Family portrait

Tonight Chris grilled cheeseburgers for us on the deck. I made oatmeal raisin cookies, and even though I never get the measuring right for cookie size, somehow I ended up only one shy of the four dozen the recipe yields—this is practically a record for me. Laura went to play with the little girl across the street and then called to ask if she could spend the night. She came home and packed her suitcase to bulging, one tshirt to sleep in, hopefully an outfit for in the morning, and I think about four giant stuffed animals. No doubt no toothbrush. She’s coming home at 7:45 tomorrow morning before her friend’s mom has to go to work, so the bulk seems a little excessive. And Will’s been walking around the house with a Lincoln Logs box on his head hollering, “I can’t see, it’s too dark!” Even Kitty cuddled up for one of her many naps against our big family portrait (the one that’s propped up against the bookcase since I can’t find anywhere to hang it). Like she actually likes us or something. Suddenly we’re some kind of Brady Bunch family. Weird and cute all at the same time.

The Greatness of Macaroni

Back home, life is normal again. Or as normal as it gets here. I had an email today from a friend asking for my macaroni and cheese recipe. On a fundamental level, perhaps macaroni is the perfect food. Cheese and pasta. Yummy. And usually children will eat it, always a culinary plus around here. Although last night Will decided the macaroni (not to mention the beef tips I sautéed in soy sauce) looked like poison and cried until Chris made him a peanut sandwich (i.e., peanut butter and jelly).

Crockpot macaroni and cheese
(This is the best recipe, but obviously you need a crock pot. I understand not everyone has this miraculous device, but I’m sure I don’t believe it. This recipe is my sister-in-law Shari’s father’s—so it’s a few degrees removed. Parenthetical commentary is mine.)

12 oz macaroni (oh, what the hell. What size box do you have?)
16 oz sharp cheddar cheese (obviously that’s easier if grated. again, it’s a question of what size hunk you have in the fridge. the bigger the better)
12 oz evaporated milk
1.5 c milk
1 tsp salt
.5 c melted margarine (or butter. I generally leave this out or at least reduce the amount. it’s very good this way, but sort of swimming in fat. like leaving the butter out helps)
2 beaten eggs
4 slices American cheese (or more than that)

In the crockpot, stir together everything but the American cheese (stir, don’t layer). Then layer the fake cheese on top. Cook for 4 hours on low or 2 hours on high.

Mama’s macaroni and cheese
(This is the recipe I used until Matt married Shari and I abandoned my culinary heritage.)

4 oz package of macaroni (or again, whatever!)
“cheese to taste” (typical of my mother’s cryptic recipe writing. she writes down a recipe and then completely changes it when she cooks. she’ll call me to give me a recipe, read it to me, and as she says 4 oz of macaroni, then she says “I usually buy that brand that comes in the green box, you know the one that’s cheaper, and it’s not the biggest size but the next one down. And then I leave out the cheese and put in basil instead.” or whatever wacky thing she does to the recipe. it’s always good though. regarding this one—since I seem to be doing that too now—I usually use either a half or a whole of the big hunks of kraft extra sharp cheddar, depending on how long I want to have leftovers.)

Layer the noodles first then cover with cheese and repeat for at least two layers, ending with cheese on top.

Mix 1 c milk or carnation evaporated milk with one egg and a “shake” of dried mustard (Coleman’s). Pour over the cheese.

Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes or until not juicy in the center.

Vegas Day 3

Assimilate me

I made it to two paper sessions this morning before it was time to cut out to for the rest and relaxation part of the trip. The Star Trek experience was a hoot. Although I’d run into several people at the conference who were looking for company, I went alone, as is proper for religious experiences. I wish Chris and Laura could’ve gone with me though. I think Will’s not quite old enough yet to be assimilated. Although I did buy him a Borg teddy bear at one of the promenade gift shops, so evidently he’s not totally outside their marketing range.

I had the Captain Janeway salad at Quark’s Bar and Restaurant. I went through the rides and the museum several times each. I managed to resist assimilation by the Borg on four separate occasions. As I was about to wrap it up, I ran into some people from the conference, one of whom took my picture with a Ferengi. I’d go back again, especially if I could go with my family. But, as is always the case when you meet the mighty, it was sort of disappointing. The phasers and tricorders in the display cases in the museum all looked like props—which you know they are, but you hate to lose the mystique. The uniforms looked just like on the show (since they were in fact the actors’ uniforms), but they demonstrated an alarming tendency in the Federation towards anorexia. Perhaps I’m exaggerating a bit—but certainly they wouldn’t have had any uniforms in my size if I went back to the Academy. It was a fairly postmodern afternoon, a day spent immersed in Federation culture and simultaneously aware that all the officers in the rides were awfully young.

I had time for one more conference session afterwards, and then off to the hotel for the red-eye flight home. Even the red-eye was sort of a let down—just a bunch of normal folks on Eastern time in the far west wondering when on earth we’d ever get home.
I saw Elvis about a dozen times, heard the Blues Brothers (or some reasonable facsimile thereof) sing, watched a fake Rod Stewart who looked even more run-down than the real thing dealing poker. I never saw anybody win any money, and most of the dancers I saw were mostly dressed. I have to confess to spending a large part of my time hidden upstairs in the conference areas, even when I wasn’t presenting, because it was just safer up there. I suppose that’s lucky for me, since the conference motto was “What happens in Vegas will be reported to Galactic Overlord 10” or something to that effect. He must be bored with my report.

Vegas Day 2

All work and no play

Today’s my conference day. Three two-hour long conference paper sessions, three and four papers each session. Whew. I decided to stick to the Le Guin thread in the conference and unfortunately missed a lot of interesting papers on other topics, particularly Star Trek. One of the sessions was an author reading with Le Guin and another writer. After the talk, she signed books—a maximum of three, and if you wanted more than that signed, you had to get back in line again. The book dealers were out in force, and they had just piles of books. Le Guin must suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome.

