peevish mama

What happens when you are caught in flagrante delicto with the Easter Bunny? What happens when your youngest child flings open the door to the storage closet and discovers you crouched amidst a veritable orgy of Easter offerings, spread out and naked in all their sugary glory – a tableau of secrets and cavities, searingly pastel under the bare basement light bulb?

Well, first you scream. You scream the kind of scream normally reserved for robbers in face masks or flashers in trench coats. Or rats. You might scream like this if you saw a rat. And that youngest child would scream too – or at least you think she’s screaming because her mouth is in the shape of an O – but you can’t actually hear her because your robber/flasher/rat scream is so, so loud.

After she slams the door in horror you collapse, your ass mercifully landing on a soft bed of hot pink Made-In-China Easter basket grass and you weep with frustration. Your tears are hot and angry because you have spent the last fourteen years of your life guarding the magic, protecting the shimmer, stoking the flame. All to have it ruined by a little white rat who NEVER LISTENS WHEN YOU TELL HER TO STAY IN BED. You want to smash and break every colored plastic egg the way your heart is broken, because she’s only seven. And seven is so, so little.

You only have one choice. One hail mary pass. The TRUTH. Yes, you will tell her the TRUTH. And when you go upstairs and find her curled up in a frightened little knot with her bedspread pulled up to her eyeballs and her two braids sticking straight up on the pillow, the TRUTH comes tumbling out. And you might sound slightly more emphatic and unhinged than what’s below, but this is essentially what you say, and it feels so good to say it because the TRUTH always saves the day.

You are the kid and I am the grown up and when I tell you to stay in bed, I have a very good reason! I’m supposed to be the keeper of the magic. There’s a line between the kids and the magical creatures and the grown-ups are supposed to keep you on the other side of the line – whatever the cost. You disobeyed me and now I have to tell you something that you’re not supposed to know. The Easter Bunny isn’t as powerful as Santa. He’s a spring creature, he’s a little fragile, he’s white, he has little pink paws and when it snows in the spring, he can’t handle the deliveries. He just can’t do it. When that happens he contacts us – I can’t tell you how because you shouldn’t know ANY of this – and he drops the stuff off early and I was just trying to figure out what was what so I could put it out for him. He’d be angry at me and at you if he knew what happened and you better hope he doesn’t come back here and pluck everything tonight. NOW STAY IN BED!!!

And then you go down stairs and pour yourself a glass of wine and you cry a little more with your hand on your heart, because when you leaned down to kiss her, she whispered: OK, Mommy.

I’ve mentioned this before, but Doctor Dash and I are constantly sliding books and articles to each other via night stand. He told us about an Atlantic article about how we’re overprotecting our children at dinner and he was so fired up about it, so nostalgic and verbose and downright frothy, that the kids and I were all ears. Of course, I couldn’t wait to read it and I wasn’t disappointed.

As summer approaches and we fling open our doors and send our youngsters out into the world, it’s nice to be reminded that it’s not only ok to pull back, it’s good for them. I have been trumpeting this philosophy of child rearing since the beginning days of this blog and it’s validating to read a well reasoned article supporting what I’ve always assumed were personal views shaped by my own gut feelings and a splash of laziness.

Letting kids figure out how to get around – even if it means getting lost and having moments of uncertainty – is empowering to them. Letting them brush up against strangers allows them tune into their own gut reactions and lets them feel and understand that balance of good versus bad in the world. (Hint: there is overwhelmingly more good, but you’d never know that by listening to the news). Falls, scrapes and collisions teach lessons about physics, physical boundaries and self care.

A little freedom is our way of saying to our kids: we trust you, we trust people, we trust our city. Even if we DO whisper a hasty Hail Mary prayer from time to time.

You will want to read this.

No two times on my yoga mat are alike. Sometimes I feel fluid and strong. Sometimes I feel creaky and old. I wonder if I look any different on the outside. I know that when my body doesn’t move the way I wish it would, as seems to increasingly be the case, I fret. I think about aging, about my inevitable, slow decline, about becoming something that is anathema to me: still. I move so that I can keep moving. I want to have dance parties with my grandchildren and not just be the stiffy grannie who amuses everyone. I want to get DOWN.

I’m especially preoccupied with all of this because I recently found out that my ACL repair of a few years ago did not take. It’s unclear whether another surgery is the best option. The only thing that I know is that someday, I don’t know when, this knee will hurt. And maybe it will hurt so much and for so long that I will need a replacement – which I know isn’t the end of the world, but oh my god. I find myself doing a lot of magical thinking around the knee – Would I switch bodies with that person? That person? – trying to intuit what other kinds of health issues I would be inheriting along with their seemingly intact knees.

Crazy, I know. But isn’t it nice to know that things haven’t changed much around these peevish parts?

Yesterday my yoga teacher said something along these lines: our bodies are how they are and what we have right now. It was a different beast twenty years ago and will be a different beast in twenty years from now. We take care of them so that we can use them to communicate with the people we love. We take care of them so we can feel good. Because if we feel good, we can be good.

It made me want to cry. And it made me want to write.

You must watch this video about the A-Z’s of Dance. It’s so inspiring.

And hello again. We have some things to catch up on.