May 10, 2012 It’s Thursday, It Must Be Cleveland

We decided to accompany my mother-in-law on a trip back to her hometown of Wabash, Indiana. Still skittish about taking our 15-month old, Eddie, on an airplane, we decided to drive. It was a 12-hour journey, but my husband’s parents, who were in their mid-eighties, said they would be driving, so we thought if they can do it, so can we. A few days before we left, we learned they’d decided to fly.

With a long journey ahead of us, we vowed to leave at 4 a.m. We pulled out about noon. My husband, Bruce, drove the first five hours, but when we stopped at a rest area, I told him I’d take over for a while. Bruce took Eddie over to a grassy field next to the parking lot so that he could run around for a bit after being cooped up in the car for several hours. I went to get gas. I’m not accustomed to self-service gas stations because in New Jersey, someone had the ear of someone and it’s now the law that we can’t pump our own gas. I put my card into the machine, and just as I was about to input my PIN, someone pulled up behind me and asked, “How do you like your Subaru?” We chatted for a about a minute, and by the time I turned my attention back to the machine and tried to input my PIN, it wouldn’t accept it. I tried to cancel the transaction so I could start again, but the machine jammed. I pressed “cancel,” over and over again to no avail. I got back into my car, backed up to the pump behind me and put my card into the machine, but it again jammed right after I input my PIN. I asked the man using the pump behind mine if he, too, was having trouble. He was not. I pushed the “Call for Assistance” button, three times. No one came.

A small park at a rest stop in Ohio.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I said and jumped back into my car, backed up and tried to find a third pump, but by that time, all the slots for cars that have their gas tank on the passenger side were now occupied. I sped around to the front of the gas station and did a U-turn so that I now faced all of the pumps, a manuever that enabled me to get a pump usually reserved for cars that have their gas tank on the driver’s side. A bird’s eye view of the situation would show a bunch of people calmly getting gas, and one errant car buzzing around them like a fly trying to penetrate a closed window. I inserted my card, and this time it worked, though the nozzle kept shutting off prematurely as the tank filled. I kept having to pull the handle on the nozzle again and again to keep the gas coming out. When the pump registered $40, I figured it must be filled. I got back in my car and picked up Bruce and Eddie.

“What took you so long?” Bruce said.

“Don’t ask,” I said.

I had been driving about 25 minutes when I whizzed past two state troopers sitting in the highway median. I saw in my rear view mirror that one of the two cars pulled out and got into my lane, a few cars behind me. What are the chances the trooper suddenly wanted to leave the median just after I drove by, and now wants to be in my lane? Coincidence? Soon, he was directly behind me and put on his flashing lights. The worst thing about a ticket isn’t the money. It’s the indignity of being scolded so publicly. I was once put in the “baby chair” in kindergarten because I cried in class. This felt similar. We pulled into a rest area, and he wrote me a ticket for $111. Bruce got into the driver’s seat.

At about 8.30 p.m., we pulled into Cleveland and planned on staying the night. I like to stay in old, majestic hotels, but the Renaissance, one of Cleveland’s most regal, was $239 for the night, and given that we just spent $111 on a speeding ticket, we opted for the Radisson.

It seemed adequate, particularly since we were leaving early the next day and would barely see the hotel. I overlooked the fact that we were directly across the street from a sports arena, but once inside the room, it was hard to overlook what sounded like a loud machine going on and off. The noise followed an arc, first revving up, reaching full speed, and then ramping down until it stopped, only to start again a minute or two later. I called the front desk.

Open kitchen at Lola in Cleveland.

“There’s a loud noise in our room. What the heck is it?” I asked, and began mimicking the sound so the clerk could identify it. He showed no recognition.

“I can move you,” he said. “I’ll keep you on the same floor.”

I hadn’t indicated a particular affinity for that floor, but I said all right.

I hung up and walked down the hallway, trying to figure out what the sound might be and whether the other rooms were likely to be better. I initially thought it was the ice machine but when I walked by it, I heard no sound. I walked all the way to the end of the hall and while the machine wasn’t as noisy down there, I could still hear it. I considered that it might be the elevator but thought it unlikely. A hotel couldn’t operate if its own elevator was so loud, people couldn’t sleep. That would be counterproductive, like opening a bakery near a foul-smelling landfill, or eating your young. I figured it was one of the big rooftop generators I observed outside our window.

Bruce and I decided I should go ahead to the restaurant and secure a table before everything closed. He would meet me there with Eddie. As I walked through the lobby, I told the man at the front desk that a new room wouldn’t be necessary.

“What was that noise anyway?” I asked.

“The elevator,” he said. “People in the room next to yours always complain, but I thought your room would be fine.”

It wasn’t that he didn’t recognize the sound I was making. It was that he did.

We decided to have dinner at a restaurant owned by celebrity chef Michael Symon, of Iron Chef fame. I don’t watch Iron Chef nor have I ever heard of Michael Symon, but I figured if he’s famous, it’s hopefully for good reason.