As Le Guin was signing my books, I asked if she was planning to attend all the sessions about her work. It only seemed polite, she answered, and sure enough, next session, there she was. I watched her throughout while I listened to papers, wondering if she would ask questions during the discussion section after the papers, but she mostly listened quietly, smiling here and there when appropriate, drawing in a small notebook. I was glad to see this, as I knew my paper was in the next session.

When we moved to the next presentation room, I headed up to the front table where a very nervous looking young man was sitting. It was his first conference presentation, he’d just finished his undergrad degree, and the subject of his paper was sitting in the audience. Nothing like seeing somebody really nervous to remind you that you’ve done this a dozen times and it’ll be fine. Sure enough, it was fine: my paper was respectable if not fabulous, and I was able to answer my questions from the audience. Le Guin came up after the panel and said thank you—to which my only response could be thank you!

I snuck back to the hotel room for a quick phone call home—everyone is still alive, and evidently better, as Will says Grandma took them to the BIG movies! He has a big splinter, and it’s just a hoot to me that my mother, a powerful nurse almost never unsettled by anything that happens in the hospital, decided to leave it for me to deal with. Chris was having fun on his trip, having found a compatible evening out partner at his workshop, but the beach was sort of a bust because of a red tide, which is too bad because his hotel was a resort on the Gulf Coast.

And then on to dinner. The other woman on the panel invited me to dinner with her, and we walked up and down the strip, looking for somewhere interesting to eat and seeing the sights, from an absolutely fabulous Dale Chihuly ceiling in the Bellagio to the guys standing on the street handing out the strippers-direct-to-you cards. We ended up far down the strip having dinner at the Luxor, which I’m sure is a tawdry replica of Egypt, but at least resembled something Egyptian, much more so than Excalibur evoked Arthurian legends. Nothing like having the buffet in Vegas. Good thing we had to walk a mile or two to get there! Altogether a pleasant evening spent in good company.

Vegas Day 1

Mall architecture

Las Vegas is confusing. On a street map, it looks like everything is all in one big row, the Strip, and you can just walk down Las Vegas Boulevard and go from one hotel to the next. Instead, it became clear about three minutes after the airport shuttle pulled into town that whoever came up with the mall design theory—confuse everybody so they have to go down all the halls looking for one store—worked here first. Finally I made it to the conference. I met my dinner date for the evening in the hallway outside the elevator, where he was wandering aimlessly looking for conference registration. Always good to meet somebody new, especially when they are even more lost than you. But because I don’t mind using maps, eventually we got registered for the conference and headed out into the bright lights of the big city for dinner.

We ended up eating dinner in the Caesar’s Palace mall, right outside one of the fountains with the moving statues. It’s hard to describe what happens to the notion of classic Greek statuary and architecture when you thrown in slot machines. And let’s just say that the mannequins at Victoria’s Secret in Vegas doesn’t look anything like the ones back home in Kansas.

At the conference that night, an author roundtable included my favorite contemporary writer, Ursula K. Le Guin. The panel got off to an interesting start with the dismissal by one of the male writers of the notion that the personal is political, and with his assertion that science fiction becomes deadly tedious when it becomes political. Le Guin, whose work is steeped in politics of all kinds, made a few pointed but polite remarks to the contrary as I sat and wondered what she must’ve been really thinking.

The conference hotel is “inexpensive” and essentially grossed me out. I brought flip flops in case I decided to swim at the pool, but spent the trip walking around my hotel room wearing them so I wouldn’t have to touch the carpet. Wish I could’ve stayed at the Bellagio.

Vegas reports are all posted after the fact, as I determined there was no way I was dragging my laptop all the way across the country, and I'm damned if I'm going to pay to blog. At least for now.

Reporting for duty

I’m leaving for Las Vegas at the proverbial crack of dawn tomorrow morning, and finally, now that I’m finished writing my paper, I’m getting excited about going. The conference program looks pretty interesting; there’s a guy presenting who’s been writing on Star Trek and race that I’d like to meet. But especially I can’t wait to hear Le Guin read—wonder what she’ll choose?—and although I haven’t packed yet, I’ve already picked out the books I’m going to ask her to sign for me at the reading: Tales from Earthsea, The Other Wind, Dancing at the Edge of the World, and The Telling, the book I’m writing about now. My mother sort of freaked me out by suggesting I should take her a gift, a jar of peach jam or something from South Carolina, but I’ve mostly recovered from the suggestion now and resolved maybe just to write her a letter one day explaining what I feel about her work (as if I could do that). Probably she has fifty of those a month, not to mention the jars of jam.

I spent last night poking around the Star Trek Experience website and getting ready to spend a fortune on souvenirs for everybody; Will wants a Captain Picard and a Borg action figure, and Laura wants an ensign’s costume. I told her not to hold her breath on that request. I have to call Chris tonight and see what he’d like… I think I’ll see if I can find a Starfleet Academy tshirt for myself. And should I shell out fifteen bucks to have my picture taken on the bridge? Guess I’ll have to decide that once I get there. My grandmother has warned me the last three times I’ve talked to her not to get addicted to gambling, but I guess I should at least try a slot machine. And I packed my books to read on the plane already too… The Historian, that new Dracula book that’s supposed to be so wonderful, and the latest Elizabeth Peters mystery.

The worst thing about leaving is that none of my family is coming with me—and I couldn’t weasel any friends into the trip either. I really wanted to go with Chris, but he left yesterday for his teaching workshop, so that didn’t work out. Maybe if it’s wonderful we can go back out together, get a cheap flight sometime in August when every other sane person is staying away (the temperature in Vegas yesterday was 104 degrees!). Laura wants to go and get assimilated with me, and while I’m pretty sure Will’s too small for that, I know he’d have a ball too. I love that I’ve raised little Star Trek geeks. I just wish they could come too.

