Today, I...

Today I… ...told my son he’d need to drive himself to practice. He told me my keys weren’t in my purse, so I… ...looked through my purse. No keys. So I… ...figured out that I must have locked them in the car WITH the valet key, so I… ...called my husband to ask him to leave work immediately to unlock my car so that my son could drive to practice. After my son returned, I… ...went out to retrieve my keys from the car. No keys. So I… ...dumped out my purse, and I… ...found the keys. Today my daughter asked what time her orthodontist appointment was, so I… ...looked in my calendar. No appointment. However, I… ...remembered moving her appointment to Thursday afternoon because cross country ended on Tuesday, so I… ...scrolled through my old emails and found the appointment verification: it said 4pm. But I had parent teacher conferences all day and into evening, so why would I do that? Ugh. So I… ...called my husband and asked if he could take my daughter to the orthodontist appointment I had foolishly moved and apparently not put on the calendar. He did. Then he texted me from the dark, locked orthodontist office that it was dark and locked. So I… ...scrolled through my old emails, and I… ...found that the appointment is next week. I am still trying to think of a way that I can mess up my dog’s schedule and then ask my husband to fix it unnecessarily. Ideas?

My Particular White Privilege

I know I’m not alone in the experience of loving my children so much that it scares the shit out of me. This started, of course, before they were even born. I was scared for them when I had the prenatal tests done. I worried about what I was eating and what I was (or, more to the point, was not) drinking. And it only got scarier from there. I went through a phase when I was sincerely worried that one of them would fall into a pit toilet in a campground, and I never settled in my mind what I would do if one of them fell in. If I jumped in after, would I land on them? Then how would we both get out? Should we camp with a rope ladder? I am thankful that now that the smaller of the two is almost my size, this is unlikely to happen. But it doesn’t mean they are safe. It doesn’t mean I worry less. There are car accidents. There are school shootings. There is meningitis. There are bad people and bad choices. There are things they are missing out on and things they aren’t doing but should.

Today we exercised a bit of the worry and then let go drill that is parenting. Because of the pandemic, the traditional cross country camp was canceled. For reasons based mostly on his own personality, my son, whose high school identity is a member of the cross country and track team, didn’t run when the team was not an option. I was happy, then, when two other boys initiated a three-person run. My son just turned 16 but--partly due to the pandemic and partly to his laid-back personality--he hasn’t yet gotten his driver’s license. So when he proposed that he bike to the trailhead so that he could be responsible for bringing himself home, a part of me admitted that this is the natural evolution of parenting. He should be allowed to take on that responsibility. I confess, though, that I worried. I talked to him about a safe biking route. I was worried about him getting hit by a careless driver. I worried he wouldn’t actually wear his helmet. I worried that he wouldn’t lock up his bike. And here’s where my particular privilege comes into the story: I didn’t worry that the police would see him biking or running and assume he was a criminal. The riots happening across the country, including in my area, did cross my mind, but he wasn’t going to a protest. He was going running on a trail with two other guys. He is a skinny white teen on a bike (with a helmet, I hope.)

God, or whatever you want to call Her, has a funny way of pointing out our weaknesses. I’ve been praying to be different. To be who the world needs me to be. Ha. Over lunch, I asked my son how his run was. “Really weird” was his answer. It turns out he arrived before his friends and was waiting for them at the pavilion at the trailhead. As he stood there, half a dozen police cars arrived in the parking lot. The police got out of their cars and came up to him. They asked him what he was doing there. He told them he was waiting for his friends to go for a run. They asked where he had come from. He showed them his bike. They asked him for identification. He doesn’t, as I mentioned earlier, have a license, but he did (thank goodness) have his school ID in his phone case. He showed it to the officers. They nodded and backed off. They said he matched the description of someone they were looking for, but it wasn’t him. Later, they asked him and his friends to call 911 if they saw a guy of around 30 with a beard and a broken foot. My son is amused that he might be mistaken for such a person--a kid of 16, with no facial hair yet, running. How did they mistake him for that?

And this is where my mother’s heart and my trying-to-be-antiracist heart collided: if my son wasn’t a white student at a well-funded all-white high school, that might have ended differently. My son asked the police what the guy was wanted for and was bummed that they wouldn’t tell him. My son has never been taught to be nervous around cops. My son stood there, amused at the oddity of the situation. My son has never seen a friend, a brother, an uncle, a father, or a neighbor stopped or treated suspiciously by the police. He didn’t act nervous. He didn’t try to run away. He tried to engage the police officers in conversation. He was curious, not afraid. I have never had to have a talk with him about how to act around the police, how to not get shot or kneeled on or beaten by the people he knows are there to protect him. The only time he’s ever seen a family member have an encounter with the police was during an ice storm when I backed into a delivery truck and the delivery man called the police. The policeman told off the delivery guy for being rude and called me “ma’am” and assured me that everything was OK and that people make mistakes, especially in ice storms.

If my son was a black man, all of those things would probably be different, starting with what I worried about when I watched him ride away. No, starting with how he felt about police before he rode away.

My heart pains me in imagining the different reality of every mother of color in America today. And last year. And for the last 300 years. 

I am not sorry that the interaction between my son and the dozen police officers who accosted him this morning in a forest preserve turned out the way it did. I love my son too much to wish otherwise. The point of all of this is that I want to live in a world where every mother can carry on worrying about bike helmets (and maybe pit toilets) and not that should her son slightly resemble someone accused of a crime, he might not come home at all.

The one in which both of my kids beat me in a 5K

Tonight my kids and I ran a 5K at Mooseheart (in the dark because it showcases their holiday lights display.) I haven't run much the last three weeks because of my hamstring, and it's back to not feeling good after going from stand-still to somewhat race pace. I finished in 25:37, which in a small race was good enough for 6th place woman. I am grateful that I can do that and grateful that instead of beating myself up over how I'm slower than I once was, I can be grateful that I'm faster than I was more recently. It's a respectable time. But what I'm more grateful for is when we were walking to the starting line, and my kids walked off together to start near the front of the pack, talking, looking strong and fast and completely in control of the situation. (As it turns out, they were and they weren't. Neither had run since the end of their respective seasons, which was almost a month ago for Adam and almost two months ago for Gretchen, so neither ran as well as they thought they would. Afterward, Adam said that if this had been at the end of the cc season, he could have won. He got 6th. G did, actually, win 1st girl in the 12 and under category and was 4th woman overall. At the end of her season, she still would have been 3rd, though.) Both kids beat me. This is beautiful to me not because they are stand-outs--they aren't--but because they are just good enough to feel empowered to walk up to the front of a race, to run until they hurt (G was hurting pretty badly), and to see themselves as runners. I feel, perhaps foolishly, that identifying themselves as runners will, to some degree, innoculate them from some dumb decisions in their teen years. Not all, of course. But if you see your body as a thing that runs, you don't put really bad stuff in it. If you see your body as a thing that runs, it doesn't matter what the opposite sex says of it. If you see yourself as part of a team, it doesn't matter if there are other crowds you aren't part of. I am also grateful that running brings them closer together.

