd still have fun.

Girl Trouble

2009-06-18T10:53:00.000-07:00

When Isaac came home today from his fourth day of a summer kindergarten prep program provided by his school, he looked tired and reserved. Given the long ride he'd just had on a crowded school bus without air conditioning on a day with a heat index of 105, I figured he was just overheated. So I brought him inside and let him rest on the couch while I got him a drink of water.

Then I opened his backpack to find a note stapled shut, my last name written on it in careful schoolteacher script. My son's very first Handwritten Note Home from the Teacher. Uh oh. What had he done?

I pulled out the staple and opened it up. It read:

Mrs. J,

I just wanted to let you know Isaac had a bit of a sad day at school today. After some comforting and a drink of water he seemed to be OK. Have a great weekend!

-Mrs. H.

Well, that was a kind note.

And vexatiously cryptic.

Had he been overcome by a sudden bout of homesickness? That seemed unlikely. He'd never been seriously homesick during preschool. In fact he'd been rather upset when his preschool term ended that he would not get to see his friends on a thrice-weekly basis anymore, and then thrilled to discover that his best friend from preschool would in fact be in his class in the summer program.

Had he experienced a sensory-disorder-related meltdown? Had he been suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling of fingerpaint and unable to wash his hands? Had there been a loud sound, like a floor buffer or a vacuum, echoing in the hallway? He's gotten so much better lately at coping with such things. I hoped it wasn't that.

Had another child teased him? Hit him? Taken a toy from him? Had he somehow bothered or hurt another child? I didn't think it could be that last one. I figured he must not have broken any rules in the midst of whatever event had triggered the note, or the teacher would have outlined a specific infraction.

So I asked him. I said, "Your teacher sent me a note today saying that you were sad. Could you tell me what happened?"

"But I wasn't on red!" he protested. "I wasn't even on yellow! I was green."

"Do you mean there is a chart at school where kids who get in trouble get a yellow card or a red card?"

"Yes," he said. "If you get a red card you get a note home."

"I don't think you were in trouble," I said. "I think your teacher just sent this note home because she wanted to be nice and let me know you'd had a hard day."

"Oh," he sighed in relief.

"So what happened to make you sad today?"

"I'm too tired to tell you."

"Oh," I said. "Let me get you some more water. Maybe you can tell me later."

In a few minutes I asked him again, "What happened today to make you sad? Do you feel like talking about it?"

"It happened at the writing center," he said. "I cried and they gave me water."

Oh, so that's it, I thought. Isaac's motor skills delay, a product of his sensory disorder, makes writing hard for him. He can read at the third grade level, and yet he struggles to write his own name. This was starting to make sense to me.

"Why did you cry? Did the teacher ask you to write something that was hard for you to write?"

"No," he scoffed, as though that were a ridiculous question. "It was free writing time. I could write whatever I wanted to." He doesn't like to admit he has trouble writing. Was he holding out on me?

"So what happened, then?" I said. "Did another kid take your crayon?"

"We were using pencils." He folded his arms and looked away.

"Did you punch through your paper by accident?"

"No."

"Did you get frustrated trying to write what you wanted to?"

"No. I don't remember," he said. "I'm too tired to remember what happened."

"Was there an earthquake at the school that caused you to drop your paper?"

That disarmed him. He relaxed his defensive pose and started giggling. "We haven't even had an earthquake drill yet, Mommy. Only fire drills. And I know all about those."

"So, what happened. Did a kid say something mean to you?"

"No."

He paused. Then he said, "She wouldn't take it."

"Who wouldn't take what?"

"The girl. I made a card for her. It was a thank you card, but she wouldn't take it. She thought it was a Valentine. She said it wasn't Valentine's Day." He turned his face toward mine and his wide, chocolate-brown eyes brimmed with tears. "I made it for her, and she didn't want it."

"Ohhhhhhh." I said. "So, you like this girl? And you wanted to do something nice for her? And then she said no?"

"Yes," he said, despondent. His lip quivered. He was trying not to cry.

"Oh, sweetheart," I said, throwing my arms around him. "I think that would have made me cry, too."

I don't think I'm ready for this.

Mother Mythology

2009-06-12T17:55:00.000-07:00

My mother was a feminist activist. She was a liberated, liberal professor with a master's degree who taught Women's Studies courses at a local university. She was a card-carrying member of NOW. She dressed me in jean overalls and sensible shoes and allowed me to choose Little Boy Blue as the color of my bedroom and encouraged me to play with toy trucks in the mud and banned Barbies from our home. She took me to an Equal Rights Amendment march on Washington when I was eight years old.

My mother was an impoverished, impulsive teenage mom. A troubled high-school dropout from a dysfunctional and abusive home who found escape from her alcoholic father and her Valium-and-electroshock-therapy-dazed mother in a marriage on her seventeenth birthday, and gave birth to me eleven months later, just before she turned eighteen. Who had another baby before she fully figured out that her charming knight in knight in dented armor was a pathological narcissist with an addiction to lies who was only really capable of the sort of love that is not love of another at all but instead a reflection of love for oneself. The sort of person who would give a homeless man the coat off his back in a show of virtue, but would also disappear for a weekend leaving his family with no money and nothing in the pantry but crackers and peanut butter.

My mother was an uneducated, unemployed, homeless divorcee living with two dirty, hungry kids and a new lover in a car.

My mother was neglectful. She was an ambitious working college student who dreamed of becoming a professor and was willing to put her education ahead of time with her kids. She was an essentially single parent who supported two kids on work-study wages, student loans and sometimes welfare (but never child support from their father, because at that time, she got none). She had no time to make real dinners. She forgot to do laundry. She did not throw elaborate birthday parties, or take her children to playgroups, or ballet lessons. She did not teach her children to swim, or even show them how to ride a bike. She did not help with homework; she had her own homework to do. She sometimes left her two young daughters to wander the university library unsupervised during her classes. At times she left her children for extended periods with unhappy, unbalanced relatives, or with their father despite the fact that she knew their father was selfish, inept at parenting, and incapable of keeping a clean, safe home. Sometimes she did this because she had to. Other times she did it because she was tired of us and wanted a break.

My mother was amazing. She once spent an entire weekend hand painting paper fish to decorate my little sister's room. Each fish was different. When she finished, walking into the room was like walking into an exotic aquarium. It took a moment to remember you could breathe. My mother once convinced my sister and me that chunks of asphalt she had painted gold were really dragons' eggs, and that if we cared for them enough and waited long enough, one day they would hatch. When she was home and we were home with her, my mother read to my sister and me for at least twenty minutes every night, without fail, no matter how tired she was, or how much work she had to do. She read us Laura Ingalls Wilder, and the Narnia series, and Lord of the Rings, and all of the books about the Boxcar Children, and everything she could get her hands on by Roald Dahl. She taught us how to make bread from scratch, and explained how trees made oxygen, and took us to poetry readings. When she was in school and her kids were in school, every once in a while, she would wake up and say, "Let's play hooky." And she would call in sick for everyone and we would spend an entire day at the zoo.

My mother was an advocate. When she moved to a new school district and the school her daughters wound up in turned out to be a crumbling building with screaming, overworked teachers, disintegrating textbooks, roaches in the lunchroom and classrooms so overcrowded the students had to climb over desks to cross a room, and an administration that refused to listen to her demands for reform, she went to every private school in town and demanded an audience with each school's admissions staff. Eventually she decided that the most expensive school in the city should give her children scholarships. So she made the school do it. (I am still not sure how.)

My mother was a Bad Mother.

She was not just a bad mother-- she was a stereotype of a bad mother. The kind of too-young, too-poor, too-selfish, dependent-on-the-state bad mother you hear politicians railing about on the evening news.

My mother was a Good Mother.

And I mean the saintly, archetypal Good Mother. A Holy Mary Mother of God sort of mother. A sacrifice-your-life-for-your-kids-and-don't-think-twice-or-expect-any-glory-or-thanks sort of mother.

My mother was a Bad-Ass Mutha.

A take-no-prisoners, fuck convention, down with the patriarchy, up with my kids, let's conquer the world while wearing sparkly purple face paint and then go out for ice cream sort of mother.

My mother was old-fashioned and before her time and a product of the times and a trendsetter and a trendbucker and trendy and all-out-of-style.

My mother was all of these things and more and which part of her you might encounter depended on what day it was and how much caffeine she'd had and which way the wind was blowing in Argentina.

Because above all else, my mother was a human being. Imperfect and devastatingly, unbelievably perfect, all at once, just like the rest of us.

It's the most obvious thing in the world that mothers are human, that each of our own mothers are human, and were human, were people, with their own lives and emotions and dreams and flaws and strengths before they were mothers. And yet somehow this incontrovertible, in-your-face fact that mothers are ordinary people is not always acknowledged when people in our society talk or think about mothers.

We place impossible expectations on mothers. And when I say we I do not just mean "21st century Western culture" or "North Americans" or "the media." In we I include myself, and I include you, and I include your hairdresser and the President of the United States (whose mother, incidentally, seems to have been a hell of a lot like mine) and street children in Africa and Angelina Jolie and the Pope. When I say we I mean all those who have had a mother, which is to say everyone.