And of course I always worry about giving my paper, whether somebody a million times smarter than me will be there to destroy my poor weak argument. That Le Guin herself might show up at the sessions—there are four or five on her work—is a pretty scary idea too. Surely not. But almost the very worst thing of all is that between writing my paper and working on my class, I’ve been busting my behind for two weeks to get this house cleaned up—the end of the school year scrubbing—and now it’s really really clean (except for the carpet, which I’ll deal with when I get back)—and now I’m leaving. I told Laura today that if she and Will trash this house while I’m gone they’ll never ever see a Captain Picard figure in their entire lives. And I mean it too.

All about Daddy

Will’s class did a really cute Father’s Day project this year—Chris got a tall plastic cup that Will decorated with glitter glue, in a sort of minimalist way, with a sprinkle here and there. Inside the cup, he put these strips of construction paper, each with a different question and answer, all about Daddy. My favorite of these is “What do you and Daddy do together?” “Go on a walk and find popcorn to eat.” I love that.

Rejections and an ingrate daughter

I took Laura to school with me last Wednesday so I could do my weekly rejection check—see how many of the poems I sent out at the end of last semester have come back. I finally realized that April and May is the time to send out poems; many journals don’t accept summer submissions, so if you squeak in an entry right before the end of the reading year, they usually read the poems more quickly so they can clear out their office for summer. Although maybe I should consider whether perhaps this makes the editors unsympathetic. I certainly have gotten a number of nos lately.

When I open my rejection letters, I generally allow myself a minute or two to whine about it—particularly if it’s one that I really had hopes for—and then I file it away and move on with life. I opened up this one, which had a really good set of poems included—and said something to the effect of why didn’t they like these poems? My far-too-smart-for-her-own-good daughter turns around and says to me, in this teenager voice, “Well, Mama, maybe it’s because you’re not Edgar Allan Poe.” I had a hard time deciding whether to laugh or stuff her in a trash can. Fortunately for her I decided to forgo the trash can, but it was a close call, let me tell you.

Nail, tire, rain

I have a nail in my tire. I found out coming home from Columbia, a little more than a hour's drive. A friend following me out of the parking garage called me on my cell to tell me my tire looked low, so I stopped at the next big gas station to check the tire, which was practically flat as a board.

You can picture it, I'm sure: the pouring rain. the vain attempts to use the umbrella. how you can't screw that little cap off because everything in the universe is soaking wet. how finally I used a babywipe to get some traction on it to unscrew it. the stupid long skirt that's so much fun to walk in but that can't be held up out of the torrential flood puddle. then! the broken nozzle on the air machine! the last two quarters! driving to the gas station across the street! having abandoned the impractical soaking sandals long ago, marching into the gas station barefoot for change (ewww). finally, praise all that is holy in the universe, a working air machine. driving home in cold wet clothes feeling all tragic in the air conditioning, which it's too hot to turn off.

Guess I need to get that fixed.

Push you out the door

I’m dreading taking William to school today. Either Thursday or Friday, I forget which, he pitched this huge fit when I dropped him off. He always turns clingy when we get out of the car—“hold me hold me hold me hold me.” Wonder if he does that with Chris? I generally try to get out of drop-off duty, preferring the happier pick-up moments, when you get big hugs and demonstrations of the day’s art projects. Chris manages the drop-off easier than I do anyhow; one thing I’ve learned being a parent is that sometimes the spouse is better at something than you are. I can’t do shoulder rides at all, and apparently I give terrible baths. But I am really good at letting William “help” me cook. And I am the math homework backup too—pretty unbelievable given my own performance in math, but it’s more a matter of being better able to bite my tongue. Being better at some things means you pay a terrible price: all the drop-offs, or the math homework on a terrible fractions day.

But being better at something doesn’t always mean that’s what you get to do. Because Chris’s class starts at 7:30, which is when daycare opens, I’m on drop-off duty all summer, alas. I’m actually usually better at it in the summer anyhow, because I can take more time to pry Mr. Will off my leg gently. We’ll come in and read a story and play in the water table a minute or look at the new toys—the Glow Worm room trades out toys every couple of weeks, just to keep things fresh. Half the time I end up reading a story to four or five children, all crowded around with Will in the proprietary lap position. This classroom actually has a rocking chair, which is sort of sad and also good—because there is something about sitting on the floor with this pile of kids on top of you. Aside from the fact, of course, of how hard it is to get up off the floor then. But when you have on your good work clothes, sometimes that rocking chair is really handy.

And I have to confess how much simpler it is to manipulate your own kid when you’re surrounded by several others. One of the cherished classroom goodbye routines at this daycare is push-you-out-the-door. Just like it sounds, when you’re all ready to go and have your goodbye kisses and whatnot, your little tot escorts you to the door, steps behind you and pushes you out. Will usually runs out after you for one more kiss and hug too, although I’m not sure if this is an official part of the routine. Laura used to do the same thing when she was a Butterfly. My theory is that the kids feel they are in control of your leaving when they are the ones pushing you out of the room. So when I’m ready to go, if Will isn’t ready yet, all I have to do is ask if Jacob or Peyton wants to push me out the door (which they are always willing to do) before Will’s shoving me out so fast my head is spinning. I know, it’s terrible to manipulate your kids. But everybody does it, and sometimes you just have to get to work.

Part of the weirdness of the drop-off if the “having” to go to work. Almost all us parent as we leave will say “Mommy has to go to work now!” Moms and Dads announce this very brightly, but the implication of course is that work is this terrible place that separates you from your child—and I don’t know, maybe it is. I try to say something like “Time for Mama to go to work!” so it’s not so negative (even though I often feel that way myself about marching off to the salt mines). But when you have to repeat your leaving mantra eight thousand times that makes it rather difficult to avoid having to go. By that time, though, sometimes work feels like an escape—all grownups, most of the time. Nobody twiddling your hair or putting their chocolate fingers on your clean shirt. Quiet time in which you can actually accomplish a task. Sometimes the desire to be at work really makes you wish they’d hurry up and push you out.

