Clayton's Bully

 A few years ago, whenever we would read a book in which some kid was getting picked on, Clayton would stop the story to say proudly, “There are no bullies at my school.” Despite the “friend” who stomped on his beloved Calico Critters during an ill-advised playdate, Clayton’s elementary school experience has been remarkably conflict-free.

Until now.

Last week, Clayton came in from playing outside in tears. A neighborhood kid— a first grader— had called him names and hit him with a stick, trying to provoke him into a fight. When Clayton tried to go inside, the kid began harassing our dogs through the fence.

“He made Socă growl,” Clayton told me through his tears.

I was shocked. Socă is part basenji, a barkless breed of dog, and has probably barked fewer than a dozen times in his twelve-year-old life. If this kid had made Socă growl, he must really have been messing with him.

Clayton, too, I had never seen so mad.

“I just wanted to hit him!” he said, sobbing. “Why was he being so mean?”

I had no idea. Why would a first grader be picking on Clayton? I went over to the neighbor’s house to find out. As his father and I talked to him, the kid said nothing. He just stood there, staring at me with enormous brown eyes.

“Did Clayton do something to you?” I asked him.

He shook his head wordlessly. I couldn’t believe that it was this cute little boy that had made Clayton cry.

“This is Clayton’s mom,” the dad said to him. “And next time she’s going to call the police and they’re going to take you to jail and I’m not going to get you out.”

Two days later, the kid struck again, this time on the bus. Now Clayton was a “cry-baby” for telling me what had happened. He hit Clayton repeatedly on the head, again trying to provoke him into a fight.

This time, I called the school. I talked with the school counselor, who sighed when I said the kid’s name. She said he was lucky he hadn’t picked on someone less gentle than Clayton. The kid got an assigned seat on the bus, and for a few days, there were no further incidents. Cautiously, Clayton went back to playing outside, but I noticed that he mostly stuck to the backyard, avoiding the street and the creek. When the kid was out on his bicycle, Clayton ducked behind a tree or came inside.

The peace was short-lived. Two days later, Clayton was playing outside when the bully approached and began to insult him.

The bully: “You have ugly shoes.”

Clayton: “You have an ugly face.”

The bully: “Why don’t you want to fight?”

Clayton: “Because it’s violent.”
The bully: “What’s ‘violent’?”

Finally, the kid— unable to define violence but with a clear understanding of the concept— pushed Clayton. Clayton pushed him back, and the boy fell off his bike and onto the pavement. When Clayton went up the driveway, trying to get away from him, the kid picked up a loose piece of cement and threw it at him.

Recounting the fight, Clayton was beside himself with fury.

“Shouldn’t we call 911?” he asked desperately.

I shook my head, trying to hide a smile.

If not not the police, what about the school? Clayton longed for the involvement of some higher authority, someone who could mete out the retribution this kid deserved. He was guilty of trespassing, damaging property, assault. How could he just get away with it all?

But worse even then his rage was the awful self-hatred it opened up in him.

“I hate myself!” he kept saying all afternoon, breaking down in tears again and again.

“But why?” I asked, trying to console him. “You’re amazing.”

But Clayton had understood something about the kid, perhaps something about the very nature of violence.

“He wouldn’t do this to me if I was different,” he said. “He wouldn’t do it if I were more like Alex, or more like Jose.”

I couldn’t deny it, and yet it broke my heart. Not only had my gentle, kind-hearted son been singled out and picked on, but he had been made to despise the very things about himself that I loved so much. And no matter how much I affirmed to Clayton that he was the better person for having those qualities, it didn’t change the truth the way he saw it: that this kid had sensed in Clayton an easy target and nothing Clayton did or said would change that.

The only silver lining was that Clayton’s friends at school had rallied around him. Whoever fights with Clayton fights with us, they’d said. Clayton had told them how the kid had threatened him: “I’m going to hit you with this stick!”

“So then you say, “I’m going to hit you with this hand,” his friend had instructed. Clayton broke into a grin, remembering. “But it’s always easier to think of what to say afterwards.”

That evening, Don went over to the kids’ house to talk to his father again, the piece of cement the kid had thrown stuffed in his jacket pocket.

The father just shook his head in exasperation. “I don’t know what to do with him,” he said. He repeated the empty threat about the police, except now the police were already at our house, waiting to take the kid to jail.

“What he really needs,” the dad said to Don, “is to get punched in the face.”

That night, Don taught Clayton how to punch. How to make a fist. How to aim for his nose. How to use his body to put force behind the blow.

“The next time he says something to you,” he told Clayton, “you punch him in the face. That’s all it’s going to take.”

