Epilogues

Right now the blackboard of shame says 8 days, and my record is 11.5.

No one at day care ever so much as batted an eyelash about the train undies.

The neighbors finally took down their Christmas wreaths around the first of June.

I run at least twice a week these days, and my pelvis hardly makes that snapping sound at all anymore.

Ingrid has asked about nail polish two more times, and each time my wimpy ostrichlike vague response has somehow satisfied her.

The nipple healed after one day of pumping and one day of acrobatic new nursing positions. It turned out the cause of the weird nursing was not teething but coxsackie virus; both girls had it, with the sores on their tongues, fevers, and crankiness. All better now.

The day care decision is pending. The at-home day care lady swears she's only taken one sick day in the past year. I'm leaning toward that, but waffling.

The little car is great. We never miss the old one. Well, we haven't sold the old one yet, but we never drive it and never feel the need.

Speaking of cars, I've now gone a whole seven days without anything flying off the roof of my car, but I did drive all the way to the fabric store today with the trunk open.

Snared

This is certainly a case of caro being late to the party, but last week I discovered Alltop, and I am smitten. I'm a sucker for simplicity in design. And what an elegant way to skim through favorite reads and find new ones.

My blog is on there, as well...waaaaay at the bottom of the moms category. And I'm so tickled to be part of such a nifty site that I am doing just what the clever Alltop marketing masterminds anticipated: telling y'all about it.

Check it out.

And I laughed through it all.

Wednesday night A was out of town, and it was a work day. The events of the evening seem worth recording for posterity:

Pick girls up from day care.
Decide it will simplify dinner to pick up a you-bake pizza.
Tell Ingrid we are getting pizza.
Drive around tiny cramped pizza place parking lot looking for space.
Drive around block looking for parking space.
Drive around block again.
Drive around block again.
Finally find spot to park.
Get girls out of car.
Order, pay for, and wait for pizza.
Carry baby and pizza to door.
Get pizza guy to walk around counter to open door for me.
(Door opens inward—isn't that against code?)
Inch across parking lot with children and pizza in all limbs.
Place pizza on top of car.
Put girls in car.
Make right turn onto major neighborhood street at rush hour.
Accelerate.
Look in rearview mirror in time to see pizza flying spectacularly off roof of car.
Cry, "OH NO!"
Pull over.
Comfort Ingrid, who is crying.
Convince her it is the silliest, funniest thing that has ever happened.
Drive back to pizza place.
Circle parking lot. Twice.
Park illegally.
Get girls out of car.
Wipe cheese and mushrooms off of rear bumper.
Enter pizza place. Laugh sheepishly.
Tell pizza guy what happened.
Order duplicate pizza.
Gracefully accept 50% discount from kind pizza guy.
Wait for pizza.
Gracefully accept help (again) opening door.
Inch back to car.
Ingrid asks, "Mama, are you going to put the pizza on the roof again?"
Reply, "No, kiddo, I think I've learned my lesson."
....
Arrive home.
Turn on oven.
Feed hungry, tired baby her dinner while pizza bakes.
Field random phone calls from A's friends.
(Why did I not let the machine get them?)
Returning from answering a phone call, notice funny orange coloring on baby's upper lip.
Turns out big sister has drawn her a mustache.
Or tried to let her smell the scented marker.
Decide not to worry about it.
Baby becomes inconsolably tired.
Decide to put her to bed before pizza is ready.
Upstairs, whip off uncomfortable work shirt and bra to nurse baby.
Halfway through nursing, hear oven timer start to ring.
Let baby nurse for another minute.
Put baby in crib.
Rush downstairs, topless.
Remove pizza from oven just on the cusp of burning.
Run upstairs for comfortable bra and shirt.
Run down and cut up slice of pizza for Ingrid.
Baby is crying in crib.
Tell Ingrid to blow on pizza before she eats it.
Run upstairs to calm baby.
Put baby in crib again.
Cut myself a slice of pizza and sit down next to Ingrid.

