Girl drama in the neighborhood this evening. Callie walked down the street and found Beatrice* reading a note from Hero* after an unspecified fight. The note called Beatrice “pissy.” Callie (who has previously liked both Beatrice and Hero equally) helped Beatrice write her response and delivered the second note. I heard about it when Hero’s mother (my friend and Sunbeam partner) called to ask if Callie said anything about why Beatrice wrote a mean note to Hero that included, among other epithets, the “b-i-t-c-h” word. Callie is six. (Okay, almost seven. Still. And her mother swears. But not that word!)

I asked Callie to tell me what happened. She didn’t want to. She wouldn’t look at me. We sat on the porch swing in the backyard, and she spoke to her bowl of brown fried rice (fiber! not as tasty as refined rice!).

It took awhile, but I got most of the story: that she hadn’t been told what the fight was about, but she was solidly on Beatrice’s side because Hero was mean to her friend. (Wasn’t Hero her friend too?) She confessed that she’d told Beatrice two really mean words to say to Hero, but she couldn’t tell me what they were. I did the whole “I’m not mad at you I just need to know what happened” routine and still she demurred. “You’re going to be really mad, Mom,” she said. Finally she whispered that she’d suggested the words “stupid” and “brat.”

I asked how she felt, how she thought Hero felt, Beatrice felt.

I’m aghast, of course, at such casual cruelty, but struck again by how quickly children can work their way to remorseful empathy, given only the opportunity.

And at least she’s not a sociopath.

*not their real names.

My soul mate turned 36 last week, so that must mean it’s time for another colonoscopy! Happy birthday, honey!

I signed up Tom for his first colonoscopy at 33 because his maternal grandfather died at age 43 from colon cancer. They found a polyp that was pre-cancerous but advanced enough to warrant a repeat in three years. We are fortunate to have good health insurance, but after paying all four bills (hospital, anesthesia, doctor, and lab) it will probably be about $400 out-of-pocket.

The most striking thing this time around was the nurses’ attitudes before and after the exam. Before, they were a little surprised as to why such a young man had voluntarily gone through the fasting, bowel cleansing, and breezy-hospital-gown wearing. I smiled serenely through their curiosity just as I had cheerfully (and perhaps callously) ignored Tom’s whinging about the entire bottle of laxative he had to drink. I even cooked him a fabulous last meal, complete with home-grown rhubarb crumble 36 hours before the exam.

After the exam the nurses were a little hushed and serious-faced. Tom slowly woke up and was his usual slightly-goofier-than-normal-post-sedative self. He said several times that he’d love to take that drug every night at bed time. (Finally I told him propofol was what killed Michael Jackson and that sobered him up a bit.)

The doctor came in and said they’d found one polyp again, less advanced than last time, but still concerning, and then he said that if Tom hadn’t started coming in this early to get checked out he would’ve been looking at cancer in his forties. When the biopsy comes back they’ll decide whether he needs to come back in three years or five, but he can never, ever, ever (I swear he said it like five times, but probably it was only twice) go longer than the 3-5 years without an exam.

We stopped at In-n-Out Burger (could their fries taste any healthier? yuck) on the way home and then Tom had the rest of the day to nap and contemplate the meaning of life. Mostly he is glad he married me, he says.

“Why were you so adamant about me getting a colonoscopy the first time?” he asks. “Was it because your dad is a doctor?” “How did you know my grandfather died of colon cancer?”

I stare at him, unbelieving. “Your mom told me.”

“But I don’t know that sort of thing about your family” he says.

He does know, of course, or at least he’s heard it all before, from me and my family. We see them often, and we talk about that kind of thing. It’s just that Tom is a Mary and I am a Martha. Maybe lots of couples are like that, with the husband secure in leaving mundane details of daily/household life to the wife. I don’t usually mind; I have a good memory and I like taking care of my people. I like being in charge and responsible. The only problem is when I forget our roles (like forgetting to remind Tom to bring his driver’s license to the hospital — who doesn’t take their wallet with them?) and then we both suffer–me from frustration and him from the force of my wrath.

But back to the mushy stuff. Tom kept asking why it was so important to me that he get tested and I stopped. “Dude, you act like this is some favor I did for you, when really it’s in my best interest to keep you around. I love you.”

(Not to mention the kids. I am not raising them alone.)

“I think I was really meant to marry you,” he says, “because you’re a doctor’s daughter so you know about these things and you trust doctors, so you got me to get a colonscopy and you saved my life.”

I shake my head. You were supposed to marry me because you are my soul mate. The life-saving thing is just a bonus.

This year I didn’t go through my usual cycle of Spring = Daydream of Homeschool; Fall = Boot Them Out Now. We had a great summer that was a little crazy with our basement finishing project, and we’re still sucking the marrow out of the warm days and cool evenings. We’re on a hiking-to-waterfalls kick (Stewart Cascades and Battle Creek Falls recently; next up Grotto Falls and Diamond Fork) and finally eating dinner outside.