The inside of the restaurant was lovely, possibly too lovely for a 15-month old, but the hostess didn’t seem to mind. She seated us in a beautiful dining room with a vaulted ceiling, little light bulbs that were suspended from the ceiling by long wires and were surrounded by chandelier crystals, and a view of the kitchen, which was wide open so diners could watch their food being prepared.

Soon, Bruce and Eddie arrived, and I ordered sweetbreads, despite Bruce’s warning. Eddie had pierogi, and Bruce and I had oysters, scallops and sliced pork, one of the restaurant’s signature dishes. I also had two martini’s – enough for me to momentarily forget what sweetbreads were but not enough to stop me from remembering. And as soon as I did, I couldn’t eat another bite.

The next morning, I got up just before 7 a.m. to find a café with an internet connection in which I could do my morning copy editing job. It’s a job I’ve had for 10 years and do remotely wherever I go. The woman at the front desk of our hotel directed me to a new café on the adjacent street, but when I got there, I found it was closed. I wondered where the cafe’s owner got his morning coffee. Certainly not his own café. I went back to the street on which we had dinner and found a café there that was open. As I settled in with my laptop and coffee, I noticed the music playing over the sound system and got up to ask the woman behind the counter who it was. I can’t remember if she had a tattoo and a nose ring, or if that’s just how I remember her because she was young.

“I’ll go check,” she said and disappeared into a back room.

The man standing next to me at the counter said, “I did the same thing last week. I heard this great song and just had to know who it was.”

He looked to be around my age – mid- to late- 40s – and seemed to share my vantage point of modern culture – from about 10 steps behind.

“So who was it?” I asked him.

“Oh, this guy called Alexi Murdoch,” he said.

I was writing down the name just as the young girl behind the counter returned.

“It’s Outkast,” she said. “Wheelz of Steel.”

“Oh, Outkast!” the man said.

I guess he’s only five steps behind. I’d never heard of them. And it irritated me that they spelled “Outcast” and “Wheels” incorrectly.

As I sat back down, I thought about how far removed I am from popular culture, like a raft that’s slowly drifted out to sea, so imperceptibly that I didn’t realize it was happening until I looked back toward shore and could no longer see it – without my glasses.

April 23, 2012 Strange Frequencies

About 2 a.m. last Thursday, the recording on my son Eddie’s “Winnie the Pooh” tabletop game began to play. First the music: Buh duh dah, duh duh dah, duh. Then Pooh’s syncopated voice: “Can. You. Help. Me. Find. My. Friend. Eye. Ore.” I don’t know why the toy went on. You either have to press one of its buttons or knock into it as you walk by for it to begin playing. In my semi-consciousness, I decided the cat must have crawled across it. It was either that or an intruder, and I preferred to think it was the former.

It went on by itself.

The next two days were filled with activities, and I didn’t give the Pooh incident a second thought. I stubbed my toe on our kitchen table leg and may have broken it. I frantically made phone calls to report a story on which I’m behind. And Eddie and I went out to lunch with our friend, Doris. We then went to an antique store made up of booths from different dealers, and Eddie ran around lifting small items from one booth and then depositing them in the next when he would find another item more interesting.

Saturday night, after my husband, Bruce, put Eddie to bed, we retired to the living room to watch television. As often happens, I fell asleep on the couch at about 10.30 p.m. and Bruce went upstairs to bed. Around midnight, I was awakened by our cat, who was swatting at something in the next room. I didn’t know what it was, but it’s usually something I care about deeply, so I yelled out her name, “Fish!” and then tried to go back to sleep. But it was fruitless. Once I’m up, I’m up, and so I went upstairs and tiptoed into my office, which is just off of our bedroom where Bruce was asleep, and I turned on the computer.

I checked my email and went on to Facebook, reading posts and clicking on links to stories I would never find interesting during the day. After about an hour, I decided to go to bed. I turned off the light in the office and crept into bed, feeling my way around the metal bars of our iron footboard in the dark. As I lay down on my pillow, I could see the light of the computer monitor emanating from the office, and I considered shutting the office door, but I figured the screen light would shut off soon enough, and I didn’t want to have to get up and negotiate the metal footboard with a broken toe again in the dark.

Our bedroom light mysteriously went on.

About two hours later, something woke me – perhaps Bruce’s snoring — and as I opened my eyes, I had to squint because the overhead light in our bedroom was on. It seemed especially bright, like car headlights. I woke up Bruce.

“Did you turn on our bedroom light?” I asked.

“What light?”

“Our bedroom light. That one,” I said, pointing to it. “Did you turn it on?”

“No. Why?”

“I don’t know how it got on.”

“I don’t know,” he said and rolled over.

When I woke up again the next night and found the light on, I wasn’t even surprised.

“It’s on again,” I said to Bruce.

“So it is,” he said and turned over to go back to sleep.

