Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting!

by Sandra Tsing Loh

  Surprise baskets of teddy bears and lotion

  Ladies Only! night at Harrah’s casinos

  Six-ounce low-fat yogurt cups with decadent carob-like flavor sensuously mixed in

  The glistening torso of Matthew McConaughey erupting out of a swimming pool as he targets us with a peppy “finger gun”

  Then one day I flop open my newspaper’s Weekend Calendar with its grim march of weekend listings and see something that makes me stop. And let me note that clearly some powerful, mysterious force beyond my control has drawn me to flop open the L.A. Times Weekend Calendar in the first place—

  To begin with, its cover does indeed feature a laughing Matthew McConaughey erupting out of a swimming pool, and I fear hernia, because by my count Matthew McConaughey has been erupting out of swimming pools for so many decades, he must be as old as I feel, meaning about sixty-seven. I fear that right after that erupting-out-of-the-swimming-pool photo was taken, Matthew McConaughey immediately bent over in a cramp screaming, and that the series of full-color follow-up photos inside would be various shots of Matthew McConaughey lying in fetal position by the swimming pool, among knocked-over photography equipment, clutching his hamstring in his tiny white shorts, and howling.

  If so, it would be the most interesting thing ever published in L.A. Times Weekend, which for years has been a notorious literary wasteland. (A wasteland in the T. S. Eliot sense in that it is a hideous entertainment-listing combination of both The Wasteland and Cats.) Clearly, as the weeks, months, years, and decades have ground on, the editors have fallen into a rut of quiet desperation, resulting in a kind of walled-off Grey Gardens–like paranoia about publishing anything that is NOT cheerful and NOT about the weekend! So all the articles go: “It’s the weekend! What do you do on the weekend? Is there special, soft R&B music you play on the weekend? Why is it we feel so moved to barbecue on the weekend? Is there a delectable carob-like dessert you particularly savor on the weekend? What is your favorite day of the weekend? Favorite time of the weekend? Favorite moment? What is your favorite alternative spelling of weekend? Weekynd? Weakend? Wekeynd? Weikïynddh?”

  And now come the Q&A’s where Los Angeles celebrities are frantically interviewed about the weekend. They are very short—never more than thirty-seven words—in case foundering readers will get confused and lose the thread OF…The Weekend. Knight Rider is coming out with its eighty-ninth anniversary collector’s edition DVD, so there, capsized by the side of another pool, clutching his hamstring, is David Hasselhoff. “David Hasselhoff, do you like to BBQ on the weekend? Do you have a favorite dessert you savor on the weekend? Do you have a favorite song about the weekend? Is there something special about LOS ANGELES weekends? Provocative question: Have you ever weekended…in San Diego?”

  And, clutching his hamstring, David Hasselhoff will grudgingly admit, “I like to barbecue on the weekend. I suppose I’m not one to turn away a carob-like dessert on the weekend…” And then he’ll gradually fly into a rage. “I really have no idea about the weekend. Fuck off about the weekend. You’re like some kind of freak of the weekend. Fuck off!”

  Paging through this sorry end to an old-growth forest, this papering of the city’s litter boxes, however…

  That’s when I see her.

  Ageless, timeless, untouchable.

  Julie Andrews.

  Ringed off—protected from the riffraff—by the ornate borders of her own perfect ad.

  Perfectly coiffed.

  Perfectly cool, amid the hamstring-clutching debacle that has become modern civilization.

  I see Julie Andrews and an urgent bell, inside me, goes off.

  For me, Julie Andrews is not a celebrity, not an entertainer, not an actor, and possibly not even a person.

  Julie Andrews is a force.

  A wind.

  A feeling.

  An ache.

  A vibration.

  To say that for the past forty years Julie Andrews and I have had an extremely close personal relationship is a wretched understatement. When I drive over a hill and a vista of emerald-green valleys suddenly drops opens before me and the mad, shocking, bittersweet beauty of the world hits me like shock plugs to the chest, causing a song to spontaneously lift out of me like a soaring lark? That is Julie Andrews. I carry Julie Andrews internally, like an organ. Within my torso I have a heart, liver, lungs, and a Julie Andrews. On the back my driver’s license, I signed a thing where in case of a car accident, they can transplant, to any young teen or old person who may be in need of it…my Julie Andrews.

