Butterflies pee blood. That’s what my kids learned today from the Grow-a-Butterfly Kit I bought for them. Actually, since I’m the one who shouted this information while witnessing blood spraying from a newly emerged butterfly’s lady parts (they’re all girls in my mind), it’s probably more accurate to say they learned it from me.
My children learn most of their erroneous facts about science, nature, history, and the cosmos from me. Turns out I shine only with the basics, like answering whether apples grow on trees or underground like potatoes. Though I absolutely have tried, I cannot explain why we don’t have watermelons growing all over our yard after we’ve spat so many melon seeds there over the years. It’s also proven difficult for me to explain how a photo travels from my smartphone to my computer, and the reasons I never wet the bed. This is because (1) I am not a walking encyclopedia and (2) never seem to realize how full of shit I am until I’m knee deep in what’s come out of my own mouth.
If you have a young child, I hope you’re in the same boat. Because it’s not just misery that loves company; it’s ignorance and ineptitude, too. I don’t want to be the only mom who’s a walking, weekly confirmation of her children’s suspicion that, yes, we really do forget most of what we learn. But, come on, how the hell am I supposed to remember what a scalene triangle is? And why? Oh, wait. I know why: Because some evening, my third-grade daughter is going to flop down next to me at the kitchen table with a geometry worksheet, and ask me to remind her. That’s when I will excuse myself to use the bathroom, sneak a peak at our American Heritage dictionary, and come out acting like I totally knew.
So help me, if you’re able to explain on demand to a child how wind is made, why conifers don’t go bald in the winter, or how worms survive after being chopped with a garden spade, I hate you. It only means you’ve got a better memory than most and/or spend too much time on the Internet. And it’s making the rest of us look bad.
As it turns out, butterflies don’t actually pee blood. Some online almanac tells me it’s meconium. (That’s newborn caca, to the layperson.) Sometime later today, probably while putting the kids to bed, I will issue the retraction of my misinformation from this morning. I will swallow my pride and be honest, confessing I had to look it up on the Internet, slowly but surely handing over my authority to Google, slowly but surely revealing I’m not as brilliant as they used to think I was. That’s okay: My preschooler, who witnessed the caterpillars quadrupling their size, saw them climb to the ceiling of their tent, watched them sealing up as chrysalises, and finally saw them emerge a week later as butterflies — he told me today that it wasn’t that interesting watching them come out, that he’d rather have seen them going in.
The bloody show
I may not know everything, but for now, I’ve still got the kids beat.
Last year for Mother’s Day, my husband made dinner and fed the kids. It was frozen grocery-store pizza. They ate all of it, left none for me, and didn’t even clear—let alone clean—the dishes. I discovered their debauchery when I returned from delivering a gift to my own mom, an hour-long round-trip I took just after I mowed our family’s lawn, which is of course a task I’d eagerly undertaken just to get away from the kids for a spell. When I got back and saw the pizza remnants and filthy countertop, my husband had his feet up, was nursing a glass of red wine, and barely looked away from his movie to say hello. I was, um, just a little bit mad.
Before you start razzing on my husband and asking if I was a mail-order bride, rest assured that he had already given me what I requested: a quick family camping jaunt the night prior. Of course, I’d had to shop for it and pack for it and load up the car and drive to the campsite alone with the kids because he was at work until late in the afternoon. And of course the original campsite was a hovel, so we ended up having to relocate to a different one, depleting most of our daylight hours. Boy, was I happy out there in the woods the next morning when our son, then 3.5 years old, woke me up and kept me up at the crack of dawn in one tent while my [snoring] husband slept…and slept…and slept in another. The icing on the cake was probably when my son told me he didn’t love me, even as he couldn’t bring himself to leave my side so I could sleep some more. The chaos was nobody’s fault; just the product of trying to camp on a work weekend with little ones in tow. What was I thinking!?
