Truth or Consequences

"What if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would break open."

--Muriel Rukeyser


Last night at dinner, Danielle told us about an old friend from high school who recently got in touch with her via e-mail. The first couple of exchanges were bright and cheerful. Life? Wonderful! Kids? Perfect. And then Danielle made the daring confession that her life was in fact is not always wonderful. Her children are in fact not perfect. She herself may be somewhat flawed as a parent and a human being.

Her friend wrote back along the lines of "Thank God!" and "Me, too!"

Isn't it a relief when someone tells the truth about her life? Because then you get to tell the truth, too. And you know you're not alone when it comes to having a flawed, problematic existence. It's nice not to be alone.

Of course, there will be times when you tell someone the truth and they reject you for it. They look at you like you're an alien because you've admitted that your child has some issues about bed-wetting or nose-picking ("Does Lester wipe mucus on his walls, too?" you ask oh-so-innocently, only to receive a cold stare in reply).

Now, frankly, I don't trust my fellow moms who can't give it up when it comes to admitting her child does strange things. Because as a mother and a former strange child myself, I'm of the opinion that most children, especially those under the age of six, are stark, raving mad. They engage in so much antisocial behavior it's amazing we don't institutionalize them until they can prove they're capable of going out in public without showing off their new Star Wars underwear to complete strangers.

Conversely, I owe a debt of gratitude to every human being in my life, male or female, who has made such daring confessions as sometimes their kids drive them so crazy, they have to lock themselves in their rooms for ten minutes just so they won't do something they'll regret later. I am grateful for every "me, too" I've gotten in response to some shameful admission on my part. I'm doubly grateful for every "Oh, you think you're an awful parent? I can top that easy."

The other day I read a blog where the writer said, "I never yell at my children. They're little for such a short time, and I want their childhoods to be happy."

Confession: Sometimes I yell at my kids so hard and so loud, it makes my throat hurt.

I've been meaning to mention a book I read recently called Dinner with Dad by Cameron Stracher. I picked it up at the library, thinking it would be a browser--a book I brought home and read a few pages of it before moving onto something else. But in fact, it was a keeper. There are a lot of reasons I'd recommend it: it's funny, it's well-written, and most of all, Stracher nails the life of the middle class, overeducated, overbusy suburban parent.

Here's the gist of it: Stracher is a law professor and a practicing lawyer who travels frequently. He commutes to Manhattan from Connecticut and often doesn't come home until after his children are in bed. One day it hits him: he's missing his children's lives. In fact, his family seems to be functioning completely separately from him.

So he makes a change in his life: he pledges that he will be home for dinner five nights a week; and on most of those nights he'll cook. He quits one job, works from home some of the time, tries hard to get home on time on days when he has to go into the city.

So you're expecting a heartwarming tale of a dad reunited with his family, happy dinnertimes filled with good food and lots of laughter. What you get instead is real life. A son who's a picky eater, a daughter who loves pasta with butter one night, hates it the next. Stracher works hard to make delicious meals and is constantly rejected. He gets mad. He yells. He stresses everybody out. His wife starts to complain about too much togetherness.

What I love about this book is Stracher's honesty about himself. At one point he writes, "Could it be that in trying to change my life I have accentuated the flaws I was trying to change? Before I started making dinner I was impatient, moody, and unavailable. Now I am impatient, moody, and available."

A little later he writes,

Instead of exercising patience with my daughter, her whining sets my teeth on edge, like nails across a blackboard. When she spills water at the table I take her to task for her clumsiness. When she leaves her markers uncapped, I make a show of tossing them into the garbage, even though they could probably be revived with a little water and a good recapping. I buy her a three-dollar bracelet, which she loses, and I give her a stern lecture about treating gifts with respect.

I am, in short, the father of my nightmares.

I love this kind of stuff. Not because it makes me feel superior. On the contrary, it makes me feel like I've found a comrade, a compadre, a partner in crime.

The good news, is slowly, over time, things improve. The kids become more adventurous in their eating. Stracher chills out. He's grateful for success, more philosophical about his failures. So ultimately it's a satisfying book, even a hopeful one. And it's an honest one.

Which is all I ask for.

