If you're in the mood to feel very sad...

... then you should definitely look at these photos.

Movies

In the absence of any interesting posts, here are some movies from the last month or so:

1) Skipper wearing shorts. If there's anything cuter than a small toddler in shorts, let me know.


2) Dutch delivering her memorized poem at her final acting class for an audience of parents with camcorders. This is only for deeply, truly, dedicated Fans of Dutch, because Cook filmed the whole thing sideways, and I can't be bothered to try to figure out how to rotate the image. Also, it's pretty boring even right side up.


3) Skipper and Dutch. They did this for about five minutes before I started filming, and then of course Skipper noticed the camera and had to come try to eat it. Skipper thinks that Dutch is incredibly, endlessly interesting and funny.

You didn't believe me when I told you Dutch was enormous.

This is Dutch with two of her classmates.

I have found the perfect job for me.

This is it!

Existential crises over the years

Hey, fun game: guess who this is!
















Here's your hint:

Contemplating the weasel

This morning, Dutch, Skipper, and I were walking to the bus stop, and I was absent-mindedly singing "Pop Goes the Weasel" when Dutch fiercely interrupted me to say "Mom! The weasel doesn't go pop! There IS NO WEASEL!" and to sing to me her version of the song (a clean-up-time variation that must have come from daycare).

I staunchly defended my weasel by defaulting to the brilliant and effective argument I've been using a lot lately (a variant on "because I said so") - "I am 33. You are 5. Because I am older, I must know more than you know, and I know that there IS A WEASEL!"

Lately, Dutch has been very adamant about what's true and what is not, what's right and what is not. She clings to her arguments tenaciously, squeezing her eyes shut against mounting evidence, and eventually gets more and more desperate as she realizes that she's got it wrong and can't figure out how to back down without feeling humiliated. I think she's trying to establish her identity, and she seems to have identified inflexibility as a way to create a strong personhood.

Plenty of adults continue to make this mistake all their lives, and I am certainly guilty of making it a lot. It's hard to help her find ways to be open to information without feeling overwhelmed and unstable, to dwell in the gray areas a little longer without getting stuck in them; it seems like one of the big challenges of being human.

Bob, saying things on my behalf, again.

Here you go. I'm feeling pretty bleak overall these days, as you know, and the news doesn't help.

hate spirals

I love this very much.

The quarter has reached the point where I've got very little to say and less time to say it in. Also, work= crazy.

However, I have the time to tell you that Dutch is doing paleontology in the playground at daycare (can I say how much I love Dutch's teachers, who have been debating whether they should dig up all the sand in the sandbox and bolt down some big bones at the bottom of it so the earnest diggers can actually find something?), now loves brushing her hair, and has been wandering around singing this:


And Skipper... is a punk. But we love her. Today she ate an entire banana at daycare. Also, she says "hat" ("HA!"), "belly" ("lelLAY!"), "dog ("DOHHH!!"), and "daddy" ("dehYEEE!"). That's the news from here.

Apple pie

Yesterday Dutch got a baseball glove.* She played catch with Cook in the park, and was very pleased by her progress in the throwing category. Catching, not so much, apparently. When she was getting her hair cut, the haircutter asked her what she was planning to do this summer, and she said "I'm going to learn how to play baseball." When I asked her last night what she'd like to do today, she said breezily, "Oh, play more baseball with Daddy."

The haircut! Look! This morning, Dutch and I sat in the kitchen while I snarfed down large quantities of coffee and she wrote out a menu for her restaurant ("The Happy Chime Restaurant"). Here are your pictures.













This is what Dutch looks like when she writes.













Oh no, wait - wrong kid.


































































And lastly, this is what Dutch looks like when she's having an existential crisis.**


















* It's traditional brown, not pink - pink is apparently no longer her favorite color.
** Probably in French.

