Recently in Parenting Category

"Be careful your scooter wheel doesn't catch in the bump..."
"Don't jump on the couch, you might fall and hit your head on the coffee table..."
"Walk if you have a lollipop in your mouth..."
"Slow down..."

There are days when it seems like all that comes out of my mouth is an endless loop of be careful watch out be careful watch out be careful...

When did I turn into that person?

My constant cautionary recital seems particularly peculiar to me because I'm not really a fearful person. I know that bad things happen but whether through sheer ignorance, blind faith (in what I'm not sure), or simple optimism, I rarely that those bad things could happen here. (And yes, I do recognize that I am totally tempting fate with that comment, which, in turn, demonstrates at least some fear on my part. I mean, I'm not crazy--remember when your kids were young and you'd say proudly that your infant had learned to sleep through the night and then you'd be up all night with a screaming banshee from hell?)

So why then my constant admonishments? I mean, despite wanting to wring their scrawny necks on a fairly regular basis, I do in fact recognize that I have basically good kids who won't dash into the street or run away or use their scooters to play candlepins with the old people waiting for the bus. 

Are my cautions a sop to the fates, a kind of twisted-around prayer that none of the things that I'm describing in my cautions will actually come to pass?

I know that my words alone will not prevent the scooter wheel from catching in a rut and sending the scootee sprawling.  And it's pretty clear that the phrase "glass coffee table" does not connote the same splintering bloody mess in their minds as it does in mine. But saying these things, reminding myself that these things could happen...maybe it is reminding myself of how thin the line is between "everything's fine" and "oh shit."

Of course, I think it's safe to say that the boys don't even really hear me, actually, other than as a kind of Charlie-Brown-esque wonkh-wonkh-wonkh-wohnkwohnkwohnk floating through the air.  Hell, sometimes, I don't even hear myself, that's how automatic my comments have become. And if I'm boring myself, god knows I have to  be boring them.

I wonder. If we're all bored by my warnings, what would happen if I tried an entire warning-free day? Seriously.  An entire day without telling anyone to be careful, or watch out, or slow down...what could happen? Would the sky fall? Would they? Would we make it to bedtime unscathed and unscratched?

I'm going to try it.  I'm tempting fate. Tomorrow, caution gets thrown to the proverbial winds.  

And then when one of them falls off the scooter/bike/junglegym/couch/bed--THEN they'll realize that they should have been listening all along.

Knock wood.

There is a vigil happening right now, in Union Square, for Dr George Tiller, the doctor who was shot in a church in Kansas.  I can't go to the vigil because I'm home, making dinner for my very desired, very wanted children, who I can afford to feed and clothe, as well as supply (sometimes) with legos, bakugan, hot wheels, and swimming lessons.

A (very long) while back, I was having dinner with four of my closest friends from college and we realized that in our college years (and the few years immediately after college), among the five of us, we had had four abortions, two incidents of date rape, and a wide array of unsavory and unsatisfying boyfriends. Through nothing but sheer dumb luck, I was not one of the women who had an abortion - instead, I drove friends to the clinic, waited with them, and drove them home. But those roles could have easily been reversed; I could have been the passenger, not the driver.

Now all of us are mothers - babies we had inside the shelter created by stable relationships, jobs, health insurance, family support.

But if we'd been forced to carry those college-created babies to term? Who knows what would have happened to those unwanted children, the products of broken condoms, drunken fumblings, "true love" that didn't last - and who knows what would have happened to us, women not ready to be mothers?

What I do know is that more than twenty years ago, we had access to a safe, clean, close clinic that helped us through those dark hours. It never occurred to us, way back when, that twenty years later, those pro-life protesters would still be shaking their horrific posters at women caught in the most difficult decision of their lives. How does a "pro-life" agenda square with shooting a man in cold blood, in a church? The idea of violence in a church violates the very foundations of social order, even if, like me, "faith" isn't a daily part of life.

