Wheels on the bus

            As far as I am concerned, air conditioning when the temperatures are under 90 and the humidity is under actually-seeing-drops-of-water-in-the-air is absurd.  With some open windows and a few well-placed fans, most houses are perfectly comfortable without blowing all that cold air around.  This is not just an environmental stance.  Long before I became environmentally concerned obsessed, I preferred a natural breeze to the throat-stiffening, headache-producing, odor-trapping refrigeration that comes with air conditioning.

            Nowadays, I care even more, due to my quest to hand my kids a living planet.  Why the hell would I turn on air conditioning when the ocean breezes seem to be doing the job just fine?

            Unfortunately, my husband is a bit more of a fan of air conditioning.  He would prefer to have it on all the time.  Zachary and I like fresh air.  So, we have made a compromise.  Open windows when awake, air conditioning when asleep.

            Except, it really isn’t much of a compromise.  The boys have allergies, and I think their parents do, too, and we probably should be keeping those allergens out at night.  More to the point, I am a little paranoid about leaving the kids’ windows open at night.  Especially now, as their room is right at the front of the house and we live on one story.  It would be way too easy for someone to slice a screen and lay hands on my little guys, who – frustrating though they are when awake – are very, very sweet while fast asleep.  I could actually imagine someone wanting to make off with one of them if the only view he or she got was a sleeping child.

            I have every faith in my ability to hear, should someone break a window.  Having babies has made me a much lighter sleeper, and every time one of them coughs down the hall, I wake up.  Sliced screens?  Not so much.

            So, we lock up tight at night and switch on the A/C.  We probably would anyway, since J cannot sleep well without it, but really, I haven’t given much here.  And, lately, what before seemed like caution now seems like the smallest of security measures.  (This is the point where my mother-in-law might want to stop reading.)

            You see, we have had a number of nighttime burglaries in the neighborhood.  Some guy in a ski mask breaks into houses with open windows and elderly female residents.  Nice.  Although I am not elderly, I am not willing to take my chances that he remains satisfied with the geriatric population.

            So, I have gotten my butt in gear and crossed the following items off my to-do list: appointment with security system, safety deposit box, sending the manuscript file to a friend in case the thief steals my computer and my backup, and air conditioning duct cleaning.  Looks like our A/C is here to stay.

            Benjamin is every parent’s dream when it comes to food.  He may not eat everything, but he is sure willing to try.  The list of foods he does not like fits on one hand and includes pickles and hummus.  The list of foods he does like, however, is long and varied.  Mostly, he is partial to the Atkins diet – fruits, vegetables, and protein.  The kid eats asparagus.  He adores lemons.  And he’ll take protein in any form he can get it.  He loves tofu, eats kidney beans straight out of the can, and has been known to down an adult-sized hamburger.  While grains and dairy aren’t his favorites, when he’s hungry he is perfectly happy with cheese, milk, or whole wheat pita. 

            Now, the odd thing is that he isn’t into breakfast, which makes him an anomaly around here.  We are a family of breakfast eaters.  But Benjamin alone is not a morning person, and he’s not really ready for breakfast till he’s played a bit and usually had his first of many daily bowel movements.  (I’ll leave it at that except to say that if you ate as much as he eats, you’d poop as much as he does, too.)  However, he has been known to request Chinese food for breakfast.  And Indian food for dinner.  And Mexican food for lunch.

            People tell me what a great job I have done, and believe me, I’d like to take credit.  But, if I take credit for the one, I will need to take the blame for the other.  I refuse to take the rap for Zachary’s eating.

            Zach is on a multi-vitamin because he only eats fruit once a day—on a good day—and only eats vegetables once a week—in a good week.  He is on a prescribed iron supplement because other than a once-weekly hamburger, he has no sources of iron.  He is now on a calcium supplement, as well, because he decided a few weeks ago that he does not drink milk, in addition to eschewing cheese, yogurt, tofu, and broccoli.  (Don’t tell me to get the calcium-enriched orange juice; he has his iron supplement in the OJ because vitamin C helps the absorption of iron while calcium inhibits it, which means the calcium has to be at a different time of day than the iron supplement.)

            Zachary is the embodiment of the future in which we eat no actual food and just take nutritional supplements.

            Matters have gotten much worse of late.  He is out of control of his life, with the move and the other move and his father working a lot and his mother very pregnant.  It is not so much that he is asserting control through food as that he is out of control of his responses to food.  The smell of macaroni and cheese suddenly makes him ill.  Fish fingers – once his primary source of protein – suddenly make him gag.  His body is creating a safety zone by allowing in only carbohydrates.

