Day 7

Twenty-nine third graders sat on the floor in an old refurbished building. They were collectively writing a story and the leader of the discussion was a patient man named Steve with lots of enthusiasm. There was talk of a rapping hamster who was stuck in a tube. There was mention of rocket boots, of money, of wanting to see the world. I stood and watched this creative chaos and wondered how it would end.

The sweating volunteer paused the discussion and asked a question: "OK, wait a minute. We have the hamster in this dark and strange tube, but why would he go in there in the first place?" There was general shouting and creating and "Rocket boots!" and "Why not?!" and such when a hand shot up in the front row. Steve the volunteer quieted the mob and pointed to the intense little girl, sitting straight-backed and waggling her hand in the air as high as her shoulder would allow. "Did you have an idea?" Steve the volunteer asked. A loaded question, if ever there was one.

"Well, you want to know why he is in the tube. He wants some money, too. So why not let the motivation be  the same? Put the money in the tube, just a little back so he has to go in to see it, and then he can get stuck. It will be a trap." There was a chorus of "Oh yeah!" and Steve the volunteer bounced a little bit, "Great! And what is hamster money?"

The little girl answered promptly and calmly. "Why cheese, of course. It's funny because 'cheese' is an expression for money."

I have written a lot about my daughter. She is the walking embodiment of where all of my nerves and feelings and heart end. Bruise her and I will bleed. She smiles and I dance. She storms and I drown. I work hard to keep the responsibility for this intense visceral connection off of her young shoulders. I am supposedly the grown-up here, so I carry the weight of these intertwined souls and all the beauty and heartbreak that involves. I am the mother and this is my job. As she gets older - suddenly so tall! - she pulls away and defines herself in contrast to me. I celebrate this even as I feel the tiny stabs of loss. This is the way it is supposed to happen. This is what I am raising her for - to be independent, to think for herself, to find what she loves and pursue it. This is not about me.

My wee girl with her nose in a book.
She's in her Halloween costume, but it's not Halloween.

But sometimes, you know, it is. I stood with the other parents along the edge of this mayhem of ideas and laughed with them at the cheese, if only to mask the vivid, grateful tears that suddenly threatened to fall. I will never force my kids into being like me - heaven forbid they be like me. I would never insist upon their interests or their goals. I will not project my unfulfilled fantasies onto their small frames and make them live for me. I just won't. But my little girl - my beautiful, independent little girl - loves to write. She loves to tell stories and has invented them since she could talk. She loves to play with words and make them sing for her. She amuses herself with plays on words and explains them carefully to me. She has journals full to overflowing with bits of ideas and and dialogue and characters. She totes them everywhere with her and stops to write when she feels like it. Her spelling is atrocious, her handwriting is sloppy, punctuation is frequently optional - but she writes. Oh, she writes.

There are times when we don't communicate very well. There are times when my "I love you so much I could just lay down and die," comes out in a shout or a criticism. There are times when I try to tell her all the words she needs to avoid the heartbreak of growing up. I try to fill her up with the information that I felt I lacked as a child, not realizing that she lacks it for the same reason I did, she's a child. Sometimes she's weary and says, "Please can we stop talking, now?" Sometimes she has more ideas to share, more questions to ask. I try to listen and answer the questions she asks, not the ones I think she needs to ask. I try to listen to what she tells me when she rages or fumes, or can't sleep at night. I try to hear what makes her truly happy, what she really needs from me. I fail at this as often as I succeed. So it is to be a mother.

But this intense little straight-backed girl with her ready smile and waggling hand so high in the air, who is thrilled by "motivation", who thinks a story through, who makes a silly play on words - she is familiar to me. So familiar it hurts. I see me in her, but she is not me. I don't have enough words to explain to her how this fills me so. I have only my stupid, grinning tears that embarrass her on a field trip to communicate this deep connection to her, this gratitude for a shared love, some common and sacred ground. We don't always communicate very well, but I hope that we will always write.

September 13, 2008

On September 13, 2008, Hurricane Ike made landfall near Galveston, Texas. Its 120 mph winds and rain reached 275 miles from its center. It ripped roofs off of houses, knocked down trees and power lines, blew the windows out of skyscrapers and exploded a giant hole in my heart.