In the Company of Women

Growing up, I usually only had one or two good friends at a time. In college, I didn't bother joining a sorority; the very idea went against my grain. So the big surprise for me as an adult is how many friends I have, whole groups of them, all of them women. Some I know well, and some have been virtually anonymous. How many women have I had heartfelt conversations with while we pushed our children on the swings, only to never see them again?

I remember once when I was in my twenties, before I was married or had children, telling a friend of mine that I found men more interesting than women. My friend was ten years older than I was, a lifetime wiser. She said, "Oh, women have always been more interesting to me."

And now I think she's right. Every woman I know plays a thousand different roles, juggles a hundred balls in the air at once. Really, some days I think we should all get medals. Most of us, anyway.

Tomorrow night, I'm going out to dinner with my two best friends, Amy and Danielle, to celebrate Amy's birthday. This has become our tradition: each of us gets a birthday dinner at the restaurant of our choice. We see each other frequently in everyday life (though not as frequently as when our firstborn sons were little, and we depended on each other for our sanity and survival), but the dinners are special. We dress up a little, wear makeup, go to grown-up places instead of the playground or the pool.

I remember reading about stuff like this in magazines, little articles in Women's Day (which, along with Family Circle, I read as a single woman in my twenties, a strange way to pass the time, in retrospect, sitting there in my apartment, listening to Public Enemy or Pavement as I read) about groups of friends who had little traditions and treats to cheer each other up. I thought it must be nice to have a group of friends. I hadn't had one since junior high.

And now I have one, which exists in various permutations and cross sections, shrinking and ballooning, expanding to hold whoever wants in. Danielle and I are in a book group with my old next-door neighbor, Kathryn; Amy and Kathryn and I hang out at the pool; Kathryn and I go to church with Meg and LiYing and Karla, who also go to the pool, where they are connected with other moms who have kids in the same schools or on the same teams or in the same dance classes. As far as I can tell, everyone is welcome, no one is turned away.

It's all so different from sixth grade, where exclusion was the name of the game with girls. Now the women I know are a bunch of socialists. Everybody's in, all the snacks and toys are shared. If you have a doctor's appointment, you can drop off the kids with somebody on your list. If you're going insane, you can drop off the kids with a friend who understands. The children's clothes are passed around and down. In fact, thanks to Danielle, I don't believe we've spent more than a total of fifty bucks on Fine Young Son No. 2's wardrobe. I mean, in his entire life.

This is not to say there is never tension or conflict. Your best friend's kid is rotten to your kid, and you care, you take it personally. And the next day (or ten minutes later), your kid is the rotten kid, and you dismount from your high horse. Somebody's husband gets laid off, and maybe nobody really understands what that's like, or everyone sort of forgets after a month or so. There are resentments.

But mostly the women I know take care of each other. They remember birthdays and that your kid has a nut allergy, they take your son down the slide at the pool because you don't like the slide. They pick you up from the airport. They're nice to your in-laws when they visit.

It makes you feel rich, doesn't it, to have these friends, some of whom you have nothing in common with other than you both have children? Amazingly, having that little in common turns out to be enough. Sometimes it's everything.

Revision Quest, or Tale of My Sweater

Last fall I decided to knit myself a sweater. It had been many years since I knitted a sweater, and the one I'd knit way back in 1992 was completed only by the good graces of the tiny, octagenerian who owned the yarn store I frequented, a lovely New Zealander named Alice. Alice walked me through the final stages, step by step, stitch by stitch. She did a good bit of the finishing herself, if I recall correctly, which is why my first sweater ever was a triumph. I knitted it for my boyfriend, who is now my husband, and the sweater is still with us, high up on a closet shelf. The neck, it has to be said, is a little tight, and we're a big-headed family, so it doesn't actually get worn. But it still looks great.

I knitted Fine Young Son No. 2 a baby sweater, a sweet little cardigan with buttons but no button holes, and aside from the cruddy job attaching the sleeves to the body, it turned out well. I knitted my goddaughter, Megan, a sweater, and did the same cruddy sleeve job, but it still turned out pretty dang cute.

So I thought I was ready for a sweater of my own. I saw a pattern in Vogue Knitting last fall, in an ad, went on line, bought the pattern, bought the yarn (from Jimmy Beans, my favorite online yarn store) at quite a pretty penny, and got to knitting. It was an incredibly easy pattern, and I had the front, back and sleeves done in no time. I was not pleased with the neck, which had an unfinished look to it, but I thought maybe once I pieced everything together, I could mess around with the neck and get it to look the way I wanted it to.

