As you may or may not know, Labor Day is a celebration of workers — a “yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country,” according to the Department of Labor.
What I want to know is who figured giving people a day off from work was a break from their labor. More particularly, I would like to invite anyone who thinks Labor Day is a nifty holiday to spend it with me. Especially Mike’s bosses, who deemed that he had to actually go to work on Labor Day, thereby increasing my parental labor exponentially.
Yes, yes, yes, I know that my children’s caregivers deserve a day off from their work. I’d deserve a day off too, if I actually had the kind of work where I had to wait for a day off to not work.
Nor do I mean to undermine the ideological underpinnings of the holiday, even though a good 80% of the country — including some recent Presidents — would if they knew it was created by the nineteenth century labor movement, which owed more than a little bit to socialism.
All I’m saying is that sometimes, when you have young children, a day off from work ends up being far more work than a day on. Toss in an Apple Festival and the last day the JCC pool is open for the summer, and you have just the right elements to reduce a mother to a puddle of tears.
Of Apples and Swim Diapers
I was the one who chose to fit in a visit to the Apple Festival before heading to the pool. My reasoning had something to do with the concept that if I could just get Jake good and tired out my evening juggling two small children into their respective beds would be magically simplified. Somewhere my mind was conjuring up mythical images of me settling contentedly onto the couch all by myself to watch Mad Men in one sitting.
The sharp reader will immediately spot the flaw in my reasoning. Tired children, it turns out, do not always fall easily into bed. And, more to the point, tired children will demand a whole lot more of your energy in the time before you put them to bed than they will on a normal night when they are not so tired and therefore not in bed so early. If you’ve ever seen a performance of “Condensed Shakespeare” — in which the actors riff through something like every one of his plays in an hour or so — you have some inkling of how a toddler approaches an evening shortened by lack of sleep.
But it’s one thing to have a rational idea of how the evening will end and quite another to have the courage to not try tiring the toddler out. After fewer than three years of motherhood, I can’t say I’m quite there yet.
So off to the Apple Festival we went, watching the clouds clear as we headed south out of Asheville and into Republican-dominated, suburban, retirement-community territory. Somehow, these threats seem like not such a big deal until you park your car and walk down tidy Main Street with a disorienting sense of displacement. Where, you wonder, are the people who don’t wear pleated khaki shorts and tee-shirts advertising a church-sponsored activity? Why, you ask, would I want to eat the ubiquitous curly fries at what is plainly billed as a celebration of the apple harvest?
I’m willing to concede that we made it harder on ourselves by spending the previous day at a downtown Asheville street festival full of dreadlocks, people on stilts, vegan food carts, and — a spectator sport that has won Mike’s heart — bicycle jousting, in which grown men wrap themselves in foam, cardboard, and electrical tape “armor,” ride toward each other at full throttle, and, literally, joust. This procedure is otherwise known as falling off their bicycles and bouncing down the hill until their momentum is slowed by the crowd of onlookers. Jake was quite concerned for their safety, though easily distracted by how cool it was that they taped stuffed horse heads onto their handlebars.
We did finally make it to Apple Festival face painting, however, Jake’s new favorite fair activity. Once he had an orange butterfly on his cheek, he seemed ready to face the fest. Or at least to scout for ice cream. For the record, he skipped the apple ice cream that seems to be one of the Apple Festival’s main draws and opted for plain vanilla.
And then he spotted it — the parking lot full of bouncy houses and the bouncy circus train through which he sprinted twice at two dollars a pop and the rickety carnival rides in which he thankfully had no interest. And, most importantly, the giant inflatable slide that sparked in me a distinct memory of dragging him up to the top of one when I was about eight months pregnant. This time, I snickered, Mike could do the honors.
No need, it turned out, as we approached the slide just in time to see his friend Wendell come catapulting down.
“Wendell!” Jake yelled as if it were a normal day on a normal playground and just the sort of place he would expect to find one of his best friends, buried among the scary bear-man looking dads munching on oversized greasy turkey drumsticks and the sharp-featured feral children in crew cuts bearing the whisper of a bout with lice who seemed bent on trampling any children under three in their path.
Four frenetic turns on the slide with Wendell later, Jake expended a good amount of energy on a meltdown when we refused to spend the rest of the afternoon letting him continue the activity. Instead, we bribed him with one more two-dollar dash through the bouncy circus train that he enjoyed for reasons not entirely apparent to either of us.
Hence, by the time he lay down on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant where we ate lunch and pretended not to hear us suggesting he rethink this choice, I had plainly achieved my goal of tiring out my child. In fact, it is a miracle for which I have absolutely no explanation that he stayed awake for the whole post-lunch car ride back to Asheville.
We arrived at our house right on schedule to throw together a quick bag of pool items and head out for the last few hours of the worlds’ best instant play date until next Memorial Day.
As I leaned into the car gathering baby and all the items that baby entails (diaper bag, extra blanket for cool morning air, multiple toys for long car ride) Jake suddenly dashed toward the house.
