Wheels on the bus

            Judge me if you will, and you probably will.  I have taken a shameful and illicit step that nonetheless, by its very nature, must remain painfully public.  There is nowhere to hide on this one, no doors to close over my failure and no curtains to draw over the evil that has entered my drawing room.  There is almost no defense for the place I have gone and the choice I have made, but perhaps you will cut me a little slack, anyhow.

            I have bought a leash.  A leash for my son.  Call it by some other cute name if you can, but there is no denying that Benjamin now walks about at the end of a very short leash.

            A leash is a sign that I see my child as a animal to be contained.  It degrades his humanity and stifles his explorative desires.  Instead of teaching him caution, I am one step short of putting him in a straight jacket. 

            Yeah, I get it.  I know how strangers look at me, wondering whether I keep him in a cage at home to complete the dehumanization.  But, since his explorative desires include runs through the parking lot at the grocery store, I find myself left with little choice.

            He is big and he is heavy.  He is strong and he is fast.  Unlike his older brother, he does not look for ways to win my approval.  He looks for ways to test the laws of gravity, traffic, and patience.  He laughs with glee when he hears the word “no” and tries new and inventive ways to elicit it.  I am too pregnant to carry his 27 pounds around all the time, assuming I still want to be walking by August.

            So, my choices are few.  I can limit him to the stroller, I can make him stay in the house all day long, or I can put him on a leash.  Other than that, I can scoop his splattered remains off of the parking lot.  I have chosen the leash.  The leash allows him to try things; it allows me to hold his hand and let him walk; it means he doesn’t get the satisfaction of a panicked “NO!” quite as often as he would like.

            So, judge me if you will.  You will not be the first and you will not be alone.  There are people way ahead of you in line – presumably people without children or with children like Zachary, who actually listens to what I tell him to do – who look at me as though I am using a cattle prod on the child. 

            I don’t care.  Better leashed than dead.

            Benjamin is highly verbal.  At twenty-one months old, he has left the two-word sentence in his dust, and he is now fully capable of expressing all his desires, which is why most of the time he sounds like a walking menu with trucks thrown in.  “No like it pita,” he insists when we put hummus on it.  “Ben turn,” he hollers when Zach is playing with, well, anything.  “Train, take it,” as we left someone’s house, and then “train, keep it,” just in case that would work, instead.  And, my personal favorite.  “Mommy eating big one.”  (He was talking about pieces of watermelon, people.  Get your mind out of the gutter.)

            But, words are not his greatest gift, despite how cute it is when he says “ladder, go up!” then crouches down for “ladder, fall down.”  No, his talent is clearly in the cuddling department.  Zachary, on the other hand, is not a cuddly child, although he does like to snuggle with me.  This is a trait, his father likes to remind me, that Zach comes by honestly.  His mother isn’t much of a cuddler, either.  I do, however, like to snuggle with my kids, and one of them is clearly supremely gifted at it.  Zachary snuggles because he needs the comfort; Benjamin cuddles because that is what he does.

            Ben is ample, he is strong, he is affectionate, and he loves to fit his body into the voids left by other people’s bodies.  And, as much as he likes to cuddle with people, he likes stuffed animals even more.  He feeds his giraffe blankie from right off his plate.  He runs about with his arms fiercely embracing bears and dogs and dolls.  He has them kiss each other, and he provides them with plenty of kisses, himself.

            This, too, is an honest trait.  His father was stuffed animal obsessed, by all accounts.  As a child, J had a bunk bed, because the top bunk was necessary to house the impressive plush collection.  Ben clearly got the gene, because every time we take him off to his bed, he clutches yet another stuffed animal to him.  “Cow come with!” he implores.  We comply, even though he is probably going to need to register his bed as a brothel if any more animals take up residence there.

            Someone is following in Daddy’s footsteps.

            Long before gravity took over our bodies, long before little people took over our time, and long before 5 AM became an early morning rather than a late night, we attended an academic institution that had a lovely tradition called Spring Break.  Some people went to Cancun, some people went home and had their laundry done, and I generally tried to get a jump start of term papers because I was a raving geek (as opposed to the embodiment of coolness that I am today).  The really good kids, however, did something called Alternative Spring Break, which involved building houses for people unable to afford them or somesuch altruism.  And, although I don’t regret missing out on Cancun and I certainly don’t miss the trips home, I do wish I had an opportunity to spend some time just doing for people to whom I am not related.

