I need the eggs.

Motherhood and writerhood in my Petaluma hood.

Consigning Times. April 9, 2013

Filed under: Keepin' it Real — lumamama @ 1:07 pm

In previous posts, I know that I’ve mentioned that I come from a long line of hoarders (genuine, borderline, and simply fond of collecting). As a reaction to this, since I was a kid, I have thoroughly enjoyed getting rid of things I didn’t want or need anymore. My parents still laugh about how I would “clean my room” as a teenager by simply throwing all the things I no longer required out into the hallway. I always found sitting in my newly purged room very satisfying – I simply pretended the rejected items outside my door didn’t exist anymore.

Fast forward to adulthood, and clearly, this approach doesn’t work anymore (although, come to think of it, there are a few houses on my street where they seem to be using this same tactic). And as my kids have grown, I have had the need to preform the purge-by-proxy, discarding the outgrown clothes and long-ignored toys. I’ve tried it all – boxes toted to Goodwill, where they won’t take half your stuff; bags carted to consignment shops, where they don’t take ¾ of your stuff; garage sales, where you don’t sell 80% of your stuff. The best way to get rid of my kids’ stuff, by far, is the Just Between Friends sale.

The North Bay JBF sale is run by a friend of mine, Jennifer Hundley. She started up the franchise when our kids were babies, and has grown the business so much that the woman honestly owns her own semi truck trailer. This is seriously impressive to me. The sale happens twice a year at the Santa Rosa Fairgrounds, where Jen and her crew take over a gigantic exhibition hall and fill it to the rafters with really good used kid stuff. It is heaven for hoarders and purgers alike – you can get rid of your old stuff, and amass huge amounts of really awesome new-to-you stuff on the cheap.

Preparing for JBF involves forethought and stealth. Removing my girls’ old clothes isn’t too difficult – Viv is too little to care, and Penelope has never been much of a clotheshorse. The toys are a bit trickier. First, I “stage” the soon-to-be sold toys in a box in Ian’s office. I wait for a few weeks to see if anyone notices the toys aren’t around anymore. If they pass (or fail?) this test, they go out to the shed (AKA the Land of Misfit toys), where they wait to be unearthed just before the sale.  Once in a while, Penn will ask for something that has been exiled to the shed, and I tell her “I think Benny borrowed that.” She now seems to have a fear of people borrowing things, for some reason.  Before the sale, some things keep getting last-minute reprieves (example: the stupid Fisher Price Farmyard that no one plays with, but I’m attached to it because I had one as a child). Last year, I had enough items to warrant a whole flatbed handtruck of my own. This felt momentous.

I love to purge our old stuff, but I also love to buy new stuff. JBF is the place I buy all the clothes that people compliment my kids on (Hannah Anderson, Gap, Gymboree). JBF is where I bought almost all my kids’ Christmas presents last year, including the fatty Playmobil Egyptian Pyramid set that goes for $200+ on Ebay. Bikes, outdoor toys, the American Girl double stroller that Vivi piles high with baby dolls: all someone else’s JBF purges.

So even though I do get rid of a lot of stuff come JBF time, Ian always rolls his eyes at me, because I usually come home from the sale with the Subaru packed to the ceiling with NEW stuff. And though I brag about all the money I make on items I’ve consigned, don’t ask me how much I spent at the sale. (The truth: I usually pretty much break even.)

The JBF sale is April 11-14 at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds. See you there – I’ll be the one with my very own flatbed hand truck… piled high with stuff to buy.

 

Little Goth Girl. September 20, 2012

Filed under: Uncategorized — lumamama @ 5:46 pm

The other day, a friend and I took our kids out to dinner. The kids were all tired and teetering on the brink of not being able to hold it together though a leisurely meal, so I decided to download an emergency video on my iPad for the kids to watch if they got squirrely while waiting for their food. I purchased an episode of one of the more innocuous shows my daughters like – “Bubble Guppies” – thinking that there wasn’t much that could upset my friend’s son, who can be sensitive about “bad things” happening in stories. Unthinkingly, though, I chose the Halloween episode. Five minutes into the show, when Guppies dressed as ghosts and vampires floated around the screen, my friend’s son began to whimper. I smacked myself in the forehead. I forgot that other children are scared of such things.

My four year is a Goth. Not REALLY, but ever since she could express herself, she has loved all things ghoulish, dark, or creepy. Her favorite movie is “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and she prefers her plush Jack Skellington to her baby dolls. For a long time, she said her favorite color was black. (When she changed her mind and told me it was pink, I was a little sad. I wondered if it was princess-driven peer pressure.) She selects clothes from the boys’ department, often emblazoned with skulls. When we went to Disneyland right before her third birthday, she didn’t want to wait in line to see the princesses – her favorite rides were “Snow White’s Scary Adventures” and “The Haunted Mansion.”