I know that some thoughtful, intelligent people, some who are mothers themselves in fact, disagree with me. I know that some say they do not feel intense pressure put upon them by the people around them, or our culture itself, to be superhuman and meet impossible goals. When I first encountered this opinion I must admit I was partly convinced that people who hold this opinion must live in an alternate universe and must in fact be communicating with me through some warp in the time-space continuum (which really was a rather exciting scenario to contemplate). But I think that what people who say they feel no pressure to be perfect mothers actually mean is just that -- that they feel no pressure, not that it does not exist. I believe that on some level, they are aware that it exists but, consciously or unconsciously, they mostly ignore it.

Our own culture's particular history of holding mothers to impossible standards is well-documented. It has been downright fashionable in academic and medical circles for centuries to blame mothers when children develop social issues or mental problems or mysterious medical ailments that cannot otherwise be easily explained.

Autism was thought until just a few decades ago to be caused by "refrigerator mothers" who were too distant and cold; anorexia, to be the result of a mother who hovered too much.

Freud contended that if a mother nursed a child too often on demand, the child would become gullible and needy, but if a child was nursed too infrequently, he or she would turn into a bitter, sarcastic pessimist. And forget about bottle feeding. (As far as I know, the man never did provide a clear guideline for just precisely how many times a day a mother ought to nurse her baby to prevent it from growing into a totally neurotic wreck. But then again, he never nursed a baby himself, so how the hell would he know?)

Now we've relegated the term "refrigerator mother" to the linguistic dustbin and admitted that Freud's theories were perhaps somewhat negatively affected by his unhealthy obsession with his own mother and his habit of snorting coke.

But, if you read this century's news, you'll soon find that mothers who co-sleep are KILLING THEIR BABIES WITH SIDS, and mothers who don't co-sleep are CAUSING ATTACHMENT DISORDERS. Mothers who feed their child peanuts too early are causing peanut allergies and mothers who feed their children peanuts too late are also causing peanut allergies. And mothers who keep their houses too clean are causing seasonal allergies but mothers whose houses are dirty are subjecting their children to MRSA.

Mothers who work all day are causing their children to be more aggressive in school. Mothers who stay home are putting their kids at a disadvantage in math class and betraying their daughters and/or ruining sons that someone else's daughter will marry, by setting back the women's movement.

Mothers who breastfeed in public are either doing a beautiful, natural, environmentally friendly thing and bolstering their infant's IQ and immune system, or they are perverted exhibitionists who exploit their children and should be banned from restaurants and run out of grocery stores and kicked off of airplanes.

I myself was blamed by no fewer than five doctors for my own son's failure to thrive before he finally got a medical diagnosis. Of course, these doctors couldn't agree on precisely how I had caused it. I had caused it by nursing him too often (Ah, paging Dr. Freud!) or by feeding him solid foods too early (when he was six months old) or by helping him too much when he ate or by not helping him enough when he ate or by being too nervous around him when he ate or by letting him manipulate me. I was an overprotective mother or an underprotective mother or a clingy mother or a "refrigerator mother," by another name. (Until of course they discovered the actual medical problem. Then I was just unfortunate.)

The lyrics may have changed, but it's the same old tune.

Why do so many of us continue to sing along?

Any mother, every mother, is sometimes bad at mothering and sometimes good at mothering and most of the time something in between, and every mother makes mistakes and every mother feels uncertainty and every mother has moments of selfishness. And yet, somehow, by the grace of God or fate or the universe, humanity has survived. And in fact, not only has humanity survived, but most people raised by human, imperfect mothers are perfectly sane.

But a strong taboo lingers against mothers in our society actually, publicly admitting that not only do they fail, daily, at achieving the impossible, conflicted ideal of perfect motherhood, but they have no wish to meet that ideal. That in fact, they would prefer very much for that ideal to fuck off.

I see that taboo right now rearing its ugly head in a sudden moral panic about good mothers who are calling themselves Bad.

Brave women who have previously challenged the ideal of the Good Mother have been smacked down before. When scientist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy contended that the "maternal instinct" in primates could occasionally be overridden by a mother's desire to tend to her own needs, negative reaction to her affront to the ideal of motherhood was so strong that one of her male colleagues apparently thought he was actually being clever when he quipped, "My own view is that Sarah ought to devote more time and study and thought to raising a healthy daughter. That way misery won't keep traveling down the generations."

When bored, lonely, exhausted mothers began taking to the internet in droves and writing publicly about how motherhood made them exhausted and lonely and bored, the backlash was swift and intense. These women were exploiting their children for money and fame! They were putting photos of their kids on the internet, where any evil person might see those innocent cherubic faces and THINK BAD THINGS. (Never mind that, given the ubiquity of cameras in this day and age, that sort of logic can only lead to keeping children permanently locked in the house.)

And, perhaps worst of all, all these women who were writing about the dull side, about the drudgery of motherhood-- all these women openly discussing low-class, scataloglical, Women's Work, were presumptuously assuming that someone might actually want to read about such things. Which, obviously, no one would.

Except it turned out that a large number of people -- even in fact some of those people who are not themselves mothers -- did want to read about those things.

And suddenly visions of dollar signs spread like a tranquilizer and quelled the indignant roar.

But now Ayelet Waldman (yes, that woman, the one who issued that disturbing declaration that she loved her husband more than her children in The New York Times) has gone and published a book with the words "Bad Mother" right there on the cover. With the word "Good" crossed out, in fact. A book, not a blog? Written by a "real" author?

Now Certain People suddenly seem to be afraid that if mothers who are really rather decent parents despite the fact that they allow their children to eat Cheetos and watch More Than the Recommended Amount of TV go around calling themselves "Bad Mothers" in brazen defiance of the Good Mother ideal, then mothers who allow their children to play in meth labs will suddenly, somehow, be entitled to a free pass.

Though plenty of reasonable people have recently signed on to this argument, I fail to find the argument to be anything resembling reasonable.

If a writer published a book called "Bad Wife," in which she detailed her refusal to cook dinner, ever, for her husband, outlined her tendency to micromanage home improvement projects, and admitted that she forsakes sex in favor of blogging at least twice a week, would a rash of articles and op-eds appear warning that such a dangerous book might legitimize Bad Wivery, thereby causing a trend of Increasingly Irreponsible Wives, and ruining scores of marriages?

Sure there would!

If this were the year 1933.

Others argue that the good mothers who embrace the Bad Mother label only legitimize the criticism of those who are overly judgmental of mothers.

But the good mothers who call themselves Bad Mothers in unabashed tones are not capitulating to the ideal. They are flouting it. They are defying it. They are looking it full in the face and telling it that they do not care to be judged by it.

They will change it.

My mother was a feminist activist. My mother started motherhood as an impoverished, impulsive teenage mom. My mother was neglectful. My mother is amazing. My mother is an advocate. My mother is a sinner and a saint.

And if there had been blogs when I was a child, my mother would have had one.

And I'm pretty sure, if I asked her why she was blogging instead of cooking dinner, that she would have told me that Bad Mothers with blogs were saving the world.

Loving Because

2009-05-24T11:48:00.000-07:00

Good mothers love despite.

From the first day we hold our children in our arms, we love them despite.

We love them despite their waking us in the night, again and again, until we are ill and crazed with sleeplessness.

We love them despite their crying for no obvious reason.

We love them despite their tendency to piss in our clothes and vomit in our hair.

We love them despite their lack of understanding of so many things that make the world work, like rules and laws and social conventions and polite replies and locks on doors and traffic lights and sidewalks.

We love them despite their all-too canny understanding of how to annoy and provoke us.

We love them despite their biting us, or hitting us with tiny fists. We love them despite tantrums. We love them despite broken picture frames, and broken dishes, and toys flung across a room. We love them despite their anger.

We love them despite their taking of our time and our attention. We love them despite their desire to have what they want right now. We love them despite their constant, constant need of us that brooks no respite and very little compromise. We love them despite their selfishness.

We love them despite.

This is the Mother Love, the instinctive love, the love that has the power to turn ordinary women into saints in the face of adversity and tigers in the face of danger. This is the love that halts a hand about to slap and mutes a voice about to scream more times than anyone who has not felt it could know.

It is not infallible. But it is incredibly powerful. It strengthens us. It shakes our sense of self, violently, and flips our concentration outward, giving us a sudden vision of the world as a place peopled by people who once were children like our own.

There is no other feeling quite like this feeling of loving our children despite.

But oh, to love them because is so much sweeter.

When my son was less than two years old, he once pushed his tiny way between two much larger children who were fighting viciously over a toy, and firmly held them apart, saying "Stop! Share!"

When he was two and a half, he once tried to put the falling autumn leaves back on the trees, scared that the trees might be sick.

He reaches out patiently, gently to touch animals, never pulling fur or tails, never chasing them just to chase something. Even cranky cats who hate children like him.

He thinks worms and spiders are cute.

He likes books.

He says hello and smiles to people we don't know in stores and restaurants, or on the street.

He'll play the piano for hours at a time, just trying out the sounds of different notes, making up songs. Sometimes I have to remind him to stop and eat. He's not a virtuoso. He can barely read music. He just likes to play. Sometimes his play songs sound like real songs these days, though.

