motherhood

Neighborhood Kids


My mother used to ship all of us but the baby outdoors right after breakfast during the summer. She would then lock the door behind us. We had screen doors on the front and back. If we needed something, we would stand at the door and holler in. Mom would holler back that we only thought we needed something when in fact everything we needed was outdoors.

 

“I’m thirsty!”

 

“There’s a hose in the backyard!”

 

Except for potty breaks, which my younger brother never availed himself of as the neighbors lilacs served more easily, we didn’t get back inside until nap time. Even lunch was served al fresco out back on the picnic table complete with paper plates and a jug of kool-aid.

 

When I tell this story these days, it’s greeted mainly with horror. How could my mother have locked us outside? A bunch of preschoolers unsupervised in the wild? But we were hardly unsupervised back then circa 1970. Our neighborhood was typical of the era, packed with children of all shapes, sizes and ages. Even though there were working moms, at least every other house had a grown-up in it. It was hard to do anything that wouldn’t be seen and reported by someone be it child, teenager, someone else’s parent or a busy body senior with nothing better to do. Of course at the time I was being jailed in the vast playground the neighborhood provided for me, I was indignant. All the other kids could wander freely in and out of their homes. It wasn’t fair. Today I see my mother’s side of it. My mother had four children between the ages of six and one year. Four and not one of us useful in any meaningful way and there she was with a house to clean, laundry for a family of six and a baby to mind. Not to mention, meals to prepare and stockpile. Clothes didn’t come out of the dryer wrinkle free because the concept of that kind of clothing wasn’t yet a reality and there were precious few edible ready made meals. We didn’t own a dishwasher yet, didn’t even have a window unit air-conditioner. A mountain of work whose enormity was fairly consistent from day to day and primitive working conditions while handicapped by a wee one. I would have thrown the rest of us out too.

 

My own daughter’s experience with neighborhoods in summer is ironically in the same neighborhood I grew up in. Our home in Des Moines was not somewhere I felt safe letting her roam. The next door neighbor was creepy. He watched me and my house intently after my late husband went into the nursing home, and numerous visits from local law enforcers to his home plus an unfriendly, territorial dog that roamed freely had me keeping Katy inside. At my parents however, she ran freely in and out, playing with the neighborhood children much as I had at her age. The only difference was that my mother didn’t lock the screen door anymore and my daughter sometimes need to be ordered inside because she couldn’t bear to not be a part of the action outdoors.

 

Today we live in a rural township. There aren’t many children visible until we discovered the boy and girl who live across our alley. Josh and Hamburger (Amber) are just a bit older and younger than Katy respectively. She made first contact and kept at it until they began to let her into their games. It’s not easy to be an only child. She doesn’t have the built in playmates that I had with my siblings, although I regarded my brother and sisters as a fall back measure only. It’s been hard for me to let her run outdoors without me following after to keep an eye out. Last evening she decided to go out after supper to look for her friends, and to try out her new rain boots as it had rained all afternoon and there were still a few puddles. I told her she would have to wait until Rob was ready to go out. He was going to work on some reno projects. “Why?” he asked. Why indeed? 

 

We went into town today to register for kindergarten and shop for school supplies, and when we returned, Josh and Hamburger could be heard from behind the hedge as we climbed out of the truck. Katy was off like a shot and before long she had brought her friends back to play in our yard for the first time. Unlike my mother, I let them come inside at some point and they played noisily and messily in Katy’s room for a time. The messy part was rather upsetting to my very untidy girl. I think it is an only child thing. As I sat in the kitchen below her room trying to work on email, I realized the vast wisdom of my mother’s decision to lock the door after us all those decades ago. Not that I bother much with housework or cooking. I tidy more than clean and I cook…..my husband is laughing as he reads those two words and chortling at what comes next…..when Rob doesn’t. I have no great interest in the “house” part of my wifely status. It’s a by-product of my earlier circumstances. The beds don’t always have to be made. Dishes will be fine in the sink overnight. And if you can’t see the dust, it isn’t there. Still, small children are only just practicing the art of playing together and doing it nicely. (Actually, I don’t think we ever really make it much beyond this stage….ever.) The noise and disharmony eventually reach critical mass and I unilaterally decided that it was time for friends to go home for a while and for Katy to eat lunch and have a rest. Surprisingly, she agreed with me.

