Mother on my mind

Woke up this morning thinking about my mother and wishing she felt better.

I told Steve last night that the worst thing about watching your parents decline is that it makes you re-think everything you thought you knew about them. He said, "Not me," and then he said, "Wait. Yeah, it does."

I guess that's not as tragic as I think it is. I mean, I spend most of my life re-thinking what I think I know about something or someone. Why should it be any different with my mother?

Tried to call her last night and this time someone who answered passed the request along to someone who knew who she was and that person went to find her and then came back with the message that Mom would call me back. She wasn't feeling well.

So, maybe she thought it was Mary, because Mary calls more often than I do, or maybe she thought it was me, thinking that I was overdue for a phone call, or maybe she thought it was me the same way that I thought it was time to give her a call. Some people are just connected to each other that way.

I don't like to think about her there. At the psyche unit, on the 8th floor. Joe told me that there are more nurses and doctors running around there than there are patients.

If she'd only. If I'd only.

I spend a lot of time thinking about four years ago (or was it five?) when I found her in her room, stretched out on the bed, hands folded on her chest, like she was laid out for a wake. I stared at her and she opened her eyes and looked at me. "Marie? I tried to kill myself last night." And all I could think to say was, "It didn't work."

If I had said, "Let me give you another opportunity at it, shall I? I'll be back in an hour," then maybe this would all be done. Betty would have gone out when she wanted to.

Instead, there is all this wriggling on the end of a hook going on.

I know she's crazy because a sane woman wouldn't put her kids through this. But how crazy is she?

Because, I think that craziness must be on a continuum, like autism and diabetes and pregnancy. I think you can be a little bit crazy, or only crazy in one aspect of your life. Mom seems to be crazy by turns. Like, she's normal, or at least, placid, for a few months, and then, she's nuts, and wants to die.

I envy my friend's grandmother, who still lives alone. I think it'd be easier to die, or at least, to quit living, if you lived alone.

Mom's wish to quit living is being carried out in front of a live audience, and it's an audience that wishes to have a vote.

Is this being very cynical to wish that she could just get on with dying?

If only she'd taken pills other than blood pressure medication. But that was only because she wanted to show her doctor who was boss.

I remember thinking that it was the most clear sign yet that she was damaged. Because who in their right mind would take blood pressure pills to try to kill themselves, especially if they had sleeping pills right there?

Someone who just needed attention?

But I seem to be incapable of giving that attention to someone. I hoard it, dole it out in bits and pieces. I think Mom needed more love from me than I had to give her.

I wonder if my lack of demonstrative loving made her want to do something to get my attention and the doctor's attention. Made her want to do something like threaten suicide but not actually do it.

I think, What is it you want? and it's like I'm screaming into a big wide dark hole. I don't think there is any answer coming out of it.

But I think that I must know what it is that she wants already and I can't give it to her.

I'm awake

It's 1:15 in the morning. I can tell this because I've squinted hard at the clock on the shelf next to my dresser clear on the other side of the room. It would be easier to tell the time if the clock were on the bedside table, but my husband needs it to be farther away from the bed so that when the alarm goes off in the morning he has to get out of bed to hit the snooze button. He usually does this three or four times every day. It seems to work for him.

I can hear him speaking now through the door to our room. He's in the hallway and he's talking to Nick. I know this because he's telling him to pick up the clothes in his room and brush his teeth and get to bed. He's probably just come home from working late and has done the usual perimeter walk through the house, checking on the boys and telling them to get off their computers for the night. He's hates this. He says it feels like whenever he sees them he has to yell at them.

I've wrestled with this, too, but it's not as hard for me. The kids are home schooled so I see them all day long. Not all of the time spent with them is nagging time. Sometimes it's fun stuff, like a park day or club day with other home schooled kids. Sometimes it's a field trip, although that happens less often now that they're both in high school.

It's harder to find field trips that are interesting to teenagers. The last one was supposed to be a tour of a recording studio but because the owner's sound engineer didn't make it in to work that day, it devolved into a monologue about the owner's early days in the music business and how, since his voice is gone, he likes to encourage good looking young women to come and sing on his cable tv show. It was educational, all right, just not in the way I'd anticipated.