On September 11, 2008, my dad called me from Conroe, Texas to tell me that the trip he and my mother had planned to come out and see us would have to be postponed, the airports were closed. I was confused because of the date. Was it because of terrorists? "No," my dad laughed, "I don't think the terrorists have figured out how to control the weather yet. It's because they're expecting Ike to touch down. They're extra careful about these things since Katrina." My parents lived on a flood plain and I begged them to consider going to stay with friends. "We'll be fine," said my dad. "I want to be here to move the sand bags if I need to. Don't worry about us. We'll catch a flight out when this blows over." We talked a while longer, a rare treat. My dad didn't like chatting on the phone. We talked about a passage in the Gospel of John. I don't remember which verse, specifically. I just remember it was John because we both loved that book with its non-linear perspective, its mystery and its poetic leaning. "Give my babies a kiss from me, and we'll see you soon," he said. "My babies." That's what he called his grandchildren. It irritated me irrationally. I hung up a little relieved that the mad cleaning frenzy could wait a few days before they came to see us in our tiny house.

I checked the weather throughout the night Friday and into Saturday morning. Ike made landfall around 2:00 Saturday morning. I tried to call my parents, knowing I wouldn't be able to get through. Everyone was trying to call their parents. Jammed phone lines, phone lines down, no cellular service. Not that my parents had cell phones. I prayed and assumed they were all right. Saturday afternoon with my babies in the back seat, I drove downtown to pick up my husband from work. We chattered about replacing our fence, I'd found someone giving away old fence boards. My husband answered my phone when it rang because I was driving.

It was my sister. I listened to his end of the conversation: "Oh.... oh... OK... well where are they now? ...  All right... she's driving, I'll have her call you."
I was pissed. I had assumed that my parents had jumped a plane somewhere and were on their way to our house. They sometimes had a habit of arriving unannounced. I thought about the toddler mess and un-dusted shelves and panicked. "Where are they? Don't tell me they're here!"
"No, they're not here. Just drive home."
"Then where are they? Are they OK?"
"Just get home."
"No, tell me now. What's going on?" My panic had shifted. I didn't like how calmly my husband was speaking. I didn't like that he wasn't telling me anything.
"I don't want to tell you while you're driving."
"I'm fine. Tell me."
"Your dad had a heart attack."
I don't remember the rest of the drive home. Only fighting the urge to throw up and the hot, pounding, ringing of disbelief in my head.

I sat in the garage and called my sister. We wept together and tried to figure out what to do. The airports were closed. My mother had no cell phone. All my sister had was the front desk phone number of the intensive care unit of the hospital where they were. I called over and over and over, trying to reach my mom. Phone lines still jammed. All I could think of was my mother, afraid and alone in a hospital waiting room with nothing to eat, nowhere to turn and her family stuck thousands of miles away. Her worst nightmare come true.

Later that evening, I finally did get through to her. Dad had been out in the hurricane, shoring up some things in their yard, moving some debris. He could never sit still in a crisis. A tree had fallen across their driveway, hitting their car. He came inside and told my mom he thought he was having a heart attack. The car was ruined, the driveway was blocked, the roads to their subdivision were impassable, so they started out on foot to the hospital. A stranger in a pick-up truck stopped for them, picked them up and got them as far as he could before his truck got stuck in the flooded streets. They walked some more in the wind and rain until another stranger picked them up, a doctor as it would happen, who took them to the hospital.

My phone rang Sunday morning during church. My mom had no idea what time or what day it was, just that the doctors had discovered a hole in the septum of my dad's heart. They would have to operate and repair it. Sunday night, instead of boarding a flight to visit me in Seattle, my dad boarded a life flight on a stretcher, heavily sedated and in critical condition. The hospital chartered an emergency flight to get him to San Antonio for open heart surgery. The hurricane had knocked out the power in the hospital, too. The generators were too overtaxed to be reliable during surgery. The airports were closed. I sat all night on the couch, nursing my baby, watching mindless TV, knitting a useless shawl, uttering wordless prayers from that place where anguish and fear live deep beneath the ability to verbalize.

Early in the morning I got the call. He made it. He was too unstable to operate. Congestive heart failure, wait and see. I took my kids to the park and sat on a stump. "My dad is dying," I wanted to tell the other moms as they chatted about shoes for pre-walkers and the best baby food mills. "There's a hole in his heart," I wanted to tell the birds that chirped obliviously around me. "He can't breathe on his own," I wanted to tell the sun that twinkled in the beautiful fall sky. "I can't get to him, the airports are closed," I wanted to tell the leaves that were just starting to change their colors. I said nothing and stared at my phone and let the kids play in the sandbox.