 

As I type this there is a toy strewn bedroom beckoning, along with the lunch dishes, and a very tired little girl watching odd Francophile  cartoons as she lies on the couch in the living room. Another interesting day for us both.

Happy Birthday



Tomorrow my daughter will be five years old. It also marks the day that I realized that there was something horribly wrong with her father. A unfortunate collision of anniversaries. The latter half of my pregnancy was marred with increasingly frequent “incidents” that I suppose had I not been pregnant and sick and preoccupied, I would have picked up on. I don’t talk much about the specifics of the early days of my husband’s illness. Partly out of guilt because I didn’t see what is so obvious to me now, but mostly because I know that the things he said and did were a result of the damage that was being inflicted on his brain and thus changing his personality and ability to reason.

I went into labor the night of the 26th. It was about 10:30 when I realized that the rhythmic tightening of my belly was actually regular and close enough to be early labor pains, and of course my water breaking about 15mins later confirmed that I was right. We had been out to dinner earlier, and Will had had a bit to drink. Another thing I didn’t know at the time was that his ability to metabolize certain chains of acids found in food and drink was nearly gone. His illness was a metabolic disorder. His body had stopped producing a particular enzyme it needed and as the acids built up it triggered his immune system into attacking the coating around the nerves in his lower back and the dura matter that protected his brain. The disease also triggered a hyper response from his adrenal glands that was slowly killing them as well. Alcohol is largely composed of the type of acid that he couldn’t metabolize any longer. Even small amounts triggered erratic behaviors because it was like a poison building up in his system that his body could barely eliminate. Long story, but the short of it that night was that he was not much help to me. On the way to the hospital, the stress of the situation caused one of his increasingly more frightening memory lapses where he would get lost in surroundings he had know all his life, much like an Alzheimer’s patient. His stressed adrenals meant that he reacted out of proportion to a situation, so he was angry and a bit scary. Once we were finally in the birthing room at the hospital, his overwhelmed system just shut down, and he spent the rest of the night and into the morning before Katy was born wandering the halls of the hospital in kind of a daze that had the nurses more concerned about him than me at times. Aside from the nurses who periodically checked in on me, I went through the first eight or so hours of labor on my own.

I don’t like to think about any of this really. There is no point anymore. He was sick, and I was too busy to notice, or what I did notice I chose to rationalize away. Though it still bothers me that I failed him so utterly at a time when he needed me so much, the worst of it now is that my daughter’s birth is not a happy memory for me. She is my child. The only child I will ever have and all that I have left of Will, and her birthday is tinged with regrets and sadness that unfortunately I have never managed to completely hide from anyone. Time and distance hasn’t made much of a dent in this of yet, but I have hopes that someday it will.

Real Women


Caitlin Flanagan irritates me to my core. Last year she published a book, To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife, which made her the darling of the nano-second with the Right Wing talking heads. Although it stops short of endorsing the shoeless, knocked up and slaving over a radiating microwave conservative mantra, it is a load of poser crap because as nearly as I can ascertain Ms. Flanagan is not, and never has been, a housewife. Her husband is filthy rich. She has a nanny and a housekeeper. She works. Okay, from home. But if the woman has a job that necessitates the need for a nanny and a housekeeper, them ain’t mother’s hours. 