Usually the goodbye routine is fun, if a little lengthy. But last week, I was running late—that’s always when the problems hit. I had a long drive before a meeting, and I’d already been delayed at home. Will was playing with Kitty, who scratched him and made him cry, and then when I picked him up to calm him down again, I discovered she’d scratched him enough to make him bleed a tiny bit, which of course I realized when I saw the smear of blood on the very front and center of my shirt. We had to kick Kitty out, take antibacterial boo-boo measures, and change my shirt too. By the time we got to daycare, I didn’t have time for weasling out of the room methods and had to resort to the much less preferred hand-the-kid-off-to-the-teacher. Now generally speaking, the teacher stays close by during your good-byes, but tries not to interfere unless it’s just one of those mornings where Mom or Dad are clearly never going to be able to get out on their own. It’s better for everybody if they do, but if they don’t, a little special teacher snuggling will often do the trick.

But this was a desperate measures morning, and after telling Will that I absolutely had to leave so I could be on time, I tried to hand him to Ms. Amanda. He really has very strong arms and legs. Not convinced that my being on time was important to him, he hung on. A minute more discussion, and then I just had to pry him off and go. This is the worst of the daycare moments: your sweet baby is screaming in a sort of demonic possession way. You are of course the reason he’s demonic in the first place, since clearly anyone who would leave their child in this state must have an office down on the lower-levels of the Inferno. The poor teacher has that set-jaw look that indicates she understands why you’re doing this, but boy, this spectacle sure isn’t getting the day off on the right foot. Generally a teacher or parent wandering down the hall will peek in the glass window to see who’s being murdered, so you almost always have an audience. It’s just miserable.

The standard wisdom in daycare settings is that the kid stops crying by the time you get to the lobby, and everyone is happy and playing again by the time you’re driving out of the parking lot. I’m not convinced about this, particularly with William, who is going through a little stage right now in which he can hold a grudge or remember an insult for quite a while. Since he may possibly have inherited this trait from me, I can easily see him spending the morning howling in despair at his abandonment by his formerly beloved mother. And of course, as I’m driving off to my meeting, an interminable miserable drive in which I hear the echoes of terrible baby screaming, this is what I’m imagining. Finally I called the daycare (which is #3 on my cell phone speed dial, only after Home and Chris cell) and asked if they’d check on Will for me.

One of the reasons I love this daycare is because they always very nicely, without treating you like some blithering idiot, go check on your child. I actually did this with Laura once when she was three herself, because one afternoon at work I simply became convinced something was wrong with her. I’m not psychic, I discovered that day when I finally decided I had to call or else leave work. I kinda thought I’d already known that, but I guess you have to test these theories out. The staff member who handled the psychic parent network phone line that day just went down to see what Laura was doing, asked the teacher how her day had gone, and kindly reported her findings back to me, adding that parents should always trust their intuition, and she was happy to check for me. I wondered afterwards if they had psychic parent-teacher training workshops, she was so smooth. I realized later instead that obviously I was not the first crazed parent to call. After that little episode, I don’t feel nearly as weird calling just to see if my hysterical child has calmed down after being so rudely dumped at school, so about thirty minutes into my drive I called and got the standard reply to such inquiries: he settled down by the time I got to the lobby. I could go to work with a clear conscience.

Next year Will’s classroom is on the front hall of the center, with a big picture window facing the parking lot. That means two goodbyes—one at the door, and then the wave at the window. For years I’ve watched the poor Caterpillar parents walking around the shrubs to that window before heading off to their cars. Most of their kids are smiling and waving, but there’s always that occasional one or two wailing and rending their garments. That mom or dad always looks composed, but you know inside they are shriveling up and dying. And that they probably have a big presentation later that morning. You can only offer them that smile that says, I know, good luck and move on, because it’ll be your turn next week.

Board meetings and watching squirrels

I had my last Board of Trustees meeting today. Thank goodness. I hate those meetings. They’re so presidential—the big conference tables, the giant cushy black leather chairs, the flag and the university seal printed carpet, even a spectator and press gallery off the side of the conference table—all the way down to the water decanter at each place. One or two women besides me, and one black man, and otherwise a lot of presidential-looking white men. I am a faculty representative this year, and the youngest person in the room by probably twenty years. I have this invisible neon sign over my head that says “She doesn’t belong.” My job is to sit and listen. Very respectfully.

All that’s bad enough, but it’s summer and Laura’s out of school. We are not millionaires, so we can’t send her to camp. We have her scheduled for a couple of day camps later in the summer, but it’s more of those 9-1 deals that really make it just that much more impossible for you to do anything while the kids are in camp since you’re driving back and forth too. Essentially, then, while Chris is teaching summer school, I am keeping Laura. (Poor Will gets marched off to school as usual all year, since we have to pay through the summer for his spot in the room or he’ll lose it and then we have no daycare in the fall—and if we’re paying for it, by gosh he’s going. Not to mention the fact that I can never work a lick when he’s home.) Staying home with Laura (and with Will, for that matter) would be great—except that I’m working on a faculty development grant myself now, and it’s tough to get my work done with her underfoot, although I’m managing.

She’s been to school with me several times, where I give her my cell phone in case of emergencies and let her watch movies on the big screen in the multi-media classroom just downstairs from my office. She generally me at my office calls to say, “I’m hungry” or “When are we going to have lunch again?” and once, “I love you,” and so far this arrangement has worked out fairly well. It certainly helps me to concentrate hard on whatever I have to do so I can finish it and we can get home; work time of approximately one movie’s length will focus your attention, let me tell you. I can write at home while she plays or reads or watches tv or whatever, but at work it’s strictly whatever business needs taking care of and then back home again.

