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Category Archives: Family
The Tooth Fairy Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
Back in the day, when the tooth fairy used to come around…
My sons came to me one day, giggling conspiratorially.
“Mommy,” the younger one said with a knowing gleam in his eye, “We think we figured out something. You’re the tooth fairy, right?”
“You got me, boys” I confessed with a sigh, pretending I was crestfallen to have been discovered, “But let’s not ruin it for your sister by telling her.”
Inside I was saying to myself, “Think you’re so smart, boys? You just shut down an easy revenue stream for yourself!”
I’m not kidding about the easy revenue stream. One night I entrusted Colin with performing the tooth fairy’s sacred duty. The next morning my oldest son came gleefully skipping down the stairs, clutching a twenty dollar bill.
“Look what the tooth fairy left me!” he gloated.
I shot Colin a dirty look and said, “That’s funny. Usually, the tooth fairy leaves one dollar.”
“Hmph,” Colin said, “A twenty must have been the only cash the tooth fairy had in her billfold last night.”
Nowadays, there’s no more anticipation, no more thrill of discovering a dollar (or twenty) under the pillow, no more fairy dust…no more magic at all. These days, even my daughter has to shake down the tooth fairy to get her due.
Last week I yanked a tooth out of my younger boy’s head at his behest. Relieved to finally have the bothersome tooth out of his mouth, he took off with a broad, bloody, gap-toothed smile. I was left standing in the bathroom, gazing at the little baby molar in my hand. I took considerable care to rinse off the blood clinging to the uneven root, while I considered what to do with the tooth. It was, after all, a little piece of my son. It had been a part of the sweet, shy little smile I had known and loved for a decade. It contained his DNA.
I held it nestled in the palm of my hand for a little while and then…I threw it away.
The next day he showed me a second wiggly tooth. It prompted him to ask me what happened to the tooth he had just lost the day before.
“Oh! Uh, the tooth?” I asked guiltily, “Well…I, ummm. I threw it away.”
He shot me a look of mingled shock, accusation, and disappointment.
“I could fish it out, though!” I said, “Shall I get it out of the trash? I could easily do that!”
“Nah,” he said, and then after a short pause and a meaningful sideways look in my direction he added, “But I’m going to keep this tooth.”
I trace my cavalier attitude to my own upbringing. After going through the whole tooth fairy charade with my two older sisters, the tooth fairy of my childhood, a.k.a. my dad, was pretty much over it by the time I came along. The morning after losing a tooth and tucking it under my pillow, I would awake with joyful anticipation. I’d lift the pillow to discover…nothing.
“Dad?” I’d say glumly, “The tooth fairy didn’t come.”
“Hunh,” he’d say with a studied nonchalance, “Well, check again in another couple of hours, I bet she’ll have come by then.” I repeatedly find myself using this very same line on Tatiana these days.
By the time my little brother lost his first tooth, the tooth fairy was truly sick and tired of coming to our house. When my brother would sadly inform my dad that the tooth fairy had forgotten to come, he would say as he fished around in his pocket for loose change, “Turn around and put your hands behind your back. I’ll call the tooth fairy for you.”
My poor brother. My poor son. I’m going to blame it on the genes.
My Brother is Special, Pt. 2
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about how my genius brother managed to game his way into the local preschool for children with learning delays. Yesterday I wrote about the few shows we were allowed to watch on television before my mother decided to destroy the set in as dramatic a fashion as possible. These posts got me thinking about another incident that involved my brother, school, and our family’s warped relationship with popular culture via the television…
My brother Teddy discovered Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids in Kindergarten. He became completely enamored with the show, and with the character named Mushmouth in particular. Mushmouth is the slack-jawed character, who speaks with the slow, rhythmic cadence of a simpleton. He adds “buh” to every word so that he sounds something like this: “Heybuh, Fabuh Albuh.”