The airports finally opened. My sister went first because she didn't have any children. My brother went next because his wife would take care of his children. Then it was my turn and I would bring my children with me. We stayed in a hotel near the hospital and ran errands for my mom. Dad was stronger by then, but not yet ready for surgery. They released him to the hotel. FEMA vouchers paid for them to stay there. My dad fell in the lobby when he came down for breakfast. My daughter cried, the hotel employees scurried to find a wheelchair, hotel guests looked on with morbid curiosity, I watched as if from above myself. This was someone else's life. My mom sent us home. FEMA wasn't covering our stay, we were useless, they didn't need our help. My son called hotels "hospitals" for a year.

The morning Dad went in for surgery, my brother and sister thought to call and speak to him before he went in. I didn't. I didn't know I could do such a thing. It was so early. He made it through the surgery. One of the best heart surgeons in the country patched the hole in his heart. Two days later, on a Saturday afternoon, my mom called and told me that the doctors thought he was making good progress and they were going to take him off the ventilator the next day. She sounded a little more rested, hopeful, excited even. "I held his hand and sang to him. I told him I loved him. He's non-responsive, but I know he heard me. I'm almost positive he heard me. He moved a little." I passed on the good news to people who called to check, I went to sleep that night on the couch, lighter than I'd felt in weeks. I slept so hard I didn't hear the phone in the wee hours the next morning.

At about 4:00 AM on Sunday, October 5, 2008, the hurricane made landfall again. I missed the call because I was asleep. It woke me up but I didn't get there in time. I had to call her back. She was crying so hard I didn't recognize her voice. "He's gone. He didn't make it. He's gone." I hung up the phone and called a friend to go pick her up. I sat in the dark with my baby on my lap and the phone in my hand and I didn't know what to do. I threw up. I wondered if I should go back to sleep. I wondered if there was some kind of mistake. I sat for an hour, not wanting to wake up my husband or my daughter. Numb and empty, nursing my baby back to sleep. It finally occurred to me that my husband might want to know. I would have to say it out loud. I went up to the bedroom where they were sleeping and nudged my husband. "He's dead," was all I could say.

Four years later, I can't help but remember the hurricane. The sun shines today, the leaves are thinking about changing, the birds are hopping around the trees. My baby and toddler are full-fledged kids now. My son knows the difference between a hotel and a hospital. My daughter doesn't cry over her Papa any more. My mom is on a train tour of the Rockies with friends right now. None of us live on a flood plain any more. It sometimes seems unreal that we weathered that particular storm. But we did. The waters have receded, the power has been restored, the debris has been cleared and repairs have been made, the airports have been reopened and we can fly again. I always think of my dad on this day and tell him silently: "Don't worry about me. I'll catch a flight out when all this blows over."

Remembering My Lines

"Honey! Time to get up. You don't want to be late for your last day of school!"

A few months ago, the jBird and I were lying on the floor reading together. In the book she was reading, the main character's mother said this to her daughter. jBird read it to me in that sing-song voice that denotes a friendly and warm adult.

"Can you say this to me when it's my last day of school?" she asked me.
"Sure," I said. "You want me to remind you it's the last day of school?"
"No, I want you to say it to me just like that," and she repeated the line in the same sing-song Mother voice.
"No problem," I said.
"You have to remember to do it."

The mothers in the books she reads are either perfect or absent. The perfect ones are attorneys, astrophysicists, veterinarians. But they always seem to be on vacation. They always have the correct words to say to their daughters. They are warm and loving when they need to be, but stay out of the way most of the time. They are these benign, flat characters who serve a certain purpose and then fade into the background. The absent ones are another sort of wish-fulfillment, I suppose. My jBird is intrigued by orphans. Some of the mother characters are so horrible that it is a relief they are gone. Others are an ephemeral snapshot of beautiful perfection kept close to the child's heart, but not interfering all that much when they want to go chase fairies or something. These things fascinate my independent little girl.