I had something arranged with a sister-in-law in Columbia for Laura for the Board meeting, but then—they changed the time. I tried several other plans: nothing worked. If the meeting had been in town, I might have left her—gasp—home alone for the hour it would take, but I have to drive to Columbia for it, which makes it a minimum three hours and more usually four, so that was out. Finally, I decided she’d just have to come with me. After all, she’s ten years old now, plenty grown enough to sit quietly and read a book during a meeting. I bribed her with the second volume of The Babysitter by R. L. Stine (the pre-teen Stephen King—and yes, I had a certain amount of anxiety about the non-literary book my daughter would be reading at the meeting, but tough. It’s summer). Driving down for the meeting, I gave her her instructions: Sit in the back row. Be still and quiet. Read your book and don’t ask anybody questions. If somebody speaks to you, answer politely. When we go into executive session and you have to leave the room, stay with Mommy’s friend C. I wondered if maybe it would be good for her to see a meeting like this, if she’d be better prepared herself one day to move into the working world if she knew what it was like. And in the back row, after all, she’d be short and maybe nobody’d notice her.

Mostly it seemed like nobody did. She wasn’t bored, she said, and when I asked why not, thinking perhaps she’d been interested in observing the power structures of the university, she told me it was because she’d gotten almost halfway through her book. Afterwards I took her for a walk around the main campus, which she’d never seen. She liked the library and the quad, but especially all the squirrels. She’s had a squirrel fixation since before she could say the word. We’ll be at the zoo standing next to the very rare lemur cage or something and she’ll be hollering, “Look, a squirrel!” I’m convinced she’s going to be a biologist. And maybe she has something there. Maybe there’s not all that much difference watching squirrels store their food and flout their tails in defensive postures and going to a Board meeting.

Nothing changed in the world—on the one hand, I wasn’t summarily fired, and on the other, nobody on the Board now thinks we should make better arrangements for the care of school-aged children in America, I’m sure. No squirrels were harmed in the progress of the day. Laura and I rewarded ourselves with ice cream for lunch and swimming in the afternoon with a friend of mine, declared it a pretty good day, and came home unscathed ourselves. I imagine that she’ll remember a good day of squirrel watching and ice cream, and I will have a good reminder about a child’s perspective on the world.

Cosmic significance of the shredder

When it comes to household appliances, I always knew it was impossible to achieve perfect union with all creation through ironing, but I had great hopes for the shredder. I have spent several days this week shredding old everything, leaving this one tiny pile of stuff to file away in my formerly overcrowded file drawers, and one big box of crap to stuff into the attic for the kids to shred after we’re dead. I have gotten some gratification through shredding, erasing the past, as it were, or at least the power company’s vision of the past, not to mention a number of consumer complaints that I wrote at a time when I obviously needed medication or anger management classes (not to say those days are over). But on the whole, I don’t feel yet that I have reached nirvana. Alas.

Old school papers

Laura and I are still going through school papers; we found another stash of them. All during the school year, I try to go through them every night, or at least once a week—and on an average school day she might come home with six or seven papers a day, not counting William’s sheet or two—and save the couple that are most interesting from that week. Then in June we go through them one more time and put them in a box up in the attic. When they’re grown, they can while away an afternoon or two remember their glory days (always assuming the papers survive the attic for that length of time).

I always find a number of interesting things (one this year’s most memorable is a very cute note to a boy that I won’t quote here, except to note that it was signed “your hunny bunny” and fortunately appears not to have been delivered). Here’s the essay she wrote last September about being grown—finally we found it in her portfolio. I just love it. What a hoot this girl is.

Grown Up

Writing Situation: Suppose that you woke up one morning as a grown-up.

Beep beep beep! I wake up and looked at my clock. 9 a.m. Then I got out of bed to make up my bed and put my stuffed animals up when I saw that my animals had disappeared! I went to my closet and saw in the cubbies that my animals stay were files! Then I ran downstairs to the mirrir and saw I was a ADULT!

I quickly called the doctor and told him about my problem. He said he’d be right over. When he got here he checked my DNA and he said that they were addult! He said I could get a job so I could pay my taxes. So I went out to a computer store that had a wanted sign. The store haped to be Best Buy. I signed the papers and the told me I could work in the CD section.

When I got home from work I checked my closet again this time I saw two rows of cubbies! My stuffed animals were in the first and the files were still there. In between the two cubbies was a swirl. Sudinley I had an idea! I walked right in to the swirl.

Beep beep beep! I woke up and looked at my clock. 9 a.m. Then I remembered what had just happened. I jumped out of bed without bothering about the covers and saw in every place they would be were my stuffed animals! I ran downstairs and looked in the mirrir and saw I was a normal kid.

(P.S. thank hevens I didn’t have a husband)
The End

Bedtime stories

Lisa: “Laura, quit kicking your brother’s feet out from under him. He’s going to fall and hit his head on the footboard of the bed and then you’ll be in trouble and you’re going to say, ‘Unh! I didn’t mean to!’ and I’m going to say ‘tough, you should’ve thought about that before and now you’re grounded,’ so stop it already.”

William: “And my head will fall off?”

Not emailing Barbie

Laura and I had to have a discussion the other day about why we don’t email Barbie. I’m not sure exactly how she emailed Barbie in the first place, to tell you the truth. After watching her browse around in the girl-cyberworld a while, I did see that many sites allow kids to just type in a comment box and in theory they’re emailing Kim Possible, or whoever. So at least she’s evidently not sending real email; she has an email account, but doesn’t have permission to check it on her own yet, mostly because of spam, because the only mail she gets there is from her Aunt Shari. When I asked Laura if she was ever using her last name or anything that identified her—which of course she has strict orders against—I got the mom disgust look and eye roll, so that was reassuring.

She’s only ten, so I still peer nosily over her shoulder at the computer at pretty regular intervals, and the Barbie question came up last week when I glanced at her screen and read this:

B-mail Question of the Month
Ever wish you could change just one thing about yourself? You’re SOOOO not alone. Hair, weight, teeth, feet, style, age, appearance, attitude, whatever it is, SOMEONE out there feels the same way. So read on, but know this first: YOU’RE AWESOME THE WAY YOU ARE. (Believe it) And if there’s something you REALLY want to change (that can be changed), face it head on, be strong, and find (or create!) the courage to change it. (Good luck!)

