::: true story tuesday: stuffed brainwashers :::

Did you know that stuffed animals are aliens who were sent to earth to transform children's brains into nostalgic gobs of senseless, sentimental goo?

I know this because a kid can have a whole swimming pool full of these things, see another one in the store, and immediately become brainwashed. I remember standing in the aisle of K-Mart when I was about ten, crying uncontrollably over the thought of leaving behind the sad-eyed brown furry bear that had brainwashed me. I was sure it would be sad, alone, frightened and pine for me for the rest of its sad, lonely, frightened life.

And, yes, I do remember being fond of the book Corduroy.

I had enough stuffed animals to completely cover my bed. Each one was very special. And I just don't mean that they each had names. They had personality traits, relationships, feelings. The stuffed animal that had the most power over my little child brain was a red and yellow bear named with the same originality as my cat, Kitty. My bear's name was Teddy.

Teddy was given to me by my parents when I was very, very young. Before I could even talk, actually. Teddy was a gift to me when I was only a tiny baby. In fact, I believe Teddy was a gift to me for when I came to live with my parents.

I don't know the whole story, because my parents were so incredibly protective of me, but I do know, and always knew, that I was adopted. That was never a secret. But information about my biological parents (not my "real" parents, I was constantly told, but my "biological" parents. My "real" parents were the ones who raised me) was very guarded. I think my "real" parents were too freaked out to tell me about my "biological" parents because they thought I'd pack my bags and go back to them or something. As if. My "real" parents were very much real to me. My biological parents were strangers. Only my real parents would tuck me into bed every single night and pretend that they couldn't tell which one was me amidst my mountain of brainwashing stuffed animals.

When I was a very young child, my mom was an excellent mother. She would sit by my bed and sing to me, running her fingers very gently over my closed eyelids and my soft eyebrows. This was such a magical feeling. I loved how it felt so much that I would keep my eyes closed long after she'd stopped, because I didn't want to lose that magical feeling or break its spell. I can almost still feel her fingertips on my eyelids. I try, now, to use this technique on my own children. They're not so easily enchanted.

At some point in my little life, my mom decided to bring out a good friend of hers to introduce to me. Barney was a very big, very old teddy bear that was given to my mom when she was a child. I thought it was strange but also kind of cool that a grown-up would keep a teddy bear, and that they would call it by an actual name. My mom trusted me enough to borrow Barney for a while, but it was always very clear to me that Barney was her bear, not mine. While I thought this was a rather selfish thing, for an old person to keep a teddy bear from a little kid, I didn't argue about it. If she wanted to be a grown woman and get all freaky about a stupid old bear, that was fine with me.

Still, I dressed Barney in some nice clothes, a sweater and a pair of jeans, and introduced him to the rest of my stuffed family. From that point on, Barney spent a lot of time on my beds. When I had a camera, I would get Barney, Teddy and all the other stuffed brainwashers in line and photograph them. My dad would give me such a hard time about this. "Film is so expensive! Why do you waste it by taking pictures of your stuffed animals?" Mostly, though, he would just make fun of me. You'd think I was the world's biggest idiot for going to Washington DC on a fifth grade trip and taking pictures of the pigeons instead of the Washington Monument. Big deal. The monument would be there forever. These pigeons were gonna take off. Seriously.

I never regretted taking pictures of my stuffed animals. Sure, I felt silly about it sometimes, but regret? No. After all, these animals were just as much a part of my family as my "real" parents were. As a matter of fact, one of the most traumatic things that ever happened to my little brainwashed self was when we came home from a long drive, returning from West Virginia to visit my mom's relatives. When we arrived home, one of my thoughtless, inconsiderate parents opened the hatchback and Teddy FELL OUT of the car onto the hard, rough gravel driveway. I knew immediately that he was dead and went directly into the process of grieving.

Yes, I was a drama queen.

But it wasn't all my fault! I mean, my mom took my bear very seriously, almost as seriously as she took her own. Once every few months, she would cut a little slit in the seam on the back of Teddy's neck, take out all of his stuffing, and wash his body in the washing machine. After he had been fluffed dry, she would carefully re-stuff him, adding more fluff if necessary, restitch any places that were in need of restitching, and fix any facial features that were in danger of falling off. And then, she would carefully re-stitch that seam in the back of his neck and it would take me days to get his stuffing back the way I liked it.

It was understandable that Teddy needed an occasional bath. I took him absolutely everywhere. And I'm sure I threw up, peed and drooled on him and I most definitely know that I cried on him. He understood so much more than anyone ever did. He understood my heartaches, tears, and all of the unfairness of a child's life. Teddy stood by me. Or rather, sat by me. Or kinda hung limp beside me.

As I grew older, Teddy and I remained close, but Barney and I grew apart. After all, he was my mom's teddy bear. He just shouldn't be around, I thought, when I cried to Teddy about the bad words my mom would say to me, the bad words she would say to my dad, the bad names she would call us both, the embarrassing stories she would tell her friends about me, the fists that struck me, the hands that slapped me. Barney could never have understood the feelings I had. But Teddy did.

Teddy remains with me still. He went with me when I moved out of the house at age 18, no longer able to stand the mental and physical abuse my mom continually dosed out. He stayed with me through a failed engagement, many jobs, several apartments, and a handful of boyfriends. He continued to offer a shoulder (or head, or tummy, or back) to cry on.

 
Shortly after I moved out, Barney left with my mom when she divorced my dad and moved out of the home in which we'd lived for almost my whole life. My dad lived there alone for a while, but since my grown, adult parents couldn't come to an agreement on how their stuff should be divided, and since the divorce continued to get uglier and uglier, they sold the house. My childhood home was no longer mine, and all of my stuff, everything in my yellow room, including Miss Kitty, disappeared from my life forever.

But I still have Teddy, and every once in a while, I'll turn him over and run my fingers along the seam in his back

::: true story tuesday: children of the corn[field] :::

Being an only child can be quite a challenge. I remember hearing people tell my parents that only children did not socialize enough and therefore would be spoiled rotten or or hyperactive or just plain strange.

They were totally and completely right.

I spent a lot of time with my cat who had been given to me by our neighbor Linda Wise when I was about five years old. I think the kitten knew immediately what was to be in store for her, using her keen kitty senses, because as soon as her little white paws hit the living room floor, she was off, hiding behind the couch for hours. While she trembled back there, I named her.

Five times I named that cat.

Popcorn. No. Snow White. Uhuh. Snowball. Nope. Peanuts. Nah.

I needed something more original. Something that was as unique as I was. Something no one had ever thought to name a cat before, ever.

So I named her Miss Kitty. Kitty for short.

Kitty curled up at the foot of my bed at night, played with me when she felt like it, tolerated me until she didn't feel like it, and mostly napped in the rafters of the basement. A couple of times, she got out of the house and scared me out of my wits, because I was sure I'd never see her again, but she came back, and she remained an inside cat for as long as we had her, which was until I moved out of the house at 18.

Kitty wasn't my only friend. I also spent a lot of time with my good buddy Pancho. Out of all of the kids in the neighborhood and all of the kids at school, Pancho was my very best friend. She was so cooperative and kind, ate dinner with us every night, and spent the night with me when I wanted her to. She took long walks with me, accompanied by her trained pony and her very colorful and incredibly tame pet parrot. The biggest problem I had with Pancho was getting people to take her seriously. It really bugged me when I had to tell people not to sit on Pancho, or not to step on Pancho, or to stop interrupting Pancho when she was talking. It was just rude. Nevermind that they couldn't see her or hear her. Just because she was imaginary didn't mean she didn't have feelings.

Pancho and I spent a lot of time in the cornfields around our house. Our ranch-style home sat on five and a half acres of land, but we only used about an acre and a half of it. The rest was rented out to Coony Geiger, who farmed it and all of the other fields around our house with corn. So, essentially, our house was surrounded on three sides by cornfields. In the Spring, Coony would pay my parents and plow our garden plot in exchange for the use of the field. This, to me, was just ridiculuous. I couldn't believe that my parents actually got PAID to have Coony plant the corn. After all, a cornfield was better than just about any playground I'd ever seen.

My most fascinating, imaginative and frightening stories happened in the cornfields. When Pancho didn't feel like playing, my other friends (the kind with actual skin and bones and stuff) would play hide and seek in the cornfield. Around the middle of July, the corn was so high you could run through it and no one would be able to see you. We were always very careful not to pull up stalks, because my mom said that every cornstalk we destroyed was robbing Coony Geiger of his crop. So we only ran between the stalks with wide spaces, like where the corn hadn't grown or the corn planting machine had forgotten to drop a kernel. We'd run through those fields, trying to get as far as possible before "IT" could count to fifty, and then we'd scrunch down very low, looking for any sign of "IT"'s feet so that we could take off running again. The leaves of the stalks would whip my arms and legs as I ran by, and later, when I showered, the tiny scratches left behind would burn and itch when the water hit them. That was what summer truly felt like.