Next time, I'll probably just make us all omelets and toast.

The Wee Eliot Ness

Ingrid's been peeing on the potty with total reliability for months. Number two, though? Never.

We'd tried all sorts of encouragement, all kinds of potties, all kinds of conversations, and a good long stint of no-pressure, hands-off waiting. Out of some sort of idealism, I'd been resisting offering bribes. And somehow I'd been thinking that, once I finally crossed into the world of offering presents and prizes for poops in the potty, it would definitely happen.

But nope. This jar of temptation has been sitting on top of our bathroom cabinet for well over a week.

And we are still changing diapers. Ingrid apparently shares my resistance to such base forms of coercion.

She has her own ideas of what would help, though, as I found out the other day:

Mama: What do you think would help you learn to poop on the potty?

Ingrid: An ice cream cone.

Mama: Mmm, good idea. When you poop on the potty, it will be such a big day, we'll go out and celebrate by having a big yummy ice cream cone.

Ingrid: No, no. [Stammering a little, trying to express an important thought.] While I'm sitting on the potty waiting for poop to come out, I'll be eating an ice cream cone!

Somehow I think we're just going to have to wait her out on this one.

Dreamy

The red currants are ripe, and both girls know how to pick them—Ingrid conscientiously placing most of hers in the bowl, and Iris with great concentration and two tiny fingers. The herbs—parsley, dill, mint, sage, basil—are ready to be pinched back and harvested. There are flowers, and Ingrid and I clip a little bouquet for the table: coneflowers, amaranth, lavender.

It's hot out, but not too hot to run. There've been warm, breezy days, and no rain since I can remember, but lots of help watering the garden, and lots of time in the wading pool in the backyard and the big pool at the park.

Iris's hair is a couple of inches long, and in the humidity it whips into ringlets. She is intrepid, standing on the seat of the child-sized rocking chair, holding the back with one hand and rocking it, brave and strong as a tiny cowgirl. Everywhere, she looks for things to climb. She is becoming lean and uncontainable.

Ingrid is mysterious as ever, but affection and joy rise up. At the park, she throws off her shoes before I've even set down our bag and wades to the middle of the pool. Look at me, Mama! Look at me! She makes a bed for the two of us on the couch and asks me to lie with her under the blanket and read Shel Silverstein poems. She hugs me—for the first time, I realize, in ages—with arms that suddenly seem so long.

Our CSA delivers strawberries—pints of them that keep coming: one, two, three, four, five. And heaps of salad greens, piles of chard, and handfuls of sweet peas. Ingrid helps me make shortcake biscuits. We eat dinner outside.

We end the days, all of us, covered with the evidence. Sand inside diapers and undies and under my watch band; fingers and faces stained with berry juice; arms and legs and cheeks mosquito-bitten and smeared with dirt; the knees of tiny pairs of pants filthy and scraped; sweat—mine and theirs—everywhere.

For the first time in a long time, I wish this could last forever.

Our Friends on the Outside

Our friends C and J come over for dinner every week, usually on Thursday, when our shared box of CSA vegetables arrives. They are terrific people. Cooking and eating and sitting around the table with them is a deep and reliable source of pleasure. And there's something else, too.

One Thursday in May, C came over early to bake a birthday cake (their oven was broken). Ingrid had refused, in a dramatic and whiny way, to nap, and, in the middle of a long afternoon with an overtired girl, I was relieved to have another grownup in the house. Iris was napping, and Ingrid stood on the stool next to C as he mixed eggs and flour and sugar, coconut and pecans. I kept ducking into the living room to breathe air uninhabited by children, the way some punk would lean out the window to sneak a smoke.

But the few minutes of rest weren't the best part. The best part was what C said later, J nodding along, after both girls were in bed and all four of us were warm with wine and arugula and cake: If I lived with Ingrid, I’d do a lot more baking.

More baking? I didn't get it until he went on, She loves batter. It’s so much fun.

Oh my God, I thought. Fun. I’d forgotten.

