Tag Archives: Parenting

The Caterpillar

Last Friday morning I was in a big fat rush. It was going to be a busier day than usual at work. I woke up stressed out about all the documents I needed to crank out, the emails I had to answer, and the presentation I was going to give that still needed fine-tuning. I wanted to get the kids to our neighbor’s house early so I could get to work.

To my frustration, instead of letting me drive them there, the children begged to be allowed to walk. I didn’t have the heart to say no, but I warned them that they would need to hurry. I drove the short distance myself, passing them as they walked. I parked the car at our neighbor’s house and waited for them. While I stood there waiting, acorns turned into mighty oaks, mountains eroded into plains, and species evolved.

I was reminded of my son’s first tee-ball experience. During one of his games I was standing behind the fence right behind his two coaches. Whenever it was time for the two teams to switch sides, they would tuck their chaw into one cheek with their tongues so they could yell out, “HUSTLE, BOYS! COME ON! HUSTLE! HUSTLE! HUSTLE!” as they stood there with their arms crossed over their beer bellies. All the little four year olds would run across the field as fast as their little legs could carry them. My son would lope along at a gentle pace a few yards behind the pack. At one point, one of the coaches turned to the other with a look of disgust and spat, “That boy don’t know the meaning of hustle.”

As I waited by the car in front of our neighbor’s house I could see my children slowly ambling along the road and thought, “Come on kids, hustle, hustle, hustle!” As if in perverse response to my mental plea, I saw them slow down instead, and then drop to the ground to inspect something.

“Come here, Mom! You have to take a picture of this!” my son called to me.

For a second I thought about scolding them and reminding them that I was in a hurry. For some reason, (OK, probably because my son so adroitly played to my photo obsession), I grabbed my camera and walked back to where they were.

To be honest, I was kind of disappointed at first when I realized they were just looking at a caterpillar. But they were both so completely entranced that I crouched down to look at it myself. I could see their point. The translucent lime green skin! The perfectly segmented body! Those curious speckles!

The caterpillar was a cosmic gift. For a moment, the mere fact of its existence arrested time, that most precious commodity of all, and we were wonderstruck. Oh, to always have the open heart and reverent eyes of a child…to slow down enough to see the abundant miracles around us and to know instinctively that appreciation of these wonders must always take precedence over lesser concerns.

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This morning…

The past two weeks have shaken us all to the core and have left us feeling raw, exposed, and vulnerable. There was the vicious bomb attack at the Boston Marathon, the devastating fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, and the catastrophic earthquake in China. Closer to home there have been great sorrows that have not made it into the news cycle, but have made the people around me painfully aware of how precious life is and how cruelly capricious the tides of fate.

This morning I realized how much these events have crept into my psyche. I had been up to 2:30 am (the only time I could find to write) and had woken up at 6 am to help my son get packed for his three day school trip.The night before, when he had announced that he was too tired to pack and would wake up early to do so, I knew with absolute certainty that this was a terrible idea. I knew this morning would not be pretty, but I didn’t have the energy to argue the point or to start the packing myself.

So this morning at 6, I sat on my bedroom floor with an open suitcase and my laptop opened to the emailed packing list my son’s teacher had sent.

“Bring me three pairs of long pants and three long-sleeve shirts!” I called out to him.

He slowly shuffled into my bedroom with one pair of pants and one t-shirt.

“THREE pairs of pants and THREE LONG-sleeve shirts!'” I  bellowed with exasperation, “CHOP CHOP!”

Seasons changed, my skin began to sag, and more grey hairs sprouted as I waited for him to reappear. Finally he showed up bearing…another t-shirt and a sweater.

When I protested, he claimed that he couldn’t find what was asked for in his drawers.

I rifled through his drawers myself and discovered one or two of the things he needed, but confirmed the fact that the rest of the items simply weren’t there. They were buried deep in the mountain of unwashed laundry that I hadn’t been able to get to all week.

You can probably imagine the snarling and generally churlish behavior that ensued, but we finally did get him packed. Already running late, I began getting myself ready for work. As I was getting out of the shower, I could hear that my husband was about to leave the house to drop him off at school for the field trip.

"Yes?"

“Yes?”

