Archive for the ‘Kids’ Category
I took my five year-old daughter on her first roller coaster last month. She was all about it, but not for the thrill-joy-pukey-awesomeness one would expect. To her, it was a challenge. A machine for kids always bigger and bolder, to be conquered for once and for all. I saw her watching the machine cautiously at first, guarded, standing in line and hearing the screams of the passengers whizzing around the corner on each trip. The six year-old we were entertaining decided to abstain, seeing all those heads bobbing and hair flying around; all the dizzy expressions when the carriages returned to the loading area. But my kid, she handed over her two tickets and rode that sucker all day until she felt like the boss of it. And I was sitting next to her in the exact moment when she went from cautious to confident: she looked over the side of our car at the very peak before plunging downward, threw her arms proudly in the air and hollered with hysterical glee, “NO HANDS!”
Within the next month at some point, I’ll have a tiny new bundle of boy in my house. BOY. I have only a vague idea of what he’ll look like. Or who he’ll want to be. Or most importantly, how I’ll get him from tiny bundle to college student, and beyond. It’s our only boy in the family, other than Marley the Border Collie, whose eccentricities had to be tempered with anti-depressants and whose side I could not ever leave for fear that he would do terrible things to our apartment or car, even just when I needed to pop into Longs for mulch or coffee filters for five seconds.
We have men in our books, music and art, and to a degree in our lives, but no grandpas, stepdads, uncles, or even a standup neighbor who come around. The few blood relatives who made it past their fifties have opted not to embrace this little family in the sense that I would call them “unavailable”, apparently having better things to do. We have an amazing assortment of chosen relatives (unrelated by blood, but family nonetheless) but those uncles live ever so far away. And though they’ll be great at special dates to baseball games and vacation fishing trips (yes, I’m blatantly gender stereotyping), peeing standing up, and advice about all that manly stuff (which I just wrote so I don’t have to write the word masturbation on my blog but I might as well start dealing), I don’t have a reliable dude checking in each week to, I don’t know, show her how totally lovely men are.
I’m not worried about raising a good man. He’ll be rad. And totally emotionally intelligent and self-possessed and kind, and all that good stuff. But that’s just the blind faith I have about being able to occasionally access some deep wisdom I do not actually have the intelligence to possess, for long enough to make good decisions and raise a strong, confident child. We seem to do that regularly enough.
I missed out on regularly being around a man for most of my life. I don’t really know what they are comprised of, nor how to assemble the pieces into something whole. I missed out on aftershave. Going out to lunch and talking about school, future, travel. Handshakes. There’s something life-affirming about a firm handshake from a great man. Watching a man in your immediate circle of family meet other adults, grow relationships and foster community for you. On your behalf, in order to release you into the world with resources someday. Making dinner, jokes, and slipping you some cash for rent when you’re in your first apartment and you have no idea what you’re doing and you just bounced the check for the light bill. I pay attention to these things in grocery stores, libraries: eyeing men in the park with their Baby Bjorns tightly strapped to their chests. Appreciating men who respond wholly to their kids and aren’t just schlepping them from point A to B while women do the connecting and careful thought. Men who are present for kids (biologically related or no), to me, are like wonderful unicorns.
In this family it always ends up to be about figuring it out as you go along. I am my own kind of bold yet, maybe, timid. In a few months this will probably all be old hat (or at least the exhaustion will dull the anxiety). I just feel like I’m waiting in this rollercoaster line. Wanting to just jump in the car, throw my hands in the air, close my eyes and scream already.
The smartest kid in class isn’t always the most popular.
I read this great interview of Huey Lewis once (stick with me) about how depressed he was in the early ’80’s when his band started selling millions of cassettes and records and the whole world seemed to be obsessed with them. To paraphrase simply, his musical family had taught him that the best, quality, honest music was liked only by very few, and that popular music was such because it was done for the mass appeal, and therefore wasn’t contributing anything valuable to the world. So they went platinum and where most people would be singing praises he was totally crushed and ashamed.
Isn’t that awesome?
And when you know something is brilliant, be it a book or record or whatever, and it gets the attention it deserves (even if just for a second), you are just glowing from within. Or at least I am. When Tori Amos went from near obscurity to suddenly appearing on the cover of Spin in the mid 90’s I was nervous for her. I couldn’t believe that a little piece of my goofy world had ended up in the hands of the world at large. Would they take care of her? Would they find themselves reflected in her songs like I did? Did she have good people to take care of her and remind her this would all be over soon, and that it didn’t account for the value of what she wrote; that it was more of a lucky fluke and that she should just appreciate for a second and then get back to the business of making art?
It’s like the recent elections. It’s easy to rustle up enthusiasm for banal and sugar-coated if you’re talking to the right crowd. It doesn’t last, ultimately. You just have to wait until that awful, repetitive pop song runs its course through the minds of the uneducated* and fearful, until they’re stationed in front of American Idol again shoving Cheetos into their god-fearing nostrils. But to offer up something inspired, something that’s actually designed to do the world a whole hunk of good? That’s a harder sell.
Let’s call this post prop-8 therapy, shall we? I am utterly exhausted by elections these last few cycles. It’s too much hate and fear to work through and then just move on with your life, unaffected.
Incidentally, I really wish our public schools weren’t so awful that even I am pulling my kid out and trying to find a way to come up with an extra $20K per year so she doesn’t turn into a thug with emotional detachment issues. Test scores be damned. They have no art, no literature, no joy, no time for teachers to do anything but worry about straight lines and corresponding percentages. It’s depressing.
