For a while there, I was really liking growing things. My dad and I had a shared garden plot behind our houses where we grew all kinds of veggies (promptly eaten by groundhogs) and a lavish berry patch featuring beautiful golden raspberries (which have now been entirely taken over by the local black-caps); we dug and planted squash seeds and baby strawberry plants and rows of spinach and kale (neither of which were willing to put up with the rocks and the unpredictable weather); he used to run a giant hose across two properties to sit out in the back on a plastic chair to water the whole of it. There were years we had 30 tomato plants in pots between us, and I prided myself on how the girls would ride by on tricycles, grabbing juicy little fruits in their swift little fists to snack on mid-play, coming in with berry and tomato stains down the front of their shirts. We grew brocolli in a patch by the driveway (now the milkweed colony) and they used to eat the flowers; its contemporaries were a sweet bunch of chives gifted from a friend and a radish plant little-E brought home from school, all of which have long since faded into the soil. This year, the tomatoes sucked. We bought one of the basket-plants we’ve put up for years, and it was a sad and straggly mess all season, its fruit already unappetizingly squishy before it was even ripe. I put only six tomatoes in pots along the side of the house in June, where I had twelve a couple of years ago; four of them died immediately and the other two have just stood there all season, water, sun and fertilizer bedamned, not growing. (One of them finally has its first green tomato, about the size of a dime, and it’s Labor Day. For heaven’s sake.)
Shaking my head at this gradual collapse, I’m telling myself now not to do it next year: not to even dig into the earth to plant things this upcoming busy spring, because they aren’t going to grow and nobody’s going to take care of them. (I planted 6 peas in a pot by the deck-steps, and gave them a trellis because I thought they were climbing peas. They weren’t. But they dutifully sprouted and even grew nice purple beans, which then nobody ate, because there were never enough at a time to bother with. Maybe I’ll harvest them dry off the vine and put in a bigger patch next year just to get enough beans for one or two meals… but probably I really shouldn’t!) But it’s hard to accept this wisdom: we live in a society that makes more more more the refrain of every song it sings (and tells us that stepping back = quitting and quitting = failing). We’re all busy taking on more at work, taking up more hobbies, trying to find more time to spend with our friends and families, to write more, to read more, to exercise more, to cook from scratch more, and that doesn’t math. Some thing has to be made less in order to make room for every more. Every time.
So here’s what I’m trying to put into my head as today’s take: I don’t have to say I “usedto like growing things” or I “used to garden” like I’m a quitter who has failed at a fundamental human skill. And I don’t have to keep trying every spring, in frenetic little April bursts (too soon anyway, here), in order to keep from being a quitter.
There was a time in my life, when the kids were smaller and my dad was stronger, when I could do more with a garden than I can now (which still wasn’t much, let’s be honest: he did 9/10ths of the gardening, and that’s a good part of why my 1/10th nowadays doesn’t amount to much… but it’s also more like a 30th than even the 10th it used to be!). If I’m lucky, there will be times in my life to come when I have time again for gardens and I can grow things again. But this next few years, this “season” of my life when I teach at 2 colleges, have a partner who’s also a teacher, and have a kid each in elementary school, middle school, and high school, 2 of them doing theater, 1 doing a winter sport and holding down a part-time job he can’t drive himself to, one of them doing a year-round sport… It’s okay if this isn’t the season for gardening.
The older the kids get, the bigger their dreams and the more expensive their activities, both in terms of time and money, the latter of which which leads to lifestyle changes like me taking on a second MAIN job (bumping the side-hustles down to positions 3 and 4) and having much less time (especially as compounded by the first–I’m looking at you, 4-hours-a-week-of-gymnastics and late-evening mid-week basketball games) to do (1) job #1, (2) shopping and cooking, (3) general house stuff, (4) the side-hustles in question & (5) reading books for me! What it won’t bump: reading to the girls at bedtime, even if one of them is in middle school now and it’s patently ridiculous that “bedtime” still takes 1-2 hours every night.
