Someone watching closely might have noticed that the hair dryer was pointed toward her blond curls at most half the time.
But at seven o’clock at night on the floor outside the bathroom, no one was around but my middle child’s siblings, and for once they were uncharacteristically quiet, the eldest immersed in a book and the boy concentrating on getting every bit of shampoo out of his hair. If I’d tried a decade ago to blow-dry my little bookworm’s hair she’d still be shrieking today. I assumed that every child shared her fear of screaming hot wind; consequently with the younger ones I left the dryer under the sink and used only towels.
Until recently that is, when I unearthed that noisy gadget (my own hair outrageously revolts unless allowed to dry in its natural state) and turned it on the middle child’s fine blond hair one frigid night when I worried that otherwise she’d freeze. I anticipated revolt; instead she could not stop giggling as the air tickled her neck. “Don’t stop, Mommy!” she yelled. “The wind is making me laugh!” I’ve continued to make her laugh since then, gently detangling the hair as she wiggles and squirms. I point the dryer off at an angle, willing it to dry slowly. It’s not often that I get to see that child alone. It’s even less often that she’s still, so I brush and dry and linger for as long as she’ll let the wind make her laugh.
Unfortunately, I’m not certain there’s any amount of post-shower hair care — no matter how hilarious — that can make up for all the times this child, sandwiched between a pair of high-maintenance siblings, has had her needs deferred because her mother was needed somewhere else.
Almost exactly four years ago the combination of heavy spring rains and my sump pump’s untimely demise lead to the spontaneous generation of a river below my living room.
This might have been nice (Consider the soothing babble of water! The dewy humidity! The bathing options!) but for the fact that a finished basement stood in its way. Being possessed of a crumbling marriage, difficult child, active toddler and a new-born whose adoption status rested on the blade of a knife, my ability to divert said river was at best limited. Furniture was moved to higher ground, insurance dried things out and replaced the carpets and while time more or less did its part to bring that part of the house back to tolerable standards, it was by no means fixed.
This fact nagged at me. Four years! I said to myself. Four years since the flood and still (STILL!) you haven’t replaced all the baseboards, you lazy girl you. Four years and you haven’t cleaned the detritus out from the storage room. Four years and you’ve not redone paint scarred by moving furniture, gigantic humidity-sucking fans and five-thousand trips up and down the stairs made by the water-buffaloes who call themselves your children. Four. Years. You fail at life.
Until such a point that I am able to spend several hours a day writing, a few more working on websites, even more writing for Jane, every waking one caring for the kids then the final three (or four) reading, I will not believe that my life is at full capacity. Oh, and I forgot to schedule in the hawt secks! At least every other day! Anything less than that amount of activity and I’m convinced that I’m the most intractable slacker.
This is poppycock, I know. But just try convincing the voices in my head.
Almost exactly four years after the flood, my darling boyfriend found himself with a brief break in his hectic schedule of international gallivanting and all-around troublemaking. “Can I come help you with some of your projects?” he asked, and before those little voices pointed out how horribly lazy it would be to accept the help, I’d said yes.
And so on a Monday morning just five minutes after the bus had pulled away from the curb I discovered a semi-nude man armed with a paintbrush in my basement. “Are you going to paint without any clothes on?” I asked, eyes wide with wonder and drinking in every bit of his exposed skin.
“Do you want me to paint without any clothes on?”
“Would you?”
“As you wish,” he said, and for the next couple hours I worked to the slap and roll of carefully applied paint, relaxing as (for once!) someone else took care of me.
Really? I should let people take care of me more often.
Bear in mind that this is the child who, at the age of four, refused to believe my assertion that letters came in both capital and lowercase varieties. “You’re making that up, mommy!” she said, and would hear no more talk of such foolishness. It took the pressure of an entire class of Kindergartners to convince her.
Suffice it to say that the intervening years have taught me to hang quietly back and allow her to think she’s much smarter than her old mom. So it was with only the slightest degree of surprise that I registered her jacked-up eyebrows and expression of shock during this brief exchange:
Her: And then in my book? This guy? He was the god of dreams? But I don’t remember his name?
Me: Morpheus, honey.
Her, suspiciously: How did you know that? Have you read it?
Me: No sugar, I haven’t read it.
Her: Then how did you know?
I figure at some point she’ll discover that I’m no slouch in the brains department. Perhaps within the next twenty years.
If asked (and quite frequently even when not) I can provide an exhaustive accounting of my feelings pertaining to matters that affect the intimate sphere of my life in any conceivable case. Or in almost every case, that is, except for the topics of my little ones’ soon-to-be-born sibling and her potential adoptive parents.