Last year, it became clear that Halloween was Penn’s favorite time of year. She loved to go to the Halloween store just to look at the creepy decorations; the carousel of zombie babies could keep her happily entertained for more than an hour. She even slept with a set of Halloween nutcrackers she picked out – a witch, a vampire, and a skeleton named Jewelry, Shere Khan, and Jack- hardly the cuddliest toys to be snuggling up with at night.
That’s not to say that Penelope is not scared of ANYTHING. For a while, I thought this was the case – it even worried me a little. It didn’t seem normal for my child to love skeletons and ghosts the way other girls her age loved fairies and unicorns. But then, something  happened that made me realize that this phantom fixation was nothing for me to be scared of.

    Right after Halloween last year, we took our girls to see “Yo Gabba Gabba Live.” I was excited to have scored seats in the very front row. We drove to San Jose for the show and took our seats. Penelope was thrilled…right up until the moment show started. Music blared, lights flashed, and five six-foot-tall monsters dashed onto the stage. She was TERRIFIED. She jumped out of her seat, ran to the back of the theater and out the door. “I want to go home!” she shrieked. I held her, comforted her. She was shaking. Even though it was awful to see my child so frightened, it was kind of a relief to know that there was SOMETHING that scared her.

It was my mother who reminded me of where Penn’s ghostly fascination likely comes from. “Don’t you remember how you used to check out all those true ghost story books from the elementary school library? And what about Mr. Hamilton?” I had to laugh. Mr. Hamilton was a lamp that I purchased from a craft show with a baggie full of saved-up quarters and dimes. He was a ceramic skull that held a small blue light bulb inside. I brought him to every sleepover – he was especially for telling ghost stories. And to this day, I do like a good Gothic novel or creepy movie, especially at this time of year. I even suspect that our house is haunted (with a friendly ghost). With all that in mind, I suppose it’s not terribly shocking that Penelope prefers “The Corpse Bride” to Strawberry Shortcake.
So, instead of trying to squelch my daughter’s interest in the dark side, I celebrate it as part of who she is. I try to protect her from the things that genuinely frighten her – loud noises, flashing lights. And I try to remind her that not all kids are as enamored with goblins and zombies as she is. She is trying to learn to understand this, and it’s funny to hear her trying to explain to her friends: “no, that witch isn’t SCARY. It’s just a little bit SPOOKY.” And at our house, that is a big difference.

 

Speaking the mind. August 8, 2012

Filed under: Family — lumamama @ 4:58 pm

There are certain associations with the word “grandmother.” Home-baked cookies. Sensible shoes. Flowered dresses, pearls, jello salads. My Grandma is many things, but stereotypical is not one of them.

Holding court in her kitchen chair at family gatherings, my grandmother chain-smokes – she used to smoke Marlboro Light 100s, but switched to cigarellos when the tobacco taxes got to be too high. She drinks Almaden “Hearty Burgandy” – boxed wine that she “decants” into old red wine bottles and stores in the fridge – starting at about 10 AM. (At that point, she has been up for six hours; it’s practically midafternoon for her). She was a card-carrying Communist in the 30′s, a die-hard Republican for most of her life, and ardent Obama supporter in 2008.  She served as the first female County Executive in her town, and still takes phone calls from city officials who want her opinion, something she is always more than happy to give. She adopted her sister-in-law’s orphaned children, her family growing from four children to seven overnight. She frequently employs eloquent use of the word “goddamn.” She loves gardening, mysteries, jewelry, children. She loved her husband, my grandfather, so much that she cooked and delivered every meal to him in the nursing home, right up until his death six months ago.

At least, this was who my Grandma was until a few days ago. Now, we don’t know who she is, and maybe, neither does she.

My grandmother suffered a catastrophic stroke last week. She was late for her standing Wednesday afternoon happy hour date with her neighbors – an event that blues the air in her kitchen with smoke and cursing, and one she prepares for by pouring cheap off-brand vodka into an Absolut bottle.  (Clearly, one must never take the contents of a bottle for granted at my Grandma’s house.) Her friends found her in bed, unable to speak. They rushed her to the hospital.

When I first heard that Grandma had had a stroke, my first thought was: “she’ll get better.” She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005, and she seemed to shrug it off like a cold. When doctors found tumors in her gut last year, her initial prognosis was terrible: months, at most. But tests showed that the cancer was slow growing, lazy, really just a nuisance. “There’s more of a chance that you’ll get hit by a truck,” one of her doctors said. “This cancer’s not going to kill you.”

Though she was getting older, frailer, sometimes wobbly on her feet, Grandma seemed kind of indestructible. The smoking and drinking and cheese-and-meat Wisconsin diet seemed to help her thrive. She was at her best when getting riled up about something: this summer, as the Scott Walker recall election loomed, Grandma gesticulated as she ranted indignantly about Walker’s crimes against teachers, labor, public employees of all kinds. Her righteous anger seemed to feed her, energize her.