Bedtime is when they talk to me. And stories are the fabric out of which are woven human souls. So. Let the dog-hair pile and stick another box of fish-sticks in the freezer for tomorrow’s dinner, because some things are non-negotiable.
When I start a piece of writing but have to go look something up to make sure of a detail before I can finish it, I will then get derailed 47 times and never end up doing so.
When I have a half-finished piece of writing in the queue, feeling like I need to finish that first gets in the way of me writing down any of the other things I have to say along the way.
I don’t even remember what the detail was that I let everything else be derailed by.
Clearly, I need to practice getting out of my own way.
After a 7:45am appointment for routine bloodwork wrapped up at 7:40 (woo!), I stopped at the coffee kiosk at the entrance to the medical center to finally caffeinate my headache, working in quiet consort to fill and doctor the contents of my paper cup while the young woman running the place filled pots and changed filters and got her day going too. When I came up to her register to pay, and she gave me the total ($3.23), I said “Ooh, I might be able to pay for that with actual money” and dug into my wallet. “Great,” she said, as I counted out three dollars and then unzipped the change pocket. “I needed the ones,” she added, and then I replied “Well, here’s another then, because I thought I might have the change too, but I don’t.” “No problem,” she said merrily, and because I’m a dork, I kept talking. “When you go places with kids, you might see a fountain, and if there’s a fountain, they’re going to throw in all of your change.” “Oh, of course,” she agreed. “I mean, what can you do?” “Fountains are sacrosanct,” I said sagely, like the bookish old person I obviously am, and we smiled as I filled up the change pocket for future possible fountains (or, more usually, those whirlpool ramps nowadays, or a bouncy ball out of a vending machine that everyone desperately has to have and then doesn’t actually play with and just ends up joining the collection at the bottom of my purse).
As I left, I was a little jealous of her cheerful morning: a steady stream of people to caffeinate while she works for a friendly family business; likewise, the chatty receptionists at the office desk swapping Advil packets and loving mock-insults: they all have somewhere to be every morning where they’re wanted and greeted and smiled at, and then they get to give people what they need and help them out and probably nobody screams “I hate you” at them with any regularity or moans like a dying cow when asked to read a chapter. But, still, even with my “babies” now heading into grades 4, 6, and 11, when I think about signing on to a “full time” job (in addition to the several part-time gigs I already juggle), the black pit of “but when the hell would I get anything DONE?!” yawns before me. And to take a “real” ENOUGH job that it could be instead of rather than in addition to would cost even more of the rapidly dwindling time we have left wherein they want my presence, aid, feedback, comfort–the things that lead to enough “love you too”s to balance out the “hate you”s, so I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing: tightrope juggling almost enough time with almost enough money with the overlapping demands of several almost-real jobs, so that I can stay almost as involved as I’d like to be while still giving them almost all of the things they really want and need (and almost none of the outlier wishes–but not QUITE none: there’s still a little room for miracles). And as has been well documented by the Mommy-blogger hoards, all that balancing is enough to almost completely erase whatever personhood I once constructed, but at the heart of that injustice is the reality that I almost don’t care; I was never half as interesting anyway as who they-three will turn out to be.
One of those stupid sponsored stories this morning led with “My baby said their first word at 5 months! And said ‘I love you’ by 11 months! I have followed these tips I found [somewhere] and you can too!”
And all I could think was, “ffs, why are you rushing THE BABIES?”
It’s bad enough when folks shove their older kids into sports and instruments and hobbies they’re only vaguely interested in and try to home-brew passion, strategizing college admission advantages for people who can’t even reliably find both of their sneakers at the same time on any given day, but doesn’t infancy feel like it ought to be inviolate? In the lives of kids with normal development curves, it’s the only time the parent can really only feed and follow–you can’t control a baby, and you can’t deliberately instruct or cajole or bribe a baby, so you have to sit the hell back and learn from the baby–that’s how people learn to parent in the first place.
And didn’t we figure out years ago that rushing kids into sport specializations burned out their muscles, that shoving them early into schools put them at a disadvantage, that the “best” kids in most school grades and most organized-by-year team sports are the oldest kids who’ve had the most time to grow?