I view the existence of ghosts much the way I view the existence of God: with a lot of skepticism but a healthy respect that borders on fear. Basically, I don’t believe they’re out there until I’m given reason to believe they are – and then I want to run like hell. Bruce’s sisters say they have heard ghosts in the guest room of his parents’ house. It’s an eighteenth century stone house, and every time we spend the night there, I lay in bed with my eyes wide open for about forty-five minutes, listening to the floor boards creak and the radiators pang before I relax enough to fall asleep.

The haunted guest room

I’m not someone who sees ghosts. My mother is our family’s self-appointed medium. She says moments after my grandfather died, he came to her in her sleep to say goodbye. And she tells the story of how my brother, Steven’s image came into her room one night when he was very young to say he had to go the bathroom. She called it his “astral projection.” A few minutes later, my brother actually did walk into her room to say he had to go.

I may have seen a ghost once, the ghost of my father, about five months after he died. It was 10 years ago, and I was in my parents’ house in Florida, sleeping in the guest room, which is across the hall from my parents’ bedroom where my father died. I was lying in bed not yet asleep, my eyes open, and suddenly a circle of little lights began to dance on the ceiling above me. I assumed it was headlights coming from the street below, though I didn’t hear a car, and I was on the second floor of the house. I watched the lights as they moved up and down, as if someone were holding a dozen little flashlights and shaking them back and forth. I was captivated. After about five minutes, they stopped, and that was that.

At the time, I thought the light display might have been my father, showing me he was there. But it was in a period when I thought lots of things were my father, like a plastic bag that the wind carried next to me one morning as I ran down the boardwalk. The bag followed me for about half a mile before the boardwalk turned right and the bag went straight, getting caught on a metal fence rail. I jogged in place for about 30 seconds hoping the bag would extricate itself, but it didn’t.

When I woke up this morning, I thought about our bedroom light and wondered whether it was caused by an electronic malfunction. We use a remote to turn the light on and off, and I wondered whether we were now on someone else’s frequency. We once installed a battery-operated doorbell that used frequencies like those that open a garage door, and every time our neighbor’s doorbell rang, so did ours.

My father, as a young boy

In fact there are probably logical explanations for all the recent happenings in my house. But I prefer to think it’s my father wanting to visit me and my son, Eddie, who bears my father’s name. After all, today is my father’s birthday. It’s not surprising he’d want to spend it with family.

April 5, 2012 Goodwill

I learned to make macaroni and cheese the first time my mother was in traction for her back, because as she lay in a hospital bed, it was me who made dinner for my father and siblings. The second time my mother was in traction, I mastered grilled cheese. By the time she had back surgery when I was in junior high, I could roast a chicken, rubbing its skin with a mixture of vegetable oil and paprika to make it crisp.

My mother’s back went out so often, one of the predominant childhood memories I have is of her standing in her blue and white bathrobe on the white tiled floor of our hallway, her upper body hunched over like an upside down “J,” her right hand holding the spot on her back where it hurt. If you floated her sideways, her arm would look like a shark’s fin. Her back pain was so bad sometimes, she would take painkillers, so when she kissed us goodbye and sent us off to school, her eyelids were sometimes half closed and her speech slightly slurred.

Heavier than it looks.

I hated that she was incapacitated, I hated that I had to make dinner sometimes because of it, and I hated that the drugs she took for it made her groggy and unavailable….until my own back went out.  I’ve pulled my back out five times in three years now – most recently last week. I was in the shower and bent down to shave my left leg when all of a sudden BAM! I had a back spasm that sent the razor flying, and I couldn’t stand up straight. As I stood hunched over in the shower, I saw that the head of my razor — which is three blades surrounded by a thick waxy wedge of shaving cream and lubricant – was lying directly under the stream of water. These razor heads cost about $4 a piece and don’t last very long, and I’d just put on a new one. I watched the water beating down on the wedge of shaving cream and lubricant, eroding it, and despite my pain, I began kicking it out of the path of the water so that it didn’t waste away.

I hobbled out of the shower with soap still on my body and took a couple of ibuprofen and lay down on the rug in the hall just outside my son, Eddie’s room. He was still in his crib, and I could hear him talking to himself. When he wakes up, he usually talks for about 20 minutes before it descends into whining – the signal that he wants to come out of his crib. I had already gone downstairs and prepared his morning bottle of milk, and I had it in my hand. I continued to lay there waiting for the last possible moment to give it to him because I knew once I did and he’d finished it, he would want to come out of his crib, and at that moment, I didn’t think I could lift him.

As I lay there on the floor, I thought of the night before when I was in a bar, half into a martini, and I was chatting gaily with a waitress about being an older parent.

“Tell your friend she can have a baby at any age!” I said, not quite slurring. “Look at me! I had Eddie at 47! It’s eeee-aaa-sy!”

The very next morning, snap! My back seizes up like a badly-oiled transmission.