Yesterday my husband, recalling the Great Mother’s Day Debacle of 2012, asked if my hope for Mother’s Day this year is to just have the day to myself. Admittedly, I really want that. But I’ve decided that I need to get over it. There is really no other day of the year on which the kids think they are more integral to my happiness (which they are), and therefore, it’s just kind of screwed up to try to get away from them. They want to be near the guest of honor, all day long. They want to wake her with breakfast in bed. They want to make personally sure she has fun and that they get due credit. And since kids who are my kids’ ages have little to no concept of what actually is pleasant and fun for a woman of my age (Hint: it’s not having my hair braided with shaving cream accents while we play Barbie spa), the day just gets exhausting. “I’m resigned,” I said to my husband. “I think I just need to accept that Mother’s Day isn’t relaxing for moms.”
That’s when my husband reminded me of the idea I floated last year after Mother’s Day. What I’d half-kiddingly suggested is that on Mother’s Day, my husband get the elusive parent’s-day-off–and on Father’s Day, I get mine. That way the kids, who are, after all ,the reason we’re parents, get to be the integral part of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day that they should be, but my husband and I each get to take a full weekend day off to truly relax and get some Zen, and we don’t have to experience one lick of guilt for taking it. Sounds like a plan to me. For that, I think I can delay gratification for another month here.
In other words: Happy Mother’s Day, honey! Enjoy your day off!
Yesterday, there was an FBI manhunt in our neck of the woods for an on-the-run murder suspect described as “extremely dangerous.” It began near my daughter’s school and gradually progressed toward my son’s. They were both in “hard lockdown” inside their classrooms for a couple of hours. Bus-riders were in lockdown even longer. Hard lockdown, or “code red” as my daughter knows it from the practice drills, means nobody is to go in or out of the school, shades are to be drawn, lights turned off, doors locked, and kids huddled in a pre-designated safe spot in the classroom.
My 4-year-old son goes to a little church preschool and was pretty oblivious to what was going on. My daughter is older, in the third grade, and can’t have the wool pulled over her eyes so easily. She was clearly shaken up by the experience. After being able to sign her out of her classroom, where the kids were indeed sitting in the dark but watching a video and not cowering in tears as my over-active imagination had feared, I asked her what she knew about the situation. Obviously, she knew they were on code red. She explained that she knew that code red could mean there was a bad guy in the school. And she knew–or thought she knew–that this dread scenario for which she’d drilled was basically really happening. That’s because she overheard her teacher telling another adult that a bad guy was nearby.
“Mom?” she asked as I filled out more of the story for her. “Did he kill anyone?” I told her that he was in trouble for a murder case that had occurred in the past, that nobody had been killed today, and that the police would be able to capture him. I watched her eyes scanning outside our car, looking nervously for this bad person.
Later, as she wrapped her lanky limbs around me like a baby chimp and curled in my lap for a hug in a way she never does anymore, my daughter asked, “Mom, did that man kill a grown-up or…well, you know, someone smaller?”
To tell you the truth, I don’t know, but I told her it was a grown-up. What a scary afternoon she had. I spent much of last night thinking about something that’s been weighing on my mind for a couple of months now. I brought it up to my husband just after the Boston Marathon bombing, but it had been brewing in my head since December 14 of last year, the day of the Newtown massacre.
“I’m starting to feel like there’s a strange thing we have to do,” I said to him. “I think we’re supposed to figure out how to raise brave children. I think that might be one of our jobs.”
The thing is, I’m not sure how to do that job. Bravery has never before been something I saw as an essential life skill for me when I was growing up, and certainly not for everyone. Bravery was the domain of soldiers, police officers, and, quite frankly, men in general. But the more bad I see in this world, the more I think it’s a critical life skill for everyone. Our younger generations are growing up every day with this constant onslaught of frightening news from every direction. I think about how we’ve been at one war or another for most of their lives, how terrorism isn’t an overseas thing to them like it was to me when I was a kid, and how, strangely enough, they don’t seem any braver for it. If anything, they seem more calloused.
I don’t want to raise calloused people. I also don’t want to raise people who rely entirely on the decisions and actions of others for their safety. For now, it’s fine, but for when they grow up, they need to be brave. I want to raise kids who can think for themselves in crisis situations, who can respond with confidence and courage, not with deferential resignation. I want to raise them to have mettle that exceeds my own. How do you raise the type of children who, as adults, will go rushing into the mayhem of a bombing aftermath to help the injured? Because the world really needs those people. How do you raise the type of children who don’t retreat from evil but take it on? Because the world really needs those people. In this world, in these days, how do you raise brave people instead of calloused ones? I don’t know yet, but the world is always going to need them, so someone’s got to do it. I’d sure like to try.