A few years ago, Bill McKibben wrote an article in Harper's, called "The Christian Paradox: How A Faithful Nation Gets Jesus Wrong," in which he points out that the most basic precept of Christianity is the truly radical notion of  "love thy neighbor as thyself." And it is radical: I mean, think about it: if you love your neighbor as yourself, can you imagine telling that person who (not) to marry? Or how to educate your children? Or what to do with your own body?

Somewhere in the fringes of the "pro-life" movement (and one must use inverted commas here, because let's be frank: there seems to be a real confusion about whose lives are - and are not - valued) there are people who are applauding what's happened in Kansas. How they rationalize this act of violence with their putative faith, I don't know.

I do know that there are many people of faith, including many Catholics, who are outraged by what's happened, and who knows, maybe - finally - Dr. Tiller's death will be the catalyst that moves us closer to that radical and foundational Christian notion of loving our neighbors. But I have to say that I'm not optimistic.

The vigil in Union Square is over now; I can see from my window that people are filing home,  and I suppose that some of the women in the crowd are themselves wrestling with the dilemma my friends wrestled with, decades ago.  

How can it be that all these years later, we are having the same battle over women's bodies - and how can it be that women have even fewer resources than we did then? And how can it be that the body of a doctor - a healer - has so little value?

A doctor killed in a church. How do we put that statement next to the phrase "a civilized society?"

"F. is a liar," said Liam as we walked to school the other morning. "He said he had all these cool bakugan pieces and he promised he would bring them to recess but he didn't. He said he couldn't find them but really he doesn't have them. I know it. He's just a big liar."

I know F. and, in fact, he may be a bit of a liar; he's also a bit of a bully. But I also know that F. has a pretty miserable family situation and there's not a lot of extra money around for stupid faux-anime Japanese toys. I think probably F. made up the story about "all the cool bakugan" just so that he could be in the conversation with Liam and his friends at lunchtime recess.

Recess, as we all know, is a pretty fraught place: factions come together and disperse, alliances are formed and dissolved, on a minute-by-minute basis. F gets left out of the bakugan conversation, but Liam gets left out of the Sponge Bob conversation - Sponge Bob doesn't play at our house yet (yes, it's true I am the meanest mom that ever lived) - and because of that, apparently, Liam can't even open his mouth in conversations with the older boys in his karate class. How can I tell him that most of those SpongeBobbing boys are louts (elementary school versions of the boys I used to date in high school, thus causing my parents to hold their heads and keen in despair)?

And yesterday, also at recess, Liam got fed up with another boy, Z., who has apparently been teasing him for months - gave him such a shove that Z. fell down. 

Liars, peer pressure, shoving ... my little boy, it seems, has entered the world of Big Kids and I hate it.

Let me say here that I know my son is no angel:  he's got a Napoleonic streak that sometimes verges on downright tyrannical - I find it infuriating and I can only imagine how he seems to another eight-year-old. In Liam's world, there are rules and these rules are meant to be followed. I swear that if we sent Liam and a phalanx of other third-graders to the Middle East, peace would be achieved in no time: You! Go over THERE. That's NOT FAIR. You're CHEATING. The rules say TIME OUT. TAKE TURNS.

Z. taunts Liam by saying he's small (and it's true: my reference to Napoleon was deliberate: Liam is by far the shortest kid in the third grade), and he says Liam is weak and stupid and bad at soccer. And when the teacher isn't looking, he likes to poke at Liam, squeeze his arm and say he's got no muscles... Noodgy, nasty stuff (none of which, by the way, other than the "you're short" accusation, is true. Yes, that is defensiveness you hear in my voice. Sue me).

