Throwing Fits

I'm having one of those days. It’s Monday, and despite the extra hour Dan bought me this morning by taking Connor for a walk, I’m feeling desperately unmotivated. My feet hurt still from a long-running problem with fallen arches and a stupid shoe choice for Saturday’s walk around town with a new hire for the college. Sunday, which we usually spend resting on the couch, began as a Publix shopping dream and ended up in a Felliniesque porch sequence involving Mr. C and Ms. C. who’ve just moved in across the street, Mr. J and Ms. H. and the other Mr. J and the lovely Ms. T. Jumbalaya was involved but came far too late for me before the heat, mosquitoes and innumerable gnats that wanted to fly into my eyeballs turned me into a bit of a wretch.

Not to mention, my son and I were having a fight. It began earlier in the week when he found his yelling voice during dinner out with friends. He has in the past cried when uncomfortable or displeased, but he has learned to yell and throw fits, kick and hit me, and make more noise than White Zombie in a bad concert hall. I have to admit that it’s taken me by surprise how loud he is, how strong and how out of control. Already at 4 months, I’m losing the battle. I do suspect by his suddenly disrupted sleep schedule, and endless eating without any break in our midnight wakeup calls, that the boy has been having a growth spurt, but I’m bone tired and he’s getting bigger. Hence our fight. I refuse to lose this one at four months because, as Mr. J (a kindergarten teacher) says, it’ll be worse when he’s four years old and we’ve not mastered this behavior. He’s also leaned to employ his charm and after being banished to his bed, will smile, giggle, coo, flirt, talk, and do something with his eyes that looks like that Puss in Boots from Shrek – all pupil and cuteness – to get back out.

As his mother, I’m supposed to remain unaffected else end up with a child like Paris Hilton – all opportunities and advantages but with no manners or morals, doing time while crying and getting religion. The idea has me so freaked that we’re using tough love to get him back into shape – at four months!!. When it’s naptime, he lays down and naps, damn it. If he cries about it because he’s not quite ready, he cries. If he wants to scream at me because I don’t move him out of the bathroom and downstairs fast enough, so be it, he screams. He’ll go to bed at bedtime and like it, play with Shakey Cow without fussing because he wants to see what I’ll do, and eat when it’s lunch time. No more of this turning his head around to check out the room with the most tender part of a breast in his mouth. I’m taking back my role as parent. I’m done with being a glorified cow, it’s time to show Jr. who’s boss. I'm older, meaner, and for the time being, bigger.

Now I say this because we had a terrible scare last night. His father was holding him when Connor, in a fit of restless umbrage, threw himself backwards and Dan nearly dropped him. The baby’s done it a couple of times before and I’ve caught him. But it’s highly dangerous and last night his head stopped a foot and a half above the tiled floor. Thank God Dan had him firmly by the leg or that velvety little head would have hit the deck and we’d have spent the night at the emergency room stitching it back together. Mr. J the Kindergarten teacher said nonchalantly, “Oh, you’ll drop him a couple of times,” but the whole concept reminded me that children push boundaries as part of their nature. God knows Dan and I did. And somehow we survived all of our mistakes. Yes, we’ll have to let Connor make his, but I don’t want him making them to spite us. Those fits are too dangerous. I’ve seen them in my college students, my fellow wild-child riot grrls, with the lovely and out-of-control Ms. Hilton and I have to wonder if no-one ever told them “enough!!” and meant it before they descended into their demented dance of destruction.

Not that I want to parent out of fear. That’s the kind of Zieg Heil lockdown that turns out reactionary children who will get a tattoo not because it expresses their innermost self, but because they think it will annoy you (it won’t in our case and our son will be driven to much more extreme things to piss us off). But I do want this little baby getting all of his sleep and learning to wait for his toys and for his Mom’s attention. Those unused to delayed gratification never learn it and the world is a rough place for them. They turn out like my friend Ms. R, who had more talent in her little finger than I have in both hands, but can’t get anything accomplished because she won’t do anything unpleasant or tiresome. Or a bright and promising student whom I watched implode with drugs and disease because he would not apply himself or deny himself any of life’s sensual pleasures. Connor must learn these things in order to be happy, in order to use his advantages and intellect for good instead of mere self-indulgence, and so the baby is back on his schedule, screams be damned.

