Wrap it Up

The day before Christmas Eve I got a phone call from my mom saying that something has to be done about that cat. 

“She’s over there all alone, and I’m afraid she’s going to just curl up and die.” 

Here’s the story of that cat.  She started out as my cousin’s cat, when my cousin lived next door to my parents’ house.  When my cousin moved out of state, that cat was then passed on to my brother.  Then when my brother moved back in with my mom to help take care of dad, he somehow managed to pass that poor cat on to my mom.  The cat is about sixteen years old, is missing some teeth, is widely unpopular because she hisses at anything and anyone that moves, and is kind of stinky.  That’s an understatement.  She’s a smelly cat.  (“What are they feeding you?”)  She didn’t even have a name or if she did, it had long since been forgotten.  Everyone just called her Kitty.  The one good thing about Kitty is that she loved my grandma and would lie at the foot of the bed when grandma slept.  Ever since grandma died, the Kitty had been tolerated in the house, doing her own thing, and coming in and out as she pleased.  She wasn’t really an accepted member of the household but she wasn’t awful enough to be taken to the APA or the Humane Society.  She was pathetic.  Old, unwanted and stinky, she was our very own cat squatter ala Holly Golightly.  Nobody had the heart to take her anywhere.  And nobody really wanted to bother. 

When we moved my mom over to her new house, we left the cat behind.  We checked in on her every couple of days and made sure she had food and water and that the house was warm enough for her to survive.  There just wasn’t enough room in the new house for a stinky cat.  Of course having my own cat problems, there was no way I could take in another cat that pooped on the floor.  For weeks we wrestled with all of the options on what to do with that cat and who was going to be responsible for her.  Somehow, once again, I was stuck with a responsibility out of sheer default.  I called the Humane Society and told them Kitty’s sad story and they suggested I call Animal Control.  Animal Control came that very day, the day before Christmas Eve, and picked up the cat from the old, empty house.  My mom met them over there to let them in.  By the time I arrived to the house they had picked up the cat and were gone.  My mom’s eyes were full of tears when I walked in.  She stood in the middle of her old, abandoned house and said, “I told them that I just couldn’t take care of her,” and I felt like we weren’t talking about the cat anymore.  The cat was a symbol.  Those tears were meant for someone, or something, else.

I guess on one hand it seems silly to be sad over having to get rid of a cat that you didn’t really want in the first place.  But on the other hand, it was just one more thing my mom had to say goodbye to this year, one more thing that she couldn’t save.  It was a sad way to begin our holiday, to be sure. 

Still, after that, our Christmas actually turned out to be not so bad.  Sure, there were moments here and there when I’d think of my dad and miss him like crazy.  I held back the tears when I heard on the radio, “I’ll be Home For Christmas.”  I watched White Christmas by myself one night and cried practically the entire time, remembering my father singing along to “Gee, I Wish I Was Back in the Army.”  If there was one thing my dad knew how to do, it was celebrate.  So celebrating without him didn’t quite feel right this year.  When the family got together we tried our best and managed to laugh a lot, sing a few songs, and cry only a little.  I guess that’s how the holidays work after you’ve lost someone close to you.  Since this was our first, it was probably the hardest.  I imagine next year when I watch White Christmas I might cry at first but then smile, remembering silly old dad.

Apart from some of that melancholy, I bet that our Christmas was probably no different than all of your Christmases.  We rushed from my family’s house to my husband’s family’s house on a snow filled Christmas Eve, trying to keep our son awake so he could share in the excitement of opening of all of his presents.  He was overindulged this year by the family and he was actually able to appreciate it for the first time.  He learned quickly how to unwrap, going faster and faster with each present.  He said, “Santa!” every time anyone asked him who was coming to town.  He said “Baby Jesus” every time anyone asked whose birthday it was.  It was an exhausting pace and by the end of the night we were ready for the excitement to be over with.  On Christmas morning we told him that Santa had come and there were presents waiting for him under the tree.   We saw the ever emerging personality of our terrible two year old, who that morning traded in his stubbornness for sweetness and officially became the world’s cutest child.  He literally ooohed and ahhed over every gift he unwrapped.**  We realized later that day that we’d forgotten to take pictures or record any of it.  We kicked ourselves for being so caught up in the moment that we forgot to capture said moment on film.  And, after all the presents were opened and all the food was eaten and all the families were visited, we experienced the same Christmas hangover that I assume every family experiences.  The tree that looked so magical when you first put it up becomes an intrusion in your living room.  The snow on the ground turns grey.  Some of the lights on the outside of your windows burn out.  Oh well, we thought, there will be more Christmases.  We found ourselves looking to the future, planning next year’s Christmas, wondering how to top this one.  That’s how it is when you have young kids. We thought, next year.  We can’t wait to do it all again next year. 

Next year is a strange thought for me.  Now if you’ve followed my blog up until now, you’ll know fully well that I am entitled to say that I’m glad this year is coming to an end.  I feel like I should look to the New Year with hope and anticipation, surely a year like the one I’ve just had deserves to be followed by a year of peace and blessings.  A year where no one gets sick, dies, or needs to be moved into a nursing home.  No more sad, anthropomorphic cats.  No more trying to take on more than I can handle.  But friends, I have to say, while I’m relieved that this turd of a year is wrapping up, I would be lying if I told you I wasn’t a little afraid of things to come.  Is it possible to have an even worse year?  Would God allow it?  These are some things I think about, you know, when I’m feeling a little sorry for myself.  It sounds selfish, I know, but I’d like to be able to focus on my budding family, dedicate my whole attention to my brilliant son and not feel unbearably sad and lonely, burdened by the seeming weight of the universe.  I’d like to be pregnant again, believe it or not.  But here’s what I’ve learned this year.  No matter what you want or what you try to accomplish, life has this way of happening.  Things are going to happen that are simply out of your control.  I don’t know about you, but it’s a pretty scary thought. 

Let me just say that I’d be absolutely hopeless and fearful if it weren’t for this fact; that “now these three remain; faith, hope, and love.  But the greatest of these is love.”  Love is what I witnessed when I kept vigil last New Year’s Eve on my dying grandmother.  Love is what I saw when my family surrounded my dad on his death bed and sang to him.  Love is what I witnessed for months when my mother in law stayed by my father in law’s side in the ICU and refused to leave him alone.  Love didn’t let my grandma, or my dad, or my father in law down.  Love didn’t fail me last year.  I saw it acted out in so much abundance that I can’t even describe it all.  I see love in the face of my son and I think there’s no possible way I could love him any more than I do right now.  But I will.  Tomorrow I will love him a little more.  Next year I will love him even more.  And the days will go on and on, and the love will grow and grow. 

