It’s unrealistic to hope that my children won’t ever get divorced, given the statistics, and their own parents’ history, but I hope it anyway. It’s easy to get a divorce, but it’s hard to get unmarried, even when the cut is clean and bloodless, like mine was. Our legal and financial ties were easily dissolved, and there were no children to keep us connected to each other. I moved away, and apart from a split-second, chance sighting across a parking lot during a summer vacation over ten years ago, we never saw each other again. Even so, the severed life is a phantom limb that sometimes twitches and aches for no apparent cause. It’s been nearly fifteen years since I kissed that husband good-bye—three times as many years apart as we were a couple—but sometimes I still dream about him; that we are together in the home we once shared, and that it’s this life that’s been the dream all along.
Most of the time, my memory of him is distant and unfocused, a face in the background. But then something will bring it into sudden focus. Once it was a silver locket, tarnished and forgotten at the bottom of my jewelry box. Inside, our two portraits were still hinged together, each of them so small it was like spying through the wrong end of a telescope. A stolen backward glance. Sometimes it’s my oldest son who reminds me of him, lean and tall, with his sandy brown hair and blue eyes, his innate esprit de corps and love of order. It’s ironic to glimpse traces of the life I left behind in the life I ran toward, and it could be pure projection, yet it moves me when I see the similarities. Nothing is ever really lost.
There’s no reason for those memories and dreams to occasionally haunt me. As far as I’m aware, I have no unfinished business with that long-ago part of my history. Except that I think, on some level, maybe there is no divorce. Maybe if you make those vows, you don’t get your whole deposit back. Parts of your souls stay tangled up together, for better or for worse. I mean to tell my boys that, too, before I blink and they’re men already, picking out rings, making promises that are impossible to keep and hard to take back. But the metaphysics of love will have to wait until I’ve covered the mechanics. You know, the basic facts. Like where eggs come from when both chickens are left-handed.
14.
Mom, the Musical
Whenever career counselors try to parlay child-rearing experience into marketable job skills, what they typically come up with are administrative functions, like appointment making and record keeping. As if you’d want to do those things for anyone to whom you weren’t legally or morally bound. They completely overlook the far more specialized skill set moms acquire over the course of those years, which easily qualifies many of us for top creative positions at Disney World, or in Broadway musical theater. By the time our kids head off to college, we are show business veterans, having produced, directed, and starred in such classics as “Christmas,” “Halloween,” “Birthday Party” and other holiday extravaganzas for eighteen consecutive years, at breathless tempo. Motherhood isn’t a desk job. It’s vaudeville.
Let’s take a run through the standard repertoire. Practically speaking, the first major production of the year is Valentine’s Day. Chronologically, it should be New Year’s, but that’s an adult-oriented occasion, which properly belongs to the childfree, since they can sleep in the next morning. They’re welcome to it. The rest of us can’t stay awake till midnight anymore, anyway.
Valentine’s Day used to involve champagne and debauchery, too, but classroom party preparations leave a mother too exhausted for romance. V-Day is the biggest classroom party of the school year, and conscription into its service is impossible to avoid. I have three elementary school kids who have up to thirty classmates each. That’s a lot of love to deliver. I’m usually up late the night before, hot-gluing foil-wrapped chocolate hearts to cards, signing X’s and O’s, cutting sandwiches into heart shapes, and hating everyone. I think mothers wearing a school visitor name tag on February 14 should be treated like military veterans, with drinks on the house and complimentary manicures wherever we go.
When I was a kid, about a thousand years ago, Valentine’s Day was all about the valentines, which were painstakingly handcut from a book that contained not one licensed, trademarked character. You chose the plainest, slightly backhanded ones for the kids you didn’t like, and the most ornate, gushing ones for the kids you did, and we gave it to each other straight up, without the orgiastic euphoria of corn syrup solids to cloud things. For party refreshments, we had our own tender, young hearts to eat out. I don’t know when that changed, or whether it’s an American thing, but every valentine my kids give and receive comes attached to at least one piece of candy. As if that didn’t add up to enough insulin resistance, the room moms mix up a vat of sugar and red food dye and pour it in a feed trough. Or they might as well, considering what is actually served. If you’ve seen video montages of psychedelic “happenings” in the sixties, you’ve seen something like a modern Valentine’s Day classroom party. On the glycemic disaster index, Valentine’s is second only to Halloween.
I try to limit my on-site presence to dropping a snack off at the door and running, but this year I thought I’d linger and check in on my third-grader’s class. The party couldn’t have been going more than twenty minutes, but the floor and desktops were already littered with red and pink cellophane wrappers. My child was slumped backward in his seat in what appeared to be a diabetic coma. Several empty Pixy Stix tubes lay scattered in front of him. His lips twitched slightly when I spoke his name. About half his classmates were also catatonic at their desks. The other half were doing gymnastics across the room. Their drug dealers, the room moms, stood paralyzed against the wall, as if watching a fire they had accidentally started.