(Note: I am actually not a good enough knitter to mess around and make things right. I was deluding myself).

I had learned a lot about piecing things together from working on my goddaughter's sweater, and I felt I was up to the job of my sweater. I pieced the front and back together. Lovely. I attached the sleeves. I took the sleeves off. Attached them. Took them off. Finally got one on right. The second sleeve, however, was too big. I tried everything I could think of to make it fit in nicely. It wouldn't. I decided to live with it.

Only when I put the sweater on, it didn't look good. One big problem: it was a drop sleeve sweater. I hadn't given this much thought when I bought the pattern, but now I realized this was a look I couldn't pull off. I'm a broadchested kinda gal, and drop sleeves only serve to emphasize this. Add to this that the neck was too wide and allowed a fair viewing of my bra straps.

By the time I pieced the sweater together, it was spring, so it wasn't like I was going to get a lot of wear out of it anyway. I put it away. Maybe it would look better in the fall.

Now here we are at the end of August. I was going through my study closet this morning (deciding yet again it was just too messy to organize) when I happened upon my sweater. Maybe things had changed over the summer. Maybe I'd been imagining all those problems. I took it into my bedroom and tried it on.

I'm sad to say it is still a problematic sweater. It made me look frumpy and lumpy. I stared at it in the mirror and thought about all the time and money I'd invested in it. Would I just have to chalk it up to an object lesson, eat the loss?

And then I had a realization. When I started knitting the sweater, I weighed about thirty-five pounds more than I do now (Weight Watcher's, baby: I highly recommend it). In fact, the sweater is huge. I took it off and laid it across my bed. The sweater looked even huger. I put it back on and went to the mirror. If I grabbed a big hunk of sweater in the back and pulled the sweater tight, it actually looked pretty good. One of the sleeves was still set in sort of funky, but that's to be expected of anything knitted by my left-handed self: there's going to be a funk factor.

So maybe I'll frog the entire thing and start again--this time in a smaller size. I am, it should be said, an excellent reviser. I never get things right the first time. Rarely on the second time, either. But the third time? Honey, it's the charm.

Fall Projects

I am a project girl. I like to have at least five projects up and running at any given time. That way, when I get bored with one, I can hop over to another. I hop around like a little bunny with half a brain, finishing things up, starting new projects, so I always feel my life has purpose and meaning. There are projects to be completed! Fear not the void!

My Fall Project List as of August 28 (officially speaking, still summer, but why procrastinate?):

1. Start and complete a rough draft of a new book. I write children's books, middle grade fiction to be specific, and this fall I'm writing a sequel to a book that was published a few years ago. I keep trying to get started, but until Fine Young Son No. 2 starts preschool, there's not much chance of any meaningful work will get done.

2. Finish knitting the sweater I started this summer. The back is done, the front is halfway done. This is a Christmas present for a recipient who shall remain unnamed. I made great progress on it earlier in the summer, but when it started hitting 100 degrees every dang day, well, the thought of a lapful of wool was not enticing. However, I'm back on the pony and plan to have this sucker done by the end of September.

3. Finish the Amy Butler throw also started earlier this summer, another Christmas present. The material was purchased, washed and ironed in April. It got boxed up, moved to the new house, and retired to a closet until two weeks ago. Re-ironing was necessary. Then the measuring and the cutting of many, many different sized blocks of fabric (see above picture). Now I'm ironing seams. Next: the laying out, and then--scary, scary--the actual sewing. I'm sure I'll only have to rip out stitches eight or nine hundred times before I get it right.

4. Knit socks for various folks I love for Christmas. I love knitting socks. In fact, I've knit so many, I don't need a pattern anymore. You can take socks anywhere, you can get the most wonderful, funky yarn without have to sell your first born to afford it, and everyone loves them. Every once in awhile, I knit my ownself a pair, just because there's nothing like a homemade sock. It puts all other socks to shame.

5. Have at least two dinner parties. Next week (please, please) they are going to start building us a screened porch ("they" being the builder guys we contracted with in July). When it is completed, there should be plenty of warm weather left to have some folks over. It has always been my dream to have lots of dinner parties. It just seems so grown-up somehow ...

