Bumblebee Sweet Potato

Although at times I thought it might.

It did, however, take me over three years. In fact, the only New Year’s resolution that I made this year was either to finish it, or to stop even trying to read it. And I’m finally done.

I feel a huge sense of accomplishment, not least because I’ve already in my life abandoned one of Jane Smiley’s books (The Greenlanders—oy, the names, it’s worse than a Russian novel) , and I like her too much as a writer to have two unfinished books by her on my shelf.

Now, having finished it, I wish I had read it backwards. But first, the back story from the dust jacket:

…in the wake of 9/11, Smiley faltered in her hitherto unflagging impulse to write and decided to approach novels from a different angle: she read one hundred of them, from classics such as the thousand-year-old Tale of Genjii to recent fiction by Zadie Smith, Nicholson Baker and Alice Munro.

If I had read it backwards (or if Smiley had organized the book differently), I think I would have had a more successful experience, and not felt the need to drag out my reading of it for such a prolonged amount of time. While there’s no question that Smiley is more widely read than I am, it would have helped me, in reading her analysis of various forms of fiction, to have first read her essays about the 100 novels she read in the post-9/11 world.

It’s not that I expected that both of us would love the same books. But it might have, for example, helped me to understand her writing about writing better, had I known in advance that she is not a fan of The Great Gatsby, which is one of my favorite books. I can’t explain my love of that book in as clear a method as she explains her disdain for it, but still, knowing her feelings about that–and the other books that are in her 100 that I’ve read–would have helped me to better understand the arguments she was trying to make about the novel.

That being said, I’m happy to have read it (and happier still to be done with it). And now, I can finally go back to reading her fiction—I’ve had a copy of Ten Days in the Hills for about six months, but I vowed to get through this opus (or give it up for good) before I cracked the cover.

that I dreamt I was playing scrabulous last night?

I might have a problem…

My favorite dad-blogger, MetroDad, wrote a post last week that I really enjoyed which consisted of questions to other parents. I liked it so much, I’m ripping it off.

Why does my daughter insist on wearing her batting helmet onto the field when she’s playing softball? Is this a sign that she’s destined to be one of the uncool kids?

If a four-year-old boy and a gnat are in the same room, which one will get distracted first? What if there are legos in the room? How does the equation change if there are dinosaurs? Train sets?

Is it wrong for me to refuse to let my children watch the movie Alvin & The Chipmunks in a movie theater, and instead Netflix it so that I don’t have to be in the same room with that singing?

Is it a sign that I’m getting old that I can no longer listen to my beloved hip hop, because I can’t listen to one more song that references a stripper pole? Didn’t there used to be lots of popular music that didn’t talk about strippers?

When I’ve repeatedly warned a certain child that she’s going to be late to her softball game if she doesn’t put her cleats on right now, why is it my fault when she actually is late?

Which of the following scenarios is likely to happen soonest: 1) the parents who decide that it’s okay for them to block the entrance to the daycare with their cars will have a change of heart or 2) the Potato will enter kindergarten and stop going to daycare?

At what age will I stop carrying crayons with me everywhere that I go?

When I finally do break down and get a cell phone for my kid (which is still years in the future), what will she set her sights on next, a fake ID?

Is the rate at which a child outgrows a pair of pants directly related to the amount of money that one spent on those pants?

If you only have one pen in your purse, and that pen is hot pink and has a Polly Pocket doll on the end, is it acceptable to use that pen in a meeting? with your boss?

At what age can I expect that my child will use the bathroom when he needs to, instead of insisting that he doesn’t need to pee while hopping up and down in a frantic manner?

If a child’s friend, when entering one’s house for the first time, exclaims, “this is the messiest house I’ve ever been in!,” is it socially acceptable to send her home with a dust-bunny in her pocket?

Answers in the comments—or questions of your own—are welcome!

When I was about 8 years old, I had super-long hair. One day, I decided to have it all cut off, and when I came home, I went searching for my best friend to show her my new haircut. I was walking down our street when I saw my best friend’s sister. Who thought I was a new boy in the neighborhood.

I was quite traumatized at the time, and I’ve evidently been carrying that around with me for the last 30+ years, because when the Bee told me two weeks ago that she wanted to get a major hair cut, I froze inside. I debated telling her that story for a long time, but in the end decided not to—because not everything is about me, after all, except here on my blog.

I did tell her that she should wait until after her musical was over, since she was supposed to wear her hair in a bun for that. We were talking about it in the dressing room yesterday with the woman who was doing her hair, who told her that she would probably feel ten pounds lighter after she got all that hair cut off.