Grandma was the woman who inspired me the most as a teenager. Brilliant and well-informed, witty and unwavering, she prided herself on fighting for what was right, what was logical, what made sense. She never shied from debate – she welcomed it, and usually won. She was never afraid to “give ‘em hell.”

As I have gotten older, I have come to realize that making my grandmother proud has always extremely important to me – one of the largest motivating factors in my life. In our extended family – packed with Ivy-League graduates, doctors, PhD’s, lawyers, even professional musicians who perform at Carnegie Hall – that is not always easy to do. She loves to brag about the accomplishments of her children and grandchildren, and I have often hungered to be included in the list of the braggable. Fired up by the cracks she saw in the glass ceiling, she suggested I become an engineer – me, with the abysmal math grades and the science notebooks filled with half-finished short stories. As a teenager, I wished that I could do that for her – sometimes, I still do.

My grandmother -  top of her high school class, brilliant politician – has always valued intelligence so much. Even when her body was under assault, it never occurred to me that she would lose her mental sharpness. It is impossible for me to imagine.

My dad, calling to give me updates, told me vaguely “she is having some trouble speaking.” This seemed expected, but not insurmountable. My maternal grandmother also had a stroke, and I remember her struggling to recall words like “piano” and “boot,” instead calling many objects “whatchacallits” for about a month.

But my mom gave me more details. “She’ll say, ‘The problem is…’ and then trail off and say ‘boof yit obb. SHIT.’ She knows she isn’t making sense, but she can’t find any words. She doesn’t know our names or who we are. We aren’t sure how much she understands.” And tests showed that the stroke was in the brain’s largest artery. The physician’s assistant who shared the test results with them said that the damage was extensive and that it was unlikely that she would recover much cognitive function.

My dad, laughingly, says “the most frustrating thing for my mother would be not being able to talk.” It’s true – talking is like breathing for my Grandma. What my dad hasn’t talked about is how devastating it must be to see her – a force of nature, an orator, a reciter of Shakespeare, a teller of jokes – reduced to nonsense syllables.

At this point, we are waiting. Waiting to see how her speech and occupational therapy go. Waiting to see if she can go home or not. Waiting, and hoping, for her strength and will to carry her through yet again.

Earlier this week, I saw some Disney princess baby toys and got very upset. I spent a good hour of a busy day composing an angry letter to Fisher Price, chastising them for selling out to the inescapable princessification of childhood.

Ian shook his head at me. “What a waste of your time,” he said. “What, exactly, do you think is going to come of that? Do you think they are going to pull those princesses off the shelves, issue an apology?”

“It wasn’t a waste of my time,” I said. “I am enjoying being angry.”

I thought about it later, pondering the grand tradition of the Strongly Worded Letter in my family. My father just wrote a letter to the editor of his local paper detailing the shortcomings of a candidate running for judge. My grandmother has written letters to family members, to Congress, to companies. My Grandma has wielded a pen mightier than the sword, and a tongue sharper, her entire life.

Perhaps my little letter was, in a way, a small tribute to her, carrying on her tradition of telling it like it is and cutting through the bullshit, at a time when she can’t do that herself. And I’m quite sure that if she knew about it, she would be proud.

 

Glocks and Hair Dryers. July 23, 2012

Filed under: Uncategorized — lumamama @ 1:30 pm

I received my first gun before I was born. My proud papa came home to my pregnant mama, bearing a long, thin box.

 

“I bought a gun for the baby,” he said. He took it out of the box – a simple .22, nothing fancy.

 

“What if it’s a girl?” my mother said doubtfully.

 

“Then she’ll have to learn to shoot,” he said.

 

To people from Marquette, Michigan, my hometown, this story is not terribly surprising. When I was a child, we didn’t have Martin Luther King Day off from school, but we did have a holiday on the opening day of Deer Season. The school district offered Hunters’ Ed classes alongside Drivers’ Ed and First Aid – all of these were considered necessary life skills.

 

When I went to college, most of my friends were from places like Boston and Connecticut and the New York suburbs. All they knew about guns, they had learned from Dr. Dre videos. My .22 story became a party trick, a joke I would tell about the backwater I grew up in. I played it up, decorating my dorm room door with a photo of me shooting my dad’s semiautomatic handgun, arms extended, sunglasses on, badass-ness incarnate.

But my dad isn’t some redneck who shoots beer cans because he’s bored. My dad earned a varsity letter for shooting on the Harvard rifle team. (How much do you wanna bet that’s one varsity sport that doesn’t exist anymore?) My dad is a judge, a highly educated and respected man. He also happens to be an avid hunter and gun collector.  My dad hunts deer, woodcock, grouse, pheasant, then uses the meat to create gourmet meals that he enjoys with good red wine. After a day of hunting or an afternoon shooting skeet, my dad comes home and spends a few hours listening to Vivaldi and cleaning his guns. To this day, the smell of gun cleaning solvent is one of my favorite aromas – it has that comforting-evening-at-home association.

