seven

My daughter’s recent birthday has ignited my memory of being her age. Her intonations, tics and tricks are so familiar to me. The pouting, the scary emotions that overpower her sometimes, her otherwise infectious enthusiasm and mostly good nature that result from a happy home and mostly good natured parents who try their best. I remember trying all on all of those moods and attitudes I see her working through myself, like outfits, or hats.

Besides being my daughter, Zoe is this dimension of my own childhood self, just as I, as a mother, am a dimension of my mom’s mothering self.

I have my baby book that my mom made. The title on the cover is “Your Baby Age 0 – 7.” I look at it a lot lately, in sadness and in wonder, because the idea of the book is such a contradiction to what I thought was her lack of sentimentality in later years. It’s filled with details about my lost teeth, my doctor’s visits, my first words, and upbeat descriptions about each of my birthday parties. I was glancing through it yesterday, looking at a photograph of my mom at 26 holding me in the front seat of the car coming home from the hospital, searching her eyes for clues about what it felt like to be her, holding me in her arms. Ready for the adventure and not knowing what the future would bring.

And today, as I look through pictures of myself bringing Zoe home from the hospital on my computer, with my hopeful and much less worried looking eyes, I simply can’t believe Zoe is the age I was when I was no longer my mom’s baby. This loop of life, moving through it sometimes seems truly miraculous.

Seven was also the age I turned when my youngest sister was born. I remember what our house on Linden Lane felt like physically, the light in the downstairs hall and the smell of concrete and Tide in the basement and how the house was changing. Rules, once rigid, were becoming less so. I imagine my mom was tired, maybe overwhelmed? Sugar cereal, once outlawed, began creeping in.

The office with the yellow, brown and green wallpaper was peeled down and painted, yellow I think it was. Or pink? There was a gilder. A slide. A changing table. We were intrigued, but after a bit, bored and ready for the next thing. Nine months seemed an interminable amount of time to wait.

I remember going to the hospital at the end of the summer to meet her, and it all seeming unreal to me, how tiny my sister was, and like, where the hell did she even come from? I remember we got to go to Sea World with my dad the week right after she came. I know it happened because there’s a picture of Lanie and I on my dad’s lap holding twin Shamus, pink faced and white-blonde haired. And I remember too that it was my birthday five days after Lex was born, and I was extremely pre-occupied with what I would get when we returned from Sea World. Because that’s seven.

lice lice lady

There are certain things you don’t know about. Until you do. And then, if you’re like me, you’ll suddenly know way too much about said subject. You’ll seek out info, talk to everyone, see all the sides of the thing, and really just sink those teeth of yours into the meat of the issue. You’ll go there.

This week, that thing was lice. Totally, awesomely, sexy-ass lice.

Apparently, lice is the dirty (not so) secret of the school aged kid. And because young kids are mostly grubby little scumbags who never have any idea what’s happening to them, it’s clearly a much bigger deal and rite of passage for their parents.

They found it in school last Friday, where people from a lice checking company are contracted to come and pick thru the kids’ heads four times a year. Z didn’t even get sent home, because it was “just an egg.” It’s a Department of Health/Department of Education rule that teachers don’t have to send kids home with the eggs – just the live lice. Seriously, that is a stupid fucked up rule. Those eggs hatch into lice! I know I was only a B – student in biology but come on now.

But here’s the fun news – in New York City you can just call someone on the phone like you’re calling the deli for OJ and tampons and within hours, someone will come to your house, apply shampoo and special conditioners and comb the lice out of your kid’s hair. I was laughing with a friend about how our contemporaries used to call people’s pagers (remember life before cel phones?) to get pot delivery people to come over, and now we’re calling lice ladies. Business idea I would have appreciated in this particular instance: “Hits and Nits.”

Turns out, most of the women who do this for a living are observant Jews, so getting lice on Shabbos eve was not a great situation. I was freaking. I had already thrown everything in the washing machine and began my ten hour laundry marathon for the night and was convinced we were all infested. But Brenda, this nice Jewish lady who owns the company and sounded like one of my mom’s friends, talked me down and told me she could have somewhere there in about an hour and a half. A lice lady pimp.

