June 29, 2015 Puke-A-Whirl

At the local park where I take my four-year old son, Eddie, there is a swing made out of a tire. It hangs from the swing set by three thick chains, but instead of moving back and forth like a regular swing, it rotates, like a top or a carnival ride.

We were meeting two of my son’s friends at the park, and as soon as we arrived, my son ran over to the tire swing. He was soon joined by his friend, Peter. As the two of them climbed on, a third boy walked over whom none of us knew.

“Do you want to go on?” I asked.

He didn’t answer but started to climb up on the tire. Once he was seated, I began to spin the tire around.

“Last time I was here, I got sick on this swing,” he said. He was a little older than my son and his friend, old enough to complain about maladies.

“Oh,” I said, trying to slow the ride down a bit, lest the boy get sick again. I didn’t want him throwing up on my watch, particularly with his mother seated nearby.

“You know you can spin this one around AND push it back and forth at the same time,” the boy said, speaking with the authority of someone who wants to overcome frailty.

I continued to spin the swing around and around until I suddenly felt resistance. I looked at the ground and saw the boy who had gotten sick had put his feet down to stop the ride. He quickly began to climb off.

“You okay?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. He headed back to his mother.

Soon, the third boy we were supposed to meet at the park, Jack, approached the swing.

“You want a ride?” I asked.

“Nah,” he said and started to walk away but then changed his mind. He came back and climbed up on the tire. I began to spin the swing around and around, but after a few turns, I again felt resistance. I looked down and saw Jack’s feet on the ground. He started to climb off before the tire had stopped spinning. He looked pale.

“I want. I want,” said Jack’s younger brother, Cade, who is always standing nearby wanting to do what the older boys are doing. But after a few revolutions, even Cade, who will throw his body onto anything without even putting his hands down, wanted to get off the swing.

“Down,” he said.

I helped him off.

Now it was just my son, Eddie, and his friend, Peter, left on the tire. “Spin it fast, mommy,” Eddie said.

I spun the tire around and around.

“Faster!” Eddie said.

As the tire spun faster and faster, I watched Eddie and Peter lean backward and laugh with glee, their mouths wide open like fruit slices. I was happy to see my son smiling, but I also felt proud, the pride of a mother whose son has achieved something. In this case: the bravery to spin. I’ve always known the world was divided into those who can tolerate fast, scary rides and those who can’t, and I was proud my son was among the former. There’s a certain amount of courage afforded to those who can go on scary rides, and a cowardice associated with those who don’t. My son made me feel like our family has balls, like we were bad ass. I felt courageous, by proxy. And it felt good because me, I’m mostly yellow. I remember going to an amusement park in eighth grade with my then boyfriend, and as we went around and around on a ride called the Paratrooper, I started to feel queasy. It’s not a fast ride, but it has just enough up and down and round and round to shake things up in your stomach. By the fourth or fifth revolution, I threw up all over my shoes and that of my boyfriend, and I’ve been skittish about scary rides ever since.

I continued to spin my son and his friend faster and faster, but I suddenly feared that going too much in the same direction would make them sick. I let the swing slow down enough to stop it. I then gave it a big push in the opposite direction. I continued to push it around and around, faster and faster, and as I pushed, I could see Peter’s face begin to smile again. But this time, my son, Eddie, didn’t look so good. I stopped pushing and let the ride slow down and as it did, I could see my son’s face growing pale. Soon his feet were on the ground, and he was trying to climb down before the swing had even stopped.

“One second, one second,” I said trying to stop the tire before he fell to the ground.

“I feel sick,” he said and stumbled over to a bench. He suddenly belched. “I just threw up,” he said, though I didn’t see any signs of it.

“Just relax. I’ll get you some water,” I said.

As I walked over to our cooler, I felt a tinge of disappointment knowing that my time among the brave and the courageous, however brief, was now over.

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June 18, 2015 Row, Row, Row Your Boat

It was going to be a nice day: breakfast of challah French toast topped with fresh picked strawberries, a trip to a warehouse full of shabby chic furniture, a pit stop at a garage sale that had fishing rods and tackle, and then renting a boat on a local reservoir so we could take our son out fishing, his new favorite pastime.