Clayton glanced at me, his eyes wide. Really? I understood his disbelief. It was hard to imagine him punching anyone— except for maybe his sister. And in the face?

“What about the stomach?” I suggested, imagining a broken nose and blood.

“The face,” Don insisted. “This needs to stop.” He drew the kid’s face on his palm, and Clayton practiced slugging it until his fists were sore.

The crazy thing is that so many people— men at least— seem to have a story like this. My brother does. So does my father and my husband. It’s as if, in the world of the street and the playground, all the axioms we’ve taught our kids since toddlerhood— use your words, don’t hit, control your body— go out the window. Instead of conflict resolution techniques, we’re practicing punches in the living room.

I watch as something seems to harden in Clayton. He goes to school the next morning pumped on adrenalin, ready for the fight that will— supposedly— end all fights. He seems suddenly older, less of a little boy.

Is this the making of manhood? The rites of passage that turn our sweet little boys into, if not men exactly, something much closer? My feelings about it are a jumble of contradictions. Is a punch to the face really the answer? I’d like to say no. I’d rather be scheduling a joint session with the school counselor, a visit to the “conflict corner.” But neither do I want my son cowed into hiding behind trees, too scared to defend himself. There is a fine line between non-violence and spinelessness.

It has rained all week, so no one is playing outside. Clayton is disappointed; he is ready to get it over with, and so am I. I am hesitant to leave Clayton alone at the house when I take Dee Dee to her guitar lesson, worried that I won’t be here when it all goes down.

“Don’t worry, Momma,” Clayton tells me. “I’ll be fine.”

“But you’ll probably be upset,” I say.

He nods, matter-of-fact. “Yeah. But I'll just wait to cry until I come inside.” 

The Game of Life

 

On Friday afternoon, we went to a brewery for what passes, in the social studies department of Enka High, for a baby shower. I drank one beer on an empty stomach and knew I wouldn’t be driving home.

“Your mom’s drunk,” Don told the kids.

“Really, Momma?” they asked curiously. “On one beer? Daddy usually drinks more than that!”

At home, I throw together an impromptu dinner, marveling at how much less of a chore cooking feels when I’m wasted.

Meanwhile, Don’s setting out the new Life board for game night. There are only four little cars, so Don and I are a team. We lose our first job for bringing our cat to work, and our second for snoozing on the first day. We end up as dancers, making 60K every pay day.

The new Life— updated, I presume, for the 21st century— is just as woefully unrealistic as the one I remember from childhood. Dee Dee goes on a trip to Paris and gets fifty thousand from the bank. Seriously? In what alternate universe do you earn money on a vacation in Paris?

Then Sylvia writes a book for forty thousand, and I don’t even try to bite my tongue.

“More like pay forty thousand,” I grumble, thinking of the money I spent this week on advanced review copies of my book, the forty bucks I doled out for an ad-free website, the conference fee I’ll pay if I’m accepted to speak at a booksellers’ conference in the spring. Whoever wrote this game was clearly thinking of Ann Patchett and Barbara Kingsolver, not the likes of me.

I lean my head against the back of the couch and drink water while Don runs the game. He’s counting out a hundred and forty thousand dollars in twenties (and cursing) when Dee Dee ducks under our legs and comes up with the missing stack of 100 K bills and a lost cat toy, both furry with dog hair.

“That’s more like it!” Banker Don is suddenly in a much better mood, and so is the cat.

Before I know it, we are all getting married.

“But you and Daddy already are married,” Sylvia points out. (Yes, but we didn’t make 150 K at our first wedding.)

“I think I’ll be gay,” Dee Dee says cheerfully, picking out another pink peg to join her in her car. At least some things have changed since I last played this game.

“Who do you want to marry, a boy or a girl?” Don asks Clayton. Take that, heteronormativity. Now all they need to do is come up with genderfluid pegs.

An expensive sound system and a thirty thousand dollar swimming pool later, we get to choose whether to have kids. I am still tipsy and shake my head.

“No kids. Not this time. I want to be able to run without peeing my pants.”

“Is that the only thing you don’t like about having kids?” Dee Dee asks me.

“Pretty much,” I say. (That, and matching all the pairs of white socks in the laundry.)

A few minutes later and Sylvia, who is already the mother of a charming pink peg, is having twins. Like Chrissy Teigen, she gets to choose the gender of her offspring.

“I want two girls,” she says.

“Okay,” Don says, handing over the kids, “but that’s a lot of girls.”

“I have one boy,” she protests, pointing at the sole blue peg in her car.

“That’s not a boy!” Clayton points out. “That’s your husband!”