“I need to poop!” he yelled.
Yes, dear reader, this turns out to be another post about poop.
I’ll spare you the details, other than to explain that Jake had just spent a week being absolutely perfect about not peeing in his new Big Boy underpants but had not had the same luck with the old Number Two. Hence, when he declared that he needed to poop and willingly ran to the potty to do so, I was feeling like we had achieved a turning point.
It was at this very moment that a friend who had spent the day at the JCC pool called. “Can’t talk now,” I huffed into the phone. “Got a poop happening!”
Being a mother herself, she did not require any additional explanation. And, being a mother herself, when I called to tell her it was a false alarm, she told me she was dealing with some crisis of her own and would have to call me back.
Which she did when I was quite convinced that Jake really was going to pull off the poop in the potty. I was wrong, but wisely held off returning her call through several rounds of, “I can’t do it,” a few cries of “I want a diaper!” and many, many, many returns to the potty.
And then, finally, forty-five minutes after our dash from the car — he did it.
I called my friend. “We’re on our way,” I reported. “I’ve just got to feed Lily.”
Since my friend was planning on being there for another hour or so I felt that there was no need to rush. Instead, I put Jake in his swim diaper, trunks, and swim shirt and asked him if he could play by himself while I fed Lily.
As a member of this household, Jake is all too well aware that “I need to feed your sister” really means, “I need to take your sister into an airtight, distraction-free room where the sounds of her brother singing songs in Hebrew and the click click-clack of the dogs’ toenails do not drift by, causing her to abruptly spin away from me looking for all the fun she is missing while she nurses.” My child, I have determined without a whole lot of melancholy, is not long for this particular mother-daughter activity.
Even without the distractions, Lily’s meal didn’t take more than ten or fifteen minutes. Triumphant and still on time, I carried her back into Jake’s room. Where he lay on his bed next to a pile of books snoring away.
“Are you napping?” I said just a little too loudly in the hopes that whatever the answer might have been a moment ago, it would now be a resounding “no.” “Or do you want to go to the pool?” I added in a cheap but effective shot.
“I want to go to the pool,” Jake responded before his eyes were even properly open. “And,” he added by way of information, “I peed in my diaper.”
Anyone who has had any experience at all with swim diapers knows that the term “swim diaper” is a misnomer. Diapers — at least as I understand it — are absorbent. Swim diapers — designed as they are to be in water and not to cause the child wearing them to drown — are not. One mom-friend of mine aptly described swim diapers as “Saran Wrap.”
“What?!” I cried.
A picture of Jake just a few weeks before standing in the dining room in his swim diaper watching a stream of pee make its way out one swim trunk leg and down to the floor appeared before my eyes. The fact that I was witnessing a repeat performance was rendered all the more distressing by Jake’s pooping triumph just minutes before. How, I asked the gods and goddesses of potty training, could we have had such a breakthrough in the hard part of potty training only to have Jake — who had not peed in an inappropriate place while conscious for nearly a week — fall down on the easy part of the job?
“I peed in my diaper,” Jake repeated, looking just the slightest bit alarmed.
And then I did one of those things that any reasonable parent would hide from the world and just try to put behind her. I grabbed my poor little boy who, to his mind, had done nothing more than pee in a diaper just as he had thousands of times already in his life, and yelled, “Your swim shirt is wet! You have pee all over your swim suit! If you didn’t have another one you couldn’t even go to the pool!”
To his credit, Jake focused on the positive. “I want to go to the pool!” he crowed.
“Well, now you have to put on a new swim suit,” I snarled. I plopped Lily down on the changing table, telling myself as I do every single time I leave her there that it is not safe. Then I left her there anyhow and headed for Jake’s bed.
It was when I found the big puddle of pee in the sheets that I really started to cry. The kind of crying that happens only when your friends are about to leave the pool and you are all alone with sheets that need changing and threatening rain clouds are gathering to drive every possible play mate away from the pool and you happen to be even more exhausted than your two-and-a-half-year-old because you did not get to lie down on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant before lunch.
When You Have No Choice but to Go On
If this were just a story about me it would end right there, with me curled up in a ball on the bed crying because that’s all I felt I could do at the moment.
But, of course, it’s not, as no story will be about me until my kids have lives of their own. Or maybe until they move out. Have their own children? Okay, perhaps I will never again have a story that does not in some way involve my children.
At any rate, in this particular story, I could not remain lying on my son’s bed next to the big wet urine stain while Jake said optimistically, “We’re going to the pool!” I had, after all, promised him just that, and he plainly failed to see why peeing in a swim diaper should have any impact on this promise. Plus, even in my debilitated state, I understood that it is probably not the healthiest thing in the world to let your child watch you cry helplessly over what you know you will at some point recognize as no big deal.
So I gathered myself into a wispy little ball of can-do and got us ready for the pool.
