Thanks for your kind words...

We're headed out-of-town tomorrow...I'll try and post Saturday Pursuits, if they are pursuits-worthy.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

Life

Yesterday was a trying day with L., to say the least. I put up a post on Family Education today in which I dance a bit around just how trying it was, and mused instead on how unpredictable kids can be when you take them out in public places. I felt down and blue yesterday because what should have been an ordinary outing--taking the kids to get haircuts--turned into a nightmarish experience, and I ended up with a bruised and swollen jaw as a result, and L. yelled terrible things at me in front of strangers and I felt so judged: both of us. I spent the rest of the afternoon nursing self-pity about why life has to be so complicated, and how I could have one child (T.) be so excited and giddy about how fun a haircut is and another child (L.) who would work himself into a knot of anxiety and overloaded senses over the same experience. I hate being judged.

And I've been burdened by guilt all week because T.'s end-of-year school performance is today in the school chapel. She's been so excited about singing, and about seeing her best friend J. there for cookies and punch after the performance. I was going to miss it because of summer school, and this has made me feel so guilty all week, and no other family could come and hear her sing, and I SO wanted to be there. But as it turned out, Scott called a short while ago to say that T. has had a migraine episode and that just as the kids were lining up to go into the chapel she threw up. He's whisked her home, my poor girl in her pink dress and her braids, and no one will get to hear her sing.

And this is the second migraine she's had in two weeks.

It's so hard to feel badly for your kids--for the burdens and challenges they face, especially when they are ones other kids don't have to shoulder; obstacles that will mark them all their lives, and alter the way they do things, or rise up like huge walls preventing them from breaking through, from being all they can be. Of course, even as I write those words, I know these are not insurmountable challenges, the ones my kids face, but still--it's hard.

Who indeed

We're going to a wedding this weekend. Tonight, in T.'s bath, I talked with her about what a wedding is like. I told her she could wear her pink twirly dress, dance, eat lots of food, and have a big piece of CAKE. She listened, eyes wide with excitement.

Who's getting married? She wanted to know.

Remember cousin J. and her friend A.? Remember how they came and stayed with us and brought their big hairy dog Stella?

T. nodded.

Well they're getting married!

T.'s eyes grew even wider.

She dropped her voice down to an amazed whisper.

Mama? Who's Stella going to marry?

Food for the soul

On the other site today, I put up a post about a wonderful evening with friends we had this past Friday. We spent it at the house of my colleague/friend/office mate--she and her husband lived in Suriname some years ago when they were in the Peace Corps, and on Friday she cooked up authentic Surinamese dishes. We were joined by another colleague/friend and his family--they have two children, 4 and 3 and our hosts have two--almost 10 and almost 8. I tried to google some of the recipes because they were so tasty, but couldn't find the exact ones. There was an amazing pumpkin and tomato stew dish, and a curried potato and bean and egg dish (the eggs were hard-boiled, peeled and cooked whole in the curry), and some flavorful noodles, and a pan of spinach cooked in onion and curry. My friend had also made the fieriest little chutney sauce I have ever tasted. It was a pale peachy-orange color and I swear it looked and smelled like salsa. If you ever encounter a little dish of a condiment so pleasant and harmless looking as that one, DON'T scoop a huge pile of it onto your dipping bread and pop the whole thing casually into your mouth. Take it from me.

It was all fabulous, aside from the burning mouth part, and washed down with lots of wine, of course. We sat on their screened-in porch surrounded by lots of candles, and laughed and ate, and laughed some more, and ate some more--you get the picture! What is definitely a huge perk in this friendship (aside from getting to eat all that tasty food, of course) is that our kids all get along so perfectly. This is not often the case with parent friendships. If the parents get along, then sometimes as luck would have it, the kids don't. Or sometimes one half of the parents won't get along with the other half of the other set, etc., etc. But this is not the first time we've spent an evening together, and it's always worked out wonderfully for everyone involved.

