An Introduction!

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way.

--Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities



Okay. So Dickens was referring to the French Revolution, not my house in the hour between dinner and bedtime on an arbitrary Thursday evening in September, when my four-year-old is “putting on a show” on the living room couch clad in a tutu and fireman’s hat, and my one-year-old is pushing a wooden tricycle into the wall over and over again in a desperate attempt to turn it around, and the dogs are circling my legs because although I managed some meatballs and zucchini for the girls, and set the highchair tray on the floor for them afterward as an appetizer, I have not actually managed to feed them, and the telephone rings and it is an editor I owe work to, and I say, “Oh, no, it’s just the radio,” and rush into the bathroom and lock the door behind me to block out all the background noise.

It is times like this when, like Dickens, I fear we are “all going direct the other way,” especially me, because I am responsible for all this chaos: I made it, I asked for it, I wanted it, even—or so I thought. I think it is safe to say that parenting has never before been compared to the French Revolution, but now that I think about it, I’m not sure why. If the Revolution was a time of political and social upheaval during which the monarchy was overthrown by the people, who desired equality and more control over their government, then is there in fact a more apt comparison for a peaceful household of authoritarian adults into which two citizens are born, insisting upon radical change, personal freedom, the undivided attention of those in power, making manifest a willingness to fight to the death for them?

The end result, of course, of all this turmoil, was the Enlightenment, a glorious period for France, and for much of the world. And even when I am locked in my own bathroom, trying to conduct a business call, as four especially demanding citizens lean on the door from the other side, demanding entry, I can still grasp the “season of light” to which Dickens refers. All of the best things in life, in my experience, come from hard work and a sense of purpose, burnished with a sense of humor and a refusal to quit. I was queen, once. I ate cake for dinner whenever I wanted to, which was more often than it should have been. Now, I need to share, and let them eat some too, and that is only the very beginning of the end of my years of entitlement. At heart, I believe in democracy, which requires being open to the wisdom and the foolishness, the best and yes, the worst.

At night, when my children are sleeping, which is sometimes the easiest time to love them, I slip into their rooms and watch their faces in the shadows, the rise and fall of their little chests. Yes, I can see then, can say to myself as I slip back out and close the door gently behind me. This is the spring of my hope.

Back to School, Eternally

September has always been so fraught for me with nervous energy and promise. Before I even started school myself, the atmosphere changed in our house as August waned because my mother's school year was starting. And because I went back to graduate school in between my own college graduation and the birth and eventual first day of school of my oldest daughter, there have been few consecutive years when there wasn't that amped up feeling, that shifting of molecules that has nothing whatsoever to do with the cooler air and lack of humidity.

September is change, it is newness, it is hiking yourself to your feet after a languorous rest, no matter how you spent your summer months. Suddenly, everything is faster, brighter, more urgent; because I am me, inexorably me, there is an inevitable edge to my excitement. And now, there is Annika's birthday--the annual reminder of this insane, wonderful decision that I made to do this all over again in spite of my conflicted feelings the first time around--and--in honor of the swirling, edgy, elation that is my relationship to this decision, there is Annika's birthday party.

This year, I decided to do a harvest dinner on the roof for just family--Ben's family, my family, us. We brought in all of the vegetables and fruits from the garden: zucchini and patty pan squash, beans, cucumbers, eggplant, onions, shallots, cantaloupe, and armfuls of tomatoes in a dozen hues, from the tiniest currant variety to Brandywines nearly as big as Annika's head. And herbs: basil, thyme, parsley, chives, cilantro, and tarragon. And with the exception of an exceptional fillet of beef provided by my sister (for which I concocted an herb and shallot mayonnaise using the herbs and shallots I had grown), and some shrimp because, well, it always seems like a good idea to have some shrimp, each dish featured ingredients we had grown ourselves.

Is my self-congratulatory tone coming through? I felt proud, I will confess, and please, no need to egg me on here with words of praise; I'm doing it myself, cutting you off at the pass. Not just for the garden-centered meal, which represented a full day's hard work, and yes, a summer's investment of time and love, but for this year--for surviving this year--perhaps the hardest of my life, in so many ways. This year, among so many other things that have happened, I became a mother of two, and it has been the hardest, most excruciating transition. I know here I am supposed to add that it has also been the best thing I ever did, because people always say that after they say how hard parenting is, but the truth is, although Lily and Annika seem to me to be exemplary children, whether or not raising them is the best or most rewarding thing I ever do remains to be seen.

I realize how much I am my mother's daughter when I feel compelled to add: I kind of hope not. Or rather, I hope it is only one of many best and rewarding accomplishments that require all kinds of investments on my part over the mad, erratic, unpredictable course of a lifetime. I'd like to think I'm raising them to want for me nothing less. And as the year--the way I always view it (no New Year's Eve resolutions for me)--rolls to an end and just as quickly takes off like a race car--I would like to add that I desire nothing less for them.

One

It's the middle of the night, and I can't sleep, and it just occurred to me that exactly one year ago from this very minute I was sitting in my apartment, wide awake, both willing dawn to arrive and praying it wouldn't. Tomorrow, or rather today, is Annika's birthday.

Because of the complications of Lily's birth, I had to schedule Annika's birth two weeks before my actual due date. It seems so long ago now, but there were choices, and I agonized over them. Did I want to have the C-section before Labor Day? The arduous, anxious pregnancy would be over sooner, but the hospital staff would all be at the beach. I decided to wait until after the holiday weekend. The night before I was to go into the hospital I couldn't sleep at all. I sat on the reclining chair reading for a while, then just sat. Although the apartment was full--my family was here--it was quiet and still.

I remember being grateful that the feeling afraid was about to end, one way or another, because all along I'd known that the surgery could be dangerous for me, and I remember trying, desperately, to imagine Annika. Of course, I couldn't do it. All I could envision was a baby Lily, the baby Lily had been, with a feature or two tweaked, but I could no more imagine an entirely different baby, her own person, than I could make myself fall asleep. I pushed open the door to Lily's room. She was sound asleep. I tried to imagine how her life was going to change, and mine, and I couldn't do that either. All I could imagine was the two of us, going on as we had, with a prop baby off to one side, as though we'd just happened to pop Baby Ann, Lily's largest doll, into my handbag.

In the morning I was exhausted. Fueled by adrenaline, we got ourselves to the hospital. There was a lot of lying around on gurneys, shots, explanations of what was going to happen. It was cold; I was cold, pretty much at every stage of the process. And I steeled myself to remain alert. Lily's birth had been an excruciating, terrifying blur; this was cold and clinical, yes, but I'd be damned if I wasn't going to be fully present.