He wants to know everything. Like where people came from. And where the Earth came from. And where the Sun came from and where the stars came from and where the universe came from. And what an electron is. And how nuclear fusion works.

I'd love this boy no matter whose child he was.

I always have loved, and I always will love my child despite. But as the years go by, I feel incredibly lucky and humbled to find I love him more and more because.

Kids at Play

2009-05-20T10:42:00.000-07:00

There has apparently been some controversy lately in a local suburb, a suburb right next to mine, in fact, over kids playing basketball in the street.

People complain that the sound of the ball hitting the street again and again is too noisy. They say the hoops are an eyesore, and degrade property values.

I can certainly empathize with the people who find the presence of kids playing outside to be annoying.

The neighborhood kids play soccer in my yard. It's a really good yard for soccer — no trees in the middle, great turf thanks to the zoysia.

I work from home every day, and the kids are noisy, especially in the summertime when they're out of school. Sometimes their laughter carries right through a closed window.

I'm an avid gardener, and I care about my property. And the kids broke one of my little solar lights once, and once they knocked over a potted plant and broke the pot and killed the plant.

So I bought a little garden fence to protect my lights, and my plants, from errant balls.

And I let the neighborhood kids keep playing soccer in my yard.

Sometimes, when their laughter distracts me from my work, I go outside and bring them lemonade.

From time to time, I kick the ball around myself.

Five

2009-05-16T14:23:00.000-07:00

Two weekends ago, my husband had a birthday. When he complained only half-jokingly about getting older, I said to him, "What? You're not a year older today. You're only a day older than you were yesterday."

I made a mental note to remind myself of this brilliant device in six short months when I earn the same number of birthday candles as my husband.

Last weekend my son turned five years old.

When he awoke on the morning of his birthday, he asked me, puzzled, "Why am I not bigger? I thought turning five meant I would be bigger." He stretched his arms wide, until his wrists poked out of his fleece pajamas, and he studied the length of his limbs. "I don't look any bigger."

"Having a birthday doesn't mean you're bigger exactly -- it means you're older," I said. "Turning five today just means it has been five years today since the day you were born. That doesn't mean you're any bigger than you were yesterday."

"Oh," he said, looking a little disappointed.

Oh.

Mother's Day Every Day: My Story, Part II

2009-05-10T05:44:00.000-07:00

This is part of the MOMocrats.com Mother's Day blog event to support Mother's Day Every Day, CARE, and the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood. See my previous post for Part I of my story.

There was no room at the hospital.

That is to say, at the hospital where I had signed up to have my baby, which was the only hospital anywhere near my home where the team of doctors I'd been going to throughout my pregnancy for prenatal care delivered, all of the labor and delivery rooms were full. All of the overflow rooms were full. As I struggled to fill out insurance paperwork (Thinking, more paperwork? I thought I'd preregistered so I would not have to fill out all of this paperwork while ACTUALLY IN LABOR) while breathing through contractions in a wheelchair, a hospital attendant cheerfully informed me that the softly lighted, softly-furnished, hotel-like private maternity ward rooms I'd seen on the hospital tour were not available, and that I would in fact be sent to a curtained-off corner of the decidedly NOT private pre-term labor evaluation room.

"We're just having so many Mother's Day babies," she beamed. "Now, please try to stay quiet during those contractions. We wouldn't want to scare any of the pre-term women who are in for evaluations!"

I am really, really amazed that this particular person has avoided being murdered by an enraged pregnant woman during her ignorant, condescending service as a maternity ward attendee. If I weren't such a peaceful, nonviolent -- all right, if I hadn't been in the middle of a stop-your-breath contraction at that very moment -- I might have ended her incredible streak of luck.

Later, in the pre-term delivery room, as I struggled to get comfortable on a barely-padded gurney, a nurse adjusted the baby monitor straps around my belly, and said, "Woah. Your contractions are really intense. Off the chart. They must hurt a lot. I'll tell the attending to call anaesthesia up soon so you can get your epidural."

"I'm not doing an epidural," I said, through clenched teeth. "I'm doing no-drugs, assuming everything goes well. It's in my birth plan. The one I submitted with my pre-registration. My doctor knows all about it."

"Oh. You are, are you?" She gave me a skeptical look. "Hmph. I wouldn't do it without drugs, myself. But you can always reconsider, dear." She patted my arm in a motherly way.

I was used to this attitude by now. Throughout my pregnancy, few doctors or nurses had taken me or my birth plans very seriously. I was 23, and apparently in this day and age of educated women waiting until 30 or 35 to have children, pregnancy at 23 is considered practically the equivalent of pregnancy at 17. If I'd had a nickel for every time someone had told me, "But you're so young!" I would have been able to pay for a doula to argue my birth plan for me.

"Well," the nurse continued,"Your regular doctor isn't coming today. She's not on call this weekend. You know, it's a holiday. Let's see . . . if we can get a hold of him, it will be . . . Dr. Z from your practice. But he's delivering at a hospital across town. We might have to get a resident."

Dr. Z was the one doctor of four who I had managed not to meet once during my entire pregnancy. I had been assured by my OB that one of the doctors I had met and discussed my delivery plans with would attend my birth. And now it turned out that even he might not even make it.

Just then, the resident assigned to attend me until "my" doctor who I had never met did or did not come, ducked her head into the curtain and barked, "Turn onto your left side and stay there. Don't get out of the bed."

"Um, why?" I asked. "The contractions hurt more when I'm on my side. I can handle them much more easily if I sit up a bit, like this."

"That baby monitor is old and it doesn't get a good reading unless you lay on your side."

"But, there's nothing wrong with the baby, right?" I said. "I mean, I haven't had any complications besides some pre-term labor symptoms, and the nurses say the baby's heartbeat is fine. Do I need to be on the monitor all the time?"

"Lay on your side!" the resident repeated. "If it hurts, we can get you some drugs." And she stalked out.

Great. This resident, who incidentally, didn't look much older than I was, and who had somehow managed to acquire the attitiude of some mid-twentieth century strap-em-to-the-bed-and-cut-that-baby-out stereotype straight out of a '70s Lamaze handbook despite being both young and female, MIGHT BE DELIVERING MY BABY.

"I do NOT want this person delivering our child," I said to my husband. He nodded and said something vague and supportive that I can't remember. His eyes had been glazed and saucery pretty much since we walked through the hospital door. Great, I thought. There's my advocate.

"You're not going to be one of those dads who passes out are you? You told me you weren't going to be one of those dads who passes out," I said.

"Of course I won't pass out," he said.

Suddenly, I really, really wanted my mother. She had scheduled a flight to arrive just before the baby's due date. But the baby was coming two weeks early.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. None of it was supposed to be this way. I didn't even want to give birth in a hospital -- I'd wanted to give birth in a birthing center, with a midwife. But there weren't any birthing centers in St. Louis. And at the time, midwives were illegal in Missouri. My own mother had broken the law by deliberately giving birth to me and my siblings at home, with an OLD-old-fashioned, still-makes-housecalls sort of doctor and a midwife who had teamed up and abetted her crimes. I might have considered doing the same, but not in our ridiculously cramped one-bedroom apartment in a building with paper-thin walls. Besides, I wanted serious medical support at my disposal if it became a necessity.

So I'd resigned myself to a hospital birth, but not to this -- not to giving birth practically strapped to a hard gurney in what was essentially a curtained-off hallway with condescending nurses shushing me so I wouldn't "scare" the other patients and a rude doctor who kept barking at me not to move (I was, incidentally, even at that moment ignoring her instructions to stay stiff on my side, which I was sure would piss her off, but I did not care).

My mother was supposed to be there. Or failing my mother, at least my sister, who was in town but was not answering her phone. None of my family were answering their phones. My husband's entire family was out at a party for Mother's Day.

"I want my mother," I said to no one in particular.

I knew I sounded now like the pathetic child the nurses thought I was. I didn't care. I was in pain. I was SUPPOSED to be in pain. I was SUPPOSED to be annoyed. I was giving birth, right? Weren't people supposed to be kind and accomodating to women in labor?

Eventually pain and instinct and the rhythm of labor took over my thoughts and pushed aside my fearing and wanting. I would have this baby, hallway or not, rude doctors or not. I would have the baby whether or not my husband ran away or passed out. I would have this baby if I had to walk out into the parking lot and catch him myself. It was ME having the baby, and not them, and everyone else was just there to help me if something went wrong, and if they failed to help me, so help me, I would COMMAND them to help me and they would listen because they would see in my eyes that I was capable of anything.

Eventually I got a fancy hotel-like room and I really barely noticed the room because the room didn't matter now; I was in a prison of my laboring body, but it wasn't a bad prison. I felt like I had the bright light of an interrogator in my face, and yet was laughing.

And then after twelve hours of labor, (or maybe it was really a month and a half) and NO drugs, thank you very little condescending nurse-lady, my son was born, just an hour and a half before the end of Mother's Day. And immediately after the cord was cut, the nurses snatched him up and took him away and I hadn't even seen his face. And I asked the doctor I didn't know (who HAD come, and had been blessedly competent, but practically silent), "Was it a boy? Like the ultrasound said?" and he said "Yes."