Don’t you think there’s a reason babies soak up language slowly and thoughtfully over time and then start to shape it when they’re ready to?
Don’t you think that trying to speed up that process is only going to mean skipping over the necessary listening and sponging? Don’t you think workaround “tips” are just going to amount to teaching them to mimic earlier and listen less?
Parrots can be taught to mimic.
But we don’t want (I hope) baby parrots. Don’t we want to know what our kids actually think, themselves? With their human brains, not with mimicky bird-brains?
And don’t you think the last damn thing any of us need in a world that is increasingly politically, socially, and actually ON FIRE is a rising generation that’s any WORSE at listening?
Rather than (always the “rathers,” now, the infinite stream of excuses–to whom? To the judgments of past-selves, whose conditions allowed very different modes of being? To the imagined audience, also based entirely on past audiences, because there really isn’t much of a present one, and if there were, if anybody were really interested enough to invest in this, don’t you think, crazy woman, that they would be self-selecting into reading and therefore would have passed the point of deciding not to judge already?) needing major reasons to write Big Things (like tracking a household’s progression through zoom-schooling in a global pandemic, for example, or waiting to announce the next local catastrophe (bad enough, the distant ones, the quiet, grey ache in my heart whenever I think about banyan trees and canvases, Lahaina burning)), and rather than seeing the timid (and vaguely desperate) morning “doomscroll” (in lieu of and avoidance of and deep abhorance of the competing bias-junkets that call themselves “News” in 2023), how about tricking this old body, this pair of wrinkly hands that (let’s be honest) has always been wrinkly into writing by writing only little things–one a day, about whatever snags the mind as it crosses the feed; maybe we’ll find out what we think (and along the way, maybe discern rather that “we” is reflective of a confident inner royalty or just a slow unraveling of the idea of being a single self at any point in time).
Here’s a small thought about small thoughts, prompted only by the starting itself: what a fucking relief to just write words without having to find and frame the perfect image to lure the reader into noticing them.
I love photographs. I love to capture EVERYthing: the tiny shapes of leaves on weeds in sidewalk-cracks, the color of the sky, which, every minute, is different from the color of every other sky that’s ever been, every laugh that crosses my kids’ faces, every time a cat curls around herself like a nautilus shell, even sometimes (rarely) the dog. But it’s hard to write when the pictures have to–always–ALWAYS–be given primacy.
So here: have some words alone. Just as themselves. Wording merrily along, here if you want them, easily ignored if you don’t, white and black and nothing else at all.
After several months of the whole team being on campus (the menfolk started in-person on day 1, and the girls went in after giving the Lower School a few weeks to work out the bugs), our county is on “orange” and everyone is schooling from home this week.
Up and ready to go before the lessons even began, Tab enjoys a math game on her school iPad. Evanny is quick to get in on this fun and chooses a word search game. Caleb helps Evvy get something working on her machine. Tabitha tries to pay attention to her literacy lesson, but sixteen six-year-olds on one Zoom is HARD. Evanny squints at the tiny face of her friend reading aloud in the corner of the frame. Caleb participates in a class discussion. The girls take a mid-day break by creating an artificial night in their room so they can stay up late pretending to read in bed!Tab, looking thoroughly more disheveled by early afternoon than how she began the day, works dutifully on a few math problems. Evanny, also dutiful, skip-counting in a dot-to-dotCaleb’a self-selected rainy day PE: yoga!The girls’ version: leaping around to spell names and other favorite words on their alphabet floor. A Spanish assignment left lying on the couch
As of 1:30pm, first and third grade are finished for the day, while middle and high school are still finishing up. Getting to this point has taken breakfast, brunch-snack, lunch, 1 pot and 2 pods of coffee, and 7 cups of tea.
A little latte to start the day (perks of schooling from home!)Big mug for the big coffee drinker, grader of many tasks and leader of many meetings. Sometimes Mummy brings tea to drag you through your last afternoon meeting …And sometimes you enjoy your second cup while unwinding to a cake-decorating video before shifting gears from school to chores, snacks, piano practice, and too many episodes of Avatar: the Last Airbender.
