Maternally Challenged

It's Amazing to Me I Once Worked There

I wasn't going to say anything about this inane piece in the Washington Post by Charlotte Allen about the teeny-bopper kinda love the ladies have to Barack Obama ("We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?")--I mean, it was so stupid it passed out of my head about as fast as my daily horoscope--but then I see where John Pomfret, the Outlook editor who commissioned it, was quoted as saying the piece was tongue-in-cheek.

To which I can only reply: No, John, it wasn't tongue-in-cheek. It was head-up-ass.

I swear, weeks like this I find myself thinking newspapers can't die fast enough. It's not like people can't be sublimely stupid on the Internet, but at least they don't kill trees doing it.

Only in First Grade is a Rash a Social Asset

Bad weekend around here: my 7-yea-old, Suzanne, was walking around with a hollow cough that made her sound like Tallulah Bankhead after a weekend bender, so it was off to the doctor and then to the drugstore for a round of antibiotics. On Friday night (these things always happen on weekends) she sprouted a weird, vividly red rash on her butt. Thinking she is having an allergic reaction to the amoxycillin, I call the on-call physician, who says yeah, that's probably what it is, and prescribes a new antibiotic.....which we forgot to get on Saturday, since by then she was already feeling better.

Then, on Sunday, the rash spreads, she develops a wicked earache and my husband and I look at each other and go, Hey, why didn't you go pick up that prescription?? Because, of course, the only way to deal with something like this is to immediately blame your spouse. Anyway, back to the store, new antibiotic, but the rash persists. So yesterday, once again, we are hauling up the road to the pediatrician. This time, the doctor looks at Suzanne's butt and says, "Well, her ear is already better and I can't hear anything in her chest."

"So what about the rash?" I say.

"Don't know what it is," the doctor says. "But it's getting better, so don't worry about it. Sometimes we never figure these things out." And she ruled out lethal staph infections and ringworm and bedbugs.

Back in the car, headed this time to school, Suzanne sighs happily. "I can't wait to get to class!" she says. "When I tell everybody all about my rash I am going to be soooo popular!"

Random Thoughts from a Jetlagged Brain

Just got back from a five-day trip to The Hague (on a magazine assignment, yes I know, it was hardship duty) and I am here to report a few observations:

1. Dutch TV is every bit as inane as American TV. A big part of the reason is that much of it IS American TV. For the rest, I will name only two shows I happened to encounter while channel surfing: "Beauty and the Nerd" (title in English, show in Dutch, do not ask me why) and "Dancing Queen," a "Dancing With the Stars" knock-off (or inspiration, who knows) set to (steady yourselves) the music of ABBA. And only ABBA.

This is my idea of hell.

2. Of all the contributions America has made to the world, pop music may be second only to the Bill of Rights. I say this after five days of listening to Europop in various elevators. Their idea of pop music is a female voice crooning into a microphone some phrase ("I gave you my love" comes in mind) over and over and over and OVER, against a background of synthesized music made by machines that I do not think were even programmed by human beings. Same phrase. Again and again. The next song involves another phrase, set against a slightly differenet synthesized sound. Only heroin addicts would enjoy this stuff.

I have gotten old and crotchety, and I have been irritated lately at the style of many modern American singers, who either do aerobics while lip synching (if they cannot carry a tune) or, if they do have a voice, slide up and down the melodic scale as if it were a greased pole, searching for a note to  land on. But I take it all back. That is ever so much better than robo-music. One more day of listening to Europop and I would have had to stick my head in an oven, if I could have found one. Ovens, it seems, are not standard equipment in Dutch kitchens. Yeah, I know. WEIRD. But they have their reasons.

3. The Dutch have bathroom plumbing DOWN.  My  shower consisted of a knob on the left, which controlled flow, and a knob on the right, which was marked with Celsius degrees markings, so I could program exactly how hot I wanted it. Simple. Elegant. Only took me two days to figure out.

4. These little Euro cars--Tuk-Tuks, they are called in Holland--are so cute that I wanted to steal one and stick it in my suitcase. It almost would have fit. It makes SO much sense for short trips, schlepping kids, grocery store, etc. that I want to drive my minivan off a cliff. This is the future, people. When it comes to cars, Americans are stone stupid.

Check, and Mate

My seven-year-old: Mom, can I sleep with you tonight?

Me: Nope, I plan to sleep with Daddy.

Daddy: What's wrong with your own bed, in your own bedroom?

The seven-year-old: It's so dark in there!

Daddy: Well, turn on the light.

The seven-year-old: You know I can't sleep with the light on!

