In the Flow

The ebb and flow of sibling relations is as natural as the ebb and flow of the ocean tides, if not as regular. Still, a mother revels in the flow, dreads the ebb.

Sunshine and Hollywood have been flowing, lately. (See me smile.) 

A full year of high school under her belt has grown Sunshine's confidence; she's more tolerant and accepting of her little brother. She laughs out loud at his goofy antics that, a year ago, made her squint daggers.  And Hollywood, who will turn thirteen later this month, has matured socially, so his humor is a shade more sophisticated, less dependent on (although not entirely devoid of) farting and burping.

Two years apart, they're often encroaching on the other's territory. It all began, of course, when Hollywood showed up in the first place, all 7 lbs of colic screams, to turn Sunshine's only-child world on its ass.

More recently, he invaded her middle school. Then she his acting class. Both occasions of tectonic disposition to suck the waters back out again. 

"Lifeguard's make $350 a week," Hollywood said, last month, when Balthazar reminded Sunshine, again, that she would need a job next summer. (He's in a bit of a hurry to move them on and out. Then, on other days, he's not.) 

As his sister turned her head, truly interested in what he was saying, I saw the concern in Hollywood's double blink.

So, I was nervous, this morning, when I delivered them both to the pool where he has put in many hours to whittle a place for himself amongst the guards.

This could be a disaster, I thought, as they climbed out of the car.

Then, "How was it?" I asked, three hours later, when they, climbed back in. My words were eggshells. 

"Awful," said Sunshine. But she laughed through her report: "I was stuck with the weak swimmers; and I'm blind in this eye from the chlorine; and I forgot my towel and I was dripping in the lobby, and you're not allowed to drip in the lobby...." 

Hollywood howled along with her. "I liked it," he said, when she was finished.

"Everybody likes him,"she added. "He makes them laugh."  

I let out my breath. There would be no major shifts on this day.

I dropped my head back in the water.

Flow.        

The Feverish Storm

It's noon and The Storm has calmed, is sleeping, silently, now, after a tumultuous morning: fever; sore throat; tummy ache. (Sounds like strep, but we've had a sore throat in the house for the last couple of weeks, so we'll wait and see.) It's really too early for me to be sitting down to blog, but the house is quiet (a rare thing on a summer day!) with The Storm subsided, and the the pictures I took of her struggling to swallow two and a half teaspoons of cherry-flavored acetaminophen have inspired me.

I had to share!

"How do you know it will make me feel better?"

"I'm only seven! This is too much!"

The first of the seventeen tiny sips she took to get it down.

I think she likes it!

Sizing up the enemy.

It went like this: Sip of medicine; gulp of water; sip of medicine; gulp of water; sip of medicine; gulp of water, until....

"All done."

Candy Sprinkled Smiles

A trip to our local Baskin-Robbins for some Saturday afternoon cones turned into the best ice cream outing ever! Like always, I ordered the Mint Chocolate Chip (which it turns out is one of the top five selling BR flavors of all time, along with Chocolate, Vanilla, Pralines 'n Cream, and Chocolate Chip.) Hollywood had the Wild 'n Reckless Sherbert. The Storm opted for two scoops of Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, and her Tweedle had a scoop of Wild 'n Reckless on top of a scoop of Orange Sherbert. Oh, and they got sprinkles!

Then the kids climbed up to the bar overlooking the candy station to eat/lick their ice cream, when Trivia Guy behind the counter starting chatting with us. Or rather enlightening us. And that's when the real fun started! (I love me some trivia! Pair it with ice cream and that's my kinda heaven!)

Do you know why there are 31 flavors? Odd number right?

"One for everyday of the month," Trivia Guy explained.

"What about February?" asked the Tweedle, stumping him only temporarily.

"Double up on Saturdays," he suggested.

Then he made us guess how many flavors BR has created since day one (which was sometime in 1945, incidentally.)

"118," said The Storm.

"137," said the Tweedle.

"252," guessed Hollywood.

I went higher, "since they were making new flavors back when I was a kid." The kids eyed me, did a little mental math, then upped their numbers, too.

But not high enough. Turns out there've been over 1000 different BR flavors throughout time! Anyway, I was impressed.

Then Trivia Guy gave the kids each a cup of free gumballs (Remember how hard the bubble gum was in Bubble Gum ice cream?) and we went on our way, a whole bunch happier then we were when arrived.  Ah, the power of ice cream!

Oh, but not before I snapped this pic of Hollywood's blue stained lips. It's not nearly as good as his strawberry smile of yesterday, but the red sprinkle stuck in his teeth is a nice touch, no?

