No Children

Years ago when I was pregnant for the first time, a new father colleague said to me, 'you'll be amazed to see how the world is really divided into two camps: those who have children, and those who don't.'

I remember noticing the tiny things at first:

The waiter who sets an open glass of liquid right in front of my toddler? No children.

The waiter who hands the liquids directly to me, or otherwise out of reach of the two year old? Children.

The waitress who'd put the hot steaming grease-bubbling pizza face pizza down right in front of my children? No children.

The waitress who waits til its not bubbling anymore to bring it to the table? Children.

It was just a slightly amusing but otherwise benign observation.

Lately I've had cause to make the same observations, but in situations that are slightly more heartbreaking. My son invited a grownup friend of the family over to watch a claymation movie that he'd made--it was about eight minutes long. The friend arrived, chatted with grownups in the kitchen for a bit, and just as the popcorn was being popped, he announced he had a headache and had to go home.
Headache and had to go home? No children.

Aspirin? Aleve? Tylenol? I offered. Knowing it would have little effect on a headache that was apparently so excruciating he couldn't just humor us all for eight (okay maybe nine, with compliments) minutes, but passive-aggressively shoving in his face anyway.

No, no...I think I just need to go lie down.

Go lie down? No children.

My son was heartbroken--and confused. Sure, he's being raised in that 'everyone gets a trophy' age, but this was really a proud accomplishment, this little product of his claymation summer camp. I certainly understand that my children are going to experience disappointment in their young lives--and I get that this is the best time for them to exercise that muscle...much better be disappointed when you're small and surrounded by loved ones who pay for you to do things than when you're older and have no one. But this just seemed cruel.

The grownup left.

My sister-in-law described a time when her own brother promised to take her son out to a movie, then cancelled mintues before. He just didn't feel like it anymore. Her son sat in the doorway, where he'd positioned himself to wait for the uncle, and wept.

Her brother? No children.

I have many childless friends who are over-the-top thoughtful and focussed on my kids. And while I have three kids of my own, I've probably made some stupid mistakes with other pals' toddlers, now that I've been out of the toddler-mindset for a few years.

This past weekend some relatives were lined up to take my daughter away for part of the weekend, to visit cousins. She was over-the-moon excited. On Saturday morning they called to say they'd decided to go up a day earlier, so wouldn't be able to take her. I hardly felt like I could beg them to change their minds, but my heart broke on behalf of my girl--a middle child who yearns for any form of attention that doesn't involve being lumped with her siblings. I want to scream 'don't you know how disappointed she'll be???' but I know that would be pointless. They just don't get it. They have, you guessed it, no children.

Vocabulary Lesson

Hooray my son got to use a vocabulary word at dinner tonight.
'Mama, that's one of my vocabulary words!' he exclaimed, with sparkles in his eyes.

This is a kid who has not been won over by school, until lately. Learning the tricky rules of the English language actually made him cry when he was in first grade. 'That's 'ph' instead of 'f?'' he'd wail? 'Why? This is just so mean!'

When he had to come up with five every-day uses for math in second grade, he struggled. If it weren't for his obsession with Yu-gi-oh cards which have points that have to be added and subtracted regularly, and if it weren't for the fact that he used allowance money to buy those beloved cards, he probably wouldn't have been able to come up with anything. 'What's the point of math?' He'd complain.

For him, school was just another big grown-up conspiracy. There were many. Like having to dress nicely for certain occasions, having to have a bed time (when it was clear the grownups were staying up later and having fun without him), and having to sit in the back seat of the car.
But this year, in fifth grade, it's all coming together. He got to use a vocabulary word at the dinner table tonight, when we first heard that that guy gone into the Holocaust Museum shooting.

'Why would anyone want to do that?' my eight year old daughter asked.

'Probably because he's an anti-Semite,' my son answered, before adding 'that's one of our vocabulary words.'

His class has been studying the Holocaust this month, on the heels of a unit on bullying, and one on slavery, and at one point, thanks to O Ambassadors, a former child slave from Africa came to his class to speak about his experiences, and last week some Holocaust Survivors shared their stories . He's become passionate about Emmett Till, and Anne Frank. And his own class has visited the Holocaust Museum in Manhattan several times this past month.

It's exciting to see what he's learning in class start to apply to the world around him. It's just so tragic that the history he's learning has become current events.

Brung It On

My otherwise perfect eight year old daughter can make me lose my mind with one word.
"I brung my shinguards."

"Sophie brung me this necklace from Africa."

"I wish I brung my money."

Can you guess what that one word is?

I should be clear. She's not getting perfect grammar from either of her parents. I don't make many written mistakes, but can be pretty lazy verbally--realizing, only after the fact, that I said 'and me' when I should have said 'and I' and vice versa, but I do know the difference, which should count for something. Something like having grown kids who speak without glaring mistakes. Brung? She's not hearing this word from us. Brung??