So bring it on, New Year.  Whatever comes, I’ve got love on my side.

**I think it’s important to note that on Christmas morning, as he oohed and ahhed over it at first, after my son unwrapped the Singamajig doll he started to really examine it.  My husband showed him how to squeeze the doll’s belly, and it opened its mouth into an O and sang a few notes.  My son snatched it out of my husband’s hands and threw it on the ground.  “No way,” he said.  “It’s scary.” 

I’m not making that up.  Now that’s my boy.

Parental Discretion Advised

I was sitting at a table of mommies today eating brunch and one of them began sharing the details of her horrible weekend.  She had to cart around all of her kids to way too many activities and school functions and it was wearing her out.  She caught a cold and experienced hearing loss recently and needed to schedule surgery around Christmastime.  And all of that took a back seat to her concern over her son being constipated, as she was sure he had major intestinal blockage.  I lifted a forkful of hash brown casserole to my mouth and nodded my head in agreement at how hard it is to have a little one who hasn’t pooped for days.  I kept right on eating.  I finished my entire plate of food and went back for more.  Four years ago, before I was pregnant, before I had a son who's also experienced constipation every now and then, having a discussion like this was unheard of, much less during brunch.  I was as squeamish as they came.  You couldn’t even say the word “poop” anytime close to mealtime, and if you said anything related to it while I was actually eating I would’ve had to leave the room.  That’s probably why I was so much thinner before I had a baby.  My "ick" tolerance sky rocketed after giving birth.  I think pregnancy prepares you for the big gross out, being so gross in and of it self, what with the crazy bowel movements and the vomiting and the swollen appendages.  Then the actual giving birth part is just so, so gross.  Oh come on, it’s only beautiful once the baby is cleaned off and perfectly swaddled, lying in your arms.  But the actual birthing process…I’ve seen the video and it ain’t pretty.  Even though I had a c-section and couldn’t see anything that was going on, my husband assured me that “Oh my God, it’s so gross” while this supposedly beautiful miracle of life was taking place.

Now look at how far I’ve come.  Just ask my siblings, who used to delight in torturing me at dinner time by making puking sounds.  Now the sound of anyone throwing up, well, to be honest that still makes me want to throw up.  But my son throwing up all over my clothes doesn’t bother me one bit.  It sends those motherly instincts into overdrive and just makes me love him even more.  Because once you’ve had a three month old leak out of his diaper every time he has a bowel movement and actually poop in your cupped hand, you grow a thicker skin, a stronger stomach.  Let this be a warning and a relief to those of you expecting your first child.  When it’s your kid, you really can take just about anything.

One day early on in my stay at home experience, when my son first started crawling, I walked into the living room where he had been playing and where I had left him for just a few brief moments. I stepped in poop barefooted.  I looked around.  It was everywhere.  Poop on the furniture, on him, on the floor, on some of his toys; everywhere I looked.  I picked him up and of course it squished out onto my hands and all over my shirt.  We went straight to his room where I stripped him down and then into the bath.  I rinsed out his clothes before putting them in the wash.  I scrubbed the furniture.  I scrubbed the floors.  I bleached his toys.  I changed my shirt and scrubbed my hands, but no matter what I did or where I cleaned, I just couldn’t get the smell out.  I felt like the Lady Macbeth of poop.  When my husband got home later that evening, I held out my hands in frustration.  “Smell them,” I said.  “I’ve washed them a thousand times.  I can’t get the smell of poop off of me.  It must be in the fibers of my nose.”  He laughed at me.  “Carrie, have you looked in the mirror today?”  No, I thought.  Noooo.  I ran to the bathroom and in the mirror, there it was, a giant smearing of poop right across my neck.  How could I have missed that?  It must have come off my shirt when I changed.  I was disgusted.  Thank God I didn’t leave the house that day.  I began to cry.  This is what my life had been reduced to.  This was the joy of parenting, smeared in its excremental glory across the blind side of my neck.  It was a low point for me.

Ever since that traumatic experience, I haven’t really had any issues when it comes to the great number two.  That kind of thing will pretty much desensitize anyone, which I guess is why I have no reservations about telling you the story.  It only grossed you out if you don’t have kids.  If you do have kids, then you know all about it. 

To me, the funniest part of the story about the woman at brunch was that this woman didn’t even think twice about mentioning constipation while we were all eating.  I don’t know about you, but now that I’m a parent, I think my filter is operating at about fifty percent when it comes to what’s appropriate to talk about in public and what is not.  I find myself bringing up bowel movements in a lot of my conversations, even with people who don’t have kids, even to people I barely know.  I am turning into my mom.  Somehow the “p” word gets worked into every conversation every time she calls me and every single time we sit down to eat.  I’m not exaggerating.  I feel like I'm living one long Pepto Bismol commercial, the soundtrack of my life being “nausea, heartburn, indigestion, upset stomach, diarrhea.” 

Since we're on the subject, I'll let you in on one of the funniest things about my son, a thing we've come to call his “poop face.”  Since he’s still in diapers, he's all to eager to proclaim when he's done the dirty deed.  “Poo poo mama,” he’ll say to announce it.  I don’t need him to tell me, it’s pretty obvious what he’s doing when he's doing it.  He does the same thing every time he goes.  He’ll find a quiet, unassuming corner of the house.  He’ll get a very serious look on his face, concentrating intently on “something over there.”  Then he’ll turn red and begin a very dramatic series of grunts and pushes.  If he’s really into it, he’ll grab onto something and hold on for dear life until he’s done.  And when he’s done, he’ll simply get up and go on playing just as if nothing's happened.  He’ll announce, “Poo-poo mama!” like an exclamation point to his big finish.  And right now he’s going through a phase where he hates to have his diapers changed, so I have to convince him that his butt stinks and that mama needs to clean him up so he won’t be “covered in ca-ca.”  The word “ca-ca” cracks him up long enough for me to change his diaper.  You say it and try not to laugh.

