remember this

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Five for Friday: These Exquisite Endless Fleeting Days Edition

Last night was one of those nights: I woke up at two, could not fall back to sleep, and as I drew closer and closer to morning, my brain decided to amp up the anxiety. It went like this: Dinner party stress: I think I will do a Greek salad; I do want to grill the salmon/chicken beforehand, but that means I need to clean the grill today. Probably I should also make hummus today, too, so I can use tomorrow before our guests arrive to panic-clean everything in sight. Birthday party stress: the treasure hunt is still in progress, and I don’t yet know if we’ll have enough kids for teams which affects how I do the treasure hunt. I need to text a neighbor about using his mailbox as a clue location. And oh, since the resolution of the treasure hunt is going to be the big pink flamingo pool floatie, HOW am I going to do that if the kids swim before they treasure hunt? Maybe the kids should do the treasure hunt first, then dinner, then swim? But that means swimming later, and will we bother our neighbors? Upcoming travel stress: Ugh, I do not want to get on an airplane. Will the cat sitter be as good and trustworthy as my friend said she would be? Will the cat be too lonely? My husband will be here with him at night, but he is so used to people. Will he hate me and Carla when we return? Will my husband be lonely? I’ve never left HIM alone this long before, either. Social stress: I have one upcoming week during which I am Carla-free, and I’ve so far planned FOUR meetups with friends, and I want to do all of them, and at least three of them won’t happen this summer otherwise, and yet ACK. Upcoming sleepaway camp stress: Ugh. What will I do without my baby while she’s away? Will she be okay? What if she hates it? What if she gets poison ivy and can’t sleep and is as miserable as she was the first time she got poison ivy, and was more wretched and despondent than I’ve ever seen her? And of course the recent Texas tragedy is playing over and over in my head, God rest the souls of those poor children and soothe the hearts of their parents. What if… Not floods, probably, but fires or bears. How do I teach Carla to evade a bear without terrifying her? IS there a way to evade a bear? She’s so little. Does the summer camp have A Bear Plan? Should I call and ask or will they think I’m crazy? Apocalypse stress: All this flooding feels Biblical in nature. And the wars. And the news. Everything is hopeless. 

That was when I got OUT of bed, because being in bed was no longer going to lead to sleeping. I checked on my child, flopped across the entirety of her bed like a starfish, and stole the cat (also sleeping, also taking up as much bed as possible) (what? there’s no rule against waking sleeping cats), and went and sat in my office trying to hypnotize myself into sleeping via the motorcycle rev of the cat’s purr. 

The cat purred until he fell asleep, slept, and then – as usual – abruptly woke up and decided it was time to play. So I got out my laptop and wrote this post. 

I have been feeling guilty ALL summer about how constricted I feel with Carla around so much. Especially guilty now, as her sleepaway camp nears, and I won’t get to see her at all. I know in my heart that it’s not HER that I’m resisting; it’s the dearth of time alone, that’s all. Spending time with her is, in fact, so precious. Here are five of things I’m loving about our time together. 