There was one crucial thing I had forgotten, and I didn’t want to miss my chance. If I’d learned anything in these past two weeks, I’d learned that sometimes you never do get a second chance.

I raced out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around me and my hair streaming with water. At the top of the stairs, I barked out his name.

He turned around, and from the bottom of the stairs he looked up at me with a doleful stare and sighed, “Yes?”

The word was imbued with that unique teenage inflection that makes it abundantly clear that behind that monosyllable is irritation, a lifetime of  suffering, and the sure expectation of more unreasonable parental behavior…

I tried to modulate my own tone, but failed.

“I LOVE YOU!” I snapped.

A momentary flicker of surprise registered in his eyes and after the briefest pause, he muttered “Love you” and ambled out the door.

My son and his buddy

My son and his buddy are both turning thirteen this month. The boys met when they were just three years old during storytime at the library, and they immediately hit it off.

(My son is on the right).

I became fast friends with the mother of my son’s friend. Besides the fact that our sons were born in April and have names beginning with “N,” we share other similarities. Rosita and I are both Korean. We married Englishmen, who happened to have studied at Cambridge at the same time, and whose families live in the same general part of England. When we met, we were both in the trenches of parenting our firstborns and were delighted to have found a kindred spirit in each other. (As you might guess from her name, Rosita has a fascinating background, which you can read more about on her blog).

The first time Rosita and her son came over for a “playdate,” (I put that word in quotation marks, because after all these years it still makes me wince and want to apologize for using it at all), the boys disappeared into the playroom. Rosita and I sat next door in the living room drinking tea and chatting happily. We kept hearing loud crashes and noises, interspersed with peals of laughter. We were not yet seasoned mothers, so we were foolishly reassured by the laughter. We had gotten past the point where we couldn’t blink for fear that the boys might drown in a toilet, impale themselves upon a sharp object, or tumble headfirst down the staircase. We thought we had at long last dropped our anchors into the relatively safe harbor of toddlerhood. In any case, we were desperate for adult conversation and companionship and it was easier to just ignore what was going on next door.

“Chitchat, chitchat, chitchat…” (Crash! Bang!)

My son’s friend kept popping into the room to drop hints that we should be paying more attention.

“We’re being Thing 1 and Thing 2,” he said.

“Oh, uh-huh,” we nodded absentmindedly and continued communing with each other like long-lost sisters, “Chitchat, chitchat, chitchat…” (Smash! Boom!)

He disappeared into the playroom again, only to reappear a few minutes later to announce plainly, “We’re doing terrible things in there.”

Clearly, it was time to check on the boys. When we got to the playroom, our jaws dropped. We were aghast. We were speechless. Every single toy was on the floor. Every single puzzle had been upturned and all the pieces strewn about the room. Every single board game had been opened and the pieces shaken out all over the floor. Every single book had been taken from the shelves and had been dumped on the floor. There was literally no inch of carpet visible under the ungodly mess the two boys had created in a matter of fifteen minutes.

We scolded. We cleaned. We gave stern looks. We reorganized. We shook our fingers. We reshelved books. Finally, we got the room back in order.

Not wanting the boys to mess up all of our hard work again, we sent them upstairs to play in my son’s room.

“Don’t make a mess!” we warned and went back to our tea and sympathy.

“Chitchat, chitchat, chitchat. Chitchat, chitchat, chitcha–”

Suddenly, we realized that it was alarmingly quiet upstairs. I think most parents would agree that silence is far more ominous than noise.

We raced up the stairs to see the two boys hunched silently over stuffed animals, industriously giving them haircuts.

“We’re being barbers,” the boys announced proudly as they looked up from their work. The badly shorn lions and bald teddy bears stared at us reproachfully…

I’ve always been convinced that the boys will be lifelong friends. Rosita’s family moved away to Madison, Wisconsin four years ago, but we still stay in touch and we see each other at least once a year. This past weekend Rosita and I met up in New York City with our boys to celebrate their thirteenth birthday together.

