Literature made me do it #SOL23 9/31

Look. I’ve slept through my alarm, so my husband has to wake me up, and this morning’s shower is non-negotiable, so in I go even though I am already running late. As I wash my hair I mentally review my closet and select the navy and white sundress even though it is March and still cold because I know I can layer the light gray cardigan over top and no one will be any the wiser.

I am out of the shower, face cream on, hair combed, mascara on and down the stairs for breakfast in under five minutes. Andre has made me a smoothie – he really is the best – but I have to wait for the water to heat for tea. Breathe. Crossword. The water boils and I pour it over the tea, gulp a little more smoothie, run up the stairs to wake the boys then back down the stairs to stop the tea steeping then back up the stairs to finish getting ready.

Black leggings are obviously a no – the dress is navy. I dig for gray leggings. Nope. The only available tights are also black. I search again for the gray leggings while my brain again mentally scans my closet. Ah, there are the leggings! I dry my hair then brush my teeth, wishing – not for the first time – that I were ambidextrous, a skill I imagine using mostly to do things like dry my hair and brush my teeth at the same time. Superpowers, I think, would be wasted on me.

Ok. Ready. Just socks.

Socks.

What the heck kind of socks am I going to wear with gray leggings and a navy dress? Gray. I need gray. There are no gray socks in the drawer. I have white – that’s a no – brown, black. I stare at the socks. In the caverns of my mind I hear my stepsister, Jamie, saying, “I’d go with the _______ pair. ______ goes with everything.” I have no idea whether she said “brown” or “black.” ARGH.

Um… Ok, focus on shoes instead. Which shoes will I wear? I slip on a brown pair, then catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror- nope. I grab a navy pair – but with which socks? Precious seconds slip by. Andre walks into the bedroom and stares at me, barefoot, with multiple pairs of socks on the bed and several pair of shoes on the floor. He looks perplexed. “What are you doing?” I explain my conundrum and he suggests solving it with brown boots. Perfect! I zip them up. Not perfect. They look…wrong.

My carpool buddy will be here any minute. I have not had any tea. I need to be ready about three minutes ago. I still haven’t made my lunch. I stare at the sock drawer as if gray socks might magically appear. I remember that I threw out my last pair a few weeks ago – holes. My carpool buddy arrives downstairs. Suddenly, the solution is obvious: Shakespeare socks. I’m an English teacher! Sure, they don’t match, but they say “To be or not to be” so I can claim literature and no one will be the wiser. Precisely no shoes (probably in the world) go with a navy dress, dark gray leggings and blue-ish Hamlet socks with white skulls and green crowns, so I throw on some navy slides, rush down the stairs, toss a bit of tea down my throat, grab my lunch and run out the door.

No one commented all day long, but I’m pretty sure it was one of the more unusual outfits I have worn in a while. Whatever. March Break starts in under 24 hours. And tomorrow I’m wearing jeans.

Not a soccer mom #SOL23 6/31

Confession: I am a terrible soccer mom. I was a little shocked to discover this about myself, but it’s true nonetheless. I didn’t start out this way. I played soccer growing up. My dad coached; my mom watched; my sisters played – it was a family thing. So, when the kids were little, I dutifully signed them up for soccer and volunteered to help coach their teams, but eventually, I realized that I was more interested in the game than they were. Evidence:

Yes, that is my (younger) child. Yes, he is *inside* the ball bag. No, he did not want to play.

So, the kids stopped playing on teams and I stopped coaching. Life went on.

Both kids are pretty athletic (as I am not), and my older child never stopped playing the game with buddies, but he didn’t join a team again until this year. Then, he made the high school team, too. Suddenly, I have an app on my phone and there are uniforms and practices and games and tournaments and so so many emails. I know that this is part and parcel of youth sports, but it turns out, I’m a terrible soccer mom. Evidence:

I ignore a lot of the emails.

The app made me crazy, too, so I made my partner download it.

Which means I really should read the emails.

We are often late to practice. Sometimes it is my fault.

I do not know the names of all the boys on the team. (In fairness to me, my child does not like it when I ask him things like the names of the boys on the team, so I stopped.)

I definitely do not know the parents of the boys on the team.

I often take walks during the outdoor games.

I often do crosswords during the indoor games.

I accidentally missed today’s semi-final because I was walking (In my defense, my son is injured and was not playing AND I had been told the game was starting later AND I didn’t know that the playoff games were shorter. Which I probably should have known. But whatever.)