I about hit the roof. Like many mothers of girls, my feelings about Barbie are conflicted. Yes, I played with Barbie. I still have my first Barbie in a shoebox in the closet, although I doubt I’ll ever get rich off her, the original plan. But once I became conscious of Barbie’s impossible figure—well, let’s just say that someone who teaches women’s studies classes might have an issue with the Queen of Anorexia and Plastic Surgery. I do have Barbie for President 2000 in my office, which we talk about in class, but I still have my problems with anybody whose feet are perpetually molded into high heels, however sensible.

It’s not that I don’t believe Barbie could change: her resume touts her as a modern superwoman, who’s had “more than 90 careers—from Olympic athlete to astronaut.” Great! So when her B-mail asks my daughter a question about what she’d like to change about herself, you’d think it might have something more than physical features listed there. Oh wait! I left out attitude. Laura could change her attitude. After, of course, her “hair, weight, teeth, feet, style, age, appearance.” Let’s get our priorities right. Surely there’s some more convincing way Barbie can tell a girl she’s “awesome” the way she is.

So poor Laura had to listen to the anorexia lecture about how girls can die from how people expect them to look, and how it’s not all Barbie’s fault, but that we have to be conscious of the cultural messages around us, and blah blah blah. She restrained herself from the eye-rolling this time (she’s a smart girl), but clearly didn’t quite understand why her psycho mother gets so worked up about things. After all, I’ve bought her Barbies before (although her first one was a gift). And I’ve even bought her brother a couple (about which more later). What’s the big deal? It’s not that I’m not used to this attitude—I’ve had hundreds of students over the years rolling their eyes at me too over my insistence that they should think about questions like what messages advertisements send us about our lives. I guess I just hate to see Laura take her first conscious steps into that world—because of course she’s been in that world before she could even walk, when I opened the gift box that contained her first starchy pink dress. At least we were able to fend it off until after she was born—we asked the ultrasound tech not to tell us the sex of our little bean for just these reasons. Little man, sweet girl: it starts soon enough. For now, the end result is a lecture (as short as I could make it) and a prohibition against emailing Barbie. For now, I hope it’s enough.

Ocean in a bottle

During summers, the child development classrooms loosen up a little, laying off the more structured play. Kids are often out in the summer so the classroom’s not so crowded, and people drop their kids off late or pick them up early, so the structure’s harder to hold onto—I dropped Will off in the middle of a student teacher’s lecture the other day, which must’ve been good practice for her in handling classroom disruption. Everything’s just more flexible in summer. Music day, game day, share day, cooking day, water day—the kids’ll spend whole afternoons doing nothing but making crafts or squirting each other with spray bottles (because of course we couldn’t have water guns).

On Will’s daily sheet the other day, we found out that he ate two helpings of mashed potatoes and corn, but skipped the meatloaf, probably a smart move. He was energetic, happy, busy as a bee. He napped from 12:45-3:05. And in the blank after “Today I did something special,” his teacher had written “I made an ocean in a bottle.” He came home happily shaking an old Pepsi bottle with a taped lid full of sand and a couple of shells and some sort of blue rock—and three dolphin/whale looking creatures. I wonder if Miss Amanda let the kids add the ocean water themselves; it looks like some combination of oil and water, although I’m not sure why the oil’s in there. I can just imagine the mess.

But the room seems to be in part about socializing the kids to handle things without too much mess—and certainly they deal with messes easily and without fuss. I took Laura and Will to the library Friday morning to sign them up for the summer reading program; we got a late start and then spent a while in the library, so we were late getting Will to daycare and came in just at lunchtime. He wanted us to stay for lunch, so we hung out a while and watched their lunch routine. One of the student interns and the assistant teacher got all the lunch things ready while the lead teacher read the kids a story—it’s this very complicated process. Get the lunch cart from the kitchen down the hall. Cover the manipulative play center (i.e., puzzle shelf) bookcase with a plastic table cloth and wipe the surface down with bleach water. Wipe the kids’ table too. Stack papers plates in a sort of pyramid on the bookcase—the kids can’t separate the plates themselves yet. Spread napkins around in a similar fashion. Add cups and spoons.

Once the eating area was all prepped and the story ended, Miss Amanda started singing this song to the tune of Bingo: “There was a boy in the Glow Worm class and . . . . Dalton was his name, oh! Dalton, you can wash your hands, Dalton you can wash your hands, Dalton you can wash your hands and then go eat your lunch!” The kids were all sitting around in a circle—on their spots, which are marked with little cutout animals with their names on them laminated to the floor—dying to be chosen to wash their hands, raising their hands and kind of bouncing quietly in place during the long pause before she would name the lucky child. In classic teacher mode, Miss Amanda chose the children who were “waiting so patiently” first.

As the kids actually made it over to the table, they dropped many cups, some before even sitting down. A couple of forks. A peach and a chicken patty or two made it to the floor. Crumbs of course are just part of the landscape. Extras of everything are ready on the lunch cart. But nobody spilled their milk, which they poured themselves from a tiny pitcher into their tiny glasses. And the quiet at the table (which Miss Amanda assured me was unusual)! Kids sort of politely asking for seconds. No pressure to eat green beans. Just six kids having lunch with three teachers, everybody happy, nobody complaining—although there is a rule that if you drop two forks you don’t get another. Was it just last week that Will’s note came home, explaining how he wouldn’t eat lunch and cried all afternoon?

That ocean in a bottle reminds me of Will’s day at school, in ways I doubt were intended. I have it sitting on the windowsill in the kitchen, in front of the sink. Once it’s been sitting for a day or so, the sand all settles to the bottom, and with the light behind it, it’s so clear—the dolphins, the sand, the blue rock. Everything peaceful. Then William will see it and start begging for it; two seconds later the sand has exploded and the only way to see the dolphins in the cloudy water is to turn the bottle again and again until one bumps up against the edge. The peacefulness of the ocean, the ocean in the storm. A perfect metaphor for the three-year old life.

The little things

Our favorite restaurant right now is Jason’s Deli—fast, inexpensive, good food. Will’s favorite macaroni and cheese (yes, he likes it more than mine). Friendly staff who always load up our fruit cups with grapes for a certain little boy. A pickle mascot who looks just like John Kerry. And free ice cream cones for desert.