Her books never say things like:

 Daisy's mother was a complicated woman. Her jeans never seemed to stay up. One of Daisy's favorite games to play with her mother was to yell 'Coin slot!' and stick her finger in the spot where her mother's jeans had slipped down. Mother sometimes drifted off in the middle of sentences and left Daisy wondering what she was even talking about. She was by turns dreamy and disconnected, crabby and blunt, present and attentive; but she was always loving. Daisy was never exactly sure what her mother did. She would sometimes spend hours at the computer or writing in a journal and then she would suddenly get up and go on a mad cleaning spree or take Daisy and her brother to the park. Mother could talk for what seemed like forever about certain things, but then other times answered with a distracted 'Mmm-hmm.'

They just don't write moms like that for kids. I'm not even sure that they should. My voracious little reader escapes into books for hours at a time, her favorite place to read is sitting in the tree in front of our house. She absorbs these characters and scenarios and tries to fit them into her world. She is still young and doesn't quite realize that her world is richer, more textured and interesting than the formulaic stories she reads. After all, she has no real fairies that come and talk to her or clans of cats who come to her for help. I remember being eight. I remember imagining the worlds of my books while playing in the woods. I remember thinking sometimes how much easier my favorite characters had it. I remember wishing my mom would be more like the moms in the books. These were things I never would have dared ask my own mother, so it thrilled me to my very childish soul when my jBird asked me to say the lines from her book. That kind of openness and innocence in a gesture of wishing is something that brings me to my knees with gratitude. I am more than happy to oblige.

This morning we woke up on the couch. My jBird suffers from chronic insomnia and last night was a little rough. In the wee hours she had finally fallen asleep and she lay there snuggled against me, warm and safe, mouth open and breathing her little snaggle-toothed halitosis into my face. She's getting older, but when she's sleeping, she looks every bit of my baby girl still. I watched her sleep for a few minutes, trying to squeeze the last drops of silence out of the morning, trying to give her just a few more minutes to restore that whirring mind of hers. I kissed her forehead, stroked her hair and said:

"Honey... it's time to get up. You don't want to be late for your last day of school..." in that lilting voice of fictitiously perfect mothers.

She stirred and smiled a tiny jack-o-lantern for me, and snuggled closer. I often miss my cues. Sometimes I step all over other people's lines. Sometimes I burst into the scene and start reciting a soliloquy from an entirely different act. Almost always, I improvise and confuse the other players. But sometimes, sometimes... sometimes I get it right. I arrive on cue and remember my lines. My ovation is that little smile and an extra snuggle.

jBird and her real mom.

In time, she will realize that life is not like her books. That people, even people who love her with all they have to give, are fallible and messy and real. She will come to see that this drama we live is a rich story unfolding without formula, without a script. I know my daughter and I believe she will come to appreciate this. Just as I hope that she comes to appreciate that even though her mother is not the glossy perfect mother she reads about, that she is a real mother. A woman who tries and sometimes fails. A woman who loves her more than she even knows how. A woman who will say the false lines that she requested to show her how real the love is she has for her.

The Balancing Act I Do

She came home from school in a mood the other day. She cried a little too easily, got a little too irritated with things, her feelings all on the outside. This is the flip side of that shiny coin of intensity that makes her so bright, so funny, so cheerful and magnanimous. These are the darker sides of those very same traits.

"What's wrong, baby? Why are you so sad? Did something happen at school today?"
"No. I'm fine." A stomp, and a swirl of skirts. Clearly she's fine.
"OK. Let me know if you want to talk about it." She doesn't want to talk about it. She's fine. I don't want to push it, I'm vigilant.

Another outburst. Screaming, sobbing over Legos. "Honey, take a  deep breath. This seems a little extreme."
Deep breath in, and on the exhale it all comes tumbling out: "Mama! Abby had such a rough day at school today and I felt so bad for her and there was nothing I could do about it. I felt bad. It made me grumpy and Hannah didn't care. I wanted Hannah to feel bad too, so I snapped at her. I know I shouldn't have done that and now I feel awful. I feel like she shouldn't even want to be my friend." This is between sobs and wails and deep breaths and nose blows. I hand her a tissue and wonder where to begin.

"Tell me about Abby's bad day." A tale of second grade woe: forgotten homework, a good student finding herself in a "bad" position, embarrassed. My jBird feels her pain keenly. These things are important. She knows how she would feel in the same spot and it bothers her.
"Is Abby OK now?" Abby got over it. She is, after all, seven. There are faeries to imagine, math problems to do, butterflies to chase. I choose my words carefully for once. It's a balancing act I do.

