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I have failed as a parent in every respect except for two: I have managed to feed and clothe my children. They are not starving or naked. So yay for me.
What have you done right lately?
Have you ever seen that episode of Scrubs where Turk asks Carla what’s bothering her, and she peels back her scalp and there is a gushing forth of all her neurotic thoughts and obsessions? That’s what this blog is going to be like.
I am doubled over with guilt for the following reasons, in no particular order:
1. Last month I called Princess Zurg’s best friend’s stepmother to see if PZ’s best friend could come to PZ’s birthday party and found out that PZ’s best friend broke her leg in a really bad way over Spring Break and was totally bed/couch-ridden for the next couple weeks and still needed to have another surgery and was going to have limited mobility because of the whole crutches thing for however long it takes to recuperate from a broken leg that’s been broken that badly. So that’s why PZ didn’t have a birthday party this year, because if the best friend can’t come, what’s the point? And the reason I didn’t know about PZ’s best friend’s broken leg before this was because PZ’s best friend lives on the other side of town and her family doesn’t have a car, and so we don’t see her very often at all, especially not since PZ has been going to a different school for the last year. I can count on one hand–probably half of one hand–the number of times PZ has seen her best friend over the last year. That is the state of PZ’s social life. That I felt guilty enough about already, and I didn’t think it was possible to feel much guiltier, but I didn’t foresee the broken leg. When I heard about the broken leg, I felt just awful for PZ’s best friend, and I said I would certainly bring PZ over for a visit, soon. In fact, I penciled it into my calendar for that week. But it didn’t actually work out for that week, and I told myself I would have to pencil it in for some other day the following week, but you know what? I never picked up another pencil, and I never took PZ to see her best friend with the broken leg. It’s been a month. I could still take her–I still want to take her, or think I want to take her, or think I mean to take her, but I’m beginning to suspect that maybe I really don’t mean or want to take her and never actually did because if I really did, I would have done it by now, wouldn’t I have? The truth is that a best friend on the other side of town is much like a starving child in Africa to me, only without a convenient little intermediary organization like UNICEF that I can write a check to and thereby assuage my guilt. No, I have to actually block out some time in my schedule to actually visit the best friend on the other side of town myself, but that is too much work, and that is why I’m a terrible human being. Moving on!
2. Lest ye think the best friend with the broken leg is some kind of aberration in my ordinarily-chock-full-o’-thoughtfulness life, I also have an aunt who lives on the other side of Portland, whom I see about once a year. No, once a year is too generous. I see her about once every year and a half, usually when some other member of my family comes through Portland and says, “I should really see B. while I’m here,” and I say, “Oh yeah, that’d be good, I’ll go with you.” My aunt is getting on in years and is now in a nursing home. I don’t know exactly how long she’s been in the home because I didn’t realize she’d gone there until my older sister mentioned it to me one day. I know she’s only been in there sometime since last July because last July I went to see her in her house (not “the home”), but still, I haven’t been to see her in “the home” and don’t even know which home it is because I haven’t called any of my cousins to find out or get an address to send a frakking Christmas card, should I be so humanitarily inclined this year. I’ve lived a half-hour away from her for the last five years, and I just haven’t gone to see her because I haven’t wanted to think about what to do with the children or when would be a good time to go or calling on the phone and having a conversation–it’s all just been too much, darling, too much, because I’m a terrible human being. But wait! There’s more.
3. After the turbulent elementary school years with Princess Zurg, I have been so relieved and happy that Mister Bubby has done well in school and has never been a problem for anyone and always does his homework and has just generally let me send him off to school and not worry about him for six-and-a-half hours, five days a week. Then a few weeks ago I got a call from his best friend’s mother, who wanted to know if I was also concerned about the fact that our sons have learned exactly nothing new in school this year, that they are still doing the same crap they did in first grade, only with slightly different worksheets. That was the first time I ever really stopped to think about it and realized that actually, yes, now that you mention it, Mister Bubby has been complaining that school is boring and he already knows everything they’re teaching him and why can’t he just go to third grade, and yes, they do have an awful lot of worksheets, don’t they? What the hell is up with the worksheets? I don’t remember doing so many worksheets when I was in school. I guess they can’t afford books and slates anymore because they have to buy computers so our children can be competitive in the twenty-first century. And what are they using the computers for? Hell if I know. The last time I was involved in a child’s education, it was primarily for the purpose of figuring out how I could get myself less involved on a daily (sometimes hourly) basis. All I’ve ever really wanted was to send my kid off to school for six-and-a-half hours a day, five days a week, and not have to worry about anything beyond that. I don’t remember my parents being that involved in my education until I was in high school and the math got harder. I’m feeling a lot of resentment over the fact that I’m devoting all of May 29–paying a babysitter for six-and-a-half hours–to volunteering at the school for “Australia Day,” the annual second grade extravaganza. It’s not like I ever volunteer at the school if I can possibly help it, and usually I can help it quite a bit because our neighborhood school is overrun with parents who volunteer for everything. It’s a very competitive game–who will be the lucky soul who gets to chaperone the field trip to the rock museum???–and I’ve been quite content not to play it. They used to make me volunteer to chaperone field trips because PZ was supposedly so volatile that even being attended by her own freaking aide was not enough, no, she had to have parental supervision if they were going to take her off of school property, and so, yes, I was pleased as punch not to be doing that anymore–but now it’s freaking Australia Day and they need all the helping hands they can get and MB wants me there anyway because I never volunteer and possibly he’s afraid the other kids assume that his mom must be some kind of crack mom because she’s never seen on school property during school hours. And that’s how I got roped into being a group leader in the morning and running the flipping didgeridoo in afternoon, whatever the hell any of that means, I haven’t even looked at my job description(s) yet because I’ve been so preoccupied with the fact that I pay all this money in property taxes and my neighbors spend so much of their time helping out in the school, and my son is still doing first-grade worksheets in flipping May and what the hell does he need a flipping didgeridoo for anyway? I’m so angry about it and yet I feel I have no one but myself to blame because I was the one who wanted a worry-free education for my son–rather, an education for my son that was worry-free for me–and this is just what you get for not worrying: fill-in-the-blank worksheets and mother-frakking didgeridoos. Nice work, Mother. I hope you ate a lot of bon bons this year while your son’s brain was atrophying!