When the doctor held the baby up over the sheet so I could see her, I tried to focus but only got a fragmented view: her skin looked much darker than I'd expected, I saw brown hair, squinted eyes, tiny squared-off feet. Annika, I thought. She didn't look like her ultrasound picture. She didn't looked like Lily. She looked like herself.

It is the ultimate cliche to note that it's astonishing what can happen in a year. Barring unforeseen circumstances, I will not have to go to the hospital in the morning. But I will have to get up at 6:30 to give breakfast to my one-year-old girl. I think tonight, now, I may just be able to sleep.

To Be

This past weekend Lily was making a To-Do List, a habit she has picked up from Ben. These lists are hilarious--both sets, actually--and I should be saving them as documents of their shared ambition and perception of a weekend as about eighteen days long. I happened to notice an item on Lily's most recent list that caught my attention: Ressle with dogs. "Ressle" is "wrestle," for those of you out of the habit of deciphering semi-phonetic spelling, and I loved that she had added this item, in spite of the fact that it is nearly impossible for her to avoid wrestling with the dogs, intentionally and inadvertently.

It made me remember, when asked for my inevitable childhood story that day, of a game I used to play with our childhood dog, Grapes. We had a large, square garden in the center of our lawn, and sometimes, when Grapes and I were in the mood, I would play a sort of modified game of tag with him around its outskirts. I would bend at the knees in a dog-like play stance and then take off in one direction or the other; Grapes would follow. Suddenly, with no warning, I would pivot and run in the opposite direction; he would sort himself out and chase me that way. The funny thing was that he would never run through the garden, even if I got sufficiently ahead of him so as to be on the other side. Somehow, although there was obviously no rule book, no terms of the game, he understood the rules.

But the point here is not Grapes' intelligence, or our relationship, or the parallel dog/girl relationships. Again, what struck me about Lily's list was the redundancy of the dog wrestling item; what I am interested in is the fact that I had--and Lily has--the time and space to run around in a yard with a dog at all. Lily has developed her dog wrestling games, and there are infinite variations, on her own. Grapes and I were able to devise our version of tag because we had hours of each day available to do nothing but run around. And in both cases, parents--adults of any kind--had nothing whatsoever to do with the games.

I so often find that my best advice to myself as a parent is to back off. Lily--and Annika, already--discovers so much more when I do so, when I resist the temptation to intervene, to explain, to elaborate, even to comment. I owe my parents so much, I see now, for the gift of the time and space in which to create my world as a child.

Lily's To-Do Lists are not indicative of an encroaching, modern, oppressive, goal-oriented society; rather they reflect her honest, heartfelt, healthy desire to be like, to form a bond with, her dad. But we must be careful that they remain so, or--preferably soon, and for the next decade or more--fade away altogether. I am ever more convinced, watching my own children grow, that To-Do should be To-Be.

Thank You Note

Apologies for some recent gloomy, cryptic, pointless, faux philosophical entries which I would call ramblings if they weren't so brief. I will try to be less self-indulgent, a little more focused and alert. So moving on.

Late this afternoon, the three of us--me, Lily and Annika--were making our way down Seventh Avenue to meet some friends at a playground. It was a glorious afternoon: sunny and warm but not hot, and the air felt clean, and passersby were smiling at each other, and people were eating at outdoor cafes, and I had an iced coffee, and Annika was relaxed and contemplative in her stroller, and Lily was quite literally bounding joyfully down the street.

In fact, I was so lost in my own thoughts that it took me a while to realize quite how joyfully. I snapped to when she tugged my arm and said, decibel high, "Mama? Can you please listen to me sing this song?" and then without waiting for a response from me belted out a mostly accurate version of the "Spoonful of Sugar" song from Mary Poppins as though she were Liza Minelli in Vegas.

Although in another frame of mind I might have tried to shush her, her exuberance was contagious, and the equally joyful responses she got from everybody we walked by pushed all such thoughts out of my head. When she was done, we walked a little more in a companionable silence until I realized she was moving in a strange way, lifting her knees high and sort of pitching forward, then rolling back holding her arms out at her sides. "I'm a bike, Mama!" she said, as I pushed prosaically beside her.

"That's great," I said. "Do you wish you were riding your real bike?" This, because I had promised her we'd bring her real bike into the city, and I had forgotten, as well as, apparently, my general prosaicness just can't help making its buzzkill presence felt.

"No, Mama. I'm not riding a bike. I am a bike." Oh. I watched a little more closely. Sure enough, as I really looked, I could see that she was, indeed, being a bike, her legs the turning wheels, her arms the handlebars, stiff at her sides.

Shortly thereafter, we reached the playground, and as soon as I sat on a bench she was off, a flash of blue, with her friends, to the other side of the space, without looking back. I could hear her peals of laughter, her organizing voice, clear across the expanse. And I found myself thinking, as I sat and followed her voice, so strong and clear and confident: Someday I will tell her thank you for this, for being able to jolt me back to the self I want to be by sheer virtue of her personality, her lack of self-consciousness, her faith in herself and in me. So often, and I am sure many, many times to come, but for now I mean today, this afternoon, on the stretch of Seventh Avenue from 16th Street to Laguardia Place. Thank you, Lily, for being so essentially you, and in being you, bringing me back to myself.

Still Life, With Plum

Last night of prescribed writing about parenting. Good; it's beginning to feel a bit like taking medicine. I have been doing it so naturally, so often; I think the main lesson learned is to be a little gentler with myself and not quite so controlling of my subject matter.

I said I would write about my cab ride, and so I will. It is illustrative of a truth I am trying to catch hold of these days, which is that the very rough moments are exactly that: moments. But as the rough moments are occurring, when I am riding atop a tidal wave of bad behavior, or preverbal frustration, it is impossible to remember this. Which is why I keep reminding myself of the fact in calmer waters. I am hoping it will one of these days sink in.

So I needed to get back home after a lovely morning out, and after a brief flirtation with the notion of the F train, which stops at the end of my street, I surrendered to a New Yorker's mundane luxury: the taxi. As a child of the suburbs, where the build-up to the acquisition of the driver's license reaches ludicrous heights, I played along with my peers, although I didn't really share the excitement. Somehow I knew that once I had the little plastic ticket to freedom, there would be, from where I was at the time, nowhere to go. And sure enough, I spent my one licensed year before leaving for college doing what suburban kids do, probably still in this age of the $5.00 gallon of gas: driving around. When I got to New York and realized that for dollars in the single digits I could be chauffeured around the city like a queen, I was hooked.

