Solo

Don took all three kids to Georgia and Alabama this weekend to visit his family.  As much as I love my in-laws and enjoy watching the cousins play, I opted to stay home this time. This isn’t the first extended period I’ve had to myself; last fall I went to an out-of-town conference for a long weekend. But this is the first time in my own house and on my own time.

Friday

Oh no, they’re gone.

What if they’re crying? What if Dee Dee pees in her carseat? What if Sylvia’s too sad without her mom? What if they won’t sleep at Granny and Papa’s and are exhausted and miserable? What if the DVD player stops working and Don is miserable? What if they have an accident... No, I will not think that way.

I told myself I would not spend this precious time cleaning, but look at this house. I won’t enjoy being here unless I clean it up a little. I’ll just tidy up and sweep the floors. I might as well mop, too-- it won’t take long with no one here. And I’ll just clean the bathrooms and change my sheets and unload the dishwasher. There, done! Ugh, look at the front of the oven, all streaked with who knows what. But I will not spend any more of this precious day cleaning. If I clean the oven door, I’ll want to clean the sticky cabinet doors, and the refrigerator handle, and--I know myself-- I won’t stop.  It is after eleven already-- the time is slipping away!

I’m going for a bike ride-- a nice, long bike ride. But it’s almost lunchtime and I’m hungry. I’ll just eat those leftovers quickly and then I’ll go. But, wait, you’re bolting your lunch again! This is exactly how you’re not supposed to be eating this weekend. You’re supposed to take it slow.

But I want to go biking! Quick, eat up! You’ve got to fit in the bike ride now, because you have a massage scheduled for three. Okay, fine, quick-- eat! But next time you’ve got to eat slowly.

Why does my family being gone make me miss my mom so terribly? Mom! Mommy! I miss you.

This country is beautiful. Fields of ripening tomatoes, horses grazing, mountains. I love this, all of it: the effort, the heat, the sweat, the speed, the views, the freedom. I feel strong-- I could bike like this forever. Mommy, I miss you.

Home again. Shower. Snack. Sheets off the line, onto the bed. Better head downtown for that massage. Ahhhhh. Time’s up already? My legs are tired and I’m hungry. Ice-cream! I just took so long deciding on a flavor that the server sat down to wait. Oh, the luxury of time.

Mmmm. Mint goat milk ice-cream. Savor it.

Now, to write...

Time to go again. Friends, dinner, wine, music. If only I could sing like that.

Home at last. How clean the house looks. How empty.  Feed the hungry dogs, lock up, read one page of The New Yorker. Whew. So much today. Tomorrow I will slow down, I promise.

Saturday

Today I:

* emailed my Italian friends that I have not heard from in years.

* signed up on twitter. Why? I thought I might read the news headlines and educational articles, but I’m surely kidding myself.

* ordered a book of Italian short stories with parallel texts, ostensibly to brush up on my Italian, but really because I’m secretly plotting next year’s solo getaway.

* used up all the eggs to make ginger ice-cream.

* wrote. Two days in a row. Halleluiah.

* ran to a our friends’ yard sale. They’re moving to Pennsylvania, where teachers actually make a living wage. Scored, among other things, a pair of little girl’s sneakers, some pirate action figures for Clayton, and a Dora doll the girls will certainly fight over, but I couldn’t resist.

* ate lunch: cheese toast with garden tomatoes and Greek yogurt with blueberries and cardamom. That’s better-- slow. Still found myself getting up multiple times during the meal. It’s a hard habit to break, it seems.

* finally got started on Rebecca for book group. Not too gripping yet, but at least I’ve made it past the first five pages.

* went to the grocery store and talked to my mom on the phone for a few moments in the cereal aisle before the connection was lost. Mommy! I miss you! It’s so easy shopping without three kids in tow, but I do find myself missing the free popcorn.

* unloaded the groceries and made curry. I honestly don’t think I’ve made this dish since Clayton was born. Oh, how subtly they change our lives.

* went for another run. This morning’s twenty minute jog to the yard sale just didn’t feel like enough. Some friends are coming over in less than an hour, but the house is, miraculously, still clean.

* had a marvelous evening with friends. Love, words, tears, inspiration, connection. Just what I needed.

* couldn’t sleep. Too much sugar right before bed, or maybe too much love. Kept thinking about my dear, dear friends and all the resolutions for the new school year that I made tonight.

Sunday

I had plans of going hiking today, or driving up to Graveyard Fields to see if the wild blueberries are ripe, but somehow I couldn’t leave this quiet house. I ate a luxurious breakfast of melted brie on toast with homemade blackberry jam, and nobody asked me for a bite. Even the dogs were still asleep. Then I sat on the porch and wrote a long overdue letter to Chiara, my Italian roommate, and finally got going on Rebecca. Reading novels like that makes me feel sixteen again, when I devoured Jane Austen because I was too proud and too embarrassed to be seen reading Harlequins.  

Around ten o’clock, I thought, I could still go somewhere. Mountain biking, or on a solo hike. Don and the kids wouldn’t be home until close to five. But I drive so much and am home alone so little. Instead I caulked around the bathroom tub and the kitchen sink, and got to cross both off my summer list. Even better, I don’t have to spend the next nine months feeling grossed out by the old, mildewed caulk and wondering when in the hell I’ll get around to redoing it, or how I’ll ever manage, under normal circumstances, not to use the sink while the caulk dries. As soon as I finished, I threw away the summer list, and started a new one.

Leftover coconut milk curry for lunch with green beans from the garden. I admit I appreciate my solitude the most when it’s meal time. One plate to put in the dishwasher, perhaps one pot to wash (this time in the bathroom sink). I linger over every bite. It is ludicrously easy to live alone.