Show Me The Blood

That's what I tell my kids when they come to me with their problems when I am trying to write. Jane Austen was right never to get married and have kids, is all I can say, because I am dead certain that if SHE had had a seven-year-old turning up at her elbow approximately every 90 seconds to sigh heavily and say, "Mommmmm....." we would never have had Pride and Prejudice. I don't regret having kids, I can't imagine life without my kids, but there are times, and this is one, when I would really, really like to scream, "WOULD YOU PLASE JUST LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE FOR TEN MINUTES WHILE I FINISH A THOUGHT FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST?!?!" Instead, I say to them, "Come get Mommy if there is blood on the carpet or the cops are at the door," and they go away as if they have understood--when the reality is that they and I both know they will be back in less than five minutes with another Great Big Huge Honkin' Problem that only I can help them with.

In short, I've childproofed my office, but they keep getting in.

And here's the thing about parenthood: at this point, I have no idea if I am a) instilling a deep sense of worthlessness in my children, because some dumb magazine article always seems to be more important than them and their problems, or b) modeling for my children that you can be a mom and still use your brain--or what's left of it after childbirth.

I imagine that one day they will be discussing this with their shrinks. I only hope that I am still around to hear how it all turns out, because, man, I would really like to know myself.

What Would Normal Look Like/ Part Deux

My career as cultural arts committee chairman of the local PTA is over, and the verdict is in: I am Definitely Odd.

When I took the job last spring, my predecessor assured me it wasn't a huge task once you knew the ropes; basically, it consisted of lining up various performances for school assemblies. I thought: How hard can it be?--and the answer was, harder than it looks, but still eminently do-able. In theory. In reality, that question--how hard can it be?--is one which in my experience has always, always been a prelude to disaster. When it comes to this question, I have learned from my mistakes, and can repeat them exactly. That was my first mistake. My second mistake was thinking: I can do this pretty much by e-mail and phone, and I won't have to go to PTA meetings.

I hate meetings. My idea of a properly run meeting is the kind Ben Bradlee used to hold at the Washington Post. News meetings at the Post were held in a room that could accommodate, at most, about 20 people, and it lasted 20 minutes, max. You were expected to show up with your game on; there was intense competition to have your section's stories in the paper, as prominently displayed as possible. But there were also deadlines, and a paper to put out. To keep things moving and on track, Bradlee had this little device--a joke shop toy, I think it was--that made machine-gun noises. When somebody said something dumb or irrelevant or just started droning on too long, he'd point it at the offender--RAT-A-TAT-TAT-TAT--and, in a manner of speaking, kill him off then and there. It was hilarious--provided, of course, you weren't the victim. For that very reason, Bradlee didn't have to use his little machine gun all that much. A whole lot of work got done in those brief meetings, day after day.

This, I have slowly come to realize, is not the way most people think of meetings. There are a whole lot of people in the world for whom meetings are a kind of social life; there are bureaucracies in which the whole purpose of showing up for work seems to be to Have a Meeting. People have meetings to plan meetings; some people spend so much time complaining about having no time for meetings that they could have had four meetings in the time it took them to complain. Much of the time, meetings are like paperwork: the process of getting work done somehow becomes the work itself. Most people either don't notice this, or they find ways to cope (my husband takes laptops to meetings, and gets work done in the back of the room). But I do notice, and I seem to be totally lacking in coping skills. Being cooped up in a meeting that drags on too long is, for me, about as thrilling as growing dental plaque. Honest to God, I would rather poke a sharp stick in my eye. At least then the pain would be a distraction.

Obviously, not all meetings are the horrors I describe. I go to monthly meetings of an environmental group at my church without complaint, and, obviously, monthly PTA meetings need to happen. But on general principles, I try to avoid meetings, even routine PTA meetings. When it came to running the cultural arts committee, my plan was: a) find out what I, personally, was supposed to do; b) do it; c) report back. This way, I thought, I could avoid the slightest chance of getting stuck in a room with people whose concept of meetings was different from mine--and, given that mine is a decidedly minority view, this seemed fairly likely.

People like me should never, ever volunteer for the PTA.