See, if I had any filter at all, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you all of this.  I wouldn’t have mentioned the word poop or poo-poo eleven times, oops, thirteen, in this one single blog entry.  This is all part of being a parent, isn’t it?  The good, the bad, and the downright disgusting parts of the experience.  I like to think of it as “baptism by fire,” or in other words “baptism by ca-ca.”  You can use your own discretion and call my stories inappropriate, or gross, if you want to.  To me, it's just another perfectly normal conversation about poop.

Fourteen…

LOL

I have a really bad habit of laughing when my son falls down.  I suppose I partly have America’s Funniest Home Videos to blame, who taught me and the rest of the country to grab the camcorder and cue the laugh track every time a person of any age slips and falls.  I can’t help it.  My son makes the face when he falls.  He sticks his lip out and his face gets really long and he looks like an inconsolable baby duck, and it’s just plain adorable.  It’s the pre-breakdown face, the one that could end up going either way depending on how much attention he feels like he needs on that particular day.  He could tuck the lip back in after a minute or so and be done with it, or he could turn that quivering lip into a scream and turn on the waterworks full blast.  To my husband’s family, this is the saddest face they’ve ever seen and it breaks their hearts.  The face draws out their most sincere responses of “Aww, poor baby” and demands their instant sympathy.  They are good people.  My family, on the other hand, sees the face and we do the thing that my family does best, we laugh at my poor son.  I’m starting to get a little better by turning my head, or covering my mouth, but my son still knows that I’m laughing at him.  I’ll look over and see my brother and mom covering their faces too.  He’ll get no sympathy from us until we get this out of our system.  Get ready to think badly of me; every time I laugh at him, he says “No, mama!” and shakes his head, reminding me that I’m a terrible person for thinking that his recent pratfall was hilarious.  (So that you don’t think I’m the most terrible person, I’ll just remind everyone that I only laugh when it’s obvious that he hasn’t severely injured himself.  I’m not the devil, you know.)

This laughing thing has gotten me into trouble many, many times.  When I’m not having anxiety dreams, I’ll get woken up by my husband because I’m laughing in my sleep.  I must have funny dreams, although, I can never remember what’s so funny the next day when my husband asks “What were you laughing about in your sleep?”  I guess I just crack myself up.  Ask my husband, I do this at least two times a week.  When I worked at the university, my boss used to hear me and the girls laughing from back in her office and she’d call out, “Do you ladies need something to do?” like we were twelve year old girls who can’t fall asleep at a slumber party.  In school, I used to get called out by the teacher for laughing.  It was usually at my own joke.  And God help me if anyone in church does anything remotely funny.  You are not supposed to laugh in this most sacred of places and yet inevitably that's where someone burps or makes a toot sound, and it forces you to be immature in the House of the Lord. 

I have mostly my family to blame for these inappropriate fits of laughter.  I blame them for most of my issues, anyway.  I guess when you grow up the way we did, you realize that it’s better to laugh your way through life than to cry.  In the last three years, I have often had to remind myself that if I wasn’t laughing, I’d be crying.  I just don’t want to be sad all of the time.  Watching someone die of brain cancer is not funny.  Watching your father reach out and pat one of his chubby nurses on the behind and say “Boop,” when she bends over and then say, “Well, what else am I supposed to do with it?” is inappropriately hilarious.  He would have never done anything like that unless he was sick.  So we laughed it off because the opposite of that is just too sad. 

My sister was over at our parents' house one time helping her husband load some two by fours onto the back of his truck and she wasn’t looking when she threw one back, so instead of landing in the bed of the truck it flew straight into the back window, shattering it.  My brother in law was fuming since the words “Watch where you’re throwing that…” just came out of his mouth in slow motion mere moments before it happened.  What did my sister do?  You guessed it.  She laughed.  And laughed and laughed.  She laughed all the way home later that day with the wind whipping hard through the busted out window of the truck.  And she still laughs anytime we bring it up.  She didn’t mean to but once the dirty deed had been done, nothing else could be done about it except to laugh, which she did, much to my brother in law’s chagrin.  And you think I’m bad.  She’s the queen of inappropriate, nervous laughter.  It’s still a sore spot for my brother in law every time he tells the story, made ten times worse by the giggles of my sister in the background.

I don’t know if this happens to you but when I’m the only person laughing at something and nobody else is laughing, it just makes it that much funnier.  I had my own marital set back when my husband asked me one night to give the back of his head a quick trim for an upcoming event at work.  I haven’t cut my husband’s hair since before we were married, when his dad took over doing it.  I begged my husband to please don’t make me do this, go spend a few extra bucks at the closest Great Clips, because I was scared that I’d mess it up.  He promised me there was no way I could mess it up because he attached a certain device to the end of the clippers and all I had to do was zip, zip, zip.  “Like this?” I said as I zipped a bald spot right in the back of his head about the size of a half dollar.  I said, “Uh oh.”  I felt hot.  I pursed my lips, knowing what was coming, and looked down, then back up, turned my head, and did everything I could think of to contain myself.  A slow leak of breath like laughter came out of my nose.  Then I started snorting.  I said through my snorts, “I don’t think anyone will notice.”  When he looked in the mirror and saw what I had done, he was furious.  “Carrie!  People are going to notice this!”  When he looked at my face and saw that I was red and crying from restraining laughter, he had to physically leave the house it made him so mad.  I erupted in boisterous laughter.  I felt just terrible about it, I really did.  He just couldn’t tell.

I’m finding that this laughing thing is also not conducive to disciplining my son.  He’s too much.  Along with the face, my son can throw some of the cutest fits.  He recently started doing this thing when I correct him or call him out on something.  He rolls his eyes.  I know that in about ten more years that crap will not be cute, but to see a two year old roll his eyes busts my gut.  If I say, “Buddy, don’t touch that,” he’ll look right at me and slowly touch whatever it is I told him not to.  Right now it’s the Christmas tree.  He is testing every single boundary I am working so hard to establish and sometimes it wears me out to the point of delirium.  At the end of some days I think again that if I wasn’t laughing I would be crying.  Don’t get me wrong, we know fully well that sometimes I do cry.  But when I tell my son “no” and he looks right at me and throws a car into the air, letting out an “uh” after he does it and then catches my glare to see what I’m about to do next, I can’t help but smile.  “Buddy,” I’ll say in my most disciplining tone, trying to contain my laughter, “Don’t do that.  Go pick that up.”  He’s obsessed with the letter “w” now and makes me write it about a hundred times a day on his dry erase board.  When I’ve had enough and I can’t take it anymore I’ll say, “Mama doesn’t want to write ‘w’ anymore.”  This crushes him and he cries in his most desperate plea, “Wetter dub-a-you.  Wetter dub-a-you!!”  It’s pathetic and hilarious, and it’s during these times that I thank God for moments when I can look my son in his sad little face, forget about the power struggles and the embarrassing trips to the mall, the stages of development and those uptight parenting responsibilities, and I can just throw my head back and laugh out loud. 

