Married, and things...

There’s a photo of my husband and me hanging on the wall of our living room.  It’s a great black and white shot, taken on our wedding day.  His face is in the foreground, blurry, and mine is in the back and sharply focused.  I look serious, something I rarely am and don’t remember being that day. I thought it was odd at first.  The more time that goes by, though, the more I like the picture and what it symbolizes- how thoughtful one really has to be to be married, and how much you don’t expect that.

Anne Lamott once said upon attending a friend’s marriage how touching the whole thing is.   “Two people fall in love, and decide to see if that love might hold up over time, if there might be enough grace and forgiveness and memory lapses to hold the whole shebang together.”  I think you can boil down all the vows you make during your wedding and distill them into those three things. Grace, forgiveness, and memory lapses. And of course, the binding aspect of it all. You are legally bound to be in each other’s corners.  Which is good, considering how different marriage is from what you expect.

When you’re dating, and things are rosy and perfect, you’re sure it will be fabulous, because of course no one in the world has ever been as in love as the two of you are.  You can’t imagine that in a few years you’ll find yourself saying things like “What’s the matter with you?”  Your spouse replies, “I’m just lying here,” and your response to this is “yeah, well, you’re lying there with a tone.”  Only in a marriage is this sort of thing said.

 People who are not married (or in long term partnerships, no bias here) don't really understand it, probably.  Or maybe they do and have decided it's not for them.  After all, there's something to be said for the sort of longing you have in the beginning, for the mere mention of the object of your affection making your hands shake.  It's gorgeous and exciting, really, to be so interested in a new person.  But there's also something to be said for having someone in your life who's seen the very worst of you and decides to hang around anyway, as cliche a sentiment as that is.  There’s something extraordinarily ordinary about it all. You pictured it being smooth, painless, a sort of waltz that you would just automatically know the steps to.  Or a great love song at the very least.  It turns out it’s static.

"Did you give him his amoxicillin?  Will you let the dog out?  There’s something funky in the fridge.  I don’t know where your socks are! No, I did it last time.  We have to be at Parent’s Night in less than three minutes!  Can you turn the dryer on? Should we just get takeout? He’s got a fever-maybe his ears?  The electric bill is high this month."

But honestly, it doesn't feel ordinary anymore.  It doesn't feel like a cliche.  It feels like a truth as clear and deep as the cold lakes I grew up swimming in, and just as beloved.  When you decide to love someone instead of just feeling it, it becomes a fact of your life, at least it has in mine.  There is gravity and the weight of water and Meg loves Andy, world without end.

 As it turns out, there are lyrics to the static.  If you listen closely, under all that, there’s something else being said.  If you listen closely, you’ll hear, “I don’t want any life but this one.”  You’ll hear, “I’ll stand by you as long as I breathe.”  And of course you’ll hear, quite loudly and with every heartbeat, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

A Good Mom

 **Disclamer: I wrote this last February :) **

           I'm not sure why I thought motherhood would turn me into a Martha Stewart clone.  Believe me, there’s nothing in my pre-kid life to suggest this would be true.  I was a girl who did homework at the last possible second, and that girl grew into a woman who puts off really cleaning her house until company’s coming, and then runs around frantically shoving things into drawers and lighting scented candles to disguise the general untidiness.  I’m a big fan of sleeping late, taking long baths, and reading really thick novels with a hot cup of tea.  If relaxation were an Olympic sport, I wouldn’t necessarily go for the gold, but you can bet I’d be standing on that bronze platform without breaking a sweat. 

            
For some reason I thought motherhood would change this, and it in many ways it has.  A child forces some semblance of a routine.  You can’t stay up watching Grey’s Anatomy on DVD until four in the morning anymore, not if you’re going to make it to Lil’ Kicks Soccer class on time the next morning.  Motherhood comes with an unending checklist of tasks: You have to wake up, you have to make breakfast, you have to get to preschool before the “Who’s Here Today” circle time song. 

            
  But even though I’m a different person than I was before my son, I’m just never going to be the kind of mom who has color-coded bins in her house.  I think I’m allergic to them, or something.  I’ve learned that that’s all right, that there are a lot of ways to be a great mom, and good enough is good enough.   For the most part.