"One of the things I love best about you is your great big heart. You care about people. You understand that people are hurting and that bothers you. That's called empathy and it's a good thing to have." This prompts more wails from her.

We both take deep breaths and carry on. "Do you think Abby is still crying over her forgotten homework? But you are still crying for her. What do you think about that?" This is where it gets treacherous for me. One toe out of place, one false start... the balancing act I do.

"I think it's kind of silly." She heaves.
"Well, I don't know if I'd call it silly. It's not silly to care about people. That's important. It's also important to care about yourself, though."
"I do care about myself!" She does, too.
"I know you do, sweetie. But part of how we learn to care about ourselves is to not give too much of our hearts away." I can speak with authority on this subject. "It's nice that it touches you, but does it need to touch you that deeply for the rest of the day? Some things are worth all of this emotional energy, some things are not. For the things that are not, you need to take care of yourself by learning to guard your heart a little bit. You have to choose what will be a big deal, what will be sad, but not that big a deal." It is not my place to tell her what is a big deal and what isn't. The big deals of seven-year-olds frequently go unnoticed by adults. I remember this right now. There are many days that I don't remember this and dismiss her and tell her to stop yelling at her brother. This is the balancing act I do.

"How do I do it, Mom? How do I guard my heart? I can't help what I feel." Ahh. Busted. Therein lies the rub, doesn't it? How, indeed? I am still learning this. I fail at this miserably. But now I must explain what I know, but not what I always do. This is the balancing act I do.

"Well, your feelings come. They are automatic. They are essentially chemical reactions in your brain to a situation." I can talk like this to her. She's used to it. "We can't help those, they just happen. What we can help is what we do with them. It's up to you what labels you give them: anger, fear, sadness, love. Does that make sense?" It does. We've talked about this before.

"Oh! It's like the train coming into the station, right? I don't have to get on?" Yes, it's exactly like that. "But sometimes I forget and I'm on the train before I realize it." She loves a metaphor as much as her Mama does.

"Yes, that happens. We all do that. But you can choose to get off, apologize if you need to. Forgive yourself and move on." These are words that I say to her. I think she knows I don't fully understand them. I wait. She blows her nose.

"Sometimes I can't forgive myself." Her voice is small and tired and I blow my nose, because I know. This strange heredity that keeps me up at night. Did she just come that way? Something in my DNA that passed on to her like alcoholism or depression? Or have I taught her this through my actions? Both are terrifying and I find them unforgivable. You see why this is tricky for me. This is the balancing act I do.

She crawls on my lap, all long legs and angles where baby pudge used to be. She buries her head in my chest like she's done since her first hour on earth. We quietly sit and cry together over the things we can't forgive. I don't have practical answers for her. I have only my fear and my forgiveness and my love for her.

"We'll work on this together, OK?"

The Gift of Faeries

Today I spent my day doing something I loathe and loving every minute of it.

But first, let me tell you a little bit about my jBird. She is my firstborn, so my pregnancy with her was filled with all of the excruciating clock-watching, book-reading, irritating all your friends with exhaustive explanations of your reproductive anatomy kind of wonder that first pregnancies usually are. Being a bit bookish and a bit of a perfectionist, I was going to do it the best. I read Spiritual Midwifery about 5 times and had the whole thing planned out. I knew better than anyone what my birth experience would be like - right down to the tie dyed, gender neutral onesie she would wear home from the hospital. Except that I didn't realize that it wasn't just my birth experience, it was our birth experience. The jBird's and mine.

My mental images of wandering the moors in my flowing white gown, gracefully pausing to exult in the next labor pain until it was time to squat and catch her myself while all of the leprechauns looked on - or whatever in the world I thought I would be doing - were completely (and thankfully) shattered before we even checked into the birthing center. She had her own agenda. An agenda that involved bouncing up and down, turning sideways, pooping in her water, completely tangling herself in her cord and hanging out for 17 hours inside despite my uterus' repetitive insistence that she move down. I'm pretty sure she waited until I actually voiced the words "I give up" before she decided to come blasting through. So tangled was she, that the midwife lost her heartbeat while she was on the way out and my baby girl flopped, blue and lifeless into a gray and exhausted world that April morning.