“Here,” I said to my son, picking up a bottle of spring water from a treat bag and silently blessing whichever mother had thoughtfully included it in the loot. “I think you should drink some of this.”
He rallied enough to unscrew the bottle top and pour in a packet of red drink mix that had come with it. Of course. I eased out the door, hoping he would hit his bottom and find a recovery program before the bell rang.
Sugar is to children’s parties as cocaine is to the entertainment industry. If your kid is part of the scene, you have to accept that they’re going to come into contact with it. You hope for the best, and brace for the worst. For a very short while, I thought I could keep my babies’ pancreases pristine. I kept them away from refined carbohydrates. I limited fruit juice. I made them barley-sweetened whole grain teething biscuits that even the dog wouldn’t eat. But I couldn’t keep it up. The slope of my nutritive backslide can be plotted by each of my kid’s first birthday cakes. When the oldest turned one, I made him a whole wheat carrot cake with pineapple-sweetened cream cheese on top. Two years later, it was a homemade chocolate layer cake, frosted with buttercream, for my middle child. Three years after that, I ran by the warehouse club and picked up a slab of corn syrup and hydrogenated vegetable oil, spray-painted blue, for the baby.
It was an increasingly futile effort anyway, since we don’t live in a bubble. Even the bank tellers at the drive-up window are pushing candy. School is just a high-fructose corn syrup distribution hub. I’ve had to shift from a preventative focus to damage control. I can’t keep my kids from getting their hands on a can of soda when they leave our house, but I can at least make sure they’ve had something nutritious before they get out the door. I figure it’s better to shoot for moderation anyway. I grew up under a very strict anti-junk-food regime, and wiped out all seventeen years of it in one semester of college. My husband, on the other hand, grew up with no dietary rules or restrictions, and never developed an internal regulator to suggest that there should ever be any. Outside of the suppers I cook, he eats like a twelve-year-old with no mother. So I’ve relaxed my standards in hopes of finding the middle way.
Besides, what’s childhood without an occasional sugar buzz? At least once in your life, I figure, you’ve got to eat a chocolate bunny the size of your head, and you might as well do it when you can most effi
ciently metabolize it. I must have a little bit of the pusher in me. I loved watching each of my kids realize for the first time what’s inside a plastic Easter egg, what comes after they say “trick or treat.”
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME,” my youngest bellowed joyfully up and down the street, the first year he could trick-or-treat on his own two feet and hold his loot bag by himself.
Where creative output is concerned, Halloween is an even bigger production than Valentine’s Day. It’s also more competitive. Everyone’s in it to win for best costume design and best front porch special effects. To add to the intensity, there’s almost always a conflict between directors and actors as to whose artistic vision should get prime consideration. The actors in our house always win. My cute and original costume suggestions are consistently rejected in favor of the trademarked and cliché.
“Ninjas, again?” I ask, when presented with their demands. “That’s so 2005. What about the headless man I showed you?”
“It’s weird.”
“It’s avant-garde.”
Actors.
Halloween is just as much, or more, work for me, as any of the other major kids’ holidays, but I get to share in the fun to a greater extent than at Valentine’s Day or Easter. For starters, there is the kickback from the treat bags. I prefer to take my cut in chocolate, but will also accept candy corn and caramels. And then there are the grown-up parties, with the excuse to dress up, something I love to do. My husband loves it considerably less. In fact, no two words strung together will strike dread into his heart, and joy into mine, like “theme” and “party.” The last time I persuaded him to put a costume on, we were going to an allages gathering, and I came across a cheeky, last-minute concept he agreed was too apt to resist. I folded and pinned a tablecloth around him like a giant diaper and dropped a couple of onions down the back so it would sag appropriately. When we arrived at the party, the adults immediately caught on that he was a—wait for it—party pooper. We were basking in the glow of a well-delivered punch line, when someone’s little boy wandered into the room, carrying a plate of cookies.
“Hey,” Patrick said to him, in that overbright tone that adults use with children sometimes. “Do you know what I am?” To make it easier on the kid, I made a sweeping, game show hostess gesture toward my husband’s rear end.
The little boy looked at me and then back at Patrick with enormous, solemn brown eyes, and made his best guess.
“An ass?”
Theme parties are a curious custom of the married-with-children set. It’s as if we’re all lost at sea on a twenty-year cruise, and have to keep our spirits up. Or it could be that they serve an important psychological function, helping us to shed old identities that no longer fit. How else could you appropriately say good-bye to your leather jeans and rollerblades? There are costume parties, dance parties, karaoke parties, bad Santa parties, taco parties, pool parties. Over one Christmas holiday, I attended three separate “tacky sweater” parties. I think I developed an allergy to acrylic yarn that year.
Occasionally, single people are drawn into one of these events: someone’s bachelor neighbor, or visiting younger sister, persuaded to come in from the cold world outside and warm themselves in the glow of string lights and thinly suppressed marital tensions. Oddly, they never seem to come back.