I remember one summer taking a walk through the cornfield all alone not long after it had sprouted, so it was probably only about two feet tall. As I was walking, I spotted this strange looking thing sticking up out of the ground, all red and orange and yellow. I crept cautiously up to it, trying to identify it. It kind of looked like it was growing out of the dirt, but the again, it looked like maybe it had been buried there. Upon closer examination, I was sure I knew that it was...

...a chopped off finger!

I examined it as closely as I dared. It really looked like a chopped off finger all right, and it looked like someone had stuck it right in the mud, like they wanted to see if it would grow. It had definitely been there for a while, because, while it wasn't decayed, it was all kinds of freaky colors. I picked up a piece of cornstalk and poked at it very carefully, ready to take off running if the rest of of it clawed its way out of the earth. It didn't move. What if, I thought, this wasn't just a chopped off finger. What if, I thought, it was actually a whole body, and this was just the finger sticking out of the ground! I could barely stand to stay there much longer, but I could barely pull myself away from this creepy thing that was sticking up out of the ground, all red and white and black, just like a dead finger should look. After concentrating on the dead finger for a while and convincing myself that, yes, this was indeed a dead finger, and it could actually even be a dead finger that belonged to an alien (I had just seen Close Encounters and knew that there really were aliens and that they would come to talk to me soon), I freaked myself out enough that I was almost afraid to turn and run. I knew that the minute I turned my back, the dead finger would jump up out of the ground and chase after me. Don't ask me how a dead finger can run. I don't know. But in my eight-year-old mind, that finger was gonna run, and when it caught me, it was gonna do horrible dead-finger-like things to me.

After a while, I couldn't stand it anymore, and I knew I had to leave. I was so afraid that my parents were going to ask me about this dead finger, or, scarier yet, that they were going to find out that I knew about the dead finger they had planted in their cornfield and then they were going to plant my dead finger there, too. I was so afraid of it that I never told them about the creepy dead finger that I found. I was afraid to go back into the cornfield for a week, just in case the dead finger could move around to different parts of the field, or it had dead finger friends who were also waiting all around the cornfield to rise up out of the ground and chase me.

For many years, I believed that there was some kind of finger or dead person or other creepy thing buried in our cornfield. But time heals all dead fingers, and eventually I couldn't stand the thought of staying out of the field, because it was my playground, my hiding place, my magical kingdom. Pancho and I got up the courage to go back into the cornfield, and, before long, we were picking up leftover ears of corn on a hot August evening for her pony, Wildfire. After a while, I stopped being afraid of the creepy dead finger. But I never forgot about it.

It wasn't until I became and adult that I saw that creepy dead finger again. In my adult mind, through my adult eyes, it was very easy to see that the creepy dead finger was just a fungus. A bright red, black and white fungus that looked like a creepy dead finger. My adult mind could see this and know it.

But that doesn't mean that my adult mind didn't entertain the possibility that even a fungus could be an alien.


You never quite get over being an only child.

Photo from ChuckDoherty.com. 

::: true story tuesday: keeping up with the smiths :::

It's important to find things to keep you occupied when you live in the country. It's especially important to make friends with your neighbors, and to keep the friends you make. When I was a child in my neighborhood, there weren't many houses, which means there weren't many families, which means there weren't many kids. But there were the Smiths.

The Smiths lived in a really nice two story house three cornfields away to the north. Gene and Marilyn Smith were Catholic and had three kids when I first met them, and then had a fourth child later. Dawn was a two years older than I; Tony was my age, and Steffy was three years younger. Timmy came along when I was about eight or nine.

Gene and Marilyn were loud and colorful, and they always had the best things. Gene was a plumber and must have made a nice chunk of change because he could afford that nice two-story house, a very nice yard with a lot of flowers, an in-ground pool with a big, tall fence around it, and all of the coolest toys.

I remember one summer, Gene bought a moped for Tony and I happened to be there when they were riding it. Tony was riding it all over the yard, being the daredevil that he was. It looked so easy and so fun that I just had to try it, which was probably the best bad idea a person could ever have. Naturally, I got my turn. Naturally, I mistook the gas for the brake, and naturally, I flipped the dumb thing over. I didn't get hurt, but I've had a healthy respect for two-wheeled motorized vehicles ever since. Tony, however, did not have a healthy respect for me, and I was teased about this all the way through our school years together.

I spent many hours swimming in the Smiths' pool, which was a miracle given that, #1, my parents didn't seem to care too much for the Smiths (but my parents never had many good things to say about anyone) and, #2, my parents were so overprotective, I wasn't allowed to associate with anyone that they even suspected of being a shifty character. The fact that they let me splash around in the water with people like The Smiths without even staying to watch is, frankly, a bit hard for me to believe now.

Somehow, though, I was able to spend a lot of time with the Smiths, and I was able to spend a lot of time in their pool. Obviously, I didn't spend as much time in their pool as they did. This was so apparent because of my total inability to make any graceful movements in the water. Tony was always very quick to point that out.

"You call that swimmin'?!?" He would laugh his obnoxious Tony Smith laugh. "You're just splashin' around! Don't you know how to swim?"

We had this conversation every time I tried to swim in their pool. Every time, I would splash ungracefully, and every time, he would laugh at me. To this day, when I try to swim, I remember that I really can't swim because Tony Smith said so.

When the pool got boring, or it was too cold to swim, we would play Engine Engine Number Nine in the front yard:

Engine, Engine Number Nine
Going Down the Chicago Line
If the Train Should Jump the Track
Do you want your money back?

And then, there was:

Bubblegum, Bubblegum in a dish
How many pieces do you wish?

And my very favorite, because of the fantastic mental images it conjured:

My mother and your mother were hanging out clothes.
My mother punched your mother right in the nose.
What color was the blood?

I always chose green.

We would also play freeze tag, or TV tag, or some other kind of tag, or hide and seek, or we'd pretend we were spies (sometimes we really were spies, spying on Dawn who would get mad at us and tell us to grow up).

If totally necessary, Marilyn Smith would let us play inside.

In spite of what my parents said, I thought Gene and Marilyn were really nice. They both laughed and smiled a lot, and Gene always had some kind of joke to tell that I didn't really understand. Marilyn never failed to gently touch one of my springy curls and sweetly tease me that she was going to cut them all of to keep them for herself. She loved my brown ringlets.

But Marilyn Smith had rules, too. For instance, we weren't allowed in their living room because it was to stay clean just for company, and we weren't allowed in their parents' bedroom because...well, because it was simply off-limits. I did sneak in there one time, though, because Tony had told me that they had a sink that was made just to wash his parents butts. I didn't believe him, so I snuck in one time, just to see if it was true. And sure enough, there it was. Right by the toilet. It was a toilet-looking thing made just for washing butts, which I now know was a bidet.

But I would have to say that Tony's biggest claim to fame as far as I was concerned was the booger. Tony was the kind of kid who was obsessed with bodily functions, even more so than most boys his age. Tony was the only kid I ever knew who would try really hard to smell his own farts, admitting with no shame whatsoever that he did it because he liked the way his own farts smelled. He liked to brag about any kind of sound, fluid or goo his body produced, and that, of course, included boogers. If Tony found an exceptionally large or gooey booger, he would not for one second hesitate to show it to the closest person, except for his sister Dawn. Dawn was very mature and only tolerated, with a very low patience level, the antics of her annoying little brother, and, in turn, the antics-by-association of me. So, if there was a choice between showing Dawn the booger and showing me the booger, I would win every time. I think.

The thing that was different about Tony was that he didn't get embarrassed when anyone mentioned bodily functions. In our house, no one EVER said the word "fart," though my mom was the queen of gaseousness. And if I were to be caught in school with a booger hanging from my nose, I would simply have died. But not Tony. No. Tony would just laugh and pull it out, maybe even measure it, and show anyone who was nearby so that they could all appreciate the fineness of his great big boogers.

One day, when I got on the bus, there were no seats anywhere, except for next to Tony. Now, I played with Tony during after-school hours mostly out of sheer boredom, but when we were on school property, I really would rather not have seen or been seen with him. What do you expect? He was embarrassing, for crying in the mud! But I was also a fairly nice kid, so if his was the only seat left on the bus, I wasn't going to make a big deal out of it.

So, I sat down next to Tony and started talking to him when I noticed that he had something stuck in the top of his blonde hair. Being the nice person I was, I reached out for it, this thing that was stuck there, right on the top of his head. I took hold of it and pulled, and it was cold, sticky and rubbery.

