F-a-d-e to i-n-v-i-s-i-b-l-e. Step b-a-c-k and a-v-o-i-d becoming a p-e-s-t. After my s-n-e-a-k-y p-l-o-t to t-e-s-t her l-i-s-t for this Friday’s spelling bee she did not d-i-s-g-u-i-s-e her c-r-y. “Mom, you are taking over my life!”
Editorial Note: G-r-i-n. H-a-p-p-y. H-u-g. L-o-v-e. T-h-e-s-e are more than words to m-e-m-o-r-i-z-e.
This is the only way to see where I am going.
Editorial Note: Spend your day hauling a posse of second-grade girls and you won’t know whether to look forward, look backward or squeeze in-between.
Sometimes, what to do next becomes quite clear.
Editorial note: Keep a goldfish alive for three years and you might one day find yourself in this position.
It’s not fair! Everything happens when you don’t expect it and at the very end when you want it the most!
This was my daughter, yesterday, at that hysterical place where well-laid plans go postal. Dear friends from Texas were about to board the plane for a weekend at our place when the flu bug arose in that most irrefutable indication up out of your gut and onto your Air Jordans. Our friends are now where they should be: still at home and on the mend. That’s where we are too, on the mend, facing a few days suddenly free and undone. She and I will find it, too, the fresh direction in just the two of us, holding hands, nursing root beer floats and indulging in what will be no small amount of retail therapy.
Friendship is like that, so reliable and yet still so unexpected. As I write I’m playing the angel voice and sacred songs sent forth by my friend Sally Dworsky, who wrote her love hymns as our children romped in a shaded schoolyard like a litter of kittens, pure life and joy; be sure you have a listen. And then a secret heart, a handmade valentine arrived in the post from Beth, so faraway and yet her magic is today here in my grip; it is my ticket and I am using it right now, sending love to everyone, everyone by return mail, and with this solemn pledge.
Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
Love the one you’re with.
Some things said are not to be forgotten:
So last night my husband stuck his head into the office where I was filling out the Scholastic Book order form and all such things I like to do in my spare time said, “Did you get Georgia some different floss sticks?” Then she wandered in holding up the offending specimen and said:
Mommy, these are really hard to use.
I whipped my head around to look at the both of them and said YES I GOT SOME DIFFERENT ONES BECAUSE I DIDN’T MAKE A SPECIAL TRIP TO TARGET.
The thing is, I’m conscientiously avoiding Target for incidentals since they usually extract $200 or more from me before I leave. I’ve written about the peculiar devotion I have for flossing, and my wicked bliss to see my daughter favorably habituated toward dental hygiene because of our early introduction of candy-colored flossing sticks, but criminy guys, HOW ABOUT TRANSITIONING TO SOME NEW FLOSS STICKS BECAUSE I DON’T ALWAYS HAVE TIME TO MAKE SPECIAL TRIPS TO ALL THESE SPECIAL PLACES FOR PEOPLE WHO NEED THINGS LIKE SPECIAL FLOSS STICKS THAT THEY DON’T SELL AT THE GROCERY STORE.
And Georgia looks at me and says:
Mommy, these are really easy to use.
Some things said are not to be forgotten:
“Mommy, make your next book not about Zen. The whole idea of Zen is bogus.”
Pause here before you rush in to soothe my bruise; to bolster my case. There is no purer truth than what she uttered here. No finer precision, nothing clearer. If only I could do it, really do it, then I would earn my place as the dimwit ancestor of the wisest, choicest, sassy ass eight-year-old Master of the Milky Way.
You go, girl! Show me the back door straight out of bogus, as you always do. Truth is more beautiful than beauty treatments.
***
This is Not to Be Forgotten Week on the Road, where we share Some Things Said.
Some things said are not to be forgotten:
Mommy, I’m OK with it.