That's a preliminary list. Standing in the way of its completion will be travels to visit schools in Kentucky and South Carolina, various church committee meetings and commitments, school volunteer stuff, and the sheer necessity of cleaning a toilet or two. I will keep you updated as to my progress.


Two projects that most likely will not get done:

1. Clean out the closet in my study.

2. Make a scrapbook from various papers and artwork produced by Fine Young Son No. 1 in second grade. 'Nuff said.

Reality Check

Sometimes when I'm reading other people's blogs--blogs written by young moms who have three or four children whom they homeschool while running some fabulous cottage industry which involves sitting on the couch and knitting all day and then writing books about it while the (amazingly well-behaved and highly self-sufficient) children play with handcarved wooden blocks on the wide-planked hardwood floors--I wonder why I myself have failed so miserably as a mother and a human being.

The way some of these bloggers write about their families, it seems like it's nothing but good times and fuzzy moments and charming toddlers in calico dresses, everyone off to the farmers market or the Krafty Kids Co-Op or what have you. There are no TVs, no squabbles over computer time or whether or not the Nintendo DS is going to be taken out back and shot (because of course there is no Nintendo DS).

In case you were wondering, this is not my life. If I have written anything in the short history of this blog that would cause you to think that (and I don't think I have, but you never know), anything that would ever make you think I'm anything other than a broken woman contemplating sending her four-year-old son to military school out of sheer spite, well, I apologize. I don't want to be the cause of yet another woman walking around telling herself that everybody else is doing a better job of being a parent than she is, everybody else's kids are more emotionally well-adjusted and simply less insane than hers.

After a lovely back-to-school open house that made me all aflutter with back-to-school giddiness, reality crashed right back into our lives. When I picked Fine Young Son No. 1 from school yesterday, all hell broke loose in the minivan. Brothers yelling and screaming at each other, seatbelts unlatched so blows could be thrown. And despite my many threats, despite FYS2 being sent to his room for the afternoon, there was no improvement at any point up until the time the boys lost consciousness (clarify that: until they fell asleep; I did not drug their afternoon snacks, though in retrospect it wouldn't have been a half-bad idea). From about 4 p.m. on, I had a headache that wouldn't quit.

It's not that we don't have good days, days when my fine young sons play together and seem to halfway like each other. We do have those kind of days, or at least fragments of those kind of days. And I love my children and would take a bullet for them (but not one for their Nintendo DS) and can't imagine life without them, except for maybe having leisure time and not having spend a chunk of every day wiping syrup off of every available surface in the house. But, really, my life would be so much less without them. Emptier. Poorer. A lot less funny.

But if you ever read this blog and think, "Ah, I'd like to have her life because it seems so much simpler than mine, so much easier, her children so much better behaved than my own--why, everything at her house is fun and carefree and light," please remind yourself: It's a blog. That means most of the cruddy stuff is edited out.

Which is what makes it different from real life.

Back-to-School Redux

Okay, okay, after my "homesick for the home we never had" post the other day, I have to say that back-to-school time really is quite lovely. Yesterday we went to an open house at Fine Young Son No. 1's school and met his teacher and saw old friends, and Mr. "Do I have to go back to school?" was happy as a clam, making the rounds to see all of his old teachers, saying hey to everyone in sight.

As much as anything, I love the night before the first day of school. When I was a kid, I'd sort through all my new school supplies (how did I get them to school, I wonder--I didn't carry a backpack; no one did--a paper bag, maybe, since this was also pre-plastic bag?), lovingly sniffing the pencils, feeling rich in paper and pink erasers. And, ah, the thrill of a new lunch box! I had a purple Road Runner lunch box in the early years, graduating to a denim/vinyl tote thing around fourth grade, with a Peanuts lunch box thrown in there somewhere. My mom always put milk in my thermos (no Kool-Aid for moi), so my lunch boxes always acquired a sour smell by around week three.

Yesterday afternoon, I vacuumed FYS1's room--which he had supposedly picked up: ha!--and straightened up his desk, and generally made everything tidy for the big day. First day of school equals fresh start, in my book. In the kitchen, I washed out the Mystery Van lunch box and scrubbed the vinyl and even attempted to clean the cloth handle, which has gotten grubby over the years since first grade.

