i’d like to tell you I have a veggie garden because I’m really into organic everything, but the truth is there’s nothing quite as satisfying as watching my kids fight over fresh greens. In my defense, I have stopped telling them the peas were candy.
You can buy prints and cards of this painting here
There’s a bug going around the school this spring. I usually resist the urge to pump my kids full of unnecessary antibiotics, but last night Thing2’s nose was runneth-ing over, and I got out the purple stuff.
Literally taking his sniffles in stride, Thing2 came limping over to me (apparently this particular strain of flu is being sponsored by the American Branch of the Department of Silly Walks) and opened his mouth. I popped in a spoonful of grape-flavor. He danced on one foot and then the other quickly and then looked at me and smiled.
“I’m just making sure it gets everywhere, Mom.”
“The flu?”
“No, the medicine through my body.” His legs regained functionality as he slid around the floor, jitterbugging to his internal iPod. “And, I think it’s working, Mom.”
One of us clearly doesn’t understand how the purple stuff is supposed to work, but it might not be the guy dancing around the kitchen in his jammies.
“Mom, I have a new superpower!” Thing2 barely had his seatbelt on. “I can create wind!” That neatly explained seven-year-old Thing2’s energetic, skyward gestures as he hopped off the bus.
“What do you mean?” I asked. Thirteen-year-old Thing1 smirked as he tried not to inject eighth grade into a heretofore innocent and imaginative conversation.
“I can,” Thing2 insisted, launching into an explanation of how to get the weather to bend to your will.
We quickly figured out that the weekend’s Frozen marathon – halted when Thing1 threatened to get a court order to get Thing2 to stop playing it – had inspired the afternoon’s flight of fancy. It’s the result of a pattern that’s threatened to force us into using the worst parenting platitude ever devised. It’s one I prayed I’d never use, but here we may be.
Thing2 had zero interest in Frozen until last week. He, along with the rest of the boys in his class, were left off the guest list of a girl’s slumber party (a story unto itself). Discovering the party’s theme and certain he was off the list because of his ignorance of the plot’s complexities, he promptly began begging to see it.
“I’m the only one in my class who hasn’t seen it,” he told me, digging out the other most over-used phrase in parent-child relations .
“Where have I heard this before?” I asked, resisting the temptation for a traditional answer. The question was rhetorical – I’d heard the complaint two weeks earlier. It was before ‘Everything is Awesome’ from The Lego Movie became the newest tune Thing2 used to torture Thing1’s highly sophisticated musical ear and he’d been the only kid whose parents were keeping him in a cultural wasteland devoid of talking Lego characters.
I was a teeny bit curious about Frozen, however, so when the Big Guy and Thing1 were busy with homework hit the download button. The rest of the weekend was history.
I’ve avoided completing the other half of the ‘Everyone else is doing it’ equation for thirteen years not because I’m a parenting genius, but because Thing1 is a born skeptic. If his friends were jumping off the proverbial bridge, he’d ask if they had insurance and a rope.
Thing2 is a different matter. He doesn’t go along with the crowd just to go along with the crowd. He goes where the fun is.
When we got back from the bus stop, Thing2 offered to demonstrate his wind powers. I fetched firewood as Thing2 climbed to the top of a snow drift, raising his hands in the air and gesturing to the clouds. The top of the pine trees continued to sway. “See?”
Weather control soon bored him and he began jumping from drift to drift.
“You’re going to get hurt,” I said.
“No I won’t. Look, Mom,” he said as I filled the canvas wood carrier again. “I’m jumping over the Grand Canyon.”
I stopped and watched him leap between two solid snow drifts. He really did look like he was getting ready to jump over a gorge, and I realized I’ll never get to ask the oldest, most-overused query in parent-child relations. The answer was already there in his flushed cheeks and every new story he was imagining with each leap. More jumpers would just make it more fun.
In my inner world, I fight dragons. I take on armies and villains, triumphing over any challenge with wit and courage. Did I mention this was a fantasy?
In the real world, I've wrapped myself in the notion that my dreams are the result of an active imagination. Lately, though, as I look at my life and the things I haven't achieved or the real demons I've been afraid to fight, I've come to an uncomfortable admission. It's not just the inner triumphs that are fictional. Everything in that world is imaginary – especially the courage.
Before thirteen-year-old Thing1 was born, I never thought of myself as especially kind or patient or even steadfast. When he came into our world, however, right away he needed me to learn all of those things and, for him, I did. My kindness or patience still wouldn't win me any awards, but because of him I learned to keep trying when the breast milk wasn't flowing right away. I learned to stick by someone who was screaming in my face and to put someone else's needs before my own.