It was a booger.

I was so totally grossed out, I could have puked. I shook the disgusting thing off of my hand and stared at Tony with repulsion. He just laughed, as if he had placed it there himself, just so I would find it and pull it out of his hair. And maybe he did.

To this day, when I see something in a person's hair, I either point it out to them, or I let them discover it themselves. I never, ever, ever touch it.

::: true story tuesday: living off the land :::

There was no question in my mind that I could do it.

I sat in the back yard, behind the dog pen, hunched inside of a makeshift tent that was constructed out of heavy wooden beams and a big, black tarp, something my dad had brought home (read: stolen) from the rubber shop where he worked. I had in my hand a small mason jar full of ripe red raspberries, picked only minutes ago from the row of bushes that ran along the north side of the chain link fence that was the dog pen. I was attempting to make raspberry jam, using a spoon and smashing the raspberries into a thick, gooey pulp. No sugar needed. These babies were plenty sweet. Not necessary to cook it. Plus, I wasn't allowed to play with fire. And who needed toast? It was a jam good enough to eat with your fingers, right out of the jar.

This was all part of a plan to prove to myself that I could live off of the land.

It seemed to me, even then, that it wasn't completely necessary to have grocery stores. After all, everything that you could buy at the store could be made or grown at home. Well, with the exception of bananas and baloney. But I could live without bananas and baloney.

My thinking was this: I really needed very little to survive. First off, I was pretty skinny. I had been a skinny kid since the very beginning, and had worried my parents because I "ate like a bird." They would take me to the doctor, who would assure them that I would eat when I was hungry, and then he would assure me that he would marry me someday, and let me choose a reward from the treasure chest (I always chose a ring, so I could say that it was from the doctor who was going to marry me someday). My great-grandfather, who we called Big Grandpa because he was very tall and was married to Little Grandma, who was very short, would shake his head at me at every family gathering. "You look like a bird! You're going to dry up and fly away!"

But I really don't think it's fair to say that I didn't eat, because I really did. I loved fruits, vegetables, bread and bacon. I ate a lot of stuff. And I ran around a lot. And I think it's because of the things I liked to eat that I came to my conclusion that I could live off the land.

After all, what could be better than a fresh carrot, straight from the garden, plucked from grandma's vegetable plot before it was big enough? Well, a tomato, of course! A red, sun-warmed, juice-drips-down-to-your-elbow-burning-the-scrape-on-your-arm-from-the-bike-accident tomato is one of the best things that can ever happen to a real, garden-loving kid. There's no store-bought tomato that could even pretend to be more than a tasteless water balloon. And corn! Well, if a kid could start a fire (once she was allowed to use matches for more than burning the trash once a week) and boil some water, corn would just be the best thing in the world to eat! And since I was such a dairy addict, I certainly had to have a cow. With a cow, I could have milk, and butter, and ice cream. None of those required matches. And what did cows eat? Grass! How hard could that be to grow?

Given all of this staggering logic, I knew that I never really had to have a job. I could eat fruits and veggies straight from the garden, sleep in my tent, and drink milk and make butter from my cow who only needed to eat grass. It was a flawless plan. Sometimes, I still pull elements from it. This is why I needed to know how to make bread from scratch, or how to knit a scarf, a hat, or a pair of mittens, how to milk a cow, how to raise a goat, how to butcher a pig, how to make yogurt. This is why things just don't feel right if there isn't a garden filled with herbs, veggies, fruits and weeds in our yard. This is why I've made homemade horehound drops, why I read books by Gene Logsdon and Wendell Berry, why I get so excited about mulberry season, and why I have a get that goofy nostalgic look on my face when I see a row of red raspberries, gooseberries or currants. Because when I was seven years old, I had a plan. And I was sure that I could live off the land from that moment on. It would work. How could it not?

As long as it stayed summer all year 'round.

::: true story tuesday: crushed :::

In an effort to chronicle my life for my children and grandchildren, and also to hone my writing skills, I've decided to begin a weekly feature titled True Story Tuesday. In it, I will share a true story about my life.

Jimmy was one of the most handsome men in the whole world. He had wavy black hair, very big brown eyes, and the most friendly smile ever. I knew that our lives together would be very happy, and that he would treat me like a queen. Every word he spoke to me was like honey. Every look he gave me sent chills down my spine. Spending the rest of my life with Jimmy was all I could think about. I knew that I would have plenty of time to think about him, too, for the rest of my life.

Jimmy was in my first grade class.

It's so funny that a six-year-old child can have such strong romantic feelings, but I definitely did. I was very serious about Jimmy and could barely concentrate on learning my addition facts or staying inside the lines with someone as cute as he was sitting in the same room with me. And the thing about Jimmy wasn't just that he was cute. He was nice, too! He always had a polite word to say, and a nice smile on his face, and a nice answer for the teacher. There was no better word for him. He was just nice.

You would think, with as nuts about Jimmy as I was, that everyone would know how I felt. But they didn't. Not even Jimmy. He was, and remained until now, my secret crush. Sure, I've mentioned him a time or two. Why not? Jimmy and I were classmates from kindergarten all the way through graduation. But I never shared with anyone exactly how I felt about Jimmy. Not my friends, my other classmates, and especially not my parents.

As a matter of fact, I think that my relationship (or non-relationship, actually) with Jimmy was the conversation piece (or non-conversation piece, actually) that set the tone for communication (or non-communication, actually) with my parents for the rest of my life. I remember, very distinctly, sitting in my room watching T.V., because as an only child, it was totally understandable that I would have my own television in my room, and since my dad was (and still is) a T.V. junky, it only makes sense that there would be T.V.s in every room in the house, including mine. I was probably watching Sesame Street, or The Waltons or Little House on the Prairie. It seems like it was evening, so I could have been watching The Brady Bunch or Sonny and Cher, too. But I remember that I was totally immersed in the show and not really interested in having a conversation. But here came my mom. And somehow, I felt very uncomfortable with her there in my room. I sensed that she was sabotaging me, somehow, and I didn't even know what that word meant when I was six years old. But there I was, and here was this uncharacteristic visit from my mother, right in the middle of one of my favorite shows. Maybe, in all fairness, she was just trying to bond with me. Maybe she had just been thinking, like I often do as a mother, that she should be spending quality time with me instead of letting me sit in my room watching hour after hour of television. But I definitely had the feeling that I was being set up. So here she was, in my room, sitting on my beanbag chair, and she was asking me about my day at school. I may be wrong, but I don't think it was the first day of school, and it wasn't like my mother at all to ask me about my day (at least not that I remember). She just wasn't a milk-and-cookies-when-you-get-home kind of mom.

After a few seconds of chit-chat about who-knows-what, she asked me.

"So...do you have any little boyfriends?"

I knew it. Sabotage. Maybe it was in the way she tried to slip into my room and be all nicey-nice. Maybe it was because of the way she worded the question, so demeaning, "any little boyfriends." Whatever it was, it totally set me off. I, even in my little six-year-old head, was offended by my mother's allusions to my immaturity and childlike silliness.

And it was at this point that I made the decision that would affect my relationship with my mother for the rest of my life.

I lied.

"No." I answered. That was it. Nothing else.

And I went back to watching The Six Million Dollar Man or Sanford and Son, or whatever I was watching. It could even have been Hawaii Five-O, because I just wasn't paying attention anymore. All I could think of was that my mom found out, somehow, about Jimmy, and that she was trying to weasel her way into my personal life, and I just wasn't about to let her.

This was a trend that continued all through my at-home years. Never, not even once, did I share with my mother about my crushes, boyfriends or even my fiances. Somehow I knew that she had some strange ulterior motive, that she was too overprotective or jealous to be trusted with such sensitive information.

I also vowed that I would never refer to my daughters' crushes as her "little boyfriends."

And I never have.

::: true story tuesday: the giant who pulled my pigtails :::

In an effort to chronicle my life for my children and grandchildren, and also to hone my writing skills, I've decided to begin a weekly feature titled True Story Tuesday. In it, I will share a true story about my life.

The Giant Who Pulled My Pigtails

One of the worst things about living in rural Ohio was our very long lane. I can't even begin to count how many times I had to run to the end of that lane to catch the approaching schoolbus. Sometimes, when the icy air froze my nostrils together, my mom would wait with me in the warmth of our Volkswagen van, but most often, I was on my own. Even now, as a forty-year-old woman, I still have nightmares that I'm standing at the storm door in the front room, and I miss the bus, because I either don't have my schoolbooks together, or I'm in my Scooby Doo undies, or I don't have my hair brushed.

And having my hair brushed was a very, very big deal, so I certainly couldn't have gotten on the bus with my tresses in a tangle.