I like the subway, too, for the same primary reason: I don't have to drive. But with a cranky 4-year-old, exhausted, hungry baby and a stroller, the cab won out on this occasion. The trip started out fine. The cab, easily hailed, pulled to stop at my feet. (Will I ever get over feeling like this is a little bit magical? I want to go. Here is my car!) The stroller folded with the tap of my foot into its neat little package and was deposited in the trunk. Keep in mind I am holding the baby while hailing, folding, depositing and loading: holding her under one arm like a football.

We get in. Lily buckles her seatbelt. I put on mine. Baby coos at driver. Lily takes bite of nectarine, baby starts to scream. Lily finishes last few bites of nectarine, baby continues to wail, we realize that baby wants nectarine, but there are no more. I take pit and hide in ashtray on door; baby acquires inhuman strength in desire to get to, and pry open ashtray to get pit. She fails. I remember I have one small plum. Baby cannot eat plum as is baby, and has two tiny teeth, so I take tiny bites off plum, remove from my own mouth, and feed to baby, who suddenly seems as though she has not been fed in last three months. In about 10 seconds, plum is gone. Pit is hidden in ashtray with larger cousin pit, and baby again starts screaming. I have bits of plum on my shirt and in my hair. Baby is covered with red plum juice. Baby accidentally smacks in Lily in face while flailing around to get to ashtray. Lily starts wailing too. cab driver turns up radio.

As I am sitting in the back of the cab, sticky with plum juice, which is staining items of clothing on all three of us, listening to my two children screaming, the steamy air oppressive inside the cab, which appears to have no air conditioning, the baby thrashing around miserably on my lap, Lily accusing me of letting Annika "hurt my body, which is not allowed at school," my head starting to pound, trapped in the back seat, literally strapped in to my fate, stuck in traffic that has no visible end ahead, I am able to leave my head for a few seconds somehow, to step outside the experience and observe me as an outsider would, an outsider excepting the cab driver, whose strategy is to pretend that we don't exist by regular increases of radio volume.

This is a terrible moment, I observe as the outsider. There is nothing you can do right now.

It was a zen moment, then. I gave in to the awful wailing, the thrashing, the stickiness, the waves of loathing emanating from the frontseat, my own misery.

This will not last forever, I repeated, as we sat dripping in the humidity. But it kept lasting, and in desperation, I told the cab driver in a virtual scream to be heard above his radio that I had recently learned that the sound of a baby crying is used as a means of torture in prison camps. They pipe it into cells, I explained, and he neither acknowledged I was speaking, nor lowered the volume of his radio.

But just then the traffic cleared, and the driver sped up, and in a blink of an eye we were home, and I tucked the baby under my arm, and took the stroller out of the trunk, and ushered Lily up to the curb, and said thank you to the driver, who gave me the merest hint of a nod, and stood on the sidewalk in front of our building, and exhaled.

And now, a day and a half later, it already feels like it happened to somebody else. A moment, Not a good one. But a moment just the same.

Time Travel

I have one or two more days of limiting my subject matter to parenting, depending on if you factor in the day I skipped without explaining or confessing. A mixed bag, I would say. I didn't feel guilty writing about parenting, as I declared that I would in advance, but being the kind of person who feels a little let down in a restaurant after ordering due to the termination of the decision-making factor, I also felt a little constrained and irritated by the confines of my pledge. I guess that's point of an experiment: to see what happens.

Tomorrow, to make up for my skipped day, I will write about the five minutes I spent in a cab today that felt like an hour, as I'd planned to now. But right now I find myself compelled in another direction.

Today I started reading A Wrinkle in Time for the first time in many years with a child who'd never read it before. He'd started reading it without me, and is a little on the young side for the book, so was understandably a little confused. We plunged in, and for a few moments the boy, an inordinately polite little guy, sat beside me as I fell in full force, forgetting about him, the room I was sitting in, the Upper West Side on a muggy summer afternoon in 2008. I was about eleven, in the hammock in our front yard, under a crab apple tree that dropped blossoms for weeks on end like soggy snowflakes, holding the book above my head in a kind of a trance.

My favorite childhood books so often had plucky girl heroines, but Meg was different from Anne or all the Betsys or Jo or any of the others. In fact, the strongest memory I have of reading this book is of how different it was altogether from anything else I had read: not exactly science fiction, which was not my genre, and not exactly a thriller or mystery, also not my genres, and not exactly a coming of age. It was somehow all of these and none of these, and when I snapped out of my reading fog and remembered my patient student, I asked him, "So what did you think of it, what you read?" and he looked a little nervous to tell me and then, finally, said in a small voice, "I thought it was strange."

"Do you like it?" I asked, genuinely curious. He nodded, quite vigorously.

"I don't understand a lot of it, but I do like it," he said. I nodded too. "Strange" seemed just about right. So we got online--when I would have called my uncle, a mathematician of sorts--to read about tesseracts, and as I stumbled a little trying to explain the four-dimensional cube within a cube, the boy interrupted me, unusual for him, and said, "But isn't the fourth dimension time?" I must have beamed at him because he looked taken aback.

"Exactly," I said. "I think you're ready to keep reading."

And as I walked back home to my own two girls, who have so many heroines to discover, including brilliant, defiant Meg Murry, I felt actually a thrill of anticipation on his behalf, as well as a little wistful on mine. A wrinkle in time, indeed.

Mrs. L

So I decided to try to remember the mothering models from my own childhood, as I keep thinking about the way all the mothers I know are perceived by all the children I know, and why, and how this will change as the children grow up. With really small children, I think most adults are sort of lumped together in the category of "adults," with some seeming nicer and some seeming stricter and some of no interest whatsoever. But as kids get older they are increasingly aware of parents, their own and other people's. I remember being around eleven or twelve and starting to assess the mothers of my friends, the mothers in particular, as unfortunately many of the dads were just shadowy figures who showed up for the big play and stood awkwardly at the back of the gym in their suits and expensive shoes.

And I remember the way some kids talked about their moms, too. I had a friend who was embarrassed by hers, and I knew this, even then. I had a classmate whose leaned on her too much for companionship, and I knew this too. And on one summer weekend right around this time I learned that one mother of my acquaintance was a drunk, a scary, mean one who passed as a regular mom at school pick-ups and other occasions, and I think this really hit home the notion that there was a whole range of mothers out there, and that I was extraordinarily lucky in mine.