 

But there’s the description of the day and the reality of it. From the minute we got to the warehouse, my son kept saying, “Mommy, when are we going to the yard sale?” “Can we go to the yard sale now?” “Is it time to go to the yard sale yet?” “Mommy, it’s time to go now. Let’s go to the yard sale.”

 

We bought an old farm sink and headed over to the yard sale but found it wasn’t really a yard sale. It was a guy cleaning out his garage, and he had lined up all his old fishing rods and tackle by the roadside to see if he could get any nibbles, so to speak. We bit. Thirty dollars later, we had a freshwater rod, a new tackle box – we probably paid more for it than it would have cost at WalMart – and got a fishing lesson on how to set up a line with sinkers and fishing swivels. We then headed out to the reservoir to put our new knowledge and equipment to use.

 

On the way there, my husband said, “My cell phone is out of juice.”

 

“Do you have a charger?” I asked.
 

“In my car,” he said.
 

“Oh,” I said.
 

“Why?” he asked.
 

“Why? People should always travel with a charged cell phone,” I said.

 

“I have a charger in my car and one in the house,” he said, defensively.
 

“Fine, but that’s not what I asked,” I said. “I just wanted to know if you had a charger on you.”

 

“I usually charge it at home, but I couldn’t find my charger last night,” he said. “Remember, I asked you where my charger was?”
 

“Why are you getting so defensive?” I asked. “All I wanted to know was whether you had a car charger on you, so you could charge your phone right now, in the car.”

 

“Well, then why did you say, ‘People should have charged phones on them.’?”

 

“Because when I asked you if you had a charger on you, and said, ‘Why?’ So I answered,” I said.

 

“I didn’t ask you ‘Why?’ “ he said. “Why would I ask you, ‘Why?’ That doesn’t even make sense.”

 

“You’re kidding me, right?”

 

Our son was in the back seat as we argued. Sadly, he’s accustomed to it. Perhaps there was a time when he thought all the arguing and animosity was his fault, but by now, he probably understands his parents are just asinine and that in between all the discord, they sometimes like each other.

 

We arrived at the reservoir and rented a row boat for an hour. They handed us life jackets and sent us to boat #14. We walked down to the dock, and the three of us piled into the boat, along with our two fishing rods, a canvas bag filled with boxes of bait and tackle and a couple of long sleeve shirts that we clearly didn’t need as it was really hot. I like to be prepared for anything.

 

The oars were attached to the boat through metal rings that swiveled, though there seemed to be something tenuous about the way they were attached. Every time my husband rowed, the ring on the right side of the boat side would jam for a moment before moving forward, as if the ring was being forced to swivel in a direction it didn’t want to go.

 

“I want to try something,” I said, and reversed the oars, thinking maybe the last renter had put them in backwards. The swivel mechanism worked a little better initially but after a few strokes, it began to jam again. The problem wasn’t that the oars were inserted into the wrong holes. It was that the swivel mechanism was broken.

 

Despite the clunkiness of the oars, we made it out toward the center of the reservoir and began to fish. As time went on, my husband noticed how far we had drifted from the boat house, and he suggested we start rowing back.

 

“I’ll take care of it,” I said. “You fish.”

 

I tried to row the boat toward the boathouse but I couldn’t turn it around in the right direction. The broken swivel mechanism made it difficult to turn the boat back around toward shore, and every time the oar got stuck, the boat would turn back in the wrong direction. There was a light breeze making the boat drift farther from shore, and the longer it took me to turn the boat around, the farther we drifted.

 

Frustrated watching my efforts, my husband said, “Let me row.”

 

“I got it,” I said.

 

I continued to try to right the boat, to no avail.

 

“I don’t know why this is so hard,” I said.

 

I could feel my husband breathing down my back. “Fine. You do it,” I said, moving out of the way.

 

My husband handed me his fishing pole and tried to turn the boat around. He managed to row a couple of feet. I was watching so intently, I didn’t realize I wasn’t holding the fishing rod he’d handed me until the line snagged onto something in the water and as the boat moved forward, the rod quickly went overboard. We were so focused on getting back to shore, the loss of the rod went largely unnoticed.

 

With every row, the swivel on the oar continued to jam, and with the wind, we were barely making any headway. My husband gave a few strong heaves and suddenly, the metal ring snapped in two.

 

“Great,” he said. “Now we’re never going to get back.”