I hear the thumping up and down the hallway of my oldest son, Sam, as he reluctantly performs a regular Thursday night chore, emptying the wastebaskets. I notice that he's avoiding emptying the wastebasket in my room. He probably thinks I'm sleeping through all of this. I wish I could.

Briefly I consider doing some thumping of my own, out into the kitchen, perhaps, where I could make a cup of cocoa in a put upon manner and inflict some guilt where it would do the most good. I decide I'm really too tired to get up. Maybe I'll read for a while. I flip on the light next to the bed and pick up a dog-eared copy of "Interesting Times" by Terry Pratchett. I love Pratchett. He makes me laugh and I can use a laugh or at least a grin right about now. Damn it. I was sleeping so well, too.

My sister says that when I was young I used to thump up and down the halls when I was mad, just like my kids do now. My dad called me Thumper, which usually made me stomp even harder. I was slow to pick up on teasing back then. I had a hair trigger temper as a teenager, too. My dad seemed to delight in provoking it, or maybe it just seemed like it to me.

I hear footsteps approaching the end of the hall. Will whoever it is notice that there's a light on in my bedroom and feel all contrite or something? The steps recede again. Obviously, nobody's worried about cutting in on anybody's sleep time tonight.

I read for a while and eventually my eyes close more than they stay open and I put the book down and turn out the light. Whatever fireworks were inspired by my husband's return home are all over for this evening. I can sleep, hopefully the boys will sleep, and eventually my husband will sleep. No more drama, not even from me, Thumper.

Rock and Load

It's Saturday morning and I'm listening to my son doing color commentary on the state of the refrigerator.

"This is disgusting. Yuck. Who put this in here?"

He marches out of the kitchen and thrusts a half empty can of green chilis toward me.

"Mom, are we saving this?"

I don't want to crush my child's newly found zeal for search and destroy style housekeeping, but I happen to know that my husband put this can of chilis in the fridge, doubtless planning to use it for some culinary masterpiece in the near future. If I tell my son to throw it away, my husband might be annoyed. I weigh my husband's probable future irritation with my son's overwhelming need to use the bulldozer approach to cleaning the refrigerator, i.e., everything not nailed down gets pushed into the nearest garbage can, resulting in an appliance that is sparkly clean, fresh smelling, and above all, emptier than when you started.

I recall feeling exactly this way a long time ago, just prior to our move from Grand Rapids to Ludington, except that it was a house I was emptying instead of a refrigerator. I'd been upstairs cleaning the attic and stumbled across a large sack in one corner. Inside the sack were rough pieces of alabaster, pink and white and gray-veined, ranging from a few as small as a baseball to some as big as a loaf of bread.

Maybe it had something to do with being hot and dusty from hours of clearing the detritus that had accumulated after twelve years of cohabitative bliss, maybe it was because I knew that I'd only scratched the surface of what still needed to be organized, maybe it was because I distinctly recalled having moved this same sack of rocks at least three times in the last seven years, but right then I knew I'd never hated anything as much as I hated those rocks.

It didn't matter anymore that I and my husband had driven six hours to collect these very stones, sacrificing an entire afternoon to climb around on quarry piles in the hot sun, determined to find the perfect raw material for sculpting candle holders, incense burners and miniature busts.

That day in the attic I had exactly 72 hours before I had to pile everything we owned into a 24-foot truck. The contents of that sack were no longer potential art projects, they were a bag of rocks that weighed about thirty pounds and they represented everything I hated about moving.

I hated having to organize and pack up our stuff in order to move it when it was only going to get unpacked and disorganized the moment we reached our destination. I hated making choices about what had to go or stay and I particularly hated making choices about someone else's belongings, which these rocks technically were. They weren't just my rocks. They were my husband's rocks, too.

