Kitty

You know, it’s funny how having a cat makes me feel more scholarly. More maternal. Just all around cozier. I never wanted a cat, and I still don’t really want one, to tell the truth. Kitty’s nice and all, but basically a walking hairball, and we have our hair issues in this family. Right now, though, I’ve been working all morning on a paper I’m writing, sitting home in my pajamas since tonight’s my night class and I go in later, with Kitty curled up on the floor next to me—and it just feels different having another presence in my universe, but one so undemanding. Who’d have thought?

How do I love thee?

Last night Laura and I went to our local bookstore (which she says should be called Books-a-Hundred because they never have what we want), looking for something I needed for my poetry class (and no, I didn’t find it). We were just running in for a minute, because we also had to stop by Target for a quick errand and then still get home for bedtime, so I kept her with me instead of letting her lose in the kid section, from which it is really quite difficult to pry her when it’s time to go. She’s leafing through something like 100 Best Love Poems while I look for my book and look over her shoulder at the same time to make sure she hasn’t wandered into an erotica chapter, should the book have one. She settled after a while on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem, a “A Man’s Requirement”—although it seems to me it was titled “A Gentleman’s Requirement” in the collection she was reading. She finishes reading the poem and starts looking in the pages just before and after for a minute.

“What are you looking for?”

“Where’s the poem about the lady’s requirements?” she says.

I still start laughing thinking about it. Now Barrett Browning had, in my opinion, quite a radical streak, and I didn’t read that particular poem closely myself, so aside from Aurora Leigh, maybe there is such a poem. Right then, though, I had to explain to Laura that I wasn’t laughing at her, but at how happy it makes me that she can read Barrett Browning and then look for what she might have to say about how she expects to be loved herself.

Lasterday

One of my favorite things William does is the way he asks questions about what we’ve done. Did we have Laura’s birthday party lasterday? Did we go to Papa Adrian’s house lasterday? Did I fall off the treadmill at Grandma Kathy’s house? (Yes, yes, and oh my god, yes.) Lasterday is such a wonderful all-purpose three-year old concept of the past.

Do not enter, please

Laura's notebook cover these days.

Laura's vision of the world

Apparently Laura had to do a prewriting exercise about her parents in school last week. Lord only knows what she’s supposed to do next, but here’s her version of our household dynamics—perhaps not the most accurate. Poor Dad came out not so well in a couple of respects—he doesn't sleep nearly that much! I especially love how I teach collage. :) Just in case you needed a reminder that kids don’t see the world the way we do.

What I almost forgot

I spent all day yesterday chanting to myself, don’t forget the Tooth Fairy, don’t forget the Tooth Fairy, knowing if I didn’t, it’d just be all over. Tuesday and Thursday I have my night class for the next couple of months, which in principle is fine, and the class is going well, but it gets out so late. I haven’t taught the class before, and all my advisees show up late afternoons, so before it’s all over, I am just randomly flinging around papers and books like a maniac trying to get ready. Then when class lets out, I usually spend a few minutes picking up. So 8:30’s the earliest I’ve left campus this week; the first night I came home everybody was already asleep. That day I saw my husband and children for a grand total of 45 minutes in the morning while we were all running around juggling cereal boxes and showering and packing lunches and yelling about the whether it’s warm enough to wear short sleeves (which is pretty much is right now). I drove home last night with all deliberate speed—don’t forget the Tooth Fairy—and got home at 9:00, so I did get to see my little people, but Chris was cranky because they were almost asleep when I came in and disrupted the universe.

I snuggled up with everybody in Chris’s and my bed, and boom, before you know it, we were happily snoozing away, that lost tooth still waiting in its fancy pillow. I woke up this morning at 5:00 from a dream about boxes of Barbie dolls thinking, oh my God, I forgot the Tooth Fairy! Fortunately nobody’s up at 5:00, and nobody really knows what time the Tooth Fairy shows up anyway, so no harm done. And Chris remembered too when he work up at 5:45, so even if I had forgotten, all would have been well. Maybe the all-day chant worked. Maybe that last repetition in the car just dug that sentence down into my subconscious, which somehow connected it to Barbies and presented me with my little 5:00 a.m. mental alarm. And it’s not as if Laura doesn’t know who the Tooth Fairy is or would probably care that much if she got her two bucks (price adjusted for inflation—remember how we would get quarters?) after her Lucky Charms instead of before. But Lord, the 5:00 feeling of panic. All over a little yucky lost tooth that I throw in the trash.

I have this aunt who saved all my cousin’s baby teeth in a little cloisonné box, and presented her with it when she left for college, which I just think is disgusting. It is rather odd, though, to think about parts of our bodies lying around in the trash, scattered at different layers as time passes between each lost canine. There must be some middle ground between the total attention that box of teeth represents and the sense that I have of having practically abandoned my parental responsibility (and never mind the fact that the all-day chant thing keeps it pretty well in the foreground). How much does all this matter in the end? Last night’s not the first time I almost forgot—but having never completely forgotten, will any of this make any difference to Laura one day? Who knows. All I know is at home, I’m always worrying about grading or something I haven’t done for class, and at work, I’m always worrying about forgetting the Tooth Fairy. I am not doing so hot a job of living in the moment. Maybe I should add that to my list of resolutions.

What we forgot

The other day as we left his daycare, we almost forgot the latest in Will’s succession of Scratchies (currently a purple My Little Pony originally named Twilight Twinkle). We got out the door and were buckling up when I remembered, and we had the following exchange.
Mommy: “Uh oh! Guess what we forgot!”
William: “Your calendar?”
This from my three-year old. Perhaps we need a less structured life.