Suck It

Just in time for the holiday season, the Battle of the Binky has begun.  I’ve just taken the first step in waging war on oral pacification in my house.  I’m slowly phasing out my son’s binky usage during the day.  Yes, I’m fully aware that most people think my son is a little old to still walk around with a binky in his mouth.  One of my single guy friends pointed this out to me one day when he asked my son’s age and then went on to say “Oh, he’s way too old to be sucking on a pacifier.”  To which I replied, hey if you have anymore parenting advice send it my way, since you have so much experience being a guy who’s single with no responsibilities and zero children, and all.  He said that he used to be a thumb sucker until his parents would spray the “same stuff that they use for dogs to stop chewing on things” on his thumb.  Some of my single friends swear there’s little difference between raising a dog and a child.  I’m going to have to go ahead and disagree.  A dog is not the fruit of my loins.  A dog is not a mini me.  A dog cannot talk back and say, “Ewww, this stuff tastes awful,” or, “Bad mommy,” which I’m sure is exactly what my son would say if I pepper sprayed his binky.

Oh, and dogs can be put down.

When you enter a battle of this magnitude, you have to be prepared for the ultimate test of wills, the ultimate power struggle.  Who is stronger, me or my precious son?  I’ll tell you what, my tiny son is quite a behemoth of strong will.  He is a combination of me and my husband and this makes him just about the most stubborn baby I’ve ever known.  Everything he has done he has decidedly done at his own pace in his own time.  I can’t really take credit for any milestones in his life because he is so fiercely independent. When he decided to walk, he just started walking.  When he decided to talk, he just started talking.  His favorite words are “I do it!”  Meal times are like road side bombs in our home and I have had to use all of my tools of manipulation just to get him to eat his vegetables, now that he’s decided vegetables are “yucky.”  Any wrong turn can result in a devastating explosion.  Not to mention he’s the spitting image of me, so fighting with him is like fighting with myself in the mirror.  Of course, as with any war, it’s of the utmost importance that I pick my battles.  The ones I choose to fight I have to be committed to fighting.  Because if I’m not consistent every time, the ever watchful child will learn quickly that sometimes he’ll win, even if he loses most of the time.  What will result is an epic struggle for power that will last for the rest of my life. 

While I am fully engaged in the battle of wills pretty much all of the time, others unknowingly get drafted into it.  Dada just wants some peace when he gets home from work so he gives in to Junior’s fits to produce a second of quietude.  “Don’t make him eat those if he doesn’t want to,” he’ll say, rubbing his forehead, not realizing he’s just launched an air strike against my efforts.  Junior learns fast to ask dada for cookies instead of mama.  Talk about manipulation.  And don’t even get me started on grandparents, who drop atomic bombs all over my battle when they throw all the rules I've established in my own house straight out the window.  Grandparents are never, hear me now, never on the side of us parents.  They are always going to sabotage our efforts, setting back months of hard work with just one sleepover.  Junior gets everything he wants at grandma’s house and he knows it.   Those same people who never gave us anything now give our children everything.  Then they have the nerve to send home to us the next day a child possessed with the demon of overindulgence, and expect us to correct him.  A child who was almost compliant now won’t do a thing you ask him to and answers everything you say with a resounding “no.”  It takes days of reconnaissance to start over, much less gain any new ground.

When talking about power struggles with toddlers, a friend of mine suggested a course in “Love and Logic,” a Parents as Teachers seminar that’s offered a few times a year.  The point is to get Junior to think he has power over his life by offering him more decisions.  Such as, instead of “eat your vegetables” at dinner time, it’s “what kind of vegetable do you want?”  This manipulates the situation so that both Junior and mommy are satisfied.  I can get on board with that.  I’m all about manipulation especially when it yields the exact result I want.  Although, this method kind of goes against all of my own old school upbringing and somewhere my dad, who just had to snap his fingers and point to make us behave, is rolling in his grave.  Oh, and I can just hear my mom snickering when I offer my son “choices.”  She’s the woman that will give my son suckers from the time he walks in her door until the time we leave her house, but when I try to do some new school, psychological manipulation on my kid I’m being a soft wimp.  “Kids should just do what you tell them to,” I heard one of my mom’s friends say.  Right, that’s so going to happen.  I hate to admit it but when I tell my son not to do something he will look at me and smile and do it anyway.  They learn so early.  Since the dawn of time there has been a constant, ongoing battle to get children to obey their parents.  Just ask God.  

Per usual, I’ve received all kinds of advice on how to get rid of my son’s binky obsession.  And as usual, I find myself weighing all of my options.  One of my friends suggested that I tie it to a balloon and let it go up into the skies, waving bye-bye as it floats away, hopefully landing in some other child’s life.  That to me sounds like a way to effectively get my son to hate balloons and to forever refer to them as the great binky thieves.  Another friend of mine suggested that I cut off the tips of the binkies.  She actually said, “clip the nipples.”  I cringed and covered my chest.  I’ve heard of binky fairies who come and take away your binky in the middle of the night and leave a special treat behind.  I’ve heard of taking Junior to the toy store and letting him exchange the binky for a toy.  You can hide them, you can conveniently lose them, or you can just tell your child no and endure two straight weeks of crying.  It seems that no matter what, I am faced with the same reality.  It’s just going to take some time and some growing on both of our parts to overcome the binky.