Both of my kids can run faster than I can. Tonight I'm grateful for my own running, but I'm just as grateful for theirs. 

The things we lose

I often think about how fragile all of life is. One day you are a competitive triathlete, the next, bam! your foot is broken for the rest of your life. One day you wake up early to exercise, sneeze(!), and then can't move at all for weeks/months and find yourself a season and a half later wearing a compression corset and not even allowed to do laundry. Or you are driving home from work, and someone else is tired or on their phone, and all of life is over. Then there is my grandma, who has rapidly progressing dementia and was transferred to a nursing home yesterday. Once obsessively neat and somewhat over-involved to the point of nosiness, she has lost the ability even to know what to do in the bathroom or when to wake up. She will soon forget how to swallow. In her dementia she has said things I know the real Grandma would regret and has damaged the relationships with her children. My mom has lost her mother. Sooner or later, quickly or slowly, we all lose everything we think we own, everything we think we are. What you have today is a gift, and it could be gone tomorrow, or even later today. When I was a teenager, my grandpa thought I was unnecessarily dark for thinking things like this. And yes, these things are sad, but they are also true. I think such thoughts are both dark and light. I think most people could do with a bit of reverence for what they have and appreciation of the fact that it is temporary. All of it.

However, maybe my grandpa's point was that there is such a thing as taking the fragility awareness too far. My kids cried themselves to sleep last night. This is perhaps the sort of thing that bothered my grandpa. They weren't crying about my grandma, as that is almost too big for them to understand. They were crying about an eighty-five cent piece of rubber.

Adam won the coloring contest at school yesterday. He was enormously pleased. This makes two years in a row of coloring victories for him, and we take our victories where we can get them. Adam doesn't spill everything that goes on in his day like some kids do, but yesterday he came home so happy he was babbling. He did well on the Wordmasters competition, and his classmates had voted his coloring the best for the second year in a row. He gave me the blow by blow on the voting and how Heidi was a close second with only two votes less than him, how time had been called when he still had one section left to color, how someone knocked over a water bottle on his prize-winning work and how the teacher had hung it to dry and inadvertently torn a little piece of the paper in doing so. The prize was a little rubber duck in an innertube. He told me everything imaginable about this duck: how one girl had wanted to pet it because it was so cute even though it was made of rubber and who wants to pet rubber?, how it had acquired its name (Squeaks,) what the other choices had been and why he had chosen as he did. He made each of us guess the name, even after we had heard the previous guesses. He played with it all evening. He wanted it to eat dinner with him outside on the deck. I don't allow toys at the table, but he was so enamored of this duck, and it was rubber, and we were eating outside for the first time, so I said OK. Gretchen went upstairs and got a rubber duck to eat with her too. As soon as they were done eating, the kids got up and were dancing around the deck throwing their ducks in the air and catching them. Then they started to see how high they could throw them. About a minute before it happened, I thought in my head, "I hope that doesn't go on the roof." I decided that no, Adam would be smarter than that. Nope. He threw it up, and it didn't come down. He turned and caught my eye, and when my face confirmed that yes, the duck was gone, his face crumpled and he started to cry. Oh well, we told him, maybe it will come down in a hard rain. (I don't think it will.) We don't have a ladder long enough to reach the second story, and even if we did, I'm not sure we would risk climbing on the roof for a rubber duck. Life is fragile, remember.

Adam was a mess the rest of the night. Gretchen kept trying to make him feel better by fetching his other rubber ducks. (By the way, I didn't realize that Adam has a rubber duck collection, of sorts. What?) Finally Adam said he didn't want all of his toys downstairs and please stop. So she did. But she kept bringing up to Adam how sorry she was about Squeaks, how sad it was, how much she missed him too. Then Adam would start off crying again. Finally I suggested to Gretchen that she just not bring it up any more because it was making Adam sad to keep thinking about it. Then she started to cry because she had made Adam feel worse. She wouldn't stop crying either. So by the time they were in bed, both kids were sobbing, one because "I just miss Squeaks so much!" and the other because she had wanted so badly to help with the grief and had made it worse.

Sometimes it helps to move our minds away from the true tragedies to the ones we can hold in our hands (or throw on the roof.) We all went to bed last night somber at the thought of how quickly and thoroughly joy can transform into sorrow, the fullness of having into the hole of loss. We woke up to blossoms on the crab-apple tree but know that winter will come again soon enough. How fortunate for us, though, who once had grandparents who took us camping and taught us to play pool. How fortunate we went and learned when we could. How wonderful to have won the contest, how fun were those hours of victory. And how lucky for us, now, to be watched over by a little duck who reminds us to handle with care the treasures of today.

Another Lesson on Lessening

This afternoon found me making sugar cookie dough (to make into shamrock cookies later) while my son "played" with his microscope. We looked up rotifers on the internet because he was looking at some prepared slides, and then we looked at salt and sugar and human hair and paper and a piece of carrot that I hadn't cleaned off the table after Adam ate lunch. (Do the benefits of doing nothing never end?) Playing with his microscope was Adam's idea, as was what he is now doing: shooting baskets out on the driveway in full winter gear amid the occasional snow flurries. Several times while looking at things he didn't understand, Adam said, "I really like this microscope,” and “I like the cross section slides the best.” That kid can make me more furious than anyone has since my sister grew up, but he also can be source of pure delight and wonder. I am here to take a teensy bit of credit for that, in a sort of negative way. I think the magic of this afternoon was more about what I did not do than what I did.

Not long ago a friend who also has a third grader remarked that I am good at fostering my children's ability to play imaginatively. I have been thinking about whether or not this is true. I was good at imaginative play when I was young, but I am not particularly good at it now. I read to my kids. Mostly, though, I do nothing in particular to make them play as they do, with microscopes and legos, inventing new board games and "talking" their various little animals and cars, making up songs and putting on shows, organizing and reorganizing football cards, making obscure (and extremely non-representational) artwork out of pipe cleaners and tape and markers and then "selling" their art in a "grocery store". So today, when I watched my son engaged in an act of spontaneous inquiry, I thought about how such a thing came about. I haven't mentioned his microscope, well, ever. In fact, I had forgotten that he had received one from his grandparents on his 8th birthday.

Although it's far too easy to forget it as I plan which summer camps and classes my children will attend in the next couple of months, as everyone I know with a third-grade boy frets about which baseball team he will be on this spring, as I listen to parents discuss who is in the advanced and enriched program and as the school administers standardized tests, my accidental secret to raising kids who come up with their own imaginary games and come downstairs with their microscope and say, "Can I do this now?" is to do nothing.