 

“Don’t say that!” I said. I was beginning to share my husband’s despair.

 

“Mommy, can I fish?” my son asked.

 

“We can’t use the oar like that?” I asked my husband.

 

“I was having trouble getting us back before, and now, we have a broken oar,” he said.

 

Realizing we were going back, my son said, “Mommy, I don’t wanna go back! I want to catch a fish!”

 

“Eddie, we’re trying to get back to shore,” I said. I was beginning to panic.

 

“But I don’t wanna go back to shore!” he said.

 

“We’re stuck out here,” my husband said, throwing in the towel.

 

“I wanna catch a fish!” my son said.

 

“Will you both shut up! Just shut up!” I said.

 

“Don’t talk to me like that!” my husband snapped.

 

We are clearly a family that handles stress with decorum and composure.

 

“I’m going to call the boat rental place,” I said, pulling my cell phone out of my pocket. The number was so clearly stamped on the inside of the boat, it made me wonder just how often these boats break.

 

“We’re stuck,” I told the man who answered the phone.

 

“Where are you?” he asked.

 

“I don’t know. The middle of the reservoir.”

 

 

“I’ll find you,” he said.

 

 

The man on the phone was soon approaching us in a motor boat. I waved my hands wildly to make sure he saw us. The man tied our little boat behind his, and as we headed toward the shore, I hung my head in shame as we passed the other boaters, because we were having to be towed back. But I also felt a little satisfied, knowing that no matter how defensive my husband got as we argued earlier in the car, my underlying point was right: people should always travel with a charged cell phone.

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June 15, 2015 Zen and the Art of Strawberry Picking

The thermometer in the car read 91 degrees as my four-year-old son and I headed out to the strawberry patch. It was the orchard’s last day for picking strawberries this season. I was not going to let the heat deter us.

I remember going out there last year with a credit card but just six dollars in my pocket, and the farm owners accepted only cash.

“How many berries can I get for $6.00?” I asked the woman behind the counter, feeling around my pockets for any stray coins.

“Well, you have to buy a family pass in order to pick, and that costs $1.00,” she said.

“Okay, how many berries can we pick for $5.00?”

“About 10. Twelve at the most. It depends on how big they are,” she said. “But you better keep it to 10, because you can’t go over $5.00. And once you pick them, you have to pay for them.”

“Okay, pal, we only get 10 berries,” I told my son as we walked out to the patch. “Let’s go out there and pick 10 of the most perfect berries they have.”

This year, I didn’t want to drive all the way out there for 10 berries so I stopped at a gas station on the way there for an ATM. Once we stopped, my son had to poop, I wanted coffee, and he wanted gum. Twenty minutes later, we were on the road again, though my son complained for about a mile about wanting his gum, and I said he couldn’t have it until he ate his sandwich. He’d been in the pool all morning for his swimming lessons, and I didn’t want him standing outside in a hot strawberry patch with no nourishment, even if it was just half of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

“I don’t waaaaaaaannt it! I want the gum,” he whined.

“You’re not getting the gum until you have the sandwich,” I said. I always feel funny in these situations, forcing my son to eat something that’s not particularly healthy simply because it’s what I made him for lunch, when in another form, something as sweet as peanut butter and jelly could be considered dessert.

“Daddy gives me gum,” he said.

“Daddy’s not here. Eat the sandwich,” I said. “No sandwich, no gum.”

“Fine!” he said, and literally growled.

He nibbled at the sandwich, but about half a mile later, he started screeching. “Bugs are biting me!” he yelled. “Bugs are biting my penis!”

“They’re biting your what?”

“They’re biting my penis,” he said. “Mommy, bugs are biting me!”

I reached around while I was driving and tugged on his bathing suit, thinking maybe his penis had gotten caught in the cloth mesh of the suit.

“They’re still biting me, mommy! Bugs are biting me!”

“There are no bugs biting you!” I said.

“They’re biting my butt!”

“We’ll be there soon,” I said.

“It hurts! It hurts! They’re biting my butt!”

“I said we’ll be there soon!”

“Mommy! They keep biting me!”

