At the risk of once again linking to another writer’s work rather than create my own…
Mark Morford humorously wonders which group poses the greatest pretend threat to the American way in this article, “Beware the Vegans!”. Pretty damned funny (and scary, since one of these otherwise useful groups will soon become the target in Rove’s sights).
Spouse gave me a glorious day of writing as penance for the two trips he’s taken this month. I ate, I wrote I breathed with my eyes closed a few times. I got in and out of the car with ease, and managed not to have a meltdown over situations large or small. It was a good day. I hit 80,000 words, and not just schlock. Stuff I could put my name near, if not on.
I came home at 7:30, at which point in a regular day dinner is done, the house is tidied (by a three-year-old, so it ain’t spic-n-span, but still, toys are in their place), bath is done, jammies are donned, teeth are brushed, and stories are underway. Tonight, though, at 7:30, I walked in, and a mud and blueberry smeared boy greeted me, beaming, at the door. He was finishing his cereal, covered in marker tatoos and stamps. The house looked like a bomb filled with puzzle pieces, toy cars, bristle blocks, a miniature tea set, and cat vomit went off. The sheets, which I change every Sunday, were full of sand from a post-playground nap.
To be fair, the bath was already drawn, the kid had a burrito and banana before the cereal, and the cat vomit was all over my stuff, so it’s understandable that it got overlooked.
So I put my happy, smeared, tatooed boy to bed and thanked his father for the day of writing. ‘Cuz if we ever get a room of our own, we’re willing to tolerate an awful lot in the sandy, blueberried, markered, late for bed department.
At least I didn’t come home at 10, like I prefer to on my increasingly frequent days off. They might have been doing shots and playing poker.
And having a damned fine time.
We found the perfect preschool for us. Actually, I found it online six months ago as we moved the first time, but I’ve been busy going in and out of escrow four times and to a conference and on holiday vacations and through a prolongued lawsuit, so aside from listing the top ten preschools I wanted and making a table of when tours and open houses and applications and fees are due, I haven’t made much progress. Applications for all the local preschools were due several months ago. It’s like grad school all over again…you apply a year early and then sit in limbo for months. I thought the Pope eliminated limbo, in yet another, “sure the Pope is infallible, but now I’m Pope and my infallibility trumps the dead guy’s infallibility. No really, I’m sure this time; don’t question me. No, I’m not going to change the Bible, too, because it’s been changed millions of times by people a lot less infallible than me, but it’s really done this time. It’s the final draft, because the word of God can be changed until people start noticing, then it’s final. The Book of Mary? Never heard of it.”
Small problem, y’all. I need preschool, like, now.
So we’ve toured several preschools. Peanut and I have the same opinion of all of them, and loved, loved, loved the school we saw this week—the school whose online program description made me cry because I finally felt safe letting a preschool community help care for my kid. (Yes, I am overly involved in my child’s development and life. It’s a little thing called mothering. Look into it.)
(Sorry. That was snarky. I just don’t like the collectively raised eyebrows I just heard as I admitted that a preschool philosophy made me cry…I feel like jumping on my desk [who am I Tom Cruise?] and hollering “you don’t know me. You don’t know my life. Don’t judge me!”)
You can see how easily I’ll fit in with the laid-back earthy co-op preschool we’ve chosen, btw.
Being at the school made us happy. Leaving the school we were happy. I had more patience than I’ve had in months, a new perspective that, unlike other schools, made me confident in my parenting style and confident that a community of likeminded parents will help me be better every day. I even set up stations in our living room, dining room, and kitchen last night, inspired by the way Peanut played so intently and earnestly at the school This morning has been a dream of cooperation and constructive interaction and structured but uncoercive play.
Anyway, we have two problems. The first is that the waiting list is at least 40 families, for the fall semester. I was hoping for the “how does next week sound” semester. But it’s my fault we’re way behind. We knew last year we were moving, and to which approximate area. I could have done all the work and had him in now. But seriously, it’s preschool. I have books to finish and an academic career to reinvent and a corporate career to beat off with a stick and a family to foster, here, and I…ah, what the hell. Admit it. I’m lazy. I’d rather blog than call for preschool tours. Sue me. I need a local dentist, too, and that’s even further down the list. Right next to “edit all the video we’ve shot of Peanut in the past three years”.