Today, I took her to get it chopped off. She donated a huge, foot-long braid to Locks of Love. Here’s the before

and the after:

This weekend I’ve been reading Anne Enright’s The Gathering, and was struck by this observation in the novel:

“They are surprisingly tall–eight-year-olds. They are surprisingly like real people. Of course your own babies are always real to you, they are all there from the word go, but even strangers’ children look like proper people by the aged of eight…”

My Bee is looking more and more like a grown-up every day, and this new hairstyle has hastened the process considerably. She and I went out for ice cream on Friday night, after her performance, and the ice cream stand at the end of our street was full of the sixth-grade stars of the show. It was fairly terrifying to be around that much hormonal tweener-dom, not least because I was sitting there with the Bee, who was drinking in the big-girl-ness of it all.

I need more than three years to get ready for that. Can’t I just go back to the time when an eight-year-old looked like a big girl to her? Can’t we regress to toddlerhood? I’m not ready for cell phones and boys hanging around on their bikes, and talking about how eating too much ice cream makes you fat.

As we walked home from the ice cream place, we talked about whether she would still be willing to go to the ice cream stand with me when she was in sixth grade, or if she would be wanting to hang out with her friends and talk about boys. She admitted that, while boys are gross now, she might want to talk about them when she’s in sixth grade, and would not want me around for that, and I told her that when I was in sixth grade, I talked to my friends about boys (”eww, Mom, gross!”), and that I didn’t want to talk to my mother about it either.

I also told her that she might decide that she liked girls instead, and that would be fine too, then we talked a little bit about the lesbians that we know, and how liking girls that way is just as normal as liking boys. She said it’s okay to have a little crush on someone when you’re in third grade, but not to really like them. I asked her if she had a crush on anyone and she hesitated, but then said no.

Ulp.

Today she’s playing dress-up with her brother. Tomorrow, she’ll be asking for the car keys.

I spent most of last night in the dressing room of the theater where the Bee is about to perform in our town’s youth theater. The kids in the show are in grades 3-6, and the Bee is a simple chorus member, but she’s clearly entranced with the idea of performance–unlike many of the other kids she spent her time quietly waiting for her cues, sitting still so as not to mess up her costume.

It was a real departure from her usual impatient self, and I was moved to see her so changed by the experience. In addition to that, she stood up for herself and a group of other kids (many of them older) when one of the directors was yelling at them for not being in a place that no one had told them to be. I was proud of her for that, and told her so this morning–I was just about to intervene and tell the director that no one had told them where to go, but I didn’t need to, because she spoke right up.

She looks like such a big girl in her costume, wearing stage makeup, with her little character shoes on. I can hardly wait to see the real thing tomorrow night!

I took two third-grade girls to the mall today, and got an ugly vision of my future. The Bee and I had to go buy some pants for spring, and one of her friends tagged along for the ride. One thing I wasn’t expecting was the playing-at-being-big-girls that happened.

And that said playing would involve telling each other how skinny they looked in various outfits.

I’m not sure where the girls picked up the idea that the best compliment that one woman can give another is to tell her she looks skinny. I don’t like the idea that my daughter has embarked on a journey that can end in body-obsessiveness and feeling bad about herself.

I was watching the Bee at softball practice the other day, and she struck me as such a tomboy, wearing the same dark blue hoodie that she wears every day, with some jeans and her cleats. She and the other girls on her softball team were running around in that way that only tweener girls can–part gazelle, part ballerina, sometimes both at once. She looked so strong and graceful, with her braided hair and her her long legs.

I hope that she can always look at her body in the mirror and see that graceful girl, but I can see that she already knows that society wants her to look a certain kind of way. I just wish I could keep her away from the idea that anything less than perfection is no good at all.

You may remember a post I wrote a while ago on BlogHer about Facebook and family etiquette. I was reminded of this recently, when in a kind of stinging gesture, my brother (yes, the same brother in that post) eloped with his girlfriend. And guess how I found out?

Yes, it’s true.

I found out that my brother had gotten married from Facebook.

Apparently, telling their seventy-eleven friends on Facebook was more important than picking up the phone and calling people in their actual families.

I’m getting kind of old, I think.

I waited until well after April 1 to post about this, as I wanted it to be clear–this happened in real life. I was not punked.

I have, at this point, talked to my brother, and I’ve basically forgiven him for it (although will I ever let him forget it? Not likely!). I’ve also ‘met’ my new sister-in-law, by talking to her on the phone for the first time (previously, I had only met her on teh internets). I’m feeling oh-so-very-pomo.

We did, eventually, get a wedding announcement, and I guess there were days when just getting the wedding announcement with no phone call would have seemed like the height of bad manners. Those days appear to be over.