            Well, here’s our chance, and many of you have risen to the occasion.  Here are the responses I got to my call for Alternative Mother’s Day suggestions:

• Becky, at Mommy Wants Vodka, is giving money to Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.  Please visit her post about parents who have lost children and what people are doing to honor those children.
•  Coco, at Mommyhood and Life, is donating to Heifer.org, so as to help those suffering from the food crisis.
• The Mad Hatter suggests donating to The Stephen Lewis Foundation in honor of the grandmothers in Africa who are raising AIDS orphans.
• The Other Bear donates for breast cancer research each year in honor of her mother’s friend.
• I also encourage those who haven’t to visit Julie’s post on uninsured children and spend some time today learning about this important issue.
• Please spend some time reading the series over at MOMocrats.

If I have missed anyone, please send me an email or leave a comment and I will add your ideas.  Today is about motherhood, and motherhood is about children.  That’s all I have to say about that.

I don’t usually post twice in a day, but I wanted to get tomorrow’s post up early to give people a chance to think about how they might contribute.

            So, I am starting to think I was a little depressed (“no shit,” they say).  But, I feel like I am starting to come out of it (“about time,” they mutter).  Although I am not yet really returning phone calls and still wake up every day that I have social plans hoping the other party will cancel, I am beginning to think about people other than myself now and again (“good, because this blog was starting to get boring,” they reply). 

            As Mother’s Day rolls around, I start thinking about cards for my husband’s grandmothers and what to send his mother.  He writes out the cards to maintain the illusion that HE was the one to purchase the cards, but I suspect his mother is on to the whole arrangement.  She is hard to shop for, and we have taken to sending her flowers for Mother’s Day.  As I am increasingly uncomfortable with the environmental effect of cut flowers, we tend to steer towards potted plants, which actually stay alive in their house (as opposed to ours, which is where lavender go to die).  I just cannot stomach putting all those resources into growing and transporting flowers that will croak a week later.

            This year, however, as I tried to muster the energy to go online and order the flowers, I found myself listening to NPR.  I don’t get much time, as Zachary asks, “please can you turn it off?” the moment we get in the car, and Benjamin has now taken to saying “turn off, Mommy” when his brother isn’t around to enforce the news ban.  In the moments during which my children have actually lifted the news blackout, however, I noticed there seems to have been a bit of a natural disaster in Myanmar.

            My mother-in-law has spent her life educating children, hers and others.  In her spare time, she is a devoted grandmother.  Kids are sort of her thing (well, kids and speeding).  So, I decided that this year, the best way to say “Happy Mother’s Day” to her would be to help other mothers and their children.  And so, we are taking the money we would have spent on flowers and donating it to the American Red Cross  for their disaster relief fund, in the hopes that perhaps at some point they will be permitted to provide disaster relief.  For good measure, I asked J to give any money he was planning on spending on me to the same organization (which translates into $2.50 for the Hallmark he won’t need to buy). 

            Of course, there are free ways to celebrate Mother’s Day.  For example, click here to see Julie’s post on uninsured children.  You could spend an hour on Mother’s Day learning more about this important issue, if you aren’t familiar with it already.  Come election day, this issue ought to be somewhere near the top of your priority list. 

            Or, you could write a letter to a teacher, thanking him or her for helping raise our next generation.  Or, you could recommit to one environmental measure (eschewing plastic bags, for example) as a gift to mothers who want their children to inherit a planet that feels somewhat habitable. 

            Join me this year in celebrating an Alternative Mother’s Day.  Please leave your ideas in the comments or write your own post on ways to recognize all mothers on this important day.  Then email me the link (see my About page).  I will break my no-posting-on-weekends rule this weekend because Mother’s Day seems to keep falling on a Sunday.  I will post links and the ideas you suggest on Mother’s Day.

            As for me, I am hoping that, in addition to the donation to the Red Cross, I will get a day with no new pimples on Sunday.  I am starting to feel like a mountain range, and Benjamin does not help when he delightedly points out each new pimple.  Never should have taught him that word…

            I had never met a child like Zachary.  Certainly, I know there are other bright, sensitive boys out there whose cognitive abilities outstrip their social skills.  Yes, I know that mine is not the only little boy who likes pink, sparkles, and all things beautiful.  Of course, I have heard that there are other children who dislike Band Aids.

            But I had never met one.  The children we knew in London were nothing like him, although his little friend down the street was surely as intelligent and eccentric as he is.  I was the only other Highly Sensitive Person who I knew. 

            And then we met him.  A few months older, a good head taller, Oliver nonetheless seems to be Zachary’s perfect match.  They each march to their own flutist, but they speak each other’s language.