I do feel a little perturbed when I think about some of the mothers I idealized at this time. They tended to be quite unlike mine, much as some of my friends around this time were quite unlike me. There was one in particular; I'll call her Mrs. L. She was young--she was probably just over 30 when I met her, if that, which is unfathomable to me now. She was blonde and pretty, like my mom, but flirty and trendy, unlike mine. Her husband, too, was extremely young, and both parents were sporty and outdoorsy in a golf and skiing kind of way mine were not. In fact, those are the qualities that were valued in this household: physical attractiveness, youth, sportsmanship, skiing prowess. There was no practicing the piano, or participation in the town library reading competition. Come to think of it, I am pretty sure neither the mom nor the dad had gone to college, and education was not a particular value either.

I thought Mrs. L was glamorous and gorgeous and fun. I can unwind a whole scene from a winter Saturday morning before we all went skiing when she opened a giant can of Spaghettios with an electric can opener and blithely spooned it into colored bowls for her four children and me, while wearing pale pink ski pants, her hair like the Barbie heads her daughter had upstairs: white blonde and styled in a flip. In what was hardly a coincidence, neither Spaghettios nor Barbies were found in my household, so a mom who looked like one, serving the other, for breakfast, before skiing, must have seemed like an alien creature to me. In fact, in my reel of this memory my mouth is a little bit open, in shock and awe, I suspect, as I watch Mrs. L flit about in her pretty kitchen.

Anyway. I am no Mrs. L. I am my mother's daughter, like her in some ways, unlike her in others, but formed in her household, under her care, exposed to her values and ideas. I wonder if Lily and Annika will have Mrs. L's and who they will be, and what they will see in them that they don't see in me, and--I guess ultimately what all this wondering is about--what kind of mothers they will be themselves, some day, if they choose to be mothers. And what I--and the work of these days of raising them--will have to do with it.

The Gloss of Time

Parenting young children leaves so little time for self-reflection. It is immediate, active and often chaotic, and when it is not, there is everything else to be done. But every once in a while I find myself wondering what my children will think of me, now, when they are grown. In other words, how will they remember me at this time in my life?

As I lay in bed beside Lily tonight, reading her goodnight story and letting my mind wander as much as I could while reading, I found myself thinking about the surprise party my mother threw for my father when he turned 30. This is one of my earliest, if hazy memories. When my dad turned 30 I was just 3. I don't remember seeing photographs of this event, and it's not the subject of family lore, so I trust my hazy memories more than I do those of the morning my father cut off his finger in the lawnmower, for example, which I really only "remember" because we have talked about it so much.

This party, though. It was winter; my father's birthday is at the end of November. I remember the door opening: a blast of cold air and a black sky. It was night, which maybe I remember because it must have been late for me to be up? He had been at a basketball game, or playing basketball; I remember basketball, but maybe I am conflating memories here. There was an awful lot of basketball in those days. Was there a poker table with a green felt top? My mother's hair was very blonde and flipped out at the ends. My father's hair was dark and thick. The clearest image is of his face, a crinkling around the eyes, a smile.

That's it. I don't remember guests or music or food or even being allowed to stay awake and watch; I don't know if I was. But to think now that they were 30--almost a decade younger than I am now--and that I was a fully actualized little girl with the capacity to notice my father's smile, remember it, is both thrilling and terrifying to me. Today, for example, right now as I sit at my desk, I am afraid that I will be crystallized in Lily's mind in these hideous black culottes that are stretchy and were tolerable to those who know me well during my last trimester and C-section recovery but are long overdue for a trip to an incinerator. Will she remember me with my unbrushed hair pulled back into a messy bun with a stretched-out elastic and purplish circles under my eyes? (The last time I saw my father he kept saying, "Is there something wrong with your skin? Under your eyes?" until my mother finally heard and snapped, "I think she's tired, Joel," shutting him up.)

And that's just the physical. Will she recall our ongoing exchange de jour, where she ignores me or does something she's not supposed to do, I reprimand or call attention to the ignoring or misbehaving, she bursts into tears and yells, "Just stop yelling at me, Mama. Just stop all the yelling," as though my being pushed to the brink has nothing whatsoever to do with her and is rather causing her undue distress? Will she remember that? Will I?

The funny thing is that I sort of think she won't. Not really. And I'm not sure I will either. Memory is so cagey. It condenses everything and then filters it out as it chooses, selectively, of course, in slices. And my memories of my parents are mostly scenes: this party, and then more clear and concrete scenes as I get older, and they do: the time my mother poured a cup of water on my father's head in the old kitchen, my father weeding in the garden, my mother sitting with her friend on the patio in front of the house, scraping wallpaper off of the walls. I remember many times they were kind: my father bringing me a Fribble when I had mono and a painful sore throat, my mother staying up late, late, late on a work night to help me finish a report on Clipper ships. (Why? Why Clipper ships?) And I remember fights: my father wandering the grounds of my high school because I was five minutes late to meet him, my mother, cold, refusing to get involved in a sibling battle, a stolen headband, idiocy.

But I realize, as I write this, that my memories are kind, less judgmental than I imagine I felt at the time, feel so often now. I remember the atmosphere more than the incidents, the sense of being loved. That, I think, is finally something to strive for.

Let It Be...Without Me

Note: No post yesterday on account of house being struck by lightning. I hope that's the only time I'll ever be able to use that excuse.

I recently had an exchange with an American parent living in Europe about the differences between the ways Europeans and Americans parent. We came to the joint conclusion that while many Europeans worship the child, many Americans today are fetishizing childhood in a way that, to me, seems detrimental to the child.

There are so many manifestations of this fetishization. For one, there are the baby and toddler "classes" that simply did not exist when I was born. I am not talking about piano lessons or drawing classes for older kids. I am talking about "enrichment activities" for pre-verbal children, sometimes babies who cannot yet walk. These classes are religiously attended where I live, and in the cities where many of my friends live, and I confess that I myself signed up for a handful of these classes when Lily was a toddler, largely out of my inability to listen to the voice in my head that told me they were inane. Or, a louder voice: that of my mother, who allowed and encouraged us to take all the classes we wanted when we were old enough to choose and desire them--and lord, we did--but who finds this new trend about as silly as taking $400 and ripping it up into confetti.

And although it has taken me a few years, I now both trust my instincts as a parent more, and have gathered sufficient empirical evidence to have determined that there is quite a bit of truth to the confetti argument. I wonder what would happen to this generation of children if their parents could just learn to step back?