We met them several weeks ago for dinner; also in attendance were a knot of social workers (to keep us from engaging in adoption-related fisticuffs, perhaps) and N., hugely pregnant with the child who in bursting into existence has prompted so many questions. “If the baby is going to be his half-sister and her whole sister,” asked my eldest, pointing in turn to her siblings, “what is she going to be to me?” I mumble an answer about everyone being plain old siblings, but this is the least of what baffles me.
I’m hardly the only one asking questions. The woman chosen by N. to raise her child is also struggling. She’s been contacting me from time to time with concerns I am hardly qualified to address. How should I act in the hospital while the baby’s being born? she wants to know. Should I offer to feed and diaper the baby or let N. do everything? And Is it alright for me to act happy around N. or should I keep it under control out of respect for her loss?
The social worker calls with updates and we ask ourselves what (if anything) we can do to encourage N. to take care of herself . Does she have enough healthy food? we wonder. Is she spending her money wisely? Is her partner keeping away from the drugs and violence he’s chosen in the past? The answers we come up with are never very satisfying.
And then I wonder, as I guiltily eavesdrop on the new family’s Facebook messages, why it rankles me so to read references to “our birthmom” or “our new baby,” or to see their friends chime in about how terribly lucky the baby is to be getting adopted by them.
I don’t have answers any more than I know how I feel about all this. I can only hope that in fifteen months none of us will be in this same situation yet again.
She would have been allowed to stay up at least an hour later but for a melt-down triggered by an uncooperative storage box and (more importantly) extreme tiredness. I asked that she lower her voice, fearing that the outburst would awaken her siblings. She declined to comply. “I can’t do it!” she shrieked. “I hate this stupid toy!”
My eyes went wide. As charming as I might have found her company throughout Survivor I could not let such churlish behavior pass unnoticed. “Straight to bed,” I said, and so brusque was my manner that she knew there was no use in trying to protest. As I heard nothing more from her I assumed that exhaustion overcame her the second she pulled up the sheet.
But when I came to bed at midnight I found resting on my pillow a folded square of paper and a pencil. Dear Mom, it began, except that the “o” was in the shape of a heart:
I’m sorry about the way I acted before. I just got so mad with the toy not fitting into the box. I swore an oath to myself that I would never do anything like that ever again. I will try to control my eternal anger with boxes! (Boy I don’t like those things!) Anyway, I really do love that toy (it’s one of my favorite presents!).
Anyway, could you please, please, please, please (taking breath here) please accept my apology. Please. I just felt really guilty. I mean, I get to have my friends over this weekend and then I pitch a HUGE fit over a box? That sounds like I’m a spoiled brat (and I am not, you know it). Anyway, please accept my note, bad humor, and my apology. Please write back on the other side of this sheet. Love you.
PS. I love you.
P.P.S. I guess I was pretty tired.
“Your Very Lucky Mom” I signed my response before tucking it between her clock and tissue box where she’d see it first thing in the morning. To encourage her to continue the never-ending practice of taking responsibility for one’s ill-temper, apologizing, then trying to do better in the future, I bought a small notebook and installed in on a shelf in the hall between our rooms. “Write to me anytime,” I told her, “and I’ll always write back. We can discuss anything you’d like.”
Inch by hard-won inch she matures. There may be hope for this child yet, I think, and her eternal anger with boxes.
No matter how quietly I sneak off or how far away they might be, some scatological sixth sense causes my children to appear upon the bathroom threshold the second I drop trou.
Locking the door doesn’t help. They just talk through it.
“Mommy, we’re making a classroom in your bedroom!” my youngest burbled as I attempted to have a private moment. “We need chairs!” Cheeks flushed and blond hair in a charming disarray, his appearance backed up the thuds and happy squeals I’d been hearing upstairs over the past ten minutes. Nevertheless I had to choke back the urge to yell at him; not because of the interruption of my ablutions (I abandoned that battle long ago) but because as I finished washing my hands I found once again that all the towels had been conveniently stored in a damp heap on the floor.
“Why can’t you ever hang these up after you’re done drying your hands!” It almost slipped out, a scowling rush of mean-spirited words that would have taken the smile off his face as fast as a slap.
I couldn’t, even though similar phrases run through my head all day long. I couldn’t because similar phrases run through my head all day long — and I know how they got there. It’s impossible, I’ve decided, to muzzle entirely the endless voice of criticism that speaks to me all day long.
It tells me while I’m writing that I should be working on websites. It tells me while I’m working on websites that I should be playing with my children. While I’m playing I should be folding laundry. While folding I should be cooking. While cooking, doing home repairs. While peeing, making doctor’s appointments. While bathing, bathing faster. While falling into bed, working more. And at every moment it says I’m not good enough; that I’m a fake, a fraud, a failure.
Given enough time the voice of the parent turns into the voice of the friend, the lover, the boss, the spouse. It turns into the most fervent cheerleader or the harshest critic, and in each case it supplies the tone for every other interaction to come.
