It's not easy to die

I think about my mother, off and on during the day. It's easier than living with her.

When I lived with her I thought about her first thing in the morning and last thing at night. I laid in my bed and worried about her. I worried that she was awake. I worried that if she was awake she would trip going down the stairs. I worried that she was taking too many pills. I worried that she wasn't taking enough of them. I worried that her blood sugar was too high. I worried that it was too low. I worried that she was too cold or too hot. I worried that she didn't have any food she liked in the house and would ask me to make a special trip to the store for her. I worried that she was going to ask me to call her doctor for her or the pharmacist. I worried when she didn't want to go to church. I worried when she went outside for a walk. I worried that I wasn't giving her enough attention. I worried that I got too mad at her too easily. I worried that I made her feel guilty.

I pulled up some pictures from last Thanksgiving and some of them were of me and some of them were of Mom. In one, we were smiling at the camera, our heads tilted together. I was wearing a hat that she'd knitted for me. By Christmas, when the next pictures were taken, I looked ten years older, faded. There are no pictures of us together.

She took a handful of her blood pressure pills on a Friday night in January. When I went in to check on her the next morning she was laying on her back in bed, her hands folded on her chest, like she'd been laid out for her funeral. I thought she was dead, and then I saw her chest rise and fall. She opened her eyes, sat up abruptly and said, "Marie? I tried to kill myself last night." I looked at her, alive and alert and I thought, "How? There's no blood. Her wrists look fine. Did she imagine it? Dream it?" and aloud I said, "It didn't work." "No," she said and got out of bed.

I'm a Pepper, you're a Pepper

"Marie?"
"Hi, Mom."
"I'm calling to tell you something."
"Go ahead, Mom."
"Did you know I'm a lesbian?"
"Yep."
"I just wanted you to know."
"You've lived a good life."
"No, I haven't."
"Well, I forgive you."
"I was going to ask you to forgive me."
"I forgive you. I love you, Mom."
"Would you tell Mary?"
"Sure."
She hangs up.

Thanks

Talked with Mom late yesterday afternoon, after playing tennis with Steve and the boys, after listening to Oliver Twist on the headphones. Oliver had it rough.

She sounded pretty good. Told me that David had dropped by and had lunch with her. She said she'd gotten her hair shampooed and set the day before. "It's a little flat in the back where I slept on it," she said but I reassured her it didn't matter. She said her cousin Richard had stopped in earlier to say hello as well. "It was before my hair was done," she said.

She told me how she'd informed her mother that she was planning to marry her cousin Richard when she was a little girl. "My mother told me I couldn't because he was my cousin. She said we couldn't have had children then. I was mad at her."

"How old were you?"

"About ten."

"You were very opinionated back then, weren't you?"

"Always have been."

Later I told Steve that it was easier to bear conversations with my Mom when she's talking about hearing voices. Then I can say to myself that it's good she's in a nursing home where she's being cared for 24 hours a day. When she sounds so sane, like yesterday, it's harder to deal with. I feel like I should pack her up and move her out of there and in with me. I talk myself out of this, usually within minutes. I know that I can't watch her all the time. I know that she has more problems than I can handle. She told me that, once. "You couldn't handle me," she said. I felt bad and a little defiant, but I believe her now.

She said she was glad I'd called, that she loved me and then she said goodbye.

Onofrio speaks

I called her just now and she said she'd changed her mind about the flowers.

"You don't want me to cancel them?"

"No."

"It's nice to have something cheerful in the room," I said, and she agreed with me. After a few minutes listening to me tell her stories about my boys, she said she was waiting for the nurse to come back because she had to talk to her. The doctor was by the day before on his rounds and she said she'd been getting instructions from Dad's father again. He's been dead for fifty years, but Mom hears him talking to her.

"He says I'm only allowed to eat mashed potatoes and graham crackers and peanut butter and I can only drink tea."

"Why does he have so much say over you, Mom?"

"He says I'm being punished because I put your Dad in this place."

"Do you ever dream about Dad?"

"Oh, not lately. Last time I dreamed about him we were dancing. Your father loved to dance."

I tried to make the case that if Dad was dancing with Mom in her dreams then he was happy and had forgiven her, if she needed forgiving, but she wouldn't have any of it. "Heaven and Hell don't communicate with each other," she said, when I suggested that she ask Dad to intercede with his father on her behalf. And Onofrio, Dad's dad, is in Hell, so my mother says.

She said she'd cancelled her appointment to get a permanent today ("I'm afraid I'll have an allergic reaction to the chemicals,") but she thought maybe the stylist might have time to give her a shampoo and set. "It's nice to have someone play with your hair," I told her. Then she said she had to get ready for lunch, told me she loved me and said goodbye.

Mailing out

Sent a letter to my mother with some pictures in it of my daughter at college and one of my sons working on a school science project. I put the pictures in the envelope after writing on the backs of them, explaining what's going on in them, maybe too much. She's not stupid.

I try to send her four pictures a week. Sometimes I get my camera out and force myself to record something, anything, so that I have something to send to her. Today I found a picture on the internet of a snowman built out of Legos. I printed it in the corner of a sheet of paper and folded it up so that it made a greeting card. I was sending her Maxine cartoons but then I found them so annoying I decided she'd probably not like them either. Some crabby old woman making nasty remarks. Mom's already surrounded by those.

