Author Archives: Naptimewriting

Center of the Universe

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Setting: Breakfast table. Early, early morning.

Peanut: I don’t want rice milk on my cereal.
Mom: okay.
she busies herself getting everyone’s breakfast ready. Sliced kiwi and dry cereal for Peanut, pumpkin and plums for baby, coconut granola for herself. Begins to pour rice milk on her own cereal…
P: [screaming] I said I don’t want milk on mine!
M: P, this isn’t yours. Yours is just the way you wanted it. This is my breakfast.
P: Oh. I thought you were ruining my cereal.
M: Not everything is about you. [wondering when she started reciting the Mother Soundtrack] You know, the Earth revolves around the Sun, not around you.
P: Um, no. The Earth revolves around the World. You can ask me next time. I know everything.

So this is parenting a teenager? One part wanting to tape it shut, one part stifling your laughter at how painfully clueless they are?

This week in Peanut

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Things you did this week that made me want to cry (how’s that for a executive summary of four-and-a-half?):

You interrupted your play at school when a toddler’s ball rolled away from her. You stopped the ball and handed it back to her before resuming your own wild shenanigans.

You stood atop one play structure at school and intoned obscenities, grinning ghoulishly, at a group of girls playing below.

When asked if your baby brother could play with the wooden utensils from your play kitchen, you looked me right in the eye and said, “Always.”

The glitter paint all over the dining room and living room weren’t really your fault, since the cat walked through your painting, then sat down on another to lick his glittery, sticky paws, then rubbed himself all over the furniture trying to get the paint off his fur. Thank goodness, I guess, you like pink glitter paint the best, because it blends a bit better into the rug than the blue he could have sat in.

When you woke from your nap with a fever, and went wandering into the kitchen to find me, you carefully barricaded the open side of the bed with pillows so your baby brother wouldn’t fall out.

You pointed your bubble blower at me, repeatedly, even after I asked you to shoot at something else. When I took that away, you pointed a well tuned recorder. When I took that away, you pointed a cardboard tube. When I took that away, you used your finger. Don’t fool yourself, boy, I can take that, too.

A plea for sleep

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Dear goddess of babies who wake every two hours:
Thank you for passing my child off to the next goddess. I appreciate your care in those first weeks. I don’t miss you. I’m sure you understand.

Dear goddess of babies who wake every three hours:
We’ve spent a lot of time and effort with my children, oh goddess. My first child was in your care for three-plus years before you handed him over to the goddess of children who sleep all night. So I’m thinking you need a break. You’ve had responsibility for my second child for nigh on five months, and I’d like to ask that you relinquish him to the goddess next door. I know he visited with the goddess of babies who wake every five hours a few times last month, and you can see he did fine there. Your extra care and nurturing should be for newer babies who need the extra milk. Bring him next door, please.

Dear goddess of babies who wake every four hours:
Please don’t be home when your neighbor, Three Hours, comes knocking.

Dear goddess of babies who wake every five hours:
I’m calling on you, oh goddess because your wonderful, growth-inspiring nurturing is just what my son needs. Keep your eye out for Three Hours and greet her if Four Hours isn’t home. Please accept the care of my dear baby. Please watch over him and let him sleep, uninterrupted, for five hours twice a night. Help him grow and develop in whatever ways are right for him.

Unless you’re caring for too many wonderful babies. Then pass him on to the goddess of children who sleep all night. I won’t tell Three Hours, who seems to have taken a shine to my whole family. He’ll be fine with All Night and I’ll be over the moon. False idols, nothing, I’ll create a whole shrine to you.

Inside the Naptime Studio

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Welcome to Inside the Naptime Studio. I’m your host, and we’re here just to make you answer these questions on your own blog (or in the comments.)

1. What is your favorite word? parsnip

2. What is your least favorite word? fecund

3. What turns you on? good food, old friends, and quiet

4. What turns you off? dolts

5. What is your favorite curse word? motherf***ing c**ksucker

6. What sound or noise do you love? mountaintop/foresty quiet

7. What sound or noise do you hate? leaf blowers and car alarms

8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt? judge

9. What profession would you not like to try? Blue Angels pilot

10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? Thank Me, someone to take over for a while.

Now you have a go.

Twilight zone parenting

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You know the ads make it look so cute. Babies make every scene adorable. Preschoolers make every moment lovable. Together they warm hearths and hearts.

So I was in potential heaven this weekend. In the kitchen, baking my favorite chocolate cake recipe for my mom’s birthday, listening to “Wait…Wait…Don’t Tell Me” on the radio. Gorgeous day outside, decent night of sleep…you get the picture.

