Making a spectacle of one's self ...

He sits in the chair and plays patty cake with the armrests.

He is nervous, though he isn't saying so.

"They won't touch my eye with any of these gadgets, will they?"

"They'll just ask you to look through the goggles and tell them what you see. It's not uncomfortable."

I'm just trying to smooth over his fears, and I'm not sure it's helping.

Discomfort comes in many forms. Especially where small cubicles contain larger-than-life anatomical eyeballs.

Experience, I suppose, is one antidote to discomfort.

But it helps when part of that practice lets you choose your specs.

And it helps when no one actually pokes you in the eye.
Because knowing what to expect often takes practice. ...

And patience. ...

And perhaps answering all manner of questions that don't seem to have anything to do with the present circumstances. Such as ...

"When I'm 20, how will you do errands?"
"Maybe I'll send you to do them for me."
"But what if I'm in college ... or far away?"
"Then I'll just do them ... same as now."
"But how? You might not be big enough."
"I'm not going to shink THAT much in just 12 years."

After all, I'm sure he didn't expect to need glasses until he was much, much older.




Of course,  I didn't expect him to look so much older in the blink of an eye. 

Eleven

Times change.

You wake up one morning. The number after your name ticks up by one.

And you realize something just isn't quite right with your little world.

The sun peeks through your windows and its light is set further ablaze by the color of your soundings.

This can not stand.



And so ... we change.



But as we do, we have to remember. ...

Some things always stay the same.

Snow day

He could not contain himself.

I couldn't contain him, either.

She knew I didn't want to go out in the cold and the wet.

She didn't want to go out there either.

But something in my face ... 

She's called it The Look of Disappointment ...

Made her haul on her dayglow coat and too-small boots and pretend to care about snowmen of the smallest stature.

Tinder and tentacles

He. Never. Looked. Back.

Not even a glance.

Kinda makes me want to gather up all those kindergarten preparatory books  (you know, the ones that coach kids in the fine art of treading lightly on their mothers' feelers as they take their first steps toward independence) douse them in accelerant and light them on fire.

Fluff and fold

She wants to earn money.

She wants to have a job.

So we gave her the laundry.

She's old enough. She interested. 

She's not a baby anymore. 

*Sniff-sniff.*

It's a good thing, I know. 

It might require us to accept shrunken clothes, pink whites and an occasional soap-suds flood but it will 

give her a sense of competence as well as accomplishment. It will introduce her to independence while showing her how a small contribution can benefit the whole.

It has also had an unexpected, trickle-down bonus.

"I helped Ittybit fold laundry and she gave me this," he tells me proudly, holding out his hand.

"This is my favorite lint ball, mom. Can you make sure the dog doesn't eat it?"

Smitten

This is the face of a boy so in lurve he made a painting in a girl's honor.

Then he asked me to ask her to come and see it.

He backed away and pretended he was invisible. Shy.

Unless I'm mistaken, and this is not the face of a boy so smitten but one who sent his mother on a ruse so he could check out a girl's posterior.

I'm just going to pretend it was the former and not the latter.

Golden Age

The dress swung when she moved. It shimmered, too.

I gave it to her thinking it would be worn to the New Year's Eve party we'd attend as a family ... only the rest of us would be wearing jeans ... or pajamas.

She's the one who understands the value of dressing up, even if you're just going to play Tag, or Hide-and-Seek, or King of the Laundry Mountain in your best friend's basement.

To each their own.

Since I ended up spending most of the holiday season floundering on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, she ended up missing that party and wearing the dress on an ordinary Thursday ... paired with black leggings and a rainbow-edged wrap sweater (which she probably stashed in her backpack the instant she sat in her seat on the bus).

She's never been one for excessive layering.

She allowed me to take a photograph when she came home in the afternoon.

As she stood by the tree and swung the dress -- slowly and rhythmically as if an audience was watching -- I was reminded of her four-year-old self ... when I'd gotten her a similar frock. She'd swung that dress, too. Only she'd twirled and twirled until she'd gotten dizzy and had to sit down.