Nothing. An afternoon in which we didn't go anywhere. We didn't have any athletic events. We didn't invite anyone over or fill up the house with false stimuli in the form of TV or video games (since we don't really own a usable version of either.) After lunch, Gretchen needed a nap, and I lay down on the couch with a book, and Adam roamed about for a few minutes until he saw his microscope in his closet. That's it. That's my secret. I was doing nothing.

Nothing is pretty darn easy, I must say. I was dozing off, in fact. But nothing also takes courage and practice. I will confess that on this chilly damp Saturday, I had two back-up plans: a lego train exhibit at the library and a parade. And maybe I would have made us do one if not both if Gretchen had not clearly needed a nap after spending the night with my mom last night. And it was with reservations that I canceled both plans in favor of what my kids really needed: down time. Living in a wonderful community, as we do, where on any given weekend there are dozens of fun and/or educational activities and facilities available, the temptation is to think that if we aren't out soaking up as much stimulation as possible, I am not being the absolute best parent. But the truth of parenting is more complicated than that.

I am not advocating parents doing nothing ever. My children are generally well behaved because I am intentional and constant in ensuring they are. I try to expose them to a variety of activities and cultural events. Tomorrow we have one thing after another: church followed by birthday party followed by basketball game. My son plays a sport pretty much every season and takes piano lessons, and my daughter takes a dance class and a gymnastics class. But starting when my son was a toddler and we started to sign up for little park district classes and sports and preschool, I carefully guarded one day a week to not sign up for anything. I had an instinct that there was something as valuable about time alone as there is in engagement. I now have a day of the week when my daughter has nothing, and as much as she looks forward to Mondays because of ballet and Thursdays because of gymnastics, and as much as she enjoys preschool, she also celebrates Tuesday because she can hang around and play in her pajamas and doesn't get rushed off anywhere when she is in the middle of an imaginary drama. It isn't that all of the other things my children are signed up for are not wonderful and valuable experiences for them, it's just that I must remind myself to hold back a bit, to worry less about cramming everything into one short childhood and occasionally let what they are learning in their structured activities blossom into something that is their own. And instead of feeling guilty that I sometimes need some downtime myself, I need to remember that it's OK to say that I am going to read for a bit, or cook, or sweep the floor. It's OK to not be constantly playing with or transporting or teaching my children. Sometimes--OK, often--they are far better at engaging themselves in meaningful play and learning than any adult could be.

I need to remember this and remember to occasionally lie on the couch. Sometimes the best of everything that I can offer my children is less of everything.

"And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? If then you arenot able to do so small thing as that, why do you worry about the rest?" --Luke 12:25-26

All I Can Do Is Walk Him to the Bus Stop

My son is eight. He is, for the most part, a calm and responsible boy. He can get carried away with silliness. He sometimes cries about ridiculous things, like the need to wear jeans to school when it is 20 degrees outside. But I trust him as much as I would trust any eight year old. Even so, I have taken to walking him to the bus stop most mornings. I do this partly for him because he is the only one at the bus stop in the mornings. But if I examine my motives carefully, I realize I don't think that being alone at a bus stop is such a terrible thing. The ability to be alone is quite valuable, in fact, and alone for two minutes while waiting for a bus filled with peers is probably not entirely a bad thing. So I have come to realize that, mostly, I am walking Adam to the bus for myself.

I walk my son to the bus because if I don't, I stand at the front door and watch him cross the street and then walk away, out of sight. He walks confidently but without deliberation, as though this is what he does on a normal day, as though there never was any question of him walking down the sidewalk to the bus stop, getting on a bus driven by a stranger (granted, it's the same stranger every day,) and then spending the bulk of his day somewhere other than home with me. As he walks, I see double: I see my dependable and intelligent "big boy" going off to be dependable and intelligent where all the other kids his age are; but I also see my baby, my toddler, my preschooler, and he is walking away, going off without me, leaving me. Both sights are irrefutably true. I must let my child go out into the world because I want him to learn to be independent and to learn about the magic of words and numbers and the stories of our history and the marvels we think we know through science. But I must also accept that my baby is just walking away. My toddler is leaving. He is going off into a life that will be his and not mine, that he will control and I will, decreasingly, only influence. He doesn't need my hands to hold him up any more, and he isn't afraid to stand on a corner by himself and then get on a bus and not look back at his mother, standing alone and watching.

Today a broken and bent man went into a school full of children like my son, children whose parents scolded themselves for being silly enough to almost weep every morning when their brave dependable children walked out into the world, and did the worst thing I can imagine a human doing. There, but for the grace of God, go I. And one can't help but know that even with the grace of God, people are there already. I can't imagine there is a parent in America today who isn't wearing the clothes of the parents in Connecticut, who isn't completely undone by empathic pain, who doesn't look at the school pictures of their children hanging in the hall or at the top of the stairs and HURT to the point of near-paralysis, and who isn't thinking of how a person could, before she even knew what was happening, lose everything. How can any of us ever be brave enough to let our children go out into the world? I really don't know.

And yet, I also know that I must. If I love my children--and I do--I will eventually have to let them cross the street by themselves, even if there are reckless drivers in the world, because I want their world to be larger than my modest suburban house and yard. I will have to let them get on the school bus and spend a day at school because I want them to be able to understand the marvelous world they live in and the mostly marvelous people who share it with them. The horrible horrible truth is that I can walk my son to his bus stop every morning, but unless I am willing to force him to grow up in fear, unless I am willing to sacrifice all of the brilliant things he might become and the fantastic journeys he might take during the life ahead of him, I have to let him get on the bus by himself.

Those of us who are in the season of advent have an uncomfortable mingling of Good Friday and Christmas today. Our streets are lined with lights and wreaths, preparing a path, lighting the way, and yet we watch our brothers and sisters as they hang on their crosses and ask how God can allow such pain. My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? And yet, since I became a mother, since I felt my son's presence in my womb, for me, Christmas and Easter have become inseparable. Yes, I await that moment of pure joy Christmas Eve when "Silent Night" becomes "Joy to the World," that moment when I transcend hope and actually believe that God is with us, that the kingdom is near, that swords will be beat into plowshares, that "they shall never harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain." But I also think of Mary giving birth alone, save for a man she had only recently married. I think of Mary loving her baby and then watching him grow up and then.... And I think of God, who knew humanity pretty well by then and still let his whole heart be born flesh--the kind of flesh that is first a helpless and dependent baby, the kind of flesh that must be never out of reach of Mama and then eventually learns to walk on his own, the kind of flesh that eventually must go out into the world if He is to experience life in its abundance, if He is to make a difference on this unreliable planet among broken, bent, and hurting humans.

If you've ever watched a beloved child walk down the street to a bus stop, Christmas is equal parts wonder and terror. He will get hurt. He will be grieved, perhaps even unto death.

Lord, have mercy on us.

Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, "This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed--and a sword will pierce your own soul too." --Luke 2:34-35

Team Chickpea Piccata: Some Thoughts on Deliberately Falling Short

“The true object of all human life is play.  Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.” –G. K. Chesterton

“If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.”  --Jean Piaget

“Imagination rules the world.”  --Napoleon Bonaparte

Comparisons are the death of joy.  I know this.  I know quite well that I ought to go about living my own life the best I can and not worry myself with what anyone else has or does.  Competition, however, is contagious, and it’s a difficult disease to shake.  You would think that abandoning my career and for the better part of a decade earning $0, and that having my running career taken down by a chronically broken foot, and generally doing and having nothing lauded or glamorized or even compensated by our current culture would go a long ways towards breaking me of measuring myself against others, but such a thought underestimates the depravity of human nature.  There are endless ways to keep falling short, even if you protest that you are not really running the race.

The issue I am currently wrestling with is how much is enough.   Likely, the level of enough is different for every family and within each family, every kid.  Still, I think every kid probably has a level that is too much.   Every year it feels like more and more kids are doing everything available, and in an affluent suburb, that’s a lot.  Kids are in soccer—and not just regular soccer, travel soccer with foot skills classes and special audition-only tournaments—and baseball and swim team and Spanish class and piano lessons and scouts.  I feel like Adam is in plenty.  He’s in “recreational” soccer and cub scouts and takes piano lessons.  But all of his friends are in those things and baseball and some sort of tutoring as well.  Maybe football too.  Most are now on “travel” soccer teams.  Today I overheard one mom moaning/bragging that her eight-year-old is on two travel teams and a baseball team.  If you talk to the parents of these over-scheduled children, they will claim that they are doing it for one or both of two main reasons: (1) the child’s friends are all on those teams, and (2) if the child does not play every sport every season, and if he/she is not on the best teams now, he/she will not make the high school team(s). 

Now for my confession: sometimes, I believe these parents.  Sometimes I worry that my son is getting behind by not playing fall ball when the rest of his baseball-playing classmates are.  Sometimes the competitive part of me wonders if I am, when he is only eight years old, causing my son not to “make” the high school soccer team by keeping him in “recreational” soccer while all of the other kids who ought be his teammates and competition are now in travel soccer.  (Side rant: the travel soccer thing annoys me for other reasons too.  If we all just stayed here, the competition would be of the same level.  Instead, people are giving up their weekends to play teams whose members live in our town but on a field 90 minutes away.  And they’re paying a thousand dollars to do so.  Why? Because all of the good teammates and competition have gone to travel teams.  If we all just stayed here, we all could just stay here.  Seriously, folks, get over yourselves.)

Of course, there are all sorts of other ways I fall short of perfect.  Recently, I was at a meeting in a house that was probably close to twice the size of mine and decorated like a model home.  No, much more nicely than a model home.  I was in constant awe.  There were pictures in the bathroom, and they were hung in painted rectangles (perfect perfect rectangles) that matched the matting of the pictures.  The soap and hand towels matched the paint and the matting as well.  And that was just the bathroom.  Moreover, the house was immaculate.  Not a stray anything.  Every surface—and there were a lot of surfaces—was polished and shiny.  No dust on the framed mirrors.  No sock fuzz on the carpets. No toys.  Not even any toy boxes.  No papers.  Of course I didn’t go exploring around the house, so it’s possible the upstairs was grimy and chaotic, but I really doubt that was case.  Gretchen, who did go upstairs to play, told me that she hopes she can go back there someday because the house was even more like a castle inside than it was outside.  I wonder: how is such a life possible? 

How do other people live these lives?  And, because it’s really all about me after all, why do my children and I seem unable to pull it off?  Why are there piles of papers that I don’t have any idea what to do with but am afraid to throw away?  When should I be scrubbing the kitchen floor and tile walls (not that   I have these) and polishing the bathroom counters?  Do my kids have more toys than other kids, since the toys in my house seem not to all have a place to go other than the floor?  Frankly, I suspect that even if my son was on three travel teams, he still wouldn’t be the best soccer player in the third grade.  He’s small and neither particularly fast nor aggressive.  Nothing I do is likely to change that.

I know there is no point in making these comparisons.  In the end, when I’m, say, eighty, I don’t think it’s going to matter to me that my floor was dirty or my mantel was dusty or that my mirrors were splattered with soap and toothpaste.  And, let’s be honest, some of our kids are not going to be on the high school soccer and baseball teams, and that’s OK.  Really.  Some of them (gasp) might not want to be on the high school soccer, basketball, and baseball teams.  Furthermore, when I pull out my rational self for a few minutes and think through this thing, I suspect that it’s too early to either predict or prepare for those years-away try-outs.  If I’m being completely logical, do I think that playing fall ball in third grade is going make that much difference in Adam’s baseball playing two years from now, much less six or seven years from now?  No.  I don’t think it will.  What I actually believe is that there is far more to be lost than there is to be gained.

For example, the other night while I was making dinner—and I’ll return to that activity in a moment—my children got to (read: had to) play by themselves.  Adam had already had a piano lesson; Gretchen had already taken a nap.  We had already had some time together for snacks and a trip to meet Adam’s new teacher and discuss his allergies.  And so my children had something they would not have if they were on multiple sports teams: down time. 

Segway to a snapshot of our home: our dining room is neither elegant nor neat.  We have a big indestructible table covered in colored paper and cardboard, markers and crayons, scissors and tape and popsicle sticks and googly eyes.  We have a play kitchen and a lego table, and the floor is often strewn with plastic food and lego blocks and pretend money and a few stray dominoes and other detritus of childhood.  The chaos of that room often makes me cringe and sometimes makes me angry.  Interestingly enough, however, the response the room more often than not garners from visitors (at least visitors of a certain type) is, “This room is awesome!” 

The chaos of the room more accurately reflects the mind of my youngest than any of the rest of us, although all of us are prone to leaving things where we last used them when we get distracted by (or startled into) the next activity.  Gretchen, though, lives in a world of constant imagination, a world with multiple simultaneous plotlines and lots of made-up songs.  During this one late afternoon, she wandered past the lego table and decided to set up a petting zoo.  She built a number of enclosures that were neck-high to the various animals she was going to display.  She built a slide entrance for the visitors, so they could get in but the cows could not get out.  She mounted pretend lights on tall pillars so that the zoo could stay open past sunset.  She surrounded the penguin enclosure with cooling blocks.   The longer she played, the more details she thought out. 

Adam had returned to the play he had started on a previous afternoon.  He took our big tub of plastic animal figurines and sorted them into teams: the snakes, the frogs, the birds, the sea creatures, the wild dogs and cats, etc.  Then the teams competed in a baseball tournament.  He would periodically call out to me the current score.  On the evening in question, the frogs were winning, although the birds, being able to fly, are usually very good at fielding.  Yes, he could have been at real baseball practice then, had I signed him up for fall ball, but I couldn’t help but think that he has many years ahead of him for organized sports and likely far fewer years to make up a new world, to “believe” that the frogs could play the birds and win, to govern the rules not just of the game but of nature and physics as well.  You can’t sign your child up for imaginary play, but you can sign him up out of it.   

