Read Planting Dandelions Online

Authors: Kyran Pittman

Planting Dandelions (6 page)

BOOK: Planting Dandelions
6.82Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
I was braced for every possible repercussion of placing the boys in day care, except that we all might like it. It was a revelation to pick up my two-year-old at the end of his day, and hear the pleasure in his voice at having news to tell me. It was bliss to have five hours to myself at a stretch. None of us were going to fit back under the jar. The third baby was on the wait list for Mother's Day Out
in utero
. They each graduated from a couple of days a week to half-days all week, then full days at school all week, and my work, like the contents of my purse, has tended to expand to fill all available pockets of space.
Along the way, I morphed from part-time priest assistant to full-time writer. I have a desk, but my “office” is generally the end of the dining room table. According to the amount of e-mail spam I get, advertising work-at-home opportunities for moms, I'm living the dream. It's not unlike the dream where you sit down for an exam and realize you have no pants on. Only the exam is a magazine deadline, and there's a chance that I really don't have any pants on. Every day is casual day at Work-at-Home-Mom Inc. Also, it's always bring-your-kid-to-work day, because my office hours don't neatly correspond with the ringing of the school bell. The kids come home around the same time of day that New York editors usually approach the bottom of their to-do lists, where my name and number sometimes happens to be.
The first time one of my essays was picked up for publication, I had to leave a voice mail for one of those editors, a person I aspired to work with again and upon whom I wished to impress a certain air of decorum and professionalism. That whole neurotic, hapless, flying-by-the-seat-of-my-pants, Wendy-Among-the-Lost-Boys thing? Ha-ha! Merely my literary persona, my dear. I can turn it on or off at will.
I left my message, and closed with this: “I have to go now. The baby is naked, and he has a hammer.”
It could have been worse. On any other day that week, I could have instead closed with:
“I have to go. The baby is locked in the dog crate.”
“I have to go. They are making a contest of jumping over the pee on the floor.”
“I have to go. They just lassoed the ceiling fan.”
I decided I needed the proverbial “room of one's own,” so I claimed a utility room at the back of the house, which had previously been designated as an arts and crafts space for the kids, a place where mess-making was allowed. Of course they weren't the slightest bit interested in it until I moved a desk, a chair, and my laptop in and declared it off-limits.
I might as well have baited it with candy. A few weeks later, in the middle of a project, I walked into my sanctuary to find it completely trashed. A cupboard full of art and school supplies had been pillaged. Paint was splattered on the floor, my file folders and copy paper strewn across it, a fine dusting of craft glitter sprinkled over everything. I went looking for the perpetrators, half tempted to rub their noses in the spilled glitter, wondering if I ought not to have revised my position on spanking along with everything else. I apprehended the vandals in the driveway, making mud pies on an industrial scale from a batter of dirt, water, poster paints, and school glue. They stared at me like raccoons caught in headlights on the rim of a dumpster.
“For the love of God,” I implored them, “go watch television.”
At various junctures, I've tried again to establish a regular work space, as if I were a regular person with a regular job. I stake my claim, furnish it, and accessorize it with file folders, letter sorters, and Post-it notes. Somehow I always wind up right back at the dining room table, laptop propped open amid the dirty breakfast dishes and school papers. It seems that I'm resistant to a room of my own, maybe for the same reasons the boys weren't interested in a creative space that was designated exclusively for them. We like to be near each other. My sons' correct sense of their place in the middle of my life remains intact. The difference now is that they aren't expected to occupy the whole of it.
I never fell out of love with my mothers-in-arms. There are some I see regularly, though more often over dinner or a glass of wine than at the playground. These tend to be the moms who also sought the middle way, though I'm glad to know that others are still out there on the lonesome high road, if only as a challenge to conventional wisdom, an oxymoron if there ever was one. Every one of the rest of us has strayed from our early ideals in some way that would have appalled us then. We laugh and cry, and remind each other how short, how sweet, that time was.