Laura likes to fill out their comment cards, and once she discovered that some restaurants will send you a get-a-free-cookie postcard when you do, she evaluates the food and service when we eat out very regularly. Often, in fact, before the food and service get there, but as she always points out, it’s always good here. So why worry about the technicalities?

But last time we went Laura took the drastic measure of writing a note on the comment card, because our favorite Jason’s ice cream machine’s been busted for probably the last month (the only other Jason’s in our driving distance puts fake bacon bits on their potatoes—ugh). They’ll give the kids a free cookie to make up for it, but the lack of soft-serve ice cream has become something of a tragedy in both kids’ assessment (although Will unfortunately can’t write about it yet). We might ride up there for dinner tomorrow night—but Laura asked me to call first to see if they got their new machine first! I guess it really is the little things that count.

Cleaning out the book bag

In the post-school summer cleaning that is my first reaction to freedom, my daughter and I have been cleaning out her book bag. Fourth grade was pretty good to her. She ended up with good grades—As in everything but math and science. (I hate we’re already going down the girls making Bs in math and science road, but I swear, if the entire western culture can’t figure out how to solve this problem, I am not going to allow myself to feel personally responsible for it either.)

She was the top reader at O. Elementary—the most Accelerated Reader points in the whole school at 267.4 points. She came home with her shiny gold certificate and a big smile. Every time a kid reads an AR book, she takes a little test on it and earns points for correct answers—small prizes like free ice cream cones and chocolate parties and big prizes like t-shirts and bowling at the end of the year. To give you an idea of how points are scored, consider this: Fourth graders have to earn 85 points to go to the bowling party. The average point value for a fourth-grade reading level book in Oakdale’s library is 2.556. (I, also a B scorer on math, calculated this figure myself with the handy dandy cut and paste feature in Excel. Yes, I can write formulas in Excel, thanks very much to my science guy friend.) The very highest point value for any book in her school library is the fifth Harry Potter book, at a whopping 44 points. (And just to scare the older and wiser readers out there, by the way, Tolkien’s books are rated on a six-grade reading level.)

And while I don’t measure reading success by AR points, given the number and sophistication of the books she’s read this year, I think she probably was the top reader at school. I have really struggled particularly the last couple of months with my occasional desire to say the terrible words my parents uttered so often in my younger days: “Are you ever going to get your nose out of the book?” It started at Will’s birthday party, the family one, where we only had a couple of kids his age and the aunts and uncles and grandparents and the family dog and whatnot. She spent a good portion of the afternoon on the couch reading and completely ignoring all of the chaos around her. I spent literally years of my adolescence doing the exact same thing (although I generally preferred to read outside by the creek). I have a new understanding now of being torn as a parent: wanting her to read, loving that she loves to read, and understanding that books may be her way of removing herself from our family one day too.

My sense that she’s a reader and a storyteller was confirmed today when we pulled this crumpled brown paper bag out of her backpack, and I started to wad it up and throw it away. It was full of these scraps of paper, nothing else, and it certainly didn’t look important. Turns out Mrs. H. had her class do this really interesting last-day-of-school activity with the bags, which when you look at them a little more closely are decorated just like the bags they use to swap Valentine’s—crayon names and hearts. (Or at least that’s what Laura’s bags always look like. Probably when Will’s in school he’ll draw Darth Vader on his.) Each child had a bag and twenty little slips of paper. The class celebrated the last day of school by sitting on the floor (not at their desks, those rebels!) and writing something about every child in the class on a slip of paper. Laura told me the kids were supposed to write something nice about each other, or to tell what they thought of each other. I thought this constituted a considerable risk, but that Mrs. H, she can carry it off. Laura got several of your basic “have a good summer” type remarks, but she also got “Have a nice time reading” and “I love your scarey stories and I think you have a big and happy smile” (I loved that one). A total of 10 of her notes mentioned her reading or ghost stories. She was five people’s best friend—and she also has a stalker: “Dear Laura, I’m watching you always.” Hm.

We celebrated her AR status (and her squeaking by in Math with a B) by pre-purchasing Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. And of course, we had to buy two copies.

Short squat Han Solos

Will is working on his second collection now—the first was tiny Buzz Lightyear toys, and since he developed this interest shortly before Christmas, we now have many Buzzes and Zurgs and accompanying small aliens, all of which wind up at the bottom of his toy box no matter how many times I ask him to put them back in their empty Huggies wipes box. The current fascination is Star Wars figures, particularly this one set of toys that come two to a pack, very short squat Han Solos and whatnot, probably not more than three inches tall with big feet and wide stances (very easy to stand up, always important for easily frustrated little kids).

He likes to take them to school, which I’ve been letting him do despite the school’s no toy weapons rule, because to tell you the truth, they look so innocuous with their tiny light sabers and blasters that I didn’t even think about them as having weapons for days, and by then he’d already taken them with him to class several times. None of the teachers has said anything yet. I’m still trying to find him a Darth Vader and Yoda, although that’ll make three different Darth Vaders that Will has. And I bought him a Darth Vader t-shirt the other day, despite feeling very conflicted about having my charming non-violent three-year-old wearing the Master of Evil’s face on his shirt when he goes off to school.

His little action figures really are cute, though, especially 3 Creepio and Count Cuckoo, which I just about die every time I hear him say. So Count Cuckoo (who we know is evil because he has a red light saber) is fighting Obi Wan Kenobi, I think, and Obi Wan is kicking Count Cuckoo’s butt, and William says in this very deep solemn the-Force-is-with-me-type voice, “You shall not come back to my school.” I don’t think we’re warping him. But I swear, it’s so cute to watch that it would almost be worth it if we were.

