plea to Dumbledore

In case you are not au fait with first grade writing, it says “Dear Dumbledore, I’m stuck at a school for Muggles. I need your help. Send me an owl when you get this. Thanks, Helena.”

This resonated with me because I used to feel like that all the time. Like I was stuck at a school, in a house, in a world for Muggles and that I just wasn’t one of them and some day I would find out what made me different and then I would go off and be different and everything would be much much better.

Thing is, I was kinda right. That’s what growing up has given me — passage out of a school overrun by deeply muggle-ish Muggles and into a world where I fit in. No more must I lie and say that yes, I was allowed to stay up and watch SNL when I really wasn’t and even if I had been allowed, I’d have fallen asleep long before it was on and I probably wouldn’t have understood it anyway.  No more do I have to feel wrong and out of place because I don’t wear designer jeans or day-glo socks. (Yes I was at middle school in the early 80’s; how did you guess?) No more do I have to pretend that I’m not that smart really and no, I don’t really like to read. Bah.

Now I watch what I like (GLEE!) and read what I want (just read a whole bunch of Andrew Clement taken from Daniel’s bookshelf) and go to bed when I want (now) and eat what I want (mostly) and wear what I want (pajamas! and Doc Martens!) and no one looks down her nose at me and tells me “That’s just not cool.” Or if someone does, I don’t care. Who cares about being cool? I care about being kind and interesting and interested and fed in body and mind and heart.

And not about doing or being or saying what anyone else thinks I ought to.

• one book of Garfield cartoons
• one pair of shorts
• one pair of sweatpants
• two pairs of underpants
• one pair of socks
• two t-shirts and a long-sleeved shirt
• a pair of swim goggles
• two dollars and a large handful of change (his entire life’s savings)
• Gussie and Dog (his two oldest and most important sleep friends)
• a flashlight
• a colored pencil
• a tiny blue stretchy frog.

All of this was gathered up into his baby blanket.*  He lugged it downstairs, opened the front door and stood looking at the world. I sat in the dining room, pretending to write. Then he announced, as if to himself but loud enough to wake the neighbors: “I have decided not to run away today” and shut the door.

I found his choice of necessities very interesting.  Despite his current obsession with Uglydolls, he left behind the few he has managed to acquire. He left behind all his most favorite books (wise, I suppose, since books are heavy to carry around and he, like me, is a library fanatic). But he brought swim goggles. And a pencil but no paper. Why? I wish I knew.

But if I were going to run away, I bet my list would look equally odd to him. It would probably have more underwear but it would also have strange things like a half-melted candle that my grandfather made or a taped up bundle of the letters Ed wrote to me over the years we were together but in different continents, both useless on the open road.

If you were going to run away and had to fit your necessities into a baby blanket, what would you take?

*I know this because I helped him unpack at bedtime.

My own handwriting has deteriorated mightily since the mid-nineties when we got our first computer. Even then, I preferred to write long hand. It felt as if I were more organically in touch with the words that flowed from my hand. The pen felt like an extension of myself in a way that a keyboard did not. I even used a fountain pen, the kind that you fill from a jar of ink, which might have carried an element of pretention about it, but if it did, it’s an okay kind of pretention, the kind that leaves you with a writing callous stained blue.

Now, however, I have been absorbed by the machine and write twice as fast when I’m typing as when I’m scrawling. And I do scrawl. My once reasonably handwriting, at speed, is now illegible. And my hand aches terribly. I used to produce pages and pages of writing. The thought is somewhat worrying to me now. What? No keyboard? No computer? The horror! The horror!

Still, I think it’s a good idea that my child is being forced to learn joined-up writing, even if for no other reason than suffering builds character. But I think I might procure a calligraphy set and leave it lying around. It would be a shame if the inked word vanished altogether. There is something so raw and real about the physical process of applying ink to paper, something absent from the tap of fingertips on computer.

In fact, I think I’m going to go look for my pen.

*And since anachronistic longing is clearly the mood of the day, I adore that the terms upper and lower case refer most concretely to typesetters’ boxes, when the plugs of lead that would stamp the capital letters were in the higher case, and the smaller were in the lower.

Then there are nights when you’re ticking along fine and suddenly wham bang, flat on the floor, eyes rolling up in your head. When in fact, you hit the Wall of Tired.

I just did that.