Meanwhile, I was making chickpea piccata over mashed cauliflower on a bed of arugula.  We had roasted squash and zucchini on the side and fresh blueberries and wheat-free, dairy-free chocolate chip zucchini cake for dessert.  It took some time, yes, but the end result was the sort of dinner I wish I could get in a nice restaurant but usually cannot.  I couldn’t help wonder if the people whose children are on two or three travel sport teams at a time ever eat that way, much less every night.  Doug commented to me recently that as he stands in line at grocery stores, he compares what most people buy to the food in our cart. (I confess I do the same, in a shamefully self-righteous way.)   Other people, he said, buy a lot of processed food: chicken strips, pizza rolls, crackers, fish sticks.  It’s quick and easy, no doubt, and it doesn’t mess your beautiful kitchen.  Likely, people eat that way because they don’t have time to chop and sauté, to study recipe books, to plan menus in advance, and then to wash several loads of dishes when dinner is over.  Likely, they do not read labels because their children are not allergic to wheat, milk, eggs, tree nuts, fish, and shell fish.   Perhaps they never think about the impact they are having on the environment by supporting factory farming, the over-production of genetically modified corn, and chemically processed and over-packaged food-like products.  Unfortunately, somehow we’ve come to believe that by making such decisions, we are prioritizing our children’s futures—namely, their chances of making the high school soccer and baseball teams—while failing to recognize that such decisions, in fact, only look towards a few years of sports competitions and not the long-term health and survival of the people we claim to love.

That night, I surveyed my messy house: the kitchen covered in dirty or air-drying dishes, the dining room covered in half-completed craft projects and a lego zoo, the family room set up as a baseball diamond with the birds in the field and the frogs lined up in their batting order, the shelves and bags and tables over-flowing with books and magazines and homework .  My kids did not get “ahead” at anything that evening.  Had someone come to our house, they would not have been impressed by either my domestic prowess nor my interior design skills.  For that moment, though, I thought that  maybe by making dinner and making my kids amuse themselves, we all came out ahead anyway.

Summertime, and the Living is....

**I wrote this almost two months ago and just now got up the courage to post it.  Tomorrow, or soon, I will tell you what I did about moving up.  Or sideways.

June 5-8, 2012

This feels like a hard confession to write, possibly because I want to be someone other than who I am. I do NOT want to be one of those parents who complain about summer and school being out, especially not at the beginning of the first week of summer vacation. Yesterday there was one hour of school, and by dinnertime I was already dreading the rest of the summer. The whining. The bickering. The constant constantness of children. They talk all the time, keeping me from my own thoughts, and yet they do not add any new information. The talk is just sound, biologically and diabolically designed to be impossible to tune out. It could be used as a form of long-term torture by the government, if amendment VIII to the constitution didn't forbid the use of cruel and unusual punishment. This morning I went on an almost two-hour bike ride, arriving back home at 8am. By 8:30 I had already sent my son to his room because I just couldn't stand the constant little jabs and insults and taunts directed at his sister. I was reminding myself on my bike ride, to psych myself for another day, that really he's a good kid. Compared to any other eight-year-old boy I've come across, he's really quite kind and focused and gentle. But he's an eight-year-old boy. Boy, oh boy, is he an eight-year-old. And the summer stretches out long long long before us.

So here I am, dreading summer. It doesn't help that my foot--the one on which I had surgery last year--is killing me again, on top of the sprained back and broken rib, of course. The sprain and the break are normal and almost healed. The foot is completely mysterious. I wasted a year of my life on it and then on surgery, and it's not better. So summer is taunting me like an eight-year-old brother intent on making me scream.

But injuries aside, I find myself dreading summer--not the summeriness of summer, but, specifically and horribly, all of the time spent entertaining and meeting the legitimate and made-up needs of children. Yesterday, well before dinner, I was suddenly transported back twenty-some years to before I was old enough to have a "real" summer job and did babysitting/nanny jobs in the summer. I remember one job in particular that was most of a workday watching a little girl named Allison, and maybe her brother, although I only remember the girl for sure. I have nothing in particular to say about the girl. I don't remember her doing anything horrible. I don't remember anything particularly wild or disobedient or difficult about her. She was probably a normal kid, maybe seven or eight years old. The thing I remember is that in spite of her being a nice enough kid, I really did not enjoy my babysitting career. I counted the hours, the minutes even, until I was off duty. And I felt that way about most of my day-time babysitting gigs. The night-time gigs I would count the hours and minutes until bedtime. And in the larger scheme of my life, I was counting the weeks until the job was over, the months until school was back in, the years until I could do something else with my life, something a little more...stimulating?

Fast forward through the rest of high school and college and graduate school and all sorts of interesting classes and "valuable" education, and here I am, stuck in more-or-less the same situation, always busy, always in demand, and at the same time so bored I sometimes consider whether I should beat my skull against the wall just to be doing something else, something at least slightly more interesting. In some ways my current situation is a bit better: there is no ambiguity about what is allowed, or at least less, since I am the one who decides such things, and there is no fear that the children are hoodwinking me that the real parents are OK with such-and-such. I can change the scenery: decide that we ARE running errands or going to a park. Sometimes I can actually talk to another adult if we meet at a park, although, mind you, those conversations tend to be interrupted repeatedly by requests to play on the slides or to push the swings or for snacks. But in many ways, the parenting gig is even more hopeless than babysitting. There is no off-duty coming in a couple of hours. The end of the "work day" means...nothing. And there are no weekends. The job is not going to end, at least not for many years. You don't walk out of the house at the end of the day or week with a pile of cash. When you go on vacation, the kids come too, and they bicker and whine and ask for snacks from the back seat. Worst, though, is the knowledge that this is it. I don’t have some brilliant and interesting career ahead of me.  In spite of my masters degree, I’m not even confident I could get a job if I had time for one.  This is the fulfillment of all of my teenaged fantasies about the future, about the time when I have a graduate degree and a husband and my own life. Joke's on me. I may have a graduate degree, but it turns out the golden era of my adult life is almost exactly like the time when I was fourteen and helping someone else live her life. Only now I don't have dreams of the future to sustain me, and I can't go hang out with my teenaged friends after dinner every night. The truth is that my life is so tedious most of the time that even when another adult arrives I have nothing to say interesting enough to engage in actual conversation. My current situation is so intensely boring that when I desperately dig around for some little tid-bit to offer up in the name of adult interaction, even my most interesting item causes the eyes of my listener to glaze over and elicits little more than an obligatory nod or grunt of assent before the would-be listener's attention reverts to whatever it can find of more interest.  I’ve taken to breaking ribs just to have a conversation topic. Apparently, that’s what I do when I’m bored.