I had heard from other moms I know about this one famous woman named Abigail, an Orthodox woman in Boro Park Brooklyn who is such the maven of lice ladies that she had a New Yorker profile written about her. Honestly, you cannot make this stuff up.

I was sad to miss the opportunity to meet any person who had been profiled in the New Yorker, but I needed action that night, and as I mentioned, it was Shabbos.

So Brenda sent us the lovely Svetlana, a tired, middle-aged, Russian bleached blonde who made her way over around 8:30 PM with her rollie suitcase full of magnifier lamps, combs, shampoos, lotions and oils. She had been working since 8:30 AM that morning, when she helped diagnose the many cases at my daughter’s school. Since then she had been to three people’s homes and combed out several heads. That woman needed a glass of wine, which I gave her after she checked us all, treated and combed Z’s hair section by section, and told us how to proceed with treatment over the next week. She even gave Z a little present – a compact mirror with a winking lady on it.

None of us had gotten lice, or eggs, besides Z, which meant we caught it early and were pretty lucky. Svetlana was awesomely Russian and blase and I totally love her. I tipped her ass off. She drained her wine, told us she’d be back Sunday morning at 8 am, rollie suitcased out the door, and went home in a car service to get a well deserved good night’s sleep. Because the next day she had to go to work “in the salon.” That’s where she works when she’s not combing lice out of school children.

So one thing to take away here is that you never really know what people are doing on the side. And its probably best that way.

s.w.a.k.

My whole life I’ve been prone to emotional triggers brought on by songs, smells, textures, and tastes, so it’s no surprise I’ve folded these tendencies into my relationship with my kids and my own memories of childhood.

I’ve written some about the overwhelming nostalgia bath I’ve been taking since Zoe started kindergarden this fall. It’s been amazing. Today, when I was at her school for lunch duty, I took her and another little girl to the bathroom. They took me “the secret way,” from the basement level cafeteria to the girl’s room on the first floor. Through their chatter with each other, their expressions and in their excited two steps at a time climbing, I could viscerally recall my own elementary school and the journey from the lunchroom to the bathroom — the exact way the cafeteria smelled, the smooth concrete banisters against my hand as I ran up the linoleum stairs to the steamy heat of the girl’s (and the mystery glimpse of the unfathomable urinal through a door crack in the boy’s).

The lead up to Valentine’s Day today was epic, and Zoe has been vibrating with excitement. She was thrilled with her outfit of dark pink tights, light pink skirt with hearts, and white shirt with hot pink flowers. She spent the past five evenings under my tutelage, making valentines for every kid in the class – and really caring about how each kid would react to the size and sparkle of the stickers and the different colors of heart shaped balloons and flowers she was customizing for each one. I just loved it. Having recently discovered my inner scrapbooking soccer mom nerd (or, how fun it is to shop at Michael’s Craft store – a formerly suburban pleasure paradise now available to us New York City residents), we just sat there at her little table, cutting and coloring and sticking stickers, listening to Fiona Apple and discussing Eli’s favorite color versus Lina’s. Here was something I always loved doing when I was younger, something relaxing and creative and fulfilling we could finally do together. It totally rocked.

I used to feel a constant pull toward eras I never lived in, careers I’d never have, places I’d never live. I feel less that way now. Part of that must be finding my way, hopefully, or else realizing aspiration is never ending. Maybe that’s why memories are flooding in now – because I’ve accepted that now my real job to make things as sparkly and pink as I can for my kids, just as my own parents at roughly my age sacrificed a lot of their own middle years to make things exciting and textured and full of joy for me and my sisters.

Its funny to feel like now I’m the grownup comes up with the ideas and the adventures, and also the one who says the things like: “I’m turning that television/IPad off right this minute if you keep ignoring me when I ask you to bring your dish to the sink!” Some days it’s so much damn work to make all the decisions and keep the momentum going, but when I think about how much it means to Zoe to sit down and color with the set of 140 markers I picked up – and how much of a charge it gave me when my own mom bought me a similar set, I’m really feeling that sparkly Valentine’s love.

the new "new"

The last 11 days have been nonstop family time. And while I’m totally exhausted from the non-stop-ed-ness of it, the planning and the packing and trying to keep them occupied in airports and restaurants, there’s something lovely and special about the self-contained capsule of vacation together time. I loved looking over on our flight the other day and there we all were, four of us clumped into three seats, all looking at some kind of screen, gobbling snacks. I love turning around from mission control (shotgun) in our car and seeing the two of them sleeping with abandon in their car seats, cozy with their blankets. The feeling of seeing all my lovies confined to ten square feet of space somehow warms me – like we’re as present as we can be in this adventure, barreling into space together.