4. We were thinking of sending Elvis to summer camp this year. Rather, Sugar Daddy thought it would be a good idea to send Elvis to this summer camp for children with disabilities, and I had no argument against it because hey, who doesn’t need to get rid of Elvis for a couple hours a day during the summer? So we sent away for an application for this camp, and we got the paperwork in the mail a couple weeks ago, and I started to fill it out because I’m pretty good at filling out paperwork. I did all right with the name and address and emergency contacts and doctors and insurance information, and then I got to the section where I had to describe in detail the extent of my child’s disability and his specific challenges, and I thought, “I can’t do this right now, I’m going to do it later,” because after all this time I still have trouble confronting these facts about my son. I have a visceral response to requests for quantification about his disability. I just can’t handle it. I don’t understand why, but I just can’t, and by “can’t,” I really mean I just don’t want to, and I don’t know why, but I just don’t. But I have to, or he’s not going to go to camp, and I will be sorry later, sometime this summer, when he’s driving me crazy and eating all the popsicles and replacing all the batteries in all of the small appliances and can’t find the right screwdriver and wants me to push him 89 times on the swing but he really means 99 times and he gets frustrated and starts yelling, “aaahhhAAAHHHHaaahhhhAAAAHHHHHaaaahhhhAAAHHHHHaaahhhhAAAAHHHHH” with the full force of his diaphragm behind it for the forty-seventh time that day, and I will probably start screaming myself and want to pop him one and possibly I will actually pop him one because I can’t stand it anymore, and I will only have myself to blame because I was too lazy to fill out the paperwork on time so he could go to camp and make me a little bit less crazy. And I wonder how I can love my son so much while simultaneously not wanting him around very much. Maybe I don’t love him as much as I think I do, unless he’s asleep. That’s just not right. Which reminds me, I need to find that frakking paperwork and fill it out, and now I’m afraid I won’t be able to find it.
5. Girlfriend is almost 42 months old and still needs to be toilet-trained. Sugar Daddy did the heavy lifting with toilet training Elvis, although that was mostly because he finally got the idea that I wasn’t going to do it, and so now he deserves a medal and I need to get on the stick and finally toilet-train our non-disabled child, who has absolutely no desire to use the toilet. In point of fact, she has the opposite of desire. I think sometimes that I was born in the wrong era. As much as I enjoy the conveniences of modern life, I often wish that I could have parented back in the day when adults weren’t supposed to care about scarring their children for life, and if they didn’t do what Ma or Pa said, Ma or Pa could just beat them with a stick and voila, instant compliance–and they didn’t grow up to be serial killers or anything, just average, reasonably-productive citizens who also beat their children with sticks. Not that I want to beat my child with a stick–no, I am far too modern and enlightened to have such feelings, but I admit that I am just plain old weary of trying to figure out how to get my children to do stuff without beating them with a stick. How did toileting get to be so complicated? How did human beings evolve to the point where sitting in their own filth is a preferred state? I have seen each of my children reach the stage where they were interested in the toilet, only to immediately recoil upon being offered a toileting opportunity–and not only recoil, but turn and run in the opposite direction, screaming bloody murder, huddling in a corner every time the word “potty” is uttered–leaving me feeling very much like a guy who’s misinterpreted a pretty girl’s attentions and ends up not only offending her with my romantic advances but turning her into a lesbian besides. What on earth have I done?
6. I am seriously considering giving up my housekeepers because it is so depressing to me to walk around my house and realize that I’ve just been engaging in a bi-monthly exercise of shoving stuff in closets and drawers so someone else can come vacuum and mop, and once the vacuuming and mopping is done, all the crap that we own just comes SPROING!ing out of aforementioned closets and drawers and deposits itself all over the floors and countertops, along with the neverending stream of new crap that finds its way into our house on a daily basis. I am just ready to surrender to entropy already. I caught up on the laundry, sort of–the clothes part, I was mostly caught up on, and then I had this backlog of towels I had to wash, so I’ve washed nothing but towels for the last two days, which is not to say I’ve been continuously washing towels for 48 hours, but towels is all I’ve washed, and now I have an unbelievable backlog of actual clothes that need to be washed again because you just can’t go 48 hours without washing clothes, not when you have six people in your family, all of whom wear clothes. What do I do all day long? Seriously, what do I do? You know how OBL can’t go grocery shopping until she’s organized her pantry? I look in my pantry, which is an unqualified disaster, and I just think, “I would sooner never eat again than try to figure out what the hell is in here,” and then I cram another cereal box in there, close the door real quick-like, and jam a chair in front of it so it doesn’t SPROING! open again. I’m like the anti-OBL. It’s not like I do nothing. Obviously, I am filling up my days with something other than blogging and Facebooking because people still have clean clothes and they have food to eat and there is toilet paper in the house, but on the other hand, there’s all this entropy and long-neglected best friends with broken legs and aunts in failing health and summer camp paperwork unfilled-out and three-year-olds in diapers, and I have to tell you, people, it’s not because I don’t have enough hours in the day. It’s probably because my parents didn’t beat me with a stick more when I was little.