There are good reasons. One, it’s legitimately late. Two, today’s circus routine included picking up a hysterical Daniel at school halfway through the morning, while also calling someone to come look at a heater that had begun smoking ominously when turned on, setting off every fire alarm in the house, while excitedly expecting house guests, while not getting any work done or any soup made or anything else except driving furiously down the road, smelling of smoke and wondering how to help the boy wonder learn to keep his temper and then considering how, perhaps, one was not quite keeping ones own temper if one were driving a little too fast while muttering fiercely under ones breath and having to reach deep for any shred of calm.

Yet, the day has ended. And all is (somehow, miraculously) well. And another day I will tell you a little about Daniel’s meeting with the president of Ed’s college. But for now folks, I have hit the Wall.

G’night.

This time last year I was admitting that while I didn’t like high-waisted jeans, that each must choose her own likes and dislikes.

So Helena and I were in some craft store and they had their Christmas stuff up. “What,” exclaimed the five year old beside me “is the world coming to? Christmas already?!”

I refrained from shouting “Right on, sister!” and just nodded a bit. We found our large pads of drawing paper and went to pay. Then Helena told the lady at the till that they’d put their Christmas stuff up a bit early.

“Ah yes,” said the lady. “But Santa needs a lot of help so we have to get started early. It’s not that long until Christmas now.”

Helena eyed her. “Santa will have to wait,” she said, “until after Thanksgiving.”

Right on, sister.

Last year I was double posting: once about how our mundanity is our humanity
and then about a deep, disturbing dilemma: cute or scary? We still have the glasses somewhere.

What is it with Halloween costumes for women? My sister and I had a long conversation a couple of days ago about a party she was going to and all the women were planning on being a “cute” (read, sexy) pirate, or a cute witch or a cute vampire or a cute cocktail waitress or a cute whore. All right I totally made the last one up but what better evidence do we have of the feminist backlash than the plethora of costumes for women that spread less fabric over our bare flesh than we would normally wear as underwear? She (my sister) was toying with the idea of going as a naked woman (with a trench coat on) but after more thought, she decided to go as a baseball player. Right on. Then the Excellent Walker got held up outside some NYC party, the very description of which was self-awaredly whoremongering (“‘I make the vodka because I like having sexy times with the sexy ladies,’ the designer, who dressed as fellow clothier Karl Lagerfeld for the night, explained.” quoted from the Gossip Girls.) Um. Okay. But EW said it better than I would have: these days, on Halloween women dress up as male fantasies and men dress up as even more powerful men. A quick look at Halloween costumes for women online results in pages of costumes, most of which are pretty scanty, many of which are straight out of Playboy and some of which straddle the leather line between S and M.

Frankly, as self-aware, self-possessed women in tune with our sexuality, if we want to be sluts or dominatrices, we should probably just do that. But let’s not be all passive-resistant about it. And jeez, let’s broaden the selection and include a few slightly more creative and well-clothed choices for women — and, god help us all, for girls. And boys, while you’re at it. I know it’s too much to ask that Halloween not center around Disney-licensed charactes, but I applaud the girl in Daniel’s class who dressed up as Jack Sparrow. She wasn’t about to let a little thing like gender get in HER way, man.

Take Helena for example. She decided last Halloween that this Halloween she wanted to be a “little bunny.” And so she was. Her granny bought her the mask. Her mother made her the costume. Helena sewed on her own tail. She is not any rabbit in particular. Just a rabbit. A little rabbit. A little rabbit who collected all her candy in a carrot she also had her mother make (last night, dammit). She is steady, determined and unflappable. She also likes to be cute and so she is.Daniel finally (after spiraling through wanting to be a television program, an oven, a Martian and Calvin again, decided he wanted to be a black hole that would suck all the available candy into its gravitational well. He wanted people to throw candy into the black hole (that was himself) that would spiral around and land up in a vacuum cleaner bag (because a black hole is a vacuum naturally).

This costume proved to be unmakeable in the Stunt-workshop. In fact, after much tinkering, it still looked way too much like a strange black dirndl skirt. So we surrendered that idea and Daniel decided he could be Space. And carry a black hole. You can just about see it in this picture. Indeed, people did throw candy into the gravitational field and we created a small rent in the space-time continuum for him to retrieve the candy later.