So it’s pretty sweet. However. After the unnecessarily stressful and busy build up of the Hanukkah/Christmas/New Years season, 11 days without our beloved babysitter, and almost two weeks of the smaller kid waking up every night several times, its nice to be back to a moment where I can just sit quietly and collect my thoughts and write some things down and maybe take a walk without worrying that I have to get back to relieve my husband as he watches both kiddies.

I do like the special times but much prefer the regular days, routine, and doing what we always do. I like the normal.

And now, onto the new. New year. New goals. New anxieties. So how to calm the constant adrenaline and the need I have to be always be moving and doing? How to balance wanting MORE, being better, thinking big with being content and feeling lucky? I’d say my biggest challenge is how to find the joy and not see the stress. So I’ll be working on that. If you have ideas about how I can chill the f$#k out, do let me know.

big kid

The second week of September this year was a big one for our family. Lots of “firsts.” First full day of Kindergarten (my daughter). First PTA meeting (me). First lice scare (daughter, son, me and my husband. No one had it). These are situations I would file under: Having a Big Kid.

I went from knowing every move Z made last year at her small, nurturing pre-school with three teachers for 15 kids, to her being one of 22 kids with one teacher in K. I used to get a report about what she did or didn’t eat at lunch and if she went to the bathroom during the day (!) Now, the kids are eating lunch in the cafeteria on their own. They pee with a partner, and no one is making sure they go.

Becoming more independent. Learning to operate as part of group. Following directions and learning consequences. All good things! It’s just … an adjustment … for me.

That first week realizing I had a big kid was a bit jarring. There were lots of afterschool meetings bunched together, with big kid school-ese and information about fundraising and peanut allergies in the noisy auditorium, where the sounds of the principal on a microphone, plus the murmuring of parents, plus siblings of our newly minted elementary students were all echoing off of the walls. Lots of questions from parents of even bigger kids, about middle school and money for school band and lots of politics I couldn’t begin to understand yet. I felt like I had no idea what was going on.

And so the C word keeps cropping up. Control. And by that I mean feeling like I have none. Principals and nurses and teachers and lunch ladies and all kinds of interactions that happen to my child without my sanctioning during the day. I’m getting what I feel is very little information from or about my kid. But is this actually happening, or is it part of a larger realization that the world is moving forward and my big kid is being plummeted in? I’ve been feeling acutely that sadness and pain are now imminent for her. She’ll need to fight her own battles and deal with the challenges of big kid-dom beyond the safe cocoon of preschool. I guess I’m having trouble thinking about all the amazing things in store for her at the same time because I think I’m seeing it from her eyes, and it all seems so, well, BIG.

When we leave her every morning in class, the panic in her eyes seems to lessen each day. Maybe its more of an awareness than a panic — she seems to know that she’s in a new and somewhat uncomfortable situation where people are expecting her to be more self sufficient. We get very little out of her when she comes back in the afternoon after a full day, save for some worksheets practicing letters and notices about a library card and ordering Highlights magazine. I know she’s processing, and can see that she’s proud of her new status as a big kid. Every time another parent asks how its going, I’m forced to say its “going well,” and yet I feel a bit vague on the whole thing. That must be the realization once again, that Control is an illusion.

9/11 makes me feel vulnerable as a mom

My daughter started kindergarten this past week, but its me that’s gone back to school, and it’s 1977.

I watched Z. get ready for her first day, clutching her new purple quilted pencil case, and it shocked me how the memories flooded in. Suddenly, I’m four going on five, getting ready for my end of summer birthday. I’m wearing a paisley dress I obsessed over, the feel of the banana seat bicycle I first learned to ride beneath my bum. I remember how I looked myself dead in the eye in my parents’ full-length mirror, singing songs from day camp into a brush, mimicking how I saw older girls and women behave. I see Z. do dances in front of her shows on TV, hear her using intonations that I can tell she’s heard from other, likely older girls – the not so cute “Mommmmmm (MAH!)” and that’s “dis(GUST)ing!” I distinctly remember hearing my own voice say phrases like that – thinking I sounded so cool and mature.