Out of Control

The Storm approached me early this morning to ask if I could take her to the park so that she could work on her shooting.  We live in the desert, so finding a patch of lush grass for a kid to practice soccer on isn't as easy as it might be in, say, Iowa. 

"Sure," I said.

"What time?" she said.

"How about ten o'clock?"

At ten minutes to ten, when she found me again, she had her ball under her arm and her cleats laced. For a nine-year-old, The Storm has things pretty together.  "It's almost ten o'clock," she said.

"Got it."

At ten, she said, "I've got some water for you. Let's go."

She comes by her control issues honestly, my baby girl. Long before I banned Balthazar from making the bed, anymore (around the same time I banned him from using my toothbrush!) because he could never do it quite right--The pillowcases should always open toward the bed's edge--my own mother was banishing me, and everyone else, from her kitchen. She still does, quite regularly. She's particular about the way her dishwasher is loaded, and the cloth used to clean her counter, and a few other things.

But, beyond the blue and gold patterns in the kitchen linoleum of my youth, and beyond the ceramics that define her kitchen now, I don't remember my mother being too controlling, at least not nearly as controlling as I am.  

"I feel sorry for her husband," my father's said, countless times, referring to The Storm. 

"I know, right?" says Balthazar, in response, each time.

"It gets worse with each generation," my father says.

"I don't know about that," says Balthazar. Then he ducks to avoid whatever I'm throwing at him.

At the park, The Storm instructs me: "Stand here. When I say ball, pass it to me.  Then move to the goal post (she means the tree she's designated as such). If I can take the shot, I will. If I can't...."

I sort of stopped listening. I don't play soccer. I'm only there to support her.

We take our positions. "Ball," she says, and I pass it to her. She traps it. Then she stops.

"What did I say?" she says. "You weren't listening were you? You need to pay attention." She says these things she's learned from me, that I learned from my mother. I've done this to her, as my mother has to me, via both nature and nature.

"Ball," she says, again. Again, I screw up.

She braces herself on the goalpost-tree.

"Seriously?" she says, and I can see the way she'll plant her hand on her living room wall, decades into the future. I can here her tell her husband, again, the way a hanger should hang in a closet, or how to fold a towel properly.

And I say a little prayer that she that she finds a man with a sense of humor. Someone like her granddaddy. Or Balthazar.

To The Library

~A rare, quiet, beautiful moment, brought to you by the letters A through Z~

It's the morning of the first day of summer vacation. A day that has me pushing my control lever into overdrive, like the coming of Christmas. By mid-May I'm already a little panicked. My breathing quicker.

 "To the library." I say, at breakfast. "We'll read, a lot, this summer."

Other declarations I make: Daily journaling for The Storm. In cursive. And multiplication facts; Essays from Sunshine. Every week. Multiple drafts; Math for Hollywood.

"And chores," I say. "Routine." I pound a mental fist on the table, but my voice cracks somewhere between the first and second syllable when my brain does a flip flop: Who are you kidding?

"At least, we'll try."

"I don't need a book," Hollywood says. "I've got three already."

"So, you don't want to come to the library?"

"Not really," he says.

Then, "You look sad, Mom."


Hollywood came after all, and we chanced upon the Farmer's Market, next door, where the strawberries were ... well, sweet as freshly picked strawberries in June.  Hollywood bought and ate a whole pint to himself. I'm sorry that I didn't think to snap a pic of his beautifully stained face. But, since we've decided to do this every Friday morning (routine?) maybe I'll get one next week.  

Little Pieces of Me

When Balthazar and I were still adjusting to our new life as husband and wife, he used my toothbrush. It was sitting there on the counter beside the sink we shared, in the bathroom we shared, just off of the bedroom we shared, so he thought nothing of scrubbing his molars with it. After all, he explained later, once my tantrum had subsided, my tongue was always in his mouth and I didn't worry about germs then.

"Is nothing sacred?" I screamed. 

It wasn't the germs. It was the sharing. 

Then we had babies. Beautiful babies. Who began by inhabiting my womb. Who claimed my breasts from Balthazar--who'd claimed them from me, years earlier. Beautiful babies who stole my heart, and made me want to give them everything.

And so I did.

That's what we do.

Mothers.

In the beginning, I gave up my sleep, that they be nourished and held. Later, I gave up my career, that they be loved and cared for all day long. I studied other, more qualified, mothers and I became them, adopting gentler tones, songs, games, a craft cupboard that I would have scoffed at in my previous life. I gave up my sex life: "Shh, they'll hear us." Then my evenings, to soccer, ballet, homework. My radio station to Miley Cyrus. My exercise regime, my time with friends, my time alone, my thinking time, to their ever more demanding schedules. Now, my closet and shoes, since Sunshine and I share a size.  