The truth is that I’m a little surprised that I don’t want to be more involved, but I don’t. Maybe it’s because he didn’t play for so long or because when he started again this year, he asked me not to watch while he got used to playing again. Mostly, though, it’s because it’s his thing, not mine. One way or another, I’m not really a soccer mom, and I’m making my peace with that.

Video Game Poetry #SOL23 4/31

I have spent much of the morning in the same room as Mr 12, who is deep in a video game with a bunch of his friends. At first I was annoyed – it’s hard to write with someone talking loudly right by me – then inspiration struck: somewhere on Twitter, people are turning their bedmate’s sleep talking into Insta-style poetry. Here, very lightly edited, is the poetry of 12-year-old gamers. (Apologies for the curse-words. I promise he mostly curses in video-game play.)

Try to remember

Last night, I went into Mr. 12’s bedroom to give him a kiss goodnight and found this

That is a trash can balanced on the edge of his bed. Naturally, I asked him if he wanted me to put it on the floor. “No!” he sat up. “It’s for my memory.”

Pardon? I must have looked at him funny because he answered my unspoken question.

“You know, like Dad does.”

I was still confused. As far as I know, my partner has never placed a plastic garbage can precariously close to the edge of our bed in honour of his memory.

“Like the clothespin.”

That little tidbit was no help at all. I wondered if perhaps he was sleep-talking.

He sighed, “You know how Dad does weird things so he doesn’t forget something else? This is to remind me that I owe D money and I have to bring it tomorrow.”

Ah-ha! Andre has recently been using a memory technique where he does one thing to help him remember to do another. So we have a blue clothespin on our dishwasher detergent to remind him to… something. He’s also trying to create new habits by placing something we want to remember near something we already use. So, this is happening in our kitchen

And, while parents hear the platitude that “your children are watching you” so often that it is banal, I realized that somehow I had begun to think that my preteen and teen were, in fact, no longer watching us at all. Turns out, I was wrong in the best of ways.

But I still don’t know what the clothespin helps us remember.

Who is Charlie?

Lately I’ve been having trouble getting to sleep. I finish reading, turn off my light and close my eyes… then some rebellious part of my brain hears “PARTY!” and gleefully begins to list all of the things I need to do. These wild worry-happy neurons are willing to let pretty much anything in:

things I should have completed but haven’t
things I need to do for school
things I need to do for my family
things I need to do in the morning
things I need to do before I die
things I don’t really need to do but, you know, I might as well add to the list

Any self-respecting 50-year-old working-parent-brain knows how to handle an unplanned fret-festival: paper. I live by the mantra on the paper is out of my head, and I keep a pencil and post-it notes next to my bed. I like using the little ones because they imply that my lists are somehow manageable. I also like to pretend that I won’t fill up three or four or five…

Things usually look more manageable in the morning, even if sticky notes litter the cover of my book. But Monday, I woke up to this:

Um, y’all… I don’t know anyone named Charlie. And who is the questionable person who goes with Charlie? What activities do they need? Was I planning them? Do I need to plan them? I have no idea.

I spent Monday dutifully crossing off most of the things on this list, but Charlie lingers. What does Charlie need? Who is Charlie? If I didn’t know better, I’d say that my list-making brain was playing a practical joke on me. I suppose the only solution is to go upstairs and read for a while and see what I put on tonight’s list… Maybe I’ll wake up with things for Charlie to do.

All Hallow’s Morn

Andre calls up the stairs, “Honey, have you seen the raven?”

“It’s in the basement,” I holler back.

“I’ve checked there. Surely we didn’t give it away. That’s not our style.” He keeps muttering as he goes back to making biscuits.

I put the finishing touches on my mascara and check on the “Midnight black” eyeliner that now forms dark circles around my eyes, then confirm, “There is no way we gave away the raven. I’ll look when I get down.”

In the bedroom, I slide into the old-fashioned gray dress that spends most of its life in a heap at the bottom of the closet. Because of the way it’s made – sleeves that button on, a heavy hood in the back – it regularly slips off of its hanger and I rarely notice until Halloween comes around again. The thick material doesn’t wrinkle much, and I don’t think it would matter anyway. I pull my hair back into a short ponytail and head down to the kitchen.

“Are you sure the witch hat is in the box?” I ask. “I only saw the wig.”