I am enjoying my daughter more than I ever have. She is bursting with energy and excitement. Every day is filled with discovery and hilarious conversations. It hurts my heart to watch her growing up and away from me, but I feel so close to her right now, as I remember what it felt like to be her age. I have scattered memories of early childhood but Kindergarten is the moment true memory is sparked. I vividly recall my teacher, Mrs. Lockett. My white fluffy bathmat with pink, blue and yellow flecks that I took naps on. Having an accident at school and having a little plastic bin with extra clothes to change back into. The way strep throat felt.

Last night I was reading Where the Sidewalk Ends to Z. I was reliving my own confusion at some of the things I didn’t understand in those dark and subversive poems – trying to wrap my head around Shel Silverstein’s crazy and specific universe. And as we read and she melted into me, I kept swallowing the lump of pride and sadness and purity of experience. It’s the same way I felt as she shyly sat down at her Kindergarten table last week. It was like watching a really manipulative television commercial for Life Insurance, one with indie music and the mom watching the kid walk into her first day of school with backpack on both shoulders from behind – only it was actually happening.

I’ve also been thinking about how I felt a few weeks ago during the run up to Hurricane Irene. We live right in the evacuation zone in Brooklyn and had to make a decision the day before about whether to leave our building prior to the storm in case we lost power. We have another kid who is just a baby, and it felt a little too risky to stay in place, so we schlepped our pack-n-play and air mattresses and crap over to my brother in laws, also in Brooklyn but on higher ground. There I spent the night restlessly obsessing that a tree would crash through the window and kill us all.

I had many emotions during the 24 hours of the storm: fear, annoyance at the inconvenience, dread of the unknown. But I think the most poignant part of the experience was that I didn’t want to have to be the adult making the decisions about how to protect my completely helpless children. I didn’t want to be making copies of our important documents and sealing them in a Ziploc. I didn’t want to scour the stores for D batteries. I wanted to be the kid listening to what someone else told me to do.

Today is 9/11, so of course it is a moment to recognize ourselves as vulnerable souls trying to move forward through the scary and unforeseen things that continue to plague us. I am 39 years old and I have all the trappings of an adult, but sometimes I wish I could cuddle into my own mom and she could just tell me the right thing to do. Of course I now know, she had no idea what she was doing, either, when she read to me and tried to teach me how to behave in the world.

Millions before us have had children, raised them and let them go. But if you take a second to think about how scary and random life can be, it can bring you back to feeling like a five-year-old, standing on the steps of your big new school, clutching your purple quilted pencil case.

welcome to mommy land. control freaks, stay out!

Now that I’m deep in mommy land, I don’t often think about my pregnancies. When I see someone in their ninth month in August, still commuting to work, I’m glad I’m not them. All those weird pains and the no drinking and worrying about mercury in fish and the baby’s body parts. Now I can’t even remember the name of that major test with the needle you do at 20 weeks to check for severe chromosomal disorders. At the time it was the biggest deal in the world. Will I have it or not? Is the risk of miscarriage worth it? What will I do if they find something bad? It seemed like every week of my pregnancy was fraught with some stressful choice to make.

On the other hand, it’s such a simple and poignant time, when you can superimpose expectations on your swollen profile. You see visions of your family camping under the stars, writing a novel together, going on safari – who knows what movie or commercial these images came from, or if you even like camping! But, more immediately, you can obsess about the water birth you want, or your nursery being a temple of gender-neutral organic purity. And if all those choices seem so crucial at that moment, it’s because in the back of your mind you likely realize that control is gone, forever. Not that it was ever there to begin with. But every mom-to-be has the moment where she is crushed by things not going the way she researched and planned and along with that comes the realization that research and planning just aren’t what they used to be.

For some, it happens during the actual birth, when so many don’t end up getting the experience they desire. For others, it’s breastfeeding. Or being blue instead of euphoric after the baby arrives. Or feeling like yourself again (whatever that even means!).