Sometimes I think she's lost that abandon. She only finds it again ... when no one is watching.

It's so subtle ... this difference.

She's not a little girl anymore. And yet, she is.

On the sixth day of Christmas ...

The seeds of disbelief are sewn:

"Mom! I just found the gift tags SANTA used last year. They were with the Post-It notes."

"Huh? Well, that is odd. Maybe he left them here last year. ... That's it. I bet he changes things up every year. ... Keeps it fresh."

"I don't know. ... something smells fishy to me."

Autumn of our youth

Ok ..

Which of you wiseapples went and told him to grow up overnight?



We need to have a chat.

Star quality

Zombified, Ittybit sat staring at the T.V. watching an opera singer perform.

The little girl was tiny but her voice was bigger than life.

"I want to be like that girl," she said emphatically. "I want to be famous."

It wasn't for art's sake that Ittybit wanted to make her voice lift above the songs she hears on popular radios stations. Although the beauty of the music drew her in, it was the pretty little girl in a floor-length dress that held her transfixed. "She's only a kid ... and she's on TeeeeVeeee!"

"You don't want to be that girl," I say quickly, and just as quickly want to kick myself for saying it that way. Of course she wants to be just like that little girl. She wants the mental picture we all have about fame. How special it would be.

It's easy to fault with the logic, but more difficult to dismiss the feeling behind it. Don't we all have some degree of desire for acknowledgement and adoration? Only we want the well-deserved kind of fame that wipes its feet when we invite it in, doesn't snoop in our drawers when it uses our facilities, and never wears out its welcome.

"No. I do want to be like her. I want to sing on a stage in front of lots of people. Or I want to publish a book. Or I want to act in the movies."

I try a different approach.

"Well, I wouldn't want to be that girl. I was listening to an interview with her and she seemed extremely anxious for a little girl. She was worried about what would happen as an adult. Would she be able to keep the momentum? Would her voice change? Would it be as pretty when it did? I just think that's a lot of worry for a little girl to handle."

She shrugs her shoulders. She doesn't share my concern. The gun has fired and the stopwatch has started. The time to make your mark, she thinks, is now.

"She's already 11. Maybe that would be a problem if she were not yet 10," she says as if she's already decided it's all over once you reach the double digits.

I just smile and let her dream alone.

What does her old mother know about fame and what it's like, anyway?

We all have our dreams and anxieties no matter where we go or what we do. We all swim against tides. We walk down roads others travel and they're always new to us. The only thing I can really advise her to do is to follow what makes her happy until it makes her miserable. Then maybe she'll be ready to forge her own path.

We can only predict, we can't know for sure. Don't help. Don't hinder.

The most cliched wish of all time

I really wish there was a spell that could harmlessly keep them little forever.

What do you wish?

Shadowy

Dear Ittybit,


Some day you will want me to go away.

Far, far away.

You may even wish me dead.

You won't mean it, but it will still hurt.



One day ...

Maybe when I'm not around ...

You'll remember saying it and wish you hadn't.



So I'm telling you now ...



Before I get lost in whatever it is I probably should be doing later ...

After you've stopped bouncing around in front of me ...

Begging for my undivided attention ...



That whatever it was you said didn't hurt my feelings ...

As much as it woke them up.


More minutes ...

To work ...

To play ...

To be alone ...

To be together ...

Will seem so trivial where there are no minutes left.




Love and better balance,


Mommy

Are we making life harder than it has to be?

I'm not sure why I'm so fixated on these stories.

Another one hit the media stream this week.

Fear. Distrust. Jealousy. Anger. Rage. Meanness. Inexperience. Faulty thinking. Hopelessness. All mixed together with the immediacy, seeming anonymity, and enduring nature of technology, what we end up with is a society that can neither understand nor protect its own privacy.