            And peanut butter, of course, which is all well and good except his pre-school is a nut-free zone.

            Then, there was the incident at Disneyland, when he refused to eat his peach at snack time, despite the fact that he actually adores peaches – one of his few forms of fruit.  (You’d have to be seriously wrong in the head to dislike California peaches around this time of year.)  And, so, matters came to a head, and I informed him that I was not planning on dealing with low-blood-sugar tantrums, and there would simply be no more rides till he ate the damned peach.  Benjamin got to go on the carousel and Casey Jr. Train while his brother sat there staring at the peach.

            OK, maybe that time he was asserting control through food…

            I try to be patient.  I give him extra affection and try to carve out special time.  This too shall pass, I remind myself, and with him periods of pickiness are usually followed by periods of trying two or even three new foods.  In fact, the child sat down two hours later at Disneyland and ate a chicken finger, as if he hadn’t given up chicken completely five months ago.

            And so, I sit and I wait, doing my best to bury my frustration, which works sometimes.  And the whole time, I console myself in the cries of my younger child: “Mo broccoli, pease!”

            You’d think I’d have a stock answer by now.  It is a pretty straightforward question, and people ask it all the time.  It is a standard of small talk, in fact.  But, every time I hear it, I struggle, trying to figure out an answer that is truthful without being way too much information.

            “Where are you from?”

            It is a very good question.  I’ll get back to you when I have an answer.  I grew up in Massachusetts, except for when I didn’t live there.  I lived in Philadelphia longer than Washington, D.C., Chapel Hill, or Charlottesville, but I haven’t lived in any of those places in years, and none of my stints were that long.  We have moved during all three of my pregnancies, and two of those have been international moves.  My latest domicile was London, but I think we can safely say I am not from there.

            Nowadays, here in Los Angeles, I sort of stutter and respond, “The East Coast.”  It’s vague, but it gets the job done.

            I long for a place of permanency, but I may never get one.  I wish for geographic rootedness, but it may never happen.  I will probably go a long time before I develop a place-based identity.

            The best I can say is that I am an American.  And, although it is fashionable to be self-denigrating about that fact, I am not.  I am proud to be American. 

            Yes, Americans use too many resources, and there are plenty of Americans who care nothing for the environmental flotsam they leave in their wake.  But I am proud to be among the others, the ones who are working to clean up our act.  The recyclers, the bikers, the pedestrians, the non-drier-clothes-hangers, the open-windows-instead-of-air-conditioners, the vegetarians, the Freecyclers.  I am not all of those things (anyone want to guess which ones?), but I am proud to be an American alongside them and to strive to be better.

            Yes, Americans were responsible for Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and Americans will be responsible for more such atrocities as long as there are people who see our strength as a license to behave however we want.  But, there are other Americans working to reveal the abuses and prevent their reoccurrence.   I wish I were as good an American as they are.

            Yes, there are Americans who discriminate against homosexuals, who hate people because of their skin color, and who preach the word of God while living a life that would have made their Savior weep.  But there are others who stand up to them, who fight for the rights of people they do not know, who live lives of service and humility.  I hope to find a way to live a life like theirs.

            And, so, this Fourth of July, I will not be hiding.  I will be proudly wearing my favorite Fourth t-shirt, the one that says “Celebrate Freedom: Read a Banned Book.”  I will be spending time with my children, working to raise them to be the kinds of Americans I so admire.

            I am an American in the tradition of Jack Kerouac or Gertrude Stein.  I am on the road, I am shuffled from one place to another.  But, I look at my shelf of books, at Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Octavia Butler, and all my other loves.  And I am proud to celebrate that part of my nationality, even as I know how much work we all have left to do every single day.

            Some Americans disgust me, but others?  They rock my world.

            I draw animals.  They come to me, trust me – even the ones who usually growl at strangers and then rip flesh from their legs.  When I am pregnant, dogs and cats cannot keep away; I give off some hormone that turns me into the Pied Piper for house pets.  I have never known anyone as attractive to animals as I am.

            Until now.  Now, pregnant though I am, they ignore me.  They give me a cursory once-over, and then move along.  They know there is a better game in town.

            That’s because I am always with Benjamin.

            Now, all kids like animals, and Zachary is as into them as any other child his age.  But Benjamin?  Ben has a gift.  Dogs, cats, horses, it doesn’t matter.  They turn away from all other humans the minute he walks into the room.

            He has recently discovered bugs.  Actually, both kids have, but Zach’s response is to run screaming from the room every time a fly enters.  Benjamin has a different approach.

            “Doodlebug!” he announces.  And sometimes he is right.  Sometimes, however, it is a little roach-like creature that got stuck on its back and died on our front step.