Except that at each key moment in the broadcast, Peanut pushed a button on some infernal singing toy that blasted crappy kids’ music over the top of a clever and topical NPR rejoinder. And each time I measured and poured, the baby nursing in my sling reached out of his faux sleep to grab a fistful of goop.

The zen that used to be cooking, as most parents can attest, is now the zen of cooking and listening and showing and sharing and cooking and observing and correcting and cleaning and cooking and listening and ignoring and pretending and listening and watching and for god’s sake not blinking and sighing and listening and explaining and spilling and cursing and apologizing and crying and drinking.

Or something like that.

Turn your head and laugh

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For the first time in a long while, my Monday jaunt to the local produce mecca was a solo venture. I usually walk or run there, with at least one child, so I’m limited in time and volume—I can only buy what I can bring home in the stroller and only what I can grab before one or both lose their patience with obscure veggies.

So I brought home a lot more than I normally would have, including selections from the bulk bins. Grains, beans, nuts. And I let Peanut try several before dinner. Raw peanuts, spicy pumpkin seeds, tamari sunflower seeds, cinnamon almonds.

And while I washed and peeled and cored and sliced, P was making a mess.

“Peanut, please, please, please. I know you’re a wiggly guy, but can you please eat and then go play? It’s important to me that you don’t play with your food because of the mess it makes.”

“Mom, it’s just really important to me that I play with my nuts. Because it’s important to me.”

I did a double take before I realized he meant the almonds.

I know that some day soon (next year, according to a mom with three boys) he will mean what I thought he meant. Until then, I still laughed really hard. Because I am a fourth grade boy at heart.

Ode to Six Months

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Oh, how I love this age.

The excitement of being able to follow a pointing finger. The thrill of having clean sheets flapped over your delicious little head. The shock of new flavors as you finally get to taste those things other people eat.

The sitting, the rocking on all fours trying to crawl, the babbling, the laughter, the unadulterated joy of bathtime, the more deliberate efforts at making needs known…and the cuteness. Oh, my the cuteness.

Ah, six months.

Even the hard bits are easy because this age is so wonderful. Six months was a welcome eye in the storm with Peanut that allowed me to appreciate him rather than constantly struggle to keep from drowning.

And Butter is just as delightful at six months, which reinforces how much I adore this age. He won’t play alone much, but he will sit on the kitchen floor and play with his dearest love—the metal colander—long enough for me to chop one vegetable. That’s more than I could chop for the first five months of his life. He doesn’t sleep well because he’s teething, but he’s awake a lot less than Peanut was through his teething year. Butter has such a temper, and its perfectly adorable because what he gets mad about, usually, is gravity. And what fixes is it cuddling me.

Sign me up, six months, for I’m willing to accept those terms.

Dear, sweet six months. No separation anxiety yet. No social frustrations yet. No struggle to individuate. Yet. No talking, no walking, no chasing the cat, no refusing to do what Mama asks, no hitting, no coloring the carpet, no whining, no demanding, no slamming doors. No nuances. Six months is just adorable, cooing, babbling, drooling, nuzzling infant perfection.

Gotta go. Teething means he’s up every hour all night the past two nights. Isn’t that adorable?

Open Letter to the Friend Who Quit

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Dear Friend,

I know you won’t read this, but I wish you would.

You were quite brave to tell me that I’m too much for you. That after 15 years of friendship you just can’t handle how intense I am. That you want out.

Of course, I wish you had told me a year ago, when you stopped answering my calls and emails. Because you left me thinking for thirteen months that you were hurt, depressed, overwhelmed, or insulted. It would have been nice for you to stand up for yourself back then, so I didn’t spend all that time offering support and love, of the sort that we’ve always offered each other. That you offered me so many times that I was in desperate need. That I really owed you and would have gladly given if you’d ever picked up the phone.

And though you severed ties several months ago, made it clear that you wanted nothing to do with me, I miss you. I love you.

You’re in everything here…in the wine glasses I rarely use but still remember fondly as a “You’re Better Off without Him” present given more than a decade ago. In the food processor I’m using now to make baby food, that you sent when you found out I was making Peanut’s baby food with a small grinder. You’re in one of the four books I keep on my desk because they make me ache desperately to write. You’re in the felt pizza you sent Peanut, the blanket you sent just because, and the muslin blanket you sent Butter (once I finally got you to respond to an email and you admitted to having avoided me for more than a year). You’re in randomness of every day, large and small, most of which you’ve probably forgotten, but all of which occupy space in my life and say to me that you thought of me. Past tense. Done. Over. Regretted, I guess, and wasted. But not for me.

