the modernity ward

Awful

I went out to lock up the chickens after the girls were off to bed and could only find three of the four.

I hunted under the porch, in the nesting boxes, the shed -- nowhere. Chickie Emma, the smallest and nicest of our hens, a little blue-egg-laying Araucana, was not to be found.

Then I noticed the 25-gallon plastic tub turned upside down.

I lifted it.

Underneath was a very dead Chickie Emma, along with a final blue egg.

I knew immediately what had happened: Daphne, my holy terror of a three-year-old, was the rooster of the flock, and when she came walking all the chickens froze in their tracks, let her pick them up, docile for only her. She also, of late, had been experimenting with trapping them in the shed, once even hiding two under the plastic turtle-shell lid of her sandbox. I spoke seriously then, explained that they would die, sent her to her room.

But I must not have been watching closely enough early this morning. In fact I know I wasn't. And then we left the house and were gone most of the day. The hot, sunny day. That poor little hen. What a horrible way to die. Not the humane death I had envisioned for the animals under my care. No, a hot, unpleasant, miserable, protracted death for a sweet little creature I loved best -- we all loved best -- of our chickens.

I dug a hole in the dirt just to do something with my rage. Daphne was asleep already but Sophia wandered out. I showed her Emma's stiff body, let her pet the chicken's feathers, explained what had happened. She was unfazed, and tried to comfort me by suggesting we get another chicken.

I didn't bury Emma. I put her in a trash bag in the freezer. When Daphne wakes up in the morning I will show her, and we will talk about what happened, and we will bury Emma in the yard together. We will plant a tree over the spot. ("An apple tree?" asked Sophia. "With branches to climb on and a tire swing?" [She's been agitating for one lately.])

Not that I expect this to change Daphne's behavior. She's three. Innocent, in that her brain isn't capable of making the connection between her action and the chicken's death, or for that matter of stopping the action even if she DID understand that at the very least she would be in trouble.

Obviously there's one person at fault and that's me. I didn't see what happened, I didn't watch closely enough. Worse still, I was congratulating myself all the while for providing a little wildness for my girls, an unfettered life in the confines of the backyard, with dirt and animals and bare feet and tree climbing.

That wild dirty-footed life includes death as well. Sometimes at the hands of a child.

I'm so sad for that little chicken. 

How to Raise Girls Right

Baby: Pop a garter with a bow on it around her malleable little cranium. Or people might think she's a boy. She doesn't even have any hair, for god's sake. Make sure she doesn't wear a blue shirt ever. Unless it also has flowers on it. But the flowers have to be pink.

Toddler: Maybe the Cars-themed pull-ups were on sale but if you ever let her piss in anything that doesn't have a princess or a unicorn on it she's gonna grow up lesbo.* Everybody knows that.

Preschool: Don't let her get dirty. Oh, that pretty white dress, you can't go in the sandbox, you'll ruin it! Here, you sit in the car while your brother digs.**

School-age: Tell her to gang up with the other little girls! Chase the boys! Girls chase boys! But make sure she also understands that ew, boys are gross.*** She should probably still rassle 'em a little bit though. Just always let them win in the end. That will serve her well in years to come.

Extra credit if you can teach her how to exclude and manipulate other little girls. The best way to do this is by example.

Puberty: The day she gets her period, sit her down a the kitchen table. Hoist your old tape player up on the table and pop in The Nails' "88 Lines about 44 Women." Listen to the whole thing together. Tell her she has to pick one and be it from now on. Support her in her choice.

High school: Give her a 35-year-old book about sex written from a religious perspective. Get really drunk one night and wax rhapsodic about the "essential communion of souls" that sex is. When you sober up, scream at her about how she's going to get a disease. 

If she gets a urinary tract infection, bark at her, "Well, next time tell him to do it RIGHT!" Do not attempt to elaborate on this. If she's such an adult she thinks she can do...whatever it was...that she did with that boy, she can damn well figure out what he did wrong.

