You are currently browsing the monthly archive for November 2008.
I’m eating my words and they cause me indigestion. These words I swallow, rather than speak.
To the God of special services in our local school system, these words represent my wrath: “I don’t trust you, and frankly, I don’t like you either. I can’t say that about too many people in my life. My first impression of people is usually dead-on, but I actually thought you were one of the good guys. And then you underestimated me, insulted my intelligence, and worse yet, misjudged my boy. Big mistake. I will not go down without a fight. Don’t mess with me.”
To all of those PTO parents with their perfect children: “As someone recently said to me, ‘We are all one misfortune away from having a child with special needs.’ Be thankful and shut up. And anyway, just so you know, I had a bunch of your perfect little children in my CCD class last year. They ain’t so perfect. Trust me.”
To the well-meaning, and not so well-meaning friends, family and acquaintances, who believe they have the solution to our energetic son, usually something involving militant methods: “Honey, you have NO idea. Spend a week in our shoes. Then beg for mercy.” Oh and for the dunces who say things like, ‘If he could only focus,’
“Gee, ya think?”
Here’s a few more words, gentler, but still unsaid: Be kind. Show compassion. Love our son. Invite us to tea. Listen. Hug.
Cissy – Eating My Words
I’m going to use cloth diapers. They are better for the environment. “Not gonna happen,” my aunt said. But I argued, “There are services. People did it all of the time before Pampers.” “Uh huh,” she said in the way only a woman who raised four children can. I didn’t last a damn day or cloth diaper. I was buying diapers in bulk carrying cartons bigger than cabinets for years. My aunt didn’t gloat or brag or say, “I told you so” because she had never believed for five seconds there was more in my sentence than words that would evaporate the moment I was actually mother to a pooping machine.
My daughter will wear green and yellow as a baby. There are more differences between girls and other girls and boys and other boys than between boys and girls. People create gender roles in infancy. The first time a man on an elevator asked how old my adorable baby boy was I pulled out the pink and my daughter’s been plastered in it ever since.
There is no need for brand names for little kids. I started calling Dunkin Donuts the coffee shop because why should my child know brands when learning her first words? Well, at six, she can order a smoothie and yell into the intercom “I’m hungry” expecting employees to know she wants an egg and cheese croissant. I’ve held off on Bratz dolls and don’t yet have a Hannah Montana singing tooth brush but Hello Kitty is a family member. I know all the words to High School Musical and Camp Rock. My daughter has more Webkinz Kinzcash than I have real dollars and more trendy headbands than strands of hair.
My daughter will wear jeans and overalls, boots and sneakers, comfortable, durable and practical clothing. My girl decided by age 3 she preferred skirts and dresses and tights and sandals. She has a purse collection. She collects jewelry. She admires shirts with glitter and thinks the buttons, snaps and zippers on jeans are uncomfortable and ugly. She will wear sneakers only on gym day and asked me when she was four how old she had to be to wear high heels. Me, who at forty-one has two dresses and one is the wedding gown she likes to take out just to look at and touch, was stumped. Little girls should not look like hookers did not seem a maternal thing to say.
I will not do expensive themed birthday parties kids don’t remember that encourage materialism. There was Elmo, Sesame Street, Care Bears, Build a Bear, High School Musical and a gymnastics party this last year that required more logistical planning and confusion over who we could and could not afford to invite than there was planning my wedding.
I will let my daughter know parents are parents and not best friends. Once, when I insisted she clean up and get rid of some of her stuff she said, “Why?” ”You have to limit what you have. We live in a cottage. It’s small”. She argued, “You collect sea glass. Daddy collects hats. I can collect what I want and I collect collections.” “Actually, you can’t collect as much as you want. We, your parents and we own this house. Your opinion counts but we make the rules.” “Oh,” she said, “I didn’t know that. Sorry.” Had I, in an attempt to make her feel valuable, heard, loved and significant failed to convey that there are age limits for driving, voting and military service even in a democracy?
There will be no candy or eating in the car on a regular basis. The crumbs are embedded into the fabric. It looks as if Goldfish and Teddy Grahams have revisited the 60’s and having reckless orgies in the back seat of my Subaru.