* I should point out I, myself, am uneducated. A small handful of semesters at a community college is as close as I’ll ever get to respectable, thank god. Smear that on your Poptarts and eat it for breakfast.
There are so many. Currently my child is watching a movie about cartoon flies who are embroiled in the feud between the Russians and the Americans their race to the moon.
How. Dumb.
First of all, the Russian accents are awful. They occasionally slip into Indian territory. And the Russian flies are all red-eyed and evil and obsessed with beating the American flies. Not because they are passionate about a moon mission, but because they don’t want the Americans to win. Because non-Americans are jealous and devious all the time, right? They don’t have goals other than hating on us. That’s definitely the impression I want to leave my child with. Thanks, Tim Curry.
Oh wait, I forgot the best part. The woman fly saves the day with her motherly love. She can’t actually do anything physical because she faints every time there’s a challenge presented to her. Good times.
One summer, I nannied for a wacky little girl named Leila who loved to watch the Wizard of Oz. Rather than swooning over Glinda’s sparkling gown and tiara, however, she would fist pump and scream “DIE, DOROTHY!!” in support of the Wicked Witch of the West during peak moments. For real. And with a voice that sounded as though she’d been drinking whisky and smoking Carltons for five years.
Leila-isms are oft-repeated in our home. We quote her more than any kid I nannied, taught or cared for in a ten year span (which at last count, including the girls who attended my South Central Los Angeles, pro-bono dance classes, totaled over 100). And no quote more often than this (said in a whiny, insistent, depressive tone): I Want To Watch Tee-Wee.
Leila was allotted only a few short hours of Dorothy or Wallace and Grommit reruns weekly and consistently tried to manipulate me into giving in and throwing a video on to keep the complaints to a minimum (which I did not do, of course. In case you’re reading this, mom of Leila. We made whole grain granola and read Proust instead).
My daughter has shortened this phrase to simply “I want to watch”. Which is probably because she’s a Taurus and doesn’t have time to pansy around with long complicated five-word sentences. She’s also amazingly confident navigating the remote and often masters new search functions before we even know about them, prompting quick grab-and-recoveries like “yes that was cartoon but, honey, it’s the grown up kind” (Yikes).
So our family tee wee habits have waxed and waned. For the past year we’ve not had ANY cable, and instead have been streaming stuff from our awesome Roku box, which enables us to watch all the horrible movies that Netflix offers for free, but also a guaranteed nightly viewing of Rachel Maddow on the news channel, cheaply rented movies and TV shows from Amazon, and the occasional addition of a great movie to Netflix’s Starz queue. We have a cute little flatscreen Hanspree monitor connected to the Roku, the DVD player and the living room stereo, forming a poor girl’s version of a home entertainment system and it’s been just peachy.
But then we have this baby coming. In December our world will be rocked and we’ll be exhausted by a new tiny person (I’m still trying to catch up on sleep from the first one. Five years ago). And I recall VIVIDLY that there’s nothing more lovely than fondling the remote control while the baby drops back to sleep at the tail end of a 4am feeding, and finding a reminder of the wonderful outside world, still glamorous and with room in it for you, in the form of Bravo, HBO and A&E.
As part of preparation for said baby, I’ve been ogling U-verse ads that come, and finding sweet deals for wall mountable tee wee sets on chain store websites, but I just can’t commit. I suspect my wife, though she appears cool on the issue, would secretly would throw her Marc Jacobs bag into the bay for a night with bonafide cable and a bag of pretzels. Should we throw in the towel and embrace pop culture? Or save those hard earned cable payments for some post-partum massages?
We spent the weekend furiously trying to pull in some quality family time, what with spending recent free hours stationing the three year old in front of some awful princess movie and hitting the snooze button.
Warp speed has continued for us, and will do so through mid-September when I will finish my wine program and likely die of exhaustion. We have been having visitors, thank heavens, to break up the tragic monotony of work-and-school-and-work-and-school, but have paid dearly for every moment with them over the week following their stay with us, when we look around and realize no one has had time to grocery shop and we’re going on day four of waking to find there is nothing clean to wear to work.
We had been planning to drive down to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and dazzle the baby with penguins and sea otters for some
time. Saturday was the day and along with the “big fishies and little fishies”, the baby was absolutely estatic to discover cotton candy, a thing she had heard about but never seen in person. She chomped down a tottering cyclone of blue cotton candy as we strolled the 1.5 miles to the Aquarium. She could have stopped there but the Aquarium did not disappoint, and we even had time to do the whole clam-chowder thing on the pier before driving back home.
Sunday morning I pulled some time in at work while the wife and kid attended a successful 2-year old birthday party that apparently involved chocolate cupcakes, great coffee, and a guest named Xander, in honor of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer character.
Nursing the activity hangover that afternoon, we stopped into Bakesale Betty for her infamous fried chicken sandwich and lemon ice, grabbed a seat on the sunny sidewalk and chowed down. It felt lovely to people watch our truly rad and diverse neighborhood, and I felt encouraged by the fact that we live in a community that embraces sitting on stools along the sidewalk at tables made of brightly painted ironing boards. With all our pushing and life-building to the “next big thing”, I sometimes forget how amazing life is just outside my kitchen window.
The baby is also relishing the moment. She takes a bite of her chicken, and a long draw of lemon-ice and reflects on her weekend. She is smiling.
“What’s up, baby?”
She leans over and hugs me deeply, burying her face into my shoulder.
“I’m so happy my tears are coming out”, she says.
I hug her back.
“Why are you so happy today, sweetie?” I whisper into her ear, still laying against my face.
“Because I love you” she replies.