This post was going to be titled “how to turn 8 during a pandemic,” but as we close out the day—or, really, enter the last lap of the four-day string (because we haven’t seen what Sue promised the girls yet, or had a birthday song from Lola)—we are missing a few of our favorite friends (and Lucy moved away, and Juliet doesn’t do birthdays, so it’s really just Maxine and Noelle), but everything else one might want to do as an 8-year-old new to the Earth, this little magic 8-ball got to do, and gleefully, pandemic or no pandemic, with masks in the photos as the only real tell.
Thursday between classes, Tabitha helps me make her sister’s requisitioned birthday pie: pumpkin with meringue
We started out with a birthday dinner two days out, because a scheduling snafu meant that Caleb wasn’t with us for her birthday like he’s always been before. And we couldn’t leave him out of the song and celebration of birthday dinner!
After school: Scootering with sissy while waiting for family to arrive, Evanny models the end of 7 for me. Evanny and both siblings together get to enjoy a family-traditional sushi dinner on the deck on a beautiful night…With their favorite American aunt and uncle (and canine cousin), sitting at their own socially distant table at the Deck Cafe…And this very huggable Papa, always ready to catch a wildly flailing child half in and half out of a hammock!Happy birthday pie!Feel free to admire how clever our plan was for handling candles but get bored before you hear me telling Caleb off for blowing on the pie and wrecking the plan. BIRTHDAY GIRL STABS THE NOMS!
Then it was Friday—still a school day, but a school day with a party-ish feel, as Ev’s gift from her grandmother had arrived a few days early, double-boxed with one for her sister too (to help support Lola’s resistance to participating in all gift traditions as well as to make sure the fun was shared), and “celebrate Evanny’s birthday” was on her daily lessons calendar.
Friday there was an early gift for both girls from Lola to open—LEGO friends sets with SO MANY PIECES that we built between half of our classes and hardly had time for lunch…But we DID manage lunch—and a lunch FaceTime call with Auntie Cathy, who dressed up as a birthday present herself, played “happy birthday” on the kazoo, stirred up the dogs into a wild bark-a-thon, and made lots of giggles. (We also called Lola to say thank you for the LEGOS, but that wasn’t nearly such a ridiculous affair.)Then Evanny’s class had a celebratory dance video that they all got to watch and dance to together, from home or desk, and Ms. Palmer said of course her sister could join! And then Mummy surprised her with a chocolate and whipped-cream mug-cake (while her classmates only got animal crackers saved up from lunch!)Deeeeeeeelicious
And then it was Saturday, the ACTUAL birthday day, when we hadn’t planned a party, just a sleepover within the pod, but then Daddy’s furniture-moving plans and his need for help from Joe turned into us having supervisory custody of the three next door for most of the day too—so it ended up LOOKING like quite a party after all (except without a second round of singing, because we never could get everyone together at the same time to do it!). The actual first words spoken were “she came, she came!” though, because some mother reminded 7-year-old Evanny that there was still a week-old tooth lying around downstairs and a month-old one in my jewelry box and she had dang well better get them under her pillow if she wanted visits from any coin-bearing faeries! “Mom, Daddy, the tooth fairy left me TWO coins! Because I left two teeth!” (See, eight isn’t THAT old…)
Birthday morning child WOOHOO (I mean, it’s sort of morning. We’ve already had tea and a chapter of Harry Potter and at least an hour of LEGO play…but finally Daddy was awake and had coffee so there could be PRESENTS!)Like most birthday joys, presents are best shared with one’s sisterNew roller skates! (Very well timed, since the old ones were starting to pinch those lovely toes!)Excited faces for this fun doodle book from Daddy!Sitting right down to read a new book to an eager onlooker, my new 8-year-old proves that she’s still an awesome big sister A morning visit to Papa’s is next—for more gifts AND yogurts from Trader Joe’s (they’re our favourite)Ta-da! I’m 8 today!