As I've written before, I've been thinking lots about friendship lately; I think the older we get, the more we think about the importance of friends in our own lives--at least this is true for me. After the heady, intense days of high school and college there came an in-between period, when Scott and I found ourselves immersed in the day-to-day business of parenting. We were lonely for the socializing we had done during our graduate student days, but a part of us also knew that the time would come --all too soon, in fact--for these days to come back around again. But as our kids are getting older, we're finding that one large benefit to this is that we are branching out a bit more socially, and coming together with people because of common interests, not just because of school and play dates, and parenting groups. Does this make sense? Maybe we're feeling grown-up again, in ways that go beyond parenting. We're getting back in touch with who we were before the days of diapers and potty training, and the drain-you-dry-demands of very small children. Life hasn't gotten easier, and in some ways parenting has become much more challenging and I'm sure will continue to be for years to come, but we're not feeling as physically and emotionally drained as we felt in those early years.

It's such a glorious thing, really, to sit with friends on a warm May evening, sipping wine and tasting food so completely out of your normal realm of experience, all the while knowing that your kids are having the best time of their lives playing with their own small friends: making paper airplanes, or lost among a pile of Legos in someone else's family room. Friendships feed the soul, whether you are small or pushing forty and there, in our friends' cozy, love-filled house, surrounded by the spicy, garlicky smells of a small country so very far from our own, we felt richer than we've ever felt in a long while.

Saturday pursuits

(We found this K-Nex Ferris wheel at a yard sale this morning for $5. AND it was already put together! I'm serious!!!)

Time travel

Last night I dozed in bed next to T. and listened to the rain fall and the wind swoosh around the great oak trees in our front yard. I was thinking about something else--something completely mundane, like what I would make for dinner Saturday when our friends come over--or so I thought. Then, completely unbidden, came a sudden memory: Greece, two years ago. Or, more precisely, an old, run-down playground just outside the village square on a the island of Lefkada. We had just finished a marvelous dinner--tangy, garlicky tsatsiki, hunks of crusty bread, salad, wine, and while the rest of my family was finishing up dinner I took the kids on a short walk to the playground. My grandmother, bored with the lingering dinner conversation, joined us and we made our way up the stone stairs leading to the playground. It's a completely unacceptable place for a playground, really. All a child would have to do is climb onto the low stone wall encircling the play area, lean over too far, and topple onto the street below--to their death, probably, or certain injury. But for grown-ups passing the time while the children play, it is a marvelous place. You can look out into the velvety purple-black of the night sky, dotted with pin-pricks while around you swings creak and the kids run and laugh, heady with the night air and the need for bedtime.

But I was there last night--I swear I was. Suddenly transported to that strange, surreal playground, with the weeds curling over the bottom rungs of the slide's ladder, and the rusty merry-go-round, and that horrible drop to the street below. I pushed T. in the swing and turned to look at my grandmother, who was seated on the stone wall with her hands folded, looking out at the inky night before her. What had she been thinking about? What private memories, what world?

*************

This morning T. taught me that you just can't be a 1900s mother/heroine/writer in 2008--not, at least, when there are Little People to play with and a whole morning stretching ahead, and you haven't really had your Mama to yourself for a solid week. Click here to read about it...

Stuck

I had a conversation today with a woman who has three children, one (the youngest) with autism. Without any preamble, she pushed a petition at me to sign. It's not an anti-vaccine petition but, rather one that will ask for an extension on the investigation into whether or not vaccines cause autism; this extension will allow families the chance to claim compensation for their child's vaccine-related autism. I didn't sign. I didn't sign because I hadn't read the thick pile of supporting information attached to the petition. I didn't know the woman, and I try not to sign anything without being aware of what I'm signing, and why I'm signing it. But I felt badly for not signing it, and the woman seemed offended, as if my refusal to sign signified a type of betrayal on my part of the cause.

I felt badly, too, because I found myself balking at the way she was talking about her young son, who isn't even in elementary school yet. Just as she believes that vaccines caused her son's autism, she also believes he is almost "cured" of it. She looked at me, expecting me to nod and agree with her, and perhaps offer my own personal anecdotes to support her belief, and I felt badly because I didn't; instead I offered my own perspective: that L. is who he is and has been from birth. That I wouldn't want to change him for all the world, but that we do have challenges to overcome. He's a child; not some toy that is broken and needs fixing. I bridle at that way of phrasing things, and about where it places those of us who feel their kids don't need "curing" or "fixing"; I bridle at the implication that we haven't done enough to "cure" or "fix" our own kid(s).