That's why I decided to do what I did. After all, he was already at the new place, possibly working hard and not having to pack up the old house. I was resentful about the whole arrangement. Also I was getting help loading the U-Haul from my brother and already was having a hard time justifying the bajillion books that were coming with us. ("Don't they have books in Ludington?") How could I possibly explain a bag of rocks? ("Marie, did you know that this sack has rocks in it?" "Yes." "Don't they have rocks in Ludington?")

Decision made, I crashed the sack down three flights of stairs and dragged it to the curb for the garbage men to take away in the morning. If I didn't accomplish anything else that day it was fine, because the bag of rocks was gone and that was four square feet of misery I wouldn't have to cram on the truck.

The next day on the phone, my husband asked me if I'd remembered to pack a certain bag of rocks. Naturally I told him that I had no idea where they were. Thinking about it fifteen years later, I'm sure I'd throw them away and lie about it again, no problem.

Now my son stands in front of me with can in hand. He's transferred his irritation with me for giving him this particular chore to the refrigerator itself and his body is stiff with that air of righteousness that's so conducive to a good cleaning session. I know exactly how he feels.

"Go ahead and pitch it," I say. "I'll think of something to tell your dad."

Spuddies — Unlimited Fun in the Sack

There are only two “Spuddies” left on the porch -- the one that looks like a six-legged hedgehog and the one with four twigs sticking out of its head.

Spuddies are my sons’ answer to the question, “What do you do with a ten pound sack of potatoes, an unlimited amount of sticks and a few hours to kill on a camping trip?” In this case, they made ten little men (and one hedgehog) using Idahos, sticks, and, for one scary Spuddy, bits of glass for teeth. They brought all eleven of them home to show me and so I did what any proud mother would do. I posed them on the porch for a picture (see attached).

I like the Spuddies. I like them because they’re something that my offspring made with their own hands and I’m a hopeless fan of every hand knit potholder, ceramic dish and woven basket that my children bring me. I believe that this is due to a chemical reaction that happens to women after they have their first child and so it’s nothing for which I have to apologize or for which I need therapy. I accept that I will always gush over my kids’ handcrafted items, the same way that I accept that I will always only wear things with elastic waistbands.

I also like the Spuddies because they’re proof that my kids’ brains haven’t completely turned to cooked cereal after too much time in front of the computer. There they were, out in the woods with nothing to do, and they scrounged raw materials and built something. If they can make Spuddies it means that the synapses are still firing, their imaginations are still in working order, video games have not turned them into mindless drooling zombies. It’s nice to know that if my kids were stranded on an island somewhere, with no digital comforts, they’d still manage to find ways to keep themselves amused. It also means that they’d starve to death for the sake of playing with their food, but that’s another worry.

Spuddies are also concrete evidence that my children aren’t grown up yet. When you’re an adult and you see a sack of potatoes you think about food, or work, depending on whether you’re the eater of the food or the preparer of the food. Only a child with nothing on his mind except how to have as much fun as possible in the next couple hours could look at a sack of spuds and see potential action figures. If my kids were as mature as they’re always telling me they are, they would have been too embarrassed to make toys out of vegetables, much less bring the collection home to show their mother.

There are one or two drawbacks to your kids making their own toys. For one thing, they don’t come with manufacturer’s warnings attached, like “This Spuddy has glass shards for teeth. It is not safe at any age. Do not leave on the floor where your mother will step on it. Throw it away immediately.” The boys felt bad about my foot and promised not to experiment anymore with sharp edged models. Still, it was great lesson in applying direct pressure to stop the bleeding and I’m sure I can use their residual guilt for extra chores next week. If they show signs of slacking I can just start limping again.

I think that the Spuddies would make a terrific family camping game, except that of course, there already is Mr. Spud Head or similar on the market. We bought one years ago. It’s plastic and the parts are mostly gone. Myself, I prefer this organic version to the one that comes in a box. With Spuddies, the number of toys you can make is only limited by the number of potatoes in the sack and what you’ve got available to stick into them. And the best part is, when the kids get bored with them, you can pull out all their arms and legs and facial features and cook and eat them. The Spuddies, I mean.

