Paci Wars

My daughter never “took” to a pacifier. I remember her using one when she was about 5 months old and needed to be still for a full body x-ray scan. Other than that moment, when it was impossible for her to be attached to me, I served as her human pacifier, and after 12 months, we were done. It was a reasonably easy transition (though this memory is likely clouded by 3 and a half years of space).  Matt, on the other hand, was all about the Paci from the beginning. This worked out because Kate was 28 months old when he was born; I needed to be THERE for both of them.

Because he took to the Paci (by the way, I am purposely capitalizing “Paci” as one would capitalize the proper noun of a person, deity, or method of birth control because it is that important to Matt), he slept great. He was easily consoled. He was just plain a laid back baby. At about 12 months (the perfect time in my mind), the Paci had been gradually removed from our lives. He would leave them in the car or in his “cubby” at childcare, never to be asked for during the day. We went whole days without it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t quite finished removing something else from his life yet. I couldn’t seem to get rid of both the Paci and the breast. During the weaning process, I gave in. I needed to be finished with breastfeeding. I was starting to get really irritated at my 14-month-old nurser. So the Paci returned to help him get to and stay asleep at night. It would be easier to get rid of than my breast, right? Well…it went OK. In fact, we ditched the Paci completely at 20 months when the last one was “lost.” But then it returned after a febrile seizure that scared the bejeezes out of me on Memorial Day. When he asked for his Paci, I did not refuse.

The war against the pacifier is waged on two fronts. First, of course, is the war with my 2 year old. I’ve tried losing the Paci, tried reasoning with Matt about how it’s time for the Paci to go, tried to explain that the Paci is for little boys and he is a BIG boy, tried to shame him into it by pointing out how the big boy neighbors and cousins don’t have Pacis. He doesn’t care. He wants the Paci. And he has even more than the usual 2-year-old worth of stubbornness, thanks to some, ahem, genetic factors. So, the Matthew front is fought every day one way or another. But the second, more potent front in the Paci War is the one waged in my head between Everything’s Cool Mommy and Paranoid Freakout Mommy.

EC Mommy thinks, “He’ll grow out of it. He’ll stop when he’s ready. No one ever went to college with a Paci. It will be fine.”

PF Mommy has another perspective: “I’m a failure. I can’t get my kid to stop using a Paci. I can’t convince him of anything. He has all of the power. He will need braces because of my failure as a mother. He will trade the Paci for cigarettes. I’m going to have a three-year-old smoker. He is too dependent. (EC Mommy breaks in: HellO…he’s TWO! Of COURSE he’s dependent.) Even my mother, the sweetest woman alive, has mentioned in her low-key way that have I noticed that maybe his teeth have been affected by Paci usage. When is he going to stop? When will we be done with the Paci? I can see the disapproving looks from my father, from other parents, from strangers at church. Bad Mommy. Bad Mommy. Bad Mommy.”

Unfortunately, PF Mommy doesn’t just fight the Paci Wars; she is a tireless footsoldier who sometimes even promotes herself to General in my head. I guess PF Mommy is handy when it comes to following instincts about your kid’s health or behavior, but I really wish she would take a vacation when it comes to stuff that is way less important. The Paci will go away, eventually. In two years I’ll probably forget all about the departure of the Paci, just like I’ve forgotten exactly how Kate became potty trained. Sigh. Time to take a breath and let EC Mommy take the reins again.