  1. Mornings with Girl and Cat: Every morning, I either wake up and feed the cat and then take him up to Carla’s room, where he wakes her up with his purring. Or Carla wakes up first, feeds the cat, and I wake up on my own. Either way, we end up watching cat videos on Instagram for an unplanned amount of time. I hold the phone, she nestles into me, the cat lies somewhere between us, engine rumbling. It’s more comfortable so snuggle up in her bed – there’s more space. But I kind of love the mornings when the three of us gather in the armchair in my office. There’s nowhere near enough room for both of our rear ends in the chair, but Carla squishes herself in, half on top of me, anyway. We have so rarely had morning plans this summer that we take our time. Mostly I try to keep our reel-scrolling to ten or fifteen minutes, but one day we watched for a half hour. We’re in our pajamas. She leans her head against me. Her hair tickles my cheek. Her legs, coltish and long all of a sudden, overlap my own, her feet almost reaching mine.
  2. Car Rides: Now that I’m not driving two hours a day, every day, I’m no longer averse to going places. Carla gets to sit in the front seat now and she loves it. I am surprised by how much I love it, too. She chooses the music we listen to, she makes jokes, I can reach over and squeeze her knee. There’s this very subtle shift that’s happening – I suppose it’s been happening all along, and I only just noticed it – wherein she’s becoming less of a charge I am shuttling about and more of a companion; I’m not ferrying her places, we’re going on adventures together.
  3. Cat Obsession: I am almost embarrassed by how much time the two of us spend observing the cat. He is just so cute, Internet. And Carla and I fully and intensely agree that everything he does is cute, and we want to be informed of everything he is doing so we can take part in the cuteness. The two of us will stand on either side of the cat tower and pet him and comb him and rub his little feet (he loves to have his back feet rubbed and will splay his little toe beans so you can gently rub the webbing between his toes) and admire him and tell him how handsome he is. If he is doing something adorable (most recently he jumped onto my bathroom counter and “hid” in the sink), one of us will call out to the other so we can both bear witness. No one else in the world is as interested in his every whisker twitch as she and I are, not even my husband, and I love that we have this shared obsession. 
  4. Pool Time: Carla seems to have much more fun in the pool when she has a friend over, and I get that. Unless you are a boring adult and enjoy swimming laps, it’s a little lonely to play in the water by yourself. But friends cannot come over every day, and sometimes we just have each other. We play a game we came up with last summer, Water Spa, where one of us is the client and the other is the incompetent spa technician. The client lies down on the pool float and the technician drags her around the pool trying as hard as possible to dislodge her from the float. We practice handstands and Carla gives me tips about how to do mine better. We wave to the kitty, who watches us from the window. I don’t know that I’ve played with Carla all that often since she was a little kid. I was never great at it; I don’t enjoy it. But I’m learning to relish these playful hours in the pool, just the two of us. 
  5. Unexpected Undertakings: During the school year, our time together is fairly structured. Wake ups, breakfast, me cajoling Carla through getting dressed/brushed/out the door, car rides to and from school, me prodding Carla through her weeknight activities or homework, dinnertime, bedtime routine. This summer, with so much free time, we’ve ended up doing things I’d never anticipated. Playing Clue together, then watching the original Clue movie. Watching YouTube videos about how to give a cat a “hygiene cut” and then giving our cat a hygiene cut. Taking videos of the kitten and editing them together for his non-existent Instagram account. The other day, I was working on her treasure hunt and she wandered into my office and perched on the arm of the chair, curious about what I was doing. I didn’t give her a peek at the treasure hunt – she will not get an unfair advantage! – but I did show her my digital folder of birthday things. I’d created a Pool Party Scattergories last summer, in case we had rain and the pool wasn’t part of the party, and she was delighted. We played it together, just the two of us, sitting there on my chair, counting down “Three, two, one” and then saying our answers simultaneously. When the prompt was “things you find the fridge” and the letter was E, we both said “eggplant” at the exact same time and dissolved into giggles. Mundane things made magical.

This summer has reminded me of that feeling so familiar in Carla’s baby and toddler years, of being touched out and overstimulated and unable to have a moment to myself. It has reminded me of that first summer of Covid, when I was Carla’s sole friend, teacher, parent, and entertainment and I was ill-equipped for any of those roles and I felt like it was unfair that she was forced to have me as her mother when she deserved so much better. 

It has also reminded me of how joyful and creative Carla is: She is so full of laughter and singing and buoyant ebullient energy. She and a friend composed a song about potato chips, of all things, and it’s catchy and hilarious. She wrote a story (about the cat) for submission to Story Pirates. She created an absurd exercise routine she does in the pool, narrating herself spoof-gymfluencer style. She constructs elaborate lairs for the kitten out of boxes. She is a delight, still in many ways a little girl while in increasingly numerous ways a young woman, and I have a front row seat to the complexities and contradictions of this stage.

Right now, she wants to be with me. Yesterday, after we’d been looking up Truth or Dare questions for her sleepover (I’m writing them on slips of paper and putting them in a basket), and I needed to go do something, she called after me, “And then when you’re done, we’ll do something together!” As though we hadn’t been doing something together all day long. 

How long will this last? It won’t last forever; it can’t. The point is not to hold her tightly to me, it’s to stay here as she leaves.  

I never learn; I seem destined to repeat this lesson again and again. There is exasperation but there is also an urgency to preserve these moments in amber. The push and pull of parenthood, the resistance to and longing for closeness, the need for separation and the anguish that separation leaves behind.

