Becoming real

One day when R was just a few months past three, he looked up at our engagement picture (where it had been hanging on the wall since before he was born), and asked, “Who are those people mommy?”

In just over a month, I will be another year older. Before I had kids, I had approximately 36 bottles, creams, powders, sprays and small electrical appliances that I used to get ready to leave the house on any given day. In my younger years, I scrutinized the evenness of my eye shadow and tried on six different pairs of shoes before leaving the house for a date.

Today, if I discover the spit up trickling down my back, AND have the time to wipe it off before running out the door in the morning, I consider the day a success. Time that I once devoted to primping; I would now rather spend getting extra strawberry-jam-covered kisses while banana goo is unceremoniously wiped in my hair.

After K was born, I noticed that my hair was just a little less shiny (notwithstanding the banana goo), and there were a few more lines around my eyes. During those first months when new mothers sleep less than is even humanly possible, I sported dark circles too. And don’t get me started on what the miracle of life does to everything from the neck down.

Not long ago, R asked me to read the classic children’s story The Velveteen Rabbit to him. In summary, a little boy gets a stuffed rabbit for Christmas, which becomes the boy’s favorite toy, accompanying him through childhood, until the boy loses interest and the rabbit is cast aside. The whole book is told from the rabbit’s perspective. Personally, I’ve always thought it was kind of a depressing story. But, as I was reading it aloud to my four-year-old, I heard my own voice reading these lines:

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

I laid in bed that night thinking about these words. What I decided is that I’m not getting older. I’m just getting more real. Moms aren’t born real. They’re made that way by their children.

Say what?!

Long before I was a wife or mother, I was a high school English teacher. This is a job that merits hazard pay and requires a sense of humor if one is to survive (and that’s just the first week). In honor of the beginning of a new school year, here are a couple of my favorite memories from my time in the classroom:

I was dazzling and captivating a classroom full of freshmen with a rousing rendition of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. In Act 1, Scene 1, there’s a confrontation between Tybalt and Benvolio, archenemies from the houses of Capulet and Montague. At some point during this argument, Lord Capulet enters the scene and utters the following line, directed toward his wife, Lady Capulet:

Capulet: What noise is this? Give me my long sword, ho!

(For those who may be rusty in Shakespearean literature, this roughly translates to “Hand me my sword. Hurry!”)

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a head bolt suddenly upright. The male student, to whom the head belonged, gazed at me through a curtain of uncut bangs. I was fairly certain that this student had, up to this point, slept through most of my enthralling tribute to Mr. Shakespeare. However, he now appeared to have something urgent to say.

STUDENT: “Uh, Miss C? (This was before I was married.) Did he just call his wife a ho? ‘Cause my moms (yes, you read that right, and no this child did not have two mothers) and my girlfriend would freak if someone called them that.”

(*Urban dictionary defines the slang term ho as: a Prostitute, Whore, Hooker, Tramp, Slut).

ME: “Of course, I didn’t know Shakespeare personally, but I don’t think that’s what he had in mind when he penned that line.” Moving right along…

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When I was pregnant with R, I taught a class that was disproportionally full of sophomore boys. I enjoyed teaching this class, and participated in friendly banter with students between more serious academic moments.

Anyone who has ever taught can tell you that, occasionally, things come out of your mouth before your brain has fully processed what it’s about to say. It’s a hazard of repeating yourself 6 times per day.

This particular class frequently attempted to negotiate smaller homework assignments, and I frequently shut them down. But one day when I was about 8 ½ months pregnant, I was feeling generous (and tired). When they started in on the homework negotiations, I decided to give them a break and shorten the writing portion of the assignment.

STUDENTS: “Do we have to do the entire writing prompt?”

ME: “Just do the first part. I’m feeling easy.”

An eerie silence fell over the room as 20 pairs of eyes immediately flew to my bulging abdomen, as if it provided all the proof they needed to qualify my previous statement. In that moment, I realized that I had just announced to a classroom full of adolescents that I had loose morals. A split second later, the room erupted in laughter, and my face turned 8 different shades of crimson before I had to laugh too. But I never used the word “easy” to describe myself in any context again.

A happy school year to all of my teacher friends!

Daddy's girl

R and I had a momma/son date yesterday. We rode bikes at the lake, played on the playground, had lunch out together, ran errands, and finished the afternoon with ice cream. He’s growing and changing so quickly that it’s nice to have the time to really focus on his stories and thoughts. He told the cashier at the store that he “likes to spend time just with his mom alone.” (He’s a heart-melter, that one). So, my husband and K had some bonding time of their own.