Today, I am feeling buoyant with the love of friends and the powerful connections I felt last night. Impulsively, I head into West Asheville on my bike, not even bothering to check the air in my tires. Today, everything feels so easy. I explore some new neighborhoods, and then find myself pedaling by the houses of two different friends. Neither one is home, but it doesn’t matter. It is like I am weaving a metaphorical web of my community on my bike. At the house of a third friend, her two beautiful children peer excitedly through the screen door. “Someone’s here!” they yell. They are getting ready for their own bike ride, so soon the house is quiet and my friend and I chat together in the living room. We are both excited for the new school year, the familiar routines and the strange new freedoms we will enjoy with kids in preschool part-time.

On my way home, I follow the river. The water is fast and high after all of the rain we’ve had this summer. I stop on a bench and eat melted trail mix while I watch the water and daydream. Peace settles over me, and I think with gladness of my family’s return.  

Home again, I pick green beans and blueberries from the garden, and then treat myself to yet another snack of crackers and goat cheese, plus a little of the ginger ice-cream we never got around to eating at dinner last night. I might have spoiled my dinner, but I treasure my last meal alone. An hour and they will be home. I sit on the porch and write.

Vacation Magic Times Two

During the second week of summer vacation, our family went camping at Lake James, about an hour east of Asheville. I had anticipated the trip with equal parts dread and optimism. True, most camping trips thus far had involved torrential rains; soggy, grumpy, overtired kids; and Herculean efforts to get said kids to sleep. To add to this less-than-hopeful precedent, the girls had just begun full time potty training, except that the “potty” part was a misnomer, since, thus far, the toilet had played such a minimal role in their elimination. I was already feeling wrung out and worn down with the relentless chores of child-rearing and housewifery. Sopping up urine with paper towels and admonishing the dogs not to eat the poop on the living room floor while I dashed for a plastic bag just added the proverbial salt.

On the other hand, I was eager for a break from the daily grind. Plus, I wanted to be optimistic. I had such fond memories of camping as a child, my sleeping bag squeezed between my brother and sister in the dome tent we shared. I allowed myself to imagine my kids nestled together in their bags, chatting and giggling, before simultaneously falling into an exhausted sleep. I pictured Don and me sipping beers and gazing into the fire, the summer night darkening around us.

It was not to be. The first evening of our trip was still and hot, the tent sweltering. Don broke a sweat just reading goodnight stories. Three hours later, as I coaxed an exhausted Sylvia to sleep in our tent, I could hear Don muttering to himself in the kids’ tent as Dee Dee and Clayton ricocheted off the walls.

“This is hell. This is absolute hell.”

In the morning, we almost threw in the towel and high-tailed it back home. But there we were. I’d spent the better part of two days sorting through the camping gear, gathering supplies, and loading the car. Don had spent more than an hour the previous afternoon hauling wagon load after wagon load down the steep trail to our campsite. True, the night had been miserable, but leaving now meant that miserable was all we’d be.

“Let’s stay,” we agreed. Maybe with a little more time, the trip could redeem itself.

Miraculously, it did. Hiking along a lakeside trail later that morning, we discovered a sandy beach in a private little cove. Watching the kids bobbing around in the dappled sunlight, with the glassy waters of the lake stretching out behind them, all my frustrations from the previous night felt inconsequential. These were the moments to remember, the idyllic scenes that create that bright tapestry of childhood. I felt overcome with gratitude that we hadn’t sprinted for home, that despite the unrelenting travails of parenting toddlers, we’d managed to stumble our way to this magic place.

Swimming with the kids in our private little cove, I dove down through the sun-warmed water to the cool beneath. The fog of sleep deprivation, the quotidian tedium of my existence, the ennui that had engulfed me for weeks, the discouraging sense that I rather disliked my grumpy, defiant children-- all seemed to dissolve in the cool, dark water against my skin. Swimming just beneath the surface, I ferried the children around on my back, one after the other. My father used to do the same for my siblings and me on our Sunday trips to the beach, and I can still remember the powerful sweep of his arms through the green water, his black hair streaming, the unfamiliar skin on his shoulders oily and slippery beneath my hands. The memory is a powerful one, singular in the  treasured physical connection between us, the way the surface of the water both separated us-- how eagerly I waited for him to emerge-- and made him wholly mine.

As I swam underwater with Dee Dee on my back, I could hear her chattering away at me from above the surface, babblative as always, even with no hope of a reply.  A surge of joy rose in me. The world felt huge and light-filled again, and my love for my children pure and immense.

Later, perched on driftwood on the sandy beach, we ate peanut butter sandwiches and apples, and the kids sucked lemonade out of their water bottles, surprised by the sweetness. In the late afternoon the storms rolled in, and we ate our pasta dinner hunched together in the sodden tent. But soon the skies cleared and a cool breeze blew off the shimmering lake. The kids took a lukewarm bath in a plastic storage container, delighting in a fixture of the daily routine made so thrillingly new. They ate half-burned marshmallows for dessert, burned leaf after leaf in the fire, made up endless stories with their stuffed animals in the tent, and eventually-- miraculously-- settled down to sleep.

That camping trip was a highlight of the first few weeks of summer. “Our best yet,” I  said to Don cheerfully as we drove home, all three kids asleep in the back of the van.  “We should do it again soon.”

* * *

A month later, our annual family vacation was fast approaching. After a long road trip to South Dakota last summer, we’d opted to stay closer to home this year. We’d visit Congaree National Park near Columbia, then do some camping in the upstate before meeting up with my my brother’s family and my parents in Tennessee for a brief rendezvous before they continued on to Indiana. A week before we were to leave, Don came into the bathroom while I was brushing my teeth. I caught his eye in the mirror.