Babies, breastfeeding, and books

Laura is ten and Will is three but lately I have been reliving my pregnancies and their baby days. I’ve been thinking about this ongoing project, literary representations of mothering by mothers, while I’ve been cleaning up my office at school and trying to plan my summer writing. I realized in the great rush of sort and file that I thought I had just been reading mostly for pleasure, with a little of my academic writing thrown in there, but in fact I have piles and piles of books and research on the subject, too much not to do something substantial with it.

Yesterday I was vacuuming up behind my bedside table, something I rarely feel compelled to do. I’d had a vase of gerbera daisies there and forgot to throw them away before we left for Georgetown last weekend. About the first thing Will did when we got home was start sifting through this puddle of petals and flower fluff, spreading it everywhere. I’m vacuuming away last night, and when I finished, on the floor under the vacuum was one of the little paper stickers that covered the adhesive on my nursing pads—I remember how hard they were to vacuum up now, how slippery they were, how they always ended up on the floor. I stopped breastfeeding Will sometime before he was a year old, so that paper’s been behind the dresser for at least two years (and no thank you, I don’t want to hear any comment on my housekeeping). It just seems so odd to find it after now after this long—it feels like a sign, to go on with this project. (I sure as hell hope it’s not a sign of anything else!)

And then, as I backed up my hard drive yesterday, I ran across an old folder of archived email from graduate school and couldn’t quite resist the temptation to squander a while skimming through them. Aside from (re)discovering that I was a really whiny person while I was on the job market—the patience and forbearance of our placement director was astounding—I also found several email about Laura when she was eight months old. The contrast between the daily life represented in those email and what I wrote in her baby book was of considerable interest—as I think about it more, it’s not that I tried to leave her parents out of her baby book, as much as I felt her book should be about her, when she smiled and pulled up and her first family visits and whatnot, rather than our exhausting daily life when I was trying to find another babysitter so I could finish writing my dissertation and find a job, and how lonely I was because I stayed home with Laura days and Chris kept her nights while I was teaching, and how much I would’ve practically died of happiness if I’d known another woman with a baby or had someone to stroll around with the quad with me and Laura for an hour. I hadn’t thought for years about how I would write in the study and listen to Laura playing with her babysitter and hate writing, and how one reason I was so determined to breastfeed Laura was that I was afraid we couldn’t afford formula if I couldn’t.

I’d had this happy notion that small babies slept a lot, that I’d be able to read and write while I stayed home days with the baby. And because my classes met Monday and Wednesday nights, and she was born over a holiday weekend when Monday classes were cancelled, I actually only missed one class. I doubt I was very effective the first night back, but I was determined not to shirk my job, even when it meant I had to teach a beautiful, terrible story by Cynthia Ozick called “The Shawl,” about a nursing mother in a concentration camp watching as her milk dries up and her baby begins to die. TAs had a set syllabus to follow, and I followed it on the verge of postpartum tears that night. I have never been able to read that story again; I’m not sure even now if I remember it rightly, but I literally cannot revisit that story. The first couple of months of Laura’s life—before my grandmother volunteered to pay for a sitter so I could work a little more easily—is a series of blurry memories of breastfeeding my new baby between classes. Chris would bring her to my office hours with two Chick-fil-a sandwiches for our hurried dinners—about the only time we saw each other that semester. Home alone with the baby during the day, I built a nest on the couch with student papers and a pen on my right-hand side, and articles on my left. While my daughter nursed from my left breast, I graded quizzes or wrote lists, and then would read for my dissertation when she switched sides and I had to hold her with my writing hand. This scenario probably wasn’t what the person who coined the metaphor of juggling for motherhood had in mind, but it was certainly very applicable nevertheless.

Of course things settled down, and generally when I think of Laura as a baby she’s older, when Chris and I had found all the malls that had department stores with the good bathrooms with couches, the changing rooms and family bathrooms, when we were able to go out together, three of us now instead of just two. I remember how easily she fit into our life then, but I had really forgotten so much of that earlier time. I had the same kind of maternal amnesia with Will, my friend Lisa pointed out to me the other day. He was born at the end of a semester, and I taught my class from home. It was tough, but we were closer to home and arranged for a grandparent to come spend Fridays taking care of Will so I could grade papers—during the week I would email students and write lectures and assignments while he napped, but I still needed at least one full work day a week, and it was those Fridays when I would only come out of the study for lunch and to nurse Will. Although I was very very tired, I really didn’t think it was too bad at the time—and I still don’t—but that lasted only a few weeks, and the semester I went back to campus while he went off to daycare as a little four-month old was a nightmare.

In fact, there’s no contrast between the email I wrote that semester and his baby book, because I am still seven months pregnant in his book. I couldn’t write about that time. I loved William, but work then was horrible, for reasons far too complicated to go into here. I hated my breast pump, disguised as a briefcase and full of ice packs with its one little picture window flap over the pump itself—the one element of the whole system that wasn’t totally mechanized and measured. I felt literally consumed. And I was constantly upset by how the staff at Will’s daycare handled his feedings—and he was difficult to bottle-feed, let me tell you. My breast milk became a crucible, a measure of love, a way to hang onto William and somehow to what was important to me as a mother and a person too—I have this image of that semester as a freezer full of bags of breast milk; bottles of separated milk in the fridge, the thin clear layer on the bottom and the cream on top; the little Igloo lunchbox cooler I used to carry his bottles back and forth everyday; rushing to daycare after class to nurse him so they wouldn’t waste another bottle; how sometimes I would literally cry over split milk.

So this contrast, then, between these two genres of my own experience of being a mother, my work email and the two baby books. Is there a way to reconcile those, to bring baby’s first steps together with mother’s? As I read anthologies of women’s experiences of parenting, and blogs about being a mother, and poetry about pregnancy and birth, I am looking I suppose for some answer to my own questions, a mirror of my own experience. Something to me in the act of writing an event down makes it permanent; I wrote the narrative of Laura’s eleventh month, which included her first word—hey, as in the southern version of hello—and so I remember it. Maybe this summer I can finally write a bit of Will’s baby book, go through my old notes until I find his first word, remember his babyhood more completely, reclaim his past—and my own.