Suddenly, the heat and the incessant whining, the driving back and forth to his swimming lessons in summer traffic, the fact that my laptop broke, the story deadlines I have looming and yet have little time to work in order to meet them, the fact that my taxes are due and I haven’t had time to get everything together and the accountant keeps writing to me, “When are you sending me your stuff?” the filthy house with sand and toys in the rugs because the cleaning woman quit on me a year ago when she got a job, the laundry that doesn’t stop no matter how many loads I do, the body that won’t stop aging on me and no matter how much I run, it just doesn’t get any easier, it all erupted inside of me like a pot beginning to boil, and I yelled at the top of my lungs, louder than anyone should shout in the small space of a car, “Stop it! Just stop it!!”

My son grew quiet. I felt regret. It’s a common pattern. He whines. I yell. He stops. I feel regret. And then I take stock of what kind of mother I am. At times I’m the best mother, better than most – fun, witty, engaging. We do crafts, we read, we sing, we dance. And other times, I’m the worst mother, worst than most — impatient, stressed out, yelling. I’m like the girl in that poem, “There once was a girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her head. And when she was good, she was very, very good, and when she was bad, she was rotten.”

“I’ll pull over as soon as I can,” I said. “I’m about to get off the highway.”

I suddenly feared what if there really is something biting him, like a bee or a little crab. What a terrible mother I am. I felt like a heel. As soon as I exited the highway, I pulled into the first driveway I could find. I got out of the car, opened my son’s car door and unbuckled his seat belt. He had bits of peanut butter and jelly sandwich on his lap and some jelly on his stomach. He stood up in front of his car seat, and I pulled back the elastic on his bathing suit and looked for whatever may have been biting him. There was nothing in the back of the suit or the front, and I couldn’t find anything on the seat.

“Bud, I think it was these tags here,” I said, showing him the three tags in the back of his bathing suit. “They were probably scratching you.”

It didn’t really explain what might have been biting his penis, but I didn’t bring it up. Still feeling regret for having yelled so loudly, I handed him a piece of gum.

We got back into the car and drove to the strawberry patch. As we got out of the car, you could feel the heat. It was oppressive. I grabbed our bottle of water. I should have taken two, I thought. We went to the counter to get a basket for our berries and headed out to the patch.

The paths in between the rows of strawberries were narrow and the dirt was hard and uneven, making it difficult to walk. My son nearly fell a few times in his plastic sandals.

“Try to find really red ones. Like this,” I said, holding up a berry that was deep red.

“Like this, mommy?” he asked, pulling a berry off a plant.

“Darker,” I said.

As we moved down the dusty row, the heat in the patch was stifling. The only respite was the occasional light breeze that would blow by and feel cooling because your body was wet with sweat. It reminded me of Budapest, where my husband and I lived for a year, where there were few air conditioners and people just allowed themselves to sweat, and that was okay. The oppressiveness of heat can be grounding, like one of those heavy jackets they put on you before taking an x-ray. There was no point in fighting the heat so I relaxed and gave in, and it felt good. I walk around all day stressing out, frenetic. It felt good to be ground into the earth, to do nothing more than sweat and hunt for berries. Even the hunt was therapeutic, the search for the perfect berry. It’s like fishing, or hunting for deer, or looking for the perfect seashell. Out in the hot patch, there’s nothing else out there but you and the berries, and so you search for the perfect berry, and everything else just falls away. And in that moment, you are in the moment, and that’s all there is, right?

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June 12, 2015, The Power of Observation

I went running yesterday, and near the edge of a small park by my house, I spotted a lone blue flip-flop. My first thought was the obvious: Where is the other one? My second thought: my son is going to seize on that. And sure enough, we had a play date that afternoon and as the two boys walked through the park, they saw the blue flip-flop from ten feet away and were on it like a hawk that’s spotted prey. They picked it up, tried it on, and inspected it from every angle, as if it were an alien species, before throwing it at each other.

Children have an attentiveness to small things, perhaps because they’re closer to the ground or they simply don’t have all those files and data and embedded cookies taking up valuable storage. They have the same senses we do, but times ten. They’re like chameleons, who can rotate and focus their eyes separately to look at two different objects at the same time, or like ants, with their microscope antennae that transmit a 50-fold magnified view of the world  around them. A few days ago, I threw a mini-milky way bar, which is about an inch long, into our kitchen garbage pail, and with debris covering it almost entirely, my son spotted it and said, “Hey! You said I could have that.” I left my son in the living room the other day to walk into the kitchen, and hearing my rustling around near the window, my son said, “Mommy, what are you getting?” He heard me lifting a peach. Try opening a candy wrapper in a kindergarten classroom. Twenty heads will turn around sharply, as every child looks for the origin of the sound.