It’s not even like I was lifting something heavy. But then these things never happen that way. They occur when you lean over to pick up a crumb or a strand of hair. My mother once dislocated her shoulder playing mah jong.

Laying there, I realized I had no choice but to call our babysitter, Jean, and ask her if she could come over to get Eddie out of his crib and take him for a few hours.

She arrived quickly, changed Eddie’s diaper and got him dressed for the day, as I stood hunched over and watched, my hand holding the spot on my back that was injured. I followed the two of them downstairs to the kitchen and as Jean gave Eddie his breakfast, I sat with them eating a bagel, chatting away until I felt another spasm. And a few minutes later, another.

For two days, I couldn't reach him.

Jean told me to lie down, and she said she would take Eddie to her house for a few hours. I walked with them to the front door and stood inside the screen door as Jean carried Eddie out to the front porch, down the stairs and buckled him into his stroller. As she unlocked the wheels and was about to leave, I kept trying to say goodbye to Eddie, calling his name and waving, but he wouldn’t even look at me. As she pushed the stroller down the street, Eddie stared straight ahead.

My husband, Bruce, came home from work early, and I remained in bed for about 48 hours, first upstairs in our bedroom and then downstairs on the futon couch, which had been opened up so I could be in the living room with Eddie. By the third morning, I was aching to hold him, but I didn’t think I could handle the weight. I still couldn’t stand up straight, and I continued to have pangs of pain if I turned or leaned the wrong way. I asked Bruce to put Eddie on the futon bed so I could have him near me. He placed the child on the far end of the bed and went into the kitchen to wash dishes. Eddie remained in the farthest corner, playing with a plastic cup holder from his old bottle warmer, despite my calling his name and beckoning him to come over. After a few minutes, he got bored and tried to get down from the futon but chose to do it on the side where the bed meets the wall and got stuck between the two. By the time Bruce heard me calling him for help, Eddie was crying.

“He’s stuck,” I said, stating the obvious.

Seconds before he got stuck.

Bruce lifted Eddie up and placed him back on the futon and began undressing him for his bath. I started to tell Bruce how an interesting phenomenon had occurred with my back in that in my attempts to avoid pain in one spot, I’d inadvertently pulled muscles and tendons all over my back, effectively distributing the pain everywhere like dots in a Seurat painting. Bruce’s response was, “He’s trying to touch his penis.”

“What?”

“He’s trying to touch his penis. He can’t get to it all day because he’s in a diaper,” he said.

“Did you even hear what I said?” I asked. “I feel like I’ve been trying to talk to you all morning, but when you were in the kitchen, you couldn’t hear me because the music was on, and then the water was running, and now you’re in here, and I’m talking to you, and you’re not even listening.”

If I could sum up most of the fights in our relationship, they would sound like this: “You’re not listening to me!” And then I stomp my foot on the ground, like a petulant child. At least that’s how Bruce sees it. Me, I believe I’m a scintillating conversationalist with keen insights whose brilliance is wasted on a man who doesn’t hear me because his head is often somewhere else, and his ears seem to follow. But having been in pain for two days, and feeling frustrated and sorry for myself, instead of stopping there, I got madder.

“I hate you. You make me unhappy. You make me unhappy for him.”

But my anger was less about Bruce and more about feeling like in the last 48 hours, I had lost Eddie. I’d worked so hard from the moment he was born to entertain him and love him, and wrestle him away from my husband, to whom he seemed so naturally inclined. And after months and months of singing to him, doing vaudeville in front of his crib when he first woke up, playing games with him on the floor during the day, bringing him to the beach, reading to him, buying him soft toys, serenading him with my guitar, I indeed did win his affections. While his first words were “Da! Da!” he soon started saying, “Mumm. Mumm,” and he’s been saying it ever since. And yet in two days, I had lost all of that. There’s an accounting term called Goodwill, which is the value of a business not directly attributable to its assets and liabilities. It refers to things like reputation, the cache of its name, like Bloomingdale’s or Godiva. In 48 hours, I had lost all of the goodwill I had built up with Eddie, like what happened to BP after the oil spill. I thought of a man on my writers’ forum, who, for years, was enormously helpful to everyone when it came to computer-related matters, but one afternoon, as a silly prank, he sent people to a web site that was meant to be funny, but it wound up crashing a lot of peoples’ computers temporarily, and they got really mad. In seconds, he wiped away years of goodwill – poof! — and was nearly blacklisted from the writers’ forum.

Ironically, as my back mended over the next few days, it was not Bruce or the babysitter who took care of Eddie but my mother, who was in town from her home in Florida for a few days. She lifted Eddie out of his crib and would put him in his high chair when it was time to eat. She put him up on the diaper table and got him out of the car seat when we returned from a trip to the supermarket. She was happy to be there for him because living in Florida, she fears she’s missing his formative years.