* * *

We go around the neighborhood together, me on foot, she in her new rollerblades. She’s still a little unsteady, so she holds my hand. It is so hot, as hot as the summer she was born, when I walked endlessly around the block trying to induce labor; sweat trickles down my back, her hand is damp in mine. When the road gets steep, I pull her, even as an ache spreads across my shoulders; on the downhill side, she grips tight to my waist, her arms hot, her weight setting me off balance. 

There are places where the road is flat and smooth, where she lets go and glides ahead of me. So far, there’s always been another tricky spot that causes her to stop, wait for me to catch up, thread her fingers through mine. Any day now, she’ll discover she’s fine on her own. I hope she always reaches for my hand. At the same time, I hope she doesn’t look back. 

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Pearls

Carla is, at this very moment, operating a library in our living room. She has made a circulation desk out of couch cushions and has brought down fabric bins from her room to hold books (we are not thinking about the current location of the original contents of the bins) (*cough cough* her bedroom floor) (nor are we thinking about how much less fun it is to dismantle a library than it is to create one). She has divvied up the books by category, which seem to be: Realistic Fiction, Fiction, Piggy & Gerald, and Non-Fiction. She has rounded up all of my library books, from the real library, to use in her offerings. She has her (my old) laptop on the circulation desk and created a Google doc in which she typed the title of every book on her shelves. She has created personalized “photo” library cards for her critters. And now her stuffed animals are asking her for recommendations and checking things out. I already checked out Anastasia Krupnik and read two chapters out loud to the librarian, who sometimes still sucks her thumb. 

Not sure why one of the patrons is being used as a step stool, but we all do our part to encourage reading I suppose.

Carla is at this wonderful age between Little Kid and Tween. She’s got all these responsibilities and behaviors of a big kid, and yet she still loves playing make believe and she still has that childlike wonder and delight in the world around her that transforms my heart into a big neon sign pulsing behind my ribcage.

The little round thing on the right is the library card scanner; the black lamp illusion box is the book scanner. I’m not sure which cat is checking out Little House in the Big Woods, but I hope they won’t argue about it. Not the line of library users waiting their turn to check out.

She had to accompany me to the grocery store this morning because my husband is at the hospital. Call Week bleh. Big as she is, I am just not ready to leave her at home alone for an extended period of time. (My husband and I left her alone for about 30 minutes once, while we went to pick up takeout, and that seemed both fine and terrifying.) She was initially extremely grumpy about being dragged along to the store. Who can blame her, really. 

Each cat has her own library card.

But almost as soon as we went inside, she became quite cheerful and inquisitive. She wanted to push the cart, which she can (mostly) do now without ramming into displays or other shoppers. She asked me what various things were (kumquats, delicata squash, figs) and pointed with glee at the baby artichokes and requested we buy many, many types of fruit (yes: kiwi, plums, blueberries, mango, grapefruit; no: whole coconut, pie pumpkin). I love being able to say yes to her at the grocery store, and I was able to say yes a lot: to two types of yogurt (yes, child! Ask for ALL the yogurt!), to a pumpkin roll from the bakery, to a package of mini stroopwaffles (to share with her father), to packages of frozen cherries and frozen raspberries. 

There was a brief mishap in the refrigerated case that holds things like Pilsbury bread and cinnamon rolls. We were in the rice/quinoa/grains aisle, and the case was at the end of it, and all of a sudden a bunch of cylinders tumbled to the floor. Carla ran to help, along with multiple grocery store staff members, and informed them cheerfully that it “just collapsed out of nowhere!” (I really hope they saw that she was not anywhere nearby when this happened. It really was one of those moments of invisible chaos.) As we walked past, I saw one staff member holding up a cylinder that had popped open, the uncooked dough bulging out.

Then we got to the meat section and while I was putting ground beef into a baggie, she told me she was going to the fish counter to see if they had any live crabs.

No live crabs today, but they did have a WIDE selection of clams. Carla begged me to get her a clam, and I felt kind of terrible about it but I said no. I don’t like clams and I have no idea how to cook them, let alone a single clam. 

Then she pointed out the oysters.

“Do you think they have pearls in them?” she asked. 