            This little boy, he is probably even smarter than Zachary (although I imagine my in-laws would dispute such an outlandish claim), and social situations seem even more overwhelming for him.  He talks less than Zachary, but then so do most people.  He thinks inside while Zachary shares every last thought – with me.  But, playing together, they have no hesitation, no fear.  There is simply comfort.

            Zachary is playing well with all his new school friends, and they chat away with ease.  He is suddenly interested in “sports,” although he has no idea what those are, because a classmate talks about his adventures in soccer and baseball.  Dropping him at school, I watch Zach settle into conversation with a little girl who may be the only child I have ever met who speaks as much as he does.  Coming home for a playdate, he and another child giggle in the backseat, telling each other jokes that I don’t quite understand.  And, as always, he is watching them for cues: what is normal, what is appropriate, who am I supposed to try to be?

            But, with Oliver, there is comfort I have never seen.  The sense of being in the presence of a kindred spirit.  They work on different wavelengths, but together they create music.  Zachary never seems to be trying with Oliver, and playing with him creates no stress.  They just do it their way, coming together and moving apart through some understanding they have never needed to discuss.

             As their younger brothers play together, demonstrating the social ease that comes with second child-ness, as their extroverted mothers’ words spill out across each other, I watch these two boys.  They are released from their internal world and the burden of their own perceptions.  And, together, they are just two little boys playing with pool noodles.

            Because I am not a competitive parent, I try not to talk about the fact that my children are smarter, cuter, kinder, and better behaved than everyone else’s.  I don’t want to make the rest of you feel bad, just because your kids weren’t born at Lake Woebegone.

            However, today we will make an exception, because we visited the pediatrician a few weeks ago.  Zachary, it turns out, has had some sort of crazy growth spurt and is knocking his head against the 25^th percentile for height, a zone he has never before encountered.  It’s a good thing he’s bright, because basketball is probably not in his future.

            His brother, at twenty-one months, is only an inch and a pound less than Zachary, who is two years older.  He weighs in at the fiftieth percentile but has a head in the 90^th.  That means his head is bigger than 90% of the other kids his age, which comes as absolutely no surprise to those of us who have to try and yank a shirt over that thing each morning.  And, he measures at the 97^th percentile for height.  Given that we’re Jewish, that puts him at taller than pretty much every other child of his ethnic background.

            When he was born and we sent around an email with his name (which is not really Benjamin), a friend replied that we had chosen a name fit for either a pro linebacker or a don at Oxford.  I am banking that, given his size, he is still in the running for both positions.

            But, the part of the visit that showed just how extraordinary my kids are was the taking of the blood and the shots, when they screamed in the 99^th percentile.  And my heart swelled when Benjamin began shouting “BAD” and hitting the woman making his big brother cry.

            Unfortunately, the blood tests revealed that perhaps my children are a bit below average in one way.  Both boys are anemic.  How, you may wonder, does a toddler who eats as much as Benjamin come up anemic?  As far as I can tell, there are two possible explanations.  Either his totally below-average mother keeps forgetting to serve meat or he eats so much damned produce that he flushes the iron right out of his system.  I suspect there is only so much iron in watermelon and peas.

            The mark of a true Washingtonian is the ability to say things like “over by Capital Hill” and “down at the Smithsonian” without gasping at the sheer governmental importance of it all.  A Washingtonian would never do what I did, one New Year’s Eve, and walk over to Richard Gephardt at the next table in a restaurant to wish him well in the Presidential campaign.  Fat load of good it did him, of course, but a true native or a well-assimilated transplant would be cool in the face of political superstardom.

            Every city has these quirks.  Bostonians don’t visit the Cheers bar; Londoners find those double-decker busses useful, not charming; and New Yorkers for the most part do not visit the Guggenheim.  In Los Angeles, of course, you can tell the natives from the out-of-towners because they are way cool when they run into movie stars.

            And so, one day last week, had you been in Long’s Pharmacy, you would have assumed I was quickly assimilating to my new home (unless you, say, read my blog and know better).  Because, as I walked in the door, exhausted preschooler and hungry toddler in tow, and looked up at the checkout line by the front door, I did not swoon.  I did not fumble for a pen to get an autograph.  I merely gave a half-smile and a quarter nod in Henry Winkler’s direction before heading off to look for ice packs for Zachary’s lunch bag.

