“I am wearing a dress made of rainbow,
dipping myself into the
blue brook of time.”
~Inscription on the instruction booklet for the DIY Mini House kit manufactured in China (lines penned by anonymous author)

Summerly has entered a phase in which she initiates really interesting conversations. Recently she began interviewing each of her family members about what pet they would most like to have within certain categories (sea animal, forest animal, bird, reptile, etc.), and the other day she said to me over dinner, “Name ten salty foods you know I like.” Frequently she makes inquiries that appear solely intended to get to know me better as a person, too, which I think is pretty remarkable. After school a few weeks ago, she asked me what I’d done that day, so I ran her through all of the commonplace doldrums of housework and family executive business and rabbit-wrangling that permeate my days at home waiting for school to call and tell me that they’re closing down because all of my kids are sick and have also infected everyone else in their grades including their teachers, or that a meteor is due to hit just outside of city limits in a few hours, or that it’s all a dream that Biden won the election, or any other imminent catastrophe that is all too easy to imagine. Well, I didn’t tell her about the anxiety bit (not because I wanted to shield her, exactly; it just didn’t feel explicitly relevant), but I mentioned that I’d experienced writer’s block that morning so had busied my hands with a new creative project for an hour to try to stimulate other creative neurological energy. She asked what project I’d begun, and I showed her the front of the instruction booklet for building this miniature efficiency apartment (a kit my mom gave me years ago that is just the kind of incredibly intricate, frustratingly complicated, seemingly endless endeavor that she knows I love, one which also necessitates the use of six different kinds of glue and the purchase of tools like a set of microscopic needle-nosed pliers).

Summerly fell in love with it, much like my mother and I had, and inspected every detail. She said it was missing books, artwork, and “lovies”, but on closer inspection she found both books and artwork, declaring that it would be complete once we’d added some minute stuffed animals to the setup. She said, “Then I would be able to live there. But not after I have kids, if I have them. It would be perfect for just me and my husband or Other-Girl.”

Of course I didn’t bat an eye, but just to make sure I was understanding her correctly, I asked, “You mean it would be perfect for two people, like you and your husband, or you and your Other-Girl?” “Yeah,” she said. “It would be great for a couple, but not once there are kids.” Dear universe, if you are listening, thank you. I am so happy that children talk like this today in our world that is so fractured and polarized and corrupt and upside-down and backwards. If my daughter chooses a woman as a partner someday, I already know what nickname I’ll give her after I tell her this story. I think she’ll love it.

Once again:

“I am wearing a dress made of rainbow,
dipping myself into the
blue brook of time.”

From my husband. Teachers have always been essential workers, and it’s nice to see those words being used to refer to them, to see that knowledge recognized and this event actuated. I hope that one day teachers will be on a pay scale commensurate with the importance of their career, but for right now it’s going to feel pretty great to watch this happen tomorrow. Talk about a shot in the arm!

I could cry with happiness. Also because I pulled a muscle cringe-laughing at the bit about 1778.

Why are many nursery rhymes and lullabies so completely bizarre as to border on disturbing? I’ve mentioned “Humpty Dumpty”, “You are My Sunshine”, and “Rockabye Baby”, but what about “Jack and Jill”? They go to get some water, perhaps to help out their overburdened mother, and the most commonly known first verse ends with one kid’s broken head and the other falling down a hill. Then there’s “Little Miss Muffet”, whose arachnophobia prevents her from enjoying a nice bowl of curdled milk on a cozy perch. How about the dismemberment of those three blind mice? Did they deserve to have their tails amputated with a carving knife? Can the mice be blamed for running after the farmer’s wife, considering that they possessed no ability to see? Don’t even get me started on “It’s Raining; It’s Pouring”. I mean, is it really about an old man so concussed that he dies in his sleep, becomes paralyzed, or is at best bedridden? I could go on.

I think the worst one of all might be “Hush, Little Baby”. Think about the lyrics: the parent, patronizingly referring to himself in the third person, is telling the kid to be quiet while promising to buy her a mockingbird, of all things. It’s not overtly stated that this gift is intended as a bribe to elicit silence from the child, but because the two notions are so closely linked, and form a rhyming couplet, to boot, the inference is logical. I’m desperate for my children to go to bed when it’s that time, so I get the parent’s perspective, but it’s not a healthy habit to promise the expenditure of money to reward children for a few hours in which they are not speaking to me or needing anything from me. Wouldn’t the kid expect a new gift every night simply for doing what her body requires anyway? What a way to go broke. And as if this weren’t enough, the wheedling parent goes on to promise that if the bird is faulty, he’ll fix the problem by buying the kid a diamond ring. Ahem. A diamond ring signifies, at least in our culture, betrothal. Does this mean the parent is passive-aggressively hinting at some kind of Oedipal codependency? Even if not, it’s distressing to think that he would suggest buying another, much more lavish present, as a solution to having given a gift that underwhelms. And this cycle continues: the parent promises a mirror as a substitute for the ring if it turns out to be costume jewelry, a goat to replace the broken mirror, a cart complete with a bull to dry the child’s tears in the event that the goat proves indolent, a dog that the parent gets to name as a consolation prize for the overturned bull-drawn cart, and a brand-new cart with a horse this time if Rover doesn’t bark (who wants a barky dog anyway?!).