After: Pester her for grandchildren. Reminisce fondly about the days of having small children underfoot. Tell her not to get pregnant, because it will ruin her life. 

 

*Do people still actually say this?

**I totally saw this go down in Philadelphia once. Rich white lady and kids, for demographic sampling purposes.

***I mean, they really kind of are.

Sunshine in February

I sit in undying gratitude that I was brought up to believe that small children are best left to their own happy devices out in the mud and chicken shit, chattering to hens and inventing worlds with pebbles, while mothers sit and write. Or draw. Or think. 

Well done, Mom. 

I can see how some would criticize it as a type of detachment parenting -- the polar opposite of the symbiotic closeness of the baby days, where I wore my children on my body and fed them that way too, reading their needs without a conscious thought. I think it is exactly the same thing: an honoring of essential human nature, which likes its needs met without a struggle and then to go off wandering.

At any rate: the kitchen sits in disarray and I have a clean spot at the table for my sketchbook, and Daphne has come inside with two eggs still hot from a hen's body. Why waste sunshine in February wiping up crumbs? 

I Had it Coming

I have been informed in no uncertain terms, over the years, that it is unseemly at best, the way I gripe about the daily clatterbang-in-the-ear that is the reality of childrearing. Particularly the stay-at-home variety. You wanted this more than anything in the world, I've been told. And now all you do is complain about it. 

Or more pointed: You remember what it was like to want this reality so desperately you would shoot your body full of mare's urine and blow up your ovaries like Jiffy Pop -- and you have the audacity to complain? Other people can read this, you know. The walking wounded with Jiffy Pop ovaries and no carseats full of fishy crackers. A windwhistling gap in the heart.

I know. I know.

I do remember, you know. What that was like, living with my head somewhere detached from the earthly plane, lost in the what-if. How it blurred everything I did, the fuzz of grief, like a migraine in its infancy. The multithreaded timelines for each possibility: if the first baby had lived, if the second had, if I got pregnant now, if we had the home study a month from today. Wanting to take all the unknowns in hand and press them into a shape I could at least recognize.

I keep that with me, that time, a little rock in my pocket to reach in and feel. A weight light to carry hidden, solid enough that I don't forget it.

Here's the thing though: that little rock, it isn't magic. I can't brandish it at the children when they're abrading my last taut nerve and transform them; hell, I can't even transform myself with it. It does what it does, which is to sit tucked away, providing ballast; but it doesn't change the moments, either joyous or difficult. 

It made me notice the little pebbles other people are carrying around, though. I can sense the heft of another person's pain. I wouldn't trade that for lighter pockets.

But I can't carry someone else's pebbles. You carry your own, I carry mine. Some people won't be able to read about the ugliness inside my mothering, and that's all right. We know our own boundaries. We keep ourselves safe.

Here's the other thing: this part of mothering, the constant aggravation tempered by (and sometimes made the worse for) moments of incomparable sweetness, the noise and the clutter and the brain-static that I can't shake off even in a rare moment of quiet -- I knew this was coming. Hell, I'd read enough Erma Bombeck to know what was in store for me.

And this was exactly what I wanted. This mess, this chaos, this panic of needing aloneness and never quite being able to get it -- the hilarity, the impossible stories, the silliness -- this is what I wanted. The struggle of figuring out how to handle a child's first attempts at lying, of helping a tiny person get a handle on big feelings. All this.

If nothing else, daily interaction with small children is great for comedy material. Dark comedy. Very dark. 

It's not accurate to say that no one talks about this part of mothering; it might be true, though, that nobody understands it until they're in it, and then the depth of understanding defies words. I don't know if it changes much to talk about it, like this -- but I do know that if I don't talk about it, I'll die.

 

Oh for the Fuck of Shit, Children

Sit right in your goddamn chair. Don't make that disgusting chuffing slurping noise when you spoon your milk into your mouth instead of fucking drinking it like a regular person. No, don't tell your sister to be quiet STOP SCREAMING STOP SCREAMING okay. 