Today, while playing out on the lawn by herself, Lily occupied well over two hours engaged in a game of her own devising. She took two small tents from the shed and placed them near each other on the lawn. She took a row of small chairs and footstools and set them up in rows. She had a cavalcade of dolls and animals arranged in various postures and locations, as well as countless other small objects she'd collected around the house and yard. There was scotch tape involved, and water. There was a full size stroller and two doll strollers she'd managed to connect with elaborate knots. All of the dolls and animals were dressed; those who didn't have ready-made clothes were wearing clothes she'd made with paper and leaves.

Every so often I would look out the window, amazed by how the world she was creating took shape. Not once did she ask me for help, or my opinion, or my feedback, or my praise. Once she appeared to be finished with the construction aspect of the project, she began to play. After a very long while, I made my way out in the yard, over to where she was playing. At first, she didn't even notice me. And then: "Oh, hi Mama. Do you by any chance want to be the bus driver?" Really, how could I say no?

Annika, if I am tempted to bring you to Baby French or Art for Tots or any other activity you cannot yet pronounce, I will buy you some more blocks, books or paints instead. And be the bus driver every once in a while. Although I suspect you won't need me to very often. There's somebody just waiting for you to be old enough to jump on the bus.

Thoughts on Babies and Dogs

Yesterday, with Annika in the Baby Bjorn, I was walking the dogs--two full-size collies--when a couple of women stopped me at the corner. They were speaking to each other in another language, German, I think, and didn't speak much English. After a few confusing minutes, during which it became clear their intentions were friendly, I finally realized they wanted to photograph the dogs.

This had actually happened once before, and although I find it odd--sort of like the way I find tourists photographing stationary objects such as the tree at Rockefeller Center odd--I see no reason to say no, so I stopped and let them take their pictures. When they were finished they thanked me, and one of them, struggling over the words and speaking loudly, the way I do when I attempt to use my French, said something along the lines of: We don't usually see anything like this in our country.

A neighbor, a guy I know who lives on my street, happened to be walking by as she said it, and he laughed. "We don't either," he said to the women. "That's just Amy."

I relay this anecdote as a conduit. I cannot count the number of times people, many of whom are related to me by blood or marriage and some of whom are strangers with opinions they feel the need to share, have made comments about the insanity of my choice to have those dogs. And it is my choice, in that I knew all along that I would be the one to feed and walk them, to nurture them on a daily basis, as--quite simply--I am the one who is always home.

The funny thing is that not for an instant have I ever minded the daily care of the dogs. They get fed twice a day, walked three times a day during the week, and every once in a while require a trip to a groomer or vet. Although there are times, such as when it is raining or cold, that I would prefer not to walk them, the work itself is simple, entirely physical in nature. And in return for their food and walks, as well as the easy physical affection I bestow upon them, these dogs give me the unconditional love pets are famous for, their own brand of uncomplicated affection, and loyal companionship around the clock. Whenever I get one of these "What were you thinking?" comments, I always smile to myself, knowing that I have the better end of the deal.

By now you may be wondering what, if anything, this has to do with parenting. If not for this past week, I would have a hard time knowing myself. But I never realized before how much the daily care of a baby has in common with the daily care of a dog. This was thrown into relief for me by virtue of the fact that Lily spent this past week with my parents in Massachusetts, leaving me--for the first time in years--alone with a baby for more than a couple of hours. Spending a full day with Annika requires feeding, airing, the facilitating of sleep, along with somewhat mindless narration and play. But the lack of emotional entanglement, of arguing, negotiating, manipulating and being manipulated, explaining, elaborating, enhancing, and calibrating in this week without a four-year-old around has made me realize that it is the mental work required of raising an older child that leaves me spent, not the excruciatingly dull, robotic work of unfolding diapers and filling bottles, over and over again.

I miss Lily. In fact, I feel bereft, a word I've never before used to describe my emotional state. But today, when I entered the living room and found three pairs of eyes, three nonverbal beings awaiting their lunches, I must confess my mind felt clean and clear.

Tomorrow, Lily returns. I think I'd better go rest up.

Just Say No!

A few weeks ago I went out to dinner with a group of women, half of whom I knew well and the other half of whom were recent acquaintances. Three of these women did not have children, and I realized something with a start as I looked around the table. These days, it is not so often that I spend much time with friends who don't have kids.

This is a mistake for many reasons, as was highlighted for me over the course of this evening, and as has become even more clear to me in subsequent weeks. Parenting young children can feel all-consuming. It almost always narrows the world of the parents, at least at first, when anxiety levels are high and the learning curve steep. And it throws parents together with other people who must spend time for the first time since childhood in playgrounds and ballet classes, preschools and swimming lessons: other parents.

But as I realize whenever I have a meal or even a conversation with my friends and relatives who do not have children, other parents are sometimes boring, quite often insufferable. It is all too easy to forget, apparently, that being a parent is not in and of itself of general interest, that one's children--even if known and loved by your companions--do not constitute a scintillating conversation by virtue of their sheer existence.

One of the women I was sitting next to at this dinner was a women I had met a few times before through a very close friend. I liked her the instant I met her, more so as the evening progressed. She is quick-witted, irreverent, widely read and traveled and an uninhibited daredevil who seems to speak her mind as a matter of course. She is also from my home state, and we have some superficial things in common that made it easy for us to feel familiar. I was pleased to see her again, pleased to be seated next to her.

When I asked her what she had been up to, she told me a really funny story about a recent trip she had taken that reminded me of a train ride I hadn't thought about in twenty years. I was about to start my story, when the woman across from us, who has two small children about the ages of my own, asked me a question about a school we are both interested in looking at for our older girls. I leaned forward, felt a familiar kind of tension flood my body. "Well," I began, but the woman next to me reached out and covered my mouth with her hand.

"No," she said. "I just can't do it tonight. I really like both of you, and I know you have other things to talk about besides kindergarten applications. Please." I felt my face grow hot. I saw the woman across from us color. I shook my head, mad at myself.

"You're right," I said. "I'm sorry."

"I'm sorry, too," the woman across from us added.

"Thank you," I said, and I meant it. And for the next hour and a half I had the best conversation about books that I've had in a very long time. It turned out that before we had kids, the woman across from me and I both used to be voracious readers. Now we are desperate readers, snatching moments late at night or on the subway back and forth to work. We spend way too much time cutting chicken breasts into tiny pieces and changing diapers. But that doesn't make it interesting.

I have been thinking of that gentle hand over my mouth since it happened. When I see this woman next, and I hope I do, I will thank her again. I can't be who I used to be if I let myself forget who she was.

