Wax on. Wax off.

Okay, so more than a year ago I told Eric that I longed to be a writer and I asked him what I could do to become one. Brain surgery, perhaps? He came up with the brilliant idea that I could... wait for it... actually put words on paper, or computer screen, as it were.

And so I did. I have spent the last few months writing here and on simonsongirls.blogspot.com about absolutely nothing and having a grand time of it.

And since Eric is my Mr. Miyagi I went to him again recently saying that I was sick of waxing the car over and over and still not feeling any closer to actual writing. He suggested that I send something I have written to someone other than my closest friends. Imagine that!

And so, I found a little fiction contest and sat down and whipped this up for it. I don’t actually write fiction, well, I don’t actually write at all, but I was able to cobble this together with a little help from something I posted earlier. I don’t really care if I win, (although it would be nice not to be the biggest loser) it really was just fun to see if I could put something together on a deadline. Turns out I finally got it sent off only because time was up.

Thanks to those of you who endured endless emails and readings of this while I was working on it.

Because I Said So: A Love Story

It’s Thursday and the Midwest sky has opened up in sheets of rain: a perfect day for lunch out. As a stay-at-home mother I find myself turning to more and more of these outings, desperate for evidence of life beyond our four walls and for adult interaction, even if it is just to order grilled cheese and grape juice for my daughter and a Reuben and coffee for me. Eloise, my “mostly companion,” is four with a name culled from children’s literature.

I love my child with a fierce, all-encompassing love that causes me to do things like co-sleep with her for three years, a move that almost drove my husband mad. It also makes me do things like decide to leave my job as a graphic designer and stay home full-time.

Living with a child, especially a bright, interested, curious child like Eloise, is like living with a debate team twenty-four hours a day. Everything you think, everything you say, is questioned. Your authority on every subject doubted. There is little that she believes you are an expert on and after awhile you become both defensive and a little nervous that she is right.

We find a free couch at the coffee shop and sit down. “Hold on to your juice,” I say for what may very well be the one-millionth time in Eloise’s short lifetime.

She looks at me, waiting. I search my head--stumbling over all the sleepless nights and the piles of dirty laundry my brain has turned into these last four years--for what she could be waiting for. “Please,” I say finally.

She accepts this and goes back to munching on her sandwich. She stops again, looking at me, the wheels turning. “Why?”

Two years ago, when Eloise was two we were oblivious to the power of endless “whys.”

People cry about the evils of the so-called “terrible twos” in nearly every parenting book ever written, and perhaps for some people there is such a thing. In our house, this was not the case.

Instead, we sailed through the “twos” with nary a whimper. Sure there were times when Eloise was grumpy or a bit stubborn, but it was nothing we couldn’t handle, nothing that gave us any cause for alarm. We thought ourselves not just safe, but above such things. It seemed then that we had somehow earned this with our superior parenting and fine luck.

We were wrong.

It seems sad to think that behavior could peak at two years of age, but the “twos” departed and in their absence the “Oh my god, what have we done to deserve this? threes” descended. Last October, clearly as one sign of the coming apocalypse, Eloise embraced her new role as the world’s most contrary child. She didn’t just push the envelope or test her boundaries; she made it clear that she looked at me with nothing but pure teenage disdain.

“I am NOT taking a nap! Never! Ever! Never!”

While I was not a believer in karma or reincarnation I was beginning to run out of reasonable answers to the question of what I had done to deserve this. I read to her. I told her that I loved her a hundred times a day. I tried to look at the world through her eyes. I was fine with the idea that somewhere down the road, in twelve years or so, we might have a fight or two or even that Eloise would get that too-cool-for-this-family thing that I absolutely hate on teenagers, but this had been far worse, and far earlier than I imagined.

Now, at four, Eloise moves effortlessly between the irrational rage of her three-year-old self and a new, painstakingly precise cataloging of “whys.” The funny thing is, I expected the whys. I just imagined I’d handle them better. I thought that I would answer them patiently and even in-depth. There wouldn’t be a single “because I told you so” from me.