In some ways it hurts me because he’s so beautiful and so perfect. His smiles are all roundness of cheeks and lips and eyes – like the dancing of sapphires and rubies. He has been laughing lately – a silvery sound straight from the angels. But Sunday nights after a weekend of holding and playing with him, he turns ugly and screeches. Mom’s too tired by then, from holding his flailing little body, to care whether or not he’s unhappy. I’m hoping if we return to his schedules, to discipline for all three of us, I get the smiles now without the stitches or jail time later.

Relativity

Have you ever seen one of those Baby Einstein videos? I always thought they’d be fun if you were really stoned. They have executive desk toy balls bopping, dancing puppets, children playing musical instruments, toy trains running around tracks and stuffed animals playing with other stuffed animals. They even have those clusters of strait lines that babies are supposedly drawn to (it’s some weird visual hallucination they like because they’re eyes don’t track right – kind of like those games you get in cereal boxes). I saw my first one at a friend’s house early in the morning with coffee and toast and it seemed like the perfect thing to watch as you were waking up. They are this generation’s “Sesame Street” and play the music of Beethoven or Mozart in the background, use different languages or the paintings of Van Gogh and DaVinci, and are supposed to give your little baby sponge-like genius level mental acuity.

Of course, we said that about Sesame Street, too, which was mostly about dancing puppets and Cookie Monster (not to discount my favorite, Kermit the Frog). Mine were given to me by my dear friend Ms. M, an engineer with two children under the age of 5. Another close friend, a Mr. S. now has he daughter on weekends from his difficult divorce from a difficult and obnoxious woman. I got him on the phone last week and asked if he was using them for his daughter. The question might have seemed somewhat absurd because he almost snickered: “no, those are mostly for busy parents.”

I almost took umbrage. Almost. Then I stopped myself and remembered that Mr. S. sees his daughter only on the weekend, when even the busiest amongst us makes time to play with the kids. I’m not teaching this summer, true, but I’m still on e-mail, doing household business (the only way to keep an infant in ecologically correct diapers and not spend a fortune is to buy online), revising my book, writing this blog and a few articles, etc. So yeah, Connor gets parked in front of the Einstein a couple hours a day. The latest is teaching him to count and say nursery rhymes in seven languages including Russian and Hebrew. Do I feel guilty for what seems like teaching him to watch TV? Sometimes. Sure, I’d rather be reading to him in the original German or staging plays between Shakey Cow and Crazy Frog. We do those things, but not all the time. Sometimes, Mama’s gotta get something done. Sometimes, it’s washing his clothes, cleaning his bottles or wiping up cat barf from his floor. Sometimes it’s reorganizing the third chapter of her book, the one on Dickens’s Bleak House so that it makes sense to someone not steeped in Lacanian Literary Theory. So sometimes Connor gets to fill his velvet-haired, otherwise bald little head with dancing puppets to the tunes of Ludwig Van. It could be worse.

To some parents, TV is the absolute worse enemy you could engage in the struggle to build stronger, smarter, healthier children. To some, it’s a lifesaver along with those buzzing, vibrating, singing chairs that the Baby Whisperer hates. It’s all in the flavor of the parenting you choose. Shakespeare’s Hamlet says “There’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.” But thinking makes it so – that’s saying in a way, that it’s all relative. To some, good parenting is constant hands-on, granola-eating, no TV, listening to the Poetry of Rilke while dancing a waltz to Mahler and reciting differential equations.

To some, it’s letting the kid gum a moving box and use his imagination to determine what Shakey Cow might be saying to him at this moment.

We all have to find that space where we are comfortable with the choices we’re making for our little darlings that doesn’t turn us gray any faster than we’re already going. And we have to be good enough with our choices to not get defensive when someone says they do it differently. I have heard fierce debates about sleep training (where baby learns to sleep on his own, even though s/he might scream a bit) versus the family bed (where everyone sleeps together in a heap until baby kicks Daddy in the head too often and he bails to the couch). Friendships have ended over day care options or formula choices. Mothers and daughters fought viciously over rice cereal versus oatmeal. Nothing is more of a sacred cow than how you raise your kids, but some of those cows are waltzing the streets and others have been ground to hamburger between what used to be good friends.