Most times, when I was very young, my mom would tame my stubbornly curly hair into two sections and pull them into pigtails on top of either side of my head. It was the only time my hair looked cute. Usually, it was a stubborn mess, a "rat's nest," as my mom would call it.

On one occasion, when I was in kindergarten, my pigtails and I took that long driveway to the end and got on that big bus full of kids who were all older than I, and I found my seat. I don't think I was particularly bratty as a little child (my pictures of me look sweet enough) but something prompted one of the eighth grade boys (who were absolutely GIGANTIC when I was five) to use my pigtails daily as a source of entertainment. I was so intimidated and afraid of losing this older kid's attention that I didn't even tell my parents that my hair was being yanked. Then again, I don't think I told my parents much at all.

But one evening, as my mom was removing the rubber bands from my pigtails, she noticed that my tender young head was red and swollen, which, believe it or not, was not a normal thing. She finally got it out of me that this big kid...let me see, what was his name...Gary, I think (I feigned, knowing his name full well), had been, once in a while, accidentally tugging on my hair a little bit. She didn't say much as she finished brushing out my rat's nest.

The next day, I rode home on the bus, as usual, and Gary may or may not have pulled my pigtail, as he normally did, and the busdriver, Gib (who was my busdriver from the time I was five until I graduated from high school) made a left turn onto Lovebury Road, just like every day. But what was very NOT normal was that, when we got to eighth-grade Gary's stop, my mother was there, at the end of eighth-grade Gary's driveway, with her hands on her hips. Wow, I thought, I wonder why my mom's picking me up here? But it turned out that my mom wasn't there for me, but for my vengeance. She stomped onto that bus. She pulled big eighth-grade Gary out of his seat. She grabbed two fistfulls of eighth-grade Gary's beautiful black hair. And she yanked. Hard. Again. And again. And again. She yanked until eighth-grade Gary screeched like a little kindergarten girl. And then she stuck her finger in that big kid's face and spoke between gritted teeth.

"If you every touch my daughter again, I'll take each of your fingers off with my teeth." And then she took me by the hand, pulled me off that bus, and walked me home.

And then she took a pair of scissors from my dad's barber kit and lopped off all of my curls, cutting my hair so short that everyone thought I was a boy, including the cute older boys that I wanted to kiss.

::: true story tuesday: yellow :::

In an effort to chronicle my life for my children and grandchildren, and also to hone my writing skills, I've decided to begin a weekly feature titled True Story Tuesday. In it, I will share, ahem, a true story about my life.

In a creative writing class years ago, my professor shared these words of wisdom: "Don't assume it's interesting just because it happened to you. It has to be interesting because you make it interesting through your writing."

Here's hoping it's interesting to you, dear readers.

Yellow 

The first thing that comes to my mind is waking up in my own bedroom.

See, when I think back on my childhood, there are an overwhelming amount of memories...some very, very good ones and some very, very bad ones. I've told parts of most of the good ones many times to whatever poor soul would listen--my kids, my husband, the dog. But it's very hard to narrow it down to the ones that are worth actually sitting down and hammering out in writing. In my megalomaniacal mind, I want to write my whole fascinating life from start to finish. But how practical is that? I know that it's impossible to tell them all, so I'll just tell them as they come to my mind.

I don't know if there was a particular thing that made me feel the way I did that day, but I remember it so clearly that I think of it often, probably once a week. That seems like a lot, but I really do. Maybe I think of my childhood more than most people, I don't know. But I probably recall some bit of my growing-up daily. So much of it affects the way that I relate to my own children and the things that I do for them, and there are things about being a kid in that house that I will never, no matter how hard I try, forget.

But on the day that particular day, I woke up in my room and felt so very fortunate. Even blessed.

I don't think that I was very old, maybe ten or eleven. It's hard to tell, because I spent a lot of time changing rooms in our ranch house on Hartville Road. Since I was an only child, and there were three bedrooms in the house, I switched between the two smaller bedrooms often. It was always so exciting to me to get a new room, like a new world, and to change the view out my bedroom window.

On this particular day, I was in the middle room. The bathroom was directly across the hall from me, and my parent had the bigger room that was attached to the bathroom. I probably spent most of my growing up in this bedroom, because I know that it's the bedroom that I lived in until I moved all of my stuff out of the house when I turned eighteen. Most of my memories come from that room. So, maybe after about ten or eleven, I stopped moving from room to room. Anyway, for the sake of clarity (which can be dangerously close to the same thing as inducing boredom), I'll name the rooms, which we didn't do when I was a child, but it will make it simpler now.

The back room, where I spent a lot of time before I was 10 or so, was mostly pink. After I moved out of it, it became my mother's sewing room. While it still had a twin bed in it, it wasn't really used for sleeping much, except for when I may have decided to sleep in it for the night, just for the sake of novelty. I seemed to like to sleep in a lot of different places, including the bathtub, which was one of my favorite weird-kid rituals, taking all of my pillows and blankets and sleeping in the bathtub all night. I don't know why I did it, because I always woke up many times in the tub uncomfortable and trying to work the kink out of my neck enough that I could go back to sleep, but I often went back to that weird-kid ritual and my parents always let me. They would even come to the bathtub to tuck me in. I guess they were kind of weird parents, too.

So, the pink room was the sewing room.

My room, and this is what I remember about this particular day, was the yellow room. It had yellow-ish wallpaper (though later, or maybe earlier...who knows?...it changed to a different kind of wallpaper. More about that in another post), green carpet, and--and this is the part I remember--yellow princess curtains.

Now, maybe I was influenced by the movie The Little Princess with Shirley Temple and how she woke up the morning after that mysterious Indian guy next door granted her wish, and how she woke up and the first thing she did was run her fingers along the edge of the luxurious linens. I don't remember if I'd seen that movie recently on the day I woke up in my yellow room, or if I had even seen it at all, but that morning, the sunrays came streaming through those yellow princess curtains, danced upon my eyelids, and gently roused me from my sleep. I lay there in the warm sunlight, looking at the sweet color, that happy, sunny yellow of the princess curtains, and I suddenly felt very blessed. I don't know that I can explain the feeling much better than that. I simply felt as if I were the luckiest girl in the world, and that my room was the very prettiest, very sweetest, very most princess-est room that ever existed, and that I was so fortunate to have such a magical and royal room.

Looking back on it, I think it was the beginning of a love for the simple and bucolic. My room was not at all fancy. Most likely, my mother had made the curtains herself or bought them at the discount department store where we often shopped (which was later turned into a K-Mart, and then into something I can't remember, and is now a small strip mall), but there was something about that sunny yellow color that made me very happy. Actually, yellow still makes me very happy, and yet I don't have a single room in my house that has a single wall painted yellow.

Maybe it's just too sacred, that color, and is to be reserved solely for that bedroom in my mind and the reflection of the sun off of the yellow maple leaves in the autumn. Whatever the reason, yellow lifts my spirits and makes me think of that inspiring day when I was certain that I was a true princess, and nothing in my world could go wrong.

::: if i get there before you do, i'll cut a hole and pull you through :::

How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!

Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide,
Rivers and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside—

Till I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown—
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!

~Robert Louis Stevenson

This is one of the girls' favorite poems, and when we read daily from The Child's Garden of Verses, this one is almost always read. The older children sang a version of it for choir.

Isn't swinging one of those simple, lovely things that makes childhood grand? One of my favorite memories is of my dad pushing me on my little metal swingset in the back yard, me soaring, he loudly singing, "Swing lo, sweet cherry-ought. Comin' for to carry me home." I can remember how I would rush to the swingset at the school next to my aunt's house, even into my teens, when my friend and I would pump our feet to the rhythm of our own voices singing The Steve Miller Band's Fly Like an Eagle.

It's great fun as a child. But somewhere along the line, we decide, or someone tells us, that we're too old for it, and then, when we want to return to it, our bottoms are too big for the seats, or our feet drag on the ground. But if we can get past those parts, it's still a simple, lovely thing to do.

And swinging in sync with a friend? Ah. Magical, isn't it?

I loved watching Sweetheart, The Baby, and their friend Lydia fly through the air, giggling, trying to slow down and speed up to match each other's flight. And even the competition that took place was interesting to watch. The synchronized swinging almost became an obsession with some, and a non-issue with others, and for those some who took it seriously, the fact that no one would sync with her was a great insult to her psyche.

Life is like that. There are things I take way to seriously, and someone might be able to say to me that it's no big deal, that I should just shrug it off, that it doesn't really matter anyway. But that doesn't erase my human emotions, my desire for relationship, my confusion when someone I love, or someone I try to love, rejects me, deals with me callously, or misunderstands my intentions. Why does it matter? Why does it bother me so? Why, when people who love me, people who really know me, people I respect and admire, tell me to forget about it, shrug it off, can't I do so?

