Buying Jeans

I had to buy new jeans not too long ago, essentially because I suddenly discovered after more than twenty adult years that my body is flattered much more by jeans with a certain flair at the bottom. Maybe I won’t go all the way to bell bottoms, but a little extra fabric at shoe level works. The pair I’m wearing today has a little fortune stitched into the back, a sure sign that I’m too old to be wearing them—and they’re those low-rider ones that are all you can get now, more hip hugger than a jean with a waist. Mine says “Everyone is the architect of their own future,” which I liked enough that I looked through my size to find a second pair with the same logo (only after, by the way, the jeans had met my comfort and size and prize criteria first). I don’t like the fact that I can’t bend over or reach up without worrying about whether my very maternal and Rubenesque stomach is hanging out, but at least I look cool now—when my arms are down, anyway. Naturally these new jeans reinforce my idea that all women’s clothes are made for 18 year old girls, but I’m not bitter. Not me. Nope. Not one little bit.

Message in a bottle

William has realized his birthday is coming and he loves pirates. And yes, these events are connected in his mind. Pirate ships, pirate puppets, pirates fighting knights and dragons, because we don’t have a ship yet, only a castle. Very deprived child. He has also been writing lots of letters, which is I guess something they must have done at school, because we certainly don’t do much of that at home. Yesterday he made me a message in a bottle—and he did this on his own. I had an empty beer bottle that I had put a couple of stems of daffodils in; when they died I washed it out and had it sitting on the counter until I could put it away. Will came in and asked for it, and then came back a little later with his message all rolled up and ready to go, except that he couldn’t quite roll it tight enough to fit, so I had to help with that. Chris taped the top of the bottle, and his mass message-in-a-bottle production line started off. The one he made me includes two notes. He tells me that one says, “Dear Mommy, I hope you have a great day. I love you, Will.” And the other: “Dear Mommy, would you please buy me a toy today? A pirate ship and a book and a Ninja Turtle watch and . . .” many other things on a very long list I can’t recall and that changes every time he reads it to me anyhow. It’s just charming, if I can be a bit sickeningly maudlin about the joys of motherhood.

My daughter has embarked on quite a few projects of her own lately as well. Elementary school is almost over for her—she’s bringing home permission and order forms for everything in America at the moment, including her big field trip with Safety Patrol, t-shirts for fifth grade memories of field day, spring portraits, cookie fundraisers, and my god! If they would stop sending all these papers home, I am sure Orange Elementary would save about a thousand dollars a week and not need fundraisers anymore. We had Rising Sixth Grade Orientation the other night, parents and fifth graders all lined up in the middle school auditorium like a rowdy bunch of sheep. She is off to one big school next year. They’ll have uniforms (ugh). Lockers (yeah!). Electives (yeah!). And school dances (oh no!).

The fifth graders are also having all these summative experiences, winding up their elementary days like a dusty old jump rope they dragged through the playground for six years and are almost ready to put up now. They had Life Skills lessons every week with the police department, including stress management, which I wish I could’ve taken too. I heard a rumor they’d be having a sex education unit—at least according to the letter that came home a few weeks ago—but if they have, it’s been subtle enough that Laura apparently hasn’t noticed it yet. The fifth graders are teaching the kindergarteners to bowl for the Accelerated Reader end of the year party. They’re making friendship bead bracelets so they’ll be BFF even if they’re not in the same pods next year (all those budding aliens, still best friends forever). And even the librarian and yearbook advisor is retiring this year, cleaning out her office and sending home pictures from yearbooks all the way back to kindergarten. In music Laura earned her recorder black belt, the ultimate When-the-Saints-Go-Marching-In achievement. Elementary school is ending.