I breathe in deeply. “I don’t want you to spill it.” I say, knowing even as I do that it won’t be enough. More. More. Must answer next “why?” “I don’t want you to stain the couch.” I am pleased with myself. Even Eloise couldn’t argue with that.

When it comes to motherhood, some days feel like one long, un-winnable battle. And if you did win, then what? The payoffs of a motherhood well fought and rightly won may be years away, or might never come at all. But, sometimes you see a glimmer of the future, of who you have made this tiny person become, and it’s enough.

“But the juice is purple.” She pauses.

“And the couch is purple.” Another pause.

“So…” Very… long… pause.

“It wouldn’t leave a stain.” She stops, looks at me, and I see that she is giving me time to adjust to her theory so my brain isn’t completely blown away.

But for a minute it is blown away, just a little. My eyes fall to the dark velvet couch of the coffee shop and I think back to trees falling in empty woods. If the color the juice leaves behind is hidden so totally in the fabric of the couch, then is it a stain? Did she plan this out like a champion chess player, moves ahead of me? She must have known my answer about the stain. She must have known it and questioned it. Worse… does she have a point? Well, yes and no.

And that’s how it is with Eloise. She is sweet and bright and inquisitive, all wonderful qualities in an adult… or someone else’s child. We all hope for smart children but what we don’t realize in our moment of wishing is that the smarter your child, the dumber it makes you feel. It isn’t enough to just say no, or even no with a single piece of evidence. In this new world, absolutely every possible outcome must be warned against. Don’t hit your sister. Don’t poke your sister. Don’t make your sister hit herself with her own hand.

Be careful with your juice because it could stain. Be careful because the wet spot could ruin other customers’ clothes if they sat on it. Be careful because the spot of sugary juice on the couch of the coffee house is bad news for more reasons than I can list here. Please just be careful because I am your mother and I asked you to. Just do it because… because…

And there it is.

Because I said so.

Christmas letter? Bah Humbug!

I have been working on our Christmas cards lately and I am at a loss this year when it comes to what to say in “the letter”.

I know, I know, no one likes those letters that come with Christmas cards. Well, no one but me. I love them. I love seeing photos of my friends and their kids and I love knowing what they’ve been up to. I don’t even mind that a few of my friends (not you, of course) brag like a Christmas card is the boarding pass to Heaven’s airline .

And usually I don’t have any problem writing a mildly funny, self-deprecating little update on the Simonson clan. But this year is different. This year we are basically the same as we were last year, just older. Eric has the same job, I am doing the same thing I was 12 months ago, Emily is just more Emily, and Claudia just looks at the rest of us like she is stumped as to how she ended up with such a motley crew. How do I put that in a Christmas letter?

We have gone nowhere worth mentioning, we have done only mostly self-serving things with our time (okay, completely self-serving things) and we have created no new people this year.

How about this:
2006 has been a great year for the Simonson’s. With little personal upheaval to weigh on their free time, Eric and Kate were able to devote a great deal of time to watching more television. Then after almost four solid years of either being pregnant or nursing Kate has rediscovered the joys of alcohol and has decided to make the New Year’s resolution of developing a drinking problem. This may be the one resolution she is able to keep.

Emily and Claudia continue doing a bang up job of turning into decent human beings despite their parent’s best efforts. One shining parental example this year: Emily started preschool in September, and while she was terribly worried about it she felt a little better when Kate told her that she should try it and if she didn’t like it she didn’t have to continue going. True to the deal Emily went and decided 2007 would be a better year for school. Only after she announced her decision to wait until next year to try again did Eric mention that it was his policy that kids who sign up for preschool go to preschool. And so began three long months of “peel sobbing Emily off of Kate at the door of preschool.”

I am at a loss. So, when our card comes with an empty sheet of paper inside, the few people on my list who read this will know it is because we are awful, awful people who watch too much TV and forgot to work the whole “united front” thing out ahead of time.

Happy Holidays.