I don’t think we’ll be dining on this batch of Spuddies, however. I suspect that the nine that are missing are somewhere behind the hedges that surround my porch. Probably I could find them if I looked hard enough, but it’s better to save those under-the-yews-and-in-amongst-the-creepy-crawlies searches for the spring, when all the eight legged critters are still sluggish from the cold. Besides, if they’re buried deep enough in the mulch, by this time next year I may be harvesting at least one bag of potatoes. If I’m lucky, my boys will still be young enough at heart to make Spuddies out of them.

Quality time

Today was the usual grab the stack of newspapers from the porch, the wagon from the garage and a pair of drink boxes and cookies and run out to the elementary school to pick the boys up from the bus stop kind of day. It's a good break for me. I fold the papers and listen to Nick and Sam tell me about their respective days at school. A little island of quality time in a hectic sea of work-related stress.

Nick is first in the car and I ask him how it went.

"Terrible," he says.

I immediately suspect the worst but I try to see if I can put it in perspective for him. "Was it a terrible day the whole day long, or just in the morning? Or maybe just before you left?"

"The whole day."

"What happened?"

"Some kid knocked me over."

"On the playground?"

He nods.

I think about how some people’s kids shouldn’t be allowed out on a leash. "What did you do?"

"Told the aide."

Relieved he didn't haul off and punch somebody, I praise his levelheadedness.

"What else happened?"

"I had to stay in for study class."

Dreading the advent of another behavior report, I ask, "How come?"

"We were writing something in class and I didn't finish it."

My heart plummets. "Oh, no, Nick, you're kidding."

At this point, Nick, carefully noting my reaction to this recital of the day’s events, can’t contain himself any longer. He starts laughing uproariously, holding his belly and rocking in his seat, shouting "Pulled your leg! Pulled your leg! Hahahahahahaha! You fall for it every time! Hahahahahaha."

"I hate you, Nick," I say between gritted teeth.

Now Sam announces that he's got his finger stuck in the bolt hole for the trailer hitch which has been rolling around on the floor of my car since spring. It weighs about 10 pounds and he's starting to panic because he can't free his now swollen and hurting finger.

I sigh a long suffering sigh and tell him to come with me. We leave Nick in the car and walk into the school in search of a soap dispenser. Everyone we meet along the way smiles a greeting. Nobody notices that my son is attached to a trailer hitch even though Sam is doing his best to bring it everyone's attention by saying things like, "It''s not my fault," and "It was an accident."

I locate a classroom with a sink and dribble soap on Sam's finger. Then, a little twist, and voila! he's free. He smiles a relieved smile and I begin to see how I can use this to get even with Nick. "Put your finger back in the hole and follow me," I tell him.

We get back to the car, Sam looking convincingly morose and me more grim than usual.

Nick asks, "What's going on?" and I tell him we have to take Sam to the hardware store so we can buy a hacksaw to cut his hand off with. "What?" "Yeah, the soap didn't work." "You're kidding, right? Are you really going to cut his hand off?" He's a little apprehensive but more clearly fascinated by the idea, which is right where I want him.

"Hahahahahaha! Got you! Hahahahaha! You should've seen the look on your face! Hahahahahaha!"

"Aarrrgghh!"

I love quality time.

Endless summer, endless chores

School’s out, summer’s here and that means it’s time to get out The Endless Chore Game.

Chores are not popular at my house. Nobody looks forward to them. Nobody appreciates the trouble I take to make sure that everyone has chores to do that will build character (“Why do I have to clean the bathroom again? I did it last week!” “Because you did a terrible job and you need more practice.”). Nobody thanks me for assigning chores that are a good fit for them (“You told me I did a great job on the bathroom this week so why do I have to do it again?” “You’re so good at it I’ve decided to make it your regular chore.”).

Chores are not easy to think of. By the second or third week of summer I’ve lost all my zeal for assigning things that actually need doing, like washing windows and weeding the garden, and I’ve settled for assigning things that can be done without direct supervision, like answering the phone or checking the mailbox.

Chores are not contagious. My children see me doing chores all the time, so how come they’re not patterning themselves after me? If you’re a reader your child will most likely be a reader, too. If you’re athletically inclined it’s a cinch at least one of your children will embrace sports. You’d think that watching me work like a dog would induce my children to sweat buckets in order to be just like me, but it hasn’t worked out that way.

