Doctor Laborde

Blog called on account of Nicole's arrival in NYC. Back tomorrow.

NYC

Early this evening I was walking through one of the subway stations near my apartment on my way home when I walked past a dad with two kids: a boy who looked to be about ten and his sister, younger by a year or two.  The boy was holding a Metrocard; the dad was waiting for them a few paces ahead. There was nothing remarkable about the scene, nothing even vaguely out of the ordinary. A dad, two kids, on their way somewhere, or going home like me; I didn't know, it didn't matter, but as I kept on walking, I suddenly stopped, right at the base of the stairs to the street.

Everything was out of the ordinary about that scene, at least in terms of what had been ordinary for me for so many years. I found myself thinking, pounding the obvious over the head with a hammer: Oh my god. Children actually live--LIVE--in this city!" Mine do. 

When I was growing up in a borderline rural town that has since become more classically suburban, trips to the city, and Boston, mind you, not New York, were special. We went quite a bit: my father went to every Boston Celtics home game, and we went with him sometimes, my mother liked to take us to see plays and go to the ballet,we went shopping, or out to dinner, or to visit our urban pioneer friends, who lived in the then still slightly edgy South End, where my father felt nervous parking his car. But every time I walked down Newbury Street, or looked for books in the Boston Public Library, or later, even when I lived in Cambridge and took the T downtown every single day, it still felt like a mini event: Here I am in the city!

Which I think is why I occasionally have these moments, these instances of feeling shell shocked that my children will have Metrocards, that their "ordinary" will be hot dog stands and 24 hour delis, taxis to Chinatown, picnics in the park. Their "ordinary" won't be waiting for a ride, being driven to a friend's house, walking around to the side yard to get the mail. I don't think my oldest, at five, knows what a mall is, or a car pool. When we are not in the city she doesn't understand that you can't get things delivered. 

And she has an urban confidence that I remember even as a small child noticing in my South End friends: an assumption that the streets they walked were theirs, a total absence of that "Look, I'm in the city!" vibe that I possibly still exude to some extent, in the best possible way, because I think it with such pleasure. 

I didn't plan this, living here. If you'd told me twenty years ago I would be, I would have laughed in your face, called you insane. But here I am, heading home each day on the express train, my unlimited ride card in my wallet, with this child who owns the streets of New York, and another one, who can walk all around the block, if you give her an hour or so, who's got a little swagger, too.

Yes, kids live here. Mine do. 

On Their Terms

Today was my gardening class, and we had two special guests: a pair of garden snails transported into the city by a family I love with the plan of moving them permanently into one of the new planters we have set up on the roof. The children were unanimously excited by the snails. They wanted to touch them, but only the shells. They wanted to peer at them very close up and speculate as to how they "slimed around." They completely didn't get my escargot joke at snack time, but that's okay; it wasn't very funny anyway.

For most of our class, the snails waited patiently in their cozy Tupperware container, certainly more patiently than most New Yorkers wait to move into their new digs. Approved wholeheartedly by the co-op board and just in time for the still low financing rates, at about 4:15 they were carried over to the chosen planter, at which the point the carrier, who was supposed to put the snails on an appealing patch of dirt, stomped her foot. "They won't come off," she said. "They don't want to leave the container."

"Let me try," another gardener requested. He, too, could not dislodge the stubborn snails, who were possibly thinking that they should rent instead, in the hope that another six months would provide even more advantageous circumstances. I took the box from the child and tried myself. They were right: The snails, having had their snail universe rocked over and over in the course of a week or so, were not going to give up the ghost. This was their Tupperware now, and they weren't giving it up just because we had planted a few herbs and hydrangeas for them. 

The gardeners were becoming restless, worried, even. Without thinking about what I was saying, I set the lid of the container, which was the part the snails were clinging so desperately to, down on a nice patch of dirt near a healthy-looking clump of cilantro. I hoped it wouldn't taste like soap to the snails. "What are you doing?" one little girl said. They all waited for my response.

"I think they just need to do this on their own time," I said. "I think they will slime off when they're ready." The children, seasoned gardeners now who know all too well how to resist when they're pushed, nodded, all seven of them. This made perfect sense to them. And later, when I thought about it, it did to me too.

Meditations on Basil

I have been doing a lot of planting lately: my garden in Connecticut, the garden on our building's roof deck, the roof deck at Lily's school, where I teach my gardening class. And some of the time, much of the time, Annika has been gardening with me. It might surprise you, how much a twenty-month-old can garden. As it turns out, babies this age like pots and trowels, soil and digging, and--at least in the case of mine--the taste of herbs.