Heathen...uh, heaven help me

I don’t know about anyone else but I had very specific ideas of what my kids would be like, or at least what the first one would be like. It would be a girl, like me (sure enough.) That girl would have dark brown curly hair like I did (Curls? Yes. Brown hair? Not so much.) This is not to say that I am so great, just familiar. And, she would be very into musicals, especially “Annie.”

When I was a kid I was obsessed with “Annie.” I would play the soundtracks to both the Broadway version and the 1982 movie version over and over again on my little portable record player, when I wasn’t mooning over Shaun Cassidy, that is. I knew all of the songs by heart, and due to a trip to see the traveling version as part of Barbara Marland’s birthday party, I felt pretty secure in much of the choreography as well.

Anyway, this obsession shaped a pretty big chunk of my childhood and spawned my later obsession with being adopted (which was a stroke of good luck when I found out at 10 that I was adopted in real life) and orphans (which was a little ironic when I became one for the second time at 17.)

I always imagined that I would have a little girl that would wear deep ridges into those same albums and Emily is as obsessed as I ever was, although videotapes have taken the place of the records. She has memorized both the 1982 version and a newer made-for-TV one by Disney. Here’s where the irony comes in again: when I say memorized, I mean that she has seen them each enough to “know” the songs, although her idea of “knowing” the songs and my idea of “knowing” the songs couldn’t be further apart.

When I tell you that I know the songs to this particular musical, I don’t mean that I know them in the way that people know every song on the radio. I don’t mean that I can sing the chorus really loudly and them hum and mumble though the rest of the song. I know these songs like they were written on my soul. I have listened to them hundreds, if not thousands, of times.

I have imagined what it would be like to be a depression-era orphan plucked from heartbreaking poverty into unimaginable riches. I have pinned my childhood dreams on playing Annie on Broadway only to wake up at eight years old and realize I am 5’10” and could never play a ten-year-old orphan. Never mind that I could hardly sing and couldn’t dance or act.

This is not the way that Emily knows these songs. Emily knows these songs at the top of her lungs, but just one line of any given song, and she does not actually KNOW even that lines worth of words.

For instance, there is a song called, “Easy Street.” It is the song sung by “the bad guys,” Ms. Hannigan, the mean orphanage manager, her good-for-nothing, criminal brother, Rooster, and Rooster’s dim-witted girlfriend, Lily. The song is about how they can’t catch the big break they imagine the wealthy have all gotten and it is during this song that they hatch their plan to swindle Daddy Warbucks out of $50,000.

In Emily’s version, it is “Heathen Street.” I must admit that I like the idea of a heathen street and I briefly had fun trying to rewrite the lyrics in my head to fit her title, but as funny as I found the idea initially, no song is cute after 1,000 times and with the lyrics butchered.

This has all left me searching deep within myself, wondering… worrying really, about what other things I may have imagined and wished for when I was pregnant with her. What other fantasies of mine have been twisted into her in order to drive me insane? The late seventies and early eighties were a pop culture torture goldmine.

Shaun Cassidy anyone?

Scenes from a garage sale

Imagine someone you love and trust goes through your things while you’re sleeping. This person paws your things looking at them not with the sentimental look of adoration you would, but with a cold, critical eye. This person sees only the scuffmarks and tears, not the memories of the past and the potential for the future.

Once through your things, this loved one goes back, gathers up what he/she wants and takes it away. Sure you don’t realize immediately what things are gone—your grandfather’s pocket watch, that DVD that you love but haven’t watched in months, that sweater that makes you look like you have breasts or that you are 10 lbs. thinner, or both—you don’t realize they are gone but you loved those things, and you will be heartbroken when their absence registers.

Now, still oblivious to the betrayal, you join your loved one for what you think will just be a fun day out at a friend’s house, but you are wrong. Instead, you are forced to watch strangers buy your things and carry them out of your sight. You are powerless to stop any of it. You feel as though parts of you are being ripped away.

That’s what Friday must have been like for Emily, except that the things I took to sell included unused baby toys, torn pop-up tents, and rarely watched Blue’s Clues videos that might cause ADHD.