I was at the overcrowded mall today buying some overpriced lotion when my son decides that it’s this particular time, in this particular store, that he wants his binky.  He asks for it over and over again, “Binky, mama.”  “Mama doesn’t have it,” I say and this time I don’t have to lie.  Today I decided not to give in and pack an emergency binky in the diaper bag.  Today was the beginning of the end, in my mind.  My Gettysburg.  He starts the tears.  “Sucker, mama.”  The force is strong with this one.  He is cleverly letting me know that if he can’t suck on a binky, he’ll take whatever else is available.  Sucker first.  “Apple juice, mama,” he says next.  I hand him his sippy cup but it’s empty.  “Sorry baby.”  I hand the credit card to the cashier who is sympathetic and who is trying her best to distract my son by showing him all kinds of cute, scented soaps.  He isn’t interested.  I hand him a soap dispenser in the shape of a Christmas tree.  “Here buddy!  Your very own tree!”  “NO!” he screams.  He has made it clear to me and everyone else that he wants only one thing: oral satisfaction.  I got nothing.    

I can’t imagine what my face must have looked like when I picked him up and carried him crying and screaming out of the store.  His face was full of snot and tears by the time we got to the car.  I got in the car, turned around and said very calmly, “When we get home you can have your binky, but that means you have to go to sleep.  Do you want to go to sleep when you get home?”  He said, “No.”  He fussed a little more in the car but by the time we got home, all was well.  He’d forgotten about wanting his binky and instead he had lunch.  We ate peanut butter and jelly, laughed, and when it was time for his nap, I satisfied his oral fixation and let him have his sweet, precious binky.  He slept like an angel. 

I suppose in the near future I will have to crack down and get rid of the binky altogether.  Baby steps, my friends.  Let me revel in this small victory today.  It cost me several dirty looks from impatient mall goers as I dragged a crying baby across the entire length of the mall, but it didn’t take away my dignity.  They don’t know what those terrible twos are like, or else they’ve forgotten.  They don’t know how hard I’m working to implement certain standards in my son’s life.  I said it once and I’ll say it again, parenting is so hard.  Those people just don’t get it, the ones who say in restaurants “Can’t you keep that kid quiet?”  Or who stare at you with judgment and condescension while you’re checking out, trying to squeeze in a little Christmas shopping, buying some stupid overpriced soap at the mall. You know what I think of those people?  Hold on while I get my emergency binky out.  Because even though I won’t let my son have it, I’m going to shove it in their faces and tell them that they can just suck it.

The Age of Innocence

Just this year, my mom has turned into an old lady.  That, or just this year I’ve started to notice just how old lady like she is.  When you go through piles and piles of forty years worth of someone else’s stuff, you start to realize a few things about them.  We rented a dumpster to clean out her old house and I swear, every time I tried to throw something away she said, “Now, someone might want that.” Or “Well, we could use that.”  She insisted on keeping every single thing.  “I might use that at Christmas,” she said about her thirty year old electric knife that’s missing the cord.  “Your uncle so and so gave that to me.”  I can’t tell you how many fake flowers she has in her house.  They are everywhere, collecting dust, in even more hideous looking vases.  She proudly displays them in any free space, in any given corner of the house.  Every piece of the clothing that was left behind in her old house smells like fried food, Ben-Gay or pee, since she just recently started having bladder control issues. 

I don’t mean to gross you out.  I’m trying to get you to understand.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, she’s always been old.  She had me when she was forty so I’ve never really seen her when she was young and hip, which my siblings swear to me that she was at some point in her life.  Now you hip forty year olds who are having children don’t be offended.  My mom was never hip and by no means attempted to be so.  She is fun without trying to be, funny without trying to be, but one thing she is definitely not is cool.  She’s never been cool.  She always seemed so closed off to anything having to do with my generation.  She never liked any of my music and all of the lyrics she could make out offended her puritan-like sensibilities.  Her favorite thing to do was to pick out some horrific ensemble from the thrift store or a garage sale and say “All the kids are wearing these!”  You know, before bellbottoms and polyester shirts came back in style.  No, by the time I was born my parents were tired after having three children and then being surprised by a fourth.  They were worn out.  They were poor.  My mom didn’t take me to the park much.  She took me to church.  She had drawers full of buttons.  She watched TBN and Lawrence Welk.  All classic old person stuff here, people.  She loved and still loves to pick through junk.  It’s junk that she will never let go of, as much as I try in vain to convince her that, mom, you can only have so many fake flowers and so many buttons before your house starts to look like the inside of a Goodwill.  It took only a few days for her new house to go from the cute, modern-mixed-with-classical décor I had bought for her, to something that looked like a fake-flower-tornado hit it.  My sister laughed about it, saying it reminded her of the scene in The Waterboy where Bobby’s mama is laid up in the hospital one night and then the next night when we see her she is surrounded by all of the chotchkies from her trailer, brought in to her hospital room by her patient and dutiful, albeit slow, son. 

In spite of all of that, my mom never seemed like an old lady when I was growing up.  She just seemed extremely out of touch.  She’s sort of an innocent, really, or she is really good at acting like one.  She will turn off a movie if it has just one curse word in it.  She’ll say, “I don’t like that.” To hear an offensive word come out of any her kids’ mouths gives her a near heart attack.  Remember, she’s the same woman who never said the “v” word, and the same one who hated using the “f” word.  Not that “f” word.  The other one.  Okay, I’ll spell it.   F-a-r-t.  I still can’t say it.  I’m thirty two years old and when I pass gas I call it a toot.  Thanks again, mom.  If the woman says anything offensive or crude it is by sheer accident.  We have an uncle on my dad’s side named Dick, and she saw a guy at church who looked just like him, except the guy was about seven feet tall.  She came home that night and told my siblings and myself that she saw a guy who looked like a seven foot Dick.  She said, “He did!  He looked like a seven foot Dick!”  To this day I’m not quite sure if she realizes why we fell off of our chairs with laughter.

Now I’m sorry if I’ve offended you with that story.  I told that story once when I was out with some friends and I fear it may have been a little too off color for them.  But it’s one of the funniest things my saintly, naïve, pure as the driven snow mother has ever said.   You’d laugh too if you were raised by her.