“It’s there,” he assures me, “but it might need a little dusting.”

To the basement, to hunt for a raven and a witch hat. By the time I’m back in the kitchen, both boys are downstairs.

“Do you have the permission form?”

“Yeah, did you see the viking helmet?”

“Oh, I couldn’t find the raven, either. Mr. 12, any chance the raven ended up in your room?”

His mouth stuffed with half a biscuit, Mr. 12 shakes his head.

“What are you wearing?” I ask him.

He counters, “Did you find the screaming mask?”

“No, all I could scare up was a scythe. You could use a graduation robe for the gown.”

He ponders for approximately one second. “Nah. I guess I’ll do the lion for school,” he says, “but I’m definitely going as the dinosaur tonight.”

I nod, and put on my wig.

Mr. 14 looks up between biscuit number two and 3. “Weren’t you a witch last year?”

“She’s always a witch,” says Mr. 12, then he giggles.

“Has anyone seen the raven?” Andre is still hopeful, but if that raven is in the house, it’s really well-hidden.

“Dad, give it up,” says Mr. 14.

“Fine, then I get the Viking helmet,” Andre retorts.

“No way!” Mr. 14 gulps down his drink and moves towards his backpack.

“A hat is not a costume! And don’t forget the permission form!” I call after him.

I finish breakfast and put on my chunky witch shoes. I find the hat and shove it onto my head over my wig, forgetting that it won’t fit into the car and I’m just going to have to take it off again. I grab my bags and get ready to go. At the door I look back to say goodbye. The viking is gone. The lion is wiping away biscuit crumbs. No one has found the raven. And the permission form is still on the table, waiting.

Happy Halloween!

First Impressions

What he likes best, my 12 year old, is comfortable clothes. What he likes are sweatpants and t-shirts, sneakers and worn socks. He likes things that are broken in, soft, slouchy.

Because of this, he spent the summer showing more and more of his ankles as his legs grew and his pants didn’t. He spent the summer with gaping holes at his knees and growing holes in his t-shirts. He spent the summer in stained, ratty clothes – familiar and freeing.

But September loomed and the week before school started, his dad insisted on clothing culling. Both boys dragged clothes from various drawers and dark corners and piled them up in giant heaps in the middle of the floor. Sizes were checked. Those things that were barely holding together were consigned to the rag pile. Items that were still in good shape but nonetheless did not meet individual style standards – such as they are – were gifted to the neighbors’ kids. Everyone agreed that having pants with intact knees and shirts without stains was a desirable goal.

Or so we thought.

On the first day of school, Mr. 12 appeared in the kitchen wearing perfectly respectable sweatpants (if there is such a thing) and a beloved but besmirched t-shirt. I pointed out the stain and asked if he would change it, just to humour me. He agreed. Moments later he returned… wearing a shirt dotted with several small holes. I maintained my composure but suggested that this shirt, too, should be changed. Mr. 12 was less enthusiastic about my second request.

At this point, his dad, somewhat chagrined, I think, by the reappearance of these shirts that he had assured me were gone, chimed in. “Have you ever heard the saying ‘you never get a second chance to make a first impression’?” Mr. 12 had not, and he agreed to change one more time.

And that was the end of that.

Just kidding.

The next day, I only got a passing glance at my child as I scrambled out the door on my own way to work. His dad didn’t look too carefully either. This explains why we only noticed his less-than-new shirt (ok, it had holes. again) after the school day was firmly over. I shook my head and started to explain our “your shirts shouldn’t have stains or holes” theory – the simple idea that seems to be anathema to him. He listened patiently, then shook his head with mock sadness. “It’s ok,” he reassured us. “After all, I can’t make a first impression twice.” He skipped away, laughing.

Since then I’ve gone back to letting him dress however he likes.

Watching and worrying

“Hey,” I say, all faux-casual-like, leaning against the doorframe that leads into the tv room. Two lanky fourteen-year-old boys look up from the couch where they loll contentedly. Across the room, the twelve-year-old glances away from his computer to see what’s happening. “So, um,” I realize that my casual act is not fooling anyone, but I press on, “have you heard of Andrew Tate?”

I can practically hear their eyes roll. And though I would not have said it was possible, they relax further back into the couch, bodies stretching. They are already done with this conversation I have just started. My oldest glances up languidly, “Yeah. Why?”

