Ill-advised

A note: I entered the Erma Bombeck Writing Competition this year. I did not win, but these fine essayists did. Here's what I submitted, in the spirit of the late, great Bombeck:

On any other day, my darling 4-year-old daughter is all giggles, ringlets and tutus. Yet a simple cold turns my little sweetie into hell on a trike. It’s all I can do to shield the world from her baby rage.

Sequestering a sick kid is good etiquette; nothing draws greater scorn from other parents than bringing the plague to the playground. But the real reason to absolutely, never, ever leave the house with a sick kid? To do so is asking for a giant, ridiculous, public tantrum.

Despite this knowledge, in my sleep deprivation (because yes, if they’re sick during the day, they’re sick ALL NIGHT LONG) I naively thought I could pull off one quick grocery run. Dinner. Milk. Tissues. Surely I could sprint through the store before she detonated?

Foolish, foolish mommy.

I should mention that when my daughter is sick, she emits a constant, irritating-to-mothers-and-dogs whine. My shopping list was nearly attained when the whine reached a crescendo.

“What is it?”

“My socks are itchy! These are not the shoes I wanted,” she flailed.

“We’re almost done. Just a few more things.”

This was not the answer she sought. She wanted out of the cart. She wanted bare feet. And she wanted that box of Cheez-Its two aisles back.

“No! I! Don’t! Want! These!”

She took off her shoes and socks and spiked them on the linoleum.

I could feel the stares of other shoppers. Without a word, I picked up her socks and shoes and tried to put them back on her feet. She kicked me. I tried again. She kicked again. I put the shoes next to her in the seat.

“Put on your shoes. We’re in a store. You have to wear shoes and socks in a store.”

She hurled them. My patience evaporated.

Through clenched teeth I growled: “Put on your goddamn socks and shoes. Now.”

At the top of her tiny lungs, for everyone from the backroom to the checkout to hear: “I DON’T WANT MY DAMN SOCKS AND SHOES! I WANT CHEEZ-ITS!”

I ducked my head in mommy shame. As I put the rest of the items in my cart -- and you can bet there were no tasty cheese-flavored crackers in there -- she slowly put her shoes and socks on, watching my face the entire time. Just as a child instinctively knows the love conveyed in a mother’s smile, I suspect they also know that flash of anger in mom’s eyes mean “knock it off right now or your favorite toy is now mine.”

Let my mistake serve as a cautionary tale: never, ever leave the house with a sick child. Or the queasy one might be you. 

On playtime

What did you draw when you were a kid? I’m pretty sure my childhood art was limited to rainbows, houses, trees and stick-people.

My 3-almost-4-year-old draws those too. But also these:

I'm hoping she'll build me a cubicle
out of cardboard boxes next.

That’s right. That’s a laptop computer, made three-dimensional by folding her paper into squares. While I could offer you this image as proof that my daughter is brilliant (which, like any doting mother, I assume she is), it also kind of freaks me out. What does this say about the permeation of technology on her young life? Shouldn’t she be drawing something more… I don’t know… organic?

I’ve been compelled recently to think a little more about how and with what my kids play. Making the rounds on editorial pages and parenting blogs has been data from a study in the journal Pediatrics. The study concludes that preschoolers are getting too little unstructured, vigorous playtime because parents and educators are too worried about skinned knees and academic-readiness.

Also being circulated on social media is this petition asking the makers of LEGO to stop dumbing down and pinking up their toys as they target the girl demographic.

The thing is, I don’t know how to protect my kids from these daily assaults on their playtime. And I don’t know how marketers are such evil geniuses that my kids love gender-specific toys for characters of which they’ve often never been exposed. Why does my son like Batman, Spider-man and Star Wars, or my daughter like all things princessy, when they’ve never seen more than a minute of any of those movies as I surf the TV by to more age-appropriate PBS shows?

When my kids were infants, I tried to keep their onesies gender-neutral. Not because I wanted to confuse little old ladies who peered into my stroller, but because I thought it was so ridiculous that all little boy stuff came in blue and all little girl stuff came in pink. The alternatives were usually sickening colors of yellow and green.

But now that I give my kids free choice in what they wear, as evidenced by their epic power clashing, their clothing selections are primarily gender-specific blues and pinks. Just try to put my son in something pink or my daughter in something blue.