I must not be the only one. I was listening to a repeat show on This American Life, an NPR radio program that I download as a podcast each week. This week's theme was The Kindness of Strangers. In it, Brett Leveridge tells the story of his experience of standing on a subway platform. A stranger, which, of course, means someone Brett doesn't even know, probably someone that no one waiting on the subway knows, meanders along the platform, and chooses people as if choosing players for a kickball game: "You're in. You're out. You can stay. You have to leave." But it wasn't like the people who were told they had to go left. They just ignored this strange person. Not Brett, though. For some reason, as the guy approached Brett, all he could think about was how he hoped the guy would approve of him. A guy he didn't even know. A total stranger.

So if, as humans, it matters to us that a total stranger approves of us, how much more important must it be that someone we know, someone who at least in modicum knows us, rejects us?

This is why, I believe, the person of Christ is so compelling. He was, and is, what we long to be. Perfect. Without sin. Blameless. And we long so much for that perfection and blamelessness, for that relationship and acceptance, that it's almost unbearable when someone rejects us for reasons we can't fully understand, even if it's a person we don't particularly like. Even if it's a person we can't really stand at all.

But here was Jesus, and, yeah, like I said. Perfect. Without sin. Blameless. And still, He had enemies. He was despised and rejected. Those He loved denied Him, betrayed Him, doubted Him. What must that have felt like for Him, who didn't just feel He hadn't done anything wrong. He really hadn't done anything wrong!

And so I know that, with all of my flaws and failures, I can't expect to be unconditionally loved by anyone but God, but this feeling of swinging so high, of laughing and and feeling that weightlessness, and laughing, and then falling and scooping so low, and reaching out my hand to sync with someone who chooses to keep theirs death-gripped tightly on the chains, pumping their feet so that they can rise higher and higher and higher than I, is always a bit of a shock to me. Hey, I think, wasn't this supposed to be fun?

And on the worst of days, I just want to jump off of the swing altogether.

My son told me recently that it takes seven positive comments to counteract one negative one. Seven. For every. single. negative. So if you get totally chewed out by someone, told in every way how you've failed, what a loser and terrible person you are, just imagine how much encouraging and building up your loved ones have to do to cancel out what that one uncaring, selfish, unthinking person did.

Wow.

No wonder it's so hard to love. It takes persistence, doesn't it? We have to keep undoing all that's been done, not just by us, but by others, too.

I guess that's why I want to be the one who swings next to you, who, when you reach out your hand for someone to sync with, grabs that hand and sticks right next to you, keeping time with your rhythm, no matter how high or low you go.

Sometimes I'm up, sometimes I'm down
Coming for to carry me home
But still my soul feels heavenly bound
Coming for to carry me home

The brightest day that I can say
Coming for to carry me home
When Jesus washed my sins away,
Coming for to carry me home.

On Being A Non-Runner at Forty.

When I was lithe and slight and eighteen, an early summer day would find me stretched out on the lounger in my rural back yard, slathered with Hawaiian Tropic Dark Tanning Oil squeezed from that slippery bottle speckled with fresh grass cuttings, the promise of a deep island tan with the added benefit of that classic "tan of the island" coconut scent. It wasn't a relaxing endeavor; some days I would restlessly squint my eyes against the noonday sun and check under my suit strap for proof that I was cooking, wondering how long I could take the beating rays before giving in. Other days, I would partner up with the hose and mist myself every few minutes, taking advantage of any light breeze that would come my way. And some days, the breeze itself was enough to cool the heat, and I would relax, willing the wind to blow, but never falling asleep like my friend Stef, who would snooze on her side and come away with a raging burn on one half of her body, the other half maintaining its original ghostly whiteness.

I never had a problem achieving a tan. I can remember my dad coming home from work on summer days when I was just a child and declaring, "Well, you're brown as a biscuit!", a description he and I still use on my own little sunbunnies. I never had a freckle or a burn in my young life, just a Coppertone-girl golden-brownness.

As a teen, I would take advantage of this ease-of-tanning on those sometimes-blistering, sometimes-breezy days, feeling that I could give myself an instant makeover by just spending a couple of hours lounging around. My favorite part of the ritual was always the lukewarm shower that followed, the moments where the water would resist the oil and form droplets on my darkened legs, where the whiteness of winter would meet with the crisp, brown lines of summer. And then, after the shower, it was the choosing of the whitest tank top or t-shirt, something that would showcase all of my time and dedication. Of course, a thin layer of after-shower Hawaiian Tropic wouldn't hurt, either. Just enough to emit that summer scent.

After Bard was born, my skin changed. Hours in the sun would result in a smattering of freckles over my face and arms, but particularly on my shoulders. My legs, now carrying the weight of too many cravings, rarely saw any kind of light, let alone that of the sun, so they remained a pasty white. Though I'd never been into bikinis, due to a frightening incident of the realization of power when I presented myself in a white knit bikini to the young man I was dating as he picked me up for a boating outfit. His jaw dropped. I got scared. I changed into a one-piece. Still, I had allowed myself modest two-piece suits when tanning in my own yard. Now, the area that had once been my taught tummy, henceforth my big belly, would never again own a tan.

I have fantasies of living in that young body again, sleeping in it, running in it, tanning in it. Sometimes, like today when I was lying in my new lounger, the fantasy is so strong that I awaken with a sort of shock when I open my eyes to this frumpier, flabbier, frecklier body. And I vow I will change it. I will run. I will get fit. I will cut out the Dr. Pepper and the potato salad.

And I do think I should. I could just kick myself for getting out of the running habit, especially since it seems that everyone around me has picked it up and, ahem, run with it. And it makes me feel like a foreigner, an outsider, even a leper of sorts. Can't I just do this simple thing? Can't I just get out there and run?

But it seems that my impatience runs true. Face it, I tell myself, you have a hard time just LYING STILL for fifteen minutes. When running, I find myself constantly checking my clock. Am I done yet? Have I filled the time requirement? No? Then why do I feel like dying? When will this end?

And, unlike tanning, one outing doesn't offer a makeover. An afternoon in the sun would always elicit comments like, "Wow! You've been in the sun!" Unless I walk into the grocery store with my running shoes and jogging attire on, sweat dripping from my furrowed, impatient brow, no one will say, "Wow! You went running today!"

Even my pastor, my trusted pastor, has jumped on the bandwagon. On Sunday, he gave a sermon based on Hebrews 12: 1-2.

^"1-3Do you see what this means—all these pioneers who blazed the way, all these veterans cheering us on? It means we'd better get on with it. Strip down, start running—and never quit! No extra spiritual fat, no parasitic sins. Keep your eyes on Jesus, who both began and finished this race we're in. Study how he did it. Because he never lost sight of where he was headed—that exhilarating finish in and with God—he could put up with anything along the way: Cross, shame, whatever. And now he's there, in the place of honor, right alongside God. When you find yourselves flagging in your faith, go over that story again, item by item, that long litany of hostility he plowed through. That will shoot adrenaline into your souls!"

Some pastors,those with less talent, might think that preaching on a running theme would be banal. Some pastors might focus on the pioneers who blazed the way, or the veterans cheering us on. But not Patrick. He preached on running, and it got me all fired up. He said-- and I kid you not, this actually slapped me in the face like a pair of wet running shorts-- "Running is something only we can do for ourselves." Huh. I can't pawn this running responsibility off on someone else, eh? If I want it done, I actually have to do it myself? What a revelation that was... even though he was preaching from Hebrews.

One of the reasons I would like to run is for much the same reason I would like to tan. When I was young, I was good at it, and it felt good. Running came naturally. It was simple, enjoyable. It was the easiest way for a kid to get from one place to another. And it provided hours of entertainment. Freeze tag. TV tag. Kickball. Foot races. Chasing boys on the playground.

But now, I'm forty for crying out loud. And I'm not a *good* kind of forty, either. I'm a flabby, frumpy, freckly forty. My friend and former running partner Kim, who took the easy way out and did not give up running, is a different kind of forty. She's young and trim and gorgeous. And when I see her, and I realize how hard she works to keep running, I think, "You can't look like that. And you don't deserve to look like that. You're just a flabby, frumpy, freckly forty-year-old who can't run a half-mile without your digestive system running the other way," and the old Solomon in my head starts doing the nanny-nanny-boo-boo thing. All is vanity. It's futile to try. What's the point? Blah.

So I battle with myself this way. Every. Single. Day. And if I do get out and run, I criticize myself for not running farther, or often enough, or fast enough.

See why it's easier to tan? Or, better yet, to just stay inside, in my room, at my desk, and write about tanning and running?