Still haven't responded to the letter from Mom's cousin. I feel as though anything that I say about Mom and her condition will just sound defensive. I don't want to be defensive. This cousin was Mom's favorite person in the whole world growing up and beyond. Her best friend. How can I tell her that Mom is in a nursing home? How can I admit to her that I couldn't take care of her best friend? Because that's what I'd have to tell her. I couldn't do it. I tried and I failed to provide a home for my mother.

Instead I keep sending these little peace offerings--letters, pictures, flowers--waiting for forgiveness. Which is dumb, because she can't forgive me and I shouldn't be waiting for it. She says she's being punished for having put my dad in a nursing home. I tell her it's not true, but she doesn't believe me. I encouraged her to put dad in a nursing home because I could see it was killing her to have to take care of him twenty four hours a day. It was the only way to save her. Now it's circled around again. Putting Mom in a nursing home seems like the only way to save me.

I'll try to call her today.

Motherland

I got a card yesterday from my mother's cousin. She'd had a phone call from Mom and it had upset her, this cousin, so she'd written to me, looking for explanations. She said in the card that she was worried that my Mom was thinking about ending her life. She was looking for reassurances.

I don't really know what to tell her. Mom seems okay on the phone sometimes. Other times she calls to tell me she never loved me and not to phone her anymore. "You kids were all conceived in lust, not love," she says. She tells me that she talks to Onofrio, my father's father, and that he's the devil and he tells her to do things, awful things, and sometimes she does them.

She used to live with me, right up until the day she took an overdose of her blood pressure medications. And then she was admitted to the psyche unit at the hospital and from there she went to a nursing home close to where she used to live. And now, she's still there, making phone calls to everyone on her Rolodex, telling them not to call her.

When I think about her, which is a lot less frequently than I did when she lived with me, I try to remind myself that she's among people who know her and that she's being cared for, fed and housed, at least, if not medicated. She won't take her pills anymore. Even though they might keep the voices away, keep Onofrio from tormenting her. She thinks they make her worse. How much worse can she get?

Guilt is pointless unless it moves you to do something. I keep feeling that I should do something for her, something more than calling her, sending her flowers, pictures, letters.

Sometimes I think that she would be better if she lived with me again. But I remember how it was and how I couldn't believe that she was seriously off her rocker until she took the overdose. And then I felt so much relief when the doctors recommended a nursing home. I felt like someone else was taking responsibility for her, finally. It was as though an elephant had been lifted off my back. And I didn't much care where the elephant ended up, just so it was somewhere else.

I'm a thousand miles away from her now. My brothers are in charge of her care. I keep hoping that she would be normal again. Sometimes she sounds that way on the phone. But if I keep her talking long enough she'll slip in something about her father-in-law or about her allergy to water or about how she can't eat anything.

Yesterday she called and left a message describing the last bunch of flowers that was delivered to her room. She sounded so happy, telling me the colors and what kinds there were. She called again later. "Don't send any more," she said. There were too many and there weren't enough vases. She still had some left over from the week before. I'll check again on Friday and see if she still means it.

Word game

My oldest son has a large vocabulary, which I love, except sometimes I don't know what he's talking about. "Don't worry. I won't do a meddycore job," he assures me, regarding his thank you notes to his aunts and uncles.

Funny how a little thing like the accent on the wrong syllable can completely throw off a person's understanding. When I figure out what my son is trying to say, I correct him. "It's mee-dee-O-ker," I tell him, showing my teeth on the E’s and stressing the third syllable. "Whatever," he says, shrugging.

I like that he's so comfortable trying out new words, especially since I'm such a coward about it. Sometimes in conversation I can see the opportunity coming up to use a new word but I'll be unsure about how to pronounce it. When the space to drop the word in actually happens, I'll substitute a more familiar word or phrase that conveys my meaning, but not exactly. It’s not the efficient, new word.

Once, when I was twelve and reading a Nancy Drew book, the word "antique" showed up in the story. I pronounced it "anti-cue" in my head. I remember being puzzled by it, but it didn't seem to have any bearing on whether or not Nancy recovered from being knocked unconscious and locked in a cellar by her villainous high school physics teacher, so I never looked it up. Fifteen years later I heard it used by someone in passing and finally, it clicked. "Oh, anTEEK!" I chirped, which brought me some weird looks but lots of personal satisfaction.

Thank goodness my son isn't hung up on whether or not he's got it right. "God is omni-SESS-ant," he says. "I think you mean, omNIscient," I say helpfully. "WhatEVER," he says, grinding his teeth.

"I think all the RESS-i-pants will like these, don't you, Mom?" he told me the next morning, showing me the progress he'd made on his thank you list. "ReCIPients, and yes, they will." "Aauughh! WHATEVER!"

I once corrected someone’s pronounciation of “harassment”. Annoyed, the speaker informed me that the polite thing to do when someone mispronounces a word is to mispronounce it yourself later in the conversation. But surely that would simply reinforce the wrong way to say the word and the next person they use it on may well doubt their intelligence.

