You know how before you have kids, before you even get married, you do that thing where you vaguely think about what might vaguely happen if you produce vague offspring in some comfortably vague future? Ed and I talked about having two children as the eco-responsible thing to do. Someday. We thought we might name them This and That. Someday. We thought these thoughts in the warm, safe glow of being twenty and then twenty-five and even twenty-nine and having no intention of sprogging up within the immediate future. And we talked about having two children so much that it seemed impossible we would have just one. Thus, when writing this list, I clearly wrote down a version of “Reproduce” and had to correct it lest the future get the wrong idea that I would have one and be done.

Then I had one. And I was done. More than done. I was baked, fried, roasted, grilled and burnt. I had been skinned, held over the fire and chewed until I was nothing but bones and gristle. It had been the single hardest thing I had ever done, and I nearly hadn’t made it. I did not understand how the human race had survived if this was what having babies was like. I loved my baby, sure, but it was with the sort of deep, dark determined love that is dragged from the primordial swamp of the soul and psyche and was in no way pink, fluffy, warm or cozy. I gritted my teeth and I loved that baby with every ounce of strength I had because that baby needed so much more love than I thought it was possible to wring from a human heart. Slowly, I adjusted, I coped, I changed. The baby grew a bit, calmed a bit, cried a bit less and I thought it might be safe to breathe.

Then, about 20 months after the first arrived, Ed suggested it was time to think about Number Two.

Don’t make me, I whispered. Don’t make me go back there.

But when we decided to have one, he pointed out, we decided to have two. He could have held up my list as proof. We had decided to have two. One baby was always going to arrive as the first of two.

Fine, get it over with then, I said, before I get any more sane and refuse to go back to Babyland, a jungle so dark and hideous that the very thought of returning made me shiver and sweat. It would be awful. I would go back to surviving on two hours of sleep in every twenty-four. I would go back to the helpless horror of knowing that I could not comfort my baby any better than anyone else in the world, but that it was, as the mother, my job to hold the crying baby and do my best to make things better. I would go back to sitting immobilized on the couch while a baby demanded that I grow a third and fourth breast because he was not done feeding, dammit. I would go back to clinging to the rudder, and hoping that the storm would clear.

I was completely wrong. I have never been so glad to be so wrong about anything in my whole life.

Having the second baby made having the first one make sense. She was round, warm and reasonably cheerful. She slept occasionally. She made little cooing noises. I understood why people liked babies (even if I still semi-secretly thought they were sort of larval). I saw glimpses of the pink, fluffy and warm that had been rumored to hover around these tiny humans. I picked up my crying infant and calmed it, just by being its mother, just by smelling right or having the right voice. The intense miasma that had surrounded me and the first child opened and we both could breathe more easily.

It is somewhat astonishing to me that the woman writing the list knew that she must have two babies. Not even that she’d quite like to have two babies, or that she planned to have two babies but that she MUST. That was right. Had I stopped at one, as I would have given an ounce of leeway, the world would be a less wonderful, more inexplicable place.

Of course, this all makes ten times more sense when I look back and know that the first child was autistic and the second child was not. Babies with autism, even the very high-functioning brand my son has, are not rewarding in the way that a neurotypical child is. They don’t coo and babble; they don’t particularly like faces; they hate even minor shifts of routine; they are rotten self-soothers; they find the world oppressive and overwhelming; they take a long time to bond; they learn to be loyal before they learn to love. It’s not a recipe to make a first-time parent feel confident or even competent, and I’m convinced the baby is not thrilled about its lot in life either. It’s just something to survive, for all of you, not something to revel in. Yet this baby taught me more about love than anything else — or anyone else — had ever done, or will ever do. I am grateful not just for having the second child, but for having both babies.

3. Have a baby two babies.

Check.

This is the third of a series of posts provoked by finding a fifteen year old list of 20 things to do before death. You can read about it here.

He’s in a mainstream school which nevertheless definitely welcomes odd-balls. It’s like Square Peg Central and it’s the reason we’re there, rather than at our local elementary. Still, that lord-of-the-flies thing is still going strong, and he comes home most days with stories of small moments of unhappiness. Asked to draw something in art that ‘tells a story with strong emotions,’ the class clown drew Daniel screaming. He notices the laughter, knows it is unkind, but doesn’t know how to navigate it.

There are a lot of messages of hope and solidarity being sent out to gay teens and pre-teens right now, and rightly so. But the message that it gets better is true for anyone who is being made the Piggy. It gets better. I tell this to my child, and to the child in myself still crying because no one would invite her to play and no one wanted to sit next to her on the bus. It gets better. It gets so so much better.

I have sometimes wondered why I write for children, when I happily shook the dust of those years off my feet and never looked back. But for me, writing for children is not about immersing myself in that mindset. It’s about celebrating what made those years bearable for me, the lifelines that helped me to survive grade school and junior high. For me, now as then, stories make order from an inexplicable universe. I knew that I could have found the door to Narnia, would have climbed the Faraway Tree, would have gone to Oz, would have followed the rules in the Chocolate Factory, would have been pure enough of heart to find the Grail… I knew that I was more than my classmates told me I was. Books kept my soul intact when it might have crumbled.

So now I write the stories I want to read now, the stories I wanted to read then, the stories I reached for, the stories that gave me solace, held me up, took me away, made it all better.

It gets better. It does get better. And in the meantime, there are a hundred hundred stories that will hold your hand, squeeze it secretly and whisper, “You and me, we know. We know things those bullies will never know.”

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.)