“I want to be something else in life besides a dad,” says my husband, who is a very good dad, and doesn’t ever want to be a less good one. As for me, I rail all the time at the frustrations of taking care of little children. I wish I could swim clear across the lake in summer instead of doing my laps always parallel to shore, where I can keep an eye on my sons. But still, in spite of all that, I hold on to a little hand-knit blue sweater with a yellow duck on the front (size three months) and a pink rabbit-fur-trimmed baby hat, and even when I hand over to my friend Laurie a boxful of Audrey’s outgrown dresses, I say (trying to sound casual), “If you get around to it, you might give them back when Leah doesn’t need them anymore.” I don’t want to burn my bridges yet.
Today we had one of those mornings when I would have given my three best pairs of salt and pepper shakers (two china bananas, the miniature baseball mitt and ball, the plastic penguins), plus my entire freezer’s worth of frozen raspberries, my favorite eight-year-old pink chenille bathrobe, and our last jar full of homemade maple syrup, for a half hour more of sleep.
We stayed up late last night. Came home past midnight, fixed ourselves a snack, had (crazily) a cup of coffee. Got to bed around two A.M. (The staying up part is never what’s hard. What’s hard comes later.)
Six-fifteen A.M. A yelp from upstairs: Willy. And then a crash (he leaps out of his crib unassisted now, but you wouldn’t want to watch). Followed by: a few bars of “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah.” “Go-bots. More than meets the eye!” Thump, thump, thump on the steps. (He skids down, on his bottom, one riser at a time.) Then the familiar sound of footed pajama bottoms scuffing across the kitchen floor. The refrigerator door opening. (He gets his own bottles now, too.) The bedroom door opening. Little feet rushing across the floor. The sound of a toy chain saw, buzzing in my ear. (Directly overhead, in fact. And to think that last December, Steve and I actually went to five toy stores to locate this item.)
And finally, as he pounces on top of us, the words “I want my breakfast!”
Of course I prolong this stage, of being half awake but still at least prone and under my quilt, as long as possible. Willy brings me a book to read in bed (dumps it on my head, usually), and if I’m lucky it will be one I know so well that I can recite the words without opening more than one eye. At which point he will reach over to the night table for my glasses and put them on my face. Upside down, generally.
In my eight years of rude awakenings, I have developed a few tricks, of course. Feigning sleep is one. Sighing dramatically, then flopping onto my stomach, head under the pillow. Toddlers know how to handle that one, though: by sitting on your face. Particularly effective when the toddler in question is still sporting last night’s diaper.
I may give my child an errand to run, to the farthest reaches of the house. (“Go bring me a purple marker.” “Have you seen your bulldozer lately?”) Then he’ll—briefly—dash off. (More scurrying of footed PJs on floorboards, bumping back upstairs, rummaging in toy bins.) But now I know that my reprieve is only momentary; I get no peace: I lie there like a patient waiting for the dentist, who has stepped out for a moment only to return with the drill.
Sometimes I try to toss the ball to my husband’s court—a dirty trick, no question. “Dad will read you that book,” I say. “Go ask Dad to slice up your banana.” Feet scuffing around to the other side of the bed. Pouncing. The sound of book jacket hitting skull. Followed by, “Ask Mom.”
So I adjust my glasses on my nose—right side up—and open this morning’s selection, which, if I’m lucky, will be The Pokey Little Puppy or Curious George. And if I’m not so lucky, an ancient but well-loved comic book, The Adventures of the Incredible Hulk, or a three-year-old program from Disney World on Ice. I may, after the second reading, try my final ploy: “Now why don’t you read it to me, Will?” (Then I can close my eyes for two more precious moments.) But by now I know the game is up. Six-thirty finds me out of bed and in the kitchen, making coffee. Rounding up Charlie and Audrey. Packing the school lunches. Pouring out the cereal.