My mom, the re-teller of family stories, has countless times told us and others how she knew I needed to be moved ahead a year in school: I started coming home every day with a new injury.  Once I had wedged myself into a garbage can.  Once I stuck my finger in a pencil sharpener to clean the crayon out of it.  I came home covered in band-aids with scraped knees and bumps on the head and a restless mental hunger that drove me to constant reading and badgering my parents into teaching me long division.  My first grade teacher didn’t find me a thrillingly exceptional student, but my mom, a very good mom, knew.  I was bored.  My physical well-being, not to mention my intellectual growth, necessitated that I be pushed ahead.  I needed a change.  I needed a challenge.  I needed to be using my strengths.

This week, as I sat in the podiatrists office waiting for an explanation on my mysteriously still very painful foot (I don’t feel satisfied that I received a good one,) I fumed about how in the space of approximately two months I’ve sprained my back, broken a rib, gotten two infections, and reinjured my foot.  Mother, I think, it is time to move up a level, to find something else to do with myself, some sort of challenge for my mind before I smash up my body beyond repair and start in on someone else.

When one is in elementary school, moving up a level can be a matter of simple math: in the case of my childhood, I moved from grade two to grade three.  In my current situation, math does not seem to be the answer.  For some reason I don’t think going from two children to three children would work quite as well.  No, it’s far more complicated and involves some difficult choices.  I will have to release some of the blessings of my current life in order to pursue another.  I’ll have to rebuild bridges that, if not burned, have certainly been neglected and fallen into extreme disrepair.

I don’t know what moving on looks like from here.  I only know that something has to change if any of us is going to come out of this summer unscathed. 

Mr. Awesome

Last night the kids played school. "Penelope" came home from the first day of school with a take-home folder and a form for me to fill out about my child. It was hand written by her teacher, "Mr. Awesome." Mr. Awesome was, appropriately, an awesome teacher. He sent home daily progress reports on how Penelope did with her soccer lessons and her xylophone lessons. He helped her make a craft: a flower in a flower pot that he himself cut out and decorated. School with Mr. Awesome is what all parents wish school could be for their children: full of creativity and excitement and plenty of individual attention. He's a dream come true.

When bedtime came, Penelope knocked on the door where Mr. Awesome was showering. He let her brush her teeth, wash her face, and go potty while he was in the shower. They talked, during these activities, about how it was that they share a bathroom. Turns out, one lives next door to the bathroom and the other lives right across from the bathroom. Both teacher and student were excited by this discovery. Mr. Awesome read Penelope her bedtime story, and when there was a little time left on the timer, he read her another.

After Penelope had gone to bed, Mr. Awesome confided in me that the next day there would be a new student Penelope's class. He was up after hours coming up with lesson plans.

My book club arrived late, but even after we were all gathered, someone noticed that Adam's bedroom light was still on. Mr. Awesome was supposed to set his timer for fifteen more minutes and then turn out the light. Recently, Mr. Awesome has discovered Roald Dahl and has been unable to stop reading Fantastic Mr. Fox even when he should be turning out the light. Mr. Awesome heard me coming up the stairs, and his light went out just as I was almost level with his door.

On the way to the camp-out today, Mr. Awesome was very pokey about getting dressed because it's really rather difficult to put on shoes and a sweatshirt with an open book in one's hand. He asked, finally, if he could take James and the Giant Peach with him to the cub scout camp-out. I warned him that there probably wouldn't be much time for reading and then said, "Of course." I understand completely. My insides are celebrating. Awesome.

Empty Space

This poem arrived in my e-mailbox today from Poem-a-Day:

Ghostology
by Rebecca Lindenberg

The whistler's
inhale,

the white space
between is

and not
or after a question,

a pause. Nothing
isn't song:
a leaf hatching
from its green shell,

frost whorling
across a windshield,

an open door
opening

Oh Lord, teach me to be thankful for the empty spaces. Help me to hear the silences as a part of the song.

I have never been one to deal well with emptiness. Or, rather, I have never been one to allow much emptiness to exist. On the rare occasion when I have chosen it, allowed emptiness can feel like a blessing.

I've been stiff and sore and oddly fatigued for the last week or two. I ran anyway. I thought maybe more running would make me feel better, more fit, more able to face the apathy and fatigue that seem to be haunting me.  Instead, I felt stiff and sore and sluggish while running more.  So I figured what I really needed was a good yoga class. Power yoga. Turns out that was NOT what I needed. I found myself unable to do some of the positions that I usually can do effortlessly.  Friday evening I was quite sore and quite stiff, so I planned to swim in the morning and see how that went before I planned my run. It was a big concession for me. By Saturday morning I was unable to move and nearly unable to handle the pain. For someone who runs and does triathlons for fun and who gave birth twice (once with pitocin) without pain killers, that's saying something.

And so I took Saturday off--mostly. I am a stay-at-home mom, a type-a, and an exercise addict, so taking a day off never ever happens. But it did. I stayed in bed for most of the morning. I got Gretchen dressed and sent the whole family out to do a Cub Scouts electronics recycling project without me. I slept, off and on, for most of the morning. I went downstairs for lunch, after it was mostly assembled by my husband. I did take Adam to his baseball practice, where I stood around, afraid to sit lest I get stuck and unable to get up. I came home exhausted and lay around some more. I slept through family dinner, which was OK since I had a dinner date with an old friend from high school. We had a delicious dinner followed by chocolate fondue and a walk that blistered up my feet but kept my back fairly limber. I had been invited to go see a friend's band play at a nearby bar, and although I wanted to see my friends there, I decided I had pushed myself far enough and went home to lie down again.

Sunday I marveled at how I had actually let myself off the hook multiple times. Realizing I could not bend enough to get into my swimsuit, I did not exercise. I didn't do the service project. I didn't make any meals or do any laundry or wash any dishes or floors. I considered the possibility that maybe the one who keeps me "on" those "hooks" is me. My husband picked up the slack, and he did it without accusation or complaint. My family did not eat as usual, but no one said anything about it. My friend never accused me of being wimpy for taking 20 seconds to stand up after dinner. The gym never called to ask why I hadn't come to swim. My running friends will be there next week and the week after.... Turns out, the emptiness was lovely. Freeing. And restful.

Of course, I couldn't repeat the performance on Sunday. I considered not going to church, not singing in the choir, but I went anyway. I sat through Adam's first piano recital, of course. I went through with the previously extended invitation to have friends over for pizza. Then when they wanted something other than pizza, I didn't hang myself all that high, but I did boil some pasta and heat up some store-bought pasta sauce. Nothing major. But not quite as empty as Saturday. I was not entirely off the hook.

Monday I woke up in much much worse pain. Saturday I didn't swim because I thought I couldn't bend enough to get into and out of my swimming suit. Monday I didn't swim because I was pretty sure I would get in the water (if I could get in the water, that is) push off the wall, immediately spasm, freak out, and drown. It seemed a poor risk.  Pain or no, I was going to have to be on duty again. Sure enough, while packing Adam’s lunch, I got stuck in the garage when I went to retrieve a juice box. I couldn't pull myself up the step without a railing. My legs wouldn't do it. Later, I cried, then coughed, then spasmed and screamed and hyperventilated, each while continuing the previous occupation. So I called the doctor.

The diagnosis: sprained back. Lumbar and sacroiliac. The treatment: rest.

Suddenly I find myself not only released from all of the activities that take up my time--kettlebell, running, swimming, yoga, laundry, washing floors, gardening, picking up after others, ridding showers of mildew, vacuuming, grocery shopping--but more or less forbidden them. Suddenly, what only days ago was freedom is now prison. A day off is lovely. Watching weeds invade the garden and dust gather and laundry piles grow is stressful. While I probably should take some time more regularly to be still and contemplate, I find that having nothing to do but be still and contemplate feels almost as painful as the injury itself.

To add to the emptiness, yesterday I was finally forced to face the reality that my covenant group is disbanding. I’ve seen it coming for a while. And most people are not coming to book club either. The plate that was, a few weeks ago, frustratingly full now has a fair amount of white space on it. I feel like suddenly most of me is empty space. In one week, I've lost most of my job, my covenant group, my running group, my yoga and kettlebell classes, and my race ambitions. I shouldn't even be sitting here writing, since sitting is one of the things that aggravates my back. I can’t sit and practice my horn or support the weight of it while standing. So what am I to do with all of this life I have?  More than once a day I find myself staring at nothing in particular or drifting off to sleep because the alternative is pondering the possibility or even likelihood that my existence is quite pointless.

Today I walked extra on the way home from preschool, walking being one of the few things I am allowed to do with myself. And, of course, I can think, not that I have that much to think about. I was struck, pretty forcefully, with the sudden understanding that I feel stagnant, stuck.  I recently read the autobiography of Beryl Markham, whose adventurous life in Africa was pretty much as far from mine as conceivable, and was stabbed by her assertion that “A life has to move or it stagnates.  Even this life, I think.  Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday.” Ouch.  I’ve been doing the same thing for eight years now.  I have a master’s degree, but I have spent more years doing housework than any other full time pursuit in my life.  Oh, sure, the childcare needs have slowly shifted as my children have become potty trained and able to eat solid food and have begun to have sports practices and homework.  And I do change the details from day to day: what I make for dinner, which load of laundry I do.  It’s like the scene in When Harry Met Sally where Harry questions Sally about her dull recurring sex dream in which a faceless man rips off her clothes and Sally says, “Oh sometimes I change it a little.”  Harry asks how, and she says, “What I’m wearing.”  Should I mention that I have worn pretty much the same clothes every day for the last eight years, varying a bit by season?

I don't want to admit that I've been bored more or less since I quit my job eight years ago, but there it is, whether I like it or not. I love my children. I find raising children challenging to the point of being almost impossible, and I will readily agree with anyone who (condescendingly or sincerely) declares that raising children is the most important thing a person can do, but even so, it doesn't provide the sort of constant intellectual stimulation I seem hardwired to prefer. I need something else.  I have filled up my time with other pursuits to supplement the chores: band, running, triathlons, choir, covenant group, Bible study.  In a time when my body forbids physical activity, and the people who would potentially provide mental stimulation via book club or covenant group or Bible study are too busy with their own lives to concern themselves with my restlessness, I cannot deny that I am, in spite of my full calendar, miserably aimless and empty.  I survive from day to day.  I make the dinner and process the laundry.  Then the next day I make another dinner and wash a different load of laundry.  A dinner that will be eaten and forgotten.  Laundry that will be dirty again in a couple of days.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Indefinitely.  For years.

Oh, I know I should appreciate the blessings I have.  As Warren Zevon would sing, “Poor, poor pitiful me.”  I have not only enough of everything, I have too much.  And I have to wash it.  Boo hoo.  I have the luxury of lounging around whining about existential things while other people are worrying about where to sleep, how to stay warm, and whether or not they will get a meal today.  Those are the kinds of worries that are real, and the kinds of priorities that make lives like mine and Beryl Markham’s seem cushy and arrogant when we want something else.

So I am sidelined.  I’m not going to starve because of it.  Rather, I should probably use this time of forced stillness to figure out which direction I should move when I am able to go again.  When most of the buzz of constant motion is silenced, when all of the activity I use to distract myself from the emptiness is put on hold, what is left?  Who am I underneath the things that I do?  Why am I here?  If, as Lindenberg claims, “Nothing/ isn’t song,” this injury, this perceived emptiness has value.  Eventually, the whistler will exhale.

It could always be worse

Yesterday, on the way home from visiting my grandmother, we toured an enormous dairy farm. The farm is so very very large that approximately 80 calves are born there every day. With multiple births an hour, they can make the birth process a tourist attraction, and so we were called into the birthing barn in time to see a cow deliver.

It began with what looked like a couple of little hoofs protruding from the cow's rear, just under her tail. As she labored and the feet came out further and went back in, of course some poop came out from pretty close to the same region we were all watching so intently. This was a fascinating development to my seven-year-old son, who happened to be seated between me and my mother. For some reason, he chose to ask his Nana his questions in an exchange that was pretty amusing. My four-year-old daughter was seated on the other side of my mom, and she was apparently listening in.

Son: Ew. There's poop coming out while she's having her baby.
Nana: Yeah, birth is messy.
Son: Were you messy?
Nana: I had to be cleaned up afterwards.
(Short pause.)
Son: Where did it come out?
(Pause.)
Nana: Between my legs. I'm not built just like a cow, so it's a little different.
(Long pause.)
Son: I'm glad I'm not a girl!
(Very long pause.)
Daughter: I'm glad I'm not a cow!!

Days Like This: Tar and Bleach Edition

Although this happened last spring, I decided to post it today, for my friend Jen, who will understand.

My husband is obsessed with our driveway. Twice a year he gets it sealed. I wonder if his zeal for driveway maintenance would be diminished at all if he had to seal it himself, but since there are apparently dozens of companies and individuals that want to do it for us, that is something I will probably never discover. As it is, it’s a minor inconvenience, in that the things in the garage are trapped in the garage for a day, and a rather minor expense. I have mentioned before that maybe we are being excessive and left it at that. I have enough other things on which to spend my petty irritation.