Laura had this massive project due, a timeline of her life so far, concluding with a discussion of her hopes, dreams, and ambitions. We were supposed to help her read through newspapers and magazines from when she was born, look at family pictures, tell her stories about when she was little. She has become a real student. Not only does she think she knows what the teacher will think she should write, she can handily crank out statements like “My family is important to me because they put clothes on my book and food in my mouth and a roof over my head,” something nobody in this family has ever said in my hearing. Even more so, she has reached the state of Zen studenthood that allows her not to know when the project is due. I asked her Monday to have her teacher call me if it was due that day, as we had some fairly serious problems over the weekend with copying the pictures she needed for the album. She comes home Monday from school to tell me the good news, that her project wasn’t due that day! When is it due? “I don’t know! You didn’t tell me to ask her that!”

How they get from coming up with their own messages in a bottle to composing them on demand escapes me. All these little moments, bottled up in time capsules, things they’ll never remember on their own, slipping by so easily. I save pictures and tests and notes from the teacher in a box for each school year in the attic, which is getting pretty cluttered already. I would love to have some of these things from my own childhood; I periodically have nightmares in which all the things I have carefully saved in the fifth grade box, labeled Orange Elementary, Ms. H’s class, will one day burn up, just because we have so damn much paper in the attic, but I can’t get rid of it. I look forward so much to giving these children these things one day, and I imagine spending a weekend sorting through them with Laura and Will, maybe with their children even. I love to look at them myself even now—imagine what it will be like then, opening those messages in the bottle to see their pictured pasts.

Career Week

Another high pressure Career Day at Orange. They don’t give out those ice cream parties lightly. Laura’s ambition last year was to be a scientist, the same as this year:

Although she’s stepped up the stakes a bit in her achievements, what with that whole curing cancer thing. I wonder if this is connected to her grandfather’s recent death, but haven’t asked her yet . . . We’ll see if she wins. She’s taking her microscope to be one of her props this year, which could put her over the top.

Big questions and art

Yesterday Will asked me Why do mommies love their babies? and Why did God make us? Whoa. On a less cosmic scale, we have two pieces of artwork today for the gallery. First, a self-portrait of William watering flowers—we started sunflower and tomato seeds in one of those indoor greenhouse boxes yesterday afternoon. The purple lettering underneath says I love you flowers.

And a Y-tree for Laura, made by drawing one big Y for a trunk and then lots of little Ys off of that for the trunk. She said the shadow was awful and made me crop it out. Always the critic.

Coloring shadows

It’s that time again. Stinking Week of the Young Child. Time to celebrate our children and families and the wonderful staff at our Child Development Center. Will has probably enjoyed his last two weeks at the Center more than ever in his life—they’ve been doing great science experiments. Which thing will float? What happens if you mix this and that? But it’s that damn Week of the Young Child, and I am all pissy again every time I set foot in the door.

I find that having a child in daycare in general results a low-grade guilt, almost like a sinus infection that never quite goes away. Every time our weekly parent letter comes home thanking Kayla’s mom for donating fish to new aquarium, an overly sensitive parent (such as myself) can easily see that as a reminder that you haven’t done anything lately. Every time some little homework slips by you, it reminds you that your child is the only one at school without baby pictures that week. While certainly neglect isn’t the word that immediately comes to mind in this context, it’s not all that far off if you already wish you could leave work earlier to pick up your child. And I imagine it must be even worse if you are unfortunate enough to have a job that you need but that you don’t love—at least I want and need my work.