My realization that my mom is considered to be among the elderly came later that afternoon, after helping her “throw away” stuff, when she wanted to take us out to lunch and she picked, of course, Hometown Buffet.  I have issues with buffets.  They are unsanitary.  There are always morbidly obese people who stay for four hours sitting in the corner and it makes me feel so bad for them.  And usually the food is terrible, as is the case at Hometown Buffet.  It’s just terrible.  A friend of mine says about buffets, you wouldn’t pay ten dollars for one plate of terrible food, why pay ten dollars for ten plates of terrible food?  He has a point.  I have a few rules of my own for eating at any buffet.  Stick with the starches, stay away from fish (especially at Chinese buffets).  Don’t even look at the ice cream machine next to the desserts because God knows when the last time that thing was cleaned.  Say it with me, botulism.  I sat down with my plate of biscuits and mac n’ cheese, looked around, and noticed a funny smell at the table next to me.  Buffets are so sad.  Hometown Buffet is like the nursing home cafeteria where my grandma stayed.  My son brightens everyone’s day and is oblivious to all the sadness, but I just can’t eat at those places.  They zap the appetite, and life, right out of me. 

I looked across the table at my mom, who was on her second plate of “good” salad.  It occurred to me, she’s old.  She loves this place.  It doesn’t bother her that we are surrounded by white hair because even though she dyes her hair blonde, she’s one of them.  I said, “Mom, why did you want to come here to eat?”  “Oh, I like their salad,” she said, as if she wasn’t aware that all of the ingredients on the salad bar were readily available, fresher, and weren’t handled by one hundred people at the nearest grocery store.  My mom is the queen of denial.  My brother joked with her, “She’s an old lady, that’s why.”  She insisted, “I am not!”  We laughed, but then I looked around.  Yes, sorry mom, but you’re officially old.  Seventy two years is only considered young in parts of Japan where the people live to be a hundred and twenty by eating fish and drinking green tea.  

Most people are sad when the realization hits them that their parents are old.  It happens to some overnight because of sickness or an accident.  Others like me know it’s kind of always been there, you just realize it so much more now that you’re a bit older yourself.  It’s not sad to me.  It’s kind of a relief.  It justifies some of her behavior quite rightly.  She can’t hear because she’s old.  I have to repeat everything three times because she’s old.  She drives like a maniac because she’s freaking old.  It explains so much.  She wants to keep all of her things and I have to let that go.  Because she’s old.  She’s like any other person who has experienced change in their lives.  She’s a little bit out of her element, a little bit scared.  I have to take care of her, because I’m not old.  Not yet anyway.  I have to be her patient and dutiful Bobby Boucher (pronounced Boo-Shay) and surround her in things with which she is familiar so she feels safe.  She loves eating at the old person’s buffet so, well, I can eat there too.  She wants a room full of fake flowers then I suppose I just have to give up and let her have one, since it doesn’t hurt anyone.  I hope that when I’m old my son tries to be as patient with me as he can.  I hope when I’m singing in the car “Bust a Move,” which will be so ancient by then, that he’ll just roll his eyes and smile.  I hope he’ll bring his son with us to the buffet where I’ll noticeably pee my pants but load up on the “good” salad anyway.  God give me patience with my mama.  I will turn into her someday.  We all will.

But if she starts a doll collection like my grandmother’s, oh heck no.  That’s where I draw the line.

I Always Feel Like Somebody's Watching Me

When I was a little girl, Cabbage Patch Kids were the hot ticket item at Christmas time.  It took me a few years to get one.  I begged and begged my poor mother each year and swore that if I did not receive one that Christmas, it would surely be my last because I would just die.  My grandma, rest her soul, tried to hand-make one for me, but it wasn’t quite the same.  The doll she made looked similar enough to a Cabbage Patch doll but the nose was longer, kind of funny shaped, and there was something off about its eyes.  They followed me.  My grandma’s house was stocked full of dolls of that nature, always looking at me, sometimes blinking, heads cocked to one side.  Some of her dolls were life size, some of them were missing eyes, some were either bald or had patches of missing hair.  Some of the dolls were all wrong, obviously possessing the heads ripped off of other dolls so they had these giant bulbous heads but teeny tiny bodies.  Every single one of them was the stuff of nightmares. 

It was my brother who gave me my first Cabbage Patch Doll.  I couldn’t be afraid of this doll, even though at the time my mom almost threw it away because Xavier Roberts (the supposed creator of the dolls whose name was scribbled on their butts) was a pronounced Satan worshipper.  At least, that’s what someone from my church had said and my mom believed them.  No, my doll wasn’t a creature of Satan.  She was pure heaven.  My doll had blonde hair tied in two pigtails on either side of her perfectly round head. She had a cute little dimple in one of her cheeks.  She had cute corduroy overalls.  She was my very first Cabbage Patch Kid.  I had a couple more after that, but that doll in particular was my favorite one.  Maybe it was because it was my brother and not my mom who bought it for me.  My brother was living in Washington D.C. at the time and must have felt guilty for being so far away, so that particular Christmas I scored big time.  He gave me the doll and, like, a million My Little Ponies.  Maybe I loved that doll so much because it was my first “big deal” gift that I can remember.  The one that everyone talks about and everyone wants but no one can get and I got one, the poor little girl from Maplewood.  A few years late, but I still got one so it still counted.  It was finally a doll that I wasn’t afraid of, one that could be my friend instead of one that stared at me all night waiting for me to fall asleep so it could devour my soul. 

I kind of have a thing about dolls.

Okay, that’s an understatement.  I hate dolls.  I hate clowns too.  But what child of the 80’s doesn’t after seeing Poltergeist, right?  I’m not crazy about any toys with eyes.  I’m also not crazy about toys that move and talk.  Because any toy that sings, or talks, or makes any kind of noise, always, always goes off at some point when you’re not touching it, usually during the night.  When I lived with my parents, my nephew would stay over a lot so we kept a lot of his toys in the back room of the house which was right behind my bedroom.  He had a pair of giant green Hulk hands that when you slapped them together would scream “HULK SMASH!”  I woke up one night to that very sound.  When the fear that someone was trying to smash my face subsided and I became un-paralyzed, I went looking for what I thought was either going to be a toy or a very tan blonde-haired wrestler.  I found the Hulk hands and I threw them down the basement steps.  I thought that was the end of it, thinking I had broken them somehow.  Just a few minutes later I closed my eyes and heard “HULK SMASH!”  Was it me or was the sound getting louder?  I expected to turn my head and see them floating above me.  I ran down to the basement, picked them up, ran back upstairs, opened my back door and chucked them into the backyard as hard as I possibly could.  They landed with a “HU--.” 