            Winkler, too, would have assumed, had he thought about it at all, that I was being respectful and giving him his space.  This would have been a gross miscalculation.  The fact is, I was not entirely sure it was Henry Winkler.  It’s not like he was wearing a leather jacket and waving out the window of the Cunningham’s garage.  And, I am notoriously lousy at recognizing celebrities. 

             I am the woman who, early in 2000, stood next to Martin Sheen on the curb at National Airport.  He looked oddly familiar, and as we drove away, I stared as I tried to place his face.  He smiled and waved, so I did too.  Then I turned to J.  “That guy looks strangely familiar.  Is he one of my old professors?”

              Whatever my next career move, I am clearly not cut out to lead any of those “spotting the stars” tours.

               And so, by virtue of my cultural idiocy, I will blend right in, respecting the rights of the stars to buy their cough syrup in peace.  Unless I spot Rachel Griffiths.  Girl, if I see you anywhere, you can rest assured I will drool all over you.

            “Margorie, my younger son has come down with a cold, and I don’t want him around your kids because it is pretty nasty.  If I could drop him off, Zachary could still come over for his playdate.”

            “Sure,” she replied.  “Will he let you do that?”

            “I’m not sure.  I wanted to talk to you before I asked him.  I’ll talk to him now and then call you back.”  I hung up the phone and went over to Zach.

            “Zachary, Tom wants you to come over to his house.  But Benjamin is sick, so I can’t come with you.”

            “But, Mommy, you could drop me off!”  Well, that answered that question.  If only it had gone so smoothly in execution.  Don’t get me wrong; Zach was perfectly happy to be left at his friend’s house, and the friend was perfectly happy to have him there.

            Benjamin, however, was considerably less sanguine.  He has come to regard playdates as a joint activity, and he was not pleased to discover that he was to be excluded from the event.  Zach got to take off his shoes, enter the house, and go play with the trains, but Benjamin remained shod.  As we walked away to spend the hour tooling around the neighborhood, he screamed: “HOUSE!  HOUSE!  Shoes off!  Shoes off!”  Only the promise of blueberries could soothe his soul.

            Pickup went no better, with the child apoplectic that he had been barred from the festivities.  Zachary, on the other hand, was happy as a clam.

            “He’s really mature for his age,” the other mother said.  “He can come back any time.  He plays so nicely and behaved himself so well.”  If only the same could be said for the shrieking twenty-one-month-old I was trying to drag from her front hallway.

            I tend to lean towards the left on most measures, and people have been known to refer to me as a raving liberal every now and then.  But, unlike many of my liberal friends, I do not wonder how it is that so many people out there are self-absorbed.  I do not shake my head at those who put themselves first.  I do not ponder how it is that such large numbers of people seem to disregard the needs and rights of others, trampling over anyone in their path to get their way.

            I do not wonder because I spend an awful lot of time at playgrounds, so I have seen where it all begins.

            I have seen seven-year-olds climb the wrong way up the slide, then slide back down, then climb the wrong way up again, all while a line of two- and three-year-olds wait their turn at the top.  Their parents do not intervene, and why should they?  These are probably the same parents I see teaching their children to climb up the slide rather than the steps when they are babies.  All the while, I am repeating like a moron to my children, “Up the steps and down the slide,” while they look at me and wonder why their idiotic mother cannot see that everyone else is going up whatever way they please, as long as they are big enough to have the right of way.

            I have seen children twice Zachary’s size shove him aside at the top of the slide.  It was with great pride that I finally watched him shove back and assert his turn.  I have taught him to be understanding if a smaller child is taking her time or pushes past him, but I am pleased to see he is finally not letting the bigger kids take advantage of him.  Of course, he has no chance of really winning, because they just shove him harder while their parents sit idly by.

            I have seen three little girls come along and use the rope ladder to come down the wall, even though Zach and another child were patiently waiting in line to go up.  I have seen a child use our shovel, then drop it to climb to the top of the climbing frame, where he pushed my son for absolutely no reason at all.  When I picked up the shovel and gathered the children to go home, he looked at me and said, “I was using that shovel.”

            “It is our shovel,” I responded.

            “But I was using it.”

            And so I flat out told the little shit, “But it is our shovel and you just shoved my kid and we are going home.”  Perhaps his caregiver could have pointed this out, had there been one anywhere around.

            I have also seen older children take my kids by the hand, help them do things they cannot do, and soothe them when they hurt themselves.  And I have made a point of thanking them, telling my children to thank them, and complimenting them to their parents.