Liam hadn't told me about being teased until the day of the shoving. After dinner the other night, he said he needed to talk to me, so we went in my bedroom and he spilled the beans about shoving Z. and knocking him over. He said he didn't get in trouble because the other kids told the lunch aide that Z. had been yelling at him - and that if Z. hadn't been making his life miserable, he wouldn't have been so angry. When I asked him if he'd told anyone what was happening - or if he'd even said anything to Z - he said no. He didn't want to get Z. in trouble and he didn't want to be mean. "I thought I could handle it, mommy," he said, and then folded his little eight-year-old body into a ball and began to cry.

As he cried on my lap, something weirdly ferocious and primal swept through me: an angry she-bear-protecting-her-cub sort of thing. It's easy to forget about this primordial instinct, I guess, because mostly it's covered up by logistics and lessons and errands and playdates and bake sales and all the rest of it. But when I saw Liam crumpled up and crying, I wanted to rip that other kids' head off, or at very least give him a shove myself. 

Listening to Liam's tale of woe and wrestling with my inner she-bear, I started to wonder where he got the message that he had to "handle" things himself. Have we been unreceptive to his worries and tribulations? Or does he think that he'll be thought "a baby" if he asks for help? Even this morning, when he had a terrible bloody nose, he only told me about it after the fact, telling me that "he knew how to take care of it."

Taking care of it, however, did not seem to include disposing of the huge stack of wadded-up kleenex, smeared with dried blood, on the floor by his bed: apparently I'm the clean-up crew. (I didn't do it. I asked him to do it. He complained. I insisted. He eventually complied. Eventually.)  Clearly, he wants to be his own boss and caretaker, but I'm not entirely sure that either of us is ready.

Don't get me wrong. I don't want to be a helicopter parent. In my teaching, I see all too clearly what heli-mommy produces: college kids who can't register for a class, talk to a professor, write a paper, make any decisions, without having a parent run interference. Many of my students seem detached from their own lives because their parents have been calling all the shots, put a kind of protective bubble around their kids. Remember John Travolta as "The Boy in the Plastic Bubble"? That's the heli-parent effect: same idea, but without the actual plastic or the disease. How do Husband and I find that balance between protecting Liam from a world filled with bad behavior, broken promises, and dashed expectations - and letting him make his own choices, find his own way?
 
So much of the language of emerging independence connotes suffering - hard knocks, fight your own battles, take your lumps, pick yourself up and dust yourself off - that it's no wonder they call it "growing pains." I guess it would be problematic to send Liam to school covered in bubble wrap - but I'd like to find him some psychic bubble wrap, a kind of padded envelope for his sweet soul, so that he emerges relatively unscathed from the treacherous terrain of childhood.

Can I get that at Staples, do you think?

No, the woman in that picture is not me. She could be, if we added forty pounds, covered her in sweat, and shaded her face a delicate shade of purplish-plum.  Oh, and drop the leg from straight up to about nine o'clock.  Then it would look like me in Bikram Yoga class.

Bikram is yoga done in a hot room - a sauna, basically. You do 26 postures (each one twice) and the class lasts about 90 minutes, during which the room gets to just above a hundred degrees. By the end of class my clothes are soaked, I'm a bit dizzy, my face is plum-colored, and my muscles sometimes shake uncontrollably.

I love it.

Until Bikram, I wasn't really a yoga-head. That whole "breathe through your left nostril to unlock the chakras of your right ankle" stuff makes me giggle and I never felt like I was getting much of a workout. (yes, yes, I know Madonna and Sting got their amazing bodies with "just yoga" but they have hours a day to spend on their yoga - and I think they're lying). But with Bikram, there's so much sweat, and so much stretching and balancing and pulling that it's impossible not to feel like you've exercised every iota of your body: "inside out, bones to skin," say the yoga teachers.

The classes never vary - the teachers rotate but they conduct the class according to a set script and the poses are always done in the same order. Part of the teacher training is to memorize the script and I'm sure that as they are telling us to "stretch past the limits of our flexibility," they are thinking "do I need to pick up cat food on the way home?" Some of them run through the class dialogue so fast, in fact, that they could probably get jobs as auctioneers.  The set routine and the constant teacher dialogue means that I don't have to think - and that's why I love it. 