“I have to say,” I confessed through a mouthful of toothpaste. “I’m sort of dreading our

vacation.”

It had been a tough week. Dee Dee and Sylvia had been keeping each other up reading and playing long after their bedtime. Sylvia was sleep-deprived and weepy, Dee Dee grumpy and defiant. Back in the doldrums myself, I felt exhausted, impatient, and frequently enraged. The thought of battling with Dee Dee over bedtime for four nights in a row in a ninety-five degree tent deflated me. Nor could I summon the energy to tackle all the preparation and clean-up the trip would require. When I’d asked Don to check the weather forecast, I’d realized I was secretly hoping that we’d be rained out, but the ten-day forecast predicted one scorching, sunny day after another.

“Really?” Don said. “Me, too!”

With our dual confession, a weight lifted. We scrapped our camping plans and booked a hotel in Chattanooga on Priceline. Two rooms, free breakfast, air-conditioning, a swimming pool. The kids were ecstatic when we told them. “A hotel! A hotel!”  We could be staying at the Holiday Inn a mile from our house for all they’d care. They just wanted to watch PBS Kids ad infinitum, eat forbidden Fruit Loops for breakfast, and sleep together in the king bed.

Travelling with young children is never exactly relaxing, but our trip to Chattanooga came close. All the house rules were off. One afternoon, I spent a whole hour reading on the bed while the kids watched Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood on PBS and Don napped. I didn’t cook, I hardly cleaned, the dirty laundry simply piled up in the corner by the dresser. When the kids asked me to read them a book, I never once said, “Not right now. I have to...” And how pleasant they were when they had my full attention! It felt wonderful to like my own children again.  

The magic of Chattanooga was not the magic of the lake. But there was magic nonetheless. Rock City was my favorite. I’d seen the iconic advertisements and assumed it was some sort of touristy gem mine, not a true city of stone, with intricate pathways and lush gardens. I learned that the original owners of Rock City had considered calling it Fairyland, and I could easily see why. It was easy to imagine fairies flitting around those cool, dark passageways and lush and secret places.

Watching Clayton run ahead-- “Mom! Dad! Another tunnel! Come see!”-- I saw myself as a girl, exploring gardens with my parents on family vacations, proudly watching them admire a beautiful rose bush I pointed out, or a hidden bench we found tucked away midst the trees. There is something extraordinary as a child when you realize your own enjoyment is mirrored in the grown-ups you love. How marvelous it makes everything seem, to feel your own delight thus affirmed. We used to beg Mom and Dad to ride the roller coaster with us on our annual visit to Busch Gardens. How much more fun it would be if only they would love it too!

And how fresh it all feels through the eyes of your children: this tunnel of stone their first tunnel, this swinging bridge their first swinging bridge. I loved Rock City more because my children loved it, and they loved loving it because I did.

Is this what parenthood does? Suspends our own egos, relaxes-- for a little while--the tyranny of our own desires? Traipsing single-file with thirty other weary tourists down the underground tunnel on the way to Ruby Falls, with Sylvia, asleep, like a dead weight on my back and the cheery, practiced jokes of the tour guide grating on my nerves-- even that was worth it. “Are we really underground?” Clayton kept asking. “Are there people walking around on top of us?” Even stupendous Ruby Falls, when the tunnel finally opened up and the remarkable underground waterfall was revealed, was nothing compared to Clayton’s endless excitement to be below the surface of the earth.

And so it went, vacation magic finding us everywhere: in the civil war hospital tent at the children’s museum, where Dee Dee wrapped my leg in bandages and fed me medicine from a tin cup; at Rock City, when Sylvia wriggled off my back so she, too, could walk across the swinging bridge; at the top of Lover’s Leap on Lookout Mountain, where Dee Dee exclaimed with awe, “Look how high up we are!” It found me as I ran in the cool early morning through the streets of downtown, with the river, shining in the morning sun, opening up before me. It even found me unexpectedly, late one evening and long after the children’s bedtime, as I listened over the monitor to Clayton and Dee Dee talking in the other room.

Here’s your little cat, Dee Dee!”

“Hooray!”

“Do you want to make a little house for our animals?”

“Yes! I do! I do!”

“Shh! Don’t wake Herman. He’s sleeping.”

“My cat is sleeping, too.”

Normally with children who refuse to go to sleep, my patience is paper thin, my anger quick to rise. “They were being ridiculously cute,” Don will say about some post-bedtime shenanigans, and I’ll just growl about how they should be asleep by now. But that night, Clayton’s tenderness with his sister, and her pure joy at his attention, the sweetness of the little animal beds they’d made out of paper cups and Kleenexes, and the palpability of their excitement as they played together into night... Vacation magic had found us right there in room 309 of the Chattanooga Rodeway Inn.

"I'm a little girl!"

I've realized that Dee Dee has had the spotlight in my recent blogs. This one goes out to my littlest girl, Sylvie. 

                                                                * * * 

            Like most families I know, we've been blessed with loads of wonderful hand-me-downs. Over the last two and a half years, we have worked our way through box after bag of passed along clothing and shoes. The girls’closet is full of more shoes than I have probably owned in my lifetime. Tennis shoes with pink lights that flash at ever step, purple crocs, felted Mary Janes, Berkenstock-style sandals, sports sandals, flowery sandals. They have about as many dresses, but I can count on my fingers the number of times they have actually worn any of them. On the surface of things, it has simply never been the right time. They were winter babies, wearing fleece onsie over cotton onsie day after chilly day. Then, when they were crawling, dresses seemed absurdly impractical, their chubby knees pinning the skirt to the floor, immobilizing them. As toddlers, it was no better. They'd trip over their hems, get hung up climbing into the car or stroller, splatter the front of an otherwise immaculate dress with yogurt or tomato sauce. And so, with few exceptions, their plethora of dresses has remained, neatly folded, in the bottom drawer of their dresser. 