“Do you think he’ll even remember me? He’s not even going to know who I am,” she said the day she arrived. And as she left, she said, “I hope he remembers me til the next time I see him.”

It seems back pain isn’t the only thing I inherited from my mother. There’s the constant profound fear of being forgotten.

March 23, 2012 On Pruning

How was I supposed to know you don’t prune an azalea in March? It’s not like it comes with instructions. I did the best I could. I’m only human. I nurtured it when it was small, fed it, watered it, took care of it year after year. There comes a time when a bush has to start taking responsibility for its own growth.

Trees apparently need buds to bloom.

It probably wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t snipped off all of its buds. I didn’t mean to. It was more of a slow evolution. I was cutting all of the branches back to the nearest bud, as I was once instructed to do, but after that initial trimming, it seemed like I had pruned too delicately, as I’m wont to do, so I began to cut deeper and deeper into the bush, hoping to coax all of the energy to the surface so that it would have large, luscious magenta blooms. One needs conviction and a stomach for cruelty to effectively prune a tree because it requires you to forgo the joy you have now for the promise of something better later. Vowing to be strong, I hacked it. When I stepped back to see what I’d done, the bush was half its original size.

Pleased with my handiwork – and my conviction — I took Eddie for a walk to the post office. On my way home, I happened upon Charlotte, one of our town’s most talented gardeners (her garden his larger than her house), and she told me that thanks to my untimely hacking, my azalea was not likely to bloom at all this year. Without buds, there was nothing to bloom, she said. You’re supposed to prune an azalea after it flowers, not before, usually about halfway through the summer.

“And a hydrangea? When does one prune that?” I asked reluctantly, knowing the damage was already done.

“Oh, you can do that in the winter, after the flowers have died. You just rub them between your fingers and pull them off,” Charlotte said, rubbing her fingers together like a child might do with a firefly.

Charlotte's garden, in spring.

“Okay. I did that,” I said, relieved. Going for extra credit, I said, “I cleaned it up a bit, too. I cut off all the wood twigs that didn’t have any green buds on them. You know. The dead ones.”

“Nooo. Why’d you do that? A lot of those might have gotten buds that just haven’t sprouted yet,” she said. “It’s only March. That would be like keeping the baby clothes Eddie has now and throwing out all his toddler clothes, because you don’t think he’ll grow anymore.”

As I turned to wheel Eddie home, she said, “There’s always next year!”

From dead twigs sprout beautiful blooms.

When I woke up this morning, Eddie was in a particularly fussy mood, whining incessantly. He followed me around the kitchen wanting to be picked up as I tried to make his breakfast, a habit of his that always puts me in a quandary because I know he’ll stop whining if I pick him up, but if I pick him up, I can’t make his food, which is really the better long-term solution. Sometimes you have to forgo the joy you could have now for the prospect of something better later. I let Eddie whine while I prepared his meal.

I put his leftover mushroom and cheese omelet in the oven to warm up, and I sliced a banana. I placed him in his high-chair and by the time I was done buckling him in, putting on his bib, sliding the tray piece onto his chair and filling his sippie cup with water, his eggs were ready. I gave him his plate, and for the duration of his meal, he was quiet. But as soon as he finished, he started to whine again. As I stood at the sink washing dishes, saying under my breath, “For the love of god, will you just shut up,” I heard a crash behind me. He had tossed his plate onto the floor, along with the metal bottom of my wok that had been sitting on the counter next to his high chair.

“Eddie!” I yelled. “Just stop!”

He looked at me, and his face got red, and his mouth made that upside-down fruit slice shaped pout, and he started to cry. Frustrated and feeling at the end of my tether – at just 9.30 a.m. – I began to cry, too. I usually comfort him when I see him cry, but this time I didn’t feel like it. This time, I was upset, too, because I felt like I couldn’t win. His whining had gotten to me, and it made me lash out, and once I did that, I felt bad, and I resented that I had no way out. I have to put up with the whining, and then I have to feel bad about reacting to it. I sat on the floor at the base of his high-chair and picked up bits of omelet and mushrooms, and I whimpered. After about a minute, I stood up expecting to see him red-faced and pouting, but he looked at me and gave me a big smile. I laughed. Apparently, one can snap and err, but children, like azaleas, recover nicely if you give them a little time.

March 6, 2012 William Wants a Doll

Ben Franklin said there are only two things in this world of which one can be certain: death and taxes. I’d add a third: if I have put Mardi Gras beads on my son, Eddie, he will no longer be wearing them once my husband gets home.

A baby with beads

“He can choke,” my husband, Bruce, will say.

“They’re not even real beads. It’s all one piece,” I’ll say.

“He can hang himself,” he’ll say, intimating the child might walk by some random hook or knob and be left hanging in mid-air by the hair-thin strand of beads. I suppose that’s true on some planet where spaghetti can lift meatballs or thread can carry clothing, but there are hundreds more likely dangerous scenarios in which our son will find himself in our home, such as pulling a lamp off of a table or eating one of the various coins my husband leaves all over the house.