Writing prompt (step one): 25 things to write about

1. The worst Thanksgiving we ever had.
2. As a girl, I spent all my money on…
3. The Kate/Dorothea Katerina/Lydia Matilda-Katherine connection
4. Toddler grammar (“No I like that” = “I REALLY don’t like that” and other revelations)
5. Childhood weeklong summer vacations in Blue Stone Park, West Virginia
6. 8th grade track – 2nd place in the 800 meters
7. Card games with my grandfather
8. Maggie, the 16-year-old grande dame of the house (chocolate lab mix — still kicking…well, mostly still BARKING)
9. What IS Gus (the 10-year-old mutt “new” dog of the house)?
10. The unfortunate Key lime pie incident of 1985.
11. Contrast: The trip to the hospital for Kate’s birth versus Matthew’s birth (not the gory parts, friends, just the attitude)
12. Why I need to revisit Paris
13. Words from my childhood that have shaped me (from “I’ve never seen anyone so small draw so well” to “blimpo, are you going to eat that ice cream?”)
14. Modern Dance was the most valuable class I took in college.
15. Eleanor, my first yoga teacher
16. Mom’s cooking lessons (knowing about salmonella at age 5)
17. “I love dogs more than people” (A quote from something written by me in first grade)
18. Contrast: dropping off my older brother at College in 1984. Me getting dropped off at the same College in 1992.
19. Favorite holiday traditions of MY family (the one where I’m the mommy) – some that exist and some that I want to institute
20. most memorable Christmas tree of my childhood (ok, so there are two)
21. Talents that I appreciate in Dorothea
22. Last year her favorite gift was the Disney Princess Go Fish game. Go Figure.
23. Paci Wars
24. The 1984 white Camry
25. Learning to drive a stickshift.

Another act of independence

Yesterday my four-year-old daughter, Kate, took another step toward womanhood. Her bold act was an inevitable: I did it at her age. My mother did it at her age. I think it’s a fair bet to say that her great-grandmother did it at age four also (though it’s possible that the impulse came early for Dorothea, who was a serious fire pistol). Overcome with a sense of urgency understood only by another woman she did something that we all want to do but that few have enough courage to pull off. That’s right. The do-it-yourself haircut.

Let me start by saying that objectively speaking, Kate has really beautiful hair (when it is clean…). This is not just a mother’s judgment. She has thick, straight with a touch of curve at the ends, perfectly highlighted in the summer hair. She has singlehandedly increased the business of the woman who cuts her hair. (Rebecca IS talented and I’m happy to pass her name along to friends and strangers in the grocery store alike, though she told me that usually the people who come to her after seeing Kate have children with thin, wispy hair that will never morph into Kate’s hair.) I’ve had Kate’s hair cut for her in various lengths of bob since she was less than a year old (yes, she could carry off a thick, chinlength, stacked-in-the-back bob before her first birthday). I resisted bangs because I figured that I could go longer stretches without taking her to get a haircut if I didn’t have pesky bangs to contend with. When she first started getting haircuts, everyone at childcare knew her by the waterspout that was on top of her head. Then, around age 2, she started resisting the waterspout and began tilting her head and hiding behind that swag of hair. When the bob got long enough, she would ask me to give her “Malti hair” (a Dan Zanes/Barbara Brousal song that has a video in which Malti wears her hair in pigtails). Lately, though, there has been no Malti hair, no barrettes, no clips, no ponytails of any sort. Maybe she got tired of the head tilt and peeking out behind a wall of hair.

Yesterday it was COLD. I mean, no-way-are-we-going-to-play-outside-no-matter-what cold. Knowing that Harold was going to do “errand duty” and then deliver groceries to people who needed them (and who can argue with THAT), I braced myself for a long morning alone with stir-crazy children. I managed to convince the kids to get dressed, to eat waffles without syrup (don’t think I’m a freak. I just knew that other sugar would be inevitable to get through the morning, so when they refused oatmeal, this was my solution), to negotiate with each other and pick a video that they both wanted to watch. But things started to break down when I declared the end of TV time. Matthew kept finding items to turn into swords (plastic golf club, foam baseball bat, a roll of wrapping paper ) and was alternating between getting me to swordfight for a while and then degenerating into tormenting Kate or one of the dogs. All items are now on the top shelf of the bookshelves in my dining room. Again. While I was attempting to clean out the junk drawer in the kitchen, Kate took an interest in the big scissors.

“What are you doing?”

“Just holding them.” She has them in her right hand and is twirling her wrist in a circle. She starts fingering her hair with her left hand.

“Please put them down if you are not using them. It’s dangerous.” She points the scissors at her left ear and I can see it coming.

“Stop. You could cut your ear off. Put them away.” She complies, and we move on.

A short while later I’m busy with getting lunch ready when she emerges from her room.

“You cut your HAIR?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“You could have cut yourself!”

“I didn’t do it.”