“Well, um…” I don’t know what to say. Maybe I thought they weren’t watching Andrew Tate? Or that somehow they wouldn’t know who he was. I hesitate. I want to say, please tell me you are not watching videos made by a misogynistic racist jerk, but that seems like overkill.

My fourteen year old gives me a withering look and says, “Mom, if you use the internet, you know who Andrew Tate is.” I do not tell him that I did not, in fact, know who Andrew Tate was until relatively recently.

“Do you watch him?” I ask. By now the 14 year old friend is joining the conversation. He smirks while my son sighs.

“MOM! It’s like, you can’t not watch him. If you watch videos his videos are there. He doesn’t even post them himself. He gets other guys to post them. They’re just there.”

The friend concurs, “Yeah, they’re kind of everywhere. You can’t avoid them.”

I take this in. So, yes, they watch Andrew Tate. Now what? “So, um, what do you think of him?”

The boys have had enough of my beating around the bush. They tell me that he’s obviously a racist and a jerk. They can’t quite come up with the word misogynist, but they know that what he says about women is not good. They watch his videos anyway and insist that they are not actually influenced. “We know what he’s doing,” they assure me.

I am not comforted, at least not right away. I don’t like this, my boys out in the wilds of the internet listening to jerks who say hateful things to preteen and early teenage boys.

I try to broach the topic again later, but my kids shut me down. “MOM! Just… stop worrying about this.” I tell them that what we consume affects what we think. They are stoic. I suggest that their brains are wasting energy on not believing this. They disagree. Finally, I let it drop.

The next day at dinner, my older son tells us that Andrew Tate has been banned from several social media platforms. We talk about whether or not other platforms should ban him. Mr. 14 says no. “If he hasn’t violated their terms, they should leave him up there. If they don’t want him there, they should change the rules.” My husband tries to push his thinking, to encourage him to consider when something should be banned. Mr. 14 is nonplussed. “You can ban what you want, but it’s not like it goes away.”

Dang. We continue the conversation, but he doesn’t budge.

For a week, they tease me with information about Andrew Tate. They tell me about his money and his cars. I respond by sharing the idea of the Bechdel test, by pointing out places where we encounter systemic inequities in our daily lives – should the prime minister of Finland be censured for partying? (Mr. 14’s take: “Probably most people who run countries shouldn’t really party.”) Should a female news anchor be fired when she lets her hair go gray? (He says, “I don’t think TV is a good choice of careers if you think they don’t care when you get old. They do.”) For a week, I worry that I should do *something*, although short of banning the internet, I’m not sure exactly what.

Several days into this, one of the boys yells, “Hey Mom, come quick! It’s another Andrew Tate video.” He bursts into hysterical laughter. And I start to get it. To them, Andrew Tate is a joke – he’s a show, and a stupid one at that. My kids are internet skeptics, completely unphased by the idiotic behaviour that shows up on their screens. They don’t believe that Tate has all those cars or even all those fans. They see him for what he is – a flash in the pan who behaves badly to get attention. They watch him when he shows up in their feeds, but largely to mock him with their friends.

So maybe what I was worried about is not quite the right thing. I can’t prevent my children from seeing things on the internet; there aren’t enough parental controls to stop the world from coming in. My boys aren’t any less at risk than other kids, but their generation has a different relationship with the internet than mine does. We’re going to have to negotiate this together, and in the meantime, I think the kids are alright.

Uprooting

After three weeks away and an 18-hour drive home, the kids and I pulled into the driveway. I unlocked the doors and opened the back hatch, handing bundles to the boys as they made their way inside. There, in the waning light, I saw several dandelion plants nearly as tall as the 11 year old dragging a suitcase up the front steps. Long green blades of grass – not grass I had planted – poked up between the paving stones and around the azaleas, visibly proud of how quickly and well it had grown. And even the enthusiastic grass had nothing on the tomatoes: they had grown exuberantly, abundantly, outrageously, and then, exhausted, had laid their heavy branches down on the sidewalk, creating a thick verdant obstacle course for passersby. The plants were out of control.

I paused, arms laden with the miscellaneous car detritus that appears at the end of a long road trip, and shook my head slowly – as if I could somehow reconcile this sight with Andre’s text from last night: “I did some trimming of the garden so you wouldn’t be totally horrified, but you will still want to get out there to rip stuff up.”

I was, in fact, totally horrified.