Okay, so putting beads on my son is not going to earn me mother of the year, but I certainly wouldn’t be the first. If you search on Amazon under baby and necklace, you get 13,000 hits. Babies wear necklaces, and people don’t call child services when they see one. But none of this matters because the real reason my husband doesn’t want Eddie wearing beads is not about safety. It’s about gender.

“No son of mine is going to wear a necklace,” he’ll say. “People will think he’s a girl.”

“That’s stupid,” I’ll say.

It isn’t the first time Bruce has contested Eddie’s attire. A friend gave us two beautifully knit yellow sweaters. One fits like a little jacket and has buttons down the front. The other flairs out a bit like an angel’s wings, but instead of having buttons, it has two little strings on top to tie it closed, like a cape. Bruce didn’t like either, because of their color – yellow is for girls — but he found the sweater with the strings particularly offensive (I would put it on Eddie when Bruce was at work).

One night, we went out to a local restaurant and wheeled Eddie over in his stroller wearing the yellow sweater with the buttons. As we waited for a table, Bruce went to the bathroom. Just then, our old neighbor, Theresa, who is a waitress there, saw me and came running over and peeked into the carriage.

“What’s her name again?” she said.

Etude in yellow

“Shshsh,” I said. “It’s a ‘He.’ “

“Oh, sorry,” she said, whispering.

When Bruce returned from the bathroom, another waitress came over to say our table was ready. As she walked us to our table, she looked down at the carriage and said, “She’s so cute! Look at that sweater!”

Bruce looked over at me.

People break gender rules all the time. Our babysitter said she bought her grandson a kitchen set, and he loves it.

“You bought a kitchen set for your grandson, the one whose father is a cop?”

“Sure. Why not?” she said.

“And the father didn’t say anything?”

“Why should he say anything?” she asked. “He has to learn how to cook, especially if he winds up with a wife like me.”

It’s not that Bruce is homophobic. As the saying goes, some of our best friends are gay. It’s that Eddie’s a boy, and Bruce wants to make sure the child – and everyone else — is aware of that. And boys wear blue and girls wear pink and never the twain shall meet.

Since Eddie was born, we’ve been playing him the album, “Free to be You and Me,” – Marlo Thomas’ 1970s anthem to individuality – and I cry every time I hear the song, “William’s Doll.” It’s about a young boy who wants a doll more than anything, a desire for which he’s mocked and ridiculed by everyone around him. His father tries to gently guide him away from his desire by buying him a basketball, a badminton set, marbles and a baseball glove. William is good at all of those activities and actually enjoys them but when he’s finished playing, he turns to his father and says, “Can I please have a doll now?”

His father doesn’t buy him one, but his grandmother does, when she comes to visit and sees just how much he wants one. When the father frowns, the grandmother explains:

“William wants a doll,

so when he has a baby someday,

He’ll know how to dress it,

put diapers on double

And gently caress it

to bring up a bubble

And care for his baby

as every good father

should learn to do.

William has a doll

William has a doll

‘Cause someday, he is going to be a fa-ther, too.”

I don’t know what it is about the song that makes me weep — whether it’s the notion that my son may one day be ridiculed for being different, or it’s that I was. And mine were such small infractions: wearing Wrangler jeans instead of Faded Glories, or wearing navy blue stockings with white shoes. I think the larger infraction was in my head, a feeling that no matter what I did, it was wrong, simply because I was the one doing it.

William wants a pink grocery cart

In some ways, Bruce is more sensitive to Eddie’s needs. When we used to use wet washcloths instead of wipes to clean him during diaper changes, Bruce would dry off Eddie’s bottom or let it air dry before putting on the new diaper because he thought the baby would be uncomfortable if he were damp. Bruce still warms up Eddie’s milk bottles, even though we no longer have to. When he draws Eddie’s bath, he keeps it shallow – while I make it deep – because he’s seen the child feels steadier when there’s less water.

But if Eddie ever wants a tutu or an easy-bake-oven or a grocery cart that’s pinker than pink, he need only say one word: Mom?

February 4, 2012 Sgt. Pepper Has Arrived

The summer after sixth grade, my best friend, Eileen, threw me a surprise party because our family was moving away. The party was in her backyard, and she invited our whole class, including our teacher and Steven Mitchell, a boy with blonde curls and big front teeth, like a beaver, on whom I had a crush. When Eileen and I entered her yard, my classmates shouted, “Surprise,” and I fell backwards onto my ass as if the wind had blown me down. I then got up and ran out of the backyard, and Eileen had to chase me down and bring me back to the party. My entrance has become part of my family folklore because it was captured in a home movie that’s been played so many times, it’s like a recurring pattern on wallpaper. I enter the yard, I fall down, I run out of the camera shot, and moments later, I’m escorted back by Eileen. I enter the yard, I fall down, I run out of the camera shot, and moments later, I’m escorted back by Eileen.