 

My dad was once a card-carrying member of the NRA. Sometime during the Clinton administration, they sent him a packet with a full-color glossy poster of Charlton Heston inside. As I recall, he was dressed sort of like Daniel Boone, standing on a hill in a heroic pose, clutching a rifle in each hand. Underneath the portrait was an inscription: “FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS.” My sister Kate and I thought it was the most hilarious thing we had ever seen. I think I commandeered it and put it on my bedroom wall – ironically, of course.

 

By that time, I was rapidly growing into the knee-jerk liberal that I am today. I knew that the NRA and the Second Amendment people were generally aligned with my political enemies, bedfellows of creationists, Rush Limbaugh, and Operation Rescue. I knew that loving guns was not something that would play well at the Young Democrats meeting.

 

And I didn’t really LOVE them, not the way I loved fishing or canoeing or the other outdoor pursuits my dad had taught me to love. I never became a hunter; I just didn’t have it in me. (Another childhood story: when I was about three years old, my dad came home with a truck full of dead ruffed grouse. He took me out to show them to me. “Oh, Daddy,” I said. “I will feed them when they wake up.” Ouch.)

 

But I did have a healthy respect for firearms – I knew how to shoot one, how to carry one safely, how to clean one. When we were fishing in remote locations, I was given a handgun in a holster in case an aggressive bear came by (thankfully, I never had to use it). I understood that guns had uses aside from killing innocent civilians, and I believed that with the right education and the right precautions, guns and people could coexist uneventfully.

 

People here are often shocked when I tell them that we had guns in nearly every room of the house when I was growing up. My father has so many that he ran out of storage space long ago, and he keeps the rifles (unloaded, of course) under the family beds. People ask how my parents could be so unconcerned about us finding the guns, playing with them. I shrug. They were completely unromantic to me. They were to be left alone, maybe feared just a bit. We weren’t tempted to play with them any more than we were tempted to play with my parents’ kitchen knives or the matches next to the fireplace – they were utilitarian objects, just part of everyday life, boring and adult.

 

My dad and I argued, sometimes. As I learned more about the problems that existed in other areas of the country, as I read stories about kids playing with guns and teenagers getting shot over Nikes, I began to feel that more gun control was necessary. But my dad sees it as a slippery slope. Even though he’s a Democrat, he fumes over Chuck Schumer, Dianne Feinstein. He even voted for George W. Bush in 2000 because he was worried that Gore was going to take his guns away. I’m still working on forgiving him.

 

When something like the horrific massacre at the movies last Friday happens, I find it hard to understand why people like my dad can’t see why it’s important to control access to huge ammunition magazines and assault weapons. My dad and his sportsmen friends have no use for machine guns. The only thing a machine gun is used for is maximum carnage.

 

But unlike most people I know here in liberal Northern California, I am not completely anti-gun.

 

A few years ago, when Penn was a baby, I wrote a story about a home invasion and abduction. The story haunted me. I became a poor sleeper, startling at any small noise. I was convinced that someone was breaking into our home just about every night. Shaking in my bed, I would often wish that we had a gun – a small pistol, nothing too extreme – just in case. I even looked into buying one. I didn’t. I got some Mace instead.

 

When I was about 14, we went on a vacation with our extended family. We went to a resort in Northern Wisconsin, not far from my hometown. At a restaurant there, my three year old cousin found a box filled with toys – dinosaurs, Legos, and GI Joes with tiny guns. “What’s this?” he asked, holding one up to his mother, a Waldorf teacher. She contorted her face and took it out of his hands.

 

“A hair dryer,” she said.

 

At the time, I thought it was funny. But I thought of it again and again over the years, whenever the gun control debate came up. What if my little cousin found a gun and pointed it at his head, thinking it was a hair dryer? What purpose did it serve to deny the existence of guns altogether? Why not explain what it was, what it was used for….and explaining why that was wrong, if that is what she believed?

 

My mother-in-law – no fan of guns – tells a story about Ian as a child. They didn’t have toy guns in the house, but one morning when he was about two, he took a bite out of his toast to make it gun-shaped, pointed it at her, and went, “BANG!” “I don’t have any idea how he learned about them,” she says. “He didn’t watch TV, he didn’t play with guns. It’s just so out there in society.”

 

The thing is, guns are gonna be there. I’m not saying every family should have one. I’m not saying kids should be given toy Glocks and AK-47s. I’m certainly not saying it should be as easy as it is for psychopaths to procure them. But I don’t think it serves anyone to pretend that they don’t exist, to try to keep any reference to them away…or even to ban them completely.

 

Not long ago, a police officer came to Penelope’s preschool to talk about safety. When I picked her up that day, I asked what she had learned from the policeman. She thought a moment, cocked her head, and then enunciated carefully: “WE NEVER, EVER PICK UP GUNS.”