Teddy began talking like Mushmouth. Constantly. Concerned, his conscientious Kindergarten teacher alerted the specialist at the school, who began to pull him out of his regular classroom for intensive speech therapy.
When my dad got wind of this, we knew it was going to be ugly. As punishments were always meted out communally in our household, my sisters and I were all made to sit alongside our brother on the couch as my dad ranted on and on and on. It seemed like the hailstorm of words pelting down from that normally monosyllabic, phlegmatic man would never stop. In a thousand and one different ways, for what seemed like a thousand and one hours, he told Teddy that if he continued to talk like Mushmouth, people would think he was a Dummy, a Straggler, and a Weakling!
At long last, his lecture came to a terrifying crescendo with a thundering: “DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?!”
Teddy answered: “Yehbuh.”
Our jaws dropped involuntarily and my sisters and I froze in a tableau of mute horror. We held our breaths as we waited for the axe to fall. But so habitual had become this idiosyncratic way of speaking, my Dad didn’t even notice.
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The Sound of Music
Last week I recounted a conversation I had with my sister in which we were trying to figure out what would possibly induce anyone to scale a mountain if they weren’t, say, fleeing from Nazis. It later occurred to me that The Sound of Music reference might not be as immediately obvious to everyone as it was to my sister, who, like me, grew up immersed in the world of the von Trapp family.
Our fluency in popular culture was severely hampered by the fact that our mother got rid of our TV in a rather dramatic fashion. Even before this incident, we were only allowed to watch a select few shows. That limited, but weirdly eclectic selection included: Saturday cartoons, The Waltons, the Charlie Brown specials, the Miss Universe pageant, The Wizard of Oz, and last, but certainly not least: The Sound of Music. This movie, which we watched only once a year, played a disproportionately influential role in our lives.
The Sound of Music was always one of my mother’s “favorite things.” She would get starry-eyed whenever she watched it. When she was in a particularly good mood, we might hear her humming Edelweiss in her rich, melodious voice. Drunk on the unabashed sentimentality of The Sound of Music, she loved to indulge the fantasy that her own children would one day hit the road as The von Kim Family Singers. The closest the von Kims ever got to performing in public, however, was the occasional church service. My mother would try to recreate the movie’s magic by having my sisters and me sing a hymn in three part harmony. Somehow the effect was never right. There was always some important element missing, but she could never quite put her finger on it.
One day it hit her like a bolt of lightning. She had always been particularly fascinated by the scene in which Julie Andrews fashions play clothes out of curtains for the von Trapp children. Inspired by this brilliant example of ingenuity and frugality, my mother one-upped Maria herself. She laid her hands on some stiff maroon crushed velvet upholstery fabric from which she made each of us matching pantsuit ensembles…
We wore these. In public. And not just to church, but to school as well. This would be around the same time that we were stealing food from squirrels.
Fortunately, there is no photographic evidence of us sporting these outfits, but my sister has lovingly recreated them for you:
Goodbye, Ned
One day early this summer, my daughter visited me in my office. I showed her the spider that had taken up residence in the corner of my window. We were about to leave for vacation, and we worried that he might be swept away by the cleaner while I was gone. Hoping to avert such a disaster, my daughter made this sign for the spider, whom she named Ned.
We had big plans for Ned. When we got back, we were going to make some spider-sized furniture and maybe hang some pictures to make him feel more at home.
Alas, when we returned, Ned and his cobweb were nowhere to be seen. When my daughter found out, she gave me this look:
I left the sign where it was, hoping he might find his way back home…Every morning when I get to work, I’ve been checking to see if he’s come back, but there’s never any sign of him.
Today I finally accepted the fact that, like this beautiful, too-short summer, Ned is gone for good.
We miss you, Ned. It was nice knowing you.
I’m the Worst. Mother. Ever.
I cringed all day whenever I recalled the lecture I gave to my daughter as I dropped her off (late) to school this morning.
Worst Mother Ever: (in an accusatory voice) What were you doing upstairs when I was calling and calling you to come down?