Thankfully, my son, Eddie, has a bit more social grace. We just threw him a party for his first birthday, and while none of the attendees were his close friends – he doesn’t yet have any — he moved through the party with the ease and warmth of a seasoned politician.

I have arrived!

He was actually taking his nap for the first hour of the party, but the second he woke up, he uttered a small, audible cry, which could be heard over the baby monitor in the middle of the party. Three women ran up the stairs to his nursery (I was not one of them), and moments later, he was ferried down the stairs by my brother’s new girlfriend, followed by a small procession of my mother and some other woman, whose name I can’t recall.

Eddie was wearing his new red onesie, which has a decal of gold buttons and tassels across the chest, making him look like a member of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. As he emerged into a room full of people staring at him and calling out his name, my son flashed a huge smile and I’m not sure from where he picked this up, but he raised both arms high in the air as if to say, “I have arrived.” (I later realized he does this, in part, because every time he achieved something, I would lift his arms up in the air and sing the chorus to, “We Are the Champions.” He now lifts his arms up for successes as large as walking and as small as finishing his breakfast).

For the next two hours, everyone wanted a piece of him. Our friend, Hank, said he was holding Eddie for about five minutes when he could feel the pressure of the crowd bearing down on him, waiting for him to pass the baby along.

“I felt guilty,” he said. “I knew there were five other people wanting to hold him, and they’re just looking at me thinking, ‘Who’s this clown?’ “

A hand works like a shovel.

Eddie took it all in stride, smiling, throwing his head back in exaggerated enthusiasm, making everyone feel special.

It amazes me how much he’s grown in the last year. He walks, he talks – though its gibberish – and he can turn on the television with the remote. When I dress him now, he puts his arms through the sleeves, himself. I used to have to put my hand up the sleeve and fish around for his, pulling it through and out the cuff, like threading a needle.

He’s also begun to express his opinions. I’ll put a hat on his head, and he’ll take it off. I’ll put it back on, and he’ll take it off again. If he doesn’t want to go somewhere, he’ll do that loose-arm thing I’ve seen children in Wal-Mart do, where they make their arms limp like water, making it impossible to lift them. My husband, Bruce, and I refer to it as, “He’s on strike.”

The cousins helped him open presents.

When it was time for birthday cake, everyone piled into the kitchen. I pulled out a box of candles and started to stick several of them into the cake when I realized I needed only one. I lit the candle and held Eddie up in front of the cake and waited for him to blow the candle out. He just looked at it. I blew out the candle and took his finger and stuck it into the frosting to smear his name, which was written across the top of the cake in blue icing. My friend, Patti, said she wondered whether I would serve that piece or cut around it. I served it.

We gave Eddie a small slice of birthday cake, which was a chocolate double-layer cake with butter cream icing. I also gave him a small pink cupcake with a little football on it that was a gift from the woman who works in the local bakery. I handed Eddie a spoon, and he used it a little more than usual, a feat I attributed to the sugar content. The spoon enabled him to shovel in more food, faster, though after a while, he found his hands gave him a more ample serving. We’d already detected he had a taste for sugar around Christmas, when we threw a party and someone brought a box of Krispy Kreme donuts. We left the box by the front door to remind us to take it out for recycling, and Eddie apparently knocked over the box, dislodging the remaining glaze that had been stuck to it. When we found him, he was lying face down licking the bits of glaze off the floor.

After about 10 minutes, the pace with which he was eating the cake began to slow down, and his eyes, which peered out above a beard of chocolate frosting were beginning to glaze over. With cake now in his nose, his hair, and all over his hands, his belly protruding like a Buddha, he had reached his limit.

Starting to fade.

I pulled him out of the high chair and sent him off into the living room to open his presents. He sat on the floor surrounded by his newfound cousins, who he’d only just met at the party, and they helped him open his gifts, sometimes before he could even get to them. After about six gifts, I thought it was probably getting tedious for the other guests. I told everyone we would open the rest of the presents after the party. I received a long, persuasive, well-thought-out argument from Eddie’s four-year-old cousin, Connor, about the virtues of opening the rest of the gifts now and not later and how Eddie would really prefer it that way and that it really is the best way to go regarding these matters. I let Eddie open one more gift.

The last of the guests left around 6 p.m., and Eddie was so wired from the excitement, he never had an afternoon nap. We usually put him to bed for the night at around 9 p.m., and it’s sometimes a struggle. Tonight, he fell asleep easily around 8 p.m. without a pacifier, the chocolate frosting still lodged under his fingernails.

A whirlwind of a day.

March 2, 2012 The Bloody French

I wheeled Eddie’s stroller into the bakery and went to get a coffee.

I thought I broke him

“He looks tired,” said Mae, the woman behind the counter.

“I think I broke him,” I said.

“Why?”