A few years ago, desperate at being faced with another long summer arguing about chores, I invented The Endless Chore Game.

The Endless Chore Game has no winners or losers, just players. It’s called “Endless” because it has no start and no finish. Your game piece just goes around and around the path, until summer’s over and it’s time to put the game away.

Here’s how it works. I make a board with a circular path on it, divided into about 40 squares and I write a different chore on each square. These can be simple and boring, like scouring the kitchen sink or more complex and interesting, like making dessert for six people for less than $5.

The finished board looks like a Candyland game, only the images are more sinister. Instead of kids climbing ice cream mountains and playing under gumdrop rainbows, I draw pictures of kids mowing the lawn and washing dishes and sweeping floors. In the corner on the upper right is a shadowy adult figure, arms crossed, tapping her foot. I think it sets the mood.

I put the board on the refrigerator door and the kids use magnets for game pieces. Every day in the summer, they take turns rolling dice and moving their pieces to find out what chores they have. It’s not completely grim. The board has a few free spaces with fun stuff, like cloud watching or pudding construction or singing Old MacDonald Had a Farm on the porch in three part harmony.

This will be the third year of playing the Endless Chore Game in our family. Every summer I modify the rules a little bit. For instance, you’re not allowed to reverse direction anymore. This keeps certain resourceful players from moving back and forth between free spaces for the duration of the game, thereby getting almost no chores at all compared to everyone else. And I’m toying with the idea of assigning points to certain chores, so that if you land on the “Paint the Garage” square you don’t have to roll again for a week.

Some members of the family enjoy games so much they leap downstairs every morning and play the Endless Chore Game first thing. I think it’s the thrill of knowing you might get lucky and get no chores at all for the day. It feels like a mini-vacation almost. Some family members are less enthusiastic, suspecting that the Endless Chore Game is not really a game at all, but just a way for a certain parent to get out of having to face unpleasant realities, namely, being unpopular in the name of character building.

I love The Endless Chore Game. I even play it, although, technically, I do chores whether or not I roll the dice first. I don’t play because I lack a list of things that need to be done. There will always be chores in my life. I will always feel obligated to do them and to insist that my kids know how to do them. Chores are required. The Endless Chore Game just makes them more interesting. Well, all right, and there’s something else. The truth is, I’m still shooting for the “Sing Old MacDonald on the Porch” square, and I have a feeling this might be my lucky summer.

Take note

I was dropping off my daughter, Alice, now a freshman in high school, at her soccer game. Getting out of the car, she stopped dead and said, "Shoot! John's here."

Since I knew she and her friend, John, had had a recent falling out, I asked her if it wasn't a good thing to see him today and tell him how she felt.

She gave me an exasperated look. "No, it's not a good thing, Mom. I wanted to talk to him on the phone. I don't want to talk to him right now because I don't have my notes with me."

Notes?

A few nights ago, she sat on my bed and, aware that my eyelids were at half-mast and falling fast, quickly recited her to-do list for the next morning. "I have to get up, go downstairs and put clothes in the dryer, take a shower..."

Here I interrupted, "Dad will put your clothes in the dryer tonight if you ask him."

She considers this and finds it acceptable. "Okay. I have to get up, go downstairs and get my clothes out of the dryer, take a shower, get dressed, dry my hair, pack my stuff, eat some breakfast -- I know you're tired, Mom, but I'm not going to talk long, I'm just going over my schedule right now for tomorrow morning -- and then get over to Bridgette's on time for once."

She looks at me every couple of seconds while ticking off points on her fingers to make sure that my eyes haven't slid sideways to the pages in my book. I'm not really having any trouble resisting the urge to read while she's talking because I've only just started this book and it hasn't gotten good, yet. Normally, I'd have to close the book to keep from irritating Alice but tonight it's more fun to leave it open, the pages a subtle threat in the competition for my attention, and see how many times I can make her check to see if I'm listening. Two, so far. She's getting pretty good.

