In those days their favorite thing was discovered quite by accident: I seated straw into cup in preparation for the day’s first healing gulp and it made an amusing noise. They were enchanted. “Again,” demanded the older baby, while the younger baby chortled. Of course I did it again (and again and again and again). Anything that kept them amused and marginally out of trouble for five minutes was worth the trouble, and so it became our routine to drive home to the sounds of rhythmic soda straw squeaks and little people’s laughter.

Do you remember when you used to love this sound, I asked today, demonstrating on my cup as we waited for the light to change. Neither the just-turned-seven-year-old nor her almost-six brother claimed to, although they both politely chuckled when I pointed out that it used to send them into gales of hysterics.

“I don’t remember being a baby,” said the girl.

“I don’t either,” said the boy.

I do, I said. You both pooped a lot. Poop is pretty much the ne plus ultra of humor topics these days.

“I did not!” said the boy, aghast.

“You still do,” said the girl.

“I wish I could be a baby again,” said the boy, and I’d have to agree with him. Even for a day — even for an hour! — I’d like to be mother to their baby-selves, in no small part because I’d like to believe I’d do it better a second time. I’d be more patient with carrot-colored walls and elbows that smell like bacon. I’d appreciate more that I could fight by proxy, that the sun brought on laughter, that the beloved wank-couch still lived. If I could do it again I would endeavor to yearn less.

And I’m certain I could succeed.

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This post, For One Day, originally appeared on aag on Thursday, November 3, 2011. Tweet This Post!

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“What do you mean?”

Not many people who fall in love at twelve stay with that person their whole life, I said. That’s just the way it works. And then you still have to deal with him in all your classes.

“That’s not very romantic,” she sniffed, and the conversation was over, at least until I asked her just about every bleeding day how things were going. “It’s fine mom. Why do you keep bugging me about it?”

Just checking, I said, then I allowed her to ferret out of me the name of my first boyfriend. She attempted to tease me about this fact until such a time as I demonstrated that simpering Briiiiiiiiiii-annn while making kissy-face noises behind my back was really not all that effective at getting my goat. And then one Sunday night after a weekend at her father’s house she asked with no lead-up, “Did you and Brian ever have a fight?”

Sort of, I said. Why do you ask? She claimed to be just curious until her continued questioning lead me to disclose that it wasn’t so much a fight as it was that dear Brian simply stopped speaking to me. I never found out why he was upset, I said. We didn’t talk for weeks, and then one day he said some little thing to me, and eventually we ended up just being friends.

“I can’t believe you said that!” Her voice rose with unusual passion. “XXXXXX stopped talking to me too!”

Really now. How’d that happen?

“I have no idea! One day it was fine, and the next he wouldn’t even look at me! Then his friends started whispering and pointing at me!”

What did you do?

She shrugged. “Just ignored it and walked away.”

Probably a good plan, I said.

“And then he sent one of his friends to ask ME why I was mad at HIM! Can you believe that?”

Maybe you should talk to him directly? But that suggestion was met with the most stark derision. The standoff continued until one day this young man marched up to my child between third and fourth period to announce without preamble that he could not longer be her boyfriend.

“Good,” she apparently answered. “That is fine by me.” And the next day she donned a t-shirt with the uncharacteristically effusive¹ words “Peace Out!” emblazoned across the chest, which she told me she planned on pointing in his direction at least once in the course of the day.

Better than tears. Right?

1. for her

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This post, As Quickly As That, originally appeared on aag on Wednesday, October 5, 2011. Tweet This Post!

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And then, as it turns out, my mother refused to get in and my father ended up driving.

Gosh, dreams surely can be difficult to interpret! I certainly wish I knew what this one meant! What a mystery!

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This post, Mystery, originally appeared on aag on Monday, September 19, 2011. Tweet This Post!

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Eventually the call of snacks brought everyone together. Discussion was limited to who had gotten the best juiceboxes² and biggest blueberry³ and no one, not even once, questioned why these two families had joined forces that day at the park. But despite the fact that I know from nearly six years of writing this blog that someone will chime in with “Don’t worry so much! Just enjoy it!”, I must consider if I’m going about all this in a reasonable, rational way.

Some would say that parents should refrain from involving children in their dating lives until such a time as marriage or cohabitation are under serious discussion, at which point the factions should meet on neutral ground where introductions can formally be made. It’s a big deal, those people would say. It should be something that everyone always remembers. Thus far I’ve not played by those rules. My children have met any number of my partners in the context of friendship: mommies with kids at our birthday parties, men as part of groups over for dinner, the friend who helped shift furniture and install the teevee, the guy who brought past a book for me to read. I have enough friends — and my children have enough friends — that there’s a constant stream through my house for events social and utilitarian, and the presence or absence of one particular person draws little attention. It’s not that I’ve feared them becoming attached to someone. It’s that I see no reason for them to do so. They don’t need a new daddy. They have no want for male role models.