            Until now. Now the girls insist on picking out their own clothes. I pull open their drawers for them. "OK," I tell them. "Pick a shirt.  Now pick some pants." They have never, ever, ever looked as well-dressed as so many young children do, but if Dee Dee wants to wear a pink shirt with striped orange pants, well, honestly, I couldn't care less. At least she's dressed, after all, which these days, especially, is not something to take for granted. 

            Then, a few days ago, Sylvia pulled open the bottom drawer, the one with the dresses. 

            "I want to wear this one!" she announced, holding up a pretty white sundress with different colored buttons all down the front. 

            "Okay," I said, and pulled it over her head, wondering if it would fit her. That drawer hadn't been opened in almost a year. 

            She looked down at herself, smoothing the front of the dress, touching the colorful buttons. 

            "I'm a little girl," she said in her cute little sing-song voice. "I'm a little girl." 

            It is not the first time she has said that. In fact, pretty much any time Sylvia picks out a particularly girly-looking shirt—like the one with the glittery purple tutu that says, "All girls love shoes!"—she says it. This is in contrast to most other times, when she says things like "I'm a ghost!" or "I'm Shaggy!" Almost always, these things are said with a tone of exasperated defiance, as in: 

            "Come on, Sylvia!"

            "I'm Shaggy!"

Or: 

            "Hurry up, baby girl.”

            "I'm a ghost!"

            But, "I'm a little girl" she says with a note of somewhat amazed satisfaction. It's not that I can't relate. The other night I got dolled up for the YWCA's annual fundraising Black and White Gala. In the ten minutes I had to get ready, I painted my toenails and inexpertly applied foundation and eye shadow. I honestly think I might have had both since I was a teenager, and since I so rarely wear make-up, I feel like a teenager when I'm putting them on, wondering if people will notice that I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing, like my best friend in seventh grade did.

“You didn’t put it on right,” she told me scornfully as we walked to the bus stop one day. She had a very knowledgeable older sister, so she knew about things like eye shadow. “You have to use two colors. Like this.” She pointed to her own expertly made-up eyes. That was over twenty-five years ago, but to this day I cannot wear eye shadow without feeling like a make-up wearing impostor.

I put on some lipstick, pulled on my dress and some fancy jewelry I picked up at a clothing swap, opted for the comfortable sandals instead of the heels. And even though my hair hadn't been cut in eight months and my make-up was surely wrong, when I looked in the mirror, I felt a little of the same pleasant surprise I imagine Sylvia does when she sees herself in her girly-wear. "Wow. I'm a girl!"

            I'm a girl. Having two girl toddlers, the question of what it means to be a girl is constantly swirling in the air around us. After weeks of wanting to be Daphne, Sylvia has abandoned that character in our on-going Scooby Doo role-play. Now, Sylvia is Shaggy, Dee Dee is Freddy, I'm Scooby, and Clayton is the monster. I'm constantly mixing up my pronouns when I talk to them, saying things like "Shaggy needs to hurry. She needs to get in his car seat." 

            "Why do they want to be boys?" Clayton wants to know. "They're girls!"  

            "They're just pretending," I tell him, but, like him, I wonder. When I was little, I always wanted to be a boy, too. Boys didn't have to wear dresses, or sneak shorts under the skirts they were made to wear to school. And although in elementary school, I could beat all the boys but one, I had a sense of myself as an anomaly among my female classmates. Maybe I could run fast, but most girls couldn't, or didn't care to; girlhood, in the way that I understood it then, did not merit my respect. Even as a girl myself, "being a girl" was nothing to aspire to. 

            Then there's the fact that Scooby Doo, even in its most recent incarnations, seems mired in an outdated sexism. In one especially awful episode, Freddy gets caught up in a winch. "Oh, what do I do, Freddy?" a helpless Daphne asks. Even smarty-pants Velma gives up without trying. "Mechanics aren't my forte," she confesses. The answer: go get a man, even if the only one available is hapless Shaggy. It's no wonder to me that my girls don't want to be the female characters. Even though they've only seen the show a handful of times, I'm not surprised they're not dying to be either air-headed Daphne or know-it-all Velma. 

            It wasn't until I went to college that my disparagement of girlhood began to shift, even as I became almost immediately indoctrinated that the very word girl was taboo, carrying as it did the implicit sexism of centuries of inequality. (My favorite cartoon from that era was of a proud father looking into a crib. "It's a woman!" he says. "A baby woman!") Suddenly, girl/womanhood was no longer represented by the mall-loving, boy-crazy, gossip-spreading girly-girls who cared only about how to apply eye shadow. Suddenly, being a woman meant being smart and strong and comfortable in one's skin—and one’s body hair. It meant being competitive and ambitious in the world, but affirming and supportive of one's fellow woman. Whereas until then I had felt proud to be a different from most girls, for the first time I felt proud to be one. 

            Looking back, I wonder why that shift felt so drastic. Even in high school, I had plenty of strong female role-models. My mom was brilliant and nurturing. My best friends' moms were self-sufficient and independent and successful. My older sister was smart and athletic, whose impressive feats, both academic and on the track, I struggled to keep pace with. My best friend was just like me; we recognized each other as kindred spirits during the first warm-up lap at basketball practice, so determined were we both to come in first. But somehow my conception of what it meant to be girly, i.e, a girl, did not stretch to include these people I admired. And although I was outraged—and baffled—when my calculus teacher told our all-female math team that girls were just not as good at math, my vision of girlhood had remained, for the most part, derisive and uninspiring. 