And so it goes. I get the farmhouse I’ve always dreamed of, and an eco house to boot. As we near the end of the game, Clayton starts to panic because he hasn’t bought a house yet, and all the house-buying squares are behind him. Then Don and I get to chose if we’ll sell one of ours.

“Here,” I say to Clayton. “You can buy this one.” I hand him the farmhouse. After all, it’s a lot to keep up with now that we’re old.

Don protests; that is not how the game goes! But— just like in real life— I can’t stand to see my children sad.

“We’re selling it,” I argue. “So why can’t he buy it?”

At last, Don relents and Clayton moves his family in.

“Now I’m the only one without a house!” Sylvia cries. This game is feeling more realistic by the minute. What if Sylvia doesn’t have a place to live? Will she move back in with us? What if . . . ?

My existential anxiety is finally quelled when Dee Dee, compassionate sister that she is, sells one of her houses to Sylvia. Sylvia hardly needs it, however, because on her next turn she reaches the end of the board and gets to retire at Countryside Acres. Even when she cashes in her assets at the end of the game, she refuses to sell her house.

It is the best game night ever. Despite all odds, Don and I keep our jobs as dancers until retirement, and everyone ends up a multimillionaire. My favorite part is when Don asks Alexa to play disco music so that Clayton can show off the dance moves that won him fifty thousand dollars at the disco contest. Soon we are all dancing around the living room. I’m getting down with the broom that I’m using to sweep up all the debris from the drunkenly prepared dinner.

“Look at Momma!” Clayton says. “She’s dancing!” 

What's Wrong?

 “You think I’m too messy, but you don’t think Clayton is too neat!” Dee Dee wails.

This outburst comes at the end of a recurring fight, in which Clayton is infuriated by Dee Dee’s mess and Dee Dee, in turn, is enraged by Clayton lobbing her toys into her room and bossing her to tidy up. Their father, annoyed by their constant bickering, tells Clayton flatly that he is “too neat” and Dee Dee that she is “too messy,” and charges them with finding a way to live together.

Clayton immediately seeks me out in the kitchen.

“I don’t think it’s possible to be too neat. Is it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.” I think of my Italian roommate, Fabiana, who regularly cleaned the inside of the kitchen drain with a toothbrush and asked me to go outside to brush my hair, lest any fallen strands contaminate the bedroom.

“But am I too neat?” Clayton persists.

The diplomatic answer would be no answer, or a noncommittal shrug. After all, Don and I are supposed to be a united front. But I can’t help valuing Clayton’s sense of order and our shared appreciation of a tidy house.

“Am I?”

I shake my head wordlessly, not realizing that Dee Dee is watching me like a hawk. She buries her face in her hands.

“You don’t think Clayton is too neat, but you think I’m too messy,” she cries through her fingers.

“I never said that!” I backpedal desperately. “You’re just different! I love how creative you are, all the crafts you—”

“But you still think I’m too messy!”

I remember when the kids were very little, and I’d be pushing the twins in the double stroller with two-year-old Clayton on my back. The diaper bag would be packed as if for an apocalypse, my shirt stained with breastmilk, my shoulders knotted as tree branches under the perpetual pressure of the Ergo straps. Seeing me, moms with older kids would nod sympathetically.

“Don't worry, it gets easier—” they would begin, before shaking their heads and giving an apologetic shrug. “Actually, I'm not sure if it does.”

I would smile and nod amiably, but secretly, I wondered. How could it not get easier? Maybe they just felt guilty that they were out of the trenches, while I was still clambering over barbed wire and dodging mines in No Man’s Land. Or maybe mothering young children is a bit like childbirth; we know that it is laborious and painful without being able to remember, precisely, what that pain and labor felt like.

Now that my kids are older, I can almost understand what those moms meant. I would never dare say that to a new mom, though, as there are certain things— certain important things— that do get a great deal easier. After all, you do eventually sleep through the night (barring a senile dog who scratches at the bedroom door, not remembering that he just went out an hour ago). Meals never cease to be a daily chore, but at least now putting food on the table is the extent of your responsibility; you are no longer charged with both putting it on the table and spackling it between your offspring’s toothless gums.

But while the physical labor of childrearing has undeniably lessened, I am finding it harder and harder these days to navigate the emotional map of living with three emotionally complex youngsters. If it’s not “You think I’m too messy,” it’s tears because “You’re mad at me,” or a gloomy moodiness that has no discernable cause at all.

Because, let’s face it, humans are complicated, emotional creatures. With five of these creatures living in the same shared space, our moods and emotions are bound to bump up against each other. They are also hopelessly intertwined.