Anyway, I know this is all a huge can of worms. But when I left a part of me wondered why I had made such a big deal out of NOT signing the petition. My signature wouldn't have cost me a thing, and maybe I did have an obligation, loyalty-wise, to put my name on it. Maybe the woman just rubbed me the wrong way? Was it selfish of me not to sign? What do you think? Would you sign a petition without feeling fully comfortable about where exactly you stand on the issues involved? Isn't that like making an uninformed/ignorant vote?

Dabbling in the fourth dimension

Up until two weeks ago L. was reading purely for the absorption of facts and historical information--we've been reading non-fiction at bedtime for almost three solid years now. For two weeks straight recently we read through Bryan Berg's Stacking the Deck--twice. While I did find the book intriguing (really, you have to check out this guy) it was hard for me to get excited every night about reading the latest installment--especially the second time around. Before Berg's book, we read through a 1970s train enthusiast magazine that L. had gotten for free at a model train expo. Then before that we read an endless amount of books about space, including several space encyclopedias. Last week, though, L. took a new book off his shelf--one Scott's stepsister gave him for his birthday last year: Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. I have learned a tremendous and varied amount of information reading to L. at night, and I wouldn't trade it for all the world--this has been his gift to me. This new dip into fiction has been like another gift, one I wasn't sure I'd get. For a week now we look forward together to the new chapters, and as I read, L. lying still next to me in his bed, together we journey into the (sometimes dark) magic of L'Engle's book.

Last night when I was reading Chapter Four of the book to L. Scott walked in on a most scary part, (if you read the book as a child and remember it Chapter Four is when the children encounter a shadow--evil embodied, the thing that is keeping their father away from them; and if you haven't read it then maybe now you'll be interested in checking it out) and made a face at me. I think he wanted to know why I was reading something scary to L. right before bedtime, but we plowed on through it until we got to the other side, the beginning of Chapter Five. We're slowly trying to teach L. that sometimes this is what you have to do; sometimes you have to push on through the frightening bits of books and films and life until you come out again on the other side of it all, feeling bigger and better than the things that frightened you.

I used to read scary things right before bedtime when I was a child--I especially liked to read creepy ghost stories. I read L'Engle's book when I was a few years older than L., and I remember huddling under my blankets and devouring page after page, holding my breath over what was. Then, when I closed the book shut, the scary parts vanished into the pages of the book and I'd snuggle down under my covers, feeling warm and safe in my bed. Most of the time things always came out alright in the end, and when there were stories or films (or later as I grew older real-life terrible tales of things gone horribly wrong) that didn't end well I still had the comforts of my room, my house, my family--my own private, safe universe. I so desperately want L. to learn this--to learn that the scary parts of life have to be dealt with and processed and not allowed to become larger than you can handle. And it's hard to learn these lessons by only reading non-fiction which is, I think, filled with startling realities (The Big Crunch--now, that's frightening, I think).

Anyway, the scary parts of the book fade in L.'s mind, almost as soon as we read them, as I thought they would, in the face of all the interesting scientific and mathematical bits. When I picked L. up from school yesterday he told me he'd been thinking about the book all day--namely the tesseract (if you really want some good bedtime reading, go here and then read through it all and follow the links to the use of the tesseract in popular culture).

"I can't get that book out of my head!" L. told me in the car.

"That's the sign of a good book," I told him, so giddy inside that he'd been thinking about one of my favorite books all day.

"It is?" He asked. "Is it supposed to get inside your head like that?"

"Oh yes," I told him. "That's how you know it's really good."

I'm still not sure what he'll make of the story in the end, but I think it will be one to stick with him; maybe he'll remember feeling a sense of awe and suspense while we read together in a darkened room at the end of the day, or maybe he'll forever latch onto this concept of the tesseract and go on, as he is now vowing to do, to apply it to a new way to travel through space and maybe time. But whatever he makes of this book--this dive into the world of fiction--a door has now been opened for him; he's peeked through and dabbled a bit in the world I love, just as he's allowed me, all these years, to share in the worlds he loves so much.