I mean, I appreciate a good contingency plan, and it’s nice to know that the parent has ideas about what will happen if things go awry with the gift that he’s intending to impart, but certainly there is a better way to handle this situation. I also think it’s strange that the parent would be so keen on purchasing a twittering bird and a barking dog when he’s basically beseeching his child to go mute. And why is he reinforcing the expectation that the gifts he’s offering will disappoint? Is he trying to raise a child ingrained with low expectations or inculcate the concept of planned obsolescence? If so, there’s definitely a more wholesome means to that end. I realize I’m passing judgment on this parent, so I tried to think objectively: maybe this kid’s love language is gifts, she has exactly one week to live, and these are the seven things she wants most in the world. Maybe the grieving parent knows that any poor parenting choices won’t matter at this point, and since he’s rich as a sultan, he wants to fulfill her final desires, as much to comfort himself as to bring her satisfaction. If this is the case, fine; I rescind my argument, and you should read no further.

If circumstances are other than those, I stand by my distaste for these lyrics. The rhyming isn’t even good enough to explain away the author’s choice of words. As far as how the ditty ends, after all of the promises the parent makes to the child, when the final gift, the horse and cart, fails to impress, he concludes by assuring the child that she is still the sweetest in town. I seriously doubt the veracity of this assertion because, if she’s as used to being parented the way that the song suggests, I’d expect more resemblance to Veruca Salt than Mother Theresa. Besides the fact that superlativizing (yes, I made that up) one’s child like this is intrinsically dangerous, it doesn’t even make sense that a child would be assuaged with the knowledge that she’s a real sweetheart after the solution to each disappointment leading up to that realization was the procurement of material possessions to fill the void left behind by each previous purchase that fell short in some way.

I guess it could be a whole lot worse. At least the parent is singing a goodnight to his child, as opposed to the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe. Now there’s a truly tragic household: the woman, having overbred to the point that she’d lost the ability to manage her family, restricts her children to a liquid diet and, instead of a lullaby at bedtime, delivers corporal punishment. Seriously, why hasn’t anyone reported Mother Goose to Child Protective Services by now?

Summerly recently requested that I make banana bread, and when I mentioned this to my friend Kate, she suggested I use the mix from Trader Joe’s instead of my usual “from scratch” recipe. I picked up the mix that very afternoon, eager to accomplish the task using fewer ingredients and in less time, but instead of adding water per the instructions, I used four defrosted bananas with their liquid. The baking process yielded a deliciously odoriferous kitchen and a beautifully-textured loaf with a close crumb, the taste of which Summerly didn’t much like. She was a great sport about it, though, so I suggested that, because it required more time and work, she could help me make my old recipe on the weekend. We looked over the ingredient list and added plain yogurt to the online shopping order in preparation, and she commented, “This one will taste more better because we’re going to make it together.” Be still, my heart! But I couldn’t let the grammar flub go unremarked upon, so I hugged her and said, “I agree! But you mean it’ll taste better, not more better.” She shook her head. “No, Mommy. It’ll taste better because it’s the old recipe, which just tastes better. It’ll taste more better because of the ‘together’ part.” Well, you can’t argue with logic.

Fast forward a day or so, to a night when we were having sausages, latkes, and green beans for dinner. The kids asked for cinnamon to put on the leftover applesauce I’d served as an accompaniment to the latkes, and Summerly asked for more salt on her green beans. I handed over the seasonings so they could administer them, and after dinner I noticed that Summerly’s placemat was smattered with cinnamon on one side and salt on the other. I asked her to clean up her space, so she wiped the cinnamon into her hand the way I’d taught her and dumped it in the garbage. Then she she went back, looked directly at me, licked her fingertip, touched it to the salt, and licked her fingertip again. She repeated this motion about six times, until all of the salt was gone, her eyes locked on mine the whole time. I said nothing until she’d finished, but a moment later I reflected, just to be sure we were on the same page, “You just cleaned up the salt by eating it off your finger.” In an even, uninflected tone, she replied, “Of course I did. You know me.”

Bold move, kid.

