Lady Marmalade

Last night, while fooling around with a thumbtack she'd found on the floor, my daughter sang a little song that went:

I love to say marmalade, everybody does.

I I love to say marmalade, everybody does.

I LOVE TO SAY MARMALADE, EVERYBODY DOES.

I love to say marma-laaaaaade, everybody does. 

She sang this song with such drama, variety, and depth of feeling, it sounded like "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen.

Just as I was wondering what her deal was, I realized it was true:

Everyone really did love to say "marmalade."

Supermoon

Last night there was a rare confluence of a lunar eclipse and a "supermoon." By 7 p.m., the time the moon would rise per the newspaper, I'd handed the kids off to their dad. They were planning to find a good viewing spot and take binoculars -- like everyone else in town, scheduling their night around the moon.

At 6:45, loading the dishwasher, I thought: "What am I doing?"

I called Dave and suggested we go see the moon, right now.

Ten minutes later, heading out of town with a bottle of wine and glasses in the car, I felt a pang of sadness that I wouldn't see my kids see the moon.

Ever since their dad and I split up, we've been loosey-goosey about birthdays, holidays, significant events of all kinds, so that I've never had to miss one because it wasn't "my day." During the last big moon a year ago, I drove them out to a field and let them run around screaming -- literally, like lunatics -- until their dad pulled up next to my car and we watched them a while before sending them off, still in a festive spirit, to House #2.

Still, you can't share custody for every celestial anomaly that makes the papers. Getting divorced means your young kids will sometimes see the sky without you.

(The previous night at my house, we'd had our own little event. Because my kids sleep in their underwear like savages, I noticed as my son climbed into bed that his underpants had holes in them.

"When you take those off tomorrow, you can just throw them out," I told him.

But the situation (underpants! holes!) struck my son as hilarious. He began ripping the small holes into larger, connecting holes, uttering words lost in a giggle.

"What?" I said.

"All for one and one for all!" he shrieked, tearing a giant, butt-sized hole in his underpants.

"Okay, just . . . take them off," I said. "They're not even . . ." The shredded remains were no longer serving any purpose. "Just throw them out."

"No! I want them!" my daughter screamed, starting a fight over the tatters clinging to his form.

When he started ripping up the front, I had to shut it down, for real.

So, like other people have Paris, the kids and I will always have that version of the 2015 Supermoon.)

Dave and I watched the moon come up over a field, happy as could be. Then we went out for pizza.

Bookless

The last book I read was an 800-page novel about two English magicians in 19th century London. It involved forays into Venice and the Faerie realm and described a fantastical counter-reality in a tone like Jane Austen's:

"Can a magician kill a man by magic?" Lord Wellington asked Strange.
Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question.
"I suppose a magician might," he admitted, "but a gentleman never could."

I toted the hardback edition back and forth to my job in San Francisco during the fall of '05 or '06, riding the Transbay bus over the bridge in fog and drizzle. For forty minutes a day, my life was perfect.

I never understood San Francisco, or what I was doing there, or why other people seemed to like it. Riding the bus in every day was a form of mental and spiritual preparation. I read several religious books on suffering, a subject in which I was keenly interested at the time, and enjoyed a great many insights into the nature of reality before I was forced to disembark and, you know, go to work.

These were the most vivid reading experiences of my adult life -- including, too, The Wapshot Chronicle and The Collected Stories of John Cheever -- and always seemed to take place in fall and winter.  November was the ideal reading month (overcast, wet, sad for no reason), but January and February, in their existential bleakness, were close runners-up. I must have read books in spring and summer too, but it was not the same.

How many years ago was that? Nine? I'm sure I've read a few books since. But my attention span is shot, thanks to years of kids and the Internet.

When my daughter was a baby, I began reading The Diary of Samuel Pepys and, about fifty pages in, gave up forever. (And now this same daughter, wearing an octopus costume, has plopped down next to me to play Coin Monkey on my phone.)

What have I read lately? That Caitlyn Jenner and Kris Jenner have had a falling out. (Thanks, phone!) Also, using Amazon's "Look Inside!" feature, some recipes from a cookbook of baking sheet meals: entire dinners prepared on one rimmed metal tray. Salmon! Fennel! The works!

I probably should start reading books again.

Maybe just one.

Let's not get crazy.