I don't think I can comment on these individual cases anymore. I can only express sadness for such a senseless waste of life.

And while I'm opposed to laws that make "bullying" a crime, I'm not opposed to trying to prevail to humankind's better nature.

As soon as they get into school, kids start seeing differences in each other. They have their likes, dislikes, frustrations, irritations. They start to feel the pain as well as the power of exclusion.

These days, as I visit the classroom and meet my kids new friends, I can't help but look at their faces -- some laughing and smiling, others startled, worried or homesick -- and want to hug each and every one.

What is it that I need to teach my kids? Certainly they can't be friends with everyone. We all know we have our limits of patience and tolerance ... They won't be able to make everyone happy. No one will be able to make them happy, it has to come from within.

But we don't have to make another person's life harder. We may not be able to make everyone's life easier, but that doesn't mean we have to make anyone's life harder.

I expect the next phase will be a petition ...

Dear Mrs. Murray - From Annabel,

I just learned yesterday we had a rule that says kids can't hold hands. Why do we have this rule? Our lane is called Friendship Lane and holding hands is part of good friendship. I think we should consider the rule a little different. I know we should have rules to keep kids from hurting each other, but we shouldn't make rules that keep kids from holding hands. We should have a feelings day. Every kid would write their feelings about school. They should tell you how they feel. We should do this. It would make people feel happy.
So, Miss Murray -- Do you like this idea? (Check Yes or No).

I hope you write back.

Love,
Annabel

Steady as she goes

She held the egg in her dye-stained hands. A crack, like a spider web, marred its surface. She'd been running with her handiwork when it slipped from her grasp and rolled under the table. I heard the tell-tale crunching of hardboiled against hardwood. She didn't realize it was damaged until she retrieved it.

I felt her suffering immediately.

She'd waited weeks for me to give the approval for the messy rite of Spring. She endured my stern looks as she overfilled the cups with colored water. She said a thousand "I'm sorrys" as splashes of blue and green and red and orange stain the floor.

She did her best to clean them up.

When she was finished she couldn't have been more proud of the pastel orbs if she'd laid them herself.

But as she held her precious mistake, her face took on an ambivalence I've never seen before. Her eyes were large and red-rimmed but stayed dry. Her lips were downturned, yet tight and unwavering. It was an emotion balanced on a razor thin moment. Everything in jeopardy of crashing down. It was sad mixed with study.

She steadied herself and the moment was over. She was solid and happy again.

"It's ok. ... It's still beautiful."

Casting stones

I walked out of high school one day with about 100 other students, and followed 99 of them for a mile to a home I'd never visited before.

I didn't even know who owned it, though I could guess it was someone who never suspected their kids would invite a few friends over while they were at work, let alone a guest list that avalanched through word-of-mouth. (I can't imagine what kind of numbers cell phones and texting would have drawn.)

I stayed for a few minutes and then kept on walking. It wasn't my scene. Illicit parties with teens puking on lawns from illegally procured alcohol wasn't a rite of passage for me so much as a strange backdrop I stood in front of, smiling uncomfortably.

I didn't want to seem alien, but I didn't want to actually take part. I wasn't a bad kid, but I wasn't a perfect one, either.

I would estimate that such scenes of negligent judgement and sheepish behavior play out on a weekly if not daily basis with most teens. Underaged drinking bashes weren't invented by texting-friendly friends. IParty existed long before iPhone. Usually groups gather deep in some wooded place, where a friend of a friend of somebody's brother's fourth cousin brings a case or a six pack and kids going steady hold tightly to each other and to brightly colored SOLO cups.

Perhaps more infrequently a teenage opportunist knew of a house that was empty. A place that was secluded. A place that was easy to get into ... they may even have keys. Maybe they said their parents wouldn't mind a few friends.

Before you know it the party takes on a life of its own. ... The 80s were filled with house party movies, where arrogant adolescents wrecked stately homes, and yet somehow hapless hosts became heroes. No parent was ever the wiser.