At the beginning of the year, we had one of those assignments—coloring shadows. Will and his classmates laid down on big sheets of drawing paper and their teachers traced the outlines of their bodies onto the paper. We were supposed to bring it home and help our child color them so the picture would represent what was important to him. Well, the CDC starts class the same day public schools opened, the same day Chris started teaching, the same day Laura started fifth grade, and I think I had registration too that week at my own school. We had enrollment papers and supply lists and placement testing information and policy manuals and syllabi scattered all over our house, and big as that shadow was, it was still pretty easy to overlook in that vast pile of papers. Then the other kids’ parents started bringing their shadows in—and just like in fifth grade, it’s easy to tell who really let their kid do the project and who did it for them. The teachers hung each one in the hall outside the classroom door, a visible reminder at drop off and pick up that we hadn’t done our homework yet. A day went by, then two, and before you know it, Let’s Get to Know You Week was over, Will’s shadow still rolled up in the mail basket in the laundry room. Finally we did color it—Will in the Incredibles t-shirt and mask he’d been wearing since his birthday earlier that year—and they hung it up in the hall however belated, but I felt we’d started the new school year off on the wrong foot. With my first child, this would’ve killed me—but with poor Will, despite feeling guilty, I couldn’t even bring myself to feel too bad about it. Will’s shadow matters, but I am trying to learn to not to punish myself more than I can help for being overwhelmed. What else could I have done?

I know I’m prickly, easily finding things to be upset or angry about, but I’m not the only person who feels this general day care guilt. The other day when I picked Will up, another mother stood in the room talking to the teacher, worrying about the flashlights we were supposed to send in with our little people the next day. I hadn’t heard about this until that afternoon myself, although somehow we were getting our final reminder, the daily sheet with Flashlight tomorrow! written on it in big black marker. The teacher told her, now don’t go out and buy one if you don’t have one at home already, and the mother said, But I don’t want her to be left out! What about when we didn’t color her shadow? And I know it sounds so melodramatic, but my heart just hurt, for her and for me, and especially for our children.

Our children learn things at daycare, wonderful things like how science works in the world, how to be a friend, how to color in the lines and how it doesn’t matter if you don’t want to. Even what it’s like to sit in a helicopter cockpit once. And they learn wonderfully practical things, like how to lay your jacket on the floor in front of you upside down so you can put both your short little arms in the sleeves, pull on the coat, and then flip it over your head. Voila! Fifteen three years old putting on their own coats, and the teachers just have to help zip up. Every step of their learning helps them grow, but it’s also a step away from you, and you can only help them, stand back to watch, and know that’s one more way they won’t need you anymore one day. But when they do need you, and you can’t be there—oh. And that’s what the Week of the Young Child becomes for me. Wednesday is Parent Lunch Day, lunch with your child at 11:45. I have class until 11:50. And then a half hour drive to get there. I can’t go, even though I chose teaching college as a profession partially because I thought my work would be more flexible and I could find ways to be participate in my children school more often than if I had a 9 to 5 job. Chris can’t go—he’s teaching himself. And so it’s another year of Will wondering why everybody else’s parents are there, except his. A special day for parents, reads the subject line of the email asking for RSVP. Yeah, really special. I don’t know. Maybe I’m exaggerating a little. I’m sure some other kids also don’t have their parents there, and every year the Center staff tries to convince me that Will won’t be left out. But I know he is. No parents at lunch. Nobody at the Grandparent High Tea. At least we can go to the Family Picnic Friday night this year.

I think a lot about that day we finally colored Will’s shadow. We spread it out on the floor, our bucket of markers beside it. Will brought in his tennis shoes so we could try to color his feet just like them. Laura and I drew the outlines of his clothes and face, and then we helped him color in the blue for his denim shorts, the red for his t-shirt, the yellow hair that’s darkened now to brown. I know how unlikely it is that he will remember that his shadow was late. I imagine that if he did remember any of this experience at all one day, it would most likely be lying down on the paper to be outlined, or maybe coloring that life-sized sheet of paper with me and Laura on the kitchen floor. Coloring shadows means the outlines are there, but you choose how to color the image. You make your image of the world, of yourself, of your family. Even though I know this, I know that like Will, I can choose to color in the lines, to ignore them, or even to crumple up the paper I am given and redraw the image myself, I also know that the world I draw is only part of my children’s lives. As soon as they walk in their classroom doors, they must learn to deal with what they find there, alone during the day, although I hope what Chris and I have taught them, unintentionally or otherwise, stays with them. I hope that Will can somehow dimly understand why we’re not at Parent Lunch Day now; I hope he forgets it later. I hope they find some better way to celebrate our children, some way that doesn’t leave our family out. I hope it won’t matter someday, either to him or to me. I know we will have many shadows to color over the years, and the picture they will make will not be overpowered by this one image. But that doesn’t change the shadow over that week for me.