Avery is at the same charter school as Callie this year and though she still misses her old school, she likes her (male, laid-back) teacher and there’s even a girl from her fourth grade class. I asked if they were friends last year and Avery said, “Well I know her and I don’t hate her.” Here at the smaller school, away from established friend groups, they have progressed to eating lunch together. Could friendship bracelets be far behind?

Avery tried out for the debate team and though it improved my daily prayer habit (tryouts in fifth grade??) it’s an extracurricular activity I can really endorse. There should be no problem ensuring she gets plenty of practice. She’s also swimming and reading too much and I had to take her bra shopping (for fifth grade??) which reminded me of my own mortality and also how much I hate shopping for intimate apparel.

The only fruit fly in our basil is math. You might remember that we worked through half of a Saxon math book last summer after she got a C in third grade. Not that a C is so terrible (though it is, let’s be honest, I got one my sophomore year at BYU so I know), but her attitude is horrible. This summer I took her to a week-long math camp at UVU, after which I got to hear the words “love” and “math” in the same sentence, though the emphasis may have been on the word “camp.”(Seriously, it was their first year doing it and at $45 for 15 hours of a fun, interactive introduction to everything from game theory to cryptography, i.e. A STEAL, I highly recommend.)

Back in the real world Avery enjoys saying she hates math and watching my heart shrivel. Because a) I love math and b) I refuse to raise girls who hate math. I would rather they pierced their noses and tramp-stamped their lower backs than hate math. (Maybe a temporary tattoo on the left forearm.)

Homework is a nightmare. She dawdles, she doodles, she daydreams. We cajole, I yell, Tom commiserates and wanders into bypaths of How This Will Apply When You’re in Algebra. She tested into the 6/5 math group which is right where she should be, and the math groups themselves are small (11-12 kids) and taught by every adult, including the director, at the school first thing every day.

After school she asks me what 6 times 4 is and I want to take the knife I’m cutting up peaches with for their after-school snack and turn it on myself. (I don’t mean to trivialize the mental illness that leads people to cut themselves, but sometimes I honestly think it would be a relief to pull out my eyelashes one by one rather than remind her that 6 times 4 is 24 and always has been, always will be, till the moon turns red and the stars fall from the sky.)

Some days I sit next to her and get frustrated-er and frustrated-er. Some days I don’t say a word and that seems fine: it’s her homework, she’s old enough to be responsible and take the consequences or reap the rewards, but then it’s 9:30 at night and her head droops limply over the heavy book and I even though I know she’ll perk up long enough to read once she’s in bed I just want her to get some sleep.

So I emailed her teacher and asked if I could come watch the math lesson. It seems crazy to have an hour dedicated to math and then have an hour or two of drawn out, make-you-stabby assignment-doing at home. He talked to her math teacher and this morning I went in. They took a test yesterday and Avery was the fourth person to hand it in and she got a 95. She got 100% on the multiplication fact test (I didn’t check to see if 6 times 4 was one of them; I’m assuming not since the nurse didn’t call to report a case of hives, bubonic plague, and dysentery on Wednesday). Avery is fine in class, Mrs. B. said.

Of course she is.

So what do I do then? Mrs. B. said, “Let’s talk to the director, she’s really good about this kind of thing.” We walked over to the director’s office and when Mrs. B. introduced me it took her just a second to say, “You’re here about math right? Though Avery was the fourth done on the test yesterday.” I explained the whole thing and said I was quite open to suggestions. The director said she’d be happy for Avery to do her homework at the school one afternoon. She can sit in Mrs. B’s room and ask her any questions but basically do it on her own. I’m to come after half an hour and then the four of us will sit down and show her the test scores and look over her homework and tell her that since it’s clear she can do it, from now on it’s her responsibility, that it’s up to her whether she does it and gets the points for it or not.

This is my kind of intervention. After 3:30 pm this afternoon in the Year of our Lord 2011, I will not mention the words “math homework” ever again. Amen.

Molly turns one today and for some asinine reason I cannot type that without crying. Shoot. I will not be sad when there are no more diapers to change in this house, no more sticky hands to keep from unrolling every roll of toilet paper. I will not miss getting up for the early morning feeding and planning around two daily naps. I long for the day when I can start thinking about what comes next.

But not today.

—

Thank you for your kind comments on my last post. Your understanding and encouragement is kind of rare, especially on the internet, and it makes a big difference in my life. Thank you.

This morning Crysanthemum and I took our kids to Ikea for breakfast, a little quality time in the Smaland play place, and some organization-supply shopping.