In my delirium, I mistook my husband's sobs for tears of relief and joy. I demanded that she be given to me. Why was it taking so long? Why wasn't she crying? For an extremely visceral few minutes, the flurry of activity beside me took shape and I understood why no one was paying attention to me. And then, finally: her voice. A righteous scream. As my mother-in-law said while watching through the crack of the door: "She's pissed!" That scream that grabbed every nerve in my body, cut through the haze of exhaustion and adrenalin, and named me "Mama". I have never wanted to hold anyone so badly in my life. And she has kind of been the boss of me ever since.

I threw out the books when she was 6 months old. They didn't make sense, they didn't apply to her. She never slept, but she rarely cried, either. She was content to look at everything in the whole world and smile. She was nearly 10 pounds when she was born and strong. She rarely wanted to cuddle. Even nursing, which she loved, was not a particularly cuddly affair. As she grew older, the personality that fought so hard to make it in those first few minutes continued to assert itself. She is so much a part of me, but wholly outside of my existence. She started talking ridiculously early and never really went through a baby talk phase and never really stopped talking, either. As soon as she was able, she kicked my gender neutral nonsense to the curb and embraced pink and frilly and princesses and accessories with abandon, single-handedly solving that particular nature vs. nurture debate.

She's the pink to my gray. The extrovert to my introvert. The confident to my retiring. The polite to my grumbly. But she and I have just enough in common to drive each other insane. Opinionated and right? Yup. Emotional and explosive? Sometimes. Ridiculously high expectations of ourselves? Oh yes. But she has been the balm to my ego. I am so ridiculously proud of her, yet she humbles me daily. I take no credit for her good qualities - they have been there since birth. It has merely been my job to encourage those as they emerge more fully. I didn't make her who she is. She came that way. I walked into her bedroom to check on her the other night and she sat up, still asleep, and said
"Mama, can you sense it?"
"Sense what, honey?"
"Just everything. In the whole entire world."
And then she rolled over and went back to sleep. That pretty much sums her up.

So today. We had a very rainy day with not a whole lot to do. The Chief Lou was waiting around on a fire wood delivery and the monkeys were about to strangle each other. "Hey, jBird, let's go run a special errand, just you and me." Our special errand was to go 30 minutes north of my comfort zone into the suburbs where the cars get bigger and the bumper stickers get scarier and visit the brand new American Girl store. We don't normally indulge faddish playthings, but we reconciled ourselves to one of these dolls under the auspices of it being vaguely literary and because the jBird is a good kid who rarely has to follow the crowd. So today, in an explosion of hot pink and orange and screaming girls, my wee girl and I navigated around this wonderland of doll clothes and accessories that even I will admit are beautiful. It was really my worst sort of nightmare experience: mass consumption, the mall, lots of other people's children (girls, no less!), crowds, the mall, the suburbs, the mall.

But watching this rare little Bird's delight was worth every second of it. She had a designated amount of money to spend and a few ideas of what she was looking for. She asked for no more. She walked methodically around the store, weighing her options. She politely asked one of the sales clerks if an item was in stock and then calmly shrugged when it wasn't and thanked her anyway. After inspecting everything she decided on "the most beautiful gown in the world" and very seriously took it to the counter to pay for it. I, of course, had to get the accessories pack that went with it. When she busted me trying to slip it into the bag and pay for it on the sly, she insisted "No, Mama. I don't need that. You don't have to do that." And then we went out for sushi and discussed racism over lunch.

My relationship has never been what you would call comfortable with my little girl. We love each other with an intensity that often tips to extremes. I recognized very early on that she would not just be a miniature version of myself, that there were things in our respective worlds that we just wouldn't understand. I have tried with a mother's heart to accept and respect these differences every single day of her life, not to try to change her to how I think she should be, but encourage her to be who she is. Some days I'm better at this than others. She literally tore me open when she was born and when they patched me up, they stitched a little bit of her into me that burns white hot and aches for her.

A few years ago, I was talking to an Italian friend of mine about her. She asked me how the jBird was born, and when I told her, she nodded and said "That explains it perfectly!" My friend told me that in Italy there's an old wives' tale that children who have traumatic births are touched by faeries. That in surviving that first few crucial minutes, the faeries carry them and give them special gifts. And that's my jBird: the twinkling, smiling light in my life that I will never quite catch, never quite hold, but will grace me with her presence nonetheless and name me "Mama".  My gift from the faeries.