Okay, it was good to get that off my chest. I’m not going to visit anyone’s best friend today, but I think I will do the dishes and start on the laundry and pick up the 47,368 pieces of paper that are lying all over my living room floor. I might even sweep the kitchen floor. I should go to the Target, but I don’t remember why. Somebody’s prescription. Also, I’m pretty sure that since I’ve said the word “frak” about 67 times before 10 a.m. today, it probably means that I should pick up some tampons, too. Incidentally, I feel like “frak” is so much more satisfying than saying the actual F-word, it’s got to be more vulgar somehow. In any case, I should probably stop saying it around my kids. I’ll put that on my list of stuff I “mean” or “want” to do. Damn, I’m gonna eat some chocolate cake now.
My daughter’s school just called. I was afraid at first because I thought she’d done something bad. But no, it was nothing she’d done. She’d just gotten her period.
Excuse me.
AAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in———and breathe out.
Okay. It’s okay. I’m all right now. No, I’m not.
THIS IS NOT HAPPENING! SHE’S ONLY TEN! TEN!!! I KNOW YOU CAN GET IT AS EARLY AS EIGHT OR NINE, I DON’T CARE, SHE’S JUST A BABYYYYYYYY!!!!
Honestly, I am ready to cry.
Thank God we have already talked about this, so it’s not like it came as a shock and she went all Carrie on everybody, but damn. Damn. Sorry, but I’m not ready for this. I’m just not ready. The poor thing. She still plays with dolls and believes in the Tooth Fairy. Curse our omnivorous, factory-farm diet laden with beef and dairy products made from cows injected with superhormones! It isn’t right for a ten-year-old to slough off superfluous uterine tissue! What a world, what a world.
Okay. I’m calming down now. All right. This is just a milestone. It’s not a bad thing. She’s just growing up. It’s a good thing. It’s a sign of a healthy reproductive system. Healthy reproductive systems are good IF YOU’RE READY TO REPRODUCE! Aaaaaaa….no, it’s fine. I should make this a positive thing. I should mark the occasion, welcome her to the sisterhood, as it were. Other cultures have some kind of ritual for this sort of occasion, right? Should I set up a red tent in the back yard? No, that’s not good. There must be a better idea out there. Where’s my Inner Feminist when I need her?
Actually, I just found a web site devoted to menarche rituals. I’m going to need a tambourine and some sprouts. Dear God, what have I come to?
Maybe it would be easier if I weren’t on my period.
(Oh, shut up, like you couldn’t already tell.)
Mister Bubby makes his game plan
Mister Bubby: Mama, I found the perfect shirt for getting a girlfriend.
Giraffemom: Oh?
MB: Yeah. You have to have cool clothes to get a girlfriend, you know.
GM: So I’ve heard.
Princess Zurg faces her mortality
Princess Zurg: I can’t believe I’m almost in the fifth grade.
GM: Yeah. Crazy, huh?
PZ: I can’t believe I’m already ten years old!
GM: Me either.
PZ: Is time speeding up, or am I slowing down?
It’s not enough that you stole my youth? Now you must steal my eggs?
My two youngest children eat fried eggs for breakfast every day. They will probably get heart disease and die before they’re twelve. It will be on my head. But that’s what they like to have for breakfast. Girlfriend might eat something different, but not if Elvis is having an egg, and Elvis always has an egg for breakfast. That’s his thing. Unless I get up before everyone else and start making pancakes, eggs must be fried and consumed first thing in the morning.
Usually I like to have cereal for breakfast. Sometimes, though, I’m in the mood for eggs. I prefer mine scrambled. Unfortunately, I must prepare my eggs secretly if I am to eat them myself. If Elvis and Girlfriend discover that I am making eggs, they will immediately descend like vultures and demand to have my eggs. Mind you, they have already had their own eggs and moved on to other, non-breakfast activities. Also, if I tried to make scrambled eggs specifically for them, they would act like I was trying to poison them. But it’s as if they can’t stand for eggs to be eaten by other people, namely me, and they will stop at nothing to prevent it, including eating scrambled eggs.
So this morning I had a hankering for eggs. It was almost ten-thirty, and the kids were all in different rooms, doing their own things. I made perfect scrambled eggs. Like, the best scrambled eggs I’ve ever made in my life. They were the perfect consistency. I was really looking forward to eating them–even if I did have to do it standing at the sink so as to avoid the appearance of enjoying breakfast. As soon as said eggs were out of the pan, Elvis and Girlfriend ran in from the other room and started circling my plate. “Need eggs! Need eggs!” they cried. “No, these are Mommy’s eggs,” I said. “You’ve already had your eggs. I’m eating these eggs. Go and play.” “Mommy’s eggs! Want some!” And then one of them kicked me in the shins while the other one ripped the eggs right out of my hands, and they just started shoveling them in their mouths. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t exactly like that–it’s all sort of a blur now, but suffice it to say that they ate my toast, too. Little fiends.