During class, I follow the teacher's voice. We're not supposed to anticipate instructions; we're just supposed to move in sync with the dialogue. And that means that my inner voice - the voice of chores, notes, books, blogs, groceries, whatsfordinner -  goes silent. It reminds me of all the years I spent taking ballet classes (a long time and a lot of ice cream ago) and how during class all I thought about was the class, the steps, my alignment - and not about how miserable I was in school or how much I hated my college roommate.

In Bikram, all that goes through my mind is I'M HOT. HOT HOT HOT HOT. And then even that thought goes away and I concentrate on standing on one foot, holding the sole of my other foot in my hands and straightening my leg so that I look like the letter L.

Yeah, that's obviously not me either. I have yet to achieve "L." My leg extension (aka standing-head-to-knee pose) looks more like Caleb's attempt to draw a witches hat.

The teachers call bikram yoga a "moving meditation," and it is - but it's a meditation that also helps combat the wonderful middle-aged upper arm jiggle. So I tone my mind and my swags of backfat. What a lovely twofer. 

In graduate school I tried meditating - concentrating on a candle and chanting, that sort of thing. Usually I got distracted by all the crap I had to do, or I started to laugh, or my back hurt, my knees hurt, my neck hurt. I was a meditating failure.

Recently, however, I had a kind of an epiphany - be warned, yoga conversion story coming - during the savasana. That's the two minutes we get on the floor, after fifty minutes of intense exercise, when we are to rest in utter stillness before the series of floor postures.

Utter stillness. Two minutes.

Do not wipe away the sweat dripping into your eyes, pooling into your ears, tickling the back of your neck. Do not fidget with your soaking wet t-shirt, do not wipe the hair off your forehead. The teachers call those fidgeting impulses the "monkey mind" - the part of us that wants to move away from stillness, that needs constant distraction, constant reaction. During savasana, we're supposed to calm the monkey mind and just breathe. In and out, in and out.

You know what? Stillness is freaking hard.

But last week, I did it. Let the sweat drip, the hair tickle, the t-shirt chafe. And then I had a thought: what if today I didn't yell at my kids. What if I just stayed this still inside all day long?

So I did. Kept my voice calm - even when threatening the boys with no computer! no TV! One day of not yelling led to another day of not yelling. And that led to a day -  okay a day with some Stern Voice Talking - but no yelling. It's been a week and I've managed, more or less, to avoid the sort of monkey-minded yelling that provides a momentary release but ultimately doesn't really make anything better.  

Now don't get me wrong. Not screaming has not rid me of the desire to lock my children out of the apartment, or to bang their bickering little heads together, or to throw every single lego down the garbage chute the next time they scream about which legos belong to whom. Let's not get all crazy here - Bikram hasn't made me a nice person or anything like that.  And frankly, I'm not even sure my kids have noticed that I am doing less yelling. But I've noticed (and Husband has corroborated this observation, so it must be true).

Will this new-found control over my monkey mind continue? Who can say -  if Buddha had my kids, there's no way he would have found Enlightenment. For the moment, however, the monkey-minded yelling has been silenced.

Now if I could just achieve that "L."

Here's what I thought when Caleb patted me awake yesterday morning, Sunday: "But I was mommy yesterday - why do I have to do it again? Can't someone else play mommy today?"

Seriously. Wouldn't all parents do better with regular sabbaticals from parenting? Sometimes I think that divorced parents with joint custody of their children really have the right idea; or perhaps an arrangement similar to the one the novelist Fannie Hurst had with her husband, back in 1915: they maintained separate apartments, had breakfast together two or three times a week, and called each other to make dinner plans.

Sounds good, doesn't it?

I spent Sunday recovering from the birthday party we had for Liam on Saturday afternoon, which was a relatively low-key affair, for Manhattan: we used the community lounge-space in our building and had games, a movie on the big screen TV, pizza, cake, goody-bag, good-bye. Cleanup was easy and I didn't have to try and hide the disaster area of my apartment from the parents who were dropping off their kids.