Right now I’ve got to rescue Connor, who has drooled through his shirt and I think needs a nap, but when he wakes up, he’s going for a walk with his dad. Maybe they’ll bring Shakey Cow or maybe they’ll whistle some Mozart. But you can be sure we’ll be back with the Japanese nursery rhymes tomorrow.

Losing It

I was one of those skinny kids in high school. They almost didn’t let me give blood my sophomore year because they were afraid I’d pass out. The friend’s friend flirting with me at the park asked me to sit in his lap, then asked me to get up because my backside was “too bony.” I had trouble buying jeans that would stay up on my nonexistent hips. High school boys wouldn’t even look at me or my equally gracile friends, only the curvy girls got attention and I had about as many curves as I-75, I-5, I-10, or any of those interstates that runs from coast end to end of this country with only an occasional wobble around a hill.

Of course, I was constantly in motion, too. I ran to class, ran during gym class, danced during dance class, rode a bike to and from school, or later took busses that meant long hikes in the California heat. Summer was worse. To get anywhere meant Lawrence-of-Arabia crossings of endless scorched brown fields, or the sidewalks built next to them, in 115 degree heat. For years I arrived everywhere absolutely sodden and smelling of sweat, asphalt and remnants of whatever perfume I’d bothered to spray on that day. Between my mother and the school lunches at the cafeteria, I ate nutritiously, though I remember being hungry all the time.
Of course, now I have a car, a lunch budget and a baby and I’ve hit numbers on the bathroom scale that I have never seen before. Then I lost all my pregnancy weight, true, but the shape was still eggish. Then the scale started to creep up again. It’s true that I now have a rack Pamela Anderson would be proud of (I’ve been waiting 25 years for this!), unfortunately it came with Jabba the Hutt’s belly. My response was an immediate “Oh, hell, no!!!”

But even the wise know there’s no easy way through weight loss. Ask anyone at celebrity fit club or on that Discovery Health special on the Brentwood hospital for the morbidly obese. Especially because I’m nursing and also because I’d like to staunch the slow creep upward of five pounds a year that began when I landed in the barbecue, Brunswick stew, fried chicken, too-hot-to-walk South, I have to do this the right way: diet and exercise. And I don’t mean “diet” as in eating less for two weeks to get into that killer dress. I mean diet as in eating extraordinarily healthily and then moving my happy ass around a lot more than I have.
I’m no doctor and I’m no dietician, nor do I have the discipline of my colleague, the inimitable Dr. B who lives on Luna bars and black coffee and does crunches while she watches her evening TV. But they told us in fifth grade what it takes: get off the couch, go for a run, do not pass go, do not pass out and do not think that eating grapefruit or only meat for three weeks will save you. Pull up that bowl of Cheerios, put on those jogging shoes, and remember what your Mama taught you about eatin’ your vegetables.

If it’s this simple, though, why don’t we all look like Venus or Serena Williams? We all know that we feel great after moving around even a little and that (thank you Morgan Spurlock) a month of fast food makes you feel like crap and ruins your health. I’ve got my theories about this – mind I’m not professional, just the usual new Mama trying to shed a few pounds.

1) Time: It takes me an hour and a half a day to dress, do my hour of exercise, shower and groom up afterward. Most women work at least 8 hours a day and take care of children, house, home, and all social engagements in the other 8. Who has an extra hour and a half to two hours a day on this kind of self-indulgence?

2) Fast Food: If your schedule is that above, you’re eating quickly, including prepared and fast foods. Even if you can find a reasonably priced salad bar, you can’t eat it in the car while picking up and dropping off kids, groceries or the Wallgreen’s run. So you eat burgers and fries, knowing you shouldn’t but that if you don’t eat, you’ll turn into something that makes Joseph Mengele seem like a kindergarten teacher.

3) Exercise hurts: when you first begin especially. My feet haven’t been right since I started my hour-a-day power walk, but the pinching waistbands of my old clothes hurt even more so I’m doing it. Of course, the summer humidity means a girl has to be ready to sweat. I wear sunglasses and a hat so no-one recognizes me on the street. I look like that wet washcloth on the kitchen sink that needs to be thrown into the wash or buried.