“I yelled at him,” I said. “He was so happy this morning, and then he started whining, incessantly, when I was getting his breakfast ready. I was already preparing it. I couldn’t go any faster. And he just sits there and whines, and whines, and whines. I couldn’t take it any more so I yelled at him. ‘Stop it!’ And he did. Instantly. And then I felt really bad. “

“You snapped,” Mae said.

“I snapped.”

“It happens,” she said.

“I know, but I didn’t want to yell. Someone told me about this article about how French mothers don’t yell, and…”

“I read that article,” she said.

“Oh, I didn’t,” I said.

I’m lucky if I have time to read my mail. But it didn’t stop me from repeating the concept to anyone who would listen – which is mostly myself. Ever since I heard about the article, I’ve been trying to parent more quietly. I now speak to Eddie in smooth, even tones, almost with a French accent. “Eddie, your pancakes are coming.” “Eddie, don’t throw your sippy cup on the floor.” “Eddie, we don’t hit mommy in the face.”

For the most part, it hasn’t worked — particularly with our newest trend: taking food he doesn’t want and throwing it onto the floor. It started about a month ago with the sippy cup, which was routinely tossed off the edge of the hi-chair tray after every sip. I’d pick it up and hand it back to him, he’d take a sip and then toss it on to the floor again leaving me no choice but to pick it up and hand it back to him lest I allowed him to become dehydrated in order to prove a point.

These bits? They're going on the floor

Yesterday, I was surprised to see how much he liked turkey bacon. I’d taken two slices and cut them up into bite size pieces and served them to him with his pancakes. But I soon saw the bacon was all around the base of his hi-chair. He’d thrown it on to the floor piece by piece as I was washing the dishes.

This morning, I lost my cool before I’d even given him his food. He started whining when we were still upstairs getting dressed. And it continued as I brought him downstairs and was making him breakfast. I waited until I pulled the pancakes out of the oven before placing him in his hi-chair because I’ve already seen that the anticipation of the food, as he sits in the chair, is almost too much for him to bear. I buckled him in, put on his bib and then went back to the table to cut the pancake up into little pieces. I cut up some banana and pear and sprinkled them on top, and then drizzled some maple syrup over it. But with every slice I made, every step I took, I could hear his incessant whining in the background, and it was getting on my nerves. By the time I was done, I was about to hand him the plate of food, and I thought, “I don’t want to reward this behavior.” He’s been carrying on for 10 minutes, and my response to it is to feed him. The French wouldn’t do that, I thought. I held the plate behind me and said in a soft voice, “Eddie. This is unacceptable. You need to stop whining.” The whining continued, unabated.

“Eddie? You need to stop.” The whining got louder.

“Eddie!” I snapped.

He stopped crying instantly and looked up at me with wide eyes. I thought I saw the blood drain out of his face. This is a scarring moment, I thought. I’m creating something right now that he’s going to remember later in life, when he’s on a job interview or wanting to ask a girl out on a date, whenever he’s doing something that requires utmost confidence, he’s going to pull back just a bit, and he’s not going to know why, and it’s going to be because when he was young and innocent, I whacked him over the head with a frying pan – so to speak – and dented his little spirit just a bit. Still, he was indeed quiet for the moment, and I felt like I needed to seize the opportunity, to reward him for quiet rather than rewarding him for crying, so I took the plate of food out from behind my back and presented it to him.

Go on, dare me. Make my day.

“Atta boy,” I said. “See? You were going to get the food anyway. You didn’t have to cry for it.”

I placed the plate down on his tray, and he seized upon it and began to devour the pancakes and fruit, not looking up at me once like he usually does. It was all about the food. Now he’s going to have an eating disorder, I thought. I achieved my goal but at what cost?

The worst part about it was he’d been so jovial this morning, even more so than usual. I’d plucked him out of bed as I was going up to the attic to do my exercises. I have a little mat up there on which I do sit-ups. I usually sneak by Eddie’s crib and do them quickly before he begins to fuss and wants to come out, but this morning, he saw me as I walked by so I took him with me. He’s rarely in the attic so he was happy to be among the boxes of stuff, the wrapping paper and bows, the Christmas ornaments and fabrics, the brightly colored towels and fancy blue plastic margarita cups for the beach. The first thing he saw was a little Santa doll I bought him around Christmas. I had put it back in the attic about a month ago. He spotted it in a box immediately and took it out and held it close to his chest as he walked around the boxes looking for other treasures.

“He’s so happy in the morning,” Bruce said.

Eddie continued to eat his breakfast quietly. He was all business. There were a few bits of food on the floor this morning but not many, mostly because I think he liked the meal so much. He didn’t want to part with anything. But at the end of his meal, he took the syrup-covered plate, lifted it up in the air, and dropped it onto the floor.

“Eddie,” I said, in a quiet, monotone voice. “Please don’t throw things on the floor.”

He looked at me, lifted up his sippy cup and dropped it onto the floor.

“Eddie!” I snapped.

I never could speak French.