Don't clink your spoon on your cup that way. Don't touch me. Don't CLUTCH at me. Don't GODDAMN FUCKING RUN WITH THAT. No you may not climb on that WE ARE NOT GETTING THE PLAY DOH OUT it is BEDTIME. Would you PLEASE sit like a person in that chair. Turn your legs TURN YOUR LEGS so that they go under the table and FACE YOUR FOOD. No, I don't care if you hate it, and I can't hear you when you use that whiny voice. Or I wish to god I couldn't. I don't care if you never eat anything again, that's right, Mommy don't give a shit. Here's your goddamn rice, assholes. It already has butter in it OH GOD DO NOT CRY ABOUT THE BUTTER how on earth could I have anticipated you would want to put the butter on it yourself GODDAMN IT DO YOU NEED TO CRY IN YOUR ROOM.

Let go. No, get off. Do not climb on me. Do not touch me with your tiny greasy fingers or put them on my glasses or OH MY GOD YOU BENT MY GLASSES.  I am trying to eat my goddamn dinner OH HOLY JESUS DID YOU JUST SPIT IN IT? DID YOU?

I don't even care because it's still hot and I'm eating it. Except OH FINE I will get you a drink of water because it's not worth it to watch you climb in and out of that stupid booster seat and almost tip the chair and want to do it "all by yourself" and it'll take forty-five minutes and here is your water.

You want a what? More bread? No more bread. No more goddamn bread. Eat a carrot. Eat those carrots that are right in front of you. DO NOT WHINE AT ME about the carrots. Just eat them. You begged for them yesterday.

If you ask me for dessert I am going to spear my own motherfucking eyeball with a carrot and I am going to goddamn well serve it to you and YOU WILL EAT IT. 

 

Visiting Hours

My grandpa, stable enough to stay in the local nursing home, will be returning to his house this week. He has a PEG tube and will never eat or drink again but the very fact that there's an "again" is kind of amazing, and he'll get to sleep in his own house until the next pneumonia or whatever else comes for him. There will be home health care, a blessing for my grandma, and the further blessing of familiar surroundings. When the mind and body totter on last legs it's nice to know that the sheets are where they've been for forty years, the radio room is just as you left it, the TV remote is the one you know how to work. The nursing home wasn't all bad, though; when you live in the same place for eighty-odd years you're bound to know your hallmates -- one of my grandma's students from her one-room schoolhouse teaching days lives there -- and if you ever saw that godawful comic I made, its protagonist is alive, kicking with one leg, and ensconced in the same nursing home.

So it was Old Home Week at the Old Home for a few weeks. Those bear-men, like my grandpa and my dad, can turn on the charm once forced out of their caves, and it starts to make sense how they convinced those otherwise sensible women to marry them long ago.

One new thing: Grandpa had a visitor in the hospital, during a bout of ICU psychosis. The visitor was a floating being of love and light and goodness and mercy, and he brought peace with him.

His name was Jeff.

And now Grandpa, mostly lucid most of the the time, says with beatific certainty that God has nothing to do with religion.

Maybe the miracle is that the brain in extremis contorts reality into one final rationalization to make it all better at the end. Maybe that's miracle enough. Maybe that is in itself the thumbprint of the divine: that ultimate suffering might be buffered somehow.

Or maybe Grandpa met God, and his name was Jeff and he was a pretty good guy.

Visiting hours are short, short.

 

 

 

I Was Gay Married

No, it's true! My husband and I were married by a gay man. Who also happened to be an Army chaplain and Baptist minister...and partnered, at the time, to my uncle.