It probably used to be cute. Like how the fact that she didn't have the 'r' sound was adorable in kindergarten, and then less adorable in second grade. 'Brung' isn't cute anymore.
I have friends who correct every mis-speak that comes out of their children's mouths in real-time, and usually I think this is a bit over-the-top. First of all, it seems rude to correct them constantly--they have so much to figure out, and it would seem that eventually they'll just develop an ear for what is right and what isn't. And secondly, like with the writing-philosophy taught in their schools, I would hate for their little freedoms of expressions to be squelched by the fear of more so many virtual red-marks all over their stories. We've all watched bright little faces fall when faced with a barrage of nit-picky adult adjustments. It's heartbreaking.

Of course, I've found the right times to explain certain tricky language things ('a' vs. 'an,' and 'twenty-eleventeen isn't a real number'). And about a year ago I started to let her know, gently, that 'brung' isn't a word. Her response has been to get really put off by being corrected. Which is out of character for this girl who, for as long as I can remember, craved knowing all of the real rules--in part, I'm sure, so that she could correct her older, less-curious, less-exacting, brother.

But she's 'brunging' all the time. Sometimes I swear she's saying it to get a rise out of me.

I've tried to ignore it, I've tried to mention it minutes later, in private, just as an 'oh by the way' aside. Last weekend we were at a college graduation--eating eclairs on the lawn of the college President, surrounded by twenty-one year olds and their proud families, and she 'brung' it up again.

"I wish I brung my frisbee."

Something about the academicness of the whole event brought out the worst in me. A word that sounds like fingernails on chalkboard on a Brooklyn playground felt like fingernails in my brain on this campus green.

"'Brung' isn't a word and you know it! I don't EVER want to hear that word come out of your mouth again! Do you hear me?"

Instantly, I was left with the bad taste of having over-reacted. I'd pulled out a tone reserved for major sibling-bashing infractions. If you'd asked me, when I was a twenty-one year old in a graduation gown, if I'd have ever imagined using that tone in response to a minor grammatical error from an otherwise perfect eight year old daughter, I'd have said no way, I'm not going to be that kind of mom.

We stood facing each other, stunned, and then she glared at me with this glare that I'm one hundred percent sure will be a part of my daily life in three or four years. And I realized that I was powerless in the face of her 'brung.'

I comfort myself the way parents of late-potty trainers do. They tell themselves that their kids won't go off to college in diapers. I doubt she'll pull out a 'brung' in a college interview, or a job interview, or when she's being interviewed after leading her soccer team to victory in the World Cup. But for now, it's making me NUTS, and she knows it and that's the problem. It's too much power for her. And after my crazy outburst, I'm not sure I can trust my own response. It might get uglier. But what can I say? She done brung it on herself.

Biden Time

this originally appeared on nycmomsblog on May 1, 2009

Yesterday morning on the Today Show, Joe Biden said that he would recommend that his own family members stay away from travelling in confined spaces, in light of the whole swine flu thing. Planes and subways, more specifically. I wonder how his friends at Amtrak are taking this?

I watched several minutes of talking heads chatter on about whether or not this was alarmist, and predict a strong message from the White House to follow--and then I grabbed my stuff and headed out to the G train.

I could hear it rumbling underneath the sidewalk as I approached the station, and made a valiant effort to catch the Brooklyn bound train, but the doors closed before I could reach it, so I made my way to the rear staircase, where I could position myself to catch the next train, no matter which direction it was headed.

I got a nice seat on the north-bound G train, and settled in with my New Yorker magazine.

I love the subway. I've invented it many times. If only there were some vehicle that could scoot along, disobeying normal traffic signals, I'd think at times, with my arm outstretched hoping to hail a cab, my brain desperate to cough up some alternative to this waiting game--which could get emotional with the addition of other people looking for cabs. Then I'd realize that this imagined vehicle wouldn't necessarily know that I was waiting on the corner of, say, Houston and 6th Avenue. So I'd decided that this invented idea could just have designated stops along different routes. I'd be happy to walk a few blocks in either direction, I'd think, looking up and down 6th Avenue. Then of course I'd realize that this magical machine already existed, and in that particular area it was the C or the E train, and I could grab it simply by walking north to West 4th street, or south to Spring.


