Monthly Archive for June, 2008

I’m Really Here, Now (Even in Wal-Mart)

What surprised me as I stood in a Wal-Mart off I-40 in Hickory, North Carolina, was not so much that I was standing in a Wal-Mart off I-40 in Hickory, North Carolina. The exigencies of a Blankie left far behind at school can leave one in some pretty surprising places. What surprised me was that I didn’t really, that much, mind being in a Wal-Mart in Hickory, North Carolina.

I don’t mean to offend regular Wal-Mart-goers. Nor am I unaware of the PR campaign they have undertaken, in which, I am told, workers are actually being offered full-time hours and benefits. It’s just that I object to the whole concept of bigger and cheaper marketing and sell-me-more-junk-in-one-place. At least Target gives loads of money to local schools and sponsored the Minerva Awards at the California Women’s Conference I attended in 2006, giving a good chunk of money to some pretty impressive organizations, like the first women’s shelter in California. Reminding myself of these things makes me feel justified in wandering the aisles of Target looking for, yes, bigger and cheaper and more junk to buy.

As for the Wal-Mart in which I found myself, I was nothing short of grateful for its presence. We were 45 minutes into a two-hour drive with a child who, despite my request, had been allowed to take a nap at school, awakening just in time to be strapped into a car seat for two hours. “He only slept an hour!” the apologetic teacher told me, invoking nightmare images of a cranky, tired child who would not, on principle, consider a second nap, no matter how long the car trip.

So, when Jake started bellowing, “Bubby! Bubby!” at the top of his lungs and I uttered in a voice dripping with panic, “I left Bubby at school!” Mike sped for the next exit in the throes of self-preservation. And there, over a rise in the scrubby landscape of gas stations and bad Chinese restaurants, we discovered WalMart and the oversized Bubby I christened “Bubba.” (”‘Tuck! ‘Tuck!” Jake cries whenever the extra weight of all that superfluous fabric stymies his attempts to cradle the entire Bubba in his arms as he is accustomed to do with the two smaller, finer Bubbies we managed to leave behind in Asheville that day).

My boy sated with his swath of soft polyester, Mike filling the gas tank I had neglected prior to starting on our trip, I reflected on why I felt perfectly okay with my trip to Wal-Mart. The people had been friendly; Mike had traced an unerring path to the baby blankets, avoiding the horrors of powdered soft drinks made of high fructose corn syrup, chemicals, and advertising; and Bubba was sort of reasonably priced. Fifteen dollars, after all, is a small price to pay for peace and an appeased toddler.

But really, I thought, as I stared back at the legions of cars stacked in the Wal-Mart parking lot, I felt okay being in Wal-Mart because I was feeling so okay being where I am in this world. I could venture outside my usual comfort zone because I have so firmly removed myself from the old zone that provoked comfort-anxieties in the first place.

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Mothers, Daughters, and “The Eye of the Tiger”: How a Bad Song from 1982 Moved Me Closer to Stillness

On Father’s Day morning, when I started the car in the parking lot of EarthFare (Asheville’s local Whole Foods-ish place I love to shop for groceries even though we really can’t afford it), I had one of those delicious moments that happens when I hear “Eye of the Tiger” on the radio.

Immediately, it was 1982. I was no longer sitting in my practical Honda CRV but in the passenger seat of my friend Deb’s Prelude, sunroof open, music blasting, the two of us singing in unself-conscious joy some of the stupidest lyrics ever to grace a Top 40 song. We were sixteen years old, pumping our fists in the air as only sixteen-year-olds and sadly misguided middle-aged men with beer guts and Confederate flag tee-shirts can. We screamed of the fierceness of the eighties, with Deb’s short-over-the-ears, long-and-puffy-on-top hair style and my inclination toward wearing a rolled bandanna around my forehead under my bangs. Combine the two of us, and you had the lead singer of Loverboy.

(Hey, guess what! Loverboy has a website and they’re still recording, albeit without the useless forehead bandanna action. This fact for some reason brings me renewed joy at the thought that maybe I’m not so terribly old after all.)

At the same time, I was sharing a grin at the memory with Jake, sitting there in his throne of a car seat, his ready smile on display. And I was deeply in love. With my boy, my place in the world, maybe even — despite the fact that I had spent the past two days with my parents — my forty-one-year-old self. For just a moment, it all clicked into place. The alternate universes of the days when I was independent and child-free and these times of confusion and love that come with motherhood folded together like an accordion card so that one unifying picture sat on top.

It was a brief moment of clarity on a day I would uncharacteristically spend with both the father of my child and my own father.

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Driving with the Brakes On

I had a Very Bad Moment walking Jake home from school yesterday.

