Jump!

The song is Van Halen’s “Jump.”  It came out the summer of 1984 when I was an awkward, gangly, and watchful eight-year-old.  My world was the block where we lived, the kids who lived there and my older brother and sister.  Like a Mark Twain novel or one of the cartoons my children now watch, there were no adults that summer.  Maybe they were working.  Maybe they were inside.  But the street and the backyard was ours, and Eddie Van Halen let his guitar scream as we jumped into our pool, all of us skinny, all of us happy, all of us alive - over and over again.  

My sister must have been thirteen that year, my brother 11.  They seemed like grown-ups to me. My sister burst out her first two-piece bathing suit in 1984, and the neighborhood boys all took notice.  They playfully pulled her hair and pushed her into the pool.  I waited on the edge of the pool, balancing, but if I hit the water, it was an accident of my own accord, not because someone noticed me enough to see how much I wanted to be pushed in, or noticed.

The boys of Surf Street were all older than me, even older than my sister.  Vinny was tall and thin, his skin tanned to a dark brown before school even let out.  His light brown hair was long in the back, in the style they wore on Long Island in 1984.  He walked with a Danny Zuko swagger before John Travolta ever showcased his own version in “Grease.”  Vinny’s smile was a troublemaker’s smile.  He was the boy my parents never trusted; a “walking disaster area,” my mother nick-named him because things were always broken in his wake - end-tables, glass vases, my brother’s jaw.  Vinny was the reason the movie “Rocky” and all of its sequels were banned in our house.  It made the boys roughhouse, and the wear and tear on our home (and my brother) were starting to show.  But the door was always open to Vinny, because he was impossible not to love. And so we did.

Eddie was his younger brother, his hair a shock of yellow, and trimmed down to a crew cut each summer so that the tips of the ears that stuck out from the side of his head sunburned into painful blisters.  He took longer to tan than his brother, and freckles stood out on his nose.  He was quieter, and more gentle, but no less of a trouble-maker.  Lumber and appliances were stolen in local stores and fingers were always getting pointed at Eddie, but he was always welcome in our house.  He was ours, and we loved him.

Glen lived on the corner, and he was small and dark, and funny and loud.  He could flirt at age thirteen, and almost got run over by my father’s car after he let his hand smack at my sister’s pubescent ass.  Glen walked the street and into our house like he owned it, and drove my father up the wall with his attitude.  He had the great fortune to live at the house where the bus stopped every morning, and as such commanded the front of the line every single school day.  I was enveloped in a cloud of hateful jealousy.  I wanted that spot.  And I liked him.  

I secretly, desperately loved every boy who grew up on Surf Street.  They were the movie stars that were sparkling, magnificently beautiful, charismatic, and out-of-reach.  I had never not known them, they were at my crib-side when I was a baby, never not there, but in that summer, I thought that maybe I could be one of them.

  My brother had a boom box that held the coveted Van Halen cassette tape.  He put it up against the screen of his bedroom window and when David Lee Roth told us we might as well jump, we did, splashing into the pool with screams of laughter and lightness, into the beautiful unknowable and innocent waters.  It was heaven that summer, but we didn’t know it.  We didn’t know that Vinny would be murdered by the time I was a senior in high school, or that Eddie would be lost forever, to drugs, to crime, to sadness.  We didn’t know that my dad and Glen’s mom Karen would die within months of each other and that our lives would entwine at the same funeral home where we said goodbye first to Vinny, then Dad, then Karen.  

I’m one of the moms now, watching carefully as my children navigate our street on the bicycles in their helmets and elbow pads.  The kids today are protected in ways that we weren’t as kids.  Sometimes I get so caught up in the laundry, the oil changes of the car, in the raising of the children that I forget the little girl I was.  I forget that feeling of invincibility, steadily knocked down when the indifferent malice of the real world came to Surf Street.  But when Van Halen comes on the radio, I turn it up and open my window, young again, and immortal, surrounded by the ghosts of my childhood, alive again if only for the time it takes to sing “Jump.”

Out of Bounds

I was reading through an article in the NY Times this morning, or rather, Marc was reading bits and pieces aloud to me, as we do with the Sunday paper.  The subject was Tiger Woods and the collapse of his empire: golf courses in Dubai, Mexico, and Asheville, NC dead in the water.  The loss of endorsement from Accenture, Gatorade, and AT&T.  “That was some expensive ...” Marc said, marking the end of our high brow conversation.  But he’s right.