4) We forget: Endorphines are great, make you feel a little high all day, aid in concentration and make you forget your aching bones. Yet, like the dumb thing we said Saturday night after too much Sangria, we forget this.

5) Sitting on the couch/restaurant booth/bar stool is more fun. Don’t kid yourself. In California, there are special Yoga classes that take place in hot rooms for an extreme workout. Only the most devoted to fitness go. Step outside your front door in the Georgia summer and it’s like turning your shower on high, closing the door and windows, turning off the fan and then trying to do aerobics in the resulting sauna. The good news is that you drop pounds quickly, the bad news is that it’s damned unpleasant.

6) Water: We’d rather drink anything – diet coke, Crystal Lite, lemonade, bourbon, even Zima for Pete’s sake, but we don’t like to drink water. For some reason, it takes even intelligent people dire torture by exercise or a bad hangover to purposefully drink water and it’s the best thing you can do for your body if you’re trying to get more fit. That way when you’re so hot and sticky that you feel like you’re actually melting the fat through your skin and are covered in the resulting residue, you at least have a refreshed inside. A friend of mine lost huge amounts of weight drinking two gallons of water a day, no lie. The body stops retaining extra water and can flush the toxins that might add to further bodily injury.

7) Crunches suck: Both the sit ups and the foods that crunch are good ideas. Now, I know potato chips crunch but don’t get sassy with me, you know what I mean. Salads, whole grain cereals and breads, food that has a lot of fiber also cleans all that gook that collects in your inside from that Checkers or Krystal run at two am on a Sunday morning. If you want to see something really nasty, take a look at those photos of folks who have done a colon cleansing and cleared the tar out of their guts. Without proper fiber that stuff continues to collect til you’re not so much sporting a lot of fat, but just continuously full of shit. Ick. Eat your wheaties!

Well, I’ll stop there, but you get my drift. That doesn’t mean that when we lost our cat, Fish, that I didn’t buy an extra pack of Oreos that didn’t even make it into the cookie jar. It does mean that I made an extra large salad on Saturday and have been moawing on that instead of the chips someone left. I eat Luna bars for breakfast and have been trying to make sure that half of whatever I throw down my gullet is either green or crunches (and yes, Funyans ARE cheating).

It’s either that or I have to go back to the “What to Expect When you’re Expecting” diet and I swore I’d never do that, so wish me luck, cause Mama needs a new pair of jeans.

Still Fishing

Early this week, we lost our beloved little cat, Fish, to a tragic dryer accident. It was her nature to be in and amongst all things troublesome and her number finally came up. As I was gathering pictures of her, I found myself missing her terribly, the soft little ears, the tiny felt feet. She had a bad case of “little.” It was one of her distinguishing qualities. In fact, I’m sure that we adored her specifically because she stayed little, not just in size, but in personality. Fish was feisty and kittenish, always playing (sometimes roughly) and always intensely unmarked by age or better sense. She retained her youthful spirit, yes, but never seemed to grow any wiser. In the end, it was a fatal flaw.

I hope Connor, my son, has a gentler nature. I also hope he’ll have a wiser one. I would love him to remain young at heart, wild with his sense of self and so potent in his desires as to have the robustness of life about him. Dan and I both pride ourselves on some of the stupider yet fun stuff we’ve done. Who picks up and goes to New York at 30, starts business because they’re broke, spends 15 years in college, gets up to some of the trouble we used to get up to in the middle of the night? We do, and in some ways I hope Connor will live as exuberantly. In some ways, I hope he’ll have better sense to measure twice and cut once, leave off dark alleys, whiskey and wild women. I have the fear on me now, you see and I just want him to come home safe and stay out of the appliances.

Of course, he’s MY son. Moreover he’s Dan’s son and if he inherits anything of his parents’ spirit, he’ll probably give me three heart attacks a day once he starts walking and twice that when he figures out how to run. By three, he’ll probably think his name is “Get Down From There!” And I’ll be secretly proud, while I run after him, try to catch him before he jumps off the roof, and cover my ever-increasingly gray hair with ever stronger batches of Loreal. Fact is, I’d delight in this liveliness, but I have to face that fact that risk takers often take one too many and end up on the wrong side of their luck.