Yesterday my son and I disagreed over the word "penalize." It's PEEnalize" I told him. "No, it's PENalize," he shot back. We looked it up and discovered we were both right. "But mine is listed first," I said smugly. "WHATEVER!" he snarled.

I worry that all my knee-jerk correcting will stifle his linguistic daring. What if, because of my need to have my kids be perfect, my darling child quits talking altogether? What if he stops trying out new words because he's afraid some lurker will spring out and smack down his fledgling attempts at elegant word usage?

Last week I bought him a dictionary and put it on his desk. But lately I've been wondering if maybe he's thinking he doesn't need to look things up when he's got an obsessive compulsive mother hanging on his every word.

Like today I heard him in the kitchen talking to his brother. "The next time I tell you to stop it will be quite a bit more veHEment," he warns. "VEEhement," I say from the next room. "STOP!" he yells. I look up and he's grinning. Who needs a dictionary when you’ve got Mom?

All Lit Up

Armed with twist ties, duct tape and a glut of mindless determination, I teeter at the top of a 24 foot aluminum ladder, a coil of blue rope lights on my left shoulder. I’ve got one glove clenched between my teeth, and I’m leaning over to my right, attempting to thread a twist tie behind the vine that clings to the house. The small limb snaps and I swear at it and then look around for another branch strong enough to support ten pounds of Christmas lights, or a portion of it, at least, without lousing up what the outline of a walrus looks like from 100 feet away. It’s about 30 degrees out, the sun is putting out enough heat to cause the icicles hanging from the gutter over my head to begin to melt. The rhythmic plop plop plop of water on the hood of my coat provides a background accompaniment to my thoughts, which go something like, “If I fall off this ladder and kill myself this will have been so not worth it.”

I shouldn’t be up here at all. This is my husband’s job, darn it. I’m supposed to be on the ground, safe, out of the wind, now gusting at what feels like 50 mph, gazing critically upward as the man of the house positions lights, calling helpful advice to him, like “Over, over, over,” and “Up, up, up.” I keep waiting for the guy next door to notice my efforts and offer to take over for me. It’s what I would do if I were a man, I think to myself. It’s what my husband would do if he were here.

Unfortunately, my husband is working in another state, a warm state, a state that doesn’t get snow in the winter, a state where they decorate palm trees for Christmas and Santa wears tropical colored jams and surfs between chimneys. My husband calls three or four times a week and gives me a weather report so I can be witness to his suffering.

“It was a little chilly, today. Only 72 degrees at lunchtime. I had frost on my windshield this morning, but can you believe it? I left my scraper in Michigan.” “Did you get out a credit card?” “Nah. I just turned on the wipers and it cleared it right off.” That hardly qualifies as frost, I think, and I vow to hit him really really hard when next I see him, probably in January.

With my husband gone for the holidays I’d been toying with the idea of not having Christmas lights at all this year. I came up with plenty of reasons, some of them even good ones, like, it’s just an added expense and we need to be watching our budget more carefully now that we’re two households instead of just one. Or, it’s not like we’ve ever really had Christmas lights on the house, anyway. More like weird lights that just coincidentally got put up around Christmas time. One year my husband drew a Chinese dragon on the house that covered two sides and I worried that the neighbors would think it was a snake and burn us in effigy in the front yard. It’s a fine line to straddle, harmlessly eccentric on one side and dangerously nutso on the other. Most of the time I think we walk it pretty handily, but it’s harder than you’d think to avoid being obviously offensive. Once the kids wanted a rat on the house in lights and I had to nix it.

There are a few ideas that we’ve had that ultimately didn’t make the cut. This year’s included, a “For Sale” sign in script and a family grouping of penguins. I thought the first was too tacky, even for us, and the second was more complicated than I was prepared to attempt.

I tried to avoid the light issue altogether by telling myself that I’d be perfectly happy with just a tree inside the house this year and maybe a small display on the porch. To that end, I painted plywood dinosaurs so that they looked like snow-a-sauruses and outlined them with blue lights. The effect was less than impressive. One friend remarked, “Those are cute whatchmacallits on your porch.” I pulled the plug on them that same night.

Other factors began to weigh on me. The kids had been asking since Thanksgiving what I was planning to put on the house this year. They were feeling pressure from their friends at school. And every time I read the list of lighted houses in the paper I felt guilty that we weren't on it. The final straw was when I got dropped off at my house by Dial A Ride and the driver said, “Oh, you live here? Are you going to put lights up soon? My favorite was the disappearing cat you did a couple years ago.”

So on a recent weekend I screwed up my determination, brought down three bins of lights from the attic and strewed them around the floor. How did my husband do this, anyway? Oh, I remember. First he plugs them all in to see if they work. Then he goes to the store and buys all new ones. This not only makes sense, it also allows me to postpone the actual moment when I have to be outside in the cold by at least an hour. No problem. How long can it possibly take to do three sides of the house? Two hours? Four? I can spare that much time in the name of holiday cheer.

It actually ends up taking three days and my fingers and toes don’t get feeling back in them for another two. Still, the display definitely is up there. I purchased timers, and it’s going on and off regularly. It’s not anything like I thought it would be when I first walked around the house, visualizing where I was going to start and stop the strings of lights and what was possible. The vine itself doesn’t look like anything except a giant black scribble over hundreds of square feet of red bricks, all of it impossibly high off the ground. The final result is three light displays that disturbingly resemble pulsing one celled creatures. Christmas amoebas.