My kids love eating in the Ikea cafeteria, sitting at the familiar little tables in front of retro Goofy cartoons. Plus it’s free this month. Molly wanders around a bit, and I keep a close eye on her because she tries to steal food from other kids’ plates and because although she walks well for an 11-month old, she’s still my baby. As she stood at one of the toys (the cylinders that you spin to line up the three images), a boy about three years old came up beside her and pushed her sqaure in the chest, knocking her back from the toy and into the metal legs of a chair and onto the ground. Molly was unhurt and she didn’t even cry, but I was up and out of my chair, picking her up, and asking the ladies at the next table,

“Is this your kid?”

They shook their heads and I looked up and around, scanning for the kid’s parent. No one stepped forward, so I said,

“This kid just pushed my baby down, whose kid is this?”

A mother came over from the other side of the room as we sat back down, asking,

“Well, what do you expect?”

That stumped me. My kids misbehave, they don’t always want to share or take turns. One of the worst parenting days I’ve had was the time several years ago in Cairo that I bragged that Avery wasn’t a biter and five minutes later she bit the boy whose biting had occasioned my boast.

But I don’t let them get away with pushing littler kids down. And probably this is sexist of me, but the fact that it was a bigger boy child pushing my baby girl child around somehow made it seem worse. Maybe I’ve just been lucky with my girls, maybe I don’t understand or fully empathize with how naturally physical and rough boys can be. But still, I expect you to not let your son push my baby girl down. That’s what I expect. I expect you to watch your child and correct him if he does things like that.

(I also love the idea of Free Range Kids — I want my kids to work it out on the playground and the playroom. I’m not a referee, I don’t like tattling; if there’s no blood, I don’t want to hear about it. But she’s my baby. Can I be a Free-Ranger-with-caveats-for-my-baby?)

The mom picked up her little boy and told him to say he was sorry. He ignored her for a few seconds and then muttered,

 ”Sorry.”

I said, in that overly-bright-encouraging voice, “Thanks for apologizing.”

The mom and the boy and what looked like the grandmother left several minutes later.

We finished breakfast and as I was putting our dirty dishes away a different woman approached me and said:

“Like your kids have never done anything to another kid. I hope you’re ashamed, you made a huge spectacle and really embarrassed that lady and her son has a disability and I hope you feel embarrassed of yourself.”

I got that fluttery feeling in my stomach, the guilty headache, the sinking sick feeling that I had really messed up. I took my kids to the bathroom and came back. I saw the second woman sitting back in her seat and I went over to her. I asked if she knew the woman, and she said,

“No, but why would that matter?”

I said, “I just wondered if you knew her so you could tell her that I was sorry.”

“Oh, but you made a terrible spectacle, you embarrassed her in front of everyone.”

I said, “I didn’t mean to make a scene, I just wanted to know where the boy’s parents were,” and she blew up at me. She said I did make a spectacle and everyone was staring and she knows the family from the agency and the kid has autism and she knows how hard it is for them when people like me make big spectacles. I tried to apologize again, and she said,

“I hope you’re not LDS, because if you are then that was even more embarrassing.”

I admitted I am LDS and that, again, I was sorry, I hadn’t realized so many people were watching, or that it was that big a deal. She wouldn’t stop berating me, and I finally left mid-sentence.

I wish I were a good enough person (or at least a good enough blogger) to figure out a neat way to draw out the moral or ending of this story. I still feel jittery inside about it. I wish I hadn’t made that mom feel bad, but I also wish her son hadn’t pushed my baby down, and while I know it was the right thing to walk away from the second lady, I wish I could make her admit that at least there were a number of things I didn’t do in my spectacle: I didn’t yell or swear or call the mother or the boy names. I thought I had handled it okay. (In retrospect not great, of course.)

But I hate that I made it harder for the other mother. The other day Lucy told me that her “eye muscle” makes it so that the cherry tomato under the fridge looks like it’s six inches to the left of where it really is. I’d forgotten I’d even explained to her and her sisters about her eye a few months ago. She’s totally fine with it. It’s just a trick she can do with her Duane Syndrome.

And that “disability” is freaking nothing compared to autism. I know that. I know how lucky we are, how easy we have it (knock on wood, it’s plenty hard even typical-ish, which makes me feel that much worse, augh.) 

Last week I started crying when I quietly responded to my girls in line at Thanksgiving Point that the reason that big boy talks and laughs too loud is because his brain works differently and that’s okay, and I made my grandma angry when I said that if there’s a way to fix things like my Aunt Coco’s Down Syndrome then of course we should fix them. (I think we agreed, or should have, that there is a gray area between obvious cosmetic surgery and chromosomal therapies, with fraught stops along the way for things like growth hormone for very short children and cochlear implants for deaf people.)

Is there a way to talk about this without sounding like an ass? I love how Amy talks about it.  