And I said, "What's wrong? Why did they take him away?"

And a nurse shouted over, "Nothing's wrong. He has an APGAR score of nine." Another nurse chimed in, "Oh, he's perfect. His face is perfect. Adorable. He has red hair! Red hair!" And suddenly I realized that the damned nurses who had treated me like an infant had now taken my baby who I had not yet even seen and were passing him around and calling in other nurses from the hallway, to show off his red hair. "Can I see this red hair?" I said. They ignored me.

As the doctor sewed up a minor tear, and the nurses cooed over my healthy baby, I pulled my cell phone out of the purse near my bed and called my mother, who finally answered her phone. "Happy Mother's Day," I said. "You have a grandson."

"He just had to make a dramatic entrance, didn't he?" my mother said approvingly. "Coming on Mother's Day. Well, he certainly is your child."

When I hung up the phone, I said, "GIVE ME MY BABY."

When they finally complied, I had to admit that the nurses were right about one thing. He was perfect.

As you can see from my story, I might actually have been more comfortable having my baby trapped in an elevator than in this particular overcrowded hospital. But that's because nothing went wrong during my son's birth. If something had, I would have been grateful for the presence of a doctor. Even the rude resident.

Many other women are sadly not so lucky as I was. Please visit the Mother's Day Every Day site to learn how you can help women in developing countries get access to prenatal care, skilled midwives or doctors, and a safe, clean place to give birth.

Mother's Day Every Day: My Story, Part I

2009-05-08T10:30:00.000-07:00

Over at MOMocrats.com, we're asking our readers to participate in a blog event for Mother's Day to promote Mother's Day Every Day, a campaign by the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood and CARE to raise public awareness about maternal mortality worldwide.

Every minute, somewhere in the world, another woman dies due to complications from pregnancy or childbirth. But it doesn't have to be that way. Many of these deaths could be prevented with the most basic medical prenatal care, or with the assistance of a skilled midwife, nurse or doctor during delivery.

To help promote safe motherhood worldwide, MOMocrats is asking readers to share birth or adoption stories that have meaning to them in honor of Mother's Day, and link back to the Mother's Day Every Day site. For more information on this event, please read my post at MOMocrats.

This is part one of my contribution to Mother's Day Every Day. I'll be posting the second half of my birth story tomorrow.

Seven months into my pregnancy with my son, I started having contractions that were strong enough to stop me in my tracks. They would come every couple of hours, every day; at times they would wake me up at night. My doctor dismissed them at first, saying they were "just" Braxton-Hicks contractions -- practice for labor. But they didn't feel like "just" anything. They felt like someone was squeezing my entire midsection with iron bands.

Then one morning, at about seven and a half months, I woke up in the morning with contractions ten minutes apart. By the middle of the day, I was headed to the hospital for a pre-term labor evaluation.

Up until that point, during my entire pregnancy, I has been working more than 50 hours a week at two different jobs. Many mornings I walked to my full-time job, two miles from my house, and then stood or walked for much of the day. I worked for a small business that served customers in-person in a store at the front of the building while simultaneously running an international internet and telephone operation out of the stockroom in the back. As a low-level manager, I was expected to supervise employees, sell merchandise to people inside the store while simultaneously taking shipping orders over the phone, track orders that came in through the website, and answer company email. There wasn't much time to sit down and put my feet up. After eight hours of this, I sometimes walked to my second job another two miles away to stand for another three or four hours.

That's a lot of walking and standing for a pregnant woman, and in the weeks I'd been having contractions, I'd noticed that walking and standing for hours at a time made the contractions worse.

But working so much was what I felt I had to do. I had discovered that I was pregnant (Surprise!) one month after my husband had lost his job to a company bankruptcy so severe his last paycheck had bounced. Now he was working two part-time jobs while he looked for a new employer, and I was staying at a job I'd meant to quit, and working a second job to try to save enough money that we could move out of our one-bedroom apartment with the leaky sink and broken door to a place that looked something more like a home for a baby.

Now I was in the hospital, a month and a half pre-term, wheezing in pain every ten minutes, with a beeping monitor strapped to my belly, and a pleasant also-pregnant nurse beside me clucking wordlessly over printouts I did not understand. And guilt was choking me. Was I about to go into labor six weeks early because I hadn't been able to slow down and take care of myself -- take care of the child inside me, my child?

And that was when I started really talking to my unborn baby for the first time. "Stay in there," I said loudly, sternly, to my belly, ignoring passing doctors' odd stares. The baby started kicking in response to my voice. "This is your mother speaking," I continued, "and I am telling you, you need to stay inside. I know it's probably very boring stuck floating in the dark, and I know I've been working too much and I haven't been resting enough for you, and I'm sorry. But we're just not ready for you to come out yet. I haven't even gotten your crib. And I don't have any preemie clothes. I've only bought newborn outfits. If you come out today, you'll have to be naked. Naked! Naked and cold. Did I mention it's cold out here? And bright. Very bright. And it's loud. So you'd better just stay in there for a while yet. At least stay in there until I have your crib set up."

The contractions slowed over the next hour. After instructing me to drink half a gallon of water and rest, the hospital sent me home.

And my doctor told me to cut my work hours in half, start taking breaks at work every couple of hours, sit down whenever possible, stop climbing on ladders to retrieve merchandise, and stop carrying around heavy things. He also told me to lay down as much as possible while at home, and leave all my housework to my husband. I brought my doctor's instructions into my male employer, who somewhat reluctantly complied. He had never had a pregnant employee before.

("Why doesn't he want you climbing ladders anymore?" my boss asked, genuinely perplexed.

"Because I'm having contractions on a regular basis and might fall?" I replied. "And anyway, have you ever tried climbing a ladder with a baby strapped to your stomach? It's not an easy task."

"Well, I just hope everyone else doesn't start wanting a chair behind the counter," he grumbled as he brought in my new stool.)

The contractions never stopped, but they stayed half an hour to an hour apart, and I stayed out of labor.

Several weeks later, early in the morning on Mother's Day, two weeks before my due date, I spent the morning helping my husband finish the assembly of our new crib. Fierce contractions gripped me every 20 minutes or so, but I'd grown so used to them at that point that I continued working through them. I wasn't supposed to be lifting heavy things, but there were no restrictions on my use of screwdrivers, and my husband being rather infamously incapable of hanging curtains in a straight line (despite his uncannily good skill at wiring outlets, fixing broken computers and saving dead cell phones), I felt my oversight of this project was necessary.

Once we had the crib built and in the right spot, I felt a sudden, overwhelming, irresitable urge to buy a crib mattress cover. It was the one part of the crib bedding we didn't yet have, and I suddenly felt that not having one was a serious emergency. "We're going to Babies R Us now. I want the cover today," I said to my husband. It was not a request.

(Those experienced with childbirth will realize that this was the moment I should have realized that I was really in labor. But after a month of daily intense contractions, I had no idea.)

So my husband drove me to the baby store, and as I walked through the aisles snatching things that I suddenly realized I must have and have immediately with the all the deadly calm intensity of an Olympic sprinter, stopping every several minutes to double over in silence breathe through another painful contraction, other people in the store stopped to stare at the woman who was CLEARLY SHOPPING WHILE IN LABOR. When I got to the checkout, the woman behind the counter took one look at me and turned a sickly shade of imminent-insurance-disaster green.

"Are you . . . all right?" she asked me as I breathed Lamaze-style while calmly piling my purchases on the counter.

"I'm fine, thank you. And I also need this hairbrush," I said, practically tearing it from an endcap display.

And then I went home and calmly put all of the crib bedding together. The moment I had the crib assembled and ready, my contractions moved to five minutes apart.

My son always has had a habit of taking my instructions literally.

Busy Signal

2009-04-29T21:31:00.000-07:00

I've been ridiculously busy the past few weeks, growing plants in my basement (no, not THAT kind — organic tomatoes and basil), putting in my new, second vegetable garden bed (and battling sewer beavers) and supporting women's rights in Afghanistan and opposing torture and asking the government to help parents stay home with their sick kids if they catch swine flu and putting on an SEO webinar with Parent Bloggers Network and taking on three brand new SEO clients and, you know, generally plotting to take over the world.

But I haven't forgotten this little blog. My first little blog that could. I have lots of things I'd like to write here, things that don't fit very well in the other, more heavily-trafficked places on the internet I've lately moved into. Things about parenting, about philosophy, about life.

I hope I'll have more time, soon, to write them.

Racist Comments in St. Louis Post-Dispatch Get National Attention

2009-04-14T15:41:00.001-07:00

Remember a few weeks ago when I wrote a post about how the racist comments regularly posted to and occasionally left unmoderated on the St. Louis Post Dispatch website are hurting St. Louis?