This now seems like a middle path, neither so formal that hopes and fears are aroused nor so casual that no thought is given. “Mom’s friends with this guy,” I imagine them thinking. “He seems nice. His kids are nice. Let’s all play!” It is a beginning. But I cannot consider beginnings⁴ without also imagining endings, and I wonder how this one will play out. What is my exit strategy? How will I guard the feelings of my children when (if?) park days turn into angry phone calls and silence? How can I be ethical toward his children while acknowledging the very real possibility that I may not always be in their lives?

Those of you who have done this — how?

1. There may have been some overlap
2. Blue raspberry
3. My boy, and it was pretty sizable
4. A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.

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This post, Just Add Water, originally appeared on aag on Tuesday, September 13, 2011. Tweet This Post!

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You’d think she’d have learned by now. You’d think she’d have figured it out the first time her father and I scooped her from the booster seat and deposited her without a word in her gated bedroom to stew in the juices of her self-made discontent while we devoured the more than satisfactory meal she’d so precipitously rejected. Once released, mostly softened by her period of starvation¹ the child was told that she could fix her own damn meal, a task she carried out with the most plaintive wails. Small enough was she that all she could manage was a slice of cinnamon-raisin bread and a banana; this arranged on her plate for inspection we informed her that as she’d found the original meal unpalatable she could use her own money to purchase its replacement.

That took the starch out of her for quite some time.

But not enough, and it amazes me that this child’s siblings pretty much never complain about what I fix. No doubt this is all my fault as the first child was coddled with store-bought miniature jars of creamy, flavorless delicacies well into her second year while the little ones were given full family dinners (tacos, chili, pork chops) at four months old. And they loved it.²

This time the issue began, if you can believe it, with potato chips. Potato chips! I’ve been hearing for ages now how this preteen adores one variety and hatesHatesHATES another. The problem is that I can’t keep track of which is which. One week she’s cool with ranch. The next ranch sucks but sour cream and onion is wonderful. Then there was the time I bought a different brand of sour cream and onion. That went over well.

Honestly I hardly even pay attention. With at least four disparate palates to please I’m doing good if I can nourish all and not offend most. So when on a busy Saturday the time for lunch was squeezed almost out of existence by a too-long morning activity and a too-soon afternoon one, they should have been happy to have been given — on plates no less! — sandwiches, fresh fruit, cut up carrots, and a pile of barbecue-flavor chips. But that wasn’t good enough for Miss Thang who, upon arriving minutes after the meals were distributed and espying the offending items, shoved her plate across the counter at me. “I hate these,” she said with the haughtiness of a rock star whose tour rider has been ignored. “You know I don’t eat barbecue chips!”

Reader, I was offended not by the rejection of the item but instead by the sense of entitlement. As the plate whizzed past my stomach I slammed my hand on the counter then delivered a scathing lecture in which was pointed out that not a two-minute walk from her house lived people who likely spend some days each month with nothing, absolutely nothing, in their cupboards. She rides to school with them, I told her, all while she is lucky enough by the accident of her birth to live in a house where veritable piles of shiny produce live on the counter every single day, replenished by the all but unseen hands of hardworking (and equally lucky) parents. How do you think it would feel, I asked her, to wake up in the morning and have no idea how you were going to get food for the day? I’d built up enough of a head of steam that no doubt the entire neighborhood was treated to my rant. You look into the eyes of the kids on your bus, I said, and remember that some of them will eat one decent meal that day, at school, and then maybe next time you can be a little more polite in saying ‘No thank you’ to food you don’t want.

I sent her to her room tasked to write two-hundred words on the topics of food security, privilege and gratitude. An hour later she emerged, paper in hand. By then I’d calmed down enough to craft the rest of her consequence: I’d intended to make her buy a replacement lunch from me but instead she was to go online and search for a local food pantry to which her payment would go. As she addressed the envelope I wrote out a check doubling her donation and then she, abashed, trudged it out to the mail.

My friend suggested another possible life lesson: Into her lunch for a full week I should put nothing but barbecue-flavor chips. Arranged in layers in a shallow container like a sandwich. Broken into pieces in a tiny box like raisins. Stacked in a baggie like…well…chips. Ground into dust in a thermos like a drink.

Gawd I love that idea. Should I do it? Can I do it? Please say yes?

1. All of twenty minutes by the clock but YEARS to her four year old mind
2. I am joking about this. Mostly.

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This post, Great Vengenance and Furious Anger, originally appeared on aag on Monday, September 12, 2011. Tweet This Post!