And yes, that is a picture of the cake I baked. A mommy friend insisted I document my culinary achievement, particularly because hiding under that atrociously sweet store-bought frosting is a chocolate cake with three cups of zucchini in it. It's the only way my kids eat vegetables (I'm sure that any day now, Liam will be diagnosed with scurvy, given the lack o'leafy greens in his diet). If you want pictures of real cakes, check out ezrapoundcake.com - great recipes and a fabulous play on words at the same time - what a bargain!  

But as we put together this birthday party, I started to wonder...back in the days of my youth (lo those many decades ago), did I get what amounted to essentially three birthdays? It seems pretty standard now for kids to get cupcakes or something at school, then perhaps a family gathering, and then the actual party with their friends. And these parties...skating parties, bowling parties, gymnastics parties...hundreds and hundreds of dollars. In NYC, birthday parties are a lucrative industry, in part because unless you're lucky enough to have some kind of common space in your building, none of us really has the space (or inclination) to allow large groups of rambunctious children into our apartments.

And once you're having a party, you're also hooked into...the goody bag. That little trophy of participation, the "thank you for coming" present...Did we used to get those? Maybe, back in the day, if you won the game of Bozo Buckets, you got a little prize, but coming home with a zippy little bag filled with plastic doodads and maybe some candy...? Where did that idea come from?

Is there some mom in a remote suburb of Westchester living under an assumed name for fear that her secret will be revealed - that she is the ground zero of goody bags?

How do we resist this seemingly endless celebration of birth? Yeah, yeah, your being born is a big deal, and we're glad you're here, but couldn't we just toss you a cake and be done with it?

It's a game of chicken, really, I think, or maybe an arms race. None of us wants to be the mean mom who doesn't bring a treat on the birthday; none of us wants to host the party where there were no goody bags. I thought maybe I'd outgrow peer pressure once I left high-school - and for a while there, in my early thirties, I did. Then Liam started school and once again, all I want to do is hang with the cool kids (and yes, probably I would jump off a bridge if they did, what about it?)

Clearly I have no solution to this problem - all the kids who came on Saturday got decks of Kung Fu Panda Uno cards, and a small Hershey bar - and I felt a little guilty that we didn't give the guests more. At one point, I'd thought that we wouldn't do goody-bags at all, but my resolve melted into a puddle of imagined recriminations.

What this means, of course, is that I should start planning for Caleb's birthday, which is in August, now.

Yesterday I overheard two of my female students discussing their Halloween costumes:

Student 1: ...it's like slutty cop, but with fishnets.

Student 2:  Where'd you get fishnets? I need them for my devil costume, I've got these great high red boots...

After that I walked away, not wanting to hear how else the high red boots were going to be accessorized.

I indulged in a brief bit of head-shaking - had these girls no shame! is this what feminism brought us - girls dressed like strippers in the name of empowerment!

Then I remembered a long-ago Halloween and my mother's suggestion for a costume: "You can be Mrs. Olsen the coffee lady! A cardigan, some powder in your hair, we'll get you a can of Folgers..."

She was thinking ease-of-costume-making.

I wanted to be a gypsy, with eyeliner and long jangly earrings.If I'd owned red boots at the time, I would've worn 'em in a heartbeat - and I'm sure my mother would've had the same reaction as I did to my students.

Clearly I've already got my costume for this year's Tricks or Treats: I'll be going as my mother and probably wearing a cardigan.

A little while back, I gave away the boys' Fisher-Price dollhouse to my niece, who will be two in March. Liam had seen this dollhouse at a friend's house when he was about two, fallen in love with it, and so miraculously, Santa brought it to him.

There were a few other things that I passed along to my niece that made me sad - parting with the little wooden stove and all the dishes, for instance (that stove and Liam's three-year obsession with pots, pans, and cooking is a story for another day) - but giving away the dollhouse didn't bother me.