Lily is also a bit of an herb fiend, in the straight-up and not Jerry Garcia sense of the word. That is to say that she enjoys chives snipped in her scrambled eggs, cilantro in her guacamole, rosemary in her hash browns. What she really likes to do, however, is stand in our herb garden plucking things and chomping on them with gusto, asking me, even when she knows the answer, "Are you sure I can eat this, Mama? Are you SURE?"

I think it is because for five years I have been telling her that nothing can go into her mouth but actual food, and the herb thing seems a bit like cheating the system. Regardless, she has taught Annika how to wander around the beds, picking and chomping, and I was quite proud to hear Annika utter her first herb just last weekend: "Basil," she said quite clearly, pointing to an enormous patch of sage. "Basil!" 

So this morning, as the two of us sat at the kitchen counter eating apple slices, I pulled the little pot of basil that was a gift from my in-laws close to us and told Annika what it was. Imitating Lily, she asked, "Eat it?"

"Yes," I said. "You can eat the basil. Would you like to try a leaf?" I plucked her one, and she chewed thoughtfully, smiled. Then, as I sat beside her, wondering if I should intervene, she proceeded to eat every leaf off the plant, one by one, Every Single Leaf.

I'm not even sure what to say.  

Triple Word Score

So at some point on Saturday evening I found myself standing at the counter at our house in Connecticut sorting tiny Travel Scrabble tiles into rows by letter. I actually had this thought: It is Saturday night, and I am standing at the kitchen counter sorting Scrabble tiles. I could never have predicted this moment in time.

The reason for the sorting, or at least the outward purpose, was that for some idiotic reason we apparently own (or owned, thanks to the missing "K") two Travel Scrabble games, both of which were out at kid level, leading Lily to come up with the clever notion of taking all of the letter tiles and combining them in one of the little pouches included in each game. This, of course, rendered both games unplayable, not that I have ever in my life been in a situation where I was one of a group of people in which this conversation suddenly broke out:

Hey! I feel like a game of Scrabble. Anyone in?

Me! I do! I want in! Can I play too? 

And so on, until there were too many people for ONE game alone, and I was able (or not able, as this exhilarating dialogue is hypothetical, remember?) to say:

Well, it's a damn good thing I have TWO sets right here then, isn't it?

But still. Even two people couldn't play Scrabble using the letters from two games combined, so I decided to do the onerous sorting, figuring I would learn in the process if--after five-plus years of children--the majority of the tiles had survived or been digested.

I use the word "onerous" (and, inexplicably, many sets of quotation marks), but the truth is, the work was actually square on the side of enjoyable. Much like folding laundry, cleaning the linen closet, sorting Scrabble tiles turns out to be one of those mindless repetitive tasks that provides enormous satisfaction in being absorbing and more importantly, finite. 

I think I have written here before about my love for finite tasks. I love finite tasks. Almost everything I do, personally, professional, parentally (?), is open-ended, never-ending, subject to interpretation. Not finite tasks. Finite: I even like the word. Onomatopoeia: Short, crisp long vowels, done. 

As I stood there sorting, my husband came into the room. I waited, knowing he would say one of two things when he saw what I was doing. He said the first: Why are you doing that?

I was ready.

Well, we don't have a movie, and I thought it looked like fun.

No, seriously. Why don't you just throw those all away and get a new game?

That was the second--I had the satisfaction of predicting both.

I know there are many people who would never take the half hour or so it took to sort the Scrabble tiles.  I am married to one of them, related by blood to another. But I am not a member of that tribe, and not just because I loathe throwing anything away, have difficulty, sometimes, buying new things.

In this world, in this family, somebody needs to be the person who sorts the tiles, who notices the bag of useless mingled letter squares, who dumps them out together, who steadies her jaw, and sorts. Who has the satisfaction, a better kind, of filling one bag with a complete set, putting away the game, out of child reach, this time, and storing the set with the missing "K" in the hopes that it might be found and the set moved on to the donation bag, so some other family somewhere can have the satisfaction of never playing Travel Scrabble either, at least while their kids are still too small.

Yes, somebody needs to sort the Scrabble tiles. Today, anyway, I am glad that this person is me.

Oof. Those easing-back-in entries are always so rough. Will, once again, resist coward's impulse to delete. As promised, onto The Once and Future King.