I could tell you all of the other stupid things I’m scared of.  Things like bobble heads, which aren’t as cute and unassuming as you might think.  I just don’t like how they are in constant motion, as if their sole purpose for existing is to constantly agree with you.  That’s too sad for me.  I don’t like anything whose head is significantly larger than its body, so along with bobble heads, bulldogs kind of freak me out.  I’m not crazy about statues, especially statues of angels.  I’ve seen too many movies where their eyes open and follow you and it reminds me of the graves of ghost children.  I can’t watch any scary movie.  I don’t like mechanical Santas that move.  I hated Showbiz Pizza which is now called Chuck-E-Cheese and my son will never ever have a party there.  I pretty much hated and still hate any life-size figures that move and especially the ones that talk.  They remind me of those Duracell people on those commercials.  You remember those Duracell people?  Sometime in the mid to late nineties, Duracell commercials featured a battery operated family of human-esque robots.  I believe their names were the Puttermans.  They were crazy, scary looking things.  During one of the commercials the grandmother’s battery died while they were having a barbecue and the grandma fell face first into her plate of food.  The family laughed.  It freaked me out so bad.  Cause I was like, hello, evil robots, your grandma just died.  They just looked, I don’t know, soulless.  This was also about the time that Nike came out with “Little Penny” Hardaway in their commercials.  I shudder at the thought of that tiny black leprechaun. 

Don’t ever say the word “Ferbie” to me, either. 

Okay, so keeping in mind that I’m pretty much scared of every kind of toy ever made, imagine my reaction when my sister in law suggested that I buy my son the hot ticket item this year called a “Singamajig.”  Pronounced Sing-a-ma-jig.  She said that when she saw it she immediately thought of my son because he is always singing.  Don’t get me wrong, from time to time I indulge in my son’s affection for toys that sing.  I let him keep the Elmo Live he got last year at Christmas because Elmo is pretty harmless.  That is until we lost Elmo’s little stool and when Elmo tried to sit down but kept falling over I heard over and over again, “Uh oh, Elmo fall down.  Can you help Elmo?”  I kind of let the batteries run out on that one.  I looked up this Singamajig thing online.  It looks cute and harmless enough.  Its eyes don’t look soulless or vacant or ready to kill at will.  It’s snuggly and soft.  You push it and its mouth opens into an O shape and it sings a note.  You keep pushing and it finishes the song.  Now here’s what thoroughly freaks me out about it: it harmonizes with other Singamajig dolls.  How does it know how to do that?  Oh, you rational people out there with your Computer Science degrees know that it’s all about programming, but, doesn’t it seem a little Matrix-y to you?  What else can it do, what else does it “sense?”  Does it sense fear?  Will it know as soon as I unwrap it that I’m deathly afraid of it?  Will it be at the foot of my bed one night, its little mouth shaped into an O, and slowly climb up my body until I come face to face with the kind-of-monkey-shaped imp of my doom?  Will it harmonize me to death?  Laugh all you want.  These things are hot and they are everywhere.  I imagine some Japanese business man laughing his way to the bank and then on to world domination, being followed by his minions of tiny Singamajigs.

Of course I bought one for my son.  Today I went into Toys R Us and I sheepishly asked, “Where are the Singamajigs?”  I felt a flush of red come to my face.  It’s pretty embarrassing as an adult to say a word like Singamajig, much less admit to the Universe that I am succumbing to consumer driven Christmas propaganda while trying to overcome the worst of my childhood fears.  I tested several out before I decided on the blue one that sings “Skin-a-ma-rink-a-dinky-dink” or something like that.  I even had a couple of them sing together before I managed to thoroughly freak myself out.  No, I thought.  No, I can’t go there.  I am determined to not let my phobias ruin my son’s Christmases.  Next year it will be some other creepy talking, singing, dancing thing so I just have to suck it up.  I have a gut feeling that it’s going to be his favorite Christmas gift this year, one that he’ll want to take everywhere and show to everyone.  He’ll be so proud that Santa brought him a Singamajig.  It will be like his very own Cabbage Patch Doll, not freaking him out in the least bit.  I have a feeling that on Christmas night, after my son goes to sleep and I’m hanging out on the couch sipping cocoa next to a roaring fire, that creepy little thing will open its mouth into an O and sing a note without me even touching it.  And if it does, that son of a gun is going into the fire.  Harmonize that, sucka.

When The Stars Go Blue

It took a little longer than I had expected but my dad’s headstone was recently placed on his grave.  I drove out with my mom, brother, and sister to see it this morning.  It’s about a twenty minute drive from Maplewood to the cemetery where my dad is buried, up north.  You know how when you’re driving along, your mind is thinking of something else, and then all of a sudden you arrive to your destination, but you can’t remember how you got there?  That’s how it was today.  It’s a suitable metaphor for life really, meandering from place to place, not really focusing on being in the moment and then the next thing you know you find yourself in a cemetery. 

Today we step out of the car and it’s cold out.  We had to order a bronze marker for dad, since he is buried in the part of the cemetery that only accepts bronze, which are considerably more expensive than granite markers.  I laugh because dad is in the penthouse suite of the cemetery.  He is buried close to my grandma, so we say hello to her while we’re there.  We pass by my sister, just a few graves down, and stop for a while.  I cry every time I see her headstone which isn’t very often and today I do it again.  She was seventeen when she died.  We finally get to dad.  It’s a simple and elegant marker.  It looks like we’ve spent a lot of money on it but in reality we bought the cheapest one that we could find since my mom doesn’t have any money.  We discuss how nicely it turned out and how we were afraid it was going to look awful.  We think it’s fitting for him.  It doesn’t look like any other grave marker.  None of us have been here since dad died in June.  We just couldn’t come out and see it unmarked, especially since it takes so long for dirt to settle on top of fresh graves.  We cry.  The memories of his last months and days come rushing into my mind and I can’t take it, but I act like I can so that I’m able to comfort my mom.  Below me are the remnants of my father.  Someone I kissed and comforted and who’s hand I held not even six months ago.  My belief system tells me that I’ll see him again someday.  It doesn’t matter what you believe.  This is what I believe.  