            “No, Ben.  That’s a dead bug.”

            “Hi, Dead Bug!” he says, bending down and waving.  It is all I can do to keep him from inviting it in for supper.

            He is a miniature Doctor Doolittle.  And our new neighborhood provides all sorts of willing animals for him to commune with.  There are dogs on leashes, squirrels running about, birds in the trees.  And, there is The Cat.

            Our new neighbors on one side include a concert pianist who practices every night while we eat supper on our deck (no charge!)  The other side has a house that could use a remodel (or a wrecking ball).  It also has Cuddles, known to Benjamin merely as “CAT!”

            Cuddles is the neighborhood whore.  She lies in the middle of the sidewalk, spreading her extraordinarily long legs our to trip anyone who dares try not to stop, and waits for victims.  And everyone seems to know her.  They stop, they pet, they sit down and spend ten minutes pampering this feline who clearly has never met a human she didn’t like.  She will expose that furry belly to anyone with hands.  She is totally indiscriminate.

            At least that’s what people thought until we moved to the neighborhood.  Now, old friends are getting slighted.  There they’ll be, petting her, and Benjamin will come tearing down the sidewalk, shouting with glee “CAT!”  And Cuddles turns her fickle tail on whoever is petting her; her lover has arrived.

            “I feel a little hurt,” one old friend of hers remarked, watching as the two did their mating dance on the sidewalk. 

            “Don’t take it personally,” I responded to this neighbor.  “He and the cat had a special relationship.”  And so they do.  He tries to feed her grass (I’m sure her owners really appreciate him tearing up their lawn).  He pets her gently.  He talks to her.  He offers her his giraffe blankie, the greatest gift he has to offer.

            “Why do we need to get a cat?” my husband wants to know.  Don’t tell him, but he may be right.  Everyone seems perfectly happy with the current arrangement.

You know how happy it makes me when someone gets the song reference in my title, so please, someone do.

—————

            My husband has always been committed to coming home in time to give his children a bath.  I then collect the freshly-laundered progeny and do book time before we tuck them into bed.  J wants to be a part of this process because he knows how much his own father missed when he was a boy.

            My father-in-law was involved as much as he could be, but he worked hard and often had long stretches when he saw his sons very little.  J wants to avoid his father’s regrets, and so he has long had a policy of making it home for bath unless he is traveling.

            But then, he is often traveling.  And then there are the nights he needs to stay late.  And the client needs something by tomorrow morning.  And why bother even coming home when it is an hour drive from the client and he is working till 10:00 and starting again at 6:00 the next morning?  And, then it becomes easier to just assume he won’t be home.

            And, suddenly, since moving here, the regular time to get home is no time at all.

            I am used to it.  When we lived in Philadelphia, he traveled a lot, and I held down the fort on my own.  It is my job to support the family in my way just as it is his to support the family in his way, and we’re doing the best we can.

            But, this week, things are slow, and J is going to be home every evening for bath, which nowadays looks like a luxury instead of a standard practice.

            “Daddy is reading books tonight,” Zachary announced for the second night in a row last night. 

            “Honey, I want to read books.  How about if Daddy does one and I do one?”

            “OK, Mommy.  The reason I want Daddy to read books is because he isn’t home very much in the nighttime and so I want him to read to me.”

            “That makes sense, Zach.”

            “I don’t know why I got to see him so much in London but I don’t get to see him so much in Los Angeles,” the boy continued.

            And, as I gathered him into my lap to try to explain, I could hear the click of the circle coming full. 

            As we left the restaurant, Benjamin was sucking on an ice cube he had nabbed from his father’s iced tea.  He is a social little bugger, so he was holding the slippery little sliver of ice in his hand while toddling towards the door and attempting to make eye contact with every person he saw.

            And he dropped it on the floor.  Now, my first reaction was to tell the not-quite-two-year-old to leave it behind, especially given that we were on a section of carpet clearly trod by every single person entering the dining room, not to mention the waiters on every single run.  As he leaned over and attempted to retrieve it, I tried to ignore the germophobe in me and remind myself that it is important not to make the kids neurotic about these things.  As the sliver of ice repeatedly slipped out of his stumpy little fingers and ground into the carpet, I had to bludgeon that germophobe into a corner.

            Finally, he picked it up, and we continued our meander towards the door, Ben contentedly licking the remains of that ice cube.  And, three seconds later, he dropped it again.

            I decided that there needed to be a limit to these things, and that letting him pick it up and suck on it again, well that crossed the line into negligent parenting.  As he knelt to retrieve it once again, I intervened: “OK, honey, let’s just leave it there.”