So I just reread this, for the first time since seventh grade, and I found it so much more enjoyable this time around. It is so important, I think, not to read books too early. This, I think, is an art: to know when to read what, to know it well enough to guide others, such as one's offspring. I hope I do right by mine in this regard. Anyway, my seventh grade memories of the book involve an agonizing extra credit assignment and a real sense of trudging through whole chunks, although even then I found substantial sections charming and funny and clever. This time, however, I got the epic-ness of it, if you will, the mythic part of the myth. I am thinking now that seventh grade is a little young in general for "epic" and even, in some regards "myth." In seventh grade, what seems epic or possessing of a mythical quality is almost always later determined to be almost inconceivably irrelevant, such as hair crimping, or one's mother's policy on eye shadow. But I digress.

At the end of the third chapter of the first book in the book, I came across this line, uttered when Wart, the future King Arthur, learns that Merlyn is to come home with him and be his tutor: "My!" exclaimed the Wart, while his eyes sparkled with excitement at the discovery. "I must have been on a Quest!" I most certainly do not remember this line from my childhood reading, and I do not think the word "quest," or rather "Quest," for it is in the text and intentionally so a big Q Quest, would have resonated had it been brought to my attention. What struck me this time was how lovely, how inspiring, how redemptive is the notion that one might be on a quest--even a Quest--at any given point in time and not even know it. What magic it would be--is sometimes--to learn it.

To nobody's surprise, I am sure, this made me think of parenthood, which believe me, I try not to think about as hard as I can, but the mind does what it will, especially when the objects of one's thoughts simply refuse to go away, twenty-four hours a day and are, for the most part, very loud. The last two days, for example, have been arduous, exhausting. As briefly if cryptically noted yesterday, Annika and I were stuck in a subway turnstile for a full ten minutes. There was a distressing dog incident I can't quite bring myself to write about yet. Lily and Annika have both been having a hard time (this language, which most of me loves--having a "hard time"--occasionally makes a regressive little tiny part of me want to yell at my progressive, open-minded, modern parenting self: It's called "acting like a massive brat and driving your mother to drink," but anyway.). Annika's is more of a physical nature: in short, an infected toe that is healing slowly and needs to be bandaged constantly and twice-daily antibiotics that have almost left my index finger decapitated a dozen times. Lily is, well, I'm not sure what Lily's going through right now, but I know it has to do with leaving the school she's been at for most of her life, since before her long term memory kicked in, and also probably something to do with being five, which from where I'm sitting looks like a lot on the plate, emotionally speaking. 

And then this line. I read it yesterday, before my book group met, because I had folded over the page corner, and then I read it again today, because I wanted to see if it read the way I remembered it. It did. And I felt a wave of relief wash over me in a sea of discontent at the idea that all of the trying moments of parenthood, and let's be honest, even the hours, and the cups of water hurled out of the crib, and the dismantled remotes and cell phones, and the public and private temper tantrums, each harrowing in their own special way, and those worst of all moments when your child cannot communicate what she wishes to you, and you cannot will yourself into understanding anyway: they are all part of a quest, my Quest, or one of them, and someday, in a more obvious way, or maybe just in an increasing series of realizations like this one, I too will be lying on an isolated beach somewhere (because why not a beach? it's my fantasy), looking back, and I will be able to say to myself, with profound relief and satisfaction: Ah. Ah. I must have been on a Quest." 

Baby Got, No Is, Back

As it turns out, I am not very good at writing every day when I actually have a lot of other (read: paying) work to do, which was the case over the last week when, as was noticed by my aunt if nobody else, I have not posted at all. This is a problem, as the writing is meant to be the other (read: primary) work. But for now, it is unavoidable. To be fair, the work I do when I am not writing here is writing, in a sense, and editing and revising and teaching writing to other people, but you know what I mean. It's not the same thing at all. Let's see if I can get myself back on the rails, one day at a time. Have I lost you? I hope not. How can I woo you back?

Tonight, I don't have much. All week I've been thinking of entries I would post when I had the time, but for some reason, right now, in the moment, I can't remember a one of them. Although perhaps someday in the future I will want to write about getting stuck in the subway turnstile with Annika in her stroller or how Annika responded when Lily made a guest appearance in her toddler group today, or the acapella group I heard this morning singing, beautifully, a song I love: This Magic Moment, or the planting I did on the roof with my class of five-year-olds today, but for now, I'm just not feeling it; remember: I'm easing back in.