Except that today, as I lay in the sun, I actually fell asleep. I actually got a bit of a burn on my upper legs. I didn't use Hawaiian Tropic. I didn't take a shower. I didn't put on my whitest shirt.

And no one anywhere said to me, "You're brown as a biscuit!"

Not even my father.

I guess this means that a tan can't suffice as a makeover anymore. I need something more serious.

I guess this means I'm in the market for a new running partner, someone who can handle me running at a turtle's pace. And possibly vomiting.

And then I'll work on the tan.

Good Day, Sunshine!

Remember those gorgeous Spring days when the sun was shining, and you'd drag the record player to the other room and stick the speakers in the windows, find your favorite Beatles record, and play "Good Day, Sunshine" while your mom pulled weeds and you raked the crass clippings into a wheelbarrow that would be hauled up to the vegetable garden and thrown down between the rows of onions, carrots, peas and lettuce?

Remember how the wind would blow ever so gently, just enough to cool the sweat on your brow, but not so wild as to toss around the piles of clippings you'd worked so hard to rake? If you did a good job, there might be a trip to the ice cream shop in your future, or a few dollars in your pocket to use at that summer's festival. Every once in a while, you'd stop for a drink of ice water or fresh mint tea, and you'd linger a bit too long, and your mom would shout out a reminder to get back to work, and you'd haul yourself back in from the roof to go back to the sunshine and grass and dandelion fluff and bickering with your sisters or brothers. And if no one was looking, you could lay back in the cool grass under the tree or stretch out in the hammock until someone noticed and cried "no fair!" And then you'd grudgingly pick up a rake and get back to work. At least until you could sneak away long enough to take a peek into the bluebird box and see that there's a mama bird sitting on her tiny sky blue eggs.

Yeah.

That's what my kids' day is like today, right down to the record player in the window. Since their sister sent her Beatles vinyls home from college yesterday, they've been spinnin' the tunes, and it's a soundtrack custom-made for a day like today. "Here Comes the Sun" and "Good Day, Sunshine" are in rotation.

"I need to laugh, and when the sun is out
I've got something I can laugh about
I feel good, in a special way
I'm in love and it's a sunny day."

I'm telling you, there could barely be a better day, unless I had a maid to clean my house and a cook to make dinner while I'm outside digging in the dirt, spreading manure and sowing seeds.

I have work to do inside, filling out forms and finishing video projects, but I just can't tear myself away from the beauty of this day. I absolutely want to soak up every minute of this paradise.

::: wintery thoughts on a wintery day :::

It's a child's dream, a snow like this. We didn't get it for Christmas, but we're welcoming it all the same. It's the time of year when we discover that we don't have enough matching gloves and mittens, or someone is missing their snowboots, or that a pair of pants doesn't fit under the snowsuit anymore. The snow bikes, snowboards and sleds are dug out from the barn, ramps are made, shovels are re-purposed from digging holes to making ramps, and I, the mother, venture out long enough to make an appearance, take a few trips on the sled, and get laughed at for my lack of snow savvy.
And then I head back inside to make a batch of homemade hot chocolate with real whipped cream, a dash of grated dark chocolate and a sprinkle of cinnamon on top. Everyone claims their favorite mug while I revel in a job well done, listening to the "oooohhhh!"s and "yum!"s as they drink it up.

It's great fun to look out onto the hillside from the warmth of my house and feel like I'm lazing around inside a giant snow globe.

I wish I were independently wealthy. I'd love to take my children downhill skiing. It was the only "sport" that I loved as a teen, aside from fishing. Every Monday after school, all season long, a group of us would climb aboard the bus with our ski club advisers and make the long drive to the closest slopes (Ohio isn't exactly known for its skiing spots) where we would suit up, pull on those giant ski boots, and do that awkward, clomping ski-boot-walk out to the lift. For hours, we'd ride up, ski down, ride up, ski down, the time passing so quickly that it was always a surprise when it was time to leave. I could ski anything on the slopes, from cruising the bunny hops to carving the moguls, and never sustained any injury, aside from maybe my pride every time I backed onto the lift chair, which I never really could get the hang of, or the few times I fell getting off the chair, which were probably the two hardest parts of skiing for me.

Still, I don't remember being intensely fearful of the process, except for the time that one of my club mates broke her leg. I don't think it had occurred to me up until then that one could actually get hurt having this much fun. I may have had a bit more respect for the slopes after that, but never fear.

When I was a young mother with two toddlers at home, Bo and I took an evening to hit the slopes. I was so excited about getting out there, after having been off of skis for about five years. I suited up, pulled on those big ski boots, wiggled my fingers into my gloves, donned a warm winter hat, wrapped a warm scarf around my neck, and clomped awkwardly to the lift, preparing to race my way down the hills for the first time with my hubby in true ski bunny fashion.

But when I got to the top of the first slope, something happened to me. Something inside of me clicked, snapped, and locked up, and I found myself perched at the peak of a very modest hill, eyes wide, experiencing an unfamiliar feeling.

I was afraid of the slope.

Suddenly, the stupidity of this sport zoomed into view for me. A mortal being attaches long, narrow boards to her feet, perhaps even waxes them, puts her fists around two sticks that end in sharp points, rides high in the sky to the top of an snow-covered hill and, along with hundreds of other people she doesn't know and can't fully trust, races down an icy path. I began to realize how brittle bones are, and how vulnerable the back and neck can be, and how irresponsible it would be for a grown woman to leave her two babies motherless just because she wanted to get a little thrill by speeding down a snowy slope.

Nope.

I don't recall how I made it down that hill, though I'm sure I skied it. Did I enjoy myself, or did I pray for my safety the entire way?

Somehow, I got to the bottom, snapped off my skis, and nestled myself into a comfy chair next to the fireplace in the lodge with a cup of hot chocolate.

Every once in a while, the ski bug bites me, especially when I see Houdin and Monet out there trying to make jumps on our little hillside, and I want to give it another try, but now it's the cost of the thing that prohibits me. I should just put the trip on the credit card and go for it. After all, I can't take it with me. Of course, if I follow that plan, I might be leaving it behind a bit earlier than I had planned.

What did you leave behind when you crossed the threshold of parenthood? What did you pick up? What would you love to see your children do that you did as a child, but you just haven't done it yet? What do they do that you never would have dreamed of doing at their age?

::: bedtime prayers :::

Several years ago, I decided to relinquish my position as bedtime tucker-inner. My rationale was that I'm the mom; I'm with the children all day long; Dad is the dad; he's gone all day long; the children should have a memory of this ritual with their father.

So I handed over my bedtime duties to my husband Bo.

I don't know, exactly, how long he has been putting the kids to bed at night, but I do know (please don't be offended, dearest husband) that it has never been a smooth adjustment. Bo just doesn't put the kids to bed the way I do. He doesn't have that bedtime "touch." He isn't ritualistic in that "floating off to sleepytime-land" kind of way.

Now, you might argue that I was spoiled as a child. And you'd be absolutely correct. My father, the same man who dotes on all of the babies in their babyhood, doted on me when I was a wee one. When my father would put me to bed, he would spend a great deal of time putting me to bed. He would tuck me in, and he would tell me stories, and he would play funny games with me, like "Which of these creatures in the bed is my daughter?", kissing each of my stuffed animals as he pretended that they were me and then animatedly realizing his mistake. This could go on for what seemed like an eternity. Eventually, he would put me to sleep somehow, and tiptoe out of my room.

When my mother would put me to bed, she would sing me lullabyes and stroke my eyelids, just below my eyebrows, very lightly with the tip of her finger. I would lie very still, and my challenge was to keep my eyes closed for as long as I could after she'd left, believing that there was some type of magic in her fingertips that would vanish if I opened my eyes.

And while my parents were fabulous at the bedtime routine, there's one thing they never did that I always knew I'd do when I had children--say prayers over them.

Once I had children of my own, bedtime included all manner of ritual. First, a book. Then, a prayer. Then a big hug and a kiss. And sometimes, a visit back to the bedroom to chase away the "monsters."

When Bard was a toddler, the bedtime ritual wasn't complete until she had said, "Don't drop my house!" I would always promise not to drop her house. To this day, neither she nor I have any clue what she meant.

When the children would awake with nightmares or couldn't sleep because of the terrible, scary baddies lurking in the darkness, I would use my "monster spray," a can of air freshener, fitted with a new label proving that it was, indeed, monster spray. I would shake it overdramatically and spray it all over the room, ridding it of monsters.

As they grew a bit older, I had another little trick to chase the baddies away. I would come to the door and tell them to shout the name of Jesus and tell the children to listen closely. If they were very quiet, they would hear the baddies running away. When they hushed, I'd drum my hidden fingers on a doorway or wall, creating the fleeing footsteps of those cowardly critters. They soon grew wise to my little game, but asked me to do it anyway.