I wrote that post even before the Post-Dispatch featured an image of a bi-racial couple kissing on both the front page of the STLtoday.com website and its weekend print entertainment magazine, Go, to promote an article titled "The 7 Best Places to Smooch," all about the best romantic places in the area for couples to visit for some inexpensive fun. The resident STLtoday race trolls responded with a veritable torrent of lovely, insightful comments like this one (from the locally infamous regular STLtoday comments section poster Taxpayer, who to me seems like the sort of person the ban feature was invented for, but hey, I don't work at the Post):

This doesn’t surprise me at all. Libs take every opportunity they can to shove miscegnation in our faces. Now that TV has to show blacks in every commercial, notice that they are always posed beside a blonde woman. Not a brunette, a blonde. Its done for shock value. Sickening that a once proud newspaper would resort ot this. Joe Pulitzer is turning over in his grave in shame.

(Apparently "Taxpayer" was born in or before 1905. That's the only reasonable explanation I can come up with for why he still uses antiquated terms like "miscegenation" in ordinary conversation without irony. That, or perhaps he lives a very lonely, isolated life in a cave.)

The flood of racist comments in response to the image prompted the Post-Dispatch to post about the reaction to the photo on their blog about racial issues, A Conversation About Race.

Several local bloggers have responded to the flap over the photo with criticism of the Post-Dispatch comment moderation policies. Shark-Fu of Shakesville and Angry Black Bitch has weighed in on the situation; Show Me Progress has also recently featured several posts on the subject.

ArchPundit has started a feature on Blog St. Louis called "Post-Dispatch Racist Comment of the Day" to highlight some of the most extreme and ridiculous violations of morality, common sense and good taste that appear on the site.

Post-Dispatch Director of Social Media Kurt Greenbaum has responded on his personal blog to local blogger reaction over the racist comments. In a post rather euphemistically titled,
"In further defense of uncomfortable comments," Greenbaum explains:

[Post-Dispatch] guidelines ask readers to be civil, to avoid personal attacks, profanity and racist language. We ask readers to be on topic. That leaves a lot of wiggle room. It also means that we have to make some hard decisions about whether a comment actually crosses the line. We don’t delete a comment just because we disagree with it. Or because it’s angry. Or even if it expresses a point of view that makes us uncomfortable. That means ideas that some might consider racist may be allowed.

I've a quibble with Greenbaums' phrase, "ideas that some might consider racist may be allowed." Some? May? I would argue that ideas that most people would consider racist have been and continue to be allowed on the STLtoday.com site.

Unlike Greenbaum, who is a transplant to the region, I have lived in the St. Louis area my whole life; I grew up here; I've gone to different schools here, I've worked in many different neighborhoods here, and in the course of a lifetime, I've met many, many other St. Louisans from all walks of life. So I know a bit about what people around here are likely to think.

And as a life-long resident of the region, though I am aware that we have a serious, deep-rooted problem with race relations in this community, I am pretty certain that most (not some) people in the St. Louis region would find comments like Taxpayer's above-quoted treatise racist.

I'm pretty sure that many people here find such extreme comments not only racist, but offensive.

And I would wager that the vast majority of educated, thoughtful St. Louisans — those most likely to want to regularly read, or maybe even subscribe to, a newspaper — would consider comments like these inappropriate, distracting from intellectual conversation about real issues (including and especially issues related to race), and not worthy of being given a national platform on a newspaper website that, by virtue of its very name, represents our community to the country at large.

In fact, as I predicted in my previous post, the presence of so many over-the-top racist comments in the online version of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch really is distorting our city's image on the national stage. The popular New-York-based gossip and news blog Gawker recently published a post titled "Five Arguments Against Interracial Dating, From Missouri Rednecks." And tagged the post "Too Easy." From Gawker:

What's this, the weekend magazine of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has pictured miscegenation in action, and the locals are outraged! Imagine this photo, where your kids could see.

Imagine, indeed. Imagine, a diverse, cosmopolitan, metropolitan area of more than two million people, caricatured in the national (new) media on the basis of the comments of a few racist internet trolls. Imagine, thousands upon thousands of people who have never even visited, let alone lived in, St. Louis forming their opinions of our community based on the comments of people like Taxpayer.

Imagine that.

In Which an Innocent Gardening Hobby Metamorphoses into an Herbal Mania

2009-03-31T13:00:00.000-07:00

Key signs that your innocuous gardening hobby is becoming something else:

You start saving seeds from your own open-pollinated plants in the hopes of producing a new, unusual hybrid. Like, say, squarish tomatoes.

You EAT the sort-of-square tomatoes.

(I really should have taken a graft of that plant. Think of the packaging savings!)

You start thinking of your garden plans in terms of years, not months.

You start regularly Tweeting about things like crop rotation.

You build something vaguely resembling a small science lab in your basement, for the purpose of starting entire flats of seeds indoors:

You start a new blog about gardening.

What's Wrong with the STLtoday Comment Section

2009-03-19T20:15:00.000-07:00

I hate to knock my only hometown newspaper. Again.

Especially when, like the rest of the print media industry, it's probably about to go bankrupt.

But as a writer, as a sometime-editor, as an active social media user, as a blogger, as someone who has lived in the St. Louis metro area all of my life, hell, as a human being, I just can't hold this back any longer.

The STLtoday.com comment section is hurting St. Louis.

I mean it. I mean it like Jon Stewart meant it when he went on Crossfire and told Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala that they were hurting America.

Any marginally sane, reasonably educated, and moderately moral St. Louisan who has visited STLtoday.com (the online version of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch) and chanced to read the comments below an article more than a time or two will know what I mean.

The STLtoday commenting community is dominated by anti-social pessimists, belligerent misanthropists, racist ignoramuses, provincial neighborhood isolationists, one-note issue pushers who twist every discussion to fit their personal political agendas, and plain old attention-seeking trolls.

If a person dies accidentally in St. Louis, and the Post-Dispatch reports on it, you can count the minutes until someone will jump into the STLtoday comment thread on the story and make a comment about what an idiot the poor dead person was, and how much that person's death has improved the local gene pool.

If the newspaper website reports that home has been broken into, at least one comment will be sure to blame the homeowner for not owning a gun. (This axiom applies whether or not the homeowner was home at the time of the break-in, because apparently, in the minds of extreme gun ownership promoting STLtoday comment thread trolls, just owning a gun with a concealed carry permit magically protects one in perpetuity from every type of crime.)

If a crime occurs — anywhere in the St. Louis metro, any time, committed by any person of any race, under any circumstances — you can bet your bottom dollar that a chorus of obnoxious, barely-lettered white men who spend their apparently copious free time pretending to be righteous armchair race warriors will show up blaming the "creeping black menace." Never mind that African American people have lived and worked and owned businesses and raised families in St. Louis since, oh, how about since St. Louis was founded?

If a crime occurs where I live, in North County, expect a parade of comments (note that some of the worst and most racist ones I saw yesterday have actually been deleted) from people who have never lived in North County, or who fled North County's growing diversity a decade ago, talking about how the family-friendly, neighborly neighborhood where I live, where I leave my doors open to the sunshine during the day, where I'm not afraid to walk down my street alone in at night, is the rotten apple about to rot the whole barrel — the source of all St. Louis crime.

Riiiiiiiiiight. That's why I deliberately bought a house here. That's why I continue to live here. Because it's such a terrifying, decayed, crime-ridden hellhole.

(Incidentally, as a matter of anecdotal evidence concerning the terrible, terrible decline of my neighborhood, I have been a victim of street crime or theft in St. Louis City, University City, Maryland Heights, Brentwood and Creve Coeur. I have never been a victim of street crime or theft in Florissant or Hazelwood.)

Seriously, these comments are hurting St. Louis. I shudder to think what people not from the St. Louis region must conclude about people from the St. Louis region when they read comment threads like this on our newspaper's website. But the harm I see goes beyond besmirching our reputation with non-natives (I should say, further besmirching — we're already competing with Detroit for America's Most Dangerous City every year — do we really need trash our image some more?).

I can't help but think that comments like this are only worsening division and mistrust in a community that has long struggled with racial and social tensions, and has long acted, in many ways, more as a patchwork collection of competing small towns than as an urban+suburban metropolis of people facing common challenges and working toward common economic and social goals.

I don't know how things got this way in the Post-Dispatch comments threads. One might expect that a newspaper comment section would have a little more class than a YouTube thread.

Is it that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was a latecomer to the local social / interactive media scene — late enough that most of the educated, thoughtful St. Louis area consumers of news had already found other places to discuss the stories that mattered most to them, and so by default the Post is left with the internet dregs?

Is it that the STLtoday comment moderation team is not staffed well enough to catch offensive comments quickly, and therefore those who might engage in a more tolerant, intelligent discussion are driven away by the sheer bulk of ignorant and inappropriate dreck?

Should STLtoday use comment moderation and banning with a heavier hand?

I don't know.

As a writer myself, I respect free speech. For years, in fact, I didn't even bother to prescreen comments on my own blog. It was only after a persistent troll kept leaving sexist and racist remarks that served no productive purpose in my comment threads that I threw up my hands and turned on comment approval.

I am sure that the STLtoday staff struggle similarly to balance their respect for freedom of expression with their need to promote civil and constructive community discourse.

I am not sure how the Post-Dispatch can solve this problem. I imagine those who work there would prefer that people such as myself who are dismayed at the lack of constructive intellectual discussion on STLtoday, rather than skipping the comments entirely in preemptive disgust, or, say complaining about the state of the comments on their own blogs, would show up more often in the comment threads, leave thoughtful comments, and try to bring a little dignity to the conversation.