When I was pregnant with K, I was sure that I was having another boy. When the ultrasound tech announced that she would be a she, my husband’s first words were, “I guess we’ll be paying for a wedding someday.” Secretly, I think he was a little nervous about having a daughter. He grew up in a house with an older brother and no female cousins living close by. Girls were (are?) a mystery to him, one that I have attempted over the years to explain.

Those who know my husband know that he isn’t an outwardly expressive person. He prefers the strong-silent type routine as a general rule. That’s why it absolutely gets me when he walks through the door after work, takes one look at K’s beaming grin, and his entire face lights up. It’s like both of them have been waiting for that moment all day long.

I have noticed a general change in his philosophy as well. His daughter will not be wearing anything excessively short, tight, or low-cut EVER. She also will not consume alcohol until she is over the age of 21 (and then, only in the presence of her parents), he will approve all dates before she leaves the house, and she will have a curfew of eleven o’clock (still haven’t gotten clarification on AM or PM). I have known my husband since we were in high school, so I can tell you that his philosophies have changed A LOT since he was seventeen (or maybe just since he’s had a daughter of his own).

My sneaking suspicion though is that I will be doing a lot of the enforcing, and he will be doing a lot of the giving in. K has already mastered the “smile-to-get-what-you-want” shtick. Feminists the world-over condemn this practice, but any woman who’s really honest with herself knows she’s used it once or twice (no speeding ticket, just a warning, anyone?). And she probably started by practicing it on dad or grandpa.

A couple of weeks ago, K suddenly decided the kitchen was the place to be for whatever reason. After tirelessly moving her back into the living room for the hundredth time, my husband sternly said, “K, come back here.” Her response was to stop mid-crawl to grin over her shoulder at her weary father, throw him a quick wave bye-bye, and then continue on her way across the forbidden linoleum. Way to show her who’s the boss there dear.

After K was born, I heard the song “I Loved Her First” by Heartland on the radio, (here’s a link to the video if you haven’t heard it:  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxtK169-_L0) and in the hormonal storm that comes in the weeks after you have given birth, tears rolled. The general gist of the song can be understood in the refrain:

 But I loved her first and I held her first
And a place in my heart will always be hers
From the first breath she breathed
When she first smiled at me
I knew the love of a father runs deep

I love the relationship that my husband and K are developing. What I hope she is learning from him at a very young age is that a real man will look out for her best interests instead of try to exploit her, and will protect her from growing up too fast. I hope that when it’s time for her to start dating, she doesn’t choose the guy in the bar (should she ever be allowed to see the inside of one) with the most polished line, but the man whose face lights up when she walks through the door.

Why God made grandparents

I’m convinced that somewhere over the years and many translations of the book of Genesis, a couple of pages were left out. While we know what God did on Days 1 thru 7 of creation, it’s Day 10 that counts. On Day 10, God, in all Her infinite wisdom, created grandparents.

By Day 10, the average human mother had played 20 games of Candy Land, listened to approximately 300 knock-knock jokes, read the entire collected workings of Dr. Seuss 12 times, and scraped six different shades of Play-Doh off of the kitchen floor. If you’ve never seen what reading that much Dr. Seuss can do to a woman, you’ll know when she opens her mouth: “Please pass the bread I said. Do you need a dish for fish? Would you like it red or blue? Does the baby need one too?”

So God created grandparents so the species would survive. It doesn’t matter how beastly a child is acting, his grandparents can always find a reason for the behavior that does not reflect directly on the child. “Oops, looks like somebody’s tired.” “Too much excitement opening all those presents today.” “That much sugar disrupts the delicate balance of little bodies.” Are these really the same people who raised my siblings and me?

My son loves to go to his grandparents’ houses. Besides having novel toys to play with, there is no one in the world except for your grandma who will let you choose a movie, and then watch “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” six times in the middle of July when the heat index is 113 degrees outside. The same woman who once condemned cereal boxes with manically happy cartoon characters due to high sugar content, can now declare ice cream before dinner perfectly acceptable without batting an eyelash. So we try not to take it personally when, having spent the night with Grandma and Papa, R takes one look at us on their doorstep and immediately bursts into tears (and believe me, they are not tears of joy because he has missed us so much).

I think it’s great that my kids live so close to both sets of grandparents though. It’s one of the reasons that we’ve chosen to live here, rather than say, Maui. There’s something special about the relationship between children and their grandparents. I hope R and K know that their parents love them completely and unconditionally. We try to always be present for them, to eat dinner together as a family, and tuck everybody in with hugs and kisses at the end of the day.