Tomorrow I’ll share pictures from our trip, but for now, here are a few pictures I took of the supplies the boys travelled with:

Hair-spiking gel? Check.
Remote control fart machine? Check. Water-squirting camera? Check.
Video-recording spy glasses? Check.
The Googleyezer
Googly eyes in Chinatown
Googlyeyezed Starbucks Lady.
Best buddy? Check.
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The Golden Rule

Last week was not our finest hour. All five members of my household were guilty of breaking the one cardinal rule that allows us to function in relative peace and harmony. This one simple rule above all rules is that only one person at a time is allowed to be sick, have a meltdown, or be a general pain in the @$$. Last week, not just ONE, but ALL of us were sick, had meltdowns, and were general pains in the @$$es. That, my friends, is how you spell dis@$ter, cat@$trophe, fi@$co…You get the picture.

How did this happen? I blame myself. The flu had taken me down hard, and I was too sick to enforce The Rule. Under normal circumstances,  my children are so well-trained that if one child is crying and a second child starts up, (for example), I have merely to raise an eyebrow and one admonishing finger. This signals to the the second child that s/he must immediately cease and desist until the first child has stopped with the waterworks. The children almost always fall in line with alacrity. (My husband, on the other hand, is not always so docile, but we’re working on it).

Perhaps you’re thinking this is insensitive? unreasonable?

PRECISELY! I heartily concur! 

It IS insensitive and unreasonable to muscle in on someone else’s moment of misery! Am I right?!

When people don’t wait their turn to have their “moment,” it leads to scenes such as the following one, which convinced me of the necessity of instituting our version of The Golden Rule in the first place:

Years ago, I was pregnant with my third child and feeling utterly exhausted and queasy. My sons were four and three years old at the time. They would have received far better care and nurturing had I had the foresight to turn them over to be raised by a pack of wolves for the forty weeks it took to gestate baby #3. It was hard for me to do anything during that time but lie as still as possible on the couch.

One afternoon my four year old was perched upon the porcelain throne in the bathroom at the top of the stairs. He had reached the stage where he could take care of all his own toileting needs, except for when it came to the aftermath of a #2.

“MOMMY!” he hollered down to me, “WIPE ME!”

“Unnnnhh, ” I groaned as I hoisted myself into a seated position. I slowly started to make my way to the stairs. I knew immediately this was a huge mistake. I could feel myself heaving and I knew it wasn’t going to be pretty.

My poor, neglected three year old wandered by just then, looking like a forlorn little Linus holding his blankie. My son’s blankie was his beloved “clof,” one of many diaper cloths we had used as burp cloths for both the boys when they had been babies. Now we kept a pile just for him. He always had one clutched in his little hand, and held up to his face.  All that was visible were his big giraffe-lashed eyes following me as I made my way to the stairs.

IMG_0016I looked around for something to throw up into, but there was nothing. My eyes lit upon the cloth in my son’s hand, and I reached for it.

“Give me your cloth, quick!” I gasped.

Sensing imminent danger, his eyes widened.  “No, Mommy,” he said with alarm and he instinctively pulled himself and his cloth safely out of my reach.

“Give it to me, I’ll give you another one!” I snarled, willing the volcano to not erupt.

He pulled it away from me again as I lunged. For a few seconds I engaged in a desperate tug-of-war with my toddler over his cloth. Fortunately, it’s not too hard to overpower a completely traumatized three year old…to trample, nay vomit on all he holds sacred and dear. I managed to snatch it from him just in time.

As I retched over and over into his cloth, he became completely unhinged and started shrieking, “NO!!! Don’t spit on my ‘clof,’ Mommy!!!”

Punctuating all of this was my four year old’s voice in the background calling out incessantly, “MOMMY! WIPE ME!!”

It was as that moment that our Golden Rule was born.

 

This Is What True Love Is, or: Don’t Say I Never Did Anything For You, Kids

True love is setting your microwave timer for 2:30 pm, which is about half an hour before your kids are due to step off the bus. True love is having nightmares in your feverish delirium until then that you’ve missed the bus after you told your husband you would manage to do this one thing so that he could get a little extra work done after solo-parenting for two days. True love is scraping yourself off the couch when the timer goes off even though your head is about to explode and flames are licking at your innards. True love is crawling upstairs to the bathroom, washing your face, brushing your teeth, and even putting on a lick of makeup so as not to humiliate your children/scare the other neighbors and their children, who will also be stepping off the bus, with your ghoulish appearance.

Welcome home, kids. That’s about all the love I can muster for today. I’m going back to bed now.

Hope you have a wonderful weekend.

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