Right now we're navigating the first year of adolescence with all the pitfalls I'd expect and some I didn't. And even though he's getting stubble on his chin, I still look at him and feel the same powerful push to be better. He needs me to be brave now. So, not just for him but because of him, I will be.
I saw the homework folder neatly tucked in the backpack and decided it was safe to zip the big pocket. The sound of merging metal teeth brought seven-year-old Thing2 flying out of his room and into the living room.
“Wait!” he shrieked. “I left something in there!”
“What is it?” I ducked, trying to avoid his flapping arms.
“It’s going to snow today!” Thing2 unzipped the big pocket an pulled out his red satin cape.
“You’re not taking that?” I scratched my head, not even remembering seeing it a few minutes earlier.
“No.” Thing2 now unfurled the cape on the couch and then extracted his army green third-hand snow pants from the same pocket.
“Of course I don’t need it now.” Realizing I still have a lot to learn about the fashion rituals of the average rainbow-wigged superhero in the country, I popped the lunchbox into the front pocket and zipped entire the pack closed again.
“Well then,” I said, “leave the cape, but pack the cannoli.”
“Huh?”
“The pretzels,” I said, “pack the pretzels.”
“Obviously I was taking the pretzels,” he said trotting out his favorite new adult buzzword and demonstrating once again that I have am achieving true wisdom because when it come to the inner working of my youngest child’s mind, I know nothing.
Last Sunday we took a much-needed family stay-cation to Brattleboro for a ski jump competition. We chose the destination because it’s been a stopping point for many Olympians, and, in the forties, for the Big Guy’s dad.
The temperature was brisk, and the sun was out. Food vendors and tailgaiters created delicious grilled odors that bouyed the four of us on our climb up the 150+ snowy steps that lined the jump hill.
Twenty feet of snow-covered hillside and path separated the top of the stairs from the wall that bordered the jump area. We staked out a spot just below the jump-off just as the first round of jumpers whooshed past us.
Seven-year-old Thing2 watched a few jumpers and then, his awe subsiding, focused on the consistency of the snow and it’s suitability for sliding and ammunition.
The first round ended, and he began begging for permission to slide down the massive hill next to the steps. Noting the abundant opportunities the hill afforded for an impromptu ambulance ride, I naturally said, ‘No’. Thing2 pouted, but kept his silence.
The loudspeaker announced a break in the action, and we decided to move to a lower part of the hill for a different view of the action. The Big Guy and I began navigating down the hill towards the stairs. Half-way down, I turned around to offer a hand to Thing2. Still standing at the wall, he grinned at me.
“Mom, I want to slide down here!”
I hesitated for a minute and scanned his intended course for any objet d’injury. Noting the incline leveled enough near the bottom for him to stop himself, gave my permission. Thing2 sat on his snowpant-covered butt and slid.
“You are a true Vermonter,” I told him as he coasted to a stop at my feet. He is.
Despite the Big Guy’s deep roots in Vermont (from his father back to a time before “Vermont” existed) and Thing1’s maple syrup-steeped childhood, Thing2 is the only “real” Vermonter among us (I’m a recovering nomad). Local tradition confers the label only on those born in-state. The smile on his face as he sat in the snow, however, proved his status better than any birth certificate.
The path had been packed down, and Thing2 decided it was another slower sliding opportunity. I inched along behind him, keenly aware of the aging tread on my boot.
Finally, the eternal adventurer in me decided that since we were in Vermont, I should do as my native-Vermonter had just done. The slippery path was much more easily negotiated on my butt. The path from nomad to settled Vermonter is one Thing2 will be showing me how to navigate for some time.
Tuesday, we were looking forward to another snowy night and day. Like most northern regions, it takes a lot more than 6-12″ to get Vermonters flustered, but, to be perfectly honest, it’s not the snow that rattles my nerves, it’s the snow day.
I work from home. Most of the time it’s a good racket – especially when Thing1 and Thing2 get the unexpected day off. It’s not all sunshine and lollipops, however, especially when Thing1 and Thing2 get the unexpected day off. They’re good kids, but, try as I might, I have not found the trick to getting them to sit quietly with their hand folded over their laps while mommy deals with customers online (if you’ve found it online somewhere, send me the link). But, as I found out over Christmas break (almost two weeks of expected days off), silence isn’t always golden.