I'm not complaining. I'm just explaining how it happened.

And then, after so many years of being exactly who they needed me to be, exactly who I wanted to be for them, to give them everything, it happened. I was leaning into the mirror, lifting and stretching my lips to brush my teeth with my toothbrush--the one thing that is entirely mine since I claimed it so ferociously--when, on that morning, I actually saw the woman looking back at me. And I hardly recognized her.

But, she was definitely me. The mother of my children. She had my toothbrush. 

If I could only slow down, I thought, but I couldn't slow down. Because the mother of my children is very, very busy.

So, she and I hatched a plan. A blog. That I would write about her and the family she loves and lives for. The family she would sacrifice anything for, including me.     

"No," she said, suddenly frightened. "The children...." 

  

"It'll be okay," I told her. "I'll protect them. I love them, too." And I had her gather them up. 

 

"In writing about what matters to us, we'll come to know each other again. It could work," I told her.

Then I took her by the hand.  

And we all jumped.

       

On Tequila, and a Leprechaun Named Opportunity

I'm going to tell you something I've only told three of my closest friends: I saw a leprechaun once. 

I did. And he wasn't on the side of a cereal box, either. Nope. It was still hours from breakfast, when I saw the little guy, in the flesh, standing next to my bed, staring down at me, where I had been sleeping. 

He wasn’t cute and cartoonish either—like our General Mills friend, Lucky—but rather, he had a sloppy look about him. The sort of disheveled appearance you’d expect of any man, at four in the morning.  He stood about four and a half feet tall, weighing maybe a hundred and thirty pounds. And he wore an outfit not dissimilar to Santa’s—except, it was green, of course.  His hair was red, curly, and full, to match the beard surrounding his irritated scowl.  He wore no hat that I recall.  Or maybe he did.  What I do remember, and distinctly, is the stale, sour smell he had about him—or maybe that was me.  I'd been drinking margaritas, the previous evening.

Anyway, the point isn’t that I saw a leprechaun, or even whether I did.  The point is what I did about it. Or rather what I didn't do.  

~

Several years prior to this night, on an afternoon in November, my children—three, six and eight years old, at the time—came flying up the stairs, from the playroom, screaming with anxious excitement. 

“We saw a leprechaun!” they said, over top of one another. "We need a box to catch him.” 

"Hurry!" my son said.

I didn’t have a box. I offered them spatulas and whisks, instead—tools perfect for any childhood game—and a big blanket that I suggested they could toss over him. 

Off they went.   I didn’t go with them.  I didn't believe in leprechauns.   

Only minutes later they came moping back up again. 

“He’s gone,” they said. And they settled in to watch television, escaping their disappointment for the lost opportunity.  

~

So, what didn’t I do when I awoke to find a leprechaun standing within a foot of my person, well within my grasp?  Well, I certainly didn’t try to catch him.  Instead, I spent precious seconds convincing myself that he wasn’t there.

Then I yanked the sheets from my bed, but not to toss them over the scowling little man and demand his gold. Instead, I jerked them up over my own head, and had a stern conversation with myself about drinking too much, and delusions, and pulling it together.  Then, a few good headshakes later, I peeked out again. 

He was still there.

Up the blankets went again, for two full minutes, this time, while my heart beat fast with fear, and my rational brain argued with my wide and blinking eyes.

When I ventured out again, still nothing had changed, except for the leprechaun’s scowl; he was thoroughly disgusted with me.  

Up came the covers a third time.

“Go away,” I finally said, loudly and forcefully, past lips dry from the previous night's imbibing, and thoroughly convinced I had lost my mind. 

When I finally came out again, several minutes later, he was gone.

I don't expect he'll come knocking again.

~

So, why am I sharing this with you, this incident that—if a sane person were to experience it—a sane person would know better than to share it? 

Well, in hindsight, it occurs to me that this evening fell sometime during the spring of 2008, around the time that the price of gold was spiking, and just months before the recession would land on my doorstep with a loud and heavy thud.  A stash of gold would have come in quite handy around then.  But, of course, I didn't believe in leprechauns. 

So, there's a lesson that comes with this wacky experience, and it applies to all, the believers and the nonbelievers, and it's pretty basic: The first requirement of opportunity is that you believe. The second is that you recognize it. And the third is that you reach out and grab it, with all the enthusiasm and excitement of child at play.  Then you have it: Opportunity.

And there you have it. My motivational gift to you. Happy St. Paddy's Day!