After one lengthy conversation about why Clayton can’t be as nice to Dee Dee as he is to Sylvia, he confesses, “I love Dee Dee, but I just worry that she’s better than me.” There is no amount of heart-to-heart discussions about multiple intelligences and different individual strengths that can quell this fear, that can rip out this awful, gnarled nugget of “I cannot measure up.” I know, because I’ve been chipping away at mine for decades, and I can still feel it in there if I press hard enough.

Nor can I take from Dee Dee the persistent longing that seems lodged in her soul. Dee Dee just yearns. She yearns for understanding and praise and compassion. She yearns for a best friend, a cat, a place of her own. Mostly, she yearns to escape the limitations of her eight-year-old self. She wants her crafts to turn out exactly as they look in her mind’s eye. She wants to stop wallowing in the uncertainty of her future and just be a teacher already, a baker, a chemist, a writer. She wants to have done with the murkiness of childhood and get started on her life’s work. And because she can’t, because she’s stuck, for now, in the life of a child, she gets started on the next best thing, which inevitably involves a hot glue gun, some clothespins, and a little mess.

Sylvia has always been my laid-back child, my go-with-the-flow, happy-go-lucky girl. But I am slowly learning that beneath this easy-going surface, she has her own emotional depths and potholes, and they are all the more surprising because I stumble into them unexpectedly. With Dee Dee, a harsh word will bring an immediate torrent of tears, as if a floodgate has been opened for the sole purpose of letting you know just how miserable she is. (If she is sent to her room, she simply ups the volume on her sobs, lest you forget that she is wounded and misunderstood.) Sylvia, on the other hand, licks her wounds in private. I will find her in her bed after a quiet half hour, dismayed to find that she has been crying all that time because she thought I was mad about a less-than-perfect grade on a progress report, or some slight reprimand that she took unexpectedly to heart.

My father once said— of being chair of the engineering department— that he spent most of his days “putting out fires.” I find that that it is a good metaphor for motherhood, too. Between the rinsing out of lunch boxes and the matching of dozens of little white socks, I am often caught up in a whirlwind of consoling, encouraging, mediating, and sympathizing. Sometimes I find myself thinking longingly of the time when my children's grief was less complicated and could be assuaged with a handful of baby cheese puffs, a quick nurse, or a few refrains of "Twinkle Twinkle."

And while I find the old adage mostly true, that a mother can never be happy if her children are sad, it seems that, in my home at least, the inverse is equally true. If I slump in my chair with an exhausted sigh, or groan out loud about some frustration— the plumber still hasn’t called me back, or the washing machine is leaking again— my children immediately want to know what's wrong. Clayton, especially, constantly monitors my moods.

"Momma, are you happy?" he will ask, mostly when he suspects I'm not.

And even if I'm grumpy or tired or annoyed with the plumber, I always nod and tell him that I am. And it's true. Because I find that happiness is like the overstuffed diaper bag of old. All the frustrations and discontent and melancholy and regret can somehow be crammed inside that big, old bag of happy.

"Yes, I'm happy," I assure him. "Are you?"

Dee Dee's Thinking Place

 

“When are you going to write a blog about me?” Dee Dee asked me the other day.

“I’ve written blogs about you,” I said defensively. But, really, when was the last time I wrote about Dee Dee? When she was younger, the same antics that made her such a handful— spackling the furniture with her poop, dashing through parking lots at top speed—also made for good stories. Now that Dee Dee has grown into herself, she is much harder to put into words.

“It seems like Dee Dee has the role of the troublemaker in your family,” a family friend observed to me recently, having just been regaled by Sylvia with the “poop as spackle” story. “Is that true?”

I nodded reflexively, and felt a momentary satisfaction at having it laid out so neatly. Dee Dee was a troublemaker. But was it true? Certainly the old stories and photographs back it up: Dee Dee stealing Elmo from a tearful Sylvia, Dee Dee upending a pound bag of shredded cheese onto the kitchen table and eating it by the fistful, Dee Dee emptying entire shelves of books onto the floor at the library.

Now, it’s not exactly trouble that Dee Dee makes. Clayton would say it’s messes. The remnants of Dee Dee’s projects are forever sullying the house. Last Friday, when she stayed home sick from school and was losing her mind with boredom, she ventured outside with a ziploc bag on which she had printed “Signs of Fall” in neat letters. (Two previous attempts lay on the counter: “Sings of Fall” and “Signns of Fall.”) When she came back ten minutes later, she had collected an autumn leaf, a strip of bark, a piece of charcoaled wood from the firepit, and a shred of styrofoam she had pulled off a pool noodle destined for the attic until next June.