  My personal Julie Andrews is not so much the Sound of Music Julie Andrews. Yes, I’ve seen The Sound of Music more than a hundred times, but for my taste, that is the more corporate Julie Andrews. And when she comes back from her honeymoon with Captain Von Trapp in that telltale gold suit, it’s clear she has a life now, and adult responsibilities, and dwells no more in the magical realm.

  No, the moment I first really CONNECTED with Julie Andrews—when she leaned out of the movie screen and literally REACHED OUT to me—was in Mary Poppins. I was five. I remember the moment as though it were yesterday. Julie Andrews was singing to that bird in the mirror, her reflection sang back to her, and all at once, in a moment, Julie Andrews turned her head over her shoulder and shot me this sudden wry look…! It was over in an instant. None of the other children watching saw it. It was a look just for me. I was the only child with a heart and eyes OPEN enough to understand.

  And all at once—in that quick, humorous, frank look—I saw into the complexity of Mary Poppins’s world. That she enjoys being Mary Poppins, she’s a little bored with being Mary Poppins, but she knows the entire planet needs her to BE Mary Poppins, and so, while finding the job of Mary Poppins to be a little repetitive, she does always freshly thrill to her outrageous competence—the snapping of the fingers, the leaping of the clothes back into their drawers, the jig-like restacking of the blocks…

  Julie Andrews/Mary Poppins can also be pretty saucy. She never vies or pleads for attention, but when, on a London rooftop, chimney sweeps beg and plead and press her to join them in their great chimney-sweep dance of kicking and leaping and self-slapping…of course, she is an effortless virtuoso, blows the roof off the place.

  How I marveled over this because as a child, of course, I was the exact opposite. I would arduously battle to gain some narrow edge, some sliver, some narrow crescent-moon-shaped miniscus of the spotlight. I remember my deepest, most painful wish was to be in our kindergarten Winnie the Pooh play. I thrilled at the prospect of playing any of the roles: Pooh…Christopher Robin…Tigger…Piglet…Eeyore…Kanga…Roo…I knew all the lines, I chanted them on the schoolbus in preparation for the audition…in a room that I can still picture—as I can the audition spot, that mystical opening between pushed-back desks at the front of the classroom, the slightly worn spot on the beige linoleum floor that I giddily bound onto. I entered that space, I sang my three lines, the teachers politely smiled and applauded and pushed up their glasses to make notes.

  And when the roles were announced, my name was not called. I was stunned. I suggested to my teacher, Mrs. Thompson, that if there were too many children, perhaps she and Mrs. Anderson could bend the rules a little and make up an animal, some obscure forest character no one had heard of—“Tiglet,” say—so even if I had no lines in the play, I could at least have a name.

  But no, come the play, there I sat on the sidelines with all the other Nobodies…in no distinct, special costume at all but my regular old black ballet leotard, in some strange mismatched ears my mother stitched for me on her sewing machine that resembled those of no recognizable animal.

  It seemed, in my years of school life, some variation of this template would be repeated again and again. The humiliations, the disappointments, the cuttings…You would be herded like cattle into the slaughterhouse into a frighteningly lit junior-high-school locker room, given a swimsuit color-coded for SIZE (so instead of skinny orange or svelte green or even plumpish red,
you were indelibly marked with whale-like blue), and now you were standing on a small platform at the edge of a vast, echoing Olympian pool…one hundred beady eyes on you in a terrifying unwanted spotlight, the coach shouting at you to dive one thousand feet down into the icy bottomless blue, and you would be so panicked, you would suddenly let loose a juicy nervous fart that would echo echo echo echo.

  Which would NEVER OCCUR on Planet Julie Andrews. If, sitting up on that cloud, she saw such a scene unfolding, she would sweep down and forbid it. Spit spot! She’d drain all the water out of the pool. Snap fingers and my heckling teen peers would be turned to carousel horses. Pop open her umbrella and waltzing carousel music would begin, and pink cake would arrive…for my birthday party!

  And now, some four decades later, my own six-year-old daughter has become infected with the Julie Andrews virus. Already she has seen Mary Poppins perhaps twelve, fifteen times. What with the colorful, perfectly preserved wide-screen DVD version, the virus has traveled to the next generation.