I Remember When, Except I Don't

Occasionally it has occurred to me that I should take an index card and write on it my five favorite books, movies and songs, so when, on the rare occasions I am asked what they are, I will be able to say something other than the most recent halfway decent book, movie or song I have read, seen or heard. In other words, I have a retrieval problem with this sort of information, and although I know some people's brains work this way--are able to categorize and recall information like this--mine does not.

But as someone who spends a lot of time thinking and writing about my own past, you would think it would be easy for me to recall my own memories. It used to be easier. Lily has become consumed by asking me to "tell me a story about when you were a little girl." She also enjoys asking Ben, my parents, my grandmother and other adults in her life this question, but mostly she asks it of me, and for the first 500 or so times I willingly complied. And then, the well ran dry. I started telling some of the stories again and again: the old chestnuts, her favorites. The time Alison and I locked ourselves in the bathroom when we had a babysitter had a run. The time my doll Bess was left on a train, another. And, for some reason, a desperation number with paltry action: the time we were in my grandparents' swimming pool with my cousins and an unexpected thunderstorm came on all of a sudden, and we had to run out of the pool in the rain. "And there was lightning?" she always asks, and I wish, for the dozenth time that I could fabricate a tree being split in half, and I say, as I always say, "Later. Later there was a little lightning."

I have started to dread the question. She doesn't want the oldies but goodies anymore; she wants new material, is desperate for it. And although I have been on this earth for 38 1/2 years, with a near photographic memory for about 35 of those, I simply cannot pull any more childhood stories out of my hat. What in god's name did I do every single day for the 17 hours I was awake for the first 12 years or so of my life, which is pretty much all she is interested in? We played outside, when it was nice, all day every day. We played inside when it was not. But I have described our regular activities, and the extraordinary ones, so many times now that I should record my voice and hit play, saving my breath for those increasingly rare occasions when a new memory does squeeze its way into my consciousness.

This happened the other night, in fact. Annika stirred; I rolled onto my side and looked over at the digital clock: 3:54. All of a sudden I sat up in bed. The mouse! The mouse on the edge of the wicker trash basket in Martha's Vineyard in the middle of the night holding the wrappers of our secret candy stash in his curled mouse paws! I had never told Lily this story. For a psychotic, sleep-deprived instant I considered waking her to share it. I did not. And actually, when I awoke, clearer heads or at least a clearer version of my own, prevailed, and I waited until bedtime, until the inevitable question, and when she asked it, I smiled, breathed a lung-filling sigh of relief, and began.

I will write more on this subject. I want to talk about my fascination with my parents' and grandparents' childhood memories, and the legacy we leave with the memories we share, and how incomplete it is, and how certain of the stories take hold in the imagination of a child at a particular age for a particular reason (or not) and how this is both like and not like the stories we create of the past from photographs and other artifacts of the older people we love. But this is all for now. Except another quote, that came to me as I started to write this, from a book I have not read in a very long time:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Two Quotes and An Awful Lot of Cheese

"A joy shared is a joy doubled," wrote Goethe, and in my experience this is never more true than when the joy is being shared with a four-year-old. Today, to break up a mythical expanse of time, I took Lily and Annika to the Essex Street Market in the afternoon on the subway, Lily holding my hand, Annika in the Baby Bjorn. The Essex Street Market is a relatively new indoor market on the Lower East Side that I have been meaning to check out since it opened. Lily and I looked it up online, and when she saw that there were two cheese stalls and a chocolatier, she was sold. Annika had no choice in the matter, but we figured she could be easily bribed to comply.

The trip down was relatively effortless, if hard on my back, and the market itself was a perfect small-scale excursion. There were Latino groceries with bins of coconuts, stripped cactus paddles and long, hard cords of yuca. Both cheese stalls were excellent, if tiny, and I knew the proprietor of one and had a tangential relationship to the other, so we were given lots of free samples: a love I have imparted to Lily by virtue of experience if she doesn't come by it naturally. We bought two, one from each purveyor: a rich, sharp, runny cheese called Winnemere, and a firm, complex, tangy cheese called Brebis Pardou from the other. I had heard of these cheeses, both of which are very hard to come by, but had never tried either. To my great delight, they were Lily's favorites at each stall, and both women selling were impressed. "She has excellent taste," said one, as Lily nabbed a forbidden second sample of salami, figuring I would be too pleased to intervene.

After we rounded off our cheese purchases with a bag of handmade butter toffee and a bunch of miniature bananas for Annika, we decided to walk around the neighborhood for a little while. Uncharacteristically, I told Lily she could pick which streets to turn on; I cannot remember--and suspect she could not--the last time we had wandered around with noplace to be, no reason for our being there. Perhaps we never have.

When we got home, it was time for Annika's nap, and we put her in her crib and set up a cheese plate. We sat side by side on the stools at the butcher block in the kitchen, eating cheese and talking for about a half an hour. I must confess that we ate almost all the cheese. "I think it's going to be dinner soon," Lily said at one point, with a worried look at me, and I cringed, inwardly. Did I have to be such a stickler about snacks that an afternoon cheesefest made her nervous?

Much, although not all, of our conversation centered around the cheese: its texture, mouthfeel, change in flavor as it warmed, our preference for one or the other, and so on. Several things occurred to me as we sat and ate and talked. One was that I felt incredibly lucky to have a daughter who shares my love for and near worship of cheese. Another was that the afternoon had reminded me of a William Blake quote my mother has always loved. I'd never thought about it much before, and I'm not sure what he meant when he said it, but to me it captures what I should strive for when spending time with my children. Or more accurately, it captures what four-year-olds do without even trying. Here it is, and if you are a parent maybe it can help temper your exasperation, too:

To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower,
To hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.

The Job Not Taken (Involuntarily)

One summer when I was in college I got a coveted summer job at the historic inn just around the corner from my parents' house. I was to be a "groundskeeper," which doesn't sound so desirable in hindsight, but it paid well, would ensure I was outdoors all day and was, even more appealingly, a 3 minute walk from my bed, maximizing my morning sleep time.

On the first day, I showed up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed wearing cute shorts and a tennis camp T-shirt. The actual groundskeeper must have taken one look at me and made up his mind. He led me to an ancient-looking hand-operated lawnmower and told me to start, while pointing vaguely out at the horizon, where the inn's rolling lawns started about 4 miles away.