It was a good, wholesome idea: creative, outdoorsy, self-initiated. But it’s things like that that drive Clayton a little crazy. In her brother’s world, every item should have its place, and where exactly is the spot for a thing like that? In Dee Dee’s world, it doesn’t matter. Having executed her idea, she’s done with it. She’s already on to the next thing, and she certainly doesn’t want to hear about the permanent marker she left out on the counter or the fact that her “Signs of Fall” are now cluttering up the coffee table.

If there’s any one word that describes Dee Dee, it’s busy. She is always up to something: making shrines for the pets who have passed away, throwing butter-making parties for her stuffed animals, dressing up Alexa for Halloween, mixing up “science experiments” in mason jars. While Sylvia searches the internet for videos of girls taking care of their dolls, Dee Dee looks for craft ideas and science projects.

Last night, inspired by something she saw on “5-minute Craft Ideas,” she mixed up yet another concoction in a glass jar: water, blue food coloring, and glitter glue. The effect was striking; ribbons of silver glitter swirled in the turquoise water.

“I think I’ll take this to show my teacher tomorrow,” Dee Dee said proudly, holding the jar up to the light.

“Hey, can I see that?” Sylvia asked her, already reaching for it.

Maybe Sylvia’s hands were still slippery from the bath; maybe the hand-off was not what it should have been. But Sylvia’s words still hung in the air as the jar crashed to the floor and shattered across the dining room. Glittery blue water streamed across the tiles.

My eyes shot to Dee Dee’s face. Would she be crushed, her precious craft destroyed so soon? But Dee Dee looked almost relieved; for once, the mess wasn’t entirely her fault. She tiptoed around the shards of glass to rummage in the craft supplies. Was there any more glitter glue? She would just make another one tomorrow.

That’s the other thing about Dee Dee. She lives in the present. Clayton and I shake our heads, for as much as she loves books, she never seems to finish one. Everytime I look, she has a different book in hand.

“What about The Cats of Tanglewood Forest?” I ask her. “Did you finish that one?”

“No,” she says, turning the page in Wings of Fire. “I’m just reading this now.”

Again, Clayton can’t stand it. “You have to finish it, Dee Dee!” he bosses her. In his mind, the dozens of books she hasn’t finished are just another form of Dee Dee’s general clutter.

“This is just the way I read,” Dee Dee answers defiantly. She doesn’t put Wings of Fire down and reach for another book just to annoy him, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it had crossed her mind.

Dee Dee is complicated. She can be moody and emotional, bursting into tears at the smallest reprimand or burying herself with cushions on the couch, her mouth a perfect frown.

“What’s wrong, Deeds?” I ask her, trying to conceal my exasperation.

“I don’t know!” she wails.

This is frustrating for both of us. In Dee Dee’s opinion, she is entitled to her moods. After all, she can’t help how she feels. But having her mope around the house like a preteen is unsettling for everyone. I can certainly recall my own moody spells at that age, but I remember them being more private than hers— moping in my own room or the backyard, for example, not the living room. I’ve considered asking Dee Dee to go to her room if she’s going to be sullen, but it doesn’t feel like a very kind option. Ever since Sylvia’s baby dolls moved into their room, Dee Dee really doesn’t like going in there alone.

At bedtime, Dee Dee is often troubled by the many thoughts swirling in her head. I put my lips against her temples and her forehead and pretend to suck them out so she can sleep. Immediately, her face relaxes.

“You’re the best mother in the world,” she says.

I remember when Clayton was a baby, and I was not yet pregnant with the girls. A friend with a young daughter came to visit, and at one point we were all in a public restroom, each in our own stall.

“Mommy?” I heard the little girl say. I waited for what was coming. Did she need help? Did she need toilet paper?

“Yes, sweetheart?” her mother answered.

“I love you.”

Oh, I thought, so that’s what it’s like to have a daughter.

But not just any daughter. Sylvia, although loving in her own way, does not gush. Dee Dee gushes. “I love you,” she tells me easily a dozen times a day. At one point, she was saying it so much, we agreed on a code word, so she could express the feeling without wearing out the words.

Now when we go for walks, she grabs my hand. “Tomato,” she says urgently.

“Tomato,” I tell her.

Of all my children, Dee Dee reminds me the most of my own childhood self. Although not horse-crazy like I was, she loves animals with a fierce passion; when we are away from home, even if only for a weekend, she misses the pets desperately. She also yearns, like I did, for a special place of her own. Yesterday, while Clayton and Sylvia did their math homework, Dee Dee— whose blessed teacher does not believe in homework—carefully made a sign: “Dee Dee’s Secret Thinking Place.”