That’s why I’m currently locked in the master bedroom, eating some different scrambled eggs I prepared whilst they were devouring my original eggs. These eggs were not as good as the first ones. And the incessant pounding at the door is getting to me. But I ate them all by myself.
Why does the victory seem so hollow?
Somebody tell me I’m being ridiculous
My kids’ babysitter is a very nice woman. She doesn’t have any children of her own, except for her foster son, who is Princess Zurg’s age. She’s very good with my kids. She loves them, and I suspect that they love her, in their way. She offered to take Elvis and Girlfriend to see the real-life Thomas the Tank Engine at the end of the month–well, not THE real-life one, as he doesn’t exist, but A real-life one who comes into town and takes kids on a ride and lets them eat a picnic lunch in his vicinity, or something equally awesome. With PZ in summer school and MB easy enough to farm out to a friend’s house, I could have a few hours to myself. Only one problem: I don’t think I could stand to miss the looks on Elvis’s and Girlfriend’s faces when they saw a real-life Thomas the Tank Engine. So, no, that’s not going to work for me. I must come along for the Thomas the Tank Engine ride. It just wouldn’t do otherwise.
Then there’s the other thing. She’s also offered to take the younger two to Mommy & Me/You & Your Pre-schooler swimming classes–because she knows that they like to swim, and that I do not. That would afford me a little break a couple days a week, and they would get to swim, and I wouldn’t have to. Doesn’t that sound just jim-dandy? So why don’t I like this idea? As near as I can figure, I feel guilty for not wanting to take them swimming. I really do enjoy spending time with my kids. I even enjoy playing in the water with them on occasion. It’s just the thought of having to take them swimming on a regular basis that fills me with dread. Schedules, obligations–it’s so complicated. Can’t we just set up a cheap wading pool in the back yard and call it good? They would never know the difference.
So I was hoping that the classes would already be full, and this would become a moot point. Well, the baby swim classes are already full. (All 25 slots. Yeah, 25! Crazy, huh?) There’s one pre-school class left that is not full. I could easily register for that. I could send my babysitter–who should really be given a name, for simplicity’s sake…let’s call her Gertrude. (What? I like Gertrude.) So I could send Gertrude, and I’m sure Elvis would have a great time with her–he likes Gertrude, and he likes swimming, and he’s not apt to be having conflicting emotions and wondering why Mommy doesn’t love him enough to take him swimming herself. But for some reason I don’t want to. For some reason I feel like I ought to take him swimming myself, but there’s two problems with that: 1) I really don’t relish the prospect of having to get up and go swimming three mornings a week–not that I hate swimming, mind you, it’s just the having to swim that I hate. 2) I really think that Gertrude wants to take him, and I will somehow hurt her feelings if I say I’d rather she stay and watch Girlfriend while I go, and it really doesn’t make sense to do it that way when you re-read Problem #1.
Am I mentally ill, or just a woman who doesn’t want to be happy? You decide.
This is one of those days I’d like to just start over from the very beginning. I know I could do it a lot better. As it stands, I have screwed up so much that I can never turn it around, and there is nothing else to do but pray that tomorrow begins quickly.
This morning I was driving to the grocery store and watched a school bus pass in front of me. I saw one of the students through the windows; she looked unhappy. Not suicidal-unhappy, just bummed out to be going to school. Monday morning, you know. Or maybe she was suicidal, who knows. I was just thinking back to when I used to take the school bus, when I used to go to school. I lived in Oregon and went to school on many a morning just like this one–damp and non-commital. You look eastward and you see fluffy white clouds against a bright blue sky. You look westward and there’s a storm happening or about to happen. You’ll see the sun today, but it’s impossible to tell how much of it or how often.
Often the weather triggers memories of my childhood. I don’t know why that would be. I’ve intentionally suppressed most of my childhood, for no particular reason, but little things bring it back to me against my will. This morning I was thinking how glad I was not to be on a bus headed for school. Sometimes when I visit my children’s schools, I put myself in that place again, behind the little desk next to all the other little desks, alphabet marching the perimeter of the ceiling, walls smothered in pertinent information. Education is very colorful in elementary school. It looks delightful from the outside, but when I imagine myself inside, remembering those days as a young child at school, I can’t help getting a little bit sick. I realize you couldn’t pay me to do these years over again.
Princess Zurg asks me from time to time whether it’s harder to be a kid or an adult. I tell her adults have more responsibilities, because to her that’s what “hard” means. I also tell her that adults have more freedoms–because they have more responsibilities. She doesn’t really process any of this. She’s convinced that kids have it worse, and frankly, I’m not sure that she’s wrong.
I didn’t have some horrific childhood. I recall some very pleasant experiences, even in school, which I really liked for the first few years I went. I wonder if part of the reason I don’t like to remember those aspects of my childhood is that my children’s experience is and will continue to be so different. They don’t get to spend their afternoons exploring the vacant lot, randomly meeting kids in the neighborhood streets, riding their bikes to the local store, generally enjoying the lack of adult supervision and consequent interference. But mostly I think I just don’t like remembering that general sense of helplessness, being at the mercy of adults and their plans for me. Was this really the way I felt at the time, or is it just my perspective as an adult? I treasure my adult perspective; maybe this is my problem. I don’t want to trade experience for innocence because innocence doesn’t last. That’s why the prospect of reliving childhood fills me with dread. Fortunately, you only have to do childhood once. Unless you become a parent, that is.