Now the truth is, even before I had children I was never one to loll around in bed till some scandalous hour like eight-fifteen. I always believed in getting a good early start on the day (and on the rare occasions when I’d sleep in, I invariably felt guilty). But nowadays, my fantasies turn not so much to desert islands, moonlit cruises, romantic interludes by candlelight, as they do to sleep. Unbroken sleep. Eight hours. Maybe even twelve. I can’t remember the last time I had a night like that.
As parents, we are always quick to point out to our children, “You’re overtired,” and remind them, “That’s why you’re cranky.” (Even now, a quarter century later, I can still remember the terrible frustration I used to feel, as a child, hearing my mother speak those words. “I AM NOT!” I would scream. “See,” she would say calmly, as I do now to my children. “That just shows what I mean.”) But nobody gets more overtired than the grown-ups (mothers in particular). I’ll bet it’s the number one occupational hazard of parenthood.
What most of us discover, I think (when we reach the stage of life that calls for rising in the night to feed the baby or comfort him out of his nightmares or greet him with the sun, ready to play blocks), is that we have strength and stamina we never before knew about. Inner resources we wouldn’t have guessed at. (Maybe it was childbirth that revealed them to us.) I look back on my old days—when I sometimes sat down just to think, went to bed when I felt like it, and got up when the spirit moved me—and wonder why I didn’t, back then, make it to the Fortune 500 club or at the very least come up with a vaccine against chicken pox. Give a mother of young children seven days in which she is not required to make a single peanut butter sandwich or get out of bed before seven, and she could (I bet) accomplish just about anything.
But this is what we want to be doing. Best, probably, not to calculate so far ahead, but this is most likely what I will be doing for the next five years, at the very least. Fifteen hundred more mornings spent burrowing under the covers while one or another of my children announces, directly into my eardrum, “Time to get up!” Someday, no doubt, the time will come when they fix their own breakfasts (or when they get too busy with their lives to sit down for a morning meal at all), and of course then I will miss the warm, faintly damp presence of a baby in our bed.
Good morning to you.
Good morning to you.
We’re all in our places, with bright shining faces.
Good morning to you. Good morning to you. Good morning to you.
I’ve been buying diapers, nearly without interruption, for eight and a half years now. There was a period of around eighteen months, after Audrey was trained and before Charlie was born, when we lived diaper free, but we made up for it, a couple of years later, when Willy was born and Steve and I found ourselves with two children in diapers. Using the rough figure of 6 a day, 365 days a year, multiplied by 8, I come to somewhere in the neighborhood of 16,000 diapers we’ve gone through. As for what they cost us—I don’t even want to figure that one out. If we’d been using cloth, all these years, I would at least have one terrific collection of cleaning rags to show for it all. As it stands, all I can say is, you won’t find many people who change a diaper faster than I can.
Diapers aren’t that significant, really, but you might notice how often they tend to come up in discussions of babies and the decision to have children. When people try to sum up the experience of parenthood they probably don’t mention watching one’s twelve-month-old discover her toes, or giving a two-year-old a bath, or the look on her face the first time she tastes ice cream. They don’t go into the supreme pleasure of holding a toddler on one’s lap, reading him Goodnight Moon, and when he gets to the page with the quiet old lady, hearing him whisper “Hush.” What people talk about, when they attempt to reduce the whole thing to twenty-five words or less, is apt to be: diapers.
What can you say about them? Some brands are a lot better than others, and it’s seldom true economy to buy
the cheap ones. Some children are a lot easier to change than others—and I have had both kinds. A daughter who used to lie still on the changing table, peel back the tapes obligingly, and say, as if the two of us were just sitting down with our best china for tea, “Please pass the powder” or “How are you doing today, Mom?” And a son who liked to break dance while I changed him, and one who, the moment I had his diaper off, would bound like a stunt man from the changing table (three feet off the ground) and race out the door—naked from the waist down, no matter what the season. “Don’t say ick and don’t say ugh,” he would instruct me as I carried him off again to clean him up.