Unexpected developments

Monday, 13 March, Capricorn:
Unexpected developments mess up all your plans.
This will be the rule rather than the exception, all this week.

The Monday after Spring Break started off with the traditional bang. Although in this case I guess it was a fairly literal one. I got back to my office after class and lunch and had a phone message on my cell phone and office phone, and two emails from Will’s daycare. Both phone messages—Chris got them both too and we had one at home that night as well—said basically, This is Ms. Pamela, and it’s not an emergency, but would you please call me about Will? Anytime it starts off with it’s not an emergency, your parental adrenaline informs you that, yes, in fact, it is. Or mine does anyhow. Turns out Will fell “playing chase with a friend”—and running on the sidewalk, both of which are daycare no-nos, precisely because of the big purple goose egg on his forehead. He got lots of love and ice, the accident report assures me, and the following corrective action was taken: “Will was reminded not to run on the sidewalk.” Even the daycare has bureaucracy now.

Really, it took me some time yesterday afternoon to settle down from just my usual day—class, trying to catch the biology search committee before they went to lunch so I could meet the candidate too, attending her lecture later, reading drafts of papers, and negotiating my mid-afternoon panic attack about Will in the middle of all this. The child development center finally got a computer in each classroom now, which the kids use to play games, but I think the teachers have been asked to use it during naptime to keep in touch with the parents. The first two email I got from the Caterpillar teacher, ominously titled Will, both jolted me quite seriously out of my workday and into paranoia land—is something wrong? Is he sick? Did he do something? I imagine it must be something like people felt when they got phone calls in the past—it couldn’t possibly be just to talk? I think once I recover from the initial shock of having Will pop up during work I’ll actually enjoy it; we got a really cute email from his teacher last week:

From: Ms. T
To: Lisa and Chris
Date: Wednesday - March 8, 2006
Subject: Will
Funny story.... Will had been in the bathroom quite a few minutes. Being the concerned teacher I am :), I went to check on him. This was the response I got from William. “A little privacy here, please.” What an adult thing to say! T

I’m pretty sure I know where he learned that, having had about two seconds of bathroom privacy myself in the last four years. This morning, Laura is sick, most unfortunately on a teacher workday when she should be having a holiday. She’s got a little sore throat and is running a fever, watching tv and scratching Kitty’s chin, while I wander around, work a little, and then wonder what I should do for her. She already had her Tylenol and tucking in. Jello? Popsicles! We are both somewhat at a loss. Just another unexpected development.

Vengeful monster bird

I took Laura last week with my poetry class to a reading—a wonderful widely famous poet, a woman whose work I’ve read and studied and really just enjoy tremendously. I had asked my class at the beginning of the semester if they’d be interested in attending a poetry reading, and since none of them had, they were (although of course I know that means they’d rather do anything else besides have to sit in class for almost three hours straight and work). So we road tripped down to the reading, state van full of students with Laura in the back and me up front, which didn’t actually work out all that well as I was also trying to check her math homework at the time. The reading itself was terrific—the poet read beautifully, and many of my favorite of her poems. Laura enjoyed the poetry, she said, but the twenty minutes of welcoming by the various big-wig administrators got a little dull for everybody. During the reading, there were two cell phone episodes—why won’t people turn off their cell phones? I can understand forgetting it’s on, but after the first person’s rings, wouldn’t you check yours if you’re not sure? Anyhow, towards the end of the reading Laura started drawing. Her monster bird enjoyed the menu that night—incidentally, my last night of class. Maybe I’ll have time to write again.