I’ve given way too much thought to the motivations behind his self-destruction.  Maybe I’m misunderstanding the pull of sex for a man, but I have to think that there is something more to it.  I like an orgasm as much as the next mammal, but there’s a limit to the strife I would cause in order to achieve one.  Especially since I’m married and I can usually get it when I want it.  And I’m self-equipped.

Tiger was married.  Two kids, just like me.  Since I’m not a super-star golfer/celebrity/man/gambler with the likes of Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley, this is where the similarities end, but I have to consider that we are both people, raised by people, and start from there.

Columnists and bloggers alike have shared considerable theories; some complex, some simplistic.  But something occurred to me as we read the paper this morning, trying to get full adult sentences communicated to each other while simultaneously reprimanding the kids, “Don’t touch that!  Stop hitting your sister!  Put that down!”  In all of the books on raising children that I’ve read, and I poured over dozens of them religiously each time I was pregnant - determined to get this Mommy thing right, I was instructed to create boundaries.  Boundaries were the magic word that would reel in my children when they got too fresh or wild, would provide the comfort of knowing what was right and what was wrong.  Within those boundaries they would feel safe, and our lives would have order.  Boundaries - it was like a magic word, the key to a happy home, family, childhood.  Of course, boundaries are hard to enforce, and despite my diligent research, I’m not sure if I’ve ever gotten this Mommy thing down.  

Yet, as these two subjects became fused during our Sunday breakfast, I realize that maybe they are connected.  Was Tiger simply too successful, flanked by minions who didn’t provide boundaries?  His father, noted for being a hard-ass when it came to practice, demonstrated limited judgement over his own extra-martial life.  Was he equally permissive when it came to Tiger’s social upbringing?  Or did his passing signify the end of the enforcement of the boundaries set up, leaving Tiger to flounder, calling, texting, sexting trying to find exactly where a safe place to mark the wrongs and rights of his behavior lie?  

After all, what is scarier that limitless possibilities?  And what is more comforting than a clear path, marked by specific limits?  Without the guideline of a speed limit, how are you to know how fast is safe?  Especially if your car goes from 0-55 in three seconds and the cops just want to take your picture.

Tiger should have made his way to this house.  As soon as he pulled out that infamous Blackberry, I would have told him, “Don’t touch that!  Put that down!  Don’t hit that!”  

I could have saved an empire.

My Plight as a SAHM

This is as old as dirt.  Or feminism.  Or World War II.  

The struggle between working vs. stay at home moms.  We call ourselves SAHM, as if by abbreviation, it becomes more important.

“Important?”  I can hear you screech.  The indignation comes through the computer at me.  “Mothering is the most important job on earth.”

The SAHMs know that their work beats that of being a doctor, a sales rep, a designer, lawyer, chiropractor, teacher, any day of the week and twice on Sunday. They are sure and I count myself among them, so why aren’t I as sure?

I’ll admit it right here: I am intimidated by anyone who can hold a job.  I don’t care what it is.  If you have worked the register at Walgreen’s for the last twelve years, I hold you up in admiration.  If you’ve gone through school, gotten graduate degrees and hold what can be counted as a profession, I can’t even look you in the eye.  I defer.

Yet, I am the sole daytime responsibility of shaping two lives.  Not just any two, but two who were imagined, conceived, wanted, and loved with a ferocity only known to parents (even if it is copyrighted and claimed by an Alaskan politician.)

I draft legislation on my home front, and enforce it with consternation of a corrections officer (most of the time.)  My kitchen, stocked and decorated by me alone, awaits the craft studied at snooty cooking schools and competed for in reality shows.  I make and keep more appointments than the administrative assistant to the busiest CEO, tend to the sick, cheer goals and grades, and make up stories that might tickle Dr. Seuss with green.  

Yet, that Walgreen’s lady, there every time I need a glue stick or a prescription, to develop my pictures, or pick up a pack of gum, unhinges me.

As my daughter approaches the freeing age of kindergarten, when the walls rise and my day will be filled with delicious time, I tell myself that I will get a job.  Join the workforce.  Be one of them, and feel fulfilled.  

