Bumblebee Sweet Potato

It’s odd to write this entry, as so many people in the Mississippi Delta are at risk of losing so much. Almost hubristic.

We spent the better part of this weekend unloading a bunch of ‘new’ furniture that we inherited in the dissolution of landisdad’s grandmother’s apartment, after she passed on two months ago. We also freecycled a bunch of stuff that we don’t need anymore, now that we have better versions. Ironically, my MIL told me that she thought I needed to be encouraged to throw things out. This is ironic for two reasons, first because when landisdad and I first moved in together, I had to personally throw out about 7 years’ worth of old newspapers that he and his grad school roommate had stored in their mud room*. Second, because she said this to me on a day when she sent us a truck that housed more furniture than our first apartment.

What my mother-in-law doesn’t know, is that to throw anything out requires me to overcome generations of programming on my mom’s side of the family. Landisdad’s family tends to hoard things like presentation copies of first editions by Adrienne Rich. Mine hoards wrapping paper. I kid you not, wrapping paper.

My mom and her sisters are the kind of people who give you a Christmas card with a label that is made out of one of last year’s Christmas cards with the personalized note cut off. Landisdad thinks it’s silly that I have a box where I store unused wrapping paper that’s left over from last year. What he doesn’t get is that my grandmother would remove all of the tape from used Christmas wrapping paper to reuse it again year after year.

One of the things that we got in this bounty of landisdad’s family heirlooms was all of the photographs from the apartment. There are some amazing things there, and landisdad has committed to getting everything scanned so we can preserve it digitally. It’s a remarkable amount of pictures, but as LD’s grandparents both lived well into their nineties–it’s the cumulative photographic history of several hundred years of the family (when you add in the pictures of his great-grandparents that have survived).

We showed some of the pictures to the kids this weekend, and as we unpacked boxes and gave their things a new home in our house, it sunk in for me that they are really gone, in a way that it hadn’t before. But at the same time, they will always be with us. And I thought to myself, “my children will be doing this when I’m gone. They’ll be dividing up the antique furniture, and the books, and the pictures, and giving them to their kids (I hope).”

And that’s a really nice feeling to have. To know that things I use every day were used by relatives that neither landisdad or I have ever met, and to know that they will be continued to be used by descendants that we will never meet.

*Sorry honey, if you’re gonna tell a bunch of my coworkers about what you did on your 26th birthday, then this one is fair game.

Soon after the Bee was born, my mom came to visit. We were having one of those ‘now you’re a parent, so I can tell you all these things I never told you before’ conversations, and my mom started telling me a story about how her perspective changed after she had kids.

There was a woman who lived in the next town over from where I grew up, who was abducted with her kids from a shopping center parking lot. The guy forced her into her own car at knifepoint, drove her to some abandoned house, and repeatedly raped her while the kids were in the car. My mom told me that, while reading coverage of the trial in the paper, she realized that her own life had changed entirely . Why? Because the judge in the case had basically implied that the woman wasn’t raped, since the rapist let her go to the car to calm the kids down in between bouts of raping her. The judge said that she should have run, and gotten the police to save her kids. My mom told me how outraged she had been that this judge could just expect a woman to walk away from her children while they were in danger.

I guess on some level I’ve been thinking about this story since checking out the Zero Boss’s new blog Parents Behaving Badly. I don’t have near the blogging energy that Jay does, but if I did, I think I’d be tempted to start a blog about Parents Behaving Bravely. Because while I appreciate a good cautionary tale as much as the next woman, I’m also interested in what motivates parents to do extraordinary things in the service of their children.

When it came right down to it in her own life, my mom did a really hard thing to protect her children. She became the first person in her large, Catholic family to separate from her husband, and the first to get a divorce. My dad was becoming increasingly irrational, drinking more and more, and behaving violently, and she decided that he had to go. In doing that, she risked not only the everyday troubles of a single parent, but also the likelihood that her own family–her own mother–was going to look at her as a failure. She told me that she went home five different times to tell her mother that she’d kicked my dad out, before she could actually get up the nerve to tell her. And when she did? My grandmother said, “I was wondering how much longer you were going to stay with him.”

I have no comparable story from my own life (knock wood). The bravest thing I ever did for my children was wait until I was in my thirties to have them. This is not to disparage young parents in any way–just to say that I would have personally been a terrible young parent, and would have ended up with a much worse father for my kids than the one I ended up with. I hope that if it ever comes to it, I can do something as brave as what my mom did.