We were strolling down a moderately trafficked street — the kind of residential road motorists use inappropriately as a through-way, inducing the residents to have cement traffic calmers installed which end up acting only as a challenge to the faster drivers but at least slow them down to 30 mph or so. Jake was happily waving a bright yellow wooden ball he had discovered in the stroller bag and yelling, “Bahl! Bahl!” to any and all who would listen.

As we ambled along in front of some neat little houses, Jake took the opportunity to toss his bright yellow wooden ball down a rather steep driveway.

“BAHL!” he shouted in the sort of toddler tone that warns you there is far worse to come if you give up the ball for lost and continue your walk home.

Off I dashed, down the steep driveway, the ball infuriatingly gathering speed as it skipped along just beyond my reaching fingertips. Some neighbor dogs began barking at my intruding figure, and I glanced guiltily up at the owner shushing them. He did not seem to take me for a thief, so I kept after the ball as it took a final flying leap and landed in a patch of vines adorned with a number of dead leaves a strikingly similar color of yellow.

Victory finally attained, I trotted back up the driveway, yellow ball held aloft, to find that our blase attitude toward the stroller brake broken during a plane trip four months ago was finally coming back to bite me. It’s not that we don’t know it’s kind of dangerous to push your child around in a stroller in the Smoky Mountains without benefit of a brake. Nor that I failed to see the absurdity of propping it just so on the sidewalk in front of our house so it would neither roll down the hill unattended nor obediently back away when Jake flailed his body in objection to taking a ride. It’s just that we’re so busy and there’s always something else that needs fixing.

Fixing the stroller brake jumped to the top of my to do list, however, the second I reached the top of the driveway to see Jake’s stroller sitting in the middle of the street with two cars stopped in front of it.

Jake looked at me with an expression of some confusion as I scrambled after him in a state of mild shock. “One of those days,” I said lamely to the elderly woman in the first car.

Her open-mouthed stare of purest horror — the people they let have kids these days! — will likely stay with me forever. It sure did induce a good flood of tears when I finally made it to the privacy of our living room.

Just when I had been willing myself to the point of believing I do have what it takes to be a mother.

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At Least Now I Can Eat Dinner at a Normal Time, or Something I Actually Can Control

Most people probably consider it an obvious choice to eat dinner with your child. It is, after all, the foundation of all those sitcoms we grew up with, isn’t it? Remember Richie Cunningham … eating hamburgers at Arnold’s restaurant with The Fonz. Or … the hijinks taking place in the otherwise unused kitchen during those forbidden episodes of Three’s Company I snuck up past my bedtime to watch. Now that I think about it, the only dinner eating on television I can remember seemed to take place during the once-a-year Thanksgiving episodes of Friends.

Okay, so maybe that explains why, until last night, dinner as a family wasn’t part of our family ritual.

Honestly, we figured with Mike getting home at seven o’clock, dinner as a family was sadly out of the question. By seven I am usually drawing a bath for Jake because I once read it’s a good way to relax your child before bedtime. Never mind that Jake resists any such relaxing bathtime properties and any modicum of tiredness the bath might inspire is cast off the second his father walks through the door. In fact, the Daddy-inspired adrenaline mixed with a good dose of daylight savings time and a lack of decent curtains in any of the bedrooms upstairs makes bedtime a chore, so whoever does the honors tends to creep wearily downstairs to face a 9 p.m. dinner in front of the television.

You’d think we would have come up with a new plan a little bit sooner.

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Is There Such a Thing as a Graceful End to Vacation?

I can’t say I remember ever having had a graceful end to any vacation in my life.

I tend to be the type who gets stuck somewhere between the utter relaxation that is, to me, the whole point of a vacation (soldier on, you exploring, traveling, learn-something-on-vacation types, but do it without me) and the pressing urgency to do everything I let myself not do during my vacation that awaits me on my return. The feeling resembles nothing so much as my worst memories of being stuck in a car on long trips with a great need for a bathroom and none to be found for thirty or forty miles — a sweating, suspended state in which I know I will be fine but wonder when exactly the relief of normality will return. (We spent a good amount of time in a car on this trip, by the way, and I am happy to say I experienced no bladder distress.)

While I’ve had few peaceful vacation’s ends, I feel pretty certain that none has been quite as harrowing as watching my child scream out of a face full of red blotches and throw himself from his teacher’s arms as I left him at school this morning.

Sure, it was fun for all concerned spending a whole week watching him read books with Grandma and play ball with cousin Jim, but much of my vacation arose from the fact that Grandma and Jim were providing the necessary distraction to let me . . . ah, just not have to be the sole entertainment. And so, much as I would love to continue spending such time with my boy, it is not possible back home in Asheville where neither Grandma nor cousin Jim live.

Unfortunately, neither, it appears, is it possible for me to hang onto the modicum of sanity that descended over me when thrust into a place where I had, like, social things that were more pressing than work.

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