            It came as something of a relief, then, to go to college and come across a different way of conceptualizing womanhood, however sophomoric our ideas. For, after all, we were the children of the second wave of feminists; our world was very different from the one in which our parents had come of age. As girls, we had always been expected to excel as much as our brothers. We had access to reliable birth control. We had never doubted that the world was ours.

            And yet, we found things to be outraged by. I scolded my father for calling his office workers “girls,” found misogyny even in the lines of my beloved Robert Frost. Before, eye shadow had seemed to me merely trivial and superficial; now it took its place in the myriad of ways that women were objectified and thus belittled.

            Once, while my college boyfriend and I were visiting his family in upstate New York, he scoffed at an ad in his younger sister's magazine. The ad pictured three young girls, laughing with their arms around each other. His exact point, I do not remember. It was probably something about the ways in which gender is constructed by society; the ad was teaching girls to be tender and nurturing, for God's sake! I remember his father looking at his self-righteous son with confusion, gesturing at the picture. 

            "But this—this ability to be close to each other, to be loving and emotional—this  is what is wonderful about girls!" 

            His dad's perspective has stayed with me. There's nothing wrong with loving and emotional. For that matter, there's nothing wrong with eye shadow either. If we deride any quality we identity as feminine in the name of equality, it seems we have fallen prey to our own latent sexism. 

            I am guilty of it, myself. When I first learned I was to have daughters, I was nervous. What if they're girly-girls? I thought. What if they want to hang out at the mall, or be cheerleaders? What if, in other words, they're the kind of girl that made me think so little of being one myself?

            I haven't ruled out this possibility, but somehow it makes me less nervous. When the girls pick out their shoes from the overflowing cardboard boxes in their closet, Dee Dee wants her running shoes. Sylvia picks out the sparkly silver slippers with the flowers. Maybe her tastes are her own, but I don't rule out our influence either. "Look how nice you look," her dad tells her. Or, "Come on, let's go show Ms. Devon your sparkly shoes," I say, when I'm trying to hurry her out of the car at the gym. 

            The other day, I said to her, "You're a pretty girl, Sylvia." Because she is! She is ridiculously cute, with her little round face, almond-shaped eyes, and golden hair. As soon as I'd said it, I felt guilty. What if she grows up thinking that pretty is all she is, or that it's the most important thing? "You're a good girl," I added quickly. "You're funny and smart." 

            "How is she smart?" Clayton wanted to know. I hesitated. It's true that Sylvia is not as precocious as her sister. She wasn't counting to sixteen at two-years-old, doesn't recite books almost verbatim after hearing them read once. I could explain to him about Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, how, when it comes to interpersonal intelligence, Sylvia takes after her grandmother and namesake, who, in my father's words, "could talk to a stone." Like my mother, Sylvia charms people easily. Although less out-going than Dee Dee in so many respects, when it comes to people, she is the one to reach out and to bond. She holds out her arms for all her grown-up friends, gets scooped up and adored. 

            The other day, I sent Sylvia to her room after dinner, since she wouldn't stop her high-pitched screech. ("Could you just try for an octave lower," Don suggested. "Like this: Aaawwwhhh!") When I opened the door a few minutes later, she was standing on the bottom drawer of the dresser, her baby doll on the changing table, washing its face with a wipe as she sang it a little song.  

            "You've got to see this!" I whispered to Don, so of course Clayton comes running. Our ooh-ing and awing isn't lost on him. He's sees his little sister's nurturing side, sees the value we give it. The other day the two of them played together in the living room with Sylvia's baby doll. "Now she's hungry," he told her. "She wants mama's milk. And you're the mama, so you have to give it to her, like this," he instructed, positioning the baby in front of her chest. Later, Sylvia found half of a plastic Easter egg shaped like a hippo. She sat down outside the van and cradled it in her arms, gently swaying back and forth, and began to sing "Rock-a-bye Baby." 

            "Mom!" Clayton said. "Sylvia's being really sweet to her hippo!" 

            In his voice there's genuine appreciation, the same admiration I feel when I see her tend to her baby or love on our pets. Sylvia is very, very sweet. 

            In college, I would have scoffed at sweet. Why do girls have to be sweet? As a girl, I always hated that rhyme about sugar and spice and everything nice, as if girls were nothing more than life-size, cloying cookies. Even now, I'm way too much a feminist to deny the dangers of the feminine ideal, that model of docile, sweet-natured beauty that the first wave of feminists fought so hard to disarm. And yet, I can't help but see Sylvia's nurturing spirit as feminine and wonderful. 

            I'm reminded of another college experience. My first day on campus, I briefly met a beautiful girl—um, I mean, woman—with long blond hair and sexy cowboy boots. She appeared to be everything that I would have liked to be: gorgeous and confident, smart and sexy. Two years later, I met her again. She was now an out lesbian, and very butch. I wondered about her transformation, about why in discovering her love of women she'd felt the need to let go of the striking femininity I had so admired in her before. 

            She seemed to read my thoughts. "My mother wants to know why I can't look more like a girl," she said. "I try to get her to understand. There are lots of ways to be a girl." 

            Even to this day, I want to holler "Yes!" when I think of her words. Because, in a nutshell, that's it. There are simply lots of ways to be a girl. Girls can have long hair, or short hair. Girls can wear eye shadow, or not, or just try their best to sort-of wear it once in a while. Girls can wear the running shoes or the sparkly slippers. They can build towers out of blocks like Dee Dee, or sing songs to potatoes, rocking them in their arms, like Sylvia.