The last couple of weeks of my dad’s life he was in and out of consciousness, but mostly out.  My brother would play the guitar next to his bed and we’d have family sing-alongs of southern gospel standards and Johnny Cash songs.  My dad’s moniker was “Cowboy Willie.”  One time he even donned his fringe jacket and cowboy hat and brought his guitar to my nephew’s school to lead his own sing along.  It was a hit with the kids and something my nephew will never forget.  At his funeral we played recorded versions of him singing “The Holy Hills” and “He Looked Beyond My Fault and Saw My Need,” old southern gospel songs.  A couple of days before he died, when everyone was out of the room, I’d take my dad’s hand and sing those songs to him, just him and me.  I know he heard me.  There was a lot of peace in that room when I sang, a lot of forgiveness and reconciling.  I know that in those moments my dad knew that his daughter loved him and would stay with him until it was time.  I promised him every time I had to leave him that I would see him on the other side, not sure if that moment was going to be the last time I’d see my dad alive. 

It’s hard standing on the grave of someone who loved life as much as my father did.  He loved to laugh.  He loved to tell stories and sing.  He was, as my husband affectionately puts it, a “crazy old hoot owl” but he was an original.  He loved holidays and always made such a big deal over them.  He was so proud of his pumpkin pies at Thanksgiving and would shove a forkful into our mouths as soon as we’d walk through the door.  “Here, I want you to try something,” he’d say.  The smell of pumpkin pie will always remind me of dad.  Thanksgiving was really tough this year.

My dad never met a stranger.  After they removed the brain tumor and before his strokes he had no social boundaries (not that he ever had many to begin with) and would talk to anyone who had ears.  They didn’t even have to pretend to listen.  He couldn’t pick up on social cues anymore anyway so even if you were rude to him it didn’t matter.  He’d smile at you and talk to you as if you were his new best friend.  That’s how he was.  He wouldn’t be rude to you, no matter how rude you were to him.  And he was never, ever rude to his kids.  He always had encouraging things to say to us.  He was so proud, it didn’t matter what we did or who we became he was just so proud that we were his.  He’d tell us that all the time, “I’m so proud of you.”  We were so embarrassed of him at times but he was always proud of us.  “Nobody has prettier girls than I do,” he’d say, embarrassingly, all the time, to anyone.  Humility was not his strong suit.  We learned it from my mother. 

My dad wasn’t perfect.  It’s a funny thing with us humans that we tend to romanticize people and turn them into saints once they’ve died.  My dad was no saint.  He had a long list of flaws.  We all do.  His just affected me a little more than anyone else’s.  He was never directly mean to me.  Ever.  One of my friends told me how she hated her dad growing up because he would say and do the meanest things to her, and now she still hates him.  They don’t even talk.  I can’t relate to that.  My dad was loving and kind and affectionate with me and my other siblings.  He was tough when he needed to be with four deviant kids, but he was pretty gentle most of the time.  When I was young he would braid my hair after my bath and I’d cuddle with him on the sofa and fall asleep in the cradle of his arm during Cardinals games. 

It’s just, and I say this as only a daughter can, a lot of his mistakes indirectly affected my view of men and of life in general.  He felt the pressures, temptations and wiles of life, just like I do now.  Only he couldn’t handle it.  He wasn't anchored to our home.  He was gone a lot.  He settled down in his later years and made peace with himself, I think.  I made peace with him too though it took me a while and by the time I did it was almost too late.  The day of his tumor removal the doctor came out afterwards and told us my dad had Stage 4 cancer and there were still “feelers” in his brain that would probably kill him in three to six months (he survived three years after that.)  I cried the entire thirty minute car ride home from the hospital.  By the time I'd gotten home, I’d forgiven my father for every mistake he had ever made. 

Six months after his surgery, sometime in August, when my dad was in his most intense cycle of oral chemotherapy, I announced that I was pregnant.  By this time, the cancer and the brain damage from removing the tumor had made my dad’s emotions and behavior a bit erratic.  He was down a lot, sleeping during the day and up at night.  We never knew what he was going to say or how he was going to react to things.  His filter was non existent.  After rounds of chemo, radiation and then eventually, the series of strokes, his spirit, that fire behind his eyes, began to wear out and change.  His personality changed.  By the end of his life he could barely work up any emotion.  He’d stare off into the distance, his beautiful blue eyes glazed over, as if the world that he used to see of fire and beauty was nothing but a landscape of dull grey. 

I did a bit of grief counseling after my father’s death.  The loss of my dad and the two hospice experiences being so close to one another understandably left me a little freaked out.  I felt like I needed to work out a few things before they took their toll on my son.  I talked to my counselor about my life, mostly about my dad and my son, and she pointed out something to me.  A lot of the words I used to describe my dad: full of life, funny, loved to laugh, sang all the time…were the same ones I used to describe my son.  The things that stood out most about my dad’s appearance were his sky blue eyes.  As a young man, my dad had black hair and baby blue eyes.  My mom used to call him, “My dark haired blue eyed man.”  My son has those same eyes.  They are beautiful and on fire.  Everyone comments on my son’s eyes just like they used to about my dad’s.  And my son laughs hard, almost like a grown man.  A friend of mine once said “I’ve never heard a baby laugh like that.”  My son also loves to sing, especially when it’s for an audience.  We had to sing “Happy Birthday” with him this year about ten times before he was satisfied.  He just has to hear a song once and he’s singing it for days.  My son loves life and life loves him. 

It’s a tangible thing, this connection of the dead to the living.  You don’t have to look far for it.  It’s our jobs to carry on and be the living reflections of those who’ve passed.  My counselor said, “Your dad lives because of you, because of your son.”  At first I thought, oh no.  I laughed at that.  It sounds so cliché.  I promise you it’s not.  When you lose your parents, and you will someday, it’s a very comforting thought that the best of them will forever be housed in you, in your children.  Yes, I know I’ll see my dad again someday.  Right now I'm satisfied with knowing that my family tree is strong and the roots that I am now standing on will last as long as skies, and eyes, are blue.

We drive out of the cemetery and back into the world of the living.  I remember that waiting for me at home is a dark-haired, blue-eyed reminder that there is so much more life to live.  He’ll meet me over at my mom’s house later today and he will burst through the door and run into my arms, “So happy see you, mama,” he’ll say.  I’ll kiss him a million times.  There is so much purpose and reason for my being alive. For generations to come my life will amount to something, and go on and on.  Driving away from a cemetery you realize that, in the simplest terms, life is a gift.  My dad’s life was a gift to me and mine to him.  I miss him now and I always will. 

I love you dad.