We have a box of musical greeting cards that I pull out for the kids every so often to try to justify the amount of money that was collectively spent (mostly by grandparents) on them over the years. You know the cards: those eight-dollar, three-dimensional, battery-operated contraptions that sometimes feature LED or motion components activated by the opening of the bifold or the pressing of a button. They’re at once delightfully surprising and highly irritating, particularly after a child repeats the action of opening the card or pressing said button more than, say, seventeen times in a row. Sometimes I wonder if our parents’ predilection for giving these to our kids is rooted in some unrealized impulse to repay us, their children, for all of the time we spent banging on overturned pots and pans with wooden spoons, our generation’s version of a musical greeting card.

Needless to say, our kids love these things, which somehow manage to last for years upon years and withstand a considerable amount of use and reuse and reuse and reuse. The other night, and I have no idea how this happened, a few of those cards somehow ended up on the second floor during the bedtime routine, and I’m sure you can imagine that this added some flavor to an already dynamic scene. I ran downstairs to grab something and, upon returning to our bedroom, found the three children on the loveseat, each with a musical birthday card, conducting what is surely one of the strangest symphonies in human history. They coordinated the opening of the cards to coincide with each other so that all three tinny, digitalized songs would play simultaneously. The songs were “Shining Star” (Earth, Wind and Fire), “We Will Rock You” (Queen), and a shrill original birthday ditty brought to us by the folks at Carlton Cards that features a dancing cupcake with a buzzy mechanism. The odd cacophony of these three strains overlaying each other with simultaneous audio had a perplexing effect: I was torn between wanting to silence two of the three so that I could focus on just one and actually hear its singular song and wanting to put my hands over my ears and scream, while also feeling tempted to just lie down and let the flood of noise wash over me, the confluence of all three tributaries sweeping me away to terminate at the mouth of its delta with a destination that was completely out of my control.

If you don’t have multiple children and wonder what it’s like, I suggest you try opening three musical cards playing different songs at the same time. That experience provides a pretty decent approximation.

If the next few years go as well as I hope they do, I might start campaigning for our new president’s reelection. I even have my platform slogan ready to go. It’s the answer to the question, “How can this country continue to survive?”

We have to keep a Biden.

Can’t you just see it in blue bubble letters on posterboard? It’s got the rhythm of a chant built already in, and the shtick is accessible even by those on whom nuance is easily lost. Who’s with me? #keepabiden2024

Let me begin by saying that I love my Apple watch. I love being able to see the time and date and read emails and text messages with the flick of a wrist, I love that I can pair bluetooth headphones with it to listen to podcasts and music, and perhaps most of all I love being able to “ping” my phone when I lose track of it seventeen times a day. I even like being able to track my activity, or lack thereof, and when my watch tells me to “Breathe”, I actually do. One limitation of the technology, however, relates to the device’s inability to detect a person’s actual body position. Sometimes, I’ll be standing in the kitchen removing the seeds from a dozen pomegranates or peeling and slicing a bag full of Granny Smith apples that no one will eat anymore (more on that later) and feel a notification thrum on my wrist. When I check my watch, it tells me I need to stand up and move around so I can meet my “Stand” goal for the day. Well, especially on days when I feel like I can’t remember the sensation of sitting down, this is particularly irritating.

I took this picture (while standing) on the night before Thanksgiving after a day when I’d spent literally twelve hours standing in the kitchen. To be chastised by a digital garment is aggravating enough, but when that censure is unearned and undeserved, it feels like a personal affront to which the natural reaction is the desire for rebuttal. The only problem is that the device nagging you to do something you’d spent your entire daylong existence doing is deaf to your self-righteous cries of innocence. You want to set the record straight not to prove anything, exactly, but just because it’s the TRUTH. If a person walked into your house, saw you standing in the kitchen, and reminded you that it was time to stand up, you’d say, “I AM standing up! In fact, I’ve been standing up so long that a digital watch might think I’d flatlined!” and everyone would have a good chuckle. But no, there is no justice to be had where the watch is concerned. It’s wrong and it will never know. You can never shed light on the error of its judgment. There is no opportunity to plead not guilty and then win the case simply by point of fact. The watch is wrong but won’t ever be corrected.

Yes, this is very silly. I should not feel rebuked by a senseless preprogrammed microchip that’s just doing the best it can. But this feels like a metaphor for all of those moments in life when you ARE doing it; you’re doing exactly what someone or something is asking you to do, and you KNOW you’re doing it the right way, the best way you know how, even if they can’t tell, even if that knowledge is invisible to the eyes of the instant. When your child needs to take medicine and fights so hard you need to sit on his legs, hold his hands down with your knees and get two fingers between his teeth just so you can pour that purple liquid between them, that liquid that you remember loving as a child because artificial grape was your favorite, that’s when you feel like what you’re doing is wrong but you know it’s right. No one wants to force a child like this, but when there is no other way (you’ve tried everything from logic to bribery to flavor masking to distracting with a screen and several other methods in between), you have to do what’s best even if it doesn’t look or feel like it. “Treat your child with gentleness,” says the world, but sometimes being gentle in the long run requires administering an antibiotic in a way that’s fierce but fiercely necessary.