A Spoonful of Crazy Helps the Math Homework Go Down

"Let Nanny help you. Catch those digits and write them down before they escape! Naughty little numbers!" This is to be read in your best falsetto, bad English accent. This is how math homework gets done around here. My Jaybird does more math homework in grade 2 than I think I did in all of high school. If we don't do a little every day, we end up with the big, buff-colored packet of doom that must be vanquished on Sunday afternoon. In a flurry of broken pencil lead, carried tens and tears, we try to power through.

My little girl has been independent since she was born. Since before she was born. While I was in labor (and labor and labor and labor) with her, my midwife shrugged as my daughter spent hours refusing to crown, swimming around and getting tangled in her cord, pooping in her water and then suddenly launching herself out sideways: "She's just going to do it her way." This pretty much characterizes how her life has gone so far. Whatever preconceived notions I've had about "how things should go" have been pretty much chucked out the window with regards to my little girl. It's one of the things I love best about her, makes me proudest of her, and drives me the most insane. We of the strong female personalities can (gasp!) occasionally push each other's buttons. We are just similar enough to get all up on each other's nerves and just opposite enough to get all up on each other's nerves. Add to that healthy dose of independent spirit a bizarre, almost visceral attachment to each other; and math homework time can get explosive. She wants to do it her way. She wants me to be proud. She wants to succeed, and like her Mama, she has a hard time seeing sometimes how making mistakes are part of success. "Help me, Mama!" quickly turns to "I know how to do this!" and back again until we are both sweating and crying and covered in graphite and pink eraser shavings. Sometime last week I decided I didn't want to do this anymore, but I didn't know how to do it differently. Math homework drama was the subject of many late night, tearful conversations with the Chief Lou. Usually along the lines of "I'm failing completely as a mother because..." and some helpful cluck-cluck, pat-pat, kiss-kiss from the Chief Lou.

I guess my subconscious (or perhaps my alter-ego) had been working on this problem for me. Lou and the Hooligan conveniently disappeared to the library yesterday afternoon to give the Jaybird some space for thinking and doing about 50 pages of Sudoku-style math puzzles. "I'm right here if you need help," I told her and went about my business with my blood pressure already rising. So was hers. I heard a furious scratch scratch, rub rub rub, sighing from the dining table while she worked and I held my breath and waited for the wail. There was no wail, just a quiet sobbing: "Can I just do this later? I have a headache." My heart broke in half and out popped an English nanny.

"Tish tosh, let's look at these silly little numbers!" I bellowed, surprising even myself. She looked up and giggled while the tears were still rolling. "Why, that 3 hasn't enough to subtract 7! She'll have to go next door and borrow a 10. Hallllooooo! Mr. Six!!! May we have a 10 please and thank you very much? There, there, much better. Now subtract!" The Psycho-Nanny plowed on while, through what were now tears of laughter, my little girl worked out the problems. It took us almost an hour and there were still mistakes, still some challenging problems, but it was all smiles and laughs and "Oh my! I believe you've written pee pee! Such naughty words on math homework?! Oh no, those are just some backward nines. Oh my. Nanny needs her hankie." We were just finishing the last problem as Lou and the Hooligan got home. My Jaybird winked at me and whispered "Let's keep Nanny as our secret," before she turned to my husband and said, "Mom is so awesome, but I can't tell you why."

I know for a fact that if I had taken my usual route of being The Mom, patiently trying to explain and encourage, our homework session would have ended in its usual breakdown. Through that strange chemistry of mother-daughter pyrotechnics, it's hard for my little girl to ask me, The Mom, for help. But Nanny? She can help. She can even point out mistakes and convince that little independent soul to "soldier on, dear," when she starts to flag. This all sounds a little insane now that I've typed it out. But I've come to believe that motherhood is, in and of itself, a form of insanity. I would walk through fire for my little girl. What mother wouldn't? But I don't have to do that just yet. Right now, I can let Nanny do it for me.

Believe It or Not, It's Just ME!

Today's my birthday. It's very hard for me to simply state that because I always want to say it like this: TODAY'S MY BIRTHDAY! I love my birthday. I've only had 2 birthdays that I can remember that I didn't love to pieces. Not a bad record when this is number 37.