My daughter will not do the princess thing and believe she needs a price to rescue her. So, when she wanted to go to Princess Camp with her best friend last summer I cringed. But she was willing to be away from me for five half days and that was her facing a huge fear. I buckled. “She’s in what camp?” my aunt teased, “Did you say princess?” She threatened to call my college to tattle on me, where I my self-created major was “The Multi-generational Uterine Family: A Feminist Perspective.” She said she was sure she would have seen a CNN news headline if my child went to a Princess Camp but wouldn’t tattle to my feminist friends if I just kept saying to her, “My daughter is in princess camp.”
I am not going to lie to my child about Santa Claus and for many years I didn’t have to. I let her make assumptions and didn’t correct them but this year I let her pen a letter to him and when she wanted to get a photo with him at the mall I said I’d check Santa’s schedule and see if we couldn’t make that happen.
Ugh, it was so much easier to be a perfect parent before there was an actual child in the house.
I am eating my words and they are everywhere. They are stunned, recriminating and anguished. Each morning, breakfast is a hole, and a hollow echo. “One of these days we should…”, “I’ll have to call”, and “Wouldn’t it be fun if we…” are all parts of the smorgasbord. It is far from filling.
How do I make a bigger batch of family? Am I limited to biological items or can I add kindred spirits of another mother? Some ingredients can never be substituted. If you run out of something you can never get again, how many regrets would you have? Vibrancy, caring, nutty sweetness and selfless mothering were all in the recipe that was her.
I am searching for some way out. How can I fix a dish that someone else completed for me? I wasn’t finished adding ingredients dammit! I didn’t get the chance to add shopping and phone calls and dinners together. Take what lessons you can and move on. These are the leftovers I am forced accept.
I want to wake up somewhen in the past so I can pad downstairs and find her in her kitchen where she belongs and we can drink coffee together. I am instead stuck awake in my own kitchen and there is no sweetness here. There is only me fumbling around in disbelief. I’ll be dining on my screwup for the rest of my life.
On Halloween night my husband answered the door at 2am. My mother was there and told me “Your sister is in the hospital and it doesn’t look good.” We drove to Delaware to say goodbye to a body on life support I barely recognized. Connie was struck by an aneurism in her brain at 44.
I used to tell myself “I really need to spend more time with my sister.” I am eating my words.
I’m eating my words now because I can no longer sell them to Madison Avenue who churns them out and turns them into pills that are then packages by another company and sold through your trusting doctor and then back to you through your own company’s medical program that is brought you by the same people who brought you Iraq parts ONE and TWO. So now I am eating them all – they are no longer for sale for anyone, as they left me last friday pushing a chair with whatever I accumulated from my office down the street, or Avenue pr whatever other name you wish to give it to make yourself believe you are not part of the problem. I will not even say you. I will say I, though you might not be able to understand me because I have so many words in my mouth that they are spilling down the side of my face – but – but I am catching them with by scoop ready hands and shoving them back in. I will now be fat and selfish with my own words until I explode and then, THEN you may read them dripping from the sides of buildings that I used to sell inside of. I will eat them all, unless of course, you wish to dine with me, in which case, I will share. Do not expect table manners while I am eating. Eat as you like. Grab, take, devour, spit them out – I care not. I will eat whatever I like and sell not a single letter to them anymore. Never.
And here is a piece by our Nancy:
I‘m eating my words. I’m eating them and smiling. And my digestion has improved one hundred- fold. Since the 2004 coups in Florida I have lived in a state of semi paranoia, immobilized and politically ineffectual. I was never one to read the paper much, listen to the news or watch CNN. My husband takes care of that part of the marriage. I read him poems from Rumi and he reads me headlines from the Week in Review.
I began googling cottages in Ireland, affordable cabins in Canada and fantasizing about packing up everyone I know and love and moving to New Zealand (til I heard they don’t want anyone over 40.) My son called me paranoid , my friends said you’re scaring us and my husband rolled his eyes heavenward.
I stepped up my campaign to the point of near hysteria as The Patriot Act looked as if there were no reversal in sight, as the stock market zoomed higher and when the debate about what torture was didn’t have the multitudes marching in the street. I didn’t march either. I said things like I want to leave before I have to run like a refugee. I said “We have to leave this country, we have to move, the end of America is at hand. ”But most of all I kept repeating He’ll never win, He’ll never win.”