Priorities

"Thanks, Mom.  And thanks for the advice.  I'll remember it if I ever get married -- if I do.  It's a low priority."

-- 8-year-old son, after I praised him for cleaning the bathroom (including the toilet) without being asked, and told him "the way to a woman's heart is to clean the toilet."

Fifty Shades of Corn

School has started, and there's a nip in the air, California-style: The temperature has dropped to the low 80s. This can only mean one thing: Summer is over (boo!). It's fall.

There are a few things to look forward to (not Pumpkin Spice lattes, which are cloying and undrinkable): Halloween. Soups. Halloween soups.

And of course, the 60-acre corn maze off the highway, by the pumpkin patch, open after dark (obviously) because corn mazes are all about DATE NIGHT!

Unless you are my children reading this in the future (stop reading, kids!), we are all adults here. So I hope no one will "clutch their pearls" when I say that solving the corn maze is a seriously good date -- assuming you are with someone who can solve it, and you don't both die there.

In 2014, it took us almost three hours -- and when I say "us," I mean Dave. Five steps into it, I knew I was one thousand leagues out of my league. It was pitch dark, the stalks were elephant-eye high, the maze was insanely complicated, and some young wags had decided it would be fun to rearrange the location markers -- already low to the ground and hard to see -- so they didn't match the map.

If I miss an exit on the way to work, I have to be talked down off the ledge by my phone. I have no sense of direction, and when I don't know where I am, I panic. So it is no exaggeration to say that The World's Largest Corn Maze would be my "worst nightmare times a million" if I were in it by myself.

Dave found a pencil, sketched a route in thirty seconds, and was like: "This way!"

As a modern American mom, I am in charge of job, home, family -- the works. I spend entire days in the imperative tense, writing crisp legalese and then telling my children what to do. When a problem arises, my instinct is not to turn to another human being for succor and protection, but to Google it, fix it myself, or Google someone who can fix it. Often it is just me, the kids, and a search engine contra mundi.

It's totally fine. But when someone -- occasionally -- takes charge of a situation, so that your only role is to hold the flashlight, be quiet (because you have nothing useful to say), and not trip over the corn and twist an ankle, that can be super-duper, also.

People who do not have access to a giant, seasonal corn maze have turned, instead, to a bestselling series (now a major motion picture) about someone else being in control, for once. I've passed on these, as the whole plot seems patently ridiculous. (Also, "fifty shades of grey" is the color I associate with my children's socks. When someone writes an escapist fantasy called Sparkling White, Paired & Put Away By Someone Else, let me know.)

Make no mistake, solving the corn maze is a lot of work. Two hours into it, when the uncommitted and inept had faded out, an elite corps of navigators was left in the final stretch of the maze. College students, families with sleepy kids, one intrepid mom and her teenagers (that will be me, never), and guys from the various groups consulting each other about switchbacks, dead ends, and deceptive markers -- all under the stars, in a cornfield in the middle of nowhere.

By this point, I was in a daze -- a daze of trust. Vividly I could picture the discovery of my bleached bones in the maze, yet I knew my boyfriend would get me out of it and I would go on to resume my life. Stunned by this fact, I could not stop saying: "You are amazing. Get it? A-mazing? Sorry."

Last month, we were driving by the corn maze on the way to San Francisco. Dave seemed on the fence about doing it again.  What was the point?

I explained that it was a "key experience for us" with after-effects that "reverberated" over time. I spread my hands to suggest waves in a lake, rippling outward. Dave was like: "Okay, but we should start earlier this year, so it's not so dark."

No! Let's not!

It should be difficult and terrifying! And I should be useless!

We should wear costumes and play the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack!

Fall is weird.

Avoidance blanket

Yesterday was so hot, the only thing we did was go to The Dollar Store. We were there to get my daughter a plastic cheerleading baton, which would be (inevitably) weaponized, but it was Saturday afternoon and we were low on options.

Feeling expansive because everything cost $1, I put two "chore charts" and two composition notebooks in the basket. This ominous event was not lost on my son. School started in less than two weeks, and dreadful changes were afoot. There would soon be -- according to me -- fifteen minutes of "homework" and one "chore" before anyone could flop in front of the TV and demand takeout from the kitchen. And about that takeout . . .