There are other problems. The lights that refuse to light up on the east and north sides of the house are a disappointment, but after thinking about it for negative six seconds I decide I'm not going back up on the ladder because a few recalcitrant bulbs decided it wasn’t their night to shine. My daughter consoles me, “The man in the moon on the front is cute. He looks like he’s winking.” Right. As for the fish on the north side, I’ve decided it’s a classic illustration of the artistic principle of closure. When someone drives by, all they have to do is squint their eyes and shake their heads a little and the lines fill in just fine. Real artists do it all the time.

I send pictures of the lights to my husband via email. “They look great!” he tells me on the phone. “They don’t look anything at all like what I’d do,” a remark which I’ve decided was probably meant to be sincere and complimentary and not truthful and tactless. The important thing is they’re done. The kids are happy and I’m happy and I hope the Dial A Ride driver is happy, too. It’s given me a whole new perspective on husbands and traditions and whether or not having a handy vine on the house from which to hang Christmas lights is the godsend it’s cracked up to be. I don’t think I’ll ever take my husband’s efforts in the decorating department for granted again. And I’m seriously rethinking my plan to transplant the vine to the next house. For one thing, the snow-a-sauruses would definitely be easier to pack.

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.

Homeward bound

Today, in honor of my daughter’s return home after nearly a year away, I’ll do some special things. I’ll take a shovel to the living room, dust off the piano, and put her computer back on her desk. I’ll string up a banner that says, “Welcome home” and I’ll bake a cake to celebrate. I may even brush her dog.

My daughter left last August for a year in France as an exchange student and I’ve missed her every day since she’s been gone. I’ve missed her fresh face in the mornings. I’ve missed how she hides behind her hands when she laughs. I’ve missed her sitting on the end of my bed at night, reading lists of things she’s going to do the next day or next week, while I try to keep my eyes open and look attentive.

Watching my child leave home for a year was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I cried for the first two weeks that she was gone. My husband held my hand, patted my back and handed me tissues. “How can you be so calm?” I wailed. He shrugged. “I just know that anything that happens will have already been taken care of by the time we hear about it. There’s nothing I can do from here and there’s no sense worrying.” I told him, “You’re so unnatural.”

He was also absolutely right. Eventually, I quit crying and had an existence outside the one my daughter was leading far away, sort of. I set the clock in the living room six hours ahead and then I’d look at it during the day and think, “Now, she’s getting ready for school. Now, she’s in her favorite class. Now, she’s having dinner with her host family. Now, she’s crying her eyes out in her room.”

The phone calls back and forth were difficult and hilarious. My youngest son, by mid-October, was routinely telling her how he couldn’t even remember what she looked like anymore. My oldest son would tell her how much he missed her and it would take both of them a half hour to recover. Her father, who has a little French, would talk to her about the proper way to conjugate French verbs. I would ask her how to say important things, like “stuff,” and “stalker,” and “homework.” Then, I would listen to her recite what she’d done during the week and try to sound like I was paying attention (Amazing telephone reception — she could hear my eyes glaze over, an ocean away).

For the past three weeks we’ve hosted her fifteen year old French brother here at our house. He’ll stay another week after my daughter gets back and then he’ll return home. He’s looking forward to seeing his adopted sister again. She’d written before he came and told us to take good care of him and not make fun of his accent. We promised. Instead, we’ve been teaching him useful American phrases.

For instance, recently he came into the kitchen where my husband was making dinner and asked, “What means ‘Cut it out?’ Is it, ‘Shut up?’” “No, it means, ‘Stop it,’” my husband told him, whereupon he immediately walked into the living room where my oldest son was playing the piano in a particularly atonal way and yelled at him, “Cut it out!” It makes me wonder what kinds of useful French phrases my daughter picked up last year.

My daughter’s host parents have written me that she matured a lot this year while she was gone and I believe them. I can see it in her letters home and in the pictures she’s sent. I’m expecting an older child to walk through the door today but I also know that she will be different in other ways, too.

Her view of the world has grown bigger than what’s in her own back yard. It’s not just the difference between fifteen and sixteen, it’s also the difference between making plans for the next twenty four hours and making plans for the next five years. Her horizons have expanded this year to include a whole other half of the planet and so have her goals. I suspect her lists won’t be just about what’s happening in the next couple days anymore, they’ll be about what she has planned for the rest of her life. The next time she comes to sit on the end of my bed and tell her dreams to me they might take a little while to get through. I’d better get comfortable.

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.

Hello, my name is Marie and I'm a piler.