But they don’t just see and hear things more keenly. They seem to marvel in these sights and sounds. They have an appreciation of them that we can only barely remember. Every morning, my son will carefully choose which color straw he wants to use in his breakfast smoothie. When we go to the bank, he takes his time choosing the flavor lollipop he wants from the large bowl on the counter.

As I went running this morning, I again passed the blue flip flop at the edge of the park. I met up with my running partner, and she started talking about a trip she’d recently taken to Philadelphia with her daughter’s fifth grade class. She said every child had a cell phone. As the children descended the bus and walked out into the streets of Philadelphia, their teacher told them to pay attention to everything because there’s a lot to see and observe. My running partner said the kids were so engrossed in their phones, texting and taking selfies, they didn’t see anything. Apparently, children are only hyper attentive until they get their first iPhone.

I was walking down the street with my son the other day when I did something I’ve been doing since I was young: I grabbed a couple of sprigs of young growth off of a Japanese yew bush, those green shrubs with the red berries that are typically used as hedges. I like to grab the soft little branches and rub them between my fingers.

“Mommy, what are you doing?” said my son, who was walking a few steps behind me.

“I’m picking a piece off the bush,” I said.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because it feels good in my fingers,” I said.

I was surprised he even saw me do it. But that’s the beauty of a child. They see everything. And it’s wonderful to be on the receiving end of their observation. You feel like someone is paying attention to you, in a way no one else in your life does. Someone cares what you’re doing. My husband barely notices if I get my haircut.

We passed another Japanese yew, and I grabbed a couple of soft branches and rubbed them in my fingers.

“Mommy, stop it. You’re going to kill the tree,” my son said.

Perhaps a little less observant wouldn’t hurt.

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June 10, 2014 Learning to Float

It’s good to teach a child to swim. When you live near the ocean, like we do, it’s essential. And in my neck of the woods, the best place for them to learn is the esteemed Silton Swim School. For the second year in a row, I signed up my four–year-old son, Eddie, for two weeks of lessons.

The school is located on a narrow two-lane road, down the street from an outlet mall and next to a row of garden apartments. But it’s so popular during the summer that traffic for the school backs up all the way to the traffic circle half a mile away. Silton hires college students to stand in the parking lot and direct traffic, waving their arms like flagmen on an airport runway, so that the hundred or so cars that descend on the lot during morning drop off and noon pick up don’t become mired into a complete standstill.

I tried to be early the first day, but with the traffic, we arrived just in time. Scores of children were already standing on the lawn in front of the cluster of white buildings with nautical blue awnings.

As the days went on, my son would cling to me as I dropped him off, saying, “Mama, I want to be with you always,” and I’d have to unclamp his arm from my waist. But by the time I’d pick him up at noon, he’d be ebullient, saying, “Mama, I swam all bah muself!” And I’d say, “Awesome, buddy!” and give him a high five.

But we’re halfway through our first week, my son has become more and more obstinate in the morning, and it’s become harder and harder to leave. 

He isn’t the only one growing tired of swimming lessons. After finding myself in a long line of cars trying to enter or exit the swim school’s parking lot, I tried going a little earlier but found the line was worse. Going a tad later made it easier to get into the parking lot but an utter nightmare getting out. That’s because if you arrive late, you’re told to go to the dreaded back parking lot, and once back there, you have to wait in a long line of cars to get out.

At least this summer is better than last year. One day last summer, I went to pick up my son and was directed to the back lot, and it took us nearly 30 minutes to get out. I wanted to take up arms.

“I refuse to go to that back lot again,” I told my husband that night.

The following morning, I was resolute about not going to that back lot. As I pulled into the parking lot, a college student with jet black hair and sunglasses tried to wave me into the back.

“I don’t want to go,” I pleaded. “I had to wait 30 minutes to get out on Friday.” I expected him to be shocked. He was unfazed.

“It won’t be long today,” he said and motioned me toward the abyss. I complied.