These four words, I’m OK with it, which jarred so offensively on first hearing, sounding so preternaturally teen, can be useful when the mother in question buys an overpriced jacket from a mall retailer with disturbingly oversexed girl’s clothing, washes it once in cold and extracts its shrunken form from the dryer’s delicate cycle, then shrewdly purchases an oversized and durable black nylon replacement which is worn to the weekly “Totally Girly” after-school club where daughter cultivates self-confidence through the liberal application of nail polish, then arrives home with a streak of non-soluble color down the front of her new jacket, an adornment that proves resistant to her mother’s gasps and shrieks as well as to heavy dosing in acetone, detergent and full-blown maternal hysteria, unleashing a noxious cloud of fear, shame, sobbing and mutual post-traumatic regret.
I’m OK with it. Honest. The alternative is too savage for anyone to bear.
“If you really understand the condition of emptiness that underlies all phenomenal existence, you will be content no matter where you are and no matter what you are doing. This contentment itself is to be Buddha. The real meaning of attaining enlightenment is to attain this state of mind.” – Yasutani Roshi
***
This is Not to Be Forgotten Week on the Road, where we share Some Things Said.
Some things said are not to be forgotten:
Mommy, do you know how hard it is to live with two giants?
Instantly I recall recurring childhood nightmares of being chased by a colossus. Dark, haunted, heart-pounding doom and with no escape.
I will lighten my step! I will lighten it right now. I will shrink back in size! I’ve shrunk already.
No tender bones will be ground to make this bread.
***
This is Not to Be Forgotten Week on the Road, where we share Some Things Said.
I’ve written before about the kind of work my h-u-s-b-a-n-d does. He’s in the long-distance business, the very long-distance business. Outer space.
Specifically, now he’s working on Mars. Seriously. When you work on Mars it involves daily side trips to the far reaches of Pasadena and occasional launches to Los Alamos, Washington and France. Before he worked on Mars, he worked on a couple of asteroids, which was a kind of a code word for Italy and Germany. When we met on that fateful evening in Florence, Italy, 13 years ago he was actually working on Saturn.
So you think it’s a surprise to me that I find myself alone so much? I always say the same thing to my friends in a similar circumstance, although it’s nubby comfort: Every mother is a single mother.
Now careful: I mean no offense to the single mothers who are fathers, or to the single mothers who really are single mothers. I do not know the depth of fear or frustration or anxiety, the financial hardship, the personal sacrifice, the sadness, the isolation or the inconsolable straits you may find yourself in, I only sense that most of us are in these things alone.
To his credit, Ned tries to interest me in the curious question of the composition, age and origin of the dust on the surface of the red planet, but that is not the aim of my life’s mission. My mission is to uncover the truth of my life on Earth, a mission that in my earlier days I had no earthly interest in at all. And so I know that I am indeed lucky to have this field to roam so freely on my own, to resolve my questions, to find the deep source of life and love right where I stand.
Even so, Ned’s absence gives me time and space to make trouble; it lets me boil and burn in my own flaming grievance; it invariably wears out my welcoming heart. He’s always happy to come home, and I am usually quite pissy about it. He has this habit of stopping near the airport and picking up two doughnuts as a coming home prize for Georgia and me. How is it that I can hate when he does that, but love when he does that? I eat mine promptly that night or next morning.
When I eat that doughnut, mind you, it only looks like a doughnut. What I am eating is my own clogged heart and deep-fried resentment. I’m swallowing residual anger and bad attitude. I’m chomping that ever-living ego of mine back to a manageable size so we can start over.
The search for intelligent life involves a lot of starting over and an advanced form of mathematics. As my daughter wrote in an email to her dad last night: YOU + ME + MOM + MOLLY (the dog) = 1.
***
Join me for more fun with marriage all week. And just for grins, here’s your chance to win an autographed copy of my book, Momma Zen: Walking the Crooked Path of Motherhood by leaving a comment on Monday’s post. The winner will be drawn after 12 noon PST on Sunday, Feb. 3. Good luck!
Did she win? Can we vote? Is it time?
We pause for this political message, which I hope is not political.
My daughter has always had an interest in the election process. She learned to read by sounding out the Kerry/Edwards bumper stickers in the preschool parking lot. She has accompanied us to the polls. Of course she’s aware of laws, and wars, and her parents’ occasional invocation of the former and abiding aversion for the latter. Her reaction sweetly mirrored our despair when she said in 2004, “Have we ever voted for anyone who won?”