Alice is proof that we're all individuals. If I hadn't been there I would swear that she emerged from another woman's womb. One lesson that I've learned as a parent: just because you and your spouse combined to create this person doesn't mean that this person is going to be anything like either of you. Although, come to think of it, Alice is a lot like my husband, Steve. Just not like me.

I've learned more about what my husband is like from watching Alice. He craves order and routine, like Alice. Schedules and having a plan B when plan A doesn't work out is how they operate. Funny how I can sympathize with my daughter's struggles to make sense out of chaos but I have no patience with my husband's same problems. I keep thinking that he ought to be over these petty difficulties by now and should just be more like me, more a live-life-by-the-seat-of-your-pants type person. I cut Alice more slack because I reason that she's relatively new to this living and learning stuff and it will take her longer to realize she ought to be more like me.

Alice is everyone's idea of the perfect daughter. She cleans her room three times a week. She mediates fights between her two younger brothers. She helps her friends' mothers when she visits someone else's home. Actually, I taught her that one.

"If you want to be invited to someone's house more than once, be especially nice to their mother. It doesn't matter whether the kid likes you or not. You might be that kid's best friend in the world, but if her mother doesn't like you, you'll never be invited back to her house again, ever."

Since about third grade, whenever I go to pick her up from this or that house and chance to speak with her friends' mothers, they all tell me the same thing. "Alice is such a nice girl. She helped me clean up after the party. I told her she didn't have to, but she insisted. She's wonderful!" I always nod and smile, guiltily suspecting that I've trained her to be everybody's favorite drudge.

So what am I hoping to train her to be? Well, I'd like her to be confident in who she is. It's hard not to criticize her efforts. Criticizing is my worst fault when it come to my children. The problem is that I want them to be perfect. Not like me.

I recently ordered a book that talks about how adolescent girls change as they grow to be women. They stop being outgoing and carefree and fun and devolve into opinionless, mindless, gutless nothings. I read this book and casually, I thought, asked Alice if she wasn't experiencing pressure to conform more to what's considered proper behavior in girls her age. She stared at me for a long moment before arching an eyebrow and asking me, "Have you been reading teenager books again?" Then she picked up the book from whence stemmed my concerns and started reading it herself. Now and again she'll point out some behavior of her friends' that she disagrees with and which is, coincidentally, outlined in the book. She's always triumphant about the fact that this book describes her friends and not her. I'm just happy one of us is reading it.

Alice is bright, funny and gifted. I marvel that she's my daughter. I somehow feel that I don't deserve to have her. I'm afraid that there will be a price to pay for all this delight, although I'll admit that there are times when this house is too small to hold two femmes on the rag at once.

Last Friday night, before the homecoming parade in which Alice was to take part, she experienced a major meltdown and dragged me, kicking and screaming, into her personal pit of despair. I resisted, of course, but it was futile.

In between clothes changes she cursed whoever had mislaid her favorite pin-striped men's suit (I didn't mislay it, I gave it to Goodwill), dissolved into tears once, begged for help twice and stared at me in disbelief when I suggested that it didn't matter what she wore because her friends would be happy to see her however she showed up. "No, they won't."

Eventually, after trying on nearly every article of clothing in three different closets, hers, mine and the boys', she finalized her costume for the parade -- a brown suit and fedora. I smeared a black mustache on her upper lip and then drove her two blocks to where the parade was supposed to start. She hesitated at the car door. "I can't see them!" referring to the freshmen float. I'd reached the end of my mothering rope. "Get out," I growled. She got. Later, when she came back home she hugged me and apologized for going off the deep end and I said I was sorry for losing my temper.

It's really pretty easy to get along with my daughter. I just have to be prepared to drop everything and listen to her when she's ready to talk to me. Usually, it's when I'm at my lowest ebb, say around 10:30 at night, or when I'm in the middle of a work crisis, juggling three clients at once. It's a kind of testing, I know. And no more than fair considering what I routinely put her though when she's reciting lists to me. My mother says I'm getting exactly what I deserve. Someone just like me.

Marie Marfia
© Copyright 2004