            In a way, I think having a daughter who might just turn out to be a little bit like the girly girl I once disparaged is teaching me something I wish I'd known long ago, when I was sneaking shorts on under my skirts and secretly wishing I'd been a boy: It's okay to be a girl. And not just okay—it’s great. Because there are just so many ways to be one. Thanks, Sylvie. 

                        

Dee Dee's Pinata

        We have a column cut from the satirical page of the Asheville weekly attached to our fridge.  “How do you know if you’re ready to have a baby?” a teenager named Lucy writes in to “Kid Care With Arnold.” Arnold, a fictional Vietnam vet, replies, “Dear Lucy, There’s a very simple test: Stay awake for four weeks straight chained to the sofa in your living room listening to a looped recording of someone screaming. Periodically explode a pinata filled with pee and poop in every room of your house. Then burn a pile of money while your mother-in-law yells at you for not doing it correctly. If you think that sounds like fun, then you’re ready for a baby.”
This column cracks me up every time I read it. Thankfully, it seems we have pretty much made it through the first trial, despite Sylvia’s persistent weepiness. The money part goes without saying, even though I have a supportive mother-in-law, who even if she thought I “ wasn't doing it correctly” would never say so to my face. It is the pinata line that never fails to give me the giggles, so aptly does it satire the reality of my experience with motherhood. Take this week for example...
On Monday, as usual, I put Dee Dee down for “quiet time” in the Pack-n-Play in our room. It was quiet for a little while, and I presumed Dee Dee was reading as she normally does in lieu of actually napping.  Then there were some rustlings, some bangs, sounds I chose to ignore, calculating that I’d rather enjoy a few more minutes, if not of quiet, at least of solitude, even if it meant having to clean up later whatever she’d gotten into. Soon, however, a loud crash brought me in, and this is what I saw.
Dee Dee, naked from the waist down,was on her knees on top of my dresser. Her bare legs were streaked with poop. The dresser sits in a corner, and the walls that met there were smeared in feces, like two Jackson Pollock canvases in monochrome. The offending turd had evidently cascaded down the dresser, of which, unfortunately, some drawers were slightly ajar, and landed squarely on a plastic easel that was in a pile of things to be donated to Goodwill. My dresser, a housewarming gift from my parents when I bought my first house in Asheville, has broad, artsy groves between the boards. These grooves were now spackled with a compound whose tint very closely matched the stain of the wood, although the fragrance and the consistency were all wrong.  Even my jewelry box, which I had painted and decorated with beads in another life--one in which I had time to contemplate, and even execute, such crafts--was now covered in shit.
Of course I did not, at first, take all of these details in. I simply gasped as the stench. Dee Dee peered down at me from her perch atop the dresser, looking a bit like Diego on his scaffold.
  “I pooped,” she said matter-of-factly.
I picked Dee Dee up by the underarms and carried her to the bathtub for two rounds of cleansing. While she played in the tub afterwards, I tackled the dresser clean-up with toothpicks, spray cleaner, and paper towels. I emptied the contents of the jewelry box into a plastic bag and then threw the box away, telling myself I was sort of tired of it anyway. By the time I finished the clean-up, quiet time was over, and I went to let Sylvia out of her room. When I opened the door, she was standing over a puddle in the middle of the floor, pant-less and diaper-less.
“I peed,” she said.

“That’s it,” I told Don later, “I’m done. Our room is now a kid-free zone.” The girls haven’t napped in weeks, months even.  Let them not nap in their own room, together. Let Dee Dee destroy her own stuff, smear poop on her own walls. She had done her last quiet time in my room.

***

That, at least, was my plan. The next day, I avoided quiet time altogether in favor of an afternoon trip to the park. On Wednesday, Sylvia was so exhausted and tearful, I was sure she would nap if given the chance. I didn't want her sister in there disturbing her, so instead I set Dee Dee up on the futon downstairs.
For almost an hour, I heard nothing. Could it be? Maybe, just maybe, I allowed myself to hope, she’d been so cozy on the futon she’d fallen asleep. Then I heard footsteps on the stairs. I saw her head appear first, then her torso, then... oh no! Her bottom half was completely bare.
“Oh no, Dee Dee!” I said. “What did you do?”
“I pooped!”
Into the bath she went. While she was soaking, I went downstairs, dreading what I'd find-- with good reason. There was poop on the futon cover, poop on the comforter, a poop-filled diaper on the floor. I thought that was the worst of it until I saw the brown streak on the rocking horse. Maybe it was mud but I didn't bother to check; I just scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed.

On Thursday, I went on a walk in the morning with a good friend, with whom I shared my recent travails with the poop and pee pinata exploding in my house. I don’t know what to do, I say. I know that the obvious answer is “Potty train!” After all, “does not tolerate wet or soiled diapers” is a textbook example off the  “Your toddler is ready for potty training when...” checklist. But honestly, I just don’t feel I can bite that off right now. With four kids to take care of most days of the week, I’m pretty maxed out. When we’re out and about, it is a relief that the girls are still in diapers; it’s one less thing I have to worry about. And even when we’re not, it doesn't feel much easier. Dee Dee wants you to read War and Peace every time she sits down on the potty. Meanwhile, the baby needs feeding and the dishwasher emptying and the lunch made.... For better or for worse, I've been holding off on true potty training until summer, when Don will be around and there’ll be one more pair of hands.
So what to do? Abandon quiet time? Admonish Dee Dee with threats?“There will be no Dora unless you keep your pants on!”
“Well,” my friend shared, half-joking. “The mother  of one of my daughter’s classmates says she used to have to duct tape her daughter’s diaper.”
Aha! That afternoon before quiet time I found a roll of shiny red duct tape in the closet. “Ok, Dee Dee,” I said. “Let’s change your diaper!”
“No! I don’t want...” she began. And then it came to me-- the best idea ever.
“Look, Dee Dee!” I cut her off.  “You can look like a super hero!”
Because she could! As I attached the glossy red tape to the front of her diaper, it did look rather superhero-like.
“I want to see!” Clayton said, coming in. He’s obsessed with anything Halloween, make-shift superhero costumes included.
He looked at Dee Dee lying on the changing table with the red tape on her diaper and nodded seriously.
“She does, right?” I confirmed
“Yeah.”
That did it. If her brother thinks she looks like a superhero, she’s sold.
“Super Dee Dee!” she yelled as she grabbed my hands and jumped to the floor.