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When I was growing up in Kansas, and later in Virginia, my uncle lived with us. He is openly gay -- we met his friends and his partners -- and also HIV positive. We all cooked and ate together, watched movies, took road trips, commented on the handsomeness of passing young men. He taught me to deglaze a pan and to butter a steak before serving it.* He also made sure my little sisters and I got to see The Boys in the Band before we were old enough to vote. Of course the reasons he was living with us had to do with his numerous and very real problems -- mental illness, especially addiction, doesn't so much run in our family as it saunters through shaking hands and clapping people on the back -- but the good that came out of it was that to us, in our household, being queer was ordinary.

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I know my mother would probably never cast herself as an LGBT rights activist**, but what she did by inviting her brother to live with us was far more radical that taking us to any demonstration. What could be more radical than having dinner together every night -- than having fun making up silly stories -- than removing the otherness of queerness with the power of normalcy?

That's my hope for all of us, queer and not -- that sooner rather than later it all becomes normal and ordinary and unworthy of newspaper editorializing. We have quite a ways to go. But we're getting there.

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*You see why kashrut is so hard?

**UPDATED: My mother has just sent me a link to the LGBT Fundraiser she's working at this week. OKAY, MOM, WE GET IT. YOU ARE AN LGBT ACTIVIST! Heh. My mom rocks.

No More, Kids.

Last night was my first class of Back to School: The Prerequisitioning: Part II. Two nights a week, 6:30 to 8, of the kind of class where the professor spends the entire first session making sure we've all Learned A Little Something About Each Other. It's an interesting enough subject to be engaging but it's a slow pitch, some nice academic training wheels to get me back on the road to Nurse Know-It-All.

Sophia's in school and I am, okay, totally unsurprised by how much we're all liking that. One might argue (cogently) that my need for externally imposed structure was generated in the first place by traditional schooling, but hey, there it is, and it's a little too late to do anything about it now. I yam what I yam, and what I yam is someone who can quite ably get up at 6 a.m. and pack lunches and have school uniforms neatly arrayed in a closet as long as Someone Else is requiring it of me. For her part Sophia seems to love school -- and her kindergarten is worlds away from my own in terms of good teaching and learning expectations.  Daphne is enjoying the opportunity to play with all the cool toys without someone snatching them out of her hand.

La Leche League continues apace and I love that too. It's certainly firmed up my resolve to work at least part of the time with new mothers.

So this is all good, right? I have certainly had an easy enough time bidding goodbye to plans for homeschooling, at least until the girls are a little older; as amazing as I think it can be, I think I might not have the right personality to handle my particular kid at this particular age. (Especially not with the other one in the picture.) No regrets there; even if I do feel differently about it later, that's a door we can always open later.

There's one thing I keep worrying like a hangnail, though: whether our family is complete. I am the first to admit I am at my limit right now. "NO MORE, KIDS!" leads nicely to "NO MORE KIDS!"

But then that turns into "No...more kids?" Are we really too far away from "NO! More kids!"...?

I know I can't handle any more right now -- and I know I don't want to delay nursing school much longer. But in focusing on school, am I necessarily closing the door on having more children? My fertility was not so impressive to begin with; I'll be 34 this year, and we all know that your ovaries turn into dessicated cat turds after that. I mean, I know the hot new trend is having your entire ladyparts cryogenically preserved for after you've made partner, but come on, anyone who's ever read an infertility blog (or, um, injected her stomach fat with potent synthetic hormones for months on end) knows what a load of horseshit that is.  To even consider adding more when the first one was a shock and the second one a pleasant surprise seems like the height of hubris.

Oh yeah, plus we are seriously going to need my income in another five years. Frankly we could use some now but no job I could get currently would do much more than cover daycare for Daphne.

Of course none of these arguments carry enough weight to make me want another baby now. Therein lies the conflict: I know two is about as much as we can manage right now -- and I'm not entirely happy about that. 

What Do You Get...

...when you combine residual encephalopathy with lots and lots of pain meds, shake them up, and pour them into a man whose favorite story involves a mysterious personage known only as "The Mad Crapper" who once terrorized the dorm bathroom at Tulane with a turd the size and shape of a stevedore's forearm, laid across a public sink?