I am more than just a mother, I tell myself.  I am capable of SO MUCH MORE.

So I should enjoy it now.  And I do, the coffee klatches with the other moms as our daughters practice ballet, the bonding chitchat while I wait for my son to move up to his next karate belt, the play-dates, class parties.  I like going to the homes of the other moms, bringing munchkins and talking about the kids, the hardships, the disciplining.  I like to check out their houses and take stock.  Their kitchen is bigger, but I like the way I decorated my nursery better.  I’m more or less happy with the way our lives match up, pretty close to my own, and I feel the panic quell just a bit. 

Until I meet that one mom, the one who sews homemade clothes for her girls, who makes meatloaf cupcakes with mashed potato “frosting.”  My sister-in-law feeds my niece beets for dessert, and she begs for more.  I know moms who don’t own television,  and others whose children have written musicals, started foundations for poor Africans.  And the intimidation rises again.

Maybe I want to work, not because I think I’m better than a stay-at-home mom, but because I’m afraid I’m not.

Is a princess ever just a princess?

http://sahmanswers.com/news.php?readmore=2287I’ve been thinking a lot about issues of femininity, especially since having my daughter Anna and watching as she’s grown into a pink and sparkly preschooler.  I look at her and I beam with something akin to pride at her girlishness if only because it so obviously and defiantly is something of her own.  It has not been inherited from me.  We are opposites in that way.  Anna would live in her tutu - not the plain, pale pink one I bought in Target in preparation for her first ballet class, but the other one.  The one my husband bought in Marshalls about a year ago.  The garish pink and purple striped one with the sequins sewn into the tulle.  

I took ballet as well, though I lasted quite a bit less than she has.   Even though she is only three and a half, her dancing hours have outpaced mine already.  Ballet was the first girlish thing I quit in shame, not fitting in.  I didn’t speak the language or understand the code gained through osmosis for the other girls.  One of my first lies was born out of ballet class.  Mortified and determined that I just could not go through with the class one afternoon, I faked a stomachache and a headache.  (I wanted to cover all of my bases.)  My mom bought it.  Swathed in relief, I got to skip it one afternoon.

I knew I couldn’t push my luck, so I attended the next one, savoring the power of pretend illness.  It was my Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card, but I had to be meticulous in how I used it.  Yet what awaited me in that next class was worse than anything I could have imagined.  Miss Cindy, the sleek and perky pony-tailed teenager who taught the class bounded over to me as soon as I came in.  She knelt right down to my height and told me that since I missed a class, I wasn’t to worry one bit.  She had her appointment book and was going to schedule a make-up class right then and there.

It was too much.  The punishment didn’t fit the crime.  One measly lie and now I was going to have to wear make-up.  The injustice of it all!

Miss Cindy didn’t understand the tears that sprang from my eyes and wasn’t able to console me.  Phone calls were made.  My mother came to pick me up.  I never told her why I wanted to quit ballet - it was my deep dark secret.  If I’d learned anything from my older sister, to whom I looked (and still do) to unlock all of the secrets of the feminine mystique, it was that you were supposed to fight to wear make-up, not to avoid it.

Anna, however, has constructed her own “keepit box” in her room where she holds her most treasured possessions.  Nail polish and lipgloss abound.  It tickles me, in a kind of where do you come from? way.  And it makes me proud as it’s a sign of her individuality, something all her own.  And just as I stood alone in my non-girlish way, someone different, and I though, separate from my mother and sister, I don’t want this to open a chasm between us.  So we celebrate it together, even if I can’t bring myself to prefer pink over black, and we figure it all out together.

I read an excerpt from Peggy Orenstein’s book Cinderella Ate my Daughter today and it gave me pause.  She writes about the saturation of princess marketing that has taken over the little girl population and asks whether us mothers should be so glib as to indulge in it unquestioningly.  

Is it possible that my celebration of Anna’s individuality that I have been marking with tiaras and Pinkalicious cupcakes is false?  It may not be individuality at all, but the fact that the princesses got to her before I could pass on my own brand of un-girly girliness.  Her personality has been co-opted by Disney before I could exert my own influence.  Could Anna be a case of culture over both nature and nurture?