It hasn’t just been my children I’ve tussled with over the issue of diapers, either. I couldn’t begin to count the number of arguments Steve and I have had over who’d attend to the diaper this time. Same arguments, really, same words—all that changed were the children. Foolish fights, that would sometimes reduce me to tears or him to stony silence. And what they were about, of course, was never really changing diapers at all. (I know there are people who can’t stand the job, but it has never really bothered me.) I argued with my husband over who got up to change the baby, mostly out of principle. “You never ask me to change the diaper. Why is it I have to ask you?” I would say. “When did you last change the oil in our car?” he’d reply. Round and round we went—ending up nowhere. With about as much to show for all our battles on the subject as I have to show for all those sixteen thousand disposable diapers now lying somewhere at the bottom of our town dump.
During our daughter’s babyhood, when we were at our most broke, I harbored the fantasy (shared by half the mothers in America, I’ll bet) that she might make diaper commercials. Where was there a cuter, more adorable baby? Who could resist her—or whatever brand of diaper she’d wear? If she would just do—in front of a camera—what she did for me in our living room (putting the diaper on her head, kissing the baby on the diaper box), she might earn herself a college education. But we lived in the country—no ad agencies, no talent scouts within a hundred-mile radius. So her antics in diapers went unrecorded by everyone but her father and me. And I’m sure it was all for the best.
Then one by one our children left diapers behind them. I am a sentimentalist about every aspect of our children’s lives, and a historian of their days, whose tendency it is to save physical artifacts (a baby tooth, the first scrawl that could be said to resemble a human face, even the plastic clip from Audrey’s umbilical cord), and if I could have known, when I was putting it on, that this particular diaper would be the last one this child ever wore, I might even have shed a tear over its absorbent quilted layers. But of course that’s never how it is when a child is giving up diapers. One day he stays dry. Then another. And suddenly it occurs to you, it’s been three days since you’ve bothered to put a diaper on him, even when you go out. And the next thing you know, you’ve got marigold seedlings on what used to be the changing table and you’re buying a six-pack of Alvin and the Chipmunks briefs, size 2.
A few months ago that moment arrived at our house with our youngest son Willy. And though I never go so far as to say he is our last child, and I always harbor the hope that sometime there will again be energy and space in our lives for one more, this particular round of toilet training certainly feels like a particularly momentous one. The end of an era. A graduation, not just for Willy, but for Steve and me too. It seems totally appropriate, then, that the moment should be marked by a rather extraordinary event, and it was. Here is the story:
I am a believer in the idea of rewarding children, during the early stages of toilet training, with prizes for peeing in the pot. In the past, I have used goldfish crackers, balloons, plastic farm animals, and once—when I was really desperate—M&M’s. This time around, Willy’s prizes were tiny pink plastic figures currently much coveted by little boys across the nation, called Muscle Men. Every time he made it to the toilet on time, he got one; and though Muscle Men carry the fairly hefty price of around a quarter apiece, until one particular day when he was two years and a few months old, Willy’s performance in the bathroom wasn’t putting much of a strain on our budget. All day long I was mopping up puddles on the floor, while Willy smiled sorrowfully, commenting, “That’s life.”
Then in a single day everything changed. He woke up announcing that he wanted to go to the bathroom, and all morning long he kept his pants dry. That afternoon I took him shopping—wearing briefs, not diapers—and there were no accidents. On the ride home, a trip of about thirty miles, Willy suddenly piped up, “I need to pee.” So naturally I slammed on the brakes and pulled over into the breakdown lane of Interstate 93. “I’m going to get another Muscle Man,” Willy sang happily as I unbuckled his seat belt and led him down the embankment in some tall grass by the side of the highway. And my heart sank, because I had left home without my supply of Muscle Men. I had no reward.
He pulled down his pants. And just as he was finishing, and we were both studying the ground, we spotted it. Nearly buried in the dirt, in the precise spot along Route 93 where my son had chosen to pee, was a pink plastic figure who looked as if he could give Arnold Schwarzenegger a run for his money. “Oh, there’s my Muscle Man,” he said with total casualness, bending to pick it up. He put the figure in his pocket. I put my son back in the car. That was six months ago, and he’s been dry ever since.