You get a man who calls you up at nine in the ay-em to request that you email three separate televangelists that you have never even HEARD of in order to gain their opinions on this book.

One doesn't necessarily follow the other, unless you happen to have met my dad. At any rate it makes the question of what he'll be like once he's all the way out of the woods a far more intriguing one.

Did I tell you they fixed his massive hernia, the other thing he was waiting to have surgery on? As of now he's had all the big surgeries he needs. Now he just has to, you know, regain the ability to walk.

Then what? Probably some sort of facility, I hope around here. (Thanks, Melissa, for passing along your recs!) When? Dunno.

Life. Somebody oughta sell tickets. Hell, I'd buy one.

Sprawling, Disorganized Thoughts (Brought to You by Oxycodone)

Dear Firstborn:

Listen, kid: you are this close to finding in your lunch bag a box of Mori-Nu silken tofu and a spoon, mmkay? Next time I pack you a lovingly made red bean and broccoli quesadilla, bag of blueberries, mini chocolate chip zucchini muffins THAT I LET YOU HELP MAKE, and ten chocolate chips plus raisins, and you tell me that you ate the chocolate chips AND NOTHING ELSE, you will go on a culinary tour of the Least Suitable Lunch Foods of the World That Happen to Be in Our Pantry. Thursday is dry couscous day. So eat your fucking lunch, honey. Okay? Can you do that?

* * * * *

But seriously: S did a week of Basic Swim day camp, and I am incredibly impressed with her -- not just for learning all the new skills but at navigating the uncharted social waters of a camp where she didn't know anybody. She's a girl after her mama's heart, and boy, I know that takes a lot out of her. But she did it -- learned to swim, came home with silly songs and a sunburn, and managed not to have a meltdown all week long. When did she grow up so much? Where'd my baby go? Do I really have to send her to kindergarten?

I adore little larval newborns, the slow flowering of personality; I find toddlers and preschoolers challenging but charming. My fantasies of motherhood always stopped right about age 5, though, and I never thought much about parenting older children. I'm starting to see how much fun -- and how devastating -- that's going to be.

* * * * *

In other news: Dad. His medical needs are numerous at this point. The new liver seems to be a success thus far but he needs to eat more protein (to eat more, period), he needs to heal that surgical wound and gain some muscle strength back, and he has to do those things so they can fix his hernia. If not for the hernia he'd be ready to go home, just about, but the hernia really compromises his ability to sit, move, walk, and pretty much anything else you can imagine.

His demeanor was hauntingly sweet when I saw him. Part of that was the Percocet, but most of the time he wasn't on any kind of painkillers. He seemed like he'd been away somewhere, baffled at his return, in pain at times but barely tethered Earthside, other times. He wanted to hear about his grandchildren; he wanted to hear what I remembered about my own childhood. I told him story after story: the time we went to the Ozarks, caught sunfish which we turned in for prizes at the canteen. The way he swore putting together our old metal swingset, how much fun we had playing on it. Taking our irascible dog Peaches into the horse fields behind the house to run through the grass, flushing birds and terrorizing the occasional jogger. He listened, delighted, either at the memories themselves or at the idea that I had these memories, happy, of him. He'd drift off, listening, a beatific smile on his face.

I was angry, before. Justifiably so, of course -- don't worry, I'm not feeling bad about feeling mad (or any of the other fascinating, complex, old and new feelings) -- but yeah, angry. The first time I saw him sick it was like a punch in the gut. I felt sick inside but no less angry; after all, he very literally brought it on himself -- and, of course, all of us.

Now, though. The energy of that anger seems to have dissipated. It's not so simple as believing he's done the correct penance and now deserves the cure; no. The anger cleared away and now I can see how much he's been suffering for so long -- not just the interior anguish but the physical pain he endured as a result. He's lived through years of excruciating pain and embarrassing side effects, taken terrible care of his physical self. I am astonished that he has survived.

And I'm terribly glad, too.