This month she has a featured article in Oprah Magazine. I love O and I hate it. I love it because it provokes me and gives me good blog topics. I hate it because while it professes to be a tool for female empowerment, it completely buys into the same garbage about what being a woman is that all the other women’s magazines do. It is the deeper end of the self-help pool perhaps, but it isn’t helping because it makes the assumption that all the others do. If there is something wrong in your life from your relationship to your children to your job the root cause of this dysfunction is you, and though sometimes it is, a lot of the time it’s THEM. Anyway, the title of the article is You’re Middle-Aged. But Are You Done? Discuss. Oy! Where to begin with that! There are so many issues to be taken with the idea that 40 is some kind of huge mile-marker and that the decade that it kicks off is the precurser to Depends undergarments. Good lord, at 40 you still have a dozen or more years of tampons to buy. 40+ year old women are not near as wrinkly as the cosmetic industry would like us to believe (unless you smoke and were/are a tanning addict) and with a little bit of vigilance we can stave off the first bits of facial hair growth and graying. It’s not the wonder years of that the mid to late 30’s are but as Shrek says, “It’ll do.”

Flanagan yips a bit about not having the same drive or need to do and succeed that she did as a younger women and then wonders what her friends think about this decade of crisis. So, she fires up the old Rolodex and invites a few of her “average” friends over for party favors and wine and Q&A on the burning questions – marriage – money – sex and how this effects their ability to keeping dreaming about their lives and futures. Now, given who she is I didn’t expect her friends to be like mine. My best friends is a home health care nurse who is almost finished with her MSN despite having a full-time job, husband and two kids. Another very close friend is a middle school teacher whose husband is a farmer, her three girls are 22, 19, and 16 and has also just finished up her MA studies. Flanagan’s friends include a successful novelist, a performance artist, a television personality, a professional organizer , a temporarily retired entrepreneur, and she  throws in a SAHM as a bone for we merely ordinary women to relate with.

I truly went into the reading of this article with an open mind. I thought, “Hey, this is Oprah, right? She isn’t going to tolerate some vacuous shit. These women probably discuss some really important topics. The pressure on women to stay young looking and thin. The difficulties of juggling career and kids. Getting back into the workplace after taking time off. Being taken seriously in your profession.” Yeah, I was wrong, but I read on. And just made myself so crazy that I cornered my poor husband with a diatribe that lasted a good half-hour or so on how I would have answered this idiot woman’s questions. 

Although the entire article is not worth the paper it is printed on, there are a few topics that particularly galled me. One of them was sex. Not one of these women viewed sex with their husbands, or other significant mate, as important. It was an afterthought or worse, an inconvenience. One of them even quoted from a book entitled I’d Rather Eat Chocolate: Learning to Love My Low Libido whose author actually told her husband that she was unilaterally scaling back the number of sexual interactions in their relationship, and what’s more incredible really…..he agreed with her. Furthermore the group on the whole was intrigued with the notion that instead of women visiting their doctors to get help with increasing their low libidos (I am assuming that the 40’s are a low point hormonally for many women …. though I don’t personally know any such women) men should see their physicians to see about decreasing their sex drives instead. Sex with one’s love is a chore? Granted, I was married for a goodly while to a man too ill to be intimate with in any way, but even if that wasn’t the case, I would still want to make love as often as possible with my husband. Sickness, exhaustion, child, selling a house, packing, moving to another country. None of these present any sort of insurmountable obstacle to passionate interactions and this I know for sure.

Another topic was money. Money spent wisely and money thrown away. Most of the participants discussed some purchase of clothing as the best investment they ever made and were thankfully shamed into silence by the women who said that the money she spent on fertility treatments was easily the best investment she ever made. When the discussion turned to money they thrown away, it was predictably things that they regretted splurging on like outfits of clothing, furniture, interior decorators. The money  that I regret spending is on the grave site and headstone I purchased for my late husband. $1300 that I really couldn’t afford, but I did it because he wanted to be buried somewhere that his family, mainly Katy and I, and his friends could come and visit. Sadly, Katy and I were the only ones to really visit his grave and had I not interred him I could have brought his ashes along to Canada with us. Now he lies alone in a little cemetery that it is unlikely I or his daughter will get back to for long while. Who knows really? Maybe even never. I regret that money a lot now.

I thought about conversations I have had with my friends about the state of health care and education. About the night my women’s writers group discussed the realities and ins and outs of dating and how one’s relationship history influences our choices and views. I suppose that “depth” is one of those eye of the beholder things, but I am irked that such a completely shallow person was given an opportunity to have a frank discussion and blew it so definitively.