              
The exception to all this yay motherhood, I’m-okay-you’re-okay business would be the holidays.  Not just Christmas, but any holiday.  For some reason, my latent domestic goddess genes kick into high gear and I become obsessed with recipes, crafts, and well shot photos of my child in seasonal garb.  Don’t ask me why, I can’t for the life of me explain it. 

             
Take Valentine’s Day, for instance.  I had two parties to prepare for, one for my son’s preschool and one for his daycare.  Now, the easy thing to do would have been to run to Target and grab a box of cheap Valentines, maybe some heart stickers if I was feeling really fancy.  But alas, the logical part of my brain (the part that knows me and has an accurate grasp of my skills) shut down completely at the word “party.”  My mind became awhirl with visions of my son (dressed in a holiday-appropriate-but-not-trying-too-hard red baseball style ringer shirt) bearing adorable, home-made cards or snacks.  But what? A heart-shaped, hand print butterfly with the caption “Just fluttering by to wish you a happy Valentine’s day?  (I should mention here that during these episodes of holiday mania, I also don’t realize severe cheesiness when I see it.  My apologies.)  I debated this for a while before realizing that getting my squirmy three year old to paint that many butterflies had a slim-to-none chance at happening.  And roping my husband, lovely though he may be, into using his work printer to furtively make glossy color copies of our son’s artwork (again) was probably not a good idea either.

            
  I finally decided…to Put Something in a Cup.  This is a holiday motto of mine.  When all else fails (and given my delusions of grandeur, it often does) I rely on Putting Things in Cups.  Really, it works! Buy small, seasonally appropriate items, put them in a mug, and wrap, using massive amounts of cellophane and pretty ribbon.  Easy, pretty, and loved by all.  (I think.  I suppose all previous recipients of Things in Cups could have been lying out of pity.)

             
Anyway, on my Valentine shopping trip I managed to find 5-packs of red plastic tumblers with hearts. Perfect! I gave myself a mental high five.                

 I decided to put snack mix in them.  My mother-in-law has a great recipe involving cereal (I could use whole grains! The other parents would love it!), white chocolate, Craisins (Red, so as to fit the theme!), and M&Ms (I can get the Valentine bags with only red, white, and pink! My holiday saturated mind thrilled at the thought.)

             
 Except…there were no Valentine M&M’s. (Did I mention, um, this shopping trip took place the day before Valentine’s day? I know, I know.)  I had a mild panic in the Target candy aisle.  My husband didn’t understand why regular M&M’s wouldn’t do, or failing that, why I couldn’t just “buy a bunch and pick out the red ones.”  It is a testament to my craziness at this point that I actually considered this, before realizing there weren’t enough bags of regular M&Ms if I only used one color.

           
   By the time we got home, it was late.  I washed the cups and began melting the chocolate.  So far, so good.  Except that when I dumped it all together, it formed a gooey, unappetizing mess.  “Maybe it has to…set up for a bit, or something,” I told my husband.  “It’ll be fine.  I’ll just leave it overnight and dump it into the cups in the morning.”

              
You can see it coming, can’t you? These things never end well.  Somehow, it always ends up with me in a frenzy twenty minutes before I’m supposed to leave the house.  In this case, I was frantically jabbing at the enormous, hardened rock of snack mix with a spoon in an attempt to break it into manageable chunks and begging my husband to cut cellophane rectangles and find out where our son hid the ribbon (Tied in a knot around his plastic cow’s neck, as it turned out.  Apparently “don’t touch this” translates into three year old language as “please take this semi-expensive red and pink polka-dotted ribbon upstairs and turn it into a lasso.”) And when I say “rock”, I do mean “rock.”  That chunk of snack mix could have cut diamonds, I swear! It was a calcified mess of M&Ms and Chex. (I can neither confirm nor deny that I had to bang it on the countertop several times to break it into pieces.)

             
But I managed it. I pulled it off.  I got to work on time and spent the morning feeling like I’d accomplished something. Those cups of hardened snack mix, the effort I put into them, said something about what a good parent I was...didn’t they?