Seven-year-old Thing2 – already plastered to the ceiling in anticipation of Santa’s visit – had spent the morning migrating from lego projects to torturing his brother. At one point, he managed to combine activities, causing a crescendo of ‘MOM!’ from thirteen-year-old Thing1’s room. Thing1 had ‘accidentally’ knocked Thing2’s lego sculpture out of his hand. The ruins of his engineering masterpiece were strewn about the floor. One of the witnesses to the ‘accident’ was red faced, the other was in tears. I was chatting online with several customers at once and decided there wasn’t time to call in CSI to determine if the destruction was accidental or premeditated, and I ordered Thing2 to the living room for a cool-down on the iPad.
Lips pursed, arms folded over his chest, Thing2 marched to a corner of the couch after retrieving a blanket from his bunk. He stood on the couch, arranging the blanket just so and, when he had created his cave, grabbed the iPad from the table and retreated under the patchwork tent.
Thing2 has loved the iPad since it emerged from its sleek white box. Like most kids, he knows more about it than a seasoned software engineer, and I’m ashamed to admit that it plays babysitter too often on days like this.
The next day, each Thing retreated automatically to his own corner. One was in his room working on a computer project with a friend in Maine. Two was under his tent with headphones borrowed from daddy. For most of the morning, the only sound came from my keyboard.
That night, I finished work on time and, with a small break in the depression that had been amplifying for months, I thought an after dinner post was in order. But as the Big Guy took up residence on the couch for his winter’s nap and I began loading the wood stove to cook dinner, I noticed that it was still very quiet. The dishes clanking were the only noise.
Thing2 was still under the blanket and headphones, his legos and sketchbooks gathering dust. There was no new dance routine to watch and animate. There was no impromptu party waiting in his room. And suddenly I was scrambling for something to write.
Like a nagging housewife driving her husband to the arms of a lover, my quest for quiet had silenced my inspiration with electronic lithium.
Cousins arrived the next day, and neither child was interested in anything electronic as we celebrated Christmas.
The Monday after the family left, the silence was deafening, but the iPad was nowhere to be found. Thing2 emerged late in the morning, dragging his tent. He looked for his digital drug, but, not finding it, deposited his blanket on the couch and padded over to the Christmas tree where his latest Lego project was still sitting, the remaining 500 pieces sorted into empty ice cream buckets.
For the rest of the morning, he delivered a muted monologue of the building of his new starship. Occasionally, frustrated tears punctuated the chatter and interrupted my work. I broke up a few fights, but, when dinner time rolled around my inspirer-in-chief joined me in the kitchen to show me his latest dance moves. And, oddly enough, the noise made the work day better.
I didn’t write that night, but Tuesday morning, that probable snow day got me just rattled enough to get out of bed early and start tapping.
I was still embroiled with work the other night when grandfather clock counted a single chime, reminding me that it was 5:30 and time to quit. The soft din of homework-related questions had waxed into a blurred chorus of “Moms”, so when the words “stinky feet” permeated my brain, I didn’t know if seven-year-old Thing2’s smelly socks had prompted the thought or if someone was actually singing the words.
I looked up from my computer and glanced toward the den. There was Thing2, wearing the smelly socks and singing as he hunched over his sketchbook and writing.
“He wanted to write a song,” explained the Big Guy. Seeing Dad’s guitar emerge from storage, Thing2 had been inspired. No one had ever told that only he could not write a song, so he decided to try it.
At dinner, the Big Guy extolled our offspring’s achievement. “He wrote a song,” he said over and over again. I was proud, but, still frazzled from the day, I didn’t offer the encouragement I normally do.
Thing2 is creativity personified. He sings and dances. He has littered his desk books he has written, illustrated and assembled. He lives for art, and this song was just his latest expression.
I grew up hearing the phrase, “Do what you love.” I repeat it every time I see him fly through the air or ‘publish’ a new book. That night, however, I wondered how I tell my youngest child, to chase artistic dreams when, lately, I have increasingly surrendered mine, partly to depression but mostly to work?
“Dad, I want to write another song,” he said the next night after homework. This single was called Bad Cat. The Big Guy played back up on guitar while Thing2 drummed on a book and sang lead.
“Bad Cat, Bad Cat, sitting on the counter,” it started. There were three more verses on the sins of our chubby black cat.
I started the video camera on the iPhone, and Thing 2, sensing a hit, launched into another chorus. My feet began to tap. My youngest was inspiring me in spite of myself. Most of my best posts start with antics authored by Thing1 or Thing2, and, last night every beat of his drumsticks generated a new idea.