Check this out and tell me what you think: http://peggyorenstein.com/

Teach Your Children

I have a confession to make -- when I first saw in the 20-week sonogram that my second child was missing a male appendage, I was upset.  Disappointed.  I had a boy already, and I knew the outrageous, almost supernatural love that comes from the first wisps of motherhood.  I wanted to experience the same exact thing - again.

But the tech assured me that we were having a daughter, and while my husband wept at the prospect of a daddy’s little girl, I sat there stone-faced.  How was I going to get through this?  I don’t even know how to make a French braid. My attempts at eyeshadow make me look like a drag queen. 

I had never questioned my preparedness for having a son.  I know about math and science, the basics of driving car, that the World Series was for baseball and the Stanley Cup for hockey.  Any rollover that I couldn’t cover would be answered by his dad.  A girl, however, would need a more knowledgeable teacher.

The younger of two sisters, I declared myself the smart one after losing the battle for the prettiest.  My sister instinctively knew about things like shoes and pocket-books, and that they were supposed to match each other.  I am not a girly-girl.  And now it would matter.

Anna spent her first winter in her brother’s blue blanket sleepers, her blond curls rebelliously peeking out of her hand-me-down hat.  She declared pink as “my color” at eighteen months old, and own it she did.  The mornings before nursery school were fraught with tantrums if I dared to hold out a pair of pants for her.  “That’s not a beautiful dress!” she would scream, in a voice so shrill it could cut glass. So a beautiful dress it was.  With tights.  And shiny Mary Janes.

Then last week, something happened. Anna’s ballet instructor informed us waiting moms that the girls’ recital dresses were ordered.  They would be pink and purple sequined, with a teddy bear in *gasp* matching dresses.  I clapped my hands together.  God help me, I squealed.  Here it was, the culmination of all the instruction I had been unwittingly been put to in the three years since Anna was born. 

I’ve learned to be a girl, taught by the most knowledgeable 3 year-old on the planet - my daughter.  

Sick in Love

If I could do it all over again, I’m sure I would have made a different choice.  But they looked up at me with those big eyes, those impossibly long eyelashes only bestowed upon the very young.

“Can we go to Chuck E. Cheese, Mommy?” They even added, “Please?”

And I caved. I’m not proud of it, but I did. And that’s how I ended up in a sea of blinging, flashing lights, rings, dings, noise, screams of happiness and in tantrum, being pushed, prodded, stamped, and slimed by gooey hands covered in cardboard pizza cheese.  Chuck. E. Cheese on a Sunday. Welcome to Hell.

Unless you’re six and three-and-a-half, respectively. Then you are in an overstimulating, germ-ridden paradise.  

And if you think that granting two kids such a generous, awe-inspiring gift of an afternoon would buy two parents a ride home in relative peace, a calming quiet over the house as they play quietly and cooperatively to compensate for such fabulosity, then you are either not a parent, or your children are not six and three-and-a-half, respectively.

And I knew it. I knew as soon as Jacob refused dinner, then lay his head down on the couch that it was already happening. That all of the Purell that we had obsessively and fastidiously applied to their four little hands was no match for the disease that is Chuck. E. Cheese.  Just a few short hours later, after baths, teeth-brushing, stories, and Motrin, I was positive that I put to bed a child sick with Strep throat.

But I was wrong.

I had put to bed one child with Strep and the other with a stomach bug.  The kind that makes one throw up all over one’s bed after several sheet and pillow-case changes in a night.

This morning was a show in desperation, as Jacob tried to convince me with a croaking voice that he was okay, just fine, to go to school.  He didn’t want to miss his Valentine’s Day party.  Anna has a brand new tutu with little red hearts all over it. I didn’t want her to miss school. Not today when I was sure to win the Mom-with-the-cutest-kid award, let alone miss out in those precious, delicious, two-and--half hours of alone time. I had booked a pedicure as a Valentine’s gift to myself. We all sat with our uneaten heart-shaped pancakes in front of us, disappointed.

Eventually, we moved over to the couch.  Jacob to my left, Anna to my right, each with a heavy head on my shoulder, Phineas and Ferb on the television in front of us.

And then Jacob, with a hand hot from fever, reached over to where Anna’s lay.  He clasped it and held it in his.

“I love you, Jacob,” she said, one hand free to curl her hair, her eyes never leaving the tv.

Best Valentine’s Day. 

Ever.