“It’s not going to be very secret if it has a sign,” Clayton pointed out, reading over her shoulder.

Dee Dee huffed in exasperation, but quietly redid the sign: “Dee Dee’s Thinking Place.”

Later, as we walked the dogs, Dee Dee asked me casually, “Do you think we could ever build a little house?”

“How big a little house?” I asked, imagining the fairy houses we used to make from sticks in the woods behind the house.

But that was not what Dee Dee had in mind. “Oh, about this big,” she said, and she held one hand over her head and stretched the other in front of her. “Somewhere where I could have a little shelf for my books, and a chair, and maybe a little desk?”

We will never build a little house, I thought sadly. But then, suddenly, I was inspired. Last weekend, I emptied out the closet downstairs so that I could pull up the carpet in the office. Underneath the stairs and still mostly empty, it is the perfect thinking place. It even has a little shelf for her books. I told Dee Dee she could use it, if she wanted.

Her face lit up. “And it will really be mine?” she asked pleadingly.

I hesitated. The house doesn’t have enough closets for all three of my children. But Clayton has his own room, and Sylvia—well, Sylvia just doesn’t yearn for that sort of thing.

“Yes,” I said. “It can be yours. I’ll help you get it set up this weekend.”

“Oh, Momma, really?” she said. “Thank you so much!”

I often think that I would give the world for my children, but in that moment, it was like I really had. 

Labors of Love

 

Two months ago, one of my best friends asked if we could meet her family over Labor Day weekend at a campground near the Grayson Highlands in western Virginia. At the time, it had seemed like a great idea: quality time with dear friends in a gorgeous area we’d been to only once before. But I had not reckoned on the exhaustion we would all feel after the first week back at school, especially a week in which the usual beginning-of-the-year chaos was compounded by a dead refrigerator, a new kitten, and three trips to the orthodontist for a palatal expander that “just collapsed” in Dee Dee’s mouth three hours after being installed.

By Thursday (day six without a fridge), the thought of packing up all the gear and taking the kids camping by myself—Don would stay home to receive the new refrigerator and take care of the kitten—was more than a little daunting.

I hated to disappoint the kids, though, so I broached the idea with them, inwardly hoping that they, too, might be longing for a relaxing, three-day weekend at home. But what child ever, when asked, “Do you want to go camping?” hasn’t answered with a resounding yes? Certainly not mine. Only Sylvia seemed hesitant, her forehead knit with worry.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “You don’t want to go?”

But her reluctance was the same as mine.

“I want to go,” she said adamantly. “It’s just it’s so much work to get packed.”

“I’ll pack your clothes,” I reassured her, thinking that was what she meant.

“No,” she said, sighing. “It’s my babies. I have to pack for them.”

For the past few months, almost all of Sylvia’s free time has been taken up with baby care. Even out of earshot, I would not presume to call her careful routines of feeding and diapering “playing with dolls.” Taking care of her babies is serious business. For one, both Rebecca and Sparkle drink actual liquid. (Rebecca pees hers out as one would expect; Sparkle’s excretory system is limited to crying and the occasional upchuck.) Although both dolls are supposed to consume only water, Sylvia is constantly mixing up colorful concoctions for them to drink; Rebecca’s tiny diapers—which our dog, Soča, likes to tear to shreds and strew around the house—are disturbing shades of blue and red.

Like any new mom, Sylvia scours the internet for tips. From one youtube video, she learned that she could make “juice” by scribbling with marker on a paper towel and then dunking it in her baby’s bottle. For our camping trip, she calculates that she will need supplies for seven feedings; she packs two markers (tropical pineapple and orange) and seven small pieces of paper towels. Unfortunately she has run out of diapers; the babies will just have to pee in the woods like everybody else.

There was a time in my life that I would have ranked camping as the epitome of pleasure, a time when, given the opportunity, I would have opted for a sleeping bag on the ground over a bed between four walls every time. What happened? I have lived in North Carolina for fifteen years now, and for most of that time, I have blamed the climate and the terrain. Here there are no dry nights under canopies of brilliant stars. Here there are dripping trees and deluges that swamp your tent, and the stars, if they are out at all, are barely visible beyond the foliage.

This weekend, it occurred to me that it is not only the weather that makes the camping experience feel so different now. Yes, all the dampness gets to me, every surface spongy and moist and moss-covered. But the real difference is bigger than that: like Sylvia, now I have children to pack for and take care of.