I can’t help but wonder if it’s inevitable that people, even little people, put themselves into predetermined boxes. When there’s no room for imagination -- whether on the playground, the classroom, the playroom or the wardrobe -- are we limiting our own potential to do anything different or great?

My mouth did not run

I *almost* lost my schmidt on an elementary school mommy this morning. But I didn’t. Which I think counts as some sort of personal growth, right?

I won’t pretend I was sweet as pie, because you probably won’t get that from me on a good day, but I did not reduce the woman to a puddle of tears with a profanity-laced rant, a show of restraint that I can only assume made my blood pressure spike and my eyeballs bulge.

Here’s what happened. My son’s school has a running club each morning. Participation isn’t mandatory but is very encouraged. Imagine a school full of pencil-thin PTA moms wearing “spirit gear” to cheer on their little darlings. That kind of encouraged.

My son is not a morning person. When he’s old enough to drink coffee, I predict he will drink me under the breakfast table.

So each morning as we walk to school, he has to psych himself up for it. Some days he’s ready for it, some days not. Today he wanted to run, but I could tell it was taking some work for him to get his feet moving.

My daughter and I followed behind, and as he rounded the first lap, he got his timecard scanned (because, yes, the school is that hardcore that there are digital scanners to track the kids’ miles), and dropped it in his class bin.

Then his buddy walked up who is perhaps even less of a morning person. Kindergarten is tough, people.

He only wanted to run a lap if my son would run it with him. So my son went to grab his timecard for a second lap.

There was a woman holding the bin for my son’s kindergarten class. My son walked up to her, said something I couldn’t make out, then came back with a hurt look on his face.

“What’s up? Where’s your card,” I asked.

“She wouldn’t let me have it.”

This is the part where I assumed my kid didn’t speak up enough, she didn’t understand what he wanted, etc. So I walked up and asked for his card.

She said, without looking up, “no.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. (Why do I apologize for nothing in particular? I don’t know.) “My son wants to run a lap with his friend.”

“There isn’t time. The bell is going to ring in a few minutes,” she said, again, not looking up.

“Well, he could run for a minute with his friend. Can I have his card?”

“No.”

Other kids in other classes were still grabbing their timecards and running laps, but she never loosened her icy grip on the one bin that held my son’s card. This is the part where I realized not only did she consider herself the keeper of the cards, but that she was a first-class …  OK, I won’t say it. This is about my impressive anger-management skills, remember?

So I asked, “Are you a teacher?”

“No. I’m a parent. I help run the running club,” she said, now scowling and making eye contact for the first time.

We glared at each other for a moment. Think two leashed dogs staring each other down from opposites sides of the street.

“Well, good for you then,” I said as curtly as she did, adding the appropriate swear words in my head only. “You’ve decided my son can’t run with his friend. That was your decision.”

Both boys were now standing at my side, asking why they couldn’t run together. “Because she decided you don’t have enough time,” I answered.

The father of my son’s friend walked up, chuckling at the rage he could see on my face. “What a …” Again, I won’t print it here, but he said the word I was thinking all along. I hope she heard it.

More even-keeled people would not have let this interaction tick them off. More diplomatic souls would know that I will no doubt have to deal with mommies like this for the next 20 years or so, so I should smile sweetly and move on.

Those who know me well understand the cork I put on myself. A younger, less-tethered version of me let loose on a city bus driver who cut me off in traffic, a college administrator who messed with my class schedule, even a real estate agent who flubbed paperwork on the closing of our first house. (The real estate agent even cried when I flipped out on her. I’m not kidding.)

It’s not easy keeping a sharp tongue sealed tightly in one’s mouth. I don’t know if I taught my kids anything about self control today, but I do know that they didn’t learn any new four-letter words from me. And I’ll consider that a little victory lap for myself. Go, me.

Digital memories

I don’t do scrapbooks. I don’t really get their appeal. Why would I cut my photos into cute shapes and surround them with puffy stickers and patterned construction paper?

In fact, I don’t entirely expect my photos will ever live in any form but digital, though I do wonder if that’s any way to preserve a memory. There are so many things from my kids’ childhoods that I wonder if I’ll forget in the blur of sleep deprivation, soccer practices and grocery shopping.

