Tag: parenting

May: No Reason and All the Reasons

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May is here again. This is the true end of the year. May is supposed to be spring but it’s actually harvest season. We see what has survived and what has grown. We cull what we can. We return year after year to witness the fact that time has continued to move.

Every year I’m surprised, although I own and use a calendar. Several, in fact. Still, I’m flattened by the rush of endings and the gatherings stacked atop one another. Cut off one celebration and two grow back in its place, fastening ever more ceremonies around your neck like beautiful cursed jewelry.

May gathers up loose threads with brassy pomp and circumstance before summer upheaval arrives with its wet bathing suits.

May is a complete disaster, is what I’m saying. Just look at the inside of my car if you need proof. My Toyota is a rolling evidence locker. A midden heap.

The rest of you, though? You look great. Hydrated and moisturized while you’re winding down, as it were. I salute you. May your linen pants remain crisp and your drinks be as lemon-wedged as you wish.

Me? I’m choking down noises that sound like a 1987 Buick trying to merge while going uphill.

I’m not cute enough to be winding down. May is about endings. Lasts and finals. All I can do is listen to one of my sons tell me that by the time he leaves for college, 90% of our time together is done. I’m not checking that math, thanks, because I’m busy remembering carrying him in after he fell asleep in the car, all dead weight and impossible trust

At night I collapse onto the couch so dramatically that heretofore missing objects launch out of my bra upon impact. Bobby pins, receipts, Cheez-Its, Chapsticks with missing caps. I am not proud of this, but leave it here for future historians who may appreciate the data.

I almost just typed, “Still, I love this time of year.” But I don’t. I mean, I recognize the ache of it, even if it knocks the wind out of me. I recognize that sense of subjective slow motion when something is ending. I recognize that my children have become themselves gradually, then all at once. That they have developed complex, glorious, kind lives, and I get to celebrate and make banana bread for them. No-reason banana bread. All-the-reasons banana bread.

Mostly though, it’s because I’m overbuying bananas these days. They darken as we rush to and from events. I always think we’re a household that will eat many bananas. We are not. We are a household that transforms bananas via neglect into baked goods.

We recently played Jackbox as a family. The prompt was “What is the name of a horse you wouldn’t bet on?” I answered “Last Place Monty,” which got me an appreciative snort from the kids, a noise I will cherish, to some extent. One child answered, “Beefs Wellington.” That won. The next day he wandered into the kitchen and lamented, “I should have gone with ‘Thelonius Glue, Sr.’”

There are entire sections of motherhood no one adequately explains beforehand, including the fact that one day your children may become funnier than you, and that you will feel a piercing gratitude for that.

Every week I begin my planning journal by writing “Do not waste your precious timing giving a single crap about what anyone thinks of you.” This is excellent advice that is fundamentally incompatible with motherhood. There are a few people whose opinions matter to me. My husband. My kids. The dog who watches all of us in case we sneeze weirdly and he needs to retreat. The cashier who sells me bananas when he absolutely should know better at this point.

Loving these people (not the cashier. Ok, maybe the cashier. Hey, Jerry.) requires presence, vigilance, mood-monitoring, remembering who needs new shoes and what size, and who suddenly likes bananas again.

And every May, no matter how tired we are or what strange treasures are embedded in my underthings or in the Toyota’s backseat, we all somehow find our way home. Banana bread. Better versions of jokes. It’s some holy version of “WTF.”

The B and Noble Men

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Title card with The B and Noble Men at the top, three cartoon lemons looking unhappy, and a small dragon.

The two men stood in the one spot conspicuously free of shelves. Open, unsacred, lifeless space, as far from books as it is possible to be in a bookstore. A no-man’s land of sorts, but there they stood in this patch of space meant for rearranging thoughts or deciding where to go next. At first glance, they seemed to be there to grab something quickly and leave, or perhaps to wait. In each other’s presence, a momentary reprieve from feeling out of place.

We, my daughter and I, were there to rearrange our thoughts, to mend our worn edges. Words might carry us someplace softer where we could escape into neatly bound pages where someone else’s problems — smaller or larger, didn’t matter — offered strange, familiar solace. The bookstore smelled of coffee and, in that section we were trying to pass through, cologne.

