Painted Smiles and Iron Guts

This morning, my classroom is buzzing with the taptaptaptapping of students’ fingers on keyboards. I thought I would miss the sound of pencils and pens scraping against paper, scratching out ideas and shaping words. The tapping has much more energy–it’s a sound you can almost ride, and I do. And I almost feel like I’m cheating in a way, drafting off these young minds punching keys with the conviction that they have something to say that matters.

Anyways, this morning we’re tapping about objects. The kids brought in autobiography boxes, which they construct from pictures, drawings, artifacts, newspaper clippings. One student brought in a box that lights up, another chose to adorn his with a plastic mound of spaghetti. They’re all shapes and sizes and they contain all kinds of magical talismans: wands, Eiffel Towers, rubber duckies, pom-poms, dog collars, movie tickets, pigs made out of yarn. So the prompt was to write about an object–tell the stories or ideas that your chosen object represents.

My object is a gummy worm. Last week, when I went to pick up Ruthie, she came charging towards me with a strange, lopsided gallop. Usually, I get knocked over with a hug, especially on days when she’s particularly good, but on this particular day, she ran towards me and took a knee. And then, my little buddy reached into her shoe, where she’d been “keeping it all day so it’d be safe.” There, in the toe of her baby blue croc, she had been hiding a plastic baggie containing a single yellow and red gummy worm. She proudly handed me the baggie, proclaiming, “I sabed it for you, Mommy! All day I sabed it for you! It’s a treat for you for being so good.” Her little eyebrows arched with the seriousness of what she was saying. Of course, I had no choice but to take the treat from her with a wide, affirming smile. “Go ahead, Mom, you can eat it.” So I did. It was very warm. I didn’t really think much about it until the teacher tells me, with the worm half-eaten in my watery mouth, that she’d had it in her shoe since they received goody bags that morning. Mid-chew I realized that I was consuming a worm which had endured the playrgound, the toddlers’ bathroom, naptime, lunch, and all of the godforesaken places that toddlers put their feet. Then, having made the decision to not-think about where this worm had been, I swallowed. Hard. With my eyes shut.”Thank you, baby. That was, er, delicious.”

So much of parenting requires an iron gut and a painted smile. There are so many things you have to do has a parent:  maintain a calm and even voice, place your screaming-squirming-kicking-thrashing toddler on her “angry spot” with a stoic face and a gentle grip, create a dinner out of nothing at the end of a 12-hour day. Being an adult is not so glamorous or powerful-feeling as I’d always thought it would be. I never thought I’d find myself standing, in a dress and heels, consuming candy from my child’s shoe.

“I didn’t even guess that I was happy”

There is this wiggle-shimmy-dance-thing that I do whenever I am enjoying what I’m eating. It’s subconscious. I never knew I did it until I caught Ruthie doing it one day across the dinner table from me. We were positively inhaling sugared strawberries from a bowl between us. She started wiggling her little booty on the seat and shimmying her shoulders, her mouth closed in the shape of mmmmmmm. Even now, I can remember the way those strawberries felt so cold and so new on my tongue; the way they bled that sweet, pink syrup; the way they melted into the insides of my cheeks.

Today, as I sit down to write, I catch myself doing that dance of satiation. Why? Because I have three glorious hours of quiet writing time spread out before me like an empty glass lake. Because ever since I woke up this morning, my mouth won’t stop smiling and my toes won’t stop bouncing in time with the music I’ve been listening to. Because my coffee is the perfect temperature. Because today, I am my friend.

Mornings like this make me wish I were a poet, which I am not. So I’ll share a few lines from the poem that captured my attention this morning. Linda Pastan, in her poem “The Happiest Day,” writes

I didn’t even guess that I was happy.
The small irritations that are like salt
on melon were what I dwelt on,
though in truth they simply
made the fruit taste sweeter.

Early Morning Vignette

This morning, we left the house at 6:45 a.m. (right on time). Ruthie insisted on waiting until we were in the car to put on her socks and shoes, and I have learned to pick my battles, so I said Fine! and carried her little Keds to the car with the pinkies of my already-full hands. Once we got in, we headed to Starbucks for coffee and apple juice. We took the “secret road,” which is just a new, more direct route to Starbucks.

The conversations that I have with Ruthie in the car are always the best, but, since we’re usually bustling from place to place, I forget them. This morning, I was fortunate enough to remember it.

me: Who wants apple juice in a box?!