Indeed, it didn’t take 30 minutes to get out of the back lot that morning, but it did take 10, enough to harden my resolve. The following morning, as the college student with the jet black hair tried to wave me into the back lot, I ignored him and quickly veered off to the left, placing me firmly in the front lot. I had gone rogue. I felt like an escaped convict. There was a system in the lot, a well-defined balance, like the ants have, in which everyone must stay in line and comply or the whole thing will fall apart. Cars enter through the center line and then peel off to the right or the left, like the spray on a fountain, based on where the college students instruct you to go. Those turning left then come to another crossroads, where they are guided into the front lot or the back. That morning as I was being directed toward the back, I revolted. I veered off toward the front lot and tried to quickly tuck my car into one of the slots, but there was not a spot to be found. I was now blocking the access lane, stopping cars from exiting the lot. I had defied the instructions and was now about to crash the system. My heart was pounding. I began to sweat. Someone is going to come banging on my window in a few seconds, I thought. I’m going to get yelled at.

Suddenly, someone pulled out of a spot nearby. I made a beeline for it, almost hitting the car that was leaving. I swiftly pulled my car into the spot, leapt out of door and headed toward the pool area to pick up my son. As Eddie and I left the lot, I felt like my old dog, Sparky, who, when he would urinate in the house or tear up a pillow would refuse to look at you as you yelled at him. He would turn his head to the side. I drove out of the lot with my head cocked sideways, to avoid any eye contact.

The following morning, I was certain I was going to be scolded. I was sure they’d written down the make and model of my car and my license plate and that the manager of the school would be waiting for me by the entrance. But that didn’t happen. As I entered the lot and made my way to that pivotal spot, the college student with the jet black hair was standing in his designated post and waived me in the direction of the front lot.

“Thank you. Thank you,” I said, adding, “Nice glasses,” in a sycophantic gesture of utter gratitude.

This year, the parking lot situation has been a lot easier. We signed up for swim classes earlier in June, when a lot of kids aren’t even out of school yet, so there haven’t been as many cars at drop off and pick up times.

In fact this summer, the problematic spot is the traffic light just before the turn off for the school. The cars back up about a quarter of a mile, and it can be frustrating. I’ll make it all the way down to the school in 10 minutes, and I can spend almost another 10 minutes just waiting for the cars to get through the light.

Yesterday, I was a few minutes late to pick up my son when I got stuck at that light. As I sat in a line of cars, I watched the light change from green to red twice. On the next green, the cars began to inch up toward the light, but the man in a mini-van in front of me wasn’t moving fast enough. I was watching the gap between him and the car in front of him widen, and I wanted him to go faster, so I got up right behind him, to nudge up his car so that he would close the gap. The sign in the crosswalk indicated we had only 10 seconds left before the light was to turn red. Nine seconds. Eight. I was nearly on top of car in front of me. Seven. If I was any closer to the mini-van, I’d be in it. Six. Five. I hit my brakes before it was clear the van wasn’t going to push through the light.

As we sat at the light, the man in the van stuck his head out of the window and started yelling at me. Seeing he clearly had something to say, I pulled into the turning lane next to him and opened my passenger side window.

“You almost hit my car, you fucking asshole. What are you, in some hurry?” he yelled. He was about 70 years old, was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, though I could see through the lenses that he had slitty little eyes, and he had large gaps between his upper front teeth, making them look like pegs.

“Actually, I am in a hurry,” I said. I was strangely relaxed. Sometimes in the face of someone yelling at me, I’m overcome by a sense of calm.

“You were right on my car. You almost crashed into it, you asshole,” he said.

Just then, his wife, who was sitting in the passenger seat, leaned over him and yelled out the window. “He’s not himself. He’s on medication,” she said, apologetically.

The man continued. “You got a lot of nerve, ya jerk,” he said.

His wife again interceded. “He’s sick. He’s on chemo,” she said.

And with that, I suddenly felt sick. He was already dealing with cancer, and now I’d driven him to a frothy anger by tailgating him. But worse, his wife was making excuses for him when in fact he had a right to be mad. I was tailgating him too closely, and I could have hit his car. I deserved to get yelled at. I always tailgate too closely, and drive too fast, and get angry when people in front of me are driving too slowly. It’s often when I’m late, but sometimes, it’s simply that I hate to be impeded.