Or maybe 100 feet, but still. I had never actually operated a push mower, or any other kind of lawn mower. When I was three, my father cut off most of one finger in one while my sister and I watched, and although we always had plenty of chores around the house and yard, from this particular one we had been spared. I had done lots of weeding, and in fact, as I had confidently walked earlier that morning to the groundskeeper's shed, I had eyed the lovely flower gardens, imagining myself picking bouquets for the tables in the restaurants, plucking out the occasional clover.

Such was not to be my fate. It took me about an hour to get the thing running at all; I was too proud and too embarrassed to ask the guy how to do it. Once the motor surged, I felt a flood of relief: I still had all ten digits. And then I started pushing. It was hard, so much harder than I had imagined--or not bothered to--any time I had seen somebody else behind one on our own lawn or elsewhere. I have never been physically strong, and after 10 minutes my arms and legs ached with effort of pushing the mower through the tall grass.

After half an hour I had blisters on both hands as well as my feet, clad in unsensible sandals, and tears welled in my eyes as I struggled to turn the heavy contraption at the end of an uneven row. I looked at what I had done so far. The lawn looked as though a drunken alien had failed to complete some kind of signal visible from space for his home planet compatriots. I couldn't do it; I couldn't keep going. But I had to, because although I have become expert at the art of the half-assed job, I have never been a quitter.

By four o'clock, I had been fired. "Not for you," the groundskeeper had said, eyeing my progress, or lack thereof, and I walked home more slowly, head down, ignoring the flowers and the little brook we had caught sunfish in as children. I was exhausted, too physically spent and demoralized to even feel upset about the loss of the job. The next morning I could barely walk. My hands and feet scabbed over. And to top it off, I had been scorched. My face was so red my freckles faded into the background.

Why am I telling you this, remembering this now? Because at the end of today, after a twenty-four hour cycle of being the primary caretaker for two small, angelic-looking little girls, a cycle that included interludes with other people, a number of meals, and a modicum of sleep for each of us, it occured to me that compared to this, that day at the inn--my foray into assistant groundskeeping--was literally a walk in the park. How on earth do people do this?

I'll keep you posted.

What Goes Around, Comes Around

Sometimes Lily says things that cause me to shiver in recognition, recognition of a former self I can no longer recall so well on my own. Today, she said to me, with no trigger I could identify, "Mama, I don't want to be a grown-up. I want to stay a kid forever." I couldn't even speak for a moment.

"I know what you mean," I said, finally, not sitting next to her on the subway at all but in my childhood bedroom on the night of December 10th, watching the minute hand on the clock draw closer to 12. When this happened, I had decided, and it was my tenth birthday, my childhood was officially over. Double digits. The beginning of the end. I curled up under the covers and wept.

Lily thought my response was funny. She giggled. "You don't know what I mean, silly," she said. "You're a grown-up."

"I was a kid once, too," I said.

"And did you want to stay a kid?" I thought about how to answer this. The last thing I want is to pass on my own neuroses in ways that are not genetic and therefore less avoidable. But I didn't want to lie. It was a real question that deserved a real answer.

"Sometimes," I said. Her eyes were wide and serious.

"But do you right now? Wish you were still a kid." Again, I thought. It had been a long day. We were all hot and tired and cranky, and we had dinner and bath-time and bed on the agenda, a series of events that when done solo leaves me depleted at best.

"Yes," I said. She nodded, somberly.

We rode the rest of the way in silence. We both had a lot to think about.

Bugs are Good for the System, Too

It had a bug in it, and I drank it anyway.

That might be the subtitle of my collection of parenting essays. It is certainly the subtitle of my evening.

The "it" in question is the glass of wine I drank up on the roof deck a few hours ago as I sat by myself in the twilight, high above the city streets, surrounded by rooftops and thousands of windows, behind which likely sat some other parents with their own glasses of wine, equally desperate for an hour--just a hour--alone.

I say this is likely, but in fact I know it to be true for at least five or six parents around the country, for as I sat up on my roof deck, in blissful solitude, I made a few phone calls when it grew too dark to read, and every single person I reached, between the ages of 30 and 60+ expressed to me some level of angst about their children, about the job they'd done this day in particular regarding them, and this in spite of the fact that parenting was neither the covert nor ostensible reason for my call.

I have to say, this made me feel a little better about the fact that I had been pushed out of my own front door by a groundswell--a tidal wave--of exhaustion, defeatism, anxiety, anger, and sheer grime the instant I closed the door behind me after depositing Annika unceremoniously in her crib. This day was like any other, twenty-four hours long, but it felt like eighty, and suddenly I couldn't take it, being a mother, for one second more.

My provisions: aforementioned glass of wine, still bug-free, the most recent New Yorker magazine, my phone. I forgot the Hershey bar with almonds I'd bought guiltily at the drug store while picking up a prescription--guiltily because I spend so many hours explaining to Lily why we don't eat junky candy from the drug store and then buy and hide it like a CIA operative with a career-threatening sugar addiction. And I don't even like candy that much.

The funny thing is that nothing out of the ordinary even happened today, except for the fact that I didn't work in daylight hours, meaning that I was actively on parenting duty all day, from daybreak--literally--to that moment of flight. Lily had a friend over, and they covered themselves from head to toe with what looked like Native American tribal signs in magic marker. When I told them both that they should know better, they blamed each other. Annika followed me or Lily, variously, around the apartment, screeching. She fell twice, once forward, once backward, part and parcel of the whole learning to walk thing, but no less traumatic for being a stage. We went up on the roof for lunch. Lily and her friend dumped water on each other. Annika ate some dirt. Lily explained to her friend that her mother thinks this is okay because it's good for the "commune system." I wondered how long it would take Lily's friend to tell her parents that Lily's mom lets their baby eat dirt. And on and on.

But by the time Ben got home, I was ready to comb the banana out of my hair, stop explaining why rice cakes aren't dinner and burn all the board books in the middle of 16th Street. I understand that repetitive sounds are good for language acquisition. It's just that they kill brain cells in those over the age of 35. I made it through dinner, through my 500th reading of Strega Nona, through the agonizing tooth-brushing session during which I suppressed what I always suppress: the intense desire to reveal that brushing your teeth three times a day for the ridiculous length of time advocated by our overpriced "pediatric dentist" will not actually guarantee admission to Yale. And then, I fled.

As it turns out, one of the conversations I had up on the roof, the final one before my Dante-esque descent, did in fact make me feel grateful, intensely, profoundly so, for my two little devils. But the knowledge that every day, in every year, for the entire duration of the proposition, holds the possibility of agony made me feel in my today, a lot less alone. It's really hard to be a parent. It's really hard for everybody, and--bite your tongue, I am telling myself--it's hard if your kids are ten months old or 38. I'm not an age concealer: that's meant to be a nod to you, Mom and Dad. Thanks for never saying to me: My god. It never ends.