 

My first reaction was to laugh. I imagined what my dad would say when I told him that this was the message being passed along to Northern California’s children. NEVER, EVER was a long time.

 

But I was grateful that this was being discussed. It’s important and potentially life-saving. And I’m glad that she’s not being told that guns are hair dryers. Although, I could just see her picking up my hair dryer, pointing it at me, and saying…”BANG!”

 

Malone World Tour 2012. July 18, 2012

Filed under: Family — lumamama @ 1:15 pm

Sometimes, scrolling through Facebook, I come across my friends’ vacation photos. Smiling families stretched on white-sand beaches, slick with sunscreen. Families bedecked with leis, drinking out of coconuts. Even more astonishing – couples in vacation photos, kid-free, frolicking in Vegas, Europe, Mexico. I grit my teeth and fight the urge to click the “hide” button. I will myself to be happy for them. I remind myself that someday, SOMEDAY, we too will get to go on vacation.

It’s not that we don’t travel. HOOOOO boy, do we travel! Penelope has her own frequent flier number on several airlines. We own practically every travel-related baby and toddler item, from a baby-sized pop-up tent to a carseat caddy to a special strap to make airplane seats safer for little folks. We make at least three or four lengthy trips every year, to the exotic tourist locales of Marquette, Michigan (my hometown) and Chevy Chase, Maryland (Ian’s hometown).

The thing that I always must remind myself of is the fact that most of my friends who get to go on exotic vacations (KID-FREE VACATIONS!!) live near their families. They do not have to deal with the tri-annual schlep across the country. When the holidays roll around, they don’t have to worry about getting stranded in the usual O’Hare snowstorm. When a family member dies, they don’t have to take out a loan to pay for funeral travel. They don’t have to play Kayak.com Roulette, watching and waiting to see if airfares go down slightly, getting singed to the tune of hundreds of dollars if they wait too long.

Don’t get me wrong – we LOVE to go and visit our families. We just returned from a three week trek that included visits to Ian’s parents in DC, friends in Chicago, my grandmother in Fond du Lac, WI, and my family Marquette. The trip had enough drama and enough laughs for an Emmy-nominated miniseries.
HIGHLIGHTS:

- The teary-eyed expression on my mother in law’s face when she spotted us at her surprise birthday party.

- My cousin’s college-age boyfriend printing out black and white drawings of human organs for Penelope to color. She loved these more than any coloring book.

- Sitting with my college roommate, her husband, and their baby in the shadow of Chicago’s silvery skyline for a Millennium Park picnic.

- Penelope informing our friends Brett and Mark that she had met the ghost who lived in their basement.

- Toasting my grandmother on her 90th birthday.

- Penn’s excitement whenever she saw someone wearing a Packers shirt – she doesn’t see that too often back home in Petaluma!

- Penelope loving the fact that the sun doesn’t set until 10:45 PM in Marquette. Nothing like a late night beach visit on a hot summer night…

- Listening to Vivian and my nephew Henrik having lengthy and elaborate conversations together in toddlerese.

- Drinking a Pink Squirrel, an ice-cream drink on the menu of local institution the Villa Capri, at my 15 year high school reunion. As a kid, I would read the menu and think, “that drink is the height of sophistication and adulthood. Someday, I will have one.” My childhood dream came true.

- Hanging out with old friends and new ones – their wonderful spouses.

- Showing a college friend, Anne, around Marquette and seeing its beauty through the eyes of a newcomer.

- Watching Penelope land bluegills – and even better – watching her eat them after my dad fried them up.

- My sister’s Watermelon Daiquaris.

And of course, it wouldn’t be Lumamama without some lowlights:

- Vivian puking on me in the first hour of a five hour flight. Did I have an extra shirt? No, I did not. So I went shirtless, tying my cardigan around me. It was a nice look.

- Penelope resolutely refusing to adjust to the Eastern time zone, embracing an 11:30 bed time every night.

- Vivian developing a raging case of diarrhea that lasted almost a week, while also cutting a canine tooth AND suffering from seasonal allergies. GOOD TIMES!

- Vivi gravitating, moth-to-flame-like, to my friends’ beautiful china collection

- annnnnd our stupid cat deciding to pee repeatedly on the carpet while we were gone.

It’s crucially important to me that my kids know not only their grandparents, but their parents’ homelands, different as they are. It’s important to me that my girls swim in Lake Superior at twilight, that they eat Mackinac Island Fudge ice cream, that they drink out of the same lion’s head water fountain that I sipped from as a child. It’s important that they get to swim with Grandpa Pat and fish with Grandpa Mike. It’s important that they get to see Grammy Vicki paint and hear Grandma Cheryl read stories.
Travel is hard. Travel is expensive. Travel is stressful. Even those friends who get to go on “real” vacations have to put up with bags that are one pound overweight, surly flight attendants, airsickness, crappy hotel beds, crappier hotel breakfasts. But travel is, ultimately, worth it, whether it’s to the Bahamas or to Northern Michigan.