Updates

1) I came home yesterday, late, after a very long day, to find the end of my street blocked off with police tape. Also, a lot of police at the other end, and concerned-looking people standing all around the block rubbernecking. There was nobody at my end of the street, so I ducked under the tape, feeling furtive and very apprehensive. I was pretty sure - 80%? - that nobody I care about was likely to have been hurt in any criminal violence, since they're not prone to criminal activity, but it was a little scary. The homeless guy who sleeps in his car down the block from our place told me that there was a body in the street. By then, I could see Cook, Emma, and Brendan on our front porch. It turns out that the dead person was brought (after being thoroughly stabbed) out of a nearby apartment complex and dumped on the sidewalk (because NO WAY the police are going to figure out where he came from! Good plan!), probably about 20 minutes after Cook, Skipper, and Dutch passed by that spot on their way home. Yeesh.

2) Skipper might be a bad person. Seriously. She hits! She bites! She screams! She's vengeful and ferocious and wild. I mean, just LOOK at her!





















































Don't tell me that isn't the face of a child plotting something evil.



















Anyway, we got our camera fixed. And the weather has been gorgeous.

My Kid

I was trying to explain to a classmate of mine recently that Dutch and I have some wildly divergent tastes. Because I'm exhausted (and tend toward verbal diarrhea anyway), I ended up telling her that before Dutch was born, I would never, given a lineup of 5-year-olds, have identified Dutch as my kid. She's not what I thought I'd get. I was thinking, if I thought about it at all, that my daughter would be a more straightforward kid, a kid who would wear whimsically mismatched tomboy clothes and tackle the world with determination. A plucky kid. There's a kid in Dutch's class who's kind of the kid I expected and wished for. She has a funny deep voice and adorable short hair, and she barges right up to life and engages with it. I like her, but I'd rather have Dutch.

Dutch is just herself. Most of Dutch's obvious personality traits are very clearly inherited from various family members, but you could never have guessed which ones would turn up and how. Nothing about our girl is straightforward, but there are all sorts of strange little delights tucked away in all the twists and turns. Also, some of the things I loved about my imaginary child are pretty easy to align with my real child. For example, it turns out that baseball gloves can now be purchased in pink.*

Anyway, Dutch declared that she is going to be rich and famous, probably for writing a book, possibly for writing a play,** so we're going to live off her riches when she grows up. (Screw the imaginary kid - THIS kid's going to be RICH!) If she doesn't end up doing some sort of acting/dancing/whatever onstage at some point in her life, I will be surprised. She had to memorize a poem*** for her acting class, and she blithely performed it at "Music Time" for two classfuls of preK and K kids at her daycare. That takes some pluck.


*Title IX, I'm looking at you.
**She organized a focus group at her daycare for her classmates to help her flesh out characters and plot for the book she's currently writing. It seems that talking animals will be involved, and dumbwaiters.
*** Cook and I have perforce memorized it too, since she can't read. I am prone to talking or singing out loud to myself anyway, which makes for some embarrassing moments on transit, and now I find myself muttering "and guarding vast caches of GOLD!" in the hallway at school.

Today's news brought to you by the recession.

Keeping up my string of depressing posts (is anybody still reading?), I feel the need to inform you that my dream job has, in fact, been filled by somebody else. I caved in and emailed my rival, and she told me she'd heard through the grapevine that they filled the position internally the week the opening was posted, and never even interviewed anyone.

Glass-half-full take-home message: Hey, at least I never had a chance, so I didn't exactly get rejected. Exactly.

Glass-half-empty take-home message: The competition for jobs is so acute that I can't even get an interview for a somewhat unusual job for which I am very well qualified. And all my serious competitors for this job are still unemployed.

Next steps: Today I applied for an $11/hour temporary job for which I'm massively over-qualified (and probably won't even get an interview, because 9000 other people will apply), and started the paperwork to get the kids onto the state health insurance program.

Looking ahead: If anybody knows of a job even vaguely related to planning and health, preferably with benefits, please let me know. We'll go anywhere.

The bus is a place where you can talk about death.

The scene: Dutch, Skipper, and I are riding home on the bus. Skipper is nursing and thus quiet.