             
Well.  If I were being totally honest, I know that my kiddo would have been just as happy-maybe more so- to bring in flimsy Scooby Doo valentines.  If I were being totally honest, I’d admit that I was just trying to keep up with ”her”.  You know, her.  That mom whose kids look like BabyGap ads and never seem to have tantrums.  That mom who always has good hair.  (What is with that? Where does she find the time?)   The mom who does have color coded bins in her house and actually knows what’s in them.  The mom who doesn’t still fit into her maternity pants and never yells at her children.  I’m willing to bet, if you’re a mom right now, you know exactly who I’m talking about.

              
The thing is, though, when I think about it, I realize that she doesn’t even really exist. (Okay, maybe the kid in my son’s preschool who handed out heart-shaped cookies with each student’s name perfectly written in frosting has a mom who comes close, but that’s it.)  She’s just something I’ve made up, some mythical mommy who’s a mix of expectations I’ve set for myself and TV parents who never put a foot wrong.  Every mom I know personally is struggling, at least a little.  The moms I know who work feel guilty because they’re not at home, and the moms I know who stay at home feel guilty because they  can’t, or don’t want to, “do it all.”  I know a mom who says she feels like “the Big Bad Wolf,” because she’s strict with and expects good manners from her daughter, and I know a mom who says, “they walk all over me, but it’s working for now,” about her two boys because she takes an easy-going approach to discipline.  Motherhood is one of my very favorite things about my life right now, but I have to admit sometimes it feels like a no-win situation.

So, we might all be in this together. It might be okay to admit that I don’t have everything figured out, that probably no one does. Probably everyone has their frantic moments when they find themselves slamming a boulder of snack mix onto the counter. (Well…maybe not that exact scenario.) Probably the fact that we all love our kids and want to do the best we can for them is all right.  Wonderful, even. So maybe I can cut myself a break.

Until St. Patrick’s Day, anyway. I saw a recipe for the most adorable leprechaun cupcakes…

Little Man

Well.  I'm not sure how this happened, but my adorable little baby has, somewhere along the line, turned into a boy.  I know, shocks all around!  And not just a boy, but a dude. He's not quite four, but he has a favorite band, wears baseball hats, and doesn't always want to hold my hand.  What next?

When I was pregnant with him, I thought I knew what kind of boy I'd have.  I pictured a serious little guy with dark eyes and hair and a dry sense of humor.  (A miniature of my husband, in other words.)  So when my  blond-fuzzed baby was born, staring at me with my own blue eyes, you can imagine my surprise.

He's always had an opinion, always been chatty.  Before he could talk, he roared and grunted and filled the corners of our house with his loud, insistent calls. I would wake to him jabbering like a baby crow in his crib, which later turned to his demanding, "Mama! I out, I out! You! Me out!,"  and then to his wriggling over the side and then the gate and appearing in my bedroom, poking me from sleep with one chubby finger.

I always joke that my husband never gets any peace; wherever he goes there's someone nattering on at him.  My son keeps up a running conversation from the moment he jumps out of bed right into his sleep. "Mama, watch me do this, see, I have the tape and I'm making a web.  And now I'm Spiderman.  I'm chasing feefs. What are feefs? (He all but rolls his eyes here) They steal stuff, Mom.  And I chase them.  And catch them in my web.  Do you want to be a feef? Why do you have to do laundry? But our clothes are not dirty! That's just sand, it's ok.  You can not wash that and then you can be a feef.  Well then can I watch that one scary Scooby Doo movie? Why not? YES IT IS! It's propriate! It's propriate! IT'S PRRRROOOOOOOPRIATE!"

Sigh.

I should have known, really.  At his two year old check-up, the doctor said, "Okay, buddy, I'm going to look in your ears," and Sam replied, "No! You not look my ears. I go home wif my mama."  The doctor said, "well...I guess we can cross off the 'speaks in two word sentences' box."

It really puts your flaws in perspective, to see them mirrored in someone you love so intensely. My beautiful boy is stubborn and emotional and unable to give in when he believes he's right.  He gets that from me.  But he is also fierce in his desire to protect those who can't protect themselves, and I'd like to think he gets that from me as well. (Though in all honesty it's probably from that damn Spiderman.)