So who is Evanny at 8? Well, if she’s anything like Evanny at 7, she’s her two favorite Katy Perry songs all day long: a firework who loves to ROAR! Evanny is superheroes and comic books, sugar-treats and fairy wings, story-scraps in an even mix of new ideas and stubborn insistence on trying to match canon, jazz-hands with dance-videos and giggling at math-class games and curling up with a book and screaming on the trampoline and quietly drawing rainbows. She’s a excellent big sister 98% of the time, a way better average I’m sure than most sisters her age or maybe on Earth—when Tab gets in trouble, it’s usually Evanny who cries first, because a punished sister can’t be a playmate, and the prime directive for both is to ALWAYS play together. She’s also becoming a very good little sister. Caleb’s demands are changing as he’s growing up—8 is also his number this year, but a grade!—and she’s doing a fierce and steady job of working to rise to meet them. They still do imagination play together, but they’re also investing more together time into games, and their favorites are either cooperative or based on perception and ideas for their competitive elements—plain-old “I’m faster, I gotcha” games don’t interest any of them. And while he needles her constantly, calling her “insane” at least 3x a day, she takes it as daily practice in making like a duck: she shakes her long ponytail(s) and plows on with whatever she was saying, laughing even when she doesn’t get the joke, just to stay in the game. Staying in the game, after all, is kind of her superpower.
Evanny loves her friends—old and new—and adores her teachers, and loves her mum and dad, and loves her grandparents, and loves her critters, and loves her toys, and loves her artistic creations, and loves books, and loves the trampoline, and loves to sing and dance and run and leap and swing, and she loves anyone willing to do those things with her, which is why the neighbor girls are such an attraction—they follow so readily and let her ringlead to her heart’s content (and sometimes the discontent of her parents, because she still tends to get a little too drunk on the thrill of running the ring).
Mid-morning scooter crew, already sucking lollipops, called to breakfast (“Lily, put your mask on” was something I said a lot yesterday….)Birthday breakfast in the sunshine—what could be better? (Tabitha not sitting at her own table because there’s been a quarrel and she’s feeling left out would be better, but she’ll rally, time and time again throughout a long, sugar-filled day.)Maybe a mud room game of an animal guessing card game for five as a trampoline break?Tabitha gets tired of the mob after a while and comes in to help make cupcakes. Any time Mom lets you turn your borrowed iPad on, a dance party might crop right up to liven up your birthday—Evanny and Lexi were the only ones really into this plan, but they danced enough for the whole crew. Meanwhile, Lily plays with one bin of kinetic sand in the greenie, while, behind her, Ella and Tab are playing catch with a ball made from the other. Tabitha finds an interesting way to watch the video Evanny and Lexi are watchingSpinning the birthday girl to see how dizzy you can make her—the perfect task for three little sisters Pizzaaaaaaa (finally, FINALLY, for the love)Evanny-crinkle-face, age 8, wearing an oversized crown intended to be worn by a paper lantern, but why not—she’s certainly a shining light!
Evanny is still just as bad at sitting still as she was as an infant, although when a good story’s being told she can manage for a while, at least when utterly exhausted. But she would rather be riding a bike or a scooter or climbing a tree or a wall. Her favorite person is still her sister, but she still laughs the hardest at things—so many things, sometimes ANYTHING—her brother says or does. She’s starting to feel the flutters of the anxiety that besets the rest of us, and although most days she can laugh it off pretty quickly, she’s started picking at her perfect face and telling me she can’t help it, even though her skin is smooth as milk and there’s no way to peel off a down-strand or a freckle, but that self-aware, ironic little imp is still alive and kicking. And sometimes she still bites the mama in her own fierce little spasms of energy and love.
Oh, hi. Cupcake squad gathers next door for a long-awaited sugar Sugar approved! Ella, Lily, Evvy, Ellie, Lexi, and Tab pause to smile for the baker with the camera (& Brooks is behind me on his way to grab the last sweet on the table; he was delayed by some kerfuffle with his shoe.)Birthday bike squad is on the street. (Hey, Swayzes, put your masks on when you’re playing with the neighbors!)Free-for-all: seven wild creatures as the sun starts downWhen we finally dragged them in, there were MORE PRESENTS… Balloons to blow up and let fly around the room (Tabitha is helping), blanket-nests to arrange and stuffed animals to find and borrow,Erika prepares to release this orange demon to amuse the children, which it will totally do, by attacking her!A room full of soft pillows, and a kicking mermaid is only missing…ICE CREAM and a MOVIE …AND BALLOONS THAT GLOW IN THE DARK!