His outfit deconstructs as follows: his head (sprayed red) is a red giant. His body is the solar system. His trousers are stars and constellations with occasional distant galaxies. His flashing sneakers are pulsars and his scarf thing is more star-scattered space. And he carried a black hole.

Complicated, esoteric and deeply quirky. And all about space:
I
carved pumpkins.
This one cracks me up. It’s pumpkin pie, geddit? Oh that kills me.

Happy Halloween, everyone. NaBloPoMo and NaNoWriMo start in fifteen minutes! I’m going to bed!

Or even just get through the day being good enough.

Thing is, I fundamentally think that I’m doing well enough, or as well-enough as I can manage this week. But then something will happen or I’ll let something slide and I’ll then spend the next few days feeling sad that I cannot be good enough to make everything right and happy.

This is a pretty natural place to live emotionally when you have a child who struggles as hard as mine does. The inclination to think that if I, as his mother, would just do this, be this, try this, find this — then things would be better for him. And that since they are not better, that I am implicated. That I am at fault. That I am not good enough.

Of course, many many posts ago, Krista forcefully reminded me that I am not the keeper of my child’s emotional well-being. That’s a hard bit of imaginary control to surrender, though. The idea that I might, if I did just the right thing, make him okay. I can’t of course. We can’t, any of us, make any other person okay just through our own force of will. Or desire to make them so. I have spent my life believing that if I were better, smarter, gooder (you know what I mean), prettier, livelier, holier, nicer — then things around me would be all right. My mother would be happier. My father. My friends would like me more. My boyfriends stay. It’s all an illusion, a dreadful one. A burden. And yet a burden I am frightened to put down. Because then I have to admit that I am not in control of so many things. And that the scary swirling world can visit its chaos, its confusion upon me regardless of me. All I can seek to control, is me. My behavior. My reactions. My well-being.

(Of course, there’s still that voice in my head that says — Yes! Exactly. If you control your behavior and reactions well enough, then you can make your children and loved ones happier! Prettier! More vitamin packed! — Ack! Behind me, foul fiend! Like I haven’t got enough to do today already.)

When we see him as a problem, life grows dark. All his episodes, his manias, his obsessions and howls of frustration take on sinister significance. They rack up on some inner chalkboard and each swipe of the chalk pulls us further from him. Trying to solve him, alienates us from him. Suddenly he is the other, the challenge, the problem.

When we see him as our darling, our son, our little one, the sky lightens. Suddenly, it is so much easier to parent him, to set the limits he needs, to negotiate with him well. He behaves far better as well, sensing (like the canary in the mine) that there is enough oxygen for him to breathe, enough love for him to feel safe.

His teacher wants to know how we’re solving him. Talking to her is like pounding my head against a rough concrete wall. Pointless. Painful. She wants to know who his therapists are, what traumas he has endured. She wants to know how we handle him so that she can “teach him how to behave.” She wants (a month into the school year) to see progress, to know that she is fixing him.

My child, my little one, my own. He doesn’t need fixing. He needs to be loved for who he is right this minute.

I know. It’s all go, mile a minute, wild times in Central PA.

But the dustbuster is making me happy out of all proportion to its size or vacuum power. We’re not a one hundred percent, do or die Montessori household but it’s nice when the children can get their own breakfast, pour their own drink, reach their own jacket. We try to work on the whole put your clothes in the hamper, tidy your bed in the morning, clean up your own mess plan. And for years now, Daniel and his parents have been locked in a flaming-eyed row over the post-breakfast crumbs on the floor.

Daniel eats cereal for breakfast but he doesn’t like to pour milk on it, and nor does he really like to use a spoon. What he does, then, with this cereal is not so much eat it, as fresse it (which is the German verb an animal eating). And himself, his chair and the whole floor are flooded with crumbs when he’s done. We’ve worked on eating more slowly, more neatly. We’ve suggested eating out of doors. We’ve tried place mats, and handing him the broom. We’ve stipulated that only large, easy to pick up cereal may be eaten. But every day (that we could stand the fight) it’s been a battle.

Daniel, are you finished eating? Then come clean up these crumbs please.

AAAGHGHGHGHGHGHHAAAAAHAHAHAHAAAAA, was his considered response.

Now, we own a dustbuster and the children are positively falling over themselves to clean up crumbs. Montessori through mini-appliances. Next up will be some sort of crock pot so they can make supper.

Life is good. And when you’ve just moved, you take all the good you can get.