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What I wasn’t quite prepared for was an announcement in the midst of watching Dr. Who that she’d been asked to go out with a boy. She’s only twelve! He’s only twelve! He wants to go out with you, I said, stupidly. She nodded. Where does he want to go out to?

This was the wrong question, as was evidenced by how narrowly we avoided descent into full meltdown mode. Do you like him? I asked. She allowed that she did, a little, but their acquaintance went back only a few weeks. Do you like him like a friend? Or do you like him like you think you might someday want to smooch him?

Once again we only barely avoided a fit. The problem is that she doesn’t know how she likes him, or even what it means to “like” someone, or what precisely is involved in the act of going out. And I don’t either. Thirty years ago I could have told you in excruciatingly precise detail what it meant to “go with” a boy. Of course no consideration was given back then to the idea of a girl going with another girl, or a boy with another boy, more’s the pity. I could have given chapter and verse of each subtlety of hand-holding, walking between classes to lockers, kisses-on-the-sly and weekend engagements both scheduled and presumed. I understood exactly what it meant when a boy “stole” your keys before the first bell so as to enable constant teasing contact throughout the day and the assurance of a post-school meeting where a parley for their return would be effected. But that was then. Now my knowledge is hopelessly out of date. I am as anachronized as the oldster who proclaims without a hint of irony that she digs something. That she digs something groovy.

At twelve I was perhaps a bit more socially aware than is my child. It behooved me to be so, what with the rocky nature of my home life and the fact that living in military communities brought with it constant change in the classroom social strata. She’s not faced that kind of turmoil¹. Her growing-up has been just incrementally more sedate. Which is a good thing, in general. I think. But in learning to negotiate the earliest stages of romantic entanglements, it’s not so great.

The only problem, I said when the show was over, is if one person wants to go out with in the smooching sense and the other person is only interested in the friendship sense. She nodded, aghast once again to have to consider something so appalling as Kissing! A boy! I hated to bring it up. I wish I didn’t have to! But that fact that she’s not ready for kissing doesn’t necessarily mean that the boy who’s interested in her isn’t, so it’s best to be prepared. Do you want to ask him over some time, I suggested.

“We could do homework and watch tv,” she agreed, and I said that would be just fine, because honestly? I’d like to have a look at the young man who wants to go out with my daughter.

1. yet

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This post, Asked Out, originally appeared on aag on Thursday, September 8, 2011. Tweet This Post!

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It’s also good in the sense that the hope I cultivated twelve years ago — to be home full-time with my children until they began school — has now come to fruition. My youngest, who was born really just yesterday, is now enrolled in Kindergarten, a placement I sincerely hope does not bore him to tears considering the fact that during the hour-long open house today, while all the other little children fiddled with their backpacks and cubbies, my child marched up to the board upon which was posted the entire year’s required sight words. And he read them all. Without a single mistake. Not that I’m bragging or anything.

It’s not so good because the end of summer means no more pool, which after a rocky start turned into the most soothing way ever to provide fun, exercise and mental stimulation to my offspring while at the same time not driving me around the bend. I have come to the conclusion that ten-plus hours a week up to my neck in water while sunlight penetrates right into my brain are absolutely crucial to my continued mental health. I don’t know how I’m going to make it without. Would anyone care to support my continued mental health by sending me on a mid-winter (or mid-autumn, or late-summer, or super-early-spring) jaunt to a someplace where I could indulge this new-found penchant for hanging out in pools in direct sunlight?  Email me. We’ll talk.

It’s also not so good because if last year I cried, this year — the year when the final wee chick leaves the comfort of the nest — I will no doubt sob, and I’m going to have to come up with something and fast to keep it in check enough that the other parents won’t be scandalized.

A baseball cap, perhaps? Dark glasses? Would it be out of place to arrive in a full-face veil?

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This post, It’s the Most Wonderful Time Of the Year, originally appeared on aag on Friday, August 19, 2011. Tweet This Post!

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He was my master first and my friend later. He was my Bill. I loved him so much; I loved him in every way I could think of considering that we were married to other people and never once touched in a manner that could have been seen as inappropriate. When after knowing each other for two years he came out to me as trans, I only loved him more.

The ‘net was still young but my dial-up modem eventually wheezed its way to sites that taught me what trans meant, and what issues someone who identified as he did was likely to face. Over the course of several months I watched with a thrill of wonder and pleasure as he cultivated gentler movements, a softer voice, longer hair. I learned the name he’d called himself in secret since he was a child. He tried on my shoes.