Life rarely has a hollywood ending, though. In real life, by the time police reports are filed and the news cameras roll, scores of kids will end up with records and a hefty debt to pay, often one that money can't always fix.

What were they thinking?

They probably weren't.

Something similar happened in North Greenbush last month when more than 80 students attended a party in a vacant but up-scale house, causing damage estimated in the hundreds of thousands. Windows smashed, cabinets bashed, urine in carpets. In that case all who were said to be in attendance are being charged with criminal trespass for walking into the house regardless of how long they stayed.

Predictably people reading and watching the news are outraged. They are quick to blame not only the students, but the parents as well. Not only do they want the kids an their families to pay, they want them shamed. They want retribution.

But on the price I find myself ambivalent.

I don't for an instant think there are 80 horrible, degenerate teens out there breaking into homes as a first step to a life of violent crime. I don't believe their parents are terrible people who are apathetic to their adolescents. If I did think that way, I
know I would be throwing stones at a glass house.

I was a teen once. I am a parent now.

Some of these kids made huge mistakes and some of them made common errors in judgement.

However, fingerprinting every single soul who went to a party, hauling them into police stations for processing and courtrooms and eventually someone who will oversee punishments, seems an excessive response that puts an incredible burden on a system that should be for justice and not just retribution.

And yet I can't bring myself to say making the teens face such a consequence is unfair.

Fairness isn't something anyone can achieve in situations such as this ... not the homeowners, certainly.

Kids are kids, and mistakes are mistakes and crime is crime. In the end the letter of the law is the letter of the law. Owning up to all of it is part of the process of becoming an adult. The realities of raising incomplete humans often means having to help clean up their messes.

But if our kids get through it without a dreaded phone call, we should thank our lucky stars instead of throwing stones.

One cool customer

Now, you might be wondering about what happened the day after I lost my mind, shut some doors, held a pillow over my head until one of us finally slept.

Well, nothing really. Nothing I expected would happen, anyway.

Bedtime came as it usually does at 8:30 p.m., a minute or so before I got home from work and slogged up the stairs to the sound of happy voices.

"Mommy's HOME!"

"She made it for bed time."

I walked into Ittybit's room, where the man was looking tired and relieved, under a pile of bedtime reading.

"The Champ was already pulling me into the hall and toward his room. He was ready to pick out books. He was ready, more or less, for bed.

We read about Lucy Lobster's clacky claws. We read about Al Oft's special job of surveling errant tractors amid the bluffs of Radiator Springs. We even read all about the Dragons that were Not My Dragons.

And it was time to turn out the lights.

"I want to sleep in your bed," said the lad in the dark.

"I know, kiddo. But big boys like you have to sleep through the night in their own bedrooms."

I shut the door with a snap instead of a slam.

He cried. Slightly and for only a few seconds, and then the room was silent.

I woke up after midnight to the same silence. And again at 3 a.m. Quiet.

In the morning the man opened the boy's door on his way downstairs to exercise. He was curled up in bed, still sleeping.

I know this could be a fluke. It could be like that one time, way back in his infancy, when he slept through the night. Or it could be the start of a new development. And the official end of the baby days.

My brain tells me to celebrate his ascention into boyhood. My heart looks on with tears in its eyes. Both tell me to take him to the Surley Drip for a breakfast cookie.

My desire for coffee obliges.

As sit in the seat next to him, sipping coffee and watching him eat the bagel he chose instead of the cookie, I do that thing mother's tend to do: marvel.

He's sitting with my sun glasses, watching the counter girls busily taking orders.

Dusting his hands, he licks his lips and sets down the outer edges of bagel crust. He asks to go to the washroom. After washing the butter from his hands, he's ready to leave. He turns to the girls and bids them farewell:

"We've got to scram," he says. "See ya later."

It dawns on me that while it's been one giant leap from baby to boy, it will only be as series of small steps from boy to man.

And this cat is one cool customer.

