Parenting: October 2008 Archives

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!