As we assured each other would one day be the case, our children have, one after the other, weaned from our breasts, left our beds, learned to sleep through the night. On a Saturday morning, mine can get up, turn on the television, pour their own cereal, and fend for themselves until I've had my first pot of coffee. Before I'm done brewing the second, the screen door opens and bangs shut and the older two are gone, climbing fences, riding bikes, rounding up their neighbors, scheming sleepovers. Even the youngest can spend a whole night away from home now. They are on their way.
I still don't feel a pressing need to be apart from them for more than a day. Whenever I have to travel without them, the final hours approaching departure are filled with second thoughts. I regret the decision to go, procrastinate packing, scheme to get out of it. Anything could happen, I tell myself. Life is too short to spend one precious minute away from the ones I love. Why
should
I go?
Against the undertow of impending separation, I pull them closer, touch them more, hug them longer. I bring my face to their hair and breathe in like it's my last chance at oxygen for a thousand miles.
And then it's time. I force myself to push off, to remember who I am without them, so that when it is their turn to leave me, I'll still know.
4.
D-I-Y Spells Die
O
ne morning a year, I wake up and remember that tomorrow is Pinewood Derby Day, an annual Cub Scout event that requires Cubs to design, carve, and pimp a car from a hand-size block of wood, which is then raced on a state-of-the-art electronic track, run by grown men wearing neckerchiefs. Space shuttles are launched with less precision and intensity than Pinewood Derby cars. There are exacting restrictions on dimension and weight that come down to micro-units of measurement. There are legalities concerning exterior enhancements and the types of lubricants allowed on the axles. There are innumerable websites devoted to Pinewood Derby aerodynamics, but form is valued closely behind function, with prizes awarded for “Most Patriotic” design and “Most Creative.” You can't pull a prizewinning Pinewood Derby car out of your ass at the last minute, which is why our Cubs never win prizes. It's not their lack of competitiveness, it's their parents'. We are the seventies Chrysler of Pinewood auto production. Everyone else is racing Bugattis and our kids get K-cars.
I put Derby Day on the family calendar, and e-mail Patrick weekly reminders as the date nears, but somehow it always falls off his radar. When I go to him on Derby Eve and tell him there are twenty-four hours left before weigh-in, he acts like it's an ambush. In the interest of preserving the marital trust, I will enable the “mute” button on the scene that invariably follows. But if you were to write captions based on observing our body language and facial expressions, you might come up with something like this:
“Are you fucking crazy??”
“Are you??”
And that would more or less capture the gist of it.
Sometimes—most times—I think we are doing a pretty good job as parents. Our boys slept between us as infants. They were breast-fed into toddlerhood. They never had to cry longer than it took us to figure out what was needed, and answer the need. We may not always keep up with the Joneses, but they have bikes, books and bunk beds, soccer, school and Scouts, and most of the other privileges of being a middle-class kid in America. We work hard at being whole people in a healthy relationship. Most times, I think my kids are as lucky to have us as we are to have them.
But then we hit a bump and it derails me completely. Instead of feeling like we are doing an outstanding job, I wonder who thought it would be a good idea to give
us
three human beings to care for. We can't keep houseplants alive. We can't change lightbulbs. We can't sew badges on uniforms—hell, we can't remember to
wash
the uniforms—let alone remember the goddamn Pinewood Derby. Other people seem to have no problem at all with going to work, paying their bills, mowing their lawns, dusting their ceiling fans, painting their door frames, and returning their library books on time. What is wrong with us, I ask myself on days like that. Did we miss an orientation session on Living Life? Did we ride in on the short bus?
Homemaking is not my forte. Or my husband's. Even before we had our own junior demolition crew, we were pretty well hapless. For the ten years we occupied it, the interior of our first home resembled a senior-year college dorm: crappy old furniture, broken miniblinds, and pictures hung randomly over nails that already happened to be sticking out of the walls. Our present home is furnished and decorated as if adults live here, but we haven't been in it long, so give us time. The outlet in one of the boys' bedrooms stopped working last winter. As of this summer, we still haven't gotten around to having it fixed. Insulation hangs exposed over the side of the dishwasher, where the glass tiling I envisioned has yet to materialize. The cat is working on re-texturizing the freshly painted walls, and the boys are beating back the lovely St. Augustine turf, planted fifty years ago by the original owner, one runner at a time, pocketed on her walks through the neighborhood. We help by forgetting to water it. While it would sound noble to chalk our negligence up to our preference for spending time with our kids and each other over salaried jobs, a maid, and lawn service, that wouldn't be the whole truth. It's true that we are perpetually short on money, time, and energy, but it is also true that we simply aren't on the ball.