As I stood, rooted to the spot, our neighbor Mike came over to welcome us home. I sputtered something about giant dandelions and he laughed, “Yeah, Andre didn’t get a lot of gardening done while he was home*.” Mike had watered the plants while we were away, and he’d kept at it even once Andre came home because Andre had to work. Now, together, we stared at the wild tangle that occupied the space previously known as the front yard.

“Girl,” said Mike, “get in there and get some sleep. We can deal with this tomorrow. I’ll help with the tomatoes.”

Saturday arrived, hot and humid. I rummaged through the shed and found stakes, twine, a small garden fork and a large yard waste bag. The morning was for pulling things. Out came the dandelions (really sow thistle), carefully culled so that their fluff didn’t spread seeds everywhere. Up came the grass – and more grass and more grass and many little bulbs. What was this stuff? I wiped the sweat from my forehead and checked my phone: nutgrass? nutsedge? Who cares? I ripped it out ruthlessly.

I paused for a long walk and a short lunch. The afternoon heat was more than I could handle, even with water, but after dinner Mike showed up, as promised. We staked one tomato plant after another, slowly clearing the sidewalk as we discovered dozens of green orbs hidden in the leaves. For a while he tied and I weeded. Then he weeded a little, too. Then I weeded some more. By the time the sun was setting, we had overfilled the yard waste bag and were both happily dripping with sweat. I wiped a dirty hand across my face, stood up and stretched, high and long.

“It looks good,” I declared.
“That it does,” he agreed.
“I’ve got more to do tomorrow.”
“Yes, you do. It’s a good job done for today, though.”

We surveyed the yard – tomatoes upright, paving stones visible, azaleas able to breathe – and said goodnight. I went inside and washed off the dirt, then fell asleep knowing that all that uprooting really meant coming home.

*To be clear, the house was immaculate and he’d left cold beer in the fridge and lovely treats for us to discover, so I’m not complaining. Not everyone is a gardener.

A nighttime visitor

I was reading Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane. It isn’t a properly scary book – not like scary movies, anyway – though I suppose I wouldn’t know since I don’t watch scary movies – but it is vaguely terrifying. It’s about being a child and, well, let’s call it “menacing”: no jump scares; lots of tense terror. Whatever it was, I could not put it down because I was too afraid to stop reading.

Sometime after midnight, I gave myself a stern talking to – I was a grown woman with children for heaven’s sake. I gave myself a little leeway since my husband was away on a trip, leaving me alone in our bed, but my visiting in-laws were asleep in the guest room right next to my room. They would expect me to wake up tomorrow at a normal hour, and I needed to get some sleep.

I turned another page. And another. I could not look away from the darkness that wormed its way out of the book and into my mind. Eventually, my eyes drooped closed. I had just enough consciousness left to reach up and turn off the reading light.

As my mind slipped fretfully towards slumber, the pocket door that led into our bedroom scraped open. My eyes flew open and the rest of my body shut down: I could no more move than scream. A tall, pale figure came slowly into view, almost stumbled – just there! – hovered for a moment, then turned and glided away, scraping the door closed as it left.

My lips had gone numb; so had my fingertips. I remained paralyzed in the bed, listening for some indication that what I had just seen was real, afraid that what I’d just seen was real. After seconds, minutes, hours had passed, I raised a trembling hand to the chain above my head and pulled. The light came on, though it now seemed nearly powerless against the dark. My hand groped towards the bedside table. I found the book and opened it again.

I read all the way to the end. I cannot remember when I was finally able to sleep, when the characters were as safe as they were going to be, when pure exhaustion overtook my fear.

I stumbled down to the kitchen the next morning. Everyone was chipper, everything was bright: Grandpa Jim’s beard practically glowed white; Grandma Shirley hummed and sang while she made breakfast. Hollow-eyed, I watched, wondering if I should say anything about last night’s visitation. Would they believe me? Had I imagined it?

As we settled in to eat, Grandpa Jim started to talk, “A funny thing happened to me last night.” My head snapped up; my sense were wildly alert. Had he seen it, too? “I got up to go to the bathroom, got turned around and walked right into your bedroom before I realized it. I’m just glad I didn’t wake you up.” He returned to his granola and I stared at him for a full minute before I burst into hysterical laughter.

Not a ghost; just a grandpa.

I’ve never forgotten the book. You could do worse than to read The Ocean at the End of Lane as Halloween approaches – or anytime, really.

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