Of course we all know the ups and downs of the subway--we've all encountered the dreaded 'sick passenger' which can be code, it seems, for 'they're scraping someone off the tracks up ahead.' We've all had trains stall, run late, and be miserably hot and crowded with unpleasantness. But for me, in my life, the ups are just so great that I remain a huge devotee. What? I can read for 45 minutes, with little interruption and someone else will get me pretty close to where I work? No parking spots, no hassle? Checking my logical mind at the door and curling up with a great magazine on the way to and from work each day is an enormous benefit. No parking spots to search for, no cab to squabble over. When I moved to New York twenty years ago the bus was gently considered to be the 'classier' of the mass transit options--picture grandmothers with fun hats above ground, angry people below. Now the bus is a catastrophe of cell-phone users, angry people shouting into cell phones, angry people angry at people using cell phones, no chance to tune out and read and the subway is full of interesting people reading interesting books.

After fifteen solid minutes of reading, I switched to the Manhattan-bound L, which requires a bit of walking underground. The L train rumbled in just in time, and was very very crowded. I reached for a pole with my left hand and made a mental note to scratch all itches with my right. Joe Biden's warning flashed through my mind as I stood shoulder to shoulder with dozens of travellers. But what was I going to do? We only have one car, and my husband had taken it to work out in Long Island.

We jostled along to Union Square where I switched to the uptown express--4 or 5, I can't remember which one. I got a seat on that one and resumed my reading.

After my appointments I took the 3 to the F to pick the kids up from school, and then we all took the G back home. Later that night I took the G to the C to the F to get to a party at the Plaza, then I took the F to the A to the G back home. I sneezed a few times and a woman glared at me, but it was just the ticklish nose type of sneezing so she needn't have worried.

Twelve subway rides in one day, might even be a record for me.

I've always been a pretty relaxed parent when it comes to disease and disasters. I'm full of fears and worries for my kids, but without fail those are all limited to the social and emotional aspects of their lives. I guess I feel like everything else is just either going to happen or not. Yes, you could accuse me of waiting too long to call the pediatrician in certain cases, but in many many others my lack of anxiety has served my family members well.

So we just wash our hands when we get home and soldier on. On the subway mostly, and in a few weeks, we fly again.

Ode to a (Borrowed) Balance Bike

What a difference a balance bike makes! Last fall my three year old daughter pedaled to school every day, on a hand-me-down bike with streamers and training wheels. All of her friends still slumped down lazily in strollers (don't get me started...)--but not my girl...she was determined, energetic, and justifiably proud. Fast forward six months or so.

Now everyone was four, the weather was nice again, their little legs had gotten stronger (or their younger siblings had aged out of bjorns and needed the strollers themselves)--and all of these pals showed up at school on these little wooden balance bikes. It just didn't seem fair. She was still doing that terrible uphill pedal move necessary with training wheels--my open hand was never far from the small of her back, so I could give her the little jolts necessary to heave her over sidewalk cracks, curb cuts, patches of weeds--and all these little former slugs were on these lightning quick bikes, flashing by, coasting, having a ball.

I'm ashamed to admit that pick-up became a very emotional time for both of us. She'd pedal, hunched over her handlebars, crying, while teems of children swooped circles around her, saying 'helpful' things like just tell your mom to get you one of these!, or 'tactful' things like my mom told me not to make fun of you for having those things (indicating the training wheels. or maybe even the pedals).

Egad.

And it brought up all sorts of feelings of inadequacy as a mother and poorness for me. I have two older kids and honestly, this was the first time I felt peer-pressure about one of my kids having some must-have item. I started to pick her up at off-times, we'd find new blocks to walk/wheel down. Anything to avoid the horror.

I had priced the bikes out and they were around $80. We just don't spend that kind of money on our children, especially on our youngest (I know, that's terrible, but it's our reality). There'd be no younger siblings to use it when she was done and if she followed in her older siblings' footsteps, she'd be on a 'real' bike by fall. We might only have it for one season. It just didn't make good fiscal sense.

So I called my pal who owns a consignment shop and asked her to be on the lookout for one of these babies, and--glory be--it turns out her own middle child was 'finished' with his, and her baby wouldn't be needing it anytime soon. She said we could have it in the meantime.

So we got ourselves a balance bike, on loan. And it's changed everything.

It makes so much sense, it's hard to believe anyone ever thought training wheels on a bike with pedals made sense for young kids. No one really needs to learn to pedal, EVERYONE needs to learn to balance. Why not tackle the balance first, then add in the pedals?

My daughter zips around the neighborhood now, lightning fast, thrilled beyond belief. If I'd known how transforming it would be I would have plunked the money down sooner. I can't recommend it enough. I should say here that we did try to 'make' a balance bike by having the cranks removed from our tiniest bike, but the seat was still too high. This thing's brilliant; the smoothest, most graceful ride around. It's one of the few 'new-and-improved' contraptions for kids these days that is an absolute improvement. It actually feels like someone invented something new for a change--rather than just adding bells and whistles to something tried and true.