Damn it, you’re everywhere around here. Except where it really counts: in person, in spirit, and in friendship.

And I’m so mad and hurt and bitter.

But I’d forget it all in a minute if you’d just call or write.

Because I love you.

Parenting FAIL

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Every stinking night my kid walks out of his room well after bedtime and tells me his foot hurts. And every stinking night I feign concern and get him an ice pack. He puts it on his foot in bed and comes out twenty minutes later to hand over the now-warm bag of rice he made at school and colored and sewed himself.

Tonight he came out two minutes after the ice pack and said it’s not cold enough.

I said, calmly and firmly: “Go tell Daddy. I don’t care.”

So maybe I get an F for parenting tonight. Or maybe he gets an F for being an intense kid. Because his nightly fake sore foot is not responding to the nightly effective treatment, so maybe he’s not pretending hard enough. Or he’s pretending too hard. It’s my job to prepare him for the real world, right? Let’s call this a referral to a specialist.

So grades have been submitted but changed with permission of the Dean. Peanut gets the F. I get a well deserved drink.
Or a block of parmesan cheese.
Or pretzels and ice cream.
Or all four. Nothing like a healthy eating FAIL to go with the rest of the week.

This week in Peanut

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A roundup of the goings on in a certain four-year-old’s world…

Me: Would you like melon in your lunch?
Peanut: Heck yeah!
Me: Heck yeah? Where’d you hear that?
P: From you.
Me: Great.
P: Spectacular.
Me: Spectacular?
P: Yeah. What’s that mean?
Me: Like really great, something that makes you say “wow.”
P: Oh.
Me: It’s a good word. Where’d you hear it?
P: You. Can I have some spectacular melon?

Stalking through the house, and unearthing tape and construction paper projects at every turn, Peanut narrates his misadventures as though reading them from a book:
“He searched and searched for the shooter but could not find it. So he made one himself and put it on so he could shoot pirates who came to the castle without paying toll….”

Running naked out of the bathroom after his bath, Peanut dove under the huge box he’s been playing in to hide from the jammies-application process. Spouse, tired of playing the “where is he? I can’t seem to find him” game, said to the cat, “Cat One, do you know where Peanut is? If you know, go there.” Then picked up his feline mole and tossed him onto the box.
Peanut was horrified that the cat gave him away.

Ah, to be so adorable and clueless.

Chick lit and Franzenfreude

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I was unaware, as I began reading Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, that there exists a growing anger toward him because he’s male. The criticism doesn’t seem to be about his writing of female characters or his focus on male characters. The frustration, according to the media, is that the attention he’s receiving isn’t being given to female authors.

Maybe the media is getting the complaints wrong. Maybe the assertions that Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner are mad about the media circus surrounding Freedom‘s release have to do with something more than a misplaced perception that “white male authors get all the attention.” Because there is certainly something to the criticism that there are NYTBR books and there are so-called chick lit books and ne’er the ‘twain shall meet. I don’t agree with that distinction, but I do believe in the distinction between literature and fiction.

I don’t agree with Time magazine that Franzen is The Great American Novelist. But I do agree that he’s writing something important and completely apart from that which most American authors write. Canonical lit? We’ll see. I don’t personally think so. But I really don’t think that Picoult or Weiner are writing literature.

Franzen’s maleness is hardly his fault. Yes, it’s frustrating that when critics and professors speak of American literature they tend to load the deck with male authors and hang on to alleged classics for the sake of tradition rather than taste (reference how many more people cite the infernal Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby over To Kill a Mockingbird, the latter of which is precisely three thousand times better than either the Salinger or the Fitzgerald as a social critique and character-driven narrative. But Catcher and Gatsby are focused on different moments in time, different themes, different pieces of Americana and are still valid parts of the canon. Even though I can’t stand reading them.)

Some men write really well and deserve critical praise. Some women write really well and deserve critical praise—but do they deserve more praise than they get?

Certainly women writing today get more attention than women used to get. More female lead characters in the canon, more female authors. In my graduate program we read a lot of Walker and Morrison and Nin and Stein and Barnes and Atwood and Perkins-Gilman and Wharton; so I’m not sure that the drumbeat of “women are ignored” really holds true.

The number of male-crafted texts revered in NYT circles still outnumbers the number of female-crafted texts, sure. But are we asking the wrong question?

Is the author the real issue or is the content the more important place to focus our feminist demand for equal time? The “pros versus readers” list of best millennial fiction from The Millions cites 20 books (including duplicates), 10 of which are by women. So? Should we be counting? Or should we be reading carefully to see if women and men exist, fully formed in these texts?