The ads for this dollhouse claim it as "a girl's first dollhouse..." If you put batteries in this house, you get noises: "with the phone ringing, the kitchen timer dinging and much more, this friendly Fisher-Price home is full of activity." Given that level of dinging and ringing, sounds like there should have been a "girl's first martini" in the box, too.

What I found particularly galling about this house - into which we never put batteries, duh - were the figures that came with it. Not the Fisher-Price wooden dowels with bowling-ball shaped heads and plastic hair of my youth. I guess too many kids swallowed those.  No, instead the house came with "realistic" molded plastic figures, squat and pink, too big to fit in all but the greediest of mouths. 

The inhabitants of this pink-roofed, faux-Victorian dream house are probably molded in the same pressurized chamber (they are essentially the same shape) but they are finished with a clear eye towards who does what: Daddy, with brown hair and a sweater vest, holds a cellphone, and resembles either a television evangelist or a dot.com dude who made millions and is quasi-retired. Mommy, also brown-haired, wears a cardigan and holds ... a baby-bottle. Note the separation of fiefdoms in this picture from the FP website: Dad upstairs on the computer, Mom downstairs ... in the kitchen. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose, eh? 

Perhaps I shouldn't have let my niece have the doll-house; maybe instead I should've roamed on ebay for that paragon of alternative doll families, The Sunshine Family.  When I was a little girl, I loved the Sunshines: the mom wore a long calico dress and sandals; the baby was blonde and indeterminately sexed; dad had tan pants, workboots, and a red turtleneck - a sure sign of a counterculture lifestyle (they probably smoked a little weed when the baby was sleeping). I'm sure they lived in the woods outside Boulder or maybe Berkeley.

You could also get the Happy Family, who were the Sunshines' black neighbors, and even, eventually, Sunshine grandparents. I find myself deeply curious about the marketing meeting that produced that: "the Sunshines are a big seller....let's make old people!"  But hey, it was the mid-seventies, with its peculiar brand of "Free to be ... You and Me" idealism.

 
I'm not saying that Mrs. Fisher-Price is a plastic version of Ibsen's Nora, or that my niece will be brainwashed by a two-inch man holding a cell phone; I guess I'm asking if it's possible to escape their faux-Victorian conventionality.

Maybe we all should go live in the woods with the Sunshines. 

There's an old Partridge Family song that my college roommates and I used to sing on roadtrips - a song best sung at a bellow, accompanied by expansive arm gestures: "Point me ... in the direction of Albuquerque... I want to go home...I want to go ho-ho-hommme." This past weekend, in a happy conjunction of a 10th wedding anniversary and an academic conference, Husband and I pointed ourselves in the direction of Albuquerque for four days without our children. My mother - who is soon to be canonized - stayed with the boys in New York. 

Ten years of marriage. A decade that encompassed, in no particular order: two tenures, a mother with pancreatic cancer and liver failure (and subsequent death, after a year in bed); the near-death of one child, a miscarriage, another mother's divorce and subsequent re-marriage, 9/11, eight years of Dubya (about whom we said, in 2000, "how bad could it be?" thus proving that one should not ask questions to which one doesn't really want answers), the birth of a second child, two unpublished books, two unproduced screenplays, major reconstructive knee surgery followed by two months on crutches, innumerable academic conferences, three published books, several handfuls of published articles, and living for more than a year in a two-room apartment with one (very small) closet.

Frankly, sharing the closet came the closest to breaking us.

So there's been a lot of water under the bridge in these last years, which is perhaps why it comes as no surprise that we've not gone away together, without the boys, in more than eight years. Each of us has had little solo jaunts, and we've had a few overnights here and there, but a string of days, just the two of us? 

Nope.

It's been eight years of sleepus interruptus, of endless rounds of meal preparation and clean-up, of sounding interested in the Bernstein Bears, or Thomas the Train, or Jedi, Pokemon, Batman. And on and on.