            So, that’s where I fall on the mothering scale: somewhere between the first and second drop of an ice cube on the floor of a busy restaurant.

            The problem with living far from relatives is…  OK, there are a lot of ways to finish that statement.

            … the kids don’t see their grandparents enough.

            … the kids don’t get to build a relationship with their cousins.

            … vacation time is spent visiting instead of vacationing.

            … the money and carbon emissions involved in maintaining a family relationship.

            Lately, the one that has been weighing on my mind is that my husband and I cannot go away together.  Who would watch the children?  We are hiring help, but we cannot leave the kids overnight with someone who has just started watching them.  The grandparents have been known to travel all the way to London to watch our children, but there has been no opportunity for that since we’ve moved (and, let’s be fair, should all their vacation time be spent traveling and babysitting?)  And the clock is ticking.  Once this baby comes, there ain’t no going away for another year. 

Despite all the frequent flier and hotel points my husband accrues, we have no way of using them to escape our children.

            We got no babymoon with Zachary because I was spotting and couldn’t travel.  We got no babymoon with Benjamin because we were neighborhood-hunting in London.  And, yes, there are a lot worse things than not getting a romantic getaway, but we’re starting to need one sorely. 

            Then, it occurred to me, right about the time J’s best friend asked if he could join the guys in Vegas for a weekend in July (he asked me, which I thought was sweet but a bit odd).  I have the perfect person to leave the kids with.

            So, in a few weeks, J will have a guys’ weekend.  And me?  I won’t be at BlogHer the weekend following that because I will be going on a babymoon with my best friend.

            Found a way to use those hotel points, after all.

Zachary is back in school after 2.5 weeks off, and he has turned magically from a whine machine into the lovely child we all knew he could be.

Books are everywhere.

Working on finding more help.

Benjamin is potty training, which I intend to post about at some point because potty training is the fifth circle of hell.  Do I really need to sit here for 15 minutes after you have finished pooping because you want to discuss the fire engines in the book?

Putting my nose to the grindstone on the book, which means colonizing the night, but it had to happen sometime.

So, I guess blogging is taking a back seat to writing, unpacking, hiring, school runs, and pooping.  And you all thought you were high priority…

Back soon, once this draft of the book is back in my agent’s hands.

This post is a follow-up to the one I put up late on Friday, which was about a very important conversation I had with my son.

Thank you all so much for the support you sent my way after my post on Thursday.  Your comments and the emails from people I did not even know were reading were so thoughtful.  Things are a little better now. 

I have found a doctor for my husband. 

We are starting to look for some more full-time help, which we had hoped to hold off on till close to the baby coming.  However, I cannot force my body to be capable of what it is not, and if I keep up at this pace, I’ll see a repeat of my last pregnancy, when I could not walk for the last six weeks. 

Zachary’s school starts up again today after a two-and-a-half-but-who’s-counting-week break.  He is difficult unbearable when he has no programming, so we are grateful for an eleven-month school.  Unfortunately, June is the start of a new school year in this school, so after moving here three months ago, he finds himself in yet another transition into a new class.  The school, sensitive to this, has kept him with one of his teachers and a close friend, but he is still anxious about the change on top of change on top of change.  I can’t say that I blame him, but the last week has been one long chorus of whining, and I won’t be sad to drop him at school today.

Most importantly, I have started unpacking the books.  We save them for last, because there are so many and they need such careful attention.  I have a system, a system that would have left Whatshisname Dewey green with envy. 

I only took about 20% of my books to London.  It would have been absurd to bring the thirty or so boxes of books that went into storage.  You do the math on that one.  I missed them, and I always seemed to need a book I did not have with me over the last two years.

But, now I am unpacking them, and I found a few things.  I discovered that my book collection grew in London, and our children’s book library seems to have doubled.  Yet, we moved out of a house that had built-in book shelves.  Suddenly, there was an overpopulation crisis.  We found that we need more shelves.

The other things I found were tucked away in a box of books.  A childhood diary, written I think when I was living with my grandparents.  I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but it is sitting in my closet glowing a bright, pulsing orange, begging for my time.  And a pile of photos.

The pile is small, maybe twenty in all.  They are photos of my childhood, all that remain.   In some, my sister still has long hair.  In others, our hair is cropped short by haphazard shears.  My father pops up here and there, and our stepmother is in one.  And there are many photos that include the half-brother I have not seen or heard about in twenty-five years.

I leafed through them, and Zachary came up.  “Who’s that?”

“That’s my sister. And that’s me when I was a little girl.”

“Who is that?”