Laundry life sentence

Laura and I were watching the real first Star Wars the other day, the part where Luke and Han rescue Princess Leia and they all leap with abandon into the garbage chute. We’re having popcorn, just watching them roll all around in the trash (pretty disgusting, really), that monster-thingy snatches Luke under the muck, finally R2 turns off the compactors and they escape. Whew. Laura turns around to me and says, “How come Princess Leia’s dress is still all white and clean after they’ve been down in all that garbage?”

I remember my own first movie unreality realization at about the same age, asking my own mother virtually the same type of question. We watched King Kong, Faye Wray got washed overboard or something—I have this memory of her afloat on a raft?—but she still had on perfect makeup. Of course we’ve all had plenty of discussions with Will about how movies aren’t real, particularly whenever monsters show up, so we won’t have them leaping out the closets outside Monsters Inc., but Laura’s been particularly conscious of household labors lately, so I can’t tell if her realization is more about the movies or laundry. Her friend came over to play the other day, wearing a new shirt, and I said something to her, your basic “cool shirt, did you get it for Christmas?” comment. She had, and then she made this strange and sort of catty comment that Laura hadn’t noticed she had a new shirt. Discussion ensued about how sometimes things hang around in the closet, how was she supposed to know it was new, blah blah blah, and then they asked me, the referee, how could I tell it was a new shirt? It had a section covered by a lacy net-type fabric, with no picks on it at all yet. It had a satin ribbon tie around the neck, also still smooth and shiny and not picked up at all. So clearly it hadn’t been washed yet.

My arcane laundry knowledge clearly awed them both. How did I learn this stuff, Laura wanted to know. “Twenty years of doing laundry’ll do it,” I said sagely. I think she’s still trying to wrap her head around that idea—God, twenty years of laundry? I bet Princess Leia never had to wash her own clothes.

Playing with the Bible puzzle

Chris and Will are slugging around in the kitchen this morning, with evidently no urgency whatsoever about school starting back today. Chris has a teacher workday and no meetings til noon, so in protest at the shortness of the holiday, I think, he’s been rather leisurely this morning. William could’ve gone back to school yesterday, but it just seemed mean to send him instead of letting us all enjoy one last day off together. I still have a strong feeling of new new New Year, starting over, beginning again, a new season coming, a new semester starting, new toys still to play with, and why start school earlier than you have to when there is still fun to be had?


As you can see, Chris and Will found a use for the Books of the Bible puzzle, although probably not what was intended by its Maker. Still, it probably would’ve ended up in the attic otherwise (and may yet), so I guess it could be worse.

I spent a good part of yesterday enjoying my last day of no work—I drew for a little while, which I almost never do anymore, and read a little, and folded a swan from my Origami Page-a-Day calendar, one of my Santa presents. I buy all the Santa presents, including my own, which actually is pretty nice, since I get to buy something weird for myself I otherwise wouldn’t (although I must say it was very exciting to have a surprise in my stocking this year!). I ordered this calendar thinking I could have a little Zen moment at work every afternoon when I’m starting to get really brain dead, but it looks a lot more complicated than I thought. I didn’t get off on the best foot either. I stupidly started the calendar out the first day trying to fold the sheet with the instructions on it instead of the blank page before I was intended to use. So I folded a little, then opened it up to read the next step, then folded a little more. My Simple Sail Boat turned out badly, let’s just say, but I wound up with a respectable swan on my January 2 attempt and learned an important lesson in the process: Fold not tomorrow’s origami today.


I will work on my syllabi for a while, then wake up my even more sluggish Laura-Girl, and teach her how to sew. She wants to learn to make something like these Ugly Dolls. Should be simple enough and a nice way for us to spend time together, she said optimistically. Tune in for the grisly details later.

Happy New Year Resolutions

Another year of pretending you can make things turn out the way you want if you just try hard enough. So, my efforts along that line. . .

1. Get the kids to bed earlier. They need more sleep, and Chris and I need more time to ourselves. Maybe if they get to bed earlier, I’ll be able to stay conscious after they’re asleep.
2. Read for pleasure more. I just finished Sara Nelson’s So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading; unfortunately I don’t have her job—read a book a week and write about it!—so I don’t think I can keep up that pace and still do all the other things I want. But I would like to read something new more often, rather than just rereading because I don’t have time to start a new book. Maybe one a month? In the spirit of New Year’s Resolutions, and because I love memoirs and thought the first chapter looked interesting, I’m starting with Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen.
3. Cook something truly delicious. I’ve been planning weekly menus and generally actually sticking to them, but my during-the-week repertoire tends to be somewhat repetitive—what can I actually manage to get on the table in the thirty minutes between getting home and the expiration of my starving children? After a while, eating feels like a job. Since half the time neither Laura nor Will likes what I cook anyway, I will cook something wonderful that I might enjoy more often. Damn the macaroni and cheese.
4. Work on my book and finish my stray articles. Or at least some of them. Ideally I’d like to do a little something every work day, but I don’t think that’s realistic with me teaching a new class this spring (and a night class, wail!). But I will try to work even in just a small way on my writing every week, even when I have grading.
5. Say no when I don’t want to do something. Or when I don’t have time to, even though I’d like to. Even if it’s making cupcakes for the after-school party. I have to learn to accept that I am not a bad mother or person if I don’t do everything everybody else wants.

There you go. All appropriately open-ended and vague, a veritable recipe for success. Surely I can manage to cook something delicious at least once in 2006.