For every mom pimping out her daughter, there are hundreds that go to bed hungry every night so that their own children have enough to eat. For every dad that beats his child, there are thousands working two jobs so their kids can have new sneakers for school next week. Why should the crazy parents get all the attention from the mainstream media?

Here’s a link to my final post on the San Diego Reader’s website. I originally wrote this post back in April, when there were a slew of urban mommy/daddy bloggers pondering about moving to the suburbs–this was my perspective on the debate. Enjoy!

There are times in my relationship with my children when I feel like I’m channeling the Commandant from The Great Escape, and they are Steve McQueen. The Bee in particular has an artful, almost Judd Nelson-as-John-Bender-like way of responding to punishment and threats (a reference perhaps more accessible to my Gen X cohort).

That sort-of “give me another” kind of reaction.

In a way, I almost admire it, even while it’s simultaneously driving me absolutely crazy. I mean, Steve McQueen is the guy we all wanted to be, not Hannes Messemer playing a Nazi, right? As a child of the ’80s, I certainly never wanted to be Principal Vernon. I want my kids to be tough, and to stand up for themselves when they have to. But why does it have to be so damn hard to live with them while they’re learning to pick their battles?

I know there are people that worry that they are too permissive with their kids. I’m the opposite. I’m much more worried that I’m too harsh on them, that my expectations for their behavior isn’t age appropriate. That I’m expecting them to grow up too fast, to act like an adult too fast. And there are times, in my frustration, that I get into a kind of feedback loop with the Bee, where our only interactions with each other are negative.

For the first few years of our parenting, landisdad and I were unaware of the beauty of the sticker chart. And after we did find out about them, we were sort of opposed–I mean, it seems so mercenary, to reward your kids for good behavior. Kind of like bribery. Then, last year around Christmas time, I finally broke down and made a sticker chart for the Bee. It was a revelation.

Later in the year, when she was having difficulty with her teacher, Mrs. X suggested a school sticker chart. It took a while, but eventually, her behavior did improve.

All that rewarding good behavior got me thinking. Do we all have an internal sticker chart that lets us reward ourselves for being good? Is part of parenting teaching kids that good behavior isn’t something that anyone is capable of all the time–but that it is possible to be a good person most of the time. To beat the averages, as it were.

We’re moving into a time in the Potato’s emotional development where he’s starting to approach every disagreement as the end of his world. He’s in that toddler place where he wants to do everything by himself, and is constantly frustrated by his own limitations. He wants ‘helpee,’ but only on his terms, in his way, and if his dad or I try to help him in some unacceptable way, he more often than not will collapse on the floor in a heap.

When the Bee was in this phase, I did some of my worst parenting ever. I’m a (mostly) rational person, and the constant irrationality of the toddler wears me down pretty quickly. In addition to that, when the Bee was a toddler, landisdad lost his job, and three months later, I got laid off to part-time, so we were both pretty stressed out. The struggle of being first-time parents of a willful little girl was more than we were up to.

This time around, I think that landisdad and I are better equipped to ease the Potato through his toddler-hood. Our financial state has certainly improved, and while there are new stresses, they are nothing to compare to the joys of living on unemployment (especially when it’s about to run out). And we have this beautiful girl, who has taught us so much about being parents. That we need to reward ourselves when we’re doing good, and not just punish ourselves for doing bad things.

School starts in two weeks. I can’t wait, and neither can the Bumblebee. It’s too hot to play outside, and after this weekend’s party, landisdad & I had too much to do to take the kids to the pool yesterday.

Consequently we suffered the whining and misery of a girl who hasn’t seen her best friend since school got out.

A lesson to me for next year? When your daughter decides in the last two weeks of school to change best friends, you better get that girl’s digits. Because her family just might not be listed in the phone book. Or she might have a different last name than her mom.

Sure she’s seen other friends, and spent whole days happily playing with them. But not this one special friend, the one who (I’m sure) will be dumped two weeks after school starts. I actually had to convince her a few weeks ago that spending an afternoon telling her former best friend about how much she missed her new best friend might not be a great idea, in that it would hurt the former best friend’s feelings.

But it’s not just the Bee who’s in a cranky and irritable mood these days, it’s everyone in our house, especially me. I feel like I’m in a rut at work, and I’m bored with the stuff I’m working on right now, and just generally wishing for September so that I can move on to something more interesting.

No wonder people go away the last week of August. I need a change, and soon.