Nonetheless, her gut wrenching screams of, “That’s my stuff! They cannot have it! THAT’S! NOT! FOR! SALE!” echoed throughout Belmond this weekend as though I were selling off her body parts. Despite my best efforts to quiet her she pled with me, breathless and panicked, “Mommy… get that back. Please, I need it. I play with it all the time. Please, please, please Mommy.” She tried to force herself from my arms to chase down the shoppers like they were her family going in another line at Auschwitz, hands reaching out, tears streaming.

It is only because Emily treats every event lately like she is being carried off to a death camp that I can watch her act like this and continue doing whatever thing it is that is causing her heartbreak. So, I held her with one hand and sold her things with the other, and soon she was over it enough to eat donuts and play with the other kids.

I did, however, notice last night when we were with my in-laws and they asked her about the sale that she had this weird sort of expression on her face that reminded me of the one that my brother used to get after he’d been removed from a situation, spanked for misbehaving, and retuned. It was this look like something awful had happened to her and she had accepted it but that it was maybe even worse that the adults in her life could sit around talking about her assault like it was okay, that really bothered her. Or maybe she was just tired and I’m not as over it as I thought I was.

Had I really done this awful thing to her? I would feel an awful betrayal if Eric sold my things. Does it seem weird to anyone that we do things to our kids that we wouldn’t want done to us? Would absolutely everything I do as a parent seem this strange if I over thought it this much?

This was my first garage sale experience as a mom (having one that is) and my child was the only one out of all the families there that had a problem with it, so this time I’ll chalk it up to tired child and even-more-tired-mom. Because, despite Emily’s best efforts I sold her things, and mine too, and the sale was a success.

The "terrible" twos were a walk in the park

People cry about the evils of the so-called “terrible twos” in every parenting book ever written, and perhaps for some people there is such a thing. In our house this was not the case.

Instead, we sailed through the “twos” with nary a whimper. Sure there were times when Emily was grumpy or a bit stubborn, but it was nothing we couldn’t handle, nothing that gave us any cause for alarm. We thought ourselves not just safe, but above such things. It seemed then that we had somehow brought this upon ourselves with our superior parenting and fine luck.

We were wrong.

The “twos” departed and in their absence the “Oh my god, what have we done to deserve this? threes” have descended. Last October, clearly as one sign of the coming apocalypse, Emily embraced her new role as the world’s most obnoxious child. She doesn’t just push the envelope or test her boundaries; she makes it clear that she looks at me with nothing but pure teenage distain.

“I am NOT taking a nap! Never! Ever! Never!”

While I am not a believer in karma or in reincarnation I am beginning to run out of reasonable answers to the question of what I have done to deserve this. I read to her. I tell her that I love her 100 times a day. I try to look at the world through her eyes. I am left with this: I think that I may have been Mussolini. Why else would I get a child that acts this way at three? I was fine with the idea that somewhere down the road, in twelve years or so, we might have a fight or two or even that Emily would get that “too cool for this family” thing that I absolutely hate on teenagers, but this is far worse, and far earlier than I imagined.

One of the best parts of this behavior is that it often comes out of nowhere. We will be sitting, reading together quietly, and suddenly, as if another person has entered her body, she will turn to me like Linda Blair and say something like, “Claudia needs to die! I am NOT going to share my toys with her!” Well sure, that makes sense.

While it may be hard to believe while reading this, we do not just sit her in front of cable TV for days at a time. As far as I know, the only exposure to death that she has even had is the discussions about my parents. And yet, there she is throwing proclamations of bloodshed around like a cast member of the Sopranos.

When I try to explain to her that we do NOT want Claudia to die, that we would be heartbroken if that happened she will look at me with a face that makes me think for a minute that maybe she gets it, maybe she realizes what an awful thing it was that she said and say, “I’ll keep her toys to remember her by.”

So, as the days start ticking down to her fourth birthday I am filled with both hope and dread. Surely is has to get better, right? Or are there more, as of yet unimagined, ways that she could torture me?

Oh god, maybe I was Hitler.