Ingrid does love batter. She loves watching us mix things, loves getting her fingers in there, getting covered with it: cheeks, wrists, elbows, neck. She says, I love it! She mutters, sticky-tongued, smacking batter off of her fingers: Mmm. Tastes like whoop cream. Tastes like whoop cream.

And if you’ve had a good night’s sleep—and if you’re wearing a clean shirt, and if you’ve spent at least a few hours recently without anyone climbing up your torso or shrilly demanding your undivided attention—then apparently it’s easy to see what that girl on the stool with her arm in the bowl really is: a joy. A pure example of total sugar-coated delight. And funny, too.

Everyone talks about it taking a village, and about how we need the arms of friends to share the work of cooking and caring and carrying. These friends have definitely got arms. The four of us take turns chopping and grilling and stir frying, soothing and (this falls mostly to J on our dinner nights) imagining and playing—changing one pretend poopy diaper after another, inventing elaborate dances for each of Ingrid's unique and beloved stuffed animals.

As I think about that cake baking day, though, I realize that, often, even more than their arms, I need their eyes. Eyes that are fresh to all of this.

And being a mother—being embroiled, so often, in discipline or struggle or shoulder-to-the-wheel loneliness or just plain exhaustion—I can tell you how very, very rarely I have it in me to offer that to another mom. There is freshness in loving children but being childless. There is something we parents keep using up that these friends—without, I think, thinking about it very much—replenish.

I am sure there are times C and J would rather be visiting friends with less chaotic pre-dinner hours, cleaner place mats, more reliable short-term memories. Their lives, just like ours, are work. But the kind of energy they have left at the end of each day is often different from what we've got. It's the kind of energy that can stand to change a couple of pretend poopy diapers. The kind that can look at a sticky three-year-old and see fun.

We tell them we're glad they're around, and I think they believe us. But I'm afraid my absurd, sloppy gratitude can't ever quite make sense to them. Without experiencing it for myself, I don't know if I'd have ever believed that all a person needs to do to make my day or, hell, my whole week, is come over and bake a cake with my kid at three in the afternoon and then say they liked it. But it's true: that's all it takes. And these two lovely people do it over and over, and I'm so grateful.

Linda (with bonus glimpse of mildewed shower curtain)

This is exactly what people mean when they say blogging will cause your kids trauma and embarrassment. But I can't resist. I have worked very hard to word this in a way that won't attract scurrilous googlers:

This is my eldest's number one favorite implement for bathtub self-exploration.

Obviously, the girl is a genius.

Bad dreams, day care, and more than you wanted to know about my right nipple.

I dreamed I was going to do some sort of reading of my poems. I arrived with a stack of poems in a big box that looked like our dining room table turned upside down, and everyone at the reading treated me like some kind of crazed pariah. "That is the filthiest dining room table I've ever seen," I heard people gossiping to one another. "And are we really supposed to listen to those poems after she has let them touch her dirty, dirty clothes? Doesn't she ever do laundry?"

Sheesh. You'd think my subconscious could give me a break once in a while.

~~~

I mentioned that Ingrid's fantastic and long searched for day care is most likely closing at the end of the summer. We have two options in front of us:

1. Cooperatively run day care center nearby but slightly off my path to work. Fourteen kids in her classroom, two teachers. Rave reviews from many, many families. Four hours of "work" required per month. Advantages: Pretty close to guaranteed reliability and stability (it's been there 30 years). Worries: Is it going to freak Ingrid out to be in a classroom with 14 kids?

2. Small (5 kids, max) in-home day care run by a woman I sort of know through our early childhood classes. She has an early childhood ed. background and taught preschool for eight years. I know some of the kids who go there, and they are on the quieter, more mellow side. She has a long list of stellar references. It's two blocks from where I work. Advantages: Many. I am much more confident that Ingrid will be comfortable in this setting. Worries: She plans to be doing this for the next five years, but with a one-woman show like this I know anything could come up and then we'd have to put Ingrid through another transition. Also, if she or either of her two kids is sick, there's no backup and we're out of luck for that day (though she doesn't charge for sick days she takes).

Thoughts?