But frankly, whenever I do leave a thoughtful comment on STLtoday, I feel like I'm tossing a shiny pebble into a polluted swamp.

Perhaps if I really want to see things improved there, I should organize my own cleanup crew.

The Forest Fire

2009-03-17T13:24:00.000-07:00

Once, there were two wise women who lived as neighbors in a village near a dark forest.

The land near the forest was fertile, and the village prospered. But every few years, a drought would sweep across the land, and fires would break out in the forest. For this reason, for generations, the people of that village had built their modest homes at a distance from the forest, and had taken care to keep the field between the forest and their village free of brush, so that the fire would not spread. And whenever the fires did come, the villages would work together, digging trenches in the field, and bringing pails of water from the river nearby to douse errant sparks and soak the ground around their homes.

But then a more than a decade passed without a drought, and as the prosperous village grew more prosperous, and crowded, young families began to build homes in the open, empty field near the forest.

The two wise women considered it folly to take such a chance, and both shook their heads. They both advised their neighbors not to move into the field. But, enticed by the space and beauty the rich, open field afforded, the villagers continued to build there despite the advice of their elders.

Before long, the baron who controlled the realm around the village noticed this trend, and he began to encourage it. Because every time a new farmstead was created in the baron's jurisdiction, he could tax the family that lived there for the use of the newly cultivated land. "Build near the forest," the baron urged. "The climate has changed. We may never see a drought again. You are safe from the fires. Build larger homes and farms! Take all the space you want!"

And the loggers selling wood to those building new homes, and the merchants selling furniture, and the roadbuilders who were hired to build new roads into the new part of the village also found reason to encourage this trend. And some villagers even began to borrow money to build new, empty homes, in the hopes that they might encourage people from other villages to move there, and sell the homes at a profit. And so, people began to build houses right into the forest.

And still, both the wise women protested. Hadn't the village prospered for centuries by living prudently, and taking precautions against fire? But the villagers did not listen. The wise women stayed in their homes, far from the forest. But the village continued to move.

And then one year a drought did come, and with it came the fires.

At first only the homes built directly in the forest were destroyed. And the first wise woman said to the second wise woman, "I told my neighbors, again and again, not to build their homes in the forest! I told them the drought would return! And so did you! And yet, they did not listen. Now they reap what they sowed."

The second wise woman replied, "Indeed, we did tell our neighbors not to move. I am sorry they did not listen."

And the first wise woman sat in her house, content that she had given the right counsel.

The second wise woman went down to the village to console the families that had lost their homes, and offer them what extra food and clothing she had.

Now a second round of fires came, and this time many of the homes in the field were damaged or destroyed. And the two wise women spoke with one another, and the first wise woman said, "Such fools! If only they had listened to our advice, or even taken a moment to think with their own heads, they would have known not to build their homes there. Look at us, safe and sound. We did the right thing. That is why our homes are still standing."

And the second wise woman said, "I tried many times to convince our neighbors to listen to reason, as you know. But so many others, respectable-seeming folk, too, were giving our neighbors poor counsel. How were they to know whose advice to take, not being as experienced as you and I are in these matters?"

The first wise woman replied, "Well, next time they will know to listen to me, and follow my example!" and went back into her well-protected house to work on her knitting.

The second wise woman went down to homes near the forest that were still standing, and told her neighbors, "If we are going to save our village, we must work together. Let me show you how to build a firebreak, and soak the ground, the way we all once used to." And the villagers, grateful for her offer of help, listened and began to work to protect their homes.

As the drought continued, more fires came, and though by working together to fight fires, the villagers did manage to save many homes, many homes were lost. Without an open field to protect them, even many homes in parts of the village that had been safe from fires for centuries were burned to the ground. The second wise woman began letting displaced villagers camp out in her wheat field.

The village elders petitioned the baron for help, but he responded with a letter stating that the royal tax coffers had been depleted in an effort to save the Roadbuilders' Guild, the Furniture Merchants' Association and the Forest Home Promotion Service from collapse.

When the first wise woman heard that the villagers had petitioned the government for help and been denied, she snorted and said, "Losers. My tax gold shouldn't bet spent to fix their folly. I built my house in the safe part of the village." She looked out her window at the second wise woman's yard, which had turned into a tent city. "She's our of her mind," said the first wise woman to herself (for there was no one else around for her to talk to). "Wasting her time helping a bunch of fools. Well, a friend to fools is a fool herself, I say."

As the fires raged, flames finally engulfed much of the old part of the village. Unable to beat back the flames on her own, the first wise woman was forced to flee as her home burned to the ground.

The second wise woman, with an army of fellow villagers defending her home and field from the flames, saved much of her property. The next day, it rained, and the fires were doused, and the day after that, the second wise woman was elected to lead the village's effort to rebuild.

Conversations with a Four-Year-Old: Matricide

2009-03-13T12:41:00.000-07:00

CHILD: BOO!

MOTHER: Ah!

CHILD: Did I scare you?

MOTHER: Oh, yes. You scared me. You were very scary.

CHILD: But did I give you a heart attack?

MOTHER: Well, no. You didn't give me a heart attack.

CHILD: Okay, let me try it again. Louder next time.

Object Permanence

2009-03-07T21:10:00.000-08:00

Today, to make room for a new, lighted shelf I'm building to sprout seedlings for my garden, I took on a task I've been postponing for a long time— reorganizing my basement storage shelves.

I've been telling myself to do it for almost a year now. And for almost a year now, I've been telling myself I didn't want to do it because it would be tedious, because it would be time-consuming, because there could be spiders lurking, because I'm allergic to dust.

Because I needed to rake the sweetgum balls out of yard, or clean the oven, or paint the bathroom, or dig a new garden plot in the front yard instead.

But today, as I broke down old appliance boxes to recycle, and rearranged storage bins, and vacuumed up dust, and cobwebs, and even a spider or two, I remembered the real reasons why I didn't want to do it.

I didn't want to do it because I didn't want to see that big bin of fabric, full of sewing projects I started but never finished, silent monument to a habit of failing to finish things.

I didn't want to do it because I didn't want to see the moving boxes from our move to this house two years ago— every single box saved, folded neatly, stacked in organized by size and shape, ready and waiting to be used again. Because in 28 years, I've lived in 22 different houses and apartments, and the boxes stand testament to the fact that I am incapable of not expecting to have to move. Because who knows when the airport will seize my family's home or my parents will divorce or my mother will lose her job or the landlord will sell out from under us or my Dad's girlfriend will find out he's cheating or the ceiling will cave in or my bi-polar roommate will stop paying rent and start having loud sex with my ex-boyfriend in the next room or my (now very EX) fiance will fail pre-med the same year I graduate and slowly turn into an angry, controlling binge drinker, or my husband's employer will suddenly go bankrupt and his last check will bounce and four weeks later, we'll find out that I'm pregnant?

How can a happily married, stable, working adult like me possibly believe that she owns a home that will not somehow disappear when she looks in the other direction?

I didn't want to reorganize that basement storage space, because I didn't want to see the folded high chair, the covered bouncy seat, the infant car seat carefully wrapped in plastic to keep out the dust, the bins full of baby clothes, all washed, neatly folded, and sorted by size, waiting for the next baby. The next baby. Waiting for four years, now, for a next baby we haven't chosen yet. A next baby that may never come.

I didn't want to see the box of handwritten letters from friends I now never speak to.

I didn't want to see the telescope two adults who both wanted to be astronauts as kids never, ever take out of its box to look at the stars.

But I did want to start seedlings for my garden.

So I cleaned my basement anyway.

A Dog Is Not the Same as a Child

2009-02-21T17:11:00.000-08:00

I love animals. Really, I do. I was the proud owner of a series of cats from the age of six until the year I turned 24, when my last cat passed away at the cat-elderly age of 13, and I decided to give my poor cat-allergic husband a break and not adopt another one. I had a pet dog once, too— a rescue Cairn terrier who was so fiercely attached to and protective of me that he'd bark loudly at any unknown man who got within three feet of my personal space. In my lifetime I've had the pleasure of caring for pet mice, a pet lizard, a pet turtle, a pet rabbit, and tanks full of freshwater tropical fish in assorted shapes and sizes. Despite my current pet-less state, I am a card-carrying animal lover. For heaven's sake— I'm a vegetarian.

So I don't really mind that much when people call themselves "pet parents" instead of "pet owners." I get it, I really do. You love your animals so much that you'd much rather refer to them as members of your family than property. It's a nice sentiment, and I'm sure that on some level your animals appreciate your acknowledgment of them as feeling beings, capable of emotions and thought.

But when pet-lovers who do not have human children go beyond the label of "pet parent," and actually start comparing the experience of caring for a pet to the experience of parenting a child, as though the two were even marginally equivalent, I start to get peeved. It's not remotely the same. It's not. It's not at all. Trust me, I know. I've done both. And while I may feel real empathy for you when you describe that time you freaked out while your dog was having surgery, it does not compare at all to the time I had to wave and smile as surgeons wheeled my infant son off to anesthesia in a steel crib-cage.