“That’s my mommy,” the one I had just told him died when I was very young.

“Who’s that child?” he wanted to know of the toddler he saw in the pictures with me.  And I froze.  I did not think I could explain “half-brother.”  And I was not prepared to deal with follow-up questions about him.  My sister, her I am ready to talk about.  But the boy?  He is so far away and so long ago I don’t know what I would say.

And so, all of my honesty about my mother’s illness and her death evaporated.  I lied to him.  “I don’t know who it is.”

The day will come, the day will come my child.  You will know it all.  But you must be older and you must be stronger.  I learned too much too young, but you do not have to.  I hope you will not learn until you are old enough to face these truths with a man’s heart.  I hope you will never surround yourself with books, hoping that the walls will fortify you against what is beyond their pages.  I hope you will know that books can be good company, but they can never give you the answers, because sometimes there are no answers. 

I hope your life will ring with Louis Armstrong and Mozart, not Beethoven.  I hope your pages will read like Forester and Stein and Austen, not like Dostoyevsky and Dreiser and Woolf.  I hope your color will remain pink.

And I hope that when the time comes for you to know it all, you will have become an empathetic soul who can feel for the child I was without having felt it yourself.  

There are questions we are ready for and questions we can never be ready for.

“How will the baby come out of your belly?” he asked. 

This one, I was prepared for.  “I’ll go to the hospital and Dr. Chen will help the baby come out.”

Unfortunately, this opened the door for a follow-up question a few days later.  “But, Mommy.  How will the doctor get the baby out?”

OK, so not exactly a question I wanted to answer, but I am fortunate. I could answer honestly without having to explain the details of female plumbing.  I showed him my c-section scar and explained they would help the baby come through there.  Pitch, swing, hit.

Then, there are the questions about the war.  “Why is he angry?” my going-on-four-year-old asks of the President.  It is harder to answer this one, as I am not sure anyone really knows.  But, it is impersonal, and so the answer comes slowly but clearly.

In the airport, on the way to visit his grandparents, Zachary asks, “Where are your grandparents?” 

He asks about death a lot.  Remembering his lessons from the church school in London, he believes people can rise again after they have died, which gets a little sticky as we try to respect another religion without fostering beliefs we do not hold.  Much as I hate to feed his curiosity about death, I answer honestly.  I tell him my grandparents died, and when he asks why, I explain they were very old.

A whole summer before he turns four, and I am getting really good at the four-year-old questions.  I might even be called a master of being clear and honest while giving just enough information.  I even handled the recent, “How does the baby get in your belly?” with grace and sensitivity, giving some bullshit about mommies and daddies loving each other very much.

And, then it came.  Yesterday, we were in the living room.  Benjamin was napping, and Zachary was quietly playing while I tried to nap.  A wrong number woke me up, and he came over to cuddle.

“You look so much like your Daddy,” I mused, stating an obvious fact if ever there was one.

“And who do you look like?” he asked.

Well, the honest answer, the only honest answer, is that I look like my mother, a stronger resemblance than even his to his father.  And, so, I took a breath.  “I look like my Mommy.”  I prepared for questions about where she is and why he has never seen her. 

He seemed to know already.  “Is she dead?”

“Yes, she is, baby.”

“Why is she dead?” Zachary asked.

“Well, honey, she got very sick and so she died.”

His next question was immediate.  “Why didn’t you take her to the doctor?”  Doctors, he knows, make people better.

“I was very little.  I was as young as Benjamin,” I told him, not mentioning that I was almost Benjamin’s age, to the day, when my mother died.

“Is your Daddy dead?” he asked, rather relentlessly.

“No, he’s not.”

“Why didn’t he take her to the doctor?”

“He did, honey, but she was very sick.  The doctors couldn’t make her better.  And so she died.”

“How was she sick?” 

Good God, child, leave a few questions for next week.   “Well, take a deep breath.  You see how the air goes in?  It goes into your lungs.  Well, her lungs were very sick, so she died.”

He thought for a moment, allowing me to do the same.  Then, “I don’t understand the process of death,” he said.  “How you die and then rise again.”  (And, yes, these were his exact words.)

So, I tried again to explain that people don’t rise again after dying, although some people do believe Jesus did.  He seemed to accept my answer, and I preempted the worries I knew would follow by explaining that I eat healthy foods and exercise because I want to live a long time to be with him.

But the worries, I think they came anyway, because 3:30 AM found me standing on his bunk bed ladder, keeping one hand on him as he fell back asleep after an hour of anxious wakefulness.   Somehow, I think neither of us was ever going to be ready for that conversation, for the questions we both knew needed to be answered.