I have chosen this as my birthday theme song this year:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q1Z7u6c0mQ&feature=related

Undeniably adult now. No one is mistaking me for the nanny when I'm out with the kids. No one checks my ID for anything - except that one guy at 7-11 who checks it every time I buy gas but that's a whole other thing. College was more than a decade ago, I'm coming up on my 20th high school reunion. I've been around long enough now to see the high fashion of Junior High come back in vogue as "retro". People of a certain age look uncomfortable and a little sad when I reference pop culture in conversation. And I'm OK with that. We live in a culture that values youth and beauty above substance; where growing older (or at least looking like you are) is to be avoided at all costs, and where actual good health takes a backseat to an unrealistic ideal. It's hard to resist the gravitational pull of popular opinion sometimes, even with the best of intentions. The hair dyes are purchased, the creams, the outfits, the depilatories,  the "special" undergarments. But over the last couple of years, along with those attempts at staving off the inevitable, what I really was purchasing was a whole boatload of guilt and self-loathing.

Flower pot hat.

As a mother of a daughter, I am ever-vigilant about teaching her to be proud of the person she is. To accept her uniqueness and celebrate it. She's 7 now, so it's not much of an issue for her. You wanna wear a hat that looks like a flower pot? Awesome. You wanna build a time machine that will transport you to colonial times at recess instead of letting the boys chase you? Go for it. You wanna wear a shirt with a picture of a monkey wearing glasses to school for picture day? Rock on. Right now my wee girl is in her own orbit. She's got this whole world that she inhabits that is all her own. She's friendly and outgoing, she gets along with people in a way that I find almost enviable, she's relatively unscathed by the politics of being a little girl in a society that's in a rush to grow them all up. But I know in a few short years, her orbit will start to feel that gravitational pull. She'll start to notice that she's different at a time when that's about the last thing anyone wants to be. And then what? I want to be able to say, without hypocrisy, "Just be yourself. Your self is fabulous."

These are our actual faces. Deal with it.

I quit wearing makeup on a regular basis when one time, in my 20s, I was especially late for work and didn't put any on. All day, people kept asking me if I was sick. It was so disturbing to me that when I didn't have my warpaint on, people thought there was something wrong with me. Thus began my campaign: "This is my actual face! Deal with it!"  Now that face has crows feet and little parentheses around my mouth. I'll be honest, sometimes those little footprints and punctuation startle me when I look in the mirror or see a recent picture of myself. But they are also a happy reminder of all the years I've thus far been able to laugh and smile and etch those little lines a little bit deeper. I've been OK with the makeup thing for years. But on this, my 37th birthday, I am chucking the hair dye: the makeup I've been applying to my steadily whitening hair. It wasn't fooling anyone, least of all me. I started to go gray when I was 22, I'm now reaching that point where there's a little more salt than pepper. I've spent years and thousands highlighting, low lighting, and desperately coating those amazingly resilient diamond strands. This is the year I say "Enough." This is the year I look in the mirror and see my ever-changing mane of crazy hair and say "You are part of me and I love you." It seems a small and silly thing, but it's a huge leap for me to banish the mental images of Barbara Bush from my mind when I brush. "This is my actual hair! Deal with it!"  I'm doing it for me, and I'm doing it for my daughter.

When she looks at me, I want my little girl to see a woman who has enjoyed her life, appreciated herself and loved her person. I want her to see a woman who didn't spend a lot of time, money and energy trying to deny and defy nature. These bodies we've been given can do some amazing things and I believe we should take care of them. But ultimately, they are disposable. They were made to wear out. When our jeans reach that pinnacle of just-right comfort and ease, we rejoice. We wear them every day we can get away with it. We are sad when they're in the laundry. Why don't we do that with our bodies? I'm not quite old enough yet for unsalvageable and unsightly holes. I'd like to think I'm at that "favorite jeans" phase of life. A little bit faded, worn in, comfortable and still highly functional.

It's a new year for me. Another year of being undeniably adult. I want it to be a year of being undeniably fabulous. I think there should be a secret meeting for all preteen girls to explain to them this wonderful secret: regardless of your structure, your clothes, your hair, your face, the hottest woman in the room is the most confident woman in the room. Embrace your hotness!