A decent Salon article points out that women tend to write bestsellers and men tend to receive accolades for their brilliance. And thus begins the age-old popular culture versus high culture nonsense, a debate that is false in its pretenses and its conclusions. Because women write brilliant literature. And men write throwaway novels. Gender is not the issue.

Look, it would be nice to see as many female author names as male names on a list, because we tend to write about different things from different perspectives. But despite what I believe about the importance of womanist fiction, authorial gender is not the point. I’d like to read good books and, later, when recommending them, notice that they’re by women. Or men. I don’t care about who writes them. I care what they write about and how they craft their novels.

I care that the characters are three-dimensional, believable, deeply felt proto-humans. I want well crafted male characters and female characters. Make the situations in which they operate real or surreal, but make the characters seem viable, possible, and believable. My absolute favorite contemporary novel Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace has some pretty serious gaps in the “fully realized female characters” department. I believe it suffers because the women have almost no voice. Franzen gives me less impressive language, less humor, fewer arrestingly painful moments, but bigger, bolder, more solidly credible female voices. And so few books written by either men or women do that. No, he’s not Walker or Stein or Hurston, but he’s also not Joyce or James or Wallace. I’m not in the mood to bash Franzen for being something he’s not.

Small difference

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The difference between him and me:

He thinks it’s really funny to hide behind the door and call me into his room long after bedtime; and that it’s really sad when my entry hurts his foot.

I think it’s a little sad when he calls me into his room long after bedtime; and that it’s a little funny when my entry hurts his foot.

Naptime Writing Ticker

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…acrobat classes predictable failure. Asked why he didn’t want to do any of the activities or return the next week, Peanut replied, “I don’t want to go to a class where they tell you what to do.”…

…Butter’s third ear infection in ten weeks, all of them ragingly infected, was diagnosed by his mom and a borrowed otoscope. Subsequent visit to pediatrician included the marveling MD’s “I can’t believe this thing hasn’t ruptured, and I can’t believe he’s smiling!” Hours later, it ruptured. And Butter continued smiling….

…progress through the house made increasingly difficult by four year old blocking routes of egress with arms akimbo and the petulant demand, “say the magic word.” Process has become tougher after the first magic word, “Damnit” lost its effectiveness. Passersby now asked to name the magic fruit, which I’m convinced he has not chosen in advance. He just listens to us list fruits until he hears one he likes. Arms drop, and passage is granted….

…pudding day this week featured homemade butterscotch pudding. Huge hit. Repeat performance requested…

…a week of sleeping at least part of the night next to a sick, wakeful baby has left my contorted neck (heaven forbid I have a pillow anywhere near a baby or rest in any way other than sniffing his sweet breath) so stiff I can barely move. Wondering now if his ear infection has somehow given me meningitis. Trying to find the funds to get us both some chiropractic adjustments because, hey, why the hell not at this point.

Seems so wrong

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Butter has been sick. Third ear infection in ten weeks, third cold in nine weeks. Not miserable, but a bit drippy and sad at night. More than reasonable, I think, for being the unwitting victim of preschool scourges without the benefit of preschool play. Peanut was ten months old when he got his first cold. This little dude was four months. Robbed.

So last night was particularly heartbreaking, given how long he’s felt out of sorts. Most night he either sleeps horribly or really well considering his age. On healthy, easy nights he sleeps almost six hours, nurses, then wakes every two hours to nurse. On sick nights he wakes as often as every hour for one of several comfort measures, only one of which he can handle himself.

Last night, with the ear infection brewing and the cold ramping up, he woke about every two hours, but before I could even get to him he was slurping on his thumb and falling back asleep. So I didn’t actually see him or pick him up for more than ei ghthours. And I woke at 4am, Spidey Senses tingling, wondering why he hadn’t cried or nursed yet. Peanut had awakened me in the wee hours but when I went in to answer his cries for Mommy, he wouldn’t say anything. So I went back to bed.

Went into the boys’ room at 4am and peered into the crib. Wide awake baby smiled at me. I reached down to pat him and felt him soaking wet and freezing cold.

He had puked all over himself some time in the night. Most likely gagged on the stuff clogging up his tiny ears and tiny nose. Probably hours before, when Peanut called for me and couldn’t articulate what the problem was.

Nice parenting. Didn’t even check on the sick baby except to listen to his breathing from the door all night while he lay cold and wet in a pool of his own vomit.

Makes me wonder how miserable he is the times he does cry. And reminds me why I’ll never let him cry. And makes me rethink the decision to stop co-sleeping.

Still, waking on my own to find a cold and wet baby who smells like puke is its own reward.