When I found out I was having a boy, I cried. My reaction took me by surprise. At the time, I had a healthy, happy 3-year-old daughter at home. I had long been saying, what do I care about the baby’s sex? What a privilege to even be having another child!
So, when tears spilled out on the way home from the doctor’s office, I was ashamed. Self, I said. You are being a jackass. But it didn’t take long for me to deduce the gloom was because I’d secretly wanted another one of my daughter. Not just another daughter, mind you, but another one of my daughter. Basically, with my ultrasound results, I was hit with the realization that that ship had sailed. Not that we conceived by cloning. I was truly being irrational, and I’ll blame it on pregnancy hormones.
But there was more behind those tears, and the real issue rose to the surface over the days that followed. Deep down, I realized I was scared of having a boy. This was based on what I’d seen among my daughter’s peers and my own friends’ offspring. Good kids, but their themes of speech delays, communication issues, attention problems, and truly epic temper tantrums had secretly left me grateful they weren’t mine. Communication with boys seemed so trying, and I wondered how the mothers managed to connect with their sons under such primitive conditions. I assumed it was the adorable cowlicks and miniature tighty-whities.
When my daughter was two, she could pronounce the word sphygmomanometer—and knew what it meant. I loved that I could talk to her almost from the time she could walk, connect with her through conversation. Because I am a blabbedy talker and writer, I put a high value on words, and to me it seemed I’d been given a child teeming with them so that we might easily bond. Which we did.
So, how was it going to be with a son? Based on my limited experience, I anticipated communication would take much longer. The idea of waiting extra years depressed me. Moreover, what did I really know about boys? Not much. I have one sister and no brothers, and I never babysat much. I’m not a dude myself. Looking back now, I see how my poor dad and grandpa bowed to the pressures of our mostly female clan, grew accustomed to our constant chattering, our histrionics, our hair in the tub drains, our TP-swaddled tampons taking up valuable garbage-pail real estate, our choice of tearjerker films over action ones, and our need to talk through every issue until it was talked to death. That was the only world I knew, and it was decidedly deprived of maleness. Tonka trucks and GI Joes were foreign territory. There were no battles of keeping the toilet seat up or down. I knew nothing of Kleenex wads, girly mags, and Selective Service registration. Football was a thing we cheered for, not played.
My son is four now. Though he has indeed exhibited many of the behaviors I used to quietly find so off-putting in other people’s sons, we never had trouble bonding. On the contrary, it’s been easy. I can appreciate the one-track thinking of his masculine mind, the relative slowness of his development when compared with my daughter. I also feel like I’ve had time to savor each of his stages, because they’ve all lasted longer than his sister’s did. I just understand so much better those “boy behaviors” I used to judge. In the end, the challenges have largely been what I imagined they’d be but not at all how I imagined they’d be. True love made quick work of my foolish fears and opened my eyes to the beauty of little boys. They’re quite different than I thought, and they sure don’t fit in any one box.
When my son bends down these days to put on his dorky little cowboy boots, the band of his teensy tighty-whities sticks out of his jeans. Cowlicks pepper his head like miniature mushroom clouds. I just have to smile to look at it all. Those are the small details I would have attached myself to in other people’s sons long ago, a way to dial back my judgments, the odd problem I hadn’t named until I found out I was having a son—my misconception that wee boys were really kind of a pain in the ass. Now that I’ve got a son of my own, I realize they’re not. And it’s not the cowlicks and the undies that help me connect. It’s the person. He’s his own flavor of awesome. And as with my daughter, I wish I could clone him, too.
I can’t blame them. So am I. When you think about the whole shebang, it is kind of a weird thing. But I probably shouldn’t call it a shebang, right? Trust me, that is not how my kids got confused. Their confusion is entirely about the mechanics. Why? Because of me. When women pathologically hardwired to ramble try to explain anything of complexity—how to make a frittata, for example—we pretty much sound like we’re trying to explain the God Particle.