One of the reasons camping used to feel so delightful was that it was so uncomplicated; everything I needed could be crammed into a fifty-pound pack on my back. Back then, camping was pure recreation. Now, going camping feels a little like being transported back in time. At home, the kids mostly take care of themselves. Using the bathroom, getting dressed, even having a bowl of cereal—all of these things have long since ceased to necessitate a parent’s involvement. But when we are camping, it’s “I need to pee!”, “Where are my clothes?” and “Where do I spit my toothpaste?” Suddenly my children’s most basic needs are my responsibility again.

Clayton and Dee Dee can’t understand Sylvia’s new preoccupation with taking care of her babies.

“It just doesn’t seem like fun,” Clayton complains, missing the days when Sylvia played Calico Critters with him or jumped on the trampoline. Even Sylvia gets worn down with the demanding regime of meal times and potty needs. Sometimes she puts her babies to bed early just so she can get a break.

“Do babies sometimes go to bed at six?” she asks me hopefully.

“Oh, yes,” I tell her. “Definitely.”

And yet, despite how exhausting their care can be for her, she keeps at it. She even decided not to do ballet this fall so she would have more time in the afternoon to take care of her babies. Clearly, all the work is meaningful for her, or these babies would be stowed away in the toy chest like so many other toys.

Sylvia used to say she wanted twelve children, but I think she’s changing her mind.

“I don’t know how you did it with three kids,” she tells me seriously as I kiss her good-night. “Even two babies is a lot of work.”

What Sylvia seems to understand—and what camping last weekend reminded me—is that the work is its own reward, each act of care really an act of love. Sylvia mixes glue, white paint and water to make “yogurt” for her babies, spends her allowance on outrageously-priced diapers, and changes her dolls into their pajamas religiously each evening. My own days of diapering and feeding behind me, I drive my kids to the orthodontist, consent to adopting a kitten, and spend my Saturday morning packing the car with sleeping bags and camping supplies. The tasks are different, it is true, but the love behind them is the same.

At one in the morning during our first night camping, Dee Dee wakes me with her flashflight.

“Momma? I need to pee.”’

We stagger out of the tent onto the moist ground, and I help her pull off her pajama bottoms. As soon as we are back inside, Sylvia needs to go, too. When we are all finally settled in our sleeping bags, I’m feeling the same satisfaction I used to feel when the kids were small: dry bottoms, check; everyone in bed, check. But now Sylvia can’t sleep; I can hear her muffled crying through my ear plugs.

“It’s too dark,” she says tearfully. Her flashflight turns itself off automatically, so she has to keep pushing the button every few minutes to ward off the dark. I turn on my headlamp and hang it in the overhead pocket of the tent. I stroke her hair, find Rebecca in the sea of sleeping bags, and lie that it will be morning soon.

It isn’t. I sleep fitfully for the next few hours, and make several more trips outside the tent alone, my middle-aged bladder one more reason sleeping outside isn’t quite as much fun as it used to be. Finally, Clayton wakes up for his own potty break.

“It’s okay, Mom,” he tells me bravely. “You don’t need to come with me.” He is empathy incarnated.

I unzip the tent for him and hold the flashlight; he does his business and then reappears just beyond the screen.

“Actually, I need to poop,” he says apologetically. “But I can go by myself.”

“Oh, no. I’m coming with you.”

On our last camping trip, Clayton had ventured to the bathroom by himself during a rainstorm in the wee hours of the morning. Not wanting to flush the toilet while he was alone because of the scary sound it made, he had waited in the stall for some time until another grown-up happened to come in. Having heard that story, there is no way I’m letting him go by himself this time.

I feel around in the tent for my pants and headlamp. Dee Dee stirs, sees us leaving, and hurries after us, stumbling over Sylvia in her sleeping bag.

“Come on, Syl,” I say. “We’re going to the bathroom. I guess you’d better come, too.”

We walk down the narrow road toward the bathroom. The kids are chatty and cheerful, as if pleased to have survived the night, and I begin to suspect that, despite the dark, morning is not far off. Above us, the trees are black silhouettes against a star-splattered sky.

“It’s so beautiful,” Dee Dee says, awed, and for a moment we all walk with our heads tilted backwards. Clayton and Dee Dee hold my hands; Sylvia holds her baby against her chest. For once I’m not comparing these little splotches of stars to the wide openness of skies out west. I am just grateful to be sharing this moment with my children, walking hand in hand on a rainless September night.

When we arrive at the bathroom, Sylvia hands me Rebecca.

“Do you mind taking care of her for a minute?” she asks.

“Not at all,” I tell her. “I’d love to.

Still a Yittle Boy

“Will I have to get rid of my stuffed animals soon?” Clayton asks as I lean over him at bedtime.