Next Tuesday Princess Zurg starts at the School for Incorrigible Girls. Initially I was disheartened to learn that they’d accepted her to their program. Deep inside I was really hoping that they would tell us PZ wasn’t bad off enough to benefit from their services. I thought, This is not what I want for my child. But in the last week it’s become clear to me that this is the correct course of action, and the fact that I don’t want it is basically irrelevant. I don’t want a lot of things, but to a large extent they are out of my control. Where I was once at the mercy of adults and their plans for me, I’m now at the mercy of my kids and their plans for themselves.
So yesterday’s visit to the School for Incorrigible Girls went very well. We visited. I don’t know if its official description is a “clinical program in an educational setting” or an “educational program in a clinical setting,” but either way, it is what it is. When you walk in, it just looks like a regular doctor’s office. That’s because the school is downstairs. In the basement. MWAHAHAHAHAHA! No, it’s not that bad. There are windows and natural light coming in. No bars on the windows.
There is a long corridor with lots of therapists’ offices. There are two classrooms and there is a common area for full-group activities and a half-gym for PE-type stuff. The gym looks like a converted chapel, what with its vaulted ceilings and high windows letting in the light from heaven. The acoustics are…amazing. I do not want to be there for dodgeball without ear plugs. They have an art room with a kiln. A freaking kiln! No iron maiden, as my husband noted.
Actually, the creepiest thing we saw was the “quiet room,” which, actually, when I think on it, is exactly what a quiet room should be: a totally blank space where kids can go to de-escalate, without any external stimulation. There’s no door–and by this, I mean there’s no door, the thing that goes open and shut. When I mentioned this to a friend of mine, she wondered how the kids got in and out, if they were supposed to climb through a window or something. No. There is a doorway, but no door. So the children are free to come and go; it’s not a check-out-any-time-you-like-but-you-can-never-leave situation. The walls are totally bare, the carpet an indescript gray, and there’s no furniture. The walls aren’t padded, but they are reinforced, to keep the kids from kicking holes in them. (Oh, you look horrified, but that’s exactly what I’d recommend for any quiet room that was housing my child.) Plexiglass on the windows. Yes, again, there are windows. It’s perfectly serene. No reason it should have given me the willies. Maybe I just long for a room like that in my own house. Maybe someday, when we put the addition over the garage. Ah, dreams.
So the program currently has ten kids total, ages 8-12. Most of the kids are in the 11-12 range. Princess Zurg would be one of two nine-year-olds; everyone else is older, including the two girls presently in the program, who are both 12. (Quoth the director, “One of them is nice.” Awesome.) Two or maybe three students have Asperger’s or something similar. They have a “Rainbow” group for kids on the spectrum. (PZ likes rainbows–and who doesn’t?) They have a ridiculously huge staff. There are more adults than children. Which I guess isn’t hard to do when you have two teachers, a staff psychiatrist, a clinical psychologist, the program director, and seven interns. And that’s just for starters. The academics are very basic–three R’s, not much else. Maybe an occasional science lesson. Sugar Daddy asked if they had art, and the director laughed. They actually have three art therapists on staff, so some kids have art twice a day. Yes, they have art. They have a freaking kiln!
So they have to do an intake evaluation, to see if PZ qualifies for the program. They have to see just how crazy she is. Not that these children are crazy, mind you. Hey, I have a mental illness myself. I’m being insensitive and tacky, but in that self-consciously ironic way, so don’t judge me, people. I’m ready to put my child in a psychiatric facility. I’m just trying to keep it real.
Or maybe I’m trying to keep it unreal. This is a program for children with “serious psychiatric problems,” which means something different in the educational system than it does in the vernacular. Apparently. For the most part this feels like just another alternative placement. On the other hand, it’s a 45-minute bus ride and we have to account for her whereabouts and goings-on 24/7 and attend family therapy once a week (in freaking Tigard–gaaaah!–am I even capable of saying “Tigard” without the “freaking” prefix?) and the average stay is 18 months. In 18 months PZ will be in middle school. I could cry. That’s what I feel like doing.
But my mind is not closed. If anything, after yesterday’s visit, my mind is more open. Assuming she qualifies, this program is the equivalent of literally tens of thousands of dollars of therapy, all paid for by the school district. Your tax dollars at work, fellow citizens. My husband thanks you. My daughter thanks you. Her siblings thank you. And I thank you.
So yeah, that’s where it stands. We started the paperwork. We’ll see. We’ll see.