They were aggressively unremarkable, those men. Able to demand attention without effort, to compress the air around them into a self-satisfied density. Loud. Confident. Convinced. The kind of people who view their success as an inevitability, etched into marble, affixed in permanence rather than scribbled on the side of a red Solo cup.

Perhaps that was the cologne talking.

They stood in that bookless space, wearing athleisure wear of curated ease, possibly worn for the exertion of “watching the kids” for a bit.

Forgive me, sometimes I read too much into things. It was a bookstore, after all.

They were comfortable and loud, their presence as much volume as it was space, somehow sprawling across this nearly empty bookstore so close to closing. They were careless as they dismantled a woman one of them had encountered — socially, professionally, who knows? Didn’t matter.

“She had too much plastic surgery,” First Guy said. “Her face looked tight. Fake.” He sculpted the air with exaggerated movements. “She looked like a lemon,” he added, pleased with himself. “Which is fitting.”

Other Guy laughed. “Yeah. I totally get it.”

Encouraged, First Guy fumbled for more analogies, more ways to articulate how deeply unacceptable this woman was, what with her face and everything else about her. He pulled his features into grotesque imitations of whatever displeased him about her, which seemed to be quite a bit.

My face never keeps its mouth shut and must have betrayed me. It always does. A flicker of something, too small to name but enough to catch their attention. Disapproval, maybe. Or disgust. Some merciless and mirthless conveyance of this again?

I warranted enough attention for them to shift their bodies and pause their conversation, their gaze heavy.

What did they see? Stitches, scars, gravity, broken things, healed places of a full human?

Nah. Definitely another lemon. Or maybe a yuzu or a blood orange. I haven’t had work done on my body unless you count the pieces of bone, flesh, and pain-points removed, so they were left only the sour.

We considered each other. I’d guess they were thinking I was intruding without smiling. They would probably not guess I’d had another day of fighting tiny, bothersome dragons.

Their interest faded. Their laughter resumed, quieter now. Slick. Greasy.

I walked away to catch up with my daughter.

She stood in the Young Adult section trailing her fingers over the spines of books. She held herself carefully, her shoulders drawn inward in the way she does when she’s trying not to let disappointment show. Her fingers lingered on one book, then another. She’d had a hard day, the kind with sharp teeth and scales. The kind a mom can’t fix, except by standing between her and the world long enough to let her breathe.

We searched for books — anything, really — that offered comfort, distraction, or, failing that, instructions for building a trebuchet from empty bags of Nerds Gummy Clusters.

She didn’t notice the men. She didn’t register their voices lofting over the shelves. If she did, it was part of the din of the day.

I’d said nothing to them. Me. Lady Speak Your Mind.

Of course I didn’t. Because it wasn’t my place. Because the parking lot was dark. Because I’m not their mother. Because risk analysis. Because this is the way of things.

Strategy? Failure? Quiet calculus of motherhood?

If my daughter weren’t there. If it were daylight. If I were ferocious, less aware of what happens when certain men decide you’ve embarrassed them. Maybe I would have said something.

Probably not. But maybe.

But if I did, it would’ve been presented as a possible joke. Lemon Face clearly owes you an apology. How dare she. Big smile. Plausible deniability. Pointless.

But I didn’t. Of course I didn’t.

When we left, they were one shelf away from the self-help section. The Universe, perhaps also running on empty, only offered dad jokes.

We, my daughter and I, left without books and went home, a place where tiny, bothersome dragons give us passage and say, “We’ll catch you tomorrow.”

Morning

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1592-800

Now that the children sleep through my dawn tip-toeing over creaky floors, I am finding early mornings productive writing time. I am also slightly obsessive, because now I cannot sleep because the writing calls. My eyes open at 4:58 every morning, two minutes before my phone is set to vibrate me awake.

The routine these last 48 days works in its tedium. Sloppily pour coffee into comically over-sized cup, take a few deep breathes, and see if I can write three pages of anything — usually drivel — in under twenty minutes. My inner editor fortunately likes to sleep in, so at 5:00 it’s all words, no worries. Extraneous and self-indulgent? Welcome to the page! Weasely and unattractive? Sure, come on in. Tepid and fearful? The water is fine. Jump in.