—Guilty silence—
W.M.E.: What were you doing? You were reading weren’t you?
My daughter: (mumbled, barely audible, sheepish response) Yes.
W.M.E.: You’re not allowed to read in the morning anymore! Got it? NO READING ALLOWED! Now you’re going to be late for school, because you were…READING!”
Poor, poor kid…and it’s only the fifth day of school.
Mutual Bafflement
My husband and I split up on Saturday. It was just for the day, but what caused us to go our separate ways was something that has always divided us and that reveals how very different we are.
My husband loves nothing better than to camp and hike in the great tick-ridden, mosquito-filled, venomous-snake-laced outdoors. I too adore nature. I am enthralled by the writings of naturalists such as Loren Eiseley and Annie Dillard. I am awed by nature photography and documentaries. I am stirred by poetry that celebrates the seasons, the starry firmament, or the miracle of life in all of its myriad manifestations…But Lord knows I certainly don’t want to actually be in nature.
I can’t fathom it. Why would you subject yourself to the hassle and discomfort of camping, if you weren’t homeless? Why would you want to gnaw on dry, uncooked food fished out of a hot, sweaty backpack? We’ve progressed so far beyond this! Flushing toilets, hot showers, comfortable beds, refrigeration, microwaves, air-conditioning, couches! Why would you give that all up on purpose?
…Which brings me back to Saturday. My husband decided it would be the perfect day to go on a hike in the Blue Ridge. I decided it would be the perfect day to take a daytrip to visit my parents and sister in Arlington. We knew the boys would want to go hiking, but we weren’t sure what our daughter’s preference would be. We presented her with the two options, never dreaming that we would be inflicting an agonizing Sophie’s Choice moment on her. Honestly, she looked like she was going to cry as she deliberated out loud.
“I really, really want to go to Grandma and Grandpa’s, but I really, really want to go hiking too!”
“Well,” I reasoned, bewildered by the fact that this was actually a difficult choice, and trying to make the decision a little easier for her, “I’m planning to take you to their house over Labor Day weekend, and that’s only a week away, so maybe you should go hiking.”
“But that’s SEVEN WHOLE DAYS,” she wailed.
Finally, we decided to put the poor girl out of her misery by flipping a coin. She went on the hike.
In Arlington as my sister and I drove to Harris Teeter to pick up some groceries, she asked me what my husband and kids were doing.
“They’re going hiking,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.
“Hiking?! What do you even do on a hike?” she asked.
“Well…I guess you drive to a mountain, find a trail, and then walk up to the top.”
“Why would you do that?” she asked, sincerely mystified.
“I have no idea. It’s not as if they’re being chased by Nazis.”
“Huh! I just don’t get it.”
“Me neither. That’s why I’m here, and not there.”
At that moment my husband called. He and the kids had gotten back from the hike and he was checking on my whereabouts.
“Ask him why he went hiking and if he really thinks that’s an enjoyable activity,” my sister urged.
I relayed her questions to him. He was rendered speechless. All he could muster was a: “Hunh?!?!”
“Oooh, gotta go,” I told him and hurriedly hung up the phone, because just then I witnessed a real spectacle of nature! I saw a flock of little birds taking a dirt bath in the mulch rings around the trees by the grocery store parking lot. I hung out of the window of my sister’s air-conditioned car and took a picture with my camera phone:
Ahhh, nature!
Three for Three
7:20 am
It’s official…
summer. is. over.
Praying Mantis
She is a predator. She stalks her prey with stealth and ruthless cunning. Once she has set her sights on her victim, (often smaller members of her own species), resistance is futile. She will bite the head off a victim who struggles, even that of her own mate.
So unrelenting is she, that she can even get a praying mantis to crack a smile:
“She always captures her prey!”
And speaking of praying mantises, check out this little one in training:
Have a wonderful, wonderful weekend!
o wonderful, wonderful 