Q. What’s awesome about your kid being suspended from school?
A. You don’t have to dread that inevitable phone call from the principal, asking you to pick her up again. Yes!
Princess Zurg continues to struggle in school, and we in turn continue to struggle with Princess Zurg. I am beginning to fear that PZ’s first grade teacher was right when she said there was a narrow window of opportunity for children to learn the skills necessary for school success. Honestly, I want to puke as I type that. Well, not “puke” so much as “punch someone in the face,” but you know, tomayto, tomahto. Anyway, I have never liked the idea of people having expiration dates stamped on them. Undoubtedly, in general there is such a thing as a “Best Before” date, as the brain develops and eventually starts pruning away those parts that aren’t used (neuroscience, schmeuroscience). That’s why early intervention is so critical. On the other hand, when you’re talking about a person’s temperament, how late is too late? And when you’re talking about Princess Zurg, how much is temperament to blame, and how much can be laid at the feet of her disability? If we may speak of disability as having feet. You see the stress I’m under, how it affects the language arts. You must be patient with me, or read no further.
It was easier when she was in kindergarten, in first grade, and even second grade, to keep things in perspective. There’s always hope that a five-year-old can get her act together eventually. What happens in the primary grades usually stays in the primary grades–except when it doesn’t. When you carry it with you to third grade and fourth grade and beyond, that’s when the future starts looking grim. Yes, she’s only nine years old now. But in less than eight months she’ll be in fifth grade, and a year later she’ll be in middle school. We are hurtling toward the apocalypse, we have not been saved, and we can’t seem to find a church that suits us. I will drop that metaphor before it herniates, but you get the idea. I’m scared.
In September things seemed so promising. Her medication was making a real difference–and I still think it is. It just isn’t a big enough difference, not where it counts. The number of aggressive behavior incidents has not dwindled to “zero”–not by a long shot. And it’s been almost six months, give or take a couple weeks’ vacation. It’s time for another IEP meeting, time to advocate for my daughter’s interests again, and I’ve got nothing. No brilliant ideas. No half-baked ideas. No gut instincts. Just nothing.
What’s going to happen is that our “team” is going to recommend the day-treatment program they first brought up in September. (You know, the one in freaking Tigard? You might remember.) I’ve been trying to find the paperwork on it. I’m afraid I may have recycled it in a fit of maternal protectiveness–or rather, a fit of self-protectiveness. I didn’t want to believe I’d ever have use for it. So I’m trying to do some research about it on the internet. The web site says it’s a “constructive all-day outpatient alternative to residential care, providing education for children (ages 7-11) experiencing serious psychiatric difficulties.” Wow, that’s hard-core, isn’t it? But then, so is hitting and kicking people and making endless rationalizations for your bad behavior. That’s not autism. It’s sociopathy.
My husband and I have joked about having her committed, but the sad thing is, a generation ago that’s exactly what would have happened to people with Asperger’s Syndrome. They’re too functional to be disabled, so they must be sociopaths. What do you do with children who won’t respond to discipline, besides give them more discipline (which they continue not to respond to)? It’s all well and good for me, an adult, to experiment with psychotropic drug therapies (you know, the legal ones), but when you’re dealing with a pre-adolescent child whose brain is still developing (rapidly), said experimentation is decidedly unappealing. In other words, I’m willing to medicate my daughter if medication is what she requires, but this repeated trial-and-error stuff makes me nervous. On the other hand, we can’t really wait for puberty to run its course, either. Or maybe we can. The point is, I don’t know.
I’m anxious to take action, but at the same time, I hate to be rushed.
So this weekend I took part in a discussion on the Brain, Child website about this essay in the Winter 2008 issue, “Relieving Myself,” by Heather Caliri. Caliri is a writer in San Diego (she also has a blog, which as of this moment I have not yet perused, but here’s the link for your pleasure). Caliri wrote about her experiences with Elimination Communication (EC), or diaper-free parenting. The philosophy, in a nutshell, is this: parents don’t need to depend on diapers, but they can learn to read and respond to their babies’ subtle cues and thus teach their children to have a sense of their own elimination needs and never endure conventional toilet-training hell.
I’ll be honest with you, kids: the first time I heard about EC, around the time my last baby was born, my reaction was, “You have got to be effing kidding me.” (Truly spoken like the woman who personally kicked Kimberly-Clark’s stock through the roof.) My second thought was that it must be awesome for the people who have the patience for such things, but I would never be one of those parents. And you, dear readers, know from careful study of this blog that I am still not one of those parents (and never will be). (I once mentioned something to my step-mother about diaper-free parenting; her response was, “And what are you supposed to do with your other 20 minutes a day?” Haha. Good one, step-mom. I thought she was being generous!) However, I was intrigued by Caliri’s essay because she was clearly not out to persuade anyone else to use EC, merely documenting her own experience, and I thought it was a very insightful, often humorous piece about the nutty stuff we do in the name of good parenting. (Not that EC is inherently nutty, but one can drive oneself nuts with any aspect of parenting.)
I wasn’t entirely surprised, though, that one of the first comments on the discussion page was a slam on Caliri’s hygiene standards and etiquette. Not to give anything away (Sugar Daddy, avert your eyes because there’s a plot spoiler ahead!), but in the final scene Caliri is in a restaurant bathroom with her baby, Lucy, who proceeds to pee in the restroom sink. This has some stylistic resonance, if you’ve invested in the preceding narrative, but some people evidently thought it was just really gross.
Myself, I would be lying if I claimed not to have my own thoughts along the line of, “That’s not something you expect to see in a public restroom (if you’re lucky).” However, my reaction was mitigated by the following:
1. It was a baby.
2. There was running water, not to mention a nearby soap dispenser.
3. After nearly ten years of up-close-and-personal interaction with human waste, not to mention the three years I spent in the People’s Republic of Eugene, there is little that actually shocks me anymore.