A few minutes in, my Writer Brain flips on and takes my thoughts by the neck. “Stand up straight! Make yourself heard! Have fun!” It’s like improv on the page, at least the way I wanted improv to be. One idea following another, or sometimes one idea that only brushes hands with the previous idea in a way that makes no sense, but doesn’t have to. It just needs to be honest.

I write quickly to beat my inner editor, who I love and need, but she is fearful and precise. I try not to disturb her.

My children wake up. Sometimes after 750 words, sometimes after 2000, sometimes after I should have written 2000 but I’ve gotten caught up in distraction. Once they are up, my writing mind collapses in a heap, sometimes satisfied, sometimes not. If I do not make it to my desired 1667 (a number gleaned from NaNoWriMo) before I magically transform from a sparkly word weaver back into a mothering pumpkin, I try to keep that writing brain warmed up and nimble. It’s like when Olympic diving: there is a warming pool they go into between dives, trying to keep focused and ready, and not giving a flying fig if the entire world sees them pulling their swimsuits out of uncomfortable places.

If there is a gnarl in the writing, I try to unknot it while making breakfast, but I am unable to either devote enough attention to it or put it away completely, so I’m in a creative nether area that serves little purpose. It can lead to excessive grumpiness.

The kids also have routines, each one falling into habits that I can’t say are completely awful. The oldest comes and sits by me, curling luxuriously under a blanket, and reads a book. He doesn’t like to talk in the mornings, so we mutter a loving good morning to each other and continue meandering in our own thoughts. I can write while he’s here.

Middle child is all external, despite his rich inner life. While later in the day he can happily stare into space and daydream for long, satisfying minutes, in the mornings he realizes he’s gone nine hours without talking to anyone. There is much information he needs to offload. He begins talking to me before he’s even in the room. He continues thoughts from the day before or shares commentary on what lies ahead for him that day, not always aware that I’m not capable of fully attending to anything or anyone at the moment. It feels like he and I are mid-conversation, and yet I’m completely lost on what we’re talking about. Once he’s in the room, he needs my presence. He also needs me to put a bagel in the toaster oven for him and get the cream cheese from the top shelf of the fridge while he tells me all about some random fact that must be connected to something we’ve spoken of once before.

The morning fetch begins in earnest as the little one stirs at the very moment the oldest realizes he’s also hungry. They are able to make a lot of their own meals, but there are still things I have to reach or I have to do, still. Then, despite routines and things being done the night before, there always seems to be a flurry of panicky activity to get them out the door in some state of readiness. Despite them having an hour-and-a-half to eat breakfast, get dressed, and do the most basic of chores, we are rushed. They complicate the process with their own distractions. I become a talking alarm clock. You have ten minutes before you need to brush your teeth. Detonation in ten, nine, eight…

It always feels like we are running late and running the risk of forgetting something important. It’s a sense of perpetually wondering if the stove is on, yet there is no real reason for it other than the lack of ability to bring one task to completion before beginning several others. The kids want fun, I want accountability and calm, and my husband just wants to go move into someone else’s house, I’m sure.

But through it all there is the sky. We generally only notice the sun and its rising as it relates to our estimated waking and departure time and, at certain times of the year, the glare it throws in our eyes when we stand in certain spots wondering where shoes and backpacks have wandered to.

But this morning was remarkable. The sky started as an unusual navy blue, promising spectacles to come. The sky, before turning blue, went through a palette of oranges and reds, pinks and purples, with some yellow as the sun was about to make its spectacular entrance. It was perhaps the unusual heat of this December, mixed with the low light of this time of year. Perhaps there was excess dust in the air. The sky was unreal and yet moored me to the moment, holding me by the shoulders with its magnificence.

When I opened my mouth to make another reminder to wash up or to double check the location of papers or bags or snacks, what came out was an appreciative gasp.

“Come, look.” Unspoken and unnecessary was “Be still,” because the full glory of the sunrise hushed us with its majesty.

We stopped. We beheld. The sky asked us to breathe and be together, and we did.