As promised, here are some photos from yesterday’s birthday party. We had a very nice, and small, party. The weather held with us, so the kids were able to splash around in the kiddie pool, and climb on the wretched princess castle, and generally leave the adults alone.

The Potato is in a big fire truck phase right now, and many of his gifts revolved around a certain theme.
Yes, fire trucks, fire truck books, fire truck t-shirts, hats–you name it, he’s got them all. As a devoted fan of Dennis Leary in Rescue Me, I have to wonder–how come the firefighters in this books never talk about getting some?
And what birthday photo array would be complete without the post-cake messy-face shot?

Sorry I haven’t posted much lately, I have been planning the Potato’s 2nd birthday party, set up for tomorrow. We’re really hoping for a nice day here, so the kids can run around in the baby pool, and the adults can sit in lawn chairs and sip cool drinks. Pictures on Sunday!

This week’s San Diego Reader entry is posted here. Regular readers will recognize it from a few weeks ago.

And thanks to all those sending good health wishes to the Potato–he’s back to normal today.

The Potato is home sick today. He woke up with a fever, and was doing that kind of listless, draggy thing. We went downstairs for breakfast, and he threw up all over the kitchen floor.

I’m from the school of parenthood where sick kids get to watch tv all day (when they’re not napping). My kids are only allowed about 1/2 hour of tv a day normally, so this is a very special treat.

After I got him cleaned up and we took the Bee to day camp, we came home & started watching tv. (Yes, thanks to the beauty of AirPort, I can blog and sit on the couch watching tv at the same time. And I wonder why I never get any exercise.)

So here’s my question. Who the hell is this Diego, on Dora?

At one point in the Bee’s life, she was a Dora addict. In fact, Shame of My Life #1312 is that her first word was ‘backpack.’ I once impressed a teacher at the kids’ daycare by knowing the Spanish ‘Happy Birthday’ song, ‘Feliz Cumpleanos,’ which I learned from Dora. But she gave it up about two years ago. It seems like they’ve had the audacity to actually introduce new characters. I feel so out of touch!

So last week while landisdad and I were on vacation, we got a babysitter one night and went out to dinner. We had a few minutes to spare before our reservation (how did that happen?), so we wandered in to our local hippie store to browse. I can’t remember what landisdad bought, because I was hypnotized by the magazine rack full of zines on one wall.

I first experienced zines in the early ’90s, when I moved to the Bay Area. I hung out with a fairly alternative crowd, although not strictly a punk one, and we frequented a lot of both new and used independent bookstores. It was at those bookstores–Moe’s, Cody’s & Black Oaks Books in Berkeley, Diesel & Walden Pond in Oakland, City Lights, Modern Times, & Green Apple Books in San Francisco–we wasted time in all of them, sometimes for hours. We were nearly always broke, and used bookstores were by far the way to go, since their prices were so much lower than the new bookstores. And zines were great, since they were given away, or they cost a buck or two. Picking them out was a total crapshoot–you might find some brilliant, savagely funny writing, or you might find total garbage–just some guy writing about how he loved to get drunk.

The beauty of the zines, though, was their sheer amateurishness. The do-it-yourself quality. People clearly spent hours, days assembling their zines and then distributing them, and for what? I doubt that more than a handful of zines ever made back the small amount of money it cost to produce them, and yet people kept churning them out. I loved that about them–the fact that they were so clearly a labor of love. They were the product of people with something to say, and even if I didn’t find what they had to say particularly interesting at times, I still had to give them credit for putting in the work.

Jumping back to 2005, I ended up buying four new zines that night that landisdad and I were out. I’ve finished all but one of them now, and of the four, there was one that I’d pick up again, if I saw it somewhere. Since it cost me $8 to buy all four, I think that’s a pretty good investment.

Reading through them, I’ve been thinking, why would anyone keep making zines, when self-publishing on the web has gotten so much easier? Although I guess that you could say that about any kind of writing–why write for a magazine, when you can just blog, why send letters to the editor of your local newspaper, when you can post your opinions to the world wide web?

I started to call this post “are blogs the grown-up version of zines,” but I decided that framed it in a way I didn’t want to go. Obviously, zines and blogs can live in the same universe. And it’s pretty pedestrian of me to want to delegate zines to a lower level of the literary chain, just because I happened to encounter them in my youth and blogs in my middle age–I’m sure there are many fine zines being produced by people in their thirties and forties, just as they are probably many inane blogs being produced by people in their teens and twenties (I don’t visit that corner of the blogosphere much).