DAY IN, DAY OUT
Mess
The La-Z-Boy Lounger
Counting Heads
Swamped
I WORK. I RAISE CHILDREN. I think about large subjects like how to raise a moral child, how to stay married, how to prevent nuclear war. These things are deeply important to me—and if I sound flip, I surely don’t mean to.
But what occupies my mind, as I set out the cereal bowls, as I pull on my sweat pants, as I tromp out to the car to drive Audrey, who has just missed the bus, to school—a dozen other moments of my day and as the sixty seconds before sleep comes—is very often how, how, how, how to keep this house neat.
Not spotless, mind you, or even clean. Just how to avoid being totally buried in Matchbox cars, GI Joe figures, half-eaten fruit roll-ups, and glitter.
I never used to care so much about tidiness. Before I was married, I used to keep a whole room (with the door securely latched) filled with nothing but boxed-up junk. I didn’t even own a mop. I had taken my vacuum cleaner to be repaired and six months later still hadn’t picked it up. I had enough changes of clothes that I could go two weeks—sometimes as long as a month—between trips to the laundromat. If I was having a friend over for dinner, I’d sometimes put a few dirty dishes in the closet.
Then I got married. Steve isn’t one of those compulsively tidy types. He just had so few belongings it would’ve been impossible to mess them up. He came into my life with five cartons of possessions—three of which were paints and brushes. About those, especially, he was and is inordinately fastidious. You would never know, to look at his hands or his work pants, what colors he was working with that day. It takes him a good half hour, every night, to clean his brushes to his satisfaction. Always take good care of your tools, he has been teaching our children ever since they could talk.
When I cook, he says, our kitchen looks like the site of an explosion. Good food never came out of a tidy kitchen, I tell him. Clean the counter, overcook the rice. Wash the pans, burn the onions. You need only look at my kitchen to know I’m a good cook.
And then—this is what breaks us—there are our children. Who, like their mother, do not travel light through life. I think Audrey still owns, and keeps tabs on, all but maybe twelve of the toys she’s been given in her nearly seven years of life. Now and then I wade through the stuff and eliminate something, burying it deep at the bottom of the trash. A few hours later she confronts me suspiciously: “Have you seen the purple brush that goes to My Little Pony? I can’t figure out what happened to that pillow I had in my Barbie Townhouse.” (Now the tea bag on the doll bed makes sense. And all those little tea leaves
leaking out onto her floor).
Audrey believes, and tells me regularly, that toys have feelings. Not just toys, either, but also three-year-old Happy Meal boxes (collectibles of the future?), barrettes, broken china. A pair of red patent-leather pointy-toed shoes her godmother Kate gave her—that she can’t fit, but likes to use as cars for Barbie and Skipper to drive around in. Many large, interesting sculptures made out of cigar boxes, cardboard wrapping-paper tubes, pipe cleaners, and Styrofoam trays. None of these things can be thrown out, as long as she lives within state lines.
Willy goes less for details, more for broad strokes. He likes to take every pillow from the couch and all the beds, dump out the contents of every large box I have just filled with toys, sorted by category. And then stretch our eight-foot-long expandable tunnel across the living room to make a spaceship. He heads directly for the nucleus of whatever activity is going on at the moment and scatters whatever has been assembled there (the marbles from Chinese checkers, the tracks of our new train, two cups full of chocolate chips) in all directions.
All of this makes it sound as if I make no effort to exercise control or discipline, but I do. I post signs, aimed at both the literate and preliterate members of our household, listing both tasks and reminders. (“STOP! Have you put your bowl in the dishwasher?” Or simply a picture of me, looking mad, standing over a pile of blocks.) I confiscate un-picked-up toys. I buy brightly colored plastic boxes, tubs, and bins; I label them “Legos,” “Smurfs,” and “Superheroes.” We start a new leaf at least once a month.
Domestic Affairs Page 6