Monday was driveway sealing day, and since we had an early gymnastics class, I didn’t even have to worry about someone ringing the doorbell and reminding me to move my car, causing me to go out in my pajamas and crazy non-showered hair. When we arrived home from gymnastics, the driveway people must have just left. The driveway was glistening with a thick layer of perfectly even new tar. (Note: I’m not sure if what they seal driveways with is true tar, but for the sake of convenience, let’s call it that .) The driveway had been nicely roped off with florescent string and a sign. We parked in the street and walked up through the lawn to the front door. We stopped to smell the crab-apple blossoms, which were just peaking and about to scatter about the lawn in a shower of hot-pink, but all we could smell was tar. Lovely. I had to go to the bathroom, and my hands were full, so I unlocked the front door and went in, calling to Gretchen to follow.

I made it as far as the kitchen when I heard screaming. It was more of a fury scream than a pain scream, so although I turned and headed for the door, I was not filled with panic, and I was not running, and I yelled to Gretchen, “What’s the problem?” When she only continued to scream, I yelled a little more irritably, “Gretchen! What is the problem?”

You surely see where this is going. The problem, of course, was that Gretchen was covered with tar. For reasons known only to Gretchen and her omniscient God, and perhaps only one of those two, as soon as I had gone in the front door, Gretchen had gone over to the driveway. She didn’t get very far on its newly slimed surface before she slipped, skidded, and fell. Her brand-new white gym shoes were black. Her legs (thank goodness she was wearing a little leotard and no pants) were black, her hands were black, large portions of her pink coat were black, and even her face was smudged with tar. I know the rare child who really doesn’t care whether or not they are naughty or filthy or any manner of annoying or disgusting, but, thankfully, Gretchen is not one of them. She is perhaps exuberant and curious and opinionated and independent, but she doesn’t look for trouble most of the time. Somehow, it finds her. And so she was standing there surveying her hands and legs and shoes and screaming.

I’m sorry to say that when I surveyed her, scream is what I did too. Not the wordless shrieking issuing from my child but repetitions of “Why did you do that?” and “Don’t touch anything! Don’t touch anything!!” in escalating octaves. Oh, who am I kidding? There may have been some wordless screams of anger and frustration in there too. What a colossal mess. I’m surprised no one came out to investigate our mingled screams. I’m surprised we still have a rabbit infestation.

I went back into the house for a canister of wipes and managed to get most of the tar off of her hands and legs—enough, at least, to get her jacket and shoes off of her without spreading more tar. I had a little on the top of my shoe, and that was the only further casualty. She was still crying, and I was still telling her that her brand new shoes and her pretty pink jacket were probably ruined and she would have to wear them around with black on them and why would she do that? Then I took pity. She was sobbing and sobbing, tears running down her tarred face. To be fair, I could not remember specifically telling her to stay away from the driveway. I put in her the bathtub and scrubbed the rest of the tar off of her. Then I washed the tar out of the bathtub and put her in dry clothes and hugged and cuddled her until she calmed down.

Then I started in on the shoes and jacket. Lucky for us, very little tar had gotten on her leotard, and the part that had been tarred was already black. Small mercies. The shoes came pretty clean. The leather tops are more or less back to white. The fabric around the ankle openings is down to gray. The rubber around the bottom has been changed to more of a fluorescent green, but in all, they are not a complete loss. She is going to wear them the rest of the summer at any rate. Honestly, how long were they going to stay pristine anyway? They’re play shoes. Not play in the tar shoes, exactly, but if it wasn’t tar it was going to be sand or infield dirt or plain ol’ mud. The jacket was a larger project. I scrubbed with water. I scrubbed with soap. I called my mom, who, amazingly, did not know how to get tar out of fabric. We googled. I facebooked. I tried Goo Gone, which, for some reason, I had a bottle of in the basement. I got the black tar look down to a dark-grey very dirty look and left it to soak. Most facebook suggestions ended with some version of give up and get a new one.

While the jacket was soaking, I decided to continue on with the laundry in process. I transferred the dark load to the drier and put the white load in the washer. I added a bit of Clorox Ultimate Care bleach. I must not have put the bleach jug all the way back on the shelf because a few minutes later, when I was back to working on the tarred jacket, the bleach jug launched itself off the shelf and wedged itself behind the washing machine. I reached down to get it, but my arms are too short. I tried to reach it from under the set tub, which meant kneeling in a puddle of water from the drippy jacket, and found that my swimming shoulders are almost too broad to get between the sink legs. Feeling like I had done quite enough annoying household labor for one day (I had spent all of the pre-gymnastics morning fruitlessly trying to scrub and bleach the mildew stains out of my shower,) I went over to our family calendar and wrote “get bleach” in Doug’s color. I scrub showers, clean tar, and do the laundry. He can unwedge the darn jug of bleach.

I came out of the laundry room to ask Gretchen what she wanted for lunch and was assaulted by the sound of preschoolers singing “Saturday! Saturday!” in their shrill almost-off-key voices. The cabinets were practically rattling. Gretchen had just been given her new big-girl mattress and a CD player for her nightstand, and she was relaxing from the stressful tar-filled morning in her room. I did not find the din relaxing. So I shouted up the stairs for her to turn the music down. I shouted again. I screamed. The music was certainly too loud for her to hear me, so I stormed up the stairs and yelled into her room. She just looked at me with a scared and startled expression. Her eyes filled with tears. Suddenly, I felt like the worst mother on the planet. It was a jacket and shoes and a little noise, and what are those things in comparison to my beautiful, loving and joyful daughter? I turned the music down for her and hugged her for a long time and told her I would make her lunch and read her a story. It had been a long morning for both of us.

Just as lunch was almost ready, the alarm in the laundry room alerted me that I could shift the laundry again. I went into the laundry room to find a large puddle seeping out from under the washing machine. I had left a towel under the sink to catch the drips from the jacket, so I was confused. Crap. Don’t tell me, I thought, that the washing machine is leaking. Of all the days!!! But when I bent down to examine it, I noticed that it was not just water. It was thicker. Slimier. Smellier….

The cap on the jug of bleach had shattered in the fall, and of course the jug was not upright but on its side. Without a cap. And so a huge puddle of bleach had formed under the washing machine and drier, along the baseboard, and was spilling out into the main traffic area of the laundry room. Seriously. But it was lunchtime, and I have never needed a lunchtime quite so badly. So I closed the door on the laundry room and resolved that when my guests arrived, I would just say, yes, yes, my home does smell of tar and bleach. Long story.

When my covenant group arrived an hour later, they miraculously showed up with apple slices and brownies. More importantly, they helped me laugh about the whole day. It’s just stuff. It’s just one day. And it’s worth it, somehow. If this is the holy work to which I am called, then may God forgive me for having screamed in the midst of it.

And thank God for that returned sense of humor. I spent most of my morning cleaning tar and most of my afternoon cleaning up bleach. When my husband came home, asked about the “get bleach” on the calendar, and heard the whole saga, he asked, “Is the driveway OK?” He was serious. And yes, in case you are concerned, the driveway is going to make it.