            I have seen my own children push other children, throw sand at them, drop toys down the slide, and snatch toys.  And you know what?  I have disciplined them EVERY SINGLE TIME.  Discipline is not a naughty word, and it is not about hitting or screaming.  Discipline is about teaching limits.  Whenever I say, “no throwing sand!” I am disciplining.  Whenever I say, “If you want to put that truck down the slide, you need to be holding onto it, because you could hurt someone,” I am disciplining.

            So, if you are one of those parents who is so fucking liberal that you are appalled at the idea of using the word “no” (and yes, there are parents who make a point of never using such a word), if you are a parent who thinks time-outs are stifling a child’s spirit or somesuch shit, if you are a parent who thinks that enforcing turns and rules will destroy your child’s creativity, hurrah for you.  Just keep your kids the hell away from the playground.

            One of the drawbacks of living in temporary housing is not really knowing where the Emergency Room is.  We had driven past a nearby hospital frequently, but I had not really registered exactly where it was.  And this is precisely the reason I found myself snapping at the toddler that I could not hug him right now, reminding the pre-schooler to hold the towel to his head, and frantically calling their father to help me find the closest ER.  And of course he was not picking up his phone.  Then I was telling the toddler he had to stop crying immediately, shouting to the preschooler in the bathroom that we would be leaving for the hospital in a few minutes, and Googling Emergency Rooms in Santa Monica. 

            Turns out there was one three blocks away.  That’s the funny thing about temporary housing; you just don’t notice your surroundings because you will be moving soon.

            It all started because Zachary does not listen to his mother.  I TOLD him that he was likely to hurt himself or break a toy if he insisted upon balancing upon the tiny bunk beds from his fire station.  But, due to the fact that I am his mother, he completely ignored me.

            “Sometimes I wish she would break things, just to show her I am right,” my best friend said on the other end of the line, all the way across the country in Boston.  “But she doesn’t seem to care when she does.”

            “And he never hurts himself, either,” I added, as Zach giggled and balanced and then fell over.  He started screaming.  Of course, he always starts screaming.  “Zachary, did you hurt yourself?” I asked as I walked over.  “And what were you doing when you did?”

            And then, my friend in Boston heard the following from afar, as I had placed the phone down on the coffee table that had assaulted Zach’s head.  “Oh, my God!  I’ll talk to you later.”  And the line went dead.

            Benjamin woke up from his nap when I was still trying to stop the bleeding.  There was no question of leaving him with a neighbor because we have no neighbors.  We are in temporary housing, an apartment in a building of anonymous people.  And our car is parked in a garage about 1/8 of a mile from the apartment, so I put Ben in the stroller to get to the car while Zach walked, still holding a towel to his head.

            By the time we got to the ER, the bleeding had stopped, and Benjamin was wailing because he had not had so much as a diaper change since getting up from his nap.  I looked at the volunteer: “Actually, it’s the other one who’s hurt.”

            And, although I had failed to remain calm and reassuring at home, although I had snapped at Ben in frustration because his father was not picking up the damned phone or complying with the email that instructed “call NOW,” I know that I am not a total wash as a mother in emergency situations.  I know this because I had the presence of mind to pack pretzels in the diaper bag before we left.  Which explains why both children were chipper by the time we had gotten through registration.

            In fact, no one had any issues until half an hour later, when the “Fast Track” nurse came in and ebulliently told Zachary, “I have a Band Aid here for you.”  Now, if you have been reading here from the start, you will remember that Zachary rates Band Aids as second only to spaghetti sauce on his list of Dreaded Adult Torture Devices.  When I tried to tell her to ditch the Band Aid, she told me it had a numbing medication on it.

            And this is why I held Zach on my lap for twenty minutes, holding the damned cotton ball with the medication onto his little cut, while his brother moved furniture around the waiting room.

            Later, after we had pinned Zach down so the doctor could glue the small (really, very small) cut on his head, I asked him what he would like for dinner.  I said he could even eat in front of the TV tonight, a crazy idea if ever there was one.  He hemmed and hawed, but he finally came out with it.  “I am not eating at home tonight.”

            “Where are you eating, then?”

            “I want to eat at a restaurant.”

            Fortunately, I did know where the Denny’s was, since they are, after all, ubiquitous.  I called my friend, leaving a message letting her know what had happened, so she wouldn’t worry that the child had lost an eye.

            And, once we had returned to our temporary housing, the apartment so small and so ill-suited to children that the only way they can amuse themselves is with close encounters with the coffee table, I had to confiscate the fire station bunk beds, because the first thing that kid did upon returning home was to try to balance on them again, this time bringing his brother in on the act.

            So much for his gifted intelligence.