If all of this sounds like a lot of work to put a kid to bed, I guess it was. Eventually, I felt that I needed to hand the task over to my husband. But I could never quite let it go. I wanted him to do it like I did. I wanted him to read to them, and joke with them, and scare away the demons for them. But he never quite got the hang of the privilege of being the tucker-inner. Each time he would trot off to do the bedtime routine, he'd return within just a few minutes. I never understood how you could do a good bedtime routine in under five minutes. That's less than a minute per kid, for crying in the mud! Sometimes, he'd just stand in the hallway and pray for them all collectively. Remembering my own childhood bedtimes, I knew that this would never have been sufficient for me. And I was right. It wasn't sufficient for our kids. For the first several months of the transition, they would moan and complain when Dad would put them to bed. They would call for me. Beg for me. But I really felt that Daddy needed to do this. I tried to make suggestions. I encouraged longer bedtime sessions. I even gave him an anthology of stories to read to the younger children. It never really sunk in. And I've always felt that, somehow, I was cheating the kids. And maybe even cheating myself.

I've decided to take my tucker-inner position back.

For the past three nights, I've insisted on a certain bedtime. No yelling or prodding or coercing. If you're in bed, I'll read you a story and/or pray for you. If you're not, I'll hit the sack without tucking you in. It's that simple.

The second night I was on duty, Sweetheart, my seven-year-old daughter, closed her eyes quietly as I prayed for her. I have a certain way I say the prayers, and certain things I always say peppered with requests and thanks that are appropriate for the day. I always ask God to surround their beds with angels to guard and protect them. I always ask for sweet dreams. And I thank God for our home, and our activities that day, and for the child I'm blessing.

When I finished Sweetheart's prayer, she grabbed my face and said, "Now, I want to pray for you."

Let me tell you what it's like to get your socks blessed off.

The prayer began with her thanking God for her "sweet mother," and telling Him how much she appreciates all that her mother does for her, and how hard she works to make a lovely home for all of her children. She asked for God to bless her mother, to give her sweet dreams and to bless her with peace. And then she ended the prayer with words that brought tears to my eyes. She asked God to help her be kind to others, to treat others they way she likes to be treated.

"Thank you, God, for a mother that loves You. Help us all to grow up to love and serve You, too. In Jesus' precious name we pray, Amen."

I will never, ever again give up my tucker-inner duties. There is nothing you could pay me to let them go. You couldn't drag 'em from me with a team of wild horses.

If you haven't done it in a while, go tuck your kids in. It doesn't matter if they're five years old, or fifteen. Ending the day with a comforting word and a reassuring hug is truly relationship-building and serves as a very special ritual for both the tuckee and the tucker, a time to calm fears and heal wounds and offer apology and forgiveness.

And you might just get your socks blessed off, too.

::: just roll with it, baby :::

I hadn't been on roller skates in, like, fifteen years, and there we were, among a group of our peers, taking our children to skate, among a group of their peers. And our children had never been rolling skating.

"Quads, speed skates or in-lines?" asked the man behind the skate counter. I glanced around me. I couldn't believe how skating rinks had stayed virtually the same since I'd skated. Snack bar, video games, loud music.

"What's the difference?" I asked.

"Uh...well..."

"I mean, I know what quads are, I think. But what are speed skates? And in-lines? Are those the same as roller blades? And which should I get if I haven't been on skates in fifteen years?"

The nice man gave me a quick lesson on skate differences while The Baby pulled on my hand, eager to get onto the rink. Did she have any idea what she was in for?

The evening out was a result of an invitation from our homeschool support group. The rink had been reserved entirely for our group, so it was good to see friendly faces there. As I laced up my skates, one of the fathers chatted with Bo about skating. "Our daughter broke her leg here a couple of years ago." Great, I thought. That's wonderful. What was I thinking?

"Well, I haven't skated in fifteen years...since junior high school," I said, suddenly realizing that it's been more like twenty-five years. What WAS I thinking?

But it really wasn't as bad as I'd thought it would be. I mean, I actually stayed upright the entire time. And none of the kids complained about skating. Monet, always eager to try new things, roller bladed and fell many times, but kept getting up and trying again. Bard was greeted immediately by one of her homeschool group friends and they stuck close by each other through the evening. She, too, fell a few times, but she got right back up and tried again.

Even Sweetheart and The Baby put wheels on their feet and tried. And Bo, who seems to do well at everything he tries, braved the Limbo and actually made it through the first round.

Even though they were playing Petra and Steven Curtis Chapman, it reminded me of my pre-Christian junior high days. An evening wasn't complete without a couples skate, and there were always the ever-popular standards playing as I wheeled expertly around the rink--Hold On Loosely, Strange Magic, Caught Up in You, Working for the Weekend, Hold the Line, Hot Child in the City, Kiss You All Over, and Xanadu. Ahhhh...the excitement of Saturday Night Skating.

But I do recall one not-so-pleasant memory from my early skating experiences. My dad had taken me to a skate rink when I was about eleven, and he sat on a bench as I skated. The older boys were racing around the rink while I fumbled along, jerking backward and forward awkwardly. Plus, I was eleven, for pete's sake! That horrid age when you so very much want to be cool but are very much NOT, especially with your boyish just-out-of-the-seventies haircut and Holly Hobbie shirt, where all of the older boys are so very cute, but they wouldn't notice you unless you...

...unless you happened to skate a bit too slowly right in their speed-skating path. Unless they happened to receive a very big push from one of them as they race past you. Unless you know for a fact that they notice you, because you see them pointing and laughing as you swirl into helplessness. Unless your dad happens to see the whole thing.

And then, as a young girl, you find yourself sprawled on the floor of the skating rink, nothing bruised except maybe your pride (and possibly your butt), but still feeling a secret thrill that he TOUCHED you. Sigh.

Yep, that was me. Right up until I saw my dad reach across the kneewall that separated the seats from the rink and grab that kid, yank him up by his shirt, his skates dangling above the wooden floor, and scream nasty things into the boy's, face which included watching out for little girls on the rink. And I, the little girl, wished that the whole world would just open up and swallow me whole.

I can still remember stealing a glimpse of that boy as he continued around the rink, and I think that was the first time I ever saw anyone give a person the finger. I knew that it was a bad thing, because that kid was mad, and my dad just ignored it.

But I saw it. I see it, still. And it still makes me feel small and humiliated.

I know my dad meant well, but I think I would have been happier to have had him on the floor with me, and my mom and a few siblings would have been nice, too. And if someone knocked me to the floor? Well, he would have been out there to pick me up.

That's why it was so good to see Bo skate around the rink with Sweetheart and encourage The Baby to get her balance, to encourage her to skate into his arms.

And to have him hold my hand as we glided--okay, eased warily--around the rink.

::: changeback messages :::

Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. ~Elizabeth Stone

The past few days have been very trying and challenging. I've been trying to adjust to some recently discovered behavior issues with one of my kids, and it has not been easy. On Wednesday, I was so intensely depressed that I had no will to even attempt to deal with my family in a fair or rational way. I was just angry. Every call of "MOM!" or request for help was just too much for me to handle. Everything I'd ever done, any decision I'd ever made about family, childrearing, love...it was all futile. There was no point to anything.

Edison, my 13 year old son, bore the brunt of my anger, even though he wasn't the main source of my frustration. He and I have been butting heads since he was two, and I have journal entries to prove it. Something just got into that boy's system and has never found its way back out. He's argumentative, independent, headstrong, persistent and his mood changes very easily depending on his surroundings.

He's a lot like me.

So we went head-to-head about his argumentativeness, his sloppiness, his rudeness, his criticism of his siblings. I was ruthless. He was ruthless right back.

The thing is, this is just the type of behavior I've been trying to address. Not that I've been trying to address it so much in Edison, though that seems to come as a side effect of my own changes. I've really been trying to address behavior problems in me.

Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives. ~Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1969

Raised an adopted only child in a very, incredibly dysfunctional household, I got some pretty screwed up signals from my parents. My dad was, and still is, a manipulative liar. My mom was simply out of control. She didn't know how to handle me, and decided that the authoritarian, belittling, beat-the-tar-out-of-the-child approach was what would whip me into shape.

I inherited the best of both parenting worlds.

Most of us become parents long before we have stopped being children. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

This is absolutely, amazingly appalling to me, given that by the age of 12 I had begun planning my post-childhood life, and it did NOT include repeating with my children anything my mother had ever done to me. At that age, I didn't see the manipulation and lying that my dad practiced regularly. I simply saw that he was my savior. He rescued me from bedtime, from discipline, from having to face my mother.