I walk into her bedroom, put the scissors on a REALLY high shelf, sweep up the hair, and assess her hair again. She missed a few strands that are now hanging in the middle of her face, so I ask her if I can trim those for her. She agrees, and then whenever anyone comments, “You got a haircut.”  She replies, “Mommy cut my hair.”

Other than making it clear that I didn’t want her to use the big scissors by herself, I didn’t comment on the appearance of her hair. She isn’t fazed by her hair. And this is why I have hope. Even at age four, if my hair “looked funny,” I would have been aware of it. I would have probably cried when I realized that my hair did not suddenly look like Barbie’s or Wonder Woman’s or even my mother’s after the haircut. Kate is fine with her hair. And it’s not that she doesn’t have an opinion about her appearance. She has definite opinions about what she wants to wear and I don’t stand in the way of her orange and pink flower sundress with purple-and-pink-hearts patterned tights combination. She looks at her ensembles in the mirror and smiles at her reflection. “I LIKE this dress and these tights.” She’ll put on a piece of jewelry and say, “I feel pretty.” So she’ll have interesting bangs for a few months. She already had an appointment with Rebecca in two weeks, and I feel no need to move it up. I love Kate’s self-assurance, and I pray that she keeps it.

Oh, alright. A Writing Plan.

I hereby announce to The Word People and the Universe that I am committing to a Writing Plan. First, here’s why I’m resisting the Writing Plan. I am the Queen of Guilt. I mean, for a non-Catholic, I am truly gifted. So, I don’t want a plan that’s going to make me feel GUILTY. But I see the whole, if-it’s-in-writing-it-will-be-a-source-of-motivation side of the picture, too. So, how about an un-plan. A…plun? Here it is:

1. Write for at least 15 minutes during lunch on Mondays and Thursdays.
2. Write on Fridays after work. (I work a half-day, so this is doable).
3. Write for at least 15 minutes over the weekend.
4. Create at least one something (could be collage, photograph, shrinky-dink, painting, drawing with markers, batch of cookies) a week.
5. Celebrate every little step I take in the right direction. For example, this writing plan counts as a post, dammit!
6. Let go of the guilt.

There you have it, folks. A plan. Plun. Oh, whatever!

Writing prompt: What I’ve learned from four Anns in my life

The first Ann that I can recall was Ann C. I don’t know exactly how my mother found her mother, but Ann C. was my age and had an older sister, Mae, and lived in the neighborhood, so my mom decided that it was a good idea for me to go to her house a few days a week when I was in preschool and every day after kindergarten (it was half-day kindergarten). I remember several things about this experience:

1. I didn’t enjoy Ann C.’s company, because she whined.
2. Her sister Mae felt that she somehow got the raw end of the deal in life because her little sister somehow garnered more attention from her mother (perhaps because she whined?)
3. Ann C. had trouble saying “s”s, I guess, because she would whine, “You’re not ‘upPOSED to do it like that!” To which I would reply, “It’s “SUPposed, not ‘UPposed.”
4. Her mother watched soap operas in the afternoon. Let’s pause here for a moment. I’m pretty sure my mother was paying her to watch me. So, I barely saw her and she watched Days of Our Lives while I tolerated spending time with her daughters. Moving on…
5. They had an above-ground pool. It was about 3-feet deep. I couldn’t swim then, and I still can’t now. I guess I wore floaty things so that I wouldn’t drown, because I don’t remember constant supervision from Ann’s mother (though, in her defense, at least her own daughters COULD swim).
6. I accidentally broke the leg off of the Brunette Darci fashion doll when I was demonstrating how flexible her legs were when compared with Barbie. Ann was upset, but she handled it rather well, and the Brunette Darci (who had another name, I’m sure, but I can’t remember it now), did carry on as a special needs representative in the Barbie/Darci world. She was still played with, but we didn’t put swimsuits on her anymore. She wore a lot of long gowns.
7. It was with Mae and Ann C. that I gained clarity on the following religious classification: All Catholics are Christian, but not all Christians are Catholic. (They were Catholic. I am not.)