It makes me think of the poem “Epistemology” by Richard Wilbur, the second stanza of which is:

“We milk the cow of the world, and as we do
We whisper in her ear, ‘You are not true.'”

It’s in those moments, when what we’re giving or doing is being met with displeasure, repudiation, or invalidation despite our certainty that the purpose is for some sake of betterment, that we must try to find ways to silence those naysaying voices. It’s in those moments, when the face value of our actions is so unrecognizable to the objective directing them, when what we’re doing is essential to an end that is wholly, deeply good, when the nature of our engagement bears little resemblance to the holistic cause or the effect of it, it’s hard to reconcile these things to ourselves, let alone to others. It’s in these moment when we have to summon the most trust in what we know is real and true, in our instincts, in our quintessential understanding of the order of things. So next time my watch tells me to stand up after I’ve been piping rosettes or sewing a costume or rolling out cookies or stripping thyme while standing for hours at the kitchen island, I’ll raise my wrist to my lips and whisper to it, “You are not true.” Sometimes, when the world tells you it’s time to stand up, it’s enough just to know that you already are.

The same night that I made the foolish choice to try to shower while all of my children were not only awake but also on the second floor of the house with me, I entered the hallway to see Summerly holding up the bra I had put in the hamper before my shower. She had it between her thumb and forefinger at arm’s length and was staring at it quizzically, head tilted to one side, as if it were an unidentified animal pelt or something partially on fire. She looked at me, started laughing, and said, “This looks like something the Ancient Greeks would wear!”

Ummm. Thank you?

Liam is going through a phase where he’s trying out different kinds of humor, much of which is influenced by his bedtime reading of Garfield comics, and he’s predictably met with mixed responses. Sometimes he’s inane and unbearably goofy but sometimes he’s downright hilarious, and we’re very clear about giving clear feedback to try to help him learn what is funny to other people based on things like personality, age, timing, and context. One night recently, he was making jokes that missed the mark completely. One example was his very own punchline to “Why did the chicken cross the road?”, which was “To get to Chick-Fil-A.” We all told him this was very silly but we didn’t think it was funny. Enter Arlo, who chimed in with, “Why did the turkey cross the road? To get to Turk-Fil-A!” Well, we positively cackled at that.

A few nights later, I was preparing for a shower in my bedroom, which also happens to be the clean laundry clearinghouse. Liam was supposed to be changing into pajamas and brushing his teeth, but he obviously thought this was the moment when he could wait no longer to find the one pair of underwear he wanted to wear despite the fact that he had a drawer full of them in his room, so he came in to scrabble through the laundry basket. I was wearing nothing but a long shirt, the bottom hem of which I pulled even farther down for modesty’s sake, and said, “Pardon my nudity, but you’re supposed to be getting ready in your room.” “Nudity?” he said, giggling and following me into the bathroom, pointer finger upraised. “You’re not nude! You’re on sale! See? You’re half off!”

Thank you very much, Jon Arbuckle.

One night I was helping Arlo floss his teeth before bed while perched atop the closed commode, and I noticed that the toilet paper roll was nearly bare. I asked Summerly if she would please look under her sink for a new roll, as I was sure that there was one in the cabinet. She opened the cabinet and said, “No, there isn’t one in there.” Now, I realize that this child is challenged when it comes to organization, tidiness, and finding things, even ones that are in plain sight, so I almost expected this. I took a deep breath and said, “Are you sure? I swear there’s one in there. Would you please look again?” She opened the cabinet again, scanned the interior, and closed it.

“Nope,” she said, absolutely deadpan. “There isn’t one.” I began to get annoyed. I was absolutely positive that I had unpacked an entire packet of toilet paper only a few nights earlier and stored the entirety of its contents–six rolls, at least–in that cabinet. No way had they gone through that much toilet paper within the space of a week. Or had they? Was one of them being irresponsibly profligate when it came to wiping? Why would they do that? Is someone experiencing OCD symptoms pertaining to toilet tissue? Should I be worried about the plumbing? What an enormous waste of money and resources! I loathe wasted money and resources! Haven’t I impressed this upon these people? Or maybe I’m crazy. Maybe I dreamed that I put toilet paper under there. Was I drunk? Could I have imagined doing that because I’ve done it so many times before? Was it a different sink and I’m just completely dissociating? Or is my daughter seriously unable to see a stack of toilet paper in a cabinet when there is nothing else except a cylinder of Lysol wipes under there? Should I be worried about her? I decided to try a third time. “Sweetie, either I’m losing my mind or there is some toilet paper in the cabinet after all. There should be several rolls stacked on the right side, closest to me.”

The girl looked me in the eyes and said with a complete poker face, “Oh, there are six rolls under there. But you asked if there was one.”

Kids are evil.