  (I suppose I only have myself to blame. A visiting mother recently asked why I appear to allow my children to watch approximately twenty-nine hours of television a day. And I replied, in surprise, “That’s not television. That’s Julie Andrews!” Or, alternatively, “That’s not television. That’s The Aristocats!” For me, The Aristocats is art, possibly a more important experience for young people than four—or, as in my case, ten—years of college.)

  When Hannah gets one look at the Julie-Andrews-at-the-book-festival ad I’ve clipped and pinned to my office corkboard…

  “Mary Poppins!” she exhales. She taps the photo with her small hand. “Mary Poppins!”

  And that’s it.

  While I myself might not have attempted to locate the children’s stage in the northwest quadrant of the Target/Home Depot plaza in the middle of the vast 150,000-person L.A. Times Book Festival, for my daughter…?

  We were going to do it.

  The sun was shining in Los Angeles, there was a joyous lark rising within us, Hannah and I clutched each other’s hands because the dream was alive, hers and mine…

  Julie Andrews!

  Because I was a bit flummoxed over the colored, many-planed map to the Target/Home Depot/Staples/Bed Bath & Beyond plaza, which seems to fold out to a size of about twenty square feet, the plan was to get to UCLA on Sunday morning at least an hour early so we could even FIND Julie Andrews.

  But of course, hampered by my two actual small children, and their confusion of little shoes and little skirts and little socks…which had to be color-coordinated exactly, as they were to be seen by Mary Poppins, who would probably, if they were mismatched, correct them…And with me, the harried mother, very much lacking Mary Poppins’s crisp organization and flair, our family arrives at UCLA…merely ON TIME.

  And when, after much confusion, we arrive at what turns out to be the Julie Andrews stage, I am struck with horror.

  Certainly it was unrealistic to expect Julie Andrews to nestle coolly on a comfy Victorian chair while Hannah and I, and perhaps a handful of other children, sat patiently at her feet, gathered around what I knew would be Julie Andrews’s tastefully fabulous shoes. Shoes that didn’t draw attention, but when you looked closely at them, were discreetly fabulous.

  And yet neither did I expect this—this Cecil B. DeMille–like vision, this vast, echoing Valley of Julie Andrews. In that moment, I see my fatal and naive miscalculation. Julie Andrews is not just my personal friend. Julie Andrews does not belong to me alone…

  Oh no, I see myself and my naked Julie Andrews rabidity reflected in the eager faces of approximately ten thousand other premenopausal forty-something mothers. Flanked by their own children, their own demonspawn clutching their own Mary Poppins videos—which are identical to the wide-screen collector’s edition we have—the mothers jostle one another with their identical-to-mine EZ-cut khakis, and T-shirts and tote bags bearing the logos of all the proper classical music and public radio stations that Mary Poppins would expect us to have at age forty. The mood is tense as we accidentally—or is it?—bang our healthy Mary Poppins–approved bottles of water and tubes of SPF-60 sunscreen against one another—

  I see, with this throng of ten thousand competing rabid mothers, that even getting within shouting distance of that Target Julie Andrews stage is going to be ugly. Not only did these Julie Andrews–mad mothers get here early, they were clearly privy to the hidden capitalistic code that gets a human being close to Julie Andrews. The complicated passes from radio stations, the secret Internet clickings at all those hideous timed five-minute intervals…Or perhaps it was their much-better-than-ours airline miles that got them within a hundred feet of the stage, or they used their Platinum American Express cards, or they turned in their courtside Lakers seats…They parsed all the complicated bar codes of Western civilization, which, if punctured from a forty-five-degree angle just so, will magically open.

  Fortunately, though, Brenda is here. All business and cinnamon Dentyne, she has staked out…the tree behind the sound mixer. If I perch Hannah on the top bar of the metal security fence, through a Y of tree branches…yes!

  We can see Her head! We can see Her head!

  We can see that Julie Andrews is wearing a white pantsuit!

  She raises an arm!

  She speaks!

  She says, in her lilting, mellifluous, 100 percent real Julie Andrews voice, “Good afternoon, everyone!”

  All at once, as though TORN from our ten thousand–plus throats, a howling scream rises!

  And rises!