Thing2 was reminding me of what he knows instinctively. Art isn’t a dream, and it’s not a living. It’s life. When the song was over, I gave his newest opus the reception it deserved.
“You keep doing what you love,” I said with a tight hug free of doubt.
Last night I set the alarm for 4 AM again, and this morning, for the first time in ages, I didn’t hit the snooze button. I had homework – to practice what I preach. Completing the assignment quickly reminded me how much art, for me also, is life.
Thing2 may be a bit unorthodox, but he’s turned out to be quite the teacher.
I'm trying, with limited success, to work three jobs. I got the one that pays the bills for 40 to 50 hours a week. I've got the one I took on when the Big Guy and I decided to become parents. And I've got the one that I'm still auditioning for – The one I get up at – still early, Buddy, don't you want to go back to bed? – 4AM to scribble in my notebook and doodle in my sketchbook for.
I slept in today. It was 5 AM when I finally dragged myself out of bed and into the shower, but I figured I had enough time before the rest of the house was awake – Stop that, kid – to get through a story revision – No you cant have the remote when everyone still asleep.
Thing2 usually does his own figuring on Saturday mornings, however. Like most seven-year-olds he has a sixth sense that tells his body clock when it's a school morning and went to get up early. Today the body clock was working perfectly, and as I sat down with my notebook and a short story I'm updating, somebody padded out in his jammies and socks.
Now, I'm sitting on the recliner with my story in my notebook and no daylight or molecules between me and my seven-year-old. i'm still editing and writing. I don't know if these are the kind of working conditions that Louisa May Alcott had to suffer through when she was an aspiring writer, but I figure scribbling away with a giggly seven-year-old – Cut it out! wrapped around my writing elbow is in my next job's description.
I can get used to that. The pay isn't so great, but the benefits are hard to beat.
One of my less attractive qualities is an obsessive-compulsive need to schedule every half an hour of my day. However, as more of my waking hours have been surrendered to supporting a new release at work, extra dentist appointments for the kids, and an impending influx of guests for Christmas, I’ve begun arranging my day by the quarter hour.
Last night, as I stood at the kitchen island, my rear end facing the red hot wood stove and my iPad calendar open, seven-year-old Thing2 came to rest his chin on one of my arms as I rearranged my work day for today. I got my writing at 4 AM, email at 6, kids to the bus at seven, fitness at 7:30, dinner preparation at 8:30 so we can eat at right at 5:30 or whenever I actually sign off work.
“What are you doing?” He asked.
“Just prioritizing my day,” I said.
“What are prior-ties?”
I thought for a second and then answered, “They’re just important things on my to-do list.”
Then I scrolled to Saturday. Writing got a nice chunk of the morning while the family was still in bed. I had a block for work, but moved it to the end of the day. There were blocks for running and breakfast at Bob’s, cleaning and grocery shopping. I was moving my blocks of to-do’s from one hour of Saturday to another when Thing2 held my scrolling arm tight and said, “You don’t have any time scheduled to cuddle with me.”
“You’re right,” I said. “Where should we put it.”
“Let’s do it right before we go to Bob’s for breakfast,” he said.
I added a one hour block after writing and running and right before Bob’s to sit on the couch and snuggle. Thing2 gave me a big hug and said, “I think we got the prior-ties in order, Mom.”
Seven-year-old Thing2 and his thirteen-year-old brother Jack take turns sitting next to me when we go to Sunday breakfast at Bob’s Diner in Manchester, VT. Thing2 is still at the age where he’s easily entertained by shiny objects and it was my wedding ring caught that his attention the other morning.
Waiting for our drinks to arrive, Thing2 grabbed my hand from the table and began inspecting the rings, twist and turning my finger. The Big Guy told him the story of the stone (they came from his grandfather’s ring) and then of his own gold band (also owned by his grandfather).
Thing2 tried to pull off my ring for close inspection, but I stiffened my finger and the ring would not come off. It would twist, but it would not move up my finger.
“It won’t come off,” exclaimed Thing2. The server had now brought our drinks.
“It’s not supposed to come off,” I said.
“What is it.. cursed?” he asked turning to ancient pop culture and Ringo Star’s ruby ring in the move Help to explain the phenomenon on my finger. Even Jack had to laugh at the question. Our server took our order and walked away giggling.
Thing2 was now wedged between my arm and body. Sun flooding through the plate glass window bathed Jack and the Big Guy on the opposite side of the table. It was just an ordinary Sunday with nothing planned except wood stacking and hanging out around the homestead. I had his answer.
“It’s not cursed,” I said. It’s blessed.
Picking My Battles 