So it was a good day—and hopefully, knock-on-lots-of-wood-fully, the girls next door who couldn’t keep their too-lose masks on their silly faces aren’t right now asymptomatic carriers who have just given COVID to the pod! But the county is in good shape statistically, and we kept them outside in the wind all day, so….hope and hope and hope.
Good night, sweetly weepy, sugared out, exhausted birthday girl.
AND THEN THERE WAS MORE, because our pod-friends slept over so we could play again the next day and suck the very marrow out of birthday weekend! Evanny was sad at bedtime because there had been too much of everything and Ellie felt too small at the end of it all to manage an upstairs collaborative sleep, but first thing in the morning, little feet scampered up the stairs following the sound of giggles, and when she creaked open the door, they both yelped “Ellie Ellie Ellie Ellie!” And all was right with the world. (And then 5 minutes later, I heard cheerful enthusiasm in “Hi Brooks!” too—There’s still some practice needing doing, but Evvy tries and cares and wants to be kind and inclusive, traits I’m proud of her continual commitment to.)
Slumber party morning crew reenacting Shark Boy and Lava Girl in a dark, lit-balloon coven in the window-shade-darkened morning. Opening ANOTHER present from Auntie Christalle—is this a stuffed animal?No, it’s a crazy hat!!! Perfect for a game of…“Throw Throw Burrito!”Breakfast cupcakes! Let the sweets go on forever! (Small sister is also here, btw—just so deeply submerged in a hammock that there was no way to catch her in the photo)Play time fashion, pandemic style. We can’t make their lives free from its influence—the world is big, and it finds its way—but we can do everything in our power to make sure it only changes their experiences, not deprives them. And finally, a sought-after lull to enjoy a new book while the whirlwind packs up and tidies and swirls all around. Happy birthday to my rainbow baby, my little miracle, the firelight and the starlight, the ember and the flame, the girl who made a full-time mama out of me (and happy birthday, motherhood—have a cupcake yourself, Mum, and some Frangelico in your day-after coffee cup!)WAIT DID I SAY “FINALLY”? Psych. Now she’s asleep in a tent, because Daddy declared it the last perfect weather weekend for a camp out and Sue provided the PERFECT last present, a fairy-lantern craft kit for each girl. These are what they spent the afternoon creating, and in whose glow my new 8-year-old played guessing games with her siblings, wrestled with her brother, read her book by flashlight, and is now dreaming wind-tossed, magical dreams.
“This is my mermaid rock.”Other people have to find their OWN mermaid rock. Keeps lash and away they goDaunted a little by the depth and movement of all this lovely water, Tab was all about the in and out Mermen get rocks too. Goofballs. Pre-dusk, and the dark chases the sun away across the skyAn hour later, the chase is almost over, and the camera is making ufos out of the string of light bulbs. Now, the grown-ups can sit by the marshmallow fire alone, with wine and silence. Well, at least until the raccoon fight breaks out!Morning, Baroque style.One mermaid walks on waterThe lake, this morning, is clear glass: no green, no waves, no nothing.How brave is my chilly wild thing, with this whole glass lake to her very own self?This brave.Same lake. The difference over just a handful of days blew our minds.Where did all the waves go? (We know, we know: Canada)Nymph climbs freeEverybody needs a bit of this magic, right away! (Okay, everybody but Matt and Caleb, who both have hurt feet, so they have to say inside and sweep)Found their happy place.Nobody even needs a floatie in these gentle shallows–and everybody enjoys our last swim before we have to check on out and head back home.One last Tabba-picture from Erika’s phone… it wasn’t the ocean-beach she had in mind, but I think we did okay with this mermaid’s displaced birthday trip.
that rare, random descent 