And like *that* the hat gets passed

Do you remember back around Sunday when I wrote this? The whole parents in black and white hats thing? Oh, how I reveled in stealing the white "good guy" hat from my husband's traveling-man fingers.

Well ... last night Ittybit insisted on drawing a picture of her father in her journal and writing a poem next to it to describe him:



"Dad, Dad you're so sweet

Whenever you come home

It's really a treat."


A few pages later, she repeated the process next to a drawing of my likeness ...




"Mommy sleeps in her bed

She always has her camera with her

She came to my dance recital!

But she left early.

It was ok, though. I didn't mind."

Time, she flies

Annabel's last "special day" at preschool, originally uploaded by toyfoto.

Dear Annabel,

Today was your last "Special Day" at the Marilla Cuthbert Academy for Unspeakably Charming Children.

It's not your last day of school there, but the last day in which one of your parents **points to self** will show up bearing healthy snacks that none of your friends will touch with a ten-foot pole.

It was the last day I'd have a chance to slip the photos I had taken of your classmates (all year long) into their bookbags. Photographs I'd tucked in envelopes and that you had dutifully sealed with "Love" in a color representing their name ... Blue for Billy ... Magenta for Madeline ... Silver for Sierra.

It's the last day in which one of your charming teachers will tilt their head and cluck in my direction ... when I so obviously hang up the paintings in the wrong place or as I'm reading books when I should be helping kids put on their smocks so they can paint. There will be chittering among them as I break some other rule ... such as talking to you when you are in line instead of making sure you are all as quiet as church mice.

It's been more than three years since you first walked through the doors of this cooperative preschool ... the very one I went to when I was your age ... the very one I lived above when I was a young adult.

You already know those stories, you say when I mention them in passing.

You also know numbers and the difference between upper and lower case. You can spell you name and recite your phone number. And every day you come home with a new letter and all the words you learned that begin with that letter.

Both of us have learned a great deal these last three years.

In addition to writing your name and remembering your numbers, you've learned to cut with scissors, recognize letters and understand about cause and effect, as it applies to so many things.

On the last Special Day I was finally proficient in hanging the paintings to dry, and collecting all the crafts so that parents wouldn't have to search. I easily did the chores that needed doing ... cleaning paintbrushes, wiping tables, vacuuming floors and taking out the trash.

I didn't even mess up snack time.

"O" was the letter of your last special day.

We brought Oranges and Oyster crackers and Olives (though you were quite sure no one would eat them). We also brought orange smoothies, blended at home the night before.

You helped. We blended oranges, pineapples, papayas, mangos and bananas with ice and orange juice, squeezing in the juice of a lime for good measure.

When we tested it you gave it your highest praise: "The most delicious of deliciousities I ever had in my whole entire world of worlds."

I beamed. And then I set the blender up for a second time ... this time adding kale to the mix and a plan to call the new creation "Oscar Isn't Such a Grouch After All Smoothie."

But as the kids' luck would have it, the blender broke.

And then your father gave me his patented eyebrow arch: "Kale? Really?"

"Yes, Kale. ... I just wanted to see Ms. Cuthbert's eyes roll back in her head one last time."

Of course tonight you'll have to report that I didn't need a green smoothie to do that; all I had to do was put out the green tractor trikes in the play yard.

"In the wrong place again, mom. In the wrong place again."

*Sigh*

Look out Kindergarten, ready or not, here I come.

Love,

Mommy

Older, wiser ... but still wearing size 4T

Ittybit: Mama? When I am an old woman will I look like you? I mean ... I don't have black hair, so I think I won't look like you. But ...

Mama (Trying not to hyperventilate): You think I am an old woman?

Ittybit (Realizing her mother's frailty): Well, I'm an an old woman, too.

Mama (Trying to regain composure): You are not an old woman. You are a young girl ...

Ittybit: I know I'm a kid, but sometimes change can be hard. In that way I'm an old woman, too.