This is not to say that as a family we haven't taken trips together but as a very wise cousin of mine pointed out, there is family trip and there is vacation. Vacation is what you do when you go somewhere without your kids, even if it's into the hospital for a routine tonsillectomy.

Being on vacation means that even when our flight from O'Hare to Albuquerque was delayed by more than an hour, I didn't care. I didn't have two small children pulling on my hands in opposite directions; I wasn't asking anyone to stop sliding into third base along the polished concourse floor; I wasn't cramming three bodies into one bathroom stall to pee before we got on the plane.

I traveled with my laptop, a magazine, my conference papers, and a paperback book. Everything fit beautifully in my shoulder bag, which is not I realize, news in and of itself. But do you know what was NOT in my bag?

children's motrin
benadryl
fruity dentyne
lollipops
small bags of pretzels
hard candies
sticker books
crayons, markers, and things to glue
portable dvd player
binder of dvds
changes of underwear
wipes
a diaper-just-in-case
blankie-and-bearsie

This list is crazy long and I know it's symbolic of my travel madness; one day, I suppose, when my children are closer to being people than to babies, I will not have shove every possible eventuality into my carry-on bag.

So you can imagine my state of mind - and my non-aching back - as I walked through the Albuquerque "Sunport," as they call it, and out into the Land of Enchantment (it says so right on the license plates), where the sun shines 310 days a year.

We had a glorious weekend - visited cousins in Santa Fe (where my cousin's wife Laurie just opened a lovely little shop), went for two long hikes in the hills, had great food - and oh yeah, the conference was good too.  I love Santa Fe, always have (which is not saying much, I know - doesn't everyone? The real surprise would be falling in love with, say, Detroit. Or Duluth).

I wish I could tell you that Husband and I fell madly in love with each other all over again, or that we're still glowing in the memory of our trip, or that I found my spiritual center somewhere on Big Yesuque trail, north of Santa Fe. 

I didn't. I mean, Husband and I remembered that we are capable of conversation that extends beyond discussions of logistics and schedules, so that's good; and grimy loud LaGuardia didn't completely destroy the memory of wind in the pines at ten thousand feet, so that's good too.

 

Here is what I discovered:
I was happy to leave my children.
I was happy to come back to my children.

And I suppose even if I left Manhattan to live in Santa Fe, I would bring that paradox with me: it's where all parents live.

 

Yesterday, on "Marketplace," the radio show that makes it almost possible for me to understand economics, the fabulously voiced host, Kai Ryssdal (the man judging pumpkin pies in the picture above) read letters and emails from listeners. Not surprisingly, most listeners had strong feelings about the financial bailout and the country's fiscal meltdown. Ryssdal started the segment with the comment that "revenge is a dish best served cold," and ended by saying that even those who didn't want revenge clearly want to blame someone for the mess.

That started me thinking about blame and why it's so tempting - and satisfying - to point the finger at someone and say "YOUR FAULT." And of course, that finger-pointing is something one tries to inoculate one's children against: "I don't care whose fault it is, you are not allowed to whack your brother with a wooden train track." To which Liam likes to respond: "Caleb instigated me so I couldn't help it. It's HIS FAULT that I hit him." 

Do you see how mature I am in NOT talking about the blame games within a marriage ... and my somewhat uncomfortable realization that my children may not be the only people who need lessons about personal responsibility. I know, I know that I shouldn't hit my husband with a wooden train track just because he left his (dirty) socks on the table again.

But I digress. 

So there I was, listening to "Marketplace," sitting in traffic on the FDR, and because I was alone, I indulged in the deliciousness of finger pointing (and okay, maybe a little ranting, too).

And I figured it out. I know where to point the finger; I know who is to blame for it all: Iraq, Katrina, the housing bubble (and the subsequent POP that has beslimed the country), the financial implosion...