So instead I will leave you with this: what I saw at the subway station at Union Square as I exited my train to head up to the street and back home after my children's literature book group. A man, standing at the base of the stairs to the street, with a stack of fliers in his hand. His sweatshirt was white, with an image of Jesus nailed to the cross silk screened on the front in black, surrounded by red and orange flames. The words: Jesus will save you from hell. All the way back home I kept thinking about this message: what it says about this man's interpretation of Jesus, what it says about this man's vision of hell, but most of all, what a very odd, very unfriendly, aggressive, presumptuous and hideously ugly design to be wearing around on your sweatshirt. 

Remind me tomorrow that I can write about a passage from my book group book: The Once and Future King. A quest!

Humor Me

Periodically, I am overwhelmed by a wave of guilt over Annika's baby book, which is largely blank thus far. I know this is a cliche--the fate of second children everywhere--and much of the time I can suppress my guilt, so overwhelmed am I by virtually everything else. But then. The wave comes (why does guilt feel like drowning?), and I succumb. 

So as an impetus to write in the book itself, I will practice here, by relaying the most extensive conversation I have had with Annika thus far, and--I suspect--the most extensive conversation Annika has yet had with anyone.

Scene: I am lying in bed, the covers over my head, trying to pretend I am still asleep. It is approximately, no exactly, 6:15 a.m. Lily is awake. Loud. (Why is Lily seemingly always awake? Why so loud?) I hear tiny padding footsteps. 

Annika: Mama? Mama? Mama up!

I open my eyes, and Annika is standing by my side of the bed, holding a little pair of shoes. I pick her up and place her next to me on the bed. She hands me the shoes.

Annika: Mama. Shoes on. Shoes on.

I put a shoe on her left foot.

Annika: Mama. Other one. Other shoe on.

I put the other shoe on her right foot. She surveys my handiwork.

Annika (very pleased): Shoes on! Pretty! Pretty!

Me: Yes. The shoes are on, and they look very pretty.

Annika: Down. Down. Show Dada. Show Lily. Pretty! 

I put her back down on the floor.

Annika: Bye-bye, Mama!

So Annika, this one's for you. You are 20 months old, and you talk! And before you are two, I am going to flesh out your baby book. But only if you start sleeping until 7. 

When is a Job Not Just a Job?

Let's pretend I didn't just take an unearned three-day weekend there. I don't know why I am risking losing the few loyal readers I have by slacking off. Sigh. 

Anyway. I have had a study-in-contrasts kind of a day, which many of my days seem to be these days: days in which I try largely unsuccessfully and with unintended comic effects to balance the many unflattering, ill-fitting hats I am trying to wear simultaneously, much like the man in Caps for Sale, a book without one-tenth of the clunky adverbs and adjectives in this sentence alone.  And cute monkeys to boot. Wearing caps.

In an amusing twist of fate, I am currently editing a book called Raising Your Toddler. This is amusing to me, anyway, because due to a very scattered childcare schedule, I am often attempting to edit Raising Your Toddler while, well, raising my toddler. Or at least while keeping her semi-occupied and with a mouth full of applesauce while I conduct business calls and check word counts. 

Today, for example, although I had a babysitter, Annika was not particularly interested in the Battleship game said babysitter was playing with Lily when the author of the book I am editing called. As I answered the phone in my professional (i.e. polite) voice, Annika fell into my office on top of the child's camera she was wearing around her neck, a camera I keep meaning to throw out, as it has never worked, but somehow can't bear to, as I liked the idea of it so much before purchasing it.

Annika wailed, the author asked, "Are you still there," the babysitter rushed in, Lily called, "It's my turn," and I froze with the phone to my ear. I find these moments are so concrete, so obvious, so in your face, so much more of the time than one would expect, at least for me. I suspect this is not the case for those parents with proper office jobs, those who do not work at home, those who have actual doors on their home offices, which I, at present, do not. 

I feel like I have set up this anecdote with an element of suspense. What did she do? Did she drop the phone, scoop up the toddler, cradle her to her chest? Soother her, throw away the useless children's camera, join in the Battleship game? Reprimand the sitter, run out of the office with the phone leaving all the chaos behind, explain away the crying in the background by telling the eminent child psychologist/author of toddler book that sometimes kids "just need to cry?" 

I think I will leave you hanging. Just know this: The author of the toddler book, a very wise woman I feel privileged to be working with, is a very big advocate of the good-enough school of parenting. I am trying to squeeze the last drop out of this editing project, in more ways than one.