It would have been a miracle if he’d have been able to carry through with his plans but he was married to someone who could not have been any more different from me. She was in no way ready to deal with a transitioning spouse and he was in no way willing to give up his marriage. Thus began a period where he talked of nothing but death: his plans, his equipment, the effect he wanted it to have on his wife. Frantic, I demanded that he hand over all his razor blades and ratted him out to his wife and therapist. The latter did what she could. The former posited vaguely that his mood was bound to improve once the season changed. I wrung my hands and listened for the phone to ring after every siren.

Eventually he reached the conclusion that an intact marriage was the most important goal. He cut off his hair,  re-grew his beard and adopted an attitude of such insufferable assholery that I could take no more and began calling him on his shit. It was at that point that he removed from his life the people who had been the most accepting of his desire to transition. Including his therapist. Including me.

With the perspective of many years now I can forget about the pain of losing the relationship and remember only what he¹ taught me, the tiniest fraction of which is this: Jokes at the expense of trans people just aren’t funny, and so when one popped up on a board I frequent on this site — a site which, mind you, is dedicated to the free exploration of consensual sexuality — I sent off a note to the comment’s author.

Who happened to be an assistant moderator on that particular board, a fact which I pointed out to him in my note. What example does it send to the rest of our members? I said. How do you think your comment would make a trans person reading our boards, or considering joining, feel? Would they feel welcome, I asked, and to his credit he immediately agreed to remove the “joke”. But then he spent the next half-hour arguing with me about it. “I’ve got black friends, Asian friends, gay friends,” he said, “and they all think my jokes are funny.” And “If someone’s going to be offended over a little joke they don’t belong in our group.” And “If 99 people think it’s funny and only one is offended, I’m going to go with the majority.” And I argued back despite being in tears because with every word he said I could only hear sirens screaming down my street.

We left off with polite words but when I checked back hours later not only was his original “joke” still there but it was also echoed and expanded upon by another group member. This time I went straight to the top; I made my case to the group’s main moderator with the final promise that if “jokes” like those were allowed to stay on our boards, I wouldn’t. I cannot watch this, I told her. I cannot by my silence give the impression of approval.

She gets it. The jokes are now gone. I won this round, but I have a feeling the next one won’t be so easy. I have a feeling that very soon my affiliation with that group will need to end, because I won’t — I can’t — sit by while  dehumanizing “jokes” at the expense of already marginalized communities go unchecked.

It’s a sin that somehow
Light is changing to shadow
And casting its shroud
Over all we have known

1. I have used masculine pronouns throughout as this is where he ended up. I am not sure if this is the right answer in a situation like this but it feels the most respectful

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This post, Turning Away, originally appeared on aag on Thursday, August 11, 2011. Tweet This Post!

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We assured her she would, and on the day of the class she appeared at the breakfast table with somewhat less than her usual degree of surly. She went into and came out of the facility with a smile on her face, which is the admittedly very low qualification by which I judge if a child’s activity has been successful. Tell me what you learned I asked, once safely ensconced at home. She thrust her notes into my hands while demonstrating on a stuffed animal proper baby wranglin’.

“And,” she babbled, “we learned how to change diapers, and how to feed a baby, and how to milk a baby…”

You learned how to milk a baby? I said, trying not to laugh.

“Mom, you know what I mean!” she said, and I said that I certainly did! Since then it’s been my family’s go-to phrase. Kids dawdling about room cleaning or getting out the door? Let’s go! We’ve got to milk the baby! Bored on a hot afternoon? Why don’t you spend some time milking the baby? Vying for attention while I’m in the middle of something? Can’t you see I’m trying to milk the baby?

And on the rare instances when they’re doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing? You just keep on milking that baby.

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This post, Birth of a Family Meme, originally appeared on aag on Tuesday, August 9, 2011. Tweet This Post!

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He is so happy when he emerges, gazing into my sunglasses to catch the reflection of his slicked-down hair, then mussing it into dark-blond spikes before peering in again. He says, “I’m Blondie Bear, right Mommy?” and I murmur that yes, yes indeed he is Blondie Bear. I don’t tell him that Blondie Bear’s sun-bleached locks will be shorn before school starts in two short week. I don’t want to ruin the moment.

I hope he remembers this mommy, the good mommy, instead of the one who screeches about left on lights and running faucets and unflushed toilets and dirty hoarded underpants and sodden towel piles and grape jelly globules all over everywhere. I hope he remembers the good mommy, the mommy in sunglasses with hair tied back, arms and shoulders as golden brown as his own, the mommy who sings in the minivan on the drive home. I hope he remembers the mommy in the pool, smiling back at him as he goes up into the air and down again, laughing.

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This post, Golden, originally appeared on aag on Thursday, August 4, 2011. Tweet This Post!

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