My oldest child, a third-grader, is an inquisitive little cookie often accused of being an old spirit. That she requested the recipe for babies when she was only four was not surprising. I remember how intently she listened as I explained that a woman has an egg, and a man has a seed. When the seed and the egg get together, a baby begins to form. Voila! I also told her where the egg was located and where the seed was stored. Feeling like I’d done a good job of playing it cool, I stopped there and nervously waited for her to ask how the seed got to the egg. She didn’t.
Fast forward five autumns. Out with me on an errands run, my daughter randomly blurted, “How does the male’s seed get to the female’s egg?” At first I gave her a very plain answer—yes, the this goes into that answer—but because I was off guard, I then went on and on about it. At least I did it matter-of-factly and with no hint of my urge to scream and poop my pants. I even explained how the male moves around to make the seed come out and why. Good God. Her expression spoke volumes, indicated she was feeling kind of like this:
When I got home and told my husband how I’d had to SAY THE THING, I’m not sure if I was being a martyr or a braggart. “Aren’t you glad you didn’t get that question?” I said. “Seriously, what would you have said?” Without hesitation, he answered, “I’d have said, ‘It swims.’”
Crap. Me and my God Particle.
“See those two ducks, honey?” During the days that followed, I began pointing out to my daughter random examples of sex in the animal kingdom—you know, to sanitize normalize it? “That’s the male on top of the female,” I’d say. “They’re making a baby!” And then, of course, the female mallard would try to flee as a second mallard would attack, bite at the back of her head and pin her down like a rapist with his stupid webbed orange flapper. Then another would try. Then another. Soon her poor head would be pecked bald from the abuse of horny mallards. It wasn’t quite the Exhibit A I’d wanted.
Thank God my sister has two dogs, Martha and Buddy, who often “play train,” as my daughter long called it. They always look like they’re having a grand old time, grunting and panting with their standard smiley dog mouths agape. They would make a good example! So, I turned to them next, explaining to my daughter that “making a train” was actually sex. In retrospect that was a really bad choice of words. And unfortunately, Martha was always the one riding Buddy, so it kind of confused matters.
You know, I’m not afraid of explaining sex. I just wish I had some control over what my kids envision with it, particularly when it dawns on them that their dad and I do it. Violent head-pecking, growling, tongue-lolling—these are just not what I want them to envision. (Which is why my husband and I lock our bedroom door.) In all seriousness, though, how can I make it not gross? And why the hell is Dad not having to field these questions?
Ha! Well, Daddy finally got his come-uppance this week. Our 4-year-old is like a little engineer. That’s the kind of inquisitive he is. He likes to know how things work, loves to construct and deconstruct. Once I gave him a broken alarm clock and a screwdriver, and his face lit up like Justin Bieber getting his monkey back. So, apparently, my son demanded out of the blue to know how babies are made, and like any good engineer, he wanted specifics. Here’s how my husband said it went down:
“Dad, how are babies made?”
“Oh, you know that. There’s a seed and an egg and—“
“No, I KNOW about the seed and the egg, but how do they get together? How is the baby MADE?”
“Well, only grownups make babies, so you won’t need to make a baby until you’re a grownup.”
“But then DAD, I need to know HOW.”
And so on.
You know what my husband did? He continued to deflect those questions until they stopped. What did he think was going to happen next? I bet he wouldn’t have guessed our son would take the conversation to our daughter, which he did. This conversation took place yesterday after we picked up her new tadpole.
“You know how tadpoles become frogs?” my son offered. “First they get legs. Then they lose their tails. No, wait. First they’re a seed—”
“No, they’re not!” my daughter said. “First they’re an egg.”
“No, no, they’re a seed AND an egg,” my son answered.
Quarreling continued for a few minutes before my daughter said, “Look, this is what happens. First it’s an egg. Then the tadpole is born. Then a frog—hmn, I think it’s a frog—puts seed on the—hmn—wait, on the…um…tadpole.” Her brother listened intently, nodding with an ah-ha look. Yet I could tell his sister was getting confused by her own explanation, and I really didn’t like the idea of letting them think you just ejaculate on things to make them grow.