I've heard that ducks, or maybe geese, only have a set number of offspring, because that number is as high as they can count. I am definitely one over my cognitive limit. Even a freestyle outing, like going to the park, taxes my stunted left brain, since it seems to be against some law of physics for three boys to move in one direction. I go hoarse shouting, “Come back!” “Too far!” “Not in the creek!” “Where's your brother?” I sound like an especially high-strung border collie.
I'm not strong on organization to begin with. I once boiled a pan of eggs dry because I was using the egg timer in another room to help me stay on task and focused. Now imagine what soccer is like for someone like me, faced with the problem of allocating three kids, two parents, and one minivan across overlapping practice times, overlapping game times, and fields that are not even remotely near one another. I need a topographic scale model to work it all out.
Other people probably figure this stuff out in their heads. Other people probably don't program text alerts to their phones reminding them to “pick up kids after school” and “make supper” and “put the kids to bed.” I suppose other mothers just notice their children are not home, or are hungry, or have fallen asleep in their clothes on the floor. It blows my mind that there are so many women who are not only responsible for domestic operations, but hold outside jobs that require them to be fully dressed and out the door before nine o'clock each day. I have dropped my kids at school while wearing my pajamas under a trench coat, and I'm already getting up at six in the morning. I can't imagine having to have my personal grooming act together in addition to serving breakfast, packing lunches, and signing homework.
I was somewhat prepared for the physical and emotional exertion of raising children. I knew there'd be sweat and tears. But I had no idea how mentally challenging the gig would be. Planning and strategy is a huge aspect of it. I am the family secretary, social director, and chief purchaser. I plan menus, oversee nutrition, do the budgeting, pay the bills, maintain the filing, schedule appointments, coordinate recreation, and liaise on my kids' behalf with teachers, room parents, coaches, health professionals, and other parents. That's on top of all the cooking, cleaning, driving, and schlepping.
Needless to say, balls get dropped. At least one school morning every semester, the clean clothes and the groceries run out together, and I have to convince the children that it's all a splendid adventure to wear yesterday's underwear and sprinkle cinnamon sugar on toasted stale heels of bread. But then there are days I can't pull it off, when the tide of domesticity rises up and engulfs me the minute my feet hit the floor. Sometimes so many balls drop, it feels like I am up to my neck in them, adrift in a Ball Pit of Despair.
I would like to be better at managing life. It bothers me when our habitat goes all to hell. I feel bad for our kids. I also grew up with creative, right-brain parents who couldn't seem to get it together domestically, and shame can still flare up over certain household tasks to which I've inherited allergies. Lawn maintenance is one such hot spot. The house I was raised in sat on a large corner lot, shaded by several majestic maple trees, with bluegrass that grew shin-high. There were deep craters that the dog had dug, various small critter graves marked by Popsicle-stick crosses, and a picket fence like a hockey player's teeth, with a few more gaps each year. We had dandelions. Lots and lots of dandelions.
My mother loved them. My sister and I would bring dandelion bouquets to her, and she would coo over them as if they were hothouse orchids. They would go straight into jelly glasses to adorn the table. We made dandelion wreaths for our necks and tucked them in our hair. We made curlicues by peeling strips of the hollow stems backward like string cheese. We used the sticky, bitter milk inside for “glue,” artfully adhering leaves together. One spring my parents picked the tender new leaves and cooked them as greens. We made thousands upon thousands of wishes, blown heaven high on dandelion fluff.
BOOK: Planting Dandelions
6.82Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Her Impossible Boss by Cathy Williams
Berry the Hatchet by Peg Cochran
Piano in the Dark by Pete, Eric
Unknown by Unknown
Green is the Orator by Gridley, Sarah
The Surfacing by Cormac James
The Infernals by Connolly, John
The Birthday Lunch by Joan Clark