This season I am not particularly attracted to any candidate and repelled by only a few. You can see how I’m teetering on the knife’s edge of an opinion. I am inspired, however, by my daughter, because she is purely, gleefully, hopelessly, and totally for the girl.
Perhaps this is the state of mind when you’re a girl in the state of 8. She and her friends are totally, unabashedly, fearlessly girls. And by that I don’t mean anything in particular, but that they are completely free and unafraid to love themselves. They love themselves and they love each other. They adore one another. They hug and kiss each other endlessly. They have not yet acquired any reason to withhold themselves, to judge themselves as too this or too that, to hide any part of their hearts or minds. Of course they notice the boys, they like them too, in silly ways that you can tell will soon be too much.
“The boys all love me but I only love Amy,” she said last year in first grade.
This year she has new crushes and allegiances, and one of them is Hillary. “Because she would be the first lady president!” she says while jumping up and down. In her unbiased and uninformed view I see something I no longer see in myself and hardly anywhere else.
I see a place that I fled, through pain, cynicism and calculation, many, many years ago. I see the place that my daughter herself may abandon as she feels the weight and strictures of the world we live in. I see the Girl’s Team, and I wonder if I shouldn’t glance back over with an open mind.
I don’t call myself a feminist. I try not to call myself anything. And believe it or not, to be a Buddhist is to work your whole life on getting rid of the -ist. And so I read with unexpected awe this eye-opening essay by Gloria Steinem earlier this week, “Women are Never Front-Runners.” Oh, I know what the arguments are, the feelings, the hunches, the dislikes, the gossip, the distaste. But when I see the brutal lash of cynicism, the extraordinary criticism, the arrogant, all-knowing, analytical, dismissive discounting of what and who this woman is, I flinch. I flinch because we are so much harder on her than the boys. Have I been this hard on myself, just for being a girl? Am I sending my daughter into this cruelty, where she will never again jump up and down for the girl?
In short, when my girl speaks, I listen because there is a message in it for me. There’s a message in everything that comes our way.
The other night I told my daughter that the girl might not even be a candidate for president, and I told her who it might be.
“Would he be the first African-American president?” she asked.
Yes.
“Cool!” she said, her eyes once again twinkling with the possibilities.
For my daughter’s second-grade homework:
The Big Ten
Pretend you are going to be taken by helicopter to a deserted island where you must live alone for seven days. You may take only 10 different things with you. Think before you begin writing. If you forget something important, you may not survive!
1. Nintendo DS
2. DS games
3. Food
4. Water
5. Clothes
6. Toothbrush
7. Toothpaste
8. Floss
9. Bathing suit
10. Sunscreen
As a matter of survival, may I point out that the floss is big number 8.
I need help today, I say dully, after too many nights of too little sleep and a cough that won’t go away. The rains have descended and the allergies too and I’m feeling low and dim and all alone.
I’ll help you, she says, and she lugs two grocery sacks in from the trunk. She’s chosen the heavy ones with gallons and cans and her arms hurt, but she’s beaming.
I need to rest today, I pine, piling my woes on the kitchen counter.
I’ll make you a schedule, she says, and she bends over a pad then posts it on the refrigerator.
Relax Scedule
Sun 12:00 to 1:00
Mon 11:00 to 12:00
Tues 1:00 to 2:00
Wed 10:00 to 11:00
Thurs 9:00 to 10:00
Fri 10:00 to 11:00
Now I’ll set the timer, she says, and you go lie on your bed.
And if you need to schedule a makeup time, she adds in a stroke of management genius, write in on a piece of paper and give it to me before.
She’s thought of everything, you see, everything I need, and she gives it to me in the same way her needs have been tended and timed all these years into a sane and healthy rhythm. A time for this, a time for that. I take to my room and close the door. She turns the dial on the timer, and I feel it rushing back to me in a flood, all of it coming around again in terms never more certain, never more genuine, and right on schedule.
I am loved.