I think I’ve figured out the moral. Avery was with me when the second lady wouldn’t accept my apology on behalf of the other mother. She was instantly defensive, saying, that lady has a baby of her own, how would she feel if it was her baby who got pushed down?

But it wasn’t really about Molly or even the boy (who is probably young enough to quickly forget and forgive), and it most certainly shouldn’t be about the second lady, whose voice in my head I’m going to do my best to ignore even though she succeeded in making me feel bad and making me think again (and again) about how I act and the example I set for my own kids.

So –

Dear Mother of the Child who could be My Child Next Week,

I am sorry, more sorry than I can say. I am sorry I overreacted and drew attention to you in a public place. I know you’re doing your best and I’m sorry that I made it harder. Please forgive me.

Yours in motherhood-is-hard-solidarity,

Shannon

1. I used to think that the Tom Hanks movie, The Money Pit, was a gross exaggeration of the perils of home improvement, but according to my basement finishing experience, it’s actually a glitter-encrusted fairytale in rose-colored glasses of the glamour and ease of fixing crap up.

2. I used to wonder how anyone who had remodeled or built their house could ever, ever leave it once it became their Anne-of-Green-Gables-y House of Dreams, but now I see that after spending five million dollars and nine million hours on a pitiful approximation of their original vision (even if technically it was adequate), they then had so many negative associations with the space that it was either move or exorcism.

*And yes, I know it could be worse. I know.

There is a prickling at the back of my mind, like a phantom limb that isn’t a phantom or a limb, but is a part of me, if I am away from my nursing baby too long. The unbreakable tie that tethers us is invisible in the hours we are separated. Yesterday I painted downstairs all day, coming up only to nurse the baby and eat a sandwich, both at arms length, careful of the wet paint on my shirt. By the end of the day I needed the smell of her smooth temple against my mouth and nose.

I also needed a bath. My nursing baby was covered in apple sauce, from the hairs on the back of her head to the sides of her thighs under her tray. She needed a bath, too.

I felt the tie that tethers us soften, lazily uncoiling, free as I lay in the water and she flopped from the left of my belly to the right, ever curious and reaching. I sat up to wash our hair and she sat in my lap, her side to my belly. She looked up at my breast, zeroed in on my nipple and reached her mouth up for a nurse.

I’ve been thinking, ever since, about breastfeeding in general, and public discomfort with it in particular. Nursing to me is motherhood distilled. It is the last time my baby is part of “me and my baby,” “my baby and I.” It signifies the time before she is apart and away, before she is someone who needs less from me, takes less from me, but then paradoxically requires more from me, more purposeful patience, more counting to ten before I explode over toddler-ish escapades. It’s something I do simply because I enjoy it, not because I feel I should or because it’s best for baby, but because I like it.

The past couple of weeks I’ve been experiencing my first-ever nursing aversion. I didn’t even know there was a word for what I was feeling, the temporary pain, the impatience, the counting down six more weeks until we hit a year, where I had assumed I would nurse till around eighteen months with my fourth baby, and that I would find it heartbreaking to stop this final time. I did some reading, and maybe it’s the weather or my hormones or the baby having a growth spurt or my needing to drink more water and get more sleep.

Last night I thought of all the maternal imagery Jesus uses. I love the types and symbols and metaphors of the scriptures. I love talking with my daughters about the women in the scriptures and imagining what barely-or-not-mentioned women were feeling and thinking. Possibly they are getting a very unorthodox perspective on stories like Queen Esther (poor Vashti, eh?) and the Parable of the Talents (sounds like food storage).

Jesus asks how many times would he have gathered us like a hen gathers her chickens and tell fathers to bring children up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. He asks how unlikely would it be for a woman to forget her sucking child and says He is even more constant.

Before He was crucified He said there would come a time when they would say “Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck,” because baring and nursing and mothering make one vulnerable.

Moses, when fed up with the children of Israel for not appreciating manna, asks the Lord why he is responsible for them: “Have I conceived all this people? have I begotten them, that thou shouldest say unto me, Carry them in thy bosom, as a nursing father beareth the sucking child, unto the land which thou swarest unto their fathers?”

And when Isaiah prophesies about the redemption of Israel, he says that “their kings shall be thy nursing fathers and their queens thy nursing mothers.”

I think one of the reasons I like nursing so much is because it’s one of the few mothering things I’m really good it, one of the few things that comes naturally to me, something I don’t have to overthink or remind myself ten times a day that swearing probably won’t make this situation of the sugar all over the floor any better.

I don’t know why we are so uncomfortable with imagery of the physical, maternal body. Jesus tells us to eat of His flesh and drink of His blood. I bring Molly to my breast and she eats and drinks greedily. I wish I were as eager to accept the nourishment Jesus offers hourly as she accepts the milk that flows from my breast.