I suffer from piles. Piles of work, piles of papers, piles of clothing. My home is full of piles.
In my sons' room there are piles of toys, piles of dirty clothes and piles of books. I ask them to pick up the piles and they do, but within 48 hours they're back again, the contents rearranged, but in much the same spots as they were before, as if there were pile magnets in the corners and under the bed.
Some piles are when-I-get-around-to-it piles. The one on top of the desk is the to-be-filed pile. Some piles are piles-in-transition. The lump next to the front door is the things-to-be-brought-up-the-stairs pile, part of which will be added to the clothes-to-be-put-away pile on top of one son's dresser and another part of which will be put on the pile-to-be-brought-up-to-the-attic.
Some piles are promises. I put photos in piles with the idea that I promise to sort them into albums at some future date.
Some piles are guilt piles. There is a pile of magazines on my coffee table that I haven't had time to read but since I bought the subscription I feel I ought to at least riffle them once before I give up entirely and throw them away.
Some piles are object lesson piles, like the pile of videos and dvds, not in their cases, which I refuse to put away because I didn't get them out and if I continually pick up after certain people in this house they'll never learn to pick up after themselves and will turn out to be pigs and no one will ever marry them and I'll be stuck with them and their piles forever.
Some piles are permanent. On the shelf of the entertainment center is an "electronics pile" where I throw headphones, game boys, joysticks and memory cards, because it's pointless to leave them on the floor all day for when certain people get home from school in the afternoons. I mean, sometimes I need to walk on it.
There are change of plan piles, like the one in the corner of the living room with stuff that I planned to sell in my garage sale which I was going to have because I thought we'd be moving, but since we're not moving, at least not any time soon, it's still there in the corner along with the pile of cardboard boxes that I was planning to use to pack up the stuff I didn’t sell.
Some piles are indecisive. Like the pile of scarves and mittens still sitting by the back door because I haven’t convinced myself that just because it’s May it won’t still snow next week.
Sometimes piles are sentimental. In my basement, I have piles of sketchbooks and letters and drawings and sculptures, things that I made or that friends sent or that my children brought home from school. Piles of feelings and memories that I can’t bear to throw away.
Sometimes piles beget other piles, like the sock basket with paired socks in it, a direct spinoff of the original sock basket that contains socks with no matches yet but might someday when the dryer decides to spit them back out.
Sometimes piles are spontaneous, like the piles of shoes, jackets and backpacks that suddenly accumulate on the floor by the front door whenever the kids come home from school.
When I had cleaning help, my piles got transformed into stacks. Once a week, the piles would go from being mixed up messes to neat and orderly stacks of like things, all the papers and books over here, all the toys over there, all the dirty clothes down in the basement next to the washer. I’d look at the stacks and feel like I was making progress with my piles because they were organized.
I admit that I have guilt over the sheer numbers of piles in my house. I’ve checked out piles of books on the subject of clearing the piles away. It always results in my feeling energized about getting rid of the piles, until I realize that until and unless I can get all the rest of my household to feel the same way, the piles will keep coming back. I’m assuming here that when half of my household leaves to start their own lives somewhere else, the piles in my life will diminish in size and scope. I know some people who thought the piles in their house were because they had kids, but when the kids left they had to admit that it was themselves and not their children who had been the pilemakers all along. I suspect I’m heading toward the same revelation down the road.
I wonder, is the propensity to produce piles genetic? Are my children doomed to have piles, too? Or is it something I can train them to avoid? How would that be possible if I’m the one that’s teaching them to make piles in the first place? Is there a twelve step program for dealing with piles? Maybe I could start one. “Hello. My name is Marie Marfia and I’m a piler.”
I’m planning on moving my office from my basement to a new space this summer and for a while I contemplated having a pile free existence. What would it be like to work in a room with no piles in it? Bare floored and with corners that I could see into, table tops with nothing on them, except of course, the pile of computers and scanners and printers that I need to do my job. Hmm. Piles seem to follow me wherever I go. But it’s fine. I have a pile of ideas about what to do about it.

We're settling in.

It's gotten easier, a little, or maybe it's just that I'm expecting less.

Today Mom has a dentist appointment. She grumbles that it's just for x-rays, "A way for them to take more of my money," although how she expects to have her teeth fixed (she needs a filling replaced) without them knowing what's in her mouth, I have no idea. "They need to support 5 hygienists, 2 receptionists and a family of four, Mom," I tell her. I feel the same way when people question my hourly rate, like I made up the amount out of a clear blue sky or something.

She seems pretty cheerful this morning. Lately she's been going to church with the old gentleman that lives next door to me, Jim. She says she puts both feet on the floorboards and grabs hold of the car door and shuts her eyes. I tell her she'll be safer if she can just relax instead. I think she's angling to get me to go back to taking her to church in the mornings. I won't cave, though. It's supposed to be Steve's job, since he's not working right now. But she thinks his driving is worse than Jim's.

My house has shrunk two sizes in the last couple months. Once, when Mom came to live here, and again, when Steve came back from Virginia. I can only imagine what it will be like in the summer, when the boys are home from school for three months, and Alice comes home from France. Plus, we're expecting to host Alice's host brother, Corentin, for a few weeks. I'm planning on moving my studio to the back of a gallery downtown, which will free up my basement to use as an additional sleeping area. It'll all work out, I'm sure. It's just hard to know where all the confusion will go. It can't possibly be contained in this one, small and getting smaller all the time household, can it?

In a lot of ways, having my mother come and stay has been like adopting another child. This one has required more than the usual adjustments. She comes with baggage. Drug dependencies, which we're working through, and anxieties, which we're trying to distract her from, and physical problems, which we're mostly ignoring, since there's nothing we can do about those until they get worse.

She's demanding, like a child, but unlike the rest of my children, she's better at getting me to do things for her. For one, she's the one that trained me, thirty years ago. With the kids, I tend to negotiate requests for things. I say, "Okay, I'll take you to your friend's house, but first you have to clean the bathroom for me." With Mom, I jump up to do her bidding, almost before she's finished framing the request. I take it back. I used to jump up to do her bidding. Now I negotiate when it will be possible to do her bidding, "I wasn't planning on going to the store today. How badly do you need diabetic milk shakes?" It's gotten less frenetic, since Steve's back home. Now he gets to do her bidding, and she's more reluctant to ask him to do things.

One morning, she stood in front of me while I sat on the couch, typing into my laptop, and said, "I want you to take me to church today." "Why can't Steve?" "I don't like to ask him." "Tough. I have to work today and he'll be happy to drive you to church. Besides, if you don't ask him, he'll have his feelings hurt." She did ask him and he did take her, but after that she started to call the man next door.

Jim's a life long bachelor. She pays him with cookies. Today's will be raisin, the lucky dog.

Mother worry

I remember saying to someone that it was easier to worry about her at my house than to worry about her from two hours away, but that turns out to have been a lie.

It’s harder to worry about her here. When she was living away I worried about her only intermittently, for the space of a phone call and for an hour or two afterward. Then, my regular life would take over and I’d forget about worrying about my mother until I remembered to call her again or she called to remind me. Now, she’s here and I worry about her almost non-stop. It’s worse than worrying about my kids because she is better than they are at getting my attention and getting me to do things for her. I jump when she asks because I’ve been trained to do it since I was small. I resist, sometimes, and I’m successful in my resistance, sometimes. Mostly, she asks for something and I do it immediately. I don’t try to negotiate, like I do with my children.

Mother in the morning

When I walked into the kitchen this morning my mother looked from the back how she used to when she was working third shift at the hospital, pink sweater and white pants, white socks looking like her nursing shoes.

She used to come home in time to tell us goodbye in the mornings, and then she’d have a warm beer and go to bed for a few hours. The warm beer was because when she kept it in the refrigerator, someone else would drink it. They left the warm beer alone and she needed it to get to sleep after working all night.

Later, she found out that the amount she made extra for the family was just taken away again in additional taxes, so she quit. That and the paperwork that she had to do just killed any desire to work as a nurse.

I wonder what she might have done if there had been other career paths open to her when she finished high school. But back then it was nursing or teaching. I can’t see her as a teacher. I never thought about whether or not she was cut out to be a nurse.

I remember when I was sick and she would bring me weak tea or ginger ale and lay cool, damp washcloths on my forehead, or her hand against my hot cheeks. I didn’t think of her as a nurse, then, but as my mother.

When I was older and living alone and sick sometimes, I used to wish she was there again, to cool my cheeks and tuck in my covers and bring me tea and toast and medicine.

When I take care of my own children I think about how it felt to have her hand on my face as I put my own cool hands against my son’s forehead while he lays on the couch, under the comforter and with a bucket nearby, just in case.

Here's Mommy!

I came down the stairs and surprised my mother with her pants down in front of the refrigerator, rummaging around for the plain yogurt. She has a yeast infection and the yoghurt helps. I definitely have to get a curtain on the front door, which is comprised almost entirely of clear beveled glass, and is on a direct line with the refrigerator, and also the window in the kitchen, which faces my neighbor Jim’s house. He’s 89 and I figure one more big shock could kill him.

I took her to the doctor’s yesterday. This is a new doctor and so far, and probably because he hasn’t made a move on her medications, she likes him. I filled out forms for her and listened to her misremember to him how long she’d been on certain pills and why. It was interesting, sort of, and alarming, more of. She sounds so completely normal, but the dates are all wrong in her head. She is starting to confuse events in her more recent past. When Dad died, when she moved in with my brother and his wife, when she moved out again. She referred to my Dad’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s on two different occasions, labelling it the starting point of all her own troubles. The depression started then, and the sleeplessness, and the worrying.

Now it seems like everything oversets her. Talking to the doctor she confessed that she’s taking more Ativan since she came to stay with me. She says that it’s from living with two little boys. This from the woman who raised 10 boys and two girls without benefit of any mood altering drugs. I have a hard time believing that noisy kids can be responsible for her anxiety attacks, but how the hell would I know? I didn’t have to listen to the confusion from five times as many children for thirty years. Maybe the effects are cumulative. I could blame it on the generation in front of this one, my generation, my siblings. If we’d been quieter growing up maybe she’d be in better shape now. It’s all your fault, you noisy gobs!

I haven’t announced her move to my brothers yet.

For one, I don’t believe it’s permanent, just because she’s done a runner on other members of the family before me. There’s no sense in counting on her to stay here and be happy. She doesn’t ever stay happy for long.

There was an article I read last week that talked about this pissed off gene that all human beings have that keeps them from being happy with their situation, no matter how perfect that situation might be. The author, Hugh McCleod, claimed that it was the pissed off gene that got you out of the cave to hunt wooly mammoth in the first place. My mother seems to have this gene in spades, except it hasn’t gotten her out of her cave to hunt, unless it was to hunt out another cave to hide in. One with a main floor laundry, for preference.