“Look, guys,” I finally said. “Here’s the deal. There’s an egg. The daddy puts sperm on it. The sperm is the seed. Then the seed and the egg grow into a tadpole. The tadpole grows into a frog.”
“When does he put it on the egg?” my son asked. “Where?”
“After the female lays it,” I interrupted, annoyed that the animal kingdom had once again failed me in explaining how HUMAN babies are made. Flustered I started to second-guess myself, as in thinking maybe I don’t actually know for sure how frogs make babies and whether the eggs are fertilized outside the body. (Don’t judge me. I was frazzled.) Self-talking, I muttered, “Wait. Maybe they’re not like chickens.”
“What? Chickens help make frogs?” said my son.
“Have you ever seen a frog penis?” said my daughter.
“Frogs don’t have penises!” laughed my son.
“All animals have penises!” insisted my daughter.
“Want to hear about the God Particle?” said I, or might as well have. Time to volley back to my husband.
Last week I walked into our guest bathroom and found this on our cabinet:
Let me just say it’s never a good thing to find creamy dark brown fingerprints on a bathroom cabinet in a home where young children toilet. Never.
So, I was this close to yelling, “Who the hell got poop on our cabinets!?” before I remembered that my 4-year-old son had eaten Nutella earlier that morning. You know what? I didn’t clean up those prints for three whole days. Satisfied it wasn’t fecal matter, I guess I just sort of let it slip my mind.
Not counting my life between the ages of 12 and 22, I think my standard of clean hit rock bottom sometime around my first child’s third birthday. That’s the year she got up in a sleepwalking stupor and actually shat in the corner of her carpeted bedroom while sick with a stomach bug. That’s the year her friend carved her name with a preschool shiv (the business end of a broken tea-set spoon) into our dining room table. That’s the year she dragged a crayon across our wall, up one story and around the hallway. There was plenty more. Do you think I gave a hoot those days about those stalactites of goo that build up on the hand soap dispenser over time? Barely. Just like I barely noticed crumbs, fingerprints on our stainless steel fridge, and the fact that we hadn’t built so much as a step from our sliding glass door to the ground two feet below it.
I’ve improved since then, but I’ve got a long way to go. (Obviously, since I left brown Nutella fingerprints on my guest bathroom cabinets for three days.) Sorry, but some days, just getting a clear view of the carpet feels like I won the interstate lottery.
When there are actual gross messes to clean up, it’s hard not to get housekeeping myopia. At least for me, having little kids has made it challenging to see my house the way it probably looks to other people. When the laundry’s folded, the dinner dishes are washed, and the kitchen counter is wiped down, I feel pretty great.
Post-partum housekeeping myopia has its limit. When I know someone outside my immediate family is going to be at the house, suddenly I wake from my hypnotic idiocy and realize that, oh my god, we’re complete freaking pigs. It’s only then that I see my house the way I think an outsider would, poopy-looking fingerprints and all:
How I see my living room on a night when I’ve cleaned my heart out and no guests are imminent
Look closer. There is a used Band-Aid on a Wal-Mart toy on the floor in this scene. This is what I see when guests are coming. I am a pig.
My “clean house” tonight. Just one pair of used undies on the bathroom floor. Yay! Let’s eat in here!
Also from tonight’s “clean house.” I was feeling all proud that I made my son pick up his mile-long strip of wasted toilet paper and fold it onto the back of the toilet. Didn’t realize until taking pics for this blog that there was an unflushed TURD in that toilet. Hurrah for our clean house!
My piece de resistance, even on a “clean house” night like tonight, the dirty little secret called the “laundry room”
Did you just say, “Oh, that’s not that bad”? Are you insane? Look closer. Hand to Heaven, those are our CLEAN clothes.
I seriously wonder if I’m in good company on this one. Why? Because housekeeping has never been my special skill. I have no middle ground. I’ve always had trouble finding the shades of gray between spring cleaned and pigpen. My nickname as a kid was honestly “Pigpen.” How long would it have taken you to wipe the Nutella off the cabinets? Please say a week. For the love of God, please say a week.
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