~~~

Iris is cutting her top front teeth and as a result she has been nursing funny for the past week or so. By "funny" I mean "clench, clench, clench, chomp, chomp chomp." For a while this was only moderately painful, but during one of last night's nursing sessions it started to be really, really painful, and then this morning I noticed there is an actual open sore on my nipple. Which I guess would explain why it has been feeling like she's chewing my nipple off: She is.

I am so taken with the pain and grossness of this that it's all I can do to keep from telling everyone about it: "I have an open sore! On my nipple! My baby has been chewing my nipple off! Feel sorry for me and be impressed with my motherly dedication!"

More worrisome is that right now it genuinely hurts too much to nurse. And this, of course, is the boob that makes literally 90% of the milk. So poor Iris is cranky, and I'm worried my whole supply is going to dry up. I am pumping on the wounded side (which hurts a lot, but much less than nursing), but not getting much milk, and nursing her only on the uninjured but wimpy side. Other than Lansinoh and Ibuprofen, what else should I be doing? At this point I wish someone would just give me a hit of (insert name of nursing-safe extreme pain reliever here) so I could let her nurse on the milky side again.

Polish

Just now as I was helping Ingrid get ready for bed:

"Mama?"
"Yeah."
"H has polish on her fingernails."

[H is a girl at Ingrid's extra crunchy Waldorf-y wonderfully free-thinking day care, where all the women are strong and half the kids (including H) have two mamas.]

"Oh! That's very grown up!"
"Mama, I want polish like H's.
"Oh, hmmm..."
"H's is purple."
"Oh, wow! Who helped H put on her nail polish?"
"Her mama."
"Mmmm."
"I want mine to be purple, too! On my fingers and my toes!"
"That sure sounds like fun. We'll have to think about that."
"I want to do it now."
"Well, we don't have any nail polish in our house right now. We'd have to get some from the store. I'll have to think about that. It's a very grown up thing to do, wearing nail polish. We'll think about it."

Good grief, am I ever unprepared. I don't know if I'm for this or against it. Damn hippie lesbians.

Work

I make it a rule not to write about work, but this isn't about work, it's about working. It's about what it feels like to keep going to my office every week.

I've been working at the same place for almost six years now. When I started my job, I had no children. Had never been pregnant. Had never tried to get pregnant. A and I weren't even married.

The place has been good to me. They've given me so much flexibility, and it's interesting work that's changed enough, over these years, to keep me challenged. I like working, and not just as a form of respite from parenting. It's fulfilling, what I do. It's important, and I enjoy it.

Lately, though, I feel so strange during the time I spend at the office, and I think this odd feeling comes, somehow, from my body being (more or less) back to its non-pregnant state again. I used to work full time. Now I'm just in the office two days a week. And those days, although the work I do has changed—gotten more interesting—are weirdly like the days I spent here years and years ago. The architecture of the place, the relationships, the procedures. It feels wrong and somehow false that I keep doing all of it the same way I ever did. I have changed shape so many times in these six years—physically and emotionally. I am different. And yet that is invisible, mostly, to the people I see at the office. Now, unpregnant, no longer on maternity leave of any sort, no longer obviously wretched with sleep deprivation, I look—if you don't pull up my shirt or look really closely at my facial lines—substantially unchanged from the unmarried twenty-something of as-yet unproven fertility who first walked in the door on an August morning in 2002.

I am slow with these identity shifts; it's taken me ages to wriggle my way into feeling like a real human being while caring for one child, then two. I've thought much less about what that means for who I am elsewhere, without the little people who've stretched me out and reshaped me.

I guess I will eventually figure out some new and remarkable way look at this. For now, my work identity feels like an ill-fitting shell. Is it like this for you, working, if you do? A lot of mothers seem to experience their work as a reassuring source of enduring identity during the changes of motherhood, but for me it is starting to feel phony.