She’s so antsy. I keep expecting her to settle in and purr comfortably but she doesn’t do that. I don’t know what a grandmother is supposed to act like. Mine all died before I was born. I only know that this one is difficult to get used to.

The other day at dinner, she offered grace at the table and then made a remark to the boys that she knew they didn’t believe in God. They both jumped on that. Sam: “I believe in God. My god is just smaller than your god. There’s only me to believe in him.” Nick: “And I have two angels.”

I don’t know what she thought about that. Maybe that’s why she feels a need for more tranquilizers.

Steve says she baits me. I know this, but I think it’s more to establish herself in the hierarchy than from any sense of maliciousness, although the meanness is something I remember growing up.

She says being mean was the only way of exerting control over a herd of children. Things went by pretty strict routine around the house. Mom ran it and Dad enforced it. Sometimes, I envy the older boys, the ones that came first, because they must have experienced Mom and Dad before they became completely overwhelmed by the numbers of us.

It wasn’t like we lived on a farm or anything where you could get lost in the chores outside or where there were wide open spaces between you and the next person. We were all huddled together in our cave, stepping on each other’s toes, using up all the hot water, sleeping in the same rooms, breathing each other’s breath. It was a crowded, stuffy, moist cave, for the most part. We all developed a mean sense of humor.

She’s on the couch now, listening to her favorite television channel, All Catholic All The Time.

When I saw her this morning she had her pants down and was clutching her blue rosary, her travelling rosary she calls it, like a raggedy security blanket. She’d slept well and waked up to pee and get something to eat. Her hair was sticking up in the back and her eyes were hooded and tiny in her puffy face. She said she’d dreamed about indians and then again about an old neighbor couple of ours from a long time ago, Blanche and Henry Martin, both dead now. “Was Henry talking?” I asked her, because Henry had died after contracting Alzheimer’s disease. And she nodded. I gave her a hug and she shuffled back upstairs to wait until the boys left for school. She says it’s to stay out of my way, but I think it’s too busy for her and reminds her of school mornings from thirty years ago.

In those days we ate a lot of oatmeal. Mom was like a huge organizing spider in the kitchen, making lunches, serving breakfast, directing traffic. She’d buy white bread loaves 30 at a time and put them in the big freezer in the utility room. Then she’d take the bread out and lay it in single slices all over the counter in the kitchen, trying to thaw it out enough to spread something on it, peanut butter and jelly or the dreaded ham spread, making sandwiches and packing cookies and apples and oranges. Never chips, because those were expensive. All our cookies were homemade because that was cheaper. We were stupid and envied our friends who brought packaged treats from home.

Underwear is so personal

Last night I became inexplicably angry with the world and was sent to bed by my husband. I read for a half hour and fell asleep. Later I heard him discover the bag with sexy underwear I’d forgotten on the stairs and he came into the room where I was sleeping and kissed my cheek and whispered that he loved me. Sexy underwear is good for a few things. Myself, I just feel ridiculous in it, but it apparently makes Steve feel loved and for that I should just keep my mouth shut and buy more of it.

I’ve always surrounded myself in white cotton. Ever since I was a kid, it’s been full size cotton briefs. Hanes, for preference. Sometimes I’d splurge and buy them in colors, woo hoo. Pink, blue, yellow. Sometimes purple. But I haven’t worn bikini bottoms since before I got pregnant with my first child.

I think the motivation here was to hide as much of my stretched out ass as I could. Lately, the shape of my butt has changed a bit, due to regular running habits picked up in the last five years, and maybe that’s why I browsed the camisoles with matching panties rack last night while waiting for my youngest son to finish trying on blue jeans in the fitting rooms at Meijer. I haven’t graduated to Victoria’s Secret yet, you’ll note. I’m still only looking in the lingerie department at the giant grocery chain. But baby steps first, right?

The truth is, I know what I look like. I’m an artist by trade. I can’t fool me. I realize that I’m 44 years old and my hair is going gray at an alarming rate, that gravity has taken a firm grip on my belly and breasts and that the weight of the world generally keeps me from throwing my shoulders back and lifting my chin clear of the developing wattles underneath it. I see these things on a daily basis. I check the mirror.

What’s worse is seeing myself when I’m not prepared to, before I’ve taken that anticipatory deep breath, like when I’m passing jewelry departments and I catch sight of myself in one of the mirrors on the counter. It’s a shock, then, I can tell you, to catch myself, off guard, putting my usual foot forward instead of my very best one. Usually there’s a second or two lag time between when I first see myself and when I finally recognize that reflection for who it is, namely, me. It’s worse, somehow, when I don’t even know that it’s me, when the picture I have inside my head is so different from what’s out there for everyone else to look at and which I can’t even recognize without bracing myself for the experience.

It all boils down to the fact that I can’t seriously contemplate myself in skivvies that feature lace and ribbons and scalloped edging. Silk or satin or even slippery polyester just seems like it’s asking a cow to compete in a dressage competition. I’m not there. I don’t qualify. I don’t fit the pictures in the magazines or the advertising circulars. I suppose I could paint my lips with drippy wet lookinig lip gloss and pout them for the camera, but it would end up being a picture that would send me to the floor to roll around shrieking.