And that’s why I find NPR’s Baby Project, a blog that follows nine pregnant women who will be giving birth this summer, to be so moving. The women range in age and background in a diverse-ish NPR kind of way, and its lovely to read what they think about birth plans, baby names and their new status as parents. No matter how different their circumstances are, they are united in this moment, this time ‘Before Baby.’ It’s pure. Sure, there is worry and stress and expectation when you’re pregnant, but really, there’s nothing you can actually do. The road is in front of you, and you’re not getting out of that car now.

As the Baby Project moms continue to give birth in the next few weeks, only some of them so far have gotten what they expected from their birth experiences. One mom went very early and almost died from blood loss. Another didn’t get to have the baby at home as she planned, but made it through her hospital birth without the epidural, which was important to her because she felt she was supposed to be the home birth “poster child” for the group. There will be triumphs and wonderful surprises in these stories, but for so many it will likely be different from what was planned.

Maybe it’s a pothead thing to say, but when I was pregnant I would envision strangers on the subway as babies. I’d look at people, and see only super tough looking doo-ragged ganstra rap baby, or middle manager suburban baby or skinny 20-something hipster person baby. It just kept hitting home that we were all freaking babies at one time, and that all of our parents had made it, they had gotten through it, and now we were all adults, and some of us were ready to jump on board and try our own hands at it. Circle of life, blah blah blah. But it calmed me somehow, and when it wasn’t making me crack up inside, it made me feel okay about having no control over my life anymore.

And so for these women who have invited us into the moments Before Baby, I thank them for their time and energy and wish them all the best. And I encourage them to keep writing and trying to understand what happens After Baby. Because we can certainly use all the thoughtfulness, insight and humor we can get here on the other side.

musings on a past life, pre-kids

I have these moments of intense nostalgia, usually triggered by one of my senses. A summer camp smell, certain songs by Phish, or a glimpse of The Breakfast Club on cable can recall a time and a place when I was a different person. So pure in their ability to create longing for a past life, these moments feel like the impetus for an artistic epiphany or something – like I’m supposed to do something tangible with these powerful memories. But I can’t paint or sculpt or write a song or make a film. I wish I knew how. Or had the time.

Recently I was waiting for my husband to meet me in Chelsea for a friend’s art opening. It was a Thursday, late afternoon, early summer, and the kids were home in Brooklyn with a sitter. I planned to walk around and check out some galleries, since I never do that kind of aimless cultural wandering anymore, but I was thirsty and ducked into an Irish pub instead. I sat at the bar and drank two beers and got kind of buzzed as the place started to fill with people. As I listened to conversations around me, couples and clusters of friends having their first drinks of the night, getting ready to go to a show, a party, a restaurant, I felt a pang of envy for my younger self. There was a time where I regularly sat in bars like this one, alone, sipping a whiskey, reading a magazine and waiting for a friend or a boyfriend. There was nothing this twenty-something unencumbered self had to accomplish, short of getting to my job and doing my laundry. Go to the gym, maybe.

A night like this — the first warm one of summer — would be languid, anticipatory, pulsing with potential. Maybe I’d meet someone hilarious or make out with a stranger. New York, and the world, was open to me. I didn’t know where I would be in ten years. Looking back now, my only anxiety was: who and where do I want to be and how in the hell do I get there?

I wouldn’t have guilt about leaving the kids. Or worry about ruffling a babysitter’s feelings by staying out too late. Or wasting money on a stupid night out. Wondering if I bicker too much with my husband. Or if my kids will be as lucky as I was to enjoy a mostly happy childhood.

I likely know where I’ll be for the next ten years, and most days I feel incredibly lucky. But now I have the worry of staying lucky, not screwing up. Being an example. Keeping my marriage strong. Being a good mom. Trying to enjoy my blessings without the crushing anxiety that can go along with having them. Because at a certain point all that languid, pulsing-with-potential business begins to get tired, and you start looking for the next thing, which begets the next, and the next thing you know you have a mortgage, two kids and four kinds of insurance (health, life, condominium, auto).

So sitting in a bar every once in a while is a definitely a good thing. It’s just a very different thing if you don’t get to do it with regularity.