So I hereby present, for the general edification of pet parents who have not yet acquired children of the human variety:

Key Differences Between a Child and a Dog

(Substitute "cat" or "potbellied pig" for "dog" as you please.)

If you're a dog owner, and you're out of milk and you need it for the recipe you're making for dinner, you can run to the grocery store down the street without your dog.

If you are a parent of a small child and you find yourself faced with a grocery emergency, you either must find a babysitter immediately, or dress your child appropriately for the weather, take your child to out the car whether or not your child wants to go, strap your child into an appropriate restraining device, listen to your child complain about your selections on the car radio all the way to the store, take your child out of the car seat, locate a cart that actually has a working seatbelt, listen to your child whine about your not finding a kiddie car cart, listen to your child whine about having to ride in a cart, listen to your child ask whether you can buy every tenth thing you pass, load your groceries into your car and return your cart to the corral while also wrangling your child, strap your child back into the car seat, drive home, and then figure out how to get your child and the groceries out of the car at the same time.

A new puppy may wake its owners up several times a night to take it outside and use the bathroom.

A new baby may wake its mother up several times a night to CHEW ON HER BOOBS.

A new puppy may sometimes pee or vomit on the floor.

A new baby may sometimes pee or vomit IN YOUR FACE.

It can take a few months to housetrain a dog.

It can take YEARS to housetrain a child.

If you leave your dog alone in a fenced yard with a bowl of food, a bowl of water and some toys for eight hours a day while you work, you might feel a little bit guilty and worry that your pet is not getting enough stimulation.

If you leave your child alone in a fenced yard with a bowl of food, a bowl of water and some toys for eight hours a day while you work, you will be arrested.

You must take care to teach a dog that seeking out your shoes and chewing them to pieces is not an appropriate way to play.

You must take care to teach a child that playing with matches could set your entire house on fire.

If you are trying to write a blog post, and your dog won't shut up, you can put your dog out in the yard, or at least in the next room, for an hour.

If you are trying to write a blog post, and your kid won't shut up, you will feel morally obligated to figure out a way to entertain your child. You can set your kid down in front of the TV, but then you'll feel guilty, because all of the childcare experts say TV IS BAD, and besides, it might not work for long. You can tell your child to go play in his or her room, but he or she might start bouncing balls off the walls or playing a trumpet. If your child is old enough, you can tell your child to play outside, but then you will feel compelled to repeatedly check on your child to ensure that he or she has not scraped a knee, broken a limb or been kidnapped.

If your dog needed dialysis, you might consider taking out a second mortgage to pay for the procedure.

If your child needed dialysis, you would ask a surgeon whether it would be feasible to cut out one of your own kidneys and give it to the child instead.

A dog will never ask you where puppies come from.

A child will ask you where babies come from, where ice cream came from, where toilets came from, where the sky came from, where trees came from, how cars work, how light switches work, how a heart works, why the stars glow, where he or she was before birth, where people go when they die, and whether there is a God.

Owning a dog is a serious commitment. Raising a puppy to be a good dog citizen can be difficult. It can take a year or two of careful training to teach a dog to behave properly both in your own home and in the outside world, around other dogs and people. But if you do the job right, your reward will be constant companionship for years to come. And every other dog owner who sees you out with your dog will remark on what an excellent job you've done as a trainer.

Parenting a child is a serious commitment. Raising a person to be a good citizen is incredibly difficult. It can take 18-25 years of careful training to teach a human to behave properly both in your own home and in the outside world, around other people. But if you do the job right, your child will move out of your house, possibly to a different city or even a different country, and if you're lucky, he or she will call occasionally and come back to visit you on holidays. People will praise your grown child for being a good person, but few will remember to even consider, let alone mention, what an excellent job you must have done as a parent.

Who Should Make Dinner?

2009-02-18T16:18:00.000-08:00

Today, while in my seventh day of illness with a stuffy nose, body aches, and a hacking cough, I:

-Went to bed at 12:30 a.m. after being up with sick, coughing child
-Was awakened at 4 a.m., 4:30 a.m., 5 a.m., 6 and 8 a.m. by sick, coughing child, who was sleeping in the bed with me, while my husband slept in another room
-Made my son breakfast
-Convinced my son to eat breakfast*
-Brushed my son's hair*
-Got my son dressed for the day*
-Picked up all the toys my son scattered around the house over the past week while I was sick
-Vacuumed the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, the office, my son's room, and the hallway
-Mopped the kitchen floor
-Cleaned the coffee table, the sofa, and two living room chairs thoroughly with a lint roller
-Washed two loads of laundry
-Scrubbed the stove and the kitchen counter
-Wiped down the dining room table and chairs
-Scrubbed a toilet and a bathroom sink, cleaned two bathroom mirrors, and washed and dried a bathroom rug
-Sorted and organized all of the mail, coupons and circulars in the house; filed bank statements, etc.; tossed out expired and outdated things
-Explained key parts of the economic stimulus package to my Republican father-in-law over the phone
-Consoled via email not one but two friends having emergencies
-Called my son's future kindergarten to register him for orientation
-Cooked my son's lunch
-Convinced my son to eat his lunch*
-Put away a load of dishes from the dishwasher
-Loaded and washed a new load of dishes in the dishwasher
-Wrote two work emails
-Downloaded and installed new music software for my son
-Wrote an entire blog post (that I am bumping until tomorrow because I'm writing this one)
-Emptied and washed the vacuum cleaner filter

All while caring for a sick preschooler who was annoyed at being kept home from school.*

*These things are not as easy as they sound when the child involved has a sensory disorder.

Today my husband:

-Handed me the phone to talk to his Dad since he was on his way to work
-Drove five minutes in no traffic to the office
-Sat down in a chair
-Listened to political podcasts
-Programmed some stuff
-Listened to science podcasts
-Programmed some stuff
-Maybe went to a meeting
-Came home slightly early
-Did one load of laundry and folded another.
-Helped my son install some more music software
-Played on the Nintendo DS
-Watched TV
-Started to feel a little sniffly and tired, like he might maybe be coming down with the virus the kid and I have had for an entire week
-Gave me puppy eyes about being sick and tired

I've suggested he make a tofu stir fry.

A Handmade Valentine's Day

2009-02-12T10:14:00.000-08:00

I am constantly annoyed by how difficult it is these days to find reasonably priced stuff for kids that doesn't have licensed characters or corporate logos stamped all over it.

If my son specifically wants something with a character on it from a movie or show he's particularly fond of, I don't mind letting him have it. For instance, he loves this Wall-E movie poster he got from our local library, and considering that Wall-E was the first film that actually entranced my child with a sensory disorder enough that he was able to sit through the entire movie in a crowded theater with a thundering sound system and an enormous flickering screen without experiencing a Total Sensory Overload Meltdown of Epic Proportions, I was all too happy to frame that scrappy Pixar trash-collector robot and hang him right over my son's bed, Disney logo and all.*

But I really resent the fact that when I'm trying to buy my child, let's say, a pair of shoes, half of the pairs in the boys' section at the shoe store are essentially plastered with ads. I'm happy to let my child enjoy pop culture in moderation, but I don't want my kid to be a walking billboard for mass-produced schlock.

So I am not particularly fond of the chintzy licensed character valentines most kids pass out at school. Yes, I know that a lot of people think Valentine's Day as we know it was essentially invented by Hallmark for the express purpose of selling chintzy cards, but celebrating love on February 14th actually has a storied history dating back to pre-Christian Roman times, when boys used to spend the day going around slapping girls and women they liked with strips of goat hide. (I'm not joking. Read the link.) In medieval times, after the holiday had been named for St. Valentine, lovers used to send one another intricately decorated letters that were sometimes written in code.

People have been celebrating their love for one another, as February's warmer winds thaw the frozen ground, by exchanging handmade notes and gifts for a very long time. And I think the tradition of a handmade Valentine's Day is a much nicer to honor than the more recent tradition of rushing to the 24-hour drugstore the day before the 14th to grab a box of chocolates for the sigOth and a box of printed cartoon ads for the kid to hand out in school.

That's why I had my son handmake the Valentine's Day cards for his preschool class this year. I bought blank cards, a few heart-shaped stamps, and some glittery stickers— all things he could handle easily on his own without much help from me— and let him go wild. They may not be as slick as those mass-produced valentines, but I think they turned out pretty well.

It did take a few hours longer than buying a box of Wall-E valentine cards would have, but he'll remember the fun he had making these, and the pride he took in finishing them, a lot longer than he would have remembered a trip to the store.

*Does anyone besides me find it incredibly ironic, by the way, that in a cross-promotion gambit for a film that is essentially a warning to all humans not to continue destroying the earth with too much cheap mass-produced crap, Disney has produced tons of cheap mass-produced crap? I mean, they passed out plastic digital watches at the premier, for heaven's sake.

Conversations with a Four-Year-Old: The Presidency

2009-01-24T16:36:00.000-08:00

CHILD: Maybe when I grow up, I will be President.

MOTHER: Well, maybe you're right. Hey, if you become President when you grow up, can I live with you in the White House?

CHILD: You could watch me on TV.