I think I met Ann G. when I was 11 or 12 years old. She worked as the secretary for the international adoption agency for which my dad was a social worker, went to our church, and sang in choir with my mother. More to come…

The Birth of Lucy and Ethel Day

Since children (4-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son for me, 2-year-old daughter for her), it’s been hard for my best bud from college (H.) and I to get together for more than an hour every couple of months. Recently, it occurred to me that in addition to e-mail and the four times a year when we can actually catch sight of one another, we should have one day a year (two if we can swing it) when we get to be the friends that we were when we met in college. We get to try something new, chat over coffee, share music and ideas, and mostly, laugh — laugh at ourselves, laugh at life. In our senior year of college, we had many adventures living with two other roommates in a farmhouse. I think that was the year when we started having Lucy and Ethel moments that we described as such: Lucy and Ethel paint the exterior trim, Lucy and Ethel go to the beach in February (in a snowstorm), Lucy and Ethel put up a Christmas tree. Lucy and Ethel get stuck in the farmhouse in another snowstorm and mix too many alcoholic beverages. You get the idea.  That’s when it came to me that we needed a Lucy and Ethel Day, and it should happen one weekday during the last week of February (because everyone knows that February really is the longest month to endure — just ask Dar Williams). Here is how this idea started in my mind.

In the course of going through our attic for yard sale purposes, I came across my two College sweatshirts (both purchased while I was in high school and had chosen but did not yet attend the College). I don’t think I’m going to wear them anymore, but I don’t want to throw them away. So I had the bright idea that I could cut out the fronts of the sweatshirts, in a square, and turn the sweatshirts into a pillow. This pillow would work in my son’s room. He just got his big boy bed and the cover is all balls and sports. That way, I would get to keep the pillow but not actually keep it in my bedroom because, well, do I really have to explain? I didn’t even get as far as pulling out the scissors when I remembered that I cannot sew. This did not stop me from continuing the creative process, though. I thought that the square College emblems would not really be big enough for a pillow, so I should get some red sweatshirt material to use as a border to sort of frame it. Again, the realization that I cannot sew. Then I thought, “H. sews things. She has made curtains and purses and the like. Maybe she can help me.” Then I remembered her blog about making the crib skirt. And I imagined us bent over the sewing machine in her living room, with some sort of alcoholic beverage, laughing. And I realized that this would probably take more than our hour-long quarterly visit to accomplish. And I thought about how this seemed like a Lucy and Ethel moment. And that’s when I decided that we should have a whole Lucy and Ethyl Day.

Once a year, at the end of February so that we have something to look forward to during the awful beginning of February and so that we can make it to March, we should get together (on a weekday, so that we already have childcare in place and it doesn’t really disturb our families), starting fairly early in the morning, and have coffee. Lots of coffee. And maybe smoothies and later on some coffeecake or something similarly decadent. During the coffee, we could listen to music and actually talk and laugh, much like we used to do, oh, almost every weekend morning when we were in college. The Lucy and Ethel portion of the day means that we must either make something or do something we have never done, or go somewhere we have never gone (something that can be accomplished easily in part of one day). For example, we could make pillows (not something she hasn’t done, despite the crib skirt incident, but something I haven’t done successfully since the seventh grade). Or we could make homemade pizza with homemade dough. Or we could make foccaccia from scratch. Or make “Vision Boards” of what we imagine our lives can be. Or we could go somewhere in an hour radius that we haven’t been before (Lucy and Ethel love roadtrips).

Lucy and Ethel Day is about friendship, but it is also about the creative beings that we were when our friendship started. I want to remind that girl inside me that she still gets a voice, a chance to laugh and make something that doesn’t turn out perfectly. Too often she ends up waiting patiently for the adult me to get the kids to bed, make lists, make a presentation for work, sweep the floors, and go to C*stco for milk. So, this day is about that girl, too — the girl who went to London for a semester without really knowing what she signed up for, the girl who wrote damn good essays, the girl who took the first dance class of her life as a college senior (Modern Dance — one of these days I’ll write about how that was the most valuable class I took in college). That girl deserves a day to play. If the end of February doesn’t work out one year, we can have a Lucy and Ethel Day in the summer. There is a whole different set of possibilities then.