Which brings me to the last scene of my roof deck adventure. I will switch unsubtly to the present tense to underline the experience for you.

It is 9 o' clock. I am standing by the elevator door on the sixth floor waiting for the elevator to arrive. My phone and my keys are in my pocket, my unread New Yorker under my arm. I am holding my not quite finished glass of wine--alas, even under the most stressful circumstances I am only driven to drink in minuscule amounts. I notice, casually, that there is a tiny bug in the wine. Then I spot another. I consider the tiny bugs. I flick them out with my forefinger. And then, I drink it anyway.

It was just that kind of a day.

Which Came First?

Among the many subjects that are of great interest to Lily these days are chickens and death. The other night we were eating chicken for dinner when she remarked, casually, "These chickens had to get made dead for us to eat them," or something to that effect. "And they probably don't like it." I thought for a second. "Well, they don't know we're eating them. They're already dead," I said. She cleaned her plate.

Tonight, when I was putting her to bed, she said, "Mama, I love you so much that I will never stop loving you." I was touched. "Me too, Lily," I said. "I love you that much too." She furrowed her brow. "But I guess we'll have to stop loving each other when we're dead," she said. "I will love you forever," I answered immediately, hoping there was no chicken component to this conversation.

And yesterday, in the car, as the two of us were driving somewhere, the firm voice from the way back seat. "Mama?" I caught her eye in the rearview mirror. "Yes?" The characteristic gesticulating. "How do chickens make eggs?" Forgive me for not launching into a detailed ovulation explanation. We were in the car; I have to speak really loudly for her to hear me when I'm driving. I was distracted; I could tell she was just making idle conversation anyway. "Inside their bodies," I said. "We'll read a book about it later. I'll explain it better when we're not in the car." She nodded, already onto something else. But then, a few minutes later. "Mama? If the egg comes from inside the chicken, where did the first chicken come from?"

Oh, Lily. If I only I knew.

Confessions of a Former Baton Twirler (Got Your Attention, No?)

It occurs to me now, on the eve of the Fourth of July, that this used to be a pretty big holiday for me. When I was a kid, we had traditions for this day as well-established and consistent as those for Thanksgiving and Christmas. At noon, we would join what felt like the rest of the town for the parade. There were a few years when I was actually in the parade, once--and I have not thought about this in a solid thirty years--as a baton twirler. That's something that nobody I know now knows about me: that when I was in first grade I knew how to twirl a baton.

Then, after the local Bluebird troops had marched (I was one of those too) down the old Boston Post Road with the Rotary Club, the Town Selectman, and so on, we would meet up at the centrally located home of some good family friends for a post-parade get-together. After that, to my grandparents' house, to the pool, to convene with our cousins for a cook-out. And finally, to fireworks, always fireworks: sitting on a hill with some assortment of friends or relatives for a display set off by the local fire department.

It was a day I looked forward to, a real holiday, a celebration. One year I rode on an antique fire truck in the parade with a bunch of my friends. Another year my aunt sold silk-screened T-shirts she'd made at the fair in the park on the parade route. I still have two of these: Lily and Annika will wear them tomorrow. Hot dogs on the lawn of the First Parish Church, running for candy thrown by the teenagers on the lumber company's extravagant float, s'mores at dusk with my cousin Andy, and the climactic and yet definitively final event of the day: lying on the grass with my hands behind my head looking up at the black clear sky, waiting for the first burst of light.

When did I stop caring about the Fourth of July? In college? I can't remember. The truth is, I am even a teeny bit patriotic. Okay, more than that. In fact, although I occasionally become disgusted with a wide variety of government officials and policies and threaten to move to France, I am also the granddaughter of three immigrants who came here under fairly desperate circumstances and seemed grateful for the opportunity until the day that they died. I think as a child, my now sort of embarassing patriotism was linked to the Fourth in my mind; in other words, it wasn't just about the hot dogs and the parade.

Is the Fourth of July a kids' holiday? Lily doesn't seem too into it, but then again, I have given her no traditions or sense of meaning for the day. Ought I start? I don't know. It seems somehow exhausting and artifical to start making a big fuss, for a number of reasons. I think I will explain to her tomorrow that we are celebrating the birth of the country in as simple a way as I can, and see what she has to say about that.


This feels super boring to me. I apologize. I will be back to the nitty gritty work tomorrow. I'm feeling it a little bit, though, writing this. Happy Fourth of July.

The Pants Are Always Patterned on the Other Side of the Bus

I took a few days off. With no notification or explanation. And guess what? I'm not going to explain myself now. Is that wrong? All I will say is that I was wondering over these past few days if I would be able to write productively, or at all, if I didn't know that I had to write here, and guess what? I didn't. So the blog's back on. Big time. Because boy do I need to be writing. It feels awful not to be.

To ease back in, I will relay an anecdote from a ride on the bus last week with another mother and daughter, whom Lily and I both love.

We are seated across from each other: me and Lily, this mother and her girl, who's a year older than Lily, almost exactly. It's been a long day for everybody. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, Lily bursts into tears, remains quietly sobbing. What's wrong? I ask her, putting my arm around her shoulders, raising my eyebrows at the other mom. She sniffles and finally is able to get out the words: It's my pants. I just hate all of my pants. Did she say "pants?" I ask myself, because it makes no sense to me, this has never come up before, she is not particularly into clothes, and she happens to be wearing really cute new pink linen pants that I bought knowing she would love them because I am prone to pink-aversity, meaning she knows this was a gift from the heart. Yes, my pants, she wails, quietly, as we are, after all, on the bus. Why? I sputter, at a loss. Because they're plain. They have no patterns. Every other kid in the world has patterns on their pants. I resist the urge to spout the "if every other kid in the world jumped off a bridge" chestnut as I notice that our young friend in the seat facing us is wearing camouflage pants. Aha. Honey, I say, as comfortingly as I can manage considering the ludicrousness of the situation, I think we can find you some pants with patterns. This is a solvable problem. Just then the wearer of the coveted camouflage pants starts to sob a little herself. Her mother's eyebrows shoot up too. What's wrong? the mother says, and we all await the answer. Of course. I should have seen it coming. Are you ready? Here it is. I want my pants to be plain.

There is a parenting lesson here, inherent to this story, but I will leave it unanalyzed, will let the pants, in this case, speak for themselves.