Just call me Judgey McJudgester

Since I think that it’s pretty safe to say that it is mostly my women friends that check out this site, I thought I’d put a link on here to an interesting article. I like to think that I am usually a pretty open-minded person although it is becoming clearer and clearer to me that I am not.

Also, I especially hate it when moms judge each other. I think that all moms are probably doing the best they can, and so, short of abuse, I think that it is generally a better idea to support rather than villanize. Enough fighting about whether or not it is better to stay at home or work outside.

That said: I'm going to judge away.

About a year ago I read an essay written by author Ayelet Waldman about marriage and motherhood. Waldman had been featured on Oprah on a show entitled, “A Mother's Controversial Confession.” While I would like to say that I never watch tripe like Oprah, and especially shows involving phrases like “controversial confession” I would be lying. While I am not glued to the couch every afternoon at four o’clock like Eric likes to think that I am, I do, from time to time, enjoy a little of the guilty pleasure that is Oprah Winfrey.

Anyway, the show centered around the buzz created by an essay that Waldman wrote for the book "Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race and Themselves", an anthology edited by Kate Moses and Camille Peri, In the essay Waldman goes from a gloating announcement that she is the only mommy she knows having any sex to saying that she loves her husband more than she loves her children. And not just that she loves him more, but that she could more easily imagine a life after the loss of all four of her children than one after the loss of her husband.

“An example: I often engage in the parental pastime known as God Forbid. What if, God forbid, someone were to snatch one of my children? God forbid. I imagine what it would feel like to lose one or even all of them. I imagine myself consumed, destroyed by the pain. And yet, in these imaginings, there is always a future beyond the child's death. Because if I were to lose one of my children, God forbid, even if I lost all my children, God forbid, I would still have him, my husband.But my imagination simply fails me when I try to picture a future beyond my husband's death. Of course I would have to live. I have four children, a mortgage, work to do. But I can imagine no joy without my husband.I don't think the other mothers at Mommy and Me feel this way. I know they would be absolutely devastated if they found themselves widowed. But any one of them would sacrifice anything, including their husbands, for their children.”
(Read the essay in its entirety at http://www2.oprah.com/tows/booksseen/200504/tows_book_20050420_kmose_b.jhtml)

I was horrified. I am definitely in the Mommy and Me group. Not only would I sacrifice Eric for the girls but I can tell you that he better damn well do the same to me.

Maybe I am less fazed than Waldman by the idea of widowhood because my mother was widowed at my age and so it is something have thought about, no obsessed about, since I was a teenager falling in puppy love with the boy in from of me in English class. I have always been acutely aware that I should be prepared for such an unlikely event.

Maybe it is because my own membership in the neuro-oncology patient club has given me a gift in the knowledge that I will almost certainly not outlive either my husband or my children, which is just fine by me.

But, I think that my problem with the essay lies in the idea that I feel like parents should be crazy in love with their children. And while I will be the first to admit that motherhood is hard work that sometimes leaves me grumpy and exhausted, that exhaustion doesn’t make me love these kids any less.

I mean my god, who looked a their child in the delivery room and thought, “Eh, that nose looks better on her dad?”

Perhaps it isn’t that she doesn’t love her kids any less than I do, maybe she just loves her husband more. Sure I love Eric, but admittedly we do not have the long talks about our wonderful marriage that Waldman and her husband do. I do not consider Eric the sun around which my life revolves. I consider us friends (although not the best either of us has) and partners both in life and in this job we have made for ourselves to raise these girls.

Eric and I have a marriage that’s best qualities right now, in the depths of brand new parenthood, are the fact that neither of us has to worry about cheating and we both know that the other will wait this thing out. We joke about divorce about 23 ½ hours a day, but when it comes down to it we both know that, at least for now, inertia is strong enough to keep us from going anywhere. Famous last words? Perhaps.

That said, I just finished her book Love and Other Impossible Pursuits and I loved it. I guess the old saying is right: never judge a book by the ridiculous crap its author has said in the past that offended you… or something like that.