Just then, the light turned green, and I drove on toward Silton Swim School, a little weepy and vowing to be a better person. By the time I reached the parking lot, I was tailgating the woman in front of me.

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June 4, 2015 Big Hero Six

Our neighbor’s daughter has nine children. They’re all home schooled, get a healthy dose of religion, and live on a shoestring. The result has been that they play well with each other, they take care of each other, and they share. They don’t have that many toys, so they’ve learned to take turns. They seem to lack that sticky substance kids apply to all their possessions that make it difficult for them to hand them over to someone else.

When they came to visit a week ago, my four-year old son, Eddie, heard the chirping of children and wanted to play with them. As an only child, my son’s ears are attuned to the sound of children the way a thirsty person might perk up when they hear the sound of a running tap. I walked Eddie over to my neighbor’s house, and he played with my neighbor’s grandchildren all afternoon. When he came home, my son talked about the children endlessly until he went to bed, and he looked forward to waking up so he could play with them again.

The next day, the youngest three children came to our house to play in the sandbox in our side yard. One of their older siblings came along, as a babysitter. I disappeared into the house to take care of something, and when I emerged, Patrick, the youngest child, said, “Can I go in the house and get Big Hero Six?” He’d been in our house briefly and spotted Eddie’s newest toy, the marshmallow-like robot from the movie that bears his name.

“Okay,” I said.

I suddenly saw my son get up and walk down the street toward a neighbor’s tree and then hide behind it, with his back to the tree so no one could see his face. But from the side of him, I could see his cheek turning red and quivering. He was crying, silently. It pained me. I walked over.

“Buddy, buddy, buddy,” I said, rubbing his arm. “Why are you crying?”

“I don’t want him to have Big Hero Six. That’s my favorite toy,” he said.

“He’s not going to keep it,” I said. “He just wants to play with it.”

“But it’s my favorite,” he said, still weeping silently, almost cathartically. He seemed utterly vexed. He loved his new friends and desperately wanted their love and approval, but he did not want to relinquish his new toy.

“I know how hard it is to share,” I said. “It’s really hard. And they have all these sisters and brothers, and they’re used to sharing. You’re not.”

I could see from his response that emphathy wasn’t working, so I tried reasoning.

“You know the benefit of sharing is that you get to have a toy you don’t usually have,” I said. The only example I could think of was a recent visit he had to the house of a friend, who was also an only child.

“Remember when you were at John’s house, and he had the Bumble Bee transformer, and you really wanted it? When he gave it to you, it was as if it were your toy for that moment, right? It was like you had a Bumble Bee transformer,” I said.

“John wouldn’t let me play with it. It was his favorite toy,” Eddie said.

“Oh, shit. That’s right,” I said and suddenly remembered the tug-o-war over Bumble Bee, and the arguing, swatting and tears. I had been mixing it up with one of our previous visits to John’s house, when John’s mother was in the room, and John was forced to hand over a toy.

Sharing is rough for all kids. Everything else in the house is ours. Toys are the only things they have, and the only things over which they have any control. There’s not a lot of things in their lives at this point that are theirs, and yet we force them to hand their toys over to someone else like it’s a Communist regime, and personal ownership is secondary to the party. And we do this not just because it’s a nice thing to do but because it will supposedly makes our children better people. And indeed some kids are better at sharing than others, and it seems as though those children are more giving and more generous, when in fact it’s not which kid is a better sharer but which mother is more Stalinist about it. And therein lie the secret of sharing: it’s less about generosity than about the forcefulness of the parent.

I coaxed my son out from behind the tree, and he allowed Patrick to go into the house to get the toy he wanted. A few minutes later, they all ran down the street to play with a stomp rocket, leaving behind a pile of dirty paper cups, plates with half eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And in the middle of it all was Big Hero Six.

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Monkey See, Monkey Do

We have a small pond in our backyard, about the size of a hula hoop, in which my son has a handful of goldfish. He likes to catch the fish in a net and sometimes hold them with his hands, touching and squeezing them like one might touch a pet. Some have even survived.

Yesterday, it was about 53 degrees outside and raining as he sat on the side of the pond and said, “Mommy, can I take my shirt and pants off and go in the pond?”

“No,” I said.