When he was around.

And he wasn't around often. Birthday parties, friends' visits (which were limited, as my mom hated most people and criticized all of my friends), family dinners, you name it. My dad wasn't there. He didn't attend my track meets, dance recitals, school functions or softball games. He just made sure that when he was around, he was the ultimate "good guy."

My parents were not very social, didn't belong to clubs or groups or organizations. My mom had very few friends, and my dad didn't have many good ones. They weren't Christians, so they didn't belong to a church. They simply stumbled along in their child-raising life. I was there to stumble along with them.

When I moved out, my mother carried out the threat she'd screamed many times all through my life. She divorced my dad, and told me that she no longer had a daughter.

So, coming into motherhood, I was ill-equipped. As a daughter, I had been bullied, threatened, beaten, manipulated, lied to, distracted, rewarded, screamed at, hated, argued with, applauded, slapped, shaken, frightened and frustrated. As a mother, I was determined to be better.

Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children and no theories. ~John Wilmot

I read every parenting book I could find. Since I was a Christian, I read a lot of books that approached child-rearing from a "Christian" perspective. Most of those books included some kind of physical or emotional punishment. Spanking, time-out, ignoring the child when they displayed bad behavior, etc. I had been insistent with my husband Bohemian that I would never spank our children. The system I liked best was natural consequences. We spent many conversations discussing this, him telling me that this sounded good in theory, but how would it work in this situation, that situation, and what if it didn't work at all? I stood firm. Until my daughter was born.

Theoretical parenting, or theoretical anything for that matter, is not nearly as difficult as hands-on. I have never done anything in my life as difficult as being a parent. With Bard, I worked very hard to change my ways. I would be positive. I would not allow certain television shows to be viewed. I would bake more, cook at home more, speak positive words more. I would be firm, but fair. I would be consistent, but caring. Bard responded to this so well. But the hardest was yet to come. Bard was actually a fairly easy child to raise, and we raised her by the James Dobson method. Discipline immediately, consistently, lovingly, and informatively.

But, as I said, Bard was easy.

Boy, n.: a noise with dirt on it. ~Not Your Average Dictionary

When Edison was born, I was confused. I had been confused about how he was conceived, I was confused about when we should tell people that I was pregnant only six months after my first child had been born, and I was confused about when he should be born. The issues have changed, but the confusion has not diminished. With Edison, the parenting books flew out the window, and the discipline became much more serious. He was headstrong, to say the least. Some of his first words were "shubbup!" (shut up) and "goway!" (go away). Some of the things he would do would just break my heart. Some of the things he would do would just melt it. So I plugged away, disciplining, caring, trying to be consistent, trying to be fair, and most often, doing all right. Then along came Monet.

Around the time that I had Monet, I joined a feminist mothers at home e-mail list which had influenced my decision to become an attached parent. Monet was with me all the time. He was either attached at the breast or slung from my hip. I taught him sign language to give him a communication advantage. I tried not to spank, but instead ignored bad behavior and rewarded good behavior. Monet, in his effort to be heard, just made the bad behavior louder. And louder. And I became more and more frustrated, and less and less of a person.

Around this time, Bard and Edison discovered a new, entertaining pasttime. Sibling rivalry. This, I believe, was the beginning of my parental breakdown. Up until this time, I thought I was at least a decent parent. By the time Monet had grown old enough to join in with the sibling battles, I had begun reverting to my old parenting tactics, the ones I had learned as a child. Bullying, spanking, anger, belittling, sarcasm...even a few occassions of slapping. The worst one, I think, was screaming. The older my children got, the more they fought with each other...and the more I hated myself.

Because the rule for me had been to always be fair, but the only way I would ever have been able to accomplish that was to be everwhere at all times or to install a million dollar security system in my home. There was no way I could be fair, and to me, that just didn't seem fair. There was only one thing I could do...stop having children.

Now the thing about having a baby - and I can't be the first person to have noticed this - is that thereafter you have it. ~Jean Kerr

And then Sweetheart was born.

While Monet had been a planned pregnancy, Sweetheart was a total surprise. Through the whole of my pregnancy, I worried that she would be another boy. It was because my boys were boys that I was having such a hard time. Girls were, in my very simple opinion from my limited experience, easier than boys. I can't begin to tell you how relieved I was when the midwife called to me to look at my baby's face, to see those rosebud lips and to just know. Sweetheart was a girl.

With Sweetheart, I was walking the line between being an attached parent and a conservative Christian parent. There were a lot of changes going on in my life...buying land, selling a house, moving into a tiny cabin, bringing my dad along with me even though I didn't really want to, but felt too guilty and indebted to say "no," and then, later, building our own home, which took the other part of the time that was left when I wasn't trying to keep a 16x24 foot cabin clean while seven people were living there. The one thing I most desperately did NOT need was another child. And that is precisely when I found out that I was pregnant with Baby. It was the worst pregnancy I could have had, from the horrible vomiting, to the kidney stones, to the flu, to my dad having an incapacitating back injury and, consequently, a nasty bicycle accident. I was so not ready to have another child.

And here's where I need to clarify. It's not the child that's the problem. No, not at all. It's totally and completely ME. I don't know how to care for my children. No, it's not like I can't feed them or clothe them. It's just that I haven't learned to talk to them.

But recently, I've been learning to do just that.

I picked up a book that I had tried to read several years ago, a book called How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk. I had originally glanced through the cartoons, and then I tossed it aside, maybe even gave it away, because it sounded like a bunch of psychobabble. But this time, I read it. And here it was. Me. Right there on the "don't do it this way" illustration. Again and again and again, I recognized myself. I was amazed. Because, before, when I would read How To books on raising children, I would feel so inadequate because it never told you what to do if you'd already screwed up beyond belief. But this one does. It shows you what you've been doing wrong, and how to do it right.

To bring up a child in the way he should go, travel that way yourself once in a while. ~Josh Billings

In reading this book, I also saw a lot of my childhood, a lot of the things I remember hating about how I was talked to. There was no compassion, no understanding. It was all authority, all "you will do it MY way, you bleeping brat!" I think, to give my mother some understanding, she was just too, too tired to try to talk to me. I was difficult. My father was difficult. She had already lived through a lot of difficulty.
So now, here I am, faced with a new way to deal with children. Listen to them. Be compassionate. But be firm. Be kind. Be empathetic. Oh, Lord! Doesn't that sound like...like...
...like what Jesus would do?
So here I am, trying to be more like Jesus, and along comes this issue with one of my children, an issue that just smacks me right in the face. It was embarrassing, deceptive, troubling behavior. What was I going to do with it?
And the first thing that came out was this: change back. What you're doing doesn't work. What you're doing is wrong, it's bad, it's damaging. Change back. You're giving them too much leeway. You're giving them too much control. Change back.

We worry about what a child will become tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today. ~Stacia Tauscher

And then comes my mother-in-law in her infinite wisdom, listening to me cry about my fears and my humiliations, hearing me insist that I'm doing it all wrong, just when I thought I was doing it right. I tell her how my son has done this unspeakable thing, has done it and another parent had to tell me about it. Another parent whom I fear, who intimidates me, and she tells me these things. My mother in law tells me these two things. First she says, you're humble. Of course you're humble in front of someone who intimidates you. Why be humbled in the presence of someone who doesn't count? Secondly, she tells me that I'm getting changeback messages, and that I need to refuse to accept them. Changeback messages, I say? What are those? She gives me a brief explanation. It's in all the twelve step programs, she tells me. You do something good in life, and someone comes along and tells you that you're doing it wrong. They want you to change back. The husband quits drinking, and the wife, who has nagged him for years to quit drinking, buys him some beer, justifies it. "It's the only pleasure he really has." Why? Because she feels guilt, she feels uncomfortable with his change. She had grown accustomed to his story, to who he is. So she "tells" him to change back. Satan, my mother in law tells me, is giving me a serious changeback message. You're doing something right, she says. Keep it up.

The hardest part of raising a child is teaching them to ride bicycles. A shaky child on a bicycle for the first time needs both support and freedom. The realization that this is what the child will always need can hit hard. ~Sloan Wilson

I let my boys ride their bikes on the road. My dad wouldn't let me do that. He was afraid. He was afraid, I'm sure, of losing me. Somehow, though, he lost me, but in a different way. He lost me, he lost my mom, and now, he's losing his grandkids.

My son didn't do what he did because I let him ride his bike on the road. He didn't do what he did because I started talking to him like a human being and stopped talking to him like the control freak that I am. He did what he did because he has free will. He did what he did because he's a human boy, with ideas, thoughts, worries, needs, emotions, fears. My son needs my support. He also needs freedom. These are two things I never had.

I will not change back.