Ruthie (Raising her hand): Me! I want apple juice in a box! See? I’m raising my hand for apple juice.

me: I see that. Nice work, kid-o! Do y’all raise your hands at school?

Ruthie: (Still with her hand in the air.) Ha! Yeah. We always raise our hands for school.

me: Well, you can put your hand down for Mama, because we’ve still got a little ways to go before we get there. Your arm might get tired.

Ruthie: Look! Look how long I am! I’m gettin’ really long, aren’t I, Mama?

me: Yeah, baby. You are really, really long. We need to measure you in the doorway when we get home and see how much you’ve grown.

(Okay, in order to understand these next words from Ruthie, you have to know that her favorite thing to watch right now is the home video of her first 2 weeks. She is especially entranced by her first days in the hospital––namely, the part where the nurse measures her. She made me replay that one for her several times over the weekend, which I didn’t get until this morning.)

Ruthie: Little babies have zippers in their booties so that the doctors can measure them, huh?

me: What, baby?

Ruthie: (Whispering) Babies have zippers that come from their booties so that doctors can see how long they are.

me: Er. Kind of. Uhhh… those are really measuring tapes. Like rulers that bend.

Ruthie: Oh. Why do they do that?

me: Because babies can’t stretch out nice and straight like you.

At this, Ruthie becomes very quiet and still until we get to Starbucks, where she raises her hand again for apple juice and yells that I’m going to jail because my seat belt’s not on.

Once we get to school, I realize that I have forgotten her bag, her blanket, and her bear. So I dash inside with Ruthie, confess to the teacher that I’ve forgotten, well, everything, and scurry out the door to call my very dear friend who helped me break into the pool last weekend to see if she’ll pick up Ruthie’s things and swing them by the school before noon. She says she can, and I remember how much I’m going to miss her when she moves to Athens in a few weeks. Not just because she helps me out when I’m totally brainless, but because she’s the one person I can depend on in Auburn and because talking to her is just like thinking. By now, I’ve hit the train tracks, and there is a train crossing them, which gives me just enough time to have a little weep over my friend and her moving away. I tell myself I will only cry until the train is gone. And I stick to that. When the train passes, I turn on NPR, where Steve Inskeep is interviewing Secretary Sebelius about the nation’s health care plan system, which you can find here, and made a mental note to email this to my dad.

By the time I get home, the story is over and my brain has wandered so much that I realize I didn’t really hear any of it, let alone understand it. I park the car, run in, gather up Ruthie’s bad, blanket, and bear in one fell swoop, and head out the door. I chunk the bag on the futon on the porch and race through the screen door, down the steps, and off to campus.

I decide to walk today to clear my mind before my work began. The air is cool, and as I pass by Pine Hill Cemetery, I am thankful for its old, old trees with their obscenely green leaves that look positively electric after last night’s storm. Just then, Sufjan Stevens’ version of “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” comes up on my iPhone, and I am all teary-eyed again.

That is, until a call from the Director of our Writing Project site interrupts my moment of worship with news that she is running late. By the time we finish chatting about Writing Project stuff, I’ve made it to the library and I’m sweating. I all but run to the Haley Center, up several flights of stairs, to room 2474, where I am delighted to find my favorite breakfast: fruit and sausage-cheese balls.

PJ Rides

Ruthie touches the wind.

My Saturday morning begins with the heavy sounds of Ruthie barging down the short  hallway that joins our rooms, still half-asleep, blanket and bear in tow, her hair teased a solid four inches out from her head by what I call sleep-traveling. She’s almost always smiling, proud of herself for spending the night alone and happy to be jumping into my bed, where she not-so-patiently waits for her chocolate milk as I fumble for the remote control. Once I get the t.v. on, I can usually steal a few kisses on her forehead, right along her hairline, which has the sweetest smell I’ve ever known.

Every morning, she has two chocolate milks. On Saturdays, I let her drink the first one at home, then we go to Starbucks for the second. This past Saturday, we loaded up at the wee hour of 6:40-something to make our weekly coffee schlep: Ruthie wearing panties and a chocolate milk stained butterfly t-shirt my parents bought her at the zoo when she was less than a year old, me in my pajama pants and Hanes tagless undershirt. Neither of us had on shoes. I picked her up and thunked her into her car seat, buckled her in (so she wouldn’t “go to jail”), and tucked her blanket in real tight around her legs. With Allison Krauss playing and the windows rolled down, we crept out of the driveway. I caught Ruthie’s eyes in the rear view mirror to see her mouth pulled into a tight smile that only children in a state of heightened anticipation can manage. As we picked up speed down the street, she squealed, “We’re goin’ on anudder PJ ride, aren’t we, Mom? Only girls go on PJ rides, huh?” She laughed and laughed from her gut and so did I. In Alabama there aren’t many days when the air feels cool on your skin, but on this Saturday morning in June, the air felt delicious. We spent the rest of the drive in awed silence, both of us with a hand out “touching the wind,” as Ruthie put it.