Because what happened--you could see this coming, I'm sure--was a Tragic Miscommunication. Basically, I was told at the beginning of the year that the PTA didn't have any money for cultural arts, that the budget had been depleted by a big equipment purchase for the school the year before, and that for the time being I needed to work on getting some grant money. So I did, and then....the PTA got some money....and then (yes, I know this sounds weird), somehow, I never found out about it. How, you ask, is it possible that the cultural arts committee chairman never found out about the thousands of dollars she had to spent on cultural arts? Simple: a) nobody told me and b) I didn't go to PTA meetings. My only defense here is that everybody was on notice about my aversion to meetings, and there's nothing wrong with my phone or e-mail. I mean, I let people know what I was doing. And I knew money was coming in--the usual fund-raisers and stuff--but I figured that there were priorities, and that when Cultural Arts got some money, somebody would tell me. This is what's known as a Fatally Flawed Assumption. (Remember the old saying? "Never ASSUME. It makes an ASS of U and ME.")

Meanwhile, October, November, December were passing, and unbeknownst to me (busily working on grant proposals in my office at home) I am getting a rep as a Major Slacker. And then this week, everything finally comes to light, and somebody else leaps in to line up some acts for the rest of the year (from a list of potential acts I'd drawn up last August), and I offered to resign, and they took me up on it. And I am delighted, actually, because this was a job I am not suited for, and somebody else could do better.

But the fallout here is that in the Momworld that is an elementary school PTA, I now have a rep. Exactly what it is I'm not sure, but I am pretty sure that it's not as a team player, or as the exemplar of what a committee chair should be. With the facts people have at their disposal--and, really, it's not worth it to explain all this in detail, because the bottom line is, what needed to be done got done--I am pretty sure that people's impression of me is going to be that I am just, you know, somehow...not right. Which, believe me, is truer than they realize--I have the hospital records to prove it--but it's not true in exactly the way they are thinking. And of all the not-nice names people could conceivably call me, "slacker" is not one that would really stick.   

Anyway, yesterday I took a bunch of papers over to the school to drop off so the PTA president could hand it over to whoever gets the job now. I was planning to stick it in the PTA mailbox, but when I got out of the car I saw one of the co-presidents getting out of hers, so I said, "Hey, can I just leave this with you?" And we chatted for a moment, and she said how unfortunate it was that I wasn't going to be cultural arts committee chairman anymore, and I was trying to think of a way to say how happy this very fact made me, all the while thinking that this lady was giving me a strange sort of sideways look. And so that's when I looked down and realized that I had my husband's jacket on, and that it was inside out.

Yup. Definitely odd.

What Would Normal Look Like?

The night before last, our cat spent the night outside--which isn't supposed to happen, but it did. So yesterday morning we discovered the fruits of her night on the town: a dead mouse right smack in the middle of the front walkway. I saw it as I was rushing out the door and made a mental note to throw it in the underbrush later. When I came back it was gone (I later discovered my friend Ann had been by in my absence and had moved it just under the hedge to get it out of the way). Then Suzanne came home from school with her best friend, and the two of them found it, of course, and decided to give it a proper burial. Put on gloves before you touch it, I said, and they said they would.

So I'm busy, and I hear them running around, and about half an hour later Suzanne grabs me. "Mommy, come look where we buried the mouse!" she says, all excited, and I allow myself to be dragged out the back door into the yard over by the woodpile, where--

(cue Psycho soundtrack here)

--Suzanne, with her friend's help, had buried the mouse up to its neck, leaving its grisly little head--bloody mouth agape, one eye missing--staring back at me like a little furry miniature Freddy Krueger (sorry to mix horror movie metaphors here, but I'm still creeped out and it's all that comes to mind).

I've spent a great deal of my life striving for normalcy, God knows I have, and the results so far have not been promising. And now it looks like I am going to be raising kids who are just as afflicted as I am, because while Suzanne and her friend thought this whole thing was hilarious, especially the part where I screamed, I am quite sure that this is Definitely. Not. Normal.

Another Week, Another All-Clear! I'm On a Roll!

Got a voice mail from my doc, The World's Most Wonderful Gastroenterologist. I love him because he talks to me like I'm an intelligent person and we are two intelligent persons discussing complicated topics. Those of you who haven't spent as much of their lives being a patient as I have may not know, but that is a rare thing in medicine these days. Anyway: "Tracy, I've been trying to reach you. I have your path[ology report] here and it's okay, nothing to worry about. Call me tomorrow--ask for Stephanie, she'll know how to reach me--and we can discuss it in more detail."

Again--thanks, everybody. You guys are settin' the bar pretty high in the friendship department here. I hope I can live up to it if the shoe's ever on the other foot, which I hope to God it will never be. But I'm just sayin'.

Another Week, Another Biopsy

Yes, I know, it does seem like I am working hard to get attention and sympathy these days, but I am not making this up.