Still, go figure, my husband is absurdly delighted when I bring home a little bit of nothing made of padded cups and fuzzy red material, completely impractical to wear under my usual t-shirt and sweats, but apparently no end of a turn on for him to discover when I take off the outside stuff to reveal what’s left over.

I don’t get it, much, but I’m grateful. And a little ashamed of myself. Not for wearing the stuff, which isn’t shaming at all, but for not wearing it, when it so obviously gives him so much pleasure to see me in it. It’s got nothing to do with how I think I look, does it? It’s got everything to do with how he thinks I look.

I’ve rejected his version of me for the last twenty years. Now, here I am, unable to believe in myself as a beautiful woman, and I have to take his word for it. Thank god he still believes. And if all I have to do is put on bikini underwear with lace in it to get my solitary worshipper to renew his fervor for my favors, then it’s cheap and I shouldn’t be bitching.

Was I bitching? I thought I was being grateful.

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

Science is gross

Lakeview Elementary had a science fair this week. I got to go with the boys, who each had something on display. Sam was required to attend from 6-7 pm as part of his assignment grade, so he could be on hand to explain his project to any interested passersby.

Nick’s project was a wooden catapult that he'd constructed with a lot of his dad's help. Both boys and Steve had spent a rollicking hour in the attic flinging marshmallows during the past weekend. You could hear the whoops and thumps from two floors away.

At the fair, Nick's project, along with about 30 dirty marshmallows, was placed on a table with the other simple machines. These were inventions built out of wood or cardboard. Most of them used pulleys and counterweights and levers to solve an obvious problem. Sometimes the problem involved something that the third grader was required to do but didn't like to. My favorite of these was the "Pet Letter Outer." Nick's catapult was named "The Hurler." I'm not sure what problem it was supposed to solve unless maybe it was the problem of what to do with an extra bag of marshmallows that would otherwise just lay around, useless.

We milled around the gym and it reminded me of every other science fair I'd ever attended. There were the usual 20 displays comparing battery strength and dish soap bubbles. No clear winner emerged from any of those. Dawn was the favorite on the north side of the gym, while on the south side it was Ajax, hands down. It was Everyready Alkaline at the front and Duracell at the back. One project explored how long it took little metal mailboxes to rust in various planetary atmospheres, using ball jars and complete with a backdrop of heavenly bodies. This will be important when we finally colonize Mars and need to receive mail there. Most of the displays featured obvious signs that someone's parent had gotten involved, like coordinated computer graphics, scientific sounding language and correct spelling.

Sam's project was a comparison between human spit (his) and cat spit (Kato's) to see which grew more bacteria over time. It showed, clearly, that the cat's mouth was cleaner than his, which sort of surprised me, and I had to wonder about his methods. He used six petri dishes, some sort of gel and the warm, dark confines of the guest room closet. The final display featured scribbles meant to be many-legged amoebas and pictures of yawning cat and human mouths, cut out with undulating edges and pasted wherever they happened to fit. As he neared completion on his board he'd tear off a picture to put something essential in its place, like a conclusion or his results. He didn't record his data in a notebook, per his dad’s suggestion, not bothering with writing down his observations during the experiment and instead relying on his “photographic memory" to assemble a graph, making up an arbitrary scale to use instead of an actual culture count. He still earned a score of 89, getting 10 out of 10 on his oral presentation, which just goes to show that he’s inherited my talent for talking but none of his dad’s talent for details.

Nick's catapult was the object of many admiring looks, right up until one of the older boys discovered that it was capable of flinging marshmallows 15 feet. After that it was hidden behind a press of small bodies and marshmallows kept popping out over the heads of the crowd at the rate of about 1 every 3 seconds. There were little boys chasing marshmallows all over the place. The missiles dropped onto the floor, plinked off of project boards and even smacked one mother in the face until one of the teachers, Mr. Petersen, stepped in and shooed the kids away. Nick was relieved his machine had suffered no damage during the mayhem and gathered up the catapult and the remaining half dozen marshmallow missiles, declaring himself ready to go home, which we did.

The next morning, I went out to the car to take the kids to school and discovered Sam already in it, waiting to go. He was chewing something and I asked him what it was, thinking he'd found some candy somewhere in the car. I was getting ready to deliver Standard Parental Lecture Number 366 about the follies of consuming so much sugar right before class. He didn't want to tell me what it was at first but eventually he opened his mouth and I saw the remains of a marshmallow in it.

Realizing that the only marshmallows in the car were the ones that came home with us from the science fair, the following thoughts raced through my head: Nick hadn’t taken the marshmallows inside last night. Those things had been in the hands of at least 20 kids, not to mention on the floor and the walls, and ricocheted off at least one person’s face. I was surprised and then grossed out. This was much worse than just sugar before school. "Do you realize how many kids had that thing in their hands last night? And it was on the floor, too. Yuck, Sam! How can you put that in your mouth?" I asked him. He shrugged his shoulders and smiled at me. "It tastes good," he said, as if that explained everything.

Which it did, in a way. At least, I believe the results of his experiment now. Ew.

Marie Marfia
© Copyright 2004