 

This guy.

Ask yourself: what would have happened if he hadn't thrown his ego in the ring against Gore and Bush, way back when ...

See? 

Now you want to point your finger too.

Liam and Caleb have been watching Looney Tunes lately in their after-dinner TV hour and their laughter - is there a better sound anywhere than the laughter of small children? - makes it almost okay with me that they're watching cartoons.

(My husband says, "not cartoons. Looney Tunes. Classic, subversive, elegant." He also told me once that my inability to appreciate Looney Tunes, along with my general dislike of "Seinfeld," almost rendered me unmarriageable; one of my oldest friends sees my distaste for "Seinfeld" as a significant moral failing. What can I say? I take comfort only in the fact that unlike Sarah Palin in the V-P debate, I'd be able to answer the "Achilles' heel" question.)

But I digress. So the boys are watching Looney Tunes and howling with delight at poor, beleaguered Wile E. Coyote and his futile attempts to catch Road Runner. I do have a soft spot for Coyote because of his endless optimism: this time, his Rube Goldbergian plan will work. This time, it will be different. This time, when he runs off the cliff and into thin air, he'll keep running and not plummet to earth.

But of course, he never catches that damn bird and he always falls to earth.

Coyote is Loony's version of Sisyphus, whom Zeus condemned for all eternity to roll a huge boulder up a hill ... only to have the boulder tumble back down before he can reach the top. Sisyphus had tried to trick the gods - had in fact declared that he was smarter than Zeus (never a good idea) and as a result he suffers from the eternal frustration of a never-completed task.  

Sisyphus and Wile E. Coyote have something else in common, however, other than their shared inability to reach a satisfying conclusion: they are the twinned patron saints of parenthood.

Think about it: if you ever wrote down everything you do in a given day, you'd never get out of bed. Breakfasts, lunchboxes, dishes, shopping, laundry, email, doctor's appointments, babysitting arrangements, menu planning, food cooking, school organizing (where are the empty boxes for the art project, where is the reading book, where is the permission slip, where are the gym shoes) ... and that's even without a job, if you've got one.  It's like Coyote: as long as he doesn't look down, he keeps running on air. But once he notices ...WHAM.

And Sisyphus ... well, look at that list. An infinite loop of chores. I stare at the dishwasher and wonder, why put the clean dishes in the cabinets? Why ask the boys to put away their toys, why put the remotes in the basket, why... wipe off the counters, swab away the pee that dribbles down the toilet (o the joy of three boys, all of whom seem to pee with their eyes shut), put away the coats, fold the laundry ...

Why not just let that damn boulder thunder down to the bottom of the hill and leave it there?
 
Control.

I can't control global warming; real estate prices; the environment; Sarah Palin; Wall Street; the crackers who won't vote for Barack not because he's black, you know, they're not racists, it's just that they've heard things, you know, and then there's his middle name. You betcha.

I can't control the slow shuffle of food tourists on 14th street, who meander from Trader Joe's to Whole Foods and back again; I can't stop the maniacs who dart through traffic on the Cross County like they're racing in the Grand Prix; and the fate of the Mets is out of my hands.
 
I'm sure you have your own I-can't-do-anything-about-it-even-though-it-makes-me-nuts list. We all do.

But within the confines of my four little walls, you see, I can impose some order. Temporary order, yes; fleeting serenity, perhaps ... but at least it's something.  Who knows? Maybe Wile E. Coyote gains the same pleasure as he rigs his (doomed) rocket-blasting-roadrunner-destroying contraption; maybe Sisyphus simply enjoys the view (each time) as he gets close to the top of his hill.

I do have one - unlikely - source of comfort to help with the Sisyphusian nature of house-and-child keeping: the curmudgeonly Robert Frost, who was not a particularly good father or housekeeper, but was a hell of a poet.

Poetry, he wrote once, is but a momentary stay against confusion.

And you know what? So is folding sheets.

Beep beep!