For kids, the ultimate theme party is, of course, the birthday party. In the annual scheme of things, it’s the big showstopper. The other holidays follow a pretty standard arrangement from year to year. You go to the attic, pull out the appropriately labeled boxes, and take it from there. But every single birthday party starts from scratch. You have to determine the theme, select a venue, compile the guest list, plan the activities, coordinate the decor, and prepare a menu, all out of whole cloth. Smart planning starts before you even get pregnant, by arranging it so that your children are born in May or September, well spaced from other special occasions, and never in the same month as a sibling. Then you won’t have to greet every New Year’s Day with a scream because you just remembered you have two birthday parties to pull off in the next six days, and no money, time, or energy left with which to do it.
In the carefree, frisky days of spring, mating seems like a swell idea. Birds do it, bees do it, you think blithely as you yield to the primal rutting urge, humming a Cole Porter tune. Forty weeks later, sometime between hosting Thanksgiving dinner and dismantling the holiday decor, you will remember that birds and bees fly away and leave their young, Cole Porter was gay and childless, and that you are the one stuck hosting birthday parties at the worst possible time of the year. When my two older boys, born in the first week of January, two years apart, were very small, the timing of their birthdays wasn’t quite so inconvenient. Before they got wise to the calendar, not only was it possible to postpone the party for weeks, I could get away with a joint celebration. But all that changed once the first went off to school and saw that other kids were having birthday parties near, or even on, their actual birthdays, and didn’t have to share the billing. The bar was raised, early and high.
With three kids in grade school, the number of birthday party invitations we receive is staggering. There have been weekends when all I seem to do is ferry kids from one party to another, sometimes as many as three in one day, which thrice exceeds the quota established by the Council for Not Losing Your Freaking Mind. The mileage alone is exorbitant. The home birthday party seems to be all but extinct, with celebrations held at the newest inflatables/bowling/gymnastics facility, usually in an industrial park on the outskirts of town. I am sure if I added up the fuel cost times three kids at fourteen years each, I would do just as well to buy a trailer and make our weekend home the parking lot of whatever party spot is this season’s must-rent.
Most of those places are pretty horrible, but none so nerveshattering as Chuck E. Cheese, the indoor kiddie arcade/restaurant with the creepy animatronics. Kids love it, parents hate it. I dread seeing Chuck E.’s sneering face turn up in our mailbox. Nothing says clean, safe, and child-friendly like a snaggletooth rat wearing a baseball cap, gang style. The strolling, in-house version of the mascot is terrifying. It looks like it carries plague. “If that rodent comes over here,” I heard one toddler’s father whisper to another across a party table, “I’m taking him out.”
To be fair, my kids love to attend those outsourced parties, and from time to time, we’ve hosted one. But to me they feel antisocial. The activity level doesn’t allow the kids to really connect, and the turnstile format doesn’t let them practice much in the way of social graces. Instead of getting to play guests and hosts, and focusing on each other, such parties tend to be all about the action. I jumped off that bandwagon early, declaring myself a one-mom society for the preservation and advancement of the simple, homemade party. These have struck some of our guests as so exotic, it feels like it is the theme. “What a neat idea!” one mother exclaimed, when she dropped off her son and was told we’d be staying put and playing some bingo and musical chairs.
Another time, we had a camping-out party in the backyard. “Is that a stick?” shouted one of the little boys, as I explained in my chirpiest camp director voice that we’d be roasting hot dogs and marshmallows. He made gagging noises. “I don’t think I can eat food on a stick!”
He could, and did, and loved it. My kids were in private school at the time, with the help of scholarship funds made possible by wealthy families like the one that boy belonged to. It was a very good, very expensive school, and we felt lucky to be there. But after that night, I began to think the benefits flowed both ways, that some of those kids were lucky to have us, too.
The key to a homemade party is to keep it simple, or you may as well hire it out. As a Google of do-it-yourself birthday party ideas will swiftly demonstrate, it can be all too easy to get carried away. I recommend not even looking at the websites. You’ll be stenciling monograms onto hand-sewn favor bags and airbrushing fondant. The handmade movement is supposed to be an alternative to conspicuous co
nsumption, but sometimes I think it’s just a sneakier way of showing off.
Who are we knocking ourselves out trying to impress, anyway? The birthday kid? Mine would love a three-ring circus in the backyard, but they don’t really care what the theme or venue is, as long as they can get together with their friends, eat cake, and open presents. The party guests? I’ve yet to meet a child who wasn’t perfectly delighted with a few rounds of stick-the-tail on something and a helium balloon to take home. For sure, we’re not doing it to impress the dads (“What—is it someone’s birthday?”). The applause of other moms is what we’re after. A birthday party is an exhibition for us as much as it is an amusement for the kids. We use it to communicate how affluent or frugal we are, how offbeat or mainstream, how socially or environmentally conscious, how creative and capable. It has become a statement; our float in the parade.
Planting Dandelions Page 16