But grandparents have the luxury of sitting on the floor for hours; stacking and restacking towers of blocks while the kids take turns knocking them over. With no thoughts of how much laundry is piling up or worries over that cherry popsicle stain on the carpet that will set without immediate attention, grandparents can spend those 10 extra minutes at the park. Grandparents get to be the “yes-men.”

Of course, the real winners here are the parents. After God finished creating grandparents, and shipped all children to their houses for the weekend, She sat back on the couch (after having first removed the collection of pointy Ninja Turtle accessories from between the cushions), looked at all that She had made, and saw that it was very good.

Evolution of a marriage

We’re in the process of painting our bathrooms. We hired someone to paint the exterior of the house this summer, which looked so good when it was finished, I decided why stop there?

If this were the theatre, my husband would be cast in the role of the long-suffering martyr. His defense when I get an idea in my head is to back away slowly and be as invisible as possible until the project is complete.

Early on in the marriage, I would ask his opinion on paint swatches or towel colors, and then buy what I had planned to in the first place. He would insist he really didn’t care whether the towels I bought were slate grey or heather grey, and that I should buy whatever I liked. That’s what he actually said.

What I heard was, “I care more about this basketball game I’m trying to watch than about our home. I would rather shout obscenities at the television than spend two minutes weighing the aesthetic appeal of chrome vs. brushed nickel fixtures.” This usually ended in a lengthy discussion (okay, lecture) on the importance of communication in a healthy relationship (I can’t help it; I’m a trained counselor).

Six years and two children later, we’re lucky to have any private conversation that doesn’t revolve around whose turn it is to take out the diaper pail. Still, I think we’ve learned a few things.

So when I announced my intentions to paint the bathrooms, he pretended to be genuinely interested in the multitude of paint chips scattered across the dining room table, and I pretended that I hadn’t already chosen a paint color three days before. Duty done, he wandered into the living room to watch the Olympics in peace (Okay, not in total peace. The four-year-old was shouting the same phrase over and over at the top of his lungs, while the baby munched on the rogue Cheerios that had lodged themselves in the elastic of her pants at breakfast). But everyone was happy.

I'll try them all please

Occasionally, in a fit of drama, the four-year-old will accuse me of loving his sister more than I love him. When this happens, I reassure him that I love him and his sister equally, but if he only knew…

I will admit that when I was pregnant this time around, I had fleeting moments of self-doubt. How would I ever love another child with the same intensity (some might say smothering affection) that I had loved my first? From the moment they put him on my chest, I forgot that seconds before I had accused him of trying to kill me.

I had never loved like that before. Let me explain, in case my husband is reading, that I do, in fact love him (believe me, I am not the type of woman who would launder the underwear of a man I didn’t love). This, however, was in a completely different category altogether. After all, when I met my husband, I did not instantaneously think, “If a train were barreling toward you, I would jump onto the tracks without a moment’s hesitation.” This feeling was so overwhelming that I had a hard time imaging I could feel it about anyone else, but when they handed me my daughter, there it was again.

I love my children for different reasons, and it’s because of their differences that I’m able to love them both. My son, despite looking just like his father, inherited my, shall we say, intensity for life. He speaks, plays, and moves with passion. He likes to get his own way (must be his dad’s side coming out there), which sometimes causes us to butt heads. We are alike in many ways, both unable to mask emotion on our faces. When something is important to us and we love it, we go at it full-tilt. If it’s not, well, we’re stubborn to the end. He will randomly say things like, “Mom, your heart will always be in my heart” (where does a four-year-old come up with this stuff?) or “I love you, Mom.” He is loyal and will stand up for himself and others. He’s compassionate, always the first on the soccer field to rush over and see why somebody’s on the ground. He got his dad’s sense of irony, and his humor is sometimes wry and sometimes silly.

Our daughter is, of course, still developing her own personality, but already she’s different from her brother. What R took out of the genetic pool from my husband, K took from me. Our baby pictures are interchangeable except for eye color. She is easy-going, playful, almost always smiling. She has recently started diving for people’s noses with her mouth open; then laughing hysterically at their reactions (usually fear, as she has just grown four sharp new teeth). Whereas my son started getting impatient with being held soon after he began crawling, she loves to snuggle. I have a feeling that she may be what my grandparents used to refer to as, “a character.”

Those who know me know that I love dessert. When I’m offered a choice between two different types of cake, I always want to try both. I love the chocolate cake for its bold taste, and smooth texture, but I also love the carrot cake because it has a hint of spice and some nuttiness. I appreciate them because they each have their own distinct flavor.

So what I want to tell R when he accuses me of not loving him and his sister the same is that he’s right. I don’t. Having more than one kid is like having your choice of desserts, and more dessert is always a good thing in my book.