It's such a cliche, but I am in constant wonder at how he got so big, so fast.  When he was a tiny, unhappy baby it seemed that he would never get any bigger.  He cried and screamed and fussed for the first few weeks of his life, and I remember clearly thinking that someday he would be big, like two years old, and I would be able to take him places without wearing a nursing bra. Or without having people think he was hurt, as he would no longer be shrieking like an animal caught in a trap.  I dismissed the thought immediately.  Two years old? Pah!  It seems so far into the future as to be impossible.  And now, here he is, sleeping upstairs in his pirate pajamas, and he is almost double the age I thought it was ridiculous to imagine.

My boy, my son! It is still odd for me to say those words, still odd for me to think of myself as a mother, yet I cannot imagine a time when I was without him.  He was sick a few weeks ago.  When I went and picked him up (miserable and looking very small and ill), it felt strange to take him home and know exactly what to do.  I spread sheets over the couch and got his blanky.  I stripped his smelly sweatshirt from him and replaced it with soft pajamas.  He sipped Gatorade and watched cartoons while I stroked his hair, all the while thinking that I was his mother.


That's one of the whole points of parenthood, I think.  It makes you slow down, makes you aware of the passage of time.  It irritates me when Sam whines for his "sleepy blanky".  But at the same time, I know I will turn around one day and Sam, God willing, will be a man.  And I'll be holding a hunk of crocheted, used-to-be-blue yarn and thinking, "remember when Sam was little, remember when he couldn't sleep without this?"  Already it gives me pause to think of how that moment will feel.


I love you, you noisy, crazy little boy.  I will adore and protect you as long as I breathe, and probably after.  You are my very heart, and these almost-four years have been beyond imagination.  I can't wait to see what's next!

Logophilia

I used to like to write.

It wasn't so much that I liked to tell stories, though I liked that too.  I really liked the sound of words, the rhythm you could make by joining them together.  I liked to repeat words until I couldn't remember what they meant; it was then that you could really hear them.  To this day, I am in ecstasy over the first line in Daphne du Maurier's 'Rebecca' : "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."  Have you ever heard anything more gorgeous in your life? 

The first poem I remember writing began "late at night, when the dark grows old".  I was ten.  I loved that sentence.  I love it still, to tell you the truth, because it was amazing to me that I could string together words that hadn't been put  that way before.  (And still haven't, according to Google... :) )

Growing up, I have a certainty (read: baseless conceit) that I would be a writer someday.  The world was nothing to me but blank pages to write on, and I was sure that I would.  I didn't know very much then, certainly not that ambition counts for far more than dreams and love when it comes to things like that.  I have no real stick-to-itiveness, never have had.  I could start and maybe even finish a story or a poem, but when it came down to the brass tacks of mailing it places, or looking up writing contests or anything that would be helpful, I fell short.

I was certain I would be special and creative.  Weren't we all?  We grew up watching Reality Bites and a million other things that convinced us, or at least me, that working hard was for anal, close minded people.  You were supposed to have something to say in the world, you were supposed to be as useless and beautiful as Ethan Hawke, in all his indignation over being fired for stealing a candy bar.  (When I watch that movie now, I just want to throw the greasy little ingrate in the shower, sad to say.)  I thought, I really thought, that some writing thing would just fall into my lap and I'd get on with it, leading to a life of arty people and cities and coffeehouses and travel.

  What happened is this. I got married to a man who also loved to write.  We had a son, then bought a house in a small town, and somewhere in there I became just another person, scrubbing coffee from the new rug early one morning because, dammit, I just paid $39.95 for the thing at TJMaxx. I juggle t-ball and playdates and wonder if it's worth it to pay for private swimming lessons. I make packaged Toy Story mac'n'cheese and then try to make up for it by serving organic fruit alongside. I am too old to be a wunderkind, the way I'd planned.  I work part-time at a school, and it is important work, and I am good at it, but...it wasn't really supposed to turn out this way, was it?

That sounds melancholy, and I really don't mean it to.  On an average day, you'd be hard pressed to find a happier person that yours truly. I like this town.  I like my house and I love my family.

But the girl who loved words is in there somewhere, and I'm going to see what this blog does to bring her out.  We'll see...