Until Ruthie gave it a name, I hadn’t really thought of our PJ rides as a ritual––they were just what we did. Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about rituals, how they’re made, and why they’re so comforting. At what point does one aspect of a daily routine begin to shape itself into a ritual? What’s the difference between a ritual and a routine? Why are rituals so satisfying? And what are they satisfying?

So I picked up an old friend (Robert Fulghum’s From Beginning to End: The Rituals of our Lives) and began reading. Again. Here’s what he says:

To be human is to be religious.
To be religious is to be mindful.
To be mindful is to pay attention.
To pay attention is to sanctify existence.

Rituals create sacred time.
Sacred time is the dwelling place of the Eternal.
Haste and ambition are the adversaries of sacred time.

When I think of the word ritual, I think of churches and candles and chanting or reciting words that I don’t understand. Fulghum’s interpretation of the word is so comforting to me because it’s so personal. In a sense, we make our own rituals out of the things that we do on a regular basis, out of the routines and habits that structure our daily lives. Having a three-year-old around makes it much easier to recognize sacred moments when they happen, because three-year-olds are mindful. Always.

Futi Kunga

Two nights ago, Ruthie discovered Futi Kunga in our kitchen pantry. What follows is the story of our new found friend Futi and how she came to be.

I was washing dishes in the sink because we don’t have a dish-washer. Er, we do have one, but it sits on the back porch because it has to be wheeled over to the sink in order to work. When I wash dishes, Ruthie usually plays in the pantry or with the magnets on the refrigerator. I could hear her babbling, but I was mostly just focused on not breaking a glass. When I (finally) finish with the dishes, I turn to Ruthie and begin the whole let’s-get-ready-for-bed process. Actually getting in the bed takes at least an hour of prodding, changing, whining, resisting, and brushing teeth with princess toothpaste. I tend to be fairly impatient about moving things along at the end of the day. So I was standing behind her, nudging her away from the pantry, and cooing, “C’mon, bud. Time for bed. Let’s go. C’mon. Let’s go. C’mon…” Ruthie whipped around, eye brows raised in her most serious serious face and whispered to me.

“Futi Kunga’s in there, Mom. She’s got those beans. You see those beans down there? Futi Kunga’s gonna eat um, Mom.” (I keep our canned food on the very bottom of the pantry.)

I asked Ruth if Futi might want to come to bed, and she (again with the most serious serious-face) said, “No. She’s not comin’ with us in the bed. She’s gonna sleep in there tonight.” I nodded, like, “Oh, right. Of course.”

Once we got in the bed, I learned that Futi Kunga had come from the dungeon––a place that, for Ruthie, is the most terrifyingly awful place she can imagine, so terrifyingly awful that the word is uttered with the weight of words-you’re-not-supposed-to-say. But, and this is important, “Futi did not drive there.” We don’t know how or why Futi was in the dungeon, but we do know that she got out (because she’s in our pantry).

So what’s Futi been doing since she moved in? Well, yesterday, Futi ate a banana Ruthie left for her, and tonight, we read Futi a story about bunnies. We went to tuck her into the pantry for a good night’s sleep on the canned beans, but Futi insisted on sleeping in the other side, where the vacuum cleaner is.

Bah! Humbug.

Two days ago, I was stopped by a sneaky policeman at 5:45 in the morning on my way to work. He was hidden behind a brick wall with his lights off on Samford, not half a mile from my house. I was going 49 in a 30. When he pulled me over, he left the lights on: not just the blue and red, but the big spotlight as well. I was panicking because I haven’t renewed by tags, and they expired in, ummm, August. I am also without a license. (Ruthie likes to play with my ID’s and my wallet. When I’m stuck in traffic and she’s wailing, or in a meeting that I’ve had to bring her to, it seems like a great idea to hand it all over to her. In this moment, however, I was certainly regretting my hasty attempts to console my child in stressful situations.)