I’ve been having some work experiences lately that I describe (mostly to the other moms that I work with) as my ‘cautionary tale moments.’ As in, ‘observe me, the mother of school-aged children, you mothers of less-than-school-aged children.’ Learn from my (and landisdad’s) mistakes. Do not forget to sign your children up for spring break camp until the week before spring break. You will be bringing that kid to work with you ever day during spring break. And that? Is BOOOORRRRRIIIINNNNNNGGGGG! Just ask my 8-year-old.

But I digress.

The thing that’s going on with my brother though, while it feels like a potential cautionary tale, is a little hard to translate into an avoidable mistake.

What I really can’t get over is that I appear to be related to a person who I only know through the internet.

I guess back in the day, when people lived in one village their whole lives, it was possible to have a cousin or something in a neighboring village whom you had never met.

But in this day of hyperconnectivity it seems both ridiculously old-fashioned and also (as previously pointed out) post-modern, to have this problem.

Do you think a complete set of William Gibson novels would be an appropriate wedding gift?

I’m going to register my little Potato for kindergarten tomorrow. Sniff!

Tonight, I had to take him to the doctor to get his paperwork filled out, and that required six shots! Six!

Poor little man, I wasn’t the only one sniffling.

Landisdad and I went to see Stop Loss last night. It’s a pretty good movie, especially if you like your propaganda wrapped around a center of chewy eye candy (mmmm….Ryan Phillipe….). After the movie, landisdad and I grabbed a bite, and during our post-movie debrief, he told me that he feels as if, because he is not doing everything in his power to end the Iraq War, he must at some level be okay with the war. And about his frustration that millions of other people are the same way.

When I was washing my face before bed, it occurred to me that the Iraq War has become something like a well-healed piercing. It started as something painful and bloody, but now that it’s five years old, it’s become a familiar, numb hole.

On Friday night, we had some friends over for dinner–one of them was a political scientist, who told us about a study she had just read that contrasted the effectiveness of political persuasion when it was presented as fiction, as opposed to news. That people are more moved by political arguments that are presented dramatically (and not first and foremost as political arguments) should not be news–after all, political propaganda has existed since at least the time of the Greeks. But it did give me hope that this movie might heighten the urgency of ending the war for some of the people who aren’t feeling that urgency now.

It’s been a war-filled weekend, in a weird kind of way. My MIL came in on Friday, and she brought me a book called Street Art and the War on Terror: How the World’s Best Graffiti Artists Said No to the Iraq War, which is basically pictures of all kinds of graffiti that appeared around the world in the period before and during the war. Each photograph is accompanied by a short description that includes the location and artist, if known, and the date the photo was taken. The blurbs are spare, and so far, my favorite (annotating a picture that just combines a picture of Bush and the single word, “FUCKER”) has to be: “Anti-Bush stickers seem often to have a pretty direct message; it’s all in sharp contrast to the normality of the street sign. Few previous US presidents have been treated with so little respect.” Perhaps because few US presidents have treated the US population with so little respect?

All this thinking about our current war made me go and dig out a letter that my oldest step-brother, who was deployed to Kuwait in Gulf War I, sent to me after that war had ended but when he was still in Saudi Arabia, waiting to get shipped home. I doubt that his sentiments would be foreign to most of the soldiers fighting in Iraq today. I’ll close this post with his words:

I frequently wondered if the objectives here were worth dying for. Unfortunately though, I came to the conclusion that there isn’t much of anything worth that.

I volunteered, so here I am.

Like most parents, I typically check on my kids before I go to bed. The Potato has a tendency to climb out from under the covers, and I cover him back up. The Bee gets to read in bed for a half-hour or so, and she falls asleep while reading at least once a week.

Lately, I’ve developed a new bedtime ritual.

My daughter has really dry skin, especially in the winter. Her hands are sometimes so chapped that her knuckles crack and bleed. Landisdad and I supply her with lotion, and remind her to put it on constantly, but she hates having lotion on her hands, which makes it worse.

A few months ago, I started sneaking into her room at night and putting Vaseline on the backs of her hands while she’s asleep. I thought I would do it once or twice, and then tell her about it, to prove to her that using it would actually make her feel better.

After a couple of days, I asked her if her hands were feeling better, and she said yes. I told her that I had been putting on the Vaseline, and suggested that she keep it up.

About three days later, she said, “Mom, you need to sneak into my room and put Vaseline on my hands again.” When I asked her why she couldn’t just do it herself, she said, “It’s gross! and it gets on my book!”

Sigh.

So I’m left doing the midnight Vaseline treatment a couple times a week.

What kinds of things do you do in your kids’ rooms at night, while they’re sleeping?