4. It’s not like it was my sink.
Just kidding on that last one. Actually, if Caliri were visiting my home and wanted permission to let her baby relieve herself in my bathroom sink, I could hardly refuse her on grounds that my bathroom sink is a holy shrine to cleanliness. But seriously, the fact that I was physically removed from the situation certainly allowed me the emotional distance to take the episode in stride. After all, I’d already survived an earlier scene where Caliri let Lucy do her business by the outside wall of a neighborhood apartment building, sans smelling salts. I actually thought that lifestyle choice a tad more gauche, maybe because I’ve lived in apartment buildings in neighborhoods where people had issues with personal boundaries. But also because I couldn’t envision Caliri hosing the stucco off after the fact. (Certainly not without a handy soap dispenser.) However, no one else on the discussion board mentioned the wall-peeing, only the sink-peeing and how beyond-the-pale it was.
Ordinarily I don’t enjoy being a de facto defender of public urination–not any more than the ACLU enjoys defending those awful neo-Nazis, I’m sure–but my sympathies were with Caliri because she’d written a really interesting essay about an issue much larger than toileting, and her point was getting lost in the collective condemnation of her bathroom manners. Sure, maybe a baby peeing in a public sink is uncool. I won’t try to argue otherwise, because, you know, it’s not a choice I would make. (Then again, trying to save the world one less diaper at a time is obviously not a choice I’ve ever made either.) But I didn’t think it was fair to make that one part of the essay the centerpiece of the conversation, when the article was not about the relative merits of EC, but about Caliri’s own parental hangups and how she got over them. I thought that, as a writer, Caliri would appreciate some feedback on something other than her choice to let the baby pee in the sink.
Alas, ’twas not to be, because people were really, very put-off by the sink-peeing, and also by BC editor Jennifer Niesslein tsk-tsking them for harping on it and making it personal. That led to some people wondering if they were supposed to all pretend they agreed with someone instead of giving their honest opinion(s), and whether tolerance only went one way at Brain, Child–also, whether we were all privileged, self-absorbed white women and whether we were going to silence women’s voices for the sake of niceness. Valid questions, all of them, but in the meantime, poor Caliri’s article was not really being discussed; it was her personal character that was on trial. It made me very grateful that my essay for Brain, Child never made it into the online content. (Not that there was any sink-peeing in that one. Maybe a little nose-picking, but that might not have been in the final edit.)
I’m pretty much done with that discussion, edifying as it was, but some lingering questions remain (for me), so I will put them to you, gentle readers:
1. Am I “out of the mainstream” because my objections to public sink-peeing have more to do with decorum than public health? (I dunno, baby pee + running water + soap = ?) In other words, am I just gross?
2. Do women, as one BC commenter said, equate hard-hitting commentary with rudeness? Do we wish to “make sure everybody ‘feels comfortable’ at the expense of dialogue”?
And for the sake of science,
3. Do you prefer your dialogue hard-hitting, or comfortable? Are you by any chance a woman?
Most days I love Elvis (my four-year-old, not the dead guy). Today I would like to send him to boarding school.
He was sick this weekend–woke up Saturday morning sick and stayed sick through most of Sunday, did a lot of sleeping–and that’s where my troubles began. He took a long nap Sunday afternoon–the good news is, so did I; the bad news is, he woke up at 4 p.m. feeling well again and was thus awake for the next many hours. I think I coaxed him back into bed at 1:15 a.m. by lying down with him. I think he actually fell asleep sometime after 2 a.m. He woke up again at 8 a.m.
All things considered, I was actually feeling pretty bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when I got up today. The long Sunday nap really did some reparative work, subsequent 2 a.m. bedtime notwithstanding. However, all things are relative. What I was not in the mood for at 8:30 a.m. was to chase him and the baby around the front yard in my pajamas. I was happy to do it in the back yard, but the front yard is connected to the street, and the street is connected to trouble. The problem is that my children all share an intense dislike of the back yard. The intensity of the dislike is directly disproportionate to their competence in the area of personal safety. Thus it is that Elvis and the baby are the children who dislike the back yard the most. Don’t fence them in. Sugar Daddy is planning to build a fancy play structure back there this summer, but I have the sneaking suspicion that Disneyland could spring up back there overnight and my two youngest would still prefer to chase balls in front of moving cars. Once again I have revealed myself to be a pathological pessimist, and if the fancy play structure fails to satisfy, my lack of faith will be to blame. At least I’m self-aware. That’s all I can say.
So back to the issue at hand–the lure of the front yard and my vain attempts to increase the attractiveness of alternative venues. I had no choice but to put the padlock back on the front door. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the padlock to save my life (never mind the children’s lives). I knew Mister Bubby had had it just the night before, and I’d instructed him to put it on the phone desk in the kitchen, where he insisted it still was, only it was not. I told everyone that they had two options: a) help me look for the missing padlock or b) get dressed and get in the car so I could drive to Home Depot and buy a new one. I realize that choice (b) seems a little extreme, but believe it or not, that is what they chose, so that is what we did.
Elvis was not happy with any of the decisions I made this morning. He was most unenthusiastic about visiting the Home Depot, if screaming continuously at the top of one’s lungs for 30 minutes can be characterized as “unenthusiastic.” I’m sure everyone in that cavernous warehouse store was glad to see, or rather hear, us go.