“I’m not taking any snacks,” I warned nastily as I threw a bowl of cheese crackers into the pool bag. “I can’t take you in the big pool,” I added, noting that even if I had the least desire to put on a bathing suit and even I weren’t in urgent need of a bikini wax I had an infant under my care as well and no promise of volunteer arms to hold her while I held Jake in the big pool, so it really had nothing to do with Jake peeing in his swim diaper.
Undisturbed by these dire facts, Jake raced out to the car under a canopy of truly ominous clouds. I shivered and tucked a blanket around Lily’s feet as I strapped her into her car seat, recalling with only a slight bit of regret the runny nose she sported the morning after my last foolish foray to the pool in the rain. This would be yet another one of those times when my second child’s needs were ignored by the louder demands of my firstborn.
We pulled into the JCC parking lot heralded by a roll of thunder. Jake chose not to hear it when he could see the promised pool.
I, for my part, could not see my friend. She had obviously left with the last bit of sunshine. As, apparently, Jake’s friend Quentin was doing at this moment.
I pulled into the spot next to Quentin’s car and waved a much cheerier hello than I was feeling to his mother. “Are you guys leaving?” I asked, preparing to choke back another wave of sorry-for-myself at her answer.
“We just got here,” Quentin’s mother said, looking skeptical. “I figured it’s the last of the pool for the season so I would take him for an hour before dinner.”
It was as if the heavens opened up and rays of sunshine accompanied by a chorus of angels shone down on us. Except for the rays of sunshine part. And the chorus of angels.
Instead, it rained on the beach umbrella under which Quentin’s mom, Lily, and I sat chatting away to the chorus of our boys playing gleefully in the mud. Jake enjoyed himself, I enjoyed myself, and Lily quite enjoyed sitting in a different lap for a change.
And when it came time to leave I had a tired, happy boy with a tired, happy mother. We ate scrambled eggs together and Jake took a bath, and he even “read” books by himself while I nursed Lily to sleep.
And when the night was done, I deemed it a lovely, perfect day indeed.
Why It’s Good Sometimes to Have No Choice but to Go On
The real gift of that disheartening hour of potty training and stripping Jake’s bed and trying as I always seem to be trying to Just. Get. Out. Of. The. House. (so much like that dream where I am trying to run but my legs are so very, very heavy and I can’t move) was that it was all necessary for the magical moment when Quentin’s mother said, “We just got here.”
Any earlier or any later — any one of our crises removed from the equation — and we might have arrived at a pool full of kids Jake didn’t know. And when Jake doesn’t know other kids at the pool, Jake doesn’t play. Instead, he clings to my leg whining. Or grabs Lily’s foot like it’s the corner of one of his blankets and sucks his thumb. Either way, he does not tire himself out in the way I so very much needed at the end of my Labor Day.
Instead, we arrived after a pee-in-the-swim-diaper crisis to a lovely hour spent with a friend who just happened to have a son who could keep my son happily occupied. And I let go of all the frustrations I had been feeling and counted myself very, very lucky.
Not only lucky to have this friend and this place and this life. But lucky, indeed, to have encountered what seemed to be a bunch of roadblocks in front of my trip to the pool, made it over them, and found this reward at the end.
The lesson, it seems to me, is two-fold. First, what seems like a personal blight from the Universe on your small life — everything going wrong while you’re all alone and unable to handle a single extra thing on your plate — might just be a gift. Even without a small child standing over you chanting, “I want to go to the pool,” you have a reason to stop crying and keep going. Though the small child certainly helps.
Second, things do happen for a reason. Which is not to say there is only one way they can possibly happen. Only that nothing is ever really a mistake, even putting swim diapers on your not-quite-fully-potty-trained boy when he is bound to lie down on his bed for a short nap. See it through, keep an open mind, try your best to trust that you will end up in a good place, and you just might.
In other words, trust that you can handle anything, as long as you don’t make it bigger than it is. Cry and move on. Be open to the possibilities.
And you too may find yourself enjoying a friend in a light summer rain to the sound of your boy and his friend screaming with laughter.
Tangled Up in the Moment — Garudasansa (Eagle)
Garudasana (eagle) seems appropriate for a meditation on being so overloaded you don’t know which end is up, what to do first, or how you are going to get to the next minute. Here is an asana where you twist every one of your limbs around another limb … and then are supposed to balance on one foot.
The crazy thing is that I have always found garudasana one of the most easily achieved balance poses. And I’m not alone. Maybe it is about those of us who are used to having a million different things going on at the same time. Maybe we are so used to that state that we can more easily achieve balance here than in a more straightforward balance pose.
Whatever the reason, I invite you to approach garudasana with whatever you need at one of those overloaded moments when your child has just leaked pee out of his swim diaper all over his bed, your infant is perched precariously on the changing table, and you have no one to help you change the wet sheets and get to the pool before the clouds open up and pour rain all over your evening plans. Or something like that.
Because, once you surrender to the loveliness of tying yourself up in knots, once you find the balance in this state, you get to wait until the time is right and then let go, fling your limbs wide, and fly.
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“Sharp-featured feral children”–very good. I grew up with them, by the way.