I told her no, I didn’t think so, but it was possible. And she wanted me to ask the person staffing the fish counter if there were pearls inside. I told her that it was impossible for that person to know. The oysters were closed, and would remain so until they were cooked.

“No, mommy,” she said, knowingly. “They open and close like this in the water.” She showed me with her mouth. “It’s how they swim. Someone could look inside and see the pearl.”

Okay, fair. But this particular grocery store staff member was certainly not in the water with these oysters before they were caught. 

“I think you should just ask, Mommy.”

I did not want to ask. So we stood there for a few more moments, discussing the probability of finding a pearl in a grocery store oyster. 

I don’t know why it charmed me so much, but it did. How hopeful she was about the possibility of a pearl! How certain she was that the fish counter staffer would know whether pearls were present. How startlingly knowledgeable she was about bivalves. How willing she was to discuss it with me, and how carefully she constructed her arguments, trying to get me on board. 

I don’t think I’m conveying it all well enough, but my heart was so full. It was such a happy shopping trip, such a fun time we spent together even though we were both doing a chore.  

Sometimes I wish I were an oyster, so that I could wrap a morning like this one in gleaming nacre, protecting and preserving these fleeting moments of childhood like the precious pearls they are.  

And now it’s time for lunch. Carla says she will close up the library and take her lunch break in the Book Nook Cafe, which she, the librarian, also owns and operates. It serves Lunchables.

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First Day of Fourth Grade

Carla woke up the first day of school before my alarm went off and came bouncing into my room, all dressed. “Wake up! Wake up! It’s almost 6:30!” she called cheerily. I was a bit blearier than that, but her enthusiasm lifted me out of bed. She ate breakfast while overseeing the creation of the “First Day of Fourth Grade” sign; I did the colors wrong at first, so had to redo it. Please imagine me very fondly rolling my eyes. 

We discussed her outfit: a pink sweater over black cutoffs. I told her I really liked the outfit, but wanted to let her know that some kids would be dressy for the first day. Would she prefer to wear something dressier? No, she did not. She wanted to express her “style,” she explained. Plus, she didn’t want to give everyone the impression that she was going to wear skirts and dresses every day. She’d worn a lot of dresses last year, and remembered that one day she wore something else to school and that her classmates expressed shock that she was not in a dress. She wanted to avoid a repeat of this type of incident. 

Did you dress up for the first day of school? My mom took me school shopping every summer: a special trip to the Big City to go to the Big Mall and stock up on new clothes and shoes. I remember LOVING those shopping trips, and feeling very excited about and proud of my new array of school clothes.

Honestly, I loved everything about starting a new school year. Brand-new school supplies, with fresh notebooks full of unblemished paper. New binders – or Trapper Keepers – that were slightly stiff when you opened them. Pencils with sharp, clean points and plump pink erasers. New shoes, free of scuff marks. New classrooms, bright and cheery, and desks that have nothing in them. So many things to look forward to! I am so glad that Carla is feeling that happy anticipatory joy this year. 

I cannot believe she is in fourth grade already. Fourth! Grade! Do you remember when she was brand new? Well, probably not because I was a terrible blogger at that time. But I remember it quite clearly, and it was only five minutes ago! And now she is NINE and in FOURTH GRADE.

My memory is not one of my strong points, and much of my childhood is a foggy mass dotted with blurry snapshots. But I remember big chunks of fourth grade. My teacher was wonderful – she had all these great ways of engaging us in learning – including this semester-long quest that I am sure was accompanied by lesson plans but just seemed, at the time, like a big, long exciting game. She read aloud to us from fun books. She arranged a class field trip into the badlands where we got to dig for dinosaur bones. 

I remember the boy I had a crush on in fourth grade. I remember one classmate took a family trip to Japan, which was kind of unheard of back then, at least in my small hometown, and brought back a ton of exotic snacks that we all got to try. I remember sleepovers with school friends. It was a great year. I hope Carla’s year is just as memorable.

Carla was all ready for school a full 45 minutes before we needed to leave, so we settled in to read the book I am reading to her (Where the Red Fern Grows, which I have never read before). 

We took her photo in the rain and I dropped her off. She skipped into school without a backward glance. Really, could there be a better way to begin a new school year?