By the time the officer came back to the car, I was in tears. Apparently, as of December 8, my license was suspended. I forgot to pay a speeding ticket in Chambers County. Brilliant. So he slapped me with two tickets: driving with a suspended license and driving with improper (expired) tags. After he admonished me for driving with a suspended license, he told me which way he was headed and left me there. 

While all of this was happening, I couldn’t call home because I didn’t have my cell phone. The night before, we had gone to Fantasy in Lights at Callaway Gardens. Just before we were about to drive through the lights, I was moved by the spirit of Christmas to pile up in the back of the truck with Audra and Ruthie so we could experience this jolly ride in the open air. Apparently, in my hastening to get to the back of the truck, I kicked my phone out of the cab. Idiot, I know.

So, I couldn’t call home, couldn’t call in to work to let them know I was running late. I drove home in the rain, defeated, to tell my husband (who’d spent a good hour and a half scouring the truck for my phone the night before) that I’d just received two tickets for stuff I should have already taken care of. I used his phone to call work and guiltily left for work. 

On my way home from work, my plan was to get a new phone and pick up Ruthie from school, then head straight home. On the way to ATT, I was pulled over. Again. I showed the guy the tickets I’d already incurred that morning. He asked me to call someone to come and get me since I was driving on a suspended license, and I broke down. Eventually, he let me go so long as I’d go straight home after I got a phone and picked up Ruthie.

Thankfully, the day ended early, with Ruthie and I going to bed by 7:30 after a dinner of scrambled eggs and fried bologna (one of my favorites). 

The next morning, I was getting Ruthie dressed for school. I put her in a new jacket from one of my favorite stores, Janie and Jack. In an attempt to get her excited about putting on her clothes, a task which is generally wrought with temper tantrums and tears, I went on and on about the new jacket she was going to wear–how soft it was, how pretty it was, how it had her favorite colors (pink and green) on it. She had only one question for me: “Does it even have a zipper on it?!” Yes, it did. “And can I zip it up myself?!” Yes, she could. “YAAAYYY!! For my new jacket!!” (Followed by enthusiastic jumping and dancing and generally joyful shimmying of the shoulders.)

So, today, for the second day in a row, Adam and Ruthie drove me to school. Hopefully, I’ll get my tags changed this afternoon (if I can find a ride). While I am desperately frustrated at my own stupidity for not taking care of stuff I’m supposed to be taking care of, I am thankful for my little girl, who always reminds me that we can and should find something to celebrate everyday. Today, I celebrated the zipper on my own raincoat. Without it, my shirt would be sopping wet.

2 Things

1.

On Sunday, I took Ruthie to the grocery store. Before we even got out of the car, “Green car, Mama? Can I get in the green car? They have them here. They do. I’m gonna ride in the green car.” As we walked up to Kroger, she spotted the lone green car across the parking lot. I hate those stupid car/carts because they’re breeding grounds for every kind of viral fungal bacterium that seems to stick to all children between the ages of 2 and 5 in the form of a thick crust of snot between their nose and their upper lip and often times caked all over their cheeks. Of course, my child is not prone to the snot-crust-cake because her cheeks and nose are generally chapped from the considerable amount of time I spend wiping her face off.

So anyway. She boards this ship of black grimy grundge and happily honks away on both of the horns in the car, as this is a two-seater. We head to the frozen foods aisle where I always begin my schlepping through the grocery store. As I’m debating over whether we eat enough Homestyle Eggo waffles to make it worth my while to purchase a box of 10 or a box of 25, I hear Ruthie talking to herself. “This is my special day. This is MY day. My day. It’s my day. Is it my day? It’s my day. It is.” I don’t know what she’s talking about until we get to the pizza section. It is at this moment that she turns to me and proudly declares: “THIS IS MY DREAM COME TRUE, MOMMY! IT IS!” And it is also at this moment that I realized that we have very little control over the cultural messages that our children receive in this world. My only comfort was that at least in Ruthie’s version of the fairy tale dreams come true, she was the one driving the car.

 

2.

We planted mums this weekend.

The Grocery Store

A globe of not
plastic, not glass, but
of light and rubber:
a balloon––
boisterous, mysterious,
floating in a summer’s
salon of heat and cash registers.
Bobbing against halogen lights,
escaped from
the child’s sweaty fist.