To add one more digital file to my laptop memory, here are just a few of the things I hope to never forget:

• The way my house smells in this kid-centric time of our lives: coffee and pancakes, Play-Doh, antibacterial wipes, fish food, sweaty kids just home from the playground.
• How adorably baggy the kids’ sports uniforms are at the beginning of each respective season, only to barely fit by season’s end.
• The sound of my kids giggling. My daughter’s is an open-mouthed guffaw, which she covers with her little dimpled hands; my son’s is more of a squeal, which usually ends with a dramatic sigh.
• That little flash of pride that crosses their face when they’re really proud of themselves, about reading a new word, kicking a ball just right, being praised for their good work.
• What it’s like to hold their small hands in mine, and moreover, how they reach for my hand instinctively when we go to cross the street, weave through a large crowd of people, or just because they want to tell me something important. How much longer could I have before they don’t do that anymore?

K: Adult supervision recommended, not guaranteed

It’s true what they say: kindergarten is not like when we were kids.

I have faint memories of kindergarten being about shapes and colors and learning the alphabet. And when I heard that kindergarten today is more like the first grade of my youth, I knew my son would be just fine academically. And just a couple weeks in, he has been.

What I guess I hadn’t fully considered was that he would also need to be more self-sufficient than I remember being in kindergarten. There seems to be less supervision, less handholding, less touchy-feely-snuggly “let’s help you adapt to this new world”-ness.

Rather, the kids seem to be expected to take care of themselves and their stuff at a whole new level.

I’ll give you an example from my son’s first day of kindergarten. When I went to pick him up, his teacher was standing at the door. I asked, like I might have when he was in preschool, “Did he have a good day?” The teacher looked to my son as if to remember which child he was, then said, “Um, yes.”

Walking home I asked my son how it was. He said, “I only cried once.”

Why had he cried? Because on a class trip to the restroom, when he exited the stall he discovered that his class had left without him.  The teacher had apparently asked the children if everyone was done in the restroom, and when they said “yes,” he walked them back to class.

So my kiddo, with his mother’s (lack of) sense of direction and the fear that came with realizing he was alone, wandered the kindergarten classrooms in tears looking for his. A teacher’s aide took pity on him and helped him find his way.

I was annoyed that his teacher had neglected to mention this event in my kid’s day, and I was concerned that he didn’t keep count of his students. So when I took my son to school the next day, I asked as nonchalantly as I could muster, “So, my son says he was left behind at the bathroom?”

His response: “Well, yes and no. We talked about what to do if he ever gets lost again.”

In my head I was thinking, “How ’bout don’t lose my kid in the first place!” But I also realized in that moment that this was not someone who was going to look out for my kid like a good mother hen. This was a professor, not a childcare provider. Even at the kindergarten level.

While I knew beforehand that I would need to try to fill in the gaps created in my kids’ education by budget cuts and larger class sizes, now I know I’ll likewise have to teach them how to move through the world even more independently.

So far, so good

Kindergarten has officially begun.
We woke the kids up early. So early, in fact, my son's first words to me were, "Why do we have to get up at night?" Did I mention drop-off begins at 7:15 a.m.?
Fed, dressed, and ditched our plans to walk to school after dark, rainy clouds decided to hover over our neighborhood just as we were ready to go.
A ridiculously short car ride, and we were there. Umbrella, check. Backpack, check. Lunchbox, check. Camera, check. Hubby choking back tears, check.
I didn't cry. Are you proud of me? I knew that if I cried, my kids might think school was something big and scary.
I could read the slightest bit of apprehension on my son's face, but otherwise he was stoked that the big day was finally here. He found a friend from preschool right away. He sat at his assigned seat and waited for us to go away.
And so we did. And so, here I am. I've already sent the requisite photos to friends and family. I'm busying myself with my usual work. And I'm watching the clock.
I can't wait to hear about his day.

Another one down

R.I.P.

“Swim #2” – 8/31/11

In Memoriam: Swim #2 was a good fish. He swam around merrily with his more resilient buddy, Swimmy, for a solid week before his gills quit twitching.

I wish Swim #2 could have timed his demise a little better. Like maybe while my son was at school so I could again pull the ol’ switcheroo.

Instead -- while herding my crew out the door to school in a desperate attempt to not be late again -- my son stopped off at his room to give his new pets their breakfast. The second I heard his wail, I knew.

Swim #2 was too far gone to pretend he was “napping.” I whisked him out of the aquarium and flushed him as quickly as I could, hoping this wouldn’t be cause for indelible childhood scars.

It didn’t help that my daughter tried to comfort (?) her brother by offering, “I think the other fish is going to die, too.”