I watched him remove his long sleeve shirt, and as he started to take off the t-shirt underneath, I reiterated, “No!” He continued to take off the shirt and then toss it on the grass nearby.

“That’s it. Go inside,” I said, pointing toward the house like a cop directing traffic. “Now!”

As he marched in front of me, I could hear him saying, “You’re a frickin dickhead.”

I’m not going to say I can’t imagine where he’s heard that. I don’t necessarily couple my curse words like that, but let’s just say I’ve used strawberries, and I’ve used blueberries, I just haven’t necessarily had them together. I didn’t take issue with his language. It was his insolence. He swung from vine to vine, going from ignoring my instructions to scoffing, disrespectfully, as I issued his penalty. And so I did what I always do. I yelled. “Get in the house!”

I’ve always been a yeller. As a kid, I yelled when I was unhappy. In my twenties, I yelled about jobs. In my thirties, I yelled about boyfriends, and in my forties, about my husband. I yell when I feel overlooked and underappreciated, slighted or ignored. And now that I have a child, I yell when he is frustrating, when he doesn’t want to go to school or take his bath, when he doesn’t want to get dressed or eat his meal.

I sent my son to his room for 15 minutes, for disregarding my instructions about his shirt and for then brazenly calling me obscenities. When the 15 minutes had passed, I entered his room, and he seemed contrite. I asked him if he knew why he was in there. He said he did.

Later that day, we would argue one more time before he went to bed, about how to properly roll a die in Monopoly. He said my husband told him that you just throw the die, which he did, and it bounced across the room. I tried to show him how to shake it in your hand and then spill it out onto the table, like in craps.

“Daddy says you throw it!” he said loudly, and stormed off. “I don’t care about the game, and I don’t care about you!” he said.

I wondered how a parent can ever have one of those gentle teaching moments with such a willful, stubborn little child, when I realized I had indeed taught him something: how to yell.

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Missing

NOTE: For the next month, I’ll be participating in a Blogathon, where we are supposed to post entries to our blogs daily. Expect to see more posts, of varying size — with less editing.

I went into a local café and as I stood at the counter getting my coffee, I noticed the poster of a woman who’d gone missing in North Jersey was no longer on the bulletin board. I hoped that meant she’d been found. I knew that was unlikely. Either she’d been missing for too long, and the owner of the café wanted to make room on the bulletin board for other notices like upcoming shows at a local music venue, or worse, she had been found but in a ditch or a state park.

I’d looked at the poster dozens of times over the last few months as I poured my coffee, scanning the five photos a distraught family member must have pulled together to make the flyer. In one, she’s wearing a rust colored dress with black leggings. In others, she’s wearing a floppy sun hat. She was a full-figured girl with a round face, wavy brown hair and a bright smile. She was 30. I’d heard the posters were distributed by her parents. It made me think she lived at home and had gone missing on account of a man, perhaps someone with whom she’d been corresponding online for months. She’d finally gone to meet him, with all the hope and anticipation of a young woman who yearns to get out of her parents’ house, to be touched and told she was beautiful, to be loved, truly loved for who she is.

I can’t imagine losing a child. I thought of a friend whose son died from a heroin overdose and how she was devastated. I thought of a colleague, who grieved online in the wake of her son’s death, posting photos and videos made by people who loved and cared about him. I had relatives who lost a child while he was away at summer camp. He was about 10. Thirty years later, their bedroom is still filled with photos of him from that time period, like a shrine. Every time I see them, I think, they are the ones who lost a son. It defines them.

Last night, before I went to bed, I searched online for more information about the missing woman from the bulletin board in the café. I found some news stories about her disappearance. Her name is Meaghan McCallum, and she’s bipolar. She’s been missing since March, and while she’s disappeared for a day or two in the past, she’s never been gone this long. Indeed, there was a theory that she had gone to meet a man she’d met online, but for some reason, family members discarded that notion. Her car was found not far from my café, and for a time, some reported seeing her in my area, but those sightings turned out to be another woman. The family has set up a Facebook page to field tips and keep people posted about Meaghan’s case. To date, she has not been found.

I was listening to a radio show this week where the Korean mother of a young girl who’d been murdered said there’s a Korean saying that says when a parent dies before the child, they go to heaven, but when a child dies before the parent, they go to the parent’s heart. She said only when she dies will her child die. That sounds about right.

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