My Momma told me to let wild things be. She also tried to tame me, talk me down out of trees and big cities, and away from wild men. For all her efforts, I broke away from her only to heartlessly do those things that frightened her most. Will I have the courage to let Connor be himself and the wisdom to know when he's courting disaster? Will I have the strength to survive his loss if he goes one step too far, or can I stand losing him as he slowly blanches, shade by shade, like a photograph left in the sun? Neither seems acceptable, yet I feel the fear on me again and don’t know how to shake it.

Gone Fishing

You know how your Momma always tells you to let wild things alone. I tried, I really tried. Our cat was barely a day or two old when I pulled her squalling from under the porch. I kept her in a bin around the corner so that her mother could claim her, but she never did. I called Dan, who was out of town on business, who said “absolutely not” but knew we had a new kitten when I came home from school and he was feeding her for me. She was tucked into the crook of his arm wrapped in a towel, clawing and biting at the bottle. As she finished the bottle and keeled over sideways, Dan would say “that’ll do, Pig,” and almost called her “Pig.” Under my protests, though, he switched up to the name “Fish,” for reasons I think only he can remember.

Now this little cat was a menace. She totally took over our new house, terrorizing our older 17-year-old bag-of-bones cat, jumping up on countertops and the tops of the cabinets, into the tub, out of cupboards, through every lovin’ open door she could find. Everyone who visited was exhorted to “mind The Fish” and keep the doors closed. She scrabbled in and out of washing machines, cupboards, boxes, bags, dishwashers, and dryers. She bit everyone who ever loved her, me included. The more a visitor was fascinated with her sleek black coat, elfin eyes and monkey-kitty antics, the more viciously she bit him. She would wait on the stairs and pounce on your feet, or under the bed to jump out and sink claws into bare toes. She walked all over Dan while he was trying to work, sleeping in his in-basket, batting at the birds that rested outside the window – including the doves who finally quit running -- and so scrambling the paperwork that he built a bed for her out of burlap bag and an old towel on top of one of the file cabinets. No shower or bath was complete without her diving into the tub and tracking foot prints all over the wet porcelain. You couldn’t beat her – it only made her more determined. We used a squirt bottle to discipline her when she sharpened her claws on any of the furniture but she turned it into a game and would lay one monkey-kitty paw on the side of the ottoman if she was bored, flex her little claws to check our reaction then run like hell as we sprayed our living room.

When we started collecting baby gear for Connor, she slept in each and every piece, as if testing it out. I think she thought we brought them home for her. She was roundly disgusted with the actual baby and I caught her looking at him one day after we’d put him on the floor in the carrier as if to ask “Dude, what kind of hairless cat are you. ..?” She started peeing on things: sweaters dropped under the coat rack, corners of the room near his daybed, boxes that his diapers came in. Recently, I caught her in his daybed, rubbed her on the head, picked her up and tossed her out onto the old chair she had already shredded. It got worse; she terrorized Ling, danced in and out of the food cupboards, bounced in and out of every appliance. I found her in cabinets, locked in the laundry room, hiding in bags, haunting every door to the outside.

It’s like that kid who insists on riding his motorcycle without a helmet or the race car driver who finally crashes or the stunt junkie who can’t stop or that guy who loved bears and was finally eaten by one. Fish constantly courted death and disaster and they finally accepted her offer. Two evenings ago we loaded the dryer with dark clothes, turned it on and returned to the porch without knowing that Fish was in there. She didn’t survive. Needless to say, it was a bad death and we are totally heart broken. Dan is devastated.

But what do you say when a wild thing is finally claimed by their wildness? Rock and roll is full of such characters: hard drinking, fast living, snarling, chain smoking tricksters who dance with the devil and eventually must pay their due. We love these wildcats and are cut up when their evil ways catch up with them. I know that’s why we loved her and why our devastation at her loss is so inconsolable. I just hope she’s somewhere lapping up Fancy Feast, clambering in and out of cabinets and machines and biting something soft. It’s not that she meant well so much that she gave us all so much joy who got to enjoy the little minx in her wildness. So here’s to little Fish. She’ll be sorely missed.

I just hope my son has a gentler nature.