Another day I would have shrieked at my son about the towels, but on that day the medicine was working correctly or I’d gotten enough sleep or sufficient orgasms, or perhaps the gods of motherhood were happy with my sacrifices and decided on a whim to give me the energy to do better. “You need chairs?” I asked, and handed him a damp towel at the same time. “We can get you a chair just as soon as you hang this up!”
He did, and we did, and for one more day I kept from passing on that critical voice to him.
Four years ago today I put a babbling fourteen-month old baby and a semi-sick six-year old child into the car and drove (quickly, but by no means recklessly) to a city some two hours away for the purpose of picking up my infant son.
Except that then he wasn’t my son. “It’s only for a few weeks,” I told everyone, but despite the fact that a few weeks have stretched into four years (and more importantly that we are in possession of parental rights surrenders and a judge’s decree) I can hardly believe even now that he won’t someday have to leave.
Out of all the reproductive choices I made from the age of sixteen on, taking that child was the one that most shaped my family.
I wish I could say that I’ve responded to the chaos of the past four years in positive ways each and every time, but the fact of the matter is that I’ve failed. I’ve failed, I sometimes think, much more frequently than I’ve succeeded; I can only hope that the successes stand out in his mind more vividly than do the failures.
Last night a shadow appeared at my bedside a few minutes before 3am. “Mommy, can I get in bed with you?” the shadow asked, and for once I snapped wide enough awake to answer in something other than a grumbly mumble. I inquired with much more patience than one might think possible why it was that his own bed was not sufficient.
“A bug,” he told me, not waiting for any more of an invitation to climb under the comforter. “There’s a bug in my bed.”
In the middle of a frigid February I felt nearly certain that his bed was as bug-free as mine; nevertheless I scooted over and pulled the cover up to his solid little shoulders. “There’s no bugs here, baby,” I said, and as he wedged his body into the nook he’s been the right size for at every age from birth until now, I realized that he belongs here, not because of some heavenly pre-ordination but because we have made him fit, and that’s both far simpler and far more difficult than relying on guidance from God.
5-year-old, peering forlornly into McDonald’s bag: But mom! I wanted a Happy Meal!
Me, after having been up ’til 3am the night before and still feeling extraordinarily cranky: You’re right, it’s not a Happy Meal. But it is a meal and I expect you to be happy about it.
Early February brings tax season to the aag household. Under normal circumstances I would have had mine at least estimated by now but as I’ve been busier than (as my dad likes to say) a one-armed paper hanger, the forms got pushed farther back on the counter and lower in my overburdened thoughts.
At least they did until the ex brought up the topic. He was prompted by a desire to submit his own taxes, which he proudly told me would bring about the issuance of a quite pleasant refund. I’ll try to do them this weekend I promised, then scurried off to address other brightly burning fires. He questioned me again before he left for the night. “You’ll take care of your taxes this weekend, right?” I assured him that I would do everything in my power to pull off that miracle. “Good,” he said, “because I really want to see if you can afford to let me use one of the kids as an exemption on my taxes again this year.”
I think I’ll be able to, I told him, but I won’t know for sure until I see all the numbers in one place. With a final admonition to hurry up, please, he left. And by god I did do the taxes that weekend, keeping watch over a sick boy as he coughed and flailed upon the couch from 10pm until midnight, at which time I sent an email to the ex with details of the tax situation, phoned him to request his help in watching the other children, then took the boy to the emergency room; and I can assure you that the emergency room on a weekend at midnight is not nearly as much fun as it sounds.
We arrived home near three am, at which point I sent the child (much improved after medicine and a breathing treatment) to bed and thanked the ex most profusely for curtailing his alone-time activities to bail us out. I gave the time-honored hint of walking toward the door to hurry him on his way but he didn’t take the bait. “I read your email,” he told me, “and we really need to discuss this tax situation.”
Three am isn’t a good time, I pointed out. Can we talk later, when everyone has had some sleep? But he seemed unwilling. He planted himself at the kitchen counter and laid out an argument explaining why it was brutishly unfair of me to keep all the children as tax exemptions when he so abundantly deserved the extra money the exemption would bring into his life.
How much money that exemption would take from my life apparently did not cross his mind.
Later that weekend I sat down with pencil, paper and calculator. Ten minutes of math revealed that after child support, taxes, health insurance and other deductions, the ex brings home a sum of money that is approximately $400 less than my net monthly income. It’s $400 less, but it supports a single human being, where as my net monthly income feeds, clothes and shelters four.
I feel entirely justified in keeping the exemption, especially since the ex spent the next day dealing with the delivery of his 46″ television set. But perhaps I’m missing some crucial fact here that would reveal why I should allow him to claim one child on his taxes?
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