I wish it ended there. That would be such a good ending! But alas. That afternoon, I put the girls down in their room together. Again the promising quiet, fueling my ridiculous hopes that a nap might actually be happening.
Then, “Aaaahhhh! Dee Dee pulled my hair!”
Inside, the room is a complete shambles, the floor covered with barrettes  blocks, and books. It also reeks. I glance sharply at Dee Dee, but although her pants are missing, her diaper is intact! Hallelujah!
A few minutes later I notice the poop on the rocking chair, just one slender swipe, like someone had wiped a chocolate-covered finger on a napkin.  Oh no! Dee Dee has immediately headed downstairs to find Clayton, and yep, that’s her poop. Still, I am triumphant. It was just a finger swipe! Just one little bit of poop on a chair, and only her hands to wash. What a victory.
It is only that evening as Sylvia sits on my lap reading books that I realize what an idiot I am. I absolutely failed to put two and two together. Dee Dee had poop on her hands; Sylvia was crying because Dee Dee pulled her hair. Is it any wonder the top of Sylvia’s head smells so awful?

On Friday, I put Dee Dee downstairs again, with the duct tape and a serious talking-to about not taking off her pants. And, low and behold, when I go downstairs to get her she is reading a book on the futon, poopy diaper intact, pants on.
She is very proud of herself.  “I left my diaper on! I didn't get poop everywhere! I pooped but I didn't take off my diaper. I left my diaper on...”  (Honestly, she never stops talking.)
I am proud of her, too, but mostly I’m just relieved that today I don’t have to drag anything out to the driveway to hose off. Maybe we’re getting somewhere, after all.

* * * 

I wish that were the end. That would be a good ending, too-- uplifting, optimistic. But, again, alas.
Today I started this post while the girls were doing quiet time. The quiet ended with the predictable screaming, but when I went to open the door, it would not open. I leaned in and forced it ajar. Inside, Dee Dee had barricaded the door with Sylvia’s crib. Beyond the crib, it was as if the room had exploded. The diaper basket, the dirty clothes hamper, the bookshelf-- all had been emptied onto the floor. There was a stuffed turtle in the garbage can and little Indian bracelets all over the changing table. And standing on the other side of the crib was Dee Dee, butt naked, covered in poop.