Last week, I went for an endoscopy (a lovely procedure where they stick a little tube down your throat to look at your upper GI tract). This is something my doctor wanted to do because about 10 years ago he'd diagnosed a hiatal hernia and folks like me have to be scoped once in a while. No big deal, right? Being Medically Unusual, I've gotten used to having lots of weird things done to my body. As long as you give me good drugs beforehand, I'm cool.

Except that this time he found something called Barrett's Esophagus, which is a disease of the esophagus which ups your chance for esophageal cancer. He took a biopsy and I'm supposed to get the results tomorrow or Tuesday. So of course I hit the Internet and discover that folks with this condition have about a 1 percent chance of getting esophageal cancer in any given year, and that as long as you're getting scoped regularly, esophageal cancer is pretty curable. People die of it because it doesn't cause symptoms until very, very late--which, obviously, this isn't. Plus, my doctor didn't ever use the "C" word, and what's turned up so far is, in his words, "Not too serious."

It's funny, though, how little words can haunt you. "Too." Hmmm. It doesn't help that I have a friend who is dying of esophageal cancer as we speak, and I haven't even spoken to her lately because she can't talk anymore.

After the Full Crisis Mode I went into on the mammogram scare, I thought I'd try to just handle this myself, which was a complete load of horseshit. I can't handle anything by myself. In fact, I should not be allowed outside the house without adult supervision. As it is, I am periodically overwhelmed by fear, and as soon as I dump one delivery, another arrives. And even though I know that the very condition of being afraid is a futile attempt to control the universe--as if imagining some unwanted outcome will somehow make that outcome less likely--what's also true is that fear is a monster which does not engage in rational discourse.

So: I admit it. Once again, I'm not fighting a disease here so much as a state of mind. And the last go-around on this taught me that there are ways of doing that a whole lot more effective than diving down a hole, covering your ears and chanting, "LA! LA! LA! I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" to the universe. What I'd rather do right now is just own up to the fact that I am weak and scared and pretty f--ed up at the moment. Again.

Best Christmas Gift Ever

It's Christmas Eve, the kids are in bed, and David and I are about 45 minutes from collapse ourselves...but for some reason tonight I was thinking about a Christmas that happened when I was somewhere between eight and 11, on the cusp between childhood and adolescence.

My mom was big on Santa Claus. At Christmas she did all kinds of things to encourage our belief in him: she would ring bells in the hall outside our doors on Christmas Eve to convince us the elves were there; she talked to Santa on the phone; she helped us write letters to Santa; she encouraged us to look at a map of North America and figure out his progress over the course of Christmas Eve (since of course he came straight to our neighborhood; how he made it everywhere else was not an issue I bothered much about). One memorable year, she even got some boots, rubbed the soles in ashes from the fireplace, and made ashy footprints all over the carpet in the living room as proof that Santa had indeed come down the chimney.

Some people may say that this was a dangerous thing, that no parent should have gone to such lengths to perpetrate a myth, that when the truth came out the child would be disappointed and angry. Not true, at least not for me. At some point, of course, I figured out there was no Santa, and I was disappointed. But mostly I was impressed with the lengths my mom had gone to while the magic had lasted.

The Christmas I'm speaking of happened one year when I had pretty much reached the conclusion there was no Santa, but I had not actually said so out loud. I wanted there to be a Santa so much that giving him up was painful, and I enjoyed the mystery. On this particular Christmas Eve, I remember sitting with my mother on my parents' bed in their darkened bedroom, looking out the window over the neighborhood, and "seeing" Santa visit all the other houses.  I saw him  go to Jimmy Blacks' house, and Brenda Culverson's house, and Jimmy and Leanne  Pitts' house,  and then to my grandparents' house next door.  And then he flew away--because, my mother suggested, he realized I was at the window watching him. He would be back later, after I was asleep. I wasn't seeing anything, of course, but the pretense was magical. And it was a moment we shared, just the two of us.

The next year I was too old for such nonsense, and for years after that I thought of that incident as just an example of my mom's silly side. I think I had to become a mother myself to truly appreciate what she did for me that night. My mother never went to college; she was orphaned during the Depression and I am reasonably sure that there was never a moment in her own childhood when she enjoyed a similar moment of magic. Her childhood was so deprived that at one point she and her sister ate out of garbage cans to stay alive. But somehow this woman who had been given so little in life found a piece of imagination and creativity to pass along to me, along with the unspoken message that imagination and creativity were qualities that could create new realities in a humdrum world. It was a kind of faith that there was a reality beyond what our senses can tell us. Where she got this insight I do not know, but she gave it to me, and it's a gift I'll never forget.

Merry Christmas, all you moms out there.