(Re)Considering Disney Classics

For the past 6 weeks or so, my homelife has taken on the musical scores of The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, Peter Pan, and101 Dalmations. How did this happen? Well, like most of my parenting mistakes, I all began at Target. I was moving down the DVD aisle, looking for the Doodlebops (an educational show about three young people: 2 boys and a girl, one purple, one blue, one orange. Disturbing? yes. Harmful? not if you don’t count my singing along to the theme song.), when I came across The Little Mermaid. “OH!” I cried. “I used to love this movie! Ruthie, looooook! You and Mama are going to watch this as soon as we get home. Kay?”

After the first 40 minutes or so, I realized that I had made a mistake. My background in gender theory has problematized every encounter with popular culture in the first place. In this case, I was completely and utterly horrified at what I had subjected my child to. Main issues with the film:

• Ariel trades her voice for a body.
• Ursula is the ultimate excessive woman (who lives in a vagina, no less)
• There is no mother
• The Law of the Father is explicitly introduced in the second song in the film when the daughters of King Triton exult in their names “Great father who loved us and named us well…”
• Ariel marries at 16.

With each viewing (by now, Ruthie was incessantly inquiring after both Ariel and Ursula), I became more and more engrossed by the representations of gender and gendered relationships. Now I know some of you readers are probably saying what nearly everyone says to me when I go off on the Little Mermaid tirade: “But do you really think Ruthie gets all of that from the film? I mean, c’mon! It’s a kids movie.” This vignette is for you, wary reader.

Ruthie is eating mac and cheese with us at dinnertime. She leans in real close to me, grabs my cheeks with both hands very gently, and says with conviction, “I’m gonna get married like Ariel.” I might have choked. Adam started laughing. I was incredulous. Who told her that she got married?! I was already upset by the fact that Ruthie paid particular attention to the parts when King Triton was mad and by her obsession with Ursula, who she says is “not very nice.” I was equally distraught by her newfound interest in princesses and “pretty” things.

I’m not entirely sure what we’re going to do about this Disney catastrophe in our household. On the one hand, I don’t want to teach Ruthie the age-old binary that insists good is pretty and bad is ugly. I also don’t like the assumption that women need to be saved (as seen in Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and many other children’s stories). And the absence of mothers in many of the Disney movies is especially disturbing. However, I was brought up on Disney movies and seem to have turned out alright (for the most part anyways). Several other people whom I esteem and admire have admitted to having favorite Disney movies.

This being said, I have not restricted Ruthie’s Disney movie time. While I remain vigilant over the screenings, I have decided that withholding the movies might not be the best thing either. When she’s old enough to have some idea of how brainwashed she has been, she can unlearn all of the idea that she comes to think of as “natural” as a result of her socialization. Meanwhile, we continue to praise her for being “smart” and “funny” and “pretty.” We notice when she does a good job drawing and we affirm creativity and imagination.

One day I came home from class and found Ruthie and Adam outside looking under a rock. When I walked outside to see what they were up to, Ruthie stuck out her little finger, pointing to a creature that resembled a maggot or something equally disgusting, and said, “Look, Mommy! A gggrrrrruuubbbb. Is he a sweet little boy?” I can say with some certainty that none of the “princesses” featured by Disney would be depicted searching for grub (although Timone and Pumba do have a healthy appetite for such tasty morsels).

In the end, Disney movies will probably not take too much of a toll on her innocent existence… perhaps the best we can do as parents is educate our kids about the world around them as it is rather than censor every single thing that they encounter.

in just–

When I was in high school, we didn’t read any of the kinds of poems that I use in my own classroom. Now that I’m working with the amazing and talented Emma Bolden in the Art of Writing Club, I’m learning that my secondary English education was sub-par at best with regard to poetry. The only poem that I can really remember from high school is “Two Roads Diverged in a Wood” by Robert Frost. I’m pretty sure that we had to memorize it. I learned more poems in French than English. So now that Emma and I are collaborating on this project, I have been drinking poems each week, amazed and appalled by my lacking knowledge of this world of words painting other worlds with their sounds, their shapes, and their strange new meanings.

When I started teaching high school English, e.e. cummings soon became my favorite poet. His beautiful invention never ceases to fill me with a sense of awe. I simply relish the following poem, which captures the day that I spent with Ruthie collecting all of the flowers that have bloomed within a 2-mile radius of our house. By the time we were finished, she was covered in fresh cut blooms. Her favorite was the big pink one with pollen in the middle. She kept pointing at it with a serious countenance, warning me: “Make you sneeze, Mommy.”

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window, into which people look (while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here) and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and from moving New and
Old things, while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there) and

without breaking anything

e.e. cummings