I don’t know when I stopped caring and started retreating into a tight ball of terror. I shouldn’t have read Loung Ungs First They Killed My Father, her own horror story of being five when the Khmer Rouge came and destroyed her family and Cambodia. It sent me reeling back to the unspoken conversations with my grandmother the numbers on her brothers arm after we saw him walking barefoot in the snow on 13th street glassy eyed. I definitely should not have read Naomi Wolf’s The End of America.
Everyone I knew was so excited and energized sending each other emails and you tubes . I probably got 6 emails a day and just as many videos. I just couldn’t get my moj going . It was if I were engaged but I refused to set a date for the wedding or meet my fiancés family. I didn’t want to get too involved because then if I found I really wanted to marry this guy that I really really loved him what if he changed his mind? I wasn’t up for the devastation of disappointment. Sometimes I read the messages but lots of times I just deleted them. I did buy an Obama t shirt, we did get bumper stickers and we continued to send our meager donations. I was in the middle of reading Dreams From My Father when we were invited to a party to watch the democratic convention on a big flat screen tv with lots of great food and excited hopeful friends . I knew I loved him by then and his speech cracked through my hardened heart. He’s the real deal. She’s incredible! I love them. Please God let them win, I thought. But I went back to my malaise shortly after and stayed there not watching Saturday night live, repeating he’ll never win, they’re going to do something horrible , and mostly feeling how cruel everything had gotten. I knew the cure for depression was to get involved. But I didn’t think I was depressed, just focused elsewhere. Like in planning my escape to some Utopia before the Nazis came to Chilmark. So we went up to New Hampshire and made calls to Undecideds and made bundles for the weekend volunteers to hand out, but the Muteer Paneer at the Indian restaurant across from headquarters did more for my psyche than sitting and hearing people on the other end of the line telling me that Barack was a Muslim and was going to raise their taxes. I came home and continued to delete the emails and not watch the You Tubes. My boomer friends have been recovering from their wounds of having lost their heroes in the 60’s which might account for their not marching in 2004. But they had jumped all over this election. They were inspired and fired up . Why I kept asking myself cant I participate in this with all my heart? What is it I am afraid of. The only answer I could come up with that made any sense but was not an excuse was that I have a sick son. We have tried everything to help heal him and everything has failed. He just gets sicker. I guess I just couldn’t bare one more disappointment. But once knowing that that was what the problem was… not allowing myself the risk of getting hurt, what could I do about it.
One day close to the election I went kayaking with a new friend. It was late October. No one was around. I had just spent the morning calling lawyers in Canada to find out how long it would take to become a citizen and get on their medical plan. It was misty like the thin spray of a fine rain. The leaves were gold and red and beginning to gently float down around me. I stopped paddling and sat. A sudden sharp wind came up and my boat started rocking wildly. This was only my fourth time kayaking. I started to get scared and I had to lecture myself. Do you think panicking is going to help anything? Do you want to try to control the pond? Can you breathe into this and just surrender? Can you take a chance and just let go? And somehow miraculously I felt a calm come over me and then a voice. Can’t tell you whose or where it came from but it said: the stillness has to come from inside you. No matter how chaotic things get out here, if you are quiet inside you wont be affected by it. Suddenly my kayak grew absolutely still but the water continued to roil all around me. Then out the fog my friend appeared. I’ll never forget her only words to me as she took in the exquisite beauty of our surroundings. Without knowing anything about my googling Haciendas in Mexico and kibbutzim in Israel she said, “Anyone who would leave here is crazy.” That’s all she said. It couldn’t have been more perfect. It was if God or Buddha or Moses or all the children in the world got together and said let’s help this frightened woman come to her senses.
So I’ve had to eat my words. Thank God. Thank every single person who worked, and those who didn’t and the ones who sent money and the ones who didn’t and the ones who like me were frozen in fear and the ones like my friends who went to Ohio for two months. Thank America for getting it. Thank the internet for spreading hope. Thank the young ones for waking me up and thank every mouse and every squirrel and every butterfly and every kayak on every pond.
I sprinkle we have to leave and he’ll never win on the top of my steel cut oatmeal instead of the usual slivered almonds. I sauté The End of America with leeks and garlic and it’s amazing how sweet, given time, things become, even onions and fear.