Second issue, other than the serious uptick in my caffeine consumption today, is that there is a much, much, much shorter waiting list for the afternoon program. So if I want school asap, I have to begin a bootcamp of earlier naptimes, or let Captain Caveman skip nap three times a week (and inflict the resulting frustrated, emotional, out-of-control lump that is a napless three-year-old on the other kids after lunchtime) to get into the afternoon program. He’s already said he needs naps and doesn’t want school in the afternoon. He said this today after refusing nap for more than an hour as he rammed cars and trucks into each other on the floor for quiet time.
So wait or cram my kid into a schedule that will fit my need for free time? I should get a sitter a few times a week until we get into the school. But that would involve research, and unless you can find it in a Melvyl search of Berkeley’s Doe library, I just can’t be bothered. (That’s right, even Moffett is too much to ask. Bancroft I’d consider.)
If you have a PhD in science, you may speak about science curriculum and theories. If you have a PhD in theology, you may speak about religious curriculum and doctrine. People who fit either or both descriptions are welcome to talk with each other. If you are some schmuck without an advanced degree in science or religion, you may sit down and shut the frack up. And listen. Because you do not have the science or theological knowledge, nor the critical thinking skills, to be in this debate. Shhh. Listen.
Now Texas is joining the group of states that should be told to “feel free to flee” the Union if they insist on devaluing education and science. Mobs don’t determinine curricula; those who know what the hell they’re talking about do. In science class we teach science. In theology class we teach theology. In English class we teach English. If you want me to teach computer programming in my English classes, I will. But code ain’t in English, and science simply isn’t subject to the same principles that faith is. Whole different ball of wax.
Texas isn’t going all Kansas on us, but it’s not looking good, either…
Peanut and I were hiking and passed a group of teenaged girls, probably 17-19. They had stopped and were cleaning up after their dog, a feat I found impressive since there were, I think I’ve mentioned this, three teenage girls in the middle of a hiking trail. No witnesses, no garbage cans.
So we walked passed, and they continued on…about half a mile ahead I passed a bag on dog poop sitting at the edge of the trail. I thought about picking it up, but I was feeding Peanut (in the backpack) and needed two hands clean to divy up sliced tofu. So I walked past the disgusting remains of a jerk who felt compelled to clean up but not dispose of his ward’s waste.
But guess who stopped and picked it up? Those ladies behind me engaged in a conversation about how gross poop is, and as I turned around to look, the young lady already holding a bag of poop bent down and grabbed the second bag. Different color, different…um…size, so clearly not her dog’s poop.
I told her she was the nicest human on the face of the earth. She blushed and all the girls fell back, waiting for Peanut and me to hike away and leave them alone. I did. Peanut asked what was going on, and I explained.
Kids these days.
I really need to send off this article so I can clear it out of my head and either begin another or finish my book. But as always, I’m much more confident in the process than in the result. I’ll spend weeks, unless I stop myself, editing and proofreading and editing and proofreading and editing and proof…(getting boring for you, too?)
Why is it I am willing to do 99% of the work, really throwing myself into something and doing my best, but when it comes to asking for approval and money, I stop short, more willing to keep a backlog of solid work than finishing by asking for recognition/publication?
A story from Morning Edition on NPR yesterday claims that venting anger is counter-productive, and that the best way to express anger, according to years of research, is to dispassionately discuss it.
Just curious: was this research done by robots? Are the psychologists involved using drugs to which I do not have access? Have the researchers involved ever had children? This line from the report makes me a little itchy in my yelling lobe: “The key is to speak out your anger without getting emotional about it. Basically, we’re not supposed to yell at anyone anymore.”
Look, if I were anything other than a shell of the person I once was, I’d enumerate reasons that this research is, aside from being counter-intuitive and repression-inducing, just dehumanizing and degrading. Especially the snide bit where they call out Moms as yellers.
But I don’t have any anger about dispassionate researchers. I reserve my passionate responses for the fight-or-flight flood that follows being kicked and hit and screamed at by a tiny irrational person.
Here’s the link to Spiegel’s article. Would that it were this easy to be gentle and logical and dispassionate all the time.
To whomever found my blog yesterday by searching Google for the phrase “when things feel out of control,” know you are not alone.
I cannot count the times I have Googled “good god what have I done,” and “ideas for doing things a lot differently than I am right now,” and “help I’m going to kill my husband or kid or both,” and “what if I can’t make it through today,” and the like. I have even contemplated buying URLs for a support group of people like us: wwwmyhusbandisanasshole.com is available as is http://www.someonepleasefindmeasittersoIdon’tlosemymind.com and http://www.someoneshootmebecauseihatetoday.com
Most of the people reading this blog empathize with you. We would all gladly share stories of when we felt so out of control we thought the answer, if there was one, might be at the end of a terrified web search. And we all made it through to mock our own lives another day.