Then last night I made lunch. I am a "Do it the Night Before" kind of gal--lay out the clothes, take the shower, make the lunch. We are not a family of morning people, and it is best not to have too much to think about while the coffee is percolating. Making FYS1's lunch is usually the last chore of the day, as I almost always forget about it until right before I'm ready to go to bed. I can't put if off until morning, because I must have ample time for coffee drinking. So I sleepily make the tuna sandwich (he's allergic to nuts, so no peanut butter for him), wash off the grapes or cut up the apple, shove a couple of Oreos into a baggie. I do my best not to forget the snack.

Last night, of course, because it was the night before the first day of school, making lunch was a little celebration. I lovingly cut the tuna sandwich into triangles. I happily washed the grapes. I thought about throwing in an extra Oreo into the baggie, but then I remembered FYS1's dental bills.

This morning, FYS1 was up twenty minutes earlier than he needed to be and dressed before I got downstairs. This will never happen again--as early as tomorrow, I will be dragging his sluggish body out of bed and yelling at him that he'll lose computer time if he doesn't finish breakfast in two minutes. But this morning he was all enthusiasm.

Typically another mother in the carpool will be driving in the mornings, but this morning FYS1 asked me to take him, it being the first day of school and all, so I did. And when I dropped him off I said what I always say when I drop him off at school: "I love you, Daddy loves you, God loves you, and yes, even your little brother loves you."

And just like he always does, Fine Young Son No. 1 rolled his eyes and said, "See ya later, Mom."

And just like that, he was back to school.

Back to the School of Our Dreams

I think back-to-school time is a bit like Christmas. The very phrase "back to school" triggers a bout of nostalgia for so many of us--and mostly it's a nostalgia for something that never really existed. Yes, we all went back to school, but how many of us walked there kicking through piles of red and yellow leaves, the air slightly chilled and autumnal, our brand new shoes shining in the morning light?

Okay, maybe you did, but not me, baby. Having spent a lot of my growing-up time in Virginia, the first days of school I experienced were hot and muggy. I did walk to school through third grade, and I did wear new Mary Janes and knee high socks (this was in the early '70s), but summer was a long ways from being over. There were no leaves on the sidewalk, and the air was not crisp with the promise of fall.

So when nostalgia wells up in me, it is not for the humid Virginia mornings I dragged myself through to the squat, pink-bricked school that was Kings Park Elementary, but for a 1950's New England scene that I never actually experienced--in the same way that I've never experienced a Victorian Christmas straight out of Dickens, and yet that's what I start pining for around December 12th.

Fine Young Son No. 1 starts third grade next Tuesday, August 21st. We are told temperatures should be hovering in the mid-nineties. Talk about crisp and autumnal! And because it's the 21st century, he will wear pretty much what he's worn all summer, shorts and tee shirts. He'll wear tennis shoes instead of sandals, and because we don't buy him new tennis shoes until he absolutely needs them (otherwise we'd go broke), he will not be trotting into room 207 in shiny new footwear.

He will have new school supplies, but they will be arriving in the same backpack he's been carrying since preschool. It is a red Gap backpack and there's a small hole in the bottom so that pencils fall out fairly easily. I've offered every year for the last two years to buy him a new one, but he is attached to this one. If he ends up carrying it through high school graduation, I for one will not be surprised.

Moreover, he will be bringing lunch in the same Scooby Doo lunch box (The Mystery Machine) that's he's had since the spring of first grade. I offered to buy him a new one, but no. The old one will do just fine.

He has been this way all his life. No changes, thank you very much. We moved to a new house in May, and I'm amazed we convinced him to come along. I think he would have been perfectly happy if we'd let him rent the old one from us.

Fine Young Son no. 1 neither walks to school nor takes the bus. He is driven. (This year the big excitement is we've been asked to join a car pool, and it looks like I'll be doing more picking up than dropping off--which is to say I can finally live out my dream of waving my child off to school while still in my PJs). So when he's an adult and is hit by a wave of back-to-school nostalgia, he'll probably envision the inside of a minivan ... which is driving through a crisp, New England fall morning toward a red brick school house, and all the kids are playing kickball, and everyone is happy forever.