The Highs, The Lows

         I'm typing this without the "n" key on my keyboard. That's the kind of afternoon I had yesterday. Dee Dee and I were in the side yard getting the eggs, Sylvia was finishing up an episode of Dora on the laptop, Clayton was, well, Clayton was somewhere.
Somewhere along the line, I must have made an impression with my impersonations of animals talking, because now it's "What is Howard saying?" "What is that fly trapped in the window saying?" "What is my cereal saying?" "What is my poop saying?" Ad infinitum.
Right now it's "What are the chickens saying?"
At first, I play along. "They're saying, 'Thanks for the food, Dee Dee."
"And what am I saying?"
"You're saying, 'You're welcome.' Come on, Dee Dee, let's get the eggs."
"What are the eggs saying? What are the chickens saying? What is this egg saying? What is the basket saying? What am I saying?"
"They're saying, 'Hurry up, Dee Dee!" I am exasperated. This has long since ceased to be cute. Finally,  one, two, three, five gregarious eggs are all in her basket.
"Hurry, Dee Dee!"  I say.  I want to get back inside before another episode of Dora begins on the laptop.
Inside, I am met by Clayton's muffled shouts. "Mom!! I'm all done pooping!" he yells from the bathroom. (Oh, that's where he was.)
I close out Netflix and hurry in to help wipe Clayton's bottom. He had a bout of number 3 earlier today and he could use the expert help.
Not to put to fine a point on it, but the toilet needs some attention, too. I'm getting out the toilet brush while Clayton washes his hands. "What are my germs saying?"
Ugh. There's no Comet under the bathroom sink, so I head for the kitchen. Sylvia is still sitting in front of the laptop, her tiny fingers curled over the keys, as if she's got some important writing to do. It's cute, until I notice the missing "n."
"Oh no!" I exclaim. Don just replaced the keyboard a month ago, after another letter mysteriously detached itself. This time, the mechanism still seems to be in place, at least. Maybe it will snap right back on, just like in all the infuriating You Tube videos we watched about replacing missing keys the last time around.
I'm fumbling with the n as the kids head out onto the back porch. I glance up to see the screen from the sliding door has been totally detached from the frame and is flapping freely in the wind. At this point, I could care less about the screen; what worries me is how angry Don will be when he comes home. I glance at the clock. 4:23. He could be home any minute. The screen will be the first thing he sees, and he'll swear and scold the kids, and I don't like to start the evening out like that. I put the n on the counter and grab the roller tool to reattach the screen.
The kids head out to the fish pond while I struggle with the door. Clayton is looking at the tadpoles when the girls start throwing the pebbles that Don sprinkles decoratively around the edges to cover the pond lining. To be honest, I don't care much about that either. What young child doesn't want to toss rocks into water? It's irresistible. But Clayton knows his dad's rules; he is outraged.
"Mom!! They're throwing rocks! They're not supposed to do that!!"
Dee Dee, for once, listens when I holler at them to stop. Sylvia just gives me a look and reaches for another handful.
"Put that down or you're going to your room," I threaten from the porch.  She pauses, looks at me again, and then hurls them into the pond.
I want to give her a time-out right then about as much as I want to rip out a hang nail. But out I go to the pond. Sylvia sees me coming and reaches for another handful of pebbles as fast as she can. If she's going to get in trouble, she might as well get her money's worth. She is also laughing gleefully, which makes me madder than I care to admit. I scoop her up and take her to her crib. She laughs all the way there, and by the time I drop her in her crib, I am boiling.
Meanwhile, Dee Dee and Clayton head up to the tree fort.
"Dee Dee! Don't! You can't! Dee Dee! Don't climb the ladder! You will fall! And you will die!"
All of this is said, I am sure, to get my attention, but I am still working on the screen. Dee Dee can manage the ladder.
A few minutes later hysterical screams are coming from the tree fort. I imagine someone impaled on a nail or dangling by one leg from the ladder. I sprint up through the woods.
Dee Dee is sitting, smug as can be, on one of the make-shift stools Don made out of two by fours. Tears are streaming down her older brother's face.
"Dee Dee won't share!" he howls.
There is another, bigger, unoccupied stool in the tree fort.
"Why don't you just sit there?" I suggest.
"Daddy made this one for him and this one for me and Dee Dee had a turn, but she won't share!" he sobs. "And I tried my best but she pulled my ear!"
I'm not sure how to react. Is this true, endearing, four-year-old despair or is my son already a very good actor, knowing just how to turn on the chin-quivering and the tears? Most likely it is a little bit of both. Even if it is an act, he seems to have convinced at least himself by his performance-- the tears are real. (And I wouldn't put ear pulling past Dee Dee, either.)
Dee Dee, meanwhile, is still perched impassively on top of the stool, holding on with both chubby hands. My heart goes out to him. She must be an infuriating little sister.
I glance at my watch. It's 4:39. Surely Don will be home any minutes, and the energy will shift as it always does.
Clayton is red-faced and sweating. It's over eighty degrees, and he's still picking out his winter clothes when he gets dressed in the morning. This is one conflict there seems no point in resolving, so I don't even try.
"You look hot, Clayton," I say, changing the subject. "Let's go change your clothes, get you a drink, and read a book until your dad comes home."
Dee Dee hears "book," and hops down off the stool.  Clayton whimpers all the way back to the house, where we meet Sylvia on the porch steps. I don't even have it in me to wonder how she got out of her room, never mind scold her.
"We're going to read a book, Sylvia. Come on."
It's mere seconds now, I tell myself. Don will come home, and we'll be peacefully reading on the couch and everything will be fine.
Dee Dee and Clayton are bickering over which book to read when the phone rings. It's Don. He hasn't left work yet.
A year ago, that would have put me over the edge. Doesn't he know, doesn't he care, why can't he, etc., etc., etc. I try to be more understanding these days. I know how hard it can be to get out the door at the end of the day. But today? I allow myself a moment of self-pity before I head back to the couch.  I was (more or less) offered a teaching job last week, but I turned it down.
"Momma? What's the robot saying? What's the horse saying? What's the cookie saying? Clayton's squishing me!"
  Maybe I could still change my mind.

* * * 

Don's had a rough week at work, too.  With the warm weather and no air conditioning, his classroom is sweltering. There were faculty meetings, coaches' meetings, a staff breakfast that meant a late night trip to the grocery store for orange juice and yogurt in the name of faculty "morale," and inane bureaucratic decisions to move final exams up by a week, when he's already racing to get through the curriculum.
We sit down to dinner. The kids are talking a blue streak. "Nobody talk!" he demands. "I want a few moments of silence!" In the past I would have smoldered. (i.e., "What's your problem? You haven't seen the half, the quarter, the eighth, of it!") I try to be more empathetic now. We're both doing the best we can.
At work, Don deals with bureaucratic crap; I deal with the other kind-- all over the toilet. He's got meetings that squander his time and good humor; I've got bickering, whining, naughty children that squander mine. He's got all the perks of a professional life for which I sometimes yearn; I've got all the perks of being with our kids full-time.
Because today, really, was pretty great. I went to the gym in the morning, then took the kids to Lake Louise. We watched the ducks, had a picnic,"winged on the wings" (to use Sylvia's expression), read books in the shade. The trees were blooming, the sun was warm, the lake sparkled, and I realized I was making the ducks talk without even being asked.
Afterwards, we treated ourselves to chocolate ice-cream on Weaverville's quaint main street, and when we got home, we all read books piled together on Clayton's bed. At quiet time, Clayton brought Dee Dee a stuffed pig to "make her happy" and later he let Sylvia play with his teddybear, whom Elmo immediately began to mother and put to bed. And when I stubbed my toe on the coffee table, Dee Dee hugged me and sang me "Twinkle Twinkle" so I wouldn't cry.
So what if Dee Dee pulled out all my dental floss and dumped the matches into the bathtub when I thought she was sleeping? So what if the n key is still missing and sometimes Sylvia cries so much I just want to scream at her, "Stop crying!" (Which doesn't help-- I've tried). Those moments are just the faculty meetings and irritating emails of full-time motherhood. They are the lows that make the good times feel like flying.