I hope you found something in your search that made you feel better that a lot of life is out of control, and that nothing can get you through like taking each minute as you can, however you can, and praying to whatever quantum physical force you think might listen to please, please let me make it through this hour.
Best of luck, and I hope something I wrote at least made you laugh yesterday. I makes me sad that I can’t find you through all those anonymous stats, just to tell you everything will be okay. I hope someone tells you that. It will be. I think.
The single reason my son is a terror and I am a writhing mess: lack of sleep.
I suspected it, but thought there might be greys and nuances and spectra. Nope. He slept through the night last night, and I got a full eight hours uninterrupted by cat or child or snores (you know who you are) or trains. And I was a peach today. So was my kid. We had a grand old time. He told me this was his best day ever. He’s three. He should know.
Don’t know how to decree an official mandate on sleep, but I right now hold aloft my sword and declare this family will commence giving me nights like that every night for-freaking-ever more.
Else rue the day.
As they have been for years.
I got some toxic assets for you.
As long as you’re making important institutions stronger by taking the self-imposed crap off their hands, would you please relieve my family of the litter box, the laundry, tantrums, and my attitude?
It won’t cost tadxpayers near what buying up all the financial shenanigans will…
Leave it to ck…she gets to all the good posts first. But our version, over here at the Insanity Warehouse where even the insanity is on sale and going fast, went a little something like this:
setting: public bathroom at a Berekely playground
time: an iota before naptime
Me: Peanut, sweetie, please don’t touch the walls while we’re in the bathroom
P: Why?
M: Because bathroom walls are dirty.
P: Why?
M: Well, there’s no ceiling and nobody who cleans these walls so the rain and the mud and the germs all just stay here.
P: Why?
M: Same reason I just told you. My answer hasn’t changed.
P: [grabs chain that blocks off bathroom, ineffectively, during after-hours]
M: honey, please don’t touch that.
P: Why?
M: Because it’s dirty. It’s part of the bathroom, it doesn’t get washed, and it’s dirty.
[everyone voids, everyone sanitizes. And Peanut grabs the chain again.]
M: Hey! Peanut. Please don’t touch that.
P: Why?
M: Do you remember me telling you before?
P: Yes.
M: Then why shouldn’t you touch that?
P: Be. Cuz. It. Dirty.
M: That’s. Right. [he has thing thing about breaking out syllables when I bore him. I have this thing about repeating his cadence. Because it diffuses my anger and because it’s fun.]
I went back into the bathroom for a moment to toss a tissue from my pocket and I hear the chain.
M: PEANUT! I just told you not to touch that. [dash back out to stop him and am greeted by:]
P: [blank stare]
M: Do you remember me telling you not to touch that?
P: Yes.
M: Do you know why we don’t touch that?
P: Yes.
M: Why did you touch that?
P: Because I want to touch it and I no want listen to you.
M: Would you like it if I didn’t listen to you?
P: No.
M: How do you think it makes me feel when you don’t listen.
P: Sad. An-ry.
M: Yes. So please listen when I say no touch.
P: No.
M: I’m sorry? What?
P: I. Say. No. I. No. Want. Listen.
Okeedokee.
I. No. Want. This. Job.
I have to say, while Peanut is in his room noisily refusing to sleep whilst concocting an elaborate triage center for his stuffed friends and the various wheeled vehicles that will rush them, surprisingly free of gore (for he is three and lives a sheltered life by design), to the doctor’s kit wherein they will be asked to give a urine sample and listen to Peanut’s heart; that he’s turning into an interesting creature.
It’s not true that things that don’t kill you make you stronger. For parents, that which does not kill you makes your kids stronger and more compelling humans. We’re still whittled down to nubs, but they blossom in the compost of our selfhood.
[pause while I go to the now open door and remind him that during quiet time he has to stay in his room. “Why?” “Because the whole rest of the day is about what you want, and right now is about mommy wanting your body and brain to rest and grow.” “Why?” Because I’ll die right here if you don’t give me an hour of peace. “Because that’s the rule in this house.”]
Ahem. Where was I? Oh, yes, offering organic flesh ripped from my sanity as fodder for Peanut’s growth. Reread the Giving Tree when you have a chance. It’s about sacrifice and shriveling up into relative uselessness. Together.
That Shel Silverstein is another San Franciscan who knew his left from his right, eh?