  And rises!

  We are Romans in a coliseum. It’s almost scary, a little gladiatorial, because we are not just ordinary, schvitzing forty-something women, we are Julie Andrews–mad mothers with our Julie Andrews–mad children…The estrogen supernova is a dark whorling eye you could probably see from outer space…From where Julie Andrews may well wish she were sitting on a cloud and observing us—

  Julie Andrews puts one perfect white sleeve up again—

  We shush.

  Julie Andrews mentions her latest book, The Great American Mousical—

  We scream again—

  She could mention anything.

  A Julie Andrews clog—

  A Julie Andrews chapeau—

  A Julie Andrews low-fat Havarti—

  And we would scream and buy it.

  And now what happens is almost…too painful to relate.

  It is perhaps the most painful of all the painful childhood moments I have previously tried—and failed—to shield my daughter from.

  The under-attended birthday parties, on those weird cursed weekends when at the last moment everyone suddenly gets sick…The face falling. “Perhaps James is coming? Kristy?” No, they are not.

  The first morning Hannah rode the school bus. It had been her idea. She flew to the bus stop that morning in such excitement. While waiting in the semidarkness, she danced on the sidewalk, in her white-and-pink-striped sweater, a bit too jaunty, chattering confidently to all the older kids. These included her assigned school bus buddy, a third-grade girl named Rae, with a cloud of light brown hair, Princess Jasmine backpack, and a sweet, kind face. A face that went into a dumbfounded stare when the two of them stumbled onto the crowded school bus and there was only space for Rae to sit down, not Hannah…

  And to my terror, I saw the white-and-pink-striped sweater…continue on down the aisle, deeper and deeper into the bus! I saw Hannah’s very being crumple under her too-large backpack, her face stretch into a frightened, surprised wail of tears, and as she stumbled into the bowels of the back of the bus amongst impassive, iPod-wearing older teens…

  I jumped into my car and screamed after the bus, the roots of my hair on fire for the entire 12.5-minute ride. While screaming along behind the bus, I dialed Kaitlin on my cell, chanting, “Remind me again why I should not pull next to that school bus at a stoplight, take out a tire iron, break the glass, and pull Hannah out of there. I vaguely sense there is a
reason I should not do this, but I can’t quite remember why.”

  Or there are the endless pill bugs and ladybugs that Hannah finds among the plants and leaves in the garden. Insects my daughter lovingly hugs to her breast…even as she is slowly suffocating them. With loving care, and such alertness her fingers tremble, Hannah fashions cunning little homes for her pets, adding water, and delicious leaves so they will be cozy. In slow motion I am forced to watch as, her face shining, her voice rising and falling in cadences of hope, Hannah describes all the happy plans she has for her and “Pilly,” how they will wake up together each morning, the sights they’ll see, the picnics they’ll have…Even as I can see “Pilly” frantically trying to clamber up the slippery sides of his Dixie Cup deathtrap with too large a plop of water in the bottom, begging for air, legs flailing…What will be in an hour the caved-out defeat of my daughter’s dreams, her crushed heart.

  No no no no no no.

  More painful than any of these things is the event that occurs now.

  When Julie Andrews says…she will take live questions now FROM THE CHILDREN.

  And all over the—the—the—southeast northwestern quadrant…the vast, rolling acreage…of the UCLA campus…Hopeful little hands go up!

  I remind you that, in the leafy valley directly in front of the giant oak tree we’re standing behind, the tree whose upper Y of branches frames Julie Andrews’s coiffed head—which for us is about as big as a Tic Tac—we can’t see Julie Andrews’s body, only her head—

  Who will GET to ask a question? Well, in that leafy valley that opens beyond, you can vaguely make out these ant-like figures who are the members of some kind of dreadfully perky young Target and Barnes & Noble youth team—

  Which is to say they are pimply corporate summer job twentysomethings with no sense of history, of fairness, of literary judgment…In this hideous, horrendous, nonmagical world we live in, these minimum-wage Target intern hooligans don’t know from nineteenth-century London or pieces of letters that magically fly up through chimneys or the splaying legs of Dick Van Dyke (and how Bert would play, elbows flying, on his many clattering instruments in the park, and how no one would give him money, not even the copper, not even a tuppence)—