This trip, long and tough as it was, really solidified a feeling of family for me. For the first time, it felt like we were really our own unit – the Malones – taking on the world. We tried to take a family photo to capture this moment. Check out the results below, and get a glimpse into what we talk about when we talk about life with small children.

 

My Big Fat Midwestern High School Reunion. June 20, 2012

Filed under: Keepin' it Real,Mama needs a drink — lumamama @ 3:11 pm

Say the words “high school reunion” and a few choice clichés spring immediately to mind: balding, paunchy jocks in suit coats; grown-up mean girls turned fat and tacky; nerds returning as triumphant rich dudes; awkward girls minus their glasses and suddenly sexy. Another cliché: the Reese-Witherspoon-in-“Election” type who plans the shindig, the girl who thinks of high school as the greatest years of her life. I am here to tell you that those clichés are bogus, because I am not that girl.

I will be attending my 15 year high school reunion in a few weeks – in fact, I’m involved in planning it, even though I live in California and the reunion is in Michigan. Involved, but not in charge, thank god.

Although high school wasn’t a markedly painful time for me, it was not the highlight of my life, either. I was friendly with lots of different people at my small-town high school – jocks, drama club types, hippies, cheerleaders – but I kind of drifted around. I never felt particularly pretty, and definitely not “popular” in the 80’s movie sense of the word. I had a good time without being much of a party girl, but I also had the requisite adolescent identity crisis. I got excellent grades, but only in the subjects that interested me; I did things like Student Council and French Club and National Honor Society because I figured I could extracurricular-activity my way into a good college despite my abysmal math scores. I was experimenting, trying things out, following my disparate interests, and, in many ways, biding my time until the rest of my life began.

For some reason, I was in charge of planning our ten year reunion. Actually, there were good reasons: our class officers were in vet school, working for the Treasury Department in Washington, fighting in Iraq. I was working sporadically (surprise) as a boot camp instructor and freelance writer. Somehow, my responsibilities appeared a bit less demanding than those of my fellow officers.

If I hadn’t stepped in, there would be no reunion, and that just felt wrong. I had seen enough reunion movies to feel that this was an essential American rite of passage. What if someone had become a hit man and needed to go to the reunion to turn his life around (Grosse Point Blank)? What if someone was a failed musician and needed to see that he wasn’t as big a mess as he thought he was (Beautiful Girls)? What if Romy and Michelle showed up in their candy-colored dresses looking for a Post-It billionaire? And I also sort of wanted to get all my classmates together and show them how wrong they had been when they have voted me “Class Klutz” ten years before. Look at me now! I teach aerobics classes! Klutz no more!

Planning the party in those pre-Facebook days was, essentially, a nightmare. My high school class had roughly 400 members, most of whom had scattered far away from our small town. There were some left in Marquette, but others in Florida, Hawaii, New York. Reaching them all seemed challenging, and making the party fun and affordable for all seemed completely impossible. I was more stressed out about managing the guest list, the decorations, the food and drink for the reunion than I had been about my own wedding three years before.

The party was held at the ski lodge, empty and sunlit for summer – a nice spot, and cheap, but in the middle of nowhere. I arranged for taxis to cart drunken people around. I ordered food and prayed that my head count was right. I had no idea how much alcohol two hundred slightly embarrassed 28 year olds would drink, so I had to guess. I bought a dress than walked the delicate line between, “Check me out – I’m not that goofy brace-faced dork anymore!” and “I’m a responsible adult now, I promise.”

Against all odds, the party was intensely, stupidly, amazingly fun. One of my friends had made name tags with everyone’s yearbook pictures on them – these provided some serious drunken hilarity when we began plastering the no-shows’ tags all over ourselves. I had made an iTunes mix of ‘90s songs, and people danced like it was 1993. I talked for hours with people I hadn’t spent time with since elementary school, catching up and reminiscing. And for the most part, everyone seemed pretty much the same as they were in school – pretty girls were still pretty, dancing gracefully under the lights; nerdy types were still a little nerdy, but more confident, less afraid. Despite the surprising sameness, everyone got along and enjoyed one another. At the end of the night, I stepped back and breathed out, astonished: my panic had paid off – people had had a good time.

So, when our class’s 15 year mark rolled around, a few people asked me if there would be a reunion. “I don’t know, but I’m not planning it,” I said. When they asked again, I said. “Probably not, because I’m not planning it.” And then, just like the fairy tale where the gnome has to be asked the same question three times before giving an answer, they asked again, and I said. “Okay, I’ll HELP plan something. HELP. I don’t want to be in charge.”

Luckily, this time around, there were others who were willing to help from the start. And luckily, they are more organized, better connected, and less sleep-deprived than me. They are making the reunion happen, and I’m going to show up in my borderline skanky/classy dress to have a few drinks, sing some Karaoke and have a good time.