The smiling fun of past two days are more than just my joy at being healthy, off crutches, in the bright light of spring, surrounded by flowering plum and cherry trees, and finally home again. Nope. This is about the trough in the parenting roller coaster that follows a week or two or three of every-cell-fraying individuation. This is the afterglow of personality development. This is the necessary calm in the storm that is growing up, the respite that allows moms to breathe, just for a moment, and to smile at the beautiful creatures they are lucky enough to have met.
Oh, I love you, little character.
It has taken several days for me to finish D.T. Max’s New Yorker article, biography of sorts, of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King. The article is moving, and includes correspondence from Wallace to Franzen and DeLillo, and quite a bit from his wife, Karen Green, whose pain I cannot even fathom and would love more than anything to salve with…what I don’t know. Because it’s none of my business, but if I cry reading a biography what must she do living in it?
Aside from being a touching portrait of an intensely intelligent writer who wanted simply to make readers feel “less alone inside,” and who in that quest felt increasingly more alone (except in the sunshine that was his marriage…thank heaven for Karen Green, who from the article I gather made him feel more at home and comfortable in his own skin than, it seems, anything else could outside really great writing).
What compelled me yesterday, reading the final pages of Max’s article (I still haven’t read the new piece of fiction that follows—I can’t yet) was Wallace’s root idea for The Pale King, as he articulated it in a typed note amongst his papers: “Bliss—a second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—likes on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious things you can find…and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.”
I think that technicolor bliss can probably come after any intense “almost kills you” period of intense focus on undesirable emotions (fear might work as well as boredom). As melodramatic as I oft am, I know that the weeks of intense three-year-old battling, of taking each breath as though it might be the only thing that could keep me going, is part of what made yesterday, a gorgeous, sun-filled day of hiking and strawberries and camaraderie with Peanut, the second-by-second bliss it was.
It was not a perfect day. It was a perfect-as-human-existence-can-get-if-you-have-a-dollop-of-realism-adorning-the-top-of-your-daily-trifle day. And I’ll take it.
We thought we were lucky that Peanut potty learned pretty early. Started using the toilet regularly around 15 months and took himself out of diapers at 21 months. Did it all himself, the little control freak, which was great. Except since it was all self directed and all about control, when he’s mad at one of us he pees in inappropriate places.
I’ve been trying for a month to break the peeing in the cat box thing. Tried reasoning with him, tried empathy (would you like it if they peed on your toys or in your bed?) Tried making a hard and fast rule. “In this house, we pee in the toilet.” He told me, as you know, that this is not his house, and at his house he and his dog pee in the cat box all the time. Why he and his dog even have a cat box, considering the disdain they have for cats, is beyond me.
Anyway.
Today he pees in his pants. I ask him if he can tell me why. He says, “Yes. Okay. One reason I just feel like it. One reason it just easier.” We talk about that one. If it’s just easier to pee in your pants, that’s called a diaper. If you just feel like it, I feel like ignoring you and working on my book, but it doesn’t work that way. So I reiterate where we pee and why.
Later, I walk in the bathroom and find a dustpan on the floor, full of a supsicious yellow liquid. It’s near the cat box, so either they got pissed at his piss and chose a new target, or he just tried a little something new.
M: Peanut?
P: [running in] What?
M: Can you tell me a little about what this is in the dustpan?
P: And on the floor.
M: [biting tongue] And on floor…
P: Yes. I pee, pee, pee in dustpan. And on floor.
M: Hmmm. You know peeing on the floor makes me frustrated bcause it’s slippery and dangerous and stinky and germy. And you know we only pee in potty. Mommy pees in potty. Daddy pees in potty. Can you tell me why you did this?
P: Yes. One reason I pee on floor in sweeper I just want to. One reason [and he looks me dead in the eye for this one] I just no like your rules.
We talk about why there are rules. Tile floors with urine on them are slippery. People fall and get hurt. Also pee is germy and we don’t want to get sick.
Also, and this is just for you who can read—I’m really f—ing tired of this. My cousin says floating targets will make the toilet more appealing. My aunt says move the cat box (and now, apparently, the dust pan). Our pediatrician says blue food dye in the water so he can make it green.
I say there are a few rules you don’t get to not like. Seat belts. Teeth brushing. No hitting, biting, kicking, scratching, pinching, or hurting anything that breathes. And seriously? Seriously. Seriously. There’s only one place to pee.
At Daddy’s office. Is it Take Your Daughter to Work Day? I’ve been asking that for three years and it has never been take your daughter to work day. He has long, curly hair and wears pink shoes. Please take him to work.
It’s nice that moms in distant lands feel the same way at times…
Couldn’t do it, but cathartic that engrish.com has our back with full instructions…
NaptimeWriting 