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence
Anyway, I came home with a new padlock, and once again I was able to restrict my children’s mobility to a level I was comfortable with. I also came home with a pin lock for the back patio door, in anticipation of our second visit with Department of Human Services in three months. (Hm. Really more like three and a half, to be fair.) This is somewhat embarrassing to admit, but Elvis did have another run-in with the sheriffs a week ago last Saturday. It’s kind of a funny story, provided you were there and have a sick sense of humor. SD was still in California, I’d had kind of a rough night vis a vis the sleep issue, and Elvis woke up around 6 a.m. I wasn’t ready to be awake at 6 a.m. For a while I just lay there in bed and let him kick me in the head. It seemed like I let him do that for a really long time, but I really have no way of knowing how long it was because at 8:30 I was jolted awake by the realization that there were cops in my house. Apparently Elvis unlocked the back patio door, went out into the back yard and drove his dump truck around the side of the house, boosted himself up on the garbage cans and unlatched the side gate, and drove the truck up to the front porch only to find the front door locked. Upset that he couldn’t complete his dump truck-riding circuit as planned, he started screaming, which woke up the neighbors, who came knocking on the door and were unable to get an answer. (If I couldn’t hear Elvis screaming, I’m not surprised that I couldn’t hear an adult knocking. I was obviously enjoying a dreamless slumber. If only I could remember this beautiful experience.) Hence the summoning of the sheriffs, who arrived to find that they also could not get the attention of the lady of the house by knocking or yelling, and finally gained access to the house by following Elvis into the back yard and through the still-open patio door. And the rest is my personal rap-sheet history.
I know you’re waiting for the punchline. See, it’s funny because if I’d simply left the front door unlocked, like a totally irresponsible adult, no one would have been the wiser. But hindsight is twenty-twenty, as I can tell you from sad, repetitive experience.
The good news is that these officers were much nicer than the ones who found Elvis after his last unauthorized outing. The bad news is that even nice officers have to report incidents of child neglect to the state. Ah, well. Someday I will live in a more corrupt society, but by then my children will probably all be safely out of my custody and it won’t really matter.
If I seem a tad too flippant about this affair, it’s because I know I have no excuse for my failure to keep my son in those quarters of our property where his screaming would not disturb the public peace. I didn’t realize he could get the side gate unlatched yet–I thought he’d have to grow a couple more inches and refine a few problem-solving skills before I had to worry about that scenario, but naturally I see in retrospect how short-sighted that was. I should have installed a different lock on the patio door back in March, when my parental fitness first came into question. It was totally our intention to do so, but the lock my husband bought turned out to be inappropriate for our particular door, and oh, who cares, it doesn’t matter. My priorities were clearly screwy. It’s painfully obvious now. I can’t help but be reminded of Lady Bracknell’s scolding of the orphaned Mr. Worthing in The Importance of Being Earnest: “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” Of course, I had lost one child twice as opposed to two parents once, and it’s really not the same thing at all, but I swear that is the exact line that came into my brain as I was sitting there with those officers with nothing at all to say in my own defense. I simply felt ridiculous.
The frustrating thing is that while it is true that my own carelessness was to blame for this and the last incident, I realize that there is simply no substitute for constant vigilance. If the back patio door had had a proper lock, there was still the matter of the door to the garage, which Elvis figured out how to unlock within 48 hours of our installing the thing. Once in the garage, there was nothing to prevent him from opening the outside garage door and winding up in the same place, i.e. on the front patio with no way of opening the door he wished to use for reentry. I suppose we need to get a new garage door-opener, one that operates with a keypad both inside an out, or something. There’s really no way to keep him from unlocking the inside door unless we install a lock that requires keyed entry on both sides. I suppose we should do that, too. The point is, there is always going to be something that I haven’t yet thought of. I don’t believe I will ever feel safe inside the house again.
The really ironic thing is that for seven years I lived in apartments, abodes which I could never have child-proofed to anyone’s satisfaction because I was not allowed to install child locks or make any permanent alterations to the front or back doors. I had to make do with putting things on high shelves and old-fashioned constant vigilance–which was never actually constant, but in seven years I was never once accused of depraved indifference to my children’s welfare. It wasn’t that I was a better parent then, but that I had different children. Elvis wasn’t mobile until we moved into our house and he started climbing on stoves and eating batteries out of the Speak’n'Spell. It makes me wonder what would have happened if I’d had Elvis when we lived in university housing–specifically designed for families–where all the doors, in compliance with state fire codes and ADA regulations, automatically unlocked from the inside. It was hard enough keeping the less-than-thoroughly-curious Princess Zurg from escaping every time I went to take a shower. I imagine that if Elvis had lived with us then, I probably wouldn’t have showered at all for nine months. That might have brought me to the attention of the state, too, but for different reasons.
Anyway, I am less torn up about this visit from DHS than I was about the last one. It’s not as though they’re going to take my children away or press criminal charges. It simply isn’t the purpose of the investigation. The purpose is to shame me into being more hypervigilant than I have heretofore been. Unfortunately, I have suffered so many failures over the course of my parenting career that I now have an impossibly high threshhold for guilt and shame. I’m largely immune to scolding. A visit with me is not likely to be reassuring to anyone.
NOTE: We now have a padlock on the side gate as well, so Elvis should be safe until he learns how to scale it.
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