When I told one of my friends here that I was involved in the reunion planning, she laughed and said, “that doesn’t sound like you.” And she’s right – in many ways, it doesn’t. It also doesn’t sound like me to be the Vice President of the Mothers’ Club, or to teach mom-and-baby fitness classes, or to buy my kid a Princess-themed potty, complete with “royal flushing sounds.” But now that I think about it, it DOES sound like me – I have always been pretty good at subverting my own expectations, at embracing contradiction. I was usually the only Student Council member sitting around the fire at the Hiawatha Folk Music Festival, the only Drama Club member at the cheerleaders’ sleepover party. I am, in many ways, still the very same eclectic but passionate person I was in high school.

I think that is why the reunion ritual is so important. Contrary to what the movies would have us believe, attending a reunion isn’t about the big reveal of the changed self, about showing people what you AREN’T. The reunion is about remembering and recognizing and reasserting who you ARE, and who you always have been beneath the polished and grownup exterior. We change, certainly; we evolve and grow. But those years stick to us, for better or for worse. I think in many ways, growing up is not making some kind of momentous change of the self. I think the real secret to adulthood is learning to claim ourselves, to bear ourselves with confidence and openness, to BE ourselves.

So my name tag will say: Megan Anderegg Malone, Petaluma, California. Writer/ Former Boot Camp Instructor/Mother of Two/ Perpetual Student. Student Council Secretary/Class Klutz. All true. No shame.

 

Tiger Mother/ Guppie Mama June 18, 2012

Filed under: Family,Kid Culture — lumamama @ 12:10 pm

Anyone who knows me will agree that I am emphatically NOT a Tiger Mother. My children watch embarrassing amounts of television, eat a lot of processed garbage (we are both a Goldfish house AND a chocolate milk house, argh), and they have never touched a violin, to the best of my knowledge. Although Penn did receive a dissectable plastic model of the human body for her birthday, it wasn’t because I want her to start studying for the MCATs…it was because she loves skeletons.

Some of my friends have had their kids enrolled in classes since they started walking: soccer, gymnastics, musical theater, ballet. Not that they are Tiger Mothers, either -  they are following their children’s interests, experimenting to find their kids’ “thing” – the activity they love and are great at, the thing that they will end up chauffeuring their kids to for years and years, the thing that will drain their bank accounts and pad their kids’ college applications. That thing.

Penelope’s forays into organized activities have been….less than stellar. We did a mommy-and-me music class together when she was little, and although she loved the CD’s and knew all the little hand motions that went with each song, she spent each 45 minute class session running amok (going in the opposite direction from the other kids during the marching songs, using the maracas as throwing stars, smacking her pudgy hands on the window glass, screaming during the “goodbye song”). Goooood times.

We also tried soccer last summer. Here’s how that went: soccer coach lines the kids up for a drill. She tells the kids to start running, to touch the orange cone, and then run back to the start line. Penelope starts running, her thin white legs pumping, flying across the field. She keeps running and running. The poor 19-year-old soccer coach is yelling her name, blowing a whistle; I’m chasing her with Vivian bouncing along in the Ergo carrier. She keeps running until she slams into the chain link fence, she bounces like a stunned bird, then turns around and runs to the left instead of going back to the start line. We got a refund for the rest of the soccer session.

We’ve been enjoying a period of relative cooperativeness and compliance lately, so I thought I’d cross my fingers and sign Penn up for swim lessons. I have learned a lot about my child’s personality and motivations in the last year, so I knew I’d have to set her up for success before starting the lessons. Every day for a week before her first lesson, I’d say, “hey, Penn! Swimming class starts soon! Won’t it be fun to swim by yourself?”

“No,” she’d say. “I want to swim with you.”

“Well, I’ll be there, too,” I’d say. “You will just be able to swim without holding onto me.”

“Nope,” she’d answer. “I like hanging onto you.”

A few days before we started the lessons, we went swimming with some friends. My friend’s  little girl, five months younger than Penelope, had just conquered the whole swimming thing. She could jump from the steps and swim under the water for a good ten seconds, wiggling into her mother’s arms.

Penn watched this carefully. She tried a few jumps herself. She came up from underwater sputtering, but smiling. “Again, again!” she said. I marveled at the power of peer pressure – Penn just wanted to be like her friend, and if that meant swimming alone, she would do it.

On the way to her first swimming lesson, I said. “So, are you going to swim like Alafair? All on your own?”

“Uh huh,” she said casually, as if I’d asked if she would like to eat a banana later.

And she did. In her first two lessons, she went from blowing bubbles in the water to leaping from the side and kicking like a smooth little eel under the water toward the teacher. With each leap, her teacher moved farther and farther back, forcing Penn to swim longer and longer.

The other moms sitting next to the pool were enjoying their half hours of kid-free time – reading, talking to friends, texting. I, however, found myself acting like a fan at an Olympic swim meet.