Under the covers, his animals create a topography of hills and valleys; brown glass eyes peer up at me. Two years ago, Clayton slept in a narrow strip of bed, perilously close to the edge, until Don and I installed a “stuffed animal shelf” above his bed. Now it only the beloved bear squad that gets to sleep in bed every night, with the half a dozen others that get rotated in. Sometimes, however, the animals on the shelf take matters into their own paws and dive onto the bed even when it’s not their turn. They like it better, Clayton says.

We are at the cusp of something. In bed, Clayton’s body is impossibly long; his feet are as big as mine. And yet I am reminded of when Clayton was two and well-meaning friends would look at him and say, “You’re such a big boy now, Clayton!”

“No, I’m yittle!” he would protest. “I’m a yittle boy!”

When I dropped off a book at the library the other day, a poster caught my eye: “Stuffed Animal Sleepover at the Library.”  Cool, I thought, immediately hooked. I bet my kids would love to sleep over at the library with a stuffed animal.

But I was wrong. The event was exactly what was advertised: the sleepover was for stuffed animals alone. Also, it was over; pictures of stuffed animals reading books and playing hide-and-go-seek were in a binder by the check-out.

That night, when I told Clayton about it, his eyes grew bright. I watched as he surveyed his host of stuffed animals. Who would like a library sleepover the most?

“We’ll do it next year,” I told him.

But as I kissed him good-night, my heart clenched. Next year. Was it possible? Would Clayton still want to take a stuffed animal to a sleepover next year?

I recently read Wonder by R.J. Palacio. The book is touching on so many levels, but what I liked best about it was that it didn’t shy away from the details of little boyhood. The main characters are all in fifth grade. They change classes and use lockers. They have crushes and “go out” with girls. And yet, August’s mom still lies down next to him at bedtime, and when he’s upset, he covers himself in a mountain of stuffed animals and waits for her to find him.

For me, so much of the poignancy of the book comes from how fragile and fleeting that boyhood seems. In Wonder, August’s coming of age is inseparable from his transition from the protective bubble of home school to the harsher realities of middle school. One wonders, for instance, if he begins to relinquish his attachment to his favorite stuffed animal simply because he is getting older, or because, now in school, he has internalized the judgement of his peers.  

Clayton, too, is not immune to these concerns. Although he still plays with Calico Critters with enthusiasm— “I feel so happy when I play with them!” he told me last week— he will not claim them when others are around. Privately, however, he is unabashed in his loves: fairies and leprechauns, stuffed animals and Sofia the First. In our home, at least, he still gets to be a “yittle” boy.

I think of the Dar William’s song, When I Was A Boy, which resonated with me so much when I first heard it in the early nineties. The female character in the song balks at gender’s dictates and mourns her lost childhood, when she rode her bike topless and climbed anything she could. Now, it is the verse in which her male friend talks about his boyhood that brings tears to my eyes:

When I was a girl, my mom and I, we always talked

And I picked flowers everywhere that I walked

And I could always cry, now even when I'm alone I seldom do

And I have lost some kindness

But I was a girl, too.

Maybe it is the triumph of our times that skinned knees and climbing trees are no longer the markers of just boyhood. It is hard to imagine a girl today being judged harshly for playing sports or getting dirty. And yet the consequences of gender nonconformity are so much stricter for boys than for girls. Perhaps that is why the more feminine aspects of Clayton’s boyhood seem so imperiled by the passing of time. After all, Dee Dee and Sylvia will outgrow Sofia the First and Calico Critters, too. But somehow that certainty doesn’t wring my heart the way it does with Clayton.

When Don grows impatient with Clayton’s tears and sensitivity, and says he has got to toughen up, I want to take Clayton in my arms. It is far too easy to imagine a time when Clayton’s tears won’t come so easily, when his Calico Critters will move to a box in the attic, when I will no longer begin my afternoon workouts to the theme song from Sofia the First: “I was a girl in the village doing all right...”

So when Clayton asks if he’ll have to get rid of his stuffed animals soon, I am emphatic. I tell him no and never. I remind him I still have Cuddly Wuddly, that Uncle Stefan still has Mommy Monkey. But I know what he is getting at; I sense it, too. One day the dinosaur comforter that I pull around him every night will be gone, the bear squad regulated to the shelf above his bed. I can feel that time coming, and there is so little I can do.

I kiss Clayton good-night again and arrange his stuffed animals around him in the bed. This is all that I can do: cherish Clayton, treasure this time. You never know, maybe one of those bears will get to go on the stuffed animal sleepover next year. Still, when I turn off the light, my heart is so full, it hurts.