Mother laughs.

CHILD: You should put that on your blog.

Yes We Did

2009-01-19T20:07:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow, the United States will have a new president.

On that chilly day in Illinois in February, 2007, when he officially announced his presidential campaign, Barack Obama looked like such an unlikely candidate. A young man, an African-American man, with a funny name, running for a presidential nomination against a former vice presidential candidate and a former First Lady? No way he could ever get elected, right?

And yet, when I turned off the cynical voices in my head, and listened to my heart, I believed he could. So many people, even then, believed he could.

My belief in Barack Obama's ability to do the once impossible sent me to the Missouri State Democratic Convention as an Obama delegate, where I proudly represented the primary votes of members in my community who also believed he could win.

My belief sent me to the Democratic National Convention with a press pass, where I sat in the stands at Invesco Field with 84,000 other people who also believed that tomorrow's events could come. And it was there that I finally, fully realized just how much the power of the movement to elect Obama lay, not in the man himself, but in the hands, hearts and minds and walking feet of the ordinary people behind it.

That realization kept me focused during my hours as a volunteer Neighborhood Team Leader at my local Obama office.

And whenever I felt my newfound conviction in the ability of ordinary people do to extraordinary things start to waver when faced with the forces of apathy, disillusionment, and stubborn opposition to the forces of change, I would meet an Obama supporter or volunteer whose personal committment so impressed me that I felt compelled to continue believing our work to change our country could succeed.

People like my fellow Neighborhood Team Leader, Sara, who approached canvassing with the same determination she mustered to run marathons; people like a field organizer named Alex, just out of college, working his first "real" job as a community leader, who came in to a struggling neighborhood office in a working class town, and turned into an organized Get-Out-the-Vote machine in a matter of days. People like the man with two prosthetic legs who joined my canvass team, and walked more streets than half of my other canvassers. People like the former die-hard Hillary Clinton supporter who volunteered to take charge of canvassers and voter-protection crews in one of the least-staffed, most challenging neighborhoods in the St. Louis metro on Election Day.

It was these people who really won on November 4th.

And I trust them, all of them, to continue working, in ways large and small, to make the country they love a better place, no matter what happens after tomorrow.

Congratulations to tomorrow's President, Barack Obama, and to all of the ordinary people who paved his way to the White House by being willing to dream an impossible dream.

"Learn to" List: Flintknap, Read Classical Sanskrit, Tango, Make Wine, Play Dulcimer, Knit

2009-01-13T13:14:00.000-08:00

I am a deeply curious person, and therefore I am always interested in acquiring new skills. The list of things I'd like to learn how to do is essentially endless, because nearly every time I hear about an interesting and useful skill I've never heard of before (assuming it doesn't somehow involve certain few things I prefer to avoid familiarizing myself intimately with at all costs, such as scorpions, or raw sewage) I find myself wishing I had it.

If I had infinite free time, infinite boldness, and a large chunk of cash, I am certain I'd spend my entire life traveling the globe learning things like how to make artisanal cheese, perform brain surgery, and and swim the English Channel.*

Unfortunately for me, I have limited free time, I am nervous by nature (scratch that brain surgery thing), and I seem to have, ahem, misplaced my money tree.**

These facts together conspire to keep my lengthy "Learn to" List from shrinking.

But here's at least one thing I can cross off:

The first thing I ever knit. It did not unravel. And it actually does something!

* As opposed to what I can do in deep water now, which is essentially take a longer time to drown.
** I did receive an anonymously mailed photo of my money tree festooned in toilet paper garlands and looking rather tipsy, at what was clearly a fairly racy party, with certain Wall Street executives playfully tossing one another into what appeared to be a champagne fountain in the background. I was not amused.

Bag Attitude

2009-01-07T22:09:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, I went to a Dierbergs grocery store. It was not my local Dierbergs store. I try to avoid my local Dierbergs store when I can, because my local Dierbergs store, though filled with friendly people, stocks a ridiculously limited selection of bruised and moldy produce.

(My local Schnucks has a terrible produce section too, actually. I am convinced, in fact, that both area chains send their worst produce to my neighborhood on purpose, so as to reserve the shiniest apples and least-green potatoes for their stores in places like Chesterfield and Ladue. But that's a topic for another post.)

Anyway, this was not my neighborhood Downscale Dierbergs for the Hoi Polloi, but a fancy schmancy We Have Non-Wilty Onions sort of Dierbergs store out in West County.

Outside this store, plastered neatly to the glass between the automatic doors, there is a little sign that reads: DID YOU REMEMBER TO BRING YOUR REUSABLE BAGS? On this sign is a picture of the Dierbergs brand resuable grocery bags that are available for purchase for one dollar apiece inside the store.

When I first noticed it, several weeks ago, I thought this was a kind and clever little sign. My husband and I always remember to bring our reusable shopping bags in to the grocery store now that carrying them has become a habit, but in our early days of using them, we would often forget and leave them in the car.

It's the sort of thing that makes you think that the Dierbergs grocery chain might really be taking this whole reusable bag trend seriously. And why shouldn't they? I mean, not only are reusable shopping bags vastly better for the environment than either the paper or plastic disposable kind, but they also save stores money.

Well, tell that to the checkers and baggers at Fancy Dierbergs.

I've already become accustomed to dramatic sighs and rolled eyes from disaffected checkers when I respond to "Paper or plastic?" with "Neither, thanks! I brought my own."

And baggers! Well. Nearly every time I pull the reusable bags out of the cart, it's like I'm telling a world-class pianist to play a concerto on my son's toy xylophone, or asking a master architect to design a house for me with crayons. I'd swear the slight once caused a particularly affronted bagger to put a bunch of bananas in with two cans of tomato sauce on purpose.

And the last time I went to Fancy Dierbergs was the worst time there so far. Not only did the checker roll her eyes and sigh when my husband cheerfully replied, "Neither!" Not only did the bagger look askance at us, and then cast a rather wicked glare toward our bananas before dolefully shaking out the first of our eco-friendly bags.

No, this was not the end of our punishment for showing off as environmental goody two-shoes. Once the checker finished scanning our groceries, she completely, purposefully ignored the pile of still-unused resusable bags that the bagger had not filled yet, and put all of the rest of our groceries in disposable plastic bags, leaving half our reusables empty on the counter.

Lest my gentle reader think this anti-eco-bag attitude is unique to the workers at one local grocery chain, only two days later, when we were at that Target of St. Louis Targets, The Mecca-Target — Target of South City — where, incidentally, they also sell their own brand of reusable shopping bags — our checker, upon realizing that we had brought reusable bags, refused to bag our items entirely, and demanded that my husband bag them himself.

Seriously, people. Is it that hard to put things in a slightly different kind of bag? Of a sort your own store sells in a deliberate attempt to get more people to use them?

Clearly some sort of campaign is needed to get cashiers and baggers outside of Trader Joe's and Whole Paycheck on track with this whole saving-the-planet-and-your-store's-bottom-line business.

I imagine the surest way to fix this problem is to make reusable shopping bags so entirely commonplace, so totally unremarkable, that not even the surliest teen temp store employee would bat an eye upon seeing a customer pull them out. If everyone starts using reusables, then checkers and baggers everywhere will be forced to stop silently accusing me of being a pain-in-the-ass hippie with their eyes when I whip my eco-totes out at the register.

Therefore, I am issuing this public call: if you haven't jumped on the reusable grocery bag bandwagon yet, I urge you, for my sake, please, to purchase a set immediately and use them on your very next shopping trip.

The ego you could help save may well be mine.

(But the planet you will help save will be your own. )

Conversations with a Four-Year-Old: Bedtime

2008-12-27T19:40:00.000-08:00

MOTHER: Okay, time to go to sleep. Can I give you a big hug before I go?

CHILD: Okay!

CHILD leaps out of bed, runs behind mother, and throws his arms around her back.

CHILD: I'll give you a monkey hug!

MOTHER: Okay, okay little monkey. That was a nice hug. Now it's time for all the cute little monkeys in the world to go to bed.

CHILD: No, it's not time for me to go to bed. I'm a nocturnal monkey.

MOTHER: Oh, well, nocturnal monkey, it just happens to be daytime! So it is time for you to go to bed!

CHILD: It's not daytime. There's just a lot of lights on in my room.

MOTHER: Well, all that light must be making you sleepy, right, nocturnal monkey?

CHILD: No. I'm a nocturnal and diurnal monkey.

MOTHER: When do you sleep, then?

CHILD: Um . . . I only sleep at . . . dusk.

Conversations with a Four-Year-Old: From Picky Eater to Cheese Snob

2008-12-09T12:56:00.000-08:00

MOTHER: I'm about to get started making lunch. What would you like to have for lunch today?

CHILD: I want a grilled cheese sandwich please.

MOTHER: Okay. One grilled cheese sandwich coming up!

CHILD: I want Havarti cheese on it.

MOTHER: Okay . . .

CHILD: Havarti not Cheddar or American. And I want a slice of Swiss cheese on the side. Not on the sandwich.

MOTHER: Okay, I'll put Havarti cheese on the sandwich.

CHILD: And a slice of Swiss cheese on the side. Cold.