Every time P jumped, I held my breath as she held hers. Every time she swam a bit farther, I would squeal and applaud. I couldn’t help myself. I found myself taking pictures and videos, getting close up to the edge of the pool for a better view. I loved the determination on her small face, the shy smiles of pride she gave the teacher when she accomplished something. I loved to watch her collect the high fives the teacher offered. I loved the way she leaped from the side of the pool, her little legs akimbo, no fear or tension evident in her tiny body. I couldn’t wipe the stupid smile from my face. “I’m a trout!” I heard her yell at one point, and I called my father immediately to tell him. The first time she swam from the stairs to the wall, I cried.

It all felt so MOMENTOUS – like she was passing onto a new plane right before my eyes. After the first lesson, I apologized to the teacher for being such a dork. “I’m just so excited for her!” I said.

The teacher smiled. “It’s fine,” she said. “It’s nice to see such a proud mama.”

We had a week of glorious improvement, of huge strides. I started fantasizing about the junior swim team. That was a sport I could live with, I thought to myself – bustling meets, exciting races, few injuries.

Then, we went to a swimming party – and we saw the flip side of the peer pressure coin. Another of my friends has a son just P’s age who has also been taking swim lessons. We had been talking on the phone about the kids’ progress and it sounded like they were at the same place – just starting to travel through the water on their own. We had tried to get them together to practice, but this was the first time we would be swimming together.

Benny and Penn stood together on the side of the pool, counted to three in unison, and flew into the water – and it became clear that they were the yin and yang of swimming. Benny could tread water and dog-paddle, his blond and curly head bobbing at the surface. His arms did most of the work to carry him back toward the wall. Penn, on the other hand, was an underwater glider, holding her breath, kicking her slim legs, and holding her arms near her sides. After surfacing, she watched Benny swim for a moment – and then decided that she wanted to do it the way Ben did.

Unfortunately, P just can’t do it. She struggles to tread water, her head sinking and slipping until just her nose and mouth are at the surface. She swallows water and gasps. Over and over again, during that pool party and at the gym pool the next day, we had her jump – and every time, she tried to dog paddle, sinking like a stone.

I found myself growing more and more disappointed with each jump. I’d watch, wait, and then grab her by the arm. “Hey, Penn,” I’d say. “How about you try it under water again? You’re really good at doing it that way. You can go so much farther and faster that way.” But P shook her head. Benny is her best friend, and if Benny swims with his head up, she wants to swim with her head up, too.

On Father’s Day, I suggested that we all go swimming together as a fun activity, but I was aware that there was a small part of me that just wanted Penn to practice and get back to the underwater glide again. P was tired and cranky, and it wasn’t as warm as it had been. “Do you want to swim?” I asked her.

“Maybe later,” she said.

So instead of asking, I told her it was time to go. We got to the pool, and another one of her friends was there, a non-swimmer. Oh good, I thought. Penn will want to show her her best technique. Nope – back to the dog-paddle struggle again, the fish-lips at the surface. I noticed that if I positioned myself far away enough, she’d eventually duck under and swim toward me, but she surfaced with a look of worry instead of triumph – I’d pushed it too far, and although she could do it, she was a little scared.

I talked to my mother later that day and told her about how frustrating it was – how well Penn had been doing, how she had backslid, how I had gone from clapping and crying to criticizing and cajoling her to do things differently. “But she’s having fun, right?” my mom asked. “She likes it?”

Yes. She is having fun, whether swimming steady as Michael Phelps or thrashing around like a hooked bass. She is having fun, and that is the important thing.

That Tiger Mother instinct – the wheedling, the suggesting, the correcting – is new to me. When Penn started swimming, I was so thrilled and happy to see her loving something so much, to see her doing something so well. To see her take a step backwards was disappointing, and it was hard for me to hide that. I don’t want to damage her budding confidence or make her feel like I only accept perfection, but I want her to succeed. It’s a tough balance to strike.

With a little reflection, I realize that the two steps forward, one step back thing is the way to growth. At that pace, you’re still moving forward.  Swimming, reading, riding a bike, becoming independent…the process of mastering these skills is just that – a process. I’m still moving forward in the same way, in fits and starts, with regressions and progressions and stalls.

Since my own childhood, my parents have always let my sisters and I make strides forward and stumbles back. They have always let me know that I can make mistakes and that even if I do things imperfectly, they will be cheering my efforts on. When I ask for feedback, they give it honestly; when I need support, it’s there, whether they think I’m better off dog paddling or dunking under. And they have asked along the way – are you having fun? Are you feeling fulfilled? Are you getting something out of this, even if you’re almost drowning?

So at today’s swim lesson, I will try to keep the encouragement and curb the commentary. I will clap for effort. I will praise the will to get into the water and to try, the joy of jumping into something you haven’t quite figured out yet, the importance of learning to do it your own way.

 

 
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