Dutch: I told Teacher C and Teacher J that I'm going to get a short haircut.*
Me: Yeah? What'd they say?
D: They were excited.
M: Hm.
D: I don't think I look like a (Dutch) with long hair. I want to look more like a (Dutch.)
M: Oh.
D: I want to look more like I did when I was a tiny baby.
Me: You want to be bald? Or do you want a mullet?
D: No. I just... I'll never be a tiny baby again.
M: No.
D: And soon I'll be...
M: ...a grownup?
D: ... some dirt.
M: Um. Yes. After a long while. But you'll be very special dirt.
D: Mom! You only think I'll be special dirt because I'm YOURS.
M: Maybe.
D: Mom! Anna has beads that she says are magic! Tomorrow I will ask her if they can make you live forever, and if they do, I will give one to each of you!
M: Great, thanks!

*Dutch and I have back-to-back PROFESSIONAL haircut appointments scheduled for next weekend. I'm holding my breath that she'll actually go through with a short haircut...

It's complicated

The half-mile walk from the bus stop to the daycare was a slog for me yesterday morning, with Skipper in the frontpack (all pissed off, because she wanted to walk) and Dutch dawdling along behind, nattering incessantly on tedious topics. I was exhausted, anxious, greasy, sweaty, and generally feeling crappy. I had been unpleasant and impatient with both kids the whole commute, and was feeling bad about that and also irritated with both of them. Also, it was raining. As we stood at an intersection waiting for the green light, I was staring off into space, ignoring Dutch while she prattled, and I heard somebody say "Good job, mom!" I turned and saw a man who had paused on his way into the grocery store, looking straight at me. "Good job, mom!" he repeated, looking very earnest.

I don't celebrate Mother's Day, being of the opinion that it's become a condescending and almost insulting holiday. If society actually values mothering, it would be nice to show it in some way other than one day of guilting people into spending money on cards and flowers. Who cares about daffodils - how about some paid parental leave, or universal childcare? Or hey, world peace?

However, if I'm going to get a day where people celebrate me for doing the kind of caregiving that the whole society should be doing for our children, I'm not sure what would be appropriate. For my Mother's Day present, Dutch has offered (spontaneously, I swear) to "not freak out ALL DAY!" Which sounds pretty good to me. But what I'd really like for a special day for me is just to be alone. I don't need flowers, or a spa, or a vacation destination, or anyThing. I just want to be on my own for a little while, with nobody asking anything of me. A former boss of mine, Lady Catherine de Bourgh,* once told me smugly that she didn't understand why so many people celebrated Mother's Day by doing stuff without their children. SHE wanted to spend time WITH her children on Mother's Day. (The subtext in everything she ever said about parenting, or actually anything, was that everybody else was doing it wrong.) Whatever. Apparently I'm one of those bad selfish mommies.

After I dropped off the kids yesterday, I went swimming. I haven't been going very often lately, because I haven't had time. I still don't have time, but I really needed the swim. It was fantastic. The adjective that sprang into my mind as I kicked off was "free" - I was free!

When I visited the daycare later on in the day, Skipper was delighted to see me, and gave me a hug. Then she pointed at one of her classmates, looked at me and explained something in fluent Ewok, and wobbled off to do some sort of important activity involving a purple plastic ball. When I left, she casually waved good-bye and went back to her business in her community.

I'd like to see the celebration of Mother's Day in my life as a day to remember the importance of caregiving for all of us, and, on the personal level, a day to recognize the richness, the mundanity, and in the end, the limitations of the mother-child relationship. I am on my own, and so are Skipper and Dutch. So is my own mom, an openhearted mother and a woman with a gift for building community. It's up to us to work out how to be ourselves and also be with eachother.

So that's this year's cranky, wandering Mother's Day diatribe.

I also wish to give my congratulations and blessings, in honest joy and celebration, to A, and to J, and to L, who are launching this year into the brave and ordinary work of mothering. Let's get cracking on the world peace thing, everybody, before those babies grow up.



*Famous in our household for having told me that she could have been a professional dancer if she had pursued dance more seriously, and that she could have gotten an advanced degree in mathematics, had she chosen to pursue it.