Really, the chore charts were for me, as I am trying to step up my game. It is all too easy to let the kids do whatever they want. (Per Myers-Briggs: "INTP parents take a relaxed, intellectual approach towards their children . . . Having no interest in exerting control over other human beings, . . . INTP personalities are not particularly demanding parents . . .")

Still, I appreciate the value of "forming good habits," etc. Most other parents seem to think such things are kind of a big deal.  Okay, okay!  As Shakespeare's Portia puts it: "Happy in this, she is not yet so old but she may learn."

* * * * 

Cut to today, when the chore charts are still in a bag on the table, and my son is following me around, asking me to buy some Minecraft-related thing from Xbox Live.

After a whole day indoors with Minecraft, I am Minecrafted out. His speech comes through like this: "Blah blah . . . texture pack . . . blah blah . . mod . . . blah blah . . . I need . . . "

He followed me into my bedroom, where I put a down comforter over my entire body and said: "I'm at the store."

". . . Blah blah?"

"I went to the grocery store to get some milk. I'm not here. You're in charge."

Working entirely from my own mothering playbook, I proceeded to explain to him that I was in my Avoidance Blanket, i.e., "at the store."

He laughed and crawled under there with me. "Avoidance Blanket," he repeated.

"You try it!"

As he cowered under the blanket, I pretended to call his name. "Where are you?  Come out!  It's important."

A tiny voice squeaked: "I'm in Japan!"

Hilarity ensued, and this is -- for better or worse -- my style.

It is not a straightforward winner like the chore chart. But I believe its benefits will bear out over time. Because avoiding unpleasant things is human nature, and also funny, and making jokes about avoiding things is an exercise in self-awareness, I would be happy to joke about the Avoidance Blanket with my kids for the next ten years.

I like to think that, by college -- after a childhood of playful dialogue -- they will not be the ones demanding "trigger warnings" or banning speakers with whose viewpoints they disagree.

Hopefully, my kids will see those kids and be like: "Um, okay. Enjoy your Avoidance Blanket. With the excellent study habits I've formed, I'm switching to a science major right now."

(Image: Portrait painting of Princess Auguste Wilhelmine Maria (1765-1796) with children (public domain) via Wikimedia Commons)

Lente, lente

My freshman year of college, I took Latin. It was a tiny class -- four students -- and met in the professor's office. One boy had been in my fifth grade "gifted" class, where he conducted a yearlong investigation into the Loch Ness Monster. At eighteen, he read a lot of Tolkien and was fluent in the language of elves. We were both branching out.

Despite some vague idea that Latin would "come in handy," I was doing it for my own reasons. In my rural state college, a sense of lofty intellectual endeavor was hard to come by. Our professor was out of central casting -- an absent-minded gesticulator in a Fair Isle sweater -- and there was something satisfying about parsing Latin verbs at 8:30 a.m. It felt like school. 

We read Cicero, Tertullian, Ovid, Horace, Bede. Today I could not tell you the first thing about Latin grammar, but something of its rhythm -- the sound of the pithy aphorism -- stayed with me.

Abyssus abyssum invocat. 
(Deep calls to deep.)

Veritas odium paret.
(Truth creates hatred.)

Tarde venientibus ossa. 
(For those who come late, only the bones.) (Modern equivalent: You snooze, you lose.)

And one of my favorites;

Lente, lente currite noctis equi!
(Run slowly, slowly, horses of the night!)

* * * * 

For a long time after I graduated college, my actions seemed -- even to me -- to be of very little consequence. I could change jobs or move, go out or stay in, master the ancient Japanese tea ceremony or stay in bed all day with a tabloid and a bag of chips, with no discernible effect on anyone or anything.

Life was a weightless, dreamlike drift from one thing to the next. I was free to make snap decisions and act on any passing whim. Who cared?

All that changed when my son was born. From that day on, every life decision was important. Things were not going so well, and the motto I seized upon was "Lente, lente": No sudden moves. Or as Carl Jung put it:"Hurry is not of the devil; hurry is the devil."

The other day I was discussing this philosophy with Dave.

"I prefer tiny, incremental changes over a long period of time," I explained.

"That sounds like the frog in the boiling water," he remarked, "where the heat gets turned up so slowly, it doesn't realize it's being cooked."

"Yes," I agreed. "I want to be that frog."

(Image: "Sousse mosaic stud farm detail 01" by Ad Meskens - own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons)